Digital Disconnection – De-friended by a Dog

This morning I posted a piece I wrote for Provocative Penguin, where I edit stuff by me and other writerly people.

 A copy is up there,  and below, for posterity.

We love our pets. They’re our companions, housemates and friends. We give them names. We give them treats. We display their photos and speak about them proudly, and sometimes, we speak for them. As a society, we love our pets.

We also really love our Facebook. We give it lots of daily attention, tell it all our most personal details, use it for communication, use it to post videos of our daughters’ laptops that we’re going to shoot with a pistol because they disrespected us on their wall. Wait, what? Okay, most of us are a bit more reasonable than that, but we DO take it pretty seriously. And very personally. So seriously and personally that we can be excited or hurt by people we don’t even see.

Pinterest – the quickest, most aesthetically pleasing addiction, I’ve ever had.

I’m going to go ahead and do a post about this phenomenon.  There’s not a lot TO say that hasn’t been said already:

But I can’t not comment on it, because it’s kind of insane. For those of you who don’t know, here’s my version of a little run-down of how it works:

Notice What You Notice II – Those Eyes

Inexcusably late, on my bike ride to work this morning, I notice that the graffiti/painting/art that I see on most mornings on the side of the in-progress Artscape building on Shaw, was especially vibrant in the sun. I pulled over to snap a shot.

I wondered how I would incorporate it into a grouping of other shots, since I wasn’t planning on going for a walk today.

I biked to work. I existed in my office job for 7.25 hours + meal break.

At 530pm, I unlocked my bike, noticing a 3-4 degree drop in temperature, and caught sight of my breath. This hadn’t happened on any other day this week.

Notice What You Notice

Those who know me well know that one of my greatest skill sets is to be able to rationalize and optimistic-ize (I don’t think “optimize” sounds corny enough to fully explain the lemons-to-lemonade outlook I tend to force upon myself). So in my last post, I talked about the experience of losing my camera while on my most recent vacation, and how that changed my point of view, and allowed me to focus on new, finer details in my day to day life.

I found, and was inspired by, this stencil in the alleys near my house:

I took heed.

I Lost My Camera in Colombia – A Blessing in Disguise?

I just got home yesterday from a 10 day trip to Bogota and a couple surrounding towns. It was an amazing vacation, and before leaving Toronto, nearly every person sent me on my way with a ‘Have fun! Be safe! Take lots of pictures!’ type of message. Another equator-bound lady and I scoffed at such cliches, thinking ‘Ppff! Like we’re not going to come home with hundreds pictures of this new place we’re going to!!?’

And I took them! I took classic shots of my feet in cute little shoes on top of sewer grates or ground-maps that said ‘Bogota.’ I took simple, wide, landscape shots of the churches and the mountains and the crazy masses of yellow diesel-fueled taxis and insanely packed buses everywhere. I also captured unique, artistic close ups of graffiti,  colorfully painted villas, exotic flowers, and road-side cows, chickens, donkeys, sheep, horses, and dogs. I assured there were photos with me framed perfectly in front of the dark salmon terra cotta walls of the house of Simon Bolivar, and sitting on the ledge of a beautiful rock wall backed by huge palm trees in Parque Nationale, and on top of little bridges over an adorable creek in Parque de Los Novios.  But none of these will make it to their destined profile-perfect internet home; instead, I came home with 45 shots, and they’re all from my camera-phone.