Summer in the City

Today I took the LSAT. It was hard, but perhaps not as hard as I thought it would be. I'm trying not to think about it, because I don't want to convince myself that I did really well and then get like a 152 in three weeks. So I'm going to try to distract myself until I get scores back.

Of course, that's way easier said then done. Everyone who knows me knows I thrive on being busy. And though I have my internship where I work about 5 / 6 hours a day (at a cubicle no less... crazy) and a few good friends hanging out in my college town for the summer too, I knew I would have a hard time filling in the extra time without classes or LSAT-studying.

But God must have known that I would feel that way, because he put the Layman Group into my life. The Layman Group is an organization that exists simply to spread the fine arts. I was impressed by their website and I loved their vision, so I sent the contact person my resume and said that I would like to get involved. In a whirlwind I met with their director, who was a really incredible and dedicated artistic presence, and he basically offered me the opportunity to help. I'll be working with fund-raising / development (naturally) and I'm unbelievably excited about having an opportunity to really use what I've learned working in development for the past 9 months to help a cause that I'm passionate about. The Layman Group is right on in their deduction that in our area the arts are thought of as unattainable and unnecessary. But as I tell my dear engineering friends, no one recites math equations to themselves in the showers. They don't make museums for theorems and you don't cry at the end of a live performance of a thesis.

Art is what we live and breathe for, and our area isn't immune to that. And I'm psyched about helping start a movement to show people how important the arts are to our lives. If nothing else, it's one of the few things that crosses all boarders; there are no cultures, no people, no souls that have no expression of art. So let's make it available here too.

I love New York. And I want to move there next year. But I hate the truth that to experience great art (as in theatre, visual art, music, etc.), you pretty much have to be in New York or a comparable metropolitan area. Or, worse, that the art in our communities is more or less ignored. I would love for middle-school students near my college town to be as culturally educated as students in Manhattan. It's possible. :-)


So, yeah. There's my soap box for the summer. Oh, and I'll probably work on my Honors thesis a little bit. Maybe. ;-)

With love,
Shelli