I love this photo of little Sophie, holding hands with an Aboriginal girl in Australia. Not only am I wearing the most ridiculous outfit (my mom let me dress myself as a child) but, having no memory or anecdotes to suggest otherwise, I like to think of this as evidence for how children are born nondiscriminatory. While I can’t speak for the other little girl, it appears that I didn’t notice or care about our differences, all I saw was a potential friend to play with, and seized the opportunity.
In high school a student names Brock from Adelaide, Australia came to stay for awhile. I showed him the picture and told him about how my dad still played didgeridoo for us on occasion, etc. He proceeded to tell me about how terrible the discriminating against native Aboriginal people was, and it forever changed how I saw this photo.
On a totally separate note: My dad’s favorite memory from Sydney was when he tried to order a martini, and they responded they were “all out of martini.”
When I was in college I had the opportunity to travel to the Philippines with my friend Izzara, who was from Cebu. Our friendship started with one of those small world moments; it turned out that she knew one of my old friends Shuta from boarding school, and she had gone to boarding school where my cousin Nicola went (Suffield Academy, in CT), and after this discovery we became quick friends over curly fries with mustard. She invited me to come visit her over Winter Break, so after a quick trip through Amsterdam with my two older siblings, Sage and Gentry, and an even quicker stop in London for New Years with my mom, I flew to Manilla. It was a very exciting trip, especially because I knew nothing about the Philippines before going. I ate baby eel at a Spanish restaurant and learned about historical Spanish occupation of the Philippines, and how that was why it was a predominantly catholic country. I ate balut (fertalized duck egg) from a street cart. I ate freshly caught uni straight from the ocean on a catamaran. We attended Sinulog Festival, swam with whale sharks.
I didn’t get any great photos of myself with said whale sharks, but I did have the scare of my life while trying.
Before they take you out in the canoes, there is a mandatory training video which basically just entailed threats of imprisonment if you touched the whale sharks. It brought to mind the story of that American tourist that got caned in Singapore. Izzara had also cautioned me early on about the way things worked in the Philippines; for example, if a driver struck a pedestrian the incentive structure was such that it made more sense (fiscally speaking) to back up and finish the job and pay for a funeral, than to call an ambulance and risk paying the medical bills.
Anyhow I signed on the dotted line and slid my snorkeling gear into place. Having only been snorkeling once or twice before, I was struggling with a foggy mask, treading water, and preoccupied with my underwater camera gear. I was admiring a baby whale shark in front of me when my fin makes contact with something hard. Before I even have time to register that I had kicked a whale shark, that despite their massive size can apparently sneak up from under you, a set of brawny arm lifts me fully out of the water in a single motion, and deposits me brusquely back in the canoe. I don’t even remember what he said because sheer panic had started to over take me, third world prison bars flashing behind my eyes, but I know that it was curt, like “watch out,” but that I also wasn’t in trouble — thank heavens!
I took this photo of my dog Chip one foggy morning in Stinson Beach, CA many years ago. He has since passed, though he is remembered fondly.
My favorite memory of Chip is from the time we had been driving seven long hours from the Bay Area back to Newport, and just as we hit LA and Chip got up from my lap, where he had been laying the whole drive, walked over to my mom’s lap, peed, and then went and lied down on his bed until we made it home. My mom and I still laugh about how much Chip loved me, even though she was the one who fed and walked him.
This is a picture of Belle, our other Yorkshire Terrier, in Stinson Beach on that same day. We got her after we had had Chip for awhile. I believe it was around the time I left for boarding school because I distinctly remember the impression I was left with was that I had been replaced by a six pound dog. Belle tragically passed in Stinson some years later when we were renting a house in Seadrift.
This was taken in the early morning in Stinson Beach, outside one of the yurts on my aunt’s property there. Her home has been featured in many magazines and catalogues because it is so stunning. I lived with her for almost a full year while I was in college. I loved living in Stinson. My commute to San Francisco was often stunning and stimulating, as I would make up games on the drive and blast whatever music my Stanford friends had introduced me to most recently. My favorite games were: see how long you can drive in neutral, and see how many cars you can get to pull over so you can pass them. (Much of the road is long, winding, and just a single lane between redwood trees and a rocky drop off into the ocean, so if you were unlucky you could get stuck behind an uneasy driver that would go well under the speed limit the whole way, with no way around them.) Some of my favorite songs from that time were by a band called Disclosure, who turned out to be terrible when I saw them live at Coachella.
When I was living with my aunt in Stinson Beach, I became infatuated with this man that I met online who had graduated from MIT and was now working in tech in Silicon Valley. I was really interested in what his parents had done when he was growing up that contributed towards him being able to attend MIT for computer science, and one of the things that he mentioned was that he had grown up playing chess. I didn’t know the first thing about chess but I downloaded an app so we could play chess together, hoping I could learn by playing, but he would mate me in three moves, so the chess didn’t workout — neither did he and .
I don’t know why I liked this shot so much. I took it on my Canon Rebel T2i, which was a really high end camera at the time. One of my favorite features was that it was so user friendly (i.e. I didn’t have to adjust shudder speed, exposure, aperture, etc.). This was one of the few times when my subject was out of focus, and yet it captured this seagull mid-flight in such an interesting position that I quite liked the photo anyway. Mostly I love this color scheme though. Foggy blues and pale greys. (I’m partial to spelling “gray” with the English way.)
Sophie's External Brain 