Supporting each other

In the last post, I wrote a little bit about our falling in love.  It's frustrating, that so many of the fairy tales and stories that we read, hear, see on television, etc..., so many stories just stop and handwave "happily ever after."  Because I know that the story continues.  That happiness may continue, but it's not a constant.  Nothing is.  Just because you've found someone, does not mean that everything else will suddenly go right.

Finding Brian was the *start*of something right.  But that didn't mean things were perfect, or that all troubles had ended.  I was only in my first semester of engineering school, at one of the top schools in the country.  I'd like to move on to the second semester for next post... but I don't want to sugar-coat college life.  I struggled with a lot of things, things that I think are not unique to me.

I was living in South Bend when the movie Rudy came out.  Everybody loves a happy ending.  But it is an unfortunate fact of life, that everyone has to choose what is most important to them.  In the things that mattered the most to me, engineering and a career that lived my dream, graduating from college was a triumphant success.

In other things that mattered to me... choosing engineering, and those academic pursuits, had a price.

Giving Arts a Chance: Junior year

So we moved from Nebraska back  to Indiana.  The place that is home, but not mine.  My mother's family has lived in Indiana since at least 1920.   My father's side of the family has been on the Indiana/Ohio border for about 200 years.

Mom grew up visiting her grandmother on Sundays, and playing with her cousins regularly.  I was lucky to see my grandparents once a year, and my cousins less than that.

We moved to a small town in northwestern Indiana.  Starke County, just north of Pulaski County.

I don't recall registering for classes, so I am guessing my parents registered me.  I'm not sure why I didn't take band that year.  Did I consciously choose not to?  Did they simply forget to sign me up?  Or did it have activity fees that they balked at?  It might not have fit the schedule that I had.  Regardless, I didn't take band.

Giving Arts a Chance - Sophomore Year

Continuing my series of thinking about arts in my life.  My Sophomore year of High School, I was actually enrolled in band.  We had two bands: Intermediate and Advanced.  I was in the Intermediate Band.  This was the year I learned that the only other clarinet player in the school was a Senior.  I got to know her a little better that year, as the only other clarinet player.

Then again, she was out in front of everybody a lot that year.  She was selected as Mother McAuley for the senior's Mercy Day play, she got the lead in Godspell, the Fall Musical.  The school did that with an all-girl cast, it was cool.  And she was the lead for Cinderella, the spring play.  I was so in awe of her.  We exchanged pictures towards the end of the year, she wrote a note asking me to take care of Mrs. Jensen the next year.  I wish I could have done that.

Giving Arts a Chance - Freshman year

In my last post I wrote a little about the arts offerings at my first high school, and I thought I would elaborate on the classes I mentioned, the plays my friends were in.

Being the only student from my elementary school to go to that high school, I didn't walk into school with friends.  The day that we had class retreats, one of the Freshman activities was to make friendship bracelets, and then give them to someone in the class.  I guess the teachers figured out that nobody knew me well enough to give me one, so Mrs. Wells (my Academic Advisor, who was there that day) made up a bracelet and when we did presentations, she gave it to me.

Intro to Arts was required for all the Freshmen.  The school operated on a quarter/semester system, so the class was divided into four groups, and each quarter we rotated to the next class.

Memory

One of these days, I plan to write about new beginnings, starting all over again... about globalization, family, the village and the internet.  Every time our family moved, it was both a blessing and a curse.  It was an opportunity to start over again, to try something different, be a different "me" than I had been before.  It also meant that nobody knew where I was coming from, or why something might be meaningful to me.

My first high school was Mercy High School, in Omaha, Nebraska.  An all-girls private liberal arts Catholic high school run by the Sisters of Mercy.  I was there for two years, transferring to a public school just in time for my Junior year of high school.  But today I want to talk about Mercy.

Hobbies and family support 1: sports and classes

I read through Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers: The Story of Success" within a week of Levitt and Dubner's "Freakonomics."  Many of the ideas in the two books complemented each other, so that there are some concepts where I am not entirely certain from which book they came.  Since they were both library books, I don't have them on a shelf to check.

Both books talked about how social class can affect talents and hobbies.  One book spoke about a child who sang at their school.  The child had talent, the potential to turn it into a career and live a different life from what her family had known.  But the family didn't think of it that way.  Music wasn't seen as a viable career that could/should be nurtured and encouraged.  Instead, it was seen as a minor hobby, just something that the child did.


That hit home, for me.  It reminded me of a conversation with one of my aunts, about how her father, my grandfather, always encouraged education, but on practical things.  I don't think it's coincidental that of his 8 children, the 6 college graduates majored in subjects like accounting and mathematics.