Today I went to volunteer at the Habitat for Humanity site in Daly City. I was working a lot this week and decided to unwind in a time honored but not particularly healthy fashion by drinking lots of beer, smoking cigarettes and playing virtual dj on turntable.fm till 3 in the morning. Needless to say I was feeling pretty raw when I got up this morning. Thanks to Katie, who was nice enough to lend me her car, I got there on time for the safety talk. Me and Nick, a Parisian who created I pad apps for kids, got put on a crew to work on the developing roof. I'm normally apprehensive about heights and being a little hungover and sleep deprived definitely intensified it, but I was able to hold up ok. Much as I would like to say I carried myself with a cat-like grace walking across the joists and hammering nails into the girders, in truth I came across more like a paranoid, 500 pound gorilla. For most of the morning, we placed and nailed girders across the joists mainly for the purpose of their absorbing the flames in the event of a possible fire. After lunch I was happy to get down from the ladders and work on creating new girders by hammering blocks into pieces of plywood. After doing this for a couple of hours, I found myself really getting into the idea of 'letting the hammer do the work' as they say, and - to wax a little philosophical - remove the idea of myself as someone forcing a nail into wood and instead just watch as the hammer and nail do what they're designed to do under a pair of hands. I've been reading some stuff about zen buddhism this week, if you can't tell! Anyway, it turned out to be another good experience and I'm excited for the opportunity to go back and do more. Especially when they put in the elevator! If you're looking to get some knowledge and practice about what it takes to build a home, you can't go wrong volunteering with habitat for humanity...
