The one where I ramble

Today my co-teacher came into the classroom wearing new RayBans and informed me that she had forgotten her English over the holiday, and - on an unrelated note - was very unhappy to be back.

**

Yesterday, as I thought about the obsessive amount of meal photos I take, I decided that it would be a cool art project to snap a photo of every meal you eat for a year.  Make a cool collage or something.  The beauty of art projects is that you can create them out of something you already find interesting/fascinating and make up a profound meaning after the fact, using key words like metaphor, lighting, perception.

An art major friend recently told me about how she created an art project out of her long distance relationship with her bf - collecting letters and photos and creating a piece for a final project in one of her classes.  We agreed that it would be a hefty amount of work to burn that project after the breakup - which thankfully never happened. 

As I thought about my photo food project and how it would never happen because I'm not pressured by an impending grade, I realized that it would also never happen because it would be too much of a pain to whip a camera out every time I wanted to snack. (Though I suppose I could phone photo snacks and DSLR photo meals, and pass it off as a meta interpretation of perceptive lighting). 

And then came my moment of total inspiration: Food Photography as weight loss.  Have people sign on to an agreement to photo and post every single scrap they eat.  Watch the pounds drop as people become too lazy to find a camera for a handful of chips (which they then cannot eat), or too embarrassed to post the massively unhealthy junk they consume.  

It's comparable to the Facebook Effect: I am convinced that people regularly have dressed better in the last 10 years because there's a much higher chance they will be photoed and uploaded.  Actually, that's not entirely true.  We're still more sloppy than generations past - but we're more conscious of the perpetual possibility of being photoed. It's like we're all on our own reality tv show where the reality becomes scewed through the observational effect - you behave differently when being recorded.

I think maybe I will come back to this post one day and edit it so that it becomes snappy and clever and concise and oh so witty.  Because I can.  Because it's public.  Because it's meta. Like Community.

*Apparently I'm behind the times.

**Favorite comment from ^
"I dated a guy who did this for a year too and posted it on flickr... I now think of it as a rather pretentious thing to do and I don't know if it is directly correlated to him (he was a hugely pretentious hipster architect with a fantastic mustache) or if it is because it just is."