friendly reminder

um, hello?

Uh, yes, hello?

Hello. I have been gone. And having some fun.

My BFF, Betsy, came out to visit. Betsy has been around since 3rd grade--longest standing friend in life that I'm not related to. We've been through a number of things, and are going on 20 years of being friends. That makes us ooooold. What's worse, is we're generally ok with it. That makes us even more old.




We're not 16 year old cheerleaders anymore, but we're still pretty cute.

two things I tell myself:

There is a place where mystery is lost, but try never to go there, if you can help it.

******

There is nothing less creative, less effective, or less productive than narcissism.

look, i kind of took a photo

A few weeks back, I went with Daley and Cyndi to a photography class up in Fresno. Cyndi let me borrow her camera for the day and I took this photo while trying to figure out ISO. I have taken only a handful of photos that I genuinely think have captured something worth preserving. I really liked this photo.

I guess that's what the draw to photography always was for me--accurately capturing emotion...because I am such a sentimental sucker. Upon learning that involves significant amounts of focus, time (and extroverted), sorting, oh, and skill and talent, I decided I'd stick with capturing emotion in music and words. I'd still like to be able to take a nice photo, which is why it was cool to go with them to learn a few basics. I know there are things that I could have done better in this shot, but I like how it portrays their friendship. It was a good day, they both add a lot to my life.

remember that one time when John Mayer wrote an amazing blog?

Me too. I went back and read it today, and I'm pretty sure it's even more timely now than it was when he originally wrote it. So in a psuedo re-post, here's some of his thoughts that were uncomfortably dead on in their description of....well...us, I guess.

This is about a level of self consciousness so high in my generation, that it's actually toxic.

This is about the girl in her bedroom who poses in front of the camera she's awkwardly holding in her outstretched hand. She'll take a hundred photos until coming up with one she's happy with, which inevitably looks nothing like her, and after she's done pouring over images of herself, will post one on her myspace page and then write something like " I don't give a f*ck what you think about me."

This is about the person trying out for American Idol, who while going off about how confident they are that they were born ready to sing in front of the world, are trembling so badly they can hardly breathe.

This is about us all. Every one of us. Who all seem to know deep down that it's incredibly hard to be alive and interact with the world around us but will try and cover it up at any cost. For as badass and unaffected as we try to come off, we're all just one sentence away from being brought to the edge of tears, if only it was worded right. And I don't want to act immune to that anymore. I took the biggest detour from myself over the past year, since I decided that I wasn't going to care about what people thought about me. I got to the point where I had so much padding on that, sure, I couldn't feel the negativity, but that's because I couldn't feel much of anything. And I think I'm done with that.