New Hampshire: Day 2

The train­ing is light and relaxed. I avoid wear­ing my name tag, but not the awk­ward round of intro­duc­tions every­one has to make around the class. We fin­ish early for the day, and I won­der if there’ll be a test at the end as part of my certification.

I vaguely remem­ber that Dave Seah, my online men­tor and per­sonal coach, lives in New Hampshire. We met four years ago when I joined 9rules, and imme­di­ately devel­oped a con­nec­tion. His writ­ing, ideas, and achieve­ments have always inspired me, and he’s been the only per­son to make a guest post on my blog.

I call him, and as fate would have it, he lives 10 min­utes from my hotel. For years, I’ve won­dered if he had a New Hampshire accent, and I finally find out he speaks just like me.

Dave picks me up and whisks me away to Factory 99, an open artist stu­dio con­verted from an old fac­tory, to meet Sid. Sid is a pho­tog­ra­pher try­ing to turn his pas­sion into his liv­ing. I see his pho­tos, and pick his brain about off-camera flashes, expo­sure, post-processing, back­drops, and light­ing for much longer than I should have. I can’t even explain how many ques­tions he’s answered. I feel like I’ve been through a work­shop, and leave with an urgency to try every­thing I’ve learned. It’s easy to see why Dave is such good friends with him, and the syn­ergy continues.

From there we take a stroll to down­town and onto Main Street. It’s only sun­set, and many stores are closed, a sign of the eco­nomic down­turn. It’s a small city we’re in¹, and there’s almost noth­ing of note, save for the tri­an­gle man­hole covers.

We make a quick stop at his house, nes­tled among ever­greens and a cosy part of town, to check on a turkey he’s been slow cook­ing. I finally get a chance to see his stu­dio in real life. I rec­og­nize the lap­top he pur­chased for his project. I see his hand­writ­ing. His gun vault. His OLPC lap­top. His cats. All the lit­tle details I’ve glimpsed from his pho­tos are in front of me now.

We look for a place to have din­ner, and decide on some Asian food. He takes us to a Korean/Japanese restau­rant. I let him order every­thing for the both of us. Just from hear­ing him describe the unagi, I can tell he’s one of the few peo­ple who ana­lyze and study and appre­ci­ate food the way I do.

Over our steam­ing bowls of rice and tea, we talk as if we’ve known each other our entire lives. I real­ize just how sim­i­lar we are, how we’re at the same stage in life, both self-aware, emo­tion­ally intel­li­gent, won­der­ing the same things, fig­ur­ing out the mys­ter­ies of life, and try­ing to sus­tain our­selves on what we love doing.

I don’t feel so alone anymore.

1. Compared to Ottawa, at least, at only one tenth the pop­u­la­tion [↑]