28 OCT 09 - AUTUMN - My friend and fellow photographer You Li invited me to accompany him on a photowalk today. We're currently experiencing what simply must be THE most beautiful Fall I have ever seen here in the five I will have experienced in the Hudson Valley region. The trees have just exploded with color and everywhere you look, things are so vivid and vibrant . That said, I'm not sure why today's picture is of the ground, and why at that, I've stripped it of the color and vibrancy that got me outside today with my camera in the first place. I think its the textures that got me. Whatever it is, personally, I don't feel like you miss a thing in this black & white, you probably even gain an element or two.GORGEOUS day...even for this place.

26/27 OCT 09 - FLOWERS IN PRISON - The flowers again, I said I'd get all I could out of em before I inadvertently kill them off. Here you can kind of get the feel of the view from my window. "But, Dan" you say, "All we can see out of your window here is gray dreariness." EXACTLY. "but, Dan," you say. "aren't you being just a little melodramatic???" NO, I'm not. That's precisely what this place is, gray, and you wouldn't necessarily understand it unless you've actually been to a place like this; completely FULL of gray, kind of depressing structures. It feels a lot like a prison at times. In my room in particular, this feeling is actually amplified by the netting/fence that's in focus in this picture and by the "spotlight" that shines across the area and into my room at night. I've never been to prison, but there are times when I get the sensation that this school must be an awful lot like it in many regards, and that's kind of what I'm trying to convey in this picture. No matter how hard they try to push how beneficial and beautiful this place is, everything good they try to spoon feed me at times feel like little more than putting a pretty pink bow on an ugly pig, or flowers on the window sill of a prison cell. (ok, a little melodramatic)

26/27 OCT 09 - Candle - No one takes pictures of candles anymore! Just me and the Yankee Candle catalog people apparently....

Days 2/3 (24/25 OCT 09) - DISTRACTION KIT - So I've already found myself slacking off. I didn't get a picture up yesterday, even after I did a pretty good job of keeping the thought of doing so at the front of my mind. I didn't want to just let myself get by on not accounting for a picture yesterday altogether, so I have two today. The picture ABOVE re is of my "going out kit". This is going to sound stupid, but I rarely if ever head out of my house to do anything without bringing any assortment of things to keep myself busy with. At the very least, I never leave my house without the top three items you see: my keys, my phone, and my wallet. Those aren't too strange. What's strange about me is what's below those three items: My journal (I have several, each used for a different purpose), a book (at least one, usu. MANY more), my Bible, and at any given time a mass of documents that I have deemed important for at least that day (usu longer); as a functional solution, here these documents are neatly stowed in a series a organizers (my not-so-inner nerd showing). As I 'm writing this, I think I'm figuring out why I always leave the house with too much stuff: You know when mothers leave the house for the day with little children, maybe babies,or toddlers, and they've got that cumbersome bag of stuff they might need for any and every situation that could arise with this finicky and demanding little child? And in that bag is something, usu. several things actually, that the mother, should she and her child find themselves oddly motionless for more than 15 seconds and restlessness and boredom begin to set in, will use to occupy, entertain, or distract the child so that the little tike forgets how insipid the situation was before the stimulus was introduced? Well, this stack (which admittedly is usu much larger) is my "distraction kit". I used to fool myself nto thinking that I was carrying this stuff with me out of the house in order to always feel like I was getting the most out of my day, utilizing my scraps of time and keeping my mind engaged when things slowed down. Or sometimes I'd even fool myself into thinking that I would deliberately and purposely set aside time in my day to get X, Y, and Z done, earn a sense of accomplishment from a slow day. Now I realize, it's my distraction goodie bag. I'm not sure what it says about me that I have to carrry one of these (or all this stuff) around everywhere "just in case.", but it probably isn't good. My friends know all to well. Even if I'm at a party, my enormous bag full of stuff is never far behind...usu out in the car...waiting....just in case.

Days 2/3 (24/25 OCT 09) - SUNFLOWERS - Was walking through the grocer today and saw these sunflowers, bundled up and on sale. I bought them to add some life to my living quarters (I live in barracks) Being a student at an almost entirely all-male institution, I'll inevitably catch hell for purchasing these, and what's more, displaying them in a vase on my window sill (I guess something about them doesn't exactly exude the manner of military bearing "the man" is looking for). Culture of my surroundings aside, I thought that between now and their full boom (if I can awaken the gardener within me to not do something stupid between now and then to kill them) that these would make for some interesting pictures on occasion.

Day 1 (23 OCT 09) - The very first photo entry into my photo blog. So why a passage of scripture? This isn't going to necessarily be another religious blog is it? Seeing a Bible verse as my first image will inevitably turn some people off, they'll automatically click the back button, or maybe give a perfunctory scroll down the rest of the page to see if there's anything else this guy has to offer, at least a decent picture or two to provide some restitution for blindsiding you with this religious onslaught. Take it easy. This verse, and thus this picture like all the pictures in this gallery carries significance in my life, and if you've even read this far, you're probably the type of person who's curious to know just what that significance is, faith-based or not. So to you who want the meaning behind the image: I feel that this verse you see above explains a lot of what I've been through in the last year and a half. There may be a Bible scholar out there who reads the verse, reads what I write here, looks back at the verse, laughs out loud, and then waves over his or her stuck-up seminary friends around the computer to muse at how I completely missed the real aim of the passage. But for me, the plain meaning I read speaks volumes. Like the blind man in this passage, I apparently had a physical defect that had been apart of me since birth, unknown to me and everyone else around me though. At age 22 (juuuuussst about 23), this became a serious health concern that required invasive surgery. Although the operation was a success, what followed were some of the darkest and hardest days of my life. I had countless questions and anger inside of me. Every new trial that arose (and trust me it didn't just rain, it poured) seemed to be some kind of punishment, like I had done something egregiously wrong to put myself out of God's good grace. Everything in my life up until about my 23rd birthday seemed to flow together all too perfectly. And afterward, i couldn't have felt more dejected, depressed, and unloved. Plain and simple, I believed I was being punished. And not that it wouldn't have necessarily been deserved, I'd/I've done my share of stupid/immoral things. All I could do was literally cry at times and try to think back to which one must've resulted in the curse I had found myself under. I don't remember exactly when I found this passage, whether or not it was during a particularly dark period after my diagnosis and surgery, but I do know that even in such a short rendering of this event, in only three verses, I found myself empathizing with this blind man. And that wasn't an attempt to seem overly melodramatic or to sink myself deeper into self pity (although I had done that at times too). The reason I empathized with this man was because of Jesus' explanation of why this seemingly horrible affliction had happened to him. I had been through a rough patch when I read this, but even so, I knew I had so much to be grateful for. Everything I had been through wasn't a punishment, it took me some time to realize that, but of course you never realize what good the pain might be doing you when your in the thick of the storm (to mix metaphors). I related to this man in, at least I believe, in the purpose for his condition, to display the works and grace of God; to be all the better a testimony when God used his condition to display His power in this man's healing and its use for furthering the Kingdom. God saw me through some very dark times, only so that I and others could see the work God brought about as a result of those occurrences, and please know that it could only have been Him at work, and nothing to do with my own strength, because I did not have the strength to make it through even half of what i did on my own. I guarantee not even half my posts will be this 'heavy', but I guess that's the note I'll start things off on.