Decisions.

Sometime life presents you with really hard decisions. Not just the "Which of my two children do I want to save from the natural disaster?" or "Do I take the treatment that may or may not kill me in four months or let it go untreated and certainly die in two years?" Oh, no, not simple, tidy decisions like that.

Sometimes you have to decide whether you're going to buy a camera or go on a very short weekend somewhere sunny.

I've been dithering for the past couple of weeks over buying a new digital camera. I've had my old one (which is currently languishing on top of my parents' teevee, no memory card, no batteries) for at least five years (I ordered it off Amazon the night my father choked on a burger bun, went cyanotic but refused to go to the hospital. I am not yet ready to consider my parents' mortality. My own, sure. All at peace with that. But my parents? Oh, no, they're going to live forever).

Anyway, my old digital camera seems terribly passe. It doesn't do anything cool (though seemed the edge of cutting edge technology in 2001), the zoom is laughable and tends to take blurry photos when subjects are in motion. I'm just not happy with it.

But do I really need a new camera? Um, probably not. Not like I take that many photos, even when I do remember to bring my camera. But I feel like I should. Especially with the Niece and Nephew on board, I feel like I should be documenting things more, pictures I can bring out on family occasions and say "See what a little dork you were?" Because that's what good aunts do.

I also feel like sometimes my personal history gets mixed up and memories and people that are so important to me right now get muddled, marginalized, muffled by time. I'm always so happy to look at pictures and remember right then I was feeling crappy because I had a cold, but that friend had finally come into town so I'm grinning like a lunatic with a red nose and careless hair.

I found a box of pictures when I was last home. A veritable treasure trove of smiles and groans and needing explanations from my parents. The majority were a stack of blue-green tinged photos developed from old slideshow film I had gotten developed as a present to said parents many years ago. It was of a trip to Thailand when I was about a year old and my brother and sister were six and seven. And there were all the cousins I can't stand and my grandmother with some pepper in her now completely salty hair and my grandfather, when he was alive, before the stroke. There was me, looking like an orphan, with big eyes (well, as big as my eyes get, anyway) and messy hair that could not be tamed no matter how much water my mother tried to slick it down with. There were my brother and sister in matching blue and green swimsuits (my sister's was green with blue polka-dots and my brother's was just green trunks piped in green. My mother is not a kind woman). It was like opening up a hot, muggy day, smelling like a particular combination of sweet fruit, polluted air and smells from the kitchen quarter that only my maternal family's compound in Bangkok smells like, and the screams of children intent on murderizing each other and the clicky, sharp, melodic, fast-paced sound of the grown-ups gossiping in Thai. I want to have those pictures of right now for the Niece and Nephew (someday the Daughter(s) and Son(s)) to open up when they're turning thirty.

There were also miscellaneous pictures from high school and college. My prom picture in particular calls up some crystal clear memories of slightly tipsy revelry and thinking my friends are the greatest friends. Also, this picture looks like we were re-making Dynasty.

So do I buy a new camera? This one in particular.

No. I go the beach.