Verde Smoke

You’re cordially invited to watch MIT@Lawrence’s youth celebration event, hosted in the 2nd floor conference room of the MIT Museum (265 Massachusetts Avenue) on May 9th, 2008. This event featured both presentations by student workshop participants and and free ice cream!

[Week 10 04/09/08: WARNING: Excessive alarm clock metaphor to follow…]

I set the wake-up time on my campaign to a leisurely half-past Lawrence, because I made a conscious choice to ground my efforts in graduate school in a community where some people believe time stopped when all the mills closed. I lay my head on my pillow, full of hope that after the fall semester’s work, I’d be attune to the rhythm of change in that place. Then I sought out a stable/successful youth empowerment organization and a group of young constituents and leaders. I again thought I could easily step into the rhythm of their existing programs and add some capacity to take community change a step further than individual advancement. I set some personal milestones to complete a campaign, unknowingly trying to mimic the style of Gersick’s described as proactive, temporal pacing strategy.

[Week 4: 03/12/08] Why is my strategy like a Tootsie-Pop? My reflections this week will be both around my project’s strategy [candy shell] and my own “meta” strategy to work with these youth [chocolaty center]. Thus, I have two organizing statements: (1) On the surface, I’m organizing a leadership team of YouthBuild Lawrence youth to stop the pollution of community spaces but really I’m (2) starting with a small group of youth in Lawrence to raise their voices and call for change in their community.

[Week 3 03/05/08]: He hesitated, then asked me why I was there. After thirty straight minutes of almost continuous talking about himself, in my last one-on-one of the day, this 22 year old lifelong Lawrence resident, father, and would be jack-of-all-trades, looked straight in my eyes and turned the tables on me completely.

[WARNING: Yes, I’m journaling for a class again. I’m not sure if these self reflective experiences find me or I find them. Nevertheless, I’m writing weekly reflection papers about a hands-on project I’m doing as part of Marshall Ganz’s “Organizing: People, Power and Change” class at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

I have to admit, I procrastinated a bit around building the rough draft of my final photo essays.  I had all the pieces (in fact, too many pieces) and ideas, but I felt like I was back in high school again, facing down the insurmountable beast of a final paper of which I had too much I wanted to say.  Usually, once I get into working, it flows easily once I get started but it’s taking that first leap.  With this project, the themes I wanted to cover and the enigma that is Lawrence’s identity seemed like a black hole, that I’ve circling around like a hesitant but curious animal.

I called my self a photographer recently in a meeting for my research work for MIT@Lawrence the other day, and honestly, I felt a little like a liar.

Those of you from my former life, who’ve called me “Teach” and railed at me when I made you edit a story down to one page, might have a chuckle at the thought of me writing a script and storyboards of my own. What’s the old adage…”Those who can’t do, teach”?

This week, I’m sensing that we’re going a bit deeper in our examination of landscape – moving from focus on individual vocabulary and grammar of single sentences to more complex expressions stolen from the realm of poetry.

[10/20/07] This week’s ruminations extend the discussion of significant detail from vocabulary to the grammar of the language of landscape in Lawrence (and Austin actually). Basically, grammar refers here to the rules or formulas employed to communicate meaning using land vocabulary elements such as materials, forms, paths, and processes. And like any good sentence, the meaning is all in how you construct it – its order, its relations, its context in time and space. I see multiple grammars at play in Lawrence: creation, immigration, exodus and reluctant residence.