blah blah blaaaaah!

I have a good picture for today, or maybe even a couple, but I feel like writing/divulging emotion more than anything right now. Today was wonderful and exhausting, and due to that exhaustion, I had an extreme over-reacting incident which left me feeling crazy and paranoid for the better half of the evening. I'm generally level headed, but after a long walk and taking pictures in lots of extraneous positions, about anything could throw me into tears.

Today was mostly intense. Photographing a Senate hopeful who's marching across Tennessee to gain votes involved running across Woodland Street Bridge, and constantly playing catch up with myself, my car, and Bob Tuke, dude running for senate. Then rushing to meet Ira Glass (THAT'S RIGHT) and then hear him speak at The War Memorial Building. It was just kind of a lot.

Of course, in between these moments there were smoothies, and feeling proud of myself, and silly trips to Kroger... then there were those three glasses of wine I had while waiting on Ira Glass to sign my poster! That was good.

It's summer. It's nice that it feels that way. Hayley got her wisdom teeth out and i have been a bad friend about it. I need to go see her.

I'm fucking tired. I'm fucking in love. It's wonderful, it's ridiculous, it keeps coming up in weird and ironic and funny ways.

So, there's that for your liking. Also, I had the find of the day on foundmagazine.com yesterday...

Question

Why is it so easy to stand is a forrest of flip flops and not find one pair that is just....... normal, simple, like.......... not covered in hot glue and plastic flowers?!!!??

I blame it on America.

Pancakes and Beach Bums

Yay-yay-yay-uh.
Life is good.

Four Things

Memorial Day

Cookout, turned cook-in, turned trampoline party. I know, now, going into any social situation that isn't my own friends or people who really know me, to expect the questions and comments about my camera. "Pretty big camera you got there, huh?" "What's with the camera?" "Are you a photographer or something?" I mean, or something... I guess.

It's just interesting. There are people who immediately wonder why their picture is being taken, like the boy in the first photo. We were watching Hercules, and I figured nothing could distract him. I was right about his brother, but wrong about him. Ethan immediately looked at me, asked why, and then asked to see the pictures, while I'm sure Ryan, his brother, didn't even notice I had moved to take the picture.

Adults will sometimes scream/giggle, mostly women. "don't take my picture!!" They dive behind their Better Homes and Gardens, or their husbands, who have the most who-gives-a-shit expression on their faces.

And then there are people like Jacqueline, who, for some unknown reason, just get it. She is relaxed and indifferent to the camera, and when I ask her if she'll put up with standing in a certain spot for me, she shrugs and tells me a story about her school or her friends, and then we keep talking, and eventually we have made plans to paint one wall of her room some time this summer.

Jacqueline is one of my favorite people, and if we hadn't wasted so much time doing flips on the trampoline, or playing baseball with a soccer ball, I would have made her stand or sit in various places around her entire house, which is old and covered from top to bottom in Victorian decor, 80s and 90s family photos, various stringed instruments played by Jacqueline's father, and books... thousands of books. Ranging from children's stories to any Christian related literature you can think of.

And Jacqueline seems oblivious to these things. She is open and unattached to much of anything, unless you include her dogs. Of course, I've known Jacqueline and her family for my entire life, but things change just the slightest bit when I look through my camera at a person. It makes things different, more real, more planned, easier to understand. It makes me categorize people in ways I wouldn't be able to without photography. It makes me learn people, and what makes them uncomfortable.

Jacqueline, unlike Ethan, is uninterested in viewing the pictures of herself. As far as she is concerned, we're talking about Penguins and Global Warming, and whether or not she has a deck of cards in her room. It's incredible.

(Sorry for the long and unnecessary break down of taking pictures tonight.)
(Oops.)

Dirty

Ren Fest (for Saturday)

Sisters

Graduate

But more importantly,



Summertime.

Un-Planned (Perfectly Planned) Pizza Picnic

Camping

God's Top Ten

...on myspace

Cheerleader Peek

OBVIOUSLY

studying for AP English test at.... Panera? I mean, why the hell not?

My name is Marshall and I do not have a picture today.

Happy Mother's Day?

Friday and Saturday

On a side note, I have:
2 weeks of school left,
then 5 weeks of Nashville,
then 5 weeks of Chicago
then a week of Nashville,
and Senior year.

At which point I will have:
12 weeks of being 17.

On another side note, that actually pertains to photography, photographing my mother is always very difficult. She likes to smile and laugh for the camera, so I always have to look for moments she is wrapped up in other things.

It is just interesting. I don't know how to explain to her that her smiling and posing is not the point, and she just keeps asking me what the point is, and if I want her to frown in my pictures...

aaaaaanyway, this weekend... so great.

text messages

The guy said we sounded like angels.

Once upon a time, there was a place called Nashville. It was full of motorists, and I hate them all.

Pie times four over two is me slappin yo ass. Slappin it niiiiice.

Have fun. Forget about it. That's an order.

Hell is a department store with unisex fitting rooms.

Ha ha! Lol.

I effing love you!

Missa Bob Harris!!

Fuck those fucking delicious cookies!!!

Let them know. It doesn't matter. People would throw shit at the pope if they found out he wore panty hose, but god would know he just needed the support. catch my drift?

You be right, sister!

Instant friends!

Whatever. You're hot.

Junior Hallway

Back

For now, just accept this. These strange and suspicious feelings will eventually dissipate, as I slowly figure out that she is not intentionally out to get me. This week is moving way too fast, and I feel like I'm not seeing anything for what it is. That's not like me. I try to hold myself in high regard when it comes to calling bluffs, but everything feels unreal today. There's no differentiating; there's no calling anything. I've been sitting in chairs at school all day, but I feel like I need to look to make sure it's there. I don't know what's behind me and I keep pausing to check for, oh, I don't know, bugs? monsters? my mother asking where I want to go to dinner? I can't figure out what's really going on.

I am living a half life, but not even that. a third life. My inability to be honest with my mother clashes with a pure desire to hold her in my arms and feel her release everything that keeps her so on edge. On top of all of that is the fear and the knowledge of all the things we have in common. I have a selfishness in me that I know is unfair and a pride in me that I am trying to harness as something positive.

Why don't I want to be here? I don't want to see what I could become. It's simple, but it's also dangerous. And I just know, like every other 17 year old girl with a mother, that I can't wait to be gone.

Ay, Ay, Aaaaay....

Excused Absence

Farmer's Market

You're Welcome

Quick update:
Friday night, my dad, his girlfriend, and I drove up to Johnson City where my grandparents live. Their house is on top of a huge hill that used to be surrounded on three sides by woods for as far as you cared to walk, but over the years subdivisions have been moving in closer and closer, and there's even a radio tower in the front yard. My grandmother says the thing gives her home a commercial look and she hates it.

Its the same house that my father grew up in, and I sleep in his old room when I'm there. Looking out a window at an old tree and the most stars I've ever seen. My dad used to shoot out the only street light at the top of the hill so that he could see the stars better. Stories of raising cattle and pork, and farming tobacco fill every empty space in conversation.

My grandparents go affectionately by Maw and Paw to all eight grandchildren. Maw will fix you a grilled ham and cheese before you've expressed that you're dying for one. She cooks and sews with a kind of patience I've never known, and East Tennessee is the only place I feel alright about working in the kitchen while the men watch the Kentucky Derby in the living room. Paw had polio as a child, beat it, fought in Vietnam, and has loved my grandmother for 50 years.

At dinner (fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, corn, and butter), Maw talks nostalgically about how she never used to lock the front door, and Dad and Paw joke about a nearly fatal copperhead snake incident that ended with my father on top of a swing set, and Paw, standing over the freshly killed snake, squeezing out it's venom with a garden hoe. Just out of curiosity.

Hayley's Hair Flip (With Fork)

Hayley White, y'all.

She da shit.

It's May