a kentucky summer...free style

Thursday, August 20, 2009

2009-08-20T18:12:00.001-07:00

It appears I suddenly quit with updating this blog each day, but I have not forgotten it is here. Summer is not quite over yet, but almost, and so I will end this blog with this one last post in honor of a year finished...and a birthday.

It’s a disappointing thing, sometimes, to realize that when you move far away from home the only thing you can’t leave behind is you. Sometimes we want to leave our families, forget our situations, and wipe the slate clean. What we fail at times to realize, however, is that deep down inside what we really want is not a clean slate, but a brand new one—a shiny fancy one with special places to hold the perfect writing utensils, the intricately carved wood frame buffed and finished in high gloss, and the built-in stand on the back so it needs no help being propped up. But as clean as the slate can be, it can never be replaced, and the memory—the scratches, the scuffmarks, the worn edges—it contains can never, by any means of our own, be erased.

I was not unaware when I left my home that I would always be where I always am. I may, however, have been a bit too naïve in hoping the slate could in fact be wiped clean with no remnants left of what I wanted to be my old life. But I’m learning our life is our life and as much as it evolves, it does not simply start over. There is not old and new but simply then and now, and even that can get a little muddled. It’s difficult when the same things show up over and over and you just want to know that someday those things won’t be there anymore, meanwhile, let’s keep the good stuff.

Tomorrow is my birthday, which, consequently, marks one year of being in Kentucky. As I finish out my twenty-eighth year of life and stamp it with the number twenty-eight for approval, I end this year and begin the next one with a sigh of recognition that the time to look deep into the very being of who I am and why I’m here has come. I did not have unrealistic expectations that Kentucky would magically sweep all my weaknesses and flaws away (which isn’t to say I wouldn’t have been happy if it had). And so I find myself in the very place I need to be, which is always the place where we’d rather not. I think of my sweet friend Sarah from back home who always gives her new birthday year a theme and I wonder what mine might be if I were to follow suit. The Hard Stuff, perhaps? Or maybe something a little lighter—I wouldn’t mind.

Tomorrow marks a new year in my life and a new year in Kentucky. What it will hold, I can’t even guess

Friday, July 25, 2009

2009-07-25T22:58:00.000-07:00

For a number of hours today, I got to hang around with Marilyn as we began the process of fixing up what will be a prayer garden here at Asbury. And it was the most fun I’ve had in a very long time, definitely the most fun I’ve had all summer. We laughed and worked and played and chatted and had a ball. I got to hear stories of how she and her husband met and dated. We wondered around a gardening store and made commentary to one another about the statues. She talked a little about her youngest son who finally just moved away from home (he’s my age) and his struggles that always go along with that. I love hearing Marilyn talk about her children. She is so in love with them and delighted by them, even when they make bad choices.

Today, we pressure washed. I thought this might take an hour at most. Not true. It took the whole time. In the middle of it, we took a break and went for a drive to get some materials and do a little browsing. The pressure washer Marilyn borrowed had a little container on it to put soap in. And so Marilyn went out and bought a big jug of soap. In the process of trying to pour it into the soap container, I got some on me and when I went to rinse it off, I was annoyed that it would not come off. I found that weird, but paid little notice as we powered the thing up and went at it with the benches and the cement floor.

And then at one point, I went to switch my hands on the nozzle because my elbow was getting tired and felt a sudden sharp sting in my finger as if I had just gotten a sliver. It stung so badly that I put the nozzle down and left for the bathroom to wash my hands, wherein I noticed even with other soap, I was hard pressed to get this soap off my hands. I continued with the power washing for a little while longer before Marilyn took over when I needed a break. I sat for a moment and then picked up the jug of soap and turned it around so I could see the warning label. “CAUSES SEVER BURNS” it stated just like this in caps, and then went on to state it should not be ingested and should be kept out of contact with eyes, mouth, and skin. Skin. Yes, that’s what it said. For a couple of hours we’d been spraying that stuff all over. The nozzle was covered in it because our hands had gotten soapy from it and the mist had likely been inhaled by the both of us. Flush skin for 15 minutes, it said, if you get any on it. I told Marilyn to turn off the power washer for a minute and, laughing, read her the warning label. We had a good laugh and she said, “My legs do seem to feel a little strange. Needless to say, that sliver was not a sliver, but a tiny chemical burn where the skin had come off. The sting was the feel of that soap on the rawness underneath.

A small price to pay for having a blast of a day with Marilyn. On our return from the drive, Marilyn dropped me off to power wash some more while she left to drop off the sander she had borrowed and used on the top of the benches. Instead of power washing, I ran off to the post office to get my Victoria’s Secret package I knew was waiting for me. In it were a couple pairs of pants and a shirt, among other things. As I made my way back to the garden, Marilyn was walking in and when she saw me she said, “What is that?” I replied with a big smile on my face, “It’s my Victoria’s Secret package.” “What did you get?” “Some pants and a shirt, I think.” And she smiled and said, “Okay, I’ll power wash while you go try the clothes on and show them to me.” I laughed at her delight in my new clothes and gave her the fashion show she wanted. They are, I should note, some great clothes. Marilyn wholeheartedly approved.

The final bit of amusement came when Bekah and Elissa wondered over to see what we were up to. I can’t remember, now, what we were talking about, but Marilyn commented to them that she and I were a lot alike. Case in point happened only a few minutes later when Marilyn put something in her car and turned back around to head back down to the garden and tripped over the curb and stumbled, in slow motion, to the ground. No harm was done and we all couldn’t help but laugh, and not more than thirty seconds later, I turned back around to walk back into the garden and tripped on my own feet. These are the ways in which you should not be like somebody else. Well, whatever.

Marilyn and I finally parted ways and I wandered back to the dorm for the rest of the afternoon and evening. It was definitely a good day. And so, until next time. There is still much more to be done on the garden. Here are a few pictures from the day.

Thursday, July 23, 2009

2009-07-24T20:46:00.001-07:00

written the following day

I bombed out in Hebrew again today. And I sit here and let out a sigh as I think about it. Here's to hoping I simply pass the class!

On the up side, Marilyn walked with me to go find myself some lunch and convinced me to go to Subway and split a veggie sub with her. So we ordered to go and thought to eat outside, but the Kentucky summer was rearing its unpleasant head, so we sat in the student center instead and ate. A good way to begin my Hebrew studying for the day. Always a joy to get to chat with Marilyn. You just never know what might come out of her mouth.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

2009-07-23T19:26:00.000-07:00

Wednesday was a whole lot of Hebrew. I'm ssssoooooooooooooooooo tired of Hebrew. I've come to hate it. We didn't have class today, so I studied, but it doesn't feel as if I'm getting much of anywhere.

So I took a break and watched So You Think You Can Dance! Which I missed last week. And it had the most amazing dance on it about fighting breast cancer. Brilliant. Watch it.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

2009-07-23T19:25:00.000-07:00

written later

Perhaps it’s time to remember Jesus. I seem to have pushed him by the wayside in the midst of this ocean of Hebrew I’m drowning in. One might think that studying Hebrew would bring you closer to God, but anyone who might think that has never taken Greek or Hebrew. It will bring you closer after that fact, but in the midst, it will make you want to shoot yourself. I feel as if one of these days I ought to learn a language that is not dead. Someday, Bengali will fill that roll, and in my dreams, so will French and Italian, but don’t put much stock in that actually happening. I dream a lot and I dream big.

On a high note, I got my glasses! They’re awesome! I’m loving them! And this day is exactly one month till my birthday. Let the countdown begin.

Now back to Hebrew. Ugh.

Monday, July 20, 2009

2009-07-21T04:05:00.001-07:00

I should be writing a post that repeats yesterday's post...but I'm not. Because I can't. Because I wore myself out on Hebrew. I tried, I really did, to study Hebrew today, but alas, I didn't get particularly far. We don't have a quiz the following morning, so I let myself slack a bit. Not smart, but maybe needed. Instead, I was able to go get my splurge of the year! My purple Ray Ban Wayfarer Original sunglasses, Bob Dylan style. They are currently at the eye doctor getting the perscription lenses put in. I can go pick them up after my next class is over. So excited. This is a picture of the lovely babies. Morgan got matching, though tortoise shell instead of purple, glasses and we will be taking pictures soon. So wait for some goodness to show up on here. Well, more goodness;).

Sunday, July 19, 2009

2009-07-19T21:10:00.000-07:00

I studied Hebrew all day today. And I mean aaaalllllllll day. And it felt a bit like this picture.

Off to bed, now, to do it all again tomorrow.

Saturday, July 18, 2009

2009-07-18T21:15:00.000-07:00

I was supposed to pressure wash the concrete and wood in the garden behind the chapel today with Marilyn, but Marilyn bailed on me. This is not particularly surprising. If she doesn’t set something in stone, then it’s set in nothing at all and free for the changing or canceling at any time. And so I decided to go work some more on the labyrinth pattern and hopefully finish it.

Finish it, I did! And it’s damn impressive if I do say so myself! And my quads are killing me because of it. All the standing and squatting and standing and squatting and crawling around on the floor gave me quite a workout, apparently. I was preparing to fold up the labyrinth and carry it over to the garden to see how it would fit when I ran into Marilyn in the student center. This may not seem strange except that it’s Saturday, a day she doesn’t work. But a friend of hers is in town and she was showing her where she works, so Marilyn, excited I was finished, took the friend in to the gym to show her what I had done and to see it herself for the first time, and needless to say, I blew her out of the water. She was shocked at how well it turned out. I mean, this thing is all but perfect. Marilyn was impressed and on her way out of the building, she called back to me, “I owe you lunch!” “You owe me cupcakes, too!” I reminded her. “I know!” she replied and I laughed as I wandered back into the gym to pack up the labyrinth.

A few minutes later, I wandered over to the garden with the pattern and again ran into Marilyn who was telling her friend about the garden and what was going to be done to it. When I got there, I realized I had not taken into account some of the measurements of the place and panicked for a moment that it wasn’t going to fit. These are the times when I realize that as detailed as I can be, over all, I do not have a detail oriented personality. Marilyn and her friend helped me unfold the nearly 15’ by 15’ pattern and to my great relief, it fit perfectly. And Marilyn was excited. It was fun to have her there as I unveiled the temporary version, and her friend gave some advice on how to refinish the currently tattered built-in wooden benches. As Marilyn and her friend got in the car and they prepared to go their way as I prepared to go mine, Marilyn smiled and said, “You know, I have to admit I doubted you.” I smiled with a rather cocky grin and said, “I know, Marilyn. But I didn’t. I may doubt myself in many things, but art is not one of them.” It is good for me to remember that there is something in my life that I am inherently gifted in and as much as I may be unsure about many things, my gifts are something I should never lose sight of.

Later, in the evening, Morgan and I went to Brewster’s to grab some ice cream and then went out to Highbridge and stood on the lookout that overlooks the railroad bridge to the right and a fork of the Kentucky river to the left. I love that lookout. Looking down at that river with the Kentucky tree covered hillsides all around makes me think of Huck Finn traveling up the Mississippi river (or was it down?) in his exploits, because I always imagined it looked like this. It’s always delightful when the things you imagine end up actually existing.

And so I go to bed feeling as if today was a day that filled me well. I am not stuffed at the end of this day, but I am satisfied. I was successful in finishing the labyrinth and was delighted to spend time with a friend. Tomorrow, it’s Hebrew all day. Alas, back to regular life.

Friday, July 17, 2009

2009-07-17T21:45:00.000-07:00

It is two weeks into my four week class which means today was our midterm. This class may kill me, but maybe I’ll kill it first. I sit here at my desk and let out a big sigh. In truth, I’m simply relieved it’s done. Now for the last two weeks! I’m not sure how I did; though I don’t think it was too bad. Certainly better than the last two quizzes!

When I walked out of Hebrew today, I didn’t want to look at anything even resembling Hebrew, and so I didn’t, and it was great. For most of the afternoon, I worked on figuring out the labyrinth pattern for the prayer garden Marilyn and I are designing. I spent about four hours in the hot gym attempting to lay it out and I feel as if I didn’t get much of anything done for the hours I worked. But that’s how it goes with art, especially art that takes a lot of math to get it right. Math. Oh my. My tenth grade geometry class has come back to bite me in the ass. I even had to utilize the Pythagorean Theorem today, which really means I had to find something online that would calculate it all for me.

The labyrinth is set to be fourteen feet ten inches across and will largely resemble the three-circuit one shown in this picture. It took three hours to roll out all the paper, draw the lines, find, measure, and cut string, tape them to the paper, calculate all my measurements, and finally draw out the outer circle with my make-shift compass, which, I will say, I was quite proud of coming up with. And then I was hungry and ready to go home for the evening. In three hours, I got a circle drawn. Well, hopefully the slowest part of the process is over—getting the initial lines measured on the paper.

Tonight for dinner, I sautéed up some of the vegetables from the co-op and tonight I had local organically grown potatoes and orange tomatoes for the first time in my life. It was quite amazing. It’s exhilarating, I have to admit, to eat vegetables right out of the dirt. I’m such a city girl. I know nothing about these things.

And then afterward, Morgan and April and I watched the movie Wonder Boys. It had been a while since I’d last seen it and I was in the mood. The mood was satisfied. I always enjoy that movie and it’s dark, witty, cynical humor.

I debated going to bed after that, but I decided to watch another movie. For Marilyn’s vacation, I lent her some of my movies, one of which was Pieces of April. I find this movie fascinating and always good to watch. A few days ago, Marilyn handed back over to me the movies she’d finished watching. She took out Pieces of April and said to me, “You are that girl.” “What?” I said back. “You are that girl. That girl is you. She is totally you,” she replied as she tapped the movie cover. I had never thought of that character as much to do with me, let alone as me, so I was curious and thought I needed to watch that movie again soon. Tomorrow, I am meeting up with her to do a little work on the garden and so I decided I would watch that movie tonight and then ask her about it. In light of her comment, I laughed at a few things in this movie I hadn’t laughed at before, because, well, some of these things were things I would do. But is this character, in essence, me? What did Marilyn mean by that? Hopefully, I will get some answers tomorrow. But I won’t put much stake in it, because when you’re with Marilyn, the conversation can go anywhere, and it can fly out of your control quicker than you thought you had it. Of course, it’s always an interesting one.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

2009-07-16T20:01:00.000-07:00

Today, I had the opportunity to teach Marilyn what the term “hooking up” means. I would like to give the original credit to MTV, the place for all things young and stupid, for first explaining this to me. Wait, did I just admit I watch MTV? In the process, I also taught Marilyn what nicmo means and maybe even DTR, but maybe she knows that one. This came up loosely in a conversation about her son and his relationship exploits. She used the term and I thought it wise to tell her what it actually means. If you don’t know what it means, well, you can Google it. Such terms are not difficult to find. I will not disclose the definition here. Educating on the next generation—always interesting, often inappropriate.

Beside that, I’ve spent all my time studying Hebrew and it’s possible I have gone insane. I think if I put a gun to my head and pulled the trigger, I would destroy myself much quicker and more efficiently, and maybe even learn Hebrew faster. Who knows?

Our midterm is tomorrow and I’m in no place to take it at the moment! What did I get myself into??? That is what I keep asking myself. I may be digging my own grave here. We’ll see.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

2009-07-15T17:51:00.000-07:00

Can't spend much time here tonight. I bombed out in Hebrew today. Big time. It was so bad that when we were given a break, I left and did not return. So I've been spending all the rest of the day catching up on vocab. What this meant was that I missed the lesson on verbs. Lovely, but at the rate I've been going, I'm not sure I would have understood it anyway. So I'm reviewing the slides from that presentation now and then will be back at it with the vocab. Ugh. Whoever thought it would be a bright idea to pack a semester's worth of a language into a month should be deemed legally insane (if there is such a label) and never allowed to be a part of the formation of curriculum ever again. I don't know if this was such a good idea for me.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

2009-07-14T20:42:00.000-07:00

Today, I am experiencing, for the first time, the southern and midwestern phenomenon commonly known as chiggers. And it sucks ass! It's a very miserable experience. Chiggers are a mite that climb onto humans and other animals from grassy and woodland areas. They do not technically burrow into your skin but they feed off your skin cells and sit on your skin doing so until you most likely scratch them off. They are almost invisible to the human eye and so often go undetected until the itchy little bumps begin to appear. The worst part about it, though, is that they will stay on your clothing and it can be days before you feel well enough to not scream. I am not to that point. Today, these little bites began to itch, and they itch bad.

And so today I mentioned this to Marilyn while standing in her office talking about garden plans and she said, "I wish I had something to help you with. Oh wait! I do! Windex! No, seriously, it works." Well, these are the things that happen when you hang around Marilyn Elliott long enough. You end up doing crazy things like spraying Windex on your bug bites. Marilyn is obviously the mom of multiple children because she grabbed the bottle, shut her office door and said, "Here, I'll spray you." It took a bit of effort, but I convinced her I could go to the bathroom and do it myself, as chigger bites happen under your clothes and my bites were far enough under my pants to require me to remove them.

Surprisingly, it works. And it works quite well. My Big Fat Greek Wedding was right.

So I am going to bed now. I have done four loads of laundry in order to wash these devil creatures away, but as one last precaution, before I jump into bed, I'll spray a fine mist (or not so fine) of Windex on my skin and hope the itch free feeling will last long enough for me to fall asleep. And I'll hope for a little less misery tomorrow as I study in the student center, but if not, I can always ask Marilyn for the Windex bottle.

Monday, July 13, 2009

2009-07-14T03:31:00.000-07:00

written the following day

I spent most of my time today working on Hebrew. Tomorrow we start up class again after a four day break, so I spent many hours in the student center working, working, working. And then I got to hear this gem around four o'clock. Marilyn came out of her office, turned off her lights, closed the door and came walking out to the front desk with her floor lamp in one hand and her bag in the other. She turned to John, the desk worker, and said, "I'm taking my lamp to get fixed and I'm off to Jazzercise and I'll be back at 7:30. If anyone asks, I'm in a meeting with the president," and smiled like a child who knew she'd just said something witty and walked out of the building. When she was gone, John said, "I hope someone asks."

Sunday, July 12, 2009

2009-07-14T03:06:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, Morgan and I took a drive to go find the old abandoned barn we'd stumbled across a few weeks ago. Here are pictures.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

2009-07-12T23:40:00.001-07:00

Last night I got to see Over the Rhine at a FREE concert with the Kentucky Symphony Orchestra. Bekah and another friend, Adam, and I went up to see it. Since the concert was just south of Cincinnati, we decided to cross over to the other side for a little while before hand. Here are a few shots from the night. It was amazing!

Friday, July 10, 2009

2009-07-12T23:24:00.000-07:00

“This is dedicated to the one I love.” --Peter, Paul, and Mary

Have I mentioned how much I really enjoy Marilyn Elliott? In the eras of the Victorians and the Romantics, it was not unusual to find love letters between mutual friends, students and teachers, and those who simply had mentors they admired. It was a very letter writing society. This had nothing to do with a romantic love as the limited view of love letters today would have it, but were words of appreciation and admiration in a time that was not so fearful to share them. And so, while I don’t know that I would call this a love letter, today I have decided to dedicate this post to Marilyn, Asbury’s rock of a chaplain, and my fantastically whimsical friend.

If I were to write this in letter form, I might start like this:

Dear Marilyn,

You are fabulously wonderful, even if you do drive me crazy!

If I could put the essence of my relationship with Marilyn into one precise sentence, that’s the closest I could come. The things I dislike about Marilyn are the things I absolutely love. I love how spontaneous she can be, how she keeps me on my toes. And I hate that she won’t nail down times with me. I love her honesty, her lack of desire to say anything but the truth. And I hate when she says things to me I don’t want to hear. I love that Marilyn doesn’t censor herself around me, that she laughs with me, that she plays with me and teases me.

Marilyn is not like any other woman I’ve met. She is never bothered by my intensity and does not try to entertain me when she is not in the mood or does not have the time. She does not fake how she feels, and I have learned that I never have to worry about what she may be thinking about me, because she’ll simply say it. I love that she doesn’t put up walls with me, and I love that I don’t have to second guess Marilyn and that I have her word on that.

With a twenty-six year age gap, our relationship is, to say the least, a unique one. It is so interesting to me, that sometimes I wish I could frame it and put it on my shelf, because it would add an interesting element to my collection of pictures and trinkets. Marilyn is largely uninterested in the age gap, but being less than two months older than her youngest child, my relationship with her sometimes looks more like an awkward parent-child partnership than a friend to friend kinship or even a pastor-student bond. The weirdest part is that sometimes it looks like all three at once.

Marilyn is one of the very, very few who understand me not just as someone of a postmodern point of view, but as a Portlander who has been uprooted and transplanted into a place entirely foreign to her culture. As a Canadian, especially one with the same bent toward postmodernism that I have, she seems to understand this with an empathy others can’t grasp. I love that I can vent about my thoughts on Southern culture, the Church, and Asbury and have no worries that she’ll be offended or even bothered, and to know that, in fact, I just might have an empathetic ear.

My first experience with Marilyn was not a personal one. Due to a minor back injury from my nasty car accident that officially welcomed me to Kentucky, I was in and out of New Student Orientation, unable to cope with both the discomfort of sitting for too long and the discomfort of being in a sea of people I’ve never met. But I did happen to be in NSO when Marilyn spoke. I don’t really remember what it was she talked about, but she caught my attention when she quoted Brandi Carlile’s song “The Story.” It is a certain type of person that has an interest in Brandi Carlile and acquaintances back home are a number of those. Brandi Carlile is a Seattle-based musician who has a bigger following on the West Coast than over here, so to hear her mentioned piqued my interest, and I seemed to stow away in the back of my mind that whether or not Marilyn was a person I should get to know, she was at least worth noting as relevant. She made me curious, but it was many weeks before we would officially connect.

Since then, it’s been a crazy ride, one that has consisted of office visits, random chats, witty bantering, lots of cupcakes, banana bread, church visits (including Easter), grocery shopping, lunch out, her front porch, one retreat, tears, laying in the grass, a trip to the public library, the asking of me (or any other female near enough to hear the question) to be the contributing factor in the giving of grandchildren from her last born and, as she so articulately noted, the only one left with the biological capability to do so, and the exchanging of books and movies.

I have known Marilyn for less than a year, and it’s been a year to remember, though one I sometimes think I’d rather forget. I don’t know if I could have survived Asbury without Marilyn. Like a little beacon of sanity, Marilyn was always there to remind me that there was a world outside Asbury and that the world outside Asbury would not see me the same way the world inside Asbury does.

I love that Marilyn will not give undue sympathy, even if I do want it, and won’t bullshit around. I love that with no warning, she’ll come out and whisk me away from my grueling work to take a quick trip to Goodwill or go sit in the sun for a few minutes or lay in the grass. I love that Marilyn does not want to be a mother to me and that I don’t want her to treat me as if she’s my mother, but that at times we default to that anyway and in the end I just go with the flow of whatever she wants, because it has everything to do with spending time with her and nothing to do with how that’s done.

These days, Marilyn and I are designing a garden (hence the public library trip)—a prayer garden outside one of Asbury’s many chapels. If there’s a timeline for this, Marilyn has not notified me of it, and I don’t find this to be a surprise. Whether or not it even gets finished by the end of the summer is up for grabs, I’m sure. But the finishing end is not much of a factor for my choice to be involved. I’m simply entertained with the opportunity this will bring for more amusing stories and fantastic interactions, and the opportunities that have already arisen.

Marilyn does not fit the Asbury mold. She doesn’t even fit the opposite of the Asbury mold. She is simply her own entity, and this is one of the reasons I so enjoy her. I could write a lot more about her. I could tell amusing stories and relay comical conversations. For now, though, I will end by saying I love that Marilyn has redefined relationships for me that is very different from the dysfunctional and painful ones in my past. I love that Marilyn doesn’t think my intensity is any stranger than that of her children or even her own and that she may not even see me as particularly intense at all. Asbury has been one of the hardest experiences of my life. It is not an easy place to be in and burnout tends to happen quickly but inefficiently. Almost a year later, it feels less like home to me than when I first arrived. But when I look closer, I remember there are a couple of people who have made it all worthwhile. What I have learned from my relationship with Marilyn is something I will always cherish. No matter where I go and where I end up, I know I will always have Marilyn to chat with, cry to, and to share fabulous poems and endless bounds of wit and humor with. Thanks, Marilyn, for an amazing time and one crazy ride!

Oh, and did I mention I love that Canadian accent? Sure is something, eh?

Thursday, July 9, 2009

2009-07-10T21:44:00.000-07:00

written the following day

Thursday was my Friday, and it felt like it. Class ended and even though I attempted to continue studying Hebrew, my brain told me it would not tolerate such a thing. And so I sat in the student center and worked on some other things and it was desperately quite in there and the clock ticked away like molasses on a cold day. Even Marilyn noted as she walked out of her office at one point, “This day is going so slow!"

In the midst of my writing the latest This Week At Asbury communication, Marilyn came walking out of her office and said to me, “Come on, let’s go outside. Let’s lay in the grass.” And when Marilyn makes a comment like that, it is generally spoken quickly and with her on the move. Marilyn does not dilly-dally. She was all the way to the door before I had hardly gotten out of my chair, but she waited for me as I hurried over and wandered outside. So for a few minutes, Marilyn and I lay on the grass beneath a tree, looking up at its branches and noticing its bark looked like camouflage. How strange. What did we talk about? I don’t even really remember now, but it was blissfully delightful!

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

2009-07-08T21:20:00.000-07:00

Hebrew, Hebrew, Hebrew! All day long, that’s all I do! I get up at quarter to six, go to the student center, study before class (and, so it seems, receive a congratulatory comment about my diligence from Marilyn as she comes into work), go to class, come back to the student center, study, study, study, eventually leave and go back to my dorm where I study some more. And yet, I’m hard pressed to actually have it all done by the time class starts the following morning. Ugh.

But, on the bright side, on my way back from a break during class, I ran into Marilyn and got to chat with her for a few minutes. She’s back this week from a month long vacation from Asbury and it’s nice to see her around. When you’ve been on a campus like Asbury’s for long enough, it’s hard to tell how on the edge people would seem to the outside world, but in the world of Asbury, Marilyn’s personality always borders on the offensive (and for some, I’m sure, falls into it). This is what I love about Marilyn. This is, not, however, what I love about Asbury.

Friday, we do not have class, so currently, the plan is to plant some flowers with Marilyn in the little garden behind one of Asbury’s many chapels. It will be interesting, for sure! And a good break from Hebrew.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

2009-07-08T21:08:00.001-07:00

written the following day

What did I do on Tuesday? Oh, good grief. All I did was Hebrew! I’ve been told I’ll start dreaming in it soon enough. Well, won’t that be fun? I’d like to have a dream where people speak Greek and Hebrew back and forth to each other. But if I had that dream, it would mean I need to get the hell out of seminary as fast as I can!

Monday, July 6, 2009

2009-07-07T21:11:00.000-07:00

written the following day

Taking a semester’s worth of a language class in one month is absolute insanity. What?! This week, I began my Hebrew class, and it has absorbed my life. I can’t write much here for now, because my taxing schedule for Hebrew study is demanding my time. I may have just signed my death certificate with this class. Word on the street is that before long I will be dreaming in Hebrew. Just what I want.

In the midst of attempting (unsuccessfully) to catch up with church history before beginning with Hebrew, my day hit a bit of a road block. My history assignment has to do with writings of Irenaeus, a second century apologist who wrote in refutation of the Gnostic heresy of the day. In the middle of reading his writing—in which he clarifies both the humanness and divinity of Jesus Christ and the totality of God as both Father of Christ and Creator of all—a question hit me. This is not the first time this has crossed my mind, but today it seemed to overwhelm me. As I read this apology against heretical beliefs, it hit me just how fucked up we are, and then, as if I’d never thought of this before, I wondered why in the world God created all of this, all of this. What in the world would compel him to do such a crazy thing and something that from my vantage point seems as if it was completely not worth it. It was a question that overwhelmed me to the point of being unable to continue with my work and after sitting for some time in the student center where I was attempting to work, I decided to get up and go see of Peg was available to chat. I’ve talked about Peg before in these entrees. A spiritual lighthouse of this campus, Peg is someone I always enjoy talking to. I value her insights on live and spirituality and God, and I value the insights she has into me.

Peg was, indeed, available, and we ended up chatting for quite a while. It was the kind of conversation that stretches my thinking in a way that is not uncomfortable but instead intriguing. I enjoy Peg and am glad she takes interest in my thoughts. The conversation was exactly what I needed, and as I wandered back to my work, my heart, while still pondering the question, was a bit more at ease.

Sometimes, I find Asbury to be the most difficult place in the world, but in the midst of those times, I find it has some of the most amazing people here, too.

Sunday, July, 5, 2009

2009-07-06T20:07:00.000-07:00

written the following day

Well, Sunday was my last day of freedom before Hebrew came and swallowed me whole. I had homework due in the evening for church history, but instead of doing it, I wandered the mall with Morgan for Bob Dylanesque sunglasses and found the exact pair he used to wear at the Sunglass Hut—Ray Ban Wayfarers 2140. It’s a bad idea, I just want to say, to look at the real deal when you’re trying to find a cheap version of them. It’s bad because nothing looks quite like the real thing and the real thing looks just like Bob Dylan. But hey, I need to update my prescription sunglasses anyway and you can’t put prescription lenses in cheap Old Navy frames…. Oh my.

And speaking of Bob Dylan, Morgan and I finished off her weekend Dylan education with the documentary No Direction Home. It’s a fascinating and very informative documentary about Dylan’s music career, focusing especially on his move from acoustic to electric. I had forgotten, though, that it’s over three hours long. It was aired on two consecutive days when it was on TV. But we watched it all, anyway. Dylan is always worth watching all of.

Now to prepare for the hurricane of Hebrew that shall blow in on Monday and remain for the entire month of July. A language in a month. Oh good grief.

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

2009-07-05T21:17:00.000-07:00

For the Fourth of July, I think I will let the pictures tell the story. First, I watched a parade in Wilmore. Then Bekah and I went out to Highbridge, so I could see it for the first time, and afterward I waved my final official goodbye as she left home in Wilmore for good. And then of course there were fireworks, which I did not take great effort to go watch, but could see a bit of from the third floor of the dorm.

Friday, July 3, 2009

2009-07-04T20:00:00.000-07:00

written the following day

Last night, I wrote a post for my blog, and then my Word program unexpectedly quit on me and I lost the whole thing. %*&^#@!

So now you get the summarized, truncated version which goes like this. In the morning, I got to go out to breakfast with some great ladies from the dorm—Morgan, Nicole, and Bekah. We drove thirty minutes to go to IHOP, because I wanted a good variety of syrup. It was delightful.

And then in the afternoon, I got to enjoy more time on the rocking chairs and even had a little company. Angela came with me and Bekah joined a little later. Mostly, we did our own thing, them reading and me practicing some more on my guitar. When the blisters got too painful, I had to put it down and decided to catch up some on one of my Granta issues—a literary magazine that looks more like a book. It’s British which means it’s incredible.

In the evening, I began educating Morgan on Bob Dylan and we watched the 1967 documentary, Dont Look Back. Always a beauty to watch. For a day in Wilmore, it was a good one.

Love the rocking chairs. Love the reading. Love Bob Dylan. Not, however, a big fan of Word.

Thursday, July 2, 2009

2009-07-03T21:26:00.000-07:00

written the following day

On Thursday, I went to Harrodsburg, about thirty minutes away. Twice. In a row. Morgan and I are part of a vegetable co-op and Morgan is on a pick-up rotation which means every certain number of weeks, it’s her turn to go pick up all the boxes of veggies in Harrodsburg for all the families and individuals in Wilmore who are a part of this co-op. I had time free, so I decided to go with Morgan to Harrodsburg and we made it all the way there before realizing Morgan had forgotten the empty boxes she’s supposed to swap out for the full ones. Which meant we drove all the way back to Wilmore, picked up the boxes, and then went back to Harrodsburg. Fortunately, this part of Kentucky is stunningly beautiful at this time of the year. And for a Northwesterner to call someplace stunning, that means something. Kentucky is beautiful in a different way from the Northwest, but it is green and full of trees and I love it. Well, the scenic piece of it, anyway.

Through this co-op adventure, I am learning a lot about vegetables. We’re getting vegetables I’ve never cooked with and some that I’ve never even heard of or seen. I was not aware that carrots could come in any variety besides orange, but apparently you can grow them in white and purple, too. Not sure if they can be grown in any other color. This is the first time I’ve ever seen a naturally grown onion, straight from the earth to me and I was strangely excited to learn that green onions are in fact just the tops of regular onions and that when the onions grow to be the normal size of an onion, the green parts are huge! And then there is kohlrabi. Ever heard of kohlrabi? It is, I later read, a vegetable that is a bit of a mix between a turnip and cabbage, which means it has more of the look of a turnip with the taste of a cabbage. It’s a fascinating piece of food to figure out. I’ll end here with a picture.

Wednesday, July 2, 2009

2009-07-02T21:03:00.001-07:00

written the following day

I got paid to take pictures today! It was fantastic.

Today was July 1^st, the beginning of the fiscal year, at least for most academic calendars, which means today was the day the new Asbury president starts his job. The school did a bit of a celebration for it—first a chapel and then a picnic out at the president’s house—and I was asked to photograph the events. Here are a few pictures from it.

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

2009-06-30T20:56:00.000-07:00

I went back to the porch today, and it was a little bit of heaven. Porches are interesting. They teach you fascinating things. I once heard, I think on the radio somewhere, that neighborhoods with front porches on their houses tend to be safer than ones without. At least statistically speaking.

Porches are where stories are told and where stories are made. Today, I practiced on my guitar, an instrument I’ve owned for enough years now that I should know how to play it, but lack of discipline has made it so I still don’t. But in the midst of playing instruments and reading books and magazines, we take moments, maybe even minutes or hours, to look up and lazily observe the view from the porch, and this is how we learn about the places we live.

Though the college is a school just the same as the seminary is, it is not mine, not in any sense of the word, so I see it differently than I do my own campus. I watch it as I watch the street and the sidewalks and the pieces of town that happen within view of that porch. I watch the students on the maintenance crew diligently keeping up the grounds. I see the townspeople with their children and their pets and maybe just each other. I watched a young man with quite the extensive spiked Mohawk skateboard down the sidewalk and disappear between two of the buildings on the seminary campus. I can see the mail arrive at the seminary, the employees walking to and from their offices to their vehicles or maybe to lunch. I see visitors and townsfolk come and rest under the shade of the great oak trees in the front courtyard of the college campus. I can see the calm tranquility of Wilmore moseying through its daily course and I’m learning sometimes it’s good to observe what’s yours from a place that’s not.

It doesn’t seem that big of a jump to spend time at the college campus across to the street as opposed to the front steps of my own campus, and yet it feels like a world of difference. I don’t think it is my imagination that the college campus has a much more positive energy. It is true that my lack of ownership and responsibility to anything on that campus may have a roll in that, but it cannot be denied that there is a happiness and a hopefulness there that I do not feel on the seminary campus. Not my happiness, but certainly a happiness that has an effect on mine. There is a hesitancy at the seminary, a strong one. A hesitancy to trust with reckless abandon and believe in the impossible. There is fear which is tied to the past, the recent past and a sense of hurt that needs healing. All of this affects the spirit of the campus, and simply by walking across the street, I feel as if my load is lighter, as if my dreams reclaim their vividness, as if my eyesight regains perspective. I feel like myself.

When the school year comes around and the students come back, I won’t be spending time on that porch. It is theirs to have and theirs to enjoy, but it’s nearly two months before that happens and I will enjoy the time I have to consider life differently from one side of the street to the other.

Life can happen from the view of the front porch and life can happen on the front porch. May many stories be made and told in these chairs on this porch at this dorm.

For now, I will meander on over throughout the next days and see what more this porch has to teach me, because there’s a lot more I’d like to learn.

Monday, June 29, 2009

2009-06-29T21:38:00.001-07:00

My friend Morgan invited me out for pizza tonight at a funky hippy type pizza place in Lexington along with another friend of hers. I’ve only been to this place once, but I enjoyed it and have been hoping to go back. But I declined the offer. Surprisingly, because I wanted to stay in Wilmore.

Yesterday, while on a stroll to Cluckers, our only gas station, to get a Dr. Pepper, I was surprised to see new rocking chairs on the porch of Asbury College’s women’s dorm. Ten of them, in fact, and all from The Cracker Barrel (where everyone around here gets their rocking chairs, including me). I would like to note that ten of those babies in one shot is not cheap. I gazed at them as I walked by and could hear them beckoning to me, so I made a plan to spend as much time as I wanted there today. College is not in session, and the students are not occupying the dorms, so I had free reign.

So I woke up, fixed myself some breakfast, got dressed, took my hot tea and my Gandhi autobiography and strolled on over. Today’s weather was perfect, the most similar it’s been to the Northwest all summer. Tomorrow should be even more so. As I wandered up and across the street, I saw some of the city workers laboring away, noticed the cars parked along the sidewalk and for the first time this summer I thought, “This is a good life.” While others worked for hours, I simply rocked in the white painted woven seated chair and enjoyed the breeze as I read more of Gandhi’s words (more, because I’ve been reading this for two summers now—I’m on summer number three), drank my English Breakfast Tea and occasionally looked out over both campuses. The sun was wonderfully bright today and warm but not unpleasant. I have not been able to find myself a pool I can lounge around in, yet, but I got the porch I’ve been longing for for the past few weeks now, and it was everything I needed it to be.

This evening, as I sat on that porch, I looked out over the tranquil little town of Wilmore. It’s summer here, which means it’s quiet because the students are gone, or at least a lot of them are. A small group of college students, probably around for summer campus work, sat on the college’s wooden benches and chatted. Here and there a car would come up the drive. Townspeople meandered with their kids or walked with their dogs or simply walked alone, taking a needed break, I’m sure, for some exercise and solitude. An older couple wandered through the campus throwing Frisbees (what for, I couldn’t tell, because they weren’t throwing them at each other, just throwing them, hitting a lot of trees in the process). And I thought to myself that at this time in my life, Wilmore is too quiet, but at another time, later, when my life someday gets crazy and full and room to breathe will be a precious commodity, an evening like this in a place like Wilmore will be a welcome break, and I came to understand what this town really has to offer. Peace. It does not offer action. It does not offer change, progressive thinking, or a variety of career opportunities. It simply offers peace. Today, I graciously accepted. And tomorrow? Well, maybe it’s time to finally learn how to play my guitar. And I think a rocking chair on a front porch is not a bad place to start.

My guitar

Sunday, June 28, 2009

2009-06-29T19:46:00.000-07:00

written the following day

It appears that I need to do a better job of reading directions. Today, I debated going to church, something I’ve not really been interested in for the past number of weeks. Actually, I debated going to mass. I’m less than thrilled or impressed in any way with the protestant churches around here and seem to find the only pleasant place to be at mass (or at the Friends’ Meeting, but that does lack in the Jesus focus I find I enjoy). But as I woke up, I decided to postpone the idea because I really wanted to get my church history exam essays done as quickly as possible, because they were due by midnight.

Well, except, they weren’t due by midnight, at least not this Sunday at midnight. They’re due next Sunday at midnight and the questions I thought were due next week were actually due this past Friday. Oops. Needless to say, by the end of Sunday, they were all done, which was nice because it freed me up for the possibility of utilizing the new rocking chairs I discovered to day at the college. More on that later, hopefully.

I also made sure to call my mother, as today is her 52nd birthday. Marilyn may tease me about my lack of daughterly instincts, but I do make sure to make the right phone calls on the right days! My mom and little brother and my mom’s husband just returned from a trip to Disneyland with my aunt and uncle and my cousin and her kids, all of whom met up with some other cousins who have just recently relocated to Southern California. This is my mom and my little brother.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

2009-06-28T21:12:00.000-07:00

written the following day

Success! Today, I was productive! As well I needed to be. On the tail of yesterday’s post, I am working on an essay exam for my online church history class, and one of these days, it needs to be done.

Back home, I used to do a lot of my homework in coffee shops, usually either Coffee Cottage or Chapters. A lot of people did homework that way. It is the Willamette Valley, after all. Coffee shops abound in the Portland area and Newberg was no exception to that rule. I spent a lot of time in those places.

I’ve been missing coffee shops lately. Well, maybe I’ve been missing them most of the time I’ve been here. Not Starbucks or Panera coffee places. Real places. Local places, with good flare and character. I’ve found a couple of places like that, one of which is probably only a ten minute drive away, so for this day, I borrowed Morgan’s car and spent much of my day at Main & Maple, a coffee shop in the nearby town, and forced myself to actually do some work. I’m happy to report that it all went well. Of the three essays I have to do, I completed one and almost completed another. Shouldn’t take long to finish all the rest of things.

Following my time there, Morgan and I went on a bit of a search for some dinner and ended up at a small Mediterranean place in Lexington. I had a falafel sandwich and have to say, it was delightful. I also tried an appetizer which was cold and wrapped in grape leaves. That was a little less delightful and while I’m glad I experienced it, I may choose to not experience it again.

I will say this: America—you’ve got nothing on the foods of the world. Nothing at all. Well, except maybe you do have a little something on the Brits. Unless you’re comparing pastries. And then nothing.

Friday, June 26, 2009

2009-06-27T20:26:00.000-07:00

written the following day

I am resentful that I have to do homework on my summer vacation. I’m resentful that I have to take classes so that I can get financial aid so that I can stay in the dorm because I can’t get a job in Wilmore that pays enough to pay any kind of rent that allows me to live anywhere at all but the streets (and without reliable transportation I can’t work anywhere else). Today, I had homework. On Sunday, I have an essay exam due—three questions, each at least one page. And today I needed to do it, so instead I distracted myself with many meaningless things in order to avoid it, because to sit down an attempt to do it is like admitting defeat and forces me to acknowledge that I do in fact have homework on my summer vacation and that I’m very resentful of that fact. I am not the only one. Morgan and I threw little mini fits because of it. Homework on summer vacation should be outlawed and credits toward graduation should simply be given away. I would even pay to get credit for simply being on summer vacation.

SV501 Syllabus
Class Objectives:
1. Get up whenever you finally wake up.
2. Turn on your computer (or wake it up); check your email, check your Facebook, check your MySpace if you have one, and even Twitter. And then check any other sites you may access on a regular basis.
3. Eat breakfast, unless you don’t want to (but it’s recommended).
4. Get dressed. At some point.
5. Brush your teeth. Maybe. (Definitely, if you’re going out.)
6. Watch TV. You may do this at any point.
7. Do something you really enjoy—exercise, read, write, take pictures, research, do math problems, sit on your ass and stare into space, watch TV, or find a pool or some body of water to float around in for an unspecified amount of time.
8. Eat lunch at three o’clock…unless that’s breakfast.
9. Go somewhere, if you feel like it.
10. Sit and think.
11. Do something spontaneously.
12. Go to bed at some point. Repeat.

Required Texts
Calvin and Hobbes. All of them.
The Compact Complete OED. Because it’s just fun to use that magnifying glass.

Assignments
What are assignments?

Grading scale
If you can’t get an A, you don’t deserve to have a summer vacation.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

2009-06-26T21:23:00.001-07:00

written the following day

I am finally convinced that the world is indeed coming to an end. Soon I will be raptured and all the other suckers will be left to deal with their bad decisions! The dispensationalists were right! How do I know? Well, for goodness’ sake, haven’t you been watching the news? Iran is in major disruption, the US beat Spain in soccer (what?!), and then in one week we lost Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson! This was Thursday: the loss of both Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, anchoring the culmination of the craziest news ever and it all happened in roughly a week’s worth of time.

It was mayhem, it seemed, even if it was only mayhem I was watching on TV. Not that Kentucky was particularly affected by it anyway. Not that much of any actual city was affected by it except LA and New York, the unofficial (and oft resented) capitals of the bicoastal United States (which I remark because the Gulf coast doesn’t really count unless there’s a hurricane).

And there you have it. I’m just waiting for the clouds to part and God to say, “It’s time to come home,” and—poof—all that will be left is a small pile of neatly folded clothes. It’s nice that the Holy Spirit makes the extra touches.

Other than that, I drove a bit today. This is nothing new. I drive sometimes in my friend’s car, but today was not a good day. Today I drove in rush hour and I realized that with enough cars on the road, I still feel really nervous when I’m in the car. I’m constantly afraid I’m not paying close enough attention or that a car is going to go out of control and I’m going to get stuck in the mess of it. This is the problem with bad car accidents—it forces you to recognize that you don’t really have control, you simply have the illusion of it, and if everyone plays the illusion long enough and doesn’t forget, you should get to where you’re going fairly easily. But the reality is that everything balances on a thread when you’re driving (especially in Kentucky!), and you really never know. So today I was more than relieved to pull back into the dorm parking lot and get out of the car. I was also annoyed that nearly a year later, I’m still so affected. It’s good to be a cautious driver. It’s not so good to be a nervous one.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

2009-06-25T20:58:00.000-07:00

written the following day

I don’t know that Wednesday was a bust but it wasn’t made in the shade either. It was a pretty dull day except that I got to eat Subway for free courtesy of my Subway points and my stomach did not agree with my drink of choice, Dr. Pepper, which ended up keeping me occupied much of the rest of the afternoon because of it. And so there you go.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

2009-06-24T19:43:00.000-07:00

written the following day

As far as days go for this month, yesterday was on the top of the list. I took Marilyn’s bike out briefly and deposited that much needed check I’d found on Monday, got to talk on the phone with another of my old college roommates—this one, a friend living in Seattle for now—and then got offered a paying photo job! Curiously enough, by Asbury.

Asbury has been in a bit of an organizational crisis for the last few years. By organizational, I mean, to be bluntly honest (big surprise), the board seemed unable to handle the organization of finding and working with a new president. Their need for control and lack of accountability has served no one well. The school, needless to say, has been a mess. Bad calls were made, rifts were formed, bad relationships were created, and in the end, the accrediting organization had to come in and put their foot down. A good year and a half or two years past their projected date, Asbury finally found a new president, and with the beginning of the fiscal year starting next week, he will be instated for his official duties. The school will have a special chapel for him next Wednesday and then, out at his new presidential home, will have a special picnic. All are invited, and I’m taking the pictures. For three hours. Hey, after Ichthus, that’s nothing.

I also got to ever so briefly chat with Peg, always a fabulous woman to talk with, and then, because I had a little extra money to give me room for some happiness, I got myself out of Wilmore! The pace of life in Wilmore is slow and as much as I like an easy pace, Wilmore is a little too slow for me. I needed a little city life, so Angela, from the first floor, and I took off for the city. It was great to get out, but I have to say after being used to Portland, Lexington is a bust as far as cities go. Unless you want to bar hop, it’s not a great city for wandering around to cool shops and cafes, not in abundance like Portland and a number of other cities, I’m sure. But we did go to one café I’ve been to before that has a very Portland feel. I had an amazing soy chocolate banana latte and a very good veggie sandwich that satisfied my craving for something delightful. The café is called Third Street Stuff and it would fit right in on an East side corner in Portland.

After a not-as-quick-as-we-had-intended trip to Target (after all, we weren’t exactly in a hurry to get back to Wilmore), we finally headed back. It was a much needed trip, it was great to hang out with Angela, and it made me feel a little more alive and a little more like myself, which is good, because I’d begun to feel half dead these last few days. Money may be a dangerous thing, but it’s amazing how just a little bit of it after nothing at all can lift your self-esteem. It is not bad to want money, I am realizing, because it’s true that it’s a necessity to survive on this planet. It is simply bad to want more of it than you need. How much we need, though, is often hard to pin down. Life is always more complicated than I want to believe. I suppose that’s what happens when people are three-dimensional. You can never see all three sides at once.

Monday, June 22, 2009

2009-06-23T20:00:00.000-07:00

written the following day

This day was a nasty one, weather wise. We had some cool thunder in the morning, but overall, the weather was hot and even when the sun came up, quite muggy. I did go out once during the day to check my bank balance and pick up some very bare essentials at the grocery store. While at the bank, I checked my balance and realized that once I bought what I was going to get, which was only two or three things, I would be down to about $15 for the next three or four weeks until I finally got the financial aid check. It is a little distressing to learn these things, but what could I do?

Later, when I got back, I decided to finally clean up my room before it gets out of control. Cleaning my room always includes opening old mail, the stuff I didn’t want to open when I got it. I found something from Asbury that I recalled leaving unopened. I was worried it was a bill and so apparently it goes without saying that if you don’t open your bills, you don’t have to pay them. Well, I finally decided to open it. Turns out, it wasn’t a bill. It was a check.

Asbury has a special account called the Philippian Fund. It is designed for Asbury students when they hit a financial crisis of some sort or another and it is Marilyn (you know—the chaplain) who gives the okay for it to be used. On her last day of work before her vacation, the day she told me to journal during my summer, when I completely fell apart in her office, she sighed and said, “I’m going to get you some money from the Philippian Fund so you can at least eat some eggs.” In truth, it was not that I forgot it was coming to me. It was, in all honesty, that I didn’t believe her. It was Marilyn’s last day before vacation, she was excited about getting out for a month, and she still had things left to do before leaving that day. I simply thought she would forget she had said it. Apparently, she didn’t, and I chose to clean my room at the perfect time. So thanks Asbury, and thanks Marilyn.

Later in the evening, I decided to take a walk. The sky was nice and the sun was setting, but it was rather gross and muggy outside. I decided to wander anyway with my camera and just want to say this. I have learned recently that there is an unspoken rule in Wilmore that if you leave stuff at your curb, it’s free for the taking, which means there’s a lot of junk in front of the houses in Wilmore. It’s a bit of an eye sore, but some of the porch decorations topped even the curb sights. Here’s a little of what I saw.

Sunday, June 21, 2009

2009-06-22T18:15:00.000-07:00

written the following day

My thoughts these days are heavily occupied by the turmoil in Iran. With the claim of fraudulent elections, protests and demonstrations have broken out. A number of those protesting against the government have been killed and communication with the outside world is gradually being cut off. Phones and computers are being monitored by the government and journalists have been severely restricted, some arrested, at least one in hiding, and another is missing. I am most impressed with the Iranian women, sometimes called shirzan, meaning lioness. They are right out there along side the men, sometimes leading, getting beaten and even killed all the same. Iran is a country of paradoxes, or at least perceived paradoxes from the outside. I will keep watching.

But in the mean time, Morgan and I went and got some ice cream in the evening and in the midst of delighting in the creamy coldness, Morgan thought perhaps we should go on a drive. I wish I’d brought my camera because it was a fantastic drive indeed. We decided to go down a road we didn’t know and ended up who knows where, on both sides of the Kentucky River at different times (at least we think it was the Kentucky River), and we found the coolest abandoned barn, lost down a back road highway, shaded by a forest of trees. Across the road from it was perhaps a smokehouse, or something tiny with a chimney, and a long forgotten structure that surely had once been a home. We will definitely be going back, next time with a camera. In the midst of having no idea where the road was going, it eventually spit us back out onto highway 27 and we knew exactly where we were. It was wonderful.

Saturday, June 20, 2009

2009-06-21T08:12:00.000-07:00

written the following morning

Back at George Fox, in their library is a cookbook I’ve checked out numerous times. It’s one I love, and I’m not really sure why I haven’t simply just bought it. I was thinking about it a few weeks ago and thought I might check it out again. Unfortunately, Asbury doesn’t have quite the state-of-the-art library system like the Summit system Fox is hooked into and so I had to do an Inter Library Loan search and hope for luck. About a week later A Taste of Madras (Indian food) arrived on campus and I was able to pick it up and flip through the familiar pages. It’s amazing how familiar things, even silly things like library books, can be comforting.

Last night, I hung out with some of my Asbury friends at my friend Heather’s apartment. We gathered to watch Amazing Grace, because Heather’s never seen it, but before that we made Indian food. Indian food is not always the easiest to make because some of the ingredients call for a special trip to the nearest Indian store which for us is a good thirty minutes away. But a trip to an Indian store is always a good day. Of the most important things to pick up was the key ingredient to making good chapatis. Chapati is an Indian flat bread that, unlike naan, is cooked on a frying pan and not baked in an oven. I first had chapati in Uganda and loved it so much that the family I was with began making it nearly every day, and they taught me how to make it. But upon arrival back to the states I discovered we did not have the right kind of flour for them, and so I did the best I could with the flour we have, but they were always second best to what I’d had in Africa. What I’d never noticed in all the times I’d flipped through this cook book was that the recipe (there are actually many) for chapatis was in there and a note was attached to the strange kind of flour it called for stating that this special flour for chapatis can easily be obtained from an Indian grocery store. This may have been one of my most exciting discoveries and it was the first thing I looked for when I arrived at the store.

Amidst three different dishes of Indian food, I mixed up, rolled out, and fried (well, Mallary fried them) the chapatis and when I took my first bite, it was as if God had said to me, “I know you’re having a hard time, so here’s something I know you will like,” and it was just like Africa. I was excited, very excited. Perhaps today I just might make some more. The taste of memories and familiarity should never be underestimated. Never.

Friday, June 19, 2009

2009-06-19T20:56:00.001-07:00

So there is this photo website that I like to post photos on (jpgmag.com). It is a magazine that publishes all photos and all are from this website. Thousands of photographers are on this website uploading around 3,000 photos a day. It’s photo heaven, really. But with so many people, it’s hard to get noticed. As part of the magazine, those running it create photo themes and you can post one photo in each theme—one photo per theme and one theme per photo. I have many photos in the themes, and recently they posted a new theme called Nature Conquers Man, basically around the idea that nature really does rule over man, much as we may work to destroy it, and can be very destructive to human made things. Perfect theme, I thought, for a couple of my Wilmore photos, so I looked at them and chose this photo, which I’d uploaded a couple weeks or so ago, not long after I took it, and had just happened to title “Rain.” Each photo has the option to become a favorite (anyone can “favorite” any photo and you can “favorite” as many photos as you wish), and the ability to be commented on, and above each photo you have downloaded it tells how many people have favorited that photo and how many comments it has. It also tells you how many times it has been viewed and, if it’s in one of the three themes coming up for the issue of the magazine, you also have the ability to see how many times it has been voted on. Votes are cast by those of us who participate in the site.

Photos get easily lost in the shuffle of daily (minute-ly, really) downloads and most of my recent photos have fewer than ten views, or perhaps closer to thirty if they’re in a theme. But when I got on today, I noticed a curious thing. The most views any of my photos has is close to 275—this for a photo that has been on there a long time and has rather eye-catching colors (it’s cross-processed slide film, which is known for its unpredictable vividness). Today, though, I noticed that this above posted photo, a photo that has been on there for less than two weeks had over two-hundred views. This seemed strange to me, but I didn’t know what was going on with it. A little later I got on and saw the number had more than doubled and I was sure there was a glitch in the system. This number was growing too quickly for it to be for real. Just a few minutes ago I logged in and the number was over 500. And then I thought of something. On the home page, the magazine will profile a few pictures from a selection of three themes in three different categories—themes that will be featured in the next issue, special features that will not, and selections from specific photo challenges, which usually have a closing date on the them, unlike the regular themes. Nature Conquers Man is a photo challenge which closes in July and when I went back to the home page, I saw that it was one of the themes selected for that showcase and sure enough, of the few that were chosen from this theme, my picture was one of them.

It was the first time any of my photos on that site were getting any kind of recognition. I was surprised, and it definitely made me smile. For a day that was only so-so, that was a good way to end.

Thursday, June 18, 2009

2009-06-18T20:40:00.000-07:00

A magnificent storm passed over Wilmore today, and I watched out the window as it thundered and lightninged and poured down torrents of rain. Sometimes the thunder sets off nearby car alarms which, though a little irritating, amuses me. The storm was dark and I’m always impressed with how different my room looks when it’s sunny outside from when it’s stormy. In the sun, turning on my lights makes no difference because the light streaming through my windows is brighter than the dingy bulbs in my room, but in the storms, though I can still see outside, the lack of sunlight is so thick that my room is as dark as if the sun had just sunk below the horizon in its final curtain call of the night. I can hardly see where I’m walking.

I love the storms that come through here. Sometimes they miss us and go around, but when they hit Wilmore, I’m as captivated as a child’s first time in a candy store. No matter what I’m doing, I stop everything and simply stand by the window and watch. I am not supposed to do that, I recently learned. Apparently, I’m supposed to steer clear of windows when there’s lightning, but I just can’t help myself. I’m mesmerized.

Aside from the storm, today lacked anything in the way of eventfulness. I got up today with the plan to read some of Jeremiah, and in the afternoon to work on church history, my online class. The storm threw my schedule off, though, and I didn’t try particularly hard to get it back on track. I baked cookies instead. I did, however, get to read some of Jeremiah, and I hope to do the same tomorrow.

It is earlier than usual as I write this and a number of thoughts are mingling in my brain and I could pick anyone of them at random and write. A lifelong friend of my chaplain died today, and so she and her husband are on their way to Canada for the funeral. I am thinking about my friendships, and I’m wondering who will still be in my life when I am fifty-three and what my history will look like. And then, with this on my mind, an old friend from Alaska called me. We don’t talk often, but it’s always fantastic when one of us calls and the other actually answers. It’s a four hour time difference and her life is in a flux of transition as her family is unexpectedly expanding. She recently married and a baby is coming in September. I first met this friend through the common connection of being Quaker. I was an upper classman in college and she was preparing to transfer in from a state university and we were both participating in young adult events in the yearly meeting. Friendships are strange. Some take a long time to build and connect and yet others come together like Lego pieces, with just a click. This is like my friendship with Rachel, and I look back at when our friendship began and think that never in a million years would either of us expect to have the lives we have right now. What will this look like in another seven years and what will it look like in another twenty-five?

I have learned a lot about friendship in Kentucky. I have learned the power of what it means for friendships to have history, to have years of a story attached to it, to have memories and emotions and a sense of knowing. To be known, really known, is something I don’t have here in Kentucky, and it is often painful to be here because of that. I am left longing for the day when my friendships here have history too, and it is not because I shouldn’t be here or I am unwelcome, but simply because that is what new places are.

I’m thinking about my friends lately and in these last two days I’ve had much needed conversation with two of those old friends who knew me before the thought of seminary even crossed my mind.

New friendships are forming here in Kentucky and I am very grateful for them. I look forward to the day when we can laugh and remember that long ago time when we were at Asbury together. And it was crazy.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

2009-06-17T23:26:00.000-07:00

These days I am feeling restless. But differently from the past, it is not the kind of restless where I feel that if I do not quench it and do something that relieves the restlessness that I’ll explode. Instead, it feels as if, if I don’t find something to do about this restlessness, I will simply fade away and disappear. That is a very odd feeling and one that feeds my uncomfortable sense of uselessness like little other. I feel as if I am lost in a world that does not belong to me and that does not wish for me to stay in it as I am, and so it is trying to change me and form me into something I do not have the capability to be, and in so doing, instead of becoming something false to myself, I will become nothing at all. And I feel as if I’m fighting it but with no weapons, and so my battle against this army of seminary academia is one in which everyone knows I will lose, because how could I not. But then I remember David struck the great warrior with only a slingshot and stone and a heart full of faith and the Philistine fell to his death.

I don’t necessarily mean I wish to strike down the “beast” of seminary. But then again, maybe I do—not out of heroic effort or a belief that it should not be, but maybe because seminary, as I’m experiencing it here in Kentucky, may be full of a lot more Philistines than Israelites. These words are harsh, I realize, but as I search my inventory of language, this seems the only accurate way for me to state it.

I have had a lot of people ask me why I stay in seminary if I find it gives me such a bad taste in my mouth. And I can only say that I stay because this is where God has called me right now, and this confuses people, because they don’t want to believe God may call someone to something they do not enjoy. This response, though, is not a Christian response. It is entirely American, so let’s go back to the beginning.

Noah was called by God to build an ark where God would house him and others while the rest of the world died after their spirit finally gave way and instead of oxygen, they began to breathe water into their lungs. Noah was stuck on a big boat with his family and a bunch of wild animals for forty days. Wild seas probably left a number of them sea sick. Dead bodies of both people and animals likely bumped up against the side of the boat. Seven pairs of all the clean animals and birds and one pair each of unclean animals undoubtedly caused a ruckus of both sound and stench. And after forty days, even if it were the size of Bill Gates’ largest yaught, the space of the ark probably felt pretty confining. I would imagine the time on the ark for Noah and his family was not exactly like a cruise through the Caribbean.

David was called to be Israel’s greatest king and yet for what scholars suggest may have been a good fifteen or twenty years, he lived in the wilderness, fighting the enemies of Israel and running from a crazed King whose family he was eventually to dethrone. We can see through numerous psalms that this was a time and place where David felt lost and confused.

Jeremiah was called by God in his very making—“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” Something about Jeremiah just gives me chills, I must admit. He’s not exactly a rock star to me, but he’s definitely one of my favorites in the Bible. And yet the calling of being a prophet utterly destroyed Jeremiah’s life. He was threatened, fought against, jailed, and despised by is very own people. In one place Jeremiah declares it is impossible for him to not mention or call upon the name of the Lord, that it would be like a burning fire shut up in his bones, and then only a few verses later we find him cursing the very day he was born.

Mary was called to carry, birth, and raise the very son of God. In that call, she watched her son be rejected by his people. I wonder sometimes if he baffled her at times as much as he baffled others. And then she had to experience what no parent would wish even on their worst enemy. She had to see her son die, and she watched him die a bitterly cruel death.

And then there’s Jesus Christ himself. He came to Earth to show us what it meant to live a God filled life, but in that calling he was expected to die a painful and humiliating death.

Now, I do not think I am Jeremiah or Mary or Jesus Christ. I believe that God will eventually give me a job I love, but I do not believe I am destined to live a life of comfort and peace. I will always have a heart that aches and breaks for the world, which will leave me living in a tension that will keep me in a place of constant movement, and I will always have a distaste for the places in the church that don’t have that heart, or worse, the places that pretend to but really don’t.

Late tonight, in the middle of writing this, I got to have a phone conversation with my good friend and old college roommate Heidi from back home. I have not spoken to Heidi since before I moved to Kentucky and it turns out this phone call was one we both needed. Heidi and I undoubtedly hold very different political views and likely interpret the places where politics and the Bible meet quite differently, but Heidi has a desire for God that I marvel at. She has a purity in the way she speaks about God that I love and it is always a joy to hear what she has to say, because even in her searching and questioning, she speaks with such a longing for God. Heidi’s life is full of new things just as mine is and with that has come some of the same struggles in each of our relationships with God. It was so good to share with someone who knew my heart because hers was right there with it.

Amongst all this restlessness, of my search for my identity in a place I can not understand, God gave me a jewel from home, and I’m reminded that in the middle of the wilderness, David still had friends, and in the midst of persecution and rejection, Jeremiah still had God who declared that though people would fight against Jeremiah, they would never prevail, because God was with him and would deliver him.

I don’t really expect this restlessness to go away. Writing these things down will not ease the discomfort this causes. But in a way I have not desired for a long time, I hope to delve into the word of God with a long forgotten passion. I do not want to study the Bible. I do not want to analyze it or read commentaries and write papers about it. I want to read the story of the Bible, the story of God’s people. I want to know who God was with David and Jeremiah, because I now that that is still who God is.

Like usual, it’s long past time for me to be in bed. It’s 2am now and will probably be closer to 2:30 or 2:45 before I finally shut off the lights, but I hope that I go to bed and get good sleep and tomorrow give time to God that I have not done for a really long time. I hope tomorrow that I do not have a devotional, a time to hear what God may be speaking to me for that day, but that instead I get to hear the story of God, and that through the story of his people of Israel, I begin to hear more of the story of myself. Christianity and the Bible, I am remembering, is not a lesson to be learned, a moral to be gained, or a set of rules to be followed. Ultimately, it’s a story. It’s a story of sacrificial love, of grace, of heartbreak and retribution, of good choices and bad choices, and of unfailing redemption. It is our story, and it is my story. Tonight, I will read a little of the book of Jeremiah before I turn off the lights to fall asleep. Not much, but enough to get me started. And tomorrow, well, tomorrow is a new day, and for the first time this summer, I am going to treat it as such.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

2009-06-17T08:46:00.000-07:00

Written the following day.

Do you ever feel as if your heart is on fire? I don’t mean a physical ailment. I mean with a passion for something that may just well consume you if you allow it. That fire that takes over and may render you incapable of breathing if you don’t harness it and learn what it is to temper it for a useful purpose. A few years back Sara Groves wrote a song about the prophet Jeremiah wherein she implores, “Jeremiah, tell me about the fire that burns up in your bones,” a reference to Jeremiah 20:9 where Jeremiah claims if he refuses to mention God or call upon him “then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.”

Most of the time, I find that fire in my heart for the things I’m passionate about is manageable. It moves me, motivates me, pushes me to do more, to be better, to think more often about the questions that are hard to answer, to remember those who are poor and have nothing—to never forget them, to never forget that the same God who made me made them with the same hands, and to never allow myself to believe that I don’t have the power to change things, that to remember who I am is to remember I serve a God who is above all and over all and who is not limited by human ambition which means neither am I.

But sometimes it’s too much and sometimes that fire is all consuming and makes me feel as if my heart just may explode from the intensity of it. This was my Tuesday, a day full of a burning passion that rendered me rather useless. But, yet, this is what pulls me back into who I am and what I’m called to. These are the days that remind me of the authenticity of my relationship with God and what that means for me as God’s child, as her daughter. In this setting I live in where a Godly relationship is defined by how many minutes one spends with God each day and the swear words we make sure not to speak, how I am with God feels so foreign to how I watch others relate to God, or at least pretend to. So it is days like this, when that all-consuming fire envelops me, where God says to me, “Remember you are mine and no one else’s, and I have created you for a specific purpose that is unique to you.”

These days pop up now and then, but it is not unusual for them to happen near the beginning of every summer for me. It is that time in my life when the craziness of the things I don’t care much for settles down and room is opened for the space to remember what my true passion is and what my heart is calling to me, what God is speaking into my very being.

I never really know what this means for me. Someday it will mean something far bigger than it means now, but I do know I am being given the space to learn again. Not to learn theology or philosophy or the chiasm in a given segment survey in the book of Mark, but to learn the things that throw fuel into the fire, to learn the things that feed it oxygen and make it burn like the beacon it sometimes is for me. It’s time to remember where my heart really is, to remember what and who it is I really love. I’m not really sure where to begin again this summer, and yet it seems as if I already have. How this will manifest itself is a little unclear. I wonder if perhaps, first, I should reread the book of Jeremiah. It’s never a bad place to start.

Thursday, June 11 through Monday, June 15, 2009

2009-06-15T12:08:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me today that the chasm between the third world and the first world is, in fact, a fabricated one. There is no such thing as one or the other. The first worlds, and especially America, have simply become the best at hiding our poverty. Or perhaps it is not that neither are true, but that we’ve defined them incorrectly. We want to believe that in the first world poverty doesn’t exist, at least not bad poverty, not like in the “third world,” but the truth is that it is simply a difference in percentages. It does, however, exist. Children starve in America. People are killed in the streets over drugs and territory. Women and children are trafficked. Yes, even in the land of the free and home of the brave. I sometimes wonder if I’ve ever passed one of these invisible women or children on the street. Portland, you know, is a prime location for sex trafficking—a coastal city somewhere on the route between Seattle and San Francisco. And it has the highest number of strip clubs per capita of any city in the nation. The sex industry is booming. Kentucky is a little lower in its sex trafficking numbers, but with all its farmland probably contends pretty well with trafficking for labor.

This world is a hard place to live in. It is hard on those in the slums of the biggest cities in the world, because their subhuman status makes them invisible to protection by their own governments, and it is hard for those of us who are not impoverished, those of us with the power of these choices, because with great power comes great responsibility. Many have chosen to pretend as if they don’t have power, which is a lie to themselves and to those more helpless than them and a great disservice to our God. But there are the rare few (and I don’t mean the Bill Gateses and Angelina Jolees) who have come to understand that it is, in a strange way, better to bear the burden of the poor than to bear the burden of ignorance, to care deeply and in a way that forces us to action about the hungry, diseased, oppressed, enslaved, and marginalized in the world.

Today, I have been listening to Sara Groves as I browse through the 1,200 pictures I took over the last three days and select just a few to edit for Facebook before I edit all the rest of them, and I have been thinking about things, thinking about my life, about Christianity and Christians, and about this world.

Ichthus is finally over. I did not stay till the very end on the last night, because I reached my limit of people time and then overstayed by two hours as it was, but I stayed long enough. I spent likely a total of about thirty-four hours at this music festival, most of which was spent on my feet moving from one stage to another and that left me with a lot of time to take in and process what I was seeing and hearing. Ichthus has attendees of all ages, but it is geared toward high school through college age. Basically, it’s a three-day long youth event with well over a hundred speakers and musicians and thousands of attendees.

If you know me (and you don’t have to know me that well to know this), you know that I just might have some thoughts and opinions about youth events. In fact, I have some thoughts and opinions about the way youth are treated in the American church, and they are generally not good ones. I believe youth (as does everyone) need to be saturated in the message of the gospel, not the convoluted message of right and wrong, dos and don’ts, guilt, behavior modification, to be or not to be, but the real story of the gospel, the story of love, the story of redemption, the story that teaches them, in the words of Philip Yancey, what’s so amazing about grace, and they need it not in a kindergarten way, but in a scripturally soaked way, a way that really teaches them, from the fall of Adam and Eve to the sins of King David to the prophecies of Jeremiah to the cross of Jesus Christ, that if the message and meaning of the story of the Bible could be summed up into one word it would be this: redemption. And it is only out of that foundation, out of that realization, that we can begin to move into a Christianity of action and into a conviction of social justice, which, like redemption—which it is inherently tied to—is saturated in scripture. Over all, I was disappointed with what I saw. I was disappointed because I discovered that very little has changed about youth ministry since I was a youth. I saw what I’d expected, but I’d hoped for something different. And yet, in the midst of it all there was that glimpse of something different. The things I didn’t discover until I was coming out of college are making their way into younger generations even if still only on the margins. In the midst of baby-milk Christianity and guilt trips and individualized spirituality is coming the message of community, of authenticity, of a world view that makes us move from inward to outward and not the other way around.

Of all the musicians that played at Ichthus this year, only one was a name I recognized, and it was the name of someone I list among my three favorites, alongside Bob Dylan and Over the Rhine. Sara Groves has an interesting story about her faith journey. It is a story you can follow through the timeline of her song writing and one that moves from that same inward to outward journey that is beginning to move its way ever so steadily into the youth culture of the church. Today, as I sat at my computer, I listened mostly to her latest two albums, “Add to the Beauty” and “Tell Me What You Know.” “Add to the Beauty” is what I would label as her transition album. It is the album where you can see the first real manifested glimpses of movement, where the restlessness and struggle in her heart for something more than what she was or had became transparent through her songs. “Tell Me What You Know” is easily labeled her social justice album and it is through these songs where her transformation into her call for the hearts of the people of the world whom God has created becomes fully real.

As an official photographer for Ichthus, I had the pass that could get me anywhere a photographer would want to be which included backstage on the Main Stage, where the biggest known bands and all the speakers were scheduled, and I was wandering around back there, chatting with someone I knew when Sara Groves came up the ramp from her bus to wait for her sound check for the next scheduled show. To see Sara Groves in person was what I’d been waiting for all day, and the only thing I’d really been looking forward to amidst this entire event. She does not seem to make it out to the Northwest ever, so this was the first chance I would have to get to see her in concert.

As with a lot of people I know whose hearts are touched by the plight of the world, Sara Groves has discovered that there is no turning back once your eyes are opened to the true poverty that exists, and so she has named her tour the Art*Music*Justice Tour and travels with other musicians in an effort to not just entertain but so that through the music they can touch the hearts of those watching. Along side video clips of Martin Luther King, Jr,, speaking and Bono’s well known prayer breakfast speech, she talks about her journey through her discoveries of modern day slavery, the unbelievable poverty of so many people in this world, her visit to Rwanda and their genocide memorial sites in hopes of sparking that same fire in the hearts of those who are there to hear them play.

I was down in front with the audience as the videos played at the start of the show, but I spent the majority of the time listening to the show from back stage. In the intensity of this crazy three day long festival, it was like a breath of fresh air to listen to Sara Groves and her fellow musicians share the same concerns that are on my heart, and I have to admit that I’d become so adjusted to not knowing anything I was hearing that when she played the first notes of her well-known song “Add to the Beauty,” it startled me to hear something I recognized, and it surprised me even more to listen to an entire show about the very things that have seized my heart and refused to let go, even though these were things not unexpected to hear from them.

This world, as I noted before, is a hard place to be in. There is so much that needs to be done, so much injustice on this earth to contend with and fight against, so many people who need love, so much struggle in my own heart to make the better choices, even though they may seem self-sacrificing, or maybe because of it. This world is constantly changing, and as a Christian, it’s my responsibility to chose to change it for the better, but it is not my calling to save the world. It is my call to seek out and follow the heart of God. That is the call of every Christian.

Ichthus was full of things I had hoped it would not be, but had also simply expected it would. Just before Sara began her show, I had a short conversation with a young volunteer security guard who argued that to listen to anything but Christian music was to listen to idol words and that when he was first saved he felt God say to him to put down the music that didn’t glorify God, which meant only listen to Christian music. “That was my personal conviction,” he claimed. I simply responded, “Well, it is not mine.” I wish, now, that I could have a longer conversation with him—that I could hear him out and share some of my thoughts, but I was exhausted and hot didn’t have the energy to say to him that my thoughts at the moment were that there are a lot of good things being said outside of Christian music and a lot of crappy stuff said within it. I wish I would have, but perhaps it’s best that I didn’t. I can only hope that what he heard from Sara Groves and those traveling with her challenged how he sees the world and planted a seed of seeking within him.

In the end, I got to meet Sara Groves. It was a brief encounter in which I simply told her I love what she’s doing and that despite my general dislike for Christian music, I love listening to her stuff. She is a delightful and friendly person. And it was the highlight of my summer so far. In fact, it may be the highlight of my entire last year and perhaps has made all the shittiness of transitioning from the Pacific Northwest to Asbury and Kentucky completely worthwhile.

I am glad that Ichthus is over. I am left with a saddening for our youth, some very sore shoulders, exhaustion, 1,200 pictures to scan through and edit, and in the middle of it all a glimpse of hope that maybe it’s going to be alright. Redemption, as Sara Groves sings, comes in strange places, small spaces, calling out the best of who we are. I have paused her music for the moment as I finish this up and prepare to read back through, but when I’m done, I will turn it back on, and I will be reminded that as difficult as things can be, just as she says, Love is still a worthy cause. And so I will simply close this out with these words of hers that have gotten me through a lot this year, and will likely get me through a whole lot more:

in the midst of passing bravery
in the face of our own injuries
is the constant generosity of grace.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

2009-06-10T21:47:00.000-07:00

The next three days just might be total insanity for me. This is a whole new ballgame. Well, sort of. Tomorrow kicks off the beginning of a three-day Christian music ministry festival called Ichthus (Greek for fish in the New Testament, and the symbol [IXOY∑] for Christianity and that silly Jesus fish we see graced on the backs of cars of really bad drivers). Created as a Christian alternative for Woodstock, Ichthus is celebrating its fortieth anniversary this year, and this happens to be the year I join in the party, rather unexpectedly.

Christian music is not exactly my chosen form of entertainment (or worship) on any particularly regular basis. In fact, I’d rather have silence over Christian radio stations. They sort of make me want to vomit, or at the very least, blow my ear drums out. But God, it appears, finds this really funny, and put me in a class last Fall with Ichthus’ ministry coordinator. I wasn’t aware of this until about a month ago when he asked me to be one of the photographers for the event. He first asked if I might want to work in the prayer tents for the alter calls and I hemmed and hawed, because nothing about that sounded enticing for me, and then I was asked the photo question, and I was sucked in to three full days at a Christian music festival. But here’s where God’s humor surpasses it all. I’ve been asked to be a ministry photographer. This means, I must take pictures of worship and…drum roll…the alter calls. For the entire weekend. Don’t laugh. Well…laugh, because it’s really ridiculous and I’m laughing. I may be laughing all weekend, because God is absurd, and she makes me smile. I love you, God. I love how you take me for a ride and remind me I’m not really in control. I’m rolling my eyes at you. But I’m also smiling and giving in.

But before all of that became my main thought process today, I got to have a good phone conversation with my dear friend Sarah from back home. Sarah has made the same move I made only in the opposite direction, from Wilmore to Newberg and it is good to talk to someone who knows the people and places in both my worlds. She doesn’t, of course, know my fellow students, but she knows many of the staff and faculty that I am getting to know, and it has been fun to get to see who knows her. It was wonderful to talk to someone who asks me questions because she’s interested in knowing the answer and who asks questions without judgment but simply because it came to mind. Processing my life is something I find myself doing most of the time, but I have been learning over the school year that some people do not have the capability to appreciate the space and grace processing requires. Talking with Sarah was like getting to breathe clean air in a place that feels often polluted. I get whiffs of that clean air sometimes. I get it when I talk with Peg. I get it sometimes when I talk with Marilyn. And it’s so validating in those moments. My conversation with Sarah was brief, only an hour. That may seem long enough, but I felt as if, despite having talked to her numerous times since coming here, I had an entire year’s worth of stuff to say. I can look back on everything now and not just pieces of it. I’m not far enough away to understand it yet, but I can at least see it all in one direction. As I talked with Sarah, I watched out my window as a storm began to roll in. Just after hanging up, I heard the first roar of thunder, and for the next few hours, storms reeked havoc outside as I sat peacefully inside and reflected on that hour long phone call. It was a delightful conversation. I hope to get to do it again before the summer disappears too quickly.

Back to my previous topic, another Sara is also on my mind. There is, surprisingly, at least one Christian musician I enjoy. She is a true musician and brings a fresh breath of honesty into her music that I don’t often see in the Christian music genre (which I still think is a strange way to classify a genre—by subject matter and not by style). Sara Groves gives me hope that even in the world of Christian music, truly gifted people exist. And Sara Groves will be at Ichthus, performing on Saturday evening. She is the only one I look forward to seeing, the only musician, actually, whose name I even recognize. The best part, though, is that as one of the photographers, the only place I don’t have access to is on the main stage (there are multiple stages). Since I’m uninterested in being seen on stage, I could care less about this. But what this means is that I have the pass that gets me anywhere else, including backstage. I have a job to do, and I can’t stop everything I’m doing during the hours she’s there, but I do hope that by chance I will get to meet her. For this pathetically crappy year I’ve had here in Wilmore, KY, I think that would make it all worthwhile. Every bit of it.

It’s 12:30am now and I actually have to get up at a designated time in the morning, so I will end on this wishful note. I have no idea if I’ll be able to write posts for the next few days, but expect a few pictures when the three days are over. And hopefully, I’ll have exciting news to report.

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

2009-06-09T21:14:00.000-07:00

Heat in Kentucky is not like heat in Oregon. There’s no warm up and no cool down. If it’s going to be a hot day, it’s simply going to start off and end up that way. Today was hot. Not the hottest it’s going to get, but it was unpleasant, and so I stayed inside unless I had to be outside. And I did have to be outside today. I had to be outside, because I went frantically around trying to find a way for the school to provide a document stating I am, indeed, an American citizen. In the end, I did not get to go make an attempt to get my social security card as I’d been planning, and I learned the school doesn’t actually check to see if you’re an American citizen like you say. Apparently, they just believe you. Needless to say, I’m still peeved that I’ve misplaced that card and the passport and birth certificate along with it.

And so, after that fiasco, I stayed inside until evening came and the warmth was not cooling down like Oregon but was at least pleasant. For a short while, I sat outside on one of our benches and read as little children played around the grounds in front of the dorms—little Korean kids, because the International folks don’t often go home for breaks. A bit expensive, and a lot of paperwork, I imagine. And so the children ran around and road bikes and scooters and had a grand time, and it was delightful to see. It was the only relatively productive part of my afternoon, because aside from that, in an attempt to get my mind off the stress of the late morning, I spent hours eating cupcakes and watching the entire first season of the Showtime series Weeds. If you know anything about movie network TV shows, you should already be aware that no Showtime show would feel like something you’d see on the regular networks or even other cable channels. Weeds, starring Mary Louise Parker, is the story of a Southern Californian suburban housewife, recently widowed, who, in desperation for income, turns to dealing marijuana and becomes unexpectedly successful at it. It’s the strangest premise for a show. No wait, Dead Like Me may have had one of the strangest premises, but the storylines rival each other for originality. Both are Showtime shows (though sadly, Dead Like Me no longer airs), so it’s not a surprise. It has been strangely entertaining to watch. It’s just so odd. I was stoked to realize I could watch them online via Netflix. But in the future, I need to pace myself with the episode watching. Maybe not an entire season in a day, or at least in a row. And maybe not fix or six cupcakes either. In my defense, I didn't eat much in the way of lunch or dinner. But that's a poor defense.

Tomorrow, I’m excited because I get to talk to Sarah on the phone. We have a scheduled date, three hours apart from each other at the exact same time. It is the first time we will have talked since I ended my first year at Asbury and I think it will be a very interesting conversation. Of course, what conversation with Sarah isn’t interesting? And then, in the afternoon, I will be taking Marilyn’s bike out for a test run up to Ichthus for a photographers/videographers meeting at the grounds. It will be hot again tomorrow and possibly a little wet. Like today, I will go outside only when I have to, but while I’m inside, I will be a bit more productive. A lot less movie/TV watching for me tomorrow. Maybe I’ll read a book.

Monday, June 8, 2009

2009-06-08T22:31:00.000-07:00

I watched a documentary, today, called Searching for Debra Winger, and I was entranced by it, to say the least. In the western world, there seems to be one place left in society where women still struggle at unprecedented levels for equality: the Church. Included in that is the struggle to have a career and a family, by choice, and not be looked down upon as wrong, a sinner, or one of *those* feminists. Outside the church the struggle for equality exists, but no one questions the right for a woman to be a manager, a professor, a researcher, a CEO, or even president. Some, chauvinistically, may question a woman’s capability to do so, but it is even in the laws that one can not judge her right. I have heard more than one woman who, after coming into the church for the first time in adulthood, was stunned to discover the equality chasm. It had never occurred to them to even think that a woman could not perform the same roles as men. Tradition is hard to break everywhere, but it is hardest to break in the church. And tradition declares that men work and women stay home. When necessity arises, exceptions are made for a woman to work, but for a woman to choose to work and have children is for some, unthinkable.

Searching for Debra Winger is a documentary, originally made for Shotime, about the struggle for actresses to have a career and a family and what it is for them to age in Hollywood. Produced by actress Rosanna Arquette, she interviews multiple well-known actresses such as Laura Dern, Holly Hunter, Jane Fonda, and Sharon Stone about their journeys and choices and struggles in the film industry. I was intrigued to watch this movie for no other reason than that I think Debra Winger is amazing, and I think she’s even more beautiful now than she was when she did such movies as An Officer and a Gentleman and Terms of Endearment (a personal favorite). The movie is so titled because Debra Winger made the decision to retire, or at least take a long break for an undeterminable amount of time, from the acting business and pretty much fell off the radar. It is probably a good half way through this documentary before Arquette finally pulls up for a face to face interview with Debra Winger. All the conversations were very interesting to listen to, but it was words from Laura Dern and then later from Whoopi Goldberg that really struck me and stayed with me. As Dern spoke about growing up with a mother in the movie business, she recalled the conversation with her as a child about wishing she’d be around more and feeling somewhat abandoned, and her mother attempted to explain to her that she did not know how to be a mother without also living out her passion. Yes, I could stay home and spend more time with you, she remembered her mother’s reply, but if I did that at the expense of my passion, I would be a really bad mom. And these words really hit me in the heart.

Today, I am young. I am family-less, and I can dream all I want. I can tell people I never want to be a stay-at-home mom, that I want to have children someday, but that I also have the passion to follow my career, and they smile and some probably think, because I can see it in their faces, that really in the end I will want to stay home. But someday, this will not be the future, it will not be a dream. It will be reality, and those looks that tell me now—without ever having to hear the words—that I’m simply silly and young and inexperienced, will instead tell me they disapprove, because I know myself, and I know that I will, in fact, never be a stay-at-home mom, or at least not a happy one. In the world, people may smile and say, to each his (or her) own, but in the church, this is be very different. It is in these words which Laura Dern recounted, where I felt as if God reminded me of who I am, and God taught me a lesson. I felt God say, I made you as you are, not as people want you to be.

I am a passionate person. I have things I’m passionate about and I have a call that may include (I hope include) having children but that is not centered around that. This is not faulty wiring on God’s part, or a defect. It is the way God wired me, with her own hands. As I heard those words, I remembered a conversation with my friend Sarah. It was a conversation wherein multiple women were present, mostly college women, and I asked her about being a working mom, and she said to me, “I have come to realize that I have about five good ‘mom’ hours in me a day. Beyond that, I lose my attention span. I get impatient. That is just something I know about myself,” and these words calmed my spirit and made me realize that my lack of desire (my horror, really) at the idea of being a stay-at-home mom is not because something is wrong with me, but because that is not what I’m called to and not what I’m made for.

Marriage and motherhood is a long way off for me. Probably further away than my career, though I can not see into my future, so I can’t really know. I am very content with my life right now. I have my difficult moments but those are not moments that a husband or child would fix—they are moments that happen at those times, too—but I am happy, over all, with the way things are. I greatly value the freedom I have to live at my leisure, to move without directly affecting another’s life and decisions, to act on a call without having to acutely consider the call of someone else.

These things will come when they come, and with them will come an entirely different way of living and an entirely different set of choices to make. In those moments when people pressure to me to fit into their mold, to be the wife, the mother, the woman I’m expected to be, I hope I remember Sarah’s words; I hope I will recall the conversations and recountings from this film. I hope I remember what God has spoken to me today, what she has spoken to me before, though I seem to often forget it—that I am who God created me to be. I am not anybody else.

So for those of you who love being a career mom, for those of you who can’t understand the idea behind being a career mom, and for those of you not there yet (or are men), I would recommend viewing this film. Some of the language is not PG rated, so be warned, but it is a documentary worth watching.

Sunday, June 7, 2009

2009-06-07T20:06:00.000-07:00

3:30pm
The thing about making my bed in the morning is that it makes me less likely to nap later, because who wants to make their bed twice in one day? Well, actually, I didn’t make my bed until about 3:30 in the afternoon, because currently I’m in the East Coast time zone but living on West Coast time. Somehow, I have thrown my daily pattern way off. For the moment, it’s working just fine, because it’s staying relatively the same. The problem is that it needs to be different. Tonight, I must go to bed by midnight. It is usually these posts that keep me up, but it is usually editing photos or watching a movie that pushes back the writing of these posts. And so, I am beginning this one earlier in the day, which does not mean it will end earlier in the day, but that is the hope.

Today is Sunday, but I did not go to church. I am on a church hiatus for a little while. Going to church here in Kentucky has been exhausting.

10:30pm
Being Evangelical Quaker in the Northwest, I never had to search for a church. When I came to college, I had four different options available in town of Friends churches alone, not including the numerous other churches there. Tale has it that Newberg was once in the Guinness book of world records for most churches per capita. A strange fact for a Northwest town. Needless to say, I simply chose the church I chose, because it was the closest Quaker church in walking distance. Kentucky, however, has no such churches, and finding a church that welcomes me as home has proven to be a seemingly impossible task. And incredibly taxing. Walking into new church after new church after new church, or even the same church a few Sundays in a row has become so stressful that it feels akin to holding one’s breath. I long to find authenticity, and what I find instead is sameness, like The Giver—our churches do not want to live in the midst of color and chaos, instead opting out for safety and sameness. So with the beginning of summer vacation, I have chosen to breathe instead. I do not get in anybody’s car and drive. I do not rush to eat breakfast. I do not put make-up on. I do put on nice clothes. I don’t even brush my teeth in a timely fashion. I simply breathe. And it makes me feel much less tense.

Today, I woke up unsure. I was unsure of how I felt, and unsure of how the day would progress. I had no plan, and I was at a loss. I was productive in some ways today. I finally cleaned the bathroom, a big feat. And I transferred the rack and water bottle holder from my bike to Marilyn’s bike for its use this week, a project that took more effort than I’d thought it would as the screws and bolts had not been touched since they’d been put on my bike in college. And yet, I feel unproductive. I feel as if it just wasn’t good enough, and I don’t know why, because it’s all I’ve got to give.

It’s time for me to go to bed, finally significantly earlier than the last week’s worth of nights, and I think it would be good to have a plan tomorrow, even if only just one thing planned. But I don’t know what to plan. I feel stuck. And so, I will just go to bed, and that will be that. I guess.

Saturday, June 6, 2009

2009-06-06T22:28:00.000-07:00

I listened to The Giver today read through my stereo speakers by…I don’t know who. And I cried. I’ve read it before, of course, but only a few years ago--not in middle school like many others. It was just coming into being when I was that age. I cried when Jonas was given memories by the Giver, and I cried because memories, when you really think about what they are and their weight in all humanity, are a force indescribable, and I was sad, distraught, really, with the grief that the community did not know them, did not know memory, did not know the depth of feeling, did not know the incredibly destructive and yet incredibly beautiful and life-giving chaos that comes with it. And I realized if faced with the decision, I would choose chaotic beauty over safety, as if that’s a surprise. If you have never read The Giver, you should. But don’t do it if you’re life is full to the margins. It requires time to drink in. Deserves it, really.

And so on the heels of that, I write this blog. It will not be a long one. I have little to say as I think about what I just heard. While listening to the book, I finally finished putting up the rest of the photos I’ve chosen to tack onto my wall. In the process, I wished I had a little extra money, because I have pictures taken more recently that I want to see. I am amused, I will say, because my pictures have been so meticulously put on my wall that I think it’s quite humorous. One look at my wall and you’d think I was an uptight perfectionist. One look at any of my drawers, though, and you’d realize I’m just that way with pictures and not much of the rest of my life.

In the midst of listening to The Giver, I decided to take a little break and go on another picture taking adventure. It was a little late for that decision and it was a bit of a race against the sun to take some good pictures before it went down. So much of a race that I finally made it to the top of the hill at the back of Asbury College in time to get shots of the sun sinking behind the horizon. It’s the first time I’ve ever watched the sun sink below the skyline, and it was impressive. I headed up through the college campus this time, so all the shots are from there. And I managed to get back to the dorm just in time to catch Marilyn dropping off her bike so I can use it for Ichthus next week (if you recall, my bike is not in working order, currently). Here are a few of the shots I captured.

Earlier today, as I sat unhealthily glued to Facebook, I was inspired to make banana muffins. The bananas in my room were bad enough that I knew I’d have to make bread in the next couple of days, and so today I attempted muffins instead. And what a break through this is for me! This gives me a much easier way to store the leftovers and a less messy way to eat. I just might be making it this way most of the time from now on.

On that note, I will head off to bed. The sooner I get to sleep the sooner I can wake up and eat another one. Mmm.

Friday, June 5, 2009

2009-06-05T22:53:00.000-07:00

The sun came back out today. It was a low-key day. Except for that part about me not being able to find my social security card. Somewhere in the mess of moving, it has disappeared. Subsequently, that means so has my passport and birth certificate. It's frustrating, because those things were actually organized until I had to box up my files and leave them at home. Stay tuned for next week when I go and get a new one.

Today, the sun came back! And this evening, I decided to go on a little project and wandered a little around Wilmore taking pictures. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I'll let them do the talking for the rest of this post. Here is Wilmore, Kentucky.

Thursday, June 4, 2009

2009-06-04T22:28:00.000-07:00

My dad first introduced us to Cheech and Chong in high school. Writing these entries reminds me of this: “the first day on my vacation, I woke up. Then, I went downtown to a quiet job. Then I hung out in front of the drugstore. The second day on my summer vacation, I woke up, then I went downtown to look for a job. Then I hung out in front of the drugstore. The third day of my summer vacation….” This is one of their acts, and if you know Cheech and Chong, you know there is a specific way this needs to be read, a certain tone that can best be explained once you know that before my time, back when vinyl was the music media of choice (yes, I am old enough to know what records, albums, vinyl, 45s, whatever you may call them, are), Cheech and Chong albums came complete with rolling paper. And not for cigarettes.

This has nothing really to do with my day other than that writing these posts makes me want to start each entry with, “the (fill in the blank) day of my summer vacation, I woke up.” And so, the sixth day of my summer vacation, I woke up. And I didn’t do much until I finally got to have my long overdue chat with Peg.

I think talking with Peg is as good for my soul as going home. And if you’ve ever moved away from a place you loved—far away—you know how powerful that is. Peg makes me feel normal. Not in an ordinary sort of way, but like maybe there’s nothing unusually wrong with me. I sat down on a chair on one side of her desk while she sat on the other. Clearing off a space at the edge of her desk so she could see me with no obstructions, she looked at me and asked, “So tell me, what’s going on? What are you doing? How are things? Where are you?” Where am I? It was a lot of questions in one shot. I was sitting in her office, of course, is where I was. I looked at her and then, searching the room with my eyes, in thought, I sighed and said, “ I feel like I’m somewhere between Portland and Kentucky.” “Well, you are,” she stated with hardly a breath between my last word and her reply. I was startled by the response. I didn’t realize I had prepared myself for a reply more along the lines of telling me I should figure out where I am and not be lost in the middle. I looked at her. “I know,” was all I could think to respond for a moment. “I guess I feel like a lot of people tell me I need to figure it out.” “But that’s how you feel,” she stated. “You can’t feel anything other than what you feel.” I was quiet again for a moment and then responded, “Thanks for validating me.” (No, I’ve never taken a counseling class, I’m just that aware of how I feel.) She sort of scoffed, as if to say anyone who would reply differently than she had was simply foolish, and said, “Well, you are where you are. You can’t be anywhere else.”

And this is what is so freeing about talking with Peg. She simply lets you be where you are and feel how you feel. We talked for a long time. We chatted about my struggle to transition into this life I’m unprepared for, and how no longer having a car makes me feel as if I’ve regressed back in time. I was twenty-four years old when I got my license and my car. It was a liberating feeling to know I finally didn’t have to depend on others for transportation, and I feel as if that liberation has been snatched away from me only three and a half years later. “Hmm,” she replied, in thought, “that’s really interesting.” I love that Peg really thinks about the words I say. We talked about seminary. We laughed about Bollywood. We laughed hard. She told me about her dreadful trip to California she just returned from. And we talked about the things that give me life and how it is that I love the college setting but find seminary really difficult to be in. And then I said to her, “Peg, I want to hear the story of how you came here.” She let out a big breath and said, “Oh my,” indicating it is quite a story, indeed. And so next time, perhaps, I will get to know more about Peg. For now, this conversation was a healing one, one well worth waiting for. A conversation in which people laugh really hard over silly things like overly emotional Bollywood films, is the best kind of conversation, for sure. I felt full after we talked, in the best kind of way. My heart is still smiling. I shall go to sleep happy.

And tomorrow…well…will be the seventh day of my summer vacation. And I, indeed, will wake up. Just as I have all the days before.

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

2009-06-03T23:50:00.000-07:00

Do you ever watch Bollywood films? Bollywood, Bollywood, Bollywood. What can I say about Bollywood? If you are unaware of what I’m talking about, let me clue you in. Bollywood is the entertainment center if Indian past-time. Also known as Hindi films, it churns out up to a thousand movies a year, like soccer is immensely popular in every country but the USA (though like soccer, it is becoming increasingly well-known), and is the most extravagant, melancholic, over-romanticized, unrealistic cinema you could ever watch. And it’s wonderfully fantastic…so long as you’re willing to read subtitles.

Generally a good three hours long and including at least six musical dance numbers, Bollywood creates the best of the best and the worst of the worst and everything in between. On the better side, I would describe it as Shakespeare meets Rogers & Hammerstein meets India. On the bad side, I might just describe it as unbelievable, in every meaning. I love Bollywood movies. And I watched one tonight. It was sappy, colorful, full of tears (from the characters), and entirely over the top. Just as it should be. The best part was the dream sequence it started out with, wherein the two main characters were running around in mountainous fields of flowers. This is what Bollywood is known for. But it was one of the better ones, and I enjoyed it. It was a wonderful escape from life and a bittersweet reminder that one of these days, I really need to make it to India. When I have the money.

Ah, money. And that brings me back to reality. A strange thing has occurred. Aside from the fact that I have just begun four sentences in a row with the letter A, I have also discovered that my credit card payment is listing my minimum payment not as its usual amount, but as $0 (and trust me, the balance is not low enough for that to be normal in any way). Technically this means I do not have only ten dollars for the month of June. But I don’t know why it says this. I, of course, am going to say nothing at all about it to the company, but I will hold my sense of the miraculous until the June 14th due date has passed. Tune back in then to see the results. For the time being, I have enough instant oatmeal, suddenly, to last me the entire month, possibly for all three meals a day. Apparently, when people move out, instant oatmeal is not something they want to take with them, and people are moving out these days. I am sad to report that none of the flavors I have acquired are my favorite—peaches & cream. I would, of course, be more than surprised and wonderfully grateful if some showed up at my door or in my mail box…which happens to be ATS-SPO #148, 204 N Lexington Ave., Wilmore, KY 40390. In case you’re thinking of sending me a letter or a picture of yourself…or something else….

Today was not so sunny as the past few days. Just after waking up, a storm rolled through and despite the fact that I really wanted to crawl back into bed and sleep more, I couldn’t help but sit up on my bed and stare out my window as the lightning flashed and the thunder roared. That is, until lightning struck directly over the seminary and was so startling that I jumped. Thunder, I’m learning, can sound like all sorts of things. It can rumble like the sound of a thousand bouncy balls let loose on a stairway (which I happened to witness the other night), roar like a sheet of metal being shaken like a madman, and clap like…well, like thunder. What I learned today is that when you hear thunder clap, you only hear that sound when it is as close as it can be, and it’s not like the clapping of an auditorium full of people. It’s like the unexpected sound of your annoying younger sibling suddenly clapping their hands together loudly right next to your ear. It didn’t stop me from watching the storm, but it did make me move back from the window a bit, considering I was sitting on the bed with my feet on the windowsill.

All in all, today was not the kind of productivity I had planned. The remaining pictures left to be put up are still on my bed and the bathroom has still not been cleaned in longer than I think I’ll let you know. But I did participate in a small photo project (took photos of our Dean of the Chapel because he doesn’t like the seminary’s pictures of him), which got me out of the dorm for a few minutes and into the hot, muggy Kentucky outdoors.

Tomorrow, I have only one thing planned (well, except for watching So You Think You Can Dance). I get to spend some time with the wonderful Peg Hutchins. Peg, first introduced to me via-email by my friend Sarah, is amazing. An ordained United Methodist preacher, she works for the chapel office and Community Life and might be described by some as a spiritual beacon of Asbury Theological Seminary. Peg is spunky, feisty, and has a smile and laugh that would light up a room. Just to see her face makes my day feel a little lighter. I got to chat with Peg a few times in the Fall semester, but Spring proved to be an impossible few months and so I look forward to getting to have the first real conversation with her in a very long time. I am excited for the time. I love Peg’s honesty—she is a native New Yorker, after all—and I love her sense of the Spirit.

But for now, it’s late, too late, as the pattern seems to be forming. So I’m off to bed for some sweet dreams and maybe a storm or two. Tomorrow, maybe I’ll get around to the bathroom. Maybe not. But for certain, I will look forward to a great chat in the afternoon and then a good dance show when 8pm comes around.

This entry brought to you by the letter A and the number 786—and apparently Allah, so Bollywood taught me today. ☺

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

2009-06-02T22:07:00.001-07:00

I drank my childhood today. As a young child, while still living in my first house, my family would sometimes eat out at the nearby A&W restaurant. Alongside hamburgers and loaded hotdogs, with my little hands I would wrap my fingers around the thick jumbo sized frosted mug of root beer and take a sip of that frothy, sweet caramel-hinted syrupy fizz. Root beer was a luxury drink of my early years. We sometimes had it around, and in a kitchen cupboard, if I could ever reach, sat a couple of those A&W mugs, purchased, once, during a trip to the restaurant. I felt like a queen on the rare occasion I drank from one. When I was older and living in a new house, we never again went to A&W and rarely bought the pop from the store. It was soon only a memory and the taste of root beer became the flavor of being six years old. On the table out in the living area of my dorm floor is currently sitting a pack of root beer, bought for an evening occasion and left out afterward for any to partake. Root beer with all its sugary sweetness is no longer my pop of choice, but simply because it was sitting there, I took one, and the instant that childhood nectar touched my tongue, I felt, if just for a moment, the cool atmosphere of the air conditioned A&W as we sat in the brown and orange colored booth with plates of food before us, and cold mugs of root beer in reach, likely because the hot summer evening made the house too unpleasant to cook in. Back then, only the wealthiest people in the Northwest had air-conditioned homes. The rest of us ate out.

It is a curious thing that the older memories become, the more enjoyable and less bittersweet they are to recall, as if after a certain passage of time, they move into a different space in our brains—Memories only, where there is no longer possibility attached to it, only reflection. They enter through the door of the "Golden Days."

I find the hardest part of living in Kentucky is that nothing is old. I have no memories of Kentucky, no experience from years past, no long lasting friendships, no history here. Everything is new, and sometimes, without roots, it feels as if I’m going to be swept away. In fact, on Friday, I felt as if I was swept away and it was Marilyn who pulled me back up to my feet before I was gone, like in the midst of a raging river an unmoving rock that I could grasp onto: the voice of reason on the brink of insanity.

And so I’m brought back to the present where I’m currently sitting in my dorm room typing this. A candle burns beside me and my lights are off with the hopes of the nearby storm making an appearance, but it is too far north for any wonders tonight, I’m realizing.

As has been normal the past many days, the sun shined bright and warm today and I opened my curtains to let the light stream in as I finally finished cleaning my room. I have moved the bike back in and all that is left is to finish putting up the pictures. The goal after that: don’t mess it back up—a goal which I have never succeeded in, but with a slower paced summer I can at least pretend it might be possible.

I am discovering that Marilyn’s advice to be productive may serve less to actually feel particularly useful to the world and more to keep me from thinking about feeling useless. Today, I have been less productive than the days before and I could feel that despair begin to seep back into my bones. I wish I could enjoy the nothingness that my life is right now, the open book, the unmarked calendar. I want to enjoy it for those times that are yet to come when my life will be more full than there are hours in the day to live it. But, in truth, it is difficult to enjoy a break from something you haven’t yet lived.

But I’m still enjoying the reality that I have nothing I need to set my alarm for. I can be lazy in my productivity and take all the time I need, and it is nice to see the enjoyable results of things neglected just a few weeks ago, like a clean room. I can get back to my Bengali lessons, as I do every summer, and hope that maybe this year I’ll get somewhere further with them. And maybe, hopefully, I can come to be at peace with myself enough to be able to sit still for a while and just read. Tomorrow, however, I will finish putting up my pictures, and then, because I can’t sit still quite yet, I will clean the bathroom.

PS. Today, I had a job interview for a workstudy job for the City of Wilmore. I will be hopeful about it. I would like the job.

Monday, June 1, 2009

2009-06-01T23:29:00.000-07:00

I am not type A. I’m messy, not particularly organized, can’t remember where I set things down a lot of the time, and can’t remember what I say to whom or who said what to me. When I clean my room, it takes days, because the mess is so disorganized. I often shove papers from school in my backpack and forget about them for weeks if not months. In fact, there are probably a fair amount of papers in there right now, and my Greek flashcards, long ago having fallen out of the rubber band, have been strewn around the bottom of one of the backpack pockets for over a year. I am not type A. Not in any way. Usually.

But in few and far between places in my life, I am excruciatingly meticulous. My photo files on my external hard drive are organized into files by camera type then year and then by month, and each event I shoot, whether spontaneous or planned, gets its own file and is dated with month, day, and year along with a brief description. If I take pictures at two different times of the day of two entirely separate things, they each get their own folder. The file names I leave as numbered so they stay in the exact order of when I took them.

This weekend, in cleaning my room, I stumbled upon this little piece of type A that managed to sneak into my DNA when someone let their guard down for just a moment. My book shelf is fastidiously organized, so much so that on the shelf where I put my non-fiction minus religion books (they have to have their own shelf), I organized them so that the literature books (which mostly consist of literary criticism books for the moment) effortlessly transition into the philosophy books, moving smoothly from works on Deconstruction, to Derrida himself, to Postmodernism and straight into The Story of Philosophy. It’s a work of art. But it was in spending over eight hours in putting photos up on my wall that I remembered some of the intense ways I organize periphery pieces of my life. Today, I pulled out the tape measure from the tool set (yes, I own a real tool set), found the level, and took a pencil from the desk drawer and after laying photos over my bed and designing just exactly how I wanted them up on my wall, I began measuring and marking so the pictures would be so perfectly placed that it would never irritate me to look at them. I don’t like crooked pictures. On one of my walls, I drew lines, leveled pictures, and then put up strips of masking tape to make sure the spaces between the 4x6 pictures were perfectly symmetrical. And then I realized if my entire life were like this all the time, I would have shot myself long ago.

And yet, my room is still not entirely clean. A few stray items are still strewn across the extra bed, but I worked on the important stuff. I put up pictures! Because of my necessity to measure things out perfectly, I’m not done with the photos, but I’ve stopped for the night and will pick up again tomorrow. Here’s the new room arrangement. You can see the start of one of my photo set-ups on my bed.

I am still enjoying my new room arrangement, and today I had a friend over. Ellen (the professor), it turned out, ran out of bread without realizing it, so the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches didn’t happen. We rescheduled a time to meet and then rescheduled again and finally decided she would simply come to the dorm, and so today I got to enjoy my new room with company. We chatted a little about my year and both agreed that these next two years here need to be better than this one was, but she graciously reminded me that at least I had one bright spot in the year: my sister’s television debut…on Judge Judy. I groaned and said, “On the gift God handed me as this last year, that was simply the ribbon on the whole package.” I want to believe God will grace me with a much better next two years—that this year was simply the transition year, the year I transitioned from Oregon to Kentucky and the year I transitioned from the first half of my degree to the second half. The middle of the program, I’m told, is often the hardest, and I’m going to hang on those words for now. This year I transitioned to a new state, a new time zone, and a new and very foreign culture. I feel like I moved to a new country and have had much of the culture shock that would be expected in such a situation.

But the year is over and summer has begun and I should be relieved, but I’m left with no car, no job, and no money. I won’t see home this summer and I am grieving the fact that I didn’t get to see my good friend Rachel’s wedding in May, that I won’t get to see my friend Amy’s wedding in a few weeks, that I can’t get a birthday present for my mother come the end of the month, and that I don’t get to be a part of the 4th-6th grade girls camp at the Oregon coast which I photographed for last summer and attended as a child nearly two decades ago. It was pictures from that camp last summer that I put up today, and as I stuck them to my wall, I mourned what feels like a loss in not being able to go back this year like I’d hoped. Moving far away is an interesting adventure into loss. I find it is smaller things I grieve the most. It is silly things like Fred Meyer (a one stop shopping place that I never particularly enjoyed while at home) and Burgerville, a local fast food joint with all local Oregon food and great fish and chips. It is familiar street names, library catalogues you’ve known for years, chapel songs you’ve come to enjoy, and a city that knows both good wine and good beer. And it is not so silly things like the lack of expectation for people to be remarkably friendly on the streets, and the loss of favorite places like Powell’s and the Oregon coast, the place where I see God most clearly. Sometimes I feel as if I miss my heart.

And so I end today thinking about these things, and I will allow myself to think about them, because it is okay to grieve over what we have to leave behind and losses we must face in the midst of change. Summer is the most spectacular time of year in Oregon, and Portland calls like the Greek sirens, neglecting to remind you that at other times of the year, the city is not such a dream (though I love it all the time). I will not, this year, get to spend time in the unairconditioned Stumptown Coffehouse on eighty-five degree evenings sipping on the strangest and most amazing iced tea as a fan blows in the window working in vane to cool the sultry room but at least succeeding in making it bearable. I won’t wander around Laurelhurst Park with Amalija, both of us wondering at the most unbelievable yoga moves we’ve ever seen. We won’t walk down Hawthorne Boulevard or eat fish and chips and bread pudding and have a fabulous locally brewed beer at The Horse Brass.

Instead, I will remember what I’ve had. I will look at the pictures on my wall and be reminded each time of the memories of my last few years. I will think about that Fall day a couple friends of mine and I wandered around the back roads of Newberg taking pictures. I will think often of Portland and secretly (or not so secretly) be proud of where I come from. And I will remember that this summer is yet to come, a blank slate, and it’s time to start etching new memories. It is exhausting to be where you are not established, but it’s a new time, still a new place, and adventure is before me. As I grieve what I no longer have, I will look forward with anticipation to what is yet to come. And I know someday I will not forget that one summer where I had to live on almost nothing, and it was foolishly fantastic.

Sunday, May 31, 2009

2009-05-31T23:55:00.001-07:00

--"I just smile once in a while cause I don't want the lines on my face." Brandi Carlile, "Fall Apart Again"

Tomorrow, when the calendar turns from May to June and my next credit card payment comes due, I will transfer funds and pay my bill. This will leave me with less than ten dollars to my name for the entire month of June and part of July. It seems a strange decision—to pay a credit card bill instead of buying food—but when push comes to shove, I’d rather risk going hungry than know I have to deal with a credit card company. God can feed the five thousand with five loaves and two fish, but I doubt even The Great Almighty can make credit card companies gracious and understanding. So I will drain my bank account and live on faith.

Today, however, I rearranged my room. When you can’t buy new stuff, move the old stuff around! No pictures, yet, though, because it’s not entirely clean. I’ve still got homeless items scattered all over both beds, and finding a home for them requires more energy than I’m interested in giving tonight, considering, once again, it’s past my bed time. My entire day was spent on this project. I was productive. In fact, I was productive enough that I even washed out the bathroom garbage can, which obviously had never been washed. By tomorrow afternoon, my room should be finished and I’m left wondering what I’ll do when there’s nothing left to do. For a little while, I’m sure, I’ll sit in my room and enjoy the change and the cleanliness of it, maybe even read a little (there’s a lot to catch up on and plenty of time for it), but that will get old. And then what? Well, I guess I’ll clean the bathroom and not just the bathroom garbage can.

I also entered a photo contest, today. Just a monthly photo thing. I have yet to have anything come of such contests, but it’s from a reputable source, so I’m giving it a shot.

I enjoyed the space of my room today. I did no movie watching, didn’t watch any tv, only went outside once to empty garbage, didn’t spent time with anyone, and didn’t talk to anyone over the phone (well, except Apple-Care for a little computer glitch). On my computer desktop is a picture of my friends Hannah and Sarah which I took in April when I went back home for Hannah’s wedding. I think, each time I look at this picture, that one of these days it would be nice to call Sarah and to hear her wonderful voice over the phone. But I have yet to do so, because each time it crosses my mind I realize I’ll probably cry, and I want to believe I’ll be a little more mentally stable one of these days, and so I wait. And I don’t call anybody at all.

Nonetheless, today I would mark as better than yesterday. It was fairly peaceful. It was productive. And I’m feeling not quite so apprehensive. Look me up in a week, of course, and I might feel entirely different.

In an email from my dear spiritual director, Jo, back home, she told me to watch for unexpected blessings. Sometimes, unexpected blessings come in the tiniest ways. Today my blessing was the simple discovery of a song: “Fall Apart Again.” I have, in fact, heard this song many, many times. It is by Seattle-based artist Brandi Carlile, and it is mixed in among a list of songs of hers on my iTunes. But today is the first time I really listened to it, and I discovered it was rather wonderfully written. The song made me smile, especially these two dry-humored and witty lines, the first one being, “I just smile once in a while cause I don’t want the lines on my face.” I’m amused by these words, because I have hit the age where ever so slightly, my skin seems to be a little less elastic and I’m finding that the first lines on my face to no longer disappear so invisibly are from smiling, and I recall a conversation with Marilyn just over a week ago about wrinkles and my note to her that I like them. They tell a story. The second line I particularly enjoy is, “I think the world of myself, but the world doesn’t think much of me.” I don’t have a profound explanation for this one. I just think it’s funny. There’s an entire story in those fourteen words. I laughed at this song, because I could imagine Marilyn, in her unsympathetic manner, reciting the whole thing to me, tongue-in-cheek at points, and not so much in others. In fact, these lines, “I don't want to hear you say that you miss yesterday. If you don't like what you see, that means nothing to me,” I think she’s actually said to me, maybe in a few different words, and if not to me then certainly somebody else. This irritates me about Marilyn—that lack of sympathy—but it’s also one of the reasons I love her, and one of the things about her that makes me smile. A paradox, I know, but love is just that way. It’s what makes friendships so three-dimensional and so worthwhile.

So today comes to a close. Three days down, a lot more to go. I’m not one of those people that counts down every day. I like the element of surprise. My room is a new room and I’m pleased with the new space. Today, I received an email from my professor Ellen Marmon to have lunch tomorrow. She knows my past week has been a little rough. I told her I would love to, but I’m out of money for such things and she offered to make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich if I wanted it. Who can say no to a homemade peanut butter and jelly sandwich offered by a professor? Surely nothing could be better than that. And I’m very much looking forward to it.

Saturday, May 30, 2009

2009-05-30T23:08:00.000-07:00

Saturday, May 30, 2009

Last night, I set my alarm. I was going to follow Marilyn’s advice (the chaplain) and set for myself a schedule. And so this morning the alarm beeped and I got myself up out of bed and turned it off. 8:15am. I’d gone to bed around 11pm. A pretty good eight hours. I waited a moment, and then I climbed back into bed. Thus began my slow paced day.

But I finally did get up for good perhaps an hour and a half later to fix myself breakfast. Then it was time to tackle the room which looked this morning much like it did when I took that picture yesterday. A friend distracted me long enough last night to keep me from beginning anything beyond moving my bike to the hallway. Or did I do that this morning? Yes, I keep my bicycle in my room. Not because I had extra space and thought it made for a nice decoration, but because the harsh Kentucky winter weather so destroyed it that I think I have to replace the chain if not the whole gear changing system. That’s floating around the “Things to spend my money on the moment I get it” list. Thanks Kentucky and thanks Asbury for the proper bike storage facility. I was searching for ways to spend money I don’t have. I appreciate this opportunity. Nonetheless, the bike is out of the way for now. Well, except that it’s currently blocking my suite hallway.

I woke up feeling as if yesterday were continuing into today. I wasn’t out of it like I was at points yesterday (when I said I fell apart, I was not exaggerating—the description to a friend today was, “I bit the dust.”), but I felt as if the stress on my heart were still there and my biggest thought was, “I don’t want to see or talk to anybody.” When I get stressed, I retreat. Some throw themselves into their relationships. Some throw themselves into work or busyness. But me? I retreat, and usually I don’t do anything at all. But despite already failing at Marilyn’s scheduling advice, I still wanted to see if being productive was going to be as worth it to me as she claimed it would. And so I began to clean which first included reorganizing my books, many of which, were sitting on my extra bed and had been there for quite some time.

In the middle of it all, I picked up my Christmas present from Marilyn. She had given me a fantastic book called Wreck This Journal, which, in fact, is a journal with different instructions on each page for ways to destroy it. I carried it with me everywhere for the first week or two and flipped through it each day looking for which page’s instructions I might want to participate in. But over time, it got lost in my messy life. I saw it a few times, but it wasn’t till today when I finally opened it back up again. And made a funnel. It went a bit like this.

This, of course, is usually how cleaning my room goes, and so it takes a long time. It’s still not done, so no pictures of it today. But after that bit of fun, I continued on with the room. The books took a long time. I didn’t get much else done. And so went the productivity. I reflected a bit on how I felt versus how I felt yesterday. Did being productive help? As I thought to myself, I realized today I felt useless, still, but not pointless whereas yesterday I’d felt both. In a response to a text message today, I told Marilyn, “I feel like I suck, but then I sort of feel like I don’t suck that much.” Maybe that’s the best way to say it.

But productivity stopped around dinner time when I suddenly remembered I was spending the evening with my friend Ann who had just graduated and was in town for a few days for what is likely the last time for a long while. I wasn’t sure I’d have the energy for her, but then I convinced her to watch Gandhi, which she’d never seen.

Gandhi, if you don’t know, is one of my favorite movies, and I have a tradition every year in which at the beginning of my summer vacation, I watch that movie. Seminary sucks the life out of me. Not the life that makes me breathe and eat, but the life that makes that all worth while. In a religion that is all about prayer, suffering, and self-sacrificing service, our schools shove our schedules full of debates, dusty books, paper writing, the reference section of the library and very little with the hearts of people. And so I watch this three hour long movie at this time every year to remind me of what I’m passionate about, of what matters in life, of who I am. Because in seminary, I lose that, and this time, I really lost it. Today, though, was not me participating in that tradition. I did that earlier this week. But any chance I can get to introduce it to a friend is a chance I’ll take! Watching Gandhi reminds me of the faith that Jesus Christ died for us to have. Each time it teaches me the same things and new things. It teaches me that the best causes will take our whole lives, that we can never accomplish anything alone, that the desire to make a difference must come from a place deep within ourselves that reaches beyond the approval of others (we will otherwise fail), that the biggest things that will happen in my life will simply be a culmination of a lot of smaller decisions and actions. And today it taught me that before the glory of the front lines, you must do the dirty work, the grunt work that no one sees but that builds in you stamina and a resistance to adversity. When I watch Gandhi, I feel more alive than I do all school year. And so Ann and I watched, each of us learning new things and Ann getting to learn about Gandhi for the first time. By the time the movie was over, it was almost midnight.

And so my day has come to a close. As I write this it is currently 2am, and it’s long past time for me to go to bed. From my window I can see the lightning from a storm that is moving in over Wilmore, and it gives my heart a little joy. Storms are by far my favorite thing about Kentucky. As the rain begins to fall, I’m shutting myself down for the night and to the lullaby of rain drops on my window and rumbling thunder, I will fall asleep.

Friday, May 29, 2009

2009-05-29T16:15:00.000-07:00

Today is the first day of my summer. Well, officially it was last Saturday and really it was the previous Wednesday evening. But today will be my first day, because today is the day I fell apart. I was on my way, but today I broke. Today I thought I just might go crazy, for real this time. I am out of money to the point where my credit card payment will go unpaid for the month of June and maybe even July depending on when financial aid disburses the summer term money, I don’t have a job, I don’t have a vehicle, I live in a dorm room, and I miss home. Not in an I-want-to-move-back sort of way, but in an I-miss-what-I-love-and-know way. This is what my life is.

This is what the plan was: Once dropping Amalija off at the airport last August, I was going to go to the Nicholasville Domino’s, who I had talked to on the phone while still in Oregon, and see if they were hiring for the same job I’d been doing back home (delivering pizza). It seemed like a silly job, but grad students do silly jobs and I thought it would be a good escape from seminary life. I was then going to have an income. I was going to live in the dorm for the first year as a way of getting connected and then was going to move out after that and into a house.

It hasn’t worked that way, not at any level. Instead, I totaled my car on the way to dropping off Amalija, eliminated my job prospect(s) in doing so, and thus, because I was unsuccessful with the workstudy jobs on campus I applied to this year, am still without a job and an income and so I’m stuck in the dorm because I can’t make monthly rent. That car crash had a snowball effect. It ruined my year, or at least that’s what it feels like at this place in my life.

But the full effect hasn’t hit until now. Now that the school year is over, the stress of all that work is over, many of the people in the dorm have left, and the weather is really nice. And the realization that my summer would not be the one of traveling around and discovering the South like I’d wanted hit me at full force, like I ran into a brick wall and fell back, stunned. It was actually last Friday, when I got to spend some time with my chaplain and another friend at my chaplain’s house. This house is not just a house. This place is a home. It’s the last house on the street and beside it is an old stone wall with trees lining the other side of it and on the other side of those trees is a beautiful little creek. When I walked through the little walk way and into the tree covered area where the creek runs through I thought it was just like home. For a good while my friend and I sat with her on her porch, sitting in rocking chairs, drinking tea and eating homemade banana bread (my bread—it’s good). Before we were about to head out to lunch, she showed us her screened in room (I’m sure there’s a name for those) at the back of the house. It is an amazingly peaceful space with lovely light weight cozy, outdoorsy, countryish furniture. I relaxed on one piece and didn’t want to get back up when she told us it was time to head out for lunch.

And that’s when my mood turned. It didn’t help that I sat in the back seat, where it’s really easy to lose myself when the windows are down and I can’t hear the conversation up front. I wasn’t sure why my mood changed and went sour and all I knew is that I shouldn’t have been in such a bad mood and there wasn’t any good reason to have suddenly switched. It wasn’t until that evening when I figured out why—when it dawned on me that being at my chaplain’s house made me miss living in a house more than anything that year had. It made me miss having a space separate from school where I could be a peace, and for the first time while living here, I was incredibly depressed to go back to my dorm room. If I were three years old, I would have screamed and cried and thrown a fit because I didn’t want to go, but I’m twenty-seven years old and all I was thinking was that nothing was supposed to be wrong, so I needed to act like nothing was wrong, except something was wrong and I hated that I was suddenly is such a bad mood.

It took hours for me to realize what my problem was, but recognizing the issue only made me more depressed. I was back in my dorm and that only escalated the problem, because a dorm room can never be a home like a house can. Rules bar you from nailing holes in the wall, denying you the ability to hang framed pictures and thus forcing you to revert to college style decorating with sticky-tack, you can’t install curtains, and you can’t paint your walls so the room feels more like you. And as a dorm, there is no porch, no deck, no space to just be with a rocking chair and a breeze. Deep down inside, I believe if I were to live in a house with a front porch, I would be so much better here—happy, even. A little part of me wants to say, oh, you’d be just as miserable—it’s all a state of mind—but a bigger part of me believes I’m right.

And so it is a week from that Friday and it is Friday again, and here I am. This afternoon, I cried in my chaplain’s office. I cried because I’m living a life I hadn’t expected to live and I don’t know how to handle myself. I don’t know what it means to live a life where entertainment must be in walking distance (if not in my room) and free. I can’t go see movies. I can’t go out to eat. I can’t go to the coffee shop. I am distressed to realize that I don’t know how to be happy without money. Being in this space causes me to realize that money really is the maker of all things in the American culture, not community. It doesn’t help, of course, that most of my closest community is gone, and now that today’s workday is over, I can add one more to that list. Community, it seems, when it is gone, is replaced with money—a lackluster substitute—and when you find you don’t have either, all that you discover is left is that void where it all used to be.

And so Marilyn, my chaplain, told me I need to be productive. “You are not being productive,” she said to me, which was not news to me. Do something, she told me. It doesn’t have to be anything big. Just do something. Make a schedule. It may seem unimportant to have your meals at the same time every day, to take a walk at the same time every day, but it makes a big difference. Clean your room. Go clean your room. She had told me that the other day, that I should go clean my room, but it was more like the way my mother used to tell me to clean my room which often made me so angry I would throw things across it instead of cleaning it. But today the way she said it was different. And so today I am taking her advice, not so much because I think she’s right, but because I feel I have more to lose if I don’t do it than if she’s wrong. She also said to me, “You’re writing a book this summer. A book of your life. You have to make your life happen. You don’t have to actually write, or maybe you should. Maybe you should journal.”

So I have decided to journal every day for the summer starting today. I imagine most entries won’t be this long, or maybe they will. And I may miss a day here and there. But this is the start of a summer that is not at all how I’d planned it to be. You are welcome to take the journey with me.

Today, I’m journaling, and then I’m cleaning my room and rearranging it. This is the before shot.