Central

Sometimes, I get nostalgic. Ok, I’m always nostalgic. I’m just like that.

Some random email reminded me of high school today. Most of my friends know that I really, truly loved my high school, Central High School of Philadelphia. One of the things I vowed when I graduated was that I’d one day give back to the school in some way.

The first four lines of the school song goes as follows:

Let others sing of college days,
Their Alma Mater true,
But when we raise our voices,
‘Tis only High, for you.

Sure, it’s cheesy, but it’s true. All CHS alums remember the song, and most feel it is true.

What made Central High so great? There are a lot of things.

• It’s a college prep magnet school, so everyone specifically applied to be accepted into the school and is motivated to achieve.

• It’s big. Each graduating class is about 500-600 people. So it’s easy to find someone to be friends with.

• It’s diverse. “Central students reside in every area of Philadelphia and represent the widest variety of racial, ethnic, geographic and economic groups. The student body is 33% African-American, 21% Asian, 5% Latino, and 41% Caucasian, making Central one of the most diverse schools in the nation. They afford each other multi-cultural opportunities in a rare atmosphere of cooperation and interaction.” — Wikipedia entry. That sounds about what I remember.

• “Central High School holds the distinction of being the only high school in the United States that has the authority, granted by an Act of Assembly in 1849, to confer academic degrees upon its graduates. This practice is still in effect, and graduates who meet the requirements are granted the Bachelor of Arts degree.” — Wikipedia entry. Yup, I have a Bachelor of Arts degree from high school.

• It has a dedicated, motivated staff. “99% of Central’s 130+ teachers hold a Master’s degree or higher.” — Wikipedia entry. About half of my teachers who taught my AP classes (and some not) had Doctorates in their fields. And it showed in their passion for their subjects.

When I hear about other people’s high schools, I see a huge difference in the culture of CHS. There was a desire to achieve, there was confidence that nothing was insurmountable, there was political freedom to cultivate and exercise our budding beliefs and skills. There were tons of clubs and teams to join, for everything from the math to the wrestling , from debate to francophilia, from Pro-Life to Pro-Choice (they set up moderated debates for the two clubs), from SALSA (Spanish and Latino Students Association) to KSA (Korean Students Association). We spent money renovating the gym, but we also spent money renovating the library — apparently, “[Barnwell Library] is now one of the most advanced public school libraries in the United States.”

We give academic credit to be in the orchestra. You could replace your physical education class by writing research papers or by volunteering to tutor a peer — but you couldn’t write a paper to get out of health class (at least, I never did, but now that I think on it, maybe you could? Someone correct me). And they taught sex ed and allowed the distribution of condoms.

And there is a enforced commitment to community service. “It is one of the few public high schools that has a yearly community service requirement that needs to be fulfilled before graduation. 30 hours of community service need to be completed and verified by academic personnel before the end of each school year.” Yup, I remember doing community service, but I think it only kicked in in our junior or senior year. Again, my memory is a little spotty. There was a pretty big range of things that counted as community service, and I think I might have done tutoring and some tree-planting related thing for my requirement.

I think the biggest, lasting impact was diversity. I think about my college, and I think about my current work situation, and frankly, I work with a bunch of white people and Asians and that’s it. In high school, everyone had friends of every race. You didn’t have a lot of time to spend mulling over stereotypes, because in every class, you’d be surrounded by people of different races, and being in contact with so many individuals, you didn’t have time to be juggling stereotypes along with actually getting to know people.

There was an emphasis on discussions and asking questions. There was an emphasis on respect for teachers and learning. My history teacher used to joke that we were little trees in the “Grove of Academia”. He also joked that we were all brainwashed with “liberal orthodoxy” and that’s probably true too. 🙂

There were a couple of randomly competitive kids, but it was never, ever cut-throat. Being a nerd was not a problem. I was a big nerd, but no one teased me. I never felt like I wasn’t “popular” or that popularity was an issue, period. Sure, some people may have, but there were enough people who didn’t care that it didn’t matter. There was no dominant hegemony of bullies or athletes. Almost everyone took the subway or the bus, because hardly anyone lived around there. Some kids probably had cars, but most kids didn’t. I never had to worry about someone beating me up for earrings, at least not within Central.

Damn, I loved my school. I miss the sense of community, of support, of limitless potential for growth (that’s just me feeling older though), of never forgetting that we were there through hardwork AND fortunate circumstance, which not everyone was lucky to have. I miss the sense of liberalism and equality that was pervasive in those halls that I have never experienced since.

Subconscious verbal habits

I call blankets “blankies”. This isn’t because I, as a child, called them blankies. I had, in fact, never called them that until sometime in college. My sister and I, while living in the same apartment, one day were commenting on friends who use that term without thinking as a result of a lifetime of usage, and were meanly mocking them. We kept using the term and now I use it by default, without a second thought.

I must sound like an idiot when I say that. 😀 Oh well.

My entire family used to refer to me as “baby” in Korean (sounds like “eh-gi” — hard “g”) for years and years and none of us noticed it. They never addressed me as that, just referred to me in the third person as “baby”. We noticed one day when I was in high school because my pastor’s family called their youngest — my friend, who is my age — the same thing. We thought it was so funny until we caught ourselves doing it. I was so appalled! 🙂

My coworker always says “moo-moo” when she talks about cows. In every way, she is an intelligent, articulate adult, who gets respect from every team, so it’s pretty funny to hear her say “moo-moo”. Hee.

What, if any, subconscious verbal habits do you or people you know have? Do you say “umm” a lot? “Like”? Does your mom still call you “woogie bunny” in public without realizing it?

Tired

Wow, I am so exhausted. Saturday night, we cooked for about 2 hours, doing prep for Sunday dinner. Seppo cooked the créme anglaise and chocolate mousse for my dish (ÃŽle Flottante), while I worked on the meringue. Wait, is that all I did for two hours? Hmm. Oh wait, I also made the chive oil for Colin and Jess’s dish, and Seppo made the mint oil for my dish.

On Sunday, I made the chocolate wafers for the dessert, which was a relatively quick affair, and did some last minute shopping for missing ingredients. All I needed to do after that was make the cheese puffs (which is purposely a last-minute deal, as they should be served straight out of the oven) and assemble my dessert.

It doesn’t sound like a lot of work, but I was exhauted then and I am exhausted now. The details of the party are at the foodblog. It was a great time with great friends. I love that we have more pictures this time around! 🙂

I slept like a log last night.

Checkmate

Wow, it’s been a busy day. We took our friend to breakfast at Merritt Bakery, then I drove her to the Oakland Airport, while Seppo returned home to walk the dog. When I got back, we worked on weeding the front yard, then went off to our bank to do crazy joint banking stuff. We now have a joint checking and savings account, and individual checking accounts with cosigning rights, in addition to our personal credit cards and one joint credit card. It sounds complicated, but it will actually streamline our billpaying every month.

In short, we’ll direct deposit into our joint account, and get personal spending money moved into our checking every month. All bills get paid from the joint accounts, all “family” purchases are put on the joint credit card. It’ll be easy to see our monthly input and output. All personal purchases will be made on the personal checking accounts and credit cards, with each of us managing our respective discretionary income as we choose to see fit. I foresee this being very convenient for gift purchasing and random splurges. 🙂

After this complex bit of hanky-banky [sorry], we went off to the Apple store so that I could return my weak-assed iPod nano-specific Belkin FM transmitter — whew, that’s a lot of descriptors — and get a speaker-output-to-tapedeck adaptor. We’re rolling old skool style, baby.

To further advance our ridiculously productive morning, we dropped by the Cingular store to upgrade our sims, as instructed to us by the anonymous voice on our voicemail. I think we should all start following instructions left to us by anonymous voices on our voicemail. Yes. *plods along all zombie-like on your ass*

Now, I’m compiling a list of ingredients to purchase for The Revenge of the French Laundry Potluck that we are having tomorrow. If you haven’t been invited, don’t be mad but read our disclaimer at the foodblog instead. 🙂

Stress test

Your Stress Level is: 32%

You are slightly prone to stress, but generally you keep it under control. You know how to relax and take things as they come, even when your worlds seems to be falling apart. Occasionally, you do let yourself get stressed out, but you snap out of it pretty quickly.

Blogger in Beta

This makes my little heart go pitter-patter.

5 minutes later.

Actually, I take that back. I created a test blog [sidenote: that “incite a ____” theme has been so useful for me!] to check out their new features, and it looks like the entire blog has to be private or public, not on a per-entry basis.

Boo. Boo-urns.

I am hoping they move toward protected entries. Almost everyone I know has a gmail account, so it would be painless to allow them to see my protected entries, if and when that feature drops.

Visitored!

My friend has been in town for a business trip and it’s been fantastic! It’s so much fun and really nice to have her in town. I feel bad because I always tell her to move back. I’m mostly joking because I think when people make major life decisions, it should be on their own impetus and not because other people have told them they should, but it’s hard not to get too hopeful! 🙂

It’s been busy, busy, busy, but definitely in a good way. We had a surprise early birthday party for her, which was really fun. We also had some delicious food, which doesn’t hurt. 🙂 I had my first soju shot yesterday. It was really tasty, so I wonder why people drink it as a shot.

Tonight, we eat dinner, go to the Y, then I bake some cookies.

Jeanorama

Sick and tired of jeans that

• sag in the rear
• are too long
• are faded beyond belief
• are too low in the front
• have broken zippers
• are just plain ugly

I went on a quick shopping spree during lunch to buy some much needed pantage. Thank goodness. I found a bunch of things the exact right size (difficult with proportionally short legs with thighs on the big side relative to my butt), so I got three pairs of jeans and a couple of shirts on sale, as well as a replacement hoodie for my broke-down-five-shades-of-not-black-anymore one.

My problem finding jeans leads me to think about the problems that most women I know have finding their size. My numeric size is quite common, so I don’t have a problem with that, but usually, the pants are too long. Even the shortest sizes are a teeny bit long. Other women tell me that their thighs are too big, their butts are too big/small, the waist is too high/low, etc.

I feel like in the last 10 years, women have been offered more choices than ever before for jeans in particular, so I’ve been really grateful, but there’s still a long way to go. In high school and college, I was always stealing my brother’s jeans because I was so sick of wearing girls’ jeans, which all had high waists and didn’t sit at my hips. And men’s jeans have a waist AND inseam length. I wish women’s clothes all had the same deal.

Last week, in my dentist’s office, the dental assistant brought me a random magazine while I was waiting in the chair. It was Ladies’ Home Journal or something. There was a section on how high waisted jeans slimmed down your errant tummy. I was horrified because I had thought that high waisted jeans were something we had evolved beyond and would never see again. High waisted jeans always just made the belly area look bizarre, no matter who you were.

Fashion is weird.

RIP iPod

On June 27, 2004 I received a beautiful little iPod from Seppo. It had a sweet, personal engraving. It was light and elegant. It was the most expensive piece of personal electronics I had ever owned to that date. It made it easier for me to enjoy my music. It had plenty of splace to carry around all the music I had and more. Its UI was simple and classic.

Yesterday, it died. I don’t know why. The last time it had some trauma was several days ago, at least. The harddrive died. It clicked, it rattled, it reset over and over again, and it overheated. I tried all the different solutions presented by iPod, iPodLounge, various websites and message boards. I ran multiple diagnostics tests. I even smacked it around. I opened it up and reconnected the parts, hoping that the problem was a loose connection; it wasn’t. The harddrive gave a little rattle that indicated that some crucial part was just not right.

Thanks for bringing me two solid years of good music listening. I’ll miss you.

Google Analytics

Every several months or so, I find myself raving about the newest Google product. But for most of them, I stop using them because they are not that useful for me.

I’ve tried and uninstalled Google Desktop Search (it was blocking out a lot of space on my harddrive that refused to be defragmented and slowing everything down; uninstalling freed up something like 4-6GBs of space for me), Google Earth (it’s nice to look at once in a while, but I found myself hardly every firing it up), and Google Desktop (I kept overloading the number of widgets and them getting annoyed by the clutter, then stripping back, then adding some more, rinse, and repeat). I’ve tried Google Spreadsheets, but I’m not that excited about it because I only use spreadsheets once a year (for NaNoWriMo).

Google Analytics is something else though. It took maybe a minute to sign up (once they send you an invitation) and set up my various domains. Then it took maybe another minute to add the tracking info to my blogger templates so that each page of each website could be tracked.

It’s great! I love the little charts and graphs it produces. I, like many others, initally thought that you needed to run AdWords in order to take advantage of Google Analytics, but no.

Frankly, it’s not too different from Site Meter, which I know several of you use already, but it has a bunch of different types of reports and just looks a lot nicer. It can be used on any website or webpage (even if you just want to track a single page, for some reason). I recommend it.