The Seven Stages of Golf

Golf is a tragic game. We know this. We understand this. We know how hard it can be to deal with the pain and the incomprehension and the frustration that golf can all too easily inflict. But it may help you to know that you are not alone in your despair. Tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of golfers suffer annually from golf-related malaise. In this helpful article, we present the Seven Stages of Golf, a guide to a common path out of your golf-related stress and anxiety that numberless golfers have taken before you. Read on, dear golfer, and know that you too will make it out of the golf-related abyss one day.

Shock and Denial

"There's no way I could have possibly hit it that poorly, is there? It moved like three feet! Come on! There's no way that the evidence of my eyeballs could be accurate! Okay. I will, har-de-har-har, give it one more shot. Maybe I can just get back on the fairway..." *sound of a golf ball thwacking into a tree* "Are you kidding me? It ended up behind me? This game is broken. I want a refund. Your physics engine is awful."

Pain and Anger

"This is ridiculous. I hate golf. Who could possibly have designed a game so clearly meant to torture and convulse the human spirit? Is it Satan? It's Satan, isn't it. This game is meant to give glory to the Devil. Dear fuck, I'm bad at this. Can someone hand me a kitten? I need something to punch."

Bargaining

"Okay. I know what I'm doing wrong here. I'm tensing up in my shoulders, topping the ball, and not swinging all the way through. So basically if I do everything about my golf game differently, I'll be fantastic at it. Can I trade in my arms for other arms? I think I'd be better at this if I had longer arms. Okay, here we go. Time to hit a good shot for a change." *thwack* *splash!* "See? Told you. Longer arms. It's in the fucking lake because my arms are insufficient. Fuck you, genetics, you ate my golf success."

Depression

"It is time I just said this out loud. I will never be good at golf. Okay? It just won't happen. Golf is not something you get better at. You don't get better at being punched in the dick. That is not a skill that you can train. There are no dick-punchedness goals to which you can aspire. God, the numbers on my scorecard are like ACT scores. There is no way this will ever be fun. Is it time to putt? Should I even bother?" *putt* *rollllllll* "Oh, look, eight feet past the hole. When will I ever learn?"

Crazy Not-Caring

"Oh look at me, la la la la, I'm using a putter when I'm three hundred feet from the hole. Why not? I suck anyway! Yayyyyyy! I'm in the sand trap? Bring on the driver! Hack, hack, hack, hack! Fuck it--I'm digging a hole in the sand and putting the ball on the lip. You can't stop me because I'm Batman. Time for a tee shot? Okay, I'm hitting this thing as hard as I can. I barely care what direction it goes in. Duck, fools! Death from above!" *whock* "Holy hell, I'm on the green. Now why couldn't I do that when I gave a damn?"

Somewhat More Constructive Not-Caring

"I could not be less emotionally invested in the flight of this ball. It is not a thing that I care about. I'm just going to hit it in a general east-southerly direction and see what fate decides to do with it. Trees in the way? Eh, what do I care. I picked up this ball from the forest, and the golf gods have decreed that the ball must one day return to the forest. Circle of life or some shit."

 Philosophical Acceptance

"You know, golf is a cruel game. It isn't meant to bring you happiness, at least most of the time. But when you hit that one great shot--and I know you know what that feels like, even if it's only happened once--doesn't it make up for all those bad shots? It does. It really, really does. Darkness just makes the light shine brighter, amirite? Oh, c'mon, don't be like that. This game has a lot to teach us about life, about struggle and sacrifice and yes, about joy, too. This isn't so bad. Lighten up, [stage 2 person]! This is fun!"

(Rough outlines of the stages gently borrowed from "7 Stages of Grief". Be kind to parodies--they're how we deal with golf.)

FEMA Corps Wrap-Up Placeholder Post (And Explanation)

Hi everybody, 

So I had a fairly good FEMA Corps wrap-up post all ready to go last Wednesday or so--it was in the fashion of "Things I Have Learned In This Program" and contained great numbers of anecdotes and admonitions, both funny and serious--and then I dropped my computer three inches onto a desk while the hard drive was spinning up, which can apparently result in a drive read error for which the technical term is "catastrophic". The hard drive is toast, the computer is inoperable and the post is indisposed (and consequently indisposted). I'm going to commence shopping around for data recovery services when business hours begin today. It apparently won't be cheap--the Apple Store guy quoted me a vague price of around $200, and none of the data recovery websites I've visited have even vague guidelines for pricing on their pages, which in my book qualifies as a Bad Sign. 

Upshot is that I may get that post back, if I'm lucky. If I'm really lucky, I might get my diary and the backups for everything I've written since December, plus several months of research and notes and downloads, back as well. (I keep an external hard drive as a backup, but left it at home as a last-ditch in case my computer got stolen while in FEMA Corps. Well, I was four days from getting home and backing up the last six months of data when this happened. I guess the system sort of worked as designed, but come the fuck on, I couldn't have waited a week to accidentally break my other half?) If not, I'll probably write some sort of FEMA Corps retrospective and air it in this space. I just don't have one right this minute and I'd rather wait and see if I can get the original back before trying to reproduce it. 

So yeah. I'll probably organize all of my FEMA Corps posts from the past year into one handy compendium at some point, with links and brief descriptions to all, just to be a better reference for anyone who wants to know what Year One of FEMA Corps was like from my perspective. Also to come will be a brief primer of what to know about FC if you're thinking about joining the program, or have been accepted and want details before your adventure begins. As always, if you have any questions about the program or my experience in it, or just want to chat, email me at andy.tisdel@gmail.com and I will get back to you as quickly as life allows.

Thanks for reading, everyone. I hope it all helped.

-Andy

Vicksburg's Last Round is Done

Our last round is over.

Although there are currently no aggregate numbers for the amount of work we did at the NPSC, I do have my own totals. In approximately four weeks, or around seventeen days of work, I did the following:

-Made 340 calls to people identified by FEMA algorithms as having passed a certain threshold of assistance from FEMA, inquiring if they by any chance needed long-term rental assistance from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. I divided them later on into “calls” and “extra”, with “extra” being multiple calls to different numbers for the same people (since accounts frequently had two or three numbers in them), but sadly my numbers in the first two weeks were for different purposes and I did not record that particular stat.

-Spoke with 130 people, comprising just about every Sandy-related situation imaginable. Some were still in apartments or somebody’s basement or someone else’s second home and would be for months to come, and who gladly accepted an offer of long-term help. Some were long since back in their homes and needed no aid. Many seniors and grandparents were staying with their children without rent, and thus had no need for our assistance. Others had maybe a month to go before they were back in the home; most of these were covered by regular FEMA rental assistance, who struck the database in a great wave in mid-May and recertified just about everybody I found for a few days, rendering my program somewhat obsolete.

-In all those hundred and thirty, there existed 37 people who needed what FEMA had to offer. I asked about their renting situation, the name, number and address of their landlord, what their plan was, how long it would take, referred them to a caseworker and set up a time for an appointment with them.

-After this came the twenty-two DHAP calculators that I completed. The calculator is a beastly, nasty piece of software that was forever developing new warts or asking for documents that simply were not in the records, occasioning a great deal of muttered cursing. These were meant to calculate the applicant’s income and total housing costs, to see what they could pay on their own and what HUD would have to chip in to keep them afloat.

-Forty-one cases I placed in the incomplete file, either through the natural progression of each case while the DHAP calculator was done, or from want of needed documents or somebody at the JFO putting in a case that clearly wasn’t needed. All of these were duly completed, solved or removed as they deserved. 

-Finally, I marked eighty-eight cases ineligible. These were people who had been swept up by the FEMA algorithms based on their having received $20,000 in assistance or more, and who manifestly did not need the help; many of them, in fact, had gotten back into their homes in November and December. It was sometimes the work of a moment, sometimes much longer, to puzzle through the documents and the signs and the tells in their file and figure out what each person’s deal was. If there was any doubt about whether they were back in the home or not (maddeningly enough, the official JFO Case Review in all its might and glory does not trouble itself to ask that question except by accident, and so the majority of reviews do not include this essential fact), a simple remedy was a quick phone call.

So passed my time at the National Processing Service Center. It was full of minor problems that I learned how to surmount; communications foul-ups, unclear instructions, calculator issues, JFO skullduggery, arcane casework and the like. I felt quite good about myself by the end of it; with a month’s on-the-job experience, I had gotten pretty decent at this whole call-out business. hopefully that’s a skill, or bit of experience or what have you, that will transfer to whatever job I end up with next.

FEMA Corps Is Going To Be Okay.

Really. 

Today, my team and several others, from both Vicksburg and Vinton, got to go to the headquarters of our lord and master, the Corporation for National & Community Service. I had never been there before, knew nothing about it, except that that was where our leaders (Brendan, Gary Turner) periodically vanished off to and that someone there took exception to my posts once upon a time. (And based on a reaction when I introduced myself, I'm just about certain that I now know who that was.) We were there for an all-day Service Learning Whatchamadoo, with the goal of learning more about the history and future of our program and getting a real honest-to-goodness talk from the people who ran it. 

And based on all that, for the first time in a long time, I feel legitimately optimistic about the future of FEMA Corps. There are good people in charge and they are listening to us. 

Let me expand on that last for a minute. We have been making suggestions all year, passing them up the various chains of command at the bottom of which we sit, and hearing nothing in response. There was rarely any feedback that filtered back down or any visible result that manifested itself in our daily lives. And saying the same things over and over again without a change, or really an acknowledgement, wore us down. 

Today, we were treated to an extended lecture from Kate Raftery, head of Americorps NCCC. And like a magic trick, like some kind of wonderful dream, she knew what we had been talking about. She spoke our language. She was speaking to us, not past us. I swear to God we connected, her and the dozens of Corps Members sitting around the room. She told us all kinds of stories about the program's founding, about the inter-agency agreement that made it happen, about the problems they were were working to address. Here, from my notes, are a few of the things she told us: 

-FEMA originally asked for 3,000 FEMA Corps members. 
-FEMA people across the agency who've worked with us praised our efficiency, our drive, our problem-solving abilities, our skill with technology. In effect, we are what happens when you introduce a young, dedicated, motivated population into a fairly old workforce. 
-Apparently that's not just FEMA, by the way. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has an unbelievable fifty-six percent of its entire workforce at or near retirement age.
-FEMA asked about sending us out one at a time, but NCCC rebuffed them on that. They ended up with a core list of things they didn't want to give up: the residential nature of the program (us being housed as a part of the program, that is), the team aspect, the age range, the pool of people from which they wished to recruit.
-Apparently, the project sponsor usually provides the housing, not NCCC. This may be a contributing factor to why we're all at Extended Stay Motels. (KR cracked that she was going to buy stock in the company.)
-NCCC has been approached about doing a kind of Park-corps and Housing-corps, but is holding off for now. 

-The FEMA Corps approval process went something like this: the Inter-Agency Agreement (the general idea), the Implementation Plan (how to do it, how much it would cost, what positions we'd be in, etc) and a budget agreement. Apparently it went ridiculously quickly for a government program, going from idea to actual thing in less than a year. Said Raftery: "It kept making me nervous. I was thinking, we must be missing a major piece here, like Oh my God, we forgot X". (See why I like this person?)

-FEMA personnel have told me that it's a small organization, and maybe it is by federal standards (7,474 people in 2011; the State Department, for comparison's sake, has nearly 50,000 all told. Defense has kajillions). But it is "monstrous" compared to Americorps NCCC, whose entire office fits on one rather cramped floor of the CNCS building. It just took a long time for information to percolate across that huge expanse of people; Raftery described how she and four aides were going to every meeting with FEMA, and every time it'd be "fifty new people" on their end.

-This is not according to KR, but to a passing dignitary who happened to be the lady who runs the budgets for EVERYONE. I asked her how much a FEMA Corps team typically cost, and she told me that each individual Corps Member cost $34,000 throughout the entire ten-month program--for training, clothing, food, everything. Now, I have worked 1879.70 hours this term as of today, according to Americorps.gov. If I die tomorrow and never work another minute for the Corps, that's $18.08 per hour. Are we worth it? Signs point to yes.

-We also represent a significant cost savings over normal FEMA operations when we're deployed in disasters, according to KR, although they didn't plan for us to be in hotels all the time and that makes the savings rather smaller than projected. They're working on that. In fact, I'll jump ahead here: one of the solutions they're proposing, which I think is brilliant because it addresses the problem of expensive housing and the problem of stultifying work, is this: we go to a regular-NCCC project sponsor, such as Habitat for Humanity, and work for them part-time (earning our keep) and work with FEMA the rest of the time. Swoosh. No more Extended Stay, we get to do direct service, and the total cost goes down. 

-Oh, fun fact: in the original plan, there were to be no Independent Service Projects, the extra community service things that I've written about extensively and that kept a lot of people sane during this year. None allowed. The campuses revolted, the requirement got changed, the program began, FEMA began to see that it was a phenomenal way to connect with the communities we were working in, and now it's actually a requirement to wear FEMA uniforms when you're out doing this work. (For some other campus maybe; that's the first I'd heard of it.)

-When they were putting the program together, FEMA had a communication problem: field staff had worked with regular NCCC teams on various disasters, but FEMA HQ had no idea what we were about. In fact, a lot of the bad experiences we've had with FEMA happened because FEMA Rumsfelded before we got there. They didn't know what they didn't know: they had yet to experience the "quality, flexibility, creativity and innovation" that Corps Members are capable of. And the more they've worked with us, the more they've liked us, and the more they've been willing to push the limits of what we are allowed to do. For once, they're being flexible about us. They've even created the FEMA Corps office solely for purposes of helping make it work. And again, this was the first time I felt like it actually meant something--we'd heard about this thing before, but to hear it mentioned by someone I liked and trusted, and to hear it commended as actually doing something for the program--that is a new thing, and something we could use more of.

After maybe ninety minutes of this tremendously revealing thing, the floor was opened for questions. The floor had been opened several times already, but this was the first time for suggestions about how to improve the program, if somewhat obliquely stated. And the suggestions were good. Revamping Team Leader Training to teach TLs how to work on project sites with multiple teams, something they were never trained for? How to manage people in an office setting, another novelty? These were good suggestions. There were many like them. And they were said to somebody who appeared to be genuinely listening, and who has an unmistakably genuine interest, professional and personal, in improving the program. That kind of person is in short supply in any organization, and I'm glad my program has one of them at the top. She was asked about better member development, about recruitment, and answered well and with solutions that made sense. She was asked about non-disaster work, and answered that her staff was developing a "stockpile" of non-disaster projects for us to work on. She left the room, after a very long, very noteless, thoroughly informative couple of hours, to what was (at least from me) tumultuous applause.

The rest of the presentations were anticlimactic. There was an extended one from city-planner-turned-pollster Colleen, whose job it is to measure what we're doing and what kind of impact we have through stats. (Seriously, I don't know what her official job title is, but she's a pollster.) Gary Turner, former Vicksburg campus director, randomly appeared on an upper floor and threw half the Vicksburg crowd into hysterics. Jackie and Shane and two Vintoners told their stories to senior staff. The chief of External Affairs (my guy, I think), Ted Miller, spoke to us and heard some of our stories. They all seemed nice enough and capable enough, although obviously we couldn't watch them work. But attitude reflects leadership, as Summit 4 says, and it is beyond good to hear and see that NCCC's leadership is committed and listening and working on fixing the program's problems. That is more of a luxury than we probably think it is.

Bring It Home Hard, Corps Members

"Go hard or go home is the motto this year/See the game don't wait, ain't no time for fear..." -Giz, soloing with Roy Jones Jr. 

I know. I get it. I feel it, too.

We're nine months deep in a long, hard program and we can see the end just ahead. Two weeks, maybe less, till we're back on the road and in Vicksburg for a long transition. Two weeks to the Upper End and the Biscuit Company and the Tomato Place, two weeks 'til we get to see our friends for the last time for who knows how long. Less than a month 'til we're quits of FEMA Corps, almost all of us gone for good. (To the Corps Members who are returning as Team Leaders, I salute you.) We see the last days ahead of us, often with our next jobs already lined up, and we slow down. We marinate. Doze. Lollygag. Whatever you want to call it, I don't care. We've lost any semblance of an edge, or a drive, or a desire. And that is probably perfectly normal for a group of kids at this stage of this kind of a program. 

I do not care about any of that. Nor should you. 

There is no excuse, including in all the things I just wrote, for slacking off right at the end. Sorry if that's blunt, but there are people in New York City and Nassau County that are still out of their homes. I'm working on a project, the Disaster Housing Assistance Program, wherein we call people who are still in rental properties and try to get them some longer-term rental assistance. It's not remotely sexy and it involves sitting in front of two computer screens and yakking on the phone all day, but we are getting disaster aid to people who still need it. It seems like that concept has slipped away from us, but what we are doing matters. And when we're not doing it, when we're not working as hard as we could be, that matters too. 

I'll be the first to admit it: I'm nowhere near as productive as I should be. I check my email, read articles, kill time when I should be making calls or running calculations. There's nobody watching me (so far as I know) and I'm in a cubicle by myself, so the temptations are always there and always strong. But none of that is an excuse, and I know that, and I fight it and I get some work done every day. Not as much as I should, but a decent amount. I have a lot of room to get better. And whether you're running DHAP or taking registrations or doing who knows what FEMA-related thing out in Texas or New Mexico or New Hampshire or D.C., you probably do too. 

Yes, the next gig is probably in sight. Yes, we have something like five more workdays and then we're headed home. And as Battlestar Galactica's Colonel Tigh might have put it, "Yes, we're tired. Yes, there's no relief. And yes, we are still expected to do our jobs." (I may be the first blogger ever to quote BSG and a boxer-turned-rapper in the same post...) Come on, guys. We're right at the end. And it's worth pointing out that we're not exactly earning the right to not be treated as kids, if kids are exactly what we're acting like. 

Take the last few days of this term as a chance to put some good work in. Whatever you're doing, do it hard and do it well. If you have no work, surprise your supervisors and ask for something to do. Let's bring this class, and this year, home hard. Let's earn this.

Ripping Down Houses

The smell was unforgettable, a lifeless miasma of mold and decay and rot. Gnats swarmed around our heads and into our eyes. Piles of debris spilled out of the gutted trailers, covering the green grass and burying a flowerpot full of bright red petals. Soggy mattresses, sodden clothes, sweating boards and cabinets and all manner of wooden furnishings and paraphernalia lay scattered atop each other, a ruined, discarded mess. Whole walls lay on the ground, yawning open to the sky, insulation and wooden skeleton mixing with wires and a metal outer layer that was hard as hell to tear through. The Maryland sun rushed down upon us and the humidity swallowed us, the garbage, the houses, the mountains around us and everything else in one gulp.

Now this was what we had signed up for.

As Summit 5 learned in our muck-and-guts in New York City, there's really nothing so satisfying as taking your frustrations out on a house that needs to fall. Habitat for Humanity had found an old lot with half a dozen trailers, and needed to dispose of said trailers--built into the ground, mind you, with iron frames and wooden floors and all the accoutrements of any house--in order to build a condominium habitat. Enter FEMA Corps. With a day off work and an urge to wreck, we took sledgehammer in hand and dug for some sweat. The day's assignment: moving trash into two huge Dumpsters and gently persuading things that didn't want to move by themselves.

It was extremely hard work, harder in terms of physical labor than anything we'd done since leaving New York. We lifted whole fallen walls up and over and into the maw of the garbage disposal, walls with electrical cords still hanging off and panes of glass still in their frames. John and I swung sledgehammers at uncooperative floorboards ("When all you've got is a sledgehammer, everything looks sledgehammerable"), pried and hammered and pried some more, and swung into action long iron crowbars out of a martial arts movie to wrench boards from the very frame of the house. (We also resorted to good old-fashioned kicking things really hard, every so often.) I don't know how many beams we chucked into the Dumpster or how many cubic yards of junk we'd thrown in there by day's end, but in the scientific determination of this witness, it was a lot.

I didn't see as much of Chelsea, Katrina, Malinda and Tiffany, although Chelsea worked on the same ruin that I was at for a time, but from what I saw they were also busily engaged in cleaning muck and slop out of those trailers that were still standing. Katrina (or somebody) found a whole long bleached-white skeleton of a rat, from skull to tailbones, and John found a massive something-skull under our house that had had deer antlers wired to it. Malinda found a live brown snake and there was much squawking until it disappeared under her house. I had various encounters with centipedes (ugh) and spiders, including one fat black monster with a yellow spot that scurried away as soon as daylight found it.

At the end of the day, we smelled a fright and looked a sight. I had mud all up and down my right side, a mask-mark on my face, several minor cuts, a hearty batch of unidentifiable stains on my uniform and Lord only knows how much particulate matter draped about my person. The rest of the team was in similar shape. We piled into Humbert/Roberto, our replacement van while Hildie's in the shop, and careened back to campus in contented silence. One thought, unspoken, coiled around each of our heads and slid silky-smooth through the tired air: now that's more like it.

Working at the Winchester Apple Blossom Festival

"DUDE, I'M RIGHT HERE."

The teenager was clad in pure white cargo shorts, a white polo shirt and a logo-less, backwards white baseball cap. Behind the orange construction fence that he had climbed over, waiting their turn, were his companions: a grey-haired oldster sporting a red shirt and a little blue young'un who couldn't have been more than eight. I'm still not sure whether their flag ensemble was deliberate. The white guy, who had just climbed over the temporary barrier separating him from the festivities, glanced sideways in my direction and shuffled his feet indecisively. "I don't give a...", he mumbled at me, before swinging  one and then the other leg back over the fence and retreating down the hot black path. 

That was the highlight of Day One at the Apple Blossom Festival, an otherwise fairly unexciting eight hours spent watching the perimeter for would-be fence-jumpers. I got ferociously sunburned, heard some incredible stories from the security guards in our area (one was an ex-infantryman who had spent a year in Afghanistan and been shot in the leg and blown up, on different days), and otherwise did very little. Day Two, although it might sound mundane, was a hell of a lot more fun: I was assigned a parking lot, one of maybe a dozen FEMA Corps members to receive the privilege, and ran it for probably seven hours. (Those CMs who participated totaled 19 ISP hours for the weekend.) A man in his seventies with a huge potbelly and a Hawaiian shirt, on a motor scooter and smoking a cigar the size of my foot, rolled through Parking Lot #3 during the day; later on, a brigade of living, breathing camels from the children's show passed by in a gigantic red trailer. I gave more out-of-towners directions around the festival than I could reasonably count, barked gibberish into a walkie-talkie and shrugged helplessly when people asked me the way to I-81. It was a hell of a time. 

When I could get away from lot-minding or fence-watching and venture into the show, I found it a fairly nice place; there were a great many craft tents, a boat show, a Greek restaurant's tent (sadly I couldn't go--my meal ticket was for another local restaurant's trailer that served no sandwiches not including meat, including a bacon cheeseburger with Krispy Kreme donuts for a bun. I did not get that because I wish to not die). It was county fair meets boat and antique car show meets mild circus, all the way through.

 I have to say, though, I had by far the most fun with the walkie-talkies that all the parking-lot minders were issued. We were communicating throughout the day, letting each other when lots were filled or how many spots were still available where, and there was a delightful air of what I imagine chaotic battlefield communications must be like underlaying everything. "P10 is full, P10 is full!" "Okay, P2, I'm sending them around to your side!" "P1 is being overrun, we need help over here!" "P3, do you copy?!" People got unduly excited or yell-y, everything sounded worse than it was, and it all contributed to this glorious atmosphere of general bedlam. I enjoyed it immensely. Things didn't calm down until well into the afternoon, when I got to simply sit and watch the legions of antique cars pass by my spot as they sped out towards Cork Road. 

Overall, it was a pretty fun couple of days, although I'm paying for it in sunburn as I write this (not that there's much sun to trouble the rest of my peeling companions at the moment, as we're driving through a rainstorm and have been living in one since yesterday.) We have another ISP tomorrow, weather permitting, at a Habitat for Humanity somewhere in the general area of Maryland. I don't know, I just get in the van. Should be a nice break from DHAP work though.