Oh, photos

Having just gotten a digital camera this summer, I realize I'm a little late to the party of online photo sharing. (Fashionably late, of course.) I knew about sites like Ofoto and Snapfish, but never took the time to learn how to use them, and frankly, I hadn't taken any pictures so fabulous that I felt the need to share. Until now, I've been satisfied uploading to my desktop, posting to the Bravenet photo album at right, and emailing select photos to friends on occasion.

Then, Saturday night was Tracy's birthday. It was a great time and we all acted wildly immature, probably in denial of or maybe in spite of the fact that 30 is staring us in the fine-lined face. I took some great pictures, which I've posted at right, and finally took the time to learn all about Ofoto, a process which happily took all of 4 seconds. (The first thing I learned is that it's called Kodak Gallery now. Oops.)

For $2.15 ($1 of which was postage) I was able to order prints so I can continue adding to my library of old-fashioned, scrapbook-like albums. (For the record, I have about 12-15 albums full of photos here, and another three at my mom's house that were too heavy to have ever made the move. I really like pictures.) Then, as I was browsing through the gallery I realized that I had access to old albums that friends had shared with me throughout the years. I spent a good 45 minutes browsing through these, laughing at memories long since forgotten.

One of my favorites was this from 2002:


















This would be me celebrating my third Halloween in that pink wig, along with my friend Rob who is paying no attention to me whatsoever. I think we were sharing the couch with a large bottle of Belvedere. Sadly, I lost the pink wig that night.

That was a great party actually, and everyone had the most creative costumes:

Then I came across this one, from Society5 in 2003:

That's Maria, Trista, and Kris in front, and me whispering a very important secret (I hope that was all I was doing) to my friend Brendan in back. Along with this album I have a series of albums from some guy named Josh who I'm guessing must have promoted these parties at the time. They all feature the same groups of people - or people that all looked the same - in some sceney bar enjoying the NYC scene. I remember that this was around the time that we started to tire of that scene. I was surrounded by my best friends, but we had all been to one too many post-Syracuse parties and the formula was starting to wear thin. Either the city was getting old, or we were.

Finally, this is one of my all-time favorites:

That's me and Kris on the back porch of our beach house in Point Pleasant. We were taking a break from House Olympics, an all-day affair that had us competing in three-legged races, the dizzy bat, an obstacle course, and water balloon fights. It was Labor Day weekend, we were both miserable, and I decided the next day that, rather than face another summer at the Jersey Shore, I needed to move to LA.

Six months later, I did.