I arrived in America in 2011 and started noticing things almost immediately.
Some were small: the way a store was arranged, the way a word sounded in an American mouth, the number of versions of the same product on a shelf. Others took longer to recognize: who was expected to explain themselves, who could move through a room without doing so, what Americans meant when they said freedom, efficiency, service, choice or home.
I did not arrive intending to study America. I was trying to live in it.
That distinction matters. These are not observations made from outside the glass. I worked here, served in its military, drove across it, stood in its grocery aisles, learned its accents, misunderstood its customs, adopted some of them, resisted others, left for a year and came back able to see familiar things strangely again.
The experiences begin in June 2011. Some details were recorded at the time; many survived in memory, photographs, records and stories I kept returning to. In 2026, I began turning them deliberately into field notes.
The gap is part of the project. There are things you notice when you first encounter a country, and other things you can only understand after living inside it long enough for the strange to become ordinary—and then becoming strange again.
This is therefore not a diary arranged by date. It is a map of recurring questions.
If you are new here, read the clusters in order. If something already catches your attention, enter there and follow the observation where it goes.
Cluster 01 — First 90 Days
The Empty Summer · The Greeter · BET as a Classroom · The Country of Laws
Cluster 02 — The Body
The Cluster Geometry · Hurricane Aisle · Hidden Fwo · I'm From Here
Cluster 03 — The Road + Relief
Texas Is Just Virginia · Maine in January · The Mountain Doesn't Ask · California's Lie
Cluster 04 — The Structure
32 Hours · The Articulation Surprise · The Hierarchy Nobody Names · The Cherokee Stop
Cluster 05 — The Reckoning
The Underhanded Country · The Accent in the Room · What America Does to Your Curiosity
If you want one place to begin, start with The Empty Summer for the original encounter, I'm From Here for the immigrant's problem of legibility, or The Country of Laws for the tension that runs through almost everything here.
I like America. I distrust some of the stories America tells about itself. I have benefited from institutions I also criticize. I have been surprised by generosity and by hierarchy, abundance and loneliness, freedom and friction, sometimes in the same place.
The point of the field notes is not to resolve those contradictions.
It is to keep noticing them.