Posts by Jonah

2-20-95

Someone around here has been accepting the mail and hiding it away without telling me! Not that I’ve had all that much time to write anything anyway.

I regularly stay up till 2 or so on Friday nights. Sometimes even on Saturdays. Other nights, however, I try hard to be in bed by midnight. Late at night is when I get the whole house to myself and, more importantly, the computer and can do anything I want to, as long as it’s silent. It’s my freetime. It’s also when I end up doing most of my homework, since I tend toward procrastination. Never put off till tomorrow what you can put off till the day after tomorrow.

Things have been going along at full speed without much time for procrastination around here. My grandmother had pneumonia, but she’s recovering from that. The last time Mom spoke with the doctor, he said it would be about 2 weeks until my grandmother would be discharged from the hospital. That means she could be moving in with us Thursday next week! We have a lot of preparing to do in the meantime. My brother will have to move out of his room into the living room. We’ll have to care for her constantly. Right now we really don’t have a clear idea of what’s going to happen.

Some bad news on the chemistry front. When the professor was handing back lab reports, me and my lab partner didn’t get them. We asked him why, and he said that he didn’t have them. We did put the in the correct box outside his office and everything just like we were supposed to after lab. I went back the next day to see if mine was still there because I wanted to change something, but since it wasn’t, I figured that he’d already collected them. But he said that they are not in his office. The weird thing is that both lab reports are missing. They weren’t together or anything, just in the box. Either he has lost them or someone hates us. It’s all very odd and disconcerting. He says that we’ll have to do a make up lab. That stinks.

I wrote my first formal lab report last night. It took a lot longer than I thought it would because everything had to be just so. I turned it in today. Let’s hope that it doesn’t end up missing too.

The theater department did a production of Wait Until Dark last weekend. I was very impressed. They did a great job. It was really suspenseful, I was on the edge of my seat almost the entire time. I went back another night to help serve with the dinner (it was a dinner theater) so that I could watch it again. This time it wasn’t nearly as scary since I knew what was going to happen, but I caught several of the details I missed the first time. It’s a story about three con men who try to weasel a doll filled with heroin out of a blind woman, whose husband brought it unknowingly from Canada. The girl who played the blind woman did it excellently.

I’ve got a couple stories of stuff that has happened to me lately that I want to write out but haven’t had the chance. I’ll see if I can get to it one of these days…

My grandmother spoke today!

Since her stroke, she hasn’t been able speak a word, only sign yes or no with her hand. Yesterday, Dad asked for prayer at Integrity Music’s weekly staff worship service on behalf of my grandmother. That same day, she relearned how to speak in therapy. She could count and sing Amazing Grace and other things by rote.
I went to visit her today. She has pneumonia, and hasn’t felt like eating anything, so I took her some chicken soup and tapioca pudding my mom made for her. As I prepared the soup for her to eat, my grandmother started signaling to me that she wanted something. It’s often hard to understand what she wants, almost like an endless game of twenty questions.

I pointed to something, “Do you want this?”

She made her hand into a fist, the sign for no.

“Well, what do you want?” I asked.

She opened her mouth, the syllables coming haltingly. “Oh… yesss…” she said. “I… can… talk…”

I laughed. It was the first time I’d heard her voice in more than a month.

“That’s right, you can talk!”

“I… can… talk…” she said, “you… can… talk…”

She has to try very hard to get the words out. It takes many false starts and a lot of concentration to get out what she is trying to say. Many times her syllables are so slurred that I can’t understand them. But she keep trying. She asked me,

“Ees… Booger… Oh… Kay?”

“Is Buller okay?” I repeated, talking about our neighbor’s dog (who, nevertheless, stays up at our house most of the time). “Yes, he’s fine.”

She asked me something about Stephanie, but I couldn’t understand her. “What… happened… to… day… at… school?” she asked me. I told her, but her ears are stopped up, and she was having trouble hearing me. “I… can’t… hear… youuuu…” she said, putting her hand behind her ear.

She ate all her chicken soup and tapioca, which is more than she’s eaten in a few days. She got me to open a package that arrived at the hospital for her. Inside was a box of thin chocolate mints from a friend. As I was leaving, she told the nurse, “I want… one of those…”

Christmas day my extended family and I were in my grandfather’s van, driving to New Orleans, where a plane would take me on a prized trip to Colorado. My grandmother sat in the middle seat, commenting about things to everyone in particular, while no one really wanted to listen. I made snide remarks to match each irrelevant one of hers, but only my dad sitting next to me in the drivers seat could catch them. “Stop it,” he warned but couldn’t stop himself from laughing. “Respect your elders,” he choked between convulsive gasps for air among hysterical chuckles but then broke into a fit of coughing brought on by my next joke.

A week later, I was sitting in a snow covered house in Colorado, letting the information sink in that my grandmother had suffered a severe stroke at our kitchen table.

Classes have been going pretty good. Well, actually more than good. It’s great. I love all the courses I’m taking this semester.

My sociology professor is a commie lib, but that’s just because he’s just a really compassionate guy (plus the fact that he’s resentful that he doesn’t get paid more than he does). I’ve been reluctant to get in any arguments with him because he seem so unsure of himself, but we have had a couple of good discussions. I’ve decided that I’m a functionalist capitalist, so if you want to label me anytime in the near future, you’ll know what terms to use.

Chemistry has been a doozy, even though I got 20 out of 20 on my last quiz (I am so happy). I’ve been listening to The Origin of Species (abridged) by Charles Darwin and A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking on tape. It was great because, while I was finding the result of a positron emission in Chemistry, I was learning what a positron IS from Hawking. Chemistry lab was pretty fun (although I broke a cardinal rule and wore contact lenses). We did all sorts of chemical reactions with a penny. It was cool. What chemistry lab should be, except, alas, with no explosions. However, now I can’t look my professor in the eye.

Religion is okay. We’re going through the synoptic gospels. As academic as my professor was last semester, this one is exceedingly conservative, a real fundamentalist. I like it. The other day he made the statement that angels have emotions. I asked him after class what scripture he could use to back that claim up. The next class period, he had a list of references for me.

English, as ever, is cool, even though Nathan isn’t in there. We did some William Faulkner and are now reading Billy Budd by Herman Melville. We’ll do The Death of Ivan Ilych later on. Dr. Allums is trying to persuade me to become an English major. Actually, double major. I told him, yeah right.

Philosophy is fun. It’s a discussion class, so that usually makes it interesting. We had our first test today on the Orestia. It was easy. I hope.

Russian History is great. Right now we’re at the 1917 Revolutions. Today I stayed after and another student and I talked with the instructor (a 44 year old woman from Russia) for over an hour and a half! It was great. She expressed the difficulty it is for her to adjust to a new way of thinking after years of believing that socialism was the best way. It’s fascinating to gain her perspective and understand why people accepted communism for so long.

Along with school I’ve had to pick up a bunch of the slack in household duties left off by mom, since she spends a majority of her time down at the hospital with my grandmother. I have a LOT of reading to do this semester, but I prefer that to papers, projects or other “work.” In the meantime, I haven’t had any. Time, that is.

Hey, did you know that time passes slower at higher altitudes than it does at sea level? No wonder Colorado has such a relaxed attitude.

(date unknown)

Nathan’s grandfather has a M1 Garand (he’s sitting here telling me how to spell it). His dad wants to buy it back from him. Nathan’s been cleaning his grandfather’s handguns and rifles and in return gets to shoot them. He’s been cleaning an Ithaca .45 auto that’s also a WWII veteran. He says it shoots a tad bit to the left. His dad has finally started reloading all those 9 mm shells he’s been making us collect. Nathan says: “they shoot much better than some made by rookies at the police academy (they would just scoop the powder out, brush the top off, and insert the lead:) ). Needless to say, there were quite a few uncontained explosions at the range. My dad laughed a great deal when telling us that story.”

About a week ago, we went to play Q-Zar, “the world’s favorite laser game,” according to its advertisements. Nathan, Stephanie, and I met some other people down there and waited while watching Nathan play graphically violent arcade games until they called us into the briefing chamber. There we divided into two teams, red (actually orange) and green. The ref (or employee, whatever) came in and picked me, since it was my first time, as an example of how to put on the vests. They’re kind of a breast plate and back piece connected with straps and shoulder pad things on top with a gun attached by a telephone cord type wire. After the briefing, we entered the vest place, where everyone else put on vests, and then on to the battle room. It was a maze-like room, foggy, and with loud music playing. We all went to our appropriate energizing stations, and then the game began. It was great, sneaking around corners, blasting away at the enemy. You could see the lasers as they shot through the fog. That helped with aiming. When you get shot, a thing on the breast plate (mine was more on my tummy) vibrates. I was running here and there for the first minute or so until I remembered the first rule — NO RUNNING.

Whenever you get shot (or tagged, as they benignly call it), the gun talks to you, saying, “Defense shield active… active… warning… warning…” and you have to wait for six seconds before you can fire again. I shot the green headquarters twice.

During a lull in the game, the ref that had given us the briefing came up and told me he thought I was doing pretty well fo:r my first time and gave me some pointers. “Protect your back. And don’t tell anyone I told you this, but if you unsling you gun, you’ll have a better range of motion.”

After 15 minutes, though it seemed like a lot longer, it was all over and we returned to our energizing stations, as per the instructions our guns gave us, for our points to be recorded. Mine didn’t work right, so the ref came over to try to help. Finally, we went out, and I got my score sheet from the desk. The ref came over to where we were comparing cards. “What’d you do?” he asked. “Not bad for your first time.”

As we were leaving, he came over again and handed me a couple of coupons for 2 dollars off my next game.
“Come back,” he said.

On the way home, Nathan and Stephanie started teasing me. “He likes you,” Nathan taunted. “You probably could have got in free if you gave him your phone number.”