This has been one busy month spent working hard and playing hard. I got all choked up today telling the bosslady how much I like my (primary) job, so I thought I would share a bit about that.
Working at an environmental justice group is a feel-good job. There are people depending on my organization who have a real chance at doing something really important for their communities and who are willing to walk 240 miles on foot to succeed (and much more). I like the people aspect of this NGO because it gives a new dimension to the environmental part of the work; the toxin concentrations in the air, the cancer and disease epidemics, the leaching landfills all have a real face. The human dimension is much more compelling than the abstract idea of a couple bird species getting wiped out. I can imagine packed town meetings in my head, I can feel the fear and grief of parents whose children have developed serious and rare illnesses overnight, and I can hear people pleading with governors who just can't provide a good answer to why it's too expensive to act on behalf of the health of the citizens. People power is hopeful and uplifting - even when an effort doesn't succeed. To simply know someone else is there is to be strengthened.
I'm also becoming quickly biased against jobs in the private and government sector, since part of what I'm paid to do is to examine their gross and often appalling failings. I don't want to be paid with dirty money, nomatter how badly chemical companies might need someone to be the seed of change from within the organization. Why should my college education be a sentence to a life of guilt?
Despite all the positive points, it has been hard to cope with intern and cashier wages, especially with the Christmas social blitz (fun!). Recent calculations yielded 40 hours time work+travel for my internship plus 14 hours for my cashier job at Roots - that's turning out to be a lot of work. More than I thought 2 jobs would be. It's frustrating to not have time to write even though the urge is usually there once every week or two. Forgive me for being so lax recently - let's hope this is just an adjustment period.
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
7.8.07
Done with School, Snapshot of China
Every time I think of it, I can't help but marvel at how it is to be finished with the school system after 19 years of going to class, long hours with textbooks, taking notes, dealing with new teachers, and meeting classmates for work and play. After being in such a stiff and well-defined system, I feel a bit floaty out here in this world where there are a huge variety of possible choices one could make. It's great to be free enough to reconnect with friends in the area, though - and soon, I'll be across the country to see the California side of the family for a kiddie birthday party!
After such a preamble, I'm posting an excerpt from one of my PC essays, for entertainment and for show. This is one ingredient in one such possibility for the future. I write about my two weeks in China, which I visited five years ago.
"I learned to bring toilet paper with me, to tolerate trash on the streets and to remain (relatively) calm on chaotic highways teeming with bikes and rickshaws operating independent of any apparent traffic laws. It wasn’t a freewheeling kind of integration that my friend and I eased ourselves into, but more of a cautious one; awareness for my own safety seemed suddenly closely linked to my decisions. At the same time, I felt sympathetic toward the people who lived there—the old huotong neighborhoods seemed a tragic place to live if lung-crippling coal was the most widely-used fuel for cooking and heating available, and the ugly practice of land-reclamation continued to leave its mark on the local mountains, all in the name of low-cost capital development. The smog coloring the sunset gray was the suspect in the case of my own respiratory ailment that developed after only 4 or 5 days. Water was also a huge problem, as every bottle-toting tourist knows, but 300 million residents will never be truly adapted to a water table contaminated by human waste. Chinese behaviors were discouraging, but what I took away was this: there probably weren’t better options readily available, and my ability to recognize such inequities could be a means to help. In China, health risks and environmental deterioration have a real, tangible meaning in a way that’s more often talked about than experienced in the US."
After such a preamble, I'm posting an excerpt from one of my PC essays, for entertainment and for show. This is one ingredient in one such possibility for the future. I write about my two weeks in China, which I visited five years ago.
"I learned to bring toilet paper with me, to tolerate trash on the streets and to remain (relatively) calm on chaotic highways teeming with bikes and rickshaws operating independent of any apparent traffic laws. It wasn’t a freewheeling kind of integration that my friend and I eased ourselves into, but more of a cautious one; awareness for my own safety seemed suddenly closely linked to my decisions. At the same time, I felt sympathetic toward the people who lived there—the old huotong neighborhoods seemed a tragic place to live if lung-crippling coal was the most widely-used fuel for cooking and heating available, and the ugly practice of land-reclamation continued to leave its mark on the local mountains, all in the name of low-cost capital development. The smog coloring the sunset gray was the suspect in the case of my own respiratory ailment that developed after only 4 or 5 days. Water was also a huge problem, as every bottle-toting tourist knows, but 300 million residents will never be truly adapted to a water table contaminated by human waste. Chinese behaviors were discouraging, but what I took away was this: there probably weren’t better options readily available, and my ability to recognize such inequities could be a means to help. In China, health risks and environmental deterioration have a real, tangible meaning in a way that’s more often talked about than experienced in the US."
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