2011.01.26 Text 6 notes

  1. How to stick gum on big red signs

    I finally got some new batteries for my camera.

    I love my camera. It’s seen an awful lot—slam poets, the sky above, squirrels, chipmunks, colored pencils, thespians, friends, costumes at an anime convention, and maybe a few other things. At the moment, however, I don’t really have anything to take photos of. I have no newspaper to cover in images of people doing things worth taking note of, and there’s no scenery that is presently begging for me to take shots of it.

    I complained to my roommate about this, and this snowballed into a conversation where we reminisced about high school (me pining for my love, journalism), and eventually middle school, and then back and all over the place.

    We reached a conclusion about middle school. You don’t learn anything in middle school. The whole affair is simply a social experiment on preteens designed to expose them to the dark side of our world, to see if they can survive it. Although in my case, middle school could have been appropriately renamed “Three Years Dedicated to Learning How To Play the Euphonium And Make Out With Goth Girls”.

    But at one point, my roommate mentions something he left behind, a little piece of artwork that is still up on the ceiling in his middle school. Then I remember the bits and pieces and people I left behind back in Colorado Springs, and at my high school—the gum I watched stick to the school sign for years after I watched a friend put it there (last time I checked you can still see where it was), the Pledge of Allegiance parody that I wrote about our school newspaper, the kids that are still there that I still refer to as “my newbies”. Outside of that campus, there are a bunch of busy people who I shared that school with. I like to think that those people have something of mine with them, because I was sure to take everything they gave me to Boulder.

    I think about the photos I took, the ones friends took. I look through some of them when the conversation with my roommate is over, and I look back at my camera.

    I have so much time left in my life to take pictures and leave my little marks on things, and on the people around me. I start to think that I have many things to take photos of.

    The batteries are rechargeable, of course.