tornado evac

After much dedication and walking, as of yesterday i have completed all 45 of the shows and attractions in magic kingdom and have 6 things left to do in the rest of the parks. i was going to go to the indiana jones stunt show to finish hollywood studios today but cotton and i were foiled by the all-day rain. In fact, today was my first tornado evacuation. in the morning we all had to leave the office and go downstairs and sit in the auditorium on the first floor until we were deemed safe to go back upstairs. i kind of wanted something dramatic to happen but it never did.

right now it's raining so hard it sounds like fake rain and it's a little disconcerting. it sounds like when the storm hits at the end of the enchanted tiki room show. i'm in my co-intern yzma's home because she is taking me to the airport in the morning so i can catch my 6:30am flight out to la for thanksgiving yay yay. tonight i had dinner with her family; her ma is a physics professor at a big college here and her pa is a funny man who watches frozen almost every night and knows all of the words. their family is iraqi and we ate a really beautiful mound of vegetables (grape leaves, cabbages, onions) stuffed with rice. maybe this says something about florida but i feel very comfortable in their home because it somehow feels very immigrant. Best of all, tonight, and for the next four nights, I won't be sharing a room with anybody! It's going to be so wonderful.

Also, my cousin called my this evening and asked me to be one of her bridesmaids in Texas next august. I really looked up to her when I was younger but we haven't spent much time together as grown ups so I am very honored to have been selected and despite having felt a lot of bitterness recently about the swarm of engagements and weddings kind of can't wait take this role. 

useless child

i think this is proof that i'm not a grown-up yet

miss manners

my newest tirade is against the way everyone is on their goddamn cell phones all the time. i feel like i can't have a conversation with anyone here who isn't simultaneously texting. the texting, dear god, the texting is ruthless. i try to coach my cohorts on the merits of living in the here and now but i feel like i'm truly standing on the wrong side of a generational divide whose line of demarcation isn't necessarily dictated by age but by some bewildering mismatch of social graces. i'm standing in lines with people who would rather talk to people who aren't there. i'm at dinner with faceless bodies. i'm conversing with myself and statues with motorized fingers who don't even register that i'm squawking noises. everybody's face is glowing with their own boredom with the world. of late, all i want to do is snatch everyone's phones and hurl them into the ocean, including my own. i feel like the lone conscious witness to something horrible that's happening.  

lazybones

is it too late for me to learn how to do a cartwheel?

Iaapa

IAAPA is the convention where anyone who makes anything for theme parks or entertainment locations comes to sell their wares, from snacks to roller coasters to water fountains to arcade games. Cotton and I went to the convention center this afternoon and walked around for 4 hours. We saw prize manufacturers and map artists and fur wholesalers and selfie booths and ropes courses. I picked a good expo partner because we were both shameless junk food eaters and stuffed ourselves with pizza, icees, multiple servings of dippin' dots, mini donuts, churros, cookies, french fries, hot dogs with tropical fruit sauces, cheesecake in a cone, cheddar popcorn, caramel popcorn, and I'm sure there was more. There were two haunted houses and I really wanted to go in them but at 26 I'm still too scared. I was about to walk into one but then I could see behind the curtained entrance a shadowed figure sitting at a table and my knees got weak and my entire constitution buckled.

The great gilly hopkins

A million things happened today. 

I visited Creative Costuming and saw where new costume ideas are fabricated in a big room full of partially-dressed mannequins in big froofy dresses and bows. I saw a Form 1 printer, a kind of stereolithographic 3d printer, for the first time. It was in hard at work on a desktop shooting a laser into a pool of liquid resin. A tiara-like headpiece was slowly rising out of the resin like a beautiful swamp thing's crown. 

After work I played haunted house-themed mini golf at Citiwalk with some very notable men in the show control business - they're all in town for IAAPA's (International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions) yearly expo, which I'm going to tomorrow. 

My mentor announced that he's moving to California and the entire office became quiet as we suddenly became aware of how lost we will be without him. In only a few months I've come to look up to him very much and it was the saddest news in the world.

Oh and according to Facebook my cousin just got engaged.

fantastical work places

I've seen a lot of crazy things in the past work week.

Wednesday I took a tour of the FoF parade floats and got to see all the floats return back to their warehouse after their parade and get parked and recharged for the next show. I touched them and saw where their drivers sit and how they're monitored along their routes. They're huge. That night I stayed late at work to finish a prototype with a tight deadline and while the Makerbot was running I was able to run out and see the The Osborne Family Spectacle of Dancing Lights on New York Street in Hollywood Studios with my mentor and the man who designed the entire show. It was a dazzling, blinding affar (over five million lights) that Disney once acquired when a family's zany enormous Christmas light display in Arkansas was shut down by the Supreme Court. The story is so good: "In 1986, Breezy asked her father if they could decorate their home in lights. Osborne complied, stringing 1000 lights around their home. "Each year after that, it got bigger and bigger," Osborne would later recall. Eventually Osborne purchased the two properties adjacent to his own and expanded the display into them.

By 1993, the display had over three million lights. The lights were extremely popular in both in Arkansas and around the world, as news crews often visited to film the display. Since their house was located on one of the busiest streets in Little Rock, it eventually caused severe traffic issues, and lots of complaints.

The display grew bigger every year, and by 1993, was lit for 35 days during the Christmas season, from sunset to about midnight every day. Six neighbors filed a lawsuit, saying traffic congestion made trips to the corner store take two hours, and they feared emergency vehicles could not get down the street. Osborne responded by adding three million more lights." I love those crazy Osbornes and am very happy that their insane display lives on in Florida.

Thursday I went to Gnireenigami's office for the first time behind Epcot to do some 3D scanning and saw their incredible workspace with a Peter Pan ship hanging from the ceiling and the kookiest, darlingest cubicles. I was invited to their Thanksgiving lunch which was an outdoor catered affair in hot Floridian November sun with tents turkey and ham and all the grand feast accoutrement and listened to a man talk about the process of making believable animatronics.

Friday I went to the Character Head Shop, where alll of the character heads are made for all the parks and I saw heads being sprayed in enormous spray booths, different molds, 3D-printed props, facial features being painted, fur being glued, huge rolls of foam, rows of character shoes, and so many things cast in resin, which I adore. Yesterday I went to the animatronics lab and saw all sorts of figures partially skinned, like Body Worlds with tubes and cables for vessels. The entire time I kept thinking about the countless people in the world who would love to be standing where I was at that very moment.

Broken Spanish

In Magic Kingdom today I had a long conversation with a small butch woman from Spain. We had been sitting on the train next to each other and when we both got off at Main Street station she asked me a question in Spanish and I attempted to respond and she told me about how she had just come from a trip to Miami and was going to be at Disney World for two days. She showed me her map of the park and asked for recommendations. I haven't spoken Spanish since 2010. At some point I realized I was definitely accidentally mixing in some Russian. I circled the good rides and attempted to describe them to her. Haunted Mansion... "Una casa con los muertos." Small World... "Agua...todos los paises...munecas." Journey of the Little Mermaid ... "la mujer...pez." Buzz Light year... "Autos... Puede jugar bang bang." She asked for food recommendations and I just circled something random because none of the food in Magic Kingdom is good. She told me about her restaurant in southern Spain near Portugal. In retrospect, I wonder if she was really telling me about her restaurant or if I came away with a completely different story because i didn't understand her both because of my incompetency and her regional Spanish accent. She asked about beer and I told her there's no beer in Magic Kingdom and she asked if it's because all the parents would get drunk and lose their children.

new york again

I went to New York; I visited my apartment and it made my heart ache to see it and smell it again and know that I haven't lived there for a long time. I met my subletter, who has somehow rearranged my belongings to make my room look cuter than I ever did. The weather was so cold, 37 degrees at night, and looking for my coats (which I never found and will absolutely have to find in December) I realized that I own so many things. How did I get so many things? I can't believe I have lived in New York for two years and that I came by so many objects that became my possessions, which I now have to take care of and be guardian to in addition to all my other things who live in California and Florida. I pulled sweater after sweater over my head, about five layers and then one of Weaver's scarves as a woolly cherry on top. On Friday I met a former Florida intern for lunch and then commenced drinking from 3pm to 3am, which started with office hours with Rios, then a romantic Bushwick pizza dinner with Rothy, gross cocktails at the Johnson's, and then dancing until I was falling asleep like a horse standing on the Tandem dance floor. I was all brunch and hang over Saturday until I went out again that night. 

the cutest elsa in the land

lives in san diego, ca