Friday night, I was on the phone with a friend, and she brought up Wall-to-Wall and the VISIONS video and added, “It’s great that you’re putting yourself out there.” I can’t remember if I said this back to her at the time, but later I thought to myself, “Yeah, that is also why I’m doing this project.”

When I originally thought of running this promotional spot for Wall-to-Wall at the VISIONS release party, the idea of putting my face on a screen terrified me. I nearly backed out of it, except then VISIONS’ managing editor emailed me asking if I was still planning to run the video, and I knew I had to go through with it for the sake of the project. The release party was the last big event of the semester for Brown’s Asian/Asian American community, and I knew that if I wanted to reach a broader audience before the break, this would be it.

For those of you who don’t know, Wall-to-Wall was created out of my participation in the Self-Expression and Leadership Program. Although the program is based around implementing a project, the course itself isn’t about the project; the project is the means by which I explore myself and expressing myself to my community. You may have noticed that this blog tracks the progress of the project as well as my own personal journey. The two are very much interwoven. So part of what was going through my head, when my friend mentioned that I was “putting myself out there” was this realization that something was shifting within me.

Personally I was very self-conscious about making this video, but that feeling was outweighed by my desire to grow the project. At a certain point I think I even forgot how afraid I felt until talking to my friend, except when she mentioned the video it wasn’t that I recalled the fear itself only the distant memory that I had once been afraid but was no longer. This next insight reminds me of when I used to attend church: In giving myself to something larger than myself, I find that I have the courage to act in spite of my insecurities. I knew the video had been worth it when the day after three people asked me about the project without me even having to bring it up.

Find out more about Project Wall-to-Wall.

It’s been a few days since the release party and I’m beginning to access the impact of the VISIONS video. On the one hand, it seems to have failed in its primary purpose – get people to email walltowall.project@gmail.com and view this website – but I can point to several reasons why I think this happened:

1. Burden of contact on the audience – Meaning a person had to go through the extra effort to email me or look up the website. A better solution might have been to have a sign-up sheet so I could contact people.

2. Time gap from viewing to action – If people got past the first hurdle, they would still have to remember to contact me after leaving the release party, leaving a span of time for them to forget. A more immediate way for people to respond might have been a text message.

On the other hand, the video served out a very important secondary purpose: make people aware of the project. This seemed to have worked given three people came up to me the other night and mentioned the project specifically.

Find out more about Project Wall-to-Wall.

Tonight was VISIONS‘ release party and unfortunately I was unable to attend. It’s hard to imagine now with all the planning and the size of the event that the concept of a release party didn’t even exist a few years ago. The issue quietly went out at the end of the semester and the staff would retreat into finals. As a freshman arriving on staff at VISIONS, I felt the absence of such an event.

In high school I took a community college course responsible for putting together the college literary magazine, and the culminating event of the course was the release party. It was very much what VISIONS’ release party is today: authors reading their work, live music, food and mingling.

When I took over layout the spring of my freshman year, I made a suggestion to hold such an event for VISIONS, but we were small staffed and tightly budgeted at the time and could not allot the resources needed to organize and fund the event. The next semester I brought up the topic of a release party again and our new managing editor took it upon herself to bring this idea to fruition.

I may have initially brought up the idea of a release party, but after that the idea got away from me as other people worked to bring the idea into reality. I forgot that I even had a role in creating the release party because I never physically planned the event. To elaborate on some thoughts from an earlier post, here’s a quote:

Ideas may begin with individuals, but they are realized at the level of community, nation, and society.

One person may think of an idea, such as the VISIONS release party or Wall-to-Wall, but it is nearly impossible for that idea to become reality without other people’s help. In order for an idea to take off, the originator will have to relinquish control and let the idea evolve in whatever way it’s meant to. What the VISIONS release party became over the years is different from what I initially had in my head. It is neither better nor worse from my vision. I could not have imagined the release party as it currently is because I was biased by the work I did in high school.

When I think of Wall-to-Wall, I know that the project is currently limited by my own imagination and past experiences. I have a vision, but I know that when the project is presented a few months from now it is likely to look very different from its current state. Even looking a couple of weeks back, the project is barely recognizable. It is changing and evolving, and it needs your ideas and input to continue growing.

Find out more about Project Wall-to-Wall.

I realized a little too late that my web address isn’t easily recalled, and especially since the project description exists on a subpage, I knew that I could not expect people to write the url down. Thus, the flyer on the right was born. Its design was inspired by this summer’s TWTP program (the cover of which is shown above). I wanted something rebellious and provocative, hearkening back to my interest in graffiti. But slowly the style design started to bleed the writing. I didn’t think people would take the time to read a long project description, so I cut the text down into three simple statements:

1. Infiltrate Facebook.
2. Take over the bathrooms.
3. Write on all the walls…

And the result is an underground movement! Hopefully, people won’t be turned away by the idea of a revolution. The flyers and the video will debut at VISIONS‘ release party tomorrow.

Find out more about Project Wall-to-Wall.

If you’re reading this, then it is very likely you found out about this project through Facebook, but just in case, go visit the group and join!

Find out more about Project Wall-to-Wall.

So last night while my friend and I were putting the video together, I was bouncing ideas off her and her suitmates for a project name. Originally, I had called the project “Voices of the Community.” However, this name became problematic for a couple of reasons: First, it was pretty generic sounding. Second, although an early motivator for myself in starting this project was to build community, I realized that in trying to reach out to a broader audience, Asians and non-Asians alike, the word “community” was conceptually limiting. Not only would non-Asians not feel welcome to participate, but a good majority of students who identify as “Asian” see themselves more part of a population than a community and would not be inclined to partipate because it involved a community to which they did not feel they belonged. In creating Wall-to-Wall my intent was not just to target those who already felt included in the “Asian/Asian American community” but really draw in those from the outside who don’t necessarily relate to this community outright.

So when I started searching for a new name, I wanted something catchy and also conceptually interesting; the latter being made as a gesture to my MCM concentration. Some ideas behind the project that I wanted to capture were

community, narrative, dialogue, conversations, breaking down barriers, free expression, stream of consciousness, writing, empowerment, visibility, reflection…

I knew that I couldn’t get the name to reflect all of these, so my goal was to come up with one that could distill the essence of a few of them into a short phrase. I liked the connotation of graffiti as a way to represent writing, free expression, breaking of barriers, and empowerment, but at the same time I struggled to find a partnering word to make it catchy: Graffiti Thoughts, Graffiti Lines, they weren’t grabbing me and paired with the negative bent of the word, I knew I needed to find something more accessible.

So I started to think about the elements involved in the project: Facebook, walls, online, offline, bathrooms. Toiletlines had been based on bathrooms and narrative, and I would have opted to go in that direction again except I felt it over emphasized the bathroom aspect of the project. I also wasn’t entirely sure if I would be able to use public bathrooms.

I was browsing Facebook, trying to think of more ideas, when the new name came right to me. Wall-to-Wall. I liked the name immediately because of its simplicity and direct reference to Facebook. It utilized the common element in both the physical and virtual settings of the project: walls. It also referenced the final stage of the project in which I envisioned covering the room wall to wall with people’s writing. This next thought would be better realized in a specially created logo for the project, but the “to” and the hyphens both visually and grammatically connect two words. In my mind the “-to-” serves as a bridge to connect the virtual and physical components on the project, two different kinds of walls. In looking at how the wall-to-wall feature is actually used in Facebook, I knew that this was the right name. The wall-to-wall brings two separate spaces together so to reveal the dialogue between them. Isolated, there is no conversation, but under wall-to-wall, isolated elements become something much richer and enable discourse. This idea that isolated writings can interact with one another to create a deeper conversation is the true hope and promise of this project. In giving it this name, Wall-to-Wall, I hope to launch it in this spirit.

Find out more about Project Wall-to-Wall.

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.

Find out more about Project Wall-to-Wall.

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.

Find out more about Project Wall-to-Wall.

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

Find out more about Project Wall-to-Wall.