athens county young life

As I've mentioned before, I am involved in an organization called YoungLife; it is an outreach ministry to high school students. I lead YoungLife about twenty minutes away from campus at Nelsonville York High School. Sometimes it's hard to explain to others exactly what we do, but I saw this video and it literally explained everything so well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNAa01QO0DM

We lead bible studies, game nights and hangouts, spend time in the community, and get involved with the kids as much as we can. I encourage everyone to get involved in Athens County as much as they can. This is an amazing community.

Here's a couple places you could get involved : athensohio.com

utilize your observation skills and start an awesome blog.

Joe Finney and Brian Kassouf, OU Junior and Senior respectively started a blog called Scooter365. They noticed a checkered scooter out by South Green and decided to take a picture of it every day for an entire year. I got an interview with em last week, shown on Day 36. I may have also been the talent for Day 23.

Check out the interview:

Also, if you're ever feeling bored, I've uploaded some links to some pretty cool blogs/sites on my Inspiration section.

people observation #21: I'm a birthday cynic, and your birthday doesn't matter.

Today is September 21, and it's also my 21st people observation.

My big 21st birthday is coming up in November... and it doesn't matter.

I've always been a cynic when it comes to birthdays, getting colder to the idea of them the older I get.

Look, there are 365 days in a year, a number far less than the amount of people in this world. Chances are a birthday is going to fall on the same date as someone else's birthday. Or perhaps, your birthday may fall on the same day as an event, or a moment in history. Why in the world do people think that this is significant?.. at all? My favorite is when a date is brought up at a meeting or some other date-bringing-up occasion, and someone from the back of the room finds it necessary to yell, "that's my cousin's daughter's boyfriend's sister's birthday!" wtf.

People expect special treatment on their birthdays. Like, because it's my birthday the world needs to completely cater to me? No! Because it's my birthday, I shouldn't have to work. I shouldn't have to wake up and be on time to class. I shouldn't have to help out these people who are currently depending on me.

I have a friend Joe who doesn't like the idea of one designated day to tell someone we care about them. Why don't we tell people we care about them all the time? I make a point to tell him often that I'm glad he's alive. Not just on his birthday, but the other 364.25 days in the year. Or things like "belated" birthdays. Just tell the person you care about them. I shouldn't have to apologize for forgetting to post on your Facebook wall on your birthday. How about I post on your wall and keep in touch with you all other days out of the year? Better yet, let's have a conversation in person.

Jimmy Johns has always done such a great job at providing my eyes with activity as I enjoy my #6Vegetarian. Signs cover the walls. My favorite is "free smells."

But the other day I saw a sign that gave a list of 16 life lessons. Number six reads, "Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance." Number 14 reads, "Your friends love you anyway." And number eleven says, "There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is age 11."

tweeting twitter tweeters twit a tweet.

There's a scene in one of my hardly-embarassingly favorite movies Mean Girls where protagonist Kady asks Regina, the clique's bitchy-yet-forwhateverreason-loveable ring leader if she would be receiving a candy cane for the school's "candy gram" fundraiser. Regina replies to Kady that she doesn't send candy canes; she just gets them.

Folks, this is my outlook on Twitter.

Call me a snob, but I use Twitter in the way it was intended. You earn the right to be followed on Twitter; I don't want to be clogging up my feed with updates on your opinions of the weather every five minutes. I don't want to have to read your conversation with @personIdon'tKnow that adds nothing to my well-being. You make me laugh, you update me on the status of a Jackets game- I'll follow you.

people observation #20: customer service, please serve us.

I am currently sitting in the health center getting a check-up, and experiencing the inevitable frustration with the system that is the campus clinic.

Clinic: we all know the connotation associated with this word. In the same way the word moist just seethes off the tongue if you're a girl, the word clinic really makes us cringe. We could go for a more appropriately-connotated word, like "health center" to be more politically correct or we could say "infirmary" if this were Hogwarts, but regardless of what you call it, when you're at college, going to see a doctor is a nightmare to say the least. It's on my top-five places I'd least want to be in Athens (probably somewhere between the back of an OUPD squad car and the bottom of the Hocking.)

It's as if clinics were designed for inefficiency. That's another blogpost, though, for another day. I do, however, give OU props for the changes they seem to be making to their health services. (Unless it's like the Pennsylvania turnpike, of course, and it's never actually finished with construction).

I sit here and listen to the nurses and technicians discussing something to be of great importance (gossip), and from below me the sounds of hammering vaguely make out the rhythm to Katy Perry's Firework as it plays on radio 105.5. There's some Japanese kids engaging in what I think is bickering somewhere close outside.

Because the first floor is getting new carpet or something, the clinic has been "temporarily" squished onto the second floor. Sidenote: The waiting room is divided with signs separating the sick people from the healthy. Like a smoking section in a restaurant, the flu-infected runny-nosed Sophomore won't affect you because you're sitting on the far east "healthy" corner of the room. Viruses can read too, you know.

So I have just passed through level one of the appointment.

Are you a Smoker? No.

Are you allergic to anything? No.

How tall are you? 5'5'' if I'm not slouching.

Your blood pressure reading is outstanding. I'm a bad ass.

Now I am sitting in the 2nd waiting period, as if the first awkward calling of the names isn't painful enough. Alright, Erin, Phase One complete. Why am I nervous? I feel like I'm sitting outside an audition. Boy, I sure hope I made the cut!

Because they're making renovations to the main entrance, people enter through whatever sidedoors and cracks in the walls they can find. I find myself sitting on an arbitrarily-placed bench in the hallway where I'm stuck between a green-faced girl in the fetal position on my left and a desk of nurses doing paperwork on my right. After memorizing the eye chart placed on the wall in front of me, and being informed that I can do my part in preventing the flu from the hand-washing PSA next to it, my mind starts to wander, and the eavesdropping begins.

Nurses' conversation seems to be dominated by the topic of several patients' confusion as they walk in side doors and attempt to find the waiting room with few, if any signs. Being in the position of these disoriented patients earlier that hour, I found myself empathetic to their situations. A student would walk up, give some rendition of the "is this where I check in?" and the nurses would explain to them that it was further down the hall. After each student would leave, the nurses would gripe about how irritated they were at the students for not knowing where to go. I began to lose patience, pardon my pun.

I started thinking about how many times this happens to us as people. We are in a different position than others, and forget that their experiences do not mirror ours. So when a student walks in to the clinic, already in a state of feeling thrilled to be there, they aren't necessarily going to know the remodeling situation let alone where they are suppose to go, even if there's an 8.5x11 Scotch-taped up to the door.

I see a student, stomach in hands, walk up to the desk and ask a nurse with stethoscope-wearing cats on her scrubs where she can find the check-in desk. Folks, don't be fooled by the cuddly sea-foam green felines on her attire. This lady snapped back with total sarcasm and cruelty to someone who was clearly a freshman (lanyard) and clearly ill, "you're in the wrong place!" She my as well had laughed in the patient's colorlessly clammy face and called them an a hole.

What happened here was the nurse failed to recognize that although several other patients had come in and asked similar questions, this particular bewildered student did not know those other kids. The nurses could have easily fixed this problem and put a sign up that said "check-in" with an arrow on it, but instead they proceeded to get ruder and ruder with every passerby. Instead, they chose to question the college kids' intelligence.

The thing is that this happens all the time. Everywhere. When you call the gym and ask if their hours will be cut short for the national holiday coming up, you don't know the other people calling in to ask similar forms of that question. When you walk up to the host's station at Red Lobster to ask how long their Saturday night wait is, you don't know that the seventeen-year old hostess had just answered that same question for a middle-aged man holding a screaming toddler just two minutes prior. When you ask the TWA officer at DFW whether or not it's alright to bring your ak-47 on board, who were you to know that there was just a recent ban on assault rifles on airlines?

My point is, when in the shoes of the gym representative (probably sneakers) or the hostess (probably dress shoes) or the nurse (crocs?), every person that comes to ask a question does not have the knowledge that you do, hence, the whole purpose of asking questions: in hopes for an answer. In a customer service position, one is to understand that they are providing exactly this, service to their customers.

I don't care if you are seventeen or seventy. I don't care if it's just a part time job you picked up for a couple extra bones. I don't care if you're stuck working this job for the rest of your life and you're miserable.

The ability to understand things from the perspective of other people is crucial to literally everything. What I learned today in the clinic is that when people keep coming up asking some form of the same question, realize the only thing that can be done is flash that million-dollar customer-service smile and answer their questions. I also learned that washing your hands is important. Do that too.

Eventually, I made it passed the check point and into phase two of my appointment. I sat on the cold crinkly paper rolled out over the table. The doctor had me take deep breaths as she listened to my heart and lungs.

"Are you allergic to anything?" She asked.

"No," I replied, shaking my head in disappointment. Stupid doctor. Doesn't she know I already answered that to somebody else?

should old acquaintance be forgot, and never thought upon

WUDDDUP READERS! We're back! eleemccarthy decided to take the month of August off. Nobody really likes August anyways. (those of you saying, 'my birthday is in august' can shove it.) Why don't I like it you ask? Well, it is a dirty combination of boredom mixed with lotsofthingstodo,butnotenoughenergytodoit. So apologies that the world has been complete chaos. Let's brush off these cobwebs, grab some coffee, and have a chat.

So in the last week I've been working hard on my new house- you know, christening the place, establishing pet peaves with the 'mates, telling the boys sleeping on my couch to get the eff out. I deep cleaned the entire downstairs and accomplished my goal that everything I sniffed for the next three days would smell like bleach. With the priority of a clean floor, comes the temporary ceasing of all things blog. (Let's be real though, it's hard to blog when the best of Will Ferrel is on your roommate's Wii Netflix account.)

At first, I thought I could dedicate this first blogpost of the year to the incoming freshmen, and how much I enjoy watching them. Their love of lanyard-swinging, their love of walking in massive groups, the look on all 1200 of their faces- a unique concoction when excitement meets fear meets optimism one can only find in a freshman. I found that trite, however, and freshmen deserve a breathe of air. They might be attempting to establish bearings in a new world, and thus amusing to watch, but they are adults, and apparently have enough brains to get into college. I thought I'd cut them some slack.

Then, I thought I could dedicate this first blogpost of the year to my three new roommates and how freaking pumped I am to be living with them. They all have different personalities, but appreciate my sarcasm, organic recipes, and loud spontaneous noises. But then I found that somewhat unnecessary. They aren't that cute.

I thought I could blog about my brother Sean, today being his birthday, and he being totally awesome. He is twenty four today, and I am probably more freaked out about that than him. He's always been my hero, ever since I was little and any thunderstorm was an excuse to get to hang out with him. I'm not very sensitive for a twenty year old girl, but I do have a soft spot for my big bro. Over the summer, I got to hang out with Sean a lot, and I owe him credit to my love for sports, music, comedy, and rational thinking. Come to think of it, I also blame him for the fact that no member of the male population has yet to measure up to the significantly high bar which my brother has set for me to expect from a guy.

Perhaps I could make this blog a recap of my summer. The topic ranging from the wonderful kids I was blessed to spend my 9 to 5 with to some sort of position in the political spaghetti I had time to slurp up every morning. I took a week to hike across Maryland on the Appalachian Trail, and got to visit my best friend Lucas Gilfillan a few times in Cincy.

There's the possibility this blog could be dedicated to the wonderful people at YoungLife, and the high school students at Nelsonville York, where I will be spending countless hours hanging out with some really cool kids.

I suppose this post just makes for a medium by which I can share my excitement for a new year. Being in Athens is great. Being in class is great. Being a Junior.. somewhat great, with a little bit of sad I'm halfway done with undergrad.

It might not be January, but it is a New Year, and I'd like to make a toast as we ring it in at Ohio University. First, let this play in the background for dramatic effect: thanks Mariah.. With quickly filling-up schedules and even-more quickly-emptying pockets, let us make it another good one, folks! May 2011-2012 be as amazing as the last, and thank you to all who have made this true. This one's for you! Cheers!

people observation #19: kids these daze.

I work too much. But with the way I eat spicy salmon rolls and the way my car eats gas, not having a job has always been out of the question. So I am currently spending my summer as a daily babysitter for a family in Lewis Center who I absolutely luuuuurve. I'm in my fourth year, and watching the kids play reminds me a lot of when I was a kid.

From age three to age seven I had a super cool babysitter named Sarah Pinkerton. (She drove a white Honda and sang Backstreet Boys with me and brought over her Care Bears and played the guitar and went to Ohio State). Sarah would let us play outside all day with the 324 other kids that lived in our neighborhood. I was always the youngest- always trailing behind with my training wheels and streamered-up handlebars as the other kids rode ahead on their big bikes with breaks and gears and pedal-backwards abilities.

For some reason in the middle of suburban golf community, behind my neighbors' yard and through a grove of trees, there used to be an old trailer (double-wide actually). It was a faded gray color, had once been white, and the yard was dirt with random dying foliage scattered here and there. What I remember most clearly was the massive pile of godknowswhat that my friends and I dubbed Trash Mountain. (cue epic music). One day out of mild curiosity, but mostly boredom, we decided to climb trash mountain. Forget its likely maggot infestation or the imminent tetanus we were signing ourselves up for, Trash Mountain had sat in our backyard for too long without being pioneered.

We climbed for a good time (which was really probably only like five minutes, but in kid time..the entire day) and then one of my friends got this brilliant idea to throw rocks at the house. I, always being the voice of reason, opted out of this experience and sat on top of Trash Mountain arms crossed while my three neighbor friends one by one picked up stones and threw them at the gray-white siding of the trailer, as if it wasn't already one thunderstorm away from completely falling off altogether.

Naturally, the owner of the house came out all like WTF and chased us out of her yard. And naturally, we ran like hell.

I have a vivid memory of her red and curly, Annie-esque hair style.

I also have a vivid memory of her holding a shot gun.

Who knows if she actually had a shot gun. Perhaps it was a metaphorical one my little kindergarten mind invented to hyperbolize the situation, but I'm pretty sure it was a real-life, something-gage, doom capability-having shot gun.

We ran as fast as we could to Matt's who lived farthest away (aka three houses down). Trying to catch our breath, we made the unanimous decision that we had just barely escaped death that day.

And just like that, four minutes later you could find us eating popsicles on the curb outside the cul-de-sac.

The thing is my days were filled with crap like this. My brother and I spent many hours riding down the stairs head first in sleeping bags and jumping off of our loft and onto the couch below. I cannot physically imagine what it would have been like to grow up without a sibling or neighbors, and if you fit into that category of readership I'd like to apologize on behalf of the amazing childhood like mine you missed out on.

Back to 2011, my parents have just (nearly) finished remodeling their kitchen. They knocked down the irrationally low 1980-style ceilings and redid the whole mofo with pretty new cabinetry and counters. Of course along with this new kitchen came enough boxes to recreate a Hooverville (too soon?). My parents, swimming in cardboard, asked the neighbor kids (roughly seven-years-old, but my age-guessing has been pretty off lately) across the street if they wanted to have the boxes to idunnobuildafortinorsomething?. They declined.

w..wai...wait...w...what?

THEY DECLINED?

I found myself heartbroken. Not just for the hours of pure childhood joy they were completely and voluntarily missing out on, but for all things children in America, 2011. I found my head spinning through memories of massive cardboard forts and tunnels and haunted houses and playhouses and Barbie houses and best friends and slides and sleds and furniture and suits of armor and helmets and swords and shields and crowns and treasure maps and pirate ships and planks to be walked and mazes to be built.

And just then I found myself shaking my head in dissappointment and repeating my grandfather with three words I once swore I'd never say. "Kids these days."

Now I'm no parenting expert, but I do believe very strongly in the power of play- kids need those hours of being well, a kid. Getting into trouble, getting bruises, that kind of stuff is important to childhood- it teaches kids social skills (which seem to be lacking lately), keeps them active, and also important, it helps them with problem solving, so they'll know how to deal when they come across real problems later in life.

Since age 16, I've worked part-time at the Child Center at Lifetime Fitness. The Child Center is built on the fundamentals of play; it gives kids free reign of the entire facilities: sweet gymnasium, tons of balls, Mac Pro lab, outside turf area, giant indoor jungle gym, etc.

A kid's entire life is completely scheduled. But Lifetime gives kids the opportunity to come in and work with other kids and organize their own games and make up their own rules. It's amazing the things they'll come up with when given the opportunity to actually, get this, use their imaginations. And I love seeing the kind of craziness they come up with.

So some kids these days are complete social idiots. You try and hold a conversation with them and they just melt into a pile of goo on the floor. You try and offer them your breathtaking collection of cardboard boxes, just oozing with potential playtime, and they'd prefer to spend their days inside pushing buttons on one of those gaming machines.

I do seem to have found an outlier in the kids that I babysit. They spend the entirety of days outside in the yard with the neighborhood kids, and they come up with the most interesting of games. The other day the basement was filled with a solid ten neighborhood kids playing a game called "teenagers." I don't know exactly what the game entailed, but I do know that it involved Bruno Mars and lockers and a controlling mom who grounded you for ''stepping out of line.'' If all kids were like these, I'd say the whole children being the future thing was looking optimistic. Unfortunately, unless we get kids playing I don't find that to be the case.

Of course, I guess I'm not completely done cookin yet, so it's no telling how I've turned out. Maybe all the playing I did when I was little has made me crazy. Maybe it's made me a product of a perfectly executed childhood. But I'm not sick, and I'm not stealing from or killing anyone, and I'm not addicted to anything (coffee perhaps). I'd say so far so good.

brother gets mad at me for talking during commercials.

My father is in the television advertising business. This means I have grown up understanding things like Nielsen ratings and target audiences. I saw Michael's role with Hanes to be just as relevant as his place on the Bulls. It means I've gotten to reap benefits of free tickets and promotional stuffed animal Pillsbury doughboys and bobble head Lucky the Leprechauns. It even means I've gotten to be in a handful of local commercials myself. Unfortunately though, because of this, I can no longer enjoy television.

Since age 4, watching TV with my family means analyzing the balls off of every piece of sponsorship, product placement, and 30-second-spot on this Green™ earth. Since preschool, I could vomit out slogans and jingles on cue, and car trips involved games like making up cheesy jingles for local billboards we'd pass on the interstate. Someone tell me this is all normal.

Every morning I'd decide if I wanted Reese's for breakfast or one of Champions and my parents would drink their coffee that was good til the last drop. I remember At school, conversations were often initiated with something about "did you see the commercial where...?" and they'd go nowhere because (unless it was the morning after the Super Bowl) nobody else cared to the least about what was advertised. While some kids were busy answering questions that didn't matter like when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, I was pondering over how many licks it took to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop and What I would do for a Klondike Bar. Hell, I could keep going and going and going...

In my family of four, I am in the 3rd place spot for best remote user (though subject to change as my mother, 4th place, slowly but surely begins to understand the DVR), and I'm in first place for most talkative during a program. This latter ranking was not my fault, but my brother's.

In addition to the above two bullshit rankings, my brother has given me the superlative of "worst question answerer in the world."

I might have to plead guilty on that one. Look, I'm not the kind of person to beat around the bush in conversation. So to save time, I'll sometimes imply the true question one was intending to ask me and answer that, leaving the question-asker 1. confused and 2. not even receiving the information that they initially wanted. Here's an example: Last weekend, my parents went camping (sidenote: when you're going in an RV, and you have running water and electricity and mirrors and beds and a refrigerator, it really isn't camping anymore.) My brother was going to meet them at the campground later that night and texted me while I was at work when I'd be coming home. What I assumed is that he was wondering if I was also interested in meeting our parents at the campsite, so I replied that I was not going camping. In reality he just wanted to know when I was getting home.

My brother has an entire catalogue of examples similar to this one, and he seems to believe I should be getting 25 to life for them too.

So I've got this going against me. Tack on the fact that I'm too talkative to watch TV, I'm nearly blind and deaf and can't read any of the guide information, and that my remote control skills are wishy-washy if existent at all, and you've got yourself one hell of a person to watch TV with.

So after a long day at the office (aka my summer nannying job), I come home exhausted and hungry, and I begin to ask my brother a question. Actually, the question I was attempting to ask was inquiring what it was that he was watching. Apparently though, he was on his third attempt at rewinding a commercial to show my mom, and as if that's not weird in itself -the whole Mom!Get dooooowwn here!you've gotta see this commercial!thing- the next five minutes get even more irrational, from both parties. I get yelled at for talking while he's watching something, and out come the torches and pitchforks.

Tell me I'm not in the wrong for getting upset after a long day of work and wanting to ask my brother a question only to be punched in the stomach for it. Of course, I may have had a few too many words for him.

The funny thing is that arguing in my family is rare, and when it does happen it becomes a big joke (just like everything else). So after our thirty seconds of shouting at each other we realized how ridiculous we were being and just started laughing and making fun of ourselves.

I guess either I need to work on my question-answering skills and just learn to answer a question as it's asked, or I need to work on my future-telling skills because most of the time I'm wrong with my attempts at being helpful. I guess I just have a gift at talking and answering questions at the most inconvenient times. Maybe I'm born with it, maybe it's Maybelline.

*meanness of brother subject to overdramatization.