After 4 months of seeking meaningful employment, constructing, refining and implementing my resume I have become no closer to employment than when I began.

I figured that I might as well “throw in the towel” on the conventional resume and try something new. Truth be told, do I really want to work in an organization that bases who they interview on a keyword search of resumes? Hardly.

So I spent a week thinking, planning and constructing what you see below.  For some it will seem stupid, to others it will seem incomplete, as for myself, I see it as a new approach that can’t do any harm.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end

- Closing Time by Semisonic

If I were writing this for anyone but myself I would begin by saying; “It is with great regret…”, but that’s neither how this begins nor ends as I am writing this for myself.

When I came up with the notion last fall to complete a Fifty-Two Weeks project I was in a place that I needed to get out of. I was as far away from creativity as I had ever been in the past 10 years. Somewhere along the way I lost my creativity that I cherished so much as a child and I was in desperate need to find it.

So when I started Fifty-Two Weeks I did so as a personal goal and journey, to get from point A to B in terms of creativity, experiencing as many things as I possibly could along the way.

This project was independent (for the most part) and a self-centered attempt to kick start myself into the creation mindset. Week after week I completed various projects for specific reasons all adding to the end goal of helping me achieve something, both short and long term.  Along the way some of my projects engaged the community, and for this I am grateful, but this was never the main intention.

With all of that said, today I end Fifty-Two Weeks, half finished, half left untouched.

I am ending Fifty-Two Weeks not because of a lack of motivation, creative ideas or willingness to create, but rather, I am ending the project for just the opposite reasons. I’ve had more creative thoughts go through my mind in the past two weeks than I have in the past 10 years.

I have reached my goal.

I have reached my destination much quicker than I initially thought I would and along the way I have experienced a journey that is full of much more than I had anticipated.

Over the past few weeks I have been creating and planning projects where the planning, execution and dedication requires more than seven days attention and therefore do not fit into the Fifty-Two Weeks ‘model’. Although one week projects are certainly beneficial, have their place and provide me with great pride and accomplishment, the things I have going on in my mind now require more attention over a longer period of time and are things that if I complete others might benefit from as well. I strongly believe that my time, creativity, effort and resources are meant for bigger things.

For those who do not know me this abrupt ending may seem like absolute failure from a lack of motivation, commitment or creativity.

For those that know me well, they will understand that there are better and brighter things coming. They know that I wouldn’t end this project unless there was a good reason to do so.

Not that I am trying to explain myself to anyone but my own person, but I certainly respect the opinion, responses and input of the various people in my communities.

For myself I admit that Fifty-Two Weeks ending is a failure itself, but only with the understanding that failure leads to success. Failure is needed in order to succeed and although I have failed at the larger Fifty-Two Weeks project I have 26 weeks I can be proud of and the knowing of what I complete in the future will be bigger and better.

The past 26 weeks have been fun, challenging, educational and overall a great experience. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that in the next 26 weeks I WILL create a number of projects that will push my creativity to the limits, challenge myself and involve my community. Whether or not I choose to post about the projects on this site is yet to be seen, but as of now this will be it.

I have not failed but succeeded. I thought I would need much longer to get to where I needed to be but it only took me half of the time.

What I do in the coming weeks will only reflect, intensify and build upon what I have accomplished in the past 26 Weeks.

When I originally approached people about this project I had the following to say:

PARK(ing) Day centres around the premise of reclaiming urban spaces (in the downtown core) as park/recreation space for pedestrian use.

Over the past 5 years cities from around the world have taken a single day to turn on-street parking spaces into urban parks, reading spaces, cafes, oasis, among many other things. The purpose of these transformations is to raise awareness of the important roles that these types of spaces play in the structure of a city’s urban fabric and how crucial they are in fostering interactions among those who occupy urban spaces.

This year the PARK(ing) Day initiative is taking place on Friday September 17th, 2010 in over 200 cities around the world and I hope that it can be brought to the Forest City as an attempt to re-green London (even if only temporary).

I believe that this type of initiative has the potential for much larger things, not only raising awareness of the lack of green space in our downtown core but the important role that such spaces play.

More information about the general principals behind PARK(ing) Day can be found at http://www.parkingday.org

I never intended Week 26 to turn out the way it did as it was never in my mind as a project but I defaulted to it because it was available.

I started with a premium Wordpress theme and hacked away at it to transform it into something that better represented what I needed. Graphic support was provided by Katie Van Den Berg.

I like this process of finding something (theme) that fits 80% of my needs and then tweaking it for the remaining 20%. I don’t have to know how or time to learn how to create a theme from scratch so this process functions well for me.

As with most things i do i think this site turned out to be minimalist, but i think in the case of this project it works.

There are a few things that I would Ike to change but doing so would take more time and effort than is needed, so I leave it how it is.

I’m 95% happy with it but am sure that it will function and appear 99% better than the previous iteration.

Having reached the half way point of Fifty-Two Weeks, Week #26, I have quickly lost steam and general motivation. I have completed so many projects already that I feel like anything to come in the second half of 2010 needs to be new, fresh and outstanding. This feeling is something that I have felt week after week but now more than ever it has been hitting me hard.

With these feelings comes the “failure” of my first project.

My project for Week 26, “Doodle of Urban Solitude” did not get completed. This projected ended because I flat out gave up on it. I ran into some problems and things just weren’t working out, so I threw in the towel and was ready to concede to failure, not of the entire year but just of this single week.

Thankfully I did not throw the project out as I picked it up today and decided to take another shot at it. Although it still won’t be what I intended it to be, I think it will get completed.

Moving on and not wanting to fold on the entire year, I’ve taken on not one but two projects as I had them both on my mind this week. Because I essentially have 3 projects on the go, none of them are getting 100% of my attention, but to be brutally honest, if I was only working on one project it wouldn’t have my full attention anyways.

My attention as of late has been allocated to a number of different things. In addition to trying to find meaningful full-time employment I have been keeping busy with a number of community oriented events, mainly PARK(ing) Day, but until recently ChangeCamp & assisting with some photography related projects for a variety of community associations.

So although in some way my disappointment in my project performance/completion may be justified, personally I have been taking it to heart and have not been willing to accept it being anything but my own doing.

With that said, failure in anything is a necessity in order to learn, grow and succeed, however, in the grand scheme of things, for me personally, failure of my entire Fifty-Two Weeks project is not an option. Although I may have failed a week I’m going to pick up the pieces and transform it into something great.

I’ve been working on nothing but PARK(ing) Day stuff as of late that I haven’t really had time to commit to anything else.

Moving from a Tumblr blog to a Wordpress installation has it’s ups and downs, one of the advantages being design.

Here are the comparisons between the old (parkinglondon.tumblr.com) and the new (www.parkingdaylondon.ca).

Old Site

New Site

Not too long ago Joshua Longbrake posted to “Brady Bunch” style photo that made me want to attempt something similar, and then even more recently he posted a personal portrait project while I was in the process of creating mine. I love Joshua’s photography and always find it to be inspirational.

Last, The Last Forty Percent has had a revolving banner for sometime on their site that included photos that I really enjoyed (the revolving banner, not so much). And I thought it might be fun to do something similar.

Although the photos were only taken over a series of minutes early in the week, I worked on them for the remainder of the week and laughed as I looked at each one.

I would have liked to come up with some additional faces and ideas, but for the number we did come up with (50 each) I am very happy.

Technically there are some places I would have liked to improve, all dealing with flash. In many photos I forgot to change my flash settings and as such the exposure was different for a select stretch of photos. In addition I really need to read my flash manual to understand what the light indicators mean on the flash.

Looking to the future I would like to do this very project but with a group of people and 5 set poses/expressions for each of them to do. Perhaps I could set this up, informally at an event with friends or family.

Overall I really enjoyed this project and the end results.

So this week I set up a simple photo booth in my bedroom and had myself and Katie make some funny faces.

The Photo Circus that I found provides a photo booth type service (much like what we did) that allows people to rent the photo circus for events to let their attendees have a good time.

So this week I list the “inspiration” simply as The Photo Circus.