Camera Insurance

Yesterday I finally pulled the trigger and bought a new camera- my sixth one since I started college.  The quality of the cameras I was receiving (usually on my birthday or for Christmas) slowly began to decrease, and for good reason.  I mean, what kind of person needs a new camera once a year?

People that know me, especially people that know me from college, know that I LOVE taking pictures.  Some nights, I would come home to a memory card with over 100 pictures on it.  It would be closer to a film of the night's event than to random snapshots.  Part of the problem is that I used my camera at all times (and often alcohol is involved), so my little electronic friends would be done faster than most.  Following is a short list of how each of my cameras met its demise.

1. Camera #1: my 17th birthday present, it made it through high school without a scratch.  But at the first tropical party at Trinity, some kind of sticky beverage got underneath the buttons, making it very difficult to work them unless you could put up over 150 pounds on benchpress.
2. Camera #2: bought hastily to capture our family vacation in the Outer Banks in August, it lasted until New Years without incident.  It fell to its death in a toilet (note: a clean toilet) at a party in New York City, and although it still SORT OF worked after that, the pictures had weird lines through them.  Then it fell in a drink concoction and it was DEFINITELY done.
3. Camera #3: my 21st birthday present that was bought with my upcoming semester abroad in Rome.  I loved it.  It got through my 21st birthday celebration, Thanksgiving festivities, and Christmas at the beach in Florida.  Unfortunately, my purse got knocked out of the car at a gas station on our drive back north.  Purse: recovered.  Wallet with credit cards: recovered.  Cash and camera: gone (along with all our pictures from Disney).
4. Camera #4: I couldn't go to Rome without a camera, so I got one before I left that took awesome panoramic shots... probably the best feature on it, especially when I used it to create pictures combining one person's lower body with another person's head.  Somehow, this one stayed firmly on my wrist through a near-arrest by the Spanish police in Barcelona, red wine fueled club nights in Rome, sprints through Prague to avoid homeless men peeing in the street, and all the European gypsies that my mother cautioned me would chop off my arm with a machete to get to my valuables.  First week back at school and it got dropped onto a coffee table.  For some reason, a lens bent up at a 45 degree angle won't take pictures... weird, right?
5. Camera #5: Christmas, four months later.  I was hurting.  I had missed the documentation of MAJOR senior year events.  Then what did I find in my stocking?!  A new Kodak!  It was a Christmas miracle.  So maybe it was the cheapest model they made.  Maybe it was bigger than my first camera with its five-year-old technology.  I didn't care.  Fast forward to about two months ago.  After a night out in uptown Charlotte with way too much ridiculous dancing, one of my friends was missing.  We couldn't leave without her.  Unfortunately, I didn't make the most practical choice of footwear.  Solution?  Take off my four and a half inch stilettos while we waited for her to meet us.  Not wanting to stand on the bare pavement, I decided to stand on my purse (after taking out my electronics, of course).  My camera is probably still sitting on that lamppost, waiting to be picked back up.

The cashier asked if I wanted camera insurance on this new one as I was buying it.  I thought about it...

"Does that cover spilling things on it?"
"Uh, no.  Only internal problems with the camera."
"Oh, so like a lens that gets broken when you drop it."
"No, because that would be your fault."

What's the point of insurance then?  I can only hope that it survives this weekend in Boston...

Graduation, Take Two

I realized something after this weekend- Graduation is a lot more fun when you don't have to worry about the whole graduating part.  I got to pretend I was in college again, relive Tent City in all its glory (and oh... it was glorious), and enjoy all the other benefits of Trinity's graduation festivities WITHOUT the sentimental and buzz-killing side effects.  For me last year, it was having to say goodbye to some of my best friends... and the fact that my parent's got in a head-on collision with an (allegedly) coked-out Trin alum.

I was one of the few who was excited for the day to come because it meant seeing my wonderful boyfriend for the first time in six weeks.  All the while, I was fully aware that most of the people on the other side were counting down the days in dread rather than in ecstatic anticipation.  But it still gave me a chance to look back at where I was at this time a year ago, at how I was feeling about coming into the elusive "real world", and about how much better their graduation speaker was than ours.  My thoughts?

You never know how lucky you are.

I don't mean that as a way of saying "Enjoy getting drunk in college as long as you can, because you can never do that again!"  First of all, that is not true.  You absolutely CAN get as drunk as you did in college, although now it's frowned upon.  In a bigger sense, I don't think a lot of people realize just how much they have working in their favor to be able to attend college, pay for college, graduate from college.  People don't realize how lucky they are to be healthy, functioning adults, to have friends and family that love and support them.  As much as occasions like graduation are sad, I think they're also a testament to the myriad of positive things we have in our lives.  If anything, that's what this weekend made me think about (besides how much I missed my friends from Trin).

I was going to write this slightly sentimental post right when I got back, but getting bronchitis and an ear infection on the plane ride home kind of robbed that feel-good, Hallmark-y feeling I had going on.  Thank goodness the antibiotics kicked in.

Holiday Crazies

In typical me fashion, I have arrived at the airport a full two and half hours before my flight. When I say arrive, I mean I am sitting at my gate, settled and ready for boarding, meaning that I parked more than three hours before departure. I'm going to pretend that I really thought it would take that long, but the truth is I wanted to sit in the airport and people watch. Weird, I know.

During this time, I also realized that I broke the rule mentioned in my last post, that Thanksgiving must be given its own moment of glory before Christmas can settle into its overbearing reign over December (and January, for me).

I only had two days of school this week, but the kids were crazy enough for one full week. They're so intuitive and I think they knew in their little brains that they needed to squeeze in all their antics in those two days. At first, I was annoyed. Why is it that the holidays cause them to go so nuts? I never appreciated having Halloween on a weekend more after realizing how much time children ACTUALLY need to recover from the sugar rush that comes along with it. The problem is that by the time they get out of that candy trance, along come Thanksgiving and Christmas, which set them off in a way that makes Halloween look like Flag Day.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that this holiday frenzy is something that affects kids and adults in very similar ways (I use adult in a very loose way here, because I'm actually including college students in that classification). I can complain about the way that kids go nuts, acting like they've been snorting Pixie Sticks on the bus, but I think I react in kind of the same way.

Let me explain. I love the holidays (clearly, from my last post). Very recently, Thanksgiving Eve and Thanksgiving have climbed up in the rank of important holidays, especially with the passing of my 21st birthday. I was finally able to get out to the glorious strip of bars in my small hometown, one street of tired libation stations littered with the kids from my high school that never left town. Thanksgiving Eve is the biggest night of the year, a drunken procession from bar to bar, searching for old faces that dominated my childhood and adolescence. My friends and I went crazy, reuniting and reconnecting, reliving our nights the next day in the only restaurant (a pizzeria) worth going to.

In college, the approach of Thanksgiving meant a sharpening of the dichotomy of social life and academic life. As dates for final exams and massive papers loomed closer, so did Christmas parties. My senior year, we had our first Christmas party the weekend before Thanksgiving, a party that began with us tamely drinking red wine, watching the Yule log, and admiring the newly chopped down tree our guy friends had just put up in their room. It ended with Michael Jackson videos and paper snowflakes poorly cut out from the empty beer cases.

The holiday season in college is characterized by pop-y remixes to Christmas favorites, usually with a new rap verse added in and half-naked girls in Santa hats dancing in videos. It means glittery tops and wrapping paper on walls and candy canes sent in care packages from overprotective mothers. My junior year it meant nearly puking every Sunday. That was the year when every alcoholic drink we made contained milk, a recipe for hangover more certain than tequila. Try ingesting gallons of eggnog, Bailey's, hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps for three weeks straight. It was not pretty.

But the bottom line is that we use holidays as an excuse for giddy behavior, whether we're young or we're old. It's not just the kids that go crazy. Just take a look at the frenzied shoppers holding 12 boxes of Christmas lights, at the increased traffic in liquor and package stores, at the stupid cards and little gifts sent just because you're "feeling the spirit." I forgot that the holiday fever affects us all equally, heightening our craziness beginning with Black Friday and lasting until we;ve caught up on sleep after New Years.

I guess I'll just have to embrace the fact that my kids are going to be off the wall for the next three weeks, and maybe that's okay. Maybe I just need to go off the wall with them.