If I had to use one word to describe cyclists that one word would be “Panzies”.  Yes, as much as I love cycling I can’t deny the fact that the major­ity of cyclists are com­plete and utter panzies. Just take a look at any bicy­cling mag­a­zine that offers advice on what to pack for a ride and the list will prob­a­bly look some­thing like this.

1. Spare Tube
2. Patch Kit
3. Tire Levers
4. Hand Pump
5. CO2 Car­tridge
6. Cell­phone
7. Water
8. Recov­ery Drink
9. Energy Bar
10. Energy Gel
11. Cycling Gloves
12. Sun Block
13. Extra Pair Of Socks
14. Towel
15. Baby Wipes
16. Chamois Cream

Obvi­ously num­bers one through seven enthrall all of the essen­tials, as far as safety and per­for­mance are con­cerned, but after that every­thing is pure lux­ury.  I  think it’s nice that cyclists have so many acces­sories avail­able, but a lot of them just aren’t nec­es­sary. For instance, Cycling Gloves, which are used so that rid­ers have a bet­ter grip on the han­dle bars and thus have bet­ter con­trol of the bike. I’m sorry, but hold­ing on to the han­dle bars isn’t a task so dif­fi­cult that it neces­si­tates the use of gloves.  I have read on some cycling forums that cyclists use gloves  to com­fort their palms when they go on long rides, in which case I think this basi­cally proves the point that most cyclists are panzies.

Up until recently, I’ve been a bit of a spar­tan when it came to rid­ing my bike. I didn’t have the fancy cleats that most cyclists had, nor did I wear the span­dex shorts, and tight jer­seys designed for cycling. Instead, I sim­ply rode with cargo shorts and a back­pack and I roughed what­ever was thrown at me while rid­ing.  Today, cyclists would rather waste their money on buy­ing every lit­tle lux­ury so that they can have as com­fort­able of a ride as pos­si­ble. But in the process of doing this, they alien­ate them­selves from the aspects of cycling that really mat­ter, ped­al­ing hard,  feel­ing the road, push­ing the lim­its of the human body. If any­thing, I would say that cycling is a sport where rid­ers should expe­ri­ence every­thing BUT com­fort, and those that blow thou­sands of dol­lars on every lit­tle gim­mick are why cyclists should be con­sid­ered panzies.   How­ever, a few weeks ago I learned that maybe there was some sense in the excessive-ness that cyclists shame­lessly flaunt.

It was a Sun­day and I set out from my house at around 11:00 AM to do my usual week­end ride.   There’s two main routes that I take when I go rid­ing. There’s the “Coastal Route” which leads south  straight to the New­port Beach/ Corona Del Mar area, and runs by the back bay and up to PCH. Then there’s the “Hilly Route” which leads north on to Por­tola, and on up to the Por­tola Springs area of Irvine. While I enjoy both routes tremen­dously, they are obvi­ously quite dif­fer­ent. The “Coastal Route” is a fairly fast ride, mostly flat, with a few small hills to keep it inter­est­ing. It has some really nice scenery, espe­cially when rid­ing around the back­bay, but it has a lot of traf­fic, and can be annoy­ing when it’s windy. The “Hilly Route” obvi­ously has quite a few hills, but it’s a fun ride because of the chal­leng­ing climbs, and reward­ing descents. The “Hilly Route” doesn’t have as many cyclists on it which makes it great for when I just want to  escape, plus some of the high climbs offer great scenery.

I usu­ally alter­nate between the two routes every time I ride, and because I had taken the “Coastal Route” the week prior, I was doing the “Hilly Route” for this par­tic­u­lar ride. My ride went great. It was a beau­ti­ful day out­side, I felt com­fort­able on the sad­dle, I loved the music that I was lis­ten­ing to, and most impor­tantly, I was rid­ing fast. I was aver­ag­ing about 22 miles per hour on the flat por­tions of the route, while I reached speeds up to 30 miles per hour on some of the descents.  Since I haven’t been rid­ing con­sis­tently, my speed on the climbs was rather slow. How­ever, at the start of my tough­est climb I still aver­aged about 18 miles per hour, until my lungs gave out and I had to ease off for the last half of it.  All in all, it was a great day on the sad­dle, and an even bet­ter day because I was near­ing one thou­sand miles on my odometer.

I have been rid­ing since June, and in that time period I have cycled on two bikes. The first was my Dad’s old road­bike, which I put 396 miles on before the front wheel popped and became irrepara­ble. The sec­ond is my cur­rent bike, which had around 600 miles on the odome­ter at the time of this par­tic­u­lar ride. As I was approach­ing the 604 mile mark, which would have  put my total mileage from the two bikes  at 1,000 miles, dis­as­ter struck. I was cruis­ing down Irvine boule­vard at around 25 miles per hour when I hear a loud pop, my back end goes up briefly, and before I know it the back of my bike is bumpy and impos­si­ble to con­trol. Obvi­ously I had a flat tire, so I quickly pressed the brakes, got the bike onto the side walk, and I observed the damage.

A rusty six inch nail had dri­ven itself deep into my rear wheel and things looked bad. First off, a pierc­ing is never good because it ruins the effec­tive­ness and integrity of the tire. This nail was a par­tic­u­larly thick nail, which meant that my tire was going to be espe­cially screwed up.  What was worse though, was the fact that the nail had pierced through the tire tube, and had embed­ded itself into the inner rim of my wheel. I had tried to pull the nail straight out, but when I did so I was met with great resis­tance, and it felt as if my rim tape would come off. Obvi­ously, this was not a repair that I wanted to make on the road. I called my mother to see if she could pick me up, but to my cha­grin she was at work mean­ing that it would take her a solid half hour before she could get to me.  Now, I was only a cou­ple of miles away from my house. I fig­ured it would take me just as much time to fix my wheel and ride home, as it would for my mom to leave work and pick me up. See­ing how my mom was busy deal­ing with an event,  it seemed like it was best just to man­age for myself.

I walked my crip­pled bike down the side­walk into a shady area, and I went to work.  My first task was to remove the nail lodged in the rear tire. Instead of try­ing to pull it straight out, like I had when I first observed the dam­age, I began to twist the nail side to side. After a few brief moments, the nail came free, and to my sur­prise it had actu­ally bent in half in the process of being run over. For­tu­nately, the rim tape which sep­a­rated the rim from the tire tube remained intact, which meant that I could repair the tire. I shifted the bike to its high­est gear so that way it would be easy to get the chain off, and I removed the rear wheel from the bike frame. I then got out my tire levers, popped off the tire, and removed the pierced tube. I went into my back­pack to retrieve a new tube and my hand pump. I slightly inflated the new tube with the hand pump, so that it would be eas­ier to place within the tire, and after that I began  putting the tube in the tire. Once the tube was on the tire, I per­formed the tricky task of pop­ping the tire onto the wheel. Once I got that done, the rear wheel was almost good to go.

The biggest prob­lem with repair­ing flat tires on the road, isn’t  replac­ing the tire or the tube, it’s actu­ally inflat­ing the tube.  Since road­bike tires are so thin, they must be pres­sur­ized between 80 to 120 PSI to hold the weight of the rider and the bike. Get­ting this pres­sure is no big deal with a full sized hand pump, or an air com­pres­sor, but on the road there’s lit­tle that can offer this kind of pres­sure. The small hand pumps that most rid­ers carry with them, are usu­ally pretty crappy. They take for­ever to pump, and can only deliver around 40 PSI tops. CO2 Car­tridges inflate to higher pres­sures, but unlike air, they  aren’t  infi­nite.  This presents prob­lems if a rider only brings one CO2 car­tridge with them on a ride.  If that CO2 car­tridge doesn’t inflate prop­erly, then they are screwed.  For­tu­nately for me, I had both my hand pump and two CO2 car­tridges with me so I wasn’t too wor­ried about inflat­ing the tube. I started with the hand pump, it was work­ing pretty good until it hit its max pres­sure thresh­old (which must have been some­thing pathetic like 30 PSI), and it wouldn’t engage with the valve prop­erly. I felt the tire, and it was still too soft to ride with, so I brought out the CO2. Now, I had never inflated a tire using CO2 before so I was a lit­tle con­fused as to how the whole thing worked. I wasn’t sure which side of the CO2 adapter went onto my tire valve, nor was I sure whether I needed my presta to shrader adapter for it work. After a few min­utes of trial and error, I suc­cess­fully had the CO2 adapter attached to my tire valve, and I put in my CO2 car­tridge. I pressed up on the CO2 car­tridge for it release its gas, and some­thing amaz­ing hap­pened. Within sec­onds my tire became rock hard as it inflated, as the CO2 fil­tered into tube, the valve and some parts of the rim began to freeze because the gas was so cold.  For some rea­son I was afraid the tire would pop, so I dis­en­gaged the CO2 adapter while CO2 was still com­ing out of it, and within a few sec­onds the ordeal was over. My tire was good to go.

The most annoy­ing part about fix­ing the rear wheel is the fact that you have to place the chain back onto the rear cas­sette of the wheel, before the bicy­cle is ride-able .  This is some­times tricky, but it’s mostly a dirty process as all of the chain grime is trans­ferred straight on to the hands. I seated the rear wheel into the frame, suc­cess­fully re-attached the chain, and I was good to go. I quickly packed up my make shift work­shop on the side walk, and began rid­ing again. Rid­ing home was a bit of an adven­ture. I rode very slow and cau­tiously because I wasn’t sure if my wheel would give out again. More impor­tantly, I didn’t want to run over another nail and have to repeat the process all over again. Within fif­teen min­utes I had made it home, and all was well.

Some­times I feel that what I carry with me is exces­sive. In my back­pack I  usu­ally have two brand new tubes, CO2 car­tridges,  a water bot­tle, a towel, a 7 pack of Cliff bars, tire levers, and a patch kit. Sure it pales in com­par­i­son to all the crap that most other cyclists bring with them, but it always feels like I am bring­ing too much with me when­ever I ride. After all,  I usu­ally ride 20–30 miles, not some 100 mile trek between cities.  How­ever, I sup­pose it’s always good to be pre­pared  in the off chance that a nail is dri­ven into your rear wheel. I know I was happy when it hap­pened to me.

On Thanks­giv­ing most peo­ple find them­selves reflect­ing on the things in their life that they are most thank­ful for. Their fam­i­lies, their friends, their jobs, and vir­tu­ally all the small things in life that can make some­one happy. As I sit at my com­puter, eagerly await­ing my thanks­giv­ing feast, get­ting mass texts every half hour wish­ing me a happy thanks­giv­ing, I can’t help but reflect on the one thing in life that I am not thank­ful for. That one thing, is Apple computer.

As I have expressed in my pre­vi­ous post about Apple, I have a sto­ried his­tory with the com­pany. At one time I used to praise their com­put­ers, my Dad cur­rently owns an Apple lap­top, and I use their Final Cut Pro soft­ware for all of my major movies. While many peo­ple who  use Apple prod­ucts blindly praise them with the belief that they are sim­ple, reli­able, and over­all effec­tive prod­ucts, my expe­ri­ence with Apple has been less than stel­lar. On numer­ous occa­sions their soft­ware and hard­ware have failed on me, I find all of their prod­ucts to be over­priced, and once we fac­tor in the “hip­ster” atti­tude that Apple seems to be adver­tis­ing nowa­days, there’s just so much for me to hate on.  How­ever, I’ve mostly kept my mouth shut about Apple.  Sure they’ve tempted me by chang­ing their name from Apple Com­puter to Apple Inc because they some­how think that build­ing com­put­ers, writ­ing soft­ware, and mak­ing MP3 play­ers doesn’t make them a com­puter com­pany any­more. Of course, they did invent the iPhone, which is quite pos­si­bly one of the most flam­boy­ant gim­micks the world has ever seen. But, I’ve always resisted the temp­ta­tion to open up a can of blog­ging whoopass on the com­pany. This week how­ever, was the last straw.

In my anatomy class we were asked to cre­ate a pub­lic ser­vice announce­ment about the swine flu. We could choose from mak­ing a movie, record­ing a radio broad­cast, cre­at­ing a power point, design­ing a pam­phlet, or assem­bling a poster. See­ing as how my group was with two other guys, we opted to go with the rel­a­tively sim­ple and straight­for­ward radio broad­cast.  While record­ing a radio broad­cast may sound like a whole lot of extra effort in com­par­i­son to some­thing like a power point, it actu­ally wasn’t too bad. All we had to do was get my Dad’s lap­top, record our­selves using garage band, and we’d be basi­cally fin­ished. So on Fri­day we met up and recorded about 80% of our broad­cast.  Despite garage band’s “fisher price-esque” user inter­face, things went rel­a­tively well. We then had to meet up on Mon­day after school so that we could pol­ish things up, and basi­cally final­ize the project.  Mon­day comes rolling around, I bring my Dad’s lap­top to school, we meet up, turn the thing on,  and what do we see? A gray screen with a folder and ques­tion mark flash­ing every cou­ple of seconds.

Even though I don’t work with Macs on a con­sis­tent basis,  I do know my way around com­put­ers, and when the OS doesn’t boot up, and instead a folder with a ques­tion mark flashes in front of you, that’s a pretty good sign that the com­puter is messed up. I rebooted  the com­puter, and was met with the same results. I went into the multi-media lab to ask the school’s res­i­dent com­puter guru, Mr. Mil­lis, if he had any solu­tions to the prob­lem.  He sug­gested putting in the OSX disk so that the hard drive could find the proper files to boot the OS.  This sounded log­i­cal to me, after all  it is pos­si­ble for a com­puter to lose track of a few vital files every once in a while. So I told the group the sit­u­a­tion and told them that I would have to fin­ish the project at home, as I didn’t have the OSX disk on hand.  Once I got home, I put the OSX disk, that came with the com­puter, into the lap­top and what did I see? Gray screen, flash­ing folder.  I put in my dad’s OSX instal­la­tion CD (a CD that he used to install OSX on one of his exter­nal hard­drives), this time the com­puter booted up as if OSX was being installed on it for the first time. It asked me to select a lan­guage and all of that jazz, and once it got to the por­tion which asked me to select a vol­ume to install the OS on, my list of avail­able hard dri­ves was blank. The hard drive on my dad’s god­damn Mac had died.

For those that aren’t knowl­edge­able in com­put­ers, the hard drive is what holds all of the computer’s data. It’s essen­tially a rewritable disk on a con­stantly spin­ning plat­ter. When data is recorded, the plat­ter writes on the disk, and when data is deleted, the plat­ter erases data from the disk.  It’s a very sim­ple con­cept, how­ever the fact that the hard drive is a disk, and has a con­stantly spin­ning plat­ter makes it one of the most frag­ile com­po­nents found in a com­puter. While I would expect a com­puter that is five years old to have a fail­ing hard drive, my dad’s lap­top was brand new and only three months old. The fact that his hard drive had already died after only three months of use, paired with a fact that it was a Mac and by virtue of Apple’s adver­tise­ments was sup­posed to “just work” made the fail­ure unac­cept­able. What was even worse though was the fact that a dead hard drive meant that our project was gone, and worst of all, the project was due the next day.

I called up my group to dis­cuss a course of action. They were still stuck on the “let’s fig­ure out how to make your com­puter work” stage of things, while I was jump­ing ahead to  “the project that we had is dead, we gotta start all over” mind­set.  It was a bit dif­fi­cult con­vinc­ing them that I had tried every­thing pos­si­ble to make the com­puter work, and that no amount of trips to the Apple store could res­ur­rect the project, we even­tu­ally were able to come up with a plan.  Because it was MY com­puter that died, I vol­un­teered to basi­cally redo our project and pull together a power point so that we had some­thing to turn in the fol­low­ing day. After work­ing four hours straight on that damn power point, I fin­ished at around 10:30 at night. I’m not the kind of per­son that bitches about doing school work late or any­thing like that, how­ever the fact that I had to write a power point on a sub­ject that I dis­dained (swine flu)  kind of annoyed me.

I went down­stairs and saw my Dad work­ing on his lap­top. You see, unlike most Mac own­ers, my Dad’s a mean son of a bitch. When some­thing goes wrong with his com­puter he doesn’t just go “Oh, off to the Mac store to drop hun­dreds of dol­lars on a replace­ment”, he goes “let me take the damned thing apart with the one hand of mine that isn’t par­a­lyzed and make it work”.  So while I was work­ing on my power point, he spent his time tak­ing apart the lap­top so that he could swap the hard drive with a dif­fer­ent one. After swap­ping around some hard dri­ves and decid­ing that it was just best to send the lap­top back to Apple, we had to do the ardu­ous task of re-assembling the thing. First off, I would just like to com­ment on Apple’s crafts­man­ship, it sucks. If my dad, who is dis­abled and can only use one hand, can take apart their lap­top and replace their hard drive with one that works, then why can’t Apple’s tech­ni­cians, who spe­cial­ize in mak­ing lap­tops, make a lap­top that has a hard drive which lasts for more than a few months? Sec­ond of all, who the hell designs these things? The lap­top had a plethora of incred­i­bly small screws that were hard to place, and really didn’t do much to add to the struc­tural integrity of the machine.  It was nearly impos­si­ble to recon­nect some of the cables that had to be undone,   and in gen­eral it was just a bitch to put back together.  Lastly, would it kill  them to make some­thing with some struc­tural integrity? If I had to describe the insides of my Dad’s lap­top in three words  they would be “flimsy, thin, cheap”.  Every time I touched some­thing inside the lap­top I felt as if I was either going to bend it, snap it, break it, or oth­er­wise destroy it. My god, with such cheap mate­ri­als, and an over­all dum­b­ass design,  it’s no sur­prise that the hard drive died.

This actu­ally leads me to my next point. Apple has always been a com­pany that has had style, but what made the com­pany great was that they had effi­cient prod­ucts to jus­tify their style.  Now Apple has taken a “style over sub­stance” phi­los­o­phy, and they are slowly killing their com­pany.  My Dad has had three Apple lap­tops in the past year. Three! Why does he have so many? Because they keep break­ing.  One had its hard drive die and its key­board break after a year, the other had its hard drive die after three months, the last one he got as a reward from his credit card com­pany and it has been ver­ily used. The fact that my dad has had so many Apple lap­tops within the past year just goes to show the drop in con­struc­tion qual­ity that the com­pany has expe­ri­enced lately. Before this recent batch of lap­tops, my Dad had an orig­i­nal OSX lap­top that lasted him four years. Dur­ing that time he dropped it, and utterly abused the thing. It had bro­ken hinges, a few keys fell off the key­board, but it still worked. These recent lap­tops haven’t taken a frac­tion of the abuse as that orig­i­nal lap­top had, and they are falling apart.

The one thing that I can’t hate Apple for is their video edit­ing soft­ware.  I always edit my videos on a Mac and if it weren’t for them, I prob­a­bly wouldn’t be as inter­ested in mak­ing  movies as I cur­rently am. How­ever, Apple even found a way to ruin this too. iMovie is one of my favorite video edi­tors. It’s sim­ple, free, yet it still has enough power and poten­tial to make decent movies. Well, iMovie used to be all of those things at least. I tried edit­ing some footage from my Flip Video Cam­era using the newest ver­sion of iMovie, and I was shocked to find that they raped the soft­ware.  See, most edit­ing soft­ware use some­thing called a time­line. You place your clips in the time­line, and then you can edit the clips as you see fit. The newest ver­sion of iMovie appar­ently doesn’t believe in time­lines.  iMovie’s new phi­los­o­phy is to edit the clips indi­vid­u­ally, and then place them into the time­line. First off this is impos­si­ble to do for a film maker. The clips have to be edited in rela­tion to one another, and the best way to do that is when they are right next to each other in the time­line.  Even then, edit­ing the clips indi­vid­u­ally is impos­si­ble. I spent a solid ten min­utes try­ing to fig­ure out how to cut down a clip, and to this day I still can’t fig­ure it out. The screen was also clut­tered. I imported about forty indi­vid­ual clips and when­ever I scrolled over them they would start play­ing, and all of this mad­ness would occur. It was frus­trat­ing.  I will admit, the new iMovie does look fancy, cool, and impres­sive, as it should given Apple’s new “style over sub­stance” approach, how­ever if Apple’s pro­fes­sional grade Final Cut Pro is eas­ier to learn than their ama­teur “iMovie” than they are going to have some seri­ous problems.

I’ve con­cluded that Apple is once again set to fail. They’ve gained mas­sive pop­u­lar­ity points by tar­get­ing their prod­ucts to all the hip­sters, but at the same time they are alien­at­ing the peo­ple that actu­ally used their prod­ucts because they were use­ful. Once the hip­sters move on to the next big fad (which believe me isn’t going to be cell­phones, com­put­ers, and MP3 play­ers), Apple’s lack of sub­stance is going to catch up to them, and they will floun­der.  I can’t express how excited I am that Chap­man uses the PC based AVID video edi­tor as opposed to Apple’s Final Cut Pro. If I learn AVID it basi­cally means that I will never have to go back to Apple’s “fisher price” UI’s, crappy hard­ware, and inflated prices.  Here’s to hop­ing that’s the case.

Last night I had the priv­i­lege of watch­ing my high school’s lat­est the­ater pro­duc­tion, “Lucky Stiff”, and I can’t help but express how impressed I was with the whole per­for­mance.  Now, I’ve never been much of a the­ater per­son.  While I do respect and enjoy the abil­ity that it takes to act, I’ve always felt that the whole “weird psy­chotic lunatic” men­tal­ity that most the­ater peo­ple employ to get into char­ac­ter, is a bit super­flu­ous. One could argue that the “weird psy­chotic lunatic” men­tal­ity is what makes some actors so great, but at the same time it’s the very rea­son why my involve­ment with the­ater has stayed strictly at the audi­ence or crew mem­ber level. Of course, in a sharp twist of irony, basi­cally all of my friends are actors in the­ater and by befriend­ing them, I’ve immersed myself in the “weird psy­chotic lunatic” men­tal­ity that I despise so much. But I strongly regress, being a friend to all of the great peo­ple in the­ater more than out­weighs the cost of putting up with their occa­sional crazi­ness, and this was no more appar­ent than in last night’s performance.

Lucky Stiff tells the story of British shoe sales­man  Harry With­er­spoon, who is the unsus­pect­ing heir to a six mil­lion dol­lar inher­i­tance from a long lost Amer­i­can uncle that he has never met. How­ever, in order to col­lect the inher­i­tance, Harry must take his uncle’s  corpse on a trip to Monte Carlo and he must do a vari­ety of tasks with the body while he is there. To add sus­pense, if Harry doesn’t car­ry­out his tasks exactly as pre­scribed, his inher­i­tance goes to a dog char­ity. Mix in the mafia, a six mil­lion dol­lar dia­mond embez­zle­ment, and plenty of romance, and it’s quite the story.

First off, all of the actors were great. In just the open­ing song I was com­pletely immersed in what was hap­pen­ing in the play. I con­tribute this largely to the amount of energy and tal­ent that the cast had.  All of the actors put a ton of time into mak­ing their char­ac­ters believ­able, and by sim­ply flaunt­ing the nuances in each of the char­ac­ters that they played, the audience’s dis­be­lief was com­pletely sus­pended. For instance, Thomas Lyons, who played the dead Uncle’s corpse, was bril­liant. He was stiff and as dead as a corpse should be, yet he mas­tered the lit­tle nuances of his char­ac­ter ( such as bob­bing up and down on a train ride scene) to give his char­ac­ter some per­son­al­ity.  I also really enjoyed Cecilia DeClue’s per­for­mance as a sec­re­tary early in the play. Her sim­ple pres­ence, lan­guage, and gen­eral energy sim­ply fit the role per­fectly and I thought she did a great job play­ing that character.

Of course, a musi­cal is noth­ing with­out the singing and for that we have to look no fur­ther than Melissa Costa. To put it sim­ply, Melissa Costa is a choral god­dess.  I have never heard any­one with a voice as beau­ti­ful, or as flaw­less as her’s, and once that is paired with her act­ing tal­ents, she pro­duces some­thing that sim­ply blows audi­ence mem­bers away. Melissa’s per­for­mance as an actor, and in her solos was spot on and incred­i­bly impres­sive, she’s the real deal. While I came to the show expect­ing to be blown away solely by Melissa Costa, Tony Esparza came from nowhere and kicked some ass. Tony played the role of a ner­vous optometrist, and his one solo song was eas­ily the best one of the show. The rea­son for this is because Tony fit his char­ac­ter the best out of any­one and the per­for­mance felt very nat­ural. The one thing that I always enjoy about my high school’s  musi­cals is the fact that they use live musi­cal accom­pa­ni­ment. There’s some­thing very tacky about using recorded music in plays, and I’ve always felt that they’ve detracted from what­ever per­for­mance I was watch­ing. In con­trast, the live accom­pa­ni­ment sounded beau­ti­ful, crisp, and I thought they were a major asset to the show.

I can’t talk about a play with­out ref­er­enc­ing the crew. For the past cou­ple of fall plays I’ve been on the crew as a light­ing designer, but I couldn’t do it for this year’s play because I had to work on the day of our tech rehearsal. While I did miss being on crew, it was appar­ent that they man­aged incred­i­bly well with­out me  (which only goes to show how much of an asset I was to the plays that I was on). Michelle Tran and Stephanie Acie did a great job call­ing the show. Chris Nguyen did a flaw­less job fill­ing in for me on lights. Of course, my brother James also did a great job with run­ning the sound. James had to con­tend with track­ing six­teen micro­phones, run­ning nine dif­fer­ent sound effects, and thir­teen voice record­ings. While cer­tainly not impos­si­ble, he had his hands full the entire show, and he did incred­i­bly well on exe­cut­ing the whole thing. See­ing as how the show was in the old gym, things were a lit­tle more dif­fi­cult for the crew since they had less resources, and space to work with. Mike Busch did a great job with lead­ing the con­struc­tion and decon­struc­tion of the set and despite what many con­sid­ered to be a set­back,  being in the gym hardly detracted from the show.

To sum up my thoughts on “Lucky Stiff”, it was a per­for­mance that sim­ply made me proud. It made me proud of all of my friends who were per­form­ing that night. It made me proud to have been a part of the Mater Dei the­ater pro­gram (in as small of a capac­ity as I am). Finally, it made me proud to sim­ply be a stu­dent of Mater Dei high school, as I thought the per­for­mance truly show­cased the best of what Mater Dei has to offer. In the end, I guess it is worth hav­ing to put up with the crazy “drama” mode that my friends enter when a play comes around if it means they are going to con­stantly put on per­for­mances like this.

After one of the most stress­ful week­ends of my life, I’ve finally fin­ished my appli­ca­tion to Chap­man.  Now for those that don’t know, apply­ing to col­lege is a hell of a process. One has to fill out tons of paper­work,  sub­mit SAT and ACT test scores, write vir­tu­ally per­fect essays, and get numer­ous let­ters of rec­om­men­da­tion and tran­scripts from teach­ers, and coun­selors.  If you thought that was a has­sle, to top it all off, doing any one these incor­rectly basi­cally means that you’re screwed for get­ting accepted to col­lege. Once we fac­tor in the fact that you also have to com­pete with a bunch of 4.8 Asian kids grade wise, get­ting into col­lege is basi­cally a crap shoot.

As I remarked in one of my past posts, Chap­man Uni­ver­sity is my num­ber one col­lege choice at the moment. The rea­son being is that they have one of the best film schools in the nation, and its prox­im­ity to home is appeal­ing to me. But of course, apply­ing to Chap­man is no easy task.  Not only did I have to fill out the stress­ful Com­mon Appli­ca­tion, and do all of the com­po­nents listed above, but I also had to apply to one of the most com­pet­i­tive film schools in the nation. So on top of the already large amount of work I had to do just to apply to Chap­man Uni­ver­sity, I had to cre­ate a two minute film, write an essay, and cre­ate a resume in order to apply to their film school.

The prompt for the two minute film, was sur­pris­ingly chal­leng­ing for me.  I had to intro­duce myself, high­light­ing aspects of my life which I felt were impor­tant, while show­ing that I was a cre­ative visual sto­ry­teller. Not too dif­fi­cult of a con­cept, but the catch was that I couldn’t appear in it.  For­tu­nately for me,  I  have friends, friends who are actors no less,  so I wasn’t both­ered about not appear­ing in the film myself.  My main prob­lem was how to approach the film. Cre­at­ing a tra­di­tional nar­ra­tive sto­ry­line is really hard to do in two min­utes, and I hon­estly don’t think I could have wrote a decent sto­ry­line around myself. I felt using songs or other gim­micks would be too tacky for me, and I’ve never really used that style as a film maker. So the only option that I was left with was to do a mon­tage, or a high­light reel of my life.

The theme of my film was “what inspires me?” To accom­plish this I shot some scenes of var­i­ous activ­i­ties that inspire me and  used voice over nar­ra­tion and a few adjec­tives to describe  them.  The results were dis­as­trous. First off, I didn’t know what exactly I wanted to use or shoot in the film. So I shot over forty five min­utes of footage,  for a measly two minute film.  Heck, I had two shoot­ing days were I didn’t use any of the footage that I shot. I had a hell of a time edit­ing the thing together, as I had to com­press it all into two min­utes of film. A few of the shots that I did use, I had to reshoot as I real­ized con­ti­nu­ity errors as I was edit­ing . Of course, my voice over skills were atro­cious when nar­rat­ing the thing. All in all, the pre­sen­ta­tion was far less impres­sive than I hoped it would be. The rea­son why I’m so inse­cure about the film is the fact that it’s being reviewed by peo­ple who are pro­fes­sional film mak­ers. They are going to notice every lit­tle nuance and mis­take that I make, mis­takes that could cost me going to my num­ber one col­lege choice.

This isn’t to say that I’m com­pletely out of the game though. The shots that I did use where all beau­ti­ful, and I think few other appli­cants will be able to match my image qual­ity.  The slow mo looks com­pletely badass. Finally, there aren’t any bla­tant errors in the film, it’s just not the best, most inspir­ing thing the admis­sions rep­re­sen­ta­tives will see.   I think the admis­sions rep­re­sen­ta­tives know that they aren’t going to be get­ting too many per­fect films, what I think they are actu­ally look­ing for is poten­tial. I can only hope that this film, despite it’s flaws and short­com­ings, shows that I have poten­tial as a film maker.

Other than the film though, I would say I have a rel­a­tively solid appli­ca­tion. Grades and test scores are decent. I like the way my essays turned out. In gen­eral, I feel as if I have enough to rep­re­sent me as a well rounded and involved stu­dent. Who knows what will hap­pen with this thing, all I can say is that I gave it my best shot and I’m happy the process is over. Well, at least for Chap­man that is.

Major thanks to all of my friends who helped me out with this. James McNally, Kevin McDon­ald, Mike Busch, Thomas Lyons, Zach Costa, and Rhys Gar­cia I really owe all of you guys one.