I'm in a play! Come on out! Links embedded below.

Been really enjoying the old Konica Hexanon lenses lately. There's something about them that's building my loyalty to the brand. There's a sharpness to them, no matter the camera used. 

​Here's a selection of photos I've taken over the last couple years, using a few specific lenses. And I think I'll post a few lens-specific posts later on.

Here's the 57mm F1.4:

Here's the 50mm F1.4:

The 24mm F2.8

The 52mm 1.8

The Konica S2 Auto's 45mm F1.8:

The tweet above is a bit of an overstatement. The fact is that my mind is always thinking about how I got into this position, how I continually made decisions in my life despite my intuition's warning system. Listening to that episode of Very Bad Wizards, however, may have helped to coalesce some of my thinking around my upbringing, however, as well as a few recent events and interactions with others.

​On Monday, I performed at a vow renewal in Harrison Mills. For the weeks beforehand, the musician I was playing with and I had spent many hours over-rehearsing for this event. We talked a lot. He is a 60 year old man who's lived a wildly different life than I have: he won awards for bodybuilding; he acted in television shows; he travelled as a musician; he's done his share of manual labour and other things I can't quite remember. He's doing ok despite the seemingly chaotic bunch of things he's done with himself.  

And I'd hear his stories and they'd kinda' stun me. This is the sort of person I admired growing up, and yet I consistently chose different things to do. As much as I wanted to try to be a musician, I shied away from it; as much as I wanted to travel, I made choice after choice that  kept me in place; as much as I wanted to earn enough money to pay my debts, I kept doing things that kept me in the red; as much as I felt insecure about the religion of my youth, I kept holding on to it and moulding it so I could still call myself a believer; as much as I wanted to get experience dating, I settled on the first person who really gave me a chance.

And then here's this guy who's gone the complete other direction. He rebelled, he stood up for himself, he never compromised on his values, he fought through the hard times and still, well, he's doing ok. What was wrong with me to think I was undesirable and incompetent? What made me feel so incapable of a person? Why, when people would tell me "You can do it," and "You really shouldn't be worried about that," why couldn't I hear them?

Fear's the most common element in all of this. I was constantly afraid, afraid that I was wrong, that I was unlovable, that I was incompetent, that I couldn't survive in the world on my own, afraid of going to hell, of disappointing my parents, of serving the wrong god, of choosing a profession carelessly, of ending up on the streets or alone. Fear, fear, fear.

To bring it back to the VBW podcast, I don't blame my parents for this. This fear, this constant feeling of inadequacy, has always been there no matter what they've said or suggested. I don't want to blame anyone for any of it. I just seem to gravitate towards it. If someone told me to be afraid, I took note and stored it in the mental caution bank.

But then I see these people who live without fear, and I read these books that tell you to overcome your fear, and I hear these podcasts that say there's no one to blame, that you're ultimately who you are already, and then I look at myself and I don't like what I see. What's there to like? And then I end up back in that cycle of fear again, afraid even to think I'm worthy of anything.

I just wish I knew how to break out of it. Because I'm still in it. I still navigate theings with a fear mindset. In my career, I'm constantly afraid of being found out as a fraud; in my family life, I'm afraid that my kids will stop wanting to interact with me; in my art, I'm afraid of "putting it out there" in case people reject it and humiliate me; in my life choices, I'm afraid that I will make some sort of financial mistake that will utterly ruin me. But none of these fears are founded in truths worth looking at this way. I can look at each of these things  and re-frame them in more positive, less fear-based ways. But I keep going back to the fear.

And nobody wants to deal with the fear-person, with the person in the fear-mindset. People will choose the confident person every time.

Every week we have these rehearsals for a play that I'm in. Last week they wanted to have me try to enter the stage in a smooth, confident way. I had no idea how to do it. Even in trying to just act without fear, I couldn't seem to get the hang of it. And that's just acting. 

In the end, the simple fact is this: I am not happy with my life. I don't feel content. I'm not happy with the choices I've made or the places those choices have taken me. I'm sure that none of this would matter if I was content with myself. But I'm not. 

But I still don't know what "next step" to take. And I'm too fearful to take some random step into the darkness.

I don't jive with memes. I remember back when people showed me the "I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER" memes a decade ago, but it took me quite a while to "get" them. For a while, I enjoyed them on Facebook or Twitter, but now when I see a meme-like image with a quote on it, I just scroll past it. They're not worth my time or mental investment.

However, my current English 11 class has confronted my habits and bias head-on: they are deeply involved and invested in meme-based thinking. Their quips and inside jokes are largely meme-ish. The class has pushed my mind into deeper thinking about how memes work and why I seem to sluff them off so much. I've found myself saying to the class, "Memes stop deeper thought," or "Memes end a nuanced conversation before we can get to the meat of it," or "Memes put down a flag before you've even reached the field," or "Memes make an in-out group mentality where it's not useful." I don't know if this sort of thinking really works, but it seems like my thoughts coalesce around "Memes stop  thought."

While reading the print edition of The Globe and Mail last week, I saw an article that made reference to the following book, Memes and the Future of Pop Culture, by Marcel Danesi. It looks like it's gonna' be a good book.

The article from The Globe and Mail, "Malls, bowling alleys, and the places of our youth are disappearing. Where do we go for a nostalgic place?" by Odessa Paloma Parker, describes part of Danesi's book like this:

Hm. I wonder, perhaps, if my tendency to dismiss meme-thinking stems from my pop-culture stewardship. As I read the part of Danesi's book that's available through Google Books, I couldn't help but think "I get that," over and over again. But meme culture is something new, something that follows different rules, that exists in a temporal space different from my pop culture conditioning.

The thing is, I have no interest at all at playing with a culture that aims to score points by stopping conversation for a laugh, or for virtue-signalling points. So perhaps I don't belong in meme culture. I look forward to getting a copy of Danesi's book somehow.

And I have yet one more piece of data to support the following statement: I'm old.

A few thoughts I started pounding into Twitter today, with annotations:

I had so many chances to not try to be a Christian. My conversion experience, as my Camp "Counselor In Training" leader said, wasn't very convincing, for example; I had soul-affecting conversations with so many people along the way. But instead of scrapping the faith and identity, I mastered bending and contorting the faith to fit my understanding. Sometimes it was overly abstract; sometimes I clung to tradition. Most of the time, though, I clung to the false hope that I would understand better in the future why my beliefs seemed to contradict my understanding of the world so much. 

I remember, not long after he became an atheist, having a conversation with my brother, for example, and I had an apologetics-based sort of justification for everything he said. And I knew I was jumping through hoops, but I kept jumping. I couldn't seem to let go. And I got accustomed to that magical thinking in so many places in my life. This became most problematic when I justified getting married when I knew I wasn't ready: I kept saying, "This may be your only chance," "just have faith," and it will work out in the end." And as a result of that magical thinking, I'm responsible for that broken home.

When I heard and read "saved a wretch like me" sort of stuff from practically every medium I consumed, when I read messages like "you are nothing without God," or "God killed his own child for you," it gets totally ingrained that that sort of thinking is legitimate. How many times did I hear, "You have no rights?" How many times did I hear about the "God-shaped hole" or how "life is hard and it doesn't make sense, and the only thing that can help you is God?" And all the times that I clung to those hopes, I got more and more alienated from myself.

I don't blame any of those people who gave me those messages. They were doing their best to help me with my "eternal soul" and whatnot. But I took those messages, despite my reservations, and I conditioned myself to second-guess myself and never trust myself.

I thought poorly. And although I abandoned the creed years ago, I'm getting so, so tired of fighting the internal struggle over and over again.