65

So I’ve invented a new game to play as I ride my bike to and from work. Its called, “How Awesome am I on my bike?” (or something like that: the name hasn’t been workshopped yet).

Here’s how it works: for every car I pass, I get one point. For every biker that I pass, I get two points. However for every car and bike that pass me, I subtract that amount of points. For the vehicles to count towards the running total, they must be on the same street, going the same direction as I am, and in the lane of traffic, the position of each vehicle being measured from the foremost point on the vehicle. Thus, a parked car does not count as a point, but a car stopped at a stoplight does, and a car in the turn lane does count, but a car that turns right in front of me does not.

Because of other things happening at the beginning and end of my trip home, I only rode from Damen& Berteau to Harrison&Oakley, but I scored my best score yet: 65. At 7.4 miles, thats 8.783 points per mile. Think you can beat me? Be my guest.

A Finisher

For a while I worked as a waiter and a bartender at a banquet facility, and during the later times I worked that job, I began to ask the people I worked with an amazing question that I was once asked in a job interview:

If you could do one thing in life and money was not a problem and you knew you wouldn’t fail, what would you do?

One day at the banquet facility, I was perched behind the bar with my coworker who we’ll call Amy. We were waiting for the guests to arrive when I asked her this question. Like everyone I’ve posed this question to, she looked at me odd and thought for a minute before delivering her response. As she told me about her dream of opening her own restaurant, she smiled describing some of the details and imagining what it could be. And as she continued, her smile turned into a defeated sadness as she began to speak the “if only”s: if only I had the money, if only the economy was better, etc. I quickly found myself praising her idea and trying to get her to focus on what she wanted and starting to truly dream.

“Sure you don’t have the money right now, but what would you want this to look like? Have you put together a rough menu? How about a business plan?”

While that conversation didn’t (to my knowledge) get a business plan in place, it did have an impact on me. I realized that one of the things I absolutely love to do, is to help people realize their dreams.

A while ago, I was a part of a small Meyers/Briggs workshop and one of the traits which stood out to me, was that I get energy from finishing projects. I am a finisher, which translates into helping others realize their dreams. I’ve always been a person who can come up with a workable solution and make things work, but this made me reflect on many other situations where I came in to help someone else come up with a solution.

I like that. I like creating and implementing solutions. Its a part of who I am. I’m excited to see what solutions I can come up with next.

A Beautiful Fall Day

There is a wonderful richness which is only found in cities that continually excites and amazes me. When so many people and so many layers enmesh and interact, there are countless hidden gems of all sorts right under our noses. I see this image of these lines that are the lives of people, and as the population density increases, these lines overlap and wrap around each other so often, which not only creates amazing new things, but can hide things so close to us. Like a ball of yarn where two strings can lay so close to one another and be ignorant of the other’s existence, so often, we can be completely unaware of people, places or things so close, so lovely, and yet so unknown.

So as I set out to explore the city I love, not two blocks from where I have ridden my bike scores of times, I stumbled across an amazing bit of the city nestled between train lines and marked with a bit former industrial glory. There was an abandoned warehouse, seemingly connected with what seems to be a bankrupt building site.

And across street, up the urban hill which ran along the site, an amazingly large bit of street art, overlooking an abandoned lot which still displayed remains of a small bonfire.

So keep your eyes open for those things that are so close, and may even be hiding in plain sight.

New Years and other things….

I am currently sitting in the Reuse First studio finishing work and helping clean up for a NYE party and I can’t help but thinking about the future. (The Future Conan?…..) Yes, the future, all the way to the year 2011: just over a day from now. The day itself doesn’t create any change, but it serves as a milestone regardless if we heed it or not.

The holiday itself has always felt very strange to me. I have often tried to avoid the implications of such a holiday which marks the passage of time so blatantly. On our birthdays we can willfully ignore looking back because we can focus our energy on ourselves and any array of tasks at hand. New Years is different because one must either come to terms with the implications of the holiday or avoid it all.

We avoid because we tend to listen to a prevalent fear which says that your life isn’t worth much. It says that if you really look at your life, you’ll see all your failings and it will be horribly uncomfortable to even look at it, let alone deal with. We avoid because we listen to the fear that says that if anyone found out that we have failed, they will retract their friendship and leave us solo, alone for the rest of our days.

There is a chorus of voices which seem to come from every possible direction that says that you shouldn’t try too hard to advance at what you do. “Don’t forget your roots” is a phrase that has some validity, but has been beaten into us with a resonant timbre of fear. They speak words that tell you that if you advance, all of your friends will leave you. Besides, everyone is just watching and waiting for you to fail: waiting for the inevitable which will bring you down a few notches, back to where they are and think you should be.

There is a chorus of voices that screams that great aspirations are to be commended, but are not to be treated as anything beyond an impossible dream. It is a chorus which tells our children to their faces that they can be president one day, and then turns around and shouts that their dreams are worthless, resistance is futile. Instead, go find something to deaden the pain because life is going to happen to you and it won’t be pretty.

This chorus is made up of people who hold a narrow view of themselves and others. They have accepted their lot in life and think that everyone else should too. They’ve accepted partial truths, or even lies as their identities and the identities of those around them and seek to enforce those views. These people become complacent in their lives and no longer see any risk as worth taking. When others step forward and say that today is Day 1, a day to start fresh and push forward for new and better things, they recoil and declare that today is Day -1.

Don’t go forward, they say. Let’s go back where it was better.

To my shame, I have at times been among the chorus, chiding those who I don’t understand or who I deem somehow lower than I am. I was inspired by my friend Perry to take a serious look at where I am and what I’m doing. It was one of the things that prompted this whole thought process. If I want anything to change, if I want to quit playing the victim, I need to make decisions and plan to move into something new.

We often get so complacent where we are, no matter if we are passed out in a gutter or sipping tea with the nobles. Yet we must push through and say that today is not another day to suffer. It is a new day. It is an opportunity to remake and improve yourself.

I’m sick of playing the victim and letting life intimidate me into having its way with me. I am done with letting others’ views of my life hold me back. I am done with avoiding the task of dreaming. I have come to a point where I am saying that 1.1.11 is the start of something new and amazing in my life.

This is my manifesto for the new year. I am making plans. I’m not just dreaming dreams, but making plans to make those dreams a reality. I am making plans for personal progress, spiritual progress, and career progress.

This is Day 1.

China

When I visited China in 2007, it was like no other place I ever visited. Being a recent graduate, still firmly inundated with the rigor of architecture, I found myself constantly looking at all of the buildings around me, new and old. From traditional architecture to the typical soviet era apartment blocks which lined many of the streets to the modern highrise complexes to the buildings in various states of completion, I was fascinated.

Perhaps more than any other area of interest, I was drawn to the different ways they built their projects. There were empty hulks of concrete structures, twenty stories high along the sides of roads, unsure of their own completion date. In the central plaza of a city larger than Chicago, one could look through point supported glass windows at the bare concrete skeleton of the new subway system with no evidence of it being an active worksite.

One of the most peculiar sights I saw came on a walk around the city, exploring it’s streets. I had seen a modern looking observation tower on the horizon in the eastern part of the city on prior excursions through the streets, so on this day I decided to meander towards it in hope that I would be able to discover what this thing is and maybe see some sights.

As I walked along the river towards my destination, I began looking for the open plaza that someone with my background would assume connects a public river walk with a tourist’s observation tower. However, I was soon baffled at the tall stone wall covered in greenery which lined the river walk near the tower. I managed to peek over the wall at one point and noticed that something wasn’t right: There was no one visible along the lower deck. I agree that it was overcast, but as the growing Chinese middle class has greatly increased tourism of Chinese Nationals, I would still expect to see tourists around a place like this.

In the end, I needed to walk nearly all of the way around an oblong city block before I found an answer. The stone wall fell away and showed a chain link fence, overgrown with greenery. Behind it was a security guard smoking a cigarette on the hood of his jeep, surrounded by an overgrown plaza, and behind him was the building I tried so hard to find. It stood there empty, with broad staircases and escalators descending from the lower deck into an overgrown vacant lot, complete with a random pile of bricks piled up in the middle of it all.

I didn’t have the words for it until a recent conversation, but I realize that much of my reaction was because I come from a place with well developed construction methods, designed to minimize construction time. China has a different paradigm, based in an economy where manual labor is much cheaper, and that has wide reaching effects, sometimes bewildering to a curious traveler. It still seems somewhat depressing to see something so grand, resting in decay before it has reached its full potential.

Ghost City

As of November 3, 2010, there have been 810 permits for demolition issued in the city of Chicago this year. One typically views this amazing mass of material and people and life in this constricted space as a solid unmoving entity, yet the truth of the matter is that it is constantly changing. Our cities have been designed and built for us and by us, and we can and do change them continually. When I walk through my city, I am fascinated by the people. I am fascinated by the homes, the stores, the streets, the plants and the parks. However, some of the most drawing bits of the fabric of this city are the the derelict and run down structures that remain in the city. With this constant change, there are often buildings, structures and even large parcels of land which are just lost, forgotten about, and ignored: creating an urban wasteland sandwiched in among our high-rise buildings. One of the questions that always runs through my head upon the discovery of these artifacts, is “What kind of history I am standing on?” There is a large vibrant city around us, but our neighborhoods are haunted by the ghosts of an infinite number of cities that have gone before us.

A wooden path leading nowhere near Halsted & Erie.

This idea of the Ghost City was first introduced to me by Kevin Harrington, a professor of art and architecture history at IIT. It is an idea which has repeatedly come back to me and has once again haunted me as of late.

During my time at IIT, I worked with Prof. Harrington to do some research on a series of tunnels which were built under the streets of downtown Chicago to move freight. The project yielded a white paper and a 3d model of the tunnel system which only seemed to whet my appetite for more.

The technology for working digitally in three dimensions was slow and cumbersome at the time and the model seemed inadequate. At that point we were working with a two dimensional AutoCad conversion of the city street map and I was layering a massive, complicated 3 dimensional tunnel underneath it. Needless to say, it was not an easily usable document and the results were disappointing.

Recently, this idea has come back to me. Not only have 3d modelling formats advanced and gotten smaller in size, but the average everyday computer and the interfaces have grown by leaps. Programs like GoogleEarth transmit not only images of the entire surface of the globe to an average computer, but with Google’s acquisition of Sketchup and the interface with GoogleEarth, a simple 3d modelling program, there are now 3d representations of millions of buildings across the globe. Could I use Google’s platform, or a similar one, to organize the modelling of the entire history of the city? I’m going to find out.