like home

It’s a quiet night in Boulder.

When i came back to Colorado after my summer away, i went straight to an out-of-the-way corner of the Gore Range for a few days with my parents, without even stopping by Boulder.

The end of July was a long series of comings home. An afternoon in a bush camp near Rom, Uganda was sort of like being partway home—and then Jónsi serenaded us to Kitgum. Kitgum was sort of like home, too. If you kill it we can eat it! If you kill it we can eat it! Coffee shops in Gulu. Easy internet access in Entebbe. Lunch in Dallas. We spoke English and were given American-type beer. Oklahoma City. All of it was travel until Oklahoma City—steps toward home, home of a sort, but not home. But then i was in Oklahoma, and that was home.

So as soon as i was settled in, i had to leave again.

i drove right by the I270 exit that i would normally take to Boulder. Chemicals in my brain did weird things.

i spent a few days camping with my family. i’m ready to be back there—Lower Cascade Lake in this case, but it could just as well be anywhere else.

rust

‘sam,’ you say, ‘nobody will ever read your blog or look at your pictures if you never update it.’
and you say that because you’re wise.
i suppose i should. and i suppose that i should stop not posting any pictures that i ever take anywhere.
until tonight, i hadn’t taken a single picture in over a month, anyway.
somehow tonight i took 160, which was nice.
i have hardly put any pictures up from uganda yet, but i might keep not putting them up for a while. i’m not real wild about most of them, to be honest.

a few days after i got back from uganda, i went over to kyle and sally williams’ place.
‘let’s do an awkward photo shoot’, they said.
an awkward photo shoot we did.





‘with props!’ they said.
with props we did.







‘with kissing!’ they said.
but you don’t get to see those (that may or may not be how it actually went, anyway).

these pictures are now very old, like my joints.

on wednesdays, i ride with sarah michals on the northbound skip after taking a construction grammar class.

the light was beautiful—shining out of a clear west sky under dark gray clouds. skeletal trees highlit against ominous skies or whatever. upon arriving at my car, then, i decided to shoot a few pictures. i drove halfway to where i used to live and jogged up a little hill.

i snapped off 160 quick pictures, and turned around to go home. the last time i took pictures for the sole purpose of taking pictures that would be beautiful was april 12.

one of those pictures is the first picture in this post.

i left when the sun dipped behind the mountains. i knew better, but i wanted to get home. my 25 minute drive featured one of the most beautifully tormented and enraged sunsets that i have seen in quite some time. i could have been taking pictures of it. but i’m rusty enough at this old picture taking business that i didn’t. i would have needed water to make it work, anyway.

i’m backlogged in photoshop even though i haven’t taken any pictures in a month. i’ve been taking a lot of large panoramas (i recently just finished manually stitching a 35 photo panorama of my brother) lately, and processing them is pretty labor-intensive. maybe if i start posting some things i’ll be more motivated to take and process more photos.

i spend hundreds of hours every week working on the nyang’i language, and i make very little progress. today i noticed that the verb [deu] see apparently shares a common source with an uncommon verb in soo (a related language) and a very common verb in ketebo/mening (an unrelated language), but not with the most common verb for see in soo or with the verb for see in ik (soo and ik are the only languages related to nyang’i). the most common soo verb for see is probably cognate with the ik verb for see, as well as with a strange set of other languages such as turkana and karamojong. that made me assume that the verb see in nyang’i is probably borrowed, but i noticed that ketebo/mening’s closest relatives don’t have a form anything like [deu]. so i expanded my search, and found that similar forms to [deu] occur all across the kakwa/bari branch of eastern nilotic. so apparently the nyang’i had some contact with kakwa/bari (possibly second-hand, through the ketebo/mening) at some point in time in their history.

and now the world knows more about the history of the nyang’i than it did this morning.