I broke my own rule. Call me a hypocrite, but today I listened voluntarily to a Christmas song outside of the designated listening period. Several years ago I came up with a schedule for when my mom in particular, and everybody else in general, is permitted to listen to Christmas music. Due to the overplaying of music, I quickly become sick of the music, as good as it is, long before Christmas leading to the following schedule. July: 2 weeks are permitted; The first two weeks of November; The day after Thanksgiving until about mid-January. Those three periods are the only time that I permit people around me to listen to Christmas music, but tonight I was on YouTube and saw White Christmas and had to listen to it. That’s all. But seriously, I’m kinda eager for the holidays!
Ooooops, I did it again.
That’s right, this Reformation Day/Halloween I pulled the prank again. After watching a few movies (Sleepy Hollow & some of Sweeney Todd) I went to a lounge just before midnight to join a NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) party. Over the course of November I will attempt to write a 50,000 word novel. I’m pretty sure I’ll fail like most of the 120,000+ participants, but the idea is that it gets me writing. NaNoWriMo focuses on quantity not quality with the idea that writing badly but a lot is better than not writing at all, which is what I normally do. After writing some at the party I left to go pull off a good Lutheran prank. This year Connie and I were joined by freshmen Caitlin and Andy as we drove to the Catholic side of town across the train tracks. We again parked at the motel parking lot a few hundred feet across a field form the Catholic seminary. Naturally there had to be a full moon so we were having fun sneaking and acting like James Bond. When we got to the pillars around the corner from the main door, our target, we saw that the building was dark instead of busy and lit up like last year. Of course going at 1:00am Sunday morning instead of 10:30pm Friday night probably made a difference. We only had six sheets of paper that we pre-taped together. A quick dash and we were at the doors where we placed the papers right on the glass using some tape. Then we turned around and Sprinted all the way back to the car to get back to the safety of the Lutheran side of town. I think we made Marty Luther proud. Mission accomplished.
Sorry but it’s not me Matt, but a different one. It’s not really about the music this week but the sweet dance that got this guy a free trip around the world from Stride gum (the lucky duck).
really, I do.
Last Wednesday following an amazing game between the US and Costa Rican national soccer teams I began to feel a bit feverish. Over the next few days it became pretty obvious that I caught the beloved swine flu. I never bothered to go the the doctor since he can’t even do anything about it except confirm what it is and tell me what I already know. Fortunately I only missed one class on Thursday since the other two were canceled anyway and Friday was our “fall break” so no school. Spending the weekend cooped up in my room was a bit less than fun when the weather was fairly nice, but the stupid fever and bodyaches were just a bit confining. But now I’m pretty much better. I’ve still got a cough and a bit of general uckiness but that’s better then what it was like and I’m glad to be done with it over a weekend instead of having to miss class.
So this song by the Black Eyed Peas has seriously been stalking me for the past several weeks I find it all over the place. Somebody’s ringtone. My neighbor’s alarm clock. During a volleyball game. Listening to the radio. While working out in the weight room. It seems nearly everywhere I hear this song. I kinda like the song, it’s just annoying how often it encounters me.
Bleh. Right now I’m pretty sure I’ve got pink eye and I don’t like it much at all. I didn’t really want to go to the ER since frankly it’s not going to kill me if I don’t have it dealt with immediately and naturally the Seward hospital isn’t really open on weekends. So I think I’ll just be skipping some classes tomorrow (oh darn) and TAing.
Friday night was great though to spend some time for Joe’s birthday. He totally freaked out (as the facebook video shows) about getting the Lego pirate ship from mom.
It was a bit annoying to miss some homecoming activities because of the stupid pink eye. I would’ve liked to go to the dance, but at least I saw us win the football game!
Speaking of football, the Huskers beating Mizzou totally made Thursday great. Though the game wasn’t the best they pulled through. Of all the teams in the Big 12 I definitely hate Mizzou the most with Colorado being a close second.
The heat in the building finally kicked on today. After freezing my appendages off for the past several weeks my room is finally warm.
What’s up with Obama and getting the Nobel Peace Prize? Seriously it’s crap! I looked at stories from my various news sources and just about all of them agree he’s done nothing: The Middle Eastern Gulf News, the German Spiegel, and even Saturday Night Live:
American sources mostly just focus on the venomous response by conservatives. Anyway, The Nobel Peace Prize people are BS.
Sure it’s an unintelligible header, but my head really is mush right now. All day I’ve been studying for my two tests tomorrow but I still don’t feel as if I know the stuff all that well. Latin American History and History & Lit of the Old Testament are probably some of my favorite classes and want to do well, but studying for big tests always stresses me out. And it doesn’t help that I’m so easily distracted by other things. Oh, I’m feeling much better though! Not quite entirely over my cold, but much better is an improvement. Ooogah Booogah well back to the studying even though it’s so nice outside lately. I forgot how nice Nebraska autumns are.
I think I’m sick. Last Friday I went to bed perfectly healthy and the next morning I woke up with a sore throat and cough. Since then I’ve kept those symptoms and added a runny nose and tonight it feels a bit feverish. I think I’ll go to the school nurse tomorrow. What an annoying time to be sick (not that it’s fun anytime). This week and some of next week is when the profs decided to dump the papers, projects, presentations, and tests on me. Gross.
This morning was neat in my TAing though. I got the chance to really interact with the kids and help them with a couple worksheets instead of copying, grading, or observing. There was a sub in for Mrs. S that was really old and smelled so strongly of tobacco and coffee that she must’ve come straight from South America or something; I was practically gagging from the smell. I absolutely hate the smell of cigarettes. Anyway, Friday the class has some wellness thing at the park that hopefully I’ll be able to join them in doing on Friday so I’m looking forward to that.
Oh, today the student paper came out again and there was an article on the role of women in chapel. Then I had a good (and very civil) discussion with folks at supper about it. Someday I’ll probably have a post about this even though, for me, it is such a gray area and that always makes things so darn complicated.
Lately I’ve been really quite happy. It’s difficult to describe, but I feel quite content with most things. Certainly today there were bad things that happened (The Huskers losing at the very end of a game they nearly had) but there were also some pretty good things (playing sardines and card games and even being able to watch the Husker game with fellow fans). Yesterday I got to play tennis and tomorrow I get to see family. Yeah, things really aren’t too bad. I’ve also been really excited about the prospect of teaching lately. Last semester I only had a small, pointless 1hr class that was just meant to deter some peeps from going into something they wouldn’t be happy with later. But now I’ve got two Ed classes and I get to talk about some neat theories and experiences and other stuff that is just all very fascinating to me. I also get to do teaching aiding. For TAing I go three days a week to help with eighth grade English at the public school. The kids are usually pretty good and the co-op teacher is great and it works out great even though it overlaps chapel time and means I need to get up earlier. But then there’s also a couple classes that are a bit more blah-ish. My global issues class is especially lame. The professor is certainly not a teacher, but a journalist that knows a lot, but very little about effective teaching. I absolutely love the material talked about, but the manner in which the class is conducted is less than stellar. I totally amazed the whole class on Thursday by knowing where Baku is (Azerbaijan). I absolutely hate that awkward silence in a class after a prof asks a question and so I feel compelled to answer it so I’m not really sure whether the other students don’t know (a possibility) or just don’t really understand the question or know how to respond. Of course it doesn’t really help that the prof is looking for an exact answer worded his ideal way. Oh, and there’s the “ummms” supposedly he averages around 700 in a class period, but I haven’t counted them myself. Anyway I’m doing great and hope you all are too. Have a nice night and I will possibly write more sometime in the future.
Well it’s been nearly 2 months since I last posted. I mostly haven’t because I don’t have good things to say, at least in my mind. Or I’ve been too busy, or both. Now I’m back at college and very happy to be here. Sure classes are going fine and I’m teacher aiding (TAing) 8th grade english at the public middle school, but one of the biggest things I’ve noticed so far this year is my health.
Usually on monday, wednesday, and fridays I’ve gone running for a few miles before getting ready for the day. I’ve also been eating much healthier. Having a chicken patty and a salad is really good for lunch btw. But last thursday was what seemed for me a hilarious example of me getting physically fitter. For my lifetime wellness class (yeah it’s required unfortunately), we had to do a 12 minute run around the track. 12 minutes really isn’t that long I don’t think. My class is pretty much full of athletes, there is only one track runner and no cross country people though. But as we’re running I’m just following along behind the pack of football/baseball players, but they were totally going so slow that after a few laps I just decided to pass them. For the rest of the time I just got further and further ahead of them and found it very ironic that the athletes were huffing and puffing to run while I was perfectly fine and even lapping the other non-athletes. The only person running faster than I was, was Amanda, who is in track so I’d hope she’d be faster. But anyway, I think the prof was a bit surprised that I could actually run decently compared to the athletes. There really is quite an athlete/nonathlete divide. Not to say we don’t mix, but it is very noticeable that the circles run a little ways away from each other.
