Good morning!

I woke up this morning at about 8:30, grabbed my book, and headed out to the hammock in Arianne's yard. I quickly sat down, and quickly flipped the hammock upside down, tumbling off and landing on my ass a yard or so away. Whoopsie-doosie.

visit to NOLA

Friday night I had the pleasure of attending a play with Arianne put on by members of The NOLA Project (and others). Titled "root [cel.lar]," its venue was this cool basement space in what I think was an otherwise residential building in a rather sketchy New Orleans neighborhood. The play consisted of a set of sketches that all took place in basement/cellar-type-places. The best part for me were all of the exchanges where the actors would yell in frustration towards the top of the stairwell at stage left, "Mom!" I especially liked the scene wherein two twenty-something aspiring graphic novelists scream back to the offstage "Mom" who inquires as to which flavor of Capri Suns she should put in the fridge, "Wild Cherry, Mom! God!"

"They wished to become frightening"

For my birthday last month, my awesome friends got my two really good books. I'm working my way through one of them, Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, right now. I like it a lot. Vonnegut is hilariously dry and distant in the way that he describes "Earthlings," and often more specifically, Americans. He makes us sound absurd; it's awesome.

Today at work, Arianne, Chris and I watched two kids we'd been bullshitting with for about an hour suddenly break into a fight and beat the shit out of each other in the street. They very nearly attacked each other with bricks, and most definitely would have if it hadn't been for two older guys wrenching them out of their hands.

Over lunch, we talked about it. The sight of one of the boys kicking the other in the head repeatedly as he lay near the curb, and the sound of their shoulders and heads cracking off the pavement as they wrestled each other was disturbing. But then one of the older guys told us that they fight like that every day. And I remembered how one of them, shocked that I'd told him I'd never been in a fight, had asked me just a few minutes before he started wailing on the other kid, "So what do you do if someone grabs your tit or rapes you?" And Chris noted how the kid he was reading the survey to wasn't phased at all by what the violence that was going on a few feet in front of him and continued answering the questions; no big deal.

I found this scene in Breakfast of Champions particularly poignant, considering the day's events:

In one of New York City's many ghettos for dark-skinned people, a group of Puerto Rican boys gathered together in the basement of an abandoned building. They were small, but they were numerous and volatile. They wished to become frightening, in order to defend themselves and their friends and families, something the police wouldn't do. They also wanted to drive the drug peddlers out of the neighborhood, and to get enough publicity, which was very important, to catch the attention of the Government, so that the Government would do a better job of picking up the garbage and so on.

sap fest

One popular complaint among the interns about our survey is that it, or any survey, is a completely inadequate way of getting a snapshot of a person. How much can you really gather about a person based on their multiple-choice answers? By far the coolest part about administering the survey for me has been all of the interaction with the kids. Even then though, we only see most kids one time over the course of the summer, usually for an hour and a half, max. But sometimes, you just have a moment with one of them. It's probably stupid to attach a lot of sentimental value to one conversation, or one glance, or one joke with a kid. I'm not saying that any connecting moment should be used as some cheesy symbol for what it's like to work with these kids; because, really that's not much different from thinking that their completed surveys are accurate depictions of who they are.





"Do you have a boyfriend or a girlfriend right now? Or are you talking to someone, or a couple of people, but you don't have a girlfriend or boyfriend right now?"

She filled in the bubble next to the latter before I could read the other options. I told her that she could mark "A. I don't have a boyfriend or girlfriend" for the rest of the page, flip it, and mark the same for the whole next page.

"I had a boyfriend yesterday..." She mumbles more as she's bubbling down the page.

"Oh yea?" I thought I heard something about getting rid of him. "Did you break up with him?

"Yes ma'am."

"Yea? Why?" She looked at me. I am thinking that I shouldn't have asked that.

"He was talking to other girls on the phone." No big deal.

"Ahh... And you didn't like that?" I say, smiling.

She smiles, "No." Still bubbling.

"How long were you two together?"

"Eleven months."

I say, "Woww" mindlessly, but she's already on the next page, pointing to the next question and asking me, "What do they mean here?"


So I finished the survey with her and went outside for Arianne to pick me up. I didn't have my phone with me, but I knew it wouldn't be long until she was back.

The girl sees me out on the curb, and comes out of the house. "You can wait inside until your ride gets here!" she offers.

I figure she's just being polite. Inside, she kept calling me "Ma'am" until I said, "Hey, I'm not that much older than you. You don't have to call me that." I tell her not to worry about it and that it won't be long at all. I start doodling on the manila envelope that her survey is in, but I feel like I'm being watched.

She's standing on the porch. "I'm just gonna wait until your friend gets here." She's protecting me.

"Oh don't worry about it. I'm great here... Do you want me to knock when she gets here?"

"Yea." She goes back inside.

A few cars go by on the street in front of me. From one of them, I hear a male voice, "Hey girl!" Instinctively, I look up. I'm sort of asking for it, sitting on the curb at 10:45 in the morning with a clipboard and a name tag and my fair skin and blonde hair. I probably look completely out of place.

The car stops and reverses. "What are you doing, girl?"

"Oh I'm just working," I say, thinking how I look like the last thing I'm doing right now is working.

"Survey?"

Relief. "Yea, survey." He smiles and drives off.

I turn around just in time to see her retreating back into the house, quickly so that I can't see that she's still watching out for me. She's thirteen years old.

I'm a genie in a bottle

I can't figure out how to get this photo upright. It's an advertisement for a scholarship awarded to high school students who have civic service experience. I'm not sure what the pink flower is for, except to deter any insecure high school boy trying to establish his masculinity from applying.


"COME SEE WHAT SHERRY IS GOT COOKING" Yes, please.


The kids are still periodically elaborating on their bubbled-in answers. This one's particularly scary.


And if you don't go inside to speak with Mr. Lee, is that an indication that you don't love your family?


Here's Arianne and I working today. Some kids called us Christina Aguilera.



This is what Christina Aguilera looks like.