Yesterday I was having a conversation with a woman who I’ve been in a few classes with here at Wells.  At the end of the conversation I said something like  “Well, okay, I’ve got to go to orchestra now” and she said

“Wow, you do a lot.”

What I wanted to say was “Thank you”, but as the words were in my mouth, I realized that “Wow, you do a lot” isn’t actually a compliment.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that to someone listening in, her “Wow, you do a lot” would have sounded more like “Are you completely insane?”

It got me to thinking about stress addiction.  Earlier this semester, I listened to a friend of mine describe her busy schedule (twenty credits, a part-time job, auditing an art class, a couple of clubs) and I actually felt guilty for not doing enough.  Keep in mind, this girl is no longer working that hard because it’s not actually possible for her to do so.  But hearing about it, even when I suspected she would eventually relax her commitments a little, was enough to make me jealous.

Here is a list of what I’m doing right now:

15 credits of “real” classes.
5 credits of independent study, choir, and orchestra.  Total=20 credits.
Henry’s VIII, a campus a’ cappella group, 6 hours/week.
Work study job, 5 hours/week.
Campus Greens, which I’m a partial member of.

Wow, I do a lot.  And sometimes I feel like it ought to be more…

Life is about small pleasures.  There are things that I like that are silly, but they make me happy.

The way certain outdoor lights make everyone’s lips look purple at night.
The way the wrapper on a roll of toilet paper crinkles into a ball.
Rare meat.
Cold showers on hot days.
A good stretch.
Good advertising.

And plenty of other similar things.  I appreciate them.

• Be a professional reader-out-louder
• fortune-telling/ mystic healing
• plant a garden and maintain it
• drive across the country in a cool van/ Magical Mystery Tour
• work on a political campaign
• work/ volunteer with a Christian youth group
• be a gypsy
• learn to play snare drums and play them in a parade
• do a juice fast for up to three days
• get into a pattern of yoga, meditation, and organic diet
• perhaps make something of declaiming
• volunteer with a feminist group
• lead a Girl Scout troop

What you know about Thomas Paine:

He was an American colonist just prior to the Revolution who wrote Common Sense along with a few other pro-revolution materials.

What you don’t know about Thomas Paine:

He was born and grew up in England, where he failed at almost everything he tried.  First he failed out of school.  Then, worked for a time as an apprentice in his father’s corset-making shop, but he failed at that too.  For a while he tried being a sailor and a school-teacher, but that didn’t work out so well for him either.  Later, Paine became a tax officer, but he was fired from that job not once but twice for embezzeling.

So, after randomly meeting Benjamin Franklin, Paine decided to move to America.  There he became a journalist, which actually worked out pretty well for him.  His writings were widely read by American colonists, and works like Common Sense played a huge role in the Revolution.

Eventually, Paine returned to England, but there his writing got him into trouble.  Considered an enemy of the crown, he escaped arrest by fleeing to France, where he played a part in the begining of the French Revolution.  Unfortunately, as was the case with many initial leaders of the Revolution in France, Paine was soon jailed for his beleifs.  James Monroe (of the newly formed United States) helped him out of that fix, and he returned to the U.S. on an invitation from Thomas Jefferson in 1802.  Sadly enough, some of his more radical ideas had caused the American people to fall out of love with Thomas Paine, and died in New York City in relative isolation in 1809.

 

This post is largely paraphrased from:  http://www.ushistory.org/PAINE/

Here is a piece I wrote for my Off Campus Study class as a reflection on a “significant experience abroad”.

I learned to ride a bike at the age of nineteen on a bumpy dirt road in Costa Rica.  The road was thick with the traffic of pedestrians, other bikers, and even a few cars.  My friends were almost literally riding circles around me.
“At least the road is flat, Emily!” they said.  “Imagine if you had to learn to ride on a hill!”
“I’d be dead,” I muttered.  I was terrified.

            The whole thing had started earlier that week.  Cat had heard about Puertoviejo de Talamanca, a Caribbean beach-town, and was completely enchanted with the idea of spending the weekend there.  The rest of us agreed to try it out.  After all, why shouldn’t we?  It promised to be fun and cheap.  When the COSI staff described it to us, they talked about the bikes.
“Is very cheap.  You can rent bikes and go to the beach,” they told us in their accented but near-perfect English.  My stomach knotted up every time the bikes were mentioned, but I told myself everything would work out.  I can probably pull it off.  I almost had it the last time I tried.  And if not, I’ll just walk.  It’ll be fine.

            I tried several times to warn the others, but they didn’t seem to get it.  When the time came and we actually found ourselves at a bike-rental shop, I had to tell them straight.
“Okay, guys.  I’ve never actually ridden a bike before.”  I think they were a little shocked.
“Emily, how old are you again?  What do you mean you’ve never ridden a bike before?”  They resolved to teach me. 
“You’ve just got to keep peddling.  Don’t move your arms so much.  No, don’t stop, keep peddling!”  At least one of them rode steadily beside me the whole time, giving me encouragement and staying safely between me and the traffic.

            I peddled through the bumps, rocks, dips, and mud.  I talked aloud, coaching myself through the hard bits.  When we passed people walking or biking in the other direction, I complemented myself on not running into them.  Passerby started to stare.  At one point, afraid I was losing my balance, I threw out a hand to steady myself on a parked car.  The car alarm started going off.  That was embarrassing.  When I finally got off the bike, I was shaking with adrenaline.  But the point is I did it.  I actually learned to ride a bike and made it to the beach and back without incident.

            While it isn’t necessarily the most significant experience I had while abroad, it is certainly indicative of what the trip was like for me.  I tried new things with only minimal fear of failure.  I ate new and different foods, went surfing and rappelling, and spoke to strangers in a different language.  And I tried biking even though I had failed at it in the States.  But this story isn’t just about trying something new, it’s also about friendship.  It would have been easy for the others to laugh at me or ride ahead and make me walk to the beach alone, but they didn’t.  Here were these people I had met essentially only a few weeks before, and they were already being such good friends to me.  The entire trip abroad was a great bonding experience for us, four people who definitely would not have been such close friends otherwise.

I’m sure acronyms can be quite useful.  And the best ones are clever, that’s nice.  But really, they are severely overused.  On campus, there are a plethora of clubs, positions, and campus groups that refer to themselves by acronyms.  That might be fine if they ever used the full names, but they don’t.  I am constantly getting emails saying things like “MUN is having its first meeting of the semester.  New members welcome!”  Which is all well and good if I’m in MUN, but if I’m a prospective new member, how am I supposed to know what those letters stand for?

Here is a list of a few of the acronyms we throw around on campus- you can try to make something of them.

MUN
MSA
WBS
WRC
WIIS
BIRT
GP
RA
TA
HRA
SA
SU
AI
Q & A
POWER
WISA
IT
JICS
LIS
CoCo
SAAC
AER
FARGO
WIRE

Hello, all.

This is not so much a blog post as shameless advertising.

I started a new blog.  It’s called Butterfly’s Books, and it is a catalog of children’s literature.  So far it’s mostly me reviewing books I like, but hopefully someday it will be a resource for various educators.  It’s getting more exciting by the day, so check it out!

Here’s the link:
http://butterflysbooks.wordpress.com/

Thanks!

So, you’re home for winter break.  The holidays and all that.  You see your family, you celebrate, you waste your time watching movies on the couch.  But you aren’t the only one who has come home.  Your friends (high school or otherwise) are all home too, and you want to see everyone.  Hopefully they want to see you too.

The trouble is, for me anyway, that I have so many friends and aquaintences I’d like to see.  Sometimes I even feel compelled to meet up with people who aren’t necessarily close friends of mine just to find out what they’re up to these days.  Of course my really close friends and I make time to see each other.  But there are a lot of people that I don’t end up spending time with.  We run into each other at the mall or a holiday concert, and our conversation goes something like this:

“Hey!”
“Hi, how are you?”
“Great!  So, how’s school?”
“School is excellent; I love it there.”
“Oh good.  Hey, we should really get together sometime to catch up.”
“Yeah, definitely.”

That yeah, definitely is the tombstone on any future get-together we might have in mind.  Of course we want to get together, and at the time of the conversation we have every intention of doing so.  But somewhere along the line that yeah, definitely creeps in and ruins everything.  In polite conversation these days, yeah, definitely has come to mean
“I’d really like to hang out sometime, but we’re both busy so it probably won’t happen.”

Let’s break it down.  Yeah is of course an informal version of the word “yes”.  Here it means “maybe”, or even “probably not”.  Definitely is a trickier word.  On the surface it sounds great.
“We should definitely get together.”
But in truth it becomes a substitution for the actual event.  The word definitely says
“I care about our friendship enough to use this strong word.  I am putting effort and caring into us.”
The false promise given by definitely eventually replaces the formal act of getting together.

On rare occasions, I do actually hang out with the yeah, definitely people.  It’s often pretty awkward.  We’ve used insincere pledges on each other so many times that our friendship has sort of withered away.  We find we have nothing to talk about anymore, or perhaps we never really did.  Maybe, we think, it would have been better to have just left it at our chance meeting and our yeah, definitely.

I wrote this recently for my sociology class.  My professor says I should be careful not to turn myself into “a preacher and a moralist, trying to impose as absolute truth a simple personal opinion”.  He’s right, of course, so let me say this before I record my postulations here:  The following is my personal opinon.  I understand and celebrate the idea that there are different versions of truth for different people.  This is mine at my current stage of life.

There are a few things that I don’t believe a person should ever want to say to another.

“I need you in my life.”
“I can’t live without you.”
“You complete me.”

These statements and variations of them are in my opinion unhealthy and contrary to the concept of equality and respect that should be present in human relations.  Unfortunately, people in romantic relationships, both men and women, say these very words to one another every day.  Why do people feel the need to rely on others this way?  To say any one of the aforementioned phrases is to imply that one other person is the sole reason you have to live, and that is unacceptable in terms of achieving personal liberty. 

One should never enter a relationship of any kind, particularly a romantic relationship, under the impression that the power of that connection alone will turn his or her life around.  Entering a relationship should not be an act of defiance, of fleeing someone or something, or the sole means of creating a life for oneself.  It should be the work of each of us to create a life for ourselves first and to find romance, if desired, afterword.  That is not to say that a person can be completely self-reliant.  I do believe that it is important to have a network of family, friends, and people we can rely on in our lives.  But to be in a romantic relationship is to give a large part of oneself to another person, and that is not a contract we should enter into lightly.  Romance should not be a union of two halves to create one whole person, but rather a connection of two complete people who complement each other.  It should be a love between two separate people leading separate but sometimes intertwined lives.

In a broader sense, the same thing applies to gender.  Men and women are simply not the same and shouldn’t try to think of themselves as one community (when it comes to gender issues).  They do obviously need each other, just as we need love and connection in our lives.  There must be balance.  But similarly to a romantic relationship, each can function in its own sphere without the other.  Gender is certainly an important part of our makeup, and we should each celebrate our own gender, but that does not mean that we should celebrate (or condemn) only gender.  When meeting a new person, gender is and should be one of the first things that crosses our minds, but it should not be the only thing we think of, and we definitely should not let it affect the way we think about a person’s other qualities.

All of this sounds very cold and hostile, but let me stress this point:  Men and Women are not enemies.  Though they may live separate lives and survive independently of each other, men and women should be above all friends, partners, allies.  They should work together not because they need to but because they want to.  Unfortunately, both men and women easily lost sight of this.  They begin to see each other as opposing forces, armies of suppression based on misunderstanding.  But society doesn’t have to be this way.  For our own futures and the futures of our children, we must now begin the rebuilding of relationships between men and women.  Each person, knowing that men and women are equal partners in life and love, can begin by changing relationships in his or her life to reflect this equality.  And we can start with our romantic relationships, affirming that though we love each other and want to be together, we are all separate people with separate goals, aspirations, and souls.

I was in eigth grade when I decided to become a history teacher.  My reasoning was very systematic.  It went something like this:

It’s time I decided what I want to be when I grow up.  I know I want to be a teacher, but what do I want to teach?  Elementary school might be fun, but it’s not specialized enough.  I want to impart knowledge.  I have A’s in every class, I could teach anything I wanted to!  What, then?  Not the arts- I don’t feel good enough at those, fun though they are.  Not math- I don’t feel good enough or passionate enough about that either.  Science is fun, but I don’t really understand or care about physics.  Spanish is out- I like learning it but my heart’s just not in it enough to teach.  Hmm, that leaves English and History.  I do really enjoy both of those subjects, but which would I rather teach?  English, I think.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Well now wait a minute.  Do I like English because I like English or because I have an awesome English teacher right now?  I would hate to dedicate my life to a subject I don’t really love.  I love reading.  I love writing.  I’m even pretty good at correcting other people’s writing.  What’s not to like?
SCENTENCE DIAGRAMING.  Gosh I hate diagraming sentences.  No, I could never teach that.  History it is, then.

In retrospect, I’m really glad I chose history.  I feel like it’s my passion- my calling in life.  I want to be able to show students that history is interesting, to share with them the excitement I feel about it.  I am dedicating my life to something I love.

Even so, I can’t help but notice that it was only after I chose my career path that my grades in math and sciences started to drop.  They didn’t drop far- my lowest grades were in math, and I never got below a C.  (Well, actually I did fail gym once, but that’s an entirely different story.)  I would like to think of this as proof that I chose the right path for myself- that I am doing something I’m genuinely good at.  But what if it’s not the CAUSE of my choice but rather the CONSEQUENCE of it?

For instance, I’ve always been rather interested in the environmental sciences- biology, zoology, botany, etc.  If I had chosen that as my career path, how different would my life be?  There are figures I used to be able to do in my head easily that I now require a calculator for.  It’s embarassing.  If I had chosen a future in science, would my math and science grades, necessitated by my choice, have remained solid A’s?  What about my humanities grades?  By choosing a left-brained profession did I unknowingly shut down a part of my right-brain?

The bottom line is this:  I love history, and I think it is the Right Choice for me.  But could there have been other Right Choices in another world?  Questions to ponder.