August 12 of 12, plus New Thing #127

Yesterday was a really long (awesome) day. I'm still recovering. It was also the 12th day of the month and (after being a tool and forgetting to participate last month) I took photos for Chad Darnell's 12 of 12 project. I finally got my act together and am posting the pictures, kinda late. (Sorry Chad.)

So here goes.

(wait, but first, I just wanted to point out that so many of these photos are hair related and I think my obsession with hair is strange) (i mean, what is up with my hair obsession?) (seriously) (it's weird) (maybe obsession is the wrong word, but i definitely like to change my hair "look" frequently) (and it's not like i'm obsessed with making my hair look "good") (actually, now that i think about it, i think i know what it is--i've always been a collector--when i was a kid it was comic books and key chains--and at some point i think i started collecting hair styles)

(on a completely unrelated side note, i'm eating frosted mini-wheats right now and they're so fucking satisfying) (and degrassi: the next generation is on the telly and i think degrassi might be the best show ever) (i know i just turned 29, but sometimes--okay, more than sometimes--i still feel like a teenager, and i watch degrassi and i'm like, yeah, that's how it is)

Oh, right, 12 of 12:

#1: brushing my teeth, approximately 1:15 a.m. (note the full beard)

#2: trimming with scissors, preparing for the shave, approximately 10:30 a.m. (note the patch of chin in the bottom right corner of the picture--i actually shaved off my chin hair a couple of days ago so i could try the mutton chop look)

#3: hair in the sink, approximately 10:45 a.m. (this was after i'd already wiped up most of the hair with a paper towel and thrown copious amounts of discarded facial hair into the trash) (someone should figure out a way to use facial hair for the greater good of humanity) (a way to recycle it) (instead of throwing it all away) (because facial hair is a resource that we will NEVER be short on, you know? we don't even need water for it to grow) (i'm just sayin' this is something all the scientific folk out there should be thinkin' about)

#4: after I shaved my face i decided that i should cut the hair on my head as well, but the office scissors i used didn't exactly give me the Kim-from-America's-Next-Top-Model look I was going for, approximately 11-ish. (do you like how i didn't even bother to wipe away the excess shaving cream before taking this picture?) (My Year of New Things is classy)

#5: all of this hair was on my head and now it's in the trash can, check it out!, approximately 11:15-ish.

#6: The Haircutters, approximately 12:30 p.m. (this woman was so funny) (she kept saying, "what did you do? what did you do?" over and over again as she inspected my terrible self-inflicted haircut)

#7: my mom's side of the family is having a family reunion this weekend. there are about 50 of us from all over the country, and we all got together in my mom's backyard yesterday for lunch. this photo was taken sometime in the afternoon between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. (the thing i like about this photo is that if you look around, so many people in the photo are laughing) (which represents my family accurately)

#8, one of the neighbor kids came over with a deluxe snow cone machine, with all the fixin's. this was late afternoon, around 4 p.m. (while i was waiting in line to get my snow cone, i was standing behind my five-year-old uncle Bobby, and i was like "hey Uncle Bobby," and Bobby was like, "hey Erik," but he didn't look at me because he was really focused on the snow cone machine, and then i started to ask him a question and he was like, "excuse me Erik, but could you please not distract me?") (which means it looks like Uncle Bobby has inherited the all consuming family sweet toothe) (i used an "e" at the end of "sweet tooth" just now because our family sweet tooth goes back to the days when random words had extra "e"'s at the ends of them)

#9: After a full day with the family, I went out for drinks with a group of friends, at the Edendale Grill in Silverlake. I'm going through another Amaretto Sour phase. This is a photo of my first (of approximately 7) Amaretto Sours of the evening, taken at 8:30 p.m.

#10: New Thing #127: I threw a drink in someone's face, time unknown, late in the evening. This is my dear friend Eleanor and her new fiance Bill. Okay, so, Bill knows about my fixation on wanting to throw a drink in someone's face and he told me that since it was my birthday week, I could go ahead and throw a drink in his face. I wasn't going to do it because Joe Chandler told me I could throw a drink in his face many, many months ago, in order to check this off of my list of New Things to do in My Year of New Things, and I haven't made it happen yet, and I owe it to Joe, but then I got kind of drunk and Bill was like, "you're not going to throw a drink in my face, are you?" and it was like he was throwing down, you know? It was a challenge. So I grabbed a drink, the first drink I saw, which, luckily for Bill, happened to be a glass of water, and I threw it in Bill's face. Actually, I mostly missed his face and got his chest, but I've never had much of a throwing arm. I don't think Bill truly believed I would throw the drink in his face and he was surprised when I did it. And I have to say it was a really enjoyable experience. We should all throw drinks in peoples faces so much more often than we do. (My apologies to Joe Chandler, BUT I PROMISE YOU, JOE, THAT I WILL SAVE THE DUMPING-A-PLATE-OF-SPAGHETTI-IN-SOMEONE'S-LAP-AND-THEN-STORMING-OUT-OF-A-RESTAURANT EXPERIENCE FOR YOU.)

#11 and #12, photo booth with Aimie, around midnight-ish. (That's a total outright lie, the next two photos were actually taken a little after one a.m., but I want to pretend they were still taken on the 12th day of the month so that they can apply to the 12 of 12 project, and so we're all going to agree to believe that they were taken around midnight-ish.) (The next two photos were taken by John Zalewski, and they are my favorite two photos in today's 12 of 12.) (in the first photo, while Aimie was feeding the machine, we were plotting what we were going to do in each of the four photos we were about to take)

(and then in this next photo, we were both like, "um, what were we supposed to do in this photo?)

Bonus photo: the theme was Homage, and this is an homage to my camera-phone. My camera-phone is haunted, or something. It's got major glitch. (I still love it, though.) What happens is, sometimes it works perfectly, and sometimes it looks like it's working perfectly but then five minutes later I'll go to show someone a photo I just took and the photo will have morphed into abstract nothingness. So this is an homage to all of the camera-phone photos I have lost: