Brick Walls Hurt

I’m not sure, quite, what I was expecting… but continuously running into brick walls hurts a lot lately for some reason.

I am trying to find a venue for Purple Day 5k.  It is to the point that I am considering shortening the name…. since I’m getting ABSOLUTELY nowhere with Round Rock.  I finally got bent this morning (thank you work for giving me the extra day off) and pushed until I got a human at the parks and recreation department.  Not that it was a good thing… actually, it was kind of a way sucky thing… they told me that they had a better thing that MIGHT be going on in the park that weekend and I couldn’t plan on having it that weekend at all.

Okay… is there another place…

Well… you could try but it will cost you $55 an hour for police plus $17 an hour for their cars and you need at least 2 of each (humans and cars) to handle traffic IF you can find a place that “we” will approve but it isn’t likely.  And well… we won’t even consider talking to you about what the next steps are until after you turn in the paperwork and the $50 (oh wait… you can’t do that because we are TRYING to redo the forms… well… you can submit them twice with two different $50 fees).

There are no events in the whole month of march on the calendar.  So I guess maybe really is a maybe.

So… now I’m struggling to find a location… again.  And I’m now looking at Georgetown to see if they are more user friendly.  I’m trying to see if the hospitals can help, too…

I can’t get the local Epilepsy Foundation to accept any help from me (but they are WAY TOTALLY understaffed… gee, I wonder why… could it be because they ignore people who knock on the door to help?).  We are already in July and they haven’t quite figured out if they are even having a November race for Epilepsy awareness month… hmmm… volunteered to help with that, too… but… well… they don’t need planning help but maybe if they actually get around to having one I can volunteer to help out at the race… maybe…

Why don’t people try to be activists?  I wonder.

I turned in my entry to try to be the Face of Purple Day 2011… The question was what does Purple Day mean to me…funny… I was limited to 100 words… It was hard to find a way to tell them what they mean to me.

What do they mean?

They have given me the support that I need in this fight.  Michelle Caplan emails me and she always seems to know when I’m at the point where I want to beat my head against the wall.  She makes me smile when it is really hard to smile.  Purple Day (purpleday.org) has never turned away anything that I think I might want to do to raise money or awareness.  They have been there to listen, to talk, to allow me to flex my fledgling wings of activist in any way that I can figure out to flex them.  What do they mean?  They mean that I have a virtual lifeline when I’m feeling really low.  I want desperately to raise this money for them…   and that is why I feel frustrated at the brick walls, slammed doors and flat out ignored communications that I get and I feel like I get.

No… I won’t give up.

If I have to create the outer-mongolia purple day 5k… I will raise awareness for Purple Day and for Amandya and for everyone who doesn’t understand, anyone who is being diagnosed… anyone who is suffering the ignorance, stigma and fear of being a person with epilepsy.

okay…

I will put my soapbox away and try to find more help out there somewhere…