The 2012 EFF YEAH! list

Anyone who has been around a long time knows that at the end of every year I like to make an EFF YEAH list that celebrates accomplishments big or small, and anything worth celebrating. It's fun to look back at the year and think DUDE. I DID ALL THIS.

In no particular order and with links to more details included where possible, here is the 2012 EFF YEAH list:

Moving to Washington DC
Starting a wildly neurotic and detailed life planning system that I love
Beginning to learn French
Beginning my Life List
Living alone in a bad ass apartment in DC
Incorporating my gutsy wedding photography business
Shooting four weddings and numerous portrait shoots.
Traveling to California, Texas, and Arkansas to see family and friends
Learning to say 'no' and to stand up for myself

Finishing the Joy Juice prompts and feeling AWESOME because of them - I highly recommend them!*
Writing my personal manifesto
Finishing the 101 in 1001 list
Buying a 50 mm lens
Doing a crazy but awesome juice cleanse and starting to take my health seriously
Donating my hair 

Working a random job for a few months
Managing to learn some really cute but fake calligraphy
Sending cards/presents for birthdays, holidays, etc.
Becoming a barista, then starting to teach others to be good baristas

Realizing that I want to be a teacher or professor someday

Deciding to go back to grad school, though it will take me a long time to get there
Meeting internet friends in real life
Reading countless numbers of fantastic books
Starting to save money to go backpacking 

Did I accomplish everything I wanted to in 2012? In short: No. Do I regret that? Eh, some of them. For instance, I really want to go bungee jumping but I'm TOO FREAKIN' SCARED to even book it! I signed up for a 5k, trained for it, then was too sick on race day to get out of bed. But what I did accomplish? Totally worth all the things I missed.

But for the most part, I like where 2012 has gotten me. And I think it's okay to say that. If you were around last January, you know that what comes next in my crazy life planning bucket list system is my goal-setting for 2013. But that's for another post.

Happy New Years, everyone! Have a wonderful, fun, crazy (and safe) night tonight! See you all in January.

*Affiliate link. Just saying. Don't hate lawyer peoples. 

dude. come celebrate with me.

As you guys probably know by now, I'm trying my very hardest to make it as a wedding and portrait photographer here in DC. So when I committed myself to scheduling a wedding sometime during the month of March, little did I know that just a few days later I'd not only do just that, but that the wedding would come up so quickly.

Paige and Paul got married on March 14th. It was a beautiful, simple court house wedding, and I was so thrilled that they asked me to be a part of it.

Since you guys have been so supportive of this dream and of Valorie Clark Photography (have I said thank you enough? I don't think so. Thank you.), I want to take a second to personally invite you guys to come view the photos of the first DC wedding I ever photographed. You can see the photos from Paul and Paige's wedding here. (I've also disabled comment on this post, so leave them there if you can.)

All the love and all the excitement. Live free and do epic shit, right? :)

Announcing: The Life List

As I draw my 101 in 1001 list to a close (5 months to go, but whatever), one of the things on there (#95) was to create my Life List. I've been working on it for a while now, and I'll continue to work on it as time goes on, but here's the start of it. The list of things that if I don't get done in my life time, I'll probably cry about. Things I can look back on whenever I want and review to make sure I'm working toward getting them done. Life Goals, we all have them.

Some of them I'm almost done with (namely, number 1), some of them are way off in the distance. All of them are crazy important to me and make my heart beat faster whenever I think of them.

1.     Make it to every continent (North America, Europe, South America, Africa, Asia)

2.     Get a nerdy tattoo

3.     Get a Thai massage

4.     Get married

5.     Spend one year living abroad

6.     Give ten gifts for no reason, all in the same month

7.     Get matching tattoos with someone

8.     Do sun salutations in New York’s Time Square on the summer solstice

9.     Own a house

10. Take a photo with a celebrity

11. Kiss under the Eiffel Tower

12. Be an extra in a movie or TV show

13. Publish a novel, novella, or collection of humor essays

14. Have/adopt a child

15. Sponsor a child in a developing country

16. Leave an outrageously huge tip for a breakfast waitress

17. Attend at least one event in the Olympics

18. Have drinks in an ice bar

19. Stay in a Hard Rock Hotel

20. Go to Bora Bora and stay in a hut on the water

21. Travel alone

22. Be part of Improv Everywhere’s No Pants Subway Rides

23. Tour the White House

24. See the Aurora Borealis

25. Go to the Galapagos Islands

26. Show up at the airport with just a bag and my passport. Take the first available flight.

27. Figure out my personal manifesto, then live it.

28. Be a photographer for a wedding (not a family member).

29. Work a bizarre job for at least a month

30. Teach a class or seminar

31. Watch all of one year’s Oscar nominated movies

32. Throw an extremely fancy party

33. Attend a masquerade ball

34. Meet J.K. Rowling

35. Hug Rupert A. L. Grint

36. Bungee jump

37. Email/write a letter to five people who I’ve never met but influenced my life

38. Decorate an entire room in black and white with one red centerpiece

39. Move out of Texas.

40. Contribute to setting/breaking a world record

41. Work for a non-profit

42. Go to a major music festival

43. Go to a couple’s spa retreat

44. See the cities where my parents were born

45. Drive across the country

46. Buy both of my parents something they want but would never buy for themselves

47. Move my blog to it’s own domain

48. Create a holiday tradition with a group of friends

49. Interview/photograph someone famous

50. Sell everything I own except the things I would save in a fire and two weeks’ worth of clothes

51. Ride horses on a beach

52. Own a vintage typewriter.

53. Join a book club

54. Become conversational in French

55. Own a photography business

56. Go on a cruise to Alaska

57. See a photo I took in National Geographic

58. Spend a day silent

59. Get into a yoga routine – twice a week for a year

60. Be a vegetarian for a month

61. Buy a fixer-upper. Make it awesome.

62. Raise over $1000 for a charity or non-profit

63. Hike a mountain

64. At Starbucks, pay for my coffee and the one behind me

65. Take a recreational culinary class

66. Pet a giraffe.

67. Attend one of my high school reunions

68. Attend a blogger meet up.

69. Learn to scuba dive.

70. Swim with sharks or stingrays.

71. Spend a day museum-hopping.

72. Stop whining; Hire a trainer and get back into shape.

73. Become conversational in four languages (English, Mandarin)

74. Go on a wine and cheese tour of France.

75. Take a photo in every country in the world.

76. Throw a drink in someone’s face.

77. Swim with a whale and a dolphin.

78. Have black and white boudoir style photos taken of me.

79. Achieve really cute calligraphy/handwriting

Are any of these on your Life List? Do you have other things on your Life List? Share!

The life goals, the long journeys, and the homesickness

One of my life goals was to travel alone. I thought it would be so cool. I’d get to explore a city on my own, do whatever I want, not have to be on anyone else’s time table. Just me.

Traveling alone was going to prove that I was capable, that I was strong, that I was  Grown Ass Woman.

It was and did all those things. For a while.

But there comes a time when you’re traveling alone that you just want to be home. It doesn’t matter if it means going back to a town where you don’t fit in, or a roommate you don’t like, or a job that makes you die inside. You want those things because they’re familiar, because they’re easy; they don’t come out of a suitcase and they smell the way you remember.

My parents just spent a week in Shanghai with me. It seemed like perfect timing: I was eight weeks into my sojourn in China, I was starting to feel like I gelled with the country, and even though I was almost as new to Shanghai as they, I could act like a guide to some extent. We had a lot of fun.

Just a little while ago, we got in taxis. Me back to my dorm, them back to the US. And I started bawling. Seeing them leave made me realize how much I wanted to go back with them. It took all my self-restraint to not say “Take me with you! I’ll sleep on the floor in economy class, I don’t care!”

Somehow, I didn’t. I held my ground. I knew I needed to stay in China a while longer. Alone.

But I’m not ashamed to admit that I cried the whole cab ride back.

I say all this because it made me have an epiphany: The journey to becoming a Grown Ass Woman is like a really long trip you make alone in a foreign country. There are other girls out there on the same journey I am and our paths will cross occasionally, like my path occasionally crosses with other travelers through China, but this is something we most have to figure out on our own. All we have to guide us are some obscure tips written in the margins of a Lonely Planet guidebook from a generation ago.

Some days, the journey is thrilling: exciting people to meet, places to go, things to learn about yourself. Hopefully this is most days. Some days, it sucks: You have to pack or spend a day on the train or you just feel stuck and bored.

Then, there are the todays. The days where you’re frustrated with yourself and this journey and your internal monologue is screaming “Why couldn’t you have just been content at home? We were okay there.  It was comfortable, it was easy, why did you have to leave? Why couldn’t you have just been happy where you were? Let’s go back. NOW.”

It’s a valid question. The answer? Because you just weren’t happy there and then. That’s all. There’s no way around that.

And so you pick yourself up and you keep going. You stand your ground. You willingly go through a bit of discomfort so you can experience some joy for once. Because even though today you just want to hide in your old life, tomorrow might be a wonderful day in your new life, and you can’t deny yourself that.

I threw out a lot of my old clothes in the past two weeks. I was always a t-shirt and jeans kind of girl, a tomboy. I rarely wore pink.

Today, I’m wearing a light pink top that I wouldn’t have been caught dead in just this past May. I bought a girly hat that I would have never picked out for myself six months ago.

It’s not comfortable, but it’s not uncomfortable either. It’s just new, it’s different. Even though I will probably always pick mudding with the boys over shopping with the girls, becoming a Grown Ass Woman has included an evolution in the way I dress, and I’m learning to be okay with that. It’s new, it’s different, but frankly, it’s a little like China.

Not every day is easy or comfortable or happy. Some days, I’m going to want to put on a tshirt and jeans, just like some days I’m going to want to go home. But the important thing is that I don’t – that I stick with the journey, that I embrace the discomfort, that I allow myself this time to travel alone because what comes out of this trip is going to make me so much happier than what I had before I started out.

Experiences versus Numbers

My friend Katie tweeted this the other day: "i'm experiencing life. you're numbing yours. how's that working out for you?"

It got me thinking -- Why do we do this? I know of so many bloggers that have life lists or 101 in 1001 lists. Is it just our innate need to put things down in written form? Are we all obsessive planners?

And really, is there a difference? I'm not not experiencing life just because I have a list, am I? Does having a list take away some of the experience? Sure, it may take away some of the spontaneity (i.e. I know the next 25 books I'm reading), but I'm still experiencing it, right?

I think I have my lists partially because I'm an organizational freak and I'm in the middle of a time in my life where I'm seeking direction. I don't plan obsessively, but it's nice to think, "Oh hey, I should go to New Orleans this summer and cross #5 off my list and finally see that place like I've always wanted to!" Because I really don't know if/when I'd do it otherwise. Honestly I kind of think if I didn't have a list of shit I wanted to accomplish before I died (or whatever), I'd never get anything done. Also, though, I just really freaking love making lists.

That being said, here's an ultra glamorous life list (so far; it'll grow as I do, I'm sure). I don't know how or when any of these things will happen, but I'm going to make them happen when I can.

#1: Stay in a Hard Rock Hotel.

#2: Have drinks in an ice bar.

#3: Take a trip to Bora Bora.

#4: Travel alone.

#5: Be part of one of Improv Everywhere's No Pants Subway Rides

#6: Go to the Olympics.

Do you have anything you really really want to do in life?