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.

Indigence.

Right now I'm sitting at work, taking a break from writing a particularly complicated memo that involves me basically making a lot of decisions that I'm not qualified to make. That seems to be a pretty standard sentiment in my office, and I think it might be a pretty standard sentiment everywhere. This particular endeavor involves defining a bunch of fundamental concepts that we're using to rewrite the way that we determine indigence. Basically, it has come to our attention that the forms and system we've been using to see who qualifies for a public defender are both doing, but not doing well (a distinction that has been made recently in other online literature). So we're going to come up with a new system and new forms that will be easier to fill out, more clear, and help us better determine who is indigent.

Why does that matter? Mostly because we like the word "indigent" and all of its variations. But we also need to know because my office is only allowed to represent people who are indigent, or who are "unable, without substantial financial hardship to himself or to his dependents, to obtain competent, qualified legal representation on his own." There are some basic guidelines provided by the Public Defender Act of Louisiana, but there are also a lot of areas that need to be interpreted, especially if you're determining indigency for people who don't automatically qualify because they get public assistance (like food stamps or public housing) or make less than 200% of the Federal Poverty Guidelines (which for one person totals out to be a staggering $21,660 per year). So, for example, you have to consider someone's assets to see if they qualify for a public defender. And their monthly expenses. And their debt. And how many dependents they have (and their ages). Astrological sign is optional.

It has somehow become my responsibility to sit in an office on Tulane Avenue, look at a computer, and use these (and other) criteria to decide who can and can't afford to hire their own private attorney. Me, the same person who calls families every week to ask them if they can help bond their child/friend/fiance/parent/cousin out of jail, and about half the time hears a familiar "I don't have that kind of money to bond him out." On a $10,000 bond. $7,000 bond. $5,000 bond. Bonds that would cost less than four digits to get a bondsman to get someone out of jail!

But those really aren't the people we're talking about here, determining who qualifies for a public defender. If they're still in jail for the trial, they're going to qualify for a PD pretty much regardless. But what about the people who sold their car to pay the guy's bond? Or used their entire monthly SSI check as a down payment with a bondsman, and owe that much again with no idea how to pay it off?

The point isn't that some people are poor and can't afford lawyers or bonds. The point is that I am acutely aware of how little I know about that entire lifestyle, and yet I'm the one that is saying "You can afford a lawyer, and you can't." How do I know who can afford a lawyer? If you make a thousand dollars more than the income cutoff, do you have a thousand dollars to spend on a lawyer? I'm inclined to think not. It's sort of hard to think of a system that doesn't reward people for bad spending habits, if you count assets like money in the bank against people. If two people have the same income and family unit size, but one of them has saved up a thousand dollars and the other one has no bank account and $19.24 in his pocket because he really likes to buy po boys for lunch, should you tell the first person to pay for a lawyer and the second person he can have one for free?

I suppose it's the nature of the beast that you're going to screw poor people over no matter what. Fortunately, I can take comfort in knowing that plenty of organizations thrive on that purpose, so I'm not alone. And I'm a pretty social person, so that's nice. But basically, you're inevitably going to punish people for saving money, or make poor people hire lawyers that they can't really afford (and go into debt, which leads to a whole slew of other problems), or give a free lawyer to people who can afford their own, which clearly and noticeably detracts from the level of service we can provide to the clients of ours who really need us. And I, with my vast knowledge of and experience with (A) supporting a family, (B) living close to the poverty line, (C) chronic bouts of unemployment or underemployment, and (D) any other of a host of issues that our (potential) clients deal with, am going to sit around the office on a Thursday night and write a policy to determine how much money really is enough before it would cause you "substantial financial hardship" to hire a lawyer.

It's ok. I live in solidarity with the poor, right? I'm volunteering, and living simply, and making less than half of minimum wage. I'm just the man for the job, aren't I?

Sometimes I make myself laugh.

520208

As of Thursday night, 3,000 people have been arrested in Orleans Parish since I started work here on August 18th. That's 121 days. That's 24.8 people per day...I think we can safely round to 25. There are couple of things that stand out to me about this:

1.) Holy crap! I've been working here for four months already!

2.) If this rate keeps up, 9,000 arrests will happen in the year I spend working here. That doesn't quite mean 9,000 different people because some of those will be the same person getting arrested more than once in a year, but that seems to happen about once per day.

3.) If New Orleans' population is 485,000, that means that in the last 4 months 0.6% of the city was arrested. If it keeps up all year, 1.85% of the city will have been arrested. (As an aside, OPP's 6,800 average prison population represents roughly 1.5% of the city's population).

I'm going to take this opportunity to just throw out some musings about the work so far:

Most of the people come through first appearances for one of the following things:

-Domestic Abuse Battery

-Possession of illegal drugs

-Illegal possession of a gun, whether because of where you are, you're a convicted felon, you also have drugs on you, etc.

I just got the pricing list for things in prison. Some of it is reasonable, and some not so much. Ex:

Ramen - 68 cents

Bible - $5

Koran - $12

2 Ibuprofen pills - 49 cents

Toothbrush - $2.12

Boxers - $3.45

On my last intake day, which was Saturday, 24 people came through for First Appearances. We give practice levels for how serious a charge is, 1-5. 1 is a misdemeanor, while 5 is life without parole. No one that came through on Saturday had a level 4 or 5 charge. Even so, the total bond set for all 24 people was $389,500. If they all used a bondsman to get out, they would be paying between $50,635 and $58,425 total to be released. Not a single one of those 24 people had an income for their entire family unit that was even half of $50k.

All of those people who don't bond out will probably stay in jail for an average of 2 months before they even get arraigned (where they get to plead guilty or not guilty).

That's enough depressing stuff for now. I'm going home tomorrow morning, and I'll forget all about all of this. I'll have fun, visit people, laugh, and not give OPP a second thought. My clients, on the other hand, will be sitting in jail. They don't get the luxury of going on vacation, or going to see their families, or forgetting about how screwed up everything is. Because that's their life. It's just my past-time.

Taking a Year Off

Before I get into the article, I’d like to give a basic synopsis of what I’ve been up to for the last two months while I wasn’t updating this blog. Unfortunately, I’m not sure I can do it any justice. Taking two months of your life and focusing it into a few experiences, stories, or even themes is an uncompromisingly daunting task. I'll see what I can do to, in the words of Kipling, "splash at a 10-league canvas with brushes of comet's hair." We’ve had great times for the holidays, including:

-giant parties hosted by Steve’s work (Project Lazarus) for Halloween, overwhelmingly populated by flamboyant gay men

-Thanksgiving dinner of 11 people at our house, for which we all cooked something and I made the 2 turkeys (one original, one Cajun-style)

-Perhaps more importantly, a Thanksgiving-day football game in the part

-Certainly more importantly, I introduced the house to the traditional Fennellian fare of turkey slop

In general, life has been great and fairly busy. I work a lot, but I’m getting a lot done and I like the people I work with as well as most of the work I do. It looks like my job functions will start to change in about a month, when Virginia finishes at school and becomes a full-time employee and we get one more employee from Australia named Sam. From there I’ll be doing more work, in the most general terms, on building institutional knowledge. In practical terms, I’ll be doing a lot of training (both actual and materials), rebuilding and reformatting the office’s Wiki (which needs about as much work as a gutted home), and coordinating all the volunteers that will start coming in. That’s not all set in stone- like all things at my office, it’s sure to change based on what crises come up here and there. But the idea is that once I don’t have a full load of intake to be doing, I’ll have at least some time to devote to those things.

Apart from work, the home life is pretty good. My housemates and I still get along well, and we’re still making time to do things together even as we each start to have more things to be doing apart from the community as well. I’m starting to form some good relationships with some of my coworkers and one of my neighbors, which is a nice feeling. I’m making time to go to the gym a few times a week in the morning before I go to work. Marecca (from the other community) usually goes with me, which is nice because I don’t have quite enough motivation yet to get up by myself as often as I do because she’s going with me. Steve (also from the other community) and I have been chilling a lot recently too, and we’re starting to teach each other songs on the guitar. Pretty soon we’ll be able to have a pretty sweet jam session. We learned Nelly’s “Just a Dream” last night, which was a ton of fun. Yesterday we had a cookout in the backyard- it was 75 degrees and it was one of the first things that I organized in New Orleans that I felt like was really a success. It was just a perfect day, and everything fell into place like Amanda Pedro putting a puzzle together.

There are still tons of people around New Orleans that invite us to come see them, and we’re not very good at all about keeping in touch with them. It’s something that I wish we would take advantage of more, but since I’m not really the contact for any of the groups, it’s sufficiently inconvenient for me to do so that I usually just don’t bother. But we’ve gotten to hang out with the Duchense sisters, Sister Helen Prejean and the sisters of St Joseph, the Jesuit Residence at Loyola, a zillion different church communities, and about half a dozen service corps (ACE, TFA, CY, Americorps, and a few other religious groups).

In terms of news, I suppose there are a few updates that are worth sharing in case people don’t know, so that you can’t say I never told you:

-My computer is pretty much officially dead. One of my neighbors accidentally decided it was thirsty a few months ago, and it never recovered. Pretty much everything important was backed up on my external hard drive, it just makes it a little harder for me to update the blog and stuff. If I’m at work I’m too busy to do anything else, even if I stay late, so I just need to remember to ask a roommate to borrow a computer to do something like this while everyone else sleeps. I’m still the last to bed and one of the first to get up in the community. Steve says I’m a vampire.

-The van, most recently named the “Lean, Mean, Green, ‘Bama Machine” is also no more. One of my housemates got in an accident a few weeks ago. Everyone’s ok, but the car is definitely totaled. So that’s going to make road tripping a little harder.

-On that note, I’ll be flying home for Christmas. I’m getting into Charlotte on December 21^st, and then Matt and I are coming to Havelock on the 23^rd. I’ll be there til a stupid hour of the morning on the 28^th, when I fly back home to New Orleans out of New Bern.

I know that’s a terribly concise relation of my last two months, but no amount of writing at this point can really do justice to everything that’s gone on. Hopefully I can be better about it from now on. Moving on to the actual entry that I was meaning to write:

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The irony of an article whose title is about taking time off after not updating this for two months and preparing to go home for the holidays is not lost on me. It’s not necessarily intentional, but I suppose that it dovetails rather nicely. I’ll keep it relatively brief, since I’ve already written a lot today.

Most people have no idea what it is that I’m doing this year. It’s kind of a strange place to be, working but being called a “volunteer” and getting paid for what I do by the organization I work for. My coworkers say I’m on a fellowship, which isn’t quite true but close enough that it does a better job of explaining my role than anything else they could say. Among people that do have some familiarity with how my situation works, there are generally two different categories.

The first are the people who just don’t get it. They understand what I’m doing, but don’t understand why. They wonder why I would waste time doing something where I don’t make money, I’m not going to school, and I’m not going to advance.

The second are the people who sort of get it. They understand what I’m doing, and understand that the work is important and valuable to society. They’re excited that I’m doing something good for the less fortunate in society. They say things like “It’s so great of you to take a year off to help people.”

Clearly, these two groups have very different ideas of the importance of social work, and that’s fine. To be expected. Probably even good, to a certain degree, because cynicism is as necessary as idealism if you ever really want to get anything accomplished. I think the important thing to realize that in a very fundamental way, they are both terribly mistaken. Allow me to explain.

The first group of people basically see little value in investing your time, effort, and money (in terms of opportunity costs) in something that won’t help you personally. The second group sees great value in doing that while you’re young and you have a lot of both time and effort. But at some point, both groups agree that in the long run, there are more important life aspirations than to sacrifice everything to help others. For group 1 it’s explicit; for group 2 it’s implied by saying “taking a year off.” What is the year “off” from? It’s taking time away from what really matters, and what really matters to them is what really matters to most people, which is getting a good education so you can get a good job and have a good family life and be comfortable. And that’s a grand ideal. But that’s not what really matters.

For those of us that have read the bible and believe that some parts of it are, if not true, at least good guidance in justice or morality, we must demand more of ourselves and each other. The goal of our lives isn’t to make ourselves comfortable. Many amazing people that either haven’t read it or don’t assign it even that much credibility have reached a similar conclusion. What really matters might in an academic sense be bringing yourself happiness, but there should be no better way of doing that than working to bring God’s kingdom to earth, which can be done by secular means as effectively as (if not more than) by any others. Jesus would not have been remarkably sympathetic to the Invisible Hand argument for social optimization. We have an individual responsibility to actively bring justice to the oppressed. That is not negotiable. What could be a more important goal? What could one possibly value more?

So if you think about it, I’ve been taking the last 22 years of my life off. And if I go on from here to live a normal life, then I’ll be taking the rest of my life off too. I think that most people who “take a year off” have, in reality, only had one real year on. The rest is just sort of a break. Or a distraction. A tangent perhaps. But how can we justify the goal of human existence in terms of the individual struggle to achieve greatness, rather than in terms of the collective struggle to overcome misery? And in the end, coming from where we are right now, is it even possible to achieve one without achieving the other?

So from now on, whenever I hear about “taking time off” to do service, I’ll be asking myself the question “taking time off from what?” And if whatever it is requires you to take time off from it in order to do service, is it really something you should be doing at all?

Tales

It's an interesting situation, having tales to tell and no time with which to share them. The good news is that I've started keeping notes of the interesting client interactions I've had at work- my office is all going to compile them for the year, I think, and then we might make a book. We'd have to make the NYT Bestseller list to come close to making enough money to bring us back to minimum wage for the hours we work. I'm really diving into the whole thing though, and I love it. I don't think it's fair to say that any of the clients are really my friends yet, but I've had really good connections with a few of them, including some really warm smiles, a few that come try to talk to me even when they've been called up to talk to their lawyer or investigator and not me, and most recently, a fist bump (separated by 3 inches of plexiglass). Those are almost as rewarding as looking on the screen and seeing someone getting released. I have to be careful about getting too comfortable with them though- I'm beginning to convince myself that I understand what my clients are going through because I've talked about studied it and fought against it so much since I got here. But in reality I can never understand what these people are dealing with, because I've never been arrested (no matter how hard I've tried on certain occasions). I have to find a happy medium. Or maybe a not-so-happy medium, if I really got deep enough into their shoes.

Some interesting experiences since my last update:

• Volunteered at the Ritz Carlton for the 10-year anniversary of Cafe Reconcile, a job training center for at-risk youth that one of my roommates works at
• Went to Plaquemine's Parish for a Baptist church service, followed by a boil. It was amazing- they treated us just like family. I learned how to boil and how to do the bus stop (just a groovier version of the electric slide); Lester responded to that with "So that means you're black now!" It really felt like a compliment. I don't know how many other places in the US that would be true for people.
• Won our first work-league softball game...and lost like 3.
• Broke the door at a bar (but not permanently- it was screwed up before I got there, I promise!!!)
• Got stopped by a cop on the street while walking. Didn't get searched. Didn't get booked. He didn't even run my ID. How different my life is from my clients'.
• Had a great birthday that included a brass band concert (Soul Rebels- AMAZING), a block party in uptown for the Abita pubcrawl, some people over at the house to hang out afterwards with beverage sponsored by my wonderful brother, and a cookout sponsored by my amazing grandparents with my housemates. The whole thing was outstanding.
• Picnics on the Fly, which is this field on the banks of the Mississippi River, with the housemates
• Volunteering at the Good Shepherd Gala, which was a fundraiser for the charter school that Catherine, one of my roommates, works at.
• Listening to great live music on Frenchmen Street, including a sweet reggae band and the New Orleans legend known as Kermit Ruffins.
• Finishing up a set of cornhole boards and sewing the bags for the backyard.
• Impromptu Shirtless Mechanic Night, after one of the tires of the van popped.
• Actually, in the same week the van was out of commission because of the flat tire and my laptop was out of commission because a neighbor of mine decided that it was thirsty. That reminded me that my idea of simple living still needs some refining. I can get along just fine without them. I think I’d be pretty sad to lose my guitar though. I’ve been playing that a lot lately, especially once my roommates are sleeping. I definitely sleep the least of anyone in my house, so I just go out on the porch at night and play some.

In other news, I cut off all my hair. A few pictures are on Facebook.