Too much academic research and concentrating on dissertations has cut me off from world news to such an extent that apart from tech goings on I had no clue. I hardly followed the French elections, hardly noticed the death of Yeltsin, hardly noticed the regional elections. There are three reasons for this. England is a hard news vacuum with it’s slightly islandish mentality (don’t yell at me for this view, I’ve been here a fifth of my life), online news resources, (finding the news I want) and thirdly researching and writing my dissertation.
I just noticed that I’d love living in Singapore because that’s the city where people walk the fastest. Copenhaguen is a city I’ve walked in but I didn’t notice it being particularly fast. Berliners walk faster than New Yorkers and Londoners walk slower than all of the above. I wonder how I’d compare to all these people and how I’d affect the averages. It’ just the type of news story I enjoy.
Natural history is an interesting topic to study although whatching the documentaries can be quite challenging. Today I decided to buy a piece of documentary result and as a result I have struggled to stay awake for over two hours. It is not that I do not like these documentaries and it is not that I have not slept enough but simply that by their very nature early documentaries make staying awake a challenge.
Before waking up I found myself catching a plane to an airport before catching a small private plane to somewhere in the mountains where I went skiing. I was going home but for some reason I was late. I was telling myself that I had to get back to one place to get my luggage before going home before realising that I didn’t. I decided to rush for the plane, dropped by my room, and threw a cursive look before running back to the small private plane, asking whether I was on the first flight before the plane took off.
Yesterday I handed in my penultimate essay. There are two main assignments remaining. the first of these is a tech case study which should be fun to do. I already have an idea of a topic that I know fairly well. with the second it’s the dissertation and I should really spend a few hours progressing with that. I had one of those classic nights on Saturday. You begin with the idea that you’re simply going to drop into the cinema and watch a film before going home and watching the lunar eclipse from the relatively low light pollution of the area around the halls.
When you fly a lot you get used to the antics of airport security. Sometimes you see people get angry and flustered by their stuff being searched. Sometimes I’ve felt that way as well. Today was amusing. My bag went through the x ray machine and since it was so full of books dvd and more they wanted to look inside. No one else was passing through at the time so I joked about how they had to keep busy.
I love working on my own projects, where I rely on no one but myself but occasionally I’m lucky enough to have no choice but to work with other people. It’s at these moments that I learn more. I learn about team scheduling and teamwork. I also learn about delegation. I’m not that good at it yet but I’m learning. Anyone working as a producer or director needs to learn that job and some are better than others.
I’ve spent around twelve hours editing today and it’s finally getting to resemble something, as I’d like it to be. It’s involved two days of video capture of a variety of material from a number of events around Europe in particular. It’s starting to be a good edit. Any creative person will tell you that the hardest part of the work is not the work itself but finding the inspiration and finding how to tell the story the most efficiently.
How many people have the ability to walk out in front of a crowd of hundreds and a televisual audience of several thousand? I don’t think that many, especially not with the confidence of this young girl. If I understood her correctly her name is Johanna and she is from Romania. I was watching the footage of the Youth Eurovision song contest and when she came on stage I was surprised by the strength of character she displayed at such a young age.
Switzerland is a land of mountains, rivers, and lakes. it’s a great place for skiing, snowboarding, mountain biking, walking, and sailing. Those are all sports I’ve done. When I was several years younger we had a day’s racketing: Racketting is walking with rackets attached to your feet across the trees up in the mountains. It’s fun, although occasionally tiring sport. At one point we took a break for lunch. During this time a few of us were jumping over a young tree and someone was taking photographs.