December 5, 2007

Anticipating the aftershock
"Make sure you take lots of pictures"

Ryan Lowell l contributing columnist

I’ve heard it’s hard coming back to the mainland. Former study abroad students have told me they had no problem dealing with the initial “culture shock” of living in a new land. Instead, their biggest troubles were re-acclimating to a society they once lived in, but no longer find normal an aftershock if you will.

Long-term travellers tell me the most difficult part of going back to the States is trying to convey what they were doing the entire time they were gone. Life has gone on without them, and they have had life-shaping experiences of their own, yet no one wants to hear about them! Abroad students are always chomping at the bit to relay even the most irrelevant anecdote from their trips in great detail, and they can’t seem to figure out why folks back home don’t find it as captivating. I’m trying to remind myself that life in Colchester didn’t just stop for my convenience, and that my friends inevitably got by without me. So maybe the reason why my buddies won’t be begging me to tell them more about the time I cut my toenails in Dublin is because they’re silly enough to think that their lives are just as interesting.

Everyone thought they had a solution for me, “take lots of pictures,” they all said, thinking that a digital camera jam-packed with pictures of my ugly mug in front of a double-decker bus from every imaginable angle will help them understand what I’ve really been doing all this time.

I know I’m a difficult bastard, and I’m always condemning something in my columns, so why stop now? To be honest, I don’t think photography can get even close to capturing the experiences I’ve had, at least not the snapshots I’ve captured with my toy camera anyway. Since the moment we got off the plane, it’s been a frequent occurrence to see countless tourists burning through film while I shake my head. It’s not that I don’t respect photography, and I’m sure I’ll be glad to have pictures when I come back, but they’re not going to help me “remember” how my life over here was like everyone tells me they will.

Renowned psychologist Stanley Milgram once suggested that photography offers a trade off: We get to record an event as it’s going on, but it takes away from the way we actually experience that event. I’m skeptical that pictures will be enough to properly document my trip, because they don’t really capture the most defining moments of my journey. Because when Grandma and Grandpa are scrolling through my shots, the most visually stimulating pictures they’ll see are the ones of me standing in front of famous landmarks like Buckingham Palace and Stonehenge. I find it excessively depressing that people back home might think the defining moment of my trip came when I was severely overtired, mildly hung-over, and freezing in the cloudy England drizzle in front of a pile of old rocks. I’m reminded of the adage, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” But next to the experiences I’ve had, my pictures are trivial at best, which makes words nearly useless (What am I telling you for? You’ve sifted through enough of my writing this semester).

Certain feelings get conjured up in my mind when I think about England, and I’m not sure I’ve got a picture that best represents them. I’ll try to convey a couple to you, but I’m hesitant as to how it will work. Firstly, I don’t have a picture that sums up the way I feel when I watch posh kids sip bottles of the fancy import lager Budweiser, as opposed to seeing it chugged through a funnel like a special kind of motor oil that fuels freshmen all the way from Ryan Hall to Act One.

I also couldn’t capture the vibe of a deserted and dormant campus at 5 a.m., oblivious to the fact that this was a time of celebration, as the Red Sox had just won the World Series. Three years and an ocean removed from the madness of the quad in my freshman year celebration, there wasn’t a soul in sight. I barely even believed Freddie Mercury when he sang that he and I were the champions of the world through my iPod speakers.

The reason why I can’t properly sum up these instances, not with pictures and certainly not with words, is because they were experiences that mean more than words, and I don’t mean “more than words” like that crappy hair metal ballad by Extreme. So when I come back to Vermont, I would love to analyze every nanosecond of my trip in great detail, but I’ll try to understand if you think the Pats game on TV is more interesting. If you ask me about my trip but don’t want the longwinded response, no worries, I won’t drone on. I’ll just smile and tell you the most cliché line imaginable, “You had to be there."

At least I’ll mean it.