Holy, I am tired. It’s like I’ve been sprint­ing for four months straight. Work­ing two jobs is get­ting to be pretty rough. I spend all day wish­ing for one of these:

Mat­tress and box spring on Booth St., Lebre­ton Flats. I’m going to miss Lebre­ton Flats when the devel­op­ment is done.

My co-workers joke that I’ll be bring­ing a bed-roll into work soon. Late in the after­noon the other day, my neigh­bor came around the corner to find me sit­ting in front of the com­puter, blank star­ing, with the tele­phone receiver just hanging in my hand. “Go home” she said.

I see the screen-zombies all over, trans­fixed like I was. When did it become nor­mal to spend 16 hours a day in front of a glow­ing panel, whatever the size?  I see them , the walk­ing not-quite-dead-but-entertained, tak­ing their dogs out in the even­ing. I see them on the bus. I see them doing all kind of things. What does it mean that so many people absent them­selves from real­ity to spend time with a tech­no­lo­gic­ally medi­ated cul­tural product?  I feel anti­so­cial when I click-clack away at my very very import­ant meet­ing regis­tra­tion emails on my Black­berry. Are we all scared of shar­ing space with other people? More likely we’d rather spend our time with our own little niche of social and cul­tural secur­ity than think about the world “out there” bey­ond our skin.

As a pho­to­grapher, I feel some­times that I’m exper­i­en­cing the world from behind a fil­ter. I won­der if look­ing at the world through a key­hole is lim­it­ing. But then, think­ing back through photo-school, to my days at the night lab, I remem­ber the won­der­ful feel­ing of dis­cov­er­ing pho­to­graphy. It was more like dis­cov­er­ing how to see crit­ic­ally. I remem­ber the sen­sa­tion of sur­prise and glory of look­ing at the world in with a new aware­ness. Pho­to­graphy is not about tak­ing pic­tures, its about noti­cing the world and mak­ing note. Pho­to­graphy is about a kind an aware­ness of the world and one’s self that you just can’t get in front of a screen.