Meanwhile...

These past few weeks have been incredibly busy. On top of all the usual nonsense, I have to get ready for my trip to Southeast Asia, I'm going to be presenting a paper at a grad student conference at Cornell in March, and I'm spending a lot of time trying to persuade people to let me take their pictures.

As part of my preparations for going to Thailand and Burma, I decided to be sensible for a change and take adequate health precautions, so I went to the clinic yesterday to get all of my shots. I feel poked full of holes, have a lingering soreness in my left arm (Hep A) and can barely lift my right arm (tetanus and polio). I also have live typhoid (in therapeutic quantities) sitting in my fridge. Irritatingly, it has to be kept refrigerated, and has to be taken two hours after and one hour before eating -- so it will sit there until I can get organized enough to come home to my refrigerator before I'm so hungry I'm about to pass out. Could be a while.

I'm working on two new photo projects as well. One is a multimedia piece about flamenco in the Bay Area, and the other a photo essay on gender and gender politics. I've always been pretty comfortable with asking strangers if I can photograph them, but working on more in-depth projects requires a much higher level of access to people's lives, so it's an interesting challenge. It's good for me, though, to have work to do that requires going out and interacting with people, instead of just holing up in the library or my room.

I'm also revisiting my paper on the Rizal Morga to present at Cornell. There are a few things that should be improved, but mostly I'm just trying to condense it.

This has really turned into a list here, but I wanted to put up something. I think this will be my first "apologizing for not posting more" post in a while.