Oh right, February is (eek!) a week and a half away.  I have a bad habit of making lots of short-term goals, then letting time sneak by unnoticed.  Let's see how the New Year's resolutions are shaping up.

1. Boost Words + Images interaction. I've been reading quite a bit about increasing commenting and traffic to a blog, and I'm happy to share some of the tips I've learned.  First and foremost, the key is to make relevant comments on other blogs within your niche.  Check.  Contributing to the blogging community is fun and rewarding.  After all, where else do you find such a gathering of folks sharing ideas about a topic?  The major effort I'm putting forth these days is more frequent updates: you may have noticed a regular full-sized update on Thursday evenings, too.  Even though I have a full-time job and plenty of other things to distract me, I know I need to put the time in to Words + Images to keep it alive and interesting.

2. Promote! Eh, I think my self-promotion needs to get a little more shameless.  I'm also on the lookout for appropriate guest posters and interviewees.

3. Get into some more galleries, grants, and contests. Uh-oh, no images on their way from the printer yet!  The lure of holding new prints in my hands will make sure this gets done, though...

4. Utilize and mobilize a Words + Images mailing list.  Hmmm.  I haven't done nearly enough thinking about this one, but there is now a sign-up page linked from the "about me" section of this site.
   

5. Get to know the Baltimore art scene. Meeting people is so intimidating for a recluse like me!

All in all, not a bad first month of the year.  How are you doing on your resolutions?  And, if you can, throw me some thoughts in the comments.  What are some strategies you use to get people exchanging ideas on your blog?  What are some great ways you've found to meet new people in your profession, and how does a timid person like me break the ice?  Do you send out email updates to keep folks in the loop?  Even better, for those of you who blog: what strategies do you use to maximize your time while providing consistent, quality content (I carry an idea notebook in my purse and make heavy use of Google Reader to glean ideas from favorite news sources)?

In the past, New Year's resolutions never resonated with me. However, a couple years in the real world have not only made me appreciate The Office a lot more, they have given me an understanding of the importance of long- and short-term goal-setting. When I begin a project at work, I create a work plan and a timeline to see it through to success. As the new year begins, why not set some Words + Images goals for 2009? Here are some things I'd like to accomplish:

1. Boost Words + Images interaction. There are many blogs out there – I'm thinking of photo blogs like Strobist – with a very active core of commenting readers. Now that I've spent a year working on Words + Images, I'd like to establish an interactive conversation in the coming year.

2. Promote! Self-promotion is key, and I have all the necessary pieces.

3. Get into some more galleries, grants, and contests. I've been taking enough pictures that there is really no excuse not to do this. My January goal is to print and frame 3-5 images, and I'm putting several more upcoming deadlines on my calendar.

4. Utilize and mobilize a Words + Images mailing list. In the fall I began a small email mailing list. Expect to hear more about it in 2009.

5. Get to know the Baltimore art scene. B'more is a social town, and everyone knows everyone somehow. Since moving in I've been a bit reclusive when it comes to art and artists around town. I plan to get out more and get to know a new group of connections after the New Year's festivities die down.

What are you aiming for this year?

As the initial momentum settles from my current work around home and the domestic, I have a little breathing room to flip through the pages of my journal and analyze the kernels of ideas written there. Now is a good time to take inventory and gather ideas on how I actually intended to present these images.

From the beginning, I wanted to make these pictures as much about words as pretty photos. So far, the following ideas look good to me:

• Combining journal writings with images in a diptych fashion, using high-quality scans of handwritten work.

• Somehow creating a zine to accompany the photos, an interesting revival of an art form from my teenage years. I am yet undecided whether this would be available as a take-home, by mail, or some other way, but the zine would follow viewers home and become part of their domestic landscape.

• Creating postcards from the images and asking people to mail them to me with on-topic musings. I'd like to see the postcards strung up or otherwise inviting interaction from readers/viewers. This is maybe the toughest idea to connect to the base “meaning” of the work.

Regardless of viewer interaction, these images demand a clean, simple, aesthetically pleasing presentation. Unlike any of my past work, I am celebrating (elevating?) the everyday, taking the small details and making them sacred. At face value a clean, traditional presentation implies images of a very photo-worthy subject.

How photo-worthy is my bedroom lamp? Dust clinging to the edge of an old box? Who would put these things in a gallery? At the root, I think this question connects back to the idea of incorporating journaling or postcard musings. What do these pictures show us? Do they reveal different meanings to different viewers based on context? Why are we looking at these images in the first place?

Ah, now that I'm asking these questions I feel like I'm back in art school again.

Just one link today, and it's for my fellow Baltimoreans this time.  This weekend, I'm going to set aside some time to enter the Baker Artist Awards.  If you live in the greater Baltimore region maybe you should, too:

I love my house.  When I wake up in the morning or come home from work in the afternoon, I take note of the color palette, the furniture, the way the light shines through from one end to the other, and I give some thanks for this living space (and the wonderful husband and cat I share it with).

Recently I've been inspired to capture small details of my life in the physical world.  My success was limited at first, or so I thought. The images didn't seem to capture the essence of what I saw. They didn't “pop” for me. Looking at them objectively I appreciate these images in their own right, but I was disappointed when I first shot them:

As I left the scene behind and moved in closer to examine what was actually striking me, I came out with some far more satisfying images. Generally speaking, if I'm not happy with an image it means I wasn't close enough.

After moving in on my subjects, I took a few steps back again and came upon this nice little shot:

As much as I'm enjoying collecting these little snippets of domestic life, I'm coming up with some questions in my mind.  I'm afraid I should be doing more.  My goal has always been for my work to be contemplative and multi-faceted, something I could write multiple essays about if I was so inclined.  I know I have the intellect, so what am I waiting for?  It's been too long since I worked on a serious body of work.  Creating the handmade book to show my best Reclamation pieces was such a fulfilling experience.  The photos were fabulous and I was very pleased with the short creative non-fiction I included in the finished piece.  As I settle into a home that is once again inspiring, I feel very ready to get my head into a new (or renewed) project. 

Then again, maybe I should take my attraction to these images as a sign and give them a little more thought. I can see a very intimate collection of photos coming out of this, and I'd like to do a bit of writing to go with them.

We'll see where it goes in the coming weeks, especially as fall and winter begin to set in. I find the cold months to be my most prolific time in terms of writing and photography production, and I'm very excited to see where my inspiration will take me in this new home and new city.

If you'd like to follow along, I've started a new Flickr set, Domesticity, which I'll be populating with images as I get them.

Following up on my July 15 update, my job search has begun in earnest.  I learned today that staying at my current job is not going to be a possibility due to some major funds falling through, but maybe it's just as well (for me).

I love where I work, but I wasn't altogether sold on the position I stood to apply for.  While it would have given me a chance to prove myself and exceed my own expectations (as if, my expectations always stay one step ahead of me), it might not have been the ideal job for me.

So, where does that leave me?

It's sort of liberating to have that choice off my mind with no effort on my part, but now I must put out my feelers and eventually settle on a job.  Yesterday I applied for perhaps the most exciting one, a position with Teach for America developing video and multimedia online learning opportunities for teachers.  I love TFA and I love video, despite the fact that I'm slightly underqualified.

Most interesting is how I played up both my non-profit experience (with a focus on urban public education) and my fine arts background in my resume.  Somehow, I found a position that utilizes the past several years of my life experience.  For that reason I've become sort of partial to this job, and may actually be pretty disappointed if I don't get it.  We'll see, and in the meantime there's nothing to do but keep looking.

This blog is about words and images, most frequently words about images.  Maybe there are some like it on the web, maybe not.  The great gift the internet has given us is ultimate control over content.  I create the content, edit it, filter it, and publish it. 

But then what happens to it?

The audience is where I lose control as a blogger, and the one major failing I see in self-published work.  Just like the zine scene, which I inhabited during my high school years, a few blogs rise to the top and gain some recognition while the rest remain adrift in the vast sea of the online universe.

For this reason and many others, I see submitting to real-life publications as a necessity to pull myself out of the crowded streets of the blogosphere and enter the more established traditional field of professional, paper publications.

The only trouble is, I am still trying to exercise that same control over content while not relinquishing total control over audience.  I pick and choose, this favorite piece of writing there, this photograph here.  I enter my work for publication only when I feel very strongly about the contest and am really invested in winning: which means, of course, I never do.

It's not about picking your favorite contest or magazine, and it's not about picking one favorite piece from six months' work.  It's about spreading your work widely as dandelion seeds and seeing what takes root.  It's about finding every opportunity that could possibly be relevent and going for it, even if it's not something terribly exciting.  It's about building a list of small accomplishments before trying for the long-reach, dream opportunity.

If there is one thing I want to take away from my short list of carefully chosen contests and publications, it is I need to do more in every way possible. I need to let as many eyes see these words and images as possible and just wait for something to stick.  And most of all, I need to keep working, keep thinking, and keep trying.

Becoming a college student again: it's a thought that rolled around my mind many times today. As I made my journey through Bolton Hill, crossing Mount Royal Avenue on foot and strolling into the heart of the MICA campus, I slipped between scores of art students on their way to and from class and surprised myself at how well I blended in. I looked like one of them, for sure, and for the first time I was adrift in a sea of people like me.

This was hardly a homecoming experience. After spending many months of my undergraduate career wishing I could share company with people like me, after eagerly plotting my escape from James Rouse's utopian city because I feel like there isn't a soul I can relate to in the whole town, the irony is not lost on me.

Suddenly I had to ask myself, is this where I will reach my full potential? Running up against everyone's expectations – family, friends, portfolio reviewers, teachers, even myself -- I am left with the realization that this choice is my own, and I need to approach it one-on-one, leaving all those others behind. So I am left alone to navigate this space in my life and land upon what is right for me at this moment.

My fullest potential may be waiting for me somewhere completely unlikely, a place where I will truly shine. Though I may still look like a college student on the outside, on the inside I already feel very far removed from the university. I question whether I want to fight this inertia and change direction now, when I have so much momentum in such a positive direction. I question whether I have ever stood above the rest and thrived in a place where everyone is reaching for the same thing.

In the end, it's all just choices, kinks and bends in a path that keeps leading me forward. Again I am reminded that promise is everywhere, that is one of the blessings of my life, and for now the biggest hardship is choosing between two parallel opportunities.

I have a tendency to buy quirky garments at thrift stores, only to re-donate them months later and purchase replacements which may or may not be consigned to the same fate. Last night as I was folding freshly washed t-shirts, I began thinking about the history of objects as they pass from one person to another.

A shirt is purchased at a trendy secondhand shop in Pennsylvania. Its novelty appeal for having a foreign-language slogan screen-printed on the front saves it from the purge when I move to Maryland, and it is packed away in a white trash bag labeled “summer clothes.” Later, I realize I have not worn it in months and place in the Free Box at work [http://www.greaterhomewood.org/, wishing it well in a new home.

I'm not sure if someone adopted it at work or if it was taken to the Goodwill when the Free Box got too full. I'm also not sure what path the shirt took to reach me at The Attic, where I purchased it for more than it was probably worth.

Years ago, I explored this idea with a camera. I had just visited a website which I cannot locate now, but was similar in spirit to Book Crossing. Disposable cameras were released into the wild and passed from person to person, with each taking one frame before sending the camera on its way. When a roll was finished, the camera would be mailed back to the artists, if they called themselves that, and the roll was posted on the website.

At age 17 I was even then a lover of words and images, so I began a similar project of my own. In a box tagged with return postage, I placed a disposable camera and a reporter's notebook with specific instructions: take a picture of something very important to you, record the frame number, and write a few words about what the photo was about and why you had chosen that subject for your single frame on this communal roll.

My plan was to present photos and stories together somehow, weaving together a collective tale of scenes, memories, snippets of life experiences. I was prepared to wait for up to 4 years -- I had learned to expect as much from the original website, which listed cameras as being in the wild for 2-4 years on average. My first person was chosen carefully: a coworker at the grocery store where I earned my gas money, one of the quintessential aging ladies behind the service desk, the glue that holds together the front end. I trusted her and knew her well enough to explain my project without awkwardness, but I knew the box would not cross my path before its due.

More than 6 years later, I still think of that box from time to time. Where is it? Did someone open the gift early, developing the pictures themselves in selfish curiosity? Is the box resting in a closet somewhere, the pictures screaming to escape the confines of their shell? Whose closet? Is it still in Pennsylvania? I don't remember the camera often, but when I do, these questions burn in my mind.

Perhaps I should try again, but what caused my experiment to fail the first time? Perhaps it would help to establish a home on the web for my traveling camera, allowing recipients to log its progress from place to place. Perhaps now that I know how to conduct myself like a professional artist and make a project look legitimate, people would feel more accountable when they received the camera.

Or maybe the project could take a different form. I could use it as a study of my workplace, or the seventh graders at the school where I work. People connected by an office, a school, a block, could spin a collaborative story, capture places that had impacted them in their neighborhood. 36 sets of hands could trigger the shutter, and the film would return to me wrapped in plastic and cardboard. Finally, and object that is able to recite its history, its path.

This could be the community project I've been itching to start. It wouldn't be too intensive, so I could start it before moving to Baltimore and before I truly feel I have the time to give to a major project. Over the next couple weeks I will roll this over in my mind a few times. Maybe the project that had me so fascinated hopeful as a 17-year-old kid will be dredged up and resuscitated after all.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the whole grad school equation and how it fits into my other immediate goals. Many people have told me I am trying to do too much, and for the most part I have dismissed them as not knowing me, not knowing my ideal operating conditions. Doing too much is in my nature. How would I survive without that constant pressure?

There comes a time, though, when I do question myself and wonder what privilege has been afforded me that I don't need to listen to others' advice. Maybe everyone else is right. But then what of my plans?

As a rule, I tend to over-plan my life. This would not be a problem if I was just trying to be prepared for any outcome, but I am most often creating a complex, carefully constructed ideal view of my future. With this mindset I set myself up for failure and disappointment every time.

Slowly, I am realizing I have to know how to be at peace with any solution. In the long term, I won't get anywhere by trying to achieve every single goal to its fullest. Everyone knows I can set goals and achieve them. I have nothing to prove but my ability to set the right goals and maintain my sanity.

So what of my plans?

Part of me has always felt I am entitled to an advanced degree: to be categorized in a certain way by my family, to feel satisfied with myself, and to prove that I stand on even ground with my partner if he chooses to go back to school. The only problem is, none of these are really great reasons to commit more money and years to my education. There are many definitions of success, and just as I have proven that success does not mean the highest-paying job, I need to realize success does not mandate a master's degree, either.

I would be truly happy in the MACA program at MICA, and I doubtless have the capacity to dedicate my life to it and be very successful. It is “what I want to do,” but it is one outcome out of many. My decision to return or not return to school is just that. It is not a betrayal of myself, my parents, or anyone who has written me a letter of recommendation.

For sure, I will apply to the MACA program. Until the reply deadline of April 1st, I will keep it in my hands as piece to my puzzle, turning it this way and that to see how it could fit.

But then there are other plans, other successes: moving to Baltimore, buying a house, getting a “real job,” saving money for someday children, settling into a life that promises to last more than a year or two. If going back to school compromises my personal career more than it promises to advance it, maybe I will defer for a year. Maybe I will accept the job that will surely be waiting to meet me at the end of my VISTA year. After all, they say one year at this particular job is equal to seven years experience in the non-profit world. There is no way I can fail to find a good job I will love.

I need to create my own definition of success and figure out what is most important to me. I cannot have everything I ever wanted, nor can I resent the fact that I chose one positive outcome over the other. And really, that's what I'm doing. My life is full of fantastic options. I can't have them all, but I can pick and choose to find the winning combination. After all, isn't that what makes options great?

I've always been successful in life, but the question I am asking myself now is, did I finesse it? Sure, I've proven time and again that I can sidestep prioritizing by working on everything at once. My life is reaching a point, though, where I want to slow down and take the time to do a few things very well. I guess it's not about fitting all the pieces into the puzzle, but collecting a lot of pieces so I can choose the ones that make the best picture.