Wednesday is more and more turning into a “hump day” for me. I think part of it is my shrinking energy pie. But I spent another hour and a half with my boss yesterday. She is feeling like she has too much on her plate. Our times together seem to be good for her. We spent a lot of time talking about non work stuff, like books I am reading and podcasts I am listening to. Then we went through a bunch of service music I had prepared to show her and discuss.

This was all good, but afterwards I could feel how drained I was and I hadn’t even done my prep for the evening rehearsal nor practiced organ.

I went into the rehearsal looking for some Friedman sabotage. By this I mean, that I was expecting some possible unforeseen moments that i would need to deflate, dodge or otherwise deal with. Besides “Stewardship the Musical,” there are other things going on at Grace which might precipitate stuff. Discontent in the people living nearby the church seems to be reaching new levels.

After our curates moved out, complaints about their  behavior surfaced at a routine public meeting of the neighborhood to discuss our upcoming parking lot expansion plans. These sentiments slowed the process way down and now there are more public hearings planned to ostensibly talk about the parking lot, even though complaints about how our curates handled themselves continue to come up in these discussions.

Night before last, Jen was involved in a meeting where people in the neighborhood were complaining about our monthly program to feed people, “Feeding America.” According to Jen there was little sympathy for people who come to get food and help. Apparently there were people in the neighborhood who were not happy about their presence.

This program is near and dear to my boss’s heart. A heart which seems to be under a lot of stress and near breaking lately. But this intolerance reflects the country at large.

I pointed my boss (and I point you, dear reader) to a series of podcasts which Brooke Gladstone has just begun about poverty and attitudes towards it in the USA:

The poverty tour – On the Media

This is a great show and Gladstone promises more like it. The perplexing thing is how myths from decades ago about poor people being lazy and exploiting the system persists even after conservatives (thank you Bill ‘the end of welfare as we know it”Clinton) have long ago won the battle and there are people in our country starving and without homes.

Although I assured my boss that my life is more than good these days, I can see I’m a little tired and grumpy this morning. I think I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Have a day.