Category: Personal Updates

My life

Last major Philadelphia Business Journal clip… for now

YESTERDAY THE LAST OF my clips for the Philadelphia Business Journal during my internship, which ended May 5, appeared. Read it below as I filed it.

Delaware County Community College has launched $60 million in renovation and new construction to better outfit its Marple Township campus for science, technology engineering and math programs by 2009.

The community college broke ground on a 105,000-square-foot science building and a 32,000-square-foot technical building on April 18. Its mission is to reconnect students with a regional business community increasingly in need of skilled labor.

“We complain about outsourcing, but what you need to do is keep these companies from going overseas. They don’t have a skilled workforce,” said Dr. Jerry Parker, president of the community college. “We need to increase young people coming up through high school going through science and technical fields.”

Read the rest here.

I am currently traveling. This was forward-posted on May 6.

Lakota reservation reflections

I WAS FIRST IN SOUTH DAKOTA in 2005. I returned in May 2006 for a service immersion trip with a small group of Temple University students. It was then that I met a gaggle of friends from the Lakota Rosebud reservation near White River, S.D. It has led to lots of adventures, including two years and nearly 600 miles of hitchhiking, but that’s for another day.

Since Monday I’ve been traveling back there again and, if all went correctly, I should be in White River now. Check Google Maps here.

Read my reflections after first interacting in an American Indian community two years ago.

This region of Dakota’s limitless expansion is only interrupted by flurries of elevation change. Once on ground, the pavement of interstate 90 appeared to have tamed the land into a consumable table of gentle slopes and caressing ridges. All of which leads me to offer muddled explanations of the region’s geographical features: endless plains with small, yet punctuated elevation changes interjected regularly.  Read more here.

I'm road tripping in South Dakota, but I'll keep this popping

TODAY I AM LEAVING TOWN in a Subaru. An older friend and I are headed to White River, South Dakota (Google Maps), just north of the Rosebud Lakota Reservation, to which I’ve gone each of the past two years, including an initial trip with a Temple University service group.

We’ll do some community work, meet with friends, learn and I’ll be sure to clear my head.

I am done with my college career and have my graduation looming.

Indeed, I am returning on May 21, the day before I am set to graduate. Asking for trouble, I know. We’ll see.

Anyway, don’t you worry. This baby will keep cooking, as I’ve forward posted lots of stuff I have been meaning to get up here. What you can be sure of is that it won’t be on anything breaking.

Be well and good thoughts.

My last day at the Village of Arts and Humanities

AS ALREADY POSTED HERE, Thursday was my last day serving at the Village of Arts and Humanities in an academic way.

We worked on setting up and filming a scene for the latest film the teens were working on, and Prof. Eugene Martin surprised me with a cake. As touching as it could be, until, like any 13-year-old boy might, one of students broke through the Hallmark moment to shove cake in my face.

Photos of that to come, for now, if only just for me, a look back on my 16-month relationship with the Fairhill rec center at Germantown and Adler.. feel free to play your own sad music.

See some of our work here.

Goodbye Village: last day of classes of my college career

ANOTHER MILESTONE IN WHAT has been a full week.. with another day to go.

Last night I wrote the last school paper of, likely, my life.

Today is the last day of classes I will, perhaps, ever endure, assuming I don’t cave and go to back for a post-secondary education. That means, after a morning religion class, during which I will hand in the last school paper I’ll ever write, I will go to the Village of Arts and Humanities for the last time as part of an independent study.

That seems particularly strange because I have working with the high schoolers at the rec center off Germantown in Fairhill since January 2007, 16 months, three semesters, a summer, startling.

It’s a hell of class. We mostly work on media projects, filming, editing and more, but I’ve always been more into hanging out with active, young people. A real excuse to beat the hell up on 16-year-old Leon in basketball, as captured by Eugene Martin in the above photograph, at the Fairhill Park.

Now that is something I will most certainly miss. While I have gone there during the academic year and beyond, because I recently accepted a gig in Harrisburg that relationship will almost certainly slow.

Last week of my college career

CAN YOU BELIEVE that today marks the beginning of the last week of my college career.

The transition already has begun, considering today, Wednesday and Friday I will be reporting for the Philadelphia Business Journal. Still, there is no questioning this week will take on some added meaning.

On May 22, I will get to add my own face to stock photography of college graduates, hoozah.

I am also excited to add that, for that May 22 graduation for the Class of 2008 of Temple University, I have been named commencement speaker, a great honor, indeed.

After this week, lot’s of excitement will continue throughout May, all leading up to my final act as a Temple student. A strange feeling, to be sure.

Former Inquirer columnist Steve Lopez in Philadelphia

EARLIER THIS WEEK Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez was on NPR’s Fresh Air, hear it here. The former popular Philadelphia Inquirer columnist was interviewed by Dave Davies, the venerable political writer for the Philadelphia Daily News who fills in for Terry Gross on Fresh Air from time to time.

He was promoting his newest book, The Soloist, which is already under production by DreamWorks as a movie of the same name to debut in November.

Lopez’s book chronicles his interaction with Nathaniel Ayers (depicted above), a homeless, former musical prodigy who began living in the streets after suffering the effects of schizophrenia. In the end, Lopez became an “unlikely advocate and friend” to Ayers, as the Los Angeles Times put it Monday.

The film casts Robert Downey Jr. as Lopez and Jamie Foxx as Ayers.

Lopez is in town today speaking to media, and tomorrow, in a free event at 2 p.m., Lopez will be at the Free Library. I’ll be there, so should you.

His first novel was the well-received Third and Indiana, set in Philadelphia, and he has also written In the Clear, Sunday Macaroni Club and had his Inquirer columns anthologized in Land of Giants. The last and the first I have read, amazed by his words, but I have also followed his L.A. Times columns and, I’ll say, he sometimes seems to be lacking the color that I think is safe to say few places provide like Philadelphia.

Maybe I’ll ask him about that tomorrow.

Photo courtesy of Obsessed with Film.

The unveiling of my Philadelphia Republican Party honors thesis Web site

I have been busy.

Because I didn’t have the grades to get into the honors school initially, in order to graduate with honors on May 22 – my day of commencement from Temple University – I have to complete an undergraduate thesis project.

I have been steadily working on my paper, due the first week of May, but, in addition to a public presentation and defense of my initial findings at a research forum held two weeks ago, I have nearly put all the final touches on the framework of a blog that chronicles my year-long research on Philadelphia’s Republican Party, the focus of my thesis.

Finally, a home for all of you dying to learn everything there was to know about partisan politics in Philadelphia.

The paper will eventually go up there too, all of my research and notes, as a means for giving the project a permanent, more visible home. For now, I am happy to have a place to organize all of my work, interviews and research.

Give it a look. I’ll keep you posted on its progress.