Schoolhouse Rock

Sunday night before the new school term starts tomorrow. I think by now it is pretty firmly established that I LIKE going to school. I’ve been going to school every chance I could get for the last few decades. So why do I still feel that gnawing Sunday night pre-school anxiety? Up until yesterday I was really psyched for it, I’ve been going through course listings like I had a gift certificate to the J. Crew catalogue. Perhaps I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by the fact that I’m planning on trying on six or seven classes in the next two days before I decided which three to keep and which four to send back. Or maybe it's the fact that in addition to showing up for classes, I actually have to teach one as well.

Elsewhere in the news, I have done a pretty decent job of cleaning house in preparation for the new term. A final dilemma is what to do with my bike. We have no area outdoors that is protected from the elements, and I’m not stalwart enough to want to carry it up our narrow staircase each time I want to use it, so I keep trying to come up with a discreet place to put in the living space. The best idea I can come up with is to suspend it from the wall or ceiling in a corner where we keep a little dining table. The problem is that it will then be pretty much hanging over our dining table.

“Do you think that might work?” I ask Paul. “How to you think it would be if I hung it there?”

“Well,” he says, “I guess it would be kind of like when people mount a fish on their wall…like if it was a really big fish that was a bicycle.”

Yeah.

Spare Change

Yesterday I spent the whole day cleaning and moving us out of our summer house sit, then went with to Walmart with Paul on his nightly craft-services run for his current film at school. (Craft services is the snacks table on a film set.) Per the list he was given, we bought probably twenty-five 2-liter jugs of cola and Gatorade. That's a liter of high-fructose flavored liquid for every person on set.
After that, we stopped at Albertsons to visit the Coinstar machine. This is a machinge that guzzles all your change, counts it for you, and gives you cash. Normally the fee for this counting service is around 7%, which is almost enough to make me take my mom's advice and go get the little paper rolls from the bank and count it up myself. But NOW they've got this deal where they don't take any fee, if you are willing to take your cash in the form of an Amazon gift voucher. No problem--for students, 'tis the season to buy lots of books. Paul empties his pockets every night on whatever flat surface is nearest, so my bag-o-change was hefty. Going to the Coinstar is like opening up my piggy bank when I was a kid--it's a complete mystery how much you'll have. In this case, when all the clicking noises stopped, the screen showed $110! Definitely the most exciting part of my day.

Progress?

They have one of those i-pod vending machines at the Indianapolis Airport. It looks like a big freezer case with a touch screen. Items for sale included i-pods of various sizes, self contained audio books with little headsets attached (fortunately all Dan Brown books so I wasn't incredibly tempted) ipod arm bands, and a couple items I did not even recognize. The touch screen has a FAQ's page which answers questions about how to use the big freezer case vending machine, but it doesn't say how to use the things inside it.

Hey, check out below how I figured out how to add a video from You-Tube (thanks to Sam)!
Any day now pictures might be next.

Physical Fitness

OK Go - Here It Goes Again

The Leach Center--our campus gym-- opens back up this week. Although I mostly like the elliptical machines, treadmills are cool, too.

Vacation Ending

My little vacation is coming to an end...butI've had a great time. In addition to my family and girlfriends, I have seen my friend Tom M and met his wife and their new baby. I've visited Jenny and Dennis at their new venture--an art gallery and yoga store, and seen my friends Troy and Rosie.

AND I've done some excellent back to school shopping--the most I've bought since returning from Australia! A department store here had a sale with 70% off their marked down racks, and I got three pants, two tops, 3 hoodie sweatshirts, a skirt and a couple pairs of earrings, all for under a hundred dollars--and I'm quite happy about the quality to boot.

Also today my mom and I toured the Clabber Girl Museum--the man who founded the company lived in Terre Haute. It's much more interesting than it sounds...really well designed and informative, and they sponsor cooking demonstrations on Saturdays, so that was fun...I have a few recipes I might try in the near future. Here's something I learned today: A pine nut actually comes from a pine cone! I never knew this.

Fun and Games

Still in Indiana. Tuesday afternoon three friends, Suma, Anne and Amy, who I’ve known since elementary school, junior high, and high school, respectively, converged at my parents’ house. Had a great time over sushi dinner out (They have a sushi restaurant in Terre Haute now!). After we returned to the house and played a game of Settlers of Catan under the guidance of my brother-in-law, Tom, who just spent his weekend at Gen-Con, the nation’s largest game convention, that happens annually in Indianapolis.

Back in Tallahassee, among those of us into board games, the favorites are often Tom’s recommendations. Last night he gave us a little history of our current generation of board games.

Apparently in about 1995 some folks in Germany looked at the state of games and realized that while video games were popular, they were socially isolating, and that most board games eliminated players as they progressed, and were overly dependent on single strategies or luck, so they set out to improve game play. The resulting games are more interactive, less dependent on luck, they have multiple strategies that you can use to win, and everyone remains involved until a winner emerges.

Amy, Anne and I (and hopefully Tom) had a great time last playing Settlers, which Paul and I had already ordered online for our friends in Tally. Earlier in the week the family also played Ticket To Ride—Germany, which is a variation on the standard Ticket to Ride (U.S.) we’ve been playing. Both are great games and highly recommended, but you can’t get them at Wal-Mart. Tom suggests thoughthammer.com, and fairplaygames.com.

Travel Day

Travel Day

Ah the dilemma…to discuss international events? Or food….
I guess that’s not really a dilemma at all, is it?

I traveled to my parents' house in Indiana today, and as I sat on my U.S Airways flight from Tallahassee to Charlotte, the beverage cart approached--something I was unusually excited about, since today’s increased security measures required that I surrender my bottle of water at the ticket counter.
The flight attendant handed me my short plastic glass, along with napkin and a small foil bag—a snack, I’m sure also welcome to those who had randomly been told to remove food before boarding as well. I eyed it and was happy to see I had recieved “Spinzels: Braided Pretzels.” As plane fare goes, plain pretzels are nutritionally about as innocuous as one can hope for—for me a choice superior to any kind of nuts or cheese product filled pretzel nuggets. Additionally there was a little foil picture of a farm house and the “Harvest Road” brand logo incorporates two stalks of wheat, all and all feeling very wholesome.

I opened the foil bag and popped a braided pretzel in my mouth, and as I chewed and swallowed, it occurred to me to wonder “Why do my braided pretzels taste like microwave popcorn?” I flipped over the pouch and began to examine the ingredients: Wheat flour, Vegetable Oil (may contain corn, canola, partially hydrogenated soy),

(PARTIALLY HYDROGENTATED SOY? In a PRETZEL? I could spend an entire post ranting just about this but I’m going to spare the readers in an attempt to proceed to the following ingredients)

…salt, ARTIFICIAL BUTTER FLAVORING, corn syrup, yeast.

Since when, even in America’s heartland, has a profound amount of salt on a flour based item not enough? Has the public been clamoring for artificial butter flavoring on their pretzels while I wasn’t listening?

Or do we just tolerate it? Or assume that in the same way my mother used to try to sneak bran into our pancakes to give us extra fiber, the corporations in our motherland are tossing in a little partially hydrogenated oil, artificial flavor and corn syrup into items to, uh…to…

Why DO creators of javascript:void(0)products like this feel the need to distribute, albeit in tiny quantities, substances that are--let’s not say poisonous; let's just say--banned in other countries, and/or associated with a myriad of health risks? Hasn’t anybody told them that there is no daily minimum requirement for corn syrup?

I’m sure there is a perfectly good reason, I’m just not sure I want to know what it is.

Viewings

We just had the big “Screening” weekend of the year at the Film School. Friday night, the students who are just finishing their first year, debuted their second directing projects. Twenty-five 6-minute films were shown, Paul’s among them. It was called “Porn and Protons” and was a comedy about a married couple whose attempts to get creative with their romance is thwarted by their son’s early return from a sleep-over at a friends house. My brother Greg gave us some music to use in the scoring. Despite Paul's pre-screening anxiety, the film received a good audience reaction. Happiness and relief ensued.

Saturday, the second year students went through their graduation ceremony in the afternoon, and the five 15-minute thesis films were screened in the evening. A party followed on the sound stages at the film school.

Last year Paul and his friend Eric had just driven out from Los Angeles a day or two before graduation, so this weekend really marks the end of our first year in Tallahassee and back in America. It has gone by quickly, as everyone says life does I guess, and it’s odd to think that I have actually gone a year without traveling to another state, let alone another country. I am going to my parent’s house in Indiana this week, where I will see my sister and her children for the first time in over a year, and my older siblings for the first time in three years. I’m looking forward to it.

Why I Can't Think of a Cute Title for this Post

Periodically I go through a phase where I feel completely out of control of everything. Like I can’t wrap my head around any single aspect of life: Not finances, not career, not our household, not our marriage. Normally these things pretty much just float in the atmosphere above my head, and I guess through some miracle of the jet stream, they never drift completely away. When I get periodically anxious and worried however, it becomes very important to me to pin things down, or barring that, maybe just tether the floating things so their presence feels more solid. And this is when it becomes apparent how unkempt, un-pruned, uncategorized, un-organized everything in my life is. I want to fix all these things, and WOE, anger and resentment unto any person nearby who doesn’t feel the need to fix them too. That would be Paul.

Maintaining a long distance relationship even though we share a residence, courtesy of the "industry standard" hours kept at the film school, and the demands of my own schedule has not helped either. Our summer semesters are over tomorrow. The appointment with a counselor is scheduled for Tuesday. Hopefully she can suggest some new strategies to get us through one more year. Fall semester starts the last week of August.