Monday, September 24, 2007
Moving along.
It has been a long time since I posted anything, and I feel like I should be saying something. Honestly, there has been a lot to say and little time to say it. I have been so busy recently and it is just now beginning to catch up with me. Because the vision program has sucked so much of my time in the past couple weeks, I am behind on everything else. I have a meeting to match kids for Big Brothers/Big Sisters tomorrow, and I am still getting referral forms. I'm getting three new Experience Corps members tomorrow and I have not warned the teachers -- I will be arriving before the school day starts to duck my head in and ask a few teachers I have in mind. Luckily, I have learned that if you give teachers too much advance warning they can forget what I told them. They are all as busy as I am, and the more weathered ones who know the plight of the VISTA have already expressed their sympathies.
I have to lead a training session for my after-school volunteers on Wednesday and I have not put together an agenda or ordered food. My work-study is coming tomorrow and I am not 100% excited to be thinking about what two of us should be doing as opposed to just me.
All in all, though, I am probably doing fine. I was talking to one of my coworkers at the office -- easily the sweetest person I have ever met -- and he seemed to think I would do a good job. "I just have a feeling," he said, and reminded me I have an excellent support system there. Whenever I thank him for being so kind he just says "that's what we do here." And it is. I do have a great support system, and I also know myself well enough to realize I will never be complacent about my job. I was 100% confident when I worked in the Staples Copy Center. Every day I went in with a feeling of mastery of my responsibilities there, but my role was very concrete. At this point in my life I am actively seeking a challenge, not a job that will provide an easy feeling of competence. No matter how well I do here, I will never be totally satisfied. I will always know there is more I could have done and I will always try to reach for it the next time. It is in my nature to be hard on myself, I just have to practice channeling that energy toward the positive.
I have to lead a training session for my after-school volunteers on Wednesday and I have not put together an agenda or ordered food. My work-study is coming tomorrow and I am not 100% excited to be thinking about what two of us should be doing as opposed to just me.
All in all, though, I am probably doing fine. I was talking to one of my coworkers at the office -- easily the sweetest person I have ever met -- and he seemed to think I would do a good job. "I just have a feeling," he said, and reminded me I have an excellent support system there. Whenever I thank him for being so kind he just says "that's what we do here." And it is. I do have a great support system, and I also know myself well enough to realize I will never be complacent about my job. I was 100% confident when I worked in the Staples Copy Center. Every day I went in with a feeling of mastery of my responsibilities there, but my role was very concrete. At this point in my life I am actively seeking a challenge, not a job that will provide an easy feeling of competence. No matter how well I do here, I will never be totally satisfied. I will always know there is more I could have done and I will always try to reach for it the next time. It is in my nature to be hard on myself, I just have to practice channeling that energy toward the positive.
Monday, September 10, 2007
In my mind I keep seeing news photos of blood running down the sidewalk. I got an unexpected voicemail from a friend and old neighbor/housemate the day after saying he had moved and I found it strange, having not yet found out a man had been murdered across the street from our house. Now I can't get in touch with him to ask if this is what drove him out.
Someone died with their skull cut open on a piece of sidewalk I must have walked on a thousand times. The lack of a reason, a motive, any explanation at all at this point, gnaws a hollow in my heart. How does a community begin to accept death when it is this senseless, perpetrated against a random, innocent person merely caught in the wrong place at the wrong time?
I work in a city with a murder rate second only to Detroit. What really rattles me is I'm not writing about Baltimore, I'm writing about a small college town in Amish country where I spent the past three years of my life.
If I went to Park Heights and talked about this one murder, the first in the town since 1982, people would say everyone should be so lucky. That just underscores the tragedy of a city so ravaged by homicides. How do people exist in a world where death is so commonplace and it's so rarely possible to make sense out of life? When I look at children in the schools and streets, I forget that in many neighborhoods by age 10 they have all seen a dead body under a sheet.
I am not sure how I would cope if I still lived in that apartment, if I remembered every time I walked outside that an innocent life had died right beneath my feet. But what about the people who can't escape? What about the people who live their whole life witnessing senseless loss of life in their street, their block, their neighborhood? How do they keep going? How do we blame them for losing sight of hope and optimism, a sense of things working out for the best?
Someone died with their skull cut open on a piece of sidewalk I must have walked on a thousand times. The lack of a reason, a motive, any explanation at all at this point, gnaws a hollow in my heart. How does a community begin to accept death when it is this senseless, perpetrated against a random, innocent person merely caught in the wrong place at the wrong time?
I work in a city with a murder rate second only to Detroit. What really rattles me is I'm not writing about Baltimore, I'm writing about a small college town in Amish country where I spent the past three years of my life.
If I went to Park Heights and talked about this one murder, the first in the town since 1982, people would say everyone should be so lucky. That just underscores the tragedy of a city so ravaged by homicides. How do people exist in a world where death is so commonplace and it's so rarely possible to make sense out of life? When I look at children in the schools and streets, I forget that in many neighborhoods by age 10 they have all seen a dead body under a sheet.
I am not sure how I would cope if I still lived in that apartment, if I remembered every time I walked outside that an innocent life had died right beneath my feet. But what about the people who can't escape? What about the people who live their whole life witnessing senseless loss of life in their street, their block, their neighborhood? How do they keep going? How do we blame them for losing sight of hope and optimism, a sense of things working out for the best?
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