V's Gap Year: May 2016

Today was a day of relaxation and reading. Emma had a sleepover with me and Olivia, and we all slept in. After talking for a while, we got up and ate breakfast before heading off to Cameron Village Regional Library to hang out. I had told myself that I was not getting any more books, because I already had a stack of fifteen in my room (some of which I have renewed five times). Ha ha. Like I could ever go to the library and resist getting books. Within about three minutes of walking in, I picked up two that were on shelves of teen books recommended by the Cameron Village librarians. Afterward, I sat with Olivia and Emma and worked on an online class about the creation of modern-day Israel that I started a bit before school ended. I find it quite interesting, and no, I'm not being sarcastic). We spent roughly two hours at the library and then went home to eat lunch. After lunch, I read my newly borrowed book while Emma and Olivia went to the store to pick up ingredients for a pineapple cake. I was addicted to the book. It is called Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi, and is dystopian fiction with emotional romance (which I am a sucker for, unfortunately propagating that teenage-girl stereotype; although, don't get me wrong, I do like a lot of other genres as well). The book is beautifully crafted, and the most striking aspect of the author's style is that she often uses crossed-out sentences. It's like Whitman using parenthesis to weave in his personal thoughts into Leaves of Grass or Junot Diaz using parenthesis to represent the silencing minority groups experience (shout out thank you to Mrs. Genesky and Ms. Hicks/Mrs. Carpenter for those scraps of knowledge!). The crossing out of sentences allows the audience to have a unique relationship with the main character--the sentences represent the private thoughts of the protagonist, and how she has been silenced and neglected all of her life.

After making the pineapple cake with Emma and Olivia, Mama and all of us went to our neighbors' house to see twenty goats. That might sound strange, especially since we live eight minutes from downtown Raleigh, but our neighbors rented twenty goats for a day and night to eat all of the vegetation in their backyard. It was awesome. There was an adorable Nigerian Pygmy goat, a La Mancha goat (from the area of La Mancha of Spain, with strangely-shaped ears that is an adaptation of the breed), and a bunch of other more conventional goats of all different colors and fur lengths. I walked among the goats, petting them and getting used to them as they ate green leaves, vines, and stripped bark off of trees. One goat approached me, Emma, and Olivia at different times and tasted our fingers to see if they were leafy greens. It was hilarious, and I ended up giving it a head rub that it thoroughly enjoyed.

Once I was done hanging out with the goats, my family and I went Millbrook High School's Dance and Drama Awards Ceremony. Afterward, I read for hours until I finished Shatter Me at about 11:00pm. It was amazing, and I immediately found out that there is a sequel called Unravel Me. I've already put it on hold at the library, since they are all currently checked out. I can't wait to read it!

I woke up on the very first day of my gap year, not tired as usual, but refreshed and ready to bird band. Normally, bird banding happens early in the morning, so waking up before 6 is not uncommon. Today, though, my bird mentor John Gerwin (the curator of ornithology at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences) had decided to start really late -- at 8:00 am (not that I complained). I banded with Olivia, my twin sister; Edward, a fellow birder; and John at Prairie Ridge Ecostation in Raleigh. Since we chatted a lot before we set up the nets (this happens pretty much any time John's around :) ), we didn't set the banding nets up until about 10. We set them up around the bird feeders by the outdoor classroom, and thus expected to catch a lot of birds, but our expectations were not met whatsoever. Maybe it was because we set the nets up so late, or because the birds could see the nets, or because we could have situated the nets better so that the birds were more likely to fly into them, but we only caught 8 birds. To put that into perspective, on a normal bird banding day, 30 birds is a low number to be expected. But it was really fun to just be able to hang out with all of my bird people, and two groups of elementary students came and John talked to them about bird banding. While John was talking to some of the kids, my former teacher Mrs. Blankenship came with her adorable son Felix. I was really glad to see her, because she taught me IB Theory of Knowledge last year and is pretty awesome.

I untangled four birds from the net: 1 juvenile European Starling (starlings are non-native, ew, and we decided not to band them during this banding), 1 male Brown-headed Cowbird, one Carolina Chickadee, and one Common Grackle. Cowbirds are quite beautiful in a nondescript way, but oh my god they hurt when they bite. They have conical beaks for cracking seeds, which means they put a lot of force into each chomp. This bird made me bleed! He was not happy, poor guy, but he cheered up as soon as he was released. The only other species that we caught and banded was the House Wren, which was one of our target species. This banding was part of a project called Neighborhood Nest Watch, where birds commonly found in yards are banded with both the usual aluminum bands (which have unique numbers like Social Security Numbers, but for birds) and with colorful plastic bands, so that people only have to see the bird in order to identify it. So we put color bands on the chickadees and House Wren that we caught.

Weather anchor Elizabeth Gardner came at about 11:45 and interviewed John about bird banding while we were there. It was pretty cool to be able to meet her, and she seemed really happy, outdoorsy, and nice. She interviewed John twice, and all the while us kids were in the background, looking for birds to fly in the net or banding. Once she had left, we stayed and talked a bit before putting the nets away.

After getting home, I hung out with my four dogs and three cats. (Yes, I have a lot of pets, so if you ever see dog or cat hair on my clothes, don't judge. It's unavoidable.) At about 6:45, I went to my best friend Emma's house with my mom and Olivia (she's also my neighbor, which is awesome). We ate delicious food, my favorite being sweet potato bread studded with walnuts, and chatted. A while afterward (at about 9 pm), Emma, Olivia, and I went to an anti-House Bill 2 art showing in downtown Raleigh at the Pink Building. It was quite inspiring, seeing all of the expressions of empathy, endurance, sadness, and anti-hate. One art piece was a big scroll-looking thing containing the names of every North Carolina government official that signed HB2 in gray on the left side of the piece. Directly across from every government official's name was the name of a transgender individual that had been a victim of violence or bullying. Every day the bill is in effect, the artist will cross-stitch a name in red thread, connecting the government officials with the people they harm and fail to represent. The power of the piece was the blood-red thread I could see connecting the names unalterably. If (When, hopefully) HB2 stops being in effect, the artist will stop stitching. That was one of my favorite artworks, though I enjoyed all of them.

Below are pictures of bird banding today: