Autoethnography

Note: Yes, I’m alive and writing. I have not posted here for a very long time.

Sometimes life happens. It can fall, in buckets and buckets, right on our heads. Fortunately, showers exist.

Photo by Tonia Kraakman on Unsplash

So much to record, analyze, and group into “like experiences” from my 2025 travels that I called Last Trip to Indiana. As an anthropologist my personal reflections and documentation of fieldwork in a place where I once lived is authoethnography.

I traveled to attend the gathering of the 50th anniversary of my High School Class’  graduation; Colombia Indiana Joint High School, Class of 1975. I managed to do this. And the morning after, I went to West Lafayette, Indiana, home of Purdue University, to see my major professor.  It means I did not stick around for anything after reunion, if there was anything going on. I left my home town area the morning after the reunion to attend a monarch butterfly release at my mentor’s home in her honor for her 91st birthday. 

I had planned to stay with her, but she had just traveled back to Indiana across the country from the Northwest Coast the morning of the butterfly release.  She was also traveling to Northern Europe 10 days from her party.  I wanted to stay and chat with her, but I thought she needed the rest.  I would have needed it – if I had to keep her schedule.

I also felt a loving need to see a friend that had a medical crisis a few months ago.  I decided I needed to see some other old friends, too.  There were many people I could not see, but, I did my best.  

The hardest part was pacing myself so that I did not overdo any one thing.   

Seeing new places and people, for, me, takes more energy than might be imagined. Perhaps I should say traveling far from home takes more energy than it should. Mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical energies all have to be considered.  I am probably an introvert by most measures, although Myers-Briggs tells me I am ENTJ.  I guess I am just an extrovert that needs a lot of solitude.

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A is for Autoethnography