After two weeks of the Olympics the magical crowds have disappeared as if gone to the next city for their Olympics. Everyone is back to wearing grey and black.

Everything is normal again.

I got a roll back from CustomColor today and in the negative is a frame I definitely never took. The location is known to me but the people are not. I puzzled over this for awhile and my guess is that because I had bought the roll from an estate, the previous photographer had shot one frame and somehow rolled it back into the cannister.

Thank you Gawker for making my blog stumble a lot yesterday and today.

For anyone visiting, no, I don't have any more pictures of cute doggies ;) but if you want to hear an amusing story behind that picture, right after I snapped those two dogs the one on the right immediately went SAMMICH! and dove for my lunch bag and ate half of my wrap before we could stop them. The owners were very apologetic.

Among the mass of stuff in boxes I've already packed and moved I've managed to sort through half of my camera gear. There's nothing like digging back into the shelves and rediscovering that you've bought something twice or that that crucial bit of kit that went missing the day before the shoot had successfully hidden itself in the back corners of a drawer.

Conclusion 1: There's a bunch of stuff that's ready for me to eBay.

Conclusion 2: If I somehow lost half of it, I would not miss it (though eBaying is better).

Conclusion 3: I've forgotten how to use half of this stuff.

It's now very close to Vancouver's winter Olympics and I feel with my personal disruption and the accelerated schedule of getting on with things that I'm in my own little world. It is less about feeling uncertain or emotional but more about trying to keep on with the next steps and so I have personal blinkers on.

This shot I took while walking around last weekend looking for places to live. I decided this week that I was not going to live downtown -- although it was obviously full of people and I spend most of my day life working there -- it also felt for some reason isolated. I thought back to my early psychology subjects in university. Was it Durkheim? I forget, whoever introduced the concept of anomie.

Anomie

Anomie refers to an environmental state where society fails to exercise adequate regulation or constraint over the goals and desires of its individual members (Durkheim, 1951: 241—276). It is important to note that Durkheim’s conceptualization of anomie is based on a general assumption about the psychological or biological nature of individual human beings. He wrote that the human “capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss” (1951: 247). From Durkheim’s viewpoint, individual happiness and well-being depend on the ability of society to impose external limits on the potentially limitless passions and appetites that characterize human nature in general. Under the condition of anomie, however, society is unable to exert its regulatory and disciplining influences. Human desires are left unchecked and unbounded—the individual “aspires to everything and is satisfied with nothing” (1951: 271).

Some people, when they have a really rough time personally, will go drinking, some people will throw themselves into work, some people will choose exercise. Tonight, after one of the worst weekends in a few years I went shooting with a couple friends on a dark and gloomy twilight. There really was no good light, it was fading fast and then it started to rain but just being able to get out, concentrate on your art and be with a couple people who shared a similar discipline was great.

And then we got drunk.

Just kidding. I don't get that way. And I tried the evening before, besides. To all my friends who've reached out the past two days: thanks a lot, pals.