For the last week or so we’ve had an unusual warm spell– 60 degrees almost every day. That’s a rare week in November up here. But last night it rained (quite a bit, actually) and the het broke and now it’s crisp and chilly and we’re all just waiting for the snow to come with the quintessential FWOMP!
Snowman art follows quickly– we’ve got some creative kids, but none quite as good as the iconic Calvin.
If only we got a little more snow...
But it’s pretty cloudy and dreary and the only thing that could make it worse would be rain, and the only thing that could make it worth it would be snow. Guess which one the weatherman is sending our way?
Boo hiss.
I plan to sneak out later and wander campus with my newly battery-ed camera, and see if I can’t make this place just look wintery instead of gloomy.
I guess this is pretty much the whiniest post I’ve ever written, and I shouldn’t even post it here because Miriam will read it. And she’s a good student who does her work and has a social life and manages to balance everything. But I want to whine about failing at D, all of the above. So Miriam you can skip this one, and just critique the video at the bottom.
For the last couple of days I’ve been kind of cut off from the world. Not that I’ve been stuck in a dead zone with no phone, internet, or television, just that my brain has been cutting off communication. I look around me and I don’t understand people. I usually have no problems with this– I may not always get it right when I put it into words, but getting a feel for a person’s thoughts is usually easy for. But for the last few days everything feels tense, stressed, and ready to bomb out. I don’t know what it is– I don’t know if it’s me getting ready to pick fights with everyone, or everyone getting ready to pick fights with me. I feel like everytime I turn around I disappoint or annoy someone. But then I cut off, and I don’t talk and I hope it goes away, but they accuse me of being antisocial. So I can’t win and I don’t want to, so I’m just going to try to go with the flow and let things roll.
In the meantime, I’ve been messing some more in WMM, and have a total of three vids to my name. I’m trying to get better at what Miriam suggested, but I don’t think I have the patience. Cutting each clip down by .001 of a second at a time is too hair-splitting for me. So I make it as close as I can, and when I hit that point where I like it but just before I tear my hair out and delete it. Picking the music has been the hardest for me- when I pick a song I think will be fitting for the movie, it turns out to be absurdly fast, or the beat of the music differs from the lyrics, and I have to pick one to time it with, or I can’t get the damn song to convert from iTunes to WMM. And on the YouTube note, I need to find more movies. I got Treasure Planet by (happy) accident, but I don’t have any others and I think I need to branch out. I’m starting to feel like all my videos look the same.
And the she-said-he-said is the stupid part of me that insists on writing this damn fanfiction, even though it makes me crazy, the characters are difficult, and the storyline is irregularly paced and I feel like I’m failing at doing the story justice. I know where I’m headed (I have the climax and aftermath basically plotted out) but I can’t find the inspiration for the small action that helps build to that. I need to intersperse the rising action with short plateaus, otherwise it will feel rushed and it will confuse people. But I can’t do that, and I don’t know how to express the changes in my characters and I basically feel like I’ve written myself into a corner with a tiny window above me, but I can’t reach it, or I can’t fit through it, or it’s locked. There’s an escape, but I can’t use it. I’m trying to work backwards, from knowing how it will end and trying to work down from there, but I’m distracted with guilt about not doing as much studying as I should, or skipping out on dinner to finish a thought process. But while I wait and try to wriggle through that hole, it’s going to continue to bother me. So I’ll continue to distract myself with videos…
