The Bean or Bust

August 16, 2009

I really want to go to the ASLA Conference in Chicago. I really do. It’s in less than a month. I check ticket prices daily. Chicago is a city that I have heard so much about with a Mayor that seems to care about green infrastructure. The seminars and field sessions are right up my alley. There’s one that directly applies to a project I am working on here – "day-lighting" a wash (restoring a seasonal river that has been filled in).

But I really can’t afford it. It would not be financially responsible for me to go (buying a latte is financially irresponsible these days). I am no longer a student, not quite a professional but there is not an entrance fee category for this liminal category. I rationalize that I may meet that one potential employer who thinks I would be perfect for their firm, sweep me off my feet and wisk me away to work on innovative projects around the world. Or I could blow $1000 in a weekend on my credit card and come home with a couple of wonky photos of my making faces into the big silver bean at Millennium Park (and by “home” I mean, come back to Tucson to live on the porch of friends). Professionals (and my dad) think that it may be worth taking a chance on the conference. However they are securely in a job and the risk seems romantic. “Jump Indiana! You can make it!” Others, including my mother remind me that my health insurance just ran out yesterday and the student loan grace period ends in two months. “The ants are devouring every piece of flesh off of her body. Darn her luck”.

It’s an interesting spot we find ourselves in – not quite a student, not yet a professional. It means that since we didn’t get fired, we can’t really collect unemployment (not I would like to. Simply another example of how sticky my cohort’s situation really is). It means that many of us are taking volunteer positions to keep our skills as sharp as we can, which leaves less time for earning money at coffee shop and restaurant jobs.

I want to go the ASLA Conference because the sessions will give us “professional development hours” for accreditation and keep us engaged in the innovations of the field. But perhaps most important, I want to go to the conference because “A Hands on Approach to Ecological Restoration and Sustainable Landscapes” would be perfect training for the wash “day-lighting” project I am currently volunteering my time on. “Gutters to Green: Innovative Water Harvesting” will talk about techniques that I have just stumbled through at my own house (did I do it right? How can I make it better?). “Post-Disaster Cedar Rapids: Rebuilding Society, Economy and Environment” looks like it will combine my past professional life (in international development and community building) with my hoped-for-future professional life as a landscape architect.

This conference has the potential to inspire and right now, darn it, we all could use some inspiration. I mean, the conference is titled “Regenerating Places and People”.