Today I met Amy at the worst Starbucks in the Midwest. If you are ever traveling across I-70, never, I mean never, stop a the Starbucks in Richmond, Indiana just off of I-70 on US-40. You’ll wait forever, and your coffee will be substandard. I have to admit, though, that today my Americano was tasty, and Amy’s cappuccino actually looked like a cappuccino. Well, at least it did until she put in the sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg and made the top part of the foam all pocked and strange. The Mexican restaurant on that exit is delicious and it’s where we usually have lunch or dinner when we meet. Next time, we’re meeting in Indy at Peppy Grill, so there’ll be a bite more to do than walk around the tiny mall and hang out at Starbucks. It’d be sweet if Becs would come along, too, so we can all hang out together for a change.
Amy and I had one of the best times we’ve had recently, in my opinion. Lots of honest conversation. Lots of laughing about stupid things. And shopping at Goodwill on 99 cent Sunday. We didn’t find anything worthwhile, although I did have to restrain myself from buying (count them) three different White Trash Nativity Scenes.I already have around 40 of them in my collection, one of which is missing its Baby Jesus, because the cats just keep stealing him, manger and all, and hiding him somewhere. It’s sad, really, the way Mary and Joseph continue to sit there staring at a place where Baby Jesus should be. All the while he is probably in the duct work, or in the basement, or inside of one of the couches. Who knows? But they remain vigilant in their never-ending pose of parental adoration. Sad. The other excellent part of the day today was that Matt, our preacher at Commonway, spoke about the book of Lamentations in the message this morning. He talked about how we need to stop looking back on our lives, wishing for the “good old days.” Instead we need to plant ourselves in our realities and spread roots. We need to be hopeful within the situations we find ourselves in. In other words, we need to stop wishing to be in other places in other times, and we need to ground ourselves where we are. At first I was a little resistant to the message, but then I realized that was probably because he was talking to me in a lot of ways. And using my favorite book of the Bible to do it. Good stuff.
Today is my last day of freedom before the long haul to Spring Break. Sometimes I am sure you think, She hates her job. I don’t hate it; in fact, I love my job. What I don’t love is the 8 to 4 regularity of it. I don’t love being in the same room for five hours, teaching similar things for those five hours. I also don’t love grading. Not one little bit. I love the look on a student’s face when she finally understands what we’re talking about. I love the letter from parents telling you that you are making a difference in their child’s life. And, I love the way you feel at the end of the day, like you’ve just helped 113 students get a little bit smarter. About English. About themselves. About the world. About life.
I told my mom yesterday that I am pretty sure I need to pastor a church. I would love it if the Methodist Church would just get rid of their ridiculous homophobia and ordain GLBT pastors. I’d be the first in line to sign up for candidacy, but I can’t live the lie that is what the Methodists expect of their queer pastors. I need to pastor because I love talking with people about God’s love, I love hearing about what people are going through, I love trying to work with people to reach a common solution. The facet of pastoring that’s freeing is that you don’t have to put values on people. And, actually, you are specifically called not to put values on people, unless you are helping them to see how God has so much more for them in their lives than what they are currently experiencing. I think I mean that you are called to help people see their shortcomings, but also to help people see how God is already there waiting for them, to make them more perfect. I love this quote from Rob Bell: “A fresh new word has been spoken about you and you are actually pulled into a better future.” That’s what I want to bring to people. You aren’t who you were; you’re in the process of becoming.
As far as wishing that the Methodists would change, I suppose I can poop in one hand, and wish in the other and which do you think will fill up first?
2011. For it’s ability to bring hope and fresh passion to an otherwise apathetic and decaying culture, I embrace the celebration of the new year. I understand that we might experience failures in the new year; we are a fallen people. This is no longer Eden. However, the festivity of New Year’s Eve and the solemnity with which people make vows, create resolutions, and set goals that theoretically will make them better people makes me know that each new year brings restored passion and compassion. There’s hope in the air. People have faith that this year will somehow be better than last. And, we give forgiveness for those failures we’ve previously experienced. Presumably, our goal is to make ourselves better this year. Here are my goals for this year. They’re not much different than last, but they attempt to take what I have been trying to do and to do it better.
Read. Both the bible and other books. Hopefully a little bit of each, each day. Watch less television, even though I already don’t watch much. It’s amazing to me how productive I can be when I don’t watch the television. I will however watch Bones and Big Love.
Run. Every day except Sunday. My goal is to run three miles a day on Monday through Thursday. On Friday, I’ll run two miles, and on Saturdays at least six miles. I also plan to add some other types of exercise. I want to finish two marathons: my own Ivanhoe’s Marathon and the Towpath Marathon.
Eat. Only food I can recognize as food. I want to remain vegan, but I want to narrow this down a bit more and eat only whole foods, such as beans, rice, vegetables, and the like. Cut out processed foods and sugars.
Dissertate. Two chapters. I want to finish two chapters of my dissertation this summer, and I have set forth a plan to make this happen.
Teach. To the best of my abilities. Love each student. Be firm with each student. Guide each student to his or her highest potential. Be more diligent in grading.
Attitude. Change it. I need to work on being more relaxed and carefree. I need to talk less and listen more. I need to remember that I don’t always have to be right. Loving people is more important than anything else. My stress level is through the roof, and I need to remember that the only person I have to please is God. What this means and where this will take me, I don’t know, but I am open to doing whatever it is I am supposed to do. I would just like to know what that is!
I am also working on an art/writing project. Once I get it going and hammer it out, I will post a link to the ongoing project. I am pretty excited about it.
Let’s begin with Joseph. For some reason, whenever I hear of a meditation on Joseph of the Christmas story variety, I get a little pissed. In my mind, I wonder what else could possibly be said about a man who had so little to do withe actual Christmas story. As Sojourner Truth points outs about Jesus, “Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him” (Ain’t I a Woman). For as little as Joseph appears to play a role in Christmas, the gospel of Matthew does spend the better portion of the first chapter giving Joseph’s lineage. I assume that means that even though Jesus isn’t technically Joseph’s son, Joseph is still important in the life of Jesus and in the eschatological timeline of the Christian church.
Despite my reluctance to recognize Joseph as someone worthy of lengthy discussions at Christmastime, and despite my desire to scream, “Can’t just one Christian holiday be about how God used a WOMAN?!?”, I have to admit that God sometimes goes to extreme measures to get me off my high horse. This time, though, a simple article did the trick. And, what’s even better is I found this short meditation by accident, via Twitter. Frank Viola writes in Remember Joseph: Rethinking Righteousness, “Today, I’d like to give Joseph his due. By my lights, Joseph was one of the most righteous men who ever lived.” That’s a pretty powerful statement. More righteous than Noah? More righteous than Job? More righteous than (fill in any person who is described in Jewish Scripture as blameless or righteous)? Really.
Viola continues by explaining Joseph’s righteousness like this, “I’m sure Joseph’s blood boiled when he heard that the woman who was betrothed to him in marriage was pregnant . . . and not by him. But because he was a righteous man, he showed mercy. He treated her as if he were in her own shoes and was guilty of what he had assumed she did.” Um, yeah. How many of us would’ve done what Joseph did? How many of us would stand beside someone who was in Mary’s shoes? Think about it really hard. Would you? Would I? Could we do it without patting ourselves on our backs or privately commenting that we are just doing it because that’s what a good Christian would do? Can we live as Viola describes Joseph? He writes “It is to react like Jesus, living void of self-righteousness.” This is the part of this meditation I loved. Viola reminds us to be vigilant in our dealings with others, because our own character is really what God is testing and proving. This holiday season can I behave this way? Can I live void of self-righteousness?
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I initiated my hookah today. I used molasses tobacco, and spent about half an hour listening to Christmas music, contemplating life, and smoking shisha. I love being Greek, and I need to go to Greece sometime in order to experience where I come from. THe only drawback to going there is that I’m afraid I won’t want to come back!
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I took the dogs for about a two-mile walk this morning, and when I got home I realized the reason I love breaks and summer is the ability to live slowly. I got up at 7:30 AM. walked the dogs around 8 AM, and made breakfast around 9 AM. This is the way my life is supposed to go. Slow, easy mornings. Now it’s noon and I have already exercised, made food from scratch, done laundry, relaxed, socialized via Twitter and Facebook, and written more than I have on any day since school started. Come to me summer, and don’t fail me Winter Break! On break, it’s all about the victuals.
Delicious vegan Egg Nog Waffles (substitute ground flax seed and water for the eggs) I made for breakfast! Yummy.
And the delicious dish I am calling Penne and Faux Sho Cheese that I made for lunch.
excerpt from “Mormon Missionaries Pay Me a Visit”
by Ken Hada
I’m sitting on my lawn
enjoying a nice blunt cigar
watching children ride scooters
up and down the street
twilight gently falling,
swallows circling,
Mississippi Kites high overhead,
tree frog, sounds of sweet shadows
[. . .]
If I convert do I have to give up this cigar?
They are not sure
but soon get back on track
like a loose wheel wobbling
until they finally bid me good evening.
I watch them roll away
and wonder
what gives them the audacity to interrupt me
while I am at worship
excerpt from “Fix You”
by Coldplay
And the tears come streaming down your face
When you lose something you can’t replace
When you love someone, but it goes to waste
Could it be worse?
Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you
excerpt from “Some of Us”
by Starsailor
Some of us laugh, some of us cry,
Some of us smoke, some of us lie,
But it’s all just the way that we cope with our lives.
My wandering soul found solace at last,
I wanted to know how long it would last.
As usual I have been way over-thinking the nature of human interactions. For whatever reason, this week each of the three excerpts above really encouraged me to think about how I react to my life, to my experiences, and to other people and their lives and experiences. By this I mean that I have been challenged once again to re-evaluate those relationships in my life which are difficult and to think about how I can more fully respond to those people in my life who take a lot of energy.
I especially like the first excerpt, because it makes me stop and think about the ways in which different people worship, thereby interacting with our Creator. Hada writes about how he wonders “what gives them the audacity to interrupt me while I am at worship,” and I wonder how many times, especially when I was younger, I have interrupted someone who was already worshiping in order to explain to them how my understanding of God is better than theirs or to try to sway him or her into my way of thinking. This rings particularly true of me in middle school and early high school when I was so involved with the right-wing evangelical Wesleyan Church. I would drop everything for the chance to pray the “Sinner’s Prayer” with a wayward soul, so I wonder how many times people wished I would just leave them alone to worship in their way. Sometimes I look back and think I was little like Hilary Faye on Saved!.
I needed someone, when I was at a younger age, to help me understand that our different faiths are not weapons to be used against each other. I needed to realize much earlier that I should be more like the character of Mary. At this age, today, I am slightly envious of those people who grow up without this extremely conservative and mixed-up phase in their lives. I meet so many fantastic students today who will likely not look back, wondering what the heck they were doing in middle school. They will look back and ask about other things, but not why they were proselytizing their friends in such ridiculous ways.
I have come to realize, possibly way too late in life, that one person’s porch-sitting, cigar-smoking, enjoyment of life and nature is another person’s going-to-church, wearing-Sunday-best, singing-some-praise-songs worship. Both are good, but many times the former strikes at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s point in “Self-reliance”: “If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, — under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are. [. . .] But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blindman’s-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument.” Too frequently, as Emerson notes, we let our leaders speak for us, and we merely become parrots of their party line.
I suppose the other two excerpts, while helping to illustrate Emerson’s point, simply serve to remind me that each person we come in contact with carries baggage, each person hides scars, and each person lives with guilt, shame, and remorse. Each person is a wondering soul, looking for solace. Each person has lost something that can’t be replaced. But, there is hope, there is grace, there is love. By coping with life, we each tap into that deeply human part of life that we all share. Those dark recesses of the human mind, those highlights of the human soul, they work together to help us recognize the humanity in each other, however difficult it is to detect.
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Being the horrible fat studies scholar that I am, as of tomorrow, I am going to try to lose 30 lbs. by February 14 when I start training for the marathon. I think it might help me to be less injury prone, and I know it will help me to run faster. In order to try to lose this weight, I am going to keep running four times a week while only consuming from 1200-1500 calories a day. This will be a huge cut for me, since I generally eat 1800 to 2000 calories per day. I plan to do this by eating more whole grains, more vegetables and fruits, no soda, no unnecessary sugars, no lattes, no hot chocolate. I am not generally a “dieter,” but I NEED to finish this marathon. I NEED to do it for me. Selfish? Yes. Also, I suppose people will get tired of hearing, “I am sorry I can’t meet with you, but I have a XXX-mile run today.” My new goal marathon is Grandma’s Marathon in Minnesota. It’s on June 16, and I will have to make a weekend of it, but it’s worth it to (sometimes) run along the shore of Lake Superior.
The ideas you find here are solely mine, but I have made every attempt to give credit to any sources I may have used. You should not associate the opinions or ideas written in this blog with my employer, colleagues, or peers. Nothing that you read here is meant in any way to represent anyone else's opinions or ideas, nor is it meant to cause injury to anyone else.
I already have around 40 of them in my collection, one of which is missing its Baby Jesus, because the cats just keep stealing him, manger and all, and hiding him somewhere. It’s sad, really, the way Mary and Joseph continue to sit there staring at a place where Baby Jesus should be. All the while he is probably in the duct work, or in the basement, or inside of one of the couches. Who knows? But they remain vigilant in their never-ending pose of parental adoration. Sad. 
The other excellent part of the day today was that Matt, our preacher at Commonway, spoke about the book of Lamentations in the message this morning. He talked about how we need to stop looking back on our lives, wishing for the “good old days.” Instead we need to plant ourselves in our realities and spread roots. We need to be hopeful within the situations we find ourselves in. In other words, we need to stop wishing to be in other places in other times, and we need to ground ourselves where we are. At first I was a little resistant to the message, but then I realized that was probably because he was talking to me in a lot of ways. And using my favorite book of the Bible to do it. Good stuff.
Reason Breeds Insanity 