The Strip(s)

this is something i wrote for the pittsburgh semester blog a while ago. however, i thought it was fitting to repost it here upon my return to vegas…

The Strip. It is interesting how the phrase conjures up two very different images in my mind.

On the one hand there is the Las Vegas Strip of my hometown, my childhood. A place that is simply all glamour and glitz. An example of American commerce at either it worst or best depending on who you are talking to. It is fleeting and inconsistent. Sure, the hotels and casinos stay the same (well, at least until they blow them up to bring in something new), but the people do not. A community of the random. A population of individuals simply stopping by for a quick vacation or random weekend.

Across the country there is another type of strip. The Strip District of Pittsburgh. A place also dependent upon exchange and people, but unlike the Vegas Strip, this row of being is not simply a place of transition but a way of life. Elderly men and their sons sit in front of coffee shops conversing about the Steelers and the random events of the week. Italian women pace behind tables full of desserts and set aside the best cannoli for their weekly customers. Young couples stroll up and down the street with cloth bags filled with fresh, locally grown produce.

The Strip district is place where people live not just visit. It has a heart that is rooted in community and celebrates life. One could argue that the Las Vegas Strip celebrates life. But it is a different type of life. It is a life that is dependent upon emotional highs and lows and short-lived pleasure. Instead the Strip District builds up a community that is interwoven and involved. It is about contentment in the ordinary and the beauty of the common.

The Vegas Strip will always have a place in my heart. It is after all the place where I have spent high school homecoming dinners, taken visiting family and friends, and seen white tigers strolling down the street. Truly it is a place of magic and memories. However, it lacks the life of Pittsburgh’s Strip. It fails to capture the satisfaction that can be acquired by simply living and embracing the community around us.

Goodbye Pittsburgh

Well today is my last day at the Pittsburgh Project. Yesterday, was the big shebang and involved celebrating at a wonderful Lebanese place in Squirrel Hill, which was then followed by a ping pong tournament (go Team Awesome!), and concluded with board games and apple-mint tea at Tim’s. My favorite portion of the night involved the five of us (Emily, Anthony, Brandon, Ray, and myself) revealing our visions for each others futures. Apparently I will be moving after graduate school to Eureka, California where I will be involved in an adult softball league and pursued by a half-Filipino man.

Through this process I realized how much we have come to know each other characteristics, passions, and dreams. I realized how much we have become a community. And community truly is a beautiful thing. Dorothy Day suggests that by being engaged in relationships within communities we can lift each other up and transcend. That community creates a people who are interdependent, serving, and sacrificial, and who have a deeper understanding of the beauties of the faith that can be found in relationships with one another.

Often I find that I am focused on myself which then results in me missing out the beauties that can be birthed out of community living. Due in part to a plethora of issues regarding pride, vulnerability, and other emotions, a tension exists between this aspect of the faith and myself. However, by ignoring this need to exist in community I am actually hindering my understanding of Christ’s love. We are Christ’s body. Each of us has a specific function and calling within community. By not participating we are obstructing the beauty that is the place of community. When people get the chance to interact, know, and appreciate each other through different situations and tests of faith, they get to know God and each other.

I will miss this community that I have been part of the past couple of months. For they have helped me to start becoming the person I am called to be.

to blog or not to blog...

“The routines of life distract us; our own pursuits make us oblivious; our anxieties and sorrows, unmindful. The beauties of the familiar go unremarked” (Lament For A Son, Wolterstorff). I forget to look even the most seemingly trivial of beauties in God’s creation. Rather than embracing the ordinary I get caught up in myself and fall short in loving and appreciating the beauty that can be found in the world around me. And beauty is what it’s all about. So I will write. This blog will be an exercise of creative faith. It will be a collection of rambles that try to grasp the fringes of something eternal. Of something that warms the heart and stirs the blood.

The Mattress Factory

Well… I finally made it to The Mattress Factory. For those who are Pittsburgh deprived The Mattress Factory is a museum of contemporary art that exhibits installation art. It is located in the ever so Sesame Street-esque Mexican War Streets of the Northside. Unlike most traditional art museums, The Mattress Factory is an installation art museum which means it is interactive and allows the viewer to become a participant in the art. It truly is a wonderful way to spend an afternoon and is definitely on my mandatory things to do in Pittsburgh list.

Although The Mattress Factory does not allow pictures to be taken of the exhibits I did manage to find a couple of pictures online that featured a few of my favorites.

being here, 2008, Mark Garry

Instant Before Incident (Marinetti's Drive 1908), 2008, Luca Buvoli

610-3356, 2008, Sarah Oppenheimer