tattoo

Today I was asked to speak with high school students in the City at their career fair about the work I do. The school brought in about 40 different professionals so that the kids had a plethora of individuals with different work experience for them to talk to and learn about. All was well until I realized that me, the DJ/Graduate Student, the landscape architect, and the tattoo artist were all in the same room. Well, there is NO denying the fact that no 15-18 year old wants to talk about community development when you could instead be chatting about how to build a career imprinting on others bodies. She sat in the middle of the room and she looked so cool - I seriously wished I could go sit and talk to her about how to pursue this newly developed dream.

It was 5 minutes into the morning before the rest of us realized this was going to be a tattoo-centric day, clearly. I craned my neck to establish eye contact with the landscape architect. He sent me a half-smile as we both looked at the empty seats in front of us. As we did, a sophomore walked in and grabbed the ONE seat remaining in front of me and asked, "OK if I borrow this?" He dragged it over to join the small group gathered at my tattooing friends table.

We were defeated. What followed was simply a small handful of interactions with some pretty savvy kiddos. These left over students were the ones that thought developing community is more exciting than body art. Either that or they needed to fill their quota of individuals they were required to talk to today.