Want to know something embarassing?

It worked.

Shameless capitalizing on TWILIGHT

My hits are down a little, probably due to the fact that I never update. Therefore, today's entry is brought to you by pop culture vampires and a shameless ploy for search engine hits. (Hell, just to make things interesting, all the desperate ploy bits will be in blood dripping red.)

So. My first aid assignment for the day was to figure out how to treat a neck wound with "severe arterial hemorrhage." Not that wimpy, mild arterial hemorrhage. We're going all the way on this one, dudes. Clearly enough, this is not the kind of thing I could find a volunteer for too easily. Not, that is, unless I was on the set of steamy vampire romance True Blood (which, I'll have you know, I don't watch. But I see the ads on the train all the time). The first step, clearly, was to figure out what exactly arterial hemorrhage was and how it differed from regular old bleeding. The answer? Arterial hemorrhage is way grosser and more cinematic. You can tell the difference because one happens when you get a papercut and the other happens when bright red blood is spurting out at regular, pulse-like intervals.

The biggest challenge with bleeding of any kind is just to get it under control -- an adult can lose 1 pint of blood to little effect, but make that 2 pints (or a delicious snack for Twilight's Edward!), and things start to move towards shock. More than that, and we're getting into the dying part. (Or the undead? Eh, that one was kind of grasping at straws.)

The major neck artery is the carotid, which you know from being smart and I know from trashy television shows. (Like The Vampire Diaries? Or is this getting silly?) Now, while we'd usually fight arterial bleeding with direct pressure, tourniquets on the extremeties, things like that. The problem arises from the fact that we're talking about the neck here. The body part that you get all "gah!"-ish if your scarf is too tight. So pressure is not exactly the ideal situation here. Unless you're a sexy sexy vampire. Instead, we need to get a little more creative.

The first thing you want to do is to avoid touching things as much as possible -- you might dislodge some sort of beginning-of-a-clot, which would make things even worse. Well, that's really the second thing you want to do. The first is to call a hospital, because things are going to get real bad real quick -- things will get so bad that the internet seems to be pretty much telling me that the only solution is to have a really good doctor use a balloon catheter to stop the bleeding and conduct unpleasant surgeries. If your patient lives that long. (Also, tonight, I have seen more bleeding necks on the internet than I even know what to do with. There are so many reasons I am not a doctor.)

Anyway. If you've called a hospital and not mucked around inside the wound too much, you can also -- very very very carefully -- apply pressure below the wound to the carotid artery. You know where it is. Find your pulse in your neck. Yeah. Right there. Find a spot below the spurting blood and press. Don't press on both sides of the neck at the same time and try not to compress the windpipe, but give it a shot.

Hey, look at you. You saved someone's life.

And you thought you just got here to see the entire cast of Twilight naked. Psh.

Now I'm just taking advantage of the internet

Tomorrow will be a return to the first aid badge, but right now I have a question. See, I bought a dress, and I think I like it. But my mom thinks it looks suspiciously like a beach cover-up. What do you think, buddies? I mean, I wore it out to dinner last night, but that just may mean that everyone around me thought I was wearing it out to dinner after a lovely day at the beach. Which is maybe not the worst thing, but still.

(Also, I'm watching the SyFy original "Infestation," which is gorier than I expected. I think a dude just got a big, big insect egg injected into his spine. Ew.)

Order of the Arrow

So, this didn't exist in 1911, but my grandfather was still surprised I wasn't familiar with it. Then again, he's familiar with everything having to do with the Scouts. Seriously. He was an Eagle Scout, Silver Beaver, you name it.

So over the past few days, I spent a little time filming my grandfather talking about a few things related to his time in the Scouts in the mid-30s. (He stayed involved with the Boy Scout Council until the 80s, and his store sold scouting equipment until, um, until today, really -- my uncle's taken over the store and Grandpa, in the tradition of retirees everywhere, moved to Florida, but still.) Today's clip (there'll be more as summer wears on) relates to his initiation into the Order of the Arrow, a particularly survivalist kind of scouting honor society, in 1936.

(We also went to the beach, over the course of which I was totally shamed by being way more buffeted by the waves than he was, but the man can swim, I'll tell you that. Clearly, the Order of the Arrow isn't for wusses.)

I've been out of town

Video update coming this evening.

In the meantime, can anyone tell me why there are no hobby shops in all of New York, it seems? All I need are a few propellers!

Sometimes, the Handbook wants to kill you

I still haven't left my apartment during the daytime with any kind of eagerness or, really, unless I was going to DIE. It's improving, though, I swear. Or so they say.

(By the way. All I want to listen to lately is Bruce Springsteen's "Live in Dublin." I'm not even a huge Bruce fan (despite living 5 years in Jersey). But I can't get enough of it. Can not. Thanks, dude.)

Anyway, I'm nearing a point of being able to leave the house and get back to things, and I'm even feeling pretty good about finishing up some badges I'd started and stopped and started again (I'm looking at you, aviation and business. Speaking of business, there's something about that coming in the next few days. So you know.) But still, really, I'm thinking about heat. Earlier this week, I started thinking about green leaves and wound up dealing with racism a hundred years ago. Today may be more of the same.

See, I continued on into the Handbook's thoughts on what to do if you just couldn't keep cool -- and remember, since air conditioning units weren't commercially available until after the Handbook was written. Prior to about 1914 (when the first air conditioned home was built in, of all places, Minneapolis (buh? really, Atlanta?)), home cooling was largely accomplished via ridiculous setups involving fans blowing across bricks of ice. Useful if you have an iceman and a LOT of ice, but still. Beside the point. Window units weren't available for purchase until after World War 2, and remember, while both of my grandfathers fought in WW2, neither was even born when the Handbook came out. So there was a whole lot of time between those two events.

Clearly, then, it was time to research the Handbook and heatstroke. Full disclosure: I had heat exhaustion once, and it was miserable. I worked at Mystic Seaport on the Sabino, a tiny steamboat that legend has it James Taylor once worked on. While I was supposed to be a deckhand, my duties were a little more expansive -- each morning, I loaded off the previous day's ashes from the boiler, then loaded on 1/2 ton of coal (with a wheelbarrow! I briefly had superdeveloped shoulder muscles, you'd best believe) and wood to make a fire. The captain, a fellow named Stu who lived on his sailboat (in the East River during the year, but for this particular summer in the Mystic River), showed me how to pilot, and the engineer (whose preternatural sense for when an attractive lady walked by taught me more about how many adult men work than, well, being an adult woman has) showed me how to build the fire and shovel the coal.

One night, I managed to sweet talk the engineer into letting me shovel for the duration of a trip down the river. It was a hot summer day (kind of like today, really), and I think a wedding was going on. I wanted to show how tough I was, and I was all suited up in long pants and a workshirt, and I was pretending not to mind that it was 140 degrees in the engine room. And was pretending not to have had a big bowl of hot clam chowder for dinner. I made it down to the first big bend in the river, maybe 20 minutes out, and I was doing a pretty solid job until I started to puke. Oh man. I've been sick since, but it was a bad one. I spent the rest of the trip lying on the top deck, in front of the wheelhouse. (I don't think the wedding guests noticed. I hope. Sorry, guys!) Anyway, it was just a shuddery feeling, the kind of weakness you feel after you're starting to get better from the flu but before you're ready to get up from the couch, or after you get off the roller coaster but before you want to get on another one.

John picked me up from the dock and got me home (I threw up in his car) and into an old-style cold water bath. That's not me in the picture, and I don't actually know who it is, but the internet is great. Besides, that guy has a way better beard than I do. Regardless, he dosed me up with a bathtub, Epsom salt, and Gatorade. (The Epsom salt arrived again later that summer when I nearly impaled my hand on sharp wood, but that's all there is to that story. I'm just real klutzy.)

According the Handbook, John messed up big time (sorry, dude).

He didn't give me any stimulants. I'm not sure what stimulants they're suggesting in the Handbook, but I'm idly curious. Cocaine? (I'm not kidding.) Caffeine? Tobacco? All of them at once, in the craziest cold water bath and drug festival in my own personal history? One can only hope. This is really, though, an example of when old time medical knowledge fails completely. See, stimulants, it turns out, can actually increase dehydration, and can increase the incidence of heat exhaustion. Oops.

Want to know why else I'm thinking about old medical advice that can kill you? Jon Clinch's Kings of the Earth came out last week, and aside from being the single most spectacular book I've read maybe ever (to the point where I have to stop every few paragraphs lest I become totally overwhelmed by it), it also features a hell of a lot of old timey medicine, involving salt pork, snowbanks, and tourniquets made of feed sacks. Yes, Jon's my dad (and WONDERFUL!), but I'm telling you that Kings is the real thing. The LA Times loves it! Oprah loves it! And so do I.

it's really, really hot.

As in, 103 with a heat index of 113 in New York today. Compared to the chilly (relatively) temperatures in Vermont -- heck, I wore a sweatshirt out at dinner last week -- it's been a rough adjustment back to the city, and I could hardly bear to leave my apartment today.

It's not even sultry, steamy, Blanche DuBois hot. Or maybe I'm just not sultry enough. Regardless it's more of a sweaty, bags-under-eyes kind of hot. The kind of hot where we left our window unit running all night at 85 and it felt downright chilly compared to the rest of the house.

In honor of the heat, and in honor of my own return to the Handbook, I went back today to see how the scouts of 1911 would have coped. (Did I follow through with all these? No. Man, a scout in 1911 didn't have air conditioning, and despite my total stubbornness until this very summer, there is no way I'm going back.) I didn't get too far.

The Handbook starts out simple -- put green leaves inside your hat. In the days before the entire Patagonia catalog of wicking fabrics, this may have been valid. But this is also an artifact of the days when men wore hats, and when green leaves were (for everyone) easy to get one's hands on. For me, this was an interesting way of thinking, I guess, about who the Boy Scouts were intended for, at first, and about urbanization in general. See, in the 1920s, my maternal grandmother (and her family, my great-grandparents and various great-aunts and great-uncles) actually lived in the same neighborhood where I do these days. No trees. Also, very few Scouts -- honestly, the first scout troops were largely white (as in, African-American scouts were banned formally, until 1915 -- a topic for another day) and Protestant (as in, Catholics were banned until 1913, at which point a sort of separate-but-equal Catholic-only troop setup began, mirroring a similar Mormon-only troop structure a few years later).

Maybe it's not fair for me to think about green trees as being exclusionary, but that's where I am right now. Being up in Vermont and in way, way upstate NY until only yesterday has made me hyperaware, today, of just how remote my existence in Brooklyn is from the more rural scouting-ish lifestyle. It's the same issue that's present in a lot of educational equality discussions, the kind of inherent biases that some people think don't matter on standardized tests, things like that -- when you ask a city kid whether a slope of 90, 45, or 0 degrees would be better for cross-country skiing, you're putting that kid at a disadvantage, just by the very nature of your assumption that this city kid knows what these things are and how to deal with them. Am I calling the Boy Scouts inappropriately rural? Not by half. It would be like calling Neighborhood Watch too neighborhood-centric. Or like calling out the Hells Angels for a reluctance to pursue pony rides. It's the nature of the organization. But still, any organization will be easier for some people to join than for others, and we need to be aware of that.

Anyway. I'm disjointed, but it's hot. I'm going to eat me some ice cream, and we'll pick up this thread tomorrow. It's going to be 102 in Brooklyn, buddy, and I'll have a whole lot of time indoors.

I got weirdly stubborn about this

See, first I thought I'd go on a little self-imposed hiatus at the end of the school year while things were getting crazy.

Then, I thought that maybe I'd wait to see if anyone asked me what had happened to this site. But it didn't count when John asked. Or when my parents asked. Or when people I know in real life who read this asked. (Who did this leave? I have no idea. I mean, I have an idea, in that there are like 6 billion people I don't know, but well, you get the point.) nd then that leads to really awkward conversations, like at brunch with a college friend a few weeks ago when she asked when I was going to start writing this again, and I said "when someone asks me what happened to it." "I'm asking." Um. Oh. Is this me telling my friends that they don't count? I have no idea. But it seems kind of jerkish, right?

Anyhow. It's July, school's been out for a month (almost), and I'm running out of excuses. I'm returning to Brooklyn on July 5, and I'm ready for action.

I'm still here, I promise

And I actually have no excuse for not updating. Except that I'm kind of a jerk.

I just got home from dinner with John after seeing Oceans in the East Village. And while I'm exhausted (it's been a long, long, allergy-ridden week, and one in which Charlie the cat broke his leg again), I figured I ought to check in, at least.

While I was an utter failure (or at least a not-insignificant failure) as an oceanographer, seeing stuff like the Oceans footage reminds me why I tried to do it in the first place (well, part of why, at least). Man, I was a third-rate scientist but the ocean is an almost-religious experience for me, and seeing that kind of film, it's like my heart is getting torn from my chest. The almost mechanical-looking mackerel bait balls, the celebratory sea nettles , oh man oh man oh man. I seriously can't take it. I get teary-eyed, just about. (I actually find myself thinking things like "wow, I would love to be a jellyfish." This is an insane-person thought.)

Also, I'm a big old wimp and had to actually leave the room during the (brief) section addressing water pollution but really, are we surprised?

Eww, I have gross legs

You may not know this. If we haven't met, you have no way of knowing this. And if we have met, you're unlikely to have noticed. But I have superdisgusting legs. Fortunately, these superdisgusting legs are also our visual aid for tonight. Yay.

Since my mid-teens, I've had icky varicose veins on my calves. They are not subtle, not by any means -- they're so pronounced that a young gentleman at the gym during my college years may in fact have once asked me if I would tell him more about the horrible accident that had so dramatically mangled me. He may specifically have inquired if it involved an animal bite. (I don't dwell on past wrongs, not me.)

Regardless, I have gross, veiny legs. I will never be Tina Turner. However, the Handbook offers tips for a modern girl on the go. Sort of. See, for the First Aid badge (that's me, always bringing it back!), I need to explain how to treat severely ruptured varicose veins.

Wait.

Ruptured? With severe hemorrhage?

(That pause was just me going to the doctor in a panic.)

(Actually, it wasn't. After my grandmother's examining my leg and asking "What is that," I did once go to the doctor. He told me to wear support hose, which I coudln't bear to purchase, and therefore I totally ignored his advice. Oops.)

Now, my icky legs just look icky -- they don't hurt. (Also, it's surprisingly hard to photograph your own leg. So you know.) But apparently, varicose veins can become a big problem when they rupture. Leading up to it, though, they tend to bulge and turn reddish or purplish, which seems like the sort of thing that would already be a problem. So, you know.

By all reports (and I'm not willing to crack open my own legs to test it), the main strategy for a bleeding varicose vein is the standard elevation-and-pressure -- keeping the bleeding extremity above the heart and applying firm pressure above the wound (hence, I suppose, my deeply-refused compression hose).

Mission? Accomplished!

Got an idea?

Any thoughts on how one might demonstrate ladder-based rescue techniques in an apartment that is tiny by US standards, moderate by NYC standards, and quite reasonable by most-of-the-world standards? (I'm in a 4-room, 4th floor walk-up, and no, I am not going to carry anyone or anything up and down the fire escape. That's just insane, dudes.)

Things that make me mad

When I lost on Jeopardy, I was angry, but I wasn't mad. (Okay, fine. I wasn't angry, either. But I'm trying to make a charming connection to my return to the First Aid badge, so bear with me here.)

Anyway. I wasn't mad because I have never been bitten by a mad dog. Out of concern for the safety of one and all, though, the Handbook's First Aid badge requires understanding how to treat for just such a thing. And so, off we go!

Now, this component of the badge comes as something of a surprise to me. See, I knew that Louis Pasteur had developed a rabies vaccine in the 1880s, and so I saw treating a mad dog bite as kind of an irrelevant thing. Then again, I just wasn't thinking hard enough -- as anyone who's ever read To Kill a Mockingbird knows, rabid dogs were plenty scary in the 1930s.

The Handbook deals with mad dogs in one way and one way only: killing them. This makes any actual mad dog-related demonstration difficult, since I am not a horrible human being, and since most US rabies cases nowadays are found in wild animals. I considered, briefly, hoping Charlie the cat would bite at me (look at those choppers! ps, he posed for this while purring, because I was also holding him up to gaze at pigeons outside the window), but even that seemed ineffective. But alas, he wasn't feeling too bitey. So instead, I was unable to engage in the Handbook's primary anti-rabid-dog methods, which consist of waggling a handkerchief at a charging dog, matador-style, in order to distract him, then kicking him in the chin. (Alternate methods include wrapping a coat around your arm, presenting that arm to be bit, then either choking the dog with your remaining arm or clubbing him over the head. Please don't be angry with me for this. I am not urging you to do this to your pet, or to your neighbor's pet, or to any actual dogs. Ever. Really.)

Once you've subdued the mad dog, of course, there's still the first aid component: holy crap, you've been bitten by a mad dog! You have rabies! YOU ARE GOING TO DIE!

Never fear. Well, fear in 1911. But don't fear now. In the pre-rabies treatment days, you had a few options. Some included the 18th-century method of swigging a drink of liverwort, pepper, and cold milk followed by an icy bath, or the even older method of drying the dog's heart and eating it. Don't do this. Please don't. It will be a terrible idea.

(If you have gotten here via things like "eat a dog's heart," leave, you sick, sick individual.)

In real life, if you get bitten, all you really need to do is get to some soap and water, then get yourself to the doctor immmmmmmmediately. (If you can, by the way, let animal control know who bit you so they can quarantine the critter for a couple weeks.) Thorough washing will minimize viral transmission, so give yourself a solid 5 minutes with plenty of soap. (Since rabies is viral rather than bacterial, antibacterial soap will do nothing for you -- this is a huge pet peeve of mine.) Regardless, rush to the doctor for some post-exposure prophylaxis, a series of shots over the course of 6 weeks or so. It's supereffective, and since its introduction rabies deaths in the US have dropped to only a couple per year. Go team!

Jeopardy, part 2

For more info, see yesterday's post.

When we left, um, me, I'd just gotten a phone call to film a Jeopardy episode. Awesome. John, my best friend Wendy (she of the swimming posts), and I booked tickets out to LA, then I had to get to studying. See, a lot of people think that, if ou're going to be on Jeopardy, you get some kind of list of potential topics. Not so! I tried to think of what I know the least about -- geography, presidential cabinets, sitcoms, and the academy awards, more or less. I made absurdly elaborate flash cards (check out Truman!), which I lugged about with me for weeks on end but hardly actually looked at. (Life advice if you want to study geography, do not waste your time making a flash card for every country in the world, because that is an insane waste of time and you will spend days on end on it and still stall out around San Marino or so. Not that I'd know from personal experience or anything.)

I also started actually watching Jeopardy. Now, this is kind of embarrassing, but I have never been a huge Jeopardy watcher. I know a lot of big fans, but it's not a part of my day-to-day schedule. Clearly, this wasn't going to help me. On the advice of Arthur Phillips (friend of my dad's, Jeopardy champ, and author of "The Egyptologist," one of my favorite books), I watched absolutely religiously. John kept score (enormously strictly -- deducting points when I didn't answer in the form of a question, all that), and things improved dramatically and quickly. When I first started playing at home (in early November), I was scoring about $18,000 per night (ignoring betting). By January, I was reliably hitting $25,000 or so, not actually because I got smarter but because I learned to quit guessing. I stopped prefacing answers with "I'm gonna say . . . ," and, most of all, I kept my big mouth shut when I had no idea. (Apparently, I made the same stupid faces I wound up making on the show, but that's much more my day-to-day life than anything else!)

By the time we got to LA, I was more dreading my taping than anything else. We stayed in the Jeopardy-recommended hotel, and I entertained myself in the rainy LA weather (it rains in LA? who knew?) by trying to guess which other hotel guests were Jeopardy contestants. I was wrong most of the time, but figured it out the morning of the taping. I took the bus over to the Sony studios with a dozen or so other future Jeopardy players, and I remember talking a lot with Nancy from Las Vegas (who was on the day before me) and Sarah from Chicago (who'll be on on Friday). I brought clothes for three days, since they tape five shows per day, but I was secretly betting on being out in one. No one who's ever met me would say I'm over the top in the self-esteem department. (Alternately, I'm realistic.)

Now. When we finally reached the studio and got set up, things got more fun. There was paperwork, sure, but it was augmented by donuts (I had several), smoothies (I had one), and fruit (which I ignored, more or less, in favor of donuts and smoothies). Maggie reappeared, which delighted me, and she and the other casting staff went over our stories. (I'd submitted six or so potential anecdotes, which they'd narrowed down to three -- this site, my time in college working on the steamboat at Mystic Seaport, and a Jeopardy-related story about the first time I met my future father-in-law. We had to rehearse delivering whatever of our stories the casting crew had liked, and then they chose one or two to pass along to Alex.

(Makeup happened around this time, too. Somehow, I managed to be the last through the makeup area, and I have absolutely no idea what they did to me. It was like a magical, movie-style transformation montage. The makeup artist told me that it was just emphasizing good areas and minimizing bad areas and that even a trained monkey could do it, but this is totally unacceptable self-deprecation. So there.)

Post-makeup, we had a few minutes to try out the buzzers and generally get a feel for the set. First things first. See, I have solid spatial perception, but the stage was totally not oriented the way it felt like it should be. I sort of imagined the audience being more behind Alex than they were, and the contestants standing at an oblique angle to the audience. Not so! This, oddly, threw me more than anything else the entire time. Though I also had some big-time problems with the buzzer. I didn't play video games as a child and it showed, though Dave from Mississippi was a magical, magical buzzer god. I think that, in the entire buzzer-practice round, I managed to ring in once, then immediately forget the correct answer. I have a feeling that my future competitors saw me as an easy pushover, and I spent the rest of the morning praying not to go up against Dave.

Finally, it was time for the audience to come in. Maggie re-emerged and went over basic rules. We were allowed to sit near our families, but not among them, and we weren't allowed to make eye contact or communicate in any way. I tried to follow this one, but let me tell you, it's hard. It's like being told not to think of an elephant. Or not to think of Alex Trebek. Exactly. (This was even harder because John and Wendy arrived with my high school buddy Jordan, who is a Big Deal out in LA, and whom I hadn't seen for something like 10 years. Plus, they were going to meet each other at the studio, sight-unseen. I desperately wanted to know that they'd found each other, which they somehow had with almost no trouble. Go my friends!) At some point during the morning, Brandon from Augusta (who would later beat me!) and I had a long discussion of Final Jeopardy betting strategies, which was probably a bad move on my part. Oops. I need to be a tougher competitor. (Please note! Important! I am not not not saying Brandon cheated, or that I gave away my strategy! My winning or losing was 100% my own fault, and I own it entirely.)

I played in the fourth game of the day, after a morning of watching three games and a lunch in the studio commissary. Other people on the show maintain that we ate at a table next to Adam Sandler, but I have no way of confirming this because I wouldn't recognize the man if he were to sit down next to me and say "hi Emily. I'm Adam Sandler." Actually, that might do it. Regardless. (You are probably, by now, getting the sense that my Jeopardy experience was heavily food-based. This is true.)

After lunch, it was my game. Despite everything I'd hoped for, I was up against Dave from Mississippi, the magical buzzer-hero, and Brandon from Augusta. The production crew wired us up with microphones (I kept trying to walk away with mine, which resulted in awkward pulling on the front of my sweater) and used a system of risers behind the podiums (podia?) to make us all roughly the same height -- in real life, I'm considerably shorter than Dave. Johnny Gilbert, the classic Jeopardy announcer, read our names, and we were off!

The first round was a complete fever dream for me -- I was pretty satisfied with the botany and time zone categories, though the army base and baseball categories left me bewildered. Above all, though, I was still having buzzer problems. (If you see the episode, you'll see me unknowingly doing that awful thing contestants do when they shake their hands as if to demonstrate to the world "see? see? I'm totally buzzing right now." I will never again judge someone for that.)

The break between single and double jeopardy felt like it took about a second and a half, but double Jeopardy was enormously better. I decided that I had to stop watching the scoreboard, and after a few questions had gone by I suddenly got the hang of buzzing in. I had some kind of weird, two-handed-two-thumbed buzzing strategy that looks superungainly on tv, but it worked surprisingly well. Only when I got my first Daily Double (a question about Robert Louis Stevenson, the answer to which I knew thanks to junior high school English) did I realize that I had never thought at all about betting strategies. I drew a number at least a thousand above the point value of the question and hoped for the best. Success! (I was actually feeling really good about the South Seas literature category, because there were questions about Mutiny on the Bounty and Typee, both of which I love.)

I got another Daily Double later in the same round. I'm bewildered by the idea, referenced elsewhere on the net, of "hunting" for a DD -- I sort of thought they were randomly assigned, and I'm not sure how one might hunt for something randomly placed. Regardless. This one was in a category about fashion, which made me draw in my breath a little bit. Only since moving to NY, and therefore no longer having a car, have I stopped buying most of my clothes at Target, and I'm still pretty much dressed via H&M and Old Navy. (Maybe I'm having a little bit of a hard time getting the hang of adult costuming . . . .) Regardless, the question had something to do with Armani and fashion shows, and it was a nightmarish moment -- I'd just bet $3000 on something and, all of a sudden, out of my mouth, comes "you think I should know that?" Oh God. On national television. Mortification ensued, while I was also thinking "Rome? Venice? Siena? Florence? Is Tuscany a city? Tuscany is probably not a city. Really? Tuscany? Sicily isn't a city either." And then, oh you will not believe me, I thought about going to the mall in high school and seeing some semi-fashionable store with a big poster in its window listing "New York. Paris. Milan." Milan! Thank heavens.

The big finale was, of course, Final Jeopardy. I saw the category: the animal kingdom. I am a science teacher with a master's in oceanography. This is a piece of cake! Plus, I'd gotten all the other FJ's correct that day, which was encouraging. Only at the betting did I actually look at the scores -- holy crap. I just won on Jeopardy.

Well, almost.

I bet so that, if Brandon had bet every dollar he had, I'd've won by $1. Was this a good idea? I'm still not sure. In my head, I think I'd do the same thing again. After all, I figured there were 4 possible outcomes: we both got it right, I got it right and he got it wrong, I got it wrong and he got it right, and we both got it wrong. In either of the first two situations, my sickeningly enormous (my first grad assistantship paid only marginally more than my FJ bet!) would give me the win. In the third situation, I'd be pretty much guaranteed a loss, but the fourth situation was a wildcard. Here's the motive: I decided that the only thing I could control was what I got right. By betting the way I did, I had a lock on the win as long as I answered the question correctly -- I would only lose under my own power. Ultimately, things backfired, and I lost because we both got it wrong and he bet way, way less than I did, but still, I can only express so much regret. Sure, if I'd bet a big fat 0 I'd be a Jeopardy champion right now, but in the moment, there was no way to know it. I took an aggressive route, but I played to win it, not to let someone else make that choice for me.

Right afterwards, I was pretty bummed -- I saw Dave later in the hotel, though, and he had great words of advice for me: "Why are you so upset? I was just on Jeopardy, so how bad can it be?" True words, sir.

One final thought: I've been so grateful to my family (who has to be nice to me) and my friends (who are my friends because they're so nice). It's part of the social contract, I guess -- if your cousin or coworker or whatever is on a national TV show, you have to call them brilliant and good-looking and say they were totally robbed in their loss. Thanks, guys. You're awesome.

Other things online have been kind of weird, though. Some sites (the official Jeopardy boards at Sony) were pleasantly serious-minded, and I've been really enjoying reading them. Others, though (I'm looking at you, Television Without Pity!) are pretty harsh -- it's making me a little self-conscious. (This is probably a good reminder that the anonymity of the internet can bite me in the butt. That and that I should never, ever make nasty comments about people on non-fictional TV shows again.) There, and via the hilarious, hilarious twitter search of Jeopardy-related posts from last night, I've learned that a lot of people thought I came off cocky, or even that my hemming and hawing during my second DD was meant to taunt my opponents (what kind of evil genius do they thing I am?) and that I was totally trying to get Alex Trebek to make out with me or something. (Do people say this about male contestants who make jokes, too? If not, which I think is probably the case, this seems both kind of sexist and also a kind of heteronormative.) Also, reactions to me seemed very split along gender lines, which I feel a little weird about, too. That's a thought for another day, though, I reckon.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaand it's over!

Phew. Jeopardy.

My episode just aired, and now I'm decompressing a little bit. Since I'm now allowed to talk about it, here's the full story:

I tried out for the show a long time ago, in January of 2009. I signed up for the online test as kind of a lark, since I'm actually not a huge game show watcher of any sort. (Except for Project Runway. That's just awesome.) Anyway, the online test was fast and furious, and I remember nothing at all about it except that one of the answers was Cate Blanchett, which I somehow guessed despite having never actually seen Cate Blanchett in any movie ever. Regardless, I was pretty sure that that was going to be the end of things, and it seemed like it was.

But it wasn't! Clearly. I got the call to go to a live audition in New York last June, the day after my last day of work at my favorite school ever (far, far away in New Jersey). I took the train in and found myself in a hotel basement (creepy), where the Jeopardy contestant coordinator Maggie (my best friend in my head) took a Polaroid (they still make Polaroids?) and sent me to sit with the rest of the contestants, who were overwhelmingly male and 20 years older than me. A lot of them had tried out a lot of times, which I found really intimidating, though I'm not sure why. Also, around this point I noticed that the dress I was wearing had a GIANT hole in it, which I tried to convince myself was a design feature. It was clearly not a design feature.

Anyway, we all were ushered into a conference room, where we took a paper-and-pencil test, which pretty much consisted of watching a PowerPoint. There was a question about English royal succession and a question about Twilight. I have no idea. After that, a live-round, in which we used the buzzers, got interviewed (I think I said something about superheroes), and answered more questions (I got a whole slew of them about various alcoholic beverages and knew none of the correct answers). I left feeling pretty overwhelmed and underprepared, then didn't think about Jeopardy again for months.

In the intervening little while, I moved to New York, got a new job, quit my new job, got a new new job, and so on and so forth. So it was something of a surprise when, in November, I got another call from Maggie (hi, Maggie!) asking me to come out to LA to tape an episode. I actually said no the first time -- the scheduling didn't fit. Apparently, no one says no to Jeopardy. It's like refusing a favor to the mob -- you just don't. They were flexible, though, and we finally scheduled for a filming date right after MLK day in January. (Conveniently enough, on my mom's birthday!)

***

Phooey! I was hoping to finish updating this pre-school, but that's not going to happen. Stay tuned for more later!

In case you didn't know

I'm going to be on Jeopardy tomorrow. Yeah. Jeopardy.

Zoo zoo zoo

Yesterday, I visited the zoo. See, I've been reading "The Lost City of Z" (like I mentioned a couple days ago), and all the talk about snakebite convinced me that now is the best possible time to pursue the, well, snakebite treatment portion of the First Aid badge. And where better to learn about snakes than at the zoo?

Despite last summer's exploration of Prospect Park, I'd never visited the Prospect Park Zoo, which was very much intentional -- I'm a big wuss, and I reliably find myself getting depressed at the zoo. It's the same reason I can't have pets who need to stay in cages or tanks, or that the NY ASPCA's subway ads bum me out for the day. While I understand intellectually that zoos have a lot of merits -- public awareness, preservation/breeding programs, things like that -- I find it uncomfortable in the moment. The thing the PPZ had going for it, oddly, was its smallness -- they didn't have big, big animals with ranges of hundreds of miles. Most of the critters were pretty small, and that helps at least a little. (I have mixed feelings about the two forlorn sea lions there, but we'll take a pass on that for the time being.) Also, they have what may well be my new favorite animal, the Pallas's Cat.

Now, I went to the zoo largely to investigate what types of snakes they might have, but the answer was, sadly, very few. I only saw a corn snake (no photography in the reptile house!), and everything I learned about it is totally irrelevant to the First Aid badge -- the corn snake is a constrictor which, while terrifying, means it's not so likely to be a biter. Zoo trip? Fun but irrelevant. Phooey.

Now, it's time to return to my total not-research in "The Lost City," which has mostly featured the 1920s explorer Percy Fawcett loading up his boats and packs with dozens of different antivenom serums and informing aspiring explorers that a snakebite is dangerous only if it turns blue and doesn't bleed. Sadly, this isn't actually true -- some bites (from coral snakes, for example) don't lead to major symptoms for hours and hours. I would bet money, also, that the Fawcett expedition -- and any expeditions launched using the 1911 Handbook -- might suggest sucking venom from a wound. Not so, says my Red Cross instructor! First, ew. Second, you won't necessarily get out most of the venom anyway.

So what do you do for snakebite? Nothing too surprising, it turns out. Splint the bitten limb (but not too tightly), wash the area well, and keep it below the heart (which makes sense, after all). Some folks might steer you towards use of a Sawyer Extractor (which looks kind of like the lease useful syringe ever), but that appears to be optional. Really, this is pretty much it, and everyone -- everyone! -- I've spoken to or dealt with says one thing and one thing only: call for help. Really. Call right away.

I finished all this, though, and I wasn't really feeling satisfied. Whether calling for help is the thing to do or not, seems to run counter to everything the Handbook cares about -- being competent in the woods, away from home. Fortunately, the internet is an excellent and reliable source for information about how to ignore medical advice. So I leave you with something you probably should not actually do if you're bitten by a snake: pressure immobilization. This sounds fancy, but it's really just wrapping the bitten limb snugly (but not so snugly as to restrict bloodflow) with a series of bandages before splinting it. This restricts the movement of the venom through the bloodstream, which has the side effect of loading up the near-bite area chock full of venom and maximizing damage there, but this is (often) a worst case scenario kind of treatment. So let's not do it unless we have to, okay?

Cooking, etc.

So I built and lit a fire, etc. I'd forgotten a long time ago how much work it is to wake up, bundle up, get a fire built and breakfast cooking, and all that. (I think even my more recent camping trips were of the granola-bar-for-breakfast kind, and it may well be that I haven't cooked breakfast over a fire since I was in the Brownies and my dad came along on a father-daughter campout.) Regardless, after some initial false starts we got a fire a'cooking, and the eggs weren't far behind.

My worries about the previous day's snow were largely unfounded, though I hadn't anticipated one technological problem: the Morningstar veggie bacon does not want to get cooked over a fire. Or cooked over any kind of heat. I'm a faux-bacon enthusiast (really), and the difference between the Smart Bacon I usually use and this stuff is the difference between night and a disgusting, awful day made out of charred, oddly colored cardboard. Really, it was pretty gross. This is the kind of problem them Handbook didn't really set out to address, of course (there is no provision for making mock bacon instead of the real stuff), so I'm still going to say it counts. Besides, it looks pretty, right?

(PS: I'm a big wimp, so given the fact that THERE WAS SNOW ON THE GROUND, OKAY GUYS?, I ate my tasty tasty breakfast indoors. I am so not Eagle Scout material.)

I apologize for the delay in posting, by the way. It's been a busy few days, returning to New York and heading to relatives' for the Seder. Additionally, I've just started reading David Grann's "The Lost City of Z," which is pretty much an H. Rider Haggard book in real life, and it is all I want to think about. Tomorrow, partially inspired by that, I have a field trip planned to investigate a very particular type of field surgery. Be prepared.

To build a fire . . .

I remember reading "To Build a Fire" in 7th grade English. Well, sort of in 7th grade English. I sat next to the window, and there was a big stack of books on the windowsill. I think we were actually doing some kind of vocabulary exercises, and I read a lot of short stories under my desk.

(Sorry, Mrs. Nogami.)

Regardless. I'm in Vermont, and tomorrow morning I'm going to be doing part 1 of the Cooking badge -- preparing bacon and eggs, in the open and without a standard kitchen. (I will assume this means I can still use things like knives, plates, etc., because otherwise things seem kind of absurd, and because the Handbook makes reference to cooking over a griddle as an acceptable practice.) For the record, I'll be making veggie bacon.

It's probably in the 30s or 40s here today, so maybe the picture makes things look a little snowier than they actually are. Still, there was a certain amount of brushing snow off of things, and tomorrow I have a certain amount of (probably groundless) concern about snowmelt extinguishing my fire. I've got a lot of dry twigs set up there, though, and a few handfulls of pine needles, so it shoudl all work out. I'll let you know tomorrow, after my delicious breakfast.

(PS: the Handbook also offers me the option to make hunter's stew (what on Earth is this? Must I actually be a hunter? I can't tell), fish, fowl, or game, as well as hoe-cakes, pancakes, or hard tack. I am passing on these, both as a vegetarian and, in the case specifically of the hard tack, as someone with no aspirations of being a quartermaster for a 19th-century whaler.)

There is no better day for this post

Before I begin, I have to say that the House's health care vote could hardly have made me happier. Having spent a large portion of childhood and adolescence on the wrong side of hard-to-insure, and having parents who've been self-employed in some capacity for the majority of their working lives, I've taken great umbrage throughout the debate at the idea that lack of health care is only an issue for the lazy and for mythical welfare queens (haven't we been done with that stereotype since like 1994?). Finally. While I know the new plan isn't perfect (what is?), the acknowledgment that 1) the protection of the people should be a primary role of government and 2) hardworking people can still be screwed over by the insurance system gives me the happiest grin this side of a icanhascheezburger. And believe me, I love a lolcat.

Now. I spent yesterday completing a major badge requirement for first aid. See? See? The promise of cheaper, more accessible health care is not making me abandon my commitment to being able to actually respond to a medical emergency. So there. (Sorry. I shouldn't check in with comments at the NY Times website while writing this.) Anyhow. As I was saying. I spent yesterday obtaining my Red Cross first aid certification.

In general, I was surprised with the brevity of the training program, though of course something is better than nothing. The real problem for me, at the training, is that I'm a wimp. I had a hard time looking at the images of amputations, objects embedded in eyeballs, that kind of thing, in the training manuals. For me, all this is straight-up nightmare fuel, though of course there's the (valid) argument that it's better to experience seeing pictures of it before I find myself walking down the street and coming upon someone whose internal organs have become external. (Despite Good Samaritan laws, I'm still not sure if I'd be able to handle that. Honestly, though, could you?) I know that this isn't a big deal for a lot of people -- at least, popular movies (of the sort I don't watch) would suggest it isn't. But still, I had a real problem with it.

There were thirteen of us in the class, and Antoine, our chipper instructor, walked us through bandaging each others' arms and legs with the least possible thought of actual gore. We spent a large portion of the morning improvising splints and making slings out of strips of gauze which, despite the certain Civil War field hospital air to it, I really enjoyed and was actually quite good at. (Witness John's bandaged arm for the show-and-tell portion of our program. They -- justifiably -- wouldn't let me take pictures at the actual training. Please note, I did not actually injure John's arm in order to wrap this bandage. I'm willing to sacrifice a certain amount of verisimilitude.)

My partner, an older gentleman taking the class in order to become a Red Cross instructor, supplied a counterpoint to Antoine's good nature. He'd done all the classes before, but he had no interest in any amount of sugar-coating. When the first-aid handbook suggested calling for EMT services, each time he'd lean over and ask me "what if we have a 9-11 situation and the infrastructure collapses?" I didn't have an answer. For a minute, I thought he was just paranoid. On the way home on the train, though, a tourist couple asked for directions to the World Trade Center site. Maybe he had a point.

One final thought, and this has more to do with my adjustment to New York than with anything actually first aid based. I'm interested, more and more, with the notion of "the country" here. I still get confused when I hear "the country" applied to places like Long Island, northern New Jersey, and all of Westchester, and a woman in my class made me think about this time and again. She explained that she was taking the class because she has a country house and, when she's there, she's scared to be so far from the hospital. How far, someone asked? Fifteen minutes by car.

I'll leave you with that one.

Just in case you know . . .

Last summer, I was pursuing the bee farming badge when I learned that honey can (allegedly) help combat seasonal allergies. As someone with dramatically (and occasionally hilariously) bad seasonal allergies -- like, I got sent home from school all the time as a kid -- I was pretty psyched. But as someone who prefers to use medical strategies that are actually proven to work, I was doubtful.

Nevertheless, I am also a person who likes to eat things that are delicious. Who isn't? So last night, I went out and bought myself some local honey (I've used up my stuff from last summer already!). On the train home, I noticed something, though. My new 1 lb jar of honey had broken inside my purse. The bee farming badge not only did not prepare me for this, not even a little.

Anyone got any tips for cleaning a pound of honey off of a very lovely camel colored leather purse?

Watch me go from "irritating" to "intolerable"

I read my first-ever anything by Proust this weekend.

Holy crap.

On the off-chance y'all can help me, does anyone have a preferred translator for "Swann's Way?"

Sylvester

I did nothing this weekend. So, so much nothing. It's in preparation for spring break, see. I need to relax in order to be able to actually, thoroughly relax. My doing nothing consisted of making two more batches of hummus, which means I am, at this point, made of nearly 75% chick pea, and of reading a whole hell of a lot of books I don't like much, then posting vitriolic reviews of them over at goodreads. Everyone needs a hobby.

Actually, I did one thing: practiced a new lifesaving technique. For the First aid badge, I need to know not only the Schaefer method of resuscitation (with which, if you'll remember, I nearly killed John in October), but also the Sylvester method. Which does not involve being an animated cat, so you know.

Sylvester's method, it seems, has a lot in common with the version you see a lot in cartoons -- setting up the victim, then working his arms like a pump while he spits out water. In this case, of course, the patient needs to be flat on his back, and some materials instruct you to bind his tongue with elastic to keep him from swallowing it. (I tried this. It hurt more than I expected and got me all spitty, plus looked creepy. Based on all three of these criteria, I would advise you not to bother with the tongue-binding portion.)

Anyway. Once your victim (well, the victim. Presumably, you are not the one who got him there) is sprawled flat-out, there's a certain amount of flipping his arms above his head to make him inhale, followed by flopping them back down for an exhalation. It sort of works, though John (who is, once again, an extraordinarily good sport) found it vastly inferior to the flat-out chest-thumping of Schaefer. It appears that Sylvester (sometimes spelled Silvester, in case you wondered) is a less-vigorous (well, yes) lifesaving method, for when you need less total resuscitation power. Maybe your victim is less-dead, or maybe he's more fragile, I'm not sure.

One week to my first aid class!

Danger!

As you guys know (I think), I'm a teacher. And while I'm justifiably coy about the name and location of my school, I take it enormously seriously. Not humorlessly. Just seriously.

This is what's pushed me towards my next badge: first aid. Once again, I'll be coy, but the subject I teach occasionally requires using sharp or hot tools and there's the potential for injury, no matter how careful I am (or how careful my students are). This isn't an issue of negligence, or of lack of safety precautions, anything like that. We wear gloves, goggles, masks, whatever's necessary. I've never had a serious injury in my classes, though at some of the schools I've taught in, I've broken up some fights. But you never know what's going to happen, and that's why I think it's time for me to, um, be prepared.

The more I've thought about it, the more convinced I've become that my next project ought to be the first aid badge. I just signed up for a Red Cross course, and in 2 weeks I will be first aid trained. Who thought the Handbook project would make me better at my job?

(Incidentally. Are other people as troubled as I am by the arrival of a movie starring the guy from Twilight that uses Sept. 11 as a twist ending? It probably says more about the age of the movie's likely audience -- for them, the WTC hardly existed except as something fated to fall -- but still.)

2010 business

Last night, I conducted an interview with a business student at a fancy school. He's asked to remain anonymous, so I will call him BSaaFS for obvious reasons. Also, I conducted this interview at a birthday party at a bar, so my notes are mostly in the form of text messages to myself. My friend Emily, girlfriend of BSaaFS, tells me that a large part of business school appears to be discussing how great business is while drinking, so I tell myself that the questionable state of my notes adds to the verisimilitude of the b-school experience.

While I took the advice of the 1911 Farmer's Business Handbook as justifying my stingy personal financial policy, and maybe even as being a little bit timeless, our future captain of industry, BSaaFS, told me differently. And I believe him, because he is way, way more qualified than I am. (Please bear in mind, I like BSaaFS very much, but that he is, as far as I can tell, extremely good at what he does, and extremely successful. He's getting flown around the world left and right, and is shaping up to be a Big Deal. I have a feeling some of what I cover here is gonna be an Omar Little-style "all in the game" sort of thing, in which we recall that BSaaFS is a delightful person but that his job is somewhat different from yours and mine.)

Upon hearing (and having read) what the Farmer's Business Handbook, our business student responded with what I might call a derisive snort. On the subject of keeping an inventory that is accurate to maintain your own records, he commented "if anything, business today is defined by keeping an inaccurate inventory -- at least for your investors. Financial success often has a lot to do with obfuscation." Yipes. More, please? Because this doesn't sound good. He clarified for me: he's not talking about companies lying to their investors, or even abut companies not being aware of their actual worth, but is specifically addressing the idea that looking profitable is often more important (to investors and to customers) than actually being profitable.

We continued in this vein for a little bit, and ultimately got along to the real core of the issue: BSaaFS is firmly in the camp of the more profitable corporations of the past few decades: that spinning the perfecption of your company is the key, and that the rest will follow. He calls it a culture of "branding and perception" (clearly, he and I are both way fun to have at a party).

Your thoughts? How have we progresses (or not) in the past 99 years? I'm not really sure where to go with this. Sadly (or fortunately) my working life is totally removed from anything of this nature, and I'm something of a babe in the woods when it comes to the inner workings of actual corporations. What am I missing? Tell me more.

Thanks, BSaaFS. You're the best!

***

Oops! I forgot! I promised a friend to post my hummus recipe. I've made 4 batches so far this week.

Ingredients:
1 16 oz can of chickpeas (not drained)
4 Tbsp lemon juice
1-2 Tbsp tahini
2 cloves minced garlic
1/2 tsp kosher salt
2 Tbsp olive oil
2 Tbsp parsley

Drain the chickpeas, reserving 1/4 cup of the liquid. Combine the drained chickpeas, the reserved liquid, and everything else in a food processor. Blend the heck out of it. Done!

1911 business

So, for the business badge, I need to explain the basics of sales. And while I considered a lemonade stand, a particularly gross encounter with a drunk dude on the train the other night has reminded me, once again, that I really don't like a lot of strangers. (Also, I'm not clear that I won't get arrested for selling things on the street. So there's that.)

I did, however, manage to turn up a copy of the Farmer's Business Handbook (Isaac Phillips Roberts, 1911), which advises me that it will rectify the gaps in my financial knowledge, which, if I've learned it at school, is "about as workable on a farm as an ox-cart would be on a railway." Let's have at it. (Bear in mind, please, that I went with the more agriculturally-oriented financial book rather than something robber baron-y because of its relevance to the overall tone of the Handbook. As I've said before, the 1911 Handbook was by no means meant for a city boy -- it's meant for the kind of young man who has access to fields in which to grow corn, poultry to raise, and cows to milk.)

Regardless, in 1911, the farmer for whom the "Business Handbook" was meant was hardly making investments, and is warned heartily against credit. He is advised to keep a careful inventory and to value his good honestly ("it is bad to deceive one's neighbor, but infintely more harmful to deceive oneself"). He shouldn't rush to buy property, but ought to consider renting, just like his urban neighbors might, until he's raised some money and, ideally, property values have declined.

There's a simple guide to keeping a 2 column'd paper ledger, with one side for income and one for expenses, and with the option of adding a daybook to keep track of hours worked by field laborers (who, in the days before much in the way of labor laws, seem subjected to some pretty long days). We're encouraged to assign the bookkeeping tasks around the farm to a child as a training device. The only real issue here appears to be the demise of the barter system -- if we're going to be keeping track of things down to the half-cent, it's important to be clear on exactly how many eggs we're swapping for ears of corn, etc. The handbook acknowledges that this is difficult, and I'm sort of interested in the effect an adoption of more careful bookkeeping on this kind of trading around the farms. Sadly, I'm at something of a loss about where to go for more info.

Thinking of shifting priorities around the farm, there's also a lot of emphasis on eliminating sources of error when it comes to animals. Dairy pails are to all have the same weight, and we are advised to measure each cow's food each day. (The sample milk report ledge includes a truly spectacular list of cow names, including, in the M's alone, Mabel, Madge, May, Meda, and Monda, as well as Tilda, Vina, and Belva. I'm not sure who the lowest-producing cow is, but we are reminded harshly to discard her!)

My particular favorite point in the book, though, is a surprisingly forward-thinking bit, advising the farmer to be sure that his wife understands the family's finances. This is put forth not just because the farmer ought to keep his wife on a tight leash, but because, Mr. Roberts recommends, the family can now work together, sharing in both profits and losses. I'm pleased to see this, nine years prior to the 19th amendment. At the end of the book, we see a sample family meeting in which the daughter, Mary, agrees to hold off on buying a new dress for the summer, and Bud, the baby of the family, is contributing money from his berry patch.

Anyway. Ignoring my book report, here's the deal: in 1911, we're living cheaply. All family members contribute, and we keep strict records. Our main knowledge of when to buy or to sell is based, simply, on our own inventory -- what takes place off our farm or in another city is almost irrelevant. We keep our debts low and avoid taking out a mortgage unless we can put down most of the money. Not bad, overall.

(As a final note, the farmer's handbook is maxim-heavy, advising us that "a man always walks more erect when his heart beats against a roll of Uncle Sam's IOU's, be it ever so small, than when he finds only keys, a pocket knife, and unpaid bills when his hand goes down in his pocket." I kind of love this, because it reinforces my pathological cheapness. Thanks.)

Now, here's the deal. We know how to buy and sell in 1911. But today? Not so much. Fortunately, my dear friend Emily (one of half-a-dozen Emilys I was friends with in college, oddly) has a boyfriend in business school. We're gonna chat, and soon. Yay!

Fussell's bugbears

In his "Boy Scout Handbook" essay, Paul Fussell expresses delight that the more recent editions of the handbook are free of references to constipation, which is no longer "the bugbear it was generations ago."

Let me tell you that this is quite the loss.

Over Thanksgiving, the entire my-parents family was ferociously excited about the 1911 Handbook's references to physical health of all sorts. It promises a few health rules for growing boys that I think we need to attend to right now:

My favorite are the rules for eating. Ignore diet books, folks, because I think this will pretty much set you straight. First, don't eat too much. Second, don't eat meat more than once a day. Third, "don't eat anything that you always taste for several hours after you have eaten it, even though you like it." As a vegetarian for something like 10 or 11 years now (yowza), I've managed to convert John to eating a lot of meat substitutes around our house, so I'm kind of delighted with the century-old advice to limit meat consumption. However, the third piece of advice is really the hilarious kicker for me. As you're going to see in a moment, the Handbook assumes these teenage farm boys have the digestions of elderly bankers. There's more refernece to heartburn, indigestion, and, yes, constipation in the next few pages than in an AARP bulletin.

I begin.

Our discussion of eating advises, correctly, that we ought to be aware of our limits (though the Handbook's particular calling out of cucumbers as a frequent source of digestive trouble gives me pause). We are further advised that most boys "eat too much of a mixed nature," combining foods like pickles, soda, hot dogs, and chocolate (their list, not mine) in a "riot of eating." We are not to eat when excited, angry, tired, worried, or studying, and must chew our food until it is "the thickness of pea soup." While that did successfully kill my appetite, I'd like to point out that it killed the appetite for the huge brownie I just ate, while being kind of tired and totally excited to be reading the handbook, y'all! Take that. Really. Failure to ignore these pieces of advice will lead to our two chief problems (like I said): indigestion and constipation.

Rather than paraphrase the constipation warnings, I'll give it to you straight: "Drink a cool, copious draught of water upon arising. Then take some body-bending exercises. Follow this with the sponge bath. Then, if possible, take a walk around the block before breakfast. After school, play some favorite game for at least an hour. In the absence of this, take a good hike of three or four miles or a longer bicycle ride. At least twice a week, if possible, enter a gymnasium class and make special emphasis of body-bending exercises." We also need to schedule a regular poop time, whether we need to or not, and to eat plenty of graham crackers.

The Handbook also warns against coffee and tea, deeming them stimulants which can cause your own organs to eat themselves (really) and which a growing boy should have nothing to do with. It has a little confusion w/r/t stimulants, though, classifying tobacco as a narcotic, which we also ought to avoid. (Points for effort on this one.)

I'm idly considering a few days eating like a boy scout (or like one ought to). Taking this too far, or taking it not far enough? We'll see.

PS: There is a full section in the Handbook about the importance of avoiding discharges of "sex fluid." I feel too awkward to address this. Do you want to learn about it? Try searching this phrase: "To yield means to sacrifice strength and power and manliness." Yeah. That's right.

Keeping tabs

First, apologies for a update delay -- a combination of chest ailments of all sorts (including the peculiar sternum inflammation costochondritis), plus grad school applications have kept me pretty busy for the past few days. I've been telling myself that writing inquiry letters and personal statements have been taking care of my business-letter-writing requirements (which, well, it probably does. For that matter, any ideas about how I prove to you lovely people that I totally know how to write a first-rate letter?).

Meanwhile, though, I've also been continuing to take care of monitoring my personal expenses in much greater detail than I have ever before. I sort of always thought this kind of thing (intense budgeting, specifically) would become automatic as I became an adult, but it never really has. I've managed my not-overdrawing-bank-accounts, etc. thanks largely to a great personal stinginess more than any kind of organization or anything.

I've been noticing two things, as I've been really monitoring my spending. First, and surprisingly, I haven't been cheaping out on things I actually require, or on things I really enjoy. Rather, I'm taking it easy on the impulse buys -- skipping nail polish (because I never wear it anyway) in the Duane Reade where I lost my house keys today, for example. I'm still buying what I need (or what I've planned in advance for -- a delicious raspberry jam French toast breakfast on Sunday, for example), but those things are more thought-through, and that makes me enjoy them even more.

This is probably a healthier way to live, in general -- eliminating the unnecessary -- and it's kind of in line with recent thoughts on fast fashion, as well. More than anything, I'm seeing this as one of the longer-lasting effects of my handbook project. 1911 farm boys were far from conspicuous consumers. Maybe we can learn something from them.

Humor me.

Just so you know, Huckleberry Finn was published in the US 125 years ago today. (This makes today its semi-semi-semi-millennial, as John has pointed out.) Therefore, in its honor, you should read Finn.

Math problem

I know, I know. I am not the mathematician in my household.

However, the business badge requires that I calculate how much money I'd need to invest, at 5% per year, to earn back my weekly allowance. Now, here's the situation: since I am a self-sufficient adult, I don't get an allowance (sadly). And even though you are nice people on the internet, I would prefer not to be 100% open about my paycheck and savings habits. So you'll have to bear with me for a moment.

Instead, I'm going to tell you how much I've spent this week on non-household expenses (since we will assume our 1911 Boy Scout was probably not running exciting errands like purchasing dishwashing soap or canned olives), and we'll assume that that's my "allowance." (I feel really uncomfortable with the allowance term, maybe moreso than I should, because talking about it makes me feel like my money is not my own. But I digress.)

This week:
$3.75 for hot chocolate with Wendy last week
$15 for Greek take-out (spanakopita, mostly) Friday night
$6 for a glass of wine on Saturday night (happy birthday, EFS!) (I know a scout is temperate. But a scout is also under 21.)
$3.50 for a coffee and chocolate croissant yesterday
For a grand total of $28.25, all of it spent on food. Go team.

Okay, if there are 52 weeks in a year, this means I'd need $1,469. Okay. First, allow me to catch my breath because that seems like an alarming amount of money. And I haven't even factored in the times I do things like, you know, buy a book. Or a postage stamp.

(Please note, by the way, that I am doing this calculation without benefit of the internet, just what I remember from high school math. Please note, also, that I am not asking John to check my work, because that seems like it would be cheating. If you find a mistake, though, feel free to make me feel like an idiot.)

I'll use the formula interest = principal * rate * time, with principal and interest switched around to give me the formula 1/P = (RT)/I. For the sake of simplicity, I'll take the inverse of each (is this the correct term? I have no idea!), giving me the final formula P = I/RT

I'm looking for the principal, so I can say P = $1469 (the amount of interest I'll need!)/(0.05). Notice that, since I'm only doing this over a single year, T = 1, so it drops out. I love that. (When I learned this in math class when I was a kid, it was like a magic trick.)

Simplify the whole shebang to come to the ultimate conclusion that, in order to earn out my allowance in interest, I'll need to invest $29,380 at 5% per year. If you can tell me where to put my money at 5%, I'll be pretty satisfied.

Yay!

Made with a box-cutter

Because I am tough but sweet (like "I want candy," but more "I want to eat my lunch right now and am currently drinking a slightly-too-large mug of kefir.")

Thanks to the lovely folks at kind over matter for the (slightly modified) pattern!

NYPL and 1941

To begin with, despite reports to the contrary from my GP back in December, I am the picture of health and unlikely to keel over any time soon. (I braved yesterday's not-so-snowpocalypse, headed out to a doctor's appointment, and learned that all is well. Later, I celebrated with a day full of eating, including a modified vegetarian carbonara for lunch, eggrolls and soup for dinner, and brownies for dinner. Go team Emily.)

Therefore, given my recent clean bill of health, I think I'm fully equipped to move on from mooning over waste disposal (though I'm going to keep trying to schedule my terrorist-watch-list-inducing interview, even though making too many phone calls asking to tour waste treatment and processing plants may begin to arouse some suspicions). However, in the meantime, barring future success in that department, I want to pull on your coat a little bit (hah! moments from now, this will be a joke!) about clothing.

So, I spent some time this weekend organizing my closet, and I noticed something. First, I noticed that I have a lot of very similar sweaters -- nearly all black, grey, or green, and nearly all either cabled or hooded. Second, I noticed that I'm kind of woefully unfashionable. Then, though, because I'm of a ruminative nature, and because I've been thinking about waste disposal, I started to wonder: what happens to all this clothing when we're done with it? And how much do we really need?

Recently, the NY Library blog had a feature on the same topic. While things have changed (do they even still make dickies?), I was struck by one thing: I have a damn lot of clothing.

If I were ten years younger and it were 1941, I would be a straight-up clotheshorse. I have more shoes than even the Imelda Marcos-y Vassar girl, who averaged ten pairs, and I may even beat the Smithie's even dozen sweaters. Sure, I have fewer evening dresses than the average Texas coed (7 1/2? Really?), but she also reported having an even seven boyfriends. So, you know.

Here's my thing: This list was for everyday wear. The low end of that means a wardrobe comprised of a dickey, a hat, three evening dresses, three skirts, three pairs of shoes, three and a half blouses, three day dresses, and three sweaters. (Plus one boyfriend.) I'm imagining arriving to work like that for the next little while -- cycling through a total of six tops and three dresses for the remainder of the year. How long until someone commented? Or would they? (Answer: Yes. Yes they would.)

There are a lot of articles, if you pay attention to those things, about the evils of "fast fashion," of H&M and Forever 21 providing cheap, disposable clothing that only winds up in a landfill within a year or two, and I usually scoff and figure, well, I'll ditch the fast fashion when the regular kind is cheaper. But is the solution really to go the 1941 way? How would it work -- switching to fewer, higher-quality items that you can wear into the ground? This is feeling very tempting right now. We'll see.

I know, and I've known for years, that the key environmental solution is to reduce consumption, not just to recycle (or bring to Goodwill, as the case may be). I think it may be time to introduce my principles to my closet.

*Notification: As of today, I'm officially beginning requirement 4 of the Business badge: "Keep a complete and actual account of personal receipts and expenditures for six months." Yeah, this is something I should do all the time, as an actual and competent adult, but I don't. So let me start. Today: $3.75 for coffee with Wendy after work.*

Paul Fussell got here first.

Despite never having met him, I'd like to induct Paul Fussell into my Handbook Book Club (doubling the member count to two).

See, while I've never met Mr. Fussell, we have a certain commonality of experience. Though he's been retired from teaching for some years, he's a former professor at Rutgers, where I went to grad school a few years back. I read two of his books (Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Class) when I was in my mid-teens, at exactly the right age to be vaguely scandalized but not entirely understand why. Class, especially, threw me, instilling a lifelong horror of the word "home" instead of "house," as well of as decorating with artificial plants. I'm only a little ashamed to admit this. Seriously, Class was a weirdly revelatory book -- a little troubling and making explicit some aspects of American culture I'm not entirely comfortable with. Regardless, it turns out that Mr. Fussell wrote another book of particular personal interest to me.

In 1983, when I was but a wee little thing, he published The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations," a series of essays on American and British culture, travel, and (most of all) his experience in World War 2. TBSHaOO is hard to track down these days -- I had to get it pulled out of storage at the Brooklyn library -- but worthwhile. See, he and I have a similar interest in the Handbook as a historical document, but rather than looking at the 1911 edition, he examines the 1979 version. This makes the whole concept doubly-cool. While the title essay is only six pages long (meaning that, in going to and from the library, I walked 1/3 mile for every page of this essay), it's a great view of another Handbook edition.

In some ways, the Handbook has hardly changed since the 1911 edition. "A complex sentence," Mr. Fussell observes, "is as rare as a reference to girls," and endless focus on self-improvement, care for nature, and wide-ranging practical knowledge remains. What I find most interesting, though, are the two complaints Mr. Fussell puts forth: the excessive use of the phrase "free world" and enthusiastic urging of religion, to the point of packing a Bible when camping -- but not a knife. This sent me back to the 1911 edition. Thanks to Project Gutenberg, I know for a fact that "free world" doesn't appear even once (take that, Mr. F!). The biblical references, though, are a little more tricky. See, the world of 1911 was a simpler one than the world of 1979, and pearhsp one, even, in which Lord B-P didn't feel as if he really needed to emphasize the importance of religion -- it was just obvious. The 1979 Handbook's increased focus on carrying a Bible, or on praying for guidance, is absent from the 1911 edition because we don't really need to be reminded. (It's worth noting here, as well, that I'm not idealizing the world of 1911, and I appreciate Mr. Fussell's remarks upon the inclusion of Harriet Tubman as an admirable American, and his observation that the later Handbook calls for "the prayer book of your faith," implying that Christianity is not a scouting requirement.)

As he tends to, Fussell brings George Orwell into the picture (he is also the subject of an essay in Thank God for the Atom Bomb, as well as four other essays in TBSHaOO), pulling the Handbook into a post-Watergate world ("A scout does not bomb and invade a neutral country, and then lie about it") that's still relevant, um, three years ago, but I feel a little funny about it. I'm hesitant, I think, to politicize the Handbook more than I have to -- and I'll offer up this photo of Nixon (as Vice-President) addressing a Boy Scout Jamboree to seal the deal. Honestly, though, despite my personal feelings on the subject (strong), and even despite my personal feelings on certain issues without scouting as a movement (irrelevant at the moment), I worry that taking this kind of approach might weaken the Handbook as a historical document. Of course, anything is a product of the time in which it was written, but I have my own doubts about this particular interpretation, as taken from this particular document at this particular point.

Ultimately, Mr. Fussell's essay delighted me with its recognition that the Handbook is more than an instruction book for teenage boys in neckerchiefs. His read of it -- a "[repository] of something like classical ethics, deriving from Aristotle and Cicero" is one of the truest going. And, therefore, Mr. Fussell? Welcome to the club.

meaner than a

It's hard to find a junkyard in Brooklyn.

Actually, no. It's not hard to find one at all. But it's hard to have a conversation with someone -- anyone! -- at one, I will tell you that. And you will believe me, because if you try for yourself you will be met with the same mysterious, scrap metal-y silence I encountered. (Unless you use some sort of deceptive measure, like asking for a crankshaft for a '87 Dodge Aries (though, of course, I celebrate the entire K-car catalog equally and with great delight).) So, anyway, in the past three days I have spoken to no fewer than eight different junkyards in the Brooklyn area, not counting those whose telephones have been disconnected (2). Out of personal (and professional? I guess?) courtesy, I'm not going to say which junkyards or where. Know why? Because they are positively Masonic in their unwillingness to have a telephone conversation. It's like I'm ringing up the Skull and Bones, Mossad, and the Illuminati, but with car parts.

You are wondering right now (quite correctly, mind you) what the hell I am doing trying to track down a junkyard. Ah! (I am telling you), it's for the badge. I am also reminding you that a scout "ought to have a command of polite language," so watch the "what the hell." Now. While I'm in the process of trying to set up a waste treatment plant tour that will probably a) never happen and b) get me put on some kind of government watch list, I decided to stop playing phone tag and start following another urban waste stream: rusted-out cars. This seemed like both a pretty interesting move, and a visually-striking one (I could get out to a junkyard, take the kind of urban-blight photos people love to put on blogs, that sort of thing). Here's the problem: I'm really, really honest. And when I called up junkyards, I explained my actual reason for wanting to stop by. I even varied the approach a little (sometimes I was writing a short, internet-based article, sometimes doing research for a blog), but still: nothing.

One guy told me, formally enough, that his employers don't allow him to grant interviews. A few hung up on me. The most talkative man I spoke to (though, actually, they were all men, except for one receptionist -- the junkyard world has a glass ceiling still, I guess?) told me, "I learned a long time ago not to talk to the press. It's just better for everyone that way. I like to keep my business in the business." (For honesty's sake, one guy told me he handles six cars a month, which equals out to a single truckload, but that he would give me that number, nothing more, and the contact info for another junkyard that might talk to me. Seriously, this was like working informants on The Wire.)

So help me out here: what's the story with junkyards and their secrets? Was there some kind of 1980s muckraking junkyard expose I know nothing about? Do junkyards hate me?

Javier the ibex

Yes, Javier isn't a Bronze Age kind of name.

Tough.

Also, I'm still debating the addition of his horns. See, I spent a lot of time today with Javi. He came to work with me. He toured lower Manhattan. And, eventually, he told me something. "Dude," he said, "I'm an ibex, no question. Nice city you have here. By the way, I'm so not sold on the horns."

Honestly, neither am I. I mounted them on his little ibex-head today, but they look, well, unnecessary. He may receive a smidge of paint instead and we'll be done with it. What do you think? (If I give him a metallic paint job, would he stand up to his actual-Cycladic cousin? Questionable. But still.)

If this isn't classical, then you and I are totally on different pages, my friends.

We are one application of superglue (which, yes, I forgot to pick up at Target yesterday. oops.) away from my completion of the Sculpture badge.

The requirement is simple (and referenced back in the saga of SassyCat): use clay to duplicate, or in some way make a piece related to, an antique sculpture. When you think antique sculpture, you may be imagining discus throwers or the Elgin marbles or something like that. Me too. However I was not the 1999-2000 Pennsylvania state Junior Classical League secretary (vice-president? I have no idea. Dude, this was ten years ago) for nothing. I made a few poor-quality efforts at bas relief, then remembered: the Cyclades.

For those of you who are less amazing than I am, you may not be entirely familiar with the Cycladic civilization. Shame on you! Really. What the hell were you doing when the rest of the world was learning about obscure Bronze Age Aegean cultures?

Let's leave it at this: the Cycladeans (I just made up that word, I think) were artistically distinct from just about everyone else. Their sculptures consist largely of white marble, flat-faced figures, standing with their arms crossed around their stomachs. Some people suggest these may have been religious in nature, but really, you don't expect me to know everything, do you? Regardless, these are pretty immediately recognizable figures, and they're startlingly modern.

Yes, they're also a lot simpler than the more immediately-recognizable classical sculptures. I will admit my weaknesses, though I will also couch them in intolerable pretension. Deal?

For my sculpture, I chose an image of an ibex, which is where the superglue comes in -- while the ibex is sculpted and baked and looking startlingly ibex-y, I chose to bake the poor little guy's antlers separately, since they kept collapsing down into his face. Tomorrow, once they're glued, expect to meet my ibex buddy.