..accidental

To be honest I don't know much about the church calendar, I wish I did, but I don't. I don't know  much of the historical traditions of Advent but the church calendar seems to haunt me at times and I feel like it is chasing me right now. 

This break has been interesting and far more emotional than I would have ever expected.  Just a lot of thinking and feeling, much of which I could type out in this diary/television thing but I will refrain for the benefit of all.

But a few days ago I started to reflect on the general scope of what I had been thinking/feeling and it all started to make more sense in light of the purpose of Advent.  This break I have struggled a lot with my purpose and worth, with my potential post-grad, and with the endless possibility of life choices that seem so looming.  I have been looking at the things in my life, the activities that I love and do, and all I want to be true is that they are marked by an incredible sense of freedom. I want these things that I love to bring me closer to freedom and closer to God.

But I feel like everything  is kind of off and that creates a critical mass of brokenness that is getting slightly overwhelming.  But despite the snow and paralyzed condition of Seattle, the day we get to remember Jesus is coming and I hope that I will be able to fall into some sort of peace and comfort when that comes.

I realize that Advent isn't about lying to yourself, trying to imagine the world pre-incarnation. I just want this emotional blizzard to be calmed by a reminder of God in my life. 

..fear

Sometimes I feel bulldozed by an idea and somehow it becomes the lens that I see my whole day/life through for a while. Usually its not something that I have been casually pondering for a while, it is usually a thought that pounces and knocks the wind out of me for a bit.

So today I had one of these idea/revelations/ponderings/whatever. I worked a fair trade show this morning. It was relaxing and it was really fun to do costumer service again, for 43 seconds I wanted to be a barista again. The organization I represented was completely, entirely above board and maybe was the perfect model of fair trade, so I take no issue with that portion of the day. But then I started thinking about altruistic consumerism, the thought that enlightened Americans can consume the world out of its misery if they just make the right purchasing decisions. Granted I do not think that this is the primary motivation behind legitimate fair trade businesses but perhaps a broader trend in America (and it is proven that if a consumer believes that companies are charitable with their money or send a certain percent of their profits to an organization, they are more likely to buy from them). The (red) campaign is not going to end the AIDs pandemic and anyone that buys a t-shirt with that notion is horribly mistaken. But maybe its something else. Perhaps wearing a (red) shirt or ordering fair trade coffee or giving your mom a plastic goat symbolizing the new addition to a Bolivian family for Christmas are all noble and worthy things to do. But a part of me asks why do I have to buy something, participate in a barrier, to transfer love and humanity to another person. Is there a part of altruistic consumerism that is guilt subduing but also rooted in fear? Fear of seeing difficult things and having to go some place difficult without the comfort (and barrier) of your wallet?

And then there are entire parts of people that seem scary. People are messy and if you learn too much about who they really are or see them in compromising situations there are things that we become afraid of. We are afraid of the unknown in people, the dark spaces of personality that seem to lurk in conversation, never being discovered. I think that I am scared that people will need me more than I can give, that people will ask me to be better than I am currently, that somehow we will get stuck to each other and then it will hurt like a band-aid when we take opposite paths. Somehow most of the social ticks that I have, the little psychosomatic dialog that seems to always be running, is really rooted in a basic fear. Scared of myself, scared of other people, scared of what it means for us to be together.

And then there is theology. I don't want to be scared of theology. I don't want to be scared to be wrong about God or what it means for me to follow them. I want to believe in a God that is perfect and exists in unending love regardless of my accuracy in systematic theology. My failures in life and misinterpretation of the bible do not compromise who God is, they might make my life more difficult, but welcome to the struggle. I find it suffocating and deeply troubling to be scared of screwing up my theology. In some ways living in fear of a misguided spiritual step leaves me a paralyzed and paranoid Christian. This is what I have been saved from! I have been saved from living in fear of being wrong, of not doing enough, of listening to people who might not have all their theological ducks in a row. I have been saved to life and that is one terribly messy endeavor. When you look at the bible, people who are following God don't live lives of difficulty solely because of outside persecution - often times it is difficult because they tried and failed or just failed outright. To fear spiritual failure is to reduce the unconditional love of God to a flighty, inadequate substitute.

There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. (John 4.18)

..home

Right now I am wearing two pieces of polar fleece and some part of this experience tells me that I am at home. REI apparel and cat hair.

Speaking of cats: We have a new one. My dad found it abandoned in a park and took it home so that he could be warm on Thanksgiving. It is strange to me how compassion towards animals seems so altruistic but really it could just be someone avoiding a hard form of love. The cat (which my mom wants to name Splat, that's a rotten name) has only about half a tail and the half that it does have is crooked. We also have an old cat that we lovelessly call black cat. Ever since we got him he has ate Tucker's dog food. At first it was kind of a cute little nugget of irony and so my parents kept on feeding him dog food. Well apparently this summer he looked like death and lost all of the hair on his belly. They gave him flee medicine which helped but also started to give him cat food. He doubled in weight. Apparently they had been starving him unknowingly. I can't really think about it. It's really sad to me.


Speaking of loosing hair: I'm sick. Whatever. I'm sick and I'm home and I feel comfortable. I think that I might start thinking of home as a place where I can be completely comfortable when I have sick breath, green mucus, and no desire to move. Maybe family is the people that I would want to care of me. Its the people that I would take care of it they where sick because I wanted to and the people I would accept help from because I knew they wanted to help me.

Speaking of death: Suicide has been a theme in my life recently. I went to school the other day and someone was jumping off of the Aurora Bridge. I was listening to NPR last night and they were talking about the frequency of farmer suicides after drought or after an economic downturn where people can't repay the debt that they owe. My parents said that someone jumped off of the Falls today, on a holiday. There is something about suicide that seems brave. I think that there is a part of every human that wants to die. For different reasons, and the reasons probably aren't all good. I think that being honest about a desire to die is being honest about human experience and I respect that a lot.

Speaking of human experience: Whenever I come home I feel like people try to make me do things that I don't want to do. Okay, just my dad. He wanted me to watch a scary movie and I just didn't want to, for some reason it's just not that relaxing to me. He then makes it a big deal when I don't. Also, meat. He gets a huge kick out of me eating meat. This is one of the reasons why I started eating meat again, because I didn't want it to be a big deal. I think that at the base of this my irritation with this is that he seems to find more humor or happiness in seeing me do things that I don't like than vice versa. Whatever. It's probably to grow me as a person or some vague parental bullshit like that.

Thanksgiving. All I want today is to be grateful for my family. If this happens I feel like it will be more God than it will be me.

..bad

When Wallingford residents walk their dogs, their dogs poop, they bag their poop, and then put it in our garbage can. This is not okay.

When our toaster is 2 centimeters too small for all normal slices of bread. So you put it in vertically and it toasts one half but then you flip it over to toast the rest and it burns the center. The center is the best part and that makes me hate our toaster.

There are bigger fish frying in the world though.

..sociology

I have fallen in love with sociology... again. Sometimes I feel as though may relationship to this discipline is like a strange marriage- at times it is amazing and I am raptured with it, other times it is a necessary evil that I have chosen to commit to. But then there are these times when it seems to sweep me off of my feet and I remember all of the reasons why it is so profoundly important to me.

So yesterday I got the opportunity to present a paper that a professor and I have been working on over the summer. Although this seems like a big deal to me, in the real world of academia it is just another paper floating around, being worked on, and maybe someday, people will read it. So really, it's not that big of a deal outside of the context of my small, SPU undergrad experience. The presentation was quick, I was nervous at times, forgot one of my terms, fumbled a little bit on one of my slides, and generally just sat there, took notes, and nodded my head while Jason was fielding questions and explaining concepts that we had talked about for months.  I felt small and young, like a wide-eyed little cousin, looking around the room at all of the big kids who talked about big concepts with precision and accuracy, mouth slightly agape in awe.

And while they where ripping our paper apart, critiquing it intensely, and sobering us up after months of staring at it, I was so intensely thrilled. I have been thinking about grad school lately and a lot of my thinking feels like it did pre-college, like it's the natural next step, something that I could passively enter into (or at least claim interest in) without much thought. I don't want to be too epic about it, but yesterday gave me a glimpse of a little bit more of the actuality of what being in post-grad might look like. 

Being at SPU I have often felt the need/pressure to find out how 'God' or  'his will' works into my education and my 'vocation'. Finding the theological relevance/justification for what I am doing. Or maybe finding out how my education will be of use to God one day, preparing me for a meaningful life of service... like social work or urban ministry. I could type out little reflection papers and snip-its of meaning and I really do believe in the importance of my education as a tool for my future life. But I have never experienced God in learning. It's always seemed like a post-factum attempt at painting my education with spirituality and it was starting to feel like I was gilding self-interest/personal promotion with altruistic motivations. 

But I love sociology. I experience God in doubt, in challenge, and in excellent sociology. It attempts to answers questions of 'why' that I annoyingly ask like a 4 year old all of the time. I love learning and having my ideas be pushed back against and challenged.  I see the importance of excellent thinking and education as a not just a means to a spiritually sacrificial end but as a form of worship in its own right. Yesterday something aligned... or that's kind of what it felt like, for lack of more articulate terms. Higher education no longer seems like a selfish next step that I have to justify with a worthy carrot of service at the end of the journey. I think it is something that would be (will be) profoundly fulfilling and life-giving in and of itself.

I would also venture to say that it makes me want to do well in my housing class. Apparently, a true revolution has happened to me because I loath that class. Oh, and another thing... I think yesterday I learned the difference between being challenged and being overwhelmed. The critique of the paper basically means a shit-ton more work on a paper that I am getting 0 credit hours for but it made me happy. School, daily questions, online quizzes, random sporadic readings in 4 divergent subjects is slightly overwhelming in the quantity. This distinction is important for me to remember. Being overwhelmed with the quantity and (at times) poor-quality of school right now does not reflect accurately on my relationship to education. I feel like I am back in kindergarten, where I am really excited to go to school again. Sweet.

..significant

Perhaps there is some significance in the fact that this is my 112th post and it is happening on November 12th. I'm  guessing there isn't though...

I feel angsty. Like pissed for no reason,  just always want to be somewhere else, angsty. Granted it's not with everyone and it's not in every situation but I just feel intense pangs of discontentment at times and their repetition is difficult to ignore. I can't put my finger on what's causing it. Perhaps its just a general shift in my tide and the unsettledness is getting to me.  Who knows... I just don't like being ungrateful and annoyed by people and things that I am blessed with. I feel like a selfish brat, going around stomping on daisies and knocking cupcakes out of my friends' hands. 

I just want to scream or to punch something, not to release anger but just to release.  I feel angsty about a lot of my relationships and where they will seem to fall post-grad. I am angsty about being in school now and the thought of not being in  school later and the thought of ambiguous grad school in the future.  I am angsty about vague things and who I am and how my education and my personhood actually translate into something of meaning. I feel angst when I feel like I spend large amounts of my day bullshitting with people. I know it's bad when I wish people had some more Marx in them, at least I would see a few sweat beads of conviction on their forehead. But maybe I just want a little more Marx... I have spent a while over the last year or two becoming more moderate. Definitely really needed. But moderate is confusing.  It's intentionally choosing middle places, places of tension and mediation. There is a person inside of me that wants to fight for something, to lay it all down for a worthy cause. Let's face it... an academic career just isn't going to do it for me. Well, right now while I'm writing this it won't, maybe later. I just want some meaning to my madness and some focus to my heart because angst seems like an exhausting, dead-end endeavor.

Whatever. I don't know what I want and that's okay. 

..not done yet

In regards to the election of Obama.

Yesterday was a breath of fresh air for many tired souls and a country that was loosing endurance.

(Full, slightly inciting, article written by Tim Wise found here: Good, and Now Back to Work)

First and foremost, please know that none of these victories will amount to much unless we do that which needs to be done so as to turn a singular event about one man, into a true social movement (which, despite what some claim, it is not yet and has never been).

And so it is back to work. Oh yes, we can savor the moment for a while, for a few days, perhaps a week. But well before inauguration day we will need to be back on the job, in the community, in the streets, where democracy is made, demanding equity and justice in places where it hasn’t been seen in decades, if ever. Because for all the talk of hope and change, there is nothing–absolutely, positively nothing–about real change that is inevitable. And hope, absent real pressure and forward motion to actualize one’s dreams, is sterile and even dangerous. Hope, absent commitment is the enemy of change, capable of translating to a giving away of one’s agency, to a relinquishing of the need to do more than just show up every few years and push a button or pull a lever.

This means hooking up now with the grass roots organizations in the communities where we live, prioritizing their struggles, joining and serving with their constituents, following leaders grounded in the community who are accountable not to Barack Obama, but the people who helped elect him. Let Obama follow, while the people lead, in other words.

For we who are white it means going back into our white spaces and challenging our brothers and sisters, parents, neighbors, colleagues and friends–and ourselves–on the racial biases that still too often permeate their and our lives, and making sure they know that the success of one man of color does not equate to the eradication of systemic racial inequity.

So are we ready for the heavy lifting? This was, after all, merely the warmup exercise, somewhat akin to stretching before a really long run. Or perhaps it was the first lap, but either way, now the baton has been handed to you, to us. We must not, cannot, afford to drop it. There is too much at stake.

The worst thing that could happen now would be for us to go back to sleep; to allow the cool poise of Obama’s prose to lull us into slumber like the cool on the underside of the pillow. For in the light of day, when fully awake, it becomes impossible not to see the incompleteness of the task so far.

So let us begin.

..later

On Sunday someone said,  "I only experience God in the present." True. I can see God and reflect upon their work in my life through the past, but this moment is the only time I experience God. I can put faith in God, in the things of my life that are unseen and in the future. I think that I have made the concepts of faith and trust words about the future. I want to reclaim them in the present tense.

Today I was given the gift of information. 

I am the first person in my family (with the exception of my great  Aunt who got a Masters in Teaching) to consider going to graduate school. My immediate family is not an academic one and the fact that I have done moderately well at school has always been praised, but viewed as an activity very particular to me, like a little stroke of luck.  Education has always been valued and respected in my family, but it has not been celebrated.

I'll be honest and say that I know little of the culture surrounding graduate school,  PhD programs, or what the life of an academic is actually like. Grad school is becoming more and more appealing as the formulated structures of undergrad become increasingly oppressive but it is still a nebulous concept to me. 

People have told me vague things like... 'You are going to grad school, right?' 'You should get your PhD...' and I just want to tell them, "I want to I just don't know how." It's the constant conversation I have with myself, finding the equilibrium between upbringing and ambition, the way I was nurtured and what my nature is. But there are people in my life that just tell me information.  They tell me that if I love sociology that I  have to be a professor, otherwise I will apply sociology to a field, but won't be a student of it. They teach me what it means to be deeply,  almost spiritually, invested in learning and what brightness it can bring to the world. 

I probably think too much,  which sounds like arrogance, but I over analyze the hell out of everything. I don't need people to question  me about what I want to do, to help me ferret out my suppressed inner longings. I just need people to tell me like it is because I don't even know enough to begin to evaluate my interest. Do I want to be a professor? Ha! I don't know. I don't know what I want to do tonight. Worrying about it won't help, just like planning out my life won't help. I want to be more rooted in now, in the people in my life now, in the place of life I am now. I want to find faith and trust for this time, finding fullness through the richness of God now, not just leaning into an ambiguous better tomorrow.

Perhaps temptations of future thinking are little cracks my wholeness, signs of my brokenness if you will. I want to think about a better, more complete tomorrow because there is hope for  wholeness in a place that is not yet broken for me. But trust and faith in the present push me deeper into the reality that I am broken.  I am broken and dying and fumbling to find something better all of the fucking time.  I want to think about tomorrow because it is a salve  on the disappointment of today. Accepting Grace for today means that I have to learn how to accept the fact that God loved me today, and that is something that I embarrassingly do not understand.

Further musings:

Sin is brokenness. It leads to bondage.

I am in bondage because I am a broken.

I sin because I am in bondage. 

My sin does not make me a sinner, brokenness is in my nature.

Jesus come to show us what lives of freedom look like.

The cross was breaking of bondage.

Jesus chose to die for my freedom, he did not do it to satiate God's wrath.

Grace is the medium that connects my brokenness to God's perfect love.

Grace is probably the most confusing thing in my life.

Grace seems more robust than 'getting something I do not deserve'.

What if the only thing between me and God was me? 

Why do I usually assume that that they are reluctant and difficult to impress?

Maybe the question should not be, 'How can God love me?' 

It seems to have already been answered.

..halloween

Sometimes I don't like Halloween because I don't know if people are wearing costumes or not. 

I am being a hypocrite for Halloween. My costume is perfect and I have a paper to prove that I am not crazy.

..rant

Generally I try to keep my blog rant free. I just don't like vomiting rage all over the internet and normally I mellow out after thinking about the topic for a while, seeing it from other perspectives.

But I am pissed.

Mostly because I appealed to have my World Religions credit (for my Global and Urban Ministries Minor) substituted for a history class about the Black Church in America since 1950.

Here are my reasons for the substitution:

• I have focused much of my time at SPU on urban issues and done this intentionally and thoughtfully. I have never taken a class from an African American faculty member, I have never taken a class that specifically addresses the intersection between race, culture, and religion.
• I know little about the Civil Right Movement and this is a great vacancy in my education that needs to be filled.
• From the rumors I have heard (read: Testimonies of close friends who have taken the class) the World Religion course offered at SPU is done with conversion as the end. The thought being, the only reason why Christian should learn about other religions is because that will give a better understanding of how to convert their believers. This is something that I have little tolerance or interest in. People of other faiths have legitimate, rational, and profound reasons for their belief. Learning about their practices and faith traditions with the intent of disproving them or converting them can be insulting, disrespectful, and colonial. I am not interested in spending my time, brain capacity, heart, or money in this form of education.
• One of my friends told me that she rarely attended the class, turned her homework in late, and skimmed the book. She walked away with a B. At this point in my life, I refuse to spend my time and money to knowingly waste away in a class that will not be challenging me. I do my homework, read, and I attend class but want this effort to be going to a worthy result.
  

So I'm annoyed. Not because I didn't get my way, but because our university offers a class that is not respected by students, is not respectful of other people, and that our 'distinctive Christian University' level of excellence seems to be fudged at times. I honestly do desire to learn about the faith of other people and see it as essential in the development of my 'world view' and as a way to develop a better understanding of other people. I just refuse to subject myself to this course because of the simple fact that it is a requirement; I will take an Independent Study, take a course online, pay for the extra credit at UW, write a letter to the Dean of Theology, not apply for the GUM minor. This isn't a cross that I am going to choose to die on but my education and person are valuable enough to be defended and protected and the flimsy requirement of this course with a particular professor will not make me compromise that.

..five

• Spiritualizing politics and political figures. Obama is Hope. Obama is Freedom. Obama is Change. For a while now this has bothered me and the advertising is becoming slightly overwhelming with the elections just a few days away. Obama is just a human. Humans can not be Hope, Freedom, or Change. I understand the spiritual nature of the campaign and I think that it is remarkable to watch the response of my generation, and so many others, to the charisma and charm of a new face on the scene. I will be voting for Obama but sincerely doubt that all of his lofty and amorphous claims will ever flesh themselves out and I am okay with that. He is a politician and he works in the world of politics, which is highly important and limited in its scope of influence. Obama is not going to bring a revolution of daisies and puppy dogs but sometimes, when I get a little lost in the rhetoric, I wonder.
• Am I normal? Recently I have been wondering if I am normal. Not in the way of comparison, where I am insecure if I somehow find out that I am abnormal. I have been thinking about it in the way of wondering if I have an ordinary human experience in my life. Do other people think about the same things I do? Do people notice the things that I do in social situations? Do other people get as angry as I do at a lot of things? Do other people feel as removed from most situations as I do?
  
• Being sexually active. This is funny to me. For a while it has felt misplaced on my tongue and I think it's because it is always attached to the actual act of sex. You have sex? That means you are sexually active. You don't have sex? That means you are sexually inactive. Right? The logic would assume so but I think that this places people in rough territory while they are single, dating, and engaged because it places a lot of their understanding of personal sexuality in a dualistic framework of sex/no sex. I would like to think that everyone is sexually active because everyone is sexual. For me it is important to think of myself as being sexually active because it is a part of who I am. To wait for a moment in time to become active in a part of my personhood seems strange to me. This thinking has nothing to do with sex, but it has everything to do with how I understand what it means to be me.
• Material solutions to metaphysical problems. It is sobering to me to think of how many times I try to create/employ material solutions to my metaphysical problems. Feeling angsty about something, maybe I need to get rid of all of my stuff. Feeling trapped in my life, maybe I need to buy myself that latte, watch that movie, see that friend, leave this town. Lately I have been feeling like my life has been characterized by coping, learning how to live with an illness that will never leave me. The band-aids of materialism feel empty after a while and they have a shitty track record; 0 for 3,000,000. Brokenness (courtesy of Bob Z) is a constant (but I do not think necessary) part of my humanity and learning what it means to live authentically inside of these conditions is my current preoccupation.
• Confession. I don't really like senior year. I could complain about everything I don't like about it but it is a waste of my energy and your brain capacity so I will refrain. So far, it just hasn't been a whole lot of fun.
  

..tension

Exist in tension. For some reason this seems to be a reoccurring theme in my faith and ends up being a pretty great turnicate when my mental bleeding refuses to stop. But tension, if it is between two 'good' things, should not exist. When all is right, good things live and coexist in harmony with each other. Tension does not exist of necessity and it does not exist independently. It exists when I don't understand ideas or objects properly. When I feel tension between my free will and God's sovereignty it is not because tension is actually present relating those two concepts. It is because I do not understand either of them in enough clarity to see how they can coexist or how they can both be equally as viable in my life.

Tension doesn't freak me out but I think that it has become a comfortable escape in my thinking. When an idea or concept doesn't work well with the rest of my thinking- blame it on 'the tension of the Christian faith'. Ascribing the this feeling of paradox to reality is claiming ultimate insight into topics and assuming a level of contradiction inherent in the universe, or at least in human relationships to God. The tension is real, I often feel it in my life, but I want to reframe it as a means and not an end. Tension as an explanation leaves me emotional and pacified and lets me off the mental hook. 

How this tension thought works out with sin: ask me later. I haven't thought about it yet.

..petpeeve

Over the last two days this has happened twice:

1. Theory/idea/theology is presented partially by knowledgeable individual.
2. Theory/idea/theology is received by recipient, either through direct contact with the knowledgeable individual or vis-a-vis another recipient conveying the new thought.
3. Theory/idea/theology is interpreted by recipient through their previously formulated beliefs and information.
4. Gaps in the theory/idea/theology are filled in with assumptions based on partial understanding and preexisting bias/experience with the topic.
5. Opinions are formed by the recipient about the validity of the theory/idea/theology based on it's congruence with their prior belief structure.
6. Value judgment made of the theory/idea/theology.
7. Value judgment made (either consciously or subconsciously) about the intelligence/rationality/faith maturity of an individual that would believe the theory/idea/theology.

I probably walk through this process multiple times a day, blissfully unaware of the people that I am disregarding and misunderstanding in the name of having personalized congruence in my thinking. Having watched entire systems and topics disregarded through a verbal brush stroke has been a good reminder to be more mindful of when I do this in my own life. Proper respect for the ideas of others is foundational to entering into relationship and conversation with them. Respect requires an assumption of rationality on the part of the other thinker. To say, 'There is a reason why you believe these ideas,' and to desire to know that story is the basis of respect for another. Once that story is fleshed out, temperance in word choice and opinion dueling will come naturally since it will grow from understanding and not assumption. I think that this is particularly important in conversations where privilege plays a role. As a White person, discussion of race are often optional for me to participate in. However, because this is often the reality in my life, I must be cautious that I do not exit conversations prematurely (because of discomfort or expediency) because others do not have the option of engaging in the conversation, it is simply a reality in their lives. As a woman, it is very discouraging and offensive when men disregard or diminish the conversation about female perception in society. (I would say gender but this covers a range of affiliations and has [in my opinion] improperly become the euphemism for women's issues.)

Perhaps it's a curse of academia: knowing a small amount about many things that you are called to draw vast conclusions about. Perhaps it's easier to assume than to ask. Perhaps it gives people comfort to formulate opinions about issues they are uncertain/ill-informed about than remaining neutral and open to learning. Whatever the motivation, it is a damaging practice, allowing for the perpetuation of prideful, justified ignorance.

Needless to say, I am annoyed by it right now.

..nuts

They are all over our campus and they are smashed all over 3rd Ave. Oh to be a squirrel right now.

In all actually I don't care about the current proliferation of chestnuts on our campus. Mostly I just feel nuts sometimes.

Like now. I feel nuts, and this is why:

I AM ACADEMIC DISASTER.

This is what I am taking this quarter:
Law and Society (Upper Division Sociology)
Microeconomics (Lowest Division Economics)
Marxism Theory and Practice (Political Science Capstone)
Family Housing (Interior Design Capstone)

This makes me feel like a neurotic squirrel that runs around the Loop and instead of choosing carefully the nuts she will be investing her time in, she just thrusts herself at all of them without discernment. I have rational in what I am doing though, it is just difficult at times.

This is why:
Recently I have had an increasing number of people give me the head tilt and then say, "What are you majoring again?" The again is suppose to soften the fact that they are utterly confused at what the hell I am actually doing with my education. And then I say, "I am majoring in Sociology, minoring in Economics and Global and Urban Ministries," and then gasp because I am out of breath. Their response is usually to offer up what they thought I was majoring in and I have gotten quite a few guesses: Fashion Design, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, Economics... Apparently I don't look like a math major.

This questioning is difficult enough but then I have to actually go to my classes. In Marxism I am 'the mole' and in Family Housing I am 'the lone psycho that is going to college to become well-rounded'. But seriously, I usually feel remarkably dislocated in most of my classes. In sociology I feel strange because my mind is silently stringing along an economic theory to support or refute what is being said. In economics I want to start screaming at the top of my lungs because, like it or not, money is here and it holds power that daily impacts people. It matters, a lot. In my family housing class I usually internally let out a huge sigh of apathy because I don't even know what to think after a while. I mostly don't know how to respond to statements like this from my professor: "Race plays an role in determining housing options. I just don't really know that much about it so we are going to move on."

So 93% of the time I don't feel comfortable in class because there is the annoying voice of a different discipline whispering in my ear, making sure I never forget their meaningful interpretation of the material. But I am no victim. I comb through, select, and register for my classes quarter after quarter and the only complete waste of time that I have chosen has been Educational Ministries sophomore year.

When I look at the world I see billions of inputs- cause and effect relationships that all tell a small part of a bigger story. When I look into my own life this holds true as well. To become educated in one of these inputs seems incomplete to me, like I am willingly closing my eyes to the majority of reality for the sake of easing my personal journey. Ordinarily I champion my position of everything. Everything has it's place and part of my educational duty is to respect and explore it.

It just makes me feel insane most of the time because I have different interests that are seemingly pulling my mind and energy in separate directions all the time. I have no idea what I want to 'do with my life'. (What a stupid question, it's not like I am going to be reborn when I graduate college, I am already doing my life now. This is reality.) The thought of grad school terrifies me because I feel under-prepared to direct my educational focus into a specific and concentrated direction.

All of that aside, I see the value and importance of everything I am studying, independently and collectively. I love economic theory. I love sociological methods. I don't care if it just seems like a shitty pile of randomness because I think it's beautiful and one day, a fellow nut case employer will to. But then they will hire me and I will probably just blog about how annoying and sporadic they are in their thinking and go back to university to get my nursing degree.

Whatever.

..coincidence//closure

I was walking on campus today and overheard a student describe her process of switching into a different art class.  She stated quite a few rational reasons to transfer to the other class and I congratulated her in my mind for figuring out the obscure matrix of SPU-land so successfully. But then she ruined it for me. She said that the fact that the wait-list opened up with an extra spot and she was able to register was evidence that God wanted her to be in the class and that God was blessing the major that she had chosen. Immediately my theological-self started shaking its head back and forth with disapproval. As it is in my life always, I disagreed with this logic on instinct and then went back and figured out just why I had such a strong reaction.

This is what I came up with:

• I have a hard time discerning what is 'from God'.  I feel ill-prepared and inadequate to wade through my life with labels that have the words 'God's Will' printed on them, adhering them to events or experiences where I feel God was present. God is confusing.
• Somehow this rational seems to be disproportionally positive. Meaning most of the great things in my life happen because God is good and therefore God wants to make me happy. True: God is good and God desires happiness for his children, I am just a little reluctant to say that these things are in a cause/effect relationship with each other. People also attribute pain or grief to God. I think that this is to find purpose, which seems to be essential to the human experience, but I just don't know sometimes...
  
• I just don't know if this is how I want to view God's involvement in my life. I think that God is subtle and intimately concerned with stupid things, like class wait-lists and the whistling biker behind me today. I am reluctant to reduce the God of the Universe to a label that I place on my happiness and convenience and positive coincidence. I want to gasp a little when I experience the mystery of God meddling in my ordinary, not simply thank them for being an accommodating bell-hop. 

I am person who craves closure. Not the forced good-bye parties of years spent together on staffs or exit interviews. The kind of closure I want is bows on the boxes of different experiences in my life. I want things to feel complete and properly discovered. It bothers me when they aren't. But right now I have a lot of boxes of experiences overflowing with content, with no bows in sight. Wrapping things up for me means talking and writing and thinking and telling the story of the boxes' content. I don't know if this is a very mature thing to be doing though. Somewhere inside of myself I am starting to feel uneasy about putting the rubber stamp of done on my experiences and then moving on. It might be nice for my mental organization but it just isn't true to real life. So I am thinking about what it means to be involved in experiences while grieving their changed circumstances without sadness. If you don't understand, it's okay, neither do I. I just want to be able to process through things in a way that is true to my current relationship to them and not as a falsified reality of complete in an effort to be done.

To be honest, my life scares me a little bit right now. Don't tell though, it's important that people think I am strong.  <  This is obviously bullshit but it's a surprisingly present little green beast in the back of my mind.

There is freedom in honesty and strength in fragility. I just need God to prove it to me because  sometimes I don't believe it.

Pedro the Lion will serenade me tonight. They just understand quite a lot and they are the only friends from high school I still hang out with.  

..okay

On Sunday at Scum I had my "Oh shit." moment. In the past it has normally been about the volume of things that I have to do and the business it will bring into my life. This time I think I just felt the weight of responsibility that I am stepping into. If I stand in the center of my life and take a 360 degree look at the things that I am invested in, it just seems that they have beady eyes that aren't as much interested in what I do, but in who I am. So I feel the weight of responsibility to be fully functioning. I still don't know what that means or looks like but that is what has been getting stuck in my mental dialog a lot recently. 

It's okay though.

Relationships... I feel strange about those too. I have a lot on my plate and it was come and will leave soon but I feel the space and distance in a lot of my friendship. In the past I would have felt l remarkably guilty about this. That guilt would then manifest itself in a nasty web of bullshit and I would either be friends with people out of obligation or avoid them.

The place I find myself at now is slightly different because for the first time (in my whole life... not to be epic) I don't feel guilty. I feel healthy. I feel like I am being a productive person who can assess her life and make wise, intelligent decisions about what balance looks like in my life.

Something else.

I think that I am learning to listen to myself more. Selflessness is not silencing my voice, it's controlling it through the power of the Holy Spirit. My desires and reactions are for a legitimate reason in my life and they should not be dismissed as foolishness. A huge part of this is being strong enough to absorb the reactions of others when your voice and theirs contradict. 

Okay. Sleep. 

..stream

of consciousness.

• Tonight my mom was telling me about Steven Curtis Chapman's young daughter who was killed in a tragic car a few month's back. It makes me sad. What makes me mad is when Christians care more about tragedy that happens to fellow Christians than tragedy that happens to 'non'-Christians. It baffles me but it happens quite frequently.
  
• I didn't realize how large of a shift it would be to walk back into UI after a summer of hyper-liberalism with the maverick, John Fox. After having my metaphorical fists up all summer working in 'advocacy', diplomacy and Christian ministry seems so passive and neutered. 
• I have found myself yawning and just wanting to curl up into a ball of sleep over the last few days because I have been exhausted. Thoughts: 1. I have been watching my language and the topicality of my comments. It's rather exhausting trying to watch my conversations and I am beginning to resent it. 2. There are millions of people in my office. Well, maybe like 30 but that's 29 more than my entire summer. The highlight of my internship would be the fieldtrip days. John and I would engage in pleasant car conversation, driving to meet with a low-incoming housing resident or a politico, whom we would talk shit about on the ride back to the office. The adjustment to a solo operation was difficult and not something I prefer in a work environment but the shift back is proving rather prickly as well.
• Today, I was getting dressed in my room and I was struck with an overwhelming feeling. I starting look at my things and had an drenching desire to make sure they were all being actively utilized in my life. My desk is the object that makes me feel most uncomfortable in this context. Desks are probably the most underutilized piece of furniture in existence (or maybe just my existence). Sometimes I think I can do homework in my bed. This is not true, I just sleep. Usually desks collect dust and bank statements. I will use my desk this year, even if it is just to use it. Otherwise I am burning it in the backyard, along with my typewriter and this purse I got from my grandma that I have toted around for 6 year and never used.
• Lifestyle expectations. Seriously. My brain is insulted with the fact that it must navigate these waters for another year. I simply have other, more pressing issues of education to wrestle with over the next year. 
• That leads to being a senior. I am tickled I am a senior. After spending a few days this summer working with a professor outside of SPU-land, the lackluster requirements of the sociology department are slightly nauseating. By the end of the year I think I will be extremely done. It's been a great run, but the time is almost here.
• PMS is okay. PMS during the most stressful week of my life: crying. All I want to do is cry. Today my dad asked me about the economy/bank/sub-prime crisis (with explicit intent to rattle off his soapbox rant) and I just started crying. Mostly because of the dynamics of the conversation but a little because of the economy. When I am crying about AIG going under, I know that I am stressed and slightly emotionally unstable.
• I am sacrilegious. This is not my intent and it does not reflect the way that I think about 'the sacred' or God. I am just disenchanted by religious delicacy in my vocabulary and want the times when I care and am indifferent to be distinct  in the ways I refer to them.
• I have probably eaten 9 Chips Ahoy! real chocolate chip cookies tonight and they taste like buttered shoe insoles. They are just created in the most perfect, appealing size that makes you feel like you are eating nothing.
• Tomorrow is the end of an era. I will no longer be the only collegiate Beach, my parents will have a shit-filled empty nest, and my brother will be learning to play his acoustic guitar on his twin extra-long bed in the city of Ellensburg, Washington. I'm proud of him and excited to come back for Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks. Maybe it's just a vain hope that some shift in circumstances will cure the difficulties I have with my family. Whatever. I think that he will be fine and WILL EXCEL AT EVERYTHING, EVER.  I am very excited for him and proud of him. 
• My room is finished. I like decorating. I don't like that I had to think about gender roles when I was decorating my room. It just makes me happy, regardless of my sex.
• All of this is meaningless. Haha. I'm not even chasing after the wind. I am sitting on a couch eating carbohydrates.

Favorite quote of the novel that I am reading right now (and the first novel that I have read in three years. No, I don't really want to talk to you about it.)

"Blindness is also this, to live in a world where all hope is gone." Jose Saramago, Blindness

..100

With this post, there will be one-hundred. Two of which were eloquent, eight that were rants, and eighty that where awkwardly caught in between. For all of them, I am grateful.

Independent of this post, I was thinking about what it will be like to be old today. To have time bleach my hair, dig large valleys into my skin, and give gravity the space to work its toil. It will all come in time. What I was most excited when I thought about getting old today (my 'most' on this topic changes frequently) was how laughing will be different. I think that it will come from my overly-sugared belly more often and that it will probably make my time-softened fat shake. I will still laugh for no reason and I will still laugh a few seconds before most people, but hopefully the tinge of panic that I feel sometimes when people ask me about it will go away. I think that I will laugh because I know. I will know how so many of my mile-high question marks worked out and I will know how all of the seemingly paralyzing mistakes make beautiful sense in the tapestry of my life. I will smile because I no longer have to convince myself of proper theology and correct behavior. My bones will be a playing a vibrating symphony of freedom, and it will be from this resounding assurance that I will know that I am following God. I will be strong and won't have to pep-talk or debrief around conversations because my strength will precede and follow me. I am excited to experience a healthy and alivening sense of chaos from the grounded perch of age that I will rest on. I am excited to relearn everything I know, reframe everything that I think makes me who I am, and experience life through other people, in other times.

Every once and a while, impatient, short-sighted people like me curse time and damn it to hell unless it will instantly reproduce to 800 times its current state. On my more long-sighted days I love the process that it creates in life. I love that I will have lived through, in, and with time and I think that it will make my gray hairs worth every minute of the wait.

..us

Over the last few years I have become increasingly aware people's use of language. How people refer to 'the homeless', 'the poor', whether or not they include themselves in classifications of people groups, their use of possessive pronouns when talking about their belongings. Personally, the use of language often reflects where I am in relation to some sort of other.

Currently I am in a state of confusion about my pronouns. Mostly the terms 'us', 'our', and 'we'. As much as the culture I was raised in has instilled in my psyche that my worth and maturity depend on the strength of the 'mine', 'I', and 'me's that I exercise, there is little comfort to be had in these terms and states. At times there is sanity, but rarely comfort. I find comfort in the communal language I am blessed enough to use. But I no longer know what to call so much of my life right now. All of the pronouns seem awkwardly misplaced on my tongue when they slip out in reference to my living situation.

Being in college, displacement and transition are a medium that comes with the territory. I will have grossed six residences once I walk down the isle at graduation, possibly a seventh soon after. Each moving experience requires cardboard and time, but also includes a shift in my language. I have a new 'us' to manage, to engage, to represent, and to ruminate upon. Over the  last few years, the liquidity that seemed to mark all of these transitions startled me and I began to ache for a sense of belonging that was more difficult to enter, navigate, and exit. I was hungry for ties that where more robust and characterized by commitment and devotion. The process into this new way of living is a story independent of this little catharsis but it can be summed up as a lot of me, a lot of others, and more of God. So all of us walked into this year together, surrounded by a sometimes suffocating cloud of witnesses, to see if this risky 'us' lived up to its radical sex appeal.

Thinking back on my naively blind ambition and hope-filled idealism, I grin at the innocence and faith that it radiated. Now my grin turns into a chuckle and I feel far away from that sugar-coated fantasy that propelled me into the new over a year ago. I deeply respect it for what it was and am proud that it welled up inside on my ribcage, pushing me into the unfamiliar. My idea and understanding of 'us' has radically morphed over the year, being shaped under the fury of my emotions and ideas. The validity of my every evolving thoughts remain to be tested by time and I can hardly evaluate them. 

I would like to think that the unrelenting flame inside of me that led me into this 'us' is leading me out of it, into a larger, deeper understanding of my belonging and relationship to the others that I am blessed to be with. Sometimes my hope takes a vacations and I feel as though I am pacifying my selfishness and bullshitting my way out of an understandably difficult commitment. Time, one of  the most just judges, will illuminate this; I am forced to remain in a state of musing for a while longer. Moving on.

Since I have been processing this year I have learned that much of my understanding of belonging is marked by fear. Fear of being known, fear of asking for what I want, fear of being hurt, fear of being rejected, fear of not getting my needs met, fear of not being able to handle the weight of relationship and the task of loving another. There is something so basic and primitively human about the desire to be in relationship with others, and when I found out how deeply this desire penetrated, it became my biggest fear because it was my biggest hope. 

There is no fear in love. Perfect love drives out all fear, because fear has to do with punishment.

After a year of intentionality, learning, and growth, some roots of  fear have been extinguished, while some others live on to be tackled at a later time. Right now I fear being lonely. I fear leaving and forgetting and loosening my grip on profoundly formational relationships. I fear replacing my longing for connection with a numbing cocktail of American independence. But I also fear becoming satisfied with the falsely mature sense of community that I hold now. Just as my preliminary understanding of 'us' was sweetly simple, so too is my present understanding of the complex realities of lives lived together.  As I walk away from an 'us' over the next few months, I am shedding my present understanding to step into something else. Some of the previously employed formula is being reused, mixing the influence of God, personal motivation, and the grace of other people in my life; making me think that this is really the way that all substantive development occurs. It makes me realized that I believe in a gospel of slow, purposely inefficient transformation and the fumbling of my language gives voice to that reality in my life.

..today

If I could inhale air until it reaches the bottom of my lungs, close my eyes, and disappear for a few moments I would. Right now. Sometimes the thought of disappearing is overwhelmingly attractive.

I woke up this morning really sad and disturbed because I had a dream about child abuse. I have been having troubling dreams recently, not where I have been injured or attacked but where I am watching others be victimized. They make me feel like I have been chewing on nickels for hours, with the throbbing headaches and a stomach of guilt. In all of the dreams I am trying to help, but always come up short, never quite getting assistance and never quite making the right decision. In my dream last night, I actually made the situation worse by clumsily calling attention to it. The next thing I watched was the little girl being forced across the Safeway parking lot, guided by the strong hand of her tuna eating father (My dream started when I was grocery shopping & I met the two as they were shoveling a mountain of canned tuna into their cart.) Sometimes I feel as though its  hard enough to process through the actual shit that happens in the world.  I do not often read novels or enjoying watching movies highlighting social problems because I can barely sift through what my response should be to the factual problems in  my life. Processing the fiction seems too daunting most of the time. Maybe next time I have a dream where I am given the chance to intervene I will actually learn something. Fingers crossed.

Yesterday night and this morning I have been dealing with things. I took the rain as a symbol of "You actually need to do your to-do list, Lindsey" and wrote emails, purchased books, did things. It was nice but when I am sorting through my mess of chores, it becomes overwhelming when people add other tasks to them. Perhaps this is why they have entire graduate classes on  'The Helping Relationship',  because its confusing.

Most valued helping relationship today: I was riding my bicycle to work and noticed a  poor Golf  driver with his messenger bag on the top of his car. 4 stop lights later I was able to catch him, knock on his window amidst the confusion of traffic and throw the bag in the car. Hope nothing broke. I liked it because it was a mostly silent exchange. There were no strings attached on either end, no public recognition to be had. Just a friendly action with a 20 second life span. If I had powers, I would alter all of my 'random acts of kindness' to be silent and invisible. Sometimes the layers of social exchange are too complex and overwhelming and  I am paralyzed by their magnitude to do anything nice because nice is far to simplistic.

Today I want my internship to be over. My boss man has spent an annoyingly long time stammering out confused instructions about a damn workforce housing report. I think that Jesus filled him with a  desire to deposit the checks at the bank because I was about ready to throw acid on him. Not that I have acid or actually would want to harm him, I was just annoyed.

I love people. I don't mind making decisions. Large groups of people often cannot make decisions. Maybe I want a vacation with someone else where we do things but it doesn't feel like a constant pause... then a passive, vague dialog... then an exchange of indifferences... then one of us getting irritated enough to fling a decision forward just so that we can progress. The absence of decision making sounds like an island vacation (or something relaxing. Think of relaxing imagery and slow breathing.)

..three

• The struggle between individualism and communal life is ever present. I have definitely felt the tension this living situation and social situations this year but have started noticing in many other areas as well. Identifying a person by their race or any other social grouping can be harmful, placing  too much weight on the community one inhabits instead of their individual distinctions and characteristic. The other side of the coin is our desire to belong. We always want to be in the  know, invited, and regarded worthy of inclusion. Finding the delicate balance of these two worlds is difficult enough in my own life but being sensitive to  it in others can often be a daunting task.
• I have been increasingly disturbed by the notion that people want to be like God. I realize that there are hundreds of biblical passages that affirm this longing but I think that it can easily be skewed. My biggest fear is the dichotomy it places in my life. If I am to become more God like I need to decrease in resemblance of myself. I don't know if this is exactly what the bible means when it mandates things such as, "Be holy as your Father in Heaven is holy."  I think all of  this can  happen within a context of self acceptance and love. If my ultimate end is to become a miniature God figurine then I should despise and reject almost all of me. I don't really want to become God or Godlike.  I want to be in  love with God and I want be shaped and purposed by them, but I  do not have aspirations of divinity. I think that they can handle it themselves.
• Having sick friends sucks. > Mostly just because I can't really stand the game of information competition that sometimes happens. It seems as though, when a person has a medical ailment that word gets passed around and people know things  and people where there and people where called. Maybe this isn't something that other people deal with, it may just be a personal quirk,  but I find that I often feel socially displaced and uncomfortable when a friend is sick.  I also feel like sometimes it is a situation where this is an invisible, ideal response that people should have, filled with wisdom, decisiveness, and compassion. I always feel like there some great standard that I should achieve,  but never quite reach. People should just not be sick.

..liberal

Those people who don't talk about politics have always baffled me. Even though it can be an unpleasant and abrasive conversation to have with some people, I have always viewed it as a necessary way of understanding and comparing my opinions with another person's for refining and reflection. This idea of political conversation is touted as a great accomplishment and what we, as members of a democracy, should always be striving for. A civil exchange of ideas and perspectives that informs and challenges our perception of the reality of society for all of it's members.

This cotton candy philosophy of democratic sparing is charming but quickly melts away when most conversations about politics actually commence. Politics is a dirty, contrived game of pride, manipulation, and self-seeking preservation.

Within the political world, apparently I am a liberal. This is not a label that I put on myself but after a weekend with my family I will gladly align myself along this party. Maybe it just means that I give a little bit of a fuck about people, the environment, the -isms of society that are all alive and acitvetly debilitating their recipients, and the widening gaps between people groups that perpetuate hostility and obliterate the possibility of peacemaking. Call me a liberal if my stance on issues falls predominately into a 'leftist' way of thinking; it really means little in the end.

This label of liberal that is so easy to brand others with is shortsighted and is causing hemorrhaging in my relationship with my father and family. With a philosophical bent towards 'the poor', 'the marginal', recycling, small corporations, and 'a social nanny state', my understanding of the American society receives the stamp of granola and I cease to be a daughter, becoming a wayward youth in desperate need of enlightenment and re-education. In the bold name of 'truth' and 'freedom' my father makes his assault on my proclaimed stance on issues, looking to inform my ignorance with the seasoned wisdom of years of government failure and excessive taxation.

Great. Let's talk. Charter schools, Seattle's bag-tax, immigration reform, public transit, affirmative action, fair and efficient tax policy, consumer safety regulation, women in the workforce, the prison system, crime, foreign aide, welfare: bring it on. The few requirements of the engagement being consistent logic, polite discourse, and a desire to understand the other's perspective. Without these prerequisites I have little interest in meaningless political racket ball because it is a pointless endeavor that leads me to a whole bouquet of pain to wade through post-fact um.

The problem with the scarlet L that is burning on my chest is that it is impossible to see past it. My father looks for an opportunity in every debate to weld the sharp corners of that L into a more acceptable and realistic C. The part that he consistently misses while he is prying and twisting in vain is that this label holds no meaning or weight in my life. It simply is a condensed, oversimplification of a massive structure of ideas and beliefs that I have constructed through education, conviction, logic, and compassion. My father is so often fruitlessly distracted by my liberal leanings that he misses the fact that my political beliefs are formed directly out of my understanding of humanity; in all of its twisted decay and inherent worth that demands respect.

So when I am eating eggs, cantaloupe, and cinnamon bread with my Caucasian, conservative family and they casually hop from racist comments about the littering habits of illegal Mexican immigrants, to the oppressive restrictions of the Seattle bag tax, and then effortlessly into the unavoidable reality of sexual harassment in the work place, my outrage does not come from the fact that I voted Democrat in the last election. I burn with outrage internally because the meaningful situations that pain beautiful groups of our society are disregarded as infringements upon our comfortable lifestyle. The grievances of the people around that table are legitimate to their situations but may hold little weight when juxtaposed with the conditions of millions of people that are flippantly disregarded over the course of a meal.

But at the end of my vacation I have come to the end of my rope and I am deeply wounded by another battle round that I have forfeited from exhaustion. Ultimately my views on issues and my political affiliation are deeply reflective of the person I am and desire to become but are not the essence of who I really I am. To be ridiculed, interrogated, and lectured because of them is not painful because I am a liberal, it is wounding because I am daughter that is being misunderstood in the name of re-education.

Usually I tell myself, "It is okay," to bind up my wounded heart and love again next time, with naive hope that something will be different. The truth is that I am not okay. I am broken because of this treatment and feel deeply unloved because of it. Where to go from here...

..bleh

Today wins for one of the best conversations of the summer. Lee Grooms gets the award. He works for Grace Church and read about our house in the Mustard Seed Sampler. The questions that he asked and the perspective that he held were remarkably nuanced and subtle. I will be reflecting on them for a while. Thanks Lee.

My uncle called me today. After walking to two different Tully's in the U-District and still missing them, they finally made it by my work. It was strange seeing him. I almost started crying before they came and became nauseous after seeing him but while we were together it was fine. I still do not know what I think about this. I don't have much sympathy for him but my heart breaks for his wife.

My dad bought my mother a car that she does not like today. Last time he bought her a car, she didn't like it either. It is not as though he is ignorant to her tastes, they have been looking for a new car for months. The rush? We are driving to the beach tomorrow and he didn't want to take the Explorer. To be honest, this part of my father really, really pisses me off. The part of my mother that repeatedly takes it and complains to me instead of talking to him is just as equally irritating. Awkward moment: My dad asking me if I liked the car when I walked in the door. Sometimes familial bullshit is needed.

Tomorrow I am going to the ocean. I want to go there. I think it will be relaxing. Honestly, my family isn't that relaxing. My dad says things like, "Change the channel. There is no reason to watch the Olympics if there isn't an American competing." They don't understand my humor/life/person. It might be a situation where I need a vacation after my vacation. There may be a reward of charcoal All-Stars so I will hold my breath. If all else fails there is the self indulgent luxury of sunbathing. Bleh.

I have been moody recently. Sorry.

..patchwork

This weekend a herd of friends came to my house and experienced the peaks and troughs of 'Valley' life. It was fun, I am tired. There was also a point where my 'SPU friends' were meeting my eclectic family, getting grilled about their vital facts and what college my cousin Spencer should attend. Having so many new eyes peering at my family gave me the chance to re-examine it to, comparing the person I am now with the person that my family raised. I found that I am strange patchwork quilt of my mother's hostessing style of diligent background work and cleanliness, my aunt Lisa's eccentric style and energy (at times..) and my aunt Brenda's flexible extrovertedness and flightiness in conversation. Duh. It would make sense that I would try to piece together parts of each of these influential women's styles into my personhood.

Snag: My family is hella screwed up. I realize 'hella' is a flexible term and that there are plenty of  other stories about families that are more dysfunctional than mine. Tell me them later, but I don't want to compare them to each other.

I found out this weekend,  rather abruptly, that my aunt voluntarily admitted herself to the hospital for alcohol abuse, reinstating the cycle rehab, system navigation, co-dependancy, helplessness, manipulation, and rhetoric. Two day after, another aunt drove my bi-polar uncle  up to the University of  Washington psychiatric ward for him to wait out his first manic episode in ten years. I found out in the middle of a beyond shitty hometown fair but for some reason it hit me harder this time than it usually does. The family gossip usually causes little effect in my life, since I  learned  from an early age that family talk is cheap and worthless and that I have very little influence over  the poor  choices my  family members make. Probably not  a relational position that I would advocate but it's where I am at.

So I  am so much of my family and yet the little part of their personalities that magnetize them to co-dependence, chaos, drama, and addiction are active in my life too.  I can see the splinters  of their struggles in my life and recognize the 'Beachness' of it but have to hope that there is something better than that. I am bored with this post because it is the same hair ball of an idea  that I have been choking out for years. Basically:  I love/admire/desire to emulate portions of my family. I want to reflect upon/respond to/evolve out of the places that my family has historically festered in, not out of spite or fleeing, but just because I want to have hope that resounds in my  body and  life.

Side-note: Exhaustion does not = a mark of success. Relaxing does not = being alone, doing nothing; it might, but it probably will rarely repeat its previous form.  

..fireflies

The future is something that I tend not to think about. I do not plan it out and most of the time it does not bother me.  I also do not have a list of things that I want to do before I die,  or a list of children's names I have selected, or a list of places to visit. I do, however, want to see fireflies before I leave this planet but that is the only desire that makes the list.

Recently I have been reflecting on relationships and 'relationships' that I have had in my life. Bad news: This is a area of my life that is severely underdeveloped for a myriad of reasons and I am exhausted with being relationally weak and indecisive. Remembering (read: building experiences that may or may not have actually occurred) past events and situations has caused  me to realize that I devalue my  personal experience in most relational circumstances.  I will heed advice, logically plan  out every possible outcome, or simply just  wait for circumstances to  blow over, all at the detriment of engaging and utilizing my personal experience. The past situations that I have been in will never exist in  reality again, they will simply be incomplete quilts sewn together by the sporadic memories of me and sometimes another.  I can remember  the ways that I experienced those situations and tangibly engage the way that they impact my life (and consequently others).  I could waste my time trying to rebuild a past that will never be  complete or I can look at the skills and shortcoming I have and  think progressively about ways  that I can move forward. Being a 12 year old relationally is easy, it takes the skills of calculated innocence and avoidance, but I am ready to grow up and switch those digits around.

The last twenty-four hours have been bad bicycling hours. I came so close to 'T-boning' a little red SUV last night and was almost doored on my ride home from work. Whenever this happens I don't say anything. I just stare,  not because I am trying to invoke a death glare but because I am scared and a little shocked.  Riding today made me realize that I think about what it would be like for a car to hit me almost every time one passes by. No more 45th; Greenlake, with its peaceful bike lane, is where I will be spending the rest of my summer. 

..moments

Today at church I realize that I try to create holy moments.

Explanation:  I have started going to Grace Church Seattle. It's a great church, with solid teaching  that encourages me to have a realistic understanding of  my faith and  a grace-filled understanding of God. Going there has been a refreshing and deepening experience and I really enjoy attending there. However, there is liturgy. I like liturgy a lot; it is refreshing since it is so distinct from my Baptist background,  I love the focus it pays on personal confession wrapped in the setting  of  the body of  Christ, it connects well to the Church past and present, and there  is a sense of  reverent sacredness that I find lacking  in  many relevant churches  in  Seattle. I  do feel  pressure though. I feel pressure  to  feel remorse  when we start the service  with confession. I  feel  pressure  to feel concern for the different issues we pray about in the middle  of  the service, and  I  feel pressure  to  have a  deep and moving  experience when I take communion. Half  way through the service I was  trying to piece together a prayer for the children of the  church, stringing together fake requests for parental wisdom  and obedience and then I just stopped. I stopped bullshitting  my way through the  required  prayer.  It felt very right to  stop. I took communion and  didn't feel anything. Sometimes communion really impacts me but today it was  normal  and just  part of my life,  a  small blip  on  my  radar screen. 

Having the  realization that I often try to create  holy moments for myself  was freeing. My experiences with  God  are not  something  that I can demand or create or manipulate. They  simply happen.  When I rode my bicycle back from Scum today,  I had a holy moment.  I believed in God and liked them  a  lot and was deeply  happy to be riding my  bike. Recognizing  the moments when  I am intimate with God is far more important  of  a skill for  me to possess than having them  on command. Sometimes I initiate with God and  sometimes he initiates with  me. We give  and take and it is very selfish  and narrow minded of me  to  think that I will have  a rousing, transformational experience  at every religious event I  go  to. I want a  God  of  my  life and my boringness not a God of liturgy or  church buildings.

Side note: Today  we found a tandem bicycle in  the dumpster. It is  gorgeous  and frosted  purple  with white walled tires  and in impeccable  condition. It might  redeem my feelings about tandems. We also found beer and doughnuts  and sat  in our garden and laughed and consumed the  loot. Today community  was unexplainably satisfying and  it  is a  gift that  I am truly humbled to receive. Thanks be to God.

..sick

I would refund this summer if I could. Regret is a feeling that I don't often have  but I would redo this summer if I could.

I am also tired of being sick. The  physical pain/annoyance it causes is tolerable but the fatigue, grumpiness, and temptation of being self-centered is exhausting. I just want to be well and finish the projects that I have started this summer. 

I have been thinking about sickness and how it effects my perception of the world.  Not being able to  taste and  smell makes food a very dull experience. If my sin can be compared to sickness,  how much of reality am I not experiencing because of my limited state? And when things start to improve and I become healthier, the world really doesn't alter that much, just my perception of it.

Visiting the doctor was a huge  blessing  today. I sad there and  was very humbled at the  power that I  had to ask and receive medical treatment. From the most basic terms, I do not understand how this is an option and not a right.

..snail

Rarely do I want to be some other animal than human. I often do not want to be a human, but never a bird or a fish or an insect. Recently though I have had the reoccurring thought of being a snail. The safety of their homes is always present, available at a moments notice. They are small, insignificant to most everything and glide along their way with deliberate slowness. I want to be a snail in a forest that eats delicious leaves, moves 3 feet a day, and then sleeps under a stump that is becoming detritus. I want a brown shell and a slimy body and I want it all wrapped in simplicity. No large network of nerves and veins and thoughts and emotions to wear me out and to keep me down. Just leaves; they are all I will think about.

I don't know how to make myself happy anymore and I am supremely discontent with every solution of escape that I waste my time formulating. They never come into fruition anyways so I suppose they do not really matter in the end. I just look at my life and see a wash of beige, or a great lake of saltine crumbs, or wet newspaper, or astroturf, or egg cartons. Nothing draws me into it. The 'spicy' things that paint smiles on other people's faces blend into the boringness of tomorrow and they are very unappealing to me. I feel like I am a reading a story of my life and the pages are mostly blank, with haphazard scratches around the margins that are of no substance or value. Flipping through the end of this summer chapter and it all looks the same. Boo.

When I am sad I wear more colors. 

I don't know why I smoke. I am quitting.

..agreement/good

I want to write a million things in this blog right now. My 'secrets'... that some people know and  some people don't.  

Whatever. I'm not going to and that's okay.

I want to stop agreeing with people. Sometimes in conversation I am the bobblehead that prompts questions and keeps the string of talking alive by being agreeable. Usually I agree with what others are saying and it is a natural response but I think that it makes some conversations strange. I am interested in hearing what people have to say and discovering what they think about issues and the perspective they hold to help them arrive at that point. My agreement with their statements has very little to do with my interest in their personhood (loonies fall into a different category that is label-less to make it nicer).  Agreement can make things seem conditional, as in: talk, nod, affirm, report back to others that it was a 'good' conversation.  I think that this boils down (indulge my oversimplification) to a desire to be self-perpetuating with thoughts.  Instead of entertaining new ideas as valid and  worth  of exploration, I will nod and prompt you into conversation I desire to be in.  Often times I am extremely passive with my disagreements, formulating them  in my mind and never sharing them. It compounds the problem by projecting a response of agreement when it was never there to being with. Whatever.

I also hate the word 'good'. It is going on the banned word list (Gay, 2005; Retarded, January 2007; Interesting, after I graduate from the sociology department at SPU; Should, July 2008; Good,  July 25, 2008).  It communicates nothing of substance.  When I respond with 'good,' I really mean twenty  other things and so it is simply a prop that I employ out of laziness. I also have a strong aversion to placing people, ideas, or experiences in 'good' and 'bad' categories. Life is infinitely more complex then good, bad, positive, negative, and I should be living into that reality through the way I speak and reflect on  situations.  Waiting for deep conversations to come along to explore the more nuanced aspects of life places far too much importance on the planned interactions of coffee or meetings, when the passing moments that dot my life can be quick little glimpses into something bigger.

Secret: I stole the Seattle section of a newspaper from a bakery today.  I felt guilty at first but then my raspberry buttonhole was expensive/disappointing so I somehow felt okay about it.

Secret: I think I might be lonely.

..scattered

There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under heaven.

A time to be born and a time to die,

A time to plant and a time to uproot,

A time to kill and a time to heal,

A time to tear down and a time to build up,

A time to weep and  a time to laugh,

A time to mourn and a time to dance,

A time to gather stones and a time to scatter them,

A time to embrace and a time to refrain,

A time to search and a time to give up,

A time to keep and a time to throw away,

A time to tear and a time to mend,

A time to be silent and a time to speak,

A time to love and a time to hate,

A time for war and a time for peace.

What does the worker gain from their toil? I have seen the burden that God has laid on humans. God has made everything beautiful in Their time. They have also laid eternity in the hearts of humans; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that everything that God does will endure forever,  nothing can be added to it and nothing can be taken away from it. God does it so that humans will revere Them.

This is the word of the LORD. 

Thanks, trust, and praise be to God.

..blessings

God has had impeccable timing with me this week. A friend visited and it was a burst of refreshing newness, I went on a bike ride with Greg that was long and slow, I have had valuable conversations and valuable reflections on my communication, I have been given a renewed appreciation for the people in my life.

Sometimes (always) I get tired of people that rant on Bush. Cheesy countdown clocks that are made in China, probably take pounds of petroleum to produce and are very ironic to me. Mostly what I am irritated about is that fact that people whine endlessly when there are other more productive and creative things that they could be doing with their time. Less complaining, more action.

But I do this too. Not with Bush but with other chosen issues in my life. Complaining is a very sad state of affairs because I realize that something is wrong and instead of doing anything about it, I shoot myself in the foot, all the while feeling productive for identifying the problem. I have been thinking a lot about the beauty in silence and simplicity. Sometimes I very thankful that I don't understand why God is doing something in my life. Maybe I just don't need to know and I find peace in knowing that he is very active but very quite. I don't want to talk about change or how I want to live differently, I just want to live into a better way silently and simply. Like a cat. Or Jesus.

\\I really appreciate my dad. Seeing him with my friends today, I was very proud of who he is and the way that he loves me and my life. I admire his life-choices profoundly and am very thankful that I consider him a true friend and an amazing father.

..suffocating

The sun shines and leaves blow and my hope like autumn is turning brown. And I know that it seems likes I'm always falling down. But it does not matter to me although it seems like should. It's because I know I am understood when I hear them say, "Rest in us little David and dry all your tears. You can lay down your armor and have no fear, cause we're always here when your tired of running and we're all the strength that you need." Its uphill, both ways, tomorrow I swear I won't act this way. I know it seems like is what I always say. You know I want to be like Jesus but it seems so very far away. When will I learn to obey, obey?


Morality will never salve/solve my problems. There is always a deeper condition of my soul and faith that remain unexplored when moral solutions are offered as the quick and painless remedies to my sickness and human cancer. My brokenness is blatant and very fragrant in my life, creating a basket of failures that can be overwhelmingly huge and impossible to ignore. Experiencing God as Grace and experiencing God as Love has been a struggle ever since I gave my life away. They take my basket away, composting my loss at the cost of their Son's death and I tremble when it happens. I find myself desiring to be able to give away my decay more quickly, keeping the pile of shit to a minimum and moving on to a better and healthier me. I fail at this too. I keep my failure because I find a twisted form of comfort in my disease, in the reminders of inadequacy. This is my plight and honestly, I barely survive it most of the time, getting through because of the life support of forgiveness given by God/Spirit/Son. The place where I do not know how to navigate is when morality is offered as a band-aid by others. When the people I share life with submit remedies of fixes and moral placebos that will never come to fruition but will rot away under the banner of hope. If I am not holding myself to a standard of morality as the measure of my life in Christ how am I suppose to navigate a community that is? If morality and its gilded lies quicken my demise as a believer how do I convey this to the people who drag me back into rules and regulation?

I want to live a moral life in Their kingdom.

I could give a fuck about being a moral person. The injection of pride that I get when I create laws to live by is an addictive fix but causes my soul to blacken and harden into a robotic and calculated machine. In my sickness I am looking for a doctor. Someone to heal me not give me a pill. I don't trust prescriptions of 'try harder,' 'communicate more,' 'you should _____ more.' Thank you, but I desire a healer that can reach into my chest and remove my death in its fullness and anecdotal reminders of an improved lifestyle will never cut it. My cancer will not vanish under a routine of morality, that treatment will just lull me into the hollow comfort of false remission. Healthy life, the joy of salvation and being owned and redeemed by a God of Grace and Love is the only cure that will survive my relapses of failure. It is in this confusing and delicate miracle that I place the totality of hope for a well-lived life. Keep your morality to yourself please. Your solutions to problems may work for you but they lead me death. I cannot keep myself to my standards and yours are far too heavy to bear.

In Them, this bazaar and beautiful chaos of Love, Forgiveness, and Grace that is called the Trinity, is where I find abundant life. Please take your offering of effort and cyclical moral piety somewhere else because I am crushed and suffocating under their endless weight.

..entrance

One time in 7th grade I had my cd's stolen from the locker room while I was in PE class. I was really mad for a while, for far too long actually, but in the end prayed for the salvation of the thief, since they were all Christian music. Last week I had my bike light stolen outside of my internship. Whatever. I guess not too much has been taken from me in my life and the feeling of violation is not something that I experience a lot.

Transition: I woke up at around 4:39 today to fairly loud voices in the kitchen. One was obviously Cory and another man with a broken African accent talking about Gatorade and omelets. I was rather confused as to what was going on, eventually just concluding that it was a refugee from his internship... over for early morning breakfast... which doesn't make any sense. After about 10 minutes of confused ease-dropping I fell back into sleep only to get woken up a few minutes later but Cory asking to talk.

Apparently I was wrong, the Rastafarian man from the Ivory Coast was not a displaced refugee looking for breakfast but a man looking for musical instruments (it turned out that he was both). Cory woke up when he was exiting our house; banjo, autoharp, and electric guitar in tow. He woke up and invited him in, asking if he was hungry and they made a meal together. They were able to have a good conversation on the porch over breakfast while the loot still waited on the sidewalk, evidence of the infraction. The man left, apologizing about the situation and without the objects.

Interpretation: I am very very proud of Cory. I think that his behavior and response shows the depth of his love and character. I am very happy that a hungry man was fed, even though we didn't have cheese. I am thankful that we had food for him to eat. I am thankful that there was a conversation to be had. I am thankful that even if all of the objects had been taken, it would have still been okay. I am thankful that Cory woke up.

I am also really confused because someone walked into our house this morning and wanted to take things. There is a part of me underneath the happiness of the ending that is angry, violated, and slightly nervous. It is great that Cory is amazing and that Mr. Rastafarian was docile and compliant. Knowing both of those things post factum is great and reassuring. Still a big part of my understanding of the story is confusion: how do we respond as a house filled with valuable people, not just valuable things? is it alright to feel violated when really, at the end of the day, it's only things and they are meaningless? how do we respond in faith as a house, knowing that God is sovereign and in control? is it okay to feel scared?

..humility/information/secrets

1. The more I learn about myself the more I realize that humility is not optional in my life. Humility is not an attitude or a demeanor that I have, it's a state of reality. Over the last week I have been discovering more of who I am, not who I want to be or think I am when I am trying. My propensity to do things that are selfish or wrong or unwise is usually overwhelming, but a state that I often intentionally overlook so I that I can focus on my successes instead of my failures. In the past, my life was metered by morality and performance failure was unacceptable and would push me into a state of flagellation and torment. Over time I have been introduced to grace but it has remained a largely abstract concept in my life. Right now, I feel like I am looking at the pile of shit that is my life, with all of its beauty and decay, and don’t feel paralyzed by my inadequacies. Grace is what allows me to look honestly at what my personhood is composed of in reality and not want to look away with disgust. It just pushes me into forced humility. When I keep on going, making choices and living life, I can do it with hope, knowing that my diseased existence is redeemed through Christ. This all may be fundamental or elementary, but grace is not a place that I go very much and I usually have no fucking idea how I am suppose to receive it from God. The pastor at Grace Church (probably not ironic...) said that if reality were fully understood then happiness would never be achievable. I have to believe that he is wrong. Nothing makes me happier than knowing the reality of my life and knowing that Jesus chooses to love me despite of it.

2. Information is strange. We all want to know information about each other. Gossip is nice because it is an exchange of valued information about others. It can often have terrible effects on relationships, but I think that it is ultimately done in a desire to know other people. I have noticed that people have been talking a lot recently about finding out about engagements over Facebook. They are usually pissed and rightly so. An exchange of information between friends is what intimacy and value is often based upon. I find that I am often evaluating the worth of relationships upon the amount of information know between myself and the other person. I feel honored when people choose to tell me things and feel loved when they ask about me. Today I had an experience where I was offered substantial information about 4 people, two of which I really just met tonight. The information was heavy and overwhelming and I feel like the structure of the relationships are not developed enough to support it. I realized tonight that I am at a loss at how to manage it and properly show support and concern for them.

3. I think that I am moving to a new place in my faith. After a year of communal understanding and emphasis in my relationship with God, I am a little burnt out. I want to want God for myself. I have wanted a secret and very personal relationship with him recently, one that is not accessed by others for a while. This desire has been seeping into my other relationships and has caused me to desire intimacy in friendships that I cannot always navigate very well. It causes me to want people to know me in ways that they can’t and makes me irritated at them when they don’t. I want to be able to appreciate people for who they are and rest in the fact that I am known regardless of their ignorance.

..commute

1. Made eye contact with a  homeless boy. He started swearing profusely at me/the world. It is a very strange feeling to invoke that amount of anger in a stranger.

2. Gave a man a cigarette because he asked  for one. He complimented my toes, hair, smile, and bike. I hate getting compliments when I  give people things. Perhaps its a way to repay  the  favor  but it  makes me really uncomfortable.

3. Almost was hit by a red sports car turning left onto a side street. He complimented my 'rig'. This form of flattery is also not appreciated. Please just apologize if you are going to scare me to death. 

..time/space

Recently time and space have been playing a shifting role in my life.

Ordinarily I never have enough time. Technically I have always had the same amount of time, 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, and 52 of those in a year. I am noticing the difference in time because of the speed of life I am living at. I am no longer weighed with 80 obligations that I will have to strategically balance to keep everyone happy, no longer plagued with to-do lists that never diminish in size. I stay up later, wake up later, go to the office when I want, and often plot very little of my life that actually happens according to plan. In all of the sticky summer looseness, I am finding that I am not becoming more relaxed, but simply more discontent. In reflecting on the year I found that I had little time to reflect. I was thinking a fair amount, but in a very removed and pragmatic way in order to solve problems and not waste any time. With the time allotted me this summer the little pangs of discontent get louder and I have become increasingly restless in my skin and circumstances. I have also been noticing lately that much of my life is ruled by time. I make decisions because they need to be made because there is a deadline. I think about my future because ‘it’s coming’ and I should be prepared before it gets here. With my head so far in the future, fine-tuning the details of my life, I tend to disregard the now, with its simple pleasures and profound foreshadowing of what the future may bring. Living a life with time as a propelling force makes next more important than now and tomorrow more important than yesterday. It seems as though it does a devastating disservice to my being and development.

Space has been different too. I got fairly organized over the school year, out of want and need. I clean my room more, am less of a pig, and see the real value in having an orderly space. Owen is also very tidy and systematic and working with him so closely for a year, I look to that as a standard of composure and effectiveness. All of that being true, my internship is a disaster. There are probably close to a million loose-leaf sheets of paper, layered on top of one another, collecting dust and my anger. It is a disaster and it is stressful. The other difficult part of the situation is that the room reflects its owner, so events like misplacing crucial notes for an executive attorney meeting happen.

This year, my life started out disorderly and chaotic and it has slowly been shifting away from that, in my organization and thinking. At times, I will come home and intentionally clean my room because I want to live into a more organized space in my life. Other times I would intentionally not clean because I needed a break from order and needed my space to reflect the confusion I was experience. I am looking forward to the day when I am no longer tidy but just live into it because the way I interact with the world is different.

Space is also reflective of my perspective on concepts. If when I think of church, I think of a building, it seems as though that community is relegated to a physical place and has little chance of making into any other part of my life. If I think of our community as this house that we live in it is reduced to activities in a common location and striped of the deeper meaning that it has between members. When I think of FareStart and the care that they placed on the material space of their classrooms and offices, it is obvious the care and concern they have for the dignity of the people that they are serving. Space is never more important than people but can almost palatably reflect the perception of them. This makes me really excited to have a house of my own.



Shallow:

I am dehydrated.

I have a very awkward set of tan lines on my back and I honestly don’t know how they took that shape. There are two horizontal lines, but I was only wearing one swimming suit. I don’t understand.

My sense of smell was very keen today.