So, I've up and switched identities. 6 years was a long time to be here. I just got a new camera (Canon 450D, ooh la la).

I've made a new account here.
(( It's a secret.))

It's been fun.

-s

shhh... want to know a secret? not only did i watch the national spelling bee today, but i also made some photographs of the sun as it passed low before the clouds and made its way in tiny shimmers through the petals of the blood lilies in the back garden.

i've finally found a camera. we are getting acquainted still, both of us a bit shy and nervous.. but i think the best friendships develop slowly.

oh, and i must say, i am ever so inspired by a one nirrimi joy hakanson (who shares a middle name with me and nantaka joy). what a beautiful dreamer she is, and aussie to boot! it makes me want to move to melbourne more than ever.

and an extra note, for good measure:
very soon frida kahlo will turn 102 and i will turn 24, all on the same day! i am somewhat afraid of such even numbers, that have little to no feeling to them to me. but none the less, i shall try to embrace my age, and wear it about me like a little red sweater of happiness.

oh i have so much to learn!

best to all my beauty-swooning beloveds,

s
joy

i have been far away.

a little ghost, who prefers emily bronte over reality.

my life is momentarily concerned with catching drifts of the eagle's call across the pond, creating tiny terrariums, working a joyless job (40 hours a week of droning death in an office), plotting my return to new zealand.. absorbing the sun.

and now that i have deprived myself for seven months of the person i love, and at least 10 months without a camera... it is wearing me thin.

i am rather dry these days, tired, anemic, empty. i suspect there is no place for me in the world. money is a charmless thing, and i am forced to spend much of my energy saving it so i can pay my student loans and try to get back to my darling e, who is across the world from me in a most despairingly literal sense. i have been trying to talk myself into breaking down my stubbornness and purchase a camera. at the moment, the only camera i have is attached to this computer. i have even been so desperate as to use it.

can anyone give me advice on which one i should get? it will be SLR.

i quit my other camera because the shutter button is broken, and every picture gets washed out because i think i pointed the sensor unwittingly at the sun one too many times. and i can't handle the annoyance of point and shoot any longer. i crave depth of focus, intense macro abilities.. the aura of the slr. what i really crave is film, but i can't afford it. i really can't afford a decent SLR either, but there are moments when all I want to do is photograph the beautiful moments about me.

so, i'm thinking about a Nikon D40. the very height of my budget is $400. can i get a decent digital SLR for that amount, or am i dreaming?

in the winter of my words i've been.

thoughts brim, and drop forgotten
a trim hope holds still, waiting,
but the stillness is a silent sort, and wanting.

finger pricks pen, ink spreading lifeblood to words,
who still wish for spring in october.

you are gone now,
my mind measures miles in small white stones, and in the lost twilight blades of vast millenia.

wan spring wings of latent green lash out in soft pecks.
the words begin.

just returned from a wonderful series of days in one of my favorite havens- the blue ridge mountains of north carolina. it was amazing to contra dance again for the first time in ages, and be absorbed into the fantastical unreality of LEAF festival and being surrounded by so many subcultural phenoms.

i took many photos with his lovely pentax camera, and am so delighted with the scanned negatives we just had made.

although they are all very grainy on the screen because we used a wide angle lens and the people at walgreens might be a bit lazy with scanning at good resolution.

maybe i'll upload some soon.

also, leanne marshall won project runway, which gives me hope about the worlds of beauty i admire and secretly aspire for.

lots of happiness and quiet resolve,

-s