Candid Shots: Top 8 Photos from my Cell Phone

inspired by my dear friend suma, i have decided to treat my readers (all of two people, it seems) to a sampling of my awesome mobile photography skills. and by awesome, i mean low-quality, not very artistic, spur-of-the-moment-because-i-found-it-amusing shots.

in no particular order:

taken: dewitt wallace library, macalester college, st. paul, MN
why it's in my top 8: gandalf. guitar hero. totally random location. enough said.

taken: the lovely ms. setty's senior-year residence, on st. clair

why it's in my top 8: i thought it was supposed to say "fragile goods," so i thought this was hilarious. turns out (i think, if i remember correctly...correct me if i'm wrong, suma!) that the box actually was used for storing figurines of gods. hey, even gods are vulnerable...(i think i'm coming off on this blog as being very irreverent and blasphemous; i promise i'm not in real life, haha)

taken: 302 revolution drive, peachtree city, GA

why it's in my top 8: 2 reasons, really. #1- i miss my parents. #2- my mom is wearing a babushka, which ups this photo's awesome factor to the 23487235766th power.

taken: national press building, washington d.c.
why it's in my top 8: i took this on one of my excursions around our nation's great capital (this is somewhat tongue-in-cheek; facetiousness doesn't really translate well in blogging, does it?) when i went to D.C. to help plan/prepare/run the PowerShift 2009 conference. one of my errands on my first day there was to go to the national press building to distribute media advisories and press releases. now, if you know me in the least, you'll know that i have a HORRIBLE sense of direction, and although i had google mapped it beforehand i still managed to get lost (it wouldn't have been like me if i didn't!). after about 10 minutes of wandering and looking for people who looked nice enough to help me get my bearings straight, i fortuitiously stumbled in front of the aforementioned building (i feel like that happens a lot to me; i must be a lucky person). anyway, this photo is in my top 8 because: a) i'm proud that i found it all by myself (with a little help from google maps), b) partly to show off that i've been to the national press building, which is probably not a big deal to most people, but to me it is. am i totally exposing my provinciality or what? and c) for someone who lists photography as her interest and one-time passion, i sure took an awful shot. i couldn't even fit the entire sign in the frame, and if you guessed that that's my finger taking up a ridiculous amount of space in the bottom half of the shot, you're right. so clearly, by "awful" i actually mean "awesome.

taken: on the subway in good old new york, new york

why it's in my top 8: so this is where i get all sappy and cliche...although my sister and i are both horrible at keeping in touch, she's still my best friend and i miss her. it may sound cold, but friends come and go in my life; part of it is me moving around so much, and part of it is me being horrible at keeping in touch, but my sister will always be in my life. guess blood is thicker than water (that's a really weird saying, now that i think about it...who came up with it? vampires?).

taken: on my way to the ROK. i couldn't remember if this is an aerial view of the states, japan, or korea, but a look at the timestamp of the photo has led me to deduce that it must have been either korea or japan. ohh~~ technology (as my boyfriend always likes to say)

why it's in my top 8: i don't know if my love for korea is because there's just something about my motherland that speaks to the essential korean in me (as much as i try to shy away from essentialism, i don't know how else to describe this), or if it's because i'm a huge escapist and the half year i spent there was the best form of escapism. regardless of the reason why, i'm constantly nostalgic for a country i've only known in my toddlerhood and for a very brief time almost 2 years ago, so of course anything that has to do with korea would show up on this list.

taken: petco in peachtree city, GA
why it's in my top 8: please. take a look at the dog/quasi-human-child thing and tell me why it's in my top 8. he/she/it is wearing a freaking shirt and has little hair (fur?) clips in its hair (fur? ahhhh this is confusing me...). at first glance i thought it was a child, and then i did a major double-take because something looked so OFF about it. it freaks me out how quasi-human it looks...

taken: target in peachtree city, GA (actually in the same shopping complex/area as the petco above)
why it's in my top 8: if you know me pretty well, you know i love pugs. i think they're the cutest dogs ever; maybe it's because of a pug named Jjangu i knew when i lived in new york. when he'd do something bad, his owners would chastise him and tell him to go sit in his time-out corner and put his front paws up in the air (this is a common form of punishment in korean culture).

(something like this. bonus picture!)

it was endearing enough that jjangu would actually go to his corner and do this, but all the while (i kid you not) he would cry these huge crocodile tears and whimper; since then i've been in love with pugs. oh, and then there's my minor love of poop, as mentioned in my previous post, haha. pugs + poop = top 8 photo compilation material.

***(note: i actually started this post over a month ago, and i've finally finished it now (now being 11/21/2009)...speaks volumes about my productivity and motivation lately)***

Sticking it to The Man

another productive day at work...i either need to sleep with the HotDocs manual under my pillow and hope i learn it inside, backwards, forwards and out through osmosis, or start insisting to people that the information i request is TIME SENSITIVE. i've been sitting around since 8:40 this morning, waiting for someone to get back to me on how to fix my footer in an expungement form. in the meantime, i have become a solitaire player extraordinaire; i have won about 35 games so far, 20 of which were under 2 minutes. on the one hand, i feel guilty because i'm being funded by the government to help the low-income community and fight poverty, not sit in my office and play solitaire. on the other hand, it's not my fault that i'm stuck on one part, and my supervisor has run out of things for me to do. plus it's awesome to think that government funding (and probably taxpayers' hard-earned money, oops) is helping me improve my speed-solitaire skills. you're welcome, america. on a completely unrelated note, i've had the thong song stuck in my head all day, and i've noticed that i play faster on solitaire when i'm singing the song in my head. don't ask.

i've noticed a trend where random people with legal issues somehow get MY extension number and ask me for legal advice. i have no idea how these people are directed to me, specifically, but it's kind of fun to listen to their stories. for instance, today i spoke to a poor, distraught man from minot, ND, by way of france. the first thing he asked me was if i spoke french, and i had to disappoint him by saying that i could only speak spanish, and very brokenly at that. i've always wanted to learn french (along with about 8 other languages), and i'd never wanted to be a polyglot more in my life than at that moment. anyhow, he explained his situation to me in his broken, heavily accented english, while i asked about 29384723 (probably stupid) questions because i couldn't really understand what he was saying. something about a green card and being stuck in france after visiting his sick mother and not having an address in the states because, and i quote verbatim, "napoleon has died." i was very confused and on the verge of laughter because he sounded so forlorn, and i thought it was ridiculous that this frenchman was mourning the death of a compatriot who died over 200 years ago and probably had no bearing on his inability to return to the states. turns out that "napoleon" was the friend he had been living with in the states, and his death was the reason why our frenchman couldn't return. oops, good thing i held in my laughter...i eventually had to forward him to another law org./firm, but for some reason talking to him made my day.

now i'm sitting here updating my blog, even though i'm pretty sure no one reads it. it gives me something to do, though, and since i'm typing away on my computer, everyone who walks by my office thinks i'm hard at work and putting those government dollars to good use. yay.