365 Days of My Life
I finally got the roll of film that was in the Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim back, and thus I was able to finish off my My Every Day set on Flickr last night. I then stayed up past midnight clicking through each and every photograph in the set, reading the copious notes under some of them, wondering at the choices I made to represent certain days when there were 20 or 30 or 100 photos to choose from, lamenting that other days had only a single grainy cell phone or webcam photo to mark their passing (though sometimes that cell phone photo could not have summed up the day more perfectly).
I'd seen most of the set before as a slideshow, but it was really only in going through page by page and seeing the descriptions, the tags, the dates, the titles, and the context that I got a feel for what the last year has been like for me. All the yummy meals, all the crazy travel, the deep depression and feelings of inadequacy when it came to work and parenthood, the wonderful family adventures, watching the Beaner grow up, go to school, become obsessed with Blues Clues. Our first whole weekend away together without the Beaner, the Beaner's first day of school, his first time on ice skates—it's all there.
I know I could look at my entire Flickr stream to get a sense of where I've been, and the bi-weekly Photojojo TimeCapsule e-mails help, too, but there's something about the editing of my year into a single photo a day that's really compelling. I can see why so many people start 365 projects each January (or 366 projects, as the case may be this year). I plan to take a break before starting up another project like this—maybe a long break, maybe a short one, I'm not sure—but I *will* do it again.