::Goodbye, Kodak

My new camera.

I am so grateful to my parents.
 

And I am SO excited.

I still can't believe it's mine.

I've decided I want to name it.

Suggestions?

::We'll always be together for Christmas

I have always loved this commercial.

I really wish it were still on the air.

::oh how the years go by

A photo survey from a friend:


1. The oldest photo of you on your computer.

Me sitting on my Grandpa's lap, posing with my brother Josh:


2. Your newest photo of yourself.

Self-portrait on my birthday, 12-4-08:


3. A photo of you and one other person.

Me with my friend Robin at a graduation party, 5-31-08:


4. A group photo.

My sister-in-law Aimee on Emma's birth day, holding Emma, surrounded by her four nieces; Isabel, Maya, Alli & Sofia, 8-4-08:


5. A holiday/birthday photo.

With Josh on his 3rd birthday:


6. One of your Myspace/Facebook photos.

A facebook profile picture; wearing my brother Joel's silly sunglasses, 6-13-08:


8. A photo of you in your favorite color.

My favorite color varies, but I like pink + black together; after Annie + I straightened my hair in Utah, 5-27-08:


9. A photo someone else took of you.

Taken by Robin @ Camp Lake Louise, 2006:


10. A photo(s) of your siblings.

Josh @ the hospital, right after his daughter Emma was born, 8-4-08:

Joel holding Emma, 8-15-08:


11. A photo of your pet, or you and your pet.

Sadly I don't have pets, but this is one of Josh + Aimee's dogs, Griffin:



12. 3 random photos with friends/family.

Me with Josh in our grandparents' garage...I can't believe how straight my hair was back then:


Me holding Joel when he first came home from the hospital:


Me with my cousin/close friend Heather:


=====

There you have it.
Wanna play?
I'd love to peep your sweet snapshots.

::I heart William Stanley

While driving home from lunch today, I tuned in to Fresh Air on NPR and heard an interview with W.S. Merwin.
I first fell in love with his work (Thanks) when it was featured as a preface in Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies.
I adore the manner in which he manipulates language to extract such heartfelt, poignant responses from readers.
After absorbing one of his poems, I feel enriched, moved and undoubtedly understood...all by a complete stranger.
He read this poem on the air, and I haven't stopped thinking about it all day:

A Single Autumn

The year my parents died

one that summer one that fall

three months and three days apart

I moved into the house

where they had lived their last years

it had never been theirs

and was still theirs in that way

for a while

echoes in every room

without a sound

all the things that we

had never been able to say

I could not remember

doll collection

in a china cabinet

plates stacked on shelves

lace on drop-leaf tables

a dried branch of bittersweet

before a hall mirror

were all planning to wait

the glass doors of the house

remained closed

the days had turned cold

and out in the tall hickories

the blaze of autumn had begun

on its own

I could do anything

~W.S. Merwin

[from The New Yorker]

::letters to a young stacer

Several months ago I signed up for daily emails from the Writer's Almanac, and have grown to look forward to their everyday presence in my inbox.
From the wealth of information contained in these gems, I learned last Thursday that I share a birthday with Rainer Maria Rilke, whose work I have long admired.

Self-portait, 12-4-08

You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.

~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

::heureux anniversaire

I am getting a little tired of pretending I'm excited every time it's somebody's birthday. I mean really, at this point, what is the big deal? How many times do we have to celebrate that someone was born? Every year, every person, over and over? All you did was not die for twelve months. This is the big accomplishment?

~Jerry Seinfeld

Today is my birthday.
The older I get, the less I care about this most peculiar of days.

Aside from buying myself a new shirt and a mango smoothie from Panera (my fave), I'll be dining out at Red Robin with my family, and having a small get-together on Sunday night.

Today is also my niece's four-month birthday, and frankly I'm way more excited about that.

::black friday, indeed

I don't remember ever venturing out for shopping on "Black Friday."
Some years, I wish I possessed the wherewithal to endure the crowded mayhem, but have decided that I simply do not.

This year, I learned about this, and it deeply wounded me.

I could wax intellectual and/or philosophical and theorize that tragedy occurred because this man was, in a sense, trampled by greed itself.
I could ascend to the haughty summit of a soapbox and conclude that this incident has laid bare the seedy underbelly of American consumerism.
I won't.

But the moment that affected me the most was, when my father was reading aloud a description of the incident, and its last sentence was something akin to "After the incident occurred, most witnesses returned to shopping as if nothing had happened."

I was stabbed by the sadness, but also very soon reminded of how very jaded I am, and remembered that I could very easily have been one of those shoppers who witnessed the atrocity and then simply returned to business as usual.

When we are presented with the searing reality of the worst in ourselves, it's so tempting to flee from it.
How painful it is to be confronted with our own behavior at its most appalling.