It’s funny. I’ve been living with depression for so long that I don’t see the very normal, standard symptoms – mostly, I notice when I’m holed up in a bathroom somewhere trying to convince myself to be happy again. But there are the boring things, too.

A lack of energy. Withdrawal from social situations. An increased interest in personal escapist activities. An inability to focus. Mood swings.

There are good days. I feel sharp and focused and I clean and I organize and I get things done; I work on my photo projects, I hang out with my roommates, I want to hang out with people. Lately, though, I’ve been succumbing more and more to the quiet, creeping symptoms than the harshly noticeable problems.

The worst part is, being like this, I feel like I’m wasting time, and I need to accomplish things. Which just makes me feel worse. Why is everything with depression a terrible cycle?

Sigh.

so i’m not big on the whole new year’s resolutions thing, since i think a person can make these sorts of things any old time of the year. it just happens that events coalesced and the changes i want to make happened to come right at this convenient landing point.

goals/changes/blah blah:

1. every day: exercise, exercise, exercise, you fat-ass.
2. every day: a photo of myself for 365 days. maybe i’ll start appreciating my own image. probably it will be an exercise in self-loathing.
3. every day, where time permits: another daily photo for my own personal project.
4. every week: a song/photo project in the works. shhhhhhhhhh. 52 songs in a year? i can do it!
5. every month: a themed mixtape. more on this later, as well.
6. every month: a mixtape depicting the mood of the month and favourite songs. (this is actually something i’ve been doing near-continuously for two years now.)

and then, general desires:
- to devote more time to my photo projects. to actually work on projects instead of driving aimlessly and losing myself in abandoned fields. to learn how to shoot people outside of a studio, how to ignore their smiles again. to try to promote myself. to have confidence in my artwork. to print out every photo i like instead of letting them waste away on my hard drive.

- to maybe find a new job. i think maybe it might be nice to work in the design field again. for some reason the idea of working at a sign store intrigues me. maybe it’s the memory of weeding. i enjoyed weeding. or maybe i just enjoyed the negative space of leftover letters.

- to improve my mental health. i might go back to my therapist. i probably need to, but i’m determined to do as much for myself as i can before i have to depend on her again. to improve my health in general. my immune system has been shot for months and i should probably get that checked out.

- to work on my relationships with everyone. friends, lovers, and everything in between.

pretty sure that’s about all, and about all i can handle. in between work and school and personal life, i want to be so busy and excited for life that it’s ridiculous. i want to spend all my time and energy on projects and happiness.

good luck, me!

My newly coupled roommates are cuddling in his bed, talking softly. The basket next to me is full of bright ripe mandarins. My chinchillas are curled together, sleeping. It’s dark now but I wish it was summer, because I’m tired of the dark and not being able to do what I want to do after four-thirty.

messing with my macro converter, taken with my canon fd 50mm 1.8 on my olympus

Last night I hung out and watched Farscape in a house destroyed by time. The couple I was with were in a brief respite from a new-relationship-based spat, while the owner of the house cuddled with his wife and his girlfriend, blowing soap bubbles at the large flat screen. Her art pasted the walls, beautiful prints of owls and girls with big eyes. In a bedroom off to the side, two children whispered softly to each other in the dark.

everything was faded and peeled and cracked and messy.

I’m not sure how I feel about this Christmas. I’ve spent it working on so much of everything – finals and school projects to personal things to work – that it’s come as a surprise that in a few days I should be celebrating the end of the year and happiness and all that stuff with my family. There’s just none of that. Something about a Christmas morning without dad seems stupid and obscene, and my extended family is gearing up for my great-grandmother’s planned descent into death. No one cares about Christmas.

It’s my two-year anniversary with the boything tomorrow. We’re making pizza and watching a Korean horror flick, maybe cookies? I got him a four dollar present, but the thing I really want to give him will take much longer to plan out and won’t be done until probably his birthday in a few months. I’m not really worried about the timing. We won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.

i think he's actually kind of scared of big animals, but he didn't mind petting these at my grandmother's house

Two years is a very long time to be consistently in love with someone. I think about that sometimes.

Last night I was going over to a friend’s house and outside a girl was walking down the dark street sobbing to herself. I could hear her from across the way. It made me so sad.

On January first I think I’m going to start this photo project. I am terrible at self-portraits and think this may be a good way to force me into it. Or at least to figure out how a person fits in a photograph. Mostly I just like the landscape and the emptiness and the peace.

Yesterday it was foggy. I happened to be awake (read: woke up much earlier than I really would have liked to go take photos for a project), and once I was finished, I decided it was a better idea to wander around down the back roads towards nowhere, hoping to find a deserted field. For some reason the road I chose had plenty of what appeared to be empty fields, however they were all blocked off with tall fences and barbed wire. I don’t know why, perhaps they were special fields just for special purposes. Or maybe I just couldn’t see far enough into the fog to realize it was a giant state prison and my entrance would have been catastrophic.

The good thing about living in Sacramento is not the constant availability of frozen yogurt – though I’m not denying the appeal – but instead the fact that it is still under development. It’s easy enough to drive for fifteen minutes and find a chunk of abandoned property, with, in all likelihood, trash galore and a reflecting puddle. All roads lead to some flat farm town. Sub-divisions end suddenly in wide open spaces with scraggly trees and wind-blown garbage.

Which is totally my favourite type of field, if you can just believe it. (Though I’m not going to say it wouldn’t be fantastic to take pictures of a nice beautiful clean open sort of field, too, those sorts just don’t happen to be local.)

Anyways! The point of this long-winded story is this: just as I was giving up hope, thinking the road I had chosen would lead only to gas stations and despair, I spotted a run-down, beat-up, abandoned old falling-down shack. In the fog. With trees behind it! Perfect! Who doesn’t love decay and neglect!

Posted: No Trespassing!

Sometimes, no matter what you do, things just fall apart. And then hobos come crawling in.

This was a monolithic cement plant outside Sacramento, surrounded by debris and managed by two friendly men.

Through the fog and around a fence, a brief glimpse of a creek. Beyond that - who knows. Perhaps that's the end of the world, right there.

Soooo… the entire website has a new layout! Yay Kayleigh! Or I think it does, except my browser has a cached redirect for my main page so I can’t see if the landing page is working correctly. Irregardless! I wanted everything to match, which is why my Journal, Photolog, Daily Photo, and Series pages all have the same layout, with minor tweaks.

I’m a bit bummed out about the Daily Photo – I’ve been sick as hell for two weeks and shooting film, so what little I accomplished is still undeveloped. So it’s totally behind. By like, a year. But that’s okay! I’m willing to accept my failure and try again! All images on there are processed using Poladroid, which is pretty fun. I think the style of Polaroid pictures fits the idea of the project, so there it is!

In camera news, I think… I am going to be a lame-ass and sell my camera. Already. I’ve had it for about half a year now, and I am willing to admit, finally, that I really hate the way portraits look with it. I think it’s brilliant for landscape photography – which, admittedly, I do a shit-ton of – but absolutely terrible with portraits. Something about the lenses – I don’t know. But even looking extensively at other people’s results with the camera (and with much nicer lenses than I own) they all look… wrong. Maybe I’m just used to the Canon style. Maybe I’m ruined forever by the popularity of Canon and Nikon. Ah, well. Either way, I’m 90% positive that I’ll be selling my Olympus and buying a used Canon 40D. I’m comfortable with it, I’ve got better lenses for it, it’s fairly cheap… it just kinda… makes sense.

Aaagh I’m sorry Olympus I tried so hard to love you. <3

So, I don’t really have many dangerous habits. I tend not to live on the wild side, preferring instead to tread cautiously on the boundary between “very nice” and “kind of quirky”. “Possibly mentally scarred and taking it out on life by being crazy and reckless” is not a title I have ever been rewarded. (Of course, I’ve always wanted to be that way, I’m just far too sane. And went through too much therapy.)

And you know those people who piss you off because they talk on their cell phones or text while driving – despite it being illegal? Or even worse, those particular few who read. What are they, crazy?!

I’m worse.

I take pictures while driving. Which might be okay if I didn’t feel the compulsive need to look at each one after I take it, checking to make sure it’s okay. In which instant I tend to swerve ever so gently into the lane next to me, probably freaking some poor middle-aged business man into early cardiac arrest.

Today I decided to see what would happen if I set my camera for a damn-long exposure, set int on my dashboard, and let it go. Results? Really cool.

Taken whilst driving around a slow curve.

Tips: If you’re going around a bend, be very prepared to grab your camera before it flies into your window and smashes to tiny pieces. No, of course that totally didn’t almost happen to me! Ha ha ha… aaaargh. I also recommend having a heavier camera. If you’re using a point and shoot, the aforementioned shattered camera is probably ninety percent more likely.

Ooooo following a caaaar.

I think I’m going to try this again in the future, on a curvier road. And if you hear about a very stupid, very deadly accident where the driver’s head was found embedded in an SLR… well. At least I died happy.

So… she has the internet again, at last!

And already my roommate is horrified at how much time other roommate and I can waste online. Admittedly, it’s mostly a binge at this point – we’ve been so deprived, there are eight thousand things we’ve been storing up to do… none of them useful whatsoever.

Admittedly, there isn’t anything largely exciting going on in my life. I spend ninety percent of my life taking photographs, thinking about taking photographs, editing photographs, or obsessing over camera equipment. The other ten percent is spent on watching movies and going “hmmm nice lighting I wonder if I could do that with my camera”.

With that in mind, I think this blog, which is uninteresting at best, is going to be converted over to a photojournal, where I combine events with photographs. Because really, that’s pretty much all I care about lately, and why try and pretend otherwise?

(Secretly, this is just an excuse for me to design a new layout. Tra-la-la!)

So, it’s only been eighty years since I last posted anything, but that is for one good reason: I moved! It was a rather sudden affair, as the landlord went, well, could you move in by the first? And we went, well, we rather love the place, so… yes?

My roommates are two of my best mates – I’ve been in a menage-a-quatre best-friendship with one for going on six years, and the other is a dear mutual friend who happens to be best friends with all our other friends. I couldn’t ask for better partners in this adventure. We’re all “yes-men”, as it were, and excited about being young adults in a middling-size city without the desire to be drunk collegiates. It works out perfectly, really.

So far, moving has been everything I’d ever hoped it would be. The place is amazing – it’s this spacious corner apartment in this tiny little apartment complex – we have about five other neighbors! (The lesbians in unit 2 are beautiful and so sweet.) Imagine a tiny cute motel tucked away from the city, but still very close. It’s that adorable. We have a big side-yard and a scruffy barren sort of front yard. Grow, little grass shoots, grow! The room I’m sharing with the girl-mate is huge and wonderful and my stuff fits perfectly. She’s still moving in, so we’ll see how things go once we all actually live together, but so far, we’ve had several sleepovers and all has been delightful.

A downside: I could not bring my cat. And not because the place does not allow animals – as if! (The girl-mate has one hamster, one mouse, one fish, one bird, one snake. I will be getting a tiny fishtank.) But rather, because my cat is so old. At sixteen, she has suddenly lost half her weight and cannot quite remember where her litter box is all the time. The shock of the move and the temperament of her bowels makes her bad material for apartment-lifestyles, though I miss her in my bed.

School doesn’t start for another few weeks, but I’m excited about my classes. And, well, actually being in a university environment. Junior college was basically highschool. With even the same people! I wish I was actually taking photography classes – waitlisted one, cross your fingers! – but pffft, they’re still awesome! (Interior Design, Film, and Oceanography.)

I feel like there should be something terrible happening in my life right now to balance out this beautiful summer haze, but as it stands, August is amazing.

Yesterday at work I took pictures of a gay couple. They were sitting out at the bench waiting for awhile, and when I finally grabbed the camera, my manager happened to be walking by. She turned to them and went “Kayleigh is our best photographer!”

I know it was meant to be like “hey thanks for waiting, as a bonus you get this chick who may or may not actually be our best but that’s what I’m going to tell you to make you feel like she was worth it.” But she says this to two incredibly gay men, and I’m standing there holding a camera wearing rainbow arm bracelets and a rainbow heart necklace.

So, awkwardly, I feel that her actually saying anything really came off as “this is the best photographer for you, since she clearly has gay tendencies herself!” They probably did not interpret things on that level, but it made me feel incredibly lame.

Another story!

So I’m lying in bed next to the boything at his mother’s house. I wake up to sirens going along the street. When they don’t stop, I lay there thinking about it. Like, huh, well, maybe there’s something going on in the neighborhood? I’m half-asleep, so mostly I’m thinking about hiding my purse and putting on pants. Then I hear several loud bangs, but they sound rather far away. Like someone running across an attic ceiling. The dog barks.

All of this is odd, but I am capable of ignoring weird circumstances in favour of sleep. I continue lying trhere, until directly outside of our window, which I know has a gate to the backyard, I hear “is this thing padlocked?”

And what with the sirens and the crackly walkie-talkie noises, I go, oh. There are cops in his backyard. I should get up. So I go, put on some clothes, and peek out the back window. There are several policemen and a canine sniffing around the yard.

Now! The funny part of this story is!: Daniel’s mother’s boyfriend has a little pot garden! It’s pretty much the only thing you see looking into the backyard! It is legal (welcome to California), but still. Cops and canines and pot = not a good combination.

I go shake Daniel and tell him to get up. And while I wander around the house nervously, trying to kind of hide, while he goes and peeks out the back. When he comes back, he informs me that four policemen just hauled an enormous shirtless black dude out of the shed! In the backyard! And, apparently, the banging we heard was him attempting to kick in the side door.

Awesome, right?

Fortunately, no one was hurt, everything’s cool, the police are like, don’t worry and hey, we will be back to talk to you about this huge amount of marijuana you have in your yard, and uh, yeah, peace out. The boything’s mother is a bit freaked out, but, well, that happens. When you live in that area. Bleck.

My life is so exciting right now! Pthhhhhhhhhhhhhhhf.

I work with children. And mothers. Both of whom are very demanding and high-stress. In order to make everything run smoothly, at work, I am nonchalant, flippant, pleasant, casual. Blase.

So please, for the fucking love of god, do not talk to me about my dead father at work.

I don’t want to be any of those emotions about him.