on: bWOston. on: the funny thing.

The funny thing about my (and most good, multi-children owning) parents is that they treat their two kids exactly the same. In all the ways that they need to do this. Such as in their reaction to the children holding up family vacations by taking too many photos: waiting so patiently and posing so graciously and offering more more more things for us to go clicketycrazy on.

They did this when I was guilty of it,

They do this now with my sister who has gradually caught the clicketycrazy bug. (She denies this but let's be real... I denied it, too, when I had it.)

Picture-taking is another funny thing -- something I've really come to think about in terms of audience, message, purpose, value. Mostly because my camera participated so actively in much of my life for a majority of the time that I was on facebook. I took and posted so many pictures, in the name of documentation, in the name of rememory, in the name of sharing experiences -- anything but the overarching reason: "for my facebook friends to see them." Which was probably the "biggest" reason, whether I meant for it to be or not, in that it is the one that encompasses all the other smaller truths of my reasoning. 

Back then,______________:

• anyone spending any amount of time with me would likely spend time with my camera, too.  An awkward third wheel crashing every chemistry party.
• experiences were annotated in my brain, first-draft captioned as the moment was being captured, like two reels of life running in my brain -- the one I was participating in with my body, and the other one I was planning to participate in (and thus, participating in) in the facebook albums-to-be.
• as much as I denied it, I was making it harder for myself to really be in the present, as I am naturally inclined to be. Which is a shame. But I did get a lot of great photos out of it. In the twisted and jaded mood of my current life, I feel like those days were "brighter" and "sparklier" than they necessarily would have been without all my photographing, because they were forced to be photo-worthy by virtue of being captured in concrete sheets of Memory. Whether it was the labeling and canonizing (woah camera pun unintended) that forced the moments to become necessarily photoworthy or the retrospective rose-colored filters photos seem to develop over the moments they capture, or perhaps a combination of the two, as always. 
• BUT I also did get a lot of cruddy, unmemorable moments memorialized. Is this necessary? Or, better question: Was my loss of that moment in real time worth the memorializations of those rather cruddy, unmemorable moments??
• my sister would be the one getting annoyed by the delay of life that would happen whenever she was with me.
• my mom would always be so patient with the delay of life that would happen whenever she was with me. 

Since I've broken up with the First And Foremost audience of my photos, facebook, I now haughtily criticize my sister for her photography-for-sharing. Feeling superior, but also less sparkly (see bullet point the third), and then grateful (see the fifth). 

And like I said, gratitude is the cure-all of temper tantrums. So ending on this emotion is a good way to stop being haughty/feeling depressingly unsparkly. 

And thank goodness for that.