Drama Queens

Most of the artists here in Albuquerque are animators.

I know that visual effects is a quite isolated industry- you burn your bridges in this business and there's not much going back. On the other hand, if you're in, you're IN.

One of the things that people outside of this industry don't seem to know is that artists are vastly different, and they tend to skew one way or another by department. For instance, I love working with compositors. They are usually quick, good under pressure, and hard to ruffle.

On the opposite side are animators. They're high maintenance, like that needy girlfriend one of your guy friends has, who whines a lot and clings like Saran wrap. Sorry. I digress.

So most of the younger crowd here at work are animators. The lighters and compositors are a bit older, and a higher percentage of them are married, most of those people also raising kids (hence their move to Albuquerque and out of kid-unfriendly LA).

Since the younger, singler people are the ones that tend to go out, while the older, married people go home to their families, I hang out with almost 100% animators. This would usually grate on my nerves. I didn't have many animators as friends in LA, for good reason.

Animators, generally, feel like they breathe life into characters. They are the ones that make the movie move. They are the ones that are obsessed with their work and never go home. The best animators are the passionate ones, and the passionate ones can be quite annoying in social settings.

Because I work with so many of these danged people, I have come to love them as friends. It can't be helped, after all. Spending enough time with someone will either lead to love or hate. Rarely indifference (I have a story about that, though) and rarely flippant acceptance (I don't accept well).

Being expatriates in a foreign land (read: from a metropolis, to a small town), we tend to stick together. All of these factors combine to me being friends with people that I perhaps wouldn't see quite as frequently were we all living in LA.

I don't dislike that fact at all; in fact, I really appreciate that I have a much more diverse group of local friends than I've ever had before in my life.

However!

Animators are drama queens.

One of them walked up to me today and said, "I almost got into a fight because of you!" No, it wasn't to preserve my honor. It was really about HIM. Be a drama queen all you want, but don't use me as an excuse to add more drama.


Had to vent about that, I'm done now.



My turn to be a drama queen! It's FREEZING.

Literally, of course, but also because there's been a problem all day in our building at work. The heat recovery chiller (which doesn't sound very warm to me) broke and they aren't getting a new one until tonight.

First of all, today is the coldest day so far in 2011.

Second of all, I sit near a row of windows, and the cold is seeping in through the glass, around the glass, everything, There's a buffer of about 30 feet from the windows that is strangely drafty and chilly, and I sit in that area. I'm a Popsicle.

I'm really hoping that heat recovery chiller is fixed by tomorrow. I'm sitting at work right now, wearing all the clothes I wore out of my house this morning, including a puffy vest and a puffy jacket. I've been sporadically wearing gloves inside the office today, that's how disturbingly cold it is.