6:26pm:
“Happy New Year’s, man,” he says.
“Same to you.”

We hang up. My thoughts are happy, knowing that my pizza will be here in an hour. Mexican pizza. And Mayday and I will get to enjoy it together. Two weeks left here, and I move out.

I worry about eating, knowing I’m going to be doing it all over again in four hours. Open bar. Thirty friends. Excited. Nervous. Nervous.

All night. Good times. They should be.

Tomorrow will be a new year.

This is my last day here at the ‘rents place for the holidays. It’s been nice. Pleasant. It’s been good to see my parents. And family. Some funny moments, some awkward moments, some tense moments. I’m flying home tonight and I’ll be moderately glad to be home. There is a lot I’m excited about: upcoming shoots, working more with Christie, seeing my friends. There is something I’m not excited about: I’m moving out of the place I’ve been staying for the past few months. I’m sad to report that the past couple of days I’ve been somewhat stressed about that. I don’t like stress and I try to avoid it at all costs. However, I have to move.

I don’t know yet exactly where I’m going to go. Ideally, a place would open up where I am. But I don’t see that happening. But then, it might be time to move on from there. I’m just going to have to figure it out. Soon.

My mom celebrated her 70th birthday and, at a gathering over at my aunt’s place, it struck me that my folks and their siblings are getting really old. I added up (estimated) the ages of the people in the room before we left and they were closing in on a millenia. And it dawned on me that 20 years from now, most of them will be gone. Unfortunate. They’re good people. I like my relatives. They have good parties.

I got a really nice email from an old friend with whom I had had a falling out. I was really glad to get that. I hope that we can be friends once more. Holidays are good for that kind of thing, too.

I got to see Alec and Zach over the holidays. That was my biggest reason for coming here. I only got to see them for three days but it was a perfect three days. Except for when we got bored.

Saw Ninja Assassin together. And I’d just like to say….
Complete.
Ninja.
Awesomeness.

We laughed. Buckets and buckets and buckets of blood. And Ninja-ness. Such a good weekend. Being with them, it was as if we had only spent a day apart. I’m so lucky to have the relationship with them that I do. I’ve never worried about who they would become. And every day, I’m more and more proud of them. They’re suuuuuch good kids. And now they’re 15 and 18. So I guess not kids so much. I love them.

I’ll be glad to see them more next year.

This week, I’m going to be holed up with the exception of getting out to meet another photographer, going to have drinks with an old friend, and then NYE in Hollywood. I’ll just be glad to be back. I’ll be really glad when I’m settled in a new place and can put this nervousness, uneasiness, and tension behind me.

But I’ll be more glad than anything when Alec and Zach come down to visit. They have, to borrow from Ninja Assassin, “special heart.”

Soon.

An odd link showed up in my stats today on Flickr. So I visited the page that brought the viewer to my stream. This was it. Click to enlarge.

This is the full quote at the bottom of that page.

Listen, I’m not here to preach from my pulpit, but to whoever got run through this filter, I hope everything works out for you. You know, with the whole lusting and guilt and all. Since you obviously bypassed the filter to get to my stream, I hope you don’t feel guilty. I hope, too, you don’t hate me. I’m really not evil. I’m actually rather good. People can testify. I have witnesses!

But you know, if you do hate me or feel guilt or whatever (and this kind of applies to everyone), well, that’s your deal. I just hope you can sort it all out in your head. Not to be a wiener, just you know… your deal, not mine.

(Zoinks. I just went to the home page of CovenantEyes, which I am NOT linking to, and holy hell. I’m like their worst enemy, providing all kinds of temptation!!!)

(The song is actually Sadeness by Enigma, but whatever… it showed up on youtube in a search for lust. And I like this more than Principles of Lust anyway.)

So Flickr. Let’s talk about it. You know, I had all of that trouble where my account got deleted and whatnot and so I’ve been building it up again from scratch. And I’ve been watching my numbers grow again.

Um… I’ve had my numbers wrong for a long time apparently. It finally dawned on me a short while back that the number I’ve been reporting as my views hasn’t really been accurate. I was saying I had 1.6 million views. That was actually wrong. Well, not technically wrong. But a worthless number. Allow me to explain. (It won’t matter to you, but it matters to me. )

Flickr provides the ability to look at your stats. I’ve known this from day one. However, I’ve always reported the number found on my page displaying my photostream like in the screenshot I took a short while ago (see below – click to enlarge).

When my account was cleared out, I was watching that number as I always had. 200 views. 483 views. 1000 views! Weeeeeeeee! But like I was saying Flickr makes some stats available within your account. They keep a running graph of your aggregate views. When my account was wiped, strangely, they kept a running tally of every stat from before EXCEPT views on the photostream. So the 1.6Million stat count, the number I was seeing reported on top of my photostream, was reset to zero. All of the other numbers stayed the same and I kind of just ignored them since I never really paid attention to that stat page anyway.

As I began to re-upload photos to my emptied out account, it dawned on me that I had been missing something. And paying attention to the wrong stats. Or rather, the stats I was paying attention to were irrelevant to me.

In their aggregate stats, Flickr reports on the number of views on the stream itself (what I’ve been discussing), the number of views on sets that you create, the number of views on collections you create, and most importantly, the number of views on your photos/videos. And they sum it all up for an aggregate view count.

I’ve been incorrectly assuming that the number reported (that I’ve been reporting) was the number of views on my individual photos. Because to me, that’s the only number that matters. To me, views on a stream is too abstract a concept that doesn’t express any meaningful statistic. A person can view your stream for any number of reasons without having any interest. However, a view on an individual photo or video is concrete. It shows dedicated interest.

Check the screenshot below and you can see what I’m talking about. The number circled (what tipped me off) is the same number that’s reported on my photostream page as seen above (with a slight difference in time I snapped the screenshot, hence the slight variation).

I wish I had paid attention more closely to these numbers when my account was re-activated. I wish I knew what my starting view count on photos was when I began this time around.

(Flickr provides some additional daily stats below that of views/favorites/comments on individual photos, the start of which you can see in the graph above, which I’ve always looked at and found interesting and that data is something I’d like to analyze more than on a day to day basis. But more on that below.)

Because of this mildly retarded revelation, I discovered that Statr which I was previously using, was reporting the same number. (Since my account was deleted, statr stopped tracking the numbers even though the account is the same; you can see the report date on the graph they produce.)

The plus side to all of this is that I’m approaching a good number and that number is 5 million. While Flickr reports that I have an aggregate view of 5.7M, the number includes all the other numbers and it’s just too aggregate-y to mean anything. So 5 million.

What I would LIKE to do is use Flickr’s API to build a utility that breaks down the stats more accurately and meaningfully for me. I like how Flickr’s stats keeps track of view counts, but the history is hard, if not impossible, to manage. I’d like to be able to see historically something like, “Ok, I posted the photo on this day and it took 3 days to get 50 favorites versus this photo which took 50 days to get 50 favorites.” I can look at the photos, look at what days I posted, look at the difference in photos, and see what works and what doesn’t. What is visually appealing in my photos? I want meaningful stats.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not a factory of photos but stats can give insight even into something like photos and their publication that are impossible to guess. And hopefully, in combination with everything else, it will help me to become more aware as a photographer of what it is that I’m doing when I take a photograph.

Anyway, there you have it. I feel better.

Oh. My Flickr account is here in case you want to see. But it’s substantially less than what you see here on ipanemic (or on my other site).

So I came away from the party my parents had for their Sunday school class the other night relatively unscathed. No bolts of lightning. No stoning. I did nearly choke to death while talking to one of the THREE pastors that was here. But other than that, it went rather smoothly.

Rock Star Moment #1
Prior to dinner, one of the younger pastors and I were standing around the bar (no alcohol – simply a term for that place where people normally keep and serve their alcohol), and we were talking about something or other. I was highly distracted, concerned with the hor d’oeuvres spread out before us, namely the little stuffed mini-croissants. Pigs-in-a-blanket. Mmmmmmmm. Not that I’m overly crazy about them, but they seemed like they would be so sinfully delicious that I had to get my hands on one.

Anyway, this fellow was talking, I was listening, and trying to work my way closer to the little porkers. He had advised I try the caramelized brie, but my eyes were on the prize. I would get back to the brie later. With a toothpick, I devilishly descended on the doughy delight. I bit in. The conversation continued.

And then I realized that I, at the age of 40, apparently haven’t learned to properly chew my food. I don’t know what inspired me to try to swallow the whole thing. But I tried. Actually, I just tried to swallow too soon. The hor d’oeuvre became lodged within my throat.

The pastor kept talking and, realizing my predicament, I put a finger up as if to say, “Hold on a sec, I’m choking. I’ll be right back.” Without a word, I bailed. I took care to exhibit social graces, not knocking anyone over, as I sprinted out of the room. Social skills: I has them.

At first, I simply went into the dining room, thinking I can swallow it in there because, well, there was nobody in there. Made sense.

Nope. So I headed for my cave in the back of the house.

Looked in the mirror. Throat looks normal. My visual assessment of the situation wasn’t stopping me from choking, either. Well, this isn’t good. Man, it’s going to suck if I go down because of a pig-in-a-blanket. I always pictured myself burning on a cross above a Walmart somewhere. Or something at least a little dramatic. Not choking on a pig-in-a-blanket.

I felt like I had an eating disorder for a moment. Decided that purple isn’t really my color. Moments later, I decided also that having an eating disorder really isn’t for me.

When I went back out, my father was talking with the pastor and another older fellow. “No, we already met,” I tell my dad as he tries to introduce me. I wasn’t sure if the pastor knew I had been choking so I went on to explain that that’s what happened. When I bailed. Choked on the pig-in-a-blanket thing. To my father, to the pastor, and to this other guy, I explained this. Not really as awkward a moment as you might think. As if they had all been there before.

Rock Star Moment #2
Later, I was on the phone with a friend of mine and had been outside talking to her for a while, comfortably smoking cigarettes and laughing. Back in touch with what I knew to be reality. The conversation carried on for a while and when I went inside, everyone was seated and eating dinner. Crap. I didn’t know what to do. Was I to just grab a plate and go to the back? My nephews were sitting in the TV room in the back corner of the house. My sister was sitting at the grown-up table (the main one, no less) and there were two empty seats there. Looks like I’ll be dining with the adults.

I had met most of the people at the table so I could pretty much skate by without having to say much. Then, an older woman (and I don’t know why I make that distinction since they were ALLLLLL older) at the far end of the table looked at my mom and said, “I don’t think I know that young man sitting beside you.”
“This is my son, Scott,” she said. “This is so-and-so,” my mom informed me.
“Hello,” say I.
“Oh, well hello,” so-and-so said. “And where do you live?”
“I live in Miami.”
One or two lines of conversation about Miami.
“And what do you do there?”

Crap.

“Well, I moved down there to do web development. Now, I… I do other things.” And I sit and hope inside (as I’m sure that my mom and sister do) that my response to her prying question sticks and doesn’t solicit any follow-up questions. Wait for it… wait… In the clear!!!! No follow-up! Good answer, Scott! Good answer!!!! I wanted to high-five my mom and sister. A tense moment indeed.

Rock Star Moment #3
At some point before dinner, my sister and I were standing around that same table talking about the crowd as they mingled out of earshot in the great room and kitchen. She was laying out silverware or filling up water glasses. Not sure. I mentioned to her the prospect of cougar hunting in this group comprised mostly of septuagenarians.

“You are wrong on so many levels, Scott.”

I love my sister. Keepin’ it real. Of course, I was only kidding. Most of the women were married. (I’m kidding, people! Jeez.)

Rock Star Moment #4
After dinner, my nephews were sitting in the TV room in the back section of the house. Sis came in. My nephew, for some reason, mentioned my computer. (I brought with me my laptop, a separate monitor, and four external hard drives, all of which are set up in my cave back here.) I told him that he shouldn’t go near my computer. His mother reinforced the issue. I said, “Yeah, if you look at my computer, you’ll turn to stone. It’s like Sodom and Gomorrah, that computer.”
“Oooooh, look at you,” sis says. “Making a Bible reference! Mom and dad would be so proud!”
“I know, right?! We should call them in here!”

We didn’t. But I was pretty proud. They taught me so well.

It’s been a very busy morning here.

see more Epic Fails

Today, my youngest son turned 15. I talked to him on the phone. He’s one-hundred and some odd miles away. He was happy. I was glad to hear it. It bums me out that I didn’t see him today but I’ll see him soon. My mom’s birthday is also today.

The more pressing matter is this Christmas party that is about to take place here in this house. My parents are having a number of their school mates over. Sunday school mates. Twenty-five to thirty of them. We talked about it earlier and I’m just going to stay through dinner, after which time I’ll saunter off to this back bedroom like Igor. Although, I am dressed snappy in my Sunday best. Minus the coat. And tie. And button-down shirt. However, I am rather dapper. It feels good to look good.

I don’t know how I’m going to manage this exactly. I’ll need to smoke cigarettes. Which I’ll need to go outside to do. So I’m thinking I’m just going to cut through the laundry room, through their closet, into my parents room and then out through the garage. Of course, if I want anything to drink, I’ll have to go into the kitchen. I’ll go in through the dining room. Or maybe just straight in. I’ll have to scope it out and see where the least amount of traffic is.

Did make the decision that I’m not going to do any of my “work” tonight while I’m listening to the soft hum of Christmas music and warm voices coming through the walls to my quiet my room back here. That, and the fact that the entire Sunday School class might just decide to stone me if they have enough egg nog, what with me being El Diablo. You know. I’m a known pornographer.

They probably wouldn’t. But I’m not taking any chances. Just going to lay low tonight.

The doorbell just rang. I guess I need to go make an appearance now.

UPDATE.
I’ve included a drawing of my escape route below for your convenience. (XXX is, of course, me.)

I left South Beach earlier today. Flew to the Carolinas to spend some of the holidays with my parents and my kids. It’s night and I haven’t been out among the peoples so I kind of forgot about it, but it crossed my mind a short while ago how much I hate this town. Expect bitter posts for the next couple of weeks. Hey, at least I’m around family.

Crap. This is going to be a long holiday.

I kid.

(And here I’d like to say that I miss the days when the parents didn’t read the blog and I didn’t have to put in disclaimers like “I kid.” Obviously, I kid. I love you, guys, Mom and Dad. You know, they’re just words. Throwing them about and whatnot. I didn’t mean anything by it. And you can read ma blog alllll you want! I love you guys! Hey, how about this weather? Jeez it’s cold here! Getting colder by the minute, in fact. Definitely going to be a long holiday.)

The “official” trailer.
Photos, video, music all done by yours truly.
The website will be filled out over the coming month.

Feed people, direct link here.

Was kind of hoping Tigergate would be bigger. “Really sorry about all that. I’ll be better.” What the hell?

Was kind of hoping for more.

Thinking about making some T-shirts with sort of witty sayings on them pointing out something funny about the predicament. You know, kind of working with the irony a little. Superstar athlete. Clean cut. Idol. Getting in that situation. Sort of playing on that humor. You know.

Just need to come up with something about Tiger Woods. Let’s see….. Tiger….tiger…. Woods…. wood…. golf clubs…. Well, I’ll work on it. Probably just stick with short sleeve shirts.