Take Note

I'm now using personalmutations.wordpress.com for all of my egocentric blogging needs. It offers me more flexibility and control and I can feed it to all my various online hangouts with ease by setting up RSS feeds. Unfortunately Tribe it seems isn't smart enough to forward my RSS updates to my notices so none of you know that if I don't tell you. My feed is available on my homepage, but you won't see it updated on your Tribe, you'll have to remember to check it yourself. If you're that interested in my life you should just subscribe using an RSS aggregator.

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He Said, She Implied

I thought it would be fun and/or instructive to go over the notable flirting events of Wednesday night analyzing what when wrong and what would have been an action leading to better results. I can't believe I let a super sexy massage therapist get away. Someone smack me.

Girl - "I'm a massage therapist."

What I did: I said "Well in that case." and turned my back towards her but quickly turned back.
What I should have done: Follow my gut, turn around like I did but insist she check out my back - after all it is a bit sore. ;)

Girl - "I'm not interested in porn. Don't get me wrong, I love sex, I think its beautiful."

What I did: I tried to "understand" her lack of interest in porn, something like "So you think porn cheapens it?"
What I should have done: TALK ABOUT SEX. Jesus man. "What do you like about it?" "How do you like it?" She just opened up the goddamn door and I went the other way.

At another table where three sisters. When I arrived on the scene there was a guy chatting one of them up, then he left the table. I turned around and asked her how she'd rank him 1-10. She said 5. Then I asked the other two and got two nines, but then one of the girls said she was biased because he was the boyfriend of sister #3.

Sister #1 - "How about you? How would you rate yourself?"

Damn clever trap <cough> I mean test. I think I failed in my response;

Me - "Hmmm. My favourite number is seven."

Me - "So you're all sisters? Do you all live together?"
Sister #1 - "You believe whatever you want."

These girls were keen to play, but I couldn't get my head into the game. I had nuthin.

So... thoughts? Recommendations? This is going to be an ongoing process of training. Help me out here.

Thank you for Porno

So last night I'm at the pub to hear a band I recently did some film work for play. I'm sitting at the bar and there's a drop dead sexy girl sitting there talking to some guy (and tossing me a glance over his shoulder once in a while). This girl is a 9 (yes ladies we really do rank your appearance on a 1-10 scale - please don't be offended). Old Kay would have just sat there sipping his beer, new and improved eligible bachelor Kay took the opportunity to practice some of his trademark charm, which has gotten rather rusty over the years...

The guy who was talking to her left behind his coat so I approached her saying, "It looks like you've been relegated to guard duty." Things went from there, I found out she was a massage therapist (hot damn) and as soon as I sat down next to her she noticed my Respect Porno (www.respect-porno.org/) button at which point I launched into the "pornographers are people too, when you pirate porno you're taking money from these hard working people, are you a porno pirate?" She said she never watched porno - ever. She did say she enjoyed sex, thought it was beautiful, all that. Then I made the mistake of trying to defend myself from her perception that I was a pornographer. It went downhill from there. Why? Because I worried. Because I tried to fix something that I perceived as a problem and by so doing attracted attention to it. Telling her I was a filmmaker or trying to explain the film (see the website above) to a drunk girl wasn't going to improve my cause.

Looking back I now know how I could have saved it, indeed prevented it from becoming an issue at all, and that's why I'm thankful. That experience improved my flirting skills and I'll do better next time. So I'm thankful, for that and the other flirting fuck ups I had that night. If you don't fall down, you're not learning anything.

www.respect-porno.org/

Sun on my face

That's what I'm thankful for today. Sun on my face. It was such a glorious day I went for a nice long walk just taking it all in.

Okay enough of that bullshit. Here's what's really got my spirits up. I added a phone number to my cell Saturday night. A girl's. A girl in a band. Ahh yes I was a charming son of a bitch. Not only was I flirting with her, but Funkstar showed up and started flirting with me too. Ha ha. And the girl that was too beautiful and too quiet for me to muster up the courage to talk to Saturday night? I bumped into her randomly Sunday afternoon and chatted her up a bit.

I'm thankful because I've got deadly game. So Triple-B is still too chicken shit to hang out with me. Who cares? My dance card is filling up nicely.

Tinkerer

I've always been an inventor at heart - but I suck at math, so it never seemed like a viable career option. Even so I love the idea of tinkering, retrofitting and altering technology. I've been toying with the idea of a flashlight that could project a slide for a while now, but today the muse really took over and set me on a course of invention for the afternoon. The result. Proof of concept for stage 1.

Locked in my windowless bathroom I experimented with an LED flashlight, an old slide from Rome's tourism board and a variety of lenses. The result? I managed to project the Coliseum onto my bathroom door.

Now that I've proven the concept all that's left is the final implementation. My first flashlight will be an LED powered slide projector, but once that's accomplished I have grander plans. Some quick math tells me that the LCD display on an iPod Nano is almost exactly the same size as a 35mm film frame. Pull that out, put some high powered lighting behind it and a 35mm lens in front of it and you've got a portable digital projector, even a video projector if I install iPodLinux. Hot. I have a Burning Man project.

Fatigue is a valid excuse

I'm just too friggin' tired. Sure its a cop out. Well fine. Deal with it. I'm piking out.

Kris Demeanor is playing at the Marquee Room tonight. He's one of my all time favorite live musicians and even though he's based in Calgary he doesn't play here that often, alway touring or involved in some other artistic endeavor. Anyways...

In an effort to financially recover from my month of reckless travel in January I've been busting my butt at the airport, putting in ridiculous hours in order to get cheques that I consider acceptable. Long story short I worked a late shift Thursday, a long shift today, I have an 0800 start to look forward to tomorrow and I'm bagged. Wow, what a horrible pun, I've probably touched a thousand bags in the past two days...

But it isn't just the hours. The last two days I've been leading the bag room, which is the most mind numbing, onerous, tiring and banal place in the entire airport. It hurts my brain and my body. It hurts it bad. To make matters worse today I had a driver with an attitude problem.

This I suppose was a needed lesson in leadership, how to deal with insubordinate little shitfucks. Since I became a lead I've had to deal with incompetence and inexperience, but this is the first time I've had to deal with a bad attitude. Its frustrating to know that someone could do better but is willfully choosing not to. Probably there was some youthful rebellion involved along with some pushing of my buttons to see how I'd react. Reacting is tricky.

On the one hand there's a job to do and a position to defend so you can't cut them any slack, they need to know who's in charge. Yet at the same time you can't be petty or mean, otherwise you undercut your own authority. Besides, a good leader inspires their underlings they don't scare the crap out of them. Sure it works for a while, but eventually they'll hang your sorry ass from a pole at a rural gas station and chuck rocks at you. Not pretty.

So I was stern, but fair. My favorite line after my driver gave me some lip on the radio was; "That's my decision, not yours." Simple, authoritative, to the point. The other lead next to me mumbled something about "That cocksucker..."

So yeah, not going to the show. Fortunately he's doing two. Next week's I won't have to work the next day, so I can, as one of the songs goes, Party All Night!

House Party for Josh Wolf

As some of you may know from my previous blog entry Josh Wolf is an independent journalist/video blogger who is in federal prison in California for refusing to hand over video tapes to the US government relating to a G8 protest in 2005. The following is a recent interview with Josh, his lawyer and a producer from Frontline. The state of journalism in the U.S. is frightening. This is important to watch.

www.democracynow.org/article.pl

Learning from a game

Here's a great article from screenwriter John August talking about what he learned from his World of Warcraft addiction. Decent advice for life methinks.

johnaugust.com/archives/2...gs-warcraft

Long Haul

Tomorrow is going to be a brutally long day. I'm not looking forward to it, but I need the money and the experience, so it must be. I start at 0800 and work through 2215. That's over 14 hours at the airport. Except for an hour and a half changeover in the middle of the day I'm crew chiefing the whole time too. Great. Well, I knew training for crew chief would make me more valuable, now I pay. But the company pays too. I'll reap a couple of hours of overtime tomorrow on top of my meagre crew chief bonus. I spent A LOT of money in January so this is something I need to do until film & video work starts picking up again.

Besides, I need to keep myself busy. Winter can be such a depressing time if you're not busy. I have a lot to think about in terms of career, school, moving, and my personal life. I feel like I'm on the right course, but its a sticky yucky transition phase I'm in right now. Its that familiar running in place feeling I had in the months leading up to my trip to Australia. I know things are coming, but they're not here yet and it burns at my soul to be stuck here. As I see it the best thing to do is to make money, prepare myself for the future and have fun.

Waiting is pointless unless you're doing something with your time, so I intend to fill it with things that will help me in the future. Sometimes that means having a beer to unwind. Mmmm. Chambly Noire...

Its my first day!

First day on the ramp in an orange crew chief vest. Not a baptism by fire, but a baptism by snow, snow and searing hot, sticky green and orange glycol. Tastes like...

My driver was Fresh, a graduate from the last crew chief class, but the other two were mysteries to me - new recruits with something to prove. Or perhaps not. Not only did they come from different pods, but I think they belonged to different species of pea. One of the two was the consummate stoner, goatee, slightly vacant eyes and a passion for video games. He wore his sunglasses ALL THE TIME indoors and out. The other was clean shaven and straight laced. As we walked out to get our equipment from storage he told me about the polygraph test he took on the weekend for admission into the Calgary Police Department.

Our first flight came in late, exasperated by maintenance deciding to park their truck on the stop line for the aircraft. We pushed that one late. Okay. Relax, we can do this.

Our next flight came in hot on the heels of the last and at the last minute, guess what? Tail swap. We brought it in and terminated it, then waited to find out what to do with it while maintenance poured over it like bees over a brown bear. Finally we were told to go to another gate and bring in another aircraft - about a minute before it arrived. No time to prepare it sat on the line for a couple of minutes while we hurried frantically to get organized.

Of the six flights I led today only two left on time. The snow made it impossible to pull carts, snow plows kept getting in the way, planes were de-icing which always adds five to ten minutes to your turn and by the time you're done your next plane is waiting to come into the gate. Pandamonium. While none of the delays were really attributable to me (blame weather and mechanical problems) it still bothered me. I should've been able to cut a few minutes here and there by being more organized, but then that's experience. For my first day on the job I think I did okay.

Goddam cold though. Out of ten and a half hours today I think I spent about eight of them outdoors in the -20 and snow. Not the best day on record - but then we've been spoiled by warm weather. The hammer had to fall somewhere. It just happened to be on my watch.

And so, it begins...