text results

1. shantell 824

2. shaun 716

3. mark 553

4. emily 545

5. jess 363

6. joel 361

7. kristin 341

8. tiffany 268

9. jaime 265

it's always interesting for me to see how the numbers come out; some new names, some classics.

[untitled]

realization

i'm listening to tally hall because a) it's been too long since i've listened to them, b) they're deliriously wonderful, and c) because i'm nervous for tomorrow.

it's been a good trip and a good day. our interviews went great and the rest of the crew flies home tomorrow. this trip couldn't have been timed better(well...), because i'm sticking around to check out the apartment scene around college station. it certainly saves me a plane ticket, anyway.

i've got a printed list of several different complexes i've researched, picked out what floor plans i'm interested in, and have their rent and amenities laid out. i'm leaving the hotel at 8 a.m. to take a taxi to the airport to pick up my rental car to drive two hours to the college station-bryan area. i've got my ipod ready to sing along with.

a week ago, i was kind of excited about all of this.
now, i'm realizing how real my leaving is and all that i'm leaving behind.
but i know that it will all work out.
prov. 3:5-6

the beginning of the end is near....

i'm sitting in the driskill hotel in downtown austin, texas. i'm down here on business with the same company i was on business with last year when i stayed at this hotel, although this time i requested to be in the "historic" wing, a.k.a. the more haunted wing (according to wikipedia, this is one of the most haunted hotels in the country). i love this place. i was booked here because the agency people were booked here, then they changed because someone at the office told them "it's where your grandpa would stay." and yes, if your grandpa is classy and wealthy, he probably would stay here. and i guess i'm getting old, because i'm loving the high-ceilinged rooms, the granite-floored lobby with marble pillars, and, well, the whole place pretty much looks like the venetian at vegas but without cutting all the corners. and i love that i'm here until friday.

last week was near-perfect. and since there's a good chance i'm not going to write it in my journal, the quick sketch goes like this:

• monday: the barnes and noble criterion sale starts. i've been saving all year for this. it's literally Christmas in july for me... plus come home from f.h.e. at the nickelcade and sit on the front steps to watch near-perfect summer's evening turn from twilight to starlight.
• tuesday: sushi with kristin where we discuss summer travels (belgium/new york city) and excitement over respective photos. discuss ploxiness afterwards. watch "the battle of algiers" at movie night. it's awesome. most people seem to concur.
• wednesday: go hike squaw peak with jaime and friends. i'm expecting a 45-minute hike a la hiking-the-Y-ish. it is a full-blown trek, reminiscent of the time i tried to hike to the top of the Y mountain and spent the rest of the day on the couch soreness. we make it to the top, i call my sister and take pictures. on the way down my sincere prayer is tenderly and mercifully answered and my knee does not hurt.
• thursday: meeting and camera prep for austin trip. spend the afternoon with my sister and nephews at ikea. caleb is well-behaved and courteous at ikea (and determined to eat my chocolate cake). the trip throws off his nap time. he is a terror for the remainder of the afternoon. i leave him with brady and go off to see "metropolis" at the tower theater for a second time. it's so incredible i can hardly stand it.
• friday: i'm offered to work at 9:00 a.m. the midnight before. we do a half day of product shots; i like doing that. that evening i'm lethargic and watch bunuel's "the exterminating angel." i've tried and tried and i just don't get bunuell.
• saturday: all day at lagoon, riding just about everything until the sun has gone down and the moon has come up. couldn't have been better. crestfallen than makbule the puma was nowhere to be found but glad i invited shaun. got stuck in a ride for a while but had a good view of the park lit up at night from up there.
  
• sunday: up packing until two in the morning, slept for five hours. mrs. utah started a conversation with me in the security line at the airport (she was wearing her sash and on her way to competition in las vegas). flew to austin (no layovers, no international hassles, a two and a half hour flight, lovely), checked all the camera gear and we're good to go. delta lost my lights, the arrived at the hotel later this evening. i've unpacked my bags, puts my clothes in the dresser and hung my shirts in the closet.
  

and that's kind of been the groove for much of my summer. it's been wonderful. we shoot in austin through wednesday. everyone else flies out that day and i'm staying to look at apartments in college station. that's going to mark the beginning of the end, but at least i'm going out on a high note.

last days of belgium

our hotel is in the brazilian/portugese/spanish district of town. and while, as i understand it, brazil tied their game at 0-0, yet that has not stopped the colonies of brazilians from driving through the neighborhoods, head to toe in green and yellow, waving flags, cranking their stereos, honking their horns, blowing their air horns, singing on the subways, and doing whatever else they can to celebrate. it's kind of fun to see them so happy, even if i don't fully understand why.

we leave for the airport tomorrow morning. i'm kind of tired and it's after 11 already. i should be packing and getting some sleep, but i know that, unlike some warm and fuzzy new york interns, i'm not very good at recollecting in detail the adventures of my amazing life days or weeks or semesters after the fact, and that if i don't do it now, these moments of life will be lost to the ether forever.
i can sleep in utah.

yesterday was the last day of the conference. we were collecting peoples' stories about how ".com" has changed your life. asking this question at a convention where internet domain names are the livelihood of most people often brings stories that are more technical than what we're looking for, but we also got some really interesting ones (a guy who's company owned the second .com address ever...). at the end of each day, we would randomly draw a name from the list of those who had given their stories and they would win an ipad. not too shabby.
on our last day we talked with a guy from pakistan (who, oddly enough, was not a terrorist or even an american-hater. further, his friend from afghanistan was also super cool) who talked about how he had a website called noipadforyou.blogspot.com which is all about how the middle east (and other parts of the world) doesn't get apple products for up to a year or more after their release and the lameness that surrounds that. he was one of about three or four people we were hoping would win.
he did (legitimately).

outside the window where we were filming was a small (and rather mucky) waterway with a statue of a naked lady in it. i'm from the u.s. and i've seen plenty of naked lady statues. in an artsy town like brussels, they're about as plentiful as waffles. yet, for reasons none of us can figure, people would continually stop and take a picture of this naked lady statue. it wasn't even that good of a sculpture. just a naked lady statue.

on a similar note, in my swag backpack from the convention was a button that said "yes to .xxx". (the dot there makes all the difference, by the way, as one of the ad guys with us didn't seem to initially notice it) as i understand it, such a "top-level domain name" (heard ALL about those this week) would help keep all the adult sites in one relative area; good for those who are looking for it, and, as i understand it, good for people who want to block it out (if this isn't what it means, well, i wore the button anyway; too late now). this evening i saw a headline on cnn.com that the resolution passed. go me and my button.

today was pretty much a free day for us. the other two production people with me really wanted to go to see bruges, a city in northern belgium that is cool because a cool movie called "in bruges" was shot there a few years ago. i haven't seen the movie (have to see if it's on clearplay when i get back to the western hemisphere) and was feeling tired at the end of a busy week (we haven't had to work especially hard, but we've played hard), so i wasn't all gung-ho for it but went along all the same.
it turned out to be closer than we thought (just under an hour on the train) and really pretty dang. like most old european cities, it's seriously old, coming in at over a millennium, and kind of looks like it graduated high school during the middle ages and decided that look was good enough for it. we saw a few really old cathedrals (note: there go the brazilians outside of my window again; it's 11:31 p.m. now and i fully expect this to go on all night), which combined with the cathedral in brussels that i saw yesterday (my first even), i think constitutes for a third of all the pictures on my camera. we went to a church that claimed to have a relic containing the blood of Christ, walked everywhere on cobblestones (which gets painful after six hours; asphalt, i miss you!), paid 30 cents euro (is there a way to get a euro sign here? they just look cool and i don't get many opportunities to write them) to use a public restroom, and, of course, bought some chocolate.

i bought more chocolate back in brussels, as i've done almost every day here. the mini fridge in my hotel room is full of chocolate. : )

i also finished my souvenir shopping for my family (i'm looking at you, dad) and we missed our bus stop because of a stupid lady who decided to stand right in front of the door (we're looking at you, stupid lady.) on the train back from bruges, i listened to (german techno band) kraftwerk's "trans europe express." it wasn't as transcendent as i'd anticipated, but now i know. and i was still there.

there's probably a dozen other notably memories from today, but you get the idea.
it's been a seriously dang awesome trip with no regrets (well, i wish i would have put forth a little for effort to pick up a few french phrases), but i'm also looking forward to getting home with my friends (and where people speak a language i know. i'd even be ok with japan.)
i'm also looking forward to being able to search google in english, instead of... is that flemmish?

the internet illuminatti in the land of chcolate

yesterday morning we walked about 1.8 km in light rain through the streets, pulling equipment and trying to find our way. sitting in the convention center where we're doing our interviews, i realized that in the last two days, all that i had eaten was a waffle with ice cream (granted, the best waffle i had ever had in my entire life, but still just one waffle) and a croissant i grabbed at the hotel that morning. belgium was great, but not without it's hassles. on top of it all, my pockets were jammed with my passport, ipod, and big fat wallet (mostly from discount/point cards from america, not euros).

since then, we have been able to store our equipment at the hotel where the ad agency team is staying, i've found a way to streamline and carry only what i need (much more comfortable), and we've had some good food. for example, yesterday i ate a pig knuckle.

when i'm traveling, i really don't want to eat food that i can get where i live (this maxim stands whether i'm in another state as well as another country; it can backfire, though. there was that place in thailand where i ordered something that didn't even have an english name and unfortunately ended up with barbecued chicken, to the envy of several girls around me....). we went to an solidly belgian-looking restaurant (next to the "boston cafe") and looked over the menus. french cuisine seems more enigmatic than japanese does to me and i was thoroughly confused. still, with several mispellings in the menu (notably "beaf" and "kooked"), this place seemed pretty legit. i gave the waiter my order and he nodded while saying something that sounded like "soup." i wanted something heartier than that, and so fumbled in bad french and hand gestures to change my order, pointing the next thing on the menu: "a knuckle of ham."
really, you image of it is as good as mine was. basically, it was a chunk of ham with several different-sized bones sticking from it. and, past the occasional tough pieces, was pretty darn good, along with the mustard sauce.

this year is the 25th anniversary of ".com", and so we're interviewing people at this internet conference about their experiences with ".com". hoping to get fun stories. one of our favorites so far is the guy who booked a hotel online for his honeymoon and arrived in spain one night, only to find a giant hole in the ground and that the hotel was still very much under construction (six months later, he received an invitation from the hotel, inviting their "valued customer" to join them for a grand opening). the trouble is, these guys are mostly internet domain name registrars, meaning they're the ones who sell internet addresses, and so they think of ".com" differently than we do and we end up getting a lot of dry stories.
essentially, these guys control the internet. i mean, if you were a g.i. joe-like super-villian and wanted to, say, blow-up the internet, this is the time and place to bomb. in years to come, the next dan brown conspiracy author will be writing about these guys and the power they have as they control the world.

we were waiting to hail a cab when a woman came up next to me and said something in french. startled and knowing only the smallest bit of french, i mistakenly responded with "please. no do you speak french?" fail.
realizing the nationality of the idiot in front of her, she spoke again in broken english. i'm not sure if she was asking if this was a bus stop or was telling us that we were not at a bus stop, since it did look like that was what we were waiting for.
to top it off, the first cab we stopped listened to our inability to speak french, saw that there were five of us plus several pieces of equipment, and drove off, leaving us confused and cabless.

belgium, like pretty much all of europe, runs on 220v electricity, twice as much as we do in the u.s. i'm learning that nearly everything that has a little block that plugs in between the item and the wall (e.g. my computer, my phone, my camera battery, our lights) can handle the 220v, provided you have a nifty little plug adapter; no power inverter needed. there are some things we still learn the hard way, as we somehow blew the circuit at the fancy hotel we were shooting at the first night. in america, it's a simple fuse box switch fix. it seems much more complicated here, as they had to call a utility guy and we still never did get the outlet back on that night. i still kind of feel bad about that one.

i assumed that most of europe was on roughly the same latitude as the states, but began to wonder when it was 10:30 last night and still notably bright outside, even for the summer solstice. checking a map, it looks like i'm roughly level with 300 miles north of canadian border. can't complain, though; the weather is absolutely perfect.

david sedaris is right: in europe, people do smoke everywhere. at an outdoor cafe today, the tables on either side of us were lit up.

at the same aforementioned cafe, everything around us was so amazing i could barely take it in. we were eating some sort of town square or plaza that was actually the royal courtyard or something. all four buildings in the quad were enormous museums, churches, or palaces. probably all over one hundred feet tall, they were covered completely in ornate stone scroll work, statues, and gothic-looking decoration. the streets were cobblestones. it's exactly what you think you mistakenly imagine "europe" to look like but presume that just fantasy stereotype. it's not.
brussels was already 1,000 years old when i was born and seems to have no shortage of truly-amazing architecture. it's awesomely baffling.

we opted to pass on dessert at the cafe, instead doing a "chocolate crawl", popping in and out of just a few of the many chocolatiers lining the narrow european streets. some look like old-world chocolate shoppes, others are sleek and modern. they all seem to have the best chocolate in the world.

i'm in freaking brussels

yes, i am.

deciding to get out of the utah film industry was the best thing i've ever done for my job there. i have been busier this year than ever before. most recently, i was in north carolina a week ago. and now i'm in belgium on a different trip.

i haven't slept over 30 hours, i think, and my creative faculties are not as sharp as they should be. i will forgo any extensive explanation of the wonders of the city or of europe in general, but will leave a few brief notes:

the first: i've never had a pronounced need to visit europe. as i've said before, if you look like me or talk like me, i'm less interested in traveling there. but as we were standing down town today in what was such perfect classic european style, with cobblestone streets and small but ornate stone architecture all around me, i fell in love with europe, and faster than i'd anticipated.

our first (and really, only) meal here so far has been, of course, a belgian waffle. served by a way cool guy with coolio-like hair/dreds in a shop so quintessentially "european waffle shop" that it could have been crafted with precision by disneyland engineers, this was the best waffle i have ever had. or that i will likely ever have, even if i live to be 111. with ice cream on top.

i don't speak more than about three words of french. thankfully, our sound guy, ben, does. i like being in japan, where i can converse with the locals.

i didn't think to bring my camera cable, so there will be no pictures accompanying these postings. but i did bring my camera, and intend to fill up the entire flash card.

i loved looking down the streets as we drove through down, unbelieving that brussels looked pretty much how i wanted it to look. it was luscious. but the down town plaza, a quad of four grand and opulent buildings that looked like my art history book come to life, was so tremendous my brain about short circuited. plenty of pictures will be taken.

there's probably plenty more, but i really need to get to sleep.

for those wondering, brussels is 8 hours ahead of the current utah time. i wonder if this post will be time stamped according to brussels time?

post script: nope, utah time. interesting.

my brilliant morning

my morning has been like this:

me: "it's been a good morning. i got up early, had breakfast, worked on my sunday school lesson, and now i'm getting ready for a shower. i think i'll watch a movie after this."

The Spirit: "you should go to the temple."

me: "what?"

The Spirit: "go to the temple."

me: "but i was going to watch a movie..."

The Spirit: "go to the temple."

me: "i wanted to watch a movie."

The Spirit: "go to the temple."

me: "yeah, but..."

The Spirit: "go to the temple."

me: "i should go to the temple today."

wearing a towel and with shaving cream still on my face, i check the temple schedule on-line because i remember hearing something at church about the provo temple being closed for a while. it closes on june 21. i'm good.

smelling like irish spring and getting dressed, i get a text message from a friend, asking if i want to do anything and i can't find my amazing red bow tie, but nothing is going to get in my way. as i pick up my wallet i decide to check my recommend.

it expired in april.

i am crestfallen.

dream rendering

i just woke up from the first full night's rest i've had this week. that's nothing dramatic: i did a three-day commercial and got 5-6 hours of a sleep a night during those three days. but i had a dream last night. like most dreams, it morphed from one scene to another. i was in minneapolis with my my best friend from high school (nothing weird there; that's where he lives) and we were shopping at a sort of costco-type store, where we could by four-foot tall boxes of frosted flakes for $2.59. not a bad deal.

i think president sam was also in there somewhere, but dreams are so fleeting it's no surprise i don't remember it all. the final scene was with the crew i've been working with for the past few days (love those guys) and we were driving on a sunday and had stopped at a town/outlet mall/rest stop that had a pretty good comic book store in it. i was pretty big into comics in junior high and still like to peruse them on occasion. and so i did, despite the guilt that it was sunday. i looked around the store at the different shelves, full of trade paperback editions, graphic novels, and various action figures in addition to the boxes and boxes of comic books, grouped by publisher then sorted alphabetically. i wasn't planning on buying anything and didn't even know what i was looking for, but it was fun just look through everything.

i pulled out a white cardboard box and began thumbing through the comics. as i did, it was as if my vision started to go bad. i could barely see more than a blurred image on the cover. i one out and held it closer to see better. this had the opposite effect: it became harder to see, as if my eyes had been sealed shut. i could see nothing.

there wasn't much more of the dream. i remember continuing to look around the store while my friends played catch with a football, ready to leave and waiting for me. as i searched around, the store seemed larger than i had first noticed, with dozens of shelves to look through. yet the same phenomenon persisted: like playing the original doom computer game, as i would walk closer to a shelf, it would become fuzzier, more out of focus, until i could hardly make out anything on it.

i woke up soon after that and, as i picked up my phone from my night stand to check the time, my text messages, e-mail, and facebook updates, i thought about this.

dreams are essentially like a computer-generated movie. everything in the scene has to be created. and my brain has seen enough comic book stores to have plenty of archives to research and make one pretty easily. and in a cg movie, if a character is going to walk over to a box and start rifling through it's contents, that box is going to have to have each of those comics have a different cover, designed and rendered.

for whatever reason, my brain didn't have that in place. whoever it was programming the dream (i guess that's me) didn't plan on me looking through there. or my brain just couldn't create or find in an archive a handful of comic coves to slap on there in real-time. dag; i'm 30 and my brain is already losing processing power. perhaps it had something to do with the fact that i was soon waking up. sam noted that sometimes we will try to run in a dream but not move, which i've noticed happened when i'm at the start of waking up and so my brain isn't sure if we're suppose to run in the dream or in life, leaving me motionless (to be eaten by a dinosaur or something). maybe this was similar.

whatever the case, it was an interesting insight into how dreams work (or how my brain doesn't). kind of like finding a flaw in the matrix. ....oohh.... what if....

"can i get you anything else?"

jaime said this would make a good blog post. i suppose she's right.

my car was up in salt lake yesterday being repaired, leaving me at the mercy of others or the uta bus schedule, which required a trip to macey's for a bus pass, again leaving me dependent upon extraneous kindness. adding to my car not starting, my washing machine chose to stop performing the spin cycle, my clearplay dvd player stopped recognizing the usb filter drive, and my timer for the lights behind my tv no longer turns the lights on or off.

sam was in and out yesterday and before leaving for a job interview, he asked if i wanted to go to macey's when he got back. being that i hadn't had much need to provide my own food for the last month and a bit, there was little for me to eat other than sugar cereal and the dark chocolate brownies i had made the day before. by the time sam came back i was running only on the remainders of a sugar crash as everything i owned was going on strike.

sam asked what i needed to get a macey's and i said pretty much everything, although i tried to make it quick as we headed to the deli counter. "do you always come here?" he asked. "yeah," i told him. "the meats and cheeses are just better." i ordered some turkey and swiss, because that was what was on sale (although i usually get swiss cheese no matter what). i wanted to get some of the black forest ham, too, but they seemed to be in a hurry and there was a line queuing behind me, so i let it go.

at the end of the bread aisle sam asked me what i thought of the girl who served me. i noticed that she was kind of cute but didn't think twice about it.
"no, no, no, i saw the way that she was smiling at you."
"of course she was smiling at me," i said as i tried to find a good red bell pepper. "it's her job to sell things."
"jeff, you knew what you wanted to buy before you even got to the counter. she didn't have to sell you anything. that smile was for real."
being that just a few days ago i was offered to get setup with someone's daughter because "she likes nerdy guys like [me]", i had a hard time believing sam that some cute deli girl liked me after ordering a pound of oven roasted turkey.

by the time we were in the cereal aisle, sam had said that he was going to go back and get the black forest ham and get her number for me. i was so incredulous to it all that i told him if he came back with her number, i would buy him half a pound of the ham, too.
he walked off and i felt a little self-conscious, wondering how this had all just happened. not sure what to do until he came back, i casually continued my shopping while leaving a message with the the movie i'm working on to see if we're shooting on friday or saturday evening this weekend. just in case.

sam came back with a vanilla ice cream cone, but no sign of a phone number or even my ham. "she said she wants you to ask her yourself," he announced. "and you can do that when we go back to pick up our ham."

there was anxiety in the background as we finished our shopping and we somehow managed to come out at the end of the shampoo aisle, meaning we had a long, direct walk toward the deli counter. i was nervous, but kept it contained.
when we got to the counter, the deli girl had her back to us, working on something else, so the other girl asked us if we were here to pick up our roast beef. sam said that we had the ham, and, thankfully, the deli girl turned around. i smiled. i had no idea what to say. but i was calm. i was nice. i was funny. i got her phone number.

i've never done that before. but i have to admit, i liked the rush and the feeling of success.
now i just need to figure out a date.

text results. may 2, 2010

work continues. we just got back from a week in moab, with plenty of amazing landscapes, overtime, and dust in everything. i'm looking forward to it being over (the number of remaining movie nights is frighteningly few!) but i'm continuing to relish the opportunity of working with some of the biggest people in the industry in the process.

i've decided now is a good time to clear out my phone's text messages. i'm rather surprised with how the numbers came out this time:

1. shantell: 1,129
2. jaime: 835
3. mark: 566
4. joel: 376
5. emily: 322

yes, for the first time in years, there is a new champion. shantell is my favorite wardrobe girl in the industry and the only film person i'm really friends with off set (which really only started on.... oh, march 2, it looks like). the bulk of those texts are get-to-know-you questions and discussions, and it wasn't long before she closed in on first place. then, one day, it happened; the crown was transferred.

it's nice having a friend who has a similar schedule: either you're working like crazy or you've got plenty of free time. so we've done things like go to the zoo or visit the museum of art.

jaime and mark you already know.

joel determined that, after last time, he would make the list. it's been mostly legitimate conversation and not numbers padding. we generally talk about movies (because really, what else is there?) and complain about clearplay's imperfect system of editing and how we'd do it so much better.

emily is a former hometeachee (once a hometeachee, always a hometeachee), member of the hpbc, and, as i've come to learn, is very cultured in not just great movies, but also theatre, ballet, and opera (those last two i need some help on).

again, the top five texters make up 67% of my total messages (6% higher than last time for you stats people).

while i do agree that texting can be very antisocial and isolating in differing ways, it is also nice to have this record of conversations between myself and my friends.

i'm really kind of curious to see how the next round's numbers will look.

the ringing of the division bell has begun

never go back to the hotel.

yesterday was just like any other day. my groceries were still sitting on my kitchen counter, not yet put away, i had just finished watching dodes'ka-den, which i'd (accurately) heard described as akira kurosawa's worst movie, and was on my way to the byu bookstore to pick up a packet for my brother-in-law when i decided to check the mail. amidst the weekly coupon fliers and my gas bill was another small envelope from texas A&M.

great, they want to reject me again, i thought as i opened it out of curiosity in my idling car.

Dear Jeffrey, Congratulations! We are pleased to inform you of your admission to Texas A&M University for the Fall 2010 semester....

i reread it and scanned over it, catching only every fourth word as my eyes stumbled in confusion. hmmm, that's interesting. i'll have to call them tomorrow, i thought as i put the car in gear. i made it about 25 feet further down the street before the possible implications had my heart beating so fast that my hands were shaking as i made a u-turn and was soon running up the stairs to my room. i read over the letter again and saw a name and number to call if i had any questions.

i most definitely had a question.

by 4:30 utah time their office was already empty, though i called twice just to make sure. the contact info also provided an e-mail address and i typed one out as quickly and coherently as i could manage, constantly stopping to make sure that i was making sense as i hurriedly fumbled over the keyboard.

i compared this letter to the rejection notice dated eight days earlier, hoping for some sort of explanation. it seemed that one, the rejection, was from the university at large, while my acceptance was from the department to which i had applied. i remembered that the application process had seemed a little vague at places, as it seemed that i was filling out forms on both the main university website and the department's own site. i went over it enough times to make sure that i had completed everything, but it seemed i hadn't. if that was the case, at least it seemed that i had made it through the more demanding selection. maybe i had just not finished the university application and with some appeals, could amend it and secure my admission.

my head was spinning. a week ago, the door had seemed shut for at least a year. just monday, a friend was asking me what i was going to do now and i ad libbed that i would apply again, finding a few more colleges to add and make sure everything was nicely polished. really, i hadn't thought about it much, with work being so busy, and i was grateful for that distraction. but the door wasn't yet open. maybe i had not chance at reversing the university's rejection, that i had only passed one of two criteria and would simply have to do better next time. it was maddening. maybe my whole life would be changing in four months, or maybe i was still out. i did my best to hold to hope without getting in the way of disappointment.

i wanted to keep this all quiet, just in case it didn't happen. there was no need in disappointing anyone else with me. still, i had to tell someone, so i called my sister. i made a cryptic post on facebook that i later regretted (wanting to keep the whole thing off the radar) but by the time i got around to deleting my status update, there were already comments. mark suggested in-n-out for dinner and, holding my thick chocolate shake, i chose to tell him, too, or else i wouldn't have heard a word he'd say.

thankfully, an evening of rock band and movie night and more rock band helped me forget the uncertain balance that my future was in.

i hoped to call the admissions office early this morning, but didn't have time before breakfast at ihop with my sister and then a funeral. but the first thing i did when i got home was make the call.

the lady i talked with knew who i was and when i explained what had happened, she told me i was in.

i was only partially successful in holding back my exasperation as i thanked her for the news. she said that last week's rejection letter was also from their department, but that after they had decided to look over my application again and reconsidered. she noted that in the twelve years she had been there, this was the first time she had ever seen something like this happen. hey, works for me.

so, yes, i am 100% officially in to the school. classes start august 30.

it's like going on a mission, except that i'm not coming back. while i'm taking all of my possessions (well, maybe i'll slim down some things), i'm leaving the rest of my life. the slate is getting wiped clean. just as in-n-out came to provo, i'm leaving. the international cinema, weekly trips to the orem public library, the long-running tradition of movie night, laughing with the office, rock band, meeting here for whatever's going on, snowboarding, everything. it's time for a new start.

but i've had a great time in provo. it's been wonderful. and i know it's time for a change, even one as drastic as this. it's a big unknown, to be sure, and i'm one who generally doesn't like moving. likely it'll be hard to leave so many friends behind and there will be lonely times this coming fall. but that will also be less distractions and more reason to dive into my studies and work at school. classes start august 30. i expect i'll leave a few days after my 31st birthday.

as jaime noted, the curse has been lifted. this means that at lagoon this summer, that puma is mine.

remembering how merciful the Lord hath been

this is a post that likely won't have the strength that i had originally imagined, but it's something i want to write down just the same.

last sunday night i was helping sam clean up the kitchen as i was being moderately successful at controlling the anxiety inside of me. i had just come off a rough week of work on a short, one by some first-time film makers, where the writer, producer, and star were all the same person. the hours of the show had been all over the place, doing nights then a day then another night and i had gotten home that morning in time to fall asleep on the couch for an hour, with my shoes on and still holding my cell phone, before stumbling up to my room for another hour of rest and still getting to church in time for sunday school. i didn't mind the rough hours, i've gotten accustomed to that. what had me nervous was what was coming up.

i was starting the next morning on a movie called 127 hours, the new movie by danny boyle. if that name sounds familiar, it's because he won the oscar for directing slumdog millionaire last year and had been one of my favorite directors ever since i saw millions. i was absolutely thrilled to be working on the same set as him; for me, it really doesn't get much bigger. but not only was i going to straight to his show on very little sleep, i wasn't going to be on the camera crew, but was doing video assist: recording and keeping track of all that goes through the director's monitor and playing back whatever scene or shot he should require. in short, being in charge of a little cart with a million different buttons and cables, and only having a brief once-over training on a few nights earlier. further, on thursday the production was moving to southern utah, where we would be hiking into canyons and shooting there. this meant i was taking a whole new package, one that had not really been field tested to make sure we had everything we may need. and i was the one getting thrown into all this. i told sam i was most nervous for monday (my first day on the job) and friday (our first day making it all work in the middle of the desert), and that i was very curious how i would be feeling the following sunday, when i would be done.

i kept a prayer in my heart. today, i found myself looking back and thinking what a good week it was. it was hard, to be sure, but everything worked out just great.

the first day was rather light work on set. i was quietly excited to be on set with the director and cinematographer whom i had read so much about in my magazines and to watch them work, my friend who was on the other unit's video assist kindly came in three hours early before her call time to help me get up and running, and before long, everyone was telling me they were glad i was there.

i spent the next two days watching james franco cut his own arm off with a pocket knife, again and again. needless to say, when i watch this movie on my clearplay next year, i won't need to have the "violence/gore" filter on. (the movie is the story of the guy who got his arm caught rock climbing and had to cut it off in order to save his life) i occasionally had to look away during the cutting of the arm's nerve itself, but i've seen it all. and my friend in props tossed one of the fake nerves onto my cart, anyway.

southern utah was a definite workout. we had to backpack in some of our equipment over a half-mile hike, which for me included a 60 lb. backpack of my gear along with a couple of quite heavy batteries (usually i found some charitable soul to help carry those). our location was 100 miles from our motel, meaning that we had to leave at 5 a.m. to be in time for our 6:30 call. and the first night i arrived in town at 1 a.m. and was up until 3 getting everything ready, pushing through the following day on about an hour of sleep. the next night i got four hours and it felt great. for being a kid who was never good about getting up for early morning seminary or particularly relishing scouting hikes, i found myself at times wondering how i ended up in this job.

it was odd not being in the camera crew, and i found myself instinctively looking up when someone mentioned my former crew. doing video assist is much less stressful, although it can feel a little lonely, since you are the only one in your department. as such, there's no one else to specifically help you move equipment or make sure everything is arranged and taken care of. but i know pretty much all of the crew and we pitch in to help each other out as needed. somehow, it all works.

there were some hard times, too, down there. for varying circumstances, we didn't have much (or any) lunch for either day, one camera assistant suffered from heat exhaustion, and, saddest of all, the gaffer on the other unit passed away in his sleep on friday night. he was the father to our key grip and best boy electric and was well-known and loved by the whole crew. it was a very sad moment on set, but there is a great comradery amongst the grips and electrics and they pulled together to carry on. a very sad day, just the same.

and now i have one week off, then i'm back on to finish out the show. i'm missing some of the most beautiful scenery, but it's so nice to have time off, a week to refresh and take care of some things. for how uncertain things seemed last week, and how far away today looked, i feel really good about it all.

the curse of makbule

last summer, some friends and i went to lagoon. there, i determined that i would win the biggest prize at the park, a giant plush puma, which i decided would be named "makbule." i knew that with enough money and persistence, i could win the game and imagined what a cool story it would be to tell as makbule hung out on the back couch during movie nights.

despite all of my confidence (and $20+ in quarter tosses) i didn't win the darn puma. and i was kind of surprised by the failure, actually. i had imagined the awesome blog post i would write. it was going to be so cool.

as some of you know, i applied to texas a&m's graduate program of animation for this coming fall. it was such a cool story: i had a film background, learned some computer animation, miraculously pulled together an application in the midst of a busy semester in the byu lab, successfully took the gre without any time to study, and slid my application in barely under the final deadline. i felt pretty smooth, ferris bueller-like.

they said they had received my application and would notify me around the "end of march or early april."

for the past three weeks, friends and family have been eagerly asking me if i have heard from them. as i was beginning to wonder if i missed some new method of notification delivery, i saw their name on an envelope as i was bringing in the mail through the cold rain this evening.

it was a very thin letter.

as far as rejection letters go, it was relatively blunt.

the curse of makbule continues. i had imagined writing a blog post (title chosen and everything) about how exciting it would be, yet how hard it would be to leave all the friends and wonderful things i have going on here. i looked forward to being in a singles ward in texas (or would i go to a family ward?), of making new friends and hopefully teaching sunday school there, of being really lonely and dearly missing my friends and movie night and hpbc and wondering if i had really made the right choice to leave everything but trusting that i had. not to get carried away, i mentally sketched out what would write if it didn't happen, too. just in case.

well, i'll be here for a while longer, now. which means now i need to think about what to do with the hpbc once we finish the series (although, with the way work is going, it's going to take us a while to get through "the deathly hallows"), continue to plan movie nights, consider getting a season pass to one of the snowboard resorts, and search for the new path in my life.

this morning on my way to work, i was listening to some old conference cds. my all-time favorite talk came up, the final talk given by elder maxwell. in it, he shares lessons learned throughout his life. the line that has always stuck with me is "never go back to the hotel."

recently, i've been learning (or noticing) that president hinckley was right, "things will work out." our plans don't always go as we plan, but they do keep going, and often better than we planned ourselves.

at the moment, i have no idea where i'll aim next. but, at the start of this year, i commented that i was excited for the unexpected things this year will bring. it's barely april and i've already had the chance to meet the cinematographer of some of my favorite movies and am currently on the set of danny boyle's newest movie, one of my favorite directors. these awesomenesses don't solve my question, but they do remind me that surprises and the unexpected do happen, big and small.

never go back to the hotel.

family conference for the single guy

only one post in march. for shame.

conference. dang, this weekend really flew by (excepting the closing prayer). i love it. no matter how many times i've been able to be in the conference center for a session, it's still exciting to be there. during the sunday afternoon session i tried to take notes not on what the speakers were saying but my thoughts as i was listening. i still plan on taking a severe highlighter to the ensign next month.

in the past, i've posted here a summary of the speakers and what they spoke. sitting in the nosebleed section as elder andersen got up to speak, i was thinking about the unmistakable common threads throughout the weekend. and i wasn't the only one, either, as the junior apostle commented on it as well.

family, raising children safely, and the hope of the rising generation: these were the topics that permeated all ten hours of the 180th general conference. counsel to teach children the gospel and love of the scriptures early was repeated and much of the priesthood session was directed toward those of the aaronic priesthood. it was interesting to hear all this talk to "the youth" about the greatness of the rising generation and to realize that that's no longer me (and it hasn't been for a while...) i will definitely look this conference up when i have my own children in five, ten, or twenty years.

but at the moment, i don't have children, don't attend a ward that has a young men's program or a primary, or really have much interaction in any way with people under 20 (allison, you are 20 now, right?) outside of babysitting my toddling nephew. so, what's a single boy supposed to do? there's still plenty. elder christofferson's talk on the stupendousness of the holy bible made me want to press on with my study of the book, elder oaks clarified how blessings of healing work, and, dang, i could easily go through my notes and list a fat paragraph of things i learned and was reminded of: the gospel is not easy to live, duty is virtuous, set up spiritual early warning systems, and it goes on.
and the power of example, mentioned in a couple of talks, can influence more than just children.

as i'm working to be patient for the day when i will have a family, president uchtdorf wonderfully taught that patience includes actively and persistently working towards the accomplishment of a goal.... ; )

my favorite movies: 2009 edition

oh my blog, how i've missed you so! facebook is quaint and convenient to be sure, but i and my life are far more than two-sentence soundbites. it's nice to have the time to write, with room to move and express.

with today being the oscars [editor's note: yeah, we wrote this a few days ago], it seems appropriate to list my favorite movies of last year. regrettably, i haven't yet seen a handful of those that i'd like to (up in the air, the hurt locker, inglorious whatevers, etc.) and so am going to list not only my favorites from last year, but also the my favorites that i saw last year, irregardless of when they were released.

the 2009 crowd:

5. ponyo

i can't remember the last time, if ever, that i went into a movie knowing nothing about it; it's a rare treat. and after the opening minutes of ponyo, i had no idea what was going on, but i was loving it. like the wrestler, the only reason i wanted to movie to end was so that i could write about it. in a world of 3-D animation, it is exciting to see a traditionally drawn animated movie. contrasted with the preview for the princess and the frog, ponyo's animation initially seems flat and rough, boasting fancy lighting or even attempting to hide its pencil marks. but it feels completely alive.

the story is a moderate adaptation of "the little mermaid", although the similarities with disney stop at the heroine's red hair. instead of teenagers in mad love, the heroes are five-year olds. it could be a called a love story, but it's a 5-year old's love story, looking at the unique friendship between a little boy and a little girl. it was during this that i realized what a master miyazaki is with children. watch the way sosuke carefully ducks through a hole in a fence while carrying a bucket of water; his children move, react, and have the nuances accurate to their specific ages. just as disney animators spend hours observing lions and pumbaas to get the subtlest gestures

and it's likely the first animated movie to ever mention the cambrian era.

4. the fantastic mr. fox
i actually saw a trailer for mr. fox at ponyo. i liked the odd sense of humor but wondered if i was seeing all the funny moments in the trailer. a few weeks later, i heard that it was wes anderson's project and that pretty much sealed it for me.

from start to finish, through and through, it's a wes anderson movie: flat, balanced framing, retro art direction, bill murray, the alienated father-son relationship, and incredibly dry and subtle humor. rocio and i laughed almost the whole way through, while the family in front didn't seem to fully understand why all of this was so funny. need to see it again so i can remember the lines to quote.

3. me and orson welles

the night after seeing this movie, i found myself thinking, wow, zac efron got to work with orson welles....

no, he didn't. welles has been dead for 25 years. but christian mckay's performance is so perfect, so magnetic, that he alone is the eponymous reason to see the movie. he does not seem to be doing an impression (as some have said of jamie foxx in ray), but has taken us back in time to be with orson welles himself. zac efron does fine, and i think he is wisely and successfully moving to being a serious actor and i wish him the best. the movie is a brush with one of the legends of film through his eyes. like citizen kane, though, it seems that no one really saw the real orson welles. his persona was an bold, brash, audacious, demanding genius who let nothing stop him, hiring an ambulance to hurry him through traffic and improvising radio play scripts as he had the whim. yet it seems that inside it all he held cowardice and insecurity. at the end, the story is over, but it's such an unforgettable experience to have been with orson welles for ever a brief time. i'm quite sad that mr. mckay was not nominated this year.... i would have been rooting for him all the way.

2. watchmen

i had forgotten how much i enjoyed watchmen until i went through the former 786's list and saw it on there. i was familiar with the graphic novel from my days of reading comics but hadn't read it personally and so wasn't in a fervor for the movie. but me and clearplay watched it one night and were surprised with how good it was. super hero stories are most interesting when they are grounded in reality, and with one (major) exception, no one here has super powers. it's a partial inspiration for the incredibles, as the crime fighters were once public heroes, but fear and paranoia soon sent them in to reclusion. like bone, each character is the embodiment of a different philosophy of life, and seeing them work to find understanding, balance, and justice makes for a very thought-provoking film. i was very happy that my brother had read the book so that he could answer and discuss the questions i had about the story, the people, and their world.

1. up

it started two years ago with ratatouille. it didn't look very interesting. the first time i saw it it was ok. but on progressive viewings i came to think it may have been the best movie of the year. wall-e looked weird and esoteric and after seeing it the first night i thought i was ok but the whole "green" message was pretty heavy handed. well, you know how that ended. so when the trailers for up started coming around and it looked vague and aimless, i wasn't worried. when i left the opening day showing not wholly bowled over, i took it as a good sign. and, despite me sincerely trying to find another champion, pixar has, for the third year in a row, made my favorite movie of the year.

for a detailed explanation, see here.

if you prefer lists and a writer other than me, go for this one.

squirrel!

i'll get the list of the best movies from years other than 2009 that i saw last year up soon, probably next week after my movie wraps.

text addict

i got my first text from the scort many years ago. he sent me a zero. i didn't know how to do it but i thought i was pretty cool. a few years later, heidi, the super secretary in the film office, showed me one afternoon how to text on my phone. i don't know if it dominoed to my other friends but it suddenly seemed as if we were all texting each other; maybe they were just waiting for me to find my way out of the late nineties.

soon, it became apparent that the 50 complimentary texts on my plan would not be enough and i added the option for 300 texts. not long after i moved to the red door i outgrew that, too. i don't remember if 800 was the next option, but i have been on "unlimited texts" for several years now.

my blue flip phone that meowed was my workhorse during my texting boon. i got to the point where i could text a whole message without even looking, my thumb+brain team knowing not only the location of each key and what letters where on it, but what words would come up on the predictive text and how many times i would need to scroll through for a particular word. sadly, the phone's sim card only held 50 messages and i would have to delete it every night. i began keeping a notebook of my favorite texts, since they were so transitory.

for my xxxth birthday, i got a mytouch, t-mobile's iphone. i can't text blindly anymore, but it does hold a lot more text messages. i'm not sure how many, because i've currently got 8,318 since i last cleared it on october 5. as my messaging program has been getting sluggish, i think it's time to clear it out, and i thought it would be interesting to look at the numbers:

my top five text friends:

1. jaime (no surprise): 2,033
2. mark: 1,161
3. kristin: 659
4. t: 639
5. brooke: 553

jaime and i not only text the most, but also the longest. it's nice that we're both on t-mobile, since we can send longer texts, which is an advantage, as we usually talk about life, the color blue, philosophy, the occasional dating frustration, and everything else under the sun.

mark and i are usually much briefer, arranging where to eat, when to play rock band, exchanging random awesomeness we see throughout the day, and the occasional dating frustrations.

with kristin, they're mostly warm fuzzies. it's nice to have plenty of those on hand.

tim is even shorter than mark. often they're 3-5 words to coordinate who's driving and where to meet, but we do a lot together and it adds up. in between that is a good amount of dry humor, again of odd and bemusing things that happen to us. i find myself laughing as i browse through them.

brooke is a hodgepodge, ranging from coordinating events (movie night, harry potter book club, office night, et al.) to friendly chit chat about whatever's going on at the moment.

in short, 61% of all of my test messages comes from those five people. jaime alone has 24% of the total.

looking through these as i'm about to delete them, i'm wishing i could export them to a text file somehow. at least i've still got my notebook.

editor's note: turns out i'm not the only one who wants to save text messages. a google search and a flip through the "mytouch" magazine i got in the mail a few days ago both offer a handful of programs to download text messages from phone to computer.

Christmas letter, 2009

editor's note: sending out a Christmas card in the first few weeks in january is, while perhaps a bit late, not entirely unheard. and that was our plan with this post. but then came the sundance film festival, a bout with (suspected) salmonella, then work on a disney channel movie, all without a day's break. and our writer spent last monday snowboarding. as a result, the yearly Christmas letter is only now being published. sending printed pages through the postal service is customary, but as most of our kinship and demographic is connected via interweb communications, we have opted to post the Christmas letter here, instead. further, we have chosen to eschew the traditional prosaic format, favoring instead snippets of moments of note from the year two thousand and nine, anno domini.

and a happy new year to you, too.

jeff gustafson

editor-in-chief

sheep go to heaven

in 2009 i learned...

our worth is not determined by cans of food

it doesn't matter who sustains you in church, the calling is the same

goats make excellent Christmas presents

*nsync marionettes make the best white elephant gifts

the world's largest recorded game of capture the flag is 1200 people. i may have been in a bigger one

30 is not too old to have a disney character on your birthday cake or bed sheets

it takes more than dogged deterination and whole ton of quarters to win the biggest prize at the amusement park,

i'm just not sure what that is

a movie about clouds can make you laugh, cry, and laugh again in five minutes

maine my new second favorite state

the biggest ball of twine in minnesota sits under a makeshift pagoda

don't break down your fee for a wedding video into an hourly rate; it's so small it's not even worth it

back up your hard drive often

some movies are too boring even for me

helvetica is a very common font

there are bears in yellowstone

rafting down a river with floating pieces of ice will leave you frozen from the waist down

the best movies are rated pg

i blessed a baby with a movie star

most of joseph smith's ancestors aren't lds but they look like him

teaching fifth graders can be terrifying, but if you bring treats and good music, they'll think you're pretty cool

if you're going to take pictures in the middle of a corn starch fight, use a disposable camera

it's fun to be a groupie

nephews are awesome

it's easier to go up a mountain than to come down it

we should be like darth vader

in life, it's the boring stuff you remember most

it's never too late

the final days of sundance

yeah, been a while. since sundance ended, i got (what i think was) salmonella, then did prep for a movie, took a team of newbies snowboarding (good times had by all), and worked a good, full week on said aforementioned movie. now that's it sunday night, i finally have some time to recount the tale of what happened two weeks earlier.

saturday was the last official day of the sundance film festival. i got the office around 11 and our dispatcher handed me my trip sheet: i had a pickup at 2:30. he then offered me a ticket to some movie, starting at 12:30, saying i should go. i was apprehensive, since a) well, you never know what you're going to get with sundance films, and b) it seemed like i wouldn't make it back in time for my pickup, which i thought he'd be concerned about. apparently this wasn't an issue for him, and he urged me and another driver to go. we had a friend drop us off (a nice perk of being on a team of drivers), assuming that someone would be there to pick us up when the movie was over.

the film was called double take, and neither during the movie nor at the end nor now do i have any idea what it was about. it reminded me very much of an orson welles movie called f for fake, one that i love dearly. welles's movie ducks and weaves in and out of several different topics--art forgery, perception, deception, illusions, howard hughes, charlatanery, and picasso--all chopped up and thrown together with welles narrating and commenting like a favorite uncle telling a story. it's absolutely a delight and it works. but welles was a genius, and masters make difficult things look easy. double take affirms the greatness of orson welles by saying nothing in 90 minutes. instead of welles, it begins with another filmic legend, a hitchcock impersonator, talking about meeting his own doppleganger in a room. this is mashed with footage of kennedy and khrushchev, commentary on how television affected cinema, and discussion on hitchcock movies, specifically the birds. all without managing to say anything about any of them. to be honest, i kind of liked it, but it never went anywhere.

we left the theater at 2:15 to find ourselves in our own mess; there were no drivers available and i should have been ready for my pickup now. my friend called to organize a ride back to the hotel for us while i checked my own messages. robert yeoman had called me, suggesting we meet up around 2 that afternoon. tragically, that didn't work, but i called him back and he suggested breakfast the next morning. that would be driving up from provo just for that, but when someone like that asks to have breakfast with you, you take it.

i was ten minutes late when i picked up my ride, a south american director with his wife and daughter. they mostly talked to each other (in spanish) but seemed to be very cool and fun. i dropped them off at the broadway, now thinking i should have gone to see his movie, as he would go on to win the award for best directing and best screenplay (reading the review in variety, his daughter noted that they compared him to luis bunuel; in spanish cinema, it doesn't get much better than that). instead, i called my sister, wondering if i could visit for a bit. becky said yes, then asked if i'd talk to mom. i hadn't, so i called her. mom asked if i'd talked with dad. i hadn't, and she said to call him. (why hadn't becky just told me to call dad in the first place? why couldn't someone just tell me what's going on??) i called dad (the van has bluetooth...) and asked him how last night was, just like mom told me to. the tone in his voice made me think that the cat had died or something. he said that the stake president had extended a call to him to serve as the bishop of the fargo first ward. while i know my dad was very humbled by the whole situation, all i can say is that it immediately and verily felt right. it felt good. after i hung up, i switched back to the radio. guns-n-roses was playing. i switched to the classical station.

i played with caleb as i talked with becky and brady about "bishop gustafson" and had dinner. becky has taught caleb sign language (which has eschewed any need for him to speak, in his opinion), and the sign for "cool uncle jeff" is for him to cover his eyes. it started out as miming "glasses" (since that's how my sister thinks of me, i guess), but with caleb, these signs tend to mutate ("drink" started out as miming taking a drink and has settled at "finger up the nose"); she tried to shift my sign to a sort of "bowtie", but the hands over the eyes was already firmly entrenched. over dinner, becky noted that i was wearing my "uncle jeff" shirt: my tally hall shirt with the "see no evil" monkeys, including one covering his eyes. and i was able to talk becky into giving me a haircut, too, all in time for me to be back to pick up the family from the broadway (they said the showing went great). later, in the hotel, the drivers would all be amazed that i found time to get a haircut during a run.

that evening was the awards ceremony, and i drove the south american guy and his family from salt lake to the awards plaza, having to swallow my pride and admit that i didn't know exactly where it was at 6:57, after my attempts find it turn up fruitless. thankfully, i was just a few blocks from it and they still got there on time.

i ended up back there a few hours later, waiting in the snowstorm for the "new african cinema" who, after 40 minutes, did not show up. it was party night, and several drivers spent the evening driving people from party to party. i was in the hotel room, on call in case the gang from sympathy for delicious needed a ride back from their party. the rule was that we had to wait until 2 a.m., but by 1 a.m. i was starting to eye the door. around that time, a friend came and said that because of the snowstorm, provo canyon was moving at about 10 mph. with me planning to meet bob the next morning, i decided i was going to sleep on the chairs in the hotel room (because i was NOT going back to the driver house....)

i changed into my pajamas, worked on my sunday school lesson for a bit (scriptures and teacher's manual all on my phone), and, when the last guys left around 3, got some sleep.

five hours of sleep on a hotel room chair (and a few ottomans) isn't too bad. i was grateful i'd brought my pajamas (that makes a huge difference) and toothbrush and wondered why i hadn't bothered to bring toothpaste. i tidied up the room and finished out my lesson on cain and abel and the ministry of enoch. sunday school started at 12:30, and if bob would call me to meet around 10, i just might be able to make it. he did call at 10, but said that his ride to the airport left at 11:55 and suggested 11:30. i said that would be great, knowing that it would put me about fifteen minutes too late to teach sunday school, conceding that we don't always get what we want.

i went down to the lobby and met up with bob, who regretfully told me that they had moved his departure time from the hotel up but said the he would be happy to meet for a few minutes. i said that was fine (rejoicing in my head that i might still be able to teach sunday school), and asked the two questions that i had prepared. i asked about his lighting design for the royal tenenbaums(yeah, i'm talking with the guy who shot that!), how he kept it so flat without becoming boring. (bounced soft light and good production design). and i asked him my million dollar question: how he balances family life, and his answer was the same as everyone else i've asked; it's hard. i was expecting that, and it's nice to know that the big guys have the same challenges as the guys i work with, affirming that my decision to find a more stable field is the one i want to make.

i thanked him and he offered me his e-mail address, saying to keep in touch and ask questions as they come. i then texted sam, telling him to tell the ward there would be two sunday school classes, and hopped in my van. i arrived the building just as elder's quorum was ending, and walked into sunday school wearing a tally hall shirt and leather jacket, with my lesson notes written on the back of some papers i'd grabbed from a recycling bin. i took a pair of old scriptures off the shelf and began the lesson, feeling awesome that i'd managed to pull all of this off. and it turned out pretty darn good, too.

the former 786, to answer some of your questions about the festival and driving:

• we work for the festival. they pay the first year drivers comparable to a low production assistant rate on a movie. second year drivers get the same as a bad rate for a loader on a camera crew.
• there are different fleets. i was on the "film maker fleet", said to be one of the best because we just drive directors to the screenings outside park city. "jury" is also a good fleet to be on, because you're just driving the jury members to their screenings. "premiere" is the one that drives the stars to their showings. it's cool because you get to say you drove [famous person], but you're also driving neurotic/obsessive publicists and crazy entourage members. and often from party to party until long hours. "paid packages" is just that: someone comes into town and hires a car and driver for X days. during that time, they own you. film maker fleet didn't brush me with as many celebrities as the premiere team had, but i had cooler people to talk with (the doc guys are much more down to earth than the fiction directors; you know, the movies with "acting" in them) and no really late nights.
• i think there were about 11 of us on the film maker fleet, and i really liked those guys. i think jury had five drivers, while premiere had 15. ish? i was told that there were about 100 drivers total, meaning that paid packages has 70 or 80. i never saw nearly that many, but i guess they were off doing their own thing.
• there are several different venues around park city showing movies, but those often sell out the day they go on sale in the fall. if you really want to see movies (instead of hoping to get a glimpse of a celeb), go to the showings outside of park city: the broadway theater and the tower theater in salt lake, the egyptian theater in ogden (very cool), or the sundance resort in provo canyon.
• each fleet has a dispatcher, who assigns us a run. we had a room at the marriot hotel (the festival headquarters) that we'd hang out at in between runs. some guys had friends or family they'd stay with in park city, and there was a house for us to stay at, but my experience with it that one night was less than ideal. like most, i'd drive home every night (though a few people offered to let me crash at their place in salt lake, a little closer).
• would i do it again? absolutely. it was an overall blast.