My 2012 in Pictures: a Montage of Montages Past and Future

From a purely photographic perspective, our family found 2012 far from boring, to say the least. It wasn’t without its share of trials, tears, and terrors, but it’s my fervent hope that the memories of those invigorating events caught on camera should outlast the emotional scars of the uglier incidents for years to come.

Some of the following subjects are from photo parades previously shared here on MCC. Some are from events that occurred prior to MCC’s inception on April 28, 2012. Some of these are sneak previews of photo parades that have been held in reserve until the conclusion of the 2012 Road Trip series, which is not represented in this gallery since it has its very own de facto home page.

That being said: the lighter side of 2012 from my limited vantage point appeared as follows. Continue reading

My Complete Video Oeuvre, Part 3 of 3: Live from Super Bowl Village

For those just joining us: today concludes the three-part landmark miniseries that chronicles my few feeble forays into the world of video. Not one of these three videos is a crowning achievement; they’re the aesthetic equivalent of lower-tier DVD extras. It’s no coincidence that the sharing of this humbling collection coincides with one of the Internet’s traditionally quietest weeks of the year. Those brash young YouTube stars make it look so simple, but not all of us have the knack for that art form.

In Part One, we watched Chinese acrobats from the sidelines. In Part Two, we watched the award-non-winning live-action short film “Bear on Scooter”. In Part Three, I move from behind the camera to glorious center stage.

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My Complete Video Oeuvre, Part 2 of 3: Bear on Scooter

In our previous precarious episode, the balancing bedazzlement of Chinese acrobats was the first humble example of my limited, sub-amateur experiences in the video medium.

One year later, at the 2010 Indiana State Fair I was stricken a second time by the impulse to test-drive my camera’s modest video function while watching live-action entertainment, just to see what would happen. I vaguely recalled a couple of mistakes not to repeat. This time we had front-facing seats; I kept the running time under a minute; and I found an odder subject.

With no schooling or forethought I created a modern masterpiece of bravery and stunt work, never to be duplicated or understood by rival artistes. The juxtaposition of a formidable force of nature with an understated man-made artifact examines the stark contrast between our attempts to navigate our world and nature’s cold-hearted insistence on denying the fundamental superiority of manifest destiny. On a deeper psychological level, the uneasy alliance between the avatars of ferocity and technology is an exemplary illustration of that innate contradiction known as the duality of man.

My thirty-nine-second magnum opus is called “Bear on Scooter”:

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My Complete Video Oeuvre, Part 1 of 3: the Chinese Acrobats

Some people are skilled with video cameras. Some are talented in front of cameras. Those who lack proper training for either side will see their amateur attempts at moving pictures yield mixed results. This three-part miniseries will clarify for the record why I’m not a vlogger, even though nobody asked.

I’ve never owned a dedicated video camera in my life, never even held or operated someone else’s. My camera has a video function, but it wasn’t a consideration when I bought it because I’ve never been a fan of home movies. I was under the impression that the average camera owner dedicates its use largely to birthday parties, Christmas Day in the living room, and grade-school recitals starring children who aren’t mine. Perhaps other families turn their gatherings into elaborate stage productions, complete with musical numbers and action scenes worth immortalizing for future generations. Our family, not so much. We’re big on photos, but minimalist on real-time recordings.

One sweltering August day at the 2009 Indiana State Fair, I was struck by one of my frequent random whims that always start with the question, “What happens when I do this?” My wife and I had been enjoying the fairground attractions and decided to sample one of the live entertainment options, a troupe of Chinese acrobats who were appearing gratis and weren’t prefaced with stringent disclaimers forbidding A/V recording devices. Just for fun, I decided to see what would happen if I tried filming them instead of merely photographing them, using the camera feature I’d never accessed before.

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What Christmas is All About: an Imaginary Dramatic Reading

As a gift to loyal Midlife Crisis Crossover readers, allow me to perform a simple act of kindness: my shortest post of the month. If I put my mind to it, I’m sure I could plan a 300-word post about What Christmas Is All About and watch it spiral out of control past the 1500-word mark…or I could acknowledge the hectic week before me and refrain from siphoning too much of your free time.

Pardon me while I step back and defer instead to a famous TV soliloquy, a more wizened reading voice, and a face that launched a thousand viral placards:

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“Freshly Pressed” Post Saves Earth, Foils Millennia-Old Mayan Armageddon Scheme

Tomazooma

If there were a Mayan Galactus, he would dress exactly like Tomazooma.

One of the first things I noticed when I woke up December 21, 2012, is that I woke up December 21, 2012, a day that The Powerless Who Wish They Were The Powers That Be duly notified us years in advance would not exist. In direct defiance of this premonition, there I was, groggy, breathing, existent, and hearing my wife out in the living room yelling at our dog. None of these things could possibly be happening. Pundits had told me so.

Clearly someone had meddled in the long-term machinations of those pesky Mayans. Who could have saved the day, and all the days after it? Did God smite them? Was their forbidden stronghold located and smashed to pieces by a South American super-hero team? Did a suspicious policeman stumble upon their ringleaders and call in reinforcements? Did their primitive doomsday device slip a cog? Or did their sleeper agents forget to set their alarm clocks for the right time to rise up and decimate?

I was clueless. My mostly ordinary work day failed to shed any light or unearth new evidence to this mystery…for the first half of the day, anyway. At lunchtime I found my answer.

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Midlife Crisis Crossover 2012 in Review, Assuming the Next Thirteen Days are a Complete Write-Off

Midlife Crisis Crossover was launched April 28, 2012, as a creative attempt to do something different with my spare time, my ostensible talents, and four decades of accumulated monumental mistakes and mental minutiae. Though it wasn’t my first blog, it was my first time attempting a blog without an immediate support system or preexisting audience. The MCC experience has been eight curious months of dedication, persistence, failures, sleep deprivation, loneliness, stubbornness, prayer, and occasional wild luck. Over the course of the first 240 posts I’ve discovered new peers, made new friends, learned new things about myself and HTML, improved 2% at photography, and remembered one or two stylistic rules I’d forgotten since college, with several more still repressed and yet to be rediscovered.

Empty Obama Chair, Clint Eastwood's arch-enemy

The infamous empty chair, a.k.a. “Obamachair”

The WordPress.com Weekly Writing Challenge has encouraged us to look back at our year and remember where we’ve been. Even before I began assembling my MCC year-end lists, I already knew which post would top most of them: “The Day an Empty Chair Ruled the Internet” was the watershed event that drew the most Likes, Comments, and Shares (and nearly the most traffic) of anything else I’ve written this year, arguably even in my full thirteen years of Internet participation, thanks in large part to its “Freshly Pressed” status that saw it spotlighted for all WordPress users to see over Labor Day weekend.

For its outstanding achievement of Attracting an Audience, “Empty Chair” is the first and only entry in the MCC Hall of Fame, even though it was about political events and my incredulous disdain for same. If we set it aside in a class by itself, my memories of 2012 look like so:

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The Parable of the Little Reindeer Candle

Once upon a time, there was a cute little reindeer candle. I have no idea who gave him to us or on which Christmas, but we accepted him with open arms into our diverse family of Christmas decorations. Unlike other reindeer, he was white and chubby, but no one made cruel albino jokes or excluded him from reindeer games. If anything, he reminded me of me. Like many other candles, he was made of wax and topped with a fuse. Perhaps he was made to chase away the dark, but to us he was too cute and innocuous to light up.

When I retrieved our Christmas decorations from the attic last week, during the unpacking phase I discovered to my dismay that the attic’s complete lack of environmental controls had taken an unkind toll on the little reindeer candle. The summer heat had jump-started the melting process, no open flame required. His hooves and horns were now deformed. A homemade yarn-and-popsicle-stick from someone’s childhood had melded with his poor, softened, formerly rotund face. I yanked it off as delicately as I could, but several strands and dog hairs were stuck fast, leaving him with a scraggly, patchy, mountain-man countenance. He didn’t look very happy to be rescued.

Little Reindeer Candle

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“Liebster Award” Nominee Ruins Own Ceremony by Forgetting to Make Any Controversial Remarks

Liebster Award!In recent months I’ve received notification not once, but twice by fellow bloggers who were kind enough to think of me and notice my low follower count when brainstorming their nominations for the Liebster Award. For readers new to the blogosphere: most blogging awards aren’t decades-old ceremonial traditions determined by committees or democracy. Most of them are congenial badges passed from blogger to blogger as a way of promoting each other’s talents, encouraging networking, and spreading good cheer whenever our malicious Site Stats page is lying to us about our traffic stats. In my mind, I think of them as Mega-Likes.

I’ve dragged my feet on my Liebster Award acceptance post for a few different reasons. I kept forgetting about it. Other writing ideas kept crowding past it to the forefront of my brain. I didn’t feel worthy. The Internet got in my eyes. The dog ate my acceptance notes. That sort of thing. However, I knew I needed to move forward on it soon, because I may be in imminent danger of disqualification. The Liebster Award can only be gifted to bloggers with a low number of followers. Evidence shows the threshold was 3,000 followers or less at one point in Liebster Award history; as of the most recent Draconian revision, new nominees must now have less than 200 followers. A lucky streak last week left me dancing on the edge with exactly 200 followers for a day, until the balance and my humility were restored when a bitter Twitter spammer dropped me after I refused them the courtesy of an undeserved return Follow. Even at 199 followers as of this writing, my hard-earned Liebster Award is two new spammers away from getting me summoned before a Liebster Award Internal Affairs review board, surely a fate worse than zero-traffic.

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NaBloPoMo Success Celebrated with New URL, Facebook Page, Self-High-Five

NaBloPoMo 2012 Badge

My NaBloPoMo 2012 Merit Badge

Congratulations to any and all bloggers of the universe who succeeded in their thirty-day posting spree for NaBloPoMo 2012. I’m two days late commemorating the completion of my own marathon because I wanted to use the final day to move one step closer to the end of our long, drawn-out vacation saga, which a lot of people abandoned as soon as Kansas returned to the forefront like a much-dreaded super-villain. As for yesterday, NaBloPoMo went likewise unmentioned because I was too partied out to celebrate anymore. I’m feeling much better now.

For the record, NaBloPoMo on Midlife Crisis Crossover remained on target and on schedule, with 31 posts in 30 days that broke down as follows:

vacation photos: 7
things about movies: 6
Things containing Thanksgiving or Black Friday: 4
Revolution recaps: 4
convention photos: 3
random photo collections: 1
Geek Demerits: 1
MCC Request Line: 1
family anecdote: 1
fiction: 1
political griping: 1
NaBloPoMo iambic pentameter: 1

When I began November, I somehow thought the results would be more random by the end. Too late to diversify now, I suppose.

About that bonus 31st post: I usually limit myself to one post per day, but two converging events demanded equal time within the same narrow time frame. I was glad to finish them both for the sake of the readers interested in each respective piece, but it was not the most pleasant experience of my November.

In addition to “Yay NaBloPoMo!”, we have two more MCC announcements:

1. I’ve taken the plunge and officially purchased the domain name, just to see what happens. https://midlifecrisiscrossover.wordpress.com and all contents should now redirect to http://midlifecrisiscrossover.com. The speed of DNS propagation to other ISPs as a result of the URL update may vary, so the site may act uncooperative for some readers for a short time. I’m told this should pass in a few days.

2. MCC now has its very own Facebook page! Readers who Like MCC on Facebook will enjoy numerous benefits, including but not limited to:

* Instant notice whenever new entries are published! (Twitter already does this for me, but my Facebook involvement trumps my Twitter use by a wide margin.)

* The ability to Like and/or comment on each MCC entry without using the Web-based WordPress Like button or comments section! (For those who prefer one set of tools over the other, now you have more options for validating or refuting me.)

* Access to exclusive MCC Facebook content! (Whatever form that may take. Stay tuned!)

* Another “Like” to throw on your Facebook “Like” pile! Who doesn’t need dozens more of those?

As always, thanks for reading and supporting. Questions and requests always welcome.