Things

So apparently I can put anything I want as my title on my business card.

WHAT DO I PUT??

You guys I have a seriously kickass Pandora station going here.

Tuesday, Sarah and I had the first session of a month-long woodworking class we found at a place in West Oakland called The Crucible. This place is a maker’s nirvana, and just reeks of inspiration and creativity. It’s basically a huge warehouse that’s been converted into a place to make stuff, with various rooms and stations dedicated to stuff like welding, foundering, blacksmithing, woodworking, neon, glass-blowing, porcelain, jewlery, and a full machine shop for metalwork. I absolutely love it so far. Last night I milled out most of what I need for the legs of a table our class is making, though the class was big enough that Sarah didn’t have time to get to hers. Our teacher is very cool and seems extremely capable, and has some funny obsessive tendencies that make me really like him. Our table will be assembled with mortice-and-tenon joinery, which we’re learning how to make both with hand tools and with a hollow chisel mortiser. Last night we also covered, for about an hour, how to sharpen chisels, which I totally loved. The classes are expensive (around $500 bones for each person), which is tough because sarah and I both want to take all the classes they offer. You can’t help but want to make stuff, being in this place.

As an aside, most of these semi-crappy photos are taken on my iPhone. I can’t say I love them, and from a photography standpoint I feel a little crippled, but I DO like the size of the thing. I can shoot videos or photos easily, quickly, and discreetly with it, which was super-awesome in Vegas. The photos are at least as good as what I get out of our Canon g10, though obviously the iPhone doesn’t support RAW. Low-light noise though, I have to say, is way better on the iPhone than on that g10.

Last week I took my first paid holiday in 6 years or so. It felt like cheating, even more so because I went, with Francisco, to Las Vegas to meet Kevin and Keith for some playtime before they went to Siggraph in LA. It was awesome seeing Keith and Kevin, if not peculiar, because our greeting hugs smacked a little of “I just saw you yesterday, didn’t I?”, which was nice.  I hope every time I see them both I feel like I just saw them yesterday; often I find reuniting with friends after some time has passed to involve a period of adjustment before we settle back into being awesome.

Some conversations had over the trip combined with a lot of thinking in my head has left me with, well, a lot of thoughts in my head. I’m not sure how to bring it all together into something cohesive, so I’m just going to ramble a bit. A friend who joined us on the trip to Vegas is a Big Important Guy at a studio he works at, and is facing a potential job shift.  He expressed some concern at the difficulties he was having in finding another job that would allow him to be equally Big and Important, how he was unwilling to compromise his stature in his job search, and how the search was proving to be difficult. It was interesting (and exhausting) listening to this, mainly because I WAS willing to make a compromise like that. I’m not sure what the better path is at this point, because I’m employed at a great company, but am bored with the actual work I’m doing right now, money is extremely tight, and Sarah can’t find work.

On the flight home with Francisco, I bought a Wired magazine. In it was an article about a dude who studies stress in baboon cultures and relates it to human stress. I found this interesting not only for the content, but also because this guy was at work giving a presentation about this very thing a few weeks ago (see ‘great company’ above). The article was basically about ‘chronic stress’, and its health implications long-term. If you have a near-accident in your car, it throws you off your game for the rest of the afternoon; in that situation, it’s acceptable for a friend to tell you to chill out when he sees you that night; your stress is a short-term thing. If, however, you’re in a constant state of unease (the way low-ranking baboons can be in their own cultures–constantly in fear of getting beaten up, malnourished, and never getting laid), chronic stress grinds away at things like your immune system or causes tics to bubble up in you that can have longer-term effects. I clench my teeth every minute of the day, and my dentists invariably tell me I need to chill out because I keep having to get my fillings redone. There was also that patch of hair in my moustache that mysteriously disappeared at the end of Avatar (though, happily, it’s grown back now).

All of this stuff bleeds into what I’m doing right now, which is basically trying to find purchase. All of my friends have various mechanisms in place on which they can rely, things to hang their hats on when the going gets rough. Coping tricks. Some rely on Buddhist or Zen-like patterns; ‘just let it pass’, ‘float through life like a leaf on the water’, etc. Some have Christian roots, and rely on God to help them through rough patches. All of those sound good to me, but I have trouble getting a ton of traction with any one thing. When I was younger I prided myself in being uber-open-minded, at the cost of being able to put confidence in an architecture for dealing with trouble. It’s coupled with a tendency I have for needing things to be ‘right’ (What if there is no God? What if being zen leads to a missed opportunity? Etc). I also like to think about the various perspectives from which people choose to view the world, but in the end a man needs a foundation on which to build his house.

Yesterday I found myself listening to the audio from this over and over:

realizing the entire time that if I actually knew some people that looked like this, they’d be the last ones I’d accept advice from.  I like picturing one of my parents sitting me down when I was younger and laying it all out for me like this; it feels like it would have been a relief. “Be something you love and understand.” I like the sound of that, but then there’s always a side of me that creeps up with some second-guessing: “dude, are you really going to build a life philosophy around some Skynard lyrics? Are you 32? Are you 32 years old right now?”

I’m rereading all this now, and it sounds whiny to me again. Sorry guys. What do I tell myself RIGHT NOW though? I guess the answer to that question is the answer to this blog as a whole. I think I’m going to try a good job at work. I think I need to stop worrying about this huge step down thing, because I’m in the quicksand now, and dealing with getting out is more important than speculating about whether I took a wrong turn. I think I’m going to try to keep my eyes open for opportunity, and hope to be surprised by life. I think I want to stop talking about work so much, and try to focus a little more on other stuff that’s going on that’s making me happy/satisfied.

I don’t know. Is that what I should do?

Yesterday at Pixar was “Motorama”; it was effectively a car show held on our campus, open for family and friends to come visit. The cars on display were pretty gorgeous (I hear Jay Leno offers some for the show every year), and the party itself was way fun. Sarah came to visit, and we strolled around admiring the cars and eating BBQ for several hours. They had some screenings of shorts that Pixar’s been working on for the kiddies (and adults), and a “build your own radio-controlled car” workbench-thing set up for kids to make cars and race them around the atrium.  I took a few photos, as well as this video, which was shot AND edited…ON MY PHONE.

That last one there is what we in the biz refer to as “an accident”.

Happy 4th of July, Americans! Happy 5th of July, Kiwis!

Sarah and I woke bright and early this morning to hit up the Alameda Flea market. Ken, Kevin and Lesleigh will probably avidly remember this; it’s a monthly event held on the naval base on which Ken and Kevin and I used to work. I never went to it when I first lived here, but I was pretty excited to check it out today. And man, it was completely out of control. It’s been moved to the runways themselves, rather than just a parking lot, and it’s maybe a half-mile square of booth after booth of random stuff. We found some awesome furniture, some crazy clothes, some very interesting jewelry, and heaps of other stuff…none of which we bought.  We’re trying to be budget-conscious since this move has drained quite a bit of savings so far, but it’s not for lack of finding awesome things we want. For example, how amazingly ridiculous (and ridiculously amazing) is THIS:

I think the base was part of a large sewing machine or weaving loom. This “Industrial furniture”-look is apparently very trendy, which makes me inspired and angry at the same time.  Sarah and I are looking around for woodworking and metalsmithing classes because most of the time the furniture is overpriced (this table was over $1000) and we always think “Surely we can make this ourselves?”  There’s both inspiration and frustration to be found in thinking like this though, because our means and time and skills our finite, which leaves only our motivation to try, and I’m not sure how far that will carry us.

This weekend is my first paid holiday weekend in 6 years. I have Monday off, and almost don’t know what to do with myself. Yesterday we woke up and literally had no idea what to do. We decided to take a break from the stressing and unpacking and nesting to play a bit. So we road-tripped 2 hours south to Santa Cruz to visit Bonny Doon Vineyard, which I’ve always been curious about.  Their wines always seem funky and interesting to me. It turns out it was kinda cool, and wasn’t an actual vineyard. They source grapes from vineyards and blend them alchemy-style; this work model allows them to exist in what looked like a big strip-warehouse sort of thing, next to 5 other wine cellars that do the same thing. So wine tasting had never been easier, or more dangerous. After 3 consecutive wine tastings, we decided we were done, but needed to sit for a while to sober up. We passed the time by playing with our iphones.

When we got home, we were hungry but felt a bit lazy, so we cooked up a meal in the style of our favorite restaurant in Savannah, Georgia, that Rachel introduced me to a few years back: The Crab Shack. Steamed oysters and clams with hot sauce, lemon, tabasco, and saltines. And some coors light.

Man, it’s been a while since I’ve had time at work to bang out a blog post.  Yesterday I was bitching to Kevin in a chat a little about being assigned very easy work, and he was like “Hey that sounds nice”.  I was thinking about that as I drove home, and was like “Huh! Yeah, I guess it IS!”

Earlier this week, Sarah and I joined the ranks of iPhone owners. I remember when Christopher got his iphone; it seemed like such a foreign, exotic device from New Zealand, and when he got it I was like “Well, I guess he’s not coming back anytime soon.” For some reason something about it was so American. I had a shitty nokia vodafone phone for 6 years, it had no camera and barely worked by the time I left, but it got the job done and was fine for me. Something about iPhones has always stuck me as so extravagant.

Add to this the fact that the recent release of the iPhone 4 has been one of those wait-in-line-for-hours type of things, which hurts my soul to even think about. But I can’t deny that it is an extremely useful toy, and remedies so many gripes I have about small technology. It just does everything. So Sarah and I went into this with a bit of a ‘necessary evil’ sort of a feeling. She waited in line for a few hours to get on a list to order one, then we had to go back later to pick it up. There was just so much fanfare and retardation that it almost made me not want to get one.

But, I mean, they’re pretty rad. Like, look at this. I’m getting ready to do this RIGHT NOW:

Look, I just took a stupid photo and emailed it to myself, where I could then put it on my blog. That’s  pretty cool. Sarah figured out she can listen to Pandora when working in the garage…she’s already in love with this trick. The phone has speakers, so you can play pandora out loud. We can see where we’re going when we need directions on the road. It’s pretty good.

But I’m not sure I feel all the way American yet. Or hell, maybe my distaste for all this fanfare is EXACTLY American?

The job is getting a little more interesting. I’m working on shots now, which is good.  I still feel clumsy and critical of things, and an odd things keeps happening when people talk to me in very basic terms. Like, the common assumption seems to be that new people are inexperienced, and so everything is explained to me in very basic terms. Part of me finds it a little infuriating, but in the back of my head sometimes I think of a dude I worked with at Weta named Thrain.

Thrain came in on Day The Earth Stood Still, and I was supposed to be his supervisor at the time. I had no idea what I was doing, so I didn’t even really know to notice this at time, but I remember him seeming to be pretty sharp. I was like “This dude seems solid, I don’t have to worry with him much, he’s just getting it done.” He worked the most massive shot on that show really easily, and the most I thought of it was “Yeah he’s totally solid, he knows his stuff”. It wasn’t until a year or more later that someone told me he had been a supervisor himself somewhere else before coming to work at Weta. Hearing that made me feel really terrible and dumb for not thinking that earlier, and also incredibly self-conscious because I STILL don’t know much about being managerial and I wasted an opportunity to learn from him, but at the same time I was like “Man I like that dude’s style. He didn’t come in and just throw a fit and blab around about how he was a big shot, he just did the work and let it speak for itself.”  That’s a totally rad style.

I think that’s how I’m going to try to roll here. I was also paranoid about being ‘noisy’ at Weta; I’d ask question after question, and a lot of other dudes around me would stay real quiet and just figure it out on their own. I never was sure whether asking lots of questions or the quiet style was better; I always felt like my being noisy was annoying to other super-smart people and that eventually someone was just going to shout at me “Damn dude, just figure it out on your own!”. And honestly, 80% of the time when I was asking questions, it wasn’t because I couldn’t figure it out on my own, it’s because I was lazy and wanted to move faster.  So right now I’mn trying to go the silent style; it’s going much slower I think, but maybe it’ll instill confidence in people that I can sort myself out on my own? I don’t know, this is really one big experiment, so I’m not too afraid of kicking the tyres (!) and trying different things.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry.  It’s not that I haven’t wanted to write.  It’s just that there have been a few obstacles. First, the logistical ones: we only got internet hooked up to our apartment yesterday, after a ridiculous bout with Comcast that left me walking away in disgust only to enter a ridiculous bout with AT&T to try to get the simplest of services set up.  I’ve been in training at work nonstop since I started, most of which involves classroom time, which in turn involves a lot of mouse clicking. Rapid-burst typing–the kind I am wont to do–indicates I am obviously not paying attention. And finally, my brain, like the rest of my life, is in a state of disarray. I have heaps of thoughts, and new ideas for blog posts hourly, so I’ve fallen into a mode where I’m seeking to ‘average out’ the highs and lows of my days to try to make sense of where I’m at.

So first off, the surface-level stuff. Sarah and I moved into a nice but awkwardly-laid-out apartment that’s a block away from what turns out to be a completely cool neighborhood that revolves around Piedmont Ave. in Oakland. There are heaps of super-cool restaurants around us, a movie theater, and three well-stocked boutique grocery stores all AT THE SAME INTERSECTION. So my culinary interests are mostly sated. The area has a slight sheen of sketch to it but is mostly very, very nice, with lots of youthful hipsters roaming about after work, doing hipstery things. Sarah made a very nice friend named Jess who lives in our little apartment complex, and she and her partner Kenny seem very nice and acceptably hang-outable.

Our apartment itself is fairly disorderly though, mostly because we didn’t move any furniture back from New Zealand. I’m thinking this might well have been a mistake. I’d assumed we’d be able to replace everything quickly and cheaply once on US soil, but it turns out that furniture is overpriced everywhere, and there are still plenty of low-quality, cardboard-backed bookcases to be found in even the chicest of shops in San Francisco.

The lack of furniture and lack of internet has made settling in pretty sluggish. When we last moved over Christmas, we had everything we needed, so it was just a matter of setting stuff up. I was also dead-set on entertaining friends on Christmas Eve, so was highly-motivated to get our ducks in a row in the few days we had between moving and Christmas. This time around, I’m still highly-motivated, but also way more out-of-touch with everything. It took us a week or so to figure out where to go to buy steel restaurant shelving; I can tell you exactly what section in Moore’s to go to to find this in Wellington.

This theme of “knowing I’m very good at something, if only I was in the right context” extends to my first two weeks at work. I’ve spent my time so far in training, learning software that was invented long before the software I’ve come to know inside and out was ever around.  It’s disorienting and frustrating to know the general gist of what I need to do, but not know how to go about doing it; I feel like I’m cooking in someone else’s kitchen with potholders on.

My assumptions and estimations about what this company ‘is’ is infantile and horribly myopic at this point.  This is another reason I’ve lagged in writing; I want to say things that are correct, but have come to realize that trying to do that at this point would be pushing things too hard. Not unlike the training I’m undergoing, I need to relax into this and let it happen. Part of me is struggling wildly with it though; my thoughts are still with Weta and all my friends and family in New Zealand, and I know how the game is played there. There is no rest, especially for the motivated.  I realize now more than ever that I sat amongst giants…geniuses that have few peers, and I hung in there with them.  I’m gone now, and they are still there, racing ahead, learning, creating, inventing, pushing the bar ever higher. To simply be able to keep up was exhilarating.  To be here now, effectively starting over from the ground up amongst strangers, is agonizing to me.  And what would happen if/when I come back to NZ? I would have spent significant time learning skills that aren’t applicable outside of these walls.

I know, I know, these are mostly personal demons. It’s an exercise for me every day, every hour, to take a step back and reassess things from a positive rather than critical point of view.  I was told the other day that there’s some speculation that I should be assigned to a show as a render wrangler.  Wrangling was my very first job out of college, and though I have huge respect for wranglers, I feel I paid my dues, so this comment shocked me in a way that I couldn’t disguise. And for a few hours, I was crushed and furious.  But then I started trying to think about what I usually tell college students about that first job, about how despite it being a little ‘grunt-y’, I learned more there than I had ever learned to that point, and that there’s no better opportunity to get insight into a production pipeline that wrangling. Maybe, then, they’re interested in accelerating me, in teaching me everything? Maybe they assume I’ll be able to learn it all quickly, and want me to rise as efficiently as I can through the system? I don’t know really; certainly no one’s told me this directly, so all I’m left with is speculation and attempts to stay positive about it all.

The questions most people are asking me are surface-level ones. Did I find the cereal bar? Yes, it’s impressive. The facilities and grounds are unarguably breathtaking.  Every morning I walk in through teams of landscapers carefully trimming fragrant rose bushes. The hours seem more reasonable, and the most-stressed people I’ve met so far are about half as stressed as I or any of my friends at Weta were on any given day. The cafeteria is pretty cool.  The artwork everywhere is inspiring. And despite my keen predilection to overthink everything, I HAVE had a few moments these past few weeks where the full gravity of things have settled on me, and I realize that I am seeing and being taught things that a thousand other people would delight to know. Yesterday afternoon, Ed Catmull sat casually in a chair in the atrium of the main building and spoke to hundreds of brilliant artists sitting cross-legged on the floor about who we are as a company, what dangers we face, and where we will go next.  That I am part of his ‘we’ made me well up with a bit of pride and honor, despite the fact that my office is currently a large conference room that I’m sharing with a bunch of interns and that it had taken me about an hour to animate a sphere earlier in the day.

So, it’s all going. I still think of everyone in NZ pretty much all day long, doing time conversions in my head (the middle of the afternoon is fun for me, because I know everyone’s just getting into work).  Today when I left work, I tried to get into the right side of the car before I realized what I was doing.  And tonight, Sarah and I had some amazing sushi at a tiny little sushi place around the corner from our apartment, and during the meal she asked me “do you think Nate and Shawn will replace us?” We sort of laughed and said “hope not!”, but there was truth to that worry, and many others in my head.

It’s probably a pretty universal desire to want to know you’re special to someone else. And because I’m a proponent of full disclosure here, let there be no mistake: to each of you in NZ, each one of my friends, you’re special to me, and should know I’m thinking of you and missing you acutely.