jamelah.net

It was really just a Wednesday, and not a particularly remarkable one, at that. Well, except for the bit where I got hit on by an elderly man at the restaurant where I was having lunch. “You,” he said, “are so pretty I would go after you. You like old guys, don’t you?” And it was funny instead of creepy, which is an important distinction. But for the most part, it was just a Wednesday. Work was work, home is home, etc.

But I got out my camera for the first time in… I’m not sure exactly how long. These days, if I take a photo, more than likely it’s with my phone, and my camera, which used to be a part of my daily life, largely goes unused. I didn’t have anything to take a picture of, so I pointed it at myself. It’s not a particularly remarkable photo, except for one thing. Normally, there’s a level of self-awareness that goes along with self-portraiture, which, at least for me, means that even in the laziest photos, there’s some amount of thought going on. It creates at least some degree of disconnect: I’m taking a picture of myself doing this, instead of I’m doing this. It’s a small thing, but it means that when I’m taking a photo of myself (and lord knows I’ve taken plenty of them) I usually at most manage a smirk and not a full smile. But in this one, I’m really smiling, because in fact, I’m about to laugh. Maybe it was because of the text message that popped up on my phone a couple of seconds prior, or maybe it was for no particular reason, but either way, I caught a genuinely happy moment.

And you know what Kurt Vonnegut said, right? “I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’” So I thought I’d better mention it.

That’s all. How are you?