Yesterday I went to the faculty art exhibition on campus. There was a lot of really cool, very original artwork of all kinds, from paintings on sandpaper to polished wood furniture to videorecordings to interactive canvases with sharpies attached. Below, I've copied word-for-word the little explanatory placard for my favorite:
Donna Stack Porterhouse, 2004 Video installation with concrete pedestal, rabbit fur
Twelve minute black and white loop of the artist and her husband making out to the audio soundtrack of the artist eating a rare porterhouse steak and guzzling beer.
Oh man, am I excited. And the best part is that this was one of the jobs I was most interested in actually doing. A lot of the applications I sent out were for jobs I would be willing to have, but this one I think will be a lot of fun. It's at a local camp/retreat center about fifteen minutes past the edge of town. It's up in the foothills a little way, so there's still snow on the road in and around the camp. Weird coincedence: it's owned and operated by the United Methodist Church (the church my parents go to, the church I'm getting married in). I'm basically just extra help in the kitchen. It's a small kitchen compared to the other camps I've worked at. The dining hall seats 100, and they sometimes will run double shifts if they have to, but basically we'll never be cooking for more than half what we serve at Pigott. Best of all, I'm actually getting minimum wage (take that, boy scout salary!) and I get to go home at night since it's so close.
I start this weekend. I am so excited.
On another note, today is Valentine's Day (as if anyone hadn't noticed), and it's the first Valentine's Day I've actually spent with a boyfriend. Last year, Chris was in Kentucky still. Looking back further, I've actually gone on three first dates on Valentine's Days. But today was great. Chris got a string trio to come to our apartment at lunchtime and serenade me, which was really sweet. And I gave him his Valentine's present, the Pojar. For those who aren't nature geeks, Pojar is the author of Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast, which is considered the Bible of plant identification by Brinkley and Pigott nature staffers. I really wanted to get it for him for Christmas, but it was really tough to track down, and I only found it a few weeks ago.
And, in the category of how awesome my life is lately, Chris's best friends are coming over this weekend, and he plans to play a lot of D&D with them. (Originally, I was included in the D&D, and Chris and I even developed a character for me, but now I'll be working most of Saturday and Sunday). Then on Monday, my family is coming to visit for the day. They haven't seen the apartment yet, and I haven't seen them in about a month.
I'm still flying pretty high about the job, and probably will be for a while. Awesome!
The summer I turned fourteen, I spent a lot of nights up late on the computer, sending email to a boy I knew from an elementary school gifted program. He and I wrote long emails back and forth about anything that came to mind, sometimes exchanging two or three in a single night. (This was before I discovered instant messenger.) All his subject lines were Beatles song lyrics. I tried to be as clever as possible in response, but most of the time I couldn't match him. We were young, and I think we both knew it wasn't forever, but we were pretty earnest about our nocturnal correspondance. I don't think I ever told my parents about him, and we never made plans to get together in person, because I think the magic would have been spoiled if we'd done that. Near the end of the summer, he went on vacation with his family for a few weeks. He'd neglected to tell me he'd be going, and the night before he left, he sent out one last email saying that, by the way, he was leaving. He ended that email with the words "I love you" in about a dozen languages. I got really upset and wrote angsty teenage poetry for the rest of the summer.
When he came home, it had been a natural break, and we rather easily picked up again, but this time as friends. Because he went to a school across town, we did run into each other a few times at district-wide band events, but once I dropped out of band, I didn't see him again. The emails slowed. We commisserated about what we labeled "DumpFest 1999", shortly after both of us had broken up with the people we'd been seeing, as had several of our friends. After our sophomore year of high school, I lost touch with him entirely. And to be honest, I didn't think about it too much.
A couple months ago, my mom ran into his family at Trader Joe's. My mom asked how he was doing, and it turns out he is at Central, and is engaged to a girl I knew, who he started dating not all that long after our email romance ended. Both he and his fiance are music ed majors, like Chris, and they're getting married a month after we are. Weird coincidence.
Today, I finally ran into him after a recital his fiance put on. It wasn't at all like I thought it would be. I had hoped we could just pick up where we left off and be friends again, but I can see now that was unreasonable. I mean, he and I hadn't had a friendship that took place in person since we were twelve. But this meeting wasn't awkward like we had a history together, because I think we both realize that we were really just kids then. What this meeting was like was like running into an old acquaintance or a friend of convenience who you don't have anything in common with anymore. I think we might have something in common now, but I guess it has just been too long.
I'm totally embarrassed by the length of this post.
Sometimes, everything just fits together perfectly, and all areas of life align positively.
I've been going to a new church and bible study group, and it is working out really well for me. I'm making new friends and I feel like it is positively impacting me.
Camp interviews went really well last weekend. We're still a little behind on numbers, but the people we have talked to so far are really high-quality.
I'm doing really well in all my classes, even the ones I don't like. And so far, I haven't skipped any classes either.
Sam lent me his copy of the Lord of the Rings, so maybe I will finally finish Fellowship.
My parents will be driving out to visit over Presidents Day weekend.
I finally talked to my dear friend Rachel in Kentucky; it had been too long.
The other Rachel is back from Ghana, safe and happy.
Chris and I finally bought Napoleon Dynamite. We keep passing it in the video store and figured why rent it since we're definitely going to want to watch it more than once.
The story that prompted me to write this post follows. In my Political Science 101 class (and yes, it sucks but I do have to take it; none of my half-dozen other poli sci classes cover the same material), we are reading a book co-written by my professor. Worse, we are supposed to write reaction papers to each chapter (about three per week) and post them on Blackboard, an online forum. Well, I had been getting more and more annoyed by the authors' conspiracy theories and how they seemed so intent upon supporting their theories rather than instructing and guiding students, the citizens of tomorrow. So for the most recent chapter, I wrote a reaction paper stating that I thought the authors were irresponsible for reinforcing the easy stereotypes and false beliefs that people have about how candidates are chosen. They spent a lot of time dwelling on the fact that a lot of voters feel they have no voice in choosing candidates, and failed to even mention the caucus system. I said that a responsible civics teacher should give his students the tools to make their voice heard. He responded (he rarely responds to student posts) and posed some vaguely interesting questions which I responded to. Then, in class today, we spent almost the whole class period talking about the caucus system. He described how it works, both in its origins and how it works now, and what it does. He also made some good points about its limitations. He made me reconsider my views, but he also did exactly what I wanted him to do--to educate the class, which was frankly clueless about caucuses. At the end of class, he thanked me for my contributions on Blackboard and told me that if he was revising his book again, he would have me help.
Wow. I just chastised him and called him an irresponsible teacher, and he publicly recognizes my writing talents and my way of thinking. It is a good day.
