On Becoming a Person

Friday we went to the long awaited San Diego Zoo. I loved it! Mostly I loved the Big Cats exhibit, but unfortunately because of the bars of the cage I wasn’t able to get good pictures of many of them. I got a lot of cool pictures of other animals though.

We left for the APA conference in San Diego on Wednesday morning. We first flew from Cleveland to Chicago, and then from Chicago to San Diego. The second flight was 4 and a half hours. It was SO long. The good thing is that I had a window seat and my cell phone available to take pictures out the window. I was pretty much glued to the window because I have never been west of Chicago. That means  I have never seen desert or “real” mountains or the Great Salt Lake or anything of the sort.

I think we may have flown over Colorado and Texas and Utah on our way in but I am not 100% sure. I was AMAZED at how brown and barren everything was. Miles and miles and miles (hours of travel time!) of absolutely nothing. I know people say the west is wide open, but I had no idea the actual extent of this openness. Just sand, sand, sand, with the occasional rock outcrop or mountain. Sometimes I saw black lines going across, like you can see in the bottom right corner of the picture below. I couldn’t tell if those were roads, pipelines, or some kind of water line.

The guy who sat next to John and I in the airplane must have thought I was nuts because I didn’t know why there were so many green circles inside brown squares lined up all over the landscape. I failed to get a picture of those, but he said the circles were “irrigated land.” That crap was weird.

  
My view of some mountains… plus our airplane wing! The green specks must be either trees or bush cover; the darker specks are cloud shadows. It looks like we are looking off the edge of the earth!

I was definitely happy to see the landscape change from desert and crop circles to green trees and blue water. The change was amazingly abrupt. There was the Great Salt Lake, and suddenly we were in CA. The weirdest thing about being here so far is that there are palm trees and regular trees in the same area. It is also weird because there are all these tropical plants, yet it is only like 65 degrees here. I associate tropical plants with scorching heat and humidity, so this is throwing me off. It’s hotter in Ohio than it is in San Diego right now.

We have done a lot of cool stuff today, which I will blog about later and post some “real” (aka not cell phone) pictures once I get them off my camera.  We went to the beach, but it was WAY too cold to swim. My verdict so far (which Adrienne confirms)  is that even though California is temperate, we would prefer to live in a place that has seasons. It’s not hot enough here to be enjoyable. And I would get bored out of my mind if it was 65 and sunny all year round.

For any of you who are wondering what my life looks like for the  next couple of weeks, here is the flavor:

Monday (8/9) – Deadline to have turned in both of my posters to be presented at APA for printing. The first one is done, but the second one is still in the works. I thought it was done when I sent it to our research adviser on Friday, but then Noah and I got an email back Saturday saying that we didn’t do the right analyses, need to re-run them and re-write our hypotheses, procedure, and results.  Where was this information say, oh, 3 months ago??

Tuesday (8/10) – Meet with my supervision professor / Do an hour-long presentation in IQ class that I haven’t started yet / Turn in my final IQ intelligence test report / Pack up my kitty (and myself & John) and drive to my parents house to drop him off later in the evening

Wednesday (8/11) – Go to the airport for an 8am flight to San Diego

Wednesday (8/11) through Sunday (8/15) – Be at the American Psychological Association conference; present those two posters!

Sunday (8/15) – Arrive back in Cleveland at 10:40pm. Spend the night at my parents house and collect kitty.

Monday (8/16) – Get home, unpack, study frantically for comps.

Tuesday (8/17) – Orientation at The Counseling Center and at Portage Path, my two practicum sites for next year

Wednesday (8/18) – Study frantically for comps

Thursday (8/19) --  Day 1 of comps. 6 hours of essay questions in the lab.

Friday (8/20) – Day 2 of comps. 6 hours of essay questions in the lab.

Friday (8/20, 5:00pn) – Drink heavily (J/k, j/k, just some drinking)

Saturday (8/21) – Get ready for the fall semester of classes and teaching.

Monday (8/23) – Fall classes start. I may or may not still be alive by then.

I have been getting so annoyed by people who leave their blinkers on when they are on the highway. It confuses me because I think they are about to merge to my lane so I am all prepared to let them in and then they just drive on and on and on in the same lane, totally oblivious to what they are causing. This has been happening a lot this summer it seems. One lady was in a van with all the windows down and was smoking a cigarette and talking on the phone. That’s safe.

Melvin and I have a new game that’s like peek-a-boo. He jumps in the bathtub and then we look at each other around the curtain. He LOVES it.

I feel exhausted and ill more than I feel rested and healthy.

My friend Andrea just had a beautiful baby boy named Ian. He was 7 weeks early; 3 pounds 14 ounces. I saw him in his incubator and I was so choked up at how fragile and precious he looked. Absolutely beautiful.

I wish I had more time and energy to show my friends how much they mean to me.

Sometimes I am so busy and stressed that I drink milkshakes for lunch because they don’t take much effort and they are cheap.

Melvin managed to lose 6 toy mice in our living room yesterday.

We found one of the mice when it clogged up the Roomba.

I don’t like it when my friends move away. I miss them.

I decided that I don’t particularly enjoy intelligence testing. I also don’t like writing the reports. It’s boring and tedious and I’m not good at it.

I LOVE the show MythBusters, especially Jamie. I need more episodes to show up on Netflix stat!

Today when I sat in a chair and wanted to cry, Melvin immediately jumped in my lap and gave me a kiss even though no tears came out.

I wish I could have seen my sister more this summer. I think she works too much.

I am really excited to see the San Diego Zoo next week at APA. A guy in the line at Marcs today said it is fantastic, even if you don’t see a single animal. Considering how much I love animals, John and I will probably spend all our time there.

I’m 24 years old and I just bought some BenGay for my knees.

I think I will get pregnant toward the end of internship so that I am still alive when my baby is growing up.

John is getting an article published in a computer newsletter. He always continues to amaze me!

We are getting our new living room furniture delivered next week. I can’t wait! Now my apartment won’t look like the Goodwill anymore.

I am happy that McDonalds still serves Orange Drink (the Hi-C stuff). It makes me feel 7 again and I like that.

So I have been reading up on a lot of local history regarding UA and it’s surrounding vicinity.  Forgive me, but I actually find this so interesting! Here are some random facts y’all might enjoy as well:

• The site of the current Student Union, Zook Hall etc. used to be a cemetery in the 1800s.  They built Buchtel Hall on top of it and when it flooded bones used to wash up. There are probably still bodies under there!
• Nearly all of the buildings on campus are not the original buildings with those names—when a building was torn down the replacement building was named the exact same thing.
• NONE of the buildings on campus are original structures from when the university was founded. Buchtel Hall burned down twice before it became what it is today, and it is the oldest building on campus.
• Many of the city’s early settlers were from the mountains of West Virginia and are actually described in historical accounts as “hillbillies”.
• In the 1930s a group of ministers tried to get all the city’s clubs to shut down at midnight on Saturday, so that there would be absolutely NO dancing on the Sabbath. Yeah, that didn’t work out at all.
• Quaker Oats, the Diamond Match Company, Goodyear (including the blimp!), Firestone, and B.F. Goodrich tires were all founded here.
• The city’s water used to be supplied from Summit Lake, which contained the raw sewage from all of the houses around it. The water was unsanitary and smelled horrific.
• When the rubber business was booming, the entire city smelled “like a rubber band smoldering in an ashtray.”
• Race relations here have always been better than in other major cities.
• The streets of the neighborhood Firestone Park are built in the shape of the Firestone logo
• Alcoholics Anonymous and the infamous John Brown were both made here.

(Photos courtesy of www.ci.akron.oh.us)

You CANNOT watch this video without laughing. I dare you to try. The first two times I saw it I cried. It is just contagious. Don’t turn it off after the first minute or so—it gets better! Whatever this guy is on I would love me some of it.

Not purposely though!!! I am referring to everything I am trying to grow in our little backyard garden area.  Remember my beautiful potted pink  impatient plant? It was originally hanging on the post of our porch, but it started killing the bush underneath it. All of these little spores fell on the bush and the leaves started dying, so now I have a foot+ diameter hole of dead branches on it. I took the potted plant down and put it on a holder on the patio itself, but since then it has started turning brown. All the leaves in the middle are dead; only the ones on the outsides are still green. I have no idea what’s wrong. I water it EVERY day.

  (This is what it looked like before the Death)

I also planted a tomato plant back there, but I made the mistake of not caging it because I didn’t think of it until it was too late. The thing grew all sideways like a vine, encroaching on the other bush it was planted next to and starting to kill parts of that. I finally bought a cage, but by this time the plant was up past my waist and had three separate stems. John and I wrangled it into the cage this morning, but in the process we broke several branches off, including the only 2 (still green) tomatoes  it has produced yet. I was so upset. But it’s my fault for being dumb about tomatoes in the first place. Remind me never to plant anything again if I want it to live!

Melvin is becoming more playful and mischievous as he gets older and presumably more comfortable in his home. Yesterday was an all around interesting day, to say the least.

First, the trash. We have discovered that his absolute favorite thing to eat is roast beef. From Arby’s. YES. I also had some lunchmeat roast beef that came in a plastic container, lined with a plastic bag. I had finished off the meat and left the container in the sink because I wanted to wash and re-use it. I was on the couch working when I heard a bunch of noises coming from the kitchen, like plastic things bumping into each other. He was in the sink, nosing the empty container. Fine with me, I have much bigger things to worry about. A few minutes later I hear plastic crumpling, and I look up and Melvin has brought the plastic roast beef liner into the living room and is carrying it around in his mouth. This is entertaining. He was looking for a place to set it down and play with it, I could tell because that’s what he does with many of his toys—carries them from one place to another and drops them where he wants to play. He couldn’t figure out where to drop the plastic, so he was running around in circles with it somewhat frantically, until he finally decided to drop it in his cat bed. Then he pawed at it and licked it for a while before getting bored and wandering away.

Next, to go in chronological order, the poop. I got home from class around 7:15 last night, go into the bedroom to change, and notice that on the tile floor of our bathroom next to Melvin’s litter box are several (5-6) cat footprints—made of poop. Upon closer inspection there are also specks of poop splattered on the side of the toilet and around the floor. I am deciding between being grossed out and cracking up. His litterbox is a mess, so I go to scoop it out. He has a covered box with a little door, and I was too lazy to remove the cover so I just reached in through the little cat door. My wrist instantly feels wet, so I pull it out and realize that it is now smeared with moist poop. Even closer inspection reveals poop on the bottom of his cat door. Basically, there is poop everywhere. John witnesses this audibly from the living room—it’s just me laughing my head off and yelling, “Gross, gross!” I have deduced that it likely was explosive diarrhea or something of the sort. We fed him meatballs from our dinner the other day. That may have been it. Far be it from me to ever feed him meatballs again.

Last, the glass. As many people know, Melvin is still in the habit of waking me up in the middle of the night, a couple of times, by meowing for attention and food. He has this habit of walking past my head and up on to my nightstand, where he often tries to put his face in the glass of water that I keep there. Then I have to shoo him down. Last night I was so tired that I must not have heard him meowing, nor getting up on the nightstand. The thing that did wake me up was a crash, the shattering sound of glass, and then his little feet hightailing it out of the bedroom.  He had knocked my glass of water off the nightstand, and somehow it shattered on the carpet (I still don’t know how!). At 2:30am I was blotting up water and picking up shards of glass from under the bed. John slept through the whole thing and found it quite amusing.

My family members who read this will understand what I mean when I say that Melvin is getting more like Jake little by little!

It became clear to me that preparing for comprehensive exams has caused a temporary memory lapse for my brain. Suckery. On my way to campus this morning, I got halfway to the highway before I realized that I wasn’t wearing my wedding ring or my engagement ring. I generally don’t sleep in these because they snag on the sheets, and I take them off while I am getting ready in the morning so I don’t gunk them up. I had to turn around and go home to put them on, lest I get a bunch of weird questions and have to do some serious explaining to my classmates. So I was late.

Then, during my break I went to the campus library to look for some books, none of which they had, of course. I was about to leave to go to class when I looked in my purse and realized my cell phone was missing. I apparently lost it on the infamous third floor, which is designated the “quiet study” area. I had walked through so many shelves on that floor it was sort of impossible to retrace my steps. I went around looking for someone I could ask to call my phone for me, but everyone I saw was… asleep. Either that or locked away in a “group study room”, likely waiting to have sex with someone, or so the rumor goes. After frantic walking I eventually found the phone perched on a shelf at the very last rack of books in the building. So I was late again.

Pair this with 6 straight hours of class half-filled with other students venting their stress about comps, and a borderline grade on my first IQ scoring protocol (which I struggle with anyway because I lack the serious focus and attention to minute detail that it calls for), and I was so ready to be done by the end of the day. I was thoroughly surprised and thrilled when I came home and found a vase of flowers on the table from John. <3. Hours of studying and a package of Sour Patch Kids (oh sweet relief!) later, I feel a little bit better. Though I fear that I have to kiss my working memory goodbye until after Comps.

The new first year students have begun their program this week. That officially makes me a 4th year student in the program. Amanda and I were talking this evening about how when we were first years we thought the fourth years were so old and mature and knowledgeable that they were practically untouchable. Interesting how I don’t quite feel like I live up to that expectation!

It IS funny though because I am currently taking a class (out of sequence) with the previous year’s first-year students. I feel like I am so out of it in that class; like everyone has their little cliques and then I am sitting there all old arthritic and out of the loop.

Here is some documentation of our growth over the years!

Mike, Me, & Amanda, downtown Akron, summer before first year

 
Adrienne & Me, Barley House, winter of first year

Adrienne, Me, & Amanda, Department, winter of second year

 

Graduation with the MA, spring of second year

Betsy, Amanda, Me, Myriam, & Zac, (Mix of all 3 cohorts!) Barley House, summer before third year

Me & Myriam at the first ever Boss Night!, Fall of third year

I need something for fall of 4th year now! I think the good side of this is that I am that much closer to finishing :)