“It’s a really, really, really, really, really, really cool program.”
“It’s the only way that ordinary people, who need to learn more, can get that training.”
“The program takes 30 people from the entire state of Wisconsin, and makes sure they’re crafted properly with the necessary tools to improve their community and their world.”
“It’s like a well kept secret, providing people with so much power to do good for their community. I wish more people knew about it.”
“I’m an ordinary citizen making a difference.”
“We use the resources we have to make the best community possible.”
“We’re making our community stronger.
“I’ve collaborated with lots of people.”
“It’s all about the kids.”
“School funding needs to change. We all need to do our parts, be stewards, do our part for children, and know who to talk to.”
“I was born in Brooklyn, and to affect your community you had to know people. In the city you couldn’t have the affect you can have here. It’s [this town] a diamond in the rough. We need to take care of it. We need to know we did the best we could, and left it in the best possible condition we could.”
“I started volunteer work tutoring 1st grade kids. Little by little, I was asked to do more and more. I realized I know how to do some of this very well. Like grant writing. One of them failed. I don’t like to fail, so I took a U of M grant-writing course.”
“For each session topic, they don’t just sit you down for dry info. It’s actually a class. Previous classes have even come up with solutions and offered them to the community. It’s not a canned program.”
“You develop networking in the program as well. You meet people that you can call later for help and solutions.”
Today, on June 13, I received an inspired idea from my brain – “swim back-and-forth in the pool until the world makes sense”. Not the best idea, obviously. But one of the ones that you don’t understand, yet know that the consequences of ignoring it would be bad. To go to the usual cop-out: “I just needed it.”
I swam back-and-forth about 20 times — the short way — until I was exhausted, or until I’d had this idea, or — a combination of the two — until I was so tired that I arm-locked my brain into making up a solution of some sort just so I could climb out of the pool with a clean conscience of some kind.
I thought wide, at first, until my energy could only manage small thoughts (this amount of time happened to be before even half-way of my first lap…don’t smoke, kids). So I started thinking small. I thought of this roadblock in my life for the last 362 days of my life, something that had only recently occurred to me as a major fucking tumor of a burden on my mind, leading to this little lance-and-drain with the pen, as opposed to swording my head in twain due to writer’s block.
I had been thinking about Juanita Peck. Very few people outside of Altoona, Wisconsin know about Juanita Peck, those who do could probably be counted on one hand, and I seriously doubt she had ever haunted the dreams of, ruined the lives of, or become creativity gremlins for, any of them. I was interviewing her for my freelance reporting job for the Altoona star, all the quotes of which are at the beginning of this little screed. Yes, that is six reallys, and no, I’m not exaggerating, that is exactly how many time she said the word in that sentence.
In complete honesty, which I aim for at every opportunity, her platitudes were sickening to me. They hurt my guts when they came over my cell phone. It was pure annoyment. It was pure boredom. Anyone watching my body language in the coffee shop would’ve guessed I either had a dentist on the other line trying to convince me over the phone to start flossing, or a fascist dictator telling me he’d only meant to scare those millions of people, not kill them — the gun just went off. I rolled my eyes to no one in particular, I turned the mouth-piece of the phone 180 degrees from my mouth once she started a spiel, afraid that for her coup de grace she’d say something so inanely stupid and cliché she’d catch my exasperated sigh.
But I have a confession, one that I discovered in my swim today: I hadn’t been able to write anything about Juanita Peck because I didn’t feel ANGRY enough at her. That is the scoliosisitic truth. I wanted something to tear her a new asshole. This innocent women, who didn’t even know what I looked like, and who I couldn’t pick out of a line up, I wanted to write something blistering about her, I couldn’t, and I was waiting for something to come my way so I could. There was some aborted fucking brain cell Down syndrome asshole major-crossroad of a synapse in my head that wouldn’t let me write anything about this woman unless I had something bad to say. And ONLY to her, certainly not myself at all. This was a clear case of feeling like the man on the mountain, and just waiting for a confused kid to wander in your path, just so you could scream about how he isn’t trying enough. For those of you who care, I had suckered myself into trying to do one of the dirtier tricks the internet’s good for — insulting with your brain people who are courageous enough to work with their hands.
My honest appraisal of Juanita Peck: She has delusions of grandeur as to Altoona’s place on the map and world events, and overestimates both her ability and how much helping children and her community really does in her life and those she touches. Allow me to measure Altoona’s rank in international news: First of all, you have the major metropolitans. New York, LA, London, Tokyo, etc. Cities with the same population as cities 2nd down the tier (usually even less population), but they still have a mystique to their name that means something, for whatever reason. Deluded teenagers dream of going to New York and LA merely because they’re LA and New York. They lend themselves easily to filling the bottomless Rorschach gap of imagination. Always have, probably won’t stop anytime soon. The second tier has San Francisco, Chicago, etc. Town’s with very little going against them, most likely superior in some respects to the First Tier, but suffer only because they are not the First Tier. Shitty, unfair, illogical, but a fact. Not the topic of the essay. Move on.
In the realm merely of the MIDWEST, however, Chicago reigns supreme. 2nd rate is Minneapolis (1st in Minnesota), 3rd rate is Madison (1st rate in Wisconsin, do you see where I’m going with this?). Eau Claire is 2nd rate in Wisconsin, somewhere around 3rd rate type cities for the Midwest as a whole (see: Branson, etc.) In Eau Claire County, Eau Claire is first, Menominee and Chippewa are 2nd rate, Altoona is a low third. Have I put it in relative perspective for you?
There’s a reason Juanita Peck is working in Altoona, Eau Claire, and not Brooklyn, New York. It’s safer (yes). It’s cheaper (smart). And (this is the one that hurts) it’s easier to declare victory. When she says “I was born in Brooklyn…and to affect your community you had to know people. In the city you couldn’t have the affect you can have here. It’s [this town] a diamond in the rough. We need to take care of it. We need to know we did the best we could, and left it in the best possible condition we could” you need to replace the plural pronouns with singular personal ones. Take out “you” or “we”, put in “I”. SHE would’ve had to know people, SHE couldn’t have the effect she has here, SHE needs to take care of it so she can die with the knowledge that she did everything she could.
She’s aiming low because she has to, and she’s building up Altoona because she psychologically needs to.
She’s had intensive training in community building, classes on tutoring children (see, now I give you the context — I was interviewing her on her thoughts with being a graduate from an intense “problem solvers” 2 month seminar — and it all comes together), and all it led to was a glorified Activities Director to keep kids from skateboarding around town or drive-by batting at mailboxes. Whatever it is kids do who don’t rub two brain-cells together and run next-door to a University campus and try to do something exciting, like straight-facing your way into a house party, or something creative and exhilirating, compared to staying in Altoona your whole life.
Now that I’ve thoroughly assaulted her entire existence in order to make myself feel better, this is the confusing part. Here are the things she must learn, coupled with things that I have learned because of her.
Juanita Peck: You are in a very small town, doing work that could probably be better served elsewhere, with very small positive consequences, compared to the towns that really need it, that you are avoiding because you like feeling like a big fish in a small pond, rather than a nameless fish in a group that’s actually doing wider good somewhere else. I am a writer who merely complains on the internet and doesn’t do anything in order to better his community at all. YOU ARE BETTER THAN ME. Wow that was tough.
Juanita Peck: Nothing that has ever happened in Altoona ever has happened, and (I might be going out on a limb here to also say) never will happen, that deserves 6 reallys. Find the cure to AIDS AND Cancer, and then we’ll talk. Pull it back a little bit. Otherwise you sound like you’re trying to convince yourself, and you depress people like me, because we strike back defensively and don’t help (even less than we already have). I couldn’t write my article for the Altoona Star because you’d called up my Editor and expressed constant concern that I was going to get your program and efforts “wrong”. Your constant griping about what we were going to write about you sounded like you thought there was a conspiracy out to destroy you and everything you’d worked for. There wasn’t. You should’ve just let me write my nothing little article about your (borderline) nothing little program in this (absolutely certainly) nothing little town, and we all would’ve gone on with our lives. I wouldn’t have been ignored for freelance assignments from the Altoona Star because of the debacle (they folded 6 months later, at $15 a week, you probably prevented me from $180, but I’m not too miffed at that). I would’ve had something pretend-respectable on my resume. I maybe wouldn’t have developed writer’s block. And I could’ve gotten around to doing something far far away from Wisconsin just that much sooner. In retrospect I admit if I was a better writer I wouldn’t have let you get to me in first place, so it is ALL ENTIRELY my fault, I just needed to get that off my chest, thank you.
Juanita Peck: Develop some original thoughts, please. Those quotes sound like tag-lines, which means, to me, that all you really understand about the program are the taglines. They’re the only thing that came out when I asked about the program, because they’re the only thing that actually happened at the program. If I’m wrong, tell me things about the program. Doubts, specifically, are music to my ears (obviously). Show me that you coalesced the new learning into something you already brought to the table — a personality, maybe, that you had beforehand — and it won’t seem like The Program literally steam-pressed you and slid the disk of “Operative Responses” into the back of your neck. Maybe I need to ask better questions. I’ll easily grant that. But even that, I think, should only be 50% of the work to make you interesting. The other half is where you’re actually an interesting unique individual in some way.
In final disclosure, I’ve been typing Juanita Peck’s entire name throughout this whole article, in the strange hope that she randomly google searches herself, and sees all this hodgepodge of insecure strutting and frothing, and sees the apology from a greenhorn rookie kid about feeling sorry for being such a greenhorn rookie kid and blaming it on her for so long. Take the advice, please, but don’t feel like I have many hard feelings left. If we meet and you’re still boring, I might grit my teeth through small-talk, but you’re not a specter of mediocrity to hate as much as you used to be. Thanks for the lessons you inadvertently taught me.
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