Sunday

I have a new goal. I was reading the Times this morning (I read the better part of it and not just the Style section, so it took AGES) and I saw an article about children on Broadway. This of course made me think of Camp Broadway and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. I love running the Turkey Trot, but I also love the parade, and since they happen at the same time I miss stuff. So my new goal is to run the race really fast to maximize the amount of the parade I get to see. I strongly suspect that either Tayler Swift or the cast of "Glee" will be in it this year and I don't want to miss that. This means I need to get fast. I've been better about working out lately, but I bet I can push myself harder. Erg club will help. I think I'll call my friend Lindsay about working out too, it's way easier to push yourself when your gym buddy is training for a marathon and has perfect six-pack abs.
Rugby banquet is in a week. I made my Little Sibs' vessels last night. They look ok. Pretty good considering my lack of arts and crafts skills. I think I'll put baggies of sugar cereal in them before I present them to my Littles. I know H. likes Lucky Charms so much that she mentioned her fondness on facebook. I don't know what T. likes, but she's pretty easy-going and responds to any friendly gesture with almost painful enthusiasm.

Nutrition & Health

I don't really read the fine print. Or, in some cases, the normal-sized print, since I thought Nutrition & Health was a two-credit class, when it is in fact four. I would think to myself "Wow, this is a lot of work for two measly credits.", but no, it's a real class. I'm doing well, it isn't an issue of grades, but it was a surprise and it made me feel silly when a classmate pointed out my mistake.
As our big project for the semester we're analyzing our diets. It's kind of fun, and I usually write down what I eat anyway, but it makes me kind of self-conscious to think about my professor reading everything I eat. I love sugar very much, and Smith only enables this love, so my diet is not always so healthy. Plus, I grew up in a family of secret eaters, and so I'm sort of uncomfortable with the idea of anyone knowing what and how much I eat. The obvious solution is to just lie, but that's stupid and defeats the purpose of the project. We enter all of our foods into this website and it analyzes it and tells us if we need to eat more or less of something. I don't know if people know this about me, but I am a milk fiend. Sugar and I have an open relationship so that it can include milk. I drink more milk than anyone I know, and yet I am apparently not getting enough dairy. The idea of drinking more milk makes my stomach hurt. I love dairy, but I'm kind of dairy sensitive, and so it's extra frustrating to be told that I need to eat more of it. I also apparently need to eat more grains. And meat. I eat too much fruit, but not enough vegetables, and I have so much sodium in my diet but I don't know where it's coming from. It's not like I salt everything. N. used to salt EVERYTHING; her dining tray was always covered in salt that she refused to throw over her left shoulder, but I almost never add salt to food. This project is interesting, but it's making me obsess over food and I even weighed myself today which is never a good idea. My goal for tomorrow is to eat more vegetables.

Other Blogs

I'm of a mind that it's ok to seriously dislike someone based on their blog. A blog is pretty much a public journal, and so it should be able to give you some insight into their personality, and thus giver readers license to dislike the author. And a blog that a person updates every day with weird excerpts from books and articles and pictures of dead birds and naked women (possibly naked self-portraits) is intolerable. It just fills me with irritation. And I know I don't have to read it, and maybe this person is actually insightful and interesting and I'm just inclined to dislike them for my own (insane) reasons, but I don't think so. I think she's probably one of those evil pretentious people that you sometimes find in small, Northeastern, liberal arts colleges. I just wanted to put that out there since it has been bothering me all day.
In other news, we finally met our chickens for Learning & Behavior Change. They're actually kind of ugly since they're going through that tricky phase of growing up where they lose their fluff but don't have enough feathers to look normal, but they're also kind of cute. They're nice to hold for sure, and now I want to spend every class in the animal lab. That isn't how it works though, and today and I trudged into the classroom I thought to myself "I wish we were playing with birds again today." Much to my surprise, when I got to the classroom there were two bright green parrots! It's one of the few perks of having purely decorative ears that I sometimes get nice surprises like that. Of course my professor had mentioned that we were going to be visited by trained parrots, but who listens? It was a very fun class, and made me want to make friends with people who own parrots, if not actually get one myself.

Just Thinking

I'm reading this great book called Monique and the Mango Rains for my anthro class, and something in it caught my attention today. Monique is a midwife in Malawi, and one of her duties is teaching women in her village how to make baby food. Thing is, the baby food is peanut-based. This struck me as strange, because I've always heard that you NEVER give babies certain foods including honey and PEANUTS because they might have a food allergy. I'm not saying Monique is wrong, since she clearly knows more about babies than I do, I'm just confused. I wonder if there is any data on peanut allergies in African children, because I have a theory. American children are raised in pretty sterile, antibacterial environments, and it's been correlated with higher incidences of allergies. African children, at least children in rural Malawi are in almost the opposite situation. They have all kinds of other problems, but you don't hear about African children having severe allergies, possibly because they are exposed to so much they don't develop allergies. But maybe that's because they have malaria and life-threatening diarrhea, and failure to thrive and all kinds of bad things, so post-nasal drip isn't that big a deal. And babies who are fed baby food do much better than babies that are fed on porridge, because it's high in proteins and other essential nutrients and porridge is pretty much just carbohydrates. So maybe it's worth the occasional allergic reaction if it saves more babies than it kills. I know that not all peanut allergies are life-threatening, but peanut allergies tend to be severe, and I don't know how available antihistamines are in rural African villages. Bottom line-I love all of my classes. I want to bring this up in Nutrition on Monday. I also want to bring up the guy who lives on candy.

Pet-A-Pet Day

The happiest of all days! I hate that I have to wait like an hour and a half before I can go (stupid class, ruins everything), but it's Pet-A-Pet Day! Even Nutrition midterms can't dampen my spirit. I really want there to be cats.
I might be volunteering at an event at Ben's farm this weekend. He mentioned on the rugby website that he was looking for volunteers, so I emailed him about it. "This doesn't makes sense", you're thinking, "Caroline spends so much time complaining about Ben and how mean he is.". This is true, but it sounds like fun. And he's been sort of better lately. Or maybe I've been better. I was actually grateful and not angry that he put me in for two minutes of A side last week. Plus I like farms, and this event sounds fun, and I hate partying, but I also hate sitting in my room on a Saturday night, not-partying. And costumes are encouraged!
I'm starting to think about this summer. Isn't that sick? It's October! I need to get going on financial aid stuff if I want to go to Africa though, so living in the now isn't so much of a possibility.
Yay Pet-A-Pet Day!

Can't Go Back Now

Smith is such a great school. I am super lucky to have the opportunity to go here. Still and all, Facebook has lately been flooded with Geneseo women's rugby pictures, and it's making me really homesick. They aren't using 'Daga field anymore. The school finally gave in and let them have a decent pitch. They're going to regionals too. I miss the girls, and I miss Colin. It was so much better than my rugby life now. I used to love going out, but now I always feel miserable the day after partying. I miss having friends that were fun to party with. And a team that included everyone, and did things together. These aren't reasons to regret transferring, and I know I made the right choice, but I also lost some really nice things in the process. You really can't go home again, I know that. Geneseo was never even that homey for me, and going back would only depress me, but I really miss it. I miss the dorms, and Court St., and St. Mary's. I finally went to mass last night, for the first time this semester, and it was nice, but it made me miss going to mass in Geneseo. I miss my big jug of honey. Mostly though, I miss rugby. The S**** team is too dramatic. It's totally cliqued out, and it just makes me want to go back. Girls dated within the team at Geneseo too, but not to this extent. It was a family first and foremost, and now I feel like an orphan.

Nice Things

I'm trying this new thing where I'm going to have a better attitude by reflecting on all the good things that happened during the day. I won't list them on my blog every day, but today is the first day, so I'm going to share.
1. I had a delicious chai during my anthro class
2. My professor gave everyone 5 extra points on our test for spelling our names right
3. Agnes (my Swahili instructor) praised me to high heaven and made me feel really good
4. I'm back to being an alternate for A side, which makes me think someone has been noticing how hard I've been working.
5. I'm the jumper for lineouts for the B game
6. I got to practice kicking with EE and I think I'm really improving
7. I got multiple warming hugs today
8. I was outside for the first snow of the season.
Fridays are really rough, and tomorrow is going to be inhumanely difficult, but I think these positive thoughts will help me get through it. I don't think I'm going to play in the A game this weekend, but I'm excited for the B game. We're playing Springfield, and they're going to demolish us (they're a women's league team), but it's going to be fun. I do love to jump.