Ryan's Journal

Wedding Crashers is seriously funny. And Scrabble is now my least favorite game ever – 84 points for “tarsals”? C’mon now.

The word from Burbank is that I’m back to work on August 15. The nights of bar hopping in Walnut Creek, driving Nish crazy in the Marina, and failing to be a contender in basketball (both mini and standard) are temporarily coming to an end. The positives: cool co-workers, a nice income, and access to the studio lot and its many beautiful actresses (who will pay me no attention whatsoever). Negatives: office space is at a premium, so it’s back to the cold, dark, window-less storage room that I sometimes slept in throughout 2003, and the horror that comes with living in a town where police helicopters fly by at all hours and traffic barely slows when vehicles randomly burst into flames on the side of the interstate. Ah well, it’s only 153 days until Antarctica.

One of the longstanding items on the to-do list has been to scan in the approximately fifty rolls of print film that I took from 1994 through 1999. The job is about half done, and while my good photographs today aren’t really much better than my good photos from ten years ago, the percentage of photos that are complete and utter crap has definitely decreased; far fewer of today’s photos require asking the question what the hell was I trying to photograph? That said, a few photos from back in the day are actually worth sharing:

In the past couple of months there have been a (tiny) handful of requests to use some of my photos for commercial projects, and since I’ve got no illusions about being an artist I was thrilled to have the chance of seeing some of the stuff in print. The first one, which was used in an advertisement for an Italian consulting firm, went to the printer today, and I think it actually looks kind of cool:

And in case anyone is wondering, Google translates the caption as “WE ARE AGAINST THE HUNTING, BUT WE WANT YOUR HEAD!”. It’s not quite “All your base are belong to us”, but it’s still catchy.

For unknown reasons the sleep schedule has inverted lately, and for the past two nights things have gotten so ridiculous that I’ve been able to watch the sunrise prior to going to bed. It’s a bit like being in college again, only now I get to take naps in a futon rather than trying to get comfortable in the goofy chairs with tray tables that they used in the engineering classrooms.

Aaron is back in town, and calling upon his uncanny ability to gather large groups he pulled together a pack of seven for some bar hopping in Walnut Creek last night. Crogan’s was (thankfully) avoided, yet we still managed to discover a joint with a rubber-kneed techno DJ, a bar offering $2 Coronas, a Kenny-friendly establishment, and some place that served us an embarrassingly large and fruity bowl of cherries, rock candy, and alcohol.

I didn’t end up going to sleep until nearly 5:00 AM last night, and possibly as a result of sleep deprivation my dreams were all over the place. In one I was JFK, and not just some actor playing JFK, but the actual, bonafide JFK. And I knew that I was gonna invade Cuba and get assassinated and everything, but mostly I was just enjoying being President during the 60’s. How cool must that have been?

In another dream I was back in Los Angeles, and for some reason was working for Warner Brothers but my desk was in the gardens at the Getty Museum. Just as I was getting ready to go home for the day a female friend came by and asked me the truly evil question “Do you notice anything different about me?” (Note to women: don’t ever do that. Just tell us what you want us to notice and then we’ll compliment you on it). Following exactly how the scenario would play out in real life, I got absolutely reamed for failing to answer the question correctly.

The magic dream marathon ended abrubtly at 8:15 when the phone rang, so sadly I never got to send a man to the moon or find out what crazy scheme I would have concocted to get out of the doghouse with my LA friend. It’s a shame; it would have been pretty cool to meet Marilyn Monroe.

More than two-thirds of the photos from the 1999 Galapagos trip never got scanned in, so the project during the past couple of days has been getting those online. They’re now mostly all scanned in. In other news, Warner Brothers called and Godfather-like made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, so the retirement may be (briefly) ending sometime in the next couple of weeks.