When I explain how the organization helps clients defend their housing rights, the first question I hear in response is oftentimes, “Do you have lawyers in the clinic?” We do not! For those unfamiliar with the approach that we use, the next question might be, “Why not?” or “How do you accomplish anything, then?” The counselors in the clinic are trained in San Francisco tena...
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Month: July 2013
Last Days WWOOFing
It’s the feel of the ordinary things I’ll remember most about this summer. I’ll remember tonight. Claire was packing her bag and listening to a podcast about knitting that was really about abortion. I never catch her doing just one thing. The glow of the kitchen lights was odd on her hair - the lopsided ponytail, the stray baby-hairs curling out of control in the humidity. ...
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Research
Sitting in a café, I stared into my open book. I was about a week into my SURP and a week out of Thailand. After glossing over these pages and these words for seven days, the past month felt like it had never happened. Everyone chatted around me and I listened and I understood. The man next to me asked to use my outlet and it was understood. I read the words on the page ...
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Final Photo Update from Thailand
Out & About
Once I was back in DC and at work, I was placed in the email department within mail analysis. I was responsible for analyzing and coding emails that came in through the Whitehouse.gov site so that they could receive policy letters. Aside from doing that, I also had a two-hour comment line shift where I answered the phone and took down constants' comments, which I always looked ...
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Inside City Hall
My two main responsibilities at the office are staffing the reception desk and doing clinic projects. On the atypical days, I get to accompany the organizers out of the office to various events and actions. While I find most all of the work here exciting, these outings are the most extraordinary and have been the most memorable parts of my summer. About a month ago, I accompani...
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Eating
More and more I’m thinking about food, not just as something that ends up on my plate but as a part of an intricate - and precarious - system. We know about agribusiness; we know about the factory farms. We know that, among other things, these farms are fundamentally unsustainable. If there was no mental divorce between what we eat and how its made, we would be too queasy to...
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Operation Orientation
The first day of the internship was like the first day of high school for me. I dressed my best hoping to impress people, ate a bowl of cereal, and headed to work.As usual, I was late, so I for sure thought that I wasn't going to impress anyone, but once I got to the building, there were other interns in line waiting to get badges, so I joined the line. Looking back at it, the ...
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Finding a Major (AKA, Serendipity)
This in a nutshell is all you really need to know about my research this summer. I own a lot of books, and I spend my days sitting on that orange couch reading them. That, of course, isn't the whole story, so if you want to know more about academic life at Pomona, here's the way it was for me.
In high school, I had two loves: history and my girlfriend (cue groans from all an...
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A Tourist in the Capital
On May 26th, my family and I drove down to DC, and there signed the lease, which was my first lease-signing ever, went grocery shopping, unpacked and got settled in. I was renting a room in a house there, and had five other housemates, but we all had our own rooms, which was nice. Only thing that’s a pain is being responsible for cutting the grass, especially when I’ve never mo...
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