| day 210 |

"No day is so bad it can't be fixed with a nap."

---

Terrible photo today.

| day 209 |

"As we go on, we remember all the times we had together. And as our lives change, from whatever, we will still be friends forever."

| day 208 |

"No matter how plain a woman may be, if truth and honesty are written across her face, she will be beautiful."

| day 207 |

"Love is the sum of our choices, the strength of our commitments, the ties that bind us together."

| day 206 |

"I don't know when, I don't know how, but I know something's starting right now..."

| day 205 |

"I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend...I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend..."

| day 204 |

"We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones."

| week twenty-nine |

Just 23 more weeks...phew.

I know I'm not religious with my blogs, but some weeks...there is just nothing I have to say. I always feel like the blogs are monotonous.

I really want to do a stop-motion film and put it to music or something. I think I want to do a journey of a missing socking trying to find its other half or something before I start doing one with a model. Regardless, expect something along those lines in the near future.

I've recently been noticing a change in my photography. I feel like I'm painting with light more, rather than just using it. I've always known that photography was literally painting with light, and I thought I executed it well enough, but now I'm noticing I'm appreciating it more. I also think forcing myself to be creative every day is helping.

Another thing, I'm realizing how much can happen in the span of one year. It's mildly ridiculous actually.

Well, until next time...

| day 203 |

"I am in need of music that would flow over my fretful, feeling finger-tips, over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips, with melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow. Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low, of some song sung to rest the tired dead, a song to fall like water on my head, and over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow! There is a magic made by melody: a spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool heart, that sinks through fading colors deep to the subaqueous stillness of the sea, and floats forever in a moon-green pool, held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep."

| day 202 |

"But you can't get away from yourself. You can't decide not to see yourself anymore. You can't decide to turn off the noise in your head."

| day 201 |

"To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time."

| day 200 |

"There comes a time when the world gets quiet and the only thing left is your own heart. So you'd better learn the sound of it. Otherwise you'll never understand what it's saying."

| day 199 |

"Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all."

| day 198 |

"I'm the one that has to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life, the way I want to."

| day 197 |

"If there is a bad taste in your mouth, you spit it out. You don't constantly swallow it back."

---

For those who don't know, I hate chocolate.

| week twenty-eight |

Later?

| day 196 |

"The slow arrow of beauty. The most noble kind of beauty is that which does not carry us away suddenly, whose attacks are not violent or intoxicating (this kind easily awakens disgust), but rather the kind of beauty which infiltrates slowly, which we carry along with us almost unnoticed, and meet up with again in dreams; finally, after it has for a long time lain modestly in our heart, it takes complete possession of us, filling our eyes with tears, our hearts with longing. What do we long for when we see beauty? To be beautiful. We think much happiness must be connected with it. But that is an error."

| day 195 |

"And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petaled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared."

| day 194 |

"You were created to love and be loved. You were meant to live life in relationship with other people, to know and be known. You need to know that your story is important and that you're part of a bigger story. You need to know that your life matters."

---

TW♥OHA

| day 193 |

"Droplets of yes and no, in an ocean of maybe."

| day 192 |

"The Winter Woman is as wild as a blizzard, as fresh as new snow. While some see her as cold, she has a fiery heart under that ice-queen exterior. She likes the stark simplicity of Japanese art and the daring complexity of Russian literature. She prefers sharp to flowing lines, brooding to pouting, and rock and roll to country and western. Her drink is vodka, her car is German, her analgesic is Advil. The Winter Woman likes her men weak and her coffee strong. She is prone to anemia, hysteria, and suicide."
---
Stranded at a friends house for the blizzard - cell phones, Picnik, and technology in general is my savior.

| day 191 |

"I listened for a trembling, for a faltering note to remind me that woman was not on the whole a mere performance- and I heard only beautiful music."

| day 190 |

"And that was what she often felt the need of-to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless."

| week twenty-seven |

Some weeks, I just don't feel like updating.

| day 189 |

"Sometimes I have the strangest feeling about you. Especially when you are near me as you are now. It feels as though I had a string tied here under my left rib where my heart is, tightly knotted to you in a similar fashion. And when you go, with all that distance between us, I am afraid that this cord will be snapped, and I shall bleed inwardly."

| day 188 |

"...behind the mask of ice that people wear, there beats a heart of fire."

| day 187 |

"It's not uncommon for my heart to feel like it's spinning in all directions."

| day 186 |

"Sometimes...you can cry until there's nothing wet in you. You can scream and curse to where your throat rebels and ruptures. You can pray, all you want, to whatever god you think will listen. And, still it makes no difference. It goes on, with no sign as to when it might release you. And you know that if it ever did relent...it would not be because it cared."

| day 185 |

"He saw things in a way that others did not, so that a city I had lived in all my life seemed a different place, so that a woman became beautiful with the light on her face."

| day 184 |

"Dear God," she prayed, "let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry...have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere - be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost."

| day 183 |

"All little girls should be told they are pretty, even if they aren't."

| week twenty-six |

Erin Collins is officially half-way there!

I'm a bit in shock it's already been half a year. It doesn't even seem that long to be honest. Now that I'm here, it's like, "Oh yeah, this is a piece of cake. I totally got this!" I know I'll still manage to get sick of it at points I'm sure, but I really cannot express how amazed I am with myself. It's a bit crazy.

This past umbrella week was a lot of fun - I definitely enjoyed it. I'm not sure if this week will have a theme, but probably not. Themes tend to just come as they please, it depends on my creativity I guess.

But until next week...