It has been a while since I felt driven to write—not just here, but at all. Things are beginning to bubble up again, whether it's the dissatisfaction with daily life, the stress of school and work, a sense of change, or the desire to procrastinate on a daily basis. Sometimes I think we experience sea changes in character without fully realizing it. Can one truly be cognisant of one's own transformation as it is happening? I find that for myself, whether the transformation is physical or unrelated to the body, it is often a single glance, an unremarkable photo, or a tiny moment which makes me aware. For instance, when I look at this photo, taken my freshman year of high school (was that really almost six years ago?), I see someone else entirely.

Mostly I see the physical transformation of my face—that single photo is the main evidence I have of the last of my middle school baby fat, before my jawline sharpened and I began to grow into my adult features. But of course there's an emotional resonance. I still feel a connection and nostalgia for the place it was taken. I remember the fabric of that shirt, the way it fit my torso when I wore it. I remember putting on that bracelet every day. I remember how my life was shaped by the daily routine of high school. I remember what made me happy or excited then. I compare all of this to today. When I visit that place now, I feel differently—it is a place of the past, which, despite all efforts, I can no longer really activate. I don't know where that shirt is, or whether I got rid of it. It probably wouldn't fit, even if I still had it. The bracelet, too, is gone. My daily routine couldn't be more different. What makes me happy or excited now might have seemed alien to me then.

It's not so much that I feel a loss at all this; I could care less about the shirt or the bracelet, the physical transformation of my face, or even the lack of active connection I feel when visiting such an important place from my past. It is true that my memory and my life plagues itself with sentimentality and nostalgia. But, stripping all that away, what remains is merely an awareness—an attempt to draw a line connecting point A and point B. True—I myself made the journey, but while traveling, did I stop to consider the shape of the path? To hesitate now as I draw the line feels only natural. After all, when we board a plane that flies from New York to San Francisco, how can we really comprehend that distance? What cities, what rivers, what houses have we flown over? How many people are below us, and what are they doing? How are they feeling? How many of them look up at the plane to consider its passengers and where they are headed? The most we emerge with at our destination is a pack of peanuts in our belly, a few chapters read, or a short nap—never a genuine astonishment at the great distance we have traveled.

Sometimes I catch myself having acutely adult moments, and I'm not sure what to think of them. Last night in my local grocery store, I stood in line at the checkout. Having already unloaded my items onto the conveyor belt, I considered how much money I would save with my discount card (nearly $17.00, I would discover), and how many buy-one-get-one-free items I had chosen. An extra tub of ice cream, two extra steaks, an additional package of cheese. I felt genuinely excited and satisfied with this. It was some time later before I considered what this meant. How often do adolescents find themselves alone in grocery stores shopping for planned meals to cook at home, genuinely delighted by the idea of a discount? When, if ever, do they feel relieved and content to return home at the end of a long day, read quietly, and turn in early for bed?

The spring semester and the brief extension of school into the summer has left me much altered, though I'm uncertain whether anyone besides myself can observe it. What's interesting about reflecting on the line—the connection between two different characters of my life, both of them me, neither of them me—is that quite suddenly I'm aware of the next point along the way. In acknowledging the distance between myself and point A, it's only natural to consider how far point C will be—incalculably so. The things I admire about myself from point A might not have come along to point B. What else might go missing when I arrive at C?

Tuscaloosa, AL*
Oxford, MS
Holly Springs, MS
Memphis, TN
Birmingham, AL*
Atlanta, GA*
Chicago, IL
New Orleans, LA*
Moundville, AL
Augusta, GA*
Greenville, SC*
Asheville, NC
Charlottesville, VA
Washington, D.C.
Monticello, VA
Natural Bridge, VA
Kaifeng, China
Luoyang, China
Beijing, China
Zhengzhou, China
Song Shan, China

*Multiple visits.

Feel free to throw your own list into the comments.

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East: Images From Beijing & the Henan Province
November 3 - 30, 2007
Reception: November 11, 3-5PM

LJCC Gallery
3960 Montclair Road
Birmingham, AL 35213

Hope to see you there!

Juggle Court from Joe Parmer on Vimeo.

Hats off to Joe's superior video editing.

There is nothing to hide. I would not put up party pictures that make people or myself look ridiculous, and don't tell the internet who I have a crush on or privilege them in my online life.

In general, people expect my online life to exactly reflect everything there is or has happened, but that is not true. Sure, you guys are allowed to know that I am somewhat crazy and hyperactive, and that is part of understanding how I work (with both meanings). What I do with this online is merely a way of coping with my life. I need the output.

Mareen's talking specifically about online expression, but I'd argue that it applies to all forms. People somehow misconstrue one type of expression as a representation of the creator as a whole. While the expression may be truthful, revealing, and vulnerable, it certainly isn't whole. It is a coping mechanism, an output, and may explore one idea and one question which has eaten away at the creator for some time.

In my photo theory class, we've been talking a lot about Sally Mann, a photographer who has recently infected my life. I think this theory of expression as an exploration and a fraction especially applies to her work, which is controversial. One series (her most famous, and probably my favorite), "Immediate Family," contains many images of her nude children. People misconstrue her as a bad mother who eroticizes her children through photos, but personally I find the work quite moving and hardly pornographic. Another body of work, "What Remains," features images of decomposing cadavers at the Tennessee Body Farm—photos often viewed as a violation of the sacrosanct ceremony of death. Because of these two works, she's often depicted as a woman whose boundaries are ill-defined, who is a terrible mother or an artist selecting controversial subjects for publicity and attention. However, I think it's merely an output—she is exploring her children, their personalities, and childhood in general. I think her work speaks volumes about the violence and wildness of childhood—the part we often brush aside or forget as we reminisce about our formative experiences, or romanticize the rawness and innocence of our early years.

I think I become infected with forms of expression and certain creators of those forms in a way that totally absorbs me and prevents me from doing much else. Late in high school I caught and recovered from several poets, including but not limited to Billy Collins, Jack Gilbert, Mark Strand, and Naomi Shihab Nye. The latter two spilled into nearly all of my serious writing, through epigraphs or borrowed lines, overarching concepts or ideas. Jack Gilbert and Mark Strand got me going on the je ne sais quoi of absence and loss. For an entire year, perhaps longer, all I wrote about was absence, dearth, death, and loss, and it became the subject of my senior thesis. Strand's "Keeping Things Whole" was the be-all, end-all of my late high school existence. Everyone I knew loved it, many could recite it, and perhaps it infected others as it infected me. In a way, the creative writing department was a mechanism for spreading the disease of poetry, as we all passed along little books, poems—vessels—to anyone else ready to come down with something.

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

Each infection with a creator and creation—if you really come down with it, and have a long recovery time—leaves a scar. Like a terrible accident, it can change your appearance. The way you look before and the way you look after can be so different that you must explain how the two yous are connected. People see scars and ask for stories. And perhaps it's also like a relationship. You take the poet, the photograph, the painting, the song, to bed each night as you're exploring, and when it's over you're left with scars of another variety. Never will you forget the way a piece has touched you, and when you encounter it again much later—or anything that resembles it—you can't help but linger a moment and remember.

Sally Mann is my latest disease. I can't stop studying her images, collecting information about her work, linking her to seemingly unrelated conversations through some abstract concept I've formed while mulling her over late at night. I want to show her to everyone because of the way she moves me; I feel that everyone, given the right circumstance, will be moved in the same way, but of course that's not the case.

I suppose my ultimate point is that I feel myself changing output. Once my output could be found here, online, at regular intervals. Once it was poetry for critique every other week. Now I feel it shifting, more than ever, to the photograph—the visual—which I can honestly say I haven't felt until this month. It's true that I've been a compulsive flickr user (and abuser) for some time now, but the energy was different. Now that I've learned to swim, I am thrusting myself into the deep end. I cannot find enough time for hiding in the dark room outside of photo class. My time there is a kind of meditation, and there is always much more to be done, not for the sake of deadlines, but simply because I am not finished.

Sally Mann has also sparked a curiosity in the idea of photos as objects, as well as antique photo processes, specifically that of tin types, large format, and wet plate collodion (all processes that I absolutely cannot afford). A local artist, Jenny Fine, got a grant to study with the couple who taught Sally Mann how to create wet plate collodion images. She lived in New York to study and work for a year, and has since returned to Tuscaloosa to teach art to elementary school students. Jenny makes tin types (and uses other alternative ways of producing images). I am supposed to model for her this weekend—an exchange for the opportunity to tag along and observe her process—and hopefully will have much more to report in the near future.

Here he is on CNN (in the blue shirt).

And of course, there's lots of other stuff floating around YouTube.

The Great Wall from glynnis on Vimeo.

Chinese street vendor food from glynnis on Vimeo.

At the market from glynnis on Vimeo.

The local Chinese pet store from glynnis on Vimeo.

Mongolian Opera restaurant from glynnis on Vimeo.

An afternoon at the tea warehouse from glynnis on Vimeo.

Horse head fiddle player in the park from glynnis on Vimeo.

Headlights are brighter in China. Even in big cities where there are streetlights, it seems like everyone is driving around with their brights on.

During our trip, Beijing implemented (or tested?) a new driving policy: every other day, only half the cars can drive into the city, depending on whether their license plate ends in an odd or even number. This was inconvenient for us, since the car we took to the Henan province was the wrong number on the day we needed to return. We had to swap cars with a driver on our way back.

Everyone everywhere is all about the Olympics. The day after we arrived there was a huge celebration in Tienanmen Square, as it was exactly one year until the Olympics. Every day you hear countdowns on TV, radio, etc., and there are advertisements promoting clean air and discouraging littering, all for the Olympics. On the news, they discuss new driving policies which will be tested, allowing only buses, taxis, and official vehicles into the city for four days to see what it will do for the air, and how the city transit systems will hold up under added weight. Downtown there are entire city blocks, and huge areas which are being constructed just for the Olympics—housing, fancy hotels, green space. In some areas, you can see more cranes than you can skyscrapers.

Instead of paper napkins, the Chinese use what Americans think of as tissue, or Kleenex, which comes in little packets at restaurants, or wrapped in a big plastic package at home.

The Chinese don't eat chicken breast, and restaurants often discard it. It is considered too dry and stringy to be good to eat.

Women's public restrooms are essentially stalls with holes in the ground, though these holes have porcelain basins with textured places to place your feet to keep from slipping. The idea is that this is "cleaner," since you don't have to touch anything, but in actuality it smells awful (despite plumbing, flushes, etc.), you can't avoid stepping in or getting piss on your shoes, and there is rarely toilet paper or soap at any of these locations. When there are "Western toilets," whether in homes or nice restaurants, they usually don't flush very well.

But you're probably not here because of your interest in school.

CHINA, CHINA!

Here are some goodies—the first installment of what we shall call "Observations That Require No Further Explanation." More of these to come.

Rolls of toilet paper have no cardboard cylindrical insert in the center, just toilet paper through and through. This seems much more efficient, less wasteful.

Everywhere in Beijing there are small courtyards which look like brightly-colored playgrounds. Actually, this is public exercise equipment, used every day in "morning exercise" or "zao chen lian" by primarily the elderly. It's not uncommon to see a courtyard full elderly, coordinated in movement through tai qi, with or without swords. Every time we pass, I still have trouble not comparing the scene to American playgrounds, full of children.

Groceries in Beijing are cheap by American standards. A trunk full of groceries which in the US would cost $100-200, in Beijing only costs about $30, or 220 yen.

The juice selection in China is delicious and incredible. While they don't have things like Ocean Spray with fifty flavors of cranberry juice, they have delicious nectars like mango, peach, apple, pear, or tomato. Peach is what seems most unusual and delicious, as it really tastes like peaches, but isn't too sweet and doesn't taste artificial. All the juices/nectars are thicker than most juices you can buy in America.

Missy's family debated the color of my hair. She says that in Chinese, they have a word, "gold," that they use similarly for redheads and blondes, but the only way it translates to English is "blonde."

I've begun uploading photos from the trip (I'm shooting for five new photos uploaded per day), so head on over to flickr and have a look.

I would say that packing has been a breeze, and certainly the suitcase bit has been. It's the boxes for school that have been the real trouble. It's sort of like packing for the trip I'm about to go on, and packing for all future trips before May 2008.

The parade of boxes in and out of my life every few months is becoming a nice punctuation. ("This is when I moved out of this place, so I know that thing happened before then. Before I moved into this place, I felt this way," etc.) Suddenly there are many more commas in my life, as far as moving goes—a period at the end of Birmingham last year, an ellipsis for Christmas break. A comma for the beginning and end of summer—an em dash for Beijing—then school again. Pretty soon the string of places I've lived with flattened boxes in the closet will form a complex, Victorian paragraph.

Aside from restructuring the sentence I'm living, the boxes are kind of a pain. Each new time I pack for somewhere I downsize. It seems absurd to take more than one box of anything anywhere—even the one suitcase, one carry-on, one purse, one pillow system of overseas travel is cumbersome. Lately I've been purging, with the help of ebay, envelopes of goodies mailed to friends, and donations, all of which I hope to continue at a feverish rate when the school year begins.

What are the packing rules you set for yourself, moving, traveling, or otherwise?

At any rate, I'm off at full-speed later this morning to Birmingham, Beijing, then Tuscaloosa. You can expect an update in late August when I've recovered from jet lag, move-in day, and my first day of class.

My partner in crime:

She has promised the following:

A trip to the Forbidden City, and kite-flying in Tiananmen Square.

Crumbling Chinese architecture, and strolls through the remaining hutongs of Beijing.

A trip to Hangzhou, where I imagine we'll be seeing the West Lake.

I have a long layover in Korea on my way home, and my flight arrives in Birmingham in time for me to (try to) get a good night's sleep, wake up, drive to Tuscaloosa, and move in to my dorm the morning before classes begin.

If reverse culture shock weren't enough, I know from previous trips that within the hour of my homecoming, at least one person will ask why my photos aren't yet online—a task that I will be completing as my sophomore year begins, and I see friends I left in May, some I haven't been in touch with since then.

I begin every trip with flighty passages about how this one will change me, how this will be the summer voyage to remember, to eclipse all others—paragraphs often scribbled in journals over the tray-tables of airplanes. It never stops being true; this trip is the trip to eclipse all others, as I hope will be true of all my future travels. I will be a foreigner who knows little more than "hello"—a redhead in a sea of silky black. For two weeks, I will be an illiterate young woman incapable of communicating with anyone but my fellow traveler, who—if my experience with Rainier and dinner conversation with relatives in LeMans serves as any testament—will likely cease to translate after a few good meals. I will be without phone, without television, without internet, without address. The thought that I will have (or, depending on your perspective, not have) all of this in a little over a week is pure delight, as well as totally unbelievable and completely surreal.

If you're worried you won't hear about this trip, or you're concerned you'll have to wait, rest assured. At this point, I'm certain that my parents decided to cover the cost of my plane ticket (and put aside their fear of non-Western Europe), if for no other reason than the fact that I might write about and photograph half the things I see. Each time the subject of Beijing arises, my father mentions that he "better read about it when I get back," or that the both of them "hope I find some wifi so they can see photos before school starts." My mother requests links to websites and articles about the places I'll go, half of which I don't even know yet, as most of the itinerary will be determined by Missy's aunt, who loves to show people around.

As if it weren't obvious already that I find no relief for itchy feet, I feel that Beijing might confirm that for me. Fractions of my struggle to find a major in school have made it here, but more and more I feel like travel should be a part of it. In my international honors class last semester (a seminar about communication and culture), we read from Best American Travel Writing 2005 and other essays. Pico Iyer, in his essay titled, "Why We Travel: A Love Affair With the World," couldn't hit the nail more firmly on its head:

"We travel, then, in search of both self and anonymity—and, of course, in finding the one we apprehend the other."

"Abroad is the place where we stay up late, follow impulse, and find ourselves as wide open as when we are in love. We live without a past or future, for a moment at least, and are ourselves up for grabs and open to interpretation."

And this one. My favorite.

"I remember, in fact, after my first trips to Southeast Asia more than a decade ago, how I would come back to my apartment in New York City and lie in bed, kept up by something more than jet lag, playing back in my memory, over and over, all that I had experienced, and paging wistfully through my photographs and reading and rereading my diaries, as if to extract some mystery from them. Anyone witnessing this strange scene would have drawn the right conclusion: I was in love.

For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can't quite speak the language, and you don't know where you're going, and you're pulled ever deeper into inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you're left puzzling over who you are and whom you've fallen in with. All the great travel books are love stories, by some reckoning—from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament—and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder."

So forgive me if upon my return—or even now—I seem smitten beyond any sensible communication. I am drunk with journey and infatuated with wandering, and I doubt I will soon recover.