All the children are insane, waiting for the summer rain.

...space...Once, when I was younger, I took a topical film class and was never able to watch even the most mindless film without considering framing decisions, pace of editing, shot variation, lighting, and art direction, ever again. Then, I took a class about the partner concepts of space and place, and I was never able to be anywhere at any time without considering how my surroundings were acting upon me, and how I was behaving in them.

It seems strange I lived most of a whole life, having scarcely considered an idea so pervasive and omnipresent. It seems futile now to consider other countries a foreign entity, or my own so familiar. To think of my room as a rectangular space filled with my belongings, and not a place ridden with energy and happenings, seems just as misguided. I see now that we govern the role our familiar spaces play in our lives, the acts we perform in them. I see also that a place, and my sense and understanding of it, is informed—even created—by the extent to which my person remains intact in it.

If you go somewhere unfamiliar to you, and find you feel more yourself than ever, that there’s a strange and metaphysical force working on you…it may be the way the buildings are stacked, or the way the buildings are sprawled, or the ratio of green to gray, or the amount of sparkly mineral in the pavement that reminds you of a certain stretch nearby your house, or the way the people glare as you pass, or the way they give you the sensation the same language is being spoken, or the complete and utter lack of resources, or an abundance of them…there’s likely to be more of you in that sensation than the place itself.

I’m grateful that this class served as my goodbye to Gallatin, as I attempt the oh-so-collegiate move to another country. It has helped me to see the move as merely a concrete shift of location, and to not assume that certain emotions and events will have any bearing on the new. The lighthearted participatory and conversational component in our class was an educational merit and privilege that was not lost on me. Voluminous gratitude to Steve, and all you radical people.