is this real life? @112956adghfj - Tumblr Blog

I live in New York now

And I guess another reminder as/for an artist is just, making the work takes time. Let it take the time that it needs. All will evolve as it does and lead you back to yourself a million times over. There is always that.

The support I’m receiving from everyone around me right now means everything in the world to me. It’s crazy. I feel I’ve been going 110mph for 4 weeks straight and oscillating between blocking it all out and getting feverish w/ stress. But I know it will all work out. I’m not even anxious about it not working out or anything, just having to get done everything that’s needed to get done has been a frenzy. But I also find it hard to grapple with goodbyes and things like “my last day at the cafe” or, my last week at home, fear I am not making the absolute most of it, but I know I am in all the ways I can and that’s all you can ever do. I just wanted to take some time to reflect on it a little bit bc I haven’t given myself the time to, and I don’t really have the time, and it’s not a full story yet anyway, but this is all part of it; The in between and what it takes to get somewhere. I showed a friend a working copy of the book I made about dunsmuir, in the pandemic, Pusher, how I love that work… and I realized that I’ve never posted it online, and how close to my chest I’ve been keeping my work in these last five or six years. Finally I’ve reached that point of having full bodies of work that I just keep fully to myself. I canceled my website subscip bc I didn’t realize how expensive it’s gotten and I haven’t updated my website in ten years anyway. Anyway, this is a whole tangent. He expressed such admiration of the work and said it’s so different than what I show here, and I talked about place and about people in the neighborhood wanting to buy photos of the neighborhood and how that’s lucrative for my “boutique” shows.. I feel the work isn’t entirely different than the photos I make at home, and we agreed that the place itself often dictates the tone of a work anyway. All this to say… idk, I’ve evolved so much through my schooling and my own practice and I’m excited to keep embracing it and growing the work, and just a reminder that I’m sitting on full completed projects that have never even really seen the light of day. It also reminded me that I used to shoot with the same camera/lens combo for ten years and never even thought to stray from that, my vision with and without the camera became so familiar and connected. I’ve had fun experimenting with my plethora of gear now but in deciding which expensive tools to lug with me across the country and how to get them there, I guess I’m yearning for that simpler time of only feeling like I needed one. But artists deserve their toys. ANYWAY… I have to pack my car tomorrow and it’s my last day of work and I don’t even know how to feel about all that.. but it will get done. Oh and I have to pick up my car and then go to Petaluma and back and run around buying every other little thing I need before I go and I still have to pack LOL. Yay <3

I’m moving across the country in a week. Lol 😂😅🥹🥺😫😭🤓

I bought a car 😭😭😭 I found my little Subaru. Thank fucking god. Now I just have to get it to NY.

My goodbye show went so amazingly perfect, I sold so many pieces off the wall and loved seeing which small prints everyone chose. Had such lovely conversations with so many people. Heart so full. It was amazing. & so nice to be sent off with so much support and reinforcement. I love my community so much it’s ridiculous. Sharing the experience of being from sf through my photography with other people born and raised here is the most special thing. To have someone say to me, “it’s wild to see my own childhood through someone else’s eyes” and just reflect on the collective haunts of this neighborhood and the light and everything… it just makes me feel like the work I’ve been making for all these years is important and does deserve to be displayed & seen & shared. Much encouragement to make a book and eventually I will <3 can’t wait for my first book release show haha. Outer Richmond literally forever this is the greatest place in the world, I said what I said, and I’m glad to go on an adventure elsewhere because it just means I get to come home when it’s over.

Just got back from NY, I have a lot to write about and wanted to take some time to write a long thoughtful post but I’m in like overdrive right now. Realized how hard it is to find a good car out there that’s not eaten apart by rust, and realizing again that I could get a cheaper and older but in good condition Honda in California and ship it for the same price that I could find a decent car there. I’m so scared to spend 10k on a car out there and have something mechanical go wrong with it. Would rather buy a reliable Honda for less $ in good California condition which would give me better resale value there as well. It’s fucking hard out here!!! I have so much do in three weeks.

In New York. I found the coast

My favorite lens for my Fuji is actually this $50 ttartisan 25mm and I put a step up filter and a huge ND on it lol. It’s a great deal but not durable at all. I had to buy a replacement after 6months of regular use, it started coming apart after I took it to LA. It’s weird that Fuji used stepping motors for autofocus on their old lenses, it makes them suuuuper noisy and jittery even when you’re manually focusing bc you’re still pulling on the motor, which is why o prefer using a manual or adapted lens. IMO people who are obsessed with autofocus though are just lazy. manual focus forever- with peaking on a mirrorless camera it’s super easy to nail focus in any light situation anyway.

Laundry

Really I’m tempted to make a new blog just so I’m not so weighed down by fifteen years of archive. Or maybe it really doesn’t matter. Though I think something is unlocked when you know people aren’t reading something and if they are they don’t know who you are. A dark quiet corner of internet. Tumblr in a way (this is how I’ve always felt) dares us to be honest because it is discoverable. I think that’s the reason I gravitate here over regular private journaling. There’s an aesthetic element to it that’s enticing but also the fact that other people might see it… I want it to be reflective of something so deep dark and true. Just unabashed interior purging. Anyway,… sometimes I’m afraid that I’ve just wasted my youth wanting instead of experiencing, and that going to grad school will further trap me in the rat chase of life re: school loans/expenses. And I’m afraid to come home and go back to work at the cafe when everyone expects more of me. I know I can’t tell the future and I should probably stop thinking about it altogether, but yeah. I guess I’m afraid of never becoming anything. Of not truly wanting something enough to pursue it maybe. Ive just always felt behind for some reason. And I often daydream about where it all started to turn for me. Was it being regularly assaulted by a classmate in elementary school? Bullied by my “friend” in early middle school? Retreating internally and never being retrieved by an adult in my life? Adopting an eating disorder bc I had a best internet friend that had serious anorexia and I just kind of internalized it? That high school affliction of thinking being afflicted was cool. Loner stoner suffering from horrible social anxiety, thinking everyone was trying to make a fool out of me. And then how that all led to me dating the guys that I did in adulthood, finding that jump of leaving the small pool of high school and people actually acting attracted to me so fascinating that I thought it was all magical and meant to be in all these circumstances where I should have exercised way more caution. Going to Canada alone at 19- I wish my parents would have stopped me. Lol. But then it all led to me here now. You just have to accept your life. It’s just heavy when you actually start to look at the details of it and own it all. Lol. It’s always a bit different than the vague image idea you have of it all in your head before you start to really analyze it. I’ll definitely keep this blog and never leave it and keep pushing through the weirdness of keeping this archive because it really does mean something to me even if it is too forthcoming or embarrassing or whatever.

👁️👄👁️

i guess the answer is always that you'll make art about what you're going through now, whether it's confusion or not, and that will always be the truth if you let it be

part of the reason i've been disillusioned in dealing with my archive/aka doing any kind of photography work on the computer is because of how much adobe sucks. case in point I just decided to sit down and pick out the photos i'm printing for my show, and i've been stuck in an endless loop just trying to open my catalog. i'm sick of subscription services running the fucking world- i've paid out of my ass for the last ten years for a full adobe suite and it's so buggy and fucked up and the worst part of it is that my entire editing world relies on it. it's just depressing. i hate computer. not to mention the problems/cost of digital space these days. everything just slipping further and further into the most fucked up reality imaginable. i don't like the disorganization of my life right now. always so hard to get a grip on what the actual fuck is happening. like from which angle are we going to view life today? i don't always have control over that. i was thinking about being an artist and being honest and how it's hard to make meaningful art or feel fullfilled(obviously) if you're not being honest (with yourself), and it's like why is that so hard? like sometimes my life just seems to be slipping away from me, i feel this apathy populating my frame of thought, which manifests as like, not wanting to take pictures of the every day anymore. it's not important anymore. i've seen it enough every day. but it's also like, all it's doing is just taking up digital space. lol. idk

I went outside for a long time I saw some friends I feel better 😂 but that creeping self isolation thought… I guess we’re all trying to “right” our thoughts when we’re alone, it feels like a failure when we’re feeling like a failure.

feeling so depressed for no reason and it feels so fucking lame. I think I’ve been spending too much time alone. I just feel like totally detached from everyone around me. In a transitional phase rn so I can understand that aspect of it- how that part is affecting me, but idk. I just feel weird. I’m just like emotionally preparing for this huge major change in my life as best as I can which means I’m kind of shutting down, like I don’t have time to be creatively engaged with my interests rn because I have so much prep to do in my day to day life. Every day has to be useful. I can accept that. But the in between and finding the motivation to get all this shit done, not really feeling like I have a lot of friends around, but also feeling like I don’t have time to be thinking about my friendships etc anyway right now. I’m just like 🫥 and then like being in my thirties now and reflecting on my twenties, lol. Idk. I’m trying not to feel jaded, I’ve always resisted that, never wanted to be a jaded person, but in a lot of ways I feel like I’ve just grown out of this fantastical view of the world and my life and like idk I’m just fucking bored. I’ve been way too cooped up but that’s just the MO right now. Feel like I should be like relishing every last moment with all the people I love here right now but for some reason I just have very little desire to engage which makes me feel defunct or something.

You know what I think the no coffee thing is actually catching up to me, which is annoying as fuck. Although maybe I’m just creating that in my head. But i was reflecting on it this morning bc i was kind of struggling with it while opening and i was like this is how it always goes with things for me- it’s not hard to quit substances, but then at like the two week mark I start to break. And I was like that’s really fucking annoying, because everyone talks about addiction like “it gets easier!” but like, it doesn’t get easier. It gets harder. Maybe eventually after all those swings of it getting harder and harder it gets easier, sure. After you’ve suffered through it all enough. Lol. And I’m just trying to follow through with that because I identified something that’s affecting me negatively and I want to have a fucking boundary with myself. If I’m not gonna quit smoking like I can at least try to stop drinking coffee and infecting myself with useless anxiety and rage. Anyway… I’m annoyed

Oh but i had this really cool dream while I was napping that I was playing this instrument that was like a three pronged violin headed banjo that had like feathery material on the strings that created an echo-y chorus like sound when I played it. Three violin heads, with their own string sets, on a drum banjo body.

This woman kept saying “I want a medium small coffee” and I kept trying to clarify that we have both of those sizes and she just kept saying the same thing with increasing intensity. this is just 0.01% of my daily interactions

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is this real life?