"I read the news today, oh boy..."

There are worse things in life, but today I read that one of, if not my favorite website is shutting down: www.scenefrommylife.com I’ve been visiting this site religiously since 2003. It’s been a quintessential part of my mornings since I discovered it on yahoo as one of the best sites on the web of 2003. It saddens me because of the impact this site has had on my life; regardless of how slight it was. Sounds weird, doesn’t it? I’ve always wondered what life was like outside my own, outside my Los Angeles. I love my city but recognize how tiny it is in respect to the rest of the world. It’s tiny y’all, tiny. I remember as a kid I’d hear about Africa, Sydney, Australia; Europe, I learned about Yugoslavia and actually did a report on it, I learned about many, many countries and umpteenth cities throughout the world, but never did I truly know what a day in the life of a local kid, adult, dog was like there (the site, appropriately used to be www.adayinthelife.org, but due to copyright b.s., it was changed). I never had a window to a world outside of California that was either outdated, via encyclopedias or accompanied by some sound byte on television. This site presented that window in a way unmatched by anything the ol’ tube could provide, adding to the notion that a picture is worth a thousand words…

“The concept is simple. Each day, one new photo will be posted on the site. A photographer is assigned to shoot one photo a day for seven days. The photo can be of anything the photographer wants. The only guideline is that the photo that's posted has to have been taken within the past 24 hours.”

So there it was. A few months ago I had the honor of posting a scene from my life photo everyday for a week. http://scenefrommylife.com/archive/2006/0515.html It was quite the experience. As in previous posts, I’ve always found the beauty of my city as something intangible, something unexplainable to those outside the L.A. County lines since we don’t have an epicenter as does New York in Times Square, as does Moscow in Red Square and so on. Our beauty lies in the details of our sprawl. In the Spanish lyrics on street signs, in the literal transplanted symbolism of our palm trees, in the cross valley bus rides. And this is what I received from scene from my life. I was privy to these kinds of things and a fresh perspective from around the globe on a daily basis. I spent time in Sao Paulo, Brooklyn, Paris, Dayton, Mexico City, Austin, Reykjavik, Chicago, Hong Kong, etc. as a local and I knew what life was like for a week on a tiny spot on a globe and a life not my own. I will miss that.

I will miss the daily fulfillment of wonder, the daily reflection of a world unknown to me yet attainable on a simple web site.