My name is Richard MacDougall, most people just call me Richard, you can call me whatever you like. Appearance wise, I'm Tall (6'3") light (150lbs maybe less I haven't checked in a while), so as you can probably imagine, I'm skinny, like a skeleton with a little skin. I was born with brown hair and blue eyes, today that remains the case as well. Oh and my skin is as pale as Casper himself. The sun is my enemy, when exposed for too long I burn more then the ball of fire itself, now I haven't had a sun burn in 6 years so I'm not sure if that's still the case but why go out and risk the chance eh? I’m don't classify myself as a shut in, I do go out when I need to, but I do spend the majority of my time indoors.
I grew up in the town of Port Hawkesbury, located on the lower part of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Well to be more accurate I grew up right next to Hawkesbury in Port Hastings, but I could cross into Hawkesbury by walking two minutes out behind my backyard. I didn't mind my childhood for the most part. I had good friends, there was a lot to do, hardly any traffic so you cloud play in the street all day without having to worry. The playground across the street was the best because practically nobody outside the neighborhood knew about it so we could have it all to ourselves, we had our own baseball field, in winter there were tons of huge hills to sled down, and there was a seemingly unlimited number of thins to do in the back woods behind our houses (hide/seek, cabin building, and so on). Yep those were the good times... Then the teen years hit and suddenly playing games running around weren't cool anymore. Which in my opinion sucked because all my friends were growing up faster then I was even the ones that were a year or 2 younger then me. My friends started to smoke (which to this day I still don't understand why) and they would even avoid me at times because they didn't want me hanging around when they did because I wasn't interested. They started dating (each other and people outside of the neighborhood bringing in outsiders), it didn't help my case being the tall awkward acne ridden kid either. Then around 15, life began as the outsider. I suddenly wasn't cool enough to hang out with my friends anymore. I would spend all my time inside the house, only leaving to go to school. A year later my family moved into Hawkesbury so I spent even more time inside because I no longer needed to wait for a bus to get back and forth from school because I now lived right across the street. I didn't have any friends in the new neighborhood, so the only social interaction I had was at the school. I'll admit most of my teenage solitude was my fault, I didn't go to any school dances, I excluded myself from other social events, I didn't participate in and groups or activities, and (worst of all) whenever people I actually liked tried to talk to me I was very rude and distant. This was due mostly to a paranoid thought, that when people tried to get to know me, they were trying to set me up for some kind of humiliation. Granted there were reasons I thought this, ever since the 4th grade I was picked on by the "cool" kids (the guys and the girls) so I immediately saw the worst in people who were close to that group. By the end of the 11th grade I started coming out of my shell a little. I enjoyed the small in-class groups I hung around with and I started trusting people more, I guess a lot of them grew out of the bully phase (not all of them). There was still a group of people I had trouble talking to, that group is commonly referred to as girls. There were a few occasions when certain girls would come up and talk to me and I was still a little rude and distant, some people call it shyness, but I call it stupid. So all through high school I never asked a girl out or even had any close female friends. I only went to one class wide party and that was the one that followed my graduation, and I have to say I had a pretty decent time hanging out and drinking Pepsi and Iced tea.
High school was over and the adult life was looming overhead. I went to a small media arts college the following September and I decided to revamp my personality for the new group of people. Unfortunately I over did it and instead of making a bunch of new friends I just irritated everybody. The sad thing is that I realized this fact within the first month but still acted this way for the entire first term (which was mostly a full class basic theory stuff) In the second term I calmed down, the class was split in two (radio/television basics) and we were finally getting to use the equipment. So I focused less on trying to stand out and more on learning how everything worked, and I enjoyed it... mostly. A requirement for the class was that we had to report at least 2 news stories and because of an early dislike of telephones I had the most trouble completing this assignment. So I slacked I helped people with their stories by being the Radio side. Which meant I had to do basic TV all over again when that was done. Radio was all right. The hours were messed but I survived. I think the teachers knew I wasn't a radio guy and cut me a bit of slack. The highlight of the radio class was the ad promotion and other editing aspects to the field, which I caught onto and enjoyed fairly quickly. Once I passed that I had a week before I had to start TV again and the instructors allowed me to start the training for the Computer video editing (which I was very eager to start but was normally not available until after basic TV was passed) and I completed it in four days. I loved it I had 4 hours a day to do the book and I used up every last minute, and I knew that’s what I wanted to do for a living. So I completed my stories and passed basic TV, then focused all my attention on the non-linear edit suite. I put together news intros, graphics for the weekly news show, and spent sometimes hours at a time packaging everything together to be viewed the next day, the show was sometime even good enough to be sent to a local community TV station and played on air for the whole city to see. A little less then a year later I completed the course but still haven't found that dream editing job.
Three years later I'm 23 years old, currently living with my parents in Port Hawkesbury, and I spend most of my day wallowing in self-pity. Since I finished school in 2004 I have moved around and had a few jobs but nothing that would have turned into a career. I lived in Toronto Ontario for about a year and a half and I actually enjoyed it for the most part. I want to go back soon (this year if things manage to work out ok), and I'd like to go back to school for a refresher in video editing and to learn more then what my last school offered. Then after that hopefully settle into the career role that I can sit comfortably at for the next 30-40 years.
So that's basically my life up until now. I can't say I'm the happiest guy in the world, but I'm not the saddest either. I don't have any real philosophy on life. I just live each day like any other. If I have regrets I try not to dwell on them. Some day things will work out for the better and I can enjoy things more, and until l that day I guess I'll just watch the world through the window.
If you read this all the way through then I thank you for your interest. Feel free to send me a note or whatever if you'd like. I like hearing from new people.
- Richard
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