Archive for the ‘ Life in the Real World ’ Category
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 [ READ MORE ]
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 [ READ MORE ]
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 [ READ MORE ]
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 [ READ MORE ]
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 [ READ MORE ]
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 [ READ MORE ]
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 [ READ MORE ]
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[ READ MORE ]
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 [ READ MORE ]
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 [ READ MORE ]
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 [ READ MORE ]
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, [ READ MORE ]
Man is a wonder. So full of possibility, so acutely a master of all things good and evil. Often we gather to push together, our efforts as one more powerful than the sum of the individuals. We chose to go to the moon, not because it was easy but because it was hard. The highest [ READ MORE ]
I’m glad I’m not a writer, in the professional sense. Sure, I take photos, and sure, some people might think I’m putting myself out there with my “vision of the world”, but for me, my vision(s) of the world are literally snapshots in time, not labored over, heavily edited presentations of my most deep and [ READ MORE ]
The Truth will not reveal itself to the idle mind. We must sometimes engage in things which we might find uncomfortable, the least of which may be the admission that we were previously incorrect about something. Concurrently, this sometimes uncomfortable journey may bring us to a bridge we have to cross. And it won’t be as [ READ MORE ]
The most important parts of the most important concepts can sometimes be distilled down to just a few or one element of those grander schemes. The search for Truth, the struggle to keep a crying baby calm or the endless waiting on the highway when driving to your girlfriend’s house. Even larger problems of how [ READ MORE ]
There’s a moth riding the inside of an invisible cylinder as fast as he can downstairs around the light near where I get my mail. These struggles seem minor to others, but to me they always pose a moral challenge. Should I show the moth where the door is? Beyond it awaits the darkness of uncertainty, an [ READ MORE ]
“THE DIRTY LITTLE SECRET” OF THE HIGH COST OF HEALTHCARE or, “THE SYSTEM IS NOT BROKEN” by S. J. Hillenbrand, B.A., M.S. Doctors Cause the High Price of Healthcare It is widely accepted that the misdeeds of physicians are the reasons why so many people cannot receive health care. The doctors order [ READ MORE ]
It’s funny how easy it is to do something when you have the proper motivation. I’m sure the military is well aware of this through the use of drill sergeants. Back when I was working out on a daily basis, my motivation wasn’t an inconsolably angry person in a smoky bear hat, it was a [ READ MORE ]
There are these people, you probably know them. They are your birth parents and the people who raised you. Sometimes these are the same people, sometimes not. And like you, they are separate from you, individuals. They party or they don’t, they have dreams, they sacrifice, they are selfish and greedy and they believe in [ READ MORE ]
It’s a very strange thing to look over some of the facebook/flashback pages of people from grade school that I left behind the day I moved on from 8th grade. I look over the friends of one person that I didn’t mind only to find that they are friends with some people that I absolutely [ READ MORE ]
So have you ever felt like it was Friday when it was only Wednesday? Or did you ever think the week must almost be over, but it’s only Tuesday? It’s like our mental clocks are just getting back from vacation with a tan and stories while you’ve been slaving away at the data entry. That [ READ MORE ]
“How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?” -Plato, 428 – 348 BC I was told by my father once that if you write down your dreams immediately after waking [ READ MORE ]
When I lived in Kankakee, there was nothing to do. I was there for almost a year before someone decided to put in a high end work out facility in the middle of a bunch of cornfields. This place, called the Riverside Health and Fitness Center, was awesome. Climbing wall, booyah, rubberized track, booyah, basketball [ READ MORE ]
So, growing up with a parent who could play a musical instrument or two, I was lucky enough to have my own song. It’s pretty easy and most people could learn it in about 1 minute. Here goes: JaaaaaaaaaaaayO…N…AaaaaaaaaaaaaaayT…H…AaaaaaaaaaaaaaayThan an Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn That Spells JONATHANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNThat Spells JONATHANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNAnd I love himmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmHe’s my boyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy Da da da JaaaaaaaaaaayEtc. [ READ MORE ]
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