I was an adorable kid. My little button nose combined with my big sticking-out ears and tousled hair guaranteed “awww”s wherever I went. All of my baby pictures are, frankly, so cute you could vomit.

Then I hit puberty. My nose was neither little nor button-like, my hair took on new levels of tousledness, and my ears… well, they stayed the same. I was no longer sweet and adorable, I was… AWKWARD.

But my features eventually congealed into a static position, forming what you now know as Elise, webmistress of bottledair.org. I may not be cute enough to make you vomit anymore, but at least I’m not ugly enough to make you vomit anymore, either. My face has gone through a lot. This is its story.

THE CUTE YEARS

Zero years old	One year old	Two years old
Three years old	First year of preschool	Second year of preschool

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I’m usually hesitant to draw with a pen, especially a non-ballpoint one, because of obvious reasons: you can’t erase, you can’t really control the heaviness of the line, and did I mention you can’t erase? Unless it’s an eraseable pen, which is just wrong on so many levels.

Anyway, I needed to loosen up one night so I took out my trust Pilot Precise and sketched this out in about five minutes. I seem to be vaguely smiling, which is a nice change of pace from the usual intense glare I have in self-portraits. And I think I finally managed to draw convincing fabric creases in the shirt.

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You see construction sites all the time, mostly when you’re in a hurry to get somewhere and they decide to close the road you’re taking, and never when you actually need to take photos of construction sites for photography class. I searched far and wide and couldn’t find so much as a traffic cone until I went to the fabric store to get, most likely, fabric, and discovered that they had completely demolished the store next door.

I had to sneak past some fallen “do not pass” tape to get on to the site, feeling very nervous all the while because I hate trespassing. Photographing went off without a hitch, smoothly and inconspicuously. Then when I was sneaking back to the exit, I tripped over a large metal pipe.

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Another alley near my house, which, coincidentally, intersects Alley #1. This was taken the day after a storm, so there were lots of puddles all over the ground. I want to frame this print and hang it on my wall, but I’m too lazy to go out and buy a frame, especially since it’s a large print (11″ x 14″). Once again, this turned out a lot blurrier than it actually is, because my scanner isn’t big enough and I took a photo of it with my digital camera.

The cool thing about this photo: you see that nice, thick tree nearest to the center of the photo? Look just to the right of it, between its branches and the branches of the tree next to it. See that blurry spot in the sky? That’s a bird, accidentally captured mid-flight.

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People like this one, because it is a swan, and it is forming a heart in the water. Awww. How sweet. That actually was intentional, too.

My father and I used to go to Oakland lake every spring when the cygnets had just hatched. We would bring a loaf of bread with us and tear off tiny bits to throw into the water so they could eat them. On a related note, once when we were at the beach and my dad was barbecuing some hot dogs, a seagull swooped down and grabbed one off the grill and swallowed it down in one gulp.

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Jilli and I had to write a “paper” (translation: three pages of 2.5-spaced BS) for Photo that involved going to the Met and looking at a History of Photography exhibit. We also had to draw a copy of one of the photographs there. Optimistic as usual, I chose “Covington, Kentucky” by Nicholas Nixon. Not just one, but five– count ‘em, five– people. Little kids, no less, whom I’ve always had trouble drawing because their heads are so darned large. As you can probably tell, I started with the kid in the center and spent a great deal of time getting him perfect, and then realized that the museum was going to close soon and hurriedly finished the rest. My favorite part of this one: the girl all the way on the right. I spent maybe a minute on her, and yet it’s the most realistic part of the drawing.

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This was another one of my first prints in Photo, taken looking down the alley by my house. I’ve never been too fond of this place, because the people whose yard is on the right side of the alley have a very large dog that they keep there. Whenever anyone sets foot in the alley, the dog flips out and starts barking really loudly and jumping at the chain link fence keeping him in. I’ve never seen him clear it, but he manages to get his front paws over the top and you just know that if he really wanted to, he could hop it no problem and rip your intestines out. So while I used to cut through the alley as a shortcut all the time, I now avoid it at all costs.

Also, because my scanner is too small, I had to take a picture of this with my digital camera, so it’s kind of blurry and dark. As soon as I have access to a bigger scanner, I will remedy the situation.

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This was one of my first prints in Photography class, before my head was polluted with ideas of “composition” and “contrast” and “dust-free negatives”. And it was also one of my best prints all year. Coincidence? Yeah, probably.

So this is the requisite “tree branch reflecting in the water” photo that a “Reflections” assignment just begs for. I took it at Oakland Lake, which, at the time, was covered with algae. Something about sulfites, I don’t know. But a few months later, this huge floating machine with a conveyor belt and an algea dump-tank scraped all of the scum off the surface and restored my precious lake to its usual pristine self.

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Scene: Tenth grade art. Assignment: Still-life. I had a vision. I would draw a still-life, yes, but I would go above and beyond the call of duty. I wouldn’t just draw a still-life, no no, I would stipple.

And what a mistake that turned out to be. When I think of the sheer number of hours I spent making tiny little dots on a sheet of paper to complete this picture, my hand aches. It came out with a strange cubist perspective, which was unintentional, but let’s go with it. That’s a salt shaker, a nail polish bottle, a mortar and pestle, and in the background, a cat mola. And, of course, Catch-22. Which is worlds better than this drawing.