A contentious corner

B. Portland Mercury

Sarah interviewed some folks and wrote a story about day labor in Portland.   I helped with translations.

Prologo

A. Chiquitos School

It’s late June and if you’re lucky enough to be 8 and enrolled in an expensive private immersion school, school is most decidedly not out for you.  In response to a craigslist ad, I spent three days doing janitorial-type tasks for headmistress Isabel, most of which could be categorized either as fighting entropy or lifting heavy things.  The first task was to make the “music room,” a small classroom filled with books and aluminum piping, into a usable classroom.  I moved about 500 lbs of stock paper out of there, futilely tried to tune all their toy guitars and “set up” (read: plugged in the ethernet cables on) a few PC’s.

Over the course of my stint at Chiquitos, I also powerwashed about the entire usable exterior of the building, a past apartment complex, mowed 80% of the waist-high grass lawn (before the gas ran out on the mower) and climbed up on the tool shed to clean Grey Recluse webs out of the rafters.  Pros: Tax-free, under-the-table, minimum wage. Cons: They ran out of stuff for me to do after three days, putting me back on the job market.

Also, I found myself stuck in the middle of some interestingly awkward tension between Headmistress Isabel and ex-husband Romin, Chiquitos’ tech guy/plumber.  Their 8-year-old daughter is an an enrolled student.  Romin, a native Iranian, speaks exactly zero Spanish, presumably to spite his ex-wife and co-workers.  Most of my interactions with him consisted of delivering messages from Isabel and sneaking undetected into his “den” to unload antiquated, unusable computer parts.  At one point, Isabel sent me to borrow a screwdriver to put together the table I was supposed to assemble:

Me: Do you have a phillips head I could borrow? Isabel asked me to put together one of those tables.
Romin: She asked you to do that?  You do not do that.  That is my job.

Whoah, dude.  I am not a threat to your weird little distopia here.  I just powerwash.  All in all, not a bad gig: The kids were cute and I got to practice my spanish with the faculty, all of whom hailed from various spanish-speaking countries.  It turned out to be Isabel who brought up the apparently comic inversion of the white kid doing grounds work for the Hondurans.  Ok.

I did send them a resume and cover letter for a vacant music teacher position, but I never heard back from them.  On to greener pastures…

I can haz blag?

I did a little traveling last year and I sent out this email list thing to my friends back home.  Now, when I bump into people I haven’t talked to in a while, they typically mention the emails.  So I gather that they liked them; or, failing that, disliked them but read them anyways.  Or maybe they just harbor fond memories of deleting them, unread, from their inboxes.  In any case, I have since then obtained a College degree and, for the first time in seventeen years, find myself under no legally or socially binding expectation to go to school next fall.

So I’m going to mexico.  To play the trombone.  I can feel my parents squirming right about now.

The rough futureplan is this:

1. Graduate (check).
2. Work this summer at anything, make bank (in progress).
3. Go to Mexico. Play the trombone for a couple years.  Don’t starve.
4. Come to my senses, come home and apply to grad school.  Be a microbiologist.  Don’t starve.

I’m starting to feel this blag thing.  I used to be of the opinion that if you didn’t slave over the HTML, then it wasn’t a webpage.  I’m sort of coming around to the idea that obstinately doing things the hard way, something I once did out of genuine curiosity for technology, but, more recently, do out of pure spite, is not a good use of my time.  I could be living, for example.  I also used to think blogs were for just for self-important teenagers and artistes, but irony prevents me from maintaining this belief.  I wasn’t really sold on blogs until I read Yoani Sanchez’ stuff, but now I’m on board.  Sanchez blogs, at great physical risk to her person, from Cuba on a computer she scrapped together from blackmarket parts; and taught herself HTML on top of that. I guess that’s pretty good.

So here it is, a blag about Mexico.  I guess what you just read is called an “Author’s Foreward,” to those in the biz.  After that comes the prologue.