Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/09/03
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search][like a cup of tasty yogert, this seemingly off topic post has genuine leica content at the bottom!] arthur said: >Isn't it the job of teenagers to find new ways to freak out the old >folks? Sure, this gets more difficult with each generation, with the new >kids having to work harder to find ever more freaky things to do. As I >remember years back, some kids took LSD. Some grew their hair long! Some >even had sex in public! cutting, in one form or another, has been around forever. from egyptian mummies with evidence of ritual scarification, to the "posessed" man in the gospil of st. mark, cutting himself with stones to release the deamons (which, given what i know about emily, i think is suprisingly accurate). today, an estimated two million americans cut themselves. though it's been called "the addiction of the 90's", it's been previlant in the u.s. for significantly longer. in the 1930's there was a rash of young women burying pins in their bodies, in extreme cases, over a hundred. what has, only recently, begun to change is the diagnosis from health professionals. typically, girls who cut themselves were quickly labeled dissassociative or, even worse, "borderline personality" and then cast off as untreatable. (self mutilation is one of the 8 criteria listed in the DSMD-IV for the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. -- which i think is perjorative and misogynist -- but that's just me.) thanks to modern research by people like putnam and trickett, who in 1987 began following some 170 girls who had started cutting we're learning why people cut and how cutters are made. putnam and trickett believe, among other things, that cutting is often the result of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. emily began cutting to make herself less attractive and, i think, she continues because it is the one thing in her life that she has control over. ob-leica-content: i was photographing emily last night at her job and the rewind on my f100 broke -- some obstanant roll of film didn't want to rewind and sheered the pins off of the interior claw that grips the film spool -- it was the damndest thing. i would have been lost if i hadn't had the presence of mind to bring my m6 as well. i actually wasn't going to bring the m6 but it was calling me as i left the house "hey! hey! i'm fun to use! i'm fun to look through and wind! bring me along! i'm only the size of a flash! i weigh the same as your 85 1.8! so i didn't have a ttl bounce flash, but i got the shot. now what i REALLY need is a 35mm noctalux, and a nice developer that will push tri-x to 32 or 6400..... kc