before & after
After photos are easy. Something dramatic happens and of course you take a picture of it. Just like that. But before photos are a little harder to come by. They require premeditation, or at least fair warning. I don’t know how many times I’ve wished I had a photo of the street just before a major snowfall or the pasta salad just before dropping it all over the floor or my knee just before falling off my bike onto it.
Last week Stéphane and I went away on vacation. I can’t remember the last time we went anywhere alone together to a different city without our dog or our computers for a whole week. It’s a pretty complicated endeavour. The gargantuan feat of coordinating our schedules with those of our hosts, our various jobs, our dog-sitter, the train and the changing seasons made us so thoroughly organized that it actually occurred to us to take before photos of our great escape.
What we were before was tired. And, as our before photo indicates, quite blurry. When we booked our train tickets – the prerequisite three weeks in advance in order to get a good fare – we had this fantasy of sleeping our way to Toronto. Sadly, our particular comfort class car was full of screaming babies. Literally. Full of them. Screaming. One in particular. Non-fucking-stop for four hours and twenty minutes plus twenty minutes of excruciating lateness in which we got a whole a year’s worth of birth control right there. We coped by sharing iPod headphones, pretending we were twelve-year-old Japanese girls. Fortunately I’d prepared a Summer Vacation playlist for just such an eventuality.
We’ve all seen before and after photos where before looks better than after or there is no difference whatsoever or after is clearly airbrushed or a stunt double or much younger sister. Our after photo may not say “after” to anyone but us, but to us it really does. We had a wonderful vacation. Our friends spoiled us rotten. Future blog posts will explain how it is that on our train ride home we were just as tired as our there. Of course we were a completely different kind tired, a sunburnt, foot-sore, fatter and gleefully poorer, late-night talking and laughing non-stop kind of tired. At the very least our after photo indicates that we are now lighter, smiling and much more focused.
Stay tuned. Future blog posts will feature before and after photos of our dog, our dog sitter, our various hosts and before photos of the meals they made us before we devoured them (because after they weren’t there).
. . . . .
Last week Stéphane and I went away on vacation. I can’t remember the last time we went anywhere alone together to a different city without our dog or our computers for a whole week. It’s a pretty complicated endeavour. The gargantuan feat of coordinating our schedules with those of our hosts, our various jobs, our dog-sitter, the train and the changing seasons made us so thoroughly organized that it actually occurred to us to take before photos of our great escape.
What we were before was tired. And, as our before photo indicates, quite blurry. When we booked our train tickets – the prerequisite three weeks in advance in order to get a good fare – we had this fantasy of sleeping our way to Toronto. Sadly, our particular comfort class car was full of screaming babies. Literally. Full of them. Screaming. One in particular. Non-fucking-stop for four hours and twenty minutes plus twenty minutes of excruciating lateness in which we got a whole a year’s worth of birth control right there. We coped by sharing iPod headphones, pretending we were twelve-year-old Japanese girls. Fortunately I’d prepared a Summer Vacation playlist for just such an eventuality.
We’ve all seen before and after photos where before looks better than after or there is no difference whatsoever or after is clearly airbrushed or a stunt double or much younger sister. Our after photo may not say “after” to anyone but us, but to us it really does. We had a wonderful vacation. Our friends spoiled us rotten. Future blog posts will explain how it is that on our train ride home we were just as tired as our there. Of course we were a completely different kind tired, a sunburnt, foot-sore, fatter and gleefully poorer, late-night talking and laughing non-stop kind of tired. At the very least our after photo indicates that we are now lighter, smiling and much more focused.
Stay tuned. Future blog posts will feature before and after photos of our dog, our dog sitter, our various hosts and before photos of the meals they made us before we devoured them (because after they weren’t there).
. . . . .
posted by J. R. Carpenter at
7:54 PM
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