A friend of the devil is a friend of mine.

Courtney keeps insisting that I update this thing, which means one of two things. Either she a) loves my blog so much she can't live without it, or b) she's like me and has a list of blogs that she keeps in her favorites folder and goes through every day, and with each passing day becomes more annoyed when the same damn entry comes up over and over again (ahem, Gavagirl). At any rate, I'm back and better than ever, if only to say:

They had never met. They were like two hummingbirds...who had also never met.

Seriously, the four people that regularly check my blog (no, you're not one of them, Elliot) should take heart; when I was at work at 11:30pm last night, it suddenly occured to me that I'm going a bit over the edge. Not many people in my office seem terribly interested in making our organization a success, so no amount of work I could possibly do on my own will affect the ultimate outcome of our program. So, I've decided to go back to the system I had in college: become immobilized by the sheer number of things to do, and then do none of them. As my work life goes to hell, I will have vast amounts of time to blog.

No, my dear friends, all is not well in Zion. We're spinning out of control and I can't find any way to get us back on track. The mission of our nonprofit is to help low-income high school students gain admission to college, and that's the one and only thing that we're not doing. When I look around at work, I see an intricate farce; everyone is "playing office." We have meetings, lunches, conferences, evaluations, calls, memos, you name it. But we don't actually accomplish the organizing principle of our organization. Our seniors have terrible attendance, our junior curriculum is so dull and abstruse that the students are bored to tears, and we found out today that a large number of the school counselors despise us and want us out of the school. Admittedly, that last part isn't really our fault. Apparently the counselors don't like it when we reveal their complete incompetence when it comes to college counseling. The method they use to counsel the students seems designed to leave the students with the idea that the best way to get into college is to wipe their asses with a blank application and send it in. So when we contradict their advice to our students by saying such revolutionary things such as, "Actually, you do have the take the SAT to get into college," their resentment grows.

So I'm trying to figure out what to do. I can request a transfer to another project, but that's a very difficult decision to make. I wouldn't have traveled all this way if I weren't committed to the people I'm serving, and to abandon the organization now might leave everything worse than I found it. However, I only have one life, and to waste a year of it while simultaneously living in poverty is not something I'm willing to do. Being a VISTA is a sacrifice, yes, but the sacrifice has to be for something. The noble thing to do would be to work ten times harder to make the organization better instead of leaving it in its sorry state, but as I said before, I'm beginning to feel like the amount of work I put into things is irrelevant. I'm only one person, and no matter how hard I've tried to point out the problems we have, no one seems willing to admit that this whole thing is close to blowing up.

Well, this entry has been a big downer, especially since it's my first one after a long time. Shall I leave you with something more cheerful? Elliot just came to see me this past weekend to celebrate our two-year anniversary. In lieu of flowers and candy, he got me a sweater and I got him a pair of pants. I found the exchange incredibly romantic.