Meal Plans.

(Note: This blog, unlike most of the others, was written spur of the moment and created in the rambling style in which it appeared in my mind.)

This is my third year as a student at college. The most significant difference, to me at least, between these years, is my living conditions. The past two years, I lived in a dorm where I shared a room with Judy and didn't have a kitchen and was required to by a meal plan. This meant that for a major part of the week I could depend on always being able to have a hamburger or salad or fries or something of the sort. Also, I never really palnned on making anything big in my dorm, because when your cooking space consists of a sink and a microwave, options are limited. (Though with foil and a clothes iron, I can make a mean grilled cheese sandwich.)

However, this year I am in the apartment style dorms. This means I have my own bedroom and a kitchen with a full sized refrigerator. Whoa! I know, impressive, eh? However, this means that my diet has significantly changed. I know over the summer I had grand ideas of cooking meals all the time and making tasty dishes that I was accustomed to making at home, where Mom does the dishes and buys the ingredients and I don't have to worry about obscure spices or kitchenware or things of that nature. Here at college, it's different. I don't have most of the little ingredients and items houses seem to acquire, I have only what I'm willing to buy from the store, which usually isn't much since I have to carry whatever I buy up three flights of stairs, making my shopping list as short as possible.

So, I basically have reverted back to my high school diet: frozen pizzas. Tostinos pizzas at that. In high school, I lived off of these and bagel bites. Now, again, I find myself stockpiling these in the freezer, ready to make for any given meal of the day (yes, I do eat them for breakfast on occasion.) I also have a box of cheerios I've eaten from once. Milk goes bad faster than I actually use it. That's the same reason I don't make the macaroni and cheese as often as I would like. Sandwiches have become a possibility after my grandma explained to me that you can freeze bread. Now I can actually use an entire loaf! With this bread, I can make the peanut butter and jelly described in previous blogs, or a turkey sandwich, provided I have turkey at the moment. And mustard and mayonnaise and pickles. Also I eat Eggo waffles alot. They're nice: put them in the toaster. Syrup. Meal.

Other than that, I'll buy food from somewhere on campus or drive somewhere to get something. Pollo Tropical and Quiznos, being on campus, are particular favorites.

The issue, besides the fact that there is little variety in my diet, is also that I eat less. At the meal plan place, it was basically all you could eat or fit in your takeout box. I didn't overeat, but I certainly never under-ate. However, now that I have a limited supply of food, I eat less than I did. I'm still eating a normal human amount, but I think the issue is when I'm living off of frozen pizzas and waffles, from where are my vitamins coming? I really don't know.

Anyways, it's 6 at night, and all I've had all day were two frozen waffles. I think I'm going to Subway.

Mathematics Education.

As I may have said previously somewhere in this blog, I am a mathematics education major. I love math. I think it's fun, enjoyable, puzzling, beautiful, and intriguing. However, most people don't.

In fact, usually when I tell people my major, I am met with various distaste. There are those who look to the ground saying, "Oh... I was never good at math," while the look on their face tells you that they are recalling terrible experiences of fractions, ratios, and trains that left two different towns and for whatever reason were going to meet in the middle. (Why were they on the same tracks? Why do they need to meet? Why don't all trains go the same speed? I have many more questions for the inventor of this train scenario.) There are the people who look at me in some mix of awe and pity, as if I had said I was going to single-handedly enter into a fight against the greater terrors of the world, where I of course would lose but I blindly still believed in victory. There are the people who stare at me in utter horror and just ask, "Oh God, why?" as if they can somehow plea for my soul to be saved from whatever evil has led me to this choice. And lastly, there are the few like me, the mathematicians, who light up at having found another as we enter into discussions of what classes we've taken and what we thought of calculus and linear algebra and what we plan to do with our mathematics degrees.

The thing is, I wonder when it became acceptable to mock the mathematics students in their choice of education. For some reason, all other majors are met with, "Wow," or, "That's cool," or ask enthusiastically what inspired them. But mathematics is universally recognized as the major that is allowed on which to be picked (I wanted to say allowed to be picked on, but I shan't end sentences in prepositions.) I think it's rather unfair, seeing as I don't make fun of majors which I detest. When I hear that someone is a literature major, I don't stare at them in utter disbelief, wondering if they actually plan on doing something after they graduate from college or if they are just wasting four years of their life for giggles. I don't roll my eyes at art majors and ask them what in the world made them think that was a good choice. I don't tell business majors that they chose a boring major, though I appreciate their practicality and think they should knock some sense into the previous two majors. And pre-med! Everyone loves pre-med, but I'd like to shudder and ask them why they would submit themselves to so much organic chemistry! However true or not these aforementioned feelings may be, I always express nothing but enthusiasm, because even if I didn't enjoy their topics, I still realize that they have different tastes than me.

I don't know if you believe in destiny or a calling. Or maybe you think it's all random chance. But if there is some sort of purpose to where we are supposed to go, or some career to which we are called, somewhere that I was intended to be, it's this. Whether I made this path for myself or I was led here by something higher, teaching mathematics is what I think I was meant to do. My life has prepared me for this and led me here. I am passionate about my major and the task I am undertaking, and I believe whole-heartedly that math is an art and that I can at least help students to appreciate that some people find it as beautiful as poetry or music or paintings. I at least have to try, and I don't know why people can't appreciate that just because they have yet to see math the way I do, even if they never do, that it's still exciting to some people.

Besides, to y'all who don't like math: you are n00bs.

The Perfect PB&J

Peanut butter and jelly is a classic sandwich, commonly used as a last resort meal in cafeterias and at camps, or a common lunch food parents pack when there's nothing more creative. It is treated with an amount of necessity, accepted as edible, perhaps tasty on occasion, but it is never really appreciated.

However, I am going to tell you today how to make a PB&J that deserves not only appreciation, but general excitement and enjoyment.

See, peanut butter and jelly is one of my favorite sandwiches, especially with a cold glass of milk. My father feels the same way. My mom doesn't like PB&J, she eats PB&B (peanut butter and butter,) which everyone else in my family feels is unacceptable on a number of levels.

The first thing about PB&J is the jelly choice. Grape is acceptable, but it will only make a decent sandwich. Raspberry is good, but the key choice is strawberry. Everyone knows strawberry is the best candy flavor, freeze pop flavor, cake icing flavor, the best part of Neapolitan ice cream, and the best jelly. The next key is that you can't buy the jelly. It has to be home-made. In our house, this is a yearly tradition. We buy a ton of strawberries and make a dozen or so jars of home made strawberry jelly. If you want a good sandwich, I recommend you either make jelly or find a way to get some of ours. Jess has effectively gotten a hold on some of our jelly, so it is possible. (The secret is to ask. We're very friendly about giving it out. We have more than we can use.)

The second step is to use crunchy peanut butter. Crunchy sandwiches are better. That's why we put lettuce on subs. Lettuce has no flavor, vitamins, or purpose other than adding that crunchiness to sandwiches. So buy crunchy peanut butter.

As for bread, I've only ever tried white and wheat bread in my life. I suggest one of those over something weird and abnormal.

Now for the actual assembly. When most people make this sandwich, they usually just put the PB on one slice of bread and the J on the other. These people are WRONG. This just makes the jelly seep through one piece of bread, leaving the consumer with a semi-soggy mess. You put the peanut butter on BOTH pieces of bread. And you spread it all the way to the crusts, leaving no exposed bread. This way the sandwich isn't soggy and the crusts are even tastier. Then you spread the jelly on top of the peanut butter, and place the two pieces of bread together.

This leaves you with a non-soggy sandwich with exceptionally good crusts, a necessary crunch, and a home made strawberry flavor.

Also good if the bread is toasted.

Past, Future, and Lack of Present.

I live a life of regret. I don't mean to say that my life actually should be regretted; rather, that I live my life regretting overly and unnecessarily.

I either spend my time worrying about what I've done and wishing I could take it back, wondering how to atone for all of the mistakes I've made, or fretting that the mistakes I've made will irreparably damage my future. I regret what I've done and fear what I haven't. All of this worrying leaves little time for my ability to live in the present and appreciate what's happening in my life at the moment.

So I decided to stop worrying so much about consequences and the effects of my actions. I decided to live "in the moment." I didn't worry so much about all of the little things that usually plagued me, refused to ask my usual questions, and ignored the signs that things would go downhill. I didn't stop to worry about consequences or what would happen in the future with my actions now. I just let myself live, and took whatever options came my way. I chose the options that would better allow me to "experience life" rather than the wise choices.

And I was left disappointed.

When I spent my life worrying, I was too preoccupied to be able to enjoy life. However, when I stopped worrying, I spent too little time making smart decisions that I ended up in a place in life where I didn't want to be.

I guess it really comes to a balance between knowing what's worth worrying about and what's not.Another situation of life being a balance . It's funny how my whole life I heard that things weren't always black and white, but shades of gray, my whole life, and still to this day I see it more and more in my life. It's never going to be one thing or the other, it's never just right or wrong. It's always a delicate balance somewhere in-between.

I can't live my life with crippling worry. But I also can't live my life care-free. Both just end up hurting myself and, in some situations, others.

So, one goal for this upcoming year. Find a balance where I can enjoy life, but I'm not just going along with every option thrown at me for the heck of it. Learn to appreciate life and take mistakes as a learning experience without allowing them to preoccupy my ability to enjoy what's happening.

This summer I learned quite a bit about the person I know I don't want to be. Here's to never being that person again. And while it may have been a mistake, I can move on from this. Take what I've learned and continue living. So welcome, next stage of life.

Perception.

As I walk around the pool at work, sometimes I think about certain things. And a few days ago, this was the train of thought that I had.

When I come out of anesthesia, I don't remember alot of what I do. In fact, there's usually a good fifteen minutes of yelling and thrashing that I apparently did of which I have no memory. This intrigues me because technically, I was awake, I interacted with people, and I existed. However, to me this time doesn't exist because I have no memory, not even a slight recollection, of this time. Although I apparently talked, moved, thought, and lived in these moments, because I cannot recall them they, in a way, don't exist to me.

It's sort of like we build our lives on our memories, on what we can recall and what we know happened. What's the significance of a moment if it never seemed to happen? I mean, yes, it did happen, to some people, but to my perception of the world, that moment may as well never have happened. I cannot recall it, I cannot think about it because for me it might as well not have happened.

It reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend, I think Gauraw, once. When I was taking astronomy, I learned that the universe isn't still, it's expanding. The other stars and galaxies are all moving away from us, and as such the light waves are expanded so that we don't see what these bodies are emitting, we see an altered form of them based on their position and speed. It's kind of complicated, but it made me think. We aren't seeing the universe as it is at all objectively. We just see some convuluted image on earth of a stretched out, distorted sort of universe. I began to wonder what the universe looks like objectively, without the distortion. But then Gauraw was like, does it matter? The thing is, we see the universe as we percieve it. And we build our understanding of the universe based on what we can perceive. Maybe it's distorted, but does that make it the wrong view? If that's how it is from where we are, if that's how the universe actuallly appears to us, if our perception is the universe as we know it, then what does an "objective view" of the universe really mean? The universe only exists to us as we can see it.

I also thought about this because Dustin is slightly colorblind. He just has trouble with greens now and then. He can't see green fireworks, for example. This made me wonder how the world was different to him. Sometimes I used to wonder if I saw color like everyone else. What if I actually saw everything in what would be the negatives to anyone else? What if my entire color schema was opposite of every other person? As long as it was consitent, I'd never be able to tell. Then I realized it doesn't really matter if I do or not, because either way I'm functioning in a world which I completely understand based on the colors I can see. Does it matter if my red is someone else's green or my green fireworks are white to Dustin?

We all interpret our world as we perceive it. We base our lives on the experiences we have had and can recall. Our life is based upon the perception of the world as we see it. Sometimes I wonder, what if I'm not seeing it all? What am I missing that other people see? If I could perceive the world from someone else's view, what would I find? Does it really matter?