Blog About Photography

Upstart Blog­ger is a fan­tas­tic designer of min­i­mal­ist Word­Press themes and is also an amaz­ing resource for the back­end of blog­ging in gen­eral.  I intially went to this site to pil­lage cer­tain fea­tures from the themes, and it was like falling down a rab­bit hole of infor­ma­tion about build­ing bet­ter blogs.

You can see that I’ve applied absolutely noth­ing about what I’ve learned, but that’s a whole dif­fer­ent issue.

Be sure to check it out.

© Greg Wasserstrom

Today was a beau­ti­ful day, the first real “win­ter day” of the win­ter – cold and white, with huge snowflakes drift­ing down from a gray sky. Today is dis­gust­ing. It’s about 20º warmer, which means all the snow on the ground has turned into dis­gust­ing slush and it’s rain­ing. It makes me real­ize how much I love the sum­mer. I’ve been think­ing a lot about this past sum­mer, my last in DC and get­ting nos­tal­gic. I didn’t actu­ally think I would miss any­thing about that place once I got to Brook­lyn, but it turns out I miss every­thing. I wouldn’t want to live their again — it’s way too small — but I def­i­nitely miss the peo­ple, the scenery, and, this sum­mer, the weather.

DC’s got hor­ri­ble sum­mers. It gets to be about 95º, it’s unbe­liev­ably muggy and the mos­qui­toes are like a scourge — they’re every­where, and I hap­pened to get these dis­gust­ing, enor­mous welts when they bite me. But I love it. It’s just like Hous­ton, where I grew up; a town that gets even hot­ter and mug­gier and has even worse mos­qui­toes than DC. Now, for the first time, I’m liv­ing in a city that wasn’t built in a swamp. Hous­ton and Wash­ing­ton were both built on land nobody wanted; DC because it was donated to by Mary­land to be the Cap­i­tal, and Hous­ton because it was essen­tially where Galve­ston picked up and moved after being dev­as­tated by a Hur­ri­cane in 1900.

My point is this. I was walk­ing down Flush­ing Ave in Brook­lyn on a freez­ing night a cou­ple weeks ago, wish­ing it was sum­mer. And it hit me, as so many things have since mov­ing here, that a lot of the atmos­pheric things I asso­ciate with the sum­mer — the humid­ity, giant oak trees full with leaves and breed­ing mos­qui­toes, my friends stand­ing around in somebody’s over­grown back­yard wear­ing cut­offs and drink­ing beer, secadas chirp­ing so loudly you almost can’t hear any­thing else — those things are all going to be dif­fer­ent here, for the first time ever. Twenty-​​three years hav­ing one kind of expe­ri­ence is a long time. It’s a big change.

The hottest sum­mer I’ve ever expe­ri­enced was the one spent in New York in 2005. Even though Hous­ton gets to be 108º at the peak of the heat in August, every­where you actu­ally go is so heav­ily air con­di­tioned that you pretty much have to wear a hoodie indoors. Here, there’s no escap­ing the heat most of the time. There are par­ties on rooftops, bands play­ing in Prospect Park, trips to Brighton Beach and Coney Island. It’s great, but obvi­ously there’s noth­ing South­ern it. It’s a whole new way of living.

This is a funny thing to be think­ing about on such a slushy day in Feb­ru­ary. In Hous­ton, I would com­plain about liv­ing in such a bor­ing place that doesn’t have sea­sons. Now that I am, I can’t wait for them to change.

© Greg Wasser­strom

I blog day in and day out for three dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal sites now. I’m still at Won­kette, though only doing a cou­ple posts per day, and I started Cyn­ics’ Party with a for­mer Won­kette edi­tor a cou­ple weeks ago, so please check that out. It’s a lot of dick jokes. I’m also writ­ing White​house​.com, which, if you recall used to be porn site. Now, it’s just my writ­ing  which is shitty deal for every­body other than me. Pol­i­tics takes over my life in an elec­tion year, but there’s not fight­ing it, chil­dren. There’s only giv­ing in.

So this is going to be dif­fer­ent now, start­ing with the post that comes next, maybe tonight, maybe in a cou­ple days. I am going make a jour­nal that will be a pho­to­book, and I’m going to write it here. When it’s ready, I’ll lay it out into a book with pic­tures, ad things, sub­tract things, include com­ments, exclude them, put in links, take them out, etc, and send it out to who­ever is interested.

I’m going to start mak­ing work that fits into my life. Right now, my life is impos­si­bly wonkyv and I just can’t swing the Dash Snow impres­sion at the moment.  I’m also going to redesign the blog part of the site soon so it also looks like me and not like a wall in the fuck­ing MoMA.