Way Before and Way After

I have a list of completed projects to write about. Per usual, I have been very busy failing at things and even more busy failing at writing about things. When it comes to writing, the biggest fail of all is not writing. In some ways, it’s the only fail. Turns out the exact same thing is true about photography. I might be a crap photographer, but I’m never so good as when I actually remember to take pictures.

This list of things I have to write about includes a campaign desk that I bought on craigslist—wait, I’m searching my email—nearly two years ago! What? Yeah, that for sure says July 2013 on it. And if I look really hard, I can even find a photograph I took when I bought it. I put it on Instagram, in fact.

This is a grainy photo that involves power cords. It’s a bad photo. But it is a photo of my desk. So it wins the day. Because there are no other photos of this desk. Not. One.

I didn’t take a photo of the desk after I applied chemical stripper (twice) to remove the sticky brown paint. I didn’t take photos after I tried (and failed) to sand off the remaining stain with my dinky little battery-powered hand sander. I didn’t take a photo of the very serious power sander (not dinky) that my neighbor loaned me. I did order a new backing pad for my neighbor’s power sander when the one on the sander completely deteriorated (because I sanded the hell out of this desk, and, apparently, the sander itself). I can check my Amazon account and see that I bought that backing pad in late July 2014. That’s how I know I did this project in late July. The only way I know. Because I took not a single photograph. Not even an after shot when I was done.

I remember choosing a darker Danish oil for the finish, and I remember using paint stripper and then Brasso to clean the brass pulls and brackets. I also remember that the brackets were a cheaper kind of brass, that they clearly weren’t the original hardware like the pulls, and I remember leaving them off. I can still see the tiny nail marks where those brackets were. They show up pretty prominently because I didn’t fill them before I stained. I don’t remember deciding to do that on purpose. I think I just failed that part. I also don’t remember why I didn’t want to take any pictures. I guess I failed that part, too.

I have dozens of photographs of all the other projects I still need to write about, so I can’t be sure what I was thinking in late July 2014 when I chose not to photograph this project. But I suspect that I was feeling a little blue. I sort of remember maybe breaking it off with some guy in July. And it had been a few months since I worked on Fail It Yourself, and many many months since I worked on it seriously. And I’d been struggling creatively with other projects. And maybe I didn’t take any photographs because I didn’t think my work was worth chronicling. I can’t be sure. It’s also possible I just accidentally erased some photos. I mean, I’m not not prone to error.

But I’m looking around this apartment tonight, and I don’t know if my life is worth chronicling, but I know I’ve worked hard to craft it piece by piece. I want my space to be bright and clean and ruthless. I want everything to be exactly what I mean it to be. But it isn’t. My life and my space aren’t full of clean lines. (How could they be, when I cut so many corners?) But this is my mess. I’m kind of proud of it.

So my before might be way before, and my after might be very after. But this is my desk. I work at it every day.

No Wire Hangers Ever!

So I was looking for a cool way to hang these super old posters of mine and found all these tutorials for hanging your stuff really cheaply using hangers. But turns out these people were talking about wood pants hangers. Because people just have those laying around? I’m like, yeah, you do that, Rockefeller. I’m hanging my ancient posters from (count ’em) four apartments ago with the garbage I bring home from the dry cleaner and some binder clips.

Also, you should just believe me when I say that this photo is lousy because I have zero natural light in my bathroom and not because I have zero photography skills.

I am a photography genius. Or not.

Originally posted January 7th, 2014

My resolutions for Fail It Yourself 2014:

• Update the blog for more than the first 3 months of the year
• Take better photos

So, my second objective required a better camera (because what are skills when compared to consumer goods) and probably a tripod. Well, here’s the thing. I had a better camera, but one day the lens got stuck. It’s basically been sitting in my desk drawer all broken and sad for a year. When I decided I needed a new one, though, out it came! I took it to a repair shop like the thrifty smart person that I am, but they basically told me that the camera was trash.

So.

I left the shop, went back out to my car, looked at my busted camera, and decided on the spot to try all the repairs I’d been too chicken to try before I knew the camera was trash. To begin my repairs, I simply smacked the thing on the dash until the lens just came unstuck, and the camera sat there in my palm all like, “what? I’ve been ready.”

I did have to follow this up by taking off the back of the camera and blowing around in there with some canned air because the smacking it around didn’t fix it for very long, but still. Sometimes violence (visited upon the inanimate and out of warranty) is the answer.

And now…I need to buy a book on photography. Because people I need help.