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Jon Hillenbrand's Blog
A Gallery of Thoughts and Images
Technostalgia
You know that feeling when you look at older technology and marvel at the intricacies of their jeweled engineering? I have named this feeling technostalgia. Today, I was playing with a very old lens, an 85mm f/2 AI-S Nikkor lens which has no motors, no chips, no auto-focus, no communication with the camera, nothing. But what it does have is all metal construction, super smooth focusing, buttery soft bokeh, incredible sharpness and a nice compact body. It’s also frighteningly faster and sharper than the lenses I use every day other than the 105mm macro and 50mm. There’s a great review of this lens on Ken Rockwell’s website. The fun thing about Nikon is that these old lenses can still be used on the new bodies. Even on my old D100, the lens works great with the camera. No communication between the lens and body, but with digital photography, you see your results instantly, so you’re good to go after some quick baseline tests.
Funny how we live in this time of old and new technologies competing for our attentions. Today I watched a waveform open and close in realtime on my touch screen cell phone as I left myself a message of possible blog topics. Later, I looked up some creative tips and tricks on how to mess with Polaroid Spectra film (I found a brand new camera and about 20 packs of film recently). Then I played with a lens designed in the early 90′s and wished my newer lenses were made as well.
Hooked up
Funny how things work in the Corporate World. After 5 years of being blocked, Flickr was recently freed from the shackles of Big Brother’s proxy at my work. All it took was a single phone call from someone obviously much more important than I. Now, instead of having to bring images home on a jumpdrive and maybe uploading them to Flickr from my personal computer, if I’m not too tired from a long day, I can upload photos directly to my account as soon as I’m done editing them on my work computer. I believe I can even do it directly from Lightroom.
So stay tuned to see many more images from me in the near future posted on Flickr. I’m going to try to merge it into my regular workflow. http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonhillenbrand/
Evolve
I had to shoot an annual meeting for a women’s group the other day. The client wasn’t asking for anything special, just some images to put on a newsletter, in a website or wherever they could find space. So I took the requisite pairings and crowd shots but then later concentrated on the very pretty country club setting where the event was being held. But after I captured some nice architectural shots, I was faced with a room full of people starting to sit down to eat. I didn’t think anything that I shot during this time would be useful, so I decided to just shoot whatever I wanted. The attendees were still glad-handing so I took some surreptitious shots with my 105mm macro. But instead of the usual portrait arrangement of having the subject look across the frame while they sit pretty on the 3rds lines, I decided to use as much of the width of the frame as possible. I would place an individual on the extreme ends of the image with a background of pure bokeh behind them. The women had become used to me and so were not aware I was shooting them individually. So I was getting some fantastic facial expressions, the kind you see when high-brow people are gossiping. The results were amazing. Getting a raised eyebrow, a fed-up guffaw or an overly amused woman presented alone on a blank background was so much fun. Each face was like a sculpture. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I had discovered something new by intentionally breaking the rules that exist to ensure the ability to publish the photos I take. It’s almost as if not caring about their “publishability” allowed me to see in a way I hadn’t looked in a while. I’ve done this recently with some of the editing I’ve done to building exteriors I never thought would see the light of day. And the result is that yesterday, my boss said she was going to print up one of those building images and present it to the president of the hospital as a gift.
I guess ignoring the consequences is sometimes the best way to evolve as creative creatures.
The Red Doorway
The red door dustily banged open temporarily scrubbing the dirty grout of the men’s conversation. She paused there in the opening, a sudden wind taking its cue to wrap around her silken form the particles of the failing daylight. Her swollen pout threw daggers at the men, her final words a commandment, a gale force whisper. The men dispersed, their eyes following their smiles down to the gutter. Slithering down the steps, dark tendril hair reaching out against the street lamps, her form rocked from side to side, the machinations of her walk hinted at behind taut clothing undecorated by intimacy. From my vantage point, I wondered what words she spoke to fill the men with such fear. But then, without realizing my blundering, I found myself staring at her. Her twin souls locked with mine, reaching toward me with a purpose as I backed away. I tried to ignore her as she strode directly toward me like a predator. Her heels announced their devious intention like the impolite hammering of secret police at the door. I klutzed myself back into a park bench in time for her sharpened index finger to pierce my chest. She spread her lips past glistening teeth and inhaled, lips approaching the curve of my left ear, switch blade fingernails gleaming near my right.
Psychologists call it repression, my inability to remember the length or breadth of her words to me. It’s the brain’s way of handling a trauma. All I remember is the waterfall of love that fell from my heart the moment she spoke, the emotion, the liquid singularity. I am looking at my body floating in the sunbeams dividing the ocean in an endless dance.
The Allure of Garbage Food
Some of you will simply not be with me during this post. But today I was talking to a friend of mine on the phone and she mentioned that she was going into a Costco to buy some food in good ol’ American portions. So I excitedly asked her to look and see if they had Pepperoni Pita Stuffs. See, for those of you who know me well, you know of the existence of my Unicorn Food (that’s the food that you loved, but which is no longer available to you). The Pita Stuffs were discontinued years ago I’m guessing because I haven’t been able to find it since before the internet was big. I know it’s pre-internet because I can’t find it on there anywhere.
Anyway, the Pepperoni Pita Stuffs was one of those microwave-only frozen food aisle items, like a Hot Pocket, made up of a curved pita filled with various meals which you would slide into a crisping sleeve (included) and microwave for about 2 minutes. They had Gyros Pita Stuffs which was sickeningly gross because of the onions and peppers which never do well in the microwave and they had a vegetable something which was also disgusting. But the Pepperoni Pizza version was addictingly fantastic. Really, the appeal was its inconsistency. Most of the time when you microwaved it, the cheese would remain frozen in the middle. Actually, if you microwaved it past the melting point of most known metals, the inside of the damn thing would still consist of frozen tomato sauce and cheese shreds. But once in a while, the microwave and the crisping sleeve would synchronize somehow and the thing would turn out perfect. Then, the taste was amazing. I don’t smoke, but you know in the movies when after the big gun battle the sweaty dirt-covered hero finally finds a cigarette after asking everyone for like 20 minutes, he sits on the ground of a trench, leans up against the wall, lights the pinched cigarette and takes a quick fast drag and lets out a deep long relieved and relaxed smokey exhale? That’s how it tasted; absolute cool reliefy goodness. The closest I’ve been able to find in terms of taste is the Pepperoni-only DiGiorno Pizza. I think they are using the same sauce.
My friend didn’t sound convinced that this was a worthy Unicorn Food item. But I assured her that it had the same allure as one of those microwave hamburgers you get out of hospital vending machines. You slide that sticky clear plastic door open, pull out the mystery burger, microwave it up in that ancient microwave that all hospitals seem to have, the one with the dial instead of numbers. And it has some sort of feeling…not like a burger, but more like a piece of slightly moistened cardboard, or like pressed cat food. It’s really bad, but a week later, you are craving one like there’s no tomorrow. My sister says that those foods contain the additive Addicto, which is something she made up. But if it came out years later that Addicto or some other trade name for an addictive substance was being added to food, I would totally believe it. Coke, Pringles, Doritos, Slim Jims, they all have it. I guess anything you can get at 7-11 has it.
Anyway, Pepperoni Pita Stuffs are awesome. If you find them, mail me a few boxes and I’ll send you a “Jon Hillenbrand’s Blog” T-Shirt.
Fortune’s Fool
Maybe it was the lateness of the hour, but at the end of the work day today, the cleaning woman showed up and started speaking with such prophetic wisdom that I found myself listening intently to every sentence in her half-Haitian-half-English tongue. She’s just like an oracle in the old Greek style. She almost never shows up when you expect her, she’s so hard to understand that you almost pull a muscle listening and much of what she has to say is so simple as to be categorized as brilliant fact. She’s in her late sixties and has lived a life of children and countries. And in the opposite of the spirit of most youth, I listen to her in the hopes of some guidance that will decrypt the life I have expertly woven through the Enigma machine. She said something like, “You work very hard, end of day, you have money and then you got no thing, you die, they money to put you in ground. Nobody care. Forget you.” What I think that means is that at the end of the day, after all of my time wasted or not at work, if I don’t have something to do besides work, all I’ll have done is lived the life of a nut in a greasy inefficient machine.
Of course, advice is often Cassandra Truth entangling the blinders-bound with things as they are. But there are sunsets to be enjoyed out there. And in more honest moments, I know I will look back on my life and wish I had lain in the grass more. There’s an audible silence brought on by the wind just after your mind goes quiet, like spreading cream across a cake. Your eyes a firmament, unfocused sparks explode like flower petals revealing knowledge of little or great import, the fruit from the garden of plenty from which only the enlightened have supped, juice escaping from the sides of your mouth and over you a benediction. Shall I deny that which waits out in the field?
The Two Year Time Lapse
The BBC, inspired by such films as Baraka, has brought a revolution to mainstream documentary filmmaking, specifically Planet Earth and now Life. Many of the mind-blowing shots are done on location, but several would be impossible to do out in the randomness of the great outdoors. The below behind-the-scenes video demonstrates what it takes (and how long it takes) to get some of the shots that we all look at with amazement while walking through Best Buy looking for where the PC games are hidden. It also shows that the most advanced technology (Avid, Nikon, LIDAR) and the biggest budgets will only enable those results which you first imagine in your own mind.
New Look
I’m giving a new look to my blog. The photos will be larger, EXIF data like shutter speed, f/stop, ISO and camera type will be posted in the left column and links to other blog entries are now at the bottom of each page. Background and text colors of the blog will change depending on the color of the photos that I post. There is also an ARCHIVE link on the top of each page with thumbnails to different pics and stories.
Also take note of the large left and right arrows (sideways carrots?) on each page. They move you forward and backward through the blog.
Let me know what you think. And click around on old posts to see the new look in action!
The Perils of an Open Mind
Absolutes of ideology are succulent butter to people who are in the checklist stage of preparing to sail with Greenpeace, pasting enlarged dead baby photos to poster boards, annoying their coworkers into voting for someone or screaming about the dangers of running with scissors. Pretendindians scream about the persecution of their ancestral 16th cousin, twice removed, feeling the genetic drawstring of history closing down their virtually imagined hardly mentioned culture as they enjoy the Redskins game while eating Taco Bell and feeling a bit guilty about modern white conveniences like air conditioning and shoes. Everyone wants to feel like they belong, but secretly they all want to feel persecuted. Case in point, the recent voting-in of Obama by two camps; those who would mention the historicity of such a momentous race-centered race, and those who would pretended that it didn’t matter. I voted for McCain because I felt that his years of experience made him more qualified to do the job. I felt this was in the spirit of the, “I have a dream,” speech given by Martin Luther King, Jr. in which he said that his hope was for a color-blind society, not one acting on the very basis of that which has been so long used to victimize. But the two times I mentioned this, I was harshly criticized by the first camp for having an opinion on the matter, being a recipient of the “white male DNA” from my parents. The second camp tried to convince me that oration skill outweighed hard experience. And McCain was going to die in four years anyway.
The perils of an open mind have kept me down. I’ve often been persecuted for not taking a stand or for taking a stand against the limiting status quo. But I’ve learned more to stay quiet when I don’t understand something and not look like a fool to my older self when he travels back in time in his mind. I’ve found that this makes me a better photographer as well. Often I am faced with a situation in which I know very little about what I am shooting. Once I am willing to capture the unexpected with a few jabs in the right direction, rather than placing people Barbie and Ken-like, avenues for beauty open up. Most people aren’t actors or professional models. But they have within them a bright light just waiting to shimmer in the catchlight in their eyes. In many ways, looking back at my old photos, the ones I might regret the outcome of, it’s hard for me to criticize certain decisions if I haven’t made them. If the variables of the universe didn’t come together, that’s not really my fault. Sure, I’ve shot the wrong f/stop and felt like a basic idiot. But that’s not the result of taking a stand on a forced outcome for a photo. Keeping an open mind photographically has kept my photos fresher to me and made the experience more fun.
Recently I was teaching a girl some basics of exposure. She relayed to me a story when she was traveling and someone told her the “correct” f/stop to use for the upcoming landscape shot. “To shoot this landscape, you’re gonna need to be at f/18.” As I teach, I create tabs in my mind on subjects to go back to. And the whole discussion of ISO and shutter speed and focal length came to a crashing halt for me when I realized that her whole paradigm of thought concerning photography was based on rules of “correct” and “incorrect”. She asked, “When I enter a room, how do I know what is the correct shutter speed and f/stop to use?” She felt this was the first step to take before talking about capturing or creating anything with a camera. To me, she was coming at photography in reverse. To herself, I imagine, I was trying to teach her to fly before teaching her to walk.
I guess the problem I have is so much in life requires our weary attention that we often equate guidelines and suggestions with rules. I often suggest to my three-year old niece during bath time not to splash too much outside of the tub because the water goes everywhere. But that’s because one of my rules is that disorder and chaos have negative consequences. Or maybe I don’t want to be wet. Or maybe I am tired and want to control something. So the simple joy of a child playing in water gets ruined a bit. I often don’t feel like explaining the reason behind the no-splashing rule or the specific guidelines of that rule because it takes to long to describe chaos, control, empathy, tub wall height, water damage, evaporation, mineral contamination, etc. And frankly, I doubt she’ll care long enough to listen to any of that because she just wants to splash. So the rule gets changed into “no splashing at all”, bath time starts to suck, and soon she doesn’t want to take a bath. Similarly with photography, there are now so many rules that it is like you can only eat huge deeply red Jonathan apples starting from one side and working your way around the circumference. And while performing this act, you miss the untamed joy of gnashing your teeth into the fruit, feeling the juicy snap splash down your chin and maybe lobbing the half eaten wet apple as hard as you can across the beach to land in the gritty sand, just to see what it does. Can the fun and unintended consequences of photography only be enjoyed by those who have been doing it professionally for years? I hope not.
Language anneals ideas in the foundary of our minds as they are pressed from the imagination into workable thoughts. This is why dictators burn books when they come into power or are threatened with the loss of it. Ideas lead to more ideas. The open mind conquers. Unfortunately, when faced with uncertainty, guidelines from the elder and the experienced are bastardized into distributed religions of dogma, the result of which is a loss of love and life and opportunity while the congregations are correcting their clothing or flipping to the page of the day. The whole point is lost. The fatwas become a rallying cry for those who misunderstand the ideas behind the original guidelines. And the only way forward as a species or as an individual is to keep an open mind.
Leadworks of Time
Tonight I had dinner with someone who asked me about having a backup plan if the whole photography thing didn’t work out. I thought for a while and responded that most of my career has been spent in the less-affluent side of things due to the fact that I never wanted to “sell out” and take a job I thought too distant from photography or videography. The closest I came to falling off the path was working for a website company as their videographer. I didn’t shoot more than a foot of tape for them but wasted two years rewriting HTML and eventually managing a team of lazy co-workers. I quit that job in the middle of a fight with my myopic boss.
Yesterday, someone asked me to give them some general photographic tips. So we spent about 90 minutes going over the three-point lighting system, general exposure decision-making, editing software and a few other things which seemed expert to her, but general knowledge to me. I didn’t feel like I had done much to enlighten her the way I wanted, but she seemed to have learned a few things that she didn’t know before.
Earlier today, I got a call from an old friend who wants me to take photos of her son, four years after the last time I took some studio shots. We talked for a while and she and I are excited to see how the photos will be different from when he was a small child to a much taller little boy now.
Almost before I knew it, I’ve become the go-to person for photography-knowledge and skills for many people. I’m a paid professional with a lot of responsibility to a large corporation’s advertising and junk mail campaign. This is a welcome, if unintended direction my life has taken. I only wanted to get paid to take pretty photos and a lot of the time, I wonder how I got here.
If I’ve learned anything from Hot Tub Time Machine, it’s that our lives are made up of a series of decisions, small and large, that generally affect the route of our careers and our overall timeline of our existence. This is obvious when looking backwards through time, but not obvious when looking forwards. I’ve had arguments with girls where I knew that if I said the next thing that came to mind, we would break up. It’s a strange singularity to be faced with if you recognize it. In the short-term, there’s the scorekeeping of the argument. In the long-term, you decide with your next sentence the future possibility of having kids with this person and sending them off to college. Kind of strange that the tempo and direction of our lives might zig instead of zag when we make the seemingly smallest of statements, actions or decisions. A Gulf War veteran Anthony Swofford wrote in his book Jarhead that in war, each step you take is either toward or away from the land of the living. The problem is, you never know which direction you are walking in until you get there.
I remember storming away from that one boss, biting my tongue when my girlfriend was mean, letting go of that door handle instead of leaving when I should have. All of these decisions are carved into the lead of my life. Funny how when the light changes, the shadows cross those decisions making them prettier or uglier. Scraping across time, I make new marks, some with effort, some abandoning all thought, all with a weight I’ll feel upon my shoulders or shrug off with the strengthening and weakening of time.
The Direction
Morality is a giant flock of birds, every one joining and leaving as necessary to fulfill their immediate ambitions, the overall shape and direction coming from the collective emergence of the many. There are those who would enliven the flock and those who would laugh at its destruction. Today I flow on my own, straggling as always uninvolved from a distance where I can take my impressions without influencing my subject. I pass along that which I can confidently say is good. My hope is the welfare of the many and my distant hope is the fulfilment of dreams from childhood which I was assured are true, despite everything to the contrary. I have time for the journey is incomplete. We rest when it rains. We work together to eat. Love leaves and arrives with sorrow and joy on the wind.
My overall direction is forward, documenting the flock, narrowing for the bright, opening for the darkness, without judgement, seeing how the wind comes to me.
Easter Bunny Kills 9. Escapes.
After an exhaustive five-minute Google search on egg-related death statistics in America and coming up with almost no usable results, I stumbled across a very interesting fact about the Black Widow Spider. As some of you may already know, the Black Widow Spider is named for her truly confusing behavior of killing off her male suitors after mating with them. I’m guessing that Psycho Killer Slut Spider was either taken or didn’t translate well into Latin, the universal nomenclature of choice for scientists. The statistic of interest to me is that less than 1% of Black Widow Spider bites result in a human death. Her venom just isn’t that effective against people. But based on her looks and reputation, I would avoid the Black Widow Spider at almost all costs. In fact, when faced with a reality show situation of either being covered by Black Widow Spiders or eating 100 Easter Eggs, I’d instantly go for the eggs. But that choice could lead to my death and probably exclusion from the million dollar prize. Even though I couldn’t find any, I’m sure the statistics regarding egg-related deaths are much worse than for Widow bites. There’s the shard-like shell, the possibility of ingesting a partially developed chick, E. Coli, salmonella, food color poisoning, the list goes on. Why don’t we just go ahead and rename Easter Eggs as what they are…mother-lovin Death Spheres!
That brings me to wonder about that whole “judging a book by its cover” thing. I mean, law-enforcement agencies regularly take part in what they classify as “profiling” which is basically a complicated way of book-cover judgement. And though many groups rail against it, I’m sure the endless number of single, loner, above-average intelligent, overly mothered white male serial killers in SuperMax prisons around the country feel like they are looking into a mirror every time they look across the aisle at the other inmates in their block. So this begs the question, why does the Easter Bunny have such a warm and fuzzy persona if it kills more people per year than the Black Widow Spider? Is it because the Easter Bunny never kills its own kind? If the Easter Bunny went around killing other bunnies, would we all still love and adore him/her? That’s another thing; what gender is the Easter Bunny? The Easter Bunny seems like a mail carrier to me which is a gender-neutral job. But it does seem to dress in lots of flamboyant colors, especially pink. So one would assume that the Easter Bunny is either a girly female, gay male, or, at the very least, a sexually conflicted individual. And judging from the very intricate detail that goes into most Easter Eggs, I would gather that the Easter Bunny may have had a very overbearing mother while growing up. It does take a lot of intelligence to deliver eggs to the correct addresses. One would be in a pickle if one delivered a basket of Easter Eggs to Osama bin Laden this weekend. So the Easter Bunny is probably an intelligent white male, early to mid-thirties, with a confused sexual orientation and an overbearing and controlling mother. He likes to hide eggs in parks for children to find. He uses those eggs to kill an unknown number of people per year and then he disappears off the face of the earth, only to return at around the same time the next year. Sounds pretty cut and dry to me.
The Easter Bunny is one of the most prolific alledged serial killers at large today.
Unfettered Brain
Tonight as my sister, niece and I looked out from the roof-top deck at the rising dusk, my niece said, “Good morning, night.” Even though she is three, I am inspired by her sideways approach to everyday things. One day, after I sang the phrase, “too many monkeys,” during a long walk, we transformed the conversation into a game where we said, “No more _____.” Could be anything. No more airplanes. No more apples. No more chicken butts. There was no pattern or goal other than the naming of pretty much every noun we could think of. We both didn’t seem to get bored with this game, funny enough, although granted it was broken up from time to time by running away from ghosts or toward doggies.
This morning I intended to shoot the front of Evanston Hospital. There was a thing cloud bank in front of the sun which terminated at the zenith of the sky, blue beyond toward the west. It created a perfect lighting situation of nice soft shadows toward the foreground and good blue sky in the background. Perfect! So I ran to get my camera but got tied down by emails and phone calls. Thirty-five minutes later, when I made it out front, the clouds had all melted away into a clear panorama of royal blue. The shadows were flat against the building now and were uninteresting. So I took some interior shots instead. Here are some of them.
Flag Day
A good photo is knowing where to stand. – Ansel Adams
As someone who is often asked for advice on photography, I usually tuck this quote in right after giving an overview of the bucket analogy, three-point lighting and the two-thirds rule. To me, it all comes down to this: knowing where to stand. Today, I thought of that adage often as I attempted to get a good shot of the new front entrance of Skokie Hospital. The morning sun was coming across the face of the building in an OK way; not awesome, but good enough to work with. The sky had just enough clouds to be dramatic when outlined with a polarizer. But the one thing I couldn’t work with were the three flag poles. I sometimes joke that the architects never consult with me before making their plans. The buildings all look architecturally beautiful but are often very challenging to shoot effectively. A downside to corporate photography is that requests are made to see signage, but that signage is often impossible to see. For interiors, signage is often completely absent except on a huge black marquee rug that everyone has tracked mud across. I’ve shot those. Brushed brass signs are placed on brown brick walls creating an impossible lighting and color situation of dark gold on brown. Highland Park Hospital is a great example of photography not being a priority. The hospital is at the top of a steep hill. So unless you have a cherry picker or crane, you can’t get a good angle to include the entire front of the building. You have to use a very wide focal length which has to be tilted up because of the hill which distorts the building reducing its side and emphasizing the sky. So I usually end up just shooting parts of the front like the awning or just the sign alone. There is one slightly raised spot that is closer to the entrance which they just landscaped in. But that spot isn’t workable now because groundskeeper has placed saplings every few feet covering every possible view. It’s blocked now let alone 15 years from now when the trees fill in.
Anyway, as I was shooting Skokie today, these three flag poles were looking right at me the way the eyes of the Mona Lisa are said to follow you no matter where you stand. And when you shoot buildings with flags, you have to contend with the wind. Sometimes you just sit there waiting. But that’s all a part of knowing where to stand. Then, wait…what’s going on with that middle flag? I noticed that the tallest middle flag pole had the American flag twisting around itself from a single lower eyelet. So instead of honoring America by having its flag fluttering from the tallest pole of the three, it looked like the hospital was being run by the Al-Qaeda network of healthcare administrators. Usually when I am asked to photograph any of the 75 or so locations that our corporation has dominion over, the Illinois and American flags are in tatters at the end and the hospital flag is just hanging down not flapping at all because it’s a double-thickness flag that is too heavy to catch a breeze. It was someone’s idea a few years back to make sure that the company flag would never be backwards. So the corporate flag is actually two flags sewn together so both sides face out and neither is reversed. Unfortunately, neither side is ever visible because of the weight of the material unless there’s a level 5 on the Fujita scale rolling through. Fortunately today, the wind was carrying new Illinois and corporate flags while Old Glory twisted itself into a tattered bundle of crushed hopes and dreams.
So like any red-blooded American, and someone who didn’t want to have to retake the photos, I talked to the front desk people about fixing the American flag. But this was apparently not an easy request to fill as no one seemed to know who was responsible for that. Concierge? Facilities Maintenance? Engineering? Outsourced to some Flag Raisers Unlimited company? No, it’s Public Safety (security). As Public Safety has (at other locations) left me high and dry for hours, I decided to just take the shots with the flag looking horrible, and I would just chop the flag out or try to find a good flag to insert. But half way through shooting, they showed up and spent about 20 minutes fixing it. Once Security finished, the grounds crew started tearing up the front lawn that I was shooting, the lawn right in front of my camera. Whatever, shoot anyway and chop the crew out. Then a million patients and family members showed up to drop off and pick up their loved ones. Whatever. Wait until people leave. Then a very nice elderly woman who thought I was a surveyor flagged me down to talk to me about a relative or friend of her’s that was a pioneering female aviator. She was putting together a presentation on early aviation and wanted to talk to me about Powerpoint, inserting videos, legal issues with movie use, etc. It all sounded cool and when she mentioned that she was into flight sims, my ears perked up even more. So I talked to her for a while about her documentary, her PPT presentation, HOTAS joysticks, TrackIR and all sorts of other nerdy things that I never get to talk about with friends.
By the time she left, I had 8 minutes to get to my next appointment. I got some shots, but I didn’t get that special feeling when I know I took the best shot possible. But since I had already spent two hours there, I figured it was time to depend on the RAW workflow to drag out some interesting editing solutions. Maybe stick with the closeups. My boss just tonight told me that she was interested in the “more creatively edited” shots, so in the end, it all worked out.
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Techo-f****d
I just wrote a whole blog post with tags and photos while laying here in bed typing with my thumbs into my “smartphone”. Amazing how far technology has taken us. But after taking the photo, the application crashed erasing the whole post and ruining the whole mystique.
Remember your audience
I shot Billy Corgan for a benefit concert the other night. Though he was donating his time, he made a few comments to the crowd which reminded me that contempt for the audience is not always made up for by expert guitar picking.
This reminded me of the axiom, “Remember Your Audience.” Film school was full of people trying to outdo each other with strange concepts and experimental imagery. An apple sitting alone on a chair in a long hallway is juxtaposed with an angry old man. Some students would nod knowingly but I would often suspect they were harboring deeper confusion. So when it came time for me to make my films, I tried to fall on the side of “clear narrative” and “understandable imagery” in order to not alienate my audience. This approach was nearly derailed in my “Experimental Media Production” class. So I ended up doing a stop-motion animation of a metal man with alligator clips for hands and a magnifying glass for a head, named Mr. Magnifier. The story involved Mr. Magnifier being trapped in a giant maze of electronic gadgets and sound board sliders. I had him riding a hockey puck car through diverging hallways. It was called Escape From the Machine. The great thing was that the film developed quite a following and people constantly asked me when the sequel was coming out. This was a double-edged sword however as I had recently run out of money for film and processing (we shot on 16mm reversal film back then).
For my senior thesis, I switched half way though my film from motion picture to still photos. I looped it in as a (say this next part in a near-sarcastic lilt reminiscent of a film student taking himself too seriously) ”montage” of images speaking the truth about Mr. Magnifier’s struggles and how they reflected contemporary society’s painful move toward technology at the expense of technology…or something like that. I got a B.
Chaotic Soul
Driving with purpose seemed to dry the aqueous pressure behind my eyes as the shrinking distance between my soul and that of my parents stretched the road and all its travelers into panoramic time lapsed smears. I was glad for the speed of other enthusiasts and procrastinations as it hid my my own from those who would so soon have me back within the mind-numbing confines of drivers school. But despite my efficient progress, I was in no hurry to meet the eyes of my mother and to see within them a worry over me or my progress in moving on with my life. And in the 5 seconds of seeing her it took for her to ask and re-ask me what was wrong, I had decided to keep my troubles with love and work to myself.
Thus opened the gateway to hear all of life’s troubles setting upon her own shoulders. I’m a good listener, I’ve been told. But today I wasn’t up to the task and I decided not to stay for dinner. My dad returned home with groceries which I failed to carry, a role I feel obliged to fulfill as any kind of a good son to those whom have provided so much. I suppose I was too busy balancing on the white picket between wanting assistance and wanting unconditional and unquestioning love. Sometimes we all just want sympathy for no particular reason. And in the 5 or so stages of grief, the one left out is the pathetic stage which no one likes to talk about, let alone admit to, though I know many have gone there before me.
So I decided to leave after an hour of listening and not much talking. But before I left, my mom asked me a third time what was wrong and I admitted that I missed my ex and my job had changed at work, and that these things were really bothering me today for some reason, and I didn’t want to talk about it even though I was there for some reason I couldn’t explain. We said our goodbyes and my dad was enthusiastic to talk and really disappointed that I was leaving after seeing him for 5 minutes. And it took everything inside of me not to walk away rudely when my mom insisted in walking me out as she scrambled to put on her gym shoes. She followed me out into the failing Winter’s cold.
We walked the few feet to my car and she parentally started in with advice I assumed I already had heard or come up with on my own. I’m sure I’ve perfected the expression of aloofness at this point in my life, but I kept it holstered to hear a bit more. She told me about the boy who loved her whom she had come close to marrying. This boy adored my mother and wanted to marry her. He even asked for my mom’s permission before he proposed to another woman, his love was so deep. My mom loved him back, but in her most honest moments, she knew that she was too much for him, that she would dominate him and spit him out after a few years. A long time ago for her, she remembered a party after their split where he was standing next to his new woman, his fiancée. My mom walked over to them and asked him to get her a coke; she wanted to talk to the her. As the fiancée’s eyes daggered into my mom’s, they broke and settled as my mom said to her the reasons for the split and the reasons for her to be happy with this man. Mom said to her, if she could find it within herself to marry him, she would find in him a remarkable man, a catch, a caring husband and loving father. The two women became fast friends as the awkwardness melted away replaced by something else surely better experienced than explained here. Years later, my mom saw the girl outside a building, now married to the man for a short time. She said that she wanted to thank my mother for her kind words at that party that one night and what a difference it had made to her. She said that they had both just lost a baby in miscarriage. But with a smile she said that she and the man were going to carry on and because of their love for each other, they were going to try again. In the end, this woman married the right man. Consequently, my mother married the right man as well, and she was the right woman for him. No marriage is perfect, but what she ended up with was the right thing that, as she put it, God had provided.
I looked away at the moon rising in a perfect blue-gray sphere and perhaps the cause of my day’s chaotic soul was rising too. Like a puzzle piece, my mother’s advice clicked into place and I felt a little more complete. My existence is owed to the small decisions she made that had lasting consequences. Through the backward-looking lens of time, we can roughly gauge where we’ve survived and where we’ve failed. My mom’s story is paralleling my own in many ways and part of me cringes at the outcome that I see coming but want to resist. I’d rather second guess fate and end up with the woman that I choose. But maybe in a few years, maybe, I can look back and be happy about the moonrise this day and how my mom was right once again. And to that day I shall now look forward.
The Bunker
The Bunker - put two copies of this photo side by side and you have the whole width of the house
When I lived down in Momence, IL, or “The Kank” as I like to refer to it (Kankakee Valley area about 90 minutes south of Chicago), I often came home to a dark Hill House-esque pink cottage which teased me with its Pepto crust and screwy center. To say that I believed that the house was haunted does an injustice to the word “believed”. I knew it. But like anything that anyone is sure of, it’s often the story you tell to others that reveals your doubts. I’d start the familiar story with an endless string of clauses like, “I know this is going to sound crazy, and maybe it’s just the result of me living alone for the first time in my life, or maybe it’s the woods, and of course it could be that my TV reception is bad…” Eventually I’d get to the part where I say that my petite South of France-emulating cottage was haunted by a young man and an old lady in a wheelchair. Having two unexpected roommates in a supposedly empty house of unknown origin will freak you the hell out, especially when a rack of pots and pans falls off of its moorings in the ceiling crashing to the floor in a tremendous racket only to be cleaned up by the time you walk the ten steps into the kitchen. The footsteps upstairs will also unnerve you when you are the only person at home. These are charming additions to an otherwise lonely little house for some, I’m sure. For me, I was ready to sprint out of there the day after I gave the “ghosts” a talking to. One day, after a tremendous fright, I said enough was enough. I explained it like this, “Look, I know it has to suck being stuck in a house. And maybe this is all very confusing to you. Maybe you feel like you have always lived here. But you are dead. I don’t know if you are aware of that. I mean, who would tell you? Maybe it happened in the absence of time, and for years you have been wondering what goes bump in YOUR night. Well, if that is the case, then it’s people like me, the living, who now occupy your house. I’m sorry you are stuck in this position, but I’m willing to make a deal with you. I live here now. So when I am home, which is mostly only on the weekends and at night, you should stay in the basement. I know that sucks. I’m sorry. But I can tell when you are walking around upstairs and it freaks me out. So when I’m NOT home, feel free to run around the whole house. But all I ask is that when I start to come home, please just go down to the basement. I can tell when you are watching me walk up the sidewalk, those dark windows are staring right through me. Anyway, I’m hoping we can work this out. Thanks.”
Instantly, the place seemed calmer, at peace. The next day, my landlady told me that I had to move out because her daughter was getting a divorce and she needed the place. I was instantly suspicious of the whole thing.
Shortly thereafter, I moved to a cinder block ranch home, which being next to a mansion-sized home reminded me of slave quarters. A shower was added to the original showerless floor plan in a small closet. I called this place The Bunker. It even had a small slit window at the top of the living room wall perfect for defending the waterfront. This place offered no defense against hating it though. The off-white wall to wall carpeting was perfect for accepting the massive roast I dropped on it the first week there. It added an element of, “Something bad happened here,” to the whole Sixth Sense-like experience of living down in the Kank.
Anyway, how does any of this relate to being a photographer or photography in general? It probably doesn’t. Sorry.
The Bunker - notice the gun port at the top of the wall
:| (unamused)
Today during a studio shoot, I had an interesting interchange with an older woman who volunteered to be a model for a set of ads we are putting together for the launch of a new wing to a hospital:
SUBJECT: “I own my own ad agency, so I know all about photos. And if there are any photos that I don’t like, I will MAKE you delete them.”
ME: “Really. OK then.”
Later, after the shoot, as we are reviewing the photos on the back of the camera…
SUBJECT: “That one. I don’t like my butt. And that one. Delete it. Delete that one where my butt looks bad.”
ME: “OK. So well, thanks so much for coming in and volunteering to be a part of this shoot.”
SUBJECT: “Promise me. Promise you will delete those photos I don’t like.”
ME: “I will. I’ll only use the good photos.”
SUBJECT: “Promise me. Swear. Swear to God!”
ME: “OK, I’m not going to swear to God. But I promise to only use the good photos.”
SUBJECT: “Good. Because if I see any of those photos I don’t like in these ads, I’ll find your photo studio a LOT quicker.” (She was an hour late.)
ME: “OK, thanks for coming. Safe trip home.”
The Long View
Sometimes I can feel the neurons in my head recharging to execute a wrong decision once again. And in that shiver of a moment, I sometimes see the long view of my life stretched out before me like bolts of drying linen across the stone floor of time. Thoughts meander around rejected choices like flies gathering around a corpse. I see clearly how a time machine would never work in practice. Early morning clothing choices often involve considerations for the future of my dating world and career. How could a time machine allow me a second look at a mercury-like past without changing everything in the world around it?
A few times in life, you will be asked to gather together into a group and straws will be drawn to decide your fate. This may or may not happen literally or even with you in attendance. But your future will be decided on the seemingly fickle whim of Chance. Cutbacks at work, the branch snaps, you lean left and the bullet splits your open fingers rather than your skull (happened to my grandpa in WW2). For whatever reasons, you survive or perish in some small or big way. The ripples spread out from there and the universe moves forward with or without you.
And what shall we do riding these waves of time, treading water around the wreckage of some ship that brought us to where we are now? When the sharks gather and make passes at your legs, shall you kick and scream them away or blow out your air? Or is there another path along those concentric curls that might angle the sun more clearly onto your face as you descend another trough?
Perhaps the answer is sacrifice. Not the killing of a virgin for the welfare of your town in the eyes of a dragon, but the kind of self-sacrifice that brings light to someone else. We’re so trapped in the shallow focus of our lives that we drown in the circles of confusion that we surround ourselves with. There’s an impossible distance we’ll never reach which will help explain all of the nonsense forced upon us. But if you believe in the ripple, and others believe in theirs, perhaps we can help someone else with a boost when they dip, and maybe along the paths of intersecting arcs, we will in-tern be boosted. However, even if it doesn’t come around in our favor, I’d personally like to contribute to the dance in a good way. If I sink in a conspiracy of bad luck, at least I did something good for someone else. If I hold a child above my head and drown, that child will survive. Maybe a lesson will be learned; maybe it will skip a generation. But in the end, when I view my circles from a distance that allows me to see the patterns, I’m hoping the design will be full of sun, and not shadows.
I think over again
My small adventures, my fears.
The small ones that seemed so big,
For all the vital things I had to get and to reach.
And yet there is only one great thing, the only thing:
To live to see the great day that dawns,
And the light that fills the world.
(Inuit song, 19th century)
Fate of the Created
Would it bother you to know that you were created in a lab? That your insides were not the result of slow evolutionary processes but of the genius machinations of a scientist? Sometimes I wish I had a robotic hand like in Terminator 2, but then I look at my natural hand with a certain sense of wonder. Not only does it do many of the things a robotic hand can do, but it can also heal itself which is more than I can say for a Chromalloy substitute. Of course, I can’t crush a steel hand rail or deflect bullets with my current setup, but I can punch someone, swing a baseball bat or paint small pupils on a 1/35 scale model of a helicopter pilot. I can’t play the piano, but I can type very fast then cradle a rose or an egg. That to me speaks volumes about the accuracy, speed and complexity of movement that my hands are capable of producing.
At the core of my being exists a certain connection to my planet of origin. Call it a link to the natural world or a connection to an ancestry of previous existence, but there’s something inside of me that reaches backwards as well as forwards in time. Of course, I’m completely taking my origins on faith. I have no memory nor have I visited the location of my birth (I was born in a state that we moved away from when I was 1 yr old), I’ve never seen a photo of my mother when she was pregnant with me and I don’t have any baby photos that I can remember seeing. So it’s possible that I was manufactured in a lab. I sometimes imagine a big budget movie version of my creation. Shining metal skeleton coming together on an assembly line, my eyes pieced together like the glass elements of a photographic lens, a pendulum for a heart, twin compressed gas cylinders for lungs, basket weave template for my skin which flows in like Pepto Bismol, ten thousand wires leading out the top of my decapped head to a clinical-looking machine attached to a monitor with flow charts and bar graphs displayed next to a black rubber accordion resonating with my eventual breath. An old clockmaker or perhaps a jelly green alien fingers his brow as he locks in elements of my personality/operating system.
Perhaps it is my preconceived notions of what an artificial being would look or act like that keep me from believing that I’m some kind of cyborg. Would I bleed if I were manufactured? Would I think or dream? Does the intelligence I feel prove my natural origins? What would be the method of creating a being as complex as a human? Humans approach invention as a process of prototyping, revision and eventual mass production from lessons learned. But for more complex constructions, wouldn’t it make sense that the creation of that thing take place over many months, years or eons? The human brain could be described as one of the most complex computers ever to have existed on Earth. Yet it grows into its most basic form ready to go after only 9 months of gestation.
If human evolution is the process of prototyping and development in the grand scheme of things, what will our final form be? Will we be manufactured for mass distribution? If so, for what purpose? Are we here merely to interact and exist? Is that a lofty or worthwhile existence? Or is the Earth a giant petri dish where we simmer and divide into something eventually useful for supermen who watch from afar with deadly plans. Are we on our own here or we are actually destined for something that is to come?
Cowboy Up
Today I had a great photo shoot. I was tasked with photographing a group of 7-year-olds who all have movement disorders. When I asked for a definition of that, one of the supervisors said that they weren’t especially good at coordinating their left and right sides. So, for example, one of the kids just seemed a bit lax about using his left hand as much as he should when doing a two-handed task. The great thing is, kids are kids no matter what’s going on. And kids that age are just plain cool. They are still innocent, fun to hang with, fun to goof around with and totally natural in front of a camera. This group of kids was so much fun right from the start and I got excited to take some cool pics. Luckily, we were shooting at the Lifetime Fitness workout club who generously donates their climbing wall to these young guys and gals once a week. So instead of this being “therapy” in the traditional sense, the climbing class was more like on-the-job training for life’s little obstacles, the obstacle in this case being a 35 foot high climbing wall.
As soon as I arrived, I was confronted with a set of “rules” regarding photography. They were pretty standard, but one stood apart as particularly troublesome. I couldn’t shoot any photos while the kids were actually climbing. The suggestion was, tell the kid to stop climbing, have them turn toward the camera and then I can snap the photo. I knew this was going to be difficult to adhere to as I planned to get good action shots. They explained that the rule was a safety issue to make sure that no children or adults are distracted by the camera or flash resulting in a dangerous fall. Fair enough.
At first, it was very awkward. I chose not to use a flash so as not to be disruptive or alienating. The room was mostly top-lit with coldish tungsten with tall windows on the sides. But the sun was going down and I had to push up my ISO to 500 to get the shutter speed I needed, something I cringe doing with my APS-sized sensor. The logistics of the shots were proving to be difficult as well. I would ask the physical therapist to ask the kids to pause at a certain height above the ground. That would be relayed to the kid, the kid would awkwardly stop in mid-climb (something difficult for anyone to do) and I’d try to get a few shots in the one or two seconds I had before they wanted to start climbing again. Often an arm or a rope would get in the way, and I’d ask to get a second or third shot. I didn’t necessarily want “advocacy shots”, them looking into the camera, as I wanted more natural action shots. After a while, I got into the spirit of the rule and used a long telephoto far from the climbers so as not to distract them. But for the close shots, the kids were great at just acting. I’d have them look up, reach for a distant handhold, all safely and not when they were actually climbing, and the effect was great. The kids are natural performers groaning to get into character sometimes.
The great thing was that all of these kids were totally functional and adapted to the task. Granted, this wasn’t their first class, but I saw the same sorts of behaviors among them that I’ve seen at any child-infested Dicks’s Sporting Goods’s climbing walls. The kids are just full of energy bursting to get out. When they aren’t climbing, some would jump and jump and jump on the bouncy rubber footing that was the ground cover. Even after three or four climbs to the top, they were still ready to rock. I could also see the direct benefit of the class helping these kids with coordination. The motivation wasn’t some artificial device in a rehab room and an expectant look, the motivation was to not fall off the wall. Some of the older kids in the later class also started to pick up the jovial swagger of seasoned professionals, climbing the walls with attention on routes and technique rather than any sort of focus on therapy.
Searching for a different angle, I wanted to shoot down on the climbers from the roof. There seemed to be a small space at the top of the climbing walls where I might just fit, so I asked one of the instructors if there was a way to get up there. He said, “I guess we could put you in a harness.” I was thinking stairs. So I thought about it, and after seeing these kids climb the extreme parts three and four times now, I figured I’d cowboy up. I mean, at work I wear 5.11 cargo pants every day and various North Face and REI shirts instead of the usual button down shirt, tie and slacks uniform everyone else is required to wear. I might as well take advantage of that fact. So I changed lenses to a 50mm (because it’s physically short), climbed into a harness, changed lenses again (to a 12-24mm because it’s wider to catch all of the kids on different walls), let the belayer guy who I just met rope me in and I tried to prepare myself. I also took my time retying my shoes.
I haven’t climbed a wall in years. I slung the camera across my body and tried to keep the three point rule in my head, i.e. always keep at least two feet and a hand or two hands and a foot on the wall at all times. I also tried not to rush. I figure it’s like a free-throw, just you and your task. So I took my time, chose route, tried not to compromise with my handholds, tried to relax and eventually I made it up to the top. I was really happy, but also straining at the wall at that point trying to relax. The only problem was, I went up the straight vertical wall because it was easier than the “leaning out over the floor” wall. The belay rope I was attached to was dangling down the more difficult wall to my right. So when the belayer was ready, I let go and swung quickly to the right. Trying not to slam myself or $6000 worth of camera into the wall, I spread my feet apart and landed pretty easily in the right place. I had kind of planned it and it went how I thought. But someone down below went, “woo!” which made me happy. Someone said I was like Spiderman. Haha. But I was tense all over trusting their equipment that I hadn’t taken that long to put on. The belayer was doing a good job holding me in place and I turned my body as much as possible to get an angle on the kids without getting my own body in the shot.
Of course, all of the kids were just watching me, they weren’t climbing. So I had to wait for them to all get ready, hook up, etc. So as they did that, I had to stop myself from staring down at them and staring and staring. I turned and looked back up at the wall, tried to relax, tried to settle into the harness and turned back to see the kids already halfway up the different walls around me. So I took a few shots, immediately wished I had brought the 50 or the 105mm up with me to get the shot I envisioned, framed and reframed and took a few more. They weren’t the best but oh well. I was ready to get down.
When I made it to the bottom, one of the kids ran up to me and handed his two fists to me. I grabbed his fists but looked confused and he said that he was giving me milk for strength. I could see that he was holding imaginary straws so I slurped from each one by one and he ran away smiling. It was awesome. He reminded me of my 3-year-old niece and I was happy that at 7, kids are still as cool as they are at 3. Like all adults, I want to be cool to kids, and I felt cool to these kids.
It’s not every day I get paid to have this much fun. As I walked out into the snowy evening with the tons of equipment that I didn’t use for the shoot, I was happy that programs like this exist. I am also happy that I was able to experience this one with these great kids if only for a short moment.
Do We Allow Our Existence?
Or are we merely the beneficiaries and victims of Existence, depending on the flap of the butterfly’s wings? Things happen. Shit happens. Life happens. Ups and downs and gutters and strikes. Why do things happen? Who knows why the vibrations among the atoms of the universe gang up on us or choose to shower us with joy. To make sense of it all would be as pointless as analyzing the meaning behind a children’s playground of teeter-totters, slides and swings.
But on a more macro level, that which we look forward to gives way to that which we make excuses for. I once edited a photo for someone online, a stranger. This photo was a diamond half buried and unpolished. Twenty minutes in Photoshop and the photo looked great, I think. I changed summer to fall, brought noon down to sunset and a greater reality emerged. I gave it back to the stranger who then took credit for the photo every chance he got. Part of me thought, “Oh well, if they ask him to take any more good photos, good luck to him.” I felt slighted, ripped off by my generosity. But worse than that, I felt someone advancing in the world in my place upon the ladder I had constructed. The obvious question is, where is my charitable spirit? If I made a balloon animal for a child who ran away and showed her friends, and then she took credit for making the balloon animal herself, I wonder if I would react with the same annoyance I felt toward the stranger.
Perhaps part of the root of my issues is that I was raised by Mrs. Masters Degree in Anatomy and Dr. Psychiatry, a.k.a. The Wizard of all knowledge and compassion. Together, they have been humble benefactors of knowledge and healing to the entire world I knew for many years, eclipsed maybe only by that guy who used to drop gold coins into the bell-ringing Santa’s red pale around Christmas each year. For years, they told me how special I am, how I am destined for a great purpose. That was reinforced by movies like Star Wars and Dune in which Christ-figures emerge one day to claim their greatness and fulfill their destiny. Freshman year of college, a teacher even pushed me to join the, “Young Leaders of Tomorrow,” which was a group of people destined for greatness, I would guess. I never went. I said to the teacher, “I’m not a future leader.” I was the Vice President of Campion Hall at the time, my dorm. I talked my way into it, with little to no qualifications in my mind. And once in, I found no peace. Every idea that seemed basic and honorable to me was debased by people striving for political correctness and harmony at the expense of honesty. Harmony at the expense of honesty. That explains a lot of what is wrong with the world. It’s just as bad as chaos for the sake of honesty. Perhaps that is the motivation of the True Believers in the Middle East (and Europe and America now it seems) who would rather see the world choking on a cloud of the black blood of the Earth, a burning fountain like a cut artery. They’d rather it all be chaos than go against a perceived will of Allah. Anyway, I never went to the group and I feel that in some ways I’ve chosen the path I now find myself on. Obviously, I’m not thrilled with the path that I’m on, wishing for more money, more responsibility, more experience, the usual. But I am not stupid to the eachoes of my past choices.
Historians, veterans, hell, even Robert McNamara admitted that the war in Vietnam was run the way it was because politically we couldn’t commit to a decisive course of action. Taking the long view, many of the world’s conflicts would end much more quickly if a nuclear weapon was dropped on an offending area. But to even suggest it is looked upon with disgust. There is an implication there that the better course of action is to slowly and surgically stab at an enemy, extending the conflict into years and stretching casualty lists beyond what a tactical nuclear weapon would conceivably inflict. People, of course, are worried about winning the battles only to lose the war. So perhaps the situation in the Middle East exists because we’ve allowed Existence to shape it that way.
When faced with our options, we chose one direction, like swimming left while underwater instead of going straight. The vacuum created in that space is quickly flooded by all the details and specifics of the rest of the world and the choices that the rest of the world is making from nanosecond to nanosecond.
Then where do I fit among my fellow humans as this special being I was told so much about? I’ve talked to the religious about being insignificant enough to be missed and I am assured that God notices and loves me especially because I’m very special to Him. But if everyone is special, than no one is special. If I think, therefore I am, and I stop thinking, then what am I as? As a rock? As a tree? Am I as important as the ground or the air or the wind? Or am I the singularity of everything that is me? Am I a lingering thought in the mind’s eye of creation? Or am I the pocket filled in when an infinite number of choices were made which affected all the other choices in the universe, colliding and avoiding in a zig-zag of consequences that resulted in my mother and father finding themselves at an altar in a church vowing to stay together forever in Love. Am I merely the consequences of actions that have already taken place? Or am I an actor who will one day exact upon the universe my own sets of choices which will result in the rest of existence progressing toward its infinite horizon? Will I claim my destiny?
Instruction Manual – Life – 2010
I don’t know about you, but I sometimes feel shortchanged by the instruction manual I received when I was born. Oh wait, there isn’t an instruction manual for Life. What the heck?! There are instruction manuals for everything, even chopsticks. The first time I saw those three Chinese pictures on the side of the wrapper, I thought it was a funny cool little cartoon, like the kind you used to get with that rock hard bubblegum. But once I realized they were instructions, I suddenly felt sorry for the person who had to draw those up. They were probably thinking, “I went to college for illustration, and now I’m drawing instructions for dumb people.”
I can see it now. A customer pays for his Chinese delivery and sits down in front of the TV to watch Idol. He pulls out those two little sticks locked in their last embrace. ”What do I do now?!” The panic attack ensues and he eventually curls up into the fetal position while being silently mocked by the little white boxes surrounding him. If only there had been some kind of instructions!
I submit that if there can be instructions for chopsticks, why can’t there be instructions for Life? I mean, I know if you compare an Indian oil field worker in Dubai to say a Canadian bush pilot, they have very different lives. But there have to be some common problems that could easily be solved with a few simple instructions, right? Of course, now some of you are thinking, “What about the ______ (insert religious/cult text here)” ?! And you’re right. Sure, those books are helpful for a lot of situations. But I haven’t seen anything in any of them that tells you how to talk to a girl that you like. And I’ve never seen instructions in them that cover what you are supposed to do when you are trying to hang a picture, and all you have is a nail, a wall and a picture. And where are the instructions on how to tackle running out of toilet paper? Hello?! That has to be universal, right?
So that’s what I’d like to give to the world. I’m not married yet and I don’t have any kids. So maybe I should get off my butt and start writing an instruction manual for the future generation. I could make a chapter for each year of life. The first three chapters would be just pictures. Actually, the first chapter would consist of just a hand being held up with the word underneath that says, “WAIT”. (I figure for the first year, your life really isn’t up to you. So you don’t need instructions other than just, “wait.” The second chapter would have to describe in some way, “Be cute and you shall receive rewards.” So maybe a circle + adult = milk. And a jagged star + adult = 
.
Chapter three would be one of the most complex chapters because three year olds have the most to learn of any age. They are right at that point where the choices they make start to affect what happens to them. Before that, a parent or guardian will treat them however they are going to treat them, nearly regardless of the child’s behavior. But once three years old hits, you had better start workin’ it. So three is critical. Four through ten, you are building upon a three year old’s knowledge.
Hopefully a manual like this would have useful tips for boys and girls alike. At 35 I’m still finding things that I assumed my older sisters already knew that I think I just picked up because I’m a boy. And I know there is a lot I never learned specifically because I’m a boy. For instance, I know that you have to purchase, at the very least, an 18.8 Volt cordless screwdriver or the purchase is a waste of money. Really, 18.8 is even too low because those batteries are crap, and the 9 volts are a joke. But money might be an issue so there are the 18′s. You just have to be careful with the batteries. Anyway, to me that’s useful knowledge! I don’t blame my sister for not knowing that. She knows how to pick out fresh fruit correctly. I have no idea how to do that.
Let’s write this stuff down! And the next time you see someone riding their bike down the busiest street in town, while 10 cars back up behind him, you can scream out your window, “Did you even read your instruction manual?!”
MOVED
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