To Live and/or Die in L.A.

Since what happens in Los Angeles, definitely does not stay in Los Angeles, I will assume a few of you have heard parts of my summer story and I will attempt to fill in the blanks. For the rest of you, just follow along. This should still make sense... Kind of.

I started my summer at Crash Mansion in downtown Los Angeles where McNally alumni Conall Walsh was my mentor. This guy is one of a kind. I really hope you are lucky enough to meet him someday.

Then, very shortly after I celebrated the organization I work with back home being nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, I survived being robbed at gunpoint. In broad daylight. At 2PM. On a busy street. How is that for peace? Ironic right? I changed internships twice, experienced all the challenges of entering into a new work environment (3 times), and all the while maintained 70 hour work weeks. 50 at the internship and 20 at the "day job" (I'll explain below).

The “day job”, for lack of a better term, is as a consultant for the 501(c)(3) non-profit organization Youthrive. They are the upper midwest affiliates for PeaceJam International, an organization that works to connect young people with Nobel Peace Prize Laureates like the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and President Oscar Arias. For my job, I am working on the 2nd edition of a CD (Zero Element) project that utilizes credible Hip Hop music as a tool for bringing the ideas of peace to young people. I'm basically using the appeal of music and art to get kids to acknowledge the cryptic messages of peace woven into the fabric of Hip Hop culture since the art form began. To claim that message as their own, and encourage them to begin breaking away from the commodified garbage being sold to them at their own detriment. Through my work at Youthrive, I was also able to work with the Cesar Chavez Foundation (East L.A.) during their Los Angeles PeaceJam event and travel back to MN for a week to work on the POWER Summit with the Sisters of St. Joseph in St. Paul. I have been busy. The real kind of busy. A kind of busy I did not know existed prior to this summer. Really.

Next I went to The Firm in Beverly Hills. My mentor there was Tony Ross. As the office manager he is responsible for SO many people. The office there spans two floors and is pretty big, which means he has to deal with every individual and every individual’s set of problems. I have learned a lot about how to conduct business under pressure from watching him. He makes it look easy but I still wonder to myself if I could do what he does. I didn’t get the impression that The Firm interns are generally that “highly cut-throat type” of competitive, but by the time I got there, Jon & Joel had set the bar VERY high for other interns like myself to follow. Don't get me wrong. I have always given 110% to my internships but we worked HARD. And work hard at a constant rate. There was literally NO DOWN TIME when I was there. None. I made so many runs some days that I still have the blisters on my feet now to prove it. I even estimated one week that I was walking an average of 7-8 miles per day. This was by no means a “requirement”. It was out choice. There were a few interns that put their energy into other areas, but when runs were needed, Jon, Joel, and I stepped up every time. This was our choice. They set the example and I followed suit. And it paid off.

In fact this summer I beat my original record of being offered a job within the first 21 days of an internship by 1 whole week. But not at The Firm... At my 3rd internship, a mobile marketing company called GridMob, where I was offered a promotion to a paid position after only 2 weeks.

You’ll have to wait until the next blog to hear about my most recent internship with GridMob. But I’ll say this... It involves BMW’s moving at high rates of speed through Beverly Hills, massive amounts of cigarettes and second hand smoke, 3 carnivorous fish, one little dog named Henry, and me (a young Mexican kid with only my gift of gab) talking a professional locksmith into breaking down the doors of a stranger’s mansion on Paris Hilton’s street. And yes... It was all legal. But so much fun it probably should not have been.

Oh yeah, and not that you would care anyways but I will be deciding whether or not I stay in L.A., or come back to MN very soon.

Stay posted!

PEACE. PEACE.

LL
LarryLucio.com