Post-Its

It's my last night in my dorm room. Normally this is an occasion of quasi-happiness, because I'm always ready to go home and sleep in my own not-lofted bed. But tonight, I'm going to be alone and a little sad, since my super awesome roommate has moved out and my super awesome hall mate has gone home. So, while other people are doing school years in review, I figured I'd share with you the documentation of our year- the post-it notes stuck on Clementine, our mirror.

By the way, Facebook calls blogs "drunken scribblin's" in pirate. Accurate, Facebook, Accurate.*

________________________~_____________________________


Laughter is the sunshine that warms the face. -Victor Hugo

Don't Do Drugs.
Stay in School.
No sex on the Enterprise.

Marry me Juliet, I can make your bed rock.

Are you suggesting that tiny men rape cats?

I hate sewing. I'd rather be a whore.

He must practice on melons or something.
Your mom's melons.

He's massively athletic. I'm kinda pathetic.

(About a piece of lettuce)
It will come back to you in the middle of the night and stand on your face saying LOVE ME, LOVE ME.

Our window is conveniently placed not only for Palestinian entry, but also for normal conversations. **

-Slow down!
-You just want to live!
-I want to live to be your lesbian lover!

I mean, I know I can't talk in straight lines.

I'm like the kiss of death. I draw people out of the closets they didn't even know they were in.

Drink your wine like a good girl.

You're supposed to entertain me. Dance Monkey, dance!

(About going to Istanbul)
-Now we just need money and a place to stay and a job around the time that we go.
-We got this.
-Maybe.
-Prostitution handily takes care of all those problems.

That Beatles poster is really trippy upside down. It's just like… whoa.

Prophecy mutates. Ninja turtles.

-I'm thinking of getting a futon.
-You should, that way you can name it something awesome and not have sex on it.

Just as a point of clarification- is sex on Clifford alright?

I ate your cake. I'm a horrible person.
I'll make you a new one.

Don't sledgehammer the wall and eat it. -Notes from the hall meeting

How much hot stuff has been on our carpet? Besides me?

The suicidal clock isn't up yet. It's OK to come it.

You're opening an umbrella on Friday the 13th. Do you want to break Clementine? Would that make you happy?

I had a brain wave but it ran away screaming and crying.

Fudge-monkeys in a biscuit.

(Points to shoes) See, I don't think a man could make me this happy.

Me and my mermaid throw chocolate at each other.

It's the only way to keep that last bit of sanity.
Maybe I don't have to be good but I can try to be
At least a little better than I've been so far
-The Avett Brothers

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*People of legal drinking age do occasionally occupy our room and most of the alcohol related ones are jokes anyway.
**Which don't happen in our room.

Missing Meteors

It's funny how easily conversation in college turns to what you're going to do. I'm going to fail this exam. This summer, I'm going to New York, on a mission trip, to work, to save, to party, to sleep, to visit grad schools. Next year, I'm going to apply to grad schools, to have an easy semester, to have a terrible semester, to do better, to focus more on my studies, to audition, to not audition, to study abroad, to stay in Chapel Hill, to be a leader, to be a follower. After college, I'm going to get married (!), go to med school, grad school, law school, to teach, to be unemployed, to move back in with my parents, to take a year off. To do what?

Now, this isn't a post about doing something now, though it is another tragedy of our time that so much potential is locked away in institutions and dowsed with alcohol while the world outside suffers and we learn how to think, make mistakes, describe the Hydrogen atom mathematically, start a business, get inside people's heads, understand the meaning of the actions of various Romans over the course of the Republic and Empire. It's a wonderful mixed bag that you get in college, but for a good example of someone rightly fed up with the negatives of this bag and willing to be something different, I recommend the words of this friend. For the wonderful and blessing thoughts of a good friend doing what she has been called to do, prayerfully, lovingly and in full remembrance of the awesomeness of God, I recommend her words.

I had a good conversation with a friend about what I wanted to do. It came out of talking about classes and, in particular, my teaching class. Guys, I don't want to teach physics. I could go the whole "I hate kids" route, but that would be another lie. I go the "I hate high school route" but that wouldn't be any more true. I don't have an aversion to teaching and I'd love having my own classroom, but it would be my classroom. It wouldn't belong to the kids and I wouldn't be focused on the people I was teaching. I would be teaching. I would hop into their lives as necessary and I would take advantage of every situation to be a positive influence, but it would be me, teaching. Does that make any kind of sense? I'd go home at the end of the day full of myself and miserable.

Now, I could make a conscious effort not to do that, but I fear that I would end up being that anyway because I'm not called to teach high school. You know that fear that you're made for something bigger? Now, there is nothing bigger than teaching, than changing a life, than making a generation prepared to meet the world around them, so I should probably change bigger to different. Can I get an amen from someone who has felt the Spirit move but has been entirely unsure of the direction that it's moving in? We are blessed, we are anointed... to do what?

Same good conversation, we talked about what it's like to be "called". Oh. my. lanta. Being called. What does that even mean? (I feel like a Juno reference is inappropriate here... yeah, you know what I'm talking about.) Like, a mystical voice called you out of heaven and said, "Insert name here, I call you stop world hunger because you've finally all gotten the resources and it disgusts Me to see that you waste so much food without a thought to millions of my children who are starving." Does that happen?

Because, for me, being called is this sinking feeling in my stomach that comes from disobedience (or at least the intention of disobedience). I think about things I said I'd never be, things that I know that I could be, things that I think that I should be, and my stomach just sinks because I know what I'm supposed to do and I don't want to do it. I'm supposed to actually listen to God and obey what He says. I'm supposed to put myself aside. I'm supposed to follow Him anywhere, and in the Easter happiness that has lived in my life, I never remember where anywhere can lead. And all these people have all of these stories about life and how they weren't doing the right thing and then they finally figured it out and I don't want to be that. I mean, I kinda do, because then I'd have a story to tell someone, but if I hear these things, I feel like I should fix my life, learn from their mistakes, improve the human race instead of continuing to make the same mistakes that the ancient Israelites made. So I could go where I'm supposed to and find a way to make it seem like something other than taking people with potential who care immensely about God and the world He made and locking them away in a tower for another three years learning how to think, how to pray, what this dead ancient white guy said, how to deal with what this person is saying now, how to run a church, how to preach a sermon, how to serve God in this wonderfully organized, easily dying system.

Don't believe me when I say I've got it down.

I want to share a lesson with you.

Every year, the Earth, flying through space, with go through clouds of debris- maybe the tail end of comets, what have you- and this cloud of debris will cause this thing that we call a meteor shower. I love the beauty in the idea that a cloud of space dirt comes down to Earth as something worth staying up all night to see, but maybe that's just me. We have no control when this happens. We have people who call the planetarium demanding to know why we scheduled a meteor shower on a school night. Oh sorry, we say. We'll just change Earth's position in her orbit around the sun so your child can stay up on a Friday night instead of a Thursday night. Makes total sense.

If you know your astronomy, or if you listen to the weather report, you know that meteor showers get their names, like the Leonids or the Perseids or the Geminids because of the constellation they appear to originate from. The Leonids look like they're raining down from Leo, etc. But they don't really. Once again, they're just pieces of space dirt falling to put on a show for us. Some people wish on them, so for them, a meteor shower is like driving through town and hitting every single light yellow. It's just a great opportunity. But opportunities come from a lot of places. And if you're staring at Leo, hoping to catch all the meteors, you going to miss some.

Funny how you can be looking where you're told to look, the entire time, and miss the best part of the meteor shower.

The Little Indian Man

New feeling: legitimate sadness that I can't make it to classes today (ARG MYBACKNEEDSTOGROWUPANDLETMEDOEVERYTHINGIWANTTO). So, since I won't be able to get to my Modern Islamic Civilizations class today, I figured I'd retell a story my professor told on Thursday.

Now, you've got to get the mental picture right- my class meets in the auditorium of the Stone Center, so it's a big lecture class. My professor is a short and slightly rotund Persian man with more hair on his arms than on his head and a self-proclaimed Backstreet Boys complex. He clips on his mike and paces the stage, alternating between vaguely inappropriate humor and profound truths. As much as it has burdened my heart, I love going to this class to learn something new and to listen to Professor Safi lecture. It's good stuff.

So, after we've done a day on Partition in India and Pakistan, the next lecture goes into South Asian culture a little. I'm currently fascinated by Sufi performances like this . Anyway, after listening to some fun music, Professor Safi threw up a picture of the Taj Mahal and proceeded to tell us this story.

When you go to see the Taj, you've got to see it in different lights. You need to see it in the morning, you need to see it in the evening, because depending on the light that's hitting it, the building looks completely different. So me and my friends were traveling around India, back when I had hair, and we were going to go visit the Taj. We get to Agra and have dinner at this restaurant that claims that its founders were the chefs for Shah Jahan. I don't know if that was legit, but the food was. Anyway, we get back to the hotel and we get up at like 3:30, because we're going to go see the Taj at dawn. Imagine this, you've got to visualize it. Say the stage is the Taj. There's this platform at the back of the auditorium and between the Taj and the platform are these cascading fountains, rivers of water. And you stand on the platform and you take a picture and it looks just like this:



Now, any of you who travel know that any time you get to a touristy destination, what do you find? 200 Japanese tourists, who, regardless of the time of day, have been there for an hour before you have with their little fanny packs and cameras. So we get to the Taj, it's what, 4, by now and what do we find but 200 Japanese tourists in color coordinated shirts, waiting in line to get on the platform to take a picture. And they line up, 5 at a time, and they walk up [imagine a rotund Persian man imitating a Japanese tourist bouncing up to take a picture] and click. And then the next five walk up and click. And the next five walk up and click. Click. When you leave the platform, you're led right to a postcard stand that has photos that look oddly like this [gestures to the photo of the Taj Mahal behind him].

So we wait for all 200 Japanese tourists to walk up on the platform, and we're looking at our watches and it's almost time for dawn. We finally get to get up on the platform and we're getting ready to click, when this little Indian man comes up to us- swear to God- and says, "You will come with me." [Imagine a rotund Persian man -with a Persian accent- imitating an Indian accent] And we're like, what is this little Indian man talking about? We just waited, did you see the 200 Japanese tourists? We've been waiting and this is our only chance to see the Taj and the Little Indian Man says, "You will come with me now." And I don't know what it was, but we were like "We will come with you now." [in a hypnotized voice] And -swear to God- we hopped down off the platform and started to follow the Little Indian Man.

And he takes off, so we're following this Little Indian Man and we're talking to ourselves like what are we doing, this is our only time to see the Taj, this is ridiculous, and we're running to keep up with him because the Little Indian Man is walking fast and looking at his watch and saying, "You will hurry now" and we're like "We will hurry now." Now, he's going diagonally away from the platform, away from the Taj, towards this old broken-down retaining wall and we're still talking to ourselves. And now we're at this wall and the Little Indian Man turns to me and says, "You will climb the wall now." And I'm like, no, Little Indian Man, we just left the platform and followed you around, but it's getting to be dawn and we really want to get back to the platform before the next group of Japanese tourists come through, and he says, "You will climb the wall now," and I say, "I will climb the wall now." And so I do, I climb up this broken part of the retaining wall at the behest of this Little Indian Man and turn and look at the Taj.

Turns out that this broken part of the retaining wall is where the first sunbeams of the dawn come up and hit the Taj and it is from this location that you can see semi-precious stones start to sparkle. The whole building starts to sparkle and it doesn't look anything like this [points to the picture of the Taj Mahal behind him]. And so we climb up and see this wonder and talk to each other about this amazing sight. And the Little Indian Man says, "You will get down from the wall now." And we're like, But this is gorgeous, it's the Taj, and the lights, and it sparkles and [gestures at the Taj Mahal in his mind in front of him]... and the Little Indian Man says, "You will get down from the wall now." And we say, "We will get down from the wall now."

The Little Indian Man leads us across the way to a tree that's hanging off a ledge and he says, "You will climb the tree." And we're like, No way, that's hanging off a cliff, could you imagine what would happen if we fell? I'm not climbing that tree. And the Little Indian Man says, "You will climb the tree now." And -swear to God- I said, "I will climb the tree now," and climbed this tree. And here was a completely different angle, with a different light, and it was just as beautiful as from before. I turn to tell my friends and the Little Indian Man says, "You will get out of the tree now." And I do. For the next hour, we follow the Little Indian Man around to different places, climbing up on walls, hanging off ledges, climbing trees. He had this place mapped out, knew the best places to see the light as it reached the Taj and knew exactly when to be there. He had this itinerary of beauty saved away in his little Indian brain and he was showing it all to us. When we were done, we walked back to the platform and we see another group of tourists up on the platform, click, and walk away happy with their postcard picture.

And this was around the point in my life when I realized that if you are only looking for the the postcard picture, that's all you're ever going to see. When you want to learn, really learn about somebody or something, especially someone's religion, you have to be willing to go to some unexpected places, hang off some cliffs, climb some trees. And it really helps to have someone who knows the place along to guide you around. And that might be the single most important thing you learn this semester.

Thanks, Professor.

On a Windy, Sunny Day

You ever feel like something's getting ready to happen, like today's your day, like the world is going to finally change and be on your side?

I do.

I woke up late, ran to class, got there just as my professor started, answered a question in lecture and actually got engaged in the topic, which is saying little, since it's Rome and I'm kinda taken in by the politics. I went back to my dorm and actually got ready for my day and felt like Something's Going to Happen. The wind is abusing my now-straightened hair and slipping through my coat and scarf to freeze me underneath two shirts, but it's enlivening to have something to fight as you walk. You're taking on something beyond just making one foot move in front of the other. There's life.

I've been waiting for so long for life to wake up and happen to me and I feel like today's the day. But then again, a long time waiting makes you think that maybe life's been waiting on you to wake up and happen to it. I feel like I could spend the rest of my life writing greeting cards or I could drop it all and go be an architect (why build something temporary like a building when you can have something that lasts, like a greeting card?) but I'd have to go.

So I'm sitting again at Caribou. I've got a paper to finish, a paper to write and a problem set to do. I'm going to be a productive student, I'm going to do well and I'm going to break the streak of mediocre academics because I care to be today. There's my pencil. Here's my laptop. I've got hours between now and practice and between practice and obligations tomorrow. I'm going to hunker down and focus and lose myself in Istanbul, Rome and the quantum world that hides beneath them both.

I wish someone would stop me.

Arg, Writer's Block...

I have a book review due on Thursday, but I also have a paper (on the Punic wars- darn those Romans with their excessive military activity and copious amounts of historians willing to record it) due on Friday and a problem set due two hours after the paper's due. I'm suffering massive writer's block, so I'm going to tell you, dear readers, about Orhan Pamuk's book My Name is Red.

The book is set in Ottoman Istanbul. I am currently enamored with the city of Istanbul (you would be too if you took a glance at the Aya Sophia or the Sultan Ahmet Mosque) but I know little about the Ottomans. I don't even know anything about their reputation, which is the second of the three things I'm supposed to write about. I'm supposed to talk about the Ottomans, how they're perceived historically and how the book is used as a foil for current issues today. Can I say that I have no clue what current issues are in modern-day Turkey, other than the fact that they want to be in the EU? This is probably why I'm at such a road block.

So, Ottoman Istanbul. Well, from what I can tell from the book, there are coffee houses, a lack of modern conveniences, and a lot of sex and violence. Ah, no, that's unfair, but if you go to read the book (which I quite recommend), be prepared for a little bit more information than you wanted about the character's personal, personal lives. The premise is that the Sultan of the Ottomans has commissioned a book to made that tells a story about the Sultan and contains his (gasp!) portrait. That's a main theme, right there, the idea of Venetian (from Vienna? See, 'cause I thought they were from Venice, ah well) painting which puts humanity front and center. This is a problem because 1) The portraits could become an idol for people, 2) The portraits are painted not from God's perspective but from the perspective of the artist and are thereby taking away God's creativity (Only Allah can create), and 3) they don't tell a story.

This story is told through the eyes of four miniaturists (each of which could be a murderer), their boss, his daughter, her sons and her childhood lover. The miniaturists' illustrations also speak. The beginning of the book is narrated by the corpse of the dead guilder for the miniaturists, killed by one of his compatriots. He was killed because he threatened to tell on his fellow miniaturists, to carry tales to the local religious extremists, who hate coffee (apparently Muhammad refused coffee like he refused wine) and artists in general. I'd lobby for a modern commentary on the treatment of artists, either by the government or by the people around them, but I don't know enough about Turkey to say that that's what the author's saying. And my TA shot that down.

There's an exorbitant amount of material about art in this book. They're all miniaturists (which means they draw little illustrations? I never got this- maybe on the margins of books or maybe like tiny little pictures? Glorified doodlers) and so they all talk about miniatures. They'll talk about drawing Chinese clouds and Persian horses in the style of the great masters of the past (and there's a good long section where two of the characters get locked in the Sultan's treasury to look at books and that's just a gigantic chunk of research wasted right there, because none of us appreciate it as much as we should) but they never complain that they are Ottoman's using the hybrid style of the past. Instead, most of the protestations come from people trying to blend Venetian and Ottoman styles (the daughter of the boss of the miniaturists regrets that the Ottoman style of painting will be gone, but she's willing to accept a new, happy life) and, indeed, the murderer is a proponent of these new forms. The word modernity keeps on coming up in lectures. Too bad I have no clue what kind of modernity problems Muslims in Turkey are facing today.

I mean, there's the presentation of religion in the book. It's ubiquitous. The people who aren't especially moral pray to Allah in times of crisis, like some other people I know, and the people who have killed other people still go to evening prayers like nothing's wrong. Yes, there's bashing of extremists (or maybe they're not extreme... I could have read that wrong) but there's no hating on religious people of every kind. And there's tongue-in-cheek secularist references (here's where I get in trouble with my TA because I don't have the space in a two page paper to include multiple, supportive examples of my arguments and still have it sound decent) but he's not pushing an agenda. The author says early on (when the corpse is talking, actually) that he's not talking about everyone's religious views, only his own. And I respect the kid for that. I guess I should respect him for his Nobel Prize, too.

So what have we got? A depiction of Ottoman Istanbul: check. A commentary on how the Ottomans are remembered: Not so checked. If I'm reading between the lines, they're at war, they like art and architecture (EPIC architecture), and they, like every other nation in the world, have to confront new ideas and decide how to make them their own, without losing all of their history. Oh, and they're Muslim. For the most part. There's a Jewish lady in the book. And a commentary on how social issues are foiled in the book: mildly checked. I think there's a lot to be said for how every religion must grow up into the world it's in or be left behind. No one worships Marduk anymore. Can I put that in my paper? No.

On the bright side, I can now spell miniature without having to check spell check. Mission accomplished.

A Tale of Two Tuesdays

Can I tell you something?

I'm not going to be a physics teacher.

There. I said it. It's out. I thought about giving up lying for Lent and then realized that I'd have to drop this teaching physics class that I'm in and figure out some other way to fill up the last of my physics electives and that would just be a pain. In addition to the other things that I'd have to tell the truth about all the time. Shudder.

I mean, I'm not closing the door on this option. By the time I'll graduate, I'll have a teaching license to spiffy up my pathetic physics BA with possible religion minor. I'm an honors program dropout (and happy about it, too- they didn't give me my Shakespeare this year and they don't offer classes I can feasibly take any more and you need a 3.5 [Oh. My. Lanta.] to write a thesis in physics anyway- 3.5 Math and Physics GPA), I'm a BS dropout (delighted about that one, tell me you), I've done anything but excel academically. I'm John Lennon after the Beatles broke up- I'm depending on my laurels and occasionally using this gift I've been given. My point is, I have a depressing (to me) collegiate record, the kind that needs dressing up in anyway possible if I'm going to (gasp!) apply to grad schools next year.

And I've got extracurriculars, like band and band and band and band. And SAI (one of these days I will write an epic post about the wonderfulness that is the sisterhood of Sigma Alpha Iota at the Iota Tau Chapter at UNC and you, my friends, will be jealous). And I work at the planetarium (and I've done some training on the new digital system- get excited, it's going to be legendary). And I participate in various religious organizations as much as time allows- University United Methodist's college Sunday School, small group (Caribou, Friday mornings, 10 o'clock, be there or be square) and bell choir, the Wesley foundation (as soon as band quits) and CCF (Campus Christian fellowship, though they meet when bells rehearses and the bible study got moved to Tuesdays). But it's not high school, when I was convinced that I had every application in the bag (though, in retrospect, Princeton was really just an opportunity for embarrassment). I don't have letters of recommendation lined up and my GPA only reflects the fact that I'm a science BA- I've taken enough science and math classes to substantially lower it and enough humanities (I'm not judging, I'm just saying) to keep it afloat.

So I stepped into this teaching physics world with the idea that being in front of a classroom would be a good thing, that maybe I could be out in the 'real world' for a little while before going on to... whatever it was that I thought I was going on to and that this was going to provide me with a solid backup plan because, as I still maintain, being ordained is a big thing to be wrong about. And, of course, it would make my BA look better. In general, all pluses.

So I went to observe a physics class on Tuesday and had that sinking realization that I could not do this. No, not that I couldn't do that, because I could teach physics, and I'm learning a lot now about good ways to help students really get the concepts and ways of making it less scary (because it isn't scary at the levels most of you live on... though sometimes I want to go hide my head under my pillows- let's be honest, my mattress- because of my homework) and I could stand up in front of a class, 8-3 Monday-Friday and I could grade papers and I could help students and I could do all of this, but I shouldn't do that. Along with the fact that I will attempt at all costs to dissuade you from a physics major (unless you're good at it or you have some odd admiration for the topic and are willing to devote hours, nay, days to the end of understanding its possessive and elusive nature) and so, by such reckonings, should not be a high school physics teacher and dissuade potential future physicists, I sat in the back of that classroom and realized that it was not the place for me. I know this whole picking what you want to do with your life is new (especially for those of us without male reproductive organs) because for the most part of history you just did what your dad did or you got sold off as an apprentice or something like that, but I'm glad I have the chance to look around and see where my talents are best used in the world. And that place is not necessarily a physics classroom.

I used to think that when people talked about things being wrong in life, they were just joking. I honestly thought that there really wasn't a place that someone wouldn't be perfectly happy being if they put their minds to it. Misery, drama, stuff like that was clearly reserved for the fictional world of sitcoms and books. You can't end up in a job you wouldn't like, that just didn't happen. I'm not entirely sure why I thought that, but I did. But I've realized that the idea that your heart can be somewhere else entirely doesn't have to apply to that time when your romantic love is far from your sight. My heart is not in teaching physics. My heart (gasp! again!) is not even in astronomy, though that comes closer to the mark. Two dollars if you guess where I'm headed.

Listen, it doesn't make me any better than anyone else if I'm headed for a lifetime of Sunday mornings. I've talked with a couple of friends about why we'd pick ordination instead of the billions of other professions available, all of which can be glorifying to God if the person is willing to live for Him. And we've come up with things like, "I'm too pissed off to leave the church now" or "This way, I'm saying to everyone that I'm God's" or "This is the right way for me to care for people." But what I want to submit to you, my friends, is not some fancy or even plain yet heartfelt reason why I want to set my life aside for the Church but two anecdotes, if you will, two stories.

It's Tuesday. I'm sitting in my Modern Islamic Civilizations class, which I'm quickly falling in love with, despite massive amounts of reading and a real witchb of a TA, and my professor is talking about Muhammad. It's near the beginning of the semester, so he's allowed to use all his stored phrases and prepared speeches because we won't have heard them already. He's talking about Muhammad and the Qur'an and how there's nothing new in the Qur'an. A prophet is always called to speak to his people a message of remembrance, of bringing back to their minds the things God has already told them but that they forgot- care for those in need, fight injustice, love one another. He's talking about this and about prophets and prophetic figures and my heart is burning. "Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?" (Luke 24:32)

It's Tuesday again. I'm sitting in the back of a physics classroom at East Chapel Hill High and I'm amazed at how this guy knows his stuff. He's eyeballing equations and calling out numbers without a calculator, picking out students which he knows will either give out the answer or bring up a problem that will benefit the entire class, making jokes, helping them focus, teaching, leading the class. They're learning circuits and Kirchhoff's laws, stuff I've gotten down pat at this point in my mind, and they've got it covered. The class is going well, the teacher's got this well in hand and I'm sitting back there thinking, I can't do this. There's this dead weight in my chest. What am I thinking? What could ever have possessed me to say that this is what I would do with my life? The teacher's helping them understand something, preparing kids for being things like doctors (they all have to pass a college physics class), engineers, chemists, biologists, physicists, really annoyingly scientifically literate writers, or whatever else they want to be in life, because they're thinking, they're working through something, they're learning. The kids clearly respect him. I'm sure that he's been there for many a student with a problem. He's positively impacting his world. But I couldn't be him.

But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it. (Ephesians 4:7)