Birthday was pretty great. Simple, but good. The day was beautiful and I pretended that it was just because it was my birthday. I biked around in a t-shirt, running errands. Scanned a fair amount of negatives, nowhere near my goal of course, but mainly because I was treated to a great lunch at Sweat Leaf (highly recommended) and then some pals came over, baked a cake, and my roommate ordered pizza. Pretty good. Sometimes I feel like I have to stop taking photographs, because I don't want to live my own life vicariously through myself! Here is a quote from a story a classmate of mine photocopied for me because it reminded her of a discussion we'd had: Italo Calvino - Adventures Of A Photographer - 1955 "... Because once you've begun," he would preach, "there is no reason why you should stop. The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems so beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow. If you take a picture of Pierluca because he's building a sand castle, there is no reason not to take his picture while he's crying because the sand castle has collapsed, and then while the nurse consoles him by helping him find a sea shell in the sand. The minute you start saying something, 'Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!' you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore, in order really to live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second to madness." Sometimes I do feel that I'm surely going mad.