Possibly the best thing about break is getting to read things you want to read. What has made this break even better is that I am not going back to school in January, and I find myself sitting here delightedly considering that I may just get to spend the rest of my life reading whatever I want. I imagine myself becoming the most informed and interesting person on the planet, simply by getting to read two books a week for the next sixty years.
Those of you who see me on a day to day basis may remember my brief but passionate affair with Nora Ephron's "I Feel Bad About My Neck" a few years ago. For a week I read excerpts to my friends and ran all over town begging people to read it. Thus you can imagine my delight when the wonderful Ruth Ross (who hears about nearly all of my literary encounters) informed me that there was a second book of humorous essays to be published by Miss Ephron. Merry Christmas to me.
Unfortunately, "I Remember Nothing" was a complete disappointment. I'm not kidding you, I started this book at 11:00 last night and finished it this morning at 11:30. Also, about nine and a half of those hours were spent sleeping. Of course this book was never meant to be deeply substantive. It is, after all, a collection of humorous essays. However, the Nora I met in "I Feel Bad About My Neck" was funny, snappy, and relatable. Her latest work seems to be, above else, a list of all of the fabulous people she knows and has known, and of her numerous career conquests. I did not laugh or even smile to myself. I also did not highlight a single thing, which to me is a harbinger of the work's general worthlessness.
What a mean first book review I am writing. I'm sorry. All I'm saying is, don't read "I Remember Nothing." Most of all, don't pay $22.95 for it.
You should, however, read Malcom Gladwell's "Outliers." If you (like me) aspire to become the most interesting and informed person on the planet by simply reading books, this is a good place to start.
Next on my list? Sloane Crosley's "How Did You Get This Number"
Fingers crossed it turns out better than "I Remember Nothing."
Monday, December 27, 2010
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Christmasy Comfort
Last weekend Ruth and I drove out to Boston to pick up our newly married friends Katharine and Matt. We got back yesterday night from our 18 hour road trip, so (as usual) I’ve got travel on the brain.
Of course Ruth and I went out to Boston to see other friends and as a sort of vacation for ourselves, but to me the trip felt based in Christmas—in the idea of getting our friends home to their families. Meanwhile, Sarah has been stuck in London trying to get out of Heathrow for the last five days. Day after day we got word of yet another one of her flights being cancelled, and I felt so far from her as she weathered disappointment after disappointment. Christmas drew nearer and it seemed she wouldn’t get a flight in time to be home.
It’s a CHRISTMAS MIRACLE! Sarah is winging over the Atlantic as I write this, headed for North America. In the car yesterday Katharine kept saying that she was so impressed by her parents—they did everything short of chartering their own plane to get Sarah home for Christmas. I can’t help but think of all the people who will not be able to get out of the UK for Christmas. I’m impacted by something I’ve taken for granted in past years: the importance of just making it home.
Right now my dad is driving, Sadie is on Austin’s lap (he has his headphones in as usual), and my mom is passed out in the front seat. We are flying down I-39 rocking out to the Amy Grant Christmas CD like we do every year, and like every year we are all kind of dreading a week at my grandparents house in the middle of nowhere with no internet.
As usual at least half of us forgot our cell phone chargers, and getting out of the house was a chaotic mess. Our hopeful departure time was 8 a.m., and as we tried to leave people kept yelling, “It’s 8:15!”….“It’s 8:25! Has everyone gone to the bathroom?” and then, with more tension, “It’s nine o’clock!! We finally got going around 9:30, and it’s stressful and a car is the last place I want to be after spending 18 hours on the road yesterday. Maybe it’s a cheesy message at Christmas, but in this moment it doesn’t matter that we’re off schedule or that nobody actually likes the Amy Grant Christmas CD. Our chaos is comfortable, and I’m thankful we’re all here sharing it together.
Of course Ruth and I went out to Boston to see other friends and as a sort of vacation for ourselves, but to me the trip felt based in Christmas—in the idea of getting our friends home to their families. Meanwhile, Sarah has been stuck in London trying to get out of Heathrow for the last five days. Day after day we got word of yet another one of her flights being cancelled, and I felt so far from her as she weathered disappointment after disappointment. Christmas drew nearer and it seemed she wouldn’t get a flight in time to be home.
It’s a CHRISTMAS MIRACLE! Sarah is winging over the Atlantic as I write this, headed for North America. In the car yesterday Katharine kept saying that she was so impressed by her parents—they did everything short of chartering their own plane to get Sarah home for Christmas. I can’t help but think of all the people who will not be able to get out of the UK for Christmas. I’m impacted by something I’ve taken for granted in past years: the importance of just making it home.
Right now my dad is driving, Sadie is on Austin’s lap (he has his headphones in as usual), and my mom is passed out in the front seat. We are flying down I-39 rocking out to the Amy Grant Christmas CD like we do every year, and like every year we are all kind of dreading a week at my grandparents house in the middle of nowhere with no internet.
As usual at least half of us forgot our cell phone chargers, and getting out of the house was a chaotic mess. Our hopeful departure time was 8 a.m., and as we tried to leave people kept yelling, “It’s 8:15!”….“It’s 8:25! Has everyone gone to the bathroom?” and then, with more tension, “It’s nine o’clock!! We finally got going around 9:30, and it’s stressful and a car is the last place I want to be after spending 18 hours on the road yesterday. Maybe it’s a cheesy message at Christmas, but in this moment it doesn’t matter that we’re off schedule or that nobody actually likes the Amy Grant Christmas CD. Our chaos is comfortable, and I’m thankful we’re all here sharing it together.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
The Paper to End All Papers
All Hope students have to turn in a "lifeview paper" before graduating. This paper should outline how your lifeview has been shaped by your education. It is to serve as a sort of "watermark" of where you stood at graduation. I have three days left to finish mine, and writing it has been an englightening experience.
It is quite possibly the most intimidating prompt I've ever had to respond to.
Here is the assighment:
Your lifeview paper should address the following questions: Who am I? Why am I here? How do I fit? What is the problem here? What is the solution? What is my faith stance? Why is it this stance? How does it fit with other faith stances and how do they fit with mine?
woah.
So anyway, in writing this I'm learning a lot about myself and being forced to dig into what I believe and explain it. I thought it might be cool to share a few excerpts with you here.
The climax of my education unfolded on a busy street corner in Mumbai standing outside the Dhobi Ghats. A little girl of about eight or nine years approached me holding a baby of less than six months, putting the tips of her fingers together and tapping them against her mouth. The baby’s eyes had been gouged out. Her keeper’s clothes were torn, her hair was nappy, and dirt was smeared across her face. Both she and the child she held were emaciated and clearly malnourished. While I had been in the country less than a week, I had already been approached hundreds of times by children making this motion, and the sight of poor children begging had already become commonplace. But this girl was not commonplace. She was dying. Not the sort of dying we are all doing with every moment that passes, but active, painful, organs-shutting-down dying. Tears welled up in my eyes, and I stood dumbfounded as this realization knocked the wind out of me. A knot rose in my stomach and my world stopped.
It really did, simple as that. A worldview is a created thing, and the walls of my carefully created worldview came crashing to the ground as if crumbled by a sudden earthquake. The damage was devastating and complete. And there on the street, I cried. I cried at the unfairness of it all, at the lack of hope that reflected off of her eyes into mine. I cried because she was powerless to change her situation, yes, but also because for the first time in my memory so was I. I cried because if I gave her money or food they would be taken by her owner, a person who most likely had control of thirty or forty other orphans like herself.
I cried because what I actually gave her was a purple crayon, and because when I did she looked at me with confused eyes. Eyes that said, “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”
As I cried on the street in Mumbai the words pounding through my head were: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry.” I am not directly guilty. I am, however, sorry. I am filled with sadness, compassion, and empathy over the misfortune of another. This is the human heart. This is what makes poverty personal. How can I come to terms with the penetrating unfairness of the world? And how can I sleep at night knowing that in many ways my comfort comes at the price of someone else’s detriment?
The God that I had known (the one that protected myself and others from the tragedy of the world) vanished before my eyes, and in its place I was left with a God that did not make sense to me. I began to realize that the God to which I had unquestionably awarded my allegiance at a young age was a much more complex creature than I had previously created God to be. With the promise of Jeremiah 29:13 tucked securely in my pocket, (“You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart”) I set out to discover just who this mysterious creature was and what God was about.
Belief in God is sometimes looked down upon by intellectuals because it is illogical and God’s existence is, ultimately, improvable. But for me, belief in God is not the easy or comforting choice. I am a person of logic, who finds safety and comfort in explainable answers—concrete answers that make sense from every angle. But faith is messy and speculative and doubtful. These “big questions,” the questions of faith, bring me to my deepest vulnerabilities. I believe, as many do, that my faith today affects not only this life on earth but also my eternal fate. More than anything, this “faith vulnerability” makes me want to scream disrespectfully to my maker, “Look, if eternity is on the line, then we’re going to need some (f*#$ing) concrete answers down here!” With so much at stake, God’s mysterious and coy elusiveness is anything but charming.
So how did I find myself in the nonsensical religious camp? I don’t think it matters. Faith is a curious thing, and one way or another some of us wind up believing in God and some don’t. Despite all of my logical twistiness and confusing attempts to understand what God might be like, I feel deeply that my faith is not constructed by me. It is as if my faith already is, that it hums within me almost without my command or permission—a top that spins without having been set in motion. And here is the thought that is equally comforting and terrifying to me: perhaps my faith has been set in motion, but not by me. Perhaps it has been set in motion by God. It is mine, and it is both inside me and above me, but I did not create it.
That, my friends, that is a cool thought to think.
It is quite possibly the most intimidating prompt I've ever had to respond to.
Here is the assighment:
Your lifeview paper should address the following questions: Who am I? Why am I here? How do I fit? What is the problem here? What is the solution? What is my faith stance? Why is it this stance? How does it fit with other faith stances and how do they fit with mine?
woah.
So anyway, in writing this I'm learning a lot about myself and being forced to dig into what I believe and explain it. I thought it might be cool to share a few excerpts with you here.
The climax of my education unfolded on a busy street corner in Mumbai standing outside the Dhobi Ghats. A little girl of about eight or nine years approached me holding a baby of less than six months, putting the tips of her fingers together and tapping them against her mouth. The baby’s eyes had been gouged out. Her keeper’s clothes were torn, her hair was nappy, and dirt was smeared across her face. Both she and the child she held were emaciated and clearly malnourished. While I had been in the country less than a week, I had already been approached hundreds of times by children making this motion, and the sight of poor children begging had already become commonplace. But this girl was not commonplace. She was dying. Not the sort of dying we are all doing with every moment that passes, but active, painful, organs-shutting-down dying. Tears welled up in my eyes, and I stood dumbfounded as this realization knocked the wind out of me. A knot rose in my stomach and my world stopped.
It really did, simple as that. A worldview is a created thing, and the walls of my carefully created worldview came crashing to the ground as if crumbled by a sudden earthquake. The damage was devastating and complete. And there on the street, I cried. I cried at the unfairness of it all, at the lack of hope that reflected off of her eyes into mine. I cried because she was powerless to change her situation, yes, but also because for the first time in my memory so was I. I cried because if I gave her money or food they would be taken by her owner, a person who most likely had control of thirty or forty other orphans like herself.
I cried because what I actually gave her was a purple crayon, and because when I did she looked at me with confused eyes. Eyes that said, “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”
As I cried on the street in Mumbai the words pounding through my head were: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry.” I am not directly guilty. I am, however, sorry. I am filled with sadness, compassion, and empathy over the misfortune of another. This is the human heart. This is what makes poverty personal. How can I come to terms with the penetrating unfairness of the world? And how can I sleep at night knowing that in many ways my comfort comes at the price of someone else’s detriment?
The God that I had known (the one that protected myself and others from the tragedy of the world) vanished before my eyes, and in its place I was left with a God that did not make sense to me. I began to realize that the God to which I had unquestionably awarded my allegiance at a young age was a much more complex creature than I had previously created God to be. With the promise of Jeremiah 29:13 tucked securely in my pocket, (“You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart”) I set out to discover just who this mysterious creature was and what God was about.
Belief in God is sometimes looked down upon by intellectuals because it is illogical and God’s existence is, ultimately, improvable. But for me, belief in God is not the easy or comforting choice. I am a person of logic, who finds safety and comfort in explainable answers—concrete answers that make sense from every angle. But faith is messy and speculative and doubtful. These “big questions,” the questions of faith, bring me to my deepest vulnerabilities. I believe, as many do, that my faith today affects not only this life on earth but also my eternal fate. More than anything, this “faith vulnerability” makes me want to scream disrespectfully to my maker, “Look, if eternity is on the line, then we’re going to need some (f*#$ing) concrete answers down here!” With so much at stake, God’s mysterious and coy elusiveness is anything but charming.
So how did I find myself in the nonsensical religious camp? I don’t think it matters. Faith is a curious thing, and one way or another some of us wind up believing in God and some don’t. Despite all of my logical twistiness and confusing attempts to understand what God might be like, I feel deeply that my faith is not constructed by me. It is as if my faith already is, that it hums within me almost without my command or permission—a top that spins without having been set in motion. And here is the thought that is equally comforting and terrifying to me: perhaps my faith has been set in motion, but not by me. Perhaps it has been set in motion by God. It is mine, and it is both inside me and above me, but I did not create it.
That, my friends, that is a cool thought to think.
Friday, December 3, 2010
Real Life: Take 1
Some of you may have noticed that my blog has a new title (ok, let's face it, only my Mom notices these things). With this new title comes a new chapter in my life--the first I can remember not being a student. One of my previous posts while in Chile was titled "All This, Every Day," a phrase stolen from a poem in an Anne Lamott book. This title, like most things in my life, was given to me, and the title itself reflects recognition of abundance.
My entire adult life (albeit short) has thus far centered on abundance, on realization of how deeply blessed I am. I hope it doesn't sound trite; I genuinely seem to be stuck on this thought. I have two weeks left until my graduation from college. COLLEGE. I thought I would be so much more mature by the time I got to this point, but that is neither here nor there. While my school-hating peers count down the days, I count with them. But my counting is heavy, sometimes full of dread and fear.
I am with Meg Ryan's character in "You've Got Mail" on this one: I love the smell of a freshly sharpened bouquet of pencils. I love new folders and notebooks; I love the promise of a clean slate and a new semester. I love that in school my job is to investigate, to sit and listen and soak up this intriguing and complex world of ours.
So although I am mourning the end of my formal education and of the comfort and security of school, I embark (like many of my peers) scared but hopeful. Scared because for the past 16 years I have been doing a job I was good at, and I am starting one that I might not do as well or enjoy as much as I did school. Hopeful because I am now totally adrift, free to do pretty much whatever I want! (As long as it's free.)
My blog is titled "All This, Every Day," as a reminder that we have been truly gifted. Is thankfulness a spiritual gift? I don't think so, but if it were I would want to have that one. Gratitude is praising God for what we have been given, but tonight what I'm grateful for is gratitude itself. The gift of gratitude fills my routine with breath and peace, as if God's hand is resting open on my chest, slowing my caffinated heartbeat and saying to me, "Be still. Look around you."
I travel a lot, which despite its perks often means I meet a lot of people, love a lot of people, and leave a lot of people. It is so hard to miss a place, and to miss the people of that place. I miss Chile deeply and desperately, sometimes my breath gets fast and I feel like I'm suffocating with longing to go back. In many ways, this "missing" was the theme of my semester. I miss the view of the Andes out my front door and the familiar route to class. But when my heart starts racing and the "jungle drums start beating" (Anne Lamott again), I come back to gratitude, and rest in the image of a very large God making his hand small enough to fit right over my heart. I imagine him slowing my pace to his pace, making my hearbeats calm and steady, hopeful and expectant.
...This blog got mushier than I expected.
So here is the next chapter: on January 19, I am moving to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico for 6 months. By the grace of God, I somehow have a post-grad plan (SERIOUSLY: GRACE). I have an internship with a company by the name of PEACE. PEACE is a NGO founded by an American about 10 years ago, and they have recently started a microfinance branch of their organization. For those of you who might not be familiar with microfinance, it is a poverty-alleviation strategy that provides small loans for clients looking to expand a business they've started. Usually these loans help make businesses profitable, and can be instrumental in the economic development both of families and of cities. (Most of the clients are women who did not finish high school.) I am SO excited to be a part of this!
Again I ask for your prayers, especially for safety, since Mexico's government has been a little...shall we say...unstable as of late. I'm hoping to keep updating the blog with my experiences, both exciting and frustrating. But for now, I've got two last research papers to write and my last two final exams to study for. Maybe I'm not so into school after all...
My entire adult life (albeit short) has thus far centered on abundance, on realization of how deeply blessed I am. I hope it doesn't sound trite; I genuinely seem to be stuck on this thought. I have two weeks left until my graduation from college. COLLEGE. I thought I would be so much more mature by the time I got to this point, but that is neither here nor there. While my school-hating peers count down the days, I count with them. But my counting is heavy, sometimes full of dread and fear.
I am with Meg Ryan's character in "You've Got Mail" on this one: I love the smell of a freshly sharpened bouquet of pencils. I love new folders and notebooks; I love the promise of a clean slate and a new semester. I love that in school my job is to investigate, to sit and listen and soak up this intriguing and complex world of ours.
So although I am mourning the end of my formal education and of the comfort and security of school, I embark (like many of my peers) scared but hopeful. Scared because for the past 16 years I have been doing a job I was good at, and I am starting one that I might not do as well or enjoy as much as I did school. Hopeful because I am now totally adrift, free to do pretty much whatever I want! (As long as it's free.)
My blog is titled "All This, Every Day," as a reminder that we have been truly gifted. Is thankfulness a spiritual gift? I don't think so, but if it were I would want to have that one. Gratitude is praising God for what we have been given, but tonight what I'm grateful for is gratitude itself. The gift of gratitude fills my routine with breath and peace, as if God's hand is resting open on my chest, slowing my caffinated heartbeat and saying to me, "Be still. Look around you."
I travel a lot, which despite its perks often means I meet a lot of people, love a lot of people, and leave a lot of people. It is so hard to miss a place, and to miss the people of that place. I miss Chile deeply and desperately, sometimes my breath gets fast and I feel like I'm suffocating with longing to go back. In many ways, this "missing" was the theme of my semester. I miss the view of the Andes out my front door and the familiar route to class. But when my heart starts racing and the "jungle drums start beating" (Anne Lamott again), I come back to gratitude, and rest in the image of a very large God making his hand small enough to fit right over my heart. I imagine him slowing my pace to his pace, making my hearbeats calm and steady, hopeful and expectant.
...This blog got mushier than I expected.
So here is the next chapter: on January 19, I am moving to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico for 6 months. By the grace of God, I somehow have a post-grad plan (SERIOUSLY: GRACE). I have an internship with a company by the name of PEACE. PEACE is a NGO founded by an American about 10 years ago, and they have recently started a microfinance branch of their organization. For those of you who might not be familiar with microfinance, it is a poverty-alleviation strategy that provides small loans for clients looking to expand a business they've started. Usually these loans help make businesses profitable, and can be instrumental in the economic development both of families and of cities. (Most of the clients are women who did not finish high school.) I am SO excited to be a part of this!
Again I ask for your prayers, especially for safety, since Mexico's government has been a little...shall we say...unstable as of late. I'm hoping to keep updating the blog with my experiences, both exciting and frustrating. But for now, I've got two last research papers to write and my last two final exams to study for. Maybe I'm not so into school after all...
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