The Blurgh

On Fridays, I have a nice 2-hour block between classes.  Usually I use the time to either pass out or do some emergency cramming, but last week when I exited Posvar Hall I saw a big crowd of SSP kids waiting at the bus stop.  I asked them what was going on, and they said they were going to a city council meeting downtown to lobby for SSP’s new Open Doors initiative.

The initiative is focused  on making it easier for students and recent grads to enter careers within the city government, which right now is a pretty time-consuming and complicated process.  First you have to go through their online system and create an account, then see if you have to take the civil service test.  If you do, count out even being able to apply for at least a month.  After you finally get to apply, you have to wait for the gears of bureaucracy to work, and you may or may not get a call for an interview in another month or so.

It’s a process that in the end up takes several months, and because of that lot of good candidates end up in other professions. SSP feels that the city should be the employer of choice in the region and needs to be doing a better job of recruiting talented applicants and getting them through the system as fast as possible.  The plan is to team the city with the OED to place interns in different city departments, which could fast-track them since they would then already be in the system, and then for a study to be done on how to streamline and revamp the HR process.

Mayor Conway is apparently a big supporter of the idea, but there is some pushback from the council, so we’ll see how it goes.

This internship is turning into a fascinating/mind-blowing/engrossing/eater of all available free time type of experience.  Let me elaborate…

The first few days there, my main duties were the office/go-for types of things that most internships are heavy on.  I did get to see a lot of the different things that CRR is involved with, and I noticed that everyone in the office was very busy and a little nervous about one particular new project in Polish Hill.  Being that I’m what others have termed “a nebshit,” I opened my big mouth and asked what I could do to help.  Ever since, my role at CRR has drastically changed.

If you’ve never been to Polish Hill, I’d highly recommend it–it’s a very interesting place.  It’s nestled between the Hill, Bloomfield, and the Strip in a very weird kind of way that only the hilly Pittsburgh topography can allow. Given its central location in the city, you’d think it’d be a busy area, but in a lot of ways it’s in its own little world.  There are some beautiful buildings and churches and a small strip of businesses, but other than that, it’s pretty much all residential.

In the past 20 years, significant development and revitalization has happened in most of the surrounding neighborhoods, but Polish Hill has mostly remained unchanged.  A group of about a dozen residents approached CRR about a month ago about doing a renovation project in the area, but the situation is a little different than CRR’s past projects.  In those, a well-established community organization has been in place beforehand, and they did a lot of the grassroots legwork necessary to get the renovation projects off the ground.  In this project, however, the 12 original individuals want to use this project to galvanize the community, and by the end not only have the renovations done but also have a community organization to get in on the development that’s going on all around them.

No one’s sure if it’ll work, but everyone’s excited about the possibility.  And since I opened my mouth, I’m now in the thick of it.  Between classes and my directed study (which I’ve been majorly slacking on!), I’m spending almost every free moment either in the office or out in the neighborhood going door-to-door trying to get support.  It’s cold and tiring, but also very exciting; I’ve never felt motivated like this before.  I just hope we get the project going, because I’d love to see how these things happen firsthand.

The day is winding down and I’m in desperate need of some peanut M&Ms to get me through the last agonizing hours. I check the temperature before heading out - yikes. The wind chill is really 5 degrees? I wrap my scarf around my neck three times and button my jacket all the way just to dash across the street.

I bustle into the tiny corner shop and a bell announces my presence. As always, the old Chinese man is sitting behind the counter, watching kung fu movies on a 5” black and white TV. I don’t know his name, but I would recognize his tall, rail-thin figure and broad smile anywhere. I smile at him and head back to the candy shelves - jackpot. Grabbing a bright yellow package, I make my way back up to the register and place it on the counter.

He rings me up and I hand him a few dollar bills. He counts out some coins and hands them to me.

“Here you are, dahhhhling!” he says, his eyes crinkling as he grins ever more widely.

Normally I bristle when people call me cutesy names, but coming from him it’s endearing. “Thank you,” I say, and pocket the money.

“Have a good evening.”

“You too. Try to stay warm!”

For a moment, the happiness on his face disappears and I’m overtaken by the look of sadness in his eyes. I wonder why my seemingly innocuous words caused such a swift change in his emotions. Some part of me also wonders if I really want to know the answer.

He recovers quickly, though. “It’s too cold!” he exclaims, the joy back in his voice. I nod and stuff my M&Ms in my pocket as I leave the store. Too cold indeed.

During my K-12 years, I was always given lines about how, “if you put your mind to it, you can do anything,” or, “if you do well in school, the doors will be open for you when you go out into the world.”  In the past few years, though, presumably as I’ve entered “the world” somewhat, those sentiments have been growing more and more hollow.

On one hand, I feel like I really should know what I want to do with my life.  Whenever adults (although I guess I’m an adult now, too) ask me about it, I feel like I want to go hide.  The truth is that I have no idea, and I’m not too proud of that.

And what’s with all the pressure, anyway?  I mean, I hear all the time about people totally changing their careers 3 or 4 times in their lives–did it help them to have an idea about what they wanted to do when they were younger, even though they turned out to be wrong?

Lately, whenever people ask me about my future plans, I’ve taken to giving the non-answer that’s cute when you’re younger: get taller.  For some reason, people don’t think it’s that cute now.  It is kind of true, though.  Whatever I end up doing, I want to learn and grow while I’m doing it.

So there!

Between attending the opening of a new Artist’s Marketplace and having my yearly exam, it’s been a pretty full week. So I was glad that last night I attended the chillest author reading I’ve ever been to.

Magda Hausmann is one of the coolest young adult fiction writers out there. Her books are realistic and funny and really deal with the pitfalls of living life as a teenager. When any of the girls at the PWF ask me what they should read for their next book report, I usually come back with a Magda book that’s aimed at the 12-to-14 crowd. Thankfully, there are about a dozen to choose from - she’s pretty prolific.

Anyway, she is super laid-back and last night took questions from the audience as though we were all BFFs who just happened to run into each other at a cozy coffee shop. In response to a question about where she gets her ideas, she smiled broadly and said, “I look around. Everything is right there waiting for me to write about it.” And to another person who asked whether she was worried that her books dealt with themes that were too “adult” for teenagers, she raised her eyebrows. “Teenagers are mini-adults trying to come to terms with this thing we call the real world, right?” she said. “I try to write about as much adult stuff as I can, to help these people prepare and realize they’re not so alone in their struggles. They struggle. They struggle mightily. We should be helping them along the way.”

So super cool. I think my author-crush on her skyrocketed last night. I’m totally in love.

Last night, Gretchen and I went to the opening of a new Artist’s Marketplace location, this one in the Strip.  That’ll make three locations so far, and if the new one’s anywhere near as successful as the past two, there’ll probably be at least one more popping up in the next year or two.

The first location was setup in the South Side about 10 years ago in the old South Side Market House building (off of Carson on Bedford Square), and I’m totally in love with the concept.  Artist co-ops have been popular in the city for a while, and some of them even provided spaces for artists to display and sell their work.  Pittsburgh’s also been known for its neighborhood arts festivals, and the booths that get the biggest draws in those festivals were always the ones where an artist was actively doing work.  A group of artists decided to combine the elements of those different ideas and put it all in one place.

The building is divided into 20+ studio/gallery spaces with a large central open space down the middle.  The studios/galleries are large enough to provide an artist with enough room to have a full-size workspace and also have a place to display their pieces.  The open space down the middle gives the building a very old-timey marketplace feel–almost like something out of the Middle Ages.  People love coming to watch the artists work, especially those doing metal and woodwork, and the artists get to interact with people and give their work a lot of visability.  It also provides artists with a productive setting to interact with each other, and many of them end up working together on different projects.

Pittsburgh is also a terrific place for these types of attractions since there are so many old warehouses and factories that lend themselves well to studio renovation.  A few years after the South Side location opened, one opened in Lawrenceville in one of the old buildings by the river.  At that point, people knew what the marketplaces were all about, and it was an instant success.  The opening Gretchen and I went to last night was a big event, and we have no doubt that it’ll take no time for it to become yet another attraction in the Strip.

Oh, boy. Yesterday morning I headed down to the Midwife Center for my yearly well-woman exam - a great way to start the week, ladies, am I right?

(Side note: It’s kind of funny to me that just a few months ago when Frank convinced me to co-author this blog with him, I was a little skeptical of revealing anything about myself, and today I have no problem telling the world that I saw my gynecologist yesterday. My, how things change. Anyway…)

I love the women at the Midwife Center. It’s not just for pregnant women, but for women at all stages of life. I was examined by one of the new midwives there, Maria, and she is incredibly warm and funny. She even made me laugh while undergoing a pelvic exam - not exactly the easiest thing in the world.

Since she’d never seen me before, we discussed all the standard issue things. She asked me about birth control. I’ve actually not done so well with hormonal contraception in the past (hello, near-constant headache), but luckily for me, Frank has no problem taking his birth control pill everyday, so I don’t have to worry about it. She made sure I knew how to do a breast self-exam and all that fun stuff.

All in all, a pretty good visit. I left feeling happier than I’d felt when I arrived, which is definitely saying something about the quality of the Center!

I’ve finished my first few days at Community Recycling and Renewables (CRR), and so far I haven’t done much other than the usual get acquainted with things and random go-for duties. I have been learning a lot about the company, though, and since I’m a huge history dork I think it’s all very fascinating.

CRR is a small company, but you’d never guess it by the amount of work they do. It’s also a hybrid of sorts–it straddles the home improvement, community development, and renewable energy industries. It was started about 15 years ago by Bill Hollinger and Joanna Marcinovic, both of whom were recent grads of Pitt majoring in business. They got the idea when they were working in the labs of some prominent professors who were doing research on producing solar cells more efficiently. During their time there, the professors made a breakthrough, and shortly thereafter a few of them started out on their own manufacturing cells. It made big news in Pittsburgh, and it also got Bill and Joanna thinking.

At the time, renewable energy technology was getting more and more popular, but the application of it was focused primarily on large commercial and residential buildings. Since the cost of solar cells had come down a lot after the breakthrough, Bill and Joanna decided the time was ripe to make a transition into the home market. Both of them were also very handy and had a personal interest in home improvement, so their plan was to package home remodeling and renewable energy together. They got some help from the Office of Entrepreneurial Development at Pitt, and then took the plunge.

In the beginning, business was pretty slow. They did a few renovation projects for wealthy individuals which got a lot of press, but failed to generate a lot of business. Besides the lack of business, they also just felt like they weren’t making the impact that they wanted to make. They got into this to make money, but also to do some good for the environment.

They decided to take a chance and go speak at a meeting of one of the many community organizations in the city. It just so happened that the organization was debating ways that they could decrease their carbon footprint–they were sick of waiting for the government to take action. By the end of the meeting, they developed a plan for a neighborhood-wide renovation project that would incorporate recycling programs, education, and home renovations. They also found they were able to leverage some grant funds for the project, which brought the cost to the individual homeowners to a very manageable level. Thus, CRR was born.

Since then they’ve been involved with numerous projects in Pittsburgh neighborhood and surrounding communities. There are three main branches to their business: community outreach, vendor outreach and project implementation. I’m hoping to get a taste of each before the internship is over!

Last night, I decided to be a patriotic Pittsburgher and meet my City Council member, Andrew Marsdale. He’s a relative newcomer - only elected a few years ago - but I like him a lot and he manages to do a lot of good for the Downtown area.

The meeting was held at a small café near my apartment and by the time I got there it was already full and Mr. Marsdale had already begun talking about the work he’s been doing on City Council. He’s particularly interested in the high-speed rail initiative that Students for a Sustainable Pittsburgh has been pushing for, so he talked about that a lot. Basically, he’s excited for it, and so are the mayor and a few other council members, but there are still some voices on the council who don’t see the importance of the tri-state rail system for Pittsburgh. They think that other cities in the area should take care of it.

But Marsdale disagrees. He thinks that the city of Pittsburgh is one of the foremost leaders in the region, and that while of course we need to reach out to other major cities, we should be taking the lead in developing this project. Most of the constituents who were there agreed.

Afterwards, he answered a few questions from people. I didn’t get a chance to ask him about anything, but I was pleasantly surprised that he praised the work the Pittsburgh Women’s Foundation is doing with girls in the public school system. Not bad when your council person recognizes your organization for being so awesome!

I met with Dr. Lemley yesterday to plan out our Directed Study, and my alarm over how busy this semester will be continues to grow.  Why did I ever think my last semester at Pitt would be a cake walk?  Sometimes I wish I could go back in time and smack some sense into myself.

What gets me, though, is that everything I’ve committed to doing this semester is so interesting that I can’t bring myself to drop any of it, and the Directed Study is no exception.  The idea we had when we first discussed the project a few months ago was to take a neighborhood in Pittsburgh and track different variables over time, for example population, employment, etc.  One of the first things to figure out is what data is out there for us to track.  We did decide on a neighborhood to focus on, though: the South Side.

It’s hard to think of a neighborhood in Pittsburgh that embodies its history better than the South Side.  Even before steel came to Pittsburgh, it was the center of another industrial boom–glass production.  When steel came, mills and millworkers built the neighborhood, and when steel left, it became a ghost town.  Even before the next big revitalization, though, the South Side started to bounce back as a center for nightlife, and today, it’s one of the most happening areas in town.

So, my first job is to dive into census data as far back as I can go to see what’s there, and then report back to Dr. Lemley.  Thank god the library stays open late!