goings and comings

goings: me, to kansas city and the greater denver-boulder area a la thursday. thank you rotary international for allowing me this spring break even though i'm not in school. and thank you to billye and david white for being cool parents, cool enough to temporarily move to colorado and ensuring my first ski bum experience since high school. i'll be schmoozing it up in KC Friday and Saturday with a bunch of Rotarians and other "scholars," then heading on to Denver to chill with my good friend from CSU, the lovely Ms. Kayla Wager. A week of skiing and a weekend of driving back will put me back in J-town in mid-March.

comings: the young H.H. Henningsworth, also known as Hayden, back from Martinique. a little culture shocked but not for the worst, a good friend of many of ours returned thiw weekend a little earlier than expected. he'll be all in the Conway area for the time being, until his departure in teh fall for Seattle for acupuncture school.

the respect i deserve

while waiting tables at the O'C last night, the hostess thought it would be mighty funny to sit 3 high school gals in my section. funny it was, because these 3 ladies have previously been students of mine while substitute teaching. a bit humiliating (or humbling, especially when they watched me sing the birthday song to another customer...yes, i have to clap and sing and such) too, as i was at their service.
the best part of the experience came when i was casually strolling by, checking on my tables, refilling drinks, etc. from behind came a call, "mr. white? mr. white?"
"yes?" i replied, casually and with a certain air of newfound dignity.
"may i have some more pickles for my hamburger, mr. white?"
"certainly, my dear."

i take it back...the best part was the tip. $9, far above the average for a 3-top at O'Charley's. it pays to be respectful, but it pays more to be respected.

ski bum

confession: i spent the good part of this weekend (about 15 hours or so) watching t.v.
excuse: the winter olympics are on.
excuse 2: i live in jonesboro, arkansas.

you see, since about the age of 10, i've considered myself more of a displaced ski bum than a true arkansan or southerner or whatever. that's a few years after i first started skiing, and growing up my family and i spent every spring break on the Colo/Utah slopes. maybe i'm not a true ski bum, but i can't be sure because i've never given myself the chance to find out. i tried once, when i was but a homesick little freshman at colorado state, but i didn't even click into skis before i was packing up to come back to arkansas.

but now i'm hell-bent on giving myself another chance. but this season i had other committments (or maybe the desire hadn't resurfaced before making my decision to save some money by moving back to j-town)...so i'm tempering my hunger with doses of the winter olympics. poor bode and rahlves, sucking it up this year...but three cheers for ted ligety. and three more for me in 2007, one in the U.S. in the early part of the year, one more in "summer" in New Zealand (winter again...thank you Southern Hemisphere), and another when I get back to the States at the end of the year, 'cause I'm finally going to follow another childhood dream. Grad school and responsibility calls, but I gotta do some double diamonds before hitting the books again.

Until then...please, NBC, keep these Olympics going for me. It's all I got. Arkansas is cold right now, but it's hard to ski through rice and cotton fields.

personality revelation

i've just realized for the first time that i am conclusively an introvert. hence the stress in most social situations. it may be news to those of you who've known me, as i must admit, i'm usually pretty good at faking extrovertedness, even though i never admitted to myself what i was doing. and now, thanks to the mr. rauch's brilliant article, i don't need to fake it anymore.

ice + snow + wind = ultimate weather

for some reason a couple hundred other people and i thought it was a great idea to play ultimate frisbee this weekend in little rock. after the fact, i wonder to myself "why? why are we this stupid?" on friday it snowed, large flakes, not small. on saturday night the ground froze, and on saturday and sunday, we did. the wind chill was a balmy 14 degrees and we were running around chasing a flying disc and trying to pretend we weren't cold. we were.
we (the boys named sue) went 3-3 on the weekend...not a bad showing for the "offseason."
thursday night i got to see son volt play at juanita's in little rock...they played a 2-song set with hardly a break before one of the best encores i think i've ever seen. my drunken friends tried to convince me to leave early, but thankfully for them, i held my ground. what would my friends do without me? certainly not 1)make wise decisions, 2)listen to good music, and 3)be in the presence of beauty and wisdom.

happenings in j-town

can't say there's just a helluva lot going on in jonesboro, so i'll reserve my talkings here to the most entertaining things i come across while here. that will most likely be things such as:

the other day, while substitute teaching (i.e. getting paid $75/day to read a book) at Annie Camp Junior High School (alumnus...voted "Best Overall" as a Freshman), i was asked by some awkward but energetic students (all of them) to sign an autograph. not as rick white, but as napoleon dynamite.
when will it end?

short run-down of what's up in my life, so we can get all caught up and i can devote most of this blog to filling in indiosyncracies of it all:
b.a. geography from UCA in december 2005, moved to jonesboro, ar (hometown) to save some scrilla, currently employed as sub and waiter at o'charley's (like applebee's w/o liquor), travelling on most weekends to play ultimate or visit friends or both, recently assigned to study in linoln, new zealand in feb 2007 for a year with funding from Rotary International (come visit...we'll go skiing or surfing), moving to the heifer ranch in april to work for 5 months as an intern (bitch) for cale nicholson and emily holland on their organic c.s.a., and throughout it all, trying to keep my 2006 resolutions: read, write, and learn to play the harmonica. so far, so good.