Our Dumb Blog

Cara manned a booth from the Leadership Institute at a home school convention
here in Richmond Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I came home early on Friday
from work because Ken needed me to Fed-ex something. Cara called soon after
I got home. I agreed to meet her at her hotel in Midtown.

We went out to eat at the Olive Garden at the YLS’s expense. After I put a
guilt trip on her about the tip she left, we drove “in search of a bar” but
ended up at Books-a-million instead. Somehow we ended up in the art section.
“Dali!” I cry, spotting a propped up figure jutting out from a shelf. Cara
makes a face and expresses her disgust. “_I_ like… Monet!” she grabs a
Impressionism off the shelf. We find a common ground in Geogia O’Keefe as
one of the store employees asks, “Can I help you find anything?” “No, we’re
just browsing, thanks,” answers my friend. “Well, we’re closing in a couple
of minutes,” the clerk notifies us, emphatically. We exit the building, give
up on the bar, and make our way back to the hotel. We read USA Today before
going to bed. I forgot my p.j.’s, and I’m out of clean underwear.

In the morning, Cara dresses professionally. I throw on a denim skirt and a
pair of tennis shoes. I flip from Headline News to CNN while waiting for her
to finish showering. We share a paper, eating the complementary breakfest
downstairs. A cure for AIDS is discovered. We check out of the room and go
in her car to the convention center.

We’re early. We sit down in a couple of chairs and talk while watching
people walk by. Whenever someone acts interested, I shut up, and Cara goes
into action, trying to sell home schoolers on the Leadership Institute. Over
the course of the day, people pick the climax of whatever story I’m telling
to appear at the booth. I tell about 20 half stories. I forget what they
are after they leave.

There aren’t too many people wandering by the booth this early in the day.
We leave the booth unattended and go look at book tables. Cara points out
all the Christian romances she read growing up. I get excited at the
fantasies. We return to the booth. Cara had taught given a workshop on
Thursday about instilling leadership in your child. A guy who had attended
it, asks if she’d like to join his family for lunch. He has a daughter who’s
considering going to college when she’s 16 too. He comes back later
apologizing that he has to retract his offer because of scheduling conflicts
but asks her to talk to his daughter anyway. The daughter and mother join
him later. Cara starts talking to the dad and daughter. The mother has by
now sat in Cara’s empty seat. I pull up my chair and talk to her. I tell
her about my experiences home schooling, taking the SAT, ACT, GED, my first
reactions to college life, my advice about math, and generally encourage her.
They eventually leave. The mom thanks me. Cara and I leave for lunch.
“Gosh, I love doing that!” I exclaim to her, “I really love that!”

I eat my fried rice, sweet and sour and cashew chicken exclusively with
chopsticks. After lunch, Cara stops at a photo booth. “You want to?” she
grins. “You,” I observe, “are crazy.” “Oh, come on; it’ll be fun!” I climb
into the tiny compartment after her. I read the instructions out loud while
she attempts to cram a couple of crumpled bills into the money slot: “‘Pick
background.’ What background do we want, red or blue?” “Blue. This one
won’t go in there; maybe this one…” “‘Adjust seat hight until eye level
with green light. Insert money…'” “There! Smile!” The screen ahead of
us explodes in a white flash. “We’ve got to do a crazy one!” Cara insists.
She sticks her tongue out. I cross my eyes. FLASH. I move my hand with
fingers extended into a V behind her head. She ducks. FLASH. We just plain
grin. FLASH. We groan and blindly extricate ourselves from the compartment.
“‘Pictures will be delivered here in five minutes.'” We wait. I treat Cara
to a gumball. Her mouth turns blue. Mine, green. Several minutes later,
the booth spits out four prints. “Here they are! Wait, these aren’t us…”
And they aren’t. There are two photos of a black lady and then two with her
and two kids. Not us. We wait four more minutes by my watch I pull out of
my pocket to check occasionally. Nothing. Cara is bummed. We walk back to
the convention center.

At 5:30, Cara demolishes the booth (her booth, not the photo booth), packs it
into a small plastic container on wheels, and we trot off toward the parking
lot. She drops me off at my car still at the hotel. I get home with only
one wrong turn and two missed ones.

“Are you a mouse?”

I looked up from where I was silently thumbing through index cards in a card catalog drawer and pulling author/book cards. Florence was standing there addressing me, “You’re so quiet! Cough or something once in a while. Get up andmove around! Anything to let us know you’re there.” She paused and put her hand on my shoulder then asked, “ARE you there”

I answered quietly. “No.”

When I’m not acting loud and raucous, I do tend to be unobtrusive, especially in new situations. I’ve entered the house, made my way around, and eventually entered whatever room my hostess or floormate is in to have them jump in surprise when they look up to see me there. “Oh! I didn’t hear you!” I’ve started purposely making noise when I enter a room so that I won’t catch them off guard.

I also don’t have much to say… or not the inclination to say it. Out loud. My friend in Washington’s coworker told me my friend had “warned me you were laid back.” I may have smiled somewhat at that point.
But Florence was right. I wasn’t really there among the 3×5 cards. My internship so far has consisted of mindless work like this, but I enjoy it because I can let my mind roam while I’m doing it. I think I also like it because I love putting things in there place, organization, etc. Don’t ask me to apply any of this to my own life, but getting paid to do it for someone else? Heck yeah.

It might seem like the most boring work in the world. A typical day (although those seem few and far between) starts with me getting up around 8 andtaking a 15-20 minute drive to work. It’s actually Ken’s house that he’s added an enclosed and expanded garage to which houses his books, office, and studio. The organization I’m working for is called Mars Hill Audio. It puts out a bimonthly audio magazine (on tape) with 8-10 minute articles on cultural issues. Sort of like NPR. Ken does a lot of the interviews in the studio. He’s got probably more than 12,000 books and getting new ones all the time. My job so far is to put library of congress labels on all the new ones. Working backward, I’ve reached “P” according to author last name in the room full of books yet to be shelved. Then I get to try to make space among the books already there for the new arrivals. Most of them are ended up getting stacked on top of the pre-existing ones. When I’m not doing that, I’m entering data from the catalog cards (that I mentioned pulling earlier) into a computer database. Author name, Title, Place of Publication, Publisher, Date, Call Number, and Description. Since last week I’ve entered two stacks of cards about 3 inches high. I’ve got another batch about that big to do now, and that makes up two drawers of the 8-drawer card catalog filing cabinate. Then after I do the Author/Book cards, I get to do the reviews. Then the magazine articles. Then maybe the titles or the subject headings.

I don’t think I will complete this task this summer.

But there’s other things I do. Like make copies or type up address labels and find envelopes to mail things. Stuff like that. I proofread 200 odd pages of subject titles today.

On Tuesdays Ken and I drive from Powhatan,Virginia, where he lives, about 60 miles or so away to Charlottesville, where the Mars Hill office is. That’s where the two full time employees work along with the other intern and the volunteer, Florence. Florence is almost 70, but refuses to act her age. She’s also very outspoken. Which leads her to say things like, “Make more noise!”
I coughed later on in the day. She’d already left. A pity.

I went to DC this last weekend. Visited a friend I’ve known for longer than
I can remember and went to a Broadcast Journalism School put on by an
organization called Youth Leadership something or other. Which was great
except that I have no desire to get into broadcast journalism. And any
inklings I had in that direction were quickly snuffed out as the weekend
progressed.

I also learned how to network. No, not like how to run a bunch of computers
at the same time, which might have been somewhat useful. I learned how to
meet people, find out as much as I can about them, and manipulate them into
doing things for me. No, it’s not that callous, but not exactly my style
either.

I ALSO learned about the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and how to
be an optimist. I’m happy to say that I’m still as ineffective and
pessimistic as ever.

But, despite my cynicism, the weekend was not the waste I may be making it
out to be. I learned a great deal, whether I’ll use it or not, and got
exposed to a lot of ideas that are good for me to be aware of. I also
determined that I’ll never fit into Washington professionalism, and I have no
desire to work there.

But as my friend I was staying with told me, “You are the one person I never
have to worry about fitting into the cookie cutter role of all that. You are
your own person, unlike anyone else I know.”

Which led me to the realization that I’ll probably be cursed with kids who
want to be perfectly normal.

In other news, I spent a good deal of time on the phone talking to my mom
this evening and on the keyboard (piano) playing after not having access to
one all weekend. Which means that, despite drinking a cup of coffee after
supper, I don’t have the time or energy to expound on anything more than I’ve
already covered about the weekend.

You can stop cheering now.
But there will be other trips to Washington, so maybe I’ll tell you about all
of that.

In still other news, I found 3 four-leaf clovers on Friday. I also got to DC
from here (leaving at 5:45 pm) in 2 hours and back (leaving at 9:15 pm) in 1
and 1/2. Which, as I understand it, is very good time. Think there’s a
connection? Well, take into account that I also got lost on the way and
almost got hit (never turn left from the right hand lane) as I finally saw my
friend waiting by the side of the road ready to flag me down.

In case you’re wondering, the subject title of this e-mail has nothing to do
with its contents.

Susanna was watching a STTNG episode today in the living room. Actually,
Jonathan was watching Empire Stikes Back (or is it Emperor? Umpire?), and I
had to leave the office while Ken was doing an interview, so I watched the
end of that.

“Leah…Leah…”
“Turn back, I know where Luke is!”

Anyway, then Susanna got to watch her Star Trek. Ken’s got like all of them
but 2 taped. I think I mentioned that. And I was still in there, so I
watched it too. It was one where Picard gets captured (she watched both part
one and two of this episode) by the Cardminians or whatever they’re called
and tortured. It was pretty cool.

“THERE… ARE… FOUR… LIGHTS!!!!!”

Going to Charlottesville tomorrow.

“Come in here, I want to show you how this works,” yelled Ken from the Studio. I dropped the book I was entering into the computer and ran into the next room. Ken was running some tape through one of the three reel to reelplayers in there. “This is called a pancake,” he said, as he spun tape off the roll without a reel around it. Then he quickly explained what he was doing as he expertly punched buttons, switched levers, and spun reels, leaving me with an even more vague impression of what it’s like to mix audio. He played the tape of the guy he’d interviewed on phone from across the country, stopped it, played the tape of himself asking questions, stopped, spun the reel backwards, and then set it for when the guy said “T…” of the “two” of counting backwards from five. Then he played the two tapes together. The rich sound of his studio recorded voice grated against the metallic sound of his voice over the phone lines as they played out of sync by a nanosecond. “That’s close enough,” announced Ken, quite pleased. He turned down the channels of him and the interviewee on the phone and left the two studio recorded voices playing. “Now I’ll check every five minutes or so to make sure they’re still in sync,” he said, “and adjust it over here if one runs faster than the other.” We listened to the two voices discussing a novel the guy being interviewed had written. “We’ll edit most of this stuff out,” Ken said, “I’m just trying to draw him out.” Near the end, Ken grinned and said, “Sounds like we’re sitting next to each other, doesn’t it? Who’d of thought we were separated by thousands of miles?”