Wednesday

Sunshine packed the band off to Hà Nội yesterday, crossing one more task off the to-do list, vocationally. Tonight, to celebrate, we ordered delivery food from a cute little French African style salad place across the way; and then we settled in to watch TV on DVD. For the last week or so I've been working on photographs that are just now making their way into public access. If you are interested, begin here. These are photos I took last Memorial Day weekend in Kentucky, around Sunshine's family farm. This was the second-to-last time we were able to visit there before flying here to Vietnam in October. I'm not that confidant there will be much interest in these images, since they are so old and removed from the distant events of my daily experience. Most people reading this will not find Appalachian Kentucky to be all that exotic. I too am very impatient to start producing the work I've done recently in Asia, but here are two points about that: first, I know that if I skip over these pictures in my photo chronology, I'll never get back around to doing them. This would actually haunt me. More importantly, I'm finding them very exotic myself, right now. Since before Christmas, I've been intermittently cresting a general malaise. Having conquered, for the most part, any noticeable culture shock, I'm now patiently waiting for the holiday-inspired homesickness to ebb. Spending over an hour per picture, painstakingly merging contiguous images into the photo composites I've been doing, has been an interesting meditation during this slump--a focused look into one part of the world possibly underestimated in its uniqueness of environment and culture. It's a process akin to fingering the loose ends of dental stitches, but it seems to be helping. [Cavin]