Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving is a time when families all across America come together to, well, give thanks! My Thanksgivings are pretty much all the same, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. Since we always have our family over at our house for Thanksgiving, a little preparation is need. After a week of cleaning (although this year I wasn’t home to help with that), the big day is finally here. I wake up at an hour that is earlier than what I’m used to, go for a quick run, and take a shower. Then the real fun begins. My mom and I turn on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and get to work. Chatting all the while makes the cooking, cleaning, and setting of the table go faster. I never find it hard to hold a conversation with my mom, but on Thanksgiving it is especially easy. As my mom preps the turkey to make stuffing and get that bird into the oven, I set the table. Once those two items can be checked off the list, my grandma arrives and we all sit down to watch some of the parade, since one of my mom’s favorite parts about Thanksgiving are the balloons in the parade. After I’ve had my share of watching balloons fly on by, I begin to make the guacamole, so once my family arrives at half time of the Packer game, we are ready with snacks. For some reason, the recipe my mom has for guacamole is everyone’s favorite, and my cousins insist it wouldn’t be a Stillman family get-together if Nancy’s guacamole weren’t there. When the rest of my family finally arrives, the real celebration can begin.

You can hear the kids in our backyard from miles away. With soccer, basketball, baseball, Frisbee, and hula hooping all happening at the same time, you know it’s a good time. After all, we need to work up an appetite for our thanksgiving feast! When mealtime has finally arrived, after a week of preparation, we all take a big sigh, and breath in the wonderful smells that engulf our senses. Fall. Turkey. Leaves. Buttery mashed potatoes. Stuffing. Candles. Cranberries. Pumpkin pie. Everything that embodies a deliciously delightful atmosphere can be sensed. It is at this point where my dad takes out his three-page sermon he has prepared – the schoolteacher inside of him has him do this each and every year. Instead of sighs, my sister and I let out groans (jokingly, course), but dad commences anyways. When this ritual is finally complete, we can begin eating. As I look around at my family, I remember why I should thank god every day. It is sad that it takes a holiday to make me remember how fortunate I am to be living my life. I have a wonderful, crazy family who I adore, loving parents who always support me, I love my hometown, and Lehigh University is the only place I want to be during the school year. I guess, then, I should be thankful for Thanksgiving, since it allows me the chance to thank god for giving me all these wonderful pieces of my life.

Helping the World

There are many critics of America out there that claim that America needs to focus more on its global adventures than the problems we face at home, because the problems abroad are worse. I completely disagree. Just look at any number of statistics available, and you will be shocked. Not only is there severe poverty and homelessness in the United States of America, but drug problems and crime as well. Our president needs to take a step back, and realize that while yes, we are a global power and need to be involved in world affairs, we also need to take care of our citizens. I understand the fact that less than one percent of our national budget goes to foreign aid, and that that is a staggeringly low number, but I believe that one needs to be able to help them before they can help others.

Since the end of the Cold War, federal spending has declined for job training, employment programs, and low-income housing. How does this seem fair? One of the best ways to start helping our nation is from the bottom-up. We need to put money into programs that help disadvantaged people, since the spending that is being reduced is things that the president deems “unworthy” of this nation’s money. Another unfortunate statistic is that five juveniles are murdered each day in the United States. I’m going to take make a wild assumption, and say that those juveniles are not normally from rich suburbs, but the slums where they are trying to survive on their own. It doesn’t help peoples’ situations when one-third of the young people who enter high school never graduate. If you have a third of the student population out on the streets, without a high school diploma, you better be sure you are going to have problems. How else are these people supposed to get by other than stealing and getting into more trouble? I’m not saying they are justified in their actions, but they are not completely to blame. The government needs to nip these problems in the bud by putting money into schools so these teenagers are given better opportunities – even things as simple as textbooks and chalk. With forty-five percent of African Americans and other minorities in the US living in poverty, I think I know a good place to start reform. These people in poverty have no one to turn to and that is a huge issue. Since they have no one to turn to or rely on, many males are forced to turn to the streets. Did you know that black males have a greater chance of being killed by violence than the average soldier in Vietnam? That astounds me. In a country that is famed for the “American Dream,” this many people should not face such horrid circumstances. We, the citizens of this great country, should at least try a little harder to help those in need. Even if this means writing a check every once in a while to organizations in need, donating food at times other than Thanksgiving and Christmas, or even just giving a homeless man you see on the street a meal, every little bit helps. As Anne Frank so eloquently stated, “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."

Family Weekend

Being the youngest in my family, my parents were understandably hesitant to let me venture out to the East Coast for college. They understood my want to get out of the Midwest, but had a harder time wrapping their minds around why I would want to be so far away from my family. To be fair, though, all three of my sisters did stay in the Midwest for college, and were only a few hours drive away from our house. Knowing that my parents were reluctant to let me leave did make me a little more nervous to come to Lehigh University. What if my parents were right? What if I want to come home, but I can’t catch a quick flight, or it’s too expensive? Question upon question were piling up in my head, but by the time August (and therefore freshman orientation) came around, there was no turning back. Obviously when I got to Lehigh I immediately felt comfortable and knew that this place is where I truly did belong. While I would tell my parents this every time I talked to them (often every day of the week), I felt like they didn’t really understand to what extent this was actually true. I see this as the main reason I was so excited for them to come visit me over Family Weekend.

Hailing all the way from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I don’t know too many family members who live within driving distance of Bethlehem, so having my family attend Parent’s Weekend in November meant a lot to me. Yes, I had been home for Pacing Break so it wasn’t as if I needed to see them, but I found myself getting more and more excited to show them my “new” life. Admittedly, I even started making a list of all the places on and off Lehigh’s campus that I wanted to take them. I wanted to prove to my parents that I was happy with my choice of college and that Lehigh and I were a good match. Showing my parents where I have my classes, where I study, and where I hang out a lot seemed more important to me than participating in one of the many tours or programs planned by the University. Arriving on Friday afternoon, my family was given an ample amount of time to tour how we wanted to, both Friday and Saturday. Proudly telling my parents a little bit about each building we passed, I felt a sense of accomplishment for having actually made it this far. It seems silly, but I think every freshman should take a step back, and realize what they have accomplished. We all made it through high school – what is supposed to be one of the most emotional times in a person’s life – and got into a well-respected college that we can be proud to show off. Apparently, family weekend was more than a time to see my parents, but yet another experience to learn something new about myself at Lehigh.

Top 20 lists of 2009

With the decade quickly rolling to a close, dozens of “Top 10” lists are coming out. Whether authored in a magazine, on a blog, or on facebook, these lists are obviously subjective to who is writing them. I looked at multiple lists from different sources, and found diverse rankings everywhere I went. Yes, some places showed the same songs in different spots on the chart, but often times I would find that certain songs didn’t even show up on the different lists. This made me think – why do we insist on making these rankings? If everyone has a different opinion on music anyways, can we as a population get anything out of these lists? What makes people get a thrill out of seeing songs placed in a particular order? Does it make one feel “cool” if they like a song that shows up on the chart? Honestly, I think part of it is that people like having easy and simple things to read. Instead of reading an intelligent article in a magazine, like “The Economist,” they can opt for less confusing dialect that still gives them something to think and converse about. People are also prone to judge everything they see, so by looking into these rankings, people are able to judge the songs, the author, and the magazine in general in simple ways that don’t require too much brainpower. While this is a negative view of the situation, I do think someone needed to put that out there.

It is fun, though, to look through these charts and wonder what kind of person put them together. As I read them, I always think to myself, “This person loves their rock music,” or, “The person who wrote this article is obviously biased towards heavy metal.” In truth, people like to know things about other people, and a good way to get to know someone is by reading articles that state said person’s opinions! We as humans are naturally inquisitive, and are always interested to know more about others, so this “list-making” gets us one step closer to finding out something about one more person in this large world. After all, when you are first getting to know someone, doesn’t music usually come up? In most of my encounters, it does. Not only does it let us have internal discussions, but also these charts bring people together over their music. By mentioning a “Top 10” list, you instantly started what could be an hour-long conversation, delving into why the author picked the songs they did and why. In essence, these lists bring people together – who doesn’t want that?

The Sun Inn

Family Weekend is the time when a student’s family pays too much money to come visit their child. For my parents, this weekend included spending money on the plane tickets from Wisconsin to the Lehigh Valley International Airport, renting a car, a hotel (which is always more expensive over family weekend), nice dinners, and, of course, a shopping trip to load up on food items. Therefore, it is always nice when we run across things to do that cost no money. While walking around North Bethlehem, my dad had been pestering me to go to the Moravian Museum, but since I had already visited that establishment, I did not feel a need to take another tour of it. Strolling down the streets that weren’t Main Street led us to an interesting building. It particularly struck my eye because of the fact that we had just talked about it in my English I class the past week.

This building is known as the Sun Inn, and gains its popularity through the fact that it is thought to be haunted. A tour of this museum took approximately five minutes, since the tour consisted of basically walking around in a circle on the first floor of the hotel. After reading the paragraph on each of the five stations, and not seeing any mention of ghosts, I meandered over to the front desk to confront the man sitting their about the haunted past of the building I was in. He gladly obliged to give me the low-down on the paranormal activity that had been witnessed where we were standing. According to the man I was talking to, dozens of paranormal groups have come through the Inn, and all have thus far concluded that there are ghosts inhabiting the Sun Inn. One in particular, whose name is William, quite the friendly ghost, and simply sits in the chair he is claimed to have died in a long, long time ago. Actually, all of the ghosts I was told of are relatively friendly, which makes the manager happy to be working there. The story that I liked the best is that the catering companies that work on the upper levels of the hotel for private dinners claim that once they put down silverware or other table-settings and then leave for a minute, when they return, the aforementioned items have been moved! While they have not done studies on this particular topic, it is yet another story that adds to the fun of the Sun Inn.

Halloween at Lehigh

Halloween at Lehigh was a very interesting event. Experiencing this holiday in college is much different than what I encountered back home on the streets of my suburb in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I am so used to handing out candy to the children in their fairy and batman outfits, that I wasn’t even sure what to expect here at Lehigh. Little did I know how much I would miss the youthful innocence of being at home for Halloween. As the movie “Mean Girls” states: “Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.” Lehigh is no exception to this statement – nor do I think any other college is. Since when do girls need to feel pretty by dressing in short skirts and skimpy tops? Why can’t everyday clothes do the trick? Could someone do a psychological analysis about this? I’m sure they could, and I’m sure they already have. It just boggles my mind when I think back on the past three nights. Thursday night was relatively tame compared to Friday and Saturday. Since it wasn’t truly Halloween yet, I assumed people assumed that the “sluttiness factor” should be fairly low, and as it got closer to Halloween, they could move up on the scale. This assumption was one hundred percent correct. I truly came to this realization when sitting in the Hawks Nest – Lehigh’s late-night food source – people watching (one of my favorite past-times). As I surveyed the people walking in and out of this establishment, I was shocked to see the amount of skin showing. It was almost as if there was a contest to see how much of your body one could show without being completely nude. Personally, I’m not a fan of such competitions. There is no doubt that I enjoyed my Halloween despite the array of costumes, because there are always the people who do Halloween right and actually dress up – nerds, Mario and Luigi, superman, buzz lightyear, etc. After my first college Halloween, I am now prepared for how many people in today’s world think. It is entertaining to think about how the times have changed since my parents’ first Halloween in college. I can only imagine. All in all, Halloween at Lehigh was a great experience, and now I am prepared for the mindset of college students on this particular holiday.