The Blurgh

I attended a meeting of Students for a Sustainable Pittsburgh for the first time in a while last night, and I’ve missed a lot of stuff. The last thing I mentioned was how they were lobbying the city to enact the Open Doors Initiative, which is a program to make it easier for recent college grads to enter careers in city government. That did end up passing, so for those of you who are graduating and thinking about what the hell you’ll be doing with yourself in the coming months, contact SSP for details.

Given that it’s the end of the semester and a whole new batch of seniors is about to enter the “real world,” the topic of the meeting last night was how to stay involved with SSP and the university community after graduation. A lot of SSP alum have gone on to do amazing things, but I was surprised to find out that there was no official method being used to keep in touch with past members. Starting this year, though, there will be a new officer position created to do just that.

I think it’s a great idea, because I never really realized how important it is to keep in touch with people and maintain networks until just the past few months. The quality of the work you do is important, but the people who know the work you’re capable of doing is even more important. Or at least that was SSP’s pitch for the idea

So, in the spirit of helping those who will come later, I signed up for the SSP alum email list and to be a mentor for those who need one. Now I just have to get my shit together so I have something to mentor them about…

Given that today seems like a beautiful, if crisp, day, I think I’m going to see if I can get some folks together tonight to cut a rug at a bar/restaurant in Bloomfield called Manic Attic. It’s a small place (as all places in Bloomfield are), but they have a house band that plays music that’s not too in-your-face, but also not drowsy. The kind of place where it’ possible to sit at the bar and talk to friends or get down on the dance floor, and it’s all good.

One of my favorite parts about the place, though, is the welcoming atmosphere. Most dance places, especially in other towns, have a real “screw you” attitude towards their clientèle–if you’re not hot and/or a great dancer, you don’t belong. Those kinds of places feed a common perception people have that they have to be good at something before they even try it, lest they embarrass themselves.

What the hell kind of BS is that? Manic Attic doesn’t buy into that sort of self-defeating and elitist drivel, and the way they counter it is with leading by example.

Although I don’t know the folks personally, I heard that the place was started by a group of friend’s who were fed up with how the dance scene was so non-inclusive, so they started their own place. Some of them are there almost every night, and they just rock out with reckless abandon. It’s hard to see them having fun and not want to join in, and that’s usually what ends up happening, even for the hard nuts to crack. It also doesn’t hurt that the band is totally rockin–live music makes a HUGE difference!

I mentioned a few days ago how I was going with some other CRR folks to meet with a local biodiesel manufacturer.  As it turns out, we met with them at exactly the right time.

Unlike the ethanol craze in the late 2000s, biodiesel never saw a major spike in popularity, followed by a downturn–it’s always been on a steady uphill climb of acceptance. Mainstream biodiesel is still predominantly made from various vegetable oils, but it can be made from other types of fatty oils, including used vegetable oil and even animal fat.  When we were speaking with the owner of the plant, it became apparent that she first got into the biodiesel business because of this potential–at one point she told us, “If I could just find a group of businesses and consumers who weren’t afraid to go out on the ledge a little to organize themselves, we could build a very effective operation to take used frying oil, process it, and then sell it out on the market.” After we heard that, we knew we found an ally.

In the next week, we’re going to present a plan to the Polish Hill leaders to start a coordinated used frying oil collection service for both businesses and homes.  In return for the oil, the biodiesel plant will process it and sell it on the market and at a discount to any of the participating businesses and homes who have diesel vehicles (and to CRR, which has a lot of diesel vehicles).  I think people will be pretty excited about the plan, but I’m still a little nervous about the presentation!

Last week, Gretch and I went over to sunny San Diego for a few days.  It was a nice trip–I have family out there, so it was nice to see them, and although Pittsburgh rocks my socks, it’s hard to beat San Diego weather.

Gretch and I went out one night with one of my cousins who lives out there, and we got a huge shock.  The place she was taking us to was in one of the edgy hip neighborhoods, and as we were driving (because everyone drives everywhere out there), I saw a sign on a bar that said “Wednesday night–Pittsburgh Style Karaoke!”

As you can imagine, Gretch and I demanded that we stop the car instantly.  I mean, what the hell is “Pittsburgh Style Karaoke?” Having lived in Pittsburgh all my life, I never realized it, but apparently karaoke in Pittsburgh is very different than karaoke in other cities.  And by that, I mean that in most other places it sucks real bad.  We went in the bar, and it was decked out in Steelers stuff, there were pictures of downtown, and it reminded me very much of a local dive you’d see in the South Side or something.

So, having settled on a place, we got ourselves a table and belted out some tunes.  I’m still not sure exactly what “Pittsburgh Style” means, but I do know that the place was cozy, cheap, and the patrons would cheer just as loud (if not louder) for the bad singers as they did for the stars.  Very Pittsburgh indeed.

For the past few months, I’ve been almost solely working on the community outreach portion of my internship at CRR. Last week I got a glimpse at another side, vendor outreach, and it’s a completely different animal.

The community side is a lot of canvasing, petitioning, meeting with people–things that any community organizer would be very familiar with. I’m not sure what to classify the vendor side as…maybe non-profit development work, or sales? In the scheme of things, it really is a very important part of the business. It involves meeting with businesses and manufacturers in the area, and sometimes outside, to pitch the mission of CRR and secure good prices on whatever it is that they sell and/or make, which can be anything from lumber to solar cells.

According to the folks that I’ve been working with, since CRR started 15 years ago there’s been a huge upswing of vendor’s and suppliers in Southwestern PA, especially for the more high-tech components. In the beginning, people were telling stories about how they were traveling across the country for the latest and greatest stuff to come out, but now it seems that the development of new ideas has caught up with the research in our own neck of the woods.

Today I’m going with some other CRR folks to see a local biodiesel producer who’s been around for almost 2 decades now. They’re someone that we’ve worked with before, so everyone is anticipating a smooth meeting, but I’m still a little nervous. I actually had to bust out some nice clothes, too, which also involved me having to remember how to tie a tie!

Gretch and I are doing something we never ever do–have fun over spring break!  Usually, mine is spent catching up on work that I didn’t do during the beginning of the semester, but hell, it’s my last one, so I might as well make it memorable.

Gretch also has some vacation time saved up (thinking about having to save vacation time kind of blows my mind, but I guess it won’t when I get into the real world!), so we’re going to San Diego to visit some family and friends.

See you next week!

So there I am, hanging out at my favorite little café after work, waiting for Andi to show up so she can tell me all about her law school classmates’ drama and I can tell her the cute things my girls did today. I’m leafing though this magazine we got at the office this week and totally loving it. It’s called Femiyinz – awkward name, but awesome mag. It’s a new publication (this is the first issue ever) and it was started by three English/women’s studies majors at Chatham to highlight feminist issues with a bit of local flavor.

The barista walks by my table on her way back behind the counter, arms full of plates and coffee cups. She stops, backtracks a few steps, and stands right next to me. I look up to see her smiling broadly.

“You’re reading Femiyinz!” she cries. “My friends are going to be so psyched. They started that magazine. How did you get it?!”

I tell her about the PWF and how everyone was really impressed with it. She asks me what my favorite articles have been.

“I loved the piece about unions offering free childcare to mothers who are working to get off welfare and learn some trades,” I replied. “And the profile of the new president at the zoo was really cool.”

We talked for about twenty more minutes, long enough for Andi to come and join the conversation. It’s so cool having all these little outlets for feminism in Pittsburgh – from what my mom tells me, it was not exactly a feminist haven when she was my age. And how much do I love just randomly running into people who have a hand in all the cool stuff that’s going on around town?!

It’s that dreaded time of the semester again–midterms.  This time around it’s not too bad, but I am afraid that my biotech test is going to royally kick my butt.  There’s nothing like hoping everyone else in the class sucks at it as much as you do so that the curve will be enough to save you…it’s kind of like betting on who’ll lose a game instead of who’ll win it!

Otherwise, everything is going pretty well.  I had to tell CRR that I needed some extra time for studying last week, which they were cool about.  They’ve started hinting at some possibilities opening up after I graduate, which also makes me happy.  They’re good people and they do good work–it’s hard to get much better than that with an employer.

My directed study, though, has come to a bit of a roadblock.  We’ve done some interesting demographic research, which I’ll try to put up here sometime next week, and that shows some interesting trends.  What makes it hard, though, is trying to find a good measure of that nebulous thing we call “community.”  Some people have used things like fraternal organization membership and local sports clubs, but those plummet pretty much across the board nationally after the 1970s, even in places where there’s lots of “community,” so that doesn’t seem like it’ll provide a constant measure.

It’s also possible that what we call “community” has actually changed over the past hundred or so years.  Anyway, Dr. Lemley has a really good time thinking about this, but it’s starting to make my head spin.  Anyone out there have any ideas on the subject?  What does community mean to you?

Last night, at about 8:30, I finished the first draft of the first third of the book project I’m working on right now. I felt happily exhausted, pleased with what the characters had done in these first several chapters, and excited that I would now be moving even deeper into the story and what I want to say. Shutting down my computer, I walked away from the desk feeling complete.

For about three hours.

At 11:30, I was lying in bed next to the soundly sleeping Frank obsessing about my project. Should I change the main character’s name? It’s kind of trendy and her parents are very old-fashioned people – it doesn’t make sense that they’d give her that name. And the explanation I’d given for it, in chapter two, was pretty clunky. No way would it ever work. But is she too much ingrained in my mind with the name that it would be suicide to change it now? Or am I still early enough in the draft that I can change it?

From there it just got worse. Do I need to include more scenes and, by extension, characters to show the protagonist’s evolution into a more assertive, true-to-herself individual? Is the secondary storyline with her best friend enough to carry it through the entire book, or is it a complete dud? Will readers identify with the story? Will it help them realize something about themselves?

I realized that lying in bed and being consumed by these questions was getting me nowhere. So I did what a writer would do: I dragged myself out of bed and pounded out these questions, my thoughts, crazy ideas, anything I could think of that might help me see myself through this story. It helped, it really did. I have a clearer vision of what I want to accomplish in this book, and even though I’m still not exactly sure how I’m going to get there, I’m a little bit further on my way.

I ended up crawling back into bed at 2:45. Good thing I didn’t have to work today.

Gretch and I were conspicuously absent from posting last week because my cousin Andrew, who had been living in DC, has moved to Pittsburgh.  He graduated from American University the year before and had been working as a temp, but then he got a great finance job in Pittsburgh and he decided to make the move.  Being the good family members that we are, we offered to help with the move in any way we could.  Little did we know what we were getting into…

Moving to a different state amplifies the suckiness of moving by at least ten, but when moving from a DISTRICT, or, as my cousin likes to say, an occupied territory, it reaches a new level altogether.  Example 1: did you know that you’re not allowed to drive a moving truck within a mile of the white house?  We didn’t, but the Secret Service was well aware.

Gretch and I have moved several times in Pittsburgh, and we know a couple truck rental places that have always treated us well, so we offered to rent the truck up here so that it would count as an in-town rental.  My cousin decided against it because he’s getting reimbursed and wants it to be in his name, so Gretch and I borrowed my parents’ van and drove down.  We arrived last Saturday night, and went to bed as early as we could so that we’d be at least a bit rested for what we knew would be a crappy day.

We all woke up early and went to pick up the truck.  Two hours later, we were still waiting at the truck place because they had lost his reservation.  Even though we got there when they first opened, they were out of the trucks he had originally reserved, so he could either take a smaller one or one that could have fit three of his apartments into.  By the time we got back to his apartment in a frighteningly small truck, it was 11 AM, and we needed to haul ass loading the truck if we had any chance of getting to Pittsburgh before dark.  Andrew had a couple friends over to help, but he was on the 7th floor of one of the ubiquitous cookie-cutter apartment buildings in DC, and we spent half the time just waiting for the freight elevator.  It was a good thing we brought my parents’ van, because by the time we were done it was stuffed to the brim and there was a mattress strapped to the roof.

By 3 o’clock, we were finally on the road, but on our way out of town we got lost and ended up on Pennsylvania Avenue about a block from the White House.  After discussing our national origins and purpose in life with the Secret Service for an hour, we finally got out of the District and on the way back home.  We arrived in Pittsburgh at 9 PM.

Thank god unloading a truck takes about a quarter of the time that loading does, but still, it was one loooooong day.  The rest of the week we’ve been showing Andrew around town and helping him get unpacked, along with working and schoolwork.  It’s been nice, but utterly exhausting, and it’s great to have more family back in Pittsburgh!