Sippin' on Sweet Tea

I still have yet to write a single post about my trip to Tuscaloosa, but that's mainly because there's just so much to say and so little time.  One of the highlights of the trip though, was the sweet tea.  Everywhere we went had the most delicious sweet tea.  According to one of the travel guides we found in our apartment, the best sweet tea in Tuscaloosa is at Taco Casa, so while we never ate at Taco Casa, a few people were lucky enough to get some of their sweet tea... it is amazing.

On Friday, after being back in Indiana and having no sweet tea for almost a whole week, I decided it was necessary to make some of my own.  Now, I don't mean to brag, but I make a pretty mean glass of iced tea.  Usually for the simplicity of it though, I either make it unsweet or I use splenda because I can mix it in faster and can mix it even after the tea is cooled down.  After a week of good ol' southern sweet tea though, I had to go for the real deal.

So worth it.

 There's somethin' about sweet tea that just feels like summertime.  It reminds me of hot summer days playing in the sprinkler in the back yard or having picnics.  A nice cold glass of sweet tea can take me back to eating on the back porch and playing cards with my friends on a hot summer evening; back to drawing pictures in the dirt and playing tether-ball; to swimming at the pool and playing keep-away with the beach ball... To concerts and campfires and staying up all night walking around the lake; to fishing all day and hangin' out in the barn all night.  It's funny how something as simple as a drink can bring back so many wonderful memories.




But most importantly, sweet tea is delicious.

Learning to be happy with just being me

Sometimes I see Facebook pictures and statuses of people I went to high school with who are all still great friends and hang out all the time.  I can remember a time that I wanted so badly to be part of that.  To be a member of that clique and to go to those parties.  And then I look at the life I have instead.  I am getting ready to graduate (and on time!), from a great school where I have met some truly amazing and wonderful people and made lifelong friends.  In my four years of college, not only have I gained an education, but I've also done something with my life.  I've made a difference in the community around me and in the lives of people I've met.  I've figured out who I am as a person and what's truly important to me.  I know what I want out of life and I know what I'm willing to do and what I'm not willing to do to get those things.  I've made friends who I can trust and count on to help me through anything life throws my way.  I've had the chance to visit Europe, and to spend an entire summer in California interning at a great company, making even more great friends and great memories.  I'm not perfect, and I've definitely made my share of mistakes, but I've learned from them, and they've made me the person I am today.  One thing that I'll never regret though, is choosing to be myself, even if it means I wasn't one of the "cool kids" back in high school.  I am proud of who I've become and I love my life!

On a somewhat unrelated note... ASB was awesome!  Experiences like this one are just one more reason why I'm so happy to be me!

Finding people to love

As I prepare to go down to Tuscaloosa and do Tornado relief for Spring Break, I've been thinking a lot about my last ASB trip.  Thanks to Reba Reader, I will forever have a video reminder of that amazing week.  I encourage y'all to watch the video before you continue reading, even if you've already seen it.  

Here are my thoughts at this point:

• I am hopeful that we will meet someone awesome like Glenda again.
• I want to tear out a bathtub again or do something equally massive.
• I am very, very grateful that we are traveling by van this time instead of Greyhound bus, though a small part of me wishes that we were taking Greyhound this time too... It definitely had its ups and downs, but it was a once in a lifetime experience for sure!
• I wish Pete from One Mission was going to be there!
• I am once again blown away by how well we all worked as a team.  Despite our personal differences, we were all willing to help each other out and do whatever it took to get the job done.  I am hopeful that we can do the same on this trip!
• Finding those pictures made me cry... It was also a big part of what made this trip so meaningful for me.  I hope every person on the Tuscaloosa trip will have a moment like that.
• I wish Joey Marsh was coming with us again!
• People from Galveston = Galvestonians... I wonder what people from Tuscaloosa are called... Tuscaloosans perhaps? 

My goals for Tuscaloosa (in the words of Pete):

1. Grab the bull by the balls and run with it.
2. Work dang-it! 
3. Find people to love.

Y'all know that I am twitter challenged... (Let's be honest, I'm blog challenged too.)  But I will be attempting to tweet updates during my trip to keep you all informed... follow me @MarissaRae219  (is that how I'm supposed to write twitter stuff? lol)

Peace <3 Tuscaloosa!

Reflecting on One Mission Galveston 2010

In spring of 2010, I participated in an Alternative Spring Break (ASB) trip that changed my life.  Volunteering has been a big part of my life since long before I went on the trip, but a week of volunteering with my peers and working with The One Mission Initiative in Galveston, TX was unlike any other community service experience.

Why am I writing this nearly a year and a half later, you ask?

Today, I found out that this year we will be volunteering with One Mission again this year for Spring Break, this time in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.  My good friend Brandi (who also volunteered with me in Texas) and I were ecstatic!  This wonderful news got me thinking more about the last ASB trip I participated in, and I thought I'd share my experiences with y'all!  As I write this, I'm realizing that it's awful late at night, and my writing may not be the greatest, so I apologize, but I am very excited about this and want to share while I actually have the time to write!

We left campus on Friday evening after classes let out and headed down to Anderson, Indiana to catch a Greyhound bus to Galveston.  Traveling by Greyhound is far from glamorous, but I am so glad I had that part of the experience as well.  The long trip down south was a great opportunity that gave all of the trip participants a great chance to really get to know each other.  Even with all of the orientation meetings before the trip, I still didn't know the names of all of the other students going on the trip with me when we left Muncie, but by the time we got to Texas, not only did I know everyone's names, but I had already made a couple new friends.

New friends on the bus!

Once we arrived at One Mission: Galveston, the fun really started!  One Mission was headquartered at an old Elementary School, and that is where we stayed for the week.  We arrived on a Sunday afternoon, and after settling in at the school, we had a chance to walk down to the beach and relax for a couple hours before dinner.  Despite the fact that we were in Texas, the weather was a bit chilly, so no one went swimming, but it was awful nice to not be cooped up on a bus anymore!

Monday morning began with packing lunches and eating breakfast in the cafeteria.  Once we had eaten, we gathered some tools from the supply room and headed out to our site.  We would be spending the week cleaning out and gutting a house that had not been touched since Hurricane Ike in 2008.  Here are a couple "before" pictures of the house:

One of the bedrooms

This room also had a ceiling that collapsed.  The entire room was still  wet.

Throughout the week, we emptied all of the ruined furniture, toys, books, and everything else in the house into the back yard and into a dumpster.  We pulled out kitchen cabinets, knocked down rotted dry-wall, and tore out insulation.  We pulled out light fixtures and a water heater and a giant roll of sopping wet and disgusting carpet.  It took seven of us working together to pull out the bathtub, but we did it, and it was definitely a high point of the trip.  Never in a million years would I have thought that I could carry a bathtub out of a house.  But with a lot of hard work and all of us working together, we managed to disconnect it from the house (there were a few crowbars needed for that one!) and carry it out the front door!

For me, one of the most memorable moments of the trip was when I spotted some photos in a stack of things someone was carrying outside to the trash pile.  Another girl and I stopped and knelt in one of the rooms pulling apart the photos to see what we could save.  Many of them the images were completely gone, but a lot of the Polaroids were still pretty clear, and some of the others were salvageable.  Going through those photos was when it really hit me that we weren't just tearing down walls and pulling up floorboards; we were in someone's home.

When the staff member from One Mission first told us about the house, he told us that the family that lived there had evacuated before the storm hit and had not come back, but that a relative was responsible for the house and was the one with the key who let us into the house and everything.  Since we hadn't actually met the people we were helping, it hadn't really all come together for me until we found the photographs.  As I sorted through the photos, I couldn't help but think about all of the other destroyed object in the house that we had been throwing away.  How would I feel if all of my belongings were destroyed and had to be thrown away?  Did the family have time to gather their most precious belongings and take them with them?  How would it feel to not only lose my home and my belongings, but also to lose family photos and other irreplaceable things?  I couldn't imagine what it must have been like for all of the people in Galveston who had lost so much, but I was beginning to get a clearer picture.

But for me, the trip wasn't just about helping the people of Galveston.  It was also about the other students I was on the trip with.  We were in a small house, with sledgehammers and crowbars and nails sticking out of boards and rotting floorboards you could fall through in some places.  Before the trip, many of us were strangers, but once we were in the house working, we were constantly watching out for each other.  We learned quickly to communicate possible dangers to each other immediately so that no one would get hurt.

One student remembered from a past experience working in a restaurant to say "right behind you" when walking past someone carrying a tray of food, and suggested we do the same.  When carrying an armful of boards or something else heavy, sharp, etc., it could have ended very badly if someone turned around too quickly and didn't know that someone was behind them.  We were always making sure other people were taking breaks and drinking enough water.

Working in the house was a lot of fun too!  Not only because we got to swing sledgehammers and other awesome stuff (I got to kick down a door!), but we made everything fun!  One girl was carrying around a bucket for people to put nails in as they pulled them out of the studs, and we jokingly called her the "nail fairy."  When we were passing floorboards from the backyard over the fence to the front yard, we warned each other of nails by saying "watch out for tetanus!"  We even nicknamed the different types of nails as "double tetanus" and "army tetanus" to let each other know how many nails to watch out for or if they were hiding... by the end of the trip we joked that there were 17 different kinds of tetanus.

Did I mention we wore some awesome space suits?

We found some cabbage patch dolls!

The school we stayed at also had a playground!

Here's that awesome bathtub and the team that moved it!

In just four short days, we completely finished gutting the house, all the way down to just exterior walls, the studs, and subfloors...

Me "looking tough"

The finished house

If you are still reading this post, then WOW!  Kudos to you for making it this far!  As you can tell, I could probably go on forever just talking about that one amazing week, but for now, I think I'll wrap things up with a quote that I hope will encourage you to consider serving others.  If not by participating in an alternative break trip, then perhaps in some other area of your life.

"So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they're busy doing things they think are important. This is because they're chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning."  - Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie

A little explanation...

When I got the idea to start writing a blog, one of the first things I started thinking about was what to title it.  Being the procrastinator that I am, I used the lack of a title as an excuse to avoid getting started.  I made a few half-hearted attempts at coming up with a title, but didn't put any real effort into it until this past Tuesday.  I finally decided that I just needed to go for it.  So I spent probably at least a good hour or two just trying to come up with a title.  I tried to come up with some catchy sayings (which I am not good at); I googled for random quotes (which were highly unoriginal); and I asked a few friends (none of whom were helpful).

So then I did what I do best: listen to country music!  I knew I wanted the title to be something that described me; something I could relate to; and I feel like a lot of country does those things, so I figured it would be a good place to start.  Trust me when I say I went through my iTunes library for probably a little too long that night.  There are so many good songs out there that I can relate to, but none that seemed quite right for a blog.  I needed just a short, quick line that somehow described me and that could mean just about anything.  And so we have it:

Knee Deep.

"Knee Deep" is the title of a song by Zac Brown Band about wishing you're on vacation "knee deep in the water somewhere".  Seeing as how I'm almost always stressed, and I hate being stuck in cold weather, this alone is enough to make me like the song.  But then I was thinking... I'm always stressed because I'm always involved in something; always "knee deep" in it.  At the same time though, I'm only knee deep in it.  I'm a bit of an optimist I suppose, but in the grand scheme of things, that's pretty manageable.  Think about it... I might be knee deep in whatever's troubling me, but there are so many people who have it worse off than I do.

I also want this blog to be a good mix of serious and fun posts.  Serious things are considered "deep" and I want this blog to be mostly fun, so it's "Knee Deep."  

There ya have it folks!  A little explanation for my somewhat random blog title!  I suppose I could've kept this to myself and been a little mysterious, but being mysterious isn't really my thing!

Facing My Fear

For most of my 20+ years on this Earth, I've hated to write.  Even as far back as first grade I can remember dreading assignments involving writing example sentences for our spelling words.  As time passed, my hatred only grew stronger.  The most simple assignments in fifth grade would bring me to tears and leave me breaking pencils in half!  By the time I reached high school, I realized that I am actually a pretty decent writer, but I still didn't enjoy it.

My senior English teacher changed that.  Every day, we started class with a 5-10 minute journal entry.  Usually she gave us a silly question or prompt and on Fridays we had "Friday Free Write".  Our journals were never graded for content, only for the number of entries we wrote.  She even would count the occasional entry that was just an entire page of "blah blah blah".  I found it very relaxing, and sometimes even freeing to not worry about grammar and punctuation and about whether or not I was getting my point across.  It was so nice to just write.

From that point on, writing wasn't quite so terrible.  Don't get me wrong, I still quiver in fear at the mention of a research paper, and I will put off assignments until the last possible minute, but once I get started, it's really not so bad.  Last semester I was invited to be a blogger for Notes From the Digital Frontier on mediapost.  I signed up for the spot thinking that it would be a good way for me to continue to improve my writing and to help me get past my procrastination issues.  To be honest, I don't think it helped in either area.

Even though I am majoring in a technology-related field, I still had a hard time finding topics that were interesting to me, and there were sometimes two or three weeks in a row that I didn't write at all, meaning I wrote several posts at the last minute to meet my quota for the semester.

All of these slightly bizarre experiences have led up to this strange, scary idea of mine to write a blog.  I am very intimidated, and even a little afraid, of this new venture of mine... But isn't that what life is about?  Trying new things, facing our fears?  With all the crazy new things I have in my pretty near future, I figure I better get started on at least one of them.