I met Melanie when I was 17. I was working at a photo lab, the night shift. Melanie rode by, looked in the window, and decided that I would make a good date for her friend Reg. I didn’t make a good date for Reg, although he is a swell guy. Last night, Reg and […]
I walked into the office and the secretaries recognized me immediately. Considering how much time I spent in the office this is not really surprising. I got into a lot of fights, and did a lot of things that I am not proud of. I was a problem, we all were.
It’s hard to keep things in balance, and to be honest, a lot of times this year they haven’t been balanced. Juggling my education and employment has been the most challenging. Although sometimes it feels like I am doing neither properly, ultimately I’ve been doing a pretty alright job. I’ve learned, from being busy, that a big part of balance is setting boundaries and asking for what you need. This applies in professional circumstances just as well as it does in the rest of life.
Where I am is Chinatown, and it has been burning down. It has been burning my whole life, really, but these past couple week were particularly incendiary.
Sometimes I feel like I must be wearing some sort of a sign, like a “kick me” on my back, or invisible ink on my forehead that says “gullible.” I talk to a lot of strangers, and most of the time I enjoy it. In fact, I am trying to make talking to strangers my […]
“What are you doing here?” said the pair of eyes behind the counter. Good question. John and I were going to find my grandmother’s house in Hyde Park, an upscale suburban community north of the University of Chicago. To get there, we had to walk through Chicago’s notorious South Side. What the Vietnamese man in […]
For the second year running, I’m out of the country for Christmas. Last year I was in Paris, eating really good Indian food, chocolate, and macarons. It was the first time I’d skipped the festivities, and I really enjoyed it. Although it was a bit weird to phone home and hear my family having Christmas […]
I’ve been working on a big panoramic photo (the final print will be about 2 feet by 4 feet) that I started this summer. It was July, and we’d just moved into the new apartment in Chinatown. The living room was pretty sparsely decorated at that point, nonetheless my roommate and I were sitting around […]
“Art” by Tanya Davis, movie by Andrea Dorfman Looking around lately, it seems everyone is suffering a crisis of confidence of one sort or another. There’s the global credit crisis, a manufacturing slowdown, bailouts, just about everyone could use some assistance. The city of Ottawa had proposed a massive cut to arts funding in the […]
Let’s start with a song. Here is the Final Fantasy version of the Arcade Fire song “No Cars Go”: [audio:http://jacksoncouse.com/beingthere/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/no-cars-go1.mp3] Dragon Alley is a tiny little strip of land. At first look, it’s nothing significant. There used to be an old Horse barn at one end, a forgotten relic of a bygone age, tucked behind the busy […]