Jack of all Trades

Been M.I.A. a while trying to figure out how to structure what I would term "real life."

Work Interviews: I had interviews at both Jamba Juice and the Medici Bakery, an interesting comparison of large corporation vs. smaller businesses. Firstly, for Jamba Juice, it was a group interview! I thought they only did those at giant consulting firms, but perhaps the economy is bad enough at the moment. They asked fairly standard questions such as: what Jamba Juice drink would you be, what can you contribute to Jamba Juice, what did you like about your last job, what was a difficult situation you were able to overcome, what do you consider a personal failing. Medici on the other hand, I hardly even knew the interview had started because it was more just conversational. I get the feeling, the manager knew I could handle the work since I'd graduated from Lab, and it was more figuring out if my personality type was a good fit for a place like the Medici. At the same, I also think she got exactly the information she needed to get from me, so it was a much more interesting interview. Medici was definitely the preferred choice by the way, because I would get to wear a shirt that says, "Obama eats here." And ... I will be soon! Medici hired me! Thus, I am soon to be serving fresh baked chocolate croissants, carrot muffins, and Kickapoo Fair Trade Coffee :D

Dry Cleaning: I'm now a permanent part of staff for the time being. I can work at almost all points of the sequence of dry cleaning: tagging shirts/clothing as we receive them, sorting wet shirts according to what day they need to be completed and quantity of starch, pressing tablecloths (pressing shirts is really tricky and takes time to learn), taking the tag off clothes to put on hangers, de-linting, de-pilling, bagging or boxing shirts. I like to count the number of Thomas Pink, Ermenigildo Zegna, Brooks Brothers, Tom James, and obscure Italian brand made in Milan shirts we get. It's a bit absurd how many we get of each ...

Shop Tati: I started volunteering at J's shop. I learn how to build bikes about 25% of the time. So far I've learned the basics of putting on a headset, bottom bracket, cassette, cyclo-cross style breaks, and lacing up a 3 cross wheel. From previous bike learning from awesome Illini friends such as Dillon and Jamie, I already knew a certain amount about configuring cable housing, cables, and tuning front and rear derailleurs, pedals. The other 75% of the time, we discuss what the shop will carry, the color theme, stripey socks, the shop layout, folding bikes, leather saddles, and the "lifestyle" that we want to market. Wouldn't it be great if we could change Hyde Park from mostly car based to mostly bike based? Why wait for the city to create bike paths. Convince people that riding bikes is fashionable, more convenient, and less expensive, and create the demand for more bike friendly roads. It's interesting that J designs his bikes very much the way an architect should design a building, to correlate with the needs of their way of life. I find the entire shop to be a fascinating design project ... can't wait to see it in full action :D

Wild Duck: This past Friday, Bernard and I received free tickets to The Wild Duck, a play directed by Charles Newell of Court Theatre in Hyde Park shown at the MCA Chicago. I had no idea that Charles Newell of UCVC was in fact the person who runs Court Theatre ... he seemed a normal enough cyclist the few times I had been on group rides with him. I was very impressed with the production ... it revived fond memories of 7th and 8th grade when Lab School kids could skip class to attend the matinees for the entire Court Theatre season. The set mainly featured these giant loft style windows stage right, black painted steel stairs stage left, a few spare furniture items, and these giant suspended wood doors. Very converted factory building style ...

Food Shelter: Today, my mom and I went to serve food with our church at Cornerstone Community Outreach. It was interesting ... It was strange to have purportedly homeless people making demands upon us almost as if we were a restaurant (e.g.: "I want coke, not Sprite."), and my mom said she even saw that a lot of people didn't even finish the corn and green beans. She remarked, only in a food shelter in America will you see homeless people throwing food away. Absolutely ridiculous, and even outrageous in a way. A very few people even tried to come back for another tray, and some kids came up asking for more. It's not that I want to sound patronizing, or that I want these people to act servile towards us, but I would have thought that they would at least realize that it was not our job to be there, that the food we brought was bought from private donations from church members, that we were serving them food on an entirely voluntary basis, that they didn't really have a right to make any demands from us. Then again, I've never been in a situation where I had to go to a food shelter for food.

12 hours of sleep later ...

I must have slept through my alarm today. Apparently it was a rainy morning though, so I didn't miss much. Only Adam and Jesse made it out.

Much of today was boring office type work compiling grad school recommendation information, but in the afternoon I made it out to a small bike demo volunteer opportunity at the Ray School. J brought his giant suitcase of nearly every bike tool you will ever need, and I was the helmet fitting adjuster. Not too many kids showed up, but at least a few of them got flat tires fixed, so I'm sure they appreciated that. Plus, I got to witness a $7.50 pink huffy bike with indeflatable foam tires and $5 streamers in a cafeteria crit against J on a custom white steel cross bike. And the really great thing about kids is how much fun they can have from the simple things in life, such as ramming a bike into a pole to stop. She was at this for at least 5 solid minutes.

ESLARP

In other words: East St. Louis Action Research Project.

This is where I worked for my sweat equity hours. It's not exactly affordable housing per se, but it is a much larger scale neighborhood-wide outreach program involving many small and large scale projects. Some projects do involve housing - for example, this weekend, they re-roofed one particular resident's house. However, the other projects are quite diverse. When I went in September, I worked on archival shelving units for a cultural museum celebrating a famous dancer from the area who had recently passed away. This time, I worked in a thrift store and in a cemetary.

The thrift store was GIGANTIC. We cleaned up the basement and organized the items thrown down there, as well as unloaded an entire truck full of new donations and redecorated for spring.

The cemetary's problem was that it was right by a hill and kept flooding and silting over whenever it rained. The tombstones got buried, and people had trouble finding their loved ones. We were assigned to dig down to the tombstones until they could be read so they could be documented before they got entirely buried and washed away. The particular plot we were working on contained dead babies - giving new meaning to dead baby jokes. In fact, I'm not sure if I can laugh at those anymore ...

For the evening, there was a talent show lead by the community youth. One particular "Jimmy" did an AWESOME rendition of "What goes around comes back around" along with a really well-executed dance routine. All the girls from UIUC were all over him ...

The weekend was pretty rewarding. However, there was a huge group of sophomores who were there only because their professor required them to be, and that got on my nerves, because many of them complained about it. At least they got the work done. And they weren't THAT bad in terms of whining, but still, one could tell they didn't actually care all that much. Hopefully, the weekend helped change that a bit.