2. I’m sorry I’ve been neglecting this blog, but it’s thesis crunch time (and will be, for the next six weeks, and especially the next three weeks), so my advance apologies if I don’t write that often.

If you’re wondering what I’m writing my thesis about, I’ll give you some example sentences from my introduction, which I plan on finishing in the next few hours:

My thesis explores the overall trends in production of live-streaming mobile videos from producers around the world, and focuses more narrowly on the motivations and practices surrounding the production of civic content. I document production by both general users as well as those who self-identify as activists, journalists, educators and community leaders.

# # #

I lean on Henry Jenkins’ interpretation of civic media as that which fosters civic engagement, and I am looking at its production through what Ito and Okabe (2005) have called a technosocial approach, which uses anthropological analysis to interpret the technologies which underlie social activity.

Oh, sorry, did you fall asleep? Wait til I’m done the charts and graphs summarizing the data from my quantitative analysis of civic content! You can’t even HANDLE it!!!

3. I’m also getting married. In a couture yellow dress. In a brief, private ceremony which you’re not invited to. Or your mother. Or my mother. I’m really sorry, but it has to be this way. Don’t complain. You can come to the potluck party, once we schedule it.

And then came Utrecht. I couchsurfed there in a ridiculously lovely apartment right on one of the canals with a nice couple. Like everywhere else I stayed, I enjoyed wonderful home-cooked meals (man, I feel so spoiled!) and tried hard to channel DD, who at that point was back in the States, because one of my hosts had also built himself a home photo studio and had manually engineered cameras and lenses and projectors, the same way DD does. The two guys also share a commercial love of eBay and B&H.

Utrecht is, sorry to use the word again, “quaint.” Tiny shops everywhere, very pretty downtown, incredibly friendly people who always helped me find my way when I got lost. I also got to meet up with T. and his Italian colleague, both media studies PhD students from the university; we all have the same academic supervisor. T. showed us some old churches and university buildings. It was cold but not anything like the cold Boston is currently experiencing. I bought a bunch of coffee-related things (double-walled porcelain espresso cups, an Italian stove-top coffee maker, postmodern spoons, a cinnamon shaker) and walked around until it started hailing on me. I could move here, I thought. If I find nothing in Berlin, then this would be a great alternative.

Every time I visit a new place, it’s an audition for whether or not I could move there in future. And, perhaps because I hate goodbyes, I never leave a place thinking I’ll never see it again (except Bangkok and Durango, Mexico, which I hope to never see again). I always think I’ll return very soon. This time, I really think I will be back in W. Europe in less than a year; but one never knows. Time passes when we’re not paying any attention. And then we catch our reflection in a store window and for a second we don’t recognize ourselves. I wonder if it’ll always be this way.

Tram number ninety-two.
Cobblestones, insipid dampness and an opaque sky,
more cobblestones, some closed museums,
healthy-looking individuals behind glass all working silently
on the second level of the public library

which I was kicked out of.
(Exclusivity.) The soft face of a girl
admiring my Nikon FM2 (in French),
the fact that we could have talked
or walked or shopped or eaten together
but didn’t and then it was over.
She disappeared beyond the Swatch store.

And back near Ma Campagne,
these beautiful floors. The sound of a decade dissolving
what we were then into what we’ve become,
and a silence that is still the same.
Against the wall, a large cat stares
blankly, or intently,
I can’t tell which.