Ok, I've decided to go ahead and make this journal 'public' since it seems to be public already. Thus, I'm going to do a little introduction now.

Hi. Ahem. I'm Itzie.

I live in Seattle. I moved here from Maryland in 1998 to do Americorps for a few years. I lived off of 600$ a month. Post-Americorps, I found a job with a semi-evil company as an admin assistant. I am currently paralyzed trying to decide what to do with myself as a future career. My work schedule, however, is completely sweet. I bike to work at 5:45AM seven days in a row and work for ten hours a day (ok, that part isn't so sweet except the biking part - so peaceful that early!) and then I get SEVEN DAYS OFF! So every other week, I have off. I love that part.

So my future career choices are along the lines of:

Grad School for MSW

Grad School for some less "practical" degree (such as photographic Anthropology)

Attempt to break into photojournalism (and eventually become world-famous National Geographic Photographer)

Peace Corps

International Adoption Agency/Child Welfare Agency job

Any recommendations among these choices is welcome. If I can figure out how, I'm going to add a guestbook today.

I am currently dating a very sweet boy who is all wrong for me. I like him very very much, but at the same time, I know that we're too different to continue on a long-term basis. I didn't always think that - it's a more recent development.

I live in a house with three lesbians. For the first time since I've lived in this house, no one is dating anyone else who lives here. We're all pretty much vegetarian and we all get along fairly well. I am the token heterosexual. Housemates are:

Emilie (has lived here for a year, is by far the funkiest and hippest of us all and is dating Angela)

Becca (has lived here for three months or so - is as sweet as pie, plays the accoustic guitar and is generally the nicest person in the world)

Amy (has lived here for about a month, bikes like crazy, is a bit butch, bakes all the time, and is really nice and plenty fun)

Hobbies include reading plenty and visiting BC to pick up new books all the time. I collect cameras, sort of. I have about 7 right now.

Yashika - my first camera - a 35mm

Nikkon - fairly automatic, but with manual settings used for 35mm black and white mostly

Lomo - My lomorific lomo. Best for color and gimmick-y inexact photos - some of which come out very artsy if I'm lucky

Polaroid SX-70 - for manipulating polariods... however, it seems to have broken

Holga - my favorite right now... my muse. For medium format light-leaked photos that look super super cool.

1948(?) Kodak Duaflex - An antique medium format camera for which I have to roll the film myself while locked in Emilie's closet. So, of course, I don't use it too often.

Olympus - my point-and-shoot vacation camera.

I also like to bike bike bike, bake bake bake, and knit. Knit knit. And I like to decorate letters a la Griffin and Sabine. I'm a bit crafty sometimes.

Lately, I've been spending too much time with my boy. Going out to eat too much and whatnot. We've been eating out so much lately that I'm almost at a point where I don't want to eat out ever again and I'm dying for the chance to cook my own meals. I know, I know, poor me.

I should also mention that I'm a vegetarian and a bit on the earthy do-good-ish liberal thing.

I found diaryland quite by accident. I'd been planning on starting my own blog for quite some time. Three days ago, I went looking for a discussion about Homies and racism. I found a blog site of some girl in New York, who was a bit diva-esque and not really all that interesting. So then I looked up "Blogs" on google. The second site that came up allowed you to search Blogs by location, so I went looking for an interesting blog in Seattle. Out of the few that were from Seattle on that site, Red Dirt Girl's was by far, the most interesting looking. But then, said boyfriend came over and I didn't get to read it, so I bookmarked it for a later date... which happened to be yesterday. So yesterday, I read all of her Seattle entries and discovered that she lives quite close to me AND was going to the same reading that I was that night. So when I saw her there (it really wasn't hard to spot her - there were only three redheads and one of them was the author), I introduced myself.

Anyway, I also decided to start my own diaryland diary. That would be this. So here I am.

Of course, no one is reading my diary yet. I can almost hear the empty room echoing (where my audience would be if I had one).

That's ok, diaries are mostly for the writer anyway.

It kind of reminds me of my radio show in college. Since our radio station didn't actually broadcast, no one really listened to it (you could get it on the college cable channel, but that was it). So I talked to myself and played music I liked. And that was that.