Senior Essay Crisis Resolved!

I finally popped the question to Ms. Arsenault last night after preceptorial. She is now officially my advisor, and I am going to write my senior essay about the writings of Jung. Whew...I can't explain what a relief it is to have made this decision and for her to agree to advise me! The only problem is...since Jaime pointed out that Jung looks like Richard Dreyfuss, I hesitate to put my usual charming picture of the author up. Here's to JUNG! Anecdote: When I told Dad that I would be in the Jung preceptorial, his response was, "But he was wrong. Haven't they disproved all that Freud and Jung stuff?" Get with the Great Books, Dad...they're all mostly wrong! Except Jung. Who is deep and insightful and truly understands human nature. He's right. At least I hope he's a little right so I'll have something nice to say about him in my essay.

Adventures!

I've been making plans for next year, and am very excited about the following two applications I'm working on:

1) I'm applying to the JET Programme, which would allow me to spend another wonderful year in Japan, this time trying to cook food for myself instead of relying on Okasan for everything, and still ineptly trying to learn the language and understand this incredibly fascinating, apparently contradictory culture. Kansai, here I come!

2) Yay! Midwives! I'm almost ready to turn in my application for a two-year apprenticeship in beautiful, crazy, Taos, New Mexico. Sometime this week I'll send in my application (which includes three recs but no transcript-isn't that great?!) and then schedule a three-day interview, at which time I'll be expected to jump right in and pretend to be a student. This interview is important because it will allow me to get a better idea of what it would be like to be a student with them, and (more importantly) will give them the chance to see if we all get along. I think getting along is really important for a group of eight women who spend almost all of their time together. I'm pretty excited about it because the three women I've met so far seem really confident, positive, and incredibly intelligent. And grounded. Man, do I want to be grounded.

Taos:




The only real downside of this situation is the location, which is a little more than an hour north of Santa Fe. Although I would be able to go down to St. John's occasionally, for the most part I would be pretty removed from it and all the other ammenities of Santa Fe.

Both of these options are incredibly exciting, but I'm secretly (not so secret now, though!) hoping I get the apprenticeship with the midwives.
Meanwhile, I'm supposed to be writing an essay about translating French.

What Might Have Been

Ben was up last night looking at trivia on IMDB, and he came across this under "more info" for Michael Richards:
"His character in "Seinfeld" (1990) was named Kessler in the original pilot."
Kramer could have been "Kessler"! AAAH!
How different would our lives have been, Kesslers?
Also, updates:
-After waiting on hold once for 45 minutes (after which I hung up) and once for ten, I ended up talking to the nicest guy, who immediately ordered a card to be sent to me. Although, still have not received it, actually.
-I'm making Buckeyes this afternoon!
-I'm very close to deciding whether I want to write my senior essay about Jung or Kierkegaard.

A Bad Afternoon

I turned in my seminar essay today after an epic Monday morning long lab class. No one was awake because everyone had spent the last 24+ hours working on their essays. So, after lunch I went home and took a nap, but it wasn't even a satisfying nap...I woke up and felt groggy and disoriented. Then I remembered that Netflix had warned me my credit card is about to expire, so I made the second mistake of the afternoon: trying to talk to someone who could help me figure out why my credit card wasn't automatically being renewed.

The number on the back of the card offered the typically non-relevant options...and had no option for talking to an operator or for questions regarding credit card renewal. This I could forgive them for. So I went online and searched both the Bank of America and VISA websites for information relating to my question. Nada. So...I called my branch, but the phone number listed for that branch is actually for the motor branch right next door. The lady I talked to there said I should come in to the main branch and talk to a customer service person about my card, "Just to make sure there is no funny business." So, I talked Ben into coming along and we went onto a very busy road to the bank. I talked to a customer service lady there and the first thing she said-cutting me off-was that the bank cannot handle anything relating to credit cards and that I have to call the number on the back of the card and then press -0-.

There was NO ZERO OPTION ON THE 800 # MENU!!!!

So, I am now waiting on hold, having pressed the magical 0 button...and have been on hold for over half an hour. The moral of the story is not to do business with organizations which provide you with NO WAY to talk to an actual person. The second moral is that Bank of America and VISA have a VERY BAD system set up here. There is not nearly enough information online about credit cards, and there is no clearly defined way to access the assistance I need. Both VISA and Bank of America have totally copped out by saying, "Call the number on the back of the card." News flash: the number on the back of the card is not helpful! Anyway...just had a little bit of pent up bank-rage I needed to get off my chest. Sorry. Plus, this muzak is REALLY getting on my nerves.

Wish list

Mandy was getting on my case because I didn't deliver with the Christmas list. Here it is:

For the kitchen:
-NPR Mug
-Wait, Wait Mug
-Large casserole
-1 good knife (unbelievable how difficult life is without this!)
-Salad bowl

For the growing pile of games:
-SET (cannot find in Santa Fe...argh!)
-Settlers of Cataan or similar
-Trivial Pursuit
-Boggle
(Ben and I already have Risk, Scrabble, and Apples to Apples-and despite its popularity, I think Apples to Apples is pretty lame)

For the bookshelf:
-Heart and Hands, by Elizabeth Davis
-Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich
-American Gospel, by Jon Meacham
-American Theocracy, by Kevin Phillips
-Static, by Amy Goodman (Yay!!! Amy Goodman! You're awesome!)
-Birthing from Within, by Pam England
-The One Percent Doctrine, by Ron Suskind (Cheney is bad!)

For the superficial:
Comfortable:
-Shoes (size 9.5 or 10)
-Shirts (size S or M)
-Pants (size 4-long)
-Skirts (size 4)
-Earrings (I actually sort of need earrings because I've lost one from each pair that people have given me in the past and I don't like buying them for myself. The drawback of earrings as a gift is that I will inevitably-though sometimes it takes years-lose one...but I always keep the un-lost one in my jewelry box!)

For the imagination:
-A meal with Larry David
-A meal with Carl Kassel
-A four-wheel drive vehicle
-A complete senior essay

I just want to say that watching Curb Your Enthusiasm keeps me from feeling homesick, and that Carl brings great joy to my house chores...some day I hope to have your voice on my answering machine, Carl. This post feels like homage to NPR. Hmm...maybe it should be. Shout outs to Chicago Public Radio, Piano Puzzler, Car Talk, and the Sunday Puzzle as well!

Bad Chinese Food

The single saddest thing about Santa Fe is its lack of a good Chinese restaurant. Now, I know some of you aren't wild about (or have never heard of) my hometown staple: Peking Dynasty. You are missing out. Especially if you live in Santa Fe, because in Santa Fe, Chow's is considered the best Chinese restaurant. Let me enumerate to you the issues I have with Chow's:

1) Service is slow, slow, slow. This is actually a problem in Santa Fe generally, but I mean, don't we expect more from Chinese restaurants? The only experience of good service I had there was with the bus boy, who faithfully refilled the coke that I was drinking at an astonishing pace. I was drinking the coke at an astonishing pace and he refilled it at an astonishing pace...tricky modifiers. Which brings me to...
2) They charged me an extra $2! $2! For my coke after my second refill. I mean, I don't usually drink that much but I was very thirsty, and when Ben and I checked the menu it did not advertise this fact anywhere. How cheap is that!
3) The food tastes weird. I think they are going for some sort of Asian fusion Chinese food, except that the Chinese food all sounds normal on the menu.

Okay, that's it about the Chinese food.

Aaaahhhh!
As you know, senior year has been a real roller-coaster ride so far. I have worked myself up about senior essay and have nothing to show for it. I don't have a close relationship with a tutor in Santa Fe and have had no luck finding an advisor who clicks with me. Either I am too ancient and the tutor is too modern, one of us is socially inept, or I am too passive and the tutor too aggressive. It feels like I am incompatible with the thoughts I encounter, like I am excited only by inferior ideas, and there seems to be some relation between a tutor's fondness for Kant/Hegel/Wagner/literature above all else, and our inability to communicate. So, it has been a very frustrating process and the time to turn in a paper topic proposal looms. Last weekend I figured out that getting myself worked up about it is probably not a good idea, and so I am beginning the process over again. I want to explore a very general question: What does the religious life have to offer that philosophy doesn't? The problem is finding a great place where these ideas intersect. Plato? Kierkegaard? Tolstoy? Dostoevsky? Augustine? I haven't read Brothers Karamazov yet, which is the only one of these ideas I've found a tutor receptive of. So...any advice?

The other movement/struggle of senior year has been planning for next year. The more I think about medicine, the more I am drawn to sides of it that are more intimate, more interpersonal, and less sterile. The three options for next year I am considering seriously are:
1) Apply to the JET program and go back to Japan for a year or two. Make some money and improve my working Japanese. This does not replace options 2 or 3 but does delay them and give me a (much-needed) adventure.
2) Midwifery
3) Pursue a degree that would allow me to be a therapist.

I have shifted towards midwifery and therapy as I have become convinced that I want my role to be that of someone who frees people. I want to give the people I encounter more options. I don't want to be part of an institution that imagines it is superior to those it serves. At this point I am absolutely fascinated by both midwifery and therapy... midwifery feels like a true calling, but I'm not sure it's the right time for it. The traits of a successful and helpful midwife are the ability to work very hard, compassion, open-mindedness, ability to work cooperatively and selflessly with a group of various (probably strong) personalities. Doesn't it seem like a psychology or social work degree could be a part of developing those qualities?

There is a really great program in Taos, New Mexico at the Northern New Mexico Midwifery Center. It is a 18-24 month apprenticeship that gives aspiring midwives a lot of experience and support as they prepare to take the NARM exam, which is required to become a CPM (certified professional midwife). One of the scariest things about midwifery is that I want to be a direct-entry midwife, as opposed to a nurse-midwife. Direct-entry midwives have much more freedom and are able to attend home births, but also accept certain risks from which nurse-midwives are better protected. If you are interested in midwifery at all, I recommend the book "Babycatcher", by Peggy Vincent.
I just finished it and couldn't put it down. It is an anecdotal account of being an independent nurse-midwife in the Bay Area during the 80s. If you are interested in the advantages and disadvantages of midwifery from a more statistical or medical perspective, I also read "A Thinking Woman's Guide to Better Birth". I think this would be the book for Dad to read when I finally get him on the phone about all this stuff.

The problem with Taos is that there is very little hope Ben will be able to find anything interesting to do there for two years. It is just a little too far from Santa Fe (1 1/2 hours) for us to commute or stay connected to Santa Fe. So this is a bummer, and I am currently casting about looking for a program like Taos' in California or Washington or New York...or anywhere other than Florida and Texas (which have an overabundance of midwifery schools). So if you happen to know a midwife who wants to be my preceptor, let me know.

Meanwhile, the following states are totally out of the picture if I'm a direct entry midwife. They ban it all together: Alabama, Illinois (sad!) Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Montana, North Carolina, South Dakota, Wyoming, and D.C.

Great Quote

Among so many great quotes:

"Precisely because resignation is antecedent, faith is no esthetic emotion but something far higher; it is not the spontaneous inclination of the heart but the paradox of existence. If for example, in the face of every difficulty, a young girl still remains convinced that her desire will be fulfilled, this assurance is by no means the assurance of faith, even though she has been brought up by Christian parents and perhaps has had confirmation instruction from the pastor for a whole year. She is convinced in all her childlike naivete and innocence, and this assurance ennobles her nature and gives her a supranatural magnitude so that like a thaumaturge she can invoke the finite powers of existence and bring the very stones to tears, while on the other hand in her perplexity she can just as well run to Herod as to Pilate and move the whole world with her pleas. Her assurance is most captivating, and one can learn much from her, but there is one thing that cannot be learned from her-how to make movements-for her assurance does not dare, in the pain of resignation, to look the impossibility in the eye."

Explanation: Kierkegaard is talking here about the movement of Abraham's faith. Abraham must be resigned to the impossibility of having Isaac (both before he is born and when asked to sacrifice him) and then at the same moment believe the absurd, that he can have Isaac. This movement between the a) resignation to the impossibility of a desire and the b) belief in the absurd, (belief that for God all things are possible) is Kierkegaard's account of faith. I just thought this was really cool.

Found out that I am in Ms. Arsenault's Jung precept. This is excellent news because Jung sounds cool and I know that Ms. Arsenault is really wonderful. Ben is reading Brothers K for precept with Mr. Thompson. Yay precepts! Also, a thaumaturge is a magician and I still have no idea what to write me senior essay about.

I went over to the College of Santa Fe for an after school session with the Breakthrough kids from this summer, and it was intense. It was so weird to see them again after a couple of months. I think they were excited to see me, but I can already see that their schools have had a negative effect on them. It's hard to see kids swear and fight and act totally out of control. After a half hour they settled down, but they hardly have any homework and the homework they did have was really easy and soooo boring, so it was tought to keep them occupied. Poor, poor, kids.

A Cry for Help

It was in pre-class chat mode in my math tutorial today, that I discovered that my class-buddy, Mr. Tisher, has a blogspot blog. This is good news.
Help, Mr. Tisher!
I don't know how to work this thing. You see, dear family, I would love to have links to your blogs on my blog, but I haven't been able to figure it out. I want to include youtube videos too, but can't manage it. So this is a cry for help. Isn't it Q in a James Bond film who says he can't work the keys to hotel doors? Don't look down on me, just think of what we all have in common with Q: random gaps of knowledge.

Something that's been bothering me recently...the stupidity of television characters. My new obsession with TV on DVD has been very frustrating:
House: All of the characters are stupid except House, who is wonderful and very, very insensitive. Case in point- Dr. Cameron, the goody two-shoes of the bunch who is incessantly raising irritating pseudo-moral questions, sleeps with the hunky Australian doctor and treats patients with kindness or cruel indifference depending on her opinion of the patient's worth. Dr. House, on the other hand, treats everybody like shit all the time. His consistency and honesty makes him the most compelling member of the cast, and Dr. Cameron looks like a confused gerbil.
Even worse, is Grey's Anatomy: I mean, I don't even know where to begin! In an ensemble cast of ten characters, only one, Dr. Bailey, behaves like a real person. The worst are Meredith Grey and Dr. Shepherd, who sleep around and lead everyone on, treat each other like shit, and then sleep with each other at the end of the second season, just when they had each almost managed to work things out with their other partners. My only consolation is that they deserve each other, and that at least Dr. Shepherd's wife, Addison (also Dr. Shepherd) won't have to put up with him anymore.
I feel similarly about the main characters of Lost. I just detest Jack and Kate. The good thing about Lost is that it has characters like John and Hurley et al. to make up for Jack and Kate. In Grey's, though, the people are just all totally crazy. So, what I'm wondering is: why do all the shows make such distasteful lead characters? Am I supposed to be so overcome with lust for McDreamy or Jack that I ignore their ignorant, domineering, self-centered personalities? Am I supposed to cheer on slutty girls like Meredith Grey? No can do, TV people. And if you think that your characters are disturbing because they're "like, so real" I feel sorry for you. People are confused and deceitful at times, but the people I know would not be able to go on their merry way leading happily self-destructive (and just plain-old destructive) unexamined lives.