Five Minutes You're Out

Dear Friend,

Yesterday I went on a first grade field trip to the kite museum. It was very fun, but the car ride was quite noisy. Kids love to talk. I enjoyed listening to their conversations. I wish I had a pen with me so I could have written down the silly comments they made. Here were my two favorites (and you must read these in little high pitched first grade voices).

"[name] stop talking so much.
"No, I like to talk.  Talk, talk, talk."
"If you like to talk, then go to grade 2, because they like to talk."
(This is very true. My grade 2 students LOVE to talk!)

"Your house is pink."
"No, my house is not pink."
"Your house has to be pink because you're a girl."
(Evidence that stereotypes are already set by first grade.)

The noisy car trips made me appreciate my parents. My family traveled a lot by car; my two sisters and I LOVED to talk. My parents were so patient and put up with it for quite a while; eventually though, they would tell us we had to settle down and be quite, but only after at least an hour of our non-stop chattering.

There is one game we used to play called 5 minutes you're out. I don't know how the game got started. The goal was to make someone say the word "what" and if they did, the other person would say, "5 minutes you're out." Then the person who said 'what' had to be silent for 5 minutes. It would work like this:

Andrea: Becka.
Me: Hmmm?
Andrea: Han.
Me: yeah?
Andrea: Hannah.

Hannah: Yes?
Andrea: REBEKAH!
Me: WHAT?
Andrea: 5 minutes you're out!


Perhaps my parents made up the game to make us be quiet. Going something like this:

Dad: Girls, do you hear me?
Andrea, Hannah and Rebekah: What dad?
Mom: 5 minutes you're out girls!
Dad: Ahh, 5 minutes of peace and quiet!

Although it was a fun car game, it wasn't my favorite. My favorite of all times is the information service game.

My most memorable car trips are the ones in Switzerland. When we went sight seeing, we always saw information booths for tourists. Well, my sisters and I decided to make up our own information service game. This is how it went:

First, we would pretend to answer a call using our made up Information Service slogan:
"Information service at your service, how may we NOT help you?"
Then, we must come up with some witty air-headed comment.
Finally, laugh with sisters until you think up another scenario.

My favorite scenario was this one, "Hello, information service at your service, how may we not help you? Oh, I'm sorry, I can't help you right now, I'm on the phone."

My sister liked this one, "Hello, information service at your service, how may we not help you? You need to get to (insert destination)? Well you can get there by foot, bike, plane, boat, taxi, bus, train."

A couple other favorites of ours include:

"... You are going to visit (insert destination). Oh it is so beautiful there. Have a great trip!"
(Answering the phone) "Hello, we would like to order a pepperoni pizza. What? You aren't the pizza guy. Sorry, I must have dialed the wrong number."

The summer we created this game, we played it every time we were in the car, repeating our old scenarios and maybe coming up with new ones. We were so amused with it. But even with this game my parents would eventually tell us it was time to do something else that was more quiet.

Did you ever play fun games in the car with your family? What were they like?


Hope to hear from you!
Rebekah

My Chair Debacles

Dear Friend,

How are you this week? Have you had any fun thoughts lately?

My week is going well, especially with the anticipation of Easter holiday coming up where I will actually travel around Indonesia a bit. I'm sure I will write and tell you about it.

Have you ever had any mishaps with chairs? I have. I thought it might be fun to share a couple of stories with you. First I will take you to a summer cabin up in Sendai where the recent tsunami hit. This story takes place many years ago when Sendai was not yet devastated by a natural disaster.

One summer day, many years ago, my family was enjoying the creaks and smells of our missions rustic beach cabin. My mom was out back watching the ocean and listening to the waves, my dad was outside working on something, my oldest sister was in the kitchen baking blueberry muffins for our traditional family breakfast beach picnic, and I was at the dinning room table playing a game with my other sister and some friends.

I was seated at the head of the table. I'm sure everyone knows that if you sit at the head of the table, you have to reach the farthest to get to the middle. Naturally, when the game got exciting, I would stand up to be able to reach better, slapping the table at appropriate moments in the game. When the action settled down, so would I, as I relaxed into the cushioned chair that I knew would be waiting for me. One typically trusts a chair, if it was there when you stood up, it will be there when you sit down. Being under this impression, after a rather exciting part of the game, I comforably relaxed into my chair.  To my surprise, my body kept falling until I hit the floor. Sitting on the floor, slightly dazed, I saw everyone peeking over the table to see if I was okay, my mom rushed inside after hearing a crash, and my sister peeked through the kitchen doorway to see what had happened. "Opps, I thought you weren't using the chair," she said half apologetically, half laughingly. Apparently since I wasn't sitting in the chair, my sister decided she could put it to better use as a stepping stool. We had a good laugh from that one, especially since she didn't do it on purpose!

From that point on, I was careful about sitting down, making sure no one took my chair out from behind me. Little did I know, sometimes chairs have a mind of their own. This leads me to my next story, it happened a week before I graduated from high school. 

We had one week left of school. Most of our classes were finished, including our senior comps. Some friends and I decided to celebrate by having a little bonfire. We met at a nice little park that had a designated area for bonfires. We gathered together underneath a pale blue sky as the sun prepared to set, a perfect time to build a bonfire. Unfortunately, the park security noticed what we were doing and informed us that we couldn't make a fire. Why not, you ask? Apparently, it was already too late; all campfires had to be finished by 5 pm. What? The sun hadn't even set yet! How could it be too late to make a fire? If anything, it was too early!

Undauntedly, we decided to move locations and find another park; we had papers to burn! We picked up our lawn chairs and other paraphernalia and walked out of the park. Here are some snippets of what our conversation probably sounded like during our search for a new location.
"So much for that."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, where do we go now?"
"I think there's a park near my house."
"Okay, let's check it out."
"I'm hungry, can we stop at 7/11 first."
"Yeah, I haven't eaten dinner yet."
"I already ate, so I'll stay outside with the chairs." (That last statement was from me.)

This is where my chair tale begins. There I was, waiting outside the 7/11 while my friends bought  onigiri's and other food items. One friend quickly bought his food and came outside to keep me company. That's when we had a brilliant idea.
"How fun would it be to sit in the lawn chairs, on the sidewalk, looking into 7/11?"
"No one else does it, so why not? Let's do it."
I opened up the little yellow lawn chair and confidently sat in it. Apparently I was too confident, I hadn''t fully open it up. As a result, the lawn chair tried to eat me up, or comically fold up with me inside it. Suffice it to say I was extra careful the next time I tried to sit in the chair; that is, after my friends had a good laugh and cracked a couple of jokes about the event.

This ends my two random stories about chairs. Do you have any?
In case you were wondering, the bonfire was a success and led to many good memories.

The rain has been falling a lot today, and for the first time I have a leak in my room, right over my doorway. Thank God it isn't over my bed! I just hope the roof tile doesn't fall down in the middle of the night, that would scare me like crazy!

I'll let you know what happens!
Your friend,
Rebekah

It's not called hanging out when you are on your cell phone the whole time!

Dear Friend,

Today I woke up early and decided to stay in bed and read a book. Last night I finished a book titled Shirley by Charlotte Bronte but was still in the mood to read, so I read the first five chapters of a Newbery Honor book titled Princess Academy before going to sleep. When I woke up the next day, I figured I would continue reading the book since the whole night long I was wondering what would happen in the story. I picked it up and read, I kept reading until the 300 page book was finished. It is a middle school level book, so it was an easier read. Regardless, it was still very interesting and had some good points to think about.

It was such a good 'old-fashioned' morning to just be in bed and read. I wasn't fiddling with my computer, I wasn't setting alarms on my phone, and I wasn't listening to music. I was just reading. Unfortunately, it seems harder and harder to get away from all the technology that is around us. I mean, I am writing this on a computer and posting this letter to anyone that wants to read it, believe me, I am just as engulfed in technology as the next person. But sometimes I worry about what we are becoming with all this technology around us. Take, for example, the cell phone. It is no longer used to have a single conversation with someone that too far away for a face to face conversation, but now it is used to have multiple conversations with multiple people at the same time through the 'wonderful world' of texting. I wonder how deep these conversations actually are?

This afternoon, I decided to go to a coffee shop and do some work. I was sitting at a table on the second floor, away from the distraction and smoke of other people, drinking my ice lemon tea, listening to my ipod and working. Three girls came to the second floor with smoothies and sat down to hang out. I was amazed at how much 'hanging out' has changed since I was in high school only 5 years ago.

When you go to hang out with someone you should be giving one another your attention and be talking, laughing, discussing, debating etc. Instead, these three girls sat together at the same table, but instead of looking at each other and talking with one another, they each had their phones out and were intensely interacting with their phones. SERIOUSLY!!! I'm sorry, but this upsets me. The girls would sometimes show each other something on their phone, but that little piece of technology seemed to be a part of their body. I was at a party once and the same thing happened. I glanced at the people sitting on the two couches and each one of them had their phone out and were texting. I almost felt out of place because I wasn't texting.

What has this world we live in come to? What world will my children grow up in? Will the phone epidemic be this bad, or even worse that they text me good morning rather than walking into the kitchen to give me a good morning hug and a kiss.

Do you know how it feels when you are telling a story, very animatedly in my case, and half way through your story you look at the person you are talking to and they are typing on their phone, having a different conversation with someone else? I mean, if you ask a question, wait and listen to the reply. Your texting conversation can wait. Don't ask questions or try to have conversation if you don't want to listen.

I am big on conversations. I love having conversations, so this new era of phones and texting is a little frusterating. Granted, I am thankful for the technology. Without it I would not be able to talk to my family in Japan and America, I would not be able to talk to my best friends and keep up with what is going on in their lives. But, there is a difference between talking to someone face to face, over a computer or phone, and texting someone, facebook chatting and skype chatting. To be honest, how deep a conversation can you have when texting or chatting? I suppose that's why they call it chatting and not talking. Recently, a friend and I, who typically have good thought provoking conversations, were facebook chatting for the first time since I came to Indonesia. It started out as the casual how are you little chit-chatty conversations. But after a short while the questions were getting deeper and the responses were getting longer. Eventually, we got fed up with it and figured out how we could talk and have a real conversation. Having a conversation, where you hear a persons voice, is much more satisfying in my opinion than writing short questions and half-sentenced answers.

Well my friend, there is my little rant about this new era we are living in. I am thankful my texting doesn't work half the time, that way I am sure not to become a part of the crowd. Someone told me I should buy a blackberry, because that is what everyone has over here in Indonesia, telling me all the benefits of having internet on your phone etc. I said I really didn't want to be distracted by those things which I am doing fine without. Instead I have the cheapest phone possible with a black and white screen that can make calls and text. That's all. And I really don't use it enough to justify having one in my oppinion, but it is or will be, useful in times of emergency.

I will step down from this little soap box I have been standing on and say good bye.
Till next time,
Rebekah E.