community service is fun

You may have (or more likely haven't) noticed a lacuna in my usual random but frequent schedule of posting to this blog. Mostly, this is due to the fact that I was sick all last week with some kind of fever and had to go on antibiotics. Luckily I am fine now, just in time to catch up with all the work I fell behind in while I was bedridden. So today I decided to use my magically discovered free time not for studying but to go do some community service with fellow law school peers. I "volunteered" at the AIDS walk near the capitol. What I mean by volunteering is that my friends and I loaded a lot of equipment (chairs, tables, six gallon boxes of Ozarka, etc.) into a truck that was then never moved for hours. The truck is probably still sitting in the same place, its cargo held securely by bungee cords and tie me downs. We also moved one pile of outdoor event gear across a field to form another pile. Needless to say, despite our good faith efforts to help, we were very bored and underutilized. After one woman left from sheer boredom, I convinced two of my friends to take an educating excursion to the state capitol, but even this could not fill all of our vacant time. We continued to wander around until I got a free granola bar and refrigerator magnet from some home remodelling company. Then my friends Melissa, Stephanie, Clay, and I all discovered free cake at a Starbuck's stand. After a while we got so bored that we set up a chair/goal and tried to kick rocks through it. This game ended when we realized the rocks were flying close to the nearby parked cars. My friend Melissa was the only one to score a goal. Then we watched another law student, Brian, chase down and capture a cockroach (don't ask why) which he subsequently released into the nearby field. We played with a free frisbee he got from Petco until he managed to hit a policewoman with a wayward throw. The whole experience was capped off by our post-volunteering lunches at a nearby restaurant, which the law firm Fulbright and Jaworski generously decided to pick up the tab on. I ordered a lot and boxed food for dinner (and wasn't the only one). I've heard that after a day of community service you are supposed to feel fulfilled. Somehow I don't really feel much of anything except the warm glow of reminiscing over happy times spent with my law school friends and the feel of a new tee shirt on my back (courtesy of the AIDS walk). Is something wrong here?