*Pretty quick new post on the heels of my last one I realize, but I had to put this down before I forgot*

So tonight was my first very exciting night volunteering for the Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition. Here are my impressions.

• Everyone working in the kitchen were very nice. All smiles. A few UCLA students were not smiling because their football team lost so badly to USC this past weekend. I had to keep my mouth shut about being an 'SC alum.
• The head honcho, Sam, is very soft spoken and smokes cigarettes. He delegates work quietly and calmly, like the Pit Bull in the yard that doesn't have to bark.
• The food is loaded into a lunch truck. Everyone piles in and holds onto something since there aren't any seats. It's quite an adventure traveling those four or five blocks down the poorly paved section of Santa Monica Blvd in Hollywood.
• The lunch truck stops near the Target on La Brea. There is already a crowd waiting for it. The regular volunteers comment about the smallness of the crowd. "It's the first of the month," someone says. "They've all got their checks, so they don't need to come." By checks, she means disability, or social security. It's something I need to look into. Sam says they're probably somewhere getting high, that's why they're not coming. He shakes his head.
• We served a thanksgiving feast. Instead of actual turkey, there was a turkey soup. There was lots of stuffing and potatoes, yams, and salad. There was plenty to go around and it all smelled great. I joked that I was going to be elbowing some hungry people out of the way so I could get myself a plate.
• I was in charge of the juice. It's a delicate thing juice. You don't want to tell people no when they come back for seconds, thirds, fourths and fifths, but you want to make sure everyone gets a little bit, as it's a popular item.
• There were dozens of men from all different walks of life. Probably only three women, one in her early twenties it looked like, another one who was still young but looked older and a little more strung out, and another who looked like a mother.
• Some men said thank you so many times, like this was the first bit of kindness anyone had bestowed upon them in days. Other men complained that there wasn't a real turkey. Other men said nothing, those were usually the ones that creeped me out the most because you could probably safely assume that they were the craziest. They were the ones that stared and wouldn't leave, and one even seemed to be following me around like a puppy. 
• The cranberry sauce was the hard sell. Sharon, the woman next to me was in charge of passing those out. She would say, "Cranberry sauce?" and the patrons would smile and shake their head with a "No thank you." I told her that she should use an adjective or two. She suggested "Some delicious cranberry sauce" to the next few customers and they were much more excited about it.
• There was so much food left over at the end of the hour we spent serving the people out there. Everyone was even able to take extra plates back with them to hang onto for later. We made sure everyone took bags of pastries and fruit with them and extra sandwiches. We still ended up throwing  away all of the yams and a lot of the stuffing.
• Clean up was a breeze and entirely uneventful, but it was nice being able to talk to some of the others and find out a little more about them.
• One of the volunteers asked me what I did for a living. I told her that I'm a personal assistant but I'm thinking of going back to grad school for social work. That's why I'm starting to volunteer for a lot more organizations. I want to see which facet of humanity I would want to focus on. "That's noble," she said. I felt the need to explain myself, as if attempting to be noble was a bad thing. I suppose I didn't want to seem full of myself. I told her I just wanted to do something fulfilling with my life.