Living the Dream

Day’s Verse:
“Everything is permissible”—but not everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible”—but not everything is constructive. Nobody should seek his own good, but the good of others. …So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.
1 Corinthians 10:23-24, 31

Remember how May was Bike to Work Month? Here’s the page from the Cascade Courier listing the results. You can’t see it unless you click and zoom in, but I’m listed in the right-hand column under “Most Overall Miles by a Female Rider on a team.”

For this honor, Cascade Bike Club sent me:

• An ORCA card with $5 on it (one-way fares are $2.75).

• A medium T-shirt that says “Let’s bike to work, shall we?”, leftover from the shirts they were selling on Bike to Work Day.
• A printed certificate stating my miles, team, and name. (I bought a frame for it myself.)
• A CD of music paid for by Clif bar (based on all the Clif advertising), possibly bicycling related? I’m not sure, not having listened to it yet.

Thank you, Cascade Bicycle Club! That was definitely worth riding 709 miles in the month of May.

2 Snide Remarks

Day’s Verse:
Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible.
1 Corinthians 9:9

Nonprofits seem to operate in their own strange sphere in the world, some alternate reality that for-profit and governmental agencies remain almost entirely unaware of. It has taken me quite a while to figure out how to live in this parallel world; maybe the air is more rarefied, or the water a little bit purer, or the nutrients a bit more nutritious. Whatever the reason, I found myself slowly adapting to my new environment. Now, after 6 months with the Bicycle Alliance, I think I can quantify what I’ve come to appreciate about working there.

1. Diversity. “What?” You may ask. “How can you say ‘diversity’ in an organization run almost entirely by white, middle-class baby-boomer women?” It’s true that if you take a superficial look at the Bicycle Alliance’s staff, it does seem to lack a certain breadth or depth. Yet each of the staff brings her (or his) own experiences to the organization and those contributions run the gamut. Name it and one of our staff people has probably done it. Plus, the diversity of people who walk in the door astounds me on a daily basis. I’ve started saying “You never know who’ll walk in,” and it’s true — working in Pioneer Square means interacting with everybody from homeless men to hot-shot tech people to everything in between. The vibrancy, the life, the variety of perspectives continually astound me.
2. Passion. It’s quite true that people don’t work at nonprofits for the money. You have to truly care about the nonprofit’s mission in order to stay and succeed. At my old corporate job, we had no common bond, aside from “It pays the bills.” At the Bicycle Alliance, when we sit down for lunch together, we all have the shared love of bicycling drawing us together. Regardless of our differences, we all firmly believe in the importance and value of bicycles as a transportation option in the future, and we believe in making that a reality.
3. Cool. I mean cool in the relaxed sense, the hakuna matata sense, the sense that although we’re all working hard to achieve important goals, we aren’t killing ourselves along the way. It means we’re taking time to go for a bike ride on a sunny day. It means that timing vacations just right isn’t really that important, but that having a relaxing time and coming back rejuvenated is. It means that I know if I wake up one morning and cannot drag myself in for love or money, that’s OK. Nobody’s going to flip a lid because I didn’t show up. It means that we’re having a favorite cinnamon roll contest and everybody will bring in a delicious offering. It means we can take time for personal concerns and not worry about an angry boss looking over our shoulders. It’s working to live, not living to work.

Those are just a few of the reasons I love the Bicycle Alliance. I’m not sure how I’ll go back to working a boring, cubicle-bound corporate job after my AmeriCorps tenure ends. Fortunately, I’ve learned another beautiful thing about nonprofits, which is summed up neatly in this exchange from Shakespeare in Love:

Philip Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre [my note: read "nonprofit" here] business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
Hugh Fennyman: So what do we do?
Philip Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.
Hugh Fennyman: How?
Philip Henslowe: I don’t know. It’s a mystery.

Make a Snide Remark

Day’s Verse:
Jesus stood up and spoke to her. “Woman, where are they? Does no one condemn you?”
“No one, Master.”
“Neither do I,” said Jesus. “Go on your way. From now on, don’t sin.”
John 8:10-11 (context)

Just a quick note to say that we are still alive and kicking, but after we got back from our Ashland trip on Wednesday afternoon, I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to do more than think “I should blog,” before rushing off to do something else. The quick synopsis of our vacation was that we fell in love with Ashland and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival from the first day. That day we saw Hamlet and Henry IV (not VIII as I mistakenly said in an earlier blog). I’d never seen Hamlet as a play before, though I had read the play and seen a number of film adaptations. It was incredibly powerful; from the moment the play started, we sat entranced, and three hours flew by. Ian and I agreed we’d never seen a more masterful production. We spent the remainder of the afternoon exploring Lithia Park (along with all the other visitors to Ashland, apparently) and enjoying an excellent dinner. I had Irish nachos, which is essentially French fries topped with baked potato toppings. Oh man. Yum. We only stayed for the first half of Henry IV Part One, not because it was bad, but because it would take us another 30 minutes to get back to our campsite after the play ended, and we had Things To Do the next day.

Excitingly, as we drove back to camp on I-5, a police officer pulled Ian over. Ian, I might add, is the world’s most conscientious driver and never speeds, so we knew it wasn’t the usual reason. Our confusion quickly turned to dismay and shock when the officer informed us that both our taillights were out, and he’d pulled us over because he could only see us by the license plate illumination. Yikes! I think he could tell our dismay, horror, and surprise were genuine, because he let us go without citing us. We drove the rest of the way with emergency blinkers on and the next morning we found a gas station/repair shop and got two new light bulbs (for free! The attendant didn’t think it was worth charging us, which was nice of him).

The next day, Sunday, we went on a backstage tour, walked around Ashland some more, saw Merchant of Venice preview, and then saw Merchant of Venice. I didn’t really know anything about the story, and I was kind of expecting a comedy, since in the preview they talked about couples getting together at the end — a common ending for Shakespeare’s comedies. But Merchant of Venice was most definitely not a comedy; we came away feeling bad for Shylock and the merchant, both, and not altogether impressed with Portia’s manipulative, sneaky ways. Hamlet we knew what to expect, and sure enough, everybody died at the end. Merchant of Venice nobody died, but we left with much more mixed emotions than most other Shakespeare plays. This play required much more digesting afterward, and we had an interesting conversation about characters’ motives on the drive home.

Monday we drove to Crater Lake, and it turns out most of the drive around lake and all but one of the trails were still snowed in and inaccessible. Even so, we went on up to the lake — Ian’s first visit, and my first visit that I can remember (Mom tells me I was there as a kid, but it didn’t stick). Wow. We spent the entire time having to consciously not keep remarking on how stupendous the lake was. I filled up my camera’s 2-gig memory card for the first time ever, taking RAW HDR-ready pictures. Around noon, we reached the Cleetwood Trail and hiked down to the lake, a mere one mile, but with something like 700 feet of elevation change in that mile. Everybody else visiting Crater Lake that day — and it was many people, and the day was gorgeous — also decided to hike that trail, so it was relatively crowded and dusty. However, the lake remained serene and beautiful, and we enjoyed the views but not the mosquitoes. On the way back we stopped at the lodge for a ranger’s educational talk (“Who Really Discovered Crater Lake?” — I was expecting a discussion of Native American tribes, but he talked about the first 5 or so white guys to see the lake) and then paused at a scenic viewpoint on the Rogue River. By the way, naming a river “Rogue” opens the door to way too many puns in business names.

Tuesday we hiked up Lower Table Rock and got phenomenal views (pictures to follow). The sweeping 360° views were stunning, but I also treasured the incredible beauty of the subalpine flowers. Nearly every plant seemed to be flowering, and apparently we were very fortunate to experience that because the flowering season is quite short. In the afternoon we saw She Loves Me, which was so lovely and sweet and beautifully acted, I couldn’t stop smiling for the entire rest of the day. If I could see one of the plays again, I’d choose that one hands-down.

And the next morning we packed up and drove back home. And then we went to work the next day, which left me feeling all discombobulated. I sure could get used to 2-day workweeks, though.

1 Snide Remark

Day’s Verse:
By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work
Genesis 2:2

Ian and I are on our way to Ashland, Oregon, to enjoy the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. We’re spending the night in Salem (which we suddenly remembered was the capital of Oregon when we got here), where there’s apparently a Jehovah’s Witnesses convention. That explains why all the hotels are full up. We found a room at the Comfort Inn for more than we intended to pay, but we’re happy to have a place to stay.

Tomorrow: Ashland, Hamlet at 2:00 and Henry the VIII at 7:30 or so.

2 Snide Remarks

Day’s Verse:
That’s why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good.
Romans 8:28 (context)

If you’re like me, you’ve probably thought occasionally about how you’d like to die. It’s not that morbid; death and life go hand-in-hand, and we’ll all have to die some day. As a cyclist, I’ve thought perhaps a bit more than most people about dying, since I regularly thing I’m going to have a fatal encounter with a two-ton hunk of metal piloted by a distracted incompetent. Anyway, I think that in general we all want to die the same way: Asleep in our own beds. Who wouldn’t want to go to sleep and then simply never wake up? You might want to know ahead, so you could say goodbye to loved ones, but generally it’s about as easy of a way to go as you might hope for.

That’s just what happened with Grandma Sullivan. She seemed fine on Sunday, and then simply never woke up the next morning. We had to deal with the difficulty of what to do, but for her, it was about as peaceful and easy a way to go as you could hope for. No fear, no agonizing, no pain. I’m so glad that she didn’t have to suffer through intubation or any of those other undignified, painful life-prolonging medical procedures.

Being schizophrenic, Grandma Sullivan was never able to be a real grandma to us. She tried, though: She had Christmas presents for use every year through my childhood, even though she had very few resources to obtain gifts. She had an amazingly good attitude through all the miserable, disappointing things that happened in her life. She always seemed delighted to see us, and in February when she was sick, she made it clear that she was happy I was there. If I could have one wish, I’d wish that we’d been able to know her as she would have been without schizophrenia or the side effects of the psychiatric drugs.

My great comfort is that now she’s in heaven — she was a devout Catholic, and probably had greater and simpler faith than I’ll ever have — and is free of mental disorders, disease, suffering. She’s joined most of her family, which was always important to her (who did she “call” in her delusions? Her parents, her siblings, Grandpa Sullivan, and of course her sons). It encourages me to think of her finally getting to be free and healthy, the way God wants her to be.

Make a Snide Remark

Day’s Verse:
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:38-39

Grandma Sullivan just passed away. She seemed fine yesterday; this morning, she didn’t respond when the family home workers tried to wake her up; in the ER, they found she had pneumonia and gave her antibiotics, which caused her blood pressure to drop too much.

Goodbye, Grandma. I wish I’d gotten to know you when you were you, and not schizophrenic.

Make a Snide Remark

Day’s Verse:
…but I want you to be wise about what is good, and innocent about what is evil.
Romans 16:19b

I haven’t mentioned the BP oil spill for the last 8 weeks, but that isn’t because I don’t care. Every piece of news I hear about it — and I can hardly help but hear and read about the spill; in addition to hearing about it from news outlets, I receive emails from the Sierra Club and/or Nature Conservancy almost daily asking for help and money — makes me die a little bit inside. The environmental impact is astonishingly bad already and the future looks like it will only get worse for a very long time.

This dire situation forces people to take some kind of response. You can throw up your hands and say it’s hopeless; you can leap into action helping to clean up; you can reassess and change your lifestyle; you can blame other people; or, best of all, you can joke about it. (These aren’t, of course, mutually exclusive responses, nor is this list exhaustive. Feel free to comment with other responses to this disaster.)

Joking about the BP spill — really, joking about BP’s response to the spill — doesn’t make the spill less bad or minimize its importance. I talked to somebody who simply cannot joke about it because she thinks joking means you aren’t taking the disaster seriously. I think that if you can’t see the humorous side in even these dark circumstances, you need to reassess the way you view life.

On that note, I present three excellent instances of BP-inspired black humor:

1. Massive Flow of Bullshit Continues To Gush from BP Headquarters (The Onion)
   

   Sample quote: The toxic bullshit, which began to spew from the mouths of BP executives shortly after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in April, has completely devastated the Gulf region, delaying cleanup efforts, affecting thousands of jobs, and endangering the lives of all nearby wildlife.

2. The BP Coffee Spill (Grist.org)
   

   Sample quote: “Don’t worry … it’s a small spill on a very large table.”

3. BPGlobalPR (Twitter)
   

   Sample quote: Sending some lawyers down to the Earth’s crust to deliver a Cease and Desist. That oughtta do it.

1 Snide Remark

Day’s Verse:
“In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.”
John 14:2-3

Today is moving day.

Yes, the last week and a half we’ve spent moving this and that from here and there. People keep asking, “Have you moved yet?” –to which we have no short answer, since yes, our stuff now occupies the house (in boxes still), but we continued to occupy the bedroom in my parents’ home.

Today, we put that last piece into place.

We packed up all our remaining necessities and have shuttled back and forth, moving everything. The last load of laundry is drying. I scrubbed the bathroom, have bedding in the washer, and vacuumed the bedroom. When the laundry finishes drying, we’re moving out.

I feel this strange sadness at leaving home, even though we’re only moving 3 miles away and I eagerly anticipate living on our own again. Yet the close, familiar, comfortable relationships and habits we’ve developed over the past 6 months will, I think, prove difficult to break. In short, I’ve really enjoyed living with my parents again, after we worked out a few kinks, and I’m sad (and happy) to be leaving. And I’m going to miss having the dog so constantly in my life.

2 Snide Remarks

Day’s Verse:
Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Romans 12:1-2

Today I had to run an errand to a place about 3 miles from home. The weather finally gave us a break from 55°F and rainy; the sun shone, puffy clouds floated across the sky, and people started emerging from their cocoons. For a moment I thought of driving my errand — it was to a car dealership to get touch-up paint — but I decided, naturally, to run my errand by bike. I have the red rental bike set up for comfortable short-distance normal-clothes riding, and this was the perfect opportunity to use it.

As I rode there, I sat up and enjoyed the feel of the sun on my skin, the wind in my face, the chirp of birds… Along the way, I saw a young couple, dressed to the nines as if for a formal dance, posing for pictures in front of their car. As I rode by, a woman I assume was the mother tried to pull them into one more picture, while the couple tried to get into the car. The mother was exuberantly exclaiming, “This is a very special evening!” while other family members standing nearby cried, “They have to go!” in tones I thought were reserved for movies.

When I arrived at the car dealership, a suited and tied young man asked, “Can I help you?” I indicated my bike and said, “Can I trade this thing in?” and he, hardly missing a beat, said “Sure, that plus a lot of money,” as he held the service entrance door for me. I parked my bike inside the service waiting area, and had no trouble finding a spot. The touch-up paint cost an arm and a leg, considering the microscopic volume we received. It did match the car, though, and I have protected the metal that had started to show where the bike rack rubs on the back.

On the way home with my tiny container of more-precious-than-gold (although gold closed at $1,219.10 per ounce on Friday, so maybe that’s a slight overstatement. But not much.) paint, I came upon a lemonade stand that had sprung up since I’d ridden by 15 minutes earlier. One kid had dressed up all in yellow and waved a yellow sign that, logically, read “LEMONADE!” The other kid manned the booth, which bore another sign informing me that I could exchange $0.25 for one glass of lemonade. A quick mental inventory informed me that I had a quarter, so I pulled over. I remember how excited I felt when adults, especially strangers, bought lemonade from my stands; now I consider it my adult responsibility to stop at every kid’s lemonade stand I encounter.

So I duly obtained my cup of lemonade and learned that I had received a blend of regular and pink (explaining the extremely watered-down pink look), but that it was from a mix (I’m guessing Minute Maid; it was better than Country Time and did appear to have lemon bits in it) not from fresh lemons. They then said that the one kid was wearing every yellow thing they had, and that seemed an appropriate way to attract customers to a lemonade stand. As we talked and I drank my lemonade, another adult with maroon hair pulled up and parked. She, too, bought a lemonade and we had a bit of a conversation. I rode off feeling a happy glow unrelated to the cool, not-too-bad lemonade I’d purchased.

To top it off, as I rode into our neighborhood, some kids were drawing on the road with chalk as their parents chatted nearby. I cruised by very slowly and stopped to talk with them, too. I learned that the kid was drawing a rocket ship with a bridge to the astronaut’s planet. Dad helped quite a bit with the astronauts, but the bridge and planet were definitely the son’s work. I said hi to all the other adults and walked the last half-block home.

Can you see why I love bicycling? In a car, none of those experiences would have happened. Yes, I would have gotten my expensive paint sooner. But I would have missed the romantic evening getaway those young people were having; the oh-so-snappy repertoire with the car salesman; the lemonade stand; and the neighborhood good-weather-chatting. In short, I would have completely missed out on the community experiences. Community relationships make life meaningful.

I think most people don’t even realize what they’re missing when they retreat into their insulated, isolated wheeled metal shells. Walking, biking, taking public transit — in addition to encouraging a healthier, more active lifestyle (here, here, and here, for starters) and reducing our oil dependence, these modes of transportation slow us down, force us to experience the world around us, elevate us from mere spectators to actors. I hope that next time you have a short errand to run, you will consider building the community and enhancing your quality of life by leaving the car at home. Take my word for it: You won’t regret the decision.

2 Snide Remarks

Day’s Verse:
Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts, according to the grace given us. If a man’s gift is prophesying, let him use it in proportion to his faith. If it is serving, let him serve; if it is teaching, let him teach; if it is encouraging, let him encourage; if it is contributing to the needs of others, let him give generously; if it is leadership, let him govern diligently; if it is showing mercy, let him do it cheerfully.
Romans 12:4-8

Lately, I’ve been working on creating a checklist for the volunteer program at the Bike Alliance. I figured a checklist was a pretty simple thing at heart, right? How could you have different ways of writing or interpreting a checklist?

Well, a quick unofficial survey of Bike Alliance staff members showed that people think about checklists differently.

Some people use checklists as a “Done” list rather than a “To-do List,” and would like to see everything in past tense:

• Did laundry

• Reserved Zipcar
• Went to Safeway

This seemed counter-intuitive to me. Yes, when you’re done, the list would document what you completed; but if that was its primary purpose, wouldn’t we call it a “Checked List” rather than a “Check List”?

Then there are the people who just write shorthand checklists:

• Laundry

• Zipcar
• Safeway

A shorthand list like that works because you already have context and an entire idea string associated with each of those words. You just need the list as a reminder of what to do. So when a person writes a shorthand checklist like that, here’s what they actually see when they read the list:

• Wash the towels, bike clothes, and perma-press clothes.

• Reserve a Zipcar for the trip to Spokane this weekend.
• Buy groceries for the salad to go with tonight’s dinner.

That kind of list works great if you have the context, but if you don’t have the background knowledge, those keywords won’t trigger any meaningful reminders for you. You’ll just know that you need to do something with laundry, but what? Wash it? Dry it? Fold it? Put it away? And which laundry?

Another other kind of list people seem to use is a more detailed list that contains tasks broken out into sub-tasks:

• Do laundry
  • Towels

  • Bike Clothes
  • Perma-press
• Reserve Zipcar
• Go to Safeway
  • Lettuce

  • Carrots
  • Broccoli
  • Tomatoes

This type of list works a bit better when the reader doesn’t have the context, since it lays out more details of each task as well as giving the overarching task.

Both of these styles of lists assume a competency in doing laundry, reserving a Zipcar, or choosing and buying produce. The checklist I’m creating for the volunteer program has to assume zero competency to start with, and I have to try to envision and explicitly describe each task and sub-task. This is, frankly, impossible: I have an idea of what needs to happen overall, but the nitty-gritty remains nebulous. Because this program hasn’t yet become real and people haven’t started doing the steps, I’m not sure what each individual task will actually entail when it’s acted out in reality.

I do believe that a checklist can ease the transition as we move into a new way of interacting with volunteers. Atul Gawande’s interesting article “The Checklist” and this related NPR spot reinforce the value of using checklists. I’ve put a hold on his book The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, but 108 other people have put holds on it ahead of me. In the meantime, I get the privilege of trying to write one checklist that makes sense to seven different brains.

Here goes. Good thing I have an inspirational Indiana Jones soundtrack to keep me going!

Make a Snide Remark