TIFF08 minus 6 days

And on the sixth day to go TIFF created madness.

Crazy, absolutely crazy. Lineup to drop off the envelope - people scratching their head and looking at pieces of paper - all trying to assemble their final schedule for TIFF08.

Just to rewind for a moment.

10 days and nights
300 plus movies
1 schedule

How did it come to all this madness - with its maddening lineups, its maddening scheduling riddled with spacing and conflicts, the maddening days of too little sleep nights, the maddening realization at 3 in the morning that the selections have to be handed in the morning and the realization that those last few picks and desired movies will just not fit or the decision on what those are in the first place ? And because the decision was made to not skip the employment and instead see TIFF at night during weekdays and weekends and purchase the Festival *Lite* package of 30 tickets. Yet it ends up going into work late so that you could [ and see below ] anyway end up on this final day to get the selections in before the 1 p.m. deadline, racing downtown in the morning on The Better Way [ knows as take the car to all the propagandists ] to the box office gives an appreciation to what it is to not to have to make that daily commute downtown. And still the necessity to buy that one more cup of A&W coffee in the Eaton Centre Food Court and open up the advanced schedule book to make the final markings of first and second choice and still taking another hour to complete the book with yellow first choice and green second choice and end up making way too many yellow markings and hoping for the best that the conflicts will play themselves out to a model daily schedule of movie watching perfection then to get to the Toronto Life Building across the scrambled crosswalk and fly past the volunteer pointing up to the escalator to the final destination - only to see another lineup just to drop off the envelope into the dropbox - and to be floored by the sight of people huddling at steel tables in the food area still poring over pieces of paper and now you know the rest of the story.

[ The lineup - at the end of it was a table of more TIFF volunteers to meet and have them ask if any last minute help was needed in going over the book to which the reply was what could possibly go wrong now - and then the envelope is handed over and being told that it is going into Box 50 ]

[ Then the race to get back north up the TTC way to the place that pays for all this movie mania in the first place. Fun? Wow ]