CRISIS...Averted!

Back to work. Back to Dallas...which, in many ways, was the prequel to this life's new novel.

Before I left for Detroit, I captured all my Dallas footage into FCP with the intent of loading it all to YouTube for Deb to review. Easy. Right?

Then Final Cut, Compressor and Quicktime all crap out at the same time on Nessie...right before I leave town. Nothing I can do about this while on my vacation of luxury.

10 Days later, I'm home...leaving Nessie accidentally behind on the floor in Heather's living room. Fucking lame! I needed to clean her up and take her to Apple for some TLC...like yesterday. She'll be back tomorrow, thanks to Fed Ex and $40.

So, I figure I'll re-capture everything into Premiere on my good old PC. Annoying and time consuming...but it'll do.

I gear up, ready for the battle, the tedium and I'm screwed...My version of Premiere doesn't accept 24P video!

FUCK! I freak out.

And I don't have access to my office at VCU...school's closed until January 5th! Freak out some more.

So, I take a breath and I take a chance...

I plug in my camera/capture device and hear the PC dingdong-device-detected bell. The prompt window opens. What would I like to do?

One of the choices is to capture into Windows Movie Maker -- a fine program for soccer mom's and teenagers to make family videos...nothing I EVER use...I'm TOO GOOD FOR WINDOW'S MOVIE MAKER, right?

I click it.

Not only does this little tyke of an edit program capture all my footage, it doesn't drop any frames, have any audio issues or compress the video in an unwatchable horrendous way! I've already got 2 tapes captured and I'm on to the last one. Three videos are already posted to YouTube. I'm already half done! Still drinking coffee in my pajamas...working from home like I like to do...taking breaks to sit in the warm sun...chatting with friends and listening to Electrelane. Not stressing out...anymore.

Because this means I don't have to transcribe the tapes, word for word, into WORD. Play, pause, type, play, pause, type. And repeat. And repeat again. And again...until all 2 hours of videotaped interviews are written out and readable. BORING. And for the rest of this beautiful day...this would have been my sentence for a crime I did not commit.

So...Windows Movie Maker you are my Rita Hayworth and THIS is my Shawshank Redemption.

Christmas 2008

After a boring break-up and bothersome semester, I just haven't felt like writing in a long time. What am I going to say? Five years of my life have come and gone and I'm frozen at my computer writing a 20 page paper on one single painting...and I know nothing about painting! Bitch and moan, bitch and moan...I was full of that negative shit for quite a few months there. The only things that saved me were my girlfriends and working out at the gym. Nothing like a failed relationship to make you look at your body and say, yep, this isn't working either. So, I guess in the past few months I've lost some weight and toned up. I think I look pretty awesome!

I pulled through it all and last week I went back home to Detroit...solo...for the first time. Solo for the holidays, solo in my heart. Heather flew down and kindly drove up with me, which was so fun! I stayed with Heather and Greg, mostly, and brought Wilson up too. 10 days at in Detroit and all around...I drove about 2500 miles with the roundtrip drive up and back and all the destinations in between.

More importantly, this vacation has a special Christmas mystery attached to it that I'll express and illuminate through the metaphor of a text, a book, to be specific. A dirty fairytale full of romance and comedy and even MUSIC that is over six years in the making. The story, as I see it, is just beginning. The book has been opened, the first chapter written and read, and read and read over again. It's not like it's one of those books that sat on my shelf and I never read...no...it's more like a limited edition, signed, leather-bound one-of-a-kind edition that I finally got my hands on after much anxious searching and deliberation, false-starts and near-misses. My precious!

I couldn't put it the book down, stop touching it, reading each line over and over, running my hands and fingers across its type, trying to write it to memory, that fickle space that tricks you and rewrites itself with every passing second, every new word. I wanted to beat out memory, to burn it in, burn it down, to win. I think I made some incredible progress on that!

I'm not sure, but I think the name of the book is something like "The Midnight Adventures of Prince Habib"