"We hold these truths to be self-evident..."

This is possibly one of the most well-known quotations in American society. I assume that almost immediately your mind continued:

"...that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

Now, there are a few problems with this. Firstly, everybody isn't equal; there exists a great deal of diversity and uniqueness among humankind. Luckily, the purpose of the quote wasn't to say that everybody was identical. Rather, it was meant to portray an idea that no man could be held above another for any reason, as we are all humans together. Another issue is that originally the quote didn't refer to all men, only white property owning males. However, as time has progressed, the minds of people opened and were eventually able to realize that all people, regardless of age, race, gender, social status, religion, or any characteristic or individuality, are all equal to one another. Nobody under this philosophy can be born a slave to anyone else without consent.

I bring this up to precede a more sensitive issue: my job. I work with persons with disabilities. These people are mentally disabled. Most people, upon hearing this, think, "Retarded people," or some variation, and have a stereotype in their head of any sort of idea picked up through peers or the media of what these people are like. However, they are nothing like this. When I first went to my job, I expected a bunch of the same, vegetable like people, with little diversity and little in which to be interested. I soon found that I was greatly mistaken. There is as much diversity within a home of 80 persons with disabilities as there is in any sort of society. These people have personalities. They laugh, they cry, they have fun. They make jokes and play jokes. They get angry, frustrated, and any other emotion. It takes time to get to know them and understand them, but they will be your friend, if given the chance. Going to my workplace and meeting the residents is like meeting anyone else, with or without disabilities. They are people.

Situations at work frustrate me, however. Because of the circumstances of the residents, they have to have people care for them. When I hear of staff members stealing clothes from the residents, I get angry. When workers won't allow the residents to do something fun, like the pool or other activities just because it is extra work for themselves, I am annoyed. When the employees treat the residents as less than people, as just a job, I become upset. When we refuse a resident because of their safety, it is one thing, but when we deny them because we don't feel like putting in the extra effort, it is another entirely.

I want to be a math teacher. One of my professors last semester always said, "Teaching is not for the faint of heart." This is because teaching is a selfless job. Teachers do their jobs to help others learn. It's not for money, fame, or guaranteed success. It is to help others, to open minds and change the world only through this help. Work at the home is similar. You cannot work with these people and agree to care for them if you only wish to do it for yourself, the money, or for an easy job. It is not always easy, nor is it always fun.

"...Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."
These are the rights with which our Founding Fathers said all men were endowed, including the residents. We fail if we merely provide a means of existence for these people; rather, our job is to give them a life. They are not blessed with the ability to achieve these rights on their own, so in taking this job we accepted the responsibility of helping them obtain these rights. We agreed to help the residents to live, to have liberty, and to find happiness. Even at the extent of our comfort, our ease, our time or energy, we should help the residents. To put ourselves first at the job and to deny the residents their wishes for the sake of our laziness is to deny them their unalienable rights.

Therefore, we who work with persons with disabilities need to stop thinking of themselves first. We cannot be lazy, selfish, or greedy. We must constantly remember that this job is to help them live, to help them obtain these rights to the best of their abilities, with our assistance. We must never decline their wishes on the sole grounds of our comfort, ease, or desires. We must strive, every day, to remember that our job goes far beyond giving them the necessities of existence; we are called to provide far more.

Codes.

Once, in middle school, I invented a language. Or rather, an alphabet. More specifically, I just created a new symbol for every letter in the alphabet.

Using this, I was able to record messages for myself that were so completely secret that nobody else could read them. Angsty middle schoolers are very secretive creatures, to the point of needing communication methods which nobody else could understand. I was no different.

Also within friends codes are created. Stephanie and I used some sort of code where you added certain syllables after a specific number of letters, though I don't know if she created it.

Once I let her know my code so we could pass notes, but it didn't last long. She only wrote me one note. Not being as acquainted with the symbols as me, she was unable to read it well. I also couldn't read it well. I could write it quickly, but trying to re-read what I wrote is almost as difficult as it would be for an outside source. Probably because I get some letters mixed up, and I think a few letters have the same symbol.

Sometimes, I still use this system to write down really secret things.

The Importance of Sleep.

First, let me say the sun actually shone today. It was a wonderful, life-changing fifteen seconds.

Sleep.. is a necessary thing. It is sometimes welcome and other times a hindrance. This past week it has been a hindrance, which has only helped to emphasize the necessity.

In the past, I have found that a busy day full of things like school, activities, and even work, interferes with other activities, such as spending time with friends or talking on the phone. Now, usually people will try to balance the two in a normal day's hours. Or so I would guess. However, the others of us decide to just create more time in the day. This is done by spending less time doing other activities. Like sleeping.

There have been times that I have talked on the phone much more than necessary. In fact, talking on the phone got me into trouble more than anything else in high school did. Mom, don't cringe when you read this, please. I used to spend hours a night on the phone. This was done by either using my cell or the portable phone. Eventually I was caught, and received punishment, since my parents at least understood the importance of a full nights sleep. This is one of those cases of parents knowing best. Looking back, there were a number of rules I didn't understand at the time. "Why can't I stay up all night? It's me who has to be tired.." And in retrospect, parents are just trying to look out for us, keep us from failing school from being too tired or falling asleep at the wheel or thinking that we can shirk on sleep and still function as normal people.

However, let us reminisce on those days.

There were times that I stayed on the phone for hours, and times where this severely coincided with sleep. I remember, more than once, getting on the phone before I had gotten any sleep and staying on the phone until the sun rose, leaving me less than an hour to sleep before I had to be up to begin the next day (which usually involved a lengthy nap.) Usually, though, I got two or three hours on such nights. There were times I could barely stay awake in school or church. And somehow I would do it again the next night. I sometimes wonder how I made it through those days, but that's all in the past. In retrospect, it wasn't the best idea I ever had, for a number of reasons. However, I can't change the past.

Either way, eventually I reached the age where I could actually hang out with friends for hours. Now that I'm an "adult," my parents let me figure out how to balance sleep on my own, since they gave me more than enough lessons as a teenager. I took those to heart, and am somewhat more careful in my balance of time, though not up to their wishes, I suspect. For example. Over Christmas break and this summer, the issue is that I have to be at work at 8 in the morning. It's a half hour commute, so I have to be awake a little before 7ish. This isn't a problem as long as I'm in bed at 10ish. However, eventually other friends come home, and for whatever reason, hanging out between the hours of 6 and 9 is completely impossible. People don't even begin making plans until 9. As such, I'm usually out with friends until about 2 am, which is my unofficial curfew. The rule is as long as my parents know where I am, I can be out, but there is a point where I'm out ridiculously late. So we settled on 2 a.m., I tell them where I'll be, and I'm back on time.

This only leaves me four or so hours of sleep a night. Usually this isn't a problem. I can handle a night of four hours. It's actually a step up from where I've been in the past. The problem occurs when this happens 5-6 nights in a row. Then my body begins to function oddly. I also suddenly find taking naps, something which has usually been difficult for me, to be involuntary.

Without sleep, work seems much, much longer. Time, instead of passing at the speed of a drizzling rain, seems to slow to the crawl of a snail trying to outrun this rain. (He doesn't, by the way. He is much slower.) Also, these are the days that I end up sleeping on the bench in the locker room on my break. Instead of appreciating my hour long combined lunch, morning and afternoon breaks, I scarf down my food and find a way to balance myself on the foot wide wooden bench in the locker room, until I'm awakened by the sound of the gates and jump up all too soon to help with the residents. My head is pounding the entire time, and everything irritates me. Being irritable is probably the worst side effect, as it involves people trying to make friendly comments. This is why I decided to nap between getting home from work and going out. It greatly reduces these side effects.

At college, this was less of a problem. Usually I could just sleep in the next day, though I'd feel like I wasted a day if I slept in past noon. Which happened too frequently for my liking.

Looking back, I'm thankful my parents wanted to look out for me as a kid. I remember being so frustrated with them at times, and now I'm beginning to truly appreciate their true motives for me in their discipline. I'm glad that they now let me make my own decisions, and realize on my own that having a curfew means I can still be back earlier, like midnight, and get the sleep that I know I need. I'm glad that they trust me enough to allow me to make my own decisions and discover how to act intelligently on my own.

And I'm glad that I can finally fall asleep in the middle of the day to make up on lost sleep.

Rain.

So. Monday morning, I woke up and began to get ready for my job as a lifeguard, which I've done most every day for the past few weeks. It's a fairly simple process. The windows in my room face east, though, and as I was searching for my swimsuit I noticed the light seemed different, as if it were cloudy outside. I peered through the blinds, saw some clouds, but the sun was still low and sort of shining through, so I attributed the odd sunlight to the fact that the sun hadn't risen fully.

As I walked to the kitchen, with a west facing window, I noticed it was actually quite cloudy and raining. This is somewhat abnormal for where I live in the summertime. Usually it starts out cheery and sunny, with clouds slowly building all day until the afternoon, when we are in serious danger of rain and the entire pool staff is usually watching some area of the sky suspiciously for lightning. So, intrigued, I turned on the weather channel. I wished I hadn't. The radar showed this huge green mass, slowly approaching. As I walked to my car alone (usually I go with Dustin, but he had been summoned for jury duty) I heard thunder in the distance, and ran back inside to get a change of clothes other than my swimsuit, since I was fairly certain that we wouldn't be swimming for a while.

Yesterday, the storm was circling central Florida, Deland in particular. I didn't even bother wearing my swimsuit to work. Or staying the entire day; my boss let me off early since we weren't actually lifeguarding and I'm not as talented at indoor activities with the residents as the other staff members. And Dustin was still at jury duty, since they chose him to be on the jury. Go figure.

Today, I check the radar. The storm seems to have significantly decreased in size. However, it is still circling one general area in central Florida, continuing to encompass Deland. Another rainy, cold day. With no chance of pool time. And even when the pool does open, it will be freezing.

I haven't seen the sun since Sunday... Ha. Sunday. But seriously, it's like back in the hurricane days of '05, when I hadn't realized that the sun has the ability to cheer someone up until I spent a few days with solid clouds. It was somewhat depressing, and I didn't even realize it until finally, after days, the sun broke through the clouds again and I saw exactly what I had been missing. The sun is a wonderful, beautiful part of life. Yes, the sun is part of life, it affects all of our lives daily in hundreds of ways.

People in Seattle (since they obviously read this): I have nothing less than the greatest respect for you.

Cooking.

I love cooking. I don't know if many of my friends actually know this, because I rarely cook for people. Especially in dorms, since the kitchen is a good ways away and trying to transport ingredients and supplies and such is a large hassle. Occasionally I cooked in the crock pot, but it just got complicated, so that died out, too. I've probably said it before, though, so maybe they know.

I also love the movie Ratatouille. It's about cooking and much more. I recommend it.

Anyways, ever since I was little I loved cooking. My dad always said, "If you can read, you can cook," and it's true. If you can follow the recipe, you can cook just about anything. My biggest problem is impatience. I don't often like to follow through the whole time it takes to complete a recipe. Also, I can get a little careless in my impatience, and sometimes the slightest alteration of ingredient amounts can ruin a recipe. I've since learned to be slightly more patient and meticulous in my cooking.

I love cooking desserts. Nothing is so fun to me as cooking desserts. I spent most of middle and high school making brownies, cookies, cakes, and the like. I spent a Saturday with my Aunt Teresa learning to cook candies, cookies, and fudge once, maybe one of the reasons I like desserts. And it's so dang tasty.

Anyways, I had cooked actual meals on occasion, but last summer I really decided to get into cooking meals. I spent most of the summer experimenting with recipes I found online and ideas I created on my own, and learned both some great meals and recipes which I have decided never to even look at again. I like stir-fry the best. And I think casseroles are interesting. I think probably because the foods we ate growing up rarely were in these categories. One of my favorite stir-fry meals was yellow rice and chicken and vegetables, something which Dustin also enjoyed. However, nobody liked my attempt at some sort of marinade chicken. Either way, I enjoyed trying and learning, and enjoyed the trips home where I could again cook.

Of course, upon returning home this summer, I decided to begin cooking again. Mom cooked alot for Dustin and me, but sometimes when Dustin was hungry or I hadn't eaten, I'd cook a few meals.

Today, at work, Dustin said, "I want to try making sesame chicken." Or something along those lines. So, during lunch, I looked up a recipe, wrote down the ingredients, and we went grocery shopping after work. We needed bread, milk, and some other foods for packed lunches anyways. We called Mom and asked her to cut up and bread some chicken.

We tried the recipe. It was terrible, and we had wasted half of the chicken in it. However, the Gills do not give up so easily. We took this into consideration and decided to give it another go.

We all gave input on tweaking the recipe, and tried again, with three pieces of chicken this time. Dustin sprinkled the sesame seeds on top, and we all tried our piece. Well, Mom watched Dustin and me to judge the edibleness, while we were the guinea pigs to our creation. Better, but not at all good. I had put way too much red pepper; it would have been good otherwise. So, we split up. Mom went to the internet to look up different recipes, calling out random ingredients for us to consider, and we all created our own sauce. Mom's had ketchup. Dustin's had alot of everything; he decided to mix ingredients until the sauce turned what he deemed the correct color. I merged two different recipes from online and hoped for the best. We kept this up until we ran out of honey.

We all sat around the kitchen table, which held numerous cereal bowls full of sauces, ranging from light brown to burnt red-orange to darkish brown, all topped with sesame seeds. We dipped chicken in the different sauces, trying all of them slowly. Mine failed, again. Mom's... I wouldn't try Mom's, because it smelled too much like ketchup. Surprisingly, the winner was Dustin's batch. It didn't taste like he intended, but it was quite edible, which was a welcome change. Unfortunately, we have no idea how he created it. Or if we would even want to duplicate it.

In the end, we all left the kitchen, no longer hungry, even though barely any food had actually been consumed.

I'm glad we tried.