jkatkina

I'm feeling more myself today, the last day of my three-week unpaid holiday (lol), which I'm going to stubbornly take as a good omen. I am afraid of the change going back to working full time will wreak, but I am firmly putting that fear aside for now. I'm sitting on a sunny hillside listening to some plinky guitar music and all is well in the soft animal of my body.

Dreamwidth in particular is where I've been coming to get away from the rest of social media and let my sphere shrink for a bit when I need that. It's impossible to not want to be involved in trying to right the racist wrongs currently happening -- to somehow be supporting, rallying, mourning, donating, amplifying voices of colour. I do my best. I've been trying to engage with my more racist relatives on Facebook when they post bullshit "Jesus sacrificed himself because ALL lives matter!!!" memes. I haven't been out to a physical protest here in Vancouver and am beginning to realize that may not be a way I can contribute, at least not regularly, which means trying to triage what kind of online "help" actually helps and what's just privileged noise, and then executing on what I can. It's a lot. It needs doing.

But I may not post a lot about it here. At least the outward work. I'm trying to dig inwards, too, which does fit into the wheelhouse of this blog being unrepentant navel-gazey.

Anyways, we had DnD yesterday, and everyone in our group seemed to need it. Marla is coming over again today since the seal has been broken, and I'm glad of it. She's gone near full nocturnal and apparently stopped eating for three days last week, and I will not stand for this. She will get fed, she will get a bit of social contact, and if she feels like it she will get some things off of her chest. Honestly I wish we could have her just come stay here for a bit so we could keep an eye on her and help out, but I'm not sure where we'd stash her if she's sleeping in the day and I need to use my office for work.

Okay, so — you know how TL and I ran into a group of people who know someone we used to live with?

I’m waiting for the third in this series, because everything happens in threes.

The second requires a bit of explanation.

I work at an animation studio. It is, perhaps literally, a dream job of mine. This is a studio a friend of mine used to work at before they had two kids in quick succession and had to take on full-time childcare duties. I got to know how cool this studio was through them, mostly; they invited TL and I to the 5 Second Day shorts screening. It blew me the hell away. (Seriously check out that link.)

Fast forward four years and I’ve managed to get a job at this studio, and my first 5-second day rolls around. Now, this is a big studio, near 300 people split between a couple of locations, so six months in I’ve only really met a fraction of the people. The animation community in Vancouver is also deeply incestuous — people cycle between the several animation studios here constantly, based on what projects they fit with and which studios they love best. So I definitely know people who know people who work here, but I hadn’t really come across any yet.

So I figure, my first 5-second day, I’m a painter and not an animator, I’ll take it easy and help with someone else’s project. A rando puts up a cool DnD-based project up on the company facebook, and I ping them, asking if they need another painter. They say yes, and I go to pick up whatever needs painting.

This Sunday, we had the first meeting of our DnD group in about a month and a half, and we get to talking. Now, an FX animator friend of ours from school is part of this group, and we get to talking. I mention 5-second day; she asks what I’m doing.

I say I’m working with a team, she asks who. I stumble over the slightly unfamiliar name of the project lead, and she grimaces and says his name.

This person is her ex. That she had talked to us extensively about when they broke up and she was trying to deal with the fallout. Who did her pretty dirty, and basically just sounded like a really shitty person. And I’ve found myself working on his project.

>8U gdi

Hey, universe. Can the next one of these be someone who won’t make me feel vaguely dirty by association, please?

Went to get ramen for lunch with a coworker today, a good dude who's actually around my age amongst all the recent-grad babies that surround us. This is progress: I am Pretty Bad with being social on my own, which is one part palm-sweating social anxiety and one part being really self-sufficient and comfortable on my own, but I have decided that I don't want another workplace where I know no one and no one knows me, so damn it, I am making friends.

There was a post going around the blue hellsite a while ago about friending people at work, as filtered through the lens of "humans will pack-bond with anything". It was a fascinating take, and rung much more true than any other take I've seen. The basic premise was that, for those of us more inclined towards self-sufficiency, treat making friends at work like any other small maintenance task: make time for it, engage in it mindfully, have a strategy for understanding the cues and mores. Ultimately at some point, if you work in a company, there'll come a day when you'll need help, or you'll be able to offer help, so start thinking about that before you need it.

And honestly, I really like the kind of people I'm encountering at the studio? Animators are good people. The Christmas party was a gosh darn tiki-flavoured delight. They do barbeques on Fridays in the summer. I want these people as my friends.

I feel pretty optimistic about it. There's a really interesting thing that seems to happen in a city with multiple animation studios -- people move very fluidly between the big studios, based on what projects are going on at which studio. People cycle through and circle back. A coworker I'd just started forming a connection to just left to go be a head animator for the next season of Rick and Morty, but before he left, he said, "I'll see you when I'm back. As soon as this season is over, I'm coming back to [studio I work at]." Like it ain't no thing, right?

It feels weirdly cozy, like, the longer you're in the industry, the more you know you'll have friends in any studio you jump ship to. I love it.

Anyhow, lunch with Shea was nice. We're both sort of gunning to climb the ladder; he wants to get into storyboarding, I want to be doing colour keys or be a team lead on something. I told him we'd have lunch together again in ten years and delight in our success stories.

It's a good start.