kingrat

I have some news, but first things first. An entry about the Steps Ahead launch course this weekend.

Friday morning I got up very freaking early and headed over to Camp Burton for the course. I got there just in time for the first run. The students and mentors run a mile every morning. The times are recorded. The activity isn't a race, except against yourself. I just recorded times as runners crossed the finish line.

Friday my big job was running the spider web activity. Basically, a web of ropes is strung between two trees. A group of mentors and students has to get from one side to the other without touching the ropes. The fun part is I get to gag someone if I want to. So the bossy types get it.

Because they are short mentors, I had to sit in as a mentor Friday evening. They can match 2 students to 1 mentor, but there's an activity Friday that requires one-to-one. Basically, all the students sit in a circle facing mentors. Each mentor gets to evaluate the participation level of the student facing him or her, letting them know how the student appears to the mentor. The students rotate about every 3 or 4 minutes. After that activity, the tables are turned. The students assess the participation level of the mentors one by one. So I got to be a pretend mentor for the activity.

Saturday morning I worked the run again. This time I was a sign holder. My sign said Go For It! I placed myself just around the bend from the finish line. My job was to encourage students and mentors to push themselves the last bit to the finish.

I had very little to do the rest of the morning and afternoon. There were workshops conducted during that period. And then Gender Circle which is a male-only or female-only time to get the students to open up without the presence of the opposite sex. I didn't participate in it this year.

However, in the evening the course starts focusing on the box. Basically, working with the students and mentors to identify the box in which they live. You know, as in think outside the box. In other words, what's the behavior that you stick to that's comfortable, that works somewhat to protect you from your insecurities, but that ultimately inhibits you from realizing your potential. Things like being a control freak, overly shy, bitchy, clowning, etc. The guy who runs the course pushes a theory that there's a single event in your life from the age of 3 to 7 that starts people on the road to this behavior. And part of the exercise is to find this event. I don't buy it, but I do believe that people start developing their habits early and early events build and reinforce them. Anyway, my job during this exercise was to coach the students and mentors to help them figure out what the biggest behavior of this sort is that they have and whether they want to step outside it. It's not really that hard to do, but a lot of times people are just too close to their own behavior to see it. For instance, one person's behavior was indecisiveness. If he never decides to do anything, he never fails at anything. He also never does anything either. He couldn't decide if making decisions was his problem or not. Eh, it might not be, but it's a good start. I got to coach him through seeing that. Plus a few others.

Sunday is another run. I held another sign. This time much further into the course. After the last kid ran by, I jogged with him most of the rest of the way back. He totally kicked it at the end, and left me in the dust.

The final ceremony of the course is an event where the students and mentors symbolically step outside the box, pledging to learn to live without their behavior for the school year. That happens Sunday. This one took a long time because a number of people had a hard time with that. We didn't get finished until nearly 6 pm.

After that was cleanup and a rush to get to the 7:10 ferry. I drove three Steps Up kids home. Steps Up are the upper classmen who sign up to help. They rode over with freshman and mentors on Thursday, but the ride home is supposed to be just the students and mentors. So I packed three of them into my car. I've worked with all three before so we had a good time on the ride back.

From the mentoring coordinator:

We are in great need of male mentors at Sealth. We have been short all along and then had several mentors drop on us. Please spread the word to your friends and co-workers. Given the last minute notice and the great need we have for male mentors, we are willing to be flexible with the schedule a bit. If you know of someone who would be a great mentor and could make at least part of the launch course, please send them my way. The launch course is this week (yikes!), Thursday, November 8th - Sunday, November 11th. We currently have 3 male mentors and need 3 more at the very least.

If any of the men on my friends list would consider mentoring this year, please let me know. I can't rave enough about how positive the experience has been for me.

Edited to add: If the women on my friends list would mention this to the men in their lives (significant others, brothers, sketchy pickups, etc.), I would also appreciate this.

Edited again to add: Could y'all ask around at your workplace too, even if you can't commit?

About a month ago Oprah featured The Secret on her show. It's a book and/or DVD that purports to reveal the secret to success. Hard work, drive, smarts, winning personality? No. New Age bullshit Law of Attraction. In other words, the thoughts you have have a specific frequency. Events and things in the world have frequencies too. And magically, the frequencies of your thoughts resonate with the frequencies of events and attract them to you. So if you think about winning the lottery all the time. I mean really think about it, you will win the lottery. But if you slip up, you'll be thinking negative things, and you'll get hit by a car, cause that's a negative thing.

Now, there's something to be said for having a positive attitude, and about thinking about the things you want, if that gets you to plan and execute to get the things you want.

Beyond that, it's utter fucking bullshit. Hell, most science these days actually casts doubt on the existence of real free will.

I can't believe that this sort of pseudo-scientific bullshit passes these days. People are stupid enough to believe it. Do you believe it? Then you are stupid!

Why am I ranting about it? Cause the program director for Community for Youth played the DVD for a bunch of high school students tonight. Perhaps next week we'll be telling them about intelligent design.

Erg.

The Community for Youh metnoring program starts up again next week for me. Sort of. I'll miss the first mentor training while on this family cruise. This year I'll be mentoring in the Steps Beyond program for sophomores through seniors, rather than the Steps Ahead program for freshman that I mentored in last year. I'm really looking forward to this.

Anyway, if anyone has any interest in mentoring in Steps Ahead, let me know and I'll hook you up. I'm not sure what the status or need for mentoring is in that program, but it generally could use as many mentors who can commit as possible. And if you want a basic taste or just want to help but not commit to anything, Community for Youth needs volunteers for the launch course for Steps Beyond. It's a Saturday/Sunday retreat.

We need volunteers for the Steps Beyond Launch Course.

For those of you who are not able to commit to Steps Beyond this year but would like to stay involved with the program, volunteering at the Steps Beyond launch course is a great way to do that.

The launch course is September 30th-October 1st.

Please let me know if you are interested and available. Also, if you have an friends or co-workers who are looking for volunteer opportunities we could use their help as well. Launch volunteers do not need to have prior mentoring experience. Thanks for spreading the word.

The CfY mentor training on Thursday was focusing on the topic of making requests. Kind of odd that we even needed to have the workshop but that's where our culture has gotten to. To illustrate:

The proper way to make a request is to ask something like this: Will you please do X?.

How often do you receive requests like that? How often do you make requests like that? I.e., where you actually ask someone to do something. My guess is, not very often, despite the fact that a whole host of people are going to respond to this saying no really, all the time. I don't believe you.

See what happens most of the time is stuff like this: So when are you going to ask me out? Hinting around to someone that your computer is broken so hopefully they will volunteer to fix it. Taking no risk really.

Being at the receiving end of this sort of thing is annoying. I can't count the number of times someone tells me we should get together sometime leaving the onus on me to pursue it or not be a good friend or something. My response is usually You have my phone number. And if you don't, here it is: (206) 568-8356. My email if the phone freaks you out is kingrat.lj@spamex.com.

One of the reasons I love Jason so much is that he makes requests to me. After breakfast, Do you want to walk around Greenlake? Are you going to go to Noc Noc with me this Saturday? Sometimes he can do the non-request kind of thing: You should give a bunch of money to X. But by and large he takes the risk of me rejecting the request.

See, that's the whole thing. We just don't like to run the risk of someone saying no. So we act in ways and phrase things in ways that minimize the chance of someone saying no. Sometimes it's by just not asking and then hoping they'll have E.S.P. But if they don't do it they haven't said no. Or by phrasing it leaves little room to say no without seeming like an ass.

I do it all the time. Sometimes I was aware of what I was doing. Now, I'm probably going to cringe every time. I doubt I'll stop it, cause I am probably more of a wuss than most of you.

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And the reason why we talked about this in the mentor training is because one of the things we are supposed to do is make direct requests to the students we are mentoring. Will you go to a tutoring session? Would you attend school? That sort of thing.

What are your goals? Do you know what they are? What about your New Years Resolutions? Are those goals or just something you do because you are supposed to do it and you want to be a generally better person?

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I ask because the mentoring program I'm part of is all about helping high school students set and achieve their goals. Way back in October during the retreat that kick the program off (the launch course), we all set goals. Not just the students, but also the mentors. I went through a little bit of an epiphany. The information wasn't so much new to me as was the weight I put on it. I mentioned this before, but was kind of quiet about what it was.

The epiphany? I've been telling myself that I'm happy being single, unmarried, etc. And while I am content (generally), I really want to be married and have a family. What I had been telling myself was that I wanted to open a bookstore. Which I do, but it isn't what really moves me most.

Now, for those reading this that I've asked out and may ask out, rest assured that I understand that starting off with the baby factory thing is not how to do thing. There will be those I date where I know that's not the person's goal. I won't be trying to convince anyone they should become a wife and mother. There can be fun, meaningful, and even lasting relationships that don't lead to my ultimate goal. But I know what my ultimate goal is.

One of the things that prevents me from having relationships is that I am extremely scared of making moves. Rejection freaks me out. Big time. So I avoid taking risks. Which of course doesn't result in any less rejection. My goal coming out of the launch course was to ask out someone at least 3 times per month. I even put that in my New Years resolutions (and one person objected to that resolution because it made women feel like a number). I need to risk rejection if I am going to get what I want eventually.

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Now, back to the title of this entry. Yesterday at our mentoring meeting, the program director introduced the concept of anté-ing for our goals. Most of the students have goals around school. The mentors have goals around losing weight, applying for grad school, starting a business, etc. He asked one mentor if losing weight (her goal) would be worth $3000 to her. (The actual conversation was more involved than that, of course.) He challenged her to anté up a check for $3000 to play. He would hold the check until the end of the course. If she achieved her weight loss, she'd get the check back. If not, he'd send it to someone she hates (I think it was some pro-life group).

The concept being the same as in poker. If you aren't risking anything, you aren't playing. Making goals with nothing on the line doesn't always motivate one to push hard. At worst, you are where you started.

Now, I've actually achieved my goal mostly (so far). But I've decided to anté up anyway. Put something on the line to motivate myself. I didn't at the meeting, mostly because I wasn't sure what to bet. I thought about my car, but in the end it didn't feel like a real risk to me. More than one person has received a hand-me-down car from me.

But when I got home last night, staring me in the face was something that would be a risk. My books. As anyone who knows me knows, I love my books. So I'm thinking of betting my personally signed copies of China Miéville's books on me meeting my commitment. The only thing holding me back on it right now is that I don't know if the kids will relate to it at all. I do want something they can relate to, to hopefully inspire them to take their own goals seriously.

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Back to the question I asked at the top. What are your goals? Are you willing to risk something real to you to motivate you to accomplish your goal?

I headed to Chief Sealth High School around 1:30 p.m., but stopped to get food and gas on the way. I arrived around 2:30 p.m. The students were arriving at the lunch room, from there to get security checked before loading up cars. Because I have the Magnum, we loaded my car up with luggage rather than youth. After that it was off to Camp Burton on Vashon Island. We arrived there around 5 p.m.

First order of the launch course was to set up cabin arrangements. I shared a cabin with four students, one Steps Up student (second through fourth year students) and one other mentor. Later, two more mentors who could not make an early arrival also joined our cabin. All boys. All the luggage had been packed in a couple of cars and unloaded in one big pile in the main camp activity room (which Steps Ahead called the course room throughout). Everyone had to pick their bags out of that jumbled mess and lug it up to their cabins. Of course, the first order of business is to pick bunks. The beds were small and uncomfortable, but luckily were not set on old squeaky even more uncomfortable spring frames. Just wooden platforms with thin plastic covered mattresses. Next bit of business was to establish cabin rules: how much time to take a shower, who cleans, whether discussion after lights out is okay, that sort of thing. The primary one on ours was flush.

The rest of the evening was filled with various lecture-type course room activities. The program director stood up in front and talked about what Community for Youth calls The Moves. Able vs. willing, life is a game and you are the player playing against yourself, that sort of thing. Interspersed in that were some get to know you activities. For instance, we all stood in two concentric circles mentors facing students. Every minute a bell would be rung and the students would move one mentor to their right. At each bell we were to each answer various kinds of get to know you questions: what pets do you have, what's your first memory, sing a line from your favorite song. I could barely hear anything though. The room had nothing to absorb sound. I have difficulty hearing anything above background chatter. With 30 kids and 30 mentors talking away my comprehension was about nil. And lastly, the staff announced the morning runs, at which almost everyone students and mentors all groaned heavily.

I should also mention the course room rules: name tags at all times, no two mentors sitting in a row, no three students sitting in a row, and no sitting in back if a seat is available in front of you. No starting until those conditions are met.

Seven a.m. Friday morning we were woken up. We traipsed to the course room for stretching. Then we lined up for a run down to the beach and back, for a distance of about a mile. I came in near the end for the men, with a time of 10: 30-something. I ran too hard at the beginning and had no energy at the end. I nearly puked after crossing the finish line. We then got to shower up and head for breakfast. Though my cabin had setup that first day so not everyone had time to shower prior to food. A little bit of free time after breakfast remedied that though.

First course room activity on Friday was more lecturing. In fact, the entire morning was spent in discussion. After lunch though, we headed into the woods for a ropes course. Essentially, some trust building exercises. A lot of what the weekend is designed for is to break people down, then build them back together with the group, so that folks will listen to each other and trust each other. And not just breaking down the students and getting them to trust the mentors. I mean everyone. The first real part of that was the ropes course. By trust exercises I mean the types of things you would expect. There's a falling exercise where participants must fall backwards from a height of about six feet to be caught by others. There's a wall where we all had to figure out how to get over the wall without any ropes. We did it by putting a couple of big mentors at the bottom who lifted people up who were then pulled up by the first person who got lifted up the wall. We neglected to remember that the big folks (me and one other mentor) wouldn't be easily lifted just by the guy on top of the wall. So I was stuck at the bottom and the station monitors even told us to quit because they didn't think we could get me over the wall. I must have tried about five different ways with maybe fifteen different attempts to get over. Just as the bell rang though we figured out how to get me over. Another activity was putting people through a web stretched between two trees without touching the web itself, and not being able to re-use holes in the web. This time we figured out to reserve an easy way for the last person to get through. And we were the only group to get everyone through the web. Last activity on the ropes course was to be led around blindfolded.

After dinner was another concentric circle game. Well, not so much a game. The purpose here was for mentors to assess the participation level of every student. And then for the students to assess the participation level of every mentor. I got pretty good reviews from the young folk, cause I had been making an effort to talk to all of them and to participate well. As hokey as many of the activities were, I figured fuck it. Why not just go crazy? So I pretty much did. I got some useful feedback though from the circles, and made a couple of commitments. One was to stand in front of the room more often when there were activities that required people to go up front. Another was to play football with the guys during free time. I had sat on the sidelines and watched up til that point.

Saturday morning started off with another stretch and another mile run. We were to try to set goals to beat our previous times. (There was more to it than that, but that's the highlight.) This time I started off slower, but paced myself and didn't need to slow down or walk to keep moving. I went from 10:30-something to 9:07. A hecka-good improvement. By the way, the kids there use a lot of slang. Hecka and hella attached to various adjectives to indicate superlatives. D-dub, pronounced in a particular way. I don't think any of the kids had a meaning for the term, but they used it a lot as an interjection. Also, dipset. Again, I don't think they knew what it meant and I'm pretty sure neither did they.

More course room lectures and discussion followed that morning. The big idea in the morning was out of the box thinking. Nothing too amazing during that discussion, but it led into something for the evening. To illustrate out of the box thinking, mentor-student pairs took turns coming to the front of the room pulling a random object out of a box, and then acting out a short scene of their own choosing in which that object had to play a part, but that object had to be something other than it's plain, obvious self. I.e., a rope becomes a snake. Lunch wasn't a sit-down lunch on Saturday though. Instead, we grabbed plates, piled them up, and walked out and spent time one on one with a student. I think the idea was good, but some of the discussion was a bit forced at that point.

After lunch was a confidentiality circle. Get everyone of the same gender into a room, and get each of us to tell something deep or intimate about ourselves that generally we don't share in public. Obviously, we're not allowed to repeat what other said there. I was kind of surprised that among the guys, they felt comfortable enough after two days to open up as much as they did. There was much crying.

After dinner we had a stepping out of the box lecture and activities. The program director described some kinds of boxes in which people place themselves. Behaviors they default to rather than live life. I.e., fighting, or being the class clown. And then we had a couple of exercises where people came to the front and the program director used a method or two to draw out of them how they behave under situations and how that is fucking up their lives. And not the bullshit things that people tell themselves or others either. Some folks presented a behavior or two that they thought about. The mentors in particular came up with some bullshit things, trying to impress the students. No dice. The guy running the thing is good. He went for the jugular, and the mentors were broke down and stripped of inauthenticity pretty good. I didn't go up, but during this part I had an epiphany. Which I won't share here. After the first couple of people did it in front of the group, we broke up into small groups to discuss our own boxes. Or rather, try to figure out what they were. My group didn't get very far, mostly because a couple of participants tried to do it like the program directory did, and well, weren't as good at it. However, we did make some progress and I figured out the box that's been limiting me for years. Mostly I had it figured out during that aforementioned epiphany, but most of it I knew in one form or another for the last twenty years. Behavior I knew I do, but I'd never put it all together, and put it together with how much it affected my life and how much it meant to me. Yes, I cried. Rivers.

Anyway, I said I wasn't going to write about my epiphany and this here. Too much for this audience. Sorry. I will say this though: I've been saying for a few years that my dream was to open my own bookstore. I even believed it myself. But it's bullshit. I'd love to open a bookstore. It's a dream. But not the dream. The bookstore is on hold for a while now.

Sunday morning was another group stretch and another run. They didn't make me run this time though. In fact, I didn't get to run. I kind of wanted to though. The last run was for the students only. The rest of the morning and afternoon was devoted mostly to more on students and mentors figuring out what their box is. What their limiting behavior is. Steps Ahead requires everyone to commit to stepping outside of their box, to do something different. The final activity was a ceremony where everyone publicly declared their box and committed to giving it up. Some of them were asked to demonstrate their commitment. Many of them were very moving.

The whole thing ran over, so it was a mad dash to the ferry. Many of the cars didn't make the planned ferry. I did though. I didn't have any students in my car due to the luggage transport at the beginning. Just two mentors and one of the Steps Up kids. Dropped two of them off at the high school and drove one all the way home.

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Conclusions. Holy shit. There's a bit of a cult-like aspect to the whole thing. But goddamn if I didn't see some real changes from some of the kids.

The terminology is a bit weird. Usually I prefer to use plain English, but the shorthand used there is useful. So I apologize in advance if some of the things I write about over the next months get a bit on the using the inside terms side of things. Tough. My journal.

And I think that for the first time ever in the history of this journal, there's something about me that I don't exactly feel comfortable writing about publicly. This could be a life-changing experience for me. We'll know later, I suppose, if my life is changed. Anyway, don't ask about it. There's a small handful of people I'll talk to about it and I'll get to each of you shortly. Everyone else can maybe figure it out through the other stuff I write. And if I succeed, I'll tell everyone. Maybe I won't wait. But I'm definitely not comfortable writing about it now.

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Thursday is when I get matched up with the student I'll mentor for the rest of the school year.

Went to the Community for Youth mentor training tonight. I think the training was a little lacking. Not that it was all that bad as far as it went. But they have a specific coaching checklist, code of the mentor, coaching strategy, 30 moves for success, and the mistake process (for taking accountability). And that's just the stuff on the two reminder cards. There's a 104 page manual. We went over three pages in the book, and touched briefly on three of the five card sections.

What we did get into in depth was an exercise on putting ourselves into the shoes of the kids. And one on how to interact with parents. And I got a lot out of those.

Now, in some respects it was really great, but not so much as training. Part of the idea of this is too create a community of mentors. The gist of Community for Youth's program is that they don't just sign you up with a kid and then you take it from there. There are frequent events together. Next week I have one meeting to meet the kids as a group for three hours. And then from Thursday afternoon to Sunday afternoon I'll be at Camp something or the other on Vashon Island with the other mentors and the kids. And I won't even have been matched up with a kid at that point. That will happen during the following week. It's not so much that it's rigid in form (though it's a bit more rigid than some others I've seen), it's that they don't leave you on your own.

So this training was a good start for that, getting to know the other people who I will see for the next eight months, and possibly for the next three years if I continue on into the Steps Beyond program.

Anyway, in the exercise on parents, we broke into groups and each group had to come up with a scenario for dealing with parents with which we wouldn't be comfortable dealing. One group had the family feeling like it was in competition with the mentor. Another group had where the mother abuses the kid. My group had one where the father tried to enlist the mentor in showing the student the right way. I.e., kid screws something up and the father says Phil will tell you I'm right, you gotta shape up!. You don't want to go against the parents (right or wrong, cause they'll pull the kids out of the program), and you don't want to side with the parents cause that makes you an adult authority figure rather than an adult friend. The solution we came up with was to back out of the situation. Dude, you gotta work this out between yourselves.

We'll see how it goes.

From 10 til 2 yesterday I attended an orientation class for mentoring for Community for Youth. I thought it was a training class, but it was more recruiting oriented. They say they've been coming up short in the last couple of years in the number of mentors, so they added the orientation to get more people in. Rather than start with training, they get people who are just interested into the orientation and feed those that come out of it interested into the training.

So essentially the progream is several initial events, the real training, a pre-launch, a weekend at a camp, and one or two other things. Then after that it's weekly time and whatever else you want to do with your kid. The program is all about goal setting. All the kids and all the mentors are supposed to set a goal for the school year. Something like a 4.0 G.P.A. or making the baseball team or getting a job. The mentors probably have goals a little less school oriented, or possibly college oriented. Getting into grad school, getting to a certain weight, getting a girlfriend. Yep, that last one was mentioned even. Erin mentioned to me that it might be a good place to meet women. She was right, and they even encourage it. Well, as long as it's not one of the students. Obviously, that's verboten. The other thing they emphasized is keeping your word 100% of the time. If you don't show up, the kid will not show up.

Anyway, I'm all signed up for the training. And I'll likely be mentoring a kid from Sealth.