entwined, stretched, cutting the circulation, can’t breathe.

smile. no, stop. don’t do that.

you kill me. you’re beautiful.

intoxicating. i’m drowning. don’t save me.

i don’t need you to save me.

you did this.

i got this.

I’ve always been impulsive.  I do like to plan, but there’s something about the split second decision, with little to no time to back out, that “no time to be a chicken, must move forward” attitude that I loved so much about myself.  I’ve gotten three tattoos on the fly, oops, sorry mom and dad, on the bright side they’re inconspicuous.  I’ve picked up and gone to the city with no plan, just to shoot…shoot what?  Anything.  Everything.  Hopped a train to wait in line and hopefully snag tickets to a Devil’s game the day of.  No plans, just ideas and a why the fuck not attitude.

I’ve stopped being impulsive.  Maybe it came with a little bit more age.  I know, I know, I’m 21.  But I don’t feel 21, that’s just the number my driver’s license and birth certificate say that I am.  ”With age comes responsibility,” they say.  But I don’t think age, responsibility and impulse should clash, why can’t the coexist harmoniously?  Maybe not so much impulse as spontaneity.

This will be a year full of impulse. This will be a year full of spontaneity, confidence, creativity.  I will prosper.  I will thrive.

As always, Sincerely, the new and improved version of myself, Rebecca, who didn’t care to force this post to follow a single thought process.

As always, I’m RJ and if you ever crossed my path on tumblr you can find me there again: rawrbeccajean.tumblr.com

I wrote a bit today. I need to start writing again.

As always, I’m still RJ, and this week, today especially, has been…ugh.

Today I went running with a friend.  I haven’t known her terribly long, but I feel like you wouldn’t catch on to that if you ever hung out with us.  Ever since we started working out together, she’s been motivating me, and even more than that, helping me motivate myself, whether she knows it or not.  I am grateful that she puts up with my whining and complaining, especially today when those were arguably at their worst.  Today I had the bright idea that we should run outside.  We had once before and I enjoyed it more than the treadmill, so I figured it was a no brainer.  We started off together, and as usual, everything hurt and I let her know it.  At some point we broke apart as we each found our own pace.  I was alone in my head, a place I find intimidating and overwhelming when I exercise or right before bed.  At these times, my thoughts have the tendency to race, and they can sometimes be overpowering.  I set myself up for failure before I even let myself try.  But like I said, something happened today that I’m not sure I can even explain.  For those that do not know, I have a teeny, tiny, inconspicuous heart-shaped tattoo on my left wrist.  I got it for my grandfather, Dante, because when I was in high school I would always pray to him and ask him to run on my left.  If you ever workout with me, take note of which side you are on.  I sometimes slip up, but I always try to leave the left side open for him, just in case.  Today my racing thoughts slowed as I ran and held an audible conversation with my grandfather.  I was answering questions no one was asking, I couldn’t breathe, but I kept going, asking him to stay with me.  And the best part of it all, is that I know he was there.  I’m not the only one in my family to experience this phenomenon, so you, reader, can think I’m crazy, but I know I’m not.  I asked him to help me, to take the pain away because I wanted to do this, and in no way am I kidding when I say, no sooner did I ask, was it received.  I cried because I didn’t understand, and it became harder to breathe but I didn’t care.  Finally I was done as I met my friend back at our cars.  Exhausted both emotionally and physically, I explained that I was crying like an idiot because I missed my grandfather.  Without missing a beat she said that she’d bet I was talking to him while I ran, mind you, we were so far apart on this last part of our run that there would have been no way for her to know that.  ”Cancers are intuitive,” she told me.

Maybe it was just me letting go of the thought that there is no possible way I could ever be a runner.  Maybe I let go of the mental pain and the physical followed.  Maybe I really did experience some kind of spiritual phenomenon that helped me change my mind about myself and my goals.  Whatever it was, it sparked something.  It sparked something and now I’m running away with that spark and never looking back.

As always, I am RJ, and I am proud of myself.

Initially, I was a Psychology major who adored everything Psych related. I love sleep and dreams, I love the brain, I love Freudian theories, Pavlov, Maslow and his hierarchy of needs, Erikson’s stages of development. I knew more about ole’ Siggy Freud, his family and home life than any one person would ever care to know. I love it all, but as much as I wish it could be, the passion just isn’t there. I could talk about nature vs. nurture for hours, but where is my creative stimulation? I would sit in my dorm room with my books spread out in front of me and I would think about my future in the field of Psychology and know in the pit of my stomach that something big was missing.

“Writing,” I said, “that’s what’s missing. Writing.” I’d blog to release my pent up creative energy, with RJtalks as my outlet. But it wasn’t enough. I knew I had to break away from the only thing I had ever fought for and try something new. So I went for it, and Public Relations and Journalism with a double minor in Psych and Creative writing was where I ended up. “I LOVE this! I love my professors, I love my classes, I love writing all the time! This is perfect.” Wrong. Being forced to write on a deadline killed me, I was miserable and my GPA reflected that. “Is this how it is going to be all the time?” That’s my problem, I love writing, I’m so passionate about it that it becomes this touchy subject where I all of a sudden turn into this overprotective mother, and beware to all those who try to pick apart my child.

Another minor switch came around (literally) when I dropped creative writing and picked up Photography as a minor. One photo class was all it took. I was hooked and it was obvious. My mind would reel with thoughts of photo project ideas and proposals. If I wasn’t in photo class, I was thinking about photo class. All writing ceased as I let photo hit me in waves, taking me under the surface, and like someone with a death wish, I did absolutely nothing to pull myself back up. Photography makes me sick. It makes me sick in the most incredible way. You know that feeling you get when you look at the person you love? That feeling of butterflies in your stomach, the nervous excitement, always on your mind and able to brighten up your darkest days? Yea, that’s what photo does for me. I knew I needed to know more about photo the moment I began learning about it. So after some begging and pleading in vain, I took it upon myself to just do it. I was told it was going to add possibly a whole year’s worth of studying to my schooling, my parents were not at all thrilled at first but I didn’t care. I took a leap of faith into the most subjective but freeing and creative major I’ve ever encountered and kept myself grounded with the Psych minor.

One of my friends recently said to another, “You know what you want to do, it’s just a matter of actually doing it.” I supported her claim by mentioning that I somehow knew what I wanted to do with my life from the time I was 4 years old, but by the time I was an adult, it seemed like such a fantasy. But maybe our farfetched, fantastic childhood job ideas aren’t so farfetched. Maybe it’s fear that’s holding us back from actually achieving our goals. Fear of failing. Fear of criticism. Fear of someone always being better, smarter, more creative. But we need to stop fearing and start achieving. Parents need to start embracing their kids’ fantastic ideas. If you’re kid says to you, “mommy, I want to be an astronaut.” Buy that kid a model rocket ship and a book on the stars. They say, “daddy, I want to be a doctor.” Break out the stethoscope and the tongue depressors. If you’re steering them in a different direction from what they are telling you they want to do because you want to protect them from rejection, I promise you, you’re doing them more harm than good in the long run. Eventually your kid is going to grow up and know for a fact what he or she wants to do, wouldn’t you love to know that you supported them in their decision from the very first moment the idea was born?

As always I am RJ, and I am thankful for my incredibly supportive parents.

We love you and we miss you always. Happy Belated Birthday,

Rebecca Jean.

I wasn’t going to include my usual line, but as always, I am RJ and I’m obsessed with my family.

According to Merriam-Webster’s definition, the word gay refers to: “being merry, or happily excited, keenly alive and exuberant, brilliant in color,” and finally “of, relating to, or used by homosexuals.” So to be frank, when someone describes any displeasing event or situation as “gay”: 1. you only sound ignorant and 2. you’re clearly in need of a dictionary, thus making you sound, well, like a total idiot. Even if you don’t mean to use this word in a manner in which it is offensive to the gay community, you are still not making sense, because the word “gay” at it’s very core, bears a positive connotation.

As of late, the slang meaning for the word gay really HAS in fact come to mean “something stupid or unfortunate. originating from homophobia,” according to Urban Dictionary. I hear the phrase “that’s so gay” used everyday without fail. Sometimes it is accompanied by a laugh and the follow up, “not your kind of gay though!” While I appreciate the fact that the people around me are consciously aware of their misuse of the word and why it is offensive to me, I appreciate it even more when they take the time to think a bit more carefully about the message they are really trying to convey and when they replace the word with one such as: stupid, lame, or unfortunate. Please bear in mind that the word that should never be used as a substitution is “retarded”, but that is another post in and of itself.

I have to admit (and here is my INCREDIBLY unpopular opinion) I am honestly hard pressed to find people who are not members of the gay community who are not even ever so slightly judgmental of those of us who are. Now, if you’re sitting there saying, “this girl doesn’t know what she is talking about, I am NOT, how dare she make a blanket statement like that.” Ask yourself this: Who are you trying to convince right now? Me? The world? Or yourself? If you honestly hold no judgment your actions and the way you speak or present an argument are the tell tale signs and you have to convince no one. I can not, I repeat NOT, blame anyone for being judgmental as they have no idea what it means to be gay, or live day to day with the knowledge that they are. But you can ask questions, and you can learn about what it means to be gay.

I have found that the misuse of the word gay is incredibly generational, as I rarely, if ever, hear people over the age of 30 using it incorrectly. It begs the questions, “is that approximately the age where we reach a turning point in our lives? Is that when we decide it’s time to expand our vocabularies and grow up a bit?” One could only hope.

As always, I am RJ and if you haven’t already guessed or were never introduced to this fact directly, I am a lesbian.

This was always my thing. I was the one who would wake up in the middle of the night in a panic to transcribe the most random thought, which to some could be seen as seemingly worthless, whereas I saw it as the possibility to start something beautiful. Now, I’ve become all about the photograph, and only the words my images conjure. I’m the girl with the camera, with the 365 day photo project, the iPhone with over 2,000 photos.

I used to be the girl with hundreds of notes on her blackberry of song lyrics, thoughts, ideas, blog starters. The notebooks with little to no notes, but words that came from the deepest corners of my mind as I’d sit and daydream, letting my mind wander and not wanting to stop it. I miss that. I miss having an extensive vocabulary, I’ve become lax, so lax in fact that already three times in this particular blog I’ve had to look up words I wanted to use just to make sure I was using them properly. I’m not that girl. I’m the grammar nazi, the plethora of useless knowledge, the one who uses complex words in place of simple ones and prides myself on knowing what they mean. I’ve started letting my photos do the talking. Presenting a photo and expecting the 1,000 words that are supposed to follow to just be assumed, instead of controlling them and putting them out there.

I guess I’m just growing up, changing, switching up the way I do things. Regardless, I’ve sat here for a little while sifting through these old blogs, some from as far back as two years ago. I miss the way I used to write, I feel like I used to have style and wit, and now that I’ve neglected it for so long I feel as though this is forced and I’ve said it a million times, forced writing is bad writing.

Anyone who knows me well knows what I wouldn’t admit about myself two years ago, so it was incredibly strange to read my old post So wait. He’s just not that into you? Even more so to read Life’s Tough, kid…Get a helmet. where I talked about how I was two and a half years away from graduating college. Now here I am, living in a house with three of my friends all in our senior year of college, sprinting toward the finish line. If I thought then that the real world was staring me in the face, I was sadly mistaken.

These past few years have been a stretch of one long, self learning process after the next, ones I wish I could have spent my time documenting by way of my writing, though there is no use in dwelling over the fact that I haven’t written any of it down at this point. What I have yet to learn in all of this is how to be both girls: the writer and the photographer. They are incredibly different, I feel, though they do share the common bond of creativity. I suppose it’s time to start merging one into the other, and hoping that they are able to make each other stronger and not lose themselves in the process.

For those of you new to this blog, my name here is RJ, and this is where I share things to think about.

It is very apparent from the shadowing on both the face of the model and the wall in shots such as the one below that his light source in it’s entirety came from one side with no attempt to even out the lighting scenario with a light source coming from another direction.

Photograph by Guy Bourdin. Presented by photo student.

Whereas in shots such as these:

Photograph by Guy Bourdin. Presented by photo student.

Photograph by Guy Bourdin. Presented by photo student.

there is very little shadowing, and nice even lighting creating (in my opinion) a more flattering skin tone.  While there is a certain appeal to the first posted image, I feel that it is overall less appealing than the second and third images because you lose details in the shadows.

I enjoyed shots such as these:

Photograph by Guy Bourdin. Presented by photo student.

Photograph by Guy Bourdin. Presented by photo student.

because the light source is clearly reflected off of the subjects themselves.  For me, these types of shots bring me back to a sense of complete reality instead of being able to get lost in a story or any type of fantasy the photographer may be trying to create simply by making the light source evident by way of reflection.