Yesterday was just ridiculous. Fun, but ridiculous.

First, in the morning I had two demands requests from fellow student filmmakers: the first, that I upload photos I took at a shoot the weekend before last to Facebook. So I resized and obliged. Then the director of the shoot I’m assistant director on this weekend - my good ol’ buddy Sam *cough* - needed me to make a shooting schedule. So I did that.

Then I had class, after which I “tutored” for two and a half hours, then ran back to my dorm to eat something, then caught the subway up to Central Park for a photo shoot of an engaged couple. THAT was fun. I don’t really mean that sarcastically. It was a bit rushed since we didn’t have a lot of time to begin with, and then they were about 15 minutes late. But they were real troopers - they were into all kinds of ideas, and came up with their own of climbing into a tree (which nearly ended in disaster, as the girl was then terrified of coming down). She even broke her lovely black belt. It was my first shoot like this, but I definitely think I’d like to do more - some of the pictures looked really great in my LCD review.

After that, I hopped the subway back to campus, just in time for my first Chemistry exam. There were six questions, with a few sub-questions in each. I was rolling through, like Yeah, I am so smart, taking Chemistry after I took AP Chem in high school, this is a piece of cake, and then I hit the next to last question. Spent about five minutes on it, couldn’t get it yet. So I finished the last question, which took all of 30 seconds. I ended up spending the rest of the exam time on that next to last problem. We’re talking, that movie moment where I’m sweating bullets and I keep staring at the clock and I can practically hear the second hand ticking as the professor calls out “three minutes left.” I actually got the answer by my awesome powers of deduction with a calculator way before that, but the fact that I couldn’t do the math right was bugging me, and I wanted to figure it out. I mean, it seemed so EASY. Then, literally on the last minute, I realized the wording of the question had thrown me off (it was percentages, and he had said to use x and 100-x as the variables, when for my problem it should’ve been x and 1-x). I was like, OHMYGOD. So I scribbled all the steps to the answer very quickly. And I am quite confident I aced this one.

Then I came back to my dorm and waited for Josh to call. He did, and the conversation was going quite well (aside from my persistent loud coughing - thank you, sickness), until I decided to bring up the fact that I didn’t want guns in our house when we had kids. Good lord, people, did this strike a cord. He was all “I have six guns and it’s a hobby I have to shoot them off” and I was all “Statistics show guns in the home are primarily used for suicides and accidental homicides between family members” and it turned into a big argument.

That’s been happening a lot lately. It seems like every phone conversation we have ends with ten minutes of silence after we have a disagreement, then we hang up and I text him apologizing and we text for half an hour about how we both feel. Why can’t we talk about this stuff on the phone? Oh well… it’s better to text it than to not talk about it at all. Fortunately, neither of us are the type that like to drag arguments on for ages and ages. If he was here, we totally would’ve been boning when he got home from work.

And that was my day. How was yours?

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Blogging every other day is just not my style. It’s too erratic. Too unstructured for me. And yes, I realize I’ve been doing it lately. That’s because my brain has gone to mush and suddenly I can only view my computer as a depthless hell trying to swallow me whole with its mass of saved Power Points and exam questions.

That’s right! College mid-term time. And in the first semester after three years where I actually have gen eds, it’s a little rough. Fortunately, none are on the same day. I had my Abnormal Psychology test last Thursday, and it was a fail. I did badly, I’m quite sure of it - hoping for a B-, will probably get a C. My first Chemistry test is tomorrow night. Shouldn’t be too bad, but I could be fooling myself.

The NIGHTMARE is going to be my Child Psychology mid-term on Thursday morning. 25 multiple choice, three essays. And they gave us eleven essays, saying three of them were the ones that would actually be on the test. But that means I must make outlines for all eleven to be prepared for any that might pop up. Which is WAY too much studying for me. Plus, these teachers like to take questions from their lectures and Power Points. I prefer studying from textbooks. Dammit.

I still have about eight hundred PP slides to read and re-read, and three outlines to make. This is a stressful time for me. I do not do studying well. I prefer intelligence to come naturally.

I’m still trying to decide what classes I’m going to take next semester. I think I’m registering part time to save money, so I only have room for two. Do I really want to take Children’s Literature AND Classical Mythology, so that I have one class every day Monday through Thursday? Or should I pick stuff that’s on the same two or three days so I have some extra free full days? I don’t know.

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In other news, my sister is having surgery this Friday. I don’t know how “serious” it is, but it’s sure scaring the hell out of me. First, they found two bloody polyps in her uterus and are removing those. (Note: any polyps can be pre-cancerous. Let’s not go through this again.) Second, during the SAME surgery, they are going to go in through her bellybutton and basically take out anything that “looks funny” or that she “doesn’t need” (<-- not entirely sure what that means..). This is because she is STILL having the back and lower abdomen pains she's been having the entire summer, and all kinds of doctors have done all kinds of tests and procedures and have still not made an accurate diagnosis. She's still hurting. So I guess this is one of those "We're not sure, so we're going to eliminate all possible factors" things. How refreshing.

And they found kittens at our house last night. More news on that when I hear more. (No pictures, sadly, as I am 800 miles away.)

P.S. I do plan on returning comments after these stupid exams are over. Thank you all for your feedback!

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I wanted to share this video that I made for my niece’s soccer team over the summer. I’ll be starting another one soon for the fall season, once Jennifer sends me some footage she shot. Sydney and Cameron are on the same team this year, which is AWESOME.

I offered to do these for the other teams for money, and at first there was a lot of interest, but in the end no one bought. So I’ll just make the next one even awesome-er and make them all pissed that they didn’t order their own.

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At the shoot I was on this past weekend, I was one of three female crew members (out of approximately 15). The others were the assistant director (who asked me to crew) and a freshman PA. Needless to say, while shooting in a tiny bar, it got smelly and crude, thanks to the abundance of testosterone.

Sometimes, I don’t mind being the girl on a film crew. Some men are still chivalrous, and some of the guys have this internal need to do all the heavy equipment lifting while the women eat their bagels and coffee. (I was asked to haul some equipment this weekend, but not much.) The times I don’t like being the girl on a shoot are when the day is wrapped and the men would rather go outside and smoke and play with each other than clean up, pack up, and get the fuck out.

At the end of both days of the shoot this weekend, us three girls found ourselves the only ones trying to break down equipment, get everything out on the sidewalk, and get the bar back in order. Which is odd, considering it was the DIRECTOR who was being charged $500 for each hour that we stayed in there past the agreed time. But he did not offer to help, nor did he encourage his male comrades to strike the set.

When the males finally started to help, chaos ensued. Males must be the clumsiest species on the face of the earth. First of all, one older guy showed up - apparently just to irritate me. He didn’t help on the shoot at all, he just stood around smoking and watching everybody else work while he ate the food set out for crew members. Then, I don’t know who, but someone knocked a bunch of stuff off of a table, including the makeup kits for the actors. Of course, one of the foundation bottles was glass, and it shattered all over the floor, leaving shards and liquid makeup everywhere.

What’s the first thing I hear? The useless old guy, confirming what a pig he is.

“Can we get a female crew member over here to clean this up?”

I found two things wrong with this statement. One, he probably assumed that the cleaning of messes was a woman’s job. Two, even if that were not the case, he was referring to a makeup spill - and therefore at least thought that makeup was something only a woman should handle.

As I was about a foot away from the guy, I decided to respond.

“I’m happy to clean this up, but just so you know, guys are perfectly capable of cleaning up spills. And while girls may generally be better in handling makeup than men, this does not apply to situations in which the makeup is all over the floor, thanks to a man knocking it over.”

In hindsight, I should have added that the vast majority of employed janitors in the world are men. Damn.

That guy didn’t say anything else to me. He didn’t even have a response to what I said. There was another guy on the crew, a professional from Africa with an awesome accent, and he said, “That was a very good response.”

So not all men are douchebags. Just the ones born in America and over the age of 40.

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I had a totally surreal experience last night. I had just gotten on the bus to come back from my dorm after spending a couple of hours syncing up footage for a film I’m about to edit. I had my head down in my Nintendo DS, when someone sitting across from me kicked my shoe. I looked up. He said, “Didn’t you go to Elizabethtown…” and I said, “Ryan?!”

This was a guy that was a year under me at my high school back in Elizabethtown, KY. He transferred to NYU and is a junior - also in film and television.

WEIRD, RIGHT?

Seriously. How many people from E-town will ever even come to New York, let alone go to NYU alongside me, and in the SAME MAJOR. I was blown away. Especially by the fact that I remembered this kid’s first and last name, even though we never hung in the same crowd in high school.

We ended up just talking about film school, classes, productions, etc. as if it were totally normal that the two of us had bumped into each other. He also told me that the day before yesterday, he was riding his bike home from Central Park when he got hit by a 2009 Benz pulling out of parallel parking on Lexington Ave. She fucked him and his bike up pretty hard, so what did she do? Drove him to a store and told him to pick out whatever bike he wanted.

Only in New York City, people.

In other news, I am getting sick. My face is sometimes hot, my body is aching, and my throat hurts. Which is all in excellent timing, since I have an exam today, an exam Tuesday, and another exam the Thursday after that. YAY. It’s been like a good three or four years since I’ve been stay-in-bed sick, but I’m hoping it will wait to really catch up to me until after Halloween. Can I stave off the flu for two and a half weeks? We’ll see. (It’s all those damn kids I’m around now when I tutor - they carry EVERYTHING.)

Also, the “For Sale” sign is no longer in the yard of the house Josh and I have been looking at. But it’s still listed on the website as for sale. So we’re just crossing our fingers some hooligan removed it as a joke.

My sister is having intense surgery next Friday. They found some blood-filled polyps or something in her uterus and are removing them, because they think that’s what’s causing her heavy bleeding. During the same surgery, they are going in through her bellybutton to take out absolutely ANYTHING in her body that looks funny, to see if they can find the cause of all the lower back and stomach pain she has been mysteriously having all summer. Seriously, doctors have looked at every inch of her and can’t figure it out. So I guess the next solution is to start removing things she doesn’t need…

I’m confident she’ll be fine, they just said she’ll be bed-ridden for about two weeks. Which means probably missing out on Halloween and some of the kids’ tournament games in soccer. Which sucks… but the only other dates were on Halloween and the week before Sydney’s birthday, neither of which are any better. So she decided to get it over with.

Happy thoughts, happy thoughts…

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