Thursday, March 15, 2007

the middle middle

My recently photo-obsessed wife has been spending her surplus minutes at work listening to photo podcasts, reading photo blogs, and otherwise living the photographic life. After a week of immersive research into the world of amateur and semi-professional picture taking, this is the verdict:

"It seems that there is room for mediocrity in every medium."

I feel like she has declared the sum total of my twentysomething epiphanies before they are even over. This seems to be what the working world says in compensation to the fact that I am not instantly famous and loved: "you may not be on top, but you are still substantially above average, mainly because the average appears to be far beneath your initial assumptions."

But what does it mean to be mediocre? In today's world, it means to be connected, to inhabit forums and comment pages and to bathe in a constant flow of advice given and recieved. Yes, indeed, to be mediocre is to have friends. And in my slow decent into the median, from my Rice University diving board, this is what I will look forward to-- losing the pretention, talking to people, and making some friends. So what if their pictures are ugly?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

ben, you're too young for this.

Ben said...

I think the earlier I get to this the better, actually.