Jake 🇺🇸

Killing Lions
2017-01-08 04:17:22 (UTC)

I might be mentoring little kids

I'm back in Iowa. Gosh it's freezing here. When I landed it was 6 degrees (Fahrenheit) ughhhh. The average low here is 11F (or like uhm, -10 C??). That's like as cold as Alaska, Anchorage Alaska has an average January low temperature that is one degree WARMER than where I live!! So I guess colder than Alaska. Gosh. I'm also trying to familiarize myself more with both the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales. As a scientist I work in a lab, anytime somebody mentioned temperature it is assumed to be Celsius. I'm not used to Celsius at all! I know the basic conversions:

-40F = -40C (the only point where both scales match)
32F = 0F (freezing)
70F = 20C (room temperature)
98F = 37C (body temperature, aka, the temperature i have to keep the cells at)
212F = 100C (boiling)

Let's see, as i write this it's 9 degrees outside. Actually, the coldness I'm really starting to understand:
60F =Pretty warm. If there's a lot of wind a T-shirt can feel cool.
50F = not that cold. A long sleeved shirt is fine (for me)
40F = Sweatshirt weather. A bit chilly maybe but nothing bad. If you're going to be out for a long time you probably should consider a jacket. Make sure you don't leave electronics in your car below 40F.
30F = Jackets should be worn. Maybe a hat if you're a wimp. It becomes uncomfortable to do stuff on your phone outside in this temperature.
20F = The cold starts to bite. Jacket required. Hat/gloves are nice but not needed unless you're outside for a long time.
10F = Wayyy colder. Hat and gloves required. If you're outside for over an hour you REALLY need to wear warm clothing.
0F = Almost impossible not to get numb. If you're out longer than an hour, your knees will start to hurt. The cold REALLY bites. Masks are nice to have.
-10F = If you're going to be out for long this is where you seriously need to dress up. Without gloves you can only keep your hands out of your pockets for a few seconds at a time before getting really cold and numb.
-20F = Only experienced this once. I was only outside for a few minutes. I remember my hat and down jacket not being warm enough.

The funny thing is that when you're used to temperatures around 0-10F when you experience a warmer 20F day (like what happened today) you're like "hey, the cold isn't that bad!" I suppose the weather is all relative. I remember last year in March the weather spiked up to 40F and there were so many people outside enjoying the warmer temperature (even though 40F is still pretty cold).

Anyway enough analysis of weather, what else is happening in my life? My heel hurts. My running shoes are worn, it hurts when I run with them now. Each time I run it gets worse. Thursday I ran 10 miles and most of Friday i had to walk around on tip toes cause of the pain. I'm fine now though. So... I went shopping to buy some new shoes. I also went to Costco. OMG I loooove costco lol. It's my absolutely favorite place to shop. It's like a man's shopping store lol. There's no money wasted on presentation; everything is efficient and high quality. No fluff. My kind of store! I really went on a spending spree. I spent like $300 on a bunch of stuff. I bought like 5 cases of this quaker oatmeal cereal. No other store sells that stuff and since I can only go to costco only a few times a year I really have to stock up :p

I played more volleyball last night. Yeah... I basically played all night until they closed the gym. *sigh* I have no life right now. My heel was so sore when I was done. I need to actually spend a day or two without exercise to just let it heal. *but i like volleyball too much* It's feeling better now, it only hurts slightly when I walk (it's Saturday night for me). I'll take a break Sunday. I should be able to go on a short (10 kilometer) run on Monday.

I really need to work on my friendships. I kinda feel bad for something, albeit small, that happened to me Thursday. Right when a good friend of mine saw me she ran up and tried to hug me. Maybe I was tired, maybe there were too many people around, maybe i thought it wasn't a good time or wasn't feeling the excitement. But I completely rejected her. I just was like, "hey, you're baccck!!" I also forgot that it was her birthday. Oops! :(, I just feel like it was the tiniest thing but really hurt since I wasn't as nice as I could have been. I mean, she was so excited to see me and I basically shut her down. I feel so bad about it now. Such a small thing but i can't forget it.

Another small thing was when I was at Costco today. I was looking at these running ear phones, there was another girl there who was also looking. She looked at me and said: "ohh, you should totally get those, I got those a few months back and they're amazing." We actually got into a conversation right there, she was also a runner. I told her I was training for a marathon, she wished me best of luck and then walked off to join her other friends. It was the most spontaneous interaction ever. But I loved it. She was about my age, attractive, black hair with a pony tail, short-ish, brown eyes. No make-up. *sigh* Interactions like those make me wish I was better at talking to girls. It wasn't really awkward but I just wished I knew how to turn random interactions into friendships.

Omg! How can i forget?? On the airplane ride back I got talking with somebody who lived in the same city as me. He also attends the same university!!! Anyway, he was in animal science and gave me a bunch of recommendations on things my sister should try to study in college. We exchanged phone numbers and added each other on facebook. I think the link that made it all happen was that we both had a mutual hobby: volleyball. I added him to my volleyball friends facebook chat. So... hopefully I'll see him there next week.

What else? I've realized how little I share in common with my physicist friends. We've become friends because we essentially share life together. We complain together about how hard the classes are and how hard physics is. We rejoice together when we do decently on a test. We comfort each other when one of us is going through a difficult time. We all teach students, we discuss how dumb/annoying/smart our students are. Even though we know each other really, really well. We don't share hardly anything outside of the world of grad school. One of my good friends is huge into music. He can play the piano like nothing else (he's asian... so...). He has a whole group of friends who he hangs out to do that. Then there's a couple other guys that are huge into comics and gaming. They all hang out together. Then there's a bunch of Chinese students who.... well... they're all from China so they do stuff with their chinese friends. Many times it leaves me stranded. I'm sort of a middle man. Sometimes I feel like I don't fit into any one group.

Maybe I just need to find my group.

I should join some kind of political group. I love politics. Politics is the only area that I have a passion in but don't know any like-minded individuals. I should attend more political events.

Oh yeah. One last things. So I'm signing up for a children mentor-ship program. Basically, I would be hanging out with a child probably aged 3-13 years old and we'd just do stuff together and I would encourage them. I'm not exactly sure what I would be doing tbh. But it's something where I would be meeting with them for like 2 hours a week. I figured I wouldn't be as busy this year so I might as well help out my community. That's what I told them at least.

The main thing that got me interested was actually very different.

So there's a bunch of female mentors that I know. We would mostly be doing activities at the middle or elementary school so there's a good chance that I'll be able to get to know the other girls. So yeah... that was my first instinct: by mentoring a kid, I'd be able to interact with more girls my age who aren't weird physics nerds like me lol.

The second reason I decided to do this was just to get better with kids. I've done mission trips before where I got to do sports with the little kids and it was sooooo much fun. I think it would be awesome to gain a relationship with a kid. To be like his big brother or somebody he can look up to, somebody who he can aspire to be. I wanna encourage other kids to stay in school, to go to college. One of the biggest issues in our society i think is the breakdown of the family. In poor neighborhoods the amount of children born out of wedlock is frighteningly high. It's the kids who grow up in a broken home, or, a home with only one parent who generally don't graduate college. They're far more likely to go into crime and by not getting an education they contribute less to society. So yeah... I hope I get accepted to be able to do it. I think I could grow a lot from an experience dealing with little kids. Plus, maybe I'll make some friends outside my current social circle.




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