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Today was my first day working at the soup kitchen in Baltimore's East Side. Not because I'm compassionate or noble or whatever; I really don't care about poor people. This sometimes puts me at odds with my extremely liberal group which likes Raising Awareness and Advocates Causes and whatnot. I think Raising Awareness is pretty lame; for example we're doing this event where we give out pieces of candy with hunger trivia facts on them. This isn't even for fundraising, we're just Raising Awareness. First off, I think we're giving candy to the wrong people. Since we're trying to feed the hungry and all, maybe we ought to give candy to, you know, the hungry people. But maybe that's just me. Also, who the fuck needs to raise awareness for hunger? Who doesn't know what hunger is? "Aw Jeez, I'm so full right now! I never knew people could not be full all the time!!"

Also, I personally, think it's subtly wrong if you Care About the Poor, to spend other people's money. You're just a glorified beggar, guilting other people into donating THEIR hard-earned money for your Good Cause. Presumably if you really cared you'd spend some of your own grubby money. You'd get a job and donate your proceeds to charity, or build a house for the homeless or cook food for the hungry or tend the sick. It'd be part of yourself you'd be giving, not part of other people like a fucking commie. Besides, in these fundraising things, the cost of fliers and your non-profit bread-and-circus type events is probably almost as prohibitive as the proceeds. "A portion of proceeds goes to..." Fuck that. However, I also think that as a person I ought to accumulate as many different experiences as possible, which is why I went to the soup kitchen.

I think I spent the time in a state of perpetual frustration. I went into the shelter's "office," which was just basically a room with stuff strewn about it. You know, tables, stacked up chairs, a tiny tv, somone's shitty computer, crappy cast-off shit that people donate to charities for the tax deduction. Nothing was in working order; there weren't labels on anything so we didn't know where anything was. Additionally, Miss Rose, who runs the shelter, didn't have anything meaningful for us to do, and her ebonics coupled with old person talk made her completely incoherent. This meant that she'd tell us to do something trivial, like fetch her the newspaper, and we wouldn't know what she said or where to get it. By the time we actually deciphered her request and found, for example, the newspaper, she could've up and got it herself. Miss Rose is a wonderful lady, but we were the most inefficient team to ever walk the face of the Earth. Miss Rose is damn well capable of running her shelter pretty much by herself with Carlos and Plata. We were just kind of... there. I felt so retarded.

"They all ladies," said Miss Rose. Despite the fact that there were seven girls and we insisted that we were strong willing, Miss Rose refused to let us help do the heavy lifting. So one scrawny boy from our group was appropriated by Carlos and Plata (two elderly men) to move donated furniture into the house across the street, while seven young women of differing athletic ability stood around because ladies just aren't of help.

In general, we had seven volunteers with nothing to do. The first thing we did was carry boxes of cans downstairs. Except that we didn't need the last box of cans so carrying it down was completely unecessary. Because there were so many of us, we even clogged each other in the halls. Then we sorted the cans, filled plastic bags with five cans and a loaf of bread, and placed the bags on a counter for people coming into the shelter to take them home. That was it. We got it done pretty quickly, assembly-line style with eight of us, but Carlos and Plata could've done it. Maybe it would've taken them a longer, but they could've done it, unlike the eight of us who got it done in like five minutes and spent the next hour milling around in awkward silence.

We didn't serve food or use the canned food to cook meals for people; we just gave them bags of cans and sent them on their way. Plata was eating a breakfast of canned corn. How pathetic is that? These dozens of people coming in and their major source of sustenance is eating canned corn. It's the saddest thing in the world; People just throw a can into a cardboard box during a canned food drive and, having done their "duty" to charity, consider the problem taken care of. And meanwhile people are eating canned corn for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and that's our solution. Let's throw another fucking can into the cardboard box. I think next week I'm going to bake some brownies the night before so Plata can eat some real food.

After the can-sorting, as an interuption from the aimless milling, I went with another girl into the urine-soaked backyard. This is something that's really notable about the 'hood (as Carlos calls it). We, as middle class college students, just take for granted that the campus doesn't smell. Sometimes I think, "I'm really fortunate to have a place to stay at night," or, "I'm really lucky to have food on the table," but I've never ever thought to think, "Man, I'm so grateful my house doesn't smell like piss." Well, the next time you say grace, if you do that sort of thing, after you've thanked Our Father Who Art in Heaven for your daily bread, thank him for a reeking-piss-free life too. In any case, we put donated clothes, which hadn't been washed, into different bags. At the end we were left with a giant pile of mismatched shoes and socks we had to throw out because some IDIOTS decided it would be a good idea to donate clothes to charity one sock at a time.

I honestly think most "volunteer opportunities" don't actually help people and are created for the benefit of volunteers to feel better about themselves.

I saw some people outside sweeping the sidewalk so I told everyone, "Hey, it looks like they need help, let's go join them." At this point, maybe an hour into our little trip, we had literally nothing left to do. Ostensibly we were suppose to give people plastic bags full of those goddamned cans of peas and corn, and by "give" I mean, "inadvertantly make them feel intimidated as they come into the shelter to pick up bags of food on the counter in front of them, revealing their lack of financial independence to seven random strangers trying not to stare."

So I said that we should go outside and help the community clean the gutters. Since we had rubber gloves and trash bags, we could pick up trash. But everyone was saying, "Eh..what if people don't like us going into their property?" What they meant was: "Eh.. I really don't feel like it..".. because there were people already outside cleaning the streets and sidewalks (completely public areas) and when I asked Miss Rose if the community would be hostile towards the idea, she said they'd love it. My group said, "Gee, you really want to clean, don't you?" but nobody actually moved to do anything. So we sat around making small talk for the next half an hour.

Some people left to go to the Ford Rally, a rally to protest Ford's new hybrid vehicle. Apparently, Ford's new hybrid is a "a marketing ploy to distract people from realizing the fuel inefficiency of Ford's other models" and we need to boycott Ford. Apparently the great plan to save the environment is to boycott companies when they start trying to reform.

Then, one lady, Miss Anne, came in to chat with Miss Rose, and then took a broom and dustpan and started sweeping up trash in the gutters. I got the rubber gloves and trash bag and went outside after her (she had the only broom) because I wasn't going to let a frail, elderly woman who relies on a soup kitchen to make ends meet clean up trash while FIVE young college students sit on their asses talking about who's doing what major. So I had two people come with me from the group and we picked up trash and threw it in the trash bag.

"Gee, people living here must really like pixie sticks," said a girl I was working with, after we had picked up a plethora of small tube wrappers filled with white powder.

After we finished cleaning the street as best as we were able, that was about time to leave. We met up with the two people who hadn't gone on the cleaning expedition with us, who had been chatting about their majors.

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Carlos says they need "jobs. It don't matter if it McDonalds, we just need something to make us feel like we worth somethin'." He wants to write a book someday. During the cleaning, besides Miss Anne, we'd met a young woman who told us how she appreciated what we did, and James, who'd been sweeping the streets for eight years. We met an easy-going bald man who joked about us being "working gals," and an old man who would put milk out in little tuna cans for the stray cats that belong to the whole neighborhood.

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We thought maybe for lunch we could visit to a cadre of young men from the "Jefferson Group," who had been friendly to us when we'd arrived and invited us to eat at the deli on the corner. However, the girl leading our group didn't want to go.

"The less time we spend in this neighborhood, the better," she said, "This place scares me."

... so we went to the NSA museum and we pushed the power button on the Cray supercomputer and all the microprocessor lights turned off. Except then the alarm went off and we ran away. But then we snuck back in and pressed the 'disable alarm' button. So it was all good.

As a writing exercise, I was supposed to write about a place on campus. This is:

The Drainage Ditch By the Admin Parking Lot

A monolithic bunker stands, concrete and compact, beside the grotto overlapped in green. Tiers upon tiers of cars and their glinting window panes rise above dirt, grass, trees. Light flashes through the leaves, the glare off glass and metal. Twinkling like stars, the sunburst flares briefly and then becomes shadowed by the swaying of arboreal curtains. Wind-bent branches and leafy canopy swim above my head and cast their reflections below me into the hazy water. The water runs trickling from the rim of a cement tube, a giant’s jar tipped over, into a pool so thick and murky that the water seems almost solid. Chalky rocks, white and angular, tumble down into the gully where the excess water flows and from the deep-rooted soil, the dark and soft trees reach towards the sky.

The Conservative Case Against George W. Bush

... but I put it out, eventually.

....so somebody decided to use my credit card number to finance an all-expense paid shopping trip to Miami, and my laptop caught fire after something got jammed in the floppy drive.