Surprising First

I was recently getting treated for injuries due to a bike accident at the Western States Chiropractic College Clinic when an intern asked me about my project. After I explained it to him, he sat quietly pensive for a few minutes staring at the floor, and then looked up and began to tell me about his first experience dealing with fear and desire.  I was surprised at how easily he began relating the incident; I had not even had the chance to ask him if he wanted to participate, much less let him know I had not made any balls yet.  But, it seemed as though he wanted to get it off his chest, and I had no intention of stopping him.  He started by telling me that he had a story for me, and said simply,
"It was my first":
He was five, he said, when he got his first crush on a girl in his class. He wrote her a love note, gave it to his best friend to give to her, and waited. After school a few days later, she approached him and began talking to him about the note he had written to her. He told me that the moment she started talking, he freaked out, ran into the street and got hit by a car. The experience, he said, had set the tone for all of his relationships since.  The pain and resignation behind this man's eyes reflected his confidence that the event was a forshadowing one, but I couldn't help but wonder if the event itself is what has held him back, or the fear he faced when confronted by the girl which had chased him into the street and in front of that car.


As we have aged, modes of communication have evolved, but are we any different?  Do we still let our fears and anxieties get in the way of the things or people we most long for?  How do we get past the heart break of our failed attempts at happiness?  It was clear by the way the intern told his story that he was still there, horrified by the girl's attentions and too scared to know if she liked him or not, but that was not the point of his story, because, he never told me if she did or not.  What he emphasized was his reaction and his tendency to duplicate this event for the rest of his life.  It left me feeling hollow, and thinking that the injuries I had sustained in the bike accident were not really all that bad.

Either way, I think I owe that man a ball.

Another Layer

I have come to the realization that I cannot move out of the void until my lease runs out. This is hard, but giving my landlords an extra $800 for breaking my lease would be much harder. This means I have some very long rides ahead of me during this next three months, but it also means I will have more time to think as I ride the long (and most probably wet), road home.

I have also decided, with the help of some close personal friends, to hand out balls on the street with a piece of paper with my email address on it and a question about fear and desire, so it is their option to contact me in order to have a conversation.

I will also be adding another layer to my project; in addition to giving out balls with "invitations" to strangers, I will give balls to people I know each week and have a (hopefully) deeper conversation with them about fear and desire. With this added layer I am hoping to contrast the levels of intimacy between friends and strangers, and maybe uncover more about the people I am close to and therefor, more about myself.

I have planned to start making balls in October, so I will have a solid three months to make all of the balls I will need, which is turning out to be roughly fifty more than I thought, or, 400 balls.

I am feeling less and less like this might suck and more and more like this is heavy metal.

It Might Suck

This project has come about with the completion of my first project/blog, 20 Dates in 20 Weekends; A Craigslist Social Experiment, in which I went out on 20 dates in just less than 20 weekends with almost 20 different men (I had one second date). My experiences with my first blog led me to the realization that meeting new people and forcing myself open to their perspectives was quite valuable in understanding myself.

The dating element of the original experiment was quite arduous and led me down some treacherous and painful paths, which I am sure I will be discussing in therapy for a long time to come.

This project is more about the general, rather than the specific, matter of the value of human connection. That is, how we cultivate our friendships, work relationships, and intimate relationships. How we are measured, as Desmond Tutu once said, by the quality of our interactions.

My project is a simple barter, an exchange of ideas for a hand-made object. Of course, this satisfies two great needs of my own: one to create things, and the other to connect with people, and therefore, with myself.

My process will be to give a person unknown to me before the exchange a ceramic ball for which they will give me conversation. The project's theme is desire and fear, how they effect relationships and each other.

The first stage of the project is to procure space in which to make these ceramic spheres, which I have just gotten word that I have done; PNCA will be providing me with studio space in which to create these objects for a very reasonable monthly fee. The second stage is to do a bit of experimenting by handing out preliminary balls in exchange for preliminary conversations. I intend for this project to span a year, and as a good friend of mine said, "...it would be a horrible realization to come to after making 350 balls to find out that this project sucks."

There are other arrangements to be made; I must leave The Void and move closer to the city and therefor the studio, and begin the work of making the balls. I must arrange to have pictures of each ball I make in order to post them in my blog alongside the stories. I must come up with a very good conversation opener, one that will help people feel comfortable enough to open up regarding this highly personal issue. I think that last bit will be the challenge.

It is always scary to start such a large project, because as my friend stated, it might suck, but as with my last social experiment, its success relies almost solely on people, and as I have learned, the one thing you can rely on people to be is human, which in my opinion, is always interesting.