Apparently under my badass attitude I actually have the ability to feel bad for other people. I actually want to help them. Today I met this guy who was almost ninety and he was asking us to get a volunteer to his house to watch his wife a few hours a week while he went out run some errands. I had to make a copy of something and he took me to his office, which was filled from the floor to the ceiling with video editing equipment, computers, and an electronic organ. I asked him about the equipment and he told me that he had been a video editor while he was working, and then he mentioned how much he really missed it. And to top it off, the guy made a joke out of everything, everything. His sense of humor was more dry than my own, so much so that I missed a couple of jokes he made at my own expense before he laughed. I seriously thought that the people we were trying to help would be more or less secondary to what I was doing. They were, in my mind, random people that needed a little assistance. It doesn't matter what I thought of them, I would give them the same consideration, and they would ultimately be numbers. That isn't going to be the case. I can't meet these people and then just as easily dismiss them. My Monkeysphere is going to be going nuts.
The weirdest part of working for a non-profit, I think, is going to come in the terms of people actually giving a shit about you as a worker. I went to a staff Christmas lunch today they do every year. Our boss announced that they had put in for a $95,000 grant to continue their program and that Harry Reid had made sure that we got $195,000. And I got to eat lunch and chat with the first lady of Nevada. Well, actually she is sort of divorced, which only sweetened the pot, as she is sort of a MILF. And she is on the cover of a magazine this month:
Okay, so she isn't step over your own mother hot, but in real life she's got a lot going on.
The point is that she was there, and she cared about this program and I am now part of this program. I never saw any politicians when I was slopping pizza onto warped aluminum trays. Okay, I did, but it was Fallon Mayor Ken Tedford, and he was only there to get drunk with his friends. His pizza could have been served by a monkey in a comical hat and he wouldn't have paid it any real attention. Although he might have at least patted the monkey on the head.
Right now I can see two paths before me. One is where I focus on writing and go to school and blah-de-blah and do something with that. The other is where I work in government/non-profit. Since I am a lowly AmeriCorps member and I can either leave after a year to pursue a life of helping people or I can leave after a year and go back to school seems to leave this whole year in my life as a total Schroedinger's Cat scenario. I am either a caring, helpful person, or I am a self-righteous author (the word author comes from the word Authority, and as a result the only people that write fiction are people that think they are authorities on whatever world they want to invent where characters will do whatever they do to prove their point. It is, quite possibly, the epitome of being self-righteous, as we push our own particular world view on an entire universe of our own creation).
All of that probably had nothing to do with anything.
The thing that sucks about being a human is that we aren't told what we are supposed to do. Did anyone tell Mozart to "be a musician?" I doubt it. He just did it. Did anyone tell Einstein to be a scientist? No, but he totally reinvented physics. And he did it with wacky hair. I have a portrait of Einstein on my wall. He's always so old in his pictures. I guess that is really why I like it. It isn't that he had the audacity to question Newtonian physics, its that when he became popular he was an old man. I guess I've always thought that was the time in my life I would be popular. "Old Man Moore writes Another Wacky Story" might read a headline. Why the word "writes" is the only word not capitalized is anyones guess.
I was thinking about how all writers were always like "I was writing from a very young age" and I, for a long time, thought, "I never wrote shit as a kid." Then I realized I did. It was crap and often it was left completely unfinished, but I wrote it. When I was in first grade I was told that my reading comprehension skills were low for my age group. So I decided to write my own stories so that no one could say I didn't understand them. The joke is that I don't understand most of my own stories.
That is probably all I have to say for now, so enjoy some randomness, which I honestly found by searching the word "random" through Google Image, and it was the sixth hit:
3 comments:
Actually, Mozart was really pressured by his dad from like the age of 4 to do music.
Good to hear Americorps is going well.
dawn gibbons spoke to one of my classes once. she is pretty decent looking. not too bright though...
i like how you reference schroedinger's cat even though you hate it when people reference schroedinger's cat.
I was going to point out that bit of irony about me using it while i was writing it, but I did in fact forget.
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