Kyle Hepp

November 28, 2009

To be continued — both on this blog and in real life.

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November 27, 2009

We flew out to Buenos Aires on Tuesday. To someone who was sick, the journey seemed eternal. Sit in the car on the way to the airport. Sit in the terminal waiting to take off. Sit in the airplane. Sit in the taxi taking us into the city. All that sitting exhausted me completely and by the time we got to the hotel I was so dead I passed out, waking up only when my stomach started to rumble. After I put some food in my belly, it was back out for the night. And so the next three days passed.

As you can see, it’s been a little wet and rainy here. I don’t mind. Honestly, thunderstorms are something I miss in Santiago! We took advantage of the bad weather and me being sick to go to a movie. I dragged Seba, poor guy, to see New Moon. LOVED.

Then yesterday, I thought I was feeling well enough to go out tourist’ing for a little bit. HA! We tried to walk around one of the pretty Buenos Aires neighborhoods and take pictures but after about five minutes, I was all, “Seeeeeba, I need to go back to the hotel, I need to sit down somewhere.” Again, poor guy. We found a bookstore and went and stayed to read for a few hours so I could rest but we could spend a little time outside the four walls of our room.

Then we went to lunch. Picture on the left — me angrily hiding my face because I don’t feel good and Seba won’t stop taking pictures of me. Picture on the right — me, after Seba’s promised me I can have french fries.

Today is the first day I feel energetic enough to actually get up and do something. It’s downpouring rain and Seba has a cold so he’s sleeping. Ah. Such is life.

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November 26, 2009

See Part I in the post right before this.

I didn’t lose the weight until I got into college, and when I did, it was perfect timing. I had just started to “experiment,” as parents like to say – and by “experiment,” I mean binge drink and go clubbing on school nights. Clubbing required short skirts or jeans so tight they looked painted on, so the men could ogle and you could then run to your friends, screaming in disgust about the creep-o that just tried to dance with you. I was thrilled with my new body and happy to have a place to show it off. I jogged every night while I was losing weight, rain or shine, on the track at University of Tampa, even if that meant hitting the pavement at 2am slightly tipsy. I’d run it off. When I went into the dressing room at Express with a size 10 pair of jeans I had to ask the sale associate to bring me a size 8. Those were too big as well. All through high school, I had varied between a size 12 and size 14. When she brought me a size 6 and it fit, I cried.

By the time I came to Chile I really into line dancing. I had a couple different cowboy hats, but the one I chose to wear on the 10 hour flight down from Miami to Santiago was pink. I should mention that I also had platinum blond hair at the time. I had bleached it right before leaving. People on the plane stared and I smiled back. When I set foot in Chile’s main airport, the taxi drivers, who are normally aggressive with any tourist, flocked to me like flies to honey.

The night I met Seba, I went to his birthday celebration with a girl I wasn’t close friends with. I didn’t feel like going out that night, but was trying to get to know more of the people on my study abroad program, so I made a half hearted effort at getting dressed for the party. I wore black pants, black drugstore eyeliner, and a fire engine red sweater, that I had gifted to my mom for Christmas one year and she had gifted back to me because she thought the sleeves were too small. Seba didn’t stop staring for two hours straight. When I left, he chased me out the door to get my phone number. He was wearing a red that said, “Sunshine State,” referring to Florida, so worn you could practically see through it and a crown from Burger King.

After he proposed to me, I started the search for the number one most important item on every bride’s list – the dress. I went to a small boutique store in Clearwater, and found a nude colored, knee length flapper dress. It was $700 and was the cheapest dress in the store. I loved it. I called Seba to tell him I had found “The One,” and when I described it to him, he said in a small voice, “But I always imagined you walking down the aisle in a long white dress.” WELL MAYBE HE SHOULD’VE TOLD ME THAT BEFORE I BOUGHT A NON-REFUNDABLE NON-WHITE WEDDING DRESS!!! I brought Molly with me when I went to try to take said non-refundable dress back to the store because she’s one of those women who can get salespeople to do anything. She did it. They let me exchange my dress for a long, white, sparkling, Pronovias designer gown, that I got for less than half its original price since it was the sample, though still far beyond my $700 budget. I still adore that dress. I sold it on Ebay. I don’t need it in my closet. I can adore it from the photos.

I was wearing black stretch yoga pants, hand me downs from Molly, that my mom had hemmed too short, and the same blue shirt I always wore to go running the Sunday night I got hit by a car. They cut the pants off me while I lay in the street bleeding. The shirt I threw away while I was still in Chile. And when I got to the U.S. this past August and realized I had accidentally packed the socks I was wearing that day (I know it was them because they were ripped to shreds), I started screaming that they were cursed and I threw them in the small bonfire my mom and stepdad were burning out on the deck. I don’t want reminders of that moment around me. I’m happy to look back on the incident as a third party reporter and say, “Wow, it’s so amazing that girl survived!” but I don’t want to see anything reminding me of the fact that I was actually there.

Then we went to Europe and I was so busy looking at what other people were wearing, forgetting what I was wearing that Sunday night, that if it weren’t for the pictures I wouldn’t even remember what I was wearing.

Now, I’m sitting on my bed in pink Victoria’s Secret sweatpants and a sweater from H&M wondering what I’ll have on for the next big monument in my life. Probably nothing, if I follow life’s typical path and the Next Big Step is making a baby. However, somewhere along the way I’d like to think that I’ll be wearing some kind of gorgeous designer heels, Jimmy Choos, or Louboutins or Manolos, when I’m named Best Photographer in the Whole Wide World.

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November 25, 2009

Warning: this post is completely non-Chile/non-photography related. It’s inspired by a series I read in Elle Magazine based off of a play called, “Love, Loss and What I Wore.”

When I was little, and I mean really little, like kindergarten, the other girls in my class all wore saddle shoes. I wanted some so badly and finally convinced my mom to take me to buy a pair. I got them in pink and they hurt my feet so much that I almost never wore them. At a time when the biggest stress in my life was forgetting my lines in the school play (I was so painfully shy I almost got held back and in a play called, “The Elephant’s Child,” I was literally playing the elephant’s child. Talk about pressure), my love affair with consumerism began.

In second grade, we moved from the boondocks, to what could actually be considered civilization, my parents got a divorce and I was The New Kid. I was a girl with a boy’s name and a short hair cut and my classmates were merciless. At lunchtime I would sit inside a little wooden house that other kids played on, and read inside it. I struggled to turn the pages in my book wearing bright red mittens in the brutal, snowy Michigan winter. Children poked me through the wooden slots with sticks while I read. I remember those red mittens so vividly. I don’t remember how sad I was at the time; it’s more like a vague black fog in the back of my mind that clouds my head when I think about that period in my life.

When I turned 10, my mom’s boyfriend at the time, Joe, took me and his daughter to a Janet Jackson concert. My first CD, when the CD player had just been invented, was Rhythm Nation, after my dad bought it and decided he didn’t like it. I grew up on, “Coontrooooooool. Now I’ve got a lot. Controooooool. To get what I want,” and “People of the world today. Are we looking for a better way, one time, SING IT, we are a part of the Rhythmmmmm Natioooooon,” The Janet concert was the highlight of my young adult life. Standing outside Pine Knob in Detroit, waiting in line to get in, I inhaled and squealed, “I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M BREATHING THE SAME AIR AS JANET JACKSON.” Joe bought me a t-shirt, wildly inappropriate for a fourth grader, of Janet, topless, with her boyfriend’s hands covering her boobs. I wore it to school every day with cream colored jeans. That was the moment I finally decided to embrace my eccentricity. Yes, my name is Kyle Hepp, and I love Janet Jackson and Michael Jackson so much I named my birds after them. This year, when MJ died, I’ll fully admit, I cried. And a 5th grade classmate wrote on my Facebook wall, “Thought of you today. I still remember you moonwalking in class.” What a legacy I left on people.

Then came junior high. I spent ages picking out an outfit for the first day of school. I was so nervous. I instinctively knew that I wouldn’t be one of the automatically cool kids. Yet, I still tried so hard. Like we all do. I wore tapered jeans and then found out that bell bottoms were back in. With a new red turtleneck and a fuzzy cream colored angora sweater, at home I’d thought the outfit was perfect, but as soon as I arrived at campus, I felt sick to my stomach. I knew it was all wrong.

High school flew by. I wore my cheerleading uniform on days we had competitions and my soccer uniform on days we had games. The rest of the time I mostly wore pajamas and laughed at my friends who actually cared about what they wore to school. Once I did an experiment and wore the same purple pajama pants, they were huge on me, for two weeks straight to see if anybody would say anything. Nobody did. That was in 11th grade. That same year for prom I wore a hot pink’ish orange dress to prom, form fitting, to the floor. I looked hot. And I was happy because I was going with a guy who was kind of weird enough to be interesting to me. We used to IM until 4am in the morning. He was the only person I knew who had an insane nocturnal schedule like me and he “helped,” me all the way through a website building class. It was the only time in my life, that I remember cheating in a class. When we were in high school, he was still super skinny, what my mom would call “a late bloomer,” and I thought he was awesome. I was chubby. Now he’s super athletic and has ridiculous six pack abs. While I might not have the abs, I have lost quite a bit of weight since high school. I feel vindicated for the both of us.

Part II coming tomorrow.

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