images

So this weekend Laine and I took a mini-vacation down the Monterey coast. We stayed at a not very fancy motel on Fremont (where all the not so fancy hotels hang out), went to the Monterey Aquarium late Saturday afternoon and again on Sunday morning (one of the benefits of being members).  We also found a nice brew pub, an ok breakfast place, and discovered that one of our favorite places had come back from the dead. I haven't lived down in the area for more than nine years and so it was fun to see what had changed and what hadn't.

When we were at the Monterey Aquarium, I took a lot of pictures with my phone. I've only had it a couple of weeks, but the iPhone does a much much better job of taking pictures in low light and decent video than my old, recently deceased Samsung Galaxy 2. Like this photo of squid.

Or this of jellies.

Lots of people bring their cameras and phones to the aquarium to take pictures of the animals and their families in front of the animal tanks. We're all in each other's ways with all these pictures.

At first I was going to write this huffy post about people taking pictures that they'll never look at again and rail about how people take flashes in the rooms with the animals even when there are signs all over the place telling them not to do that.

I was going to sound very high-minded.

I was going to be very wrong.

In my office at home I have boxes of pictures that my great aunt kept. I have another box from my grandmother. I have two boxes of slides from my dad that I'm maybe halfway through digitizing. All of these pictures were animated by the same impulse driving the people who were in my way or making flashes or just being annoying at the aquarium.

We all want to remember. We want to remember that good time when we were together or when we were having fun or when we saw something new or something beautiful. That it's digital now and that everyone with a phone can do it makes no difference.  And maybe its even better that there's this relative democratization of picture taking and family portraits. It's good that everyone can have their memento of that great time. That everyone can do this:

what it means to write

This past weekend, Labor Day weekend, Laine and I spent time with a bunch of friends, many of whom write. I admitted that I had this blog and two people asked me why a blog, especially since I don't have a ton of readers. (My readership may have jumped up to five after this weekend.)

I mean, I could just write things in longhand, in a journal and leave them there. I could write on a computer, print them out, hand them to Laine to read. (Or not) I could just write on a computer and leave the writings on a hard drive, where no one would ever read them, but nearly nine years ago, I started this blog.

If I think about it, I think that I made this quasi-public place to write because it would make me think about an audience. Thinking that I have to write to someone, means that someone, even if imaginary, has to understand what I'm writing. This enforces a certain sort of discipline.  I have to be clear, if I have the assumption that someone is going to read this and won't have a chance to ask me what I meant.

But to be honest, I use blogging as a place to think. I found that insight in a 2007 observation when I was apologizing to who knows what for not blogging more.

I guess that if it's a place to think, the person I should apologize to is myself. And I should do it more often.