bootcamp(ed) :: foster kids :: birthdays

I made it through Boot­camp. My web­site is func­tional and I learned a lot about com­puter pro­gram­ing, dig­ging up all that high school math. It’s hard to grace­fully teach this much stuff in so short a time. I was cranky as all heck the last few days, in no mood for the final pre­sen­ta­tions. We for­mally pre­sented our work to pan­els of review­ers, both Boot­camp teach­ers and fac­ulty in the depart­ment. The feed­back was flatly encour­ag­ing, which I find only a step bet­ter that roundly dis­cour­ag­ing. They worked us so hard that the feed­back the whole time from teach­ers was mostly encour­ag­ing, just to keep us going. The intel­lec­tual footholds were few. Fair enough, like I said, can’t quite man­age this grace­fully in such a short period of time. The con­cep­tual glue will be fleshed out come the semes­ter. Thanks to boot­camp, I should be able to keep up on the tech­ni­cal end.

The web­site still needs a lot of work. I need to use it to pro­mote the post­card project. Anne of The Fair Trade Resource Net­work has been wait­ing for me to get her some­thing like this, so she can use me to get fund­ing for pro­mot­ing art and doc­u­men­tary work on their site. I still need to do basic stuff like copy edit and add more post­cards. It’s a good first draft really. I do a bet­ter job explain­ing the project in per­son than I do on the web though. Next step it to fig­ure out design ele­ments and nar­ra­tive strate­gies that turn this from port­fo­lio site into engag­ing web content.

Yes­ter­day I went to Pat­ter­son, NJ for a shoot by the Heart Gallery. Najlah Hicks, one of my fel­low stu­dents in Boot­camp, is an estab­lished pho­to­jour­nal­ist who started this amaz­ing project to sup­port adop­tion of older kids in fos­ter care. She brings in estab­lished and renowned pho­tog­ra­phers to do por­traits of them. The por­traits help their chances of get­ting adopted. The suc­cess rate is amaz­ing given that the kids they pho­to­graph have been in the sys­tem for over 5 years, so they are con­sid­ered hope­less cases, never to find a new home and fam­ily. I don’t have the exact num­bers, but from the first round of shoots in 2005, when they pho­tographed some 300 kids, over 100 have been fully adopted and another 50 or so are in the adop­tion process. The shoot yes­ter­day was the last in a series of four done this year. 17 kids were pho­tographed. I think 6 or 7 pho­tog­ra­phers and video­g­ra­phers were there, includ­ing Julie and Ed Kashi of Talk­ing Eyes Media. I helped out Karen Pear­son with her shoots. The kids were sweet, coop­er­a­tive, and good natured. It was fun, but tragic at the same time because it’s evi­dent that they have been through hell. Good thing they have some­one like Najlah on their side.

Today was sup­posed to be a beach trip, but the pos­si­bil­ity of rain is enough that it got can­celed. Too bad. I need some good relax­ation. But I also need to clean my room and do laun­dry and such, so it’s okay. I did watch Short­bus in the bath­tub yes­ter­day, which was won­der­ful. I enjoyed the film so much. It was uplift­ing and real­is­ti­cally fan­ci­ful. Real­is­ti­cally fan­ci­ful! That might have to be my new tagline.

And happy belated birth­day Joanna! I totally need to send that sweet­heart a copy of Short­bus… Look! I can finally sing happy birth­day in Portuguese!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCPQbStzuXA]