3 weeks into being back on Canadian soil, I’ve begun to exhaust the novelties of having returned to the developed world. The stark differences between my life in Delhi and my current stay at my parent’s in the small town of 2000 (roughly) in the Canadian country side has tested my ability to adapt and re-calibrate like nothing other. At first the familiar comforts that most people on this side of the planet take for granted were a welcomed relief – simple things, like hot showers, good and plentiful meals, clean roads and sane driving standards, politeness, and clean air… these seemingly invisible elements of Western society managed to keep me satisfied and distracted for the initial return, but now, boredom is setting in, and so is an acute sense of loneliness that pervades through the rolling hills and potato fields that surround me at every turn.

In order to manage the transition from a city of 16 million to a village of a couple thousand, I’ve thrown myself into my hobbies full-force. The beauty about living in a fortress of solitude is that you tend to have the time to pursue all kinds of things that you couldn’t before. At the moment, I’ve thrown myself into learning complicated post-production animation programs like Adobe After Effects, while honing my skills with Photoshop. The goal is the create my own cinematic animations to up the level of my short film productions to a much higher standard.

This includes learning how to take a 2 dimensional picture and transform it into 2.5d, giving it the illusion of depth in order to create a really solid effect called a parallax. I’m also learning how to make an ‘animated wall’, which is basically the effect of having several ‘screens’ lined up, each with their own unique video playing, with a camera panning across. Hopefully if I can pull off this effect, I’ll be able to make an awesome introduction screen for my CapDev Travel line of short documentary travel films. Finally, and most recently, I’m taking a tutorial on animating geographic maps, in order to create an ‘Indiana Jones’ style travel route for my Egypt series… this has me especially geeking out.

Outside of my seemingly useless effort to produce video, I’m also preparing for the next big career step, which is to break into the federal government’s service via rigorous national testing. I just bought a study kit for an inordinate sum of cash which promises to prepare me for the kinds of questions and scenarios that will be presented to me on the national tests. One thing I wasn’t expecting to be doing this summer is to be brushing up on my mathematics and arithmetic skills! I haven’t done math like this since I was 17-18 years old, which I dare say was a rounded decade ago!

I’m also anticipating a potential move to Montreal, to start up the internship that I had applied for back in April (I think it was April?). After having agreed with the director of the programme to put it off until August, I’m slowly moving towards preparing myself for another major move in my life, away from the potato fields and back in the action of one of Canada’s most exciting cities. Though I’m enjoying the slow pace of being at home and with my family, I’ve come to the undeniable conclusion that I am, at heart, a city boy, not at all bred or designed for a country life that requires little to no insight into the outside world. In fact, I feel kind of dumb here, not because I’ve regressed – not yet anyways – but because I feel as though it’s practically impossible for me to share any of my experiences, or to discuss matters that I’ve been involved with for the past, well, forever. I feel like an ocean fish who was taking out of the sea and placed into a nice comfortable aquarium, wanting desperately to go back into the vast ocean to continue exploring and adventuring after getting bored trying to explain the taste of salt-water to the local tank-breds. That really sounds patronizing, and I honestly don’t mean for it to be, it’s just so hard to convey the rest of the world to those who have only seen it through a glass aquarium, and even doubly so difficult to relate to them. I guess the traveler is forever a stranger, even in his own land.

I’ve taken a bit of a break from writing lately so that I can focus on the video editing, I really want to complete this Egypt series this summer, if only I can stop myself from constantly wanting to improve upon it through the learning of all these new cinematic techniques! I’ll take to writing more once I’m back in the city, seeing as my favorite place to write is in cafes, and here, well, there are no cafes.