I always thought the sudden spike happened a long time ago, back on myspace. Which gave everyone super easy access to sharing their pictures and attempting to get their name out. Sort of like how during that time a LOT of random bands had like one or two good songs and you’ve never heard from them since. My thoughts are that as long as there is easier/cheaper access to cameras and memory (as in, you’re a lot more careful when you have a limited number of shots on a roll with virtually no way to see them until they’re developed - like the older cameras), and the extremely easy way to share them with everyone (social networking sites, because really? Most hobbyist photographers/”photographers” don’t heavily use Flickr or anything like that), they’ll be around. So then if you’re trying to make it as a photographer, not only do you have to put more effort into getting your name out - because there’re probably already a handful of established people in your area, you have to make your pictures stand out from everyone else’s even more. So if you’re decent, you can get some clientele; if you’re actually good, you’ll start taking everyone else’s.

Nooo way, never. Not for me.

I’ll pass. Lol.

You can! It was literally, for me, a “fake it ‘til you make it” situation. Eventually I just figured that I’m really not as bad as I thought I was. Haha. Thank you, though!

Of course not. I’m usually a lot more passive aggressive. Anyone I vent about on here or on Facebook, I usually don’t mention names, because I don’t feel like having to deal with people and their friends and their mother’s and sister’s and whoever the hell else. It’s just that: venting. People irritate me. And instead of going out and randomly beating the fuck out of people or calling people on their shit in public, which is incredibly tacky to me, I’ll just do it where either no one can see it or no one bothers to figure out just who it’s about. I figure it keeps everything a little bit more peaceful that way.

Nothing really in particular. I think part of it probably started as a way, as a child, to “rebel” against my mother - because we never saw eye to eye, and we grew up in a Pentecostal church. She had a lot of health problems, my dad moved to Oregon (at that time) and I was dealing with a lot of changes to my life early on. Well one day, she was saying something like “well, just pray for me,” I think she may have been having some complications with her health or something I don’t quite remember, and all I remember was like “what good does that do?” I was super little. Like, early middle school little. Part of me was surprised I said it, part of me was surprised that I half believed it at the time. She asked me “what, so you’re saying God doesn’t exist?” “I don’t know.” But from then until fairly recently, I always had the “you don’t know either way” kind of mentality. Then something clicked and I just didn’t believe He, or any other god existed. Like no chance - to me. It makes beyond no sense. Praying is just as effective as wishing on shooting stars, to me: it’s not. I’m not one to just go on faith. I need concrete. I feel like religion in general was just humans’ way of coping with things they didn’t understand. It seems outdated. When a person dies? They die. I have no idea. No one KNOWS what happens, they just think they do. Am I scared? Not of actually not existing anymore, just of how I get there. When I die, I’d really rather not have to deal with a ton of pain. :P That’s the only horrible-sounding part.

I guess I can post some stuff that I don’t blog about constantly (ie. my best friend or my boyfriend, or work).

1. My favorite color is red.
2. The best meal ever is mashed potatoes, Texas toast, green beans or macaroni, and a rare rib-eye steak seasoned with Alpine Touch.
3. The only bottled waters that aren’t flavored that I like are Fiji and Earth2O.
4. I’m near sighted and have an astigmatism in both eyes.
5. I live in Texas.
6. I am horrible at math.
7. I don’t smoke anything or drink anything alcoholic.
8. My favorite show, ever, is Lost.
9. I hate sandals.
10. I have three tattoos and two piercings.

Girl, I don’t even know! It told you were following me and I was thinking “unless this is a new person or she has a new blog, I’m pretty sure she already was,” hahaha.  :( Look at Tumblr, trying to tear us apart.

Is this about to get super condescending and technical? Anyway, I cherish the memories that made the joke what it is, today. A few years ago, my best friend got a few tattoos - some visible, some not. I was more of a piercing kind of person (all I had was two lip piercings and a nostril, nothing drastic). Well the town we live in, there’s literally a church on just about every block. Most of them are Baptist, some are Pentecostal, some are Catholic. There’s one Jehovah’s Witness one that I know of. Irrelevant. Anyway, so she would always joke about how they would “look at her like she was Satan,” because they do - they look at you with these hateful looks if you’re not dressed exactly the way they are or if you’re not known to go to any church. But they’re horribly forward, so some of them will straight up tell you you’re going to hell, some will ask why you did that, some will just hint around it and say “if God wanted me to have tattoos, He’d put them there.” So there’s that. But then, last Spring when I took Philosophy he made us take this online test that was inspired by Dante and his different “levels of Hell.” Kind of like the personality quizzes you used to find all over the place, or the ones that tell you which character you are in your favorite show. By this time, we were already saying we were going to Hell in a hand bakset for this or that reason. Nothing serious. So I took it and got level six, which was basically for not believing. She somehow managed to get level nine, which we thought was hilarious since we always thought we were in the same mind set. She’s an apprentice at a local tattoo shop, so she showed her mentor and got him to take it; he also got level six. So whenever we’re all at the shop together, we’ll occasionally make references to the joke. We got sat by the fire extinguisher at IHop and we were like “it’s because they think we’re going to burst into flames for being Satan’s friends;” we say she’s Satan’s right-hand (because she got the lowest level of hell you could get on that test), etc. It’s spanned at least a good 2-3 years of our friendship. It’s an extremely long-running sort-of-kind-of inside joke and many people CAN joke with us about it, they just don’t have an idea how it started. Some of it’s not funny to anyone but us, some of it other people laugh at. It’s more or less made us more and more aware that we have an awesome friendship.

Random things? I’d like to pet a bear, and a shark, and a male lion, among other creatures. I’d like for there to be a balance of species populations on the earth; that’ll never happen. I think it’d be awesome if there were alien species out there (peaceful ones…) so that I could have an alien friend. I WISH I COULD GET MY SWAN’S COLORING FINISHED, but it’s not completely healed, yet, and the artist is off for a while anyway, so boo.