Would You Like a Cup of Tea?

Last night I drove with G. to the Trader Joes dumpster. Although we didn't find anything G. was pleased; he felt like he'd seen the sights.
G. is our newest compoundmate (Literally, we moved him into the house next door with the hyperactive six year old and the cat-eating chow dog.) He's a intern from UC Santa Cruz. Our last intern was constantly battle-rapping or ("speakin' sanskrit" in his parlance), ate only with chopsticks and ended up getting banned from most of downtown for shooting an unauthorized documentary. Everyone in the compound is pleased that G. seems more normal. He's quiet and has been witnessed using a fork.
To major in Community Studies at UC Santa Cruz one must go on a six month internship to a community service organization. G.'s classmates are as we speak in exotic peace corps locations like India or Venezaula and building huts for little foreign brown children.
I asked G., because we were in the car together and really, I'm desperatly curious, "why here? Why not somewhere tropical and exotic? Why given the list of Indian, Venezuala, Detroit, did you choose door #3?"
Later he thought up several reasons relateding to the weirdness of young liberals do-gooding around the tropics and a genuine love of America but I think his first answer was the most honest.
"I prograstinated until I had to pick somewhere."

K. and I are fighting, or at least having a breakdown in communication. I feel it was wrong of him to put a full grown rooster on my head while I was helpless due to involvement in another task. My evidence is mainly that having a rooster trying to balance on your head, using your ears for leverage is painful. He counters with the theory that I started it. not true.
K. has been spending too much time with the other boys, splitting wood with axes and being manly. I envy the boys their wood splitting ability and want to say it's sexism that keeps me from joining them. But it's actually a lack of upper body strength. I almost cut my foot off during my one and only lesson.
All this testosterone has helped K. use his chicken talents to pick on me. What he really needs to do is catch the hens that, our of boredom or a desire for adventure keep wandering the front sidewalk with sandwich boards that read "zoning violations at this address".

We're not callous people as a whole, my compoundmates and I, but Spoonboy (the only name I've ever heard him called, I swear) phoned us from Indiana and said it was, "the law" that we had to shotgun a beer to celebrate the death of Ronald Reagan.
Square that I am, I can be convinced that just about anything is "the law" in this particular subculture or counterculture or whatever these kids with their abrasive music and controversial fashion sense are calling it these days. Once I learned several years ago that wanting to overthrow the government meant I had to take a position on the zombies v. pirates debate it was all downhill.
Besides, we have a new, free pickup truck courtesy of Toledo public housing and our friend Michael the good natured embezzzeler. I could think of no better way to welcome it to its new home in our courtyard/drive where it must sit until we get licence plates.
So there we sat, eight of us in the cab of a 1991 ford ranger shotgunning beer.
Last year at this time I was a recent college graduate. I've come a long way.