Sara Hendricks

The Six hardest Languages for English Speakers

2012-01-11T03:42:00.000-08:00

Learning any new language is difficult. However, some languages are MUCH MORE difficult than others, depending on your native language. A Spanish speaker will have an easier time speaking Italian than someone who speaks Hindi. A Klingon will have an easier time learning Kryptonian than learning Welsh. That’s (duh) because there are similarities in languages families and it’s easier to learn languages that are in the same family. So, if you (English Speaker) want to learn Spanish or German, that’s no big deal, the languages are pretty similar. However, if you’re up for a real challenge, there are languages completely unrelated to English that are fiendishly difficult for an English speaker to learn, for reasons you wouldn’t expect

Hint—Pig Latin is not on the list

6 Arabic

Spoken by 280,000,000 people in 26 different countries, including Egypt, Libya, Jordan, Morocco, Iraq, Israel, Syria, and Somalia; Arabic is the fifth most spoken language in the world. If you want to see the pyramids, religious historical relics, or a war zone, this is a good language to know.

What makes Arabic simple:

It uses an alphabetic system.

There are lots of classes you can take and textbooks you can use.

What makes Arabic migraine-inducing-ly difficult:

First, even though it uses an alphabet of only 28 letters, the letters have four different forms, depending on where they land in the sentence.

Ls, mst f th tm thy dnt ncld vwls n wrtng. Bcs fck y, thts wh.

Also, most of the time, they don't include vowels in writing. Because fuck you, that's why.

Secondly, the Modern Standard Arabic you’ll learn from textbooks, college courses, US Government Spy training, etc, is used only for writing and for watching the news. Each country or even area of a country has a different dialect. They SAY dialect, but they don’t mean cute pronunciation differences like the Weasley brothers have, they mean that these dialects can be completely un-intelligible to each other. The pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary of colloquial Arabic are all different from the Modern Standard Arabic you learned to read and write from your textbook. (What’s left to language after you change the pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary?)

“BODY Language….”

So, first you have to figure out where you want to go/who you’re going to need to talk to. Figure out what dialect they speak and then spend 2,200 class hours (double that to include homework time) reaching “general proficiency.” The Foreign Service Institute of the US Department of State has found that it takes 88 weeks of super intensive study (half that time spent in-country) for dedicated, high-aptitude language learners to become mostly proficient in Arabic. Conversely, they say it takes 23-24 weeks to reach that level in Italian or Norwegian and 30-36 weeks for Swahili. You could become competent in THREE other languages in the time it takes to reach the same level in Arabic.

Remember how French and Spanish have gender for each noun? It was sometimes hard to remember that extra little info, wasn’t it? Guess what, Arabic has that too! Also, each noun and verb must be learned not two, but three separate ways- singular, dual, and plural. In English we normally just tack an -s on the end of a noun and maybe turn the -y to –i for plurals, but sometimes we have totally different words, “I” versus “we” or “mouse” versus “mice.”

It would be like every noun changing three different ways—mouse, bimice and mice. Or maybe dualmice…

If Arabic gets too tough and you want to switch to Dutch, just remember that ageless proverb:

الخاذل أخو القاتل The deserter is the brother of the murderer.

5 Xhosa

Xhosa is spoken in South Africa and Lesotho by about 8 million people, including Nelson Mandela. Xhosa is related to languages spoken all over Africa, so if you want to travel throughout Africa, learning a new language every 300 hundred miles, why not start here? There are classes offered in South Africa if you care to move to Cape Town and you can get newspapers and magazines printed in Xhosa.

Xhosa is an “agglutinative” language which means that each word starts with a base and then you add prefixes or suffixes or infixes to add meaning. Do we do this in English too? Abso-fucking-lutely! (Well…abso-fucking-not-really would be more accurate.) Sure, we add prefixes, and we add suffixes, but, like the example above, the f-bomb is about the only in-fix we have. Xhosa also has four different tones and 18 different click sounds. In fact, the name of the language begins with a click sound that sounds kind of like the click we use when we want horses to go a little faster.

Xhosa also has 15 noun classes. This means that when you learn a new noun, you need to learn which of 15 categories it belongs to. Is it an abstract thought like justice? Then it fits in noun class 14. Is it a loan word from a different language like computer? Then it goes in noun class 9. Noun classes affect things like which pronoun you use with the noun, how you make it plural, how it works together with the verb and so forth. So after you learn each word, you have to figure out which noun class it fits into and what other changes you have to make to the sentence based on that.

Finally, numbers can be hard. I’ll just leave you with a few examples.

66 amashumi amathandathu anathandathu amashumi amathandathu anesithandathu

24 amashumi amabini anane amashumi amabini anesine

56 amashumi amahlanu anathandathu amashumi amahlanu anesithandathu

4 Japanese

Japanese is spoken in Japan by about 125,000,000 people, including Ichiro and Pikachu. Its writing system is ridiculously hard. There are two different alphabets (adding up to 96 letters), in addition to the characters which make up the main base of writing. There will be lots more to say about the difficulty in learning to read characters further on, but first-

What makes it easy: It is pretty easy to pronounce, has very few irregular verbs (not like English: swim, swam, swum), and there are countless textbooks, learning CDs, and teachers to teach it.

How’s it hard?

The pronunciation has a key difference from English that we didn’t even know existed. Based on how long you say the vowel in a word, the meaning changes. Beru is building while beeru is beer and obaasan is grandmother and obasan is aunt. Try picking those differences out when you’re in the middle of a conversation.

Turns out lots of languages are agglutinative, and Japanese is no exception. They pack lots of meaning into a single word, expressing the idea, “if (subject) had been made to work…” by saying, “hatarakaseraretara...”

However, the thing that trips up most people is the honorific language. In Japan, being polite occupies about 90% of your waking hours. Verbs change completely depending on if you’re talking to a close friend or your boss. There are something like 6 levels of politeness, and the second trickiest part is knowing when to use which one. You can’t talk to your boss the same way she talks to you, because you’re at different status levels. Women and men have different ways of speaking (guess which gender speaks more politely?) Plus, you can hurt a close friend’s feelings by speaking too politely, therefore implying that you’re not actually all that close. They take this stuff so seriously that you can actually take a night course to learn the exact proper degree of bowing.

“You’re fired.”

The words change a lot depending on which level of politeness you’re going to use. For example, the past tense of the verb to read changes from its most causal form, yonda, to its most formal form oyomininarimashita. Sometimes you have to use completely different words, like changing ashita (tomorrow) to myounichi (tomorrow, but nicer).

Besides the fine arts of paper folding and really weird porn, they have also mastered the art of both and indirect speech in Japan. You’ll never hear the word no. You’ll rarely hear people say what they honestly think. If you ask someone to come to your house for dinner with friends, they might say, “Oh, don’t you think it’s too much trouble to make dinner for so many people?” You’ll insist, “No! I like having people over!” They’ll mention, “Won’t it be hard to find your place?” “No, no, no,” you’ll say, “there’s a bus stop right in front of the apartment building.” They might have to work late that day… “Whenever you can come by, come!” you’ll say warmly. At this point, they trip and fall over… and you might finally realize that what they’re actually saying is, “Hey, dumbass, I’ve made it abundantly clear I’m not coming! Stop pushing it. Can’t you understand Japanese?”

3 Navajo

Navajo is spoken in the southwest United States by about 170,000 people, including Keith Little: a decorated Code Talker who fought in the Marshall Islands, Sai Pan, and Iwo Jima. Read more about the code talkers at http://www.navajocodetalkers.org.

Navajo has four tones: high, low, rising, and falling, and these can each be pronounced either normal or nasalized. (Don’t get a cold when you’re trying to speak Navajo.) Navajo has a shit-ton of verbs, despises nouns, and doesn’t use adjectives at all.

Navajo is an endangered language. In fact, only three percent of Navajo speakers are monolingual. Lots of people care about it, so there are bilingual schools to preserve the language, and Rosetta Stone recently completed a language program so you can learn it at home.

The fun thing about Navajo is that verbs are all important and change all the time. You can’t just say, “sit,” you have to think ahead about WHAT is sitting. If people sit, it’s sidá, if something round or square is sitting, you use si’ą́, and if something flat and flexible is sitting, you use siłtsooz.

Also, unlike Japanese that borrows words like computer (konpyuta) and beer (beeru), Navajo rarely does that. Navajo creates new words describing the term. A cell phone is called “the thing you stand up on the hill with” and an army tank is a “car that one sits up on that crawls around with a thing on it that makes big explosions” (chidí naa’na’í bee’eldǫ́ǫ́htsoh bikáá’ dah naaznilígíí.) Also, since they rarely use nouns, instead of calling most anything one person sits on a chair, they describe by how it’s used, so it can be, “bikáá’ dah ’asdáhí (“one sits up there on it”) or bikáá’ na’anishí(“one works on it”),”

2 Cantonese

Cantonses is spoken in Southern China, the city of Hong Kong and elsewhere by about 20 million people.

What makes it easy: Nothing. We’re pretty high on the difficulty list here.

Why it’s hard: The main problem that gets people who are learning Cantonese are the tones. There are six tones: high, low-middle to high, middle, low-middle to low, low to low-middle, and low-middle.

So, when you learn a new word, you have to also learn the tone, and you’ve got to hit it just right, because the middle and low-middle tones are close but crucially different. If you say something with the wrong tone, it’s a big deal. Maii (low to low-middle) means buy. Maii (low-middle) means sell. Also, tou (low to low-middle) ngo (low-middle) means hungry while tou (low to low-middle) ngo (high) means diarrhea.

Also, have you ever tried looking up a picture in a dictionary? Let’s say you’re reading a book and you come across a word you don’t recognize. Let’s say it’s this one.

黐線

How exactly do you go about finding one of those characters in the dictionary? There’s no alphabet, so if you don’t already know the character, you don’t know how to pronounce it. Well, I’ll tell you how, but it’s a pain in the ass. First, you have to figure out the “key,” a little section of the character. There are 214 keys and every character will have at least one key in it. Then you have to figure out how many brush strokes it would take to write this key… if you’re writing it in calligraphy. Then count how many strokes for the whole character. Then you look in the key index in the dictionary for the key under the correct number of brush strokes, then go to the right page for that key, then search under the key according to the number of brush strokes for the whole character, then look through all the samples until you find the character you’re looking for. For a beginner, it can take over ten minutes to look up a single word and often times, they are actually unable to look up the word at all because as a beginner, you don’t know which part of the character is the “key” and you don’t know how many brush strokes it takes to write each key. Then you realize that most words are made of two characters and you might need to look up both of them separately and find the right combination.

1 Tuyuca

Tuyuca is spoken in the Eastern Amazon and has less than a thousand speakers. It- obviously- doesn’t have a Rosetta Stone option, and there aren’t any textbooks for learning it. If you want to learn Tuyuca, you have to move to Columbia or Brazil and live on the shores of the river with the indigenous people who speak it. It’s a bit more difficult than practicing Spanish when ordering tacos at the van that drives right up to your house. What kind of language is it? It’s “a postpositional agglutinative SOV language with mandatory type II evidentiality.” Geuh…..

Because it’s agglutinative like Japanese, the one word hóabãsiriga means “I do not know how to write.” It also has two different words for “we.” One that means us and not you, and one that means us and you too. This could help clear up some confusion in English.

“WE’RE going to the movies tonight.

Finally, remember how Xhosa had 15 noun classes? Well, Tuyuca has somewhere between 50 and 140. One of the more obscure noun classes is the class that means, “bark that does not cling closely to a tree.” This can also apply to baggy pants, or wet peeling plywood.

As for pronunciation, it has two tones and the meaning of the word changes whether you say it nasalized or not… but you’ve already got tones and nasalization mastered from Navajo and Cantonese.

And last, but not least, remember the last time you had to write a paper and you had to painstakingly cite all your sources? Well, if you want to speak Tuyuca, you better get used to citing every thought you want to express. Tuyuca has obligatory endings on its sentences that state HOW you know what you’re saying. You can’t just say, “That dude is a douchebag.” You’ve got to say-

“That dude is a douchebag” + any of the following 5 verb endings:

+ because I saw him kick that puppy (visual sensory).

+ because I can smell his Axe body spray from here (nonvisual sensory).

+ because his friends are douchebags (inferential).

+ because my friend told me (reportative).

+ because I have seen other douchebags who have also bleached the tips of their hair (assumed).

Atheist Conversion Story

2011-12-29T22:27:00.000-08:00

I sat down a while ago to write exactly how, why, and when I became an atheist. I have had people ask me about it before, and I thought I would write it all out and get my thoughts in order so that anyone who was curious could read about it. I started writing, and three hours and 1,500 words later, I wasn’t even a quarter of the way through. So, I scrapped that, and decided to write a condensed version.

What it comes down to is that I was raised in a very close-knit and very religious Mormon family. Many of my friends were my same religion, and I spent a lot of time at church. My family read the bible together, prayed together, and in high school I spent an average of 10 hours a week at church ( scripture study class, Sunday church, and Wednesday night youth activities). Church was a huge part of my life, and it was important to everyone important to me, and so I went along with it. I said what I was expected to say and I mostly did what I was expected to do. My family thought I believed it. For the most part I didn't question my “faith.” I’m a pretty easy going person, so I went along with what other people wanted, because I thought it didn’t much matter. This lasted through high school, through most of college (at a church school), and even afterwards for a short time. I didn't have a testimony of Jesus, but so what? I’ll go along with being Mormon, because it’s all I know.

At college, I started studying the bible for a required religion credit and finally started paying attention. I was supposed to believe WHAT??? I was supposed to look to the Bible for moral guidance? Murder, slavery, child brides, and polygamy all get condoned, and I’m supposed to believe this is the highest moral law? Suddenly, something actually was important to me. That something was figuring out what I DID or DIDN’T believe. Did I believe I should submit to my husband? Did I believe that homosexuality was a sin? Did I believe that my church was true? Did I even believe in god? I had a lot of incentive to believe. My whole family is very religious, and I wanted to make them happy. I was pretty miserable at this point in my life and I saw how content other people were in the church, and I wanted to be content like them. But still, after four years of study, thought, and unanswered prayers I realized that no, no church is true. There is no god.

It’s not that I think religion is “too hard,” and I didn’t want to put the work in. It’s not that I want to live a terribly sinful life. It’s not that I’m angry or sad. It’s that it’s NOT REAL. Once I realized that simple truth, I felt an actual weight lift off my shoulders. I no longer had to force my mind to believe ridiculous unscientific facts. I no longer had to harden my heart against equal rights for the LGBT community. I no longer had to feel unloved by a god who seemed indifferent to me. I had finally found the happiness I wanted so badly, and I found it through abandoning the religion that had been tying me down!

So, I guess it’s as simple as that. I’m an atheist because I tried really hard to believe in a god, and couldn’t. I tried praying, fasting, studying the scriptures and that only drove me farther away from religion. I stopped being depressed and angry when I stopped trying to force myself to believe in god. As an atheist I became more giving, open, confident, smarter, happier, and a better person.

JLPT 4

2011-12-05T05:01:00.000-08:00

I just finished taking a big Japanese language test. It’s called the JLPT, and I took level 4. It’s a pretty expensive test. Between the test fee and the postage to mail in the test application, it cost about 7,000 Yen. That’s about 90 US dollars. I’m hoping to get a job teaching English at a Japanese University pretty soon, so being able to pass a Japanese test would look pretty good on my resume. Now, there are 5 levels, the 1^st level proving that you are fluent, and the 5^th level showing that you have probably studied two semesters worth at college. (As anyone who has studied a foreign language can attest to, two semesters doesn’t add up to very much language ability, much less when you have to spend half that time just learning to read...and not getting very far on that anyways.)

So, I took level 4 on December 4^th2011. I began planning to take the test in May, 2011. In May, I went to the JLPT website and answered the sample questions they provide on the website for level 5 (http://www.jlpt.jp/e/samples/forlearners.html). I passed with flying colors. I failed the level four questions spectacularly. However, the test wasn’t for another seven months. I study about twleve hours or more a week, so I figured I could level up in that amount of time. I study from the textbook series called Genki. I mostly focused on just working my way through that textbook. It’s a great textbook series that combines all four skills (speaking, listening, reading, writing), in order to create a well-rounded Japanese speaker. I figured that it would just as adequately prepare me for the test as anything else would. I felt that my listening skills were pretty good, as were my reading and writing skills, but that I needed more work on my grammar. (Specifically, particles, for any Japanese speakers out there)

About two months before the test, I started looking online and found some practice tests. I took them and aced the reading portion with flying colors. I did acceptable on the grammar section and got a...wait for it.... 0 on the listening section. Yes. ZERO.

See, the test doesn’t just hand you the answers. A sample question was something like,

Listen to the dialogue-

Girl: Why were you so late today?

Boy: I had problems on the bus.

Girl: What happened? Did you oversleep?

Boy: No, when I got off the bus, I realized I had left my wallet on my seat!

Girl: Oh! I thought you were going to say you forgot your wallet at home.

Boy: No, I didn’t forget my wallet at home.

Question: Why is he late?

A-He slept in and missed the bus.

B-He left his wallet at home.

C-He left his wallet on the seat of the bus.

For someone like me who can only pick out words here and there, this is a pretty tricky question! When I hear the choices, it’s hard to pick which one is best, because I heard the main parts of each sentence. So I picked B, because I heard about him leaving his wallet at home more than anything else. In the test making business, we call those types of questions “distractors,” and I should know better than to fall for them, but I did every time. That’s why I did worse than if I had just marked random answers.

So I immediately started focusing on my listening skills. I listened to Japanese on my phone as I biked to and from school, I watched Japanese TV at home and YouTube tutorials, and I started feeling more confident. I found a different listening sample test and scored 60% on it! (50% is a passing grade.) I continued studying, but I felt very confident that I would pass the test. From time to time Jon would give me five minute tutorials in Japanese grammar or reading as we were grocery shopping or waiting for the bus. For example, he taught me how to remember the difference between the very similar looking kanji for “to wait” 待, “to hold”　持, and “especially” 特.　

Now we’re up to the month before the test. I stop learning new things, and go back and review everything that I’ve studied up to this point. It’s a textbook and a half of review, and I’m glad I did it. There were plenty of vocabulary words I had forgotten and important grammar issues I had totally forgotten about.

The Friday before the test, I do one last online practice test, just a short one on grammar. I, again, get a big, fat, ZERO. Again, worse than if I had just marked all Bs. I then go to the list of kanji (Japanese characters)I need to know and realize that I don’t know lots and lots of them. I know about 250 from my textbook, and the test requires 280, so, since they only require 50% to pass, I figured I was in the clear. Well, my textbook did not teach me the same ones the Japanese test makers think I should know.

At this point I’m much less confident. I don’t know the right kanji, my grammar skills are non-existent, and I’m pretty sure I WON’T pass. I spend all day Saturday and Sunday morning skimming the new kanji so I can recognize them, and reviewing more grammar (particles!).

The test starts at 12:30 on Sunday, and by 12:15, almost everyone is in the room, ready to start. We have assigned seats, and we clear our desks of everything except our test voucher, a few pencils, an eraser, and a watch. The administrator walks up and down the row checking our faces to our test photo and handing out the question packet and answer sheet. At 12:45, we finally begin.

I am glad that I spent that last few days in review. Almost everything I reviewed is somewhere on that first portion of the test. There are 30 minutes and 35 questions, and the kanji part is relatively easy. I answer all the questions that I’m sure I know first, then count them. There are 18 questions that I’m almost positive I got right. That’s half. That’s passing! I finish the test, guessing on the rest of them, but making pretty good guesses, I think. I walk out of the room with a smile on my face. I notice that lots of people aren't smiling. In fact, I glance around once we've done, "pencils down!" and I notice that lots of people didn't have watches with them. They must not have known that the time was up, because plenty of people have questions with no hole at all filled in.

Jon was waiting for me outside of the building, as he went with me to the testing area to support me. He had walked to McDonald’s and gotten me a cheeseburger and a coffee to keep me from getting hungry or sleepy. He’s wonderful. One of the questions had been to correctly identify the kanji for “to wait,” so I chalk that up to him.

I felt really good going back in to take part two. It was a 60 minute reading portion. I’m a good reader, and my reading skills have transitioned pretty easily in my other language (Spanish). I got stellar scores on my practice reading tests. I love reading.

I still love reading…

.......in English.

Boy, this part of the test kicked my butt. It started with the classic Japanese test question, where they take a sentence, break it into four pieces, jumble it up, and you have to put it in order. I’m very bad at this. When I see my middle school students doing these types of questions in English, I struggle to help them figure it out….in my own language. So, I figured I would skip those, and go to the reading passages. Well, those took a long time. One reading question would focus on one paragraph of reading. So, in order to answer one reading question, I had to read a full paragraph of Japanese, then read the question and the multiple choices, another five sentences in Japanese. Just for one question. I read as quickly as I could, even skimming some reading sections, and I still had to guess on about 8 questions, just filling them in randomly. I did not leave with a smile.

There was another half hour break where Jon and I went for a relaxing walk and he talked me up, and then I went in to take the listening section. I don’t know, it’s all a blur by this point. Maybe I got 50%? There were only three multiple choices to choose from for about half the questions, so that really helped pull my random guessing score to 33% rather than 25%.

I had a hard time with this test because of its 50% pass rate. I’m used to the US, where 70% is usually the pass rate. When you walk out of a test, you know whether you knew most of the answers, so you know if you passed or not. But here, you could conceivable only know 35% of the answers, guess randomly on the remaining 65%, get 25% of those right, just from random guessing, and still pass the test! Knowing my track record of guessing, I’m not betting on that, but I still don’t know.

Also, I won’t find out if I passed till I get my results in the mail in Feb, two months after taking the completely scan-tron test. What, are they going to check them by hand? And then deliver them by carrier pigeon?

Atheists in Foxholes

2011-10-02T04:59:00.000-07:00

I have been an atheist for about four or five years now, and I'm proud of it. I like telling people about it because it really is a part of who I am. Being an atheist has made me so much happier than I ever was when I was trying to force myself to believe in god.

I've heard a lot of family and friends say things to me like, "When you run into trouble, you'll run back to god," or "There are no atheists in foxholes!" (I've also have plenty of family and friends say that they're happy that I'm happy and let's make brownies.)

I visited the Freedom from Religion website, http://ffrf.org and saw this article posted, http://ffrf.org/outreach/atheists-in-foxholes/.

I copied and pasted the poem below that was inscribed on the monument, written by Alice Shiver.

Atheists in Foxholes

Atheists in foxholes, some say they are myths,
Creations of the mind who just don’t exist.

Yet, they answered the call to defend, with great pride.
With reason their watchword, they bled and they died.

They took Saratoga from the British crown,
Secured America’s freedom at the Battle of Yorktown.

From Sumter to Appomattox, fields flowed with their blood.
When the cannons grew silent, the flag proudly stood.

From the Marne to the Argonne, in trenches and tanks,
They defeated the Germans -- the whole world gave thanks.

They were bombed at Pearl Harbor, fought on to Berlin.
Many freethinking women served along with the men.

Still war keeps erupting -- Iraq, Bosnia, and Kosovo.
Where is the peace that eludes people so?

It is broken by tyrants who bear crosses and creeds,
That overshadow reason with hate and cruel deeds.

So atheists prevail until your work is complete.
Mothers mourn, children cry, and bigots plan your defeat.

By air, land, and sea, you answer freedom’s call.
Without god or faith, you seek liberty for all.

The thing that strikes me about atheists during wartime, is their bravery. See, religious soldiers believe that when they die, they go to a better place. They think that they and all their loved ones will be together again in eternity. They don't want to die, but it's not the worst thing, right?I mean, they believe heaven is awesome, don't they?

Atheists know that this life is the ONLY one we have. They know that when they die, it's finished, there's nothing else. They won't be able to see the fruits of their valor from a cloud on heaven. They know they aren't going to see any eternal rewards from their sacrifice. Their atheist loved ones will have to live with their death, knowing there is no hope of ever seeing them again. Don't you think that requires more bravery, more morality, more commitment, more honor from a person?

I don't mean to diminish anyone's sacrifice or devotion. Any brave, moral soldier gets my respect, regardless of religious affiliation/lack of affiliation.

2011-09-27T01:17:00.000-07:00

Camping

A few days ago, I went camping with a few friends, including my husband, Jon. We went to the island of 大島(Oshima). On the ferry to the island, I even saw two dolphins jump out of the water! The trip was off to a good start. We hiked over the top of about a dozen mountains to get to the opposite side of the mountain so we could see a windmill and lighthouse. Neither of them are things I particularly care about seeing, and both were surprisingly disappointing. However, the joy was in the journey, right, right? My bag carrying the tent, food, and so forth got pretty heavy around the fifth hour of tromping up and down mountains. The views were spectacular and it was great to be surrounded by trees and birds.

The sun started going down just as we noticed some cows rounding the side of a mountain. That explains the cow splats on the trail. I was wondering about that.

We walked a fair ways away from the cows to find a camp site and started gathering wood for a fire. By the time we got around the setting up our tent it was already almost dark. We pooled our food and had a delicious dinner of salad, sausage, and so forth. Just as Jon is putting the chicken wings on the grill…I hear a creepy noise coming from the darkness. I dismissed it as my imagination…until I heard it again, it was definitely an animal and it was definitely coming closer. I said, “Hey, someone shine a flashlight over there.” Someone obliged and lit up one black cow only ten feet away from me. It also lit up about seven other cows facing us. I thought, “Hey, they’re just cows, right?” I shouted at them and clapped my hands a bit to get them to go away.

The lead cow tossed its head, stamped its feet and as it was getting worked up, the light from the flashlight glinted off its nose ring. The surrounding lady cows stood calmly watching us. At that point, I stated edging towards the fence behind our campsite. It was a decorative fence, not made for keeping the cows out, but it was better than nothing. “I think we should go behind the fence guys. You don’t have to, but I’m going to.” I was going to let this bull trample my tent, eat the food, whatever he wanted. At that point, a much braver (and perhaps more experienced) friend shouted louder than I had, clapped his hands louder than I had, and called the bull’s bluff. The cows ran off into the night and I came back from behind the fence. The rest of the trip occurred without incident.

Reading in English class

2011-09-27T01:03:00.000-07:00

A while ago I was watching an English teacher teach new words to some beginning English students. These students had a vocabulary of about 25 English words and had just mastered writing the alphabet a week earlier. Now, they were repeating after the teacher and looking at various phrases in the book, Good morning, Nice to meet you, and Are you from America? They were also studying additional individual words like, Canada, I’m, and not.

The students were looking at the phrases or words and repeating after the teacher as they attempted to learn to read these words. Three weeks later, most of them still couldn’t read (much less understand) the simple phrase, I’m not from Canada. Why? They had worked so hard! They had reviewed and repeated and completed about 18 workbook pages involving those very words! What could be wrong?

First, the students had no knowledge of phonics. They had learned to write the alphabet, say the ABCs, and they had learned one word which correlated to each letter, for example, A/Ant, C/Car, or I/ Ink. As far as I’ve seen, the teachers don’t even mention th, ch, and sh.

Second, the students were never (and have never to this date in any classroom I’ve observed) been asked to read something on their own. They ALWAYS listen to the teacher pronounce it before they are asked to “read” it.

Finally, they were exposed to very little actual English. An entire class period might revolve around learning only four new words. Another class period might involve only a minute grammar point. The language of the classroom is 95% Japanese. There were no stories, songs, picture books, etc. to expose the students to more English.

The problems with this style of learning are clear. The letter/word correlation is not all that helpful. In their first unit, they learn A makes the sound for Ant….then they learn that A makes a completely different sound for the words in Are you from America? The I in Nice to meet you, isn’t pronounced like the one in Ink, the C isn’t pronounced like the C in Car. Furthermore, the ABCs is a pretty outdated and detrimental way of teaching letter-sound correspondence. Although the letter D does make the d sound, the letter Y rarely makes a Y (why) sound. How can students be expected to figure out that H generally doesn’t make an ech sound, or that Window isn’t pronounced double u-indo-double u?

Another problem is that students are never asked to actually read a new passage without first hearing it pronounced. Therefore, they never build the ability to actually read something on their own. Even students in their third year of studying English struggle to read familiar vocabulary rearranged into a new sentence. The students are never asked to, “sound it out,” a phrase most western adults remember from their elementary school days. In fact, the idea of trying to read a new word through guessing at each letter’s sound is completely foreign. Students never learn phonics rules like, tion is pronounced shun, that a C followed by E makes the S sound, and they never see lists of words, like cat, mat, hat, pat, to drill the at sound.

Now, some teachers (who teach English to native English speakers) nowadays are actually doing much less phonics in the classroom to teach students to read. They believe that there are too many exceptions to the rule when it comes to English language spelling. It’s true, for every rule you can teach about phonics, there are a dozen words that are exceptions to the rule. It’s very confusing. So these teachers instead expose the student to LOTS of written media and expect the students to just figure it out. The students are read massive amounts of books, they listen to books on tape, they practice reading new text aloud in groups, they are encouraged to try to write prodigiously, even if the spelling is wrong, etc etc etc. This method has some very promising results. However, you may have noticed that the English Language Learners I work with are not exposed to all that much English. They cover two pages a week in their text book and three or four pages in their workbook. A page opened at random in the middle of the first year textbook has 18 English words on it. The workbook is about the same. That is simply not enough exposure to English to help the students learn to read.

So WHY? Why are the teachers teaching it this way? Didn’t THEY have to learn to read? Don’t they know how ineffective this all is?

Then…then…then it all came together one day when I saw the students copying kanji (Japanese characters) in their notebooks for Japanese class. The English teachers here are teaching English reading the same way they learned Japanese reading. In Japanese they do have an alphabet, but starting in first grade they begin learning the characters that make up the bulk of written text. A Japanese high school graduate knows about 2,000 kanji. Each character has to have its pronunciation memorized. You can’t “sound out” a character as you can a word written with an alphabet. You have to learn the kanji through rote memorization. ..much like the teachers are teaching each new English word as something that needs to be learned through rote memorization.

They are limiting their students’ English potential by inferring that new English words are learned the same way a kanji is! Their students are left thinking that if they don’t recognize the word from sight, they don’t know it. Period.

6 reasons Why it Sucks to Live in Other Countries

2011-07-22T02:51:00.000-07:00

As a kid, I grew up wanting to explore the world. I wanted to fashion saddles for giraffes in Kenya, camp in the Amazon and chat in Mandarin with the locals over a bottle of Qingdao. So, when the opportunity presented itself for me to teach English in Korea for a year, I jumped at the chance. A year later, I jumped at the chance to live in Ecuador, later China, and currently Japan. I’m living the dream.

Sometimes the dream sucks—

Six Reasons Why it sucks to Live in Other Countries.

1 – You have no Privacy

Now, throughout this article, I’m talking about living in the following specific countries—South Korea, Ecuador, Taiwan, China, and Japan, overwhelmingly Asian countries. I hope to add live in more countries in South America (Peru) and at least one country in Africa (maybe Kenya). So, for me, it sucks to live in other countries that are drastically different from my own, somewhere where I don’t speak the language, the culture is different, the standard food looks like something you’d only eat on a dare, and you probably don’t look like everyone else.

So, first of all, other counties aren’t like America in their hiring practices. They can and do ask for things like photos before they will hire you, ensuring that they only hire attractive people who fit their stereotype for the type of job they want. You can probably guess which race they want to work at a hip-hop clothing store, regardless of qualifications.

So, before you can get a job in most Asian countries, you have to send them a photo and a list of any health issues and tattoos, often you have send things like your height/weight ratio too. A friend of mine in Korea pissed off his employers pretty badly by showing up and having the audacity to be ethnically Asian. He had pulled one over on them by dying his hair blond and wearing glasses for the photo he sent in, and his John Smith style name made them think he was of European descent….which is what they wanted. When he showed up, being completely qualified to teach English, they only begrudgingly kept him around, having already paid for his airfare and the other teacher having left for Australia already.

Now, once you get the job, you have to sign an agreement to act as a representative of the company at all times. This can mean not getting hammered in public on a Friday night in case one of your English students’ parents sees you, or this can mean you have to pretend to be straight to everyone you work with.

In addition to this agreement, you have to sign paperwork telling your company where you’re going on vacation, and where you can be reached at all times, even if you’re a 42 year old married professional with kids of your own. Sometimes they will even require you to fill out a form asking permission to leave the city! See, the company you work for is “responsible” for you while you’re in that country. And since most apartments won’t rent to foreigners, your company often sets up your apartment, meaning that if they decide to fire you for making the company look bad….you have to immediately move out of your apartment.

Finally, you most likely look different than everyone else and talk different from everyone else. This means that every time you have a casual conversation on the bus, everyone is listening to you, talking about you, judging you, and remembering what you do so they can tell their friends later. It means people don’t feel shy about staring directly at you for an uncomfortable period of time. When you ask your co-worker how to say in Mandarin, “Stop staring at me,” she’ll respond, “Well, they’ve never seen a foreigner before, so if you’re uncomfortable, you should move away.” It means that people walk past you in silence and then once they’ve passed you, they shout “hello!” then laugh crazily and run away…this way they can tell their parents they met a foreigner! A real live foreigner! It means that all of your neighbors are counting how many days your laundry hangs outside and when your husband comes home from the bar, and how many choco pies you bought at seven in the morning, and “Do you think that odd foreign lady is pregnant?” but, “No, it’s just the choco pies.” It means that if you want to lay in the park and read a book, you can’t get through a page without someone coming up and asking to take a picture with you.

2 - You become a little baby infant.

Remember the last time you walked up to your toddler nephew who doesn’t remember you from last Christmas and you picked him up and he screamed and pushed away? And you smiled and tried to introduce yourself and get him to remember you? But he just wanted to be left alone with his toys? So you dumped him down and scowled about what a little shit he was? You’re that nephew when you go abroad! You walk down the street and an old woman runs up to you, grabs you by the shoulders and turns you so you’re facing her husband who is going to snap a photo of the two of you. You reflexively jerk away and she smiles at you and grips you tighter while gesturing for her husband to take the photo already. You turn away from the camera, shout “bu yao!” (I don’t want it!) in her face and stomp away furiously. Your husband, who saw it all, tells you that the old lady was super pissed at YOU for walking away and ruining her picture.

The worst part is that in addition to everyone treating you like a baby, unless you can fluently speak the language and read like a pro, you actually do turn into a baby. I studied Spanish for three years in high school and a semester in college, and when I had a layover in Panama, I almost went to jail because I couldn’t answer the question, “Que contiene esta bolsa?” One stomach x-ray later, I was cleared to put my clothes back on and continue on my way to Quito.

You need help for EVERYTHING. And don’t kid yourself about how long it takes either. The US Government (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Language_Learning_Difficulty_for_English_Speakers) says that to become competent, even if you only want to be halfway competent, you still need to spend between 600 to 2200 hours studying, like at school, in a class, in addition to homework and conversation practice, not just half-assing it with some language tapes on the plane.

This means you need help going to the bank, setting up a cell phone, filling out paperwork for your visa, everything. It means that even if you have a Ph. D. in Understanding Very Complex Ideas back home, in Ecuador, when you go out to eat, you have to point at a dish at a nearby table and mime eating in order to not starve. It means that every time you get mail, you have to keep every scrap and bring it to someone who can tell you that this piece is ok to throw away, but this piece is actually your residence tax and you’ll get deported if you don’t go to the convenience store to pay it.

Don’t worry though, you’ll soon start to pick up simple phrases. As soon as a single “Konnichiwa,” “Ni hao,” or “Annyonghaseo,” comes out of your mouth, people fall over themselves in shock that you can speak their language! They marvel that you said hello and praise you endlessly. They whisper excitedly over your ability to say ONE WORD and gasp when you pick up chopsticks and put food in your mouth. They stare at you in awe as though every single two year old in Asia doesn’t already use chopsticks and compliment you wildly when the food goes in your mouth instead of down your shirt.

See, not only do you actually behave like a child in some aspects, looking the wrong way when crossing the road, walking into the door because you don’t know the symbol for pull, but everyone sees you as so backward and simple-minded that they treat you like a child, taking your photo without permission, complimenting you on your 17 word vocabulary, and walking you to the bathroom instead of just pointing at the sign.

3 – It’s a Pain in the Ass

Living abroad is a pain in the ass. Besides finding and applying for the job, and costs of moving and getting rid of all your stuff, or storing your stuff, there are hidden pains just waiting to attack. For example, there is no craig’s lists or thrift sales. Back home when you want a couch, you know how to get one,

Well, congratulations, you just moved to Korea. Where do you go for your things? Either you go to the expensive furniture store and buy everything brand-new….when you won’t get your first paycheck for a month….and you don’t know how long you’ll stay since you’re welcoming dinner featured live baby octopuses.

You can wait till another foreigner moves away and they might give you some of their pots or pans, bookshelves, TV etc, but rest assured, no one is moving until you’ve been there nine months already, so when they move, you find yourself with four book shelves and no books, and an extra bed. Then, three months later, when you’ve decided to move back to America, you realize why they were so excited to give you their bulky furniture. It costs, as they say, a rice paddy AND the ox to get rid of bulky furniture.

You get sick almost immediately and might very well stay that way for eight months. At the top of my friend’s “Things I won’t miss about Ecuador” list was “pooping blood for three months.”

Moving on, it takes forever to get the simplest things done. Because you don’t speak the language fluently, a simple trip to get a re-entry visa so you can go home for Christmas and be let back in the country after New Years takes hours, even after you went online and printed off an English translation of the form. You find the grocery stores that carry peanut butter, tortillas, and pickles, and since I those things are spread out over three different stores, grocery shopping take a full weekend. You can’t go to ATMs after six in Japan (because they close—no I don’t know why an ATM would close at six) and you can’t go to ATMs after seven in Ecuador (because you’ll immediately get mugged, and maybe stabbed), so these little things all add up to make it a much bigger pain in the ass to live abroad than at home where you know where to get the things you need.

4 - No friends

It can be really hard to make friends if you’ve moved abroad by yourself.

Back to that old issue, you don’t speak the language. Sure, more people are studying English in China right now than speak English in the whole world, that doesn’t mean they can speak it either. How’s your high school Spanish? (Que contiene esta bolsa?) I have found it pretty rare to find a local (outside of the tourism business) in Taiwan/Mexico/Japan/China/Korea/Ecuador/Greece, who can have a conversation in English. And remember how it takes a year to become half-way competent? You still can’t be casual friends with someone with that level of Japanese. Once you’ve exhausted the topics in your first year textbook (The book is on the table…I’m 28 years old.) the conversation kind of stalls.

So maybe you find a local who can speak a little English and wants to be your friend. It goes really well, until you notice that she introduced you to her other friends as, “Look at the foreigner!” And then all anyone wants to talk about is “What surprised you the most when you came to Japan?” and how pretty your blond hair is, and how they pay so much for English lessons, but now they can quit those and YOU can teach them! Let’s take a picture together!

Also, other foreigners who have lived in the country forever, maybe they married a Taiwanese man or something, and speak both English and Mandarin fluently, and would be the best kind of friend to have…..they don’t want to be your friend. Most people who live abroad do so for a year or two. Would you go out of your way to make friends with someone who was going to move away in a year or two? Someone who would always be asking for translation help? No, you’d make Taiwanese friends who were going to stick around and could go to the DMV on their own.

The pool of foreigner friends to choose from is shockingly small. When I lived in Korea, there were a total of seven foreigners living within a 30 mile radius. So, even if the Scottish guy was a complete dick when the English lady teared up when England lost the penalty kick in the 2006 World Cup.

Apparently this matters

…even if the South African guy gets kicked out of most bars for bothering cute young women as soon as he has a few beers, even if the American couple make you a little queasy with their open relationship. Despite these things, you are all friends. In that group of people, you’ll probably meet one or two people that you have a real connection with, but they’ll move back to Australia after six months and you’re stuck going out to see Harry Potter dubbed into Korean with the Scottish guy.

Finally, international travel is expensive. So is taking time off of work. So, obviously your relationships back home are going to suffer when you only see them for two weeks throughout the year. You need to know that despite promises made in blood, no one will actually come and visit you. NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON. Maybe if I had moved to an English-speaking/mosquito free/Beach resort in Amsterdam or a hotel offering free giraffe rides on the sunny coast of Canada, maybe more people would have followed through on their promise to come and visit. In 5 years of living and traveling abroad, nary a friend has visited me, even with my offers of a free bed, free food, and pre-killed baby octopuses.

5 – You Feel Bad

Maybe you’re going to move somewhere to make a difference in the world! When I moved to Ecuador to volunteer with the United Nations, I was full of wide-eyed innocence about how I was going to change the world. I bought bags of apples and handed them out to the street kids, I gave my spare change to teens with babies begging on the corner. I taught English to refugee families being relocated to Canada. I volunteered with the Goddamn United Nations. However, life wasn’t always so sunny. Within a few weeks, I had learned that the more money I gave little kids clambering to shine my shoes, the less likely their parents were to send them to school. School COSTS money you see, and shining shoes all day brings MAKES money.

A gang of little boys under 15 years old attacked me, stole my bag of apples, yanked an apple out of a toddler’s hand, and pinched my ass on top of it. There is no greater humiliation than getting harassed by a little 15 year old shit-head who doesn’t even have the decency to run away, instead sauntering away with his group of 7 friends laughing at you while chomping on your apples you had bought for the refugees.

So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that my idealism slowly faded and one Friday I found myself stepping over a homeless old woman in my new high heeled sandals on my way to the bar with my friend and moaning about how the ATMs gave me 20s AGAIN! See, in poverty-stricken Ecuador, no stores have change for such a big bill. We’d have to walk all the way across town to the rich people grocery store with security guards and go to three different registers to buy three different packs of Chiclets. As soon as I realized who I had become, I re-devoted myself to my work with the United Nations but I did have relapses.

The other part of the feeling bad factor is learning that lots of people don’t like Americans. People outside of the Middle East, educated, handsome people that you thought you had a chance with really don’t like Americans. Sometimes that have good reason, as the US Government and its people have a history of sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong. Sometimes they don’t have a good reason, as the US Government and its people have a history of helping out other countries when they get into jams. However, once you start traveling, you find out that only 13% of Mexicans say nice things about America, only 34% of Japanese people feel good about Americans, and even in Australia, only 37% of people have a positive attitude towards Americans. What did we ever do to you Australia?

I tell myself that it doesn’t matter, if they are going to judge me just based on what country I’m from instead of getting to know me, then they are the ones that are missing out.

"I didn't even want to go to the stupid birthday party."

6 - Can’t get the things you’re used to

No, I don’t just mean you can’t get Taco bell or recognizable pizza hut. I also mean that you can’t find macaroni and cheese, or other foods you take for granted. Apparently Root Beer and Ranch are only eaten in the USA, which I suspect is the real reason for illegal immigration. You’ll find out once you travel a little bit that Mexican food is only made in Mexico. You can’t get guacamole or tacos in Puerto Rico or Ecuador, unless you’re at a Mexican restaurant.

NOT MEXICO

Did you know that everyone every where all the time eats rice? Central and south America and all of Asia eat rice for every meal. Something I never appreciated about the USA was our great variety in food choices. When I ask, “What do you want tonight?” you can answer, “Mexican, Chinese, Italian, Indian, etc.” If we live in China and I ask you “What do you want tonight?” The answer better be Chinese, or you’re gonna be unhappy. Also, cross off every image of Chinese food you have in your head from Chinese buffets and Panda Forest. China doesn’t have fortune cookies, cream cheese wontons or chicken without bone fragments and beaks mixed in it.

But besides food, what else can’t you get? How about a reasonable conversation with a person about blocked internet in China? When you bring up how frustrating it is not to be able to post photos of the time you went camping on the Great Wall on Facebook, and the fact that you don’t know anyone’s e-mail address ever since you freely gave your soul to Facebook, they offer you a great solution! Join Renren!

Simple!

They’ll encourage you with a totally straight face! It’s the largest social network in the world! It’s 100% in Chinese! It’s a great way to keep in touch with your Chinese friends and the Chinese Government! As for your old friends in America, just invite every single one of them to make an account on renren (instructions in Chinese!), then send a friend invite ( 我们可以交朋友吗?), then you won’t have any problems, and you won’t be bothered by all that porn on the internet, which is the only thing the government blocks anyways. THE ONLY THING.

But besides China and their crazy internet censorship, lots of other great sites are blocked outside of the USA and Canada, sites like Pandora, Hulu, and Netflix.

Also, depending on which country you’re visiting, the following things are difficult/impossible to find.

Tampons

Deodorant (Prepare to have the following conversation with store clerks in Korea.)

You: Where can I find deodorant?

Clerk: What’s that?

You: It’s something you put on your armpits every morning.

Clerk: What? Why do you need that?

You: Everyone uses it, to keep you from sweating too much and smelling bad.

Clerk: Do you mean that when people smell bad, they, they, just cover it up? American people are so gross that you use a product EVERYDAY knowing that you will smell so badly that you will need to cover it up? That’s disgusting. Take a shower.

You: Well, Canadians use it too…..

Birth Control Pill

Clothes dryer

Shoes for anyone with larger than average feet

Pet Store in Japan

2011-06-20T01:11:00.000-07:00

Jon got some pet beetles the other day and we went to the pet store to buy some plastic cages with very secure lids for them. Right now they are larvae, but soon enough they will turn into flying rhino beetles who will need separate cages. At the store I saw that you could buy A BAG OF LEAVES for your pet rhino beetles for US$ 7.50.

At this same pet store you could buy this adorable puppy for US$ 3,491.50. You could also buy a Labrador puppy or a grey kitten for US$ 2,244.63 each.

There are dozens of pet strollers available in all sorts of sizes and colors.

Here is a fitting room. You can see racks and racks of dog clothing in the background. I would say dog clothing takes up about half of the pet store's entire floor space.

I'm afraid to visit a baby store.

Language Difficulty Scale

2011-05-24T04:50:00.000-07:00

I used to think that it was a bit stupid when people would say, "Oh this particular language is sooo hard to learn."

ALL languages are hard! It takes lots of work to learn ANY language! All languages have their own unique traits and complex grammar structures and pronunciation difficulties. And yeah, some languages are a little easier or harder than others depending on your native language, but it shouldn't make too much of a difference.

So I always thought lists like the following one http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Language_Learning_Difficulty_for_English_Speakers

were pretty bunk.

The website lists languages in order of difficulty for English speakers.

Afrikaans, Dutch, and Spanish are listed as some of the easiest languages, taking only 600 class hours to reach "General Professional Proficiency in Speaking and General Professional Proficiency in Reading (R3)."

Bosnian and Nepali are in level two, taking 1100 class hours to achieve the same competency....and Japanese falls under level three. It says that it should take "88 weeks (2200 class hours)(about half that time preferably spent studying in-country)" to get to a level three speaking and reading ability.

I am much more of a believer now that certain languages are MUCH harder then others for English speakers. For example, I believe that Japanese is almost four times harder for me than Spanish was. I half-assed learning Spanish for two years in high school. I took one semester in college, then four years later I moved to Ecuador. Within three months of living there, I was pretty good. I felt comfortable going to the immigration office, renting an apartment, meeting new people, having conversations about the upcoming elections, and telling jokes. It helped that my boyfriend and I spoke Spanish to each other and I was taking 10 hours of Spanish classes per week, but it really wasn't that hard!

I assumed that when Jon and I moved to Japan, I would pick up Japanese pretty much following the same time-scale. I knew that reading and writing would take longer to master, but speaking and listening should be ok, especially since Japanese and Spanish pronunciation is actually pretty similar (in the global scheme of languages). I work in a Japanese speaking environment and I study about 90 minutes a day. I've been here 8 months now, so that's about 500 hours of study. Now, those are hours spent studying on my own, not in a a formal classroom setting, but as a language teacher myself, I feel that my time studying is spent as productively as possible. I go to Japanese class once a week and I also meet with a language exchange partner to practice conversation once a week.

However, I find myself still struggling to express myself in the simplest way. I can't understand people even when they are trying to speak slowly and use basic words. I can't put the words I know together to form a comprehensible sentence.

Today I made an appointment using Japanese at a clinic and it was a pretty nerve-wracking, but successful experience. At least, I think it was successful, I'll find out Monday at 3:00 if my name is actually on the list.

Japanese Library card!

2011-03-15T02:43:00.000-07:00

Jon and I went to the library today and I got a library card. It was great, just like being back in a library in the states. I have always loved visiting libraries, I love the how quiet, peaceful and interesting they are. You could probably say they are my church, and I haven't been inside one in six months!

I especially loved this trip because Jon and I spent our whole time in the children's section and there was a smiley baby crawling around on the floor as I flipped through picture books. These are the two books I checked out.

The orange one is called, "Oscar and Hoo," and I understood probably a third of the vocabulary, I didn't start the purple one yet, but I liked the pictures. I'm going to read "Oscar and Hoo" first, and I noticed that many of the words I didn't know occurred again and again, so hopefully once I spend the first few pages looking up unfamiliar vocabulary, I can spend the final 20 pages just reading.

(Most Accurate) Description of Universe Academy in Miyakonojo Japan

2011-03-05T07:11:00.000-08:00

I already wrote a post about working at Universe academy, but now I'm going to really share my feelings on the subject. The other day the management made a comment about how hard it was to replace me and how stressful their life has been trying to find someone to pick up my contract because I’m leaving six months early. At the time I didn't think much of it, but a few hours later, while mopping spit off the floor, I got really angry. THEY were stressed that they had to find another foreigner they could trick into working there? What about my stress level getting tricked into one of the worst jobs I've ever had? What about how hard it was for ME to work a job I hate- that I wouldn't have taken in a second had they given me an accurate description of the job beforehand?

I got in contact with the previous teachers at Universe and I have realized that it's not just me- every teacher who has ever worked there hated it. In fact, we e-mail back and forth quite often, two or three times a week. Why would someone who left this job a year ago, or 6 months ago still have that much pent-up bitterness towards this job? Why do we all hate it? Let me count the ways....

First of all, when you get there in the morning, you've probably got bus duty. It blows. I outlined just how much it blows in an earlier post. Then you arrive at school and all 33 kids have to get changed from their arrival outfit to their play outfit. 13 of the children are four years old and don't need any help. 8 of the children need pretty minimal help; more help is needed when their parents dress them in dress shirts with tiny pearl buttons that their toddler hands can’t handle. (On days when more than five children are wearing these shirts, I’m positive the parents are angry at us for some reason.) That leaves about 15 students who need help changing clothes and maybe a diaper change. Divide that number by the number of teachers, and that makes about five students per teacher. Sounds ok, except one teacher has to stand by the door and constantly greet each parent, and one teacher has to keep the new 20-month-old twins from trying to escape out the front doors and track down Mommy and Daddy. The final teacher has the rest of the 15 students to herself (it's a sexist place too, they would never consider hiring a man to take my position, a fact I didn't know till I arrived), and she tries to get the kids changed from pull-ups to daytime underwear and from dress skirts to shorts while ignoring the twins who are taking turns screaming at the top of their lungs, "Mama ga IEEEEEE!! Mama ga IEEEEE!" ("Mom is GOOOOOOOOD!" The unspoken insult here being, "and you're not.")

Ok, so once the kids are changed from their stupid arrival uniforms that serve no purpose into their play uniforms that they wear ALL DAY and they should just ARRIVE IN, it's recess time. It's time for them to go outside and burn off all their energy and build strong motor skills and climb and swing and kick soccer balls. Actually, since their play uniforms are shorts and shirts and they don't bring jackets, even in winter, either they have to be freezing cold outside, or I have to put my foot down and allow them to play inside because it is too cold for me to be outside in my long pants, warm winter coat, gloves and hat, much less for them to be outside in shorts.

Yes, they wear shorts all winter long. Being cold builds character. (No, the management isn’t Calvin’s dad.) Between the cold weather, the nearby volcanic eruption (the ash is dangerous to breathe), and the rainy season, the students have had to spend about 75% of their recess time inside over the past two months. Inside recess is 100% horrible. Try keeping 33 Japanese toddlers who spend all day watching ninja cartoons from running around and play fighting each other sometime. I am going to guess you'll give up after about 6 weeks and just let them run and fight, reasoning that they will fall down, get a little owie and be more careful next time. How do you think you'll feel after you pick up a crying two year old who ran face-first into the piano and now has to go to the hospital with a split lip? How do you feel now!?!?!?!

So, after recess, it’s the portion of the day where I most utilize my Master’s degree in Teaching English as a Second Languages. I lead calisthenics. Yep, the kids line up and I shout and model jumping jacks, touching my toes, arm circles, all those exercises that the two year olds can't do and don't really care about doing anyways, not when they can be pulling their shirts up and pretending to be sumo wrestlers.

After calisthenics, it's class time. I do my best, but it's disheartening to try to teach when I have two students still screaming "Mama ga IEEEEE!," two other kids sleeping in the front row, and when I try to plan a new activity, the management tells me I can't do it for some ridiculous reason. A few days ago we were studying body parts and I got some sidewalk chalk and swept the concrete behind the school and we were all going to trace each other on the concrete and point to the parts of the body....well, that activity got shut down because it would "make a mess and be impossible to clean up." You would have thought I was giving each kid a spray-paint can by the way the management freaked out.

So, after lesson time, it's lunch time. It's also spilling time, peeing yourself time, and making as much noise as possible time. The kids know the routine very well, they are supposed to:

-go to the bathroom

-get their chopsticks and cup

-sit down quietly and wait till I pour tea in their cup and give them lunch

-eat like human beings

-put away their lunch tray

-dump out any remaining tea and put water in their cups

-brush their teeth

-go to the bathroom again if needed

-sit on the floor pads and read books till naptime

Instead, it goes a lot like this

-ninja fighting

-chopstick swordfights

-spill tea all over the floor and each other

-spill food all over the floor and each other

-having refused to go to the bathroom earlier, take this opportunity to pee while sitting in their chair

-walk through the tea someone spilled earlier

-put away their lunch trays

-empty their cup of tea and get water for brushing their teeth

-spit water all over each other

-scrub their toothbrushes on the ground

-wrap their nap-time blankets around their necks to make capes

-run, wrestle, and scream on the naptime pads

Then, a very special version of hell begins. This lasts from about 11:45 till 12:30 (when I can finally escape for my hour lunch break.) There really is no hell quite like the hell of trying to get 33 excited kids to lay down and take a nap. You can try to have the older kids read books quietly till they get tired, (until the management forbids books during naps), you can try separating the kids so they can't play with each other, you can try laying your legs across two kids, holding two other kids down with two hands, and then taking away nap-time blankets as punishment for the kids who won't stop jumping up and down, shouting, "yatta!"...but if you're me, you'll take the coward's way out. You'll either pull a few kids out to a different room for private tutoring, or you'll grab the two worst kids, take them in a corner, physically hold them down and study Japanese flashcards while you ignore the rest of the little monsters and count the seconds until 12:30 when I can bike home.

At 1:30, (after an amazing lunch prepared faithfully every single day by my wonderful, loving and understanding husband, and then we watch the Daily Show or Colbert Report- gotta keep up to date on Egypt and Wisconsin) I regretfully drag myself from my house and bike to school....arriving a few minutes later and later each month. I go into the classroom and take note of what kind of day it is. Four days out of five, most of the kids are awake and talking, trying to be sneaky and play, throwing socks at each other, and waking up the kids who were actually (mercifully) sleeping, until they got woken up by a sock to the eye. One day out of five most of the kids will be sleeping and I can breathe easily for 20 minutes until it's wakeup time. I can even take a few minutes to work on something school related. The problem with that type of day is that the kids are sleeping so soundly that four or five of them will have peed themselves.

So, after wake-up time, it's recess again! Yatta! The kids don't want to bother with stupid rules, like this one,

"You have to go to the bathroom before you go outside."

So they try to sneak by and just go put their hats on and sit by the door. With 33 kids, it's not hard for one or two to sneak past you- but you always know who it was by the yellow puddle that surrounds them on the floor that spreads out and dampens the kids unlucky enough to be sitting next to them. Seriously, from now on the kids are getting sand in their tea cups.

After recess, the kids change from their play clothes into their POINTLESS arrival uniform. It was crazy enough in the morning, when kids are dropped off by their parents in the space of a half hour, but now all the kids are changing all at once, so it's twice as hard to deal with everything. Also, depending on my mood, either I've used up all my patience for the day, or I'm more patient than usual because I know the day is almost done...there's really no way of knowing which kind of day it will be.

Snack time goes about as well as lunch time and then it's story time. I've made one change to story time that leaves me with my sanity intact. Before, I would have the children sit in a half-circle on the ground in front of me while I read them stories...just like you remember from kindergarten. But this isn't kindergarten, this is a hard rock book reading and anyone lucky enough to get a front row seat is pushed over and climbed on by the kids behind them. Now, I make them sit in their chairs at tables. This makes it hard for the kids at the back to see the pictures, but at least no one is getting crushed.

Then, school is blessedly finished! Yay! I either have to stay and watch the kids whose parents don't show up till 6:30 (when I stop getting paid at 6:00, it makes it very hard to be civil to these parents), I have lesson prep time, or I have bus duty.

And the day is done. Finally. I only have one week left and I can't wait to be gone!

In other news, these sorts of occurrences also make life difficult:

-one of the few girls who actually ate all her lunch throws up all over herself and 12 backpacks neatly lined up for kids to grab on their way out the door

-the management leaves the doors to the school open all day, year round, even in winter. Apparently they like wearing their winter coats all day while also running the heater non-stop. Maybe energy is free in Japan?

-one of the three-year-olds will lean close to whisper something to me and at the last minute will sneeze directly in my mouth. This has happened not once, but twice.

-the kids will decide to pee on each other during nap-time. Why? Who knows?

-the management will tell you on Friday afternoon to be at school at 7:30 on Saturday morning for a fun (unpaid) day with the children.

February Goals

2011-01-24T04:36:00.001-08:00

Go out to the movies on Feb 1st. It's cheap night, so it will be about $12 US rather than $18. No, that's not even for a 3D movie, just a normal one.

Eat dinner at the buffet restaurant called BirdPia. There is an aviary in the middle of the restaurant filled with beautiful birds. Sadly, there is a 90 minute time limit on the buffet. L

Visit a beautiful Onsen.

Complete chapter 7 in my Japanese Textbook. (I'm on Chapter 6 now.)

Go on two afternoon trips just to take pictures.

Sing Karaoke.

Sign a job contract to get me away from Universe Academy.

Eat McDonald’s Idaho Burger.

Candle-lit dinner with Jon.

Call in sick one day.

Leaving Universe

2011-01-18T05:01:00.000-08:00

A Day at Universe With the Rose-Tinted Glasses Off

Well, the positive feelings didn’t last long at Universe. I had a hunch my feelings would lean this way, but I wanted to try to stay positive, which is why my last post about work (A Day At Universe Academy) is so upbeat. I wanted to convince myself that I loved it. I don’t why I thought I would, as Jon pointed out a previous blog entry I wrote while living in Ecuador. I worked at a pre-school in Quito for about a month and then changed to volunteering with the United Nations. Here is a direct quote that I wrote after working with the pre-school in 2006.

“Apparently when I signed up for this project I temporarily lost my brains because I thought playing with kids all day would be fun and rewarding. Turns out that it is more exhausting and tiring than fun.”

Did I suppress that memory? What made me think that I could work with 2,3, and 4 year olds all day and like it? Did I lose my brains again?

My little students didn’t change, they are still as cute as ever, and they are getting more and more well-behaved every day. I chalk it up to how fast their minds develop at that age, and the fact that I teach them to act in ways that don’t bug me. For example, they can be as noisy as they want on the bus as long as they are sitting down, the noise doesn’t bother me. However, for some reason, a disorganized “clean-up time,” drives me nuts, so they quickly learned to put their toys away like professional cleaners. I still enjoy class time every day and I enjoy trying to think of new activities and new ways to get them speaking English.

The reason I dislike it is… the rest of the day. I don’t particularly love helping kids get changed every morning (the little two-year olds still need help), and watching them play outside during recess is fine, but gets a little boring. Getting lunch ready is not any great hassle, but it’s not exactly what I imagined I would be doing as I pay off my $30,000 in student loans. Naptime is a nightmare, as described in my previous post. However, I’ve made some changes. Every day I pull two of the four-year-old kids out of naptime and tutor them for 20 minutes privately. This not only gets two of the kids most likely to be causing problems out of the room, it gives me a good excuse to avoid the worst portion of the day. Riding the bus is pretty awful too, but I haven’t figured a way to get out of that yet.

I ride the bus with the kids twice a week in the morning and once a week in the afternoon. It’s a pretty horrible 90 minutes each time. The bus driver jerks the bus so quickly around corners that the kids nearly tip out of their seats. Every time the light changes green, it’s like he’s racing off the starting block and even if he can see from a block away that the next light is red, he still floors it till he needs to slam on the brakes. It’s pretty rough on someone who is prone to motion sickness. I’m supposed to chat and sing songs with the kids, but to be frank, they spend seven and a half hours at English school and they are just little babies. Do they really need someone harping on them to sing or talk in English on the bus too? (To be honest, that’s probably just my personal justification for not making the effort to force them to participate with me.) To clarify, if they ever want to talk with me or show me something, I am very nice and engaging and talkative. If they want to sing the Itsy-bitsy Spider with me, I do the hand movements and everything, I just don’t force them to wake up from their afternoon-bus-ride-nap to talk with me. I spend most of the bus time looking out the window and trying to settle my stomach.

At the end of the day, it’s not a very personally fulfilling job. I know that the kids are learning a lot and I know I’m making a difference in their lives, but when I decided to go back to school to get my Masters Degree in Teaching English, this was not the job I saw myself doing.

So, I told my bosses at Universe a bit ago that I was leaving at the end of March, giving them three whole months to find a new teacher. (And three whole months for them to make my last three months terrible.) I started looking for jobs and so far the outlook is pretty optimistic…knock on wood.

Getting Older

2011-01-18T03:43:00.000-08:00

I just turned 28 years old and if there's one thing I will appreciate as I age it's not having to hear people who are slightly older than me say things like,

"Enjoy your youth, it doesn't stick around forever!"

"Oh God, you're so young! I feel ancient!"

"Take advantage of the time you have now."

"I wish I could be your age again."

Why do these phrases irritate me so much? Is it because I already do cherish every day and whoever is telling me to do so obviously doesn't know me very well? Is it the other person's patronizing tone? Is it because I subscribe to the notion, "you're only as old as you feel" ("only as old as you act?" "Age is a mental state?" What's the stupid notion I subscribe to?). Is it because the person telling me these things is usually only five to ten years older than me? Is it all of the above?

Toaster Oven

2010-11-24T01:39:00.000-08:00

Cooking is different in Japan. Not only is it harder to find the ingredients we would normally use to cook with, but the means of cooking is different. They don’t use ovens here, so we can’t really bake anything the way we would bake home. We don’t have a microwave, so it’s hard to heat up leftovers, but something we were very happy to see when we moved in was a brand-new toaster oven. I love toaster ovens. They are great for toasting a sandwich, making quesadillas, homemade french-fries, etc, etc. This toaster oven measures heat in Celsius, so we weren’t quite sure how high to put it when we wanted to make baked potatoes. Luckily, there were helpful hints on the front!

There are these little pictures along the bottom of the toaster oven telling you the heat and time to cook certain items.

Toast, a dinner roll, au gratin potatoes,

pizza, a person, and cookies.

What do you think of when you think "Summer?"

2010-11-11T00:36:00.000-08:00

The other day I was teaching a lesson to my little students and it focused on the seasons. I broke the board up into four segments and asked the students to help me fill each segment in with things that make each season different from the others. It went really well. I started with "winter" and they shouted out things like

Santa!
Snow House!
Snow!
Jacket!
etc. etc.
(always at volume level 11)

As they shouted the things out, I drew them quickly on the board. We moved through spring

Rain!
Flowers!
Not cold!
etc.

Then we got to summer and it continued going smoothly.

Hot!
Sunny!
Swimming!
Drink juice!
Play outside!
Chair!

"Chair?" I looked at the student in confusion. "Chair, chair!" he repeated and his desk-mate helped him out by nodding and saying seriously, "Chair! Chair!" I looked to the Japanese teachers for help, was there some sort of summer custom in Japan that involved a special summer chair? The Japanese teachers were just as confused as I was and asked the student to say it in Japanese. He didn't need to because by now all the students were in agreement that if one thing meant summer, it was a chair. Some of the students were standing and pointing at their chairs to help me understand and others were whispering and nodding their heads together, "yeah, chair."

I went to the board and drew a chair next to the ice cream cone and looked back at the class and they nodded their heads appreciatively. "Yeah, summer chair, that's what summer is all about."

A Day at Universe Academy

2010-10-31T03:03:00.000-07:00

A Day at Universe Academy

I currently teach at Universe Academy in Miyakonojo, Japan. Universe Academy is a pre-school for children age two through six, as well as an English conversation school (called “Eikaiwa”) for older children and adults who want to practice their speaking and listening abilities. When we initially moved to Japan, I wanted a job at a University….but now I’m in charge of two, three, and four year old kids! When I looked for Universities to apply to I realized that they all wanted two years experience teaching in Japan and conversational Japanese speaking ability. Also, the vast majority of job openings occur in March or April, and we were applying for jobs in June through September. Jon and I also have student loans to pay back, so I couldn’t be too picky and pass up a job offer when another one might not come along for awhile, so I decided to take this offer to teach at Universe.

It’s a cute little school and the perks that come with working there are pretty good.

 We have a nice, big apartment (easily four times the size of any place we would live in if we were in a larger city).
 It’s only a five minute bike ride from home to school, rather than 40 minutes each way on the train which is pretty standard in larger cities.
 It’s a small town, which I really like.
 The pay is good and the rent is reasonable.
 There are places to go camping and swimming in the ocean nearby.

At first I was pretty nervous that I wouldn’t like the job, but from day one, it’s been really fun. My plan is to teach here for the next year and a half and really study my Japanese. In 18 months it will be April, so it will be a good time to switch to a new job and by then my Japanese will (hopefully) be up to par to get a job which requires “conversational Japanese ability.”

A NORMAL DAY (FOR ME) AT UNIVERSE ACADEMY

The kids are soooooo little! The little two-year olds still have that cute baby waddle. My day is like a mixture of a daycare where I just happen to speak English to the kids and a preschool. The kids arrive by bus or drop-off between 7:30 and 9:00 and play inside until everyone has arrived. The kids sure have a lot of uniforms that we have to help them change between. They get to school in their “Arrival” uniform, then we help them change into their “Playtime” uniform, which they wear all day, and at the end of the day they change back into their “Arrival” uniform. How many times have I wished they just arrived in their play uniform? Every day. They literally wear their arrival uniform on the bus and that’s it. 90% of the time they are carrying their hats and then it’s a hassle keeping each kid’s hat separate from the other kids’ hats.

The kids are pretty independent. Although they take a long time, all the kids except for the littlest ones can change and dress themselves, go to the bathroom, and put their cup/chopsticks/notebook/bag/naptime blanket/etc in the their various nooks and crannies throughout the classroom.

Once all the students are there, they get to play outside for 45 minutes. The playground is big, with hollow logs to crawl through, swings, slides, playhouses, and a tiny running track about a 50th of a mile around. Once recess is over, the other foreign teacher (the one who teaches the 4 through 6 year olds), and I lead exercises, stretches, jumping jacks, etc. I don’t think there’s a person alive who wouldn’t think it was the most adorable *#@%-ing thing in the world to see the little two year olds jumping up and down flopping their arms around, trying to do jumping jacks with the older kids. Then we run for about three minutes and the kids get really into it. They all try to tear around as fast as they can the whole time, which is nice because immediately after running time it’s time to sit quietly in their seats for 70 minutes so they can have an English lesson.

This is the part of the day that is the most challenging for me. Not challenging in a bad way, but because I really have to plan carefully what I’m going to do. You’d think it would be as easy as showing some weather flashcards, having the kids repeat the words after you and then handing out a picture of a rainy day for them to color….but it’s much more complex than that. There is a huge gap between the four year old kids and the two year old kids both mentally and physically. The littlest ones are just beginning to be able to color on a piece of paper without scribbling all over the table while the older ones are already trying to write their names on their papers. The younger ones zone out after three minutes while the older ones start chatting with their desk mate after four minutes. The two year olds have only been coming to preschool for a few months while the four year olds have been coming for two years.

I try to plan lessons that every child can understand and participate in—whatever their level of English. I want every child to learn something and improve a specific skill, no matter their age. I try to change what we’re doing at least every five minutes so the kids stay interested. I want the kids to have a good time and keep a good attitude about class time and learning English. I try to let the kids be creative. I want them to create things they can take home and proudly show their parents.

With this in mind, we sing a lot of songs with corresponding movements, do a lot of crafts, play a lot of language games, and so forth. When we do the craft or activity, I break the class into younger and older sections because the older ones can (for example) trace their names while the younger ones can draw a line connecting one letter A to another letter A. I have about fifteen “helpers” throughout class time, because this helps keep the more advanced students from getting bored and it keeps the “naughty” students too busy to cause trouble!

I apply the same rules of language teaching for the kids that I learned to use for adults at University. For example, (some educational buzzwords for the teachers out there): I begin each class by activating their schema by reading a story about putting together the pieces of a teddy bear and then talking about the parts of a teddy bear before we talk about people body parts. Although I don’t write it on the board, I have two “students will be able to” goals in my head. I differentiate learning by providing scaffolding, repetition, pictures, realia, etc. I make sure all the kids get a chance to see writing, write or color something, listen, and speak, so all four skills are practiced. I ask the kids to show a thumbs up or thumbs down so they can all answer. I make sure the kids can see, listen and actively move around to reach all different types of learners…..

Through all this, I am trying to teach lifelong skills like sharing, helping one another, keeping clean, and so forth. It makes planning a lesson a pretty damn demanding experience!

This is not to say that every class is an insightful period of amazing language learning and growth of critical thinking…..sometimes I do “1-2-3 everyone shhhhh!” about fifty times. Sometimes the two-year olds fall asleep. And then, right after we’ve studied action verbs and playground words, the kids will run up to me and say, “Hiroki… Yushi…” and then clap their hands to explain that they ran into each other. …It can be pretty discouraging.

After class time it is lunchtime, and the kids are pretty good eaters. They are so good at their routine that even the youngest ones know to finish eating all their food, show their plate to the teacher, put it in the dirty dishes pan, put their own chopsticks and cup away in their cubby and get their toothbrush to brush their teeth. That said, although they KNOW exactly what to do, this is the hardest hour of day. It’s right before naptime. I am hungry and ready for my lunch break so I’m not as willing to be patient with the kids, and they are sleepy and cranky and wound-up and running around all at the same time. Trying to get them to lie down to sleep is a nightmare EVERY SINGLE DAY.

The kids just want to giggle and run around with their blankets as capes (of course) and it takes a full 30 minutes to get the kids to sleep. In fact one half hour into naptime I have my lunch break, and sometimes the kids aren’t even settled by then, but I still leave! I have two helper teachers. Both of them are Japanese and they speak mostly Japanese to the kids. There is no way I could do it without them. All three of us are always running around breaking up fights over toys, making sure every two year old uses the potty every 90 minutes, cleaning up accidents after naptime, sweeping up after lunch, getting the kids off of the roof of the playhouse, etc. etc.

After naptime it is time to play outside again. Then they have snack time and after that I have story time. Story-time is about 15 minutes, and the Japanese teachers sometimes help make sure the kids are sitting quietly, not pushing or shoving. Other times they are busy getting bags ready to go home or pulling kids away to give them medicine. Every single one of these kids has a terrible cold and sometimes worse, but they still go to school so they can spread it to all the other little snot monsters (…and me- I’ve had a sore throat for a few days now). I’m happy to say that the kids love story time and the biggest issue is keeping them from shoving each other to get closer to the front or kneeling too high once they do wiggle their way to the front.

I try to run a very active story time. Every book I read has a lot of, “The dinosaur is sad! Lets all be sad! Show me your sad face! The butterfly is hungry, what will he eat? Tanako, what do you like to eat? Where is froggy? Who can point to where froggy is? etc. etc.” The kids love to participate. Sometimes I get myself in trouble because they ALL want to participate and then cry when they don’t get to or the kids shove each other to get to the front so they can help point to froggy…I’m learning how to keep those things from happening. Then we sing the goodbye song and the kids go home!

School is over at 3:25. About half of the kids leave right away, either on the bus or their parents picking them up, but some kids don’t get picked up until six. The teachers take turns riding the bus with the kids in the morning and afternoon or arriving early or staying late to watch and play with the kids before school and after. I ride the morning bus twice a week, the afternoon bus twice a week, I watch the kids before school twice a week and I stay late to watch them till 6:00 once per week. Although the day goes by quickly, and I have a lot of fun with the kids, I am EXHAUSTED at the end of the day.

What this means for me is that I need to suck it up and get used to the busy day, because I still need to be studying Japanese for an hour or more every day if I want to be able to have conversations in a year!

Look at this awesome playground!

Great Wall

2010-10-12T06:40:00.001-07:00

When Jon and I traveled to China to student teach in March of 2010, I had a few goals. I wanted to

A) Improve my ability to speak and understand Chinese
B) Have a great experience teaching English
C) Go camping on the Great Wall

I did not accomplish every goal…this belated blog concerns goal number three. We took a lot of things with us to China- two full suitcases each. Part of the reason our bags were so full was that we brought a tent and a sleeping bag with us. After serious research on the internet (reading one blog http://blog.chinatravel.net/destinations-attractions/great-wall-camping-adventure.html), I knew that my trip to China would not be complete without a camping trip to the Great Wall, and maybe a few camping trips on weekends too! However, after talking with a few people (every Chinese person, including my host family, Jon’s host family, our cooperating teachers, the other teachers at the school, our contact person), we found out that Chinese people don’t camp. I scoffed at first because there were camping stores all over the place—camping stores that sold TENTS. Then I found out that camping to an American person and to a Chinese person means something very different. To me, it means spending the night outdoors. To them it means going to a park in the morning, setting up a tent, playing at the park all day, and then taking down the tent and going home before dinnertime. To Chinese people, “my” style of camping sounds horrifically dangerous.

A conversation we both had on many occasions:

Chinese Person: Camping is too dangerous. You can’t go camping.
Me: What’s so dangerous?
Chinese Person: It’s just dangerous! You’re alone!
Me: What’s dangerous? Is it animals? Is it criminals?
Chinese Person: You have no one to help you if something happens!
Me: What would happen? Bad weather?
Chinese: Anything! Anything could happen! And then you’d be alone!
Me: But WHAT? What bad thing could happen?!?!

Both of us throw our hands up in frustration.

So, while Jon and I were teaching, we didn’t have any weekend camping trips. This only strengthened my desire to camp on the Great Wall—we didn’t haul that tent and sleeping bag halfway around the world for nothing! After finishing our teaching contract we had about 10 days off to travel around China. We took the train up to Beijing to see the Great Wall. It’s not easy getting to the authentic Great Wall if you’re a foreigner who hasn’t fully accomplished goal number one (improving my ability to speak and understand Chinese). This is especially true if you’re the type of person to sleep or play video games on the bus. See, Jon and I had to take a bus from Beijing to a small city called Miyun, where, after eating lunch and buying supplies, we would have to get a taxi to take us the rest of the way from Miyun to a small village called Jinshanling. The part of the Great Wall we wanted to see was supposed to be the most well-preserved section of the Great Wall. The most popular parts of the Great Wall are a lot closer to Beijing and easier to get to, but consequently, they are in pretty bad repair, or they’ve been “reconstructed” with lots of modern-day cement. We wanted to visit the Jinshanling section of the wall and then hike to the Simatai section, camping out somewhere in between. It’s supposed to be a grueling four hour hike (7.5 miles) from one end to the other, the whole way along the top of the Great Wall of China! So, we figured we would start our hike near closing time and take it as a leisurely stroll. We’d find a good place to pitch our tent after about three hours and the next morning we would have another three hours worth of a leisurely strolling to go. Nothing simpler, right?

Well, just getting there was a nightmare. You may remember that Jon and I tend to either fall asleep on long bus rides or play video games, so we weren’t paying attention when the bus jerked to a stop and someone was shaking us awake, asking, “Jinshanling? Jinshanling?” Obviously, as the only foreigners on the bus, we were going to the Great Wall and they were nice enough to let us know we were at our destination. We quickly gathered our gear and dashed off the bus…..only to look around and realize that we weren’t near ANYTHING. We were at a bus stop on the middle of the highway and some guy was standing there pointing at his car. Obviously, we had just been hoodwinked. This guy had put his head in the bus, shouted at us, and we had gotten off like idiots, and now he wanted to charge us $100 to drive us to Jinshanling. We scoffed at him and walked away. A half mile away it looked like there was a town and there we would find lunch, buy supplies for the camping trip and figure out how to get the rest of the way to Miyun. The guy kept following us and shouting at us, getting angrier and angrier that his plan hadn’t worked. This was a fairly common occurrence in China, venders getting pissed that you are walking away from them instead of buying their T-shirt/kite/cell phone charm/silk scarf/terracotta statue/oil print that they will swear up and down they painted themselves that morning (even though every shop up and down the street sells the exact same one). We shouted at the guy that we wanted to get something to eat, so maybe we would come back later… this was a ruse to get him to leave us alone. He responds, “You can’t. There is nowhere to eat food anywhere.” At this point we just laughed at him and he drove off in his car. This was a pretty common trick that the vendors would use too, if we were waiting at a bus stop, a taxi would drive up and tell us that the bus wasn’t running anymore, if we wanted to take a train to another city, a private tour company would try to get us to go on their bus by telling us there weren’t any more trains that day. By this point we were almost at the little town and we could see that it was a good sized town with fairly big buildings….nowhere to eat? What a joke.
An hour later we realized that in this huge town filled with buildings, maybe there really wasn’t a place to eat. We had our heavy packs on and we were already getting hungry and tired…before we stepped foot on the wall. We had ten days to travel all over China, so we didn’t just have a tent, two sleeping bags, and the other things we would need for a one night stay on the wall, we had everything we would need for a ten day trip across China in our bags. We couldn’t leave anything behind anywhere.
Well, we finally found a tiny, poorly-lit, dusty little shop where we could buy our camping supplies. We wandered up and down the aisles trying to figure out if we would rather have sandy dried fish, canned strange vegetables, or frozen catfish. We weren’t bringing a cooler and we weren’t going to start a fire, so our options were limited. Finally we found what we needed and we also bought two ramen bowls for lunch. Everywhere in China you can find hot water—for drinking, for tea, for noodle bowls, so that part of the lunch went smoothly.
Then we asked some construction worker when the next bus to the downtown station was and we waited at the stop he pointed to for 40 minutes before giving up because not one single bus had gone by. At this point we’re starting to get worried. Were we going to spend the whole day just waiting around places and trying to get to the wall only to get there after closing time? By now it was 1:00, we only had three more hours. We decided to trudge back to where we had originally gotten off the bus and just get back on. We were happy to see that the guy who had tricked us into getting off the bus in the first place was gone and we only had to wait a few minutes until another bus came along and we got back on.
After a few more hi-jinx we finally made it to the wall at around 3:00. After all the bus rides and private taxis, this was shaping up to be a pretty expensive trip. The Great Wall better be worth it! We got out of our taxi at the entrance to the wall and looked around uncertainly….had we been hoodwinked again? Was it closed? What was going on? The place was deserted. The entire huge parking lot was empty and there wasn’t a soul in sight. We asked the taxi driver to wait while we ran up to the gate and saw someone working the door who assured us they were open and we were at the right place. We grabbed our gear out of the taxi and immediately had to set about re-packing it. See, camping on the wall is forbidden unless you are with a formal camping tour group. We were not with a formal group, so we were going to have to camp on the down-low. So, we couldn’t very well have our sleeping bags hanging on the outside of our bags like they were!

After ten minutes of organizing (was it less subtle to have two meals worth of food hanging on the outside of our giant, swollen frame-packs than two sleeping bags?), we were ready to go! We also noticed a big tour bus pulling into the parking lot with about 20 people getting out of it, so we wouldn’t be alone. After we had walked for about ten minutes, we came to a sign that showed us that we could either walk up the mountain or take a ride up the mountain. We were standing there debating which to do when a sweet old Chinese lady standing nearby told us that it was a really hard hike up to the top, so we should take the ride. That sold us- our bags were heavy and we’d already had a long day. We walked up to the counter and had the following conversation all in Chinese:

Jon - "Are you open?"
Ticket Lady - "Yes, we're open until five."
Jon - "Can we go now?"
Ticket Lady - "Yes, you can go until five."
Jon - "Does it leave right now?"
Ticket Lady - "What?"
Sara - "When can we go up the mountain? When does the transport leave?"
Ticket Lady - "You can go up anytime between eight and five!"
Jon - "Can we go now?"
Ticket Lady - "You need a ticket!!"
Sara - "But, if we buy a ticket, will it leave now, or at least soon?"
Ticket Lady - "You can go up anytime between eight and five!"
Jon - "Will it leave soon?"
Sara - "When does it leave?"

We bought our tickets skeptically and walked around the corner to see a cable line with cars going up the mountain continuously. Now we understood why the ticket lady thought our questions were so stupid! We listened to the people from the bus tour group speak Japanese to each other as we waited in line for a few minutes.

As we were going up in the cable car, I looked down and couldn’t believe my eyes, “Jon! Is that a person running straight up the mountain?” He looked down and stared, “No, it can’t be….but it is!” I couldn’t believe how quickly this person was clambering up the mountainside, but then we got our first glimpse of the wall and I couldn’t concentrate on anything else.

The Great Wall is so different in person from anything I expected it to be. I just can’t explain it. I have seen hundreds of pictures of the Great Wall, I knew exactly what it would look like, but somehow seeing it with my own eyes made it look bigger, stronger, older, more impressive. I knew that this trip was going to be worth all the hassle of getting there. As I was standing there, frozen with my mouth open, I realized that the same sweet old lady from the bottom of the mountain was standing next to Jon trying to hustle him along to the first guard tower. Had she followed us? She definitely hadn’t been in line with us to take the cable car…had SHE BEEN THE PERSON RUNNING UP THE MOUNTAIN?? She HAD! Now she was going to be our personal guide. Jon and I had to put a stop to this immediately. We didn’t need a guide, we didn’t want a guide, we only wanted to be left alone, and we didn’t want this old lay to give herself a heart attack.
She was very persistent. If we didn’t want a guide, then maybe we wanted some postcards or a T-shirt? She pulled a whole store out of her bag and started showing us everything as we tried to get her to stop and told her we didn’t want to buy anything. Once she found out that we had plans to ignore her, she explained to us very clearly that she had no job. She had nowhere she had to be, she would just follow us around until we bought something, and only then would she go home. These were supposed to be our first wondrous moments on the Great Wall and we were arguing with a vendor who refused to stop standing directly in front of us!

After vigorous arguing in Chinese, Jon finally bought some postcards and then we realized that there was no end to vendors on the wall- we would be running into this same issue again and again. Were we going to buy 25 different packs of postcards?

The lady left us and went to try to sell her wares to the Japanese tour bus people who were ALREADY LEAVING THE WALL!!

Was there no end to my shock? We had been on the cable car only minutes behind them and then argued with the vendor lady for ten minutes and they already had their fill? They had taken a bus for over two hours away from Beijing, taken a cable car to the wall, walked to the first guard tower, shouted from it, taken a few pictures, and they were finished. They certainly weren’t wearing sensible shoes.

I shook my head as the rest of the other tourists walked back to the cable car and Jon and I started our hike. After a few more minutes we started to see more vendors and a few more tourists. The tourists were all foreigners who sounded from their accents to be British, American, or German. I thought that was funny. Everywhere Jon and I had traveled in China so far, there had been more Chinese tourists than foreigners, obviously, they want to travel around their own country too! But here, we saw only the first busload of Japanese tourists and now it was nothing but Europeans and Americans (As far as I could tell from accents). The vendors seemed to outnumber the tourists about two to one and the two most popular things they were peddling were coffee and beer. Exactly what you want during a long, hot, dangerous hike!

The day must have been winding down because we were the only people leaving Jinshanling and for the first 30 minutes we only saw tourists coming from Simatai going the other direction. Almost immediately we ran into the same problem we had earlier—vendors who planned to follow us around telling us to buy their wares or use their guide service until we bought something. I was pretty torn. I knew they had a hard life and depended on tourism to supplement their meager income from farming. I knew that I had been privileged enough to be born in a country where I could afford to travel and live a decent life. I knew I shouldn’t be so pissed at them for trying to make a buck, and that I would surely do the same thing myself if we were to trade positions. On the other hand, I knew they wouldn’t believe me that I literally had only enough money for the taxi and bus ride back into Beijing in my pocket. We had already bought postcards and two bottles of water. I couldn’t spend any more money or I would risk not having enough to get back into the city where there would be more ATMs. I decided to just ignore them, which is hard when the men are trying to be chivalrous and boost me up the steep parts, but I (like many people) don’t like strangers touching me, much less hauling me around. Every time we stopped to take a picture they would surround us, and every time we started walking, they would casually follow us. They were used to the thin air and didn’t have huge packs, so they could have followed us all day. At this point I was worried that the whole trip would be ruined. They would follow us and pester us all afternoon, ruining our hike and then when the sun started to go down, they would still be following us and we didn’t want to camp out and sleep if people knew we were there, not only for legal reasons, but also for safety reasons.
Finally we walked far enough ahead that we were away from them and we sat down, hiding behind a chunk in the wall to discuss our strategy. We decided to sit there a while and rest and just see what happened. What happened is that the Great Wall official ticket-checker came walking up and asked us what we were doing!! See, when you walk from Jinshanling to Simitai, you have to pay another fee when you cross the border between the villages. This person’s job was to stay at the border and collect the fees from people walking back and forth. At this point the wall was supposed to be closed, so she was walking home. She saw us and asked us if we were planning to walk all the way to Simitai…after closing hours. We said yes, we were planning to walk the whole way yet that same evening. She smiled and said have a nice trip and we needed to pay her the fee. She gave us our ticket and receipt and continued walking. At that point we heard something amazing. Down, off to the side of the wall- people talking and walking. We couldn’t believe our luck! After two hours of dodging venders, they were just going to leave! They were talking and laughing loudly as they followed a path at the base of the Wall and we sighed in relief to hear them leave. We really almost couldn’t believe it! The Great Wall curator had seen us and let us pass, and the vendors were going home for the night! We stayed where we were for a while longer, then poked our heads up and scanned the surrounding wall and guard towers. It seemed they were really gone! We were really alone on the wall, with about 4 hours of daylight left! Holy cow, we were totally alone on the wall. It stretched as far as we could see in both directions, standing at the very top of the highest mountains- we were really going to pull this off!

The rest of the hike that afternoon was a mixture of exhausting and exhilarating. We found a good guard tower to spend the night in. The stones on the floor were flat and not too broken up, the ceiling didn’t look like it was going to cave in on us, and the walls were sturdy with big windows for viewing. We didn’t set up our tent right away in case some stragglers came wandering through and saw us there with a tent. Instead we walked around, admired the view, and took pictures. As it started to get dark, we played some card games and ate dinner.

I opened my can of corn and drained it so I could scoop it on Ritz crackers while Jon did the same except he scooped canned tomato fish. We also had some bananas, Jello, and a bottle of Great Wall-brand merlot, aged 2 years. It was a delicious dinner, although anything would have been good after hiking so far and carrying such heavy packs. Once it was completely dark we set up the tent and went to sleep, planning to wake up early and get a move on before any early hikers came past and wondered what we were doing.

I thought I would sleep like a rock that night, but the stone floor was so hard and our sleeping bags were so thin that I slept pretty poorly and was very stiff the next day. I woke up pretty early and decided to read a book as the sun came up. I didn’t spend much time actually reading- I spent more time just watching the sun rise to dissolve the mist as I thought deep thoughts about the person I wanted to become and what I wanted to do with my life. Watching the sun rise over a symbol of an ancient civilization will do that to you.

What’s especially strange about the Wall is that it was never a success in terms of keeping invaders out. Every time they built more onto the great wall, the invaders would just go around the edge or bribe the guards to go straight over it. The only way it helped China at all was as a sort of road to help transport goods across treacherous terrain. I don’t know that our particular section of the wall was any good at that, because the wall itself was so treacherous, the steps were so tall and steep that I had a hard time lifting myself up them, and lots of times I had to go up the steps on my hands and knees.

You can tell the wall probably won’t be around much longer. In the guidebooks they say the biggest threat to the wall is poor farmers who pull it apart to use the stones. I think another big problem is the plants that are growing all over it. I think the plant roots will weaken the wall considerably.

Once Jon and I hid the tent away and felt sufficiently awake we laid out a sleeping bag and had a picnic breakfast in the sun.

It was mostly fruit and crackers, but again, delicious. We had shoved the tent and everything else into our packs (amazing how much better everything fits once you eat two meals and drink two liters of water and then crush the trash), so we weren’t worried about people stumbling upon us anymore. We surprised a number of early morning hikers (again, all American/European), and then hiked the rest of the way to Simatai.

After a few hours we got closer to Simatai and the vendors came out in full force, but it wasn’t so bad this time. Once we hit Simatai we saw all sorts of tourists everywhere and the beauty of the Great Wall dissolved. People were running around, shouting, complaining about the hike, eating popsicles, and jammed together elbow to elbow. You could see that people would usually walk from the place where they first see the Wall to another guard tower or two and then turn around. There weren’t hardly any people farther away than a twenty minute walk.
Once we hit all those people, we were eager to get away from it all. I couldn’t believe that people would travel all this way to the Great Wall and then just hang out, take a few pictures, shout back and forth to some friends and then take a zip line back down to the bus. Although, I imagine if more people had wanted to see the Great Wall how I had wanted to, then we wouldn’t have had the peaceful, private experience we had, so I’m grateful for that.
In the end, it was the most amazing part of my trip to China. I will always remember my first time standing on the Great Wall and watching the sun come up over the mountains in the morning. I recommend that anyone who travels to China and has an adventurous streak goes camping on the Wall.

Trying New Things

2010-10-10T19:24:00.000-07:00

The other day Jon and I were grocery shopping and I saw something I hadn’t wanted when we came in the store but now couldn’t live without. It was tomato soup. They don’t have cans of soup like back home, but they had little powder packets that looked really good. Plus, the packets were made by Knorr, so at least I could trust it not to be super sweet or have squid or crickets in it. This is something you learn early when you live in Asia.
I’ve lived in South Korea for a year, Taiwan for a month, and China for three months and I’ve learned that you never take anything for granted in Asia. That mint ice cream looks delicious? It’s green-tea flavored and it’s gross. Oh look! Is that an American restaurant with a baked potato and sour cream on the menu? It’s a baked potato with whipped cream and honey butter and it’s gross. That carton of milk with a happy cow on the side? Oh no! A bowl of cereal just got ruined because it’s liquid yogurt and it’s gross. Are you hiking in the mountains and you’re starving and you see someone cooking something? It’s roasted maggots and tiny snails you suck out of their shell and I think you can guess that I thought it was gross and didn’t eat any.
Anyhow, this was a familiar brand of tomato soup, so I knew that once we got past the fact that the instructions were A) in Japanese and B) used milliliters instead of cups, it would hit the spot. Wait! What is that I see in the next aisle? Oyster crackers! I love those! Grab that bag!

Jon and I went home and eagerly made the soup. I stirred it up and it seemed a little thin....good thing we got those crackers to add. Jon and I sat down with our veggies, chicken, and soup. I tossed a handful of crackers in both our bowls and stirred mine up before I took a big bite. I immediately let it dribble back out of my mouth and grabbed Jon’s bowl away from him. I tried to quickly spoon out the crackers, but they had started to disintegrate on contact and I couldn’t get them all out of his bowl. I didn’t understand! What was wrong with these crackers? I grabbed more crackers from the bag and felt them. They looked like oyster crackers, they felt like oyster crackers, they tasted like….powdered sugar. Yep, they were supposed to be some sort of sweet treat, but they were gross.
I am pretty open to trying new foods. I always try to taste new foods and keep an open mind to decide if I like it or not. For example, I think octopus and squid taste good, if they are cooked a certain way. But these crackers were pretty much inedible. We decided to save the “crackers” to feed the fish. We saved this bag for a full week until we finally made it to the park where there were hungry fish. We saw a couple of fish in the water and threw out a handful of “crackers.” There were a few turtles swimming around too and they each came up to try some and then swam away. One of the fish swam around for a while ignoring the food, then left. The other one, a fat cow-print fish, went up to each individual (I can’t really say cracker, because of the disintegration) floating island of chemical preservatives and refined sugars, put his mouth out and then swam around it without eating it. This fish went up to every single island of sugar cracker and either smelled it or tasted it and moved on. Finally he swam away too. Every living being in the pond swam away.
That’s how gross these “crackers” are. The fish won’t even eat them; and I’m pretty sure that the cow-print fish ate a pebble I threw in the water!

Maybe this time I learned my lesson about trying new things in Asia.

Bat attack

2010-08-17T17:22:00.000-07:00

The other night I was sitting in the dining room relaxing and eating some ice cream. The lights were all out, I was all alone in the house, and I was watching "Precious" on my computer screen. I had just finished my last show at Comedy Sportz, and was relaxing before I went to bed. All of the sudden, something started making a strange chattering screeching noise and some crashing noises told me things were being knocked on the floor. Before I could get up, or even turn around to look, a bat whacked me on the back of the head! A real, honest to goodness bat, inside my house.
In the split second it took me to jump up, I noticed my roommate's cats in hot pursuit of the bat. I dashed into the living room to get away, and the BAT CHASED ME! It was literally chasing me, chattering and squealing away. At this point I was convinced that it had rabies, because what rational tiny animal chases a big animal? I should also note that in a dark creepy house, alone at three in the morning, with a bat chasing me, I wasn't thinking very rationally. I became much more scared than I should have been. My bedroom door was open, so I ran in there as quickly as I could, slamming the door tightly behind me. I paused to breathe and heard the same chattering behind me, but louder and angrier. I HAD TRAPPED THE BAT IN THE DOOR! His wing was stuck in the door and his body and other wing were on my side of the door, angrily flapping around. I was now trapped in my room with a furious bat. I couldn't just go open the door because the bat would fall on my arm and/or attack me!
At this point I decided the most rational course of action would be to flip out and call Jon while weeping. Jon was about four hours away at his bachelor party. He tried to calm me down and convince me that I had to open the door, trap the bat in a bag and humanly kill it. I knew all this, of course, but having Jon talk to me calmed me down enough (sort of) to actually do it. I left my bedroom through another door and opened the door with the bat in it from the opposite side. I opened the door quickly and then shut it again so that the bat wouldn't get me on his way out of the door. Well, this turned out to be a bad choice, because by the time I opened the door a second time, the bat had hidden somewhere in my room. I could hear him chattering angrily, but couldn't find him for a few minutes. I had hoped the dogs would help me, but they were surprisingly apathetic about the wounded animal in their midst. This from one dog that regularly catches and eats wild animals and another dog that literally swallowed a half-rotten baby rabbit the other day. No help with the wounded bat though.
I finally found the bat in a shoe and was able to get it into an old cereal box. He clearly had a broken wing. I was crying pretty hard still, from a lot of different emotions. I was still scared of the bat (I know they're tiny, but they're scary in the middle of the night with their loud noises and tiny sharp teeth and ugly faces!), I was tired and stressed out from all the wedding plans/unemployment/moving apartments/uncertainty for the future, I felt really bad for breaking its wing and I knew I was going to have to kill it. For all these reasons, I was a big mess.
I was finally able to trap it in a cereal box and take it outside and step on it. I felt really bad about it. I knew it was the most humane thing to do, but I still felt awful.
It wasn't until the next day that I realized what I SHOULD have done, of course. When the bat was bleeping chasing me, I should have just RUN OUTSIDE! Run into my room, then there is still a bat in the rest of the house....stupid.

Timber's back!!!! TIMBER IS HOME!!!!

2010-07-29T18:50:00.000-07:00

Well, these past few weeks have been really hard. We lost Timber on the Fourth of July when she was scared by fireworks and ran away. What made this particularly terrible was that we were in Somerset, about an hour away from River Falls, where we live. I knew she wouldn't be able to find her way back home, and she probably wouldn't wind her way back to the house we were visiting, especially since that was where the fireworks went off.

I searched that night and slept a few hours until sunrise and then borrowed a bike to ride around and call for her and ask if anyone had seen her. Over the next few hours I got more and more worried. Jon drove around calling her and talking with people too. Over the next few days we put posters up everywhere in town and put fliers in about 200 mailboxes. We drove and hiked through the woods calling for her every day. Our friends joined us in talking with neighbors, passing out pictures, and calling and looking for her. I left her information with every Humane Society within 100 miles. We didn't hear a word.

As the weeks went by, I started to lose hope. No one ever called with a sighting and animal control never picked her up. I found myself saying things like, "Timber loved....." instead of "Timber loves...." I just couldn't believe that no one even saw her. She is such a people dog, I couldn't believe she didn't go up to a house the very first day after she was lost. She has my phone number on her collar and a microchip too. Why didn't anyone see her?
I kept on seeing her as I walked down the street in River Falls, or hear her scratching at the bedroom door to be let in, or imagining how happy I would be when I saw her again. On the flip side, I couldn't stop imagining how cold and scared she was out in the woods during the thunderstorms that raged during those weeks. I couldn't stop imagining her getting her collar tangled somewhere and slowly dying of dehydration, or getting hit by a car and limping off in the woods in pain.

Then one morning I got a call from a lady who shouted into the phone,

"I have Timber! I found your dog! I have her!"

I was flabbergasted. I asked her, "You're sure? She has her collar on?"

"Yes! Yes! She has her collar, I'm the lady in the log house who put out the sign! She just walked in my yard!"

Well, I immediately knew who it was. She was the very first lady I spoke to about losing Timber. She lived only a football field away from where we first lost Timber. When I first went up to her house, she first looked kind of angry. Most people in the country react that way when a stranger comes up to their house. They are pretty suspicious of you, until you hand them a photo of your lost dog and then they are very nice. They sympathize with you and promise to let all their friends know about your lost dog and want to tell you about how they lost their dog once. Anyhow, so I went up to talk to her and she was very sympathetic and promised to look for Timber. She told me,
"You know, lost animals always seem to end up here. I bet you she comes to my house. I will send out good thoughts and hopefully she'll come."
Over the next few days as Jon and I drove around trying to find Timber, convinced that she was wandering farther and farther away, we noticed that this lady had put a sign up by her mailbox with a description of Timber and a phone number to call for a sighting. I was really touched by how much she cared.
Somehow, I still didn't want to get my hopes up that she had really found Timber. I was sure I had mis-heard her on the phone, that she would have some similar looking dog on a leash when we arrived. After I told her we would drive out right away, I immediately started screaming at Jon that we had to leave RIGHT NOW!!! We had to go pick up Timber! Jon hadn't heard me on the phone and was agonizingly slow in responding. He almost couldn't understand what I was saying and I didn't want to take the time to explain, I just wanted him to get in the car so we could go already! I'll explain later! I started crying and he couldn't understand me as I ran around like the girl in "Little Miss Sunshine" when she hears she is going to be in the pageant. I gathered up Timber's food, her treats, my purse and keys and made sure I had the $50 reward money, and JON WAS IN THE BATHROOM!!! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?!?!! I banged on the door and danced back and forth and FINALLY we left to go pick up Timber. I couldn't sit still the entire hour drive up to Sommerset and as we pulled into the lady's driveway, I saw her standing outside with Timber on a leash! She had Timber!

I jumped out of the car and ran up to Timber. Timber sniffed me and started whimpering and licking my face and jumping up on me. Jon got out of the car and she ran to him and licked and jumped on him and came back over to knock me over. The lady told me Timber wouldn't eat or drink anything, so I pulled out some food and was happy to see Timber happily eat and drink. The lady refused to take the reward money so I gave her a big hug and we took Timber home.

On the drive home we had to keep the window rolled all the way down and I even leaned my head out the window a little bit. Timber smelled like rotten swamp. It was disgusting. She was also covered in burrs and ticks. Once we got Timber home, I realized just how skinny she was. She is normally a petite dog, refusing to eat too much, even when I have tried to fatten her up in the past. She has always been a slim dog at 50 lbs, but she had lost so much weight, she probably weighed about 40. Her spine jutted out of her back and her ribs were prominent. Her collar swung loosely on her neck, but because she is so furry, it isn't noticeable how skinny she is until you pet her.

We took Timber home and I let her sleep while I went to the grocery store and bought her the most expensive, fattening dog food I could find. I went home and fed her and had to break down and bathe her. She hates baths, so I didn't want to subject her to one right away, but I couldn't let her stay in the house smelling like she did. My roommates are good people and I couldn't subject them to her smell. Bathing her was pretty hard because as I rubbed the shampoo in her skin, it just reconfirmed how emaciated she was. Also she hated it! The first thing I do after getting Timber back is do something to her that she hates!

Over the past few days I have been trying to feed her six or seven times a day, much to the jealousy to Jon's dog, who is on a diet. She has fallen back into her old routines without too much difficulty. She still loves to sleep at the end of my bed and under the kitchen table. She still loves going for walks and getting her belly rubbed. The only two differences I have noticed is her new habit of digging holes to lay down in and burying her food for later if she gets full. She is also still having major digestive issues, I assume from not eating hardly anything for three weeks and then suddenly getting stuffed with as much healthy food as she wants. She has now been back five days and everything is normal and she is starting to put the weight back on.

I am so happy to have her back home and safe. I still can't believe it every time I look at her.

LOST DOG “TIMBER”

2010-07-11T21:45:00.000-07:00

Timber was lost the evening of July 4th in Somerset WI, on 210th Avenue off of County Road I. She is a Border collie mix (black, white and gray), about 50 pounds, wears a pink and yellow collar with tags and is very friendly. She will come when called.

Please contact Sara Allsop at 715 441 4834. Call anytime.

You can't say that here!

2010-07-08T16:56:00.000-07:00

I finished teaching summer school classes the other day. I taught three 90-minute, 15-day classes based on whatever I thought 10 or more students would be interested in signing up for. See, Hudson Middle School has this neat summer program where teachers can sign up to teach classes they think would be fun. If at least ten students sign up for these classes, then the school will pay the teacher to teach that class. Some of the classes are things like volleyball, jazz band, photography and so forth. I decided to teach Book Club, Dog Training and Improv, and I was lucky enough to have all three classes fill up.

It was a crazy busy and stressful three weeks, but also very fun. One thing that was a new experience was teaching the Improv class. Now, I'm no expert improver, but I've done it for a long time and I've taught other subjects long enough to know that it's more important to be a good teacher, than to be an expert at the subject. So, for three weeks I tried (sometimes in vain) to get middle school kids to be real in front of their classmates. I tried to get them to take their hands out of their pockets, speak loudly, stay away from the back wall of the stage, and not have every scene be three too-cool-for-school middle schoolers standing around staring at each other and wondering what to do next. I tried to get them to shed their stiff "cool" shell and have some movement and emotion in their bodies. I tried to get them to care about the scene they were in....which they don't want to do, because as soon as they try hard at something, as soon as they're invested, the possibility of failure blocks out any benefits that could possibly come from succeeding.
Anyhow, as I was trying to get them to do those things, a few swears may have slipped out. See, in a dog training class, or a book club, or any English class I've ever taught, I would never say bad words in front of students. However, teaching a theater class is a whole different ballgame. You've got to be much more real. Everything is more in the moment. You can't be the same type of teacher you would be for a math class. So, in the course of the three weeks, I may have said a few naughty words, such as "dammit!" or "hell!"
Well, this came back to bite me on my last day of teaching. I was in the office saying goodbye to the principal when out in the hallway we hear a student shout, "You bastard!" The principal looked alarmed and was about to go out to the hallway to take care of it when we hear, "You can't say that! Only Ms. Allsop can say bad words at school!"
Oops.

Word Cloud Novel

2010-02-25T10:55:00.000-08:00

After making a word cloud on my blog, I wanted to make one with my novel. I just entered the first chapter, but here it is!

Word Cloud

2010-02-25T10:24:00.000-08:00

So, there is this website called Wordle that you can go to. It creates a word cloud of all the words you use most often in any sort of text. I entered my blog address and this is the word cloud it created. (wordle.net)

affianced, betrothed committed, engaged

2010-02-19T06:39:00.000-08:00

Jon and I have been dating for about one year, one month and two weeks.

We're getting married August 28th, 2010.

I'm not going to go all lovey-dovey here, I'll save that for Jon and the wedding.

I'll just say that our daily ten-hour workday separation is way too much time apart. Also, we're the only people who can talk about every one of the following topics to no end:

-languages
-travel
-other countries
-what we heard on NPR (Sorry NPR, I'm not planning to become a sustaining member)
-education
-how perfect/handsome/pretty/smart/funny/etc. the other one is
-the terribleness of winter
-the wonderfulness of Timber

See you in August.

The fastest paper ever.

2009-11-07T10:59:00.000-08:00

So, I've decided to do a little experiment. I am at the stage in schooling where I have written quite a few papers. Ok, tons of papers. Papers every semester of every year at college, dozens of them. So, by now I should be pretty good at them. I've decided to see just how long it takes me to write a 10-12 (plus works cited) page paper. It's going to on a topic I know pretty well, teaching English as a Second language, with a focus on building vocabulary, so I am estimating five hours. I have already spent 20 minutes acquiring materials (checking out four books, printing two journal articles, and pulling out any of my personal books which might be helpful), so only four hours and forty minutes to go.

20 minutes - Gathering books and printing journal articles
60 minutes - Looking through books and journals and organizing an outline
10 minutes - Writing an introduction
90 minutes - Sipping coffee and halfway finishing a rough draft at Perkins
60 minutes - Finishing the rough draft and completing works cited page
40 minutes - Printing and editing the rough draft
20 minutes - Proofreading rough draft and printing

And for a final time we have.....
.....Holy Cow. Wow. Exactly five hours.
(And it's a pretty darn good paper.)

I never would have thought it would somehow work out to EXACTLY five hours. Now I know that if I have a paper due on a Monday, all I need to do is set aside Sunday afternoon and I can finish it. It helps that I used a lot of my own reference books, so I knew where to find the information I needed, and it was about a topic (teaching a second langauge) that I am very familiar with. A paper on the Russian Revolution, I would need a LOT more time!

I need to add something. Usually I proofread and edit three or four times, so just having done it twice for this paper was grating on my mind. I broke down and spent another 40 minutes reading it through again, fixing mistakes, and printing it off. I'm glad I did, because there were some pretty ridiculous word mishaps here and there (work for word and so forth). So I can't say I finished it in five hours anymore...although if I had HAD to turn it it, it still would have been an acceptable paper.

2009-10-27T20:24:00.000-07:00

According to CNN most people have only read six of these. Let's see how I do...

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen x
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (I will one day, I swear!)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible X (I was forced)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman x
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens x

Total: 8

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller x
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Complete works? Are you kidding me??)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien x
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger X
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

Running Total: 13

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (Another I mean to read...someday)

running total: 18

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma-Jane Austen x
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden x
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

Running total: 23

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (I remember reading this and totally not understanding its significance...then reading it again in high school and finally getting it. It's not just a story about farm animals, just so you know) x
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery x
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding x
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan x

Running total: 29

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen x
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon X
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (Man, I haven't read ANY Dickens, and he keeps showing up and knocking down my score!)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Running total: 34

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas X
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding x
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (Read the abridged version, take it from me) X

Running total: 39

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett x
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante X
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

Running total: 42

80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X (Finally! I read one Dickens!)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker x
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazui Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom x (Guh. I don't see the value of this book at all!
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

Running total: 46

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint Exeupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adamson X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas X
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo X

53

This really makes me think about the "classics." Did I learn more from these books than I would have from other books? What makes these better? The amount sold? What the critics say? Looking back, I read a lot of these for school (High school and an undergraduate degree in English), and a lot of them were pretty meaningless to me life. I particularly hated reading, "The Great Gatsby." To be honest, it turned me off reading a little bit. Not as much as "The Scarlett Letter" did though. Did I read these book so that I would be able to pass and class and then check these books off a list of the classics later in life? Because I have a feeling that for many of these books, that is the only value I have gleaned from them this far! Hmmm....food for thought.

Scrapbooking Time

2009-10-26T13:13:00.000-07:00

I have been trying to minimize my possessions lately because I'm preparing to live and teach English abroad in a while. I want to be able to leave my scrapbooks safely at home but still have the photos with me, so I am saving them all electronically. I will post a few of my favorites online every once in a while.

The Daily Show

2009-10-08T08:13:00.000-07:00

I sometimes forget how much I love "The Daily Show." I'm not really the type of person who is watching TV at 10:00 at night, so I hardly ever catch Jon Stewart's show. But I did last night. One of his guests was William Kamkwamba, a whiz kid from Malawi. He built a windmill when he was 14 years old from a diagram in a book, using spare bicycle and tractor parts. He's pretty big news right now, he has written a book, "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind," is working on a documentary film, and has been interviewed by many magazines and newspapers and so forth.

This sort of story inspires me so much. I sometimes get caught up in the trappings of modern conveniences and the comfort that a nice salary provides. I am currently browsing the job market in Japan and getting excited about actually making some money instead of taking out endless student loans. I'm excited about paying off my debt and being able to put some saving away for the future.

But this sort of story reminds me that I didn't start out wanting to teach priviliged children studying English so they could make it into the best colleges so they could be a lawyer. I started out wanting to teach children so they could lead fulfilling lives, make the world a better place, and learn the skills to pull themselves, their family, and their community out of poverty, just like William Kamkwamba did.

This is his website:

http://williamkamkwamba.typepad.com/

And this is a link to the clip of the Jon Stewart Interview:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-october-7-2009/william-kamkwamba

P.S.
For some reason it wouldn't upload so I could just put the clip here. I would like to have the clip ON the post, but there was an error. It said, Your HTML cannot be accepted: Tag is broken and I couldn't figure out how to fix it. Any computer nerds out there who can offer support I'd be grateful.

2009-08-18T04:51:00.000-07:00

Italian Food in Taiwan (Siezeria)

2009-08-17T08:56:00.000-07:00

We went to an Italian restaurant the other day in Taipei, Taiwan. We had tried to go eat there a few days previous, but got there just as they were closing for the night. We were so disappointed! We traveled back to the restaurant a few days later, dragging a few friends, because it had looked soooooo good. We didn't want people to miss out on this chance to eat delicious Italian food. We had been in Taiwan for about two weeks at this point and rice wasn't really cutting it anymore. Jon was going to get delicious pizza, and I was going to get delicious spaghetti with tomato sauce and tuna....we looked forward to it all day.

We placed our orders and waited anxiously for our meals to arrive. At this point we were all ridiculously hungry. I about ate my menu. (In hindsight, I wish I had.)

Liv's and my soup arrived first. The minestrone pictured in the menu had beans, noodles, big chunks of tomatoes..., what you would expect out of a minestrone soup. The "minestrone" we received was red water with tiny pieces of cabbage floating in it. It was approximately a half of inch deep in the bowl. At this point Liv knew exactly how the evening would end. I was much more naive.

My spaghetti with tuna arrived. People made fun of me for ordering this, but I love mixing a can of drained tuna in with my spaghetti sauce, just as people add browned hamburger to their sauce. (Tuna spaghetti is really good, trust me.) My spaghetti looked ok, if the sauce was a little sparse. I took a bite. They had poured the red water-soup over the noodles! The tuna was obviously the type of low-quality tuna that is made from the sweepings off the floor of the good tuna canning factory....then they mixed it with sawdust. They didn't drain the tuna either, the bottom of my plate had oil a fourth-inch deep. How did I know what the bottom of my plate looked like? Yes, I was THAT hungry. I scraped off the tuna, let the noodles drip as much as I could and ate about a cup of the pasta. Every single other person's meal was just as bad.

The pictures in the menu looked so good that Jon ordered five different things- the same minestrone soup, a seafood salad, garlic bread, shrimp rice casserole, and a pizza. He said they all tasted the same- like old bread and socks.

Andrew told us that his baked rice casserole was pretty bland, so he mixed it with his also-bland soup and then his meal tasted just plain.

Ugh.

Never get excited about non-Asian food in Asia!

Fortunes

2009-08-16T01:41:00.001-07:00

This past week has been really enlightening in terms of my future. During a long train ride, we played the elementary school game of MASH and I learned that my future holds the following.

-I will marry Jon.
-I will be a teacher.
-I will die at 80 years old.
-I will live in Japan.
-My mode of transportation will be a buggy.
-My pet will be a stegosaurus.

A few days ago we went to a Taiwanese fortune teller. We told her our year, date, and time of birth. Then we had to change our time so that it matched the time in Taiwan. I found out that in my previous lives I was:

-A man who was a “playboy,”
-A businessman,
-A servant for the Emperor, and
-Some sort of half-god half-demon spirit.

My personality is that I am stubborn, I love to waste money, but it is easy for me to make more money, I have a good relationship with others, I am polite, I am the boss of my family, and if someone begs me for help, I will help him/her; however, if someone demands my help, I will NOT help him/her.

Also, in terms of Jon, I should,

-do good for him and
-satisfy him.

It turns out that in a past life I cheated on my girlfriends a lot (because I was a playboy), so now I am trying to make up for that by being mean as little as possible.

I prefer MASH, I think.

Hot Springs Rules

2009-08-16T01:32:00.001-07:00

Ahhhh! I guess you can't read it very well. I will write a few of my favorite phrases.

"In forbid cameras. Soaking. Food. Running. Caper. Clamors and affects other people the behavior."

"Refuses to rub the body in the pond."

"Serious illness refuses into the pond, the young boy advanced age."

"In fobids soaking the foot."

Taiwan Typhoons

2009-08-07T02:51:00.000-07:00

This weekend was supposed to be Taroko Gorge weekend.

However, because of this-

-our plans were canceled. We went to the store with every other citizen of Taipei to fight over bottled water and ramen noodles. We planned to stay inside and have a Typhoon party. Cases of beer were purchased. ..and then carried the twenty minute walk home. We waited for the Typhoon.

We fell asleep to an gentle rain and awoke the next morning prepared to wait out this storm. We went for a walk to relieve the boredom. When the typhoon got here, probably after lunch, it sure would be rough, and we wouldn't be able to go outside, so we better go for a walk now to prepare for being stuck inside for two days. The rain continued to splatter down....we went for another walk and planned to go to a pizza buffet for dinner.

We cursed the light-but constant-drizzle that was a Taiwan Typhoon. I went out for a moment to get a photo of the lame rain. At that moment a gale force wend swept up. It destroyed my umbrella and then went back into hiding.

Never mock the Typhoon!

Arguing a Point

2009-07-21T16:30:00.001-07:00

There are so many touchy issues in politics today. Gay marriage, abortion, national health care, etc etc etc...

These are the types of issues that really hit a chord in people, who then tend to forget how persuasion works. They try to appeal to people's emotions, use slippery slope arguments (if this happens, then this will happen, then this, and then we're wearing government issued coveralls in the United States of Communism.) I know that people have strong opinions, and it can be tempting to exaggerate and make pretty ridiculous analogies, because a lot of the time, those sorts of arguments can seem to work. However, wouldn't we rather have a nation of people who want to see both sides of the issue? People who can listen to an argument and decide for themselves what they believe? Shouldn't we encourage open discussion from both sides? I like the website,

http://www.balancedpolitics.org/index.htm

I think it's a great place to learn about BOTH sides of the story on lots of hot topics. Sometimes the arguments get heated, but at least you're reading both sides of an issue and you can pick what you believe. The following video is an example of something that DOES NOT provide all the information you need to make an informed choice...or any information really. I don't even want to post it, but it's an example of what I'm talking about in terms of biased arguments, so I will.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqMKK8AoLCw&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fallaboutalls.blogspot.com%2F&feature=player_embedded

I am not a political expert and I'm not so sure where I stand on health care, and this isn't really even supposed to be a blog about health care, it's meant to be a blog about how to argue a point without infuriating the very people you're trying to convince. Do they think anyone who disagrees with National Health Care is going to convinced by that video?

The following is an example argument for both sides of health care from the
http://www.balancedpolitics.org/index.htm website. It got really long, so I just included the first two arguments for each side.

Overview/Background
It's no secret that health care costs are spiraling out of control in this country. On average, we now spend more per person on health care than both food and housing. Insurance premiums are multiplying much faster than inflation, which prevents economic growth and leaves businesses with less money to give raises or hire more workers. While the quality and availability of medical care in the United States remains among the best in the world, many wonder whether we'd be better off adopting a universal government-controlled health care system like the one used in Canada.

Yes

1. The number of uninsured citizens has grown to over 40 million. Since health care premiums continue to grow at several times the rate of inflation, many businesses are simply choosing to not offer a health plan, or if they do, to pass on more of the cost to employees. Employees facing higher costs themselves are often choosing to go without health coverage. No health insurance doesn't necessarily mean no health care since there are many clinics and services that are free to indigent individuals. However, any costs not covered by insurance must be absorbed by all the rest of us, which means even higher premiums.

2. Health care has become increasingly unaffordable for businesses and individuals. Businesses and individuals that choose to keep their health plans still must pay a much higher amount. Remember, businesses only have a certain amount of money they can spend on labor. If they must spend more on health insurance premiums, they will have less money to spend on raises, new hires, investment, and so on. Individuals who must pay more for premiums have less money to spend on rent, food, and consumer goods; in other words, less money is pumped back into the economy. Thus, health care prevents the country from making a robust economic recovery. A simpler government-controlled system that reduces costs would go a long way in helping that recovery.

No

1. There isn't a single government agency or division that runs efficiently; do we really want an organization that developed the U.S. Tax Code handling something as complex as health care? Quick, try to think of one government office that runs efficiently. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? The Department of Transportation? Social Security Administration? Department of Education? There isn't a single government office that squeezes efficiency out of every dollar the way the private sector can. We've all heard stories of government waste such as million-dollar cow flatulence studies or the Pentagon's 14 billion dollar Bradley design project that resulted in a transport vehicle which when struck by a mortar produced a gas that killed every man inside. How about the U.S. income tax system? When originally implemented, it collected 1 percent from the highest income citizens. Look at it today. A few years back to government published a "Tax Simplification Guide", and the guide itself was over 1,000 pages long! This is what happens when politicians mess with something that should be simple. Think about the Department of Motor Vehicles. This isn't rocket science--they have to keep track of licenses and basic database information for state residents. However, the costs to support the department are enormous, and when was the last time you went to the DMV and didn't have to stand in line? If it can't handle things this simple, how can we expect the government to handle all the complex nuances of the medical system? If any private business failed year after year to achieve its objectives and satisfy its customers, it would go out of business or be passed up by competitors.

2. "Free" health care isn't really free since we must pay for it with taxes; expenses for health care would have to be paid for with higher taxes or spending cuts in other areas such as defense, education, etc. There's an entitlement mentality in this country that believes the government should give us a number of benefits such as "free" health care. But the government must pay for this somehow. What good would it do to wipe out a few hundred dollars of monthly health insurance premiums if our taxes go up by that much or more? If we have to cut AIDS research or education spending, is it worth it?

Soul

2009-06-27T14:22:00.001-07:00

What do I mean when I say, "Soul?" I mean I want to see something that affects me, something that makes me feel something. Here is an example of something that I think has heart.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxPZh4AnWyk

Dear Director; Michael Bay and screenwriters; Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Ehren Kruger

2009-06-27T13:19:00.000-07:00

There were so many things that I hated about Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. It has such promise. I mean, the huge aliens TRANSFORM from one cool thing to another cool thing! What cooler premise could you ask for in an action movie? However, Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Ehren Kruger (screenwriters, whom I will refer to hereafter as OKK, even though I wish their initials spelled LESS THAN A TRACE AMOUNT OF TALENT) you wrote an insulting, tedious movie.

First of all, the comic relief came in the form of fast talking, hillbilly, crude twin autobots. As soon as I saw these twins, I thought, "Oh no. Not Jar Jar Binks again!" But they were worse. They were loud, obnoxious, and even worse, they were meant to be funny and never once were. Their jokes came from cheap sexual refrences and insulting each other. It was just tiresome OKK. There was not a single bit of smart humor in the entire movie, and, as previous mentioned, I felt insulted as an audience member.

The other comic relief in the film came from strategically timed swear words and dogs or mini-decepticons humping things. Always a fresh and witty way of making the audience laugh. You three should be ashamed of yourselves. Were you making a movie solely for sixth graders?

As a 26 year old, I imagine I am starting to sound elderly when I mention the length of the cuts. I think was the average cut length was .05 seconds or so. The shot never stood still for one goddamn second! It was always spinning or panning, zooming in or out, I just about had a seizure. When there is no substance to the non-action part of the film, quick shots don't make me care any more about the characters. When Shia is about to leave for college and is on the cusp of saying "I love you," to Megan (which we, as an audience, don't care about), the camera zooms around them in circles so fast I assume it wasn't manned by human hands. I would have liked some still shots and slower shots to see the characters transform. The camera was always panning to the side, with explosions blurring the screen as the transformer clicked through a thousand changes

And the love story? OKK obviously were like, "Hmmm...we have to have at least five minutes of the film be some sort of plot, lets have boy and girl argue about who has to say the "L" word first." And then, at the end, when one of them finally says it, it was super contrived and stupid.

I guess the main problem with the movie was that I didn't care about what happened. It was tedious. You can't make people care, Michael Bay, but making it louder and longer. It had no soul!

Jon told me that I was being too critical of the writing, that if I had seen the original Transformers cartoon I would have thought the screenplay was Shakespeare. But I am not satisfied with that. Moviegoers expect a lot out of their films (Norbet aside), and with the advent of people who have been raised making and writing films at home, directing and filming movies on the their computers since infancy, people are only going to expect more.

So, Michael Bay, OKK, my only advice is to improve and realize that CGI is not going to make a good movie.

No more veggies

2009-03-06T13:22:00.000-08:00

So about a year ago, July of 2008, I decided to try vegetarianism. I had a number of reasons

-I watched "Meet your Meat." http://www.meat.org/

-I realized that the rising cost of food (in developing countries) is due, in some part, to the fact that grains are getting fed to cattle, pigs, and so forth rather than being sold to people. (Rising costs are due in other part to ethanol. Ugh. That's another story.)

-A couple other minor reasons I won't bother to go into.

So, I decided to try and stop eating meat. That didn't work out SUPER well. So, I switched to flexitarianism. I ate meat rarely, like when someone made a nice meal for me, or when I was dying for some chicken broth (maybe once every other month or so).

The other night I was at a restaurant eating my Caesar Salad and mini-pineapple pizza when my pal ordered some buffalo wings. They smelled like heaven. I know for a fact that they tasted like heaven, because I remember fondly how good they taste, though I haven't had them for, hmmm, could it be since before I started paring down my meat consumption? Maybe it has been that long.

Anyhow, I realized that there are other ways I can make the world a better place, only eating free-range chickens, eating minimal meat (still eating the fake-veggie ground beef and garden burgers), donating to UNICEF, etc, etc, so I am going to put my vegetarianism/flexitarianism on the shelf indefinitely.

I don't imagine I will still eat that much meat, maybe once a week or so, but now I won't feel like I NEED to deprive myself when what I really want are some buffalo wings with hot sauce.

Leisure Time Activities

2009-02-21T19:24:00.000-08:00

So, a few weeks ago, I was feeling really down, and couldn’t figure out why. Was it the cold, cloudy weather? My stressful class schedule? Vitamin deficiency? Precariously low bank balance? Something else? I realized I was just bored. I was especially bored with my hobbies. Or, lack of hobbies, as it turns out. In college my friends and I had so much fun. We started a band together, disbanded it, and started a new one. We went rock climbing whenever it was warm. We trained horses. We went on three day weekend camping trips. We played pranks on friends, tried cooking new and interesting foods, climbed trees, went to concerts, got crazy jobs together (box folding factory anyone?), etc. etc. etc. I tried to think of the last time I had done something other than watch TV (Season one and two of 30 Rock) or go to the bars with my friends on the weekend to play pool and talk. I really enjoy those activities, but not as much as I have been doing them. I remembered the last time I had had a lot of fun doing something interesting and different. It was the week before school started when my roommate, Ryan, spearheaded, "International Karaoke Week." We spent all week singing our hearts out. Molly even made T-Shirts.

So, it would seem the solution to my discontent is a variety of new, interesting, (inexpensive) hobbies or even one time activities. I made up a list of things I want to do in the next few months. Some are more feasible when it gets warmer, some aren’t the most original, but I am excited to cross all of them off the list, and add lots to the list and THEN cross them off, and refrain from adding some to the list for legal reasons, and THEN cross them off…

-Feed the Ducks/Geese
-Walk Timber down by the River
-Explore what touristy activities River Falls and surrounding areas have to offer.
-Picnic down by the river
-Paint (acrylic and oil)
-Board games with friends (Maybe with a theme)
-Rent a Movie (prime example of an unoriginal idea, but one I haven’t done for a while)
-Cook an ambitious meal
-Horseback riding
-Factory Tours http://www.leinie.com/av.html
-Make a friend who happens to own Rock Band and play it often. I call drums! (Trish and Michael, darn you for getting me addicted!)
-Read literature applicable to my field, but for my own enjoyment and learning
-Explore more of what the Twin Cities has to offer

So far, I have participated in two fun, atypical activities. Jon and I went rock climbing, which was fun, although my wrists, fingers, and side muscles were sore for five days. We also went target shooting. I have gone target shooting maybe eight times in my life, but I always want to go more because I think I'm pretty good at it. And it IS fun when it isn’t eleven degrees outside. (Turns out there’s a gun club in River Falls. Shall I join? Who can tell the future?)

Future activities include a wine appreciation class and a Spring Break trip to Puerto Rico. I don’t like wine, I never have. However, I never liked salads until I was 25 years old. Now I love them. I’m hoping the same thing happens with wine. Also, I’ve never gone anywhere for Spring Break. My first University didn’t have one, and last March I had 50 hours of observation to finish for one of my classes, so all spring break I was at high school.

Feel free to send me any suggestions for fun, inexpensive, leisure time activities.

Dr. Phil is a Tool.

2008-11-27T19:44:00.001-08:00

No really. Do some research.

Why don't I just list the various reasons here? Because people retain knowledge better that they have learned through their own methods. So, look him up. He's a tool. I specifically started disliking him after hearing his theories on language acquisition.

Yay Civil Rights!

2008-11-18T08:22:00.000-08:00

So my friend's husband wrote a blog post as to the reasons why he is opposed to gay marriage. I wrote a reply and decided to copy and paste my reply on my own blog because I hadn't posted anything in a while. I am too crazy busy with school and work to post much, but I want to remember this era in the future and I want my kids to someday read my blog and know how I felt as Proposition 8 (and other anti-civil rights laws) passed. I am too busy to amend my notes so that they stand alone, so I have posted a link to the original blog post below.

http://millershoutout.blogspot.com/2008/11/its-not-over-yet.html

1-I agree that the battle will not end in your lifetime, just as laws protecting the rights of minorities are strong, however, the KKK still exists. I do however believe that people are moving towards Gay rights. If you compare the percentage with which Prop 8 passed only a few years ago to the percentage that it passed this year, you will find that it is getting MUCH closer to passing, and I believe other states will follow suit within 20 years. Worst case, within 40. But that is just my own opinion. (hereafter, I will put MOO, after things that are my own opinion. And then giggle a little bit, about the MOO sound)

2 Marriage does not hinge upon the fact that people are exclusive sex partners. Affairs do not always, nor (MOO) should they, cause a divorce. Also, any sort of online search will bring up, without getting vulgar, many websites, not just swinging ones, which are specifically designed to help couples (yes, even married ones) explore sexual experiences outside of the the "traditional role."

3 Marriage should NOT have anything to do with making babies. If I were to become a single Mom, I KNOW I would be an amazing, loving, fit parent. Should society have any say about that? Your reasoning allows a slippery slope. If society has a say in marriage and marriage has to do with making babies...then shouldn't society have the right to insist I am married before I have a child? And that leads to all sorts of futuristic scary thoughts. Mandatory birth control? Mandatory abortions? Taking children away from non-married people? (You think I'm overreacting, but they DID in the past take children away from mixed-race couples, and the future (MOO and many other peoples' opinion as well) will draw many parallels between the gay rights fight for equality and the civil rights movement)

4 Again, Marriage should NOT be an institution of procreation. Scenario: I am married. My husband and I cannot have children or do not want to have children. Is our marriage any less valid because of that? Should we have a civil union?

(Tangent note. I invite people who say that gays should be happy with having a civil union to imagine the above scenario. Think about you and your partner not being able to have children. Then imagine that relegating you to the realm of having a civil union. Doesn't it make you feel a little sick?)

5 OK, ok, but AGAIN, Marriage should not have ANYTHING to do with having babies. That's what it was in the past, just basically a chance for dudes to get laid, people to gain prestige and yay! make babies. Love hasn't really been a deciding factor in marriage since the past 100 years, no matter what "First Knight" wants you to believe. Isn't that amazing? I think of myself 200 years ago. I would have been married by now, to someone my father picked out, no doubt, someone I barely knew, and I would have probably gotten married at age 16 or 17. My job would be to keep house and make babies. Doesn't your heart warm at the thought that now, we have the chance to marry for no other reason than that another person makes us happy? Not to unify feuding clans, not to earn our parents' a dowry, not to secure our future, but just because we want to be with someone, because we want to make them happy and because they make us hapy. This is not something that takes anything AWAY from hetero marriage, this does not in any way diminish hetero marriage, as so many people feel it does, but allows more people to make that commitment to each other, solely because they love each other.

6 Legal Issues have been brought up. You don't think there were legal issues that needed to be re-worded after the civil war? If it's worth doing (MOO) and it is, then the lawyers will figure it out. And many of the legal issues you brought up have already been solved, quite easily. For example, "What if one partner in a same-sex couple decided to be in vitro fertilized and thus had a baby? Would that child legally belong to both or only one partner in the couple?" This happens all the time with hetero couples, when a man can't conceive and the wife is in vitro fertilized. The child is not biologically related to the father, but that man is STILL THE FATHER. The other legal issues are just as easily fixed and/or have already been accounted for in the legal system.

Art

2008-10-26T11:02:00.000-07:00

My roommate, Ryan, started painting a few weeks ago, (see previous post about apartment redecoration) and it really inspired me. My mom had some coupons to an art store and I set myself up with all the supplies I need, at 40% off, no less. This weekend I should have been studying for a test, and instead I spent, probably 15 hours painting this below. The photo doesn't really give it justice, it looks a lot better in person.

I really liked making it, and I think it was a good first try. I already have a plan for what I want to paint next...so next time I have a weekend without too much to do I'll get on that. Don't hold your breath though.

Is this only interesting to me?

2008-10-21T16:57:00.000-07:00

Only a small percentage (less than 3%) of the words we use today were used in Old English times (~500 AD to 1066 AD) but that small percentage of words are our most commonly used words. For example, of the 100 most commonly used words, ~95 of them are Old English. Below I've listed the top ten most used words in English,

1-the
2-of
3-and
4-a
5-to
6-in
7-is
8-you
9-that
10-it

I find it interesting that "you" is number 8, while "I" comes in 20th place ("my" at 81). "He" comes in 11th ("his" at 18th) and "she" doesn't get used till number 46 ("her" #62).

One more interesting fact, quoted from "The Adventure of English," by Melvyn Bragg

"We shall fight on the beaches," said Churchill in 1940, "we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." Only "surrender" is not Old English. That, in itself might be significant."

Novel Portion One

2008-10-19T19:25:00.000-07:00

Well, I've been talking about this novel I wrote, and its awesomeness for a while. I figured I would post just the first couple pages for fun.....so here they are. Enjoy. Especially if you have friends who are publishers.

Paperback
A Novel By Sara Allsop

“Guns and Hooch!” The shout of a young man cut through the winding of the conveyor belt and the shuffle of packages en route from Lincoln, Nebraska to River Falls, Wisconsin. An idling semi cut its engine just as Joyce looked up to see her co-worker, James, proudly holding up a package. “Guns and Hooch!” he shouted again as he walked the ten yards separating them. Clint appeared after James, ducking out of his truck, as he followed curiously.
James plopped the evidence on the conveyor and stepped back. The box was made of dull brown cardboard and taped shut with clear packing tape, the corners were dented and scuffed, in fact the only unique thing about it was that it was addressed to a business which apparently sold alcohol to men and women with firearms.
“Am I lost?” Joyce asked. “Did this FedEx building get moved to Louisiana last night?”
“Louisiana isn’t the only place with hicks, we’ve got them here in our very own…” James paused and twisted the box, “Napp, Wisconsin.” He cradled his prize in his arms.
"Hey that's a lot better than Kay's Kennel and Video Rental," Clint said. The three of them had a running contest going as to whose truck would deliver packages to the strangest businesses. Sometimes it was something as simple as a Horse Supply Store on Elmer Lane, or a box that stated on the outside of it, “Do not deliver if recipient is intoxicated.” Joyce had found one a few weeks ago that she thought would be a winner forever; it was the strange business that thought that two stops to kennel your dog and rent a video was one stop too many.
“Next we'll find a business called Day Care and Poisonous Chemical Storage!” Joyce said.
“You know what they need?” Clint asked, “an aspirin and arsenic factory!”
“No, they need Monster Truck racing and lace doily supplies.” James added.
“Watch out for my hypodermic needle and crackerjack factory!” Joyce shouted.
The ideas continued as they went back to work, each trying to outdo each other in putting together the most outlandish business ideas they could. Joyce giggled to herself the rest of the day, even after everyone else had left the building by eight o’clock, thinking up other strange business combinations. The truck drivers arrived just after eight and pulled out with sagging shocks from their bulging trucks. Joyce heaved the heavy rusted warehouse doors shut behind them, nearly tripping when they caught on some uneven metal. She coughed out the diesel smoke and sat down in the small office to take her lunch, well breakfast, break. At noon she was finished with office work and began to clear her desk of papers, packing tape and mailing labels.
It was strange. Every morning that Joyce woke up for work she swore that today was going to be the last day that she worked at this horrific job. She would push back the covers in the pitch black night, leave the heavy heat of her bed to pull on some jeans and a hooded sweatshirt so she could fall asleep on the toilet. Why had she gotten a job that started at 3:30 a.m.? Now though, like every day, when she clocked out she wasn’t the least bit tired, she was pleased that she had pulled herself out of bed one more time.
Joyce grabbed her coat and tied it around her waist. She locked up the building as she left and started walking home. Joyce often took the 20 minutes it took to walk home to figure out exactly how much money she would have saved before she went back to school in five months. She was still paying off student loans from her Bachelors degree in English, but those payments were small and she could stop paying them as soon as she was re-enrolled in a Master’s Program. Joyce had been accepted to Madison University a month ago and classes started in September, meaning that she would only have to work this job a few more months full-time before she could cut back to part-time during school. That was still a long time to work at a dead-end job like this. Especially considering that she had a college degree. But she did like her co-workers, the pay was really good, and even though the hours were strange, she was sort of used to it by now. She still couldn't wait to go back to school. Then she wouldn’t have to just take a box from one place and put it in a different place for a living. She could actually do what she wanted to do, edit books.
She strolled down the street, daydreaming about helping an author get a book published. Joyce imagined there wasn’t any greater thrill than walking into a bookstore and seeing a book you had helped to create sitting there on the shelf. Unless it was someone purchasing that book. And maybe seeing it get a really good review in the New York Times Book Review. Or maybe that book winning an award and selling a million copies.
Joyce daydreamed about it, walking casually until she reached a house and couldn't help but notice the lawn. There were deep furrows in the grass, and mud tracked across the sidewalk and front walkway. It was as though a truck had backed right up against the front door.
Joyce looked up and down the street. There wasn’t anyone else out on the street and the house across the way had its blinds drawn. She wondered if anyone was looking out their front windows. She peered at the suspicious house again and then walked up the walkway purposefully, listening for a dog bark, a radio playing, or other signs of occupancy. She changed direction at the last minute to sidle to the side and peek in the front windows. She now saw why a truck had felt the need to pull up on the lawn, there was a shiny new piano sitting in the middle of the room, out of place like a pregnant nun at a Halloween party that no one else dressed up for. The furniture surrounded it, having been pushed out of place for its entrance. She could imagine the other furniture eyeing the piano askance, refusing to invite it into conversation and glancing at it snobbishly. The piano seemed to curve downward slightly in the middle, its rich brown shoulders hunched. Joyce knew that if it was possible, it would slump over to the snack bar and stand there in the corner sipping punch and keeping a sharp eye out for a friendly face.
Joyce imagined what she would do if she had a piano. She wouldn’t leave it out in the middle of the room, out of place like that. She would have a place made ready for it and the room would be built around it. It would have a nice lace runner to lie across the top of it and the bench would be filled with books full of sheet music from the likes of Chopin to Ben Folds Five. It would probably go where she had the television right now. Joyce mused over that for a while. No doubt that would create jealousy between them, and if anything, she wanted a happy piano and a happy T.V. Maybe they could be friends.
Joyce had always wanted to play the piano. It began when she was in the musical, “Brigadoon,” in high school, playing the role of third vegetable cart worker and they had rehearsed their songs to the music of a piano. The teacher had sat down at the bench, glanced over the music and then began playing. He carelessly looked from the music back to the students, listening for notes sung off-key and watching for dance missteps. His casual fingers had moved up and down the keys effortlessly, creating such a full and rich sound that when the inexperienced and tiny pit band took over, the group of 11 musicians had been no match for the music the piano had put out.
Joyce imagined herself sitting at a piano in front of a huge stage. She walked on with a backup band already set up and waiting for her. She sat down and adjusted the bench slightly, the crowd silent. She lifted her fingers to the keys and began to play, a simple tune, but one that the crowd recognized instantly. They began to roar in approval while the band joined, before long they were jamming together, she was pounding on the piano, effortlessly singing her heart out. So what if the song she imagined she had written in her head was actually an Elton John song? She could pretend she had written it all she wanted while-a car horn honked in her ear- knocking her over. She jumped up from the bushes, heart beating and stumbled quickly onto the front stoop trying to look innocent. She grabbed some leaves from out of her hair as she twisted around to see James sitting in his car in the driveway a few feet away smiling and raising one hand in a lazy wave.
Joyce took a deep breath. It was amazing how much the brain could pack in the short second it took her ears to hear the car horn to the time it took her eyes to see and register James. Her brain had already seen an angry house owner on a cell phone to the police, getting out of a truck purposefully with a bat in hand. In her mind she was already running halfway down the sidewalk, when her brain registered the harmlessness of James.
She shook her head at James and stalked towards his door as he laughed at her panic.
“Get out of here!” She shooed him away. “What if the owners come out?”
“Oh,” he said. He settled back casually and made no effort to put his car in reverse. “I thought it might be your house you were peeking in so sneakily.”
“Back up!” Joyce could just imagine the same angry house owner coming out now, having been woken up from a hang-over by the blast of a car horn to find two strangers chatting it up in his driveway.
“Get in, and I will.”
Joyce ran around and hopped in the passenger seat, shutting the door quickly and looking behind her as James backed up.
“What are you doing anyways?” Joyce asked.
“I was at the store, and on my way home, and who should I see but Joycie-poo peering in people’s windows like a criminal.” James pulled out of the driveway and paused in the middle of the street. “Where to?”
“My house is down that way,” Joyce pointed.
“How long have you been walking home from work?” James asked.
“I always walk to work.”
“You weirdo, you should have told someone you needed a ride. Is your car in the shop?”
“No, turn left here.”
“How come you’re walking to work then?”
“I don't have a car because I'm trying to save money.”
James shook his head as he turned at the stop sign. “and what were you doing peering in some stranger’s window?”
Joyce laughed. She had hoped that he had forgotten about that.
“They had these huge ruts in the lawn and I wanted to see why. Then I saw that they had a piano inside and I’ve always wanted to play the piano.”
“And you don’t?”
“No. Sadly.”
“Why not?”
“A number of reasons, A, I’m not going to live in one place long enough to make it worthwhile to buy a piano, and you can’t very well take lessons if you don’t have a piano at home to practice on. And B, I hate keyboards, so I’m not about to play one of those things, ergo C, I don't play the piano.”
“Why not a keyboard?”
“One, the keys feel different; two, a really nice one is almost as expensive as a used-piano anyways; and three, they seem tacky, like, someone with real skill wouldn’t be caught dead using one.”
“Yeah, I see that." James thought about it, "you don’t want to just suck it up and practice on one for a while…” James trailed off as Joyce shook her head menacingly at him. “Well, good luck with that then.”
“Thanks.”
After another offer to drive her to work in the morning was refused James drove off waving out the window with a yell to see her tomorrow.
Joyce pulled out her keys and glanced in the upstairs windows as she walked up to “Joel’s Chicken Emporium.” The smell of fried chicken wafted out and people chatted on benches out front. The sign painted on the window proclaimed, “Drive-Through Soon to be 24 hours!”
“Great,” she thought, “now the speaker box will be as loud as hell all night, instead of stopping at eleven o’clock.” She walked around the back of the restaurant and climbed up a set of stairs to her apartment. She wondered to herself if her roommates Megan or Cinnamon would be home.
Cinnamon was in college, going to be a psychologist. Her parents had been hippies, which explained her unique name. She had 2 brothers separately named Sky and Freedom and a sister named Ingrid Sun Flower. Cinnamon had been dating a guy named Bryce for going on three years and they were probably going to get married pretty soon. Cinnamon speculated that it would happen after she graduated with her Masters this upcoming fall.
Megan was the type of person who intimidated most people at first, she seemed vain and a little stand-offish, but was just confident in a world of insecure women. She especially intimidated men, or at least that was the only reason that Joyce could think of that she was currently and often single. She was tall, skinny, blond and often referred to as, “the hot friend.” She was in her second year of teaching third grade at the elementary school across town.
Joyce pushed open the door of the apartment and gagged immediately. It was as though she had walked into a wall of stench. There was a haze of smoke drifting on the ceiling that flowed out lazily into the fresh air. She pulled her shirt up over her nose and stepped back. She glanced around looking for the source of the smell. Judging by the scent she should look for a woman who had permed her hair and set herself on fire. Joyce left the door wide open, held her breath and stepped back into the apartment and past the entry-way closet to see both Megan and Cinnamon. Megan was frantically bent over the vacuum waving at it with a notebook. Cinnamon struggled with the window in the kitchen, trying to pry it open.
“What happened?” Joyce asked.
“The vacuum started on fire and Megan didn’t turn it off!” Cinnamon shouted as though the smoke filled room had somehow interfered with her ability to hear.
Joyce was surprised that the dinosaur vacuum they had gotten from the Salvation Army had lasted this long. It had been ancient when they bought it two years ago after moving in together. She smiled and laughed out loud. The window flew upwards with a bang and Cinnamon leapt back as she began giggling as well. Megan looked sheepishly around and took a shallow breath of air. She said to Cinnamon, “Mmmm, nothing like the smell of burnt rubber and frying chicken to create an atmosphere of romance for your date tonight.”
“Are you kidding me? I’ll make Bryce take me out, I can’t eat here.” Cinnamon said.
“Leaving Megan and I, yet again to eat alone, our only company this delightful smell.” Joyce said. “I walked in and my first thought was that someone had permed their hair and then set themselves on fire. But I think now that I’ve had a chance to fully appreciate the smell, it’s more like…no, I think that’s still a pretty good description of what it’s like.”
Megan paused and smelled the air tentatively. “You know, it does kind of smell like that.”
Joyce had an idea for something that might help. She ran back into the bathroom and began rummaging around the back of the drawers. She was looking for some perfume she had gotten as a present once. She didn’t like the smell enough to wear it, but it would do for now. She ran back out into the living room and sprayed it liberally on her finger, then wiped it underneath her nose. She took a tentative sniff with Megan and Cinnamon watching and then smiled. "You can still smell it a little bit, but it helps." Joyce passed the perfume to Cinnamon while Megan hefted up the sizable vacuum and carried it outside.
“At least we can stink up the restaurant instead of them stinking us up all the time.” Megan seemed pleased at the role reversal and took her turn with the perfume, spraying it almost directly up her nose.
They forced the rest of the windows open and Cinnamon switched on the ceiling fan. Even after everything they did, the smell was too overpowering. The perfume only lasted a few moments and then the burnt perm smell began to come back. In fact, after she had re-applied It three times, Joyce was beginning to wonder which was worse. Who had gotten her this designer imposter perfume anyways? It had to be someone who she didn’t know very well, and someone who was fairly cheap as well. A gift with the price printed right on it in permanent ink didn't exactly spell classy. Joyce tossed the spray can of $4.95 perfume back and forth in her hands. It had probably been one of those secret Santa presents at some place she had worked at a few years back. No one ever knew what to get each other so they got severely gender stereotyped gifts. Gifts like scented hand lotion or Terminator III on DVD. Joyce stopped thinking about it as she noticed Cinnamon pick up the cordless phone, then pause and look back towards Joyce and Megan.
“Why don’t we all go out for dinner tonight?” Cinnamon suggested. Joyce nodded her head in agreement, the idea of eating any food while remaining in the apartment made her want to retch.
As they gathered up their coats and purses Cinnamon asked, “Hey, I forgot to tell you, Bryce has a performance tonight, do you guys want to come? Otherwise I’ll have to sit alone.”
“Oh, his comedy thing?” Joyce asked.
“Yeah, you guys should really come and maybe we can find you some hot dates.”
“I’d like to,” Megan sighed, “but I’ve got about fifty spelling tests to grade and I’m getting evaluated soon so I’ve got to get ready for that, I can’t do anything but dinner.”
“It’s a Friday night!” Cinnamon protested.
“I know, but I’m visiting my family tomorrow and I want to be able to have fun with them without worrying about tests or anything.”
“Excuses,” sighed Cinnamon as she looked at Joyce accusingly.
“If you promise not to try and set me up with any ‘really hot dates’ then I’ll go with you,” Joyce answered. Cinnamon was always trying to set her up on dates, and while she had been excited about it the first few times they always flopped. She was too nervous and stiff with people she didn’t know. When she did meet someone she was interested in she wooed him by ignoring him, stuttering, and avoiding him whenever he came close for fear of saying something stupid. It wasn’t the best strategy, she knew, but it was all she had. She had told Cinnamon a few weeks ago that she had given up on blind dates, and looking for a boyfriend in general and was focusing on other things right now. Her theory had been that as soon as she stopped looking, the perfect guy would come along. So far it hadn’t been working, but she wasn’t about to say anything out loud for fear of another blind date night.
“Great!” Cinnamon dialed a few numbers on the phone and stepped a few feet away to call Bryce to come pick them all up.
“You know she already has a guy in mind for you, don’t you?” Megan asked. They opened the door and began to walk down the stairs.
“I know, but I need to get out of this house.”
“I’m sorry about the smell!”
“No, no it’s not that, I’ve just gotten into a rut lately. All I do is work.” Joyce and Megan had reached the bottom of the stairs and both took a deep breath of air. Joyce had never thought she would enjoy fried chicken air as much as she did right now. Joyce leaned against the building as they waited for Cinnamon to come down. “We need to start getting out more, meeting new people.” Joyce scuffed her foot against the ground, taking out her frustration on the dirt.
“And if by 'meeting people,' you mean 'meeting men,' then you are correct.” Megan sighed and leaned against the wall. “I need to find a man. My standards are starting to go down more and more. All I require now is a guy who knows how to spell friend and doesn't pick his nose in public.”
“You don’t mind the whole ‘chasing the girls around the playground and trying to kiss them’ game?”
“Are you kidding? I nearly joined in myself.”
“Gross, pedophile.” Joyce laughed. “Let’s hope the President of the PTA never walks past and hears us talking.”
“Don’t worry, I know exactly what she looks like so I can avoid her.”

Next time, on Paperback,

-Will Joyce ever learn to play the piano?
-Will the promised, "hot date," turn out to be truly hot?
-Will Obama win the 2008 Presidential Election?

Tune in next time to find out!

I love ESL textbooks.

2008-10-19T18:56:00.000-07:00

I love flipping through various English textbooks. Now that I have used, probably over a dozen texts in teaching, I can see pretty quickly if I think the book will work well for the type of class I like to teach. (i.e. awesome) There are definitly books that I've looked at and wondered how they got published, but this upcoming one has taken the cake. I took as good of pictures as I could of the chapter entitled, "Hard Times," from the book, "Express Yourself!" This must be a different version than the one I used in Korea, because I DID use an Express Yourself book in my conversation class in Korea, and I remember hating it.

"Look at the pictures and vocabulary words. Talk about what is happening in each picture."

The guy is reading about a factory closing in the newspaper. He is pretty bummed about it and the next photo shows him waiting in line at the unemployment office.

Man and wife are worried about the future. Husband has already filled the garbage can with empty beer cans.

Husband didn't get the new job. He drinks even more and then shouts and scares his wife and kids.

Wife and kids move out, leaving a note, "You don't care about us anymore." Husband is sad. He drives around and thinks about killing himself till he goes in a church and ponders his future.

All right class, let's discuss unemployment, domestic abuse, and suicide today! Let's also discuss the stereotypes that have been reinforced through these cartoons.

Stereotype 1- When a man who works in a factory looses his job, he will turn to drinking.

Stereotype 2-If a blue-collar man drinks, he will drink to excess and scare his children and wife

Stereotype 3-Man work. Woman stay home with kids.

Stereotype 4-Only a life disaster of this importance could drive a man to church....OR that church is the only thing that could prevent this man's suicide.

Who knew?

2008-09-25T18:41:00.000-07:00

I've noticed that horseback riding is an Olympic sport. I've realized that people devote decades of training to improving their skill at riding. However, knowing that, I still didn't think horseback riding was all that hard. I'm not amazing at very many things, I consider myself more of a jack-of-all trades, but the one thing I was always confident in was my ability to ride a horse. I've always been told I "have a good seat," and I can get most horses to happily do what I want when those same horses argue and fight with most riders. I've trained horses, and did a pretty awesome job.

This class I'm taking, Animal Science 268, Advanced Balanced Seat is, no doubt, kicking my ass. Riding in this class is not just sitting in the saddle and pointing the horse's head in the right direction. It's moving both legs and arms constantly. Squeezing and releasing with lower heels, keeping your inside leg at the girth and the outside leg behind, pressing and releasing as a specific hoof lifts off the ground. It's ten different ways of holding and moving your seat and each rein and leg and a thousand different combinations, and each one means something different to the horse. It's constantly moving with the horse, keeping him moving actively, even when he wants to move about a half a mile an hour for 75 minutes straight.

We ride twice a week and have a class lecture once a week. Some of my notes below.

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Fall Management/Impact Force

momentum = velocity x mass

force = feet/seconds squared

Crash Management Strategies

The strongest tool is maximizing duration of impact. If you double the duration you quarter the force. So. Do that. Make the duration of impact last longer as you're falling off a horse. Don't be thinking what I usually do, "Crap! Crap! Oh, this is going to hurt! Ohhhh. It DID hurt."

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How to get a horse to take longer steps? You need to tap the horse on the barrel, back from the girth. This activates the perniculous reflex. The perniculous reflex causes a horse to kick at his belly (in nature this happens when there is a bug on his belly), but in this case when your heel taps that area.

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How do you get the horse, "on the bit?" (Traveling with his head perpendicular to the ground, exactly 90 degrees, although his head carriage is not totally the issue here.) Do you tighten up on the bit to pull his nose down?

Leg at girth = horse steps further up under the belly = increases carrying by pushing with the hindquarters = horse lifts and rounds back (rider has an active seat which facilitates this) = horse extends bit (reaches for the bit) = Creates more contact = Leg connection = Horse on the bit.

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What four things determine a horse's value?

1 Training
2 Phenotype
3 Genotype
4 Personality

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Interesting huh? Maybe not. But it is to me.

I guess this takes some sort of skill.

Home Re-model

2008-09-22T20:08:00.000-07:00

I moved back into my apartment a few weeks ago and wanted to spruce it up. It is unfurnished and the four of us roommates are either college students or constantly spending money on vet bills, so we don't have a lot of money to spend on interior decorating. However, I came into a nice couch, kitchen table and a few other things that I love. (How I came into them is a different story, but it was loads of hard work and I moved more than 6,000 pounds of garbage or other materials within the course of a weekend. I know exact weights. That's neither a guess nor exaggeration) I mentioned to the roommates we should move all the animal stuff out of the living room (dog kennel, cat litter box, etc) and make the living area a nice place where we can have people come over and stuff. They had already been thinking about it, and I seconded the idea.

I was going to take before and after pictures, but my roommates are too cool and cleaned the whole house for me when I moved back in and transfered all the pet stuff out of the living room to make room for the couch and stuff. Here is the living room, complete with my pictures and flower print and Ryan's original painting. I like the chair with the orange ottoman, I don't know why.

The kitchen table with photos of all our pets. Including Ryan's pet spider that lives on his rear view window.

The back entrance, where all the pet stuff got relegated, including dog toy box, dirty couches and cat den.

I love my apartment. Good thing that the owner is now selling it. Apparently he put an uber high price on it, so it's unlikely it will sell, but, boy, I am going to be one sad college student if it does and I have to find a new place and move all my stuff.

Rodeo Events. The Good, Bad and "What the hell are they thinking?"

2008-09-21T10:05:00.000-07:00

The River Falls Rodeo was a few days ago and my roommate, Ryan, and I went to it, excited to see some action and pick up some cute cowboys. (That might have just been me. I didn't specifically ask though.)

We arrived and immediately I was put off by the (I try to keep my swearing to a minimum so when I say the following statement, you know I mean it.) douchbag announcer. First of all, as we walk in, said DB announcer is extolling the virtues of being American. My favorite part was when he said, and I quote, as it is branded in my memory, "And if you don't agree with everything we, the best country in the world, do, then..." And here he trailed off and Toby Keith's classy country song started with the lyrics, "We'll put a boot in your ass." At this point we were forever enemies. Did he think we lived in some sort of dictatorship? Then to top it all off, at my public, secular, University, he proceeded to say a prayer. By then I was steaming.

As the rodeo continued on my mood fluctuated. It ran really smoothly and professionally. They had great rough stock and they transitioned from event to event quickly and smoothly. I could have done without the lame jokes from the announcer. His follow-up to his jokes that bombed (about 80% of them) was always, "You'll get that tomorrow darlin'."

However, there are a few sports I think Rodeo needs to get rid of. The first one is calf roping. This really hurts the calf and no cowboy on any working ranch would ever do this. Most events, with the noticeable exception of bull riding, are supposed to be things that cowboys actually do. Stay on a bucking horse, cut a cow from the herd, rope a full-grown steer etc.

Number two sounds like kind of a turn in the opposite direction. But I don't know why they ever invented the sport of breakaway roping. This is calf roping but the rope "breaks away" as soon as the calf is roped. Sounds a lot more humane, and it is. However, this sport was created just for girls. Girls apparently can't handle the men's sport, so they made up a watered-down, patronizing, wimpy sport to keep the girls happy didn't win the rodeo princess crown and couldn't barrel race.

The last sport is easily the stupidest "sport" in the history of the universe. And I include in that line-up, speed walking, curling, bull-baiting, competitive eating and rhythmic gymnastics. It is called "goat tie-down." What happens is they stake a goat to the ground. A cowgirl gallops toward it at full speed, jumps off her horse and ties three of the legs together. Are you kidding me? I can't think of any more patronizing, condescending, "sport." The girls apparently wanted to tie up an animal, just like the boys do in calf roping, which they don't get to do in breakaway, but they can't put the two sports together, because that would be too hard, and they have to get a seven pound goat and TIE HIM TO THE GROUND! It literally made me purple in the face. There were so many girls (more than a dozen) demeaning themselves by participating in it.

So, that's the River Falls Rodeo. After parties were pretty fun though. So were the parties after the party.

Favorite Diet Foods

2008-09-18T22:04:00.000-07:00

These are some really good diet foods I hope I never get sick of.

-Pickles. (5 calories per pickle)

-Cottage cheese with fruit or a little seasoned salt.

-Yogurt with some sort of healthy crunchy cereal on top. (The cereal is much cheaper than granola)

-Tuna Wrap. (Don't mix any mayo with the tuna, but chop up a pickle pretty fine and sprinkle some lemon pepper and a little cheddar cheese, and a big leaf of lettuce.)

-Tomato and Bread. (Slice some French bread about an inch thick, then spread a dollop of low-cal Italian dressing on each slice. Place a thinly sliced tomato on top of each one and put them under the broiler until the tomatoes look half-way cooked. Then pull them out and cover with either fresh shredded Parmesan or sharp cheddar cheese and cook till the cheese is melted.)

-Cheese Tortilla. (Put a plain tortilla in the toaster oven until the edges start to crisp a little. Then sprinkle a small amount (1/8 of a cup maybe?) of shredded Asiago cheese on it and some Garlic Herb seasoning. Put back in the toaster oven until the cheese is melted.)

-Ginger and Lime Fish. (Mix together ginger, garlic, lime juice, a little butter and some pepper. Broil the fish on each side for five minutes, then spread the mixture on one side of the fish and broil for two or three more minutes. Don't let the effing cat jump up on the counter and start licking your fish while you get a glass of water.)

-Kimchi and Rice.

-Fresh fruit like grapes and apples. (They win on the easy factor)

-Veggie mix. (Cut up onions, green, red and orange peppers, and carrots. Spray a pan lightly with Pam and put the carrots in first, as they need a little longer to cook. After they have cooked a little, add the peppers. Then add the onions and some frozen peas. If you add lemon pepper or garlic, this is a good side dish to the fish or other main course.)

-Diet Code Red Mountain Dew. (yea caffeine!) Diet Sprite (Yea late night sugar attack!)

-Coffee (Yea fair trade medium blend! Yea Splenda and skim milk!)

I think the biggest thing I have started trying to do with my diet (besides run every day. ugh. Unless I start loving it soon, it will only last until the snow flies or I hit the weight I want. I need to find a workout partner to play a fun sport with me instead.) Anyhow, I have started trying to really love food. I don't eat food unless it is totally delicious. (i.e. no more soggy sandwiches or cheap canned soups.) I eat fresh, ripe fruits and veggies. I avoid canned food most of the time, and I have fallen in love with seasonings and spices. You can make a lame tuna sandwich on white bread with limp lettuce, or you can make a delicious low-calorie tuna wrap by adding lemon pepper and heating it in the toaster oven, then adding a crisp lettuce leaf. And then you can enjoy it and focus on eating it rather than studying while you eat. Another thing I've gotten better at is portion control. I don't need a full plate to feel full. I need small portions of a variety of foods, and I will feel full if I eat half as much as I usually do. And the last thing is patience. I know that in four hours Dairy Queen will still have their Moo-Latte drink, so if I am super craving one now, I say I'll get one later. And by the time later has rolled around, I don't need it anymore.

Yea Food!

Textbooks

2008-09-17T20:02:00.000-07:00

I have really been enjoying my classes this semester. I love learning about syntax and grammar and cultures and teaching methods, so this TESOL teaching career is fitting better and better. I wanted to add a few portions from textbook that I thought were fascinating.

Patterns in the Mind by Ray Jackendoff. Page 23

"There is an alteration called, "expletive infixation" that many speakers perform on words of English under conditions of extreme exasperation, as in (2)

(2) How many times do I have to tell you? I'm not talking about the Allegheny River! Can't you get it into your head I'm talking about the Susque-goddamn-hanna?

...

The interesting thing thing is that we have pretty clear intuitions about how to use this infix. It sound natural in the examples in (3) but decidedly odd in those in (4).

(3) uni-goddamn-versity
manu-fucking-facturer

(4) Jacken-bloddy-doff
ele-goddam-phant

...

I'm fairly certain none of us was ever taught the principal (or pattern) that says where it is possible to insert an expletive infix into English words. Yet we readily use this principal to make intuitive judgments about new cases....the infix sounds right only when it immedietly precedes the syllyble of the word with the main stress."

I love that my textbook helps me teach English students when to correctly put swear words in words!

Topics in Language and Culture for Teachers by Steven Brown and Jodi Eisterhold. Page 40

"Amok (which has been taken into English in the term to run amok) is a Malaysian condition characterized by a sudden uncontrollable anger; people with this condition have been known to kill whomever they see in a bout of rage."

Interesting. This portion of the book talked about how emotions are social as well as physiological. The DSMMD recognized "culture-bound syndromes." It says that certain cultures have certain dysfunctional disorders based not on genes or anything other than their culture. Crazy, huh?

Language and Culture by Claire Kramsch. Page 92.

"...let us start with the concept ARGUMENT and the conceptual metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR. This metaphor is reflected in our everyday language by a variety of expressions:

Your claims are indefensible.
He attacked every weak point in my argument.
His criticisms were right on target.
I demolished his argument.
I've never won an argument with him.
You disagree? Ok, shoot!
If you use that strategy, he'll wipe you out.
He shot down all my arguments.

It is important to see that we don't just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or lose arguments. We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent. We attack their positions and we defend our own...Though there is no physical battle, but there is a verbal battle..it structures the actions we are performing.
Try to imagine a culture were arguments are not viewed in terms of war, where no one wins or loses, where there is no sense of attacking or defending, gaining or losing ground. Imagine a culture where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, experience them differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently."

I love this fictitious culture. I want to live there.

Diet

2008-09-07T13:46:00.000-07:00

Eating is such a funny thing. Everyone knows that. I mean when we think about things that are important to us, we list things like friends, family, hobbies, pets, knowledge, etc, etc. But food and its consequences (i.e. body size) take up an enormous portion of our thought, especially girls, of course. I've always been a pretty confident girl. I get out and do things, and while I've never been super fit, I'm not an embarrassment to myself. (Unless I have to walk up two flights of stairs and then I can usually hide it pretty well by pretending to get a drink of water from the fountain rather than wheezing and huffing too audibly.) I've always thought I was a pretty girl, above average anyhow, but there's always been that one thing missing. That 10% of my body I didn't like, those 10-20 pounds I wished I was lighter, but never did anything about because, let's face it, I loved dessert and sitting on my butt more than I loved the idea of having a perfect body. (And what was perfect anyhow? Some ideal that the magazine moguls would have us believe? Some fake, unusually skinny girl that any normal man wouldn't want to be with anyhow? Some, some....insert other indignant rhetoric here)

I don't know what it was that changed a few weeks ago. Maybe it was the sense of empowerment I got from my summer job (it didn't kill me, so now I'm stronger for it). Maybe it was my frustration with various things in my life feeling out of control and I felt like I needed to have some sort of control over something...hmmmm insert weight control. Maybe I'm getting older and I've never gone this long before without a boyfriend. Maybe I finally heard enough men saying that so and so was so hot and then I looked at her and realized she always weighs 30 pounds less than me. Maybe I lost my idealism and realized that looks are important to me, and they are no doubt going to be important to other people too...who the hell knows? Being a psych minor in college just makes the list grow without offering any hope of a correct answer. (Minor, not major.) Anyhow, I went out and bought a cheap scale and made up a chart listing every day and my weight including a box to check if I had exercised and stretched that day. (I also want to be more fit and flexible, but weight comes first.) I finally wanted to be able to sit down without wanting a pillow to hold over my stomach to hide the roll at my waist. I wanted to wear a swimsuit without being disgusted by my thighs. I wanted to see photos of myself without groaning about my double chin and fat face. I wanted to be hot.

Now, as I say all these things, it sounds like I'm really insecure. I'm not, and I haven't ever really been. I have always liked how I looked and not only have I liked my body 95% of the time, I have always liked 95% of my body. It's just that now I'm prepared to like 100%.

Ok, so the diet started, and I didn't do too much different. I drank a lot of water. I ate less at mealtimes, didn't snack and didn't eat dessert unless my University was stupid and tried to make me believe for a few hours that I wouldn't receive credit for an entire semester of schooling, but that's another story. I realized that although I have always gone to food when I was bored or sad, or even just out of habit, (wake up-eat. Go out with friends-eat. Come home-look in the fridge...and you guessed it, eat) I could break that habit pretty easily. I learned that I had the willpower to eat only when I was hungry, and even then, I learned hunger isn't so bad. It often goes away after forty minutes or so, and then you don't feel hungry again for hours.

I lost four pounds the first week, and I lost five pounds the second week. It felt good, and it feels good. After only two weeks I already had to punch a new hole in my belt. I went shopping the other day and had gone down two sizes in clothes. I know I can keep this up too. I usually wouldn't buy a dress I couldn't wear, but I bought one that was slightly too small, knowing I would fit into it in a few weeks.

I probably eat 500 calories and a multi-vitamin a day. I eat healthy...for 500 calories (fish, cottage cheese, pickles, fruit). I'll admit that sounds pretty low.

One thing that scares me is that what happens when I hit 135? What if there is still some portion of my body I don't like? What if, after all this time, I just don't look good in a swimsuit, and it has nothing to do with how much I weight? I won't have a scapegoat anymore. Will I think that "losing five more pounds" will fix it?

I realize now how easy it would be to get a eating problem. I love watching the weight drop off. I look forward to weighing myself every day, and if the weight hasn't gone down, then the next day I eat even less till the weight does go down. I have such control over something I have battled with since I was 17. My initial goal was to weigh 135, and I found myself thinking today, I could hit 120, or even less, no problem. I had such headaches and hunger pains when I went to bed the other night that I couldn't sleep. But I didn't want to eat because now the scale has become more important than pain. I started out wanting to lose about a pound a week. Now if I were to have "only" lost a pound come Thursday, I would starve myself till I at least three or four pounds dropped for weigh in on Monday.

Is this a problem? It sure sounds like one. But I still feel like it isn't. I am going to stick to my initial goal of 135, not a pound below. I just want to get there faster. I now know that I am stronger than my hunger, and so I know I'm going to hit 135. I just want to hit it now. Since I weigh 153 right now....at three pounds a week, it would only take me around two months to get there. I could be the weight I've always wanted to be by Thanksgiving...or even by Halloween. Isn't that crazy? I've always been the type of person who goes out and gets what she wants. I wanted a horse. I got one. I wanted to live abroad. I lived in S. Korea and Ecuador. I want a degree, I want an apartment that lets me have dogs, I want a cool summer job, I want, I want, I want. However, this has been the one thing I have wanted for the longest time, and I am finally going to get it.

I suppose that's why I'm writing about it. I usually wouldn't write such personal things on my blog. I wouldn't open myself up to such criticism. But isn't it crazy that I am finally going to get what I have wanted for almost a decade?

Liar Liar

2008-08-23T13:11:00.001-07:00

I was driving from Wyoming to Wisconsin a few weeks ago and had an instant craving for a tuna sub from Subway. I heard on the radio that there was a Subway in Chamberlain South Dakota and immediately made plans to stop there. I had been driving since five the previous evening, with a six hour sleep break in Gillette, Wyoming. It was now two in the afternoon the next day. I pulled into town and started driving around. The town was set up all weird with one way streets and dead end roads right in the middle of the town. At one point I spun a U-turn and decided to head back the way I had come. I noticed some stupid Chevy following me really closely as I stopped at a stop light. I signaled right, realized that was headed towards a bridge, decided to go straight, then decided that left was the way to go, because I saw the (hooray!) Subway sign. That stupid Chevy kept following me and I noticed that the song I was listening to on the radio had had this strange background beat, it was really annoying.
Stupid Chevy continued to follow me as I jerked quickly to the left and headed towards Subway. By now, the background sound was starting to get a little confusing, the song was finished, and that stupid Chevy was still right on my bumper. I flipped off the radio and heard the siren, then I tilted the rear-view mirror up and saw the police logo on the "stupid Chevy SUV."
I started cursing and pulled over. As soon as the officer came up to the window, I started talking, "Sorry! Radio! All I wanted was a five dollar foot-long! The radio said Chamberlain had a Subway! Blabber! I'm charming and harmless!" I handed over my license and denied I had anything illegal in the car as he took in my unorganized mess of clothes, sleeping bag, guitar, lariat, and so forth spilling from the backseat. Th officer asked if I knew why he had pulled me over and I told him I assumed it was because of the little confusion about whether to turn right, go straight, or left, and the little absence of signaling, and/or being in the correct turning lane. He shook his head and said, "Among other things." It was like the scene from Liar Liar, "You flipped a U-turn, speeding, improper lane change, lane change without signaling...." At this point I groaned and said, "Oh no," in hopes of sounding contrite, but it just came out like, "Oh crap, you've been following me for a long time, I didn't know you saw all that." He walked away and I texted a friend this quote, "I just got pulled over because I'm a moron." Then continued moaning, but this time inwardly about how the stupid five dollar foot-long was no doubt going to change to a three-hundred dollar foot-long.
The officer came back and gave me a warning and directions to Subway. He also gave me some tips about South Dakota laws, for example, you can't do a U-Turn if another vehicle is within 500 feet. I think he felt I could also assume that speeding was also illegal. But I still got that that warning and I didn't even have to moan about being a poor college student! Hooray!

Goodbye Camp K!

2008-08-03T10:02:00.000-07:00

This past Friday was my last day at Camp K. I wanted to say goodbye to everyone in the only way I know how...through song. This will not be entertaining to anyone who didn't work at Camp K, but for those that did, enjoy. This is roughly sung to the chords to "You're Beautiful."

My life is Brilliant.
My life is Brilliant.
I love today.
I saw some angels, here at Camp K.
I smiled at them during training, they were clueless just like me.
and we all lost sleep week one, 'cause Ted had to pee.

Chorus:
You're over soon, you're over soon, you're over soon, it's true.
I saw your face on a facebook page, and when I think back,
good stories I won't lack.

Verse 2

Then Americorps came, and then they gave us classes
on how to be kind and then they saved our asses
And I don't think Rocky deserved what she got,
but we shared a trip camp that was way too hot.
And summer went on and our patience fell,
and I loved it when I finally heard Shrek yell.
And we all had our campers we thought were angels,
as we gossiped about various love triangles.
And we all worked something like 84 hours
and didn't have time for even one damn shower.

Chorus

Verse 3

Then a flying dragon, named Matt Lee
told me too late when he had to pee.
So I cleaned his clothes as we moaned about our woes,
but sent God a kiss that my group lacked Davis.
And Flipper's group somehow got all the runners
Again we thanked God that Sydney was hers
Thursday night made all our hearts ring
cheesy I know, but Jared are you listening?

Chorus

Camp K

2008-06-22T17:39:00.000-07:00

Working at Camp K has already been a life-changing experience. It has changed the way I think about a lot of things, as cliche as that sounds. I look at people with disabilities differently, I look at myself differently, and I look at the future differently. I think it has made me a better person, and has made me realize just how awesome of a person I already am. (I mean, who else could remain patient after someone has been in the bathroom for 25 minutes, remaining in there after repeated pounding on the door and hearing "Please hurry up! Someone else needs to use the bathroom!" And then the person who is waiting with crossed legs pees her pants and starts crying because she is so embarrassed and thinks everyone will be mad at her. And just then, the person in the bathroom comes out whistling and carrying a drawing of Ratatouille that they have been working on using the counter by the sink. Who else wouldn't ring that Ratatouille drawing neck?) I now know that if I had a child with a disability, physical or mental, I could handle it. I now know a little bit more just how hard it can be to be a parent.

When I got this job at Camp K, I had a totally different picture in my head of what it would be like. My job title is "Trip Camp Leader." Due to a few mix-ups in communication, and my own assumptions, what I imagined I would be doing is very different from what I am doing. I imagined myself traveling from national park to national park with eight campers and the other trip camp leader, getting paid to see the western United States. I imagined white water rafting on Camp K's dime while helping people with disabilities, but not really having to work all that hard to do it. I imagined it would be like hiking with a few friends, we would all stick together and sing songs in the car and help put up the tents and they would need a little help with directions or we would need to hike a little slower, but it wouldn't be all that hard.

What is it really like? At first I was disappointed to learn that the other trip camp leader and I trade off taking trips, so I will go one week and her the next, each time picking a new intern to take with us. (To reward the interns for working so hard for no pay.) So I was to go on four trip camps and the other leader goes on three, and then we both stay at camp the other weeks, being a group leader here.

After last week's trip, I am more than content to go on ONLY three more camps.

The first week of camp was, looking back, relatively easy. Although I had never changed an adult's diaper, showered an adult, or fed an adult before, I was surprised how quickly it became a non-issue. My group (obviously, I feel this every week) had the best campers, and there were a few who really endeared themselves to me. There was T, the 80 year old camper, who smiled at everyone and made me want to be as fit and healthy as him at 80. Although, I don't want to wake up thirteen times a night to pee. There was B. the guy who answered everything with "Really good." "How's horseback riding going B?" "Really Good" There was J. who was sooooo effing slow about everything! You could get her up and get her started, go change and clothe two other people who needed complete assistance and return to find her just barely getting out of her pajamas. All she wanted to do was sit and draw pictures of Ratatuille. Guess what we let her do all morning Friday when we were so exhausted from working 60 hours already, not counting a night of cabin duty? (I'll give you a hint, paper, markers, and rats were involved) M the whole week asking to please call her mother, crying from homesickness, wanting to go home, and blowing kisses in the air towards the direction of home...and guess what she does on Friday? She lies down on her bed refusing to let us roll up her sleeping bag because she wants to stay at Camp K so badly.

The second week was my first week being group leader. It was pretty stressful. The first week, I had been a normal counselor to get the feel of it, but this week I was in charge. I counted campers probably five times an hour, always nervous I would lose one. It was teen week, so I had good cause to worry. There were two boys in my group with no less than three girlfriends throughout the week and one guy with two girlfriends. They were always wanting to hold hands or sneak a kiss. It was middle school to the nth degree. The boys were little players, trying to get as many phone numbers and hugs as they could (from other campers and counselors alike) and the girls were constantly hysterical because their boyfriend of 45 minutes had dumped them for a new piece of tail. The creepiest part was the camper who always thought he was such a catch and would always say, "Timber....." "Yes?" I would ask, always in a hurry and being pulled in four directions, "Can I have a hug?" He would stand there, getting ready for bed, with his shirt off and arms out....I told him I didn't give out hugs.

PS everyone here has a camp name. Mine is Timber.

It is so hard because you are working all the time. It's not like you just get them up in the morning and walk with them to breakfast, you cajole them out of bed, and pull off sleeping bags and change and dress them, then walk down and then get them sitting down and then dish up their food, and then cram some food in your mouth while you feed a camper, and if you have to help a camper, you take your food with you because they will take it or touch it or eat it, and you have to keep the other kids from saying mean things to each other and/or keep them from going through the garbage for more food. Then you push a wheelchair up a hill to horses and keep the 8 campers occupied and happy while four ride at a time....on and on and on. Swimming is the best part because most of the time you can just lounge in the pool and watch them play, but about half the time, you need to pull a kid out because he refuses to wear a life jacket even though he failed his swim test, and you then have to restrain him from hurting himself or others. You get your hair pulled and they try to kick or bite you, and it's hard to pull a teenager out of a pool when they are all slippery and wet and either limp or trying to kick you in the mouth.

Last week though, undoubtedly was the worst week yet. Before I tell you how hard it was, let me preface it with what happened at the end of the week. Pickup for campers is at 12:00. Since Monday morning at 8:30 am, I had been telling myself, "I can make it till Friday at 12:00, I can make it!" Well, Fri at 12:00 rolled around and four of my campers still hadn't been picked up. I still had to deal with them! I began dishing up lunch and swallowing to hold back tears. I'm not normally a crying person, but I couldn't help it. I had made it till Fri at 12:00. I had made it to 12 o'clock and I needed to be done. For four days I had steeled myself to stay strong till 12 and when 12 rolled around and I still wasn't free, it just wasn't fair. A few hours later, after cleanup we had a staff meeting and the other staff who had been on the trip with me, Rocky, leaned over and said, "I feel like crying, but I don't know why." I said, "It's because we're done. We're finally done!" She nodded her head and broke down into gut-wrenching sobs. Full on gasping for air and weeping for ten minutes. It was exactly how I felt. One more example of how bad this week was before I launch into description, because no description will do me justice. The week after Moab I was working with a very low-funtioning child who had anger issues. While I was changing his diaper, and trying to keep him from injuring himself I got poo on every single article of clothing I had on, and had to throw away a bracelet. I had to go up and change clothes and even, yes, wipe a touch of poo off of my face. (no time for a shower) I did have time to shoot a quick text off to my friend saying that even with that, the week was still going better than Moab.

Ok, anyhow. So Monday rolls around and Rocky and I are all set up with our sign-in sheets and smiley faces. Outside the van is all ready to go, food and tents packed, and a full tank of gas. The first boy to show up is named J. He is a tall, awkward looking kid who is 13. (This week will be all teens) He asks when his friend Steven is coming, and I draw a blank on the name and look down on the sheet to be sure. No Steven signed up for trip camp. In a cheerful voice I let him know that Steven isn't coming, but we're going to have lots of fun anyways. J starts scowling. "Listen, no offense, but you guys really screw things up. You are so un-organized. I should sue you. I mean, I just talked to Steven and he said he was coming, I should sue you." As J keeps talking, I look past J to his dad. J isn't in my custody yet, so I don't feel comfortable disciplining him, but surely his Dad wouldn't let him talk that way, right? His dad laughs quietly, "Now, J, don't say that, you're going to have lots of fun." They then walk away as J continues to moan. A few minutes later, his pal Steven walks past, sleeping bag under his arm and a smile on his face explaining he was confused, he is going to stay at Camp K this week, but it'll still be a cool week, he'll see J on Fri, bye dude!

The rest of our campers check in, none of them really standing out. One girl is deaf, R, and carries a notepad with her everywhere to communicate. I start brushing up on my finger spelling immediately and R helps me make up a sign language name for Timber. As everyone starts situating in the van, the boys shuffle towards the back and the girls (only two) sit up front. L immediately tells us, "If I get too hot I have a seizure. If I get to cold I get a seizure. If it is too loud I have a seizure." Rocky and I look at her. This might not have been the best trip for her. Moab is the desert. The weather says it will hit 105 and at night get down to 45. The rowdy boys in the back are laughing and making farting noises and L keeps shouting at them to be quiet as Rocky and I run back and forth getting last minute things ready.

Finally, it happens, L has a seizure. Just like she said she would. She walks out of the car, and goes to sit in a chair inside the building and Rocky and I find her there. We look at each other. It doesn't look like what we've seen people do in the past when they have seizure. A seizure isn't always a grand mal limb shaking thing, it can be just a temporary zoning out, or a muscle twitch, but L isn't doing that. We wait with her, but as it gets closer to 10:30, and we're supposed to leave by 10, we call the camp nurse over. The nurse tells us in private that although everyone seizures differently, it sure doesn't look like a seizure to her. Another staff comes up and warns us that L is famous for faking seizures. Right. So we somehow get her in the van and when she does she warns all the other passengers that they need to be silent the whole ride or she'll have another seizure. It's a 6 hour drive. With 6 teenage boys. We warn L that silence is not an option.

The ride down takes us from 10:30 to 6:00. We stop for lunch and take over a playground. C climbs a tree, J starts going through the landscaper's wheelbarrow, and N jaw breaks. (Not really, he has these super complicated braces that come apart if he opens his mouth too wide, and then he needs to to get both hands in his mouth to pry them back together. It's a two person job.) We get C down from the tree, J gets all up in my face when I won't let him play with the landscaper's tools, and literally tries to push me over to get past them. He's not a little kid. He's used to getting his way. Not this week pal. We go to get things out of the van and realize that this week is going to suck worse than we thought it would.

The van we take has a wheelchair lift in the back. We don't need it this week, but use the space to store out luggage and food. However, to get in the back you have to put the wheelchair ramp down. The wheelchair ramp isn't working. At all. We can't get in the back of the van. We can't get to the coolers and food. You can put it down manually, but you have to do that from the inside. A skinny person CAN squeeze inside, but they can't crank it down with all the suitcases and coolers in the way, which we can't get out until the ramp is down. So the only thing I can grab out for lunch is chips, bread, apples, and jelly. So we're having jelly sandwiches with chips because of course, no one is touching the fruit.

We get back in the car and start driving again. Whoever isn't driving has to manage the kids in the back, and I don't know how I didn't get the job driving, being the "Trip Camp Leader" and all. N is sitting towards the back and we realize a habit he has. He likes to shout out the names of the trucks as we go past. He is obsessed with transportation. Every time we pass a semi, he shouts out the type it is, "Timber! Timber! Look! There's a Walmart truck! A Walmart truck!" I see N. His favorite, we learn quite quickly are trains, England trucks and Swift trucks. However, no matter what we say or do, we can't get him to stop shouting with his deep voice, "Timber! I saw a train! Where is the train? Timber! I want to see the train! Timber! Look! A swift truck! Swift! Swift! Timber!" This didn't really bother us too much, but the other campers hated it. A chorus of shouts came from the back, "Make him be quiet! Make him shut up! We SEE the truck N! You don't need to tell us every time you see a truck! Why is he like that?" Oh it was a nightmare. One of the times we stopped to pee, two of the boys refused to get back in the van. J especially was irritated. He told Rocky she was a crappy counselor, and grew incensed when she responded that she wasn't even a counselor, she was a intern. He told me that he was going to call his parents, and then the cops, then my boss and get us fired. I gave him my phone. "Go ahead. I don't want anyone having any secrets. You go ahead and call them." Sigh.

Fast Forward to Sept 7th. The job has been done for a month now, and I'm back in school. I tried to come back to this a few times to finish it and write more, but I couldn't do it. That week was the hardest week of my life. I couldn't re-live it in the detail necessary to express how horrible it was, and I couldn't re-live it the number of times needed to re-read through and through. I still don't think I can, and even if I could, I don't think anyone but Rocky and I can ever really know how hard that week was. So I will leave you with a few highlights.

We finally got to Moab. Of course the camp was full where we were supposed to camp, so we drove around until we found another campsite. It was the only one that had openings, and was located right on the Colorado River but didn't have any sort of electricity or running water. We set up the tents, with no help from the campers, although we tried to get them involved. One camper was busy having a seizure, the rest were busy fighting or listening to music on their ipods. As storm clouds started rolling in, Rocky and I got nervous and just set up the two large canvas tents and our smaller two-person tent ourselves. Once set up we realized that the tents are made for four people, and we had two girls and six boys. Six big boys in a four person tent, plus all their suitcases made bedtime a nightmare every night. Plus one kid snored...which didn't help the others sleep....which didn't help us sleep. I realize now that I should have just given them all granola bars and sent them to bed, but it was only eight o'clock and we had spaghetti on the menu. While we were trying to set up tents I started some water boiling for the noodles. We had unpacked kind of helter-skelter, unloading everything to get to the tents on the bottom, so when the dust storm blew up and the wind was so fast that it blew the boiling water off the propane stove and spilled all over the dry goods we had packed to eat. I ran over to try and save some of the food and looked back to see the boy's tent collapse in the wind. At this point I nearly packed up and went home. However, we somehow got everyone fed, teeth brushed, bathroom used, in pajamas, and in bed by just before midnight. Midnight. Rocky and I hadn't had time to eat, I had put some spaghetti in our tent to eat later, and when we got to it, we tried, but couldn't force it down. That set the tone for the rest of the week. Rocky and I never had time to eat anything. The kids would eat a bite or two, then sneak away to push each other in the fast-flowing Colorado river. Rocky and I would look at each other and one of us would round them up, ignore the insults, make them change shoes before getting the van, because they had been walking in mud, while the other would be cleaning up camp, washing dishes and ruing that she spent fifteen minutes standing by the burning propane stove in 103 degree weather to cook a meal no one wanted. Every moment outside was too hot, too dusty, too thirsty, the water we had was never cold enough, the bug spray never worked, the activities never fun enough, etc. R did nothing but ask questions all the time, "why? why? why?" for everything. She was deaf, so you always had to be conversing through writing things down. It makes it hard to keep two boys from fighting, help one boy brush his teeth, and gather garbage from the campsite all at once when you have to be writing things down. We never had time for anything. Neither Rocky nor I brushed our teeth once on this whole week, much less brushed our hair or washed our faces. The kids were never asleep before eleven o'clock. Not because we didn't start getting ready at seven o'clock though.

So I will finish there. And be glad it is in the past and glad that I am a better person for it.

Car Crash

2008-05-29T19:02:00.000-07:00

I was driving on a highway the other day and noticed the two semis ahead of me starting to slow down. I wasn’t too surprised because we were reaching the peak of a mountain (10% grade) and my little Chevy Cavalier wasn’t going any faster than forty miles an hour anyhow, I didn’t imagine they would do any better. One semi had been trying to pass the other, but slowed and changed into the right lane behind the first.
As the semi moved over I saw a truck stopped on the side of the road, and as I peaked the mountain, I saw a crushed car. It had obviously rolled over a number of times just seconds before, and there were people standing around outside it, peering inside the crushed body of the car and thirty yards away, I could see two people huddled over another body. I thought about how just the day before I had refreshed my first aid training. I pulled my car over and grabbed a jacket and towel before jumping out of my car.
As I stood up, the first thing I head was a man standing in front of another woman saying, “Don’t look, don’t look over there.” She was trying to see past him to the body on the ground. At that point, I’m ashamed to say I was afraid.
I’ve dealt with minor injuries before. I’ve helped people who have had seizures, people who have fallen from horses and hurt themselves, and I once bled almost a pint of blood all over myself after a mistake at a plasma donation site. I’ve seen pretty horrible animal injuries and I’ve always thought myself a pretty solid person in an emergency. But the way that man spoke as he blocked the woman’s view and the small size of the body scared me. I avoided it, thinking that the two people kneeling in the mud had whoever it was under control and ran to the other group of people.
I ran up and looked under the car, everyone was safely out. It was a family of five, Mother, Father, and three children. I looked over the two kids, they seemed relatively uninjured, some cuts and scrapes, scared and crying. It was a cold, stormy day, but they were wearing shorts and t-shirts and scattered around, in the path the car had rolled were flip-flops and beach bags. I wrapped one kid up in my jacket and found the mother’s shoe so she would stop walking around in the broken glass covering the ground. I asked her if anyone needed more help. She told me her daughter, her twelve-year old daughter had been thrown from the car. She had been the one forbidden from looking and she answered my question and pointed over at her daughter.
I swallowed and ran over to the body on the ground. The father was kneeling over her, and a woman was pulling a needle out of a bag sitting on the rocky, muddy ground. I blurted out my phrase. The phrase my friends and I have jokingly said to each other dozens of time, when someone stubs a toe, or trips, or is a wimp and complains about some trivial thing. I said it for real and was terrified of what they would say. “I’m trained in CPR and First Aid, can I help?” The woman looked up, said she was an ER nurse and told me to hold up the IV bag.
I’ve never been so relieved in my life. At this point I could stop worrying, she surely had everything under control. Looking back, I realized that she couldn’t do everything. That someone, me, should have known to shout at the bystanders to bring blankets to cover up the girl immediately, to keep her warm. I don’t know how much time went by before I noticed someone on the phone to 911. I had assumed someone else had called and it hadn‘t even crossed my mind to make sure, but I’m sure they assumed the same.
Another man came by and held the IV for me and I ran to my car to get whatever I could to cover up the girl. She was laying in a small running stream of water and wearing shorts. It must have been just barely above forty degrees. I grabbed a t-shirt and a towel and laid it over her bare legs, and other people ran to get blankets from their cars too.
I stepped back. The nurse was shouting at the man on the line to EMT that they needed to send a life flight immediately, and I heard the mother weeping in the background, still staying out of sight.
The father had been doing mouth to mouth on his daughter, but she had started breathing again, and he crouched next to her, his fingers keeping track of her pulse. I want to say there was blood everywhere, but that’s not true. There was blood on the crown of the father’s head, no open scar, just an undefined smear dying his thin blond hair red. He had a clean dribble of blood down the right side of his face, from a cut above his eye, but the left side of his face was clean. There was a thick ¾ inch ring of blood around his mouth. (That’s the snapshot of the event that stays in my mind. That still of him kneeling in the freezing running water, fingers pressed against her pulse, staying calm as he tells the guy on the phone his daughter’s age, how clean his nose and chin and cheeks were, with a perfectly formed ring of blood around his mouth.) His forearms and hands were so thick with wet and clotted blood that I grabbed a clean pillowcase to try and stop the bleeding on his wrists. I pulled back a second before asking him if I could bandage his arms, realizing, horrified, that the blood was all his daughter’s.
She was thin, and had brown hair. If I hadn’t known she was white from her pale dirty legs and her white parents, I wouldn’t have known what race she was, so covered in blood was her face. She was stretched out flat and I couldn’t see her breathing, it was so shallow. I wanted to go back to the mother and tell her good news, but I couldn’t think of anything to tell her.
I don’t know how long we stood there. The other bystanders and I. We had done what we could, wrapped up the injured in warm clothing and blankets, and looked around helplessly when the nurse shouted that she needed a syringe, tubing, anything so that she could suction blood. We didn’t have anything like that in our cars. My first aid kit I had grabbed from my glove box, I didn’t even bother opening. It was full of Band-Aids and one inch antiseptic wipes and two inch gauze pads and disposable Neosporin packets. There was nothing else we could do but wait.
Although we were only a few minutes out of a moderately sized town (15,000), it seemed to take forever for the fist rescue person to arrive. I have no way of saying accurately, but it felt to me like 15 or 20 minutes. It may be been only five, I have no way of knowing. The volunteer rescue guy arrived, put a neck brace on the girl, put her on a backboard and just then the ambulance arrived.
The girl was put in the ambulance with her father, and the children and mother got in the police or volunteer rescue trucks. Those people who had stopped to help stood around confused as to what to do. I gathered from the ground my towel and shirt. When the EMT workers had picked up the girl, they had pushed off the blankets covering her. My things were soaked in mud and sand, but surprisingly little blood and I threw them in the unused pillowcase. I realized later that someone must have returned one of my jackets to my car, and I was selfishly glad that my favorite jacket had been returned while a jacket I didn’t like all that much was the one that I saw the five year old girl clutch around herself as she was placed in the rescue truck.
Later that night I realized that in my frantic search of my car for anything that the nurse could use, I had forgotten about the pens I have in there. The pens I have can be taken apart easily and one piece is a four inch tube. Probably exactly what the nurse could have used to suction blood.
I think now, about how little help I actually was, other than the fact that I was going away for the weekend and happened to have lots of coats and towels in the car. I think about the father stoically asking the nurse if he can flush out his daughter’s wounds with water, while his blood drips off his jaw. I think about how dangerous driving is and how quickly people can die. I also think about how strong a body can be. Just before the girl was loaded onto a backboard, she started moaning. A soft, terrible, weak, pain-filled moan that in any other case would have been the worst sound in the world, but at that point, a noise we all felt hope at hearing.
I wonder if the little girl was buckled in, and if she wasn’t, why not? I wonder if she survived and will recover fully. I want to think she did. I called the highway patrol the next day and asked them if they could just tell me if she was alive or not, and they couldn’t tell me anything until there was a press release. I looked online and couldn’t find anything, but I’m hoping that the girl survived and the newspapers deemed a non-fatal car crash not news worthy enough to write about. I’m hoping that’s why I can’t find any information online.

Summer Camp

2008-05-27T17:10:00.000-07:00

So, I got a job this summer at Camp K. Kids and adults come here who have mental or physical disabilities, and we help them have fun....

I've learned how to properly empty out a fully submerged canoe if it's out in the middle of the lake, I've learned how to tie a half fisherman's knot on the ropes course, how to help transfer a person who uses a wheelchair (if they need help) from their chair into/onto any of the following,
-the back of a horse
-the pool
-a canoe.
-the grass
-a different chair

This summer I'm a "trip camp leader" and I'll be away a lot for trip camps. So far I am signed up to go to Moab, Jackson Hole, Dinosaur, and one that is in Salt Lake, where we see the wonderful sights that are Salt Lake! I may also go to Bryce Canyon and Maynard Dixon, which I really want to do, if I can weasel my way in...I will update later if I'm going or not.

I'm excited for the campers to get here, although I know it will be super stressful and busy, (You work Monday through Thursday from 8 AM to 9 PM and Friday from 8 AM to 4 PM) I think it will be a lot of fun too. I am nervous about the small amount of money I'll have come the end of the summer though. To put it in perspective...in one month of work here, I will make as much as I did in eight days working in Korea. However, the people here, including me, didn't take the job to get rich...

I'm thinking about my future and this summer job. There aren't a lot of 25 year olds here working for the summer. Most everyone is between the 18 and 22 age range.

I'm hitting that point in my life where I don't really want summer jobs anymore. I want a stable job. I don't want to move twice a year and always have half my stuff in storage. I don't want to have to make new friends for four months and I'm tired of none of my best friends knowing each other. My best pals live in Idaho, Utah, Minnesota, Norway, Taiwan, Korea, and Britain. When friends get together to reminisce I can't share that funny Ecuador story with my Idaho friend because she never met Marcelo, and I can't tell funny college stories with my Minnesota friends because they don't know about Comic Frenzy. It's strange how much I like reminiscing about the past, and how little I can do that. Not that I don't like to make new memories, mind you, but there is something so fun about sitting around someone's basement, telling the same stories you've all heard five times about that time you drove down to Vegas reading aloud to each other from the book you checked out from the library, "Angels Don't Knock," and writing constructive criticisms in the margins. (Including my favorite, from Claire, "This book has made me realize my dreams of being published are all too attainable.")

I fully plan to enjoy this job to the fullest, but I don't know if I want to have another summer job next year. My limited finances might make it necessary, but if possible, I'm going to settle down somewhere for a while. (River Falls) (For two years.) (Then I'll get a teaching job somewhere and buy a house) (Then I can travel in the summer)

Timber's Haircut

2008-04-27T20:03:00.000-07:00

I've only had Timber for about 8 months now, so I've never had her in the summer months. Even in fall, winter and spring, she sheds like you wouldn't believe, leaving clumps of hair everywhere. As it has started to get warmer I find more and more of her hairs in my lunch, and decided it was time to give her a shave. Also because she is staying with my family this summer and I fear that if I dropped her off unshaven she would get a Mohawk and poofy tail like the poor family Golden Retriever did. She would probably get pretty hot this summer too.

So, the first photos are the good looking dog before her shave. She is so unsuspecting.

Well, about halfway through the shave, the electric razor started to overheat, so I let Timber have a break. As you can probably tell, she knows that she is in for more shaving and isn't very happy about it.

The final product wasn't amazing. It's not easy to shave a shivering dog who is trying to crawl away and lick your face at the same time. I'll post a photo in a few days when the cut has started to grow out a little bit, and isn't so mangy looking.

Well, it hasn't grown out yet, but here she is...both on dry ground and swimming, one of her favorite hobbies, only slightly behind licking herself when company is over in terms of habitual actions.

Things that make me smile....and those that don't.

2008-04-24T12:08:00.000-07:00

Things that make me smile...

-Joyful dancing (both watching and doing)
-The first day after winter when I can wear a T-shirt outside
-English spoken as a second language
-CCR -Eagles -Joplin -Boston (OK, I'll just say all classic rock)
-Communicating in a language that isn't English
-My dog sitting at the door wriggling with happiness because she saw from the window that I was walking up the path
-Spell check
-Bike rides
-Meeting new people (as long as they are the type of people who make the world a better place)
-Horseback rides
-My job
-Good TV and/or Movies
-Sharing memories
-Beginning to accomplish or learn something new

Things that don't make me smile...

-People who don't share
-Republicans
-People who hate other groups of people
-Dogs who bark, chew, or try to jump on me
-Children who have to go without all the things I had as a child
-Horses that get all up in my face
-Poor drivers
-People who are rude on the phone
-Rap music
-The Doors (yeah, I know, I tried to like Morrison, I just can't get into it)
-Realizing that I forgot my wallet after I've filled my cart at the grocery store
-Filling out job applications (I think I've broken the three digit mark)
-Standing in front of the white board trying vainly to spell "naive" or other such word in front of a class full of students with pencils poised to copy it down.
-Bad memories

Sponser a child.

2008-04-22T20:13:00.000-07:00

So, I was surfing the web, avoiding studying for tests and putting off writing papers that are due soon, (in fact papers and tests that are still due soon) and I found the website, Children.org. I want desperatly to move to Kenya and volunteer there and teach, but between being a full-time student, being pretty broke, and having a dog, I can't really afford it. I like to live vicariously through my website browsing.

Well, I looked through the Children.org website, and it is a little strange. What you can do is choose a country, choose an age, and choose a gender. Then you see photos of children and you pick one to sponsor. This felt wrong to me, something about flipping casually through photos of children and arbitrarily picking one based on what they looked like just seemed a little too much like going to the zoo. (They also have little ten word blurbs about the children, and their family's monthly income.) And as I'm clicking through, if I'm being totally honest, I'm thinking to myself, couldn't they spend a little more time on photos? I mean, I found myself clicking on kids who were smiling. Shouldn't the person taking the photo know that a smiling face could mean the difference between this child getting picked or not? And therefor, between this child getting an education, health care, clothing, and regular meals?

Then I felt a little sick about being the person who makes the decision which child gets to get a sponsorship that would change their life, and which child doesn't. (Which child has to keep begging on the streets and not getting enough to eat at the end of the day, much less an education. Then I felt sick about the vast disparity between their lives and mine, and the money I spend on a regular basis on my dog.) So what I ended up doing was inserting a country, (Zambia) and a gender (girl) and simply choosing the first girl that came up.

Nyamgu lives with her three siblings and their mother, and family of five lives on 25 dollars a month. She is ten years old, but looks a lot older. At first I thought she looked about 14. I think she might look so old because her face is so serious.

I am now financially responsible for Nyamgu's health care, schooling, and regular meals. It's kind of a heady feeling. I mean, you use canvas bags when you go grocery shopping to help the environment, you donate to Red Cross and you even volunteer abroad for five months, and you wonder if you have made any sort of a difference. You wonder if the 1,000 plastic bags you save over your lifetime mean anything, if the money to Red Cross changed anything, you wonder if the students you taught remember any of the things you taught them...it just seems like nothing you do makes a difference. And if you do do your part, it seems like you can never get rid of all the injustice in the world, so why try?

I feel like, I am finally making a difference. This little girl just had a world of opportunities opened to her, just because I decided to stop buying a cup of coffee every day and spend the money on something else. (I know this is starting to sound a little bit too much like the commercial, "For less than the price of a cup of coffee, you could save a child..." but I can't help it! It's true!)

And then I think to myself, why am I sharing this with people? No one else is going to care about my little sponsorship. Well, the main reason is that this blog is mostly for me, as a journal. Also, as lame as this sounds, this little sponsorship has made me really happy. I don't even know this little girl, and I already feel a connection with her. If anyone else wants to feel happy for about the same price you'd spend on a meal for two at AppleBees, you should check out Children.org too.

Illegal immigrants pay billions in taxes

2008-04-15T19:39:00.000-07:00

Don't have time to read the entire article? Here is my favorite quote, from the last line, "If anything we need more immigrants coming into the country, not less, especially with the baby boomers retiring..." Read on, republicans....

NASHVILLE, Tennessee (AP) -- The tax system collects its due, even from a class of workers with little likelihood of claiming a refund and no hope of drawing a Social Security check.

Martha Pantoja helps Jose Aguilera prepare his income taxes at a community center in Nashville, Tennessee.

Illegal immigrants are paying taxes to Uncle Sam, experts agree. Just how much they pay is hard to determine because the federal government doesn't fully tally it.

But the latest figures available indicate it will amount to billions of dollars in federal income, Social Security and Medicare taxes this year. One rough estimate puts the amount of Social Security taxes alone at around $9 billion per year.

Paycheck withholding collects much of the federal tax from illegal workers, just as it does for legal workers.

The Internal Revenue Service doesn't track a worker's immigration status, yet many illegal immigrants fearful of deportation won't risk the government attention that will come from filing a return even if they might qualify for a refund. Economist William Ford of Middle Tennessee State University says there are no firm figures on how many taxpayers are in that situation.

"The real question is how many of them pay more than they owe. There are undoubtedly hundreds of thousands of people in that situation," Ford said.

But some illegal immigrants choose to file taxes and write a check come April 15, using an alternative to the Social Security number offered by the IRS so it can collect income tax from foreign workers.

"It's a mistake to think that no illegal immigrants pay taxes. They definitely do," said Martha Pantoja, who has been helping Hispanic immigrants this tax season as an IRS-certified volunteer tax preparer for the nonprofit Nashville Wealth Building Coalition.

Among those she has assisted is Eric Jimenez, a self-employed handyman who has worked in Nashville for several years. He feels obliged to pay taxes -- even though, as Pantoja said, "nothing would happen" to him if he did not.

"I have an idea, a mentality, that to be a good citizen you have to pay taxes," he said. "Also, I'm conscious of the fact that the money we pay in taxes supports the schools and all the public services."

Pantoja said she has helped a number of construction workers who, because they are classified as independent contractors by their employers and have no taxes withheld, owe big tax bills come April. Beyond income tax, they have to pay the full Social Security and Medicare taxes due.

The Social Security Administration estimates that about three-quarters of illegal workers pay taxes that contribute to the overall solvency of Social Security and Medicare.

The agency estimates that for 2005, the last year for which figures are available, about $9 billion in taxes was paid on about $75 billion in wages from people who filed W2 forms with incorrect or mismatched data, which would include illegal immigrants who drew paychecks under fake names and Social Security numbers.

Spokesman Mark Hinkle says Social Security does not know how much of the $9 billion can be attributed to illegal immigrants. The number is certainly not 100 percent, but a significant portion probably comes from taxes paid by illegal immigrants.

Nine billion dollars sounds like a lot of money, and it is, but it is only about 1.5 percent of the total $593 billion paid into Social Security in 2005.

The impact on Social Security is significant, though, because most of that money is never claimed by the people who pay it but instead helps cover retirement checks to legal workers.

Federal law prohibits paying Social Security to illegal immigrants, but the administration factors in both legal and illegal immigration when projecting the trust fund's long-term solvency.

This is especially important as the 78 million-member baby boom generation begins to leave the work force and draw Social Security checks.

"Overall, any type of immigration is a net positive to Social Security. The more people working and paying into the system, the better," Hinkle said. "It does help the system remain solvent."

The Social Security Administration drew from census and Immigration and Customs Enforcement data in 2007 to project the effects of higher and lower immigration patterns.

If net immigration is high at 1.3 million people a year, the SSA's combined trust fund would be exhausted in 2043. But the fund runs out four years earlier if annual net immigration amounts to about half that -- 472,500 legal immigrants and 250,000 illegal immigrants.

The Internal Revenue Service doesn't have an estimate of how many illegal immigrants pay income tax.

But one indicator is the 9 million W-2 forms with mismatched names and Social Security numbers it received in 2004. The IRS said the W-2 forms with invalid Social Security numbers reported about $53 billion in wages and about three-fourths of that, $40 billion in wages, had taxes withheld.

The IRS also has been issuing Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers, or ITINs, for 12 years to foreigners without a Social Security number. It's believed that many workers who seek the ITINs are in the country illegally, and the IRS reported that there were 2.5 million tax returns filed with an ITIN in 2004.

In 2006, then IRS Commission Mark Everson told Congress that "many illegal aliens, utilizing ITINs, have been reporting tax liability to the tune of almost $50 billion from 1996 to 2003."

An IRS spokesman said more recent figures aren't available.

The Social Security and Medicare taxes from mismatched W2s for the same period was $41.4 billion, Hinkle said.

That adds up to roughly $90 billion in federal taxes during they eight-year period.

The IRS defends the ITIN system, despite criticism that some illegal immigrants have used it to open bank accounts, get mortgages and establish a record of residency and taxpaying they hope might someday lead to legal status.

"The ITIN program is bringing taxpayers into the system," Everson told Congress.

Middle Tennessee State University economics professor William Ford, who has studied taxes and immigration, says a majority of economists agree that illegal immigrants are a net benefit for the U.S. economy.

He said the tax contributions from illegal immigrants, including sales taxes, property taxes and excise taxes (such as the gas tax), are significant.

He calculates that illegal immigrants contributed $428 billion dollars to the nation's $13.6 trillion gross domestic product in 2006. That number assumes illegal immigrants are 30 percent less productive than other workers.

"If anything we need more immigrants coming into the country, not less, especially with the baby boomers retiring," he said.

Con Teaching Unions

2008-04-06T19:30:00.001-07:00

So, I've been preparing to be a teacher and I'm realizing that there is so much more to being a teacher than inspiring the future of the world. There is a curriculum to follow, standards to address, unions to deal with, and on and on and on.

I've decided I'm against Teaching Unions. They served a purpose in the past, and now they just make it easy for teachers to remain adequate and underpaid. See, one thing they've done is keep tenure in place and they have also standerdized payment scales.

Tenure- Tenure is a stupid thing. Why should having a job ever be a good enough reason to keep your job? This is another thing of the past, it kept professors/teachers safe when they published things that went against the grain in publishing papers. This seems to only apply to University professors, so why make it applicable to public school teachers?

Pay Scale- The way this works is that when you start teaching you make a certain wage that changes from district to district. Every year you work you get a tiny raise. If you change schools/districts/states and get a new job up until year seven, you can transfer your years worked and start at the same or close to the same status as where you left. However, if you've worked 14 years at one school and move to another, you can only transfer seven years of work. (Seven years is the maximum, this is something that has been agreed upon by the unions.) Then, you go back down the pay scale and have to start at year seven working your way up year by year again. Why does this suck? It prevents schools from paying great teachers more than crappy teachers. The pay scale is set (and agreed upon by the union) and as long as you've got tenure you're going to get paid the same no matter if you're a good teacher or not. It prevents teachers from changing schools after seven years. Maybe this isn't a bad thing, but then schools aren't scouting other good teachers to steal them away. Maybe this sounds like another good things. But then the schools aren't going out of their way to keep their teachers. In fact they don't generally do anything except the mandatory tiny raise each year.

Now, I personally don't have a problem with the wage teachers make. (Most teachers hate hearing what I'm about to say) But summers off, all major holidays, weekends, plus like 20 sick/personal days? Sign me up. However, do I think that money matters more to people with a family to support? Does money matter more to some people, for any reason? Would it be a better world if being and staying a teacher were harder and teachers got paid for being great teachers? (And less for being crappy teachers?) Yes, I do. And I think the best way to get there is to get rid of the union.

Of course, the second way to get there would for people to stop WANTING to be teachers. And as soon as there was a significant dip in prospective teachers, schools would get on the ball offering signing bonuses and better pay. That, I don't think is going to happen. Because people don't become teachers for the money. They do it because they have either failed at what they really want to do, or they like teaching.

ha ha!

2008-04-06T19:20:00.000-07:00

So, like I've said before, I do this online dating thing. It's funny, a little fun, and below is a test people can take, just copy and paste it to go here and take a quiz to see how well you match me. Just FYI though, I wanted to see if it would work, so I took my own test, and I only match myself 69%. So I don't know how accurate it is.

Also, before you take the test, be warned, there are some PG-13 issues discussed.

http://www.okcupid.com/matchme?u=SaraTravel

HPV

2008-03-14T09:10:00.000-07:00

I am going to be PISSED if I get cervical cancer. I want to be ONE LESS, like all the commercials are telling me I could be. But I might be ONE MORE.

Apparently cancer, and especially cervical cancer, runs in the family, and I should have gotten the shot. However, my insurance doesn't cover it and it is incredibly expensive. (600+ dollars) (Actually, that's what my doctor told me a year ago, but I looked online a few minutes ago and now I see that it is just under 400 dollars. It's getting more affordable.)

It's just f#&@%ing right wing, conservative people like this guy

http://dallasisdblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2008/03/this-is-not-necessarily-a.html

that drive me nuts!

My favorite phrase from this guy's blog is this

"I've heard from some teen students on the issue, and they say that too many of their female classmates believe having sex is cool. We used to have a name for girls like that in my teen days back in the '80s."

This is so typical. You've heard it, I've heard it, and for some reason it is infuriating me now when I used to just shake my head at it. When girls have sex, they are whores. Girls need to keep their legs glued together and it is THEIR FAULT when STDs get passed around and pregnancies happen. Even when the vast majority of girls are sleeping with boys who are older than they are. (Not in a statutory rape sort of way, just that the fact that a 17 year old boy should know more (based solely on the fact that he has been alive a year longer) than a 16 year old girl.)

And lots of places want to make this vaccine legal, but conservative people think that if girls get this vaccine it will encourage them to sleep around. One of the comments on the blog that I posted a link to above is this,

"I believe that perhaps the HPV vaccination should be made AVAILABLE to those who wish to have their daughter vaccinated but to have it be a REQUIREMENT is an insult to my parenting."

Ok, so this parent believes that, A not only is her parenting style the best, but B her daughter isn't sexually active. And maybe, right now, this daughter isn't. But, who's to say that once this girl moves out of the house, she isn't going to have sex once or even twice in college? Who's to say that she totally protected from rape? Who's to say that children aren't going to be sexually active against their parent's wishes? As long as people like this parent continue getting their voices heard in political arenas, this vaccine will stay a dirty word. If some people are right, (and they aren't) this is a shot that only future prostitutes and whores need. This is a shot that EVERY girl should get, regardless of how they, or their parents think they, plan on acting sexually.

I just don't see the problem with continuing to teach your children whatever you want to ("remain a virgin till you're married" to "everyone experiments" to anything in between) but have them get this vaccine just in case.

Do you?

1st Dates

2008-02-18T09:31:00.000-08:00

I am in a dating mode of mind, so I thought I would post below the two of the worst first dates I've ever been on. The first one was both a first and LAST date and the second one was the first date in a pretty long relationship.

OK, so don't laugh, but I worked at a potato factory when was in college. It was one of the temp agencies placements and my first night there I was reveling in the excitement of making sure the hashbrown machine didn't get clogged by poking it with a stick from time to time. I would break up my time with an occasional sweep around the machine while making sure I dodged the shooting streams of hot water that would burst out at boiling temperature from time to time. As if that job wasn't fun enough, a kind of awkward guy came up and asked me out. I didn't know how to say no, so I I said yes, then pretended to be busy and avoided him the rest of my shift. I went home at 8:00 am, secure in the knowledge that he hadn't been able to get my number. Surprise of surprises, he calls the next day, having gotten my number from somewhere, and I hesitantly say yes. He says he'll pick me up at six and we'll figure out what we're going to do then.
I realize that this date could be quite a waste of a delightful Friday night, so I decide to take charge. I get all my roommates together and instruct them to get dates. Within fifteen minutes their little black books are put away and they all have dates. Then we plan together and come with the idea to go out and go night rock climbing. There is a great spot about 20 minutes away and we can bring firewood and smores and head lamps.
So, my date shows up on time and we ambush him with the idea. I think he liked the idea of not having to pay for anything, and not having to think up anything, but not really the idea of rock climbing. (He was on the heavier side.)
So we go and everyone is having this great time, we're eating roasted sweet potatoes from the fire, we're climbing at night and chatting and playing games, but (I don't even remember his name! We'll call him Jose.) but Jose keeps pulling me aside into the darkness to try and get some alone time. I'm not really up for that and so the night ends without him getting the chance to try for a kiss. He asks me as he drops me off back at my house if he can call me again, and like a doofus, I say, "Ummm, sure." (I'm no longer this chicken about dating, this was four or five years ago.)
The next day I get home and see a note for me, someone named Sandy has called me twice. Hmmmmm, I don't know a Sandy, so I ignore it. Then I get the dreaded call from Jose. But he doesn't want me to go on another date, no, he wants me to lie to his wife for him. He says she found my number in his car and wants to know what happened. He told her that he only had my number from work, and we never saw each other. I was pretty flabbergasted at his audacity.
So I hang up without making any promises and in the next few seconds Sandy calls me back. She sounded like a pretty with-it girl, so I don't know why she was so stupid. I told her the truth, that we had gone out, but i wasn't interested in seeing him again, and she told me this whole long story about how he has done this before and how they have a daughter together and then she started getting really mad, as though it was my fault that he had asked me out. As though I should have given him a background check before going out with him.
Anyhow, I hung up and and that was the last of Jose and my little attempt to break up the Gomez family.

This next date happened in Ecuador. I had met a Korean guy named Chan-He at the school I went to to learn Spanish. Since I had lived in Korea for a year, we had struck up a conversation and liked talking. So then he asked me on a date, and I was pretty pumped about it. We decide to go see "The Departed," which is playing at the movie theater just a ten minute walk from my house. So he picks me up and we start walking. We both know that Quito is not a safe city. But it is still dusk and we can walk and talk on the way there and take a taxi back home once it is properly dark. As we are walking I am talking about how two guys tried to mug me in the very park we are walking past, and he scoffs at me, "Yo llegue aqui hace ocho meses, y nunca he tuve problemas." (Or something like that, I don't remember exactly and his Spanish was better than mine is.) My Korean was pretty crappy, and his English was nothing to write home about, so we communicated in Spanish) Basically, he said, "I've been living here for eight months, and nothing has ever happened to me."
So, if you want to take a guess at what happens next. Yep, I turn around and see two big guys walking quickly towards us. I have enough time to grab Chan-He's arm and say his name before the guys are between us. The smaller guy takes me and tries to pull my bag out of my arms. This is something that I will NOT let happen. My passport is in this bag. But at first I am so stunned I don't do anything except clutch my bag tighter and back away. After a few seconds I come to my senses and start fighting back and screaming. The mugger is in the process of trying to rip my watch off my arm at this point, and I kick him pretty hard, (good old Tae Kwon Do lessons) and he backs off. And his pal joins him. It was pretty terrifying in every way. Especially because that day a friend of a friend had gotten stabbed for resisting a mugging. So, I was pretty shook up, and Chan-He comforted me and calmed me down and hugged me....and in only a few short days we were officially dating.

Heath Ledger Died Today.

2008-02-15T09:11:00.000-08:00

(I saw this on "Fathom_Works" journal posted on (yes, believe it.) okcupid.com. It affected me, and he said I could post it here.)

Online Dating! Yea!

2008-02-09T23:47:00.000-08:00

So, I did it. I joined an online (free) dating service. I haven't made many friends here at school, and I know I haven't been here this long, but I'm already tired of weekends sitting at home working ahead on my homework. And as most of my fellow students are drastically younger or older than I am, or female, it looks unlikely that I will meet many potential dates from there. I have been getting involved in the community and I start work in a few weeks, and hope to make friends through that, but what I really want is someone to go out with on a Friday night. Someone to dress up for and a reason to put makeup on, and the excitement of going out on a date. And sooner rather than later.
So, I signed up for this dating service. Apparently it is hugely popular. There are hundreds of people signed up for it within ten miles of where I live and thousands once you count 45 minutes away from where I live.
So, I've set up my little profile and put some photos of myself on, and even taken the personality tests and checked out the people I match most closely with, and rather than learning things about other people, I'm learning things about myself. And not nice things either.
As much as I hate the Millionaire Matchmaker, and her emphasis on looks, on hair and clothes, and her insistence that we live in a visually driven society, I can't debate it. And my best arguments that it will continue to be a visually driven society until we stop making it that way fall by the wayside as I click past the men that don't strike me in some way visually.
I want to meet people who know that what's on the inside is most important, people who will look at the real me. People that scoff at the importance society puts on appearance. And while maybe those people exist, I have learned that I'm not one of them.
Plenty of nice, respectable, funny guys have sent me messages on the service. After a perfunctory glance through their profile, I usually delete their messages without even a reply back. And to be 100% honest, it doesn't really even matter how witty or original their profile is, the deal was made or broken on the photo. Sure it matters to me what they’re doing in their photo. A guy rock climbing is more attractive to me than a guy in his favorite basketball jersey, all other things being the same. But the most important thing was (and always will be, at least on dating sites) looks.
I look through their photos and discard them because they are 1)-too boring 2)-too ugly 3)-too fat 4)-too anything else I don't like. And if, again, I'm being 100% honest with myself, number 1 should be number 3, because looks are more important than boringness, I just hated to put that first.
I hate that I put so much importance on looks. I've always thought that it was "other people" that were superficial and shallow. I guess that's either not true, or I have become an “other person.”
With the utmost respect to my ex-boyfriends, who have all been kind, respectable, funny, exciting, smart, great guys, I wouldn't have given most of them a second glance if I had seen their profiles on a dating service. And then I would have missed out on meeting some of the best people I have ever known, because of the value I place on looks.
What I have loved about past boyfriends hasn't been their jaw line or trim stomach, it's been their humor, their spontaneity, their ability to challenge me, to make me try to be a better person, and their efforts to give me experiences that I wouldn't have had on my own. And 90% of them, I started off not attracted to them in the least, but grew to be attracted to them through our friendship.
So, what do I do? Option 1)-Online dating/matchmaking is not for me. Not a big deal, go back to meeting guys the old fashioned way, which has worked perfectly well in the past. That way I can get to know a guy and rate him based on the whole package, rather then a photo and a blurb about themselves. 2)-Ignore my initial desire to click past people because their physical aspect doesn't appeal to me 3)-deal with the fact that while I'm not a "Real Housewife of Orange County," looks do matter to me, and it is a visually driven society, and that I am more superficial than I thought. And maybe that isn't the worst thing in the world.

New Plan

2008-01-23T13:31:00.001-08:00

Ok, this is how plans change.

January - May 2008 Go to school

Summer 2008 Work in Ireland at a kids camp

Fall, Winter, Spring 2008-2009 Go to School.

Summer 2009 two months volunteering in Africa or China, then one month working in Taiwan (This may be changed around with Summer 2010)

Fall 2009 Student teach.

Jan -May 2010 Go to School

Summer 2010 Who knows? Maybe work in Ireland again.

December 2010 Graduate with my Masters

January - September 2011 Lok for work and who knows what else?

2011 Have a real job and maybe buy a house.....who knows?

Make a Difference.

2008-01-10T14:27:00.000-08:00

I think these are such good organizations, check them out.

Top 5 Issues

2008-01-07T12:28:00.000-08:00

I've never been good at arguing with people. I like listening to discussions about politics and so forth from time to time, but I don't generally join in. I don't like explaining why I feel the way I do, or convincing other people that my opinion is better than theirs, even though it is. So here are my over-simplified issues that are important to me in the upcoming presidential election. And I have read up on all the information, and know the pros and cons of each issue, and that things aren't as easy as they look on paper, and that change takes time, and that no issue is black and white good and bad and it's not like I just want to live in some happy-go-lucky world where everyone eats peach cobbler and no one goes hungry. (Well, I do want to live in that world, but I know it isn't feasable. People would try and eat flan and malted milk shakes and other gross desserts) Anyhow, posted below are the issues that are important to me.

Foreign Policy/Relations - Help other countries more. Not with bullets, but with education, technology, and vaccines.

Social Security - This is such an easily solved problem. Make really rich people put more money into social security.

National Defense - Spend less money on defense and more money on issue number one.

Immigration - Pave pathways to legalize immigrants already living in the States and offer them more support in things like learning English, acclimation and so forth.

Gay Rights - I think Gays should have the right to marry.