American River

Yesterday was awesome!
I'll go back a bit. We have basically the entire weekend off. I had my physical last night at 7:30, but beyond that, i've been off since mid afternoon on Friday, and the next thing i have is a community meeting tomorrow morning at 8 am. And then i'm actually off for the rest of the day tomorrow. I think it's because they're having to do the trainings in rotation, and only have so many people in the administrative staff, so some people have down time while others get to sit in meetings all day. I don't really know how it'll work for the rest of training, but that's what's happening right now.

Back to yesterday.
My pod (temporary team), along with a few others, went to the American River, which is about 20 minutes away. There's a beach at a slow moving part of the river, and you can swim, hike, and supposedly kayak. The kayak rental place was closed, unfortunately, but it was pretty, and the hiking, while not amazing, was still nice. It was really good to get off campus, get fresh air, move my legs and get some exercise. I know i should be running to get ready for this baseline test coming up, but i just don't want to. So hiking was great, i walked with a couple other people, one from my pod and one from another pod that i met as we were starting our walk, and we had a great conversation about fascinating things like what is art and how this guy i was walking with is going to do a mock moon landing on the 30 year anniversary of the original moon landing as art. It wasn't the longest, most interesting, or challenging hike i've done recently, but it was still really nice.

Then last night, after my physical, i was just walking through the two buildings looking for something to do. I was hoping people might be playing games again, because i played apples to apples a few nights ago, and heard people played spoons night before last. But i didn't get too far. I was in one of the other dorms, found a friend of mine looking at the bookshelf in the computer lab, and started talking to her. As we sat by the bookshelf talking, this other girl i'd met before came over and we started talking to her. The second girl decided to start organizing the bookshelf, the first girl had to leave, someone the second girl knew came over to look at the books, sat down, then another girl came over, and before i knew it i'd been sitting there an hour. The girl organizing left to go to bed, and another hour passed as i had this conversation with the other two girls there, who i'd just met. We ended up deciding to go to bed, but as we were on our way out, some other people taht we happened to all know came by the room, and I ended up sitting with them for 2 more hours in another room having a conversation that started out with quotes from mean girls and ended up as a discussion on abortion, faith, and how people of different views can benefit from listening to each other.
It was really cool, and there were people with completely different views from my own, and it was awesome to just sit there and talk to them, hear their views, speak my mind, but know that while we may not have all agreed, we were listening to each other and learning. I hope that i meet up with those people again, and that conversations like that happen more and more here.
I actually found myself incredibly challenged by that discussion to listen to people whose views were very different from my own. I realized that the environments i've been in through college and working in theatre didn't provide me with a very diverse group as far as mindsets and belief systems went.
I also realized that I had something of an evolution in college. When i first got there, I found the way so many of the people around me generalized and stereotyped incredibly frustrating, but somehow 4 years of living in an environment like that made me think in the same way. I heard myself speaking, and thought i sounded like such a snob, sitting there acting like i knew what it was all about and i had everything figured out. Truth is, I know i don't have everything figured out, and i was incredibly happy to be able to sit and have a respectful conversation with people i disagreed with.

I have today off as well, but there's nothing planned, i have no idea what i want to do. I hear that the bus system's a mess, but it is possible to get to downtown Sacramento by light rail, if you can figure out how to get to it. I also know that a few of the people i was with last night said they were going to try to get their team leader to organize a trip to the American River for this afternoon, so maybe i can jump on that and go there again. There were some great climbing trees, but i didn't have time to do any climbing because i spent my entire time on my walk.
And if nothing else, i wouldn't mind sitting and reading my book all day.