fair warning: a little self-promotion.

Selected and published in 2011 ASMP & MOPLA Pints & Pixels Cell Phone Competition along with 40 other photographers. Book available for ordering soon!

i suspect it may be all be reductive…

i took 322 photographs today. 90 were relevant and 3 were interesting.

i wonder if this is may explain our “successes” in life. you spend 322 moments trying make things work as best they can. and at BEST, maybe 90 moments are good enough to get you through the day. you know, enough so you can sleep at night.

then 3 moments that maybe, just maybe, might yield something interesting. today, tomorrow or 7.3 years from now. perhaps there’s something to be learned. 3 moments. 3 things.

a world without love is a deadly place

stop for the beautiful moments.

a friend and colleague passed away last week after a very short battle with colorectal cancer. we went to dinner one night late last summer in battery park. he told me wonderful stories about working in New York, parties at tony randall’s home, growing up in santa fe, his love of theater, retreats to the hamptons that year and his dear partner.

he ordered my dinner for me, he laughed and giggled as we gossiped and talked about tough things at the office. he confided he was worried about some niggling little health things, certain they were nothing to worry about. he talked about overcoming some really tough challenges, and was so looking forward to the next chapter in his life. but there was no next chapter.

as we walked along the water, taking the long way back to grab a cab, fireworks suddenly began exploding around the statue of liberty. it was a wonderful moment.

may we all stop and pay attention when life gifts us with beautiful moments.

video: an unexpected fireworks show, late summer 2010. battery park.

morgan spurlock: greatest story ever sold. interesting story.

there are so many ways to tell, and hear, our stories. but not many rival this.

get in the game. save the shoes.

Thinking about cancer as a verb, kind of changes everything.

radvent

what was i doing five years ago? five years ago seems like a literal lifetime ago. i made a few resolutions that year. i kept 2 of them. i still sit around a lot.

where was i? living in venice, ca, but i was working hard that year. working at Amgen, recently assigned to both Enbrel and the new denosumab marketing team. it was the only time in my career that a colleague sent me flowers to thank me for a job well-done which made the horrible state of my paws more than worth it. thank you, kirsten.

what did i have? i was single, with amazing girlfriends and a full social calendar. i could still stay up all night dancing, and i did…well until that unfortunate incident with the polo pony. i took a full week’s vacation for the very first time in my career. ever. i drove up the coast and sat in a yurt for a week, alone. hiking. thinking. swimming. sunning. it was life-changing. for a raging workaholic like me, this was a revelation–but it completely changed my mindset leading to many more wonderful vacations since.

i  started trying take a decent photograph that year–but most of my photos included friends, gatherings, my siblings’ new offspring and documenting my single, workaholic life from my little place on Abbot Kinney.

what did i want? i wanted to settle into comfortably into my own skin, remain deliberately single and adjust my energy expenditure by working smarter, rather than harder. i managed to pull that off. i was a bonnie who didn’t need clyde that year, and i enjoyed it. enormously.

who was i with? i was with myself, mostly. also with my friends. with family. with tulips.

as for the rest, i neglected to catch their name(s).

six word memoir

we all think about writing our memoirs. i more often think about writing my obituary, and remain obsessed with reading others. in my opinion, the economist writes the best ones. reminded of the legend that hemingway could write a a story in 6 words, “For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.”

i’m not sure about me, but here’s a start:

“persistently worked it the hard way.”