I don't have any new pictures. I didn't take very many while on vacation, though I packed as if I was on assignment from National Geographic, except with mostly prime lenses. I've almost already run out of pics from our few days in Tahoe. I shoot often with a 17-35mm f2.8, but those shots all tend to be of a certain type - expository. They establish a location, mostly, and if I am lucky capture some action in forced perspective.
Has anyone ever spent more time and money taking family snapshots than I? I'm sure there has been. Nobody that I know. If I had more time and space then I would start taking portraits of others, but everything takes so much time.
The boy is in Cub Scouts and I have offered to take pictures of the various events we go to and post them online for the other parents, but I tried to check into Scout guidelines for such a thing - assuming that there are regulations to posting pictures of kids online, etc. - but none of the scout leaders responded to my question when I asked. Maybe they thought I was a pedo.
Who knows. People do get nervous when there are cameras near kids, which is both understandable and neurotic. Would a pedophile advertise his lusts so openly? Maybe. I don't know that much about them. There was a show about catching predators but who watches that sort of thing? I just tried to watch a video and couldn't get through the first encounter. People watch that sort of thing for pleasure? I posted it there so that you can decide for yourselves. I made it all the way up to the moment when they referred to the young girl as a "decoy." A term that appears to be quite technically true.
Well, I am not here to tackle Barbara Streisand's problems today.
I am eagerly awaiting the moment where I can be entirely written off as old and confused, so that I can openly say anything that I want to say. Sort of like what I do here, but in people's faces. I want Thanksgiving to come early this year. I've started asking Rhys' friends if there are any "gay" or "black" kids in their school. When they look confused I just mumble to myself, None, oh that's good. It's stupid and evil, but what the fuck. How else is he to know when racial or sexual jokes are funny or not? The boy needs me.
I hear people talk about how "hatred is taught" and "kids don't know what racism is," but that's all a bunch of bullshit. By the time they are my son's age they are quite aware of any differences between them and they do whatever they can to advertise and exploit those differences as shameful weaknesses. I see them do this all of the time.
Maybe they weren't little tyrants for the first five years or so, but nobody that has witnessed children up close would make a claim about them being free of the sins of bigotry by the time they are all corralled together in elementary school. It's virtually all they know at that age and it must be constantly fought if you ever hope to defeat or discourage it. There are so many commonplace lies people will repeat about the purity, sanctity, and innocence of children, even as you are mounting your full psychological resistance to extinguishing the very issues that some claim do not even exist. It's what parents do, all day long.
It's not an entirely ignoble lie to advance, I guess. Though children contain all the kernels of awfulness there are and ever have been. If not then parenting would be a relative breeze.
But it is not a breeze. It's not even breezy.
Well, I am not here to tackle Barbara Streisand's problems today.
I am eagerly awaiting the moment where I can be entirely written off as old and confused, so that I can openly say anything that I want to say. Sort of like what I do here, but in people's faces. I want Thanksgiving to come early this year. I've started asking Rhys' friends if there are any "gay" or "black" kids in their school. When they look confused I just mumble to myself, None, oh that's good. It's stupid and evil, but what the fuck. How else is he to know when racial or sexual jokes are funny or not? The boy needs me.
I hear people talk about how "hatred is taught" and "kids don't know what racism is," but that's all a bunch of bullshit. By the time they are my son's age they are quite aware of any differences between them and they do whatever they can to advertise and exploit those differences as shameful weaknesses. I see them do this all of the time.
Maybe they weren't little tyrants for the first five years or so, but nobody that has witnessed children up close would make a claim about them being free of the sins of bigotry by the time they are all corralled together in elementary school. It's virtually all they know at that age and it must be constantly fought if you ever hope to defeat or discourage it. There are so many commonplace lies people will repeat about the purity, sanctity, and innocence of children, even as you are mounting your full psychological resistance to extinguishing the very issues that some claim do not even exist. It's what parents do, all day long.
It's not an entirely ignoble lie to advance, I guess. Though children contain all the kernels of awfulness there are and ever have been. If not then parenting would be a relative breeze.
But it is not a breeze. It's not even breezy.
.
