Atlanta. Day 13-15.
I have slacked a little bit in staying faithful to updating this, but today I’ll try and catch up one more time, and then stick with it after this (maybe…).
So, I summarized Tuesday in my last “Catch Up” post, but some more stuff happened that day that I thought was worth writing about. When the board for Essential 2 Life came to meet at MetroMerge, Jeff sent me to get drinks for everyone at the mart down the street (ah, the life of an intern, haha). Well, when I got to the mini-mart, with its barred windows and clerks behind plate glass counters, I got all of the drinks and ice and started walking back out to the car when I was approached by a man in torn clothing, very little teeth, and a strong scent of booze, who was obviously either strung out or coming off of some high.
His name was Houston.
He insisted on helping me carry some of my stuff to the car; this made me a bit nervous, but I actually could have used the help. Houston and I then started talking for a bit. He shared some parts of his recent life story, involving how he had just gotten out of prison. He insisted on how hungry he was, and so he asked if I could go back into the store to buy some food for him. I agreed and asked what he wanted. He said, “Anything. Anything you get me, I’ll take it. They have some really cheap packets of ham in there. Like 99 cents. If you could get me a couple of those, that’d be great.”
Here’s a man who is just out of prison, and has stopped a guy to ask for food, and he is asking for discount ham loaf.
“Sure,” I replied. “Can I get you a water or a coke to?” “Yes! Both!” he answered. “And if you could get me some potato chips or something too, that’d be great!” So I went in and got everything for him. I came back out and handed him the bag of food. He looked in at all of the food, and then looked back up at me. He set the bag down on the ground, and then looked up into the sky, extended his hands, and yelled at the top of his lungs on a busy, ghetto street corner, “There is a God!” He then grabbed me and hugged me and said, “I know there is a God.” He pulled away from me, hands still on my shoulders, and said, “Will you please pray for me? Will you pray for, ‘Houston’?” I said, “Of course, Houston. I’ll pray for you every day.” He thanked me, but then said, “Can we pray right now?” And so he pulled me in again, and he started to pray for me right on the spot. As he finished, I said some words of blessing for him as well. I gave him a few bucks, and to another homeless man there beside him (who, when I gave him the money, shook my hand and said, “We are all God’s children, brother”). And then, smelling now like beer, I went back to the office for the day.
“I tell you the truth, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.”
At 4:30 Wednesday morning, I took Jeff and Andre to the airport; they are going Guatemala for a week. The rest of the day Wednesday, I did graphic design work at MetroMerge. That evening, I cooked and listened to a lot of Sufjan. It was a much needed break for me to try and work on my relationship with God as well. I definitely came to realize His love just by reflecting on His sacrifice and the Word. It was a good night.
Thursday, I spent the day at home working on more design projects. I went and had sushi for lunch, and then spent the afternoon working again until the power went out because of the storm. It came on later that night, and so I was able to cook dinner (whole wheat penne with broccoli and plum tomatoes again, but with a new sauce I made: bruschetta, marinara, mozzarella, cheddar, and cream cheese all blended together and heated, then poured over the pasta; it was amazing). I watched Garden State with Max and read some from “Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire,” a book Mrs. Sneed lent me for the summer. Even though the electricity came back on, the Internet still hasn’t; I’m at Joe’s working for the day today.
Design stuff: I have been learning a lot about typography lately. I have to build three 4 ft by 8 ft posters for the tour, and so I started on the “Welcome” poster Wednesday. I made it first in Illustrator, laying down a vector of the GCG logo, and then lowered the opacity of the logo to use it as a guide as I laid down hundreds of words associated with the non-profit and arranged them to fit the logo design. It was a painstakingly long project, but it came out looking great. With the posters, I also had to learn about sizing for large-scale prints. Since I made it first in Illustrator, everything was a vector so that it could be easily resized in Photoshop. I wanted to export the vectors as smart objects to Photoshop because there were some layer effects that I wanted to achieve in Photoshop that Illustrator couldn’t handle. But as I tried to make a 48”x96” .psd, I quickly realized that my MacBook Pro just couldn’t do that. As I researched large-scale printing online, I realized that most printers actually design posters at half-size, and then print them at 200%. So I scaled down my .psd’s and was able to process the files easier. I finished an HTML template for the e-newsletter, which was a great refresher course in HTML and Dreamweaver for me so that was a good experience. And I made another Web ad that will be featured on CatalystSpace at some point, so that’s pretty cool. I also got back the tags that I designed for the t-shirt packages, and they printed great, so I am building a good relationship with a printing service (something good for a freelancer to have).
