So… 2002 is over. My “year off” is over. Highlights of the year, for me at least, are introspective for the most part.
I finally laid out $$$ on pro camera, processing and archiving gear in anticipation of the Olympic games. As a result, I’d have to say that it’s really in 2002 that photography became a “serious” hobby for me (at least to the tune of a few thousand dollars).
And in February, I did attend my first, but hopefully not last, Olympic games. The united atmosphere of the games stood in stark contrast to the evils of international political terrorism and American knee-jerk reactions to it.
Speaking of, it’s precisely these evils, and the ways in which they played themselves out, which led to a kind of revival of my own prejudices and beliefs about international politics. During 2002 I became a strident leftist once again, feeling the fire that had been missing from my life since I was perhaps sixteen years old.
From out of nowhere, I made extensive and expensive travel plans for the Summer of 2003, which is now standing directly in front of me.
Then in a kind of sudden summer storm I spent June, July and August traveling all over the western half of the United States by car or by bus. As a kind of climax, I made my first visit to Texas. The company I kept while I was there was great. Texas itself was… strange and slightly disturbing. Texas is definitely not like anywhere else I’ve been.
I finished my third book. I think after you have written three books, it is fairly safe to claim to be an author, after one fashion or another. This took much of the remainder of the year…
Until this month, when the graduate school applications that I’d been working on “under the radar” since the moment I finished my undergraduate work finally began to take shape — and several were, in the end, submitted (with several more to go).
That’s it. Or at least, those are the events. What are the results? I feel as though in 2002, a transition has finally been completed — as though I have emerged from metamorphosis, a new being with new responsibilities.
And it is in 2003 that we will see how I handle them.