Goals I Won't Ignore This Time

As I am perusing the old archives in a new fanfiction community I'm currently lurking in, I come across an individual with guts. Someone in her life dared the author of the BLOG Kids These Days Don't Know How To Move Slow to take a daily self portrait for a year. She does not go into specifics of the terms of this dare but she made the choice to post it for friends (and creepy stalkers like yours truly) to witness this unabashed picture taking. I'm impressed with her ability to make each photo different and not just in the angles but in the emotions expressed within each frame. In some shots she even looks like a completely new person! Even though she claims not to be a photographer, I am taken by her creativity and her self-assuredness to put such an intimate part of her on display.

And because of this brave soul, I have been inspired to follow in her footsteps. I am going to take this challenge that her work presents.

Me. The person who never comes out "quite right" in every picture she takes. Me. The one who for the past two times takes her license picture when wearing white so it washes out her complexion. Me. Someone who loathes the sight of herself in the bathroom mirror each morning (and I don't mean just the sight of what I glimpse as I turn to flush the toilet and a half naked me is squinting at my reflection as I reach for the handle...which I promise will NEVER be a self portrait I decide to take). What I do usually take is funny pictures but there's only so much comedy I can hide behind.

No, this time I'm for reals. This time I'm making a goal and actually sticking to it. One picture a day can't possible be that hard for someone as lazy as me right? Maybe this will strap me down and teach me discipline when it comes to deadlines. Maybe this project will kick my ass into finishing all the things I've wanted to accomplish in life whether it is writing a four part Fullmetal Alchemist fanfiction to something so trivial as actually putting my college degree to use. This is it folks because if I can't follow through on this then there is no hope for me ever completing anything.

Though I have to laugh, out of all the challenges I have come across, this may very well be the hardest. It is not easy to pay attention to something you don't really like half the time, let alone take an enticing picture of daily.

Day: One

Photo taken on August 2, 2010 in the afternoon inside The Surge at my desk.

I'm a pen chewer. I'm not sure how long I've been engaging in this ugly behavior but I'm pretty sure it started around the time I learned how to write. In middle school I fancied what I like to call "Magic Pens" that write like markers and if you hold it a certain way the ink strokes could be thin or fat making for a really cool effect. What isn't cool is the fact I suck on them so hard the ink comes out the top and into my mouth, staining the center of my bottom lip. That's when I switch to the Bic pens with see through cartridges which are also great until the day I nervously chew through it in math class and cut the inside of my mouth and have to spit out bits of plastic and blood onto the white linoleum floor of St A's. Now if you go to my house you'll find an assortment of pens in a tiki cup on my large desk and you'll quickly be able to discern which ones belong to me and which ones belong to my husband, Steve. My pen chewing has gotten so out of hand lately that I have to take pens from home in order to discourage my coworker's from lifting my writing utensils from my desk. So far it’s worked wonderfully.