Dracula vs. The Best Friends' Club

One of my greatest interests is friendship, and I love to analyze the differences in how friendship is viewed in different times and cultures. Bram Stoker's novel Dracula is great for many reasons, one of which is that it inc;udes a surprising portrayal of all the facets of late 19th century English friendship. When Jonathan and Mina join forces with their new found friends they truly gain all the special powers of a Best Friends' Club, and only through the awesome powers of friendship do they manage to defeat Dracula. Here's what I learned:

1. True friendship can cross gender and generational boundaries.

The Best Friends' Club includes people of varying ages from the young Jonathan and Mina to the wise old Dr. Van Helsing who has been around the block a few times, and both men and women. At first they try to exclude the gentle Mina from some of the gorier aspects of their pursuit of Dracula, but they soon learn their lesson--that they must all work together to defeat their foe!

2. Spurned loves can make the best of friends.

Towards the beginning of the novel we are introduced to the beautiful and charming Lucy Westenra who tells Mina through letter that she has received three marriage proposals in one day--one from Dr. John Seward, one from Quincy Morris, and one from her true love Arthur Holmwood. Although she rejects the first two men, her suitors are not angry, but rather promise that she has earned their friendship for life. Cool.

3. True friends always hold hands.

These people are constantly holding hands. Any emotional moment. The drop of a hat. You'll be as shocked by this as you will by the fate of card carrying Best Friend Lucy Westenra.

4. Diversity is key.

Just when you think this Best Friends' Club is bunch of stuffy white British people, we are introduced to Quincy Morris, a gunslinging Texan from Texas, USA. Basically, every Best Friends' Club needs some sort of token friend to show that the club isn't discriminating. I think it might be in the rule book.

5. Friends stay friends through thick and thin.

Need multiple, intense blood transfusions because a vampire is sucking you dry every night? The Best Friends' Club is on it. Need to have your corpse decapitated to save your immortal soul? Yeah, they can do that too.

But of course, all this friendship has its costs. Jonathan and Mina are lucky they got married before joining the club. Otherwise their wedding party would have been unwieldy with 4 best men (and possibly an undead maid of honor). The couple did not escape, however, the cost of the first born son, which according to the rule book must be named long-windedly after every member of the cost. A small price to pay, I guess.

The 5 Unhealthiest Things I Did in July

Well...this is a blog post about health and also about how I spent July. It also shows that I love making lists and I think the best blog posts are lists.

So, a little background before I start listing all the unhealthy things I did in July. Through my work, I had this one 20 day long assignment pulling buckthorn, a disgusting invasive species that grows in New Hampshire. So this was basically how I spent most of July and I can say with some certainty that it was an extremely unhealthy experience in almost anyway you might look at it. Here's why:

1. Ticks and other pests--We were working in this hell hole field that was absolutely infested with ticks. The first time we walked through the field our pants and sleeves were just absolutely crawling with ticks. I think we counted 60 that first day. I ended up with 7 ticks embedded throughout the course of the 20 days, and one of my co-workers ended up with like 13 including one, freakishly, on his face! As if that wasn't enough, there were many other creatures crawling throughout that field, and in addition to the tick bites, we also endured being occasionally stung by wasps (surprise, surprise) and bitten by ants. The mosquitoes were also bad at times, and let me tell you, New Hampshire mosquitoes are monstrous. To combat all these pests, I wore a giant mosquito head net that made me look like a widow and duct taped every gap in my clothing. Clearly, I was the height of cool.

2. Environmental hazards--Rain, lightening, 90 degree humid weather in an open field. That was nothing. The main hazard was actually the buckthorn itself, although the effects on our health were slow and cumulative. Hopefully, oh my brothers, you have never experienced pulling buckthorn, but it has roots that choke out everything around them, that weave their way and entangle themselves into the ground, that come away in layers as you pull on them so you never quite get a solid grip. ("I hate buckthorn.") The effect of pulling up buckthorn day after day for 20 days is that you wake up with claw like hands and spend the day dropping things because your knuckles are swollen and your fingers are numb.

3. Junk food--The people we worked for, who were actually awesome, felt pretty bad for us, so they constantly brought us junk food--ice cream, fried chicken, soda--whenever they visited us. We also went out for ice cream about 7 times during those 20 days and would consistently order things like double chocolate chocolate ice cream with brownies and flurries with butterfinger, Reese's and health bar.

5. Mental health--We all went a little insane. Probably on a daily basis.

*I do, however, have to say that some things somehow strangely grew on me. The wetland we were working in had a subtle beauty with black moss, translucent flowers, and crickets that hopped around at your feet. Despite the ticks, it was kind of an amazing place. And I can never forget, the first dreadful night we spent there, I saw fireflies. I'd never seen them before, and when I realized what they were, I jumped out of our car and chased them, futilely trying to catch them in my grasping palms.

Multiple Intelligences: A Brief Report

So, I think I'm a pretty smart person, but like most pretty smart people, I can be so stupid. Of course, I demanded an explanation for this. So I decided to look into the theory of multiple intelligences. However I may feel about the theory itself, I can say I found myself to be lacking in three of the types of intelligence, namely spatial intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, and even though I love nature, naturalistic intelligence.

To sum this up--

1. Spatial intelligence involves the ability to conceptualize three dimensional images or areas. So if you had high spatial intelligence you would likely be good at puzzles, designing, and making a mental map of where you want to go. None of these things hold too much of an interest for me (i.e. I suck at all of the above).

2. Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence involves having proficient fine and/or gross motor skills. To sum up my abilities in this department, I'll say that my printing looks like a 12 year old boy's and when I played basketball in middle school, the only basket I made was in the opponent's net. (I am, however, a great hula hooper.)

3. I don't really understand naturalistic intelligence and I don't really want to look into it, but it has something to do with being in touch with nature and understanding the natural world around you. I'm also going to pretend it has something to do with having a heightened awareness of your natural surroundings, but don't quote me on that.

Anyway, I'm discussing all these forms of intelligence as an excuse to tell a funny story about what happened to me one day at work.

One of my co-workers was running a chainsaw and I was just standing around prepared to help I guess, when suddenly, through an inability to visualize the area around me (maybe), an inability to keep my balance (definitely), and a lack of awareness of my natural surroundings (for sure), I stepped on a wasps' nest.

They immediately started stinging me so of course I ran. Then I realized that I had left a friend running a chainsaw about five feet away from an angry wasps' nest, so I turned around and started screaming at her.

Then I didn't know what to do, so I just started running again and all at the same time popping benadryll (which I always carry with me in case of this exact situation) and also ripping off all my clothes. My other co-worker, the infamous Dmart, had no idea what was going on and just started chasing me.

In the meantime, I kept screaming these high-pitched horror movie actress screams and then I would find the situation so ridiculous that I would just collapse in laughter. Then I would see another wasp on me and scream and the cycle would continue. (And let's not forget that I've already stripped down to my bra and underwear with my clothing strewn everywhere.) I felt like an insane.

My other co-worker just kept telling me to take a shower which then made sense, but is now confusing. I ended up just lying down and made Dmart perform a head to toe exam on me to find the stings.

There weren't all that many, but my boss took me to the hospital just in case, and I was forbidden from splitting wood for the rest of the day. Meanwhile, my co-workers were left to find the scattered clothing I had flung from my body--work gloves, pants, shirt. I was tired out from Benadryl for the rest of the day, so I just kind of wandered around and picked up random pieces of wood, helping I guess.