Thursday, June 25, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.