Planning 18

Today’s Song: Short Skirt/Long Jacket by Cake

You know what’s great? Vacations. Vacations are great.

Have you ever read Divergent? No? Well, I recommend it. You can probably borrow it, or I know they have it at the library. You just have to get over the fact that you’d like to read a YA novel, thank you very much, the themes can be quite complex and emotionally striking. But in Divergent (and I’m not spoiling anything that you don’t find out in the first twenty pages or so). they’re in this dystopian future where everyone is broken up into five factions: Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntless, and Erudite. They all have their own traits and what they think is important and what they think is bad, but I really like Abnegation because their thing is selflessness. They wear grey clothes and eat simple food and try not to take up too much space. And I think that’s a lovely thought. It could get mixed in with some other thoughts, but it’s a lovely thought.

Now that I’ve read Divergent, whenever I do something like take a couple of days of vacation or eat out multiple days in a row or, heaven forbid, have more than one beer, I get this guilty feeling that I thought I had left behind me. What makes me think that I can waste my time like that? Entire afternoons spent in front of the TV or absorbed in a book or just listening to music. Who has time for that? There is a world to be saving and I am spending the gifts I have been given sitting on the couch. It’s extraordinarily selfish.

And I know that I shouldn’t feel guilty. I needed this vacation. I wouldn’t be an effective worker or educator if I hadn’t taken some serious downtime this week. And I needed a responsibility break as well. I start to get super preachy when I’m tired and that’s just not something that I need to be doing right now. What I really should be doing is serving where I can, but routine service on my schedule is difficult and motivating myself to go looking for ways that I can help when I’m resting is really a non-starter. There’s just plenty of TV to be watching instead. And anyway, I hate people.

There’s a balance between the self-serving and the self-sacrificing, I know there is. And I know that I should be able to find it. And I should be able to find confidence in what I do and in taking care of myself and in deciding my future. It’s the Adult Scavenger Hunt of Good Qualities and Purpose and I should, in theory, be able to succeed at that. I should be able to walk around with quiet confidence and not have to fake it all the time. I’m done being this chipper giggly person that I think I’ve been the past couple of years, but I don’t know how to put that down. Then again, the giggles have made the scavenger hunt difficult, so it’d be really nice to figure all that out. I’m not sure. That analogy got away from me.

I feel like taking the week off has made my brain fuzzy, but I’m going to do some identity thinking and then make some decisions, and then we’ll call this process done. I think I know what I’m going to do and I have certain webpages bookmarked and some savings earmarked for this application process. I’m going. I’m leaving. I just don’t know where to yet.yout

Planning 17

Today’s Song: Everybody Got Their Something by Nikka Costa

Let me tell you a day in my life. 

Well, that’s not fair, really. I have two lives perpetually. I have my life at home and my life on the road. My life at home is pretty simple- get up, make coffee, go to the office, get some paperwork done, go home. Sprinkle in a couple of rehearsals and meetings and TV time with the roomies and you have your run-of-the-mill twenty-something life. 

But my other life goes like this:

Five o’clock and the alarm clock rings. I’d hit snooze but I will be abysmally late if I do, so I get out of bed and take a shower. You can’t teach science with greasy hair. Then I put on professional-looking clothes, making sure to have a splash of Carolina blue and closed-toed shoes on. I pick up the suitcase I packed the night before, hopefully, make sure my toiletries are dry and packed and scurry out the front door. There may or may not have been coffee at this point.

Sometimes, I’ve packed the planetarium up the night before, sometimes I haven’t. The best days are the ones when I’m going to a school more than three hours away or so to the mountains and I get to pack up the planetarium the afternoon before the visit in fall air, when hauling three Pelican cases worth of equipment out to a minivan seems less like a burden and more like an excuse to go outside and move in the general splendor. But many times I roll up to the office before the sun has even bothered to get up, pick up my notebook and my directions, roll or carry hundreds of pounds of equipment out to the state van, and pack it in like a game of Tetris that only has one solution. If I’m being careful about myself, I use the back brace. 

In the fall and the spring, the sun’s probably up by the time I start to drive. I drive. And I drive. And I stop by a Bojangles for breakfast and then I drive. I roll up to a school around 7:30am, hopefully before or after but not exactly during the morning drop-off and I smile at the secretary in the office who points me around to the gym where I drive the van and unload the hundred of pounds of equipment I feel like I just put inside of it. Sometimes there’s a teacher or a janitor or an administrator to help out, sometimes there’s not. Either way, the equipment gets wheeled to the middle of what is probably a basketball court at least half the year. I set the projector down at the top of the key, like it’s going to make some clutch free throws and save the game. And then I get to work.

Setting up the planetarium is one of my favorite parts of the day. (We made a video of it and you should watch it, especially if you have no idea what I mean when I talk about a portable planetarium.) I’ve done it so often that it almost feels choreographed. It never fails to get a wow from any kids that walk by and though they make me feel like I’m in a zoo as they stop and watch the planetarium educator in her natural habitat, I’m also pretty proud of it. It’s not every day you get to set up a twelve-foot tall inflatable bouncy house of science.*

If I’ve gotten to the school on time and everything’s working fine, I’ve got a little break while I wait for the first show to start. Then it’s at least four fifty-minute shows where I’m on all the time, talking about space, asking the kids what they know, monitoring the equipment, monitoring the kids, answering questions. Most of the shows aren’t live shows, so I press play and plan out what I’m going to say during the maybe five minutes I get at the end where I could, in theory, show them all of the universe and blow their little kid minds. I’ve watched these shows literally hundreds of times so I know exactly where the oo’s and the ah’s come in and they never fail to make me smile. 

And the kids always ask the best questions, like the one who asked me if you could ride a bike on the Moon or the one who asked me if black holes slow down sound. Some of these kids are really thinking and most of them are as excited when they leave as when they came in (the implication here being that they were excited in the first place, which they were- I’m the best day of third grade when I show up and that is an awesome privilege). Sometimes they get caught on a certain topic (if you tell them how far away Jupiter is, you should be prepared to tell them the distance to all the other planets or change the subject) but sometimes they’re all over the place, asking about aliens and stars and moons and gravity. Never a dull moment. 

Once the last show is done, we stack up the cushions and pack away the cords and the projector and the dome and the flags and the fan and put it all back in the van again. Sometimes there’s help and sometimes there’s not. Sometimes there’s a teacher who wants to talk about what I do and sometimes there are fifth graders to help roll up the cords and one time there was a kindergartener who asked me if I was a spy and told me that spies wear back, so I was probably a spy in disguise. He knew these because he had seen all the Spy Kids movies. He helped me carry the Earth out to the van. 

With the van packed, I get in and I drive. Maybe I drive back to Chapel Hill, but I probably drive to a hotel an hour or so out and check in and take the projector upstairs and wonder how I never thought of a better response than awkward laughter to, “That’s a big suitcase you’ve got there.” I’ll probably watch some episodes of Castle, hit up the exercise room, troll around on the internet, and go get dinner before I set my alarm for the next morning. 

Then I get up the next day, and the day after that, and I do it all over again. Different schools, different gyms, different kids, but in a weird way, once I’ve got the dome inflated and the projector set up and the cushions out, it feels like coming home. Now, that probably means that I’ve been doing my job for too long, but the portability of a space doesn’t change the space’s existence, I think. If you could fold up your car and take it inside your office or your house with you, would that change the existence of the inside of your car? Besides, spaces carry the meaning we put into them and I like to think that I put a good meaning into mine. 

As I’m scheduling schools for the year and getting everything prepped, it’s nice to take a second and think about this crazy thing that I do for a job. It’s not something many people get to do and I don’t know of anyone who does it as often as I do. It’s a unique perspective on our schools and our state and it’s a blast. Though I deserve to be compensated for the work that I do, days on the road don’t feel like work. Not everyone gets to say that with the job they got right out of college. I’m lucky.

And you gotta enjoy the luck while it lasts, right?

*We don’t bounce in the planetarium. No bouncing. Do you want to know how much that lens cost? So much. Don't bounce.

Planning: Day 16

Today’s Song: The Coolest Girl as performed by Bonnie Gruesen

I’m good at school. I’ve mentioned this before.

The fact is, though, that our education system has set up people like me to succeed. I'm a middle class white girl who is great at standardized tests and can read and analyze information like a pro. I’m even good at math. But you know what I’m terrible at? Building things with my hands. Anything that requires physical effort. Drawing anything more complex than a stick figure. 

I’m smart and I don’t have problems saying that. It was kinda my defining characteristic in high school. And the world needs people who are book smart and who are able to analyze information and who are able to make an informed judgement based on the statistics presented. But that’s not the only thing people need.

When I work with kids for longer than an hour, I inevitably end up talking about college. “I work for UNC and that’s where I went to college.” And I get a variety of responses. The problem with UNC is that there are some misguided people who are Duke fans and that makes the occasional conversation awkward. But there are State fans and ECU fans and App fans and they all also defend their respective schools with some kind of purpose, so we end up talking about rivalries and sports rather than the education. It's okay- most of these conversations happen with elementary school kids and I'm just happy that they even know what a college is.

Then, when I talk to middle school and high school students, I get a lot of, “Well, I’ll probably go to community college and then transfer to a four-year school.” The kids who aren’t looking to graduate high school are probably not the ones who are talking to me (which is exactly the problem, but I'm only there for an hour). So I talk to the kids about how important technical jobs are and how they're making a smart choice. Despite what the president has said, a four-year school isn't for everyone. Graduate school isn't for everyone. A college degree doesn’t mean what it used to. There are plenty of options out there.

I’m not out there to crush any dreams. My job is the exact opposite. I’m an informal science educator, which means I get to do all the fun stuff in science, all the things that make you go “wow!” and “whoa!” and “I’m gonna tell my mom about this!” And then I leave and let the classroom teachers do all the hard work of getting the students to delve into the nuts and bolts of science. Because it’s not easy. If it was, we wouldn’t need to work so hard at it.

I could almost go back in the classroom so that I would have the chance to teach that lesson over and over again. This is not easy. We need to spend time with these ideas and these topics. Because everything in your life that is worth doing takes time. Practicing anything long enough to be good at it takes time. And discoveries and inventions and the things that move us as a people forward, they don’t just fall out of the sky. You have to have been looking for them. Well, that might not be true. Inspiration is a funny thing. But to be able to put those ideas into action, that takes knowledge and a lot of man-hours. 

I’d teach that lesson through labs. I’d teach it through problem sets, I’d teach it through independent projects. I’d teach it through build sessions and research assignments and discussions. I’d front the time, just so I could see some students getting the chance to make something of themselves by the effort they put forward. I’d take the time to tell a student who might not have expected to hear it that they’re doing a great job and the time to tell a student who expected to hear something different that they can do better. I’d encourage the strengths of all the kids in the middle, who get left out because they’re going to get through it anyway. And when the class learned this lesson, that they have to put the time in, I'd set them out in the world to do whatever it is that they want to do, knowing that they're going to work at it and that they'd have a solid backing in physics to do it.

In short, I’d do what any teacher worth her or his salt is going to do anyway. But I don’t like the way I talk about teaching, like it’s something I could do to show others how awesome I am. If you’re teaching, you should be there for the students. You should be there for the kids who are sitting in your classroom and who will move on in a year or in a semester, who may never say thank you, who may not even notice the work you put in, who may complain about how much you push them, who may shut down because they think they can’t do it, who don’t want to try, who are just taking up space in school because someone told them that they had to. If you’re going to teach, your focus is on these kids, these human beings. And I just don’t know that mine would be.

As it is, I’m the coolest day of third grade when I show up. I get to throw some knowledge and a few encouraging words. I’m pretty sure I make a difference. A kid came up to me today and hugged me and said, “I had the best time today.” It was 11:30 in the morning. He didn’t even know what else he could do with his day. But I like that I could make that happen. The next to last day of summer, this kid’s in camp, learning about science, and he had the best time today. 

I’m okay with that. 

(I promise a veritable smorgasbord of links to educational articles and backing up the claims I just threw out there in this post... tomorrow. So check back!)

Planning: Day 15

Today’s Song: Ukulele Song by Mark Swiderski

(Today's post inspired in part by: http://www.metafilter.com/112698/California-Dreamin#4183210)

Press play on the Ukelele Song, friends, and sit down. Let me tell you a story.

I got an email on Monday asking me to turn in some paperwork. I’d be happy to, except to do that, I’d need to be in Chapel Hill and I’m two and a half hours away from that fine burg. However, thanks to the marvels of modern technology, I don’t have to physically turn anything in as long as I send an electronic copy now and turn the hard copies in later. So I set about on the grand Quest For A Scanner. This is the tale I’d like to relate to you now.

Normally if I needed a scanner, I’d just use the one in the office at work, but since I’m far from that as well, I had to look for a second option. Luckily, my family has a printer/scanner/copier that hasn’t been touched in a couple of years, but still looks functional. I pulled it out and hooked it up to my computer, only to struggle with an unending slew of error messages and requests for me to clear a paper jam or a cartridge jam or reinstall a cartridge. By the end of twenty minutes with that, I threw in the towel and told the printer exactly where it could reinstall that jammed cartridge. 

I remembered that I had bought a printer/scanner/copier when I was a freshman in college, dewey-eyed and unaware of the fact that there are printers literally everywhere on campus and I was pretty sure it was in my closet somewhere. I started pulling things out and digging and I successfully found the printer. No cords attached to it, though, so I dig some more. And some more. And then, just when I thought I was done digging, I found some more places to dig. Never found the power cord (and the cords for the house printer/scanner/copier were incompatible with the cords for my college printer/scanner/copier, just in case you thought I hadn’t tried), but I did find two umbrellas, a Batman mask, a 24-count box of Play-Doh, a Nalgene, a basketball, one prom shoe, and a tiny railroad conductor baby doll that definitely never belonged to me. 

(If I stole your tiny railroad conductor baby doll, I am sorry.)

At this point in time, it was after business hours, so I decided to put it off until the morning when I’d in theory be able to use the scanner at the elementary school I’d be working at that day. Come to find out all the teachers and administrators and office workers were all in a mandatory training and the scanner wasn’t “readily available”. This crushed my dreams, but I had a backup plan- the public library! 

Ah, the public library. Though vilified in the admittedly odd town of Night Vale, public libraries are the last solace of the weary, the quiet space in the mad rush of the day, the familiar sounds and smells of a nerdy childhood brought to life in this educational space. The library had moved since I was a kid, but I’d driven past the building this summer (it’s right down the road from one of the buildings that were tagged with fruit-themed graffiti). I looked up the hours on the website and headed over to find out that the Granite Falls public library had a printer and a copier, but no scanner. The Lenoir public library has a scanner, but it’s at least a half hour trip. To illustrate, let me show you a map of my current location.

You see that whole lot of nothing? The nearest FedEx or Staples is in Hickory or Lenoir, both somewhere between fifteen and twenty minutes away. The Lenoir public library is about the same distance away and while you can’t scan things for free, you can scan them for cheap (if you have quarters). Given these options, I sighed, thanked the kind people at the library, and got in my car to drive up to Lenoir.

I ended up stopping halfway up to Lenoir because I saw the Ed Center and decided to see if one of the people I’d been working with this summer could let me use their equipment, which they could, and the day was saved by shining knights in cardigans. But, to prove a point, let’s pretend I hadn’t and that I had ended up going to Lenoir to scan this paper. I would have spent:

4 minutes driving to the Granite Falls library from my house

3 minutes discovering there wasn’t a scanner

16 minutes driving from the Granite Falls library to the Lenoir library

8 minutes scanning and emailing my document

15 minutes driving from the Lenoir library to my house

That’s 46 minutes and that’s a minimum estimate. What if there was traffic? What if a machine wasn’t available? What if there was a line? What if the machine wasn’t working properly? What if I had never worked a scanner before and needed assistance? More to the point, what if I didn’t know that libraries had scanners? What if I didn’t have internet at home or on my phone to figure all this information out? What if the public library workers or computers didn’t know the same language as me? How much longer do we think I would have worked at this then? And could I have done all this if I didn’t have a job that allowed me to flex my hours to head out into the world during business hours? What if I didn’t have a car? 

When we talk about education, we talk about a lot about teachers and funding for schools and standardized tests and we should do those things. We should think about the systems we have. But we should also be thinking about the other opportunities students could have. 

The song of the day today was used as part of the soundtrack in a web series produced by Team StarKid while they were in college. They’ve made other things like A Very Potter Musical (and Sequel and Senior Year) and Starship and Holy Musical B@man and Twisted and you might recognize Darren Criss from Glee. They’ve been able to keep on making wonderful and funny things and they make them well. 

But you know that they had opportunities in elementary school, middle school, high school, that they got help applying to college, that they’ve had support and love. You know there were dozens of registrations and trips to lessons and performances. And for kids who want to do sports, there are endless rec leagues and school events. In high school, there are clubs and organizations to show that you have leadership skills and puff up your resumes and applications. 

There’s plenty of potential in our kids. And those with drive and desire are going to throw their time and effort at opportunities. But we need to think about who we’re excluding by default and the grace we can extend to those who try.

Planning: Day 14

Song of the Day: A Song About an Anglerfish by Hank Green

It’s education week here on the blog and while I think of some important educational things to talk about (there are many, I’m just not there yet), I’d like to take this moment to defend myself.

I know what I’m doing.

I mean, I don’t know what I’m doing. I haven’t applied anywhere yet and I haven’t been accepted anywhere yet and I don’t know if we’re going with plan A, B, C, or D, but there are several plans in place and all of them are financially viable. I have done and will continue to do research into these plans and I will make sure each of them is ready should they need to be implemented. 

And besides, I like not knowing. 

I know that we should all be worried because “It’s risky stepping out your front door” and “You shouldn’t give up a job in this economy” and “Have you thought about student loan debt and how you’re going to make all this happen because I’m certainly not going to pay for it” and oh my everything, can we all just chill for a moment? I know that I’ve been on top of my game for a while now. I know that I went to college and I got a job and I’m doing okay and that’s all fine, but I want to do something else. I want to be something else. I want to change what’s happening in my existence and find a new place and GO ON AN ADVENTURE and I don’t understand why this is a problem. I’m being the absolute most responsible I can be about this. This is not the equivalent of riding a zip line off a skyscraper. This is jumping off the swings onto mulch and I’m not even swinging all that high. 

It’s just… you know those stories about quiet people going off and becoming better or at least different people via adventure? I love those stories. I love that they encourage us to go out there and do things. I’ve been hearing those stories all my life. I’ve been hearing encouragement to go do and be all my life. Are we surprised that I want to go do and be? And even if I haven’t discussed the exact plan with you or decided on the exact plan, it doesn’t mean I’m running out of my house without breakfast and my handkerchief. I know how adventure goes. I’ve got salt and a broadsword in the back.

Just trust me on this, okay?

I hate to use A Song About an Anglerfish in a post without any educational content because Hank and John Green have done a phenomenal job educating people via youtube (with Vlogbrothers, Crash Course, SciShow and so much more). I’m pretty sure that’s going to come up again later, though, so give the song a listen and check back in for more! 

Planning: Day 13

Today’s Song: A Gift for Melody Anne by The Avett Brothers

You can’t bargain with God. You can’t ask God to promise anything that hasn’t already been promised in scripture, I don’t think. There’s no exchange of goods in the God-human relationship. You can’t make a deal with God. That’s what crossroads demons are for.

But boy, do I want to. When I was in 10th grade, I applied to go to the North Carolina School of Science and Math. I didn’t get in, but before I knew that, I made a deal with the sky outside my bedroom window that if I did get in, I’d go and do some science-y career and if I didn’t, I’d be a music minister. Clearly, I didn’t hold up my end of the deal and I’ve always kinda wondered about that. Was there some kind of fate I set in motion with my promises to the sky? Did God just listen to that whole interaction and smile?

When I was picking colleges, I chose Carolina instead of Florida Institute of Technology because I wanted an out. If this whole astrophysicist thing wasn’t going to pan out for me, I wanted to be able to change what I was doing. So I altered the deal- if I didn’t do well in science, I’d look into the religious studies major. I figured I was doing the right thing here. I was giving myself options while still pursuing what I wanted to do. It nagged at me, but I thought I was being smart and practical and I went on with my life.

During sophomore year, there were some retirements in the physics and astronomy department and they weren’t offering all the classes I needed to complete the astronomy part of my physics and astronomy major. Since that’s kinda why I went through with the physics major in the first place, getting that news set off a whole host of existential crises. I mean, if I ever wanted a burning bush, this was it. To be melodramatic about it, my major disappeared. Time to pick a new one, right? But I was already most of the way done with the classes I’d need for a physics BA, so I stayed my course. I mean, it’s not like you have to have a religious studies degree to apply to seminary.

Then they started the UNC-BEST program, where you can get a science degree and a teaching license at the same time. I figured it’d be handy to have a backup plan so I went for it. Also that year, I had taken a religious studies class to fulfill a philosophy requirement and loved it and signed on to a religious studies living/learning community. So even though I felt like maybe I was walking farther and farther away from what I should be doing (pursuing education about religion to put me on the path to being an ordained minister), I was making up for it by filling in a religious studies minor. 

Junior year, I think, I went with some friends from the Wesley Foundation to a program put on by the United Methodist Church called Exploration, which is like a giant seminary/divinity school fair with a couple of worship sessions and breakout groups to talk about calling. I had a bunch of thoughts at the time, but what I remember most is that at the end, they had us fill out a card during a worship service and you checked something like, “I’m definitely interested in ordained ministry” or not and then “You can tell my district about this” or not. I don’t remember what I put. I only remember being really on the fence about it, putting the answer I felt like they wanted, and… regretting it. 

I got the idea that I could use some more time to think about what I was actually being called to, if anything, and so I figured that, as long as student teaching didn’t suck, I’d teach for a couple of years. Then an internship opened up at the planetarium, followed by a full-time position that I was qualified for, and the rest of the past three years is history. I figured I’d accept that bargain I made back when I was sixteen after I’d worked for a couple of years. My fate was sealed long ago, right? I mean, you might not be able to bargain with God, but I want to be the kind of person that keeps my promises. So seminary it is, sometime soon.

I’ve a mind for remembering facts and ideas from sermons and books and bible studies. I was good at and enjoyed studying biblical Hebrew. I am so Methodist it hurts sometimes and I do church so well, the new pastor at my home church said, “Oh, I’ve heard about you” when I was singing in the choir on a Sunday visit home. I believe in the Church as an organization and in the Church as the body of Christ in this world. I believe in our ability to make the world better and I believe that our faith requires us to do that. I believe that people see something true when they say that I should be a pastor. I believe that the countless conversations I’ve had with people over the years about purpose and calling have been good things, helpful things, and insightful things. I believe all of these things, but I’m not sold on my call, my own personal following of the divine will for the world. 

And honestly, I’m kinda sick of thinking about it. I’m sick of going over the hows and the whys and the what-fors. I just want to pick a road and be on it, but I’m so scared of picking the wrong one that I’ve oscillated a million times over the course of my life. I want to know where I’m supposed to be, I want to be confident, I don’t want to have to turn around, shamefaced because something didn’t work out. I don’t ever want to look at a period of my life and think of it as wasted time. And I don’t want to have to sell myself on how that time was still used for good- I want it to be obvious. I want to be unimpeachable in the eyes of men.

I know it’s ridiculous. I know everyone makes mistakes and you just have to try things because no one’s got it all figured out. I know I’m lucky to have the chance to pick and choose like this. I know that if I’m seeking God earnestly, I’ll find God. I know I have been given untold grace in the face of my deep pride and self-absorption. I know that life has been good to me and that I haven’t been good back and I know that I’m sorry about that. But I just want some sort of sign, some confirmation that I haven’t gotten this all wrong.

What I’m most afraid of, though, is that the sign, the answer to the, “Why won’t you tell me what to do?” question will be, “I did.

“Feed my sheep.

“Care for the poor.

“Set the captives free and proclaim sight to the blind.

“Why won’t you do that?”

Planning: Day 12

Today’s Song: To Travels and Trunks by Hey Marseilles

“Hey,” you might be thinking, “What happened to Jesus week?”

What happened indeed.

I like to tell stories and make things sound grander than they actually are, so I could recount the hours of driving up and down the interstate in the rain and the hundreds of extra people at the event I worked or the desperate need to take a break from it all. I could, but I’d embellish, and I don’t really want to embellish anymore. There are some pretty sweet pictures from the science night at Patterson Science Center on Tuesday, though, if you want to take a look. (https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.277533599116873.1073741858.125392500997651&type=1)

That’s the thing about life, though. It demands to be lived. And honestly, though I’ve frequently been exhausted this summer, and though I’m ready to be stationary starting a week from tomorrow, being able to educate kids about science and astronomy in my home county has been a privilege beyond measure and I’m 100% okay with the way it has derailed my intentions. Because maybe my intentions could have deserved some derailing in the first place.

I don’t know what to think of prayer. It’s a topic I could use some guidance on and I think a lot about the efficacy of prayer and what it would mean if the actions of an infinite and all-powerful God were affected by words from that God’s created beings. But I could also be thinking through the logistics of improving the medical infrastructure in the countries most affected by the Ebola outbreak, if I was in a position to make or advocate for those kinds of changes.

I struggle (still) with the problem of evil and how to make sense of the bad and good things that happen in the world. The hours I have spent yelling at a corner of the sky, saying nothing God hasn’t already heard before, I’m sure, are probably simultaneously higher and lower than I’d like to admit. Which is probably similar to the amount of time I’ve spent helping people who don’t have enough to eat.

I find the ideas of souls and angels and eternal life fascinating. I pick up on references to souls in pop culture and then pick them apart, which may lead to another blog post this week, but thinking about the way we think about a part of ourselves that is sometimes portrayed as the definition of ourselves is one of my favorite things to do. It stands in stark contrast to the actual soul-searching I could be doing when something like what happened in Ferguson happens and I don’t even try to do something about it.

That’s [why I told myself] I didn’t go to seminary right away after college. There was a world out there to explore. I was ready to do some good before locking myself away in an academic tower. I was frustrated with talking the talk when all I feel like Christ ever did was walk the walk. The angels could dance on the head of the pin for all I could care- I was going to go help the poor. And that’s my [reasonable] reason for being hesitant about seminary now- is it going to help anyone if I go get this degree? Would I, me, not some hypothetical person, be better serving the world if I kept my current job and just volunteered more? What’s the best use of my time and my brain?

Struggling with ideas about God and spirituality and call are all good an important things to be doing if you want to live as a person of faith. Faith can be such a key instrument in keeping our lives together, in building community, in reminding us to be better than who we might otherwise be. But if all I can do is pray for Syria and Gaza and Israel and Iraq and Liberia and Sierra Leone and Michigan and North Carolina and all the people around the world who are hurting and being hurt and hurting others, I’m not doing the right thing. 

I need to be doing the right thing.

Planning: Day 11

Today’s Song: Be Thou My Vision as sung by Pedro the Lion

A good sermon, to me, is one that I walk away from feeling convicted or called. In the same way that I can look at a memory and think, “This was a happy time” or “This makes me feel sad” or “I am proud of that moment” or “I am ashamed”, I can remember certain sermons over the course of my life that gave me this godly feeling, something pushing and purposeful. 

Two sermons this summer have given me that feeling. One I almost walked out on forty-five seconds into the sermon (the pastor mentioned Israel-Palestine and I don’t listen well when someone preaches to me about that topic) and one I was prepared to dismiss out of hand (the sermon series was titled “Free Love and Other Gospel Truths” and I rolled my eyes real hard at that) but both ended up rumbling my soul. This past Sunday’s sermon wasn’t one of those. And that is fascinating to me.

It had all the parts of a convicting/calling sermon: stories about the youth group and growing up, a new perspective on a familiar bible story, the opportunity to help, a call to prayerfully consider action, an acknowledgement of the things that we as Christ’s body promised to do on this earth. The post-sermon hymn was even “Here I Am, Lord”, a hymn whose number I have know by heart partially because it’s a great hymn and partially because I memorized the lyrics so I could still sing it while my eyes blurred with tears. My stomach lurched when I saw that hymn in the bulletin. But partway through the sermon, I realized that this was a call, but it wasn’t for me. I mean, I already work with the youth group. Whether I’m the best counselor I can be or not is another question entirely, but this sermon wasn’t meant for me. It was a weird experience. 

Listening to a sermon that didn’t call me was helpful in understanding myself. It’s like doing experiments on Mars. Hear me out. When we’re doing an experiment on Earth, there’s a whole host of variables and conditions that are specific to our planet- the force of gravity at your location, the atmospheric pressure at certain points, the presence of a basically uniform magnetic field, the composition of the atmosphere. If you do an experiment on Mars, all of those things are different. It’s a completely different lab space with different conditions. It gives you the opportunity to study something new even if you’re performing a familiar experiment. Hearing this sermon was like that for me. I could listen to it and see how the different initial conditions changed the outcome. I could observe what was happening without participating. I could think, completely objectively, about what I was hearing. 

My idea of God is intensely tied to my idea of religion and the ideas I learned growing up. And while I know plenty of facts (Methuselah is the oldest person in the bible- he lived 969 years according to Genesis) and have plenty of ideas of my own (mostly about God and the existence of a plan for all of us), I haven’t studied as deeply as I’d like, seeing as my faith is supposed to be a guiding factor in my life. 

I want to have this complete trust in God. I want to believe in a good God, who cares for people. I want to revel in stories that prove God’s providence and love. I want to believe that at the end of the universal day, everything is going to turn out for the best. But I have to consider both sides. I have to acknowledge pain and suffering and desperate prayers to the heavens. For me, it’s important to think about the efficacy of prayer and the truth of the faithful comforts we tell each other. If I get tripped up on believing in the existence of a good God, maybe seminary isn’t the place for me. 

All of this is bigger than a week of posts, but I’m going to tackle some ideas during our Jesus Week this week, taking ideas and running with them and doing some deeper thinking than I have in the past. It’ll be good practice- I think getting a masters of divinity is basically three years of thinking deeply about what you thought you believed- and it’ll help me solidify the jello of my thoughts. If the thought of talking about Christianity for a week turns you into a giant squid of anger, I’m going to recommend that you come back next week, when I’ll be talking about teaching and education and the world that I have waded into over the past four years. 

And I promise, no matter how much I may want to, the music selection this week won’t be entirely composed of traditional hymn tunes. Just a couple good ones, sprinkled here and there.

Planning: Day 10

Today’s song: Simple Man by Lynyrd Skynyrd

At the beginning of this summer, I was carrying a suitcase and a duffle bag full of clothes into my parents’ house when I scraped my foot on a rock. Not a big deal, but I had kicked off my shoes on my first trip inside, or maybe I had left them in the car, and now instead of just stumbling, I was bleeding. And my first response to this was to be super angry at this rock. How dare it be in my way when I was clearly moving with a purpose? My second response was to worry about my feet.

I never wore shoes when I was a kid, outside of school. When I was in high school, I perpetually lost my shoes. I had at least three pairs of flip flops in rotation between my room, my car, and the purgatory of lost shoes that was the rest of my house. Consequently, I could walk across hot asphalt and gravel and not really mind much. I liked my durable feet. They make me feel mountainy, in the way that only cool summer grass between your toes can.

But that all changed when I went to college. Suddenly things were gross, the ground most of all. And I don’t blame myself for thinking that- college campuses are not the most sanitary of places. Shoes are preferred. And then I had a job and I needed to look respectable often and eventually, shoes became the norm. I barely walked out to my car barefoot and while some shoes still ended up in shoe purgatory, it was because I’d switch my flip flops for flats when going into the office. So when I came back home at the beginning of this summer, my feet belonged to some kind of pansy city girl who had never played in the red dirt of the North Carolina foothills. I’m not sure how to deal with that.

But I can’t wax totally nostalgic about who I used to be. When I think back to my personality in middle school and high school, I was so full of myself. Not in a particularly prideful way, just that socially, I was stuck inside my head. I know now that there were many things going on that I had no clue about and there was a lot of comfort and caring that I could have given if I had ventured outside of my bubble. At the same time that my feet were getting callouses, my heart was staying locked up and pristine. I sobbed once in high school, in the middle of a particularly difficult week at the overnight summer camp I worked at then. While I know that crying isn’t a great indicator of emotional maturity or lack thereof, I’m convinced that I didn’t bother to feel all that much in high school.

What worries me about potentially being a lawyer, or going to law school and then pursuing a career that uses that degree, is that I would end up needing to be a combination of two parts of myself that I don’t particularly like to be: the part with pristine feet and the part with a pristine heart. I would need to be professional and business-like in the majority of my interactions and I would need to stop myself from caring too much about any one client or story. I already have a baby face, so I’d have to dress up, and caring too much would make me ineffective, so I’d have to suck up my new-found emotions. There might come a day when I forget my mountains.

Of course, that’s not a solid argument for why I shouldn’t do something. If I’m passionate about whatever it is I’m doing, my footwear won’t matter and we’ll figure out the emotions. If I have a cause, I can mold myself to be its champion. That’s honestly what’s so appealing about law school- there are so many causes waiting for champions, or backup champions, or support for the champions, and being a contributing part of any tidal wave like that is, well, exciting. 

But I don’t have to have law school for that. There’s always Big Block of Cheese Day. 

(Bonus points for the Cartographers for Social Equality). 

Planning: Day 9

Today’s Song(s): Red and Black/Do You Hear the People Sing from Les Miserables 

(Minus 5 points for not using the broadway cast, but 10 points to me for Aaron Tveit) 

I just ripped my last good pair of dark wash jeans on one of the bins we use to carry supplies for offsite camps. This comes at the end of a day when the kids were crazy, the emails were flying, and phone calls re-planning contingency plans took up the time I should have been prepping for tomorrow, but today I am indomitable. So indomitable that I spent the last thirty minutes on tumblr and now I just want to sleep and I still have emails to answer, so I’m going to bail again today, sorry team. Plus, When Harry Met Sally is on, so I have a busy schedule of needing to go cry in a corner. 

The plan for today was to talk about revolutions and fighting for things that mean something and also about how the revolution in Les Mis was not the best thing they could have done, but they did it SO HARD, they kinda won. A little. Well, Marius gets a good song out of it. Then, when I opened this document, it was going to be a list of situations where it would be useful for me to have the knowledge that law school would provide and whether I could do that same thing with a different education or no additional education at all. And, well, you see what the post is now. 

So we’ll save all of that for Saturday, when I’ll have some wisdom and some perspective and some time to think. Right after the wine tasting. In the meantime, here’s an epic video about the most important phrase a person can know: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3v3S82TuxU 

Planning: Day 8

Today’s Song: The General by Dispatch

I want to be the best at whatever I do. That’s just a fact of my existence. It probably comes from growing up in a smaller town and being picked for the Most Intelligent senior superlative in high school. I want to be the best because I am accustomed to being the best. College took that out of me, for the most part (there will always be someone smarter and someone better), but I get a flash of annoyance when someone is clearly better than me. It’s not like I’m proud of it. It’s just that I haven’t yet been able to help it. 

I don’t want to take an easy path to success. I want to play to my strengths, sure, but I don’t want to avoid a path just because it would be more difficult. Law school will be more difficult. That’s the nature of the beast. Not everyone should be a lawyer and not everyone should be a doctor and plenty of good people walk into a graduate program wide-eyed and dreamy and walk around in their careers deadened and jaded. I’m not saying that would be me here, but I didn’t read legal thrillers growing up. I haven’t taken a single logic class. This would be an uphill battle for me.

So I think that law school is an option and if I come out of any other educational programs knowing that it’s a need, I could do it, but it’s not a necessary right now. It’s an idea that I could sell myself on. And since I committed to doing this week on that, we’ll continue to explore and see and probably write in big terms about revolutionary ideas and justice and all of that, but I’ll go ahead and say the phrase that those of you who’d rather I do something else besides be a lawyer have been waiting to hear: I don’t think I’ll apply to law school this year.

Plus, I worked super long hours today teaching kids about space and I just don’t have the energy to talk myself into reading another .pdf put together by another school that will just laugh my application away. My options today were (1) get up early to buy dry ice so I can play with it and let the kids build a comet out of it or (2) get up early and continue adding to my spreadsheet of jobs you can do with a law degree. The kids really liked the comet and some of them had never seen dry ice before. 

Can I go now? Am I forgiven? 

Planning: Day 7

Song of the Day: Symphony No. 7 “Leningrad” by Shostakovich

When I need to focus, it's best to be by myself. This is difficult to do in an office full of people, so I put in my headphones and turn up some music loudly so that I can effectively ignore everyone (sorry, coworkers) and my favorite piece of the past two years has been the Leningrad symphony by Shostakovich. Since I need to do a lot of research on careers in law and law schools and what that even means, I figured I’d take today’s post to research and share the best of my thoughts as I work, and then I realized that I have a lot of learning yet to do, so this is part 1 of the things I learned when I googled “So you want to be a lawyer”.

-Let’s start out here: http://www.law.harvard.edu/current/careers/opia/public-interest-law/issue-areas/issue-areas.html (Never mind the fact that I was hours into the internet before I even found the term “public interest”.)

This list, this is why I’d want to go to law school. To work on developing policy that would improve the lives of people who are never going to go to law school and are never going to know how to advocate for themselves or that they even deserve a better life. 

-This is where I actually started: http://thegirlsguidetolawschool.com/should-you-go-to-law-school/

-Six “Should You Go To Law School” articles in and I’m starting to wonder about who their intended audience is. I’m a good student. I’m prepared to work my ass off and I know it’s going to cost more money than I can imagine. Most grad schools do. Do lazy people even apply to law school? Apparently, lazy people think about it and I’m 98% sure these articles are written to keep them from even thinking about trying.

-They keep on saying that I need to be admitted to a top 50 law school. I wonder which ones those are. *Finds list* *Immediately scrolls to see where UNC is ranked out of habit*

-Maybe I shouldn’t apply to law school if I’m intimidated just looking at school rankings.

-And it’s not that I’m not competitive enough to do this, it’s just that the competitive monster is a difficult one to put back in a cage once I let it out.

-So what I’m hearing is that if I don’t get into a top 50 law school and graduate in the top half of my class, I basically wasted my money. Guess I’m taking the LSAT again, because goodness knows my current academic recommendations are not going to help my application.

-Ah, the UGPA/LSAT Score Searcher. The killer of dreams.

-Starting to think that this is really just going to be a multi-hundred dollar way for people to tell me that, no, actually, you’re not smart enough to be a lawyer. Shake the magic eight ball. Try again later. 

-But then I read these damn articles that are full of “it’s difficult and you’re going to work all these hours and it’s near impossible to have a personal life and it’s high-stress” and all I can think is, “Psst. Watch me beast that. I got this.” What is wrong with me?

-*Sees starting salaries* *Compulsively closes browser and walks away* SO. MUCH. MONEY.

-Okay, let’s just focus on what field of law we’d like to go into. If you’re going to go to law school, you should know why you’re doing it. What are some careers I’d like to consider?

-*Listens to What Do You Do With a BA in English? for self-confidence boost*

-*Resists urge to click on all foreign policy links because I would get nothing else done*

-Public Interest Law. That sounds like what I want to do! But maybe not. This is not the most helpful article: http://www.americanbar.org/publications/young_lawyer_home/young_lawyer_archive/yld_tyl_sept08_wimberly.html 

-I’m realizing that I want to advocate for people without ever having to work with them. I’m reading all this and all I can think is, “I have to talk to people?”

-But no, really, I don’t think I should be doing research for this while I’m tired. This all sounds existing. 

-LAW REFORM ORGANIZATIONS. YES. GIVE ME THIS THING: http://www.law.harvard.edu/current/careers/opia/public-interest-law/practice-settings/law-reform.html 

-But really, I don’t think I’m cut out for this. Like, at all. So I should stop researching and stop looking into this because it would exhaust me to do it and it would break me and I would be miserable and I would live for that one day when maybe we make an impact that stays on the books and saves people down the line and yet, I read this and still think, “But I WANT that.”

Planning: Day 6

Today’s Song: A Change Is Gonna Come by Sam Cooke

You ever sit down in a conversation and wonder how you got to where you are? Like, you’re with your friends and suddenly somehow you’re discussing the official designation for the chicken walkers the Empire has on Endor in Return of the Jedi, but you’re pretty sure you started this conversation talking about the benefits of liquid eyeliner? And you’re not displeased with how the conversation has travelled, just pleasantly amused at the turn things took? I got that sensation when I sat down to take the LSAT at the beginning of June.

The LSAT was one of two impulse purchases this spring, the other being a ukelele covered in constellations. I think that sentence encapsulates my entire existence, actually. The impetus behind registering for the LSAT was probably a combination of The West Wing, NPR, and that one conversation I had with a law student at a hostel in Marseilles a couple of years ago, so, in short, a bunch of not super great reasons to be a lawyer.

At the same time, we like the things we like for a reason. That’s one of my theories about life that I feel like I never give enough credence to. There’s a reason why I stuck with all seven seasons of West Wing, and why I never turn the channel when Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or Twelve Angry Men is on, and why NPR is one of like two presets on my car radio. I am interested in the stories of people who go to our government and demand that we live up to the ideals set before us. I am interested in the governing of our country. I am interested in the questions of our time and how our values as a people (should) play out in legislation and action. And maybe I’m interested in that for a reason.

I also like to fix things. I like to help people. I like to solve problems. One of the most frustrating situations I can imagine is seeing a problem, seeing a way to fix the problem, and not having the authority or the ability to implement the solution. Now, I don’t have the expertise to fix everything in Washington, or Raleigh, or on any town council. I don’t know the laws we have on the books, nor do I yet have the eye to look at any given situation and suss out what’s actually going on there. But I want to. I want to. 

Because I see problems. I see so many problems that are systematic in their nature and I am willing to go to bat for any number of them. Like the Civil Rights Act was an idea whose time had come, I feel like changes for the better are floating out in the air, waiting for their own time and I want to be ready and willing to help. I want to fight poverty and injustice and oppression in any and all forms they present themselves. I just don’t know how, other than volunteering at a food bank and signing a petition. I don’t know the best way to fix these problems. 

So I sat down to study and take the LSAT because maybe law school is the beginning of that journey and because being a public servant is at its core something I’d like to do. I almost laughed as they handed out the test books because filing quietly into a room and taking a standardized test is something I’m awesome at and taking this test was a challenge, it was a stretch, and I loved it. I love thinking that way and analyzing the problems set before you. I love the potential to effect a great change and the absurdity of the fact that this test could be the beginning of the avalanche. 

Now I know that you don’t need law school to do that. I know that getting into the system in this case can be a barrier for change. But when I signed up for the LSAT, I needed to be doing something and do something I did. A small, self-serving something, but a something nonetheless. And since I have this test score now and since there’s a part of me, no matter how small, that would like to go to Washington one day as more than a tourist, I’ll take this week to investigate what I’d do with a law degree and maybe even take a second to think about how reasonable this whole thing is. Any and all advice will be considered, so feel free to hop to the comments. 

Let’s see what we can do. 

Planning: Day 5

Song of the day: Bad Self Portraits by Lake Street Dive

I had a moment when I was standing in my bathroom at my parents’ house in my underwear, a tank top, and a plaid shirt, with my thick-rimmed glasses and my hair up in a bun, brushing my teeth because I can’t afford another filling anytime soon, laughing hysterically at an Avengers joke on the tumblr app on my phone and I thought, “This is literally the most millennial I can be.” Now, I’m not living at home because I can’t find a job (I’m stationed out here for the summer as a part of my job with outreach at the planetarium), but other than that, I cannot think of any way that I could cram another stereotype into that scenario, unless I tweeted a vine of it.

I’ve been a lot of a millennial lately. I’ve been a lot of the target market female. Oh, sure, I have my quirks, but like a lot of my generation, I’ve redefined myself in a surprisingly standard way. I think it’s good to have a healthy balance between the “I’m a unique flower” story and the “I’m just like everyone else” story. Because you’re not like everyone else. You are, uniquely, you, and to say that you’re like everyone else is to diminish every other person’s experience (because you’re really saying that everyone else is like you). At the same time, other people out there are guaranteed to share some of your likes, your dislikes, your style, your cares, your experiences. The trick, I think, is to find friends who both enrich your life experience but are also able to squee with you when RDJ calls Chris Evans “dorito.” Or whatever it is that delights your soul.

And I think that’s a lesson that I lost, that balance idea. For the longest time, I thought I had a DESTINY, that we all had our own unique destinies, and that these destinies were these fixed things. Sure, the choices that you made led to that destiny, but there was a right and a wrong here. Pick the wrong thing and you’re doomed to unhappiness in a cubicle. There is a right and a wrong and your soul will suffer if you don’t pick the vocation that makes your heart take flight, no matter what problems or difficulties that vocation may bring. 

We’re a generation of self-starters, I think. It’s easier to be a freelancer or to start your own business or to make something and put it out there on the internet. If it’s quality, if the work you do is good, then people will find it and you’ll be able to make a living out of it. Well, if you have the advantages and then the determination to make such a thing happen. Those are our heroes, you know? The people who make something of themselves. And I’m happy to make something of myself. But I’m not going to reinvent the wheel here.

Because the thing that makes my soul sing, I think, is helping other people. And at the same time that there are phenomenal ways of giving of our means and our time online, there are also physical structures out in the world with that same purpose and I work better in structure. I don’t want to hide behind it. I don’t want to pretend like there isn’t another way, a way that can often be better. But I know a little bit about myself and I did well at school because I excel in an environment that’s structured like that. Not everyone does, which is an education rant for another day, but since I do thrive in a structured environment, why wouldn’t I seek that out, especially when I can find places that do good within their organizational structure? 

Apathy is in these days, and bitter resignation, and suspicious pessimism. And that’s fair. I understand. Not caring is cool and I can see why that would be. But I have to step out of that. I can’t exist like that and be happy. I have to throw myself at a cause, give myself to something, do my best to make a difference in the world in the ways that I can. The days I spend on the couch eat at me. The absurdly high number of hours I have spent watching Netflix worries me. The longer I sit, the harder it is to stand and I desperately need to stand. We all do, I think, but I know that I will be unhappy and lost if I stay the way I am. 

I don’t need to save the world. 

But I don’t need to just watch it either.