When I left off of Part One
(I’m using links as footnotes, essentially) - I'd arrived in Austin after a move where I met a bunch of different people - good folks, mind you, but its one thing to occasionally meet a few people offline who you knew online - it's another to drive to their homes.
It was fun but exhausting. I think when I arrived at my sister's home I spend longer than most would, needing some down time before I began looking for work. I think that was an example where I’d gone way outside my usual comfort zone as an introvert and my body was telling me to stay in bed until both body and brain were ready to adjust. Soon I did adjust and move on.
This shy introvert had gone from a small town in Maryland where I’d worked out my fear of public speaking by forcing myself onstage at open mics, in a town where they were only two establishments that had open-mic night, to Austin where I bet I can find five open mic nights per night if I wanted to. Which I didn’t. I stopped that practice after I moved... but soon found other ways to do social things.
My first six months in Austin was mixed, with rough moments mixed in with the positive ones.
A big positive step came when I found the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin and was hired to work there. I worked there for about one year but seven years later I'm still super active there. I wrote here about how I, dubbed Scottman by kids at the UU church in Frederick, Md., had found a new church: http://sbutki.newsvine.com/_news/20.... More about my activities at the church in a minute.
I had a series of interesting temp jobs, which provide a never-ending stories. The oddest was probably the first. I saw someone advertising for people doing data and hiring them at a higher than usual wage. Turns out it was a temp agency, er, staffing service, hiring folks to do work at the state Department of Public Safety. Seems there was a large backlog on applications for concealed weapons permits.
I took the job. It seemed hilarious - I move to Texas what with its stereotype of people with guns and cowboy hats and I wasn’t finding that many cowboy hats but soon I was among about 70 people processing these applications. Every week, on Fridays, about ten of us would be fired, because the project was taking too long and costing too much. At one point they offered to train some people to do a second job - I volunteered. I’d seen the first season of Survival and I knew that to survive this real life reality show I had to become more essential. If there’s interest in this job and some hilarious and some disturbing results ask me in the comments section.
Another temp job involved organizing more than five years of documents from a state agency into various groupings (one for faxes, one for agendas, one for written correspondence) and then sort them all chronologically. Except that the boss referred to it as “chronicological,” which never failed to spark at least one worker from having to hide a laugh what with Austin having its own fascination with “chronic,” aka high quality weed.
I also found work, most of seasonal, at Pearson aka the Dark Side aka the company both lobbying the state for more of those standardized tests parents and teachers alike dislike and then publishing said tests. My job was to score the tests. I met there two of my best friends, Gretchen Smith and Kirsten Clay.
I walked out of a library one day, headed to the Pearson job interview, to find someone had stolen my radio. This was the same morning NPR broadcast a story about car burglaries dropping in regularity. In my style I posted a letter to NPR suggesting they rebroadcast it for my burglar to hear. http://sbutki.newsvine.com/_news/20...
A darker moment took place when I came home to my apartment to find someone had broken into my apartment and stolen my most valuable items - a fancy SLR camera, tv and dvd player and computer. I wrote about it here http://sbutki.newsvine.com/_news/20... then focused later on why it rattled me so. http://sbutki.newsvine.com/_news/20...
Meanwhile, I wrote about how Austin differed from Maryland with pieces like this (http://sbutki.newsvine.com/_news/20...) as well as a version on facebook https://www.facebook.com/notes/scot...
Oh, and yes, while no longer a paid journalist I would still write memoir pieces and conduct writing exercise. I still wrote interviews with authors something I do to this day at a rate of one a month. I think if most people look at this index of interviews and reviews I've done they would recognize at least a few names with authors ranging from film critic Roger Ebert to Police drummer Stewart Copeland along with many mystery writers, memoirists, etc. in between. http://sbutki.new.newsvine.com/_new...
Soon after I arrived, South by Southwest happened. I decided to follow my interests which led me to a documentary called Horseboy. I didn't know much going in except that it'd be about a family who lived near Austin whose son was autistic and loved horses. I worried that, in this culture where, even more these days, too many people base decicions on science based on anecdote (thus the whole vaccine causes autism myth that I went out of my way to discredit in interviews over the years) this could lead to people saying, ah, so if I take my family to Mongolia, as this family did, where horses have more meaning than in America their son with autism will also progress.
I was pleased the movie didn't do that, it made it clear it was just one particular family's experience and they were not suggesting it was the cure-all for all families. I was more excited when I realized that in addition to interviewing just the director that the father, Isaacson had written a memoir too, and used the money from an advance to buy a horse ranch that is open for other families with children with autism to use.
Ultimately, I would interview not only the director and the father but also the son in question and his mom. And when I lost all those interviews in the home burglary they agreed to be interviewed a second time. I wrote separate interviews with all of them and they are indexed here http://sbutki.newsvine.com/_news/20... when, in a personal anomaly, I didn't finish the book until way after I'd actually published the interview. That was my one violation of my personal vow to read every book as part of an interview to avoid being those fake journalists on television and elsewhere who do interviews where it's clear they had no idea what the book involved.
I wrote memoir pieces and review pieces of various Austin coffee shops. And I wrote about the time I regained a car radio and, perhaps most importantly, resumed my relationship with NPR. http://sbutki.newsvine.com/_news/20...
Meanwhile, on the work front it took me a few years to get back into doing what I wanted, namely returning to working with folks with special needs. I ended up working full-time in group homes for a few years (working weekends which made it hard to build up a social life) and had other work before eventually getting work at a local school district where I worked for four years into last spring. At that point I decided, for a variety of reasons, to instead work in the homes of various families needing help. I currently have four jobs with four different families. This leads to lots of complicated schedule and taking advantage of “Obamacare” since none of my jobs are full-time.
Ok, so about that photo. That was me holding a sign while part of Occupy Austin. I grew up wishing I was born earlier so I could have participated in the heady history-making protests and matches in the 60s, particularly the civil rights struggles. It’s a time period I’m just fascinated with.
For years as a reporter I would write about protests, marches and other types of social aciton but be unable to participate or even comment on it because it’s important for journalists to appear neutral. While working temp jobs for the state and then working for a school district I still hesitated to participate in these actions for fear it’d lead me to lose a job.
But when the Occupy Wall Street movement began and Occupy Austin was created I had to take place. I participated in marches and organizational meetings and got a taste of what it was like to be on the street sweating your butt off, losing your voice screaming and chanting, your legs killing you and you’re making a difference in so many ways, or at least that’s your hope.
I posted a photo album of Occupy here.https://www.facebook.com/scott.butk... As my life got busier and it appeared Occupy was going to into different directions I stepped away. Later I learned there were one or two undercover cops amongst the group. We’d guessed that might be the case but it was crazier than anticipated. http://www.chron.com/news/houston-t...
Which reminds me I need to buy this book by Austin Chronicle photographer John Jack Anderson, who did an amazing job covering the Occupy Austin movement. You can learn more about the book here http://www.motherjones.com/media/20...
After I stepped away from Occupy Austin, I only did occasional protests and marches, often through my church.
I guess things became busy about six months ago. I became a more active participant in social actions, like joining 500 martches protesting the for-profit family detention center near Dillings, TX, http://www.texastribune.org/2015/05... and working with my church to provide sanctuary for a woman from Guatemala. http://www.austinchronicle.com/dail...
When Black Lives Matter Austin had its first rally, about a month ago now, I not only went but convinced some of the teenagers, from a church high school group I help run with Jairy Grisaffe, and their parents to attend as well as others. When that organization had its first organizational meeting I played a passive role, watching but wanting to help. So I stepped up and now am one of the leaders of the Allies for Black Lives Matter.
That put me outside my usual comfort zone but it felt good and right. Soon I was having two three to sometimes four nights a week taken up with marches and rallies and, more often, planning sessions.
Most recently, two weekends ago, I attended a Black Lives Matter Austin protest outside the Round Rock Police Department about the infamous choke hold on a black student.. That was the first part of my weekend and the last event of my weekend came when Meme Styles faciliated a panel at a church about not just that incident but how we can better improve the situation. I wrote about the experience here: https://www.facebook.com/scott.butk...
Doing these social actions is tricky at times because it’s hard to not look at events as someone who majored in journalism and minored in political science, meaning if i’m part of an event I am going to try hard to live in the moment but when I see what looks like the beginning of a potential news story I will have to stop myself from going to discover. But sometimes, I’ve realized, it can work to our benefit.
There’s cues and clues one can spot about problems happening right before it transpires. You have to watch for it and I do but it takes me out of the moment. I always ask those I’m attending events with whether they would be comfortable getting hurt and/or going to jail. This is like planning how much you will spend in Las Vegas. In both cases the answers to those questions helps dictate actions. So I try to help those around me get to where they need to go if violence and/or arrests do take place.
I am usually aware of the crowd size (an important thing for a reporter to know, as well as for a protest organizer to know since those numbers often don’t match the numbers police will provid) and how close the police are to me as well as determining where the trouble spots are at.
I work hard to take off that lens of a journalist and just focus on being in the moment: Feeling the satisfaction and pride of knowing i’m helping others in a cause I believe in, usually regarding race and immigration and inequities in society, in a direct physical way. For years I’d walked the walk and told others to walk that walk as well but now these days i’m not only walking but sometimes helping organize walks and rallies and getting others I know to participate too.
Watch my facebook page for notifications of upcoming events.
Between my special education work and my activist work I have come more and more out of my shell. I tell people these days that half my work is improv, meaning I'm not following specific plan while working these jobs so much as having a vague schedule but mostly going with whatever the person's interests or actions are and then just going with the flow. So if my charge needs to do some chores but wants to try again to beat me at Monopoly using his family’s house rules so be it and thus his “first.. then” becomes “first I do my chores then I play monopoly.” I even use first-then myself as in tonite, “first I finish this piece then I play one game of backgammon online and then I go to bed.
As improv comics say, when you do improv you don't question or say no - you say "yes and.." and go with it. Almost all the time I end up in a place where the person i'm working for has found more independence (one of my main goals) and/or is happier.
For example, when Austin Memorial Museum participated in National Fossil Day earlier this month I took my charge on a field trip there, required him to interview a paleontologist and write up a report. End result: He still wants to be a paleontologist even after learning to his chagrin most of them dont get a chance to even touch dinosaur bones.
Another charge is still getting used to being cared for and watched by someone who is not his mom, let alone saying more than his one sole word, “mommy.” Together we watch his favorite television program (“Everyone Loves Raymond” -I will explain in comments if you want that story) and chase and tag and hide and seek. But I’ve found he loves to look at himself in the mirror so I let him take selfies on my camera and he waves at himself and its cute and when doing all these things he forgets that I am accomplishing my job goal, namely to get him to feel comfortable in the case of someone besides his mom. And when, one day recently, he told me, unprompted “bye”, and the next time, “hello,” I was over the moon because those are the first times he said anything to me besides mommy.
So now I’ll do something improvs don’t do, namely stop:)
The end. Thanks for reading. Thanks to all who have helped him along the way, intentionally or not.
Thanks especially to Rev. Chris Jimmerson and Rev. Meg Barnhouse who have been what i’ll call my spiritual cheerleaders.
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