2004-10-07 - 8:21 p.m.
hung out with people that didn't turn me off immediately today- all men, but it wasn't all masculine and lame- well...there was one minor annoying moment-
went to shelter legal services for the first time- it's really cool- people come in with problems (disability benefits, housing, deportation, domestic violence, etc.) and a student takes their case- cases take a long time to resolve- i'm gonna do this every thursday- the case i helped with today was a guy who's living on social security and didn't file taxes for two years and may owe 40,000 in taxes- he was sad and enjoyed talking to folks i think- he chaperoned a school field trip for his daughter where they went to the petting zoo in wellesly yesterday and talked about that a lot- it doesn't look like there's much that can be done for him- they went through a 6-month process modifying his child support or something like that, i don't know any details- there's a lot more cases that go through the veterans shelter on wednesday nights- it's a little bit more inconvenient for me but i'd be able to work on more cases- but it's only for veterans and men go there to get help on cases other legal services places don't really do- working with vietnam vets sounds like it'd be a little uncomfortable depending on who it is, on the other hand these will be really poor vets (carne de canon)- pat sumi used to organize vietnam vets coming back from the war after all- but another issue is taking the side of men in family law cases- that pretty much prevents me from checking out the wednesday night clinic, although i guess i would have the choice of which cases i wanted to take, so i could choose only to take cases i wanted to help with- i dunno-
