Ana, Lena, and I took some pretty good pictures yesterday to develop today at photography camp. Today was fun since we basically spent the entire time in the dark room. Besides being a little boring sometimes, the teacher is pretty nice, or perhaps the rules are just more lenient here. We were allowed to leave the dark room for a bit to take a break in the basement with and go to the vending machines. Click here to see the slideshow of the photography camp photos.
My sister, Lena, and I are attending a one week photography summer camp at Villa Maria college. The scheduling is a very good thing since it’s just getting more organized and less slumpy. Most of the summer, I’ve been staying up into the wee hours and then even the plain old early hours of the morning and sleeping in until noon. With the camp, I’ve had to wake up by at latest eight since it’s at ten in the morning.
The course leaves a bit to be desired since we are covering more of the development techniques than actual art of photography and the teacher is a tad boring and monotonous. My sister said that he reminded her from something out of a movie and that for the short while before she just got way too bored, he was kind of funny. I think he just might be shy. He has a kind of cartoon-like nerdness about him what with the short-sleaved button down shirt and the thick glasses that he pushes up his face every so often.
Yesterday was the first day at camp and for about the first two hours or so, we just sat and listened to our teacher drone on about the history of photography and the parts of a camera. We took some pictures around the campus, and that was kind of fun. I was very disappointed when I accidentally broke my film and lost all of the photos I’d taken.
After camp, my sister, Lena, and I had to ride our bikes all the way to Delaware Photo to buy some new film (because nobody else sells it). At least we got some exercise. It was extremely hot out, though, and we were not only thirsty, but sweating through our clothes. We stopped at the Delta Sonic across the street from the photo place to buy bottled waters from their vending machine. We then rode our bikes around taking pictures at Delaware Park and stuff.
I wasn’t too impressed with the photos after they got developed at Rite Aid, but they looked a lot better when I printed from the negatives myself. A lot of my pictures are too light or too dark to see and I still need to get used to the whole film camera darkroom thing, but I hope to have some good shots by the end.
I know that this site is becoming a kind of marathon of whining, pissing, and moaning. And oh, God, am I sick of it by now. I am so sick of it that I want to toss my own leg into a paper shredder shouting, “shut the bloody hell up, you pathetic idiot!” ….Ooooh, alliteration!…. Uh— but really. I complain a ton in real life, and that’s obviously what I do in internet-life, too. It’s either photoshoots or annoying complaints on the menu. I mean, some writers are good at whining. They make an art of it. But for me, a person who has trouble throwing a witty sentence together, I’m sure that it’s more of an atrocity than an art. —I really just want to slap myself for keeping up this alliteration thing (and the self mutilation thing), but it’s fun to write. Right. Onward to the usual lineup of rants.
I am growing bored by that fact that I probably talk about the cleanliness of my home more than anything on this site, but it is honestly a reoccurring problem in my life. The house was so nice an orderly and smell-goody when my sister, my mother, and I got back form our vacation in the Thousand Islands. It was a relief to not have my father there making the air tense with his presence. My mother commented on easy it was unpacking and cleaning up without him lying around. It was a nice, quiet, and clean few hours in the home before my father finally arrived at the house around eight-ish.
Now it’s every day that I see him on his bottom, resting in a chair wearing clothes that haven’t been cleaned in God knows how long, reading his newspapers. It is not difficult to imagine the image with flies swarming all around it, eating away at the unmoving (besides the fingers turning the pages) body. Besides the times when he gets up to eat some Ben&Jerry’s out of the freezer or to throw a hissy fit about a lost object, he is either sitting in front of the newspaper or the computer. Whenever I attack my father with complaints about his sloppiness around the house, he usually tries to point out that much of the mess is the rest of the family’s and that we should be the ones cleaning up. I checked and the mess is sooooo only his. Newspapers strewn over the inappropriately large coffee table and floor, cups and bowls left out….
I’m not going to say that the mess that is filling up the house right now is all his, it is sort of a group effort going on right now, but he is obviously the catalyst in the reaction. My theory is that once one part goes bad, the rest of the parts think that it’s perfectly alright to do so also and join in. Or perhaps they just think that resistance is futile, or something like that.
I will admit that I am somewhat lazy myself. When I am not sitting in front of the computer or television screen, you will probably find me doing something equally as unproductive. But really. He’s and adult! (Please, adults reading this, don’t get the wrong idea, I’m just throwing words around, really.) He should be out playing golf or something! Not sitting inside catching up on current events! I’m serious, he is addicted to the newspapers. He piles them around himself, along with all his other crap, while sitting lazily in his chair and consumes them one after another. Cover to cover, front to back. If it were possible to melt newspaper into some sort of fluid and shoot it into your veins, my father would be first in line getting his fix. I often tell my father that I am so scarred from his obsessive newspaper reading that I will never subscribe to a newspaper for as long as I live. Even the smell of newspapers, that horrible, rotting smell, makes me nauseated.
This is not the only problem. YES, I am going to continue with this pointless and probably extremely irritating line of complaints. If you have gotten this far in this post already, or still even read this website, you are quite amazing. That or you have absolutely no life. Give yourself a pat on that back.
The second problem is that along with being spine-tinglingly (hee, that sounds funny) untidy, this house hardly seems like a home anymore. —Oh dear, I’m quoting songs now, too. Somebody stop me!— My family keeps holding these really unbearable political meetings in our house every tuesday evening. For those few hours, usually from seven until ELEVEN, my home becomes a hot madhouse full of noisy, shouting political people. Not only do these people come over for the weekly meetings, but I often wake up to find a few of them busy with campaign work downstairs in the morning. You know how terrible it is when you do something very embarrassing only to find out that there is somebody else in the house? It’s kind of like that. Except that it’s all the time.
And on top of all of this. On top of every single annoying thing that’s been going on in this house. On top of that, my father put my clothes in the dryer yesterday. He never admitted to it, but tell me, when in the history of humankind, have five or so pairs of pants dried simply by hanging in three hours? When I accused him of doing this horrible, horrible deed, he simply looked down with an evil smile spread across his face. After all of the times! If you’ve been patient enough to be a frequent reader of this site, I know that you’ve probably read about my very specific clothes-washing procedures and how my father refuses to respect them. I don’t care what people say, the clothing SHRINKS in the dryer. I yelled at my father as he left, “If you put my clothing in the dryer one more time, I will chop off your head and feed it to wild dogs!” I am obviously exaggerating a bit, but I will be very, very, very mad.
I am all for the ignorance is bliss deal, really. I think that everybody, or I, at least, would be happier if we were just stupid apes that just lived their lives. That’s kind of an extreme example of the idea, though. I am not for ignorance, however, when the person who is ignorant actually thinks they know what they’re talking about when it comes to the subject that they’re discussing. That was a long sentence.
I also hate it when people refuse to become unenlightened about things that they should so obviously be enlightened about by now. Like the internet. And Harry Potter. Just the other day I was urging my parents to “hop on the bandwagon already!” and start reading Harry Potter. I am quite sick of my father saying “I think that Harry and Hermione are going to get together” when his only exposure to things Harry Potter comes from the three movies. It also just annoys me that my parents haven’t even attempted to open a Harry Potter book just for the reason that it’s kind of a big deal in the world right now and you know, they could seem stupid if one of their friends brings up Harry Potter and they have no idea what the person is talking about….
But that isn’t all that annoys me. I am sure this is at least the five billionth time that I have mentioned my grandfather’s complete lack of knowledge when it comes to everything computery, but oh, I am going to mention it again. This morning, I was once again subject to my grandfather’s never-ending requests for me to find things on the internet for him. His requests are usually money-related, some examples being the salaries of all of the New York Yankees players, the value of silver on a particular day, and the exact value of this bean pot he has somewhere around his house. Today was no different.
He brought over this little glass ashtray which he pulled out of his pocket when I came into the room. “Max? Can you come over here for a moment? I want you to look this up on the internet for me.” I tell him that I’ll try but even before he tells me what he wants to find, I always know that I will most likely never be able to find it. This is because my grandfather’s idea of what the internet is is very, very different from what the internet actually is. He seems to imagine the internet as a very large directory made up of lengthy menus arranged somewhat like an encyclopedia. This is obvious in the tips that he himself has given me as to how to navigate through the internet. “Okay. First you go under antiques. Then once you’re in antiques, go to glassware. Then go under glass ashtrays.” Ah, yes. So simple.
I honestly blame all of my grandpa’s thinking on the way the internet is portrayed in the media. Like everything wrong in this world, it is the media’s fault! Just look at every TV show and movie when somebody meets somebody that they don’t trust. “Don’t worry, I’ve googled them. They used to live in Alaska but now they work in a bakery in…. Egypt.” See? Finding stuff on the internet is SO EASY! Anybody can find a person’s entire life history at the click of a button! It’s completely legal! Yes!!!!
Remember when the internet just started to become popular? Everybody was freaking out about it so much. “Holy crap! I can go to the mall! IN MY UNDERWEAR!” It is excitement like this, combined with lack of internet experience, that I believe gives my grandfather this totally wrong idea about the whole computer thing.
It might also be all of the fear and mystery that surrounded the internet in its early days. That might be why my grandfather thinks that I’m some sort of underground internet hacker who could easily find out such things as people’s passwords and hack into government computers. It might also be why my mother won’t even let me purchase things on Amazon for fear that her credit card number will be stolen and we will be charged millions of dollars for items that we didn’t buy.
I know that the saying is that old dogs can’t learn new tricks. But they really should. My mother should read Harry Potter. My father should learn to swim. And my grandfather should learn about the internet before he asks me to find out the value of a very specific looking dish that he has in his house somewhere. “No, that’s not it,” he says while I show him various pages on eBay. “Mine has handles.” I try to tell him that the chances of actually finding his dish are very slim, but he remains looking intently at the computer screen even after I close the browser window and leave the room. Staring at the pictures of our family vacation that were behind the browser window, he tells me that “this can’t be right. This menu is just of sea-side real estate.” Or something like that.
Okay. I am now kind of feeling bad that I compared my family members to dogs and that this entry is much longer than it should be considering that it’s just restating things that previous entries have said. And that my sentences are way too long. And that I use the word “and” at the beginning of my sentences. My english teacher would cringe. And that I’ve kind of changed the idea of this post ten times since I started writing it. So I’ll stop writing it. Now.
In the show: A shortened song; the stuffed porcupine; the book; a lot of interrupting and talking at the same time; tape and sticky tac and glue; Russell and Brandon becoming gay but then becoming straight again; swimming out to the island; taking off of bikini bottoms under water; a song by Brandon and his band; a song by Brandon Ana, Cara, and I, and pretending to give away the end of the new Harry Potter Book.
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Music from Buffalo Souvenir Music
Click here for more music and information from Brandon’s Band, Full Proof.
The house we’re staying in came with a croquet set inside of its storage garage. The only way to play croquet (or imaginary croquet, as we were playing), of course, is to wear the most preppy clothes you can find. If you don’t the croquet police will come an arrest you, didn’t you know? This is exactly what Ana, Cara, Taylor, and I did when we went to play imaginary (because we only wanted to do it for the sake of photography) croquet. We dressed up in the most preppy clothing available to us out of the clothes that we packed and we went out into the parkway close to the cottage we’re staying in to take the photos. Click here to see them.
We’re in the Thousand Islands now! My mother, my sister, her two friends Cara and Taylor, and I left for our trip on Saturday. We’re staying in this gorgeous (and quite large) house that we rented for the week. Click here to see the photos of the trip so far. That page is where all the new photos from the trip will be, also.
So, some people and I were playing around with the SmarterChild screen name and made him say a bunch of stuff. We then asked him to tell us a story and it was basically like a big madlibs game. He asked us to name nouns, adverbs, verbs, etc, and then he gave us a story using the words that we gave him. We felt like making him sound like a pervert, so our words are kind of uh…. well, you’ll see. The words we chose are italicized below. All of mine kind of sucked, but my sister’s friend had the funniest. They are shown below:
A Nice Birthday Surprise
When I was four years old, I thought that my parents had left me at the circus on my birthday. At first, I was totally excited to see all the trees and it was great when a clown picked me up and started to fornicate with me. He put me next to an old tree, pulled out some oversized clothes for me to wear and gave me some tasty cotton candy to eat, which stuck to my tree. I was having a blast until I noticed that I couldn’t see my parents anywhere in the moist audience. I started running. Thankfully my parents appeared with a large birthday cake and lots of trees, because otherwise I might quietly have been in therapy for many years.
I like that one.
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Don’t Do Your Banking on Halloween
I was dressed up as my favorite penis on Halloween and stopped at my bank on the way to a party. I was licking in line with my hand in my pocket, holding my huge breast. Suddenly, a security guard stuck his hard gun in my face! He ordered me to strangely raise my hands over my head. Everyone started screaming, even the balls. The security guard led me to the bank manager’s office, where I was slapped into the manager’s clit. The manager pulled off my mask and recognized me as a customer. He apologized immediately, explaining that the bank up the street had just been robbed and that one of the robbers was wearing a costume like mine. I was irritated but I needed to move, so I grabbed my mask and left. Later on I realized that I never even got my money!
I like that one.
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A Fishing Trip with My Dad
One weekend, my father suggested that we go fishing. So we packed up the fishing rods and penises and in no time we were ready to licking. At the lake, we put everything into our hard canoe, though I almost forgot my long breast, which would have been a problem. We paddled out onto the lake and waited luckily, then something pulled on my rod. My father said, “I have a steamy feeling that this is going to be a big one!” I touched very hard and reeled in a big one alright: a big old pole that must have weighed four pounds. This was the best thing we caught all day!
Wow, that’s pretty funny.
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My family and I went to the big Harry Potter midnight party at Talking Leaves last night. It was pretty cool. There were tons of people there, kind of hard to move. My sister was kind of crabby since she was pretty tired, and she kind of whined a bit. Other than that, though, the party was pretty cool. I recorded a few audio posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) from the party and that was kind of fun. Except when my father got really excited about it and interviewed this guy from the Buffalo news on one of them. Unfortunately, he used my last name in the post, so I had to take it off the site. I also took a bunch of pictures.
When we got home, my sister and I started reading the book. We got mad at each other whenever one had read ahead of the other. “You’re five pages ahead of me! No fair! Stop reading!” My mom came in at like 2:30 to tell us to go to bed or she’d take away our books. We were leaving to go to the Thousand Islands in the morning, and we couldn’t be up too late. We stayed up reading, anyway.
