Creative Dilettante

I've been toying with  the idea of buying a camera for, oh, I don't know, something like three years now. A real camera, I mean. Not an iPhone or an adorable little point-and-shoot I find refurbished on Amazon for about a third the original price.

No, I've been toying with the idea of a camera. I like pictures, after all. I like images, I like playing with and manipulating them, making the scenes in my head appear in two dimensions. And since I am terrible with a pencil or a charcoal stick or pastels or even watercolors, my options for making those images appear are limited to words and cameras.

So, I've been playfully batting the idea of a camera around in my brain. I came pretty close last year. On Black Friday I was out at American, scoring a fantastic upright freezer for my parents, and they had some sort of super-bundle deal on a Canon T1 (or maybe it was a T2? I don't really remember) with two lenses and a memory card and a transport case and I very nearly pulled my credit card out and plunked it down. Good thing my credit limit at the time was $500.

A friend loaned me her 60D for about six months last year, and I was pretty well in love. I took that camera to every protest in Madison and Milwaukee last spring, and also to the Dominican Republic. I took the best pictures ever! (Ok, the best pictures I've ever taken, which is nothing in the grand scheme of the world. I know this.)

Here I am, again contemplating buying a camera of my very own, to have and to hold. I've been poking through the dark corners of the internet, found a few scams, solicited advice from trusted sources about what to get. And every time I think about that box with a shiny new 60D in it, I get chills up my spine. Or, that box with the T3 and a collection of lenses. That's also on offer, also percolating through my gray matter like the warm, rich scent of good coffee being brewed by 15 bars of steam pressure. I want these things. I want them like I want coffee at 6:30 in the morning. There's a line between want and need that I can't quite parse rationally when it comes to coffee at 6:30 in the morning, and I'm having similar trouble with my desire for a camera.

What am I going to do with $1300 worth of camera? Nothing great. I'm going to run around with it like a small child runs around with a cardboard box. I'm going to take pictures, and most of them will be ok and none of them will be very good, and I will put some of them on the internet and I will keep some of them on my computer for posterity and some of them I will discard entirely. None of them will ever likely be seen outside the small circle of people that like me, and will look at the things I do just because they like me personally.

I am, essentially, a dilettante in everything I do. I don't have the discipline to take anything seriously, I don't have the focus to perfect anything. I blog, but I don't write. I take pictures with an iPhone and run them through editing software to make them pleasing. I have a closet full of dresses and the shoes and hats earrings and bags to go with them, and today I sit here in ripped jeans and an oversized t-shirt. I bake good french bread, but have failed miserably at brioche more than once, and my pizza dough is still hit-and-miss. Also, I fucked up a roulade the other day like you wouldn't believe. Never has an uglier roast been served in my house. Sheesh. I was embarrassed, for real.

And I can justify being a writerly dilettante because it doesn't cost anything to put words on a blog, and I can justify being a cooking dilettante because even when I mess up, what I cook in my kitchen is healthier than what comes out of a box, and I can justify being a clothing dilettante becasuse I do wear my pretty dresses and my sky high heels, I just need a break from them now and again and that's ok. If I really was arm-candy at all times I'd probably hate myself a whole lot more.

But I'm having a hard time justfiying to myself spending an obscene amount of money on a camera just so I can be a better-equipped photographic dilettante. I'm not a photographer, and I never will be. Just like I'm not a writer or a chef or a model. And it's a lot of money.

But still, but still, but still. I want that camera, with the same sort of fuzzy-headed need that I want a cup of coffee when I wake up in the morning.