the passenger seat

I’m exhausted.

Came back from the dance, “Santa’s Rave Cave” (I still don’t get why it was Christmas-themed), and I’m tired as hell.

I’ve also realised how slack my blogging has been. Exams really ruined my blogging routine and now I don’t have the same compulsion to blog every second day. During exams I was of course busy studying, and in the days after exams until now I’ve been busy catching up on all the things I wanted to do after exams. Anyways, onto the crux of this blog.

SRC Dance: “Santa’s Rave Cave”

When I first arrived at the hall at around a quarter to eight (having had Hills before), I was pretty bummed. The dance looked like a flop; the turn out was probably a half or two-thirds of the usual dance turn out, and there were not many people from our grade at all (damn you slackers). For a while it was kind of boring. Heard a few good songs and jigged to those and basically just surveyed the hall, seeing all the overdressed younger grades and couples that I never knew existed. Kids really grow up fast nowadays. I remember back in year 9 or 10 we had like three couples at most, but I saw at least six or seven in total from those grades at the dance. Anyway, digressing, a little while later the prefect boys went outside to practice a dance for their final assembly, and the rest of us went outside to watch Momo, Thashan, Grubsy, Milo, Swami and Peter rehearsing their routine. At that point James and I went to John’s car to retrieve his camera, and that was when the real fun started.

For a while I played around with the settings inside the hall, trying to get some good shots of things in there, but to no avail; it was too dark. Then John got out his iPhone, and turns out he has a program that can make words out of light by waving it in the air. We tried a few times to get some shots of it, but it was too dim and the timing was never right. So we tried to get hold of a glow stick, but they had all been sold out and no-one we knew had one.

But then Douglas brought out his little blue LED light. The whole group of us year 12 guys rushed outside, and we settled on the bench at the left corner of the hall, facing the mass of shrubbery between the hall and the quadrangle. I played with the settings some more and we tested some simple light trails with the LED, using a very slow shutter speed. It was perfect.

We then went ahead and tried writing words and making shapes and that sort of thing. The first task was to write “dope”, something James has been wanting to do with light trails for a while now. It took some experimenting to get the right speed of movement and lighting conditions and that, but we finally got a good shot. We shot words for a while; I did my name and people made funny shapes, but then Douglas had the bright idea of drawing penises with light. Then he had an even better idea, and I stood in front of the camera and Douglas outlined my form. It looked great, and from there we moved on to better pictures. By this time there was a group of about ten all sitting around the bench, huddling around the camera after every shot, eagerly awaiting the results after the camera had finished processing.. We shot lightsaber fights, Kamehamehas, more penises (this time drawing them on actual people), fart clouds, gun shots and shoops, with Douglas, Milo and I doing the majority of the drawing (I didn’t draw the penises), and James shooting. Deva turned super saiyan, Milo tried drawing 3D boxes (to no avail), I got some angel wings from Milo and Douglas cast a spell at me with his wand, among other things.

It was awesome.

We stayed out there for almost the entire night, returning inside only when a dance battle was announced. The battle featured Ringo, Momo, Grubsy, Victor from year 12, Murphy, Peter Kertapati and Nick from year 11 and Chi Wai from year 10. It was pretty sick. I tried taking some pictures during the battle, but it didn’t work. The predicament was this: to shoot fast moving objects, you need a fast shutter speed, but to shoot dark scenes you need a slow shutter speed. Anyway, after that was over we went outside and shot some more light trails, before people went home after 10pm.

When everyone left, I went back inside and joined the dancefloor. Linkin Park and YMCA played, and we created a huge conga line with Victor and I leading. It grew to be about 50 people long; almost all of the people still remaining in the hall. Mr Ma (Danny’s dad) even joined in, dancing with Victor while going backwards at the front of the line. The night then ended and I came home, extremely exhausted.

So that’s what I did tonight. Even though the dance wasn’t so great on its own, we made it great with our awesome light trails. Speaking of which, I’ll post up some of our pictures as soon as I can get them off James; probably Friday.

On a completely different note, I watched two movies last night: The Hurricane and Lord Of War. Both good movies, but I won’t really go into them right now; this blog is long enough as is. But, Denzel Washington was awesome in The Hurricane.

I think that will end tonight’s lengthy blog. Yes, there are no pictures at all in this one. I promise there will be a lot in the next one. Hopefully I can get back into my two-daily blogging routine, but I honestly doubt it. Ah well, at least you’ll only have to read when actual interesting things happen.

But until next time, adieu.

PS. 300 points if you can name the artist and album of my blog title. It’s a tricky one this time.