So this post is going to have a tad bit of an indignant tone.
Tonight, I took these frames to get new progressive, Transitions lenses:
And you know what? I bought these frames from Zeelool on July 31, 2021.
At the time, I just thought they looked cool. These are Zeelool’s Menin frames and they have since been discontinued. I don’t know why they were discontinued, and I don’t know when.
What I do know is that when I bought them, my kids thought they looked crazy. At the time, I was bald by choice, which didn’t help the “crazy” look.
But I had no idea at the time that by late 2025 and early 2026, asymmetrical and geometric frames would be trendsetting.
In 2021, I just knew they looked cool.
Same thing with mirrorless cameras.
In 2011, I wanted an interchangeable lens camera to be able to take nice pictures for a blog. I wanted to be a “Mommy Blogger.” Jared told me if I’d wait till Christmas, he’d buy me a DSLR for Christmas.
I was in Best Buy by myself one night, and I saw this display with a new kind of camera, and it was a Sony Alpha NEX 5N— a new kind of camera they were calling “mirrorless….” I hardly even knew that mirrors at the time were an integral part of the build of a DSLR.
I came home with the Sony Alpha NEX 5N. That was November of 2011. I didn’t wait for Christmas.
And that first year with that camera: I remember camping with church and there was someone who was really into photography at the time on that camping trip in 2012. And I remember the sort of side-eye-rolls my little powerhouse got. Surely it couldn’t be a serious tool for serious work.
To her credit, the documentary photography instructor at Emory in summer 2012 was actually one of the first affirming folks that said I’d made a good choice: all she cared about was that I could control my camera manually, which she helped me figure out that indeed, I very well could.
By 2013, I was standing in the kitchen at Carrollton Presbyterian Church while my friend was getting Wednesday night dinner ready, and I vividly remember feeling sheepish and very meek about it, but I told her, “I’m pretty sure mirrorless cameras are the future,” and she looked at me like I was crazy.
And by 2013, I was regularly adapting vintage lenses to that Sony Alpha NEX 5N camera. I could sometimes find adapters, but they were not good. Often, they arrived with loose lens mounts. Good adapters were so hard to find that I more than once took apart a Miranda camera or a Minolta camera so that I could have a sturdier lens mount for a cheap adapter, taking apart the adapter, too.
Because by 2013 I knew that the yumminess that comes with vintage lenses was worth something.
In 2025, vintage filters are a ubiquitous part of cell phone culture.
And now, in 2026, I walked into Costco tonight with 2 French pins holding my hair, pins that arrived not from a glitzy Ulta display but in a plain box as they are sold in Europe and elsewhere, and I was literally the only person I saw with my hair up that way. I saw people with elastics and clips, but not a single other French pin in the store. Apparently they are reserved for special occasion up-do’s in the United States.
And I have zero idea why because they are so dang practical: They do not leave crimps in your hair when you take it back down again, and it literally takes the time it takes me to put my hair in an elastic messy bun to do the same with 2 French pins. And you don’t have to buy a million of them. The ones I bought will last the rest of my life probably.
And in being without a dedicated job for so long, I’m suddenly realized that I’ve developed my own sacred ritual over the years, in a million different ways that I don’t even think to write about because it’s so ordinary to me probably: Wearing hair hardware that would have been familiar to my great-grandmother in 1916 and yet getting ready to wear glasses that won’t be out of place in 2027, carrying around camera gear from the 1970s that performs fantastically on my 2023-model GFX and X Series Fujifilm cameras….. I’m finally figuring out that my brain just works in a way that the conventional workplace simply is not ready for.
In 2011, the serious photographers of their day were not ready to hear that that they would be changing out the entirety of their gear systems in a decade or less.
And I know that I wrote about “buy it once” culture a few days ago and I am very well aware that I found the website “buymeonce.com” probably over 3 years ago at least; it’s been a bookmark on my Safari home screen for that long anyway. And I am very well aware that it is a growing movement now that I am only jumping on the bandwagon for as people are growing weary of fast fashion.
And in early 2026 even, there are plenty of people who are still not ready to hear either that it is indeed possible to self-engineer ethical parameters for AI life coaching from readily available platforms. And yet, I’m doing it daily with Gemini.
And yet, here we are. I’ve been on SSDI since 2011 because my brain needs more to do than the conventional workplace can find me to do in retail or admin assistant type jobs.
Anybody want to find me a job in trends forecasting?
