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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Paula's LiveJournal:

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    Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
    8:35 pm
    1) Shovel gravel into wheelbarrow.
    2) Take wheelbarrow down path.
    3) Dump out gravel, rake gravel smooth.
    4) Return to enormous pile of gravel.
    5) Repeat.

    Result: quite a nice path, I think.

    Also, my back hurts.

    Still, something about spine-destroying trail work, or brush clearing that is about 80% thorn bushes and leaves me looking like I spent some quality time with a very unhappy cat and necessitates about five minutes of tweezer-time every day after work...I spend quite a lot of time at this job grinning like an idiot.

    And today, we found an injured bird under a bush by the path. And by injured bird, I mean injured juvenile Red-Tailed Hawk. I, fortunately, had the number to a bird sanctuary, because I'm planning on volunteering there, so we got Henry the Hawk into good hands, and on Saturday I can go check up on him.
    Friday, November 20th, 2009
    7:44 pm
    Having completed some 200-odd feet of boardwalk over a West Virginia wetland, my team is moving from one obscure backwoods place in West Virginia to another obscure backwoods place in West Virginia, to do a different physically demanding project in a state park. Very exciting!
    Thursday, November 12th, 2009
    2:52 pm
    Does anybody else feel a little as though as the baby swings on playgrounds look a little bit like big, solid plastic diapers?

    I find them slightly disturbing.
    Saturday, November 7th, 2009
    5:26 pm
    West Virginia is wonderful. Or wild. Or possibly even both.

    The new team is really great. Our team leader is all kinds of amazing. There are only two other girls, which is fantastic. I am doing good, you guys.

    We've been building a boardwalk in a state park. See, West Virginia is all mountains. (Makes driving at night really exciting.) So it ain't got a lot of wetlands. But this park has a wetland, on account of some beavers doing what beavers do best, and they really want to make it accessible to students. So we're building a boardwalk over it.

    Building boardwalks over wetlands involves: hip waders, sledgehammers, lots of lumber, lots of splinters, and lots of doing things, getting them wrong, undoing them and doing them again with slight variations.

    It also involves being outside all day in a really beautiful place, learning about birds and plants and beavers. They have loaned us a bunch of binoculars. Our site supervisor is a retired college professor, who describes himself as an "educator-naturalist," and not a day goes by without twenty minutes of really interesting information.

    We live in a "holler," which means a valley in the mountains. We're forty minutes from anything and get no cell phone reception. Today, we went hiking in the woods around the house. I fell down a lot and collected a great many burrs in my clothes.

    Last night we went to Charleston and I drank a lot of beer with a few of my new teammates.

    This has been a durn good week, y'all.
    Thursday, October 29th, 2009
    10:19 pm
    So, after a week or so of events that can be best summed up as starting with a "C" and ends with a "lusterfuck," I have been transferred to a new team. It has only been a day, but I am fairly optimistic, which is not a usual state of mind for me. It helps that they cannot possibly be worse than Team Nightmare, especially towards the end there, when most of the team (and the team leader) straight-up hated me.

    Team Probably-Not-A-Nightmare (real name pending) and I are on our way to West Virginia, to do crazy rough trail work and sleep on cots! (I actually don't have that many details yet...) We have been driving for about nine hours today. We've stopped at a hotel for the night in Knoxville, Tennessee, and will go about another six hours tomorrow. I am excited. I came really close (really close) to leaving AmeriCorps, and right now I'm glad I didn't.

    We have already discussed: Justice League Unlimited, Firefly, Fleet Foxes and Regina Spektor. How's that for a good first day?

    I left behind a campus gossiping about me like crazy, which was a new and unpleasant experience. Not...flattering gossip, either. So that's nice to get away from. Doubtless New Team has heard all about my adventures in Team-Nightmare-Escaping, but they seem very welcoming and friendly nonetheless.

    Wish me luck!
    Monday, October 19th, 2009
    7:25 pm
    I spent today stripping copper wire. (Copper wire is more valuable to recycling places if you take all the plastic off first, and crappy AmeriCorps teams are very useful for tedious tasks no one else would want.) Result: blisters on my left hand like crazy, from all the wire-coating-tugging; slightly less on the right hand because I am a genius-snake at wielding the X-acto knife.

    Also, I was doing it in the sun without really paying attention to that fact. Also, it was a little nippy out this morning, so I was wearing long sleeves, rolled up. Combined, this had made a pretty nice sunburn from my elbows down, with a distinct break for my watch. Like a really modest farmer. It's pretty sexy.

    Still planning on my divorce, as soon as I get back to campus. No clue yet as to who the Team/Spouse will be, so keep fingers crossed for me.

    ( Yeah, so read the following only if you want to hear about my crazy experience with the meds that are supposed to make me not-crazy. )

    That is that, ducks.
    Sunday, October 18th, 2009
    12:06 pm
    Dream
     I was back home. My mom was stressed and freaking out, and announced that she and I were going to the Caribbean, that afternoon. Just us two, running away to a tropical land of turquoise seas and white sand.

    That is a lovely idea, I said, but how are we going to get to the Caribbean today?

    It doesn't matter, the mother says. We're going! Whatever! We'll drive there!

    The more she spoke, the more I, too, was longing for the peaceful blue waters and a crazy, impromptu vacation, but I knew perfectly well that one cannot drive to the Caribbean. Mom, I tried to explain, this is not a thing that is possible, but I was utterly unable to convince her.

    That's all I remember. This dream was most certainly coming from my own deep, illogical desires to run away, somewhere, anywhere, and right now.

    Thanks, subconscious, but I knew that already. You didn't have to rub my face in it.
    Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
    9:09 pm
    My Team Leader
     Doesn't believe in evolution: SUPER-CHRISTIAN
    Listens to Christian Rock: SUPER-ANNOYING-CHRISTIAN.

    I had to say it somewhere.
    Sunday, October 11th, 2009
    6:59 pm
    I want sweet potatoes. Somebody make me sweet potatoes. I'm in the Deep, Dirty South. There are only a couple of benefits to that, and one of them damn well ought to be sweet potatoes.
    Monday, October 5th, 2009
    7:59 pm
    Three weeks, and then I am for-real-for-true-talked-to-my-unit-leader-today transferring. I feel like a kid moving to a new school--determined that I am going to be perfect and popular, this time and knowing that honestly this is not going to happen. But it can't be worse. I'm fairly positive it can't be worse.

    I had a dream last night that I was helping to build a nuclear weapon, thus dooming the human race. It took me about five minutes after waking to stop worrying that I didn't have a conscience.
    Friday, October 2nd, 2009
    7:24 pm
    In Team Nightmare news...
     NCCC teams all have a team leader. And our team leader appointed an "assistant team leader," someone whose job, I'm fairly sure, is just to be the "I'm sick today, [blank] is in charge." And that's it. The ATL rotates with every project.

    Only, our actual team leader at this point doesn't, y'know, lead, and the ATL is pretty much in charge.

    This is a girl who I actually liked at first. We were sort of buddies at the beginning of this whole mess. I don't know exactly what I've done to fall so far in her opinion, but she does not like me. She is on a humongous power trip with this whole unexpected position of power thing.

    She's the one who writes the jobs on the board for who's-doing-what-today. She's the one who calls a meeting at lunch to give a lecture on why it is very important that we stick to the jobs we're given, even if they aren't the fun ones and even if one of the site supervisors asks us to do something else, because it's very important that we have a clear schedule of who's doing what. I'm not the only one she's incredibly unsubtle about not liking. But I'm pretty sure nobody is getting more open contempt than I am.

    I'm not the only one on the receiving end of the mean tones and terse orders. I'm possibly not even the only one who realizes how fucked up this is. Real team leader's job, at this point, is to do very little work and get her way a lot.

    It's like living at middle school. Junior high, 24/7. The queen bee doesn't like me, so I'm pretty much fucked.

    BUT I have allowed my rational side some freedom. I have been speaking with my unit leader, and am switching teams, rather than hopping on a train and going home. Come October 23, I am fairly certain I will be transferred to another team. (And if I'm not, I will be leaving.) I'm going to try to make this work. I might not really be cut out for AmeriCorps (ten months with 18-to-24-year-olds? What the fuck was I thinking?) but I doubt I could end up on a worse team than this one, so I'm going to give it a try.

    Only problem is that October 23 is three weeks away. Break out the Xanax, and remember that it doesn't help anybody to engage with any of this. Keep my mouth shut and my sense of humor at full blast, because fucking-ridiculous can be miserable, but it can also sometimes be funny.

    Anyway, rant concluded. I am being, as my idiotic team would say, a Negative Nancy. So I will end on a positive:

    THEY ARE MAKING A GHOSTBUSTERS 3. This is pretty much more important that any pathetic drama that is going on it my life right now.
    Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
    6:33 pm
    I was on a roof today! I was on a roof yesterday! Putting up shingles and hammering until I got enormous blisters. (Well, two enormous blisters and one enormous raw sore that used to be a blister.)

    And I have discovered: only slightly more than half my team makes me truly miserable. None of them were willing to nail shingles for two days, so I was blissfully surrounded by people who I can actually tolerate. (And the minute we got in the van to rejoin the majority of Team Special, I could feel my blood pressure rising.)

    The only band-aids we have in the house have Looney Tunes on them. That's right, Bugs Bunny, you loosely cover my half-inch open wound!
    Friday, September 18th, 2009
    8:27 pm
    I didn't like middle school the first time, I definitely don't like it now.
     As painfully tempting as "fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, you're cool, and fuck you I'm out!" is, and as many misgivings as I have about this program as a whole, my practical side has kept me from making plans to leave outright.

    I am, though, currently in the process of negotiating a request to be moved to another team. Which is a drastic step that the administration really doesn't like, but they also don't like their retention rates to look bad, so I've got a chance. One way or another, I'm getting out.

    Today, I was trying to explain to a couple teammates that using red-clay mud as "warpaint" and going "hey-ya-hoi-ya" and making war whoops...not exactly OK? Teensy bit racist? Maybe guys? You get where I'm coming from? To which the 19-year-old little blond WASP who doesn't have two brain cells to rub together responds that she has Indian blood in her, so it's OK.

    Really? Really?
    Tuesday, September 15th, 2009
    7:52 pm
    Friends, you are so amazing and supportive. I love that you aren't passive-aggressive fake-sunshine all the time. Because my low-key, bitchy, cynical ways just aren't jiving here.

    Right now, I have an intense desire is to casually go out for a pack of cigarettes and never come back. It's a classic, after all.

    I think, though, since I am planning on going to New Orleans on the 24th, my window. No confrontation, just a simple phone call: "BTW, I'm not coming back." So, Team Special, you have slightly over a week to change my mind. Or continue to be subtly awful to me, whichever works for you.

    Today at "work," there was about 20 minutes of our two most delightfully idiotic girls singing "Do-Re-Mi" from The Sound of Music over and over again, and at one point, about 10 minutes of spelling out W-E-I-N-E-R and T-I-T-S and P-E-N-I-S in Pig Latin. It's like living with 12-year-olds. And there are so many people I like in this world, why am I spending a day longer than I have to with people I don't?

    So--Team Special, you've got a week. I feel so free, with my delicious little I-don't-need-to-stay-imprisoned-here secret.

    Friends, I can't even describe how much you're helping me right now. So much love in my cynical little heart.
    Monday, September 14th, 2009
    8:17 pm
    broke the rules: negative is a no-no here
     So, the last time I overdid it on Xanax, I went incredibly crazy, bit Elizabeth really hard and slept for fifteen hours. So really, taking it is just...not that good an idea.

    And this time, I went all loopy and spilled my guts out about how I feel about this team. How unapproachable and unfriendly and un-leader-like my team leader is. How hostile and childish things seem. The truth, with the common sense that would usually tell me to keep my fucking mouth shut on vacation.

    Now, not that surprisingly, people sort of hate me. Some of them sort of hated me before, because I tend to not enjoy the incredibly juvenile sense of humor that results, among other things, in the phrases "giggity" and "that's what she said" pulled out several dozen times a day. I'm embarrassed by these people; I want to shake them by the shoulders until they realize that they're adults.

    There is no one I've really bonded with, and the person I like best taped up a quote in the girls' bedroom that says "A complaining tongue reveals an ungrateful heart." So...I wonder who that was aimed at. Surely not the girl who took drugs and vented her discontented little guts out.

    I have a motto too, girl-I-really-wish-didn't-have-complete-contempt-for-me.

    It goes "life's too short to spend too much of it crying in the bathroom." I'm going to do my best to live by that.

    So I'm looking at my options. I'm disappointed in this program that is absolutely nothing like I expected it to be, and I'm disappointed in myself for being a negative, humorless bitch.

    People I like: I miss you like fucking crazy.
    12:54 am
    I'm leaving.
    Wednesday, September 9th, 2009
    8:58 pm
    I'm pretty sure that NCCC has the ability to be an amazing, life-changing experience.

    But this team is a fucking nightmare.
    Thursday, September 3rd, 2009
    9:15 pm
    Meridian, MS. Lauderdale County Habitat for Humanity. Day 1. We worked on our first house today, although finishing work, which is not quite so exciting as building from the ground up, which we are going to be doing. I mostly did painting, though I did have some chance to reacquaint myself with power drills.

    But that isn't so important right now.


    ANTIOCH, BITCHES. THE ONCE AND FUTURE.


    I'm going to get a badass Antioch A tattoo with a couple people from my NCCC team. I still want the big Emperor-Norton-inspired tat on my solar plexus, but this one is simpler and I have the design ready, and that A is in my effing heart so much these days.


    BE ASHAMED TO DIE.
    Friday, August 28th, 2009
    10:43 am
    Roger, coffee house, we have contact.
     One of my few-and-far-between AmeriCorps we-still-don't-have-internet journal posts.

    I don't know if I gave a lot of detail on the project we'd been assigned; painting houses, stripping paint, minor repairs is Vicksburg, where our campus is located. We'd be staying on campus in our dorms. It had it's advantages and disadvantages.

    Which is a moot point, because about four hours after our final clearance meeting, we learned that our project had fallen through. (And keep in mind that the projects start on Wednesday.)

    We're now going to Meridian, Mississippi to work with Habitat for Humanity.

    You don't need a lot of details, team. You'd better be prepared to pack damn quick, team. Sorry you worked your asses off doing research and preparing for your project, team.

    Go completely unprepared to Meridian, team.

    Honestly, I'm not as bitter as I sound. I've wanted to work with Habitat for ages, and I think this project is kind of...cooler than our other one. But it's also scarier. Staying here, we'd have the advantage of having the faculty around, and we have a couple team members who are not entirely suited to this work, and need a little special oversight. In Meridian, it's all going to be on the shoulders of our team leader, so I feel bad for her. She's a tough chica, but still.

    I'm actually a little disappointed in myself, for having so much trouble tolerating our problem children. I almost suspect they put a few of us on this team because we have backgrounds in mental health, and I'm not living up to that.

    Step it up, Paula. I'm absolutely determined to be better. And one of the advantages of leaving is that our team is going to be isolated, and that's a pretty good recipe for bonding. (Or driving each other nuts. I'm actually pretty confident its going to be both.)

    Anyway, friends, I gotta go.

    Paula out.
    Saturday, August 15th, 2009
    3:29 pm
    Week 2!
     On Monday, my team and I spent the day in a little town cleaning up an empty lot where a building had been demolished but never really cleaned up. We dug up and hauled bricks and rubble and huge amounts of broken glass into wheelbarrows, and hauled the wheelbarrows up the hill to the dumpster, which generally took two to three people. We did this for about 8 hours. In the humid, 90-degree Mississippi sun. When people say "soaked with sweat," they are not usually being literal. I would say that there was perhaps 10% of my shirt that was even slightly dry. I had gained blisters and sunburn and several dizzy spells by the end of the day. I have a number of bruises whose origins I cannot recall, and a few cuts on my legs to remind me that no matter how tired you are, kneeling down on dirt full of broken glass is not a terribly good idea.

    So that was pretty fucking amazing. It's hard to describe. It is probably the most physically taxing day I have ever spent. (The day actually began with physical training at 5:30 am--we have PT three times a week, and we have to do it in the early morning to beat the heat.)

    A lot of the rest of my time has been wavering between intensely boring, pointless bureaucracy and an idiotic sort of summer camp.

    For example:
    "Let's do an ice breaker to get to know each other! If you could be a candy bar, which one would you choose and why?"
    "Can anybody explain what a saw is for?"
    "Let's talk about why it isn't a good idea to come to work hungover!"
    "I don't care if this isn't at all relevant to those of you who have already graduated, and won't be relevant to anyone for about ten months, but let's spend three hours talking about how to get undergrad course credit for this!"

    But Brick Chucking Day has given me a lot of hope, and a huge sense of accomplishment, and will always have a special place in my heart.
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