An arbitrary length of time in photos: Jun 2 - 22

no consistent post schedule, only ~*vibes*~

This month has really felt like a decade, hasn’t it? And we’re barely 2/3 of the way through it.

Rome

Chicago

some of these are in the suburbs; don't hate me, Chicagoans

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Surprise, I was in Chicago for about a week. I had to travel back to the US & deal with some bureaucratic stuff… not exactly my favorite reason for coming back for the first time in what feels like a lifetime. I’d been really stressing about the trip, mostly due to the uptick in issues at the border I’d heard reports about. As a foreign-born citizen, I was especially nervous about the possibility of dealing with getting interrogated & lost quite a bit of literal and metaphorical sleep over it. I was also dreading having to navigate a bureaucratic system that I was convinced would be as cold & indifferent as the Italian one. Luckily (mercifully) everything went smoothly: entering and exiting the country went off without a hitch, and I managed to get the important things taken care of on the first day there. Most of my time ended up spent with friends & family I hadn’t seen in a long time, but I managed to sneak in a bit of time to photograph as well.

June also marked the end of a year-long project. I recently posted a note about this as well, but to recap: last year, when I started photographing again, I decided I wanted to make something daily & document it on Instagram. I figured it’d be a good way to keep myself accountable and motivated, because I wanted an artistic practice I could actually maintain. It did its job, and I’m happy I can look back on a year of progress & see some actual improvement. But I’m also very ready to leave Instagram behind; round 2 of this project will all be on here, probably via Substack notes & maybe as a weekly wrap-up type of thing. I hate juggling multiple social networks & would rather focus more of my efforts here, as the community here has been wonderful.

So, to make myself feel like I’m actually planning something: starting July 1, I’ll post once a day here instead of on Instagram.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about this part of Trevor Wisecup's Walkie Talkie.

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In unrelated news, I’m now a pigeon dad:

While I was in Chicago, my wife rescued a pigeon that was unable to walk & seemed to have been abandoned by his parents. We’ve* been working on rehabilitating him, but the jury’s still out on whether or not he’ll actually be able to walk again (it seems to be due to a spinal injury). The vet she took him to said that it had been a few days since he’d last eaten, so it’s likely he was attacked either in his nest or while the parents were teaching him how to do things on his own. Whatever ends up happening, Jimmy Buffett has spent the last two weeks as an extremely pampered pigeon.

*I say “we,” but in reality she was the one that did all the hard work of taking him to the vet, medicating him, and waiting on him hand (wing?) and foot during the week I was out of town. I’m just here for pigeon hangouts.