Random Yaps and Revisits - pt. 2: How to Think Like a Street

Random Yaps that might have used my braincell or two. Or might have been a part of some stuff I wrote when I was younger.

Part 2. A Cake Being Damaged by Fork

            Pictures are powerful tools to show the things we don’t see everyday. In Visual Anthropology, we use photography to document and picture out moving and nonmoving objects that we usually take for granted. Imagine getting a cake for your birthday, divide them into pieces that would fit everyone that wants to enjoy it. Now, look at every division and corner of each slice, is it as  pretty as it looks when it was still a single piece of cake? Does it look like it's going to break into pieces? It does not look as pretty as it was when your first saw it. Can we do this at other things? Those we see and use everyday, the ones we don’t really give much details to everytime we make use of.

            Let’s picture ourselves in the middle of a newly cemented street, looks nice isn’t it? Are you excited to pass on it? Does it make you feel like you want to go over it or drive over it? Does it or does it not? Whatever we choose to feel, there will always be other people who will want to give it a shot. Imagine that street being used everyday, different kinds of vehicles go over it, trucks, jeepneys, motorcycles, private cars, even walking pedestrians. Will that street feel and look the same when you first see it? Will it look more crowded or busy? Again, imagine yourself in a junction, or a crossroad, each way leads to a community. Which place is the most used? The center? The junction itself?

            I wanted us to imagine these things in order to get a picture of what I will talk about. A street is a place we dwell in almost everyday, but aside from us, there are also many others who use it in order to deal with their everyday lives. We use it everyday, but we never looked at it closely and gave this much detail on how it really feels to be using the street. It is usually taken for granted thinking that it serves its purpose of giving us an easy way to deal with exchanges and lead us to places, but we never really got the chance to look at it in a way that we will see how hard it is to be a street.

            Using pictures, we can see how tired and used a street could get. Just like the cake we imagined earlier, the more fork and people want it, the more damaged and uglier it will look, tiny bits and crumbles will fall off the bigger part and will be unavoidably wasted. A street at the same time is that piece of cake, a whole subdivision or community is the whole cake. The more the slices, the smaller the area becomes. In a land area, the more the inhabitants, the more division the place will have, the more streets there will be. As we munch on our cake, it’s appearance changes, from a decorated piece of baked goods to a simple food we must eat before it rots or just before a fly would step on. As we dwell on the streets everyday, the more it gets used, the more it gets damaged, physically. Cracks will later emerge and the street will get chipped and tiny pebbles we may call it will fall off from the cemented larger piece. It is unavoidable, this damage will occur no matter how many times we fix it, as long as it gets used, damage is inevitable. The images below will explain about the way I wanted us to picture the streets and the damage caused by forks – the dwellers.

 

                Those images show us that no matter how many times we fix streets, as long as it gets used, damage is always unavoidable. Just like a cake, the more times a fork or a knife passes through it, the more crumbs and bits fall off. This is how we look at streets differently, away from our usual notion of it as way and as road, these are only some of the things we take for granted or should I say we do not usually pay attention to as we dwell on it on a daily basis. This is how I think like a street.