Being There

Wel­come Home balloons

I walked into my father’s bar last week, and was met by a room full of fresh faces, young and tanned. That is the sign, that is how I know sum­mer is soon to be over. Every­one is back from hol­i­days, and school is about to start up again. There were a lot of new back­packs on the bus today. On my ride to work, a teenage girl didn’t know how to get off in front of the high school. She couldn’t find the pres­sure strip, with all it’s mark­ings worn off by end­less fin­gers. I had my own bus woes to start the day. Stand­ing on the plat­form, I watched 3 buses pass as I waited for my con­nec­tion. It was a half hour before I real­ized that con­struc­tion had fin­ished on the other side of the sta­tion, and that my stop had moved. It’s a con­fus­ing and excit­ing time for every­one, me included.

I was late for work.

This time last year, I was just get­ting ready for another new start. Going back to school was excit­ing. I’d been out for two years. With all the float­ing around and drop­ping out I’ve done, I was wor­ried about being older than all the other stu­dents. It turned out that I actu­ally liked being older. When you’re one of the few adults in a room of 500 seventeen-year-olds, the other adults have a way of find­ing you. That in itself was a bit of a rev­e­la­tion. It was the first year I actu­ally felt like an adult. It was a hard year, an adult year. I was work­ing two or three jobs a week, and going to school full time. Things were going alright, until our land­lord started to go crazy. My room­mate and I were almost ille­gally evicted in the mid­dle of the win­ter. It was too much, and life started to fall apart. I showed up to work in ripped jeans once or twice. We relied on my father to bring gro­ceries from Costco, and ate a lot of Chi­nese pork buns. Some­how, I scraped through the end of school and ended up doing fairly well. I was look­ing for­ward to going back this year. I was look­ing for­ward to end­ing the marathon, get­ting set­tled, and focus­ing on my studies.

Then the offer came. A good job. A real Job, with a desk, and a salary, ben­e­fits. A “bridge in” that I took.

This is my fourth week. Tech­ni­cally, my title is “Ana­lyst, Infor­ma­tion Trans­fer and Out­put” as part of the Pol­icy and Research depart­ment of the Canada Mort­gage and Hous­ing Cor­po­ra­tion. In real­ity, I am an online pro­ducer and (mostly dig­i­tal) out­reach worker for hous­ing researchers. I pull the strings that sup­port an online com­mu­nity. I do every­thing from orga­niz­ing con­fer­ence calls and social net­work­ing to infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture design and usabil­ity mea­sure­ment. It is an inter­est­ing lit­tle eddy of the gov­ern­ment that I’ve found myself in, and a scary new world out there on the inter-webs. Luck­ily, the work I do is for a legally dis­tinct non-governmental orga­ni­za­tion, so we can do some fun stuff.

Dis­carded clothes under the streetlight

And the marathon con­tin­ues. This time, how­ever, it’s dif­fer­ent. This time, it is my choice. It was hard to put down my plans to go to school, hard to switch gears so sud­denly. But with the oppor­tu­nity of steady employ­ment comes the free­dom to do what I couldn’t before: per­sonal work. In my opin­ion, all good pho­tog­ra­phy is per­sonal. I am a feel­ing pho­tog­ra­pher, I go by emo­tion and see by feel. Work­ing lets me pur­sue per­sonal the projects I could never jus­tify when I was hus­tling work and scrap­ing by. In the long run, I feel that it  is my per­sonal work that will mat­ter most. Christo­pher Mor­ris once said that the best way to suc­ceed in pho­tog­ra­phy is to quit. I think that this is what I am doing.

And I’ve been invest­ing in myself at the same time. I found my voice at the end of a very long year. A con­fer­ence and a cou­ple of work­shops helped. New friends and new per­spec­tives were invalu­able. A whole bunch of new gear, with new capa­bil­i­ties, made a big dif­fer­ence too. I’m more focused, more tuned-in, turned on, and aware. I read visual the­ory, and a bunch of good fic­tion. My thoughts are more clear. I feel like I am tak­ing the next step towards doing mean­ing­ful doc­u­men­tary work on a reg­u­lar basis. I’m ready, and now I have the resources to make it happen.

Sum­mer is almost over, it’s time to get to work. Time for another long year.