Burned Spaghetti

I’m living on my own again for the first time in half a decade. I’ve had roommates for the entirety of my mid-twenties. I’m in a studio in a nice part of town. Walking distance from my favorite book store. And the water. And a brewery that is also a dog park. Things could be worse.

I lost some things in the move. Some small things. Mostly power cords. I have to wait until payday before I can replace the power cord for my computer because the rent on this place is so high. I think it’s probably worth it. But it means I have to do this on my phone.

I’ve just been working. Two jobs. Kinda. One and one eighth of a job. It’s basically a volunteer gig. Especially now.

I’m watching another non-profit social program cannibalize itself. I’m starting to wonder if I’m the problem.

It’s an afterschool program in a small town. I just show up once a week and cook the dinner. Talk with a kid who had a hard day. I like being in the kitchen. I think kitchens are special places.

I like what I do for this place, and what it does for me. The more regular staff don’t have to worry about cooking for the night, and I get to go to the kitchen and quietly explode. I toil over the simple meal that I am clearly over complicating. I get active. Put on some music. Get to work. Bust out the pots and pans and seasonings and over-engineer some spaghetti. Moving without efficiency or any real sense of planning I just go where I think I should be not even next, but now. I get to live into my brain a little bit. Let it move me on instinct.

While I’m doing this little dance with myself, a kid might open the door and take a peak at what I’m up to. This interaction ranges wildly in its content. “When’s dinner?” is a pretty common refrain. Staring is pretty standard as well, sometimes without saying a word before leaving, usually as a response to my noticing. Sometimes they ask for a snack or a meal to take home. I’ll ask if they have food at home, if that’s something that they worry about not having. I’ll ask it every time. I have to be brave about asking so that they can be brave about answering.

Sometimes they open the door and say it smells good. That always feels nice, even though I’m probably just frying some garlic.

Sometimes they ask if they can join me, and they’ll pull up a stool. And I will know that my manufactured chaos is doing its job. From behind this chaos I’ll lob some questions. “How’s your day going? How was school?” Pretty standard fare.

And from the other side of my frantic dashing and stirring, sometimes I’ll hear from beyond the noise, “not so good, actually”.

And then I get to stop.

I have engineered an environment in which I have an ability to let things come to a stop, for now. It’s just pasta after all, I can burn a few noodles.

Not over dramatize, or over focus. Stop just enough to communicate that what I’m doing doesn’t really matter. It will get done. Take a seat and let me know what’s up.

Someone up above fucked up. Someone in finance. We don’t have as much money as we thought we did. I say “we”, I mean the agency which employs us all.

The C-suite is being coy about it. Maybe because they have to be. But it’s clear that someone somewhere fudged a number. And now we’re done. Program staff were soft-laid off. By which I mean they were given a new set standard number of expected hours which would not reasonably sustain anyone without another source of income, and so were forced to quit. We’ve maintained a skeleton crew for now, a couple managers. And myself, who doesn’t need this job.

The kitchen is getting a remodel, by the way.

I know. Finances are complicated. Funding sources, or something. This is a hard job. No one really knows what they’re doing anyway. Or at least we’re all doing our best.

The program staff didn’t just do their best, they did their jobs. And it didn’t matter.

I don’t know what to do with this. It’s far from the first time I’ve directly witnessed something like this, and I’m starting to think it’s not actually personal. I’m starting to think it’s kind of a feature. A sort of planned obsolescence. Not consciously. Built into the bones of the way we organize and are taught to bring about social change through proper avenues. The co-opting of activism by agencies too closely reliant on capital.

I’ve been reading some books.

I think in my 29th year alone in this nice new apartment I need to make a pretty big decision about my future.