As Things Shift

 More thoughts on making changes in how I use my time in my last couple of decades in this body. She is tired...more aches and pains and I feel the responsibility is all mine to work with her so that I have choices about what I do. Now I totally get why "our health" is the main topic of conversation for old people. 

I'm still having a lot of emotions about making the break with my OCF volunteer position. We had our October meeting and I still did most of my tasks and felt such a sense of loss about the ones I didn't do. I used to email a list of interested members with our agenda and a meeting reminder, and since I stopped doing that, our momentum of involving more crafters in our discussions has essentially been lost. I'm in the process of emailing the people who were and were not awarded permanent booths at that meeting. We awarded four, but had sixteen applications...and I feel all of them deserve personal responses. I feel that anyone with whom I engage doing Craft Committee business deserves a personal response. It's always so entirely frustrating to email any concern to any group and not even get an acknowledgement. 

We announced our Town Hall which will be on Sunday Oct. 29th...and got some emails on the subject...which I answered. Today, on my day off, when I told myself it would not be healthy for me to resume the emailing tasks (I only got five done on Friday and Thursday was a shop day so I got none done.) I know prioritizing my own needs is the right thing to do and the core of my struggle. OCF will eat you up with the endless need for improvement. But I know all those people want to know what decisions were made.

So, after my 12-hour workday on Saturday, I had to skip the light parade downtown, as I knew my body wouldn't take it and by the time I had finished, it had already started anyway. But I did tune into the OCF Annual Meeting despite my visceral disgust and the difficulty of listening to a few people whom I consider to be deceptive and working against my interests. I was interested to find out that the ED had five goals, which turned out to wrap about twelve goals together, but at least there are some plans, however vague. Despite the item that received the most feedback being the absence of the artisan directory in the Peach Pit, that wasn't in the goals, nor was any artisan-specific goal, except that the improvements to the wifi were kind of wrapped into the first goal, a 5-year plan for replacing the water system. It didn't sound like any work in the ground would happen in year one, and although it wasn't explained, my theory is that the reason for wrapping them together is to string some wires underground in the waterpipe trenches for better internet. So nothing in the short term, but something in the next phase, maybe. At least the wifi was mentioned in the ED's speech.

No one else addressed any artisan issues, but I didn't expect it. Diversity was mentioned a few times of course, but increasing diversity in the artisan sector usually translates to getting more "diverse" people to apply and we are not really suffering from lack of diversity in the applicants. Adam made the improvement of giving people a way to identify their ethnicity in their work so at least they wouldn't be rejected for cultural appropriation, which was a small fix and did help. But the big Booth Rep system was not addressed of course, and our gentle and gradual efforts to improve it have not done a lot. It's a big thing to tackle, and involves a lot of education first, and despite a promise to provide DEI training to committees, that has not happened and from my experience when I crashed the coordinator training, it won't help anyway. People have to educate themselves, and there isn't a lot of time in the committee meetings to really do much of it. Our committee itself is not very diverse, except in LGBTQ++ people, and we didn't put in any process for making more diversity happen. Maybe it will when they replace me as a member. Just not picking another old white Booth Rep may help. Hope that happens.

It's really hard for me to grasp that I am walking away and will no longer have any influence on what is said or done by the committee. I doubt I will even have the heart to complain. As an admin of the Neg shit site I don't feel great about posting my complaints in there. Almost all the feedback I have gotten about any of my concerns amounted to "you shouldn't complain, as a leader and as someone who has been treated well by OCF...." and that just rankles. I have not been treated exceptionally well at all. I have learned to not complain...have learned to work on solutions quietly after introspection about what more I could do to solve my own problems. I have learned not to ask for anything. I have learned that what I give does not translate into what I get, which is fine, and I don't think it should. I value equity, not rewarding individuals for their efforts for the common good. I still totally value volunteering and working together for solutions. I have just lost faith that any of that work will have satisfactory results.

So the financial info was also interesting. Since the artisans were all told to attempt to reduce the number of passes we buy to help reduce the internal population, apparently we bought 600 fewer passes, and now we will be rewarded by a price increase (I heard from $100 to $120) for those passes. To me that is a $160 increase (again) for the people who help me do my work out there, as I pay my workers for their expenses, including their vehicle stickers, day passes, teen passes, whatever they need to help me make my sales. I will have to eliminate one worker and go back to doing their job myself, be that selling, loading, driving my inventory in, or booth maintenance or however it plays out. Six hundred booth passes is a lot...saved OCF a bunch in infrastructure costs and I am proud of all the people who did that intentionally. However, I guess it wasn't helpful to ask artisans to pitch in that way. Another mistake I won't be making again.

What I'm observing about myself is that I am not willing to be organization-positive, and absolutely that is a good reason to step aside. I cringe at the salutations of Fair Family, "peaches" or the horrid "yes yes yes." I feel like anyone who thinks they are cared for like family is delusional and I won't engage in that. My family members don't lie to me or try to manipulate me. They don't just keep assigning more work to me when clearly I am working hard. They support me and honor my work and help me do that when possible. I don't have those same feelings about the org. I do have them about some of the individuals I have worked with, and I feel terrible about pulling away from our mutually supportive efforts to make lasting and helpful change. 

So yeah, I'm still in enough to care but out enough to not care quite as much. Fuck it. If my work was as important as I think, someone will pick it up from where I left off. If not, it will fall by the wayside like the work of so many others. Maybe the truth is that there were 600 booth people who stopped wanting to participate. Maybe there was no one who wanted to replace them. Raising the price on everyone else isn't going to fix that.

Okay, day off.