So basically last week, I had complete out of body mental breakdown whatever and I decided to buy plane tickets to Chicago in September, the weekend between Hopscotch and Bristol, so I could shoot Riot Fest. Because I figure that I don’t need to do anything in October other than coo over my photos of the Violent Femmes and regrow my feet after they have blistered and fallen off. I can recover in October watching college football, etc.

It was a confluence of things that spurred this: my Lis and her Jay considering the trip, THE BEST PAM EVER, Adam, the Carls and all their spawn I have yet to meet, and then the ‘Mats reunion show and also Fall Out Boy is headlining and there’s this thing where I could be three feet from Patrick Stump for a second time in 2013 and that’s just something that I accept in my life, alright.

The past two weeks were really weird. I spent a lot of time hollering at Allie about a variety of things that mostly boiled down to “BUT HUMANS: WHY”, I read a lot of Tumblr posts about Carol Danvers, I shot two amphitheatre shows after having shot exactly one over the previous four years (ie my cred is for reals now), my bank gave me a stupidly absurdly enormous credit limit raise, and it was just a week of … everything coming together. Five years, a lifetime, of hard work and unhappiness and frustration, and it really was like the sun coming out after a thunderstorm. A really, really long thunderstorm. The credit limit thing is the summation of it: I have worked very, very hard the last two years, with varying success until recently, to improve my credit and pay down my cards and save money so I could buy a house. A place that was mine. I still can’t do that, but my efforts have resulted in some whoppingly dumb credit limit raises that I have resisted the urge to abuse.

I could have seen that limit raise and bought a new camera body and the $1400 70-200mm/f2.8 Nikkor zoom that I actually, genuinely, need. That’s what I would have done three years ago. Instead, I metaphorically froze that credit card into a block of ice with two other credit cards and stuffed them at the back of the freezer, so I can keep paying them off without using them. I’ll save up for the lens and buy the $700 Tamron version; I’ll find someone selling another D80 body on Craigslist for cheap. It’ll happen. Instant gratification isn’t necessarily the best.

I revamped my website and I’m incredibly proud of it. I look at all those photos, and I think, I am good at what I do. I even figured out how to get my domain registrar to point my domain to my site and a sub to my blog.

I’ve written more than once this year about how satisfying it has been to finally, finally see some of my hard work come to fruition. Hell, even my post about Matt Harvey is about why knowing where you came from to success is important.

I spent this week in a Wikipedia-and-Twitter black hole of people who were involved in the Decaydance Records scene in 2008. I alleged that Ryan Ross turned into a cloud of bats and flew off to Romania. I’m in love with the world, and maybe with you.