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Tuesday, September 16, 2008

when the dust settles

I still have not fully emerged from weekend mode into work mode. I like to move with the rythym of my energy though so I'm not to pressured. I had a meeting with Ainsley this morning. I thought it was at 11:45. It was at 11:15. I felt really horrible. But here's what I learned because everything in life should be treated like a learning experience. I should call in the morning to confirm appointments, when I'm unsure. I should write appointments down, in fact I should start writing everything down. I usually don't but I'm learning my memory is overloaded with the 5 million things that can and usually do occur in any given day.
It was a good meeting and he gave me some useful information.
I need to to learn how to ask people I know that know stuff what they know and how to connect. I'm always unsure of, and feel weird about, wether to connect through people I know but I guess that's how the world works.

So I've been working my way through this book called 'the working poor.' Here is an excerpt from the cover.."Most of the people I write about in this book do not have the luxury of rage. They are caught in exhausting struggles. Their wages do not lift them far enough from poverty to improve their lives, and their lives, in turn, hold them back. The term by which they are usually described, 'working poor,' should be an oxymoron. Nobody who works hard should be poor in America."
It is giving me a deeper insight into issues of poverty and the emotional layers that can build on a person who lives in poverty. I cry every night after I read it. It would be a different thing if I could look at is a just a book , but I see these people in our office everyday. And in some ways it is like looking into a mirror. I know I'm not poor poor but some of the things that the people in these book say to themselves, I know I've said to myself. And I realize how slippery a slope it can be to poverty, how one little mistake can invite you into a cycle that you may never get out of. It really made be sit down and assess my spending more carefully, because with this new job, I've really loosened up on my budget. I felt like I was looking into a mirror and I was concerned and disturbed with what I saw.
It is troubling when I see people who come in, who don't have jobs, who are so close to nothing and who have cable and $200 phones. It can only make sense to someone who has so little in life, both physically and emotionally, that what you can buy/what you can give yourself goes beyond just getting stuff, it's like fulfilling something that is missing. I understand it and at the same time I see how it enables they cylical nature of poverty in someone's life.

I really just feel like a run, I get that feeling a lot. Just to start running. Where I'm running to or from has yet to reveal itself to me. Have you ever got that feeling after a long day at the beach, when you're just sitting somewhere and you can still feel the movement of the ocean. It's still with you when you still still long enough. I feel like that sometimes.
Anyway, g'day.

Song: That's what hurts by Hall and Oates ( I think)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmfkKeTEawg

Quote: It's not easy for men to rise whose qualities are thwarted by poverty. Juvenal

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