Visualization

This is the image I posted as a visualization of my site sit at the beginning of the semester. It was kind of embarassing to me then, both because it is a selfy and because I'm posing with a cigarette. I used it anyway, beacuase midnight was approaching and I couldn't think of another idea of how to represent the space I chose visually. I don't think it uploaded correctly then, so this might be the first time people are seeing this. Honestly, looking at different words that people chose and looking back at this photo, I don't see much that I didn't before. It's still embarassing that I am at the front of a picture that I used to represent a space outdoors. Looking at the word life, as Amala wrote about it last week, makes this photo a little less embarassing for me. In her post, Amala reported that life was defined as follows in three different dictionaries:

OED:
The condition or attribute of living or being alive; animate existence. Opposed to death or inanimate existence.
The condition, quality, or fact of being a living person or animal; human or animal existence.

Urban Dictionary:
A sexually-transmitted, terminal disease.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
The ability to grow, change, etc., that separates plants and animals from things like water or rocks
The period of time when a person is alive

Etymology: Old English life (dative lif) "existence, lifetime, way of life, condition of being a living thing, opposite of death," from Proto-Germanic *libam (cognates: Old Norse lif "life, body," Dutch lijf "body," Old High German lib "life," German Leib "body"), properly "continuance, perseverance," from PIE *leip- "to remain, persevere, continue; stick, adhere"

All three definitions use the basic idea of life as being living, but the Merriam-Webster definition and the etymology she provides are interesting to me. I like looking at this picture while thinking about the idea of life as specifically "the ability to grow [and] change" and the roots of the word in German as "to remain, peresevere, continue; stick, adhere." In my selfy I am alive with the tree I like so much, growing, changing, and perservering. I took the photo early in first semester, and looking at it reminds me that I have grown and changed and perservered as a student at this school. I have grown, changed, perservered, the tree has grown, changed, perservered, and my relationship to it has too, through my site sits.