Friday Night Lights

More photos from my life in 2010 attempts. When I was a teenager, I spent most Friday nights clutching hot chocolate and vaguely paying attention to the score at football games. I haven't been to a game in more than a decade, but Friday night I went to the Aloha high game. Aloha is this unincorporated community I cover. I'm busy working on a series of articles about it right now, and the football team has a kind of rags-to-riches story. Seemed like as good a chance as any to get some good reporting in. The picture-taking was just a bonus.







(This previous photo is of two pre-teens. The girl (left) is asking the boy if he has a girlfriend).

@the Ace

For the last assignment in my photography class, we're supposed to take a bunch of pictures this week (ideally 360 a day!) of life in 2010. After class, I made a list of places in Portland I wanted to go. First up was the Ace Hotel. I kept trying to be surreptitious, which does not make the best pictures. I just don't know if I have the guts to be one of those 50's-era photographers who just walk right up to people and take their photos. And I'm too nervous to ask a person in a coffee shop if I can take their photo. So here is what I came up with:

Every old barn needs some paint

This week's assignment in my photo class was to make a self-portrait that reveals some inner thing about yourself. These are mine.

When I was in high school (and even junior high), I wore make-up. My mother used to take me to the Clinique counter to buy eye shadow and foundation. I always felt so embarrassed, sitting in those high seats as the make-up artist brushed blush across my cheeks. Do it just like this when you go home, they'd say.

I was never good at putting on my make-up. My mother told me women are supposed to wear makeup. If she wasn't wearing hers, she said she didn't have her face on. "Every old barn needs some paint," she said.

I felt like I'd never get used to putting a mascara wand so close to my eyes. I would never know how to make blush look natural, how to blend foundation in so that it looked like your real skin, only better. So when I went to college, I just stopped wearing it. Secretly, though, I always suspected I would be more beautiful if I wore makeup. Some nights, after a few cocktails, I would ask sorority girls to put makeup on me. Outside and done up, people would tell me how pretty I looked.

I don't wear makeup now. But the reason isn't because I don't like makeup, or because I think I look better without it. The reason I don't wear makeup is because I know I'll never be pretty that way. I know I'll never be good at putting it on, at being the kind of woman who would make the South proud. A beauty.

I read your diary

I've enrolled in my first-ever photography class (yikes!) at Newspace in Portland. For our first assignment, we had to take a series of photos of something people don't normally look at (Would You Jump Rope readers might notice that I repurposed this for our collaborative blog). I chose personal journals. Here are some photos from my series. The rest are in a Flickr album.