Archive for June, 2008
I finally decided to go pro with my flickr account. I’ve been digging through my old black and white film and have been finding stuff i must have overlooked. i was shooting so much film around this time that it was easy to let some really good frames slip through the cracks. i have yet to process and review the black and white shot in New Zealand and Australia; i’ve been a bit distracted.
speaking of photography, the current show at flightpath is super impressive. the walls are covered by elaborate photo mosaics by Jon Oldag. you can see more of his work on his flickr. i would suggest coming up here and seeing this stuff in person. a lot of time and patience must have gone into each project.
Ben and i will be moving into our new apartment in Clarksville in a couple of weeks. i’ve been so excited that i have been itching to pack. my room has four boxes just waiting for books and i keep planning the layout of my new room in my mind.
i’m trying to figure out where to go next. i have 53,000 frequent flier miles; enough to send me somewhere exotic. i’ve been wanting to go to new mexico, though, and since a couple of my friends just recently closed on a house, i think i might try to set up a visit, but i also might want to stick with my original plan and go to new york and chicago to visit all of my friends that have recently moved away. i figured i would go ahead and buy the domestic tickets and rack up more miles for a crazy international adventure.
its a rough life, eh? well, with gas prices shooting out of control, my summer road trips have been suspended indefinitely. for any trip i want to take by car, i have to ride my bike to save up the gas money, so, i might be able to pull of a week in west texas, but all the alpine adventures i want to take are too far away to reach in the ways i had in the past. my way of life will just have to adapt. i’ve been out of town too much this year anyway. my vacation way of life is endangered.
so, i think that i will finally go back to school this semester and finally get that crazy degree i’ve been told i should get. nothing like 100 credits in community college to make me feel like a big waster.
Since i’ve returned from Australia, i’ve been more of a night owl. normally, i’m quite the morning person, waking around 8 and getting to bed around 10:30, but lately, i’ve been waking at 8, napping in the afternoon (for hours), and staying up until 1. At first, i couldn’t sleep at night. i laid awake for hours, going in between uncomfortable to angry to sad due to exhaustion. i would try to wake early and exercise a lot and avoid napping in the afternoon in order to sleep at night, but nothing was working.
So, i decided to embrace it. its summer after all. upon returning to Austin, the temperatures in the afternoon and early evening have been hovering in the low 100′s, so, really, why would one want to be awake for that? now i’m sleeping from 1 or 2 to 8 in the morning, then napping a few hours between 2 to 6 in the afternoon.
This weekend i am hopping on yet another airplane to St. Louis. This will be my 12th flight this year. Considering how much i hate flying, thats quite the feat. I was chatting with a travel writer friend of mine and she mentioned that not only does she suffer from motion sickness, but it seems to be common among other frequent travelers. i never had issues with motion sickness before, but on the last few flights of the “flying onslaught” i had just endured (8 flights in ten days, 2 of which were 12 hrs), i began to experience a bit of airsickness and, on the day following the really long flights, i would cough and then immediately feel nauseous. is it a trait that develops over time as one continues to travel more and more?
in other news, i think i’ve been drinking too much. when i got on my bike this morning, i was sweating and exhausted in a mile (luckily, the taco shack is only a mile from my home). with the gay pride parade saturday and all the beer i consumed the day before and after, i should probably cut back if i hope to attempt a 30 mile ride in fort worth thursday. before i left for Oceania, i was riding around the city every day, which isn’t to say that i was riding lots and lots of miles, but i was at least to the point where i never really felt tired or out of shape on my bike.
about Pride this past weekend: i can’t stop finding amusement in the fact that Pride and R.O.T. (the Republic of Texas Motorcycle Rally) consistently occur on the same weekend every year. One side of Congress is overflowing with hardcore motorcycle enthusiasts clad in leather and black t-shirts with beards and helmets and chrome while the other side is filled with rainbows and faux-hawks and a full on parade complete with a tower of people dancing to “YMCA”. standing out in the streets watching all the gay people cheering at the parade after having ridden my bicycle through motorcycle traffic made me glad to be home.
in other news, i’m currently sitting at the dining bar at whole foods downtown where a grackle has been grooming itself out the window in front of me for the past 10 minutes. its a female grackle, so its particularly ugly, and it keeps lifting its wings and scratching itself with its beak. it won’t stop fidgeting and it makes me want to scratch my legs and my wrist and my head. it fluffs up, as much as a female grackle can fluff up, and stretches its neck and lifts its wings like a tall skinny guy standing akimbo, and it strikes me as cute. sometimes the wind will blow chunks of floaty dust off the awning above and the bird stops scratching long enough to watch the dust floating around it, and its cute. i really think its cute in a horribly hideous you-used-to-be-a-dinosaur kind of way. the birds usually run around with poop on their heads, screeching their annoying little brains out, and, suddenly, i think its cute. its almost as though i am sharing some kind of personal moment with this hideous bird, as though it is grooming for an appointment… but, really, part of me wonders if there is something really wrong with it and its going to drop dead at any moment.