There are two instances where I hate myself and when I feel like crying:

when I break things
when I can't find things.

i broke a tripod just now. not a really good tripod - just a small old one that i found hanging around my mom's house and that i adopted as my backup tripod - it was probably slightly better quality than mine, but a bit bulkier and does not fit in my camera bag (small fabric purse).

i had put the legs up and i was twisting the top to try to get it lined up better - when i realised that it didn't twist and one of the legs snapped off. it's metal, and it just snapped - not at a joint or anything, just in the middle of the connecting piece. as i said, it's old, but still.

and because i'm so messy there are so many instances where i can't find things. at those times i'm so mad at myself for being messy and for not being more organised, but does that translate to improved organisation and decreased messiness? of course not. my place firmly believe in entropy - tendency to disorder.

while i'm throwing out the big words... i think i have a new favourite - topophilia. discovered it in my cultural geography textbook. coined by a chinese american geographer whose name i don't feel like looking up, it means love of a certain place. i've experienced that driving through bc and admiring the vastness and beauty of the province, and i've experienced that hiking or sightseeing and just being surrounded by nature.

and speaking of cultural geography... there are some interesting topics, but in general this course is way too artsy for me. It's essentially Archaeology: Special Editon - now with MAPS!. it doesn't seem all that relevant. Good fucking luck getting work as a cultural geographer.

But the textbook did raise an interesting (if possibly not 100% accurate) point: "we all must belong somewhere to be complete persons".

The average length of time that an American lives in any specific place is five years. Now, that number is probably lower for most other countries, but that was the stat that I happened on. That's a lot of moving. How can you belong somewhere if you move that much? Or would they change the scale and think that while they may have moved a lot, they've lived in the US for all their life, and that's what matters?

Maybe that's the source of American patriotism. I realise there is regional pride and certainly the north-south split in the US, but I'd think that if people move a lot, the importance of regions lessens and that sense of belonging gets transferred to the country as a whole.