Cruisin' on a sunday afternoon

Playing air guitar to the Rolling Stones.

Today marked the last GetInvited.ca boat cruise of the season. This particular cruise took place on the Capt. Flinders, a three story ship, with a dance floor, a floor for food, and a upper deck for sunning and more dancing. Crammed with people having fun and good music the Capt. would float around the Toronto Islands, criss crossing the Toronto harbour for about four to five hours.

Even with six hours of sleep I still felt a bit tired, most likely from the lack of sleep during the past week. It was starting to catch up to me. I was like a zombie getting down to the docks. A bit dubious with regard to the weather, I thought it was going to rain. Heavy grey clouds filled the sky with no trace of sun.

Arriving a bit early I stopped to get a hot dog from the local vendor and by the time I inhaled the food and started walking up the gang plank the sky had gotten a bit clearer. It was still overcast but the heavier clouds had been replaced by wispier ones. This made for great lighting. No harsh shadows and a nice background with a lot of texture.


Fashion designer Lisa and model Sam on the bow listening to tunes.

One comment I seem to get a lot of when shooting events like this is "You're one lucky guy... What an easy profession... shooting half naked girls/women all day!". While shooting half naked women is a nice distraction my mind was still fixated on the odd email I received from the girl a couple of days ago.

Had I done something wrong? Of course I had. The only problem was figuring out what that was. I hadn't gotten any follow up correspondence so it was pretty obvious that the girl didn't want to talk about it. As a general rule of communication this is usually a bad sign. Then again it could be her email was down. No, I don't believe in coincidences. I wanted desperately to call her to sort things out but my voice was still in pretty bad shape.

I thought about calling her with the computer using the text to voice option. But who wants to be called by a guy that sounds like Stephen Hawking? My voice inflections wouldn't be there and the end result would be just like emailing, provided the girl had the patience to stay on the phone to listen and not think it was a crank call. As a result I was left in the dark going through a variety of worse case scenarios in my head.

As unhealthy as it is to focus on the negative and things that I couldn't act on without more information, I found myself back stepping through the last few days trying to deconstruct the events in where the results ended up being as spectacularly confounding as this. What "butterfly"¹ had I stepped on in the past to create this situation?

As a kid, touching a set car lighter, or licking that frozen pipe, there's a simple action associated with bad consequences. Once figured out that A causes B you can say "Well that was dumb, I'll never do that again.". You've identified the bad action, A. It's easy to then avoid the negative consequences, B.

With women, in case you didn't know already, this is vastly different. Things can be going well, then, poof, at some random point in time everything is seriously wrong. What happened? I wonder if they just do that to keep you on your toes? Whatever the case may be finding that trigger action isn't always so easy. It may be a number of parameters that when combined in a specific order create the unhappy end results. I was still trying to figure out how anyone could get into so much trouble with someone without the ability to speak.

Between the lack of sleep the night before and the email enigma I felt pretty wiped out shooting on the cruise. It was like I was on automatic. Happy couple [click], girl dancing [click], friends drinking [click], people smiling [click], girl in bikini [click], guy drinking shot off girl's chest [click], girls rubbing sun tan oil all over each other [click]. It was all a big fat blur.


The SXE FX designs logo and also a gratuitous butt shot.

At one point I remember talking to Lisa about her swimsuit designs. Lisa is a designer and owner of SXE FX who I met through Andrew (fashion designer) Majtenyi. She was showing me her label which was on Sam's butt at the time. This took my mind off the odd email for a few minutes. My plan of keeping busy over the weekend to distract me from my current affairs was starting to take hold.

¹ Ray Bradbury reference from "A Sound of Thunder"