Gotcha!

I was browsing a style blog and thought, I wish my hair looked like that. Then I remembered I needed a new hairdryer, and went on Amazon. I only needed $0.01 more to get free shipping, so I then also remembered that I needed a longer audio jack for my car. Then I think, if I'm going to get an audio jack, I'll need a car charger for my iPod. I checked out, closed the window, and it returned me to the blog page. And that's when I thought: that's how they get ya...

Helicopters

It used to be that you could hear the game-day crowds when something big was going on. You didn't even have to know who our football team was playing, or that there was a game at all, but by 8am you'd awaken, drowsy on a Saturday, to the streets crowded with blue and gold fans. I would follow the cheers of the crowds at Kip's or the lair, and even during intense studying new when to refresh my screen to see the updated score. That was in 2007, just before the effects of the economic bubble burst had spread across the nation, when tuition was just $6,000 a year, when our interactions with the police meant you were probably drunk in public.

Now it's the helicopters that signal something big. From my apartment I hear them fly south to occupy Oakland, north to UC Berkeley. They come in the afternoon when I am at work, and this time I know to look at my screen for the headline, the protest, the shooting. I check in with my volunteers, and figure out whether or not I should hold class that night. The buzzing of the choppers stay into the night, and not even my double-paned windows can block them out.

Always and Never Again

I'm good at school. Like, really good. After 17 years of formal public education, you'd hope I would be. I can analyze, I can write, and I'm really good at learning. Give me a book, give me a discussion section, let me break it down to you in an essay. I got straight A's in college, high school, AND middle school.

But after spending the entire part of my memory-forming life in institutions of learning, I often feel entirely inadequate at work. It is frustrating that, at 22 years old, I was pushed into an completely different world of which I knew nothing about. Never mind my theoretical background in the connections between the government, non-profits and civil society, or my ability to reflect on how copy machines are like Gramsci, I know nothing about the real world. Networking, marketing, management. There wasn't a leadership program, internship or class I could take that would get me there. I can learn these things bit by bit, but when a whole new world gets thrown at me, it's a lot to take. When I started realizing that my colleagues had kids that were older than me, that they had been in the profession since before I was born, I got intimidated.

I want to think of myself as someone who is awesome at what she does. But what if it's not that I can do whatever I set my mind to, but that I just happened to find my calling in school work. That I'm just really good at school. Sometimes I wonder if I am too organized, too formulaic and straight for the energetic, chaotic world of the non-profit. I expect recognition for my work just like when a teacher grades my papers, yet I don't realize I need a marketing plan, relationship building, and connections. As a camp counselor I could talk to each one of my kids, but as a program manager I have over 300 students, volunteers, staff members and parents I'm supposed to be BFFs with. I connect more with my volunteers--energetic, neurotic students like myself--than I do with the black kids whose childhood resembles nothing of my own. What if this just isn't my calling?

But then I also think, if I don't do my job, who will? Who will take an intern's wage to run a program? Who will keep things organized and prepared? Who will run the mentor classes and interview the kids? Of course, if I leave my position, the job will be filled, if there is a job left to fill by the time I'm done with this program. But I've also seen what it looks like when my manager hires someone new in the middle of the year, with the kids running around and the district threatening to cut off all funding because the program is in violation of just about every health and safety code. While I can't do the job, for 30k I'm not sure they could get anyone better. And where would I go? I want to go to another non-profit. Work under someone for a change in a real office with more than two people. But who's to say I'd be any better. I can't organize a community meeting to drum up support for community supported agriculture.

Or maybe life is about failures. Long gone are the days when I got an A for effort and showing up at office hours. There are plenty examples of this, but as I scroll through a gossip site to console my dejection, I think about Anna Wintour at Vogue, dismissing a designer's entire season of work with one turn of her nose. I think this rings particularly true as I consider my other passion, sewing, and the constant temptation to leave this serious business altogether to go make clothes. Even in the world of sequins and bias tape, and perhaps even more so for artists trying to make a living off their craft, does failure loom again and again. And as someone who has always gotten that A, I'm sensitive to this. I worked my ass off, but I was always rewarded with success. Always.

California Dreamin'

Whenever I drive home to Santa Cruz I'm in a rush. Shoulders tense, I weave around cars. I hit traffic at the Coliseum, and tap my foot anxiously. It's most likely hot, or I have the heater turned up too high, and I'm sweating. I flip through the radio channels and try not to fall asleep through San Jose. By the time I hit the Fish Hook and Highway 1, there is traffic again, and I'm invariably late. Maybe for that movie I was planning on seeing, maybe for my dentist appointment. I text, and want to yell at the cars going 50 through Aptos even after the traffic has let up.

But once I'm home, something changes me. All the carefully packed outfits I brought end up on the floor in favor a comfy pair of pants, a baggy shirt and a warm jacket. I borrow that beach skirt from my mom because even though I have one, I didn't think to bring it. I swear that someday I'll master packing, but I don't care enough because right now I'm headed to the ocean.

I usually stay in Santa Cruz longer than I plan. A three day weekend turns into a week. The short day trip ends in me staying overnight. I get a good meal for the first time in weeks, and drink too much.

By the time I'm headed back to the Bay Area, I'm the one cruising down the highway at 50 mph.

Gramsci and the Copy Machine (or how I learned to use my college degree)

It's true: I may never really use my undergraduate education. Well, at least not in the traditional sense. I didn't learn business skills (though, rumor has it, neither do the students at Haas), I didn't learn how to farm, or to litigate, or program, or whatever it is people in our service economy should know how to do nowadays. My thesis on the political underpinnings of the agricultural production of Mexico sits gathering dust on my shelf while I try to run a school-based non-profit on the virtues of sweat and enthusiasm alone (the food policy think tanks weren't hiring). I may never be asked to recall the name of Gramsci's seminal work or define his concept of the intellectual. Yet in a way, these ideas still linger, even today as I shoved our copy machine back across the room at the office.

When I first moved in to my office, I had grand plans: not just for program development, but for record-keeping and even the office layout. In the mornings, before my part-time coworker got in, I moved the furniture about, making the place my own. It was ridiculous to have the copier all the way across the room, I thought, when I can make a study corner there near that built-in table. A recent college grad, I was ambitious, with a burning desire to do things right, and do them right now. Of course, in order to move the copier, new furniture was needed, which we scavenged from the sidewalk and my coworker's apartment. The awkward setup filled up with paper, and the other tables would overflow with printed material whenever we would need to assemble large packets of paperwork. Meanwhile, my study corner was used only sometimes, the books it housed were out of the way and underutilized.

Now, the end of the year, I once again had a bug to reorganize. I used some left-over grant money to get closet organizers for our art supplies, and once again started in on redoing the office layout. This time I asked my coworker what she thought of the new copier location (now perched precariously on top of the extra computer desk), and we hemmed and hawed over the perfect location. A few days later everything was arranged, and I noticed with a sigh of resignation that the copier was once again back in its original location, the shelves across the room restored to theirs. It would give us more room to make copies and lay out our supplies, and with the bookshelf back towards the center of the room kids could more easily find what they needed. "Makes sense," said my friend, who used to work there. "That's why we had everything there in the first place." Of course, this renewed setup came with modifications: the power cord to the copier no longer stretched across the doorway, and the stack of literature was switched with textbooks on shelves, with everything positioned to ease access and make them child-friendly.

The placement of a copier is a trivial thing to worry about. If anything, however, it serves to think about how we are in the world and, most especially, how my work in a non-profit can build upon the resources there or fight against them. It is easy to come in to a space, a school, a community, and tell people what you think is best. But it is a whole different thing to involve yourself wholly, to watch, to listen, sometimes for years, and to then act with people to make changes and help achieve what is needed. My ideas can be grand, but if they don't work for the students I am trying to serve then they don't really serve them at all. Decision makers, wrote Gramsci, must engage with everyday understandings, from pop culture to, in my case, study habits. While there are many possibilities for change out there, they are contained within the local and historical conditions in which they are located. This includes the environments in which my kids grew up in, the relationships they've had, and their way of interacting with the world. As a program coordinator, and as a mentor, I can't go in expecting to change things. I have to really pay attention to how things work and how we can build upon them to improve.

In this way, college taught me to be a a critical thinker. I mean this not just in the same trivial sense that college teaches you how to bullshit on assignments or spellcheck for grammar. An undergraduate education in development studies taught me to think about how I am in the world, and what impact (for better or worse) my actions can have on the developing world around us.

Testing...

Ever since I left Mexico, I have had the urge to write. Not constantly, but rather off and on throughout the past year. Actually, it's been two years now.

Without the excuse of international travel, however, I couldn't bring myself to write anything down. What could possibly be so interesting about my everyday experience? Even though I have a proliferation of blogs bearing my name (starting with my high school MySpace page, meghalomania), I don't typically suffer from the delusions of grandeur that would lead me to think that people might actually want to read about me. At the same time, however, I need a place to put stuff down, to process what goes on. And so rather than troubling others with my constant musings about life in the Bay Area, I decided to start another blog.

My experience with journaling has been shaky at best. When I was a kid, I used to pick up pen and notebook every so often with grandiose ideas of writing every day, chronicling every detail of my life for future reference. But this gets boring: not only to write, but to read as well. What stuck the second time around, when I was living in Mexico City in 2009, was not chronicling everything I did but rather writing to process my ideas and thoughts about living in a new place. This is not to say that interesting things didn't happen (swine flu among them) but more important is that I discovered writing as a tool to explore the world around me, to pause and think in-depth about life as I see it.

When I last signed off, I had returned to Berkeley to finish out the Mexican semester and prepare for my senior year at Cal. I was volunteering as a mentor at the local middle school, and generally enjoying life traveling around and going on adventures. I have since graduated, and now I run the mentoring program at the local middle school. Friends and relatives have come and gone in what has possibly been one of the hardest transitions of my life. But what I see every day, as a counselor to at-risk youth and a resident of the Bay, continues to inspire me to write. And so here I am, on a lazy Sunday, giving this thing another go and hoping that in this way I can keep my mind turning and my fingers moving...