stress, pasta, and bit o' recognition

It's nearly 1 a.m. and I am blogging. It's nearly 1 a.m. on a day when I worked at 6.30 a.m. after only sleeping 3 hours, and I am blogging. I did have a little nap this afternoon, but not much. There's so much work to do and I am really overwhelmed and not doing well at channeling this energy into work, so I'm reverting to one of my favourite tactics: get the fingers moving on the keys, any way I can. Then get back to work.

So here's a blog in 3 parts.

Partie Une: Stress

(Does one say "partie une" or "partie un?" Partie has got to be feminine, right? But 'une' still looks wrong. Francophones, please advise.)

This course I am taking, on British Romantic Lit, is way more stressful than I thought it would be. I've read most of the material before, written papers on most of the material before, and liked most of the material before, but something about this course is not working for me. I don't feel like I'm connecting to the material the way that my professor wants us to. I don't know. I'm just not handling it well. I have to do all this work by Thursday and I need to go to the library tomorrow, which I hate, and beyond the library and the research, I have to reread Frankenstein for Thursday's class and write a final draft of my research proposal, because that's due too, and oh, I basically have to leave directly from class on Thursday to get to the airport because I'm going to San Francisco for the weekend.

The other source of stress is my thesis, aka the book on my trip across Canada. It was my goal for the semester to get a first draft done, but the semester ends with April, and between thesis and the research project, I'm not sure if this is possible. True, there have been times when I haven't worked as hard on my thesis as I should have, but overall, I have been working pretty consistently. And when I've let my thesis sit for a few days in a row, it hasn't been due to slacking off, it's just been to prioritize other deadlines.

Anyway, the present deadline I have is to deliver a chunk of work to my adviser tomorrow. Hence being awake and heavily caffeinated at 1 a.m. I wanted to give her Ontario and Québec, but I have 17 pages on Ontario and I'm not done yet. It's a big province and I was there for a long time. So I guess it will just be Ontario and I will view the deadline as another failure. Well, half failure.

My problem is that if I stay up all night writing, I'll get Ontario written, but then will I have the energy to go to the library and read Frankenstein and write the proposal and pack for San Fran and get up at 5 a.m. again on Thursday for another early day? If I can make it through class and if I can get to the airport on time, I'll have a long plane ride to catch up on sleep, but that was going to be designated reading time so I had less to worry about in SF, where I wanted to actually enjoy the city. Then again, it's supposed to rain all weekend, so maybe having reading material in SF isn't such a bad idea.

And oddly enough, writing all of this out has made me feel a little less stressed. At least I have organized my stress now, pinpointed the sources, you know. I think that counts for something. But moving on...

Partie Deux: Pasta

I love pasta in restaurants. I always have. One of my first grown-up, not ordered off the kids' menu meals was fettucine alfredo at the Olive Garden. I think I was 5. It was a huge deal. I had to split it with an adult, of course, but it was love at first bite for me and pasta.

So when I moved to Michigan and into my first apartment, it was natural that I should turn to pasta. It's easy to make, and it can be prepared in single serving sizes very easily. I defaulted to the packets of pesto that you mix with olive oil and milk for sauces, but occasionally switched it up with a bottled tomato sauce or the alfredo packets.

When I moved back to Chicago, I went shopping with my mom at Sam's Club to stock up on foods that I could buy in bulk, since I didn't have a car and there wasn't a full grocery store within walking distance of my first apartment in the city. One of the things I bought was a 5 lb. monster bag of pasta. And since that was before I knew about how taking 9 hrs of grad credits was a huge rip-off, I was so painfully broke that year. I ate pasta all. the. time. No matter how much I ate, the amount of spaghetti in the bag never decreased. The pasta stopped tasting good, but I felt like I didn't have a choice. Then one night, it backfired. The pasta actually made me gag and I couldn't force down anymore. And I still had at least 2 lbs of that freaking bag of spaghetti left.

It's been like this for two years, friends. Sure, I still love pasta in an Italian restaurant, but at home, I haven't been able to stomach it. I tried different brands of pasta, different sauces, but everything made me gag. It's been rough.

But this week, I had a breakthrough. I don't know why, but on Monday night, I was wandering aimlessly in the grocery store, and I found myself in the pasta aisle. It had been a while since I'd tried it, so I thought I'd give it another go. I ended up trying a new noodle, one I'd never cooked at home before: ROTINI. Rotini is fun and whimsical and cooks in 3.5 minutes! Win-win-win! I paired it with tomato florentine sauce and I loved it. Now I just have to make sure I don't overdose on rotini. Don't worry, I bought a small box.

Partie Trois: A Bit o' Recognition

The ladies at Ice-Dance.com and I definitely do not keep the site going for recognition. We don't do it for thanks, and we don't get paid for it. We just do it because we love skating, especially ice dance. For me, personally, it is linked to a possible career path that I am exploring, but IDC honestly isn't about furthering my own goals or anything like that. I guess I feel some sort of responsibility to share our coverage with the World Wide Web because I know that we do a good job. I'm floored by the talent and dedication of the dancers that we photograph and write about, and I want to honour them, too. We all have a sense of pride in what we do.

So for friends that aren't as heavily invested in the skating world as I am, the short story is that the World Championships were supposed to be this week, in Tokyo. For obvious reasons, they have were postponed. Last week, there was a ton of press about what the options were, so the IDC Staff decided to weigh in. We all had ideas and the article we wrote was passed between all 4 of us before it finally went online. I didn't do any of the rough draft work because I had the first draft of my proposal due last week, but I spent a couple of hours composting the various drafts, throwing in a few more thoughts, and piecing together the final version. So we published the article and did what we usually do—posted links to the IDC Facebook and Twitter accounts. A couple of people said nice things about it on the thread on FSU (skating's main discussion forum) on the subject of Worlds, but shortly after we published, a delusional Virtue & Moir bandwagoner hijacked the thread. And we moved on. The news kind of slowed over the weekend and we all had various things happening, so I was happy with what we'd put together, but I wasn't really thinking about it on Saturday night when I opened an email from Daphne, the IDC administrator.

It turned out that PJ Kwong, Skate Canada announcer and commentator and author, had read the editorial we'd written, had loved it, and had written a blog about it. Okay...whoa. Not expecting that.

Even though we're all really proud to be associated with IDC and we know that we do quality work, we're still underdogs in the media world. People keep getting their media from the web more and more, but web media is still the last one invited to the table. We're the first to get our credentials cut when we're short on space. I don't know about the other federations, since I've only covered big events in Canada, but Skate Canada prints out articles and clips newspapers and puts things on the wall in the media center at its big competitions. But they only print and clip from newspapers, not websites. Well, one of my photos made it onto the wall at Nationals this year—but it was uncredited, stolen by one of the Victoria newspapers off of the IDC website and printed without my consent. They were even careful enough to crop my name off the edge of the photo. So not quite the same thing.

In conclusion...I don't do this for recognition, but it feels really, really nice to get a bit of recognition on occasion. Thanks, PJ Kwong. You've always seemed like a really nice person.

And not to overexpose myself, but I really am proud of the joint effort that brought about this editorial, so if you'd like to read it, it's here.

And with that, my fingers are clearly moving across the keys with no problem at all, so it's back to Ontario.

busy break

Technically, I'm on spring break this week, but I'm not any less busy this week than I was last week during midterm week! So I'm not really feeling the "break" part of this week, but it's definitely spring in Chicago. This isn't to say that the weather is nice, just that we're experiencing some of that cold, damp, muddy weather that we look forward to every March here in the Windy City.

I did a phone interview last week with Tanith Belbin & Ben Agosto, Olympic silver medalists in ice dance who are currently touring with Stars on Ice. They were a great interview because they're very poised, they come off as very friendly, and they can pack a lot into a short amount of time. I was able to squeeze the 15-minute phone call into my midterm schedule a week ago, but I didn't have a chance to write the article for a few days. It went live on ice-dance.com today: read it here.

This is also deadline week for IFS, the figure skating magazine that I started writing for a couple of issues ago. I normally plan ahead better, but the timing of this deadline was tough, and I was still gathering information and frantically reading books at the beginning of the week. I'm reviewing two books in one of my columns, which are going to be my 4th and 5th reviews for the magazine, so I guess that's kind of becoming my thing. I like reviewing books and take that task very seriously, so I'm trying not to rush through them.

And of course, I'm trying to keep plodding through my thesis, but I'm having a tougher time with energy and motivation this week. I was so looking forward to working on my thesis this week, but with everything else going on, I guess it's not the relaxing break that I was looking forward to. I have stuck to all of my deadlines with my thesis adviser so far, but I'm worried that I'm not going to be able to keep this one.

When I need a break from the written word, I'm also working on my old scrapbook from 2004, which is proving to be a bit of a challenge, since I can't locate quite a few photos from spring/summer 2004. I'm hoping to find backups at my parents' house this weekend. I thought I had a stack of backup discs here, too, but I can't find them.

This is my most recent page, in progress. I finished it yesterday.

Which brings me to two other projects: 1) cleaning and 2) organizing photos. Both are ongoing and monstrous tasks. I'm not exactly the best housekeeper, especially when I'm busy, so I have all kinds of piles of things to sort through. I cleared a bunch of stuff out of my bedroom last week, but somehow new piles have already appeared. I'm enjoying the extra space right now (my roommate moved out in December and I haven't found a replacement yet), but I definitely kept at least the living room cleaner when B lived here.

The photo organization is also a huge task. It's time for a portfolio update, so I'm trying to figure out which of my skating shots from this season that I should print. I'm also well overdue in posting photos, so I'll try to get a couple more sets edited this week. It's also nearing the end of the season, so I need to make sure that I have double backups of everything. Being a part-time sports photographer is a never-ending task. I can't imagine keeping up if I did this full-time!

And spring break week culminates with seeing Stars on Ice on Saturday. I might be going alone, which will be a weird experience, but at least it's just the U.S. tour and I'll be reunited with the girls for the traditional CSOI weekend in April/May.

getting the shot

2010 has been a great year so far. I've already made some fabulous memories and quite honestly, being at the Olympics was a lifetime dream come true. I'm really not that old, so I consider myself a very lucky girl. But amid all of the excitement and happiness that 2010 has brought, I've also been suffering from a lack of inspiration and confidence.

At work, I was offered a position that I felt I had earned, but after the informal offer from my manager, the job was given to someone else without so much as a word about it to me. In my fiction class, I feel like our professor is constantly looking down on all of us, which has made me pretty apathetic about writing—not good when this semester is one of six in a degree that's costing me thousands of dollars. I haven't felt much like writing anything, including but not limited to: working on my novel, writing short pieces in hopes of publication, revising essays I wrote last semester that I really liked at one point, blogging, and writing articles for IDC. It's been fairly glum as far as writing.

However, two things happened in the past month to really give me a boost, and one just happened last night, so look, I'm writing about something recent for a change!

Let's start with last night. I was in my Writing About Place class, which I've really enjoyed all semester. While the class has mainly functioned as lit-for-writers, we have also done a bit of writing in the form of "narrative exercises." Our third exercise was due 2 weeks ago, and the assignment was to write a one-page scene in which external and internal factors contribute to an irrevocable event. I chose to write a bit from my novel, which is a YA-ish book (but hopefully smarter than most of the crap YA) about an ice dancer. Surprise, surprise, right? Anyway, in the scene that I wrote, Jessie (my protagonist) bites it on footwork in her free dance at a major competition. My goal for the scene was to write the "action"—the skating, the ice, the arena—but to stay inside of her head and get at her emotions, too. All in a page. And well, I crept over to page two a bit. It's really tough for me to write short.

Last night, we workshopped half of the exercises, including mine. And guess what! People liked my scene! Only about half the class had read excerpts from my novel before, so there was a bit of confusion about the characters and background info from the rest of the class, but overall, I got some great feedback, good suggestions, and even a bit of praise. It's been a long time since I've felt that good about something that I've written. I'm having a really hard time balancing all of the projects in my life, but I've been wanting to work harder on the novel, so I'm going to try to set some goals and deadlines for myself so that I keep plugging away. I don't think that the scene I wrote will enter the novel without some revisions—I don't want it to actually be that short since it's going to be the focus of a chapter, but I'm looking forward to working with it and expanding it.

Okay, inspiring thing #2 actually happened a month ago today, so this is a bit late. As usual.

At Thin Ice (see my last few blog entries), I saw the second show four times—Saturday afternoon & evening and Sunday afternoon & evening. The first three shows were dress rehearsals, with the final show on Sunday night being a live TV broadcast. And at the last show, on Sunday night, I got this shot:

Probably one of the coolest photos I've taken in my short career as a skating photographer, right? It's not often that someone back flips over someone else in skating—I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've ever seen it, and definitely the first time I've ever photographed it.

People sometimes ask me how I get such great shots of skating. I'm not very confident in general (not just this semester) and I'm so awkward at taking compliments, so I usually just shrug it off and say that I was in the right place at the right time, or that I have great material to work with. Both of these things are true, but there's a lot that often goes into getting a great shot, and this one in particular is a good example of that.

I saw this show four times, and this shot is from the last show. So before I took this, I saw the program (and this move) done three other times. I photographed two of those three shows. At the first show, I wasn't at all ready for this, and my photo is a mess. The ice is more in focus than either Mike or Marie, and my shutter speed was way too slow to freeze the action in his flip. I decided not to shoot the second show, because I felt like the skaters were exhausted from doing two shows a day for the second day in a row (not a typical schedule for this group) and I was exhausted, too. At the third show, I was ready for the flip and adjusted my shutter speed, but I was at a different angle that was unflattering for Marie, to say the least, and I still didn't get Mike anywhere close to being in focus.

So for the last show, I was ready. I sat in the corner, where I knew I'd get Mike's face upside down, but I switched sides, so I'd get Marie's face as well. I adjusted my settings so I could get my shutter speed even faster, I closed the aperture a bit so my depth of field wasn't as narrow, and I decided to try a vertical photo with a one-point focus. From the angle where I was sitting, it wasn't too tough to follow him and keep the focus on him. And of course, since I'd seen the program three times before, I knew exactly where the move fell with the music and what the set-up looked like. After that, I just had to stay calm, take a deep breath, and not shake! And as soon as I snapped it, I flipped my camera around and checked it on the LCD screen, but I already knew that it was going to be a good one.

In the end, I still had to work with it in post-processing. It was a little less than 2 degrees from vertical, and since it happened so fast, it's not like I had a chance to center it. So when I rotated the photo, I cut off part of the background, and I had to spend some time working with the patterns and filling in some of the darkened crowd. The lighting also wasn't great at the shows—house lights were up a bit, so I had to work with the colours to get it to pop like it had in person. It was definitely worth the work, though! This is certainly a photo I'm proud of, and I've received more praise for this shot than for anything else I've ever taken.

So as I've been thinking about this shot during the past month, an obvious realization I've had is the importance of doing your homework. For me as a skating photographer, this means that whenever it's possible, I try to see programs more than once. I try to go to practices at competitions, even when they're early, because I know that even just a slight familiarity with programs will translate into better shots. I watch skating online as much as I can, not just because I love it, but because I get ideas for shots that I want to get if I'm going to see that program live later in the season. I even like imagining what shots I would get if it's a team that I know I won't see. I relish every opportunity to "practice" shooting skating—whether that means shooting practices, local shows with terrible lighting, international events, club competitions with little kids doing single jumps, the Olympics, whatever! I love it all and I know that every shot I take is an important one.

More than all of that, though, I've been thinking about my role as a skating photographer and how it relates to, well, my life. Besides being curled up under my pink comforter on my bed in my jammies, I think that I'm more at home behind my camera in an ice rink than I am anywhere else. Skating photography is something that I know that I'm good at, it's something I love doing, and it's something that I always want to be better at. Freezing my tail off boardside at a club competition gives me such a feeling of satisfaction. When I'm there, I know it's where I'm supposed to be. I know that I'm doing something valuable. That's something I don't generally feel at my job, even though I can stock the nail polish faster than anyone else on the task team. I know that this is because I work in a beauty store for a job, but I shoot skating because it's life to me. I can't help but want to be there.

I know I've had some incredibly lucky breaks—one of the best skating photographers in the world sat me down and taught me how to use a camera, for example. That's how I got started. But I was in that situation because I went after it, because I felt something pulling me towards skating photography and I followed it. And I continue to go after it. I'm not delusional and I know that there isn't much of a chance at having a career as a skating photographer. Maybe skating photography will never be enough of a means of income to survive. Maybe it will, though. And if there's a chance at all (and I think there is), I have to keep hoping that someday I'll get out of retail and into doing what I love. Even if it's never a career, though, I think it will always be a part of my life. I just can't imagine ceasing to care about being in the rink to capture those moments. I feel responsible for them.

Keeping Busy

The fall semester is keeping me busy. I like the constant pace and always having something to look forward to, but I also crave sleep and downtime. I like being able to sit at home and work on all of my different projects, but too often, I start something and can't make myself finish. Like unpacking. I haven't successfully unpacked in months. There has been a constant suitcase on my living room floor since August, except when I repack it and take it somewhere else for a few days. I hope my roommate doesn't hate me.

About a month ago, I was in Ottawa for my second figure skating competition as one of the official event photographers. It's stressful, to say the least. When I cover events as part of the media, it's a different vibe. If I get too bogged down, I can skip skaters or certain events. There are usually breaks built into the day when I can sit down for a few minutes, download my photos, maybe even eat a donut. But at the EOS competitions I'm doing this season, it's nonstop. Floods usually don't last more than 15 minutes (less than 10 minutes at Minto!) and if there's a chance for a longer break, I do what I can to help out Rhonda at the sales table. It's exciting, but I think that four days is my limit.

A few weeks ago, I had a completely different sort of skating event to cover. CBC, one of the Canadian TV networks, has a new show this fall called Battle of the Blades. The easiest way to explain it? It's like Dancing with the Stars, but the girls are professional (or retired) figure skaters and the guys are retired hockey players learning how to figure skate. I took photos at the first taping, available for viewing on Ice-Dance.com. The lighting was a little low and they put me on the "wrong" side of the arena, since most of the choreography was done for the judges' side, but the experience was fantastic. It was such a cheerful atmosphere. It's not meant to be taken completely seriously, but the athletes all have a competitive streak, of course, so they're working hard and putting together some fun numbers. I wish I could go every week, but since it's taped in Toronto and I live 10 hours away in Chicago...it's a little difficult. I am planning on going back for the final week of taping, though.

So the photography aspect of my life is going well. I'm looking at upgrading to a Canon 50D (I currently shoot with a 20D) sometime this month, whenever my student loans finally come through. They're only like six weeks late, so it may still be a couple of weeks, if last semester was any indication. The writing aspect of my dual life, however, is another story. The pressure of being in a creative writing program has made me agonize about everything I put on the page. I don't feel very confident in my writing lately, and I'm not having much fun with it either. I'm constantly procrastinating my assignments, which only makes them more stressful, and I feel like I can never catch up. I admit that I'm starting to rethink this duality, but I don't think that changing my situation is a viable option right now. I tried to change my situation over the summer, but it didn't pan out, and now I feel fairly stuck.

But at least I'm keeping busy. No time to sit around and feel stuck for too long. This week, I have a nonfiction workshop piece to submit, an essay to select and prepare for Ecolit, and when the week is over, I get to enjoy a weekend in western Michigan with some new friends. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for some beautiful fall foliage.

Resolutions?

I'm so sporadic with this blog. In my defense, shortly after my last post, I embarked on a fantastic adventure. I spent two weeks photographing figure skating events in Ottawa and Lake Placid. I went to Montréal for less than eight hours. I saw friends -- both old and new, took over 50,000 photos (ah, the life of a sports photographer...going to need a new shutter soon!), laughed until the wee hours of the morning most nights, survived attacks from giant spiders and a batlike moth, developed knots in my shoulders from holding my camera that still haven't gone away, and had a marvelous time. Of course, I should have come home and blogged all about it immediately, but it took weeks to catch up from all of those photos. I'm still catching up, actually.

So today, I'm re-resolutioning to blog at least once a week, and I'll certainly try to write more often. It's a good day for resolutions, because tonight is my first class of my third semester of grad school. I'm also resolving (see, I do actually know the word) to do my assignments in a timely manner and manage my time better than I did last semester, so I don't get sick. In addition to my really lame retail job and two grad courses, I also have plans to step up my photography assignments this semester. I have a lot of traveling planned, at least tentatively, and I'm hoping that I can balance everything.

Tonight, I'll begin a course on Ecoliterature. I'm kind of terrified, because I don't especially like nature or reading things that require me to form opinions. I do like pretty descriptions and interesting facts, though, so I'm hoping I can find some common ground. I'm also hoping that no one makes me argue in this course. I hate arguing.

Tomorrow night, I'll switch gears for Creative Nonfiction Writing II. This will be my fourth writing workshop (I'm required to take six for my degree), but my first with this instructor, so I'm not sure what to expect. My emphasis in the program is creative nonfiction, so I'm hoping that I'll feel more comfortable in this class, but I have to admit...I haven't done much writing in the CNF genre since last semester's CNF course which was discouraging at best. I hope I can step up my motivation.

And because I can blog about whatever I want to blog about, since I chose not to go with a theme for this blog, I'm planning to write about Canadian ice dance in my next entry. Shooting events in Ottawa and Lake Placid means that I've seen most of Canada's dance teams for the season, and I feel like sharing my opinions. Plus, I just really like writing about figure skating.

Beginnings

I'm not a habitual resolver in honour of the New Year, but I made pact with myself this year on January 1st. I am writer, and in 2009, I will spend at least half an hour each day writing, at least five days per week.

Enter wrist injury.

I'm not sure what I did to it, but several days into the new year, I started experiencing moderate pain in my left wrist. Writing took a back seat for a few days, and I was angry that I was already breaking my resolution.

Enter ACE wrist wrap.

It's not flashy and it was fairly cheap, but it's allowed me to get back to a normal typing schedule. Adam has admonished me (twice) typing with flat wrists, so I'm trying to remember to keep my wrists elevated, at least some of the time. It's difficult with a laptop, though.

Speaking of Adam, he's actually partially responsible for the creation of this blog, with his "all writers should have a blog" mantra. He's a friend of mine in the MFA program.

This is where, if my blog was a movie bursting with clichés, the camera would pan back abruptly and me, as narrator would say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm getting ahead of myself. I should start at the beginning." Then the shot would fade into a shot of quiet, snowy street, and I'd talk about my childhood.

Now that you're picturing that, I'll just jump on it, but I won't cover childhood. Maybe another time.

I'm a native Chicago suburbanite who has recently returned to the City of Big Shoulders after a 2-1/2-year stint in Central Michigan. While in Michigan, I earned a B.A. in English from the tiny but picturesque Olivet College, and I thought daily about all the reasons why I love Chicago. I moved back to the area in summer 2008, and in fall 2008, I moved downtown and began working on an M.F.A. in creative writing at Roosevelt University. I'm primarily a nonfiction writer, so keeping up with this blog should come naturally for me.

I'm also a musician, though somewhat lapsed. I began my undergraduate studies as a french horn player and music education major, but decided that a life behind the baton ultimately was not for me. I love music, though, especially taking advantage of the great music in a city whose orchestra boasts the best brass section in the world. In my opinion, of course.

Photography has probably eclipsed music on my list of loved art forms, although I am still learning. I shoot figure skating, mainly, and while I readily admit the shortcomings in the rest of my photography, I am very proud of how my skating photography has progressed since August 2007! If you're interested in reading my photoblog, it's here, although I recently forgot to update it for a few months in the midst of computer troubles. I'm getting back on track with it, though.

Since I am a perpetual student, I think of my life in terms of semesters, so I have high hopes for this semester. I plan to take two workshops, so I will spend a lot of time writing and one of the courses will be my first exclusively nonfiction workshop. I'm also looking for a new job--I'm currently slaving away in retail, but I'm hoping to find a position as some type of editor or editorial assistant in Chicago. Feel free to let me know if you have a lead!