Right now I feel like I should be wrapping up my work week. Instead I am on my laptop, in bed, with some intentions of checking my GHCC email and slogging through some paperwork before the day is over.

Yesterday I was in bed all day, slightly feverish and hurting all over, recovering from a stomach virus I no doubt picked up at the school. I know this because I have not gotten a stomach virus since first grade. There are perils to returning to elementary school, for sure.

When I was young and stayed home sick, my mom would often insist that I take an extra "day of rest" on the first day I woke up feeling better. I remembered this as I got into my car this morning exhausted from the task of getting dressed and ready to leave. As my mother may have predicted, I hardly got anything done and ended up leaving after a few hours anyway because I had a killer headache and absolutely no energy. Mind you, in the past 36 hours I had eaten nothing but a soft pretzel and a piece of toast, which may have had something to do with it.

So here I am with my cat, Katie, sleeping on the bed next to me, hoping I'll be well enough to do at least half of the fun things I had planned for tomorrow. At least I have eaten a substantial amount since getting home: half a package of ramen noodles and two small pieces of chocolate.

This is getting a little ridiculous. I'm ready to see my energy and good health come back now.

In almost everything I do, I want it to be perfect. Recently I was talking to a teacher I had in grade school about my sister, who is now one of her students. "She is so serious, and very hard on herself. Remind you of anyone???"

Born 14 years apart, we are surprisingly similar in some of our mannerisms and attitudes. One of the most striking examples is that pursuit of perfection and the difficulties we face just to keep going in the face of frustration.

If I am working on a task that matters to me, I want it to be perfect. From the outside I am sure it looks like I am doing a good job, but I still feel like I am underachieving, like there is something more I should be doing, like I am not working hard enough. When faced with adversity or challenge I never give up, but it is so overwhelming to keep wanting more and more from myself and knowing I don't have a ready source to draw it from. Somehow I need to find a way to turn around and see it all from the other side, see the bigger picture, and know I still have the power to exceed others' expectations even if I cannot exceed my own.

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.