Suburban Goddess

I was contracted by a major corporation to photograph their holiday Christmas party. I have known about this for approximately, oh, eight months. So at the beginning of November, I ordered an appropriately festive holiday background…baby blues and snowflakes, a spattering of festive iridescent glitter…which has yet to arrive.

The party is tomorrow night.

The item was shipped on November 7th via the wonderful United States Postal Service…. which seems to have no idea where the package is. Now, normally, I wouldn’t freak out quite so hard; I’d simply use a different background, dress it up and no one would know the difference. However, there was a very specific request for this certain backdrop, which is rather unique… and that big corporation is the one that I work for.

I’m trying to have faith, take a deep breath, and visualize it sitting on my front porch when I pull up this evening.

It will be there. It will be there. (Hey, God, are you listening? I kinda need your help here… I went to church this week!)

However, if it isn’t, I will be in a bind of epic proportions. You can’t just cancel a job as a budding professional photographer; it’s, well, UNPROFESSIONAL. I might as well stamp AMATEUR right across my forehead. So as I sat in my living room last night with a paper bag and bottle of Tums, I tried not to panic. I mean, there is a last resort here; I have one 10×20 pristine white backdrop… I do not, however, feel I possess the artistic skill to master backdrop painting in a single evening.

But I will, if necessary.

So if I go home today and my welcome mat is barren, I will be spending the evening channeling the spirit of Martha Stewart… and praying that everyone at the company Christmas party is too iniebriated to notice the ghetto photography set-up…

Drink tickets, anyone?

Silence is golden…

and duct tape is silver.

My father’s friend, the Argentine doctor, is often assailed with medical questions when he’s off duty. I can relate; I hate when a computer savant asks me a technical question that I KNOW they will not understand the answer to. At this point, I’ve deferred to the polite answer, “I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.”

This particular friend has blown away the notion that doctors are horribly overpaid; when you figure out the expense of med school coupled with malpractice insurance, and add the constant fear that you will still be sued despite that insurance, plus the fact that you are ALWAYS on call, and your life is never truly your life anymore, well, it’s enough to make me not want to be a doctor. Lucky for us there are crazy people who do.

So one evening, the conversation turned to finances. You could tell he was uncomfortable with the topic, and chose instead to tell a quick joke to explain why professional services cost so much:

There was once this mechanic… a man broke down on the side of the road while this mechanic was passing by. He waved at the mechanic frantically.

“Hey, Mister, I’m broke down. Can you help me fix my car?”

“Why, yes, I’m a mechanic.”

“You don’t say! Well, you fix my car, then send me your bill.” They shook on the deal. The mechanic looked under the hood, then walked back to his truck and grabbed a hammer. He went back to the car, tapped on something beneath the hood, and the engine roared to life. The owner was overjoyed, until the mechanic came back and handed him a bill.

“$105! All you did was bang on something with a hammer!”

“You asked me to fix it. I fixed it.”

“But what’s the $105 dollars for??? A hammer only costs $5!”

“Yes…. $5 for the hammer…. $100 to know what to hit with it.”

I cracked up as I thought about all the “free” graphic design I’ve done, not to mention all the “free” photography that took literally hours to finish and make presentable. Until this point, I’ve never felt right about charging what I do for my services; but now, I’m finally starting to see that I AM worth something.

Why is it that when you stop trying so hard, things seem to work out easier?

My father had a rather impressive stack of firewood, the remnants of a few trees fallen by Katrina. On Thanksgiving night, he decided to light a fire so we could all gather around.

If your family lights a bonfire in the middle of a residential area, you might be a redneck.

A few moments later, a warm fire roared to life, and my family and their friends gathered around with glasses of wine and bottles of beer. My father’s best friend, a doctor from Argentina, began telling stories as the glasses of wine flowed more freely… occasionally, much to my father’s dismay, he would get up and add more wood to the fire, which began to grow progressively larger and hotter. Another story, another glass of wine, another pile of wood… my father’s face grew more pained as the once large stack of firewood began to dwindle quickly.

“Hey, amigo, slow down, eh?” he called out to his friend, who ignored his request and instead piled on four more pieces of wood. The embers beneath the fire glowed a bright orange; the heat was becoming so intense that I had to keep pushing my chair backwards. This resulted in the conversation growing louder, since everyone kept pushing farther back from the fire. A little while later, the neighbor’s head popped over.

“Hey, ya’ll? What’s going on?”

A few moments later, he joined us, the redneck war stories growing more animated… somewhere during the course of the conversation and seven more pieces of wood, someone mentioned s’mores.

“You can’t roast mashmallows over pine! It’ll make you sick!” claimed the doctor’s office manager, another close friend of the family… this lead to another heated discussion over the carcinogen content of pine, which sounded largely circumstantial to me, personally. I held my tongue and watched the barbs fly back and forth like a spectator of a tennis match. A few moments later, the doctor raked the coals back and placed the last four pieces of wood on the fire… My father finally had enough.

“I don’t know about s’mores, but right now, you’re roasting my weiner!”

And that, my friends, is what family & friends are all about.

Yesterday, Alex & I made the trek from Houston to New Orleans for some time with the family… what should have been a five-hour trip extended to a painful 8 hours, thanks to Houston traffic and the oil & gas industry that decided to blow up part of I-10 during the busiest travel time during the calender year.. (okay, highly exaggerated, but in case you didn’t know, I-10 is closed between Lafayette & Baton Rouge, making it a royal pain to get to my parents home on the OTHER side of Baton Rouge…)

I love these trips, especially when I’m having a case of writer’s block… the inspiration comes from everywhere. The scenery, the family, the other drivers, the food, and of course, the kid. Within thirty minutes of waking up this morning, my mother made the comment, “that’ll probably go on the blog…”

Yes, Mother, you’re probably right.

But I feel I owe the electronic world this service; entertainment this great was meant to be shared! Stories to follow… as soon as I find a broadband connection and get off dial-up… I think I just watched another gray hair grow in while waiting for this to post….

“Oh my goodness… aren’t you precious!”

“No, I’m Alex!”

When I woke up yesterday, the dog was pacing nervously back and forth in front of my bedroom door… since he does this every morning, I didn’t really think anything of it. As I put on my fluffy white robe, tying the sash firmly around my waist, I walked sleepily to the back door, letting the dog out as I do every morning.

I noticed there was a distinct coffee smell coming from the kitchen. Since I didn’t MAKE any coffee, I looked around until I found the culprit; about the same time, the dog came bouncing back in, pacing nervously.

I reached down to find an empty Starbucks bag; whole bean, dark roast, espresso beans…. I tunred the bag upside down slowly with an incredulous look on my face, then looked down at the dog, who continued to pace nervously, whining slightly…

The damn dog ate the entire bag.

“Did you EAT this?” I said, holding the bag in front of the dog’s nose. He hung his head and continued to walk back and forth… I couldn’t help it, I started to laugh.

“Sorry, dog, you’re going to have to ride that buzz out.”

He continued to pace for eight full hours. Particularly interesting, Starbucks beans apparently give dogs a flaming case of gas, and occasionally I would catch a whiff of rebound bean… Each time he walked past me, he would whine slightly, as if to say, “Please help me! I’m having a heart attack!” before emitting a tiny “poof.”

And that was my entertainment for the day.

Currently, the dog is completely passed out at my feet. Don’t worry; he’s recovered nicely.

I’ve been fighting an internal struggle for some time with the concept of faith. But here lately, it seems to be magnified…

I’ve never hidden my disdain for large, organized religion. I think the reason for that is because in those big, bright, shiny churches, I have been betrayed and belittled by people in the name of God. Those who use his name to pass judgment on others, or use the church to advance their own selfish agenda, those who go against everything in the teachings that I grew up with… those are not Christians. And those few have left a bad taste in my mouth for anything “Christian.”

But I do not want my daughter to grow up without faith. I’ve seen first-hand what it can do to a child; I’ve seen the hopelessness, cynicism, and emptiness that a life without faith brings. There are great lessons to be learned in religion, lessons that I am only now starting to grasp…. lessons that I don’t want my child to live without.

Over the past few weeks, there have been signs everywhere… all things keep pointing back to a certain church here in the area. Sign after sign after sign… but the breaking point was tonight. I had dinner with a photographer friend whom I admire a great deal; until tonight, conversations have been relatively light and not too personal. The evening went as any other… we ate, talked about our jobs and our kids… he walked me back to my car, as he always does, opening the door, ever the Southern gentleman. Nothing out of the ordinary.

As I drove away, my phone rang. It was my friend that I had just left; he divulged some very personal history, then asked me about my faith. I faltered for a moment; is this where he was going to tell me I need to find God? But he didn’t; he just explained why he had chosen faith in his own life.

I’m not sure why he chose to tell me those things. I hope he didn’t think I would judge him; those with faith who actually live the principles have my complete and utmost respect. He is one of those people. But as I hung up the phone, I was suddenly overwhelmed in a way I’ve never been. I started crying so hard that I had to pull over; I don’t know where the sobs came from, but they just kept coming… a release of so much pain, sadness, and heartache…. years of internal solitude…. anger and rage at my ex…. and a profound understanding that the life I knew is totally, completely, and utterly GONE, and it’s up to me now to choose the path I want to follow.

I cried for almost fifteen minutes straight… then found the most calm peace I’ve had in months… this is what it’s like to hit bottom. This is true understanding. I have absolutely no control over anything, and there HAS to be something else out there. I’ve been living with these principles, walking a straight line, taking the high road… but I’ve continued to deny the very heart of all those principles. Faith.

All right, God. I get it.

I went to see a grown-up movie for the first time in quite a while last night: it was a toss-up between “Fred Claus” & “Lions For Lambs.” After a day of mind-numbing work, I needed some intellectual stimulation, so I settled on “Lions For Lambs.”

This movie was not what I was expecting, but I loved it. I won’t ruin it for those of you who have not seen it, but it was incredibly thought-provoking… as the war in Iraq drags on, you can’t deny the fact that we have to eventually change our approach or admit defeat… but the thing I loved the most about the movie is that it focused on THE SOLDIERS involved. These amazing men & women who actually DO something with their lives, who stand up for principles, and who are currently changing the world… these scores of nameless, faceless people who keep the fight off American soil, who travel halfway across the world to risk their lives…

The courage, the strength, and the bravery that these people exhibit on a daily basis should be constantly commended and recognized…

…yet the American media is more concerned about what Lindsey Lohan is doing.

I yearn for the day that true journalism returns; journalism not touched by the hands of corporations… journalism that presents ALL the facts…. journalism that is not tainted by the generation of ad revenue.

I yearn for the day that journalism returns to a search for truth…. and ceases to be business.