I went caroling with my students on Saturday, for Orthodox Christmas, and I was narrating the whole time.  The voice in my head wouldn't shut it, even after I ducked out and ran home after an hour and a half.  Emma was sick in bed, we were talking, and I was narrating our conversation as we were having it.

I'm constantly scribbling things down in my head and looking at the world in terms of composition and subject and light, and it gets in the way.  I was sitting in Paulina's grandparents' house around Christmas time, and her grandfather Bronisław and her cousin Radek were playing folk music for me.  I was nearly too busy taking photos and thinking about how to write the story to be there.

I want to be in the pictures that I take and the stories that I write, not simply collect and polish them. But I've lived in Poland for over a year now, and I still feel like I'm an observer.  "This is so Polish" pops out of my mouth all the time: when we have potatoes, beets, and pork cutlets for dinner; when the cashier (every cashier) manages to ignore you, regard you with disdain, and ring you up at the same time; when the god awful radio is on and every single station regales me with the same blend of shitty American pop, American adult contemporary from the eighties and nineties, and home bred disco polo.  And I still have to get to the bottom of the abyss of Polish mysteries, like why the students are dressed as devils and bears and camels to go caroling (the answer: modern day religious tradition merged with old school, pre-Jesus folklore.)

Emma's sister, Clara, has lived in France for five years now and will be there, probably, for the rest of her life.  She's marrying a Frenchman next January.  From the beginning, Clara's mindset was to live exactly as French people do, rather than transplant her American habits on foreign soil.  But Emma and I...we don't do that.  We don't think of Poland as our permanent home, we live in a specific educational setting where students and staff are encouraged to speak English to us at all times, and we still have the same food and exercise habits, the same interests and needs, all of which cause many Poles to raise their collective eyebrow.  Finally, neither one of us are any good at Polish, which, to put it lightly, is incredibly stupid, because we live here.  Clara thinks of us as anthropologists.  Minus, I suppose, the language skills.

This "anthropology" inhibits me from being fully in the moment.  This taking of notes and photographs.  It's almost enough for me to abandon my words and my camera, and travel with a lighter pack and fuller presence. But, I can't.  I mean, I can.  I won't. I want to write and I want to take pictures.  I do step back to obsreve what's unfamiliar, to categorize unfamiliar as different.  I do miss my old life and intend on returning to some semblance of it in the distant future.  And I want to collect it all, these fragments of other places and people, even though--well, is any of it really proof that I'm here?  That I'm contributing something?  That I'm living fully?