A shot of my daughter’s bouquet from her 6th birthday just about covers perfect. Here’s few more. picking the one to be my popinjay was hard. Make sure to click on them to check them out full sized too.

This is not the picture I intended to take, but these things change. Last December my daughter was getting close with a little girl and on impulse I filled a little box like this with little things–a a candy scented stick of lip gloss, a rubber ball filled with water and glitter, a glittery bracelet–and gave it to her after school on her birthday. I felt a little odd about it, because I wasn’t sure the girls were at the point that they would be exchanging gifts, and we live in an area where lots of people can’t afford big things for their kids, so public shows of gifting are rather uncomfortable and unpredictable.

Saturday night I learned my little box was the only present the little girl got on her birthday.

So yeah, I’m angry. I’m angry that I didn’t give more. I’m angry that her parents didn’t get her anything (one of them works at a thrift store and gets a huge discount. She could have gotten something, even used is better than nothing!)

But that’s not where it stops. It gets worse. Worse and I just cannot go into more on a public forum, where someone might find this and get angry. Because right now a little girl’s health depends on her having a place to stay. Maybe her physical health, but definitely her mental health. And I’m caught between probably getting taken advantage of and leaving a child alone in a seriously crappy situation. So I’m angry at the people putting her there. I’m angry that I can’t give her more and I’m angry that we seem to be expected to take on the responsibility.

Ahem. So apparently there’s a lot of clueless going around lately. Most obvious has been this year’s snow. We have had a ton. Not a record, but more than I remember having with one exception in the time I’ve lived here. Also not long ago the news made the statement that all fifty states had snow in the air or on the ground in a 24 hour period.

Also, the snow itself:

Yeah, totally clueless to mere things like gravity.

This week’s concept is Free.

My picture:

The Meaning: This is my bed. Freedom is only a truth in my dreams. Life is a series of choices and consequences and I strive to live it with no regrets (by living well and coming to terms with my own actions). But in my dreams there is full freedom. The laws of responsibility, commerce, capitalism, and even physics need not apply. In my dreams I come back to a point where I can be anyone. Do anything. The weight of the world doesn’t exist here, and as I walk through unconsciousness I cannot be made to touch the ground.

A lot of my stories start from flashes of inspiration in my dreams. Never literally, because the laws of logic also don’t apply to my dreams. But my dreams are my direct connection to my “what ifs”. Later tempered by style, shape, the rules of reality and solidification into written word, the freedom of my dreams are nevertheless the raw birthing room of my stories, the fuel to try to bend the harshness of the world in the waking world to my whims.

This week’s concept is “Bold”.

You more of a story with this one. See, I only got my license this past November. When I was a teen I wasn’t as thrilled about it, because I wasn’t going to have my own car and it’s not like I had many places to go. Then when I moved out we didn’t even have a car. Then when we did it was a challenge to keep one running. We had a string of cars that broke down, or just had something major wrong with them, like no seat belts.

But last spring, fed up with it all we got a loan, and a newish used Kia. So this fall both kids entered school and we had a nice car with plenty of insurance. It was only natural that it was time for me to drive. Only, I was terrified. Driving was overwhelming an I am not a person of great confidence (I can sometimes fake it well though). So part of it wasn’t just learning to drive, but learning that I could depend on myself to do so.

Last month I went to a workshop and I had to drive on the express way by myself for the first time. In rush hour. It was majorly intimidating. In fact, and I’m not exaggerating or anything, I teared up and shook for most of the trip. Of course, it wasn’t really that bad (traffic and traffic manners I mean). On the way home four people cut me off without turn signals and three rode my tail along most of the highway, despite that I was edging over the speed limit. And by the next day when I had to do it again, I was fine.

So the moral is that Bold, for me, isn’t fearlessness. It’s doing what you have to despite being terrified. So for my Popinjay today I took a picture of the driver’s view out of our car, which really is my car now too.

So this week’s challenge was to capture the concept of “guilty”. It was a hard one for me, not because I couldn’t find anything that fit the concept, but because I found so many things that did. So in the end, this is what I decided to photograph.

See I am filled with guilt. I was raised to feel guilty about everything. Never smart enough, never pretty enough, never good enough, whether my family meant to teach me this lesson or not, they did. Many have taken advantage of this over the years, using my own guilt and self doubt to use or control me. And I make it easy on them by perpetuating my own guilt and self doubt punishing myself when no one else is here to do it for me.

Pardon my French, but it’s about damn time I stop living with this parasitic twin named Guilt and embraced my victories and my failures. It’s about time I stop perpetuating the circumstances I was raised in and embraced my right to be a happy, normal person.

This one was easy. I knew exactly what I wanted to photograph…my newest dice!

This week’s concept is Alive. Here’s my photo.