Ah, Thanksgiving. The time for family and binge eating. Very few holidays bring the same joy as this most sacred celebration of the Native Americans saving the original settlers from starvation. A quick aside, Lies My Teacher Told Me has a great breakdown of how the original Thanksgiving actually went down and is a great book if you want to learn what your US History textbook should have taught you.
I digress. For me, Thanksgiving is a pain in the ass. It's gotten better over the years, though, so I guess I shouldn't complain. Most Thanksgivings I will celebrate three times - my Mom's house, my Dad's house, and my fiance's house. Prior to this year the schedule went something like this:
9:30 - Wake up
9:30:04 - Shut eyes tightly and hope today is not Thanksgiving
9:35 - Hear beginning sounds of Thanksgiving Mother Edition
9:40 - Call fiance make sure we are still doing this
9:45 - 10:00 - Shower, select pants and shirt with most breathing room
10:00-11:00 - Parades, dog wrangling and table setting. At some point fiance arrives with great gift my mom loves.
11:00-12:30 - Thanksgiving Mother Edition
12:30-1:00 - Drive to Dad's
1:00-4:00 - Recovery. Watch football, nap and set the table for Spicy Thanksgiving
4:00-5:30 - Eat Thanksgiving classics so spicy you long for thai food to break the heat
5:30-6:00 - Drive to future in-law's
6:00-8:00 - Football, small talk, prayer to a higher power that if I survive I promise to live life differently.
8:00-10:00 - Thanksgiving Round 3. Struggle through a plate of food.
10:01 - Slip into a food coma on the couch
This year is different, though. I spent yesterday with my Mom and today will be spent with my fiance's family. So far it has made Thanksgiving a much more enjoyable experience.
This has been all over the web, but in case anyone missed it...
A teacher in Howell, Michigan, the current home of the KKK, kicked a student out of class for making anti-gay comments. The teacher told him to shut it and get out of his classroom. Anywho, the teacher was later suspended without pay for the day. At a hearing regarding all these shenanigans a 14 year old openly gay student gave a pretty impressive speech in support of his teacher.
Follow the link for the video. It's well worth the two minutes it will take from your day.
Every week I try something new for my Creative Thinking class. It started simple. I brushed my teeth with my left hand. From there I progressed to more serious topics like Thai food. This week I doubled up and tried two new things, homemade pickles and Python programming.
First, the pickles. I had a list of 10 things I wanted to learn/try before the end of the quarter and make my own pickles was number 6 on the list. Lucky for me I was trolling through old Men's Health magazines to clip ads when I found a recipe for not one, but three different types of pickles. Being a big wuss I started with the classic pickle. Boiled up 1.5 cups of vinegar, added 1 tbsp salt, 1 tbsp sugar, 1.5 tbsp pickling spice, 15 peppercorns, 3 cloves of garlic and a dash of crushed red pepper. After 24 hours of marinating in that batch of miracle juice I crunched in to the first spear. Holy Jesus! Why did I wait this long to learn how to do this. Not only do they have a better crunch than store bough, but they taste better, too. I'm definitely doing this again next week and tinkering with the recipe. Sweet and spicy is on the way!
Now for the nerdery. Since our creative brief was for ThinkGeek.com I figured I would get in to the spirit and try my hand at a little programming. There are two free introductory books on Python and it's supposed to be one of the easier languages to pick up so I'm giving it a shot. Four lessons in I'm enjoying the challenge, but not much else. The deeper I dive in to the language the more I have flashbacks to multivariable calculus cram sessions in my dorm. Oh well, at least at the end of this I'll be able to say I gave it a shot.
Next week holds another challenge for something new and I have a few ideas. I'm not going to drop them here, but if it goes according to plan I should have something fun to write about next week.
It turns out that Cochlear Implant video I shared the other day isn't all smiles. Apparently Cochlear implants are a major dividing point between the deaf culture and hearing culture. My fiance, Lorelei, is a Speech Language Pathology major at UGA and is also getting a minor in American Sign Language. I showed the video to her and she mentioned that she probably wouldn't want her child to get one.
I was stunned. I listed off reason after reason I would want my child to have one: for their own safety; to enjoy the sounds of music; to be able to interact with other hearing people everyday; to not have to struggle in life. She replied that I was only looking at this from a hearing perspective and deaf people would consider that offensive. She told me my aunt was very outspoken in her opposition to cochlear implants. Further background info, my Aunt grew up in a deaf household, has her PHD in Deaf Studies and she and my uncle adopted my cousin who is deaf.
At this point I just wanted to hear her perspective to see if she could reel me back in. I was lost and confused as to why anyone wouldn't want their child to have the opportunity to hear. So she began with the basics. First, being deaf isn't like being blind or disabled. Deaf people have their own culture, and many deaf people are very successful. Many deaf people can read lips and some can even voice. Second, not all deaf people are completely deaf. My cousin, for example, can hear at certain frequencies. They even can translate those sounds in to full sound recognition in some cases. Third, even if someone is an ideal candidate for cochlear implants there is a 3.7% fail rate, and if they fail your cochlea is ruined and you lose all hearing. No sound recognition. Just nothing. To go along with that even if the initial implant is a success you can still lose hearing down the road. That hearing loss isn't even included in the failure rate. Fourth, even with a cochlear implant you aren't guaranteed to hear as well as a hearing person. Some patients only see a slight increase in hearing. Fifth, its an incredibly invasive procedure that involves drilling in to the skull. Finally, a cochlear implant completely alienates you from deaf culture.
I was still going back and forth on the issue when she suggested I watch Sound and Fury. Sound and Fury is the story of two families struggling with the decision of whether or not they should get cochlear implants for their deaf children. I searched for the video and found this clip on YouTube.
It was at that point I realized how ignorant I was being. I just wasn't seeing life through deaf eyes. I scrolled through the comments and the debate was there, too. A few deaf people against a world of hearing people trying to explain why those children would be ok without the implant.
I decided to double back and check the comments on the original video and see if there was a debate there. Sure enough, eight pages back there was a comment about how wrong it was to make such a personal decision for a child.
This whole discussion really moved me. I feel awful for my knee-jerk reaction and it makes me want to dig deeper. I'm not really sure what the conclusion should be here, but I guess it's something along these lines. Think through your perceptions and then research both sides. You can be surprised by what happens to your initial perception.
Edit: I watched Sound and Fury and it's follow up tonight. The decision on Cochlear implants is still a hard one for me. I'm not sure which way I would go. The filmmakers seem to be pushing a pro-implant world, but my limited exposure to the deaf community has shown me that it is a beautiful culture we should cherish. Tough topic.
There are moments in life when you have to decide if it's ok to laugh or not. Girl says, "I like the big ones", Daniel Tosh makes a racist observation, and now I present you with Girl smacks concrete and makes funny noise.
Just so you know she survived and now leads a normal healthy life. For optimum laughter watch 9-12 times.
This weekend my fiance and I took a weekend getaway to the greatest place on earth, Clemson, SC, for our engagement pictures. The weekend earns a solid A- on the fun scale and could have only been improved if I hadn't had so much homework to deal with. Tailgating, football, lake, and boozes on Saturday then Blueberry muffins and engagement pictures on Sunday.
I'm lucky that one of my best friends, Adam, was a Graphic Communications major at Clemson and is a photo superstar. For background this is the same guy that hid up in a tree for two hours so he could get pictures of the proposal. After we saw how those turned out we started begging him to do our engagement photos. Two reasons, he is that good and we're pretty broke. Lucky for us Adam had already planned on offering up his services as a wedding gift so it all worked out.
Taking the pictures was great. We're all good friends so we screwed around the whole time and had a really good time with it. Favorite moment might have been when my fiance discovered a tree that had actually grown a sack with two balls and wanted me to take a picture with it (awaiting photo).
Since that time my fiance has asked me everyday when our pictures were going to be ready - apparently girls love this shit. Lucky for her Adam is a known procrastinator when it comes to Physics and Chemistry, his last two classes to graduate from Clemson, both are on their third round. As a result of him putting off his real work he did up a couple photos as a preview of what was coming.
"You guys look like f-ing J. Crew models on safari or something."
All rights reserved on both photos to Adam Peake.
Poor Adam has no idea the beast he has now unleashed. Like a junkie after their last high, Lorelei is now chasing after the rest of the pictures with more fervor than ever before. I only pray that I can hold her back long enough for him to finish them all.
...And to answer your questions yes, she is that good looking. No, I didn't trick her in to this relationship.
I was sitting at my desk griping about having to put together a blog entry. Thinking to myself that it would be so much easier to just go to bed and not worry about this. So I did the logical thing and started poking around the corners of the internet.
I learned that ants can survive a fall from any height. Sounds like an interesting premise for a bank heist if you ask me. The queen outlines a dastardly plan to steal the identities of thousands and then jump of the roof in an apparent suicide. Only she's not dead. DUN DUN DUNNNN!
I discovered that in Japan they have different stickers for the elderly and newly licensed to put on their cars to alert others, bears do shit in the woods, lightsabers would have been perfect with a wrist strap and found a lolcat that brought a smile to my face.
It's funny because it's legal.
Finally, I found this video and I knew my original post on the merit of lightsaber wrist straps was toast.
I'm not sure what was more moving, the mother's reaction or the baby. The sheer exuberance of his smile at hearing his mother's voice is something you usually only hear about in fiction. Stuff like this just doesn't seem to happen in real life. Even the doctor's cheesy line about an early Christmas present doesn't ruin this moment. There are some things in this world that are truly awesome and this is one of those moments.
