Winter in 'Nati town

So I just went back to school again. Winter break was amazing. I started dating a cute little Socialist activist named Nancy I met in UC's Racial Awareness Program and finally spent some time chilling out. I really needed some down time. Nancy is incredibly outgoing and since I began dating again, I have suddenly remembered how much I enjoy meeting people, being social, and making people laugh. I got so depressed over the last year or two that I forgot that I was good at that shit! She is also brilliant and passionately about social inequality, diversity education, and issues of political justice - so we have a lot to talk about.

I have two more grad applications to do and then the waiting game begins. Hopefully I will get into one of the nine programs I applied to; otherwise I think I may do something like Americorps or Teach For America.

I am still trying to figure out how to save up enough money to buy a used limosine and/or used schoolbus. I really want to take a huge road trip this summer with a bunch of my friends in an old bus. I have two books about how to do a schoolbus-RV conversion. The plumbing seems to be the most complicated aspect.

Places I have been considering visiting on such a trip:

1. Centralia, Pennsylvania - the mine-fire-ravaged town that inspired the script of cult classic film Nothin' But Trouble, a personal favorite
2. The Mississippi River
3. The World's Largest Ball of Twine, in Darwin, Minnesota
4. Carhenge, in Alliance, Nebraska (photo below)

5. Detroit, Michigan: home of the Heidelberg Project, The Henry Ford Museum, and numerous fascinating industrial ruins.
6. Petrified Forest National Park
7. Death Valley and Trona, California - the honest-to-God strangest town I have ever seen
8. The Mutter Museum in Philadelphia
9. House on the Rock, in Spring Green, Wisconsin - which contains a huge indoor carousel museum!
10. Graceland
11. Dollywood
12. Any other crazy roadside attractions/house museums/folk/outsider art installations/natural wonders/crazy shit we can find along the way.

Actually I just stumbled onto a really awesome website for this kinda shit:

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/

As the president of UC's 'Geocats' Undergraduate Geography Club I am also in charge of planning our group's annual (UC-funded) trip to the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, which is happening this year in Las Vegas. I have mixed feelings about Vegas, but I love road trips and the desert is amazing. We drove to California for the 2007 convention and Arizona looked like outer space to me. Hopefully we can see some cool state parks or something like that. I have to start working on that shit.



I have been reading a great book about race, class, and social capital, Dalton Conley's Honky. The book is insightful. Conley was raised by poor (by choice) artist parents in a public housing project in the predominantly black and Puerto Rican Lower East Side. He writes about how even though his parents were broke, their whiteness - and middle-class backgrounds - still gave them a lot of social capital that his neighbors lacked, ultimately giving him acess to lots of resources other kids in the neighborhood would never see. I enjoys Conley's writing because it bears a lot of relevance to my own relationship with urban poverty. I came to Cincinnati for art school, have been broke and on my own for the better part of a decade, and spent years in poorer neighborhoods in the inner city. But being an artist is a nonstandard form of pverty - mostly because artists dont generally come from poor backgrounds, and they rub shoulders with people who have money all the time. Most artists I know can call their parents if they need money because their car breaks down or some shit like that. They have connections back to middle-class culture that elevate them above the other people who live in the shitty neighborhoods they generally inhabit.

I am also finally reading Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives, which is required for my Senior Seminar course. I am really excited about the book, having been a fan of the genre of social documentary photography and crusading journalism that Riis founded for years.

The other day I finally got back to taking some pictures of local urban blight. I shot some old buildings in Brighton around McMicken Avenue:

I posted an hour's work with my cheap digital camera on my page with Flickr, if anyone is interested in more of what you see above.

So that's my life lately.

Over and out.