Security is Rude and I have Attention Deficit oooh shiny...

Well do I have a story for you. But first, as always, enjoy.

Honestly, today was pretty boring. Except for the last two or so hours. Let me begin with learning layouts.

Since I am a baby editor for the Summa I must learn to do all the things I would normally not be involved in as a writer. Mainly this means learning how to layout the paper in some sort of organized fashion. Tonight was the night I was going to learn, and so I did. My crash course covered all the basics and a little of the not so basics. Let me tell you, next time you're reading the paper and everything is lined up and spaced nice and even, you had better appreciate that, because it is a pain. Once all the formatting was cleared up I was pretty much cut lose, and started to build my section. Two people left, and I was there alone, until someone I had told to come finally showed up. Unfortunately, the teacher had left and I am less than qualified to teach someone how to use the program. 

Being that there wasn't much to do, we decided to go to the Basketball game to pass the time until the teacher got back. The only problem was, the basketball game was on the 3rd of January, not the 31st. An understandable mistake, however, since both days were on Monday and the listing looked very much like it was today. It was a nice walk though, and I'm sure we looked pretty cool walking through Jerabeck with confused looks on our faces.

The point of the story is that the security officer was douche. What? Why are you confused? Oh, I didn't explain that. Right. Well, since there was no game we decided to just go back to the office and finish the layout. We had locked the door on our way out so we needed to have security let us in. This could have been so much easier if the security guard wasn't extremely uncooperative. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad he isn't about to let just anyone walk into buildings they're not supposed to be in, but at the same time, at least have some common decency about it. He just made the entire situation extremely difficult, and in the end wouldn't even let us wait for the person who could let us in to come back, AND accused me of trying to break in. Very cool.

Fun night in any case. I need some spontaneity in my life, and I enjoyed it. Now I just need to get around to my feature article due for class tomorrow. All I can think about though is that I will be holding that new magnificent chunk of glass. No picture tonight, because there will likely be several tomorrow.

Also, if you haven't caught on at this point in the blog, many times I am intentionally vague. It's enough for me that I am divulging my life to the world, I have to try and keep some form of privacy.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

I'm feeling nostalgic today. One of my all time favorites.

A friend of mine said the other day 'Out of sight, out of mind works for me'. Something along those lines. This is  concept that has never really made much sense to me, as I was always told ignoring your problems never helps them go away. The things you chose not to think about will likely be there when you decide to open up again.

It's a simple concept really, not thinking about something. It is much more difficult when actually put into play. There is something on my mind that has been plaguing me for months. It's not really important what it is, and I suppose anyone who knows about my life will realize what I'm talking about. This thing though, has been so imprinted on my mind that the concept of ignoring it seems like an almost impossible feat. Being of the firm belief that nothing is impossible, I will attempt to do just that.

It's not that this thing is harming me in any way, or even a bad thing really. It is, however, hindering me from making forward progress in my life. I very much want to go about my college experience with a sense of adventure. I want to try new things and travel (how cliche is that?). How can I ever accomplish my goals in life if every time I make a mistake I let it weigh on me and consume my attention? I'm only human after all, and perhaps I have let that get away from me. Even as I write this the idea of pouring my thoughts onto the internet for everyone to read seems a little silly to me, yet here I am, because I want to make a positive change in my life. I really want to figure out who I am going to be, and why I want to be that person.

To finally adress the point, I have decided that maybe 'out of sight out of mind' works well for me too. I definitely don't want to burn any bridges, but for the time being I need to focus on myself and what I want.

Anyway, I promise the next blog won't be so invested, I just really needed to put these thoughts into words. On a lighter and much more exciting note, only two more days until my lens arrives! I know I know, try to contain your excitement. Really you're just embarrassing yourself. I will slap that bad boy on as soon as I get it and take some nice pictures for everyone. Well, maybe not slap. I would really hate for the picture I posted to be of another broken lens. Edit: I will gingerly place the lens onto the camera, and take some awesome photos for you guys (and girls). I will leave you with another picture.

I wont give you any information on this one. I don't want to spoil the image. Do you know what it is? More importantly, what do you see?

Long Days and Children Smoking

New day, new music. Enjoy everyone.

Saturday is always a challenge for me. Most of you probably don't know, but my weekends consist of almost nothing but work. This allows me to go to school during the week uninterrupted by a work schedule. Luckily, my awesome manager works incredibly well with my school schedule. My work shifts are usually Friday and Saturday from 12:00 to 10:00, and then Sunday from 2:00 to 7:00. Oddly enough, the Sunday shift always feels twice as long as the Friday shift.

Saturdays though, are strenuous. There is no sense of the first day back to work, nor the sense of the last day between me and four days of rest. Rather, it is the busiest day of my work week and often filled with difficult customers and mountains of unfinished work. Even so, I wouldn't change the decision I made to work there for anything. Despite it's setbacks, I love it there. I play with animals all day and some of my co-workers have become more like extensions of my family rather than just people I see once or twice a week.

Moving right along, I ended up staying up until almost four o'clock this morning. The time was completely unproductive, and all I had to show for it in the end was a terrible pit in my stomach this morning when I drug myself out of bed. Usually the shower is enough to perk me up, but today was a 'Starbucks and two energy drinks' kind of day.

I talked a lot about photography today with my usual source about, well, pretty much everything. Several more names have been added to my long list of "must see" photographers. When you look at their pictures it is very easy to see how digital photography has clearly pulled the art form further away from actual art. It is far to easy to take four hundred pictures of one thing and pick the one that happened to come out right. With film you are forced to take a step back and really think about how to take that picture. I am not quite at the point of forsaking digital photography or anything, but I can definitely understand now why everyone is telling me you need roots in film to truly see the world through a camera lens.

I looked at several hundred images last night, but one has really stuck with me. The photograph is by Sally Mann. Enjoy.

Oooooooouuuuuuuch

Here is a great song accompanied by an even greater music video. Enjoy

Today, my friends, was a sad day. After I left you last night, I decided I would take some pictures with my digital camera, seeing as how it has not been getting a lot of love lately. Since I started the film class it has just sat in the bag. In order to make the switch all I needed to do was change my 50mm 1.8 lens from the film camera to the digital one. A simple enough task, but oh so many things went wrong. One thing actually; I dropped the lens.

The whole thing played out in slow motion. I saw it slip from my careless grasp, fall a mere two feet to the cold tile floor, and finally crash to the ground with a spine-tingling thud. I was frozen. Every photographer is bound to drop at least one piece of equipment at some point in their life. I, up until now, had been very fortunate that I had never done so.

Initial damage reports seemed good, until I tried to focus the lens. Gears were grinding and making sounds one should only have to hear in the deepest, darkest layers of hell. This was a bad sign. Not one to give up hope, however, I gingerly placed the lens on the camera. Despite the awful noises emanating from within, the lens did seem to still perform well. That is, until I tried to use the auto focus. With one last grind of the gears, all noise stopped as the guts of the lens spilled forth from the housing, revealing circuitry and ribbon I could only imagine in my nightmares. Surely I was dreaming.

Sadly, I was not, and I am now the proud owner of a set of VERY well made convex and concave lenses. I am also out a lens. The little lens did serve me very well in it's few short months of service. It will be dearly missed.

I have been planning on upgrading to a higher quality lens, but I was planning on making the purchase sometime around this summer, not right now. Due to my film class though (and my burning desire to own one) I have been forced to move the plans foreword. I suppose forced isn't the best word though, as I am rather excited. I loved my 50mm so much that I decided to get another one. This time though, I went with it's bigger, badder brother. The 50mm 1.4 USM. That's right ladies and gentlemen, 8 focus blades instead of five, with a micro ultra-sonic motor. It's pretty rare that I pay extra money for expedited shipping (because if I wanted it that badly I always figure I could just go get it from the store) but because this is a little out of my actual monetary budget and must be charged, I will make an exception. I'm sure in several days you will see joyous pictures of me un-boxing my new baby. As for now, I will leave you with a very, very sad photo. The squeamish may want to look away.

Film Development and Mind-Numbing Philosophy

Today held many exciting things. First off, here's some music for your read.

On to today. It started, as any other day, with my obnoxious 'old phone' ring tone screaming at me to get out of bed. After a quick shower and breakfast, I was off to class. A class which, despite my initial interest, will prove to be the bane of my existence this semester. I never though someone could talk so much without actually making a conclusion. The class is Philosophy of the Human Person. The title seems innocent enough, but it is deceptive. My mind craves solid answers to even the toughest of questions, a hunger this class seems like it will never sate. Every time the professor rolls around to some ambiguous point it is simply discredited by the next topic. We seem to run in circles for an hour and fifteen minutes, never to come to any actual end. Thank God for 10:50.

My next class was much better. It is entitled Feature Writing, a class where you (what else) learn to write features. Our guest speaker today was Claudia Feldman (I think that's spelled correctly). She was an absolutely wonderful speaker. So much real world advice wrapped up into such a small time, it was a little overwhelming. Moving on though.

The highlight of my day was my photography class. I developed, for the first time, film. Film I shot several days ago. It has been burning a hole in my camera bag ever since. For someone like myself, who is used to only shooting digitally, it is a bit nerve racking to not instantly have feedback on a shot. Normally I can guess the controls, snap a few pictures, and adjust. With the film camera it is definitely much more intuitive. You really cannot let the camera do much work for you. Luckily, the film came out ok. I won't know for two more weeks what the pictures look like on paper, but I did see the negatives and some of them looked promising.

I guess that about sums it up. Not nearly as interesting as it seemed in my head, but I had a very exciting day none the less. Now all that's left to do is catch up on today's news and get ready for a work filled weekend. I'm very curious to see what my weekend blogs will be like. I anticipate they will either be very dull and short, or long rants about how customers say the silliest things. Only time will tell.

So yea, I'm doing this now

I have decided to make a blog, mostly for myself, to collect my thoughts and such at the end of every day. Well, I will try and write every day anyway. I'll be posting things relevant to my interest as well. Dubstep, photos (by others or myself), news articles, etc. If you're interested in those kind of things, or just my life in general, then make sure you come back.

Here's a song I have been listening too lately. I cannot decide if I like the dubstep better than the original, but here is the remixed version.