Monday, August 6, 2012

curious summer

We've covered a lot of ground since leaving Vancouver the first week of June. A lot of literal ground. We drove from San Francisco to Chicago and then to Toronto before turning back for Los Angeles, where we are staying in Westlake for a week. I can't remember the last time I was in Los Angeles, but I'm pretty sure I never visited this neighborhood. It's one of the least diverse neighborhoods in LA, 75% Latino. On my morning jog, I heard someone call me 'Chinita' for the first time in a long while, maybe since living in Washington Heights. Seems like a lifetime ago.
Sometime during our three-week stay in Illinois, I thought of how odd it was to be sitting at my parents' kitchen table in the middle of the day having lunch, like a lazy teenager on summer vacation. There was something extraordinary in the ordinariness of it all. Then Marido came in to join me which seemed to normalize the scene and remind me that I'm not, in fact, still in high school, but then it seemed even more amazing that we were both there, half-nomadic already, preparing for an even longer journey than the almost 5,000 miles we've covered in the last six weeks. On a day-to-day basis, our lives seem mundane, but I'm fascinated by the way we've suddenly switched gears. It's amazing but a little alienating at times.
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There's some photography about hermits featured in the NYTimes Lens blog this week, work by the photographer Carlo Bevilacqua. I had this fear that we would become van-dwelling hermits, but then again there is something beautiful about living simply and not having trouble with anyone.