Not for Profit

Going for Broke

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 10:04:37 -0800

Tomorrow, in a freshly pressed dress, coffee in hand, and hair done up like a stewardess, I will begin my first corporate job.

I have worked in the non-profit arena, social services, Arts organizations, and childcare for seven years post college, and for as many years before college, volunteering, speaking out, and ignoring my classes to charter a start-up NPO while in high school.

Beginning at 8am, I have a breakfast meeting with the full staff of my new public relations company, followed by a lunch meeting with my team to help me get acquainted. My tasks will not be so foreign, message crafting, volunteer recruitment and logistics management, but I am struck my an overwhelming feeling that I have no idea what I am doing.

Non-Profit work is a lifestyle. Working for a social service organization you grow accustom to the adrenaline of making things work without all of the tools you need to fix them. Most NPOs run solely on a culture in which you are asked to take a mission discount, working for less so you can do more. The organizations I have been fortunate enough to work with breed a togetherness among their employees, because without it, the overwhelming task and underfunded paychecks would leave the positions vacant.

Most of my friends work non-profit, we have a culture of being broke, exhausted, and enthusiastic. For the first time in my life I am defending my employment decision, explaining why the company I work for is not “really evil,” and thinking honestly about a retirement plan, and looking up the corporate ladder.

Is this the end of my non-profit life?

Doubtful.

Most non-profit professionals do exactly this, burn out in our twenties, make the corporate switch in our thirties, and return in our fifties with a new skill set and a better grip on our own finances. I just wish I wasn’t so predictable.

The first Northwest Dharma retreat, where I had the privilege of...

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 19:14:41 -0700

The first Northwest Dharma retreat, where I had the privilege of giving some meditation instruction

Just a little flash

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 19:05:26 -0700

Lisa’s Jetta was steel grey, handed down by her cousin it was free as long as her father could borrow it when he found work again. It had no heat and was announced on the streets by cat pictures Lisa had painted on the door way and those chubby stars that she painted on everything. It was a bucket of a car, but as the first one with a license she was the queen of the road.
Lisa lived down the block from me my entire life. We had been in the same kinder garden class, competed for seats on the student council, and had the same birthday. We went to different high schools; since my parents had divorced I could use the new address to get into classes on the other side of town. During those years, the most time we spent together was on drives, late at night, along Highway 1, in pursuit of an In and Out Burger. I had declared myself a vegetarian two years earlier and In and Out Burger was the only legitimate option for a salt fueled, fat saturated fast food meal. The drive was 45 minutes in either direction, along the California coast to the middle of the curve around the Monterrey Bay. Veering East, along Cabrillo Highway we would cross what is commonly referred to as Steinbeck County. Along this road were farm worker camps, cowboy bars and the grounds for the California Rodeo, the biggest rodeo west of the Rio Grande. That manure saturated, heavy producing land where I learned my first Spanish “Ci Se Puede” and learned that as a white girl from the coast I would never understand. Processing plants for strawberries broke up the miles of manicured crop rows. This was The West, as it had become, incorporated, segregated and riddled with violence. To us it was “the valley” that vast other that was too hot and too far from the water to produce anything worthwhile. After all who wants to live in a town that is known as the artichoke capital of the world?
The giant artichoke marked our exit. 12 feet high in the middle of a field it looked more like a giant pineapple that had been hastily covered in spray paint. It was tagged and painted over, the various shades of green giving it a patchwork style. There were rumors about this artichoke just a mile out of town, about what kind of cover the shadow provided for drug deals and the dumping of bodies. People spent too much time painting over graffiti for any bodies to be well hidden in that ground. Most of it was bullshit, but we would never stop there, it had said Norte across the south side for a long time, either they had grown tired of painting over it or Norte had won a battle over this boundary line.
This road was used for moving workers and hauling crops, it wasn’t very well lit and Lisa’s headlights were dim. She drove it enough times to do it without light. She would tap on the cracked plastic of the center console motioning that she was ready for more smoke. Careful not to cut myself on the shards of plastic I would dig out the pipe she had borrowed from her dad, crush the weed, just a little bit, between my fingers to make it fit into the smooth glass of the pipe. The lighter lived in the side door panel and as the driver she got greens.
We talked shit about the people we had in common and made up stories about the ones we knew through school. She would tell me about dates and I would mention how much my exes wanted me back. I would talk about stage managing the school play and she would tell me how great it was that I had time to do those things, since she had been so busy with the leading role. In and Out Burger’s yellow and red arrow stood out in a wash of light from the outlet mall. The weed had kicked in with outstanding accuracy and in another city we may have been too high to be in public. But this was Sastorville , that far reach of land between Salinas and Castroville that no one claims except those who have been beaten into an allegiance.

http://www.quickmeme.com/Judgmental-Bookseller-Ostrich/

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 21:50:15 -0700

http://www.quickmeme.com/Judgmental-Bookseller-Ostrich/

Eric McCormack's case of the not gay's

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 21:08:53 -0700

Eric McCormack's case of the not gay's:

Supporting my blog post Writing what already is

Writing about what already is

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 21:04:56 -0700

So I am trying to fix a story that is sort of about going home again when the things that made it a home are gone. The characters are in the midst of a conflict that is old news, something they have fought about and struggled with for years and I find it difficult to write about the smaller pieces that keep an old battle alive. It is very much a game of how to name the things the character accepts as true, what colors their reality. It reminds me of a discussion that I had the chance to sit in on when I was still in high school about how giving a name to an old battle is sometimes empowering and sometimes impossible.

It was a sort of town hall with a group called Positive Images that operated out of the North bay in California. Before I knew the difference between transgender and transsexual and the concept of gender queer had not entered my vocabulary these folks were talking about what already is and what happens when you start to name something that has never ceased to exist. The topic was how to build a supportive program that recognized the “new” identity of the trans community.

At the time Will & Grace was incredibly popular and being called a break through for having an openly gay main character (see Eric McCormack’s 500+ interviews about how totally not gay he is in real life). One of the women who helped to facilitate the group said “That’s great, what does the character do for a living?” Silence. “What I am looking forward to is the day when the story isn’t about him being gay, or her coming out. I want story’s about FTM truck drivers who loose weight, and lesbian teachers who start a home business. When is it going to stop being about our genitals and who we sleep with?”I understood her to mean that a sexual identity and a gender assignment are not the beginning or end of a story, but part of the larger life of real people. The things that color someone’s reality. This idea has clearly stuck with me.

One of the questions that come up again and again is how to name something that already is a part of a character’s life. Often the relationships we have with our struggle’s are defined by who was with us, and who is still staying away. How does one write about the old grudges and half acceptance that we all hold on to?

Eqanimity and a hundred bad dates

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 13:44:00 -0700

I manage two meditation classes on Sundays, at a yoga studio in the heart of Tacoma’s bar scene. One class flies under the Dharma Punx banner and the other was built to accommodate yogis who were looking for more formal mediation without the swearing and irreverence that sometimes comes with the Dharma Punx.

Walking to class on Sunday morning is never dull, cigarette butts, vomit, and high heels that didn’t last through the night are all scattered along the street. I live in this neighborhood, and so I get to hear everyone coming in excited and going home drunk and disorderly. By the next morning, it is dead quiet, except for the pouring of coffee, and the moans of those waiting for pancakes. The little grocery store is selling hair of the dog and pepto bismol to those who have walked back to pick up their cars.

It is a strange reality on Sunday morning, trying to focus my thoughts on Equanimity in what feels like the skeleton of a hundred bad dates. Equanimity translates to something like the sublime understanding and acceptance that things are as they should be. In my limited study it is the closest thing to faith in the Theravada Buddhist tradition. It follows teachings on loving kindness, compassion, and sympathetic joy reminding us that we are not responsible for the actions of others, but asking us to have faith that the realities of impermanence and karma keeps things in check.

Living next to endless bar fights, occasional gun shots, and regular car theft, it is hard to have faith in the idea that everything is as it should be. Commonly I find myself hoping that whatever crimes are happening around me, I am spared the burden of knowledge, praying for ignorance if peace is not on the cards. But Equanimity does not suggest that justice will prevail and crime will disappear. Equanimity only suggests that for every drunken Saturday night, there will be a Sunday morning.

The only thing we could afford in Monaco was ice cream

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 12:36:24 -0700

The only thing we could afford in Monaco was ice cream