April 30, 2009
Today S. looked a little stressed so I asked what was wrong.
His response:
“Honey, I’m only worried about two things in life…money and Swine Flu.”
HAHA.
Just got back from a photo shoot to do headshots for an awesome British lady and her business partner, now I’m heading out for a double date. Love my life!
April 29, 2009
Email from a kind reader:
Hello Kyle,Where have you been? I miss reading your new post @ your blog. can’t wait for updates.
Thank you to Shue in Kuala Lumpur for reminding me that I HAVE a blog!!! Normally JMCS at least makes my To-Do list even when I get busy. I’ll look at it and then cross it off even if I don’t get to it because staring at things on the list that don’t get done, stress me out. However, the blog didn’t even make it that far this month. I haven’t even considered that I should feel guilty for not posting because I’ve been so busy.
All things considered, that’s a great thing. Remember? I lost a lot of income in this past month. Fortunately, I’ve had an extremely busy month with photography. Every time I think that the slow season is about to start, I keep on booking. I am set to make a record 600,000 pesos in April. It sounds like a lot, and really, if I could get up to 1 millon de pesos a month I’d be almost completely replacing my lost income. However, the one thing about photography income is that you’re always having to invest in new equipment. I paid off the 3k camera that I put on my credit card with non-photography income so I have a zero balance. I don’t like debt. But, in terms of personal money versus photography money, my photography balance shows that I’ve still spent about $1k more than I’ve earned this year. If I ever want to go full-time I’d have to work out a good business plan.
Anyways, back to what I’ve been doing, I may not have been updating this blog, but I’ve been busy over at my wedding photography blog. For the past three days I’ve been averaging 3-4 hours of sleep a night so that I can finish client photos. I don’t want to fall even further behind because I have another session tomorrow and Friday. I’ve been working really hard and I’m proud of my latest engagement session and wedding that I just posted, so if you feel like it, head on over and leave me some love. 
PS. The weatherman LIED!!! It was not 60 and sunny, it was freezing and the beach at La Serena looked like this! However, the plane did not crash and for that I’m eternally grateful.
April 24, 2009
Tomorrow I have a photo shoot in La Serena with Mr. and Miss Rye Bread!!! I’m so excited to get out of Santiago for a little bit and see some new places and meet some cool new people. I love shooting in cities I’ve never been to, it’s always great inspiration to see something with fresh eyes.
As I sit here on my couch, literally gasping for air and using and abusing my inhaler, a smog free weekend is sounding pretty damn good right about now. Plus, just checked the weather forecast — sunny and 60 degrees sounds like perfect weather for a photo shoot.
I have another wedding to blog pretty soon, and when I get back I promised Miss Rye Bread I’d put a rush on her pictures so she can get her Save-the Dates out for the wedding, so lots of eye candy coming to my photography blog soon! In the mean time, feast your eyes on my latest Brazilian bride and her Chilean husband!
PS. Send me safe flight vibes, I hate flying alone!!!!
Comment when yours is up and I’ll add your link!
Sara: What happens in Puerto Rico stays in Puerto Rico.
Aimee: Mumbai changed her perspective on life.
Clare: Nightmare travels in Romania.
Heather: Discovered an interesting culture within a culture in the U.S. in a small town.
Renee: Her greatest hits in travel.
Shannon: A walk down memory lane back to when summer vacation was the only thing on a kid’s mind.
Lydia: A wild Brazilian goose hunt all for a tambourine.
Abby: Her very exotic travels in…Canada!
Lauren: You won’t believe me but her adventures involve a bidet shower and alpacas.
Emily: An actual travel story in Chile, finally!
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Since this group blog post is a pretty open theme — Travel Experiences — I’ve decided to post mine on the hostels we stayed at while traveling through Costa Rica for two weeks. I actually took this from the travel blog I started specifically for that trip.
*Edited to add: To this day S. is still upset about the loss of his bathing suit. He refuses to buy another, and that’s his excuse as to why he never uses the pool at our building. Please note, this trip was 4 years ago.
April 23, 2009
S., please don’t read beyond this. Thank you.
I MUST BUY HIM THIS TOY!!!!!!!!!!! (Says the girl who’s income has just been cut in half).
It is a camera that you put on your dog’s collar so you can have a little video of what life is like from his or her eyes. As blog readers may or may not have realized, S. and I are obsessed with Papito. And S.’s other favorite thing in the world is technology and gadget stuff. It’s ideal! I’m pretty sure Papito wants it too so she can show us what she does while we’re out.
Thanks to Julia Alison’s blog for the genius idea.
Here’s another topic that is bound to come up at one point or another amongst the expat crowd — being homesick.
“I miss my friends.”
“I miss my family.”
“I miss ____ (fill in name of hometown or college city).”
It happens to most, if not all of us at some point or another. The longing to be with people who know us in a place that’s familiar becomes overwhelming.
I don’t get homesick often, but when I do it runs me over harder than a micro barreling down Alameda on a poor kiltro (stray dog) wandering in the middle of the road. Missing all those things can be a black hole that’s hard to crawl out of. You start to wonder what your life would be like if you lived somewhere else. You start to idealize the people you used to know and the places you used to go. You start to focus on only what was in the past, forgetting to appreciate what you have in the here and now.
I’ve learned too important things that help me deal with being homesick.
1. Nobody is ever homesick forever — or at least nobody I know. You might feel a strong urge to go back home for a while, but it will pass. Yes, the age old wisdom really is true, “This too shall pass.” Eventually you’ll start to appreciate your life as is again, instead of wishing you were somewhere else. And if you have been homesick for an inordinate amount of time, maybe that just means you really should go back. But, homesickness for me has always passed within a month, and once it took two, but never more. So I comfort myself in knowing that homesickness too, shall pass.
2. Life goes on without you — accept it. At first when you live abroad, your friends start getting married, relatives start having babies, somebody’s grandma dies. And you miss it all. That feeling can be devastating, I know. Sooner or later, though, you’ll plant your own roots wherever you are. You’ll live through your own births and deaths and weddings and divorces and happiness and sadness. Those won’t replace what’s going on with your childhood/college friends and family back home. But, again, it comes back to living your life in the here and now, as corny as that may sound.
3. The beauty in being an expat is that you’re always missing someone, something, somewhere. Yes, I said beauty, that’s not a typo. In a sense it’s a little heartbreaking that you’re always far away from people and places you love. But, I really do think, that very few people are as appreciative of the friends and family they do have as expats are. When you miss someone or somewhere so much only then do you know how strongly you really love him/her/it.
April 22, 2009
I found a fantastic article from the Wall Street Journal touching on several topics I’ve posted about here before, such as long hours and no job security but with more in depth information.
1% of all U.S.Americans make a living blogging! I find that news really exciting. I think it means that as the profession goes mainstream, it will A. Be a more respectable thing to have on your resume, and B. Possibly move towards a different system, where bloggers are actually hired by companies rather than contracted as freelancers (meaning benefits and job security).
Here are a couple quick facts about those of making a living online:
Demographically, bloggers are extremely well educated: three out of every four are college graduates. Most are white males reporting above-average incomes. One out of three young people reports blogging, but bloggers who do it for a living successfully are 2% of bloggers overall. It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year.The barriers to entry couldn’t be lower. Most bloggers for hire pay $80 to get started, do it for about 35 months, and make a few hundred dollars. But a subgroup of these bloggers are the true professionals who work at corporations, serve as highly paid blogging consultants or write for sites with substantial traffic.
Pros who work for companies are typically paid $45,000 to $90,000 a year for their blogging. One percent make over $200,000. And they report long hours — 50 to 60 hours a week.
The story also goes on to report that bloggers, in general, report very high job satisfaction. I felt that way up until recently, which probably has to do with the fact that the rug was pulled out from under me, metaphorically speaking, and my job is no longer as financially sound as it once was.
WSJ adds:
But for how long can nearly 500,000 people who are gradually replacing whole swaths of journalists survive with no worker protections, no enforced ethics codes, limited standards, and, for most , no formal training? Even the “Wild West” eventually became just the “West.”
This has me thinking about where I want to go in life. Ideally I’d love to make a living being a full time wedding photographer/blogging for myself. Realistically, how many of us out there have a shot at becoming Dooce or Pioneer Woman? No matter how easy it seems in theory to start a blogging empire, no matter how many people think they can just start a website and make some money, truth be told, it’s not likely. Heather and Ree are both extraordinarily talented writers, Dooce is married to some kind of internet geek who makes her site look amazing (and saves her thousands of dollars in web design fees). And Ree seems to have a fantastically interesting life story. In another article I read recently about blogging, which I can’t remember, or I’d link to it, the author said something along the lines of, “If you want to make a living off your blog you better either have an extremely interesting life, or be able to make your boring life sound extremely interesting.”
I’m not there yet. I’d love to go back to school and do a degree in Writing. Then again, I’d also love to do a degree in Dietetics and become a nutrionist or get an MBA so I’d have a freaking clue how to actually make money from my photography business. There are a lot of things I wish I could do, but life’s too short!
Anyways, I just thought that was a cool article and wanted to share since I know a lot of you are also interested in blogging for a living.
Alright, everyone…the topic that everyone seemed the most enthusiastic about is sharing a travel story. Plus, that sort of combines some of the other ideas that were tossed in the mix, like “favorite weekend destination,” or it can also be a childhood memory WHILE you were traveling. I mean, really this could be anything…your scariest, funniest, most memorable, prettiest, most romantic travel story, whatever you want.
FYI, the reason I’m not going back to the poll method to choose group blogs is because I’d rather only the people who are actually going to write on the topic choose it. If I have a poll it’s open to all the readers (not that that’s a bad thing) but I think they sometimes choose topics that you all don’t necessarily want to write about. Twice, in the past we’ve had group blogs that were clear winners in the polls but everyone was complaining that they didn’t want to write about those topics, which is probably because the readers chose it, not the writers. See what I’m saying here? Plus, we also made it pretty far down our list of topics from last time so I wanted to get some fresh ideas!
I like the idea of having a Chilean guest post but unfortunately I’ve been trying to get S. to guest post forever…so until he “feels inspired,” that probably won’t be happening around here anytime soon.
PS. Big news, coming VERY SOON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
April 20, 2009
Anybody up for another group blog?
Leave suggestions for a topic in the comments!!!
Last year I received an email from an angry Chilean reader. He said that being friends with expats was hurting my perception of Chile and that if I wanted a “real” experience in Chile, I should be friends with only Chileans. I wish I had saved the email so I could quote directly from it, but alas, all negativity that comes into my inbox gets a courteous reply and then goes straight into the trash bin. But, I wanted to touch on the topic, just because I also see gringos and gringas who write about how proud they are that they only have Chilean friends and never hang out with fellow U.S.Americans. They think it’s the only way to live a “real” Chilean experience.
It’s true, I hang out regularly with other expats. We’ll grab a drink, talk and laugh about our lives, sometimes about Chile, but contrary to popular stereotypes about expats, we do not get together exclusively to bitch and moan about this country. Of course, if someone is having a bad day and they feel the need to complain, we all listen and commiserate. But, more often than not our conversations don’t revolve around hating this place.
When we do talk about Chile, I genuinely enjoy our conversations and feel like I usually walk away with a new or improved understanding of the country. I think that Chilean people might be surprised at what they could learn from foreigners who come in with a different perspective on the world, just like we learn from them about their way of life here. The truth is, like Renee said the other night, nobody else gets it quite like a fellow expat. The Chileans don’t understand the way we see things because they haven’t been in our shoes, and gringos that don’t live here permanently or semi-permanently might be able to sympathize but they can’t walk that mile either.
The other day, an email went out in Chilespouses (a group of women married to/dating Chilean significant others that live here). A woman was upset with herself that she was having problems with the Chilean immigration system and not being able to get her paperwork done, having to wait in long lines, having employees jerk her around, etc. Within hours, she had received an overwhelming number of responses of people who had all been there. My Chilean friends don’t know what the immigration system here is like, nor do my gringa friends who don’t live there. They can’t quite fully grasp just how frustrating it can be. You just can’t get that kind of support elsewhere.
Of course, surrounding yourself with only foreigners and not making an effort to learn the language and culture isn’t the best idea either. I know people who have been here for years, and barely speak Spanish. It amazes me. I’m proud to say that of all my close expat friends, every single one speaks great Spanish, far better than the average gringa, or if they don’t, they’re actively learning. The people I know are integrated into Chilean society, work jobs at Chilean companies and have Chilean friends. We all make an effort to be a part of this country. Hanging out with expats does not make our experiences any less authentic.
I found the email sent to me laughable, to be honest. How can you define what a “real” experience is. Sure, there are folks who live up in La Dehesa in their gated communities, no stray dogs on the street, everyone driving around in shiny cars, living with a staff of 3 nanas, a chaffeur and a cook, sending their kids to the most exclusive private schools. Is that not real? Because there are Chileans living that life. Just because it’s not standard doesn’t mean it’s not real.
I have Chilean friends, I have Chilean family, I have a Chilean mutt. I have a Chilean husband for Pete’s sake…I have enough Chile in my day to day life to last me a lifetime. I like spending time with my gringa friends because the rest of my life is Chilean. In the first year of my time in Chile, I thought I wanted to be like those people who say they have no gringo friends whatsoever. Most people who come on study abroad go through that phase — or if they don’t, they probably just came to party and aren’t here longer than 6 months.
If you need to find more Chileans to be in your life, I heard a good friend giving advice to a newly arrived gringa in Santiago, “Say yes to everything.” It’s true. Say yes to the nerd from your bio class when she asks if you want to study together, say yes if your host family invites you to the beach for a weekend with them, say yes to the creepy guy who asks you to a party. I’m not saying you have to make out with him — I mean you can if you want, nobody’s judging you, even if he has a mullet — but I’m just saying, you live an authentic experience by saying yes to do things that Chileans do with Chileans.
However, that doesn’t mean you have to say no to the gringos. Now that I’ve been here for almost 4 years, I’ve realized that neither way is a good way to live. You can’t have all Chile in your life with no grasp to your own roots and culture. And you can’t stay planted in the past never coming to grasp with the culture and reality of where you’re currently living. There has to be a balance — and saying that you won’t be friends with an entire group of people, simply because they do (or don’t) come from the same place as you, is just silly. Everybody has something to offer.
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- Push has got to be one of the saddest books I've ever read. I want to cry.
- Is the air bad today or is it just me? I can barely breathe up in here!
- @emilyinchile, not a particularly good one, I have to admit. now working on the Photoshop edits of your pics :)
- @jmphotographic, thank you so much! and thanks to @rocknrollbride for featuring Emily's wedding!
- @suzydarko, I love you too! a couple months and I'll have a temporary respite on solid ground in the good old U.S. of A!
- Finished the Raw edits of @emilyinchile's photos. Celebrating with a new episode of Gossip Girl. I know she approves :)
