It’s been a crazy couple of weeks. We finally have students in our classes, which means that I don’t have to spend us much time wandering through classes on the 6th grade floor but instead get to do the job we came here for and work with kids who really need our help. Unfortunately this means that I spend much of my time in the basement of the school, and as it is dark when I get to school and dark when I leave I find that I never really see the sun any more.
We’ve also started helping with two other programs, one after school intervention program for students who are failing and a lunchtime detention program. The detention program was one that was already in place and that we just took over to help out, and unfortunately it makes us kind of have to act like the bad guys. It’s not an alternative program by any means, just a silent detention program where we have to enforce silence and glare menacingly at the students (well, the glaring may not be spelled out in the instructions, but it certainly seems to be implied.)
The after school program is a bit difficult as well. These are kids who have a history of not doing well in class. Each day they go to each of their teachers and have them fill out a paper stating whether or not they have accomplished everything they should for the day. If they haven’t they get sent to this after school program where they are supposed to do their work. They don’t want to be there, they don’t really know their work, but they’re stuck there for several hours no matter whether they get their work done or not. For some of them it only takes one time in the class before they start getting their work done, for others they aren’t going to get their work done no matter what you try. It’s not that they WANT to make your life miserable (at least I don’t think so) but they aren’t that eager to make life easy for you either.
But my parents came to town and we went on a whirlwind tour of the area, as well as having them come and watch me do PT. They came a little late, missing some of the more exciting exercises and only seeing the really ridiculous ones. We even picked up a little statue of the David that the SAM was using as a promotional piece and carried it around taking pictures of it. We even took it on the Underground tour! It made me a bit morose to see them leave, but it was fun having them here.
I went and saw the Airborne Toxic Event, a band which has my best friend Sarah’s brother in it. I really enjoyed the show. ! They played my favorite Bruce Springsteen song (I’m on fire) and did a great cover of This Magic Moment, not to mention the last three songs turned into a total punk rock fest as we all jumped and moshed and were crazy and they threw beer and water at us. It was lots of fun and entertaining and definitely worth taking the bus all the way over there.
I wasn’t able to stay and try to say hello to Noah when it was over, mostly because I wasn’t thinking when I decided to take the bus over there. In my head I was thinking “oh, it’s an eight o’clock show and they have one opening band. Plus Airborne only has one CD of music. I’ll be out of there at 11:00 at the latest.”
Yeah… it didn’t get out until almost 1:00. And there’s a bit of a problem with the buses here in Seattle. They don’t run between 12:30 and 3:00 past downtown, and I was two transfers away from my house. I shot out of there as soon as I could (after waiting a short while to see if I could snare Noah’s attention), and ran down to the bus only to be reassured that yes, indeed, I had missed the last bus.
So there I was… in the wearhouse district down near the stadium next to a skeezy highway and no bus coming for another two hours. I could have gone and gotten drunk in the bar near the Showbox and waited for the late bus, but that would mean that I wouldn’t get home until around 5am and I had to leave my home around six in order to be at the office the next morning (yeah, the concert was on a Thursday). Oh, and the meeting that I had the next morning? It was the first meeting of an optional committee that I had applied for and that was semi-prestigous, so I couldn’t just miss it and I didn’t want to come hung over. So I was stuck with something else…
I called the bus company, and they told me that my best bet was to get to downtown (walking through skeezy highway and wearhouse country) and catch the 2:30 bus. So I set off for skeezy country and started walking towards downtown.
It wasn’t all that bad, although I was in concert wear and nowhere near as armed as I would usually be before I went into this kind of situation. It was cold though, and dark and a long walk. It might not have been as long as it felt like, but it felt like forever. At least I had my big boots on so walking wasn’t too much of a problem. I hummed a little for myself and was fine until I got to Pioneer square, when all of a sudden suspicious people started to abound.
I was a little on edge when the gentleman in the bright orange blazer fell in step behind me. Maybe it was the beard. Men with long beards seem inherently suspicious. It didn’t help that I turned a couple of times but he stayed with me, and one of my turns took me to a place that was more deserted than the other places I had been before.
Then I heard a woman singing. It was loud and a little off-key, a song about being broke and lost and not knowing what she was going to do, sounding a little like a gospel. I turned and smiled at her and the scary guy wandered off somewhere else. We fell to talking and I found out that her name was Bernadette and learned about her family, how she was the only one left after her mother had died and her daughter had been shot to death by her husband. I gave her a dollar and she asked me where I was going and when she found out where the metro folk had sent me she scoffed. She walked me to another stop, one that was closer and where the bus came at 2:15 rather than 2:30.
Bernadette left me at the stop, I told her that her singing had really helped me out and she told me that talking to me had helped her feel a lot less troubled, and I fell to talking to another woman who came up a few minutes later. She had just gotten done cleaning up the stadium with a bunch of other people and she was upset that I was all by myself in the middle of the night in what she thought was a bad neighborhood. She explained that this was drug selling central, and that she knew this because she had used to run in that crowd. I found out about going to jail and her family, and how she was determined never to do drugs or sell drugs again because it would have meant that she would be separated from her son.
Eventually I got home, although it was a bit of a struggle since I was barely able to keep my eyes open. I know that I fell asleep through a couple of the bus stops but finally made it home around 3. The next day was… hallucination-inducing to put it mildly. But I managed, although around 3pm the little pink elephants were dancing a can-can on my arm and twirling with the brownies.