Amy’s Journal

Birdwatching and organic gardening…sound like two wonderful hobbies that I do in my free time, don’t they?

Wrong.

They are my CLASSES this quarter at Stanford. For actual grades! I’m taking an organic agriculture class, which is three hours a week outside in the stanford community farm, where we learn to compost, learn about soil, bugs, plant structure, sustainable practices, marketing–the works. We got split up into groups of five and each group gets their own bed to cultivate and plant! We keep a field journal just like real farmers and get graded on how well we do. Its a blast to dig around in the dirt and get credit for it.

Here are some pictures of my gardening class.

This is the part of the stanford community farm that is allocated for our class.

Me with my amazing farming group doing an experiment with dirt.

Another group planting their seeds in rows.

Not only am I taking organic gardening, I’m taking a class called the Biology of Birds, which is a field research based class. We definitely have been learning all the crazy and awesome things about bird biology (like the fact that they have hollow bones and can actually circulate air through their bones!), but my favorite part about the class is that once a week I have to wake up at 5 (yes its difficult, but worth it) and go out to the nature preserves around stanford and watch birds and record them for 4 hours. There is something so magical about being in the woods at dawn listening to the birds sing. We are doing a study about Oak Woodland birds. Oaks woodlands are the major habitat for birds in California, and they are dying! We are trying to determine what the affect is of recreational human use of oak woodland spaces on the birds by comparing the bird density and diversity in a preserve that is open to the public and one that is closed to recreational use.

California Oak Trees--the major bird habitat of California.

We got split into groups for the different projects in this class as well. I’m in group Oak Titmouse. This is our mascot:

Oak Titmouse

Out of the 12 or so hours of class I have a week, I spend 6 hours of it outside, and I find myself thinking, “Is this actually school?”

Happily, the answer is yes

So, most of you around my age have experienced what social dance means today. I think the name sums it up nicely, “freak dance.” Some of you from my parents’ generation have experienced this through your children, and for those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m not going to describe it. You can use your imagination. As a little girl, this is not what I thought social dancing was. I had dreams of Disney ballrooms and flowing dresses and swirling endlessly around the room with my prince charming. My first junior high dance was a serious wakeup call.

But no longer! This quarter at Stanford I have been taking Social Dance three times a week with my boyfriend. We have learned swing, cross step waltz, rotary waltz, club two step, merengue, salsa, cha cha, and tango. My personal favorites are swing and the waltz. Swing is so exuberant and fun, and the beat is so easy to sink into. Plus it reminds me of the rockin’ 50’s and their awesome clothes.

I love the waltz because it is such a romantic dance. When you lock eyes with your partner and go swirling around the room, everything around you fades to a dizzy blur and you feel giddy and lightheaded—the only thing in focus are my boyfriend’s eyes and I feel swept off my feet all over again. I get to feel like Belle from Beauty and the Beast! (Not that my boyfriend is a beast, I just identified with Belle as a little girl because she is brunette, not a princess, and always has her head in a book).

My dance teacher gives us a little social dance history lesson every class, and the general trend that he talks about is that every generation rebels against the dances that were “cool” in their parents generation, getting less and less appropriate every time. My question is, how on earth can dancing get less appropriate than it is now? What are our kids going to do? I have come up with a new theory, which is that we have already hit bottom right now, and that our kids are going to rebel against our “cool” freak dancing by heading back in the other direction and learning social dances from past generations, like the waltz, and swing. I think this trend has already started, since the social dance class at Stanford is filled with hundreds of students every quarter, and Stanford throws old fashioned social dances every quarter that are completely packed! I may be wrong, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed

Even though I always have a job open to me at Amy’s, my parents and I both thought that getting a little experience working at another company would be interesting for me. So I am interning for the summer at Traditional Medicinals, an awesome organic medicinal herbal tea company out in the country in Sebastopol…about 40 minutes from my house. I am interning in both the QC (quality control) and R&D (research and development) departments, doing a project looking at the supply chain and sources of all their herbs, which come from little communities all over the world! TM is really committed to helping alleviate poverty and suffering by supporting these communities, and it feels great to be doing my small part to help them do that.

The working environment at TM is really cool too, since their offices and factory are way out in the country down a one lane road with horses and pigs bordering them. Here are some pictures of the building and the grounds.

This is the office building. I work on the second floor.

This is my cute little cubicle (sigh, someday I will be important and have an office with a window )

My absolute favorite thing to do during break and lunch is go sit in the herb garden. TM has a huge herb garden with examples of a lot of the herbs that they use, and its fun to go meander around looking and smelling the different flowers and plants, or just sit by the lavender and watch the thousands of bumblebees in bliss.

But by far, my favorite part of working at Traditional Medicinals is the people. They are all unique and totally quirky, are soo interesting and inspiring, and are really passionate about what they do. I have two bosses, Katie and Joseph (there is no picture of Joseph because he was in Germany and India doing very important things when I was photographing). Katie is VP of QC, and Joseph is VP of R&D. They both care so much, and I love working with them. I am learning a ton every day.

This is a picture of me with my boss Katie down in the cage where I sample herbs. My my aren’t hair-nets flattering.

Ok, so, this is David. David is not my boss, but he sits next to me and was sort of my boss while Joseph was gone. He is the resident herbalist, and he knows more about herbs than anyone you will probably ever meet in your life. He is also the resident British conspiracy theorist hippie whose father was the photographer for the Beatles (how cool is that? he saw them all the time growing up). One afternoon he told me that my job was to contemplate the veins on my orchid petals for the next few hours (he was kidding, sort of). This is the sign on his door:

In fact, this pretty much sums up the entire company.”Herbalists for Peace”–could i have possibly found a cooler place to intern? (except Amy’s, of course) Most definitely not.

As a student on the Stanford campus, I see efforts left and right to make the campus go green. There are contests between the dorms to use less energy, compost bins and recycling in every eating area, and students who walk around giving away free compact florescent light bulbs to replace the regular ones (they use up to 80% less energy). But what I have realized is that no matter how many systems are put in place to make it easy to live green, it all comes down to personal choice. Every day, I see students toss their entire leftover lunch into the trash instead of separating it into the trash, compost, and recycle bins, simply because it takes less time. In many of my friends’ rooms, the free CFL lights that they were given are collecting dust under the bed because they neglected to switch the bulb. And these are all young, brilliant, environmentally conscious students who claim they truly want to live green. But it’s not just about thinking it and saying it—it’s about reflecting your decision to make a difference in every action.

Something that I struggle with personally is the urge to feel good about myself because I am already doing a few things (using a hybrid, changing my light bulbs, biking to get around, eating organic, etc) and then becoming complacent because I can think to myself, “I’m doing my part.” Those few changes are great, and we should feel good about the efforts we make, but I know that I can’t let myself stop looking for ways to improve. I can’t allow myself the luxury to be lazy when it comes to the environment. This is the future of our planet—my future, your future, and our children’s future. That’s our choice. Living green is not a decision we make once and then forget about, it is a decision we are forced to make a hundred times a day, with almost every action. No matter how insignificant a single action may seem, I trust everyone will join me in the effort to push ourselves to make the right decision—every single time.

So, I just got back from spending my winter quarter abroad in Mexico! (essentially i got to miss winter completely, since the weather is gorgeous here already). I would have written earlier but the piñata dog ate my camera. No really…my camera got smacked by a flying stick during the smashing of the piñata at my farewell party and I didn’t want to post without the pictures!! (Luckily I managed to recover most of the pictures).

Where do I even begin? So many things to tell, so little space. Well, I will start by saying that I was studying at CEPE, which is part of the University of Guadalajara, but at their campus in Puerto Vallarta. The classes were amazing, and entirely taught in Spanish. My teachers did not even speak English, and I read novels in Spanish! This is a picture of Ruth, my awesome Mexican literature teacher, who is a writer herself. She gave me a book with some of her short stories in it before I went home.

But, as my dad likes to tell people, I was double-majoring in mexico–studying spanish and the beach! I swam with dolphins, went whale watching, and boogie boarded, body-surfed, and swam non-stop. I also went on some adventures into the mountains, where I rode a race-horse and galloped faster than I ever have in my life and jumped off of cliffs into freezing river swimming holes. Here are some pictures from the various adventures that I had.

Baby dolphin kisses!

Boogie boarding in Sayulita with friends

Attempting to jump into the water with the hundreds of wild dolphins, only to scare them away and get stung by a huge jellyfish that wrapped itself around my stomach while I was in the middle of the ocean.

Crossing a stream on my crazy energetic horse Azteca who nearly ran me all the way to the next time zone (actually the next time zone was only about 10 minutes away so that really was possible).

One question that I get a lot is, was it hard to find vegetarian food in Mexico? Actually no, since essentially you can get rice, beans guacamole, salsa, cheese, and tortillas about anywhere you go, and I could eat tacos every day for the rest of my life and be pretty much content. But, I didn’t have to because believe it or not, there were TWO fully vegetarian restaurants in Puerto Vallarta, one that was really close to my school, owned by a family friend, that I ate at every day. It is called Planeta Vegetariano, which means vegetarian planet. The food was amazing! The other one is called Mary’s and was a little farther away but absolutely delicious.

This is a picture of me outside of Planeta…yummm im craving their incredible buffet right now. Well, I’m actually off to India tomorrow to complete my travels for the quarter so I should stop writing and get packing, but to sum it up, I had an amazing quarter in Mexico…I am pretty much in love with the country…the roads, the cobblestones, the people, the culture, the smells, the noise…I love it all and I hope to spend a lot more time there in the future.

Yes, that is the name of a class that I am taking. And yes, all of you who lived through the 60’s are now being studied in university history classes. A strange feeling, isn’t it? My mother was definitely a hippie (see the pictures above–my mom at age 16…looks a bit like me, doesn’t she?), and it is so interesting to study the time that I have heard so much about and seen so many pictures of. The 60’s were such a unique time–nothing like it had ever happened before and nothing like it has happened since. The most amazing part of the 60’s to me was the civil rights movement–I cried the entire time I read Why We Can’t Wait, by MLK Jr, and I highly recommend the book. It will inspire you to re-evaluate racism in our current society. I also just finished reading The Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test, about the Merry Pranksters, which is a trippy book and is suuper interesting too. Are you on the bus?

This is the reading list for my class, if any of you are interested.

The Sixties Papers (Stewart & Judith Albert, eds)
Fire in the Streets (Milton Viorst)
Dreams Die Hard (David Harris)
Whv We Can’t Wait (Martin Luther King, Jr.)
One-Dimensional Man (Herbert Marcuse)
The Whole World is Watching (Todd Gitlin)
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Tom Wolfe)
Personal Politics (Sara Evans)
Meridian (Alice Walker)

We also had to watch The Graduate, a great movie, and I am about to write a paper analyzing The Graduate through the lense of Marcuse’s social theories in One Dimensional Man. Marcuse is hard, I must say. But for everyone, interested in the 60’s or not, I highly recommend the movie “Across the Universe” that is playing right now in theatres–it is about the 60’s, is a wonderful romance, is based around the lyrics of the Beatles songs, and is visually stunning. What could be better?

Peace, Love, and Rock’n Roll
Amy

I finally had time, now that school is out, to go visit our new Medford plant that is up and running! It is huge, and really well organized. The day that I went up there they were making the pesto pizza, and it is really interesting to watch the whole process, so I thought I would put the pictures up that I took from that day and explain how the whole thing happens:

First, the dough is made in big vats in the dough room.

Then it is separated into little dough balls that are the right size for each pizza crust.

Then the dough balls are flattened and hand worked to get the perfect crusts, and sent through the oven.

Then the crusts come out of the oven, go down the conveyor belt, and a machine deposits pesto onto each crust.

Then the employees spread the pesto around the pizza as it goes by. I did this for a half an hour and got completely covered in pesto!! It takes a lot of practice to do it right without spraying pesto everywhere.

Then they place six slices of tomato on each pizza.

And scatter broccoli pieces everywhere.

Then someone sprinkles cheese all over the top.

Then the finished pizza heads into the spiral freezer to get frozen. The pizzas actually never stop moving, they spiral up through the freezer on a conveyor belt and come out frozen at the top! That is me and my grandmother Ellie standing next to the pizzas.

After the pizzas are frozen, they are fed into a plastic wrapper that seals around them and is then cut into the individual wrappers.

Then a big fast machine pushes the frozen and sealed pizzas into the boxes.

Then the boxes of pizzas are put into cases.

Then the cases are stacked on big palettes to be shipped out to stores, where they will be bought by a customer, and eventually end up on someone’s kitchen table! Yum!!

Me and all of my friends working and chilling on “Rinc Beach”

My friend Jonah and me on “Rinc Beach” once again

Spring quarter at Stanford is awesome. Everywhere you look, everyone is outside (wearing 30 SPF, of course). The lawn in front of my dorm has been named “Rinc Beach” because at any moment you can find a crowd of people working, playing, or listening to music outside. Plus, my classes this quarter are very chill. I wanted to take it a little bit easier spring quarter after taking 18 units winter quarter so that I could enjoy the sunshine.

I am taking intermediate Spanish, which is a lot of fun, a poetry class, and an intro-seminar called “Top Ten Books,” which is my favorite class that I have taken so far at Stanford. It is a small class–about 12 people, with a professor, and we read the ten books most often taught in English departments in colleges and high school and talk about the books and what makes them “classics,” and argue over whether they should be or not. When I explain this class to people, they always want to know what are the “top ten books,” so here they are, in the order that we read them in (I can’t figure out how to make the blog have italics or underline, so just pretend that the book titles are formatted properly):

Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (short story not book)
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior

We just finished reading and discussing The Sound and the Fury, which was super intense and a bit difficult but I really liked it. I had read almost all of these books before, so I am getting to read them again which I love because you miss so much the first time you read most books because you are just trying to figure out what is going on.

The end of the year is approaching and people are getting very nostalgic already, we are creating yearbook pages for our dorm and I get teary-eyed sometimes when I think back on the year. I can’t believe it’s almost over!! I honestly feel like I just moved in, but at the same time I feel like I have learned a lot since then and am not entirely the same person. Its funny how time does that sometimes, isn’t it. I’m excited for summer though, to go back and live with my mom and dad and Stormy (I missed her so much). I am still finalizing my summer plans but will write another post when summer comes around and I have more time to write!

I hope everyone is having a wonderful spring!

-Amy

(Emilyn and me studying statistics til 3 in the morning)

It means work. For some reason, I thought that the hardest part of college was going to be getting in. I’m pretty sure some people told me that too. First quarter I only took 13 units so that I could adjust to being at school, and it wasn’t too bad…so I thought that maybe they were right. But this quarter I am taking 18 units so that I can keep up an average of 15 units per quarter, and I realized that Stanford is not easy. I am getting B’s on stuff for the first time in my life. And I even (gasp, gasp, hyperventilate a little) got a C- on a math quiz. As finals approach in the week after next, (where did the quarter go, didn’t it seem like I just finished first quarter?) its getting even worse. No-one is sleeping. I am in a sleep and dreams class taught by Doctor Demente, the leading sleep scientist in the world (and the guy who discovered REM sleep and much much more) and he just keeps telling us how important sleep is. Three weeks ago we had our midterm, and as I stayed up til the wee hours of the morning reading my sleep and dreams book, I could not help but begin to laugh with sleep deprivation about the fact that I was staying awake to memorize a book that was continuously telling me that I need to go to sleep. Thankfully, Doctor Demente is awesome and gives you bonus points for the class if you fall asleep in lecture. Well, back to work now, and man I have never looked forward to spring break this much before.
-Amy

So this is what I do now that finals are over. I sleep. I sleep in the car, I sleep in the movies, I sleep for 12 hours every night (the picture is actually from the ride home from Big Game (Cal vs Stanford), which sadly, we lost. I am the one passed out on my friend’s lap.). I never thought I could sleep this much. I’ve made up all of the sleep that I didn’t get during finals week, and then some. But it feels good, almost as good as it feels to be done with my first quarter at Stanford. Don’t get me wrong, I love school, but the hectic pace of school makes break that much better. I don’t have my grades yet, but I think I did pretty well.

My mom wants me to tell you all about what I do in school…so here it is. I took 4 classes this quarter. They were Art of Living (literature/philosophy), Virtue of Vice and Vice of Virtue: Rhetoric of Criminality, Hindi, and a little computer class that our RCC (resident computer consultant) taught. My favorite books from my lit class were Song of Solomon (I can’t figure out how to underline or italicize) by Toni Morrison, The Gay Science by Nietzsche, and Fear and Trembling by Kierkegaard. Hindi is fun but hard, and my rhetoric class was by far the most work-intensive class I have ever taken.

But its all over now and I have three whole weeks to relax, catch up on Grey’s Anatomy (Sigh…McDreamy) and Battlestar Galactica, read some good books that are not required, get caught up in the fashion world, and spend some quality time with my family and my boyfriend, and go to Mexico!! For as long as I can remember we have gone to Mexico for winter break, because my dad is a baby when it comes to the cold and he would drag us all down south the minute it got cold enough to see your breath in the air. I have since realized that I inherited his fear of the cold, so I am looking forward to some sand, sun, and warm water. I hope everyone has a great winter, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, and happy other winter holidays!