The Type of People who Volunteer/Do Community Service

1. Do gooders that want to help others
2. Confused people who are trying to make sense of their own life
3. Overcompensators that want to show the world how they're gooder than everyone, the ones that ham it up for the foster kids and homeless and senior citizens but turn a stoic face to "the normals"
4. People being punished

I volunteered at the Bingo night at a nursing home yesterday. Being there reminded me of those times we visited during Girl Scouts projects and with the cobbled together kid's chorus group made up of our neighborhood's Taiwanese Christians. And me.  There was this constant inner conundrum of wanting to be accommodating yet not condescending.  The excruciating wait watching some of the Bingo players with their knitted hats and long triangular fingernails gingerly locate and cover the called number. Some of them wore homemade beaded bracelets, with the same kinds of chunky glass and base metal beads that were in my beading kit I got for Christmas in 5th grade. I wonder if some kid gave it to them or they made it in the Arts and Crafts room.  A man wore a beaded necklace.  It was stupid, but it made me happy that they still treasured pretty things, pretty and intrinsically worthless things, just like the rest of us.  That if it was a kid that gave it to them, it wasn't just a polite exchange made more in an attempt to make the giver feel important, but it was special to both parties.

There was a male senior who shook my hand and spoke only German.  Or Russian. I forget.  And soon after he shook my hand they said they needed a male volunteer to stand next to him instead because apparently he liked to touch people in places that would still be covered by a bathing suit.

I wanted to yell at the middle-aged men that were excessively superficially hammy with the seniors, you're not better than them, you're just not There yet.