Vacation Time

So, I took this week of my paid vacation in June for no apparent reason. It's been a very long time since I had a good break from UPS, so I figured I would just chill out and spend a lot of time doing loads of nothing, or maybe whatever happened. This is how it all went down.

Monday
Woke up at some point in the afternoon and took my laundry over to my parents house to do some laundry, post some blogs, eat some donuts, etc. Then I went over to Rachel's house for a little while. Then I went home and watched the movie Outlander, which I got from my local Blockbuster. It's about a guy who crash lands his spaceship in the time of the Vikings. (Don't ask me.) He was chasing some evil alien monsters when he crashed, and so he has to enlist the help of the vikings to fight the aliens, and avenge the destruction of his home planet. Let's just say that it was totally bad ass!



Tuesday
Woke up around noon and called up my sister, Amelia, so that we could hang out. (She is on vacation too). We ended up going fishing first at Washington Lake, then at Crystal Lake, then Trial Lake. I didn't actually do any fishing. I just sat in the warm sun on my camping chair, sipping at some Rhubarb soda, and read a lot of The Gargoyle. It was good times.



Then we went home and watched Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, and ate fishes. It was an evening of tasteful hilarity all around.



Wednesday
I took my car to Discount Tires to get some new tires, and order a new wheel for my spare that was destroyed on my last journey to the Spiral Jetty. I bided my time by reading a lot more of The Gargoyle. Then I went down South to jam with my heavy metal band. We have this new drummer who is going to take us to a whole new level of wrath. Life will never be the same after you have heard the noise we are concocting in various basements of West, and South Jordan.

After I had blasted my own ear drums into oblivion with those dudes I went to my parents house to watch some X-Files with Amelia. We finally finished Season 4. So now we can begin watching Season 5 which has remained unopened since Rachel bought it for me at Christmas.



Thursday
I ended up spending most of the day with Rachel. We went and saw Transformers 2, which absolutely sucked to the max, unfortunately. This has been a terrible year for movies, but Transformers 2 brings it down to a level of badness that has not been often reached since the nineties. After that debacle we headed over to Mikado for some sushi. I tried this new roll called the Bushido Roll. It was very excellent. I highly recommend it.

After all was said and done we just spent a bit of quality time back at her house. It's nice to just hang out sometimes. We watched the first two episodes of Big Love which, I must say, is much creepier than it usually gets credit for. I dig it.

Friday
Woke up all discombobulated at 10 AM with a text message about some photos. So I spent several hours on my computer finishing the wedding photos from last week that I had procrastinated a bit on, dropped off a disc to the right people, drove down to Discount Tires to pick up my new spare and then to Rachel's house to let her dog out, and watch him try to get at the neighbor's dogs through the fence for a while.

Then it was time to drive down to the UC to see the Lehi rodeo with Rachel and Trent and KaraLee and Ryan. I have never seen a rodeo before so I was pretty pumped. But then it rained like hell on us, which kind of took the piss out of it all. Nevertheless it was good, cowboy times.









Saturday
Now it is Saturday. I processed some photos. I laid around. I started to watch a Terence Mallick film that I have been looking for for years. I found it at my local blockbuster. It's called Days of Heaven, and like all Terence Mallick films it is incredibly beautiful.



Now I am relaxing at Rachel's house again. Later we are going to the Real Salt Lake game, another first for me. I have never been to a soccer game. It should be awesome. At least it will give me a chance to wear my jersey that I also got from Rachel. I intend to represent like a real soccer fan.

All in all it has been a fairly successful vacation. I don't want to go back to work. If you do want to go back to work after vacation then it was a bad vacation. I have had a few of those in my time. But this one was just about right. And I still have tonight and tomorrow, in which I plan to do a whole lot of nothing again, or whatever else happens.

Shooters

Shooters: getting down to business with old friends: gots to git paid in this dark year of our Lord: the mysterious lives of old friends: aimless ramblings in the night: and a tiny pinch of irony


When Somer called me up and asked if I could do a job with Teresa on the 20th I said, “Sure. Why not?” I hadn’t crossed paths with that Gemini woman since that one dark night at Sandy Station. We were all still young, and full of life back then. But things turned ugly on that night. Bad things happened. Things that aren’t quite fit for print, and which I will never be fully prepared to explain, even to myself. Let’s just say that I humbly pray, every night, that no one captured that scene on video. Youtube isn’t ready for that sort of weirdness.


There is a short list of people who have managed to work their ways into my crazy, inner consciousness to the point that I can truly call them the right kind of people. These are the ones who have been with me in all the wrong places at all the right times. So even if I haven’t seen them since the year 2004, I still know that if I run into them tomorrow morning we will still be friends. These once in a blue moon friendships are the best kind, because if they were not then they would have fallen by the wayside a long, long time ago. It’s easy to be friends with someone you see every day. It's another thing completely to be friends with someone you see only once a year.


I believe I have been to Teresaland only about 4 times in the past four years. I will list them now just for chronological reasons.


1) The Infamous Arches Spectacle - We took some crude photos, for strictly academic reasons, but quickly degenerated into drunken hijinks that got us all in the worst sort of trouble with one very stern school teacher.


2) The Khan Wedding - Wherein we demonstrated complete professionalism and grace in spite of some very intense sociological vibes. Unfortunately we did not get into any sort of trouble at that time.



3) The Wedding of Chesie & Tosh - Almost completely unexceptional, except that it stressed us both out so bad that we were doomed to fall directly into the Great Sandy Station Fiasco.



4) South Jordan Anonymous Wedding - A long, long session of rainy photography, followed by a weird, dark night of the soul in South Salt Lake.



So I went down to South Jordan, on a bitter cold summer’s day in June, to shoot a backyard wedding. It was all very moist. Nevertheless, we had a job to do, and like Lee Van Cleef we saw it through. The most disturbing part is that even now, after all is said and done, I have no idea what the names are of the bride or the groom, or anyone else who was there for that matter.


That’s just how we roll.


But this is all just a bunch of rambling about things no one ever understands, like phone phobias, and the problems that come with the ongoing attempt to converge our various styles. You just had to be there to know what I am talking about. But we do understand, because we were both there, looking through our respective objective, and subjective, lenses. (Ha! If you weren’t lost before that last sentence, you certainly should be by now).


Anyway, to make a long story short, it turns out that Teresa and I have been living within 100 meters of each other for a little while now, unbeknownst to both of us. How can this happen, you ask, in this wondrous age of communications? For well over a year I have not seen Teresa a single time, and yet all I had to do was look out my window at the right moment, and I would have seen her walking her dog past my building. And yet, I still had to drive all the way down to South Jordan, in the pouring rain, to figure that out. And that, my friends, truly is ironic.

Life Lesson of the Week #2: Acid Rain Sucks!

A weeks worth of rain in South Salt Lake will increase the PH of your swimming pool to unacceptable levels of acidity. This is not an easy problem to solve either.

An Analog Boy In The Digital World

Today I woke up just in time to witness a great moment in television history, as few people probably were capable of seeing it. You see, at 1:00 PM here, the old, analog television broadcast signal was turned off once and for all. They have been constantly reminding me for weeks, on public service announcements, that if I was prepared I would not ever see any change at all. Nevertheless, change is exactly what I wanted.

As I explained to people that I was not going to get a digital converter box they would look at me like I was some kind of a moron. They would protest against my ignorance. They would say, "But Brandon, it is only like forty dollars for the box."

"But, oh my friends, that is $40 too many."

"But if you use the government rebate it's only like $20."

"So you are telling me that if I spend $20 of my money, then the government will spend $20 of our money so that I can continue to get cooking tips from Rachel Ray? Sorry Rachel Ray. I just have more important things to do. You will be missed."

This conversation would still end with blank stares in my direction. Sometimes a little bit of sympathetic head-shaking in recognition of how I have continued to go further off the deep end yet. But I just don't see any point any more. And so, there I was, at 12:58 PM, watching the KSL news, ready for the rapture.

The news people were vigilant in explaining to me what was about to happen, and reminding me that if I had prepared myself I wouldn't feel a thing, er, I mean notice a thing. I felt like it was judgement day, and I had failed, yet again, to repent my many sins against American commercialism. The reporter was explaining that they were up on top of broadcast point, or something, from where "the signal" transmits. And this old guy was going to be the one to flip the switch and make it official. The signal would be terminated by this particular guy because he had been there back in the 1960's when they had begun transmissions at Broadcast Point. He was saying something like, "In just a few moments....."

The old guy apparently flipped the switch prematurely. I only saw his pointer finger flex ever so slightly, and that was that. Nothing now but static. For some reason I found this to be the funniest thing I have seen in about 7 years. I laughed solidly for about 5 minutes until tears streamed down my face. I can't really explain, even to myself, why it was so humorous. It just was.

I have been thinking a lot lately about how technology, designed to make our lives easier, actually makes our lives worse. I am trying to get a website up and running so that I can attempt to start some sort of photography business, but I feel I am held back by my inability to buy a $3000 digital camera. Anybody who still believes digital photography is cheaper, is either a fool, or delusional. Even if I bought that $3000 camera, I would have about a year if I was lucky before I would have to buy a $5000 camera. This is the way of digital technology.

And so, I am contemplating the pros and cons of starting a business based on film rather than digital. I could very well do this. As a matter of fact, I am one of the last graduates of the SLCC photo department who had the luxury of a proper film-based photo education. People will tell you that you can learn all the same things in digital, and that the final image is all that matters. This is true. But few people have the gumption to learn things in digital. Digital photography is too easy. It allows for laziness. It let's you get away with murder sometimes. But ultimately it is a crutch. And it is always better to know what you are doing, than to let the machine do it for you.

I have seen both sides of the fence. I know film, as well as I know digital photography. Some would not see this necessarily as a strenth in this day and age. But, as the old political quote advises, "Work the difference". Analog rules!

Life Lesson of the Week #1

It takes over 48 hours to fill a 25,000 gallon swimming pool with a garden hose.