quality time
I love my family, extended and immediate, but on occassion, being forced into their company is enough incentive for me to take a power tool to my temple. I have this theory about why family vacations take places on cruises and I'm pretty sure it's because if you're on a boat, you can't escape.
I think I need a new hobby. The Archipelago exhibit really inspired me to get back into photography again. I don't know why I've let my camera collect so much dust over the years. I could make up an excuse about how I didn't have the time to do it, but I think I stopped after I started realizing that I didn't want to go through life as a bohemian. When I was 12, my family voted me, "most likely to become a starving artist" and now they think of me as "most likely to assasinate a major conservative political figure." Go figure. I think I will start putting my darkroom back together... My mother suggested that I pick up fencing again. Now that was a fun hobby for a few years. I was quite good in my age group, I even won a few medals in a fencing tournament. Beating boys is always more fun than beating girls ^_^ Most of all though, I think I might pick up the flute again. I devoted so many hours to playing for so many years... I began because I loved the bird piece to "Peter and the Wolf" yet once I surpassed that I began to get bored. Practicing for an hour and a half a day just wasn't cutting it for me. I did get to audition for the Disney youth orchestra in NYC though, which I'm sure made me a better musician. So much time put into acquiring a skill... it would be a pity to let it go to waste. I wonder if I'm still any good.
And now, a blast from the past:
"...the most important reason for going from one place to another is to see what's in between, and they took great pleasure in doing just that. Then one day someone discovered that if you walked as fast as possible and looked at nothing but your shoes you would arrive at your destination much more quickly. Soon everyone was doing it. They all rushed down the avenues and hurried along the boulevards seeing nothing of the wonders and beauties of their city as they went.
No one paid any attention to how things looked, and as they moved faster and faster everything grew uglier and dirtier, and as everything grew uglier and dirtier they moved faster and faster, and at last a very strange thing began to happen. Because nobody cared, the city slowly began to disappear. Day by day the buildings grew fainter and fainter, and the streets faded away, until at last it was entirely invisible. There was nothing to see at all."
~The Phantom Tollbooth