Enjoyment and interest are the order of a day following nights and nights of sleep.

I have admitted to myself a new interest, something I always feel I am not allowed to do. I want to learn more about prisons.

It is an old interest, long repressed for fear of playing the voyeur. (“We are all necessarily would-be both voyeurs and exhibitionists of all those affects we are inhibited in expressing, witnessing and sharing” (Tomkins 147)). I remember several things from my mother’s surprise fortieth birthday party. I was nine:
1. Barbeque chicken was served.
2. There was an older boy with a blue hat with a white A embroidered on it.
3. I spent a lot of time playing with one of those tilty mazes with marble-sized holes and a marble.
4. A friend of the family teased my mum that he was her favourite person (I don’t know why). Mum would have none of it. I was so surprised, and so pleased, when she said that her top three were right here, pointing to dad, my brother and I. I made the top three! The family friend was told, no, not top ten either, but probably top hundred.
5. The woman who made the chicken worked with or founded (and I think donations were taken for) an organization called COPE that strove to rehabilitate ex-prisoners. I had never imagined such a need before. Why? Why? Why? Because they often can’t get jobs. Because the world changes after twenty years. The world changes! I tried imagining and kept imagining for days.

COPE strives! A quick google search yielded a homepage. http://www.projcope.org/
And here we have a summary:
In the course of such human events, we the people of Project COPE hold these truths to be self-evident:
• the obstacles faced by many being released from prison are so overwhelming that a productive life without crime seems impossible to achieve by oneself;
• within the religious community there are enough caring people and sufficient resources to help ex-offenders deal with and overcome these threatening obstacles.
The Challenge is to make the right connections.The process is simple:
• Project COPE interviews and screens applicants soon to be released from prison and selects those most likely to succeed with a little help from some friends.
•Project COPE recruits and trains congregation-based teams of volunteers who are willing to be those friends during the trauma of community re-entry.
•Project COPE connects one team of volunteers with one ex-offender of their choice and shepherds their partnership for one year.
Among other things, this article, courtesy ALDaily, has got me imagining again:
http://www.newtopiamagazine.net/articles/70?POSTNUKESID=fcec6b0478bc75628d44a0a0df10f4f6

And so I write on all of my bureaucratic documents that I want to spend my life studying compassion. I do not and cannot articulate the mixed bag of feelings that comes with that last sentence.