Everyone Needs their Thing

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Hey guys so like, I think I need a new thing. You know? Like, everyone has their thing. Like besides their job or whatever. Ian’s job is that he plays the piano but his thing is old man cardigans, you know? Or Rebecca is an actor but her thing is that she was in the Peace Corps in Mozambique for two and half years. Like that.

So obviously I need a thing. When I was in high school it was the color green. When I lived in Paris, it was doing my laundry in the sink. When I got back from Paris, it was that I had lived in Paris. Did you guys know that I lived in Paris? Yeah… you did… OK so obviously that can’t be my thing anymore….

I tried to make it clear plastic umbrellas for awhile but I just kept losing them, plus my sense of irony is a little too cultivated to pull off something that twee….

Anyway, here’s what I think it’s going to be. I want my new thing to be: photos of lamps.

Yeah. I’m going to just start taking photos of lamps. I’m going to have a whole instagram devoted to photos of lamps. Except maybe not instagram because that’s sort of the obvious choice. But I’ll put them somewhere. Maybe a tumblr. Photos of lamps. That I take.

And that will be my thing. That will be who I am. Not who I am like an actor or a waitress because that stuff is so surface level, this will be like, that little detail that you think is just a detail but actually it defines me. Like a unicorn in the wild where you can’t look at it directly but when you sort of let your eyes go off to the side, there it is. A fucking unicorn. And you get it.

That will be the pictures of lamps. For me. It’s like when you sign into your account on the student loan website or wherever and it shows you a picture that you selected three years ago or whenever and it’s like STOP do you recognize this photo? And somewhere deep in the recesses of your nostalgia-addled mind, you do. You do recognize that photo.

Because part of you selected it. Your past self gravitated towards it, for whatever fundamental reason, and your present self feels that same tug. Maybe because you maintain the same general aesthetic leanings, but maybe just because your present self honors and respects your past self’s choices. In a sort of bittersweet way. It’s like, oh yeah, my 2009 self did like that sunflower, and you know what, I would fucking hate that sunflower today, but I can’t, because that person I was in 2009 liked it. And you sort of want to go back to 2009 and give that person a hug.

Like how I’ll never really be able to not like Matchbox 20. Or how I got a tattoo when I was eighteen because I thought it would be a good idea to remember that I was the kind of eighteen year old who was down to get a tattoo. And I did. And I still have it. Do I still like it? Who can say! I mean really who can objectively say. But I respect it.

So my photo when I sign on to look at my student loans account, well it’s a picture of a lamp. Because for whatever reason that’s what I picked in 2009. And I see that picture of a lamp, and it’s my student loan identity, and it’s me. That picture of a lamp represents me in that database. And to myself. To remind me of myself. It’s like a mirror. Or a time-warped mirror. And that’s who I am. I am the lamp. Because I was the lamp. Because I decided to be the lamp.

So yeah, it’s going to be a series of self-portraits, really. These photos of lamps I’m going to take.

And that’s gonna be my thing. Taking pictures of lamps. Because everyone needs their thing.