(Flexible Number of) Slow Takes Thursdays Vol. 2

So, I know that 7 Quick Takes are supposed to happen on Fridays, but keep getting inspired to do them on Thursdays. And mine are never very quick, so…

I move to institute (Flexible Number of) Slow Take Thursdays here on Drops of Jupiter! And if no one follows suit, that’s perfectly OK, especially if they already write Quick Takes on Fridays!

1. Habitforge: Leo Tolstoy once wrote (I’m paraphrasing) that morality and the whole essence of a person lies in the smallest of their actions and habits. After reading that, it dawned on me that not all of my actions and habits reflect the type of person that I want to be. (Specifically, I am quite a messy person. But I don’t really think that fits with the rest of my personality, and it certainly does not reflect the type of responsible adult that I want to be!) I let the notion drift around my head for a while, but not with any idea of how to change my behavior.

Enter inspiration from my lovely friend, Lindsey. She wrote a post on her family blog about Habitforge.com, a website that allows you to set up a goal and desire, and then tracks your daily progress on completing the goal for twenty-one consecutive days (on the premise that it takes three weeks to establish a habit). If you miss a day, you have to start over! So I set up an account and entered three goals: making my bed each morning before work (getting to it on my lunch break does not count!), picking all the laundry up off the floor and either putting it away or in the laundry basket before bed (my mother will be the first to tell you that I’ve been terrible at that for the last twenty-three and a half years!), and hitting all of my prayer devotions every day (I was getting woefully lazy at keeping up with those!).

I think what makes this so effective for me is the fact that I can see my daily progress (or lack thereof), and if I mess up, there’s no one to blame except myself. I hope to have become a habitually neat and responsible person at the end of this voyage, and then set new goals once I’ve mastered these! Thank you, Lindsey!

“You cannot dream yourself into a character: you must hammer and forge yourself into one." -Henry David Thoreau

2. Running: Along the lines of my wanting to be more responsible for myself, I’ve decided to be more proactive about the care and feeding of my body. As easy as it is to blame anything I don’t like about myself on genetics and lack of time or resources to exercise and/or eat well, the fact is that I am the only person responsible for my health and well-being! I don’t want to reach middle-age with manifold health problems because established crappy habits in my young adulthood. Moreover (and more importantly) my body is a gift from God (see Psalm 139:13-18), and the best way to thank Him for it and honor His gift is to take good care of it!

But, like my messy habits from early in life, it was hard for me to establish a routine to hold myself accountable for my habits. I’d typically go for a run whenever I felt like it, which sometimes meant only once or twice a week.

However, I’ve since been inspired by Christine, my roommate. She’s training for the Hood to Coast Relay in Oregon this coming August, and to keep herself on track she writes her running stats on a calendar so that she can commit to five runs per week. I don’t know if I can handle five quite yet, but since Easter I’ve been writing my mileage on a calendar. It hasn’t been spectacular so far, but it does motivate me to do better each week.

3. Work: Once again, work has been inordinately stressful lately. Without getting into the details of how it happened (who knows might read this blog!), the facts are these: Upper management (read: my supervisor’s boss) decided to change the chain of command in the social services office. We now report to the management/ leasing department instead of to Irma, the department head.

(Which, to my way of thinking, is a huge conflict of interest. The social services department was established specifically to advocate for our tenants when the rules and regulations of the leasing office shouldn’t necessarily apply to them for various medical and psychosocial reasons. Management suddenly controlling social services undermines the purpose and effectiveness of the office, and certainly undercuts our ability to serve our clients. It’s like forcing the defense attorney to answer to the prosecutor during a trial; the prosecutor would certainly win every case).

One of management’s first moves was to take away my office and give it to our new advancement director (a fancy term for the guy who raises funds for this building), and put me in his old office. On the surface, this shouldn’t seem like something to get upset about; it’s a nice office with a window to the park just outside. But it is situated far away from the social services office, within the building community center. The new geography has effectively removed me from my position as a case manager in social services. So my old department is significantly compromised with one of three case managers gone (and 402 tenants to keep an eye on), and my new position doesn’t really serve any purpose for my original assignment or the larger picture of social justice.

The other problem with this office is that the community center boasts a very nice television and a great sound system. But it’s on all the time, and it’s very loud. Irrespective of my disliking too much TV to begin with, having a television blaring in surround sound directly outside my office is not conducive to getting any work done. (Before you ask, yes, I turn the sound off every morning. But invariably, someone bangs on my window until I turn it back up. I'm lucky to go for an hour in silence.)

I worry that this may be an irreversible change, and though I’m trying to stay positive, I’m more than a little worried for what this means for the rest of my volunteer year. I feel that these new changes were not made with the wellbeing of our clients or social justice in mind. (I have to stop writing about this here because if I don’t I’m going to start spilling things that shouldn’t be posted on a public blog.)

4. JVC is awesome: One of the things that made me like JVC over a lot of other volunteer programs is that there is a strong support structure built into our lives as volunteers. We have: our immediate community of JVs; support people (usually FJVs who live in the area) who come hang out with us, pray with us, and buy us dinner and drinks; a Jesuit liaison, usually an SJ priest or scholastic who lives in the area; and the JVC office itself, whose staff keeps an eye on all of its volunteers, helps us with things like our medical insurance, and periodically comes to visit our volunteer communities.

Andrew, my community’s program coordinator, came to visit earlier this week. He checked in with each of us to see how we’re doing at work, in community, and personally. In light of the above work situation, we had a lot to talk about. I also was able to talk about some personal issues that I feel are not appropriate to talk about in my community, and my plans for next year. It was so nice just to have someone whose job is to make sure I’m being treated fairly at work and that I’m functioning well in other areas of my life. JVC is really great at making sure we have ready access to support like that.

I may be the only person in the history of “Quick” Takes to make four takes so long, so I’ll stop now. Happy Thursday, everyone!