Obama's Heading to Washington and so am I

Many of your may already know this, but I thought I'd give an update anyway.

On Saturday (so soon!) I'm moving to Washington D.C. to work for a non-profit. I'm going to be interning in their Affiliate and National Programs Department, which is more interesting than it sounds, I promise. Basically I'm going to be working with volunteers, doing trainings and canvassing supporters in an effort to protect and secure women's reproductive rights nationwide and help get Obama & Biden elected.

I'm very excited about the internship and think it will provide me with a lot of really great experience. That said, it pays basically squat. Therefore, I'm looking into other part-time jobs. I've applied a few places including the National Council Against Domestic Violence, a few after-school youth programs, and Greenpeace.

I'm living verrrry near the Capitol Building, which is going to be interesting. I can watch all those politicians that rule the world walk around during their lunch hour and get bagel sandwiches like the rest of us. Maybe I'll get to harass some of them on behalf of women or human rights or the environment. Maybe I'll meet Dennis Kucinich! <3 National Book Festival (so I guess that's just really, really dorky love). It happens on the National Mall, which by default is also near my abode, and even though it's hosted by Laura Bush, I'm going. I need to meet Neil Gaimen to get his autograph and R.L. Stine to discern that he's real. Let me know if you want signatures, Goosebumps fans.

I'm be in D.C. during the biggest, weirdest election in memory. That in mind, I'm headed down to the County Broad of Elections to get my absentee ballot - don't forget to register for an absentee ballot if you won't be home to vote! I would remind everyone else to remember to vote as well, but I honestly don't think anyone could "forget" during this particular scenes-from-the-apocalypse election cycle.

Fish Out of Water

I'm a vegetarian. I stopped eating meat at 14, mostly out of novelty. After eight years of veg-life, I've found plenty of my own, more convincing reasons to keep livin' meat free.

I also work at a steakhouse.

By any stretch of the imagination, I shouldn't be working there. I don't know a lick about fine food, I have no idea what's on tap at a bar. I don't care about cooking. I have close to no restaurant experience, and I think $60 for a two person dinner is highway robbery. Even though we serve it, I still don't really know what Orange Roughy is. I'm worse than a fish out of water. I'm a vegetarian at a steakhouse. But the shifts are fun, the people and stories are hilarious and the pay, as far as restaurant work goes, is fabulous.

Recently, I was exposed as a veggie when the kitchen staff saw me picking meat off of a piece of pizza (Yes. We're a nice restaurant, and the staff orders in pizza). The reaction of the crowd was insane.

"Why are you working in a STEAKHOUSE?!"
"Why are you a vegetarian?"
"Is it cause you like animals?"
"Do you think we're gross for eating meat!?"
"Why are you a vegetarian?"
"Are you vegan? Don't be vegan!!!!"
"She's a vegan!" (*No, I'm not.)
"WHY are you a VEGETARIAN?!"

I've been asked all of those questions a million times before, but never all at once. It was really more than I wanted to deal with, and ultimately waved everyone off with the classic reason that human beings do anything.

"Because."

So I was outed, and it was overly dramatic. Such is the world of food service.

On Friday, the head chief pulled me aside to show me the appetizers he had made for the bar that night: potato skins with cheese, chives, sour cream and bacon. Um, swell. Thanks for showing me. But wait...what's that in the corner?

"I made those without meat for you," he said, pointing.

Nothing makes you feel at home like someone cooking for you.

Thoughts on the Blog

If I'm going to do this thing right, I may as well get organized.

I'm thinking that I will create some semi-regular features, in addition to just adventure stories. Maybe things like highlighting friends that are doing particularly interesting stuff with their lives at the moment, and some posts on the practical stuff in taking a year (or whatev's) off - planning, interviewing, finding stuff to do with my new mess of a life (like blog about it). Perhaps other things. I realize I'm making this sound very formal, but let's face it: I have time on my hands.

Finally, if you start reading, be sure to say hi to me here or on facebook. I want to know who I'm talking to!

Musings on the "Real World", or You're Already There, my Friend.

I can't say if the concept of "delaying the real world" was made popular by Collen Kinder, but the phrase certainly was. It seems that more and more people are "delaying the real world" in hopes of something more rewarding. Why? I dunno. Maybe our generation is lazy and foolish. Maybe we've watched our parents' job-related unhappiness fester for too long. Maybe delaying the real world is just new hype on a very old story.

You can't answer a question like "why?" without first defining "what?". So what is the real world? What makes your post-graduation life "real" in comparison to your madcap college days? MTV never seemed to find much of a difference, anyway.

Here's the way I understand it. The real world involves most or all of the following: a belief that you are an adult, a belief that adults have "real jobs", a steady paycheck, a 9-5 schedule, Tuesday morning sales meetings, a 401k, commuting, marriage, kids, retirement, death and most importantly, a cubicle. That's the real world, that's the scary-ass fate that awaits us once we toss up our mortarboards and eat our last graduation weekend mini-quiche. Right?

Get real! Every part of your stupid little life is your real life, this is your real world. All of childhood, all of college and God forbid, everything you do after college. It's all you've got to work with. So it doesn't matter if you sign up for a 401k and a i-banker's salary at JP Morgan, or if you hop on a boat and sail down to Peru to help orphans. Both are very real, very important parts of the world. Referring to one path as "real" automatically implies that the other is somehow unreal. And for so many reasons, that is whack.

Placing disproportionate values on jobs has landed us with too many lawyers, politicians and celebrities and too few teachers, nurses and community organizers. It's also left my entire generation with a complex. We're trying to balance an impossible set of scales. On one side we measure trading our souls for the security of 9 to 5 jobs and the beginnings of student loan payments. On the other side, travel, adventure, a job that doesn't pay well and makes your heart sing, and a whole lot of pressure and ridicule. For being lazy, or quixotic, or selfish, or unrealistic. For being young at the turn of the millennium. We're trying to be practical and true to ourselves and trying to find something that matters and something that makes money - ideally something that does all of that. Those are the choices we're trying to balance.

"But it's not cut and dry like that, fool!" you cry. Of course it isn't. And that's my point. I've had friend after keyboard-hunched friend ask me a few variations of one theme: what's it like to be a grown-up in the real world? I don't know - but it feels a lot like being a kid in college, don't you think?

I don't want to delay or fight the real world anymore, I want to change the conversation and the vocabulary. I want to know how your life is, not your new life as an adult. I want to hear about what you're doing, the honest-to-goodness valuable thing in your life, not "the real world". Because let's face it. Regardless of where you are in your life, this is the real world and you're in it. And there's no way to delay what's already in progress.

Roadside America (pictures pending!)

My Grandparents live in West Palm Beach, FL. It’s sunny and filled with strip malls in the way only Florida is, and it’s a long way from home. So when someone ends up in the hospital, it isn’t necessarily easy to figure out what to do next. Which is why, with my grandfather’s 88th birthday approaching and his frequent trips to the hospital, my mom and I hit the road: Great American Road Trip style.

If you’ve never driven from New York to Florida, you’ve really missed out on some fantastic lapses in the time/space continuum. Because of the sheer volume of tiny states in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, the first several hours breeze by. We’re in New York! No, Pennsylvania! West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina! In the Carolinas and Georgia the states get bigger and things slow down a bit until you arrive in Florida. “We’re here!!” you think, and if you’re going to Jacksonville, you really are. West Palm Beach, on the other hand, is at the bottom of Florida and reaching it is a lot like driving to the Northern most point of Canada, or to a White Castle in New Jersey: sure, you could do it – but why would you want to?

When we arrived in West Palm, everything was fairly quiet. Happily, Grandpa got out of the hospital in time to celebrate his birthday at home with us, and even though Tropical Storm Faye brought the rain and blew into the hotel to knock over our continental breakfast, things were relatively quiet.

But life is about the journey, not the destination. So here are a few things we found along the journey.

NATURAL BRIDGE

Natural Bridge, Virginia is home to one of the Nine Wonders of the World. It is a gigantic rock formation over a small river that forms a land bridge. This bridge is big. It’s large enough to support a low traffic highway, which thanks to our burning desire to experience nature without ever having to leave our cars, it does. Thomas Jefferson is the first recorded owner of Natural Bridge. A teenage George Washington is rumored to have vandalized it by craving his initials into the stone back in his wild and crazy days. Now flocks of tourists arrive every day to ride the complementary bus service, visit the wax museum and the haunted house, ogle the roadside attractions, stay at the nearby luxury hotel, watch the nightly light show and, if there’s time, see the bridge.

FOAMHENGE

While most of Natural Bridge seems to be based on the classic roadside attraction economy, one back road monument over shadows them all.

As we drove down the road, we saw a sign of stone with the chiseled words “Foamhenge” peeking out of the brush and there on the hillside, silhouetted in the afternoon sun, was Stonehenge. Sort of.

Turns out Foamhenge is the only Stonehenge replica in North America made entirely out of Styrofoam. It was created by a local artist for the purposes of “education and entertainment” and hey: one out of two ain’t bad. But Foamhenge is no laughing matter: vandals are threatened with legal fines and counter-vandalism should they take to craving the great Styrofoam cups, under the warning that the artist “hides in the woods” and is “crazy enough to do it!!”

After reading a list of threats written by a crazy man from the woods, I walked about 3 feet and promptly got the roadside-loving crap scared out of me: there was a large man dressed in all black, arms outstretched to strangle me. It was the artist come to kill me! I lamented the fact that Foamhenge would be the last thing I saw.

He held still, careful not to agitate me into a fury of Styrofoam slashing panic. In fact, he didn’t move at all. Turns out that he was a life-sized replica of Merlin, fabled builder of Stonehenge

SOUTH OF THE BORDER

South of the Border, South Carolina (hereby referred to as “S.O.B.”) is probably the most well known roadside attraction in the country, largely because they want you to know about it. S.O.B. billboards begin about 200 miles from the actual site in either direction, translating to 400 miles worth of advertising. When you round the turn on the highway and see that fateful sombero-shaped water tower, it’s nearly impossible for the average road warrior not to stop. We were no exception.

Pulling off the highway into S.O.B is a lot like stepping through a time machine into a 1970’s town populated entirely by a stereotypical and racist “Mexican”-looking cartoon character named Pedro. From it’s humble beginnings as a crap store, S.O.B. has grown into an entire crap town, including highlights like “Pedro’s Gasolina”, “Pedro’s Bowl-a-rama”, “Pedro’s Amusement Park”, and “El Drug” (the drug store). There’s also a couple motels and a camp ground, tucked disturbingly close to a gigantic fireworks store. The streets were lined with gigantic plaster sculpture of animals on parade in no particular order, and a giant mushroom presides over the campground. Everything is brightly colored. Everything is covered with this racist cartoon. Everything is child-like. Everything is about consuming. It was not like the two worlds of New Orleans, but more like watching a production of Jekyll & Hyde where Dr. Jekyll only makes a cameo appearance.

So hats off to Natural Bridge for being beautiful, and to Foamhenge for being exactly the sort of roadside attraction one dreams of finding. And if you ever find yourself lost in a South of the Border, remember: I-95 is just past the fireworks store and straight on til morning.

Long before the SuperDome, where the Saints of football play...

I’m having a hard time writing about my time in New Orleans. I’ve been trying all day and things just don’t seem to be coming out right. I think maybe the whole beast is a little too emotionally charged for me to process at the moment. For one thing, my grandfather was in and out of the hospital while I was there, ultimately cutting my time there short. For another, the organization I was working with just didn’t seem to be that coordinated anymore. I won’t be using the group’s name. There was a lot of down time and a big disconnect between the volunteers and the people in charge. The whole system was very disappointing because there is so much work to be done.

It’s been three years since Katrina rocked the Gulf. Looking at the Lower Ninth Ward, it could have happened last week. In the area directly near where the levees broke, the neighborhoods are completely wiped clean. Cement foundations and overgrown grass are all that’s left. In other areas houses still stand, completely gutted and sagging. The front walls are marked with large X’s indicating, among other things, how many dead bodies where found inside. Inspectors painted them in the weeks after Katrina. Residents still see the body count every day. Walking through parts of the Lower Ninth is like walking through a war zone. I kept feeling like I was somewhere in a small, foreign county in a town that hadn’t been rebuilt yet after the latest civil war. It was always a shock when I reminded myself that this is the same country I call home.

And then you head down to the French Quarter; hit Bourbon and Frenchmen St. Check out the colleges, visit the river walk. The city lit up, vibrant, bustling. There’s jazz again. There’s a sense that things are somewhat back to normal. It’s a divide like I’ve never experienced, a city that is living halfway between a constant party and a war zone.

So where do you even start? How can we still be asking that question?

I did do some positive work while I was there. I worked on a home in the Upper Ninth Ward, which was also hard hit. The home is being refurbished by NOLA 100, a group who will repair and rebuild 50 green homes in 100 days. I helped put in the insulation, paint the outside and fill/caulk all the cracks. I “mowed” a bunch of lawns. Most lots are so overgrown they are now filling, by no exaggeration, with small trees. Thus “mowing” involves several hours of whacking the crap out of nature with a machete. On one memorable day I even helped do some replanting in the wetlands outside the city. Hopefully that helped make it up to Mother Earth after the whole machete thing.

I met some really interesting people there, too. I explored the French Quarter with the “Frenchies”, three students from France who met for the first time at our volunteer site. I met an anarchist poet from New Orleans and a former 9-to-5-er turned Tokyo resident turned consultant from Birmingham. I was only in New Orleans for a week, but thanks to the city and the people I met, I came back with enough creativity and excitement to power me for several months.

New Orleans is still alive, still powerful. Some areas are deserted, some literally hum with volunteer word. Some neighborhoods, like Habitat for Humanity’s Musicians Village, are rebuilt and absolutely stunning. There’s a lot of drive for change and a lot of people who are hungry to make it happen.

And good thing, too, because there’s so much work to be done.