Lately, I’ve been horribly absentminded, only seeming to center and focus when I’m working on my photos. Speaking of which, I sent copies of the magazine containing my photo essay to a few friends and my mother and an aunt. When I talked to Mom this weekend, she was in alt (isn’t that a lovely phrase? In alt?) about the photos, saying that originally, she thought there might be a couple of small ones contained in an article, since it was my first photo publication. She wasn’t expecting the center spread and several pages of photos.
She thinks I should pursue my photography more seriously, so she’s buying me a Nikon D70 camera. Yeah, I was blown away and in alt (there’s that phrase again).
Aren’t mothers wonderful? And no matter how old I get, she’ll still put my work on the fridge, and show everyone how great it is.
Anway, where was I? Oh yeah–absentmindedness.
If one knows that a man is absentminded, one becomes used to it and does not reflect upon the contradiction until it occasionally doubles, and the contradiction is that what is supposed to serve to conceal the first absentmindedness reveals it even more. For example, an absentminded person reaches his hand into a spinach casserole, becomes aware of his absentmindedness, and in order to conceal it says, “Oh, I thought it was caviar”–for one does not take caviar with the fingers, either.