featured – The Pulp Press

Ava Greer is talented enough to take pictures of anyone or anything in the world, but it’s physically impossible for her to take photos of anyone except homeless people! Poor girl! Luckily, she’s finding solace on Instagram and Facebook support groups for other street photographers with similar problems.

According to Ava, she is physically incapable of pressing the shutter button unless there’s a homeless person somewhere in the frame. “It’s like my body shuts down, and if the subject isn’t homeless, I literally cannot take their photo!”

But it wasn’t always like this, she says. “I’ve been doing photography since high school. At that time, I had never even seen a homeless person up close before.” Back in those days, Ava mostly took pictures of her friends and family, cashiers, mailmen, babies, and some still life.

“Then, I left home and traveled to loads of different cities for six months. When I got back, I looked at my thousands of photos and realized that only 20 of them were not of homeless people.”

According to Ava, she took all 20 of those photos on the first day of her travels. “The rest were all pictures of homeless people – thousands of photos of them. Nothing and nobody else,” she remembers. “As soon as I noticed, I rushed out the door to take pictures of people who were not homeless, but I couldn’t. I physically couldn’t do it.”

It’s been two years since then, and Ava’s problem still hasn’t improved, but she’s coping by participating in online support groups for street photographers who are unable to take pictures of anyone but homeless people. “There are actually a lot of people like me on Instagram, and I’m also a member of loads of street photography groups on Facebook, and we inspire each other to keep going.”

Sage Parlancer is the envy of her third-grade classroom; she has saved enough swear jar money to afford her entire future college tuition, and possibly her retirement. Her excellent vocabulary and money-saving skills have already gotten her accepted into three Ivy League schools.

“I’ve been passionate about profanities since I was about three years old,” Sage recalls. According to Sage, it all started one morning when she witnessed her father stub his toe while making breakfast. “He was so angry! He was like, ‘F@%* S#%! C#@!,’ and I was just thinking, ‘wow, what a wonderful avenue for self-expression.’ When my mom found out about what happened, she got so angry that she started cursing as well. It was amazing. I’ve loved swearing ever since.”

Sage’s parents, Fretta and Frank Parlancer, used to lay awake with sweaty, pounding hearts as they thought about the drug-addicted prostitute they were certain their daughter would become. “It was about two months after her fourth birthday when we realized we needed to do something to stop her. We tried washing her mouth out with soap, but that didn’t work, so we did some Googling and decided that a swear jar would be the best way to teach her some manners.”

A True Polyglot

The swear jar only inspired Sage to take her love for dirty words to a new extreme: “By the time I was five, I had learned the entire French language just because I thought I was cursing,” Sage remembers.

Shelves2_WP — Sage’s money banks line a five-tier shelf in her home.

Sage’s exploration of the French language (combined with her naturally romantic disposition) motivated her to curse in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian, as well as in German, Swedish, Russian, Swahili, Amharic, Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu, Farsi, Hindi, Nepali, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, and Klingon.

By the time Sage turned six, the Parlancers had an entire five-tier bookshelf lined with swear jars and piggy banks, each designated for their respective swear word. “It got to the point where we were scared she was going to become a prostitute AND that we would go into debt trying to make sure she had enough coins to put in her swear jar,” Frank remembers.

But after news got out about Sage’s impressive savings, it became clear that Sage’s parents no longer needed to worry because their darling eight-year-old already had a promising future ahead of her.

Now, the only thing Sage and her parents have to think about is which Ivy League school she will attend in the fall of 2028 as she’s already been offered positions at Columbia, Harvard, and Yale.

Sage, you are an inspiration. Keep up the good work!