More church musings -- this time with puppets!

I went back to the little Episcopal church today. Again, no anonymity (by now, I was not looking for it)... midway through the service - after the singing of happy birthday to a 91-year-old woman in the back and before communion - the priest (same one from last wednesday) said, "No pressure, but if anyone here is new, and wants to say a few words about themselves, ahem, JULIE, they would be more than welcome." Then, jokingly, he offered a door prize to anyone who brings a man to church at the 10:15 service, because it is made up of mostly middle-aged and elderly women. Afterwards, we adjourned to coffee and birthday cake in the parish hall, which apparently has been rented out to an organization called COPA - the Conservatory of Puppetry Arts... so the place is filled with marionettes and strange monster-type puppets. The funny thing is that I didn't really even notice that it seemed odd decoration for a parish hall until I saw the movie posters for Team America.

I have this strange thing going on... in some ways it's a love/hate relationship with church, but even in the ways I feel alienated from it now, I still crave it, it still calms me down. Even when I sit in church and recite liturgies that I question, and wonder how much of my faith is cultural and how much is "real," for lack of a better word (though it begs the question, can any faith, even "real" faith, be extracted from its culture?), I would rather go than stay home. Maybe it's because even though I'm realizing that on some level, we all ultimately worship God "as we understand him," church, for me, is still the place where I know how to do that. And so I go, almost as an offering -- an admission that I want to know God, and even though I'm confused about it all right now I'm going to trust that it's not my job to figure it out so in the meantime I'll keep showing up.

Vacation, part III

OK, really, I'm home for good. Now I'm back in Pasadena again, where it's so hot in my apartment that my computer keeps shutting down because the fan can't keep up. Here's a little visual update for the far-flung Berkeley folk out there.


Is that he-man (with the sword... although Andrew could pass for he-man too, of course)? The shirt was a gift from a friend who picked it up in Iraq, I think.










Hannah the rock star.








Emily, Andrew, and the always-smiley Mr. Bill.







Only on the UC Berkeley campus do people graffiti in latin (Nietzsche, no less).

Addiction

I'm posting not so much because I have something to say, but because my Addiction and Family Treatment class just ended and it was really powerful and a bit gut-wrenching and frustrating and scary and hopeful and sweet and sad and way too close to home sometimes and I want to write something down before I move on and lose the feelings associated with having been there.

This was definitely not a book-learning class. We took field trips to residential treatment centers, and had guest speakers, and went to 12-step meetings, and heard so many personal stories over the course of the week, as well as just getting a totally different perspective on the physical (disease-model) roots of addiction... people in the class shared insanely personal stories and the professor cried at least three times. For the first few days I was a bit at arm's length from it, even though it was really fascinating, but by the end of today it felt intensely personal to think about the power of secrets, and the lack of education and support for healthy coping behaviors.

Anyhow, having walked out of the class into the light of day, and traffic, and dealing with the housing office, and my empty apartment, and people heading off to the beach, and thinking about Ultimate, and packing for vacation... I keep wondering if it ever gets any easier to go from a place of emotional intensity, straight out into a world where absolutely everything seems trivial and I want to snap at people who make jokes or don't take something seriously enough because don't they know what just happened in that room? Don't they know what people are going through? How do you process that stuff in a way that lets you return to the world outside and actually engage with life again when you leave the office? How do you learn to make the transition? I suppose everybody goes through this to some degree when they navigate between worlds, so advice is welcome.

Backwash and chuck taylors

I went to a mid-week Eucharist service tonight at a small Episcopal church up the street. I was late, of course, but I was just looking to slip into the back and have a bit of anonymous peace and quiet and liturgy to get my mind off the little hamster wheel of overwhelmedness that it jumped onto the moment I returned from vacation.

Instead, I found myself in a teeny, tiny church with a large, bald, black priest wearing a white robe over shorts and white Converse All-Stars, and four black women interspersing comments about the NBA finals game into their discussion of the reading (Matthew 4-5, two passages coincidentally about being in the midst of chaos). It was wonderful. They stopped in the middle of the chapter and introduced themselves to me, asking all sorts of questions about my program before jumping back into reading. After a bit of discussion and prayer and a time for silence and contemplation, we came to communion. I love the liturgy and tradition surrounding communion, especially in high church. I love that in the Episcopal church they consider it an opportunity to contemplate the mystery of God, because really, some days I just don't get the whole wafer-and-wine thing as a reminder that I believe there is a God and I believe he loves me ('cause some days lately even that sounds crazy).

But, lest I get too wrapped up in the seriousness of the moment, one of the ladies calls out to the rector as he up-ends the cup of wine into his mouth, "Did we leave you any? 'Cause sometimes I really want a lot of that blessing and I take a big swig," and we all disintegrate into titters and giggles and jokes about backwash in the blood of christ... and even though I'm a pasty white girl who wandered in off the street 10 minutes late with no idea who just won the NBA championship, I felt warmly welcomed.

Now that's communion.

Vacation, part II

OK, back from the rest of the week off, which included lots of laying around on the beach drinking free margaritas with Tiffany in Cabo San Lucas, and a fun, quick daytrip to Santa Barbara with Goat, which included biking and banana splits. I'm still working on being in the mood to write, but in the meantime a picture's worth something, right?

Anyhow, now I am back in class, and really enjoying the class (Addiction and Family Treatment) because it feels a lot more practical than the theory stuff we've been stuck learning so far the first year. We've been taking field trips for this class and meeting real people instead of just sitting around reading case studies and writing up treatment plans for imaginary families. But a friend of mine had a good take on that whole process in a recent email: "Glad that you are getting into the actual doing of what you have been looking to do. Doing is usually much more interesting than learning, but i guess if we just did, we would never learn of all the posible ways to do."

So I'll hang onto that for the next few weeks of sitting around feeling useless before I start practicum.

Vacation, part I

Two quick pics from the weekend in Boulder with Becky D... it was a lot of biking around, hiking (or, sloshing through snow for 5 miles to get to a frozen lake), grilling, eating waffles, and hanging out with her friends, all made possible by the generosity of Southwest Airlines who bumped me off a flight last July!
As for that bottle of wine... well... we weren't about to let it go to waste. That's what those bottle cages are for, right??

Nothing to report here other than that it is hot (was in the upper 90s over the weekend) and I am taking finals and very much looking forward to a trip to Boulder starting Thursday to visit the fabulous Becky D, and then a trip to Cabo with the fabulous Tiffany (she won a free trip for two to Mexico and is taking me as her guest... how lucky am I??), where I plan on exploring and relishing old friends and reading the paper and eating slurpees and listening to the podcast of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, and maybe Car Talk if I can find it.

Finals aren't too overwhelming in and of themselves (just two take-home exams) but I think I'm just exhausted from the constant presence of having something to read or write hanging over my head since the beginning of January with only a week's respite in March. I love my program and I'm extremely grateful to be able to pursue a totally new field, and I know that I had a killer schedule this quarter with tons of free time, but I'm counting the days until graduation (369, to be exact). If I ever decide to get a PhD, will you please ask me if I know what I'm doing?? In the meantime, I'm actually psyched to start practicum on July 10, at Glen Roberts Child Study Center, a county-funded community mental health clinic in Glendale. I'll be working there about 20-25 hours a week for a year.

I'll try to come up with something more interesting to say one of these days soon....

quote board

The latest entry in my random quote list, from my friend/coworker Kim while we were skipping out of one of the main sessions at an Urban Youth Workers conference last week:

"Find someone who wants to pay me $5000 to look at porn and then we'll talk."

OK, so the context was a discussion about situational ethics and the greater good of being merciful above all else, but even in context she had us going for a while.

Synchronize me

So, I bought an iPod.

What finally pushed me to do it was that I'm taking a distance learning class this summer, and when I went to pick up the course materials I had the choice of getting a 5-inch thick, 30-lb binder full of course materials and 20 CDs, or I could get the entire course in PDF and MP3 format on two CDs that fit into my purse. So, to save a few trees, I opted for the mp3 option, which conveniently also gave me an excuse to finally buy an iPod so that I could listen to the lectures on the beach instead of sitting in front of my computer. I ended up going home and finding a great deal on one on Craigslist and drove straightaway to West Hollywood to pick it up, so within two hours of stopping by the Distance Learning office I was busy trying to figure out how to work this thing.

And then I discovered podcasts.

I can get news. Music. Spanish lessons. NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. I could even download sermons via podcast, except that I still think that church is supposed to be a community-affirming experience and I refuse to partake alone in my bedroom.

So if you need me these days, you can probably find me in the kitchen, doing dishes, mumbling Spanish vocabulary under my breath.

did I say that?

So, a while back in the blog I made some naive and idealistic comment about being grateful for people who irritate me because they give me practice being kind. Well, that is all fine and good until my neighbor moved in.

I've chatted with him a few times, because I like knowing my neighbors and all. Anyhow, he's one of those.... umm.... chatty types, where you can't just talk to him for a minute, 'cause even when you're running away late for class he's still talking at you as you go, and if you don't go, he'll talk for 20 minutes nonstop, and you have to point out that you're holding 50 pounds of groceries and carrying your mail in your mouth and this isn't the greatest time to get into a long conversation about the cable service in the area.

Anyhow, even this wouldn't be so much of a big deal, 'cause it's not hard for me to point out the part about the groceries and the mail etc... and whenever I'm not in a hurry I try to stay and chat a bit... but I have this balcony, my haven, the place I go when I leave my phone and computer in the back room and want to just sit and ignore technology and listen to buses go by for a half-hour, or read, or just generally be away from people for a little while. And it overlooks his yard. So now when he comes out (which is most of the time, because the weather's nice and he doesn't have a job), he just starts talking to me on the balcony, even though I have pointed out that I can't hear him (because of the aforementioned buses) and have mentioned that I'm in the middle of reading. And it's one thing to walk away when I have the grocery excuse but it's hard to sit on the balcony and politely inform him I'll be ignoring him 20 feet away.

biking

A big THANKS to everyone who biked/walked to work/school during bike-to-work week! Every mile counted, from Jenn's 2-mile walk, to Martin's toodling around Leipzig in Germany, to Becky D's 32-mile round-trip commute in Boulder. Cumulatively, we biked 115 miles, including 28 miles biked by three folks at Goat's office, which is getting double-matched. So altogether we're sending $175 to Wild Hope.

For the cycling geeks among you, the LA times also happened to print a huge feature today about bike commuting, in their Health section.

Ride on!

heaven on two-wheels

Hey everybody... next week (May 15-19) is National Bike-to-Work week, culminating in Bike-to-Work day on Friday, May 19!!

Why should I bike, you ask? Well, OK, so all of you know the reasons. You're commuter- and enviro-savvy. It's good for the earth, it's good for your body, it makes a political statement, you arrive at work more alert and in a better mood, it reduces our national dependencies on oil and caffeine. It's a tangible way of being the change you want to see in the world. If you're not already a fan, give yourself a chance to let biking rock your world.

So, I'm going to donate $1 for every mile that you guys bike on Friday, either commuting, or running an errand, or some other activity that you would have done in a car. It's this easy:

1. Bike to work (don't forget to wear a helmet)
   
2. Take a picture of your bad self on your studly two-wheeled wonder
   
3. Send me the picture, tell me how it went, and send me your mileage.
   

I'll send a check to Dave Willis at Wild Hope, a non-profit faith-based organization that I've guided for, which is heavily involved in advocating for the protection and expansion of wilderness, and getting people (from college students to journalists to politicians) out into wild places to, among other things, experience it in a way that helps them understand why it's worth preserving.

If you absolutely can't ride, I'll still make a donation for anyone who replaces a car trip with public transportation (ask a stranger to take a picture of you on the bus... it's a great way to make friends) or carpooling. But if you can ride, do! Check out informational resources here, or ask me, or go down to your local bike shop - they're always friendly. Feel free to include your friends/SOs/coworkers... I'll make a donation for anyone you guys recruit to bike to work if you send me a picture in all your spandex glory*.

* spandex not required

scheduled maintenance

I had my "week seven breakdown" this week, right on schedule. This one was a little bigger than previous week seven fireworks*, as it included irrational thoughts about dropping out of grad school and wondering which I need more - a therapist or a babysitter. My current "to do" list contains items such as: 1. Brush teeth. 2. Dress self - matching optional. 3. Stop losing things.

Anyhow, this one was pretty cathartic, as my despondency over feeling out of control seems, so far, to have snapped me back to a place where I'm ready to start figuring out what I do have control over. But Goat had the pleasure of walking me through it... and as I was sitting in class the next day, I had to grudgingly admit that I'm high maintenance (thanks to all of you who have known that for years and humored me). Scott Peck writes that mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs. Does kicking and screaming count?

*"week seven" is grad-school speak for the point in the quarter where you're exhausted from the work and adjusting to a totally new schedule, but you're not yet close enough to finals week to taste the end.

Joshua Tree

Grover went to Joshua Tree this weekend... did some camping, did some hiking, did some climbing. As usual, he brought me back a picture.

hippity hop

Remember the giant blue rubber bouncy balls you hopped around your yard on when you were five? I think mine was a Daffy Duck one. They're still out there... I shot an Urban Assault bike race in San Diego this weekend and the Hippity Hop was one of the challenges... they are actually much tougher than they look, as a grownup. Good leg and ab workout.

Idealism

I have a love-hate relationship with idealism. I get all these big ideas in my head about saving the world and then when I realize I can't make much of a large-scale (or sometimes even small-scale) difference I get bitter and cynical. And hanging onto the hope of large-scale systemic change usually prevents me from being part of the small-scale change I can be part of, and, sadly, from really just relishing the moment I’m in now.

Anyhow, I told my boss the other day that next year for lent I thought I should give up idealism. "Hmm...," he said, "that sounds pretty idealistic to me." Drat.

And on a totally unrelated note (or maybe not)... this was a quote from my OT Writings professor, in the course syllabus, which I wanted to share (even though I had no illusions about seminary answering any questions...):

People sometimes comment ruefully that they thought seminary was going to answer their questions but in fact it leaves them with more questions than they had before. One presupposition of this comment is that the key or a key thing about the Christian life is that it means having the answers to questions; and I think that implies that Christian faith is a set of beliefs and answers. I think the Writings can help us see why this is not so.

• They set our lives not in the context of a set of beliefs but in the context of a story, and of some smaller stories, too.
• They set us in a relationship with God - a relationship of praise, lament, trust, repentance, and testimony.
• Thus, they rescue us from the limitations of what we believed already.

Fairy Godmother

I'm a Godmother! Now all I need is the sparkly wand. Meet Sydney (doing her best Rosie the Riveter impression)...


Also, if you like Sudoku, try Kakuro. It's insane. But don't try it unless you have an hour or so to to kill the first time.

Di'anu

I will probably butcher something about the meaning of Dayeinu in this, but here goes.

The word means "enough," in the sense of, "it would have been enough" or "it would suffice." There's a little song that goes with it, in the passover haggadah, in which each successive step of God's provision for the Israelites is recounted -- and punctuated with the claim that each of these steps, though not the whole shebang, per se, would have been sufficient:

Had God fed us with manna and not given us the Sabbath, Dayeinu!
Had God given us the Sabbath and not brought us to Mount Sinai, Dayeinu!
Had God brought us to Mount Sinai and not given us the Torah, Dayeinu!
Had God given us the Torah and not led us into the land of Israel, Dayeinu!

Dayeinu. It would have been enough. I love this concept because contentedness is usually something I have to remind myself about. Dayeinu. What I have, even if it is all I ever have, even if it all goes away tomorrow, is already so much that it would suffice. Even if I never get an iPod.

The second part of dayeinu I really liked was the explanation in the haggadah, which likened the whole process to acceptance of necessary baby steps, in the long process of getting to where we want to be. It's a very therapy (and AA)-oriented concept, which might be why I liked it so much. Each of the steps, alone, really weren't enough, at least in terms of getting the Israelites into, well, Israel, and completing what was begun. But they could never have gotten there, eventually, if they hadn't gone through each step along the way. So, the concept that even if what you have isn't enough, it's something, and being grateful for what it is will do a heck of a lot more to move you along there than sitting down on your butt and whining that you didn't get the whole thing handed to you on a silver platter. As my OT prof said, "it's not enough, but it's not nothing. And it is a gift from God."

I was talking about this with a classmate the other day, about the way that Christians often sit around and pray for something - something holy-sounding, of course; say, that God would change us, and make us more patient or kind or generous - and then protest when we're given an opportunity to take part in getting what we asked for, to do the work of changing, rather than waking up one day changed, which is what we thought we asked for. Or in her case, she was frustrated because she wants to be in a relationship but is afraid to practice dating, because it's scary and you have to be vulnerable and risk getting rejected a few times along the way and things like that.

So dayeinu: for the $&*$!# LA traffic because it gives me a chance to practice being patient; for people who irritate the snot out of me because it is a chance to practice being kind; for people who ask for my time, attention, and money because I have a chance to practice being generous with what I have been given; for G who makes me practice saying what is on my mind and not running away. Baby steps, being OK with where you're at in the process of getting to where you want to be, not knowing if you'll ever get there. Dayeinu. It is enough.

sailing

OK, so I have enough emotional distance on my Old Testament project now that I'm OK putting it up. But I took down the painting, in which I ended up printing a heart off the internet and pasting it in, because everything I drew looked like a headless pink turkey.

*****
“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.”

I happened upon that Louisa May Alcott quote a few years ago, and tucked it away. It captivated me, but I can’t say that I knew why at the time. I think I liked the idea that knowing that I was still a beginner – at so many things – made it OK to sail into a storm rather than stay in port, safe from wind and waves. And I liked the part about not being afraid.

I have never really thought of myself as a person who is afraid. I’ve traveled the world, tried new jobs, taken up sports and hobbies, returned to grad school at nearly 30. I project so much confidence that a roommate in college once admitted that I made her nervous, because I seemed to have it all together. You see, I have this thing about competence – I try new things, but only things that I know I can master. I don’t have to be put together, but I have to be in control of the things that aren’t put together, I have to have them in a big purse over my shoulder, to tuck them back into if they start to spill out. And if I can’t keep them tucked in, then I’d rather not show up, because I don’t want to be that vulnerable, and I wish I didn’t have to work out my issues on other people’s time. But I can’t keep it together, at least not for long stretches of time. I've always known this somewhere in my head, but these days life is reminding me of it a little much, in ways that are a little too personal. And it's scary. So most of the time, part of me wants to turn around and sail for safe harbor, so I can sit inside where it’s warm, maybe with a martini.

The Old Testament Writings live in the place where the reality of God meets the reality of life. They are not pretty, or neat, nor do they keep all of their issues tucked into a big purse out of sight. God is not a cosmic vending machine, where you put in your prayer, pull the lever, and out pops your little trinket or bag of Chee-tos. There is weeping and wailing, and hope and loss of hope, and cries that are met with “because I’m God and I said so, that’s why,” and cries that are met with silence. Nobody shows up all prettied up. All that the authors and characters can do is show up, and describe the world as they know it, and say that Yahweh is the Lord God, and that this broken, bleeding heart is all they have to give.

So I am doing bad art for my final project in this class. I could have written a paper. It would have engaged my head on the topic of showing up before God with a messy heart on a cracked plate, and it would have been succinct, and eloquent, and have tied together some points well and straightened out a few things knocking around in my brain from the quarter. But instead, I’m going to deliver my broken heart. I am not an artist, and it will frustrate me to try to translate my ideas onto a page in reds and blacks. It will not look like I want it to look. It will not speak to anyone the way I want it to speak. It will betray my incompetence. In that way, it will be my broken, bleeding heart. I am not afraid of storms. This is the world as I know it, Yahweh is the Lord God, and this is all I have to give.

Matzo Ball Soup

I went to a Passover seder tonight. I really enjoyed it - it was nice to get a deeper understanding of stories I saw acted out on felt boards in Sunday school (although the felt board stories usually focused more on Jesus than on the 10 plagues of Pharoah). I also really enjoyed the matzo ball soup. And, apparently, many other things, since I am so full right now I'm going to have to waddle to bed.

Anyhow, there was a liturgy in the middle of the Haggadah (I'm not actually sure if you call something a liturgy, if it's not in church, but that's how I'm choosing to explain it) where I learned the Hebrew word Di'anu, meaning "it would suffice." And that is your little teaser, which I will expand on tomorrow -- both the liturgy itself and why it was so compelling.

the green monster

So last week I had blog envy... and now I have iPod envy.

I had never used one until I borrowed G's to go running on the beach on a balmy Saturday afternoon (OK, so this LA place is growing on me little), and there was SO MUCH GOOD MUSIC ALL IN ONE PLACE! And no ads. 'Cause when you're running, ads really kill your motivation. And then my neighbor was going off about how her mini 'pod had revolutionized her life and all, as if it cooks for her and writes her papers and made her lose 20 pounds while eating only ice cream. OK, maybe it's not that amazing, but it was shiny, and full of good music, and I want one of these shiny musical things, even if it never does my laundry.

toot toot

Since I know Hannah will not toot her own horn about this... let me toot it a little for her. Her band, the Bittersweets, just got an email from a fairly prominent radio show host in Alabama, in which he heard a bit of their new album coming out in June and said that she sounded so good that she sounded just like Shawn Colvin in 1988. Actually, he said she "sounded more like Shawn than Shawn does," and said he was going to start playing the album as soon as they'd let him (it comes out in June).

In other tooting news, my friend Jessica, who I have known for 20 years, just produced another human being. I have other friends who have had babies, but this time feels different, somehow. It's ridiculous, I feel proud as if I had something to do with it or something, because I have known her since we were 10 and both new kids in the 5th grade with huge bangs and huge glasses, and the fact that we survived to be grownups together and have done much reflecting on the process along the way makes this a salient moment for me too.

Woo hoo! Consider yourselves tooted.

Anybody know a good joke?

OK, so I am really tired of being overly serious these days. Last quarter was too intense. Where has my stupid side gone off to? It's time for a trip up to Berkeley, maybe another Ugly Night Out. Maybe I should just wear those plaid pants to class Thursday? Hanging out with a bunch of therapists-in-training isn't helping. Nor is having too much free time to become inert this quarter. So I am soliciting jokes, pictures, memories, inside humor, taped recordings of Natalie's laugh, sock-puppet home videos, stories of public humiliation (mine or yours), basically anything good for a belly-laugh....

verbatim

If there's one thing our professors do not do, it's beat around the bush, and if there's one thing they do do, it's tie everything back into personal development. Compliments of my very grandfatherly integration prof:

"You don't know why some clients make you angry and some make you horny. But you've got to let it help you grow as therapists."

Lenten Feast Days: ashes and dust, part II

It's funny how attempting to explain to someone why you do something makes you think about it in totally different ways. So thinking about lent this year, I've started to realize how easy it is in American Protestant culture to completely reverse the purpose and meaning of this season leading up to Easter. We often make sacrifices in an attempt to master ourselves (or, of course, we give up ice cream because swimsuit season is around the corner), when the real purpose is to do the exact opposite -- to remind us that because we come from ashes and dust we cannot, ultimately, master ourselves, but will always be dependent on God. And I don't think that means God is orchestrating every moment of the future and we're just supposed to sit around and wait for it to arrive, like room service on a silver platter. But ultimately, I think it means that God is a lot bigger and more mysterious than we give him credit for, and recognizing our dependence is somehow acknowledging that. In the Hebrew lesson for the day (compliments of my OT class.... since my Hebrew is nonexistent), the word yada, "to know," also means "to acknowledge." So maybe I don't have to know, or understand, God very well in order to acknowledge him and be grateful.

Lent has never been part of G's world, but he gave up chocolate this year. When I was explaining feast days to him (on Sundays, you don't have to fast from the thing you gave up for lent), I was really thinking that I could tough out a lenten discipline for the whole seven and a half weeks. I can handle it, I thought, I don't need no stinkin' feast days. But then, a few days after Ash Wednesday, G asked if it ever got easier, to resist the thing you sacrificed. I said I thought that, in some ways, it gets easier because you adapt to life without it. I was looking forward to the day when I adapted, when I didn't get in my car and absentmindedly reach to turn the stereo on every time before I panicked and realized I didn't have that option. "Maybe that's why you're supposed to have feast days," he said, "so you don't adapt so much and you remember how important that thing is to you, so it still means as much that you gave it up." There I go, learning about lent from a Jewish boy.

Woo Hoo

OK, don't want to get ahead of myself here, but I think I may have found a church in LA that I would actually relish going back to a second time. I was having lunch with friends from Berkeley yesterday, lamenting that I seemed to be nearing the end of my church search prospects, and mentioning that I wouldn't mind finding a church where a few cynical people hung out (remember, I like to call them 'hopeful realists'). My friend mentioned that her cousin had been going to Pasadena Mennonite Church. I think the Mennonites have ties to the Amish, but there was nary a buggy in sight. And here are five reasons why I'll be going back:

1. It was small (maybe 50 people?), and the woman in front of me turned around after the service and said, "I've never seen you before, have I?" and then proceeded to talk to me for 5 minutes and remember my name later.
2. She turned out to be an ethics professor.
3. They're big on social justice, and they're not theologically wishy-washy (because I've become theologically wishy-washy of late and while I'm sorting through all that I need to remember there might be something more constant than my personal opinion out there).
   
4. There were nerds, hippies, and punks present -- and not a small amount of polar fleece.
5. Someone invited me out to lunch afterwards.
6. They sang off-key.

WhySpace

OK, can anybody give me a compelling reason to be on MySpace? I mean, once upon a time everybody told me I had to get on Friendster, so I did, and really the only thing that happens is that I get an email every six months from someone from my past who found me, and wants me to be their "friend," and I say yes, and then I never hear from them again. Maybe that's because they all left for MySpace.

Anyhow, I'm thinking about this today because I just wandered upon a website where people with camera phones can post their pictures... and some guy posted, like, 25 pictures of people writing on a white board at a business meeting. I don't really get it. Maybe it's art. I think I missed the Net Generation revolution by just a few years, where all the random stuff that you say and think in passing gets immortalized with emoticons. I blog and I email, but that's where I draw the line. I can't IM either... it makes me anxious to have to write in such short snippets, and then while you're writing your reply, the other person changes the subject, and you hit "enter" anyway to respond to the question they asked before, and then they can't figure out what question you're answering, and you spend five minutes trying to unravel why, when they asked what they should do about their boss's habit of putting them down at staff meetings, you answered "because I was out of cheese."

Think Thank Thunk

I've got a bunch of incomplete blog entries piling up, but never fear, that doesn't mean I've stopped thinking... all the time... about everything. Just ask the boy who popped into my life when I wasn't looking (we'll call him G... and I bet he was wondering when he'd show up here), who gets quite a chunk of it these days. It's just all been sort of big things I've been thinking about that are impossible to contain in a post. I need to get over it and just be OK starting threads that I never tie up... maybe over spring break I'll try that out. For now it's finals week and, despite being not exceptionally stressed or taxed this time around, it's hard to muster up the energy to do anything other than compulsively check my email and move the piles of clothes in my room (clean but too lazy to fold, not clean but might still wear again tomorrow, skanky from Ultimate) around in little circles, from the chair to the bed to the floor and back again.

I like thinking. But every once in a while I go through a phase where I get frustrated about being a thinker, and wish I could chill out a little. I was home for my brother's birthday last year, sitting around in the garage he built, listening to him talk with his friends about building things, and towing things, and fixing cars, and it felt so.... tangible. They make stuff, and break stuff, and fix stuff, and it made me really jealous. I sit around with my friends talking about esoteric things that don't even exist. Or, they exist, but you can't see them or touch them or measure them. I know I am who I am, and I've learned to work with it, and I suppose my chosen profession is my way of putting my proclivity for relentless thinking to good use. But my brother is building a house now, and sometimes I just want to fly there and pound some nails, and learn about drywall and how to drive his excavator. That just sounds really cool. In the absence of being able to do that right now, maybe that is what Ultimate does for me... running around after a piece of plastic for two hours shuts down my head and roots it back in my body.

And since if I go any further with this, I'll just be thinking more... I'll just stop there.

Milestones: happy no more tuesdays

That's Happy No-More-Tuesdays, not Happy-No-More Tuesdays... in four and a half hours I'll be done with 11-hour days of class. Spent the last day of clinical lab role-playing a suicidal adolescent girl. The cool thing about today was the sense of balance that is creeping in for the first time... between talking about elder abuse and postpartum depression, we had a potluck marking the end of clinical foundations class, where we reminisced over two quarters of in-jokes and drama, and talked about transitioning into practicum. Somewhere along the way we've gone from people who know nothing and are stressed out about it, to people who know only infinitesimal amounts more but who can laugh about it now. I was having trouble seeing it before today, but it finally helps me realize how far we've come since orientation week.

I kept a list of professorial quotes this quarter, here are a few of the more entertaining ones (not sure if they're funny... maybe it's just therapist humor?):

"So what would that mean to you if....?" (regarding anything - i.e. if I hugged you, if I were your mother, if you wore red shoes today)

"who's that idiot who wrote the book about men having caves? how come women don't get to go into caves? he doesn't need a cave, no, he's depressed, you idiot!"

"I used to hate depressed clients"

"Why won't you take your Prozac!? Just put it on the pile. Treat it like a vitamin deficiency."

"Psychotic persons should not be traveling the world. that's just a bad thing."

Mortality Therapy: Ashes and Dust

"Remember that thou art dust and to dust thou will return."

OK, so most people wouldn't find that a particularly cheery thought for a Wednesday evening. But last week was Ash Wednesday. And yeah, if I were thinking about death all the time, that might be a problem. But on a random Wednesday, in the middle of a long week of studying, and interviewing for practicum, and trying to remember to keep my fridge full, and 72 other things that feel really urgent if you let them, a little dose of my own mortality in the form of a charcoal cross across my forehead was a good thing, to begin 40 days in which, somehow, I am meant to remember that God is God and I am not. (OK, so I'm supposed to remember that one the other 325 days too, but the intentional discipline of lent helps bring it home).

I gave up the stereo in my car for lent this year. The faceplate is now living in my sock drawer. So let's just say that it was a looooong drive to Palm Springs in Friday afternoon traffic at the end of last week. I figured it would be a good chance to be more present, to God and to my own self, since I'm usually pretty good at distracting myself with email, music, people, bellybutton lint... you name it, I'll get sidetracked by it. In the car, I'm trapped. Hopefully in a good way. But after an hour and a half of being alone with the little spinning hamster wheel of my own thoughts, it was not a good feeling. Praying wasn't getting me very far, and besides, I was managing to distract myself from that too. I needed something short and sweet. So I repeated the "dust" line 20 or so times. Really. There is something about remembering, as Ecclesiastes points out, that the sun comes up and the sun goes down, and the rivers flow and are never full, and that all of this stuff runs whether or not I get out of bed on any given day. Yeah, the stuff I was thinking about is important, and somewhere within my theology I assent to the idea that God cares about things that are important to me, because I am important to God. But pondering my eventual demise takes a lot of the pressure off and definitely puts a few things in perspective.

Anne Lamott has a great passage in Operating Instructions about how revolutionary it is to show up for your life and not be ashamed that you don't really have your shit together. So this week, I'll drink to "dust," because mortality therapy helps me keep showing up.