Monday, August 25, 2008

Alligators and crawfish

Saturday, August 23, 2008
11:16 am
I am definitely a bit anti-social. I woke up this morning before my alarm went off (around 8:45) just now left my bedroom for the first time because it was the first time I knew I wouldn’t risk running into Betsy. She really is a nice woman, but I think she might be a bit lonely (she lives by herself) and she really likes to talk. I don’t. I heard some noises outside my window and when I looked I saw her outside playing in her garden. That’s when I decided to venture out to the kitchen and have some strawberries. She has 4 cats. I don’t like cats. While I was cutting my strawberries on the only clean part of the kitchen counter that I could find, one was rubbing against my leg and another was walking on the kitchen counter, trying to get close enough to see what I was doing. When you’re staying in someone else’s house and you’re chopping food you’re about to eat, you don’t really want to have to wonder if you should have wiped off the counter before putting the food on it. You don’t want to think about where the cat has been walking and if you’re strawberries are now covered in the same stuff as the cat’s feet.

I think her house is a bit too big for her. She definitely has enough stuff to fill the house, but that’s all it is. Betsy and a lot of stuff. Her house is also very old looking. I can imagine an old woman living here alone. She has stuff everywhere and everything is covered in cobwebs or cat hair. I guess some of the girls from Psi Psi came over on Thursday to help her clean to prepare for my arrival, which I appreciate. You can’t really tell though. My room is nice and clean except for the boxes of stuff along one of the walls that belong to the Psi Psi chapter. She said there wasn’t enough room in their storage unit for all their stuff, so she lets them keep boxes at her place. She really is a sweet woman and cares about these girls a lot. There is a chapter member who lives near New Orleans, which is about 4 and a half hours from here. Betsy is letting her keep boxes and boxes of her stuff at Betsy’s house for the summer because she didn’t have a way to get her stuff home. Now there’s a little twist in that story: the girl emailed that chapter yesterday morning saying that her bus was supposed to arrive in Natchitoches yesterday afternoon but she needed someone to pick her up from the bus station and a place to stay until she was able to move back into her apartment on Monday. The girl that was going to be able to pick her up tried calling her all day to let her know that she could but was unable to reach her. She went to the bus station anyway and waited and waited and the girl never got off the bus. A couple hours later we find out that this girl from New Orleans has now decided to live at home this semester and take classes online, so she never got on the bus and never bothered telling anyone that she wasn’t coming.

It really sucks that I don’t have internet out here. I’m kind of used to it since we didn’t have internet in our apartment at Pickwick. At Pickwick, though, we were able to walk over to the Club House and use it there and if it wasn’t working, we were guaranteed to be able to get on at work the next day. It also wasn’t too big of a deal because we didn’t have work that we needed to get done at home and use the internet for. Now I do. It really wouldn’t be too bad if I knew I was guaranteed to get to have internet on campus. Betsy said that I can use other girl’s computers when I need internet, but there are things that I can only access through my computer logged into the VPN. Oh well. I’ll just have to figure out how to make it work and make the best of it.

Sunday, August 24, 2008
10:00 am
Yesterday afternoon I met with Jenn Styron. She was one of the girls to help get Psi Psi reinstalled as a chapter like 6 years ago and she was also an LC when she graduated. Now she’s a volunteer for ASA and is the chapter development coordinator for Psi Psi. She’s awesome! She was shocked to hear that we didn’t have LC buddies set up so she said she’s going to adopt me as an LC buddy and try and get Nicole one as well. I’m excited! During our meeting she and I talked about what we’re going to tell the chapter tomorrow when we meet with them. I’m very nervous. She also took me to a little hot dog stand that has internet so I could check my email and stuff, which I was very grateful for.

Talking to Jenn made me think some more about what I want to do with my life. While I was at Clayton State with Nicole, I was commenting on how much I love this job, especially getting to do expansion work at a University. It’s like being in college except you don’t have to worry about classes and test and you get paid for it instead of having to pay for it. Nicole said that’s why she wants to go into Student Affairs. I’d honestly never really though about that until I took this job. That’s also what Jenn wants to do. Nicole wants to be more in charge of Student Activities and programming, but I think if I did it I’d want to be a Greek Advisor. I’m not really sure about it though. I really love my job and I know that if I did student affairs I’d really love it, but it conflicts with what I’d always said I’d do. I really love kids and have always wanted to work with them and I feel kind of guilty considering doing something else with my life. Working in higher education would be very enjoyable, but how much difference would I be making? Working with younger kids, I know I’d be making a difference in their lives, especially if I go into social work. But when I was working at the Boys and Girls Club this summer, I loved the kids and working with them, but there were many mornings when, if given the option, I would not have gone to work. That’s not the case now. I am excited about the job that I do and have looked forward to going to work every morning for the last 7 weeks. I think that has more to do with the ASA aspect of the job than just the college life aspect, so I could always get a job working at HQ instead of at a University. I was talking with Stacy, the executive director of the Foundation, and she said there seems to be a very high turn over rate at HQ, so if it’s something that I want to do, I’d probably only have to wait a couple of year for a spot to open up. That’s good because I want to get my masters no matter what, but now I’m starting to think more about what area I want to get it in. Higher Education, Psychology, Elementary Education… I still have time to think about it more, but I’m really torn.

I was talking to John on the phone the other day and I was telling him all about Clayton State and he was like “Oh! You have the perfect job right now to be scouting out different grad schools!” I laughed because that’s something that Nicole and I talked about right away and part of the reasons that she took the job. I am excited to see all these different schools and what they have to offer. I took a tour of Northwestern’s campus yesterday and, as of now, I definitely like Clayton better. Clayton’s campus was just gorgeous and very new looking. Northwestern is very old looking, but not like vintage/antique-y old, just like run down old. And it’s very hot here, just like in Texas. I definitely got spoiled working in Indy this summer because I could wear basically whatever I wanted to the office because it was only like 80-85 degrees. Now that I’m back in the south, I have to really plan out what I’m going to wear based on how bad I’m going to sweat in it in the first 5 minutes I’m outside. Yuck. I like the heat in the summer, but not when I have to be dressed in business casual. Or, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad except that I couldn’t really buy a lot of summery business clothes for this job because I knew I was going to be traveling up north as well where they’d do me no good at all.

Last night for dinner Betsy took us to a local restaurant called Mariners that was really nice. It sat right on the lake and was mostly windows, so the view was beautiful. We were on the wrong side of the restaurant to see the sun set, but it was still really pretty. For appetizers we got mini meat pies, which apparently are something that you have to try when you’re visiting Natchitoches, and some blackened alligator. They were both really good! For my entrĂ©e I had blackened tilapia with crawfish etufee on it. It was delicious! It was a lot of food so I wasn’t able to eat it all and I’m really looking forward to having leftovers for lunch. Betsy’s an ecologist and works more on the math and theorem side of ecology (she wrote her dissertation on orchids). Besides both of us being members of ASA and liking healthy food, we really have nothing in common at all. She told us that the reason she lives such a boring life is because she get her excitement fix all in one year and now she’s done with excitement. One job that she had was working on one of the swamps in Georgia and she said that she had several close calls with some alligators. Later that year she was asked to go to Jerusalem and live for 4 months (I forget why). She apparently did not want to go and told them so several times before they finally convinced her to go. She went right before the Gulf war and she said that there were guns everywhere. You would be walking down the street and pass modern, orthodox couple pushing a stroller with their child in it and the husband would have an oozy tossed casually over his shoulder. It was crazy hearing her talk about some of this stuff.

11:30 pm
Goodness I am tired. I had my first meeting with a chapter tonight! It was good, but a bit stressful. This chapter needs a lot of help because they’re so small, but they really seem to be a great group of women and I’m looking forward to working with them! They all seem to be pretty excited about meeting me and taking me out to eat and cooking for me and are even offering to let me stay with them if I start to get tired of staying with Betsy. I am very excited at the moment and I have really high hopes for these ladies and hope that I’m not disappointed. I also hope that I don’t end up being a disappointment to them!

I got to talk to John tonight for the last time before he leaves for India. It was sad, but I know we’re going to do a good job of keeping in touch through email and such, so I don’t feel as though my life (or our friendship) is ending. We talked for over an hour and it was a really good last conversation. I was pleased with it and I think that he was too. I really like the way that our friendship has evolved over the last three and a half years. We better not grow apart while he’s in India. That’ll upset me.

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