Montréal: Kahnawake

St Kateri’s shrine was the reason we’d thought to visit Montreal in the first place, so, as you might imagine, standing here by the quiet banks of the Saint Laurent after months of anticipation felt pretty good. Our Lyft driver’s GPS had been acting up, which meant that I’d get a chance to have my longest exchange in French of the trip (which also felt really good). More significantly, it also led to experiencing this church from this vantage point first. I don’t know what was special about this tree, but it literally took my breath away. Christine was walking … Continue reading “Montréal: Kahnawake”

National Camera Day: Смена-Symbol in Everett

So apparently today is #NationalCameraDay, which makes it a great day to share the (unedited) results of my very first roll using the Soviet-era (1972 to be precise) LOMO Smena Symbol. I’ll have lots to say about the camera itself in the next post, but first, a few words about the content itself; I hate feeling like I’ve wasted film, so I try to take meaningful shots whenever I can. But I also had no idea how this fully manual, viewfinder-style camera would perform, or if I’d botch the whole thing up trying to meter for the first time, so I … Continue reading “National Camera Day: Смена-Symbol in Everett”

Search Engine Optimism

I saw a reel this morning that detailed some moves at Meta to push people away from hashtags and towards “SEO” as THE way to get people to see their posts. I don’t know how this person got their information and I don’t care, but they did claim some level of insider knowledge that piqued my interest. But what motivated me to write these words was a reply they gave to a comment about wanting old instagram back; they said, and this is almost word for word because it’s seared into my brain: “it never will! the best thing to … Continue reading “Search Engine Optimism”

The Ex: 20 Weeks of Gratitude, Week 6

Part 1: Difference Today I want to talk about hummus. That’s not hummus in my photo, that’s mtabbal, aka baba ghannouj. I don’t want to talk about mtabbal at all. I took that photo years ago to talk about “my” culture. I want to talk about chocolate–flavored hummus. Rick Flair-endorsed, BDS-listed #SuperBowl ‘mmus. I want to talk about how my views have both changed and remained the same when it comes to this amorphous cellular cake of matter and meaning we call human culture. I didn’t think much about hummus before I started leaving Lebanon; that’s when it stopped being … Continue reading “The Ex: 20 Weeks of Gratitude, Week 6”