if i were a guy, my name would be henry and i'd be 3% german

so i was lookin' on wikipedia (instead of cleaning the kitchen) and i typed my name in the search. it gave a list of short name forms, and apparently "hank and shanka" are diminuitive forms of henry. henry originates from the norman version of the germanic name haimrich, which means "ruler of the home" from 'haim' meaning home and 'rich' or powerful. sure hope that's prophetic. and my family's last name (given slave name, whatever) is keller, which means cellar in german. maybe i am german.
i was reading slate magazine the other day, and apparently this *white kid got a dna test done and discovered that he was like 80% european, 11% north african, and 9% native american, but was too late to file for financial aid based on his minority status. Another girl gives this story:

Ashley Klett's younger sister marked the "Asian" box on her college applications this year, after the elder Ms. Klett, 20, took a DNA test that said she was 2 percent East Asian and 98 percent European.
Whether it mattered they do not know, but she did get into the college of her choice.
"And they gave her a scholarship," Ashley said.

so sad. it's the benefits of being on the short stick of racism without having experienced it.

lol when i set out to include this article, i was going for the "i wonder what percentage german am i" and not something that just makes me mad! ah well.

good night, everybody!

*may need to sign up for ny times online to read this article.

you are soooo good to me!!

(i finally got a pic up!)
i wrote an email to my movie night group about last night's trip to snellville, where in highpoint church waterdeep performed (on tour for like a week) with robbie seay. there are only 3 bands in the world whose concert i'd pay to see: jars of clay, waterdeep, and we versus the shark (cause if they make it "big" i can say, "ah, i knew them when..."). incidentally, this "concert" was free, so that's where the title comes in! the email is as follows:


hey all!
so last night was wonderful! pam came and picked me up and we then met up with miss ashley (that really does have a nice little ring to it, no?) at my place. then we had an enjoyable car ride (where i read psalms, and we got to partake of ashley's really nice voice, and pam revealed to her about why there were rubber gloves in the car) to snellville and listen to some supa dupa music from don and lori and robbie seay (not C, as first thought). it was nice. then robbie's brother blank spoke and it was great. then they sang more. then pam gathered the courage of us all and we went to meet the folk on stage. there was an artist (rob from london) there who was doing "reflective drawing," which is drawing with your eyes closed, apparently, and we met him and offended him (not really) by trying to use him to meet don and lori (lol). then we all shook lori's hand, and i told her my *dream about the worship camp and ashley offered her babysitting services. to us both, she was like, "uh, okay". lol then we went and all of us shamelessly flirted with rob. we all did, but pam most of all; don't let anyone tell you differently. lol then pam was all unsettled cause we never officially met don. so we followed lori back into the sanctuary and finally said, "hey, introduce us to your husband." SOMEONE almost made lori fall, cause she had to turn around to hear us, but she shall remain nameless. the three of us who went will take it to the grave (until it becomes financially opportune to reveal, of course), but the guilty one knows who she is. so don comes out and meets us. we talked about everything, like how old he is to be able to remember sanka coffee, allergies here in the south, and other important tidbits as such. then ashley asked about the white chocolate chip cookie he was eating, then he shared it with us. then pam said he was amazing. then i said "sorry for sounding cheesy, but your music moves us" something along those lines. pam groaned, and then we almost went "mano a mano" but then we broke it up then don tried to start it again. it was great!
oh! and we also discovered that "shahi bazaar" is an international grocery store. good times. another great adventure for the books.

*my dream was that waterdeep got together and had a worship camp thing and they would teach in the mornings and we'd gather 'round a huge bonfire at night. it was a sweet dream! i told her to let me know if they did that.

what made "una cosa graciosa" graciosa

i totally forgot to add one of the main reasons that night was so funny. you remember this:

we work up the nerve to actually go and knock on a perfect stranger's door. and his girlfriend (dari) answers the door. pam and i kind of look at each other. i'm praying that this woman doesn't have a shot gun in her hand. she says "i'm always in my pajamas when you guys come." pam and i look at each other again. i mean, we weren't carrying a pizza or anything, but we smiled and nodded anyway.

lol, well i forgot to mention that at the end of our conversation, she says "yeah, i totally thought you guys where with the church of christ or a jehovah's witness or something. i'm always in my pajamas when they come." we just laughed. and slowly stuck our tracts back in our pockets.

yeah, i'm doing pretty good. this week sure has been busy. i went to quitman with pam on saturday and came back on sunday. ah sweet impetuous youth. her family is great. and strange. but that is what makes them great! i really enjoyed my short stay there, and would highly recommend it.

i had a translating job on tuesday for a meeting with the advisors to the board office here. i felt all important and stuff, you know, sitting in on this meeting. but then the hispanic lady i was supposed to help out didn't show up. so i went down to childcare. the director has the cutest baby ever, so i played with him. i may have a babysitting gig on the side. that would be sweet.

we're doing some babysitting at church tonight to raise money for chapter camp for the bulldog students. okay. bulldog is a campus fellowship affiliated with intervarsity. intervarsity has "chapter camps" in the summer where members of chapters come together and learn and grow closer to one another. nicely caught up now? i thought so.

so, yeah, i think that'll be lots o' fun.

i've been thinking about me and what my interests are and what i'm all about. i'm not very politically minded, but that's probably because i'm ready to 86 this country. is that the right number? well, basically, i want to leave it.

lol

anyway. there was a meeting on monday for all of athens to come together and discuss the poverty of our county. of all the counties in america (159 in the state of ga alone...gotta love 8th grade georgia history), athens/clarke ranks number 5 among the poorest. number 5! that is amazing. we we're outranked by 3 counties in texas and the harlem area in ny. we're poorer than those in new orleans, people completely displaced by a huge natural disaster! in the tuesday meeting, one of the speakers from monday night came and shared what he'd talked about. the poverty line for a family of four is a little more than 19000 and for an individual is a little more than 10000. heck, i barely make 19000 year and i'm struggling. i can't imagine life for a poor family of 4! and a lot of people say that the number is skewed due to the large amount of po' college students. but even if you remove the 18-24 population from the data, we've still got a huge number of those living below the poverty line that is disproportionate to the state and federal levels. it's just crazy. we're trying to find out why this is.

so, yeah, other than what i think of legalized abortion (let's make it easier for people to be completely irresponsible, and no one is fooling anyone with that "rape, incest" thing because most people are not having abortions due to those reasons), capital punishment (eye for an eye), legalized drugs (i say legalize 'em!), immigrants (heck yeah they should be legal, but it shouldn't be a difficult process for them because that is what this country is about and they make up so much of our workforce) that's about as politically minded as i'll go.

okay, so i really don't know about the legalization of drugs. i can see pros and cons. gosh, maybe i'm more liberal than i thought. spooky.