To comment on the above photo, I tried racking my brain to summon just one word, and use that word to describe the photo. The first word I came up with is “disappointment”. Really, it’s a cold day, little Susie is all psyched to see the elephants she clearly is a big fan of. She’s got her elephant ready, her jacket to fight off the biting cold while she stares at the world’s largest mammals (unless they’re Asian elephants, which aren’t as cool imo). One can even speculate she intended to have a little Night at the Museum episode where she’d spend the night in the elephant house hoping she could see them doing people stuff like drinking tea or paying taxes. Who knows, she could’ve caught a glimpse of the majestic ritual of pachydermic parturition; the female lies down, knowing it is time, closes her eyes and musters all the force in her body to give birth. Seconds later, a stork appears carrying a baby elephant with overgrown ears.
But no.
She couldn’t see any of those wonderful things because it was closed. Her parents didn’t have the internet, so she couldn’t have checked online that the house would be closed all winter. Instead of admiring those beautiful wrinkly creatures, she gets to stare at a door that doesn’t even use its trunk to drink (the door IS made of one, a TREE trunk. Hehe.He.) She stares at it, sad, disappointed. I’m not sure if the photographer was one of her parents or just a random guy. Either way, they decided this little girl’s crushed dreams would make a smashing photo. Jerk.
In all seriousness, disappointment is part of our lives. I personally try to avoid it as much as I can by lowering my expectations to the level of having none. I do a pretty good job at maintaining these expectations (or lack thereof), but once in a while, I can’t help but get excited, and BAM, crushed.
However, looking back on it, there were very few times were the feeling of disappointment carried on for too long. I either sucked it up and carried on like the -alleged- adult I am, or, ooor, I got something better. Things always work out for the best. Depending on what you believe, call it what you want, be it, God, luck, Fate, the Universe, but I believe that things always work out in the end. After all, and by the words of one of our world’s greatest thinkers and role models, Katy Perry:
“After a hurricane comes a rainbow.”
So maybe, this little girl walked away sad and upset from the elephant house and discovered later that she was allergic to elephants, and her not going saved her life. Maybe, mayyyybe, she discovered that her true passion in the world of pachyderms lied in hippos and not elephants. I don’t know, maybe she just forgot about it because she’s like 5 years old. The point is, disappointment is always there. It’s like ketchup in a McDonald’s burger. No matter how many times you asked “without ketchup”, it’ll always be there somehow. The trick is to learn to deal with it; either bite right into that delicious piece of plastic with a smile on your face, or just scrape it off the burger if it bothers you so much and eat it, occasionally tasting the little bits of ketchup that are left but telling yourself “hey, that’s life”. Or maybe you discover that you liked ketchup all along. I don’t know, this analogy makes no sense.
CUT!
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Notes:
Hi!
I haven’t written a post in a while. In fact, it’s been several hours since my last post (about 2800 of ’em), and I thought ‘hey, I’ve got work tomorrow and it’s 11:30pm, so what the hell.’
That is why I have decided to implement an idea I had several weeks ago to try and keep this blog active. I’ll call it Project 1839, the year where photography as we know it was born.
I took the preview photo from the “History in Pictures” Twitter feed (@Historyinpics), which provide some really cool photographs from around the world, most of which are black and white photos taken any time from the mid 1800s to the early 2000s.
I’ll borrow some old photographs found on the internet and just talk about them. It’s an exercise for me to keep posting here, and hopefully will create some interesting content. The posts won’t be as long as I usually make them, so they’ll be short and sweet, not unlike Danny DeVito.
Edit: Lol.
Neatly Random 