Recent adventures!

Here is March through October in photos. I just picked one photo for each month so it just a sampling of recent activities. Hope you enjoy!

MARCH
Youth Group Spring Retreat
Jeannette and Pular sprawling in one of the bedrooms at the retreat center.







APRIL
St. Louis Half-Marathon
Me completing the half-marathon. (It was great training and running experience, which was neat and kind of redemptive because I have had some not so great running/racing experiences in the past.)






MAY
Memorial Day Weekend in East Tennessee
Sarah and my father happily leaning over the balcony of the cabin.





JUNE
Linda's Wedding in Portland, OR
With Linda, who I've been good friends with since middle school, before the wedding





JULY
Fourth of July Parade in Webster Groves
Ben, Nina, and Veronica at the parade.






AUGUST
Labor Day Weekend in East Tennessee
Ben and I sitting on the couch after a hike in the woods with my dad.





SEPTEMBER
In Metropolis, Illinois on the way back from East Tennessee
SuperMeg











OCTOBER
Hiking at Shaw Nature Reserve
Here is Ben posing by a tree.

Seven Facts About Me

Heidi H. has memed me! And, shockingly, I am actually writing a blog entry. Perhaps this will lead to renewal in my blog writing...we shall see...

Here are the rules:
1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

Seven Facts About Me:

1) My parents met in the circus...
When my sister and I were little, my parents always told us that they had met in the circus where my mother had been the strong lady (tearing apples apart with her bare hands) and my dad was the skinny man. In actuality, they met in law school (maybe that's similar to a circus...:) ). I guess my grandparents had told my mother that same story when she was little, so she wanted to pass on the tradition. I'm not sure if my sister and I ever actually believed them, but it was a fun story.

2) I didn't get my ears pierced until I was 22.

3) I was really into arm wrestling in the eighth grade.
My close friendship group in middle school, which consisted of about 8 academically focused girls, got really into arm wrestling during lunch in the eighth grade. Excitingly, I was the arm wrestling champion of our lunch table. During that year, I practiced arm wrestling with my dad frequently and also ended up arm wrestling several relatives and the middle school principal.

4) I love sports movies!
Something about people working together toward a goal and overcoming obstacles always get to me, no matter the cheesiness level.
My favorites are probably Heart of the Game, Rudy, Remember the Titans, Breaking Away, and Friday Night Lights (primarily the TV show).

5) Currently, I am mostly listening the following on myspace:
http://www.myspace.com/allirogers
http://www.myspace.com/sandramccracken

6) My maternal grandmother immigrated to the U.S. from Scotland with her family when she was 7.
The other 3/4 of my ancestors have been in the U.S. for several centuries. I am mostly English and Scotch-Irish, which refers to people of Scottish ancestry who immigrated to Ireland before coming to the U.S.
Interestingly, my paternal grandfather, who was born in the U.S., spent his teenage years living in Scotland (his step-father was from Scotland).

7) I sometimes sleepwalk and/or sleep-eat.
Both Amber and Laura (my roommates in St. Louis) can attest to this. I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night (some time between 11:30PM and 4AM) and, in some weird mostly asleep state, think that it is morning time and begin either getting dressed or eating. On several occasions I have brought bowls of cereal back with me in bed. This is not a good thing because I end up pouring milk on myself and wake up with cereal and milk all over. I also sometimes storm into my roommate's bedroom (usually only if her bedroom light is on...I am like insect drawn to the light) and begin talking some illogical nonsense to her.

Okay, so I think I am going to skip steps 3 & 4 to the MEME process. But, if any blogging friends, such as Lexie, Jacob, Daniel, Sarah L., Laura, or Kim, read this, consider yourselves MEMEd.

Burnell

I was planning to write a long update entry, but instead I am going to just write about one thing that's been significant in my year so far.

In early January, I found out that one of the students with whom I worked in my first year of AmeriCorps had been killed. I mentored 7 students full-time at a city middle school that year. It was incredibly challenging for me...i felt like i didn't really know what i was doing (how do i build trust cross-culturally?, how do i love them?, how do i set boundaries and not let them run all over them?). I don't really know how effective my mentoring was with those kids, but they got in my heart in a deep way that year. because i didn't really know what i was doing and had little training and no curriculum from which to work, i was often thinking and praying about them and how i could support them, which probably contributes to the fact that I still feel this emotional connection to each of them 3 years later.


In Jan., I found out that Burnell, one of my seven students, had been shot and killed in his neighborhood in August 2007 (at age 14). Burnell was kind, goofy, and always respectful to me (a rare quality among sixth graders). He loved football and talked incessantly about it. He also had a pet iguana and a little trouble making streak. I felt so saddened by his death and overwhelmed by memories of him. It kind of took me out emotionally for a week or so. I ended up writing his mom a letter expressing my sympathy and sharing some memories of Burnell.

One of my Burnell memories that I didn't share with his mom was when he defended me:
I wore a pair of black shoes almost everyday that year until they literally fell apart. So, midway through the year the shoes were pretty scuffed up. One day I was standing with some kids as they were about to be dismissed from their class and one boy said, "Look at Ms. Meg's shoes. They're tore up." Burnell immediately said, "Stop talking about her shoes. They look fine." That story still makes me laugh. In reality, my shoes were "tore up," but I love his kindness to me in that situation.


Burnell was actually the third African American teenager killed in a shooting in 2007 to whom I was connected. In the other cases, I didn't know the victim but was the social worker for the victim's brother (in one case) and girlfriend (in another case). I feel like I should have some kind of profound response to this situation as a whole, but I don't. It makes me feel sad, and I also see/struggle with the temptation to sensationalize this problem in an unhelpful way.

ricki!!

I just talked to my sister and she told me the exciting news that she interviewed Ricki Lake in person on Monday for an article. This news was surprisingly thrilling for me. I'm not an obsessive fan, but The Ricki Lake Show was a part of my afternoon routine in middle school and I've also watched the old Hairspray movie many times.

Sarah was interviewing Ricki about a documentary that she helped produce and star in called The Business of Being Born. Sarah actually previewed the movie when she was home for Thanksgiving so my parents and I watched it with her. The movie is about the culture around childbirth in America and particularly focuses on/advocates for homebirth. The movie felt a little one-sided, but I would definitely recommend it to anyone who is interested in these issues.

Sarah interviewed Ricki Lake in a hotel lobby and reports that she is really warm and engaging. (just in case you were curious...)

happily introverted (at least at the moment)

I haven't been feeling too adventurous recently. I think I am in a season of low-keyness. My life still feels somewhat crammed with school, my practicum, and church activities/ministry, but in my free time I have been making choices erring on the side of rest and introversion. Few things have seemed as appealing to me recently as a good book or watching an episode of Friday Night Lights.

Sometimes I get like this when I'm feeling a bit low, but I don't think that is the case right now. I have been in the mood of savoring little pleasures like a good book or a folk music cd. An additional factor is that so much of my scheduled life (my school social work internship, church stuff, etc.) involves focused interaction with others so, when I'm not doing these things, I often just want to unwind at home.

In my unwinding time during the end of last semester, I ended up reading 2 books that I enjoyed and were thought-provoking. I rarely read books for fun in the middle of the semester but both of these books captured me and I found myself staying up late reading them after I finished my studies on school nights.

One was A Long Way Gone:Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah. It is about the author's childhood in Sierra Leone in the midst of the war. It gave my mind and heart a small glimpse of conflict in Africa in a way that I hadn't really grasped before. Reading the book felt especially relevant because several of the youth and families who I am close with are refugees from Liberia, which borders Sierra Leone. While the conflicts in the two countries are very distinct, I felt like I could better understand what my Liberian friends might have experienced during the war and the ways that this could still affect their life today.

The second book was Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet. I randomly purchased it in an airport while waiting for a plane. It is also a memoir and is about Daniel's experiences growing up as an autistic savant. Meaning, in his case, that he has Asperger's Syndrome and extraordinary mental abilities (for him this manifests itself in his experience with numbers and in his ability to learn languages). His experiences were fascinating and made me think about the mind and how it can differ from person to person. It also gave me a window inside the experiences of the youth I work with who have Asperger's. Because of their disability, most people with Asperger's cannot articulate their experience of the world. The author, though, is able to be very self-reflective. His experiences of social interaction, particularly during his childhood, were very interesting and helped me to think in new ways about how the youth I know with Asperger's experience school and friendship.

Boris

Here is a link to a video my sister told me about this evening. Her boss at the newspaper where she works created it a while ago. I found parts of it to be hilarious (and posting it enables me to publish a new blog entry without asserting much effort :).

Boris the Famous Cat

September Update

The last few weeks have been full of new things.

1) I switched bedrooms in my apartment and my new bedroom is now an orderly and peaceful place for me to be, which had not been the case in my old bedroom for probably
several years.

2) Amber returned from Germany and moved back into our old apartment (I am now starting my 4th year on Oakland Ave….craziness!).

3) I started my practicum with Special School District, which provides special education services for all of the public schools in St. Louis County. I am interning as a school social worker at 4 schools (1 elem, 2 middle, and 1 high school). They are all regular education schools, but I will just be working with students who have IEPs (meaning that they are receiving special education services). The one of exception to this is that I will be doing some counseling/goal-setting work with elementary ELL students (primarily Bosnian and Mexican). So far, I have mostly just been figuring out what school social workers actually do and also learning more about special education, the cultures of the specific schools, and the different student populations. From my experiences so far, the main roles of school social workers appear to be: acting as a liaison between teachers, students, parents, administrators, and outside community resources; one-on-one counseling with students; leading therapeutic groups; writing social histories, etc. to put in student files; participating in IEP meetings; observing students and helping develop strategies that can be utilized in the classroom to help them succeed in school…
I love being back in the school environment. It has been a little frustrating, though, because I am not sure how much independence I will have as an intern (I have mostly been shadowing the school social worker so far). Still, I am definitely learning a lot and enjoying experiencing all of the different hats that school social workers wear.

4) I joined the YMCA. As much as I love running and feel some sort of weird loyalty to it, it has been great to have the option to exercise without running, especially since it has been so hot outside.

5) Classes started. All of my classes this semester are electives and are not required for my concentration, which is Children, Youth, and Families. I am choosing to take each of them because I feel like they fit an interest I have within social work. You’ll see by the diversity of them why I often feel overwhelmed when I think about narrowing down my social work interests.
a. Advanced Statistics (my interest: social science research)
b. Revitalization of Depressed Communities (my interest: community development)
c. Differential Diagnosis (my interest: mental health, specifically with children affected by poverty)

So, I think that is all of the changes that have been going down recently in my life. I guess I have also gotten more involved with youth ministry to African youth at church and with the transportation ministry. I am still trying to sort out how many commitments I can handle, since I have tendency to say yes to so many things that my schedule can begin to feel exhausting. Overall, I feel excited about the fall and also glad that this time of change is coming to a halt, for now. Over the last few years I have realized that times of transition can be especially stressful for me and I need to be patient with myself during these times.