On Becoming a Person

My morning commute to school is 15.7 miles.  Most of that is highway driving.  On a good day, it can take me about 25 minutes to get to campus from home.  On a bad day, like today, it can take me almost an hour.  When I calculated it out, my average speed was 31mph.  On the highway, where the speed limit is 65.  Amazing.

It was cloudy and rainy today.  Nothing out of the ordinary for Ohio, right?  Yet for some reason, people were driving like they have never seen a raindrop before.  Classic Ohioans.  When the snow starts, they’ll drive like they’ve never seen that either.

My lane at a dead standstill. 

Based on my experiences, here are some guidelines to follow, in case you ever want to start a traffic jam.  I’m pretty sure they are almost 100% guaranteed.

1.) Tailgate the person in front of you.  Even if you know there is someone directly in front of them, and someone directly in front of that car too, just tailgate anyway.  Somehow, it might get you to your destination sooner.

2.) Slam on your brakes for no reason.  Often.  Especially when you are being tailgated by a car who is also being tailgated by a car who is also being tailgated.

3.) In fact, slam on your breaks when you are going 70mph and being tailgated.  You need to get your speed down to 55mph as quickly as possible, so why do it gradually when you can do it instantly?  I mean, you’ve got at least 1 foot between you and the subsequent car.  That’s plenty of room.

4.) Change lanes.  Abruptly.  In fact, don’t read any of the exit signs until it is nearly too late and you have to cut someone off to make it up the ramp.

5.) Better yet, change lanes abruptly for no reason.  If another lane looks like it might be going a tad faster than the one you are in, move into it immediately and worry about picking up enough speed to fit into the flow of its’ traffic later!  You don’t have any time to waste!  And when the lane you were previously in picks up its pace, move back.

6.) If traffic is keeping up a certain speed, make sure that you go 10mph slower than whatever speed that is.  This will ensure that other drivers, who want to be going faster, need to change lanes to get around you.  This is especially effective if you are in the middle lane.

7.) Don’t let anyone merge in front of you.  Ever.  Force the other car to either slam on its’ breaks and wait for you to pass, or to gun it and then slam on their breaks after getting around you.

8.) Don’t turn on your headlights in the rain, the sleet, the snow, the dusk, the dawn, or any time except when it is already cloudless, bright, and sunny outside.

9.) Change radio stations often.  Look for things in the glove compartment.  Fiddle with your iPod.  Talk on your cell phone.  Put on makeup.  Shave.  Do anything that will distract you sufficiently to prevent you from stopping in a gradual manner.  Instead, look up at the last possible second, say “Oh crap!”, and slam on your breaks before you hit the person you were tailgating.

10.) If you see a car pulled over on the side of the road, even if everything is perfectly fine, make sure you slow down so you can get a really, really good look.  You don’t want to miss the opportunity to see someone injured.

Here are some more fruitful images, all of which were taken while my car was stopped for a significant enough amount of time to allow me to feel safe doing this.

 
Here it comes… finally… after like 10 miles of near standstill…

Oh, I can see the exit ramp… but it’s so far away… the traffic is backed up from the red light at the street after the ramp all the way onto the highway and into the right lane for yards and yards.

 
At least now I am on the ramp :-/

I love you, city of Akron.  I love leaving for class an hour earlier than I have to be there, and some days arriving 40 minutes early, and some days arriving 10 minutes late.

With the arrival of fall, I took the liberty of roasting up some spaghetti squash.  It is positively scrumptious, and can be an awesome substitute for pasta or any grain side dish.  Here’s the play by play:

1.) Cut the squash in half lengthwise.  It is really hard to cut, so I recommend asking somebody in the produce department to halve it for you before you buy it (they should do this—when I worked in produce I did it for people all the time).  If you have to cut it yourself, you will need a really good knife!  (John cut this one for me).   

2.) Scoop out as many of the visible seeds as you can… I found that no matter how hard I tried some still ended up in the final product.

3.) Place the squash face down on a baking sheet and put in the oven at 375 for approximately 1 hour.

4.) I also roasted some of the seeds on a separate sheet.  They were only in for about 10 minutes, or until golden brown.

5.) Remove the squash, flip it over, and use a fork to scrape out the insides.  It should fall apart like spaghetti noodles. 

    (Don't get distracted by my dinner leftovers-- they aren't part of the squash demonstration!)

6.) You can literally scrape out the entire thing.

7.) Put the squash in a bowl and season how you like it.  I loaded mine with cinnamon, sugar, and butter.  Some people say it is also really good with spaghetti sauce on it, just like noodles.

8.) Enjoy!

9.) Cleanup is awesome—you just throw the shells away!

Lately I’ve been getting more into spoken word (a type of poetry; like slam poetry sort of… it’s a lot more intense than regular poetry).  I have a book of it and a CD, and last week I went to see Carlos Andres Gomez on campus (as mentioned in my previous post!).

Anyway, I thought I would share a couple of my favorite pieces of his, via YouTube.

Distinctly Beautiful: He talks about his experiences as a public school teacher in New York City (the Bronx, I think), and how he used to ask the girls to do an activity where they write “I am distinctly beautiful because…” on their papers.

What’s Genocide: Again, starting from an experience as a school teacher, he talks about what genocide is—in the United States.  The video is a bit annotated.

Here's the link to the full version, sound only: http://www.speakyoursoul.org/speak/poems/whats.genocide

Man Up: And lastly, this is actually my most favorite.  He didn’t perform this when I saw him, but I found it on YouTube and I really like it.  It’s like 10 minutes long, but I got really into it and it went quite quickly.

That’s about it I guess… I just like his ability to write about life as it really is… and how it is so evident from his work that he genuinely loves and cares for all sorts of people.  That is rare!

8:00pm – Finally sit down to start studying for the Vocational Behavior class exam that is scheduled for 9:00am the following day.  Break out the 12 page study guide I have made for myself earlier and attempt to memorize lists of studies, authors names and dates, correlational findings, meta-analyses, definitions of a zillion similar constructs.

10:00pm – Realize that I am struggling to retain any of the information on the 12 pages; resort to making flash cards of the most important material instead.

10:40pm – Run out of index cards to write on.

12:00am – Eyes are completely glossing over.  I still have like 1/4 of the material that I have not even looked at, but I go to sleep anyway.

5:00am – Wake up; study some more.  Intermittently fall asleep.

7:20am – Get ready for school

8:10am – Leave the house with backpack, lunch, laptop bag and purse.  Get outside, realize it is raining, and come back for umbrella.  While trying to lock the door, drop the umbrella, handle side down, on my bare toe.  Scream in the hallway.

8:12am – Unable to find garage door opener in my purse, I drop my belongings on the neighbor’s porch and dump everything out.  No garage door opener.  Go inside and look for it there.  It’s not there either.  Realize that I have left it in my car, which is locked inside the unopened garage.

8:14am – Call John at work, who has the spare opener in his car.

8:20am – Get the emergency bypass key, try to use it, struggle, ask John via phone what I am supposed to be doing.

8:23am – Figure it out; drag the garage door open by hand.  Get a handful of loose asphalt stuck under my fingernails.  Go back for my belongings, which are still on the porch.  Load up the car, back out of the garage, stop the car, shut the garage by hand, get in the car, look at the clock, scream again.  Exam starts in half an hour.

8:25am – Drive to school, frantically memorizing the rest of the information I have failed to even look at while balancing it on my steering wheel.

8:45am – Arrive in parking deck; walk across campus as fast as humanly possible, still memorizing.

9:00am – Take the test.  Write 7 pages of essays.  Cry a little on the inside.

10:40am – Finish the exam; pack up my stuff and go to the counseling center.

11:00am – 3:00pm – See clients.

3:20pm – Return to the psychology department, go to the computer lab and print out all of the stuff I have failed to prepare for teaching due to the studying.

4:00pm – Arrive in my classroom and start setting up, only to realize that I have left my notes in my office.  Run back to the psychology department, passing a student who says, “The classroom is the other way.”

4:05pm – Arrive back in classroom covered in sweat and thanking God that I somehow thought it would be a good idea to wear flip flops with a professional skirt.  Begin teaching.

5:00pm – Try to show my class a YouTube video.  The sound will not play.  The screen wants to shut off.  Recruit a tech-savy student in the class to help me out, but she is unable to diagnose the problem.  At her suggestion, I give the class their 5-minute break.  After 1-minute, the video decides to work.

5:10pm – The video is on how graphic artists use Photoshop to re-do (and totally change!) pictures in the media.  Another video comes up as a suggestion on YouTube, and one of my students asks if we can watch it.  Sure, why not.

5:12pm – I tell my students about another video I saw where they used Photoshop to change a photo of a man into a woman.  Another student suggests that I search for the video so we can watch it.  I am really tired, so I agree.  Without thinking, I type “Man into woman” in the search box and start scrolling through our options.  There are lots of naked people in bed together.  It takes me a minute to realize what I typed really means.  My students are cracking up. 

5:13pm – Feel torn between laughing, turning red, and crying inside all over again.  Do all three.

6:00pm – Meet up with some friends in the psychology department, get dinner at Country Diner and make immature jokes and quote John LaJoie and SNL the entire time.  Feel like we deserve it.

7:30pm – Go back to campus and watch a spoken word artist (Carlos Andres Gomez!) perform.  I see one of my students there.  We wave at each other. 

9:00pm -- Feel deeply moved.  Feel like crying.  Clap a lot.  Meet him after the show and tell him I am in my third year of a doctoral program in counseling psychology, and that I feel like everything I have been learning for the past three years he taught me in his hour long performance.

Martha
by Katha Pollitt

Well, did he think the food would cook itself?
Naturally, he preferred the sexy one,
the one who leaned forward with velvet eyes and asked

clever questions that showed she’d done the reading.
You’ll notice he didn’t summon up a picnic
so that I could put up my feet and hear how lilies

do nothing but shine in God’s light.  God’s
movie star, he says
we stand in glory, we are loved like sparrows,

like grains of sand: there are so many of us!
He means he stands, he is loved.
The music wells up in the dark theater:

a kiss, a kill, a tumult of clouds and symbols!
We lift our hands, we weep, we don’t deserve him.
I don’t deserve him.  I’m

all wrong.  I’m nothing, hurrying home
in my raincoat and practical shoes.
The sky won’t speak to me.  But still,

somebody’s got to care about the tablecloth
and the bread, and the wine.

Apparently, there has been a small outbreak of the swine flu in the psychology folks at Akron.  One of Dr. Snell’s students got it, and now everyone is kind of freaking out.  The department chair sent out an email telling us all to let our students stay home without penalty if they say they are not feeling well—no need of a doctor’s note or anything.  [I wonder how many people will totally take advantage of this…].  One of my students, who has been out of class for a week now, came to my office the other day covered in sweat and saying that he has been feeling really ill and was having a hard time walking.  I told him to call the health center immediately, but I don’t think he did.

Today I felt absolutely miserable, and was torn about going to school or staying home.  I laid in bed until the last possible second, and then decided to go to school (looking like crap, as a natural result of the lateness).  I made it through like half of the day in a zombie-like state, and then after consulting with a few people, decided to take their advice and “GO HOME NOW!!”.

The rest of the day I have spent in bed, watching Planet Earth and typing up my Voc study guide (oh, help us all…).  John made us dinner tonight and even served it to me and brought me Kool-Aid and a cold wash cloth for my head.  Amazing!  I took a couple of quizzes on Facebook, one of which told me that I am 70% black.  Enlightening.  Just for kicks, I also Googled my own name, and was sad to note that only two of the websites that came up (even after searching pages and pages) were actually me.

I think the rest is doing good things for me, but I feel like I won’t be able to stay home tomorrow.  I’m helping out with a Safe Zone training for the RAs on campus, and I don’t want to miss that.  I am pretty sure it is just exhaustion or a cold and not really the flu, but I feel kind of bad knowing I could totally skip out on my responsibilities and nobody would question it given the current epidemic.  I wouldn’t do that though, unless it was truly necessary.  Then there wouldn’t be any guilt anyhow.

MacGyver, of course, meaning John in this instance.  Yesterday, he broke into our apartment building using a twig.  Yes, seriously, a twig.

The story: We were coming home from church/lunch, and I had to go to the bathroom really bad, so instead of waiting for John to park the car in the garage and walk across the parking lot, blah blah blah, I jumped out as we pulled in the driveway.  Unfortunately, I hadn’t brought my house keys with me, so John took his off the ring and gave them to me.  However, in my haste, I forgot to leave the front building door propped open for him.  I never even realized this until I came out of the bathroom and found him in the office.  A giant twig was in the kitchen, and he told me he had used it to break into the building.  He explained how exactly that worked, but I didn’t understand it anyhow.  I think I like it better that way.

I think there could be some resemblance, don't you? …

In other news, somehow following a discussion of how I used to to grind nuts to make peanut butter when I worked at Heinens, I became dubbed the resident expert on poop at the counseling center.  Thanks, supervisor-friend.

In other other news, I have been feeling like absolute crap lately.  No pun intended.

John is super smart when it comes to a lot of things—computers, home maintenance, fixing things, siding and windows, video games, etc. etc.  He can be one of the smartest people ever.  

But… sometimes.  Yesterday morning before work/school, we were toasting up bagels for breakfast.  John always eats cream cheese on his bagel, and I know this.  So when he pulled the butter out of the refrigerator, I was confused, and I said, “You know that’s butter.”  He kind of looked at me but didn’t really respond.  So I watched him lavishly spread it all over his bagel and take a gigantic bite.  Then he looked at me, grimaced, and said, “Yuck!  This is butter!”  I had to make him a new bagel.

Last night, after dinner, he was doing the dishes.  Most of them were piled on the counter, but there were a few that did not fit and so they were still sitting on the stove.  Before I left the kitchen to start homework, I said, “Don’t forget about the ones on the stove.”  Ten minutes later, I say it again-- “Don’t forget about the ones on the stove.”  A few minutes later, he says he is finished with the dishes.  I glance at the stove and half of the dishes are still sitting on it.  When I mention this, John turns around and cries, “I didn’t know those were there!  You didn’t tell me!”  HAHA.

The last time we went to an Italian restaurant (Bravo—amazingly good!), John wanted to order chicken parmesan.  Before the waitress arrived we had it all set—I was going to order eggplant parmesan, and he was going to order chicken.  But when the waitress went to take our order, he told her that he wanted chicken alfredo (which he has never eaten before in his life).  This totally confused me, but I didn’t say anything about it at first, thinking maybe that he had changed his mind.  A few minutes later, I brought it up and said, “I thought you were going to get chicken parmesan.”  He said, “I am.”  I said, “You ordered alfredo.”  He said, “What?!  Why didn’t you say anything?”  Thankfully, the waitress came back and we were able to correct the order.

Seriously, I don’t know what he would do without me.  I’m not sure if he would even be able to survive anymore.

My mom got me this one… and she affectionately named him “John Junior.”   He grew to be significantly huge in a matter of days, as you will soon see.

 
Starting size

 
In a 2-Liter pop bottle: Day 1

 
Day 3… or something… I did a bad job of counting this time :-(.

 
Estimated at Day 4-ish

 
Estimated at Day 6

The final day… maybe 7 or 8?

 
John cutting him out of the bottle—he originally went in through the neck but was obviously too big to come out that way!

 
Gigantic final product!

My mom’s side family picnic was this past weekend at my Uncle Ken and Aunt Sue's house.  Always a good time, always!

The biggest highlight is when what started out as a simple water balloon toss competition organized by my Mom turned into Andrew and John launching hundreds of water balloons over the house.  We had planned this spectacle, of course.  We had a nice assembly line going: one person taking balloons from the container, another stretching them across the special hose nozzle, a third filling them up, and a fourth person tying them and putting them in a bucket.  When we had filled like 200 of them, me, Channing, my mom, and my little second cousins Dominik, Amanda, and Savannah ran to the other side of the house and waited for the ambush.  Andrew and John hurled all of the balloons over, one by one, as fast as they could (it was a ranch-style house, so they didn’t have to throw them excessively high).  It was raining balloons, they were coming so fast.  Judging by our screams, they were trying to figure out where we were standing :).  The little kids were trying to catch the balloons, which ended up in them just getting soaked, and Channing, my mom, and I were just trying to avoid getting hit.  What a blast, quite literally.

Other highlights:

 
Savannah’s toad that she caught and carried around in her hands for hours, even though she made it a jar home, as pictured here.

Super-gigantic cucumbers

 
Chickens running around the yard

 
Savannah climbs a tree

 
The always-amazing corn hole; Andrew and Channing vs. Mom and Dad

In addition, things I do not have pictures for:

--Playing with a gigantic, hula hoop frisbee and watching Andrew get it stuck at the top of a tree.  “Oh, crap.”
--Playing croquet with John, Andrew, and Channing.  I have discovered that I completely and totally suck at croquet.  I only got like halfway through the course before everyone else finished.  (Why did I list this as a highlight…?)
--The hay ride we started and were unable to finish because the tractor’s wheel was cracked.  Uncle Ken and Dave dragged a huge air compressor all the way out to the field before they realized the tire was cracked, not just flat.  So really, there was no hay ride after all.

P.S.
John and I have matching Belden Brick hats.