Calling All Actions

I went to a meeting with Christo tonight for a group that wants to become the New Orleans chapter of a national organization called "Call to Action." Basically, it's a Catholic group that wants to bring inclusivity into the church, primarily in the arenas of opening up ordination to women and married people and making the church more inclusive to LGBT people. I didn't really know what to expect, but I know for sure that that wasn't it. When we showed up, one of the people milling about asked if we had the right place - we were the youngest people in the room by about 50 years. If it's not quite that much, it's the result of a small miscalculation and not hyperbole.

Now, I'm used to being the youngest person at church events. In fact, when I went to mass with Steve at one point in the Fall, the parish director was so excited to see young people show up to the service that he took us out to dinner and asked us about joining the parish. But I wasn't expecting people who had stuck with the church for so long to be the ones actively trying to organize to change it. It was incredible hearing their perspectives, though, as they had all actually lived through Vatican 2 and could talk about what things were like before that, as well as to reflect on how things have evolved over the 50 years since then. It was a very interesting perspective to be able to share.

I guess when I think about it, maybe the oldest generation has the most dissatisfaction with the way that the church is run today. Many of the people my age that have issues with the church just leave. But older people have spent more time as part of the church, have developed a stronger identity as Catholics who go to mass, and have more invested in Catholicism. In fact, one of the women at the meeting tonight mentioned that if not for her children, she might not be a practicing Catholic at all anymore. She had 6 children, only half of whom still go to mass. It turned out that everyone who was part of that conversation (excluding me) had children who were grown, and at least one of each set had stopped going to mass. And the parents, who I was talking with, identified with their children's reasons for leaving the church. But for some reason it was strong enough for them to organize, but not strong enough to make them just leave.

I think this experience lends itself to an interesting commentary generally on the human condition of developing an identity as part of a group, and specifically on religion as an organization. What does it mean to be Catholic if you disagree fundamentally with a large number of decisions that have been made and consistently re-affirmed by the leadership of an organization, especially one as hierarchical as the Catholic church? You agree to be part of a group that shares certain beliefs, and then fight about what those beliefs are. To what extent are you really PART of that group, and to what extent do you even want to be? I like to think about what would happen if one of these people, or I for that matter, could somehow erase our history of personal experience with the Catholic church and then if we were asked to decide which, if any, religious organization we would be a part of. How many of us would choose Catholicism, with all of its brokenness and judgement and exclusivity? Certainly there are a lot of things that I love about the Catholic church, but are those things worth also being connected to all the things I disagree with?

I suppose in some ways it's not entirely dissimilar from campaigning for political change. If you're affiliated with a political party because you believe in many of their positions, but you take issue with some of their other stances, you generally stay in that party and fight to shift it closer to your ideals. You don't just give up on the whole thing and call it a wash. Most people don't, anyways.

It's beginning to feel like I'm rambling, so I'll close. I guess the take-away from this is either that old people can be progressive and fight for change, or that young people are less-invested in the church. Or, of course, that the success of organizing efforts is limited by the ability of the organizer to reach all of the intended audiences, which could have been a huge factor in play here. Oh yeah, and that self-imposed identities are funny. That's a pretty big one too.

Back To The Basics

It's amazing how relative all of our experiences are. It causes me to wonder about how much objective reality can possibly exist across people, when so much of my personal reality can be affected by my present surroundings. I'm beginning to think that human beings are more myopic than we are rational, but because we fail to recognize this to be the case we have tricked ourselves into thinking that we're primarily rational. And we ARE, I think, as long as we agree to stay short-sighted. Everyone has been in the position where they were SO cold that all they wanted was to be warm, and then after about 5 minutes inside a house with the same sweater on that they were wearing outside, they're sweating and ready to open the door for some cold air. It's because you didn't actually want to be WARM. What you wanted was to be warm-ER. And in your quest for immediate gratification, you overdid it. Because frankly, we're not very good judges of what we need when we're uncomfortable. The human desire for self-gratification overwhelms the natural penchant for moderation just about every time.

I think people get this way about food too. People think they're really really really hungry, and then they eat too much and they feel sick and they're really really really full. Equally unpleasant experiences. And while the latter experience is generally more avoidable than the former, with remarkable consistency it follows the former as if it were the necessary consequence of getting very hungry.

The reason why I began thinking about this was, like most situations where I begin thinking about things these days, while I was sitting in jail. Without getting into any details, I was talking with a guy about some options for getting moved in jail because of some issues that were going on, and one of the options was to be placed in a highly restrictive setting that we'll call "lockdown." There are pros and cons of being on lockdown, depending on your situation, but one of the most obvious cons is that there's potential for you to end up in a cell, many times by yourself, for up to 23 hours per day. When talking with this guy about his options, and getting to that one, he had a lot of questions about the conditions on lockdown that I did my best to answer. The way we were talking about it, it was as if we were talking about going to jail. Here's the thing- he's already IN JAIL. He's been in jail for quite a while now. But the little things, like having a day room, having time out on the yard (even less than weekly, in the least restrictive option), 15 minutes of family visitation per week, phone privileges... the prospect losing or changing any of those things really made me feel like we were talking about sending a free person to jail.

What it really made me wonder was how much freedom -I- have, and what would have to be taken away for me to feel like I've lost it. If there's jail within jail, could there also be jail within freedom? Or freedom beyond freedom? Like many musings, this brought me back to my favorite concept - value (I know I love value for a number of reasons, chiefly because a housemate of mine once told me so) . I think freedom is defined not as your abstract ability to do whatever you want, but your ability to access things that you value. I'm not permitted to own or use heroin, based on the laws of Louisiana (and the US, for that matter). I don't feel like my freedom is restricted in any way by this prohibition, however, because I have no interest in ever owning or using heroin. Some people think differently. I'm not allowed to go into stores unless I have a shirt on, based on common convention and municipal regulations. I do sometimes feel like my freedom is restricted by this, however, because if I had it my way people would never have to wear a shirt unless it was cold enough to warrant one for the heat retention. Again, some people think differently. At any rate, that rule restricts my freedom, while heroin laws do not.

But does the requirement to wear a shirt restrict freedom, in the abstract, any more than the restriction from using heroin? I don't think so. Or, to be more nuanced and less clear, I think that you can't answer that question because freedom doesn't really exist in the abstract, or if it does, it can't really be qualified, only quantified. A place with 5 restrictions might be more free than a place with 55 restrictions. But it's hard to say that one thing is NATURALLY more restrictive on freedom than another. It depends on what people value. If heroin were made legal, I would be no more free than I am right now, because a right that you don't exercise isn't a right at all.

So I find myself thinking that I may have an abundance of freedom, because I can do just about all of the things that I want to do. In fact, there are a number of things that I am free to do, but choose not to. But I wonder if the amount of freedom available to me has limited my ability to conceive of other things that I would value more, if I only had more freedom to do them. If it were easy to sprint, we would have no use for jogging.

Caveat- this, like all posts on this blog, is experimental. The stream-of-consciousness musings that help me try to wrap some of life's less-ordered parts into a more manageable package. I try pretty hard to separate my personal identity from my ideas, so feel free to disagree publicly or privately. In a few days I might disagree too.

Night Out Against Crime

Today was the annual "Night Out Against Crime" in New Orleans. The idea is that people go out in their neighborhoods, meet people in the community, talk about public safety, and build relationships with their neighbors. You know...to meet the people you're surrounded by, which will make crime that happens to other people seem more real to you. Then everyone will be more likely to stand up against crime, or something like that. These events pop up all over the city. They're mainly hosted by by community organizations or churches, but any group could set up a little block party and have a NOAC event.

I had a minor heart attack when I got to the NOAC event that my office was going to have a table at. I didn't see anyone from our office (which isn't common, and is a larger conversation for another time) when I got there, but I DID see the district attorney himself, Leon Cannizzaro, at the event chatting with a few police officers. Other than me and the guys that made the film they showed at the event (called Shell Shocked, which is actually turning out to be a pretty good commentary on violence in the city), Leon and the cops were the only white people in the park. As if we didn't have enough people getting confused between our office and the DA, we have an official spot at an event where the DA shows up and there's nobody from our office around. It was a little discouraging. Our community outreach directer was there, who I saw later, so it wasn't a COMPLETE no-show. Might as well have been though.

When I was walking back I was drawn to the sound of music down Rocheblave St. Now, I wasn't in what one might call a "safe" part of town. I had walked from Tulane and Broad to Claiborne and Orleans, and then I was walking down Lafitte St back towards Broad to catch the bus. So, I was wandering around the Treme and mid-city around 8PM - not outrageous, but definitely nothing like any of the neighborhoods I've lived in before. When I made it to the event on Rocheblave, I saw that it was being hosted by the Greater Zion Baptist Church, mostly because there were tables with the name plastered to the front, and partially because of the music coming from a stereo positioned in the doorway of the church. One of the deacons walked over to me and introduced himself - in fact, several people introduced themselves to me and everyone was very welcoming. The deacon asked me "do YOU live around here?" He was trying to be genuine, but there was no way that he could hide the incredulity. I can imagine what was going through his head- it didn't really make sense for me to be living there, but it also didn't make any sense that I would be there if I didn't. Not really a high-traffic area, and besides that I was the only white person on the block. Probably within 10 blocks. Actually, it was even more distinct than that. Not only was I the only white person there, but I was one of the only men there at all. If you don't count the deacon, I was probably the only male between the ages of 15 and 35. I wish I were joking.

And that brings me to my issue with the Night Out Against Crime, which is similar to the issue that I had with the Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition speak-out sessions against the Department of Justice: the people whose presence is truly needed don't come out. If we believe what everyone says at these events (and in general, really), which is that most of the violence in the city is committed by and against young black males, then how can we do any good when those people aren't part of the movement? All the mothers in the city who have lost their sons to violence can hang out together and commiserate, but until they can bring the remaining sons out to see the hurt that is caused to the community by violence, then we might as well just call it like it is and have support groups instead of community action events. Are the kids that go to church the ones that keep getting shot or getting locked up for gun charges? And if not, then maybe the church should close up shop for a little bit and the congregation should go spend some time outside of the corner stores where people hang out. You have little to no legitimacy when you're not part of that life experience. That's why I'm the wrong person to start the movement, I'm very aware of that. But I'm only slightly more wrong than a grandmother who knows everyone in the neighborhood; because neither of us has ever been told that we have to go shoot the guy who killed our brother so that they don't come after us too. She has a better understanding of the effects of the problem than me because she's probably felt them more acutely, but that doesn't give her the legitimacy needed to change an entire culture. An entire lifestyle.

So what do we end up with? A big gathering with a bunch of kids that are too young to understand what's going on and a bunch of adults whose experiences don't seem relevant to the group that people are most concerned about perpetuating the cycle of violence. We've basically hit every group that CAN'T DO ANYTHING about the problem. To a very limited extent, if you can get the local politicians involved, they can work to improve opportunities and make the system more navigable for the young and under-resourced, and potentially limit violence in that way. But no politician, no matter how powerful, can waive their magic wand and fix the whole problem. There's an entire history that can never be fully resolved, and there's a long way to go before people are willing to give that up. A narrative has been set in motion and so many people have been socialized with that narrative, that the only way to stop the violence is to rewrite history or adopt a new narrative. Neither of those things can happen without the support of the people who buy in to that narrative the most. And those people the ones that are conspicuously absent from most of the community organizing events I've seen so far in the city. Maybe, just maybe, it's going to take more than free hot dogs and a few ads in the Gambit to get somewhere with the highest murder rate in the country.

Vote for the Crook. It's Important.

I truly wish I could say "only in Louisiana." I guess to a certain extent, I can. Nowhere else that I know of do they have celebrity bartender nights featuring former governors, or bumper stickers that read "vote for the crook. It's important." And I feel confident that even if those two things were true other places, you'd be hard-pressed to find people chanting to re-elect someone that just finished serving 10 years in the federal penitentiary for embezzlement and corruption charges. But that was just another Tuesday evening for me in downtown New Orleans.

Let's back up for a minute and explain. Edwin Edwards was the governor of Louisiana for like 4 different terms over the last 40 years. He's 84 now, and he literally JUST got out of the federal pen this year. His most recent election was in the 90s, when he ran against former KKK Wizard David Duke. If you've listened to really old bounce music from New Orleans, one of the first beats to become popular featured "**** David Duke" on loop. David Duke was understandably quite unpopular with the minorities of Louisiana, among others, and it led to a serious third-party campaign which endorsed Edwin Edwards with the phrase "Vote for the crook. It's important." Everyone knew E2 was a thief. But at least he wasn't a Klansman. Truly, this represents the triumph of the lesser-of-two-evils philosophy of voting.

What's important here, I think, is not so much to dwell on how funny/terrible that election was, or how cool it is that former governors tend bar in New Orleans for a night just so that their loyal supporters can sit around and talk about how much better they would be doing in the current situation than Bobby Jindall is (although that was quite an experience). I think it's important for us to think about how and why we end up with this false dichotomy of having to choose one of two candidates, and this serious difficulty of not really supporting either one. How did the people of Louisiana find themselves choosing between the crook and the racist?

Well, as in all things, there are tons of complications and nuances when we get into the specifics of those two people and the political climate of Louisiana at the time, but I'd like to focus on the more basic issue of the way that one becomes an option at all in this political world that we observe and sometimes feel like we participate in. You get on the ballot (read: become an option) when you get endorsed by a major party, or when you get some largely inaccessible amount of people to signal that they support your candidacy (before you're on the ballot, mind you). That means that you pretty much either need to have a lot of support from people already within power in the party, or you need to have enough independant power and wealth to get your message out to a ton of people outside of the election process. Most people understand the importance of a republic over a democracy in that we need people we support to make decisions for all of us, because those of us that are doing real jobs that make the country run day-to-day don't all have the time, information, perspective, education, and/or intellect to decide what is in our best interest and how to pursue it for every single issue that comes up. That's why we elect a small group of (theoretically) elite people to make those decisions on our behalf, and we expect that those people will work in our best interests because we elected them to do just that, and we picked the person that we thought would be best at doing just that.

But somehow in the process of outsourcing decision-making about what we should do as a country to state-wide and national delegates, we've also outsourced the decision-making about who should be the decision-makers. That's where things get dangerous. We, as a people, lose our agency when we no longer control the fates of our politicians, which is what happens every time a primary goes by that no one cares about. If you had to choose between the primaries and the actual election, you really have more of an opportunity to shape policy by voting in the primary that the actual election. I'm not one of the people that thinks we should throw out the two-party system all together and open up elections to be a free-for-all. I've seen multi-party systems that worked and that failed, and I think that even the ones that succeed lend themselves even more to the base political tactics of favor-trading that lines pockets without solving any problems. But I think that the nomination system for parties needs to be more vigorous and accessible, and that's as much our fault as the big, rich, born-and-bred politicians behind the curtains at the National Conventions. Until we demand options that are better than and different from what we've been dealing with, we're not going to get anywhere. That means changing our focus in a few ways. That means focusing more on who makes it INTO and OUT OF the primaries, instead of waiting for the candidates to be selected before we consider the election to have begun. It also means focusing less on what law school a potential candidate went to, and more on what they've done with their lives. Finally, it means focusing on answers instead of rhetoric. I love rhetoric. I got my BA in rhetoric. But if we really want to get answers from our candidates at debates instead of double-speak, how about not voting for anyone that doesn't give concrete answers in debates? How's that for a movement? Watch all the debates during primaries, and keep track not only of what answers people gave, but who answered the questions at all. If you can't tell me what you believe in, either you don't know the answer or you're too weak to defend yourself to people who disagree. Either way, I don't want you to represent me.

Maybe if we pay more attention to the things that matter in a candidate and how people become one, we can improve the entire field. But if my options are to vote for the crook or the Klansman, I'll vote for the crook every time. It's important.

Those Less Fortunate

This is a phrase that I see a lot: "those less fortunate." I read about it in news articles; I hear about it from JV’s talking about their clients; I see it on virtually every cover letter for someone who wants to intern at our office; when people congratulate me for “taking a year off” (see older post on that whole idea). I think that phrase has, like many things, lost the original depth and nuance of its meaning and become a shallow, bland placeholder phrase. When people say “those less fortunate,” it can refer to any number of groups and situations, but it primarily means people that have less money, less education, less privilege due to their race and class. Some people that make it a point to sound progressive also include things like gender, sexual orientation, and ability in that list, but primarily people talking about the less fortunate mean the former list much more than the latter. I think the following applies with equal force to any of them.

When we use the label “less fortunate” to refer to the social position and struggles of these groups of people, what we’re really doing is admitting that our privileged position over them is not the result of something we’ve done or earned, but it is primarily because we had better luck than them. We are fortunate. We’re the lucky ones, as Allison Krauss might say. We have what we have not just because we deserve it, but because somewhere along the line we drew straws, great big humongous cosmically relevant straws, and some people got the short ones, but we were not those people. Some of us got the awesome wide ones you can get at Burger King, the ones that are so big you can actually drink a milkshake through them without it folding because you had to suck too hard. Other people got bright, colorful Krazy Straws that glow in the dark and light up as you drink through them and maybe even change colors. And then “those less fortunate” got a coffee stirrer that has been chewed on by a cat a few years ago so it’s all twisted up and liquid won't travel through it. As one might guess, the coffee stirrer is the shortest of the available straws in this situation, and the guy or girl who picked it got totally screwed. And it’s not their fault they ended up with the bad straw, that’s just it – they’re less fortunate. They don’t deserve the short straw any more than I deserve the Burger King straw, or the Olsen twins deserve the Krazy Straw. But that’s the straw they got, and they’re stuck with it.

But this is the other thing about “the less fortunate”: just because the difference between my situation and theirs is based on luck, that doesn’t mean that it’s completely out random. The straws didn’t all appear out of thin air, nor did they group themselves together and organize the picking of themselves. It’s true that neither coffee stirrer girl nor Krazy Straw guy did anything to deserve the straw they randomly picked-- but at some point SOMEONE was putting all the straws together, and they put the Krazy Straw and the Burger King straw and the coffee stirrer all in the same handful, knowing full-well that someone was going to get each of them and that would affect their life. Or at least their straw-related happiness.

So here I am with a pretty good straw. I can consider myself fortunate. I see other people with pretty crappy straws. They can consider themselves less fortunate. In the same way that I didn’t do anything to make myself fortunate, and they didn’t do anything to make themselves less fortunate, I didn’t do anything to make them less fortunate either. I’m not the guy that put all the straws together, I just benefit from it. This is a very difficult situation for me to wrap my head around and to figure out what is really right. I, like most people, feel like I worked hard for the things that I have. I started with a good straw, but I also had to take what I had and make something out of it. It’s not like everything just worked out for me automatically just because I had a pretty good straw, right? I know people that had straws as good as mine that didn’t work as hard as me, and many of them aren’t in as good of a position. But then again, if I look at the people with the really good straws, the ones way better than even mine, I notice that many of the ones that didn’t work as hard as I did are still better off than me, and the ones that tried as hard or harder than me ended up WAY better off. As egocentric as I am, even I can extrapolate that experience to presume the way the people with the coffee stirrer feel when comparing their lives to mine.

So what’s the take-away here? First of all, I think it’s important to remember that I am, and most of the people reading this are, extremely fortunate. We have more, in terms of most measures of social capital, than the average person in this country, let alone the world. Second, that our position is based largely on just that – good fortune. And for many of the people that are missing out, it’s not their fault that they drew the short straw; they’re just unlucky.

Here’s one crazy idea, just to throw out something both concrete and controversial. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not that radical, but just think for a minute about the possibilities. What if there were a 90% estate tax? And all the proceeds were divvied out across the country, were earmarked solely for public education, and were allocated in proportion to the number of students at each school? If you really want to start eliminating luck from the equation, you have to simultaneously get rid of the advantages that come from inheriting wealth, and the (separate but related) disadvantages that come with inheriting poverty. Because you inherit poverty just as much as you inherit wealth. And in many ways, it’s easier to squander your wealth than it is to overcome your poverty. Of course it’s not a solution, but wouldn’t it be an interesting start?

What I think is especially appealing to me about this plan is that you’re not taking away anything that someone EARNED, except the person who died, and I don’t think that person has much of a legitimate claim to it once they’re dead. I’m not sure people have the right to inherit wealth. If there is an argument along those lines that I’d be receptive to, I think it would be more that a person has the right to leave their money to whom they want, but even that I think is inaccurate. If you want people to have things you have, you should give it to them while you’re living. Once you’re gone, you don’t really have a claim to it anymore. That’s my current position, anyways. Which isn’t quite socialism, because you could still have as much wealth as you could personally acquire. You just wouldn’t get to start with so much that the rest of the players can’t compete. And competition, as we all know, is the heart of Capitalism, our national religion.

A New Perspective on Sex (Offenders)

One of my more ongoing projects over the course of this year is one that I stumbled upon in November, and have been sort of working on here and there for the last 6 months. Over the last month or two it's gotten more attention in my office, and we've got a few people that are actually interested in the issue. Enough that I feel comfortable having a lot of interns working on this project...and I mean a LOT. We've probably already expended 200 hours of volunteer labor on this grand scheme that is evolving as it goes, but maintains the same basic goal: find housing for registered sex offenders.

I realize that many people have a hard time feeling sympathy for registered sex offenders. That's part of the reason why they need so much help. It's so easy, politically, to earn points by throwing the book at them. Not only is it a minority that everyone loves to hate, but they're pretty much exclusively convicted felons, meaning you don't even have to worry about losing their votes! Add to that the fact that the vast majority of convicted sex offenders (at least in New Orleans) are indigent African-Americans, and you're got guaranteed results from increasing punitive regulation on them. Here's the thing about sex offender registration: it's existence alone proves that the system is broken. Let's break that down for a minute.

You're arrested for a crime, convicted, and sentenced. What does that mean? It means the police think you did something wrong, and they along with the DA's convince a judge or jury that you did it, and therefore you must be punished (unless they farm a plea out of you, but that's a different story). Sentencing is intended to serve a few purposes: punish the offender, deter future offenses by the offender and others, and keep the good, law-abiding citizens safe from the criminal while (s)he is being rehabilitated. Go to jail, do your time, pay your fees, do your community service, finish the restitution, and then go about your way. That's how it's supposed to work, right? But with "sex offenders," you serve your time and then get out only to be monitored for the next 15 years, 25 years, or the rest of your life. That means you register your name, picture, and charge in public domain; circulate it to every neighborhood you ever move to (and pay $600-$700 each time for the privilege of doing so); report to probation/parole; and conform to a whole host of crazy regulations, including random drug tests and searches for contraband (which includes any materials with sexual encounters, human or animal). Technically, I imagine many rated-R movies and more than half National Geographic publications meet this broad classification.

What is the purpose? To punish them even more? For all other charges, a probationary period is used in lieu of serving the full sentence; for "sex offenders," it's in addition to the full sentence. Shouldn't sex offender registration be sort of like a specialized probation, where you serve part of your time in the community, but with added restrictions? Also, the public record of all the information would be a special kind of public shaming that even the US wouldn't condone for sheer punitive purposes. People here still sort of believe in 8th amendment rights.

It turns out that the most logical explanation for the requirement, and the one that most people will give you (as a valid justification for the rule), is that people need to know where these dangerous people are so that they can be safe. There are maps, public databases, neighborhood watch groups. There are fliers, newspaper ads, and bulletins every time a new one moves into a neighborhood. Many of them have a special condition saying that they can't live within 1000 feet of a school, church, playground, daycare, or "place where children generally congregate." Basically, it’s clear that the people who made the law think that children are unsafe when within three football fields of such a person. If these people are so dangerous that we need to know where they live and keep them physically separate from our children, why are they being released? I'm not trying to argue that everyone convicted of a sex offense should die in Angola (the largest state penitentiary in Louisiana, and one that houses only life-sentence or death-sentence inmates). I think that this is a clear reflection of the fact that everyone admits jail doesn't work. It doesn’t rehabilitate or deter future offense, because if it did, we wouldn’t have to worry about these people when they got out.

I don’t have all the answers. I might not have any of the answers. But I know where to start, and where you start is to stop ostracizing people and then wondering why they haven’t been properly socialized. And no, socialization isn’t always effective, nor is it always good. But when it comes to deviant behavior, it seems pretty clear that taking a bunch of people with closer ties to the underground economy than the formal one, and forcing them out to the fringes of society, is not going to encourage civic engagement and participation. And that doesn’t just apply to sex offenders—that’s just what’s on my mind right now.

Yesterday

I started writing this entry on Friday, February 11. It is now Tuesday, February 15. "Yesterday" here now refers to "5 days ago," but is still a kind of cool story. Without further ado:

Yesterday was a productive day. Started with a meeting with the education liaison and teachers for OPP, where we spent 2 hours learning about opportunities to get classes. There are 48 slots in GED classes for people above the age of 19 in OPP. There are about 3,000 prisoners that fit this category (there are another 500 that are 19 and under).

I got back to my office to see an email titled "Armed man may be in our bld", about someone who allegedly stabbed someone in our building and was still at-large, NOPD suspecting he was still in the building.

Around the same time, I got copies of the sick call request forms that people use in jail to request medical attention emailed to me from the jail doctor. It took a little while because he had to ask the Sheriff's permission to send it to me. The sheriff is going to start hating me- in the last few weeks I've been associated with people bothering him for marriages in jail, sick card forms, "ambushing" the educational partners, and photo motions. I dig it.

Next, I did some training on intake and did intake. That included me coming within literal seconds of being arrested. But let's not get into that right now.

Coordinated volunteer work on getting this Spanish-speaking guy married before his trial, because he'll probably get deported afterward (or serve more time, then get deported).

Then I wrote memos and did bond calls for my intake people.

Got home in time for dinner and meeting Brian's dad.

Went to Le Bon Temps to see Soul Rebels with a few of my housemates and one of their friends from out of town.

Got home at 3AM.

Got up at quarter to 7.

Start over.

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That's a bit of a dramatic example of a day, but really not a whole lot different from how my life goes. Probably the biggest difference between that and an average day for me is that I had contact with more clients than I usually get to these days. Today I spent a few hours at a clinic with a client of ours, but other than that I spent most of my time doing volunteer recruitment, coordination and training. But enough about work. I feel like I always talk about work. That's probably because that's the most relevant and time-consuming part of my life right now. But there's more to my life than my work, although maybe the world would be a little better if there weren't, and I'll talk about it a bit now.

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I didn't work at all this weekend. I laid out for a while, went to a (miserably attended) "Know Your Rights" presentation, biked around, gave blood, went to mass and dinner with the National JVC board, went to a dive bar with housemates and FJV's for a friend's birthday, ate copious amounts of pancakes, wrote a letter, made hummus and flatbread, went to a coworker's boyfriend's art show and out with some coworkers after, bought fabric and spray paint to finally make a "New Orleans Hornets"-themed bag toss set, and actually slept for almost 8 hours one night. On the agenda for this week is coaching our house's intramural basketball team, finally making those bags I keep talking about making, and hosting our America-themed party on Friday night. Oh yeah, and getting an MRI in the morning. That will be interesting. I don't think it even makes sense to talk about the shoulder until I figure out what happened with it. There's too much uncertainty. Everything will be fine though- that much I know. At least I got a whole season of softball in before it blew up.

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The Stacy boys are considering having the next FOSAA reunion in New Orleans. I can't decide which is worse- how much my housemates are unprepared for FOSAA, or how much FOSAA is unprepared for NOLA. Either way, I can't wait to see how it pans out. Things like this can only end up one way - flawlessly.