Spectacles

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.

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?

Today was a Good Day. I secured a number of donations for the JHU Freshman Day of Service on Wednesday. Today I picked up a five-gallon bucket of Sherwin-Williams gloss finish exterior latex paint. Tomorrow some folks from Hopkins should be dropping off paint rollers and trays, trash bags, gloves, and possibly some gardening supplies. In-kind donation forms and thank-you letters abound.

I woke up this morning with a headache that began last night. Despite a grumpy start to the day I managed to keep my energy and spirits high enough to do what I needed to do. When I got to the office to print and copy the paperwork for the Sherwin-Williams donation (and use the cool postage machine!), however, I was manic and shaky with hunger, probably a result of last night's visit to the gym. Luckily, Karen was there and suffering for lack of food and fresh air as well, and we walked over to Carma's. I ate gazpacho outside and hoped I wasn't too poor a conversationalist due to being undernourished and sleepy.

This afternoon I was pleased with the day's work and couldn't wait to come home and ask Doug to go out to dinner with me. There was a coin toss along my way, and I threw all the change I had into the boot of a smiling fireman with kind eyes. It wasn't very much, but he said "thank you, God bless you," and there was just enough time for this exchange before the light turned green and my time on Gwynns Falls Parkway was over.

So, I am currently trying to figure out how to post a long piece of writing without showing it all on the page at once. For anyone familiar with LiveJournal, I am dearly missing the tag. Since Blogger doesn't seem to give me the option of putting a long chunk of text behind a cut, I am going to wait until version 2.0 of my website is up and running and host it from there.

I was reading my friend Matt Fowler's blog today, and there was one entry in particular that interested me. Matt is doing a year of service for Mission Year, so we will really benefit from sharing our experiences with each other.

His third entry really struck me because it reflects an attitude I encounter all too often. When I first committed myself to this idea of year-long service to my fellow people, I expected my friends and family to meet me with enthusiasm and support. I was not at all prepared to come up against deeply ingrained societal values that said I should be pursuing a 'real' career, that my intelligence and capability obligated me to achieve conventional success.

Now when I describe my job to people, I feel like it sounds broad enough and difficult enough that it demands a certain level of respect. When I say I helped to write three successful, $65,000 grants and I work in an inner-city school every day, I can prove that I am serious about this.

Still, though, there is this American idea that skill and determination should be compensated monetarily, that I should be chasing the kind of success that will be universally appealing. That isn't what I'm about. My friends and family have come around and more or less appreciate and admire what I am doing, but sometimes when I tell new people what I am doing I still encounter this word:

why?

And, well, why? It's not a question I can answer for everyone. I can't answer it for everyone not because I don't have a strong enough "why," but because there are realities out there not everyone can accept. I don't feel I can blame them. After all, it is so easy to look away, and so hard to believe we have the power to change anything. But I need to, and I do believe it, even if the only change I make this year is for the roughly 250 kids that are going to walk through the doors of my school tomorrow.

Finally

At long last, we've been released into the wild. Yesterday was my first day settling into the new office. The school seems strangely lonely compared to the constant activity at GHCC. There are only three new teachers, and the four of us have been spread out in our own corners of the building for the past two days. Today I ventured down into the kindergarten area to check out the newly renovated -- and very pretty! -- space, an adventure that yielded some conversation with one of the new teachers, which was nice. I am terrible at introductions, and often just slink around and smile at people as if that will convince them I am actually someone they should hold in high regard. Hmm.

Tomorrow all the teachers return, so hopefully the school won't be so quiet and lonely. Hopefully I'll make a good impression and not be totally overwhelmed. This job is forcing me to restructure the way I interact with people, something both positive and difficult.

As ready as we all were to leave and get into our respective schools, we still gravitate back to the main office. Both today and yesterday, we have ended up there together, discussing our days and enjoying familiar company. It's good to know that whatever storms we may encounter in the schools, we have a home at the GHCC office. I mean, really, our department's space is a basement efficiency apartment with yellow walls -- it even looks like it should be more of a home than an office. And despite the quirks as it makes the uneven transition from one to the other -- like not being able to use the (small) printer and the air conditioner at the same time -- it is a comfortable retreat, and I hope it remains so.

We VISTAs are still in training this week (going on week four, counting PSO), so there isn't much going on. All of us can agree we are burned out on training, ready to have our office keys in hand and be released into the wild. Having been here in the office since June 25th, I am seriously ready to move out into my school.

I start there on Monday, geared up for another week of orientation as I sit in on the teachers' professional development week. After that the kids arrive, and I had better be ready.

The blog has been kind of quiet because I am having some computer issues relating to some new hardware I just installed. Hopefully it all gets fixed pretty soon, but my computer usage has been significantly reduced since Sunday night.