I have never liked introductions. Introducing oneself is not a simple task after all. What do people want to know? What is interesting to them? Do they want my life story or just my name and occupation? Place of residence perhaps? Well, here it goes.

I am an ordinary person living in New York City in a one bedroom apartment with a partner and two parakeets. I am 30 years old and still don't know what I want to do with my life. Based on my background education, supposedly I should be working in a field of accounting/finance. I never have. Not a day. I hated it when I was going to college and I hate it now. Why did I major in it? Only God knows. My passion has always been in the arts, animals and the environment. When I was a kid I used to secretly cry when I saw a homeless dog. I used to get seriously upset when I saw garbage in the otherwise perfectly beautiful scene. In my then naive perceptions of life, I wanted to literally change the world. I was sure that I could do it :-). I wanted to save all the animals, I wanted to persuade people to act consciously, to think about the trees, rivers, nature, pollution and so on. I firmly believed that I could make a difference and so about 12 years ago I went to college to major in the arts and environmental studies. Well, to make a long story short, that didn't work out.

I grew up in the conservative family and according to family such empty dreams were not the way to go in life. I was told one has to get a solid profession like a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant. One person COULD NOT make a difference. Looking back on it now, I understand that my family wanted the best for me. They didn't want me to constantly search for a low paying job and be a starving artist. They wanted me to be a professional with a nice steady income. And that is how I became an accountant :-))

After getting my diploma I realized that if I have to work as an accountant, I will hang myself after a day or two. I hung around for a couple of years helping my friend with her business, building things, painting houses for an income, fixing attics and so on. You name it, I did it. I am a very handy person and I love working with my hands, so painting houses and doing construction work beat the hell out of accounting. After that I got into graphic design. I figured I fiddle around on the computer all night anyway, so I might as well go to school and take a few classes. I scrambled some money together and took as many classes as I could afford at the School Of Visual Arts. While there, something dawned on me: I will be designing ads to help sell things which people will buy and later dispose and contribute more to the pollution of the environment.

After I realized this, something clicked - my childhood ambition to "change the world" came back. I started to understand that one person indeed CAN make a difference and that difference does not have to encompass global actions and political movements like it did in my young imagination. It can be as simple as YOU stumbling on my site and reading a story about Genetic Engineering or Pesticides in your coffee. YOU hopefully stop using a toxic product or support some kind of cause and THAT is the DIFFERENCE. Yes, I know it's an old concept, but everyone arrives at things at their own pace and in their own time. I stopped thinking about global change and impossibility of it all and instead decided to make this website and hopefully make a difference that way.

As far as work goes, I decided to still do graphic design but I WILL NOT design ads for products that are not environmentally safe. Naturally, with such strict criteria, it's very hard to keep a constant income. I am currently working on getting my portfolio together and designing a website for my work, so presently I am unemployed. If anyone feels like helping you can click the paypal button and donate as little as a $1. I want to thank you in advance if you do so. It would be of so much help.

I have also recently discovered that I can design t-shirts on cafe press. I gave it a shot. Hope you like them. Drop me a line and tell me what you think. If you want something custom, I can do that too :-))

This site is still at it's beginning stages, it's very young. I constantly strive to improve it. I need to add a lot more things, write more articles. If you guys have any suggestions, comments, please don't hesitate to email me or you can go to my blog and leave a comment about the site anywhere you want. Thank you for coming and I hope you will visit again.

@Lara Berch