Back in Bend

My trip home from LA was eventful. I visited Sleepy Molly at Hermosa Beach, the highlight of which was a restaurant named Sharkeez and its unlimited mimosas/chips and salsa bar that comes with every breakfast purchase. What a steal! Otherwise, Molly slept... a lot. And so the moniker "Sleepy Molly" was birthed. Fun times.

San Francisco was super fun, as my dear friends Simone and Katelyn went out of their way to ensure a dull moment never dampened our good spirits. Basically, this meant watching a lot of LOST, drinking a lot of cheap beer, and laughing over inanities (yes... it's a noun. Look it up! [I had to]). Although our attempt to sneak at least two of the three of us into a showing of District 9 backfired, and the weather insisted on remaining cold and windy for my entire four-day visit, we took to the streets every night like the brave vagrants we (read: Simone) sometimes (read: often) resemble(s), and I couldn't be happier about the cavalcade of poor choices that made each sojourn at least slightly memorable.

Driving into Oregon made my Thursday afternoon - minus the speeding ticket. I love trees! And mountains! And toothless Klamath Falls gas station attendants! And single lane highways! And Gilchrist... oh Christ, Gilchrist! Since my return, I've pretty much just been staring out my bedroom windows at the trees and mountains and soaking it all up. Also, I finally went and paid to see District 9, which was both incredibly intense and violent. A must see!

Today's my 22nd birthday. I don't know why I'm sitting here updating my blog, but it seemed pertinent. My parents took me out to breakfast at Alpenglow. I'd like the record to show that neither wished me happy birthday until the second time they saw me this morning... I mean, I know I'm not supposed to let little shit like that get me down on such an awesome day, but who the hell doesn't wish someone a happy birthday (especially when that someone is their own son!), like, the second they see them?! Strange...

Otherwise, Disneyland kicked ass. I'm still retrospecting the whole thing, but I think for now I'd just like to say it was a trip and a half. Maybe even a trip and three-quarters.

It's All Happening

So I'm halfway packed and the apartment's halfway cleaned, which is halfway closer to hitting the road than I expected to be from the vantage point of earlier this morning. Leaving Anaheim kind of snuck up on me, like a thief in the night. As some of you may recall, my return to the US from Dunedin arrived after a several week countdown, and I was more or less ready to get the hell out of New Zealand (great as it was). This time, though, I have to say goodbye to Disneyland, which is always rough. When I walk out of work tonight and slip through the Cast-Members-only secret entrance, it'll be for my last time.

Maybe.

Yesterday was unofficially my "last," and by that I mean some of the good friends I've made here called in sick so we could head to Universal Studios for a taping of the Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien, followed by running wild in Disneyland with a fistful of Readmission Passes (what you get when a ride breaks down and you're on it, which basically entitles your group to front-of-the-line status on any attraction of your choice, and what Attractions Cast Members pretty much get for free when they collect them from the sweaty clutches of greedy tourists during work). The line for Conan spanned 3.5 hours of my life, necessitated the consumption of 2.5 slices of pepperoni pizza, and allowed for a Scarlett Johansson sighting. The show was incredible; I sat right behind Max Weinberg and discovered what Conan actually sips from his coffee cup. Not water. Not coffee. But Diet Coke. Robin Williams as the first guest pretty much stole the show. Guy's crazy.

And Disneyland, as always, was magical. There really is no place else on Earth where you can wander through an utterly convincing jungle outpost and still hear the cacophony of Fantasmic entertaining 7,000 guests just down the path.


I'm not sure how any other job could ever manage to stack up against this one. Seriously. Office cubicle? Say what now?

Tonight's my last Splash shift. When I clock out at 12:30, I need to return my costume, my ID card, and my parking pass. I'll no longer be in the system. Am I okay with this? I suppose so. But the walk out is going to be a bit tragic. Tomorrow after my housing inspection I'm headed to Hermosa Beach for a day, then up to San Francisco for several more to visit Simone. Wohoo! I plan on being back in Bend around August 20 or 21, depending. Also, I know this last post kind of fell flat past the first few sentences, but I've got to get to work!




Narrator's voice: And so it was... the end of his Great Disneyland Adventure.

For Fellow LOST Fans - "Mysteries of the Universe"

These videos complement certain elements of the [best show on] television, LOST, particularly the DHARMA Initiative. A new installment will be released every month until Season Six's premiere in January. They're effectively creepy. Watch in order!

Part 2:


Part 1:

Nine Days Left

It's 2:44 p.m. on Friday, August 7th. I'm in gym clothes. I did not go to the gym.

Work looms - the 4:30-1:00 shift (which, I just realized, is nothing I should complain about to relatives, given we all know the ugly, late-night backside of a front desk counter) - and I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. On one hand, I do enjoy walking lost and found goods to the drop box at Main Street's Fire Department after closing; on the other... well, there really is no other. I fucking work at Disneyland!

I don't know what else. Yesterday a simple ride stop for a lap-sitter escalated when a girl split her head open during the evacuation, a buxom woman dropped her Juicy Couture sunglasses into the flume, and Yours Truly discovered a Brer Rabbit animatronic hydraulic fluid leak, which necessitated the help of maintenance. We were down for two hours, all because some crazy dad wouldn't keep his kid by his side.

And I also attended a two-hour Imagineer lecture on the current California Adventure expansion and makeover, up to year 2014. I'm contractually obligated not to say anything about it, except that it was [insert appropriate adjective here] (which is exactly what the confidentiality papers I signed instructed me to write, not an attempt at humor... I don't think bracketed statements are funny).

I'll post again before I leave. For now, though, this is what you get. Like you're all so disappointed.

Me In Costume

I'm only sharing this because I'm in one of those moods. I took it with the intent of cropping it into a Splash Mountain photo, but that turned out to be way difficult/I don't really have the time, so...

Picking My Nose and Staring Out the Window...

... Is NOT what I was doing when I came up with the title for this blog post. At any rate, the last week has really been insane. My good friends Bird, Caitlyn, Sarah, and Ben all came to visit me and run around Disneyland during the same two day span, so my 48 hour break from Splash Mountain was spent within a half-mile proximity of the attraction waiting in line for everything else. By the end of my Tuesday/Wednesday weekend, my feet were blistered, my good spirits exhausted, and my work week just beginning. I've only now begun to recover. We had a great time, though, and many shenanigans were had. Bird and I even treated ourselves to a spendy lunch at the Blue Bayou before everyone else showed up.



Otherwise, I've been working. And working. And working. My detestation of the "Base of C" position has sunk to new depths, as my previous least-favorite shift, "Merge," has proven itself manageable once the cast member responsible for its functioning knows what the hell they're doing (read: I've been at Splash for over a month now and am no longer fresh-faced to the ways of its world). "Merge" consists of standing at the point in line where the Fastpass and Standby guests collide, which is about 100 feet away from the load station. By this point in time, Standby guests have been waiting in line for anywhere from 60 to 120 minutes, and they've been watching Fastpassers whizz by them at disconcertingly unfair rates. So, when I heave my bulk in front of the Standby line to stop its flow and allow an obscene amount of Fastpassers to cut - just when it seemed there was nothing left to obstruct the Standbyer's from their logs - people get PISSED OFF. Like, seriously pissed off. They swear. They push. They spit. It's not a fun time. I've heard so many lowly stories of how long people have spent waiting for Splash Mountain now that all I can do when I hear a "new" one is stare in bemusement.

Anyway, my new system is this: stop both lines until there's practically no one in front of me (but not so few as to give the loaders no one to work with), and then let in the Standby line up to a designated person who I've picked ahead of time that's standing at the bend in the rabbit hole queue. Everyone after this person has no idea what's going on, because they can't see me until they've rounded the curve. Then, I stop the Standby line again, wait for the area ahead of me (my "buffer zone") to clear out, and let in everyone who has a Fastpass. The official ratio of guests I'm supposed to allow past me at a time is 45 Fastpassers to 5 Standbyers, which is a ridiculous proportion and not one I follow. My system allows for at least 20 standbyers to every 45 fastpassers, and it hasn't backed up on me yet. Wohoo!

In other news, my roommate Kyle totally sucks. He wasn't too great a sport about three of my friends sleeping on our floor last week, and since then I've said three words to him (which were: "hey," "okay," and "night" [as in, "goodnight," which I found too appallingly long a word to communicate to him with, and so abbreviated for my own sanity's sake]).

Base of C

There's a position in Splash Mountain called "Base of C," during which one cast member is paid by Disneyland to sit in the dark recesses of the lift hill that pulls logs and very-much-suspecting guests up to their final plunge. The job of this individual is to stare resolutely at a small monitor that screens each log for lap-sitters or standers and, if they spot one, to enact a manual ride stop, enter the view of the guests with a flashlight, and stand there shouting until whatever was an issue has been fixed. Whenever I'm stuck at Base of C for inordinate amounts of time, such as last night, I start to go a little cuckoo. First of all, there's the vulture spiel playing directly over your head, on repeat, for however long you're down there.



"Everybody's got a laughing place... looks like this one's for you. Wait 'til you see what happened to that old Brer Rabbit... he learned his lesson alright... but I'm afraid he learned to late! Laughing place... we'll show you a laughing place... right up here. If you've found you're laughing place, how come you aren't laughing?"

x 400.

Guest response to these animatronics varies according to age and weight. Little kids cry or scream. Fat little kids laugh back in an obese attempt at cleverness (because the vultures have just asked them why they aren't laughing). Dads stare, entranced, at the mechanical gadgetry displayed before them. Mothers are usually too busy either shielding their sight from a drop that's still a good thirty seconds away or scrambling to secure all personal belongings to notice what's happening. Minorities swear (not being racist, here, just observing and making rash generalizations), and inappropriately skinny adults (read: chain smokers or meth heads, but like there's really even a difference, right?) flip them off. The same-old, same-old nature of this position gets tiring quickly.

Plus, from where I sit, I can watch the logs pass by from the corner of my right eye, which positions myself firmly to the left of their track. On the video screen, though, my view is an overhead one, with the camera perched just above the vultures. Seeing each log from two unique perspectives gets my mind all cracked out on the nature of reality/existence/whether or not I'll still be sane by thirty, and I wig out a bit. Plus, on the far left side of the monitor's image, I can see the entrance to the recess in which I sit, and sometimes I stick my foot out a bit so that I can see my own foot on the monitor. Me watching myself from a distinctly removed position - while also watching logs from two contrasting perspectives - doesn't go over too well. I leave each Base of C shift feeling dizzy and confused, or, as I've taken to calling it lately, "confizzled."

Go ahead, try it! It's fun, I promise: "Confizzled."