Change of Pace

A picture of where I wasn't last weekend.

Every year a phalanx of photographers descends upon a small Missouri town for the Missouri Photo Workshop, where they each wrangle up a story and spend a week of days documenting it in pictures and nights getting their images and ideas ripped to shreds by a faculty of professional photographers. It's all very educational and cathartic and I felt lucky to be chosen as a volunteer member of the team (i.e. free student labor) that helped run it this year.

All in all it was good and I learned a lot, but just the same, if I'd had it to do all over again, I'd rather have been in Mesa Verde and the Great Sand Dunes National Park with Jack.

• I now know a great deal more about how to use a bunch of cameras and lenses that I can't actually afford to buy
  
• Have been informed that I should throw out every photograph I've ever taken and start over from scratch
  
• Was actually told to my face by a faculty member that I couldn't understand the issues behind whether or not Tiger Woods was pushed into golf against his will because I am not a mother and as a woman without children, this is just apparently beyond my...I don't know what...mental capacity? empathetic skills?
  
• Doubt I'll ever actually get a job as a professional photographer
  
• Learned how to deal with packs of ostensibly angry farm dogs who object to joggers using the roads in front of their homes

On the last one...border collies require a firm, even slightly angry voice..."GET BACK IN YOUR YARD NOW" seemed to work pretty effectively. And they remembered me a day or two later when they still barked at me, but didn't come out into the road to nip at my heels as they did the first day.

And labradors can sound mean and look mean when their teeth are bared, but if their tails are wagging, it's a good bet that upbeat, puppy-wuppy dog lingo will do the trick. That earned me a couple of escorts for two miles of a hilly backroad of St. James, Missouri, but only until we got to the border collies' territory. Apparently the canines of the town respect each others space.

The rottweiler and his sidekick yappy chihuahua luckily did not require any dealing with at all since by the time they came after me from one side of the farm house, I'd already turned around and was headed the other way, out of their view.

So that was running in St. James. A long dusty, hilly dirt road with lots of cows and horses and picturesque farms that had me kicking myself for leaving my point & shoot digital at home. I only went twice, but twice a week has unfortunately pretty much become the norm for me these days. 12 - 15 miles a week sounds ridiculous compared to what I was up to nine months ago, but it is what it is and at least it's better than nothing.

I am however considering the possibility of going to Spokane in December for the Cross Country Nationals with a local running group. I'd really have to get my act together to even be in remotely decent shape, but hey, maybe a little motivation would do me some good.

For my Fundamentals of Photojournalism class we were each assigned another classmate as a subect and we had to do a photo story about that person. My assigned student was a pleasant enough fellow, a junior undergraduate here, but as Biden would say, "bless his heart" but he was just as boring as can be. So no photos of mine will be forthcoming this time around, but I'll throw out a few by my documentarian, a French exchange student named Baptiste Etchegaray:I'm still only barely justifying my identification as a runner, logging just over 20 miles last week, but none at all so far this one. I went and watched and photographed a half marathon last Sunday and felt a pang of longing when the winning time was slower than 1:30, but I couldn't have run that these days anyway.School has not been the relaxed, easygoing intellectual experienced I had hoped it would be. I find myself overwhelmed by anxiety a terrifying percentage of the time and it takes very little to unbalance me to the point of tears. I miss my city and my friends and my boyfriend, who I see just about as often as when I was in New York and he was here. We're working on trying to improve that situation, but there's still just the endless work and reading always hanging over me.I watch the younger students and their voracious drinking, smoking, late-night lifestyle and wonder how they manage. Was I like that too? Is it just that I'm older now and don't have the energy for such hedonism or will I somehow be rewarded for my stoic monasticism with the stellar grades that eluded me as an undergraduate?

I'm going to hunker down and try to work on a paper now (my crazy friday night out with Sissela Bok and Kant) and then go to sleep early with ambitions of getting in a few miles in the morning. Then if I'm really good and finish that paper tomorrow, I can drive out to St. Louis tomorrow and curl up with my sweetie to sip wine, eat chocolates and work on my annotated bibliography for Mass Media...or Ethics, since I think that one is due sooner.