Back to Bloggin’

Dear Blog,

It has been a while since our last encounter. I miss your spell checker that saves my every entry, the chance to just write something that’s NOT a paper, and my lifted spirits from seeing new page views.

What have I been up to? Well how about a brief rundown of my escapades.

This summer I worked for some old elementary school friends by helping them run one of their shaved ice stands at the Jefferson County fair. After four twelve hour days of ice-shaving action my shoulders weren’t sure if they would ever stop hurting. But, on the bright side, I did have free admission to some nice music and all the ice I could eat.

I came back early for a Whitman Institute of Scholastic Enrichment (WISE) camp which I was an Resident Assistant for. The camp was a chance for Walla Walla kids to live in a Whitman residence hall and take classes from Whitman professors. The camp itself was only a few days but the design was such to try and inspire the children to apply themselves in high school and excite them for college. It even proved educational to some of my fellow RAs, the most noticeable instance was when the mathematics professor proved 0.999 repeating infinitely was equal to 1. Several long philosophical, logical, and mathematical debates followed with me helplessly trying to convince my fellow counselors, who were off duty at the time, that this was true.

Past that, I trained for a week to be a Student Academic Adviser, or SA, (I have no idea why there is only one A in the acronym) in Lyman House. My job description is essentially to help new students with the transition to Whitman academics. We trained on study skills, active listening, memorization strategies, and prepped for Orientation Week for the new students. Meeting each section of Lyman was both nerve-wracking and incredibly wonderful. Throughout the semester I have been putting on academic programs, holding office hours, and hanging out with the awesome residents of The Tower and B/C Section. I hope all of you have had wonderful Thanksgivings and I’ll be back in the bloggin’ saddle again soon.

The Horde Returns

I am a survivor. I, along with two others in Anderson Hall remain “humans” in the game. Unfortunately for me there are a total of five zombies in my section who are attempting to “eat my brains” by tagging my body before I hit them with a sock or Nerf dart. Fortunately my class schedule allows me to avoid them well during the day. At night however, I venture to the bathroom with a loaded Nerf shotgun and muscles twitching at the slightest sound. Besides that little stressor, I realized I have around thirty pages to write before the end of the school year if I add up all my classwork together. Fun huh? But to make it more interesting I also have the privilege of campaigning for Sophomore Senate. I am allowed to officially begin my campaign on the 12^th, which will involve a late night of putting up posters and the rest of my (top secret) campaign ideas. Hopefully my ingenuity pays off and I do well in the elections.

There has also been a surge of Whitties noticing my blog, so I suppose I have to watch what I say now…

Snowballs and Cockroaches

New tasks and partners were assigned to us at the work site the next day. Instead of dry-wall and mudding I was switched to door frames. I was terrible at door frames. I managed to put one up, but it had to be fixed by our site manager afterward. After dinner we ventured out to find “Snowballs”. Basically a snow-cone, or shaved ice stuffed with ice cream. A stuffed Mango-Kiwi snowball was amazing. After Snowballs our group walked down St. Charles Ave. and gaped at the numerous gigantic houses that it was home to. Right before going to bed, while Nelson and I were brushing our teeth, we heard screams from the hallway area outside the girls and guys bathrooms. We took a look outside and saw a group of about ten high school girls, with one of the other groups who were staying at Camp Hope. Each one of them was screaming and pointing to the ground in between the bathroom entrances. The area was poorly lit and it took a moment for me to realize they had seen a cockroach. It was tiny. Maybe two inches. I walked back inside and grabbed some paper towels. I’m not a huge fan of killing things, part of the reason for my vegetarianism, so I tried to catch it in the paper towels. Each time that I covered it and almost caught it, it would dart away again, and the girls’ screams would continue anew. Finally I managed to get it in the towels and walked outside far enough to toss it in the grass. The screams subsided and one of the sixteen year olds said “You didn’t have to do that” in a semi-pretentious voice. I looked at her with raised eyebrows, “Really?” and walked back into the bathroom to finish brushing my teeth.

The next few days of work went smoothly. I moved on to painting doors and eventually to baseboards. I overcame my fear of the portable table saw and used it to cut some one by six boards into the right size for doorframes. Thursday night at dinner our volunteer cook told us amazing stories about his experience with Katrina. He told us about leaving home with 3 days worth of clothes, expecting to be able to return, only to return much later and barely be able to salvage a laundry basket worth of items from his destroyed home.

The last day, I tried to be as productive as possible, I painted like crazy and baseboarded, and almost finished installing a vanity in another bathroom. The guys in our group had been dying to take a picture outside “Breaux Mart”, or phonetically “Bro Mart”. So we took a picture in front of a sign that also read “Best Meat in da’ Parish”. Before returning home, our group took a final midnight trip to Waffle House. What better way to say goodbye to New Orleans than enjoying a strawberry waffle and hash-browns five hours before your flight?

One of the best parts about our service trip was how close our group became throughout the week.. Working alongside each other during the trip made me feel not only more connected to the people of New Orleans, but also to the people I worked with.

To Work

“Work time!” Was my first thought on Monday morning, we were finally starting work on our houses that day. First we headed down to the St. Bernard offices and received our assignments for work sites, sadly Nelson, my roommate, and I were working on separate houses. Our 19 person group split into a group of nine and a group of ten, each with its own house to work on. During the work day we would stay with that smaller group, but afterward we had plenty of time to spend with everyone else. When we arrived at our work site I was paired with Tess to work on dry-wall in one of the house’s bathrooms. It was a very frustrating day. Tess and I spent the better part of the day removing, readjusting, and finally finishing the last piece of ceiling drywall in the partially dry-walled bathroom. After a hard days work we returned to camp hope for some rest and dinner. That night we visited the house of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, the character of the summer novel that all 2014 Whitman students were required to read before their first year. He welcomed us into his home and we discussed everything from his opinions of the Government response to Katrina, to the recent tsunami in Japan. The evening eventually pulled to a close and we returned once again to Camp Hope.

Tuesday’s productivity increased dramatically. Not only did Tess and I finish the ceiling, dry-walled the entire rest of the bathroom and started mudding. It was incredibly more satisfying to see the change at the end of our second day of work than the first. At dinner that evening we were spoken to by the “Head of Homeland Security and Emergency Management” of St. Bernard Parish. He spoke to us a little about his job, and other things about Katrina. After dinner we headed out for some more sightseeing. We stood and watched Live Jazz music at Preservation Hall, walked down Bourbon Street, and ate some more late night snacks. By the end of night we were all exhausted and hit the sack after reflection.

4NOLA

“You here on your spring break?” Said an astonished elderly woman while exiting mass. My nervous nod and smile made her plump cheeks tighten into a broad, loving smile.

“Bless you! Thank you so much for coming, bless your heart!” Some of our service trip group had decided to attend a Catholic mass at St. Peter Claver to experience some New Orleans culture. The mass was complete with a gospel choir and passionate preacher, not to mention a couple hundred spirited New Orleans residents all happy to welcome us to their church. The nineteen of us had fund-raised and paid to spend a week in New Orleans as volunteer construction workers for the St. Bernard Project. While we arrived there as amateurs, they taught us enough of the basics to put in drywall and flooring, frame doors, mud walls, apply baseboards, and plenty of other tasks. We left for Louisiana early Saturday morning, so I naturally stayed up until 2:30 AM folding laundry and packing for the trip. I took a quick two hour nap before getting up, showering, and going through the spring break room checklist with Nelson. Both of us were excited to get to hit the road and get together with the rest of the service group.

When we arrived to the night lights of New Orleans and weren’t able to see much of the city from the plane. On the van ride to our place to stay questions kept running through my head. Were some of the rundown houses I remnants of Katrina? What was here before and after the hurricane? Where would we be working? Those questions would have to wait a little longer, the first task was to settle in to Camp Hope. The camp was a converted school, first for volunteers after Katrina, and later for BP cleanup workers during the spill. It had recently been reopened for Katrina volunteers and we were one of the first groups to stay there since it reopened. The converted classrooms were outfitted with about 15 bunk-beds and comfortably fit the six guys in one and the thirteen girls in the other.

The first day in New Orleans we had breakfast at the Waffle House and feasted on servings of hash-browns, eggs, toast and, of course, a variety of differently flavored waffles. Later that day, the trip leaders had scheduled us with tours of the area, showing us some of the reasons for Katrina’s large impact on the city. We toured the levees, parts of the severely reduced wetlands and saw illustrations of the surrounding area’s topography, and how New Orleans lies primarily below sea level. After the tour we went to a local street market and bought a few souvenirs and returned home for dinner and a nightly group meeting.

Sleep Deprivation

I pushed my body’s sleep deprivation abilities to a new maximum. Last week I had three papers, a French test and a French project due, on top of my regular reading and homework for each class. The first was an Encounters paper due on Monday, which I finished editing on Sunday. I then outlined my History paper on Ancient Rhetoric and wrote the first part of my Politics paper so I could ask my Professor to read it and give me suggestions. Somehow I survived the entire week and finished all my assignments. I proceeded to recuperate with several early nights over our presidents day weekend. I used the extra Monday off to get ahead on my next homework assignments to ensure I would never have to replicate that experience.

Another Night

Another night in the Allen reading room! Also known as the quiet room, where Whitman students go to spend time doing homework in a completely silent environment. Admittedly I’m typing this blog alone with “You Don’t Know Me” by Ben Folds playing at full volume on my laptop. In the reading room next to a mantle place and an open gas lit fireplace there is a small book titled “The Allen Reading Room Challenge”. When you are the last person in the reading room on a given night you put your name and the professor and assignment responsible for your late hour in the library. I am currently the Valentines day victor of this challenge at a current time of 3:39 AM Feb 14th. The time varies however and the last contender could be pulling an all nighter. Generally the winner is within an hour of 4AM. This is my 3rd time winning the challenge, something I feel reluctant to be proud of. But the good news is that I have all my homework for tomorrow long since finished and am currently working on the first draft and outline of two essays due later this week. Well you know it is about time for me to continue working on my homework when I catch myself singing along to “Wat Da Hook Gon Be”

Good night, or should I say good morning?

One hour later…

You feel strangely accomplished, and know you shouldn’t, listening to Bach’s Prelude Number 3 in C major while reading Machiavelli, Hobbes and Martin Luther at 4:30 in the morning.

 

Colombia

A Few Highlights

The Portland airport isn’t a hotbed of paranoia, nor does it take very long to get through security, nonetheless dad was freaking out the entire time. In fact, he managed to freak out so productively that we had an extra two hours to sit in our terminal at the airport. Our flight to Denver went by quickly, however we were forced to rush to our next connection to Bogota. By the time we arrived that flight also ran out of carry on room so we had to check our bags, fortunately for no charge. Like any brilliant traveler I realized the airline’s shortcomings when it comes to baggage claim and immediately took some extra underwear and socks out of my carry on. This later turned out to be much to my benefit when lo-and-behold the Bogota airport lost our suitcases. We also suffered another setback when the fog at the Bogota airport was too thick to safely land in and we altered our route to Panama city until the fog cleared.

After meeting with family and exceptional amounts of hugging and besos, we headed out to the Paipa hot springs. I was exhausted so I dozed off several times in the car. During one of my naps my feet drifted over towards a fire extinguisher located underneath the seat in front of me, and I happened to put a little to much pressure on the nozzle. “POOOM!!” White powder flew everywhere and I thought for a second that we had been shot or the engine exploded. My grandfather immediately pulled over and we surveyed the damage. A fire extinguisher lay with its head unattached next to the seat in front of me. I grabbed a rag, and after fifteen minutes of scrubbing and cleaning we were back on the road to Paipa.

Dancing in Paipa! Paipa has an arena where musical performers come frequently to perform, we were lucky enough to listen to a group during our time in the town. I managed to pluck up the courage to ask a few Colombian girls to dance but was still confronted by a language barrier and the confined seating in which we were watching the show. I think I did decently, but started to fear bumping into annoyed drunk people too much so I went back to just listening. By the time it started raining my family and I decided to call it a night.

Finals Festivities

I played more video games involving zombies during finals week than the rest of the semester combined. I also studied my mind raw for the time I wasn’t melting it trying to survive Nazi Zombies. Apart from relaxing with video games I had several finals and a choir concert. My first final was an easily filled out exam for Ballet. We had to name several positions like 1^st Arabesque and motions like Assemblé or Balancé. The test was a take home and we were encouraged to work together or use the internet. Galen, Florence and I managed to power through it one night and all pull A’s on it. The course as a whole was easily one of my favorites. Ida, our dance instructor, was always vigorous in teaching, and helping perfect the material she taught. I originally just planned to take the class to learn fundamentals of different motions and how they could apply to different styles of ballroom dance. However Ida’s enthusiasm and skill at teaching made me appreciate ballet for the grace of its highly structured movements, and I constantly do combinations of plies and releves waiting in the Prentiss lunch line.

My final day of student calling was the Monday of finals week, however instead of phoning more students, the Office of Admissions threw us a work party. Interestingly enough E-section had a section dinner right before the party, with a drag theme. So I showed up to work in black dress with multicolored dots on it.

My first scheduled final was French 105 I was slightly nervous for how I would do but I had been doing the review sheets that Professor Winchell was kind enough to give us to prepare for the test. While I took longer on the test then most of the others in the class I felt confident enough that I managed to keep my B in the class.

Chemistry was my next final, it was a multiple choice final of all the material that we learned. Nelson and I were both ready to get that over with. We struggled through our semester of chemistry and both of us are looking forward to switching out of it next semester. Fortunately since the test was multiple choice it made it easier to pass. After a painful few hours of questions involving Redox reactions and Hess’ Law in tandem with properties of light and matter I was done with chemistry.

After Chemistry was over I was incredibly relaxed, it was the last final I was worried about. My final final (haha) was Microeconomics which was one of my easiest classes. I calculated that even if I earned a 65% on the final I could still pull an A in the class. Partly because of my high test average and partly because of my professors policy of giving back a full letter grade on tests depending on students participation in class. After breezing through my microeconomics final I was completely free of stress, I relaxed further by starting my packing for winter break, with the occasional visit next door for some super smash brothers.

That Friday I rapidly packed up the rest of my clothes for winter break and my upcoming trip to Colombia. I also ran around the dorm like crazy and said bye to all of Anderson. Prentiss had a veggie wrap calling my name so I stuffed it in my Tupperware for the trip. I hugged Nelson goodbye and moved my luggage over to the car, I had once again managed to mooch another ride. This time off of Annette, a Corvallis kid, and her mother. The trip had a light air of nostalgia accompanied by a Hood River grilled cheese, which made for a nice combination. Annette dropped her mom off before me at Woodstocks pizza to meet up with some family. As I was switching to take the passenger seat I stepped out of the car and saw two CHS grads walking into the pizza place.

Wow, this place never changes. I thought.

“Did you know that there’s a Market of Choice now on 9^th Street?” Said Annette.

Looks like I spoke too soon.

Ice Jinx

It snowed here. Walla Walla has this weird cycle of snowing decently, lingering for a week, and then slowly melting. Then it snows again. This morning was particularly icy and as I was walking out of the dining hall I told my roommate,
“Okay Nelson, here’s what we do, we watch those guys and if they slip we know to be careful there.” A moment after I said that, the girl in front of us slipped on a patch of ice. Fortunately she caught herself, But the most important thing is that Nelson and I were okay.