big hopes & little wishes.

to be honest, i have been in the process of a quarter life crises this entire autumn. i find myself daydreaming about my own studio every morning. waking up and getting the paper, drinking coffee, checking my email & starting the day with a clear and creative mind. choosing the clients i want to have and enjoying my time with them, fully capturing their sweet & silly family moments is the least i could do. the feeling of a day well spent, my heart softened and thankful, these are the things i dream of when i wake up in the moonlight, waiting to start my day.

someday, i tell myself, some sweet day.

these past few weeks, though stressful and dreary have given me the wonderful opportunity to look inward and find what i really want in my life and the main thing i want is to feel accomplishment. i have had the opportunity to dream, and be forced to settle down the noise in my mind, the distractions, the buzz and figure out exactly how i want to run my life and therefore my business.

i have decided to start my own studio, gradually. baby step upon baby step, i hope to gradually be able to separate myself from the weekly work schedule & make my own. i want to create how i want to create, without a time clock and without the pressure.

it begins with a dream they say. little wishes & big hopes, let's begin.

grateful part one.

we are officially on our way to begin the thanksgiving holiday. olivia is nestled in the back seat snoring happily as mike drives us to my parent's home for the evening. tomorrow we have an early lunch with my side of the family, then we will be on the road to mike's parents and brother's family dinner. needless to say we are going to be totally stuffed and loaded with gladware.


here are some not so little things i am grateful for.

leftovers. families that live close by. and far away. my mom's never failing early christmas decorations. fenced in dog parks. oatmeal. pit bulls. mail (the good kind!) a warm home. kitty blobs. yankee candles i had forgotten about. owl mittens. good friends. pumpkin spice coffee.

The Drifter.

3:27am late night insomnia used to be a thing of the past but is making a vengeful comeback as I lay in tangled sheets and a tangled mind to match. For a while I was content, but when my mind ceases to rest and the only thing willing to offer its reprieve is the spilling of words into text, I have no choice bur to oblige.

"At least I am doing what I love in some way," I tell myself as I snap the shutter two hundred times for two hundred of the same photo with a different face attached to its focal point. The familiar crack and fizzle I felt when a camera was placed in my hand has sweltered into a sense of duty. A role/purpose relationship. So much so, that when I have a subject in front of me, mine for the taking as my mind twists as twirls around visions of beauty and manipulations, I am left dumbfounded and stricken with utter confusion. To think artistically has been drawn out of me like venom being drawn from a wound, slowly and with the ever most care. I feel as if I can no longer think for myself when a camera is placed in my hand. I am strictly a device, a tool to push buttons to make the shutter come alive. I am the messenger from subject to camera, with as little content in between as possible.

Some of the best people I know don't know what to do with their lives.

And I hate to blame our parents, but when you grow up being told you can be anything you want to be, you are left without a sense of direction and a perpetual taste for wanderlust. To be "anything" then slowly turns into "something" and we are left at a loss when we always end up disappointed in ourselves.

What do I want to be when I "grow up?" I still do not know. I still do not know what will make me happiest, or hell even something I can live with for the rest of my life therefore leaving me nowhere with no options.

I do not know what to dedicate myself solely to when I want to dedicate myself to everything. I want a million lives to do a million things, be a million different people, yet sadly I only have this one chance and the concept of choosing a definitive scares the bejeesus out of me.

Not even counting the lack of funds to make a change but also the sheer lack of motivation, the acceptance of my own defeat leaving a bitter taste in my mouth daily.

I cannot hold still & yet I cannot move forward either. I feel as if my destiny will always be just to be a wanderer, with no definite purpose, no exact role in society, but a drifter, a mere tourist of this world taking in the sights but leaving no memorable traces of myself behind. There will be no great monuments built in my name nor will many even know my life and that is such a hard thing to grasp a hold of when you grow up hearing otherwise believing you are special and different and unique.

So here is a cheers to my generation, the patron saints of lost causes. The college degrees turned into waitresses, the Juliard's ending up in their parent's basements. Maybe one day we will find our places in this world.

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.” — Sylvia Plath