Monday, November 13, 2006

I’m Standing In Fog

High atop the city, in my high-rise home above the clouds, I feel the clouds wrap around me. Tonight I stood in the fog. Really.

Up on the second-highest floor of my building, my apartment has the best views of the city. I can see all the way to the lake in the south, and way up past the city’s borders up to the north.

Most of the time.

Tonight, the sky is covered in a murky thick fog.

I went out on my balcony, because the fog was so thick. I have never seen it quite this thick. It has been thick before, but not like this.

Then it occurred to me, hey, I’m standing in the fog. I really am. I can feel the droplets of water making up the clouds swimming around me. I can see the fog all around me. It was as if I was floating on a cloud – aside from my concrete balcony below.

Awesome. I was standing in the fog. It was an eerie feeling being in the fog. Sort of like being trapped in a bad b-movie horror flick, only this was real. I half expected some zombie or Buffy the Vampire slayer to come jumping out from nowhere.

But it turns out, all was quiet way up in the midst of the fog. I think I’ll go back out there, just to be in the clouds again.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

The Isolation of Homework

My current client allows me the comfort to work at home. At least, that’s the way they described it. My typical day is filled with the occasional email, and not much else in terms of communication from the client.

Sounds like paradise, right?

No boss hanging over your shoulder, constantly bugging you to get your ass in gear. No office gossip, and none of that office politics.

However, it is actually quite lonely working from home.

I don’t like office gossip. Those who have all the time to talk poorly about someone else have too much time and not enough work. And I can’t stand office politics – people kissing someone’s ass to get that much anticipated big promotion.

But when you remove all the contact from the office, and reduce it to a mere handful of emails, you realize how alone in the world you are.

Granted, my current client is a little too carefree for me. I don’t like having someone constantly watching my every move. But, the client should have enough self interest in their invested dollars to at least call me every week and ask for a progress report.

I have gone weeks on this contract without talking to a single person.

I’m wrapping up this contract and I am looking forward to getting back out in the working world of the living.

We human beings are social animals – or so Darwin and many anthropologists tell us. Working all by oneself without any form of human contact, I can see why.

The isolation of being surrounded by nothing more than the voices in one’s head is all the proof I need. Guess I’ll just have to learn how to tolerate the office gossip, and live with the politics of an office.

That’s a small price to pay, for a little human contact at work.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Advice to Peter Jacobson – Less Is More

I just finished watching the King Kong. Nope, not the classic with famed screamer Fay Wray, this was the recent re-make staring Naomi Watts as the screaming babe.

I remember the original. It was a classic love story with the now famous tragic twist. A beautiful babe falls in love with a grotesque scary monster.

Peter Jacobson directed this re-make – you probably know him from his other major theatrical releases, the Lord of the Rings movies.

Jacobson did a wonderful job turning a classic into a Jurassic Park-like monster movie. The monster effects were even more realistic, with a full range of dinosaurs on the island where King Kong called home. The effects were amazing to watch, and the way they were incorporated with real-life actors was stunning.

Naomi Watts is hot – she can be my screaming babe any day.

Problem with this movie – as with the Lord of the Rings movies – was length. I was never a big fan ‘the rings.’ But I saw one of the movies, and afterwards I felt it was four hours of my life wasted.

Jacobson suffers the same fate with King Kong – the movie was over three hours long. I enjoyed watching the movie, it kept my attention throughout and I enjoyed comparing it to the original.

BUT, if I hadn’t been watching at home, from the Movienetwork onDemand, I’d probably not have enjoyed it. I probably wouldn’t have sat through all three hours straight. As it was, being onDemand, I paused it several times to get up, stretch, grab a snack, make dinner and other distractions which kept me coming back.

Less is more Jacobson. Less is more. Give us all the effects, the screaming babes, the love story with the tragic twist, but leave us wanting more. By creating mammoth length movies, I seriously question your story-telling abilities.

The best story tellers know how to edit something down into interesting and manageable bits – why don’t you?

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