Sarah Meets World: August 2011

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Kid stuff

Having spent the past 2 months hanging out in the Children's Hospital, I've been remembering glimmers of childhood that I hadn't thought about in a long time. I'm convinced there are certain archetypes -- certain kids that everyone remembers, no matter which school they went to or which part of the country they lived in, as though the same kid existed everywhere and just went by different names. The three most consistent are:

1. The Girl Who Had Breasts Before Anyone Else (Joyce Udall). While the rest of us 4th graders were muddling around with cooties and crayolas, she suddenly showed up with fascinating secret things like bras. All the boys were suddenly mysteriously aware of her charms (i.e. "Ooh, she must be very smart to have figured out how to grow those. I suddenly want to be her friend.") All the girls pretended it didn't matter. Think back. You know there was a Joyce Udall at your school.

2. The Kid Who Ate Glue and/or Figured Out How to Flip His Eyelids Inside Out Then Chased People Around the Playground (Jim Leveille). Oh, Jim, I had such a 5th-grade crush on you. I know that Ed Hall gave you a run for your money in the glue-eating department for a while there, but you were always the undisputed winner. Ed had to settle for being The Kid Who Carried a Superfluous Briefcase in Elementary School. Was there a Jim Leveille at your school? I've lost track of the one from mine. How did he turn out?

3. The Kid Who Got Glasses First (Sarah Jacobs). I distinctly remember the eye test at the beginning of kindergarten. I couldn't see a dang thing. I was acutely aware that all the other kids apparently could see something on that big white rectangle at the end of the hallway, and I knew I was going to fall short! Disappoint! Fail! So I did the only rational thing that came to mind: I memorized the answers all the kids ahead of me in line gave, then spouted them off when it was my turn. Pass! Huzzah! ...only to fail at the beginning of 1st grade when they re-screened with a different chart. I recall describing that I saw "a brick wall with a flower pot on top and a daisy in it," thinking I'd get bonus points for detail. Alas, it was actually just the letter "F". Glasses for me.

Were you ever one of those kids? And seriously, whatever happened to Jim Leveille?

Saturday, August 20, 2011

This weekend I'm visiting my sister's family in Arkansas, epicenter of Wal-Mart in the United States.
The accent here is as contagious as herpes.
After one day here, I'm afraid I'm already talking like them.
By tomorrow, I'll probably be driving a car like this:

Help me.

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Sunday, August 14, 2011

The Masses

The year was 1989. The movie was Field of Dreams. Every movie-goer thought they had learned a valuable lesson: If you build it, they will come.

I took that statement at face value, never giving it a second thought because (a) I was 8, (b) it was just a movie, and (c) everything sounds more profoundly true when it comes from a disembodied voice whispering across a cornfield.

This weekend, I've been to three very different events where masses of people had come, and it got me to thinking about why they really come. Is it actually just because someone built the event, therefore they felt compelled to come to it, like moths to a bug zapper?

The first event: Friday night's live showing of Bye Bye Birdie at The Muny, which is an outdoor theater in Forest Park. (Finding The Muny was a victory in and of itself. Sometime, ask me to tell you the lost-in-Forest-Park story of the golf cart, the public bathers, and the Unibomber lookalike who knows all.) Thousands of people were at the show on Friday night, and as I stared across the crowd it struck me that even though all of our lives were intersecting there for the same show on the same night, every one of them had a separate reason for being there. Most of the reasons probably boiled down to being either:

- a huge fan of musicals

- someone who hates musicals, but got dragged along by a sadistic fan of musicals

- a girl named Sarah on a doozie of an awkward date with a math teacher... um... just hypothetically speaking, of course.

The second event: Saturday at midnight, another date, this time for an annual bike ride called the Moonlight Ramble in which they close the streets to traffic and let the bikes own the night. 10,000 cyclists showed up and packed the streets for a 15-mile ride in a giant loop around town. In theory and feel, it reminded me of the Krispy Kreme Challenge last February, but mercifully donut-free. Why were we all there?

To ride. To be up way past our bedtimes. To pedal down the center lane of Missouri's busiest freeway system without any cars on it. To feel like a solid mass of people with a common bond. And, okay, maybe to find out whether some people really treat this as a clothes-optional event.

Clothes mandatory!

The third event: Sunday morning in a Catholic church. A new friend of mine let me come along to Mass. I had been to one Mass before this, at midnight on a Christmas 10 years ago, where hundreds of people acted as though they had only come because their mothers would be ashamed if they didn't attend church at least once or twice a year -- They rotely stood/sat/knelt/mumbled stuff. They ate wafers. They left. It had a cold, empty feeling.

Today's Mass was different. There was joy. There was a guy in the choir who smiled every time the piano started to play. There were people there because they liked it; because they chose it. They came because they wanted to come.

Why do you attend what you attend?

Saturday, August 13, 2011

Electrifying moments in sporting history

I just got home from the park. You see, after retiring from the hallowed sport of kickball in the 5th grade, I returned to it today as a substitute for the ophtho department's league team.

The sun was bright. The grass was green. The pitches were underhand, medium speed, medium bouncy. The perfect storm.

After 7 thrilling innings, our team managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, narrowly losing with a score of 6 to 0.

Edge of the seats, folks. Edge of the seats.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

A serious and egregious error

Something is horribly wrong with this package of neon sour gummy worms.
Can you spot it?

The packaging's decent. Nothing is spelled wrong. There's no subtle subliminal message.

They're not stale. They taste all gummy and neon and such, exactly as advertised.

There's even the added benefit of fat-freedom, plus the fact that they were only $1. But if you've ever had neon sour gummy worms, think for just a second about what the absolute best flavor combo in the whole package is and then the problem becomes flagrantly obvious.

Somehow, biting the red halves and the blue halves off their respective yellow and orange halves in order to sticky them together and pretend there are red/blue ones just isn't the same. Deep sigh...I tried. So much for the total package.

Monday, August 8, 2011

Wandering around in the dark

This weekend, I had a chance to drive up to Minnesota to go caving with my friends, Jorge and Val. Apparently, they've been trying to get a spot on the wild/off-route tour of Mystery Cave for several years but it always books solid before they have a chance to sign up. This year, it took a state government shut-down and a complex website stalking operation to finally snag reservations for 3. Our personal thanks go out to Governor Tim Pawlenty and the hard economic times for making the weekend possible.

We geared up in knee pads, elbow guards, helmets, headlamps, lug-boots, and cave packs then followed a man in a blue and orange jumpsuit down a nice sidewalk in search of a cave. Using our impressive skills as master cavers, (i.e. following the clearly marked signs along the paved walkway), we eventually found the cave entrance and then spent 4 hours in the dark, cold underground.

I was impressed by virtually everything about the experience, but a few things especially stood out:

1. Moving through tight spaces. There were places along the passageway where we were flat on our bellies, heads turned sideways because the helmets wouldn't fit vertically, creeping along using fingernails and toe scoots. The human body is remarkably pliable! (Note: When possible, I tried to let Jorge go ahead of me. The wisdom in that was that he's bigger, so I figured that if he fit I would fit. The downside was that he ate a lot of cabbage the day before.)

2. Leadership. A good leader enables his/her followers to feel competent at the task at hand, even if they aren't fully skilled at it. Our guide, Greg, was exceptional at this. He knew every twist, turn, and pebble along the route and gave us plenty of clear advance-notice of what was coming up and how to deal with it. He eased us in via easier routes, getting us really comfortable first before gradually leading us into a claustrophobic's worst nightmare. He gave us candy.

3. Darkness. At one point, we made our way through a narrow channel sloping downward to the edge of a deep drop-off. Shining the headlamps down the chimney, the light couldn't reach its bottom. Greg had us gather there on the edge of the bottomless chasm and turn off all our lights. Total darkness. Sitting there without eyes, I could feel the rest of my senses wake up. My skin picked up the cave moisture and the breath of the caver beside me. I could smell a million years of earth. We could hear a river running 50 feet below us. I would swear that river hadn't existed at all while our lights were on.

4. Caving as a metaphor for life. I'm sure there's something profound to be learned here, but all my attempts to put it together come out awfully heavy-handed. Sometimes, life takes you through your darkest, deepest, worst nightmare where the ground is rocky and your hands are bleeding and the walls are closing in. You come out of it muddy, scraped up, blinking into the light, wearing grubby plastic bags on your feet. But what's the bigger moral to that story? Help me out.

Monday, August 1, 2011

29-ness

Tomorrow, I will stop being 29.

According to some fancy math calculations that I worked out on a piece of scratch paper, that means I'll be 30.

Thank you, Bonnie.

I've been trying to decide whether there are any deep thoughts I want to publicize on the verge of turning 30. To keep it from getting too schmaltzy, here are my sincerest hopes, dreams, insights, shortcomings, and goals in exactly 30 words:

Things I've learned

I'll be learning for the rest of my life.

Things I want

Not sure who You is yet

Things I want to improve at

Everything