Overthinking
The other night (actually, it was several weeks ago, and I keep meaning to write new stuff and never get around to it…), I was crossing the street. I was on my way to a bar, and this dude in front of me, well, I don’t know where he was headed, but for the time being, we were crossing the same street together. He was blind. The walk sign turned on, he was a little slow for my taste, and I stepped out of the designated crosswalk area to pass him. Maybe the sound of my footsteps threw him off, because he walked out of the designated crosswalk area as well, cane a-tip-tapping.
Only he didn’t return to the designated crosswalk area, like I did.
I felt partially responsible for this, and could have easily rectified the situation, but as I watched in what should have been horror but came off as only passing concern, I was weighing my options, considering outcomes, and basically taking my sweet goddamn time coming to a decision on what I was going to do and what was going to happen. See, shit’s not so black and white in my head. This guy was maybe in his early 40s. He’s survived this long; surely I’m not going to watch this guy walk out in traffic and get plowed down now, right? Over something as simple as my footsteps outside of a “safe zone” for a total of five paces? Not possible. If this guy was that shitty of a blind dude, he’d have been eliminated long ago.
Secondly, what do you do to direct a blind guy back into safety? Whoop? Holler? Whistle? There was nothing I felt I could say or do that wouldn’t sound condescending, as if I was calling a dog. He’d probably be pissed if I said something. He’s been at this a while, right? Who am I to step in and make him feel like a helpless idiot?
Fortunately, several other people at the scene didn’t hold these reservations. Two cars honked at him, and a guy on the opposite corner said, “Over here!” I wonder if the blind dude thought it was helpful or patronizing. Seemed patronizing to me. He corrected his trajectory. What a bunch of dicks.
Backup Dragon
MP3s make my blog interesting without having to do much of that annoying “writing” shit. After shooting photos for four or five years, I finally purchased a plan from a backup service to keep all my photos safe and sound at a datacenter on the moon (or however backup services work). But before I signed up, I was calling Mozy to make sure that their client program supports backup of external drives (Carbonite does not, but they don’t bother telling you that until you’ve installed the software and you find out for yourself). Anyway, there’s a weird option in the voice menus:
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Oddly enough, this dragon isn’t anywhere on their site, so I have no clue what they’re talking about. Also, the hold music was like… pipe organ music with a laughing wizard. It all sounded really unprofessional, but they’re supposedly the real deal, so I guess they’re allowed to throw weird shit around like that.
Voicemails from Adam
Christ, time to lighten the mood in here. I’ve been meaning to upload these for EVER (they’re a couple weeks old), but I haven’t found the time. And really, I think they’ll act as a good way to open the windows up on the ol’ blog and air out some of the existential funk that’s built up in here over the past week. That shit gets in your clothes and stays there, but here’s a little trick: cup of baking soda in with your regular detergent.
The Setup:
Both of these are hilarious, but I think they work better together, like an audio diptych. The first was a voicemail Adam left on the night of Cameron’s birthday. I missed the call, because I didn’t hear my phone ring at the bar, but sent him a text to have him come meet us. Note that in the first voicemail, he speaks for nearly a minute, but communicates literally nothing. He also begins the voicemail in a middle-eastern (?) accent, but quickly forgets.
He met up with the rest of us, hung out for a couple hours, but also had plans to catch a concert. I told him if the concert didn’t go too late to give me a call when he was done. I also missed that call, but since he’d had a couple (?) drinks by this point, the tone changes drastically. If you listened to either individually, you’d probably think “that guy’s really weird.” But when you get both sides of the coin, you think, “that guy’s really weird, and I desperately want to be his friend.”
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Cupcake Wrapup
Alright, I just thought I’d put a cap on this whole thing before I drop it. It’s been a little heavy in here.
I heard two podcasts recently that really resonated with me, and I’ve edited down a couple morsels of inspiration from them. These are both from The Candid Frame, easily one of my top three favorite photography podcasts. The first is a segment from Chase Jarvis, which is actually from a newer episode, but I heard it out of order. The second one is from an interview with Bobbi Lane, and she may as well have been speaking directly to me. If you found yourself relating to my last two posts, give em a listen, even if photography isn’t your bag; it’s like five minutes total.
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So here’s where I basically stand right now: I’d have left work Friday, had I not just made a commitment to my mom, who spotted me for the camera body I want. My tax returns would have just about covered the body I want, but I was semi-responsible and got rid of my credit card debt instead. My mom (and my brand spankin’ new step-dad), offered to get me the body and allow me to pay them back interest free. As much as I wanted to leave work, I want that camera body more than anything in the world — probably more than I’ve wanted anything, ever — and this seemed like the best way to get it. I could either save up for it and buy it myself (something with which I haven’t had much luck so far), but by that time it would be closer to being replaced with a newer model, almost defeating the purpose, or I could get it now, and have it paid off by that time. I’m impatient, and I’ve really come to decide that I’m outgrowing my old body. It’s easy to leave everything behind to pursue your dream if you already have the equipment. I do not. But the camera gave me renewed tolerance today, and work was only kinda suicide-inducing. I am going to pay this goddamn thing off as quickly as I can, and I have a couple ideas to help speed up the process (letting the camera help pay for itself), which I’ll be trying to roll out over the next couple weeks.
My previous blogs made it sound like I was done that exact second, but it was more of an announcement that I was preparing to jump ship, rather than just jumping ship. I need my life jacket first.
And that’s a wrap, I think, on this whole discussion.
“Cupcake” Response Response
So my buddy Joel posted a response blog to my last entry, and I thought I’d rebut, one last time.
His response is exactly the response I was talking about, which is more or less, “You do what you have to do to be able to afford the things you want to do.” But maybe my blog still didn’t quite impress upon him just exactly what point I’ve reached; the point of almost complete psychological breakdown. Most people don’t like their jobs, and sure, you could just say that I lack coping skills. But my friend Ben tonight was talking to me about the blog, and told me about his own decision to abandon the 9-5 paradigm and follow his own creative calling. Over a year ago, Ben left the same temp agency I’m working for — walked out on the job — swearing to himself that he would never work a “normal” job again. It was a bold decision, but for an entire year he and his girlfriend struggled until his dedication started making pieces fall in place for him, and just a couple weeks ago, he signed his first contract with a comic book company to do exactly what he wants to do. He told me tonight that, as difficult as the decision sounded, he made it without hesitation because he knew he literally had no choice; drawing chose him. He called it being “commanded” to pursue a career in comics.
I didn’t quite put it as simply or elegantly as Ben described it, so here’s another analogy I’ve come up with. Consider a person that wants a sex change, so that their body “matches” the way they know their mind is wired. Their peers may not understand the decision, and just cannot get over the argument, “Look, you were born with a penis, you are clearly a man,” but this person knows that they were meant to be a woman. The analogy’s a little extreme, but the point is that this person knows exactly what is best for them; what they absolutely need to do in order to continue living their life.
So yeah, sorry, but it’s not as simple as “just fucking do your job, and enjoy the parts of your life that are not your job.” I literally cannot perform jobs like this anymore. I literally cannot enjoy the parts of my life that are not work, because that dread consumes just about every single waking moment. I am wasting my life, I am wasting the talent I have, and the talent I could have, had I the freedom to practice photography all the time. And just like the woman that needs her penis surgically flipped inside out (yeah, it’s an awkward analogy), I know what I have to do, whether or not people can empathize or understand the gravity of the situation.
I was listening to an interview with a stand up comic the other day, and he was talking about his family’s disappointment in his decision to drop out of law school — less than a year away from completing his degree — to try to make it as a comedian. They asked him, “You’ve already invested all this time and money, why don’t you just finish the degree so you have something to fall back on?” And he told them, “No, I know what I want to do now. Why waste any more time?”
I’ve reached a breaking point, and I no longer have a choice: I have to find a way to make money doing the only thing I think I’ve ever been kinda decent at, or I lose. There is no fallback or failsafe. There is no, “Well, if it doesn’t work out, at least I could always go back to work in networking.” No, I cannot. I think people too quickly decide that successful people are either extremely intelligent or extremely lucky, but I think I’m beginning to realize that it is rarely either. They just have such a singular, focused goal and motivation to reach it. I cannot “train” myself to become a better photographer by dabbling in it a couple hours a weekend, and absolutely hating my life for 40 hours a week. I have to dive in head first and make photography my sole objective.
And I don’t mean “successful” as in “I’m going to be a millionaire professional photographer.” I will consider myself “successful” if I am able to sustain myself with photography, even if it meant a lower standard of living. I don’t care if I’m assisting a professional photographer for $8 an hour, I don’t care if I’m making $20 a day selling portraits on the street. If I’m living on ramen noodles, I will wake up happy every day knowing that either A: I am forging my own path or B: I am working for and/or surrounded by other creative people, and it can only get better from there.
And I will be surviving; I cannot continue to survive at the rate I’m going.
From Joel’s response:
For example, Atiba Jefferson, one of the greatest skateboard photographers of my generation, got his job by just being in the right place at the right time.
“Right place at the right time” was not wasting his life in a cubicle. He was out making it happen for himself, not waiting for opportunity to fall in his lap.
I Don’t Want Your Fucking Cupcake
It’s amazing, the effect work has on my general disposition. “Oh, Christ, Bill. Are we complaining about work again?” Number 1: Yes. Number 2: Yes, fuck you.
Unless you’re very close to me (e.g., Nina), I don’t show it much, or I just avoid you, but the past week has worried me a bit. I’m back on another temp position. When designing the position, a round table of misery experts realized they could make my shitty data entry jobs infinitely less enjoyable by arbitrarily scheduling them at six fucking thirty in the morning. Networking (at CPU, in Casper) almost broke me. Yahoo almost broke me. I left both of them. I’m no longer in a position to leave jobs, and that factors into my depression. It’s like having to serve a prison sentence (I imagine), knowing there’s no way out of it. Oh, and you’re innocent.
Let me briefly describe this week to you: For Monday through Wednesday, I showed up at six fucking thirty, to stand in a room and run copies of legal documents off for no reason. Hundreds, thousands of forms. “That doesn’t sound so bad,” you think, “at least it’s a paycheck.” But it’s not the job, but the subtler, more psychological factors. Today was a slight change of pace, but the novelty wore off quickly; I sat at a computer, looking at hundreds and hundreds of scanned legal documents, and typed key information from them into fields in another program. Again, the work is dumb, mind-numbing, and unforgivingly tedious, but I don’t think that’s what has me stewing all day, every day. Why does the corporate environment remind me so strongly of grade school? Not high school. Grade school. It’s fucking embarrassing. For example, today I came back in from one of my “holy shit, fifteen minutes already?” breaks, and HR was setting up a table of fucking cupcakes, while automatons filed out of their cubicles to line up. For cupcakes. I walked past the line, went back to my computer, put my headphones in, and went back to typing up bullshit. A woman later came in and asked “did everybody get their cupcakes?” I didn’t respond, because I figured silence meant that my mouth was chock full of cupcake or something, but she then specifically targeted me to make sure I got my cupcake. This woman didn’t do anything wrong. I was just so unbelievably annoyed by the whole thing. I was going to say “no,” but then realized that I would have to explain to her that I don’t particularly like sweets, or, you know, that I’m an adult, and have pretty much been over cupcakes for a good 19, 20 years. That sounded like more hassle than I was prepared to deal with, so I said “yes.”
Yes, I got my cupcake.
I’ve never felt so fucking stupid in my life. I remember at Yahoo, they were always trying to pull the “hip IT company” thing, and they’d do shit like buy everybody in the building a microbrew. Once they brought in a zillion bottles of wine and everybody got a couple glasses of wine. One day they came around with carts with hundreds and hundreds of pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. And every week we had bagel day, and pizza day, and we always had free vending, and onsite massage therapy. “This job is so awesome!” It’s not awesome, you fuckwit. This job is fucking awful, and they know it, and they’re pacifying you.
It’s the exact same case with the cupcakes. They know that everybody in this building has been coming in and sitting in a cubicle for eight hours a day, in many cases, for years. When you’re that fucking defeated, I bet cupcakes are fucking awesome. Probably almost as awesome as your wife deciding to have sex with you for the first time in three months. The other day, as I was standing at a counter and stamping COPY on about 1,000 copies, my 8th-grade-educated manager watched me stamp a couple, then slapped my shoulder and told me I was “doing a good job.” Really? Thank you for the validation! Not only could a monkey perform this job, he’d also be smart enough to fucking walk away from it. And again, like the cupcake lady, that guy didn’t do anything wrong. He probably thought he was being nice. But it came off as so unbelievably patronizing, as if he thought I’d stamp COPY even faster so that the next time he came around, he could tell me I was doing an even better job! I’m not here for the paycheck! I’m here for the approval! But that shit’s in my head. I’m sure that dude’s a good human being. Probably better than me, now that I think about it. I’m just so tired of being put in positions where I’m talked down to — intentionally or not — for several hours a day.
So things have been getting to me, and it’d be cool if I could channel this stress and frustration into something creative or productive, but it doesn’t happen. When I get off work, I want to sit and try and be happy that I’m not at work. Last week, I had my first night terror in months, during which I woke up screaming bloody fucking murder for several seconds, then spent some time hyperventilating and crying. That was fun. Night before last, I was so pissed off after work that, after picking Nina up and spending 20 minutes looking for a parking space, I finally cracked when this dumbshit driver did… something to piss me off, and all I was able to channel that into was busting my hand on the steering wheel and scaring the shit out of Nina (my friends know that in the past, I’ve had some “anger problems,” maybe. I thought I’d made great strides toward resolving them, but I think all I actually accomplished was putting up a dam; it didn’t really affect my breaking point at all, just allowed me to build up a nice reservoir of hate before the dam gives). Today, I was livid after work. Fucking. Livid. I got off at 3:15, but my new position requires me to fill out my timesheet in such a way that all the company’s clients get billed for the few minutes I spend on each project. It took me 15 minutes to fill out my time sheet. Do you know what 15 minutes feels like at that fucking place? Three lifetimes gnashing teeth in hell. I’m frantically clicking away in the shitty Java timesheet application, watching the computer’s clock as minute after minute tick by, and I’m just boiling because I’m there and not getting paid for every excruciating minute. The program needs to be a single checkbox, which says “I wasted another eight hours of my life, I agree to pretend this paycheck makes up for it.” So I’m running late to pick Nina up, still fuming because though I can leave that place, it doesn’t leave me, and after picking her up from school, I missed a turn on the highway. Normally, this would be a mild inconvenience, which resulted in my having to drive an additional 1.5 miles out of my way to flip around to get home, but today, remembering that I can’t be punching steering wheels with Nina around, I ended up breaking down and crying. Seriously. What the fuck is wrong with me? With any luck, it’s a brain tumor.
“What the fuck, Bill. Man up, do your fucking job.” This is the shit that pisses me off. My entire life, nobody has supported me in the idea that maybe, JUST FUCKING MAYBE, I am not designed to fit into that mold. I was telling my dad about this particularly demeaning, one-day-only, temp job that I took, and he said, “Yeah, but you do it for the dollar.” No, dad, you don’t just fucking do anything in the world for a buck. Especially at the expense of your own sanity, which is CLEARLY what years of this fucking bullshit is costing me. Any other outlet I ever had was a waste of time in his eyes. I remember after I moved to Portland, and I was telling him about the skateparks, he said “You’re still doing that shit?” What, desperately trying to enjoy half a fucking minute of my life? YEAH. I’M STILL DOING THAT SHIT.
Even discussing with friends, I end up getting the same, tired, condescending talk about pipe dreams, the real world, and my place in it. Can somebody accept the fucking fact that my brain is not wired for this shit? FACT: MY BRAIN IS NOT WIRED FOR THIS SHIT. I don’t think I’m better than the people that can live this way; I just personally cannot do it. Period. I should be a sound engineer, up at 3 in the morning on two pots of coffee, trying to find just the right combination of amp and mic to capture a band’s sound in the studio. I should be a writer, holed up in a den, wasting away on a whiskey diet and punching away at a book. I should be a stand up comic, full of coke and free liquor, bitter and cynical, bitching on a stage and making people laugh. Here’s an idea: I should be a professional fucking photographer, showing a gallery full of some bullshit to a bunch of high class art collector morons who act like they fucking understand me through my stupid fucking pictures. I should be anything but the fucking moron in the shirt and tie making your fucking computer talk to your fucking printer, or your other fucking computer. Or the fucking idiot on the other end of the phone trying to frantically get your shitty home business’ email working again while you call me a fucking idiot. Or the guy in the fucking copy room stamping COPY on three boxes of paper, who gets a fucking CUPCAKE once a month. I don’t want to count down the rest of my life in 8 hour, 5 day increments. That’s not my fucking place, I’ve fucking known it since I was a kid, and fuck you for trying to convince me otherwise. I’m a square fucking peg and if I can’t find my square fucking hole, I’m going to have to make my own, with or without your support.
Addendum:
I can look back on this post in two different ways. One will be, “Wow. That was a low point. Good thing it motivated me to do greater things with my life.” The other is, “Oh yeah, I remember that instant just before my spirit was finally broken once and for all. Life sure is fun here in the copy room. Happy 55th birthday to me!”
With any luck, it’s a brain tumor.
Photoblog Relaunch
“Failed to Find a Place for the Imported File”
I just got this error in Lightroom today for the first time, and I panicked a bit, thinking it was a failing hard drive, something wrong with the USB port in my camera, or something wrong with my SD card. Other people posted the problem online, and it seemed to be solved by using a card reader instead of going straight from the camera.
But it turns out I’m just an idiot.
If anybody happens to be Googling around for “failed to find a place for the imported file,” because you’re having issues when importing photos directly from your camera, change the battery in it. The battery apparently had just enough juice for the computer to recognize it as a drive, but not enough to initiate any communication (or something). Weird. I popped in a fresh battery and all my photos imported just fine.
Me too! Me too!
I’ve been kicking around the idea of doing my own “take a picture every day for a year” project, a project that every camera owner on the planet (or at least on Flickr) seems to be tackling lately. I always talk myself out of it. I mean, I ran Moonplantation (my old photoblog) for just a couple months, which I only updated three times a week, and it almost became a job. I stressed out over producing photos for it, even though my shooting schedule was self-imposed and completely arbitrary. I’m not entirely sure why other people choose to do 365 photo projects, but here is why I’m finally going to commit to my own.
My friend Ben (one of the most amazing artists I know) has been interning at a local studio for several months now. He’s been doing so much drawing not for himself lately that he’s burning out and has started to devote an hour a day to drawing whatever the hell he wants to draw. It doesn’t have to impress anybody, an editor doesn’t have to approve it, it’s not going to be seen by anybody (except for maybe a couple friends, if they ask). Ben and I had a several-hour-long talk about creativity and the creative process the other night (which wasn’t as pretentious as it sounds) in which he brought this up. I also mentioned that I had been entertaining the idea of taking a photo a day. He was probably more enthusiastic about it than I was, and there are several reasons I ended up getting very excited about the project.
First of all, I’m getting to be a better photographer all the time. Actually, when I look back at the stuff I was shooting just a year ago, I’m unbelievably embarrassed of it. The thing is, I’ve progressed without a real conscious effort on my part. I took over 11,000 photos in 2009 — more than three times what I shot in 2007 and 2008 combined — and that was WITHOUT making an effort to have my camera with me at all times. I absolutely cannot become a worse photographer over the next year, and by forcing myself to take photos, whether I want to or not, is not only going to speed this process up, but will change how I approach photography entirely; it will put me in the habit of not even thinking about whether or not I should grab my camera when I step out the door, I will just always have it. When the year is up, I will have long since been placed in that mindset, and will continue to carry the camera with me without it being a “rule.”
But I think more important than getting better at what I do, it’s the changing of my approach to photography. My friends would say “How hard can it be to take a photo a day? You just push a button. Just take a fucking picture a day and be done with it.” It’s NOT that simple, because my brain does not work that way. There are maybe a lot of people with cameras that don’t have a problem taking a picture, any picture, and throwing it on a blog. I cannot just take a picture. When I put a camera up to my eye, there are a million things going through my head, particularly if I’m shooting a person. Most of it I can’t really put into words or explain, but a lot of it is, “Can I make this person look how they want to look in photos? If I put this online, everybody that sees it is going to judge me and my skill. Am I good enough? Is this photo going to be worth showing to people at all? Am I even going to like it? If I don’t like the photo, how can the person I’m shooting like it? I hate snapshots, this can’t look like a snapshot. I hate art, this can’t look like art,” and on and on. There’s this trepidation, nearly every time I push the shutter. It’s often even worse when I get home and get them onto the computer: “These are awful. I’m a fucking idiot. Photography is bullshit. What a fucking waste of time.” I think forcing myself to take a picture every day, and showing it to people, whether or not I think it is representative of my skill, will help ease this issue I have, and make me more comfortable with the fact that not everything I shoot is going to be incredible, while at the same time building the confidence in myself that I am a competent enough photographer that most of what I shoot should have at least a little photographic merit.
The difference between Moonplantation and my year project is that for Moonplantation I made three photos a week. For this project I only need to take a photo a day. Then, in instances where I actually want to make a photo, it should come more easily to me. Hopefully, I want to write a little bit about each photo as well, whether or not I enjoyed taking it, whether or not I like the final result, etc etc, as a sort of director’s commentary.
So blah blah blah, I can’t really explain this that well, but I tried. The point is, I’m going to take a photo every day for a year, beginning tomorrow, to in some way document an entire year of my life (tomorrow’s my birthday, I turn 28).
I’ll post a link here tomorrow when the first image goes up.
State-Sponsored Discrimination!
I was reading online about some racially-motivated assault, and I was trying to imagine the feeling of having to live with the understanding that some people dislike you just because you exist. You know, trying to imagine I’m not a 20-something white American male from a middle-class family; humanity’s most generic creation. My empathy experiment didn’t get very far, because, short of the one time I went to a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles, I’ve never really felt displaced. So yeah, I have a very limited world view, but I did remember this exercise my third or fourth grade teacher organized, and looking back on it, it’s kinda funny.
We were learning about discrimination, and to demonstrate, the class was split into left and right-handed kids. Left-handed kids would be second-class citizens for the day. Unfortunately, the left-handed kids in the classroom consisted of me and maybe one or two other students (anybody that was in that class with me… which is probably just Ray, I think it was me and Kevin Phung). We had to wear an arm band or some sort of other identifier, and we had to be last in line at lunch, we were the last to be allowed to go to recess, etc etc. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I was, what, eight years old? I wasn’t traumatized, but that’s kinda fucked up. The funny thing is, the experiment was never reversed! The left-handed kids were just shit on for a day and that was that. By the end of the day, everybody had learned a valuable lesson: It pays to be a part of the majority, and god help you if you’re not.
