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philenaI called out of my volunteer work today. No particular reason--I feel well, I don't have anything else to do today, and, to be honest, I probably will find myself a bit bored come late afternoon. But I have been extremely busy the past. I have not had a full day to myself since October 6th, and, although this Saturday will be my own also, I couldn't bear the thought of getting up and going out just one more day. And therein lies the dilemma: if I had been working that much at one job, no one would think it strange for me to take a day off. But since all this business has been spread out among many jobs and activities, it's the volunteer work, the one thing I do that has not been requiring anything extra from me, that gets cut so I can recover. That's not actually the dilemma--that part seems pretty patently unfair (she types as she sits comfortably at home, listening to Rachmaninoff and making tea instead of biking five miles to stuff packets and file folders at an animal rescue (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
suddenleap, if you still want a kitty, this is the place to go that I've been telling you about)).
But is it fair to call in for a "mental health day" for volunteer work (whatever the cause for needing one) as it is at a paid job? Paid jobs make allowances for personal days off, even requiring you to use them if they accrue past a certain amount. Normal workplaces assume that to some extent you don't particularly want to be there--hence the salary and benefits packages*. Volunteer work you do because you want to**, and because the organization needs the help and, in many cases, is counting on it. They don't make allowances for people not coming in. The allowances they do make they make because volunteers aren't reliable, not being paid--but then, why would you volunteer if you don't intend to be committed to it? Volunteer work is rarely the kind of thing where you can breeze in once every month or two and address do something for an hour and feel good about yourself. There are only so many envelopes to stuff if you don't commit yourself to learning enough about the organization to be genuinely useful to it; otherwise you're just making more work for them, because they know how important it is to keep volunteers happy, even if you individually are more of a burden than a help. So the unreliable volunteers make work for organizations who just need dependable workers that don't drain the coffers. Presumably the volunteer workforce in general does more good than harm, otherwise organizations wouldn't be so desperate for them, but I feel as if I'm taking advantage of them by buying into the "I'm not paid to be here--I don't need to be thoroughly reliable" even for one day. Even if I did call in advance, instead of just not showing up. If it had been another day of paid work, you bet I would have been there! I can suck up the "it's just one more day until the weekend" and perform as well as anyone (except all those universities who have stopped scheduling Friday classes because no one goes to them), but today, since the prevailing culture didn't require it, I took advantage of it, and now I feel guilty. Not so guilty that I'll go in anyway, but guilty enough that I'll blather on a bit on livejournal.
Let's see what the old receipt**** has on it for me to talk about today:
A little while ago***** in the bakery, about half an hour or forty-five minutes before closing, a woman comes in and has a slice of cake and a cup of tea. I'm working alone, the store is completely deserted, (as it so always is until five minutes before close, when everyone and their mother comes in for cake slices, which all need to be cut individually and takes the longest time and makes me close late). Anyway, it's very quiet, so the woman and I chat a little, and she tells me that she just learned that she needs double eye surgery, and had decided to comfort herself either with a trip to the bar across the street or a trip to the bakery. And of course I give the nice salesclerk smile and tell her I'm so sorry to hear that and that I'm glad we won in the comfort-providing competition, and all is well. But my first reaction was one of distaste--not towards the poor woman who needs surgery, but towards the idea of comforting yourself with food instead of having a drink, and then towards the idea that she should have gone to the bar instead. Because that was my first reaction: how sad to be eating cake alone instead of going to a bar to--what, drink alone? How is that any better? In the short run it's probably much worse, assuming you're driving home, and in the long run it's far more destructive to cultivate the habit of comforting with alcohol than with cake. But the culture of stigma towards gluttony makes it difficult to internalize that, and although I probably should have turned on the classical music station and chatted longer with the woman so that the whole atmosphere of the empty store was friendly and warming, I had work to do (or maybe it was just a book to read), and now I'm left with the image of this poor woman eating cake alone because she's had some bad news and is scared about it.
This is not to say that comforting oneself with food is always bad. A little while ago my supervisor at Camfed was off on one of her ridiculously many travels (this one was to Zambia), and while she was gone there was a mini-crisis, involving an influential board member who, having just yesterday sent us $1500 with more to come either from herself or from people she's encouraged to donate, should under no circumstance be involved in a crisis. It's too boring and complicated to give all the details; suffice it to say that she needed right away some information that my supervisor alone had, and since my supervisor was unreachable in rural Zambia, we couldn't get it for her. On the way home, I bought some cookies at a very yummy bakery right on the way to the BART station, and upon my arrival I immediately told Daniel all about the rough crisis and he sat me down on the couch and served milk and the cookies, which I wholeheartedly agreed that I thoroughly deserved after an extremely rough day. And this circumstance is in essence no different from the one above, except that it didn't really leave a bad taste in my mouth******, because it was Daniel who served the cookies. Somehow, the involvement of another person provides some sort of tacit acceptance and approval of an activity which, when done alone, leaves an observer with a sad impression of lonely gluttony. Which I guess is another reason why I regret not having spoken to this woman and made sure she wasn't entirely alone. Because she thoroughly deserved some cake after the news she had just been given, and should not have had to submit to my adverse judgment on her actions, and although I don't know whether the whole experience would have been more satisfying if the salesclerk had butted in when she might have wanted to be alone with her thoughts, I do know that my cookies wouldn't have been nearly as calming after the rough day if I hadn't been sharing them with someone, and this woman looked awfully lonely.
This line of though is making me depressed, so I will move on to something slightly more cheerful, although still thematically related. If one is willing to consider metaphorical cases, some instances of lonely gluttony can be considered virtuous, although that is more the result of the greedy action being balanced by the virtuous one: in this case, reading. I might have mentioned how fond I am of George Eliot, and how much I enjoy reading her books. At the moment I have only read two: Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. I mentioned Daniel Deronda a few entries back, and although I have since finished it and concluded that it is inferior to Middlemarch (and written a long compare-and-contrast essay about it in a letter to my grandfather, which he has received, read, considered, and responded to, which, considering the pace of our usual correspondence, tells you a little more about how long ago I finished it), I still read it voraciously. And voraciously is exactly the same word to use, because her writing and her themes and her ideas often take so long to digest that reading a chapter is like eating a thick, fudgy brownie. I often need to take a break and clear my mental palate with a cup of tea and the funny pages. And those times when I had an afternoon to myself (another factor which will tell you how long ago this was taking place) and spent it devouring the book I felt a little over-stuffed afterward. The last bite of a fudge brownie does not taste nearly as good as the first few, and you don't appreciate it as much. Likewise, although I was dying to know what would happen with the Ezra Cohen search (no, this is not really a spoiler), I was well aware that speeding through the chapters hampered my appreciation of the quality of the prose. It's all very well to do this with a mystery novel, where the plot is all you have to pay attention to, but in a book where the writing style (not Henry James, to be sure, but refreshingly adult, with just the right amount of convolutions in the sentences to keep the grammar-sections of my brain whirring away) and the themes discussed are just as or more important than the plot, the reader does both the book and himself a disservice by racing through to find out what happens next. Henry James fixed this problem by keeping anything resembling a story down to an absolute minimum, but George Eliot had no such restraint. And yet, despite all the food and eating metaphors above, this sort of literary gluttony is considered downright virtuous. I guess it's because the virtue of the literary aspect outweighs the vice of the gluttony aspect, but it's not even a question of outweighing: "Yes, he eats too much, but he matches all his food purchases with donations for starving children," is the same idea, but the even though the disapprobation for gluttony is outweighed, it's still present. Maybe the metaphorical aspect for literary gluttony is what allows it to be thoroughly neutralized and negated by the literary aspect. Maybe I think about this too much, and should move on to my next, arguably just as frivolous bit of shmutz:
I have discovered why people where hats at a rakish angle! Maybe now it is to appear rakish, but it also works when you're constantly traveling in one direction and the sun is too low to be blocked out by wearing the brim normally! Just tilt the hat to one side to block the low sun out of your eyes, and voila! Rake and solar protection in one!
Hmmm: this appears to head back on the food theme: I once had some extra cookies with me, and offered them to a homeless man begging for spare change. He politely said, "Oh, no, thank you, I'm cutting back on sweets."
I also wrote down "fair trade coffee" on the back of my receipt, but I don't remember why anymore.
One even a few weeks ago our neighbors had a hippie protest singalong, including such gems as "glory glory hallelujah, our rights go marching on." Actually, that's the only one I wrote down, but believe me, they had a whole repertoire, complete with harmony and a guitar.
There should be the ability to google pieces of music based on what you remember of the tune--you know, hum a few bars into a microphone and let the search engine do its job. For example, my sister had a stuffed donkey with a little wind-up music box inside, and recently I had the tune in my head and sang it to Daniel. He said it was Borodin's "On the Steppes of Central Asia," and played the piece for me, and although the first few bars were the same, the rest wasn't. And I'm still in the dark as to what was the tune that my sister's donkey played (and probably still does, assuming my mother hasn't given it away). So, readers, if anyone knows of a simple tune that sounds very similar to Borodin's "On the Steppes of Central Asia," let me know, because my brain will probably itch until I find out or until I forget about it.
И сейчас, по-русски!
Я читаю Анну Каренину по-русски, читала ее за целый год, а только страниц 200 прочитала . Но, говоря честно, не очень пыталась закончить роман. Как написала раньче, я прочитала очень много других книг в это время; Анна Каренина просто читается медленно. И теперь читается медленнее, потому что рассказ перешел на Левина и хозяйство его имения. Когда я читала книгу по-английски, мне очень, очень скучно было читать об Анне и Вронском: Ах, любовь, какой жгучий восторг, и я беременная! У меня неприятный муж, какая зеленая тоска! Наоборот, Левин был милый, умный, влюбленный человек, и я очень хотел узнать, выйдет ли Кити замуж за него, найдет ли он выполняющую философию жизни.
Но теперь, по-русский, кажется, что он думает только об имении его, и мне надо посмотреть каждое слово в словарь, потому что я никогда не узнала, что значат овес, урожай, скота, покос и т.д. Слова про светские дела я знаю, а не этих. Поэтому, начинаю перепрыгивать те абзацы, в которых есть слишком много сельских слов. Я смотрю на новый абзац, ищу немного слов в словарь, и решаю, что это значит: "был то время года, когда сельские вещи случились," или, "Левин посмотрел на поле и думал о сельских вещах." Теперь все будет идти гораздо быстрее.
*Speaking of remuneration, the same week that I learned that my individual health insurance policy, over which I had been wrangling with Blue Shield for well over a month, had been approved, my supervisor at Camfed told me that I'm eligible for heath benefits there. Hah. However, it would still be three times what I'm paying now, even with them picking up half the premiums, so it didn't particularly matter. I don't particularly need anything beyond the ability to go to a doctor when I think I have ringworm*** without bankrupting myself, so I'm merely amused by the rotten timing.
**Or because the probation officer told you to
***Since at the time I didn't have health coverage, I went with the assumption that I did have it, got ringworm/athlete's foot medication, and now I'm all better. It probably came from a kitty--quite a few of them come into Hopalong from all manner of places. Two that I named were taken from a trash-heap, but since we decided that potential adopters might be put off by names like stinky garbage eater, I suggested poubelle and помойка. The names were accepted and written down in ink, but I doubt they will last after the kittens find forever homes, as I learned from another task there, which involved calling up recent adopters and asking how everything was going:
"Hi, this is Clara from Hopalong, calling to see how LaSnorta is settling in with you since you adopted her last month."
"Who? What? Oh--you mean Corkie!"
Of course, since if we stuck with names like Spot and Corkie, we'd be worse off in the record-keeping than if we assigned each animal a serial number--which we're getting close to doing. I see quite a few Fido 6s and Juniper 4s in all the paperwork.
****The receipt is dated 9/19, to tell you how old these events are.
*****See above
******Haha! Bet you couldn't see that one coming!
suddenleap, if you still want a kitty, this is the place to go that I've been telling you about)). But is it fair to call in for a "mental health day" for volunteer work (whatever the cause for needing one) as it is at a paid job? Paid jobs make allowances for personal days off, even requiring you to use them if they accrue past a certain amount. Normal workplaces assume that to some extent you don't particularly want to be there--hence the salary and benefits packages*. Volunteer work you do because you want to**, and because the organization needs the help and, in many cases, is counting on it. They don't make allowances for people not coming in. The allowances they do make they make because volunteers aren't reliable, not being paid--but then, why would you volunteer if you don't intend to be committed to it? Volunteer work is rarely the kind of thing where you can breeze in once every month or two and address do something for an hour and feel good about yourself. There are only so many envelopes to stuff if you don't commit yourself to learning enough about the organization to be genuinely useful to it; otherwise you're just making more work for them, because they know how important it is to keep volunteers happy, even if you individually are more of a burden than a help. So the unreliable volunteers make work for organizations who just need dependable workers that don't drain the coffers. Presumably the volunteer workforce in general does more good than harm, otherwise organizations wouldn't be so desperate for them, but I feel as if I'm taking advantage of them by buying into the "I'm not paid to be here--I don't need to be thoroughly reliable" even for one day. Even if I did call in advance, instead of just not showing up. If it had been another day of paid work, you bet I would have been there! I can suck up the "it's just one more day until the weekend" and perform as well as anyone (except all those universities who have stopped scheduling Friday classes because no one goes to them), but today, since the prevailing culture didn't require it, I took advantage of it, and now I feel guilty. Not so guilty that I'll go in anyway, but guilty enough that I'll blather on a bit on livejournal.
Let's see what the old receipt**** has on it for me to talk about today:
A little while ago***** in the bakery, about half an hour or forty-five minutes before closing, a woman comes in and has a slice of cake and a cup of tea. I'm working alone, the store is completely deserted, (as it so always is until five minutes before close, when everyone and their mother comes in for cake slices, which all need to be cut individually and takes the longest time and makes me close late). Anyway, it's very quiet, so the woman and I chat a little, and she tells me that she just learned that she needs double eye surgery, and had decided to comfort herself either with a trip to the bar across the street or a trip to the bakery. And of course I give the nice salesclerk smile and tell her I'm so sorry to hear that and that I'm glad we won in the comfort-providing competition, and all is well. But my first reaction was one of distaste--not towards the poor woman who needs surgery, but towards the idea of comforting yourself with food instead of having a drink, and then towards the idea that she should have gone to the bar instead. Because that was my first reaction: how sad to be eating cake alone instead of going to a bar to--what, drink alone? How is that any better? In the short run it's probably much worse, assuming you're driving home, and in the long run it's far more destructive to cultivate the habit of comforting with alcohol than with cake. But the culture of stigma towards gluttony makes it difficult to internalize that, and although I probably should have turned on the classical music station and chatted longer with the woman so that the whole atmosphere of the empty store was friendly and warming, I had work to do (or maybe it was just a book to read), and now I'm left with the image of this poor woman eating cake alone because she's had some bad news and is scared about it.
This is not to say that comforting oneself with food is always bad. A little while ago my supervisor at Camfed was off on one of her ridiculously many travels (this one was to Zambia), and while she was gone there was a mini-crisis, involving an influential board member who, having just yesterday sent us $1500 with more to come either from herself or from people she's encouraged to donate, should under no circumstance be involved in a crisis. It's too boring and complicated to give all the details; suffice it to say that she needed right away some information that my supervisor alone had, and since my supervisor was unreachable in rural Zambia, we couldn't get it for her. On the way home, I bought some cookies at a very yummy bakery right on the way to the BART station, and upon my arrival I immediately told Daniel all about the rough crisis and he sat me down on the couch and served milk and the cookies, which I wholeheartedly agreed that I thoroughly deserved after an extremely rough day. And this circumstance is in essence no different from the one above, except that it didn't really leave a bad taste in my mouth******, because it was Daniel who served the cookies. Somehow, the involvement of another person provides some sort of tacit acceptance and approval of an activity which, when done alone, leaves an observer with a sad impression of lonely gluttony. Which I guess is another reason why I regret not having spoken to this woman and made sure she wasn't entirely alone. Because she thoroughly deserved some cake after the news she had just been given, and should not have had to submit to my adverse judgment on her actions, and although I don't know whether the whole experience would have been more satisfying if the salesclerk had butted in when she might have wanted to be alone with her thoughts, I do know that my cookies wouldn't have been nearly as calming after the rough day if I hadn't been sharing them with someone, and this woman looked awfully lonely.
This line of though is making me depressed, so I will move on to something slightly more cheerful, although still thematically related. If one is willing to consider metaphorical cases, some instances of lonely gluttony can be considered virtuous, although that is more the result of the greedy action being balanced by the virtuous one: in this case, reading. I might have mentioned how fond I am of George Eliot, and how much I enjoy reading her books. At the moment I have only read two: Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. I mentioned Daniel Deronda a few entries back, and although I have since finished it and concluded that it is inferior to Middlemarch (and written a long compare-and-contrast essay about it in a letter to my grandfather, which he has received, read, considered, and responded to, which, considering the pace of our usual correspondence, tells you a little more about how long ago I finished it), I still read it voraciously. And voraciously is exactly the same word to use, because her writing and her themes and her ideas often take so long to digest that reading a chapter is like eating a thick, fudgy brownie. I often need to take a break and clear my mental palate with a cup of tea and the funny pages. And those times when I had an afternoon to myself (another factor which will tell you how long ago this was taking place) and spent it devouring the book I felt a little over-stuffed afterward. The last bite of a fudge brownie does not taste nearly as good as the first few, and you don't appreciate it as much. Likewise, although I was dying to know what would happen with the Ezra Cohen search (no, this is not really a spoiler), I was well aware that speeding through the chapters hampered my appreciation of the quality of the prose. It's all very well to do this with a mystery novel, where the plot is all you have to pay attention to, but in a book where the writing style (not Henry James, to be sure, but refreshingly adult, with just the right amount of convolutions in the sentences to keep the grammar-sections of my brain whirring away) and the themes discussed are just as or more important than the plot, the reader does both the book and himself a disservice by racing through to find out what happens next. Henry James fixed this problem by keeping anything resembling a story down to an absolute minimum, but George Eliot had no such restraint. And yet, despite all the food and eating metaphors above, this sort of literary gluttony is considered downright virtuous. I guess it's because the virtue of the literary aspect outweighs the vice of the gluttony aspect, but it's not even a question of outweighing: "Yes, he eats too much, but he matches all his food purchases with donations for starving children," is the same idea, but the even though the disapprobation for gluttony is outweighed, it's still present. Maybe the metaphorical aspect for literary gluttony is what allows it to be thoroughly neutralized and negated by the literary aspect. Maybe I think about this too much, and should move on to my next, arguably just as frivolous bit of shmutz:
I have discovered why people where hats at a rakish angle! Maybe now it is to appear rakish, but it also works when you're constantly traveling in one direction and the sun is too low to be blocked out by wearing the brim normally! Just tilt the hat to one side to block the low sun out of your eyes, and voila! Rake and solar protection in one!
Hmmm: this appears to head back on the food theme: I once had some extra cookies with me, and offered them to a homeless man begging for spare change. He politely said, "Oh, no, thank you, I'm cutting back on sweets."
I also wrote down "fair trade coffee" on the back of my receipt, but I don't remember why anymore.
One even a few weeks ago our neighbors had a hippie protest singalong, including such gems as "glory glory hallelujah, our rights go marching on." Actually, that's the only one I wrote down, but believe me, they had a whole repertoire, complete with harmony and a guitar.
There should be the ability to google pieces of music based on what you remember of the tune--you know, hum a few bars into a microphone and let the search engine do its job. For example, my sister had a stuffed donkey with a little wind-up music box inside, and recently I had the tune in my head and sang it to Daniel. He said it was Borodin's "On the Steppes of Central Asia," and played the piece for me, and although the first few bars were the same, the rest wasn't. And I'm still in the dark as to what was the tune that my sister's donkey played (and probably still does, assuming my mother hasn't given it away). So, readers, if anyone knows of a simple tune that sounds very similar to Borodin's "On the Steppes of Central Asia," let me know, because my brain will probably itch until I find out or until I forget about it.
И сейчас, по-русски!
Я читаю Анну Каренину по-русски, читала ее за целый год, а только страниц 200 прочитала . Но, говоря честно, не очень пыталась закончить роман. Как написала раньче, я прочитала очень много других книг в это время; Анна Каренина просто читается медленно. И теперь читается медленнее, потому что рассказ перешел на Левина и хозяйство его имения. Когда я читала книгу по-английски, мне очень, очень скучно было читать об Анне и Вронском: Ах, любовь, какой жгучий восторг, и я беременная! У меня неприятный муж, какая зеленая тоска! Наоборот, Левин был милый, умный, влюбленный человек, и я очень хотел узнать, выйдет ли Кити замуж за него, найдет ли он выполняющую философию жизни.
Но теперь, по-русский, кажется, что он думает только об имении его, и мне надо посмотреть каждое слово в словарь, потому что я никогда не узнала, что значат овес, урожай, скота, покос и т.д. Слова про светские дела я знаю, а не этих. Поэтому, начинаю перепрыгивать те абзацы, в которых есть слишком много сельских слов. Я смотрю на новый абзац, ищу немного слов в словарь, и решаю, что это значит: "был то время года, когда сельские вещи случились," или, "Левин посмотрел на поле и думал о сельских вещах." Теперь все будет идти гораздо быстрее.
*Speaking of remuneration, the same week that I learned that my individual health insurance policy, over which I had been wrangling with Blue Shield for well over a month, had been approved, my supervisor at Camfed told me that I'm eligible for heath benefits there. Hah. However, it would still be three times what I'm paying now, even with them picking up half the premiums, so it didn't particularly matter. I don't particularly need anything beyond the ability to go to a doctor when I think I have ringworm*** without bankrupting myself, so I'm merely amused by the rotten timing.
**Or because the probation officer told you to
***Since at the time I didn't have health coverage, I went with the assumption that I did have it, got ringworm/athlete's foot medication, and now I'm all better. It probably came from a kitty--quite a few of them come into Hopalong from all manner of places. Two that I named were taken from a trash-heap, but since we decided that potential adopters might be put off by names like stinky garbage eater, I suggested poubelle and помойка. The names were accepted and written down in ink, but I doubt they will last after the kittens find forever homes, as I learned from another task there, which involved calling up recent adopters and asking how everything was going:
"Hi, this is Clara from Hopalong, calling to see how LaSnorta is settling in with you since you adopted her last month."
"Who? What? Oh--you mean Corkie!"
Of course, since if we stuck with names like Spot and Corkie, we'd be worse off in the record-keeping than if we assigned each animal a serial number--which we're getting close to doing. I see quite a few Fido 6s and Juniper 4s in all the paperwork.
****The receipt is dated 9/19, to tell you how old these events are.
*****See above
******Haha! Bet you couldn't see that one coming!