(no subject)
Last Friday was one of the most trying, and strangely reassuring, Fridays I have had this year. A couple of weeks ago, I had finally given up in frustration and told my tutor (among others) that I was not going to be able to shoot the shots I needed in order to complete the second half of my first assignment. A big problem. So my tutor tells me to come into the Kelvin Grove campus on the 17th and she will help me get the shots done. Sounds simple enough, but when I read the university's web site, the calendar indicated that there were lectures and tutorials on that day. Confused, I made a heap of enquiries to the tutor and anyone else I could get in touch with. Eventually, someone answered my queries and told me that it was the web site calendar that was mistaken, and these two weeks have basically been the Easter holidays for the university. People seem genuinely surprised that I did not automatically know this. I do not know why I keep staying in the course when every impulse I have is telling me to quit already. But after a lot of arguments and hassle, I finally managed to get myself to the Kelvin Grove campus and meet up with the tutor.
Once the tutor and I found a location, we set up and shot the shots that I had planned to comprise the video. This was both a very perplexing and very confusing process for me. Not because I had not shot things like this before (hell, I do it all the time when I feel creative enough). But rather because I was being ordered to work in a procedure that was completely different from what I am used to. Having any procedure at all is a big difference compared to what I am used to, as a matter of fact. Normally, when I am shooting video, I just make up things as I go along. This has the effect of making my speech seem awkward and stumbling, in spite of the fact that I may have already plotted out the general idea of what I am going to say well in advance. In fact, I noticed on Friday that even when there is a script and someone else directing the action, everything I do is so unnatural and jerky it makes me feel like an arsehole. Whenever I have an audience, or perceive I have an audience, I really feel like a complete arsehole. This has been a major problem for me since day one, and like all the other major problems, it does not seem to be getting any better.
In any event, the subject of the video was fairly simple. The video begins with a subject (played by me in this instance) eating a bar of chocolate whilst a teddybear (pictured to the left) looks on. After a couple of seconds, the teddybear is meant to start gesticulating to indicate that he wants some chocolate, too. After giving the teddybear a puzzled look, my character cuts the chocolate bar in half and hands the larger half to the teddybear. This is followed by shots of the teddybear "eating" the chocolate, my character reacting with slight puzzlement, followed by my character shaking hands with the teddybear. And I am supposed to edit that all down into a thirty-second piece. That, fortunately, does not include a five-second title card including the name of the piece, the "producer" (ie. me) and other such information. Oh well, I think the mere fact that I have managed to cut together a 32-second rough cut is quite an achievement in itself. I honestly have no idea how I am going to shave two seconds off the running time, although when I queried this with the tutor they told me that they were not that strict. Which is just as well, I think.
All of this is causing me to have a lot of serious internal debates about why I am enrolled in university, what I am doing there, and how I am going to complete it. The second and third years of the course will apparently require me to attend classes at Kelvin Grove. This is an hour's train ride from the station nearest to where I am currently located, and that does not include the thirty-plus minutes it takes to ride to that station on the bus that stops outside my present front door! Needless to say, this prospect has me just about shitting myself with worry because it is already hard enough for me to travel to the Caboolture campus by my present means. Of course, the old man thinks I can just travel from Morayfield to Caboolture (lion's share of an hour) to Kelvin Grove (over an hour not counting downtime between trips) and be just fine. So I asked the stupid fukkwit what happens if I have to turn up for a class that is at 0900? Flap my fukking arms and hope for the best? I have to say that by the time I get through this course, and that is a big if at this stage, I am probably going to end up completely out of my mind from the stress of necessary social services not doing their stated jobs.
Of course, the probable need to relocate closer to the city in order to be able to make it to the campus in time to attend classes is also going to exacerbate a patently awful financial situation. As it currently stands, I have very little money and even less when one accounts for the fact that I have major problems keeping myself properly fed. I do not know what market failure allowed the estate agents to think that a duplex house from which one must travel for over two hours to get to the city centre is worth more than eight hundred dollars a month, but if ever there was a time when we needed the government to start regulating a market, this is it. In point of fact, if I were able to impose regulation, I would be regulating the housing market with an unholy vengeance. If I came into a few billion dollars, I would set up an entire neighbourhood of rental houses and rent them out at a price undercutting the nearest competitors by a minimum of a hundred dollars. Because as far as I am concerned, people who have to gouge their customers to the point of desperation in order to make money do not deserve to remain in business. And you can put that on my gravestone when the end comes at long last.
Anyway, I have questions to ask of the readership out there. I know some of you are still reading, so this is a chance to participate, of sorts. The bear you see in the photo above is in need of a name. A noble, strong, masculine name to reflect his larger size compared to the rest of my bears, of course. Or just because it would sound good. Take your pick. Anyway, more important is the question of what I am going to do about my living arrangements. I have not asked the people at the university if I can just avoid the changeover to the Kelvin Grove university when the requisite work at Caboolture is done, so I do not know what my options in that direction are. But I am so sick and tired of my options being limited by the constant underestimation of the amount of assistance I need. It was quite seriously difficult enough to get the process of applying for university completed in the first place. And if I had known what things would be like when I got here, I would have simply not bothered with the process in the first place. What is the point of moving to a new place where you are constantly out of money and know nobody if you are going to suffer a decline in the quality of your life as a result?
Anyway, I hope this entry has been as rotten to read as it was to write. In closing, I offer the following words: Disappointment and elation are all a matter of context.
Once the tutor and I found a location, we set up and shot the shots that I had planned to comprise the video. This was both a very perplexing and very confusing process for me. Not because I had not shot things like this before (hell, I do it all the time when I feel creative enough). But rather because I was being ordered to work in a procedure that was completely different from what I am used to. Having any procedure at all is a big difference compared to what I am used to, as a matter of fact. Normally, when I am shooting video, I just make up things as I go along. This has the effect of making my speech seem awkward and stumbling, in spite of the fact that I may have already plotted out the general idea of what I am going to say well in advance. In fact, I noticed on Friday that even when there is a script and someone else directing the action, everything I do is so unnatural and jerky it makes me feel like an arsehole. Whenever I have an audience, or perceive I have an audience, I really feel like a complete arsehole. This has been a major problem for me since day one, and like all the other major problems, it does not seem to be getting any better.
In any event, the subject of the video was fairly simple. The video begins with a subject (played by me in this instance) eating a bar of chocolate whilst a teddybear (pictured to the left) looks on. After a couple of seconds, the teddybear is meant to start gesticulating to indicate that he wants some chocolate, too. After giving the teddybear a puzzled look, my character cuts the chocolate bar in half and hands the larger half to the teddybear. This is followed by shots of the teddybear "eating" the chocolate, my character reacting with slight puzzlement, followed by my character shaking hands with the teddybear. And I am supposed to edit that all down into a thirty-second piece. That, fortunately, does not include a five-second title card including the name of the piece, the "producer" (ie. me) and other such information. Oh well, I think the mere fact that I have managed to cut together a 32-second rough cut is quite an achievement in itself. I honestly have no idea how I am going to shave two seconds off the running time, although when I queried this with the tutor they told me that they were not that strict. Which is just as well, I think.
All of this is causing me to have a lot of serious internal debates about why I am enrolled in university, what I am doing there, and how I am going to complete it. The second and third years of the course will apparently require me to attend classes at Kelvin Grove. This is an hour's train ride from the station nearest to where I am currently located, and that does not include the thirty-plus minutes it takes to ride to that station on the bus that stops outside my present front door! Needless to say, this prospect has me just about shitting myself with worry because it is already hard enough for me to travel to the Caboolture campus by my present means. Of course, the old man thinks I can just travel from Morayfield to Caboolture (lion's share of an hour) to Kelvin Grove (over an hour not counting downtime between trips) and be just fine. So I asked the stupid fukkwit what happens if I have to turn up for a class that is at 0900? Flap my fukking arms and hope for the best? I have to say that by the time I get through this course, and that is a big if at this stage, I am probably going to end up completely out of my mind from the stress of necessary social services not doing their stated jobs.
Of course, the probable need to relocate closer to the city in order to be able to make it to the campus in time to attend classes is also going to exacerbate a patently awful financial situation. As it currently stands, I have very little money and even less when one accounts for the fact that I have major problems keeping myself properly fed. I do not know what market failure allowed the estate agents to think that a duplex house from which one must travel for over two hours to get to the city centre is worth more than eight hundred dollars a month, but if ever there was a time when we needed the government to start regulating a market, this is it. In point of fact, if I were able to impose regulation, I would be regulating the housing market with an unholy vengeance. If I came into a few billion dollars, I would set up an entire neighbourhood of rental houses and rent them out at a price undercutting the nearest competitors by a minimum of a hundred dollars. Because as far as I am concerned, people who have to gouge their customers to the point of desperation in order to make money do not deserve to remain in business. And you can put that on my gravestone when the end comes at long last.
Anyway, I have questions to ask of the readership out there. I know some of you are still reading, so this is a chance to participate, of sorts. The bear you see in the photo above is in need of a name. A noble, strong, masculine name to reflect his larger size compared to the rest of my bears, of course. Or just because it would sound good. Take your pick. Anyway, more important is the question of what I am going to do about my living arrangements. I have not asked the people at the university if I can just avoid the changeover to the Kelvin Grove university when the requisite work at Caboolture is done, so I do not know what my options in that direction are. But I am so sick and tired of my options being limited by the constant underestimation of the amount of assistance I need. It was quite seriously difficult enough to get the process of applying for university completed in the first place. And if I had known what things would be like when I got here, I would have simply not bothered with the process in the first place. What is the point of moving to a new place where you are constantly out of money and know nobody if you are going to suffer a decline in the quality of your life as a result?
Anyway, I hope this entry has been as rotten to read as it was to write. In closing, I offer the following words: Disappointment and elation are all a matter of context.