Tuesday July 11, 2006
An update.
Firstly, being an RA has been a great experience for the past few weeks. Its been challenging for me, even to just make the effort to introduce myself to the people on my floor/dorm, because there are 210 people living in SRC. While I don’t know everyone in the dorm, I feel like I know most peoples names. I feel like if I wasn’t put in this position, I wouldn’t really go out of my way to meet so many people. That’s why I think this job has been rewarding – its been challenging to almost be a frosh again, where you’re meeting everyone and learning new names and faces. I don’t have a normal group of people to eat lunch with everyday, so I normally just walk over and sit with whoever I recognize. So its been good for that.
As promised, I have been doing more biking this summer. Its taken the place of going to the gym for me, where my lower body is stregenthening but my upper body is weakening. Today, and I hope this is something that continues, I rode with Harry to his workplace in Newark. It took us a little over an hour to get there – we crossed the Dumbarton Bridge and rode through Newark. It was a 14 mile journey. Riding back made it the longest I’ve ever ridden and I rode back even faster, making it in 1 hour! Now I just need to keep it up.
Thesis research has been going well. I’ve been reading a lot and taking some so-so notes. What I’ve found thus far is a lot of scholarship that occurred in the 1950s-1980s that was written about Japanese Americans and the internment experience. Scholars before have asked the question of what happened to JAs after internment, but most have focused on a few sites of interest or used non-historical methodologies. Chicago was the city to receive the most resettlers in non-West coast states and articles have been written about how JAs fit into the black/white racial dynamic of that city. I’ve also found an article about resettlement in Cleveland (apparently Cleveland was the 6th largest city in 1940…who knew?) and also one about Seabrook Farms, NJ, where JAs helped process frozen food for the war effort and was thus a popular place for resettlement up until the 1950s. Yet, it’s interesting that California has not been mentioned in the literature I’ve looked at. Perhaps I haven’t been looking deep enough or some authoritative work exists that has closed this question for good, but I feel like similar studies would have mentioned this work. This does give me hope that I have a niche for my research. I suppose that’s what makes history research interesting; while the fact that nobody has written about what you’re interested in is a good thing, it sure makes finding sources difficult!
Oh, so I organized SRC to go see Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest last weekend. 153 came! While getting signups was easy enough, getting people to drive and getting the tickets itself was a big hassle. Since SRC subsidized tickets, I had to withdraw $420 from my own bank account to cover the rest. In total, I took $1224 in CASH to the movie theater and bought 153 tickets when the box office opened. It was the most cash I’ve ever had at once and I was half afraid that the money would blow away, I would be a few dollars short, or that I would get robbed. But, we saw the movie (it wasn’t that good anyway) and it worked out.
That’s all I can think of for now. A special shout out to Jenny for prodding me to take time to write an update.