august: cleveland county: October 2014

It seems like so much has happened to me since the last time I posted! I went home and to a band contest and had a maybe dead mouse in my house and saw the infant Jesus of Prague and subbed for a prof and applied to intern at the State Department twice and wrote a paper and lead a class discussion and baked a lot of goodies for myself and watched I Ship It and bought a lot of books for a little money at the public library. Whew! I also slept 11 hours last night to rest up from all that amazing stuff.

Now I'm going to unpack that first paragraph a bit.

Last weekend I went home, but my parents weren't there the first evening since they went to Emily's choir concert in Fay. Since I knew they wouldn't be there, I stopped in Prague (pronounced Preg) on the way home because I'd always wondered the the National Shrine to the Infant Jesus of Prague (pronounced Prag) was. So I took I-40 home and stopped at the church. It seemed to be a Catholic church with a lot of statues of baby Jesus. I was totally alone in there, which was weird but cool. I liked it - if you've ever thought about visiting it, I'd recommend it!

On Saturday Mom, Dad, and I went to Ada to watch the band contest. We're such nerds - at least our neighbor is still in band so we've got a tiny bit of a connection! The band did Fiddler on the Roof and they were so good. We only stayed for a few bands since we wanted to get on home to watch football since both of our teams were on tv, but we got to see Elgin, which is my old high school band director's current band! As we were leaving town, we saw him standing by his bus so we stopped to say hi - it was great to see him again!

I submitted not one but two applications for two different internships with the State Department this week. I really hope that one of them works out - fingers crossed and thumbs pressed! I'd love to go to Berlin for the summer!!

On Sunday we had communion at church. The older lady sitting behind us had her mother with her. When communion was about to start, she asked her mom if she wanted to go down to communion. She said, "No, I want to go home!" It was very funny since she's a bit hard of hearing so she said it in a normal tone of voice.

I bought a bag of fresh cranberries on impulse last week...then realized that I had never had fresh cranberries before. They're really sour, so I've been putting them in salads and baking with them. It's quite tasty!

On Thursday one of the professors I work for wasn't going to be there, so she had me go in to put on a film for the kids. I guess she hadn't mentioned it to the class because they looked very confused when a girl who looks like a 10th grader showed up and started turning on the DVD player. I sat in the back and wrote half a short paper while they watched the movie for an hour - not a bad gig!

I watched the short film I Ship It on Thursday. It's so good! I absolutely loved it. The trailer is below. You should watch it too. Like all of Yulin Kuang's short films that I've seen, it makes me wonder why all films aren't like this.

Now to the main event: the maybe dead mouse.

I was making chocolate chip cookie bars yesterday when I dropped some of the chocolate chips. When I bent down to see if one had fallen under the fridge, I noticed a dead mouse! It freaked me out so I decided to deal with it later. When it came time for me to deal with it, I called my dad for advice and to have someone to scream at. First I poked it, and that was gross, so I had to use a pencil to get it out. I was grossed out by all of this, so I sprayed some antibacterial spray in the general direction of the mouse and spent a lot of time trying to convince Dad to come and do this for me. (He said no, by the way. He'll take care of Emily's dead cats, but not my dead mouse.) Finally, I got it out from under the fridge.

IT WAS A TOY MOUSE. I guess the girls that lived here before me had a cat and left a toy mouse under the fridge. This is karma for not forwarding their magazines...

That brings us to today. I woke up bright and early and excited because today is the Friends of the Norman Public Library's annual book sale!!! They've been setting up all week when I went there to read. There were so many people there - it was crazy, and the selection was way better than Eufaula's book sale. (Sorry Eufaula.) Check out this glorious bounty I got for SIX American dollars!!

If your eyes are a-failin', that's:

a Russian textbook

The First Two Lives of Lukas Kasha by Lloyd Alexander (a childhood favorite author - I've never read any of his non-children's stuff before)

the French film Micmacs (from the director of Amelie)

The Moffats by Eleanor Estes

Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (in English cause I'm lazy. Also I've been to his house.)

The Idiot by Dostoyevsky

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis

And out of all those, I've only read The Moffats before. That book only made the cut because it's almost Halloween and I always want to read that chapter where the art teacher comes and they all make red leaves around Halloween. At the book sale I saw a girl who I think was a real-life Rory Gilmore. Her dad asked if they already had a certain book and she said yes. When he started to put it down she said "No, wait! This copy will fit in my purse!" Their tall tall stacks of classic books were the reason I felt justified in picking up the last three books...

Also, what is up with this German train strike?! I watch the news almost every day to keep up with my language skills, and the train workers' union had a strike on Wednesday (I think) and then again all weekend. It's fall break in Germany, so they're ruining a lot of vacations and probably killing some little kid's dream of watching his favorite German soccer team play (the strike means that almost all the special trains from the main stations to stadiums are cancelled). If this had happened a year ago, either Maggie would've been stuck with me in Erfurt or I would have been stuck in Amsterdam (neither of these things would've been horrible, just inconvenient). Some of the trains are still running, but they're very unreliable and very crowded. I'm glad I'm not in Germany right now!!

3:55 PM
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Labor Omnia Vincit.

7:26 PM
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Home Improvement & TTIP

Merry October. Callooh! Callay!

(That is from the book Attachments by Rainbow Rowell, which is probably in my top 100 favorite books. (That's a lie. I love more than 100 books on the same level.))

Anyhow, yesterday we were finally blessed with autumnal weather! I was so happy that I opened the window (I chose to ignore that opening the window is like death for allergy-havers) and then walked to the grocery store for milk. I also worked on an Op-Ed I'm writing about why TTIP is bad for everyone.

So, TTIP. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. I don't like it. It would just lower trade barriers between the US and Europe, and work to make sure that both sets of regulations were monitored at the same time. Somehow this is supposed to bring jobs to the economy (unless you're the redundant set of regulators). The Europeans really don't like this idea (unless they're conservative, powerful, and rich), and the Americans are pretty unaware of it.

My favorite part of this is reading FAQs about it from the European Perspective. My favorites, from the CDU, translated for your reading pleasure:

Q; Will the American movies cause the end of European film?

A: No.

(This is hilarious because European movie theaters are already 80% American films dubbed into local languages.)

Q: Isn't it "typically American" for TTIP to get rid of our data protection?

A: No.

(The Germans can't get over the NSA scandal...although they do have a point given all the recent photo hacks.)

Q: Will German farmers have to plant American genetically modified corn?

A: No.

Q: Is it true that with TTIP fracking will soon begin in Europe?

A: No.

(Do Germans understand what a trade agreement is? I think they're concerned that they're signing their entire continent over to the Americans to do what they will with it.)

Despite this compelling pro-TTIP FAQ from the German Christian Democrats, I'm still unconvinced that this is the best thing for the world. First of all, we'd be putting ourselves on an even playing field with countries such as Chile and Mexico, who are nowhere near as rich as us. That seems a bit unfair. Let them keep their economic advantage! Second, we'd be damaging the environment by transporting more goods from here to there. Finally, Europeans don't want our stuff. The corporations may want to transport our stuff to Europe, but Europeans consumers are pretty skeptical of buying it.

Okay, boring stuff is over! Now for the photos!

I caught my car kissing another car the other day. (Read: Someone low-level ran into my car on campus. I took a photo of their license plate too, but there wasn't any damage.)

I changed my horrible shower head for one that actually has water pressure! It was really easy, too.

The only problem now it that it's really tall, so I have to stand in the middle of the bathtub to wash my hair. The best part is that it's super easy to clean the bathtub now with this handy removable shower head!

10:28 AM
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