When I was a child, somebody put a big, blue plastic camera in my grubby hands. I got older and the cameras got fancier and I “studied” photography in high school then college and I took a LOT of photos. So now I’m going to post my photos in no particular order with stories that may or may not have something to do with what’s in them – my new experiment in creative confidence.
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Did you and your friends ever pass notes in school?
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I got my first cell phone when I was 11 years old. A friend’s family took me on their annul trip to Cape May and my parents wanted to be able to reach me directly so they bought this big, silver brick phone. Kerri and I spent almost the entire ferry ride standing on opposite sides of the same deck talking to each other on our phones. Yes, that was back when you had to pay for the number of minutes you used. I realized 35 minutes in that mine had been on speaker the whole time.
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To send a text message on this prehistoric cell, I had to navigate into the web browser. There were twitter-esque character limits and I didn’t get a notification when someone responded. I had to keep going into the browser to check.
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There was no such thing as unlimited data. Or unlimited texting. Every month my best friend had to keep tally of the number of messages she sent or received and every month she exceeded her limit. Sending a message that didn’t consume every allotted character was a fireable offense.
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That’s why my friends and I wrote each other notes during class. It’s hard to imagine how we could fill so much paper with news for people we saw every 90 minutes or so. But my phone didn’t enable me to simply broadcast my Very Important Thoughts out to the world. It didn’t even take photos. I had to use a pen to write words, fold the page as elaborately as I could manage, and hand it off between periods. Erin was the best at folding. Thomas liked to draw pictures. Megan had the girliest handwriting…or maybe Thomas has the girliest handwriting…
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My friends said they liked my notes because I wrote them how I spoke which is the same way I think. Stream of consciousness, swerving all over the place and ending up nowhere near where I began.
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So, now you can understand my blogging…
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📷 This is a picture my mom took of me taking a picture of something in Bath.