Parks and Recreation

This post is in honor of the new show starting next Thursday, Parks and Recreation on NBC with Amy Poehler. As a Recreation Management major, I feel it is my duty to watch this show (at least once). I also did a summer internship in a city Parks and Recreation office, so I really feel obligated.

See clips here.

Before going away to college, I was looking over my choices of majors and told my dad I was interested in Recreation Management. He didn’t seem very excited about it and told me about someone he knew who majored in that and didn’t make any money. Believing my father to be the wisest in all the land (he didn’t say no, it was just his shrug that threw me off), and I did hope to make a lot of money some day, I picked a different major.

My junior year of college I decided I didn’t want to go into Early Childhood Special Education anymore, and I needed to pick a new major. One evening while my neighbor gave me a haircut and a perm, I read the BYU catalog from cover to cover and dog-eared the majors I was interested in. I knew I wanted to plan weddings and parties, and cook or arrange flowers, but they didn’t have a party planning major, or a culinary arts major (SIDE STORY: After I got married I put my name on a waiting list for the culinary arts program at a nearby college, but my name came up when I was pregnant with Trevan and I knew we would be moving soon, so that didn’t happen). I also thought about interior design, but they cut that major the semester before, or something like that.

I kept coming back to Recreation Management but could picture my dad’s shrug in my mind (that’s the power of a shrug - though he really didn’t care what I chose). I then went back through my dog-eared pages and followed began the process of elimination. To help make my decision, I examined the classes each major required you to take and read their descriptions. By the time Kristen finished with my new hair-do, I had a new major to go along with it, Recreation Management. It is funny I picked my major while having a black cape velcroed (or was it snapped…) around my neck. I can still picture the details of that night like it happened yesterday.

The first time I went to meet with an advisor in my major I told him I wanted to plan parties and weddings, he was like, “Oookaaay, we don’t have any classes in that.” I then pointed out that there were a lot of event management classes, and that was the closest I could get. (SIDE STORY: Really, he wasn’t my technical advisor, he filled in because my real advisor stood me up three times and then preached in his classes about how rude it was to be late or to not show up to an appointment. It was really nice for Dr. Palmer to agree to be my advisor, he ended up being my favorite professor in college; he was motivating and hilarious!)

One of the first classes I took was an introduction into the major, which involved a field trip to see Recreation Management in action. I knew I was in the right major when we ended up at Disneyland, and a surf camp in San Diego. We also stopped in Vegas on the way there. We went to a lot of other places, but those two were the most fun. That field trip was where I met my friend Michelle. We had some good times… especially chatting in statistics class (which I gratefully passed with a D-).

Me and Michelle in statistics, Fall 2001. It's sad my hair isn't that blonde anymore.

(Michelle it was hard to find pictures of us where we were't posing to get our back sides?!)

Me and Michelle while camping at the sand dunes, Fall 2001

Michelle and I participating in some "field studies" while on a ride at Disneyland.

You can see the remnats of my earlier perm. Fall 2000.

I am in one tea cup and Michelle in the other while learning more about Recreation Management.

After I started taking classes, I knew I was in the right major, and that that was truly where I belonged. It was a very hands-on major. Experience I gained in classes gave me material to put on a résumé, and not all majors can say that. For an event planning class we planned a conference for the American Camping Association. The experience in that class helped me in my future job at the American Cancer Society. We were also required to do two internships, and at that time most majors only had you do one. I LOVED IT!!!

I tease John because I have a Bachelors of Science degree and he has a Bachelors of Art. Especially since my major seemed to be weighted heavily with college football and basketball players (surprisingly not why I chose that major) - it almost discredited the major in my book, I don’t know how the majority passed – they seemed to miss class very often, and I can think of a few that slept through a lot of the classes. Even though my major was fun we had theories we had to learn, or one major theory. It’s all about the theory of flow; here, I’ll educate you.

Taken from my Leisure Programming Text Book (I kept it of course):

“Csikszentmihalyi (1975) has developed a concept known as the autotelic experience. He suggests that leisure occurs when an individual experiences a loss of ego, a loss of self-consciousness, engages in self-forgetfulness, is engaged in the transcendence of individuality, and loses an awareness of self-construct. In this state, the individual is in control of his or her actions and environment. The individual has no active awareness of control, but is simply not worried by the possibility of the lack of control or failure. He or she feels a sense of personal power and control. This state is known as flow… The job of a leisure service programmer is to assist individuals in entering the sate of flow… A state of flow is felt when opportunities for action are in balance with the individual’s skills; thus, the experience becomes autotelic.”

Did you get that? For example, I find flow boogie boarding in the ocean (I would have been a surfer had I grown up on the west coast). It requires a little bit of skill (timing), there is a challenge (catching the wave at just the right time to get the full effect of the rise and fall and riding the wave all the way to the beach), and an element of risk (wipe outs, drowning, sharks, jelly-fish, rip tides etc.). Flow (or the autotelic experience) is achieved as I catch and ride good waves, forget about the risks, and lose track of time. I also find flow party planning, and hopefully assist others in achieving flow at their parties.

Don’t you feel smarter? Or did I lose you at Csikszentmihalyi?

To sum it up, I loved my major! I could tell more stories, but I think this post is long enough.

So, tune in with me next Thursday to watch Parks and Recreation. (Hopefully it is funny; John makes fun of all the previews.)

If you all lived closer, I would have a party and we would roast hotdogs, and have s’mores. Maybe, I’ll make some anyway…