My community service consisted of five simple tasks. Four of these tasks were on behalf of the TRK or the Tualatin River Keeper's organization. For this organization, I cleaned garbage from river banks, polished and sharpened tools, cleaned canoes and packaged goods for a silent auction (which, by the way, was suspiciously loud). At one point, I piloted a naval vessel down the Tualatin river and collected the most foul-smelling garbage on earth, including one Pepsi bottle full of fermented urine. It was fun.

My community service was not tied to my exhibition directly, but I would like to share a revelation I had in my time spent pulling ivy. It came while I trying to figure why it necessary for me to control the ivy population, why nature had developed a method of controlling its parasitic growth. The ivy I was pulling, it seems, was native to the Eastern United States – it does not belong here – and in the East, there are methods plants have developed to balance the ivy's destructive nature. When the ivy came to the west, it found an environment that was ill-adapted to it. So the ivy dominated all plant life it was able to overwhelm and as it thrived, it evolved to even better crush the native plant life. So that's rapid evolutionary change – and it was humans, after all, that brought the ivy west in the first place.

I had done a lot of community service before this. I didn't learn anything about myself because most of what I did was an echo of something I had done previously.

They say that if th individual works for the society, the individual will ultimately benefit. So you might say that everything I did directly benefited myself. As Jamie said, and I must concur, the tools we sharpened and oiled were tools we later used, so that's also a direct benefit.

Just as in #4, when the community is strengthened the individuals within are too. In case in particular, my community service consisted of pulling ivy in an area that was clearly somebody's back yard. The owner of this yard sat on his deck and several grown men and women toil on his property while he sipped scotch. The benefit to this individual is apparent, of course.

I chose to do the community service I did because it was available to me and convenient. I did the service because it was assigned and not by choice so my ethics never came into play. For the record though, my ethics, which include a belief that being self-giving is the ethical way to live, matched up quite well with this service. Of course, I don't always follow my ethics exactly, which leads me to believe that I may be a super villain or somebody's evil rival, without knowing it.

I would rate my effort as a 10, because I went out of my to look to community service options in my area and I completed all my 25 hours, maybe more, I'm not sure. I never slacked off, I gave 100% for each hour I worked and 110% as I relaxed after that. I would rate my experience a 5. It would be about a 7 or 8 but working in the scotch-drinking man's back yard really soured me to the whole thing. Here I was helping the community and this schmuck sits on his deck while we work in or near his back yard. How do we solve this? Follow his lead, of course. Hah! I did enjoy cleaning up the Tualatin river, though. I'm a fly fisherman and because all rivers are part of a whole environment, when one river is healthier, everything it feeds is benefited and a healthy river is a river with a lot of trout!