(photograph stolen from the internet)
I was reading about techniques of research and analysis that require a defamiliarization with the present and I started to really think about the opposite, about familiarization. How easily we become familiarized with things so that they lose this magical surreal quality that they had before. I don't know if you can even escape this process, or really think your way outside of it....perhaps it is just another aspect of the search for perpetual newness.
When I first got to Amsterdam I was so mesmerized....by all the bikes! the canals! the bridges! the architecture! the boats!.......and now I am the one running into tourists on my bike who are so mesmerized by its loveliness that they wander aimlessly onto the cycle paths.
The same goes for cell phones, the ubiquitous communication technology that I have been evading for years. Now I am texting people and even cycling while doing it, like it ain't no thang.
I was very weary about starting this blog since I don't really know what it means to have a blog anymore, but I suppose this can just be another extension of my paper notebooks. I am still unsure about how I feel about this process of self preservation and identity construction through such an impersonal medium. Or perhaps I am just over thinking it all.
Even still, I seem to have only fears: the fear that people will read my blog and feel like they are communicating with me and therefore stop other direct forms of communication, the fear that I will have to censor and recalibrate everything I say based on an imagined audience, the fear that no one will read it, the fear that everyone will.
I don't know what this will be....but it will take shape soon enough.
