I’m home! The trip was fantastic, and I’ll have a longer trip diary for you soon, but right now I’m still decompressing. (It was a super short trip, but I spent so much time walking and hauling camera gear around—not to mention struggling with my terrible French—that it feels like I was gone for a month. I need time to recover.)
More soon.
At the moment this post goes live, I’m in Montréal. It’s my last day here, and I’m either having a leisurely coffee in that café I’ve fallen in love with, or I’m scrambling to make sure I have everything ready when I head to the airport in a couple of hours. (It could go either way.)
On one hand, this trip has been fantastic—I’ve taken loads of pictures, and I’m probably (remember, I’m writing this ahead of time) feeling incredibly inspired.
On the other hand, this is the latest in a series of disruptions—a couple of day trips in the summer, a cold, et cetera.
I thrive on routine. It helps me get past creative blocks, and it takes away my excuses to not do something, and it just generally makes everything work. But when my routine is disrupted—by a cold, or a trip, or just something else that I need to get done on a deadline—all of that falls apart, and I have a really hard time getting back on track. It can take weeks to build my routines back into place, one by one.
Not to mention: routines work well for writing and drawing, but they’re not great for photography. I can’t really decide to just take pictures every day from 10:30 to noon. (Well. I could. But it would be a lot of pictures of the cat, and she hates the camera.)
I’ve realized that I have to stop relying so much on routines. Right now, I just can’t sustain them, and trying to is holding me back.
I’ve been making some progress over the last couple of weeks—I had some client work I needed to get out the door before I left, and I had a surprising amount of prep to do for this weekend trip, so I haven’t been able to rely on any of my established habits or routines to get things done. And it’s been good. It’s been working.
When I get home, I’m going to have another list of things that need to get done: edit this massive collection of photos (and the photos from the summer that I haven’t got to yet), finalize the site redesign (I’d really wanted to have that done before I left, but… yeah. Didn’t happen), some other things that I haven’t had a chance to think about yet. All of that is going to get in the way of the things I want to make: photos, drawings, everything else.
I have to find a way to make it all work.
1. exploring… a new city. Love.
2. feeling… good about the election results. I didn’t vote for the Liberals (I’d planned to, but they lost me when they supported Bill C-51), but their win doesn’t bother me at all. It was the first time in ages that I woke up the morning after an election and wasn’t depressed.
3. thinking… about the cupcakes I’m going to make later this week.
4. getting… (almost) everything done on time.
5. reminding… myself to breathe.
6. making… some really good photographs. Not just on this trip. It’s been a good month.
7. trying… to be good, but I could easily—and happily—survive this entire weekend on nothing but coffee and bagels. I wouldn’t even feel guilty about it, with all the walking I’m doing. But I should probably eat something else.
8. living… in the future. Not a Back to the Future thing, just a realization.
9. reading… three books at once, and I need to get through them before I let myself tackle the one on my bedside table. (Which I’m really looking forward to.)
10. hoping… that my planning pays off.
I’m off to Montréal for the weekend!
I’ve got a couple of posts scheduled to go live while I’m away, so there shouldn’t be too much difference around here. If you email me, I’ll probably see it, but unless it’s really important, I won’t respond until sometime next week.
In the meantime, I’m going to try to update both Twitter and Instagram with some regularity while I’m away, so if you want to see what I’m up to, those are the places to do it.
1. loving… sweater weather.
2. trying… not to let nervousness turn into anxiety.
3. making… these tacos. And they are amazing.
4. figuring… out what I still need to get done. (Too much stuff, not enough time.)
5. feeling… relieved that I voted early—it was quick and relatively painless, despite the paperwork, and I would’ve hated having to stand in the lines I’m hearing about at the advance polls this weekend. (Hint: I did not vote for the party that made it more difficult to vote.)
6. thinking… about how I rely too heavily on routines. When they (inevitably) get broken, I always struggle to get back on track. I’d like to find a better way to do things.
7. learning… more about old coins than I ever really wanted to.
8. counting… the days.
9. wondering… how I ever managed without a stand mixer. Seriously: Life. Changing.
10. watching… so many romantic comedies and action movies. So many. This is what happens when I come down with a cold.
A lovely ‘personal response to treating black and white as an editing afterthought’ by Julianna Thomas.
