Photo shoot the other day




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Working on the inside

The piece below is something I wrote a little over a year ago. At the time I felt like it represented a real ‘happy ending’ point in my life, a reckoning with the issues I had while we were living in the UK that I had long kept fairly quiet about because of the shame I felt around them. Watching a friend endure something similar last fall somehow unlocked the words for me -- even though, until now, I haven’t shown them to anyone but that one person.   Here it goes: ———— January 2018 People ask me a lot about what it was like living abroad. For a long time -- the whole time we were there -- I couldn’t answer that question honestly. I’ve had three major depressive periods in my life, each lasting about two years. The most recent one started when we moved to Scotland. That’s the one I’m going to talk about. I didn’t really want to go there in the first place. When Eric decided to include the UK in his academic job search, as his postdoc appointment was coming to...
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The Adventures of the Griffis Family in China: November 10-18, 2010

Day 5, Saturday. One of my American-style indulgences last night was a vanilla Coke. In retrospect, this was a Bad Idea. Eric and Owen both slept all night for the first time since our arrival, as I can testify because, well, I didn’t. I had thought that Owen might get less attention in Beijing, but so far that seems not to be the case. Yesterday a young woman checking in at the same time as us asked for a picture with him, and this morning at breakfast the waitresses are cooing over him like mad. He is not at all ready to deal with the attention so early in the day, and sits very stiffly with his eyes averted until they leave him alone. Eric’s brother Kevin had warned us that on his trip to China, the “Western breakfast” at his hotel seemed to have been created by people who knew of some American foods but had no clue which ones were eaten at breakfast, so we are pleasantly surprised by the non-random nature of the hotel buffet, which has both Chinese and Western options. Owen is ...
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The Extremely Abbreviated Adventures of the Griffis Family in China: November 10-18, 2010

If I don't get this done now, I never will. So, here goes the rest of the trip in a much more abridged form: The Extremely Abbreviated Adventures of the Griffis Family in China (Days 6-10) Day 6: We visit Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Both are extraordinarily vast and impressive and hard to describe or get good pictures of because of their vast impressiveness. The former is magnificently austere, the latter magnificently ornate. We also get to see “new” Beijing in the form of a vast urban mall for lunch (San Francisco readers, imagine the Westfield, with all Chinese food and only a slightly more skewed ratio of Chinese to Anglo diners.) That night Guangsho takes us out for Peking duck, yum yum. Day 7: Eric spends the morning talking to people at Peking University. Owen and I spend the morning wandering the university grounds with our guide for the day, whose English is, alas, extremely limited, to the point that conversation is pretty much nonexistent. We meet a Ca...
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