Some days even my lucky rocketship underpants won’t help. Calvin & Hobbes
Deep breaths.
Sometimes I need to remind myself to do that – just take deep breaths and don’t speculate. Don’t worry. Don’t frustrate.
In other words, chill the fuck out.
Because I have to believe that things will work out in the end, and even if they don’t the world won’t explode and my head will remain on two upright shoulders.
So just take deep breaths, and buy a different pair of lucky underpants.
Nothing says personality like a bottle of spray paint.
The world is wide, and I will not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum. Frances E. Willard
Happy (belated) New Years! There’s something about beginnings…now doesn’t that sound familiar? Shameless plug for the only other post I’ve put up aside, I’m excited to get 2012 started for a number of reasons.
Exercising and healthy diet resolutions aside (I have exercised three times and have promptly regained those calories by finishing two whole bags of kettle corn in one day – so far, so good), why I’m really looking forward to a year that is supposedly my last is, surprise, journalism-related.
As with most resolutions, this anticipatory giddiness stems from a personal goal of mine.
Lately, I have been discovering a new form of journalism that, quite honestly, scares me a little: documentaries. It scares me, but it’s the kind of scare that usually leaves me grinning like a half-wit. As with most things in life, I accidentally, wonderfully, stumbled into documentary journalism. Here’s what happened: I was assigned a photo story and ended up discovered a group of young boys doing graffiti on an abandoned hospital in Ravenswood, a neighborhood in Chicago. The story behind the hospital was that several years earlier a boy was shot outside the hospital perimeters, but because he was not “technically” on hospital property no one retrieved him for fear of consequences. What consequences outweigh a human life, I couldn’t possibly tell you. In the end he died, his parents sued and the hospital closed down. (Here is a link to the article published at The Chicago Tribune concerning the issue.) There the hospital has remained as a husk for several years, like something conjured in a moment of Kubrick-esque musing. Yet for this group of relatively young boys, the abandoned building is simply part of their ad hoc canvases across the city. Anyway, now I’m working together with them and a professor at my school to create a short film on graffiti in Chicago.
I’m just getting started (hell, I’m just figuring out the basics of my camera at this point), but I can’t wait to see where this will take me. There I go again – grinning at my computer screen. Good thing my roommate isn’t here.
