homeless

recently i have been thinking about home, and have come to the conclusion that i really have no place to call home. when people ask where i am from, i kind of stumble. sometimes i am completely honest and tell them that i grew up in maryland, spent the last 10 years in florida, and am now going to school in ohio. but that is a mouth-full, so depending on where i am or even what mood i am in i will usually pick one of the three...

when doing work in some small towns in ohio, i realized it was easier for some subjects to relate to me if i told them i was from maryland (even though i hadn't lived there for more than a couple months in the past decade), but it was close enough to ohio that it made kind of made sense to someone who rarely left the county he or she was born in. but if they pressed and asked about college or recent employment, yeah, i was from florida. and then there were the questions of how my family could stand me being so far from home.

but the thing was, i never saw maryland as home. i hated so much of the culture that i saw as attached to the area where i grew up that i wanted out. sure i have always loved my family and would call it going home when i left florida to visit. and, despite my generally negative view of this area's culture there are still aspects of it that i adore and take pride in. but calling somewhere home comes with a feeling. and though i definitely feel a sense of comfort when i visit my father who now lives in a condo littered with memories of our past, home does not seem like the right word...

on a recent road trip south, traveling with two eastern european friends, i found it amusing when people would ask where we were from and we would just respond 'ohio.' it was true, we had just spent the last eight months of our lives there, but it kind of reminded me of the old coneheads skit on saturday night live - they were clearly aliens from another planet but they just told everyone they were from france....

i realize that though these places have most definitely shaped me, i have never used them to define who i am (only which sports teams i root for!).  i often think of the cliche, 'where ever you go, there you are.' there is this myth that people find themselves when they travel, or have these life altering experiences. and yes, travel can open  people's eyes to many new things. but there were times when i knew that i needed to change things in my life, but i realized that it didnt matter where i was, if i wasnt happy with myself, sure a cool place could distract me for a bit, but once the newness died down, i would still be an asshole with issues to work out...

so the thing is that i travel and i wander and i photograph because that is what makes sense to me. though i have places that i love and people who i love there. i have no place to call home because i don't need to. so when people ask i will stick with the simple answer, france.