Volunteering Again

I'm back on the gravy train...

We're in the midst of a four day weekend.  Yesterday was Hemelvaart, the christian holiday referred to as Ascension in English.  No school until Monday.  If it seems like we are always on the cusp of, or in the midst of, or on the tail end of, a school vacation of some duration, that is because that's how it really is.  Dutch kids don't go to school less than their stateside cohorts, they just spread the school year out a lot more evenly over here.  Summer break is only six weeks.  The other six weeks or so of the long-style summer I grew up with are spread over the rest of the year here, especially in the spring, when, after a long, dark, cold, wet winter, it is hard to get anybody to do anything productive anyway.  This year, between 14 April and 7 June, we will have had two four day weekends, one five day weekend, and a two week spring break.  Five weeks after that stretch begins the summer break.  It's a great system.  It requires that parents have flexibility in their work schedules and ample time off themselves though, so it's a non-starter in a more...competitive culture.  

The C's school week included a field trip on Tuesday.  The field trip consisted of The C's class walking twenty minutes from school to the Van Gogh museum, visiting the museum, and then walking back to school.  That won't add anything to the narrative structure today.  It's just me pinching myself in writing.  My good fortune continues to exceed all boundaries of what I believe any reasonable person could expect, or even hope for.  Of course I also consider my hopes and expectations to be rather modest, and I speak from within the socio-economic class and system in which I exist.  And the more I steel myself for impending lack and possible hardship, the more rich my current bounty reveals itself to be.  My capacity to be thankful for what I have grows and grows, even as I predict imminent global strife that will not spare even my own family.  I don't know where that's coming from.  Could thinking long and deeply about complex interconnected nefarious inhumane systems actually imbue one with a state of secular grace?  

Sunday we went to the circus.  It was pretty good.  The circus in question comes about one time per year to a large grassy plaza in our neighborhood.  We go every time we can, and have since The C was a toddler.  I have written fairly detailed descriptions of the circus.  I won't do that again today.  Years have routines.  Trying to write a little something about my life every week for years on end really highlights that fact.  Lately I'm making an effort to avoid rewriting things I've already written a bunch of times.  I would like to add links to former essays in these cases, but over the years search engines have grown poorer and poorer at helping me to search for my own content.  A simple search for "onion in nederland" will lead to a link to my output.  But add another term, like "circus" for instance?  Nothing.  Often not even the original result will be there.  That used to work.  It no longer does.  I don't know why and am not going to waste my time in speculation on that subject.  The point is, with nearly a decade's worth of archives, finding a single post without the benefit of a searchable database is prohibitively time consuming.  That is why my linking to old writings dwindled, and dwindled, to the point of disappearance.  At this point I only do it if I am fairly sure of the title and have a pretty good idea when I published something.  

So, attempting to avoid repeating myself too much...  To a stateside imagination the most important thing to stress is scale.  Barnum & Bailey this is not.  There is a core duo which has run the circus since we were first spectators, a clown and an MC.  They are supported by a slowly rotating caste of talented acrobats.  They work up a completely new performance for each season.  This time they came with six performers in total and maybe the same number of stage hands.  The tent holds maybe two hundred spectators.  They stay for several afternoon performances and then move to another part of the city.  Things come to you like that here.  It's nice.  They aren't allowed to use animals in the shows here anymore though...not even birds.  The animal act was always more of a comic relief anyway.  The animal trainer lady either wasn't very good, or she was very good at training animals to perform the role of poorly-trained.  She wasn't there this time.  

I am volunteering again.  I've been doing so for a couple of months now, but didn't want to say anything until I felt like it was going to stick.  We're doing a bit of wildcat charity, as a good portion of what we are collecting and distributing does not fall under the aegis of our former umbrella organization.  My boss somehow still has possession of the electric cargo bike though.  She uses it to collect and transport food donations to an organizationally-sanctioned event at a community center on Saturdays.  But she has the cargo bike always, and uses it and her personal donor network to collect and distribute food a couple times per week to fifty or more needy people in the neighborhood.  That food is distributed from another volunteer's apartment.  My boss and that one volunteer were doing one hundred percent of the labor and legwork for several months before I got in touch wth them to see what was going on, and ask if they could use some help.  

So now I am going a couple days per week to the European corporate office of an international internet entertainment company which just so happens to be five minutes from our apartment.  I've seen some fancy offices in the states in my years as a courier.  In my volunteer work over the past several years I've seen several fancy canteens here in Amsterdam.  Office culture is different here.  People eat lunch together at work, and large companies have full scale cafeterias.  This one, this office, as well as this canteen, takes the cake.  It is opulent.  

It is unclear to me how many people work in this office.  It is a large building, but I've never seen very many people there.  I mostly visit the kitchen and dining hall, entering through the underground parking garage, but I have come through the front doors a few times as well.  The building is several stories tall, but I don't know where all of the corporate employees are.  There are plenty of support staff though, security guards, cleaners, clerical workers.  The team that operates the canteen is large.  Most days they have a manager, three chefs, two dishwashers, and a half dozen people cleaning, bussing tables, and replenishing stock in the dining room.  And they are generous.  And not like the "I stole this from the man" generous, but like "the official corporate position is that there is enough to share with everyone" generous.  If I get there early the manager is like, "Have a seat.  Eat whatever you want.  Drink whatever you want."  The refrigerated canned and bottled beverage selection is comparable to a small convenience store.  There is a coffee machine.  There is a smoothie and fresh juice station.  There is hot food with fish, meat, vegetarian, and vegan entrees.  There is a salad bar.  There is a cereal bar.  Back in the corner is a full self-service bar.  Twice the manager has sent me away with a bottle of local craft beer in my pocket.  I have not seen any Heineken.  

The amount of leftover food they produce is breathtaking.  Some days it is more than others, of course, but it's never not enough to feed several dozen people.  Some days there are leftovers for a hundred.  Our little outfit couldn't possibly transport or dispose of it all.  Once everything is removed from display and brought back to the kitchen the service staff come form all over the building to take as much as they want in to-go boxes.  Then I take whatever we can use.  The rest gets thrown away.  Everybody gets their fill at the trough, then I cart away tens of kilos, and there is still a tremendous amount of waste.  

I'm there every Wednesday and Thursday afternoon.  It's working out great for me so far.  Not only is it a good deed I'm doing for my community, but it is such a cornucopia that I can bring home all sorts of good food myself.  Needless to say, everything is organic, fair trade, fresh caught, grain fed, etc...  I'm feeding my family now several days per week with stuff I bring home from there.  It's a wonderful inflation hedge, and an ethically unambiguous one from my perspective.  I'm depriving no one but the trash compactor in the process.  

The fare veers toward fancy.  I certainly find a lot more things to please my partner than I do to please my child, and honestly also more for her than I find for myself.  For the most part we can't take donations of seafood, but I can certainly bring it home.  The P loves fish, but we don't prepare it at home.  So now, most nearly every week I bring The P something fishy, a mackerel salad, or a baked fish filet, or a shrimp curry.  I bring her various warm and cold salads, stuff that I think she would find yummy, but that I don't prepare at home.  For The C there is less, but fried fish, bacon, sausage, and cream-filled croissants have been appreciated.  

Our home eating strategy of many years is that we do not prepare meat dishes at home.  None of us are vegetarians, but we eat vegetarian day to day.  Out, traveling, vacationing, visiting family and friends, we eat whatever we want, or whatever is offered.  Al three of us love meat.  We just don't make it at home.  I consider it a practical and health-conscious system for daily living, and getting to eat meat is always a treat.  That said, if you look at the above list of things I am bringing home you might see a trend.  I might not be "preparing" meat in our home, but our family meat intake has been increasing with the reintroduction of volunteer bounty.  As for my partner and child, that's great.  Being able to spoil my partner and child with meaty fishy delicacies at no out of pocket expense checks a whole bunch of boxes for me.  And while I continue to believe that the Netherlands is going to be among the best places to be in the world in the medium term, I also believe that privation and lack are marching steadily toward us all to some degree.  For the time being I have intercepted the gravy train.  

And though most of what I bring home is for my partner and child, I do not fail to snag things that I find particularly tasty myself.  I do not think it was a coincidence that after like two years of dieting, and losing a fair amount of weight, about thirty pounds, I was not quite ever able to reach my target weight until the corony diktats put an end to my volunteering.  I'm very good at sticking to a diet.  I am very bad at, when encountering free, delicious, unhealthy food, not immediately jamming it in my mouth.  I am a glutton.  My gluttony is not limited to food.  With all substances, activities, beliefs, hobbies, habits, feelings, etc., I am an all or nothing type of person.  And I have no desire to change that.  It's a facet of my personality.  I am long aware of it and make choices with the fact in mind.  I am perfectly capable of engaging in abstinence.  I am perfectly incapable of engaging in moderation.  It has always been so.  

And that's not to say that it must be so.  But I have no complaints, and am certainly not keen on voluntarily reprogramming at such a fundamental level.  

I mentioned today a couple of times things like coming strife, and approaching privation.  If you just read this note, then that could be confusing.  I have outlined my ideas on that subject in writing in this space in the recent past.  But don't take my word for it.  If The Economist says that famine is coming, that's not a prediction.  That's the ruling class agenda.  

Oh yeah.  I just want to get out ahead of this one, for the record, like I try to do.  "Monkeypox" isn't a thing.  And even if it was a thing, just in the last week our public health overseers have completely redefined what sort of thing it is.  It went from a "virus" mostly limited to central Africa and spread through close contact, to a "disease of global public importance" possibly capable of airborne spread.  Shingles is a well-documented side effect of the toxic injections.  There is no moneypoxxx outbreak.  There is only an epidemic of auto-immune reactions to foreign toxins contained in the coerced injections.  I'm hoping that this ruse is so transparently stupid and contrived that it will be nearly universally met with the ridicule and disdain it deserves.  I'm not afraid to spit venom at public figures.  Indeed, I consider it a duty of citizenship.  In my private life however, it is my strong preference to treat all other humans with respect, even people who see the world far differently than I do.  That said, out of consideration for the feelings of those far more credulous than I, I treated the convid ruse with kid gloves for far too long.  I'm not making that mistake again.  I hope I'm not alone.  

Peace!