24 hour project complete

      I did my project from about noon Sunday March 2 to noon today. I walked around my town (from my house to cvs to buy an ankle brace, past my high school, to a nature preserve, back to the high school, back home), went out to dinner, and went to school. It was easier for me to think about the main walk as an experience and collect ephemera (my rules were to walk as far as possible and to take a picture every time I stopped for whatever reason--to look at something, to figure out how to go around snow, to text, to check the map, etc.). I had trouble thinking of the daily, monotonous parts of my life as an experience and had to remind myself to look for ephemera.
      Emotionally, it was weird to re-visit places from my past. I had to walk by my high school twice, I could hear the sounds of a basketball game inside, I walked around the preserve where my high school P.E. classes would take nature walks and my family would take hour long hikes, and I coincidentally went to a restaurant with my family that I hadn't been to in six years, but it felt completely the same. I liked the peacefulness of the experience, but at times I felt like an outsider, not in a sad way, just different. I did things I don't know I would have done before this class, like sitting in the middle of a parking lot filled with bird seed for ten minutes to listen to all the birds or routinely taking pictures.
      No one had very strange reactions to me. I said hi to most strangers I passed. One couple thought I was completely lost and stared at me for a bit while I held out my map. I tried to be sneaky about taking photos if I was in populated areas or photographing abnormal things (like the library).
      My problems were: reminding myself to take pictures, remembering to collect ephemera, and my knee and ankle pain which was awful at the end of the six hour walk and my zumba class on Mon. morning. I started and ended my experience in pain :/ On a different note, it's very hard to rewire your brain to think of simple things as art and ephemera.
      I liked this experience because I got to focus on one project for a longer period of time, but didn't have a set goal. I literally hiked in a circle, for nothing, but the experience, which is really all going anywhere is.