Today, I got home from vacation. Suddenly, for whatever reason I was sucked into my own thoughts. Sometimes I get stuck in my own mind and I really don't know how to get out on my own. So I threw a composition notebook, Jane Eyre, 4 pens, a scissor, my ipod, a scarf, some mints, a deck of cards, a tripod, and three cameras into a bag and headed off. I mentioned in a different photo description that I decided to make my way into the woods behind my house soon. That was my plan. I headed into the back field where I found out someone is keeping bees. There were about thirty of those box things you keep bees in. (I really don't know the name of those...) I had a really strong urge to run through the middle of them as fast as I could. Or maybe I wanted to sit down in the middle and photograph them. I couldn't decide which sounded more enjoyable. However getting stung 70 times would ruin my plans to make it to the woods so I shook my head and moved on. I got to the ponds and then got distracted. Me and my dog, Gage, were walking along when I frightened a duckling and it flew all the way to the other side of the pond. I watched it float on top for a few seconds when it was suddenly drug under the water. I thought maybe it would come back up, so I waited approximately eight minutes before I decided there had to be something under there that had drown it. It definitely gave me an uneasy feeling. Than I saw something skimming across the pond nearer to my feet, I thought maybe the duckling had managed to appear without me noticing, but no such luck. At first I thought it was a turtle because we have a lot of those in our pond but after a minute of observing it I thought maybe it was an extremely large snake. I don't think it was that either. By the time I moved on I came to the conclusion that it looked exactly like a ferret. I later figured out it was an otter. I gathered up my stuff and moved on when it disappeared. I got to the beginning of the woods and I was so on edge it was terrible. I was terrified because I was trespassing, because I've recently watched Marble Hornets and was afraid of being attacked in the woods, because I have this crazy fear that I'll find a dead body whenever I'm alone, and what if I fell in one of the wells in the woods? I didn't tell my family where I was going. In other words, I'm awfully paranoid. Anyway, I was reading an interview earlier of a photographer who said when they began self portraits they were extremely uncomfortable and awkward infront of the camera but now they feel natural and relaxed. I want to get to that point. I'm not as uncomfortable as I used to be, but I still need a lot of improvement. So that was my main focus of the day, self portraits. So I got to the begining of the woods and shamefully tried to buy myself time. I took some shots at the edge of them. I set up my tripod and took about 13 different ones. All sorts of them, just to try to be more comfortable and try different things. This one was my favorite because the self timer had quit about a second before this and for whatever reason the camera went off and took an extra shot. Therefor, this wasn't posed at all. Anyway, after my self portraiting I packed up again and headed in. It wasn't easy. There isn't actually an entrance into the woods that I know of. Everything is terribly overgrown so I was just treading through overgrown grass and ferns taller than myself. It was extremely difficult. I got about three minutes in when I hit blackberries. I was in shorts and that didn't seem like a good idea, but against better judgement, I continued. After another minute or so I hit a barbed wire fence. It looked like there might have been a clearing just a bit beyond that but I used the fence as my excuse to turn around so I wouldn't get caught trespassing, or eaten by slender man, or find a corpse, or fall in a well. I've realised I'm beginning to see life outside of myself. As I stood staring into the woods I imagined the shot of what I looked like. I walked back with my head low sad that I couldn't get into the woods, or sad that I didn't actually try all that hard to get into the woods, with my props and cameras and tripod in hand. Dirt puffed about from under my feet with every step I took and again I imagined what that shot would look like. I thought about setting up my tripod and camera and resuming my position to see, but then I remembered I wouldn't see myself carrying said tripod and camera. I figured I needed an extra tripod and another camera, but then I realised I would want to photograph myself lugging around two tripods and four cameras. I just can't win. I guess you can't always get the shot. Ha. But what I'm really trying to say was that this day didn't settle any of my wanderlust, I still want to go into the woods, Marble Hornets has completely terrified me (go watch it on Youtube. Really, you'll be scared for weeks.), there's an otter in my pond, and I view the world different than I did last w

"Is that a boy or a girl?" This remark, usually addressed to my back from building sites as I was about to turn a corner, started to get badly on my nerves. It was the speaker's conviction of his own originality and his confidence that you had never before heard this witticism that made it so annoying. Walking past building sites, road works and other places where men of the blue-collar persuasion were to be found became quite a ordeal. I had just left school and was working for a linen hire firm. Every Friday I delivered to a factory which made moulded rubber products at Hawthorn Trading Estate near Corsham. My arrival was the signal for the entire workforce to down tools, wolf-whistle and call out humorous remarks as I walked through the factory. The central premise of these remarks ..."Hello Rosebud" and suchlike... was that the speaker had mistaken me for a young woman. I think my visits must have been the highlight of their week. I had led a sheltered life and was rather naive. I had never heard of latent homosexuality and it did not occur to me until years later that certain of these "alpha male" types might have enjoyed my epicene looks rather more than was normal in fully heterosexual men. Long hair on men had just reappeared for the first time since the 18th century and a "shock of the new" effect was to be expected. I have always been convinced that the long hair of the 1960s was a reaction by my generation to the hated "short-back-and-sides" haircut forced upon us by our parents during the 1950s. My haircuts were particularly noticeable and I hated the "scalped" look which seemed to change the shape of my head after an especially severe short-back-and-sides. I also hated Brylcreem, which the barber routinely slapped on your head unless you said you didn't want it. "Painfully shy", I was too timid to speak up and give instructions to an adult. At night the fresh stubble on your temples and the back of your neck rasped against the pillow, and in the morning there was a greasy grey stain from the Brylcreem. The short-back-and-sides was not really a hairstyle at all ...rather the absence or negation of a style. It was a simple removal of surplus growth, very much like clipping your toenails. It was not a thing that offered scope for interpretation or self-expression. It was the same for everyone. The subliminal message seemed to be that we working-class children had no business to think of ourselves as individuals at all. We had a position in life's scheme, ordained and unalterable, and we should not get "fancy ideas" above our station. But with puberty comes the process that psychologists call "individuation". We step out from behind our parents and become autonomous human beings. This is almost invariably a cause of domestic conflict. The War of the Hairstyles began when I was about 14. At first there was a kind of propaganda campaign, but the enemy was stubborn and I soon adopted guerilla tactics. I managed to prolong the intervals between visits to the barber and refused his offers of Brylcreem ...often eliciting a tut-tut and a shaking of the head. I also began to request a trim only, or what was called a "square cut", in which the hair at the back of the neck, instead of being buzz-shaved to stubble, was left about a sixteenth of an inch long and trimmed to a square shape. This gave the regrowth a tiny advantageous head start. One day I trousered the half-crown I had been given and, instead of going to Mr Perry's salon in Staple Hill, went to one of the ruinous houses in Berkeley Road. I had brought my mother's make-up mirror and a pair of scissors. Propping the mirror up on a shattered mantlepiece, I began hacking away at my hair. Amazingly this strategem worked. "Oh, that looks much better", mooed my mother when I got home. Open warfare was enjoined one day when I was 15. My father, exasperated beyond endurance, wordlessly marched me down the road to "get a proper haircut". By now Mr Perry had retired and we patronised "Joseph", conveniently just down the road from our house in North Street. But it was a Saturday afternoon and "Joseph" only worked a half-day. My father was not deterred and we continued to another establishment in Downend. It was packed and my father, not himself in need of a cut, soon got tired of waiting. He stood up, gave the man his two bob plus a small gratuity and, indicating me, loudly said, "Give him a good old-fashioned short-back-and-sides". The fifteen men sitting around the room looked up from their copies of Titbits, Weekend or Reveille, turned towards me and smirked. "Bob's your uncle", said the barber. It was a humiliation which still has the power to wound. But of course, time was on my side. My parents would not be able to go on organising every d