I rearranged my entire room last night because a new piece of furniture wouldn’t fit where I thought it would, and now it feels like a totally different space — I love it. I have Ross to thank, because I was crumpled in my chair weeping the frustrated tears of I-just-spent-an-hour-building-my-new storage-cubby-thingy-with-actual-nails-and-screws-and-I-missed-a-step-so-it-looks-weird-
but-that’s-ok-but-what-am-I-going-to-do-NOW-it-is-TOO-BIG-to-go-next-to-my-desk-my-
life-is-a-travesty, but he up and hauled everything around and now I am a happy typer. My whole desk area is so organized, in fact, that I made a list of five things to do today and every single one of them has now been checked off. Good lord, list-checking is satisfying, isn’t it? Except when you’re morbidly depressed, like I was in January, and in your masochistic and unbalanced quest for self-improvement you make lists that say things like,”Wednesday: Memorize the geography of the United States.”

Anyway, one of the things on my list was to scan and upload the first batch of pictures from a set of vintage photographs that I bought on Ebay. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with them, if anything, but gosh they’re fun to look at. There’s something curiously uplifting about gazing at the faces of people long dead, their expressions made artificially stern by long exposure times and complete ignorance of the concept of candid photography. I decided to sort out the pictures by subject, and the first batch — comprising portraits of young boys — can be found here.

This face is my favorite by far, even though there are older and weirder pictures in the collection. He reminds me of one of the kids I used to teach — oh, the memories. Sure, I threw that particular student’s breakfast into the trash towards the end of our relationship and he threatened to kill me, but there were extenuating circumstances on both sides.

As the sun fades into evening (we were just noticing yesterday how dark it was at 8pm — these really are late summer days), I leave you with two of my best boys catching some light while walking back from a hard afternoon’s work helping to set up the stage for the Zeitgeist’s new production on Saturday. The thing I like best about this picture is the fact — which went unnoticed while I was shooting — that Ross has an antenna growing straight out of the top of his head. Sort of detracts from his air of studied cool.