Where Am I Going, What Am I Doing

I think it's fitting that I'm writing this on my last first day of undergraduate classes ever. This day feels as ceremonious as others make it.  Friends are posting pictures and other friends are posting encouraging messages that we'll be ready for adulting come May. 

You see, though, despite choosing to be a student, there's still a world that I'm still very much a part of, which keeps churning on, ruggedly and often unjustly.  I think being overwhelmed by how much everyone else was producing caused me to stop blogging originally.  In regards to my wary attitude of monetized blogging, Liz of Delightfully Tacky wrote openly about her return to "authentic" blogging.  Good for her.  For me, I want to focus less on others and embrace what I want to do.  Although videomaking -- and daily videomaking at that -- fuels me in a profound way, I felt I was losing an aspect of my voice.  I want this blog to be a continued refinement of that voice as much as I can muster.  Believe me, I'll be giving myself as much grace and space as I'll need.  If that's long breaks without saying boo, so be it.

That said, I have been feeling a fair bit of external pressure to figure out what I am going to do in the coming years.  That's putting it mildly.  Unlike a few of my friends, I don't have a set path.  The alumni I was fortunate enough to visit in San Francisco this past week reassured me and my cohort of fellow seniors that our first jobs don't have to determine what we'll be doing for the rest of our lives.  Well, I would certainly hope not.  The trip overall was very informative.  I'll be better at synthesizing what I learned into thank you cards to send to the alums.  Meanwhile, though, Silicon Valley is a troubling place.  I recommend this article, and this article to articulate a few of the issues I see with the place as a whole.

On that note, I've been doing a ton of thinking about culture and media lately.  For Christmas, Nicole gifted me The Influencing Machine, a brilliant comic about the evolution of journalism/culture/media by Brooke Gladstone.  This discovery has sparked a ton of fascinating thoughts.  I've grown far more interested in net neutrality debates, media industrialization, and not to mention, the warfare surrounding the privatization of information that we are all complicit in, whether we realize it not.  Plenty of this is scary and depressing, but hopefully there's something to be gleaned from observing this paradigm.  Just this morning I woke up, read from bell hook's Feminism Is For Everybody, and proceeded to feel so radically alive.

Last spring, I took a risk.  I left my job at the Career Development Center for a chance to work with an amazing arts non-profit called Saint Paul Neighborhood Network. I've been in love with learning about community media efforts ever since.  As much as I enjoy Macalester, branching out into the larger metropolises grants me with a much greater appreciation for where I have chosen to call my home away from home.  With great consideration, I have continued to think about where I want to make an impact, and I feel attached to the Twin Cities, at least for another year.

And besides, this rad video from PBS's The Art Assignment makes me pleased to continue pursuing art in the Twin Cities.  Check out the shoutout to Macalester!!

(P.S. Their Case for Kanye video is pretty inspirational too.)

Cheers to radical everything: kindness, hospitality, art, communication, etc, albeit on my own terms.