Inland, Dreaming of Waves

Where's my stick?

I so didn't want to copyedit today.

Despite how fascinating "Germany and the Americas" might be, I just wanted to curl up in a chair on this rainy day and drink something hot and sweet and read a trashy fantasy novel. But I tried to be a good girl. I called the contractor who can't be bothered to hurry his artistic ass along and finish my kitchen. I seem to be in the remodel from hell, and I can't get out. Even my mother-in-law is calling me "too nice," when I'm way more confrontational than most of the Bradleys (my husband's family). Mostly I'm looking for a way to turn loose electrical wires into a designer statement. Martha, please help!

I rewrote my story on rock gardens that I'm supposed to send to the Rocky Mountain News in early April. I tried to copyedit but kept wanting to fall asleep. I like working with words. But something about reading on a computer is so DAMN sleep-inducing. It's gonna be a long time before we regularly read books on hand-held computers, believe me.

Maybe my mood was less than, shall we say, enhanced, by my spending all weekend at a crew leader training. There I was sitting in class all weekend, at a state park that is only a vision of itself at this point. (In other words, it's overused farmland that needs major restoration, and part of our job this weekend was to help a little.)

They tried to scare us to death. I've been doing restoration projects for 5 years now, and I've never been on a crew where someone had a meltdown or a major problem with the leader or another crew member. But their training was all about that. The problem was, I never got to role-play being a crew leader with a problem person. Shouldn't that be the point of leadership training? Doing it, not reading and listening about it? I got to play the ineffectual sub-leader who thwarts the crew leader's best intentions. Great! If I ever get someone like that on a crew, I'll know how that person feels--bored stiff! And the people who did get to role-play leaders were teachers and other types who already had years of experience dealing with slackers and troublemakers. Why couldn't they resist the urge to jump in already and let us newbies timidly raise our hands after nobody else had volunteered?

Anyway, I'm not too worried. People who volunteer for restoration projects generally know they're going to be doubled over all day picking weeds or wielding a pick-mattock. They're not the type to complain about too much work. In fact, Wildlands Restoration Volunteers has a picture of a guy with a t-shirt, "Work doesn't scare me!" (Though now that I checked, I can't find it under the project I thought he wore it for.) I can think of only one person on a crew who couldn't handle the work, and she was old, and the elevation was 11,000 feet. I didn't feel that she was a wimp; in fact, I felt bad that none of the people on the crew had even noticed she was having a hard time.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to whipping motley groups of people into restoration machines. As long as they don't throw me off the edge of a cliff. I've never been that comfortable in groups; I'm more comfortable one on one. So the only reason I can think of for volunteering to lead a group is that alternate reality episode of Star Trek: Next Generation, in which Jean-Luc Picard never fought the Klingons when he was a student at the academy (I think it was Klingons) and thus turned into a wannabe leader instead of a captain. It's a great episode, though typically male in its equation of violence with leadership.

Hmm, maybe that's not such a great example after all; I'm not supposed to beat the volunteers into submission but motivate them.

Oh hell. Where's my stick?

posted by Price of Silence @ 8:56 PM