Categories
Meta Senegal or PC related

crickets

I realized a few months ago that this site had completely collapsed under the weight of broken links, incompatible updates, and what I can only assume is depression over the state of the world.

This (awful?) default WordPress theme at least gets the text back up. Maybe at some point I’ll get photos up and linked again.

I haven’t been back to Senegal in over ten years. I feel a bit guilty about that.

But I saw one of the guys from the village, Hamedu, in Milan, Italy, of all places. I found him on Facebook and messaged him. My boyfriend and I met up with him at a metro station, walked through the streets, spoke a weird Pulaar-English-Italian combo, ate lunch, and went to an art museum together.

He’s living in Milan, working in a restaurant. He was just about to make a return trip to the village—his first time back after leaving six years before, and the first time that he would meet the daughter that he has with Aminata, my host sister and the oldest of Kanni’s daughters.

It seems like a very lonely life for him in Italy.

I was very happy to see him.

Categories
Meta Travel Video

oh hai…

…time for the annual(?) blog update. What I’ve been doing:

claremajor.com

feastandsacrifice.com

And some of this.

Categories
J-school Meta New York Times Travel Video

Oh, yeah. New York.

Per Leslie’s request, here’s some blog CPR.

I’m in New York, interning here for the summer:

End Times
www.thedailyshow.com

On my first day I and another intern went out to shoot footage of gyro cones (the big rotating things of meat that chawarma innards are shaved off of), then I burned some DVDs. The next day I tried to call people in Utah whose houses were up for auction (and got mostly disconnected numbers), and today I had a few hours of tech training and then started to edit a Nicholas Kristof piece. It’s fun.

Categories
J-school Meta Video

blog fatigue

For the three of you who still check this thing: Hi! Thanks for your misplaced loyalty!

Excuses:

1) Busy. With work, mostly. I’ve been editing a steady stream of Adobe projects—customer profiles and filmmaker stories from Sundance, including a really cool doc on kids’ experiences of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Cory and I also revised our “soil in Senegal” video for a Peace Corps World Wise Schools feature.

2) Blog fatigue. I hit the point that many others have, where I realized that what I would be writing about (if I sat down and forced myself to) was stuff that wasn’t especially unique or insightful. Or interesting, even to little ol’ navel-gazing me. And while wankery can make you famous, I have no interest in just adding to the noise. Susan Sontag had it right:

“A good rule before one goes marching or signing anything: whatever your tug of sympathy, you have no right to a public opinion unless you’ve been there, experienced firsthand and on the ground and for some considerable time the country, war, injustice, whatever, you are talking about. In the absence of such firsthand knowledge and experience: silence.”

I could comment on every Peace Corps story that pops up in the national news, but does anyone really care? The days and the weeks and the months are passing in a blur of work and guilt over unfinished work and episodes of The Wire, and honestly I have no interest in boring my friends with trite laments about “Where does the time go?”… which of course brings us to:

3) Mid-twenties, post-Peace-Corps crisis, blah blah blah. Maybe I should get a dog.

Blogging might become interesting/relevant again once I’m at school this fall (Orientation starts August 21st. I’ve bought a Cal sticker and a t-shirt, so I’m set.), but until then I’ll probably just post the occasional photo.

Thanks for checking in, all the same 😉

Categories
Meta

New and improved

I managed to finally get around to some housekeeping—trying to improve readability with a few text and color changes, fixing the background (that may have only bothered me), and (*drumroll*) upgrading to Gallery2.

Well, kinda—there are some redirect and layout issues still to be sorted out, but, for just browsing around, it works pretty swell.

Let me know if you find anything that seems more broken than usual.