Musings

It's been quite a week and weekend. NOLA is very good at chewing you up and spitting you out. After two nights of being up until the wee hours on Fri and Sat, I finally got a good night's sleep and have a moment at a coffee shop. Forgive me, to those I said I would call over the weekend.

Well the weekend started off with uncovering the depths of how much a dirt-ball, grease-ball, and hair-ball (I'm in need of a shave and a haircut) I could become. I spent Saturday in the attic of one of our staff members, installing the radiant barrier (beefed up aluminum foil) with my team. Strangely, she described it as, "One of the easiest installs you're going to do." The job consists of maintaining your balance among the rafter and not falling through the ceiling--something that one teammember of mine now has more hands-on, or in her case 'leg-through' experience. It also requires measuring and stapling the sheets to the rafters in close quarters and eventually crawling around in the debris of decades of rafter-wood erosion as you get closer and closer to the edge of the room. Due to my profusive head sweat, what I like to think as an evolutionary advatage to the warm global climate change we're about to hit, I took the award of 'most-sweaty'. Since the worn-down level of our uniform cloth has given what I wear the consistancy and absorbance of a dish-rag, I also took the cake as 'dirtiest' or 'most covered in the crap the ground was covered in'. The end result was 1000 sq. feet covered in silver-metallic-looking sheeting that reminded me of a construction by the Haitian Space and Aeronautics Administration. But the attick was a lot cooler than we had started that morning, and it was 2 PM rather than 9 AM. I think that speaks volumes for the work we're doing.

Since then, I've spent most of my time with friends in Blue 5 (I'm an honorary member now) exploring the French Quarter. There was a Louisiana Seafood and Cajun Tomato Zydeco and Cajun Music Festival going on near Jackson Square and the French Market. It was a very good time with such highlights as eating bacon-wrapped shrip (a now obvious perfect combination that I wish I had realized long ago), enjoying the sunset along the river walk with a case of silver bullets, being personally serenaded by an old man there to the tunes of Otis Redding, and hearing a very energetic blues band at a little bar along Bourbon St. My latest return to the frat-boy choked, gutter-stain of an expensive stye hole that is Bourbon street was made rather reluctantly, but the result was good. The band took out most of the stops: coming out into the crowd, playing the guitar with one's teeth, singing about subjects that would make most truck-drivers blush. Good times.

Well now that I've made my confessional for the week, I may as well end with some reflection. I've been thinking more and more about getting down what growth I've noticed in myself or bits of wisdom that I've gleaned within the last year. I've been told that it's important to get these down to make notes for entrance essays or interviews that one might have in the future, but I'm hoping more to use it as reminders to reread and curb any regression I might experience in the next few years. Most of what I've thought of is fairly elementary, a lot of 'no-duh' moments, but things that people might still overlook in the grind of modern life...

Firstly, I've learned that the majority of what one believes is a sum of the information that has been available to them up to that moment. In other words, "it's a great big world out there, and there's a lot that there is to know that can go right by you if don't pay attention." In one interpretation this is an example of how important it has been to see other parts of the US and the benefits of travel. On another level, it is an admonition not to judge people for their ignorance. A person can't help being a bigot of they've never met a gay person, can't help being hopeless if they've never known opportunity, and can't help having simple tastes if they've never eaten anything but macaroni and cheese. This doesn't mean that these aren't things to be remedied: every man should know the joys of checking out girls with a lesbian friend, every at- risk kid or former inmate have the chance to get a job and escape the cycle of poverty, and everyone should try Indian food at least once. I think chicken masala and veggie samosas are a good starter meal.

The second thing that I can think of right now is the necessity for generocity in a person's life. Working for the service of others is one of the few things that unequivocally makes life worth living. I know you learn in college from people that read too much Ayn Rand that there's no such thing as true altruism and that any act for others is inherantly an act for one's self. My reply is, "Who cares? It still gets the job done." If both me and those being served are happier for it, then all the better-- even if it is a somewhat selfish happiness on my part.

I can see that the life I had in college was much more sheltered and much much more self-centered than my life now. Not that I'm still not sheltered and self-centered-- I haven't read the news in weeks and still do plenty of things for me. But the point is that in college, a majority of my my passion was what was going on for the weekend and how much time I could responsibly devote to shooting aliens and pwning noobs while playing Halo after class. It's a shame that I couldn't have come out of myself a little earlier and made volunteerism a bigger part of life. In the book that I've been reading, Reclaiming Youth At-Risk, the concept of generocity is given as one of the four most important factors in ways to become a whole person (along with Mastery, Individuality, and Belonging). It's a part of life that is kind of overlooked and undervalued.

Another thing that I wonder if I'm going to be able to handle next year is the importance of being connected. I've been sleeping, eating, and working with the same 10 people for the last 9 months, and I've begun to be dependant on being with others-- sometimes, like them or not. I'm glad of this, seeing as the lowest times in my life I lived alone in my single and came out mostly for meals and class. I wonder what it's going to be like next year once I have my own room. This need for connectedness also goes in the way of people that I've left behind: family, friends, ex's. I admit that I haven't been perfect this year with keeping in touch, but I've never valued correspondance much until this year. My parents can verify this with from my lack of contact for months at a time during college, and their corresponding hate-mail in my inbox ("ET Phone Home, Son!") gives further testament. This, again, is something that I'm still working on and hoping to make more time for before the year is out.

Well I'm sure there's more to come in the way of Ameri-aphorisms, but this is all I can think of for now. Besides that, I have work to do. My love and blessings to all my family, friends, and ex's out there.