365: Obsessed

Confession: I am obsessed with Deadliest Catch.

I have NO idea why.

The show and I have exactly nothing in common. I'm a vegetarian and I abhor the continued pillaging of our seas. They're crab fisherman. They're all blue collar roughneck dudes. And clearly that is about as far from my life as you can get. The show reinforces a ton of gender stereotypes that I generally (fiercely) resist. I can't even fathom worse working conditions. All of the guys on the show are hardcore thrill seekers/risk takers. I've been terrified of a dead bat for two days. I really have no idea what the hook is for me. But the heart wants what the heart wants.

365: Riding the Bus!

'm ahead of schedule in my M/W Human Sexuality class so we got out of class earlier than usual. I had time to kill and it was a beautiful day so as I strolled along towards Stonewall to see my babe I saw the bus stop and thought "Hmm...I haven't rode the bus since I moved to Chico maybe I should do that?" and as if by magic a bus pulled up and I decided to hop on! All I knew is that it was headed in the direction I was going and that with a Chico State ID I could ride for free! According to Ange this made me a "weirdo" but whatevs! It was a random and fun adventure. I only rode about 5 stops before I bailed. I didn't want to ride all the way to Costco or wherever and be stuck there. More adventures to come once we move down here!

One of my favorite jokes ever

Knock, knock.

Who's there?

Interrupting cow.

Interup--

MOOOOOOOO!

A Lesson in Photography

Ange and I have been looking for homes in Chico because DUH, we're moving there. Looking for a home has been exhausting but filled with silliness and giggles along the way. One of the funniest/worst things about the hunt has been looking at the pictures that people or realtors post. I mean, you want to sell the property...why wouldn't you think through the pictures you are taking and think whether or not you are featuring the best parts of the house and if you are enticing people to go for your property? I have picked some of the more ridiculous pictures that we've seen in our search to highlight what NOT to do.

Exhibit 1: Showing off a whole bunch of crap that is leaving with the current owner.

Hi, we don't care about your chair or ugly fake plants or dumb clock. Other than those things, this picture highlights nothing. A corner perhaps. 

 Or this one. Your curtains are ugly. And your rocking chair is creepy. That's all.

Exhibit 2: Way too close pictures that you can't figure out what is going on.

I think this is an entrance way? It's really close and there's no explanation attached.  WTF?

Exhibit 3: Pictures of random corners.

I don't know how many random corner shots there are out there. Great! Your house has corners. I'm so pleased. I was worried about finding a plethora of houses WITHOUT corners. Whew.

Exhibit 4: Someone who did not even try and clean their house.

I mean really? WTF IS THIS??? A picture of your crap by a window? GET. OUT.

Exhibit 5: Not knowing how the basic principles of a camera work.

 Camera flashes in a mirror is no good. And this really doesn't show me anything about the bathroom. Losers.

Exhibit 6: Terrible room pictures.

Great. A big white room with a door. Perfect. I want to move in tomorrow. 

Great! You have a shower curtain that presumably hides a shower! AWESOME!



Lights! You have lights!!! Sign me up.

Exhibit 7: Extra crusty things you should have fixed before listing. 

OMG, really? You have a burned up fireplace? At least paint it! Geesh!

Exhibit 8: I don't even know how to describe these ones...

 What the hell is this? I mean really, what the hell is it? A shed attached to a motorhome? In your backyard? What?

OMG, please enlarge this picture and look at the stuff on the crusty built-in wardrobe. I was seriously dying.

 

 This picture goes along with the one above. Again, please enlarge. Read the sign behind the pool. Dyyyyyyying. Srsly. 

This ends our tour for the day. Please refer back to this post when you are thinking of listing your house. Please.

Old School Style: Fort Building

Ange made plans to go hang out with her bff Prem so I of course made plans to hang out with my bff Leslie. She had to work all day and I didn't so she put me in charge of making plans for the evening. I hate making plans. But since I had all day I decided I could tackle the job. I decided if I made a big list of things we commonly do, then at least I could force Leslie into helping me make decisions. Knowing my sister's fondness for things organized and also goofy I came up with a "Things to do Ballot." I can't lie, it is awesomely nerdy. 

You'll notice near the bottom of the list  I had "Build a cool blanket fort." My sisters and I are pretty much the champions of blanket forts. I think we made approximately 786,570,808,786 forts in our childhood. Leslie and I had been talking about our forts for some time and we had mentioned that we should totally make an adult sized fort soon. BFF night seemed like the perfect idea.

After we did some of the other activities on our list we headed to her house to begin fort building. When we got to her house we decided that we needed some supplies. Namely, pins of some sort to reinforce the blankets and brownie mix. Because duh, what else do you do in a fort?

So we went to Walmart to get some supplies. 

We found some binder clips (which we didn't end up using) and some clothes pins. Both were $1.88. A good investment. We also got our brownie mix and some whip cream, because...yum. We got home and my dorky sister remembered she'd used the last of the eggs the day before. Then I wanted to to kill her. But instead we went back out to get eggs. We didn't want to go to Walmart so we decided to hit the gas station because gas stations often have rations that you would need on a short moment's notice. Well that was a bust. Milk, cream cheese, ice cream...no eggs. Then we drove by the liquor store. Yeah, no luck there either. Then we went to another gas station. GZUS, why doesn't anyone have eggs??? So we went to Meijer. Sigh. We finally got home and mixed the brownies really quick, popped them in the oven and then started fort building. 

She's a maniac with the brownies.

Our starting materials.

I was really worried about ripping the ceiling fan down. It didn't stop me, but I worried. 

Leslie made full use of her clothes pins.

Zoe had no idea what was going on.

Our first peak. 

 

At a certain point you have to maneuver carefully to arrange blankets. 

Lots of giggling ensued throughout the 45 minute building experience. 

The cord to the lamp provided a great storage place for our emergency fix it pins inside the fort.

Unintentionally the fort became more teepee like. We left it because it was funny. 

We decided we needed to do some union inspections in honor of Clint. 

 

One thing we didn't have in the olden days: a ginormous flat screen tv. Funsies.

 

The final view from one side. 

The final view from the other side.

Leslie and Zoe were ready for movie & brownie time. 

And then Clint the ruiner of everything good came home and almost destroyed everything. Luckily we shrieked enough that Godzilla was paralyzed and repairs were quickly made.

Clint joined us in the fort to watch the end of Unstoppable. And then promptly fell asleep. Lame-o. 

Yay for for building!!!

Chapstick

I LOVE chapstick. Maybe more than love. Maybe I'm addicted to chapstick. My friends and family would probably say so. I could totally ween myself off of it if I wanted, but why would I want to do that? Chapstick makes your lips so soft and smooth. Who wants dry crusty lips? Not me that's for sure. My favorite kind of chapstick is Chapstick brand in mint flavor. If I have no chapstick I'll use pretty much anything but given a choice, mint is the way to go. My least favorite kind is plain. Especially no name gross plain kind. Yuck. I like a firm chapstick too. Blistex is way too smushy. I think it has higher petroleum content. Chapstick brand is a nice consistency. It doesn't squish all over your lips when you use it. Two of the worst things that happen with chapstick is if you leave it in your pocket and send it through the wash. If it just gets washed it gets water-logged and even if you let it sit out to dry it's never the same. If it goes through the dryer then it melts all over your clothes and leave permanent little grease spots. Ange is the worst at leaving chapsticks in her pockets. Grr. The other worst thing is if you leave your chapstick in your car. It gets all melty and if you try to use it before it cools down it smashes all over your lips. If it's not sitting upright then it oozes all over the tube and gets all deformed. Bleck. I go through about 1.5 chapsticks a month. It's worth it.

How to Eat a Caramel Apple: A Demonstration

This is Ange eating a caramel apple. Notice the eyes squeezing shut so tight.

Notice the champion caramel apple eater (me). BIG bites. Whoa.

Pretty Little Flower

Every spring this little lonely daffodil raises it's little head out of the piles of leaves I refuse to rake in the fall. It only lives for a few weeks (mostly because I suck at anything gardening related and don't do anything to encourage life), but every year it makes me happy to see it. It seems like it springs out of nowhere and all of a sudden I'm like "Oh hello little flower! I've missed you!" This usually means spring is right around the corner. This came up about two weeks ago so I'm hoping that means I'll have a warm sunny birthday.

How I Looked for a Job

As I mentioned previously, I often make decisions in random spastic ways, and this pattern has usually served me well and I alluded to the fact that my new job search was somewhat similar to the way I had chosen my undergraduate university.

All is ready to be revealed because I got a job offer and I accepted! Yay, yay, yay!

So one would think that with higher and higher levels of education you would you have more choices in the world available to you. That's kind of true in some ways, but not so much in others.

You see, there's only so many places that a person with a PhD can work. And the job openings for those people don't open up often. So when you go out to look for a job your choices are somewhat limited. You go where there are job offers and that often means you have to do a nationwide search. And that's what most PhD students do.

That's mostly what I did...but with some limits. I know that the economy is bad right now and just getting A job anywhere I can should be my goal. But in the words of one wise person, homie don't play that. I really cannot be expected to move just anywhere. Besides the fact that I am generally picky about my surroundings, I have actual real-life concerns like is my family going to be discriminated against or worse, hate crimed? Why in the world would I choose to move somewhere more backwards and conservative than Indiana? And while we're at it, why do I want to live anywhere uglier than Indiana and farther away from civilization?

So I needed a plan. And here it is:

Oh how I love MS Paint

Anywhere in the "Not Even" zone would be immediately passed over for consideration. Generally speaking, these are very conservative states where my family would be in danger and/or highly undesirable places to live anyway for a multitude of reasons (ratio of city to farmland, distance from the beach, plethora of Southern twang, etc.). Now I'm sure some cities in the zone are "just lovely," but frankly no amount of convincing on the part of a native is going to convince me I would want to live anywhere in the zone. So I didn't apply anywhere where jobs were listed in this area.

I heard from a lot of people that this was a fool-hardy decision; I shouldn't limit myself so much. Well guess what? I applied for 52 jobs outside of that zone. FIFTY TWO. That's a lot. I was sure I'd get SOMETHING.

And guess what?

I did. Suck it naysayers.

And not only did I get A job in the desirable zone, I got one of my top choices in my very top zone of ideal living.

I accepted a job at California State University-Chico on Monday. My heart is singing on the highest mountain-tops. Starting this fall I will be a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Chico State. I've never been so happy in my entire life. Once again, random strategies for world domination have worked in my favor. Go me!

National Enquirer...I mean, really?

Who the hell reads the National Enquirer? 

I was recently going to the bathroom in my place of employment and there was a National Enquirer on the back of the toilet. Now, in my building, knowing my co-workers it was purchased as a joke. But it got me thinking...

Who the hell reads that trash? I mean, there can't be that many people who think it's a funny enough joke to support the on-going printing of it. So that must mean they have actual readership. 

Besides the one time they actually got a story right (see: John Edwards, skanky politician extraordinaire) they usually talk about alien babies and tragic completely ridiculous and made-up celebrity stories.  Their stuff is so far-fetched that it is nowhere near believable. How do people think it is a good investment of their money?

They even have a website which I'm almost embarrassed to link to, but it's such a crapfest I couldn't help myself. Besides the crappy content, it looks like a 5 year old designed it. So many blinky .gif images! Arghhh!

Anyway, those are just my thoughts. Do you know anyone who reads this shit show like for real? Not for jokes?

How I Chose My Undergraduate College

You know when you are in junior high/early high school and you have to take the PSAT? Well after you take it, and if you do well, you start getting a whole bunch of junk from colleges that want to recruit you because you are oh so smart. Well unbeknownst to my dad I returned every damn info card I got in the mail. Every. Single. One. 

I got hundreds. 

Why would I do this? Well I knew I wanted to go somewhere in life. I wanted to venture out into the big wide world and DO SOMETHING. Something important. And getting out into the world and doing something important would most likely not happen if I stayed in Indiana and went to IU, IUPUI or Purdue like my high school friends. I needed to get OUT of Indiana. So why not send postcards out all over the wide berth of the US? Sounded good to me. 

My dad was so angry with the amount of mail I was getting. Hehe. 

Here was my system of selecting a college:

1. Get postcard or small letter-y type thing telling me about some fabulous college far from Indiana in 200 words or less. 

2. Fill out postcard saying "YES! I would like more information about your far away college. Please bury me in mail."

3. Get a much bigger and more in-depth mailing about far-flung college with pictures and lots of words describing whether or not it was cool. 

4. Look at materials the college sent and decide if they were lame or not. This was a somewhat random process. Mostly I looked to see where they were (no where too cold or snowy, e.g. Minnesota), whether or not they had been sneaky with their first mailing and they were secretly a religious college (No Jesus freak schools for me), and if they seemed hippie and random enough (I can't be somewhere all stuffy and strict). Lame schools went into the trash and good enough schools went into the maybe pile. 

5. The maybe pile got pretty big. I had to go back through and apply more strict standards. Not really too sure what these standards were, but they were obviously important at the time. 

6. I somehow managed to whittle it down to 3 schools (plus IUPUI which was my safety school). I applied to all 4 and waited. Eventually got accepted to 3 and waitlisted at 1. Decided if they thought I was only waitlist material I hated them anyway and I'd rather drop dead than attend their school. So I really had two decisions.

7. Since I am a procrastinator extraordinare I waited until like April (when most of my peers already decided where they were going and had plunked down deposits) to start realizing I needed to really pick one. So I packed up on two marathon road trips. My dad got to go to Florida with me (and this is where we had the 18 hour drive where we spoke barely at all) and my mom got to go to Pennsylvania with me. 

8. The Florida school had managed to be sneaky through all of their materials. They turned out to be way too strict and too religious. Yuck. Nevermind. 

9. Luckily my Pennsylvania choice turned out to be PERFECT. Since they had bombarded me with lots of mail and even phone calls I had already had a sneaky suspicion that I would love them. I was right. It was a glorious trip and I had found my perfect school. My dad continued to be annoyed that I chose a school 8 hours away. He bought me a car so he didn't have to drive to Pennsylvania again until I graduated. WIN!

Turns out Juniata was the best random decision I ever made. If I had to go back and do it all over again I wouldn't have changed a thing. The experience I had at Juniata really shaped who I am today and of course who I am today is AWESOME. I was confident in my haphazard system and it worked out for me. Don't let anyone boss you and tell you that you are not making informed and sensible decisions. Sometimes wacky systems turn out to work well. Just be fearless and confident that you'll find your way.

Please, I want to marry you!

In my 5 years working on African issues and in Africa the one thing that I find frustrates most females going to Africa is the ever-present annoyance of men trying to get in your pants. I know that is blunt and it sounds harsh, but in my personal experience (anecdotally of course) this goes across all African men I have ever met, be it Nigerian, Congolese, Gambian, etc. I really hate to generalize, particularly across one of the largest and most populated continents on the planet, so please know I do not do this lightly.

Luckily it is usually done in a light and playful manner and not in a scary, threatening manner. I have NEVER felt like I was going to be assaulted, just oogled, sometimes in a manner we would call “sexual harassment” in the US. Here it isn’t. It’s just standard practice. Particularly given the fact that American girls tend to send unconscious signals to the men they are interacting with on a daily basis. Those “unconscious signals” are being overly nice (which is very American), always wanting to help (Americans love some underdogs), and just being an American (but particularly a larger white woman). I know, I know, that’s pretty much an all inclusive list. So pretty much, if you are an American woman, you will be sexually harassed, or at least intensely flirted with.

The interesting thing is that for the most part, this behavior continues even outside of Africa amongst the African men I know. I have been hit on or propositioned by the majority of African men living in the US that I know (or really, even meet). Not every single one, but nearly. It seems that it’s a hard cultural habit to break. It used to drive me nuts, but eventually I learned to ignore it and deflect. It still bothers a lot of newbies, and it used to bother Ange a lot, though now that she has traveled with me and has met lots of Africans herself she’s becoming more used to it and not as upset. It’s probably the number one thing that drives new visitors to the brink of losing their minds. If they can move past it, their experience is usually a great one. If not, they get caught up and really annoyed.

This has been my experience up until now. However, for the first time in my history of working with African men and living in Africa I am basically free from this. I didn’t really notice it at first, but one day I last week I went to the market and got a marriage proposal while I was trying to buy a set of plastic drawers. After explaining that I was already married, he basically said any white American girl would do. I had to promise to send him one in exchange for the deal I negotiated with him for my drawers. So ladies, there is a man in Benin just waiting for you. Sorry I had to sell you out, but 1000 Naira was at stake! After that experience I all of a sudden realized that that was the first time in the 2 and a half weeks that I’d been here that I’d had that happen. I had to think really hard about it, but nope, hadn’t happened. Of course now that I am conscious of it I am looking at for it. And still, a week and a half later, it hasn’t happened!

Of course it is refreshing for me to not have to constantly be on my guard but it’s also interesting from my research perspective. Why aren’t men flirting/harassing me? Is it really their staunch religious views? In the past I’ve worked with men from a variety of different religious backgrounds (from Catholics to Muslims) and no matter what their religious beliefs about sex and behavior are supposed to be, I find they very rarely “walk the talk” when it comes to obeying religious doctrine.

So, on the one hand it is surprising that in this Pentecostal environment people are (so far) obeying their religious beliefs and guidelines, but on the other hand it isn’t surprising because that is what you would (stereotypically) expect. And if it isn’t the influence of religion, then what is it? It could be that I am in a really weird space in terms of age…most of the people in church are older and married so perhaps I am too young for them (though this has NEVER stopped anyone before)? And my prospective interviewees, students, are all much younger than me, so maybe that has something to do with it? Right now I am leaning towards explanation #1, which is of course very interesting and relevant to my work. I’ll have to keep thinking about this one.

I can’t do it Captain! I don’t have the POWER!

I’ve mentioned this before in the past, probably several times, but one of the biggest problems facing Nigeria is power (followed closely by security & roads). The national power company is NEPA which technically stands for National Electric Power Authority, but colloquially is referred to as “Never Expect Power Always.” Because it’s completely true. It’s hard to get a real estimate of how much power NEPA provides, both because they would never give realistic figures and because Nigerians have circumvented NEPA (at a high cost) which doesn’t give you a real idea of how often the power is off. Based on past experiences where it was a little easier to estimate (being in a “village” with less money to operate the circumventers) would be that NEPA works less than 30% of the time. Pitiful.

The circumventers currently in wide-spread use are diesel powered generators and invertors. When NEPA switches off wealthier homes and businesses automatically switch to generator power (or as it is locally referred to “the gen”). If a gen should fail (run out of diesel or other instances) then an inverter kicks on and supplies power. After some stealthy sleuthing on Wikipedia, it seems like an inverter is just a giant battery (BIL can correct me if I’m wrong). It is only recently that I have had much experience with inverters; in the past no one had them, but recently both the M’s and the Children’s Home have them. The downside to an inverter is that it only runs low electricity things (e.g. NOT the fridge, microwave, air conditioners or even the water heater). It is probably only once or twice a day that the inverter turns on and it’s usually for less than half an hour. Of course I don’t know how much these things cost and I would not ask what the budget is for them because A. the gen runs the entire compound so it would be difficult to get an estimate of a realistic cost, and the inverters are house by house (or lacking such as the case in my guest house—if everyone is else on inverter then I have no power…well none except flash light!) and B. it seems a little too intrusive of a question.

I think the lack of stable of electricity is one of the things we most take for granted as Americans. Even as I tell people about it, they can’t quite understand it until they come here and experience it for themselves. After you’ve lived with unstable power for a few days all of a sudden you think “Ah Ha! Now I get it!” It is really more than just an annoyance. It affects safety, health, and overall quality of life. It increases the costs of many things (generators are much more expensive to run), pollutes the environment, and on and on and on. You have to live in the environment and talk to local people and think deeply before it really starts to sink in and you get a bigger picture of things. It's one of the most challenging things for Americans to understand and yet can really have an impact on how our views of the world are shaped.

Now I'm going to go off on a semi-political/philosophical academic tangent here, so if you aren't here for the academics and just like it when I talk about getting electrocuted and making a fool of myself you might want to bow out now.

Still with me? Ok!

One of things about working with college students that is most frustrating is their (here I am generalizing) limited world view. Charming and idealistic, but also maddening when having a conversation with them. Though my most relevant experiences relate to Juniata College students and traveling in The Gambia, the basic concepts are still relevant. Juniata is a liberal, peace-loving, die-for-democratic-ideals kind of school. I know this of course because I went there and I love these things. However, in the face of reality it is often hard to reconcile these things we believe and have learned with the actualities of how people live their lives. Sitting in a technology-driven, comfortable classroom we can discuss passionately our love of democracy and how fundamental it is to human existence, but when you get out in "the real world," or at least the world that again is not quite as comfortable as the easy existence we have in the US, you find out that democracy and "ideals" have much less value. What really has value is having dependable electricity 24 hours a day, have a safe place to live without fear of robbers and kidnappers, having roads that you can drive on without worrying the next dinosaur-sized pothole is going to snap your car in two, and having access to educational and economic opportunities. If you don’t have these, things like “freedom of speech” and “democratic elections” hold much less value. It isn’t to say they aren’t important, but if you don’t have the basics, you can’t begin to think of luxuries.

Now many students would say “But this is the reason you NEED democracy and freedom of speech! You need to hold leaders accountable!” but again, this is first-world thinking. In many parts of the world if you speak out against the government you, your family, and your friends are in real danger of death. Not just someone will be mad at you, but they will KILL you. As much as I love free speech and voting, if someone tells me that if I talk about these issues they will kill my parents, my sisters, or my partner, then I’m out. Maybe braver souls are willing to die for these ideals, but I am not. I've been near the tip of a gun held by a soldier shouting at someone very close to me (physically and emotionally) and I would have done and said anything to get them to go away and never come back again. I know this happens much more often to people who live in dangerous countries 24-7 and are not just scared visitors like me. So I won't die for those things and I think I can safely say neither are the majority of people living in countries with corrupt and inefficient governments. You hope (and pray) for change, and deal with the daily struggles of living doing the best you can.

Random Hebrew & Random Answers: A Typical Day's Conversation

Obviously the M's have an internet connection since I am blogging and Facebooking, etc. The funny thing is that when I first connected my Google page was all in Hebrew. And it comes up as www.google.co.il which indicates that we are connecting through an Israeli internet service. Ok, no biggie most of the time. Randomly Blogger will only display all the command functions in Hebrew which of course I cannot read so I just have to randomly guess and click on things. But usually going back to the Google homepage and clicking on "English" will fix most things.

I was kind of wondering why they had an Israeli connection, being that we are in Africa and Israel seems like an awful long way to travel for internet. I didn't know if there was some secret Israeli business cohort living in Benin that I didn't know about. So one day I casually inquire as to why we have an Israeli connection/everything is in Hebrew. The person I asked looks at me with complete seriousness and says "Oh it's because we source the internet from Egypt." WHAT? Most random answer ever that still makes no sense on multiple levels. But one thing I've learned working in Nigeria is that sometimes it's best to not further inquire because it A. usually gets you no where anyway and probably even farther from the logical answer you are looking for and B. involves you in a very long conversation that you probably don't want to have, especially when you go back to point A. So I just said "Oh, ok" like that answer made complete sense. Right.