The Problem With Project 365

By now, 25 days in, you have doubtless noticed that I am participating in this thing called Project 365 whereby I take & upload & post a picture every day. Every single day, and we're not going to go into quality control issues here, even though perhaps we should. There is another problem with this project that I didn't foresee at all and it is this: my life is boring. Really boring. Boring to the nth degree and that boring quality is showing up in my photographs.

Every damn day I wake up in the same bedroom (that's not for lack of trying, either) and then I probably walk the dogs on one of the three same possible walks, all of which have been photographed in dim early morning light to a fare thee well. Then I come home and take a shower and feed the dogs and get in the car and proceed along the same exact route (it's all on my flickr stream, taken through the car window) to my decidedly unscenic office where I spend the day looking at a computer screen or possibly going to the occasional meeting or whatever comes up. I then retrace my morning route in the opposite direction, back home, where I make dinner & do whatever for a few hours before getting into bed with a novel and then going to sleep. Lather, rinse, repeat. It's dull. It's predictable. And it's exceedingly not interesting on film.

Then there are the nights that I go out and take long exposure pictures of drinks. Those are getting dull too, as well as reinforcing certain beliefs about me (namely, that I drink too much and hang out in cheesy bars - I grant you these beliefs have a certain, well, truth to them, but that doesn't mean I want anyone to believe them) that I don't want reinforced or cast in concrete or, you know, whatever large solid building metaphor you have lying around. Because I could become virtuous and healthy at any given moment! Yes! It could happen! And I need that hope to sustain me.

So I thought today that I would carry a troll doll around all day and take pictures of it in various places. I'm not sure that that's going to be much more interesting - "Hey look! It's a troll doll next to a computer monitor in an office! Wowza! I don't know how much more of this my heart can stand!" - but it's something. Maybe. Maybe it's something. It's either that or it's going to be blurry, out of focus pictures of my dogs lying down or blurry, out of focus dark pictures of my friends hoisting beers for the foreseeable future. This is harder than I thought it was going to be.