Kate the Great's Merry Adventures In Iowa!
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Kate the Great" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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12:01 am
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Today's Twittering
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11:34 am
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Various milestones
At this time two years ago today, Ben and I were on our first date! It was at Egg'lectic Cafe in Wheaton, IL. We'd worked on a megaproject together in the block right before that, then he drove me home for Thanksgiving, 'cause he's also from the Chicago area. He worked into conversation on the way back the question: what's my favorite restaurant? Then, to my dim-witted surprise, he suggested that we could go out to lunch there that following Sunday and then he could drive me back to Cornell.
Yay. :)
Now I'm back in Wheaton again -- Ben and I drove back here last night. It seems really fast, coming from Iowa City instead of Cornell. To get to Cornell you first go to Iowa City and then head north for another 30-40 minutes. It shaves the time down to 3 1/2 hours (and actually a little under that, driving at night to beat traffic).
Yesterday was my last day of student teaching. I'll still be at the school, wandering from classroom to classroom to observe other teachers, for two more weeks. But yesterday was the last day I actually ran the class.
It was a really weird feeling, even though I've gotten to ease my way into it, no longer thinking about future lessons to plan for a few days now. The weirdest part is realizing how inconsequential it seems. One of my classes had no reaction at all to the news that after two and a half months I suddenly won't be teaching them. It really struck me that to them I'm just one of the many teachers they deal with every day, whereas to me they are my first-born students. My class been on their minds about 45 minutes a day, five days a week, plus whatever time they spend doing my (rather sporadic) homework assignments. These classes have been on my mind for countless hours every day, seven days a week.
To give a bit of comic relief and perspective to this post about this big transition: when I was handing back some projects, there were still a handful of people I only identified by a combination of process-of-elimination and sheer luck!
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09:03 pm
[Link] | I love Ben very much. Have I mentioned that today?
( Hee. )
In other news... this morning I yoinked one of Ben's Bibles and finished reading Revelation -- Chapters 16 through 22 (23?). I came to the definitive conclusion that I want to be a youth group leader. I've always had a special fondness for youth groups, and especially for youth group leaders, but I never had the shall we say chutzpuh to be able to lead a bunch of teenagers in much of anything unless my own personal grade depended on it! Now, thanks to student teaching, I do.
So I'm praying for a youth ministry job, around here, preferably paid, and preferably where I don't need office hours in a church all day every day so I can still be a substitute teacher and make an extra $110 a day and actually be able to get out of debt sometime soon!
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07:47 pm
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Go Steelers!
I'm now nominally a Steelers fan, I've decided. Know why? 'Cause I found out today that a certain Rashard Mendenhall is now playing for them. $2.8+ million.
Why I care?
1) 'Cause all us Mendenhalls ARE related! You may contrast my pasty whiteness and his splendid sunburn-proof pigmentation and say "No way!!" But it's true!!! ONE set of Mendenhall SIBLINGS came over from England in the 1680s to escape anti-Quaker persecution and BOO YAH now Kate the Great is related to a professional football player.
2) As he gains fame, more and more people will start learning how to say my name. Mending-hall? No! Mendelson? No! Menendez? No! Molenhouse? No! Mulholland? No! MEN-DEN-HALL, yo! MENDENHALL! W00T W00T! Yayyyyyyyuuuuhhhh!!!
It already started when he was all over the local news 'cause he was so rockin' playing for University of Illinois -- when I took the Praxis, the people there were like, "Mendenhall... that name sounds familiar for some reason." And I was like, "Yep, I'm famous. Tee hee."
I'm having a great weekend at Cornell. Grading a lot, but enjoying every minute of it. Great projects on immigration and I learn something new with almost every one of them.
Last night Ben and I went to church ('cause he was curious about the Saturday evening service, and had already somehow gotten a certain Atheist friend of his to go to confession 'cause he's started working as a male escort -- it was actually the friend's suggestion 'cause it was just that remarkable). We enjoyed the Saturday mass better 'cause there were almost no crying babies at all! Then we went to Subway -- delightful!
Today's been a lazy day. We took a walk together after lunch, and spent much of the afternoon hanging out and joking. We got some French version of The Birdcage and decided to do 1000 sit-ups. I got to a leisurely 300, Ben was doing push-ups as well and wasn't counting but probably didn't get that far and then quit. :) I feel fine now, though I hadn't done any for a long time 'cause I figured out I have a lot less back problems when I don't do 200 sit-ups a day. Hmm curious. :)
In an hour or so we're going back to Iowa City.
All the actual teaching I have left to do is a review day tomorrow for the test on Tuesday. I'm thinking some kind of Progressive Era bingo. :) Then I'll still be there observing for two more weeks (until December 11).
Then: here at Cornell for a week making my e-portfolio (already started in Methods), then I'll spend a couple weeks in Wheaton huzzah! and then I'll spend block 5 at Cornell (living out a backpack most of the time) doing senior seminar for education.
Then I'm all done!
Hey Ben just showed up! So... buh bye. :)
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08:54 pm
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Kate student teaching = weird stuff like this
Here's an example of something I made to use in class today. The kids thought it was a lot of fun and my mentor teacher snagged a copy to use next year. I modeled it off some of the quizzes I remember seeing in teen magazines. Hee. :) Start in the upper left corner.
( Are you more like Taft or Roosevelt? )
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06:07 pm
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How He Loves (heart)
I got an email last night from a friend at Cornell linking to a song called "How He Loves" by David Crowder Band: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWgeUrD4MHI (embedding has been disabled).
I'd drifted away from Christian music a lot in the last several months -- usually if I do listen to the radio, I listen to Catholic talk radio. This song got to me so much, though, that I actually put batteries in my portable cd player for perhaps the first time in months and listened to a Christian music station on my walk to school. And it was wonderful.
We are to love the Lord with all our "heart, soul, mind, and strength."
The song got me evaluating that.
Mind -- My strongest one right now. Despite my general shortness of time, I do take some time to read apologetics pretty regularly.
And when I'm observing parts of my mentor teacher's religion classes, I remember that one of my particular spiritual gifts is knowledge. That teacher -- and, I think, unfortunately a lot of the religion teachers at Regina -- don't know a lot. Students ask him questions and he doesn't know what to say, and he pieces together incorrect answers. ("How often should we pray?" they asked. "Oh... I'd say once a day or so is sufficient." The Bible says to "pray without ceasing" -- turn your whole internal monologue toward God. Always, always.) And he asks them to think about questions without even knowing the answers. Sure... some things we just don't know -- but not nearly as many as he tells his students! I plan to get some apologetics books for him as part of my thank-you-for-being-the-best-mentor-teacher-ever gift. (Today he actually told his class that Jesus performed "thirteen or fifteen miracles." Ummmmmmmmmmmm........ I think that's a little short.)
Strength -- I'm not sure how to measure this one. I think it's moderate. I take the time for some things, church and aforementioned reading and the like, but not enough. God wants me to be writing more than I am. And I'm not so good about, oh, let's say, not getting drunk pretty regularly. That's a strength issue.
Soul -- Soul ties in with strength a lot, so much so that that in most passages where these different ways we're supposed to love the Lord are listed there are only three ways listed instead of all four heart, mind, strength, and soul. I'll differentiate in my self-evaluation that strength is ways I stand strong (or not) whereas soul is not only my everyday attitude toward others (loving?) as well as how solid we are in feeling loving toward God. I'm working on soul -- working on being less materialistic, celebrating life and looking at other people more and thinking "God loves that stranger just as much as He loves me, God is thinking about them as much as He's thinking about me, as much as I'm thinking about myself and more." And feeling a flood of affection for those random people on the sidewalk.
At the same time, I wonder about my soul in how high a priority I've been placing living according to the Lord consistently. In some aspects of my life, I am very much understanding that His rules are not arbitrary and we've been told about them because He really loves us and knows how He designed us. Say, rules for how to operate in romantic relationships because He treasures such relationships even more than I do and wants them to be as happy as can be. The example I have about why I wonder is that, in the just-mentioned relationships example, if I lost something precious that I want to protect at all costs (that relationship), I would have probably defected to sleeping around. Which might no longer be the case suddenly, bringing me to heart....
Heart -- This one's been lacking. One great weakness of the religion classes at the school I'm student teaching at is that they, too, lack heart. They're a class like any other -- only worse in that there's a popular idea among students and teachers alike that "No one should get less than an A or a B in religion." There's not a lot of mind and there's not a lot of heart in such situations either. "They're too young to handle that," my mentor teacher once told me, having slipped up and actually told them something meaningful. But they're not. They're in high school.
Anyway, yesterday in church one of the hymns said something about God's love making all other love seem very insignificant, and I had a fleeting thought: "What does that mean? How has God shown love? What are they talking about?"
An obvious problem in my heart.
So when I heard this song (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWgeUrD4MHI), I... I feel like I woke up. Is this one of my favorite songs ever? Do I love the lyrics all so much? No. But in general, Christian music is about the heart. There's heartfelt passion behind all the lyrics in these songs.
Listening to this song for the first time -- reminding me of all the similar CCM songs -- made memories of God's love flood back through me.
1) When I was almost five years old and first heard of Jesus, He gave me a vision of Him smiling at me and opening His arms to me.
2) In high school, when I was suicidal, I turned to God, asking to die, and instead he planted a seed of joy in me that pulled me through and grew and grew, changing the very essence of me into joy unadulterated by pain. I consider this time my "born again" experience.
3) In college, when I got introduced to Catholicism. Just sitting through mass, anywhere, made me feel like my very soul was trying to leap with joy. It's now my home -- more and moreso all the time.
4) Insecure, always fearful that somehow God would get tired of me like other important people have, and realizing that the feeling wouldn't go away, I tried to give up trying to please Him. I destroyed so much of my life, but, talking to God about it out of habit, He told me, "I'm not giving you up this easily." Not, "I'm not giving up on you," as if I were supposed to pull through and achieve -- "I'm not giving you up." I didn't need to fulfill any role or worry about becoming boring or something else like I had become to various other people in my life (and would become again). People come and go (even when they shouldn't), but God isn't leaving me. We can leave Him, but He won't abandon us. Ever.
5) I think it sounds like a cheap cliche to say my boyfriend is a gift from God, but he is. I see him as nothing less than a miracle, as God reaching down to me to save me from the hell I'd walked myself into and been bound into. My boyfriend's very existence got me out of a bad "friendship" (read: with benefits, without much friendship) that I couldn't find the strength to end otherwise and even helped me get out of a long bout of depression I'd been dealing with. And from the beginning and all along when I talk to God about him, God encourages me. From the first dates when I didn't know what I was getting into and God actually told me to "Go have fun" and on throughout as I've struggled to get my mind around a relationship lasting this long, on through recent "long distance" times when it's been so hard that without God's direct encouragement I probably would have just given up on this. And it's always, always been worthwhile.
6) The Lord still talks to me and guides me, reassuring me, telling me I am where I am supposed to be; telling me that I don't need to understand, only to trust; that I have more than enough energy to trust because trusting takes very little energy at all, what really takes energy is trying to convince myself of why things are for the best instead of truly trusting that they are; and so on. If I listen God always wants to tell me something, thoughts foreign to the workings of my mind in a gentle voice unique from all of my ever-buzzing internal monologue.
Thinking about all these things -- inspired by that song -- I feel my heart so in love with the Lord again.
Ohh wow, I am loved.
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12:02 am
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Today's Twittering
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08:56 pm
[Link] | I've just gone back through my last 7 years of LJ entries from today's date.
My favorite is from November 12, 2006 -- my sophomore year at Cornell:
"The Kate the Great Show"'s theme next week will be "Songs I Spontaneously Start To Sing And Dance To On Days I Feel Particularly Cute."
The end!
Current Mood: katetacular
http://katethegreatest.livejournal.com/2006/11/12/
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08:00 pm
[Link] | Today I mentioned to my classes -- when talking about Prohibition -- that I know two people up at Cornell who are brewing beer in their closet in the dorms. I think they've figured out that I'm in on it, because to the one class I insisted that I would not tell them how to make it (but that it's very easy to look it up online, and no I'm not advocating that as a research project) and to the other class, when asked if it tastes bad, I swiftly and firmly answered, "No." And then the class realized that I like beer and I've tried this closet stuff!
HAHAHAHAHA.
Luckily I think my mentor teacher was out of the room both those times.
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10:41 pm
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Yay Joseph! :)
I just can't get enough of this tonight!
Link!
Luckily, I am hard at work while I listen to this over and over. Well, until the finale, at which point I MUST stop whatever I'm doing to spread my arms wide and lip sync with my eyes closed.
I spend all of Friday afternoon cleaning my apartment and singing the chorus to this song at the top of my lungs!
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06:05 pm
[Link] | Friday was nice... I got to go to school at 9 instead of 8... and then leave at 11! It was parent/teacher conferences. We all sat at tables in the gym, and very few parents came. But I got a nice email from my supervisor at Cornell saying her friend, whose daughter is one of my students (conveniently the student who always says "YOU'RE MY FAVORITE TEACHER!!") told her that I did an "awesome job" at the conferences!
This weekend was good. Ben and his dad (visiting from Oregon!) came to my apartment to pick me up on Friday evening. And hey guess what I'm finally used to Ben's dad! I opened the door and it was like, y'know, it really is genuinely nice to see you. Like, completely! So that's great! :)
Ben's dad wandered into my room, noticing that "Ben figures prominently" on my wallspace. :) Then he seemed a little embarrassed for wandering into my personal space, heehee. :) He was thrilled to see the type of exercise bike I have though, and moreso when I told him I got it for $20.
I was invited along for everything they did over the weekend, so that was cool. We went to Lincoln Cafe twice (I was specifically offered one of the $30-something specials they have, but I wasn't really interested in them) and to Masala and Subway and Scorz. And worked out a lot. And drank a solid amount of beer. We actually sat in Big Creek Market and drank 1554 and Guinness at the little tables in there! Legal? We're not sure. And that first night we went to John's Grocery (a.k.a. "Dirty John's") and stocked up on various interesting beers. They have two rooms full, mostly interesting foreign stuff, often in single bottles. We like that a lot.
Anyway. That first night when we were at Lincoln Cafe and Ben had left the table for a moment, Ben's dad asked me how I'm liking Iowa City and student teaching and all, and I said it's all been really great -- then blurted out, "...except that I'm in Iowa City while Ben's in Mount Vernon." Then he told me that he and Ben had been talking about that the other day and they brainstormed that Ben and I should get together on Wednesdays as well so then we'll only be apart two days at a time instead of five.
So that seems to be the new arrangement. Ben is coming to visit me tomorrow night! (Which means I should be working on stuff instead of being on LiveJournal, yeah!) But I heard about it first from Ben's dad, who maybe even came up with the idea, so that's cool that he seems to really like me and all. He even mentioned at one point in the weekend, when talking about grad schools Ben should check out in Oregon, certain opportunities there might be for me out there, too. Wow. For reals.
In other news -- teacher appreciation week, and I'm on the list! I saw nice Regina Regals fleece blankets in the teacher's lounge, then after school my mentor teacher set one down on the desk in front of me... it had my name on the tag! YAY!!! :-D We get another present on Friday, and lunch every day this week! Mmmmmmm! :) I've never seen the teacher's lounge so full as when we got free pizza today! Haha. :-D
Love y'all,
KtG
Current Music: "Close Every Door" ~Joseph/Dreamcoat
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09:03 pm
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Handsome Roman!
I was looking up something on PBS.org so I could make a back-dated lesson plan because I'm getting observed tomorrow, and I saw this on the main page that stunned me:
The guy in the middle is one of the most attractive people the world has ever seen!!!!! WOW. Stunningly beautiful. Absolutely stunning.
(The guy directly to his right is Nero, whom I spent much of three class periods talking about today. All those 14 and 15-year olds were entranced. One guy even let his eyes bug out and his jaw hang open when he heard that yes, Nero really did tie Christians to stakes in his garden and wait for nightfall so they could be set on fire as the lanterns for his parties.
...Among his many accomplishments... Matricide's another one... that gets overshadowed with all the persecution and fiddling while Rome burns.
He ended up committing suicide at age 30. There was a coup and he was going to be clubbed to death. He was too chicken to do himself in at first, so he asked one of his friends to kill himself as an example. He didn't; Nero had to summon his own courage when the enemy soldiers got close enough.
Contemporaries described his appearance as: blond hair, gray-blue eyes, an unnecessarily large neck, a protruding belly, and very skinny legs. Hahaha. :)
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08:09 pm
[Link] | This is kind of amazing:
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11:01 pm
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Today's Twittering
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07:24 pm
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Mass @ Catholic school
So today there was a mass at the Catholic school I'm student teaching at. They have those periodically, in the gym.
My thought process today was pretty much: "There are, like, no Catholic teachers here. Or maybe just all the non-Catholic teachers choose to sit by me. How can it feel awkward to be Catholic in the middle of a mass at a Catholic school?"
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In other news, yesterday at St. John's (in Mount Vernon) it happened to be All Saints' Day. I'd never been to an All Saints' Day service before (I'd wanted to go my sophomore year but chickened out being not officially Catholic yet, and hadn't felt the inclination after that). I really liked it, though. A lot. And when I left it, I actually was full of the feeling that yes, death is nothing scary at all, for myself or for those I love. I normally don't think I'm afraid of death, but leaving that service yesterday I was powerfully unafraid of death and just as unafraid of losing my loved ones. I was so filled wtih the understanding that death really is not the end, and they never really leave us. The thought of death seemed almost completely irrelevant.
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07:13 pm
[Link] | Ben came to pick me up on Friday night and take me to Cornell! Wowza. :) Yay.
I needed a 15-minute nap before he got here, which became a one-hour-fifteen-minute nap as I didn't press "enable" on my cell phone alarm. So, I awoke at 6:53, a mere seven minutes before his appointed time of arrival (moved up from 8:00!), and in dire need of a shower and a room cleaning.
A grin spread across Ben's face when he saw me open the bathroom door with a towel wrapped into a turban around my hair and me looking shocked that he'd arrived without my hearing it. :) Desiree had told him how I'd overslept.
I packed my stuff in record time and we went back up to Cornell and... brewed some beer! Our beer-making stuff had arrived that day, hooray, hooray! It was after midnight before we finished that.
And it took over 24 hours to start bubbling. We were a little concerned. Now it's got a nice healthy fermentation going.
Saturday night we hung out at 10th Ave. (with Ben & Ken & Phil & all that crew) for a while before Ben wanted to go back to New Hall to watch Metropolis with me. :) That was nice. His roommate Colin and his suitemate Andrew both made excited exclamations of "METROPOLIS!!" when they wandered in. That pleased me. :)
Metropolis, by the way, is a weird, weird film. Great, though, of course.
Before the movie, I thought, "I want chocolate. And I'm hungry." Then I realized, oh hai, that really loud Halloween party next door that's a New Hall Council sponsored-event since the throwers-of didn't want to buy food? Yeah, they'll have food and chocolate. So I went there and worked my way through the dancing crowds to munch on some popcorn and chocolatey goodness and bring a plate of popcorn and candy corn back for Ben. :)
Sunday, Andrew pounded on the windows and made a big show of looking in while we were having cuddly time. That was a very funny reminder that yes, Ben does live on first floor.
Then he drove me back last night -- after he cooked another wonderful dinner for us all -- and stayed over, which was nice. :) As always.
And we've just ordered more brewing gadgets and supplies. :)
Yeah, I love him a lot.
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07:39 pm
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"The Trouble With 'X'"
I just read a very wonderful and brief essay by C.S. Lewis called "The Trouble With 'X'"
The first half of the message struck me the most -- it's the idea that all of us (including ourselves) have a "fatal flaw" that absolutely drives everyone around us up the wall and we can't even see it.
The idea that it's all of us is what hit me. Yes, we should work on our own flaws, but we should approach everyone in the world with the expectation that they have some "fatal flaw" and the expectation that we will love them before we see that flaw, with the assumption that it is there... and continue to love them long after that flaw reveals itself. Not expecting them to ever understand what's wrong with them as much as we do! All the while, never forgetting that they're in the same position with our fatally flawed selves.
Here's the essay:
( The Trouble With 'X' )
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09:34 pm
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Writer's Block: Nature or nurture
Now, as to the first question, it's worded in such a way that it's redundant. I'll overlook that.
As for brain chemistry and moods, it works both ways. Studies show that if you force a smile, it triggers "happy" chemicals in your brain and you actually become happier. If life events take a turn for the better, you tend to become happier.
But your brain chemistry also dictates your moods, I think even more than your life events. 'Cause you can certainly feel like absolute rubbish even when life is fantastic!
Similarly, I think people are born with certain temperments. I've known an entire family of people prone to clinical depression; I've known people raised in foster care who are thriving.
I bothered to answer this question 'cause I was just thinking about how unpredictable my mood has been becoming... sometimes I'm fulfilling the calling of overwhelming joy God has blessed me with... and other times... let's just say I'm not. Sometimes lately it's hard to find the energy or motivation or understanding of why I even need to go through the motions of daily life.
I am picking out some reasons for it, I think... but I will always first point my accusatory finger at my failed-me-before brain chemistry. (Sigh.)
Now, to productivity!
Tags: nature v. nurture, writer's block
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09:01 pm
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birthdays!
I realized it's my grandpa's birthday, so I called him and sang him happy birthday. :)
His response was: "Hi! Whatcha been drinkin'?"
He and my grandma told me how they spent all day in afternoon on a gambling trip (grandpa lost five dollars, grandma made $15.80, there was a buffet), how tomorrow they're playing bingo (grandpa will be given a cupcake with a candle in it, they'll turn out the lights and sing, and the lady will read his horoscope), how grandpa likes to watch Westerns early in the evenings and Fox News later on ("Have you heard of that?").
Grandpa also said, regarding my plans to go to Utah this summer, to check out the dinosaur bones. Near a border, there's pretty much a wall of dinosaur bones that they built a building around. In South Dakota there's dinosaur bones, too!
Grandpa said he doesn't feel as old as 83, but he's kind of sounding like it. Less of a gruff bark of a voice.
I got an additional birthday package from my dear sweet mum today! It contained two books:
1) Hail to the Cheif: The Making and Unmaking of American Presidents by Robert Dallek (as I requested specifically)
2) God in the Dock by C.S. Lewis.
I'm thrilled about that second one. I'd asked my mom for "Some collection of C.S. Lewis essays" and she'd made it sound like she hadn't been able to fill such a vague request. But she did, splendidly! It's 48 essays and 12 letters and I don't think I've read any of them yet!!! :) My mom is super delighted by how excited I am. :) She loves giving gifts that are well-received!
By the way, Ben and I have put in an order for home brewing stuff! It's a joint effort between us and it's going to rock.
Tags: grandpa
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12:00 am
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Today's Twittering
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