Young Man's Chronicles: July 2009

My Reading

Jodi Picoult "House Rules"
Michelle Richmond "No one you know"
Dean Koontz "Mr. Murder"
John Hart "The Last Child"
Kazuo Ishiguro "When we were Orphans"
Stacey D'Erasmo "A Seahorse Year"
John Weir "What I did wrong"
Tana French "In the Woods"
Julie Powell "Julie and Julia"
Jodi Picoult "Nineteen minutes"
Nelson DeMille "The Charm School"
Jodi Picoult "My Sister's Keeper"
John Grisham "Appeal"
Stephenie Meyer "Twilight"
Jennifer Cody Epstein "The Painter from Shanghai"
Elliott Perlman "Seven Types of Ambiguity"
Michelle Richmond "The year of fog"
Amanda Eyre Ward "How to be lost"
Ted Dekker "Skin"
Ted Dekker "Th3ee"

Well, despite the fact that I am already 20, I still have a very vague idea of how to drive a car. Especially a big car.
I guess in Moscow, where I spend most of the time, driving a car is not a crucial knowledge, especially taking in consideration the ridiculous amount of traffic on the roads and the amount of money you have to spend before you can successfully get a driver's license. So all in all, in Moscow I would say you can easily leave without knowing how to drive a car or even having one.
However, here in the States it's a totally different story. Say, I would one day live in America. Then definitely, no doubt, I would have to buy a car and learn how to drive one. Especially if it was somewhere in Florida or in California, where not having a vehicle basically equals being stuck at your own house all the time.
Bottom line. I think it is very important to learn how to drive. Just in case.
So today after some debating and weighing all "pros" and "cons" my friend Whitney gave me couple driving lessons and even let me drive her big Chrysler for a while. I drove around the movie theatre and then in the evening I was driving around the house where I live. Quite stressful. Especially when it's a big car and it's very dark around. I guess it really takes some time to start feeling comfortable behind the driver's wheel. But on the other hand, I think all the stress and experience is really worth it.

I did another photo-shoot with Whitney, and this time it was all about the combination of sensuality and roughness, feminine poses and exaggerated make-up. We were thinking about the name for this photo-shoot for a while, but the circumstances we happened to be in on this day helped us to come up with the "Sensual Survivors".
So basically I would say this was the most adventurous photo-shoot I had so far. Me and Whitney drove quite far away from our town to the empty road away from high-way. While I was photographing for about 2 hours,the car doors stayed open and apparently the engine battery died. So when it was time for us to leave, we couldn't start the car. To make the long story short, for about an hour we were stranded on the side of the practically empty road in a car full of flies, without any conditioning working or any water left trying to figure out how to get out of there. It was definitely very adventurous if not stressful experience. Finally some guys, who were driving by, stopped and helped us to start the car again, but after the hour of surviving in an extreme heat we thought "Sensual Survivors" would be appropriate name for the whole photo-shoot.
Check out the pictures below:)