Things I Enjoy

I was at the grocery store at 11 pm. The woman in front of me in line was buying six cans of cat food and a handle of vodka. When she got to the front, the checker looked up at her and said, "You're early."

Today's Links

Here's another link for my fellow unemployed drug addicts out there (coincidentally, again from Newsweek, which is apparently the newsletter of unemployed drug addicts forced to live on cat food everywhere):

Laid-Off Men Don't Do Dishes

The crux of the article is that unemployment affects more men than women, and that while women who are laid off spend a lot more time doing domestic tasks, unemployed men seem to do less, instead dedicating their time to "snacking, sleeping, and channel surfing." Here's the money quote, and the reason I'm posting this link on the blog: "We men today may be taking care of our kids, our skin and our feelings more than Grandpa Ralph ever did, but we still grapple with the same core problem: proving that we weren't just born male—we've become Men. And during economic crises, men humiliated by their loss of work often compensate by reasserting their worst hypermasculine impulses."

Two things:

1) Does the connection between work and self-esteem still apply for millennials? I think of the large number of us who either a)have trouble finding work or b) have trouble deciding what work we want to do or c) just generally prefer to engage in some floating. Are male millennials therefore emasculated, or we just not that focused on it, and (if true at all) this article would only apply to older people?

2) I'd say that the author of the article has diagnosed a general problem with human history not particular to the Great Recession. If men weren't so concerned with proving they were Men, I suspect human history would have a lot less violence and mayhem. Too bad we don't have little LED lights that click on to let us know when we're men, or get a certificate in the mail or something. But again I would ask: Is concern with being Men something else that millennial culture is leaving behind? I feel like the closest I've ever been to anyone worrying about his manhood is a Hemingway story (but maybe that just says something about the circles in which I run.)

On String Beans and Moral Authority

Last year I was pretty faithful about volunteering at a local food bank, but I stopped going when the bank cut its Friday hours. Today, I decide to give Thursday afternoon afternoons a try.

There’s a new director, and when I get there, he’s about to start lunch. While under the previous director I had done both intake and pantry work, I don’t want to presume on the new one, so I wait to be assigned. As a result, I spend a few minutes loitering. I always find it a little sad when a place has changed from my memories of it, but despite six months, things are not too different. The waiting room has been rearranged, and now has more chairs. There are now fans placed everywhere. The pantry has a new sign admonishing volunteers not to take any food. All small things, though the sign is a little disconcerting.

I don’t recognize any of the other volunteers, either because it’s been six months or because it’s Thursday. I start to introduce myself to two in the pantry, but their conversation looks pretty animated, so I slink back out to the waiting room. I can still hear them, though I don’t think they realize that. One says, “Is that guy waiting for his food, all creeping up over your shoulder and shit?” No, the other one responds, he’s a volunteer.

The new director comes out and asks me if I’d be willing to work in the pantry. Sure, I say. We head back there and he gives me a quick review -- nothing seems to have changed policy-wise.

It’s a new shift, so the two other volunteers leave. “Matthew” comes back and says he’s going to be working in the pantry with me. Good deal.

He shows me around, and I generally defer to his authority. I don’t bother telling him that today is not my first day, although I do question him when he tells me to give out two cans of both the Lucky Time green beans and the Golden Harvest green beans. Aren’t those the same thing? I ask. “They’re both green beans, but you should give out both,” he says. But won’t that mean going through the stock twice as fast? They’re different brands, but are you sure they’re not meant to be replacements for each other? “I’m sure,” he says.

As recently as last summer, running out of food was a serious concern. Maybe things have changed -- the shelves do look fuller. It doesn’t seem worth an argument, so I agree to do it his way.

A new volunteer comes through, led by the director. She is an older woman wearing a large scarf, a black dress, big earrings, and numerous rings. Her hair is short and blonde-white and severe in an older-woman-of-means-not-letting-herself-go sort of way. She looks out of place, a faded socialite wandered in from a Fitzgerald story.

She is uniformly impressed by everything. Here are the refrigerators, the director says. “Oh really!” she says. And here is the USDA food, he says. “Oh yes!” she says. Her oh reallys and oh yeses are still audible as they move into the warehouse.

Matthew and I begin to fill orders. He pulls out a psp and uses it play hip-hop music. I can’t describe exactly why, but it feels incongruous with the situation. I'm not happy about it, but decide not to say anything about it.

The socialite comes back through. I hear her being introduced to the woman working intake today. The woman says that she’s a single mother. “Oh really!” the socialite responds. She continues that the welfare office told her that if she was having trouble finding work, then she should find a place to volunteer. “Oh yes!” the socialite responds.

Another volunteer comes out of the warehouse into the pantry. He gives me his name and says, “I bring the Mormon boys.” He’s wearing a white t-shirt with a picture of Jesus that says “my boss.” I introduce myself. My eyes are drawn to his hair, which is flat and oddly pushed back, almost like there is some sort of singularity in the back of his head which is forcing light and gravity to converge on it. I notice that sweat on his forehead seems to be coming from under the hair, and I wonder if he’s wearing a toupee.

He asks me where I’m from, and I tell him the name of the university where I work. “Oh!” he says. “I’m headed there tonight to hear the speaker on Mormons!” Our conversation has lasted thirty seconds and it already has a theme. Yes, I tell him, I heard about that. He tells me the time and location of the speaker, but stops short of asking me if he’ll see me there. He looks like he’s considering it, though.

“Do you know who’s back there?” he asks, and gestures to the warehouse. “See that guy? He’s the 1983 heavyweight champion of the world.” He’s here? I say. Though I have no idea who that is, nor have I ever seen a fight, it seems like the sort of response the toupee man was looking for. He nods grimly.

The man in the warehouse is well-muscled, but otherwise nothing particularly sticks out about him. I wonder why the heavyweight champion is volunteering at our food pantry, or why that seems odd to me. I imagine faded glory; I picture all the boxer characters from “Million Dollar Baby” and their broken dreams; I hear “Eye of the Tiger.” All of that happening here, in the warehouse of our local food pantry. It’s uncomfortable, like seeing someone who was cool in high school now working a menial job in your hometown.

Maybe it’s not like that at all; maybe it’s good and fine that the heavyweight champion is here. I still decide not to introduce myself.

I ponder Matthew and his bagging. He puts a paper bag inside a plastic bag and then stacks all the way to the top, building careful pyramids of food security. Or he uses empty boxes and builds precarious and heavy sculptures, small cans supporting big ones, ungainly cans ready to topple out, etc., like some sort of unstable chemical arrangement whose atomic bonds are ready to break at the slightest moment. Nothing seems to predict when he will make the careful stacks or when he will opt for the Tasmanian Devil swirl approach.

After a few orders I work up the courage to talk to him about his bagging and how heavy and inconvenient it probably is for the clients. “It doesn’t matter,” he says, “we help load the food anyway.” That’s true, I tell him. But the people also have to get the food into their homes. “I never thought of that,” he says, but I notice he doesn’t change his ways. I decide if he’s willing to open the pandora’s box of passive aggression, then I’m going to stop giving four cans of green beans and only give two.

A client comes back into the pantry despite the numerous signs posted everywhere admonishing that only volunteers are allowed. He’s come through the warehouse entrance, too. The heavy-weight champ has let him by.

“Can I get some of those sausages?” the client asks. Sorry, I tell him. Those are for the homeless packs. “I usually get some of those sausages and soups and shit” -- I appreciate his alliteration, even at the time -- “but this time they gave me a whole bunch of cans and rice and beans and shit I can’t cook.”

Do you not have a means to cook? I ask. This is a question that is supposed to covered during intake. “No, I’m living in my car,” he says. “I’m sorry, sir -- I’d be happy to give you a homeless pack instead of the regular order. Just bring me back what we gave you, and I’ll swap you.” Had intake gone correctly, I would have given him a homeless pack in the first place and wouldn’t be in the difficult situation of asking for food back. Still, most of the food is stuff he can’t use anyway.

He brings the bags back, but since every order gets the same food, when I start to reshelf, it’s clear that some items are missing. I go back outside and ask him if he brought back all the bags. He admits that he did not, but tells me that the bag he kept had cereal and other things he could eat. He is upset that I’m asking for it back. I tell him that I need the full order back, so that I can give him a full homeless pack. He grudgingly leaves to get it.

While waiting outside, I hear one client talking to another about Obama, and how he is going to help turn things around. She is nodding and saying, “Oh really?” and “Yes?” to his every comment, but I’m pretty sure from our encounter earlier (when I asked her what kind of milk she preferred, another question that should have been covered during intake) that she does not speak English.

Mr. Alliteration returns with a bag which has cereal, peanut butter, and a bag of rice. I go back inside to fill the homeless pack. I reshelf his peanut butter, and put a larger one into the new pack. Although technically cereal boxes are not supposed to be part of homeless packs, I go ahead and throw it in, anyway, plus all the other stuff that is supposed to be there.

I head back outside to give it to him. “Can I have one of those pizzas?” he asks. Pizzas? Sometime in the last few minutes someone from Pizza Hut has dropped off some over-cooked pizzas. This happens every so often, and even though it’s only a few pizzas, they’re appreciated.

“Sorry,” I tell him. “We save the pizzas for families.” This is true.

“Come on, man, why do you gotta be like that?” he tells me. His face is wrinkled up, though he’s more angry than cajoling. “Just let me have a pizza.” Matthew is next to me, finishing up another order. He grabs a pizza and gives it to him.

Although the odds of me ever seeing this client again are low, and it is doubtful there will be any long-term harm, I’m nonetheless irked. Hasn’t Matthew ever heard about not undercutting your partner’s authority? I realize that is normally given as parenting advice, and suddenly feel a little guilty. I am not this client’s parent, nor is this client a child.

Still, I tell Matthew that I thought pizzas were just for families. “They are, “ he says, “but I usually will give out whatever just to make them shut up.” Oh. Wow.

The client has heard all this, but somehow I am still the one who is the enemy. He is smug. “See, man? What did I ever do to you?” he scoffs as he ambles away. I don’t tell him about the big peanut butter, or the cereal that I wasn’t supposed to give him but did anyway.

I suppose my moral authority on the string beans has evaporated. It’s hard not to want to give extra food; hard to visualize and remember that extra food for any particular client is taking food away from a future client.

So as I walk away, I recant. I should have given him a pizza, even if he was mean and it was against policy. I decide that for the rest of the day I’ll give out the pizzas to every client until we run out, whether they’re families or singles. Not only will it feel like atonement, it will also make me feel like I didn't just give one to Mr. Alliteration because, like Matthew, I didn't want to deal with him. These thoughts seem like they should be contradictory, but they don’t feel that way.

Things I Enjoy

I saw a hand-made sign today on which various students had posted messages about their commitments to action for the semester. One in particular caught my eye:

"I'm committed to being more apart of the freshman experience."

Why I enjoyed this:
(1) Because of one little typo, the sentence expresses the opposite of its (most likely) intended meaning.
(2) If there is no typo, it raises some serious questions about what the student had been doing previously that was so pernicious to the freshman experience, plus the level of self-awareness required to then make this pledge suggests an interesting example of akrasia.
(3) I don't know if anyone else has ever noticed this about the sign, and since I was a guest in another department's office, I didn't mention it and just tried to keep my giggling in.

And let's not talk about the use of "freshman" in place of the preferred term "first year."

Things I Enjoy

A local lunch spot has a hand-written sign on the soft drink machine: "Water cups are for water only. No outside containers neither." The spacing and the handwriting make it clear that the "n" on "neither" was added after the message was written.

Why I enjoy this:
(1) Tautologies make me happy, particularly when there is any kind of justification for them (as it appears there is in this case). Water cups are for water and a is a.
(2) I love that in attempting to fix the second sentence someone only added a grammatical error where there was not one before. Good intentions led to a poor result. I'm sure it's a metaphor for something, and charming in its way.
(3) There's no particular reason that the "no/neither" pairing couldn't be correct, except that English has capriciously decided that it is not. In Spanish the double negative would actually be the correct concordance (ni/ninguno). (And I suspect the misapplication of a Spanish rule to the English sentence is the reason the change was made -- I'm sure this is some kind of metaphor, too.)

Today's Links

For all the other unemployed drug addicts forced to live on cat food out there who missed it, there was an article in Newsweek recently which fits the theme here:

Barack and Michelle: The Millennial's Dream Couple

A lot of people I know do seem a little too obsessed with the President and First Lady, though plenty of them are Boomers or Gen-Xers too. Still, I like taxonomies in general, and I particularly enjoy anything that attempts to classify or describe millennials, so let's add this one to the heap.

(Exception to the rule: the woman I met on Saturday who said, "I hope I'm not being presumptuous, but you look like a millennial," before she told me about the millennials at her work asking about what volunteer opportunities were available and scoffing that the desire to have these opportunities provided seemed to her to be a continuation of the scheduled play-dates with which millennials were raised. Not only has this connection been made before, lady, but I'm not entirely sure you should hold strangers to task for the actions of their larger demographic group. In fact, that may be a definition of prejudice. Plus, no one was talking about millennials; you just brought it up un-motivated, which was conversational awkwardness verging on inconsiderateness. And lastly, not to resort to ad hominem or to be off-topic myself, but I don't think anyone with large, blockish, orange glasses and wearing that many layers or colors -- i.e., someone who clearly goes to such effort to look hipster -- should really be critical of millennials who, when all is said and done, are the preeminent arbiters of all which is hipster.)

On Orientations, the Vestigial, and Transition

I have been to six orientations now: first, as a freshman; three times as an orientation volunteer; and twice now as a staff member. I suppose the first orientation will always be poignant for me, though for reasons largely tangential to the event itself (not that it wasn’t full of just as much enthusiasm and saccharine as any other orientation). John Irving says somewhere that one of the hardest things to accept about the passage of time is how things become inextricably wrapped up with parentheses, and this is how I still see that day -- my mother preening as we walked onto campus (she had just 123 days left to live), my sister (she would eventually move across the country) having a probing talk with my RA (he would hook up with one of the freshman girls in of our dorm), and so on. I remember that time as a sort of nexus or transition point from an old life to a new life, with both real and coextant. It’s one of the few times in my life where I really remember what it felt like to be me at the time, but on top of that, I also know how things turn out -- like a double-exposure of memory.

(Lots of events and places around this period are touched by this poignancy, so I try not to put too much stock in the phenomenon itself. I think it is the normal mythos-imbuing tendency of humanity; we no longer treasure the arrow which felled the great bear, or build cairns in the place where we had startling visions, but we still venerate the miscellany that populate our own existences and build our own personal eschatology.)

Back to the orientations. I don’t remember much from year two or three. From year four I remember some feelings of specialness, because I thought it would be my last. There were also some patriarchal feelings as an RA and as a senior, as if I were enjoying my brief stint at the front of the galley before my body was lit on a pyre and pushed out on an ice floe. But numbers five and six: the staff years.

“Alumnus” is the “vestigial present passive participle of alere, ‘to nourish,’” and I assure you that no one feels more vestigial than I do on the day of orientation. Parents and students are experiencing a transition (many, particularly the latter, blissfully unaware of the parentheses that will come to afflict their lives); I am stuck here.

I often wonder if we who work at the university have anything in common with others who are rooted to a place which others experience only in transition. I’ve never known an airport worker, or a subway attendant, or anyone like that, but I wonder if it’s at all similar. I have seen all of these faces before, heard all of these questions.

The parents all blend together. And the students: It’s hard not to want to type them. Many of them do seem to fit common stereotypes. There are the homebodies and the sluts and the people who are embarrassed to have their parents around. But it's also hard not to feel something that approximates love for them. Beneath it all, there are so many worries and hopes and unanswered questions. I wonder who is meeting a fun roommate (who will tragically take her own life fall of her sophomore year), or who will eventually decide to pursue the liberal arts (and then go to law school)? What struggles? What confidences? I want to take them all in my arms and tell them it will all be okay (for most it probably will be, people settle in; and for those who don’t, plenty of people have suffered worse things). Part of me also wants to hurry them. It’s like watching a chrysalis and wanting to shout out at it to hurry up and make a butterfly, but also being transfixed at this one moment of beauty and perfection when it was perfectly caught in transition.

On Employment, Dead Birds, and Fine Stitching

I am the most dreaded of hangers-on: I am a recent alumnus who has become university staff.

This probably doesn’t seem like such a bad deal. After all, universities are nice places overall. Most employees at my university are happy to be there. And don’t get me wrong: I’m not complaining either (much). I like my job and my lifestyle, and I’m comfortable with my choices. But it can still be an awkward situation to wear the scarlet “a” for alumnus.

Here’s the best metaphor I can give. It’s like someone I remember who was adopted, and while she was largely fine with that, she would complain about how many people instantly knew that she was adopted. She was clearly Korean, but she had a very Irish sounding last name. Most people when they met her in classes or whatever assumed (correctly) that she had been adopted, and so without her control people always knew this intimate detail about her and jumped to all these conclusions about her. (The phenomenon was even worse when she was out with her parents, who were both white). For her, it was like having this thing which should be her private knowledge on a big billboard, or, if I may (to keep the Hawthorne reference above company), it was an albatross around her neck.

Now, again, I don’t mean to suggest that being the alumnus-who-has-become-staff (and if that’s not the name of a pulp-comics monster, it should be) is all that bad, or nearly as serious as the example above. But same basic principle is in operation: I have no way to control who knows this fact about me (and a lot of people do). And this fact, of course, comes with its own associations: I am a left-over, a remnant, the collegiate appendix. I am the engine that wouldn’t turn over at the start of the race. Or so it can be perceived.

I don’t think I was any different than the current students when I was one. I knew only two recent alumni who were staff (the “recent” is key here -- if it has been more than ten years or so, I’d say, suddenly being an alumni who has come back becomes cool). One was a tall, overly-thin alum who chose to fulfill painfully trite stereotypes, such as still wearing braces and working in the IT department. The reasons he had stuck around seemed facile in their clarity. The other alum was a nominally-normal guy who chose to work in admissions, though I still felt there was some kind of desperation about him (a projection on my part, I know). For both, the unasked question seemed to be: You worked so hard to get a degree at this prestigious institution, and working in this institution is now the most prestigious thing you can find to do? (To both alums, I can only say: I’m sorry for my prejudice.) (And perhaps there was also some self-defense at work: surely if they were “stuck” at the university, it must be through some personal defect, and thus sticking around was a fate which I would not have to worry about.)

I’m not saying I actively thought about this too often. But I’m not saying these wouldn’t have been my opinions, either. And now I laugh: look at the company I’m in! I don’t work in IT, nor do I wear braces. But is there an air of desperation about me? Do people look at me askance and wonder why I’m still here, or worry that the same fate will befall them?

I don’t know. Somewhere between maybe and probably not. Of course, again, please don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. In fact, I’m rather fond of my scarlet a. The stitching is quite nice.