Spent about 11 hours today shooting a movie; I was the director, with a crew of four other people. I had a script I loved that someone else had written, and a team to lead putting it together. Now the film is in the can, as they say, and within our small crew the task of editing falls to me. I love editing, I do, getting my fingers on the controls, setting the shot sequences, fading ins and outs, sound levels, foley, all the tweaks of film geekery have grown on me immensely. In some ways it was hard to imagine turning over the footage I directed to anyone else.

But film-geekery control-freakery means I have a film to edit, in the next week. Three hours of footage condensed to eight minutes. And another eight minute film besides that, with a deadline only two days later. So that's many hours of editing to be done in the next ten days. It's finals time in film school. Project, project, project. I decided to go to grad school in part because I realized I would be making stuff. Well here I am, making stuff, and I'm so deep in media stuff I'm making I can barely see. Driving home from the Sunday shoot, I picked up a cheese burger and fries and root beer and had a Tecate alongside it and passed out on my couch watching Slacker for the first time. I would go to bed now for solace and surrender but my electronic life has gone unanswered in a day; bad footing for the week ahead.

A trip to visit my family looms for the Thanksgiving weekend. I had some plans for pleasure during that time; maybe some relaxation, even a recreational personal film. Now I'm trying to figure out if I have enough portable hard drive space to get all my formal capturing and editing done while I'm on the road. There's this sense that what I'm doing is temporary - finishing this semester will put me 1/6th through the film school/interactive media studies experience. But this is it, I'm living my life. Online. Not even Aikido can save me - I still feel a little bit zoned out. Many thin blue lines running behind these eyes. The semester ends on December 2. I will then face about six weeks of no serious plans. How to promote my humanity during that period? First, finish my school work. I'm learning storytelling! Still.