24 December 2024

The meme is deceiving

I’m actually in a really good mood today. But I normally add an image to my Substack posts, and I can’t be fucked looking for one on my phone at the moment and this seemed seasonally appropriate, given the date.

The new odd job

There are two parts to the odd job: going around to four different Walmarts, and then sorting what I pick up afterwards. Up ‘til now I’d been going around to three of them with one of the people I’m doing this for. Yesterday I did the whole round by myself, but she sorted with me afterwards. We’re still very much in the growing-pains segment of this process while I try to figure out what works for me and what doesn’t. I will probably try different configurations of containers and what-have-you ‘til I’m happy with how I do it. If I can keep her from panicking in the meantime. She seems to like me a lot, and she likes that I catch on to things like paperwork, but I’m one of those people who needs to hear herself think in order to sort out how things will best work, and I can’t do that with people shouting suggestions at me. Ironically, I think I’ll be better at this once she’s moved to Nevada than I am right now. But I’ll try to tailor things to better suit me well before the move happens. I think that will ease her mind a lot too.

Meanwhile I have interesting bruises in random places. If it’s not my fingers and knuckles, it’s my arms. And I always manage to have insomnia the night before, which means I’m driving tired — I gotta quit that, because my drive from Crescent City to Cave Junction on 199 is no fucking joke when the sun’s not even up yet. I probably should just set myself to getting up at 4:30am every day and just be done with it. Those of you who have known me a long time are now laughing. I know. Shaddup.

The new lease on a friendship

I’ve talked several times about the weird situation with Stuart Parker. I don’t mean to put my whole life out on the world stage and cause drama, but I wanted to explain what’s changed because it’s possible that at some point I’ll mention having gamed with him at Neighbor’s house or something (and that may be coming up in February or March, in fact) and y’all longtimers will be all like, “Wait, what? I thought he hated you.” Thus some amount of catching-up is necessary.

Long story short, we’re friends on Facebook again, and it looks like we’re at least friendLY on a personal level. I don’t know if he counts me as a friend-friend yet. I suppose it’s possible. I left a care react on one of his Facebook posts and he responded by sending a friend request. I was not expecting that response, but I did miss him, so of course I jumped on it.

I’ve had time to think about my overall experience with the guy and while he definitely has some odd quirks? First off, so do I, as anyone who’s known me in person would tell you (some happily, some not so much). Secondly, I had to step back and look at the overall picture to understand that he definitely balances out the less-good with the more-good. It’s just really easy to overlook the more-good when you are bothered or pissed off by the less-good. So I feel comfortable at this point having anything to do with him whatsoever. Pretty happy about it, actually. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

I don’t think he actually ever hated me. I think that we were both in a weird headspace for similar reasons and it was just a bad time for misunderstandings. Time will tell whether I’m right. Or, I know I’m right that he doesn’t hate me, anyway; sending someone you hate a friend request on Facebook would have been weird even for him. Or for me, for that matter. So, for what it’s worth.

A postscript: I was Facebook friends for a while with a Canadian woman who claims to run in the same social circles he does, and she doesn’t like him at all. But one day I realized she had unfriended me, this after several DM conversations about that and other topics. No explanation, no announcement, just gone. Not a great way to convince me you’re a good judge of character, really. I don’t think she’s here, but you never know, so I just thought I’d throw that out there for consideration.

Me and photography

L sent me a DM today asking me about the photo I took of Neighbor and his dog (and, in fact, shared it here recently), because his sister saw his post with it and wanted her own copy. Downloading them from Facebook is a crapshoot because often the file quality is diminished, so I sent L the original file to pass on.

It got me thinking again about my relationship with photography and how that’s progressed over the years. When I graduated high school I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, except that “rock photographer” was high on my wishlist because I really dug Ross Halfin’s work and thought it would be amazing to do that. I never thought I’d actually be able to do it, I just thought it would be cool. I had no idea where to even begin.

Twice in my life I’ve enrolled in the New York Institute of Photography’s course, only to not finish it. I discovered that I don’t actually like photographing people, because all too often they freak out and claim that they always look bad in photos, so they don’t want any taken. (You wouldn’t know it to see me run on here, but I actually don’t like upsetting people. If I’ve decided I want to upset you, you have really fucked up.) I also realized you don’t really need a degree or certificate in photography to function as a photographer; you just need to take photos and practice. I was already a shutterbug, said activity limited only by my film and film-development budgets, and the advent of digital and phone photography only made me more so. I’ve snagged some images over the years that I still really like, and I’ve even made some pocket money from a microstock website from time to time.

Unfortunately I didn’t have a lot of money to buy more lenses and things for what camera equipment I had. Equally unfortunately, I didn’t have my own car for most of the past twenty years of my life, and when I did get out and about with my daughter’s father and took a camera along, like as not he’d wander off with her while I was in the middle of framing a shot — say, at the zoo, for instance. While he did at some point buy me a Canon digital SLR (DSLR) kit, I never felt like he really cared about me developing my skills one way or the other. It felt more like he found the whole thing annoying.

Imagine my surprise when he finally decided to take up photography as a hobby again (he had been a shutterbug in the past, but had largely abandoned it before we met), and also got our daughter interested in it, only for me to find out he had also taken up with his old flame, Crys, again. And guess what Crys does for a hobby. Oh, I see. That’s nice. And then I went into survival mode and while I’d still occasionally shoot a pretty sky, and I definitely shared the occasional selfie on social media to illustrate, for my friends, what was going on in my life? I largely couldn’t be bothered. The fact that I had to sell my DSLR gear to keep my weekly-rate room didn’t help matters.

But I still have my ancient film SLR (it’s almost fifty years old!!!). And my current phone has a pretty good camera if you don’t expect too much from it. And these days, people seem to like what I produce.

(Though the above photo isn’t recent.)

So… we’ll see. I still won’t ever be the next Ross Halfin. But I’d love to get more good nature shots. Fuck knows there is no shortage of source material here.

Okay. I believe I have cookies to bake. ‘Later. Happy Whatever You Celebrate.