mud pies to medicine: Cheating the System

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Cheating the System

Do I carry my camera everywhere? Trick question, my phone has a camera. Do I carry my dslr everywhere? No, and I inevitably end up kicking myself for not having it. Today for example. I had a great little procrastination lunch with good friends and then dropped by Starbucks for a deliciously overpriced grande 2 pump hot chocolate to make a day full of studying the heart a bit more bearable. On the way I passed a dilapidated farm I've been wanting to take a great photo of but I am waiting for everything to be just right. I have a couple ideas of lighting scenarios and clouds and at 3:30 today the heavens opened golden light onto that farm with dark clouds behind it and I kicked myself. So I did what I should not do and continued to not study. I drove to my apartment, picked up my camera gear and went back and wouldn't you know it, those clouds moved and the shot was ruined. One of these days I am going to get the shot, although it may be so idealized in my head at this point that it will never happen.

And so I have today decided to cheat the system. When in doubt, take a picture of something old, overexpose it, add a warming filter and voule!

And if you really want people on Pinterest to like it, add a basic word. There we go!

And there you have it. Day #8 Vintage Books. These were a gift from a quirky old uncle (via my grandmother). There are all old books and in Spanish! Ole! The top one is a translation dictionary and has written on the title page "16/3/907" Spanish date system so this book is at least as old as March 16, 1907. They have stamps inside from the old bookstores they were sold in. Pretty neat.

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The inspiration you ask?

I miss making mud pies. There is this huge rock in my front yard. To call it a rock really does it a dishonor. It is a boulder, brought home by my father on a huge dump truck after he blasted it out of a work site. My mom one day told me that even though it is nearly 2.5 feet high, 6 feet long, and 2.5 feet wide, that it was, in fact, only half-showing. The scientist inside of me was disbelieving and set out to get some proof. Clad in a dress, bow in my hair, and my best accessory, a shovel, I trudged outside ready to prove my mother wrong. That is when the digging began. I dug, and dug, and dug, and nearly all 3.5 feet of Danielle fit in that hole when I had reached the bottom of the rock. That became my digging spot, my mud pie kitchen. Each day it was dug, and each evening it was filled back in. Sometimes the holes were small, sometimes they were enormous, and most days the hole was turned into my mud mixing bowl with that rock as my counter. The novelty never wore off. The ebb and flow of my childhood was, in many ways, measured by the ever-changing depth of that hole in the front yard, the hole that never really disappeared even each day after it was filled in. Even though the grass has grown back in that spot, there still remains, an indentation, the scars of a childhood well lived and the disbelieving scientists I have always been.

So, you ask me why I want to be a doctor? I do not want to be a doctor. I want to open a mud pie bakery with the cash register on that rock in my front yard. But, somehow, I doubt I would stay in business long, for the world seems to have lost its taste for mud pies. I guess being a doctor will have to do.