Recent­ly I took out The Book of Awe­some from the library. It had me chuck­ling to myself many times when I read it on the sub­way. That in itself is pret­ty awesome.

And so like many peo­ple who’ve read the book or the blog of 1000 Awe­some Things, I’ve start­ed to men­tal­ly doc­u­ment every­day awe­some things.

Like, fresh­ly opened ice cream! When its sur­face is all smooth and creamy. I know that the ice cream will be soft and easy to scoop out and fresh tast­ing. And it’s so short-lived. After a week of open­ing, ice crys­tals will start to form and the ice cream will be all hard and even gooey in spots.

But for now, we’ll savour the moment. And snap a photo.

I’m known to be the one who takes pho­tos. Some­times I get com­ments like, oh here’s Trish with her cam­era again.

I admire peo­ple who can just live the moment and savour the expe­ri­ence and the mem­o­ry of that is sat­is­fy­ing enough. I, on the oth­er hand, feel com­pelled to take a pic­ture when I see some­thing new or inter­est­ing (and new or inter­est­ing to me could mean a patch of light on the wall as the sun sets, or the shad­ow of my house plant with a strange shape that I’ve nev­er noticed before). What­ev­er it is, I feel the need to cap­ture and con­vey the essence of what I see and experience.

I’m by no means a pho­tog­ra­ph­er. I was nev­er trained in pho­tog­ra­phy (high school pho­tog­ra­phy class does­n’t real­ly count; plus, I did­n’t do so well in it), and I only know how to use a point and shoot. But it’s still exciting.

Today I was read­ing this inter­view with Moby who is going to release a pho­tog­ra­phy book with his new CD. Some­thing he said real­ly res­onat­ed with me. Made me feel like I’m not the only one who feels this way, like I’m not crazy (or maybe Moby is crazy, so then I’m not the only crazy one. I can live with that).

My uncle when I was grow­ing up and some of my oth­er friends who are doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ers instilled in me this idea that what­ev­er envi­ron­ment you live in it’s prob­a­bly worth doc­u­ment­ing even if you don’t see that, like things that seem nor­mal to you in your envi­ron­ment to some­one else can seem very inter­est­ing and strange and so I want­ed to doc­u­ment that strangeness…

… music and visu­al art for me is all the prod­uct on one hand of liv­ing in this strange and beau­ti­ful world and on the oth­er hand try­ing to rep­re­sent the strange­ness and the beau­ty and the world just keeps get­ting stranger and more beau­ti­ful. I feel com­pelled to make art that on one hand reflects and some­times almost cre­ate like a sense of com­fort when con­front­ed with the strange­ness of the world. 

That’s the most awe­some thing I’ve read this week, and it’s only Tues­day! Imag­ine how many more awe­some things we’re going to encounter for the remain­ing 5 days of the week!

Take care, friends :D