I fucking hate trigeminal neuralgia. How it is that there is a situation that causes so many people such intense pain can only be one big you-should-be-fired design flaw? I'm feeling sorry for myself right now. I will allow it to go on another 30 seconds and then I am going to get on with my life, with a heating pad around my face.
I'm getting pretty nervous about my next session. One thing that my new advisor and myself are disagreeing on is if I am creating two separate bodies of work or just one. I say two, because one is all shot in places where I used to walk bear bait and the other is all shot on utopia. He says one. Clearly I am the one here with the emotional investment in both places, but he is the one with all of the make you or break you reputation in the photo world. As an experiment I have just combined images from each body of work into one document for my group critique tomorrow and we will see how my classmates respond. Luckily I have some really good, deep thinking people in my group, so what they have to say matters to me. In addition to wanting to have more bodies of work one reason why I would like to keep the two separate is because next summer I have to defend my work with my thesis and I can't wrap my mind around how I might combine the two stories. The story of utopia is this reverance for the place, ancestry, and historical mystery and the story of where I walked bear bait is this forest come alive/what lies around the corner/trees do wierd things- thing.
Last night I went into the basement and sifted through a couple of bags that Bob left in our stepford basement when he left for California 10+ years ago. There were two bags, a lot of VHS cassettes, but also this microcosm of a life. He had japanese bowls, a few articles of clothes, photos of himself as a child, sex toys (not sure why he didn't take those!), books, keys, coins, an irish ring of some kind, even some snack food. Why he stored food, is beyond me, and what it is I cannot tell you because the packaging is in japanese. But it seemed like there was a tiny speck of every aspect of him. So very fascinating. It makes me want to go get a time capsule and put in tiny little specks of my life and leave a mystery behind. Maybe in my time capsule I will cut my face out of every photo.
I offered to spread Bob's ashes and I think his dad is going to take me up on the offer. My plan is to take them to Italy, where Bob dreamed of spending his last days. Bob had a step uncle (or something like that) who was Italian and considered himself Italian by association. He spoke a little Italian and was the kind of person who would probably learn it fluently after a couple of weeks in Italy. One of these days I am going to make my way over there and go on some kind of vacation, probably a wandering one, and drop a little speck of Bob in the most beautiful places I can find. I think he would have liked that plan. I think I like that plan. It makes me happy to plan on doing this one last thing for him.
Comments