Hello, World! I'm an adult?

Okay folks, it's been a while, but here's what's been up, bullet-point style:

• I'm currently living in Incline Village, NV for the summer, working at the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival.  I'm really enjoying myself, and I've met some cool people.  I've been down to San Francisco a few times, I hiked up Mt. Rose (between Reno and Incline Village), and I finally broke down and bought an Xbox360.  
• I finally joined the ranks of smartphone users.  Staying with Verizon, I got a Droid.   It's pretty awesome.
• I DIDN'T get the job at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago that I was interviewing for.
• I DID get a job with Royal Caribbean, most likely starting in 2011.  
• I DID get temporary overhire work at the Goodman on their fall musical, Candide.  
• I will be moving to Chicago temporarily so that I can start to build a name for myself before I embark on my Royal Caribbean contract. 
• I'm finally getting back to work with my dramatic writing, working on my new musical about a young man growing up in NYC dealing with substance abuse and schizophrenia / dissociative identity disorder.  

I'm sure you were all expecting this (all two or three people who read my blog), so, here's the rub: 

I'M ON A BOAT

Aww shit, get your towels ready it's about to go down (shorty, yeah)
Everybody in the place hit the fucking deck (shorty, yeah)
But stay on your motherfucking toes
We running this, let's go

I'm on a boat (I'm on a boat)
I'm on a boat (I'm on a boat)
Everybody look at me 'cause I'm sailing on a boat (sailing on a boat)
I'm on a boat (I'm on a boat)
I'm on a boat
Take a good hard look at the motherfucking boat (boat, yeah)

I'm on a boat motherfucker take a look at me
Straight floating on a boat on the deep blue sea
Busting five knots, wind whipping at my coat
You can't stop me motherfucker cause I'm on a boat

Take a picture, trick (trick)
I'm on a boat, bitch (bitch)
We drinking Santana champ,
Cause it's so crisp (crisp)
I got my swim trunks
And my flippie-floppies
I'm flipping burgers, you at Kinko's
Straight flipping copies

I'm riding on a dolphin, doing flips and shit
The dolphin's splashing, getting everybody all wet
But this ain't Seaworld, this is real as it gets
I'm on a boat, motherfucker, don't you ever forget

I'm on a boat and
It's going fast and
I got a nautical themed
pashmina afghan
I'm the king of the world
On a boat like Leo
If you're on the shore,
then you're sure not me-oh

Get the fuck up, this boat is REAL!!!

Fuck land, I'm on a boat, motherfucker (motherfucker)
Fuck trees, I climb buoys, motherfucker (motherfucker)
I'm on the deck with my boys, motherfucker (yeah)
This boat engine make noise, motherfucker

Hey ma, if you could see me now (see me now)
Arms spread wide on the starboard bow (starboard bow)
Gonna fly this boat to the moon somehow (moon somehow)
Like Kevin Garnett, anything is possible

Yeah, never thought I'd be on a boat
It's a big blue watery road (yeah)
Poseidon
Look at me, oh (all hands on deck)

Never thought I'd see the day
When a big boat coming my way
Believe me when I say
I fucked a mermaid

I'm on a boat
I'm on a boat
Everybody look at me 'cause I'm sailing on a boat (woaah)
I'm on a boat
I'm on a boat
Take a good hard look at the mothafuckin' boat (sha-sha-shorty, shorty, yeah)

_____________

I hope you all enjoyed that.  Just think of me excitedly / drunkenly singing it, and you'll get the picture.  

Speaking of pictures:

Goodbye College

After I finished my final exam in French 107, I stepped outside onto the steps of Memorial Hall and turned on some music on my ipod.  I decided that it would be a good idea to take my shoes off and walk straight up the Green on the grass to Delaware Ave, a sort of personal symbolic farewell gesture.  Memorial was where my first college class met 6 years ago, and now it's where I finished.  And it feels pretty damn good.

Checking In, a Week Without Facebook

Hello again friends.  It's been a week since I probably lost contact with you.  My past week without a facebook account has been both productive and fruitful, mostly for my mental state.

I've recently gone into what I call "Zen master" mode.  I had an eye-opening realization this past week: life is beautiful simply because it is life.  The fact that you are having experiences, both good and bad, makes life beautiful and worth living.  You are completely in control of your own happiness and feelings.  If you don't want something to make you feel a certain way, then just don't let it.  If you can remember that in all situations that life is beautiful because you're living it, no matter what hardship or strife, you are one step closer to true happiness and nirvana.

Now, if we factor in the "human factor", we can see that this is a very high goal to strive for.  Some would say that Man is beautiful because he is flawed, or because he can be aware of his flaws.  I argue that Man is beautiful because he can realize that his flaws are still beautiful.  For example: I was recently counseling a friend with some relationship/dating advice.  He was upset over something that could possibly have been nothing, but it could also have been interpreted as frustrating and telling about how the girl felt about him.  Instead of traditional advice, I posed this question to him: "People are complicated.  Are you prepared to deal with that?"  This question opened his eyes and made him realize that he need not worry over small things or potentialities.  Things can go well, and things can go poorly, but they can always be beautiful experiences no matter what happens.  Living is beautiful, no matter what.

Switching gears:

I'm sitting in the Scrounge here in my last full week of classes at 9 AM while writing this post, and I'm amazed at the massive line for Dunkin' Donuts.  I know the line is probably out the door right now at Newark Deli and Bagel.  People really like coffee, bagels, and breakfast sandwiches.  On one hand, I'm amazed that coffee shops ever fail to stay open, but on the other hand, it really speaks volumes about the power of combining  manipulative marketing and low prices on today's American consumerist society.  Dunkin' Donuts doesn't really make good coffee.  Because I only drink coffee black, I realize what coffee actually tastes like.  I have no problem with people who use copious amounts of milk, cream, or sugar in their coffee, but they aren't really good judges of who has good coffee.  Caffeine addiction aside, people flock to the staple coffee and breakfast because they don't care how their coffee tastes, and because of the advertisements, although none of them would ever admit it.  As a generally economically conscious American, I'm a big supporter of buying local and sustainable.  Dunkin' Donuts, per customer served, probably has a higher level of sustainability than Newark Deli and Bagel, since NBD uses Styrofoam cups and take-out containers for their food.  Dunkin seems to use mostly recycled paper and plastic for their cups and wrappings, and they don't use styrofoam for anything.  However, their coffee is terrible, and I've heard that their food isn't great either.  The bagels are only so-so.  Rant over.

That's all for now.   Maybe more once it really sinks in that this is my last week of college.

R.I.P. Facebook, Hello Life

Today, I permanently deleted my facebook account.  So far, it's been a very liberating experience.  No longer do I come home from work(at which I had been on facebook for hours) and sit on facebook instead of being productive.  I came home from dinner, had a snack, changed over my laundry, and then did some reading and smoked the hookah on the balcony with Matt.  Deleting my facebook account is something that I've wanted to do for quite some time, but the catalyst today was this blog post that I saw on digg.com today:

http://www.rocket.ly/home/2010/4/26/top-ten-reasons-you-should-quit-facebook.html

While I agree with this blogger's stance on facebook's lack of ethics, the post really only acted as a catalyst, fanning the flames of my already burning desires to do away with facebook from my life.  I spent entirely too much time on facebook, and I cared entirely too much about other peoples' perceptions of me on facebook.  The one thing that I will miss out on is the chance to "network" online with other theater professionals, but.... NEWS FLASH ::: The world went 'round before facebook ever existed, and my world will continue to turn now without it.  

I've decided I need to spend more time living my life instead of projecting my life onto others via social networking.  I'm going to continue to use Twitter, because the character limit and sheer stupidity of the majority of its user-base severely limits my ability and desire to project myself onto other people.  Coupled with my blog here, I'm pretty sure that I'll obtain a healthy dose of internet socializing while not allowing myself to get sucked in or carried away.  Life needs to be about life, not about facebook, or how other people perceive you (especially on the internet).  I already feel like I am spending my free time better, and it's only been roughly 10 hours since I deleted my account.

Now, on to more fun matters.  I've made it a daily task to check the theatre job websites at around noon when the new listings arrive each weekday.  In fact, on weekends, very often I am sad that I can't compulsively look for any openings for audio positions.  I've been sending out plenty of resumes, cover letters, and applications, and I have a feeling that it will pay off for me soon.  Staying in Delaware wouldn't be the end of the world, but it's time to get out.

However, when I'm working on productions like this on(http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2010305020011) it becomes harder to say goodbye to what I recognize as the place where I am beginning my professional career.  The REP's production of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is quite possibly the best production of the year, and even though there isn't very much sound from a board operator's perspective, I still find great joy in providing my services to the production in making sure that the communications and monitoring systems are up and running for each performance.  Do yourself a favor and come see it if you are around or can get to Delaware easily.

Ummm, Dear Diary, that's all for now.  Whatever.

Feel Free to Hate Me, But............

I started watching Lost.  I KNOW, I KNOW, in my last post I said that I was gonna spend my free time learning AutoCAD and retroactively drafting sound system block diagrams.

So far, I'm 7 episodes into the 2nd season, and I'm sort of hooked.  Go ahead and judge me if you want, but so far there are very few things that I don't like about it.
List of Lost Dislikes so far:

• Repeated line: "DON'T TELL ME WHAT I CAN AND CAN'T DO!!!"
• The presence of Michelle Rodriguez.  I hate her so much.
• The WAY throw-back "Previously on Lost" bits before every episode.  Sometimes they go as far as 20 episodes back, and it's just really frustrating to watch.  
• If the characters just came out and said what they meant, so many problems could have been avoided that were caused by lack of communication.  I know this is one of the central themes of the show, but it's still annoying to watch. 

Positive things:

• I don't have the major issue that I thought I would with the number of cliff-hanging endings of episodes.  I thought it would feel like reading The DaVinci Code, where each chapter cliff-hung (is that a word?) the reader to keep them reading onto the next page.  I actually thing that Lost aggressively went against the grain of cliff-hanging endings (at least in the first season).  
• There have only been a few "OH HOLY SHIT" moments *so far*.  I know that more come later in the show, but I thought that I would be bombarded by "OH SHIT" moments from the get-go, and I haven't been, so that's good.
• I also thought I would hate the absurd number of flashbacks and longer back-story scenes.  I know that they are important to the development of the story, and I thought that I would hate them.
• I never thought I would say this, but J.J. Abrams has created really interesting complex characters that play very well off each other.  Through the flashbacks, we see the characters both their best and worst, and we get to know them inside and out.  I'm intrigued
• The acting is at times quite good.  

I am gonna keep watching during my downtime at work, and continue to learn AutoCAD when I have my second monitor at home.

Like I said, go ahead and judge me, but I was really curious to see what all the fuss was about, and it sucked me in.

School is fun, but drafting is more fun.

Okay, so on top of finishing up with school and exercising, I've resolved to take some time to really hammer out my portfolio before the summer comes.  I am going back to the basics with AutoCAD and Vectorworks in order to make sure that I can provide Lake Tahoe Shakes with paperwork that done in the USITT graphics standard.  I also want to back up and provide myself with some more accurate paperwork for shows that I've worked on previously, like stuff from Heritage and my designs from last spring.  I'm already familiar enough with AutoCAD and Vectorworks to make lines and text and arrange them how I want, but the internets have granted me a gift of an AutoCAD 2010 training manual, so I think I'll start with that.

The urgent need for a portfolio with better paperwork has arisen from the idea that I might actually want to apply to grad school in the next few years, and I will need an accurate portfolio.  Also, any bigger jobs that I could be looking at (or higher profile employers) will probably not be too impressed with what I have thrown together at this point.  So, here are the goals for my portfolio:

• Create packages as complete as possible for each production that I've worked on so far, including block diagrams, equipment lists, ground plans w/ speaker placement, and rack diagrams.
• Create a website that will allow me to showcase my work.
• Set a working standard for myself that complies with USITT standards and my own high personal standards in order to further my career.
• Complete Portfolio as far back as last summer by the beginning of June, including audio mix-downs of LSOP performance.  

As someone who works in a theater program where sound is not at the forefront monetarily or artistically (which is not to say it's a poor program, we really do produce great theater), I can fully appreciate (though not first-hand) coming into a new job and getting strong paperwork and information from the previous sound team.  It makes everyone's life easier, and it showcases the engineer's organization and planning skills.

So, that's my plan.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't write this in order to procrastinate doing homework.  Life is hard.  Blah blah blah.

Updatez

So.  I took a job as Sound Engineer for the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival this summer, so I'll finally be able to take my cross-country road trip.  I'm hella excited.  I'll get to visit Kyle in San Francisco several times over the summer, see Phish in Berkeley, and do my drive down the California coast before returning back East in September (still pending future employment chances outside of DE).  I'll be the sound engineer for The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), mixing the show's area mics (it's an outdoor theater), and assisting on their live music series.

After that... who know...?

The ultimate goal is to get a job on a tour, but if I don't get that (or anything else) I'm prepared to move to NYC and start my life and career there.

The job search so far hasn't been a complete failure.  I've established rapport with companies who didn't have the spots for me this season, and I've made some good contacts.  Yay.  I also keep applying for crazy jobs that I'll never get like Franco Dragone Entertainment Group and Cirque du Soleil.  Maybe someday...

Also, as someone who has grown up with video games, works in an artistic field, and has studied film as art academically, I found this article by Roger Ebert very interesting.

Video Games Can Never Be Art

Enjoy.  I'm a relatively large Roger Ebert fan, but I have to disagree with him here.

Management Oversight Provided by our Boss, Mr. Andrew Ferry

Over the last 6 months or so, I have rekindled my love of public radio.  This fall while living at home, I often found myself with little to do, so I started backwards through episodes of This American Life.  I got to around mid-2002 before I got sidetracked by real life, but every single week I look forward to the new episode.  It really makes my Monday mornings far more entertaining than most.  This morning was no exception, as I got home from classes, made tea and oatmeal, and put away some of the new additions to the kitchen (dishes, cups, etc).  I love the stories, and I even love the correspondants and hosts of the show. I also love another show.  RadioLab.  It's a lot like This American Life, but it's completely science related stories.

****BEGIN SHAMELESS PLUG****

If you've never listened to This American Life or RadioLab, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do yourself a favor and listen to an episode or two.  Feel free to turn it on while you are doing chores or other idle tasks, but I warn that you'll be sucked in and forget about the chores for the duration of the hour.  Please listen and support public radio.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/
http://www.radiolab.org/

Please give it a listen; you'll be glad you did.

****END SHAMELESS PLUG****

Completely shifting gears here, but I know that a lot of people who potentially might someday read this nonsensical blog might be aware that I am not really a morning person.  I almost got fired from a summer job when I was 18 from the middle school that I attended (supervised by a long-time family friend) because of chronic lateness.  I was a summer maintenance worker, and I had to be at work at 7AM.  (I had to resist the impulse to use the phrase "call time," but I don't really think that phrase is applicable outside the world of theater.)  I got fired from a sunglasses store by ANOTHER long-time family friend due to chronic lateness (the last straw when I showed up 45 minutes late to open the store).  However, I have made a tectonic shift in my attitude towards mornings as of late.  This semester (MY LAST SEMESTER), I have an 8AM French class.  It's really not so bad; it's taught by a very relaxed graduate student, and I already sort of took this class once before (embarrassing...).  After that, I have a really boring American History post-Civil War lecture class that is extremely boring but easy.  Also, I get up and go for a short run in the morning before class, so I'm usually up and moving about by 7.  After all of this, I usually get home around 10 or 10:15AM.  I sit down and eat a short breakfast/lunch/whatever meal, and then I usually have a very strangely large amount of time before I have anything else to do.  In my past years of college, I would have done any number of things:

A.) I wouldn't even be awake yet at this hour, so I'd continue to sleep.
B.) I would go back to sleep until around 4 in the afternoon.
C.) I would play video games or dick around on the internet (which, to be fair, I still do occasionally).
D.) I would eat anything I could find in the fridge or freezer just to pass the time, or sit in the dining hall for 45 minutes or so, going back for seconds and thirds.

However, permanently moving out of my parents' house has made me feel much more like an adult.  When I get home from class, I tend to think, "Hey, maybe I should clean up a bit, it's getting a bit messy,"which is something that I would think in the past after class, but the adolescent part of my brain would pop up and shout, "No, don't waste your time cleaning!  You should be doing things that you enjoy in your free time!"  This seems like a great idea sometimes, but as I've experienced first-hand, it can certainly lead to extreme procrastination, poor sleep schedules, failure of classes, and extreme amounts of wasted money and time.  However, when this semester started, something just sort of clicked in my head.  "Hey, you're an adult now!  You have things to manage in your life!  You better do it!"  I better do it.  Or else.

Stay tuned for two stories that have been inspired by two of my short anecdotes that I mentioned in this post: my summer job as a maintenance worker after failing out of school my freshman year, and my room when I lived in Kent, the product of adolescent laziness.

Things that have happened. to me. recently. maybe.

I'll just leave this right here...

There.  It's out of my system.  I feel better now.

So.  I went to see Avatar with Erinn.  It was... surprisingly entertaining.  Erinn was seeing it for the third time, but the first time in true IMAX.  I was amazed by how quickly I was immersed in the terrible story.  The 3D effects were really very amazing.  I want to see it again.  Maybe on drugs.  Just kidding(?)

The State of the Union address was uneventful.  I would have rather watched Jersey Shore.  No, seriously.

No, I'm kidding.  It was on in the background while I ate produce and played video games and talked about the Master Cleanse with Lauren and other people.  I am always entertained by the idiots like Chris Matthews and other stupid pundits and TV journalists who say ridiculous things like "I forgot he was black".  It's so painful to watch, yet so much fun to realize that people listen to these idiots as if they were speaking fact and not opinion.  From what I gathered, the speech itself mostly entailed Obama criticizing people and outlining some plans or something.  I'm not even sure.  Does that make me a bad person because I was more interested in making fun of pundits than listening to the speech itself?

Anyway, I'm currently sitting in tech doing what Erinn calls "sitting around for credit."  It's a bit different than my normal "sitting around getting paid" that I usually do.  However, this show apparently runs around 4.5 hours.  With no set.  Fun.  It does have some pretty awesome costumes, makeup, and masks. If you like Shakespeare and good acting from our graduate students, you should come see it.  If you like plays that are short and action packed, (ACTION PLAYS!!!!) maybe it's not for you.  You should come though.  Please.  Thanks.  The more shows you come to, the more likely it is that I make money eventually.

We're about to get hit with another snow storm thing tonight.  I shall, as per usual, make an epic journey into the center of New Jersey.

Now that we're approx. 15 pages into this play through 4 hours of tech, it's time for dinner.  Adios friends.

On Citrus, Lunch-boxes, and other foodly things.

I'd just like to take a moment out of my day to talk about the glory of fruit and the beauty of a lunch-box.

Erinn recently introduced me to the delicious pummelo, a large bigger-than-a-grapefruit-sized yellow-green beast of a citrus fruit that has captivated me like none other.

As Erinn so aptly puts it, "The pummelo tastes like what you'd think flowers should taste like."  It's a very light taste, but what makes it so much fun is the extreme effort that it takes to actually cut it and eat it.  After looking at some of these images of cut pummelos, I feel like we might have been going about it the wrong way.

Here's how we were peeling and eating it.

1. Cut a small X into the top of the pummelo's skin to give you a place to start peeling.
2. Peel the 1-2 inch thick skin off all the way around with your hands until what you are holding remotely resembles a snowball made of pulp and membranes.
3. Randomly stick your knife into the pummelo and attempt to seperate it into two halves.
4. Peel back the membranes that hold the actual edible fruit bits apart deep within the pummelo.
5. Pick apart and eat as if you were a monkey grooming another monkey.

As you can guess, this method gets quite messy pretty fast.  In about 1 minute on the internet googling "pummelo" I came across this.  The proper way to peel and eat a pummelo.  Even though, somehow, I am the worst out of the group at peeling the pummelo in our own "special" way, I thought our makeshift pummelo peeling method seemed a bit dicey.  Maybe we will resolve to try a more traditional method the next time a pummelo rolls into Erinn's apartment.

Let us now turn to the opposite side of the citrus spectrum in terms of size.  This morning, while at the Newark Natrual Foods Co-Op buying toothpaste, I stumbled upon a fruit that I feel some sort of strange connection with, dating back to before I can remember.  I, for some reason, have always loved kumquats, the tiny bite-size relatives of the orange.

These things are just so much fun to eat, mostly because, unlike the fucking crazy 2 inch thick skin of the pummelo, you can just eat it whole: skin and all.  You have to spit out the pesky seeds, but part of me greatly prefers the easy access style of the kumquat.

The weird part is that for the life of me, I can't remember where I developed my affinity for kumquats.  I think it was from some children's song, or television show; some lost relic of my childhood that's been pushed out by all the mindless online gaming and alcohol that I've taken in over the years.  I hope that I can eventually put my finger on exactly what sparked my kumquat obsession.  I can accurately pinpoint when I stopped eating kumquats in my childhood; it most likely has something to do with me eating them in lower/middle school, when kids giggled uncontrollably when you said stuff like "do it" and "come here".  I'm sure the word "kumquat" drew some fire, and I'm sure I stopped bringing them into school in order to quell the harassment.

All this talk of food is particularly relevant because I have just acquired a new lunchbox.  Having recently moved out, I decided that I needed a good way to save money at work by bringing food in from home, so I settled on this kickass bento style lunch-box thing.  It has 4 bowls that stack up inside a thermos-thingy, and it keeps your food warm/cold for hours.

Technically it's called:

Zojirushi Mr. Bento Stainless-Steel lined Lunch Jar

I have had good luck with it so far.  It's kept noodles, rice, and chili warm, and it's kept fresh veggies fresh all day.  Yay.  Here's a picture of my first time using it at work:

Crappy camera phone picture, but cool just the same.

I never know how to end blog posts without making them sound all "Dear Diary", so here's the end of this post.

That is all.

Greetings, internet.

Greetings, internet.

This Christmas, I went to Colorado to ski.  While I was there, it made me think quite a bit about what the future holds.  There is a part of me that wants nothing more than to get the fuck out of here and live in the mountains, working in some simple job at a ski resort as a lift operator, or restoring hiking trails somewhere, or something like that.  There were so many people in Colorado who were young that seemed extremely happy with their lives.  Maybe it was their dream to run the lifts in Steamboat.  Maybe it was their dream to cure cancer or contribute something in the more traditional sense.  I couldn't really tell.  I've always thought one must follow his or her dream to be truly happy.  I am beginning to see that's not the case.

The ultimately important conclusion is that the people/workers in Colorado were happy then, in that moment, doing what they were doing.  Happiness in existing.  There is something extremely basic and extremely beautiful in that idea.  More people need to find the happiness in their everyday lives instead of dwelling on the bullshit that happens.  That said, if I actually start writing in this blog again, I'm sure I'll use it to complain about all the fucking nonsense that happens to me as I finish this final semester.

This idea of happiness in existing every day made me realize why I enjoy theater.  I have always seen in art a great importance, but I believe that theater has a unique chance to speak to people and relate the plays and narratives on stage to their own stories in their own lives.  Good theater can speak to so many different kinds of people on so many levels, but because it is different every time it is performed, only the great theater rings in the minds of the audience.  It's not like a painting or a movie or a song that you can go back and get literally the exact same experience with the work.  That is, it is an identical piece of art.  Nothing within the artwork has changed.  Theater, on the other hand, is completely different every single night, every single performance.  When you go see a play, it's a 100% unique experience that you will never experience again.  One can see how this can be both a gift and a curse for theater as an art form.  Shows come and go very quickly because it takes a very special quality of work to stay with the average audience member for a long period of time, and even more to make him or her want to return to see the same show again.  However, it makes revivals and remounted productions very interesting for the audience member.

Okay, you might be wondering, "What the fuck does this have to do with the idea of happiness in existence and Colorado and people who operate ski lifts???"

The interesting dynamic of a different performance every night makes it very enjoyable for the performers.  Actors/stage managers/technicians often are asked, "How can you run the same show over and over again!"  It doesn't really occur to them that in good theater, it offers a completely different artistic dynamic every single night.  Especially in the world of sound, the temperature and liveliness of the audience each night directly affects the way you mix the show.

Even as I sit in tech for a play as the board operator, typing this blog, I can still appreciate the idea that each night feels different, and in turn offers a different experience completely dependent on the character of the audience that evening.  I can't think of a better job than facilitating such a unique, important art form.  As a sound person, I have a lot of responsibility in making sure that all the backstage elements come together (i.e. setting up/maintaining the communication system, video feeds, etc).  I feel like there are plenty of people in theater who don't really enjoy that aspect of it.  I, however, embrace the idea that I am using technology to facilitate art, and I like to believe that I make every effort to approach what most would call the tedious uninteresting tasks with the patience and grace of the artists that I am supporting.

Maybe that's why the people in Colorado were so happy.  Maybe they realize that they were facilitating the enjoyment of all the guests on their vacations.  I could certainly find happiness in existing in that type of environment.