I’m sitting here the kitchen cooking with my housemate as we prepare our two dishes for tonight’s dinner at her pastor’s house. She has a glass casserole dish piled high with lasagna, and I have a platter of lemon bars cooling on the side. In a minute I’ll need to go upstairs and change because I have flour streaked across my shirt, but for now I’ll sit here and write.

I am thankful for this kitchen and this house and this wonderful friend who now lives with me. I am thankful for all my housemates and for the little family we’ve created. They took me in when I was still back in Seattle and looking for a place to live. I am thankful for all the people who aren’t present in this room: my stepmother who always made cooking seem fun and easy, my mother who gave me my first cooking assignment when she went back to work, my grandparents who were the first guineypigs to taste my cooking, and my aunt who lent me her kitchen this summer until I could carve a chicken with confidence. Tomorrow night I will call on my memories of all of them in yet another milestone, my first turkey.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Yesterday a couple of friends came over for tea and cake, and while the tea was still seeping in the pot, I shared mySELP project with them and the developments with VISIONS.

While I was talking with them, they jogged my memory about a similar idea that I came up with at the SELP classroom on Thursday. In responding to the question of how to engage people who aren’t already tuned in, I remembered a project I worked on freshman year in MCM called Toiletlines. The project consisted of bringing offline bathroom graffiti online via Flickr and a website. I really liked the concept of the idea, but the participation never reached beyond the classroom. So the project died after I completed the class. But the idea of using bathroom stalls came back to me as a way to expose people to the project who wouldn’t normally choose to expose themselves. Sitting on the toilet staring at a dull door, you can’t help but read what people write. What if we did that with the project and completely saturated Brown’s campus with temporary graffiti displays? I could see this project really taking off and reaching a level of consciousness outside of the Asian/Asian American community.

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Tonight, I was acting in my friend’s short film which was shot in Spectrum India on Thayer Street. I’ve been in and out of this store several times over the last three years, never bought anything, but always enjoyed looking at the knickknacks. Despite never having made a purchase, I acquired a collection of bangles from the store. The owner of Spectrum is an elderly Indian man, and before a customer leaves, he always asks, “Please take a bangle from the back counter.” I became very confronted by this request since I always browsed but never bought, and each bangle only seemed to burden my shopper’s conscience. At one point, I even tried to sneak out of the store so as to avoid being asked to select another bangle.

Up until very recently, I was the kind of shopper who didn’t like to be bothered; I actually dreaded people asking if I needed help. This all stemmed from my own anxiety around interacting with strangers. Landmark took me to task on this anxiety. Not only did it push me to share myself with people I didn’t know, but it allowed me to experience strangers as a source of compassion rather than fear. Subconsciously, I’ve been walking around unaware of this until I was asked to act with the owner of Spectrum India.

In my friend’s film, I play the role of a downtrodden young women drained from life. She enters the store after an exhausting day, gets her handwriting analyzed by the owner, and through the reading, rediscovers a part of herself she has forgotten. For this part, I actually had my handwriting analyzed. One trait of my handwriting is that the crossbars on my t’s are written relatively low which indicates low self-esteem. He was very nice about it saying all I had to do to fix it was cross my t’s higher. Then he got down from his stool and ushered me over to his laptop at the far end of the counter. We waited a few seconds for the screen to load, and then he pointed to the desktop background. A cup of milk was drawn against a blue background. The cup was overflowing and out poured the words, “You are overflowing with possibilities.” I know before this summer I would have completely written off what he said as a plug for self-esteem, but I caught myself right at the moment.

I was ready to disregard his words because he was so exceedingly optimistic about the potential of youth. Here I was a graduate of the Landmark Forum, which is all about possibility, regressing back to a jaded college student. I had those same thoughts that I couldn’t make a difference even as he was telling me I could. I distrusted what he was telling me because he was still a stranger and thus could not know anything about my potential. But when I stepped back from the judgment, I saw a different person.

I had always known him as the man behind the counter, the one whom I tried to avoid when leaving Spectrum. But in this brief exchange, I witnessed a man who went out of his way to uplift the spirits of others. Yes, he didn’t know me, but this man still believed in me and my ability. How rare is this unsolicited belief in another? Parents are a given, teachers maybe, but strangers certainly do not fall in this category. Here he was doing just that.

What a difference believing in someone can make. It got Barrack Obama elected after the media wrote him off as a long shot. It got me to move back out here and take on my SELP project. Even this project would not survive without those outside of myself who also believe in it. They are the foundation from which everything arises. Ideas may begin with individuals, but they are realized at the level of community, nation, and society.

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I met with VISIONS tonight to discuss the project. Here are some notes:

Overall, I’m feeling positive. Not everyone was definitely for the idea, but they were willing to listen and even getting VISIONS to commit to publishing a portion of the project will go a long way. My next course of action is to see if I can find a team to work on this either through

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I swear that the universe is conspiring to make this project a possibility. Yesterday, I got an email from my advisor saying that he would be on campus today, so I emailed him back and met with him this evening. He had a couple of good suggestions for my project and other related activities:

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I only have 15 minutes to write, but I wanted to try and capture what has been going through my mind the last few weeks. I’m taking this course outside Boston called the Self-Expression and Leadership Program. The premise of the course is to take on a project in a community. However, the course is not about the project; it is a tool around which the course is constructed. As I see it, the real purpose of the course is to learn about oneself and all the stuff that comes up while trying to implement a community project. Meaning that in the last month I’ve had to put myself out there and talk to people in such a way that challenges how I would be if I were not trying to get this project off the ground and engage other people. It’s in these conversations that would have never happened (since I normally would not be trying to start a community project) that the magic happens.

So my project, as I described it last Saturday morning when it came to me is

Voice of the community project. Part 1. Let’s write a collaborative document. I’m going to make the barrier to entry really easy. Facebook. Start a group and ask people to write anything they want about any topic on the wall. At the end of the month, we’ll publish what’s there. Part 2. Let’s have a face of the community too, a separate group. People join and we’ll take their Facebook picture and use it to create a collage that becomes the cover. Let’s get people to participate, and let’s make it easy.

Some notes:

Well, I have to run off to work, but I’ll be updating this again, since the project has changed more since this original burst of inspiration.

Find out more about Project Wall-to-Wall.