Celebrating Joblessness

My furlough has officially arrived. I haven't heard much from work. I had a few people call me to say hi, but other than that, I haven't heard a peep.

And the world is still turning (just as I thought it would).

To celebrate my lack of a job, I decided to go push chunks of raw turkey into cans. Doesn't sound fun? Well, to tell you the truth, it really wasn't that enthralling, but it was for a good cause.

One thing that I appreciate about my religion is that there are plenty of opportunities to serve other people. There is a cannery down in Garden City that is run by volunteers. Each church unit in our area are assigned different days throughout the year to have people go volunteer. It ends up that each person goes (in theory) about once a year for a four hour shift.

We ended up doing turkey chunks. They take frozen turkey breasts, put them into a grinder that moves them up a conveyor belt into a hopper that feeds them into the cans (with the help of people) that goes down the conveyor belt to fill up the cans with hot water and seal the cans.

*breath*

There is another area where they pressure cook the meat, put the labels on the cans, and box them up.

I ended up being put in charge of making sure that the meat was pushed down into the cans. I didn't realize how tired my hand would get when I had to force the chunks into the cans. I went and did this on Tuesday, and my tricep is still pretty sore today. As I was standing by another volunteer, she commented to me that she would be completely fine not eating turkey for a while.

I would have to agree with her.

There were times when the meat was warm and slimy. Wifey would have never made it. During her pregnancy, she has had a hard time cutting up a chicken breast to cook. She doesn't particularly like raw meat normally, but she would have died during her pregnancy.

After I left, I smelt a bit like the frog I dissected in my eight grade class.

I was willing to do this because of what the cannery does. You can buy the goods if you want. A bulk of the food gets given away at little or no cost. People can receive assistance from the church in the form of a bishop's storehouse. It is like a supermarket without any cash registers. You get an order filled from your bishop (hence the name) before you head there, and then they give you what you need and send you on your merry way.

Another place where this food gets sent is to the sites of natural disasters. They get all this food on hand, and then when something goes wrong, the church has a the means to get the food to where it is needed.

So even though my arm is a bit sore and the idea of eating turkey is still repulsive, I was happy to help.

Just for Old Time's Sake

A few months ago I was at a Boise Music Week performance. I happened to run into one of my old professors there. We chatted for a bit and caught up on what we were doing with our lives. He knew that I was working as an editor for a local company, and asked me to come in sometime and talk to his editing class in the fall.

I was a bit taken aback. I had always worked pretty hard in class, and did my best to participate, but I never expected to be a guest lecturer. I guess my A's in his classes were well deserved. I walked away smiling with my ego stroked, and wondered if it would ever really happen.

Tomorrow, it will.

A few days ago it really hit me. Dr. Willerton, the current president for the Snake River Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication (which I no longer belong to), asked me to come talk to his class. I'm sure that he has a lot of other contacts in the valley who have more editing experience. They could probably do a better job as well. But he asked me to give the presentation.

I just put the finishing touches on my PowerPoint presentation. I feel like it will be a relatively rousing 45 minutes for the class. I hope that they will not be scared of me, eagerly asking questions so that I can impart my meager knowledge to them. Remembering how my three hour lecture classes were, I am guessing that they probably won't be as eager as I am. At least I get them for the first part of the class before their brains are wandering to the social engagements they have planned for 9:00 when class gets over. It should be a fun experience.

Wish me luck tomorrow. It will be fun to walk the halls and smell the dust from the Liberal Arts Building once again. Who knows, I might even go take a peek at the pictures in the halls from the photography students like I used to on break. Just for old time's sake.

Solving the World's Problem One Day at a Time

I really like it when someone else verbalizes something that stews in my brain. It wakes me up to think Hey, why aren't I saying anything about this?

That being said, I came across an op-ed piece today by Thomas L. Friedman called We're Number 1(1)!. The article piqued my interest, making me put some things together that I haven't thought of in a while.

I have always heard the term "The Greatest Generation" attributed to my grandparents' generation. I never had that great of a relationship with my grandparents because they lived far away and I was a (sometimes) cantankerous teenager. I would rather stay home and have a weekend to myself than make a road trip down to Utah and stay with people who seemed so far detached from my current situation. This was before I found out that you could learn things from other people that didn't share your viewpoints.

Now that I have become somewhat enlightened, I struggle with many of my generation. Many seem to be self-serving to a large degree. Many were raised with both parents working, so they were given free reign to do as they pleased until Mom and Dad came home at 5:00. Self-gratification was the name of every afternoon, which has translated into schooling.


Friedman says it this way:

We had a values breakdown — a national epidemic of get-rich-quickism and something-for-nothingism. Wall Street may have been dealing the dope, but our lawmakers encouraged it. And far too many of us were happy to buy the dot-com and subprime crack for quick prosperity highs.

Our big problems are unfolding incrementally — the decline in U.S. education, competitiveness and infrastructure, as well as oil addiction and climate change. Our generation’s leaders never dare utter the word “sacrifice.” All solutions must be painless. Which drug would you like? A stimulus from Democrats or a tax cut from Republicans? A national energy policy? Too hard. For a decade we sent our best minds not to make computer chips in Silicon Valley but to make poker chips on Wall Street, while telling ourselves we could have the American dream — a home — without saving and investing, for nothing down and nothing to pay for two years. Our leadership message to the world (except for our brave soldiers): “After you.”

Another author, Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post, argues that people have lost their zeal for learning.

The larger cause of failure is almost unmentionable: shrunken student motivation. Students, after all, have to do the work. If they aren’t motivated, even capable teachers may fail. Motivation comes from many sources: curiosity and ambition; parental expectations; the desire to get into a ‘good’ college; inspiring or intimidating teachers; peer pressure. The unstated assumption of much school ‘reform’ is that if students aren’t motivated, it’s mainly the fault of schools and teachers.” Wrong, he said. “Motivation is weak because more students (of all races and economic classes, let it be added) don’t like school, don’t work hard and don’t do well. In a 2008 survey of public high school teachers, 21 percent judged student absenteeism a serious problem; 29 percent cited ‘student apathy.

Samuelson is talking about primary and secondary schooling, but I would hazard a guess that this issue occurs in graduate and post-graduate work as well. It declines sharply once you are paying for your education, but I know that there are high school grads right now who are cutting classes. The sun is shining and their friend is having a barbecue tonight. It won't hurt to skip just one class, because their teacher is teaching in a large lecture hall with 119 other students who are supposed to be there.

I was amazed by the fact that as I was in college, people were just trying to make the grade instead of learning. I saw a discussion on LinkedIn claiming that someone's military experience had given him more useful skills than his Master's degree. He cited the fact that he learned a can-do attitude in the military, which was more important than the education he received. While the military can teach you a lot, I don't buy the fact that his education was not of value. I buy the fact that he does not value his education. Or maybe the fact that he felt his education's value had been inflated.

The cost of education is rising, but so is the cost of not getting an education. How do we expect to fix the economy if we encourage freeloading? If someone is used to asking for the answer on all their tests, aren't they going to be fine asking for the answer on all their work assignments?

I appreciate it when people live up the their mistakes. I don't find that it tarnishes their reputation, especially in difficult situations. Instead, it tells me that they are human, like me. I know I make mistakes (even though I don't like to), and I don't know how to fix everything, but I do my small part by attempting to do a couple of things:

1. Try to make someone's day better every day. I go out of my way to help out someone each day. Sometimes it is something as small as offering to write an email for a colleague that has a slammed workload. I just try to do at least one thing a day to make someone's life easier.
2. Accept responsibility for my successes and failures. It is hard to do at times, but I do it anyway.
3. Use the things I learned in life (or school) to make my own life easier. I have many friends and family members who are teachers, and I find them to generally be giving and passionate individuals who feel like their hands are tied. I honor them by trying to use the knowledge they offered to me. We all know that they don't get rewarded handsomely for their chosen profession.
4. Put myself in situations where I can learn. If I am not learning, I feel bored. That is just the way I work. For this reason, I know a little bit about a lot of things. If you have new things for me to learn, please send them my way.
5. Explore the arts. Books and music have a way of expanding my views on life that give me vicarious experience. It gives me a chance to attempt or experience something without having to fall on my face in a public space. It also helps me connect with other people. These things tap into my emotions and remind me of people who I might need to help the next day.

What kinds of things do you do to make sure you stay industrious or honor those who have taught you?

Monday? Already?

I came to a bleak realization today—my weekend is already gone. I understand that the time-space continuum has not yet jumped to Monday, but I also realized that my thoughts of having a restful weekend are out the window.

You see, tonight I have plans to go people watching at Art in the Park. Boise City gathers a bunch of local (and not so local) vendors who come and sell their artistic wares in the park right next to the Boise State campus. It is a great people-watching event where all sorts of people come out. You get the bohemians who wear their sun dresses and Rastafarian hats haphazardly hiding their dreadlocks who stare at the same yard sculptures as the well-to-do businesswoman in her a-line skirt who is quickly trying to pay the vendor so she can get back to her 1:00 conference call. Munchkin will love being out among the people, as she always does. Such a social creature. She must take after her mother.

Tomorrow is going to be a marathon. We have a service project starting around 10:00 in commemoration of September 11^th. It is kind of a hole in my American memory, as I wasn’t in the country when it happened. That is a post for another day though. Needless to say, we are going there until about 1:00, followed by a church meeting for me at 4:00 that will last two hours, followed by another church meeting for Wifey and I at 7:00. We will go home, slide into pajamas, peek on (hopefully) sleeping Munchkin, and slide into bed ourselves. The next morning, we have our normal church meeting at 10:00 – 12:00, and then we can rest. And by rest, I mean we will probably visit family.

As you can see, my weekend is almost over, and it is only Friday. I am glad that Munchkin is well behaved, and doesn’t mind having family babysit her. She suspects that we are planning something this weekend though, because she has been waking us up at all hours of the night to punish us for not keeping her in the loop. I understand that children are prone to doing that, but not our Munchkin. She slept through the night starting around two months. 

Yes, I know we are lucky.

The past three nights, Munchkin has decided that she needs to wake up at crazy times. Last night, it was about midnight. She went back to bed after about an hour of drifting in and out of sleep. Then she decided to wake up at 6:00. And she stayed up.

I could tell Munchkin was pretty sleepy when I was leaving for work about 20 minutes to 8:00. She crawled up to me making that noise where she wants me to pick her up. Generally it is accompanied by upstretched arms, but the arms stayed down this morning, and her eyes locked on my shoes instead of my chest (which is about as tall as she can see from a crawling position). I picked her up as her eyes came level with the television. And she just stared; no little hands trying to pry my lips apart to see my teeth or tongue, no cheek pats, and no attempts to grab the glasses. As Wifey came back with a bottle, Munchkin yawned, then immediately started to jump out of my arms so she could get at the bottle. 

The funniest part about the whole situation is that Munchkin starts whining as soon as she sees the bottle. It is almost as if she thinks that we aren’t going to give it to her. The frantic moans and squirms come until the bottle is through her lips. As soon as she can taste it, she stops making noise and squirming, but she doesn’t exactly relax. One arm generally stays up in the air as if she had a question. She doesn’t reach for anything. Her eyes often close. Her arm just hangs out in the air. After a while, her tiny fingers start to explore the side of the bottle, or sometimes pat your arm or chest (but only if you are lucky).

The fact of the matter is, Munchkin was yawning then, headed for a nice cozy nap in her fuzzy, footed pajamas. Now I am yawning, wishing for a snooze, but I realize that it is almost Monday again—no nap for me.