breathe, vaughan, breathe!

this week i did things that scared me. i didn't mean for lots of challenges to happen all in one week, they just presented themselves and it was up to me to slay the dragon or let it turn me to flames. the first happened on monday afternoon. my lovely friend paul asked me to cut his hair. i warned him that i'd never cut hair before but was willing to give it a go. he bought a sharp pair of scissors and away we went. it was only about 3 minutes in that i suddenly froze with panic. he'd asked for a very simple "same length all over" cut and i was taking huge chunks off and realised that i can't cut hair. not only am i not qualified, i have no idea what i'm doing. i've cut my own hair often and trimmed other people's hair before but i don't know how to take someone's hair and fashion it into some sort of sexy do and this point had escaped my attention till this very moment. i'd started on the side and the back and it was too late to go back. "its ok," reassured paul, "if its really bad i'll shave it off". he dropped into conversation that wedding that he was being best man at. it was this coming weekend. the haircut i was giving him was going to be in someone's wedding album for the rest of their lives. eek. i had to just keep going and developed a reliable method of sort of brushing my fingers through the hair, snipping as i went. i realised how much we take for granted when we go to the hairdressers, like going to the doctors, you just assume that this person knows exactly what they are doing and is blessed with magical powers. it aint true. they might just be making it up as they go along just like you. it was ok though, paul was pleased with it, although i know it wasn't a real haircut, i knew it was pretty much the same all over, which is what he wanted. it was OK and that was good enough for me.

i then had to confront someone on a work issue. i hate confrontations but i'm not afraid to just do them and get them over with because i know that if you leave things to fester then they can infect all sorts of things, a stone left unturned can hide nasty diseases. so i had a little chat and felt an awful lot better for it and it made lots of work things go a lot better subsequently. i have ideas form plans and i can get defeatist about a thing unless i'm sure it is worth seeing through. i can take my job a little too seriously but its because i care about it so much. i feel the weight of the responsibility in my hand, here is this precious thing and it needs to be nurtured in order to grow and succeed. in our meeting on wednesday we were talking about the future of chapter again and i found myself getting so excited, seeing all the possibilities. its already my favourite place in the world and its only going to get better.

the last thing i did was the biggie. on wednesday, after i'd finished my ushering shift in the cinema, graham the projectionist asked me if i'd be available to do a meet and greet with someone coming to speak at the film on friday "get him a cup of tea, make sure he's ok till he has to go on". obviously, this didn't present a problem. then sally the lovely new cinema programmer bounded over to ask if i "didn't mind hosting the Q&A session too". full of confidence that i cannot fathom the source of, i said yes. i think it was due to the sudden influx of vitamin A from all this recent unexpected sunshine. it was only the next day, when i spoke to carol, head of marketing, who went over my duties for that evening that i started to get a little nervous. the speaker was MARK LYNAS, a climate change expert who had contributed to the making of THE AGE OF STUPID, a documentary-cum-fiction film staring pete postlethwaite about the effects of climate change. i'd seen it in a preview screening the week before and enjoyed it, if it did frighten me a little. i'm quite careful with my carbon footprint (i have a bicycle, not a car; i buy ecologically sound cleaning products and organic food; i never put shopping in plastic bags; turn the light / heating off when not needed; etc) but i know others are not so careful and i know that there is shit going on all over the world in other countries that i have no power of controlling. you get the picture. carol warned me that i may get the odd nutter in the audience (it is chapter after all, i'm used to nutters) and an e-mail from dan, the WALES ONE WORLD FILM FESTIVAL organiser advised me that mark has had a lot of problems with audiences recently due to coming out as pro-nuclear, which he likened to coming out as gay to your wife. suddenly these images flashed into my head of dreadlocked tie-dye wearing hippies spitting at him on stage and a whole room full of people shouting at him and it being *all my fault*. nerves. shaking. waaah! i spent the afternoon researching the subject and went on mark's website to try and get an idea of who he is. i was terrified of cocking up. i went in at 5pm to check the mics were working and got reassured by the amazing rob and graham that i'd be fine. lots of people heard what i was doing and told me i'd be great. it kind of made me worse, thinking "all these people believe in me, they don't know i'm going to cock i up". of course, it wouldn't be the end of the world, its only one bloke coming to chapter, its only a small thing really. but the fear was gripping me. the voices in my head started "no-one would blame you if you pulled out, you're not really qualified to do this, they'd understand"... "you could lie and pretend to be ill, then it wouldn't be your fault"... "maybe if you get yourself so worked up you will genuinely be ill and they won't let you do it anyway"... its very hard to ignore the voices of doubt in your head. i was determined to do it. i remember when i was about 13 i was asked to accompany my friend for a national youth theatre audition. i had to sing, although i couldn't sing, i wanted to do backstage things. i got so nervous and worked up i had a bad tum that day and my mum said it was probably best i didn't go. i am still so ashamed that i allowed myself to get so nervous that i made myself ill and missed the chance of doing something i loved. i sat in the house that day and felt numb with relief and disappointment. i thought about that time when i was 13 quite a lot on friday before the talk and determined that it wouldn't happen again. for goodness sake, i'm almost 30, i've done plenty of public speaking before and have to speak at meetings and things, for some reason this felt like that audition all over again.

i met mark at 5.30pm and he was a very nice man. it was a little bit awkward, meeting a stranger and pretty much babysitting him for half an hour. i was relieved that he wanted to watch the film before the talk, he said he'd seen it in so many different incarnations during the years it was being made he wanted a refresher on which one this was, it meant i would have it fresh in my mind too and i wouldn't have to make awkward chit chat for an hour and a half. we chatted about cardiff and i told him about chapter. i'm proud of my city and where i work, i had no problem filling the time. we chatted about the film's subject matter, he wasn't as militant green as i was expecting, he was professional and sensible but just had a lot of integrity. he was really kind to me, i told him it was my first Q&A and he said he'd help me out if he thought i needed it, he'd done hundreds! it was fine. i completely garbled the introduction, i'd rehearsed it a few times in my head but still managed to come accross as nervous. once the film was over and i'd helped put the chairs out i felt at home, it was fine. it was quite enjoyable and though there were dissenters in the audience, the pass-the-mic work by my friend rose was perfect and i did the whole "yes, the man in the blue jumper" bit ok. mark was quite comfortable and i managed to come up with some interesting questions for him (obama and the current economic climate and its impact on the issues, the severn barrage etc). i felt really proud of myself by the end and was on a massive grinny high for the next couple of hours.

this week i also saw the czech film BOOGIE which was about a man going back to his home town and having a night out with the boys when he should have been at home with his wife and son and took him outside of his normal life and back to a world of heavy drinking, prostitutes and bad nightclubs. i was underwhelmed. it was a bit dull and reinforced the stereotypes of machismo in the eastern european countries, it made me a bit depressed but films like this are always worth a punt. i also watched the last episode of RED RIDING on channel 4. i've really liked getting into an event like this, watching something live on tv but it has made me realise again how much i hate adverts, iplayer / tv on demand is so much better. its been such a beautifully shot, well executed drama, full of filth and corruption. the final episode tied up a lot of loose ends but still left you full of the suspicion that the community was rotten to the core and so riddled with dirty old secrets and trauma that it would never be properly well again.

tonight we go to see THEO in buffalo. woo! he is a boy genius. i love his two eps so much, they are full of magic and sadness. if possible we will try and make it over to gwdihw for casey's film night that i have shamefully missed these past two weeks previous. its ridiculous that CLUBFOOTFOOT shows pretty much exactly on-the-button stuff that i love and hold dear yet i haven't made it to all his nights yet. shame on me but sleep often overtakes me on a sunday.