Last week I had the brilliant idea to joke about celebrating Thanksgiving here, at my coworker’s apartment. I was imagining something simple, just us and the cats watching a historically accurate rendition of American history:
Your people will have stickshifts.
Instead, the idea of celebrating Thanksgiving after work next Thursday has caught on and now there are five of us. Have I mentioned I don’t cook? My family has spent some Thanksgivings in restaurants. Most of my Thanksgiving knowledge is from the Pepper Ann episode where all the shelves are empty and people are fighting over the last yam. I don’t even really know what a yam is. The Thanksgivings I remember spending at home involve my sister playing Turkey Time until everyone has it stuck in their head for weeks. (Fair warning about clicking that link.)
I’m worried we’ll end up eating Charlie Brown style:
This blockhead cooked all this.
I suppose this is the day to make lists of ingredients and start buying…yams? Any and all recipes are requested, as is advice on cooking times. How do I know when I’ve found the right turkey? Do I have to make stuffing? Is apple cake as culturally appropriate as apple pie? Help!
If you’re here from the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health blog, I’m grateful for your interest. Here are a couple posts to get you caught up:
The truth is, I’ve been lackadaisical lately. My last post was in October…and it’s past the middle of November already. I’m not as negligent as a certain medical student I know, nor am I as regular as an esteemed graduate student adviser. I’m somewhere in between. I’ve been collecting data, analyzing data, preparing instruments for submission to the institutional review board (IRB). The usual excuses.
Nonetheless, I’d like to write with more regularity and this little, unexpected spotlight makes me want to write more. What would you like to read about? I have a post in the works about Zipaquira, the local transportation system, and about the logistics of research. I’m happy to field questions or focus on a particular aspect of public health, living abroad, or evaluation research. Questions and suggestions are welcome in the comments!
My work has dance classes twice a week. After hours, we get together , six or so women with an instructor and dance for an hour and a half. Salsa, bachata, cha-cha-cha. We warm up doing aerobics moves that remind me of my mom’s classes at the Y, where I tend to fall off the plastic step thinger right in the middle of choreographed dance moves. Vine step to the right, now lift and back. The windows fog from all the sweating and moving in a little space.
Guess who drew the faces.
It makes me think of 80s clothes and Madonna headsets. We have complicated feet AND arm movements and lots of me jumping, taking wide steps, looking like a giraffe. I am (unintentionally?) the class clown. I am excited to learn, momentarily discouraged, eager to show the instructor that I am slightly less left-footed as the rest of Gringolandia. So far I am not having much luck, though I persist in the effort.
This week only three of us could be there, so I suggested we learn something complicated to make the other classmates regret not prioritizing our dance class. Our ever-obliging instructor taught us some fancy cha-cha-cha moves. Here is how we looked after an hour:
With talk of a burstingeducation bubble* and the ongoing protestsabouteducationin Chile, I’ve been thinking of the advice I wish I had received before applying to college, what I wish I had known going in. It’s an open secret that I miss teaching, that talking with teenagers about health for two years was a dream job. I wish I had had more time with them, especially to talk about college.
Dreamboat young Matt Damon explains.
You might not have to go to college.
I know, you’ve been told your wholelife that college is the most important thing ever. Take some time to think long and hard about what you want to do. Do you want to work with your hands, be an artist, computer programmer, entrepreneur? You can learn those things without paying $12,804- $32,184 a year.
If you don’t have money (you probably don’t), go for free.
Avoid debt asmuch as possible. Go for free. Or as close to free as possible. Go to a state school, get a scholarship, start saving money now. Ask your family if they’ve been saving for your education.
If you have money, go somewhere known.
College is about who you’re meeting – the professors and students who will help you get a job later. Don’t go somewhere completely unknown. You’ll spend your job interviews legitimizing your school and convincing people that it’s a real place.
If you have family abroad, go to school abroad.
It’s not only less expensive, but the language skills you’ll gain will help you get in the door. Then you can explain your amazing, high-quality, low-price experience. If you want to work internationally, or with international populations, going to school abroad is an option to look into.
Get a job.
Something related to what you want to do after graduation. Anything that will earn you some money, experience, something to put on your resume. Work every summer, whether at a camp or at your family’s business. Save the money you earn – pretend it’s an unpaid internship. Learn something useful: another language, how to talk to people who are upset, basic accounting, Office programs. Not having any work experience when you leave college is the best way to stay jobless for months, years. Why go into debt if you’re just going to sit on the couch after graduation?
Focus on skills.
The college degree is the new high school degree, and a Mastersis the new BA. Your fancy piece of paper doesn’t automatically get you a good job. You can learn about other people’s opinions by going to the library and attending free lectures. Learn how to do things, and people will hire you to do them. Few jobs involve bloviating or pontificating. If you want to do that, get a soapbox, start a band, get a blog.
You’re in college to learn things you can’t anywhere else. Make it a worthwhile.
———————–
*This morning I was explaining how expensive US education is, how we are all in debt. The person I was talking with said: “We usually have some extra soup left over at the end of the day. I’ll save some for you so you can bring it home.”
It felt like a big deal. Back then, I thought I’d be including a videowitheverypost. I thought I’d be writing in-depth, critical analysis, biting commentary, Important Things. Instead I’ve written about toilet paper and threadbare leggings.
It’s a little creepy having all this information, knowing so much about my blog’s visitors. But it’s nice to be acknowledged, right? I appreciate y’all sticking around and reading.
So, ever-patient reader, What would you change? What do you want to read about in the next month?
Note the threadbare leggings, flip flops and travel pouch. My mom helpfully told me that everyone could see my underwear just as I was going through security. Maybe that’s why I didn’t get stripscanned?
I sat next to a Colombian woman who offered to connect me with her son, who rents rooms to students; watched The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, and finished Season 3 of Six Feet Under. Going through customs and security was long but uneventful. I asked for a 90 day visa and got a 30 day one – most likely because my jumbled explanation that I was in Colombia as part of my studies, but was studying at Columbia and just completing a study here.
The taxistand outside El Dorado, the Bogotá airport, should be replicated everywhere. I pushed my trolley up to a window outside the airport, told them the address of my hostel, and got a printed paper to give to the cab. No negotiation, no confusion.
It finally hit me that I was someplace new, that I was moving to another country, that I was in Bogotá when we were driving away from the airport. That trip always does it for me, whether it’s driving in to Moscow from Sheremetyevo or Santo Domingo from Las Americas. Of course, my hostel had moved without updating their website, so there were a few moments of frenzied scavenging for the new location (3 blocks away). Overall, not a bad way to get into a city.
In honor of my birthday, and the official birthday of this blog, I offer you, dear reader, a soundtrack to my last couple years:
In 2005, I spent 6 months studying and interning in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. The bodega outside my house played one song, all night, every night: Daddy Yankee – Gasolina. I spent a lot of time on buses, the kind you stop with hand signals and shouting. To get on, you swing two fingers back and forth and the driver shouts “doce doce” to confirm that it goes to the part of town I lived in (Los Kilometros). You get off the bus by shouting “En la esquina, por favor” (Drop me off on that street, please) or “déjame donde pueda” (Let me off wherever you can). Each seat would fit three people, with a folding seat extended in the middle, used during peak hours. I loved watching the cobrador, the fare collector, jump on and off the bus as it was moving.
At 6 am on Sunday mornings, I went directly from Saturday revelries to La Pulga to buy work clothes. Professional clothes, from expensive US labels, sold for $5 or so. I recorded every cent I spent in green pen, and added up my weekly spending by hand. I’d come home with my loot on Sundays and nap all afternoon under the unopened bed net. (I wasn’t intentionally being a delinquent; I just never saw any mosquitoes.)
Senior year in college, I frequently had a playlist on in my room and Rainer Maria – Artificial Light was the first track. I was an RA and lived in the back room of an apartment that was demolished a couple years later to make way for a new residence hall. That was the year I traveled to Key West for 11 days, filled up a Moleskine, and biked on the boardwalk at night with my eyes closed.
After graduation, from February – December 2007, I lived in a beautiful apartment in Santiago, Chile. It was $300 a month. When it rained, I could see the mountains from my window. I bought a bed the first day, and a stove, couch and fridge on the second day. Otherwise my apartment was empty. I had two forks, two spoons, two knives. Meals were frequently served on the floor. In the mornings, I would brush my teeth on my tiny 16th floor balcony and look out into the windows of my neighbors. I taught English to medical students and government students at the Universidad de Chile, executives at SC Johnson, and gave private lessons.
When I wasn’t teaching, I was at my practicum at CEMERA – Universidad de Chile’s Adolescent Reproductive Medicine and Integrated Development Center. I collaborated with a health psychology student and social work student to create and provide sexual health workshops to high school students. We’re still in touch, all work in the field of sexual health and share resources. When it was dark, in the early hours before work, I got ready to the Mountain Goats – This Year.
The summer of 2009 was spent in San Francisco at the National Sexuality Resource Center. During lunch at Delfina, a friend introduced me to J Dilla – Workinonit. She was living with the person she was in love with, and it was early on in the effervescent early stage of the relationship and they knew every move, every thought the other had. But they never touched, except through words. She would step out of the shower and put lotion on her skin, and through the closed bathroom door, she’d hear “you forgot a spot on your back.” True love, workinonit.
