Look At Me Still Talking When There’s Science To Do
In Grand Rapids… thinking about Barrow (among other things)Archive for August, 2008
Oh, cheese is a person in your neighborhood
The woman in the silver Buick was very nervous. Though the rest of the drivers traveling down I-96 that Saturday afternoon were obliged to maintain a constant speed as they zoomed toward whatever mundane adventure lay at the end of their trips, she was indecisive. First impatiently zipping through traffic and next growing sluggish, holding up the cars she’d only just passed, she could hardly decide which lane to take, much less how quickly to travel.
During the periods when she fell behind the pack she was thinking hardest about the single straight-backed wooden chair in her backseat. She doubted her own courage as well as the sincerity of her host. She doubted the very nature of the invitation; whoever has heard of a “bring your own chair” party, regardless of how charmingly it was scrawled at the bottom of the embossed notecard?
Naturally, she’d chosen her most uncomfortable chair, and this not without a great deal of thought. Remembering the days she’d spent in preparation of this afternoon, the woman in the silver Buick gained confidence and deftly passed the silver Neon one final time. She didn’t look back as she chose the exit for Okemos; no, her fate had already been decided, and it was with her head held high that she went to meet her destiny.
(Today I have nothing better to do than make things up. Based on a true car-with-a-woman-and-a-single-wooden-chair sighting. Not to worry, I’m still plugging away at that data entry.)
Go on until you come to the end
All those days that we were out in the field this summer we were armed with colorful folders containing pages and pages of spreadsheet printouts to fill in. All those days I recorded point framing data I was charged with the care of a two-inch three ring binder that simply could not hold any more pages if you put a gun to its head, er… spine. Our madcap total season days produced four completely new folders in the space of thirty hours, not counting the four folders that the Barrow team toiled over.
We ran all these folders through the copier before we left; one oughtn’t to leave such things to chance, and any number of scenarios could have separated the folders from the trusty research assistants who transported them in their carry-on luggage. Then what would we have to show for our ten weeks away?
What, indeed. The actual copying took forever, since weeks of tundra exposure left even the all-weather paper curled and cranky. In the case of the Atqasuk folders, the copy machine would only accept so many dead mosquitoes before it became cross and finicky. In the end, however, we had a delightful pile of shiny white data, suitable to shipping back to the lab in Michigan.
The point is that the data is more or less useless in binder form, and the computer has been hungrily accepting the efforts of the ITEX team as we try to transfer everything into the electronic versions of the spreadsheets. This takes much more time and patience than one might imagine, and is the reason that I haven’t unpacked everything in my apartment as satisfactorily as I might…
So be good for goodness’s sake!
My sources say that when a little Atqasuk child is naughty his little Atqasuk grandmother will warn him that his punishment will be to come back as a caribou in his next life. Caribou are feasted on by mosquitoes in the summer and are forced to eat nasty lichens in the winter. No one wants to be a caribou.
They don’t care what you know until they know that you care.
Today I did the nerdiest thing I’ve ever done, not counting the time I read a history of the Oxford English Dictionary for fun. Or the day I wrote a letter to my brother in the Standard Galactic Alphabet. Or the time I made my own Monopoly board, personalized to my friends. Or the summer that my brother and I taught ourselves Tengwar, the writing system for Quenya, the language of the elves…
Room 2242 Kirkhof is not unlike a dungeon, despite the skylights and the unlocked door through which one can easily return to the normal world. I think the dark brick walls that extend up three times the length and four times the width of the tiny floor really set the tone. Today from 5:30 to 7:00 this room was filled with seven white kids intent on gaining +35 nerd points… and a cheerfully obliging professor. As the professor, one of my very favorites, described the notion of “cases” and the thorn, ash, and eth, five of the students pored over their “Introduction to Old English” texts and the other two clutched their volumes of “Old Norse Grammar.” We were very pleased.
Nerd Hour was not my only reason for returning to GV’s Allendale campus. After a vile introductory seminar that I attended downtown, I had yet another education class that made my blood boil. I dislike my classes and my classwork and my classmates. They are boring and they are a waste of time and they are depressingly excitable. And anxious. When our seminar leader reminded us that students prefer teachers who are warm and enthusiastic, my neighbor drew an asterisk on her paper. “Warm and enthusiastic,” she wrote carefully.
Allendale campus is also home to the biology lab, where I was reunited with Jeremy and Jean. They were kind of like Bizarro World Jeremy and Jean, the kind who wear clothes that I don’t recognize. The kind who have gotten haircuts and are not deathly tired and tundra-y. I was happy to see them. We had four whole days to catch up on! Bob was there, too, naturally, so we had a debriefing. I look forward to having time every week to be in this environment.
Being on campus was strange, however. I rode the bus. I saw the freshmen. When I see freshmen walking around holding hands I always wonder if they are the kind who went to college with their high school sweetheart or the kind who managed to pair themselves off during orientation week and the first 48 hours of classes.
Either way I think they’re idiots.
Pa regains his composure and reports:
Perhaps when my dear roommate Mary scanned the classroom and failed to notice me sitting in the fourth row I should have let her sit in the back row by herself. True, both of us are independently predisposed to be look-diseasers and back-row-snickerers when left to our own devices, but when we joined forces and sat together (I don’t know how she didn’t see me, anyway- how much more conspicuous do I and my polka-dot purse have to be?!) the disruptive nature of our participation was set in stone.
Without naming names (ridiculous names, I might add) Mary and I were quick to pinpoint the standouts and predict the way the class would progress from now until December. Though we will undoubtedly be pleased when we are inevitably proved right, the actual events are going to be dull and possibly painful. I’m afraid that the best I can hope for is “droll.” The worst part is that we are quite certain that fifteen weeks with our enthusiastic (blond Juliette Lewis doppelganger) professor and her Tips for the Classroom* will not make us feel any better about our future possible professions.
I can’t stop laughing. At inappropriate times. At appropriate times, too, but the inappropriate times are the ones people remember and frown at you for. How could I possibly refrain from laughing at the girl whose laugh sounds like a garbage truck? Or the boy who suggested that our professor’s short fingernails indicate true dedication and a strong work ethic? Or the gentleman who awkwardly shouted out “terrorist!” when a nice young man was introducing himself to the class?
I went to the grocery store and paid for my own food today. It was disconcerting. At Meijer I had far too many choices of which foods to buy and I missed the convenience of the toy-slash-gun aisle at the Stauqpak. Plus there was no BASC grocery card to use at the checkout lane…!
For the record, my insane desire to run screaming from the College of Education and just graduate with whatever hodge-podge degree I can scrape up is not limited to me- at least two of my friends who did not spend a delightful summer in the Land of the Midnight Sun are experiencing the same symptoms. We have only until Friday to change our schedules, though, and then the panic of the start-of-semester will subside. It always does.
Science report: still entering ten weeks of numbers into endless spreadsheets.
* Children love candy! You can call on kids at random if you have a stack of notecards with their names on them! Write with different colors! Don’t get married when you’re eighteen!
Everything happens for a reason.
Until I got back to Michigan and was surprised at the speed with with the internet complied with my requests, I didn’t really think I had been dealing with slow internet. Fascinating.
I don’t really plan to stop writing in this blog, even though my favorite summer ever is over. After all, there’s still science to do, and I’m still talking, aren’t I?
The chief trouble is all the things there are to do that aren’t science, namely, education. I begin classes tomorrow, and in a week I’ll have to be in a high school literature classroom every day. I am not looking forward to this. I care nothing for teacher clothes, learning theories, child development, or educational politics. I’m afraid that it won’t be enough to enjoy the company of kids (or high schoolers… who I really don’t care for) or the company of books. I ALWAYS enjoy the company of books, though the company of comparative literature, analytical essays, and POETRY I could expressly do without.
If things were different and some “ifs” were settled and I had more time, then I would be all for escaping from the College of Ed, but I have resigned myself to the notion that it will be good for me. Resignation is healthy, right?
If I ever get out of this prickly bush, I’ll never get in it no more.
Things I missed about home:
Pub burgers
pickles
macaroni and cheese
having a decent pair of jeans and more than 5 t-shirts
Lake Michigan
my dog
Cousin Weekend
Family Reunion
Summer Movie Night
Rosie’s graduation party
the people 
Things I miss about Barrow:
science
the sun!
the ocean
the point
KBRW
yellow curry at Arctic Thai
point framing!
Osaka (don’t tell Jean!)
Stauqpak
Crazy Tent
Ernie
owls
shenanigans with Rob
being ridiculed by Papasaurus
Jean Marie’s cooking
hanging out with UTEP
my favorite walk
spaceship toilet
white pickup trucks
the cafeteria… haha
not being hot
science juice
Hiroki san eating all our gummy bears
the huts
airplane rides
catching (but not killing!) lemmings
“Good morning good morning” on the radios
tundra!
the people
I’m making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS.
I was already worried about smelling… unpleasant before I knew that I had another day to wear the same clothes I put on in Barrow. The same clothes I’ve been wearing (and washing!) for ten weeks. I normally don’t care about this, but in the close quarters of a 757, I had only the comfort of my fellow passengers in mind. So I bought a t-shirt at the airport gift shop. Now I’m a whole new Jenny.
My fellow passengers were slightly more removed from my company on today’s flights since I was upgraded. It was nice. The rest of first class was filled with your usual busy business folk and one older Yacht-Club-esque couple. They held hands when we hit turbulence in Minnesota. They were very serious until Mr. Yacht Club had a beer and Mrs. Yacht Club finally got up the courage to use the airplane toilet. These people, the Yacht Clubs and the Business Folk, all looked at me with surprise and mild dislike when I showed up in their little first class village. I was disheveled as all heck and dragging along a muddy backpack covered with Atqasuk travel tags.
Not that any of that is news. Airports and airplanes are all the same. Under construction, busy, and filled with stock characters. In Minneapolis I encountered the typical American family and almost vomited at them with their four blond children and four monogrammed LL Bean rolling backpacks. Whatever. They were cute. I guess. The one kid was a snot, though. He wouldn’t even eat his chicken strips! I’m pretty sure he took a picture of me with his dad’s camera phone. I WAS eating a Berry Tie-dye Fruit by the Foot at the time. Clearly superior to his chicken strips. If I’ve learned anything this summer, it’s that Berry Tie-Dye and Strawberry are the best Fruit by the Foot flavors. Avoid “Color by the Foot” if you can- I know the rainbow coloring is enticing, but trust me.
I did enjoy watching the people during my solo adventure. The other non-stock characters on the loooong flight from Anchorage to Minneapolis were an old Martin Crane type and a Very Important On-the-Phone-Every-Second-Until-They-Say-I-Can’t-Be Gentlemen. He was a little shady. I would cast Tom Cruise in this role for Jenny Rides an Airplane: The Movie. These two fellows had a very important business deal to conduct, but unless they were talking in code, it sounded like Tom Cruise Guy was trying to lure Martin Crane Fellow into a cabin. With fish. I think the deal was about fish.
I was fortunate to have a pleasant seat partner for the long flight. She was pleasant in that we did not exchange words throughout the entire journey. I think she was disappointed that I wasn’t a young handsome single doctor. Based on her choice of reading material, the careful and becoming travel outfit she’d planned, and her mousy demeanor, I invented a life for her that involved patient saving for long cross-country flights where she can meet eligible young men and fall in love over packs of roasted nuts. She’s careful to wear something that shows off her figure but not her skin, partially because she is ever-so modest, but also because she is petite and easily catches a chill on planes. She’s also careful to leave at home the romance novels and especially-oh, the horror, if a worldly man caught her reading something so old-fashioned- her well-loved Jane Austen books. Since she can’t quite bring herself to read Cosmo without blushing, she settles for People magazine. It conveys youth, a sense of fun, an interest in pop culture, and is less stuffy than Time or Newsweek, but is by no means provocative or embarrassing. Her lonely flights take her to Alaska at least once a month, since she is playing the numbers game and everyone knows that Alaska is a virtual treasure trove of MEN.
On the next plane I sat next to a nice older man in a pink polo shirt who ordered a screwdriver and loves West Michigan! He helped me get my bag from the overhead compartment when Cranky Flight Attendant stashed it far away.
At the end of the day I was in Grand Rapids with my parents and my sister. They were okay with seeing me, I think. They thought that my feet should smell better and that I should stop telling them to reduce their carbon footprint, but they can deal.
What shall we do while we’re waiting?
Of COURSE I got up in time to eat two pastries and have a glass of cranberry juice in the lobby of the Puffin Inn. Of course I made it onto the shuttle that I’d signed up for last night, and of course I got to the airport in plenty of time to sit and wait before the 8:45 boarding time. It was plentier of time than I’d originally thought. Last night they told me that I could skip check-in because they had my boarding passes all ready, but I was still expecting a line at security. Silly Jenny, of course there are no lines at security for valued customers who have been bumped up to first class!
Having a bed last night was lovely, though I suspect I will still be able to sleep on the plane. I hope that the rest of my team- none of whom were interested in volunteering to stay with me- was able to sleep well enough. I’ve already spoken to Jobby, and they even delivered my luggage to the new apartment!
Oops. They’re boarding first class. Peace out.
