Most of what’s been going on in my life and through my mind lately hasn’t really war­ranted a full post, but here are a few things:

Car­bon Motors & Connersville

For years I gave my home­town, Con­nersville, IN noth­ing but scorn. Prob­a­bly like most teenagers treat their home­town. Now that I’ve a fam­ily of my own, and make more reg­u­lar trips back home, I’ve come to see Con­ner­tucky in a new light. Robert’s Park (and its har­ness rac­ing track), Spar­tan Bowl, and the Con­nersville Coun­try Club in par­tic­u­lar are gems in a county that is smaller in pop­u­la­tion than the neigh­bor­hood I cur­rently live in. It’s a great town, that just hap­pened to have fallen on harder and harder times while I was grow­ing up there. This cul­mi­nated in the clos­ing of a for­mer Ford plant and the lay­offs of 700 – 800 folks; caus­ing the already high unem­ploy­ment rate to skyrocket.

My town is tough though, and filled with a blue col­lar pride in its rich auto­mo­tive his­tory (the inno­v­a­tive and his­tor­i­cal Cords were assem­bled in Con­nersville). Now the C’ville has fought off the com­pe­ti­tion to reclaim its posi­tion mak­ing inno­v­a­tive auto­mo­biles. Car­bon Motors is com­ing to town. This means jobs and regained self-​respect for those folks who were laid off and will now be able to use their exper­tise to feed their fam­i­lies once again.

My new­found under­stand­ing of Con­nersville has helped me fur­ther under­stand why I like Cleve­land so much. As dis­parate as these two places are, the peo­ple have a lot in common.

Com­pound Fest

Com­pound Fest is prob­a­bly my favorite event involv­ing Cleve­land music folks. It’s all day, every­body shows up, tons of local bands, and it’s free!

Ambi­tion

I’ve always thought that ambi­tion is a neg­a­tive trait. I’ve also never con­sid­ered myself that ambi­tious. But lately I’ve real­ized that my desire to con­stantly improve myself, to con­tin­u­ously learn more and to do the best I can at every­thing is its own form of ambi­tion. It isn’t directed toward some­thing exter­nal, like money or power, which is what I usu­ally think of as ambition’s goal. So I guess ambi­tion is like any other tool, its good­ness or bad­ness is deter­mined by how it is used.

Applied Anthro­pol­ogy

When I inter­viewed Ward 15 City Coun­cil­man Brian Cum­mins last week for BLACKHEART Cleve­land, he was excited to find out that I got my degree in anthro­pol­ogy. He men­tioned that he could see where I was apply­ing those skills doing the weblog thing. I’ve not really thought that I’ve been using those stud­ies in daily life, but since then I’ve been try­ing to see if and where else I might be unknow­ingly apply­ing anthropology.