"Well, I'm back," seems somewhat apropos.
Aug. 13th, 2004 08:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nirix5God spoke to me in a dream and told me to get my damn ass back online again. And when God tells you to do something, you don’t say no. So here I am, with my beloved DSL back, no job, immunization shots looming over my head, a bunch of new friends, a couple of drunk nights and a lot of interesting stories to tell.
Want to know where I’ve been and what I’ve been up to? Here follows a brief summary of my summer exploits, as told in a letter to Jeannette, who’s chillin’ in Iraq right now.
Dear Kyo-chan,
Hiya! How’s life been going? I just got your letter. I’m glad you’re doing okay, and props to you for your prison activities. Now when you play the “Oh yeah, well I made out in…” game, you’ll win every time. That’s SO WAY BETTER than the confessional booth.
Also good to know that you’ll be back in January. I can’t wait for you to come back home!!!
Things are going good here. The usual summer madness, you know? My dad’s sister Joan died… that was really, really weird. I only met her once when we were in California and all I remember of her is a giant shadow backlit in the doorway. Typical horror movie cliché, but it’s true. Anyway, my grandmother never told anyone she was sick with pulmonary fibrosis, and they pulled the plug on her at the end of June. It’s really odd that she’s dead… my entire life has been filled with my dad going around talking about how much he hated her, and how he never wanted to talk to her again, and if she ever calls hang up, or if she comes to the door call 911… you know. He was really torn up about it. No matter how screwed up she was, she was still Dad’s little sister, and he helped to raise her and all. Anyway, they held her memorial service last week so he went to California for that with my uncles. Aparently everyone’s speaking to each other again; even my aunt Ronnie showed up, and she’s been incommunicado for the past ten years. I have a cousin named Andrea, who is married to a man named Greg (who owns a towing company). She works for Boeing and they live in Huntington Beach, CA. It’s really cool to suddenly aquire family. They all had a good time except for my Uncle Dave being an asshole. Finally my dad blew up at him and he spent the rest of the trip sulking and not talking to him. Uncle Mike was jealous because he couldn’t make Dave stop talking to him too. In other news, Dad brought back palm tree seeds from his trip.
On the day Dad was supposed to get home, Mom and Kelsey left for New Jersey. They’re helping my grandmother unpack all of her stuff, since she just moved there from Pennsylvania. On one hand I’m really jealous (kind of New York homesick, they’ve been in Princeton and on SI a couple of times) but on the other I’m so glad that I don’t have to deal with it all. Nana’s about twenty minutes away from the beach, so that’s awesome!!! I can’t wait to go down and visit her; I’ll be on the shore every day. They say hi, by the way. Nana too, she always asks about you :-)
So where was I, in all of this? At my job.
I haven’t decided whether or not this is the best or the worst job I’ve ever had in my life. All of the people I work with are awesome, and I want to keep hanging out with them, even after this is over. The whole getting paid while doing something constructive thing is great too, and you meet tons of cool people walking around all day. And you get lots of excersize- seriously, I lost about ten pounds the first week doing this.
Basically what I do is go from door to door and get people to contribute to the organization. *goes into explanation mode* Citizen’s Campaign for the Enviornment had been around for about twenty years. We’ve gotten MTBE’s removed from gasoline in New York, and we got you the right to know what’s in your drinking water. Yay! Right now we’re working on saving New York’s smaller wetlands, thus improving the quality of our water and our wildlife habitats.
We get to the office between 1:30 and 2, and then we ‘run raps.’ (i.e. practice what we say to people.) Then we go to work.
Here is the “Burb Talk” (what they tell you the first time you’re in the van.)
“What we’re riding in right now is called a Burb. We call whatever we’re riding in a Burb, even if it’s a little red wagon, because back in the day Jane Fonda donated a bunch of Suburbans to the organization. (Sumiko’s side note: LAME. But whatever blows your skirt up, I guess…) We like to keep things professional in here, so there’s no talk of sex, drugs, or alcohol. Or swearing. Right now we’re on our way to that magical place we call ‘turf’, which is where we get out and talk to people. The people we talk to are called ‘contacts’ never clients or customers, because we don’t sell them anything. The people who give you contributions are called ‘supporters.’ The stuctured conversation we have with them is called a ‘rap’. Now we’re going to do a quick round of introductions. I want to know everyone’s name, astrological trilogy, favorite color, tree, type of socks, and… um… what three things would you take with you to a deserted island.”
Blah blah blah. My name is Feather (I told them to call me that since there were two Heathers and it was confusing) I’m a right handed Sagittarius born in the year of the dog, I like purple, the japanese maple, and tabi socks; I’d take a self cooling refrigerator that restocks itself magically, a laptop with high speed wireless internet access and a battery that never dies, and a double glaive, to chop up foliage and protect me from the natives and rampaging coconut trees…
It’s a strange enviornment to work in, since you have to be happy go lucky all the time. Well, maybe not happy go lucky, but you have to keep upbeat and positive and all that psychobabel shit. I call it going into psycho-cheerleader mode and staying there. It’s really hard to do when you have people slamming doors in your face constantly.
I thibk I have more respect for cheerleaders than ever before, now that I know what it’s like to be ra-ra all the time.
Oddly enough I wound up working with Rob Tarnow for a few weeks. That was really strange- I walked into the office on my first day, and he was sitting there, and he was like, “You!” and I was like, “You!” It was great working with him, though. He left a few weeks ago. He’s totally different from high school; I mean, the same crazy Rob but he looks a lot preppier. I’ve talked to him a couple of times since he stopped working there, but this job takes up all my time now.
You could so do a manga with the people I work with. They all fit well into anime looks, and they’re really individualistic. Peter’s the boss, he’s very politically concious, vegan, and cynical-sarcastic; Jami’s one of the field managers, she’s really cool. She strikes me as being a feminist type, although I have no idea what her views on the subject are. Tara’s the hippie; she’s incredibly nice and laid back (and she’s got the prettiest eyes in the world- silvery, mirrorlike.) There were Solomon and Matt, but they got fired a few weeks ago (Solomon could do backflips off walls. He did one with an ice cream cone and didn’t drop it till he stepped forward to catch himself.) Shayna reminds me a lot of you; she’s an art student up at Nazareth, lives in Cato, and you guys have the same musical tastes. She’s really awesome, I think you guys would get along great. We had staff night at her house a couple of weeks ago, and we wound up getting drunk at this bar across the street. That was the first time I’ve done shots (with Tanisha, who also rocks) and I don’t remember much of it, except for singing “Goodbye Earl” with Jami on the karaoke mike. Then there’s Chrissy (bubbly snowboarder) and Andrew (cynical, melancholy writer) and Durae (who also lives in Cato, and just got back from Tibet- she’s got the coolest pictures from that trip, my favorite being a couple of Tibetans smiling in the bottom half of the frame with a procession winding up the mountain behind them.) There’s Cara, an eco-friendly design major, Morgan, who’s been there a long time…er, I’m forgetting a bunch of people, but it’s early and I was working late last night, so I’m not in my right mind. (There’s also the Megans- one Megan in in the Airforce ROTC, the other is going to ESF. They’re really cool, too.) The point is that everyone I work with totally rocks. (You can tell I’m sleep deprived by my use of the same three adjectives over and over. Meerp.)
We’ve gone all over the place, from Rochester to Binghamton. We were in Oneonta yesterday. Jesus, what a drive. We talk to people from all walks of life, which is really interesting- I’m gonna write a book about it. You’d think that people with lots of money would contribute a lot, but the two times I’ve wound up in million dollar communities I’ve made about fifteen dollars. People in working class communities will only give you five bucks, but it might be their last five bucks, and they’re really happy with the work we’re doing. I guess they benefit the most from it. They don’t have lots of money to buy their way into politics, so we do it for them. Yay for organizing.
Back to the $$$$ neighborhoods for a second. I had one of my worst days ever in Cortland. It started out great, in a middle class neighborhood with awesome people. Didi Dillingham gave me her old cheerleader jacket (circa 1979.) It’s purple and says “Cortland Cheerleader” in white. She was all about the wetlands and saving the animals and stuff. I also talked to a lady with one of the most beautiful gardens I’ve ever seen. You would have loved it, all the flowers laid out and beds and then wildflowers growing all along the back. Then I crossed the street into Millionaire’s Row. God almighty. It was all uphill- you know those big hills you see from 81 when you’re driving south, and you think to yourself, wow, it’d be nice to live up there? Let me tell you, those things are a bitch to walk up. Then all the houses were nine hundred feet apart, and all the people in them were like, “Thanks. We’re not interested.” Blah! One lady told me she’d just donated SEVENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS to John Kerry, and could I come back next week? Hello, I just said we’re only here once a year, and you can’t help me out with thirty six dollars right now. God. Finally, the last house I go to gives me ten bucks, and they tell me that so-and-so lives at the top of the hill and he’ll give you a huge contribution. So I look up the hill and I see the house- by this time it’s getting really dark- and there’s no road up there, unless I want to go all the way around this long winding drive thing. Which I don’t, so I throw caution and good sense to the winds and wind up slugging up this hill, through a field with crabgrass or something up to my eyebrows, twisting my knee, hauling ass so I can get up to the house before nine. I finally get there, and the house is all lit up and there’s like ten Ferraris in the driveway, but when I ring the doorbell, no one answers. That so, so sucked.
I really haven’t done anything else this summer. I went to the Renaissance Faire, and that was a lot of fun, and I’ve read a couple of books that were really good. I also totally changed up what I want to go to school for, and I’m starting classes in a couple of weeks for forensic science. I can’t wait to go back to school. Homework and tests, bring it on. But the more I thought about journalism, the more I didn’t want to do it. If I’m going to do any sort of writing it’s going to be fiction. And I can always do that in my spare time, when I’m not coming up with insane plots to take over the world. Speaking of insane plots, a bunch of us from work are going to NY to protest the Republican Convention on August 29. I’ll admit to my ulterior motive for this- I’ve been dying for a pork bun for months, and the only place to get them is in Chinatown. Will I protest a political party for a pork bun? Hell, yes! (What type of person does this make me, I wonder. Exceedingly strange.)
So I guess that’s it, really. Nothing else is new, nothing else is going on. Anna moved to Atlanta with her boyfriend, Kate is moving back to Albany with her fiancé, Andy’s doing good, Tim just finished up his last day working nights (I’m assuming he’s going to daytime hours now.) Everyone’s just dandy. Thor sends he regards. He’s being his usual punky self.
Take care of yourself, and write back soon, okay? (I know you will, but you know how we worry.) I miss you more than anything in the world, and if you don’t come back in January, I’m coming over there to get you. So you tell the higher-ups to watch it. Cause I’ll totally kick their asses. Me and my trusty Beta Fish of Doom, whose name has been changed to Grissom in light of recent developments. (What recent developments? Don’t ask me. I don’t know.)
*makes google face*
Love always, Sumiko
Post letter news: Got fired last Friday (for not making standard, but whatever) and went to staff night yesterday anyway.
Want to know where I’ve been and what I’ve been up to? Here follows a brief summary of my summer exploits, as told in a letter to Jeannette, who’s chillin’ in Iraq right now.
Dear Kyo-chan,
Hiya! How’s life been going? I just got your letter. I’m glad you’re doing okay, and props to you for your prison activities. Now when you play the “Oh yeah, well I made out in…” game, you’ll win every time. That’s SO WAY BETTER than the confessional booth.
Also good to know that you’ll be back in January. I can’t wait for you to come back home!!!
Things are going good here. The usual summer madness, you know? My dad’s sister Joan died… that was really, really weird. I only met her once when we were in California and all I remember of her is a giant shadow backlit in the doorway. Typical horror movie cliché, but it’s true. Anyway, my grandmother never told anyone she was sick with pulmonary fibrosis, and they pulled the plug on her at the end of June. It’s really odd that she’s dead… my entire life has been filled with my dad going around talking about how much he hated her, and how he never wanted to talk to her again, and if she ever calls hang up, or if she comes to the door call 911… you know. He was really torn up about it. No matter how screwed up she was, she was still Dad’s little sister, and he helped to raise her and all. Anyway, they held her memorial service last week so he went to California for that with my uncles. Aparently everyone’s speaking to each other again; even my aunt Ronnie showed up, and she’s been incommunicado for the past ten years. I have a cousin named Andrea, who is married to a man named Greg (who owns a towing company). She works for Boeing and they live in Huntington Beach, CA. It’s really cool to suddenly aquire family. They all had a good time except for my Uncle Dave being an asshole. Finally my dad blew up at him and he spent the rest of the trip sulking and not talking to him. Uncle Mike was jealous because he couldn’t make Dave stop talking to him too. In other news, Dad brought back palm tree seeds from his trip.
On the day Dad was supposed to get home, Mom and Kelsey left for New Jersey. They’re helping my grandmother unpack all of her stuff, since she just moved there from Pennsylvania. On one hand I’m really jealous (kind of New York homesick, they’ve been in Princeton and on SI a couple of times) but on the other I’m so glad that I don’t have to deal with it all. Nana’s about twenty minutes away from the beach, so that’s awesome!!! I can’t wait to go down and visit her; I’ll be on the shore every day. They say hi, by the way. Nana too, she always asks about you :-)
So where was I, in all of this? At my job.
I haven’t decided whether or not this is the best or the worst job I’ve ever had in my life. All of the people I work with are awesome, and I want to keep hanging out with them, even after this is over. The whole getting paid while doing something constructive thing is great too, and you meet tons of cool people walking around all day. And you get lots of excersize- seriously, I lost about ten pounds the first week doing this.
Basically what I do is go from door to door and get people to contribute to the organization. *goes into explanation mode* Citizen’s Campaign for the Enviornment had been around for about twenty years. We’ve gotten MTBE’s removed from gasoline in New York, and we got you the right to know what’s in your drinking water. Yay! Right now we’re working on saving New York’s smaller wetlands, thus improving the quality of our water and our wildlife habitats.
We get to the office between 1:30 and 2, and then we ‘run raps.’ (i.e. practice what we say to people.) Then we go to work.
Here is the “Burb Talk” (what they tell you the first time you’re in the van.)
“What we’re riding in right now is called a Burb. We call whatever we’re riding in a Burb, even if it’s a little red wagon, because back in the day Jane Fonda donated a bunch of Suburbans to the organization. (Sumiko’s side note: LAME. But whatever blows your skirt up, I guess…) We like to keep things professional in here, so there’s no talk of sex, drugs, or alcohol. Or swearing. Right now we’re on our way to that magical place we call ‘turf’, which is where we get out and talk to people. The people we talk to are called ‘contacts’ never clients or customers, because we don’t sell them anything. The people who give you contributions are called ‘supporters.’ The stuctured conversation we have with them is called a ‘rap’. Now we’re going to do a quick round of introductions. I want to know everyone’s name, astrological trilogy, favorite color, tree, type of socks, and… um… what three things would you take with you to a deserted island.”
Blah blah blah. My name is Feather (I told them to call me that since there were two Heathers and it was confusing) I’m a right handed Sagittarius born in the year of the dog, I like purple, the japanese maple, and tabi socks; I’d take a self cooling refrigerator that restocks itself magically, a laptop with high speed wireless internet access and a battery that never dies, and a double glaive, to chop up foliage and protect me from the natives and rampaging coconut trees…
It’s a strange enviornment to work in, since you have to be happy go lucky all the time. Well, maybe not happy go lucky, but you have to keep upbeat and positive and all that psychobabel shit. I call it going into psycho-cheerleader mode and staying there. It’s really hard to do when you have people slamming doors in your face constantly.
I thibk I have more respect for cheerleaders than ever before, now that I know what it’s like to be ra-ra all the time.
Oddly enough I wound up working with Rob Tarnow for a few weeks. That was really strange- I walked into the office on my first day, and he was sitting there, and he was like, “You!” and I was like, “You!” It was great working with him, though. He left a few weeks ago. He’s totally different from high school; I mean, the same crazy Rob but he looks a lot preppier. I’ve talked to him a couple of times since he stopped working there, but this job takes up all my time now.
You could so do a manga with the people I work with. They all fit well into anime looks, and they’re really individualistic. Peter’s the boss, he’s very politically concious, vegan, and cynical-sarcastic; Jami’s one of the field managers, she’s really cool. She strikes me as being a feminist type, although I have no idea what her views on the subject are. Tara’s the hippie; she’s incredibly nice and laid back (and she’s got the prettiest eyes in the world- silvery, mirrorlike.) There were Solomon and Matt, but they got fired a few weeks ago (Solomon could do backflips off walls. He did one with an ice cream cone and didn’t drop it till he stepped forward to catch himself.) Shayna reminds me a lot of you; she’s an art student up at Nazareth, lives in Cato, and you guys have the same musical tastes. She’s really awesome, I think you guys would get along great. We had staff night at her house a couple of weeks ago, and we wound up getting drunk at this bar across the street. That was the first time I’ve done shots (with Tanisha, who also rocks) and I don’t remember much of it, except for singing “Goodbye Earl” with Jami on the karaoke mike. Then there’s Chrissy (bubbly snowboarder) and Andrew (cynical, melancholy writer) and Durae (who also lives in Cato, and just got back from Tibet- she’s got the coolest pictures from that trip, my favorite being a couple of Tibetans smiling in the bottom half of the frame with a procession winding up the mountain behind them.) There’s Cara, an eco-friendly design major, Morgan, who’s been there a long time…er, I’m forgetting a bunch of people, but it’s early and I was working late last night, so I’m not in my right mind. (There’s also the Megans- one Megan in in the Airforce ROTC, the other is going to ESF. They’re really cool, too.) The point is that everyone I work with totally rocks. (You can tell I’m sleep deprived by my use of the same three adjectives over and over. Meerp.)
We’ve gone all over the place, from Rochester to Binghamton. We were in Oneonta yesterday. Jesus, what a drive. We talk to people from all walks of life, which is really interesting- I’m gonna write a book about it. You’d think that people with lots of money would contribute a lot, but the two times I’ve wound up in million dollar communities I’ve made about fifteen dollars. People in working class communities will only give you five bucks, but it might be their last five bucks, and they’re really happy with the work we’re doing. I guess they benefit the most from it. They don’t have lots of money to buy their way into politics, so we do it for them. Yay for organizing.
Back to the $$$$ neighborhoods for a second. I had one of my worst days ever in Cortland. It started out great, in a middle class neighborhood with awesome people. Didi Dillingham gave me her old cheerleader jacket (circa 1979.) It’s purple and says “Cortland Cheerleader” in white. She was all about the wetlands and saving the animals and stuff. I also talked to a lady with one of the most beautiful gardens I’ve ever seen. You would have loved it, all the flowers laid out and beds and then wildflowers growing all along the back. Then I crossed the street into Millionaire’s Row. God almighty. It was all uphill- you know those big hills you see from 81 when you’re driving south, and you think to yourself, wow, it’d be nice to live up there? Let me tell you, those things are a bitch to walk up. Then all the houses were nine hundred feet apart, and all the people in them were like, “Thanks. We’re not interested.” Blah! One lady told me she’d just donated SEVENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS to John Kerry, and could I come back next week? Hello, I just said we’re only here once a year, and you can’t help me out with thirty six dollars right now. God. Finally, the last house I go to gives me ten bucks, and they tell me that so-and-so lives at the top of the hill and he’ll give you a huge contribution. So I look up the hill and I see the house- by this time it’s getting really dark- and there’s no road up there, unless I want to go all the way around this long winding drive thing. Which I don’t, so I throw caution and good sense to the winds and wind up slugging up this hill, through a field with crabgrass or something up to my eyebrows, twisting my knee, hauling ass so I can get up to the house before nine. I finally get there, and the house is all lit up and there’s like ten Ferraris in the driveway, but when I ring the doorbell, no one answers. That so, so sucked.
I really haven’t done anything else this summer. I went to the Renaissance Faire, and that was a lot of fun, and I’ve read a couple of books that were really good. I also totally changed up what I want to go to school for, and I’m starting classes in a couple of weeks for forensic science. I can’t wait to go back to school. Homework and tests, bring it on. But the more I thought about journalism, the more I didn’t want to do it. If I’m going to do any sort of writing it’s going to be fiction. And I can always do that in my spare time, when I’m not coming up with insane plots to take over the world. Speaking of insane plots, a bunch of us from work are going to NY to protest the Republican Convention on August 29. I’ll admit to my ulterior motive for this- I’ve been dying for a pork bun for months, and the only place to get them is in Chinatown. Will I protest a political party for a pork bun? Hell, yes! (What type of person does this make me, I wonder. Exceedingly strange.)
So I guess that’s it, really. Nothing else is new, nothing else is going on. Anna moved to Atlanta with her boyfriend, Kate is moving back to Albany with her fiancé, Andy’s doing good, Tim just finished up his last day working nights (I’m assuming he’s going to daytime hours now.) Everyone’s just dandy. Thor sends he regards. He’s being his usual punky self.
Take care of yourself, and write back soon, okay? (I know you will, but you know how we worry.) I miss you more than anything in the world, and if you don’t come back in January, I’m coming over there to get you. So you tell the higher-ups to watch it. Cause I’ll totally kick their asses. Me and my trusty Beta Fish of Doom, whose name has been changed to Grissom in light of recent developments. (What recent developments? Don’t ask me. I don’t know.)
*makes google face*
Love always, Sumiko
Post letter news: Got fired last Friday (for not making standard, but whatever) and went to staff night yesterday anyway.
