Long time no blog

What with my new job at child prison, forgetting my godson's birthday, and learning all about Baltimore!, I have not been blogging. I have been busy thinking about the job I have not yet started. Thinking about motivational interviewing, cognitive-behavioral therapy, race and class in the Chicago workplace, and outfits. Child Prison encourages the Nun and Social Worker uniform of modest dress and sensible shoes. How then to impress upon my environment that I am neither fully nun nor social worker? How to bring the punk rock and renegade seamstress sparkle to the grey halls of Institutionalized Child Abuse without upsetting sexually reactive children and very angry underpaid prison guards? It seems I may have to tone it down. There is also the issue of my enormous hoop earrings: too sad to contemplate.

In better news, Baltimore is still great. I feel madly in love with a toddler named Andypants. We went to the American Visionaries Museum for gaudy art made by weird people and largely concerning God: good stuff all around. Special praise for Chris Roberts-Antieau's fabric book of Gandhi's Seven Deadly Sins because 1) one could turn the fabric pages and rub all over them, 2) I like a simple moral message, and 3) it was beautiful and bright.

Andypants and Chris's mom is just the best, and spending time with her was exactly what I needed walking into this new job; she is modestly and solidly loving, which is why I had the good sense to attach myself to her way back in my social working neophyte days. There is a practicality to her that I lack. For example: I'm going on about what I'm imagining I'll need to bring to this job, what these girls will need, all theory and feeling and pure good intentions, and she listens and then says: take this book. Read this book, and change it around, and walk through it with these girls. It can be a group. She is correct. She also told me to learn origami when I was going into the Peace Corps, so that I was able to make children giggle by making them birds and such well before I could say 'bird.'

I have lots of these right and solid and practical people around. They are the best sort. They get shit done. Without these people I would be wandering Toledo pants less and tearful with all sorts of ideas and feelings in my body and nowhere to sleep.