Day 14: Inspiration and Exhaustion

Mysterious backlight on the BART, perfect for fellow 826 volunteer

Today I'm going to strive for more depth. It's not after my bedtime for a change, I've already met my person for the day, I'm nearly halfway done with the project... a perfect time for some reflection.

I'm getting tired of this. But not in the ways that I expected.

This morning provides a perfect example. I gave myself a few hours off from work (fine, I admit it, pretty much the whole day), and headed into the city for a volunteer training on how to run field trips at the amazing 826 Valencia.

826 Valencia is a pirate store and tutoring center, affiliated with McSweeney's and founded by Dave Eggers. Its sensibility is what you might call 'rococo absurdist.' I love it. I've loved it since even before I moved to the Bay Area, thanks to a blog post by my favorite museum philosopher, Nina Simon. I've been planning to volunteer at 826 since I knew I was coming into its sphere of influence.

So I attended a volunteer training, and got all excited. And then I never did anything else. That was last November.

Enter Encantada Project. As I have every week since last November, the other day I got an email newsletter from the 826 staff touting all the great stuff they're doing. But this time, rather than clicking the "archive" button right away ("delete" would involve admitting I wasn't going to do anything about the call to action), I clicked the little gmail star and labeled it Encantada Project. Because there's nowhere I'm more sure to meet interesting, very cool people than at 826, and because it's better late than never, I signed up for a training this week, and another next Thursday, and vowed to get more involved.

This is the part of the project that I'm not getting tired of at all: the part that spurs me out of my chair and into the world; the part that says "What are you waiting for? Just go do it!"; the part that looks at sociocultural experiences as just as important and essential as doing work or getting exercise or eating food; the part that's done with excuses. Already, in the last two weeks, I've done more things that make me appreciate living the Berkeley than I'd done in the six months preceding them. For that, I have this constructed set of rules to thank.

As I expected, the training was great. In fact, the training was better than great, because it was better than I expected. I got pushed out of my comfort zone and discovered I could probably do something (play the character of a crotchety old editor) better than I'd thought I could. I'm looking forward to going back.

And as I hoped, I met my new person for the day. Steven (or Stephen, I didn't ask) -- also a new volunteer -- and I ended up walking to the BART together and quite naturally fell into an easy conversation. He's a film guy, does screenwriting and poetry, lives in Oakland, used to do improv, is involved in underground art.

Here's the part I'm getting sick of: After a good 15-20 minutes of pleasant chat, I had to break the flow and bring up the project. "I've got kind of a strange favor to ask you," I started, and went into my spiel about meeting a new person every day for 30 days and writing about it and would you mind if I write about you and can I also take a photo. Once his initial look of skepticism faded, Stev/phen took it in stride. "If I can have the link to your blog project," he countered. Of course. Camera comes out, one shot, bam, it goes away. No big deal.

So why am I coming to dread that moment? Even with people who I've met entirely because of the project and who know what I'm up to from the beginning, pulling out the camera and making it official feels like throwing a goldfish in the punch bowl.

Perhaps it's because the photo turns the encounter into a transaction. I take your face, and the superficial details I've managed to scrape together about you, and I turn them into something I can use, something hardly about you at all. How could this blog really be about the people I'm meeting? By the time I write about them, I've known them for less than a day. The photo moment seems to coagulate an inherent selfishness that courses through this endeavor.

I have noticed my attitude shifting in some positive ways, though. I saw it Wednesday at the White Horse, and yesterday at the Guac Fest, and today at the training. I've acquired a degree of faith in my ability to meet someone, which brings with it a measure of relaxation. Or perhaps it's just that I'm increasingly repulsed at the desperation that threatens to well up inside me, that has done so before -- because of needing to meet the quota set out by the project, yes, but even more because of needing to prove to myself that I can be liked. Facing that darkness every day is teaching me to conquer it.  I'm learning to trust myself as a defense mechanism against the unpleasant, tiring waves of self-doubt, but it's also helping to show my inner critics that that trust is valid. Self-fulling prophecy, if you will.

So I'm tired of the project, but I'm not tempted to give it up. I've heard it takes three weeks of new behavior for something to become a habit and override what came before; I've got another sixteen days to keep pushing this project along. After that, I'll have the rest of my life to figure out what joys my new habits can bring. I have faith that I'll find a few. At the very least, I'll have Irish dancing and the pirate store...