Excerpt from the On-Going Struggle (Editor's Title)

Here is my dilemma. It is summertime in New Orleans. It is very hot-and-soupy-sauna- humid outside. I am working for the first time at a job that is considered by some standards "real" with my mother at a law office that handles workman's compensation cases and occasionally the odd personal injury. This is a huge departure from the jobs I normally take. For some reason, and for some time, these are the jobs I've taken to avoid working in an office: scrubbing pots and pans in the back of a prestigious women's college where I've seen a fellow student drop a glass intentionally just to watch me have to sweep it up, waiting tables with a mad, but well-intentioned Iraqi named Hussein, barrista-ing with all the mind-heart-body-and-soul anyone could ever possibly muster making a cup of joe, trying to preserve the dregs of what was once the type of café that could battle the corporate homogenization of you, we, all-know where (twinkle, twinkle, little ____), saving the rooftop of a falling-to-ruinous house in the Irish Channel from the weed of all weeds, Cat's Claw (mind you, that job left me scratched , bug-bitten, and smeared with dirt-I only lasted a day)…and the list goes on.

I am one of those people who thrive on being, as they say in restaurants, "in the weeds". A line of people out the door, someone has just quit, the espresso machine is out of order indefinitely and there's a potential slip-and-fall waiting to happen if someone doesn't hit the foyer with a mop and I get excited. Viscerally thrust into the everyday, my chest swells with a sense of camaraderie for whoever I'm sharing a shift. I get a rush from the sense of being perched on the cusp of adventure and calamity. And somewhere far left of career embarrassment I know that it is good for my soul and ego to be humbled by things that verge on the mundane.

Once, late one night on a barista shift, as I was crouched on the floor picking up crumbs, straws, gum wrappers, gnawed up pen caps, it occurred to me that maybe there was something almost approaching holy cleaning up after strangers…when all adults in their oblivion suddenly seem childlike in the lack of care for things they've left behind, suddenly you become their watchful, anonymous, loving caretaker.

Needless to say, the law office has precious few opportunities for me to come close to humanity with the same degree of physicality. My mother laughs at me when I remove staples because I crouch on the floor over the garbage bin like a cave woman, stoking a tiny hearth fire. In order to make copying away forests of trees bearable, I alternate yoga stretches, ballet exercises, and cha-cha foot combinations at the copying machine, sneak my shoes off when the boss isn't looking, and sit with my knees pulled up to my chin the rare occasions I work at my desk. Every now and then if something delicious gets played like Mozart's Requiem I will pantomime my own interpretative dance at my mother's feet just to hear her laugh amidst the stress of her job. Regardless of the fun we two have I find myself lonely after work.


Kate Labouisse