A Bird, In Brief

My boyfriend has had this pet bird since he was a kid. Big, white, fluffy thing that would always puff up like a pissed-off cat whenever it saw me (which thankfully only happened at Thanksgiving and Christmas as it lived with his family, not with him). He once confessed to me, "That bird was the only thing in this house that told me it loved me when I was growing up."

It died today.

Boyfriend is a wreck, and strangely enough I'm crying too even though I really couldn't stand that damn bird. But I know it's not about the bird - it's about the fact that this person I love feels pain, feels sorrow...and I'm powerless to take it away.

RIP Sarah Jones

(Just had a friend message me on Facebook re: Sarah Jones. Here's her question and my reply.)

So help me understand the Sarah situation.. who's fault is it that she died?
Was there anything she could have done to prevent it or be a whistleblower? I know that film industry can be a tough world so I wonder if she felt like she didn't have a voice or if she just didn't know and other people failed her.

 From being in that kind of subordinate situation myself, it's more that you trust the people above you to have done their homework and taken care of everything. You don't even really think, "Oh geez, this might be dangerous!"; you just figure that someone above you got permission and has MADE IT SAFE for you to be there. Apparently the production requested permission from CSX to film on the tracks and were denied, but some knucklehead (we don't know who yet) made the decision to go ahead and "steal the shot" anyway.

And yeah, you also don't really feel like you have a voice. You kind of consider yourself just lucky to be there, and you want to PROVE to everyone that you're worthy to be there so you'll hopefully get more jobs from this and move on up the ladder. So you just do what you're told and again, if you have any doubts about safety you shrug it off with, "Well, someone above me must've done their job and it's ok."

And the thing I found the saddest: there's a quote from another camera assistant who was on set that day who said that while they were trying to get away that Sarah had said, "I can't carry all this stuff," meaning all the super expensive camera equipment and that he told her to just throw it down. I don't know if she did or not; I don't know if that played a factor in her death or not. But I do know since film school you're impressed with how important and expensive ALL equipment is from day 1. I remember on one film school set I was on I was trying to maneuver around some lights, and I ran smack into one of the poles HARD (like, there was an audible and very painful-sounding noise). One of the non-film people hanging around (a friend of the director? a resident of the house we were shooting at?) asked me, "Oh my goodness, are you ok?" and my immediate first response was, "The light's fine!" Absolutely no concern for myself.

So there's my two cents into how this tragedy could have happened. Hope that helps answer your question.

EDIT 3/5/14: From an interview with her parents:

Elizabeth: Knowing Sarah, her concern was saving equipment before saving herself. She was responsible for her equipment, and it was in her interest in saving the equipment. She may well have had that in mind, not realizing the immediate danger. Whatever comes from this, it has to be something positive, so that her life will not be wasted in vain. All the energy and devotion and love that she had, it can't be in vain.  

Poor Little Neglected Blog!

I'm sorry it's been so long. Life has been a bit busy since about...oh, probably since I posted that last entry! Since then I've:

• gotten my old pre-L.A. part-time library job back.
• ...which I had to quit a few months later when I found a full-time job as an administrative assistant at a moving company that specializes in antiques and fine art (loved the library, but full time/more money per hour takes precedent at this stage in my life).
• gone to Dragon*Con.
• met a nice guy from South Carolina at Dragon*Con.
• started dating said Dragon*Con nice guy long distance.
• made my relationship with him Facebook official.
• fallen in love with him.
• been the happiest I think I've ever been in my entire life. :)

Sure, things aren't perfect. But at least I have the feeling that they can improve, that I have the power to work hard and change what I don't like about my life.

Speaking of, I'd better get on that right now. Laters!

Words Of Comfort From A Good Neighbor

Some days I just really need to hear this. I'm sure a few of you do too.

Quickie

This article further reinforces what I was saying earlier about sharing my bad days on here. I think it was incredibly brave of Stephen Fry to tell this story to the world. He's a person I admire greatly for his prodigious wit and way with words (let's face it: the man's a freaking genius), and knowing that he's had troubled times in spite of his success makes me feel a little bit less alone and thus makes me a little bit stronger.

So thank you, Stephen Fry, for being courageous enough to share your "dark night of the soul" moment with us. And most importantly, thank you for still being with us!

Birthday!

It's my birthday today, so I just wanted to post this to myself 'cause I love it so. It'll be stuck in my head all day, and that's not a bad thing!

This time last year was a mess. My first serious relationship had just ended (at the time suddenly but in hindsight not so much), and I was battling undiagnosed depression. I'm amazed and quite proud of myself for how much progress I've made in a year, and I'm determined that this birthday is going to be a great one! And the Simon Pegg birthday song is, of course, the essential first step.

Off to celebrate!

Bad Day

Well, I'm back in Atlanta, and things are generally going great. I'll try to keep up with this more in the future, but today has reinforced to me one of the things I want to accomplish with this blog, one of the reasons I started it in the first place.

To keep it short and sweet (and because my writing prowess/energy/EVERYTHING is at its lowest ebb): I have depression. I'm on antidepressants, and most of the time they keep me on an even keel, but today was what I refer to as one of my Bad Days. They don't happen very often (thank GOD), but when they do, it's killer. It's like the depression has come back all over again full force and there's not a damn thing I can do to stop it. I can't even distract myself or try to make myself feel better because all interest in everything has completely evaporated. I have no joy, no happiness, no hope. Luckily this feeling doesn't seem to last any longer than a day or two and it's generally tied to my period (thanks, hormones!) so I can sort of predict it and prepare. But that still doesn't make it any easier.

I'm on the tail end of one of those days now. Earlier I thought reading about someone else's battle with depression might help, so for that reason I picked up my library copy of Tracy Thompson's memoir The Beast: A Reckoning with Depression. Recognizing myself in bits of it helped me feel less alone and thus a little better (a minor miracle on days like today). This reminded me that I had also read an article on CNN ages ago about how people with depression should go public about it to help end the stigma and help others feel less isolated in their struggles.

So that's part of what I'd like to do with this blog over time. Chronicle my good days and my bad days so that others (and myself!) can see it's not all bad days all the time. And maybe someone in the throes of one of their own Bad Days will come across this blog and feel what Thompson described:

...In that moment, as simplistic as it sounded, he had offered me a fragment of that thing I craved: connection. I had only wanted it from people on the other side of the glass. Now it was as if out of dozens of people trapped with me inside that glass cage, one had stopped, turned to me, and said, "I am caught too...."