alan wells

It’s been a while, a long while, since I’ve written here. My last post, on June 11th, was written a few days before I graduated from college (UC Davis), and began life in this crazy place known as the “real world”. I suppose it was slightly prophetic to end my last post asking, “Will I blink? Or will I take the step forward?”I think I’ve taken steps forward. I’ve probably taken almost as many backwards, but progress is being made, at least that’s what I keep telling myself. Much has happened in my world in the last four months. I finished school and continued my freelance design projects, and managed to build a business that made enough money that I thought I was going to continue freelancing for the foreseeable future. Things change quickly though… more on that later. At the end of July I moved out of Davis, a place that’s been a great home to me for the five years I spent in school (minus a long trip, and then a shorter one, to Australia). Although I didn’t think much about it when I was moving out, Davis is and was a wonderful place to be a student, a great place to do some serious growing up. I grew fond of that place, maybe more so now that I don’t live there anymore, but looking back 5 years to a time when I lost sleep over deciding between UCLA, Cal, and UC Davis, I’m fairly certain that I made the right choice.—

“Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than its worth.” – Baz Luhrman.

—A few days after I moved out, I spent almost a month traveling in South America with my dad and my brother. I haven’t spent this much time with them since I moved away to college, and it was great to reconnect with them and spend sometime learning about the person that my once little brother has grown into.I have a lot of thoughts about some of the things I saw in South America… I think I’ll save them for another day, but it was an eye-opening trip in many ways.I came back to California ready to get back to work, and moved into San Francisco the day after I got back… Unfortunately, my once burgeoning freelance business had pretty much come to a halt in the August slowdown that (apparently) is typical of corporate america. It was a nerve wracking few weeks until things finally started to get rolling again, but that kind of slowdown was new to me, and it spooked me. A re-evaluation of priorities (the flexible schedule student life becomes less important, a steady paycheck and professional development becomes more important) and a very strong desire to continue living in San Francisco sparked me into looking around for a full time job.Serendipity stepped in, and I figured out that what I’ve been doing in the freelance world is called web production, and after finally figuring out what to call the skills that I have, I found a job with an exciting startup (Affinity Labs) as a web producer, with my first task being to help grow an online community for artists and designers (ArtBistro). More on Affinity in a future post, but a month to the day after I started and I’m still challenged and learning new things every day, and that’s exactly how I want it to be.

During my short stay in Australia, I found myself in a fairly unique position in a culture so saturated with media and advertisements. When I went grocery shopping, it was really disorienting because I knew none of the brand names or product labels. In Australia, I didn’t watch TV and preferred my iPod to the the radio, and read the books I had brought with me and not local newspapers and magazines. So I was almost completely unexposed to advertisements or other media publicity about the brands sold there. I never really thought about it in the states, but I take for granted that all the brands on the shelves look familiar, and the brands I buy here are often based on choices, sometimes informed but mostly arbitrary (what my parents bought, what my friends bought, what I grew up with, etc), that I made long ago and pretty much just stick to my habits. And who can blame a consumer? If you had to reanalyze all the available products at your local grocery store every time you went shopping you’d go crazy and also waste tons of time. So what’s the point of this story?Well, lacking any other basis for comparison, and being an environmentally conscious person, I decided that I would choose the brands based on sustainability and environmentally friendliness. Now this is harder in Australia that Californai because organic and earth-friendly products are not nearly as available, but I did what I could. I bought biodegradable detergent, recycled paper products, and bamboo fiber towels. When no good option was available I tried to not buy at all or buy the item with the least wasteful packaging or most recyclable materials.This got me thinking: not everyone is fortunate enough to be able to displace themselves into a new environment to force the breaking of consumption habits long enough to consider new priorities in consumer choices. But what if you could reset the brand knowledge of people without displacing them to new and unfamiliar places? I think maybe this is all it would take to make a huge change in consumption habits, if everything suddenly became unfamiliar and people were forced to reconsider their choices, many would voluntarily choose products that are better for the planet if given the chance. I don’t know how you’d go about doing this “reset” but I think the concept is interesting nonetheless.OK, so fast forward a few weeks, I’m back in the states, grocery shopping at Nugget Market (I definitely missed gourmet grocery stores in Australia), and I’m cruising around putting my usual items in the basket. And then it occurs to me, why not try to continue the trend I started in Australia, and try to break my buying habits? What would I buy here if I was looking at it with virgin, un-brainwashed eyes? So I tried to look at each product area with a more open mind, and to seek out some of the brands I’ve heard of as making sustainability efforts. I think it worked, at least a little bit. I ended up with some things I would have overlooked in favor of the familiar old brands and logos. For the milk dilemma, aware of both the impact of non-recyclable cartons and plastic jugs, I was pleased to find Strauss Family Creamery organic milk available in reusable glass bottles. For other dairy products, I bought organic, and with an eye for reducing packaging (buying quart yogurt instead of individual servings). For shampoo and conditioner, I couldn’t find Aveda, a company I admire because of their well documented sustinability efforts, but I did find herbal, organic products from a company I think is more earth friendly than your average haircare product company. Those are just a few of the choices I made, I don’t need to bore you with the contents of my grocery cart, but I leave you with this question:What would you buy if none of the familiar, main-stream brands were available? What would you buy if you based your choices on earth-friendliness instead of advertising or old habits?

I love this video. After travelling alone for 3 weeks, I forgot how great hugs are.

I flew into California this morning after a particularly unpleasant flight from Sydney. The California coast has never looked so good, and I’m really glad to be home. Love the Bay.

Its been a bit lonely in Sydney lately, most of the students at the University until classes resume in February, and orientation for my program isn’t until Feb 4th. So I decided that I’d take advantage of the time before orientation to get out my Sydney suburb and go travel a bit. Tasmania is a place that I never made it to last time I was in Australia, and its a pretty short flight from Sydney, so I’ll be heading there tomorrow morning. I’m doing tour with a backpacker tour company, not my preffered method of traveling but its just not economical to rent a car when you’re travelling alone. I’ll be in Tazzy until Feb 3rd, and hope to come back with some good pictures and good stories. One place I’m looking forward to checking out is Port Arthur, a famous penal colony established on Tasmania (Tasmania is an island south of Australia) for its remoteness and isolation (not unlike the concept behind Alcatraz).

Well I’m in Sydney now, and I have tons of stuff to write about in regards to that, as well as address the topics that got left behind in my pre-departure craziness, but for now I want to relay something that happened to me today.

While sitting at a bus stop, waiting to catch a bus to the shopping center to buy sheets and a pillow, I ended up chatting with a woman in her late 70’s who turned out to be a Catholic nun from Ireland (she wasn’t dressed in a habit, otherwise I would have known this off the bat. obviously.) We were small-talking about the weather for a bit and then got into a pretty interesting conversation the touched on politics, young people, spirituality vs religion, global warming, finding your life’s work and passion, and the paradox of the existence of God in relation to evil in the world and free will (Her simple answer is that God gave us free will but we have to take responsibility for the use of it, and the irresponsible use of it is where the evil comes from).

The spirtuality vs religion bit was great, particularly because I consier myself a spiritual person but definitely not a religious person and I was a bit wary of revealing that to a Catholic nun. But it didn’t seem to bother her too much, and she said that she thought the difference between religion and spirtuality was that religion was just the daily steps and rituals, and that only does not make for spirtuality, that there has to be some deeper relationship for the religion and spirituality to become one feeling inside a person.

Although this is already an interesting encounter, to understand why this was a more meaningful thing than it might have otherwise been, you have to understand the context for me. I’ve been in Sydney for 6 days. I don’t know anybody here, its been pretty lonely, and I’ve really been questioning what I’m doing here and whether this is where I should be, in a personal and professional sense. I was trying to relate this feeling to Sister Anne, and her response to my dilemma was,

“Do you mind if I have a yarn with the Lord about you?”

And although I’m not a religious man and for the most part have trouble squaring with organized religion, that seemed like an offer I couldn’t refuse, particularly in my current state of inner turmoil and doubt in my direction. Soon after, the bus stopped and we went our separate ways.

Her departing words were, “I hope you come to the right choices.”

Something about the way she said that just hit me, as it seemed to address all the complexity and weight of the things I’m juggling right now. I walked away with a huge smile on my face and couldn’t help but think that sometimes the right people appear in our lives at just the right time.

Thanks, Sister Anne. You made my day. And I’ll be stopping by to see how that yarn with the Lord went…