Idiosycratic Life

Happy Birthday to the person who:

•used to walk around S.U. with a New York State Fair Lost Child Tag that said, I belong to Ace” (nickname for Alexandra) when he was still dating his high school sweetheart

• Who falls into fantastic, well-paying, interesting, “Is a lot of international travel a problem?” dream jobs by spending a summer sleeping until 4 p.m. and playing video games

•who used to work at Fotorama in the Fayetteville Mall

•Who held my hand when we watched the footage of the Lockerbie Air Disaster and the aftermath of the terrorist attack on Pan Am 103 in photo class before we went there to document the survivors in the town (P.S. Check out the September 2002 issue of Health magazine)

• Who is always mildly confused but never offended whenever I tell him he looks like various animals, as in, “You know that picture I took of you with your hair over your eyes? You look just like the yak in this postcard!”

•who would fly back to London just to eat lunch at Wagamama if he could

• Who postponed taking classes in his major so he could have just a few more weeks playing his cello with an orchestra (a prestigious one at that)

• who sees me differently than anyone else in the world; I am seldom beautiful in photographs and never the way I appear to be in his :)

• Who sat in the waiting room at L.A. Weight Loss for 45 minutes while I waited to be weighed in, was psyched at my getting below a specific goal, and then celebrated with me at Doug’s Fish Fry (Where they’ll deep fry your left arm if you asked them too)

• Who drove to Office Max to get sticky tack in the 72nd hour of a three-day “scanning, printing, trimming, mounting” marathon when he really, really, really (I mean, *really*) didn’t want to, so that Jill and I could hang the Remembrance Week photo exhibit in time (Thanks, Jill! :)

•Who I once caught coming out of a steamy bathroom (fully clothed) with my boyfriend when I unexpectedly stopped by the apartment they shared senior year (They were testing out their laser pointers- apparently, you could see the full beam of light when it bounced off the steam... if you say so :)

• Who would awaken from a sound sleep (at 3 p.m., mind you), get dressed and go out in four feet of snow to jump my car after I wore down the battery by leaving my blinkers on while I worked in the darkroom for four hours so I wouldn’t get a ticket for parking in 15 minute parking behind the journalism school (It made it seem like I was coming back soon, see?) which, of course, drained my battery. He actually did this on more than one or two occasions and never complained.

• Who invested several thousand dollars in a professional studio camera, but walked around with a giant hole in his shoe for more than a year.

• Who, even when he is 75 years-old and capping off a successful career as a commercial photographer with hundreds of awards, will still forget to pull the dark slide out of a medium format camera for the first exposures.

Happy birthday, Luke!