On Thursday, we held our weekly Young Lions workshop with the neighborhood refugee and hill tribe kids. We gave them each a film camera to take home for a week of snapping fun! After teaching them some simple photography rules, we let them go wild in the yard on a photo scavenger hunt. Every time they saw me put my camera to my face to take a photo of them they would do the same to me...I suppose that's fair play. ;)

Self Portrait #11

I always thought Princess and the Pea was an incredibly genius and silly story all at the same time. To complain about feeling a wee pea to score truckloads of mattresses?! Genius plan! (Kinda jealous I never thought of it myself) But then not to use them for what God made them for?! (jumping on, of course!) Super silly! But then that's always the trouble with darn fairy tales...Like prince charming? Puhlease...I can think of all sorts of better things to do with a pair of glass high heels than wear them around to attract a silly boy. Or to live in a house full of 7 midgets?! (Ever heard of midget bowling?) And I dunno, I kinda like the idea of having an evil grandmother who can cast spells on random people...call me crazy.

Self Portrait #12

At one point or other in our life, we start looking for Prince Charming. I know, I just made horrible fun of the guy above, but it's true, we all want our knight in shining armor to come sweep us off our feet. But sometimes our knight in shining armor doesn't always look like what we envision. Our lovely dog Murphy is possibly the most atrocious dog you can imagine, and yet for some odd reason this makes him terribly endearing. I say 'terribly' because, well, he's pretty terrible! He has some seriously gross tendencies, like slobbering profusely and wiping it all over you at any given moment, going #2 right in the lane so you get a nice squishy midnight present whenever you sneak home late at night, snorting goop in your face...He is the most bumbling stinky mess of a dog that we have even give him his own Murphy voice that sounds very droll and dopey. He is seriously lacking balls (unless a dainty poodle is put in his path) and a number of teeth, and always wants you to rub his bum and if you don't he solves the problem and rubs it ON you. This is why I thought he was the perfect candidate for Prince Charming! Admit it ladies, men have a lot of these characteristics too! ;)

Check out Inge Kathleen's greatness of the week: http://www.ingekathleen.com/blog/

"Front yard Salsa"

Art workshops that turn into impromptu salsa dancing in the front yard have got to be close to my favorit-est things ever! We all bumped into each other randomly at Sizzling Salsa night in Chiang Mai and decided to share that crazy dancing experience with the Burmese refugee kids who come to our Young Lions workshops every Thursday. Well really, this little charmer was all over the girl volunteers and spent the hour terrorizing us with his fancy little eye lid flipping technique *shivers*. So to distract him, Laura decided to teach him some Salsa dancing moves that she'd learned the night before. It was such a hit we might just make a whole Salsa dancing workshop out of it! :)

Self Portrait #10

Some days what you've got your hiney perched on isn't all that much to boast about. One of my favorites songs has a super sweet line that I think is necessary to live by:

"You might be a big fish

In a little pond

Doesn't mean you've won

'Cause along may come

A bigger one"

(can anyone guess the song?:)

Neways, yes this is a portrait of complete randomness. My new cool roomie (blog shout out to Loweell!;) strapped me into this crazy corset thing I found in a random box upstairs (I also found a feather boa...hmmm) and I ran outside to catch the light but found it had left without me...heartless. So I chased it around back and found some of it's last beams perched on an old broken toilet. I thanked it kindly for my new throne, hopped aboard and took self portrait #10. This will have to be revisited in the future, but currently life has taken a turn towards chaos. Embrace the chaos! Due to a bad tempered dog who randomly bit our former ARI Art director/coordinator lady, I've moved into her job early, working with our awesome volunteers to put together super sweet art workshops that will wow the world. That's not as easy as it sounds. BUT I adore the challenge! I will try my utmost bestest to keep up with this self portrait craziness, BUT if I'm a wee bit late *cough* *cough* please forgive me! :)

King of my Heart

Today I went in search for the littlest of our Young Lion kiddos, (Young Lions is an a art workshop we hold in our front yard for the local Burmese refugee kids) and back a short, trash strewn soi I found dozens of families crammed into a tiny, broken down house. Once you understand the life these children lead you also start to realize how small projects like the one we hold in our front yard, can mean so much to them. This little guy held my hand on the way back to the office and we skipped and jumped and chased our shadows all the way home. He stole my heart with his beautiful long lashes and stunning smile.

Self Potrait #9

I've had a ton of different portrait ideas pouring into my brain since we started this self portrait craziness. Part of the challenge for me, is to see if I can take what I have in my current surroundings vs. what I can do in photoshop, and create my ideas. Well, with this one I definitely broke my promise with Liz Lauer to not be so creepy. Sorry Liz!
I figured I tackled the closet last week and of course the natural progression from there is definitely bottles... ;) My concept was pent up emotion, how we bottle up our emotions and shove them down deep inside...I'm sure if we could see our internal storage system of things we've failed to deal with, it would look something like this. Only with TONS more bottles...hmm...maybe that would help this image...This idea of heads in a jar isn't that novel and I'm still tweaking the outcome (all suggestions and comments welcome!), but the feeling of being able to have this portrait in my mind (yes ok maybe i'm a wee twisted) and figuring out the way to make it reality was challenge enough for me to tackle it.
Oh, one more thing:
Dear Photoshop, I ❥ you!

Take a peek at a 1810 Inge Kathleen here! :)

FRUIT! I'm a fruit-a-holic! Me and fruit are one...well at least when it's inside my tummy that is. As you can imagine, I am in fruit heaven here in Thailand! Little fruit ladies can spot a softy a mile away and start waggling their eyebrows and hand fulls of papayas and mangos in my direction when they see me coming.

My good friend Reid likes to say, "You are what you eat." Yes, I totally embrace my fruity side and just for future reference, if you need to ask a favor or have bad news, or good news, or no news...(hmm getting off track here)..it's ALWAYS better accompanied with a basket of fruit...hand fulls of mangos...pineapples peaking out of your bag!! Just sayin'...

So I've had this fascination with movement lately. There is just something I love about the unpredictability of long time exposures and human movement. When you look at the back of your camera it's like Christmas every time! Colors and smears and lines...gosh it's a gorgeous thing when it works. The world can be such a fascinating place when it's out of focus! But then again I was also one of those children who would lay on my back in the grass for hours staring at the world from between my squinted lashes or behind closed eye lids because it made everything look so different. (yes, yes, strange child I know) Long exposure photography is sorta like that for me...laying on my back and watching the world through my camera's blurry eyelid.

Self Portrait #7

Whew, busy busy whirlwind weekend with loads of good things happening, but not so much time for shooting. I'm a bit of a gimp these days with two lovely scraped up legs that make me hobble around like a 90yr old, but I made it to first base, I did! (I'm maybe a little too competitive when it comes to sports) So this is a bit of an older self portrait that will have to be a stand in until the old ticker gets back to...ticking! ;)

Anyone who knows me knows I can kill the most hardy of plants. My sisters even went as far as to buy me cacti for a birthday prezzie because they knew how much I LOVE green things in the house, but it's the remembering to water them bites me in the butt. Let's just say the cactus was found dead as a doornail a few months later. There is just no Mandy-proof plants on the market these days! My trail of plant carnage has left me with minus karma points and I've spent a life time trying to make sweet to mother nature. But really, whose fault is it that I was born with a brown thumb anyways?! *cough cough nudge nudge*

Check out the Inge Binga self portrait greatness of the week!

"Home"
Being footloose for a few years will make you start to think about the word, "home.' It could be your memory of that grey asbestos childhood home in Lynn IN, with its huge old dilapidated barn whose sloping roof you used as a sledding hill (because Indiana is so flat they couldn't manage to make any natural ones of their own). Until your mom found the bum ripped out of every single one of your snow pants from the roofing nails and banned your slipping, sliding fun permanently. Or maybe it's that big white house near Williamsburg, IN, where you used to lay on the warm, broad back of your old quarter horse for hours watching the clouds drift by and listening to him munch and gurgle. Or all the number of apartments you lived in for college, internships? Maybe it's that tiny one roomed Yangsu-ri digs (that turns into an icebox in the winter) with the rows of windows looking out over the Korean village square and you could hear soju soaked Korean shouts in the wee hours of the morning. Or Chiang Mai, where two dogs wait for you to come home with sad brown eyes (my personal weakness) and mangoes fall from trees in the middle of the night sounding like bombs on the tin roof, but make you dream dreams of sweet, sweet mango-ness.
Really, you set up home in all sorts of places with all sorts of different objects; sometimes even other people's objects, and you start to realize that home isn't a place or time, isn't a state or country, or even a house.
Home is where the heart is!
(Oh yes, I totally was just that corny!;)

Does anyone else get the odd compulsion to cart out all the living room furniture to the yard and set up shop? I'm telling ya, it's the best seat in the...(wait for it)...home! ;)

Ever seen Inge Kathleen's barbarian side? Nope?! Me either! Take a peak here!

Why in tarnations has this book never been written?! I know, I know, all females are suppose to emerge into the world, born with an innate sense of knowledge of all things womanly: cooking, cleaning, fashion, popping out babbies, makeup, picking out good husbands, wearing high heels, and all those gazillion beauty products. But it's just not so! In fact, I feel like I've been playing catch up most of my life when it comes to being a woman. We're suppose to do WHAT?! Put what WHERE? Who the freak makes all these  rules anyways! And so I've decided to start a bit of a themed self portrait series on the comedy of womanhood. It is a comedy...at least when I do it. ;) 

And for all you peeps just tuning into my crazy bloggin' world, my bestest bud in all the world, Inge Kathleen and I, began a self portrait challenge about a month ago. So far we've pasted ourselves with newspaper, live snails, and flowers, tried a power tool makeover, fallen asleep in a Korean field, levitated, and hopped up and down on broken washer machines all for the sake of a good photo. All in the span of one month! You can only imagine what else our wee warped minds will come up with next! ;)   

Self Portrait 03

NO SNAILS WERE INJURED IN THE MAKING OF THIS PHOTO

(except for that one that fell in the pond, clumsy little guy...)

So I've added a few new jungle moves to my life these days...My new workout regime goes something like this: 50 sit-ups *squash creepy crawly* 15 push-ups *squash idibiddy tick* 25 lunges *squash HUGE tick and shoo out misguided tree frog* I find I am now lost in between sets if there aren't moments of insect genocide. I've a very happy tree frog in the kitchen who greets me with a croak when I stumble, in half awake to cook breakfast in the mornings. And I've still not become entirely comfortable with the geckos who scurry across my walls fleeing from me and munching bugs all in one go. But instead of fighting nature, I've decided to embrace it! Tap into the inner animal. Become one with...snails. You wouldn't believe how moody those little guys can be. One moment they're tightly holding on to your arm and the next they're committing kamikaze suicide off your shoulder...tsk. I wonder if they've got anti-depressants for the poor wee fellows. Snail blues have to be the bleakest!

This is one in a series of self portraits that Inge Kathleen and I began at the beginning of May. The goal is not so much to torture ourselves, although judging from this image and those to come you might disagree, but to fine tune our portrait taking skills so that when we find a model willing to, say, levitate in the air, pose on top of rusty ol' washers, or cover herself in slimy snails...well we'll be ready! It's a lot tougher than it looks, trust me. In fact, anyone want to join in the self portrait fun?! The more the merrier. ;)

This big old house is starting to settle in around me and the jungle noises that emanate from the overgrown pond area and backyard, are starting to sound more like greetings rather than threats, as I walk home through the gate at night. Some of my favorite things in the whole world can be found here...loads and loads of delicious fruit, cozy little cafes to hide from the rainy season and sip a hot cup of coffee, fresh food markets whose loud bartering noises and jumble of people and fruits and veggies always bring a smile to my face and make me feel terribly lucky to be livign and breathing and experiencing all this. Burmese refugee children come play on my front porch in the evenings and we sneak around with my camera, surprising volunteers with our stealthy picture taking abilities. These kids adore using my camera, anyone keen on doing a photography workshop with Burmese refugee children sorta patterned after Listen to my Pictures? This is a photo workshop I've been dying to do for years!!

Self Portrait challenge

Why yes, that is me, getting all down n' dirty with some smelly laundry and two broken down ol' washing machines that just happen to have been in my backyard. My bestest friend and partner in crime Inge Hooker, who's lovely face I've not seen now for two full weeks, *sniff* issued a weekly self portrait challenge that would broach the distance between Korea-land and Thailand and give our photo skills a run for their money! And when I say a run I mean a painful long distance run that causes you to start wheelin' and dealin' with the power that be. So Sunday morning I grabbed my camera, a stool, and an old flip flop and headed out to the over grown backyard. Call me crazy, but there is nothing like weeds up to my eyeballs and piles of discarded treasure (aka junk) to make me feel right at home (I blame this on growing up in Indiana). So picture this; I've got the camera popped up with a wedged musty flip flop, on top of a stool, on top of an old rotten table...and there I am hopping like a deranged bunny rabbit onto two dirty ol' washing machines, striking a dramatic pose, checking the back of the camera, shaking my head while muttering curses/instructions to myself, hopping back up to try again...and repeating the whole silly sequence over and over again. Not a special moment you want to share with a stranger...or a whole group of strangers...or even better, a whole group of MONKS. In the middle of one of my dramatic poses covered it dirt and sweat and thinking there was DEFINITELY a reason I am behind the camera and not in front, I looked to the heavens for a little guidance and found...a VERY entertained group of monks on the second floor of the building next door. I think as far as new neighbor introductions go, this one takes the cake. And this is only the beginning! Keep tuned every Tuesday (ish) for more strange tales and self portrait adventures!