• When It All Spills Over

    “The law student had seemed trustworthy and responsible. It seemed like an obvious choice. I had torn my dorm room apart. I still remember the mound of stuff on my bed, including the lamp from my desk whose lamp shade was now all dented and torn up. I still remember having torn most of my favorite wall coverings off the walls, including that gorgeous pastel I’d done my senior year of high school which got destroyed in the process. It was so obvious something was off. And it was a welfare check He was supposed to come see that I was okay and then call the officer back.

    I don’t remember exactly how it all went down. Except that it was dark in the room except the TV was on. And I hadn’t let him in the building, this was another example of him managing to let himself in after someone, probably. But it was about 9 PM. One of my pod-mates must have let him into our suite, bevcause he was able to knock right on my room door. He didn’t call to tell me he was coming over.

    I was 19. He said he was 26. It was his birthday, so I thought he was turning 27. I was psychotic. There should have been no question about my ability (or lack of ability) to consent to anything sexual in nature. I’d already made clear to him that I was a virgin waiting for marriage for sex. But sex with that man happened to me during that welfare check.

    He was there for maybe 15 minutes. He wouldn’t let me leave my room with him when he said it was time for him to go, told me to stay in the room. I assume he called the officer after he left.

    I managed to get a withdrawal with hardship due to health reasons from GSU that semester. I got in touch with my psychiatrist from home and got the meds I needed and got back on track to start again in the Spring semester. It was a nightmare. I had to start over from scratch school-wise which included 4 W’s as grades, but I’d gotten a WF in English, which meant my HOPE scholarship was in jeopardy if I didn’t do exceptionally well over the next several semesters. It’s a miracle I managed to graduate in five years— it was really four and a half, given that the first semester didn’t count except to lower my GPA. But I graduated with departmental honors in the end.” “My Me Too,” by me, November 4, 2017

    “Also– I have reason to believe you sold that photo I sent you a million years ago.
    I want whatever proceeds were made from that photo. Every. Last. Single. Dime. Plus any proceeds from any videos you may have made of any of our “escapades.”
    I don’t have to tell you that that photo was sent under duress, as was every last minute of our entire relationship.
    Your entire empire is built on a series of lies.
    I hope you sleep well at night. Every last night.
    But any proceeds you made off me are mine.”— Me, in writing, to him, May 8, 2023

    “Please don’t be mad at me for the things I did.” His words, in person, to me, December 5, 2025

    “There will be no absolution, no forgiveness. I never actually responded directly to your statements last December imploring me multiple times desperately to “not be mad at you for the things you did.” I simply wanted to see if I was strong enough to face you last December. And then I did the thing I always do in the aftermath: I retreated into myself, doubting myself, deferring to you all these months after.”— Me, in writing, to him, October 30, 2025

    “I don’t want to hate you anymore. Feeling like I am at war with somebody I used to love is exhausting.” Me, in writing, to him, March 2, 2026

    I did tell him that relational power is so much better than his transactional power of buying board seats to make himself feel important, too, earlier in February in writing. I couldn’t resist bragging about having a child who was admitted to Grinnell. 

    Silence since October 30. 

    I listen to the podcast “We Can Do Hard Things,” and when it came on today, I should have known from the tone exactly what the topic of the day was. It wasn’t the most recent episode but there was the beginning of chat about the Epstein files.

    And I crumbled, and I came home, and I wrote this in a one-fell-swoop-stream-of-consciousness after I washed my hair in a crazy frenzy that felt like my life depended on getting this writing out of my head and into my computer. 

    And most days, most days even looking at the news, I can compartmentalize. I don’t get swept up in the parallels even if I was of-age even though I was definitely in the midst of a psychotic episode in November of 1998. Or the fact that the five years that followed felt definitely like coercion.

    He told me on December 5, 2025 that he had been in love with me. He told me everybody in law school thought he was 29— HA he couldn’t even keep track of the age he’d told me he was at the time, given that he’d lied abou this age. And I guess I can sort of buy that on some level, in whatever capacity his narcissistic brain is capable of falling in love with anyone. 

    The fact that the world is swept up in the sordid details of whatever has gone on in what powerful men thought was their private lives forever and ever, and is now catching up with at least some of them…. 

    I live with the constant that I have indeed come face to face in the last year and a half twice with my own personal verison of the “elite underclass” as I prefer to think of that particular personal demon. 

    The sort of person who buys board seats and stadium boxes, who collects luxury cars and expendable women, for fun. 

    And for a time, I was one of those expendable women, even if I never saw a dime at all.

    In mid-December 2025, approximately one week after I first tested myself to see if I could face him in person, I collapsed on the very couch I am sitting on right now, as I texted Jared the full story of what had happened a week prior. 

    And I don’t know exactly what Jared said to that man in the aftermath, but Jared has made it clear that I did nothing wrong, even though my brain says it was all my fault. I know that man wanted to know in October of 2025 if I ever dress up for Jared like a school girl, making it clear exactly what the five years I was an undergrad and in whatever form of relationship I had been in with him, had been exactly about all that time for him. 

    And yes, the news is triggering. And yes, it doesn’t matter that I don’t even watch the news anymore. There is literally no getting away from the fact that the world— that people— seem to not have enough of their own drama that somehow getting to the bottom of what must be a nightmare for who-knows-how-many women dealing with the public version of their very own private hellscapes….. 

    I walk around daily myself knowing that someone who never should have graduated from law school is now a multimillionaire and top-grossing partner at an international firm…..that person would never have even graduated had I had the wherewithall to report what happened in November of 1998. The wound is compounded by my school to this day due to his relationship with that institution, and that’s all I care to say about it. 

    And that person didn’t even have the decency to provide even basic job suggestion assistance despite it being a light task for someone in his particular speciality, last October.

    And I am very well aware that my having any modicum of financial independence would not benefit that particular person. 

    And while I am unlikely to ever act on it because I definitely do not need the headache, that person also gave me the ammunition I really could take to the Bar if I wanted to, last October. That man thinks he’s untouchable enough to take a client call on speakerphone in front of me, giving legal advice right in front of me, just to show off his power. I didn’t ask for identifying information or any questions at all; he gave it in showing off. 

    And I don’t really know what got into me on the way home from my ACTH test today, listening to that podcast and the tears flowing from other women about the tragedy that is whatever is in the Epstein files. I try not to think about it most days.

    But, I do very much know how it feels to have a powerful man walking around free and thriving, squandering his millions on ridiculously frivolous keeping-up-with-the-elite, pretending to be something he is not, and knowing all about exactly what that man is compensating for in his pants. Being celebrated by the very institution that should have protected me and didn’t in 1998.

    And, I do actually think there are probably videos somewhere.

    The thing is…..he apologized with out acutally apologizing. Imploring me to “not be mad at me for the things I did”— his words— is a non-apology.

    But it does raise questions: what things, exactly, did he do? Because the word “things” indicates there is perhaps more than one reason I should be mad at him. 

    I’m too tired to care anymore about what anyone thinks, him, or anyone else. I sat through an ACTH test today to determine exactly the nature of my low cortisol and the very reaction I had— a zen feeling instead of the expected nausea and anxiety— I just cannot care anymore. 

    I’ve spent 28 years suppressing my voice on the off-chance that there might be some reason for preserving that relationship, and the very fact that last October’s interaction happened, compounded by the recent lack of decency that man has shown with my medical divulgences…..I’m done.

    I’m done worrying about what people think, I’m done worrying about hurting his feelings, I’m done suppressing my truth. 

    I’m not that 19-year old psychotic girl so desperate to escape the shadow of another abusive relationship that she plunged herself into a drama with that lunatic. I’m a 46-year old woman who has spent 16 years paying her dues getting to know herself, her triggers, and yes, I have faced that man in person twice in the past year and a half and damn it, he is nothing to be afraid of. At all. 

  • Hello, Monochrome

    I posted the following on Facebook and Instagram last night:

    “It’s time.

    I set the groundwork for a new portrait photography business last December, and I’ve sat on it since then for a variety of reasons.

    I’ve missed being out with my camera.

    So, it’s time.

    Sessions with me will be slow. I’m working in monochrome for now. I’ll be limiting the number of sessions I accept, and I promise you’ll love the results.

    Just me, my camera, a single lens, lots of fun, and beautiful portraits as the result.

    Custom sessions beginning at $50. Reach out today to schedule your session.

    Hi World. This is Caroline Price Luxe.”


    I’m looking forward to being out with clients again.

  • The Ghost of Christmas that I Didn’t Know I Needed

    For Christmas, Jared gave me some spending money, with the only condition that I buy things that would bring me joy.

    One of the thing I bought was the Schneider-Kreuznach Min/Mag pictured here. I bought it thinking it would adapt to either my Cinelux 85mm or my Cinelux 37.5mm, both ways, making it a useful tool.

    And when it arrived, I was crestfallen to realize that the 85mm filter threads were dented.

    But, not to be deterred, I ordered a Neewer lens vise. So when the lens vise arrived, I went at it, determined to be able to screw on the Min/Mag.

    And, I got the lens filters successfully re-shaped, and went at screwing on the Min/Mag on the Mag side.

    And, I was ecstatic to see the results.

    But then I went to screw the Min/Mag off. Stuck.

    Irreparably, nothing-works-because-Jared-and-I-have-tried-everything, stuck.

    There were tears. I was soooooo upset. There were more tears. There was anger, because then I saw that Jared had the 85mm lens itself taken apart.

    Turns out, the dented part was a lens hood for the 85mm, with the logo on it. a lens hood that is every bit the material of the rest of the structure of the lens barrel, meaning there is no cutting it off the Min/Mag.

    And then, Christmas faded, and the Min/Mag with its problems, resigned, went into the dehumidifier cabinet.

    And then comes this past week, with the job falling through, and I resorted to what I always want to do when these things happen: I started daydreaming about camera and lens gear.

    But today, I had a renewed resolve. The Min/Mag went into the freezer for 30 minute with a dehumidifier pack, in two baggies.

    No dice– that lens hood is not coming off.

    But then, I remembered the screw. And I wondered: what would it look like if I used the glass from the Min side on the lenses?

    The Min side has its own version of a lens hood, since the glass is on the lens side of the barrel.

    The Super Cinelux 37.5mm is a no-go. Doesn’t work– has enough vignetting from the barrel that it isn’t worth the wide angle.

    The 85mm though? I gasped when I saw what it could do:

    The Min on the 85mm acts as a focal reducer and slight wide-angle teleconverter, giving me absolutely 99% of what the 85mm could do on the GFX 50sII. It gives me back the 60-70mm perspective that the 85mm had on the GFX.

    Would I like the Min/Mag to be completely functional? Of course. I was convinced that it was the Mag side that I would want the most.

    But I am thrilled to have stumbled on this serendipitous turn of gear events.

    It feels like Christmas all over again today, and literally all it cost me was going out to the garage to get one of Jared’s electronics screwdrivers.

    The setup looks ridiculous, admittedly, for a 60-70mm equivalent setup on the X-S20, but I care not. one. bit:

    So super excited. I’d given up working with the Cinelux line since Christmas in the fallout of all this, along with the sale of the GFX itself, but now I am thrilled I can have 99% of the GFX look with not spending another single dime on gear.

  • Tuesday, June 25, 2013: Cricket, the Cat of My Life


    Note: Continuing the perusal of the old blog archives.

    I love Nancy, and Bess, and Mow. They are good cats.
    Not a single one of them are Cricket. She still has a big, big corner of my heart despite being gone now nearly 13 years. She was beautiful, she was just my level of antisocial, she was elegant, aside from the single necklace she did not destroy my stuff.

    She helped me grow up and she kept me company in times when I felt like the rest of the world was falling apart in my young adult years.

    And, I still miss her very, very much.
    ________________________________________________________

    In July of 1996, I worked at Six Flags.  It was my first job.  That summer, my parents and I were in the process of moving to a new house and I had my first taste of freedom:  I had a car.   I had a boyfriend.  I had great — really great girlfriends.  It was before symptoms of my bipolar disorder had manifested.  I was 16 years old.  To this day, that summer remains one of the best of my life.

    We had a dog — Daisy — and over the years we had hosted multitudes of outside cats.  However, I’d never been allowed to have my own cat inside.  With the money that was rolling in from my little job, I petitioned my parents to let me adopt a cat.  I promised to pay the adoption fee, all vet bills, and to pay for its food.  They agreed that when we moved into our new house, I could have a cat.

    I started watching the local cable station animal shelter segments; you may have seen them — at the time, they posted photos of animals available for adoption from our local shelter.  The day before moving day to the new house, I saw her… a photo of a beautiful Calico cat with yellow eyes.  That was her!  That was the one I wanted!

    So, I drove down there when they opened that morning.   To my surprise, the cat wasn’t a full-grown cat like she appeared on TV.  She was a little kitten, small enough to fit in the palm of my hand!  I was smitten from the start.  So, I went to the desk and asked what I had to do to adopt her.  The attendant asked my age, and I was crestfallen when he explained that I had to be 18 before I could adopt an animal myself.  I explained that I had my parents’ permission, but there was nothing to be done.  I couldn’t take her home with me.

    I panicked.  She was gorgeous.  She was a kitten.  I couldn’t imagine how the next person walking into that shelter wouldn’t want to take her home with them.  She was going to get adopted and I couldn’t do anything about it!

    I called Mother at work and while she sympathized with me, she couldn’t leave until 5 pm to come with me to adopt the kitten.  She promised that we would make it to the shelter, though, before they closed at 5:30.  That’s all she could do.  I continued to panic and obsess all day long.

    We got there as fast as legally possible after 5 pm.  Driving up that long drive to the shelter, I was biting at the bits to get there to see if my precious cat was still available.   In the distance, we saw a light blue truck coming the opposite way…it was my Daddy’s truck!  I smiled big once I realized what had happened.  My Daddy had taken off work a few minutes early to come adopt the cat for me.  Both cars came to a stop in the middle of that drive, so that I could get the cat.  I don’t remember now if I got in the car with Daddy or if he passed the cat over to Mother’s car.  It was one of the happiest and most memorable moments of my life to that point.

    She was so little!  I’d never seen a kitten that little that didn’t have blue eyes, but hers were already bright yellow.  It took me a little while to name her.  After spending some time with her, we discovered she had some ridiculous traits, even for a kitten, like trying to jump way up high for the ceiling fan cord.  She could jump at least a foot and a half up in the air, too — pretty high for a small little thing like her.

    I named her Cricket because she jumped.  She got to spend the night in our new house her first night with us — the night before we even spent the night there ourselves.

    Cricket was a good companion.  That’s an understatement — she put up with some crazy antics on my part.  Later that summer, I decided I wanted to train her to walk on a leash like a dog; I’d read somewhere that some cats could do that.  It lasted maybe a week and then I gave up.  But she had crazy antics of her own.  Her entire life, she LOVED marshmallows.  When she was younger, she’d bat them around for ten or fifteen minutes before finally eating them.  There’s no telling how many marshmallows my parents cleaned out from under their refrigerator when they moved away from Carrollton.  And her whole life, she loved to get in the shower after anyone was done and lap up the leftover soapy water.

    I only got mad at Cricket one time in my life:  my boyfriend had given me a beautiful sapphire and diamond necklace that September of 1996 for my birthday, with a dainty chain that was perfect for my crooked neck, not too long.  Cricket, that first Fall, found my open jewelry box on my dresser and found that chain and chewed it to bits.  She didn’t actually eat it so she didn’t get sick, but she destroyed the chain.  I was livid.  Eventually, the chain was replaced, though, and I forgave the cat.  We decided she liked “pretties” too, so they were kept out of her reach from then on.

    Cricket was there for me during one of the most trying times of my life, when my boyfriend of six years moved out of the apartment we shared together, in 2001.  Mother brought her up to Atlanta to my apartment and I remember that large two-bedroom apartment being so big and lonely by myself.  But I was so glad to have my precious cat with me as I began the healing process after that tumultuous relationship ended.

    When I moved back home with Mother and Daddy, she found her long-time home.  She loved going out and sunning herself on the big deck.  She loved the big windows.  And she still loved marshmallows.

    In 2005 when Jared and I married, Cricket and I had to separate for a while.  Jared had his cat Murphy and Cricket had proven herself to be an only sort of cat.  We introduced other cats to our new household.   I was fairly sure Cricket would live out her days with Mother and Daddy.

    But over the years, the other cats found other homes for various reasons.  Last summer, we lost Murphy at a fairly young age.  My first thought was to bring Cricket home and we did just that.  She was 16 years old and I wanted her to live the rest of her golden years with me.

    She was a social kitten but not so much as an adult.  I liked her so much primarily because she liked to be in the room with me but she wasn’t clingy like other cats I’ve experienced.  This last year with her, though, she became more and more kitten-like.  She slept in the bed with us.  She slept more and more during the day.  And when she wasn’t sleeping, she was insistent on drinking both the water out of her dish and shower water.  These past few months we’d gotten to where we turned on the shower even when we weren’t using it, just for a few seconds, just to humor Cricket so she could have her precious soap scum water.

    In March of this year, she separated the nerve cluster in her shoulder jumping from top of the couch to the floor.  She howled in pain and surprise for a few hours and I just knew our time had come, suddenly and too soon for me.  I wanted her ending to be in her sleep, not in pain and fear.  I was in such a state of upset that Jared had to take her to the vet for me.  I couldn’t deal with it.

    There was talk of amputation of that entire leg and shoulder.  An impossible surgery for a cat of that age.  I mean, possible, but recovery and quality of life in a 16 year old cat are really, really difficult to predict and the odds were against Cricket.  I refused to consider amputation.  I promised that we would watch for signs of infection and sores in the bad leg, as she dragged it around the house.

    May 2013 came around and one day, she started putting weight on that paw again.  She started grooming it again.  She started jumping up on our bed again.  She was a cat that had come away from the brink.  She still slept a lot, but she was a happy cat and seemingly not in pain.  A miracle for a now 17-year old kitty.  The vet who had seen her two months before admitted how against the odds it was when we took her in for her annual shots.  She sent us home happy to have seen a good ending to that ordeal.  I was so proud.

    This past Sunday morning about 5:30 it started.  Cricket vomited 15 times in the span of less than 30 minutes and that was just the start.  I got out my camera and took this picture when it had subsided and she had, shaking, climbed back in bed with us:

    Cricket

    I hoped it was just an isolated episode, but it started up again.  I called the emergency number for our vet.  The doctor on call just happened to be the one who had treated Cricket in March and May and she remembered us. She met us at the clinic twenty minutes later.

    By that time, Cricket was all but foaming at the mouth as she yowled in discomfort.  The vet said her digestive system was really tense but that there was no sign of any foreign bodies that she could have gotten into her system.  No masses.  She was a drooling mess and hobbled around, unsteady on her feet.  She wasn’t a happy camper but she let me hold her still as the doctor gave her a shot of anti-nausea meds and got some fluid into her.  That’s how I really knew it was time:  Cricket, letting someone hold her peacefully while she was treated?  The doctor had to sedate her to the point of sleep to get her treated each time we’d taken her in for the past year.   But in that office, Cricket let me hold her head and look her in the eyes.  She seemed unaffected by it all, just overwhelmed with how bad she felt.  The drooling continued to get worse.  I kissed her and told her that I loved her and that she was the best cat I’d ever known.  I was there until she went to Heaven, around 7:30 am.

    What else can I say about the cat that I knew for over half my life?  She was ageless; a beautiful soul.  It was a privilege to care for her and to know her for nearly 17 years.

    She’s joined Daisy, Tinkerbell, and Murphy in Heaven.  I hope they were ready for her.