Like shutting off a light switch - the real world comes rushing back, the temperature drops ten degrees, I pop out of bed at 8:30 like I'm about to go to yoga, problems are lurking in the wings like unsolvable land mines. I am blithe (and bonny). No sense fretting - before, during, or after the last day. The next little while is going to be governed by one sad little phrase: "Everything is going to change."

For one thing, I have a fairly solid beard starting.

I'm shedding the accumulated crap; emptying my bag. I no longer need maps and guides and emergency garments. After Terra last night I emerged from the theatre into a driving rainstorm; I sprinted four blocks along Bloor, straight into the Gap, straight to the second floor and into a hoodie. I have a complicated relationship with hoodies; almost spiritual, how they arrive exactly when I need them (I could not have found a hoodie in this colour and shape a week ago; I know this because I tried, in this exact store), how I don't even need to try one on any more to know it will fit like a piece of old skin. Soon everything I wear will have a hood, even my underwear - hood for the cock, hood for the balls. And my socks. Tiny little individual hoodies for ten individual toes.

Terra, along from having the best title of any narrative work ever, nearly got me. For about ten minutes at the beginning of the film, I was actually crying at how unbelievably powerful and beautiful a world was unfolding onscreen - how dare this director, this man from Montreal, reach right into my soul and find something I couldn't articulate in a million years of trying. The visual design, the music, the use of flight (straight out of Flight)... but when the engine of the story got going, the story was merely B+ acceptable rather than A++ mind-blowing. I was bummed about it, but also relieved; I was in no fit state to have my soul blown open by a new, scorching beauty.

Every festival needs its canvas survey and mine this year was the Hollywood Chinese doc; this was a competent look at the place of Asian-Americans in American cinema in the past hundred years. It hit what I would consider all of the main points except that it didn't linger long enough on the question of sexuality for women (Asian women are whores) or men (Asian men are sexless), two of what I would call defining characteristics of Hollywood's use of Chinese culture in film, even to this day. Otherwise it was solid. Son of Rambow, the family movie from the UK, was solid as well, although here, I would have liked to see it speak more directly to my own experience making movies as a kid - there was none of that. When you're a kid making a movie, it's never about the gag (slingshotting one of your actors into a tree) as how the fuck you're going to achieve the gag (the hours and days and weeks of planning that go into the slingshot); this was what made Raiders Adapted so much fun or at least fun in concept, but without focusing on the actual craft of how the boys make their movie, Rambow left no real window for me to get at the characters. So it was merely charming.

By this point Brandy and Matty Price and I were locked in a rotating windmill of Ryerson exits and re-entries. I got cock-blocked clean into the next decade while waiting in line, by someone who (admittedly) had no idea he was doing it; I no longer care. Heterosocial relations are a game for the living. I found yet another Far Bathroom before the midnight and didn't get lost this time. For one thing, other patrons are exploring the lower reaches as well; you find them in the most unusual places. We saw Weirdsville and then DAINIPPONJIN. With the former it was nice to see Telefilm's name attached to something that isn't utter garbage, even though the film still didn't have one sweet fuck of a clue what it wanted to be for about the first half hour; it was also nice to confirm that my Scott Speedman crush remains strong and comfortable. DAINIPPONJIN was great as well, but wayyyyyyyyyyy too subtle for a Midnight screening - the comedy was fantastic and fantastically low-key, but really quiet and small. Matty Price bailed after the second reel; I bailed after the fifth.

But as it turns out, sleep is something my body no longer needs nor desires. I am in a perfect perpetual state.