#ducktrails

On Monday and Tuesday, I was finishing up shooting the short film of the idiotic director. I dislike her immensely, but I loved everyone else on the crew. I would recommend working with them. They’re all wonderful and professional except her, but the best part about the experience was that I still had fun. I thought to myself, You know, if this is the worst sort of day I have on the job, I would still be immensely happy. And I’ve always struggled a bit with the concept of being happy at work because I don’t understand how anyone could not be happy onstage or onset. But I think what this experience gave me was perspective—not everyone likes long hours and being tired and uncomfortable and doing the same thing over and over again and having to wait for lights and camera and sound and everything else. But I do. Oh yeah, and we got to set something on fire in the LA river… and then be very very careful about cleaning up the mess and making sure no embers remained, of course.

And then, I did something that some have described as Herculean. In a total of 51 hours—from 6am on Wednesday morning to 9am on Friday morning—I drove from Los Angeles, California to Eugene, Oregon, moved my friend out of her apartment, and drove back down. I attempted to sort of chronicle my journey on twitter, a duty which my friend took over on the way back, so there are actually some pretty cool photos.

The drive up was fairly quick – a mere 14 hours. But here’s the kicker—just after San Francisco, my air conditioning died. Totally dead. Very gone.

Now, factor that into your estimation of my actions. I drove 8 hours in the heat on Wednesday afternoon to get to Eugene by 8pm. The temperature was consistently above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. I think it dropped to 98 maybe once.

So, the next thing you need to know to understand this Herculean effort is that I have inherited a disease from my mother called erythromelalgia. You can google it. It hasn’t progressed very far in me, but still, I don’t do very well in the heat. By the time I got there, my feet were tingling, and my palms were hot and I felt nauseous and like I was going to pass out. Lucky me.

So, the way I saw it, I had a decision to make—how was I going to make it back down to California. Driving all 14 hours during the day was impossible. The logical alternative was to drive at night, when I knew I could at least keep my potentially-neurologically-numbing symptoms down. My friend reluctantly agreed. I didn’t give her a choice because I didn’t have one. So, fast forward 16 hours. I’m relatively well-rested, it’s 1pm, and we’re about ready to go, thinking that we’ll get home at something like 3 in the morning.

We had some fun. We made duck noises. It was good. And it was also bad. There were no icepacks at the local grocery store, so we made do with some frozen vegetables, and everything smelled like spinach and broccoli and green beans.

But by the time we stopped in San Francisco for something to eat and to say “hi” to my friend’s aunt, it was already 2 in the morning. I was forced to recalculate, but still decided that driving through would be the best idea. I should probably also mention at this point that I had a reason and a deadline to be home, which was why we didn’t take the trip in short spurts at night.  

At around 6am, I’m actually hungry, having eaten hardly anything in the last twenty-four hours because I was nauseous from the heat. So we stop and get breakfast at a Denny’s a couple hours away from home.