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By the Encaffeinated ONE, on August 22nd, 2010%
I’ve done my laundry today.
In packing to come to France, I had to pack only what I needed. It was confirmed that there was a laundry room in the building, so that meant I could carry less, and worry less about having to truck laundry around a new city.
Then it came down to the question: what do I pack?
Far beyond the simple question of the ideal blank forms of things I’m going to need (so many each of shirts, underwear, socks, pants), the question really revolves around a much deeper point: who am I going to appear to be?
Perhaps it is inevitable that I feel some nostalgia now, with less than a week left in this town that has been my home for three and a half months. It’s not all been good — often quite stressful and frustrating, actually — but I’m trying to take what gems I can from it all, see what of myself I have learned or how I might have changed, see what of the world I have learned or experienced.
And yet, it was while going down to get my laundry out of the dryer that I had this more interesting thought: what does my laundry say about me?
Continue reading A Self-Portrait in Three T-Shirts
By the Encaffeinated ONE, on July 18th, 2010%
I’m not one who generally talks about his own life. Being inherently hyper-critical of myself means also having a hard time celebrating successes — or even believing that they are successes…
I’ve been working on my PhD all summer, trying both to pin down the topic long enough to build something, as well as keep my cynicism in check as to whether it is worth building. So far, I’ve seen some success: I have a basic framework together (a bit buggy, but it runs) and now I’m building the real brains, the stuff which might actually show some worth, and the stuff I have to measure.
I’ve fought back the insanity as much as I can, and tried not to get distracted. That’s a pretty constant battle. When the heat got too much, I started working overnight and sleeping during the day. I discovered that my laptop battery had expanded in the heat (which was causing more overheating, and the keyboard to stop responding from time to time), so I removed it.
My internet became.. problematic, so I started duplicating things on the one external drive I have and trying to just listen to the backlog of podcasts, and the selection of music I . . . → Read More: A Long Way To Get To A “Reflection”
By the Encaffeinated ONE, on June 16th, 2010%
I haven’t got a really good habit for writing. I do it in fits and starts, mostly squirrelling away ideas in the big, hollow shell of a mind that I carry around in my pronounced cranium. What I have written has always been in feverish one-pass sessions, followed by disbelief and loathing on the second day, with occasional edits.
Well, that happened again, at the beginning of this month. Every Photo Tells is a podcast from a friend of mine with the excellent challenge: here’s a picture, now go write something about it. I looked at the picture in the morning of June 1 and, later that night, a ~3K word story appeared.
They’ve just done a reading of it and posted it. I think they did a great job at this dialogue between characters.
Next month: I want to challenge myself to write an actual story, not just an extended dialogue..
This time, I’ve remembered to post the text..
PDF of May’s entry: “CONVERS@ION”
PDF of June’s entry: “The Morning Sun After The . . . → Read More: Every Photo Tells even more: “The Morning Sun After The Long Night”
By the Encaffeinated ONE, on May 27th, 2010%
As suggested in the recent episode of Wandering Out Loud, I can conceive of three types of photograph: those taken to capture a moment, those taken to capture a vision, and those taken to be a photograph.
The latter category often contains things which are inspiring, which can move others to ideas and creations beyond the edges of the photograph. I know this, as it recently happened to me.
The Every Photo Tells podcast and blog takes this idea and runs with it. Each month, they publish a new photograph for inspiration, write a couple of stories about it from the two hosts, and invite others to write stories about them too. They publish around 4 episodes a month – readings of these inspired stories.
Mine just went up!
It’s a story called “Convers@ion” (originally misspelled “Convers@tion” by me.. whoops!), and plays on episode 14 of the podcast. It’s an odd story (do you expect anything less from me?  ), but it was fun to write, and came strangely easily. After the month is out (to give time for the podcast episode to have first run rights), I’ll post the full text of the story here.
Oh: . . . → Read More: What a Convers@ion with me might be like: Every Photo Tells
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