I still take a ton of photos. While I was looking through photos for the post I did yesterday I had a walk down memory lane. Even though the photo is just an image of a moment, I realized there’s so much more going on a photograph. Each photo is a complex story, which I’ve decided to write about here.

I am going to start posting a single image or a series of images and write the story about what is really happening in the image. Most of my photographs are snapshots, and they didn’t require any setup. I also realized I have some strange obsession with collecting photos I’ve taken of strangers and in my imagination I write the stories of those strangers.

I will start with one random photo:

It was 1982. I was snorkeling in Jamaica while on my honeymoon. We got married on a Saturday and by Sunday afternoon we were on the island. It took a day or two to recover from all the drinking and cocaine I did on my wedding night. As my head became more clear I was overcome with a feeling of terrible doom.

 ”What the fuck did I do?”  I kept thinking,  “How am I going to get out of this?”

I knew getting married was a terrible mistake from the moment I got married. I suddenly felt like a noose had been wrapped around my neck and I was grasping to free myself from the stupid piece of paper I signed just a few nights before. I got hit with a really bad wave of depression on our trip and even though my ex-husband tried to make it as special as he could, I was in a total funk. I didn’t share with him how I was feeling. I couldn’t. I didn’t know how to share my feelings and what was I going to say? “Ummmm…I decided last night was a big mistake.”

This wasn’t a one night stand, we had planned our wedding for ten months.

The marijuana we scored from the Rastas  didn’t help with my terrible anxiety. After smoking that shit I spent one night glued to the bed feeling like there was a lead weight on my chest and having one of the worst panic attacks of my life.

I did make it out to see Jamaica, which was really pretty, yet very depressing at the same time. It’s the only time I’ve ever been to one of the islands because I realized that the people who lived on the islands lived in near poverty while these huge resorts brought in all kinds of money. The hotel urged the costumers not to leave the resort, but I wasn’t one to go on a vacation and be stuck in a hotel all week. I wanted to see how people really lived on the island.

As young as I was still very uncomfortable with the obvious segregation between the resorts and the natives. It bothered me and I haven’t been on a “resort” vacation since.

In 2nd grade I remember getting this cut from a friend of one of my relatives who said they were a Beautician. She called my cut a “Pixie.” She was probably the janitor at the local beauty school. Guess which one is me:

In the mid to late 70′s I had the iconic long hair of the time. I liked it and while my friends were getting the feathered bangs, I hung on to this style for as long as I could until friends pressured me to get with the new styles:

4th grade

8th grade

The feathered bangs was basically the 80′s mullet look, that was attractive indeed, I’m surprised it hasn’t made a comeback yet with all the other bad 1980′s styles: the 80′s flip and then the 80′s perm. Thankfully I never really clung to these hairstyles to define me. Have you ever met someone stuck in the 80′s? It’s not pretty.

Flipping cool.

1980's Feathered Mullet

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Me and my hairdresser Mike, who is also my best friend, got dreadfully matching perms that were popular along with cocaine:

Mike and I with matching styles

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I moved to L.A. and was highly influenced by the big hair scene…

Long live rock, but NOT big hair

I finally found my hairstyle and kept the same style throughout my 20′s and 30′s. It worked well for me:

The defining style of the late 80's and 90's

Then I got tired of being a Rock Chick and had a nervous breakdown and spent the next few years redefining myself, but I couldn’t quite get the hair to match my feelings about myself so it has become something of a nuisance growing out of the top of my head.

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Hats, clips, glasses and bobby pins have become my friend and are a good distraction from my lifeless hair:

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On my trip to Texas two weeks ago my niece cut my hair and ended up with nothing less than perfection as far as defining how I feel about myself. I feel it matches how I see myself:

It’s a drastically new look for me, but I think it works.

I don’t think most men are as concerned with their hairstyle coinciding with how they feel about themselves but I think women think about this. Entertainers think about it too; I wouldn’t recognize Andy Warhol, Jennifer Anniston or even David Letterman without their iconic hairstyles.  Their hair is part of their persona.

How’s your hair?

I couldn’t see myself waking up at 5 a.m. to stand in line for a cheap television on Black Friday or any other day. I think the whole idea of Black Friday is absurd. It doesn’t seem ethical to me for corporations to have sales where they only offer a certain number of items for really cheap; a laptop computer for $199,  a 32 inch flat screen for $300, etc.

I personally think it’s a marketing tactic that degrades people. It turns otherwise normal people into drooling zombified consumers.

Retailers spend billions on advertising and advertising research. Everything in a successful store is planned, from the color scheme, to the layout, to the  smell to stimulate you into buying.

I don’t think, although I could be wrong, that if you can afford to pay the full price for an item, or a regularly discounted price that you would be waiting in line at 4 a.m. to buy a limited supply of television sets. In other words I think these sales make a spectacle of people who can’t afford to pay full price. When you only supply thirty discounted laptops, it creates competition and you pit consumers against one another. It really brings out the ugly side of people.

I swear there are executives in some office somewhere coming up with these crazy ideas just to watch the madness ensue. And they are probably thinking, “What a bunch of suckers.”

blown glass tree found while shopping with the sisters at the thrift store last year

I secretly like Christmas.

I pretend like I think it’s a stupid holiday, and in fact, I have a lot of criticism of the holiday but there are days when I kind of get this (I hate this word)”magical” feeling. There. I said it. I’m sure I’m going to be condemned now for using that stupid word. When I think of the word magical I think of My Little Pony, Dungeons and Dragons and New Age Spirituality. I don’t know how those three things are in common, but they all fit my description of magical.

I hated Christmas for a long time. Then there was a period of years where I didn’t complain about it and went through the motions.  Those were the years I spent it with my ex’s family. He had a kid and when you have a kid around you kind of act like Christmas is special because kids are taught that it’s special. Christmas was kind of nice at my ex’s family’s house. I always got a lot of presents from his family, although not-a-one from my ex.

Now we have a bunch of kids in my family. None of them are mine, but I would love for all us sisters to travel to one place for the holidays and have Christmas morning together with all the kids. The thought of everyone opening presents in their jammies seems really fun. I would even make the breakfast for that.

A few years ago I found this ceramic light up tree at a garage sale. The lady told me Someone’s Aunt made it and it’s signed “handmade by Shirley.” There are a lot of trees like mine sold at Estate Sales, so I think it was sold in some kind of kit sometime in the 70′s. I love my “Handmade by Shirley” tree. I know two people named Shirley and both those people are very special to me.

All my Christmas Decorations fit into one box: one little tree, one long string of white lights, one short string, 2 stockings, one tiny nativity scene, and various glass and wood objects that I’ve somehow inherited. I’ve had most of these decorations for years and I know exactly where or who from I recieved them.  Some years I just unpack the tree and some years I go all out and unpack the whole box.

bought in San antonio while visiting Mom

This year I unpacked entire box and I hung the string of lights in the window.  Where do you put stockings if you don’t have a chimney? Santa Claus will be coming through the door,  but mine is made out of metal and I don’t want to drill a permannent hole in my door just for the dude that comes once a year.

I’m still working on my attitude towards Thanksgiving. I am going to prepare a whole chicken and stuffing. Buying a turkey was way to big of commitment; one that’s been farm raised costs $75 and I’m not sure what “farm raised” means on a label. Aren’t all turkeys farm raised? When’s the last time you had a turkey raised in an apartment in The Bronx? Honestly, I think I’d rather have the turkey from The Bronx, or maybe Upper East Side Manhattan…at least I would know he lived well.

How’s your attitude toward the holidays?

I’ve always been addicted to sweets. When I was little we never had sweets in the house. I stole to support my cupcake addiction. Yep, I stole money from my moms purse, but didn’t a lot of kids? I took small amounts of cash, just enough to pay for a scoop of ice cream after swim team. My practice was so far away from home so it was like I was on a trip somewhere having an ice cream.

My sweet addiction… It made me do terrible things. Once in 4th grade when I was quarantined to the cloak room for bad behavior I looked through all the lunch bags and boxes and I stole Peggy Wilson’s Ho-ho.

Right before lunch she alerted the teacher that her Ho-ho was missing and the teacher conducted a lock-down room search. By that time the Ho-ho was waiting in my desk. The only thing that stopped me and that Ho-ho from becoming one was Peggy Pemperton and now the teacher.

I had the oddball desk in the front of the room. I always got stuck with the oddball desk in the front of the room because I had behavior problems….they weren’t really behavior problems, but more like non-behavior problems…the curriculum in grade school bored the fuck out of me so I would create my own curriculum. I mostly sketched out pictures of my fantasy life, kind of like comic strips. I a lot of chewed gum, but chewing gum is like third degree murder in grade school

We still had the desks where the top lifted up. I think they were from 1902 because there was still a hole in the upper right hand corner where the ink-well would have been. We were told to open our desks and Peggy would walk around the room and do a search before lunch but we weren’t going anywhere until the Ho-ho was found.

She came to my desk and there was the Ho-ho in its shiny foil wrapper sitting all alone in my empty desk. I always left my books at home on purpose and I didn’t have any school supplies, except for the pen and paper that I was drawing with.

“I did not take your Ho-ho.” I demanded.  “That’s my Ho-ho. My mom gave it to me and you cannot have it.”

She looked at me with her soft blue eyes, ” are you sure?” I remember the moment as though it’s frozen in time. I envied her and her perfect little self who knew every freaking answer to every question and sat at the front of the class because she actually liked school. I felt kind of bad but I thought I would have felt worse if I admitted my crime. I felt kind of stupid for not eating the Ho-ho while I was jailed in the cloak-room!

After some contemplation on Peggy’s behalf…I convinced her that it was my Ho-ho and class was dismissed for lunch. I was always very persuasive, but come on…who would believe I wasn’t the Ho-ho thief?

There was another time I committed felony to get some malted milk balls but I think I made my point concerning how far I would go to feed my addiction.

Between now and February, I want to get my cholesterol numbers down….I’m not sure to what. I’m still researching and the research has been pretty interesting…there are really a lot of quacks out there who make crazy claims about diet and what I need to do to improve it.

Being banned from the cloak room didn’t seem to cure my need for baked goods.

What do you crave? What crime would you commit for that craving?

The wedding was nice and a little stressful and chaotic, but that’s what you expect from a wedding, isn’t it?

It was really nice seeing my sisters and their families. I see two of the nieces pretty often because they live in Chicago, but I don’t see the bride or the family that lives in Idaho very often. I missed them. And I realized it  more when I saw them. They live so far and I mean how often do I get to Idaho? or Texas?

Our family has gotten so big.

There are now so many little kids. They run around  laughing and crying.  It’s refreshing and beautiful to watch them. They are so fucking cute.

Isabella is at an age where she’s right in the middle of it all…She must have an interesting perspective from her twelve-year-old viewpoint. She’s quiet and doesn’t say much, but I wonder what she thinks.

The bride, Nicole, is twenty-seven and until Bella was born she was the only niece.

Audrey, Violet and Blake are between 2 years old and six. They are a cross between flames you have to put out every hour or so and those YouTube kitten videos that make you cry tears of joy.

Being with family can be brutally painful. There were times when I wanted to break down and cry or run away. It’s not as though I dislike any of my family, in fact, I’m really comfortable with them.  They have quirky things about them that make me smile. We are loud…you can hear us coming a mile away…we are high maintenance in our own ways. We like things the way we like them and if it’s possible to get it the way we like then we’ll go for it. We’re not that high maintenance where we go into a Mexican restaurant insisting we get served French food, no…we are just regular human beings trying to get some attention in this big world.

When we’re together we try to get attention from each other, but we can’t all give what is wanted. It’s okay that we just want a little bit of recognition from the people we love, the people we know and grew up with, the people we’re most free to be ourselves with. What causes the stress is we don’t know how to respond to those needs and wants…they make us nervous and insecure and afraid of something. I wish I knew what…

I assume it’s like this in a lot of families.

I went to Texas a little earlier than the rest and spent some time with my mom and step-dad. I got to spend time in their home, see how they live,  sleep with their cat and smoke cigarettes with Dave on the balcony…yeah I know I was supposed to be quit, but I had a little relapse…oh well.

I guess I can make all sorts of judgements about how everyone in my family should be living their life and if only they did this or they would be so much happier. The truth is, at any given time in my life I can do a million things to make myself so much happier and I think my family sees those things. I see them too but I don’t want to do those things, or I’m not ready, or my focus is elsewhere right now.

I’m sure it pains them to watch me struggle through life, just as it pains me to watch them struggle.
Then there’s a part of me that wants us all to be the same as we were at some point, although I don’t remember which point.

We’re all a little crazy; we’re so nutty we bring an (ab)normal psychology text book to diagnose our problems while traveling. My whole family on my mom and dad’s side are  depressed, delusional or drunk. We all need to keep our bad habits and our thinking in check because it’s a very fine line between reality and lala land…just take a look at me.

Being with all of my sisters and parents puts a microscope on every little detail…it makes me think.

What does family make you think?

Fall in Brooklyn

Oh how I love the fall. Even though it’s getting colder the sun seems more intense and I have to squint my eyes a little more. I like a little chill putting on the sweaters and hats. My parka feels cozy as I walk down the street with the zipper pulled up over my chin. Too bad the fall is so short lived. In a month or maybe tonight I’ll be freezing my butt off and complaining to whoever will listen. Talking and complaining about the weather always seemed so monotonous to me. Everyone has experienced the weather and we are all hyper-aware of it so why do we talk about it so much. When I talk about the weather it’s not like I’m telling anyone anything they aren’t experiencing too, so what is the point? It’s like I’m compelled to say something about my opinion of the weather, “It’s a beautiful day here in Brooklyn.” Is it because I don’t know what else to say?

In the park today

While I lived in Florida it seemed like everything was dedicated to the weather during hurricane season, whether there was a hurricane or not. The news would report an umbrella being flown from it’s table. Here in New York we had a snow storm last year and it was like it was the first snow New York ever experienced. It was my first snow storm in New York, but I’m from Chicago so it didn’t really seem like much. I had people calling me from California to see if I was okay. I was thinking “what the hell are they showing you on tv? Everything is fine here.”

I’ve done it. I’ve texted my friends in Florida during hurricane season, “How you doing there?” As if I wouldn’t have heard something on the news and my friend was going to tell me first hand that she was getting blown away by gale force winds. No one ever responds that they’re swimming for their life in the Tsunami that just hit. Or their roof is collapsing from the weight of the snow that’s falling.

It should be a rule if you’re going to talk about the weather you have to be really good at it. You explain the weather like a Sommelier explaining wine, “the sky will be complex today, beginning with a San Francisco morning fog with hints of  Mediterranean summer rain, and finishing with balmy notes of heat like a Carlos Santana song.”

That would be kind of sexy.

The topic was condoms, the pill, sex and abortion. The article I read on Salon was a critique on another article called Get it Together, Girls: Every Pharmacy in New York is out of Plan B! Every One!  The article written by, xoJane’s writer Cat Marnell  who sometimes forgoes condoms and uses Plan B as a method of birth control. I guess this caused a lot of controversy on the internet because there are plenty of critiques on Ms. Marnell’s article including Scientific America and BlissTree.

Honestly, I don’t care how Cat Marnell uses Plan B or any other type of birth control. What I wondered is why anyone else would care either? Supposedly she’s sending out a bad message to young girls. Guess what?  xoJane is not a medical magazine whose reputation was built years of credentials. They’re a “Women’s” magazine geared toward the club chick, which means they basically print whatever will get read whether it’s about birth control or how to suck dick. I don’t know if they tell you how to give good head, but they should. Anyway, you can’t really show someone how to do that…it’s kind of like trying to show someone how to meditate.

I kind of felt bad for the writer after reading all the criticism. She’s human and she’s being honest and I really give her credit for that. It’s not easy to write what she wrote about on a highly trafficked website. I don’t think she’s alone in using Plan B as birth control (obviously, the pharmacy is out). There’s a lot of sensible women out there that make all kinds of choices whether they are what you and I like or not. Plan B wasn’t around when I was young so a lot of my friends were pregnant during or just out of high school and some of those girls just weren’t cut out for motherhood. I’m not saying Cat Marnell is not cut out for motherhood. I bet you she would be a great mom. You know why I say this? Because from the few articles I’ve read written by Cat, she is totally like me when I was young.

And why is it okay for a woman to talk about blow jobs but not her birth control methods and abortion. Why does anyone care? Your choices for birth control in no way affects my life and it shouldn’t affect yours either.

Glamor, Fashion and Women’s magazines are a strange lot to me. I never really got them. Maybe because I’m not a girly-girl. I’ve never been into having the latest this or that and I don’t really care about celebrities (unless I’m fucking them). I am very selective about the magazines I subscribe to because I’m a Gen-X-er and I get bored really easily. I’m already bored with the little cat-fight going on between B5 media and xoJane. Since when did magazines actually call each other out; look for shit wrong with their competitors? If you feel you have something, there are so many ways to point out your competitors problems without actually pointing to the writer or the article. So instead of yelling “This is wrong” like a three year old, why don’t you put out some quality content about what’s right.

I have looked on many occasions for a magazine that seems to speak to me. Something cool with a little bit of health stuff, normal fashion, some design, some DIY, maybe some intelligent articles about people I never heard of.  I like reading about the unknown. After reading Cat’s article and the responses I figured out, this is exactly why I don’t read these magazines; there is no fucking unknown anymore.

Done with my rant, I’ll go back to reading Cat Fancy.

Note: xoJane assisted 15 year old fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson with the launching of her new Teen Magazine Rookie. Tavi is pretty cool for a fifteen year old.

I’m reading the text-book or manual “How Baking Works,” by Paula Figoni because I want to learn more about the science of baking and what happens when you mix ingredients together and bake them. I feel that knowledge in this can help me modify and create my own recipes. This book is really helpful to the baker wannabe like me.

And I just started reading an E-book by Leo Babauta called “The Efortless Life.” I usually read a non-fiction book along with a fiction book, but I don’t normally read self-help or inner guidance types of books. In the late 80′s and early 90′s I read tons of self-help books. I listened to self-help books on tape. I attended workshops and spent a lot of money. I have to say that very little came out of my experience in self-help manuals, in fact, I think that at the time, some of them hurt more than helped.

here's a photo that has nothing to do with the text in this post

I’m not the same person as I was twenty years ago, now I very cautiously trust those in pop-psychology or the business of self-help. Most of the teachers, I feel, are complete whack jobs. Most of the people buying the books are lost souls being taken advantage of (and whack jobs as well).

I like Leo Babauta. I subscribe to his newsletter and I mostly enjoy reading it. He doesn’t seem to yell self-help quotes out there. He’s pretty mellow in his approach. From what I’ve read he’s changed a lot about himself. He wasn’t always centered or even successful. He managed to get through problems of debt, addiction and other things that plague mostly everybody and he writes about his experience.

He’s selling the book on his website for a “pay as you wish” price. I suggest you subscribe to his blog posts at Zen Habits; they are really easy and quick to read and they tend to stick with you throughout the day. Also there’s no spam or ads on his blog and he takes a minimalist approach to life. He’s an interesting guy.

I’m only a few chapters through “The Effortless Life,” and I’ll update you with a short critique when I’m done.

Until recently I could eat all the crap I wanted and not gain an ounce. I had been about 8 pounds underweight for about 12 years when two years ago, over Halloween, that all changed. I gained about fifteen pounds over the course of a two week Twizzler binge, then I gained another few and it actually made me a couple pounds over weight! I hadn’t had to think about what I ate in years so I had to learn how to eat. I’m still learning.

I love to bake and I’m really good at baking certain things like cookies and cake. This winter I’m going to try to get good at baking bread and I bought a tart pan. So aside from selling my book I want to perfect the tart! I’ve never made a tart in my life, but I love them and part of controlling my urges for sweets I have to make what I eat. I don’t allow myself (most of the time) to go to the corner store and buy a package of Grandma’s Peanut butter sandwich cookies. It kind of works because by the time I’m done baking whatever concoction I’ve created, I don’t want it. I like to experiment to see what works and what doesn’t so half the stuff I bake turns into something not much tastier than rubber, so after a bite or two it goes into the garbage. I also have really high standards when it comes to baked goods. You would think I was some  The stuff that does turn out usually turns out really good and I share.

I don’t know very many people here so I knock on my neighbors doors and I hand them cakes and cookies. They think I’m a fuckin’ nut, but it keeps me from eating the stuff and they end saying all these great things about me and my baked goods. So, I guess it keeps me from eating it and boosts my ego.

By the way, the photo above is my delicious strawberry cream cheese cupcakes.

What do you do to control urges?