Let's Play A Version of "That Makes Me Think Of"

When Dave got his new camera, I inherited his old one. My old camera went kaput soon after I got back from Japan and I haven't replaced it partly because I was irked at the universe for making it necessary for me to keep replacing my cameras as they went kaput and partly because I knew Dave was going to move onto a more serious camera and I could have his old one. Get off me: I'm cheap.

"Get off me." That makes me think of an old, now kaput friendship of mine with a guy named Jon Rutledge. He used to say it when we were giving him a hard time. It wasn't that easy to give Jon a hard time because he was incredibly quick witted and very, very funny. You couldn't even drink anything--not milk, not water--when you were hanging out with him because invariably you'd find yourself snorting that thing out of your nose at some point in the proceedings. Jon's since moved--to Denver, I think--and has gotten married.

In that photo above, Dave is taking pictures of a stink bug that we met in Bandelier. I like stink bugs. I always wonder how they know you're there, even when you don't bother them so much. That makes me think of when I was a kid and I used to think they were responding to my shadow so I used to try to approach them without allowing my shadow to fall on them, but they still seemed to know I was there most of the time. Are they responding to movement instead--or too?

Dave likes to take pictures of insects. His oft-ignored flickr site has some great insect photos. I wish he'd upload more of them (big hint)--though I don't know why, since I can look at them all on his computer. I'm just thinking about you when I say that.

Anyway, like I said, I got his old camera out of the deal and all I had to do was nag him for about a year to get him to buy a new camera. A year's nagging is probably not worth the cost of a new camera, but that's really not the point. At some point, I stopped nagging--and about two weeks later, he bought a new camera. There's a lesson in that, but I don't like to stop to think about lessons too much.



That's me in Bandelier, taking a photo of Dave with Dave's old camera as Dave takes a photo of me with his new camera. Tricky.

I don't usually like having my photo taken. It's partly a loss of control issue and partly a "Look at how ugly I am" issue. "Look at how ugly I am" (and its twin sister "Look how fat I am") are games I've decided not to play anymore. Yesterday, Lu and I were at the gym and I asked her about a friend of hers who joined the gym, but like many a gym members has used that gym membership exactly once. I asked why and Lu said that the woman was playing "Look how fat I am," the stay-at-home version of the game. That makes me think of when I was a size four and living on diet Coke and cigarettes and was still playing "Look how fat I am." "Look how fat I am" kept me from doing a lot of things over my lifetime, like going to the gym to make myself less fat if I wanted or narcissistically posting my photos online, I guess. Anyway, instead of blaming myself for bad photos of me, I've decided instead to blame the photographer for making me look bad. See? Problem solved.

This is what I saw as I was taking the picture of Dave taking the picture of me:



And in closing, here I am showing some love to a Ponderosa pine: