Blue, black, and read all over. London, England.

So other then the fact that I spilled tea on my keyboard and now the left shift button doesn’t work, and sometimes when I type, the text transforms itself into copious amounts of ellipses and yen symbols, life in London is going well!

I actually need to be honest for a moment. [Beginning of honest moment]

Usually I try and stick to photos… and I promise I won’t fail you all (see below) but I feel the need to use a little extra text (which will be difficult since I’m rE-leARniNG hoW to CApiTaLize LetterS properly. I was chatting with my good friend Josh today (again, see below) and I noted that lately my blog tends to be my version of “putting on a brave face.” In other words, my blog posts tend to be more “check-out-my-neat-adventures” and less “here-is-a-cyber-portal-to-my-deepest-thoughts-and-fears…dot com.”

But the truth of the matter is that the last few weeks have been {decently} hard. I say {decently} (in squiggly brackets because my keyboard is being weird} because I realize that things are much harder for other people in the world right now– including many people that I’m close to. But that doesn’t change the fact that things have been {decently} hard for me. For one thing, the economy and stress of money that has hit most of the globe hasn’t left me untouched and that has left me here, in the most expensive city in the world, feeling stressed. But more importantly, without many photo gigs to keep me going, one starts to feel a little bit purposeless… and that’s enough to make anyone feel {decently} down-in-the-dumps.

So I’m trying to keep my chin up, take each day as it comes, be brave, and keeping exploring and shooting– because that’s one things that makes me feel alive.

I don’t fully know what the purpose of this post is… maybe that’s why I don’t usually do this. But it does feel a little bit better to put it out there into cyberspace. I think I also wanted to let everyone know that my life isn’t as happy-go-lucky and glowy and sunshiny as my blog might make it appear.

On the train yesterday I read a passage out of one of my favorite books, “No Man Is An Island” by Thomas Merton. I don’t go anywhere without this book. It doesn’t have anything to do with this post except that it made me feel a little better for some reason.

“A happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found: for a happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy.

There is a false and momentary happiness in self-satisfaction, but it always leads to sorrow because it narrows and deadens our spirit. True happiness is found in unselfish love, a love which increases in proportion as it is shared… it is in loving others that we best love ourselves…

Love not only prefers the good of another to my own, but it does not even compare the two. It has only one good, that of the beloved, which is, at the same time, my own. Love shares the good with another not by dividing it with him, but by identifying itself with him so that his good becomes my own…”

[End of honest moment]

[Start of photos]
/////././/////////// <—– my keyboard freaking out

School children on a field-trip outside of the Design Museum.

Josh’s beard is out of control.

I feel like this picture does a good job of showing how cold we were for a few days there.