Sometimes it is difficult to see how trying to help a group of people could actually do them more harm then good. For example, when I was working with a Mayan population in the Guatemalan highlands, I noticed lot of run-down porta-potties dotting the country side near their villages. Now, I was hanging out with a group of people who still dye and weave their own clothes from the wool of their own sheep, grow and roast their own coffee beans, and light fires with flints to cook over, so you can imagine my confusion when I came across these modern toilets. Since there was a language barrier, I had to ask the translator to ask them if I could use the rest room. He asked, and a Mayan woman nodded and pointed to one of the big, blue, plastic potties on a hill. I’m pretty skeptical of porta-potties to begin with, especially in a third world country and the translator must have picked up on my hesitation because he quickly told me that it’s best to just pop a squat behind a bush somewhere. Out of politeness to the Mayans, I walked over to the porta-potty and pretended to go about my business with full intentions of peeing in a bush on the way back down. While I was standing there being polite, I noticed a shovel and against the wall and foot prints on the toilet seat. Later I asked some of the folks I was working with about this and they told me that some Christian missionaries put the porta-potties there to try to bring the Mayans up to plumbing par with more developed countries, but failed to show them how to use or maintain them. Since it’s culturally correct to squat instead of sit to do business for these guys, they planted their feet on the seat instead of their cheeks which explained to footprints. The explanation for the shovel was an unfortunate one. Since the missionaries did not explain the health hazards of standing excrement or provide the tools to pump the potty, the farmers began to use the contents as fertilizer for the crops which has widely contributed to the spread of diseases including hepatitis. Incidences such as this occur all the time but can easily be prevented by studying cultures and identifying their needs before implementing the wrong kinds of “help”.

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I have dreams all the time that I remember. I know that everyone dreams, but I think that since I’m such a light sleeper I remember them more easily than most, because a lot of the time I wake up right after I have one. Nightmares are the worst for me, I always wake up right after I have one and then I can never get back to sleep. So, lately, I have been having the same dream and remembering it. It’s a little varied each night, but it’s the same general idea. My friend Carla has some man that has been hiding outside her house, and he’s homeless. She knows this, and each time I have the dream she decides to let him come live in her house with him, kind of like a pet. Most of the times, he just lives there and creeps me out, and I tell her it’s a really bad idea to let him in. Then, I wake up. I feel creeped out, but that it. Then, the other night I had the same dream, but in it I saw that he was like biting her and acting like a dog. I called the cops, and told them, and she got really, really pissed at me for ratting him out because she wanted to keep him. Now, I’m a big believer that dreams are random and don’t mean anything, but why would I keep on having the same weird random dream? I don’t know at all, but I think it has something to do with the fact that I’m talking about it a lot and thinking about it a lot, so it’s just in my head more. I don’t know, but I really hope it’s not correlated with something in the real world that’s going to happen… because if she had a man as a pet, I don’t know if we’d stay friends. Unless he was a nice pet.

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Kleenex has this ridiculous web site where you can go online and take a quiz and get an extra mom to help you when you are sick. I don’t think many people actually take the time to go to the web site, but I have seen the commercial a few times so I wanted to go on the site and see what it was about. You just click around on some women and they say nice things to you, then you can take a quiz and get a virtual mom that is supposed to suite you the best. So, pretty stupid. But, I can understand the idea. When ever I’m sick, I’ll admit, I always feel better when my mom is there to make my soup and get me things that I need. I know everyone out there can agree with that too. It’s the best to have someone else take care of you. I remember when I was little, my mom would make a soup that was mainly just chicken broth and then some noodles, and we all would call it “Sick Soup”. So, still to this day, when I’m in a bad moon I just want to sit at home and eat the sick soup, but it always tastes better when ever my mom makes it, of course. The virtual mom doesn’t make me feel any better, but the idea of having my mom at home with me, even though I’m almost 200 miles away, makes me feel a lot better when I don’t feel well.

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This summer, my boyfriend went on vacation with his family. While he was there, he vaguely remembered getting into his moms car and shutting the door, and something hurting his finger. Two weeks passed and we were sitting in Lubbock and he was complaining that it still hurt. Every day he said that he would pop small blister like skin covering where it hurt, and then squeeze what ever was in it out and then put alcohol on it. This went on for a few weeks. Any time he had to use it he would say it just felt funny, and the blister wouldn’t go away. We went bowling one night and he said it was really bothering him that time, but every time I looked at it and felt it I couldn’t feel anything. He just kept popping it, cleaning it, and waiting for it to go away. One day we were in the car, driving to meet up at my brother’s apartment in Amarillo. He said it was bothering him, so I got out my tweezers and just started picking at it. I just kept trying to open up the hole and see if I could find anything inside that would make it stay like that. I stopped, but when we got to my brother’s apartment I went ahead and started again. He was watching TV, and I was just picking at it trying to get the hole opened up. As I was picking, I felt something and started to pull it out. It was skin colored and a lot bigger than I expected, so I told him to keep looking at the TV. I thought I had accidently grabbed some kind of vein and did something wrong, but just pulled and finally got to the end. And what was it? It ended in a point, and I realized it was almost half a toothpick. That had been stuck in his finger. For WEEKS. It was so gross, but I can only imagine how good it felt to have something like that out of your body after it had been in there for so long!

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One year at Thanksgiving when we were younger, my aunt decided that she wanted to try and make a fruit salad pudding concoction for dessert. She got all the ingredients together and started cooking, but something in the middle of the process didn’t go right. By the time dinner was ready, it was apparent that the dessert didn’t come out how it was supposed to. Now, on a different but related tangent, we always make it a point to play lots of games when my family gets together, and one of the most popular to play is called Balderdash. It’s a game where when it’s your turn, you get to draw a card that has a word and the definition of the word. Then, everyone gets to try and make up a definition of the word that they think the other people will pick as the right one. Then, everyone gets to vote on what definition is the right one, and the person with the most votes on their definition wins. So, the same year that the dessert didn’t work my family was playing the game when the word “zizzyvau” came up. Someone decided that the definition of this word should be the leaky dessert that my aunt had attempted, and put that down as their definition. Hilarity ensued, and over a decade later my aunt still makes the drippy dessert and we still call it zizzyvau. It’s things like this that I love, just the random traditions that wont ever go away. And this year, the zizzyvau was just as good as the first time.

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I have an extremely sensitive sense of smell. Since I was little I have always been able to smell things that no one else around noticed. Sometimes it can be good, but a lot of times it can be annoying. Like, at the gym. I don’t want to be able to smell everything around me when I’m at the gym with a bunch of random people I don’t know. I can also smell people distinctly. Everyone has their own smells, and sometimes they are attractive to me and sometimes they are not. It’s said that the way our pheromones work and are made are from evolution, to help us not mate with those who are related to us. I have to agree with this, because the way that my brother smells is very distinct to me and I don’t care for it. I can’t even share a pillow with him because the smell is so distinct. I also recall things from smells. If I smell a certain perfume on someone, any time I smell that perfume I can remember who else wears it. So, in my case, less is more. When someone comes around that has a ton on it drives me insane because that’s all I can smell. If you stink bad enough to where you need to cover yourself in some kind of spray, then maybe you should just shower and start from scratch. A little soap goes a long way for someone who can smell like me, and I’d rather someone wore nothing than covered themselves in sprays.

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Lately I have been watching random TV shows about daily things. Some of those shows are pretty addicting, they are always trying to take every day things and turn them into dramatic situations. There are a bunch of cooking shows, and they make the chef out to be a total dick. Or, they have a lot of cake decorating shows that make every cake they make into a huge deal. Like someone will drop it or mess it up, or it will just fall over. Or the people they deliver it to will hate the cake and push it over. Just things that I don’t think happen in every day work for these real occupations. So, when this new show came out called “I didn’t know I was Pregnant” I couldn’t believe it. I have read one or two freak stories about someone who didn’t know they were pregnant and then they gave birth randomly to their child with no clue, but how often can that happen, really? An entire show series about someone who has a baby but doesn’t even know they are pregnant? But, the shows has different women on each episode that claim they had no idea they were pregnant during the either the entire pregnancy or the majority, and they either found out in a freak way or just had the baby and didn’t even know they were in labor. I would like to think that women would be more attuned to their bodies and the changes that happen when you are preparing to have a baby. But, I guess these ones just aren’t.

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When I say the phrase “Perky Cups”, what comes to your mind? Do you think of coffee Yeahh I didn’t think so. If you’re like anyone else, I’m sure you think of boobs. Which, if you happen to think of both, then you’re right. It’s a coffee place in Denver, Colorado where the baristas are wearing bikinis. I can’t imagine this working. This isn’t Hooters, people don’t often go in to get their coffee and hang out somewhere in the morning. They drive up, order, get this coffee and leave. What would it matter if you saw a woman in a bikini through a window for thirty seconds before you head off to work? Do they think that they can charge more than Starbucks with this idea? I don’t know what to think about the store, or what to think about the person who was sitting down one day and had this idea pop into their head, and instead of laughing it off they decided to make it a reality. The people out there that need coffee aren’t observant enough to notice what the barista is wearing before they have actually had their coffee. If the girls have an accident and spill something they have just made, instead of having a layer of fabric protecting themselves, they are going to be spilling it right onto their skin. So many things about this idea seem stupid to me. Oh well, props to being original, hope your strange little coffee shop makes it against Starbucks.

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I am an extremely organized person. I have to have my planner with me at all times, or I feel like I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. I like to write down everything that I’m supposed to be doing on the date that I am supposed to be doing it, just so I can look at my planner and always know what I have going on. A lot of people think this is weird, and that I’m a dork for being so anal about my schedule, but I really think it helps me remember everything. I know that in college I lied by that thing, I wrote down everything that I had due and when it would be best for me to start working on it so I would have it done on time. Now, I just make sure to write down any appointments that I have or any birthdays, anniversaries, things like that that would be nice to always know. I also have a weird thing with making lists. I can’t go shopping with out having a list of what I need to get, or I will feel like I am forgetting something or I will buy things that I don’t really need because I forget what I have at my house. I think that if everyone made a list of their groceries then they would never go over their budget! And I have to always have a packing list or I forget things or over pack my bags. Lists are important to me and I think they are a big part of what keeps me sane!

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There is a new show on TLC about a family, The Duggars, who have 17 kids right now. And another on the way. Damn. It’s weird to watch them interact, they are all so happy and pleasant with each other. Very hard to believe that’s how they really are all the time. They are very conservative, they home school their kids, they don’t let them watch TV or get on the internet, and they can’t show any skin. I don’t know how you can have 17 kids and none of them object to that. And, they all their names start with a J. I think I would run out of J names that I actually liked after about 4. I wonder if when this couple met, they both knew what they were getting themselves into. If I met some guy out one night, and he told me he wanted to have as many kids as humanly possible and that he was going to make me carry them, I think I’d run away. I don’t know where people like this meet other people like this, if there’s some kind of dating web site for people that want to see how many kids they can have. I’m just gonna have to say they either met at church or got set up. But, I guess it’s what ever floats their boat. If they want to have a family as big as a kindergarten class then so be it. That just isn’t the life for me.

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