Homesickness

Like most people within contemporary global culture who are separated from kith and kin by the dreams, necessities, and vagaries of working toward a better life, my mother and I share a long distance relationship that is mediated by the technological proxies of the Information Age. Through daily e-mail exchanges, intermittent cell-phone updates, and the more customary tradition of Sunday evening phone calls, we stitch together a discursive cloth that redefines our previously held understanding of this thing called home. This is good: for without the interconnectivity of web and wire, we would be caught in the intergenerational disappointment and guilt of a mother's steady stream of weekly letters against the slower trickle of her daughter's quarterly responses.

At the same time, I am also aware that we are piecing together a record of artifact (a time capsule) that captures the poignancy and tedium of everyday life in contemporary global culture. While at its most basic our correspondence is a means of creating intimacy in the face of a deadening geographical void, it is also a means of documenting and archiving the emergence of newly imagined cultural spaces that extend far beyond the realm of our own family's domain. This new space that we have built is a place in which countless others increasingly find themselves, and it is located at the interstices of travel, dislocation, memory, loss, hope, and malaise.