Why can't my camera not be broken?

I wish that I could buy a camera and have it last for more than 11 months.

When I was living in Cody with the jerk, we went up to Billings, MT and I "bought" a nice little camera for $90. (yea, for MT and the no sales tax.) Last summer my little sister went on a school trip to Mexico, she didn't have a camera so she asked if she could take mine with her.

She got to Mexico, went into a store saw a really cute purse, freaked out and decided she must have it and sat my camera down in the store and forgot it there. Thanks to my little sister some lucky person is now the owner of my very first nice camera.

When Jennifer got home from her trip last summer as soon as she had money to spare she bought me a new camera. That happened towards the end of June last year. I'm in love with that camera. It takes beautiful pictures and I absolutely love it.

This morning when I finally got out of bed so I could get ready for work. I walked out of my room and thought that the cats had decided that they were dogs and drug their food dish into the kitchen because they wanted food. A few more steps outside my door I realized that it wasn't a food dish. It was my camera...

Jennifer had to take some pictures of the cats yesterday because they looked so darn cute sitting in the window together. When she was done with it she put it on the kitchen table.

Not a big deal you think. Johnny taught the cats how to jump up onto the counters and table the day we moved into the trailer house. And now it is impossible to keep them off of the counters. It doesn't matter how many times you squirt them with water for doing something bad as soon as the squirt bottle is out of sight they are back on the counter.

So I figure either Jennifer put my camera on the table so that the little strapy thing was hanging off the edge of the table and one of the cats pulled it off the table playing with it. Or one of the cats jumped up on the table and knocked it over the edge.

As soon as I realized it was my camera I hurried and picked it up, closed the little door to the battery and turned my camera on. Just as I feared you can see a crack in one of the lenses.

13 months after I got the camera it needs replaced again. For someone who dreams of being a photographer, I sure have bad luck with cameras.

I'm so glad that Jennifer doesn't know how to use a manual 35mm camera, or that one would be lost or broken too. I nearly lost that one shortly after my grandpa gave it to me. (I forgot it on one of the buses when I went to Great Falls for Spring Break with Lindsay.) All I have to say was thank you for our tickets being messed up or the driver wouldn't have remembered where we were going. He had already sent my camera case on another bus heading to Great Falls and I was able to pick it up at the bus station the next day.

I have terrible luck with cameras or letting people use my cameras and them getting broken.

I don't know if I should tell Jennifer she has to buy me another new camera, because it is kind of her fault that this camera is now broken, or just wait until I can buy a new one on my own when I can spare the money to do so in 20 years when I have a real job and don't have to drive a car that is falling apart. And live off freezie pops and my free four dollar employee meals from Taco Bell.

Maybe if I wait until then I will actually be able to afford to develop the pictures that I do take. I still have at least two rolls of undeveloped film from my trip to Florida in October 1998, one or two rolls from my trip to Washington D.C. in March of 1999, and the majority of the pictures I have taken since I started college still remain undeveloped.

Gah...I hate money!

Someday though things won't be as hard for me. blah, blah, blah...the struggle is only going to make me a stronger person, it is hard to see things that way when you have been struggling since the day you stepped out of your parent's house to start college four years ago.