Farm Exposure

  I met up with Matthew for lunch today up in Manchester. We ate pizza and shared our thoughts on isolation and inspiration. He seems to be in a similar rut, but at least he's still creating. We've come to the same difficult conclusion as well, that we feel the best up here in this city - inspired and at home.
  I have work at the restaurant this evening at 5 (KISS is in town and it's going to be chaos so they've called everyone in) and I thought it foolish to bother driving all the way back home after lunch only to have to turn around in a few hours, so here I am at the school library. I just finished developing three rolls of black and white 120 film downstairs and it felt go great to be back in my element. My dad notified me that my color film finally came in the mail today so that will be quite a treat when I get home tonight.
  Since the film I've just developed won't be ready for another half hour or so, the following are a few of the double exposures I shot with my Holga at Dargoonian Farms before Grandpa passed away.

  I purposely set the camera incorrectly, allowing the frames to overlap, resulting in the bars at the side of several of the images. I set out to corrupt my typical desire for perfect images, and instead tried to capture the repetition so present inside the greenhouses, set against the cracked earth and machinery out in the fields.

I'm lost.

  I've been out of college for near two months now and I'm no closer to starting my professional life than I am to once and for all cleaning up the residual crap from moving back home out of the basement. I feel totally lost and cut off from everyone I was once close with. My three best girlfriends seem to have forgotten me, yet still see each other, and my best guy friend is still up in Manchester, where I wish I was. I feel like I'm sixteen again, living at home, having my parents give me the fifth-degree every time I walk out the door: "Where are you going? How long will you be out? Don't stay out too late! Who will you be with? What are you doing?" I'm going out of my mind with the exact kind of claustrophobia I feared I would be subject to.
  I want so badly to get back into my craft but I find myself rationalizing my lack of effort towards it at every turn. Between working two part-time jobs, one that I hate immensely, and one that I'm starting to dislike, I don't feel up to breaking out my camera when I get home because I'm so damn tired. (Matt told me on the phone tonight with mild surprise in his tone that he noticed how easily I fall asleep - I fell asleep Saturday at our friend's Harry Potter Marathon night, right in front of everyone, and I'm only now realizing how embarrassed I am by that.) I haven't honestly journaled since before graduation and I can't even begin to remember everything that's happened so I stay away from that, too, my second passion, because I know I can't make up for the massive gap in time.
  I bought a book called Origin of Inspiration: Seven Short Essays for Creative People and I'm hoping it will help me pull myself out of this hopelessly uninspired rut I've found myself in. I've really lost sight of what was once so important to me, and I truly believe this isolation in southern New Hampshire is the root of it all.

  I'm still waiting for my three rolls of color 120 film to be returned from the developing lab. I check the mailbox every day, thinking somehow that getting my photographs back might just be the spark I need.