In which we lose and then WE WIN! and Evan and I have a baby and professors are awesome

I have so much to talk about!

A few days back -- before I got sick -- we lost to Wayne State. That was sad . . . I wanted to cry. But we did beat SDSU on Tuesday, which is super-duper exciting. Tonight we play Crookston and tomorrow night we play Bemidji. They're away games so I can't go . . . I was really wanting to go to a basketball game this week, but there aren't any. BUT, I got my boss to agree to make someone else work 2/18-2/20 so I will be able to go to the games on Friday night and Saturday night. That will be super-duper fun. (No, I'm not being irresponsible. I have work study money and I will run out of money before the end of the semester if I work that weekend, and then I'd have to work a week or more without being paid, and no one thinks that's a cool idea.)

Evan and I had a baby. But we had to give it back. It was sad. (NOTE: it was a game.) Firstly, it was kinda interesting because we didn't recall ever having met each other before last night. We must have been drunk or something when he "knocked me up." We became parents of a cute little baby, and when Dr. Brandon gave our baby to Evan, Evan dropped him on his head. He said, "At least I didn't shake him . . . " Then we had to name our baby. We decided to name him Fred, which I later forgot and I was unable to tell someone the name of my new baby when they asked. (How sad . . . Evan was very disappointed in me.) After that, we had to "buy" characteristics for our new baby, but we had to first decide what was important to us. We bought "muscle tone" and "gender" and "eye color." This means that we could decide the gender and eye color of the baby and it guaranteed that our baby would be ripped. We specified that our baby was a boy and that he had green eyes. Then we went to another "shop" where we purchased musical ability for our baby. Evan said that our baby was going to go all the way to the top and produce a Christian record, which he said was proof that Sara, the proprietor of the smarts shop, should not have sold it to us. Hold on a minute: we needed to rethink this whole parenting thing. We obviously have very different values and that is not good for our poor child! Does anyone need to adopt a baby?? Then we went to another shop and bought 20/20 vision and perfect hearing (so if we dropped the baby on his head again, it wouldn't be too bad for him . . . ) and natural antibodies so that he'd be healthy. Then we went back to Dr. Brandon's shop and bought "anti-schizo," "anti-addictive behaviors," "anti-genetic disorders" and "anti-alcoholism." Then we didn't have any money left and we had to wait for everyone else to finish making their purchases. It turned out that not everyone was as lucky as Evan and I had been. We had been given liberty to purchase anything we wanted while some of the other couples were told they could not. One set of parents was told that they were making poor life choices because they were a "lesbian couple." (There weren't enough boys!) One girl who didn't have a partner at all (there was an odd number of people playing) was told that all single mothers have low birth weight babies when she tried to buy her baby a healthy birth weight. The point of the game was to learn how people feel when they're not treated like everyone else is and to appreciate that everyone has different values. We talked about what was important to us as "parents" of these babies and what we wanted our child to be and everyone's ideas were different. Jake wanted his child to be a wheelchair basketball champion and gave him muscle tone and athletic ability. Evan and I wanted our child to be healthy and not have any mental health problems. There was one couple who spent all their money on their baby's appearance and made it a handsome baby boy and they named him Hans, but they didn't guarantee it's gender and it turned out that their baby was a girl. We had tons of fun. But then we all had to give our babies back and go home. It was sad. Evan and I had grown quite fond of our baby . . .

When I worked at Wal-Mart, one of my supervisors was Tim. He quit when I'd worked there for 2-1/2 months. Jaclyn and I went to Wal-Mart today and we saw Tim! Eeee! Tim was the best. He liked to tease me because I never got mad at him. He liked to try to scare me because I never got scared. (One time he almost hit me in the face and I didn't jump at all and his friend thought I was crazy because I didn't react.) And the best part was that he found people to take my shifts one weekend because I hadn't gotten to go home for like 10 weeks and I was so homesick that I was in tears. That night, I had a nasty customer and I had to call him over because she was mad at me because I had to stand by the store policy. After she left, he came back and asked if I was ok and I started to cry and I said, "Tim, I want to go home!" He said that he'd love to be able to let me go, but I could't go until 10 because we were short as it was and it was getting closer to Christmas with every passing minute and I had to stay. I said, "No, I mean home-home." He said, "Ah, I see. When was the last time you went?" I hadn't . . . When I told him that, he said, "I'll do everything I can to get people to take your shifts this weekend so you can go home." And he did! It was awesome. I loved working with Tim. :-)

Mrs. Zarzana is completely awesome. (Mrs. Zarzana teaches my Short Story class and she is the one that had my cousin Josh in her class at Mankato.) From what I understand, she and her husband (Dr. Zarzana) are very much involved in the Campus Religious Center. Dr. Zarzana cooks spaghetti every year for the annual fund raiser dinner for Neuman Club. Tomorrow, there's a workshop at the Religious Center about writing. Mrs. Zarzana stopped me after class and asked if I was going to go to it. I told her that I wasn't planning on going because I didn't have the money for it and I didn't want to go because my "friend" was going to go and she's just so . . . hypocritical . . . sometimes. Mrs. Zarzana said, "It's only $5. I'll gladly pay for you to go. You have so much potential, MJ! If you don't go out there and use what you have and learn how to become better, you'll lose it, and that would be tragic!" Then she told me to remember the quote she had read to us in class. It went something like this: There was a sign at a church that read, "don't skip church because there are too many hypocrits there. We have room for one more." She said to not skip an opportunity simply because some people choose to misrepresent it. I could be missing out on something life-changing, simply because I didn't want to hang out with hypocrits. She told me that she really wanted to go herself, but she couldn't because she takes a salsa dance class on Saturdays. Then she said that if I didn't want to go, I could use the $5 for something that I needed instead. That was so sweet of her . . . Sometimes I am amazed. I mean, usually people don't seem to care and I feel like I must be some kind of loser or something because people don't talk to me and no one sees anything in me. But Mrs. Zarzana does. And that's oh, so cool!

~MK