Almost exactly a year ago I returned to the United States of America. Two years of submersion in Angloid culture and elongated toiling on a masters dissertation have come and gone and I'm left wondering what happens now.
I felt dissatisfied at the prospect of abandoning this blog (though abandon it is exactly what I did for a year) and leaving it to rot, adrift on the digital seas without any closure or at the very least, a life raft. The blog itself began as a means of letting my loved ones know that I was still alive and subsisting off something other than beans and toast. It grew into an exercise in exploring and sharing the unique experience that I had while living in Nottingham. But being no longer in Nottingham, there's not much business left for me in Robin Hood's woods. Just a few friends and a pub or two that I miss. With the sad realization that I need to take this thing behind the barn and send it to Valhalla, I also realize that I don't want to be done.
And maybe I don't have to be. This was a travel blog, but travels aren't restricted to glamorous stints of poverty in post-industrial English cities. They also something we experience in our day-to-day experiences. Perhaps England was more exotic to the kind folks that read my writings than Northern Virginia or other American settlements might have been. At the same time, when I wrote about England, I was still writing about the normal everyday. Sure the brand names were different and the hours of operation were more restrictive, but at the end of the day, I was just writing about going to the grocery store. Perhaps the virtue of my project here wasn't that I was able to exhibit a different world, but that I was able to find for myself a different world within the exhibits of the mundane. It was self-discovery above all. I just didn't realize it at the time.
But unlike then, I'm finding that I'm continuously and overtly plagued with the mundane. There is no novelty of crusty baps, chavs or funny accents. I grind it out in an office job that stresses me out and seems like a dead end. I have a commute and I find myself counting the minutes between weekends. I'm a workaday joe. But I am also a very lucky workaday joe. I have some diversions, a woman that I love and a family that is indefatigably in my corner with the spit pail of support and the towel of love. They stitch me up more often than I deserve and I'm all the better for it. And yet, I'm finding myself getting lost in the grind. I've come from exceptional circumstance, am surrounded by exceptional loved ones and have exceptional dreams, and yet I feel shackled by a life less than exceptional. To make matters worse, I'm the one who clamped myself in those shackles. It isn't the job. It isn't the commute. It's me.
Which brings me back to my project.
I'm not done writing about my experiences because, at this moment, I'm unconvinced that I've said all that needs to be said. I'm still discovering, as I was when I was in Nottingham and Ningbo. I don't know how many of you see this blog entry, or whether it falls on deaf... eyes. Either way, the blog project helped me and I'm going to continue it, albeit under a new guise. You're welcome to come along, what's left of you. Or stay here. Either way suits me (although I like you and would rather your company). I'm going to move on to new observations and new landscapes. Geography will remain of great importance (and rightfully so) but what else would you expect of me. Northern Virginia can be a deceptively harsh domain and from where I sit, it needs some re-imagining on my part. Without any more of this dreadful ado, I'm off to trim the hedges and dynamite-blast the landscape of the cognitive geography of my Virginia. Maybe somewhere along the line I'll lose my shackles.
Thanks for your support those long years across the pond.
- Jonathan "A Virginian Scholar Reclaimed" Trenary
I felt dissatisfied at the prospect of abandoning this blog (though abandon it is exactly what I did for a year) and leaving it to rot, adrift on the digital seas without any closure or at the very least, a life raft. The blog itself began as a means of letting my loved ones know that I was still alive and subsisting off something other than beans and toast. It grew into an exercise in exploring and sharing the unique experience that I had while living in Nottingham. But being no longer in Nottingham, there's not much business left for me in Robin Hood's woods. Just a few friends and a pub or two that I miss. With the sad realization that I need to take this thing behind the barn and send it to Valhalla, I also realize that I don't want to be done.
And maybe I don't have to be. This was a travel blog, but travels aren't restricted to glamorous stints of poverty in post-industrial English cities. They also something we experience in our day-to-day experiences. Perhaps England was more exotic to the kind folks that read my writings than Northern Virginia or other American settlements might have been. At the same time, when I wrote about England, I was still writing about the normal everyday. Sure the brand names were different and the hours of operation were more restrictive, but at the end of the day, I was just writing about going to the grocery store. Perhaps the virtue of my project here wasn't that I was able to exhibit a different world, but that I was able to find for myself a different world within the exhibits of the mundane. It was self-discovery above all. I just didn't realize it at the time.
But unlike then, I'm finding that I'm continuously and overtly plagued with the mundane. There is no novelty of crusty baps, chavs or funny accents. I grind it out in an office job that stresses me out and seems like a dead end. I have a commute and I find myself counting the minutes between weekends. I'm a workaday joe. But I am also a very lucky workaday joe. I have some diversions, a woman that I love and a family that is indefatigably in my corner with the spit pail of support and the towel of love. They stitch me up more often than I deserve and I'm all the better for it. And yet, I'm finding myself getting lost in the grind. I've come from exceptional circumstance, am surrounded by exceptional loved ones and have exceptional dreams, and yet I feel shackled by a life less than exceptional. To make matters worse, I'm the one who clamped myself in those shackles. It isn't the job. It isn't the commute. It's me.
Which brings me back to my project.
I'm not done writing about my experiences because, at this moment, I'm unconvinced that I've said all that needs to be said. I'm still discovering, as I was when I was in Nottingham and Ningbo. I don't know how many of you see this blog entry, or whether it falls on deaf... eyes. Either way, the blog project helped me and I'm going to continue it, albeit under a new guise. You're welcome to come along, what's left of you. Or stay here. Either way suits me (although I like you and would rather your company). I'm going to move on to new observations and new landscapes. Geography will remain of great importance (and rightfully so) but what else would you expect of me. Northern Virginia can be a deceptively harsh domain and from where I sit, it needs some re-imagining on my part. Without any more of this dreadful ado, I'm off to trim the hedges and dynamite-blast the landscape of the cognitive geography of my Virginia. Maybe somewhere along the line I'll lose my shackles.
Thanks for your support those long years across the pond.
- Jonathan "A Virginian Scholar Reclaimed" Trenary
Yay!
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