personals II

a few photos from a recent trip to chicago, a Jamar Clark protest through Downtown Minneapolis, and a few from the moments in-between. 

left coast by train

I took a last minute trip to Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and then Napa for thanksgiving with a friend and his family. The train was my main mode of transportation, which is beautiful in its consistent slowness. I have always seen watching the countryside go by as romantic; there is something surreal about seeing the sunrise come up over California with a bunch of other bleary-eyed people. 

This trip was filled with some misadventure (as most often are) but some of the highlights included participating in and watching a chicken and duck slaughter at a Portland eco-village, taking a day trip to Mt. Hood to dip in a hot spring, tracking my parents past in the Mission of San Francisco, taking the ferry at night to Vallejo, walking walking walking, sitting in a friends living room eating late night sandwiches, and a beautifully constructed and homey thanksgiving in Napa. Sometimes getting yourself to a coast and walking around for a week is the best decision to make. 

Here are some of the personal snaps I took along the way.

therapy session 1

It's been a hard couple of months. Loss-filled. Recurrent. It's hard to not see that kind of pattern as something fated. It's hard not to draw lines and connect, pinpoint, and justify why Bad Things Keep Happening. Last week after something really painful happened, I felt deflated and defeated. The mountain of grief looked exhausting. But I realized that to process these things-- anything really-- can bring an insight and a lightness. It's working through something but also learning from something. So, I took on a mini-project that I hoped would help me move through this. It became more than it started out to be, like most things. I'm calling it a therapy session because it was reminiscent of the change I would feel while working through a session when I was a teenager: Cluttered mind goes through a filtration process. Then, release. 

here's what I learned:

-it's really hard to look yourself in the eye
-it takes a long time to stop seeing yourself as yourself
-if you can start seeing yourself as a subject, you're way kinder to yourself
-creating collages over your face means warping yourself and zooming in on yourself and taking yourself apart and that ended up feeling really damn good.