feels like home

I think North Carolina knew right when I was beginning to miss the sunny 75 and beautiful California. The state decided to cool off to at nice 75 and sunny last week. It was brilliant. It's gone back up, but I am painfully saying that I am actually used to it being hot all the time and am probably going to freeze my booty off when I get home. No bueno. Haha!

I know I've slacked on blogging the past couple weeks, but I think I'm finally getting into the swing of things and am hopefully going to be more consistent.

This past week was quite ridiculous. I was having a gorgeous Wednesday morning, helping lots of clients, laughing, blah blah... then suddenly as it was time to go, I realized my beloved iPhone was stolen. Now, if you guys know me, you know how attached I am to that thing. It is my source of all goodness: my friends, family, emails, music, applications, back accounts, maps, etc.... I went to my boss and asked if he was playing a joke on me or trying to teach me a lesson to not keep my phone on my desk, and he said no, as did the volunteers. Big UH OH. My source of goodness was GONE. To make it worse, I'm super forgetful so I only know my mother's number (and even then I had to try like 3 times haha).

Yet, for some reason, I wasn't angry. I wasn't about to cry. I wasn't pointing fingers or yelling. I was calm. I called AT&T to cancel it, and my beautiful co-worker offered to take me to an AT&T store to get a replacer phone. I wasn't in shock or anything, I was just disappointed- in what, I'm still torn, but it's kind of leaning towards myself. I spent a good half of my stipend on some rinky-dink phone that I still have no clue how to use and just kind of looked at the situation. There was no reason to be mad at the person who stole my phone. What good would that do? It's long gone, I have no clue who did it, and if I've learned anything from my experience so far in JVC is that my problems are so minuscule compared to the population I am serving. I mean really, I have the resources to get a new phone, hell, to even HAVE a phone, and an iPhone at that.

My boss gave me an old phone too, so I get to go return this rinky-dink one and get half my stipend back. Then the great B.Watkins is sending me his old iPhone, so my source of goodness will be back hahahaha. Plus, it's the only way I can deposit checks since there is no fricken Chase bank out here (thank you Chase mobile app for iPhone).

Other than that crazy episode, I've encountered what it feels like to be misjudged on your age. It's quite ridiculous actually. I was interviewing a new woman to enter the shelter and all of a sudden she tells me that not all homeless people are drug addicts or mentally ill- because I asked her to take a drug test. UHM does she know who I am? I'm pretty sure I'm the LAST person in the world to EVER think that. I assured her that I did not think that, it was just procedure for her to take the test. Then, as I am going over the rules and regulations, telling her that we ask her to save 75% of anything she makes, she continues to be rude and started saying that I couldn't tell her what to do because she's a grown woman and knows how to handle her own money. Now... in this situation I could have totally broke down, cried, yelled back at her, or be calm. As much as I wanted to yell back at her, I remained calm. (I know I wonder what would have gone down if I HAD yelled back hahaha just kidding). She proceeded to say things that tried to belittle me as well as the program, then I got up, and went to get my boss.

That walk from one office to another was not a calm one for me. I'm pretty sure when I opened the door my boss could see steam coming out of my ears like in those old cartoons. I told her that I absolutely did not want this lady in the program and wanted to send her back out (seriously, I did!). My boss came in with me to speak to the woman, and what do you know, the lady was incredibly polite to her and when talking about me, claimed that I was acting as if I was 18. Uhmmmm what? My boss obviously didn't believe her and told her exactly what I told her: that a drug test is the procedure for staying at our facility, and that if you do not want to follow the rules and regulations then she would not be fit for our program. The lady agreed.

Later that night, my boss thanked me immensely for keeping my cool. She also told me that this woman would not be the last one to give me a hard time because of my age. I'm literally half the age as a few of the women here, and it will come up again and again. Thankfully, I've bonded with many of the women and they act like they are my aunts and take care of me in a way- like wanting to find whoever stole my phone, and saying that they want to find me a nice young boy - uhmmmm we'll see haha.