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[15 Dec 2009|11:47am] |
You know how to play this game by now, right?
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Questions from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) tshuma:
1. What are you going to do with yourself now that you are nearly done with every single thing to do with undergraduate education? (I'm sure you've been asked this, but forgive me, I didn't read all of the answers to questions while I was in finals.) You are definitely forgiven! :) Going for my MPH is next on the academic agenda, but I just didn't have time this semester to properly apply to grad schools for Fall '10, so I'm going to apply for Fall '11. In the meantime I'm going to start looking for work, ideally in an educational or public health setting, and take some Spanish classes, since speaking Spanish is a requirement for most of the places I want to work and is looked upon favorably on MPH program applications.
2. How was the transition from junior college to university? It was pretty rough. It took a little while for me to transition from working 9 hours a day and then being able to come home and not think about work to going to class all day and then having to come home and do homework, but beyond that community college mostly a breeze. It wasn't that much different from highschool for me in terms of effort required, and it wasn't much of a disruption of the rest of my life: I could go about my domestic and social life as usual and fit my schoolwork in around it with relative ease. I knew Berkeley was going to be more difficult, but I wasn't fully prepared for how much my domestic and social life would need to change in order for me to be a successful student, and I didn't have a grasp of the time management skills I'd need to make that change. As a result, my first two semesters at Berkeley were harder than I've let on to anyone, and I didn't truly get the hang of it until last Summer.
3. Will you continue volunteering for the sex education organizations? Yes! I committed to being a SHEP Coordinator for a full academic year, so I'll still be working with that program next semester (though on a volunteer basis instead of for academic credit), working a weekly clinic shift and co-teaching a Topics in Human Sexuality class. And I will continue to volunteer for SFSI in some way or another as long as I am physically and temporally capable of doing so. In fact, I'm considering auditioning to be a SFSI trainer, now that I have the time to devote to it.
4. Why is the volunteering and organization you've been doing important to you? What motivates you to do it? I have a passion for and dedication to education of all sorts, and believe strongly in open access to information. Those two things are the common theme in almost all the work I do, volunteer or otherwise. With regard to sex ed, I've seen in my own experiences countless examples of how dangerous lack of information and the culture of shame and secrecy can be, and how empowering and beneficial open discussion and a healthy attitude toward sex can be, and I want to do everything I can to make sure there is less of the former in the world and more of the latter. It's also a lot of fun to talk about sex, and working with other sex educators is a good way to meet and spend time with awesome, interesting people who share at least some of my values.
5. Is there other volunteering you would be interested in taking on, assuming you had infinite time free to do so? A classmate from my public health leadership class has been working on starting an EMS organization on the Berkeley campus, and I really wish I had the time and resources to help him out with it, because it's something the campus needs badly. I also wish I had more time and energy to devote to the FSF since I haven't been able to do much besides staff con booths for them for awhile, and I'd love to work with the EFF in some way, too.
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[10 Dec 2009|10:47pm] |
Questions from tenacious_snail:
1. What sorts of sex education questions have made you laugh? Barring amusingly-constructed questions from non-native English speakers, sexual health questions don't usually make me laugh. There are questions that make me happy, or warm my heart, like when couples ask me questions together or when I talk to someone who's just beginning to explore their sexuality in earnest and they're full of open and enthusiastic curiosity. And I do giggle at the looks on the faces of college boys when I get them to do the Lubey Handshake demo and they learn firsthand what a difference lube makes. But I can't think of a question that's made me laugh. Oh! Well this sort of counts: I was talking about the g-spot at a recent workshop and one of the female participants piped up with, "You mean there's something inside my body named after a man?!" which drew laughter from all. We decided she could rename hers.
2. What do you like best about Berkeley? I love how Berkeley allows me to embrace the power of "and" in so many ways: it's convenient to both city and wilderness; I live in a quiet residential neighborhood but can easily walk or bus to one of several commercial districts; some of those commercial districts are filled with upscale chain stores, and some are filled with local artisans, and some have a mix of both; a vehicle isn't required to get around, but the fact that my household has one isn't a major burden; I can get my coffee from a shop where the owner knows not just my name but what I'm going to order depending on the time of day, or I can go to Starbucks for my occasional frappuccino craving; I can have an equally amazing meal for under $10 or over $100; there are years of history here as well as a lot of innovation. You get the picture.
3. What would it take to get you to say "Yes, I'd love to attend that party?" Generally the biggest challenge to me accepting a party invite is availability, which isn't really something party hosts (at least ones I'm not intimately involved with) have much control over. Parties held on the peninsula and points further south present an additional challenge, though, because if I don't have a non-public transit way to get there I may not be able to stay long enough to have a good time before I have to start the multi-transit agency trek back home before everything stops running, and if I'm depending on someone else for a ride, I may not feel like I can leave any time I want or need to. So it usually takes a confluence of people I'm very comfortable with, or being accompanied by someone I'm very comfortable with, to get me out to those faraway parties.
4. How did you get interested in cooking? Is it something you've always done? As I've written before, food was a big part of my life and central to all gatherings growing up. I've always loved food and been interested in cooking, and as a wee little Rhilet I was constantly under everyone's feet in the kitchen while they cooked, and always begging them to let me help. I have some pretty entertaining stories about my first attempts at making up my own recipes (my recipe for Peanut Butter Fish Cake--which, to my knowledge, has never actually been made--is in our family's 1986 Christmas cookbook) and cooking my first dishes. I started getting serious about cooking in middle school, when I decided to go vegetarian. Neither Mom nor my stepdad were willing to make many adjustments to their own cooking styles or eating habits for what they thought was a silly phase, so I bought The Enchanted Broccoli Forest and checked out Diet for A Small Planet from the library and started preparing most of my own meals. I discovered that I was good at it and that it was a great outlet for creative expression (as well as a great way to serve, impress, and take care of other people), and I found it incredibly empowering to be so in control of what I was eating. My commitment to vegetarianism fizzled out after I graduated highschool, but my love of cooking endured.
5. If you were planning to seduce someone after dinner, what would the dinner menu be? This is of course subject to the preferences and needs of my dining companion, but the menu might look something like this: mini mushroom-chevre tarts, roast quail with a pan sauce over polenta, and mocha pots-de-creme topped with cinnamon whipped cream. They're all foods I do well (well, the cinnamon whipped cream is a recent discovery of mine, but wouldn't be hard to pull off), and foods that I think are sexy to eat taste-wise, texture-wise, or logistics-wise. It's also not too much food, since being overly full isn't conducive to seduction.
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[07 Dec 2009|08:30pm] |
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Paul Simon - "Father and Daughter" |
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It's not often that you get to catch a glimpse of how your family sees you, and the rare opportunity to do so makes the occasional awkwardness of sharing social networking space with them worth it. Even if it makes you cry.
(*snif* I love you, too, Dad.)
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[07 Dec 2009|04:59pm] |
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I did it! I managed to complete my senior thesis, and I turned it in today. On time. And I'm actually pretty happy with it. Battle Thesis is ovah, and man, at times it really did feel like a battle. I'm now utterly exhausted but also sort of wound up and more than a little tired of being inside my apartment, since I've been here, working, awake, and sans human contact since Saturday morning.
All that's left between me and my diploma now is finishing and turning in my Metaphor final on the 15th and taking my PH 180 final on the 17th, and after writing a freaking 35 page paper they're both going to be a breeze.
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tired