Pictures again!

I'm growing a goofy beard. I can't seem to take a decent picture of me these days.

This is work. Every day I'm on the job I'm in the mountains, burning bonfires or checking on yesterday's bonfires to make sure they haven't gotten a bit too spunky.

In the mildly-subpar Japanese restaurant there was an adorable baby. We made faces at her and she was very happy for it. I'd ordered a one-dollar sake that was quite watered down-- I finished all 3 ounces of it and felt nothing. I made up for it at the bar right now, though. There's some reaaally tasty peppermint liquor here. Nate says it's called... Rumblemintz? He spelled it wrong. Rumple Minze. German, apparently.


Downtown Denver. I actually missed this place, after being stuck in Nederland a while.


Cristian (a.k.a. Cali, as in California) took a picture of me in my work get-up. I have fun here.

Another small town.

Just this week the Forest Service installed two very art deco wind turbines next to their facilities, in the 100 yards or so between our bunkhouse and their workhouse. They look different from most wind turbines-- They're forest green and they rotate on a vertical, not a horizontal, axis. "These things are part of the efforts we're making to be greener," said Dave Buchanan, our boss, who looks like a burly Stephen King and acts like one of Stephen King's more... rural characters. "Once they get going, we'll be supplying ourselves with all our own power." He took a long pause, as he is often prone to do. "And we'll actually be selling extra power back to the city."

Last night, without disturbing anyone, one of them was knocked from its high post by one of the frequent powerful gusts of wind characteristic of Nederland. After some dumbfoundedness the next morning we went to work as normal-- checking prescribed burns from the day before, mopping up the ones that got a little out of hand. Sometimes stump roots will catch on fire and burn slowly, snaking heat into the ground and springing up elsewhere, somewhere unexpected. We dig up smoldering roots.

The day done, we went back the bunkhouse... And were told that we had to pack our stuff in fifteen minutes and go. An evacuation, in case the second turbine blew down and landed on our house, crushing us to death while we were eating, watching television, sleeping. The first one didn't make it very far at all, but they didn't want to chance it. So here I am, suitcase packed yet again for impromptu travel, in a Forest Service bunkhouse right off the expresssway in Idaho Springs. There's a McDonald's, a Starbucks, a Subway, a few gas stations and diners. Supposedly there's a proper town within driving distance; we'll see tomorrow when we hunt for independent service projects.

I'm about a third of the way through the massive British historical fantasy novel my family got me for Christmas, Johnathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. It's lengthy, written in a Victorian voice, bears copious footnotes, and has many characters. I'm of mixed opinion: some of it is very neat, the magic is innovative and unexpected, some of the settings are very well-described... And sometimes it just seems to ramble on. The odd thing is, much like The Stand, I can't really straightforwardly say, "I feel this part is unnecessary." I'm plowing through it at a solid and steady pace, having typically an hour and a half of travelling mountains by truck each day to nap or read.

I'm back to counting calories, and keeping my numbers more modest, after two or three days (not in a row, thank god) where I'd consumed over 3000. If only I knew how many I burned in a typical workday.

See the world, they said.

I am in a near-complete stranger's house. I don't even remember-- wait, it's Tony.

Nate, one of the new teammates, went to college in Fort Collins, Colorado. We'd spent a few days in Fort Collins taking chainsaw classes and then Nate asked if anyone wanted to stay the weekend with his friends. And so, here some of us are.

We played a most sinister drinking game, whereupon I yet again reaffirmed that I, unlike many of my peers, have a pretty good idea of when to call it quits. Like, say, before you start demanding your head be shaved into a mohawk by a fellow drunkard. Nate now has a very sloppy mohawk that's kind of an off-center wedge that looks nothing like the Chuck Liddell mohawk he demanded. I socialized a little before talking to Kat, using the internet, and falling asleep on the couch with the laptop on my chest.

On my last team Americorps did not feel like living life. I was in New Orleans, for God's sake, and I felt stagnant. It was suffocatingly controlled, mechanized, automated. Funny how just a change of leaders can make it so much better. Garrett and Chris were sad to see me go, and ever since they've said that they miss me, but that they're also jealous I got out when I did-- Carmella's stricter than ever, they say, and some of their new members to replace the ones who were booted off are a little infuriating. My new team leader, Coby, is the most laid-back guy around; when I told him I scraped the truck on a rock he just gave an amused half-smile and said "You'll probably lose your driving priveleges but that's all. It's no big deal. Don't worry about it."

But here, we live in a firefighting bunkhouse. We hike through the mountains and light bonfires and cut and stack brush and logs for a living. At the end of a workday, we look out over peaks bristling with pine trees, dusted in snow; sometimes fog rolls in over the tops of the peaks and the peaks turn indefinite. Opportunities are afforded that I would not otherwise have. Staying with new friends in their friends' houses, doors opened to us, partying at night.

I'm eating pancakes and sipping on a White Russian.

It's been a good month.

Survivor: Boulder

The team has 315 dollars per week for food. This amounts to $4.50 per person per day. Some members of the team (Liam) eat more than others and aren't really aware of HOW much they eat. This is more amusing than infuriating, to be honest; we manage just fine.

However, today Liam declared that we should split the budget into $31.50 per person per week and each take care of our own food. The more it was talked about the more people liked it. They were sold when I made a joke about people making secret food alliances (though this has been deemed against the rules).

So, no pre-existing food and no outside money is permitted. This is strictly on Americorps's dollar. I find the idea hilarious, because I think I'm going to be fine. Ned intends to eat a crate of ramen noodles.

My plan thus far includes oatmeal, bananas, eggs, tuna, bread, chicken breasts, rice, pasta, broccoli, sweet potatoes.

Vanity items include skim milk, spinach... This is going to be hilarious. I don' think Liam realizes how much peanut butter costs and he sincerely thinks he's going to be able to eat three PB&J's a day for lunch. I want to see who's going to pass out first.

Upsy-downsy

Today my team and I shoveled snow for a few hours at a ski resort that has a non-profit which helps physically- and mentally-handicapped people ski. When we finished, we all got free passes and ski rentals-- a one hundred dollar value, yours for just a few meager hours of work-- and spent the rest of the afternoon skiing. It's more terrifying than I remember; I took several falls but still had a fantastic day.

I will never forget the look on Joseph's face when he first stepped onto the ice to ice skate at my cousin Abby's birthday party: his eyes were wide and he had a disbelieving smile stretched across his face. The whole of his expression wordlessly said, "Are you fucking kidding me!?"

I think if Joseph were on skis, his head would spin three hundred and sixty degrees.

To top the night off I designated drove some of the team to the bar and when I missed it and turned around in the bank parking lot I scraped it on a ridiculously-placed rock. So that's great too

I cut my hair off.

That silly part is a little more manageable now.

"It was a pleasure to burn."

I.

Wildland firefighting is not like urban firefighting. We drove an forty-five minutes on a mountain road only as wide as our truck. Looking out the window, the view carried endlessly, mountains covered in trees-- and immediately next to the truck, nothing, the nothingness of a sheer drop only feet away.

We carry a can of gas with a screw-on neck, kinked once like a twisty straw to keep the fire from climbing into the tank. The end has a nozzle and a wick like a flamethrower. When you tip the can forward, gas pours past the wick and flame drips out in a stream. We broke into two groups of three, and each group had one of the Forest Service guys lead them along the slope. There was a pile of thin pine branches and some thicker logs stacked like a bonfire up to my chest. Nate and I each had a drip-torch and we tipped them forward. The branches were up in flames faster than we expected. Starting that fire started a fire within us, and we were practically running from stack to stack, putting them alight.

We stood next to a bonfire admiring our handiwork when the wind picked up and shifted, washing Sergio and I with flame. I was closer to it than him, but we both turned and backed away. Half of my face was hot, and I thought I could feel it creeping up under my cap.

"Am I on fire?" I called to Sergio, a little too matter-of-factly. Nate started laughing and Sergio checked me out. My cap was singed, as was one eyebrow and the stubble on half of my face. My eye felt sticky, like I got gum in my lashes, and I realized they were burned together at the tips. I brushed the ashy bits of hair off as best I could. Once we realized I was okay we all started laughing, and I couldn't help but think it was smart that I cut my hair when I did, or I'd likely not have that ponytail anyway.

We burned more piles and then we went back to the first and chunked them-- we dragged the burning edges back into the middle. The last pile we chunked was unbearably hot and the smoke rolled up off the logs into our faces. More than once we had to run a few feet away, choking and gasping for air. Our lemon-yellow shirts and olive-green pants are more than fireproof-- they resist heat more than I would have believed possible. Only my face was hot, hot like what happens when you sit too close to a campfire. I remembered the shroud in my hardhat and unfurled it, wrapped it about my head. Only my sunglassed eyes were exposed, and it was the only part of me that could feel heat. I stood, one foot in the fire, pulling pine needles in, and nothing but the space in the middle of my brow could feel any heat at all but the heat there was intense.

The smoke seemed clairvoyant, accomplice to the wind, and wherever I stood the two of them shifted near-instantly to surround me. The wind wasn't terrible all the time, though: Sergio pointed out a little whirlwind of snow nearby, two spirally arms moving lazily, gracefully, down the mountainside.

I have a little stomachache from swallowing smoke, and I've been told that on bad days, in the amount we drink it, it's like smoking two packs a day. Still, if ever you wanted to make a career out of camping, out of hiking, this is the job for you.



II.

Loki is a trickster god and a fire god, and it's suddenly easy to see why the two elements are paired together. The stuff is insidious; it creeps along the ground, all these pine needles and cones spread about. Little tendrils of smoke peek out from the blanket and we have to pull it all back towards the bonfire. A fallen, termite-chewed tree is too close to the fire. It catches, invisibly at first, underneath and then inside. The only hint that it burns is the smoke pulsing out from the nest-holes, like an old man breathing on a cold day.

Rocks grab hold of any heat and lock it away but look no different until a shovelful of snow is thrown onto one. It bubbles and steams and boils the snow to nothing in a matter of seconds. The squarish rocks crack and splinter and turn into a pile of Indian arrowheads and flint knives. Our gloves are leather, white-- or once-white; they turn brown and ashy in a half-day's work-- and they make our hands invincible. We pick up branches by the cinders, carry them back to the pile, and drop them in.

The wind is erratic: it blows suddenly, fiercely, and in any direction. A sudden burst of it, and the column of smoke ran along the ground just inches over the snow off the backs of a few logs, and what was grey glowed again. Tiny embers were carried a dozen feet away to a rotten stump, and the stump went up. We piled snow on it and cleared away the brush. When the wind's gentler, white flakes would drift by us; snow and ash indiscernable from one another when both take flight.



III.

It's funny how much different this team is from my old team. I was reading in my bedroom, which is also Sergio's and Cristian's bedroom, while the others were playing cards in the living room. I went out for a moment and they invited me to play and I smiled and said I was fine. They asked me what my old team was like and I said that we never played cards together. We were a team of individuals. Chris would sit on the couch and strum, Jeremy would lay in his cot and read, Garrett would put on headphones and watch The Office on his laptop and I'd hear nothing but the occasional stark laugh. Will and Aaron, who conjoined themselves into one person anyway, sat at the computer and played flash games. If we weren't working or exercising or eating dinner we didn't see much of Carmella.

I dwelled on them a moment until I was pulled back to awareness by laughter, my new team socializing over Uno. It really does seem like they're a single friendly unit. They're more lighthearted, I think-- when someone does something dumb, we vote on whether or not they get an X on our white messageboard. At the end of the week the person with the most X's has to wear a black forest service jacket to work, its only discerning feature a patch on the sleeve: "Special."

They had a girl on their team, Beth, who traded places with me; she's on Carmella's team now. It doesn't seem like they have an active dislike for her, but they do seem to poke fun. Today Fusi (a last name, not some strange ethnicity you can't place; don't worry) made jokes about taking an assault rifle and running around Rocky Mountain National Park hunting elk without a license-- illegal and over-the-top on many fronts. The next thing out of someone's mouth when the laughter died down was, "Man, Beth would have left the dinner table by now. 'I don't want to hear anymore of this!'" Last night at dinner they pointed out that now that she was gone they had to decide who was next in the chain of cannibalism. They'd picked her because she eats a bunch of organic, healthy stuff. I called her "a free-range human." The joke was well-received.

We get to give our trucks radio designatons. It's possibly the most difficult decision we'll ever be faced with; the possibilities are endless. Ned said, "I think we should go with 'Maverick' and 'Goose'," and I said, "Way to be fucking original," and he was shot down instantly with a chorus of laughter.

After much deliberation ("blue steel" and "magnum," "Iron Man" and "War Machine," "blue moon" and "gold schlager," "Jesus" and "Lucifer") we've settled on "Han Solo" and "Indiana Jones."



IV.

I read and read and read. I've read so much since I've joined Americorps. I just finished "The Stranger" by Albert Camus. The translation was interesting; an American did it in short choppy sentences, feeling that Camus was trying to capture an American style in his original French writing. I liked the book, and all of the one-sentences descriptions of his other works listed in the back each sound philisophical and compelling and I'd love to read more.

I read my former teammate Chris's manuscript, "All the Broken Boys Go West," (formerly "The Insane Gorilla") a semi-autobiographical story about his fiance dumping him and his subsequent soul-searching road trip across America. It gave a lot of insight into him, perhaps a little too late.

I read Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger, the first of any of his books that I've read. Kat read the first half aloud to me one night over Christmas break, vibrantly and with adorable intonation, clearly enjoying herself. The characters take some warming up to but invariably will turn your heart in a single line. I realized halfway through how much the Glass family reminds me of the Tenenbaums, and there are other short story collections about them that I'm interested in now: "Nine Stories" and "Raise High the Roof Beams/Seymour: An Introduction." I guess I should read "Catcher in the Rye" too.

I read Joseph's book, an astonishing 450? pages written in two months: a fantasy story telling a war between humans and monsters from each side. The human side focuses mostly on a small adventuring party and the internal conflict of the main character Ithy; the monster side focuses on Grim, a newly-birthed monster, the only of his kind, who is compelled to unite the scattered monsters under one banner and give them a purpose in life. It's a first draft, a little rough around the edges, but conceptually strong. Joseph writes mysteries like no other, he develops characters well, ensures every action taken happens for a reason with no unseemly coincidences "saving" the cohesion and integrity of his book, and he writes fantastic final-line, cliffhanger-esque chapter-ends.

And I still have more but never feel like I have enough. My head feels elastic, like I could never fit enough books into it. I want nothing more to consume, chew on style and word choice, characters and messages, tone and theme and metaphor. Kat's instilled in me the need to read with a purpose. I peruse the dictionary for each foreign word in a novel that I stumble across (both in my travels and intellectually).

This is my address for the next six months. Send me things to read. Frank Herbert, Robert E. Howard, Vladimir Nabokov, Ayn Rand, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Arthur Conan Doyle, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Henry David Thoreau, Hunter S. Thompson, Borges. The mountains are cold and lovely and my evenings are empty.

Robert Reeve
534 Ridge Road
Nederland, CO 80466

Bourgeoisie.

For forty dollars you could have bought a ticket to tour seven historical homes owned by rich people this weekend. I volunteered for this project because our team volunteered for it, and then was told that the high cost meant it wouldn't count as ISP, but by then we were all stuck with it.

Rich people can be awfully rude. It's not that their gaze passes over you, comes to you and stops, recognizing you as a person, only to move on. It's more like they've perfected the art of not even registering the presence of those in a lower tax bracket than them. Their eyes pass from wallpaper to drapes as if you're a fixture in the room, a table set between the two.

---

When you stand in the same room for three hours as hundreds of people sift in and out, patterns emerge. Someone says "This room'd keep you awake!" every ten minutes. I was fortunate enough to have a chair in my room that I took advantage of, sure to sit as dignified as possible. This was still not enough for some.

"I see," one said to me as he passed through the room, all the entitlement of an aristocrat. "Sitting." How much contempt can you possibly put into one word spoken to a stranger doing nothing wrong?

And another, skipping hellos: "And what information do you have for me about this room?"
"I'm afraid they didn't tell me much more beyond that it's the guest bedroom for the owner's granddaughters."
"Ah. They already mentioned this. Not very informative; perhaps you'll be fired." There was not a hint of amusement in her voice, and I wore a shit-eating grin all throughout.

People smile if you smile, and continue about their business. Occasionally someone will say hello; once an hour someone will talk to you, as a human might to another human.

---

The walls are a mustard-orange background with magenta toile print, and three triangular scenes repeat all across the wall in thin rosy lines: Tigers stalking through a jungle, people riding elephants, people chasing ostriches. The bedframes match the Indian motif of the wallpaper: headboards upholstered with magenta curves like the dome of the Taj Mahal. Many pillows all embroidered. I hear a lady in the other room say the floors are pickled wood, but it just looks like painted wood to me. The wallpaper continues into the bathroom, and the shower curtain and drapes and the trim of the beds have the same print on them.

The room on the other side of the hall is a living room with beautiful bookshelves. The sea-green walls are shiny, smooth and laquered. There's a sofa and two high-backed chairs surrounding a coffee table, a Persian rug beneath them all leading out to the back deck where a flutist is playing.

A tiny bathroom-- they insist on calling it a "powder room"-- is at the end of the hall, formerly a broom closet. A sharkskin-covered door opens to a dark room, black and red and gold wallpaper in some Asian scene I can't recall. The ceiling makes me think of Escher, since it's cut to accomodate the bottom of the stairs just above.

Each room is unbelievably tall, easily fifteen feet. The doors stop but the walls keeps going. Transom windows perch atop each doorframe, double doors made of tall thin slats of wood built like a drawing of a raft. Random paintings hang upon every wall, no unified style at all. Textured modern art hangs beside realistic oil portraiture, calligraphy and abstract watercolors the next room over. Every room is lavishly decorated and not at all tied to the next, chaotic jumble of pattern and texture and color permeating the whole of the house.

Old rich people get old, but their houses sure are something to aspire to.

Objectively hilarious, subjectively creepy.

Magazine street is lined with antique shops and thrift stores. I must be getting older; my interests have shifted to looking at furniture, imagining what I'd like in the house years distant in my head.

I wandered in an out a few of them, most of them closing by 5pm on Saturday. The last one I had time for was nothing special, and the man running it was in his 50s, unattractive. A bit of a belly, and that bushy backcombed hair that mobsters have in the 80's movies. He was taking a phone call, and spoke each keyword into the receiver three times. "It's in storage, storage, storage. No, you can come get it Tuesday. Tuesday, Tuesday." I took a slow lap around the big store. Compared to the others, not much caught my eye.

As I approached the door he cut the voice on the other end off, said he had a customer, and hung up. He stood right by the door, not quite blocking it but not quite giving me enough space to leave, and he asked if I needed help finding anything, and how long I'd been in New Orleans, a smattering of other questions to make conversation. Almost immediately I started to suspect I was being come on to, and when he'd mentioned a gay bookstore on Frenchman street, mmmmy suspicions were confirmed. I told him that I stumbled upon it and saw the fiction section right up front and had been duped, that I moved a shelf too far and began to realize this was not the kind of bookstore I first thought it was. I left in a hurry.

He talked about his ex-wife briefly and how he'd been caught with another guy while he showed me around the antique store. He said that with all the work we do rebuilding the city, we must get very sore, and that I should come back to his house with him for a massage sometime. I told him my teammates were probably expecting me for dinner about now.

I left almost instantly after he laughed, touched me on the shoulder for just a second-- but still a second too long-- and noted that my Americorps situation sounded like it lacked privacy, that I probably didn't ever find the time to jerk off, and that I must be very horny.

I was out the door in about five seconds or less, a polite goodbye and a swift walk down the block while calling any of my teammates I was out with to find out where they were and tell them about this, the most forward anyone's ever been while hitting on me.

The first set of last days.

Yesterday it snowed, a once-every-four-years occurrence in New Orleans. We were going to work in a house with the all the back walls torn off, utterly stripped-- a deconstruction project, salvaging the house for wood. 45 minutes in we were reassigned. We worked in a house with no heat, and I painted trim and watched a bifold closet door get installed in one room and watched kitchen cabinets get installed in the other. Another instance of there being more hands than work, which makes for a slow day.

I spent my last day of work today canvassing neighborhoods, surveying and passing out fliers for Rebuilding Together. They gave us a map of a few city blocks, with the lots' boundaries outlined. We looked at the houses and decided if they were completed, rebuilding, blighted, or a vacant lot. Some houses look fine on the outside and are really fucked up on the inside, or completely gutted. A lot of these are bank-owned. A whole lot of the houses have been completely abandoned; not many people really want to rebuild this area. The completed houses look lovely, but are still sad spectacles alongside ten unhouses. We finished at about one p.m., and I worked on a frame for a trash can as part of the extra hours I have to do.

We played football today, three injuries in fifteen minutes. Garrett elbowed solidly in the nose, myself tripped and sent tumbling to land on a metal water bottle marking an end zone, and Aaron hit in the face, contact knocked out. Huge dent in the water bottle; my hip is killing me whenever I move. Fuck football, I never get hurt when I just go for a run.

---

Since I've come here, I've done a variety of things:
Replace broken window panes
Intall curtainrods
Lay grout and tile
Repair holes in wood and drywall
Lay bamboo flooring
Cut and lay baseboard
Paint, paint, paint, interior and exterior

If one were to distill the experience into the moments of good, strong work, I would tell you it was immensely enjoyable. Especially lately, now that all of this garbage has passed, it's been very fun. Disappointed to leave New Orleans behind with so little exploration, so little time spent seeing the things to see.

But when you hand me a rag, though, and tell me to wipe a floor, get the dust out from between the bamboo boards because we don't use brooms, to get on my hands and knees with a wet rag because we don't use mops. When you hand me a paint brush and tell me to touch up spots smaller than a fingernail on the underside of an overhand of a roof in the backyard two stories up. When you have me standing around doing absolutely nothing for an hour because you've got too many people in one place. This is when I'm upset. It's a great program, and it's great work. I just wish there was more of it.

---

My brother wrote a book. It is a novel set in his D&D world, I'm sad that I have to wait two weeks after its finish before I can read it, and that by the time I get my hands on a copy, a dozen other people will already have finished it. I am excited to read tales of a place I wish was my home, in the comfort of my home.

Saved for Obama. Or your mother.

So since my last entry I've made my blog invite-only thanks to a long procession of drama.

I have 4 hours of extra instruction I have to do for running by myself Thanksgiving weekend. I was given (and accepted) the option to write a rebuttal, which I emailed to the unit leader. He won't be back in office until the 15th.

I have 12 hours of extra instruction and a $25 fine for an alcohol offense. Anyone who knows me (which is all of you, now that things are private) know that this is not at all the sort of thing that I would ordinarily be involved with. But because we have retardedly strict rules, the one sip I had in the housing is severely punished, while the teammates who stumbled in drunk that night but had nothing in the house itself are fine. Originally I was also told I wasn't a firefighter for spike round two-- effectively giving me a six-week delay on firefighting-- but this was rescinded.

They dismissed us from the over-the-phone disciplinary hearing in tiers-- the unpunished (Chris, Garrett, and Andrea), the "lightly punished" (Wendy and I), and the severely punished (Will, Aaron, Jeremy, and Haley). They were given 12 hours, $100 fines, and were kicked off of firefighting. Carmella, for being gone all weekend and playing dumb about the party, got only one punishment: not being a firefighting team leader for spike round two. This punishment was rescinded. I guess she got the displeasure of being chewed out, but I'll take that over a fine any day. I stormed out, angry I was punished so harshly, despite it being a first offense, despite my being the only sober person all weekend. I knocked over a ladder accidentally and was called back in, chastized by Barbara Lane, Region Director for my anger management problem and my authority issues. Great, now I'm a belligerent crazy person too. When I found out they broke up our team just after this, I ducked in the room where Carmella was on the phone with Barbara and Kevin Rumery and said, "I quit." We stared at each other silently for a few moments, and I walked out.

A half-hour later I changed my mind. She said it was too late; they bought a bus ticket and I was expected in Denver and was leaving tomorrow morning at 8:30am. I called Kevin, told him I changed my mind. He called Barbara and she said I could stay, but only if I paid the $150 ticket. Sigh. I agree, and Kevin hints that one of the reasons it went through so quickly may have been that Carmella was not sad to see me go. Surprise surprise.

---

Fortunately Garrett, Will, Aaron and I made $230 in two days-- almost as much as I make in a month, now-- campaigning for Joseph Cao, congressman in an election delayed by Hurricane Rita. The democratic incumbent was caught with $90,000 in bribery money in his freezer and so a hard push was made to get him out of office. Apparently the election was narrowly won, and some of the districts we campaigned in were battleground districts that had huge jumps in voting just after my teammates and I worked them. Cool sensation, that your actions might have decided an election.

We learned of the job from our co-workers at Rebuilding Together. We worked three hours Friday night and made $50, went home and slept 5 hours and woke up at 3am. Chris joined us and we got back to the barbershop the campaign operated out of by 4am to work seventeen more hours and make $180. Like the twist ending of the movie, as we walk in to get our paychecks at the end of the night Saturday, in walks Kristen Palmer.

This lady, she runs the program we work for, Rebuilding Together New Orleans. She's on the board for the Preservation Resource Center, one of the power players in rebuilding the city. She is our boss's boss's boss. It does not get higher up than her. She gave us a really neat presentation on architecture in New Orleans when we first got here. We were a little surprised to see her, and a little afraid. But she walks in and hugs Wilma, this pleasant Southern lady who's been sending us driving 170 miles and walking god knows how many throughout the day. They insist we come to the party tonight. "Thanks For Volunteers Party," Wilma insists. "It's bad luck to say 'victory party.'" Given that she was about the nicest boss I've ever had and she paid for our lunch at an excellent, huge Chinese food/sushi/dessert buffet, and she says the party has free booze, we're considering. But we're getting tired. We decline.

On the drive home we change our mind. We hoped for an even $200 for Saturday and decided to make up for our lost money in alcohol. We get to the place for the party, the Palace Cafe, and it's a three-story, very classy restaurant downtown. Everyone's in suits, everyone's older than us. We're in our Joseph Gao t-shirts we've been wearing for two days. We are clearly underdressed. We move quickly to the small bar, the waiter in a dress shirt and bow tie. He has red and white wine and some bottled import beer. I opt for the red wine as Kristin comes over, dressed in earth tones, a 20's style flapper hat the same brown as her sweater and a cream shawl draped over her shoulders. "We feel out of place. Underdressed," I tell her.

"Don't be ridiculous, we need people like you here. Look at me, I'm underdressed too," she says earnestly. I don't buy it, she looks great. "This stuff doesn't get done without you guys, and you've got that hardworking look going on. It's fine," she insists. She's just a little drunk, she smiles and winks at me. The other guys are pretty quiet, slip off to drink. I finish my first glass of wine and grab another and Kristin continues to make conversation.

"I'm out of my element, I'm serious. I've never been to one of these high-class things with all these big names. All I know about this, I've picked up in the last two days," I tell her. She's happy to help. She starts pointing people out, leaning in and talking right into my ear over all the crowd-rabble. I have a hard time remembering the names, but one of the first people she points at is a guy with a huge nose and a little chin, balding. She says his name and says, "Fucking icon in this city-- Ugly as sin, though. His wife over there," she points, "She's a classy lady, always dressed to the nines." I remember Will, I think, mentioning that Kristin's apparently kind of a name in this city too, and I move to flatter. "From what I hear, you're kind of a fucking icon here too," I say. It works. She smiles, acts dismissive, but still elaborates. "I ran for office, but I didn't win-- it was a black neighborhood, but I came way closer than any white candidate ever did, because of my work, because they know me, and I help those communities out."

A Vietnamese man in a polo I remember from the barbershop approaches, thanks me for my work. It's Joseph Cao's brother from Texas, and he and Kristin talk about disaster non-profits and their lack of funding thanks to presidential decrees. She talks about her programs, and introduces me again, mentions that I'm volunteering for her. She gives another wink. "I worked seventeen hours campaigning today," I say with a grin. It becomes my standard opening line for the rest of the night. "I'm working for Rebuilding Together, but I'm part of Americorps." I explain Americorps briefly, and throw in that Bush wanted to cut our program completely but instead gave us a quarter our usual budget. Already I find myself playing the game, and Kristin's smiling away.

When the conversation ends Kristin says, "Almost everyone here's a Republican. Fuck the Republicans, but you've gotta play the game, you know? The budget's going to come up and now he's going to mention us when he talks to his brother, and that's that. It's all about these little connections--" Someone walks within earshot and she instantly conjures an easy smile and a greeting like that you'd give a close friend. "If you go to the dark side and go corporate it's even worse, the schmoozing you have to do. At least I still have my integrity," she assures me.

A few people talk to her, one of her standard lines is "Our kids should be carpooling together," and I stand peripheral, quickly learning my role: working boy accessory. She works people over well, and I'm having fun watching, participating. The wine helps, I'm smiling an earnest-looking smile, and I'm learning a lot about the secret charms and deals that go on here. She's a little drunker as the night goes on, and when the bar closes at 11:30 she says "What? Fuck this, that means it's time to go! Where's Wilma?"

We find her and she's drunk too, she hugs me and thanks me and introduces me to still more people. "Don't listen to Kristin," she says seriously. "You've done more for rebuilding the city this night than you could ever do in any of the rest of your time here." Kristin feigns upset and waves it off. "Not if we don't work to keep him here, we won't. He barely won, even in spite of Jefferson's garbage. Do you have a ride home?" She asks me. I'm really curious to see what they plan on getting up to for the rest of the night, but I tell her I do. She walks toward my team, all drinking together at a table in the back, thanks them for their work, says goodbye to me. I grin at them. I'm happy I've had a wildly entertaining night learning about political maneuverings. They're happy they've gotten free drinks. I realize that as far as I'm concerned, they've completely missed the point of the evening.

---

Last night I worked in a community center. Unable to help myself, the first thing I did was peruse the free bookshelf. Almost took a children's book on the myth of Cadmus, founder of Thebes. Some of us wrapped presents. Tuesday nights they serve free meals to the communities and we helped prepare it-- sort of. The cook was utterly self-sufficient and hilariously, charmingly rural. Talked about hating his time in the army and being drunk literally every day of his two years there Insisted he could cook perfect rice. We ended up serving the meals to sad-looking people. Undercooked, wet rice. Gravy with bits of hamburger broken up in it. Corn. I was very hungry until I actually ate it, and then realized I could barely get it down. The chocolate brownie mix with dried cherries and a powdered-sugar-based glazing made it tolerable.

I couldn't decide if it was hopeful or depressing. Some of the people who came for dinner just loved that a place like that existed, where they could get donated clothes, books, toys for their kids. Others never looked up from the floor, never said a word, battered clothing.

---

I haven't run in five days and I'd really like to soon. This is my last weekend in New Orleans and I still haven't eaten at Cafe du Monde, haven't eaten alligator, haven't taken pictures of the old mausoleums or the collapsing houses covered in ivy. I still feel like I didn't get enough time to see New Orleans the way I'd like to have seen New Orleans. In five days I leave for Denver again. In eleven I'll be home and I'll get to see my family again (I'm excited to go home; I miss them). In fifteen days I'll see Kat again, whereupon I will be even further delighted. Right now, I have a lot of happy things to look forward to, and even though I was pretty angry and upset last week, I realize that I'm pretty happy right now.

Pale Blue Eyes.

The computer at my house (I am careful to use the word "house" and not the word "home;" they have very different connotations) is a public computer. Some people have laptops; I did not wish to inconvenience them with borrowing theirs when this perfectly serviceable one is available to me. I am using it even now.

But after the incredibly lengthy lecture I received from Carmella last night, I'm not so sure I ever care to again. It turns out that Carmella goes through the history of this computer periodically "because it's not ours," in case we're using it for anything subversive. What she's looking for, exactly, I'm not sure-- but in the process she apparently found this, and told me it was incredibly rude to her and my team members. Hi, Carmella.

When Carmella gets mad, she adopts a tone and body language that could be a cousin to sarcasm. First she told me that she saw me running on Decatur, and that she was going to write me up and that I have to do four hours of additional learning.

Then she told me that "By the way, I read your blog, and you even talk about your running there, and you say some pretty rude stuff in there." She said it's going to alienate me from people with how rude I am, and that she sent it to Kevin Rumery, earth unit leader-- as if it were worth the effort for him to read. This was the exact moment it started to feel like an interrogation; I a suspect, my journal submitted to headquarters as evidence. Hi, Kevin.

The subtext to the blog discussion was that I shouldn't be allowed to say anything negative in my blog about anyone and that if I do then I shouldn't have it, or why can't I just make it private. I said that it was a sort of release for me, and that it was for my friends and family back home to read, not my team members; I have no intention of changing my tone. Nobody is making you read this but yourself. This is no smoking gun; I am not actually stupid enough to post anything I know will get me in tangible trouble-- or apparently not. I thought running would be forgivable compared to the massive amounts of drinking that took place this weekend, but as far as I know, I'm the only one to receive a punishment yet. (The truth of the matter is that in this place, I am being polite-- I know better than to post my angriest and most frustrated opinions where anyone can see them. You are viewing, have always been viewing, my thoughts in moderation.)

Then she told me that I was a terrible worker last week and that she saw me taking frequent breaks, standing around doing nothing. She had the audacity to say that the group would have actually gotten more work done if I hadn't been there; that someone more productive would have been able to use the ladder I was on. I reminded her that I was sick last week, and that I was doing the best I could. She told me that if I was sick I should just call off for the day rather than waste everyone's time. I told her I'd rather do some work than no work at all, and that the idea that I was actually making less work happen with my presence was ridiculous.

After the speech about how I was going to alienate my teammates, she asked me to tell her everything about who drank, how much, and when, perhaps failing to miss the point that this would be the most self-damning thing I could do if people found out I did it.

Then she asked me what my problem was with Haley; that I said some pretty rude things about her. I went through my blog in my head, recounting. I knew I hadn't said anything that rude about her. It was all informative. I cannot change what she does or says. I do not make these things up; I simply write them as they happen. Certainly I interject a frustrated comment here or there, but this is only natural: It is a frustrating situation, putting me in a frustrated mood.

"You snapped at her when she wanted to help you with the turkey on Thanksgiving--"
Irked. "Carmella, you haven't seen me snap at someone yet."
She pauses. "Still, you were awfully curt with her."

I like to do things myself. I didn't need help with the turkey, and I didn't want help with the turkey. And then I recalled a brief team meeting shortly after I put the turkey in the oven: Carmella said we needed to be patient with one another because the kitchen was going to be busy and to try not to raise our voices at one another. At the time I felt like this was directed specifically at me, but then I remembered Joseph periodically scolding: "You always think everything is about you and it's not." I am sometimes paranoid, but I am also still calculating, analyzing; it turns out that yes, it is about me a lot of the time.


Next, talking about her. She was very mad I called her a boozer, angrily asked why I would say that. I told her her teammates last year said she used to drink in spike housing and the firefighting house all the time, and that some people saw her carrying around drinks downtown. "You weren't there last year, and apparently they never talked about second, third, or fourth round, all of team leader training. But I'm a boozer because I was carrying one drink. You're judging me on one drink." She settled with, "Last year was last year and this year was this year and they're two completely different things in my mind."

She wanted to know how I felt about her, and I gave her my honest answer: I think she is a nice girl, and I've had some good times with her, but I think she is unnecessarily ironclad with the rules because of past misgivings, and she's trying to overcompensate for them. That she is keeping an incredibly tight grip on the team because she doesn't want to be punished if we do something wrong.


Then we talked about me, which basically amounted to: What is your problem? Do you even want to be on this team? Is this going to be an issue come firefighting? On firefighting we'll be even closer, have less time to ourselves, and you can't have any issues with anyone when you're working that close to them (a silly notion, getting along perfectly with every co-worker). I told her I can separate my frustrations with co-workers from my work ethic, and that I am perfectly capable of keeping my head down and getting through the job. She said this was no way to go through a year, and if I'm not happy with things now and I'm not happy when we get to firefighting, then what? And I told her I'd quit, and I told her I am not a happy person, and I started to tear up.

She said she'd picked everyone on this team for a reason and we work well together and that I shouldn't just quit if something can be done to make it work, and a blurry, lengthy rambling about my discontent, depression. She asked if I wanted to talk to someone about it, Jamie Brennan in Denver or the Gulf Coast lady whose name I can't remember, both Americorps human resource psychiatrist people. I think it's awkward to talk to someone who barely knows anything about me about my problems, and I told her as much-- that there's something to be said for shutting up and dealing with it.

Kat told me I should talk to one of them, though, and she's probably the only one who could actually convince me it's worth doing, so I guess I will. But first I have to write a rebuttal to this running offense, and tomorrow we've got some team Kevin-yells-at-us-over-the-speakerphone-of-Carmella's-cell-phone disciplinary hearing.

Some people work very hard
But still they never get it right
Well I'm beginning to see the light

Abrasion.

I knew before, in a vague sense. I do not like working with other people. I do not like the idea that I can do my tasks meticulously, to the letter, and the result will still be failure, because someone else did not perform their role at the level I expect, the level the project demands.

I was constructing benches. They pushed the boards right up against one another; the diagram had a small space between them. Perhaps so that the boards don’t warp as much, have room to grow when they expand and contract with moisture. They started their way, and when I started mine I did it according to the diagram. “That’s not how you do it,” Haley said. It is, I assured her. “Well, let’s be consistent,” she insisted. “You do it their way.” People would rather be consistently wrong than inconsistent.

Still, the project was good: building a playground, outdoor classroom, bulletin boards, cubby holes, and a gazebo for a school with 300 volunteers. I worked on the classroom, digging holes through the thin layer of grass and the thick layer of blacktop beneath. If all projects were as rewarding as this one, I would be less miserable here.

Thanksgiving went well. People commended the turkey I cooked, the pumpkin pies I baked. The cranberry sauce I cooked didn’t get much praise, because people have a strange fetish for the disgusting cylinder of gel instead. Far too much food was made: Chris’s two pounds of brown-sugar carrots and pecans; Will’s brown sugar squash and apples, Jeremy’s four pounds kugel, some sort of sweet Jew noodle pudding; Wendy’s green bean casserole; Garrett’s corn pudding, and Carmella had Aaron make mashed potatoes using the entire ten-pound bag of potatoes. Entire sticks of butter were used in many dishes, and my body cries out in sorrow whenever I put one of them into my mouth. People were quickly stuffed; every dish was a dense one.

I ran today for perhaps an hour and a half by myself. This is forbidden, especially after dark; I left at sunset. I told Will, Aaron and Garrett I’d left and I took nothing but my phone. I’d taken a break there when I ran down to the busy part of town and saw some friends from other teams in for the weekend carousing with some of my teammates. (Carmella's been gone since Thursday, out drinking with fellow team leaders. She was seen carrying a fishbowl full of liquor down Bourbon Street one night, and talked with Haley about how she was surprised and kind of unimpressed that most people on the team were only out until 2am. Apparently last year she was something of a boozer. On the plus side, she hasn't checked in on us all weekend. Others have been drinking; I'm simply enjoying the absence of authority.)

When I arrived home, Haley barked at me. She said I wasn’t to go out after dark alone ever again because it was unsafe and against the rules and that nobody knew where I was. I told her that she was wrong, she wasn’t Carmella and wasn’t in a position to lecture me, I was a responsible individual, and that I didn’t really care what she had to think. She said that I was endangering the whole team with my actions, and when I realized I wasn’t getting anywhere I decided to just agree with everything she said. I wish I could say this made her stop talking.

This went on for twenty minutes. I was not completely scathing; after all, I do have to tolerate her presence day and night. When one of the other team members decided she would resume lecturing for another forty after Haley finished her piece, I was less polite. She insisted danger was around every corner and that people waited in alleys with two-by-fours waiting to club me over the head, that people would run up behind me dead-silent and punch me in the back of the head while I was jogging just on the chance I might be carrying something worth taking. I insisted she was an idiot. A stalemate.

I come from the water.

Today I saw the Toadies for seventeen dollars. Andrea went with me, and we were right in front-- You seriously could not have been any closer to the lead singer than where we were. No more than five feet. I could see all the intense angry facial expressions he made when he sang, and occasionally his eyes would dart around, and he'd stare directly at me out of the corners of his eyes for a couple seconds while he sang and I swear his irises are solid black.

They played all of my favorite tracks and obviously had a fun time doing it. "You're a fanfuckingtastic crowd, and this one's for you," they'd say. And then jam on their guitars for ten seconds and say "Thank you." This sort of thing happened more than once. There was a bobblehead of Thor from Marvel Comics on the drum set.

The Toadies are getting up there in the years, but the vocals are still solid and they definitely still have it; the show kicked ass and I screamed my lungs out and sung along. Andrea liked it too, in spite of not knowing the band.

The lead singer switched guitars twice. Each time he did he threw a guitar pick. All the people around me were very drunk and uncoordinated. I now have a guitar pick that has a t in a triangle and says "toadies" on one side and "This pick was STOLEN from Vaden Todd Lewis" in scratchy letters on the other. And to top it off, the bassist gave me a set list and the guitarist signed it for me, skirted requests from drunk people (including arm-signings and 'will you leave my sick girlfriend a voicemail') and talked to me for a minute or two before leaving for an end-of-tour party backstage.

"Hey, I have a question for you: my friend and I were having a bit of a debate a while back. Is 'I Burn' (which I was absolutely thrilled that they played, I might add) about smoking pot?"
"Nah, it's about a book. Do you know Fahrenheit 451? Todd read the book and as soon as he put it down he started working on that song. Trust me, if it was about pot it would be way more flowery and have absolutely nothing to do with smoke or burning or anything."

He smiled and took a drag of a joint, and I wondered if I was being led on, if he was making this up on the spot.

They have a new album out after eight years' hiatus, "No Deliverance," and they played some things off of it. It certainly sounded good live, good enough that I'm going to look into it.

I thought they were going to leave it out, but the very last song they played was the song that sounds like a love song but is actually about breaking into a girl's house, kidnapping her, and running away to Mexico. I think I pulled a muscle in my throat singing along as loud as I could with the rest of the crowd.

2801 Marais St, New Orleans, LA 70117

It occurs to me that I talk about my side projects without talking about my main project.

Rebuilding Together works in more places than just New Orleans, but there's definitely a focus here. Our director... Kristin, I think her name is? She's lived here for a long time and is very conscious of the architecture of the area. Our orientation included a very interesting lecture about the styles of housing and where they came from. She loves their use of space-- the shotgun double is a long, narrow house broken into two sides. Sometimes a family lives on either side of the house, and the fireplaces are built into the wall that divides it in two. Most don't have hallways because they were looked at as wasted space-- it's a series of square rooms that just run to the back of the house.

Rebuilding Together finds low income elderly or disabled citizens, and also first responders (firefighters, EMTs, policemen), and builds them houses. They take special steps to make them as green (in the environmental sense, not the color schemes) as they can-- bamboo flooring, things like that. The furniture in the houses is all donated from movie sets! Which I think is really cool.

There was recently a huge volunteer project sponsored by Starbucks-- they spent $31 million leveraging 10,000 volunteers for two days, gave them all outfits, water bottles, espresso, fed them, paid for their airfare and hotels to come to New Orleans, really went all-out... They got a lot done, I think a hundred houses? But most aren't all the way done. A lot of the volunteers wouldn't get on ladders, so our job is to get to high places, paint trim and touch-ups, oftentimes on rickety extension ladders 30 feet off the ground. We scrape excess paint off windows that weren't taped beforehand.

Last week I did a different job on a different house every day, never to completion: repair broken window panes, install fence-posts, paint eaves of a roof, work in the warehouse, install a curtainrod and arrange furniture and wipe down floors by hand. Sometimes it feels a little like busy work, and it can be unfulfilling feeling like you never get to see the end of things. Other times, it's unexpectedly fun.

Historical homes that are slated to be demolished are oftentimes salvaged for windows, doors, mantles, columns, and anything else we can get our hands on. These parts usually only need a bit of work and are sold to the public pretty cheap. They apparently did this to offset our cost of living for utilities and things. A popular thing to salvage is barge-board: the ships that would bring supplies down the Mississippi couldn't go back up the river, so they were disassembled and the wood was used for building. Some of our stuff is made from barge board here.

I have had an ear infection for two weeks and I finally went to the doctor today. I left the marathon I was working at to go because we didn't have any days off this week. I got an antibiotic, five days of Zithromax, that I hope kicks in soon, because the infection's gotten worse the past two days. Right now it sounds like my right ear is stuffed full of cotton, or like I'm listening from underwater-- sensible, because there's apparently fluid built up in it.

I leave on December 15 and return to Denver by December 18. I fly home for Christmas on December 22. I return to Denver on January 2 at noon and I just realized that my mother may have just inadvertently made life very difficult on me when she bought this ticket for me before I left if Kat's plane tickets home take her home after I leave, shit

Uh anyway

My address is in the title, if you would like to surprise me with a letter before then.

Pink stinks.

Saturday was spent working for Brad Pitt's "Make it Right" organization as part of an ISP, an independent service project. We were told we'd be "folding tarps for the Pink Project" and most of us expected to be working outside with a huge group taking down these tent-houses that were set up as a fundraiser. The girls woke up early and primped a little on the off-chance they'd meet Brad Pitt. His love of adoption no longer applies simply to children from foreign nations-- He now adopts entire cities.

Nnnot quite. When we got to the project site we found out it was an old Walgreen's in the Lower Ninth Ward. The letters are long-since pulled down on the outside and you can see the silhouette of them on the building, cleaner than all the surrounding concrete. It's completely gutted on the inside and is being worked on to be converted into a church. It was filled wall-to-wall, hip-high, with pink tarps, and one person showed up to tell us what was going on: Pierre. The church wanted the tarps gone, so we're moving them to another warehouse a few blocks away, and someday in the future they might get turned into something useful, like reusable grocery totebags.

Some of the tarps were wet. Some were covered in ants. Some were one piece that made an entire tent-house and took three people to carry. It was foul-smelling, grueling, lots of people have sore backs and muscles, and we spent about nine hours doing it. But I got some really great pictures of the whole thing. Consider this the meet-the-teammates post, as well. Still no good ones of the elusive Jeremy and Andrea, though-- perhaps in the future, dear reader.

Haley's back, Aaron with his eyes closed, Will, blurry Chris, and Carmella.

A typical Aaron and Chris situation.

Carmella and Wendy wax philisophical.

Chris and Garrett badly miss football, and talk about it often.

Haley, sporting the "rugby shirt," a long-sleeve polo-type shirt that's this odd mix of cream and grey. A lot of people like it, but I still haven't even taken mine out of the plastic wrap-- I think it would look terrible on me and I don't like the shirt at all.

When all was said and done we moved four full-sized U-haul trucks worth of tarps and stacked them into a mountain in this harbor-side warehouse that smelled acrid and oppressive, likely from the flood. If plastic could go stale, this is what it would smell like. Most people didn't mind, but it made me really uncomfortable-- fortunately, unloading is quick work.

Pierre gave us a tour of the Lower Ninth Ward and the part Make it Right was working on. About one in ten houses still stands on those blocks closest to the pier. Most of the lots look like this:

It's very grim out there, driving through and seeing this over and over again, seeing houses still standing with X's spraypainted on them during recovery efforts showing some of the vitals of the house: dates checked, occupants recovered, and in some instances, a body count. The Lower Ninth has a whole lot of those, houses with "DEAD" spray-painted on the outside.

There's a little color seeping in from the outside, though. Make it Right sells super-environmentally-friendly homes for only $150,000. They just finished their first few homes recently, and they get excited for the little things, like when their new residents start getting mail.

To buy one of these houses, they have quite a few criteria: you must have lived in the Lower Ninth before the flood, you must prove that you'll be able to take good care of the house, a few other things... They have a very forgiving loan plan, apparently-- most of these peoples' houses were valued at only $50,000 before the storms. One of the local antique dealers I took a liking to was talking to me about it and he said it was a nice gesture, but not the most intelligent move on their part. That the houses have lots of specialized parts, and that many of the residents will have a hard time maintaining them. Not to mention that they don't look at all like the usual New Orleans houses, the Creole cottages or the shotgun doubles; they have none of the flavor of the local architecture and frankly look a little weird.

Your eyes do not deceive you: the roof is asymmetrical, the slope on front much steeper than that of the back. Most of the houses look a little fucked up, and one of the weirdest designs that nobody's bought yet, when you look at it from the front, it looks like an M. Like you could half-pipe on the roof or something. Still, the homes pass a ton of rigorous tests for weather and flood resistance and insulation and they have built them ridiculously quickly, something like six houses in 45 days. So I can't fault what they're doing at all.

These houses would easily cost three times this back home, and in the right neighborhood I'm sure they'd sell for over a million. But apparently here, at $150,000 a house, they aren't losing any money on it. They've figured out how to help these people by giving them houses better than they ever could have had, and are giving it to them as cheaply as they can humanly afford. Little by little, they're rebuilding a whole neighborhood.

Same as it ever was

Randomly, without warning, a daze strikes me now and again, things feel fuzzy, surreal. I am outside myself, this does not feel like my life, and my tongue, my hands, move of their own accord. I see these faces, I understand that I know them, but then realize I do not: I share a room with people whose middle names, criminal backgrounds, old relationships I do not know, whose loves, worries and fears I have yet to see. Icebreaker-games alone do not tell you about a person. I acknowledge them during these team meetings, at dinner, at work, I smile, but something deep inside me says: wait, this is a ridiculous situation. Who are these people? What are you doing here? This is the best you could come up with? What compelled you? Firefighting? You're going to want to do nine months straight of this?

This is new, but it is still you. Did you think a new place, new people, would make you happier? Well, here: have dozens of new places. Have two hundred new people. Are you happier now? No-- you wanted a challenge, to be sure, but you were hoping that with it would come some sense of fulfillment, satisfaction. (But then, maybe that will come later-- you are only a week into your first project, you know.)

We are friends, we are a small family a month old, because we have to be. I do not say this like it is a bad thing; that’s simply how it is. We embrace it, because there is no alternative. We eat, cook, and sleep together. But your family is at home and your co-workers are at work and your friends are at your leisure; these people are all of these at once, in sequence, inescapably. These three groups are meant to be three separate groups for a reason: no one group is meant to fulfill all these roles, or stress comes quickly.

When all this sturm und drang passes, I would like to be able to stand back and look and say I was happy.

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?"

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground

And you may ask yourself, "What is that beautiful house?"
And you may ask yourself, "Where does that highway lead to?"
And you may ask yourself, "Am I right? Am I wrong?"
And you may tell yourself, "My god, what have I done?"

Friends and Family?

Perhaps a rundown of my teammates is in order, in case I ever mention them and you’re clueless. This will be later edited to include pictures of all the folks in question.

Aaron and Will are our team’s clowns. They talk almost exclusively in the Borat voice, call each other “bra”—a strange corruption of the word “bro,” and not a ladies’ undergarment. Will is the dark-haired one, is from New York, and occasionally says something very clever I would not typically expect. They got jumped in Denver on Halloween, dressed as a banana and a fisherman, but only lost their soda and half a cigarette. The two of them are obsessed with McDonalds, and go nightly, thus violating the ‘no going outside after dark’ rule. For some reason Carmella does not mind it as much as she does if anyone else goes out.

Garrett is a pretty preppy guy, and very smart and funny. I feel like he went to a pretty upper-class university but I can’t think of which. Like Noel, he has the power to make you like him regardless of what social strata you’re in. He is most definitely a people person, and I’ve seen him joke back and forth with random people on the street, or different homeowners whose houses we work on. He enjoys The Office and jokingly called Sports Center “his meditation.”

Chris Paradis (pronounced ‘parody,’ but everyone says ‘paradise’) is a fairly skilled musician, and plays his guitar every night. When he’s clean-shaven he looks like Michael C. Hall (Dexter from the eponymous show, David Fischer from Six Feet Under), but he has some sort of no-shaving pact with Wendy. He has a novel that others have been reading that I strongly suspect reads like “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac. I like Chris; he’s very smart, and out of everyone here his sense of humor is probably closest to mine.

Jeremy is tall and has glasses that make him look like Clark Kent, and in his college pictures he is long-haired and clean-shaven and looks like a whole different person. I thought he was older than me when I first saw him, and learned later that he’s not. We bonded over running; he has ridiculous endurance for it and has a hard time finding people who can keep pace with him. He is probably the quietest guy here.

Wendy Angus-Anderson (Chris wrote a song about all her names; she has six or seven of them, when all her middle ones are factored in) has asthma. She has a hard time with running. She, Chris, Jeremy, and some others back in Denver were all pretty good friends, and I like them, but they can feel very cliquish sometimes, and I have a hard time being a part of that. She used to be a dancer, I think. I would not be surprised if she and Chris got together by the end of this, nor would I mind: I think they’d make a decent couple.

Andrea is from San Diego, and as far as I can tell she never left her house, because everything is new and surprising to her and she does a lot of weird things she thinks are perfectly normal, like breaking up toast with jelly on it into her oatmeal. At first I thought she might have had an eating disorder—She is very skinny, I saw her at the gym all the time, and she seemed to eat very little. Now that I’m living with her I realize I was completely wrong; she’s always rushing for seconds or thirds at dinner and snacking throughout the day, but she never gains weight.

Haley is deaf, but apparently deafness isn’t what it used to be, because she has hearing aids that let her hear just fine. Haley is a little dense, though. There was a neon sign in a New Orleans storefront that said “No drugs or nuclear weapons allowed inside,” and she thought it was serious. The last group that was here had a plumbing problem and had to go to another house for a week because this one flooded, and when the Rebuilding Together staff member was explaining this, Haley thought she meant they left to go to Texas to help out with hurricane Gustav for a week. She is perhaps the most motherly of all of us, in all senses of the word.

Carmella is the team leader. She is a sweet girl, but she is very by-the-book, which can be frustrating sometimes. I have been told that I’m not allowed to read while in the front passenger seat because I’m supposed to be watching for road hazards (ATD, assistant to driver, this is called). I can’t read while standing around waiting for a job because it looks like I’m inattentive (while others have been standing around idly bullshitting with each other for good lengths of time). I can only wear my bandana when it is functionally necessary (keeping paint out of my hair), but she told me to take it off the moment I got in the truck. I can’t tie the sleeves of my cover-alls around my waist.

Carmella does not allow anyone out alone, or after dark. When we jog in the neighborhood, no-one is allowed to bring their iPods in case someone decides to jump the pack of ten of us. If we leave when the sun’s up, we have to be back by 10:00pm weekdays, 2:00am weekends, but we can’t walk—we have to taxi. Even though it’s only perhaps a mile to the hangouts. And we aren’t allowed to drive the trucks there. With the fence around our lot, it starts to feel very cagey.

My better judgment tells me to simply say “okay” and do what she says when she says I should do something, but part of me always wants to say “Carmella, nobody is going to tell on you for letting us do this.”

Overall, they are good people, but we are crammed in tight and never apart, and it wears thin on me, has been wearing thin on me for days. I wish I could go out at nights; I wish weekends did not seem so short; I wish I knew more than just these nine people here. I am eager for Christmas, for nothing more than to just sit alone in my own space, to have a mattress and not a cot to sleep on.

Halloween at the Children's Museum.

The Children's Museum I spent Halloween at might be one of my new favorite places.

Becky, Lena, Lauren in bunny ears, and Kat.

Chris sporting an awesome cowboy hat, the back of Mike's head, Sarah, and ohIdon'tremember, possibly a Lauren, we have a million Laurens.

Immaculately-dressed conductor. The larger version of this picture perfectly captures his focused expression, which is giggle-inducing.

The room I was in charge of for the first portion of my evening was the A to Z room, where mask-making took place. This overweight guy's costume may have been the creepiest all night. The little girl with the wings was adorably quiet and aloof, and in some strange way reminded me of Kat.

This very cute Spider-Man had a curly moustache painted on his face. He was as talkative as he was cute. Below him is an ADORABLE BABY with an expression like an uncaring emperor in the larger version of this picture. Here, he just looks sleepy. Which, come to think of it, is more on the mark.

The table of bubbles in the blacklight room. Unfortunately, blacklights can be tough photographic conditions.

I included the shopping area just because I thought my mom might think it was neat. This sounds more misogynistic than I intend it to be.

There are two outdoor-themed areas. The above one is the clubhouse room with soft carpet and no shoes allowed; the bottom one is the one with animal costumes you dress up in.

When no-one was looking, I donned the guise of my power animal-- the rabbit-- as best I could. I am wearing my halloween costume over my Americorps uniform.

For bonus entertainment: my costume as I wore it around to the party on-campus.

Where the Heart is, While the Heart is in New Orleans.

Home is in the ghetto. I can’t tell if the houses were always this bad, or if it was the hurricanes. Our house is called the green house, because it’s painted lime green. It’s surrounded by a purple seawall-fence with razor wire atop, and our yard is the storeyard for the orange warehouse next door. Bathtubs, sinks, metal railings, molding, doors, windows, fireplace arches—anything that could be salvaged on these unsalvageable houses was.

Our (very pregnant and still very pretty) supervisor Daniela came by to give us a brief introduction to tomorrow’s work and the area: Don’t walk at night, go in groups, last year a volunteer was carjacked, went to chase his assailant down, got shot in the stomach and was hospitalized for months. Two kids got mugged right outside the fence. Carmella refuses to let us walk, in any number, after about 6pm. We can’t take the trucks out either, though; we have to taxi home.

The house looks nice enough, outside and in: hardwood floors, fresh coats of paint, well-organized. Tiger print rug in the living room. No TV, but a computer. But I suspect it’s veneer: In two days we’ve found twenty cockroaches the size of your thumb. Some are killed, some slip away. They do, in fact, scatter when the lights come on. At about 3:00am the first night, we realized that train tracks run through our backyard, and the house shakes a little and the conductor makes liberal use of the whistle. We found out again at 6:30am.

There are two bathrooms, and showering is lukewarm and means standing up to your shins in water. Three bedrooms, ten by fifteen feet: the team leader has one to herself, but allows us to store some extra stuff in there. The three other girls have a room to themselves. The six guys share the last room. The girls are happy, and the boys hit their knees on the cots every time they enter. Any time someone complains, someone else says, “You wouldn’t have it any better in Tent City with FEMA in Texas!” Yes, but then everyone would be suffering equally. This is my gripe.

In truth, though I complain, it’s a really interesting situation, it’s novel, and it’s entertaining for it. It’s rugged, it’s Fight Club, whatever comparison you’d like to draw. Work is right next door, which is convenient, and Class XIV left us a fair amount of food, a ton of rice.

Two nights in a row, I've had dreams about getting stabbed: once in the small of my back by someone back on campus in Denver, and once in the chest while I was chasing down someone in a grey skull mask for stealing the Christmas decorations off my mother's lawn.