Of KickStarting and Golems
Sep. 12th, 2013 08:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraThe presentation went very, very well. Turns out the Deputy Director used to own a clothing store, so we bonded over the fact that owning your own business is definitely the most entertaining way to make money ever! Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur – she'd actually cut out the very article I'd handed around as reference notes to the presentation. So she's in our court. Sharp, funny, no bullshit woman about my age with a loud, booming voice and a commanding physical presence. She'll be an effective evangelist with the organizational higher-ups whom I'm still expecting to be obstructionist because they're religious and conservative.
We'll do that presentation toward the end of the month.
Two big contingencies:
Uno: We have to get the go-ahead to use KickStarter to raise the money necessary for the capital expenditures associated with this project. My business plan puts the amount necessary between $10,000 and $15,000. There are simply no grants that fund for capital expenditures. Nada, niente, nene rien, никто. You can harvest tons of grant money for bulking up your programmatic elements (bleep! For which read "internal bureaucracy,") but good luck extracting one thin dime for equipment. Plus grants always ask you to submit information about the success of similar projects that used this model yada yada yada, and guess what? There are no other projects that have used this model. If I can pull this off, it's something entirely new to the world of youth services.
Nonetheless, I have to go ahead and apply for the one community grant, figure out a way to tweak our needs to conform to what they might be able to give us.
Wanna know why I hate grants? Here's why I hate grants: A grant is currently funding a New York state program that gives a stipend to kids for going to summer school. Part of that grant money goes to providing free lunch for the kids in the program. The kids are required to put milk on their trays! They're not required to actually drink that milk – which is a good thing since many of them have a genetic predisposition toward lactose intolerance. But they are required to select milk as their lunchtime beverage! That's part of the grant that funds them.
The milk gets thrown away at the end of the meal. Wasted.
So. This is a program ostensibly designed to build the character skills (lacking) in these kids, which will make them productive citizens of the great American hegemony. So what is the program really teaching them? It's teaching them to ignore cognitive dissonance and to waste food.
Second big obstacle may be the NY Parks Dept since they're actually looking for vendors from April to October, and in our first year we can only provide vendors in July and August. I'm betting strongly on the "plucky kids" storyline here to get us clearance here. It would certainly be great if we could get someone else to help us tell it too. There is some big AmeriCorps Celebration Day coming up soon, so I'm going to try and see if I can get the home planet to mention us as a VISTA success story. Premature, yes, yes, yes -- I realize. But I gotta figure mainstream press will be covering the event and the hype may whet their appetite for a human interest story.
###
In other news, I had to cancel my social life last weekend, but my FWB was amazingly obliging about the reschedule. "Shit happens, baby," he chuckled. "Why are you getting so worked up about this?"
Good question.
My date for the Brooklyn Wild Parrot Safari was somewhat less obliging and went ahead to stalk parrots through the forests and veldtlands of Brooklyn College without me, so I'll have to dig someone else up to do the Safari in October.
Also I had an extremely sexual dream about _____ of all unlikely people, which was just so weird that I bolted up in bed this morning fully awake the moment I opened my eyes? _____? _____? Too weird. No, it didn't sharpen my carnal appetite for the man himself. It did make me realize that I was definitely in a heterosexual head space for the nonce, which was interesting because unless there are personalities attached, I generally like girls more than boys if we're talking about sexual partners in the abstract.
Also, I found out that ______ had a stroke and can barely speak let alone write, which made me very, very sad. I recently reread [Title of Brilliant Book], and it is a great book. We've had a strange episodic relationship over the past two decades. He had a major crush on me during much of that time, and I was actually all set to consummate it except that on the eve of our departure to Gijon, he did something that like totally disgusted me.
We were about to go to Europe for three weeks.
And I had arrived at his unspeakably filthy apartment in Vancouver, and he had actually gone to the supermarket to buy me all my favorite treats --
"I know you love grapes," he said. "And dried apricots. And stinky cheese. And chocolate. And coffee!"
So he made me a little picnic lunch in his living room.
And I was freaked because his living room was so filthy. I shouldn't have been – after all, he lived in my house in Monterey for a year, and I knew what his cleanliness standards were (nonexistent.) But memory could not recreate this level of squalor.
After we were done, he started shoving the uneaten food into his refrigerator.
And I peeked into his refrigerator and I saw layers of food from previous trips to the store, lying there like rock strata in some strange comestible geology. The stuff in the very inside of the refrigerator had sprouted mold. It smelled foul. It smelled awful. My gorge was rising.
"______," I said nervously. "You're gonna be gone for three weeks. There is no sense in putting stuff in your refrigerator. It will only rot. Let's clean out your refrigerator. Here, I'll help!"
And he got very testy. No, we were definitely not cleaning out his refrigerator! It was fine, perfectly fine, the way it was. The unspoken coda hung there in the air: How dare you tell me what to do with my own refrigerator!
In Larry McMurtry's brilliant novel The Last Picture Show – one of my favorite novels, a perfect novel in my never humble literary estimation – the long-suffering wife of the deeply closeted football coach imagines her husband as this Golem constructed from cans of sliced peaches. Every night for 30 years, she'd been serving him sliced peaches for dessert. And I had this sudden vision of ______ as this Golem made from all the rotting produce and putrefying, half-eaten Hungry Man microwave meals in his fridge.
Really, I wanted to get back into my car and drive back to Monterey.
I can't fuck this guy, I thought. I can't even travel with this guy.
That turned out to be true. I had to ditch him in Italy.
Our friendship never really recovered though we spoke and emailed a few times after I moved to Ithaca.
But about his brilliance as a writer, there was/is/will be never any doubt. And it breaks my heart to think of him surviving one year, five years, a decade but not being able to write any longer.
We'll do that presentation toward the end of the month.
Two big contingencies:
Uno: We have to get the go-ahead to use KickStarter to raise the money necessary for the capital expenditures associated with this project. My business plan puts the amount necessary between $10,000 and $15,000. There are simply no grants that fund for capital expenditures. Nada, niente, nene rien, никто. You can harvest tons of grant money for bulking up your programmatic elements (bleep! For which read "internal bureaucracy,") but good luck extracting one thin dime for equipment. Plus grants always ask you to submit information about the success of similar projects that used this model yada yada yada, and guess what? There are no other projects that have used this model. If I can pull this off, it's something entirely new to the world of youth services.
Nonetheless, I have to go ahead and apply for the one community grant, figure out a way to tweak our needs to conform to what they might be able to give us.
Wanna know why I hate grants? Here's why I hate grants: A grant is currently funding a New York state program that gives a stipend to kids for going to summer school. Part of that grant money goes to providing free lunch for the kids in the program. The kids are required to put milk on their trays! They're not required to actually drink that milk – which is a good thing since many of them have a genetic predisposition toward lactose intolerance. But they are required to select milk as their lunchtime beverage! That's part of the grant that funds them.
The milk gets thrown away at the end of the meal. Wasted.
So. This is a program ostensibly designed to build the character skills (lacking) in these kids, which will make them productive citizens of the great American hegemony. So what is the program really teaching them? It's teaching them to ignore cognitive dissonance and to waste food.
Second big obstacle may be the NY Parks Dept since they're actually looking for vendors from April to October, and in our first year we can only provide vendors in July and August. I'm betting strongly on the "plucky kids" storyline here to get us clearance here. It would certainly be great if we could get someone else to help us tell it too. There is some big AmeriCorps Celebration Day coming up soon, so I'm going to try and see if I can get the home planet to mention us as a VISTA success story. Premature, yes, yes, yes -- I realize. But I gotta figure mainstream press will be covering the event and the hype may whet their appetite for a human interest story.
In other news, I had to cancel my social life last weekend, but my FWB was amazingly obliging about the reschedule. "Shit happens, baby," he chuckled. "Why are you getting so worked up about this?"
Good question.
My date for the Brooklyn Wild Parrot Safari was somewhat less obliging and went ahead to stalk parrots through the forests and veldtlands of Brooklyn College without me, so I'll have to dig someone else up to do the Safari in October.
Also I had an extremely sexual dream about _____ of all unlikely people, which was just so weird that I bolted up in bed this morning fully awake the moment I opened my eyes? _____? _____? Too weird. No, it didn't sharpen my carnal appetite for the man himself. It did make me realize that I was definitely in a heterosexual head space for the nonce, which was interesting because unless there are personalities attached, I generally like girls more than boys if we're talking about sexual partners in the abstract.
Also, I found out that ______ had a stroke and can barely speak let alone write, which made me very, very sad. I recently reread [Title of Brilliant Book], and it is a great book. We've had a strange episodic relationship over the past two decades. He had a major crush on me during much of that time, and I was actually all set to consummate it except that on the eve of our departure to Gijon, he did something that like totally disgusted me.
We were about to go to Europe for three weeks.
And I had arrived at his unspeakably filthy apartment in Vancouver, and he had actually gone to the supermarket to buy me all my favorite treats --
"I know you love grapes," he said. "And dried apricots. And stinky cheese. And chocolate. And coffee!"
So he made me a little picnic lunch in his living room.
And I was freaked because his living room was so filthy. I shouldn't have been – after all, he lived in my house in Monterey for a year, and I knew what his cleanliness standards were (nonexistent.) But memory could not recreate this level of squalor.
After we were done, he started shoving the uneaten food into his refrigerator.
And I peeked into his refrigerator and I saw layers of food from previous trips to the store, lying there like rock strata in some strange comestible geology. The stuff in the very inside of the refrigerator had sprouted mold. It smelled foul. It smelled awful. My gorge was rising.
"______," I said nervously. "You're gonna be gone for three weeks. There is no sense in putting stuff in your refrigerator. It will only rot. Let's clean out your refrigerator. Here, I'll help!"
And he got very testy. No, we were definitely not cleaning out his refrigerator! It was fine, perfectly fine, the way it was. The unspoken coda hung there in the air: How dare you tell me what to do with my own refrigerator!
In Larry McMurtry's brilliant novel The Last Picture Show – one of my favorite novels, a perfect novel in my never humble literary estimation – the long-suffering wife of the deeply closeted football coach imagines her husband as this Golem constructed from cans of sliced peaches. Every night for 30 years, she'd been serving him sliced peaches for dessert. And I had this sudden vision of ______ as this Golem made from all the rotting produce and putrefying, half-eaten Hungry Man microwave meals in his fridge.
Really, I wanted to get back into my car and drive back to Monterey.
I can't fuck this guy, I thought. I can't even travel with this guy.
That turned out to be true. I had to ditch him in Italy.
Our friendship never really recovered though we spoke and emailed a few times after I moved to Ithaca.
But about his brilliance as a writer, there was/is/will be never any doubt. And it breaks my heart to think of him surviving one year, five years, a decade but not being able to write any longer.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2013-09-12 07:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-16 10:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-13 09:28 pm (UTC)Do you anticipate issues if kids with no character handle cash? When I was young, I knew a really sketchy guy that was given the responsibility of running a gas station, and true to form, he pocketed every dime he could, and lasted about a week.
no subject
Date: 2013-09-16 10:51 am (UTC)It iskind of a concern of mine, to be honest, but the young woman who is the permanent head of the program needs to do it the way she wants to do it. She grew up in one of the most notorious projects in Queens. Remarked to me the other day that 2/3 of the kids she went to elementary school with are either dead, in prison or junkies. No attempt at pathos; the statement was matter-of-fact.
no subject
Date: 2013-09-14 01:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-16 10:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-15 06:06 am (UTC)Sexual dream. You could at least give us the context. Who is he?