Reforging lost dreams

Still going through a stressful period of my life.  My dog died just recently from cancer, and home life has been a little stressful for various reasons

On the upside, my theatre classes have turned out to be very good as a form of social and physical therapy, as I am still building back leg strength from the ankle break from June.  The Theatre crowd is a pretty fun bunch, and I've managed to avoid alienating them so far with my antics.  While it is an upper level course,  I've been able to keep pace with everyone else, thanks to the experience gained through my background in English and visual arts, as well as role playing.  While I ended up getting a backstage role in the Christmas production, I'm not too bothered by not getting an acting role.  A lot of theatre students end up working behind the scenes, and It'll still be cool that my cousin and I will be working with the same Director, even though we live in different provinces. 

More interesting than that, is what I've been doing in my self directed new media course.  With it being a self directed program this semester, I've been excitedly delving into learning to create video games using preexisting programming suites.  It's been really exiting, as I've managed to make more progress from two weeks of self - directed study than I had through both grades 11 and 12 in high school.  I'm not saying that what I'm doing is amazing by any stretch of the imagination, but It could be feasibly be possible to be an independent video game designer on my own, even if only as a side hobby or as a component of something bigger.  To me at least, this will put game design as yet another medium in my tool belt as a modern day renaissance man.

This semester again wasn't what I had initially planned for.  It was brought on by financial hardships because of my physical injury from a few months prior.  Still, it's been showing me that my life so far hasn't been the train wreck I sometimes see it as.  I am a unique and talented person, and while I haven't yet found myself in my ideal career, I have done some amazing things, and have picked up a lot of of knowledge and skills from a lot of different areas,  that do begin to come together in some interesting ways.  I'm not sure what next semester will hold, whether I will be back to the painting trade, or spending another semester in school,  but this semester has shown me that my interests, talents, and experiences are building towards a bright and amazing future.  I don't know when it will be, exactly, and what form it will ultimately take, but I know it's there, and I'll be able to reach it eventually.

Early 2013, Grim Portents

Special thanks to Brent Hunter for digging this post up for me after had lost it. 

Following my awesome summer job as a painter,  my employer challenged me by nominating me to replace him as owner and operator of the local franchise of the painting company I was operating.  While I had some reservations about accepting this challenge, my self confidence was at an all time high, and I felt I could handle anything if I put my mind to it.  Before I started, I knew that this would be the hardest thing I ever did so far in my life, but if I succeeded, the rewards would be great.  That was at the end of 2012.

2013 began quite the opposite from the previous year.  The few days prior to returning to UFV following the winter break, I had tried to contact one of the professors at UFV regarding my continued tutoring for one of his children.  I then found out through a sign in front of his office that he had died over the course of the holidays.  While I didn't know him that well, the experience of finding out about his death affected me in an unusual way.  I wasn't so much caught up in grief so much as disoriented by a rather blunt reminder of the unpredictable nature of human life.  As the beginning of the marketing season began, I was now facing the grim reality that sometimes things happen that you would never expect or plan for.  If people can die so unexpectedly and without warning, my business could potentially die with just as little warning.  The world began feeling a lot more chaotic and unpredictable.  Facing this existential crisis, I spent a number of my evenings in my basement, performing a sort of interpretative dance as a means of spiritual expression.  This experience turned out to be the inspiration for my two major painting projects for that semester. 

A short while after that, my Grandma took a flight in from Calgary to visit us. While we regularly went to visit her in Calgary, it was her first time coming out to Abbotsford since Grandpa died several years earlier.  She was so proud of me taking on the responsibility of running my own company, and she had a number of pictures taken of me in front of my company sign.  Then, a single week after her return to Calgary, she died in her sleep.  Unlike the previous death, it didn't seem as sudden to me.  In the past couple years, she hadn't been in particularly good health, and I even remember thinking when I hugged her goodbye that it was quite possibly the last time I would ever do so.  As a Christian, I know that dying was a good thing for her, as she could finally be with her husband again.  When I looked back on it immediately after what happened that summer I felt ashamed that things didn't turn out as well for me as she thought. 

On top of coping with these deaths, I was kept so busy with school, and lining up painting contracts for the summer, that I had to give up both the tutoring, and game development project.  The larger of the two paintings from that semester, was accidentally left abandoned on campus after I had finished it.  In the summer, I just didn't seem to have the time to retrieve it.  In the fall, though, I came to see it as having been a prophecy for the greater turmoil that I had just so recently been through.  It wasn't until the spring of 2014 that I brought myself to go and retrieve it.  It is now on the wall outside my bedroom.  I'm hoping that eventually it will remind me less of what I lost over the course of that year, and more of what I gained from the experience.

In terms of marketing, after a slow start, I was gradually getting the hang of booking jobs.  When the time finally came to begin production, I had already booked a third of the amount that I was aiming towards for the entire year.  Before we even got started on the first house, I had already made some very big mistakes that would come into effect later on.

Better omens.

Due to still needing time off work to keep recovering, and the need to be doing something productive within that time, I am going back to school full time.  With the recent discovery of still having a bunch of upper level electives available towards my BA, I made the decision. To spend them in the theatre.  While there were concerns both over my lack of previous theatrical experience, I quickly gave them more to be concerned about when I showed up to class with my leg in a cast.  Fortunately, my first day worked out pretty well, as neither handicap seemed to get in the way.

Now, I have a cousin, who I typically only see once every ten years.  Strangely though, despite the number of years that pass without contact, when we do meet, we surprisingly find ourselves still having a lot in common.  While this could be attributed to genetics, which a lot of it probably is, the two of us recently uncovered a coincidence that is particularly uncanny.  While this is my first year going into theatre,  my cousin has been pursuing acting right out of high school.  So, when I find out that the director for this semester's holiday production does a lot of work in my cousin's hometown, I am curious if there is any connection.  As it turns out, while the director hasn't previously met my cousin, he is going to be juggling productions between Chilliwack and Fort McMurray, and to top that off, he will be directing a production that my cousin will be auditioning for this weekend.  So yeah,  bizarre coincidences just seem to come naturally to us.  I'm taking it as a small sign that this is the right thing for me to be doing in my life.

Regardless of whether I get a role or not in the production,  I'm pretty optimistic that this fall is going to be a good one, as long as I don't let the difficulties in my life stop me from chasing my dreams.