Today I uploaded all of the pictures that I've taken since I got a new camera in January. There are like, 100. No, I do not think it's lazy writing to write things like, "There are like __." Because this is where I talk at the internet and that is how I talk. How I speak? It's how I make words. And speaking of my mother - she's, like, so cute:

So thank you, Past Lindsay, for only spending fifty dollars on an Amazon clearance camera. Present Lindsay admires your frugality and appreciates that you exercised such self-awareness when making this purchase; good job not giving up food for a month for the camera you thought you wanted for a minute, because as it turns out dust will collect on anything, no matter how much it cost.

There are mostly blurry pictures of me drinking different things, which makes it seems like I have 175% more of an active drinking life than I actually do:

I always get to A Thing and think, "Huh. I should've brought my camera." But then, everyone else has one or they have their phone and I realize that whatever The Thing is will be documented to death without me and so I then think, "MEH" and go on about my business. And anyone else's business I think might be interesting. And I don't have Facebook and I'm a shitty blogger so some people don't even get why I bother taking pictures because evidently the only point of them is to put them on the internet. WELL THERE IS ANOTHER POINT TO THEM, and that is to sit on my camera for however long I feel like.

I started to go through and organize them, but I got bored of that and started just randomly fucking around with the colors on random pictures? And I made it through when Diego's friend came to visit from Italy (we somehow wound up at Eataly, which I thought was weird but he didn't so whatever - also, I like that Diego looks like a zombie a little in that picture which is why I chose it if you were wondering) and when BFF got her MSW from Columbia, NBD (what is a VBD is that belt, she made it herself, thanks Ivy League) and then I had to stop because I couldn't. I have to just start over. If I'm even going to keep non sensing here. I feel like it right now. So let's see. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT TO YOU I KNOW.

This is me circa last night. In case you like to picture me while you read this. Or in case you're like my grandmother who is still bitter about never getting any of my school pictures from elementary school. I didn't wear makeup or a bra in any of those pictures, either. Also that is my yard, basically. Picture me being really pleased about it, and the fact that I can look at Manhattan whenever I want to but I don't have to wake up there anymore. I mean I still go there every day but I get to sleep in real life now.

My roots as proof that I neglect myself, too, not just my camera.

RIP Princess House. Y U M, sexy Mexican librarian.

Okay this is too unfocused even for me. rahh

Somewhere between 66th and 72nd a McDonald's pickle attached itself to my calf fat: REASON #239847838 why I don't change into a dress before leaving work more often. (The other reasons are all that I'm tired of people commenting on how different I look in clothes that aren't a chef jacket. Thank you, everyone, for letting me know just how unappealing you find me 40+ hours a week.) At the entrance of Trader Joe's, where I was when I realized that a pickle had in fact stuck itself to my leg and that wet thing I'd felt a few blocks back was not after all a big bug because I am IN MANHATTAN AND NOT LAKESIDE MAINE, LINDSAY, I stopped to flick it off and briefly wondered if the pickle had simply fallen off someone's burger and landed on my person or if I had been the victim of a sneaky pickle tosser hiding behind the fruit stand outside Paris Baguette next to a mountain of limp pickle slices. Only briefly though. Then I bought some flowers and candy bars and came home and ate too many of the candy bars and went to sleep next to Aziz Ansari until my real boyfriend came home.

I have a difficult time believing that you love me, because a lot of the time I'm not even trying. And my mother spent a significant amount of time drilling into my head that effort MATTERS. Like if after I washed the dishes, if one was dirty, I had to wash every single one of them all over again. Which meant I spent a lot of time standing on a chair in front of the kitchen sink (that's how you know kids are old enough to wash things, when they can reach them - yes that's correct, spouting violets now features free parenting tips) which meant I had scaly elbows sometimes from leaning on the wet counter which was not pleasant but what was pleasant was that if I was doing the dishes I got to play my CDs on my mom's big stereo in the kitchen which meant that I got to sing a lot of Backstreet Boys and Best of Sonny & Cher and Aqua (if my friend from the bus let me borrow it) and also practice all of my dance moves that the kitchen chair I was standing on would allow, which meant that what I actually learned was that the worse I was at doing dishes the longer I got to stand in the kitchen screaming about gypsies and tramps and the later I got to go to bed. I have to assume that at some point my mom caught on to the fact that I wasn't quite absorbing the intended lesson and made appropriate adjustments to my chore, because today I am a holy terror to live with and will absolutely THROW A FUCKING FIT if I find a dirty dish in the dish rack. So anyway, the point is, that if you notice me self-consciously rubbing my elbows when a Cher song plays, it's just because inside my head I'm suddenly ten years old again.

Wait, no. That isn't the point. 

It drives me up a fucking wall that you don't always feel like the center of my universe. Because you absolutely are the reason for all of the things. Every weird decision I've made, every freak-out, every last-minute NOPE JUST KIDDING PLANS I'M GOING TO DO THIS OTHER THING I JUST THOUGHT OF INSTEAD, every class I go to and every piece of overpriced grilled salmon I serve to an entitled Upper West Sider in hot pink gym shorts which she loads into her stroller that cost more than the security deposit on our apartment and is big enough to house a family but is only housing one child who is definitely old enough to be walking by himself and is insisting that he DOES NOT WANT AVOCADO IN HIS SUSHI TODAY, everything, all of it, is you. Not for you, exactly, and not because of you either, I wouldn't say, but in a way both of those things and in a better way, neither of them. Because all of it, every bit of it, led me to the place where you and I are together. And that, mi novio, is worth all of the things. 

The problem I'm having, I think, isn't so much that I'm not "affectionate" - I can practice that, I think my story about washing dishes proves that I like to practice things, and I think practicing affection is a combination of the dishwashing practice (important, practical life skill) and of the kitchen-chair-backstreet-boy-dance-move practice (fun, awesome - also, important, practical life skill) - it's more that I have this great big… thing, and I am too small of a…nother thing to properly, you know, thing it. Like I'm a great big stone wall, and what you are to me is a great big ocean, and the ocean is behind the wall. And I only have one teeny tiny little hole in me (GROSS) and the ocean can barely squeeze through it. So maybe you feel like there's only a few drops of water, or sometimes none at all, sometimes maybe the wall looks completely dry, but that's just a trick (because of the very small hole, making things difficult and tricky) and the truth is that there's a whole OCEAN back there and it's actually (get ready) the ocean is actually what's holding the wall up. And sometimes pushing the wall forward. And sometimes the ocean needs the wall to keep it together, because we're a team and we do things for each other.

Are we a team or are we a walled-in ocean? Also I forgot if you were the water or if the way I feel about you is the water. I'm very tired, and the light from the computer is hurting my eyes. I hope you bring me home a pork bun, because I really want one now, except maybe don't and after we go to the movies on Saturday we can go get those mini ones from Koreatown. 

Anyway I left you a present, you'll see it when you come home, and it's never enough but I want you to know that every day that I'm alive you don't ever have to wonder if anybody loves you.