Fun times roaming the streets of Hyde Park, Chicago, as well as the summer and holiday grind of Vero Beach, Florida.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Hey! Remember?
Hey! Remember Cinderella? Remember? It was so awesome!! Now you can watch Cinderella in under three minutes. Ready? Go!
(If you care, I'm the stepsister in the green tutu. You can tell by the horrible dancing but pretty amusing pantomime.)
Also also also, UBallet performed Giselle Act I and Alice in Wonderland yesterday and today, and it was freaking gorgeous. Congratulations to everybody involved!
So kids, yesterday was my first day at my internship. To remind you, I'm working (unpaid) at the Chicago Children's Museum way the hell out on Navy Pier.
It was...so much fun. First thing after they showed me around a little bit my supervisor just said, "Hey, you want to go along to a classroom visit?" So, yeah, sure, of course I did. So I did a little grunt work preparing for the lesson (as in getting friendly with the paper cutter and some foam board) and then headed out with my other supervisor and an old experienced intern.
Do you know how to teach second graders about wheels and axles? I do! You ask them lots of questions and when they say something completely wrong, you say "Wow what a great idea! I hadn't thought of that!" Then you have them build cars with foam board, dulled skewer sticks, beads, and masking tape. And they will NOT touch the masking tape until they are told!
Then they draw out the car and write up instructions so that we can take them back to the museum and build our own. That's when I walk around and say, "Daisy, you want to label the parts on your drawing? Well let's see, what are the most important parts? Yeah the design on the front is pretty important. What about the machine we talked about? Right! So what does a wheel look like? A circle, exactly. So where are the circles on your drawing? Well, no..."
Then my boss bought everybody coffee.
I actually got to do some office work as well. Not nearly as fun to talk about, but I love the satisfaction of getting someone else's work to update, and realizing they did it in a totally convoluted way, so you get to reorganize and feel like you're better than they were. Yay!
So all in all, I did not fail miserably as I expected. I actually think this is going to be an awesome summer, so long as all these people don't grow horns. I hear that often happens at childrens' muuseums.
I got an internship. For realz. It's not fake either, it's, well, realz. It is the Student and Educators Program Internship at the Chicago Children's Museum. Technically the description is:
The Student and Educator Programs Department seeks an intern to focus on supporting the activities of the department, including assisting with curriculum development, research, and marketing initiatives, helping to develop teacher programs, and compiling a year-end report to summarize attendance and revenue trends for school groups. How very cool is that? Cool enough, trust me. I am actually terrified because I don't have too much of a clue as to what that means. Still, I'm awesome. I can pull it off. Right? Sure.
This is not a must-read article, but it does make for a good chuckle if you hate poor punctuation and grammar. I support the guys, so long as they're not being total dicks about it. They seem pretty cool, but kids, you may just need to get jobs.
Yes, I'm back in Chicago, and it's good. Ok, so I've been home for less than two hours and I haven't seen anybody but my cats, but still. By the way, my cats have forgiven me for abandoning them. I think they're just grateful to have my room back as their primary hangout location.
On the plane I watched A Little Princess. There was a special 2 disc special edition of that and The Secret Garden at Books-A-Million, and I knew I had to own it. So I watched my favorite childhood movie on the trip back, and just sobbed. Like, good sobbing. That damn movie made me cry more than the tiny babies coming back from Disney World.
You know, I hate that about where I live. I have nothing to do with Disney, but having to fly out of Orlando means having screaming toddlers on the flight, regardless of where you're going. Lame.
Is it yet time to throw away the army men that Gabe left here last summer? Is it? Really?
Have you read The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls? You should.
But I am so mad. I've never hated anyone like I hate the parents in this book. Ok, maybe Cameron Diaz. But seriously, I hate these people. This would all be fine and good in a novel. I mean, great writing, right? Like how you hate Lockhart in Chamber of Secrets. Cool. But this is not a novel. It's a memoir.
This is my current favorite snippet from the story: Two parents and four children live in a two room house in West Virginia. They have no electricity, running water, or most crucially, food. Literally no food. No coal in the freezing winter, so the narrator and her brother go searching for coal that has fallen of trucks and good pieces of firewood. Under a piece of wood, they find a diamond ring. Seriously, it's a two karat diamond ring. They are thrilled thinking they will buy groceries that will last them the rest of the lives. They bring it to their mother who gets it appraised, but instead of selling it, she keeps it to replace the wedding ring her husband had to pawn.
"But Mom," I said, "that ring could get us a lot of food." "That's true," Mom said, "but it could also improve my self-esteem. And at times like these, self-esteem is even more vital than food." It's worth mentioning that at this point in time the mother is starving her children and buying enough chocolate for herself that she is actually gaining weight. Meanwhile, if I describe the father I think I literally might start pulling my hair out.
