Tiny Things

As a symbol of what little progress I made today, here are a few tiny things that got thrown out:

The hair clips I wore to my Senior Prom

A ticket to the Harbor Cruise I went on during my Senior week at Clark

A couple of the nose rings I used to wear. Getting my nosed pierced produced some of the most vivid memories of my early twenties. From having the lady at the Miraculous Creations shove a metal straw up my nose then stabbing me in the face with a needle, to my mother's guttural "oohhhhuh" of mild disapproval the first time she saw it, to all the uncomfortable boogers that used to get caught behind it. Yup. Nothing but good times.

Here's a Stone from the years at Camp Takodah when we tried to use them for character development. The butterfly sticker is from when they encouraged us to personalize them. The idea was, every time you saw a kid or a peer doing something good, you acknowledged that act by giving them a stone. At the end of the day, kids would get together with their cabin group and share why they got each stone. I was in the minority that really liked this system. It did not get used enough, however; and when it was occasionally lead to Stone-hoarding or kids doing things just to get fake glass pebbles, not because they were the right things to do. Take that and add it into your Ed/Psych paper on intrinsic vs. extrinsic rewards.