Fortitude

This was a rough week. I have one student who takes meds, but I think there are days where the effects wear off or when he doesn’t take them. It’s kind of disturbing to see the two sides of him: one where he attempts to model an idealistic vision of a ‘good boy’ (it is endearing but also kind of upsetting to see him try so hard to please me), and the other where he erupts into sadistic shrill curses and screams. This darker side of his two faces erupted after something had happened during lunch (a common occurrence with my students), and he began spewing angry verbal filth at me in the middle of a lesson. The guidance counselor couldn’t coax him out of class, and eventually he sat there drawing without saying anything, then finally gathered his things and walked out of class. I had to spend time that day and the next day discussing how to deal with anger and being upset.

What is interesting about this circumstance–and an innumerable number of similar occurrences–is that I constantly discover that I am learning the same things that my students are. It isn’t about multiplying decimals or writing complete sentences or Algonquian Native American wigwams; it’s about learning how to handle our frustration, deal with anger, mediate conflicts, and communicate what we feel in appropriate ways. These are the very areas that my students force me to struggle in. When they cuss me out to my face, when they turn around and have a discussion in the middle of my every sentence, when they are busier squirting glue onto their fingers instead of doing their math, when they fail to perform an activity I had planned, when they cry or yell or insult each other endlessly, when they hit one another . . . these are the times when I find myself struggling to force myself past the anger and hurt and upset and frustration and try to understand the root source of their problems. And most of the time, no, I am not the model of calm fortitude that I wish I could be. I end up yelling, bullying, forcing order and rigor upon their disorganized lives in every manner that I can. And part of this is necessary. Sometimes I have to yell in order to demonstrate that I care. Sometimes I have to be strict to give them the structure that they need. But sometimes, I know that I have failed them as a teacher, and I am yelling to obviate my wounded pride. I am yelling because I don’t fully understand their disabilities. I am yelling because I don’t fully understand their lives and their needs.

And this is what makes it hard. Not the hours of lesson planning every night and all weekend. Not the hours of meetings and paperwork and phone calls. Not the hours organizing bulletin boards and leveling books and creating SMART board presentations. It is the constant holes that are pricked in my self-esteem, the consistent reminders that I am frail human being with emotions and prejudices and self-induced blindness. The feeling and taste and texture of failure. Every single day. And this is the very experience that my students have endured since the beginning of their young lives.

The greatest struggle right now I have is trying to keep my energy levels up. I haven’t been able to run for a long time now, and my health is declining as a result. I’ve lost weight. I have strange growths in my neck. I’m developing asthma. So my focus, beyond simple survival–which is the mode I have been in–is to find a way to establish an exercise routine. And if I can keep myself healthy and keep myself positive, then I can keep myself calm and patient with my students.

With Struggle

I know that the wind has been knocked out of the sails of my blog posting. I’m finding it hard to justify setting aside time for self-exploration; much of my energy and thought and emotion, even when I’m sleeping, goes towards my students. I have dreams about them, and I lay awake thinking about them. It’s not like I want to.

I have a new student (I jinxed my luck in my last post), who I haven’t gotten a chance to get to know at all because he showed up yesterday, but there seems to be something going on in his home life that may make him a difficulty in class.

I made my first report cards this week, and I had my first parent-teacher conferences tonight, and two moms showed up. Which is one more than I expected.

I also broke up my first fight today. Fists and feet were flying. One part of me was angry for my student who began throwing the punches, but another part of me also recognized her need to stand up for herself. She has been getting picked on everyday, and she just couldn’t take it anymore.

So I am going to have to find a way to resolve the situation as a class. We will have to have a conversation about bullying and about the fight that happened.

I’ve realized that I can no longer ignore the way students in this class are treating each other in the cafeteria or in the schoolyard. Because they will bring it into class with them and then I spend the whole day trying to keep a lid on it.

So I have to teach them how to interact with each other. How to be friends. How to show kindness. Right now they think that picking on easy targets is “playing.”

So teaching is not only about meeting the standards. It’s about reaching your students where they need you in their lives. With material that will guide them and shape them. And that’s why I don’t have time to write much on my blog anymore. Every free second I have, even when I’m wasting it on Facebook or whatever, I always have it in the back of my mind that I should be writing lessons, planning units, writing goals, brainstorming activities. Many of my lessons at school just plain suck. I’m doing a lot of lecturing. I’m in survival mode as a teacher. But the faintest taste of success–knowing with certainty that I am making a difference in their lives, even when all that means is that I am keeping them in their seats–keeps me motivated to see it through. I’m not perfect, but lord knows neither are they. We give each other second and third and fourth and fifth chances.

Until one day, with hope, with struggle, we get it right.

A (perhaps) Premature Giving of Thanks

Well, now that I’m no longer terrified, at complete wit’s end, nor totally overwhelmed at all times, sometimes I even have these moments where I actually realize just how easy I’ve got it. Such that I almost even feel bad. For a moment. At just how lucky I am to be in my current situation as a new teacher.

Let me list the ways in which I am fortunate:

1) I’ve got 7 students. I expected to have 13 (I teach in a 12:1:1 special education classroom. For the uninitiated, that means twelve students to one teacher and one paraprofessional). If I had just 1 or 2 more students, the whole dynamic of my classroom could shift substantially — in the wrong direction. Even at the beginning of the school year, I had one student who didn’t show up ’til the second week. That one student alone completely changed my classroom from well-managed to always chaotic.

2) My para is great. She has managed to get all kinds of supplies for my classroom that I would have no idea where to find in my school. She leaves me apples on my desk. She’s been with my students for a few years now, so she knows the kind of trouble they have been in the past, and she continually boosts my frazzled ego to remind me of how much they have been turned around this year.

3) I’ve got a Smartboard in my classroom. Sure, it’s an old one and the projector is askew and it continually gets off-kilter whenever a student knocks into it. I have to lug my old 15″ laptop to and from school each day to use it. But it’s a great asset to have in a classroom. As a technology geek, it makes my life a hell of a lot easier for lesson planning. And even more importantly, it brightens the day of my students. Just the fact that they have a screen to stare at and a technological gadget to play around with is enough to make them slightly more engaged.

4) I’ve got windows in my classroom. This is a luxury not to be discounted.

5) I’ve got most of the supplies I need in the school.

6) My students may constantly harangue, harass, punch, and belittle each other — but they do not stab each other. They do not draw blood.

7) My students are all smaller than me.

8) It takes me less than 50 minutes to get to work.

Compared to some other teachers I know, I’ve got it cake. And compared to others, I’ve got it tough. It’s all relative of course, but the important thing is that I feel like I’ve got a handle on the situation at this point. I’m still strung out and overwhelmed by many a thing each and every day, but I’m beginning to get into a rhythm. I’m in a situation where I am learning just what I need to at just the right balance of overwhelming but not debilitating. And there’s a lot of helpful and positive teachers in my building who go out of their way to share when they have a spare second.

So I’m just gonna leave it at that and keep it focused on the positive. Because that’s what keeps me going each and every day.

Learning

Now that some kind of routine has been established each day, my new work incarnation as an urban public school special ed teacher has settled into a rhythmed pace, and the stress has somewhat eased up. Or at least become a more manageable kind of stress. Before, it was like fight or flight response high strung anxiety, with moments of frustration so intense that I almost cried. Now, I know that I can handle whatever is ahead in my day, even if I’m not fully prepared.

It’s that last half of the last sentence that still gets me, though. The not being fully prepared thing.

The fact is that at some point, I just shut down. I wake up at 5 in the morning and get to work at 7, where I spend my morning preparing my classroom until school starts at 8:30. Then after school I stay until 5 or 6 preparing my lessons. Then when I get home I tie up the loose ends, like printing out my lesson plans and worksheets or filling out IEP paperwork. By 8 o clock, I just can’t focus anymore on it. I need a glass of Chartreuse, a parsing of Facebook, a reality show on TV. That is, if it’s not one of the nights where I go to class for my graduate coursework.

Same thing on the weekends. On Friday after school, I desperately want to just sit there and take care of all of my planning for the next week. But I need to get out of there. And then I get home and I don’t want to think about it anymore. And on Saturday, I don’t want to think about it anymore. So on Sunday, I force myself to spend the day preparing.

But the things that I need to get done, I should be working nonstop. I should be working til 10 or 11 every night, I should be working every day of the weekend.

That’s what I mean by not fully prepared. It’s like I’m getting stressed out because I’m not working hard enough, but if I worked any harder, I would be burnt out.

The good news is, so far all I get is positive feedback from the administration and other teachers. That’s great, and it keeps me going. But at the end of the day, none of that matters. What matters is whether or not I am truly teaching my students and meeting their needs. They are the ultimate gauge of my effectiveness. And every single day I feel like I have failed them. Because I lose my temper, or I mishandle a situation, or I have not been able to differentiate my instruction effectively. They want to learn. They want to succeed. They want me to be the best teacher they have ever had. And I don’t think that I can be that teacher just yet. I just can’t. That’s the reality.

I wish that I was more OCD and more dedicated and just stayed in my classroom til 8 every night organizing, preparing, envisioning. But I can only learn and develop at the level that I am at. I’m the biggest student in my own classroom.

The 1st Month

Well, it’s been a hell of a month. But I’ve come out at the other end with some victories that are helping me to keep my chin up. I think what I am most proud of is that two of the most dominant (as in most loud and aggressive) personalities in my class, who are constantly disrupting, talking, getting up out of their seats, bullying others, and fighting with each other all day long, have been made into friends. Or at least have made a temporary truce. One day during a read aloud, suddenly some fight that had taken place during recess erupted into the classroom, shouting escalated back and forth between groups of students, based on the power struggle between those two aggressive personalities. So I stopped and decided to take it in stride. I listened to both sides and talked about how to resolve conflicts. I drew a feedback loop between two points in a circle, demonstrating how blame and aggression escalate and build endlessly. How there’s only two methods of resolving the situation: you either step forward to reconcile and forgive, or you step away and ignore. But it didn’t resolve anything and they didn’t really get it, because the two kids were still angry with each other.

Two days ago I kept the two kids behind the class when school ended and talked to them on the level. I let them know what I saw in class going on and how they were disrupting other students from learning. And then the real feelings started to come out, the hurts and the misunderstandings. I talked about how they could keep on fighting with each other, or they could act like sportsmen and forgive each other and shake hands. And finally, they did. Even exchanged numbers and agreed to meet online to play some game or something. So that was a success, because their vying for power and attention in class has been a constant problem. Which isn’t to say everything is great now, but it turned a corner in my relationship with them and with the class. I turned from being a hapless disciplinarian into a kind of tribal elder, and that was when I began to gain the vision of how to operate my classroom. Sometimes you have to allow for a bit of surface chaos in order to truly establish control.

According to commentary by others at the school based on these students’ past behavior, I have been successful in creating order in their school lives. They aren’t running the hallways all day long, breaking windows, stealing, or cussing out adults. Which isn’t to say that they are angels by any means, but they do stay in their seats overall, and they definitely don’t leave my classroom unless I allow them to.

Does this mean I am a good teacher? Not even remotely. I can’t even pretend that I am competent. I won’t be any good for at least another few years. I’m embarrassed by the kind of lessons I’ve been throwing together. But I’m doing the best I can under the circumstances, which means that I am flying by the seat of my pants. And it’s an extremely overwhelming experience, which does not even begin to describe how it feels. In teaching learning disabled children, you can’t teach a whole classroom lesson. You can’t tell the class to open their books to page 9 and complete the exercises after reading the passage. You can’t lecture. You can’t operate anything by any traditional means, because it just won’t work. Not that it works with students of any stripe, but it won’t even have a semblance of working with these students. Because they will erupt into chaos at the slightest sense of frustration or boredom. And I have 1 or 2 children who can read fairly fluently or do math relatively well, and then I have students who can’t decode words and can’t subtract. So I need to teach each student according to their level, which means anywhere from kindergarten to 5th grade — and in fact both and all at the same time, because I still have to pull them up their grade level standards for state tests — and that’s not easy to do when most students don’t work well independently and also don’t work well in groups.

The challenges are enormous. Unless you’ve been a teacher or are close to someone who is a teacher, you may not know how hard it is. You may think that teaching is easy, what with summer vacations and holidays. And maybe for some teachers in some schools it is. But for any teacher worth their salt, it’s akin to the kind of pressure and stress that a CEO of a company faces. You have to be extremely organized. You have to be a leader. You have to have intuition. You have to be a drill sergeant. You have to be a coach. You have to be a parent. You have to set policy and constantly tweak systems and structures. You have to plan for a year and plan for each minute. You have to attend meetings, conferences and join teams. You have to negotiate legal documents, compile and assess data, create forms and lessons and newsletters. You have to contact parents and create behavioral intervention plans. You have to organize your classroom artfully and advertise the learning taking place therein. You have be capable of immediate improvisation. You have to be in control every second of every day. You have to perform.

And this is minus the bonuses and societal recognition that a CEO would obtain. But the rewards — the love that you feel from a student who is finally recognized and challenged and feeling successful — almost make all of it worth it. I say almost because most days all I can think of is WTF am I doing? And all I can imagine is a nice quiet life somewhere in a forest where I am not being constantly challenged and harassed and disrespected. But the important thing right now is that my students are beginning to recognize that I am in it for real. They know that I care. And in a world of dislocation and upset and being let down by adults and society, that stands for something.

In the Trenches

There really is nothing that could prepare me for this. The sense of despair, of anger, of being so overwhelmed that the only thing I can do is focus on one piece at a time, knowing that it will not be enough. These children need help. They need help so bad that it is nearly impossible to do anything but scramble desperately in their wake, trying to band aid wounds that were inflicted long before they were born. The way they test me, tearing me apart, deliberately assessing just how committed I am to them. And it’s never enough. Because I’m not ready. And there is no way that I could be ready.

We all know that the first year is hard. But you don’t really understand what that means until you are down in it, in those moments of pure frustration, where you get so angry that you begin yelling in a way that you never thought you were capable of. And that’s when they’ve won, when they’ve wrested the control into their hands and empowered themselves in the only way they’ve learned to.

Oh yes. I have yelled, many times now. I have sent a child outside of my classroom already. And the sense of defeat I feel is untenable.

But every day is a new day. It really is. There are moments where I am soaring off of the eagerness with which they do things that they know they are capable of. They get so easily frustrated. Some of them can barely decode a word. Some of them can barely multiply. And I am trying to understand how to teach them at a level so concrete that I can barely even grasp yet myself.  Because numbers or words on a board can be too abstract. And they are perfectly aware of just how disadvantaged they are, and they feel ashamed.

Most of the time, I’m fighting just to make myself heard.

But I will not back down. Because this isn’t about me. This is about them.

Beginning a New Chapter

So my life now begins in its new incarnation. I finally obtained a job, after long last and many interviews, as a teacher of special education in the Bronx. I was hired on Friday morning. It takes less than an hour for me to get there, which is better than the up to 2 hour commute I had with my last gig, and the staff seems nice enough. But once I was hired, I was shown my classroom, given a set of directions about how to set up my bulletin boards, and suddenly, with a rush of adrenaline fear and stress, I realized that I was completely overwhelmed. See, it’s not like getting hired at any normal job, where they train you and induct you into your new duties and responsibilities.  At least, not this late in the game. Schools starts on Wednesday. That gave me Friday, and this upcoming Tuesday, to try to organize a classroom packed with junk that I don’t even know how to organize or use. As well as to plan my lessons and activities, establish a classroom management plan, and well, just about figure out every single component of how I will run my classroom. Which is kind of hard, since I haven’t ever run one before. And since I don’t even know what my curriculum will be, what my school’s policies are, what my schedule is, who my students are, etc, etc.

So I stood there, alone, in this massive classroom with no A/C, steaming in the sunlight, closets filled with dusty book after book, feeling adrenaline coursing through my system. I just had to start somewhere. So I started pulling stuff out of closets, dusting shelves, trying to figure out what I knew I could use and what I couldn’t. By the end of the day, after not having eaten anything and feeling completely lost out at sea, I finally took off for home, wishing I could have had 2 weeks to set it up instead of 2 days.

During the interview, the administration did its utmost to stress that the students I will have are the biggest behavior problems in the school. They wanted to make sure that I knew what I was getting into. Apparently, there’s a group of them that have established a reputation for creating havoc, cussing out adults, and running out of class. Apparently, simply getting them to come up from the cafeteria and into the classroom on time each morning is a victory.

But the reason I have elected to become a teacher is to be challenged. These are children who have been failed by the system. So they need me to be there for them, to see beyond their behaviors and diagnosed disabilities and into their hearts, to believe in them, and to push them to achieve. And at the end of the day, the only thing that I can possibly lose from the effort is my ego.

In any case, I’m going to be busy for the next few months just trying to keep my head above the water. So it’s a good thing I posted so frequently last month, because I won’t have much time anymore to do so. I will need to use this space for reflection and venting once I get into the swing of things, so keep checking back in, and I will do my best to continue to update. Wish me luck.

Color Awareness

There seems to be a direct link for me between insomnia and self-exploration via blog writing, so I will capitalize upon this opportunity while my sleep cycle is being disrupted. I admit that I have been frequently opening up a blank window in order to begin writing, only to find that I don’t even know where to start. It’s not so much that I have a lack of things to explore, but rather that everything inside there is so densely intertangled that I don’t know what strand is worth picking up to examine. In a sense, these past 2 weeks have been a sort of slow uncoiling of my inner and outer worlds as they seek to realign themselves together from out of their disjoint.

My sudden career shift has me excited, while also nervous. Nervous because I know that there are many aspects of indoctrined cultural training that must still be challenged within me; in dealing with systemic racism and socio-economic inequity, I must be able to explore the notion of myself as a member of a group, rather than as a unique individual. It is a group that I have tried, at times, to pretend that I am not a part of, even as I have partook in the privileges of its membership, however unknowingly. That group is the little box that I generally avoid filling in on questionaires, the one that says Caucasian or simply–and rather yawningly–White. Attach onto that the further group membership of Male, and even further than that: Raised in High Income and Highly Segregated Area, and there you go. That’s my grouping in this society, whether I like it or not.

I have been aware of what it means to be privileged for some time, based mainly on socio-economic status. But the fact is that I grew up in an area where people of color were few and far between, isolated into small, distant enclaves. So it was difficult for me to reconcile my awareness of socio-economic status with racial and ethnic inequity, however much I knew that it existed. It existed somewhere else.

When a white person finally has an experience where they are made jarringly aware of the fact that they are White, and that they are therefore Privileged, it makes them extremely uncomfortable. They want to avoid, at all costs, such experiences. It challenges their belief in their innate value as an individual, as a unique, distinct person whose worth in society is based strictly upon merit. I can remember distinctly one of these first experiences, though I’m sure there were many more before that that I have effectively blocked from my memory. It was while I was traveling alone in Peru, and I was taken to a part of Lima where there was a huge outdoor market of secondhand goods, in the middle of the city downtown. I was told that I needed to have a guide, that I absolutely could not go there alone. I was not to carry any valuables on my person, and to be aware of my belongings at all times. This was heavily stressed to me, to the point that I was extremely nervous before I went, though I am fairly adventurous when it comes to being in sketchy situations. And indeed, when I walked through the streets of that market, I suddenly became shockingly aware of my utter Whiteness. In the midst of a crowd of dark skinned people living in poverty, here was this white foreigner. The very fact of my existence in their midst signaled my privilege; that I could even travel there from so far away. I wasn’t wearing fancy clothes, I wasn’t wearing jewelry. I had worked hard and saved my money to travel there. But I knew that I was privileged just by the fact of my skin, just by the fact of where I happened to be born. I felt like an alien. I became aware of how strange it was that in one context—my normal environment—things like a nice watch and shoes are just things you get to fit in; but here in this place, such things were what made you stand out like a sore thumb.

And so what I was experiencing, essentially, was the idea of what it feels like to be someone defined as a part of a group based on immediate appearance. I was an Other. I didn’t belong there. That feeling of unbelonging stung. It was highly disturbing. We white people don’t typically understand how it is to be viewed as a part of a group. We resent being made to be aware of this grouping, not realizing that it is something that people of color have to deal with every single day.

It makes me uncomfortable even to talk about these kinds of things, just as I’m sure that it makes you uncomfortable to read them. Am I a racist? Certainly not intentionally. But my society is racist, and unfortunately, it has embedded its racism in me such that I have to struggle to remain aware of it in order to call it out on its existence. We like to pretend that everything has been put behind us. Slavery is a thing of the past. Segregation has been outlawed. Etc. And things have certainly gotten better. But when you see the statistics of the achievement gap in education, for example, or the statistics on prisons, or just simply journey to any inner city grotto, it becomes hard to deny the fact that we’ve still got a hell of a long way to go.

So this is, conversely, what I am also excited about in my current career shift. I am excited to be able to be actively involved in working to struggle against this systemic racism, even if that might be only just within myself. Being an educator in a “high needs” urban public school means that you will have to struggle not only with how society views your students, but with how your students and their families view you. Who are you? Are you just another one of them? Or are you a part of a grouping that goes beyond such petty distinctions, inclusive of all of humanity? The thing is, you can’t deny where you have come from, nor what you look like. But you can deny the urge to ignore your identity as a part of a group, and to stop pretending that everything is equal, that all the world is just. Because it isn’t. Not yet. But it could be.

I Wouldn’t Have Had It Any Other Way

Fresh back from a vacay to San Diego with my woman, which included seeing the fam, going to the zoo—which I hadn’t been to since I was a wee lad—and getting a massage for our weary limbs. And eating lots of food. I think I gained 4 pounds, which I will promptly shed now that I am back to the grind. Whilst on aforementioned vacay, however, a glimmer of light suddenly appeared out of the tunnel of my grim existence: I was accepted, nearly a year after applying and being placed on a waiting list, into the NYC Teaching Fellows program. For those not in the know, this is a program that places people without teaching credentials directly into high needs schools and subsidizes their master’s in education while they are teaching. It thus allows highly motivated and idealistic individuals who are looking to transition their careers into doing something for the public good to infiltrate low resource schools. The problem with such a program, of course, would be that many folks quickly shed their idealistic ardor once in such a position, and come quickly to realize the dire reality that is the everyday effort of teaching in the public school system. But I have, by this point in my life maturation process, tempered my idealism with a healthy dose of pragmatism, and I have learned what it is to struggle, to suffer, and to learn from my everyday grind how to overcome, through patience and steady will, those obstacles that are seemingly implacable.

So in other words, I am ready for this. Being as it is that I am an English major, I always had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to be a teacher someday. I worked in the special education department in a high school as an instructional assistant after I graduated college, and I loved it. But I wanted to get some life experience first before I considered pretending to be someone that kids could look up to. And then I ended up, in the drift of life, becoming a housekeeping manager, and then now, a retail store manager. And during that time, the idea of becoming a teacher gradually faded, and I set my sights instead on a career at a different level of influence, in public policy. But then here I was in San Diego, sitting in a coffee shop checking my Yahoo mail, and I discovered that I had been accepted to become a teacher. It came out of nowhere. I hadn’t expected to hear anything back from the Fellows since it had been so long, and they have such a highly competitive applicant pool. It took a few days of processing and discussion before I realized that this is exactly the opportunity that I need, right now at this exact point in my life. And while I had been taking solid steps to apply to a graduate program in public policy for next year, taking an extra couple of years to be deeply involved in influencing children’s lives is not a step away from that. It is learning, rather, exactly how our administrator’s policy decisions can affect our everyday existence.

So I am extremely excited to be involved in this program, and I am aware of the challenges that I will face in the coming year. But I am excited by these kind of challenges, because I really do love working with kids and being able to get through to them. I am excited by the potential to change myself, to hone my capability as a leader and teacher and shed more of my ego, shed more of my past, in order to most effectively teach.

During the summer, instead of moving into part-time work as I had planned and studying for the GRE, I will now be entering intensive training for the program. So in one way, my life is only going to get busier. But in another way, it will also get more enriched, because now I will have somewhat regular hours, and weekends off, enabling me to finally spend time with my beloved. And because I will not be doing part-time work but rather earning a decent living wage, we will now be able to finally move out on our own and get our own apartment, and finally—after 2 years—take our stuff out of storage, where it has been boxed up since leaving Tahoe in ‘07.

It’s interesting how things really do happen just when they need to. My fiancee had been praying—in a non-denominational manner—for me to find a job where I had regular hours, and here it came. And when I applied to the Fellows last year, I don’t know that I would have been ready for it then. The experience that I have gained in my current work as a manager has been invaluable in preparing me for what I will do next. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Venting/Elaborations

Convenience—luxury—the basking in a belated glow of ignorant ease, is made possible by armies out there embedded in the cusp of entrenched effort. They slog through ungodly tasks and hours, enduring what we would not like to think about, so that we can have what we want, when we want it, at cutthroat prices, in vast arraigned heaps of information and packaging.

Today, royalty includes vast swaths of consumers barely cognizant of their status. You, dear reader, are one of them. You are being served like a pagan deity of yore, a pound of nard for your feet and a waitstaff attending to your every vaicarious bowel movement (BM). You eat food grown, trucked, wrapped and served by ancient fossil fuels that took milleniums to become transformable into rapidly wasted high heat energy. You drive down to the market, where all you have to do to meet your meticulously calculated nutritional requirements is pick off some pre-packaged products from the shelf. You work hard for this privilege, yes: but do you work as hard as a farmer of old, the farmer who rose before dawn and worked past sundown to generate a (possible) surplus? You consider such work to be beneath you, behind you, inhumane, third world.

Do I sound critical, post-modern? Am I deconstructing the dynamics of consumerism? Let me be more clear. I think that the world of commerce and capitalism, generated off of the hard labor of man in conjunction with his machines, is just as it should be. I like to work hard. I do work hard. I work perhaps not as hard as our aforementioned farmer, but just about as hard as I can endure, with sleep deprivation, physical labor, and long hours at all times of the night and morning. I feel at times like I am a soldier, off battling enemies for a society that is barely aware that what I am doing is for their benefit. When I come home from the battlefield, no one wants to hear of my stories, nor will understand them, like Hemingway’s soldier in A Soldier’s Home. I am part of an army of people out there working extremely hard so that you and I can walk into a store and buy what we want without applying any thought to it. Providing service.

There is a tremendous amount of work that goes into providing a lifestyle of convience. And hence, an enormous amount of money to be spent and made. Such is capitalism, and this is its bounty. We can criticize it and predict its demise—ala Marx—all we want, but ultimately, this is the fabric of our economy and the defining nature of our existence, for better or for worse.

But I want to be clear about something else. I do need to whine a little bit sometimes, I need to deconstruct a little bit, critique and discern. So that I can go back to working my butt off and earning my hard-earned cash, providing my customers with the best in customer service. I begrudge no mindless consumer their complacent royalty. So don’t begrudge me my need to vent, my need to be recognized in some manner and degree. I don’t like to complain, or even to talk much about work in general. But it now defines my every sleeping and waking moment. I have to discuss it in some way, shape and form. I have to beg for some kind of empathy and understanding in the midst of the grim reality of my exhaustion.

How long can I do this? How long can I last? Like the soldier who keeps wanting to go back to the front even after his leg is blown off and his mind is frayed, there is something addictive about being pushed beyond your limitations. Something in me, the masochist ascetic who also loves running likes the fact that I am being stripped of all prior associations. Lain bare of my weaknesses, honed by a trial by fire of necessity, of everyday effort. As the trepidations of my initial newbie legs wears off, I grow ever more confidant in my capability. I can live on 4 hours of sleep. I can shed my excess body fat. I can survive on the middle of the night subway amidst sketchy perverts and petty criminals.

I am being shaped by the fires of the city. This is what it is to work. This is what it is to commute. This is what it is to mesh into movement, energy, mindlessness. The city, the compressed motion of commerce, renders us nebulous. We move in multiplicities. We are not one, we are many, defined as one by each other. We are clouds, we are spray, we are bullet points littering across the empty space, sentences to something that is unseen, organized by something beyond that could be cold, heartless, and angry, or could be warm, embracing, and loving, depending on what you make it out to be through the fog of your weary hope.

Trivial Mundanities, aka TMs

Trivial Mundanities. Such is the stuff of life. I am beginning to think that underlying much of Thomas Pynchon’s works is an attempt to demonstrate just how much of history is formulated by the forces of completely officially ignored and hidden aspects of existence—strange sexual encounters, anarchist theorems, pot smoke enshrouded pontificating into the night, etc.

Just to give you an example of the current T.M.s of my daily life: I left for work Friday at 12:06 midday in order to begin work at 2 in the afternoon. I then worked til 2:30 at night. I arrived at home, due to some mistakes in getting off at the wrong stations due to construction, etc, at 5:30 Saturday morning. I then again left for work that morning at 12:07, after waking up at 11:30. Blah blah blah. The point of this enumerating on timeliness is that work, in this (a)typical example of another crazy night in my life, can consume—inclusive of the transit time involved in getting to it—a grand total of 17 hours of a day in my life. That particular scenario left me with 6 hours of sleep, though in actuality it was more like 4-5, given the time I spent showering when I got home and the fitful type of sleep that was to be had.

That’s not much of a life outside of work, now, is it?

Just to give a few more T.M. laden tidbits subsequent to aforementioned Hell Night: I woke up, sort of, in the morning, stumbled creakingly into my clothes, fed my screaming parrot, ate a granola bar, brushed my teeth and washed my face, and made my way out to the street, hence towards 1) the shuttle bus to 2) the A train to 3) the E train to 4) the Q53 bus. It being a Saturday, the place wherein I work was slam packed with frantic consumers, and due to some problems we’d had with a fire at our frozen warehouse, our intranet ordering system failing, etc, the day was even crazier and more stressful than usual—and as always, compounded by the fact that I am still new and “learning the ropes” as a manager there. So I didn’t get a break to eat and sit down and drink water until 8 at night.

So I’m sitting here and it’s past 3 am in the quiet of the witching hours and I’m beyond exhausted. It’s my “Friday” however, meaning that I’m now into my weekend, which will consist mainly of sleep and attempts to pretend that I’m not going back to work again soon, very, very soon.

It’s funny that I have been for so long wishing to put the “car culture” of California behind me, and here I am, fulfilling my ambition, logging in my plentiful hours within the New York MTA system, breathing in its subterannean fumes. I spend most of that time reading my library books while listening to my MP3 player—which may have just died actually (I haven’t had to time to analyze the situation: does it just need to be hit, recharged, taken apart, plugged in, re-re-booted, etc? Or is it really, finally, after so many years, Dead?)—closing my eyes and attempting to relax/nap in the hard plastic seats of the subway while my head nods to and fro, or staring at a single point at the ground and trying to pretend that I don’t notice the weird dude who insists upon starting blatantly at me as if I’m some kind of anomaly that does not compute.

The trains late night can really lead to existential crises; you will find yourself sitting in a murky, decaying waterlogged station, the tiles splotched with grime, a vomit spill projecting on the ground in front of the puritanically designed hard wood row of seats, a midget with a black cap and a dragon embroidered denim jacket asking you if you speak Spanish and then saying something completely nonsensical to you in any language, a number of high pitched alarms ringing just slightly off time from each other for some reason that is unknown and obviously unimportant. You sit and wait, and wait, and wait. This could be hell. Trains in other tunnels rumble unseen on their way to somewhere else. Men in hardhats, doo-rags, and florescent vests walk about the station and wave flashlights. A rat mama and her baby scuttle across the tracks. Trash scatters everywhere, so ubiquitous it is unseen.

You get onto a train, finally, and random people of the night settle and are settled into states of disarray, disheveled post party/event states, bodies splayed at awkward ankles, heads nodding, a besotted woman guffawing at her partner’s slurred unfunny statements, an old man across from you pressing his head into the corner of the wall—you think at first that he is crying, and then you grasp the darker truth—his nose is pouring—literally pouring—out snot, and it is dripping down onto the seat, and he is embarrassed, attempting to hide it, trying to flick it over as it pools onto the seat with his finger into the crevice on the side. You pretend that you do not see what is transpiring.

Another man hacks up sputum and spits loudly onto the floor of the train. He stares belligerently at a man wearing an MTA uniform and hat. He spits a number of times more, to make it clear that he is spitting to make a point. He shakes, perhaps with delirium tremens, or in some state of spiritual dishevelment. He is dirty, he has bags of probably useless objects. He is talking to himself, complaining incessantly. Apparently, he has fallen asleep and missed his stop long ago, and blames the MTA system for making him miss his stop. He stares at the man across from him in MTA clothes and shakes, and spits audibly, and then continues to complain. To whom? Is it the Train Gods that he rails against? The forces of the ominous sounding Metropolitan Authority? People in the train pretend that this is not occurring, that they notice nothing, though they see everything.

Ah, the trivial mundanities of my existence.

A Summary of Work

Well, so 10 days and around 100 hours into my new employment, I guess it’s time for an update on how things are progressing.

I’m exhausted. But the good news is that even though I’ve had to quit running due to having no time at “home” other than to sleep and shower, I’ve slimmed down and built muscle mass in my arms, back, and abs. The bad news is that I’ve got bags under my eyes, my left knee is killing me, my cuticles are scabbed up and I’ve obtained several deep cuts on my fingers, and while lifting a stack of bread racks last night I felt something pop in the bones of my neck and it’s been extremely painful since and I’m still trying to ascertain how serious and long lasting the damage may be.

I’ve been thrown to the wolves, so to speak. The 1st day I showed up at my job no one there even knew I was coming (organized this store is not). The billionaire owners are flying over for a site visit this week, and all the managers have been freaking out, and thus haven’t had time to properly train me, let alone even hold a decent conversation with me in order to enlighten me on what the fuck I am supposed to be doing. So I’ve just been working with the part-time crew, following them around trying to figure out how to master the basics of things such as registers, bagging, staging deliveries, restocking, and so forth, and gleaning whatever wisdom the best of the workers can bestow upon me.

As to whether this is a career I really want to dedicate myself to is another question. At the moment, it’s simply a job, and the way the economy is headed, I’m just happy to have a decent one. But it’s hard, physically demanding work, and I don’t know that it’s something I want to build a long-term career out of. But at least the option is there, and the company, beyond the store I happen to work in, is a fairly well-managed one.

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about what my approach to managing people is. Here are some of the principles by which I operate:

• Power tripping is never appropriate; it is a sign of weakness and low self-esteem
• Similarly, never talk down to your workers. Even when they are not performing well
• You are always responsible for your workers performance. Never blame the under-performance or thievery of your workers on them. It is your fault.
• Similarly, never blame a worker’s failure to follow your command on their lack of understanding. It is rather your lack of ability to clearly communicate and articulate your command so that they understand it fully, and your failure, furthermore, to clarify that they have understood, and to make yourself readily available and open to their questions should they have any.
• It is your job and your role to function as a person who tells your workers what to do. They shouldn’t have to think for you. They aren’t paid or positioned to do so. Don’t complicate this relation by obfuscating your commands with excuses, justifications, or apologies.
• Similarly, the reason you are paid more and have a position of authority is because you are supposed to be working (or thinking) harder. You are supposed to be not only working harder, but have a deeper and broader understanding of all aspects of the work of those below you. If you think you have “earned” your position in order to sit back on your laurels and be lazy and arrogant, then you aren’t managing appropriately.
• If you can’t relate to your workers as fellow human beings, friends, and compatriots, then you won’t be able to earn their respect and they won’t work as hard as they could for you. You might be able to earn their fear, but fear only goes so far, and it backfires in the end (other than in the small, confined space of kitchens or classrooms).
• Similarly, don’t pretend to be someone you are not. If you are quiet, then be quiet. If you are obnoxious, then be obnoxious. Whatever you do, just be yourself. If you are forcing yourself to manage according to some idea of the “right” way of interacting with other people, then you are being unnatural, and no one responds positively to someone who is unnatural.
• Similarly, don’t try to mentally confine your workers into a collective box. Every worker is a human being with different backgrounds, thoughts, creative solutions, and analytical capabilities. You have to treat them as individuals, and treat every problem situationally.
• One of the most important and fundamental aspects of good management is integrity. Do what you say. Lead by example. Don’t be two-faced and don’t pretend to like people who you don’t.
• And finally—the most important principle, in my opinion—don’t enforce artificial divisions between management and staff, whether through gossip or action. Obviously, rules and laws exist for a reason. But everyone is a human being. We operate based on incentives and disincentives, and not all of them are related to money. Relating to your workers as equal human beings is probably the most single, important key to being a manager they will respect and want to work well for. They understand that it is your position and role to be a manager. They don’t have to be bludgeoned over the head with that fact. Beyond the role and functions and duties of your position, you are a human being, a person with weaknesses and desires and hubris like everyone else. Allow yourself to be a human in interacting with your workers, and similarly, allow them to be humans. Allow them their weaknesses and foibles. Encourage them, nurture them, and love them. Provide them with a positive and fun work environment. Help them to grow. If you can accomplish that task, then you are indeed a good manager.

New Horizons

Thus gainfully employed, I am now having my true “New York experience”, consisting of long public transit rides (2 trains and a bus) in the wee early mornings, people scattered throughout the trains in all manner of exhaustion (you know, when you pass out on a seat and your neck is all bent and floppy like a dead chickens), working with a diversity of youth and old local folk with heavy accents who hold conversations that could only be held in NYC (I couldn’t even begin to characterize it yet; read Don Delillo’s Underworld to get an idea: terseness, machismo, and tangential reference are its defining characteristics).

After having been stationary for so long, being actively on my feet for 10 hours each day on top of 3-4 hours of transit time has been debilitating to my aging body. I wake up sore all over, barely capable of moving. But by the end of my 1st week, the muscles have been slowly adapting, and I have been surprisingly not as tired as I would have thought during my shifts except at the very end, which is either due to the influence of the eternal florescent lighting, or to 14 years of running. In addition to honing my body, I also seem to be developing an accent and the ability to declaim aggressively in an ironic and self-mocking manner.

It’s interesting to see the other side of the grocery retail world, and to realize just how much hard work goes into supplying the spectacle that is the consummate consumer experience. Behind the facade of colorfully arrayed specialty products lies constant labor and activity. All for your convenience, for your grazing pleasure. You walk somnolently through the diversity of choices demanding your attention, picking and choosing wantonly or stringently depending on your personal restraint and desire. It’s a disturbingly unconscious yet powerful aspect of our industrial daily lives. It’s beautiful and terrifying.

One thing is for sure: you can bring in all the tote bags you want, you environmentally conscious people, but take a look at all the plastic packaging that went into the little convenient product that you just purchased. Our lives are built a little too much, perhaps, on expediency. But who am I to talk? I like having the power and freedom to wander through international markets choosing at will just like anybody else. I suppose the question is whether or not we can sacrifice, as a culture and society, a little bit of convenience in order to reduce the amount of waste created in bringing us the exotic products we desire. But who would want to give up the global market? I love exotic chocolate, fruits, nuts, and other fun and delicious items. The crux of the matter boils down to transport efficiency and product packaging, in addition to sourcing locally, seasonally, and organically as much as possible.

But in the meantime, keep on using your tote bags. I’ll be taking a hard look at the packaging waste issues as I become more deeply embedded in my position.

At Long Last, Employment

I have been unemployed for a substantial time now, and I can tell you that I am extremely excited to go back to work. Certainly, some of that term of unemployment was intentional. My girlfriend and I both elected to leave our idyllic Tahoe mountain lives in search of a new locale, with pit stops in Colombia and San Diego arraigned for the interim. But once I’d got rid of some guns and we’d decided to move on to the biggest city in the United States, I was all hot and bothered to get me some paychecks back under my belt. I figured that it would take some time, but I was not counting on 6 months (that’s not counting the temporary work I did at an environmental expo). I figured that I had a somewhat solid resume, I had practiced fielding inane interview questions, and I was eager and willing. But as time dragged on, and I was rejected from the few opportunities I was given, I became dejected and depressed.

When I started my quest here in NYC, I actually came quite close, initially, to landing an amazing and challenging job at Columbia University. I was green, at that time, in interviewing, but I think I impressed them with my energy. They also liked my stories about chasing bears in Tahoe. But I didn’t have quite the administrative experience to land the position. I think I would have gotten it had I been more prepared for interviewing, but at that time I was still new to the process.

Another job interview for a law firm, the boss took me out to lunch, and he basically told me he liked me and that I just had to iron out the details with the HR lady. For some reason, she took an immediate disliking to me, probably because I corrected her on an e-mail mistake she had made (she sent me an email intended for her boss in which she was asking him about what he thought of me), and I never heard back from them after sending them my college transcripts, which are admittedly underwhelming—but that was 7 years ago, folks. C’mon.

Another job interview for a bar which has a mechanical bull as it’s (only) feature in drawing drunken crowds (yeah, classy joint right?), the guy asked me about 5 questions, one of which was: “So let’s say you walked out this door right now, and there was a starving cat and a starving dog outside, and you could only choose one to save. Which one would you pick?” Color me confused.

Another interview process was so extensive that I interviewed with 5 different people over the course of a month and a half, and had to do a 15 minute presentation and writing exercise as well. I did alright on the interviews, I think, but at some point in the journey, one of the head haunchesses of the joint determined that she didn’t like me. This point seemed to coincide with when I introduced her to my blog address (with caveat included, mind you). I also misspelled her name in one of my thank-you follow up letters. Not sure which one of those missteps pissed her off, but oh well.

The job which I have finally landed puts me right back squarely into the service industry. But to be honest, after the process of fake ass interviews with fake ass people, I’m more than happy to be working with folk who are down to earth, straight-forward, and hard-working. I’m working for a reputable company that retails products I can stand by because I’ve been shopping there since I was a youngster in San Diego. They treat their employees decent, the people are fun, and best of all—I can wear pretty much whatever I want. So I can put aside those fancy button-downs I’d acquired for job hunting and go back to the kind of “whatever” wear I’d been sporting in the mountains for the last number of years. Sweet.

The hitch? Transportation is going to be a bitch to my starting location in Queens. Especially when I get off at 3 AM and the ‘A’ train runs local. And on top of that, the shifts are 10 hour days, with the shifts changing from late to early throughout the week, such that I will lose sleep. It’s going to be physically taxing.

But you know what? I couldn’t be more thrilled to get back to work. I like working hard. And I see the long train and bus rides as an opportunity to get some reading done.

One of the things that resonated with me in some of the speeches from the recent Democratic National Convention was how they talked about the “dignity” of having a job. And I can say that, yes, no matter how much we might idealize leisure time, the fact is that not having a job (in the absence of a trust fund) sucks. It’s demoralizing. Yes, I know, I’m going to look back and reminisce wistfully about all the free time I’ve had throughout this job hunting process, about all the hours of mahjonng, library books, and running wantonly through the park. But when you don’t want to spend any money, you can’t really enjoy yourself all that much, especially when you don’t even have a space to call your own, and you’re sharing a twin bed. Bitching and whining, I know, I’ll stop.

I’m grateful to be employed. Grateful to be working my touchous (well-shaped from running hills now) off. And to all you folks out there who are currently unemployed and looking desperately for work, I feel you.

End note: Let’s just get Barack Obama into office so that we aren’t losing even more jobs to failed policies, OK?

Dirty Hands, Clean Mind

You’ve formulated these full, glossy lit pictures of perfection in your mind. You’ve established how you believe the world should be. You’ve determined how you want those you love to be. And now you find yourself putting up walls between yourself and reality, constantly on retreat, the ebbing colors of your idealism flowing into the eroding moat outside your acceptance. You hold on tight to your imagined versions of who you love, as they slip away invisibly from between your bestowed masks and costumes like a greased pig. You clutch at ghosts, you cherish empty husks, you bed with demons. You dig yourself in deeper, unaware of how alone you have become, how lonely, how lost, how stranded.

Those who love you become your enemies. They talk about you behind your back, unable to confront you with a reality that you can’t accept. There is no possibility of change, no potential for a different outcome, until you’ve come to the end of your own rope. Until you are ready to reach out from behind the walls of your idealism and step back into the world that exists beyond your limited desires. Until you drop your selfish ego and accept your diminutive status within the world. Until you drop the burden that you have created and free yourself to become involved.

To become involved in the nurturing and growing of living things, you must get dirty. You have to struggle, get down onto the ground on your hands and knees, work at the earth, sweat into your clothes. There is no easy way to create beauty that will survive apart from you.

There is nothing wrong with being a perfectionist, with being an idealist, with wanting the world to change, with being angry and bitter with the way things are. But if this idealism is preventing you from becoming effectively involved in your own life, then it is just as dangerous as greed, just as dark as blood shed by warfare. In order to act, a thousand other potentialities must be destroyed. The question is: is this action the right action? Is this involvement the right involvement? These are the things that frighten you. These are the things that hold you back. While your plants are withering. While reality grows ever more desperate, more detached, more inclined towards despair. The real question is not right or wrong; the real questions are: how selflessly can you act? How fully involved can you be?

If you can give yourself completely, then there are no questions.

Dirty your hands in the challenge of your world. It is best, of course, to think and choose the best course of action. But how many times have the options only become apparent after you have already committed yourself? In the streamline of successive moments, the right way will become manifest. You must believe this. You must have faith in what is beyond yourself of which you are but a part. You can’t out-think the physical manifestations of the universe. You can’t formulate a perfect philosophy to encompass each and every moment. You can only open yourself to learning, like a child. In response to reality, you will know what is the right way to act.

Open yourself to the suffering transparency of the light. Break down your walls to the invading hordes of the world.

It is only your mind that misleads you.

Organize Your Self

I grew up with my momma cleaning up most of my scattered detritus after me. I’ve never been a terribly messy person, but I certainly wasn’t clean either. I considered myself organized because I would make piles in terms of accessibility: the most recent thing that I had just used would be on top, so I would know where to find something I used frequently.

Since then I’ve learned how to maintain cleanliness and organization. Having girls as roommates for a couple of years has helped, as they would yell at me about being messy until I started cleaning up after myself. Then after working in the housekeeping department for a few years, I developed a higher level of personal standards of organization and cleanliness, because I had to tell other people how to clean, and not only how to clean well, but furthermore why they should want to clean well. I would generally approach this issue from a philosophical standpoint regarding the broader issue of why working hard and applying yourself fully to work–no matter the given task–is a definitive life-skill.

I’m going to take the argument for why working hard is an important capability for everyone to have and broaden that concept a little more to introduce the idea that how we think, act, and organize ourselves in our private lives is deeply and intimately related to how we develop and achieve our goals professionally. This might seem simple to you in concept, but in reality not many people really make that connection. So let me see what I can make of it.

Clean Up, Organize, and Maintain Your Life

Yeah, I know. This is sounding like a self-help, motivational thing all of a sudden. But sometimes hearing it from other people is refreshing, because I can tell ya, hearing it from myself is refreshing. Look, you need to clean up after yourself. And I’m not just talking about your dishes or your clothes. I’m talking about behind your couch, behind the toilet, underneath the sink, those boxes full of junk in the attic. Every inch of living space that you leave to fester unattended is representative of a space within yourself. If you have a tendency to hoard things and allow them to pile up until it overruns your living area, then guess what? Chances are quite good that you allow emotional baggage in your life, both professionally and personally, to build up until they affect and infect your everyday existence as well.

Obviously, there’s differing levels of maintenance required, dependent on high and low traffic areas. But it’s all ultimately part of a whole. You’ve got to get a handle on the whole thing in order to know that you are on top of it, and the only way you can do that is by starting now in tackling all the areas that you’ve been pushing away and allowing to sit unattended. Once you’ve done a “deep clean”, or “spring clean” or whatever you want to call it, then you can settle back into the daily routine of doing your dishes, picking up your clothes, vacuuming your carpet, etc, and simply doing semi-deeper cleans periodically. But every single space, outer and inner, top to bottom, must be accounted for if you want to get your life in order.

Don’t believe me? I don’t got no psychology degree, but I can tell you that cleaning (please only use non-toxic cleaners!) is indeed therapy. We reflect our living environments. There are some things that we can’t control, like the guy on the subway who curses us for no good reason, or the pinecone that fell on top of our head right as we walked underneath it. But in the areas of our lives that are under our control, it is imperative that we empower ourselves to organize and maintain those areas in order to allow ourselves to develop.

I’m not saying to be OCD about it. But I’m letting you know that allowing your baggage to build up and sit for years in a corner is equivalent to effectively blinding yourself to your own problems, even as they culminate to become a visible monster, visible to everyone except yourself.

This baggage, this junk, this dirt, mildew, mold, mice, and other assorted benefits of laxness will manifest itself in your life in terms of your relationships and work life as well. You will be the person who never moves upward in job responsibility, who never moves forward in a relationship. You will be the person who wants to ignore their own hand in their failure to achieve. You will be the person whose computer runs so slow that it’s basically an Apple IIe in boot time.

Present Yourself Well to Everyone

We like to think that when it comes to friends that we can let our guards down and just let it all hang out, without being judged or condemned. But in fact, it is often our friends that are our harshest critics–for the very reason that they have greater insight into our lives and how we live it. Unfortunately, our friends don’t often want to tell us straightforwardly their criticisms, and so we rarely get the feedback from the people that are best capable of giving us that feedback. Instead, we get that critical feedback from strangers or hostile acquaintances, and by then, we aren’t really positioned to listen to them.

It’s important that we present ourselves well to everyone, from strangers to family members. Everyone judges. It’s human nature. We aren’t saints–we use our brains and our eyeballs and we compare and contrast other people with ourselves. With friends and family members, we CAN let our guards down, and we know that we can always come back to open arms. But only to a certain point. You see, if you keep acting like an inconsiderate slob or snob around a loved one, at some point, they will get fed up with it. And no matter how much someone may like you for your wit and company, they will probably not recommend you to their employer when you are looking for a job if you walk around all day with the crack of your ass showing. You can’t take your friends and family for granted. In fact, you shouldn’t take anyone for granted. You should treat every single person in your day with the same respect. Because it all comes back to you.

And another point here is that appearance is related to integrity. That ties in with my overall theme, which is that your personal life ties in intimately with your professional life. The way you look, the way you talk, the way you think. How you lead your private life has repercussions on the way your interactions on the street and on the job go. Call it karma, call it do-unto-others-as-they-would-do-unto-you, call it what you like. Just recognize that everything you do is related to everyone else, and that people may not be able to see who you are in your fundamental being, being as it are that they are not saints, don’t really give a shit about you, and have enough to deal with in their own lives, BUT, even completely random strangers on the street get a vibe from you. People in your workplace get a feeling from the way you talk, the way you carry yourself. Your friends know you for certain qualities. Your family jokes about how you always did this and that as a tyke. Who you are and what you do are unimpeachably interrelated.

Take All Criticism Into Consideration

I kind of went into this point a little bit above when I talked about how even the closest of friends can be your harshest critics. But sometimes a complete stranger will criticize you. Sometimes it will be your boss at work. And you will want to say “fuck you” and disregard everything they said to you. And that’s completely understandable, and in certain situations, that is exactly what you should do. However, there are also many times when you should be listening. Criticism, especially when it occurs on the job, should be taken as constructive, even when it sounds harsh and demeaning. Some managers simply aren’t good people, aren’t good managers, and don’t know how to communicate well with different people. But they are trying to get something across. And sometimes your friends, family, and even complete strangers are as well.

Taking a criticism of yourself into consideration does not weaken you unless you feel that it is so valid that you can’t see any way of answering it. So you need to take it head on. Let yourself be challenged. Take every criticism as a lesson from a teacher, and see how you can use it to develop yourself and make yourself stronger.

It’s like on American Idol. Paula Abdul thinks she’s everyone’s friend. She’s not. Simon Cowell is the one to listen to. He is honest, to the point of being brutal. If you did a shitty job, he will tell you that you did a shitty job, while Paula blathers on about dreams and how wonderful you are. If the contestant listens to Paula, and shuts out Simon, then he/she is most likely just about to be voted off the show. Simon may be harsh, but he is attempting to provide constructive criticism that should be taken into consideration if the artist wants to develop and progress.

Sometimes people just don’t phrase it to you in the right ways so that it can slip in past your ego. So you need to just drop your ego sometimes and really listen to other people when they critique you. Let yourself be judged. Learning to wade through other people’s problems and picking out what is of use to you and what drags you down is how you grow. Often in the midst of the bricolage of someone elses’ jealousy, desire, rage, and anguish is a gem of constructive criticism that is waiting to be taken into your consideration and worked on.

Alright, so I think I am just about cleaned out on any further burning nuggets of wisdom that I feel the need to bestow on you right now. I’ll plop out any new ones as they come along. I’ve still got a lot of growing and learning to do myself, but I’ve been thinking about these particular things that I’ve learned as I’ve been coming up against extreme change in my life, both professionally, emotionally, spatially, and otherwise.

Resumé Writing

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately working on resumés lately, both my own and my girlfriend’s, and I’ve learned a little bit about resume writing since then. I’ve never liked looking for jobs, most notably due to the self-advertisement that is required in the process. I don’t like having to sell myself, and I’ve never really put much effort into writing my resume in the past, so it’s not surprising that I haven’t heard back from many employers now that I’m applying for more challenging jobs on the other side of the continent. So I’ve been doing my homework and putting in the effort to really beef it up and present myself well to a potential employer.

One thing I’ve learned is that you can—and should—be creative with the format of your resume. There is no reason to present yourself according to a template in your word processing software, nor according to what “experts” might say you should do. There’s a lot of good information out there, of course, but you’ve got to take it all with a grain of salt, because ultimately, a resume is about presenting you, not anyone else. Like a wedding or an essay, the format of a resume exists to convey specific information. Within that format, you can be as creative or as traditional as you like, just as long as that information is effectively and powerfully conveyed.

Another thing I’ve learned is that making bullet point lists of your job descriptions and functions is just as boring for a potential employer to read as it is for you to write. They don’t really care if you had to answer phones or input data into a computer: they want to hear something interesting that you accomplished or contributed. Even if you’ve just been a shoe salesman or a clerical monkey, you’ve contributed a lot more to the success of your company than you might think. You have to pull out your viewpoint to the bigger picture: think of the numbers that can help convey what you’ve done, such as the revenues that were pulled in while you were a sales rep, or the amount of applications of students that you processed, etc. You want to convey not just what you did but what you were a part of.

When I help people with revising their essays and personal statements, I always make sure that any piece is written to assume that the reader knows nothing about what is being discussed, even in specialized fields like law, business, and medicine. I believe in describing things lucidly enough so that a “layperson” can get the gist of what is being conveyed. The more obtuse and jargon-filled a piece is, the more likely that it’s a bunch of bullshit. I’ve found that the same principle applies to a resume: never assume that the reader of your resume will read between the lines for you. Clearly explicate your accomplishments and contributions so that anyone can understand them and be suitably impressed.

And this is not easy to do. It’s not really the kind of thing I enjoy applying myself towards. But I’ve realized that if I’d like to get a job that I’m really into, I’ve got to put a lot of work into it. I’ve realized that I knew that my resume was weak, I just didn’t know how to approach it; after all, it’s not something you learn to do in school (though you should). So I’ve been looking at examples and formats and getting a feel for what works and what doesn’t.

Another annoying and time consuming process is that you should target your resume for each specific job you are applying for. Each employer is looking for certain things, which they convey through keywords in their job posting. The “experts” on resume writing say that you should cut and paste these keywords into your resume, but I feel that can be a bit conspicuous and even desperate. I think it’s just as effective to take the meaning of those keywords and elucidate it in new ways through synonyms and arrangements according to your own particular and unique experiences.

It’s a lot harder to create a good resume than one would want to think. It takes a lot of time, brainstorming, concentrated effort, and endless revisioning. But you’ll KNOW when you’ve written a good one. If you don’t feel confident about your resume then there’s probably a reason for it. It’s like writing a poem or story that will hold up to the minute scrutiny of a highly critical academic audience—it’s got to be hewn out of stone, every surface holding just the right amount of light to convey a whole perfect piece of understanding.

Brain Drain

I feel the need to post some explication of my recent reticence in updating my blog, as it is not due to any lack of will or desire for writing, but rather from my energy being sapped by the tedious demands of actively looking for a quality job on the other side of the continent. It has been awhile since I’ve had to buckle down and scour the earth for jobs, and I’d forgotten just how draining and depressing it can be. First, you’ve got to update the resumé, stretching down deep into your coffer of conventional business verbs (“initiated,” “implemented,” “directed,” “spear-headed,” “supervised,” “ensured”, “experienced”) to somehow compel interest in a medium of disinterest. Then you’ve got to spin your monkey-see-monkey-do capabilities into an attractive and concise cover letter for a job that looks to be out of your realm of experience based simply upon the appearance of your scattered employment history. All while sifting through the shallow yet murky realms of job search sites, which are like walking through a red-light district in the night—bright, neon calls for easy jobs that promise stay-at-home ways to make money. Somewhere scattered in the midst of these spam offers for spam jobs lie some real offers, which are generally administrative office work. And then, maybe 2 times a week, a job posting that is genuinely sort-of exciting, though most likely inundated with resumés more enticing then yours. You wade through the listings all day long, and are happy if you’ve found one job worth applying for. It’s draining because it feels like you are putting a lot of work into something that’s leading nowhere.

On top of this, I’ve also been doing the tedious research into the surprising windfall of my grandpa’s antique gun collection, which included a trip to my first gun show yesterday. I have to admit that I was a little bit disappointed: I expected lots of patriotic pasty folk with full beards and confederate flags, but it was more like a flea market with a few guns scattered here and there. Some normal looking genteel couples wandering amidst mostly hobbyist looking kind of men, with of course a few scaries swaggering about. I didn’t glean much info from a pair of old antique gun selling salts, but I did come away with a bottle of scotch bonnet hot sauce. Still much more research to be done, which may require the enlisting of an expert appraisal.

All of this on top of attempting to apply myself, somewhat ineffectively, to studying the math gymnastics required for the GRE, while trying to keep sane while living temporarily with my parents, who are driving both my girlfriend and I up the wall. We may have to just cut our losses and move out east without any jobs and live in cardboard boxes for a while.

Leaving the Workplace

 

In a matter of weeks, I will be leaving the place wherein I have worked on and off for the past 5 years. I’ve developed significantly during this time, both professionally, emotionally, and socially. Some of that is attributable to the place itself: located beside a beautiful and cold 400 ft deep (in spots) glacially formed lake, nestled into the Sierra Nevadas, a wilderness area located next door, surrounded by rocky moraines dense with pine. Bears bumble through and must be chased away, raccoons nest periodically beneath the cabins until captured and relocated, squirrels and chipmunks and mice propagate exponentially and go on daily raids throughout all the cabins, scurrying frantically about on forays for cookies (until we set traps that slaughter large amounts of them; something I’m going to work the rest of my life trying to karmically repay). Most of my development, however, is due to the people that I have worked, drank, hiked, and lived with. A seasonal gig, most people come and go, except for those who work there year-round. But bonds are formed even with the seasonal workers that are there for 2 months. People come from all over, from all kinds of different backgrounds, to work here in California in the mountains. Some people have never gone to college, some are waiting to attend grad school, a few have retired from their professional careers and are just looking to keep busy and have some fun.

The work itself has been trying, both physically and managerially. The organization of the place is haphazard, and the pay isn’t good. But the friendships, experiences, and the discovered inner strength and capability have proven to be invaluable. This last year, I’ve already been spiritually and mentally half out the door, and have only been staying on to save up the moolah in readiness for departure and further exploration. But I don’t regret any of the time and effort I’ve spent here. I don’t regret the terrible emotional experiences I’ve been put through here, the deaths and the drama and the loneliness. I don’t regret the vast number of bathrooms that I’ve cleaned, nor the hernia I’ve gotten surgery for, nor the vast amounts of alcohol that I’ve filtered through my liver.

I met my girlfriend here—something I never expected to occur in a seasonal gig where most people my age come through just to party and have multiple fleeting, shallow relationships. I had no expectations of forming a lasting relationship here, and it was a pleasant surprise to have met her here, of all places. Without searching, without expectation, without the modern quest for the Holy Woman: bars and clubs and on-line sites and speed dating.

Prior to working here, I’d worked a string of office jobs, where I filed stuff, answered phones, sorted mail, input data into the computer, and played Yahoo! dominoes and was bored out of my skull and hated all of it, even though I was paid decent. I thought of work as something to despise and endure. I used to use all of my sick days whenever I got them. Now if I use more than a few hours of sick leave in a year, it’s a surprise. I lift 80 lb buckets by myself. I take a 15 minute lunch break and work over 8 hours. And it isn’t necessarily that my work is gratifying. It’s often stressful and sheer grunt work. It’s simply that I’ve discovered that I like to work hard, I like to keep busy, I like to manage things, maintain organization, look at the bigger picture, see the beneficial result of my efforts. I like using tools, installing hardware, figuring out how to fix problems. I like physical labor, and getting down into the midst of things, working beside my workers, getting to know people and what makes them tick. I also like sitting down and looking at how to change things for the better, and creating a plan of action and a design to implement increased environmental and social benefit.

I’m proud of the changes that I’ve implemented during my time here: I changed over all of our cleaning solutions to non-toxic homemade solutions; I initiated a food-waste composting program; I alerted the head honcho to a number of problems I saw amongst management and with the general communication between management and staff; and a number of smaller little organizational stuff.

So saying goodbye to this place, I feel good, I feel that I’ve taken what I’ve needed for that time in my life, and that this has been a wonderful stepping stone to the future. So stepping into the future, I am confident. I am positive. And I am ready for change.

Composting Trials and Tribulations

So I discovered recently that I’d been mixing up my compost totally wrong. I’d been thinking (or attempting to) of the mix purely in terms of the carbon to nitrogen ratio, and of course, to my decidedly unscientific mind, this didn’t really give me much of an idea. I talked with the designer of my system for a while, and also did some more research on-line (and found this great page on it), and realized that I hadn’t been quite accepting the full concept of what I need to add to all the food waste I was putting into it: I need to add at least two times the amount of “bulk material” to mix with the food waste so that the pile could breathe and start the composting activity. I also hadn’t been mixing it up appropriately; I was simply layering, and thinking that because I had put a layer of shredded cardboard and newspaper on top and the cut the smell down, that that was enough.

So two key concepts I’ve gleaned thus far: mix well, and double the amount of “bulk material” to food waste, which in the case of the inputs I have, are sawdust and horse manure. I had been having putting way too little bulk material, and the whole thing was just a wet, disgusting mess, infested with flies and with squirrels and chipmunks and mice circling around it, and bears sniffing around in it. So I had to spend a whole day long of shoveling out this mess, re-mixing it with horse manure, and then shoveling it back into the bin. This was tedious and somewhat gross work. I was blowing horse manure out of my nose for the rest of the night.

Now the bin is full, with all the bulk material, and I started the aerating blower. All seemed well. It didn’t smell as much, and the flies didn’t seem to be propogating in it, although they were still lingering all about the area. The temperature went up to 110 degrees, although still not at the ideal 130 degrees where I wanted it.

Just when I thought I had this thing finally mixed right, a bear went in last night and knocked off the front panel and sniffed around in it. I had thought all that manure would discourage a bear from bothering with it, but apparently not. This is a big set-back for me, firstly, because I will probably have to re-shovel all that shit all over again, and a secondly, because my whole purpose in doing this was to demonstrate that composting could be effectively done at our mountain resort, without causing problems with vectors.

So it’s back to the drawing board for me. I have to determine if the reason was simply that I hadn’t yet placed a top barrier of “biofilter” on top of the pile, in order to keep it from stinking (a mix of finished compost and bulk material), or if I still hadn’t mixed enough bulk into the whole pile. Either way, it’s still discouraging. However, I’m going to get the pile going again, put a biofilter on it, and then keep monitering the temperature, maybe messing with the aerating times, and see if I can’t get it fully composting at high heat the way it should be.

This is what learning is all about, of course. Getting down in the muck and struggling.

Composting at Work

I’ve started a composting process of the food waste at my workplace using a bin that is passively aerated. It’s kind of a prototype, as I am figuring out what kind of mix of inputs will work, how much moisture it needs, etc. During the summer, our kitchen produces a huge amount of food scraps which gets bagged up, thrown into a room, then later heaved up by staff onto our dump truck, driven into town, dumped at the refuse center, where it is then sorted and transported out of the county to a landfill 70 miles away. It’s a ridiculously inefficient process of dealing with waste that generates yet more waste.

The small bin I have currently set up will fill up within a week, so obviously it isn’t anywhere near cutting much waste out. However, once I’ve demonstrated that it works and have figured out the proper mix and all that, I’m hoping that we can expand the operation to cut out a more significant chunk of waste.

The whole science and art of composting consists of a proper ratio of carbon to nitrogen, which ideally should be around 30:1. We have a vast amount of cardboard and newspaper on-hand which I will shred to serve as bulk carbon (further reducing the transport of those materials into the recycling center in town), as well as sawdust and, every now and then, pine needles. The food waste supplies the nitrogen, as well as moisture. I will also pick up horse manure from stables down the road and mix that in there as well to provide essential microbes. It remains to be seen what kind of compost such a mixture will produce—it may be somewhat deficient on nutrients as my main sources of carbon are bland.

I’ve learned already that I need to have my carbon sources on hand and ready to mix in with the food waste as it comes in, because it comes in fast. The amount of scraps that comes out of the kitchen is overwhelming. We’re not even talking about the waste that comes off of guest plates; we’re just talking about scraps that come from food prep in the kitchen.

So it’s been a learning process for me, but I’m excited to actually finally be putting my hands in the dirt after having come up with the proposal this past winter. Trying to figure out how to successfully enact a composting operation here hasn’t been as easy as it sounds, as while composting itself is fairly straightforward, when you begin talking about composting an institutional amount of food waste in enclosed in-vessel systems with a very small amount of space (must be enclosed cuz we’ve got bears, racoons, squirrels, and mice roaming about), then suddenly you’re talking about an initial start-up fee of $200,000 for a manufactured system. This obviously wasn’t going to happen.

After posing this unique situation to several different manufacturers of industrial sized composting systems, I was pointed to a small company called O2compost, which has a very simple but effective passive aeration bin design for horse manure composting. As a prototype for an eventual larger system, I am using one of their micro-bins to demonstrate that composting is possible, cheap, and saves resources and money. Hopefully on next year’s capital budget we can expand the system to compost as much food waste as possible, if not all. Unfortunately, however, I will no longer be working here at the time, as I’ve put in my notice already that I’m leaving at the end of October. Then I’m going to Colombia for 2 months, and then . . . God knows. But I’m keeping my fingers crossed that since I’ve already done the research and groundwork for starting the composting system here, that whoever comes after me will have the initiative to get the process going. After all, it makes sense on all levels: both to the bottom line, as well as to staff satisfaction. Nobody likes seeing so much waste (nor heaving the heavy bags up into a truck) every single day.

Homemade Non-toxic Glass Cleaner with Hydrogen Peroxide

I’m proud to say, after some experimentation with different formulas, that I’ve developed a no-streak household non-toxic glass cleaner. The one I had been using prior, which is all over the internet, was a vinegar/water combination with a little bit of cornstarch thrown in. This worked just fine for me, but apparently most people are just too lazy to use the arm muscle to rub all of it in so that it doesn’t streak. So I set myself the task of developing a non-streaking glass cleaner, with the most minimal input of materials possible. One formula I tried was with rubbing alcohol, and this one worked exceedingly well, but I had 2 problems with it: 1) it smells like rubbing alcohol!, and 2) the ratio of isopropyl alcohol to water just seemed too high to me to make it cost effective on an institutional level in comparison to my original formula.

The second formula I tried, and this one was my own concoction, was with hydrogen peroxide and water, with a pinch of Dr. Bronners liquid castile soap thrown in. This worked well, and it smelled pleasant as well, so I fiddled around with it to see how little hydrogen peroxide I could get away with putting in there and have it still be effective.

The resulting formula is as follows:

2 cups hydrogen peroxide (normal over-the-counter 3% stuff)

1-2 drops of Dr Bronner’s liquid castile soap

1 gallon of water

Modify according to your dispensing system, of course. If you are putting directly into a spray bottle, that would be an 8-to-1 ratio.

It sprays a lot of liquid onto the mirror or glass at first appearance, but even if you don’t rub it all in, it all evaporates without any streaking in the test trials that I have done so far.

The formula may require some tweaking; I’m going to perform some more tests on it before switching over all my 55+ glass cleaning spray bottles.

Accepting Chains

Your primary instinct, when caught in a frame, is to attempt to escape. Ever notice how normal people, if confronted with a video camera, shy away, as if held at gunpoint? This applies to any attempt to capture, to confine, to reduce any human being. We shrink. We shy. We hide. We are afraid that what will be caught is not us. It will be our greatest fears, our ugliest indefinitions.

This is why we are drawn to the stars of Hollywood. They are captured by the camera eye with poise, beauty, and supreme confidence. We all know that this is not an easy thing to do, to be confronted by the cold observant eye of the screen, the bullet point precision of the pixels. To be taken out of context, to be simply image, simply surface, to be only what is given and shared and defined.

In our lives, our first instinct is to run when we feel caught. I feel this at my job on a frequent basis. Caught by the limitation of my similarly stunted peers, by the need to project a professional image, by the performance of a role that is not always clearly defined. I want to run, to leave, leave it far behind me. I work hard without many people understanding how hard I have to work. One of the hardest parts is in having to distance myself from my workers in order to perform my function as a manager. Sometimes this entails disciplinary verbiage, or the delegating of unsavory tasks. And sometimes I can get so caught up in my duties that I forget that I am not really that person, either. That in fact, the best way to manage others is to simply maintain my own personal integrity.

To see how you appear to others, fully, is painful sometimes, when you have been hiding. It hurts to realize just how distanced you’d become from yourself. Just because you are too busy performing. Too busy playing into some role that you were given. That was already predefined.

It’s too easy to blame others for your insecurity or inability to be flexible. You could say that the stringency of continuous gossip, the limitations of your function within the whole, the economic confinements of your small salary, the regressive mentalities and pettiness of your peers, etc, etc, are holding you back. That the staff ain’t working hard enough. That the weather is shitty. That you are developing cancer in some remote and cornered part of your body. But all that can really be said is that you are not developing. That you are not allowing yourself to awaken, to grow, to extend your boundaries beyond blame, beyond fear, beyond bitterness.

Because every little thing is this world is a mere form, a mere shell, a role, a given function, a time-spatial placement, a part of a whole, a piece of the universe. It is what fills, what flows, what connects, what expands, what moves, what transcends that truly defines what is, not the lines, walls, and titles. The energy that sparks to fly across the vast and petty emptiness between synapses. A symphony, a sonnet, a wedding, a sentence: these are all hollow forms that are defined not by their structure but by their content. By what feeling flows through their spaces. A house contains conscious thought and space. Designed intelligently, it can hold power beyond wood, beyond stone, beyond itself. By uniting with the wind, the sun, and the earth.

It is more than what you are given. It is in what you bring to it. In what energy, what love, what fresh hope and positive vision.

I don’t want to keep hiding. My job might suck sometimes, but I’m going to keep exploring myself within it as long as I am working it, until I am truly ready to leave, to expand, to move, to flow. Not because I have to. Not because my money is made from it. Because I care about myself.

Things to be Excited About at Work

I don’t usually discuss my work or my workplace usualmente aquí, pero tengo que porque I am very excited about some things in the year which are manifestly about to occur. After a period of personal study in the matters of permaculture and sustainable ecological design, I suddenly thought, why not attempt to apply these concepts to the beautiful environs where I am employed? It was one of those moments, wherein a horizon is unveiled that had never before been perceived, that is wider, deeper, and yet still inclusive of all of what has come before. Why not actually attempt to unite what I am actually deeply interested in with where I work?

So here are the coming attractions: I have made 2 bathouses in which to provide penthouse suites for bats, because during the summer mosquitoes are an everpresent nuisance: one bat can consume 1,200 mosquitoes within an hour. Much more effective than a zapper. Here’s me standing next to one of my bathouses:

Also, I have built 8 birdhouses, specifically built to house native birds to the region: chickadees, bluebirds, nuthatches, swallows, and northern flickers. I will mount these next week in the surrounding forest to further encourage birds to populate the region.

Throughout the year, in conjunction with these actions, I will plant native pollinator attracting species, such as phacelia, pennyroyal, lupine, larkspur, columbine, aster, goldenrod, and penstemons; and also plant bird attracting shrubs, such as thimbleberries, serviceberry, chokecherry, elderberry, and mountain ash.

The idea is to condense and enhance the natural wildlife of the area. To further the biodiversity. To foster the interrelationships of insect, bird, bat, plant, and man. To educate and enlighten those who come to visit on the deep webs that interlink all species into verdant existence.

Also on my agenda is the goal of eventually building a compost system to compost all of our food waste, and thus to have a wonderful medium to build up the soil of the area with—currently, our soil is just thin residual soils from glaciation, with a lot of exposed granodiorite rock, and dense pine trees and some dry shrubs like tobacco brush (great tinder for forest fires, those). My eventual goal will be to build up a moist, nutrient rich soil, with dense interplanting and abundant wildlife, even in the midst of invasive humanity.

In my particular department, I am also converting completely to all non-toxic solutions. There is absolutely no reason, I’ve discovered, to use a solution that is even remotely toxic. Vinegar is the most toxic you need to get. I am also converting all of our lighting to Energy Star rated compact flourescent lighting.

I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that projecting a “green” image is fast becoming trendy amongst businesses. It’s not because there are more hippies in upper management, or because suddenly corporate humanity is growing a conscience. Rather, it is because sustainable business practices not only work to benefit the environment, but because sustainable business practices save more money after initial investments, foster positive employee and guest and community relations within the business, and push the business to the forefront of a new market and economy. It just makes sense, basically.

Fuel Reduction

Winter hath begun. We’ve been doing a “fuel reduction” project after the facility closed with the remnants of staff that remain, which entails walking through the woods with handsaws, clippers, and polesaws, and essentially gardening the forest. We gather the branches and dead trees and make piles and burn them. Because the forest is now a dense thicket of white firs and brush set amidst the older junipers, incense cedars, and white pines. Originally, back in the day when the natives came to this region for their summer vacations, forest fires were a cyclical process that cleared, weeded, and returned organic materials to the soil. The pines and cedar trees had ample space to grow. Now forest fires are cataclysmic events, spreading rapidly and destroying whole forests, rather than a small percentage of its undergrowth. All because Smoky the Bear, in his infinite wisdom, decided that fires, all fires, were bad, bad things. So for years the forest service did all it could to prevent all fires from erupting, thus effectively creating a forest dense with fuel. The natives, of course, understood the necessity of natural fires, as they understood many other simple things through observation. The industrial “revolution” and its subsequent detachment of humanity from nature created a mentality of manifest destiny, in which men decided that all of nature lay underneath their jurisdiction, that in fact nature needed to be controlled, regulated, and harnessed. Because they thought the forest couldn’t regulate itself.
Well, so now we seek to emulate what was once completely natural. We must prune the trees, thin the shrubs, collect all the dead materials and burn them. Because if we don’t, all that shit is just waiting to go up, and take our homes, and the entire forest, along with them.

There is always a tendency, in civilized (repressed) societies, to delimit everything to one-dimension, in which it is either totally bad or totally good, black or white. Complexities, subtleties, many faceted aspects of things are destroyed in our obsessive demand for appearance and immediacy. Doesn’t really matter what’s right or wrong, as long as we are reassured that it is right. Polls have demonstrated time and time again that George W. Bush strikes (or used to strike) a key note in the populace due to his “integrity”–meaning that he sticks to a plan of action, even if it is a completely misguided plan of action, even if the original intent behind the plan of action is false, even evil. In other words, we don’t care about true integrity, only the appearance of integrity.
Going back to the subject of forest fires, we painted all fires as “bad,” and so sought, quixotically, to put all forest fires out as soon as they began. And thus created a situation 20 times worse than anything we could have imagined. Through the attempt to control something that was already self-regulatory and natural, we created imbalances that now lead only to greater disaster and destruction.
I had talked earlier about how this misguided idealism, this noble attempt to control all nature and eradicate all bad, is leading to problems in the field of healthcare, such as antibiotics being rendered nearly completely ineffective. This misguided idealism is rampant everywhere in our efforts, whether it is the effort to make pest resistant or drought resistant food crops, or the effort to eradicate crime. We label things, one-dimensionally, as “bad,” and then operate based on these one-dimensional assumptions, while the actual reality grows ever more dire and destructive due to our own destructive, limited perceptions. Because–as any policeman or politician could tell you–things are much more complicated than they appear.

More on this topic later.

Green Cleaning Solutions

As your housekeeping manager, I would advise you to stop buying those fucking toxic chemicals that not only pollute the earth but also burn your lungs and give you a headache and make your skin break out in rashes. I’ve been investigating “green” cleaning solutions, and I came up with a concoction that is easy to make, effective at cleaning, and, best of all, cheap. Alls you got to do is get yourself some Borax, Baking Soda, Dr Bronner’s Castile Soap (preferably peppermint, simply cuz it smell good), and Vinegar.

For my All-Purpose solution, I mix 1/4 cup borax and 1/2 cup baking soda for every gallon of water (preferably warm to mix better), and then I squirt a bit of Dr Bronners peppermint soap up in there, amount is up to you. I then put this lovely smelling and clear admixture into a squirt bottle. It cleans effectively and you can aerosolize it all you want and it won’t kill you.

For glass and mirror cleaning, all you really need is vinegar and some newspapers. Make a spray bottle with 1/2 vinegar, 1/2 water and wipe that shit down with a sheet of newspaper and you’ve got yourself a clean window. Or, alternatively, you can make a slightly stronger solution with 1 cup vinegar and 1/2 cup cornstarch for every gallon of warm water.

I’m switching over to these methods this fall for my housekeeping staff to dabble in, and I’ll see if it works on a grander scale. So far on my test trials it’s worked out just fine. The major problem, of course, in running an institution based on these household cleaners is that the All-Purpose solution won’t do much in terms of killing germs. But I’ve determined that it is just as effective to clean with this solution and then afterwards to spray down the surfaces with a Clorox Disinfecting Spray, which pretty much kills most anything. The Clorox spray ain’t “green,” but I gotta do what I gotta do to kill them germs. But at least I will have achieved the major goal of keeping my workers and myself from breathing in tons of aerosolized chemicals in the small confined space of a bathroom.

Oh, and for bathtub cleaning, use Bon Ami. This is a scouring powder which is non-toxic, and it works really good, especially with a scrub brush in hand.

And since now you’ve got all that Borax, Baking Soda, and Vinegar sitting around, I’ll let you know that those all have multiple household uses. Look it up on Google or Ask.com or something, there’s a lot of info out there.

Another thing I would advise is that you stop using chemicals to kill household pests like ants, roaches, etc.

For ants: spray vinegar around door and window frames and ant trails. They also dislike mint, cayenne pepper, and lemon juice. For ant bait, mix together baking soda and sugar and sprinkle along the cracks along the wall and in doorways. Borax and sugar mix will also work, just don’t place where other animals (or small children) can access it.

For spiders: they dislike eucalyptus oil.

For mice: they don’t like mint. Distill spearmint oil and spray around entryways. You could also just try brewing yourself some mint tea and dropping or spraying that as well.

You see, all those pre-made toxic chemical solutions that you buy in the store are a kind of conspiracy, in a way, just like all the other crap you buy and don’t really need and that creates waste and pollution and general unhappiness and discontentment. It’s a conspiracy of convenience. Making your own cleaning supplies, making your own food, fixing your own stuff–all of this is suddenly almost taboo. It’s like supposedly our civilization is all smart and advanced and we are plumbing the deepest mysteries of the human brain and genomes, etc. And yet we’ve forgotten how to mend our own clothes. We’ve forgotten how to cook our own food. We’ve forgotten what it is to take care of ourselves, and we’ve slowly let corporate convenience dominate our lives. And all it really comes down to is someone else making money off your ignorance and laziness. Sermon over.

Positive Potentiality In Peops

I talk often in my writings of the need for openness in perception, the lack of expectations, such that another human being can exist more fully in their potential, which is ultimately infinite. I write of this often because it is one of my frequent, daily shortcomings in my interaction with strangers. By the way, if you ever feel that my writing is preachy, take it with a grain of salt, because I am not preaching necessarily to anyone but myself. Writing is a way for me to discuss issues and provide myself with advice that normally I can’t distance enough in daily life to see.

Anyway, so in the professional sphere, dealing with rich, complacent assholes is a frequent occurrence. Actually, a lot of them aren’t assholes. They are just weak minded and kind of pitiful in their ignorance of reality. They make a lot of money but they don’t have such basic social skills as courtesy or the ability to hold a conversation with someone outside of their limited social sphere. They drive an SUV mindlessly, without any idea of what cost such a thing might have to anyone else. They have spoiled, obnoxious children who will most likely grow up to be just as dumb and sheltered as they are. They like to power-trip over people who are only courteous to them because it is their job.

I can’t stand these kind of people, and unfortunately I have to deal with them frequently. But the truly unfortunate thing is that out of the numbers of people that I see every day, it is really only a few who are like that. But that few taints my perception of all the rest. And so I end up classifying a whole group of people and writing them off, such that I really don’t give any of them a chance to be anything more than just another moronic, well-off American.

It’s hard, incredibly hard, to shake off negativity once some stranger has been rude to you. I worked as a ticket seller for a gigantic ski resort one winter, and I dealt with a lot of rich to pretending-to-be-rich people who only knew how to be demeaning and dehumanizing to me once they couldn’t get their way. It got to be after a while that I wouldn’t be truly nice or open with anyone at my window, because every individual turned in my mind into a stream of idiots, bitches, and assholes. And everyday, every hour, there would be some idiot to reconfirm that. So I would just be indifferent and cold to all of them.

It’s like that receptionist, you know the one, at the doctor’s office, or that person who you talked about your refund with at the customer service window–that employee who was just outright rude to you, and seemed to derive no pleasure in life except to be rude to you for no reason. We’ve all dealt, way too often, with such a person, and they ruin our day. They are unhappy, bitter people. You know that all they do is go home and then talk shit about people from work.

I’ve been that person from time to time. All it takes is one rude motherfucker, and I close up and try to limit my interactions with guests as much as possible. And I thus effectively close off any potential in any of these people to be anything but what I view them to be. Every now and then there is that one person or family who is truly, genuinely nice and warm, and it is a shame if I can’t allow them to be that in my mind or in my interactions with them. And the fact is, further, that even the worst asshole, even the most representative complacent, close-minded sheltered bigot, has a side of warm intelligence and creativity, in which they can be viewed and understood within their own unique, personal context. It is simply that I must get beyond my own ego, I have to learn to see the bigger picture–such that if someone is being rude to me, that I should not take it personally. Such that even if someone has been sheltered and suckled on ignorance and wealth all their life, they still have that boundless potential as God. To allow myself to be mired in bitterness against them is a waste of my heart and mind.

It is, of course, much easier to say this than to manifest it in my life. But I’m hoping that if I say it enough, it will work its charm. Because I believe quite firmly that it is in the everyday that the world is changed, and if I or anyone else can’t get beyond appearances than we are just allowing the bullshit to perpetuate. It is not just Gandhis who change the world–it is the nurse you dealt with at the hospital, it is the guy who took your change at the Taco Bell, it is the person crossing the street at the stop sign, it is every person in your day, every person in your life, every little positive interaction. You know that warm feeling you get, when you smile at a complete stranger who is only interacting with you because it is business, and you get a smile back, and it is real? And you’ve actually connected to this person, and you’ve made their day, and they’ve made yours? That is what it is to cross boundaries and change the world. Positivity. Every day. Every moment. The potential in every person for love is boundless.

Newspaper waste

One of my tasks during the summer is to collect the waste from the 22 bear-proof trash cans we have located around where I work. It’s frankly depressing, the sheer volume of trash and recycling which is generated every single day by families. One of the recycling items always overflowing the bins are newspapers.

Look, I understand that this is the information age, and that people like to “keep informed” and what not. But newspapers are made from paper. Paper is made out of trees. And a newspaper’s value is pretty much zilch after the day it is printed, except to be used as bird cage floor coverings.

But how could newspapers be replaced? I think they kind of already are, in that many people are shifting from getting their news from newstands to getting their news on-line. Shit, it’s mostly free that way anyway, and if news only has value around the time it occurs anyway, then keeping up with your information on-line is much more effective, as news happens all day, all night.

The problem is that people without constant and reasonably priced access to the internet need to stay informed, too. However, there are extremely cheap laptops that have been designed for distribution to underdeveloped countries which cost roughly 100 dollars. These could be made available in areas of poverty in the US. Or, alternatively, cheap internet cafes, such as what I visited daily whilst in Peru, could supply the need for internet access. Everyone should have access to the internet, because it is a vast resource of information, as well as a means of networking and communicating outside of the bounds of your immediate social and cultural environment.

One Gross Night

This has to have been one of the grossest nights of my life. There has been an endemic of what is most likely some form of Noro-virus around my workplace these past 2 weeks, which means, in laymen’s terms, that there has been an extreme amount of vomiting. Being as I am the Housekeeping Manager, this means that I, on occasion, get the rare pleasure of cleaning up post-vomitus scenes and materials. Tonight’s was a real gem: this kid had barfed en route to the bathroom, and didn’t quite make it. He had subsequently chundered aqueous and solid chunky gastrointestinal material in basically every nook and cranny leading into and within the bathroom itself: carpet, door, tub, walls, toilet, sink, shower curtain, tile floor–everywhere. I was frankly rather amazed at not only how much spew there was, but also in the sheer expanse and coverage of said upchuck. It took me a good half hour to clean up the main spewage and corollary chunks, using a combination of baking soda, borax, Comet, Clorox Disinfecting Spray, and vacuum–meanwhile the whole time the mother was reading a maritime story to her sick boy in his bed. This cleaning occurred immediately after I had eaten a rather sizeable dinner myself, consisting of beans, rice, casserole, jalapeños, and a buttload of Valentina hot sauce.

This was not to be the end of the grossness. I was then cornered by one of my bosses, who informed me that since I had myself been one of the first to come down with the noro-virus (minus vomiting), that the health inspector who came that afternoon wanted to take stool samples of 10 people who had been infected. I was one of the chosen few. The aforementioned Mexican-style food I had eaten not so earlier was burbling quickly along through my intestinal tract, and so I gathered my stool sampling materials and hurried to the bathroom. I had to lay down some saran wrap over the mouth of the toilet and move my bowels onto it. Unfortunately, my poo at this time consisted of a series of volleys (extremely loud, like echoing gunshots rebounding off the tile walls) of largely yellow aqueous material, some of which managed to make it onto the thin strip of saran wrap. I then had to take a wooden stick, the kind that doctors push your tongue down with, and ladle this steaming shit into two very small and thin vials. This is not as easy as it sounds, especially when the consistency of one’s poo is that of a slurpee . I will end all details here; suffice to say that it was not quite the efficient and sanitary process that the instructions obviously wished it to be. Don’t worry, I disinfected surfaces when completed.

Man, it was, as I said, a gross night. I am pleased to have shared it with you.

Camp

The snow melts quietly away in the heat of the spring sun, converting to liquid, trickling down the hillsides across the roads into the lake. Life begins again, birds call out amongst the pines, the geese herald each sunrise with joyous honking, tourists creep down the mountain road gawking at nature, and I feel the urge to be out running, to be out hiking. Dripping sweat in the sauna, nights spent sipping on expensive liquor, getting my chops back on my hand drums, trying to stay away from pastries, eating Grapenuts for breakfast. Laying out on the boat dock and watching ducks bob sedately on wavelets in the sun. The little dramas and entanglements of relationships. Organic dark chocolate. The constant need for napping never fulfilled. A contentment and an urge to leave. Rooms that once were dark filled with light. Short fuzzy quips over the radio. Opaque cups. The sound of my world revolving like the seasons, thinking of the other side, yearning for somewhere else, even as I daily renew the love I have for this place.

Embracework

I can be as lazy as the next motherfucker when there ain’t shit to do or if what I do don’t matter, but I’ve discovered the satisfaction in working hard when other people rely on me. The work itself is almost secondary, although physical labor does seem to be more fulfilling. Having evidence–a trail of effort viewed–is fulfilling–to see the fruit of toil, a growth from cultivated soil. Shoveling snow, screwing anchors into drywall, moving heavy things, organizing scattered objects into a functional shape, all things tending towards purpose.
Given a clear and achievable goal, I will work towards forging a bigger picture. The bigger picture is more important than excuses and conceits for the withholdance of myself. Beyond myself is the other, and the other is myself, only understood when served selflessly. If oneself is the other, than what lies in between? What is between is work. Work to lose one self to gain oneself.
Who is to say what one does is not good enough, or not doing anything for humanity, for the good of the world? If you can give yourself to your work, than it is good work.
The samurai of ancient Japan studied the art of serving selflessly. They gave all of themselves, all of their life, to the art and philosophy of war. One slice of an enlightened sword could unite heaven and earth. What bigger picture is there than this very moment? Complete dedication, utter devotion, to the now.
The life of a soldier is a destitute reality of the destruction of the natural world for the greed of shortsighted, manipulative men. But what is not seen by the outsider is the inner light carried by the soldier working selflessly to fulfill his given purpose. He has a function, a place in the bosom of the world. People want only to hear of war as terrible fear, senseless destruction. What civilians cannot understand is the sense of heightened clarity in the midst of battle, the purpose that carries him through terror and into tomorrow. He cannot go back home. He is a vehicle for forces well beyond control, yet these forces reside within his gut. It is not his function to question. He is empty for that which he serves.
Who am I to question his purpose and resolve? It is sad to be used for purposes that are not honorable. But the men who fulfill their tasks selflessly are blessed, even if it were to destroy whole worlds. They are blessed because they have found peace within themselves.
Whether you are an assassin or a gardener, an accountant or a nurse, you have a function, a purpose in the world. If all you do is work to make money, than you will never know what it is to live.
Living centered in the universe is to do what one must do. To act selflessly is to act beyond concepts of good and evil, right and wrong. It is simply to give all of oneself to one’s actions, completely. Because who knows if the drill will slip and the picture will be crooked? Who knows if the arrow will land in its target? We shit because we eat, and we eat because we desire to live. Every path re-affirms what has already come, and destroys a part of what could be, and creates a newness never before seen. Embrace it.

Breakfast and Work

Hunter splatted out the habanero Tabasco across the surface of his eggs and hash browns as Jordus returned to the table with a newspaper folded in his paw. It was one of Jordus’ annoying habits to peruse the paper while eating with others. Hortencia sipped her coffee black and watched Hunter shovel a fork-load of food into his gullet. He was aware of her watching and felt the vague discomfort and insecurity that accompanies the outside observation of normally unaware tasks. He liked eating better alone, without the need for social projection. He liked sitting alone with a book in front of him and putting food into his mouth without thought, immersed in the story, the process of eating an excuse to concentrate for a period of time solely on the book, without any other distractions beyond the unconscious simple joy of bringing food into the mouth and chewing and washing it down in pink lemonade.

“City Recoils In Aftermath of Black-out,” Jordus read.

“So you like the job, then,” Hortencia said to Hunter.

“It’s surprisingly fulfilling to fill out forms and move them from the In to the Out box. I gain satisfaction from filling in the boxes with information that only I am designated to give, and then to place these papers in the Out box. I take the pile at the end of the day and I walk them over to someone else’s desk and I place them in their In box.”

“The job has a future.”

“It is remarkable, this feeling I get when I drop the completed forms in someone else’s In box.”

“‘25 percent of adult Americans are afraid of the dark.’ And those are just the ones who admit it.”

“I wish I could enjoy meaningless mundane tasks that I am not paid enough for. My boss gave me a raise on Monday, I think the company senses that I am restless. They apparently felt the need to show their appreciation for my mundane tasks. Employee recognition, the demonstration of the company’s awareness of ‘the little guy.’ I didn’t even ask for it,” Hortencia said, pulling off a piece of a blueberry muffin top, the kind with giant crystalline sugars on it, and stuffing it delicately in her mouth.

“There is even a gym and showers at my new job. I can come into work after a night of partying, sleep in until the last minute, then shower when I get there. They provide Mountain Action scented body wash.”

“They gave me a button in my mailbox. It says, ‘I Am Appreciated’ on it with a little golden star. In some ways I am offended.”

“It says here that children are fast becoming the top consumers of electronic devices.”

The hot sauce sprayed on Hunter’s food was beginning to cause a light sheen of sweat to break out on his forehead. He washed down his food with O.J. and breathed through his mouth.

“I am offended because it shows how disconnected the company is from my needs. They think giving me a button is going to increase the quality of my work? There’s probably statistics. I am offended because they blatantly treat me like a number rather than like a human being. They could have had my boss make me cookies or something. That I might appreciate. A fucking button. Like I’m in third grade. Even third graders don’t want buttons anymore. They want an early pass to recess or a coupon for McDonalds, something with value. Not that I’m complaining about the raise. The raise itself was a nice gesture. I could have done without the button. I would have been happy without the button. The button just served to piss me off.”

Hunter kept looking out the corner of his eye at an Asian girl sitting at the next table. She sensed she was being looked at and animatedly talked to her friend and brushed her hair back with her hand. Hunter made sure not to be caught looking, but to look enough so that she knew. He breathed through his mouth and gulped down O.J.

“That was some shindig last night, huh. I’d never seen Harris dance before. He looked like an ostrich on acid.”

Jordus folded up the newspaper and sat back and laughed. A piece of toast flew out and stuck to the table. Hunter had started laughing at the remembrance of Harris dancing and then laughed harder at the flying bit of toast. Hortencia smiled and pulled off a chunk of muffin and adjusted her glasses.