I spent my Friday night trekking across Boston in the pouring rain to see a group of people in business attire make music by pounding away at typewriters, and watching a guy play covers of 80s songs with three hacked Gameboys and a megaphone that he muffled by stuffing a sweatshirt into it. Then on Saturday, I got to go candlepin bowling, eat delicious rum-soaked Jello brains, and watch “Dead Alive” with the walking dead at J. Cannibal’s Feast of Flesh. When I started college, I never imagined that my weekends would be as wonderfully strange as they’ve been over the past few years and especially the past few weeks; I’m extremely glad that I have friends that enjoy doing the same weird stuff that I do!

Advanced Photojo has been eating my life lately. It seems like I spend every waking moment thinking up and looking for photo story ideas, shooting stories or talking about them to others, and it’s making me feel constantly anxious, a bit insecure, and even one-dimensional. I need to be less picky about what I shoot, manage my time better, and find something productive to do that doesn’t relate to photography. I’ve been scouring the BU job board and Craigslist every day but haven’t found anything worthwhile. I think I’ll try to learn some web design stuff and actually finish my website.

I signed up to do workshops with Exposure Initiative again, and am seriously looking forward to teaching photography to kids for a few hours on Thursdays. I’m teaching at a school for deaf children this time, which will present different challenges than the school for “behaviorally-challenged” kids did. Maybe I’ll get to learn some sign language!

I need a job.

I haven’t posted anything in here in over a month. Ack! I’ll try to post something at least once per week from now on.

Today I realized why my job hunt isn’t going particularly well. Typically, I find a job listing, get excited about it, apply, and then later decide that the job I applied for won’t work out for some reason or another. After thinking over my reasons for why I’m avoiding getting a job, I’ve found that two reasons seem to stand out above all the rest:

1) I’m lazy and I don’t actually want a job, even though I need one
2) Almost every single job I apply for is a SALES JOB

I hate selling stuff! Looking back, the part of working at The Picture People that I really didn’t like was the sales aspect. I basically just tried to shoot photos that would sell themselves because I felt uncomfortable with pushing expensive photo packages and membership cards onto people. The only good thing I got out of working in sales is an understanding of how certain sales techniques work, which has helped me to counter them when people use them on me.

I’m going to look for jobs that aren’t sales-related from now on, because I’d like to develop other skills than persuading people to buy things. I’ll talk with my photo professors when I get to school and see if they can recommend anything. If I can’t find anything in a few weeks, I’m just gonna have to suck it up and take what I can get because I need money.

“Look at me, I’m committing JOURNALISM!”

While I was talking with my father today, this headline from the local paper he was reading practically assaulted my eyes:

This just in: no one cares!

It pisses me off that not only is someone getting paid to write this trash, but someone else is also getting paid to approve of putting this article on the top of the front page above the fold when it would be much more at home lining the bottom of a birdcage. Seriously, was the motorcycle crash that launched a 20-year-old man 100 feet forward to his untimely death not as important as the hare-raising rescue of Joey the wascally wabbit?

Pa rum pum pum pum

While poking around various dark corners of the internets, I found some videos involving a UFO-shaped metal drum that sounds vaguely like a more melodious steelpan and is played by tapping on the drum’s surface with bare hands.

I soon after found out that to obtain one of these lovely instruments, known as a hang drum, I’d need to sell some vital organs on the black market and hop a plane to Europe (not necessarily in that order). The demand for these drums well exceeds the supply, as two Swiss artists are the only creators of every authentic hang drum in existence. Hang drums on eBay can fetch upwards of $10,000 because it’s apparently downright impossible to find these buggers stateside.

So what is someone who has fallen in love with the unique hang drum sound but is also quite keen on keeping their kidneys to do?

Enter the “hank drum,” a crude instrument fashioned from an empty propane tank that looks really freaking fun to play.

DIY instrument guru Dennis Havlena has kindly provided detailed instructions for making a hank drum on his website here. +1 item for my to-do list!

I has a plan

I’ve decided to make this into a photo journal of sorts, so I’ll be posting a lot of my own pictures and thoughts about photography, as well as other photo-related stuff. I’m mainly using this journal as a supplement to a personal website I’m working on (Quirky Pixy), but I’ll probably quickly stray from that purpose and ramble about things I find interesting. I’ll try to keep as true to the journal’s title as possible, as I’m sometimes guilty of wordiness and picspam. My new goal is to keep most entries under 300 words, and to post no more than five pictures per entry.

I just finished reading Shooting and Selling Your Photos: The Complete Guide to Making Money with Your Photography by Jim Zuckerman, and am now scheming about starting a little photo business of my own for the remainder of the summer. My father mentioned taking pictures of people at Horn Pond and then selling the shots to them, and I finally thought of a way that this might be possible. First, I need to finish my website and set up a store on it. Then I need to whip up a professional-looking business card with the site’s URL on it and print out several copies. I could hand these cards out to people after I take their picture, and place samples of the pictures on my site, which would encourage them to actually visit it. Even if people who check out my site don’t want to buy the picture I took of them, they may want a print of one of my other photos. This might actually work out! I just need to see if a permit is required for setting up a small table at the pond. Guess I have to call City Hall, eek!

St. John Photo Dump

These are my favorite pictures from the St. John trip, in no particular order. Click ‘em for a bigger version!

Gear used:

Canon Digital Rebel XT

50mm f/1.8 & kit lens

^ My dad gave this guy a tiny slice of coconut and it picked out little chunks with its claw and stuffed them into its mouth, then grabbed the whole slice, stuffed it into its shell and scurried off

^ I went a little overboard with the iguana portraits, but I couldn’t help myself because I love iguanas and these guys all let me get close enough to use my 50mm. I’m proud of them.

^ STUFF OF NIGHTMARES

^his name is Van Gogh

Many more can be found here. :)

I’m on island time

Helloooo, new journal. I’m not exactly sure what sorts of things I’m going to post here yet, so I’ll just recap my St. John trip for now.

Last Monday at approximately 4:30 a.m., I boarded a dimly-lit Logan Express bus idling in the wonderfully putrid-smelling Woburn station, and began a 12 hour trek to the 28 square mile virgin island of St. John. My parents, my little brother, my mother’s cousin and her two kids, and I took a four hour flight from Boston to San Juan, then a 20 minute flight from there to St. Thomas. After landing in the St. Thomas airport, we were greeted by live steel pan music and offers of free rum, an assurance that we had indeed arrived in the Virgin Islands. We rode in an air-conditioned taxi van from the airport to the Red Hook ferry dock, taking questionably safe back roads that leisurely curled around the island and then jerked upwards at 100-degree angles like giant concrete cobras ready to strike. The Red Hook ferry to Cruz Bay in St. John took about 15 minutes, but it seemed like much longer because I decided to sit in a cozy spot in the sheltered bottom deck of the boat where I soon found out that all of the water from the top deck gushes down in torrents whenever it rains. I spent the bulk of that ferry ride wishing my glasses sported miniature windshield wipers. From Cruz Bay, we took an open-air taxi (a pickup truck with benches in the bed) to Cinnamon Bay Campground. Having made this journey several times before, I knew that the curlicue roads in St. John made the St. Thomas streets seem like a wimpy Alabama freeway. One hill in particular always has novice riders muttering things like “You have GOT to be shitting me” to each other as the truck lurches upwards like a roller coaster cart before the first big drop, with the smell of burnt transmission fluid occasionally trickling by.

After safely arriving at the campground, we stayed in a concrete room with screen doors and no indoor plumbing for ten days.

Home sweet home.

Even though I’ve already had the privilege to enjoy the company of mangy donkeys that get a kick out of braying in front of sleeping tourists, feisty diurnal mongooses that were set loose to control the nocturnal rat population, and moths the size of B-52s that like to dive bomb anyone that dares to use the communal bathroom at 3 a.m., I always experience something new at Cinnamon Bay. This time, the campground manager personally greeted us and offered a can of RAID after we checked in, which made me slightly wary considering we’ve slept with tarantulas before at the same campground and were never offered any bug spray. Upon opening the pantry in our room and watching my father stomp-dance on the seven or eight Palmetto bugs that scuttled out after they sneezed off a direct spray of RAID, I knew that I’d get to make some fun buggy friends before the end of our stay. Lo and behold, a scorpion decided to hang out by our cooler, and what I think was a wolf spider took a nap above my brother’s bed. After catching these angry arachnids, my dad enjoyed relocating them into crab holes outside, resulting in Discovery Channel-style arthropod deathmatches underground.

He lost his stinger when my dad caught him.

Holy fang sheaths, Batman!

Aside from having slumber parties with bugs the size of my hands, I got to do some other fun new things this time around. With the help of a guidebook, I convinced my parents that we should snorkel Princess Bay, a sheltered mangrove swamp with knee-deep water and a bottom blanketed with thick sea grass and sponges.

I silently debated whether it would be more enjoyable to stick my head into a bear trap than into these roots.

Surprisingly, this turned out to be one of the best snorkel trips I’ve ever had, and I’ve snorkeled a LOT. There were tons of teeny tiny baby fish poking in and out of the grass, and baby coral crabs and feather dusters clung to the mangrove roots. I even came face to face with a baby barracuda lurking in the shadows that had the same attitude problem and strong-jawed sneer as the fully grown version. All of the fish there weren’t afraid of us, perhaps because they were young and naive or perhaps because they’ve never seen humans before since most people aren’t crazy enough to even consider snorkeling in a swamp. I think the coolest thing I saw was a bright orange conch shell, from which two eye stalks cautiously periscoped up to check me out as I hovered just inches away. This was not as creepy as it sounds.

One day, all seven of us crammed into a 14-foot dinghy and whipped around the island’s coast, shared a channel with ferries and watched islanders give us confused looks from atop their sailboats while the waves tossed us around effortlessly. When we pulled up to shore and ate lunch, the boat took on enough water to cover the motor’s battery, and when my brother and cousin reached in to grab some of their things, they were simultaneously shocked. Neither one was seriously hurt, but we decided that it was probably time to call it a day and return the dinghy after that.

We did a bunch of other stuff this trip, and overall it was a ton of fun. However, every time I go snorkeling I wonder if I made a mistake by not majoring in marine biology because I feel completely at home in the water. I can name most of the fish and coral I see, know where certain ones like to hide out in the reef and what other ones eat, and absolutely love just floating above them all and watching them interact. If I could somehow find a job as an underwater photographer, I think I’d be in heaven.