Tale #46 - The Tale of Orientations

Hi, all!

Back with another life update (Since things were so crazy, I really didn't get a moment's peace to sketch.... not that that's a hugely bad thing....) But I did have quite an adventure when it came to my Business Marketing Orientation day yesterday.

It felt a little strange going back to school, but hey! Two diplomas are way better than one, right? So I wasn't quite sure what to expect back on my first day. Well... the day was full of supprises! The first being that my order for my Adobe CS3 package FINALLY came in. So I had that to drool over before heading to the event. WOOT! But then the ball got rolling after that. I encountered some of my old professors and we stopped to chat about how our summers went. As it turns out, we both had equally busy summers. I also told him a bit about my blogfolio, TOAMG (Here I go, inventing words again! New word = "blogfolio" XD Actually... I didn't invent it. Someone else did, but it's a new recent thing using blogs as portfolios. Cool, eh? )

So after quick chit-chat, I managed to get to the correct room. Now here I am expecting to walk in there, not know anyone, and introduce myself like a dorky idiot (Okay... maybe I'm not a dorky idiot unless I'm without my morning coffee. But then again, who doesn't sound at least a little goofy in the mornings without coffee or some other means of a turbo-hyper-galactic-boost-and-mind-defogger substance?) But strangely enough, that wasn't the case. I actually DID know a few people. One of them I recognized as a drop out from the first year of my Media Arts major (The major I was last in and graduated from. It's a 3-year long major). Smart guy, but was more in to code than the art and animation. The other person I knew came all the way from my high school days. She graduated a year ahead of me and actually STILL remembered and recognized me. (The nasty snag: I didn't remember her very well. It's a goofy thing. You know how you can meet someone and then it could be a few years later before you see them again and when they see you, they remember you and you don't remember them thus causing a moment or two of "memory-guilt?" Similar feeling. Actually, I think there was a Pepsi commercial here in Canada based on this.) So at least I could take comfort in the fact that I at least knew a few people.

Then came on the presentations the professors had along with a few contests to test to see how much you were listening. My mind, being how it is the keeper and retainer of randomized bits of important information (Sometimes, I could be doing something else at the same time and I could still remember what was said.) So I was able to handle some of the quiz questions and won a bunch of stuff. Usually, someone else cuts in front of me and shouts out the answer before I even get the chance. This time, I was quite lucky. Oddly enough, I don't know why.

But out of all the presentations, one really caught me off guard. This one dealt with my city and did one very important thing for me - It gave me hope. For those of you completely unaware of what my city is like, let me tell you that my city is a dying city right now. There are several factors contributing for this. The first is that the city counsil still wants to hang on to the old ways of doing things eventhough it doesn't work anymore in modern times. The second is that around my city are smaller Native communities/tribes. Now what would happen is that in these communities, if you did something extremely horrible or if you're a chronic (Fill-in-the-blank), they would exile you. So what do they do when they exile someone from the tribe? They give them a one way bus ticket to my city to be dumped off there! They won't outwardly admit this, but you don't have to go very far to figure this out. So you can probably tell what this means. Also, the city's core has deteriorated badly, industry and business are moving out.... sounds like a recipe for disaster. As you know from earlier posts to TOAMG, there aren't storytellers and other media geeks like me sticking around either. So from where I stand, it seems like my city is going down like the Titanic. But then I listened to this presentation yesterday that got me thinking otherwise. The presentation said they've got someone new in charge of handling some money and the city planning. What's he going to do with it? He wants to build a media/IT district overlooking our major lake. Part of this, he let one thing to be hinted at that's going to be reality - we're getting a major animation studio here. My jaw dropped at this. Was I hearing things? Is this really going to happen?

...!


...yes.

It's real. They're starting the studio's construction this month. They are really here. It's really real. I can now actually see that there's a little bit of light and hope here. Maybe I can actually afford to stay for a little while.


There's more to this story of what happened on Orientation Day, so I'm going to leave you all here on a cliffhanger. Why? Because I'm going to have to dash off to class soon. So I'm going to leave those thoughts with you guys for a while.

Anyways, see you all later!