With nothing on the plate, other than to wait for a package to arrive, I'm free to follow up on some phone calls and other tasks that have built up over the last month. These are some of the “ten minute tasks” I've recently been putting off for weeks and weeks until god finally points a finger and I have to get off my ass (for ten minutes). Life would be simpler if I could get my act together, sooner than later, but I figure the day will come when whatever it is that's driven me catatonic goes away and, in the meantime, I'll muddle through. Here in Oakland.

Cliché city, is it, this Oakland?

Could be from what I've been writing, but then part of this journal thing is to go back and notice the ways I'm acting like a wacko. Not that it's troublesome - acting like a wacko - it's just, you know, embarrassing and acting in an embarrassing way will get you shunned more quickly in this society than knocking over banks to cover your mortgage payments. Or camera bills.

Speaking of which the lens arrived just before noon as predicted. It's everything I expected with just one exception: this is not a hand held lens. You use it with a tripod or a monopod because, although it's eight inches long (as advertised), it's five inches in diameter and its weight of 6.4 pounds makes it not a brick, but a block of cement. So I'm sitting there looking at the thing thinking if I'd known what it was like to heft the thing, I'd not have clicked the order button. Then again, it was noon, I hadn't been to breakfast, why not walk down the way to the usual place and think about this over a nice BLT and a cup of coffee?

It does a couple of things, particularly with portraits, that are very useful I was thinking, giving the waitress the eye (she smiles back, but only because by now she knows I'm harmless). And I have tripods. And a monopod. Why not use them? This thing really is a monster and no one doing photography at my level would ever (in a rational world) have one, but it would allow me to experiment with a series of pictures - portraits mostly, but others as well - I'd otherwise never be able to explore. B & H would take it back in a heart beat, but why look at this as a glass half empty? None of this makes any sense, but we're dealing with emotions here, and I've decided to go with it. I'd run a picture of the beast, but you'd understand only too well my idiocy. Wouldn't want that. Too embarrassing.