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August 2006
September 2006

Wow.

3/31/07 - I'm not even sure where to begin on this one. This semester has just been absolutely insane on so many levels. I'm coaching a 17U club team now, which is wickedly fun. Most of my girls are pretty raw, but that makes it exciting because I get to watch them improve every time they step on the court. In the past I've liked coaching the younger kids because they're not "too cool" yet. Working with the older ones also has its advantages, though. They actually get a lot of the humor that goes straight through middle schoolers, and they're willing to mess with you. The stories you hear about their off-court life also get exponentially more interesting as they get older.

In my sporting life, I'm finally learning how to play racquetball. For the record, I stink at it. But it's a ton of fun! The guy who's teaching me is a PE prof named Peter who has a couple of adult state championships under his belt. Let's just say he can earn points at will against me...even if he's playing left handed. I've played three times so far, and throughout the second and third days I had one goal in mind: go through an entire game without whiffing the ball. I haven't done it yet, but I'm trying to stay optimistic. In one game he served the ball three times in a row so it hit the front wall, side wall, bounced, hit the opposite side wall in the corner, hit the back wall, and fell to the ground. I fanned it all three times. At that point Peter turned around and sighed, "You have much to learn, grasshopper." For those of you who were privy to my exploits in trying to figure out where the quote is from, that's why (more kudos to the madre for the save on that one).

As for that whole "academic" thing, classes are going pretty well. There are only five weeks left in the semester, and I won't lie, I'm ready for this one to be over. I think there's a point in every academic year when you run face first into a brick wall and your body and mind scream out in one voice, "No More!" I'm there.

I've decided that there is both a blessing and a curse to grad school. The blessing is that there is not a single problem you will come up against that you can't solve by reading something else. The curse is that as soon as you finish whatever it is you're working on, you will go and read another article, paper, or book, and realize you should have done everything you just did a little differently. C'est la vie.

So that's my life in a nutshell. Although I suppose a more appropriate analogy would be a mixed nuts can. Almost there...

Leaders are like eagles; we don't have either of them here.

1/08/07 - For the last three weeks I've been working at the Dollar General on Nashville Rd. When I started looking for a job I really only wanted something to do over the five week break between the fall and spring terms. It turns out I royally screwed up my budget for December and January though, and the work is going to wind up saving my tail rather than just keeping it busy.

Besides collecting a paycheck, I've also gathered some priceless life lessons over the last 21 days. I figure the rest of the world may benefit as much as I have from this knowledge, so I'm going to pass it on:

1. Tape is not a Christmas item. I can't tell you how many people have come to the register with multiple rolls of $0.50 tape, only to decide they don't want them when they realize it doesn't fall into the "50%-off all Christmas items" rubric.

2. It is not true that if a person consistently receives a punishment for a certain behavior he or she will modify it. Every night when my manager goes to close down the register she gets gut-punched by the drawer bouncing out of it. Twenty one days in a row now, and never once has she stepped six inches farther from the machine to keep it from happening.

3. "Can I help you find anything?" "How are you doing?" and "Forty-two cents is your change" are all little old lady code for "Please tell me your life story."

4. If you're going to rob somebody, make it an eastern European male who is in the country illegally. I still cannot believe the wads of cash some of these guys carry around with them.

5. It's easy to spot foreign nationals who recently arrived from a country whose currency is crashing -- they're the ones who buy 10 tubes of toothpaste with every trip to the store. (These are also the people you want to strike up a conversation with. They're always the most interesting).

6. People steal more for fear of stigma than lack of finances. The items most often taken from the DG: $1.00 pregnancy tests and $1.50 hemorrhoid cream.

7. Many people assume that because you work in a store, you must be familiar with all the products that are in it. Some of the winning questions so far include: "Do you think this shampoo will be good for my kind of hair?" "Which of these batteries will last the longest in my xxxx?" "Is this type of soap okay for people who are allergic to xxxx?" And my personal favorite, "Do most cats like this kind of food?"

8. Surprisingly, neither math nor people skills are a prerequisite for management positions in retail.

9. "Well hooo-wee. Look at you. You must play ball" is the proper greeting for all females over 5' 8" tall.

10. The primary objective for every person in a management position is to cover his or her own ass.

11. Any box that has Spanish written on it is properly stocked in the "Mexican" aisle.

And, last but not least,

12. Never walk into the place you work on a day you're supposed to be off. There are no happy endings to a story that starts like that.

Live life with these in mind and, well, at least you won't be surprised when the 80 year old woman chimes in with, "I was born and raised in Morgantown..."

Exams

12/12/06 - There's a senior in the soc. department who was talking about grad students the other day, and he described us like this:

I feel like you guys are a bunch of aliens who came to earth in little sociology space pods that told you everything there is to know about the subject before you got here. So now, everytime we ask you a question, you just think back to your time in the ship and the answer magically comes to you.

As unflattering as that picture is, I wouldn't mind if it were true right now. I've got a theory test tomorrow, and I just can't get myself to prepare for it. I keep thinking maybe if I ignore it it will go away, but no such luck. I actually did manage to sit down yesterday and type up some notes from the book, but I was in the school lab, walked away from the computer for a couple of hours, and when I came back the computer was shut down and the work was gone. Rude. I think that was God's way of telling me that I just shouldn't study for this test. Or maybe it was God's way of saying I shouldn't have walked away for a couple of hours. Hmmm...

It's not as if I think this thing is going to be easy. I'm actually kind of dreading it. It took me three days to mentally recover from the last test in that class. Seriously. You know how sometimes you do a really rough workout, and you're a little shaky afterward? After that test, I felt shaky mentally. I didn't even know that was possible. Maybe that's part of why I'm having so much trouble sitting down and doing this. Fear of mental pain, or something.

I planned on going for a run this morning, grabbing a shower, and hitting the books. It turns out I haven't done laundry in a couple of days, so I don't have anything to run in. The laundry's in the machine, the books are here waiting for me, but I figured I'd come and post all the reasons why I'm not reading them rather than actually picking them up and trying to make heads or tails out of them. Why do I do that?

Okay, I can hear the water draining out of the washer, so I've got about an hour before my clothes will be dry. Sometime between now and then I'm going to have a clue what Derrida is talking about. Wish me luck. I'm going to need it.

Nice

11/30/06 - About three days after posting the last entry and saying how much I was enjoying this whole running gig, the arch of my right foot started to ache a little. The next day, it started to ache a lot. 48 hours later, it was downright painful. I got out of bed on Tuesday morning, and found myself hobbling a little on the way to the shower. Bad news.

One of the profs in the soc department is a big runner, so I thought I'd ask him what was going on. His first instinct was plantar fasciitis, and it looks like he was right. He asked for the shoe I run in, held it with the opening for my foot pointed toward the floor and said, "I shouldn't be able to do this to your running shoe," as he folded it in half right across the mid-sole. Well that sucks.

(Update: since then, I have gotten a new pair of shoes, and the feet feel 100% better.)

Doing it Field of Dreams Style

11/21/06 - I have a friend who comes up with crazy (and a few not-so-crazy) schemes all the time, and he always tells others about them thinking that if enough people know he'll have to follow through in the end just to save face. So here goes: I'm running the St. Louis Marathon in April. Really. I got pretty sick a little over a month ago, and in my delerium that's what I came up with. For some reason after I got better the idea didn't go away. I kept waiting for the bus to pull up so I could put crazy on it and just let it roll off, but it hasn't shown up yet. So here I am, the girl who vowed to run only when chased after the last ball hit the floor in the fall of 2003, training to go the distance.

So far, I've been pleasantly surprised at how things are working out. The hardest part has been teaching myself to run at one pace for any length of time. Other than that, it's pretty amazing how quickly your body adjusts to something like this. I did a 7-miler on Sunday, and I feel good. That has to be twice as far as I've run in at least two years. Granted, it's not even close to where I want to be, but I'm okay with baby steps.

I think the real reason I want to do this is it gives me something to care about outside of Grise Hall (the building where all of my classes are). The wild part is I've caught myself the last couple of weeks looking forward to going to work out. It's one thing when you're hitting the gym just to feel like you're doing something. It's a whole new world when you go in with an end-goal in mind. I guess it should be similar to when I was working out with the team, only then my end-goal was to make it out of the weightroom an hour and a half later with my sanity intact. This one is a little more uplifting. Although, the starting and finish lines for this race are approximately 25 feet apart, so in the end I'm going to train for five months to run for four hours and end up right back where I began, but you know, it's the principle of the thing.

I'm sure I'll hit a plateau in a couple of weeks and I'll just want to stop, but by that point you all will know about it, so I'll make you hold me accountable (Pete, I know you're good for that one).

By the way, did you all hear that Ian Thorpe retired? Can you believe it? He's my age for crying out loud. I've never even had a real job, let alone a career that could subsequently lead to my retirement. Talk about living out under the third standard deviation from the mean. In the words of one of the girls in my cohort, "Gadzooks!"

A Glance Back

11/15/06 - The person who replaced me in Essau decided that the post, or Peace Corps, or The Gambia, or some other part of his experience wasn't what he was looking for and he went home. I can understand his decision; it's a tough place to work, and certainly not for the instant gratification type. I just feel terrible for the kids. Senior secondary school students have to choose on their first day whether they want to go on a science, business, or arts track. I convinced a group of first years to do science the last year I was there by guaranteeing them that the school would either get a Gambian science teacher or another PCV this year. Now he's gone and they're stuck. There's no way they'll get another science teacher this year. There is too much of a shortage of teachers, and the school's headmaster isn't exactly a go-getter when he can sit back and have one fewer salary to pay. It's also too late for them to switch tracks, because if they move they're going to be a year and a half behind everyone else.

I know I can't take full responsibility for putting them in the position they're in now - they chose to take science because they wanted to, and they did have a teacher at the beginning of the year. But what are they going to do? A couple of them are really strong students. If they switch tracks, they will probably be all right, but they're not going to be able to go into the fields they wanted to now. Test scores are everything in The Gambia. If they don't take the science test, they can't go into any kind of medical field, they can't go into the school of education in any of the sciences, and I'm pretty sure they won't be able to go to the Gambia Technical Training Institute (GTTI). At least a third of my kids wanted to be doctors. Granted, there are a handful of them who I wouldn't want prescribing me pills, but there were a few others who might have made it. Maybe I'm being overly pessimistic, but chances are they're s.o.l.

One of the profs gave me a poem the other day that was written by an American who spent some time in Africa. I don't have it with me, but I'll find it and post it at some point, because it reflects very well some of the feelings I'm having about the whole experience. The gist of the poem was that after spending her time in a land that physically has so much to offer, she's just tired. She's tired of seeing people work so hard for so little. She's tired of watching kids walk miles with no supplies to get such a worthless education. She's tired of pushing herself so hard to do what she can, knowing that when she leaves not much is going to change. And she's tired of waiting for the promise of a new post-colonial Africa that hasn't come to be.

I'm too tired myself to do these comments justice, so I'll save them for some other time. Suffice it to say there's not much there I disagree with.

Ouch

11/12/06 - I just got finished taking a theory test, and Oh My God my head is spinning. Our prof. gives us our tests as take-homes, but then we take them as if we're in the classroom -- 2 1/2 hours, no book, no notes, etc. I won't lie, I'd almost rather take them at the school. The whole time you're sitting there typing away going, "Hm, would you look at that. The answer to that question is approximately a foot and a half away from me and I can't in good conscience look at it." Blech.

After sending back the test I thought I'd wind down by watching a little Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I don't know why I thought that was a good idea. I have to admit, I'm a big Harry Potter fan. I can't say I'm one of those who reads the books multiple times (although I have read the Prisoner of Azkaban twice), but I always enjoy them. Then I go and watch that movie. What a monstrosity. The whole time you're watching you're screaming inside your head, "Okay, Lupin, tell him how you know about the map. Just give him a hint. Maybe a small one? Nope, not this scene? Maybe next time you see you him..." all the way until the end of the movie, when they specifically mention the map, and make this 30 second charade out of Lupin walking away, and he never turns around and tells Harry what's going on. Harry doesn't know why his patronus is a stag. He doesn't know who Mooney, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs are. What was the point of the bloody film?

Ron and Hermione like each other. Hagrid's a teacher, Lupin came and went, Harry isn't a fan of Dementors, but at least he has a new broom. The whomping willow is a force to be reckoned with, Peter Pettigrew is also a rat and he blew up a bunch of people (and his own finger in the process) not long before betraying Harry's parents. And oh, he'll make a 5 minute appearance in the fourth movie. Every once in a while Trelawney gets it right. By the way, this has nothing to do with the movie, but did you know some of these characters have their own pages on wikipedia? Harry's is more in-depth than the one on Karl Marx. Yeah, wild. So back to the movie - Fred and George are still up to no good, but they're nice guys when you get right down to it. And Hermione, she really is the brightest witch her age. Okay, so maybe a couple of things came up, but the map, ah, the map! I just can't get over it.

I guess it just goes to show you really can't please everybody when you're making a book into movie. Although I have to admit they came close with Black Hawk Down. Probably because they were as concerned with getting the story right as they were with making a good movie. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who would disagree with that, but I'll toss it out all the same.