The rebellion begins

Let me start by saying that I LOVE Daisy's school. She loves it. I love it. I love the teachers. I love the vibe. I'm very happy with it. But a couple of things are irking me right now...

The school is doing a little gift exchange for Christmas and, in keeping with the learning theme, we had to bring in a wrapped book to donate the exchange pile. Cool so far, I like it. Daisy will definitely not say no a new book. The problem is the school's instructions for the label.

TO: My friend
FROM: Your friend

W.T.F!?

I mean, why not just say "To you. From me"? And then, in that case, why even bother with a label at all? I think it's clear to even a toddler that the gift came from someone and is being given to someone; they don't need a label to explain that basic concept.

Then, there is the fact that 2 and 3 year olds can't read, so what the hell does it matter what the label says? Plus, what is the big deal about saying who the book is from? I totally get why it doesn't say who it is "to" but really what's the point in giving and receiving a gift if there is no joy or appreciation derived from either side when the recipient opens it?

Perhaps the intent is to ensure that any crappy book given doesn't reflect poorly on the child who gave it? Well, maybe if the gift had to say who it was from then there would be more pressure to present a worthy choice? And it's not like cost was an issue: we were told to spend no more than $10.

Maybe the teachers are worried that the receiving child will hate it, throw it across the room, and have a toddler-fit, thus upsetting the recipient? Well, what about the opportunity to teach kids the valuable lesson of appreciating gifts for the thought and effort not just whether or not it was on their wish list? Plus, won't most kids know which book is the one their family donated anyway? I know Daisy will. They may be only two but they're not stupid.

Finally, I find it hard to believe that a room of curious preschoolers will not ask the inevitable question: "Who bought me this?" And what will be the teachers' response? Will they say "Santa" delivered it? I'm guessing no or the "From" would have been Saint Nick himself.

So, I'm totally perplexed and quite pissed and the stupidity of it all.

Hence, I left the label off completely. I mean, there was no actual point in the label, so why waste one?

Unfortunately, husband let me down. He dropped Daisy and said, wrapped book off this week and when the teacher took it from him she examined it, determined it didn't have a label, and said she would put one on it for us. And what did Hubby say? Did he say "Actually, we left it off purposefully because we thought the wording made absolutely no sense"? No, he did not. He said "Ok," OK!? OK!!!!??????

Yes, he totally thwarted my rebellion, which is leading me to more drastic measures. I will now spend all weekend prepping Daisy for the gift exchange, making sure she relentlessly demands to know who her book is from and ensuring she loudly identifies the book we donated when it is pulled from the pile.

I will undo this P.C. insanity one way or another.

And while I'm ranting about the school... it's all but closed next week. Of course, there is no reduction in tuition which, over the Holidays, would be much appreciated. Sure, it's open on Monday (when Daisy doesn't attend anyway) and Tuesday, but Tuesday is basically a throwaway because school is only from 9am to 12:30pm and the whole day is dedicated to the Christmas concert, puppet show, and Santa visit... all of which we parents are expected to attend (which, of course, I will... happily.). What's even more annoying is that there is a sign-up sheet for parents to provide the food!

Let me get this straight: I pay you $700 a month; you eliminate one week of school and force me to find alternative care for my child but provide no refund; and THEN you want me to bring food to your Christmas celebration which, incidentally, I had to take time off to attend!?

Where's the Holiday spirit in that!?

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And yes, I fully intend to pay no mind to the fact that this is my first post on here in months. Move along. Nothing to see here.

Tilt shift

WOW. Most days your life's axis operates on a relatively even keel. The odd wobble here and there but otherwise, you manage to keep your balance.

Other days, something happens to tip your axis. Someone gives it a nudge at the right time and in the right way and before you know it, life is spinning in a different direction.

That was my day yesterday.

Really.

It was a day of dichotomies. The first half of the day was filled with life and self-affirming positivity and the second half with professional frustration and challenge. Yet, strangely enough, both situations were closely linked.

Let me explain. (it may take a bit but hang in there.)

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine sent me a link to her favorite photographer, based here in Sacramento. (For a few reasons, I'm going to keep the photographer's name out of this post but email me if you want to know who she was.) Anyway, I of course checked out said photographer's site. To say her work was unusual for the Sacramento market, was an understatement. There is really nobody else I have found like her in this area. Put your feelers out to the Bay Area or further afield - sure - but here, in good-ole Sac, notsomuch. Which is not to say that there aren't great photographers here - there truly are - but this lady is an artist. Everything about her work and her branding have a distinction and style that is clearly and personally defined. Her entire body of work has a voice. It slapped me around the face quite quickly that she was unique. (I'm also guessing that, since my friend is in the sales/marketing field, she got slapped similarly.)

After perusing the website, I found a paragraph about the photographer herself and part of that addressed budding photographers who were looking to pick her brain. While she doesn't host workshops or mentoring sessions, her words suggested that she was open to sharing some inspiration with me, if I got in touch. Which I did. And she was.

Awesome.

She agreed to meet me for some coffee. Yesterday was our coffee-date.

I admit, I went in almost without agenda. I had a short list of questions I wanted to ask but no clear goal for what I wanted out of the session. Honestly, I didn't know how much she would be comfortable sharing and I wanted to be respectful of that fact; it's one thing to nurture new, local photographers in your community, another to give-up your hard-won experience and insights for the price of a cup of coffee.  If nothing else, I thought I would get to meet and learn more about the person behind the work and come away having had a nice chat about photography.

Man, did I underestimate this lady.

In many ways, our conversation was very esoteric, which is typically not my comfort zone. At the risk of stereotyping our deeply complex and multi-faceted personalities, she is a calm and thoughtful owl and I am a panting, over-enthusiastic puppy dog. I don't know if that makes sense, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't but without 500 words, I don't know how else to boil it down for a blog post. But that's how I felt during the conversation. She speaks slower than me; she has a steady gaze to my darting eyes; and her body language is calm while I constantly fidget and gesticulate. And, while I have spent the last fifteen years of my life learning to say fifteen words when only five will do, in order to package every question or thought for public consumption, she discards the package, removes the fluff, and dives right into the issue before her. Her ability to read between my words, digest my randomly expressed thoughts, and interpret my body language within such a short period of time and then poke me in the ribs with her laser-focused and spot-on insight, was uncanny and a little unsettling.

In many ways, I felt very jealous of her path to her passion and saw starkly, in just that short time, how our lives had shaped us. She went to art school, has been mentored by great photographers, and has followed the artist's path through her life, being positively encouraged to nurture the expression of her innermost self to feed her art. I, on the other hand, have spent the last 15 years in the corporate world, being encouraged to suppress and/or change my expression of my innermost self to suit other people. The fact that we approach photography through different lenses is therefore unsurprising.

I am not ashamed to say I left in tears. Good tears. It was exactly what I needed to hear and never even knew it.

Like I said, it was a tad esoteric so some of it was "you had to be there" dialogue, however, let me summarize what I got out of our hour together:

1. I need to stop looking at other people's work. I am overstimulated and distracted by it and it is preventing me from defining who I am as a photographer.
2. I need to work from within. Forget (most) workshops, classes, guides, actions, presets... what do I really want to get out of them? How to learn to be someone else? What I have to offer as a photographer is already inside me. It's my own artistic vision not someone else's vision, it's who I am when I'm with my clients not who I think I should be, that will help me be the best that i can be. I can't get that from someone else. I have to spend time nurturing it within and pulling it out of me.
3. The words that resonate for "my style" are: contrast, color, drama, warmth emotion, clean lines, and a little whimsy. Make everything about these words from the way I take the photo, to the way I edit it, to the way I brand myself. 
4. Don't blog every session, only your best work. 
5. Spend less time editing. Significantly less time. I mean like, cut it down by two thirds. Whoah! This one smacked me in the face. What am I fixing? Either I took a good photo or not. Either I know what my editing style is or not.
6. Find beauty in the world around you. Be content in yourself and thankful for your life and express that through your art. Beauty comes from within. (This isn't something I can just turn-on, granted, but it's worth remembering.)
7. Learn off-camera flash. (I've been wanting to do this anyway.)
8. Take pictures of 30 things that are ugly and make them beautiful.
9. Take one picture a day, every day of the same thing, from a unique perspective.
10. Breathe and slow down. Get out of my head and into the moment. Focus on being present with my surroundings and my subjects. (#1 will help with this.)
11. Forget weddings. Not forever necessarily but for now. Go back to why I got into this in the first place - I love taking portraits. Quite apart from anything else, being gone at least one full weekend day every weekend during the summer, does not work well for my family. 

Like I said before, in a lot of ways all of this is like asking me to undo what I've spent several years doing to myself.  I can't even begin to express here what a huge thing that is to me. If your life hasn't been like this it may be hard to connect with. Yet in no way am I saying that the last 15 years of my life were bad or worthless - in fact I learned many, many valuable things that will benefit my photography business. But what I'm trying to get across is that this is a completely different skillset, a completely different way of approaching "your job". I mean, like a whole 180. I feel like a coat that all of a sudden has to be able to turn inside out and become reversible.

LOL. I know, you're thinking: that's a lot for one coffee date. Like I said, I was surprised myself. It was quite possibly one of the most valuable hours I have ever spent with a stranger.

And wasn't the timing perfect, given my post of just the day before?

Clearly, I have a lot to think about. At the same time, I feel more focused and am generally re-energized. I can't wait for my next client session, truly, because each session opens up a new opportunity for me to work on all this stuff - as well as, of course, delivering some cool images for my clients!

Speaking of which, right when I say I'm going to do fewer sessions, I get three inquiries from my website and schedules three new sessions this week. Isn't that how life always happens?

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In terms of the other half of my day, I can't really share too much because it's a work thing and I don't blog about work things for a multitude of reasons. Let's just say that something went down that has big impact to the company and to me , was not my fault, and where the responsible party will not take ownership of the problem or the solution and is, in fact, placing the "lesson" on my doorstep. There is history and back-story here that would take forever to explain but the long and short of it is that I'm fed up with overcompensating for other people's weaknesses.

Not only did it result in one of the most challenging phone conversations of my entire career, the eventual outcome wound up telling me a lot about the priorities of the company I work for and I can't say I'm too happy about them. Such is life, I guess.

How is this related to the first half of the day? Well because the message of being true to myself resonated here too. I ditched allowing myself to be the punching bag, treading on eggshells for a quiet life, and dealing with the issue from a place of "I'm bound to be wrong" (and by wrong I mean ME as a person being wrong, not me being wrong about something. Different things.) 
Instead, I was authentic and honest in my response to the situation. It made it harder work, more emotional, more challenging, and ultimately I'm sure there will be repercussions. But the one thing I can say for sure is that I am not second-guessing my decision to handle it the way I did and I will not apologize for it in retrospect either.

I have no doubt that this will only further entrench certain people's opinion of me as being overbearing and stubborn or however I have been previously pigeon-holed but I actually just don't care anymore. Here am I in one area of my life being called upon to nurture who I am and bring that out in a positive way and it only calls to attention even more the other half of my life where I am constantly being negatively judged for who I am asked to be someone else. Like I said, dichotomies.

Not sure where that leaves me but there you go. I'm just going to let this loose-end flap in the breeze for a while and be ok with it.

In the meantime, me and my camera are gonna have some fun.

And my good luck continues...

I love(d) my Motorola Cliq smartphone. It has survived 20 months of a curious baby/infant/todddler, numerous falls, and has almost been lost God knows how many times as a result of my post-pregnancy, lobotomized brain. Unfortunately, its nine lives came to an end this evening as I was picking up my coat to put it in the coat closet. It slipped right out of my pocket and smacked straight down, face first, into the tile floor. The above is the result. It still works fine, bless it, but it's spraying small pieces of glass everywhere whenever it's touched.

Bonus is that we have been paying $6 a month for equipment insurance so I thought that all I would have to do this evening is file a claim online and get a new one shipped to me for next week.

Yeah, well, you know what thought did.

And I should have known better given the kind of week I've been having.

The company that handles the equipment insurance, Asurion, says that the phone model has been discontinued (which it hasn't, they just have a newer version of the same thing out) and will only offer a replacement for what they consider to be a "comparable" model. My choices are a 2nd rate GPS device with built-in phone, called a "Garmin" (I know, WHAT!?) with no slide-out QWERTY keyboard (a must) or a teenager's vanity device, the MyTouch, whose reviews are less than stellar (phone freezes, standby time sucks) etc...

After some research, I chose the MyTouch because the slide-out keyboard is very important and, for the most part (specs like battery standby time and poor reviews aside) it appears as close to my existing phone as possible.

Finishing the claim up online, I am presented with a bill for $130! Yes, the deductible is $130! If it wasn't for the fact that I am only 1/2 way through my 2 year contract with T-Mobile, I would tell them to stuff it and move carriers just to get a better deal. I mean, seriously, you won't offer me the same phone and you still want to charge me $130 for the privilege?


I am soooooooooo pissed.

My only other option is to add another 2 years onto my contract and pay $180 for a new CLIQ and, quite honestly, I have no intention of giving T-Mobile another 24 months of my guaranteed business after this.

This hot on the heels of the urine-smelling-dryer, which had to finally be replaced today before the entire family ran out of clothes or I started tipping my mother for fluff-and-fold service. And of course, at that rate, we decided we should probably just max the credit cards out the whole way and replace the stupid 100DB washing machine that shudders like an old, wooden roller coaster when it spins and still often leaves pools of water in clothes at the end of it's cycle. So, finally, we will have a high-efficiency, (supposedly) quiet washer in mid January. Of course, it's back-ordered. What else would you expect?

Oh, and in other news: I'm losing my voice. I'm down to a croak.

While Hubby may consider this the one positive development in his week, it proved to be very difficult to read the required 3 stories to Daisy this evening before bed. Assuming it's not back by Monday, it will also be really hard to do all those conference calls I rescheduled from Thursday and Friday when I was out sick.

Seriously, can someone blow some happy my way?