{bazima.com}

Fear not. There's T & A in this post.

Though I resisted it for a long time, it was hard to ignore all of the fuss about Flickr, billed as "the easiest way to store, search, sort and share your photos". I need another photo sharing site like I need another email account, I reasoned. What was the point? But I figured, as with many things, the best way to determine how delightful something is is to try it out. So I created a Flickr account and began posting photos. I've since learned that Flickr is like cocaine. I can't stop packing my beak full of it and seeing what kinds of results I get, along with everyone else. The Flickr community is analagous to coke friends.

One only need to read Flickr's press page and then set up an account for themselves to understand. But The Village Voice said it well in an article a couple of months ago:

Flickr didn't invent online picture sharing, of course, but it was the first such site to recognize itself as much more than a hosting service for personal photo albums. Tricked out with features inspired by the latest fashions in online-software design & post-Friendster social-networking tools, folksonomy-friendly image-tagging code Flickr has also won a devoted following of users hungry to explore the possibilities its Web-centric toolset opens up. It's a place not just for self-display, but for an emergent visual conversation.

Tom Coates, who's been blogging for five years, wrote "the fun I have using Flickr reminds me of the immediate joy and excitement that I used to get from writing on my site." I find this to be true for me as well. I'm addicted to Flickr the way I was addicted to blogging when I first began in 2001. I was also addicted to Nerve at that time, for obvious reasons. I was looking for sex. Or sex and love. Sometimes not necessarily in that order.

Flickr reinvigorates my desire to take pictures and to learn how to be a good photographer, much like the olden golden days of blogging kept me focused on the writing process, even if the writing was for crap and instant gratification in the form of reader comments, bloggie awards, and strangers buying me gifts from my wish list. *cough*

Here comes the T & A part.

One early Saturday afternoon last December, my beau headed out for the gym. Perhaps I'd suddenly been struck by the spirit of the holidays. More likely, I was still reveling in the hot, naked, nude action we'd engaged in not an hour before. I grabbed my camera, took the white lights off of our Charlie Brown tree in my living room, and put on some music. I don't remember what the music was. Let's say it was something inherently sexy and mood-setting like Bjork's "Vespertine," though, in all likelihood, it was probably "Babysitters on Acid" by the Lunachicks or Def Leppard. The nudie self-portraits I took that day were for him. I recently put these self-portraits up on Flickr, with a note that they were a Christmas present for my guy. I liked the way they came out and thought they were worth sharing. I called them Obligatory Self-Portraits With Xmas Lights.

While I'd like to believe there are other good pictures on my Flickr page, pictures that are better than these, I'm not surprised that these are the ones that have been viewed the most. Everybody loves T & A. Perhaps even my boyfriend wishes they were more raunchy than "arty."

Everything that happens on Flickr happens in real-time. Within three minutes of posting the Obligatory Self-Portraits, I got the following email:

I love your self-photos, especially the ones you just put up. I think that you should do more like that. You are fantastic. I will send you money or do whatever you want me to do.

I laughed out loud when I read that. Send me money? Why? What? What ever did he mean? Was Flickr about to make (more of) a hooker out of me? Should I reply with, "Show me the money up front. I'll put it in my g-string and take a picture." Or simply, "How much would you give me for four beaver shots?" Instead, I wrote him back and thanked him SO MUCH for the email. I added a link to my website and coyly suggested that if he wanted to make some sort of "monetary gesture" he could donate to Bazima dot com and I would be forever grateful for his kindness and generosity.

I never heard back from him.