old friends

i have created this blog as a way to share stories from my work as they occur (the long emails have become quite the task). so, enjoy the absurdity that is my life.
it has been quite a long month. the weather here is finally starting to get to me. there will be one day of nice weather, followed up by four ugly days. although, yesterday and today it has been really beautiful outside, i can only hope that the weather holds up for my upcoming days off. i must say though, when the weather is nice here, it's really beautiful.
life at work is ridiculous and entertaining as always. i'm really starting to feel at home at nativity house, in a way in which i feel comfortable with most all of the guests, therefore also feeling a stronger sense of authority when a situation calls for such. because of this, i have decided to stay on as a staff member once my volunteer year is up. i have found that i have become so involved in so many of my guests lives, i'm just not quite ready to leave and no longer be involved with them. in addition, the local shelter that houses most of our guests over night is most likely closing for good on july 1st. there are a handful of us that are trying to be proactive about this decision by the city to deny funding to the king center and i'm curious to see the developments that will take place over the next year.
it's amazing to me how many people come through the doors of nativity house. laura and i were talking last night and realized there were so many guests who we no longer see and had pretty much forgotten. even though many guests no longer come around, we are still full everyday. it would be very interesting to be able to go back to my first day of work and notice who was there then compared to who comes now. there was one guest inparticular i can hardly believe i forgot. his name is jason, and these days i have no idea where he is or what he is doing. jason is pretty mentally ill and he had a pretty big crush on me. i would catch him staring at me on a daily basis, which wasn't very hard to do seeing as how he would peek behind a corner 2 feet away from me and stare for a solid amount of time. the biggest, reoccuring problem we had with jason was him using our phone to call the ambulance. the converstation would go something like this. 'jason, why are you calling the ambulance' 'because i've had too many beers' 'jason, you shouldn't call 911 just because you are drunk' 'but i just can't stop drinking beers'. my favorite memory of jason is one day while he was staring at me, i asked him what was up. he replied that he had figured out why i didn't like him, it was because he is white. jason is not white. i looked at him a moment and said, 'jason, you aren't white'. he insisted that i didn't like him because he was white with the families and the grandparents, so on. i replied, 'okay'.