20,000 Frequent Flier Miles
Not. Although I got my passport this morning, they cancelled the Asia trip this afternoon. Perhaps it's for the best. Home for the 4th. Time now to shoot more pictures, time to sit back and let the white noise wash through me as I sit at an open air cafe sipping on a caffein delivery device, watching the early morning traffic get out of town. Time, I think, to buy a decent jacket so I will look presentable at the home office should they ever decide to send me there again.
We dress casually in Oakland, of course, Dockers and soft collared shirts, Levis and company t-shirts. Tennis shoes. No shorts, however, we're not that relaxed. Except maybe on weekends. Asia is still stuck in the 50's. Suits and ties. Reminds me of my first years in the securities business. A memo last year, for example, advising the women they had not all been judiciously color coordinating their pants suits when they came into the office to work on the weekends. Not that they were allowed to wear anything other than dresses during the work week itself, of course.
I've been wondering about these photographs. A trap, this kind of wondering, but they really are
just a bunch of snapshots of people's faces now, aren't they. Faces that interest, sometimes fascinate me for whatever reason, of course, but true street photography (I'm making this up as I go along, you understand, something that probably contributes to my ever dwindling readership.) seems to portray people in a context where their faces and their body language in combination with their surroundings all work together to communicate a story, not just a close up of a face. There's a certain hormonal quality to pictures of nothing but women, don't you think? Well, that's the trap, talking yourself out of doing whatever it is that gets you up and shooting without recourse to a caffein delivery device.
They interviewed a fellow on the news hour this evening who's written a book about privacy,
Internet privacy, primarily, but privacy in a world of email and web sites where your every word and opinion can be found and tracked and used by most anyone with the requisite software and an axe to grind. All those conversations you had in that chat group you once frequented that now suddenly crop up ten years later when you're, I don't know, running for Congress. That cropped up in an email sent to everyone in the company by some unknown, but concerned person, just as you were elected company president. When you're, um, getting a little older and everybody in management is suddenly aware of those journal entries you wrote discussing corporate policy during that feckless period before you grew up and attained a more mature outlook. You know, those younger years, when you were forty, forty-five.
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