Day 49

You may have thought that I'd found employment by now, but it's not true. I haven't been keeping up blogging because I've been too busy...well...living. There's been a lot going on in life and in my neighborhood that has kept me up and away from the computer. Here's a quick snapshot:

• I finally got my desk put up in the tiny small front room, but didn't have wireless access in it and don't like dragging my laptop around.
• TM and I are watching his ex-dog Harold from mid-March until the end of April. He's a really sweet dog, and I've been spending my blogging time walking him and nursing his ACL injury.
  
• I've been rehabbing old furniture.
• It's gotten warmer outside.
  

But those are all little things. Here are the major reasons why I haven't been on here:

• I started my job search in earnest. Shockingly, it's been taking up time. I find it amusing that it can take up time to get nowhere with it. It's been semi-disappointing. One of the meetings I had with a person at United Way in this last week or so was kind of promising. She told me about their executive loan program that I might be able to do in the fall. It's a paid fundraising crash course that runs from July to November. It might be interesting if I'm still out of a job by then. She did inform me that I'd have to take out my lip ring: "This town is too conservative for that; I couldn't send you out to businesses like that." I informed her that the moment when I think that something on the outside defines who I really am is the moment when I need to reevaluate my life in a serious way. She shut up about it after that.
• There was a gunfight over drugs half a block away from my house.
• Then a couple nights later, 3 men broke into my neighbor's house and beat up her boyfriend and trashed it. She came running over hysterical and I took care of her traumatized daughters while she called the police. It was about a 2 hour ordeal. Later that week the girls came over with thank you cards. "Thank you for everything." "Thank you for saving my life." They were written in big block letters like the kind I used to write, only I would give them to my dad for his office and they'd say things like, "Ski daddy!"
  
• 2 days after all of this I did my first fast. TM, BA, and I all fasted together for 24 hours, drinking only water. I learned a lot about myself and my relationship to food. I thought a lot about what my job in this neighborhood was. That was a Sunday.
• The Wednesday after my first fast, I heard Shane Claiborne speak. Shane Claiborne - celibate and ok with it because he connects to people through community, advocate of the simple way, lover of people and earth, own-clothes-maker, bringing new meaning to "dirty hippy," able to make a nonChristian like me listen up and be curious about his faith - Shane Claiborne who's really living down and dirty Mother Teresa style in Philadelphia, and making a difference. Of course, I heard him at Mars Hill (see GU's Approved Orgs on the side!) so it's really no surprise. But I was thrown in turmoil after it because so many of the audience questions seemed to me to really be asking, "OK, I want to become intimate with the oppressed and help out too. I want to be a revolutionary too. I want to. My heart is in it. But can you tell me how I can do it without changing my life too much and without it being very hard? Can you please show me Freeing-The-Oppressed-Lite?" And I reflected on all that had happened in my neighborhood and about how hard it was for me to do something so simple like a 24 hour fast and I thought, is this me? Do I want Revolution Lite? Is my struggle in life that I want to be this change, but I want Revolution Lite? And if what is really bugging me is the principle that everybody wants everything to be easy, what am I supposed to do about it? I'm always bothered by the principle of things, and I'm not sure if this is something I'm supposed to "overcome" or if I'm always bothered by it because somewhere in there is the secret for what I should be doing with my days.
  
• So I applied for a Community Organizer position in my neighborhood and I'm supposed to talk with the one Community Organizer here soon. Cross your fingers for me.
• I started volunteering. I volunteer at Second Harvest Gleaners where we're working to end hunger in Grand Rapids and at The Learning Corner at Wealthy, where I teach people trying to get their GEDs how to write. More on these later.
  

And furthermore, on page 98 in The Overspent American, Schor lays out the new (or not so new?) definition of American progress. And it struck me that the reason nothing in America is sustainable, the reason why everyone wants their business to be Big Big Big, the reason why people want to have their cake (e.g. SUV) and eat it too (e.g. enjoy a clean environment) is because people love the idea of sustainability...but tucked neatly away by some kind of cognitive dissonance that is too horrible for us as a society to face is the truth that our idea of progress is antithetical to sustainability and until Small is the new Big, until Loving Walking Community is the new Suburbia, until Local Food is just called Food, etc etc etc -- until we're reconnected with each other, the earth (and God?) and that's the definition of progress and that defintion has nothing to do with accumulation of wealth, nothing here can ever be truly sustainable. Why do we want what we don't need? Why is this agenda set? Who ever thought this was a good idea?

Also, if you haven't read Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, you have to make it your next book. Have. To. Read. It. Pornified is next, along with several other books that I have on the cue. But to be fair, here's some criticism.