Friday, July 24, 2009

My other mission

This week was RAGBRAI--The Register's (as in the Des Moines Register, the newspaper) Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa. It's basically a week-long ride across the state that comes it at just under 500 miles. Thousands and THOUSANDS of people participate. Some do the entire week, some just hop in for a day or two.

I've been following it online here and it seems REALLY cool and like a lot of fun. Hard work, but fun at the same time.

I was on my way home from Omaha last weekend going east on the highway and couldn't help but notice the MASSIVE amount of traffic going west. It was all buses and trailers and vans and Winnebegos with bikes. Everybody was migrating to the start of the RAGBRAI route. It was incredible to see.

After witnessing this pilgrimage and following everybody online for the past week, I've decided that I'm going to ride RAGBRAI 2014. I'm giving myself 5 years to train up and find a bike and some buddies (who, if they won't ride with me, will at least do the driving part and meet me at each stop along the way). I can do it.

It's only 500 miles, right?

And, besides, think of how much Iowa I'll get to see. Based on the pictures, there's nothing better.

Training starts tomorrow.

Monday, July 20, 2009

On a mission

A while ago I stumbled onto a friend's "43 things" list. I can't remember for the life of me what was on it, but it planted the list seed in my head. 43things.com is, I think, some sort of social networking site where users can create a list of their hopes/dreams/goals they want or plan to accomplish in their near or not-so-near future. Now, the last thing I need is another account on another so-called "social networking" site, so I decided to just make my own list in a no-password-required word document and post it here as a public declaration of my aspirations.

I did mine slightly differently. I made my goals Iowa-specific. And I'm giving myself 10 years to do it all. Ten years from this day, I will have done every one of these 43 things. I promise.

43 things

1. Win a contest at the Iowa State Fair
2. Ride on a tractor in a parade
3. Drive a combine
4. Sleep under the stars
5. Step foot in all 99 counties
6. See the field of dreams
7. Have my picture taken at the covered bridges of Madison county
8. Eat an apple right off the tree
9. Catch a fish
10. Go on a hike looking for mushrooms
11. Ride the double-decker Ferris wheel at the Iowa State Fair
12. Watch the sunrise over rural Iowa
13. See a prairie chicken
14. See a bald eagle
15. Buy a house
16. Take a random road trip
17. Go to six different farmers markets
18. Go to the top of the Principal building
19. Meet Chet Culver
20. Go to Pella for Tulip Time
21. Visit the Iowa Arboretum
22. See a wild turtle
23. Go see the I-Cubs
24. Stand in a corn field when the corn is taller than me
25. Ride the heritage carousel
26. Ride in a hot air balloon in Indianola
27. Go to the sweet corn festival in Adel and eat some sweet corn
28. Eat an aebleskiver
29. Visit Riverside, Iowa—future birthplace of Captain Kirk
30. Have a photo published in an Iowa magazine
31. Go to the kaleidoscope factory in Pomeroy
32. Go to the Coca-Cola Celebration in Atlantic
33. Touch the Mississippi River
34. See the Dallas County Courthouse
35. Plant (or help plant) a butterfly garden
36. Go to Reiman Gardens
37. Visit the Big Treehouse in Marshalltown
38. Go to a dairy farm and milk a cow
39. Be an extra in a film shot in Iowa
40. Fly a kite at Clear Lake (or, really, just go to Clear Lake)
41. See Mannheim Steamroller in concert
42. Play mini-golf in the skywalks
43. Sing Karaoke sober, but tell people I was drunk so I have an excuse for my terrible singing

Monday, July 6, 2009

4th of July

We haven't had pics in a while, so here we go! These were taken Thursday night at the DSM Yankee Doodle Pops concert.





Car Trouble

I woke up this morning at 6:30, as usual. I showered and dressed and ate, as usual. I packed up all my things, as usual. Then I went downstairs to the parking lot to my car. But the car wouldn't unlock with my little clicker. I thought that was rather odd. So I opened my door the old-fashioned way (with the key.. weird, I know). Then I put my key in the ignition... and nothing happened.

NOTHING HAPPENED.

When you buy a brand-new car, you don't expect to experience the heart-sinking feeling of something being seriously wrong with your car for several years. But it's only been one year and my heart was swimming around my ankles.

My battery was dead because my dome light was on all weekend and I needed a jump.

So, after panicking and calling home, I called the magical roadside assistance number on my car window. They sent out the Rescue Rangers (insert fanfare here) to jump start my car. Except it didn't work. It didn't work the first time. Or the second time. Or the third. After about 20 minutes, the jump-start guy decided that, in addition to having a dead battery, there was also something wrong with the starter.

Back to the magical roadside assistance people.

They decided to send out a tow truck to tow me to the dealer (which is luckily very, very close to my apartment). They told me he'd be out in about an hour.

Well, an hour came and went. And then an hour and a half. And then two hours. And then two and a half hours. Finally, the tow truck came. But while I was waiting, I decided to lay in the grass. So I'm there in the grass and I feel something crawling on me. I go to flick it away and accidentally put my hand on it, and it stings me. It was a bee. And it got me right in the collarbone area.

After digging a bee butt out of my chest, the tow truck guy and I pushed my car onto the truck and we brought it to the dealership. Kinda. At first we went to the wrong dealership. We went to the Honda dealership and my car is a Hyundai.

Now I'm at the proper dealership and my car is spending the day at the spa. Apparently when they hit 5,000 they need a little R&R. Like twenty minutes after I got here, the mechanic technician guy came and told me they were able to jump-start my car pretty much instantly. He also raised his eyebrow at me when he saw my oil change sticker which might have been, erm, slightly out of date.

It's been quite an adventure. Yay for growing up, right?

No.

Thursday, July 2, 2009

The Last Summer

Last month I didn't blog. And I'll tell you why. I spent about 80% of my time depressed out of my mind, 10% feeling sorry for myself for being depressed, 5% pestering the crap out of people who were too busy to spend time with me, and the other 5% feeling guilty about it.

Wait... ok, yeah. That adds up. Right? Yeah. So, obviously, there was no time to blog.

Sounds like a very good use of time, right? Not exactly.

Why was I depressed? Ever since I started at Drake, I imagined how this summer would be. My last summer. I would be living in an apartment off campus. I'd have a car. I'd be interning at Meredith. I'd be coming home and making myself dinner and doing my dishes afterwards in my kitchen sink.

You know what? I have ALL of those things. And, yet, I was miserable. I was just unhappy. And on top of being unhappy, I also freaked out about being unhappy. If having so much of what I always thought I wanted turned out to suck so much, what did that mean, exactly? Suddenly, I felt like I didn't know what I wanted anymore and with graduation approaching my doorstep, that made me really nervous.

Add all of that to the fact that moving away from campus was unexpectedly difficult. Last semester I couldn't wait to move off. I love Drake, but after three years, I guess I was just tired of looking at it all the time. It's great, but I needed a change of scenery. So I moved away. And I got a change of scenery. You know what else I got? An overwhelming sense of loneliness and isolation. Granted, it's summer and there aren't too many people around campus anyway, but I still felt cut off from it. I felt like I couldn't survive with out. Like I had been institutionalized or something and couldn't live on the outside.

It was HARD.

But then I remembered... didn't I kind of go through this last summer, too? Last summer I was an RA in Ross Hall and living on my own in a pseudo-apartment. I had hardly any residents (and the ones I did have didn't need me for anything) and I felt rather alone and I got depressed then, too. But as alone as I felt then, I wasn't truly alone. I had two other RAs I saw a few times a week and I talked to my friend Ryan online all the time. So I was by myself, but not really alone.

You know what happened? They all graduated and now they have lives. Busy lives full of life things. Which is great. They should have lives and jobs. In the meantime, though that was hard for me to get used to. I felt like they got to do stuff and be busy and move far away, and I was just still here feeling completely isolated.

It's not like I stayed in my apartment all the time, though. I went out. I did stuff. But it seemed like every offer I made to every friend on the short list of people I have who are local was returned with the four-letter b-word.

Busy.

So I went out anyway. And that was good, but not great. At least I wasn't at home in my apartment eating copious amounts of cake and watching guilty-pleasure, self-loathing movies like Bridget Jones' Diary. That's something, right?

I was proud of myself for doing so, but I just could get over feeling so depressed and frustrated with my complete lack of social situation. It's not like I needed to be with someone constantly, but every couple of weeks or so would be nice. It was weird and I never thought it'd be like this. And then I got scared that it would be like this for a long, long time even after I graduate.

But then one day I woke up completely exhausted. As it turns out, being depressed constantly kind of takes a lot out of you. And to be honest, I was tired of it. So I kind of just decided that I didn't want to be depressed anymore. I said to myself "you're not allowed to be depressed today." The weird thing was, it kinda worked. I wasn't puking rainbows or anything, but I wasn't wallowing in self-pity, either. I suppose I just realized that I had done everything in my power to fix my lack of social life and it wasn't working. People have other things going on and there's nothing I can do about it, so it's really quite pointless to mope about it. So I stopped. I realized that the summer--my last summer--was already half over and I blew half of it being stupid and I was done with all that. I still have some time left to make the summer amazing, and that's just what I'll do. Sometimes you just have to suck it up and take control of your own happiness and not leave it up to other people.

Magazines

The other day I was at work and got an assignment from one of the editors I work for. I had to copy edit the next issue of Lasting Moments, the magazine put out by the Creative Memories scrapbooking company. It had something really cute on the cover—some adorable, fall-looking page featuring a baby dressed as a pumpkin.

“Aw, that’s cute,” I said as the editor walked away.

“Yeah, well, don’t get too attached. That’s our last issue,” she told me.

It was really sad news, actually. Granted, I’ve only been vaguely aware of this publication for the past few years and certainly never read it or looked through it unless Mom had a copy laying around the office (which she might have, now that I think about it). But it was still depressing.

Magazines are interesting things, I think. They’re very personal and hard to let go of. Putting aside that this is what I’ve chosen to do for the rest of my life, I think a lot of people have a hard time thinning the stash of magazines. I can do what I want with a newspaper and plop it right into the recycle bin after I fish out the funnies without giving it a second thought.

But magazines are much different. I know I’m not alone when I say I want to hold on to them. There’s something about the way they look and feel and smell. They’re shiny and colorful and nice. It seems sad and wasteful to just throw it out. Newspapers (which are great, so buy a subscription) look disposable. I think that’s part of the difference.

I read somewhere once (in a magazine, perhaps?) that the average subscriber holds on to their magazines for over a year… or something along those lines. Why? Probably because we’re all partially packrats. But I think we also get attached to them.

Will it sound weird if I say they’re kind of like friends? Maybe, but I don’t care. Mostly because it’s my blog and I’ll say what I want. They are kind of like friends. They’re what connect us to a larger community full of people with our same interests. That’s important, don’t you think? How often have we been interested in something but not had a single person to talk to about it? But that’s not the case with magazines. There are magazines EVERYWHERE about ANYTHING. It’s like the internet. You can always find SOMETHING.

A while ago I was kind of bummed about the whole magazine course of study. I began thinking about the economy and the contracting industry and realized that when times are tough, magazines are a lot of times one of the first things to go when it’s time to make cut-backs. I convinced myself it was some stupid, unnecessary indulgence that just encourages people to buy more things they don’t need.

I think every job has a service element to it. As in providing some sort of service to society as a whole. But I couldn’t find that angle for my job. One of my closest friends is a pharmacist and the service he provides to the community is just huge (and completely underappreciated, if I may say so). It’s really impressive—and that’s just on the level that I understand. I’m sure there’s even more I have no idea about. By the way, if you don’t think pharmacists provide anything useful for the community, spend three days at Drake and you’ll change your mind.

I digress. The point is that I wanted to feel like I was providing something to people, too. I'm not teaching children and shaping the future, I'm not saving lives, I'm not behind the pharmacy counter, I'm not picking up your garbage, I'm not finding more efficient fuel solutions. I'm not doing any of those things. I'm not even doing anything CLOSE to any of those things.

But maybe I'm helping create communities of like-minded individuals. Maybe, in some weird sort of way, I'm helping people find some sense of belonging. Or, at least, one day I will when I'm actually working. I still maintain that magazines are kind of like friends. They're monthly, paper friends who bring us news and ideas from people we've never met, but are connected to regardless.

I like to be connected to people. I need to be connected to people. Don't you?

So, Lasting Moments (ironically) is about to end. And the readership will dissolve and their little mail community with it. And, yeah, I think that's a pretty sad thing to think about.
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