I’ve been in the studio after classes every school day for the past month.  Seriously, it’s become a habit now.  I’m not saying that as a bad thing, in fact it’s sort of my fall sport; throwing red cups.  I love it.  Sometimes I work on classwork, but usually I’m “caught red-handed” with these cups and pitchers.

The funny thing is that we still have no clue what we’re doing.  Maybe I’m supposed to pretend we are old pros and not tell anyone that we’re struggling/working hard here.  Perhaps I’m the only one, but I think we all experience this challenge.  It’s a type of project that we have never done before, and we all kind of ignorantly agreed to.  When I was first told about the FLOW Project I thought it sounded very interesting and I wanted to help.  200 cups and interviews seemed like a lot, but we had 2 whole months so it couldn’t be that hard.  Then came the college application process.  Oh gosh, you don’t know how intense that is until you’ve spent every weekend either visiting, researching, sitting in on talk of, testing for, planning, writing essays for or applying to college.  So that cut deep into my time this fall.  Then of course there are your grades, because you need to keep getting those A’s :).  Overall, we were more time-restricted than I thought we’d be.

But one week from today, we’ll be completely done!  The show is next weekend so there’s no time for procrastination.  It came fast, and we still have a good amount of interviews and planning to do, but we can manage it.  So maybe this project taught me something about what I’m (we’re) capable of.  We faced a challenge new to all of us, but we boldly accepted it and hopefully will hit it out of the park.  And I really do mean WE.  The collaboration in this project was just off the charts.  I even switched some cups for interviews with a brother; 5 to be exact.  I enjoy the cup making more, though people really do have some interesting things to say.  He enjoys the interviewing more, so we made an arrangement.  Working toward each other’s strengths and interests just makes sense in my opinion.

I’m proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish, and I hope other people can enjoy drinking out of the cups we made and listening to the interviews we’ve done.  In fact, they should listen to more than just the interview that the QR code on the cup sends them to.  The more they listen to the better.  More interviews = awesome.  The reason I think this is important is because I feel like I’ve become wiser with every interview I do.  Sometimes I just gain insight into the interviewee, which in itself is precious.  But other times I see a deeper meaning to some of the conversations.  I’ve done a lot of thinking because of this project and can’t wait until I listen to all of these interviews.  After the conference probably, or maybe on the way over to Boston?  Anyway, thanks for taking the time to read my post and God bless.

–Drew