recap (part 1)

Alright. So, as usual, i plan to update and i just don't. Mind you, it's not like anybody's really reading this or holding their breath as to whether the little boy will finally write tidbits (details, as it were) of his "riveting" life. Well, here i am, with a well-intentioned recap, in order to update more often (hmmmm, where oh where have i read that sentence before...).

Since last update (early july), a lot has changed. First off: my mood has improved significantly (tremendously would i say, had i a british accent. the british sound so good when they say that word). I am not completely sure why, but i think it has a lot to do with me waking up to the fact that a big part of my mood-swing ferriswheel was self-inflicted. The way i used to think about things, about me, about life; the constant dark voice in the back of my head telling me that no matter what, everything's gonna go wrong, that i'm not worth shit, etc (you probably know the syndrome). Realizing that, i told that bitch to shut up and leave me alone. It seems to have worked. I also started cutting myself more slack that i normally do. Letting the pressure off my own shoulders for a while. It seems that all this has worked because in a month and a half, i have been relatively stable and cheery, which is quite something. Everybody seems to be noticing, too! From my mother who said, as i was talking about good things happening: "well, you truly seem to have found your way out of the well!", to my aunt who told me how she thought that i had become quite smiley-faced and really upbeat nowadays, to friends making similar comments.

Secondly, i decided to go back to school. At first, i plotted going back to cégep (once more and again), this time to study computer science. I was really into the idea of it, i even had a meeting with an advisor, to get registered. If i were to have been admitted, it would have meant staying here for at least another year and maybe even three years, the time to finish the program. I thought it was a nice plan, i really did. But then...

Emilie (friend extraordinaire) and I had planned a couple of weeks ago to go spend a day in Montréal, like we used to do before. The planned date was August 4th. So, as the date was approaching, an internet friend of mine came online. He had been offline for a while, because he had moved from Québec to Montréal. We had never met in real life, so i asked if he'd like to spend a bit of time with Émilie and I in Montréal. He said that he'd like to. So the plan was to meet in the end of the afternoon, someplace. The plan was then set.

August 4th, early morning, i wake up and get dressed for a day in the big town. My friend picked me up around 8:30, and we left. It felt like a great day, the sun shining, good music on the radio, Emi and I shiny happy people. We arrived to Montreal and just browsed around the streets, going to bookstores, clotheshops, art material places, etc. We went for coffee about every 2 hours (hehehehe). In the afternoon, we decided to go to ExCentris. That theater only plays international and repertoire films. So we walk into the theater only to stumble on a good friend that i had not seen in a long time. It felt totally crazy. We were 30 minutes in advance for the movie and we spent it chatting together. Then we went for the movie, watched it, said goodbye to my friend and left. At that moment i felt a bit overwhelmed. My friend had spoken about her plans for the future, what she was gonna study et al (i know this seems really disconnected to the rest of the story, but i'm going somewhere with this, please hold on). I had realised at that point that i had missed her beaucoup. Emilie noticed my pensive state and just shouted: "cheer up now, god!" We went for dinner and laughed a lot, it was great. I was also waiting for a phone call from my internet friends about where we should meet. He called, we finally set a rendez-vous. Emilie and I finished having dinner and waited for the rendez-vous. Internet friend arrived and we started walking and chatting all three of us. He took us to this place in Chinatown where they serve bubble tea. It was great fun. After much talking on how we had wanted to go to a showing of Kill Bill 1 and 2 at a theater in town, the internet friend invited us over to his place to watch kill bill 2. So we did. It was tons of fun. Emilie was sitting on a sofa and i was sitting on a futon, right next to internet friend. We kept on teasing one another during the movie (Emilie slept through most of it) and at one point, he put his head on my shoulder.

Then, when the time was to leave, i shook his hand, nearly walked through the door, had second thoughts and hugged him. Then i left.

more to follow...

Cameras! Yay!

I fell in love with photography about two years ago, in college, during Photo 1 (mandatory "introduction to photography" course you have when you do arts&lettres). That course gave us (in 37 hours) phototheory, the rules of shooting using black&white film, negative processing and photo printing. That course was total heaven. I loved spending hours in the dark room or hours roaming the streets, looking for subjects that would fulfill the requierements. i just loved it to bits. But, as is inevitable, the course ended (i got a great score in that class, actually :D) and i went on with life.

Back in early April, about a week after i had left my job at the factory, i went through a bit of a blue phase. I harboured the idea of fleeing to New York, to see a friend that i missed a lot at that moment. Upon thinking this idea through, i realised that it wouldn't be a good idea and that it just wouldn't help the situation. Instead, with the money, i bought a Nikon SLR. I rediscovered my love of photography. Since early April, i can often be seen with my camera, just shooting.

With love of photography coming back, i started hunting for other photographic tools to bring visions to fruition. Two days ago, in a thrift store, i came upon two total jewels. First one, a "Time" camera. It's a total plastic camera, that shoots 35mm film. I gather that it was given to Time Magazine subscribers as a gift. It has a 50mm lens that seems rather dodgy, and four aperture choices with descriptive icons (5.6 (cloudy), 8 (partly cloudy), 11 (sun shining, but not too much) and 16 (sun!!)). It was 2$CDN, so i bought it.
Second jewel, a not-so-dated Polaroid One Step CloseUp camera. It shoots 600 film and it was 5$. SOLD!

I loaded the Time camera with Superia X-Tra 400 film. I still have twelve shots to go, so i'll know in a while what the beast can do. As for the Polaroid, it's just marvelous. It works great.

So voilà, two great thingies for 7$ Gotta love thrift shops!

fields, endless fields

I'm kinda going through a blue period. Once again, i wonder what i'm going to do with my life, what am i gonna study, where am i going, etc. For a while, i thought that film studies would seriously end the evergoing questionning of what i want to do. Problem is, i will get in film studies only in a year and i'm already thinking: gee, i'm not sure i want to do that...

The best thing would be to find something that would merge all my major interests: photo, video, graphic design (and object design) with some form of a textual. In that respect, going to study either studio arts OR graphic design would probably be two viable solutions (if i can get it, that is).

In sculpture class, back in sherbrooke, i was always trying to speak without words. Studying visual arts put my brain in an entirely different mode, where instead of having flashes of poetry or of other type of writing, i would get visual flashes, for sculptures. Instead of jotting down ideas for verses, i would sketch down ideas for installations. In some respect, this worked very well. But the program wasn't very stimulating and the rest of my life there was hell, so i just did one term then came back here (go through the archive, i'm sure i wrote the whole story somewhere in here). When i left, the advisor of the program was shocked that i would even consider leaving visual arts. "You belong here," she said to me. "You have something to give, you have potential in the field." And when i was in Sherbrooke, before things got real bad, i was envisioning my future this way: 1. Finishing the certificate, 2. At the same time, do the prerequisite math course to get in Industrial Design, 3. Study Industrial Design. And now that i've been back to hometown 7 months now, i wonder, where has my plans for industrial design gone? I still love idea of it, i still love design, so i figure, why not? uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

so i guess everybody's right. once i chose a field, i will not question anymore and just go with it.

the thing is, you have to chose a field first.

rejoice!

hola peeps,

i hadn't updated this little hunka love in about two months, but i was changing isp and wasn't feeling very chatty. but i'm back here, rejoice!

i have started working on a personal site now. so in a little bit of time, i'll have my little house under the net, featuring photos, drawings and other crap. rejoice!

so i shall leave you at that (whoever is reading this!) and expect plenty for the months to come!

wisdom on the radio

while i was brushing my teeth, a couple of minutes ago, i was told the way to happiness by Gabriel Setlakwe, one of the mascots of the Setlakwe furniture store chain. it goes something like this:

"do you know what happiness is to you? happiness to you is coming back home from work and having your favourite easy chair waiting for you"

why, thank you Gabriel...

painting the urge/the urge of painting

it doesn't take much. i paint for a while then i quit for no reason, saying that there's no way in hell i'm ever gonna pick up a brush again. then weeks pass, i get inspired, i sketch my ideas... and then, boom, i see something that really awakens my urge to paint.

i had this idea for a character that would run throught a series of paintings (and maybe drawings, yes!). his name is albert and he has a computer screen for a head. the first thing i sketched with this character is called Albert 125 (yes, always the first name with a number), a bucolic fable about Albert visiting Nature. but then, it just stayed latent, waiting patiently in my sketch book for about a month now.

today - breathrough. i came upon two very interesting and really cool websites that woke up my urge to pick up the brush. (urls at the end of this post). not that i want to copy their style or something like that, but it gave me the little technical detail that was puzzling me about painting the Albert series (and other stuff). i guess that's what my arts teachers meant by learning by viewing.

here goes for the URLs:

Toothpaste for Dinner
natalie dee: huffing it up, every weekday

do enjoy please.

employment

i have a pretty odd job history. i have to have a job that fits me or else i just cannot stand it. it gets visceral. so if i hate a job for whatever reason, i'll start throwing up, getting ill for real just to avoid going to work, in effect just amplifying the effect of the non-liked job. that's how it happened before. i wonder if i was just actually making it worse than it actually was.

since coming back here in january, i've had two jobs. the bookstore job, that i began in late november, coming back to town on the weekends to work there and going back to the city for university (univercity? ha ha, kiss me, i'm clever). i left that job in mid-february because i had gotten a production job at a semiconductor facility of a multinational that i am not going to name. that job would have made me earn enough money to go back to school this september instead of september 2005. things were okay during the training. boring job, niiiiiice paycheck so it balanced out... but then, after training i was transfered to my assigned team-and-work-shift... weekend-night shift. so that's two twelve hours shifts during the night (midnight to noon) on saturday and sunday and then two normal night shift returns during the week. that's how things got bad. i was already rather at odds with the workplace and the people i worked with, but then, with the working during the night, things got really complicated. turns out i'm one of those people who can't work night shifts. it was sending me right into depression relapse. after three weeks, i was a replica of how i was when clinically-depressed two years ago. that's one bad bad side effect.

i called the woman who organised our training to see if i could be transfered to another team or something like that. during our training, that woman kept on telling us that they were there for us, that if we needed anything, if we had a problem, we just had to go talk with them and they would try and help us. so i called the woman about my problem with night-working, left her a message, asking her to call me back and explaining the situation quickly. then went to bed (it was 9 in the morning and i was working that night). she didn't call back. the person who called back however was my director (the boss of the area), with a transcript of the message i had left the woman (can you say breach of confidentiality?) and basically saying: "hello Olivier, this is ******, YOUR DIRECTOR. i got a message from ********* saying that you had troubles with night working... well my reply to you will be that if you have a problem with night working it is your problem, we never switch people from teams. well, we do, but only after nine months. so in your case, the dog is dead, haha. if you have a question, call me back at ***-****". i called back, got an aswerphone, left a message really explaining the case and stating that if there was no available solution, then i was quitting right after my shift of that night. he didn't call back that day.

then i went to work. during first break, i went to the vending machines to get something to drink. some man came and asked me: "are you Olivier?" so of course i said yes. him replying: "well, good, 'cause we have papers to sign, you and me". turns out this was the weekday night shift director and then weekend night shift director had transmitted the whole "case of Olivier" to him during the day. so we signed the papers and after the shift, i was done working for that company. total worked weeks: 7.

i'm back to being unemployed now. but i started looking. i gave my resumé to a really cool design jewelry and accessories store. (trust me, they are really cool. the other day, they were playing Massive Attack. in my town... wow ). after giving my resumé to them, i was convinced they weren't going to call back. the woman-owner of the place called me back the same day asking me to come in for an interview. interview was yesterday. went rather well. then i came back and the woman called again, asking me to come in for a "working on the sales floor test". so i went back, same day as the interview. it went quite well. but i'll know if i nailed it or not only sometimes "before tuesday at 8pm", because there's another candidate (a girl...) for the same job and same type of shift as me... i guess that if it's meant to be, i'll get it. if not there's going to be something else waiting.

that's the state of employment for me, for now...