Scene from a Frontier flight
- Flight attendant: do you two want cookies?
- Girl next to me: uh, duh.
I don’t really want to recap 2011, because it was a really terrible year. It was filled with self-doubt, emotional abuse, the loss of many people from my life. It was just downright terrible.
I spent my New Years weekend with the best friend a girl could ask for. We watched terrible movies, ate desserts, and of course got a little messy on the big night. 65 dollar open bars are a terrible idea. Really. But I got at least half a dozen new year’s kisses from friends, acquaintances, and total strangers.
And they all meant a hell of a lot more to me than how I spent midnight last year. Lying in the arms of a man who would never love me, revealing secrets that he would eventually use against me.
So here’s to 2012. It’s gonna be a good one.
Geographical memory is a strange thing. The body reacts in ways you aren’t expecting as you pass by old familiar places. I haven’t been north of the river since it ended, and the sadness I felt passing by certain exits was not what I needed. But I am off to New York, hoping the New year is filled with fewer painful memories.
When you find out that your little cousin was involved in a high speed police chase, and you have a hard time mustering any sort of reaction besides laughing, you know it is time to tie a knot and move on.
Seriously, biggest thug in the suburbs. Joco’s most wanted.
Extremely nervous. Couldn’t sleep. My hair looks like circa-1963 Paul McCartney. Listening to Graduation in an effort to psych myself up. Let’s do this.
So tomorrow is my 9 month review at work. You see, the job I have has this ridiculously long training process. First, you are in class for 6 months. Then you have to meet certain standards to get out into a module. This takes about 10 weeks. Then you work cases all day, but one case is reviewed every day to make sure you’re not totally screwing things up. Then 6 months after that everything you work is reviewed for three days. Then you get 3 more months of daily reviews. Then, finally, you have this big 9 month review where, once again, every single thing you work for 3 days is reviewed. I am super nervous. I hate being reviewed on every single thing I do. I am trying not to stress out too much, but I am about as stressed out as I ever have been about this. I know I will do fine. But will I excel? I don’t know. I hope I do, because if I don’t I will feel like a failure. Even if I pass.
Photo reblogged from Mohandas Gandhi with 480 notes
Software to rate how drastically photos are retouched is being developed
The photographs of celebrities and models in fashion advertisements and magazines are routinely buffed with a helping of digital polish. The retouching can be slight — colors brightened, a stray hair put in place, a pimple healed. Or it can be drastic — shedding 10 or 20 pounds, adding a few inches in height and erasing all wrinkles and blemishes, done using Adobe’s Photoshop software, the photo retoucher’s magic wand.
“Fix one thing, then another and pretty soon you end up with Barbie,” said Hany Farid, a professor of computer science and a digital forensics expert at Dartmouth.
And that is a problem, feminist legislators in France, Britain and Norway say, and they want digitally altered photos to be labeled. In June, the American Medical Association adopted a policy on body image and advertising that urged advertisers and others to “discourage the altering of photographs in a manner that could promote unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image.”
Dr. Farid said he became intrigued by the problem after reading about the photo-labeling proposals in Europe. Categorizing photos as either altered or not altered seemed too blunt an approach, he said.
Dr. Farid and Eric Kee, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Dartmouth, are proposing a software tool for measuring how much fashion and beauty photos have been altered, a 1-to-5 scale that distinguishes the infinitesimal from the fantastic. Their research is being published this week in a scholarly journal, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Their work is intended as a technological step to address concerns about the prevalence of highly idealized and digitally edited images in advertising and fashion magazines. Such images, research suggests, contribute to eating disorders and anxiety about body types, especially among young women.
The Dartmouth research, said Seth Matlins, a former talent agent and marketing executive, could be “hugely important” as a tool for objectively measuring the degree to which photos have been altered. He and his wife, Eva Matlins, the founders of a women’s online magazine, Off Our Chests, are trying to gain support for legislation in America. Their proposal, the Self-Esteem Act, would require photos that have been “meaningfully changed” to be labeled.
As a former graphic design major, I concur that this or other proactive steps need to be taken. Retouching has gotten absolutely out of control and is actually harming our youth. I’m not having it.
BREAKING NEWS: Angelina Jolie is hotter without photoshop than I will ever be WITH photoshop.
Source: The New York Times
So… this is happening. And it is probably not something I can really afford, but I am so rarely irresponsible that I am due at least one irresponsible act at least every once in a while… right? Right!
So I am starting the New Year off on the east coast. Let’s hope that’s a permanent part of my life sometime soon.
Link reblogged from Enjoying Life 1KM at a time with 90 notes
Enjoying Life 1KM at a time: 2 Years ago today, Nov 29th 2009 →
I was obese, unhappy and hung over. Actually I was still in my bed at this time ignoring the phone ringing from the girl I was supposed to take out on a date. My head was pounding from hitting the ceramic soap dish in my bathtub. That’s what happens when you are drunk and try to take a leak and…
Man, your story is so similar to mine. We should talk more.
Source: lifechangeneededaisle3
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