The great email debacle ‘09

So I was on the phone for about four hours yesterday before Susan and I realized that there was no way the press releases were going to go out that day. Yup, they didn’t go out Wednesday, and they didn’t go out Thursday either — Susan’s email has turned into such a rowdy disaster that nothing could either get through to her or out from her. We’re not sure what is wrong, but it will be okay.

Comcast was supposed to get her email fixed today — but she and I agreed that the last day you want to send out a press release is a Friday. It isn’t ideal to send it out at the end of the month either, but a Monday is actually a good day to send them out because everyone is fresh and clean.

So we’re up! And running! And only about a dozen people know! Ha ha! But we already have one person who wants to do advocate training three Saturdays from now, and that is awesome.

I had a really grand day today. After the morning’s wrestle with Susan’s email, I walked downtown for lunch with Kathy from Real Change, did some counseling, and then went to a comedy show with some of my favorite people.

It’s a 30 – 45 minute walk from my house to downtown, though to the Real Change office in Belltown took me about an hour. I went down Olive Way, which was almost a straight shot, and the sky was bright but nicely windy and snappy, so it wasn’t too hot. I detoured briefly to the Seattle Vet Center to let some of the nice folks there know Pack Parachute was open, and then walked the rest of the way down Lenora.

Seattle gets kind of flat on the northside of downtown, between downtown and the Space Needle. This area is called the Denny Triangle, and has some of the same rutty motels that were put up for the 196somethingsomething World’s Fair, and flat parking lots with orange construction signs which always seem to be under repair. Walking towards the water on Lenora there were all sorts of glistening skyscrapers to my left, and then those old tan buildings that look like every community college everywhere to my right.

Belltown’s different — it’s just to the west of the Denny Triangle, but it’s on the water, so it’s more posh — too posh for me, actually. All the rich, young, upwardly mobile go-getters in their expensive jeans and stupid watches live there in brightly-painted boxes and frequent the eight million sushi restaurants and bars with $17 cocktails. (Though I do love me some sushi.)

Real Change is actually on 2nd, and in this odd patch of road where the homeless bisect the yuppies. The street’s kind of dirty and stale without a lot of movement — the homeless just sort of stand and lean on the sidewalk. I think a DSHS office is on that road, the major bus lines come through there, and there are homeless nests pinched against some of the sheltered walls.

It makes sense, then, that Real Change is located there — Real Change is a street paper that is an alternative to panhandling. I have always really liked Real Change, in the sort of generic way you like something that you don’t know much about, and now I like it even more.

If you live in Seattle you know the paper’s peddlers, who get to keep I think 90 cents for every dollar paper they sell, and are far less obnoxious than some of the young men and women standing on every street corner of the city and trying to harass you into donating to some internationally-humongous nonprofit (said the nonprofit director).

I walked into the office and found myself stuck behind a line of a dozen of the homeless vendors who I think waiting for their papers. I didn’t want to cut in line, but I also didn’t want to wait for all of them to get their stuff, so I employed the ever-useful technique of looking awkward and out of place until someone led me to the back rooms to meet Kathy.

(Even when I was on the street I was told I didn’t look like a street person — I looked more like a dispossessed waiter in my one outfit of black slacks and white men’s shirt. I have since branched out to wearing black slacks and a black t-shirt, but only when I’m feeling fancy.)

I don’t know what I was expecting, but Kathy was unusually awesome. She is the friend of another unusually awesome girl I know named Cindy who works as  Seattle G.I. Rights counselor, so I should have coaxed forth the equation of one awesome girl means another awesome girl, but I hadn’t really thought about it.

Kathy’s young with dark hair and doing (as I learned when we went to Pike Place Market for lunch) the whole raw foods diet. The offices were in a clutter of young people with fitted plaid shirts and sardonic jokes and notes on whiteboards (found in the bathroom: “Tarp: $12, -20 degree sleepingbag: $29, camping outside city hall to protest their treatment of homeless: priceless.”)

It was actually cool and even edgy, not a vibe I had picked up with the newspaper, as much as I respected it. The busy back office, in an old building that had been given partitions and had ancient huge windows with hand scrawled signs bullying people to remember to keep them closed reminded me of being back on newspaper in highschool.

Kathy and I went to the Market and got some raspberries and the worst bubble tea I’ve ever had in my life, and then went down to the always overcrowded park at the base of Virginia. Tourists were in backpacks fresh off the cruise ships, squalling kids, vendors selling kettle corn, and me almost gagging on a tapioca ball when Kathy said she was interested in doing some volunteering with Pack Parachute, because I definitely had not realized that. But that is really awesome because she has experience in fundraising, and I don’t have any fundraisers on my team right now. (Except me!)

Plus Kathy does co-counseling, and it is always wonderful to find other co-counselors, because they normally pop up where I least expect them and they’re always delightful people. As a matter of fact I went off to West Seattle after our lunch for some co-counseling, but now I am sleepy and that all will have to wait.