After School Matters

So today I got off the bus and started to walk home when a group of students approached me. Great I thought, what are they going to try and get away with? Something pretty neat in my opinion. Their spokes person, a well spoken girl with purple eyeshadow and a purple heart clip to match in her spikey modern hairstyle, introduced them as part of After School Matters and they just wanted to ask me five questions. I said I had time and to go ahead. This interview was recorded on a home video camera by the way. I was also told that I didn't have to give long and involved answers. So I kept them short.
The questions:
1. What would you do to improve the neighborhood?
2. Is graffiti art?
3.Is there a point that graffiti crosses the line?
4. Are you influenced by propaganda?
5.Does music influence how people act? For example actions like the Columbine shooting.

My answers:
1. Pick up trash, put more green things like flowers, bushes and trees.
2. Graffiti is art. It's a way for someone to express themselves that is creative.
3. Graffiti crosses the line when it is meant to harm the building and/or the people that are connected to the building. There are buildings that could improve with graffiti on them.
4. I don't think I'm influenced by it if you mean influenced by going and buying the product.
5. Music does influence people. It's the people who choose to act out negatively.

After thanking me and wishing me a great evening the teenagers moved on. I continued my walk home and felt uplifted. Uplifted by the fact that not all kids are hooligans and if they are sometimes they at least are constructive with things like interviewing people for an After School Matters project. I thought the kids that I talked to were professional, smart and cool (or what ever the current word/slang is).

Now, I hope you take a moment to think how you would answer the five questions.
Kids are great!

An Apple Picking Photo Post

How do you like them apples? We picked them ourselves. Two pecks worth. Not sure what that means, but definitely less than a bushel. I think.

Jody liked the apples. She liked the ones up in the trees and she liked the ones on the ground. But I think she liked the ones inside of the tree best.

House Night

So we went to Hancock Tower for House Night this past Wednesday. We had decided that we would go to eat at a place at the top of the Tower, that way we could see the city from above. Fun, right? Well, there are two eating establishments at the top of Hancock Tower, one called a restaurant and the other called a lounge. We figured, being on a budget, it made more sense to go to the lounge. We just wanted appetizer and dessert type things anyway. When we were given a menu, we discovered that the appetizers and such were a minimum of $10. So we decided to split things. We'd get one appetizer and one dessert and share it. The waitress comes to take our order and we tell her what we want, and then she asks, "And what else?" We tell her we don't want anything else and she tells us that we have to order one item per person. And then she asks to see our ID's. We tell her that we aren't buying alcohol, and she tells us that we have to show ID to stay in the lounge. The thing is, not all of us are 21. So we tell her that we can't show ID, and that we weren't told that we needed ID when we were seated. She tells us that we have to leave.

We went downstairs to the Cheesecake Factory. A place where they'll let you share and be under 21. Amazing. We split three slices between the five of us. While we were waiting for the cheesecake we noticed that we were sitting in house order: the downstairs people on one side, the upstairs people on the other. And in room order too: left to right corresponding with front to back of the house. We are such creatures of habit. There's a picture (see below) and typical of amateur photography, the only part of my body in it is my arm.



We took a bus back to a train station and while we were waiting for the Pink Line we saw an old man who looked exactly like Einstein sitting on a bench across the tracks. We were sad that we didn't get to talk to him, but Einstein needed to get to Linden, apparently. On the train, Jody and I were talking, and Jenny took this gem of a photo:



So...caption contest. What do you think we were talking about?

Happy Birthday, Megan!

The MVS House, Episode 1, "Megan's Birthday"

Alarm

Last week I had a very scary start to my day. I didn't need to wait very long for my buses to work, so I was there very early. When I went into the school ( I have a key for the building) I heard this noise like "piep-piep", and I thought- oh no- and a few moments later the alarm set off. I didn't have a key for the room, where I could have make it stop, and even if I would have had one, I didn't know the number to put in. So I went out of the building to find someone who could help me, but there was only another volunteer who didn't know what's going on. So we had to wait for the principal. Luckily he came just a few minutes later, but they were the longest I ever had. Of course the police came also, but by then I was already in the library.

Into the Great Beyond

At work lately I have been sending emails. Lots of them. I send multitudes of one paragraph emails to various departments. Are they important emails? No ma'am. In fact, since I started sending them on last Thursday I have yet to recieve a single reply to any of them. It's one thing to feel like you spend your whole week writing what essentially amounts to inter-departmental nagging, and another altogether when it seems that your nagging has dropped off the face of the earth. It's not clear whether the collective silence is due to irritation or if everything that I have done has literally gone on into the great beyond. Some void in which tired, sad, unfortunate emails go to die. Who knows. But I do know that the project of updating our organization's website cannot continue until I receive some acknowledgement back from the other side of the yawning gap that is the Internet. So in the meantime, I'll be twiddling my thumbs I guess. Oh and writing a 200 word announcement for another section of the website. An undertaking that will be a bit shorter than this post, which I am writing on my lunch break. I can't figure out what I'm going to do all afternoon. This only took 15 minutes.

Revelry at the Michiana MCC Sale

Made the trek to Goshen for the "Michiana" MCC Sale this weekend. Major differences I notice between the Michiana sale and the Kansas sale are:

1. In Michiana, you stand in line for an hour to eat pancakes and sausage. The sausage is pretty good, I suppose. In Kansas, you stand in line for an hour to eat verenika, bohne berrogi, cherry moos, pie, zwieback, and borscht. And sausage. Every dish better than the next.

2. In Kansas, people play the Mennonite game with me. In Michiana, people play the Mennonite game with lots of other people, but not me. That is because I am a Mennonite of the Russian variety. This is the land of Yoders, Millers, Stoltzfuses, and Shenks, not the land of Schmidts, Goerings, Krehbiels, and Voths. I'm lucky if folks up in these parts have even heard the last name Gaeddert, let alone have a guess as to who I might be related to.

3. In Kansas, the people who direct cars into their parking spots in an open field are old men who point with yardsticks. In Michiana, those people are young men who point with one hand and wave the other in a continuous circular motion.

4. In Kansas, unlike Michiana, there are no buildings in the middle of the fairgrounds that have been burnt to a char in a manner resembling a nuclear holocaust. (Although I've been told this was the first year for that sort of thing at the Michiana sale, and that perhaps it was even an accident. I did hear that hundreds of homemade pies went up in flames. Seriously, that's a travesty.)

5. Michiana breaks up the monotony of the quilt auction with periodic hymn sings. A good idea, I think. Kansas should take note.

6. Apple fritters (Michiana) instead of Porzelke (New Year's Cookies) (Kansas).

Major similarities:

1. Michiana, Kansas ... doesn't matter. Money flows out of my pocket. Anybody have an idea of how much money is spent per capita at the Sale on a yearly basis? I suspect: $30, or maybe upwards, if you factor in the people who drop 5 grand on a quilt.

2. Lots of reveling in one's Mennonite identity. Total, unabashed Bakhtinian carnivalesque. Dionysiac, almost.

3. People of all ages participating in the same activities and enjoying them equally well. Amazing, when you think about it.

4. Likely uninteresting and somewhat alienating to someone who doesn't know anything about Mennonites.

5. Overwhelmingly Caucasian, except on MCC pamphlets and posters, which usually have pictures of non-white people.

Concluding thoughts:

I've spent too much time writing this.