ltgmars | in which Inez pretends to be "deep" but really just wants to show you old pictures

Last night my mom forced us to go get family portraits taken, so we went on a grand adventure with her photographer friends up to a beach in Michigan. It was cheesy and pleasant, so I didn't have much to complain about. Afterwards, my family went to dinner at what seemed to be a hoppin' local restaurant, and we sat outside by the river to get devoured by the tiny, invisible mosquitos. (I have, like, 15 mosquito bites, conservative estimate. GDI, kids.) At some point we started talking about pictures, and my mom mentioned an old picture from an Indonesian gathering where apparently I had been in a bad mood, so while everyone else was smiling at the camera, I was sitting on my butt with my back turned. Hahaha, it sounds so like me, seriously. I was such a bratty, asshole kid. "The things we went through, raising you." I'm sorry, parents. At least I turned out okay, right? :D?

Anyway, I went on a quest today to find that picture, but I couldn't find it. I did, however, go through boxes of old pictures, and it made me realize how wonderful physical pictures are. Here are these little slips of paper with memories crammed into them. They're never things you forget, really -- they're in your mind somewhere -- but they're things you don't ever think to remember. Sometimes the names and the faces and the details are lost, but in the end you still have a physical token of that part of yourself. Maybe you can't go back and know what exactly you were doing or thinking at the time, but throwing yourself into a picture is enough to remind you of how you were feeling. That's... so powerful. Tracing your emotions through the years, seeing how things and people and situations and your very own perception of self have changed so much, or haven't changed at all, being able to feel all of that as if you weren't years -- lifetimes -- removed from it. It's a trip, literally.

... that's all I had to say. Mostly painless, right? So yeah, here are some pictures from back when I was seriously fucking adorable.

I'm not even exaggerating, f-list.

My dad! Really loving the emus. My brother is concerned, I'm indifferent. Story of my life.

Did you know! that we used to have a cat? Her name was Lisa. We had her back when we had an apartment, though, and someone ratted us out, so we had to give her up. Recently we went to a pizza place in Michigan and apparently were really close to the cat shelter where we had dropped her off. My parents were wondering aloud whether she was still there. It's been, what, 15 years, maybe? Aw, I wonder if she's still alive. I hope she's had a long, happy life.

(Also, my mother used to dress me up in hideous floral-print dresses. Oh my goodness. That was one thing I didn't need to remember.)

Lots of old memories crammed into photographs, see? But really, things haven't changed:

I'm still a messy eater.

I still make stupid faces at the camera.

I still hoard stuffed animals like a BAMF.

And we still have fun, even if my dad would literally break if we tried to pile on top of him like we used to.

Hm. ♥

Current Mood: happy

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

melonpanpoi.livejournal.com

wahahaha you were soooo adorable (and still are!!)!!!! and your bro was the cutest little nerd hee hee...you should make some of these into lol pictures or whatever they're called...macros?

and I like your musings on the power of photographs...very deep! :)

From:

in which Inez pretends to be "deep" but really just wants to show you old pictures

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