Personae (Part Un)

The Employee

I can't believe it's been over a month since I've started my job as a programme assistant for Furnish A Future (a programme of the Partnership for the Homeless) and I haven't even filled you in on any of it. Me and two other women run the programmatic side of this free furniture distribution warehouse for formerly homeless families and individuals. We schedule clients (to come and pick out furniture), donors (to arrange for free pickup of furniture), and drivers (to deliver the free furniture and pick up the donated stuff), keep the books, manage the office and staff and everything in between. Essentially, except for doing payroll for all the staff, we run this very simple, but complex programme that provides 100% free furniture to 2000 families a year (that's 167 families a month).

I love my job. It speaks to my anal retentive need to maintain order and structure in my otherwise chaotic existence. I can't control the flow of traffic on my way to work (I drive, by the way*; the office is 3 miles from my house in Brooklyn), but I can tell a donor that their furniture doesn't meet our requirements and compile a weekly report of all the clients we've seen and delivered to in the last five days and submit it to the Department of Homeless Services Office of Rehousing (with whom we have a financial contract to provide this service). Plus, I get to be instrumental in restoring the dignity of our formerly homeless clients, most of whom have been homeless for over a year. I really get to ham it up when I put on a show for the volunteers who hang out with us a couple times a month and provide slave labour for our under-staffed programme. They want to know the feel-good aspect of their toils and I give it to them. I give it to them good.

Oh, and the current Programme Coordinator is leaving the first week in September. Leaving in the first week of November is the other Programme Assistant as well. This leaves me with the most amount of office experience running the programme. Starting the first week in September will be the new Warehouse Manager, whose tasks none of us there really know, only that he will be the primary supervisor for the programme, though what aspect of the programme he will be intimately running is unknown to most of us. Either way, come November, I will be the only one on staff with the most amount of direct experience and knowledge of running the programme. I see this as a good thing for my stature within the organisation.

I should mention, too, that I was called into the principal's office late last week for "inappropriate" language usage in a personal email to the CEO of the Partnership. I gave him some friendly teasing about an editorial he submitted to The Times and received a rash of shit for it. Mind you, if I had critiqued him to his face, he would have, like so many other times, laughed it off. The HR Director called me in to ensure that I wasn't making a fool of myself with other co-workers, supervisors or professional contacts. The difference, I couldn't verbalise to him but can to you now, between my relationship with the CEO and other professional contacts, was that I had an informal relationship with my boss, whereas I have a formal relationships with professional contacts, thus I treat it differently.

Oh, well. Stupid lesson fucking learned.

To be continued in Personae Part Duex...

*as opposed to taking mass transit

You can't fault me for that.

I need to be strong again, even if that doesn't mean physical strength. It means I need to regain control of my, um, need for solititude. Does that make sense? I feel like you shut me out with your solitude every afternoon; that I need to break into it every day. That you, at least, have the opportunity to touch, sense, reach towards that solitude on a daily basis. I feel deprived. I feel a sense of deprivation for anyone else who doesn't have what you have.

I'm intoxicated, yes, but, at least, I'm honest.

Stevie Nicks, Dave Matthews, your voices have the exact same effect on me. I can't help it.

How I Do

There used to be this part of me that was, in my perspective, at least, funky. Well, at least, it cried out to the diametrically opposed me. It was the sort hat thumped my head to The Game's "How We Do", Trick Daddy's "I'm a Thug" and every other artist who appealed to my non-middle-class sense.

Mainly, it was the piece of an individual that was exactly opposite my own piece individualism, a piece of me I strived towards for a great deal of my life; at least, the piece of me I strived the towards within the last 5 years of my life.

Y'see, I was content being everybody's Something until about age 21, when I decided that I'd just do for myself from here on out. Not because I was twenty-one, but because I'd realised something about myself: I like me. Heh. And I liked who I was.

It wasn't until recently that I realised that I loved what it was I had going (solituded, surrounded be love). And, as a side-note: it's not usually what you want that is most important; it's what you lose (or forget along the way) that miss the most in the end.

if there is
a horizontal line
that runs from the map
off your body
straight through the land
shooting up
right through my heart
will this horizontal line
when asked
know how to find
where you end
where i begin ~ tori amos "scarlet's walk" your cloud

as grace would ask without offending, "do you understand what I'm saying?"

It's Like a Present

for Lyz: play til your heart's content.

8/11/05

So, it's been a while and I thought you all should know: I'm going to Canadonia this weekend. There, I've said it; I feel no shame about it. I'm going to Canadonia for a marriage and no one can stop us. We're taking Jake with us and we're proud to have him along. We don't care who knows, though we had hoped you would be happy for us.

As for the work front, things are looking brighter; the programme coordinator is leaving the first week in September and she has nominated me to take her place. In fact, she is already training me on all the details so that, hopefully, it will be a seamless transition. The guys in the warehouse are a little weary about me taking the helm; they're not convinced I can take the wheel and "handle" the drivers (their main concern). True enough, I've been mostly quiet and meek here, but I'm starting to step out a little bit and am doing my best to show them what I'm made of and capable of. Methinks a sprinkle of gossip spread from the existing programme coordinator to the warehouse manager (the two supervisors in this programme) and on down to his guys will aid my reputation along and help boost their faith in me.

Anyway, it's still up in the air whether I will be handed this position. It doesn't make sense to hire outside the organisation for this, when I'll be completely groomed for the position, but then, it's not my decision to make. And I've been disappointed before.

The Most Important Book I've Read All Year...

was "The Monster at the End of this Book," by Jon Stone, to Jakob.