Well, I find that I am having a bit of trouble keeping up with this. It’s mostly because I’ve been going through my notes and journals and making blog entries for things that happened before and haven’t wanted to write present entries until after I had finished the backlogged ones. But the problem with that idea is that time is always moving forward, so the more time that passes before I finish the backlog adds to the amount of backlog that I have. It is a tad ineffective, so let us move to the present instead.
This is the last weekend I’ll have before I officially become a member of City Year. Now, I’m not saying that is a bad thing, I’m looking forward to really getting into my year of service. The training period has been really extensive, and at times intense, and it’s starting to wear a little thin. I really want to get down to work… but the idea is a little intimidating.
See, right now there’s not much to dread about going to work tomorrow, I know that I’ll have some training and have to prove that I memorized the pledge, but there probably won’t be much of anything that is actually going to challenge me. Once we start in the schools and I actually have suspended students to deal with there’s a lot more to worry about. I know that next weekend I’ll be spending my free time with a little nagging voice in the back of my head telling me that I might not measure up to my standards come Monday, and that means that this is my last worry-free weekend for awhile.
So I spent it doing lots of little fun things. I went to the Puyallup fair, a fair that I still have no idea how to pronounce, and found it much as I expected. There was actually a kind of comfort in that. Here I am hundreds of miles away from home but it all looked the same, the strange fatty foods (how does one fry coca-cola?), the overly large produce (652 pound pumpkins seem like they’re begging to be made into a shelter of some kind), the weird booth announcers who hate their existence, the awesome rides you’re afraid are going to fall apart just as you get on them, the games with their really cool prizes (and your inability to win said prizes), you get the idea. I spent more money than I really should have, but had a lot of fun. The group I went with- other City Year corps members- was fun and helped make it all very entertaining.
I also went on a practice ghost tour with a senior corps member who is training to give ghost tours in Pike Place Market, and am now tempted to write an urban fantasy about Seattle. There is just so much stuff here! I’ve never had a setting before having a character/plot, but I think I’m going to have to arrange to. I’ll have to do some more random exploring, as well as a lot of research, but I think that I could totally pull it off. Tempting… although I might want to wait until I get some of my other projects done.
Other than that I just wandered around, taking field notes of weird things and places I would like to check out in the future. It’s a little strange, but I think that I enjoy the random solo wandering more than I like going out with people. Especially when I can just twitter or text the cool things I do find. There’s something about the wandering and exploring and writing it down that appeals to me and while it is fun to go out and explore with people I find that I’m so much more relaxed and happy about it when I’m on my own. And I can’t really decide whether that’s a bad thing or a good thing.