JET Vs. Aeon

I'm currently very tired of getting rejection letters for librarian positions, or worse not hearing anything. So I decided back in June that if I didn't have anything by the time JET and Aeon rolled around I would apply for them, since I really would like to go back to Japan and those seem like good ways to do so. Plus there are a lot of positions available on military bases around there for librarians, and I might try for one of those after a year there since some of them require that you be in the are and I might be at more of an advantage that way.
The thing I now have to decide is JET or Aeon. There are others around and I'm applying to both, but I'm not sure which one to really hope for more. They both have their pros and cons.
Aeon: work from 1-9, not a normal schedule, but more what I'm used to since I work evenings right now. Plus that way you have the option to stay up late or get up early. Pay is not quite as good as JET. May have to pay for more on health care, not quite sure on that. Have to try to sell materials to students, that part might be hard for me since I'm not good at retail. On the other hand it's not on commission or anything. They do subsidize apartments if they cost over a certain amount a month. You are also more likely to get your placement choice.
JET: You work for the government. They pay your flight over. Work day is 8:30 to 4 something. Pretty much the best pay of any ESL thing in Japan that I've seen. You go to schools and get to participate in more things. Students are in school versus adults in Aeon. Don't have to sell anything. Might get placed in the middle of nowhere, although I do want to get better at Japanese and that might be more helpful.
Probably at this point it's best to just do my applications and see what happens.

Oops, I did it again.

Sorry, I love Glee and Britney Spears episode is still a little stuck in my head. Anyways, at some point I'll probably get better about updating, but I do tend to get randomly busy. Plus job hunting stress, and general lack of anything really appealing to me lately. Not a good combination.
However, I am a little interested in politics (enough to make a post, not enough to try and figure at what the NASDAQ means to the political climate). I live in a very conservative state, I am extremely not conservative. This makes for a volatile combination at times. Even the people (usually democrats) who I end up voting for as the more liberal option are pretty far right of say most east coast republicans. This can be frustrating. Especially when there are ads on tv all the time. This just in, according to someone who wants to be our state governor I am not a "Real American". This is apparently based on the fact that yeah I think healthcare is a fundamental right (heh didn't notice the pun till after I'd typed that), that yeah we should probably be stricter in business regulations, and that being able to speak two languages wouldn't be the worst thing ever.
A lot of the  "State Questions" we get to vote on this November in my state (Oklahoma for those of you who really must know) are ridiculous. For example the one that says that judges cannot use international law as a bases for their decisions, and specifically Sharia "Islamic" law. Call me crazy, but I don't know that I consider this such a big problem in Oklahoma that I want my representatives using time they could spend fixing the budget for things like education drafting this instead.
There's also the lovely SQ 751 which amends the State Constitution requiring that official State actions be in English. Note that it leaves "official state actions" to be defined later, which basically makes this unconstitutional at the outset. Thank you 3 years of debate mock trial.
Speaking of education, which state is behind almost every other state in school funding? Yep, us then Utah and Idaho, but seriously. We have a fun little SQ about raising the spending in our schools to the regional average, although how they're going to get the money when it doesn't allow for tax increases, and how they are going to oversee the money or even spend it is not mentioned. Maybe something the representatives could have been doing while they where busy writing those other SQs.
And yay, while they're busy doing this they might be taking away my health insurance for next year. You see, apparently lack of education about things like history lead to the belief that a state can decide to opt out of the new health care bill. Unfortunately thanks to a little something I like to call the Civil War, Federal law supercedes state. This time around it is probably going to be hashed out in the courts taking a long time and resulting in me not being covered under my mom's health insurance next year because the one nice thing I got out of that health care bill was coverage until I turn 26 starting in January. Bah. Not quite as good as a public option, but enough to keep me from moving to Canada for at least another year.
So where were we? Ah yes, I am apparently not a real American because I'm okay with Obama and I'd rather stand up to corporations than Washington (apparently our lovely Republican Governor candidate would like to stand up to Washington as our state Governor rather than the Congress Representative she's been for the last forever, because as you know Governor's have the real power to affect change in Washington).
Both sides are saying things about how important education is, and how important it is to promote the growth of industry in the state so that children will grow up and choose to stay here, but considering the lack of importance put on education funding, access to healthcare, and the fear associated with anything deemed foreign or liberal I intend to get out before I have a family.

Unintended Hiatus Over Now.

I tend to let things go without noticing for chunks of time and then come back and think that, no it couldn't have been that long. Anyways. I had a nice time using all my vacation time up... I went to my cousin's graduation in Denver, Colorado and got to see some of my friends who live there. Then I went to Kansas City and saw my aunt who told me stories about my childhood as a kleptomaniac (I really don't remember this, and I think I was something like 3 at the time.)
Then I had job interviews to prepare for. The one I'm most excited about is a federal position on an Army base in Georgia. I have relatives in Atlanta I don't see very much, and I've applied for literally about 45 federal positions since I got my degree, but this is the first time one of them has given me an interview. Federal stuff is weird.
I might be going to Houston to see my little brother with the rest of my family over Father's Day which involved some schedule finagling, but that is the one good thing about being half time. It's fairly easy to work around my schedule if I need to and if it weren't for the job applications, interview preparations, helping out family members with projects (although I did make some cash on the last one helping my sister out with a garage sale), and my apparently endless travel (I swear I spent the last 6 months not leaving the metro area, I don't know what's going on with me) I would definitely be more productive on this blog.
...Or not. I do love the books and shows and things. I think for future I will set up some posts for days I get too busy. But today I think is just going to be a fill in on what I've been doing.

The Human Library

Once upon a time when I was in library school, I had to do a blog for a class on Digital Collections I was taking. It's still up over at wordpress, and at some point I might move it over here, but it's not really one of my favorite works. 

Anyways, our teacher had assigned this project to previous classes and some students stuck with it. She gave us links to them as examples. While I was reading one of them I came across this http://humanlibrary.org/ which still seems like such a neat idea. 

Basically the idea is to help break down prejudices by letting people get to know and ask questions of someone in a group they know little about. Volunteers are recruited as the "books" and people can come to events as "readers" to check them out. 

One of the reasons I love libraries and decided that's where I wanted to work is that they are (or at any rate should be) supportive of people learning anything they want. This to me includes learning about other people in an open environment.

Ironically I've got hypergraphia

I love language and words. I started out as an English major, but I realized that while I love reading and to a certain extent writing, I was more interested in the processes behind them. And that's when I also fell in love with psychology. To be precise, psycholinguistics. Psychology courses tend to draw a variety of types of people, I met people who wanted to do pure research, people who wanted to be counsel, people who wanted to understand their own issues, and people who wanted to do profiling for the FBI among others. There is a certain stereotype of psych majors as all having major issues themselves, but that's no more true than any other stereotype, for example one of my friends was a girl in the theater department I met in a Shakespeare class. She was nice and calm and never wore even a little eyeliner.
Anyways. So while people in Psychology are not necessarily any more prone to issues than any other major we do tend to be prone to noticing traits in others and diagnosing them out of context. This is along similar lines as First Year Med Student Syndrome. Most people exhibit some traits of mental illness, as many things in this category are normal behavior patterns taken to extremes. People also tend to have coping mechanisms that they use in times of stress that can become dangerous to them, especially if they only have one response.
To use a personal example, I tend towards hypergraphia and hyperlexia.
The hypergraphia does not mean that things I write make sense, more that when presented with a blank piece of paper I tend to fill it. The margins of all my school papers are full of doodles (I'm terrible at drawing, but I persist), repetitions of alphabets including mirror writing and left handed practice (this was slightly helpful when I started learning Japanese), bits of music (I never do get the treble clef right though), and random things I've remembered like poems or lines in plays. So, I'm not actually writing lots of things that are useful for blog posts, and typing holds less interest for me either way. I inherited this one from my mom who likes to do alphabets while talking on the phone, and trace letters on things with calligraphy. Mostly it was not a problem, although some teachers got angry about the mess this made of my papers. I learned to bring in extra papers to write on in those classes.
The hyperlexia was more of an issue. Parents tend to wish their kids read more. Mine took away my books when I got in trouble, and usually what I got into trouble for was reading when I should have been doing something else. Another thing that usually goes with hyperlexia is speech issues. I have always talked too fast and not quite clearly enough, but my brother and sister ended up with more problems in that arena than me and had to go to speech, I had to wait for them often, and I distinctly remember wishing I could be in with them since they got candy while I got stuck in the waiting room reading outdated Highlights for children (I still despise that magazine and can only assume I had my books taken as a punishment when I was driven to read it).

My issues are almost entirely of the innate, that's just how my brain works, type rather than the trauma type. They also tend to be rather scarily along the line of autism spectrum disorders. ( This does, however, reinforce that point almost all of my psych teachers brought up at some time, that all symptoms and disorders are a matter of degree. For example, while both of these have impacted me, they never got so bad that they interfered with being able to live my life and interact with other people.  There is a really good book on hypergraphia I read once called The Midnight Disease which is by a Neuropsychiatrist who was actually institutionalized when her hypergraphia got really severe.
Most people have a tendency to something, and under severe enough stress (which can also vary greatly by individual) often fall back on that behavior as a comfort. So while psychology students may be overprompt with a diagnosis, it can partly be considered as what path a person might be most likely to go down given enough pressure. Rather like it can be predicted that coal under enough pressure becomes diamonds, although admittedly without that level of accuracy.

How doth the little busy bee...

Pretty good, considering the busyness. That's not quite a nonsense poem, but I borrowed it from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which along with Through the Looking Glass is full of nonsense poetry. When I was little they were my absolute favorite parts of the books. Lewis Carroll (or Charles Dodgson, your preference) also wrote a bunch of poetry where you have to solve math problems to understand them, and a long poem called The Hunting of the Snark, which is odd and lovely at the same time. I still love nonsense poems and silly poems. More than I like serious poetry, really. This did not help me while I was trying for an English degree. On the other hand it has helped enormously when kids come in to the library asking for poems to do class projects. Shel Silverstein's books are always good (although The Giving Tree makes me sad, and he wrote some stuff for grown ups in Playboy which I think was recently released as a book), I especially liked the one about the little girl who wanted a pony and died when she didn't get it. I memorized that one as a kid and recited it to my parents when I wanted something.  Edward Lear is nice, and was my first introduction to limerick rhythms when I was little.














While most of the nonsense and silly poetry I like was written for children (largely because I spent more time reading poetry as a child I suspect) there are quite a few funny and clever poets I've read that write primarily for adults. Dorothy Parker's poetry tends to be funny, for example, although it's more mixed. I also enjoy Edgar Allan Poe (funny may be overstating this, but certainly fun) although not The Bells. Since, as much as I enjoy the word tintinnabulation, I tend to get annoyed by the repetition when reading it aloud.I'm not quite sure why I group Poe in with the silly poems, possibly it's the rhymes, talking birds, and numerous parodies.  I group The Canterbury Tales in with poetry I like (really good web page too, fyi), and they tend to be funny, although not always. I also really like Robert Burns, partly in the same way as I like ballads in general, and partly because I love dialects. I have big chunks of poetry that I've got memorized because I enjoy it, which includes most of these poets.
The only poem that's perpetually stuck in my memory that I wish weren't there is Robert Frost's Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same, which I had to do for an English class. I'm not a fan of Robert Frost really, although apparently almost everyone I know has been forced to memorize at least one of his poems (I can also do chunks of The Road Not Taken and Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, but other people I know are stuck with the whole things so could be worse I suppose). I really don't know why I dislike his poetry so much, but they always make me feel cranky when I have to do anything with them, so I won't.
I'm leaving out quite a few poems and poets here, so there may be another poetry post in the future.

Busy, Busy

Skipped a couple days since I was sick Friday and wingeing about my tummy didn't seem like a good post. So I spent the day watching QI and trying to figure out what to get for a Mother's Day present*. I work on the weekends usually so I'm probably never going to post much then. *In case anyone is dying of curiosity I got her one of those pandora bracelets because she mentioned liking them a couple months ago and I couldn't remember anything else she wanted.
Anyways, on to the actual post.
So, my sister is having her first year of med school finals this week, and I'm trying to set up little surprises to make it slightly better. The main constraints being that she will not leave the house, eat, or sleep more than 2 hours at a time for the whole week. I have some ideas, such as bubble baths and fancy soaps (she likes to study in the bath), peachy o's (her favorite candy), and if I can get them tickets to see Conan (for the last day as a reward). I'm also thinking of making her some playlists for studying and putting them on her ipod, and sending her links to short happy things. I'm also trying to think of what to do for my little brother since he's headed off to Houston next week to spend the whole summer at an internship. I'm thinking a surprise party on Friday after my sister finishes finals and before he heads off which is a limited window of opportunity, but hopefully I can pull it off. Another busy week for me.
I really do like throwing parties and planning presents for events. Especially if I can somehow incorporate a treasure hunt which I might do for both of them. One day I will have either very happy or very annoyed children.

Sidebar on ads.

I get the RSS feed of this to make sure that it's working that way, and for some reason the Amazon link + image for the Carl books isn't working for the book post, but everything else is, weird. Also the ads for the Sweet or Creepy post on my feed are one for kids socks, and one for mail order brides. I'm not quite sure how that post pulled those two, the toys one pulled much better adds, Starzbunnies, American Girl Dolls (I still have my Samantha and Felicity and my sister has Addy. We like to tease my little cousin because hers are Mattel and ours are originals.), A dollhouse store (which is neat but not really related to my childhood experiences unless you count digital dollhouses, which I had a couple of different computer programs for making and playing with them), and for a site called pornokitsch which is about sci fic and not porn so actually appropriate to the topic.

Most of the other ads were at least related, for example the Kelly/Astaire post got ads on dancing lessons, and the book post got ads on writing, but most of those weren't particularly interesting to me so no post for them.  

Fun Words for Scrabble

Words beginning with q, no u, are difficult so here are some of those.
Qat
Qi
qawwali and qoff are nice, but depend on how strict your interpretation of the rules is.
I also love the word Tmesis, mostly as a trap for non English majors. Yay! for double turns.
Scrabble was the one board game I always won at as a child. I'm also fond of shiritori which helped me remember random Japanese words, although I am losing tons of vocabulary due to disuse.
I heard recently that the new Edition of Scrabble is going to allow proper names, and frankly, no. It must be stopped. That would make it much, much too easy. No proper names and you choose one language and stick with it are the only rules in my house. (Well, and no playing newcomers or children for cash) Preferably a language both players know. Possibly this would be a good excuse/way to learn Esperanto. Anyways, much as I love scrabble I tend to get frustrated with digital versions, as they never accept perfectly legitimate words as being real. I have tried a whole variety of them and they all have this issue. I would quite like the Oxford English Dictionary to make a digital scrabble game, possibly as an iphone app. I'd be on that in a second. Just a thought OED people.  (P.S. to the OED people. I'm sorry I had to weed the 20 volume set from my library's collection, but we're merging reference and non-fiction and I don't have the space. We do still have the condensed though, and I am trying to convince them to get an online subscription...Maybe if you made that app they'd go for it? No pressure though :)


     (Isn't it odd how many different versions there are of this game considering what a simple concept it is.)

Dr. Who Girl

My geek training began young, one of my first memories is of being evacuated from a hotel due to a smoke bomb and standing around the pool with all the Klingons there for the Star Trek convention. I knew what they were though because I watched Star Trek at home with my dad and had a huge crush on Jordy (he was also on Reading Rainbow <3). We had X-Men cartoons on VHS and used to watch them on Friday nights. I had an Ewok treehouse, an iceman doll (which was awesome, he had a tray you put water in and then stuck in the freezer, and then you could skate him around on tiles. My mom hated him because of those little water trails, and my brother eventually broke his head off), and once I begged some scraps of faux fur off my mom to make myself a set of tribbles. I had more usual toys too, but those are some that I played with the most.

While I may have initially been started on this path by my dad, I continued because I love this stuff. Admittedly, there are some areas I don't really embrace, for example, my video game love ends at Wii and DS (Mine's pink and if my mom asks I got it for the Japanese-English dictionary) with the occasional attempt to finish off the Kingdom Hearts series on PS2. I also prefer graphic novels to comic books, mostly because I can't be bothered to keep publication dates sorted, or for that matter house all those loose comics, and while I still have a soft spot for X-Men I much prefer Castle Waiting.
On the other hand I spent a considerable amount of time in college watching Star Trek, Firefly, and various animes with friends, and while I was in Ireland developed a love of Doctor Who which is still with me. A lot of people still think that being a geek is a bad thing, but I don't understand why. A slight tendency to get overexcited about things like Terry Pratchett references has helped me make friends and have really interesting conversations with people I might otherwise not have gotten to know.