budding scholar

More and more lately I find myself spending breaks from writing up pages and pages of fieldnotes reading blogs. Sitting on this black pleather rental apartment couch in the Eixample of Barcelona, or holed away in my windowless office, I follow links and photos to far-flung places where people write about their lives, and take pictures, and put it on the world wide web for all to see. New York, Seattle, more Seattle, San Francisco, Texas, Sweden, New Zealand (I think). And all the places these writers and photographers and foodies lead me through their links and inspirations, like Colorado, and Long Beach, California or Portland, ME and Portland, OR. My first love in blogging had long been my one and only, but the extra time home on the computer here, and lack of a social life in this new place, mean there’s more time to hop around from site to site finding new loves.

These escapes fill my mind with delicious food and images of neighborhoods and houses and places that are not HERE. They also make me think how HERE could be so much more through the effort of sharing it beyond our family and friend blog. What if I take a walk around my neighborhood every day and post pictures? What might I find, what might it add up to mean, when put out there in images and words, day after day?

Mostly they take me away from the frustrating process of trying to figure out how to do what I’m doing here. How to get access to people who will talk to me, get access to schools that will let me observe, and get over the hurdles of language and shyness. They provide connection to real people (mostly women) figuring out their lives. They fill some of the space left by not having friends here (yet).

So thank you, blogging world, for putting yourselves out there for the rest of us.