The Very Good Day and Homeward Bound

Yesterday was a red letter, blue bird day. As I am mixing my cliches, does that mean my day was purple? Maybe. Who cares? It was a very good day.

It started out with going to Olympia to testify in a working session on improving opportunities for non-tech people getting jobs in tech. Claire-Adele was proud of me.

Give me a microphone and an audience and I am in heaven. It is stressful, but a good happy kind of stress for me.

I had to give a two minute speech on my experience in Apprenti. Last Thursday, I spoke with Apprenti's legislative rep and he gave me the background. Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. sharp three people from Apprenti were going to testify together for fifteen minutes.

"Make it short--let the legislators ask you questions," Marc told me.

I looked up the members of the committee online and realized I had met two of them when I was running for school board. Yesterday morning right before we went in to the meeting room, the Apprenti leader, Greg, gave me slightly different twist on what to say: tell them what you did before Apprenti, tell them about the program, and then say how it changed your life.

Got it.

When we got in the working room, there was a new agenda and we were last of three groups to present. I had the good fortune to listen to two other groups who were trying to increase the pipeline to tech jobs. As I was listening, I heard the emotional stories of women from Ada, a programming bootcamp for women named after Ada Lovelace, which is totally ironic that a woman was one of the pioneers in computer science. And Alan Turning was a gay guy. And now we have to fight to let

!= (straight white twenty-something year old men) 

into tech. Hello?

Another thing--I know there are a lot of bright and brilliant people in tech, but you know what? Here is a little secret: tech isn't impossibly hard. Of course, people need skills to do these job but the skills are learnable. So often, tech is made out to be esoteric and elusive when this is really a gate to keep the in in and the out out.

I digress.

I jotted down a few notes to revise my speech based on what Greg told me. As I was listening to these new programs, I realized these legislators might know of the program, but they might not know about the program. When I got the mic, I said hello to committee, and specifically the two reps I had worked with before. Then I talked about the basics:

1. I was a stay-at-home mom and volunteer.
2. I have a great education (I studied math and have a masters degree) and had great work experience before motherhood
3. I couldn't get a job after I was a stay-at-home mom
4. I found Apprenti.
5. I took a math test and I passed the first stage of screening.
6. I was interviewed and then accepted to the Apprentice pool.
7. I was hired for a job.
8. I was given training specifically for the job I was hired to do.
9. I had a year of on-the-job-training.
10. I was hired permanently into my current job.

"Ooooh," said one the reps I met on the campaign trail. I could see the lightbulb above her head. "You were trained specifically for the job you were hired for? We give lots of people training and then hope they find a job. Tell me more about this." 

I had reached one of the members of the committee and connected her with the program. Mission accomplished. Yay! Go me!

When I got back to Seattle, I had a meeting then went to lunch with my manager where I asked him the deeply indelicate question of what he thought of Modi, the prime minister of India. The western press has been bashing the shit out of him, and I was curious what my manager thought. 

It was fascinating. I had read a few New York Times articles and a half of a New Yorker article about Modi and I think I know something. What I couldn't know is the context of what it means to lead the second most populous country in the world in a global economy when a vast majority of its people live in poverty and it has a complicated history. It would be like reading about the opioid epidemic in the rural south without knowing about the Civil War. Someone could understand the opioid epidemic, but the history gives it a lot of context.

Then at work, I was working with a developer on some code we were testing and we found an edge case! It is great to find these while testing. It is not fun to find then after the code has been rolled out. Yay! Go us!

Then I called my friend Ellen and told her about my great day. She has heard so many of my bad ones that I thought she deserved some good news for a change. 

After dinner, I went to an Al-Anon meeting. Normally, when I go to an Al-Anon meeting, I am kind of a mess. Two weeks ago, I had cried for an hour and a half the day before the meeting because my life was such a disaster. Yesterday, I felt great. When we sign in on the yellow sheet, we write down how we are feeling and I wrote "Joyous. And tired." I've never written joyous.

I know feelings aren't permanent, that I'll ride this wave of happiness while it is here.

And the Boy is scheduled to come home next week for a few days. I am happy now about it, but I know it will have its rough patches. Some parts will probably be full on shit show. 

But some parts will be good. The Boy wants me to teach him how to make cranberry muffins, my personal favorite kind of muffin that I used to get from the coffee shop around the corner from my first apartment in Chicago. He never old me how much he loved my cranberry muffins until he was gone. 

I am looking forward to it.

One more thought -- At Al-Anon, there are always people there who are in a bad place. That is the point, to find community when life is hard. It was hard to me to tell the group I was happy because for so long I did not allow myself to feel happy especially when other things in my life were so hard. yet I discovered that when I was happy, it gave me the space to hold other people's pain. When I am in pain, I can't be there or connect with others. When I find my own peace and serenity, I can.