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.

Brushfire Fairytales

I came out of my apartment tonight, late to meet a friend, and saw that there was a crowd of people huddled around a firetruck, and cops everywhere. Someone had lit a palm tree on fire. Y'know, because there's nothing else to do on a Friday night in LA. The firemen were out with hoses and flashing lights, it was bringing the neighbors together. This was all an entertaining scene for a minute or so, until I looked down and noticed that my car was parked three feet away from the burning tree. My first thought was something along the lines of being frustrated that they probably wouldn't move the firetruck for me to get my car out, and then somewhere along the way I realized there was a flaming tree three feet away from my car and I did become briefly curious as to what effect that would have on it.

In the end, there was no damage, at least none that I could see at night, but I had to wait for the firemen to put the tree out and for a bunch of cops to come check out my car and take a statement. At least they let me move it before they started spraying this foam stuff into the tree that they said tended to be "kinda not good on paint" (I can only imagine how good it is for the tree, but I suppose it's not good for the tree to reignite either). Never a dull moment.

Hope, part III

It's been years since the days when Andrew and I would toss this one around until 2am, but our long-running conversation on the difference between hope and optimism always comes up for me. Somewhere in the midst of our long nights of philosophical rambling, I came to the conclusion that optimism, while a very good thing, is ultimately self-generated, and therefore at the whim of my capacity to generate it on any given day under given circumstances. Hope, on the other hand, has to be rooted to something outside of me - something that exists and persists outside the bubble of circumstances that undercut my ability to be optimistic.

If optimism is simply choosing not to see the glass as half empty, what happens when there's just a drop or two clinging to the bottom? Is it just naivete, or even stupidity, to see that glass as half-full?

School is kicking my butt right now. Classes are a barrage of laws and ethics regarding sexual abuse, perpetrators, mandatory reporting of child abuse. Professors with years of experience treating clients share stories about how they have never seen a pedophile be "cured;" the best case scenario is that they stave off perpetrating for longer and longer. Schizophrenia is incurable. And even when you gain the trust of your clients to the point where they share something with you even though they know you are mandated to report it, once you make that call you have no control over whether the investigators treat your clients with any sort of dignity or respect, or whether the kids actually wind up in a situation that is any better than the one they left.

There are facts that stare us in the face that prevent naive optimism, that make seeing a glass half full as absurd as flattering the Emperor for his new clothes. So I suppose I am asking more questions about hope right now. Does it exist? If so, and it is rooted in something (or someone) beyond us, then it has to exist regardless of circumstance. How do you hang onto it? And can you hang onto it for someone else, who has run out?

Most days, I don't find it so much a depressing topic as just a constant one. I don't have answers for too much of it. When I read the first few verses of Isaiah 61, I can't help but wonder what it means to be part of bringing good news and binding up the brokenhearted, in the midst of all this. I hold onto those verses in faith that what I hope for and the God I hope in exist, and are very, very good things, but I think I have to leave room for what I'm hoping for to look really different than I think it will look. That's generally the hard part, when we cease to be able to see the bright side because we can't see how the outcome that we would vote for is possible, like a cure for cancer or a magic pill that makes paranoid delusions go away for good and makes pedophiles stop fantasizing about little kids and stops parents from doing or saying anything that won't help their children grow up to be strong and healthy and know they are loved. Maybe hope only really kicks in when our idea of a 'bright side' is revealed to be insufficient, at best, or even impossible.

But another way I've been thinking about hope lately is in Spanish. Not "thinking in Spanish," per se, because that would not help un-muddle my thoughts on the subject, but in remembering a word: esperar. It means to hope in Spanish, but it also means to wait. They do not have a separate word for the two concepts. To hope is to wait. Wait for what? I don't know. That is part of waiting. Waiting for something to be completed. Waiting until it is completed to know what it will look like. Waiting to know what 'the year of the Lord's favor' really means. Maybe tearing some hair out and chewing down your fingernails in the meantime, but knowing that nothing you do can bring it any clearer any faster. Sitting in that, and being OK with it, because it is bigger than you are and you don't have a choice and you are not in control, and maybe your job in the middle of all that is just to sit with people who have lost their hope and letting people sit with you when you've run out.

OK, so I suppose this comes across as down with optimism. That's not really my intention. I just think it's not enough, and that I'd take hopeful realism any day.

Do. Or Do Not. There is no TRY.

One of the nicest things a boss ever said to me was, "So you failed. So what. If you don't fail at something else by Thanksgiving, you're not trying hard enough." It was a petty event, that roller-skating night that no one showed up to six years ago. But Joe giving me free reign to fall flat on my face definitely opened the door to some creative thinking for the next few years.

I've been wondering lately where that freedom has disappeared to. It didn't exist working as Pete's assistant, where he used to email me from the plane to tell me he didn't like the seat he got stuck in (I kept telling him when you book a nonstop to JFK two hours before the flight, you don't get an aisle seat). I don't know whether it exists in therapy, where you're stepping into someone's life. Somewhere along the way the "safe zones," the places to mess up royally and gleefully in the name of experiential education, disappear.

So I've been making myself play intramural volleyball. "Volleyball," you ask, "what does that have to do with failing?" Well, you see, I suck royally at volleyball, and the compulsion to just go play more ultimate instead is pretty tempting, especially because everyone else on my team is really good, and I'm usually off in the corner trying to get out of the way or hitting myself in the face. But in a recent conversation with a friend, the question was raised, "would you still do something you weren't good at, just for fun?" I do it all day long professionally, but could I do it, on purpose, as a hobby, and find it fun? The truth is, I seethe for the whole first game of volleyball. I do not like to be incompetent. But my team is very welcoming, and they insist on continuing to set the ball to me despite the fact that I rarely hit it over the net. So I keep hitting, and every time it goes flying across the gym I tell myself that I am not defined by whether or not I do something dumb, and by the end of the second game I almost believe it, because the people around me believe it, and by the end of the third game I'm actually having a good time. And thus, being really bad at something is proving to be very good for me.

So maybe Yoda was wrong, maybe there is still a "try" and not just a "do," even a few years into grownupdom.

Planet of the Grovers

I ventured out the furthest I had been so far this weekend... about 50 miles west to Malibu, to go climbing at Pt. Dume, which happens to be where they filmed the original Planet of the Apes, I believe. Grover came with, of course. We didn't see any apes. Or Charlton Heston.

Stuart Smalley to the rescue

So, just when I go and post about how well I'm doing, I wake up and have a day where I wonder what the hell I'm doing with my life. Oh well, I knew it would happen... Actually I am still able to realize that I'm where I want to be, doing what I want to do, but that the process is just messy right now.

I had an interview today for a practicum site, and it was a group interview with two other women from my class - and the interviewer didn't ask us one single question. I asked a couple of questions of him, but other than that there was really nothing I could interject that would tell him anything about me that wouldn't have looked like I was being a giant butt-kisser. I just don't schmooze well. Take me out to coffee, cut the crap, we'll have a good conversation and you'll get to know me. Put me in sensible shoes and stick me in a room where I feel like I'm competing with my classmates for a job, and you are not likely to see me shine. I just don't have that competetive gene -- if you put me on The Bachelor, I wouldn't make it past the first commercial break. Just can't do it, for a job or a guy or even a parking space. But it's easy to get swept up in, and some days I feel like I'm surrounded by a bunch of 23-year-olds who all know what they want out of life and how to get there, and I have to remind myself that's not who I am and not who I want to be, or could be even if I tried.

One of my classmates has a much more laid-back attitude about things like this. When he sends out resumes and doesn't get called back, he means it when he says, "I guess God has something else in mind for me right now." I want to believe that, but I also have mostly given up on ever having a concrete theology of God's intervention in my life. I believe He cares, deeply, but I never know what that means when it gets to the nitty gritty details. But this all loops in with the topic of my OT Writings class last week: Lamentation. We tend to think God already knows everything about our problems, so when we pray we gloss over the problem itself and spend a lot of energy telling God how we want him to fix it. And then, of course, we don't really think God will show up on our timeline, so we go try to fix our own problems. But the Israelites, they worked the other way around. They felt justified wailing, in excruciating detail, over their problems, and leaving it up to God to know what they needed, to figure out how to fix it - which they fully expected him to do.

So, I will get more sleep and eat better and do what I can to keep showing up and putting myself out there, and I will feel free to lament, and to figure out what it means to expect God to show up, and I will stop trying to tell him how I want this all to work out, and we will see what happens. In the meantime, I'm counting on "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me!" to get me through a month of interviews.

Un-ringing in the new year

So, I think it's time for the tongue ring to go. I knew this day would come, when I'd wake up and decide I didn't really want it anymore, and I always wondered what I'd be thinking at the time. I think mostly I'm thinking that I'm tired of being taken for a 22-year-old, and while there aren't a lot of aspects of that within my control, this might be one of them. It was fun for a while, and I still remember getting it done on Telegraph Avenue, squeezing Andrew's hand nearly hard enough to yank it off and then realizing it was over and it hadn't even hurt. I lisped for a week, which made Natalie laugh, which is one of my favorite sounds in the whole world.

There's also something cathartic about taking it out. I got it right after I quit Westminster House, and for some reason the tongue ring seemed to mark my freedom from the job I had been letting suck my soul dry for two long years (thankfully, at least it wasn't another tattoo). But as you Berkeley folks can attest, the next two-plus years of wandering around aimlessly didn't make me feel any more free. Let's face it, I've been miserable for a really long time. So now, as I realized in a conversation with a friend last week, for the first time in a loooong time, I'm doing really well and I'm grateful for every minute of it.

I talked to Andrew a few weeks ago on the phone and shortly thereafter got an email: "I was just surprised to hear you so happy." Maybe I will take the tongue ring out to mark the occasion.

My mother will be elated....

The Random San Francisco Craigslist Roommate Circus

I was reading Hannah's blog and was recently reminded (as if I could have forgotten) of all the strange stories that she, Natalie and I collected during our three years living together in Berkeley/Oakland/Alameda. Most of them surrounded the perpetual search for someone to fill the revolving roommate position we always seemed to have open... so with no further ado, let me introduce you to the wacky cast of characters.

S: my first bay area roommate, getting her PhD in Chemistry, who was wonderful, but -- being in the agonizing throes of a dissertation -- spent every evening despondent over her laser that never worked right.

R: R, Natalie, Hannah and I moved into a fun little four-bedroom apartment in South Berkeley (where Hannah kept getting yelled at for being white). Shortly into our move, R's boyfriend broke up with her, while the rest of us were all out of town for the weekend. When we returned, she had redecorated the entire apartment, and then proceeded to "bill" us for everything she didn't want to take with her when she got back together with her boyfriend and moved to LA, whether we wanted it or not.

Tracy: After R moved out, Tracy moved in, and proceeded to complain. About everything. All the time. For eight months straight. She was one of those people that you wanted to love, because you knew she needed it, but you had trouble being in the same room.

After a while, Tracy moved in with her new boyfriend and we found a really cute house in Alameda. Total strange-roommate-free bliss for six months. Then Hannah sublet her room for the summer while she went to Brazil.

Nancy: Nancy was really nice... and liked to talk... alot. She was a Jewish Buddhist who was living with us so she could be closer to her boyfriend while her divorce was finalized. Her husband and her boyfriend helped her move in -- together. She had a little massage practice on the side, and asked me if I minded if she worked on clients in the living room. Let's see... naked people I've never met hanging out in my house? Luckily, she realized how bad of an idea that would be before we had to tell her no. We actually ended up really liking Nancy, and her fun British boyfriend Alan, who lived at the marina down the street, working on his boat. She had this fun paper-mache camel from Africa that would scare Sadie the pug whenever I was dogsitting. Anyway, Nancy left to go sail around the world with Alan, and Hannah decided she needed to live at home to save money while she was in grad school, so it was time for a new roommate.

Hannah put another ad on Craigslist, and we met Humuu, Haystack, and LoveSong (all real names), who all didn't work out for various reasons. Then there was the family of 3 that wanted to move into Hannah's room. Then some guy named Daniel (or something like that) came by. He described himself in his roommate ad as a "sensitive, affectionate guy, with an interest in 'wimmin's studies'." I made Warren come over to meet him with me 'cause it just sounded weird. He drove a big white van, and he kept telling me that he could tell it was going to work out because I "had such good energy." Plus, he was, like, 40, and he described himself as "affectionate," and he was interested in living with two single 20-something women? Uh uh, I don't think so. Natalie and I were not very happy about Daniel, but by this time we were getting desperate and we only needed to make it through three months before our lease was up.

So on the eve of having to say yes to sensitive-ponytail man, Hannah called with one more potential Craigslist roomie. Brian came over to meet us and he was quirky, like the rest, but he was kind of like a little kid and for some reason Natalie and I were a little bit won over (well, especially in the face of the competition). He was a white hip-hop gangster wannabe from Brooklyn who just needed a place to crash for a few months while he figured out where to plant himself in California. "A place to crash" turned out to mean for himself and enough stuff to fill his room AND the three-car garage. He worked on a goat farm in Santa Rosa, and when his license got suspended his friend moved in too, "to drive him around," he said, only she never drove him anywhere 'cause his car was broken down too and I don't think she had one either. He stopped going to work, and shortly thereafter stopped paying rent, and was actually really sad when we told him we weren't going to pay his rent for him and let him stay. This story could go on and on, but the highlights are that he moved out but left all his stuff, moved back in with even more stuff in the middle of the night, and started punching out the guy who was nice enough to rent him a moving truck on the day we were supposed to be out of the house, so once again we enlisted our guy-friends (and the crew of large roofers next door) to come over and watch out for us. In the end, he ended up stealing Natalie's computer, ditching his broken-down car on the street in front, spackling his walls brown so the place had to be repainted, and leaving us with mountains of garbage, which we then had to drive all around Alameda in the middle of the night trying to ditch in dumpsters without getting arrested.

Ahh, the joys of communal living :)

Is it just me...

... or is 6th grade getting harder?

I tutored a kid in math today, and he was working on one of those logic puzzles that you have to do at that age, where it's got the grid you put all the X's and O's in... and I got so stuck I had to give up. I do Sudoku puzzles in the NY Times, and I couldn't figure out an 11-year-old's logic homework?

Oooh, also -- 'cause I know you were all wondering what happened to the philandering Peruvian trekking guide... Jeanne forwarded the emails we got from his girlfriend back to him, so he knows that she hacked into his email to track us down halfway around the world to find out if he was cheating (seriously, it's like Where's Waldo meets Melrose Place). But... apparently they worked everything out, because they're starting a trekking company of their own. So, if you are ever in Cusco and you need a great guide to places few other gringos go, look him up. Sure, he'll pick you up at 5am with a hangover, get too tired to speak English a mile into every day, and hit on you while he explains the astrological designs of Incan ruins -- but playing soccer at a UNESCO site with peruvians at 13,000 feet is worth it.

Unmasticated regurgitation

Seriously... that's what a TA wrote on one of my friend's papers: "this is pure unmasticated regurgitation." Ouch. Couldn't he think of a more appropriate way to offer his criticism?

Anyhow, that's also what I have for you tonight -- mostly unmasticated regurgitation, with a healthy dose of idealism thrown in for good measure. I had hoped to have more blog entries digging in and writing through issues, to offer up some food for thought and to give myself a reason to process. But right now the sheer volume of information my brain is taking in means that trying to put a coherent thought or argument together feels like trying to build a spaceship at a garbage dump (except for the fact that the information I'm learning is actually fabulous, and nothing like garbage... that's where the analogy breaks down). Can it be done? Maybe. Do I have the energy for it on this particular night after 11 hours of class? Hell no. What I can do, instead, is rummage through the heap and hold up a few shiny objects.

Warning: begin soapbox.

The latest issue of the Semi (Fuller campus weekly paper) was on the topic of the environment, and why it is both the responsibility of individuals, and of the church itself, to take up the cause. Slightly, oh so slightly, close to my heart, especially after working as a backpacking guide for Sierra Treks for several seasons, where I was consistently awed by the creativity exhibited in wilderness, and the ways we have desperately mistaken the priviledge of dominion over the earth with domination of it.

Anyhow, I had hoped to write an article for this issue of the Semi, but that was before I came down with Death for a week before Christmas. So I was quite pleased to see the lead article, by a Fuller professor who talks of her unlikely conversion to environmentalism, addressing the issues I would have written about, and much more articulately than I could have mustered. Three things struck me, both for how she presented them in the context of environmentalism, and also in the context of what it really means to care about all the other things God cares about -- which is pretty much what Jesus meant when he said, "Follow me."

She writes of how it is hard to love what we don't often see. This applies to spectacular places like Rainbow Canyon in NE Yosemite - where there are no roads and no trails and the only way to find them is to learn to read a topographic map - as well as to kinds of people that we don't spend time with on a regular basis. Maybe our roads don't naturally "go" to those people and we have to pull out a map, or enlist a guide, to get to them. She writes of how, while it's important to have ideals and opinions, it's a problem when we're not ready to be personally uncomfortable. Maybe this means taking the bus, maybe it means learning how to love people when it's inconvenient - which, if we're talking about the kind of love God asks us to have for each other, might be more often than, say, every third Tuesday. And she writes of how this is a justice issue, because the comfortable will not change until we feel a pinch, and because we are the comfortable we are the last to feel the pinch, and by then it may be too late.

But I won't convince anyone of anything, and neither will she, as we sit and write from our comfy Ikea chairs. And she knew it too. So now I will move from regurgitation to full-on plagiarism:

"Only changed hearts will willingly bear real costs, and hearts are rarely changed by arguments, whether from the pulpit or elsewhere. Thus, I suspect that what the church can do to carry out its responsibility to the environment depends less on what policies might be advocated Sunday morning in the sanctuary, or on what sort of coffee is served in what sort of cups on the patio, than on what God's people are taught to love. Oh yes, by all means show the moral costs of policies; by all means choose coffee that does not destroy lives and rain forests; but even more, be as creative and concrete as you can to help people to love God's world and God's creatures, human and nonhuman - the world God himself, who made it, loves. Then they will steadfastly support the policies and pay more to buy the less destructive coffee."

May my heart be changed, that I might remember the world doesn't revolve around me, and that I may learn to bear real costs with grace and humility.

End soapbox.

Freegan

Meet Matt. He's a guy I play ultimate with. In the last week I have learned that he lived on a bus for a while (a decommissioned city bus) and the reason he lives in SoCal is because that's where he was when he got tired of driving the bus around the country. Matt is 25, and he's marrying his 34-year-old Italian girlfriend so she can get a visa. Since Matt doesn't have a car, he brings Nicole (another ultimate friend) and I large bags of tangerines from his tree in exchange for rides to winter league games.

Matt is also a Freegan. When Nicole mentioned this on the way home from our game on Monday, I hesitated to ask what that meant, since it sounded kind of sketchy and I didn't know what the reply would be. Turns out it's just a better name for Dumpster Diving. Matt eats for free. He "shops," and takes anyone who will drive him, behind the Trader Joe's on Arroyo. So I went with him and one of his friends the other night. When they picked me up in the getaway car, I felt like I was one of the characters in Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant," except I was taking garbage out secretively in the middle of the night rather than putting it in. . According to Matt it was an "average" night at the dumpster... on a good night, apparently there's lots of cheese. I happily trucked home two bunches of flowers.

I'm not sure if there's a point to the story, but it's been an interesting week.

more verbatim

"I mean really, if you're trying to kill yourself, lithium's the way to go. I'll tell you how in a little while." -my psychopharmacology prof

"Before this class is over, you will have lost your innocence. If you're still naive about people, and you want to stay that way, you are not in the right program." - my psychopathology prof

Ahhh, now we're getting to the juicy stuff. It's not exactly "weed-out" material in the academically rigorous sense, but it is causing us all to ask if we really want to open Pandora's Box any further. As Thomas Cardinal Woolsey said, "Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out." We started up Psychopathology and Ethics after the break, and even those of us who still feel like we made the right decision to be here can't help but wonder what it will be like to undergo a course of professional preparation that gives us unceasing awareness of the pathology and dysfunction of everyone from our best friends to our bus drivers. It's like X-ray goggles that you can never, ever take off.

I may have lost much of my naivete about people a while ago, but I still feel a bit like Eve, about to chomp on that apple and get smacked with the knowledge of good and evil.... :):)

verbatim

Actual comment made to me by stereotypically LA-looking girl while Barista-ing tonight, referring to the fact that we had only 2% milk (no nonfat) with which to make her hot chocolate:

"Ugh, I can't drink THAT! Chocolate and fat at the same time?!"

people I love in faraway places

As usual, the highlight of the break was hanging out with fabulous people who are all currently spread all over the globe. I spent some quality time with my family and big bro (we had better outfits in '78 in the photo at left); my college roommate Ruth dropped in from Ukraine (where her name is spelled PYT -- and she finally gets the michael jackson references we heap on her) and we daytripped to Dungeness Spit; I caught up with my spunky preggo friend Jessica, with whom I share a tattooed nickname and the scars of surviving middle and high school together; I caught up (in Seattle) with Berkeley friends who now live in Seattle, Berkeley, and Montana; and finally flew back to Oakland to pass a lovely New Years Eve with former roommates Natalie (enjoying a break from shoveling her car out of the snow in Boston) and Hannah (about to travel the world as a rock star), and our dear friends Phil and James, who cook us gourmet dinners and reveal far more than we ever wanted to know about the inner workings of the male mind, and we love every minute of it.





more photos from the holiday travels here....

The winter of our discontent

OK, so really I like quotes like this because they make me feel better about the general state of discontent my 20s have turned out to be, like maybe it's OK that sometimes the world just seems like a messy place to be.

"You are a Christian only so long as you constantly pose critical questions to the society you live in... so long as you stay unsatisfied with the status quo and keep saying that a new world is yet to come." - henri nouwen

In practice, I'm still working on finding a balance.... and I suppose if I had to choose I'd rather be content being discontent that discontent with contentedness, because in the first one you ultimately get to be content at the end of the day but still hold out hope for people and try to be a change agent in whatever small way you've been given to influence. But to get there I have to figure out the content thing. So maybe life is a long process of figuring out which of your discontent to be content with and which discontent you should either do something about or get over and just be content. Another cool quote on the topic, via Becky D:

"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world, and a deep desire to enjoy the world. And that makes it hard to plan the day." -eb white

But speaking of the winter of my discontent, will someone please tell LA that 85 degrees is a totally inappropriate temperature for January?

Miles to go before I sleep

I had 382 miles to make peace with LA last night.

At 5:30, I sat in Berkeley on the corner of Telegraph and Haste, watching the sky squeeze out the last of the light and the last of the rain for the day, and I had no desire to make the six-hour drive south on dark, wet roads. I had offers for two dinners, one movie, three beds to sleep in, and even the pair of guest pajamas at Phil and James' place so I wouldn't have to unpack to stay the night. And I didn't have anywhere I had to be today in Pasadena. I kept trying to talk myself into staying, but I kept pointing my car south. I even pulled over on MLK and sat with my car running for 10 more minutes, trying to will myself to turn around and stay the night. But stronger than all my reasons for staying was the inescapable urge to wake up in LA today, even if I had to drive all night to get here.

To use a totally non-dinner-table analogy, revisiting the past is a bit like poking at a wound. If you pick at it too much while it's still fresh, it takes a lot longer for new skin to grow in its place. Once you've got a scar, you can stay there longer. In a little while, further through transition, I'll be able to go back to Seattle and Berkeley and appreciate each for what it is, but this time I was spending too much energy appreciating them for what LA isn't. Four months into starting over, staying another night in fantasyland (which is what each place was, considering half the people I spent time with don't even live in those places anymore) was starting to feel masochistic. Or maybe it's less dramatic than that -- maybe revisiting the past is more like baking cookies... the oven is a necessary place to be but when the timer goes off, ding! Stay any longer and you'll burn on the bottom and get dried out and crumbly. Either way, it was time to hit the road.

I-5 ended up being closed in two places, and the drive took nine hours. I rolled in around 3am and caffeine kept me up until 5. But I woke up at lunchtime today a little more at peace with LA, having drawn up a tiny truce with everything Berkeley is/was and isn't/wasn't, and with a new appreciation for the scars that cut across the landscape of my arms, legs, and hands, reminding me not to poke too much right now.

living and dying in LA

... because really, dying is what I felt like I was doing last night. And most of today, too. After a pickup game yesterday, I found myself doubled over coughing on the side of the field for a few minutes before I could make it to my car. I made it home fine though, and thought it would calm down. But it wound up getting worse throughout the night, and this morning I felt like an elephant was sitting on my head. My whole body was aching from hacking the whole night through.

Anyway, I went in to urgent care today to see if I had pneumonia, and it turns out I've developed asthma. My body seems to be rejecting living in LA.

relative adulthood

Hmmm... for more on the recurring theme of "adulthood," start with Becky's post on Twixters (but don't forget to come back!). Emerging adulthood is actually a recently acknowledged stage of development (I had to answer a bunch of questions about it for a final last week). So it's been on my mind, and I actually hounded my prof about research into urban tribes for a while (there's not much).

One "official designation" is that emerging adulthood lasts from 18-25 (I disagree). The hallmarks of emerging from emerging adulthood are when one begins to make commitments. Maybe that means marriage or kids, maybe it just means picking one job and sticking with it for a while rather than trying something new every six months. It means being able to engage in intimate relationships (friendships or otherwise). It means entering a period of (relative) stability.

So do we count as emerged? What does it mean to make commitments in the current urban landscape, where even if I choose to stay, maybe no one else will? What if "starting a family" looks more like an urban tribe for an extended period of time? And why is just deciding to be present somewhere (instead of mentally being where we were in the past, or where we want to be in the future) so much harder than it sounds?

They say we're commitment-phobic, and perhaps in some senses we are -- but I don't think it's because we're always waiting for something better to come along. I think it's because we don't know how to say yes to anything. First, we have too many options, which should be a blessing, but winds up being a paralyzing curse when we fear squandering any of them. So one day we figure out that ultimate choice is not ultimate freedom, and we think about making some commitments. But we can't afford houses, or condos, or even monthly parking spaces, which precludes the physical aspect of attachment to places we're trying to call "home." Marrying someone no longer just means that we have to compromise on which movie to rent this weekend -- now it likely means we have to compromise on which state to live in. And TV news (which you should all stop watching, if you haven't already, unless you need to know the weather) has us convinced that if we have kids they're going die by some obscure petrifying household scenario, like suffocating on a teddy bear. So we put it off, we live in limbo for a while. That's our relative stability.

I think many of us are the model of the new"emerged" adult, where changing jobs every few years is part of a developed career path, and where intimate relationships are no less strong for lack of blood ties or civil sanctions. Or maybe I'm really full of crap, and I know nothing about commitments and we really don't have any.... But I don't know a single person who doesn't crave roots, depth, and commitment of sorts. We're wired that way. So I think what we're really afraid of is vulnerability, which is a necessary byproduct of hitching your wagon to something outside of yourself, like spouses and kids.

I'm down with heresy, yeah you know me

Being that Fuller is a non-denominational evangelical school, there are a few key things everybody here agrees on and we have (mostly) healthy disagreement on just about everything else, from drinking and dancing to doctrines of atonement. Basically, everybody thinks that what somebody else thinks is heresy, but we do a pretty good job of dialoguing about our differences and hanging onto our commonality. Recently quoted in the Semi, the campus newspaper:

"I'm a heretic, you're a heretic, we're all heretics. Can't we all just love the baby Jesus?"

question:

In department stores, why do they call it the "sportswear" section, when it's full of skirts and satiny things, and there's not actually anything there that you could play sports in?

It's a rough winter

Becky's battling 7-degree weather with 88mph winds in Boulder, Natalie's buried in snow in Boston, my family's drowing in Seattle. Come visit! It's cooled down to 70 degrees here in LA and beach ultimate runs all winter!

Shoes

OK, I've gone and done it. Filled my brain full with details about the major theological themes in the book of Luke, and John's relationship to the Synoptic Gospels. So I'll talk about shoes.

I was invited to a Christmas party this weekend where lobster is on the menu. I do not think that I own any shoes nice enough to eat lobster in. I have "sensible shoes" useful for running around shooting weddings -- they're quiet (no squeaking) and low (no falling over), but they are also no fun. So I went shoe shopping.

Ladies with small feet, I do not ever want to hear you complaining about shoes. At least they make cute shoes in your size. When you wear an 11 1/2, you get stuck with men's shoes and the leftovers at Nordstrom Rack, usually mustard-yellow pumps. Every once in a while I find cute shoes in my size, but the problem is that they're not really cute in my size. I look like an oversized four-year-old playing dress-up. And in the rare case that a shoe exists that is cute, even in my size, nine times out of 10 it has a four-inch heel, and until I start dating a Laker the last thing I need is to be 6'2".

Can I hear a little sympathy, folks, for the tall women with big feet?

Signs of the apocalypse

Somewhere back in October, just two weeks into the quarter, my mother was visiting. I wandered into my room to find her making my bed one day, and joked that she shouldn't bother, it was going to get unmade in a few hours and probably never be made again. The funny thing is, in the two months since she left, I think I've made my bed every day.

I think probably this is just a feature of the changes in my life that have taken me from using my room for sleeping only, to being in my room, reading in the IKEA chair in the corner, using my bed as a bookshelf, every waking moment that I'm not in class. OK, so maybe this is a slight exaggeration, I do try to wander to the fridge a few times a day, and I have maintained a steadfast commitment to play ultimate, but other than that, I kind of feel like all I do is read and write. I don't really have a social life. The irony of sitting in my room alone, reading all about how our development only fully occurs in the context of relationship, is not lost on me. It's not that my intitiation energy is gone, it's just operating at about 49%, and usually gets trumped by the 51% of me that thinks it's easier to chip away at the reading list so I can be an informed therapist someday. And yes, the irony that I am holing myself away alone so that I can be better at helping people with their relationships is also not lost on me.

I need help convincing the 49% to riot.

deconstruction

I am having one of those days when I think coming back to grad school is ruining me, making me unfit for human interaction. Learning all of this stuff about counseling is stamping out any feeling of ease or genuineness, now that I'm some twisted combination of hyper-observant, armed with new knowledge, and being a bit of a psychological hypochondriac, thinking that I suffer from every new dysfuntion I discover the name for.

It's probably the experience of a baseball player who, after a long stretch of feeling like a "natural," has a batting coach come in and deconstruct every minute detail, from his grip on the bat to the rise of his knee to the placement of his feet. While the intended result is that he become an athlete whose natural inclinations are refined to near perfection, the interim effect is that he can't find the sweet spot to save his life, and bats .050 for a while.

So the unintended consequence for me these days is that the combination of awkwardness and self-consciousness about my competence is making it a little hard both to make friends and to relate to old ones, and now that the novelty of living in LA is wearing off, I'm pretty lonely this week and I feel like I'm pretty far away from the figurative sweet spot in a number of ways. So for those of you who are getting strange bits and pieces of me now, thanks for your grace, and your encouragement to cut myself some slack, while I get my swing back.