Portrait of my brother soon after his cancerous tumor was removed.

Lapidary maxims about lugubrious life events can be far removed from the actual experience of adversity. These phrases sound good and fancy, downright poetic at times, but are often hard to internalize without first-hand experience.

No matter how truthful these maxims are their utility seems to expire with the approaching punctuation of the period and the reality of hardship returns. I hope to explain my title ‘Give Yourself Cancer’ and bridge the gap between an empty platitude and a maxim to internalize.

Our culture is saturated with these expressions: carpe diem, yolo (you only live once), time heals all wounds, this too shall pass, everything happens for a reason, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger . . .

I have lived long enough to see some cliches bear out their truth, but they rarely offer solace if you’re on the receiving end.

Paradoxically, these admonitions are paired with our aversion to death. We want to ‘seize the day’ while ignoring life’s twin Death. We constantly search for the modern fountain of youth be it plastic surgery or simply dyeing gray hairs. Eye contact is averted when speaking about death, if we do at all, and a tenseness unknowingly engages our face.

We hold onto an unspoken hope that an exception will be made for our death or loved one’s and speaking about it might put this exception in jeopardy. This article discusses some reasons why we have alienated ourselves from death.

I have always been interested in mortality. I thought I could use this interest to my advantage when I was a finalist for the Watson Fellowship. I proposed to spend their $25,000 studying treehouses around the world. Dwelling in a living organism literally roots you to the reality of death. Treehouses have an expiration date equal to their host and provides a daily reminder of our own death. However clever I thought that pitch (no pun intended) was I did not get the fellowship but I did win the consolation prize of being an alternate.

As much as I believe I have a level of stoicism about death, I would be lieing to not acknowledge times of self-pity and sadness. Academically I can remove myself from the fear of death studying Montaigne or Epicurus. Considering Sagan’s pale blue dot puts our existence into perspective. The recently deceased Hitchens wrote “To the dumb question ‘Why me?’ the comos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?” However, bridging the gap between rational thought and our lizard brain can be a constant struggle.

Juxtapose our death averse culture with the Romans whose victorious warrior celebrated by parading through town accompanied by an older man. Over the cheers of the crowd he whispered in the warrior’s ear “momento mori” (remember that you will die). Imagine Justin Bieber dancing and singing on stage with some old dude whispering adages about impermanence in his ear, yea, I can’t imagine that either.

My suggestion to give yourself cancer is based on happiness research and that we are paralyzed by too many choices. When told to momento mori the lack of specificity on just how to remember our death leaves us with an infinite number of possible deaths from which to choose (look at the Darwin awards if you’re lacking creativity).

If we are paralyzed by too many choices to the point of inaction when simply choosing a mutual fund for retirement then how are we to “memento mori” with so many ways to die? An abundance of possible outcomes for our own death will leave us unable to internalize the lesson of memento mori.

The choice is made for you if you face a life-threatening disease or event. Mine is cancer. My understanding is if I am to die from this disease I will slip into a coma as my body begins to shut down and I will die in the coma. Memento mori became more significant to me because I can synthesize my happiness around a specific kind of death. My head is not swimming in generalities about death, it’s very real and specific. The finitude of my life stares back at me like Saul’s mirror and it is freeing.

Some reading this may have delayed contemplating memento mori because it’s too difficult without the specifics of their “mori.” The solution I propose is through a thought experiment. Give yourself cancer to help open the dialogue of death in your mind.

 ”The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die has unlearned to serve. There is nothing evil in life for him who rightly comprehends that the privation of life is no evil: to know, how to die delivers us from all subjection and constraint.” – Montaigne

What do you think about this? Feel free to comment below. Subscribe to my blog by typing in your email address in the top right sidebar. Thanks for reading and sharing it.

Specifically, I have diffuse large B cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

I discovered I have cancer through running.

Running

My relationship with running began because I thought it would give me an edge on my high school football field. I stood 5’8″ and 130 lbs. I could use any advantage I could get. If I couldn’t get bigger than everyone else, maybe I could out run them.

I had a good coach and great friend to run with so I didn’t mind running at first. It was my first race when I fell in love with running competitively. I ran an 800m (half mile) race on a 200m banked wooden indoor track. A competitor fell down in a race before mine and they look like they’d fallen into a family of porcupines. The wooden track was so old and torn up every step produced a massive stomp, clank, and squeak with the threat of a face full of splinters if you fell.

Before the race started I was nauseous. I had no idea what I was doing and it seemed everyone else did. The gun echoed off the concrete indoor stadium and a few laps later the race was almost done. I was neck and neck with someone trying to pass me on the outside of the final stretch.

“Let’s go bitch!” came from a blur of swinging arms and legs to my right.

I went from survival mode, suffering with each stride, into a primeval mode to try and crush this clown next to me. I beat him, but I came in seventh. I was caught by the competitiveness of running and I saw I had a lot of room to improve.

I was disappointed that it took that clown provoking me to bring out my best effort, but it taught me if I was to do my best that I had to be my toughest competition. I couldn’t depend on someone calling me a ‘bitch’ in every race or workout to find that extra gear and push my limits!

I qualified for the state championships and ran a 4:39 mile placing 9th in that first year of running in high school. I quit football and began running.

Asthma

I was diagnosed with sports-induced asthma by three pulminologists. I’ve ran a stress test on a treadmill breathing into hoses, I’ve had asthma attacks chemically induced, I’ve had a camera shoved up my nose and down my throat to see if I had tumors on my bronchial tubes. All came back: it must be sports-induced asthma.

I took a melange of asthma medications over the years until in college I gave them up. With or without the medication I would get these attacks. You could hear me wheezing from across the stadium or see me hunched over like Quasimodo shuffling through the finish line. I usually had about one or two asthma-free races each season, if I was lucky.

I started every race knowing I’m about to jump on the asthma-induced pain train and waited for that familiar knife to stick itself into my rib cage and jab at my lungs with each breath.

Despite this handicap I had a successful college career. I went to cross-country nationals 3 times and I still hold 5 school track records (in college I held 7 records at once).

Cancer

Before I was diagnosed with cancer I had logged my 7,000th mile of running. That’s the equivalent of running across the USA and back again. The asthma-related chest pain that I’ve dealt with over those 7,000 miles took a turn for the worse in the span of a few runs.

I visited a new general physician and he said I do not have asthma, probably never did.

All these years of pain and I’m told I never had asthma? Then what is it!?

He said I have a musculoskeletal issue in my chest wall. Chest x-rays ruled out a broken rib and I was told to take advil for the pain. My doctor equated my chest pain to his aging knees, that’s just the way it was going to be for me from now on. Wait, what!? Almost over night my running is coming to a screeching halt!?

I refused to accept that and started researching forums, websites, and abstracts of scientific journals. I resigned to taking a month completely off of running and hoped that whatever was inflamed in my chest wall would heal in that time. If it did not heal, I would go back to the doctor.

It did not heal so I went back. I asked politely what other options we had to explore. The doctor ordered a CT scan of my chest but told me he didn’t think we would find anything.

He was wrong. We found two things.

1) I have a small granuloma on my right lung, the side I have the pain. I was overjoyed! Perfect! We found the damn thing that has caused me trouble my whole life now we just have to take it out and I’ll be fixed! Wrong. The doctors say it’s too small to be the cause of the chest pain. Well then what else did they find?

2) The radiologist noticed lymphnodes around my kidneys were enlarged. We needed another CT scan.

What? So we still don’t know about my chest pain and now we’re on a wild goose chase around my kidneys!?

Another CT scan later confirmed their enlargement and now I had an appointment to get that lymphnode biopsied. A few days later alone in the conference room at work with my head in my hand I listened over the phone that I had non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a kind of cancer.

Okay . . .

My head was swimming, I didn’t even know what the hell kind of cancer that is, what does this mean, how far is it!? That’s not even why I went to the doctor!

My first glance at the internet told me I had a 50% chance of living.

Round 1 of chemo

I immediately stopped googling it and waited until I talked to my newest doctor, an oncologist. A PET scan revealed the cancer had spread behind my chest, but again, this had nothing to do with my chest pains he assured me. The good news is I had no tumors and we caught it very early.

I just finished my fifth of six chemotherapy treatments and the Doc is giving me a 90% chance of success.

It was a serendipitous discovery. That chest pain has been the bain of my running career, a major handicap, and now it saved my life.

Running saved my life.

Still, no one knows what my chest pain is. My oncologist said if it is some kind of inflammation then the chemotherapy might clear it up.

So the very pain that saved my life may also be cured as a byproduct. Time will tell.

Another byproduct of cancer is getting an insane amount of support. It’s overwhelming and I’m so very thankful for everyone’s support. Thank You! A perfect example is this video some college running mates (and olympians) created:

I plan to write more frequently. You can subscribe to my blog below:

Several of the Moonbot animators rallied together last month to do the 11 Second Club for April. Two of us finished and we placed second and third.

http://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/april13

What I learned from winning in December I applied to April’s entry: don’t quit. Unlike December, I had chemotherapy scheduled. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to finish.

Instead of thinking about the final result, I would only focus on 50 frames at a time. If I looked at everything happening at once, it was overwhelming. By compartmentalizing the animation into sections I was able to slowly chip away at it and finish.

Or, in the words of Seth Godin – ship it!

“The only purpose of starting is to finish, and while the projects we do are never really finished, they must ship.” – Seth Godin (Linchpin)

I have owned the iPhone 3GS for 3 years and after researching and reviewing all the phones on the market, I grabbed the HTC One. You can read all the technical specs here, but what’s it like to use this thing?

Usability

After a few days of owning this guy, I am very impressed and will not regret buying this phone. It has a massive screen, great speakers, and a great camera with many built-in features.

In my hands, the HTC One is a bit awkward to hold after owning the smaller but heavier and thicker iPhone. The HTC One’s screen is so tall it is actually easier for me to type holding the phone vertically instead of long-ways where my thumbs have to travel further. The screen is so sharp, looking at it is like wearing corrective lenses compared to my old iPhone.

For the most part, the HTC One is as customizable as any other smartphone. The one negative I heard was the “Blink Feed” home screen, that it lacked customization. It only allows certain websites and newsfeeds to populate the home page (along with your personal facebook and twitter accounts). Ideally I should be able to populate stories from my Feedly account, but Blink Feed seems to work well enough so far and I just use the Feedly app to see the websites I follow.

The speakers are unlike any other phone in quality and volume. Unlike the iPhone speakers that shoot sound away from the viewer, the HTC One has two speakers that project out from the front of screen, what a novel idea! I am jamming out in the shower now!

Camera

One of the main reasons I upgraded my phone was for a better camera. The first photo I took with the HTC One was with Dave Matthews:

Dave is recording at the studio across the hall from where I work at Moonbot and he stopped to take a break and see what we are working on. Not a bad way to kick off some epic picture taking that is in store for this camera! Follow me on twitter to see what I’m up to next!

The “Ultrapixel” camera is fantastic! It has many built-in features like filters and ‘Zoe‘ that is a button to press before you take a photo and it will also take a 3 second video. This video can be used to create a slideshow later, or even cooler, in a group photo it can be used to choose what face each person should have for the final photo to ensure everyone’s eye’s are open and mouths are smiling.

You can set camera options like white balance and ISO and there are HDR and Sweep Panorama modes that you would normally need to buy an app to perform. The video can even be edited to do slow motion and can record in 1080p or 720p and the camera is great in low light!

Surprises

Yesterday I was in a meeting and opened the “Notes” app to and since the phone is synced to my calender, I was prompted with a screen that said “it looks like you’re in a meeting, do you want to associate your notes with this meeting?” Boom! Now that’s a “smartphone.”

I’m big on conserving battery power, so I turn off all push notifications. The HTC One has a ‘peak hours’ option for pushing email. For example, I do not allow push notifications on my personal, I manually update that to save battery. But I want to receive work emails in realtime, so I can set it to push those emails but only during a ‘peak hours’ time like weekdays between 7am and 6pm, otherwise it’s set to manual push and saving battery.

Switching from an iPhone?

Turn off your iMessage! After switching to the HTC One I was still receiving text messages on my wifi-connected iPhone through iMessage. It wasn’t until I disabled iMessages on my iPhone that I could receive text messages on my HTC One from contacts that own an iPhone.

HTC provides HTC Sync Manager to transfer all your music and contacts to your new HTC One. It isn’t a great application. It crashed a couple times and is slow, but it gets the job done. I did lose all the apps I had bought from the iTunes store and now I will have to re-purchase them using Google Play’s store. That cost is trivial compared to the cost of the phone so I really see it as an extra little tax and I won’t need to repurchase many camera apps since so many are now built-in to the phone.

I give the HTC One a 9 out of 10! Subscribe to my website in the top right sidebar to receive notifications of new posts.

Here are HTC’s videos describing some features:

Here’s CNET’s review:

• Read more (on average Kindle owner’s do)
• Highlight passage, saved in one location “My Clippings”
• Send-to-Kindle function for web articles and blogs
• Small
• NOT back-lit display and no glare screen
• Battery life (measured in months, not hours)
• Kindle books are cheaper, classics are free
• Save Trees – no more dusty library shelves, less baggage
• Measure’s reading speed, let’s you know how much time left in chapter/book
• Built-in dictionary, touch a word you don’t know, then know it, BOOM

CONS

• Touch-screen reacts slowly
• some obscure books are not available as ebooks

The Paperwhite is only $119 and stood out against the competition, like the Nook, for all these reasons.

Why an eReader over a tablet?

I do not own a tablet, and probably never will, so I am a little biased. An eReader, like the Paperwhite, is meant for one thing: READING. I do not want the distractions a tablet provides of the internet or Facebook when I sit down to read. Having a dedicated eReader helps keep that priority in check!

Want to check the internet? Use your smartphone or a computer. I have never been in a situation where I said to myself “If only I had a tablet right now…”

Battery life is much better on an ereader than tablets and the Paperwhite is not backlit like a tablet so it won’t destroy your eyes. If all that doesn’t convince you, the Kindle Paperwhite is a fraction of the cost of tablets!

I will be reviewing the books I’ve been reading, so sign up with your email address in the sidebar to be notified of new posts.

If you need ideas on books to read now, check out these two guys: Ryan Holiday and Julien Smith.

On a scale from 1-10, here is my final score for the Kindle Paperwhite:

I was recently diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma and am undergoing chemotherapy which makes most people go bald, so I cut a mohawk. If I was going to lose my hair (which I have) I was going to lose it in style. If you were going to lose your hair, what kind of haircut would you get before it fell out?

I may blog about my cancer experience more later, for now, this post is about photography. I decided to take a self-portrait before my hair fell out and have some fun with the lighting setup. Most of the people who follow me are interested in photography which is why I wanted to share how I took the photos.

SETUP:

I knew the kind of setup I wanted, bright rim light from both sides that would graze the sides of my head with soft fill light in the front.

Setting the exposure for the rim lights before adding the flash

I set my exposure against the two bare bulb rim lights so they were the brightest thing in the image. Then I introduced my 580 EX2 Speedlight flash, inside an Apollo softbox, for the overhead fill light and started to expose for it.

I knew my exposure for my rim lights so I had to adjust my flash power manually so it would not be brighter than the light bulbs. The two bare lightbulbs were not very bright, which meant my flash power had to be weaker. I was around 1/64 power on my flash and it was going through the Apollo softbox fabric which reduced it’s brightness even more.

The Canon 7D can control the flash from my camera’s menu even when the flash is unattached to my camera, in this case, in a softbox. My flash also fires wirelessly as well.

bird's eye view of the setup

COLOR BALANCE:

The two bare bulbs are warm and my Speedlight flash is cool. If I did not want two different colors hitting my face, I had to warm up my flash to match the bare bulbs. A swatch of Rosco gels fit perfectly across the top of a speedlight flash and they are cheap. I picked a warmer, orange-looking gel and slapped it on my speedlight with scotch tape. That compensated for the orange/warm bare lightbulbs. Now that everything was the same orange color, I could set the white balance in my camera so the lights would all appear to be emitting no color (they were “white balanced”).

I did take one photo to experiment with white balance, instead of a warm gel on the speedlight flash, I put on a cool, blue-colored gel to make the color contrast between my two light sources even greater, and this is what that looked like:

I also made an animated GIF of me spinning around below. I’ve made a tutorial on how you can make an animated GIF as well, click here.

On the back of my head is the logo of where I work. Many of my coworkers cut mohawks as well. Because the women I work with couldn’t cut mohawks as easily, they made a signed piece of artwork with a mohawk. I work with some pretty awesome people.

Below is all the gear I used to take this photo. I hope this setup made sense, thanks for visiting and enter your email at the top of the right sidebar to subscribe to my blog.

This project was facilitated through Tongal.com of which I’ve been a contributing member for a few years. My set of videos ranked in second, you should be able to watch all of them here.

LEGO gave me sentence-long descriptions of 5 ideas and the execution of those ideas was left up to me. I wanted each of my videos to rely more on an authentic narrative full of genuine reactions and not rely on scripted dialogue that screams ‘this is a corny commercial!’ This dictated how I filmed each spot more as a documentary and much less giving direction.

I used my Canon 7D with only the Canon 16-35mm lens the entire shoot and it worked out great. The low aperture and zoom fish-eye lens gave me a lot of flexibility in the moment that allowed me not to be messing with changing lenses and missing shots. The other handy piece of gear was my Glidetrack that gave some smooth dolly shots. I used on LED Litepanel as my main source of light. I really enjoyed using it, but there are cheaper alternatives out there too.

I rented a redrock micro rig, but felt it was too bulky for how quick I needed to move and adjust for each shot. I enjoyed just having my Zacuto Z-Finder on for the extra stability, although it would fog up on me.

A Great Lens!

I also wanted to give each of my videos a little flair so I added a bit of 3D animation to each. I used a combination of tracking programs and then added in the 3D elements using Maya. I modeled a LEGO block from scratch and rigged up each setup and animated, lit, rendered, and finally composited it in After Effects.

I’ve been doing more 3D Animation work lately, but I enjoyed the immediacy of working with a camera and editing footage for this LEGO project and hope to be behind a camera more in the near future. If you want to know anything more about this project just ask in the comments.

Below you can see the kind of super-secret artwork that I see at work every day that we can now share. There’s also other great projects rolling out, like we are finishing up animation on Diggs Nightcrawler.

I’m an animator at Moonbot and, if this project is funded, I’ll be animating the Golem for your enjoyment! So consider funding the project, every little bit helps! And if you have any kind of feedback about the project, make a comment about it on the kickstarter page.

We are making this video game in collaboration with all of you backers of the project, so we want to know what you all think! But it’s not funded yet, there’s 49 days left to raise money, so chip in!

UPDATE: Interview with AnimSchool here

UPDATE 2: eCritique by Jean-Denis Haas here

I am very excited I won the 11 Second Club for December 2012! There were some great entries this last month and I did not expect to win.

I first heard of the competition in school about a year and a half ago when our instructor advised us not to enter, because, as students, he didn’t want us to get ahead of ourselves by trying to do subtle character acting when we were still trying to master a bouncing ball. That was great advice then, but made me more intrigued to enter when I was ready for it! I first entered when I graduated school, about a year ago and got 18th. Over the last year much has happened, that has helped me continue to improve as an animator.

I got the idea for this interpretation of the audio file by brainstorming: what would be interesting to watch someone try and quit? (that’s what the audio was all about in it’s simplest form) If I frame things in a question instead of thinking of brainstorming as a goal I’m trying to reach it makes that process easier for me.

I thought of a rock band, being a cowboy, or a thief. Then I tried to think what would be more humorous and landed on the idea of two old geezers working a lemonade stand their whole life and one is really into it and the other wants to ‘move on.’

I came close to not entering this month and almost gave up on the animation when I was half-way through finishing. I took my blocking phase pretty far and when I hit spline on my stepped keys of my second character, it looked absolutely horrible. He was wobbling all over the place  in that initial head move, nothing was working. I realized how much work with him I had left to do. And feeling discouraged, I turned off my computer thinking I was just going to have to give up on this one. After all, I have my full time job and a commitment to LEGO to film some web spots for them I needed to focus on.

Stepping away from my computer and taking a break over Christmas was what I needed to get motivated to attack this animation again. Instead of getting overwhelmed with how much work it was going to take to get this animation to a decent place, I refocused and set small goals and completely forgot about trying to meet the oncoming deadline for the competition: Tonight, I am only going to focus on the breakdowns between these four poses.

That allowed me to take small bites and deal with each problem as it came, instead of trying to juggle all these problems in my head at the same time.

I was surprised with what I got away with while I was animating and it to not feel odd when it’s played, but if you freeze frame, it’s fairly extreme. That’s one thing I love about animation, being able to feel something happening without being able to actually see it because it happens over only one or two frames. But even if we can’t see it, it still imprints on us.

I was having a hard time getting the second guy’s lipsync to read since his head was moving around so much I had to purse his lips pretty far, check out frame 227,  or his eyes stretched in 231, or his mouth in 272, all of these kind of look ridiculous as a single frame . I enjoyed playing with that extreme to see how far I could go and it still work. Maybe I could have gone further with it. I’m really looking forward to watching the critique!

That’s another thing I love about animation: it’s a reward to get a critique. How many other professions are you rewarded with a critique? In animation it’s a privilege for someone to take their time to give you their opinion to try and help you improve. I really appreciate that about this craft.

While I was in Vancouver Film School hearing constant critiques of mine and my classmate’s work was one of the most valuable aspects of school. And watching the eCritiques has taught me so much. In this animation I already know the areas I think are weak and could be improved on, but I’m really interested to hear an outsider’s considered opinion.

I think the first guy could use a lot of work, all of his animation is a bit soft. The second guy has some subtle hitches in his movement I’d like to smooth out, his head is still a bit weird, his torso animation could be improved, as well as his shoulders . . . I’ve never used animation layers, but I may attempt to make those corrections after hearing what the critique is like using animation layers.

And a special thanks to my friend Dylan for letting me use one of his rigs (the first character) – here’s the short film that rig is from that Dylan and Logan made.

To summarize a passage from Wherever You Go, There You Are, if we hope to go somewhere then we must first step from where we are currently standing to move in that direction, but if we don’t know where we are standing and starting from, we could potential walk in circles forever and never get to that somewhere.

So for that reason and posterity I thought it would be good to take stock of what I did in 2012 (not in exact order):

2012 was incredible. I got to live, meet, hang out, fly, and work with a lot of great people and that’s what I’m most looking forward to in the coming year(s).

However trite it would be to condense a year in to one photo, the picture below comes close. I received the card on the left in 2010 after going through a tough time and have saved it as it has been a goal of mine to fly Yosemite. The photo on the right is when I flew Yosemite this year.