What's really going on
Posted Tuesday, September 12, 2006 @ 10:07 PM
I have done my best to explain to a few close friends what life has been like as a college student for the past few weeks, and have all but abandoned this small readership in the process. There are many reasons, none of which I'm sure are the real ones. Primarily, while my dorm room is already beginning to feel like home, I still feel removed from—or perhaps more accurately, without—context, which is somehow different than anything I've experienced before. I do not feel like a traveler, given an opportunity to disappear for a while to reflect and explore. I do not feel like I am resting or growing or thriving. This makes expressing myself difficult.
The cast of characters we are all familiar with have fallen away, and it is hard to introduce anyone when I do not know who will be important—when I do not know them well enough to adequately introduce them in the first place. To lean on an old cliche, I cannot write what I do not know, not because I feel I'll lose you somewhere along the way, but because I, myself, do not know where to begin or how to organize what I'm thinking, even through the creative outlets on which I usually depend. There are good days and bad (more recently, less bad), and bad ones lend themselves to tempestuous passages I don't know what to do with. Similarly, much of what I have been writing has felt emotionally personal, not necessarily due to a particular event or experience, it's just not usually the type of writing I share here. I consider it merely emotional, rather than reflective and significant, like some of my recent posts.
As writing and photography have gone hand in hand recently (one of you said, "I feel like I'm watching a documentary of your life"), my photography has also suffered. While everyone in my life up to this point practically expected me to have a camera attached to my face, trained for over a year to alternately ignore or lavish the lens with attention, now no one knows about the camera, and pulling it out around people who don't know me well tends to make them uncomfortable, suspicious, or distant. While friends used to ask me to bring it along, request my presence specifically to document something, or else secretly enjoy seeing themselves on flickr, now people hardly know it's something I do. For the most part the 350D (my love, my child, my life) has stayed in my room, and the SD600 has only made brief appearances in public, surfacing from the abyss that is my bottomless purse.
Even without considering people's reactions to pulling out the camera, again I feel I don't know where or how to start. Buildings? I don't know what many of them are for. Friends? I'd prefer them to be comfortable with me before they see my third eye. Students walking to class? I'd feel like a paparazzi. My shyness manifests itself through my demeanor and my art, apparently. I look forward to my brief return to Birmingham this week for a concert, if only because I'll see people who know my old friend the camera, and there's an event for me to document. It has been long enough that I feel I'm in a foreign land where no one speaks the language of photography, the native tongue of my recent creative process, and so I must only speak the second language of get-to-know-you conversation, which feels dry and inexpressive by comparison. Many things about college life feel this way, right now—like a new language I'm still anxious about speaking, while I long to find someone who knows the customs of home. Displacement, in a word.
I do not feel lost so much as nothing feels inspiring or familiar. I like my classes and I've even established some habits, but the excitement I expected to feel upon arrival has yet to manifest itself. Still, there are good things, and I plan to share them once I've a more solid footing here. I hope you'll bear with me as I struggle a little longer to orient myself. Part of me thinks all this hesitance and creative disorientation is bogus—like claiming you have writer's block, when all that's required is a brief confrontation with the blank page followed by a handful of terrible sentences. I do and do not believe in writer's block, just as I do and do not believe all this talk and bullshit about creativity and art in relation to my life.
I (like you, I suspect) hope something will come of all this turmoil soon. Until then, good friends, do not hold my absence against me.
For now, I hope you'll be satisfied with a video tour of my dorm room, and chuckle to yourselves near the end when you see my |\/|4d d4nc1ng skillz.
A tour of my dorm room on Vimeo
Oh, and a technical note about this blog: the amount of comment spam I'm receiving has increased significantly. For that reason, I will be closing comments on all entries after they are a few days old. Comments will remain open (and are encouraged!) for the most recent posts, and seeing as most of the comments roll in within the first few days following, I suspect none of you will mind. Until I get all the comments closed on old entries, please excuse the "Nice site! - Lance Bass Porn"-type comments which have flooded the site.
Welcome to the past, bucko. You're swimming through the archive of rocket-fish.org. If this isn't where you were headed, I suggest you get out of here while there's still time.
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Way to bust a move... nice video!
13 Sep 2006, 7:25 AM.
Seriously, though, I think a lot of people feel the same way you have been feeling when they come to college. It's such a culture shock, it takes time to adjust. I can remember my freshman year. I had a lot of problems compounding on each other, and I looked at the weekends as a way to escape back to Pinson to get away from them. Gradually as the weeks went on, the feeling started to subdue.
I'll end with this - You do what YOU need to do. Don't worry about what anyone else expects you to do or anything along those lines. If they are turned off by something or react negatively, screw them. They obviously aren't worth it.
13 Sep 2006, 7:40 AM.
welcome back. i had suspected that when you started college there would be some period of adjustment wherein you did not post here as much. so, for this reader at least, this lapse was expected. i have to admit i did not consider that your normally regular flickr posting would dry up a bit as well, but i did not fully appreciate the your predicament in that regard.
i've already commented on the video once, but i would like to add that the dancing made me grin.
something you might consider before shutting down the old entry comments, akismet is a free service that captures comment spam on blogs. it was originally developed for wordpress (which is how i know about it from using wordpress.com and wp on my own site) but has plugins for alot of other blogging software, including movable type. of the 1200 or so spam comments i got on my old w*p*.com blog, only two or three got through, and none of the 30-40 on my new site have gotten through.
it might be more work than it is worth to you to set it up, but i thought i would present the option regardless. if you are interested, you can go to akismet.com/personal to get an api key and akismet.com/development to get the plugin.
13 Sep 2006, 8:13 AM.
I'm in LA right now, and I meet way too many people every day - luckily I am here with another friend of mine who introduces me as his "producer and photographer". I carry a good amount of equipment with me and always have my camera nearby - that way, I am just a photographer and can shoot all day and night... then they see the pictures and hire me for a job.
LA is weird.
college is weird.
survival in the social world is amazing.
13 Sep 2006, 1:12 PM.
oh, and your dorm room is gigantic - great room for dance parties... even if it is only one person dance parties.
13 Sep 2006, 1:13 PM.
I thought my dorm room was huge. Yours is HUGE!
I may have to email you some day (other then for your address to send a scarf of course) to get music recommendations. My roommate and I were getting into the song.
But I'm glad you're ok though. :) Or ok in the sense that you're alive and dancing.
13 Sep 2006, 6:04 PM.
hey, you are welcome to come over here and meet a few of my friends any time. feel free to bring the camera as well. there is usually something interesting going on here so hopefully it wont be too boring or anything. anyway hope to hear from you soon or see you around campus!
15 Sep 2006, 12:41 PM.
I liked that you had Ben and Jerrys ice cream AND a Ben and Jerrys drink...annnndddd i like the spinny ending....OH! and I like the RAINDESIGN laptop thinger....i used to have one of those!! i would carry it with me everywhere...but then i got a 15 inch and it bugged me that it didnt go to the edges....so i sent it home.
15 Sep 2006, 2:59 PM.
First of all, I love you. This lovely little piece of video has reminded me of the ways. Secondly, you have an uber-sweet pad of which I'm utterly jealous. Hopefully I'll put up my own dorm tour soon.
19 Sep 2006, 12:47 AM.