Spring and my new job...

I had forgotten what working was like. I mean I'd been working in France for about a year only 12 hours a week, then I worked here - but never more than 30 hours a week, and then Geneva, but my work didn't really feel like work, and I didn't work quite 40 hours a week (a full time job in Geneva is 37 hours a week). Now I have a job where I am working 39 hours a week - plus the 1/2 hour drive to get there. So that means I have 9 hour work days, which start at 6 am. (and I'm still working almost 10 hours a week for the WCC doing this awesome project!) Needless to say, I am much more tired than before and I'm feeling the stress of having a job and working and all that stuff. Yet, it is hard to feel bad for very long when it is so beautiful outside!

Spring arrived officially last week and brought with it the last (I hope) cold snap. Now it is amazing here. Austin is such a great place for being outside! Last week I took one of my days off and went hiking with some friends and my dog. We went to a State Park and walked for about 4 hours. We only ran into one other person on the trail. It was beautiful! Today is just as beautiful as a day. It is days like today that make me grateful to be alive and happy that nature is so pretty. Flowers are so bright. I don't think I've ever seen anything as blue as the bluebonnets on the trail this morning or as yellow as the flowers that were blooming in the grass. It is amazingly verdant here.

Life is good.

After all the craziness

I had two friends in town visiting for SXSW. It was an intense festival. We did not have any sort of tickets, but just decided to see as much free music as possible and get as many free drinks/food as possible. In addition to the free boat ride, we went to many other events! On Thursday we saw Cocoon, this really amazing French Band. We saw them at the "France Rocks Austin" party. This party started at 12 noon and included free cheese and crackers, champagne, and beer. Oh and free burritos. The three bands we saw were pretty good. Then on Friday we went to a house party where we saw Seryn. They were so great! We bought their album (it's a demo, but I'm still super excited about it!) They also had free beer and free vodka at this party.

I didn't do much else for the festival, because I was working on both Friday and Saturday.

On Sunday, my friend and I decided to go to the Alamo. The Alamo itself is pretty cool - although not as amazing as you think it would be. However, the worst part of the trip was our lunch. We went to the River Walk in San Antonio. This is basically a tourist trap for people in downtown San Antonio. After attempting to find an open restaurant that was not on the River Walk we settled for a decent looking place called Rio Rio. Mistake! The hostess was incompetent and so we ended up sitting outside in the shade, and it was just a few degrees too cold for this. Then our waiter was okay, but did not seem very interested in being our waiter. Finally, my food was not that great and my friends' food might be been spoiled! He said the consistency of the chile (in the chile rellenos) was like that of rotten spinach. I would not recommend this place to anyone.

My life is now back to normal. Only working and volunteering and hanging out with friends. I am so happy that my friends from college came to see me, though. It made me remember how much I really love them! I hope we don't wait another three years before we see each other.

It started as a rainy day....

Monday night the rain started. Tuesday it continued to poor. I was keeping my hopes alive that the rain would stop before 5:30 that afternoon. There is nothing as refreshing as listening to the rain fall (drop drop drop, pitter patter) on the deck of my coffee shop. I love working on rainy mornings, when you can only tell that the sun is risen because the clouds are slightly less gray than they were ten minutes ago and you can begin to make out the sign of the restaurant across the street.

It continued to rain and became a fine mist as we became tacky tourists and walked the Capitol grounds to see and hear about the history of the great state of Texas! Did you know that Texas had a female governor in the early 1920's? Inspiring stuff. Did you know that the Texas legislature was part time. They only meet for six months every two years. That's it. The clouds were beginning to be slightly gray blue, but were still doling out the oppressive raininess. We had to hope it would stop in an hour or so, just before 5:30.

The rain continued to come down and we walked towards the docks, not sure where we were going exactly. We stopped at a coffee shop for a little pick-me-up hoping that the rain would stop and that we could find the boat. As we left the shop and headed out into the cloudy, but not raining, evening we overhead two young hipsters (one of whom I later found out was named Cotton) discussing where the boat might be. We followed them.

As we reached a fork in the road we saw a boat and a small crowd. This must be it! As we reached the head of the line the young man gave us two $1 dollar bills with numbers 172, and 173 written on them. We were among the first 200 people to show up. We were about to be part of the epic Daily Juice SXSW Boat Party.

Epic it was. The boat launched onto Lake Austin at 5:30 pm. There were bands, free mixed drinks (mojitos, ginger martinis, and jalapeno margaritas) and free beer and free food. Along with the ubiquitous live music of SXSW. It was an amazing evening on the boat. The rain had indeed finished, just in time for our evening ride on Lake Austin.

health reform in the US

This is a video the Rachel Maddow Show, which I love.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I wanted to share this with you because I think it is so important that we really see the anti-reform movement as what it is, a profit-driven anti-american people movement. The people behind this are for Insurance companies and not for the American people. Companies are only driven by profit, if more profit is good business than they do not want regulations that require them to actually pay for medical care. This is so obvious to me, yet perhaps it is not obvious. Medical care should not be a for profit industry!

I say this as someone who does not have health care coverage. I do not have it because I cannot afford it right now and my job does not provide coverage. I would like to have coverage, but I do not. This means that I am not going to the doctor to get regular check ups, I am not going to the dentist, when I'm sick I'm not going to go to the doctor unless I'm on my death bed. I am constantly afraid that I might fall and break my leg, causing untold debt that I cannot afford. I am thinking about going back to school and if that happens, I couldn't afford it. (I probably can't afford it as it is, but education is for another day.)

Health care reform seems like a no brainer to me. Not only do we need reform, I believe that we need a public option in this reform. I do not want the Federal Government to require me to buy something from a for-profit company. If this reform passes, I don't think I'll buy insurance. I would opt into Medicare, if I could. However, that does not seem like it will be likely.

In another segment of this show, during an interview with Michael Moore, he says the Democrats need to do what they were sent to Washington to do and I could not agree more. They need to buck up and start legislating. Come on Democrats!

update on the job thing

I always do the "right" thing. I am going to quit my job in just a few minutes today. Last week I was offered two jobs. In my bright wisdom I decided to try and to do both. This is not working, even though I have not yet even started one of them. I start there on Friday.

I'm definitely nervous - but I think I need to do this for my own sanity. I need to be able to walk away from something, simply because I want to. I have to look at myself and say that my mental health and happiness is more important than the obligations that I have to this place where I am quitting. I know that this will let some people down - but sometimes you need to do this. I know this sounds weird, but I need to do it.

It is also purely selfish. I have two friends coming into town this week (one arriving tomorrow and one arriving a week from today) and I was scheduled to work when they were arriving. I know that is not a good reason to quit a job, but it is one of the factors that put my over the fence.

I also decided to quit sooner rather than later to save them the time and money of training me. I got my schedule and all of my shifts are still "training" shifts, this means that they won't really miss me because I am not being depended on to cover any responsibilities. I think it is better for me, and for them to quit now before I am a "real" part of the team.

Perhaps I am being silly, but I think it will be good for me, mentally and physically.

The conversation was less than one minute. I did it.

Job (s?)

So on Thursday, the day after my 26th birthday, I got offered a job. I took it, of course. I went in, signed the paper work. "you start Friday". Then Thursday night, just before my birthday party, I got a phone call, "we want you to work for us". A different place. A coffee shop.

What to do? I decided to take both, for the time being.

Friday, after my first shift at the new restaurant, I got a text message from my other manager at the coffee shop that I worked at months ago. "Can you open in the morning?". I took the shift, of course. Then during the shift I picked up two more.

This week I will officially be working 4 different jobs. I went from half of one to four in less than 3 days.

I may drive myself crazy doing all this work, but I figure income will help me. More money is good right now. So we'll see how long I can hold this up.

We'll see.....

Texas..

I live in Texas. This may not come as a shock to most of you, however sometimes I find myself shocked that I live here.

I am pretty liberal, or progressive, or whatever you want to call it. However, I often forget that I am living in one of the reddest states out there. I was driving home today and noticed the bumper stickers on the truck in front of me. There were two that stuck out to me.

First was a sticker in support of Debra Medina. She was challenging Rick Perry for the Republican nominee for governor of Texas. Medina is so conservative that she makes former governor of Texas, George W. Bush, look like a liberal. However, her platform of eliminating property tax (in a state that has already eliminated income tax) seemed very popular here. She still managed to get 18.5% of the vote. Pretty impressive, especially since her campaign had taken a dive after her appearance on Glen Beck's radio show, where she did not deny that she was a "9-11 truther". Quite a candidate.

Second was a sticker that read "Texas permit to hunt terrorists no 91101". I have no problem with someone having different view points than me. In fact, I am happy the world is not made up of Maryann clones. However, I object to this dehumanization of terrorists. As a Christian, I cannot be for someone hunting terrorists as if they were animals. God created all people in God's image. How can I say that someone has lost that piece of God and is so far removed that I am permitted to hunt that person, as one hunts deer. I cannot do that. God created all the people of this world, not just the Americans.

race and racism

I read this article in the New York Times yesterday. It is about how anti-choice advocates are trying to convince African Americans to be more active in the anti-choice movement. They are saying that legalized abortion is just a big conspiracy, like eugenics, to rid the United States of black people.

I had never heard that argument before. When you look at the facts, it is startling to know that 40% of women who choose to have abortions are black women, while they only make up 13% of the population. However, seeing the fact that black women seek out abortions more often than white woman, without asking why, is misleading. I do not know the statistics, but I'm pretty sure that black women have a much higher poverty rate, proportionally (I am not trying to say that there are no poor whites, because trust me, I know there are poor whites). Perhaps, black women are trying to lift themselves out of poverty and the cycle of poverty that comes from having children or having too many children and not being able to care for them. Perhaps, black women are faced, like many other women, with difficult decisions. Lack of resources is a very good reason to believe that an abortion is the only option.

If anti-choice activists really thought that there was a conspiracy to kill black babies, they might want to look at the rate of infant mortality for black babies as opposed to white babies. (based on data from the CDC, the infant mortality rate of black babies is more than double that of white babies) Or perhaps there is just a conspiracy to keep black men in jail. Maybe that is why there are so many of them there. I do think there are plausible reasons to believe that there are conspiracies to keep black people down. I don't think that abortion rights is one of them.

I do not believe that our society has overcome racism (just like I do not believe that our society has achieved equality among the sexes) but I equally do not believe that abortion rights are a place where black people are being hurt by the ability to choose.