Bullets

So, I am a wee bit annoyed right now because I came out here dead tired and all I wanted to do was pen a quick e-mail to a friend and hit the sack. Then my e-mail jigger was like "No way, girl, I'm too full to send your e-mail." So I spent about 45 minutes going through every folder trying to ferret out anything with anything that even resembled an attachment, and it still wouldn't work until *lightbulb* I remembered the junk e-mail folder, which had about 80 messages, all from carnival cruises. (For those of you who are veterans of my blog, you'll recall the summer's posts on how I feel about cruising in the first place)I don't know if that just tipped it over the edge, or if that was the source, but after that, no more problems.

I am at home now. I feel like everything is messy, and it makes me think of Maggie as I find that I too cannot exist freely in cluttered spaces.

Stonework Issue 3, our brain child is finally up. There are no biographies and I feel like it is on hold because of me. I have not sent mine in b/c I'm supposed to include a picture, and I can't get the internet to work to send the picture off of my computer. So I feel like a heel for gumming up the process.

I wish I was in Mexico drinking horchata in the shade in a plaza.

I have had two chances to send my work places to be considered for publication. The deadline is Dec. 31 and I will not be sending anything for either. Farewell, fame and fortune. I can't pull things off. I pray to God that I will not end up screwing up this Africa thing too. ("Help me, help me, help me, help me...")

I hope all of my Christmas presents make it to their intended destination in time. Fortunately, Christmas happens like 4 times for me, so that eases the strain.

If I was a truly great artist, I would come to a blank page half dead with fatigue and bleeding from the liver and in the midst of being chased by a swarm of killer bees, and still compose the beautiful and heartrending words. Alas. I have this vague notion that I came on here with a number of different things I was thinking of writing about. I don't remember what any of them were.

Goodnight, compadres. The next post ought to be a happy one, or at least thoughtful. Maybe we can yet pull it off.

S.

Insecurity

Tonight, I was at a Christmas party. It was a very lovely party, I borrowed a very beautiful dress from a friend and long, beaded earrings that jingle against my neck. A bunch of my friends were there and I enjoyed mixing and mingling with all of these people that are so obviously dear and wonderful, to see them decked out in their Christmas finery and admire them. It was good to talk and to joke and to eat tasty food.

And yet, at the end, I am left melancholy.

Parties for me are like getting drunk is for some people. You have a great time while it's happening, but afterwards you don't feel so hot. Because no matter how many people I talk to, how many compliments I get, no matter how much I potentially shine, I still feel that it was never enough. I, in fact, was not enough.

Don't you ever wonder if people really like you, or if everybody is just pretending and being nice so that Jesus will give them extra sprinkles on their cupcakes in heaven? Sure, people can say all the right things and act as if they want you around, but in the end, you can't do any more than guess about the authenticity of their love, the inscrutability of their guise. What if the world around you is full of great pretenders?

Because, in the end, you know yourself to well to believe that you are in fact the life of the party, or even a moderately acceptable wallflower. You are not funny enough, interesting enough, pretty enough, smart enough, witty enough, kind enough, thoughtful enough, generous enough, brave enough, empathetic enough, patient enough, wise enough, tactful enough...you're just not enough. People have brought their sandwiches and you aren't cutting the mustard. And everyone can see. And they hate you for your insufficiency.

They hate you because you are garish in the midst of the gaity, because you are awkward among the suave. You stick out like a sore thumb for your failed jokes and inability to make conversation. You are gangly like a puppet with twisted strings.

The hypotheticals go on for days. What if they talk badly about me behind my back? What if they're only my friend because of so-and-so? What if they totally disagree with what I've just said, but are too disgusted with my ignorance to say anything? What if they're just waiting for me to leave so they can have a good conversation, a good time? All of these questions blow away in the first passing breeze because the answers are just not available to us. More questions come and replace them, and the answers? We can't know. Does it even matter? I don't know about the cosmic sense, but it matters to me.

I want to be liked. I want to be cool, to be the life of the party, the one everyone wants to talk to. That's not so different from you, I think. And so, knowing that this is what is common to our human condition, I will give myself grace. I will wait until I can grow stronger; I will pour nourishment onto the out-branching roots I put into the soil of myself. I will drink in sun and water and wait for the day when I am strong to say "I am enough."

baby! baby! baby!

I would like to announce to anyone who cares to listen that little Gladiola Hope Huth came into the world at 11:30 on Tuesday night, at 7 lbs, 13 oz. I know, I know; Gladiola? I'm still not sure what I think of the name. Mari has plans to call her Lola, I think that's much nicer than Gladdy. In case I didn't mention it in a previous post, Dave and Lori work at the college as profs, but they have also gone to church with me for the past 2 years, so I feel rather invested in this baby. Pics below (I think the one of the baby with her two beaming parents is one of the most amazing, beautiful things I've seen in a very long time.

I recant...

but only because I want people to like me and think my blog is cool, (obviously more important goals that speaking with uncensored honesty) which at this rate is not the net effect of my publishing efforts. But I have decided to give you one of the poems I've been working on as part of my senior project (but remember that this is still only a first draft). Think of it as a propitiating offering and don't leave nasty comments.

Your wistful girl,
S.

Finding the Geraniums, Gone

With the winter coming on,
I guess they felt they had to do it.
But now the neatly landscaped
plots of geraniums have been
decimated. Each plant
has left a pothole, a crater
in the world of wood chips,
a conspicuous absence of form
and flower.

And I wonder who did it,
who decided that trowel and
shovel and wheelbarrow should
do the work that a jealous frost
had set aside or was just
saving for later?

It must have been a dirty job.
I think they struggled, as
they were torn from the ground.
I can tell, because around
each pothole there is a strewing
of dark flannel leaves, the
bright shed drops of blood
red petals,
like a scattering
of hens’ feathers,
in a butcher’s yard.

More crap from Houghton

This, I declare unto you, will not be a good post. I am doing this primarily to spite young Eddius, who thinks by his complaints he can push me around. I am a free spirit! an unbound entity! I am an artist! and I shall do as I please! That being said, I feel very contrary tonight. Very irritable, very...petulant. Basically I feel like throwing myself down on the floor and flailing and whining and having a big ol' tantrum about things that are nobody's fault but mine. I think the only thing that keeps me from doing so is the fact that our floor's not vacuumed very often. For example...I have been trying to get myself geared up to write this fiction story all weak. I am staunchly resisting my own attempts at persuasion as procrastination rears her ugly head. (Why is procrastination a woman? Why is everything unpleasant personified as a woman? Stupid male chauvinist trojan horse...) So tonight I came home and just felt exhausted because I feel like I have been spending a lot of time with people, a lot of time feeling exceedingly passionate and railing about things (like Star Wars kid and Cat Shaver kid, but also happy things like getting excited about spiritual reading and Project Paul) but my passion always exhausts me so. I am telling you, by the time I get to Wednesday, I just start to crash. Which would have been okay if I had worked on this story thing on Monday or Tuesday evening. But first, when I got home at 8 I took a nap. For an hour and a half. At 8:00 at night. No, no don't ask me, I don't know why either, I've just felt disfunctional all evening. And then I woke up feeling very petulant indeed and continuing to internally resist writing this story and thinking about maybe showering instead, but instead I went and cut out the comics for us to hang on the wall, I footled about with Susannah, I played with the e-mail and went to postsecret...you know what, I don't even know what I did but I have wasted the past 3 hours!!! doing nothing!!! And I feel malaisical about life and about how nobody writes me and I'm tired of having to think all the time, to be the kind of person who talks about gender roles and marriage and the future and the idiocies of Focus on the Family and who is concerned about the place of Christianity in the arts and environmentalism and craft and the nature of stewardship and dealing with friends who are dating and dialoging about the state of the Church and all of these things that supposedly make up my life, and do make up my life and I actually do love, but there has been no shower and no story-writing (which, by the way is another thing that I passionately do want to do and see thrive in its existence; the story not the shower, though that would be nice too) and I don't even know what all is going on in the soul of me. But by crackey, I can vent it all by writing a crappy post, which no one will read because it has no literary merit whatsoever. Well, see if I care, I don't care about excellence anymore, at least not for tonight. I should have just gone to sleep at 8 and then straight on till morning for all I've accomplished. (and look, the whole post is one paragraph...people hate when I do this but I'm not changing it!)

Assorted Pieces (or, The Mixed Bag)

So, for those of you keeping score Pneumonia Boy is more or less back on his feet by this point. Hooray! Not so well that I'd be willing to fight a duel with him and consider it an even match (but someday, my nemesis!) but he's not going have to miss the rest of the semester due to deathly illness.

In the fiction class of joy and...other things, no real travesties to date but last night's viewing of Star Wars Episode III (besides completing the first stage of my Jedi training) has also confirmed that there was really no original detail in that story that I was writing about. Sigh. So now what do I do? Furthermore, our beloved Lori Huth (fiction prof. extraordinaire) is leaving to have a BABY! She also goes to my church group thing and is generally an awesome person and so this is beyond exciting news. There's a baby in her tummy and soon it's going to come out of her tummy and into the world! When you really think about it, that's rather fascinating, how does that even work, a person, inside of another person, coming out of that person to live an independent life. How bizarre. Oh, but also on the fiction front, I definitely found some consecutive pages of somebody's story in the recycling bin of the print center when I was looking for some paper the other day. Definitely featured a stallion from the plains of Amythrec with a curling mane and shadowy forelocks, or something like that. Why do I keep bumping into this stuff?

And, just for fun, I am including Kubla Khan by Coleridge. I have long been fascinated by this poem, particularly the last stanza, and what it says about the mystic power of the writer to create worlds and the fear that that ought to inspire. Maybe it just feeds my ego...Something more profound later, friends, I'm just not up to it tonight.

Kubla Khan
OR, A VISION IN A DREAM.
A FRAGMENT.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !
A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover !
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced :
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail :
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean :
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war !

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves ;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw :
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,

That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

The Day in Which Everything Occurred

Thursday, 10/26/06

So, there I was, a day away from our first batch of workshops in Writing of Fiction (I just lost about half the people who know me and who also actually live near me, they've already heard this story. Good, more for the rest of you) which, for those of you who don't live this crazy lifestyle, is where the class pretty much reads each others stories and then offers comments on them, four drafts to a class period. So, I pick up one of the drafts, the second one in fact that I was reading that day, and, well, I nearly had a stroke. I wished, in fact for a stroke, a stroke would have been preferable to the mental and emotional turmoil and anguish that I found myself thrust into. The topic of the story that I held in my hands could essentially be summed up in two words: Star Wars. The odd thing was, that the story wasn't just like Star Wars or inspired by Star Wars, it basically was Star Wars. I think there was only one new character introduced in the entire story, and it was hard to tell if he was the protagonist, or just an incidental instrument of the plot. But basically, nothing happens in the story that did not happen in some form in one of the movies. An example: In the beginning of the story there's a bunch of sci-fi jargon that I didn't really understand, and then the first coherent piece of the plot was this section explaining to us that Darth Vader used to be Annakin Skywalker, but he couldn't control his rage and felt the Jedi had betrayed him, so he went over to the Dark Side. Shocker! So, next we learn that Darth is really, really angry. He's like, so angry that it's red. It's like white, too, he's so angry that it's white rage which is also red. And the only thing that helps him handle this rage is by damaging others, you know, violence and stuff. It doesn't make the rage go away, or make it any less, but he just has to be violent because of this rage. So, next he turns around and picks up a construction worker with his mind, and chokes him, using the Force. No way! So he killed him by crushing his windpipe without even touching him??? Yeah, seriously.

So, the story is actually about this guy named Jublin Wens who was a Jedi and then kind of fell out of favor because he "failed" the Jedi order through something that sounded vaguely like an accident but then he learned to control his rage a grief (which Darth couldn't manage) and so they gave him a second chance, for which he is still grateful. So when the temple was taken over, this guy was working for the bad guys as a kind of secret agent. Darth is trying to send out a signal to call all the Jedi back to the temple so he can destroy them, while Jublin is sending out a counter signal to warn them all away. So, finally Darth comes to check on him in his little control room, and they have an exchange of words in which Jublin, obviously trying a devious tactical method to make it look like he's blowing his cover while really drawing the cloak of secrecy ever tighter around himself, defends, to DARTH VADER what awesome and generally good people the Jedi are, all the time acting like he's still on Darth's side. Okay...cool...you're losing me.

So then, after some witty repartee, Darth invites him into the hallway to show him...I don't know, his new puppy, when all of a sudden Darth whips around and is all like, "Hey, you can't fool me, I knew you were a Jedi the entire time, now you're gonna get it." Well naturally the light sabers come out and you're getting geared up for a duel to the death, when they exchange a couple of strokes before Jublin gets hit in the face at which point his "bones dissolve, his skin melts" and, in the end, "His head was simply gone." Wow. Really, these mere words cannot possibly convey to you the extent of my frustration in reading this. It was well-nigh impossible to even focus on the words of the story because you just already knew everything that was happening, so why bother. Really, I spent about half an hour to forty minutes reading this thing and trying to form a coherent response. Do you know what I could have been doing in that time? I could have had a great conversation, baked a cake, composed a sonnet, picked flowers, frolicked in a field. Really, anything, anything could have happened, but it did not, it did not happen because my time was taken up (wasted? can I say wasted?) with this thing. I felt rather insulted as a writer and as a human being to not even be faced with a scrap of attempted creativity. Really, I am often not impressed with my own work, you can tell me that my work is the crap of the universe and I might not even disagree, but at least it's my work, they're my characters, I formulate ideas of my own. And yes, yes, I know that there is such a thing in this world as fan fiction (due to the fallenness of man, I have no doubt) but I have been given to expect that even in fan fiction, something happens, something besides what happens in the plot of the movie. As in, the movie is assumed as background knowledge and then something new occurs not just, hey, this guy was trying to do this thing, but it didn't so much work out for him and then his face melts. And really, oddly enough, I have run into a number of people who just must not understand the nature of what we are dealing with here, because they are not really reacting to this information that I am putting before them. Although I have gotten the plagarism question a number of times. The answer is...I don't know. I wish it was illegal. But I just don't know.

Then...well, some more things happened. A day is long here. But then, at around 11:30 that night as I was putzing around the house, we got a phone call from Thryn, who was over at Jeff's house informing us that our dear boy, who has been feeling sick for most of the week at this point, has a fever of 103 and they're on their way to the emergency room. Oh. Ok. Susannah, who was the one on the phone, asked if she would like someone to come with them and Thryn, obviously very distressed was like, Uhh...yeah, sure, I guess. That was obviously going to be me, they're my Jeff and Thryn. We ride in the car a lot together, why not a trip to the emergency room? So I'm running all around the house to get together the stuff (coat, bag, etc.) and am ready to go in about 2 minutes. They are already at the door by this time, Kathryn had run in the house just as I was running out the other door...classic. So, we're all piled in the car and off. I have to say, it was a pretty tense ride for me. I cracked a lot of jokes, me and Thryn both did because what else can you do on a trip to the emergency room except for in between the jokes and the groans from Jeff, I was praying, I was praying hard, because I have had a fever that was 104 on a couple of occassions, and so people have told me stories, lots of nice stories about what happens to your brain when the temperature gets up that high. So, I was scared. Really, really scared. We were driving over to Wellsville, which was about half an hour away from Houghton. Only, when we got there, we could find the hospital. We ended up getting dumped in this residential area. A phone call to Shellie, EMT and direction giver. "Are you sure it's the first set of stop lights?" "I'm sure." It was the second set of stoplights.

So we made it to the hospital and then there was...the waiting. The waiting and not hearing anything. The waiting and trying to focus on homework grabbed for the purpose. The waiting in the room with the fat, old man who kept falling asleep and waking up whenever anybody walked in. Must be a good hospital, he doesn't seem too concerned for whoever he brought. The waiting for a total of four hours before they had lowered his fever and diagnosed him with pneumonia and sent us home. Phew. We were all ridiculously hungry by this point, but why would you stop at 4:30 in the morning to get food when all you wanted to do was get warm and get to bed. Definitely just hit the sack that night and slept until about 1:30 the next day. Had noble intentions of getting up in time for chapel, in time for class, in time for anything, but it did not happen. A very strange day, all told. I have been keeping unfortunately similar hours all weekend, so I have no idea how I will be able to get to bed tonight, or get up tomorrow morning. But, at any rate, this is definitely the most exciting day that I've had in a long, long time. Hopefully it will be the most excitement of that kind that I have for a long, long time. Get better soon, Pneumonia Boy!

Happy Val-Day!
S.

Thoughts on...Stuff

101, like the dalmatians (that was for you, Hope). So, I just had to change my password to get in here, again! I have about six that I use for the various things that I've signed up for, and I'll try them all in different configurations with different user names and even if I do eventually figure it out, the next time I can't remember which one it was that finally did it. Oh, the frustrations of modern life. Right now, I am watching Charlie's Angels and enjoying my last hours of indolence during break. Break was lots of fun, very restful. We got to watch the first two of the Star Wars movies (Episode I and Episode II) and I have already seen 4, 5, and 6, so I am becoming quite the expert. Soon I will be entirely indoctrinated into this closely knit and inconquerable subculture. Once I have unlocked it's secrets I will become the jedi that I was born to be! Also, I shot a rifle for the first time today. Actually, for the first five times. I was extremely averse to trying it, and I'm not sure why. I don't have any problem with guns or hunters or moral issues with it (though, for a hobby, it is a bit expensive, but there are worse). I just don't have good feelings about guns, I guess. But I thought it advantageous to take the experience that life brought me. And, big surprise, I have pretty darn good aim for a first timer. I hit a little can with my very first shot. I think that was very influential in causing me to try the other four shots. Guns are dangerous, though. You have to know what you're doing. Remember that, kids.

So, as so often happens in my goodly group of people, we found ourselves discussing the inimitable conundrum of gender roles in our society and our churches. Just note, everyone, that it was not my fault that this whole thing got started. I was just discussing the group on sexual purity that I taught this summer, and then Jeff went off on how our churches are feminizing young men. You know what the issue is, in my perspective, is that our churches are not really attracting anyone. I am pretty confused about gender roles, but I can clearly see that churches are not attracting men to act as mentors for younger men to teach them how to be men, whatever that means. But there are not a ton of godly women that I've run into recently that I want to be just like. At least, none that I know very well. There are also not a ton of godly teenagers in most of our churches. Who I see, here and in London, and in Australia, is plenty of older women, and some older men. People, if we don't do something soon, the church could just die off.

Okay, I am being facetious to a degree, but am I the only one who's noticed this trend? It's a little hard to establish mentoring programs when the younger generations, by and large, aren't interested. And, on top of that, what on earth is the church supposed to start doing to cultivate the "adventurous, wild heart" of boys. Isn't restraining what our schools and the work force, basically all institutions would be doing the same thing. What is the difference between taming and civilizing young men? I don't know the answers to any of this, quite frankly I am feeling more and more profoundly confused about all this the more we talk about it. I just don't think that there's any one size fits all approach to masculinity or femininity, or pretty much anything, for that matter.

I don't know, volunteers to take a stab at that?

Goodnight,
S.

Life's Gonna Suck When You Grow Up

Children, gather 'round. This is a rather monumental event in the life of this blog: my 100th post, the centi-post, if you will. Wow, I can't believe that I was actually able to commit to this thing for that long. This has gone from being a fairly personal tome to chronicle my life for myself and a few close friends to involving family, extended family, my mother's friends and maybe even a few strangers. You never know...after all, it is the internet. We've gone through two summers, a semester in Australia, and a full semester here at Houghton where I never really said a word except for...twice, I think. Ah yes, those were dark days.

But, I don't want this to spiral down into the dismal verbal depths of some kind of Oscar speech, and I really did log on with something to say (for a change) so I am now going to move on and say it.

It seems to be a common thread running through my dialogue with friends of late that there is reason to expect that life after graduation will in fact be worse than life before graduation. This generally puts me in a dismal mood for many, many reasons. First of all, I can take the point that this exposure to culture, to lectures by world famous authors and debates, gallery exhibits, concerts and operas, not to mention SPOT, will no longer be available after graduation. This is a major bummer because I am the only culture buff in my family, so far as I know, so after I graduate, when I come to be culturally starved as I know I will be, I will wheeze out one Saturday, "Can't we please go to a museum, a concert, something." Only to hear the gleeful but crushing reply: "No, we're going back to the mall!" Bleh. In my mind, you can only have so many pairs of jeans and that Agaci Too cami is going to rip after one good washing, but a night of intelligent conversation and deep thinking lasts forever, changes you in fact.

I don't need anyone to tell me that I won't have friends again after graduation. All your life you are socialized to this environment where you remain in groups of people the same age as you, when you get into college they even start breaking it up so you are generally put with people of the same sorts of interests. This is not even to speak of the contact with professor's and teachers who are at the top of their field, brilliant and wise and funny people whom you rather adore and don't really know where you will find in such high concentration again ever in your whole entire life. But then out you go into the world and there's no one there to meet but everyone, and what if you're just a shy sort of person who would rather not have to start all over making new friends and rebuilding her life AGAIN, after establishing a life she is already perfectly content with.

No wait, not perfectly content. The main flaw in my happiness here is and has always been the pace of life, the constant stress and busyness, the complete inability for anyone to get on top of their work, their social time, their family time or life in general. Yep, that's been rough for the past three years. But, ever optomistic, my goodly friends assure me that this, too, only gets worse after graduation. Out you go, free as a bird, for about 15 minutes before you're finding a job and a place to live, making the rent, doing the dishes and the cooking, washing your socks, then your husband might could come along and you have to rub his shoulders after a hard day at the office, take the kids out for soccer practice and piano and dance and gymnastics, and walk the dog. And what if you hate your job, it will still be what you spend the majority of your time doing. And then, they tell me, even when you come home you never catch a break, it's always errands this and demands that and another mess that needs cleaning up.

So here is the picture that's been painted for me: no culture, no intellectual stimulation, no friends, no mentors, no time, no peace, no reflection, no joy.

Well, poop.

That is what I have to say, poop on that. If that's the case, then you better believe I'm gonna be a super senior; I'm gonna be really, really super by the time my 32nd year of college rolls around with still no graduation in sight. But you know what, no matter how convinced everybody seems to be, no matter how convinced I feel, I can't believe that. First of all, even if you do have house chores to do after a day of work, it's at least a change of pace, which is very different from the schoolwork all day, go home and do homework mentality of education. Furthermore, I reckon it's almost impossible to go through life without making any friends. There's got to be people like the people I know here elsewhere in the world. After all, after I graduated from high school I didn't think I'd ever find anymore friends, and now I practically have more than I know what to do with. (she pauses and blinks, trying not to think of her earlier comment about how the educational system facilities friendships. Even if I am an introvert to the Nth degree, other people are still extroverts, so with a half decent attitude I might just be able to find somebody. And then invite them over for soup and to play Cranium some night when you're all NOT doing homework. Besides which, there's a good possibility that I could end up as a writer. Do you know how much "alone time" writer's are supposed to have (i.e.-time for them to doodle around in their creative juices and basically do whatever they want?) Sure there are the pressures of publishing. But most writers simply do not spend the entire day writing, which suits me just fine. Gives me time to learn to play the guitar, read books, build birdhouses and go for nature walks and any other wonderful occupation that might pop into my head. And, even, even if all this fails, there is always the nunnery. You don't think I'd do it, but I know I would. If I found life as crappy as every one seems to expect me to, it's off to the nunnery. So don't any of you be surprised if it happens, cause I told you I'd do it.

Anybody who wants to join me in the "Life is NOT going to suck after college" revolution, feel free to post a comment. But if you're here to rain on my parade, save it, because I already hear more crap than I can handle.

Your Toys-R-Us Kid,
S.

A Room of One's Own

While realizing this is out of season and irrelevant at this point, I like my pictures and so you get to see my room (my Houston room where I am not living right now) whether you want to or not! Here goes:



So this is the door to my room...



Really cool sign I made for my door...



I made this "Welcome" sign...it's corny, but...I made it!



Beautiful Spanish fan I got from my Pappap...



My sleeping spot, with pillows that I also sewed myself...



My goodwill coffee table and awesome rug thing...also my dresser



My bookcase and nautical corner...



The awesome view of the brick wall, brightened with my colored glass stuff...



Artsy shot of the bottles...



My (small) collection of antique photographs...



My closet decorations (including Reliant K and a map of Narnia...






Really awesome painting I made in my Studio Art class in high school...brownie points if you can guess the "mentor artist" and have any idea what kind of commentary I'm making in this piece.

That's all for now. I might have a couple of pictures that I'll use later. But, yes, all for now. I'm at school now in a completely different room which nevertheless looks really awesome. Do I see another photo essay coming on?

G'night,
S.

Close Call

So I'm sitting here, in my living room, taking care of business and getting drowsy when all of a sudden I hear this tapping noise at the back windows. Fortunately Heather is already in bed, but even as it is my heart is suddenly in my throat because it sounds for all the world like someone tapping away at the back door, looking for a way in, or at least punk kids throwing dirt clods at our windows. So, being the astute protector of the homefront that I am, I first run over and check the deadbolt. It is secure, so my next move is to go and get pants. I have no idea what's waiting for me in our backyard, but whatever it is, I am not willing to face it in my nightgown. So then I go and turn on the porch light, and the noises stop momentarily. I picture the punk kids seeing the light and knowing that I'm on the them, running away. But then the tapping noises start again, right around the door, sounding for all the world like a killer jiggling the knob. I slip open one slat in our mini blinds to peer out. No dark figures lurking around the door. Suddenly the noise changes, all of a sudden there's a buzzing. I picture a precision instrument slicing through the window glass near the knob. But then I realize that the noise is actually coming from way down in the corner, near the floor. I move to a corner window and look out to where I can see the jamb on the door. And sitting there on the stoop is what I would basically assume to be the biggest bug ever, pending the Guiness board's decision. I think there may have been more than one, but at any rate, this must have been the most determined. Confident that our awesome human-house building technology would keep the little critter out, but I did take the precaution of turning the lights back off so they would no longer be attracted. Now, granted, it was only a very, very large bug, but I think that I should be lauded for my exceptional bravery in guarding the homestead in my mother's absence (she has been in Denver all week). After all, it could have been a killer.

Oh, and I was working today on a photo tour of my room, which is very cool and I've been meaning to show you guys since we painted it. Now you might finally get a chance, but not tonight, since I don't have the pictures loaded yet. Tomorrow, maybe?

Yours with valor,
S.

One week to rule them all

Two major pieces of news since our return from the Hill Country: Last night was pie mania!!! My mom's friend is a prolific baker, but she admitted that she struggled with her pie crusts. I have never been able to make a decent pie crust in my entire life. So we all resolved to conquer this thing together. We got together and, long story short, we ended up making three perfect pies with the most tender, flaky, buttery gorgeous crusts you have ever seen in your life. One peach pie, and two chocolate cream pies. I was really nervous making the crust, but it was good to have Jeannie there, because her experience made me feel more at ease. The most difficult part was trying to decide when to stop adding water, but we must have gotten it right because they came together like magic. Jeannie could whip out those crusts in no time flat, but she let me roll out one too. See, the thing that you have to realize is that a little tearing or cracking is no catastrophe, it's easy to pinch back together. I guess with pie crusts, perfectionism is overrated. Whupah, another notch in my belt of culinary seduction, another jewel in the tiara of this domestic goddess.

So the other thing is that I have my last honors project book due tomorrow. After that, I have the whole week to do what I will. And what I will is to try to squeeze everything that I have neglected to get to all summer into this one week. And my mom is going to be out of town for the entire week. I'm already going over my little list and wigging out over all that must be done before heading back to school. Fortunately, I have a big ol' slice of chocolate cream pie to help me calm down.

Phew...in, out, in, out,
S.

Nights in gems and clover

As I write this, los techodores are pounding away all over the roof of this house, day 2 of the racket that woke me this morning. We are getting a new roof this week, thanks to the damage done by a major hail storm this past spring and our friendly neighborhood insurance company. I can walk through the house and hear something that sounds like it's crumbling down right in front of me, only to realize that it's just those little pellets rolling down the roof. Crazy.

This past weekend I was again away, as you might have noticed. Maybe not. But that's okay cause I'm back now. We spent this last weekend in the Hill Country of Texas, visiting our good friends, Marda and Jerry. Let me just state right now, I love the Hill Country. It is so different from Houston, out in the country, hilly, arid, with almost a touch of tuscan flavor in the dusty, ruddy cliffs and large opulent houses that peek out from the tops of the hills. The yard every morning was full of hummingbirds whirring up to the porch for a sip of nectar and breast jays dominating the yard with flashes of brilliant blue. We watched over 3 million bats churn out of an old railroad tunnel before flying out to look for an evening snack. We floated down a gorgeous strech of the Guadalupe (in Texas pronounced Gwa-da-lopee) River in the shade of centegenarian cypress trees that reached down from their lofty heights, stretching to touch the face of the river. We went to an honest to goodness barn dance in an honest to goodness barn with open sides and twinkling Christmas lights hung from all the rafters. Country music abounded in the cool dark night and couples whirled in Texas two-steps around the dance floor with all the pagentry of Czar Nicholas' court. I sat in the night breeze on the third story porch overlooking the river valley at watched a million stars sweep over the sky and watched some of them shoot off in a solitary, short-lived blaze of glory. Then the moon rose over the farthest hill, large and orange as a Halloween pumpkin. So, all in all, it was a pretty amazing weekend. I felt like I was really getting a taste of what it is to be a Texan, long lazy afternoons on the river, barn dances in the evening, camp revival meetings and a lunch of barbeque and church ladies' covered dishes on a Sunday morning. I don't know if any of this makes any sense, probably not, because I have a major identity crisis when it comes to a geographic kind of belonging. Perhaps its better not to get too attached to Texas either, but I don't know, I can't really help it. I'm coming to like it here, or to like what this place or these people stand for, or something. But at any rate, it was a really great weekend, and very restorative. It gives me happy feels...okay, goodnight.

S.

God's Judgment on the Multinationals

Hello! As I believe I mentioned, I am back from Galveston and full of stories (more or less). The title of this post is a chapter (which I did not read) from another book on liberation theology (which I did earlier today). I think it is fairly amusing. These liberation theologians mean well, I know, but they beat a dead horse better than any other kind of theologian that I know. Well, here is the first story that I promised.

We stayed with a friend of my mom's who has a timeshare condo down on the beach of the Great and Glorious Gulf of Mexico. Now, we are already disposed, at this point in the story (the second day of our stay)to be displeased with the good people of the Silverleaf resorts because of the stories that our friend Jan has told us of their atrocities. They employ high-pressure sales tactics to entrap potential buyers and scare the life out of them till they have no choice but to buy. Their smooth talking ways have pulled the wool over the eyes of many an unwary consumer who realized only too late that they were being given the runaround. Well, then when Jan went to listen to one of their seminar spiels, having been promised 100 dollars if she would come, was then given only 50 dollars because they said they hadn't realized that she had not driven down exclusively for the seminar. Imagine! We were much incensed, having heard of these manifold travesties, but nothing could prepare us for what lay ahead.

We had planned on playing an innocent game of minature golf on the condo's facilities. We forayed out one evening after a dip in the pool, hoping that the water would keep us cool while we played. It did that, but I think it also managed to attract every single mosquito in the Greater Harris County area. So there we are slapping away through our first eight holes until someone says lamentingly, "I wish we had some kind of mosquito repellent." To which Mom suddenly replies, "Oh, we do, it's over in the swim bag!" Said swim bag had been sitting over a few yards from the golf course the entire time, so we all felt quite foolish. But I digress, this, although amusing, obviously has nothing to do with the depredations of Silverleaf Resorts.

So there we are, putting away to our hearts content, most of us (being me, my sister, my mom, and my mom's friend's daughter) being pretty darn bad at the game. Then, of a sudden, we reached the dreaded 10th hole! !!!*bum ba bum*!!! Well the construction of this particular hole was remarkably challenging because it backed right up to a little pond, and the hole was at the top of the green butting right up against the side of the pond. So, undaunted, I lined up my shot, right around the curve racing up the green and heading right for the wall where it would ricochet back and into the hole for a perfect shot, a hole in one. At least, that was the intention. What really happened is that the ball hit the back wall, flew up into the air and, ploink!, into the pond. Oh bother. Now, before you laugh too hard, you must realize that the wall of this hole was so poorly constructed as to practically shoot the ball into the pond for you. You know how most holes have a little raised wall around the green to keep the ball in? This one was made of concrete, raised only about a half an inch above the green, intended to look like natural rock, so it sloped right down into the water. We should have been wary after this obvious set-up, but being of a trusting and naive nature, I thought nothing of it and volunteered immediately to go to the rec center for a new ball.

Off I tromped, only to be brusquely informed at the counter that I needed to give him a dollar for a new ball. I replied almost as curtly that I didn't have dollar and high-tailed it away again. Upon returning, sans ball, I explained with much indignation about the dollar. The indignation was obviously contagious, and soon everyone was up-in-arms over this outrage. Clearly these brigands had designed the hole in such a way as to suck in stray golf balls into the depths of the murky green, stinking water so they could claim a dollar and claim a profit on an otherwise profitless course. Belive it or not, while we were able to sit by in the face of all the other atrocities, this was the straw that broke the camel's back. We resolved, of one mind, that we were not going to pay that dollar.

Into the stinky pond we plunged our four clubs, scraping along the bottom through the muck in search of a golf ball, any golf ball, that could be successfully brought to the surface. There were a number that we could feel on the bottom, but none of them could be dragged up with the narrow heads of the clubs. All the time that we were trying, other folks were passing by, trying to play their game. We looked pretty silly there in everybody's way. But it all payed off when Mom finally managed to fish a yellow golf ball (mine had been purple) out of the pond. In triumph we marched back to the counter and slammed our balls down on the table. The man looked questioningly at me until my mom interjected, "There they are, we have four balls." And he checked them in, fine free. As we walked away, someone suggested that we go back and dig more balls out of the pond to see if they would give us a dollar for each one that we returned. And yes, we didn't get past the tenth hole. No one really felt like playing anymore golf that night.

No more golf tonight either, I'm afraid.
Goodnight, all,
S.

Buzoo, buzoo

Hey little peeps,

Just wanted to let everybody (Hope) know that I'm going to be outta of town again this weekend. Crazy? You're telling me. My mom has been running around all morning like a chicken with her head cut off trying to hustle everybody out the door b/c she doesn't want to hit the southbound traffic on our way to Galveston. Trouble is that my sister's high school (ahhhh!) orientation was also today, so we're not able to leave until about...now. Gotta go grab my CD's so we'll have some good music for the car. Life!!!! settle down!

Pinas de alegria a todos,
S.

Everyone listen to me!!!

I feel starved for attention. I want friends. I am tired of summer. I feel yucky and I don't know why. I always feel like such a jerk when I feel sorry for myself because I am an upper-middle class white American and I have creme brulee in the fridge and I don't really have anything to feel bad about ever. Probably I don't feel bad. Probably I feel really good, and I am just confused. I am tired of my project and I am tired of my minutia. I am tired of the necklace I am wearing. It is a choker, which means it's kind of itchy. I want to have a great conversation, not over the phone. I want to get a really long letter. I haven't done the workbook for purity group tomorrow and I haven't done any reading today and I probably won't do any tomorrow. I have to cook a truckload of food for people and for this weekend and I wasted the afternoon making creme brulee which nobody wanted but me. I got my hair cut today, it looks cute. I went to the grocery store. I didn't get to the laundry. I took a shower. I tried to cook the dinner, but I couldn't get any farther than the marinade. This is how I spend my days. I take showers, I do laundry, I clean up the kitchen, I red up the living room, I unpack the groceries. None of my projects ever get done. I have no free time. I feel like I'm wasting time doing all these little tasks. My religious training tells me that nothing is really minutia in the long run. Brother Lawrence says that...well I'm not really sure exactly what Brother Lawrence says. It's something about worshipping God in the mundane, in acts of service. Whatever, apparently I have trouble believing this anyway. Why do I do all this stuff? It certainly isn't for the accolades of family and friends. I drove my sister half an hour to her friends house today and she left the car without even saying thank you. I need perspective. What is the big picture. How do all of these little things turn into something worthwhile? Am I just wasting my time? What about this so called "project" that keeps taking up so much of my time? Is there any point to this stupid thing, or am I just trying to look cool and academic and have some kind of thing jigger put next to my name at graduation. I did this project because I hoped to reach people and bring clarity, but who is ever going to read it? Maybe if I'm lucky I'll get friends and family members and maybe a few profs, but won't I just be preaching to the choir? Is this the worst post ever, or is it just me. Lord, help us, stop whining! I wish I had said something interesting. I really do have interesting thoughts at times, I don't know what's the matter with me tonight. Maybe I'm just tired. This might have been too much belly-aching, but I hope at least that my speculations about what makes activities meaningful and what is the use of the mundane in our lives, maybe those have been more interesting than the past few posts.

Goodnight, poor brow-beaten readers,
S.

Home again, home again, jiggity jig

It is one o'clock. I have been doing laundry and messing around on Facebook like a yokel. I wish I had taken a shower instead. I want shower. I have a lot of reading to do this afternoon. Omaha, Omaha, what can I say about Omaha? While I was gone, my laptop has completely blown out. Most of the files have been recovered, but most of my music is conspicuosly missing. I don't like computers anymore. In Omaha, I did many things. I went to a dog show and ooohed over the golden retrievers. I ate chocolate covered strawberries. And chocolate covered everything else. I had some of the best meals I have ever had in my life and some very good wines. Great salmon in Omaha. I finally (finally!) saw Pirates of the Caribbean 2, and was much incensed by the behavior of one Elizabeth Swan. I read Taming of the Shrew because Francis thinks that Petruchio is perty much the coolest guy ever. I stayed up until three in the morning, sitting in Hope's car in front of her house and talking (no surprises there). We drank margaritas an hour too early for happy hour and had to deal with a very creepy waiter. We walked around the larger half of Zorinsky lake while the sun went down. I went to the Afternoon, the coolest store to ever grace the corridors of Westroads Mall. I saw two incredible photography exhibits at the Joslyn Museum. Edward Weston is one cool dude. I spent an afternoon at the zoo, rode the dragon on the carousel and got to see the bats, my great, great love. Took a ton of pictures, you can see some eventually. I have to go to the Post Office today and hopefully pick up my copy of the Emporer's New Groove. I am going now to cook some bulger wheat to go with my cucumber yogurt sauce. I still want a shower.

~S.

Goodbye, friends...

Well, this is it. I have finally finished all things. All things that there are in the world to do...no, wait, I just feel that way, really I just got done the stuff for tomorrow. That's pretty much the way it is with me, I get enough done for just one more day. Ah well, I have been reflecting upon my lifestyle lately, reflections which alas I cannot share right now...maybe soon? Maybe not, I'm gonna be gone for a week. See you next Saturday.

Goodnight,
S.

Ketchup

I hereby dedicate this post to my dear friend Tim Boland, who requested "bizarre and whimsical vacation stories." I don't have much, actually, this vacation was a whole lot of floating of the waves of the great blue and lying in the sun and flying my wonderful kite with the picture of the sailboats by the setting sun on it. We flew it higher than the building we were staying in! But anyway, aside from all the relaxation, I would say that the most bizarre event would be our trip to Fuddpucker's, a Destin, Florida institution. The greatest attraction to draw the tourists into Fuddpucker's aside from their "world-famous t-shirts" was the live alligators. Tourists crowded around the railings, leaning over to gaze into the pit of doom to see the dread monsters. So, we looked over the rail, and there, down on the sand, was....vreet, vreet, vreet! a bunch of iron-colored, footlong lumps that did absolutely nothing for so long we thought they must not actually be alive! You know, they advertise these live alligators, and I expect 12 foot long beasts with vicious toothy grins. I expect trembling keepers to throw them whole coons or possums which they would swallow with one snap of their immense jaws. Instead, the "feeding" of these alligators was conducted by the children who stood around the pit, lowering down tiny bits of red something on a long fishing pole kind of thing, which the alligators were too boring to even pay attention to. All in all, I was very disappointed by the alligator.



The other thing that I found rather atrocious was that one of the keepers was standing with one of these miniscule alligators with its mouth taped shut so silly tourists could touch it w/o worry. Poor gator! The other thing that was pretty bizarre, besides the skin tones composed of tans/burns that these sun worshippers acquired, was the giant outlet mall that we visited almost every day. So much commercialism...my eyes are still trying to focus. It is so hard not to get sucked in. Okay, another story...this picture is of Armond, my frog-prince lover. Seriously, it's true! One night (subsequent to the lizard episode) my sister came running in panicked by the presence of a frog in the garage under my mom's car. After extracting the critter with a broom, I relocated him out to the yard so he wouldn't get shut in for the night. But then, only minutes later, I recieved the report that the same frog had showed up on our front porch. I looked out the window, and there he was, crouched by the door, obviously waiting to get in! So, Armond and I have developed a very special relationship. No kisses yet, but Armond is a very persuasive little bugger, and besides, he's so cute! Okay, that's all for tonight. Hopefully I will be able to post again this week.



Goodnight electrons, spinning through the jars,
S.

I'm Baaaaack...

Creepy, isn't it? We just got back about an hour ago, so you should all be very impressed with my faithfulness in blogging. So far we have unpacked the car, I have gotten the extensive amount of mail we got while gone, checked my e-mail and deleted all the junk mail, (which was copious)and now I am checking in on my blog and absentmindedly watching the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the part where Verucca is singing her song about the golden eggs. I always thought that both Wonka movies were a little bit bizzare, a bit too psychedelic for me. And I am mulling over all the things that must be done not only tonight, but all this week because a week from today, I am shipping out again for a week in the fair land of Omaha. What could be grander than my glamourous life? Oh, and in other news, I am officially signed up on Facebook, though my little profile jigger is not as complete as I'd like it to be. But I was swayed, despite my better judgement, by an impassioned plea, and because it was also well-reasoned, I gave in. So look me up, amigos, b/c right now it looks like I have no friends. And tell everyone that it's up there, that will save me the trouble of a mass e-mail. All right, this really wasn't meant to be a full blown post, just a heads-up, I'm back in town.

All right, homies, see you in the 'verse,
S.

More Rain?

It rained again today and tonight, it is raining right now as I write this...where did I leave the keys to my ark? I am frantically trying to finish A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutierrez before we head out for vacation on Saturday early, which means I have to get it back to the library tomorrow. 2 more chapters to go and the left hemisphere of my brain is throbbing still. I am so irritated by this project, I just want to be lazy and have fun all the time. Fortunately we are leaving soon for vacation in Destin, Florida, where we will relax and have fun on the beach and do nothing all the time, and I will only bring one skinny book to work on and some big fat books to read for fun. So ha! academia, I still refuse to sell my soul to you. Today was the first official meeting of our purity group that I am leading for church for the youthies, I bet you're all dying to hear about that and I'm dying to write about it. I have thought of so many things that I have wanted to post about, but I have been in straight up reading mode, so they have gone unwritten, maybe I can do that while we're gone too. Okay...2 more chapters...(and kudos to you, Hope for your amazingly consistent posting of comments!)

Yagua Days

I read a very good book by this title once in the days of my youth. It is illustrated by Jerry Pinkney, one of the greatest of all children's book editors. It is about a Puerto Rican boy growing up in New York, where there is nothing to do on rainy days. But then, when he finally gets to go to Puerto Rico, he finds that there rainy days, Yagua days, are the best days of all. Today we had our own Yagua day of sorts, and a very interesting one it was too. First I spent the morning at the dentist, which always makes me think of torture chambers and interrogation and cyanide capsules, even though it never hurts too terribly much, I like to dramatize things. But anyway, the time at the dentist had ended, and back we hopped to the car, realizing in the process that a torrential downpour had just started. On our way back home, the rain in the streets was getting fairly high. On our way back through the neighborhood, the water was inches deep across the entire street and was running up in impressively high sheets on either side of the car. Well, my sister was enthralled, I started to get a little worried about the engine water-logging. Fortunately, before that could happen, the passenger side of the front seat started to take on water through the door. I could hear the SUV driver up ahead snickering, "Hey, I may have to spend 80 dollars on gas every week, but at least my car is prepared for these once-in-a-lifetime emergencies." After we plowed our way home we spent a bit of time bailing out the backyard, where the water was lapping around the back door. The little divits where the grass between two yards were flowing liberally with rain water making it's way down to the street. So after the rain had slowed to a stop, we played around some more, sloshing through the grass and the ginormous puddles. All in all, it was an exciting morning. And, in case you were worried, the house is as yet unflooded.

Cheers, ducks,
S.

Hoop, there it is

Last night, my family and I took in the Comets-Monarchs game. The Comets, for you ignoramuses who do not follow the WNBA, is our local Houston basketball team, and the Monarchs are the Sacramento team. It was a great game, we actually got seats three rows away from the court b/c the reason we went in the first place was b/c a client of my mom's had given us the tickets. I totally support women's sports in theory, so it was nice to have a chance to support them in praxis. And it was really fun, those ladies play hard and I had fun watching the game. I like basketball a lot more than, say golf or baseball. I don't know much about the technical terms of the sport, so it would be difficult for me to give you the play by play. But I can tell you that the Comets won!!! Yay for us. Okay, okay, laying all my cards out on the table, the entire point of this post was to give commentary so I could post my pictures. Yay for pictures.

P.S.-Sheryl Swoopes is on our team...Yay for Sheryl!

"Death in his eyes..."

Okay, so this story has been ruminating in my mind for a while, and I've really wanted to share it with y'all, but I've been unable to just sit down and write. Now I have a few minutes, hopefully enough, so here goes.

My sister has been plagued of late by a little lizzard problem. And by little, I do mean little, the thing is not more than an inch long, but from listening to her tales you might expect to spot gargantuan beasts running around in our house. The first sighting of this little critter was one evening, in the laundry room, shortly before bed. I was calmly watching TV out in the family room when my sister comes in making this high-pitched noise and babbling, "Sister, sister there's a lizzard, come and kill it sister, come, come on, you gotta come, hurry," and etc. So, being the caring individual that I am, I quickly gave in and followed her back to the laundry room. I was almost a little hesitant to see what lay behind the open door, to check would have been to shut myself alone in a room with the unknown beast that had caused my sister so much fright. But I steeled myself and pulled the door closed, to reveal a tiny gecko, almost translucent in color and with eyes bigger than it's body proportions should allow, perched neatly on the wall. Of course, I know his description only by previous observation. I was armed with my rocketship cup to trap the little guy and take him outside, but no sooner did he sense the door moving than he began scuttling away like lightning.

He first moved to the corner, losing himself in the baseboards, which are white, and form an awkward angle, but before I could even contemplate how to deal with this new challenge, he was off again, scuttling across the floor, making a mad dash for the washing machine, which he quickly secluded himself under. Though I made a show of pulling out the clothes sorter which lay next to the washing machine to appease my sister, I knew after he was under the washer that it was basically a lost cause. My sister could not rest soundly unless we both bolted out of the room and closed the door behind us and then stuffed a rug into the crack so he could not follow. Unfortunately, my mother in her unthinking selfishness, moved the rug out of the way and opened the door the next morning to go to work, thus allowing our little friend to "escape." (Heather's words.) Any conscientious mother would have obviously gone out the front door and opened the garage from the front. Honestly.

But this was not to be our last encounter with the little guy. Again, winding down before bed in the family room, my sister comes out in an even greater state of panic, babbling that when she moved a pillow away from the wall in her very bedroom, there he was, waiting on the wall above her own bed! I went into the bedroom with all due haste, fearless now, knowing my enemy. But the wall, this time, was entirely blank, no lizzard in sight. I thought I saw something down on the bit of baseboard exposed between her desk and her bed, but when I bent to check closer, he scuttled away to the tangle of cords, printer, and just plain crap in the abyss located under my sister's desk. I moved the printer, rocketship cup again in hand, but he scuttled away as quickly as ever and I lost track of him momentarily. (Keep in mind, too, that the whole time I was looking my sister was standing up on the window seat, her face looking kind of crumpled as she emitted a constant, high-pitched whine a couple octaves higher than a dog's.)I sat staring at the mess beneath the desk forlornly, when suddenly I saw the little beastie scuttle up the side underneath the desk and slip into the desk drawer. This last sighting, however, was not mentioned to my sister, as I checked the side of the desk and the drawer faithfully, but could not see hide nor hair of the creature again.

Quite a relationship, however, has sprung up between the two of them. There is reason to believe that the lizzard from the laundry room and the bedroom are the same fellow, so my sister has christened him Leonard or Lenny, for short. However, this familiarity does not increase their affection, my sister is convinced that these strikes were planned and aimed towards achieving an ever increasing proximity to the target, namely, her. "You should have seen the way he looked at me when I found him behind those pillows," she says from time to time with a terror-glazed look, "There was death in his eyes!" Fortunately there has not been a repeat incident since the offense in the bedroom, and I have told her that I recieved a note from Lenny, informing us of his plans to move to Germany to pursue his plans of racing on the Autobahn. Whether or not you are willing to believe that I did recieve such a note, well, that's up to you.

Good luck, Lenny, wherever you are.
S.

OMG!

Guys, this is the coolest, I just figured out how to add photos to my blog. I am a goddess! This is gonna be great. The test picture up here is a classic. This is a statue of Buddha sitting in his lotus flower in the Christmas parade in Hobart, Tasmania. So not only do you have the irony of Buddha in a Christmas parade, this is also a great picture b/c I took it in Tasmania, and everything that happens in Tasmania is automatically cool. Like, "I bought this milk from a milk machine...in Tasmania!" Wow, great story! Okay, gotta run, we are currently sipping margaritas and munching on chips and guacamole. I love living in Texas...but don't tell John Wesley.

Later,
S.

Grrrr...

I am not having the greatest night. I meant to post, but I've been having computer problems for the past week, so I can't get on the internet. My display is being jerky too. Jeff, I want you here to tell me what's going on so I can stop worrying. Instead of posting, I spent the night backing up my files to our travel drive, and freaking out about my honors project, since I made the mistake of projecting into the future and trying to guess how long it's going to take and how much work I'm going to get done by the end of the summer and the answer is not much, even though I'm giving so much time to this. And so I'm frustrated and tired and irritated with everything. I think I'm just going to go to bed.

Barge,
S.

I really never meant to work myself to death...

Okay, I thought about it, and even though it's long, I thought it would be a good idea to post my project proposal for my honors project up here. I'm probably going to be talking about it or at least referencing it lots this summer, since it's already consuming boatloads of my time, and you should be able to have at least some idea of what I'm doing if I plan to talk about it that much. Skimming is encouraged, it did take up three pages in MS word. I didn't post the five page bibliography, because that's just scary. Anyway, I hope this is somewhat interesting, and of course, if not you always have the option of averting your eyes. And stay tuned, I've got a couple of actual posts brewing in my head, I just haven't really had time to commit them to paper yet.

Shannon Callan
Honors Project Proposal
Advisor: Dr. Linda Mills Woolsey
Readers: Dr. Terence Paige, Dr. Marcus Dean, Prof. Lori Huth
"Word in Flesh: A Contextualization of Christ’s Parables for 21st Century Minds"

Perhaps one of the greatest questions facing the church in the West today is the question of relevancy. It often seems that there is a growing gap between the understandings, language and concepts that are common in churches and among Christians and the understandings of those concepts among the common person on the street. Also adding to the problem of this chasm is the growing biblical illiteracy of the average American or European today; many cannot even answer the most fundamental questions about the content or meaning of the Bible. This is an especially pressing crisis in the area of evangelism: if ordinary people cannot understand the words or concepts Christians use to communicate the gospel, how can we tell them the good news about Christ? One possible answer to this problem is the teaching form of the parable. It is well attested, especially in postmodern scholarship, that story-telling is a very effective way of teaching and communicating. But if those very parables that Christ used to show a picture of the Kingdom of God are in that same confusing language and drawing on those same concepts, how can they be of any more assistance? I believe that what is needed is, in a sense, a “translation” of these parables. In my project, my goal will be to decipher biblical parables into parables that contemporary, unchurched people can relate to and understand, yet are still faithful to the original intent as communicated in the biblical text.

I will attempt to do this with four parables from the gospels by putting them through a three stage process. This process will be interdisciplinary, drawing not only from the field of literature, but also from biblical and cultural study. In the first stage, I will use biblical and hermenutical tools to do exegesis on each of the passages to find out as clearly as possible what they meant in their original first century context. I will first do some introductory reading on the biblical parable form and Jesus’ use of it as well as some general reading on paradigms for parable scholarship. I will be looking in depth at each of the selected texts (listed in the outline) and also looking into the cultural background of the concepts that are alluded to which Jesus’ first listeners would have been intimately familiar with. With the information that I uncover, I will be writing a “mini-exegesis” paper for each of the parables of 5 double-spaced pages each.

In the next stage I will be looking at interpretation of the parables from the standpoint of liberation theology in a Latin American context. This will aid the final product in giving me a fresh perspective on the parables by stepping out of the traditional ways of interpretation and seeing how one culture has made these parables meaningful in their context. I will first be doing some introductory research to the process of contextualization of biblical and theological concepts and then doing some introductory reading to gain a better understanding of liberation theology and its growth in Latin America. I will then look specifically at Latin American liberation readings of the parables to gain greater understanding of their unique interpretive paradigm. The final product of this phase will be a research paper about 10 double-spaced pages in length.

The final phase of this project will be my creative response to my research in the form of fictional retellings of the four parables I have researched, set in the 21st century and using language and concepts that will be as familiar to my readers as the concepts that Jesus used would have been to his. This is where the “translation” work of my project will be done as I seek to find concepts in modern understanding that are comparable to the ones that Christ used. For this portion I will first do preliminary reading of other literary precedents in this kind of interaction with the biblical texts and then write drafts and revise to form final copies of my own parables.

Puffy Pink Clouds of Insulation

It's kind of been funny to have my sister away at camp. Everybody keeps asking me what I did all week, as if I would have accomplished some great important deeds in her absence. Alas, I don't really think that was the case. I watched Casanova with my mom on Sunday, went for lots of walks, cooked nice dinners for us (Baked Chicken and Cheese Enchiladas and Reuben sandwhiches) made iced tea, went to the library a lot, cleaned the whole house, went to Bible study on Wednesday, got most of the clutter in my room back under control and spent lots of time researching for my fantastic honors project. I've been researching like a fiend, or as much like a fiend as I can research, since most of the books I need I have to order through Interlibrary loan and so they won't be coming for about another week, and I'm really afraid they're all going to come at the same time, and then I'll have to read 10 books in 14 days and I think by the time they finally get in it will be almost time for us to leave on our vacation. I'm biting my nails a bit over this one. But that's about all the excitement that's been happening this week.

I feel a great deal of pressure to make a very good blog right now, since I just e-mailed a bunch of people about its existence and so they might be visiting. Company prose, boys and girls, we might have unexpected guests. Anyway, one of the things that happened this week is that we had to clean out our spare room, my mother's former office and my current office, since I'm a very important person with an important project now and my room has no desk and my mother always works at her own office downtown. But there was a former adventure before I made it home with this spare room, involving the washing machine in the room next door, which my sister tried to operate while the hose was disconnected, and it ended up spraying water all over the floor. The water then leaked into the closet of the spare room and caused a most fragant layer of mold to grow on the carpet. So my mom dragged everything out of the closet so we could cut out the old, moldy carpet.

But that's not even the adventure. My mom wanted to get a scrap piece of carpet for the newly denuded floor from our attic, so I pulled down the ceiling hole and up we went. The carpet was tucked away in a space that was off the beaten attic track, in order to get there you had to cross a narrow board that had been placed over a trecherous land mine of puffy pink insulation that concealed the fact that there was nothing beneath you except the brittle drywall of the ceiling. Well, it was across this narrow walk that my mom had committed herself to sojourn. However, there was the additional fact that part of my sister's old bed, the really heavy row of drawers had recently been moved up to that out of the way space. Since it was too long to fit neatly, it hung out and squarely covered the end of that narrow board.

First step, my mom inched her way out onto that flimsy board and reached over this huge, spongy silver pipe kind of thing to push the drawers off to the left. Now they sat only about halfway on the board and teetered precariously as if they wished to tumble off. My mom had to inch over to the right to avoid the drawers and began to teeter herself, so near the edge of the board. I watched in breathless suspense, helpless to give any aid and wondering which catastrophe would strike first, the drawers tumbling off and falling through the ceiling to land in the laundry room, or my mother tumbling off to fall through the ceiling and land in the garage. When the tension was almost too much to bear, I suddenly heard a crack from the board. I shut my eyes and let out a little shriek, expecting the worst. But the board held, my mom snatched the scrap of carpet, and hurried back, balancing half on the battered board and half on one of the wooden ceiling timbers, inches from death. But back she came, and all was well in the land, another near death experience averted, and the people rejoiced: "Huzzah!" You'll all be thrilled to hear, I am sure, that the new carpet was laid, all the crap was moved back into the closet, and now my office all but sparkles in the newness of cleanliness.

All right, phew, this is why I don't post all that often, b/c they always end up being so long! Later, peeps, I'm going swimming!

S.

"Unless you are a protestant, cause protestants can't vote..."

Okay everybody, it's time to vote:
(the quote is from www.makingfiends.com)

Should Shannon join up with Facebook (another internet service on which she can waste time and yet somehow also neglect) or no?

Also, if you have awesome pictures of me, send them to me b/c I am already looking for my senior picture...

That is all.

Kids, Ants and Rain

So, last week was the great Art Reach of famousness, from which I should regale you with many heart-warming and harrowing stories. Well, I will perhaps not regale you with many stories, so if I only tell you a few, I shall make sure that they shall be high quality. I think, perhaps, the most interesting day was actually the very last, for which we rearranged the schedule so that the kiddos could get some rehersal in for their show. First we congregated them in the gym, which was no mean feat in itself b/c there were over 200 kids in total at our camp. Then we herded them in groups out to the stage, which was outside. First, as we were settling the drama kids in their places in the grass in front of the stage, a few of the kids in the back row lept up yelling. Quick-response investigation revealed that those particular children had been seated in a very large nest of fire ants. Fire ants, for those of you who are not privileged enough to be Texas residents, are biting bugs who's stings hurt about 5 times as sharply, and 5 times as long as mosquito bites. So these kids were not very happy, and neither were the guides who were working crowd control trying to keep the other very curious tykes away who's first impulse in responding to the screams was to run over and get bitten themselves. So, a large area of grass was taped off and order was restored, although a number of kids seated near the taped off area looked very concerned about their tender tushes.

So we finally got all of the kids out and seated and more or less quiet, and were just beginning to run them through the walking around that they would have to do, when the first drops started falling. Perhaps I should have mentioned earlier that the weather for this particular day had not been at all promising, dark and gray and very windy. So the first drops began to fall and as they came more and more quickly, the kids were getting more and more restless. The youth pastor tried to reassure everyone, "Don't worry kids, it's just a sprinkle," and on we went. But then the rain reached some kind of unspoken critical mass and the drops started falling heavily and, as if on cue, all 200+ kids started screaming. The grown-ups all threw up their hands and laughing and the rain fell down on us all quite steadily. We started moving the kids back in trying to keep some semblance of order, and wouldn't you know it, right as we did that, the rain slowed and stopped.

Now, for a couple of cute kid moments: we were working on these crazy wire sculptures, which were easily the most difficult art projects of the week, and not terribly successful. Basically all the kids, K-5th grade were give a couple of feet of wire, and were told to bend it into some kind of skeleton for a summer symbol that they would then cover with yarn. Well, these kids got so frustrated with this project...a couple of quotes overheard: One girl working on her project said lamentably, "This is not turning out the way I expected it to." Another boy, when asked by a guide what he was making replied dazedly, "I have no idea."

I don't want it to sound like the week was negative, that's not true at all. It was a wonderful week, pouring into the lives of these dear little ones. It was an entirely gorgeous show, the props were beautiful, you could actually hear the children singing their cute little songs and the set was fantastic, their were swiveling panels along the back w/ seasonal icons that switched over for the final number into a kind of pastiche of the different descriptors of God. It is a beautiful thing to see children worshipping God, even in their lack of understanding and naiveté. And they are lovely people, for the most part, tho some of them can really give you a run for your money. I also got to put together a kind of free form poem out of the adjectives and phrases about different seasons that the children wrote up on our "Wonder Wall" (which, by the way, got the song stuck in my head all week). I would post the poem, but I think that the only existing copy is floating somewhere in Calvary Community church.

So that's the Art Reach scoop, sports fans. Hope you got enough FYI, because that's all I'm writing for tonight. Have copious peace in your souls, and eat more fish. I know I do.

Peace, love and crabs,
S.

Greetings, citizens

I have just come to a screeching halt from a week of headaches, running, boundless enthusiasm, sticky hands, baby wipes covered in paint, loud kids, discipline and rule-enforcing, and art, art, art. That's right, friends, Art Reach is officially over. It has been a great week, but it is hard to feel enthusiastic when I am this tired and my feet are this sore. So, stories later. I just wanted to say that I miss you all a great deal, and I am sorry that I have not been e-mailing or calling, but life has basically been on hold for the entire week and now I am behind on everything. But life will resume on...Monday. I think. There is so much that I have wanted to do and I have not been able to get to much of anything, since I've only been here for two weeks, one of them entirely consumed with our VBS. Lord help me, I feel like this summer is already passing me by. Ugh, I don't want to think about anything right now. I just wanted to say I am not dead, I have not forgotten you, you will, I hope, hear from me soon.

Adios, mis aguacates,
S.

Again!

Look! Look at me, y'all, I'm posting. I just posted yesterday and I'm posting again today! I'm the awesome. So, today was the first day of Art Reach, which was pretty cool. I had a fun time working with all the little kids, both the small ones and the youth sized ones (it's pretty funny b/c sometimes I can't tell which is which). I was helping out in the art room today, which was unbelievably hectic. We were trying to get the kids to do prints made out of foam. They would carve an image into the foam and we would roll paint onto it. The idea was that the places that they carved should have stayed white, but the foam was so thin that the paint got everywhere and most of the prints were just blobs of color. Some of the kids apparently got upset about this lack of success, but in my room I think there was too much chaos for the kids to really internalize what was going on enough to react. And when I say chaos I mean 30 small children, paint and sharp sticks kind of chaos. It was wild, but I really don't mind that kind of madness, I can usually keep my head pretty well even when a lot of different things are happening at once. We had props workshop in the afternoon with a lot of highly technical Crayola marker field and had a great time regaling some kids with the wisdom that I've gained in my 56 years of life, much of it lived before the invention of telephones. Really guys, there was so much crazy noise and motion and thinking ahead and thinking on your feet and I was busy constantly, but it was great and vibrant and I loved hanging out with the kids and teasing them and playing duck-duck goose and enjoying hearing about their schools and lives. They are very funny and...bold. They don't seem to be afraid of anything. I have lots of theories about kids (as I'm sure Heather will tell you, she's a guide this week, so she's hearing a lot of them) but one of the things that I don't understand is why we make these blunt categorical distinctions between children and adults. Adults are not the only ones with thoughts or the only ones with knowledge to impart. I swear I learn as much, and with such freshness, from hanging out with kids as I do when I'm at school, it's just a different kind of learning and a different kind of knowledge. I have much more that I could say about the things that I have been thinking about children and adults, and will probably come up with even more in my current practicum, but for now it's getting late and I have to get up rather early tomorrow to continue spreading joy and goodness throughout the earth. Btw, I had a call from the library, and I hope and pray that it is about my wallet. Please God, let them have found it...

Goodnight all,
S.

Happy Birthday Blog!

So...welcome back Kotter? I think, my goodly friends, that I would like to resolve to post more often, I would like to resolve to start posting on a daily basis, at least for the remainder of the summer. I will not, however, go crazy with things that I cannot actually commit to. I have been surprised thus far by how busy the summer has been, in spite of not having a job and not having a true and for real internship. I have spent a lot of time at church getting ready for our special VBS which is happening starting tomorrow and going until next Friday. It's kind of different because we have a big production that all the kids spend the week working on in different workshops like acting and art and music and then it all comes together in this big show. It's pretty fun. I will be working with the art/props group and just generally helping. We'll have lots of little kids to hang out with, as well as being able to continue making friends in the youth group, since they're basically running the whole bible school. In other news, I can't find my wallet, which has been a total bummer for me. So, if any of you have seen it, I'd appreciate a locator. I don't like this post, I'm really not feeling it tonight. Tomorrow, tomorrow I'll be witty and brilliant. Postpone the magic for another night. I'd just like to include a shout out to Thryn, the only person who consistently posts comments. And Eddius, I think you're the reason my wallet's gone. Guilt upon your head!

~S.

Hmmmm-bop

It is, as my esteemed friend Thryn has so aptly pointed out, May now. I did not write a decent post over Easter break. I, in fact got very little done of obligatory type value over Easter break, though I did have a very good time and do many recreational/outdoorsy types of things in that time. This is no good. This blog is not a very talky one. Well, perhaps someday soon, when the terror of finals is over, we can return to the sweet grasses of leisure and I can post at will. I make no promises, though. I never make promises, because they are like piecrusts, or something like that. Pie...now that is tasty.

~S.

P.S.- I just realized that this blog has had about 1 post a month for an entire semester. That is sad. I also realized that this blog is soon to have a 1 year anniversary. We should get it a cake. Or at least start posting more. :-P

Oh, you tragic thing...

Not a word on here since last break. And not many more tonight. I am in a pissy mood since I have spent another very long while trying to find a half decent summer job and no avail has yet availed itself. But I was distracting myself by reading the blogs of others and then I remembered, wait, I too have one of these, and now here I am, to say not much at all other than that I am still alive, I'm on Easter break, and I'd like to write a half decent post at some point here.

Goodnight, friends.

She said from the mountain...

It is almost 11:00 and everyone else in the DeYoung house has gone to bed except me and Thryn. She keeps playing these riffs from electric cellos that she finds on the net, and tries to keep from swooning at the thought that she soon hopes to own one herself. There are laptops and papers and pens and thoughts scattered all over the dining room table. We three (Jeff, Thryn, and I) have spent the night looking for jobs. We are a dedicated bunch, you must give us that. No, that's not true, they are dedicated, I dedicate myself to nothing, but merely go along for the ride. Dedication is just another tether that ties you down to something, another block between you and the quick exit you might find it necessary to make.

I am moody tonight. I feel out of place, here among friends in safety, I feel uncomfortable in my own skin. I feel that failure is an inevitability for me. Think of all the people in the world who are so fantastic, living fantastic lives and doing fantastic things and meeting other fantastic people and regaling each other w/ tales, told w/ the unpretentious grace of those who need not impress others, of the places they have been, the things they have done, the lives they have lived; words blending with the steam from their macchiatos and rising towards God like the prayers of the saints. How could anyone ever think of me or my life as fantastic? Blast you, melancholy, self-deprecating thought, how dare you rear your ugly head! Pipe down, be content with your mediocrity, keep your head down and no harm will come to you. The problem with that is, for those content to live w/ thier heads in the sand, nothing ever comes to them at all.

Life is a chance, and I don't mean a gamble. It's an opportunity for things to be done and for things to happen, like one big, 90-year-long play that you get to be your own Shakespeare for. But then, you start the drama and you realize how much was scripted for you from the start, how much you cannot change, how many characters you are thrown into the mix with that you can't control or understand, how much of yourself you never meant to become when you first made your entrance as "Newborn Baby." And when you realize this, you start to let those unchangeable things push you around, and as they push you, you grow smaller and weaker, and they push more until you realize that, even though you once dreamed or wanted to, you can't write poems or act in plays, you can fight duels in the woods with sticks, you can't train to become a samurai or join the Legion or learn to load a musket in 20 sec. flat, you can't write songs or novels or preach a word that will change the lives of thousands, you can't build houses for the poor or rescue the victims of a mudslide or hurricane, you can't raise fat and happy babies in a neat country house with flower boxes below the windows, you can't tie your shoelaces or chew gum and walk at the same time. And then, oh then when you smash your face against the brick wall of can'ts, you forget the gift, you forget the excitement of being given the chance, you squander it by settling for less than life, real bone-shaking, earth-quaking, rattle-the-chimney, and knock-your-socks-off life, you settle deep down in your soul that this must be as good as it gets, b/c to go for better would cause work and pain and hardship and loss and who knows what else, it must, it surely must be better to just wait here and settle. And so you settle and settle, you turn 40 and 50 and you settle some more, you read the morning paper everyday and settle, your kids check you into the home and you settle there, until you settle your own dust down in the grave, wondering, "What the hell was that all about? Where was the big secret, the big, unlocking key that would have made it better, or okay?

My good friends and comrades-in-arms, I do not want to end up that way.

So what's to do, how can you not lose sight of the bigger picture of your dreams in your day-to-day of writing papers and taking tests and dancing to jazz music in the kitchen while you cook your omelet before the eggs go bad? I don't know. I do not know, if I knew, I would be doing much better right now, right here, in this 11:12 moment.

But maybe, maybe what you do is stay up just a little bit later, brush aside the stacks of papers and sleepy laptops, and you dream, just a little bit longer. I can't give up, no sir, not on a single dream, not even on the samurai dream or the dream of the little white house done up just so and filled with happy people. Some day, I think that all good dreams come true in some form or another. I am an idealist, and to be an idealist means that w/o these silly, happy thoughts and the requisite pinch of pixie dust, you die, and no amount of hand-clapping could change it. So I must continue to live in hope, to live in sunshine and the dreams of tall-sailing ships on open horizons, I will hope forever, for as long as I can, I will hope till I die as God gives me stregnth. I will act silly, I will shout hello to the full moon, I will tell the stories and sing the songs as long as there is an ear to hear them, even if that ear is only my own. Bah, idealism is for the birds! but birds fly, and angels fly, and someday I will fly too.

Romeo and Juliet were Never Really in Love: the Debunking of Popular Urban Myths

This is day three of the exile (can it really have only been three days? I can hardly believe it). Today I escaped into the wider world, which was about as frigid as anything can be in W. New York at this time of year. I think my hands near froze off on my way up to the library. But I managed to have a fairly productive morning looking at Keener's commentary on the gospel of John, which is wordy as anything, but full of good information. I honestly wished I had more time to spend with it, but it was hard to focus b/c I didn't get to bed until late last night and I had to be up early to go to the library this morning, so I was definitely falling asleep while reading. Not as bad as usual, but still I was glad when lunchtime was over. I will have completed almost all the research that I need for this fine paper just in the past few days if I stick to my plan. I rarely stick to my plans, but hey, a girl can dream. Today I actually got a ton of stuff done. I worked on all these applications for things and I wrote some poetry (basically crapful, but I'm still trying to tackle the whole formal poetry thing and it was better than last time, so I suppose I shouldn't complain. I also got to watch Rush Hour at lunchtime, which was quite a nice change of pace from all these movies I have been watching about death and war. I mean, there is a lot of death in the movie, but there's also a lot of great comedy, which makes up for it somehow. I thought of you a lot Hope, but I couldn't get a hold of you this afternoon by phone, so I had to content myself w/ our movie instead *tear*.

Anyway, all of that is superflous, here is the real news. I am becoming acclimated to my state of exilic solitude to the point where I am actually enjoying it quite a bit. This is, of course, a sure sign that my brain is going soft, but it makes everything in the immediate present fairly enjoyable, so I will ignore any potential long-term effects. But, for example, I get to play my music as loud as I like. Today I was singing a long to "War" at the top of my lungs, which I can do b/c hey, who am I going to bother? And furthermore, I have to say that I have been cooking the awesomest, tastiest meals for myself lately, not that there's anything wrong with the food that I eat normally, there's just something about still taking the time to cook something tasty, even if it's only for yourself. But the real sign that my mind is going round the bend is that I now talk to myself quite freely and openly. I find myself, as I have always expected that I would, to be an excellent conversational partner. It is grand to finally have some company again (aka-the sound of my own voice) after this time alone. I have a glimmer of hope that perhaps I might be able to become a decent hermit after all. I think honestly, it is just finally starting to sink in that there is, in fact, no one else here, so I can do what I want and not have to worry about looking dumb. Hooray, inhibitions are gone. Bring on the madness. All things considered, I think we should all be glad that I'm not doing anything worse than talking to myself and singing too loud and laying around reading Real Simple in the middle of the afternoon. Think of all the others things that I could be doing w/ my social inhibitions gone...