I Am Not A Poser

I was going to write about how it took me three hours to clean my kitchen yesterday. Meanwhile Mike was simultaneously cleaning our bathroom, which also took him three hours. Three hours? Seriously, our home is not palatial. It's a two bed, one bath condo for Pete's sake. We should be able to clean the entire damn thing in three hours and have time for a shower and nap afterward.

But this wasn't typical cleaning. Mike was scrubbing our shower tiles with a toothbrush. I was shining our stainless steel toaster. And the crazy thing is neither of us finished our designated task at hand either. I still need to wipe down our kitchen cabinets and neither of us got to the floors. Honestly, it's enough to make me stop and consider hiring a cleaning service to come in at least once a month. But the thought of paying someone to clean my home makes me feel incredibly lazy and spoiled. Really the only thing stopping me is the yuppie guilt.

But I'm not writing about cleaning my kitchen.... err... any more.

What I want to talk about in the five minutes I am giving myself before I must get ready for bed is photos. (Surprise!) I've been thinking a lot about this wedding I'm shooting in less than a month. Holy mother of pearl I just said less than a month.

One of the things that worries me most about this wedding is posing. I admit it's not my strong suit. I've never been in a situation where I've had to direct a wedding party of people and a very small window of time. It kind of freaks me out because I won't really know if I'm any good at it until I'm right in the thick of things. Thankfully I've been in enough weddings now to know how it works.

The thing is though, I don't really like posing people. I don't like when they feel the need to stare unflinchingly at me and my lens. I think back to those elementary school photographers who used to twist my neck into uncomfortable and unnatural positions and then snap a pic. I never felt like I looked like myself in those photos. I still don't. Most people don't. But for the sake of wedding photography, I will have to. And I want my posed photos to be somewhat interesting, so I'll be doing some serious posing research (yes, there is such a thing) leading up to the wedding.

By the way, the photo above - totally not posed. And I love it more than any other photo I've taken recently.

Competitor

I got some news today that was unexpected to say the least. What was this news? That one of my photos will be published in a magazine in May.

Let me repeat this. A photo of mine. Will be in print. In a magazine. This May.

EEEEEEEEEEEKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!

I didn't seek this out. It came to me in a very roundabout way.

I posted the photos I took of the Shamrock Shuffle on my Flickr account and tagged them as such. Someone found one my photos and asked if I might want to submit them to the Shamrock Shuffle 2010 Flickr pool they had created. So I did.

Well those photos were seen, and seen by enough people that someone recognized one of my photo subjects. And in the strangest twist of fate ever, that person happens to the subject of an article in the May issue of Competitor magazine. The reporter emailed me this afternoon to see if my photo could run with her article. It took every ounce of professional restraint in my body not to respond "HELLS YEAH!" to her request. In exchange for my photo, I get as many free copies of the magazine as I want and credit for taking the photo.

So which photo is it?

This one, which also happens to be my favorite from that day.

Remember how one of my goals for 2010 was to get my photo on the Chicago Public Radio homepage photo of the day? Well I still want to do that. But this magazine thing? This is pretty 'effing cool.

Welcome Back

The last time I went to Lake Michigan, it looked like this.

I rode my bike down to the lake shore today for the first time since that frigid January day. I like how it looked today much better.

Welcome back spring. We've missed you.

Needy

I've been at my new job for almost two months now. Two months doesn't seem like that much time, but I feel like a veteran paralegal at this point. I've done more substantive work than I had done at my previous job in the six months leading up to my departure.

I hit the ground running at my new firm. I don't think I left before 5:30 a single day my first week and was getting in a full 30 minutes earlier than I had been at my old job. They were long days. They still are. But they absolutely fly by. I love it when my work days fly by. At my former job, I used to get excited when the clock struck 3 p.m. It meant only two more hours until I could go home. Now, I often look at the clock surprised to see that 3 p.m. is long gone.

This is in no way a complaint. I love being this busy.

The thing that I've found most surprising about my new job is that I'm actually good at it. I say that only because I didn't do a lot at my last job. My tasks were those that I felt anyone could do. I didn't need any sort of special skill or training. I was doing the kind of work I had been doing when I first started. But it was three years after I started. I wasn't using my brain. And I really missed using my brain. So much so, that I often times questioned if it still worked.

That was one of the beautiful surprises of my new job. I jumped in and was able to start working and doing more complicated tasks than I had been in years. Not only was I doing what was asked of me though. I was improving upon the way that my paralegal predecessors had done things. I was contributing and making things better for the attorneys I worked with. I felt appreciated. I felt smart. And I felt needed. There is no greater feeling than I get from doing my job than feeling needed.

Tomorrow though will be a different story. There will be no question that I'm needed. Not long before I left work on Friday afternoon, I learned that as of tomorrow, I'm the only person doing my job. My fellow paralegal won't be returning to work. The most I can do is continue doing the best job I can and hope that I'll live up to my veteran title. Even if it is a title I didn't think I'd have less than two months in.