Friday, May 16, 2014

Pictures on My Phone 8/17/2013 and 8/18/2013

In which ALL IS REVEALED and also there is bowling.

8/17/2013 was not a dramatic day in our hero's photograph-taking, but it was a catastrophic one in the event that he, for instance, decided to sell his used phone and neglected to wipe all the data and was concerned about identity theft. Because it includes 3 photos:

- a weird out-of-focus one of an upper corner of a room with white paint and functional plaster-work, with a door open and a blue-ish coat hung behind it. The shot is as though you lay down on the floor and pointed the camera up into the corner of the room by the door (or were laying on the mattress in your newly-moved-into flat???). Anyway, this photo looks like an accident or a test.
- a photo of the front of his driver's license. Things I think it's okay to share: our hero is from Andhra Pradesh, along with about 85 million other people, gosh-knows-how-many thousands of whom probably come to the US to study and work. Andhra Pradesh driver's licenses are functional and not too exciting, like US licenses circa 1982.
- a photo of the back of his driver's license. One other thing I think it's okay to share: our hero is 25 years old.

It's interesting for a second to think about why he took shots of his driver's license, then it's not interesting at all. He was newly enrolling in things, and in a new place, and there were probably all kinds of things with school and maybe his lease and who knows what else asking for identification. He doesn't have US identification yet, or maybe he needs this to get it (although in that case I feel like he'd have to show up physically with the actual ID).

Anyway, our-hero-about-whom-I-know-a-lot, wipe your phone better next time, dude. People can crack your s**t from your behavior on, like, Tinder. Lobbing pics of your driver's license front and back about the used electronics marketplace is not best practices.

Now some good stuff.

Because on 8/18/2013 our hero had a Night Out with Bros. And he took 43 pictures. No way am I describing each one  of them -- already, this whole enterprise has me questioning my use of my spare time. But we can relive the night through them -- if you scroll through really fast you can actually sort of see it in fast-motion, which is neat.

First, they took to the streets and -- either drunk, walking-and-clicking, or careless -- took extremely blurry street-scene shots of Cleveland's hustle and bustle. This is 3 photographs, and particular attention is paid either to a white SUV, the building behind it, or -- again -- the intersection at which it is parked; it's impossible to say.

Then, the dudes posed in front of what must be some kind of landmark building in Cleveland I have no idea. It looks mid-20th century; it tapers up to a cupola then a pointed spire with maybe some columns up there, and it's lit a la Empire State Building: on this night, red light then above it white than above that -- the cupola and spire -- green. It took a little figuring to get these photos correct: there are a couple in which our hero is small, you can barely see his face as he disappears in the intersection before the building. Then they sort it out and he's closer to the camera, looming nearly as tall as the building itself, smiling easily with one thumb hooked into a jeans pocket, wearing a grey "Varsity Fame 08" t-shirt (must have been a warm night). This is 7 photos, all together.

The process then repeats with one of our hero's friends, and honestly both photographer and subject take a turn for the worse. The friend stands, wearing a polo shirt (light blue stripe, black base) that looks to me like it reps either a football or a cricket club, his hands in both pockets and arms bowed out in an awkward/uncomfortable looking way. The shot is from far away! He's not smiling! Also the photographer (perhaps our hero) is drunk/crazy. Whatever best practices were learnt photographing the previous subject have been lost: the first photo is from a bizarrely high vantage point and tilted sideways, as though the photographer has hopped up on a park bench and bent himself at an angle. The next is blurry.

But all that's okay, because now we get to it: 30 photographs of BOWLING MAGIC. Here is the cast of characters of these photos:

-- our hero is not in them. probably he was taking them.
-- shorts and red/blue striped polo shirt guy. A buffoon, sadly. Heavyset. You can see in the shots of him selecting a ball that he is timorous about relating to and manipulating this physical object. And then you can see in the shots of his bowling that this timorousness is well-founded: he looks awkward and stuff and uncommitted in his motions.
-- jeans and red/blue striped polo shirt guy. What a stud. If we made a movie of this night, here's our alpha male. He has a nice face -- we only see it in incomplete profile in a couple of shots of his getting a ball, but it's a nice face with a strong nose but not too strong and you know has a keen gaze. And he bowls with the easy grace of a man for whom it comes easily: there's a shot of him with his foot tucked behind himself in that way bowlers do. There's a shot of him approaching the lane with quiet, certain authority, ball raised ready to go. He doesn't say a lot, this guy. He doesn't have to.
-- white button down-shirt. The aesthete. We don't see his face at all, we just get a few shots of him at the lanes. Whereas our alpha male had the unassuming grace of the... alpha male, this guy's got pizzaz. His leg kicks up almost to his butt as he releases the ball, a nearly dancerly motion. His stride up to the lane is long, as if he's devouring the shellacked wood floor between himself and release.
-- a hot pink bowling ball. They all use it some, and it's always quite prominent when they do.
-- jokesy chinstrap-beard guy. There are 2 shots of him; one of him sitting with yet another dude as they wait and he looks a little smiling, a little unfriendly, with his chinstrap and his pooched lips and his phone in his hands. But then! In the second shot in which this jokester appears, he is facing the camera bent over, his butt facing the lane, having just released the ball between his legs backwards for his shot.

Ach, bowling is fun. I'm not being ironic. There is no sarcasm on this blog. That's one of the rules. The other rules is I'm not allowed to write about anything that it's actually a good use of one's time to write about, apparently.

Now obviously, we're judging these guys purely on form, on honestly also on how I like the cut of their various jibs. For all I know, shorts/polo-shirt guy bowls a 280. But I bet he does not. There's a shot of him, face turned to someone sitting behind the ball dispenser, and the look on his face is full of questions: that guy didn't know what he was doing. The other guys seemed to.

All of the dudes are South Asian, and all dressed sort of similarly. One gets the sense that they are all in Cleveland in a similar position, although it's hard to tell if they know each other before or have simply come together as fellow students with things in common.

The lane is one of those very bright, neon-y ones with images projected over all the lanes of a full moon and clouds, white and blue and sidewalk art-ish. What's that? You want more sleuthing, more detail? Okay, hotcakes. If you blow up any of the images of the guys bowling, beneath the moon-and-clouds graphic you can make it out: Yorktown Lanes, "your bowling headquarters." Damn straight.

Now, those amongst with OCD or who are savants may be asking: yo, 3 blurry SUV shots + 7 hero-in-front-of-building-of-mixed-quality shots + 2 non-hero-in-front-of-building + 30 bowling shots = 42 shots. Slim buttons, you said 43.

I did. And that's because the dudes ate some donuts. The final shot of this dynamic series, the capstone to a night of wandering around and posing and bowling, is a shot (blurry! again! what's up with this?) of a delicious looking box of donuts. It's hard to tell, but from the lighting, the floor, and the corner of the table the box is on they are certainly no longer in the lanes area of Yorktown Lanes, and I suspect they have decamped to some late-night donut establishment by this point, because that floor looks pretty dirty. There is a jean-ed leg with a hand resting on it in the lower right-hand corner of the shot. And then, centered, the donuts: white box. 4 plain honey-glazed. 2 cinnamon bun. 2 cups of donut holes. 2 cream-filled donuts of some kind, with nuts on the frosting in that bit of frosting that cream donuts often have where a donut's hole should be. 

The donuts look delicious.

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