A Change of (S)pace

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parking spaceI hate change.  I am terrified of it.  Last fall I began my third year at Georgia State, and I was facing some major changes.  I was finishing my course work and looking fearfully towards a future of comprehensive exams and dissertation writing.  The classroom is my safe space, and leaving that space gave me a lot of anxiety.  While I was struggling to contend with this inevitable progression, a different change hit me out of nowhere.

Technically, I suppose, I was the one that came out of nowhere.  I was driving on the interstate in the rain when my car hit a slick spot.  I lost control, spun across the median, and continued into oncoming traffic.  My car was struck twice, once by another sedan and then by a moving truck.  At the hospital, the doctors said that I had broken my back in two places in addition to fracturing my sacrum, and I had to get stitches in my leg where a piece of the passenger side door had lodged itself in my calf.  I spent three days in the hospital under observation until I was able to go home, luckily without having to undergo surgery.

As one might imagine, this event had a major impact on my life.  My previous anxiety turned into a full-blown life crisis.  What was I doing? How could I go back to school?  What meaning do I gain in life from study for comps and writing a dissertation?  How am I making a difference in the world?  More than anything, what ultimately kept me connected to GSU was my students.  I know that my future is in the classroom.  I couldn’t abandon my freshmen, and I couldn’t abandon a future in teaching by running scared from the next steps I had to take.

Which brings me, finally, to the picture.  After a month of rest and rehabilitation, I was able to return to school.  The first thing I had to do when coming back was to get a handicapped parking place.  My most meaningful place on campus is this parking place.  It is, of course, a symbol of the accident and what I went through.  But to me, it also represents a recommitment to my future and my scholarly work.

Change found me once more, but this time, I learned to embrace it.  I found positive change these past months through healing.  This parking space in now empty because I don’t need it anymore.  In March I completed a 5k race, and I am now training for a sprint triathlon.  I have learned that change is something to embrace instead of fear, even when it seems scary.

Finding my Place on the Trails

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“Go outside.” This was the mantra of my childhood–enforced by regulated television time and inside playtime. My memories of childhood exist in outside spaces: the little woods behind my parents’ house where I would go to catch bugs and collect leaves, the cul-de-sac where I used to play baseball with makeshift bases & oversized gloves, the trees in our front yard that I would climb & hang off the branches. The house I grew up in, the house where my parents still live, has changed–the roads that I roamed with my neighborhood gang have been re-paved & the playhouse that acted as our fortress against imaginary armies sits decaying in the backyard–a skeletal frame of our childhood games. Nonetheless, my love of the outdoors remains & outside places are still significant in my adult life. 

The photograph above captures a moment of my morning hike through the Battlefield trails, which are minutes away from my current home in Marietta. These trails have become places where I can escape my hectic life & its places of obligation & routine: the desk in the corner of my room where I should be writing my thesis, my cubicle at work with its grey, melancholy hues and stacks of unfinished reports, my sink surrounded by dirty dishes that I need to clean. On these trails, I can clear my mind and enjoy the vibrant scenery and serene sounds of nature. While these trails are open to the public, they are personal places to me–spaces where I am alone with myself and my own thoughts.

 

 

Office Space

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My office is where I prepare for teaching and taking classes. I spend most days before class reading over materials and most afternoons being available to meet with students about their writing. I moved into this office last semester with some apprehension. I feared the move from Langdale Hall to 25 Park Place. I expected to feel uncomfortable. My office is a shared office space—one that I share with five other people. I feared the close quarters of working relationships. But I’ve found that the people I’ve seen in my office have only enriched my experience as a teacher and student.

I’ve talked with one colleague about his experience taking comprehensive exams and with another about his classes in literary theory. Although I was hesitant at first about sharing a space with other Graduate Teaching Assistants, I’ve found that the professional relationships have been valuable and significant to my educational experience. This space has become a safe space for me—one that I enjoy in solitude and with other like-minded academics. It’s a quiet and calming space, especially with the lights turned low.

On long days, I spend time after classes relaxing and unwinding in the space of my office. Sometimes I put on some soft music and sit back in my chair with my eyes closed; other times, I dive directly into the next project, paper, or teaching plan. This space provided me with somewhere away from home that I can be productive, but it also nurtures a lifestyle of intentional and personal restoration.

Home

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My wife and I live in a house just south of Atlanta Station. It’s in a neighborhood called Home Park. We’ve been here for almost three years. The street stays pretty quiet. Although some use it as a cut-through, traffic is typically moderate. Cars line the street, causing some congestion—some cars have to pull to the side to allow others to pass. House all around us are set up as roommate situations—Georgia Tech students and young professionals. We live in and around so much liveliness but have had a calm and enjoyable experience.

My wife loves to decorate, and I let her take the reigns on these endeavors. That’s a good thing, because our home is beautiful. A typical night you might find us staying in, cooking dinner, and watching something relaxing on TV (for her—some show about house renovations, for me—probably baseball). Other nights, we might go out for dinner and come back early to our home. Although we feel so comfortable here, it’s nice to get out to the nearby restaurants.

I love to sit on our front porch. From here, I can hear neighbors watching games or having small parties—laughing and cheering and talking. I watch the passersby drive past our home, often too fast, and normally give a small gesture—a nod or wave. Being outside on the porch at night is one of my favorite times. It allows me to relax and recharge and breath in the city that we live in, around, and under. I can look up and see buildings touching the sky—Wells Fargo, office buildings. I can look to the south and see the neons of the Coca-Cola factory and to the north and see the neons of the movie theatre at Atlantic Station.

We’ve loved being here, in this house, for the past three years. It has been meaningful for my wife and me. We have celebrated two wedding anniversaries, one graduation from a master’s program, two acceptances into other graduate programs, new jobs, and new friends in this house. Soon, we will have to move on. Our home has been put on the real estate market to be sold by our landlord. Next month, we will move. We will begin to build the same feeling of home in another rental property not far away. With time, we will feel a similar calm, ease, and peace that we’ve felt here.

Personal Place

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I consider myself lucky to have lived in the same house throughout my childhood into my young adulthood. I have many friends who were shuffled from place to place, whether to a different house within the city, or entirely different states or countries. This wall represents a map of my family’s growth over the years, not just in height but also time. Friends would come over and want to find a place amongst the notches on the wall. Pets were forced to stand on hind legs so we could see how they measured up from puppies to dogs. In the end, this wall has become a representation of the many loved one’s I’ve had in my life that have all come into my home and literally become a part of it.

The wall permanently captures places in time that would otherwise be forgotten. It portrays a time when I wanted to be taller than my best friend and we would constantly measure each other to find who was growing at a swifter rate. It marks the height of my older sister’s friends who always seemed so tall, but later in life I surpassed in the markings on the wall.

This wall is a very little physical part of my house, but it is a big part of my family and very nostalgic to all of us. A place becomes a home when it accumulates memories that mean something to you. For me, this wall emulates a place where I grew up from an innocent child into a young woman. There is no other space in the world that represents these stages of my life and I am very happy to have it.

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At Home Among the Books

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The hum of whispering students, pulsating whirs of the air-conditioning, flickering florescent lights: it is curious that the Georgia State library is my favorite place on campus. It is not the physical structure of the place that I enjoy, but it is my experience in between the shelves of books that leads me to this conclusion. Sometimes I visit the library simply to wander through the isles, sifting through book titles and their pages with no intention of locating a particular book. Instead, the titles and covers call for my attention and I respond by flipping through the pages of books that catch my eye. For me, the library lets my mind explore new places, entering into intellectual and imaginative spaces. I am transported, momentarily, from the physical place of the library into a theoretical, immaterial space of the words and my own thoughts. The book creates its own space as I turn the pages and skim a few lines. These trips to the library typically lead to an overabundance of checked-out books that exist in the corner of my room as a stack of unrealistic expectations–spaces and places yet to be discovered, concealed in paperback and hardcovers that I tell myself I will have time to read. After my trips to the library, I often stop at my other favorite places near GSU–the local coffee shops (how will I read all of these books without coffee?). Ebrik has a laid-back atmosphere with a neighborhood feel and cozy coffee-shop ambiance. It is often crowded, but sometimes I can snag a window seat and watch the passersby; I find stillness in the buzz of the city as I sip my coffee, peering into my newly acquired books. 

My GSU home

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Thinking about my GSU home, my mind goes to the General Classroom Building’s 9th floor, where I had my office when I came to GSU in August 2000. My mental picture of the campus is inseparable from my first office here, my experiences settling into a new work “home,” and the building itself. Of course, GCB is no longer GCB; it’s [yikes! I’m drawing a blank! I just had to google it to find out] Langdale Hall.

The name change came after the English department moved its offices to the former Sun Trust Building at 25 Park Place. But this change in my physical map—the way I literally move through GSU’s campus—hasn’t made a change in my mental map. (Or, perhaps, my mental map is changing more slowly than my physical one). When I think of GSU, I mentally inhabit my 9th-floor GCB office.

I associate that space with meeting new colleagues, starting a new job, taking on new responsibilities, meeting a succession of students, researching and writing and grading an ever-new assortment of essays. In my mind, it has a sort of sheen of the new, of expansion and change and growth.

Yet as I walked on campus to capture my mental image of GCB in photographs, I found that I could not do so; this image exists in my imagination and not in reality. As I walked my old route from the Georgia State MARTA station, I realized how subterranean my pre-Park Place existence was. I’d walk underneath Collins Street (with its “Caution: Bridge Spalling” signs; looking up the unfamiliar “spalling,” I learned it means, essentially, “falling down”), then through the parking lot under the building, then to the same entrance/exit that the garbage goes through.

Going to teach in Classroom South, Kell, or Sparks, or trekking to the Library or Student Center, I’d again go under the building—past the rat traps and the dripping pipes, through the stale, dank air—to get to my destination.

How can THIS have the glow of expansion, the sheen of growth? Space is objective, and objectively, this space says “underfunded urban university that does not care about the appearance of things community outsiders rarely see.” But as a place informed by my experiences, GCB, subjectively enhanced, takes on a different character entirely.

 

Place, Identity, and Literature in Belfast and Dublin

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Given the anniversary of both the 1916 Rising and WWI, and given the imbricated history of the two, this study abroad course considers English and Irish history and literature that prefigures, rises out of, or comments upon events affecting Ireland from 1914-1918. These years helped prepare the ground for an Irish nation—and for a bifurcated “Irish” identity—one based in what we know as the Republic of Ireland, the other in Northern Ireland. In order to better understand these texts and the complex literary and cultural identifications that they register, the course will also include theoretical studies of “place”—by which I mean “space invested with meaning in the context of power.”

This course will combine theoretical considerations, literary analysis and experiential learning in the places that formed the crucible of 20thand 21st century Irish identities. These posts reflect the class’s experiences, ideas, and insights while in Ireland, and while considering questions of place, representation, and identity.