Monday Moment 12

Yes, friends, after a brief hiatus for an action-packed week, the Monday Moment is back! And there is more exciting news--there will be several reviews forthcoming this week! But that's a story for another time.

Ah, the first stirrings of an Indiana summer...I remember them well. In order to have all that beautiful greenery, one must endure sweltering heat and 98% humidity--though the thunderstorms that are also frequently required are one of the more enjoyable aspects of the experience. But in the early days, when summer is just building up momentum, there can be few places more pleasant on Earth. Bright blue skies cover fields returning to life in mazes of new growth or riots of color. Well, you can see for yourself. This is my home.

"Wildflower Fields"
by Sarah Graybill-Greene

I stopped the car on the way to work and took this one. The road goes through two very big farm fields, and these are the wild flowers ("weeds," to the farmer) that grow before they spray them and turn all of them under...kind of sad, because they made such a beautiful photo.

Monday Moment 10

At times, the storms of my home can be terrifying, but they are awe-inspiring, they are truly majestic, and many of us learn to love them from our early childhood. Today, our resident photographer captures that power for those who may never have seen an Indiana thunderstorm.

"Dark and Ominous"
by Sarah Graybill-Greene

Here is a little bit of what's going on in Southern Indiana, with the thunderstorms moving across the unplanted spring cornfields.

Homeless 14: Voices in the Wilderness

Flag of the State of Colorado

I've been a bit quieter in the blogosphere lately, because I lost about a week to another flare-up of toothache in that poor, beleaguered tooth that is crying out for a root canal. Now that I can once again limp along on over-the-counter painkillers, instead of stupefying narcotics, allow me to give you a truly astonishing update: the state of Colorado has experienced an extraordinary moment of clarity. God willing, this trend will spread.

Remember my first post about this needed root canal, when I explained that Medicaid refuses to cover the procedure? Permit me a brief quote.

The American public could be saved untold millions of dollars every year if Medicaid and Medicare covered conditions that were still mild and as yet easily treatable, but our governmental guidelines define catching and treating a condition early as simply "elective" procedures.

At the federal level, nothing about this statement has changed. I firmly believe that we will see gay marriage as an uncontested, nation-wide policy before "fiscal conservatives" in government realize the fundamental flaw in current Medicaid and Medicare logic. However, the states are permitted to add any coverage they wish to their Medicaid programs, so long as they maintain the federal minimums. Let's hear it for the Colorado legislature! Several years ago, the Colorado Health Foundation provided them with facts about preventive care, and they have begun to listen. A quote from the CHF study:

The research is clear: investing in evidence-based public health programs could substantially reduce health care costs in Colorado. One study estimates that an annual investment of $10 per Coloradan in community-based prevention initiatives could save more than $232 million annually in health care costs after five years...  . 

Beginning April 1, Colorado Medicaid will be providing funding for preventive dental procedures, including *drum roll* ROOT CANALS! I still have to wait and see if I'm deemed eligible for the expanded benefits, and then whether or not my individual case with this tooth is approved. But I'm one step closer to saving my tooth, and for a few minutes, my faith in humanity is bolstered. I watched my parents die slow, torturous deaths because they could not do the things that their doctors recommended to prevent their deterioration; they had to wait until each new problem developed, and then simply have it treated, while we screamed as voices in the wilderness, "This is costing the tax-payers much MORE money!" without ever being heard. Indiana still doesn't hear that voice of reason. Thank God, Colorado has begun listening.

Monday Moment 7

In its many variations and convolutions, the Ohio River dominates the contours of my home. Our entire region is simply one of its attributes, another feature of a natural inhabitant that provided sustenance and transport in days gone by. We are "the Ohio River Valley," a beautiful place where allergy sufferers go to slowly, miserably die. Despite its pollen-heavy air, I love it.

"River and Sky"
by Sarah Graybill-Greene

I was sitting in a riverside café on the Ohio River and this is what floated past the window. This is a little town called Magnet, Indiana, so named because the river currents used to push the boats on to the opposite bank like they were attracted with a huge magnet.

Monday Moment 6

Today, my friend and the blog's resident photographer, Sarah, brings us an image for all those of you who fear that this winter may never end. Bask in this image, and feel the return of hope.

Summer Blooms
by Sarah Graybill-Greene

This was taken on a warm summer morning's walk down a country road.

Whenever I miss my home, I need only look at one of these extraordinary compositions to imagine that I'm there again.

Indiana of All Places

So, THIS just happened!

Yes, according to the Associated Press and LGBTQ Nation,

[f]our couples from southern Indiana are asking a federal judge to force the state to recognize same-sex marriages from other states and issue marriage licenses to gay couples.

The couples are suing the state of Indiana in a lawsuit filed Friday in federal court in New Albany that seeks to overturn an Indiana law that declares same-sex marriages void, even if another state recognizes the union.

Two things glare off the screen at me in this report.

1. New Albany, Indiana, is a 30-minute drive from my hometown. I could take you there in my sleep. Some of my best friends in the world hail from New Albany. My father's family were all originally from there. It is part of that region of Indiana which was the last place in the country to succumb to Daylight Savings Time (and I'm still pissed that we gave in on that). We are the ultra-conservative, uber-isolationists of the state, and basically of the entire country. If this issue was finally going to erupt in Indiana, New Albany--and southern Indiana generally--is NOT the place I would have expected. Indianapolis. Absolutely. But not New Albany.

2. In every single instance of a federal judge ruling a gay marriage ban unconstitutional recently--and there have been a surprising number--someone FILED A LAWSUIT. Even the most liberal of our courts do not take action on an issue unless someone has the courage to put a case before them. God bless all those willing to make themselves vulnerable before the world on behalf of us all.

Monday Moment 3

Welcome once again, everyone, to our weekly artistic feature. In this installment, our resident photographer, Sarah Graybill-Greene, offers us the beauties of an Indiana sunset.  She has titled it, "Last Light."

"Last Light"
by Sarah Graybill-Greene

Sarah described for us the simple moment that inspired such a lovely image as follows.

It was a warm summer's evening over a pond
alive with crickets chirping and frogs a-croaking .

I've known many of those quiet sunsets in my birthplace.

Monday Moment 2

Today's Monday Moment encapsulates many of my memories of home in one image. It is a hazy summer morning in Indiana, and one of the many derelict barns that dot our landscape tells its own tale of better days past, times when it was full of life and activity and a family's livelihood--probably racks of drying tobacco, based on its design. Sarah captures many of Indiana's realities, both alive and sorrowfully not, in a piece entitled "Sad and Forlorn."

"Sad and Forlorn"
by Sarah Graybill-Greene

PTSD and Fumbling, or Homeless 3

Well, gang, I just finished my first 2-hour volunteer shift at the Lakewood Branch of the Jefferson County Public Library. I know the accompanying picture hardly seems appropriate to many of you, but to me, coming here today was terrifying, overwhelming, though it was a piece of cake once I signed in and got started. Let's break this whole thing down a little.

PTSD

I know that I've mentioned Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder often on this blog, and some of you may be wondering what that actually works out to be in everyday life. (I've covered this material before, but I thought an update might be helpful.) We've all heard of it, of course, ever since WWI when it was first discovered and labeled "shell shock," and most of us still associate it with warfare. "Oh, yeah. That's what the Vietnam vets all came back with, right? Some kind of mental problems because of everything they saw and lived through over there? Poor guys. It's not surprising that would mess somebody up!" But men and women who have seen combat are not the only people who can develop PTSD by any means; even children suffer from this condition, if they have lived through something so horrifying that it permanently scars their psyches. Prolonged verbal, emotional, physical or sexual abuse often cause children to develop PTSD, and rape victims, witnesses to violent crime or suicide, and survivors of terrorist attacks commonly suffer from this disorder, as well.

However, there need not be any violence or abuse for a person to develop PTSD. Any event that is so horrifying and traumatic that the brain is forever marked by it can trigger the condition. These include natural disasters, and enduring prolonged illness oneself or watching a loved one slowly die of a terminal disease. In my case, the combination was a flood in English, Indiana, in 1991, where my family was living at the time, my mother's diagnosis with lupus, and a heart attack which left my father with only 20% of his heart muscle still functioning, after which my parents finally died by slow stages in 2011 and 2007, respectively.

Symptoms

The symptoms of PTSD vary and manifest themselves differently in people, but I'll give you the run-down on my own situation at present, since I'm the one doing the blogging here.

Sleep Interruptions

This is exactly what it sounds like; I may have trouble falling asleep, and when I get there, I wake up several times a night, feeling as if something isn't quite right with the world, and lie there trying to fall back to sleep, sometimes for several hours. As you  might imagine, this can have a negative affect on efforts to hold down a job.

Nightmares

When I do sleep, I will likely dream about my parents, their illnesses, their absence, the gaping holes it left in my life when each of them died, and how desperately I still wish I could talk things over with them sometimes. Not often, but occasionally, I dream about the flood, as well.

Panic/Anxiety/Depression

During my waking hours, any or all of these may visit me, the difference between the three being (1) totally unnecessary but very real feelings of absolute terror, as if a lion is staring me down with a very hungry look in his eye and I can't decide if running would help; (2) just generally feeling nervous, as if something terrible but completely undefinable is wrong with my world, which may not sound too bad until you do it for hours at a time; (3) the inability to care about the most basic things, like making sure I've eaten something in the past 24 hours, coupled with a debilitating sense of exhaustion and feeling absolutely overwhelmed by the thought of doing pretty much anything.

Hypervigilance

I don't suffer with this one as often as I do the others, but it has been disturbing me lately, probably because of my fears about my impending homelessness if I don't find some place to stay before my deadline of January 17th. My dear friend and current roommate pointed out to me the other evening that I was jumpy and responding more strongly than necessary to noises that happened in other rooms of the house or of the bar we were in. This is hypervigilance--constantly, and unnecessarily, being on the alert, a sense that at any moment, I may be called upon to leap into action to deal with a crisis. When I was an undergraduate, I once got a phone call in the middle of a Hebrew exam because my father had been taken to the hospital, AGAIN. It took me years to cease being terrified every time I heard a phone ring or an ambulance siren drive by anywhere near me.

SO,
     as I contend with all of that, is it any wonder that the thought of re-entering the workforce is overwhelming to me? Hence, the volunteering at the library. It's a "job" in the sense that I am expected to be at a certain place, at a certain time, to remain there for a set period of hours, and to engage in assigned tasks while there. This is a baby step, sort of practice for getting my mind used to working again, since I can simply walk out of a volunteer position if I suddenly develop a panic attack or what have you. Therapists call this "desensitization" or "exposure," allowing the mind to get used to an experience, see that nothing bad happens, and stop producing disturbing thoughts or fears just because I enter a "job" situation.

The Washington Township Public Library
in Salem, Indiana, where I had my first paid job.
(from the "Salem, Indiana" Flickr group)

I'm doing library work here. I got my first paid job ever at my hometown public library when I was 16. I've worked in the largest library on the campus of Indiana University, both in collection maintenance and for the Middle Eastern Studies librarian. I could do library work in my sleep, and on occasion, when I pulled an all-nighter getting a paper written, have at least been among the walking dead while working in the stacks. As soon as I stepped into this peaceful, cerebral environment today, allowed my beautiful books to envelop me and began shelf-reading (making sure books were in the right order), the world made sense again, and I belonged. That didn't stop me from being terrified on the drive here.

BUT,
     despite initial terror, I completed my two hours without incident, during which time I shelf-read one side of an entire row of non-fiction. For the uninitiated, I can assure you that is pretty quick work, and I felt quite pleased with myself to know I've "still got it." It was a minuscule step toward wellness, toward working again, toward getting established and back on my feet and not being homeless any more, but it WAS such a step, and it scared me, and I did it anyway. And dammit, I'm proud of myself.

Old Hufflepuffian

Hello, loyal followers!  The more eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that my blog has recently begun sporting a new badge of honor--a House banner which proudly declares that I have been "Pottermore sorted" into Hufflepuff.  (Those badges, by-the-way, are available here.  God bless the lovely people who created them.)  And those of you who just REALLY have too much time on your hands, and also have photographic memories, may be asking yourselves (and me), "Wait! Didn't she say a few months ago that she had been officially sorted by Pottermore into RAVENCLAW? Somebody's playing fast and loose with their facts here!"

Well, in point of fact, I've been sorted twice, you see.  "Cheater!" you now cry in righteous indignation.  "You have TWO accounts, while I'm still waiting to get the confirmation e-mail for my FIRST ONE?!"  A very understandable reaction, but I swear I haven't just been gathering extra Pottermore identities for shits and giggles.  No, I was sorted into Ravenclaw during the Beta (i.e. trial) period of the site's existence, but now that they have opened up to everyone, I had to go through the sorting again, like everybody else, and the Sorting Hat apparently found different stuff in my brain this time.  Considering the adventures I've lived through in the past few months, I can't say that I'm too surprised.

For ten house points, can anyone recite for us Rowena Ravenclaw's famous motto?  Very good, Miss Granger!  Indeed, "Wit beyond measure is man's greatest treasure."  And once upon a time, when I was garnering Master's degrees as if they were wild flowers waiting to be plucked in a field, and dreaming lofty dreams about proceeding straight on to a Ph.D., I think I actually believed that.  Now, don't anyone panic; I haven't had a complete personality transplant.  Still reading 950-page non-fiction books for fun, still teaching my daughter the names of ancient Egyptian deities as fast as her interest permits, still a Geek, die-hard and proud.  But I also suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and one of its effects is that it plays havoc with your thoughts.  Lack of concentration, loss of interest in research or writing projects that once enthralled you (or anything else, for that matter, except playing video games until 4:00 a.m. to avoid the nightmares you know are coming as soon as your head hits the pillow)--these are all classic symptoms, as are the famous flashbacks, of course, my first of which I finally experienced last week.  Hell-a not fun, by-the-by.  In other words, your "wit" can easily be knocked off-center by this disorder.  You don't get dumber or anything, you just find it more difficult to marshal the resources at your disposal.  Thank God it hasn't damaged my interest in reading, and I am devouring books as quickly as ever, even if I occasionally have to read a sentence several times in order to fully take it in.  My friend and comrade in arms in all this, Dorothy L. Sayers' famous detective creation, Lord Peter Wimsey, also suffers from PTSD (though in his day it was called "shell-shock"), and reading about him and his fellow WWI vets is a little like doing group therapy for me.

Naturally, this may have called another question to your mind: "Wait a minute? You've never been in the military, have you?  Besides everything else, your profile picture would seem to suggest that you...uh...don't have the physique for it."  And you're quite right.  However, PTSD is not just a problem for the poor men caught in the idiocy that was Trench Warfare, or the idiocy that was Vietnam, or the idiocy that IS Iraq and Afghanistan.  (By-the-way, does anyone see a pattern forming here?  Almost as if, 9 times out of 10, war is just a really stupid way for a government to abuse its own citizens by giving them PTSD and other irreparable injuries?  Sorry, slipped onto my soapbox for a minute.  *climbs ponderously down from soapbox*)

ANYWAY, victims of natural disasters, or long-term abuse, or terminal illnesses, or those who have seen loved ones suffer through prolonged terminal illness, all are prone to develop PTSD in the aftermath of those events.  There's been no abuse in my history, thank God, but as to the others...

(This isn't actually a picture of MY flood, but I will post one as soon as I can find one.)

English, Indiana--June 7, 1990

Police knocked on our door in the middle of the night, informing my parents that the flash flood would soon reach our street.  My parents, in turn, woke me, we grabbed a few things and went up the enormous hill above to spend the next few hours with our neighbors in their trailer, because if the waters had reached them, we would have been watching for Noah shortly thereafter.  The waters did NOT reach that trailer, but we did watch people drive boats down Main Street the next day--or just hitch a ride on a passing refrigerator.

Besides this little life event, my parents tried as often as possible to die throughout my childhood--from pleurisy, from lupus, from heart attacks.  Of course, they actually tried NOT to die, but as Eric Idle of Monty Python fame has pointed out, "Life will get you in the end."  You may wonder why, if this shit started in my childhood, I'm only just now developing all these symptoms.  Well, I haven't, first of all; I've had them off and on for years, but they've finally reached a whole new plateau, I'm afraid.  Secondly, they've done so because it's called "POST-Traumatic Stress Disorder" for a reason.  Until the trauma ends, you don't fully develop the disorder, because your mind and body believe that you don't have time to do so--clearly, life-threatening things are happening around you.  Your body just keeps pouring on the adrenaline to get you through whatever the next crisis will be until the crises finally stop.  When you do that more or less on-going for twenty-some years, you've got one hell of a debt to pay to your poor body and mind when they finally figure out that the trauma is over.  My grandmother, presumably the last person I'll have to worry about for a LITTLE while, anyway, (PLEASE, JESUS!), died this past December.  Ladies and gentlemen, let the mental games begin.

IN OTHER WORDS, I've been having one hell of a time of it lately, gang!  I found a local counseling center at which I start therapy in two weeks *fingers crossed that these people know what they're doing*.  Last night, I actually got a break from the horrifying, heart-rending dreams that have left me dreading sleep.  Many nights, I sit up to obscene hours, watching BBC comedy on YouTube or playing on Pottermore, until exhaustion finally claims me and I find out for another day that I can't avoid the dreams by just not ever sleeping again.

On one of these marathon nights recently, I received word from Pottermore that my "real" account was ready, and I could come get sorted like everybody else.  This is done, of course, by answering personality-quiz type questions about yourself, and unless you're an idiot, you can tell which way the wind is blowing on these questions.  When it asks you things like, "Do you want to be thought of as ambitious?", little green signal flares ignite that spell out "Slytherin!", you know?  And while I was answering these questions, I reached a moment where I answered, trying to be truthful, that I wanted to be thought of as trust-worthy.  When I reached the end and discovered that I'd been bunged into Helga Hufflepuff's House, for one second, I was bitterly disappointed.  "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!  I'm a Ravenclaw, dammit!  Everyone knows that!"  Then I calmed down, thought for a moment, and realized something: I no longer believe in Ravenclaw's motto.  Intelligence is very important to me, and education is very nearly ALL-important to me, but in my current situation, one thing matters more.  I don't need people to blind me with science, or show off their intelligence.  I need them to be kind to me.  Moreover, I want to be kind, as well, because there are a lot of people in this world who are just as broken as I am, and our only hope is to all be in this together.

"Shell-shock" in the trenches

Do I now think intelligent people are pretentious snobs?  Of course not, especially since judging people is wrong and judging people as a group is just a recipe for disaster.  Furthermore, I haven't suddenly become dumb; I've recently become...unwell.  I value my intelligence.  I'm just learning to value my humanity most.

Here at the End of All Things

Home is behind

The world ahead

And there are many paths to tread

Through shadow
To the edge of night

Until the stars are all alight

Mist and shadow
Cloud and shade

All shall fade
All shall

Fade

~~Lord of the Rings

Coming Home to "The Hunger Games"

Those of you who read my entry in The Hunger Games Read Along will remember my discussions of poverty and deprivation in 20th-century Appalachia (some of which has continued into the 21st century, unfortunately), and how the depiction of the Appalachian District 12 in The Hunger Games struck me so profoundly because of my own family background.  Last night, I went and saw the film, The Hunger Games, and when the opening scenes appeared on the screen, I nearly gasped.  I had come home to the mountains that I grew up visiting as often as I could in the summers, only they were those mountains as my grandmother had known them.  Shacks.  Clothing made of old, faded, nearly-rotten cloth.  The specter of the coal mines and the Black Lung lurking within them.  Welcome to Appalachia.

Girl standing in front of her family's "house" in Lost Creek, Tennessee, c. 1933-36
Photo is from the archives of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)

Screen shot from The Hunger Games courtesy of MSNBC

According to MSNBC, the entire film was shot in North Carolina, and these houses are authentic remnants of the past I've been describing, the abandoned employee shacks from a company-built and -owned mill town which long since ceased to function.  Jennifer Lawrence, the actress who beautifully portrays lead character Katniss Everdeen, was born and raised until the age of 14 in Louisville, Kentucky, a city 45 minutes from my hometown and to which I can practically drive in my sleep, I've made the trip so many times.  These are my people.  This is my home.

Randomly chosen picture of a house in Salem, Indiana, my hometown,
which has been foreclosed on and stands empty, waiting for a buyer.
Photo courtesy of Indexpost.com

Until the action of the film shifted to the Capitol of Panem, it was really difficult at times for me to watch the screen without weeping, hard for me to separate the fictional scenes from my family's own genetic memories--passed on to me with my mother's milk--of poverty, the Depression, the dust bowl, farming other peoples' land in order to eke out a living, the hard scrabble for work when even those avenues failed, and the eventual need to leave the mountains and migrate north to Indiana.

Woody Harrelson and I have always had a very complex relationship (of which he remains blissfully unaware), because he can be such a rebarbative personality, i.e. he's often a bit obnoxious and a pain in the ass.  Yet, I think we need people like that as a society, to keep us honest.  He's like my generation's Andy Kaufman.  He's also an amazing actor.  Though he, unlike Jennifer Lawrence, is not originally from "District 12," he lived and studied in Hanover, Indiana, as a young man, and in this film he brilliantly portrays the man raised in poverty, plucked from obscurity, and never again truly knowing where he belongs.  Many, many of my forebears turned to alcohol to avoid the realities of life in Appalachia, just as Haymitch has when we first meet him.  He made me truly love Haymitch as much in the film as I did when reading the book.

Image copyright Scholastic

I enjoyed the film tremendously, despite its disturbing violence and shades of a pseudo-Nazi American dystopia; I mean, I had read the book, so I knew that's exactly what I was in for when I bought my ticket.  I was astounded at just how closely the movie stuck to the book, with only a few deviations that rarely sounded any jarring note.  The secret to this accuracy, no doubt, was revealed in the closing credits, in which Suzanne Collins was listed as one of the three authors of the screenplay.  The subtle overlay of traditional Appalachian music at strategic points was very satisfying to the little girl within me who grew up hearing Bluegrass, even if I didn't learn to appreciate it until I became an adult.  Most of all, I think they very powerfully encapsulated the sheer bloody-mindedness, the determined, cantankerous independence of a group of people who endured everything from Hadrian's forces in Scotland to the English land clearances in Ireland to Prohibition here in the US, which most of us blissfully ignored and from which quite a few of us actually made a decent living for once from the manufacture and sale of illegal brews.  We love our land, we love our families, and we love being left alone to go our own way in peace.  We couldn't have asked for a better representative than Katniss Everdeen.

My grandfather and great uncle (and four-legged friend), Kentucky, c. 1930

25 Things That Prove I'm Crazy

So, we've been seeing these lists popping up all over the blogosphere lately, right?  An account of various adventures someone has had that are definitely not common to everyday life.  The numbers vary: 22 things, 10 things, scraps of information about yourself that are part of who you are, part of what makes you stand out in a roomful of people, and everybody's got some of these, no matter how dull you may think your life has been.

I'm just going to state here and now that I've led a bizarre life (for evidence, see photo above), so I liked the idea of this list when I first stumbled upon it, but hemmed and hawwed with myself about whether or not I would make one.  Finally, when my friend Bev over at My Reader's Block jumped on the bandwagon, I decided I would, too.  Thanks for giving me a nudge, Bev!

Anyway, since I don't know what experiences you, as my reader, do or do not have in common with me, I'll just label my list thusly.

25 Things I've Experienced That Most People Probably Haven't

25.  I jumped off a balcony when I was four just to enjoy the sensation of flying.  It was wonderful until I blacked out, which thankfully was BEFORE I hit the ground.  I woke up with the wind knocked out of me, terrified faces around me, and with a very overworked guardian angel wanting to slap me, I have no doubt!

24.  I served as the only page at a special session of my state's legislature when I was about 13.  For anyone who may not know, "page" is the fancy term for, "Hey, kid, could you bring the congressman a cup of coffee?  And when you're done with that, I've got some envelopes that need stuffing."

23.  I got a perfect score on the written portion of the GRE, and a 750 on the verbal.  The really impressive part is that I managed to only score 450 out of 800 on the math section (which is technically called something else, but whatever--it's math).  Good thing I never wanted to be a physicist!  Or, you know, do any math that's more complicated than balancing my checkbook.  There are times I still count on my fingers.  I'm SO not kidding.

22.  Since getting my driver's license at the age of 16, I have hit two parked cars, one parked trash can, and a concrete post at a gas station that was innocently minding its own business.  Fortunately, my driving did finally improve after about 10 years of practice.

21.  I had a seizure when I was four, after my cousin and I brilliantly decided to throw rocks at each other for fun and he beaned me on the head.  Scared my poor mother half to death.  Doctors did an EEG and I don't remember what all, afraid I was epileptic, until they finally determined that the seizure was caused by the rock to the forehead.  Yeah, I could've told them that if they'd just asked.  Again, thank you to God and my guardian angel for not letting my stupidity permanently disable me at a very young age.

20.  I had to have my gall bladder removed in emergency surgery when I was 18.  Some organs just need to be sent back to the factory, because they were faulty when issued.

19.  Counting only college degrees, I have graduated four times.  I only walked in three graduations, however, and even that many was probably just gilding the lily.  I STILL don't have a job, but I do have absolutely awe-inspiring student loan debt.  Live and learn.

18.  At the age of nine, I brilliantly rubbed poison ivy on my face after being egged on by an older "friend" who, it turned out, was immune to poison ivy and knew it.  Our "friendship" didn't last long.  Unfortunately, my rash did.  No permanent scars, though, thank God.

17.  I got my first pair of glasses when I was 8 years old.

16.  My parents were both disabled by the time I was 16 years old.  Among other things, this meant that I watched my father spend the last year of his life in a hospital bed in what had once been my parents' dining room.

15.  Because I was raised as a rabidly conservative Pentecostal, twice in my childhood I was terrified that the "Rapture" had taken place and I had been "Left Behind".

14.  I watched motor boats putter their way up Main Street in English, Indiana, when we were living there in 1990.  I guess I have this one in common with the 600 other people who were living there at the time.

13.  Because my birthday occured less than a week after the start of the school year, I was allowed to begin kindergarten when I was four years old.

12.  I once won a prize for the best Arabic handwriting in the Near Eastern Languages and Cultures department at Indiana University.

11.  When I was living in Kazakhstan one summer, a policeman came to the school where I worked, took off his enormous hat, and left it laying in the office while he went to speak to the school's owner.  This was the result.

10.  I was the only female tenor in one of the choirs at Indiana State University, and in another at St. Vladimir's Theological Seminary, because neither had a section for natural contraltos.  St. Vladimir's has two chapel choirs, the "Men's Choir" and the "Mixed Choir".  One morning, I was the only woman who showed up for the ridiculously early matins service, so the men moved over to the "Mixed" side of the choir stalls, we switched musical arrangements, and I sang first tenor.  I am probably the only woman in history to have performed a service in the Men's Choir at St. Vlad's.

9.  I petted a dolphin once.  Of course, I was at Sea World at the time, and was surrounded by a bunch of other people who were doing so, as well.  Still, I can say from personal experience that dolphins feel exactly like a soaking wet tire.

8.  On my paternal grandfather's side, I have managed to trace my family tree back to the year 1801.  After that, the trail goes so cold that I have to suspect that a boat trip from Scotland was involved.

7.  For reasons passing all understanding, I memorized the chemical formula for refined sugar when I was about six, and have remembered it ever since.  Someday, I'll be sitting in the nursing home in my wheelchair, while a baffled group of nurses crowds around me and tries to figure out why I keep saying, "C-12, H-22, O-11."

6.  I was once stalked by a Saudi man--or rather, the private eye he hired to dig up some dirt on me--because I was helping his wife keep him from abducting their children while she filed for a divorce.  I swear to God this all happened; I have numerous witnesses.  Unfortunately, he got the kids, anyway.  They still live with him in Saudi Arabia to this day.

5.  On the Sunday after 9-11, I led a large group of Muslims to attend a service at a local Assembly of God church.  They had asked me to arrange it with one of the local pastors, because they wanted to show their grief and solidarity with other Americans.  It was one of the proudest moments of my life.

4.  I lived and taught English in Karaganda, Kazakhstan for a month one summer in college (see #11).

3.  I have literally sat on the Continental Divide.  That's right--one ass cheek in Eastern North America, and the other in Western North America.

2.  Also while in Rocky Mountain National Park, I played with snow--in June.

1.  The Near Eastern Languages and Cultures department of Indiana University, while I was a student there, hired me to chauffeur around a bunch of government ministers from Afghanistan, who came to the university for a conference on how they could rebuild their education system shortly after the fall of the Taliban.  This was me driving foreign dignitaries through Bloomington, Indiana, in a 12-passenger van.  Did you READ #22?!?!  I have no idea whose brilliant idea this was, but I enjoyed it almost as much as I was terrified by the responsibility of it.  I even got to meet Hamid Karzai's brother!

National emblem of Afghanistan

Busy Work

So, it occurred to me the other night, after reading back over the post entitled "How to Sound Well-Read," that I may have left one and all with a false impression that I did not enjoy college.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  In fact, I loved being a university student, and it certainly wasn't because of all the parties (which I did not attend) or other unauthorized recreational activities (which I did not engage in).  We must remember that at the time, I was a good little Pentecostal preacher's daughter.  No, my primary joy in life during college was all the reading I did, because I did a massive amount of reading and research--it's just a shame that I couldn't get class credit for most of it!

Indiana State University
(my FIRST alma mater)

My favorite activity was to lose myself in the library stacks of whichever academic institution I was attending at the time (I've graduated from three), in those innocent, halcyon days before I had a cell phone, so no one could find and bother me.  I studied everything from medieval Islamic art to the Jewish Talmud, read everyone from Owen Wister to Anne Rice, and discovered British comedies like Jeeves and Wooster in the AV department.  I developed a life-long passion for research, as a matter of fact, and whenever I want to know more about a topic, or whenever I'm worried that my SuperToddler might be suffering from this or that ailment, all those hours of searching library catalogs and shelves stand me in good stead.  Probably the single most helpful thing I learned in more than ten years of university studies was how to do adequate research.  Usually, I was just setting out to satisfy my own random curiosity about a topic or a person; hour upon hour I spent in the basement or the back corner of the top floor of a library, my beloved books and I the only inhabitants of the planet, as far as I knew during those long sessions.  As I said, most of it earned me no course credits whatsoever, because I couldn't seem to find a class that was dedicated, for example, to the question of what actually happened to the famous library of Alexandria, and even if a class and my interests coincided, it was hard to fit a semester on Norse mythology into a tightly-packed degree program in linguistics.

Unknown nice librarian lady, Minnesota, 1974. 
(Thank you, Wikimedia.)

I have three master's degrees, and not one of them has helped me to eke out a lucrative career for myself.  The time I spent in the library stacks, however, continues to benefit me on a daily basis, whether I'm drawing once again upon the stores of knowledge I acquired there, or figuring out the best way to begin a major research project because I'm curious to know more about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  I have the tools to know where to begin, which authorities to consult and which so-called "experts" to blythely ignore, because of a couple of library systems that ran like well-oiled machines, and were always there for me when I needed them.  THAT was the worthwhile part of ten years of college.

I must say, the classes I enjoyed most were the ones in which I was allowed to choose my own reading materials.  Granted, these were not that common, but especially in graduate school, university departments begin to trust their students more to work independently, and they also realize that they can't tailor a class for the varied interests of every single student on campus.  Thus, the independent reading course was born.  For anyone who's never experienced it, this is exactly what it sounds like--you work out a reading list with the professor, you go away and read it all, you meet with the professor once a week to make sure that you're on track, and at the end of the semester, you present yourself to take an exam that the professor concocted based on the master list.  In some cases, you write an extensive paper as the final project, which is even better, since YOU get to control what's on the "exam" if it's entirely a treatise of your own making.  I did a couple of these independent courses, and actually quite enjoyed it.  There are days when I miss academia.

Which is why I've begun to suspect that for me, blogging has taken the place of independent studies.  Having set myself the goal of trying to post something every day, I know that I have a specific task, I know when the deadline is, and I seem never to have a shortage of things to write about.  I've even found ways to add the assigned reading component back onto my daily life; I've joined not one, but THREE review programs that give ME free books and give the PUBLISHERS in question an honest review of the book.  It's a little like writing book reports again--you remember, I'm sure: "My Book Report, by Jenny Campbell," written in pencil on that 2nd-grade paper with the blue lines on it, and the 'y' always a little crooked, much to my chagrin.  Still, it's a way to keep taking independent reading courses, since I get to pick which of the publishers' new books I want to review, and I get the textbooks FREE!  Nobody ever gave me THAT deal in college, I can promise you.  Here's an example: I find American military history interesting.  Not interesting enough that I would ever take a whole semester-long course of that and nothing else, but still interesting.  So, when a publisher offers me a free, hardback biography of an American general I'd never heard of before, but who was instrumental to our victory in one of our big wars (I don't remember which one; I haven't actually started the book yet), I'm going to happily take them up on it.  Like I said, this gives me the same opportunity to keep learning and the sense of accomplishment that attending college did, without me having to go into $20K a year of student loan debt for it.  Book reviewing, here I come!