Someone has to pay for the Revolution

Embarcadero an hour before sunrise

The South African time difference meant that we were at work at 6:40 am to interview a client, scurrying around in the darkness because the ACLU building's lights don't work before the ass crack of dawn. If it had been an episode of the X-Files, Eugene Tooms would have waited until I got settled in with my tea and Skype before consuming livers. Yesterday was the four-month mark since starting at ORAM, and I'm still excited to go to work every day, which either means it's a great gig, or I have a dopamine irregularity/mood disorder.

Public interest lawyering really can be all kinds of awesome, and it's funny to think that it could all have been very different if the economy hadn't swirled into the toilet. As in some poor law firm may have been deceived sufficiently or had just enough free associate spaces to say, "Sure, we'll take an extra weirdo."

Fresh out of a Labor Union Summer with the AFL-CIO, I had put myself through at least fifty on-campus screener interviews and a dozen callback ones. At most of these talks, they'd flip through my resume of public interest red flags and ask me to defend why I'd spent my summer with a labor union, why I feel like the firm's pro bono program would be enough to "satiate my public interest spirit" (direct quote). Sometimes, I'd run into someone who would proactively defend why they were now second-year associates. My favorite line was an assertion that "someone has to pay for the Revolution." Not that I have anything against firm life, but somehow it just didn't work out (Firms, it's not you, it's me.). Throughout it, I did my usual Try-Hard Bear thing: I hustled myself through Lavender Law's OCI, followed up on any and all personal connections, etc. In the end, I didn't get a single offer, and I scrambled to chase the public interest jobs that I should have been hunting down in the first place. Stormy times indeed.

This is certainly the gray matter doing its sneaky thing by smoothing out all the inconsistencies along the way, but it seems to have worked out so far. Where I end up next is thankfully a question I can delay for a while, and it's a relief to be off of the usual schedule where as soon as you land a one-year fellowship, you're already casting your resume back into the great dark seas.

YOLO artwork

Lois the Pie Queen

 Finally made it to Lois the Pie Queen for breakfast. I don't know why you would have fried chicken for breakfast, but it happened, and now I wonder why we don't usually have it. We got seated under the YOLO collage, and I again wondered why I haven't already moved to Oakland.

Especially when the BART stations get all glamm'd up:

After I took this shot, other BART denizens also whipped out their phones to take the same. It's disappointing to climb up into Oakland and expect Sapphire City, but I met some fun people to climb with at Great Western Power Station.

And to wrap up, here's a picture of Dinga with no context. 

Whatever you may be thinking about, he disapproves of it.

Thailand: Wat is a temple

Thailand was the first stop for my solidarity work with the United Auto Workers. I basically spent the week meeting with different unions and letting them know about what auto workers in the American South put up with, with the goal of asking the Thais to stand with us when the time came to organize.



It's kinda fun having a translator because you get to think through what you say two or three sentences at a time.

The hainan chicken plate in Sala Daeng was such a satisfying and cheap lunch on the same street that I worked on, it's surprising that it was just well-marinated chicken served on a bed of rice that had cooked in the chicken juices. All of it was livened up by the sweet soy sauce with ginger and some chili heat. The bowl of chicken broth is just icing. This and the convent pork rice plate kept me very happy since you get so much bang for your baht.

Thailand was a frenzied blur since I popped up early in the morning for work in the industrial provinces before racing straight for temples right when I got off.

Wat Phra Kaew was amazing with its reclining Buddha. The sound of people dropping coins into the many little metal buckets on the side just makes it so calming to walk around. Wat Pho was another story since it was just so so crowded. I was also coming straight from work, so I basically was drenched and stomping around in moist dress shoes. Hawt.

Wat Ratchanatdaram (below) was one of my favorite temples in Bangkok. Nowhere near as flashy as Wat Pho or Wat Phra Kaew to be sure, but it was meditative and completely empty except for some surly monks having tea outside. The place is arranged like a circular maze that spirals to the tippy top where you overlook the bustle of Bangkok and there is a teensy shrine. Humans had a predilection for tall places where you can see prey and danger, and this tall place was a good one.

And this was where I picked up a grumpy pet cat. It was Valentine's Day and everywhere in Bangkok, people had tacky plastic roses and little hearts for sale, along with a ton of cheesy stuffed animals. Dinga stood out though since among the sea of smiles, there was this one dubious face, kinda lumpy, kinda sad. So of course I walked up and asked how much he was. The stall lady quoted me a price in Thai, and when I clearly didn't speak a word, she probably tripled it in English (funny how translation works), but it worked out to US$2, so Dinga went straight into my bag. Even the hotel maids liked him so much that they kept tucking him into bed for the rest of the week and putting little flower garlands on his head. 

In Indonesia, he was prodded and poked at to see if he was filled with drugs while I stood by nervously thinking, "Please don't let there be any cocaine inside the cat." This all happened under a big glowing sign: "DRUGS ARE PUNISHABLE BY DEATH" with a skull and crossbones. 

He's been through a lot, and his nose is no longer brown since the fabric came off. But Dinga is now a proud resident of the United States. Lots of memories of him selling smoothies and living in a SRO in the Richmond, and all of it is like Dinga, kinda lumpy, kinda sad.