Life through a plastic lens.
I had a resentful encounter today two days ago at the camera store, which involved only receiving negatives of my photos instead of the actual, asked-for prints. In an ideal world, we (the store clerk and I) would have chosen champions to fight for our honor; or, lacking the funds or charm, we would simply have challenged the other to a duel without the help of a third party. I would have slapped him with my roll of negatives, although ideally my champion would have a leather glove and rapier. Ideally I would be drinking from his skull at the moment. Alas, this is not an ideal world, which is lucky for me as I am not that gruesome despite a couple of fond viewings of Braveheart.
Camera store? one might ask, though one never does. Yes, camera store, I might answer, even when one does not ask. I've recently gotten addicted to my new Holga camera, and a return to film in general. I am sick of digital cameras, and I have now invested an obscene amount of money in polaroid film and medium-format film. Of course, all this yields is a rather petulant shop clerk telling me he cannot print my film, even though it is regular 35mm. Which leaves me with negatives and a murderous desire.
But anyway, as classes have started today I have set about attempting to remember my schedule--
CHIN-112-01 INTENS SECOND LEV CHINESE II
FREN-366-01 SELF & SOCIETY IN 17THC FRANCE
LING-225-02 SYNTAX
LING-333-01 CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION
PHIL-159-01 EXISTENTIALISM
Given the above schedule, I hereby project that, by the end of this semester, I will be able to successfully--
1. use Chinglish with greater accuracy and flair,
2. extrapolate more on how LaFontaine plagiarized many of his stories (in French, of course),
3. correctly diagram a sentence at cocktail parties to the amusement and horror of others, and then subsequently wonder why I receive no more invitations to cocktail parties,
4. effectively cross cultural boundaries and misunderstandings with my global linguistic perspective and
5. have even more existential dilemmas, now with a greater abundance of philosophers from whom I will draw dispairing quotations.
Ah, higher education.
Comments
Store clerk: "We can't do that, it will ruin your film. See, this is E6 film, and we use a C-41 machine. Get it?"
Me: "It's called cross-processing. I want you to ruin my film. Get it?"
Getting prints from a cross-processed roll of film was even more of a challenge (apparently cross-processed film messes up the automatic color correction on their printing machine, or so I've been told), so I invested in a 35mm slide/negative scanner. Now I scan my slides, do the Photoshop thang, and have the results printed through an online photo-printing company.