Need

Favorite Book: Found?

2012-01-27T07:12:00.000-08:00

It was first presented to me 2.5 years ago as the book for "The Recently Broken-up". Starbucks on N. Atherton St. Sitting across from Paige Moyer.

It became

... the book for the "Poet".

... then the book of "Jubilee".

...then the book for "Children of Divorce".

... and then the book for "The About to Graduate".

... and then the "Recently Graduated."

... and now the book of "Everyday."

There is a good chance, friends, that "Isaiah" might just win "The Book of Dana's Life".

In Love with a Place: In Memory of Joe Paterno

2012-01-22T10:40:00.000-08:00

Love is not explainable or even justifiable. Take falling inlove: if one were to ask, "Why do you love this person?" what answerscould be given? A list of attributes, of strengths... but how can one explainthe way a person holds their fork as a reason for love? You cannot ask the restof the world to see the wonder in a person that you have found. You cannot askthe rest of the world to forgive their faults the way you have forgiven themand pray for strength that they may be happier. You cannot ask the rest of theworld to be in love the way you are in love.

I am in love with a place.

***

The president of the ministry organization sat down next tome at the final lunch of our two day staff seminar. He had sat next to mebefore at the seminar just prior and we had talked about campus and how he hadstarted campus ministry himself at Penn State in the 80s and how his wife hadgraduated from there. We repeated parts of this conversation again. His wife,it seems, may have lived in the house that I currently call home when she wasan undergraduate.

As he listed the various memories of Penn State, I couldtell that there was something he was trying to put something into words. Hefound them. "I just was never enchanted with the place. I don't know why.There was just a hubris to the chant of 'We are Penn State' that I couldnever stomach. The school never caught me.'"

Another ministry staff member from PSU was at the table with me. Wemade eye contact. I could not read his expression. He responded to thepresident with observations about his own children: only two of the four everactively loved Penn State even though growing up in State College. Not everyoneloves it, and that is okay. The president continued with some observations andopinions about the Sandusky case and the "cult of Joe Pa". I wasquiet and tried to talk about what I love about State College and Penn State in combination; how thetown is as dear to me as the school; how yes there is excessive pride... I heldmy tongue along the lines of "I can criticize my family but youcan't" kind of attitude.

How can I ask him to be in love with the same place I am?

How can I explain why walking down Calder Ave is my favoritestretch of street in downtown? How can I explain why I was compelled to walkbarefoot on a September Sunday across campus? How can Iexplain how I love the tree outside of Burrowes where I take naps on a lowhanging branch? How can I explain why the creak in the floor at Irvings ischarming to me? How can I explain the memories I have at Sunset Park, the frisbee games? How can I explain the significant of White Building 133? How can I explain the drive to Shingletown Gap? Or the feeling when Mt Nittany comes into view on 322 from Harrisburg? How can I explain that at times, even the rowdy drunkenness onmy street causes me to sigh, "Oh State College" with affection? Howcan I explain that even the worst parts of this town, scandal and all, hasprompted me to love it more?

Loved not because it is good, but because it is itself.

State College is not always an easy place to love. Penn State is not always an easy place to love. The last few months have proved that.

But I do love it. And in this, I know I am not alone.

***

I write this in memoryof Coach Joe Paterno who passed away this morning. He was a man I admired forloving and caring for this place better than I have or may ever be able to do.I am grieving as part of a town and a school that benefited so much from histime as coach and community member.

To love a place wellchanges the world.

Christianity IS a Religion

2012-01-12T15:44:00.000-08:00

I've had it. The video went viral. It was hype. It was cool. It was spoken word. It was a kid we've seen before from Seattle who did spoken word on sexual brokenness. He brings it up here. He's compelling. He's cute. He's well spoken.

See Here

And I yelled through most of it.

Because his thesis is this: Christianity is NOT a religion. It's a relationship. And anything that smacks of Religion is damaging to the human soul and to the picture of Jesus. For example: wars in the name of religion (all religion's fault). Or the use of religion to justify politics (he took some time to hate on Republicans).

No.

No. No. No.

Let's clarify. I am a Christian. I work for a church. I love Jesus. Sure, I've got complicated relationships with my political upbringing. I'm the prototypical "good kid" who struggles with guilt and hidden crap. That's me. And looking pretty for church can be a problem. But this has nothing to do with me being part of a religion.

THIS IS NOT "RELIGION'S" FAULT.

This is my fault.

A religion is a structure that enables a community of people to practice their belief system in an organized, consistent, and long term sustainable fashion. You want to talk about sustainable practices! Communities built around small institutions that help and support one another. A religions is a system of practices.

Religion has precious little to do with the many things that have been done in its name. Religion (read: structure) is not an inherently bad thing. Structure it good. You want to question what that structure is but the idea of structure in order to enable faith practices to be practiced is NOT a bad thing.

And it has nothing to do with whether or not you love Jesus.

People have problems. People are why wars are fought. People inhabit the structure that is religion and because PEOPLE are messed up, we get things like hypocrisy and the "good kid" Church Guilt. And we get hate and oppression of other races and religions. We get wars. We get the Crusades (side note: more about politics masquerading as religious faith than it was about actual faith/religious practices).

So when you tell me that Jesus is not about religion but a relationship, I'm calling BS on you. He was totally about overthrowing the previous structure, but to institute a new covenant. Covenant? Yeah. That sounds like religious structure to me.

And when you say Christianity/FollowingTheWay/Loving Jesus is not a religion, you lie. You take away something that has given beauty and order and sustainability of a faith. Relationships are practiced through religion. Own it. Stop trying to make Christianity sound nicer than you actually need to.

A Grand Idea

2012-01-02T09:23:00.000-08:00

Find the Poetry Foundation App for the iphone. Or itunes. Whatever you can do to make it work.

Sit with Christmas lights on during a grey, rainy afternoon. Preferably on January 1st if you can swing it.

Pass the random poetry finds around the room. Have each good friend who sits near you read aloud.

Continue for several hours until it is time for dinner and the sun has set.

Make creamy potato soup and share with your poetry friends.

Feel full of food and the clear space of good words.

2011 Survey

2011-12-31T07:33:00.000-08:00

An old, old tradition of mine. Like... since 2005 old.

What did you do in 2011 that you've never done before?

Danced in finals at MIT.

Danced silver.

Bought a car.

Got a real job and even raised my own salary!

Acted like an introvert.

Drove from GA to PA by myself.

Graduated from college (!!!).

Frequented a bar (salsa nights!).

Legit job.

Did you keep your New Year's resolution and will you make one for this year?

I made no resolution.

2012: Just do it. Stop waiting.

Did anyone close to you give birth?

Becky Watlington, Christy Martsolf, Amanda Tingle, Adele Cole, Alysia Watkins.

Did anyone close to you die?

No.

Did anyone close to you get hitched?

Sarah and Matt Martin

Arden and Mary

What countries did you visit?

This question pains me.

What date(s) from 2011 will remain etched upon your memory?

MIT Weekend

First week in March (a vague, blurred, but deeply etched time)

What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?

Have a legit answer to "what countries did you visit?".

What's your biggest achievement this year?

My undergraduate Honors Thesis.

1st Semester Out of College intact (mostly)

Being there for my siblings as best as I could.

Elements Apprenticeship.

Word Parties.

Biggest failure?

Belief that I was constantly failing.

Not telling the truth. Or not telling it soon enough.

Did you suffer illness or injury?

First ER trip of my life and morphine dose. Hello Kidney Stone.

Wisdom Teeth: The Gourd Face

What was the last thing you bought?

Wide legged dance pants. I'm aiming to become a Westie.

Whose behavior merited celebration?

Gretchen. Jennifer. Isaac.

Where did most of your money go?

Food, rent, car, dance.

What did you really get excited about?

Ballroom 24/7.

Thesis writing.

Working with Calvary Elements.

Whim Cotty.

What song will remind you of 2011?

"We Found Love in a Hopeless Place"

"Stand By Me" and other various constantly replayed salsa night favorites.

The entirety of "Recovery" by Jeremy Casella, especially, "Born Again". In fact, let's just go ahead and say that "Recovery" as the album of the year in my life from March on.

Compared to this time last year, are you happier or sadder?

A stupid question. Emotions are not measurable in this dichotomy.

In my own scale, I feel what it is to have seen what one is so afraid of seeing.

And somehow becoming more rooted than before.

Grateful. Not because I am happy, but because... well... because I'm not alone.

What do you wish you'd done more of?

Speaking my mind.

Going to poetry readings.

What do you wish you'd done less of?

Stabilizing.

Being afraid.

Those two go hand in hand.

What was your favorite TV show?

Sherlock

Downton Abbey

Firefly

Bachelor/Bachelorette (it was all about the community, ya know?)

What were the best books you read?

"Walking on Water" by L'Engle

"Body", collection of essays

Essays by Annie Dillard.

The essay genre in general was a new Love.

What was your best musical discovery?

Mumford&Sons, driving through a gold summer Lancaster sunset.

What did you want and got?

Ballroom weekends off of work

A trip to Boston with Fraleigh and Sara to see Vaughn

Samba improvements

Iphone

What movies did you see in cinema?

Final Harry Potter (while on oxycodone so I don't remember much)

War Horse

What did you do on your birthday? How old did you turn?

The day of was pretty quiet. A few weeks later, I celebrated quietly with Fraleigh and Sara over carrot cake and champagne.

What one thing would have made this year more satisfying?

The one thing I wanted, have wanted, will always want, but am learning to accept may never be given.

Learning to accept it and myself and life sooner.

Learning to be patient with the process of "growing up".

How would you describe your personal fashion?

From the "cannot be bothered" to the extravagent. Eg. safety-pined shoe straps to Ray Rose dance shoes.

What kept you sane?

Ballroom.

James and Sam.

Ballroom.

Elements planning.

Ballroom.

Isaiah over and over and over.

Salsa nights.

Julia Kasdorf.

Journaling.

Soup.

Who was the best new person you met?

Vaughn Morgan. A wise counselor, friend. "A lot a bit". "Boys are stupid. Girls are crazy."

Mae (not technically "new", but we became friends this year).

Nicolle Maurer.

Steve Cline, adopted little bro.

What was a valuable lesson you've learned?

-Be patient, little one, be patient. You'll grow up as fast as you can. No sense being angry at yourself while you're trying really hard to do what is good and life giving.

-Trying very hard to "be right" is a prison; "the law", as the Bible calls it.

Missed Words

2011-12-21T06:48:00.000-08:00

I came into "Christmas Break" armed with books. I also came into the Christmas Break, ie the most distractible time of the year. But last week on a retreat day, I found a list in the journal belonging to early 2011, a list of books I would read in order to complete a proper education; books I had missed in undergrad.

There were even a few blog posts about it here. I included things like "Lolita" and "Ulysses" and anything by Faulkner and...

Until two weeks ago when I made a last second decision to pick up "Lolita" from the library, I had read none of them. [Slight exaggeration. I did read "Notes from the Underground"]

If you haven't noticed, there is a list on the right hand side of this page where I'm supposed to keep you updated on what I've been reading. I don't think its changed in a while.

So this Christmas, I'm starting to make the small journey towards the literature no one made me touch in college. I have "The Basic Writings of Existentialism"[owned for years] and "Lolita" [talked about for years]. Neither are very "Christmas Spirit"-y but my annual re-read of "A Christmas Carol" could perhaps make up for that.

PS. Would anyone in the State College region be interested in participating in the IAM Readers Guild with me this year?

Changes a Brewin' in Whim Cotty Walls

2011-12-15T14:13:00.000-08:00

Things are changing piece by piece this week in Whim Cotty. A suddenly empty wall opens up. I stop in the bathroom, unsettled because something has changed. Ah yes, the grim "CLEAN YOUR TEETH" poster that reflects menacingly in our vanity mirror has been removed. I had stopped the same way when it first appeared, held up with masking tape this last August. It took several days to find the culprit: Avery's artistic choice to put it up. Her moving out to take it down.

It's been an adventure having 5 roommates this semester. Perhaps I don't want to say "adventure". I say "adventure" when I'm trying to make a comedic tale out of something I didn't quite enjoy. And I did enjoy having 5 roommates. Not just housemates. Roommates. In case you didn't know, Whim Cotty boasts of 1 bedroom that was formerly the living room/dinning room. All of 5 of us lived in various corners of that space. It kind of surprises me now that I'm thinking about it. It shouldn't have work. Somedays it didn't. But most of the time, I enjoyed the strangeness. I grew very comfortable with sleeping to the sound of a fan running every night.

Whim Cotty is not the typical apartment shape. If it were, none of the choices we made this semester would have turned out as well as they did. It is the first floor of an older stone home in the Holmes/Foster district of State College. We live in a bizarre

shape. The middle line is the first hallway. The long left of the E is the hallway that runs the length of the house and contains the "i room" and the bathroom. The top line is the kitchen and old bedroom that we use as a living room. The bottom line is the old dinning room and living room, which is the bedroom for 5. Soon to be 3.

Avery is moving out due to graduation and the onset of what we Valley Dwellers like to refer to in hushed tones as "real life". Jocelyn, by living in the madness that is/was our home, discovered that she is a very strong introvert. She loves us and we love her, but she needs a room with a door. It was a valuable insight to gain, one that the strange shape and sounds of Whim Cotty was able to give.

This set up has taught me a lot about space and how we each use it and what we need it to be doing. Yes, static walls can be active shapers of interactions and relationships. Each of us has taken up a corner and made it our own. There was something about our personalities in each of these spaces. Nicolle seemed to take to the long couch in the living room and could be found there doing work at any hour. Jocelyn was the same but only when she has the option to close the door and be there alone. Before it was cold, she used the back porch quite a bit [it isn't heated]. Avery was always in the i room, particularly on the white chair. Mel would wander, rarely settling to do work unless it was reading before bed but choosing places where she could talk and interact, often the kitchen. And me? I chose as I have chosen since I was a high school student, my bed. I put my beloved desk right up next to it and spent hours in the back corner, the farthest away from all of the action that I could. I never minded another person in the room as long as I could find a place where, on occasion, people wouldn't talk to me. I use the bed as a couch, chair, table, etc. I nap, I read, I watch movies, etc.

It's fascinating to think how the walls and size of a room and the amount of light it gets helps to determine what is a room is and how it is used. It is fascinating to think about how personalities shape the way that a space is used. And I love Whim Cotty. Not everyone in our house has loved it the same way. I am in love with its quirks and traits, the way the bathroom door gets stuck, the eerie sound of the basement, the shape of the living room and the chair that gets the light in the winter afternoons, our bizarre tile pattern in the kitchen. It's a good place with good wood floors and a good feel to it.

As Anjali said last night with her inaugural visit: "I can see why you call it 'Whim Cotty' now. It's a perfect name."

Masked and Dangerous

2011-12-09T08:42:00.000-08:00

I had begun to understand Erica Reitz's plight in her first trimester. I had begun to know the knee jerk reaction of gagging and choking at the strange smell that sometimes hit me in my apartment. The smell had become a legitimate problem: when the fridge door opened, a smell would drift out and quietly murk its way down the hallway and into the bedrooms. It travelled a long distance and would stay for several minutes after the unoffending fridge intruder had closed the door again.

By last night, I had had enough.

I pulled out a box of "not wearing right now" clothes and found my old bandanas. I wrapped one around my face and with Melanie and Nicolle for back up, I went in.

Even with protection from the bandana, it was a gruesome affair. I viciously sentenced many jars and bags to an untimely death in the trash can. I scrubbed all the walls with clorox. All items were removed and placed back in only if they could pass a smell test. Nicolle handed me paper towels. Mel helped organize things I had chucked behind me.

And still the smell persisted.

The decision to throw away almost all items in tupperware containers was the decision that changed the game.

Black beans, it would seem, do not keep well.

The smell as the lid was removed was catastrophic. I fell over and tried not to breathe through my nose. I yelled, "Get it out!" and Nicolle ran with the bag to the door and out to the dumpster. I felt the need to cheer and celebrate.

"A small miracle has happened: I was just motivated to do housework!" I said.

The moral of the story: don't wait for a smell in the fridge to gain feet and wander around your house before you viciously end its life with the trashcan and clorox.

Wisdom of the Day

2011-12-07T08:28:00.001-08:00

Just saw Erica Reitz in Irvings. After my first "grown up and employed" Christmas party last night, I've been feeling pretty angsty about maturity and responsibility and what that does to the ability of a group of people to throw a good party.

So I tell Erica all of this and then I start feeling guilty for having been the awkward person at the "grown up and employed" Christmas party.

Her response: "You can't have an emotion about an emotion. Makes everything way too confusing."

...astounded stare...

Why didn't anyone tell me this sooner?!

Missing Space

2011-11-29T07:47:00.001-08:00

I'm feeling Webster's absence very keenly today. Some days are worse than others. I woke up this morning and was again one of the first ones out of bed (it was 8:30am). With the late night, late morning life style of 5 college cultured women sharing one room, it can be hard to buck the system. Mornings are difficult. At night, I can clothes a few doors and turn off the lights and go to sleep. No one messes with lights after they've been turned on. The "right to sleep" is a communally upheld privilege. And it works this way in the mornings where the lights might not come on in the bedrooms or even the kitchen until fairly late.

On a day like today, wet and grey, "getting things done" is nearly impossible.

So I left. I packed up and moved locations, as I have been saying I should do ever since my part time job ended. I walked down Beaver with the hopes of getting one of the few tables in Saints that doesn't involve perching in a high stool at a teeny tiny table with minimal elbow room between you and your neighbor.

There was no such table.

Hence, missing Websters. My chosen spot of a Panera Booth isn't the worst place to be. There are lights, the sounds of people working and talking. Plenty of space to spread my books and pens and computer. But it isn't a Place like Websters was. Panera feels created to be neither "here" nor "there", a reproduced feeling that I get in some Starbucks, airports, and hospitals. Neutrality+Color Scheme Branding makes me feel rather disconnected.

Hence, missing Websters. I miss how itself Websters was. It wasn't trying to be like something else. It just was. It was easier to sit and work and drink tea and listen to people in a space that was grounded. I didn't know about this kind of affect a place/space could have until Websters disappeared.

I plan on taking up permanent morning residence there when it reopens in January!

Holiday Therapy

2011-11-26T09:45:00.001-08:00

I had two conversations that comforted me greatly yesterday.

#1 Standing outside of the Osmond building chatting with a friend. He asks how my Thanksgiving was. I reply honestly: it sucked. Why? he asks. I explain. His reply: "Aww! That was my Thanksgiving last year. I am so sorry!" He gave me a hug and we both laughed because bad holidays are... well, you kind of have to laugh. And laughing with someone else makes it better.

#2 Standing in Henderson lounge for the start of Elements [the weekly gathering I help orchestrate for my job]. Talking with a friend who hadn't come in a while.

Me: "How was your Thanksgiving?"

Him:"Alright."

Me:"That doesn't sound good."

Him:"I'm just glad to be back."

Short pause. "Me too."

He smiled for the first time. "Seriously?"

We laughed and high-fived, celebrating that we weren't the only ones who left, as he said, "A messy can of worms". My heart grew lighter. Knowing that his Thanksgiving was also rough enabled me to laugh.

So for those of you who had a crappy holiday break, the best I can do for you is this: you are not alone. Own the crappiness. Laugh at it, laugh with me at its absurdities and difficulties. Celebrate that all bad days end.

It's totally okay.

Some L'Engle

2011-11-23T15:22:00.001-08:00

Madeleine L'Engle in "Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art":

"For the opposite of sin is faith and never virtue, and we live in a world that believes self-control can make us virtuous. But that's not how it works... To quote H.A. Williams again,

When I attempt to make myself virtuous, the me I can thus organize and discipline is no more than the me of which I am aware And it is precisely the equation of my total self with this one small part of it which is the root cause of all sin. This is the fundamental mistake often made in exhortations to repentance and amendment. They attempt to confirm me in my lack of faith by getting me to organize the self I know against the self I do not know.

"In prayer, in the creative process, these two parts of ourselves, the mind and the heart, the intellect and the intuition, the conscious and the subconscious mind, stop fighting each other and collaborate. Theophan the Recluse advised those who came to him for counsel to 'pray with the mind in the heart,' and surly this is how the artist works. When mind and heart work together, they know each other as two people who love each other know; and as the love of two people is a gift, a totally unmerited, incomprehensible gift, so is the union of the mind and heart. David cried out to God, 'Unite my heart to fear thy name.' It is my prayer too.

"When I urge that we abandon our rigid self-control I am not suggesting that we abandon ourselves into hysteria or licentiousness, uninhibited temper tantrums or self-indulgence. Anything but. However, when we try to control our lives totally with the self we think we know, 'the result is that growth in self-awareness is inhibited.' And, Williams continues, 'there is a sort of devilish perversity in this organizing me not to sin by means of the very thing which ensures that I shall. Faith, on the other hand, consists in the awareness that I am more than I know." Such awareness came to the prodigal when he realized he was more than a starving swineherd. What led him home was his becoming aware that he was also his father's son. Yet his awareness of the sonship was enough to make him journey homewards.

"The journey homewards. Coming home. That's what it's all about. The journey to the coming of the kingdom. That's probably the chief difference between the Christian and the secular artist--the purpose of the work, be it story or music or painting, is to further the coming of the kingdom, to make us more aware of our status as children of God, and to turn our feet toward home."

pages 192-194

Penn State and Greek Theatre

2011-11-22T08:23:00.001-08:00

My professor, Judith McKelvey, was the first to hand me Euripides and make me read him. "Antigone" and most of Sophocles I was familiar with if only through cultural osmosis. "The Bacchae"? Not so much. And certainly, the "Lysistrata" never appeared in an assignment in my high school, homeschool courses.

"The Bacchae" is a sordid, appalling tragedy with dark humor shot through it. It is infused with a divine madness, especially well communicated in Suzan-Lori Park's translation. Dionysus, a young god, wrecks havoc in the name of vengeance on a city in Greece because of an old grievance. But he does this by calling out the folly of the people there and they begin to destroy themselves. Leaders who look the other way when it is time to repent and pay a devastating price for it.

Judy McKelvey always argued that the Greek comedies were ultimately darker than the tragedies. A comedy was ultimately more hopeless because nothing changes. In a tragedy, there is the classic moment of "recognition" where hubris is broken and the world is changed beyond repair. But there is also a conclusion that will prevent any such thing happening again: the event is witnessed in full and we are in the power to not repeat the mistakes.

In a comedy, the goal is to return to normal. To not change. For the world to get cynically turned on its head and watch humanity stay exactly as it was. It is a hopeless genre.

***

I had been thinking of "The Bacchae" the night that Joe Pa was fired. I thought of the the Bacchinalian madness, and the way the media seemed to tear everything in its path. I thought of the group frenzy of anger against the firing, the group thinking that happened before he was even fired. I thought of the "riot"[that wasn't much of a riot] and the many that came to "see what was happening".

Penn State is not a direct reflection of Euripides "The Bacchae". We aren't dealing with allegory.

We are dealing with some human darkness that the comedic mockery Euripides employed hits true.

I thought perhaps it was a stretch to see Greek Comedy appearing in campus events. And then on Sunday night as I drove over the last mountain and down into Nittany Valley, my radio picked up 91.5, WPSU, our local NPR station. And this was being played: WPSU Panel discussion. It was an interesting and thoughtful conversation. But near the end, Michael Berube shared a conversation he had had with a colleague. He had offered Sophocles as the poet/playwright of the hour. But then his colleague said, "No. I think Euripides is our playwright." The master playwright of the dark comedy and the mockery steeped tragedy.

***

I hope not. I hope to goodness that we have not been exposed to the world for exactly what we are if we are to stay the same. I hope this is not Euripides, but I fear that we have already embodied his narrative too completely to come out of it with anything other than the ancient leaders limping blindly into exile.

Subculture

2011-11-20T13:01:00.001-08:00

Today, Dad, Isaac, Gretchen, and I went on a hike in Mt. Gretna. Perhaps "hike" is too vigorous a word for our short walk to the fire tower and short walk back down. An any case, we dressed as if we were going for a real hike. We were surprised to find the area swarming with people: Mt. Gretna is anything but a teeming metropolis. As we started to take the walk up the hill, we started regularly seeing runners hurtling down the trail towards us. They would never make eye contact. They each carried some kind of piece of paper. Sometimes, we would see them making their way through the woods rather than following the trail. Most of them were wearing some kind of running gear and a handy heart rate monitor watch on their wrists.

Now, I've had exposure to cross country racing. Hannah did it with Lower Dauphin in high school (first ever home schooled team captain in the county). I get running a set distance through the woods.

But that doesn't typically result in universal blood loss.

Here's the thing: every person who passed us was bleeding. Some had blood coming through their shirts. Most has blood on their faces from visible or hidden scratches. One person had it dribbling out of the corner of his mouth.

I have no idea what they were doing but I was more than a little disturbed. I go for a walk the woods and spandex clad sprinters fly past me covered in blood.

Currently, no internet research has revealed to me what subculture I was suddenly exposed to.

But then again, if someone walked into a ballroom competition, would we seem any stranger wearing heels and sequins to dance in a rectangular space than someone running down a trail with blood on their lip?

Re-Telling the Story: Grieving the PSU Sex Abuse Scandal

2011-11-15T07:06:00.001-08:00

I've opened this window to write a post many times in the last week.

I've left it blank every time. Because I know that the only thing I'm going to be able to write about is the sex abuse scandal.

Writers often talk about how writing is a way to process. To heal. To understand. To move forward. To make something out of chaos.

I don't know if others do this too, but sometimes when I am most intensely gripped by emotion, I stop writing. I can predict how difficult a time in my life was by the month long gaps in the dates that appear in my journal. And if I do write, its about what I ate or an assignment or something not related to how my insides are coming apart.

An hour ago, I came home to Whim Cotty after my first visit to New Leaf Initiative on Fraser Street. Steve Lutz had called a Meeting of the Minds to start thinking of ways to make something in response to the scandal [I'm looking for a new name to call it but don't have anything else quite yet]. Two students, two campus ministers, myself (psu alum, writer, campus ministry apprentice), and a young adults minister with the input of one of the New Leaf members: sitting around a table trying to make something.

It was one of the most hopeful things I've experienced in the past week. I have no idea what this conversation is going to turn into, but we're starting to collect local resources, doing some research, and thinking about these words:

shame, silence, story

We're asking what it means to be part of re-telling the story of this past week, of these past few decades. We can't undo what has been done. But perhaps we be part of finding out how the meaning of those events can change. The story isn't over yet.

***

What you just read above isn't the post I've had in me to write, the one I've kept myself from writing for a week. Being at New Leaf tonight was the kick in the pants I needed.

Because my response to the past week was not hopeful. My response was...

anger, fatigue, dismissal, denial, distancing, horror, sadness, numbness, interest, boredom, pissed off, stunned, unaware, over aware, defensive, humbled, betrayed etc.

I was grieving. Am grieving.

And I wanted to tell you about it. But I wasn't sure what I was grieving. I wanted to give some commentary on the whole thing, but there were so many voices yelling that I didn't know what to say. If you could only have seen the facebook status updates that I have seen this week (I have 478 psu students and alums in my fb feed, not to mention the others who are connected to the school in some way), or read the tweets flying from both media sources and student sources.

Part of what I want to do is explain. I feel a desperate need to defend Penn State from the outside voices. We call the school we graduate from as "Alma Mater" for a reason. You can complain about your mother all you want, but when someone unrelated comes along and starts bashing her to your face... well, that doesn't sit so well. I've wanted to do some bashing in of a few people at various points.

Perhaps this explaining can come later. I think there is a place for me to tell you the story of my week in detail, to let you in on the sociological processes that happened in the nation, the community, and the campus. To explain about riot culture in the Valley. To explain and defend the trauma of being here when Joe Pa was fired. To explain and let you see what it was here. To show you how attacked many students felt.

But not this post.

I just need to tell you that its been a long week and a half for me, ranging from the moment I first heard the news from an NPR tweet Sunday morning before my dance competition, to today as I cried in an Elements leadership meeting, to the surreal moment of sitting with a friend who had been abused as a child after the candlelight vigil on Friday.

I'm struggling in three ways: I'm grieving for a place that I love very much, one that I have known both as a student and now as a Townie. And secondly, I'm grieving for the crimes against children and for the unjust world that let those acts be unpunished. And thirdly, I'm grieving the ways I am part of all of this. This is my home, my family name, if you will. I have to own it and I don't like it.

***

Strange as it may sound, my hope is that I don't move on from this soon. I want this to change everything. It will have to change slowly, "like yeast working through the whole loaf of dough." There is a chance for light here. I'm grateful to be in this place now, in the position of a campus minister, at the table with others longing for the Kingdom to come, "on earth as it is in heaven."

And I know this too: it is wrong that it had to come to this for everything to change.

Apologies

2011-11-04T11:37:00.001-07:00

If you saw the comments on the previous post, I apologize. I have no idea who that person is and I certainly have nothing to do with their claims of being a prophet. Spam comments: not a fan.

Thinking Dance

2011-11-04T08:09:00.000-07:00

I've written about ballroom dancing before on this blog. It became an essay that appeared in the The Curator last March and also was one of my favorite pieces in my undergrad thesis.

I'm not done thinking about dancing or what its been for me in the last two years. I've resisted writing about it on here for fear of boring you or resorting to a short post that consists of large capped letters and many explanation points like this:

"I LOVE DANCING!!!!!"

Not so good on the blogging front.

However, I've been thinking quite a bit about dancing this week as James (dance partner) and I head into DC Dancesport Inferno, or DCDI. It was our first ever ballroom competition last November and we're excited to return and enjoy the hyped up atmosphere of over 800 couples competing in two days. We're two levels higher than we were a year ago. I have a new dance shirt to go with my flowy black skirt. Basically, I'm pumped.

All of this has had me thinking on the role that dancing has played in my life since spring 2010 when I took the intro course at Penn State. I had done some small dancing before but never in such a consistent, community based way.

I do not believe that it is a coincidence that something that gives me such joy was given during the hardest, darkest semester of college and continued to be given to me through the next, difficult year. Dance has, to sum it up, been a "good gift". In the book of Matthew (chp 7), Jesus says this:

⁷ "Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. ⁸For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. ⁹Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? ¹⁰Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? ¹¹If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!"

I know this is very much about how when we seek God, He gives us Himself as the true good gift. But I have not escaped this thought this week: dancing was a good gift to me.

People dance for different reasons. James and I are very different in what gets us jazzed about being in class and on the dance floor. We've compared notes before but something he said this week while we had "dance partner social hour" making grilled cheese and tomato soup, highlighted the differences. He's very technical. He likes the details and the rules. He likes meeting those rules. it feels liberating to do something physical and accomplish a requirement through that work. For him, dance has been a good gift while working in a major he intensely dislikes and involves primarily work in front of a computer. And this bent of his towards the technical accomplishments possible in international ballroom style makes us better than I would certainly be alone.

I'm not like this. I think and talk about musicality more than any other aspect. I want the dancing to come from the music. James hates trying to "perform", especially in standard. He hates trying to look calm and chill for a waltz. I find it easy. I just listen to the music and let it do its emotive work on me. It's the process of music coming into the body like a spirit and working it like a beautiful puppet that fascinates me. Technique is only as good as it allows me to express that spirit more accurately, more beautifully. The creative process, the playing, the making up: that excites me more than anything. And this is why I love social dancing so much and why, after I leave State College [hypothetical situation. No certain plans], I will likely pick up more salsa and west coast. They involve more play and creativity with the music and your partner. But even in international ballroom styles, there is this element of channeling and performing that has been good for me.

We both agreed on this: all the mess of life comes out in ballroom. It's a place to let go, a place to safely express anger about life but aiming it directly at our stupid samba hips. A gift.

I could talk more about the different ways people interact with dance and the different creative thinking that goes into it. I probably will eventually since I'm interested in the very fractured dancing worlds at PSU, where the salsa people are pitted against the swing people who are vehemently pitted against the west coast swing people who really don't care as much about something as technical as a snappy, good tango. Or a vwaltz, heaven forbid.

But I won't. For now, I leave for this weekend in Maryland holding onto this thought: gratitude. I am grateful, almost painfully so, for the gift that ballroom has been for me in dark times. It was a gift. How could I ever treat it as if I earned the right to be there?

Weathering the Gourd Face

2011-10-21T20:50:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, I had four wisdom teeth removed.

The doctor said it "went well" and I should be "up and ready to be off pain meds by Friday."

Lies.

It's Friday and my face has only grown increasingly in size. Mostly on the left side. It's all out of proportion. It got to the point where I was so distressed that I grew nauseous whenever I saw my face in the mirror.

Needless to say, I've been avoiding the bathroom. And other reflective surfaces.

I look something similar to these vegetables:

Mostly the one on the right. Hannah posted on facebook: "I can be your friend/ if your face is puffed or yellow/ we can have fun/ I'll share my jelloooo!"

However, I've found some solid things that are helping me get through the messiness.

My dad. Pretty much a clutch decision to come home rather than get the teeth removed in SC. He's been amazing. Getting me food, making pancakes and milkshakes, waking up at 3am to deal with me crying, waking up at 3am to make sure I take my antibiotics, taking me to the dentist right at 8am to get prescriptions, etc.
Sleeping upright.
Pain meds. As I said in the midst of the kidney stone, I am no stoic when it comes to pain.
Card games dictated by Isaac's crazy rules.
Netflix: Monk, Lark Rise to Candleford, Downton Abbey, Dr. Who, and more.
Ballroom videos. Not of me. Mostly of Seth and Ali, Diego and Cherry, and Vaughn and Laura. They get my mind off of myself with the greatest ease.
It's hard to read on pain meds. Nothing makes sense. But dad has read outloud to me which was helpful. I've liked that.
Naps. Lots and lots of naps.

Grief

2011-10-17T13:31:00.000-07:00

No one teaches you how to grieve. But we learn anyway. Welearn what to do by watching, what to do to help things heal faster or better.

No one learns grief very well.

***

My friend Kelly lost her horse last Friday. It was injuredand had to be put down. She came over to my house on Sunday. She was cried out,dry-eyed. I gave her potted flowers and a tuna fish sandwich for lunch. Shesaid, "It's funny how I don't really feel like eating anymore but I stillfeel better after I eat. I didn't know I needed to." She did cry when shetold me the story. I cried too.

See, the horse was not just a horse. It was her best friend.This occupation and interest and friendship started when she was 12 and saw herthrough the worst of her parent's divorce. When she lost Oakie, it was likethat pain was somehow no longer bearable anymore. It could possibly even belike loosing parents again.

She's a teacher and felt like she couldn't call off work."No one would understand me calling off for a horse."

We have too small an understanding of grief. We don't have away to allow it in each other if it seems absurd to call off work for somethinglike this. Instead, life is forced to mush on. Divorce, break ups, stage oflife changes, friendships ending: they don't count as family emergencies. Howdoes one explain to a professor that a paper was late because you spent theweek in turmoil over your significant other and broke up with him at midnightthat night before? Is that an excuse? Can that be accepted? Is that someonetrying to get out of necessary work?

***

Loss comes in many forms, not only death. The process ofgrieving those things makes no sense to me.

People seem really unstable in grief. It comes in circleslike getting stuck in a long wave heading towards shore. You feel fine whenthings are at their worst. You feel like hell in your whole body and scream andweep when the most insignificant and unrelated thing goes wrong. You feel finewhen you should be upset and you are upset when you should be fine. No one cansee it coming and neither can you. It comes and goes. You think you are doneand then you aren't.

Some things, I would imagine, are never quite done beinggrieved.

How is it supposed to be done, the loss of the intangibles,the things for which no one gets a day off? May I wear black for 40 days inmemory of my parent's marriage? But no one even wears black anymore after someone'sdeath. May I wear sackcloth and ashes? Someone would call me depressed. Butwould it have been better for me to tear my hair out and wail over this lossthan to hold it tightly as if holding vinegar and baking soda with my hands ina fragile porcelain vase?

Marriages don't get funerals. I almost wish they did.

***

But then, there is an upside to this. Life keeps going.Perhaps this is a grace. There are things like horses still to be tended,stalls to be mucked, jobs to do. It can't end yet. For me, I still need to showup to dance class and work out my helplessness by controlling my body to music.It keeps going and carries us with it.

I wish life would give more space to the weary and broken hearted. I wish we were better at saying something, at bringing food, at carrying each other through grief and not assuming that somehow, someway, that person who is grieving the death of something that never died will somehow make it alone.

But I wish there was something, sackcloth and ashes, Jobscrapping pottery over his broken skin, anything to physically mark the change,to enact the death.

How else am I supposed to find life on the other side?

Four is Company

2011-10-12T05:42:00.000-07:00

I've had several posts in the works (several once again inspired by Anjali). Instead, I feel compelled to update you on my status: tired, caffeine deprived, waiting in the Philly airport for a flight to Dallas, TX. I'm heading there with my two staff leaders Steve Lutz and Erica Reitz AND Stac Sublett (pastor for Midtown Gathering at Calvary). It's a thing called "Leadership Network" for two days of brainstorming and planning with 30 other college ministers. Should be cool.

I'm enjoying travelling in a group. Having done the whole Fly Alone thing, I find the pleasure of having someone to watch my bag while I get breakfast and chat with as we go. It's been highly entertaining as well. What do campus ministers talk about when travelling in a group? Apparently, the primary conversation starter is "What would you do if the world as we knew it came to an end?" (ala Cormac McCarthy, Stephen King). Hysterical. Oh and who would act as us if someone made a movie about our staff team.

Really nothing else interesting to add. It's an airport. Lots of good dancing space and no one to dance with. Oh, and I had soup for breakfast. Sweet and spicy pumpkin soup with a baguette. Excellent. I don't know why I've never had soup for breakfast before!

Yours Truly,
Dana

Burrowes Wandering

2011-10-04T07:46:00.000-07:00

Tuesdays are caffeine days. It became this way six weeks ago with the first Monday Night Elements Gathering that I helped make happen. Lots of conversations, a bit overwhelmed: Dana doesn't go to sleep right away. Tuesdays are the days I drag myself out of bed in a fog, use two earl grey tea bags in a very large mug of hot water, and complain in slurred speech to my co-worker Dave about the heat/cold and the repetitiveness that are excel sheets. This is what happens when I can't sleep till well past midnight but have to get up at 7:30 anyway.

I'm finding ways to make Tuesdays bearable. Two weeks ago, LaVerne (boss and editor for Hemingway Letters) took us on a mandatory jaunt to MacKinnons for Starbucks coffee. It helped. Last week I played upbeat music and listened to sermons. This week, I took what LaVerne calls the "Scholar Walking Break". My hands were cold though (no heat inside, no heat outside), so I stayed indoors and wandered Burrowes Building with a book in hand.

Reading while walking gives a unique perspective. I got to watch people and offices out of the corner of my eye. I look up every half sentence to see where I am about to step. And in Burrowes, that is important because the stairs are a labyrinth.

Today was the first time I've been above the second floor. I've never been required to. I don't think I realized that there were floors above the level I can see when I enter the second floor from the main hallway. My professor visits were always in the basement or somewhere close by. Never the 3rd of 4th floors. It is a different world up there. The smaller departments are housed in high up corners of the building. First observation: lots of languages being spoken. Grad students, professors, and students are conversing not in English. And the way the offices are decorated are a lot less "I am attempting to look like a studious English major" and more like "I travel a lot and that's really cool." There is also a feel that fewer people end up in those hallways if they don't live there, making conversation in hallways and through open office doors more feasible and comfortable. Down in the lower levels I frequent, doors are shut to keep students from constantly stopping in with the question "Do you know where Professor so-and-so's office is?" And no one marks the fliers departmental grad student jokes with black sharpie.

I'm thinking I've found a consistent way to survive Tuesday mornings.

Rain

2011-09-28T20:17:00.000-07:00

My legs ached and shook quite miserably after latin workshops with Tal and Vlada today. I've decided once and for all that while I can enjoy parts of latin, my favorite part is when samba is over. But I digress from my story. Pat, a friendly acquaintance from salsa nights and who is in adv 1, walked out to his bike the same time I went to get mine. As we rode off in the same direction, we soon discovered (about the point of Atherton Hall) that we live within a street of each other.

And then it began to rain.

At first it was a light rain and didn't bother our cycling at all or our conversation. Within a few brief moments, the skies opened as they are wont to do in State College, and we were soaked. He yelled, "Let's go!" and we took off as fast as we could up the campus sidewalk along College. But it was no use. We weren't going to make it before everything was drenched, bags, clothes, shoes, and all. He was in dress clothes and dress shoes. My chacos have lost their tread and also served little use in trying to peddle.

And then everything just seemed as comic and joyful as it could be. I was laughing, refreshed from the cool air and rain, blinking hard so I could see, yelling at pedestrians that I was coming behind them. I was utterly happy in that unwanted, unlooked for rainstorm. It was the feeling of play; like being small again and finding the most banal things delightful to repeat again and again.

Playing in the rain with a friend was a marvelous gift.

Bilbo's (and Frodo's) Birthday Celebration

2011-09-23T09:57:00.000-07:00

We threw a grand party in honor of Bilbo and Frodo last night.

Homemade carrot cake (my aunt's recipe) with homemade cream cheese icing. Very fall. Very hobbity.

Party Planner and architect extraordinaire stringing lights over the fence and party tree. Nicolle Mauer did the writing for the incredibly lovely birthday sign.

Candles lit on the front porch. Lord of the Rings on hand for a reading.

Group singing of "Happy Birthday". All the candles we had were lit on the carrot cake (36).

Formatting Resolved

2011-09-23T07:54:00.000-07:00

I've been irritated to the point of abandonment with the formatting on this blog. For some reason, today I navigated the new blogger structure, I found all the right buttons to restore this blog to unified appearance and structure. Abandonment of Blogger to Wordpress is now postponed indefinitely.

Science, Culture, Knowledge, & Action

2011-09-20T17:45:00.000-07:00

The Highly Esteemed Anjali has sparked the desire to post yet again. Please read her two passionate, well articulated posts on recent vaccination debates here and here.

As you can tell from these posts, Anjali and I definitely espouse different worldviews and paradigms that underpin many of our view points. I am especially grateful, then, for the clarity she brings at the end of her second post: the views of one part of a community (in this case, Christian) do not necessarily express the views of a greater whole.

I agree 100% with her conclusion that refusing an HPV vaccine because it would encourage promiscuity is not well informed or accurate belief. To prevent illness and disease based on such fear is not right.

However, I do wish to disagree with an underlying assumption that drives her conclusions: that science and religion have nothing to do with each other. Let them stay separate. To allow one to influence the other is to defile them both. In one light, this is very true. All attempts to make all science pre-determined doctrinal opinions ends you up Galileo--who unfortunately lost his life based on Greek thought parading as pure theology.

This, however, is not the kind of separation or "independent discovery" that I wish to call into question.

I would like to suggest that science and religion (just as easily replaced with culture) have a great deal more to do with each other than either would like to admit.

I cannot perceive of science as Science (with a capital "S"). That is, science as a purely objective and thoroughly truthful pursuit. Several (cultural) influences on my life prevent that. Yes, one aspect are my religious and moral convictions. But the other has as much to do with my higher education in liberal arts--especially disability studies. From this paradigm, what science observes and concludes can as often be a cultural barometer as much as observation of "facts". "Facts" will always have implications as will later (or prior) interpretations influence the next observation or action.

What do I think this means for vaccinations?

I would say that the instinct of the "religious right" (which it does seem to be) to question science as sole authority is a good one but mishandled and used in this situation. Bioethics is a legitimate field and worth investing time, money, research, and personal energy into. The conclusion that vaccines should be used because they "prevent disease and tumors" is a faulty one if that can be extrapolated that science has a universal right to exterminate any and all conditions that are deemed "abnormal".

Let me state again, that I think it good that this vaccine was developed and its uses excellent.

On behalf of the religious right, I say that their questioning of its cultural implications is right and wise. But let those who question science do so with conscious gratitude of what it has provided and the world it has revealed to us. Let science discover and invent and let the researches and makers and users of its creativity be wise in what we utilize and what we reject. And may its acceptance or rejection never be out of fear or rumor or misinformation, the kind so often trumpeted loudly and uncritically from the unreliable source.

Hemingway's Wishes and the Discussed Existence of a Human Soul

2011-09-19T14:13:00.000-07:00

This past summer and into this semester, I have been an intern with the Hemingway Letters Project. For nearly a decade now, they have been collecting, transcribing, and preparing documents for publication. Many of these have never been released or seen before. I have handled letters that only myself and perhaps four other individuals have ever seen: the head editor, the scholar, an archival librarian, and the person to whom it was written.

Today while drinking chai with a friend at the Co-op, he asked what I was still doing in State College. I mentioned this project as well as my role as a campus ministry intern.

He asked more about the project. "But did Hemingway say that was okay?"
I paused. "Well, he actually said he didn't want his work published."
"Then why are you doing it?" Andy asked.
"It's for scholarship."
"So people can perform psychoanalysis on his writing?"
"Sure."
"Does that seem fair to you?"
"Well, he is dead. Do you think he cares?" I argued, defending my right to work an excel sheet and be paid for it more than anything else.

My answer did not satisfy him. I think about this conversation now and find it ironic. Andy is an atheist and does not believe in an afterlife. When dies, the personal ceases to exist. I, on the other hand, believe in a soul, in a life that does not end upon death but continues.

Is it inconsistent then that I argue for Hemingway's wishes being inconsequential fifty years after his death as if he would not care? Is it inconsistent that Andy argue for an adherence to Hemingway's wishes if the man has no soul?

"The Tree of Life"

2011-09-12T14:15:00.000-07:00

I went to the lovely State Theatre last night to see "The Tree of Life". You've very likely heard of it. The trailer alone sparked conversations of greatness and (perhaps also including) various academy awards.

When asked, "What is about?" the only appropriate answer is: "Everything."

Therefore, I will be addressing this post as a guide to help you either see it for the first time or to help in thinking through it.

I have no idea if I am "correct" in any of this. If that kind of art frustrates you, then I wouldn't recommend it. If you are excited about a piece of beauty that will take multiple viewings and lots of arguing to do it justice, then this is a must see.

Things that helped me see:

C.S. Lewis's Idea of Joy/Senshut
There are moments of divine sight given early in life that are so piercing and joyful that they remain for the remainder. All we find beautiful is a harkening back to those early moments. Perhaps they were not so wonderful if we look at them years later; but they were leaping off points. The repeated, quick, overemphasized images--window, tree, floating white curtains, a young girl walking, brotherly play, water/swimming, grass, clouds/sky, Brahms, red hair, flashlights, ocean/sand-- are what act as the signals to the young protagonist. "How did I know you before I knew your name?" he asks. One gets the sense that he never articulates those words to himself but are rather words to express a spiritual, unknown question. And these moments of beauty are the painful, longing triggers to try and find what the feelings are from.

Lewis calls these experience "joy" or "senschut". For him, it was physical joy and pain from things like a small rock garden his brother made, records of opera, a fantasy novel by George MacDonald. I think many of the repeated images are acting as this.

There is a repeated voice over of "Follow me." Follow those things. Follow joy. We all know what Lewis found as its source.

Confessions of St. Augustine
Jack's statement: "Mother and Father, you wrestle inside me" is just one place where I sense the story of Augustine coming through. Perhaps this is just because his narrative of dissolute youth, a faith filled mother, and journey to belief is one that has been retold in many forms. Conversion does not always vary in its structure so much as in the details. The moment when Jack steals the night gown from the neighbor also reminded me of when Augustine stole pears, though the guilt for Jack comes in much sooner. He says to his mother, "Don't look at me" and later accuses her of letting the father "walk all over you." It is a trying relationship for them both. Perhaps I'm reading to much into this association... but the chance for Augustine to be an influence is there.

Exposure to "Time" as a concept and limited view / ie Eternity
Time is disregarded for significant portions of this film. Time is not the organizational idea but eternity. This means that all time is not in a line but in a plane stretching eternally in everydirection. Time is a lens placed on humanity at the beginning of the world. Outside of time, however, all moments are interacting with eachother. We get to see the invisible interaction/visions through one man's eyes. Be patient. It will not make "sense" like you want it to. It will make your mind stretch to see the world outside of the lens you were born with. There are small moments that seem like eternity in this film and there are passing things that are shown for what they are.

The Magician's Nephew/Genesis
Music is key. I want to discuss with a musician and hear what they "saw" in the movie. But even I, ignorant as I am in music history, could tell. The music is both an influencer of events and a dominant force, greater even than the images. This is particularly tied to the sound of water ("and the Spirit of God hovered over the waters" Genesis 1) and to the pslam where the "morning stars sing". Lewis also used this idea in his Narnia books: the world was sung by Aslan into existence and it seems that the world in "The Tree of Life" is a well.

Poetic Rather Than Linear Structure
Poetry has historically used linear structure to tell narrative (ex Odyssey and Illiad, etc). There is also poetry that exists to communicate is in the barest form possible moments, and uses these to explore/discover ideas and beauty. These do not typically use a beginning/middle/end structure.

"The Tree of Life" is more about the moment by moment images and less about the beginning/middle/end structure. It is about image after image and sound and music and light. It is not a code but there is meaning. If you are more intuitive, that will aid you in this.

However, like most good pieces of anything, there is a definitive creation/fall/redemption/restoriation structure going on. It just doesn't look like you're used to seeing.

The Bible (esp. Psalms and Job)
You can't escape the Bible in this film, especially the Old Testament poetry. The first moments of the film are the texts from the final chapters of Job, the ones where God asks Job, "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world?" This film is, in a sense, telling the story of a Job: the one with great faith who must grieve that what God has taken away. The repeated phrase "Where are you?" begins as one of faith, hope and expectation; it moves into grief and doubt; then is restored to hope in the final sequence of the film.

Creational Understanding of the World
There is not a sense of the world making itself in this movie. Perhaps there is and I'm reading into it. I would argue however that nature is used as a conduit/manifestation of divinity and not a manifestation of itself. The image of the stars exploding out into the universe combined with the music at that moment stands out in my mind. We are dealing with spirit as well as the seen world.

Intense Love of Trees
If you think trees are awesome, then you will appreciate the recurring metaphor of trees.

Shalom/Restoration
The final sequence in this film, though questionable in its theology, does strongly imply a belief in the restoration of all things. Peace and wholeness is what each character is looking for; how does one find it in death? In a family that comes apart on the inside? I look for places of restoration in many narratives but there are few who make such a blunt leap to it as this one does. The command, "Follow me", finds its answer in a place of waiting for some final moment. We get to see healing and then the final blow that ends time and the world. What happens then we are left to imagine.

Ultimate Associative Leap
"The Tree of Life" and "Till We Have Faces". Especially the second part of that book.

Re-Posting: A Bear Story

2011-09-05T14:30:00.000-07:00

Over a year ago, me and a group of friends were chased by a bear. This is one of my favorite stories and wanted to share it with readers of this blog.

As you know, this story will include a bear. This bear, as the title of the story, will play a central role. Sorry for spoiling it but you must know that this is one of the most magnificently absurd things I have experienced.

I received a text from Mooney saying that there were folks going camping. I was immediately in on the plan and went back to my apartment after filling out work paper work to throw a sweatshirt, socks, and my glasses in a backpack. Mooney and Robbie appeared outside of #12 Grimmauld (code name for where I'm living this summer) and we visited Walmart to purchase the obligatory smore foods. While there, Mooney and I again discussed how we would handle being attacked by a bear. We had gone on a short trek up the side of a ridge just the week before and had heard strange animal noises down the ridge the other direction and this had sparked a long and humorous imagining of what it would mean for Dana to drive stick shift to get Mooney (who had valiantly defended her from attacking bear) to the hospital for severe mauling. Robbie laughed at said at least we should try not to mock anyone like Elisha and get bears called out on us. Mooney didn't know this story and it was shared with gleeful violence attached.

After many delays, we made it to the Firetower in Rothrock State Park at 9:45 or so. We sat in the dark for a long while until some other came. Started the fire, took a short walk in the woods to an overlook (which was, as I'm sure you can imagine, rather dark and gloomy with very little to see), and enjoyed not saying much of anything and eating. Our company was this: Jason Hunter, Eric Mooney, Robbie Parks, Carren Stika, and myself. Jason cooked some excellent chicken in tin foil in the fire. Carren had brought hotdogs and we ate them off of sticks since there wasn't any bread. Lots of chocolate was consummed. And then, heavy with food and warmed by the fire in the heavy, storm promising winds, we decided it was time to bed down.

The chose spot was in front of a small cabin near the base of the fire tower. It was locked but we thought that if it really did rain we could get on the porch pretty easily. One place that was considered was under a pine tree away from either of these locations and toward the start of a trail, but it was rejected when we realized that most of us didn't have ground mats. Here is the location: Jason and Robbie were by the cars. Mooney and Carren were moving her hammock over to the cabin. I was ahead of the lot with all my things in my hands moving towards the cabin. And just as I got to the edge of the trees, the cell phone tower blinked in just the write way to illuminate a moving shadow. My heart caught but I was certain I was seeing things (having just scared myself silly by thinking about the book "No Country For Old Men"). I turned on Jason's head lamp and there indeed was a black bear caught in walking right across the grass where we would have been sleeping in five minutes. I backed up and got back to the cars yelling "Guys! There is a bear!"

Jason and Robbie dropped what they were doing and tried to shine the light on the bear. Mooney and Carren didn't seem to hear though and kept walking towards the cabin. We all started yelling and they stopped. My heart was racing and I had no idea what we were going to do next. So we just stopped and watched it for a few moments. Mooney and Carren finally moved over towards us and we had the cars between us and the bear. But the bear wasn't going away! It just stayed there even while we put lights on it and talked and yelled and had no idea what to do. The food had just been put away and we could only imagine it had smelled things cooking and had come to find us.

We were all moving and confused and weren't sure what to do. When the bear wouldn't leave, Mooney finally said, "Get in the car." I didn't move and at that moment the bear started coming towards us. "Dana! Get in the car!" I ran to Jason's car and the doors were locked. "Jason!" I yelled but Mooney's door was open first and I lept in and kept my eyes on the bear. I heard Jason yell, "Dana, you have to get in or no one else can!" I realized that I had stayed in the driver's seat and moved over. I don't know how Robbie got in so fast behind me and climbed to the back. Carren was in a moment later on my lap and we were laughing and clinging hands. I had not been too frightened until I saw Mooney and Jason get nervous. but we were all in cars.

That was when Mooney realized that Jason had his keys and so we were stuck for the time being with two packs outside of the car and the door wouldn't shut.

Umm...

Jason called someone's phone and we were trying to come up with a plan. There were way too many plans going around when we realized that we no longer knew where the bear was. Jason thought he saw it by the fire. Then Carren and I screamed because it walked on our side of the car within four feet. Jason turned his car and and began to flash his lights. The bear backed up and began nodding its head and looked like it wanted to run at us. Jason revved his engine. The bear moved forwards and then back and then we all started the car horns at once. It ran off into the woods. We grabbed the packs as soon as we could. Mooney was quite brave in getting out the car at all in order to put out the last of the fire and get the backpacks. We were going back to State College.

We were about twenty feet down the road when this bear appeared again. It ran along side us and then out in front of Jason's car. It was big and lumbering. Mooney (a hunter) guessed 350lbs. It kept up at 20 miles an hour before disappearing again. We were flying now.

Jason took his time coming down the mountain after us. We stopped on 322 without a sound of cars in any direction. It was strange to see the busiest stretch of road in State College so empty. I got out of the car and laid in the middle of the road laughing. It seemed safer than anything else from the past hour had been and I was so relieved that everyone was safe and laughing at the ridiculousness of how we had all behaved in our fear. Jason caught up and called Mooney. "What is Dana doing?!" "Umm... I think she is letting out some jitters."

Seidle was still up when we got back to the Duplex. Mooney lept into his arms and started telling him how we had all almost died. Then he backed up and attempted to tell the story in a way that emphasized his manliness and defense of the helpless. Jason made it a comedy where he attacked the bear with a hatchet and Carren knocked it out with her maglight. Robbie just thought people were funny and wasn't scared at all. I was alternately the hero for seeing the bear in the first place or the brunt of much teasing because of how fast I got in that car. It took us til 2:30 to fall asleep in the backyard of the State College neighborhood. We were still laughing until suddenly we weren't and everyone was asleep

How To Become A Better Writer

2011-09-04T22:03:00.000-07:00

I was asked to write this post by a dear and lovely housemate. She asked me this question over breakfast a few days ago and then asked me to write a post.

I feel completely inadequate to write down these thoughts even though one of the chiefest delights in my life is becoming a better writer and assisting others to do so.

Please also observe: all good advice was learned from somewhere else. Tips are things I've tried and found useful. Everything in bold is advise; anything else is a tip (unless I'm hating on "Twilight").

Read
Read everything. Read magazines. Read newspapers. Read blogs. Read tweets. Read billboards. Read books (yes, whole ones). Read assigned textbooks. Read for fun. Read for school. Read stuff above your head and stuff you loved when you were in second grade. Read the book everyone is talking about. Read the book no one has ever heard of but your librarian (or some other swiftly forgotten marvelously knowledgable person) recommends. Read in genres you like and genres you don't like.

Writing without reading is like cooking without eating. And yes, it makes about that much sense.

Read Good Writing

Read Good Writing. Read it by recommendation. Read it carefully and thoroughly. While tastes vary, many authors will be recommended repeatedly. Look for people who read more than you do--especially in types of writing you enjoy or wish to emulate--and get their advise. If they advise "Twilight", dream bigger.

Read Like A Writer

Read for technique. Read for good sentences. Read for the sound. Read for the structure. Read for the logic. Read for the rhetoric. Read for the imagery. Read for the description. Read for cohesiveness. Read for the subtle details. Read to know the piece of writing from the inside out.

Tip: Use "Reading Like A Writer" by Francine Prose as a delightful guide. Used at various stages of college, both in and out of the classroom.

Write

All. The. Time.

Don't wait until you receive Divine Inspiration. If you wait for inspiration to run that 5k or dance a smooth foxtrot: you won't. Ever. Your body will fail you and so will your pen.

Write this large in your heard and mind: "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." -G. K. Chesterton.

Find Readers

I had a mentor my first year tell me that there are three kinds of writers and each person on earth needs one of each at any given moment. They can also be people who assume various roles (though the 1st typically stays consistent).

The Fan. This person will love anything you write because you wrote it.
Peer critic. Someone on a similar level who will challenge you as a peer reader
Mentor critic. Someone more advanced who will challenge you as a seasoned writer/reader.

You will not and cannot get better unless you submit your work to other people to read. I would never have been the writer I was in college if my mother had not spent all of high school marking my papers with, "I don't understand what you're saying here." Someone needed to say it and she did.

A Necessary Clarification:

Allow me to conclue with a necessary caveat: not all writing is the same. Each genre has its own intended purposes and will use different techniques to achieve that goal. Good prose writing is not the same in journalism-in novels- in memoir- in how to -in [insert genre]. Writing well for the NYT is not the same as writing for the New Yorker or for the local newspaper or for your personal blog. However, the methods for getting there can be seen as the same.

Some Favorite Resources:

"Reading Like A Writer" by Francine Prose

"Bird by Bird" by Anne Lamott

"Shouts and Whispers" anthology

"Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies" by McEntyre

"Writers on Writing" NYT series

"Paris Review" interviews

Imaginary Places: Pt 2

2011-08-26T20:25:00.000-07:00

I had a strong desire two days ago to watch the old movie version of "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe". It was sparked by listening to a radio theatre production of the book and feeling like I was listening to the story of an actual place I had spent time.

Narnia was, and at times still is, a very real place for me. An actual experience. Produced by reading and imagining. This experience of knowing a place that does not exist felt like an inverted experience of my visit to Walden Pond: the present Walden was not the one I had known; Narnia is a place I know but a promise I will never actually see falsified because I will never be able to get there.

I've even had dreams about Narnia. About snow and a wardrobe and running from the White Witch while the snow melted. It sadly disolved into a world with parking lots at some point and I kept trying to get back but couldn't.

The love of an imaginary place is deep in my memory. From my earliest memories, many years before the ability to read, I used the book cover as a jumping point for my internal story telling. I don't understand quite why this picture so inspired me and drew me into reading, poor design it may now be considered.

Music also takes me back to this nonexistent place. he music at the beginning of this video has a strong visceral response in my gut. Lots of memories of watching it. The sounds and experiences are so deeply played in my life that they are almost sounds and experiences that belong to me. As if I have actually been there.

I know I am not alone in this. I know I am not alone in walking into closets and wondering if this time the pack of the closet won't be there. And perhaps others have had a similar experience with other places or stories.

What is it that makes such a love for the imaginary places? What is it about art that weaves its way into the pre-memory, pre-literate heart and makes it grow? And why does it seem so right that is should be so?

Imaginary Places

2011-08-24T13:30:00.000-07:00

The day after visiting Author's Ridge, we took a few hours and visited Walden Pond. This was the year long home of Thoreau who then wrote the book "Walden Pond". The philosophy, observations, and practices of this writer during that one year have had significant influence American writing, ideals, and self perception. I had read significant portions of "Walden" at various points in high school and in college. I had never looked up a picture or took too active a time in researching the details of that year in the woods.

Walden Pond was very different from what I had imagined.

I am not sure I had imagined something in great detail. I could not now describe to you what I had imagined, but can tell you what surprised me.

First, it was very large. The trail around it was about 2 miles in length. I would have cut it off by the first cove we came to. My southern PA pond experiences perhaps influenced this thinking.

Second, it was anything but secluded. I know: things change in hundreds of years. This did not seem possible though while reading the book. The constant presence of highway sounds were startling. Rangers wandering in their uniforms. Families armed with beach towels and chairs an afternoon in the roped off swimming area. A large bath house. A gift shop. A fee to park in the lot up the hill from the water.

Simplify? Maybe not.

But yet this was the historical pond. And I began to question the difference between my imaginary Walden and the one that was sitting in front of me full of a open water swimmers, international tourists, and the occasional fisherman. Boston had a similar effect on me: was this the city I felt I knew from years of reading history, both in fact and story? The imaginary place had been very real to me even if I could not have told you all of its details. I would be able to tell you when it seemed to fit my expectations and my imagination.

But what is more "real"? The one I have known through reading? The one I knew through visiting? Both have an affect, shape an experience. Walden Pond, as Thoreau knew it, is no more. And yet it exists in the pages of a book.

Can the imaginary real be real as a bathhouse by Thoreau's home?

Author's Ridge

2011-08-09T19:17:00.000-07:00

This last week(end), I visited Boston for the first time. My first official time was this last April when I competed in ballroom at MIT. This time though, I got to see more than the walk from the hotel to the competition site! My travelling companions were Sara Rhodes and Robbie Fraleigh. Our first night, we stayed with the lovely Liz Jackson (of Rice University) in Bedford, MA. This lovely town neighbors Lexington and Concord, all with lovely New England farm house-like homes everywhere, lots of trees, and lots of historical markers. I had read in a guide book that the graves of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Alcott were in Concord but I had no realized until we drove through the town how close we would be. Then Liz said the cemetery was less than a mile down the road from her house. On our way to get ice cream, we stopped and began the search for Author's Ridge.

It was evening and still. Robbie found a picture of Emerson's grave but that was the only direction we had. It took several minutes of searching along the hilly edges until we found his grave marker: a large uncut stone. A few seconds later, we found Thoreau. Then Hawthorne. Then Alcott. The graves were easier to find once we saw how Emerson's had been treated: people had gathered small stones and piled them around the grave, as well as pine needles and cones, bits of flower and leaves, and lots of small hand written notes and pens. Some of the notes were of gratitude. Some were a little silly. One young girl left a note thanking each of the authors for existing and that she was looking forward to being older someday and reading their books.

I felt I should have brought something, but hadn't.

I think it was because I had never conceived of them as real individuals before. I had read their words and they were part of my life in a real way. Because of the intimacy and distance and reading words can cause between writer and reader, I had not imagined them with bodies and breath and life. Writing came from another place than that. But looking at their graves gave them bodies, ones that had long since become indistinguishable from the ground and pine trees that hung over them.

It made me grateful for them in a way I had not felt before. Alcott was a strong influence in my life in late elementary and middle school. The others came by forced acquaintance. Visiting them opened me to appreciate them as American authors whose shoulders I now stand upon as an American English major. If nothing else, they helped to define American writing as separate from British literature in a time when most believed they had to look and sound like the writing movements across the pond. They lived within the towns that I had passed through; had friends and enemies; cooked and ate food; they had actually lived.

We wandered through the rest of the cemetery and remarked on how old most of the headstones were. There were markers with symbols I did not understand. We came down of Author's Ridge and made our way back to the car. The sun was almost set and the place closed. Liz observed that she had never been here before even though she lives down the street. "Funny how one doesn't do things if they are really close. But I'm glad I came." "Yes," I agreed. "I feel like I'm friends with them now."

I felt I should have brought something, but hadn't.

Moving

2011-08-02T08:14:00.000-07:00

Last night was my first night in Whimsy Cottage [aka Whim Cotty], my home for the coming year. It was strange to have moved just a few streets away from Patty's Place. As small and homogenous as State College can be, living here for four years (starting my fifth!) has revealed some of the nuances of residence cultures and economic structures. And let me tell you: S Barnard is a different beast altogether than the corner of W Foster and Sparks. Whim Cotty is on what I can only describe as a partying street, though perhaps not quite as intense as what I've seen happen on N Barnard. My house has been the exception to the rule: a two story, yellow stone house with a white picket fence and a maple tree, it seems to have drawn a quieter crowd than the apartment buildings and old duplexes that make up the rest of the street. This year is no exception. Patty's Place was very different. It had a larger yard and lived on the border street between student housing, smaller houses, and the lovely well groomed yards and homes of professors. It was very quiet. Whim Cotty is a small plot of quiet in a busy street. It is also a change in sleep for me: this is the first time since we moved from Georgia when I was nine that I will have a room on the ground floor and this time with a fireplace!

Oh and the desk has found a new home facing the window that looks out on the walkers of Barnard street, all likely headed to campus. It'll be fun to have people to watch!

How do you work? PII: The Desk

2011-07-29T06:13:00.000-07:00

"You can tell a lot about people when you look at their books, or their relationships, or their desks." -Anjali

Inspired by Anjali, who inspires a lot of my posts actually:

http://anjnara.blogspot.com/2011/07/my-desk.html

Anjali has her lab desk. That is her desk. I live my life in front of several desks and go through a falling in and out of intense and passionate love with them. Right now, I am in transit and I have grown indifferent. No hatred. Just indifferent.

In 1st grade, I was in love with our new desks that Mom put in the living room. In love. My small knees fit comfortably under it. There was a well placed groove for pencils and pens. An inside to hide things. I was so sad when I outgrew the legit desk and had to move to a fold-able table and then even worse when I outgrew that to the kitchen table: the equivalent of homeschooled exile and reject in sixth grade.

In the residence halls, I made do with the desks found in the rooms. I spent hours there because I wasn't a fan of study halls or lounges to get my work done. The view was important. I always put the desk in front of the window so I could see something: in Simmons, this meant Mt Nittany once the leaves were gone and students wandering in various states of anxiety or rowdiness to get food in Redifer dinning commons. My desks are well placed for distraction.

Patty's Place was a house of great desks. Maggie had one that filled up the space under her bunk. She assembled it herself, deep cheery colored wood and carefully organized. Sarah chose the window with a desk that harkened back to my 1st grade one, but its lid was covered with pictures and other memories. When Rachel moved in, she brought probably my childhood ideal desk that had lots of spaces for books and letters to be tucked away. She kept it very neat.

And my Patty's Place desk. It was ideal. My preferred shape. The best placement possible. Free: a gift from the overflowing basement of the guys next door [Scott perhaps?]. I chose the window facing the garage and driveway, where it picked up the sunlight from the early morning and into the winter evening (the sun sets in very different places according to the seasons, I discovered). I set it up with very little because it was small, with lots of space for my legs. My computer front and center. Stacks of papers (mostly my thesis in progress). A candle to remember how I couldn't have one in the residence halls. A pot made by the lovely Maureen Senft that held a myriad of pens for my colored ink whims. A short lean to the book shelf.

A desk to be distracted.

Now that they've moved out, I can confess that I was interested in the movements of my neighbors, Brad Scott (until he moved out), Billy Squire, Matt Martin, and Scott Umble. We slowly became friends over the year. I watched with inexplicable curiosity at Billy's wanderings from house to garbage cans to his car, leaving in his car, coming back in his car, and slowly wandering all over again. Or remarking on the odd hours Matt seemed to leave and come back, or how long Sarah's car was in the driveway, and whether the cars were in some state of "in the middle" repairs. Or how Brad was getting along with his knee (?) after surgery in how easily he navigated from house to car on his crutches. Alright. I admit it. I was also the occassional unseen guest in their middle of the night conversations.

I was a nosy Mrs. Lynd.

Very few seemed to notice my observatory perch. One night someone did. Before I knew ballroom people well at all (my adv 1 semester), Sarah drove some to our house late at night and walked from our place to a party. Matt Shimizu saw me at work at the desk an open window and yelled to hurry and get my dance shoes on-- we were going dancing! I couldn't see who it was so I ran downstairs to find Mike, Emily, Matt, and Sarah in the living room. Matt rolled up the rug, pushed the coffee table aside, and started a chacha without music, forcing me through cuban breaks. It took me a while to convince them that I really did need to work and couldn't go with them.

I can't remember what I was working on at all.

I will miss the desk spot by the window when I move Monday. I'll have to find a new place for it where I can be equally distracted from writing, from work, a new place to pile thoughts incomplete.

Invest not just in the desk but in the view.

Well... it depends on what you're after. It depends on who you are. Like your books, relationships, and desks, where you put it (or accept it) says something about who you are.

Campus Ministry Blog

2011-07-27T20:00:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

In the next year, I am working as a campus ministry intern with CCO/Calvary Church in State College, PA. In order to more effectively share about that work, I have started a blog aimed at chronicling that journey.

Visit: http://danaray-ministry.blogspot.com/

Check out the "About me and this blog" tab for an explanation of what I'll be doing over there.

Don't worry. This blog is much beloved by me (if only for the name of it sometimes) and will be maintained as well, continuing my rambling thoughts, wishes, rants, resources, etc. Starting another blog space is to help sort the content out a bit if that is something you as my reader would like.

Love,
Dana Ray

How do you work?

2011-07-27T19:44:00.000-07:00

I told a friend last night that summer is a time when I find it hard to write. Robin Becker, a PSU professor and poet, said at a reading that her body and mind is trained now to write freely and deeply when the summer comes and proffessorial duties are at their least. I have been trained on the opposite clock: to write for the assignment in the year. My mind is increasingly disorganized and lazy in these summer months, these brightest days of the year.

I love summer. I think that 81 degrees, low humidity, and bright sun is my favorite type of day. I love what wind feels like in that heat. I love how bright the sun is. I love sleeping out in it. I love the sunsets. I love sweet corn. I love being warm. I love summer.

Summer is like taking a shower for me. Some people think best in the shower. Their best meditative work happens there. Not for me. I'm so enjoying myself that I can't think at all. I find it hard to think in summer heat, whether overly oppressive or just right. I can think all too well on cold and gloomy days.

What I do best in the summer is read. Lots and lots. I read from many genres, for intellectual growth and simple pleasure. Biography to essay to crime novels. It's a time of feeding. Of growing. A time waiting for fall when that time kicks into gear for some academic work.

But perhaps I will someday be retrained. I won't be returning to academic work this fall. No courses. No assignments. Will I write? Will I make things?

I think that is a choice (horribly) left entirely up to me.

What seasons do you do your best work in? What are other conditions that you need in place to make things? Am I just making up excuses for not having written anything this summer and barely posted?

Kidney Stone Chronicles

2011-07-20T08:23:00.000-07:00

While biking to work today, this film conversation came to mind:

Lazar Wolf: How is your brother-in-law? In America?
Tevye: Oh, he's doing very well.
Lazar Wolf: Oh, he wrote you?
Tevye: No, not lately.
Lazar Wolf: Then how do you know?
Tevye: If he was doing badly, he would write.

This is my justification for not chronicling the rest of State College Arts Fest. I was fine. And then my kidney discovered a kidney stone right as James Meek began the service reading of Psalm 103, " He heals all your diseases./ He redeems your life from the pit/ and crowns you with love and compassion." I then embarked on 5 hrs of the most intense pain I have ever known. It was, thankfully, short lived, though it felt anything but short.

So because I'm not not "fine", it's time to provide you with a blog post.

Best thing about all of this: it happened at church. If I was alone when the pain came on, I don't know what I would have done.

I learned and am continuing to learn, a lot from this process. One was that both pain and morphine and oxycodone make me a little loopy. Or slow. Or weird. Something like that. During the pain loopiness, I muttered to Kate Sauder as she drove towards the ER that I had been constructing a list of reasons why I love the local church and she had just single handedly moved to the top of the list. I then retracted my statement and said that perhaps she could take second place after communion. I was clearly out of it, but Kate knew that. I had, after all, just tried to climb into someone else's car in the parking lot.

But, all in all, the news is good: pain does not necessarily mean life threatening. I'm up and about. Working with good ol' Hemingway again. Heading to Hershey for a week on Thursday. Waiting for the kidney stone to pass. I'm thinking about naming it. Any suggestions?

Arts Fest: Day 1

2011-07-14T07:09:00.000-07:00

The event began for me last evening:

Homemade milkshake; tango lessons (how to get into promenade 13 different ways); making weekend dance plans; cool evening; Wings Over with Hannah (oh the wonders of delivery!); salsa night with a lot of people which is always best (shout out to Tyler for getting the rust out of his salsa and staying for the Shakira world cup song); walking home by myself; jumping in the water buckets on Allen st. at 1:20am; a full moon.

The weather is glorious, cool and bright. I couldn't ask for better wandering weather which is exactly what I shall do on my lunch break through stands and stands of crafted beauty. I love this event already.

End of Thursday report:

Lovely day. Delightful lunch break wandering the booths with Sara Rhodes and Robbie Fraleigh. Seeing a few more things on a walk home. Long chat with Christy Tennant on gmail about next year (she's amazing). Headache induced nap that went longer than I intended. Wandering the perfect weather and glorious sunset with housemate Ashley and sister Hannah. Wine expedition at J House with cookie dough. Pizza with Mooney and Foxy. Sitting on a curb outside of a movie theater before the start of Harry Potter just so we could feel part of the anticipation (none of us had tickets). Lots of silliness. The comfort of the perfect weather.

In Gratitude: Jessi Brown

2011-07-08T05:29:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I visited Ocean City, NJ. Some of you may remember my summer there for a leadership training program with CCO. My first stop when I arrived was the front porch of the Sheldon's home, the Pastor's family from 1st Pres where I attended. Mrs. Sheldon and I were catching up through various subjects and found our way, as women are wont to do, at relationships. She lamented that she had five daughters that she wanted married but that there were so few good men. The words were similar to those that Mrs. Bennet cries through "Pride and Prejudice", but here it was spoken by a rational, God-fearing woman who has sought her family's well being through many years. I murmured that I was lucky in this respect. She asked what I meant. I felt compelled in that moment, to observe to her and to myself that I have been blessed to count many Godly men as my close friends. Penn State actually possesses many men of character--or boys of character who are quickly becoming men. I can't praise my guy friends enough for their care, thoughtfulness, playfulness, and truth speaking. I think of "Theo Thursdays" started by Steve Sylvia sophomore year and hikes with Mooney and so many other instances of friendship from them. They've made me a better woman for being around them.

This conversation with Mrs. Sheldon made me ask: what was it that created such a community of strong men? I thought of Navigators, of discipleship, of pastoring, of good company, of good parents. While all significant parts of the equation, there was not one that applied to every man that I had in mind. C.S. Lewis, however, pointed me in what I think is the right direction.

Before church on Sunday mornings, a small group gathers in the Oakwood kitchen to read and discuss Lewis's work "The Great Divorce". Just two Sundays ago during our discussion of chapters 12 and 13, we discussed a passage that described one of the "solid people": a beautiful woman, almost like a goddess. When the speaker asks his guide who she is, the guide says:

"It's someone ye'll never have heard of. Her name on Earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green...Aye. She is one of the great ones."

Following her is a large entourage of animals and people. They are her "sons and daughters" and lovers:

"Every young man or boy that met her became her son--even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter... Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives." (The Great Divorce, p354)

Walt asked if we knew anyone like this. I said that I did and found in my answer one common presence in my brothers who served me. Her name was Jessi Brown. She was a student at Penn State. We were not close but merely shared the same circle of friends, or rather, I shared hers. She was the hub around which friendship turned for several years, even for those who did not know her well. My direct interactions with her are few and mostly insignificant: her arriving after Mooney to the surprise party she had planned for him, finding her riding her bike around Stuckmann building when she was suppose to be in studio, her "fighting" Steve Sylvia and someone else in Redifer commons, seeing her through the open door at a Navs dance practicing ballroom steps with a few others.

What I do know and will always know and carry in my heart, is that she loved and was loved by a group of boys who became men. I don't mean romantically, necessarily, though that happened too. I mean that she was such a unique person, lively, kind, that admiring and respecting her changed my guy friends. They became better friends, better brothers, better boyfriends, better sons. I claim this for those of us definitely not men as well (better sisters, better friends, etc), but I think she had a special influence over them that was very different than that she held over us. She challenged them by her mere existence to be better men.

Two years ago, she and her boyfriend Eric Kauffman died in a car accident while driving to a wedding. I began to grieve as if she and Eric were closer to me personally than than they were. But she was heart to my community and it felt as if part of my own body had gone missing. I was separated from that community by living in Ocean City that summer and even though I lived in a house with friends, I felt alone.

Jessi's absence has taken a toll in ways I don't think any of us have understood or can understand. What I do know is that I have been loved and cared for well in the last two years by a community of men that I deeply respect. And I believe I owe this gift to the example and love that one woman gave to a motley crew of undergrad boys.

Jessi, I thank you.

Transient Art

2011-07-07T10:11:00.000-07:00

¹⁴For he knows our frame;^[a]
   he remembers that we are dust. ¹⁵As for man, his days are like grass;
   he flourishes like a flower of the field;
¹⁶for the wind passes over it, and it is gone,
   and its place knows it no more.

Psalm 103:14-16

I love to start with word definitions. It seems to ground what I'm thinking and articulate words.

Dictionary.com Transient: –adjective

1.not lasting, enduring, or permanent; transitory.

2.lasting only a short time; existing briefly; temporary

3. staying only a short time:

Synonyms: fleeting, flitting, flying, fugitive, evanescent

Over a week ago, I had the privilege to attend "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee", performed at the Boal Barn by a local, summer theatre group. There were community members in the cast and production crew as well as several PSU students. Maggie Cox, dear college friend and house mate from last fall, was the vocal director for the cast and offered to take me and Emily Kerner to the opening night. It was a glimpse into her "other world": music. While Emily and I know her primarily through our college involvement in Navigators (campus ministry) and through sharing a common faith, we have known that Maggie existed in other realms than in the ones we typically saw her. She majored in music education with an emphasis on voice. Seeing her in this role was new for us and a special gift.

The evening was really lovely. I enjoyed the musical, laughing often especially when reminded (sometimes painfully) of myself in junior high and my fanatic devotion to Bible quizzing (the parallels were eerie). Maggie's response was fun to witness. She could only be described as proud and took a special delight in what each cast member was able to perform with their voice. Maggie has a gift that permeates her life in being able to bring out the best in people and her ability to bring out the best in someone's voice is part of that larger gift.

After the show, she drove me home and we talked a little bit about what it was like for her to see her work be done. She said it was strange to realize that her part in the musical was over the moment an audience was present. No more coaching or instruction. Only what could be given in the performance and experienced by the audience. Months of work and training suddenly completed and done with only one week of performances.

This prompted our talk to turn towards thoughts on art and the way we invest in making things and how all of that comes to an end at some point. Maggie said she doesn't really make art, but I argued that her art was someone else's voice and the brief, passing moment of performance. We agreed that there is something visceral and vulnerable about live performance of any kind, and perhaps that is part of it being completely transient. It lasts but a moment. It hardly seems practical. Yet the human race returns again and again, from centers of culture like NYC to the Boal Barn in State College, to instances of disappearing moments, beauty turned into memory and works hard to make them happen, to make them good. What does it matter? Like I insisted to my mom many times, why make the bed if I'm going to get in it in a few hours? Why all this repetition? And worse than repetition, why all this investment into moments that will never come again, are never repeatable?

Our relationship the transient has changed. It surprises me when I consider that 100 years ago, music was only a performance event. It could only be experienced if someone was playing it, even if it was playing a song that had been played a thousand times before. Music was always different. With the advent of Edison's voice recording technology, music can be preserved from specific moments of performance, evolving to a small pocket devise that can give me access to The Wailin' Jennys and Jon Foreman at any moment. Theater has also been preserved in film. However, I think that is a good example of the inadequacies in "preserving". It is a shadow of the real thing, something that disappointed me again and again when watching videos of plays from my highschool years.

Makoto Fujimura notes in his essay on "Art of Dance" (from his collection titled "Refractions"), that perhaps this fleeting art is still worth dedicating our lives to. He explores in depth reasons why the support of the arts should take special care to support dance and those who spend their lives to be able to complete one split moment of skill and perfect expression. There may not even be an audience. Even if there is, they will soon forget the moment or fail to recognize its worth. They will not be unchanged, however. All of a life well lived is working towards one moment, but one that is somehow capable of making things whole and complete. And to encourage art that passes is to remind us our own position as "flowers in the field". This is not to induce despair but to acknowledge hope. We live a life that will not remember us. No ground we walk on will take pleasure in declaring that we walked on it. No dance we do will be remembered by the air we pass through.

And it is worth doing because in its passing beauty, there is glory:

But the steadfast love of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him...
¹⁹The LORD has established his throne in the heavens,
and his kingdom rules over all.
Psalm 103:17-19

Steadfast. Everlasting that runs into the next everlasting. A kingdom that not only remembers but is the beauty captured, hinted at, in one note hit well with a human voice.

Bless the LORD, O my soul!

Much love to dear Maggie Cox, who inspires me with her art and her teaching. You make things beautiful.

What Makes A Good Film Adaptation? "Jane Eyre"

2011-07-01T09:26:00.000-07:00

I am confused and impressed that my highest viewed blog post was a short paragraph I wrote that asked the question: "What makes a good film adaptation?" There were several interesting responses (See post here http://danamray.blogspot.com/2010/11/what-makes-good-film-adaptation.html). But I did not adequately express what I felt was involved in such a thing, though I am highly opinionated on the subject (Are you surprised? Don't be). Many of the post views have come from people who typed just that very question in Google. It seemed somehow sad that so many people went to the post and were disappointed by a lack of clear thought. I seek to rectify that in this post(s) by beginning with my thoughts on the recent film adaptation of "Jane Eyre", a Victorian novel by Charlotte Bronte.

The Evening Of
To say that I enjoyed this film would be an understatement. The question however is why I found it so enjoyable. The conditions were excellent: Ali Sacks (my ballroom hero) organized a group of girls to go see the film we had wanted to see for a very long time; it was at State Theatre (local State College theatre with an old school feel, red plush seats, an eclectic taste in performances and film showings, and alcohol); we sat in the balcony; the apricot beer being consumed beside me smelled amazing; I may or may not have been watching it for free; and the company was such that there was excellent commenting happening before, during, and after the showing. Such a context cannot help but add to the pleasure of a period film.

The Love of the Book
Now to the film itself. One cannot consider an adaptation, I believe, without commenting first on one's thoughts on the original text. That is the very point of an adaptation and must be evaluated in those terms. I loved "Jane Eyre" in middle school and reread it periodically since then. The gothic feel has since lost some of its fascination and charm since then and I have also grown weary with the long childhood introduction that bored many of my peers. I defended it in those days out of a sense of duty. But the basic narrative captivated me: a fiesty, wronged child grows in harsh conditions into a quiet, but equally strong woman. She becomes a governess and falls in love with her employer as does he with her. I hope (as my friend Anjali also hoped/guessed) that most viewers of the film will have read the book or I would continue with the short recounting of the plot. The essence of the narrative attraction is found, however, in the evenings of tension that Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre share and everything that is not spoken between them, but felt and seen. Bronte does a masterful job of crafting these small, domestic, fraught scenes and they carry the novel. They are what stay in the mind even while the familial relations and various relatives dying and leaving inheritances are forgotten. Oh, that and the mad wife in the attic, running around the house at night trying to burn the place down (There's a whole potential disertation in the Brontes for Victorian/gothic perspectives on disability and "the grotesque". I bet someone's already taken it though. Another thought for another time).

Define: "Faithful Adaptation"
I've grown (I hope for the better) away from being a purist in my hopes and dreams for film adaptations. My first introduction to the art of the adaptation was through the 1980s BBC production of the Narnia books. They enacted the books almost word for word in a low budget attempt to tell the story well. Too bad for Disney that I still think they capture the spirit better than the high budget, fancy smancy stuff they pull these days. But it set up the unrealistic belief that word for word extraction was what made the spirit come alive. While it was part of the wonder of book into sound and light, it was not what made it beautiful: it was the ethereal and immediate ability to take the heart of the book and share it, in tact, in another medium. Meaning, that a good adaptation will take the heart of character and voice and make it tangible for the viewer in images and moments the way the author makes it tangible in words choice, syntax, diction, pacing, paragraph spacing, etc.

How that is accomplished can be different for each film maker. In fact, it is also the enacted role of the reader each time the book is experienced throughout life, assuming, of course, that all great books in life could potentially be loved well several times and not just once. My favorite example of film adaptation would be Ang Lee's "Sense and Sensibility", whose elegant visual directing combined with Emma Thompson's screenplay was able to alter the pacing, timing, and plot elements of Jane Austen's novel and create cinematic excellence. Thompson received a Golden Globe for her screenplay that year, an award I appreciate: the task of taking Austen's language and changing it, altering it, plot and voice for human bodies to use is a daunting task. It cannot be just "straight from the novel" as I once believed. My favorite scapegoat would be the most recent "Pride and Prejudice" which involved a modern sensibility for the awkward and strange, bizarre lighting and shapes, and a strangely mixed up performance by two actors who were either 1) dreadfully miscast and 2) badly directed. I believe it was both since I've loved McFayden in "Little Dorrit" and disliked Knightly in most everything other than the first "Pirates" film.

Elemental Critique
All of that is just to give a general intro to my thoughts on film adaptations. Now to apply it to Cary Fukunaga's "Jane Eyre." I found that the film was new enough in its take on Jane to make it worth making. I think of two aspects in particular that stood out to me of strengths 1) film order and 2) timing (with music. Will explain).

This adaptation took a unique turn by starting the story the moment Jane runs from Thornfield Hall the morning after her wedding (though we don't know that at this point). We follow her as she grieves while wondering the moors and looking for a reason to be alive. She is found by someone outside of their home and she just barely made it. We are as lost as the family is, full of questions. Her childhood is then given to us in flashbacks as well as her time as governess at Thornfield. The layered rather than sequential order helps to understand why we should care about her as a child and creates curiosity and engagement: you have to pay attention to keep up with the location changes and the progression of Jane's character.

The music was stellar. It added deft mood and tone to each scene and was powerful even in its absence. There was not booming music but was left to play subtle and beautiful notes in our experience of the piece. Sound was a primary tool in making the atmosphere work in this film, and it largely succeeded in ways I don't remember in other adaptations, even ones filmed at the same location (I think this is true, though I am not certain). There were several moments of intense fright for the audience that made us jump, a particular problem if you were Ali beside me with a mostly full cup of beer. The moments of quiet in dialogue also allowed for comedic moments that I would have missed otherwise to be thoroughly enjoyed with the theatre audience who let out audible laughter and gasps at exceptional moments. So perhaps what I mean by "music" and "sound" is fantastic editing.

And the acting. I have defined my definition of good adaptation as largely depending on the translation of character and spirit. I found Mia Wasikowska to be one of my favorite Jane Eyre's thus far. She was, as Ali said, "Beautiful, but in a way that didn't call your attention to it so you might not notice it." She gave a very controlled performance, which was very skillful but was sometimes surprising when she would have passionate moments (ala tree and lightening scene). Mr. Rochester was somewhat less satisfying to me though I know he is the hardest to time well. I missed the manipulative, nigh abusive, blunt charm he wields in the novel. This one "smiled too much" and left me confused as to whether he actually experienced a connection with Jane Eyre like he said he did, something I was not missing in the Masterpiece Theatre adaptation from 2008.

Judi Dench was, of course, a charming and perfect housekeeper.

"Jane Eyre"... Again
An interesting question, though, is why "Jane Eyre" continues to inspire new adaptations. In the last two decades of period film resurgence (the mid 1990s for the Jane Austen fan, and the work of Masterpiece Theatre), there have been three different adaptations (http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=Jane+Eyre) out of a total of twenty two since 1963. Compare that to Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" which has seen two adaptations in the last two decades (one for tv with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth and the other for the cinema with Mathew McFayden and Kiera Knightly [mistake]) and nine total adaptations (film and television) since 1952. It may be worth noting that the Austen films seem to have inspired more fan commitment and so may have not inspired quite the revisiting that our Jane has done. There were also more novels. And more spin offs including a Bollywood adaptations and one by the Church of Latter Day Saints (you think I'm kidding but I'm not). However, perhaps an even more interesting comparison can be made between "Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights", the sister-banes of young high school men's literary education: WH has had fifteen adaptations with one in the works for this year, including, apparently, a special song by Mumford and Sons (?). While still more adaptations than P&P, a gap of seven film adaptations between WH and JE is a lot of time and money spent on Jane and not on Heathcliffe.

I think it is because it offers a challenge that seems to tantilizingly easy to conquer. The small scenes between Jane and Mr. Rochester are, as I noted before, the heart of the film. There is also a very intangible spirit to the novel that is difficult to capture and is key to how I define faithful to the original text. There is also something to be said for the fact that I have been watching "Jane Eyre" adaptations for a long time, to the point that I get them confused with each other. Many of them are not profoundly different from each other, especially this most recent one and the Masterpiece Theatre adaptation, which I need to see again to decide whether it is indeed my favorite.

My great appreciation for the plethora of adaptations and most particularly this most recent one was that it allows different aspects of the novel to be explored and greater understanding for the long time reader. I am particularly grateful for the editing in this film that allowed subtext to rule the dialogue and interactions of Mr. Rochester and Jane. I felt as if I understood the subtext and followed it for the first time. But perhaps that can also be attributed for the process of growing up in a story and finding my own self more able to understand and enjoy what I had always felt to be worth investing in.

Also see a review of Anajlai Narayanan, who was with me to see this film: http://zurichwhat.weebly.com/the-other-arts.html

Dancing Fatigue

2011-06-30T08:05:00.000-07:00

Last night may have marked 1year from my first trip to the Lion's Den on a Wednesday night for salsa night. That first night was one of the most memorable of college. I had gone on the assumption that a friend would be there to teach me the ropes. They were not. I had however, dragged three of my friends into coming with me and certain hilarity ensued involving a long island iced tea exploding like a fountain into an unsuspecting bystanders face. It was amazing. I began going consistently at the end of January this last semester, a much needed outlet for added stress of winter months and thesis work.

Last night, there was no stress to be had but it became the longest I had stayed at the Den (yes, we stayed till closing!). And as has happened many times, the night ended with me wilting in the front seat while Fraleigh graciously gave a ride home and we extolled, in small, exhausted voices, the beauty of dancing fatigue.

What is dancing fatigue? It is a sweet exhaustion that comes after hours of dancing. I've experienced it primarily after ballroom socials and a few salsa nights: times when the fun of the thing is the primary goal, when dancing past your typical energy levels is easy and even unnoticeable. While dancing, there is no fatigue. None. Perhaps stamina decreases over the hours but not enthusiasm. No, the fatigue hits when the music and body stops.

It comes in a wave. I call it The Wave.

It is important to ride this wave into sleep. If one tries to push through it, the gentle exhaustion will turn into a monster that keeps you too tired to sleep. No, it must be prepared for. I usually go through certain steps when I get home to make it the most effective Wave because I know that once it hits, I will be completely incapacitated. I start with taking my contacts out because there is nothing harder than trying to get my contacts out once The Wave hits and I'm mostly asleep rather than awake. If the night is hot, I take a cold shower, but (alright, confession time) I usually just change into my comfiest and baggiest pjs, let my stiff-with-salt hair stand on end, and defer cleanliness to another time. Then (and this the best part), I eat. I'm always hungry when I finish with a social dance. Ravenous. The kind of hunger that happens after swimming in a pool for hours as a kid and only wanting salty things. I eat 1 of 3 things 1) toast with tea 2) cereal with lots of honey or 3) a heavily peanut buttered sandwich with honey. All of these foods remind me of 1am and waiting for the Wave.

It usually hits halfway into whatever I'm eating. I finish as quickly as possible and get to bed and get comfortable with my mounds of blankets and pillows (it's a Ray thing). In a few minutes, I am not awake and I am likely dreaming dreams that I will never remember when I awake.

Pillow marks will line my face and arms in the morning-my body won't turn or thrash in the night. And it will be the best sleep I can remember because I won't remember any of it at all.

The Local Church

2011-06-26T11:31:00.000-07:00

I asked my friend Melanie what have been the most significant positive growth factors she has experienced while in undergrad. Her thinking aloud prompted me to consider what I would have answered for that question. After this morning, I would offer at least part of my answer to be this: the local church.

Of course, "the" implies singular. With the naked eye, there are many local churches in a given area of the United States. Even the smallest town seems to be imbued with at least two white planked structures for different denominations. Theologically however, "the" is an accurate article. The idea is that there is one church that encompasses all Christians in the world. The word "local" is what designates it as one smaller gathering that is part of this larger, invisible, catholic/universal church. Words and phrases used to describe the invisible reality are "Body of Believers" and "Bride of Christ." The experience of being part of this divinely ordained and established family comes through the local, smaller communities.

I've grown up in the church. It is wired into me that Sundays mean church, especially Sunday mornings. I loose track of the days of the week if I miss a Sunday morning. But it was not until college that I began to appreciate the beauty and grace that comes in being a consistent part of a local community of other Christians. The reasons for this are varied from small, seemingly insignificant delights to more serious theological considerations and the health of one's own spirit.

Today, I was struck by some of the many smaller and wonderful gifts I have found in a member of a church. I could perhaps blog at length on each of the things I have listed below, and perhaps I will someday. For now however, I will just share a few, and observe that I am grateful for them.

Someone making zuccini bread for a C. S. Lewis book reading at 7:45 in the morning. I don't know if I would have made it without that sustenance.
Food in general. Churches are often places where people know how to eat.
Being adopted by a family. The Reeds are the best!
Getting to hang out with highschool students between Sunday school and service.
Having "Sunday school", even if it just exists so I can play hooky from it occassionaly.
Babies everywhere. Babies and newborn infants. Amazing.
Adults who know my name and care about me.
Rides everywhere.
Lunches at Waffle Shop with people I hardly know but will enjoy anyways.
Standing in the sanctuary before anyone else arrives. I love empty church sanctuaries, something that started for me in high school when I worked as a janitor at my church. Today, I started singing "Dear Refuge of My Weary Soul" and then found out we were singing it in church. Perfect.
Often knowing at least one family when I go grocery shopping.
Kate Sauder teaching me how to grocery shop. And Becky Watlington telling me how to get rid of ants with corn meal. They are so smart.
Getting to be part of family histories. I wrote a prayer last year on behalf of a woman I had never met but was part of our church family and had just lost a baby mid-pregnancy. Today, she is due any day with her third child
Being around people who are married and single, parents or not, in academia and in service jobs, students and professionals. The greater the variety, the better!

It's a beautiful thing. Messy often, as I find when I listen closely enough to hear histories and stories of where this community has been. But beautiful because at the end of the day, these are the people that take communion together, make food when someone is sick, throw innumerable baby showers, and keep becoming something better than what we would be alone.

Summer Solstice

2011-06-21T06:38:00.000-07:00

In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year... Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it.

-Daisy, "The Great Gatsby"

I don't want to miss it this year.

For the Love of Music

2011-06-19T19:40:00.000-07:00

This past weekend, I had the privilege and great good fortune to travel to Lancaster, PA for my friends' wedding. Matt and Sarah are now Mr. and Mrs. Matthew Martin. They were married on his family's beautiful farm in Millersville, a fact that encouraged the vast majority of the guests to remove our shoes very early into the service. My heels (which had mired me unhappily in several spots ranging from damp grass to mud to gravel) remained off and were replaced by my chacos only when necessary. Though the day was warm, the light was gold, the fields and the willow tree were green, and we celebrated.

But a moment I will remember from this weekend came as I raced my car to keep up with Jeremy's on the back roads the night before. We were going from Panera back to his house and I was far from any territory I knew even though I grew up not too far to the north in Hershey. He had loaned me a cd before we left and said, "You have to listen to this." I turned it up loudly. It was an album by Mumford and Sons. It was green music. I don't know how else to say it: it seemed right to be played as I drove as fast I could through fields in a sunset. Green.

And it made me want to write. I've experienced this a few times before but had forgotten the connection: certain music will trigger an immediate need to make something. When we stopped briefly at redlights or while waiting to reach a stop sign, I scribbled words in my journal. It wasn't that they were very good words or will last very long, but it was the memory that art from one person can beget art in another, even diverse forms.

"But my heart told my hand/ this time no."

Thank God for farm country, for sunsets, for open windows, for music.

The Plex: In Memoriam

2011-06-10T12:34:00.000-07:00

I did the math today and I didn't like it.

The five Plex residents are moved out. Seidle left right after graduation. Evan left last week. Steve left Wednesday. Scott is in DC for the summer. Sean has been off galavanting who knows where.

From five to zero.

There are signs of life there. A loaf of bread on the table. An unlocked back door. Couches still in place. But the computer/tv is gone. Many pots and pans are missing. The coffee table moved out. Posters taken down and moved. It changed. The residents I know are gone. The time of the Plex has ended. Part of me wants to claim that it won't ever end, at least not as long as there are Navs guys living in it.

My time at the Plex, at least as it has been for me the last two years, has ended: I no longer feel like I can stop by anytime for no reason at all.

I regret never filling the living room with newspapers. It would have been a great prank. I never pulled it off because the house always had people in it. Morning noon and night.

What is The Plex? This was the right side of a duplex on I Alley in State College. Two years ago, several of my friends from Navigators moved in and began an exciting two years as residents of the somehow chosen "central location" for any and all social activity. Whenever we wanted to have an event, the answer was, "Oh, well we could go to the Plex." Theo Thursday to post Nav Night hang outs to movies to dinners. Everything. It was a place that I began to stop by randomly just to see what was happening, sure that if I just stuck my head in the door I would find friends who were also hanging out in the living room, introduce me to "Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog" and feed me whatever was being messily made in the tiny kitchen.
It was a place of home. I went there to hide from my residence hall when it became too stressful. Last summer, I went there everyday after work even if no one else was home. I was found many times asleep in a nap on the couch. My mail even went there since I spent more time there than at my apartment. I went there for theological discussions and debates. I went there to offer hospitality (strange because I didn't actually live there) and to receive it. I went because... well, that's just where everyone went.

I know it wasn't so easy being a full time resident of the Plex. Having an "open door" culture be sprung on you over time had to have driven the guys crazy. The place was always messy, ranging from slightly disheveled to unmentionable. There were several people (not residents) who developed an hardwired feeling that they had to clean it when they came in the door: dishes, floors, vacuuming, bathroom. It was somehow all of our spaces.

And when dynamite was found in the neighborhood and houses evacuated, where did we all go? The Plex front porch to watch the action as the bomb squads came.

All of this is basically to say: thank you. Thank you to the guys who have lived there and made it a place to be a home to far too many people too many times. And also thank you to the people who made it their homes and offered its shelter and food to others, who were part of a strange community.

I am holding the memories dear.

Some favorite memories:

Theo Thursday nights. The early ones where I would consistently eat half of a Cheese It bag. I still owe Steve Sylvia many Cheese It bags.
Last summer and the many dinners there.
Sleeping on the couch after it rained on us when we slept in the backyard after the bear chase.
The dinner the guys made before the Navs formal Junior year.
Brown 'drank.
Walking in at 1pm to find Seidle sitting on the couch with the blanket. He had spent the night on the couch, sans pants, and had yet to go get dressed.
Stopping by on the way back to Patty's Place after evening classes. Just for the heck of it. One night being introduced to "Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog" when I should have been writing a paper.
Going upstairs only once when I broke my toe nail in half and it was bleeding.
Loosing many items and finding them again in the couches.
Watching the majority of the movies in college in that living room.
Hiding there after a Christmas party, tired and emotional, and sleeping on the couch until someone took me home.
The walk from Simmons Hall to the Plex. I could have done it blindfolded at one point, all several miles of it.
Navigator hang outs and fires in the fire pit.
Backrubs given and received.
It being, in general, my favorite place in all of State College to be on any given day.

(Please add your own to the comment section if you are one of the many who have been loved through the Plex open door)

Blogging about Reading about Reading (and writing)

2011-06-02T09:52:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to share some fabulous links with you about reading. If there is anything I enjoy more than writing, it is writing about writing. If there is anything I enjoy more than reading, it is reading about reading.

And if there is something summer was made for, it is reading.

Does reading make you a better person?
http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2011/05/31/jane_austen_education

Byron Borger (of the ineffably superior Hearts and Minds bookstore) reviews a book about reading (writing about writing about reading) and gives some of his thoughts on the matter:
http://www.heartsandmindsbooks.com/booknotes/the_pleasures_of_reading_in_an

J. Mark Bertrand (of WVA faculty fame. Or at least, that is how he is famous to me) was republished in Comment with his thoughts on summer reading. The paragraphs about "beach readers" was particularly brilliant and was read aloud to my coworker, Dave.
http://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/2801/

On the pleasures of bookstores (writing about selling the art of reading...in a way):
http://www.arthouseamerica.com/blog/bequest-of-a-bookseller.html

And because this is delightful in its absurdity (and the world needs delight):
http://jen-campbell.blogspot.com/2011/06/weird-things-customers-say-in-bookshops.html
[see her original post as well once you are at the blog]

And if these did not satiate your curiosity and pleasure in reading about reading/writing, then check out Francine Prose's "Reading Like A Writer," undoubtedly my favorite text from this genre.

On Hugs

2011-06-01T19:24:00.000-07:00

There is no word that fully communicates the fabulousness of a hug.

Hug. Embrace. Clasp. Enfold.

Yeah, the word itself is kind of awkward. And perhaps this is because hugs can be awkward. Very often are.

I am opinionated about hugs. I like hugs a little bit.

Okay, maybe a lot a bit.

Hugs are places where one doesn't need to be or do anything. It is a physical gesture of complete acceptance and approval. It is a gesture of mutual safety and comfort. It says that the day is good because that person is there. It

I approve of hugs across genders, amongst genders, between the generations, between friends, between family, between enemies, etc.

One of the things I miss about India is the constant hugging from the little girls and the kisses they gave so freely.

There are some who are blessed with the most wonderful hugging abilities.

I disapprove of lackluster huggers. These fall into several categories:
1) The draper. This is the one who just places the arms around the other person as if their arms were laundry to drape over a laundry line in the back yard. It says, "I acknowledge your existence but only because you were awkward enough to initiate your enthusiasm for life in hugging me first." Ouch.

2) The wet sheet. This is oddly likened to the draper. Close cousins. Maybe even fraternal twins. But still not the same beast. This is the one who hugs but just uses the forearm to lightly touch the other person. Don't want to make things awkward so we'll go with hardly touching. But it says: "You are a gross human being and I don't want to touch you because I'll get germs." Then all I can think about is whether I am getting germs from the other person and then I feel dirty because that person didn't want to touch me. Oh no... did I not shower well enough? I brushed my teeth, right? Ew. Not welcoming at all.

3) The side huger. Completely baffling because if you want to hug a person you might as well do the thing right. Someone goes in for a real hug and then gets half of the person's body? Totally confusing. Then the pressure application gets thrown off, no equilibrium, and everyone wishes they had just gone for a hand shake with that person they've known for years (so it would have been inappropriate and awkward anyway). Handshakes are another rant for another time. This is sometimes (inexplicably to me) encouraged as a way to avoid awkardness and not miscommunicate. How is that even achieved when everyone is left with lackluster hellos?

Some notes on quality hugs:
1) They will come consistently and spontaneously, expected and unexpected. Often as possible. Hugs are humanity glue. So maybe this is just for those of us who have touch as our #1 love language. But even you who hate hugs: please accept us for who we are. We'll not hug you if you don't like it. Everyone else, deal with it.

2) Will involve both arms of both people (surprise hugs are exceptions). If there is a great height difference, I recommend shorter person hugging waist, and tall person hugging shoulders. All others can alternate which arm goes up and which arm goes down.

3) Use some laws of physics: all force has an equal and opposite reaction. Or something like that. Matching the hug in pressure will make it work. If the person is a bear-hugger... well, I have nothing. Just hold your breath so your ribs aren't pushed in and crack.

And hugs can be varied. One of my favorite hug variations: being picked up and spun while being hugged. Other favorites include the "tackle hug" which was perfected by Chrissy Nettekoven and Jen Davidson during their highschool years. I have since perfected it on Jamie Zachavitch.

Now go hug someone!

Conversation

2011-05-27T20:47:00.000-07:00

1.
I've been asked many times in the last few months, "So what are your plans for next year?"

I have been terrible at answering.

This wordlessness surfaced while Maggie and I sat beside her firepit, tea mugs in hand, and the only conversation we could think of was "what we are doing next year", or more accurately, the ups and downs of not knowing. The greatest tragedy we found was when we suddenly found that we had nothing to say to each other. It grew quiet and Maggie noted, "I don't know how to talk about anything else anymore."

I didn't either.

2.
While I waited for the processional at graduation with my faculty marshal, Judith McKelvey, she and were talking about the past year and the coming year. I had just finished explaining to a very important person in the English department that I had no idea what next year was going to look like. It wasn't exactly what I wanted to be telling someone responsible for arranging my access to educational opportunities in the last four years but I didn't know what else to say. I hadn't come up with a nice way of crafting the "I Don't Know" like other answers I had heard in this interminable conversation. Mac said she had appreciated my honesty.

"I don't understand it," she said.

"What do you mean?"

"My son would understand this. His autism helps him see things very bluntly. Why do people say things they don't mean? Why don't they just say 'I don't know' more easily? And why do we all ask you this question about next year? Are we just asking because we think we're supposed to? Why do I ask you about next year when I could ask you about the book sale you went to and we could talk about what you're reading? I only asked because I was supposed to."

Then we started walking and I had to pay attention to my clumsy banner.

3.
I wonder: when did I stop knowing how to converse? Did graduating shove me into the loss of my small talk skills? Do I even know how to have a conversation and truly see and engage the person I am talking to? Is this a gracious skill that we have lost? Did I ever even have it?

And what am I supposed to do now that I do know what I am "doing" next year?

The Love of Soup

2011-05-22T19:08:00.000-07:00

Sauteing carrots, celery, onion, and garlic

One writer and one scientist attempt to follow a new recipe which results in the writer meditating on the meaning and significance of soup in her life.

Anjali and I are as different as cumin and rosemary. I think this works though through our similarities and shared loves:

-Ballroom is important (though in how, we differ)
-We read the Russians
-We love soup

Today, Anjali and I began what I think will become as Summer 2011 tradition: a shared Sunday dinner of soup. This was inspired when I impulsively bought "The Soup Bible" when I bought my cap and gown. I sat on the floor of the HUB bookstore near tears in delight.

Soup is a marvelous thing. I recently declared that if Soup was a love language, it would be mine. I'm not sure how it came to be this way. It is one of my favorite foods to make when I get the chance--last fall, I won a chili cookoff in the vegetarian category with a white chili that was more soup than chili.

There are few foods that make me feel more restored which is why I think I love it so much. Something about the heat hitting an empty stomach that shocks the body into recognizing being alive and the intense, nearly painful, joy in being fed.

There was the time at Hershey Park with Mim, Abby, and Hannah when we got caught in the rain and wore trash bags in an attempt to stay dry. Mom fed us chicken and rice soup that night and we watched "The Winslow Boy" instead of staying until the park closed.

There was the time at the MIT ballroom competition. After the last latin awards, my van was late in finding us. I had been dancing since early that morning and hadn't eaten lunch and it was near 2pm. Fraleigh let me have some of his tortilla soup. Most of it actually. It was like being run over with a comforting train. My body relaxed and I settled in for a nap.

There was the time as the semester came to a close and I was anxious about the coming year and gloomy from all the rain. Seth made squash soup with chives and rice and almond milk in strange pottery bowls. It was my first meal that day and, as sometimes happens with soup, I nearly cried from happiness. The soup itself made me so happy to be alive, to know that there were good things worth tasting and experiencing.

Strange how one food dish can be all that in just a few sips.

I look forward to this summer and further tries at soup experiments. I look forward to feeding the people who come into Patty's Place with food somehow intended in its nature to restore.

Today's menu: Spiced black bean soup with sour cream and cilantro. Also tasted good on rice.
Response: Anjali gave this soup at 3.5/5 stars but primarily because of its "anti-hindu" beef stock base. Jon Checkan (of Iron Chef: J House fame) gave it 4/5. General consensus was that it would have been better with less broth (I was guessing at some proportions) and less salt. Also: make more. Tripling a recipe for an unknown number of people is a good idea.
Lesson: soup is rarely elegant looking. In fact, it usually looks strange and ugly. But the flavors and texture can be complex and surprising with each repeated bite. And don't add salt when you use a bouillon based stock.


The finished product. Using a favored bowl is always a plus.

By Wendell Berry: "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front"

2011-05-21T12:48:00.000-07:00

This time of year is well heard in Wendell Berry's voice. I love this particular listing poem. It commands me to do everything unnatural to me. May we all aspire to be and become mad farmers.

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Rain and a Garden and Graduation

2011-05-21T12:37:00.000-07:00

It's been a week since I graduated from Penn State. I've changed my blog description. The "signatures" on my emails no longer have "English major candidate." My little brother greeted me after one ceremony with, "Hello, English Nerd."

I felt it to be a profound compliment.

But mostly, life feels the same, other than the heavy dullness that has settled over my unroutined life. I am terrible at maintaining routine without sufficient reason to motivate me. I am without reason or motivation so my life has consisted of watching movie after movie with my sisters this week from "Boy in the Stripped Pajamas" to "Funny Face."

Friday, I returned to State College and Patty's Place and our small summer community. We live small lives together in this Valley during the summers. Meals together, sleeping outside when we can, movies, bottles of wine in the grass on warm nights, shared music and garden spades, wishing each other well in work and work searches. My job(s) for the Hemingway Letters project and the writing center don't begin this coming week but the next, so I have spent the last twenty four hours with friends and a stack of books waist high from the book sale (Side note from reading: Susan Orlean's ability to describe people astonishes me).

But the joy of the day was several hours sitting in the sun that has now disappeared under the threat of an early summer rain (is it summer? Or is it spring still?) with Melanie. We went over the details of life that we have gone over a hundred times before and weeding. Yes, weeding. My housemates Rachel and Sarah have planted vegetables in the small plot behind our house and the vines were threatening there small starts. Parka lent us a spade that he had borrowed from Pastor Ben and we took turns fighting off the roots of an intense vine that had also managed to curl its way around almost every stem of the rose plant (who knew we had a rose plant?). The dirt was like wet and heavy clay after all the rain this past week and we broke it in our fingers, picking out fragments of vine roots that refused to come to us whole.

Perhaps it is cliche. I am very sure it is. Graduating has made me think about growing, specifically "growing up." How things grow, what makes them what they are, how did they come into existence and exist just so. Many important things seemed to have happened accidentally. I became by growing through whatever the earth around me gave to pushes and attempts to move and change. The accidents inspire the most gratitude, somehow.

A garden feels so much like an intentional accident. Green things, once grown, feel inevitable. Maybe its why they are so comforting to be around: with proper attention, they become when we're not watching. An living wonder. The growth of any thing is a wonder. Perhaps "wonder" is what I mean by accident at all. Quiet and astonishing: the smell of dirt caught under my nails and on my clothes and the first breeze of another State College rainstorm.

Graduating is a strange way to mark the passage of time. It was just bizarre. But the passage of time needed to be marked so I will accept the strange gown and cap and medal and the vocab change from "I study English" to "I studied." Graduating: a strange accident, a wonder, with who knows quite what I will become next.

All Grown Up

2011-05-16T20:20:00.000-07:00

Seidle, Me, Zack, Robbie, Foxy, Melanie, Fraleigh, Mooney

Well... maybe. Sometimes, even a graduation can't change very much.

Word Memories

2011-05-11T14:59:00.000-07:00

These are for Anjali, who told me to write this post after we both shared memories of the Russians in India. See her version of the prompt at her blog

Prompt: Write Your Memories of Reading Specific Books

Reading "Till We Have Faces" in the old previa mini van on the way to Maine. I was near weeping the entire trip from being so moved by the book. I remember that vacation as my favorite our family ever took together. When I think of Maine, and the changing leaves, and the sunrise from Kadillac mountain, and the bedroom Hannah and I shared with the smooth wood floors, I think of Psyche's mountain.

Reading "The Fellowship of the Ring" for the hundredth time on the way to a piano recital. That may have been my last recital ever. I was so afraid of performing that I read the battle chapters to calm my fears. What is piano to an orc with a battle ax?

Reading "The Return of the King" and crying at the end when Frodo leaves Hobbiton forever and Sam saying, "Well, I'm home," in the months before we almost moved from Hershey to Texas.

Reading "The Brothers Karamazov" on the plane to India and late at night long after I should have gone to sleep. I was fascinated by the characters and was able to follow the plot with an incredible commitment in those humid, fan blown, mosquito netted nights. I did not remember until today that in "The Namesake" by Jhumpa Lahiri, her story begins with a train wreck in India and the man reading Gogol's "The Overcoat" on that train and naming his son after the Russian author. Anjali also has memories of Dostoevsky and India. What is the tie between these two places?

Reading "Pride and Prejudice" from the copy Mrs. Bonfanti gave me as a present through her daughter Liz on my seventh grade birthday. I associate the font in that book with Jane Austen. Probably always will. I will forever be grateful for that gift.

Reading "The Red Ripe Strawberry" on the old couch. Or rather, Mom reading the book to one of my siblings and the distinct way Mom emphasized the sounds in red. ripe. straw. berry.

Reading "The Hobbit" to Gretchen on a plane to Missouri with warm banana muffins and lipton tea.

Reading "Ecclesiastes" in the first snowfall of sophomore year in the woods behind Sunset Park. Those pages in my Bible are still wet from the isolated wet marks of the light snow.

Reading "The Man Born to Be King" and the introductory essay over skype with Daniel and Tim. Something about the light that afternoon stays with me.

Reading "Say You're One of the Them" by Uwem Akpan in the grass outside of Boucke building, feeling like the sun couldn't be quite as bright as it looked, the grass quite as soft, the moment I looked up from the page in terror I couldn't escape when the machete met the head.

Do any of you have equally vivid memories?

Book Sale/Treasure Hunt at Penn State

2011-05-09T13:06:00.000-07:00

It was like the CHAP convention. But smaller. And just full of books, not curriculum.

Or maybe it was the fact that it was in the ag arena that harkened my thoughts back to the old days of wandering around the Farm Show complex with Miriam Eagleson, Rachel Shaver (Sherman), Abby Eagleson, Liz Bonfanti, and Hannah Ray. Remembering the hours spent with Miriam and Rachel looking at and purchasing books (I bought many Jane Austen and Louisa Mae Alcott books there). Remembering wandering into off limits parts of the complex and scaring ourselves with the wide spaces and darkness. Remembering the distinct sound of mothers and fathers discussing the education of children. Remembering listening to Miriam's walkie talkie and the amusing drama of the CHAP board addressing issues among vendors.

Today was nothing like that, not in a reality. But it reminded me.

Every year, someone somewhere hosts a marvelous used book sale at the Penn State ag arena. This is the first year I've heard of it. So I went. I missed the first two days but took the really glorious walk from my apartment out past the football stadium for the 9am opening. Mae Sevick met me there (who had not missed the first two days) and we wandered the aisles on a treasure hunt.

It was more than successful in my eyes, though I can just hear my parents groaning that I already have enough books and that our basement is being taken over by my bookshelf and boxes of unshelved books as it is. But really: what is more irresistable than $.50 books? I found that there is no such thing.

There were some close calls. I almost missed the Rilke tucked between "Left Behind" and "Your Better Life Now". Rilke did not deserve that placement, but I suspect that most perusers of the religious section were not looking for him. "The Man Born to Be King" had a binding I had never seen before and almost slipped through my fingers, as did Kathleen Norris's "Acedia and Me." Oh, and "The Fabric of Faithfulness," also lost in the strange religious section mess. It needed a loving home.

Some books surprised me (I still don't know what attracted me): an essay collection titled "Body", a terrifying children's books about the golem myth. Or "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Two came home in honor of Judy McKelvey [Mac, as she is affectionately known by some students], my faculty marshal for this up and coming graduation: Dante's "Inferno" translated by Pinsky (We studied this book in English 201 "What is Literature". I have loved Dante since.) and Suzan-Lori Park's play "Imperceptible Mutabilities" (Mac introduced us to her essay on the "traditions" which has influenced my understanding of literature and writing since).

Two collections came easily and without surprise: "First Fiction", first published short stories of well known authors and "The World of the Short Story". Yes, Dana loves short stories.

But now that I think about it, maybe this was like the CHAP convention in more ways than memory alone: I was giddy when I picked up a copy of "Writer's INC," my 8th grade writing text book. When I will use this, I don't know. Not looking to be the mother of an 8th grader anytime soon.

Oh well.

P.S.

2011-04-27T18:46:00.000-07:00

I'm having design issues right now. Seems my version of firefox doesn't like blogger anymore so its making everything a rather ugly. I find this distressing because my beloved 4 yr old Mac book is apparently now "old" and doesn't like new browsers. A pending switch to wordpress, perhaps?

Please forgive the aesthetic dishevelment.

And if your computer doesn't show the ugliness (bright blue links, strange heading formatting, etc), then ignore this post. And if you have any idea of how to help me, do not ignore this post at all but comment and tell me your hidden knowledge.

Reflections Upon My Last Undergraduate Course

2011-04-27T18:34:00.000-07:00

Fifteen minutes ago, Elizabeth Kadetsky said she would let us out of our three hour Wednesday evening course early. Chris cheered because he is turning 21 in a few hours and we laughed and cheered with him. She asked who of us would continue studying writing, taking courses. I was one of the few who did not raise my hand. This evening, I completed my in-class time as an undergraduate student at Penn State. My final English class is over. There may be two essays left to finish by Friday but my time under a professor is over.

I may have started crying.

It is appropriate that my final class should be a creative writing course and taught by Professor Kadetsky. I have the distinction of following her around to three of her courses in the last two years of school-- apparently, this is more than any other student has ever done. I can only hope it wasn't odious. My first course with her was my first higher level creative writing course: English 412, advanced fiction writing. Fall 2009. I met Becca Ebstein and Chris Cascio in that class, two my best beloved readers. We were terrified after Elizabeth gave us a lecture in the first two weeks about the importance of learning to write "literary fiction" and not "genre fiction" (she decided to ban it). While perhaps a bit reductive of a dichotomy, the quality of work instantly shot up. Becca and I, in particular, mark that lecture as an important turning point in our writing. Later classes with Elizabeth included "Why We Write", a course looking at the sub-genre of writing about writing (and our personal, creative motives for writing ourselves!) and this semester with "The History of the Personal Essay" where I met F. Scott Fitzgerald the essayist, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, and more.

I must note that Professor Kadetsky was one of many professors who taught courses that became very precious to me. I plan on acknowledging the scope of my English experiences in further posts over the next few weeks as graduation (May 14th!) approaches. For now though, I'm just stunned that this semester is coming to a close and that there won't be one to follow. Not like this. I suspect there will be more semesters. New. Different. Experiences that will become dear to me.

For now, I get to miss undergrad before I am even handed my official degree. I get to look at my growth as a writer this year, this semester, at how growing as a writer is bound up (indistinguishable, at times) in growing as a person. This year was the richest writing time I've had at Penn State: essay and poetry courses last fall; essay and my thesis this semester. I've fallen in love with the essay and "essaying"; learned (my lack of) conciseness and control from poetry; vulnerability and slow thought in my thesis. I experienced talking about everything I don't know about an essay by presenting on "Total Eclipse" by Annie Dillard-- it may be one of my semester highlights-- and watching the class figure it out together. I've experienced the joys of writing friendship in swapping genres with Mae, and the long talks at Word Parties with darling word lovers who "geek out" about craft and form and philosophy as much as I do... or more so.

It's been beautiful, even on the nights when I was convinced I could never write another word. I know I will keep writing. I will. But I will miss the classroom, the sharing, the being taught.

I am overwhelmed when I think of not taking any more writing courses. After Elizabeth asked who was going to continue writing courses, Megan Dutill asked why I looked so distressed. I replied, "I'm just intensely nostalgic right now. I think this means grad school."

Lenten Reading

2011-04-21T06:58:00.000-07:00

Confession:

My Lent was an epic failure this year.

The reasons are inexcusable. It started during Spring Break, I was not expecting it, school was crazy, I had a thesis blah blah blah. They aren't good excuses.

So now it is Holy Week. Palm Sunday leading towards Easter. Even when I am fasting something (anything) for Lent, this week surprises me. Like Advent, despite its best efforts to prepare me, I feel like those silly women without oil in their lamps when it comes time to celebrate.

In the last few days, I've made an attempt to do something (anything) to realign my thoughts towards this coming Sunday. I've pulled out "The Man Born to be King" by Dorothy Sayers. It is an intensely rich series of plays (radio production originally?) that she wrote about the life of Christ. My dear friend Miriam loaned me the book years ago, saying that by the final pages, it always gave her chills. C. S. Lewis noted that it was also something he read every year during Lent

After years of reading this play, I would say she suceeds in her mission. It is facinating and dynamic to see characters take on voices that run around. So much of the play are direct quotes but they come with the inbetween explanations. It helps round it out, give a different take on stories I've known since I was small.

And Judas. He is the most interesting person in the play. And the most horrible because as much as I want to identify with the gentle and trusting John, I don't. At all. I pretend that I do. But of everyone in the play, I understand and relate to Judas the most. His thoughts, his plotting, his commitment to the "Kingdom", his un acknowledged pride, his deep understanding, and his manipulability into the greatest traitor known in history. What a thing to confront on Good Friday!

In combination with reading Luke (a dramatic book in its own right), "The Man Born to Be King" is as solid a refocus of mind and heart into this week as I could conceive of in the throws of my Lenten Failure.

Poetry Month

2011-04-18T06:34:00.000-07:00

Last year, I had the pleasure of making a bulletin board (that kept falling down) in Simmons Lobby in honor of Poetry Month.

I consistently forget no matter what tactics I take, that April is Poetry Month.

But when I remember, I always take the opportunity to force poetry down people's throats. I'd like to imagine this blog is one way of forcing poetry down throats. I'd like to imagine the reader has no choice but to read what I write when they come to the page.

This is clearly false. I have an active imagination.

Thesis Status: Complete

2011-04-08T10:32:00.000-07:00

This morning I used the EE computer lab and Eric Seidle's unlimited printing to print out my 96 pages. Took them to the HUB, had them bound, and took a copy to Burrowes by 9am.

And now, at least for a time, I am done with my undergrad thesis. It still must be signed by three faculty members and then I can declare the whole ordeal officially done with. But the writing, the printing, is done. I have a hard copy sitting on my bedroom floor.

So I am spending today celebrating what I know I am going to miss. I went back to bed and stayed there for three hours. I took a long shower. I read lots of essays by Joan Didion. Egg sandwich with feta cheese for lunch. Baking cookies. Watching Return of the King and quoting it out loud. Making plans for the weekend. I like celebrations.

It could also be a time to thank the people who helped my thesis. I didn't include an acknowledgment page because I wasn't quite sure how to thank people for the small and large ways they influenced and helped me get to this. Perhaps this is dramatic seeing as how the thesis isn't like a published manuscript at all. But it was/is very significant to me. So here are some shout outs:

Eric Seidle for free printing. Jaimy Joy for showing me how to make a table of contents. Ryan Smith for helping me with the page numbers. Janet Lyon (honors adviser) for an abundance of information that I still probably screwed up in my final drafts. Dan Conway for the thesis template. Dan Conway for the wine selection at the thesis party. All attendees at the thesis party. All thesis complainers on facebook giving me hope. Erica Reitz and Fiona for reading my initial essay. Elizabeth Kadetsky for her revisions and the many essays in the work that started in her courses. The ballroom dance community at Penn State. Mae Sevick for reading lots of sub-par poems by me. The Festival of Faith and Writing. Encounter 10. Christy Tennant. Courtney, Stephen, and Cameron from Winthrop, SC for their welcome at Encounter. Alyssa Wilkinson for her Word help over twitter. My cousin Brittany for writing about these things at PBU before me. The many who loaned me books to read (Tom Houston, Alex Wattlington, Julia Kasdorf, and many others). "Girl Meets God" by Lauren Winner, "The Mind of Indirection" by Jane Hirschfield, and Scott Cairn's poetry as primary inspirations. Megan Dutill for feeding me peanut butter and jelly when I was hungry.

And, finally, Julia Kasdorf, for acting as my adviser and, as I would like to call her, my thesis "amma": constant question asker, challenger, encouragement, and good book provider (I had at least ten books from her library at any one time).

NRT: Moon for the Misbegotten

2011-04-01T08:02:00.000-07:00


Katherine Leiden as Josie Hogan, Jason Cassidy as Jim Tyrone

Show times: Friday April 1, 8pm. Saturday April 2, 2pm and 8pm. 111 Forum Building.

No Refund Theatre did it again. I am floored.

This time, instead of raptures as after Othello, I left quiet and provoked. Strange that after only 2.5 hours I felt so familiar with a cast of three primary characters. As if I had watched their entire lives before coming to this stretch of a few hours in their lives. Eugene O'Neil's writing has a great deal to do with this. That man knew how to write dialogue that carries the narrative alone. There is not "epic-ness" to this play. No on stage deaths. No sword fights. Every scene takes place on the front porch of the Hogan's farmhouse. I realized during one of the longest acts that Josie and Jim had been sitting for almost 45 minutes. Clearly, this is a character driven play.

What amazed me then was how well the NRT cast pulled it off. Perhaps that is the wrong phrase. "Pulling it off" makes it sound like they did a lot of tricks to make it work. But they don't. There aren't any tricks in this. Just acting. It would be easy for this play to fall flat on stage without quality performances from all of the characters. There is nothing that any of them do. They talk. And making this talk full of the spoken and unspoken, the rising and falling, the sudden shifts in mood, in intention, expressing the deep confusion each of the characters processes about what they want. Wants are very hard to express in the body. They don't come in grand actions or stage directions. They come in performance (even if O'Neil tried so very hard to control every performance with his obsessively detailed stage directions). And this cast does it.

I might be a little biased, but Katherine Leiden did this especially for me. There were several moments where she revealed, without words, a truth about her character that she would not verbalize for another two acts. I remember being astonished at how convinced I was that an assumption about Josie was wrong relatively early in the play. When Josie then confirmed this belief in words towards the end of the play, I could only be impressed that Katherine had so thorough a knowledge of Josie that one facial expression could draw on a fact that we only learn later. A whole character was at play from the first time she stepped on the stage.

Well done, NRT and Eugene O'Neil!

PS. Warning: It is long. And it is character driven. You should go even if these two things daunt you. But don't say I didn't warn you.

PPS. Also, shout out to Katherine for holding Jason for a very. long. time. And Jason for being so still for such a very. long. time.

"Are You Aware?"

2011-03-29T12:25:00.000-07:00

There has been a growing number of signs and chalked up sidewalks on campus with this phrase. I don't know what it means. I don't know quite what they want me to be aware of. But I like it. It reminds me of conversations from Environmental Science in the fall of 2008 and walking through the woods with my class and being told the names of trees. Of taking my floor out to the Hub lawn and watching the stars for a few hours in early fall.

Walking around campus has turned into a scavenger hunt for more of these phrases and words. They are everywhere. On bulletin boards. Written on the roads. And I like having to look for them.

I am sitting in Atherton lobby, supposed to be writing my thesis before ballroom class starts. I just overheard a conversation between two students, one who is "in the know" about the words. He said that there is a specific goal, even that they want to students to be aware of on an international level. But they want to make the point first: are you aware of the world you're in? They will reveal the subject in a few days.

I'm interested and waiting.

Curator Magazine: In Word and Dance

2011-03-25T20:35:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to share this link, especially to those of you who have read this blog for a while:

http://www.curatormagazine.com/dana-ray/in-word-and-dance/

Parts of some posts I did here on ballroom dancing turned into a longer essay on dancing and writing. The Curator published it and I am excited to share it with you in a cleaned up form!

Books

2011-03-24T19:22:00.000-07:00

Soon, thesis will be done. Graduation will then be right around the corner.

Graduation means it is time to start my literary education. Yes, that's right. I am graduating with a degree in English and I'm about to start my literary education.

(Perhaps continue would be a better word.)

The only way to describe it is this: four years is just enough to teach me that there wasn't enough time to learn all the things I needed to learn about literature. And after graduation, I will have this amorphous thing called "time". And I want to prepare for it.

So I'm starting a list. A post graduation reading list. A gift to myself as it were. And I want your recommendations. While I may have spent four years reading and then writing about what I read, I didn't read nearly half of what I feel I need to say I "know" anything of what should be read pre-death.

For example, my to-read list currently includes:

Crime and Punishment
Ulysses (Or anything by Joyce for that matter)
The Sound and the Fury
More Annie Dillard
Yeats. As much as I can get my hands on.
Biography of Bonhoeffer

Suggest away!

Reunited

2011-03-24T18:57:00.000-07:00

I've lived without my cellphone for a week. I'm not sure how I did it. Three missed phone calls, one from my youngest sister who was offended I wasn't calling her back. 25 missed text messages. Lots of emailing back and forth to organize life. It was bizarre.

The loss itself was humbling. I had just panicked, believing that I had left my phone in another professor's office while waiting to meet with my honors adviser. I ascertained that I still had possession of the phone, relieved, when Janet Lyon told me we could talk. I must have put it down right at that moment and not in my bags like I should have. Instead, it sat for a week on a black book shelf that I had been perusing. Black phone. Black shelf. You couldn't see it unless you were looking for it. Janet wasn't in her office for the next week. I hoped it was there. I prayed it was there. I didn't want to have to make myself a facebook group asking for numbers.

I think I'm supposed to say now that I was better for the experience. Actually, I spent a week in heightened anxiety because I couldn't call my sister whenever I wanted to say random things. And believing as I did that the world would end without me being in contact with it via text messages, let me just tell you how frightening and dark a time it was.

I am, sadly, not joking. I may be ironic, but I am not kidding when I say I suffered deep anxiety because my phone was missing.

Embarrassing. Completely.

I'm not sure how I feel about it (other than the embarrassment). I'm thinking about trying to talk myself out of the feeling with some great points about how phones enable communication and ease. How they are part and parcel of how our worlds work, so it isn't a bad thing that I missed it. How it would have been much better in the end to not get all those texts I missed, the euchre game,

But I don't actually believe it.

One thing I do not regret: For a week, I never opened my phone and texted while I was standing with someone else.

Learned on Twitter: The Human Voice

2011-03-18T21:25:00.000-07:00

Glossary (you'll need this before you read the post):
Twitter: "social networking and microblogging service"
Tweet: A "facebook status" length comment. Most frequently a link to article or other online artifact.
Retweet: Someone who "forwards" someone's tweet through their own tweet.
Timeline: Where tweets appear in real time order of being "tweeted". Comparable to a newsfeed but very short tweets from only those you follow.
Following: Twitter allows you to choose who you follow and not necessarily who can follow you (facebook reversed). If you follow someone, their tweets will appear in your timeline.

I should tell you that I have a twitter account. However, I've been a long time friend and admirer both the committed luddites and those who seriously question the use of technology and social media. Wendell Berry is a personal hero of mine (mostly as a writer, but you can't get his writing without his thinking on such matters). Still, I've always had an affection for social media, even back in the poorly managed days of xanga. Perhaps I've even been sheepish about my quiet enthusiasm for it. I kept up facebook and blogged since 2005. My tech skills are low ( I can't use smart phones or play with computers) but I still enjoy the play involved in new tools.

But none of this is important. What is important, is that I have a twitter account. And things have changed.

What exactly? It didn't start right when I got it and was learning how to "follow" and come up with interesting "tweets" or how to connect twitter to facebook. It didn't start changing when Steve Lutz sat me down as a CCO staff seminar to explain a tweetdeck, hashtags, etc. [Though, as Steve pointed out to me, it could be said that he was responsible for influencing me to even get one in the first place]. And "the change" certainly had nothing to do with people's response to my own nonsense sayings.

It had a lot to do with poetry. And Egypt. And Libya.

Let me explain. On twitter, you can "follow" the tweets of not only individuals (who rarely say much of substance) but of organizations who link to articles, blogs, pictures, etc. As a writer, it was amazing to get reminders and access to online material I would never have found on my own but appeared in real time. I suddenly felt connected to Paris Review and Image Journal. I got poems everyday from Poetry Foundation. Makoto Fujimura links to other artist's work. I felt in the thick of things. I started recognizing contemporary writer's names from group tweets or, even better, retweets.

But Egypt really did it. Egypt changed everything.

I started following arcarvin. He was in Egypt when everything happened. I followed him because someone (NPR perhaps?) retweeted him and suggested I follow him. I did. Suddenly, my timeline of tweets was flooded with retweets that acarvin had found about Egypt. Or rather, it was filled with retweets from Egyptians and journalists in Egypt. It was better than watching the news. It was better than reading an article. Sure, the news is sketchy, a lot of it unconfirmed, un-contextualized. But it is in real voices. It is anything but filtered. The youth of Egypt were overthrowing the government and I was reading their words transfixed on twitter. Later, articles would come out through bbc and npr on events I had already heard were happening. I am still following Ghonim, one of the online organizers of the demonstrations that overthrew the government.

And now I read tweets from Libya. My heart breaks daily. I am pressed with constant reminders to pray for freedom and for peace to exist at the same time. I have not brought myself to see the uncut footage of the fighting. But I read the words of those within the country. They are immediate words. They are close voices. Their distance from me on twitter is the same as my distance to my friends on campus who tweet me about what we learned in dance class that day: a few blocks away. That connection does not come in an article. Do not hear me say that twitter will do away with the news. It does not. Rather, I've read more of npr, new york times, bbc, local news, etc since having twitter than ever before. The reports are necessary. So is the ability to connect to human voices and characters within the distance of articles, op ed pieces, updates.

The news moves on to Japan as well. Artists keep tweeting about their books. Paris Review keeps tweeting interviews and online content. I keep tweeting about what I learned in ballroom class. I wonder if I should stop following acarvin and Nicholas Kristof (from nyt) because they take up so much space on the tweet feed sometimes. But I can't. I can't stop hearing these small bursts of voice. I cannot ignore them.

The world is changing very quickly. And I want to watch the people who are changing it, in their own voices and words. Yes, the written word continues to change everything.

Adv 1: Clarification

2011-03-15T18:28:00.000-07:00

Hey you Adv 1 ballroom students out there. And kines 17. Yes, you. I just want to clear up a major misconception that I lived with too long.

It is not true that an "older" dancer, who is better than you, hates it when you dance with them. In fact, its the opposite. It's fun to help. I'm not going to ridicule you. I'm not going to throw things at you. I'm not even going to refuse to dance with you ever again. If all you know if the two-step, great. Let's go for it.

Just stop doing what I always did: apologizing!

Jacksonville: Navs Spring Break "Uno Uno"

2011-03-15T07:57:00.000-07:00

Stomach virus currently wrecking my body aside, Spring Break was lovely. I slept in a gym with 140 college students who were miraculously quiet in their sleep. The roof was far away, sight of the nearest sleeping neighbor impossible, the only sound the fans that kept the air flowing. I couldn't decide whether it creeped me out or comforted me. Other than the second night (where I kept waking myself up to write down observations about sleeping in said 140 person gym), I fell asleep easily, heavily.

In the course of writing the paragraph above, I also finally extricated a plywood splinter from the palm of my hand. How it got lodged in my hand baffles me since I spent more time baking brownies than helping the guys assemble the new columns outside of Andrae's house. This week seems to be haunting my body in unpleasant ways. That, and I don't think I can eat fried chicken or Mexican again any time soon. Too close an association to various individuals throwing up in cars and my own painfully angry stomach.

But what did I do? Perhaps a better way to answer that is why PSU Navigators went in the first place. It's a tradition for our group to do service projects south on spring break. Yes, we are selfish and seek out need where sun is easily available. But this year the work was at least enough to keep us all busy for most of every day. Me? I volunteered for the shared job of babysitting Second Mile Ministry director's kids. Ages 2 and 14 months. Adorable.


Cici, Diana, Benjamin

Note the picture. Nap time for all four of us was about to happen. Well maybe not Benjamin. He only ran out of energy twice during the week. We ran out daily.

Two other highlights included seeing Uncle Paul and Aunt Stacy who were in Jacksonville living on their boat, the SeaSea, for a few weeks. Also, spending time with the senior girls and moaning every few hours about how we are graduating and its the worst experience of our lives and how none of us know what we're doing next year.

Oh, and being on spring break with Hannah. She's pretty cool, even if she doesn't sleep half as much as she needs to.

I recommend learning more about Second Mile in Jacksonville. I admire Andrae and his wife Luna so much for their whole life commitment to seeing justice happen! And to the other staff (Ruth, Mark, and interns), I was amazed at their joy and energy in being with 140 Penn State students all week, making sure we never ran out of Welches fruit snacks for long. http://www.2ndmile-jax.com/

Published? Comment Mag?

2011-03-11T11:29:00.000-08:00

I'm excited. Giddy, even. Not only am I sipping a chocolate peanut butter banana milkshake that Andre made our work crew in Jacksonville, Florida, but I just got to see an article I wrote get published through Comment Magazine's online content!

http://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/2717/

I've loved Comment for a long while. Read more of their online content! I also have my own copies of past paper issues floating around for you PSU students who want to borrow them.

"Aye Aye Captain": Congregational Meeting

2011-02-26T21:15:00.000-08:00

A young member's experience of her first "real" congregational meeting. What doesn't get into the official notes but is more fun to remember.

6:45: Fiona and Dana debate the aesthetics of the ceiling. Tim sides with Dana. Fiona argues that there is no natural light and so it is therefore the ugliest church she's ever worshiped in. Natural wood is however a benefit.
7 pm: Dana begins taking notes on the beginning of minute taking at Oakwood's congregational meeting.
7:01 Fiona commences whispering to Dana. Janalyn asks if Fiona is being sarcastic already. "Oh no. Not quite yet" Fiona replies
7:02: Voting on the changes to last years congregational meeting notes. Several typos. Institution of Robert's Rules. Dana asks Fiona what "Robert's Rules" are. Not sufficiently explained.
7:03: All communicant members respond "aye" to a question that Dana missed. This moment is frequently repeated.
7:05: Dana notes to Fiona that she feels like a "rude young pup for finding this process bizarre."
7:15: Elder Perry notes that he is the scapegoat that goes to jail if anything is amiss.
7:16: Mark attempts to assemble a sound system. Perry's wife notes: "Perry, stop talking. You are stressing Mark out!"
7:30: Pastor Houston notes, "We have this hand out. You should have read it before you got here. I know none of you have."
7:36: Pastor Houston asks a committee leader, "So explain this work. Is it the kind of thing that eats up your time and is onerous?" Congregation laughs. Question is not answered. Implied yes?
8pm: Leader of the worship committee stands to answer questions. "Here I am. Any questions? [long awkward silence]... Good. Good. Come talk to me only if you are sure you are a skilled instrumentalist."
8:01: We applaud a faithful church volunteer. I note to Fiona how astonishing it is to hear applause in a Presbyterian sanctuary. "Only once a year," she replies.
8:13: Screaming child removed.
8:17: Linda Bonness announces that a new church ministry will include arranged marriages along with arranged wedding showers.
8:45: Janalyn Sheetz is seen to be knitting a complicated piece. Dana admires for extended period of time.
8:46: Someone suggests that Bill Bonness sing the budget report to make it more interesting.
9:05: Dana realizes she has lost track of time.
9:20: Personal angry moment. At least one is required to meet congregational meeting quota, right?
9:21: Fiona says its okay.
9:30: Fading begins. Fiona begins texting.
9:48: Alcohol gift to a retiring elder. Dana is jealous, but glad that Presbyterians delight in good drink.
9:50: Hymn. Dana exists.

Addendum to the minutes: All these minutes are falsified with the events. Please note this in next year's addendum minutes. Thank you.

No Refund Theatre's "Othello"

2011-02-25T08:34:00.000-08:00

Tonight 8pm, Tomorrow 2pm, 8pm
111 Forum
Of course, it's free

Last evening, I attended the open dress rehearsal for NRT's "Othello". My dear friend Katherine Leiden was starring as Desdemona and several other English class acquaintances were on stage as well.

The experience was riveting.

Sure, the beginning was slow, but I chalk that up to Shakespeare getting too political about the Ottomans. "Othello", though, is a fantastic story line after that dullness gets worked out of its system. I was hooked the moment the marriage quarrel gets going. The story goes like this: the beautiful Desdemona elopes with the renowned "Moor" General Othello. This man is widely loved but intensely hated by one man: Iago. There is not a more despicable and disgusting character in Shakespeare. I mean, really, he's incredibly vulgar and a master manipulator. He manipulates every character in the play forcefully, smoothly. No one is out of his influence. He eventually gets what he deserves but not after the stage is piled high with deaths (Desdemona's death bed gets a little crowded).

Most of the audience, I assume, know this play. So saying lots of people die on stage isn't giving much away.

There was nothing more I wanted to do than to transport this production to a space like the Globe Theatre, where audiences actively responded to what was happening on stage with cheers, boos, tears, encouragement. There were several times I was thrashing in my seat because the plot had become so painful and frustrating to me. I called Iago a lot of names. When Othello started loosing it, I may have made obscene hand gestures in his direction. I was also as strongly moved the other direction. In the first scene that we observe Othello and Desdemona interact, their physical chemistry and affection delighted me that I sighed "Awww, they are so cute!" My friend beside me asked if the two actors were dating. "No, not them. Desdemona and Othello are cute!"

These were stellar student performances. I wasn't a huge fan of the setting change (20s America?) since it confused me at times (it took me awhile to figure out who Othello was when he came on stage. They have him as Irish instead of dark): the acting more than made up for it. Shakespeare isn't easy to act because it isn't easy to say. The intonations of voice change with the sentence structure. So, too, the body changes with the voice. This can be hard to embody but several characters did it superbly. Max Simone as Iago blew me away. Incredible. I was impressed that this Iago so smoothly transitioned voices and body language for each of his character moments, but maintained the same personality throughout. Casio was also a presence that lit up the stage, especially with his ease in speaking Shakespeare's English. His character isn't terribly complicated but was played so compellingly that I almost liked him more than anyone else. I also may have resisted the urge to run to him when he got his leg slashed (Shakespeare character crush? Possibly.). Othello was also noteworthy, but mostly as he developed his character into madness. And Desdemona? Ah, she was magnificent! Strength and quietness is so hard to pull off without looking like a doormat. Katherine Leiden succeeded. I don't think I shall forget her voice as she sings before her death. I had never particularly liked that part in the play (characters breaking into strange and incomprehensible songs puts me off): last night, I cried.

It also qualifies as a worthy adaptation because it revealed Shakespeare to me in a way not accessible on the page. For example, Iago has a thing for Desdemona in this version: incredibly creepy and incredibly effective. One almost suspects that he destroys her and Othello because he wants her. Iago was compelling in fact because he played the character sexually, something I had never picked up on while reading. Vulgarity, yes. Attractive and vulgar and evil, no. Iago's wife (name slippage. Sorry!) had a tough part to play opposite him but their scenes went so well, and she brought more of an innocence to the character than I had imagined before.

In summary: just go see it. You won't regret it.

PS. Also a plus: great stage kisses. They were uncommonly delightful.

Sunset

2011-02-23T15:48:00.000-08:00

The snow is beautiful. Heavy, full, melted enough to crunch. And the day is comparatively warm. I have felt much colder this past month.

A ten minute walk from my house on Foster, there is a swing set and playground for the families that live in White Course Apartments. Maggie and I have gone out there several times at key points during our undergrad years for conversation, prayer. Today, I went to watch the sunset. I swung the sun under the pine trees and horizon. The horizon was close, just on the far edge of the golf course.

When I watch the sun for longer than a minute, I always wonder: why do I not do this daily?

Jubilee 2011

2011-02-20T18:23:00.000-08:00

I'm sure there will be more talk on this later, but I wanted to share some first responses to the weekend.

I finally learned how to "do" conferences: make a game plan, rest often, take it one person/one conversation at a time. Never try to be somewhere you aren't.
Music of Joy and Peace Ike Saturday night while talking with OCBP 09 dears: Lindsey Smyth, Ruthann Rutherford, and Risa Nakajima (roomie!).
Sharing the event, even by distant moments of connecting, with my Navigator family. It meant a lot to finally show many of them for the first time the role of CCO in my life!
Jen Davidson and her wisdom; lemon ginger tea, orange/cranberry biscotti.
Liturgically structured worship.
Andi Ashworth's talk on the art of hospitality. It was great to be in her presence after following her essays at Comment Mag and the Art House America blog for a while now!
Exploring options for the future.
Playing with "Soularium", a Cru dialogue starter in picures that Leighann Dull shared with me.
The most Gospel repetitive Jubilee I've seen yet. Eric Mason's talk was particularly needed!

I love these weekends. This was my fourth, each marking a different place in my undergraduate journey. More specific thoughts on these moments will come soon.

Another installment of "Not Supposed to Say" is coming this week.

Not Supposed to Be: Homeschooled

2011-02-20T17:45:00.000-08:00

Today, I read my writing tutor reviews from last week. In answer to how I did my job, one student wrote, "Knowledgable. Very kind. Not awkward."

I might as well have been kissed for how ecstatic I was over someone telling me how non-awkward I was.

I hate awkward because I believe in my heart of hearts that I am an awkward person. Why do I hate this so much? Because I'm terrified that when they find out I was homeschooled they will say, "Ah yes. That explains the awkwardness in this sad individual. They must have been deprived growing up. And their parents must be Christian fundamentalist brain washers and terrorists. Yes, I see it all now."

I fear this because it happened once. I was on a trip with Penn State to South Carolina and on a beach hike, one of the guys that I got into a discussion with asked me if I was homeschooled. My insides shriveled. "Yes?" "You just act like some people I knew growing up. Kind of hard to relax with some people, really respectful. Dana, its really okay for you to laugh at our dirty jokes."

Ouch.

So I usually keep my mouth shut, slide through the day with as little awkwardness as possible, and hold my breath against the possibility that someone will know without me ever having to tell them about my schooling.

Confession: I consider a compliment if someone is shocked when I tell them that I was homeschooled.

All of this is nothing short of appalling. I loved being homeschooled. LOVED it. I can't say that enough. It doesn't work for everyone, I know. But I grew up one happy kid (other than having to learn math). I took piano lessons. I was in plays. I had friends. I hung out at Starbucks when I got my license. I may not have been able to tell you who Brittany Spears was in fifth grade or recognize a Backstreet Boys song, but I managed. College is its own learning curse. You can't really tell anymore.

Part of this whole thing is that there aren't many homeschoolers who could break stereotypes for them.

But then again, I knew people who are the stereotypes. Why have I taken such pains to distance myself from them in word and deed? Many of these dear people, clad in jean skirts and sneakers, from families with members numbering over 6, were dear friends, teachers, instructors. Their children were my friends. I was even one of them! My jeans were mama jeans until eighth grade. My hair was long, scraggled, and french braided (at my request). Disney was banned at one point in my childhood (my mother later recanted this decision, so don't worry about my education that way). I wish I could find the proper photographic evidence for you. It does exist.

But being this girl wasn't bad. I picked up a lot of crazy ideas about how it was bad to be that, but it wasn't. It was my own version of childhood and junior high. Yes, I was homeschooled for religious reasons. Yes, I was sheltered. And, in case you were wondering, no, I didn't do school in my pjs or eat all day or have trouble making friends. But for a while, they were friends that others might not have thought to be with.

And I've grown into the experience of a strange educational minority, without a way to communicate that experience to the world that doesn't come off as strange or defensive. I am strange and defensive because it was once a badge of odd pride, a reason to keep my nose in the air, to be better than anyone else. Too often, my pride becomes my secret shame: just another form of pride.

Not Supposed to Say: "Christian"

2011-02-11T10:03:00.000-08:00

I wrote a paper about resurrection last fall. I had never done that before. The paper came back with Professor Kadetsky's scribbles in the margins. They kept repeating the phrase "Stop throat clearing". I had no idea what this meant. I visited office hours to ask. My problem? That I kept trying to shuffle off the responsibility of bold statements with caveats, "In my opinions", side comments to add a touch of flippancy and non-committal language to get me out of saying exactly what I needed to say. I was, as I noted in a previous post, scared of using my own voice, because using my own voice would mean drawing on blatantly Christian voices. And that, I had somehow come to feel, was jepordizing what seemed a hard won battle to be a valued and respected student at a secular university. For example, I found early on that using "Well, the Bible says" as a rhetorical devise to be fairly useless in a classroom setting. Across coffee? Go for it. To your professors or classmates face when you are discussing how bizarre Byron actually was? Not the best idea.

But why have I felt this tension? Lived in this status of I can't say I'm Christian? Why do I feel that to claim that title would make it harder for me to be listened to or respected? While much of this can be traced to my own fears, I don't believe this can be traced only to imagined threats. Take, for example, what a poetry professor declared last week: "There is no place in poetry or the poet for religious convictions. No poet wants the hand of doctrine over their mouth...Existentialism is the true religious feeling of the intellectual." I couldn't disagree more. But I said nothing. For the moment, I had passed.

There are times, though, that I do not, and I wonder if it is a negative or a positive that for just a few moments, the core of my identity was revealed. In writing workshops it happens when someone picks out a theme in a poem or story that I didn't know was there but is clearly from religious experience. Often times, it gets noticed when I can pick up Biblical references or clarify half remembered Sunday School stories when studying a piece of literature. Or, as happened once, another student wrote a story full of religious imagery, knowing that I would be the only one to get it when the time came. I was, and emailed him later to ask more questions about the story. "I wrote it for you in a way. I knew you were a Christian," he noted. I was stunned. One moment that I did it on purpose was when I wrote the essay about resurrection. I couldn't write the essay honestly without "going there" as it were.

A rather difficult and negative part of all of this is my intense concern with how people will view Christianity because of me. Maybe "UnChristian" by Gabe Lyons had more of a negative affect than a positive one for me. I hesitate to declare my commitment here until I knew that my work has won the approval of my professors or classmates. Yes, as I've said, part of that wants to preserve my own status. But another part wants to preserve my faith's status until I know that I've made a good showing for it.

Sounds like paralyzing fear, to me.

Not Supposed to Say: "Passing" at Penn State

2011-02-04T07:02:00.000-08:00

Part 1 of Series "Not Supposed to Say"

We talked in writing class the other day about ways each of us "pass". While the term most commonly refers to the way members of the lgbta communities can "pass" as straight through default assumptions, this situation applies to each of us in some way. There are things we hope no one will find out, things we pretend to understand and participate in because it will make things easier.

I pass in two polarized worlds. I keep my mouth shut a lot. For the following posts I will refer to them as "Christian world" and "Penn State". I don't want to put them in separate spheres. I live in both simultaneously. They are, however, distinct, and so I give them contrived names to help with clarity.

I've begun to realize just how polarized my life as a college student has become. It wasn't in the beginning, but that was because I stayed within my chosen and created world: I stayed in Navigators. God was not satisfied with this state of affairs and I've been pried out of my happy isolation ever since.

Basically, I walk every day between two extremes of thought and belief. I myself do not change, at least I hope not. I hope that I have some integrity between the two worlds of my collegiate faith community and my collegiate "worldly" pursuits. I've longed for unity. What I mean is that I live in between two places that expect very different things from me and assume very different things about me.

I am also not allowed to speak those assumptions or contradict them. At least not without a lot of awkwardness. Strangely enough, this happens primarily within the Penn State World, the one where it boasts in its ability to say and do and be anything.

But I'm tired to not speaking in this supposedly "free" dialogue. It's time to explore the polar opposites I struggle in, the expectations and traditions of my past and faith against the expectations and traditions of the #1 Party School in the nation.

Faith Language

2011-02-02T13:14:00.000-08:00

As you can tell by my previous post, the thesis is starting to discourage me. I keep telling myself that "it all looks like failure in the middle". And its true. I think I've thought myself an utter failure at life every semester somewhere in October/March. So the feeling is hitting a little early this time. I know from seven semesters of experience that the feeling passes and it works out just fine.

But one issue that has continued to come up in my conversations with Julia Kasdorf, my adviser, has been how to express and deal with issues of faith in writing. It seems that I so effectively talked myself out of writing in a "Christian" voice for my college courses, that I have jettisoned much of the vocabulary that would be useful in my thesis. Of all things, I am writing a thesis that explores my personal journey in writing and faith, two things that inevitably drag out some unpleasant things in my life as well as some intensely theological, abstract thoughts. Getting the immediate personal and the theological abstract to work together clearly and coherently in the same sentences has been no small challenge. Much of our meetings are spent with me desperately trying to answer questions I thought I had answered in writing, but had confused Julia. While blundering through my thoughts on communion and resurrection and how I know (but can't seem to explain) their profound impact on my writing, I "resorted" to quoting from the Presbyterian Confession of Faith I read through recently in search of communion service directions and doctrines. Julia's face lit up and said, "That's what you need. You keep trying to explain these things in your own words. Pull in the other voices. You aren't just an individual making this stuff up in a corner. Place yourself and your words in a tradition."

While this was a small moment in our mangled and confusing conversation, I think it showed a deep flaw I've adopted, thinking it a strength. There is a lot of shame in me about using "Christian-ese", a lingo that makes sense and is explainable only to a Christian readership. I've made fun of this language and been influenced by some Christian writers asking for new vocabulary to re-explain the faith. But what I failed to realize, in a kind of arrogance, is that my new vocabulary will necessarily be weaker by putting off the traditional vocabulary of faith. Throwing off that vocab actually makes me fall into abstract thought and ideas. I fail to communicate the essence of my experience and my knowledge of truth in the process. I have aided no one by avoiding the words and structures given to me by tradition: creeds, texts, hymns, vocabulary, doctrine. Rather, Christian-ese is really the attempt to individualize words and doctrine in a way that has made it shallow and weak. My attempts to remake the weak are foolhardy.

Instead, consciously and actively use the deep language given to me through millenia. Study history, explain and explicate words and ideas like "communion" and "resurrection" and the texts that have surrounded them. No need to re-invent the wheel. It was great the first time around. Readers and I will go much farther together if I just take it and run with it.

Individualistic expression of faith is certain to confuse and baffle a reader. Placing oneself in a tradition and actively, consciously employing that language grounds and clarifies abstract thought for a reader. Not the other way around. It's about time I got over my awkward inhibitions with vocalizing faith. O'Connor would have been appalled.

How To Write an (Creative Writing) Thesis

2011-02-01T10:20:00.000-08:00

Simple: Date it.

Begin far in advance. You will never, ever have enough time though. So perhaps it isn't worth it. This is the awareness stage.
Begin with a question. Don't worry too much about this question because you will change your question many times. This the awkward DTR progression.
Take trips. Ask questions. Become very confused.
Meet with your adviser. Discover how bad you are with words. Discover how bad you are at asking yourself questions.
Meet with your adviser again. Be very confused.
Have a break through. That is later questioned very thoroughly by your adviser.
Feel discouraged.
Feel encouraged.
Write pages you will later throw away.
As the semester in which you write your thesis draws near, begin pursuing your thesis with dedication and persevereance. She will elude you. But keep going. It's a lot like pursuing Wisdom.
By the time the semester is at hand, enter a committed relationship with your thesis. Make it facebook official if you have to.
Make your thesis angry with you for neglect.
Panic. Then ask its forgiveness. Try over.
Consistently struggle to give Thesis the attention they demand from you.
Realize you are asking all the wrong questions, have trite and recycled language, and confuse more than illuminate any of the things you once instinctively knew were connected.
Be convinced that you never had true instincts.
Reconsider your major and whether graduating with honors is worth it.
Question your thesis's thesis. Consider starting over with six weeks to go.
Then, Lord willing, turn it in on time.
Remain confused.
Thank your adviser for never killing you for never understanding her questions and for all the times she made you use better words and write till it hurt.
Remember and believe it was worth it.

Onward State AND Collegian?

2011-01-28T06:24:00.000-08:00

I sent in a letter about STS to Onward State and Collegian. Some interesting "this won't make a difference" responses. I'm glad to have these thoughts read more widely, though!

Onward State Student Blog:
http://onwardstate.com/community/penn-state-senior-letter-on-sts-program-cut/

and The Collegian today:
http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2011/01/28/sts_minor_embodies_academics.aspx

Kalliope Submission Call: February 1st Deadline

2011-01-28T06:20:00.001-08:00

Kalliope, Penn State's undergraduate literary magazine is still accepting submissions, including artwork, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction until the February 1st deadline. And it's easy because all submissions are electronic. To submit or for more information visit our site at http://www.clubs.psu.edu/up/kalliope/ Remember even writing and artwork previously featured in another publication are allowed. Kalliope is also hoping to feature original student artwork at its end of the year release party where a copy of our 2011 edition can be picked up.

Science Technology and Society

2011-01-18T10:04:00.000-08:00

Two days ago, I learned from Onward State (Penn State's news blog) that the STS department will be cut due to budget concerns in the coming year. Since then, I've learned that this was a "top down" decision. The department was informed without warning. Perhaps this is how academia works. The Faculty Senate still needs to approve the decision. Since STS is a relatively small department with a lower student enrollment, I can't see them deciding against the decision.

In addition to being an English major, I have been working on a Disability studies minor since Fall 2009, my junior year. This minor is a recent addition to the STS department and is co-directed through the English department. This interest began when I was forced against my will and better judgement into an honors seminar called "The Body: Disability and Enhancement" under Dr. Squier. What this had to do with English, I wasn't sure and I wasn't pleased at the grim look of "The Normal and the Pathological" by Canguilhem or the fact that it was going to be in class for three hours every Wednesday morning at 9 (gross!). But without any recourse, I began to suffer through. And the world turned upside down.

I don't know how I had made it so far without thinking about the implications of brokenness on academics and life. The belief in a universal broken (fallen) is key to my worldview and beliefs. It should have informed everything. But it hadn't. It took a class in the philosophy and social history of disability in Western tradition for me to begin understanding the world I had missed. What astonished me most about this course was the vast influence our studies had on a range of academic disciplines and culture. A graphic novel. A film from the 50s. A philosophy text. A memoir. Theory. New York Science Times on Tuesdays. Assumptions of what it meant to be "well" and "ill", to be "able" or "disabled", to be "young" or "old", started to become tenuous words and ideas. I was forced to question where I had gotten them and their unquestioned validity. By what authority have I never questioned the constant social pressure for a super-healthy body? The marketing of drugs? The unspoken, unseen discrimination against the disabled? The framework of medical/moral/social implications behind each answer to these questions also pushed my assumptions in unexpected and new directions.

Since, I have taken courses through the minor program and interacted in a variety of ways with the STS program, studying in courses from philosophy to rehabilitation services and English courses. These professors came from both within and without of the department. This experience shows just the kind of diverse resources that STS both provides and brings together. For example, Dr. Silverman has been an instructor in STS and in philosophy, while her own research has been on autism and its social effects and now in rural sociology. Dr. Squier, who I can attest as being one of the most influential professors in my college career, also instructs in English and women studies.

STS also has a unique international commitment. Their studies are not meant or designed to stay within the classroom. When I went to India this summer, not only were several members of our team from this department, but I have sense been given the opportunity to explore my interactions with health, illness, and disability across cultures through an independent study.

What I see in this is a commitment and belief in academics as it affects a whole life and not simply a mind game to play in order to get a degree. They are interested in just what the humanities claims to applaud and strive for: a way to understand and celebrate the human. Knowledge is not fragmented into specialized fields but the full academic study that engages the world through specific study. Life is not lived in a classroom. Knowledge and frameworks have long reaching impacts on both our own lives and the structure of our worlds. The practical and the theoretical are not antithetical to each other but are both necessary for a life of integrity, both thought and action.

Sunday Afternoon

2011-01-16T13:37:00.000-08:00

It was my first true "syllabus" week. The last first day. The last first week. Penn State coming to a close with a rolicking finish, I would say. Still several months to go before that time, of course.

First weeks always last an eternity. Then they pick up speed and whip past till suddenly the heavy cream and butter they handed you in syllabus form has turned to cream and its tea time and then the sun has set and its time to go to bed and start over.

But for now, we're getting a slow but good start. Far fewer credits this semester which I'm loving so far, leaving time for writing tutoring, extension articles, and many ballroom hours.

At some point I will also begin my thesis in earnest. I've started. Just not in earnest yet.

Desire for Music

2011-01-08T15:13:00.000-08:00

I have declared a resolution. Or resolved a resolution. What verb does one do in making (ooo... maybe that is the word I want) a resolution?

The resolution is this:

I need a musical education.

As such, I am taking suggestions on music I Need To Know. Based on composer, song, album, time period, region, quirkiness, etc. Provide now or at any other point in 2011.

I am also attempting to learn a new way of listening to music. Not only background noise. Not only filler for time. But something worth being attentive to.

While sitting at the Eagleson kitchen table, a place where good ideas must inevitably occur and be shared, we discussed the benefits of doing and learning things that we are bad at understanding and doing. Not only is it good to plan "fun" things to do, but it is also important to learn a wide range of things that I will never be very good at. Hannah Eagleson mentioned ballet was her project for a semester. Someone mentioned knitting. "It's really grounding. Keeps you out of your head and in the world and reminds you that you are totally limited."

Despite the fact that I spent many years at the piano bench, I never invested much in learning how to appreciate music. I don't listen for variety and pleasure. In fact, I think I may be a rather bad listener. I haven't touched the piano in a while.

Listening to music may be just the thing. And playing the piano that will soon be in our living room!

Two Thousand and Ten: A November Year

2011-01-03T13:59:00.000-08:00

As the weather turned us toward November, I felt as if I had spent twelve months in its company. Chelsea and I took a short trip to Millbrook Marsh on a warmer day and spent some time quietly watching the trees and the fish in the creeks from the walkways. Things we couldn't see in summer were clear: fish resting in shade, a beaver or muskrat on the edge of the creek, the shapes of trees, the sound of wind in the grasses making snapping music. It was all dead but it had a beauty we admired all the same.

But of course it wasn't dead. It was, and is, only waiting for the earth to change directions to start growing again.

New Years Eve, I sat with friends eating french fries, watching football games, and talking about the past and the coming year. Present year, as it would now be on January 3rd. We talked of highlights and of hopes, of things learned and the universal uneasiness that graduation in May brings whenever we mention it.

Highlights:


The Rocky Mountains at Dusk (by August Huckabee)

Staff Retreat in Denver, Colorado: It feels like it existed in a world and time of its own, disconnected from before and after. I was overwhelmed with the intense joy at seeing everyone. The final worship night gave me the hymns that I listened to over and over again as the November year grew colder.


Cara, Jessi, Greer, and I before skiing (by August Huckabee)

Encounter 10: My first time exploring New York on my own. First time riding the subway. First time among such artists and thinkers and movers and shakers. The most empowering and long influencing days of the year.

The fountains on Allen Street for Arts Fest

Arts Fest, July 7: It stands as the example of what the entirety of my summer in State College was, and it happened in memory of our friends Jessi and Eric. Good food. Good friends. A frisbee game. Sleeping outside. Playing in the fountains on Allen Street. Dancing to the blue grass in our wet clothes. A massage train. Late night conversation in the Plex. The clearest freedom and joy in being alive, in being together. I don't any pictures of the summer, sadly.

Jillian, my summer roommate. Cue Flight of the Concords song "Friends".

HOINA Honors College Trip: I learned what it was to leave the familiar and come back. That leaving can be clarifying, both pleasant and unpleasant; "wipes the fog off of the windshield" as Mark said.

Kabidi Kabidi

Patty's Place: It was as wonderful living with Maggie and Sarah as I thought it would be. Cooking and baking and music and poetry.

Words: This stands in for the writing I was able to do this year, much of it coming in the nights I thought I would be able to do anything in the world but write another word. Some awful short stories; ghastly essays; poems that weren't even close to poetry. And a few pages that I'm proud of and take pleasure in rereading. And books that guided and encouraged and got some read-aloud time with Maggie: "Jagged With Love" by Susannah Childress, "After" by Jane Hirschfield, "Snow" by Orhan Pamuk, "Say You're One of Them" by Uwem Akpan, "The Brothers Karamazov" by Dostoevsky. And professors and mentors that also taught and challenged and changed my writing: Julia Kasdorf, thesis adviser and poetry professor extraordinaire; Ruth Mendum, fellowships adviser; Charlotte Holmes, fiction professor; Elizabeth Kadetsky, fiction and (not sure what else she could be called) professor; peer readers Rebecca Ebstein, Chris Cascio, Mae Sevick, and Jesse Cramer who listened to me panic; and Erica Reitz, campus minister.

Two Noteworthies:
Barb Baldner, discipler, mentor with whom I met every week.

Barb teaches me her great baking skills, as well as her wisdom!

At the Navigators Barn Dance, Fall 2010

And Hannah Ray, coolest PSU sister in the world. I'm so lucky she chose to be a Nittany Lion too!

James and I at Big Apple Dance Competition

Ballroom: From day 1 of ballroom last January, I was hooked. I knew I would be. I'm now a hopeless addict. Many thanks to Jolene for not only putting her all into teaching us, but in opening up her life to us as well. And to James Christy for being a wonderful and delightful partner, who makes me far better than I am otherwise... and take longer strides!

Hopes:

Watch more movies.
Be a better music listener.
Get out of the country again.
Decide what to do "next".
See Soli Deo Gloria (S.D.G.) take off at Penn State with more Word Parties, Art Making Nights, Film Discussions, and real conversations about what matters most.

There are many highlights from the year. When I said them New Years Eve, Evan Rothey noted that it must have been a really good year to have so many highlights. And it was, now that I look at it. But it was November. I learned that life without the color of growth and warmth can still be true life. I learned to take joy and sorrow in stride and at once. As the writer of Ecclesiastes noted, "In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider: God has made the one as well as the other, so that man may not find out anything that will be after him" (7:14, esv). Joy and sorrow were all wrapped up together, coming at once and in the same event, or hard on eachother's heals. Neither is, in this life, a permanent state. Neither have I known the greatest joys or the hardest sorrows.

It is good to keep the knowledge and memory of both in every moment. That is contentment.

The year changed with us standing on Old Main steps. Some smoked cigars and we wished the passing policeman a Happy New Year and he to us. I danced a few rounds of waltz and tango across the patio. We looked out at the world from the steps of our Alma Mater, looking at a year where we will all graduate and find something else to do, somewhere else to live. I don't know if any of us really understood that until the New Year. Maybe we don't still. Maybe it will hit us later.

The earth is going to change directions soon, and the November year will give way to whatever is coming next.

Maggie's First Day of School

2011-01-03T09:29:00.000-08:00

In honor of Maggie's first day of student teaching, I post a list of descriptions we wrote together about an October night sky. I did this once with Dominique at Beach Project about the moon and the ocean. Sometimes writing with another person is just better.

The back of a turtle shell under water.

A dappled horse.

A field of cotton.

A spilled bag of cotton balls.

Herd of moving buffulo.

Blood cells under microscope.

Rain falling in slow motion.

Mud and water on the top of a swamp.

Wind moving across the surface of water.

Skin on a moving snake.

The feel of a bean bag.

Uncooked rice, falling.

Snow- wind blown, melted, and blown again.

Crocheted baby blanket.

Lethargic sheep.

The exodus from Egypt.

How would you describe a sky?

Snowless Wonderland

2010-12-21T16:19:00.000-08:00

I recommend following these instructions.

Take a walk. Talk a walk in the cold before the snow comes and fills in to the road edges several feet thick. Take a walk and enjoy the line between gravel and pavement and the grass next to the field. Note the similarities between the sound of frozen grass under your shoes and the gravel scrapping concrete. Note the similarities in how it feels under your shoes and how you like that feeling. Breathe deeply and let the cold nip but not bite the bottom of your lungs, because it isn't the deep heart of winter yet.

Leave that border you've been considering and pick the field, the one surrounded by yellow "No Trespassing Signs" because you are pretty sure that walking across an empty corn field, waiting for summer, could hardly be considered dangerous or threatening. Take this walk in the morning or as the sun sets, and watch how the colors in the clouds aren't what they are in summer but are their own careless, distant beauty. Watch for ground hog holes. You don't want to fall and twist your ankle because you will have to climb over a creek to get out of this corn field and you didn't bring your cell phone to call for help. That makes the ground hog hole even more interesting to look at. When you come to the sound of a man running his chainsaw in the woods and his four wheeler, avoid. You didn't take this walk to be found. Walk the length of the field. Listen to the wind on the top of the hill and look at how small and full the land is with small hills just the size of the one you stand on.

And note that it is winter, that the earth has turned brown, that there isn't a sound of a bird anywhere, but that it is beautiful, and that the creek you nearly fall into to return to the road, sings clearer in the stillness, brimmed on its banks in heavy ice.

Offer the Doxology as thanks.

Dana Meets Food Shopping

2010-12-20T14:21:00.000-08:00

The other night, Dad took me to the grocery store. We needed three more boxes of mint and double stuffed Oreos to make our chocolate covered Christmas Oreos, the deadliest snack I have yet discovered (after raw cookie dough, of course). He volunteered both himself and me for the job. Reasons #1 was that he wanted those Oreos. Reason #2 is that he only goes when he has other food he wants to eat himself but wouldn't ask for on Mom's weekly grocery list. So he volunteered and took me too. I went when he asked because I know that if he goes, I'm guaranteed to score of some of my own favorite foods. When Isaac goes, this means chocolate milk and gummy bears. My own tastes are a little different.

The store was pretty busy, which makes sense for post dinnertime and right before Christmas. It felt much later with the sun being gone and the Sweet lights already up and going. I was instantly lost though when I realized that the store was switched from the Giant in State College. I couldn't find anything. So I stuck with Dad. He got his favorite bagels and grape juice. I also scored some favorites, ones that I've started getting frequently at school but only recently. I realized that my tastes have subtly shifted since I started having to buy my own food, though what these new tastes mean, I don't really know. I put a quality container of feta cheese in our cart, recently frustrated by the lack of flavor provided by Colby and Monterrey jack Giant brand cheese. I found the shelf of hummus and picked my favorite pita chips to go with it. When Dad made sure to get his peach tea and red grape juice, I pulled a jug of pomegranate and cranberry juice. Since when did I start liking pomegranate anything? And, of course, we got our Oreos.

The grocery store has a long history in the memories of most middle class American children. I remember the delight of fitting in the basket and being surrounded by food, or riding under the cart on my belly. Hannah cut her finger on the wheel one day and Mom left the groceries in the cart, purchased, and rushed to the car to get it taken care of. I remember the bright colors of Trix for Kids boxes, desperate to have a taste after the flashy (for the time) TV commercials on PBS kids. And grocery stores are just so brightly colored and fun to run around in. There are few things more enjoyable than wandering around Wegman's, on any occasion. Grocery stores always struck me as the perfect place to play hide and go seek. There are no good hiding places, only movement, and the intense moments when you are in the center of an aisle, and anyone could come around the corner and find you. Just imagine the intensity of a game of paintball in those aisles! And as a child, it is so easy to be lost and wander, feeling both safe and at a loss all at the same time. And I wanted to work there. Why is it that children want to work at check out counters? I wanted to work in a grocery store above anything for a while, especially after that kid's discovery place in Vestal, NY that our cousins took us to.

But however much the grocery store was part of my growing up experience, measuring my growth and age by the moment Mom refused to let me stand on the end of the cart, much less ride in it, buying food was never something I thought about as a kid. It was just part of life like cleaning was. If I was lucky, it was something Mom did on her own and we simply helped unload the van. It didn't involve choice exactly. The Ray family choices were as inevitable as the fact that I would hate meatloaf from day one through the present. Unchangeable.

Moving off campus changed that for me. I had to buy food. I had to think about what I was going to get and when I was going to get it and what I was going to make with it. Oh, and how much it was going to cost. It made my head hurt a little bit. I started practicing this summer but depended on the glorious Jillian and Jon to find and create our dinners. But I did pretty well at figuring out what I needed and eating it.

India incapacitated me. Completely. I couldn't figure out how to get the store. I couldn't even imagine trying to choose food and make things. I ate food for nearly a week by what came to me: left over pizza at first club meetings, my friend's canned soup, the crackers I had left from my India stash. I wasn't sleeping well. Maybe I was, but I only remember exhaustion and an intense feeling of constant awareness and wakefulness. And growing head aches. And no food.

Maybe it was the choices I would have to make that kept me from figuring out a way to get more food. Maybe it was the abundance of choices. Maybe it as the fact that there was no way to even find something like a grocery store in India, that I had lived off of whatever food Sambia had decided to give us each day (like pomegranates. That must have been where I started like them), and the sheer abundance of it in comparison to... well to... come to think of it, I didn't have a single meal in someone's home. I ate at HOINA or in a hotel restaurant, more aimed at wealthier Indians and tourists than at the average Joe (though they don't have Joes in India). I don't think I ever saw people eating. I saw the market when Prasad let me accompany him. But I didn't see people eating outside of meal times on campus.

And after that, I couldn't think to get more food than the crackers that were right there to eat.

It was Kate who saved me, who said she would come and show me how to grocery shop. I still can't understand coupons, or at least haven't the capacity yet in my mind for keeping them sorted or for using them in time. Kate understood and just knowing that she did was enough to assure me that I and my empty belly would be safe in her hands. She walked me through how to pick breakfast foods and how many days I would eat lunch on campus, what is easy to pack, what foods I'd be willing to eat many days in a row, and how to tell what average prices usually are and why chicken should only be bought when under $3 a pound. I still haven't bought any meat after she told me that. "Accidental vegitarian" I call it. A few days later, I made my first attempt at rice and burned it to high heaven, but at least I had rice, and more than enough to try again and play with flavoring and find ways to eat. Kate showed me how to boil the rice in chicken broth and stir fry peppers and olive oil and garlic to add to it. Oh, and that feta cheese I've fallen in love with and couldn't do without for the two weeks I'm home.

There is something slightly sinister though about grocery stores that I haven't really pin pointed. It's been there since India. It may have something to do with the sheer abundance of it. With the free choices presented, with the ability to have a desire and for it to be met in a short drive. It is also a way to expand beyond the known, but it rarely happens. It is easier to check the spots on the shelf where the usual cereal hangs out, get a box, and go. It becomes routine sameness. Living with Maggie and Sarah, and with Kate's initial help, I found a different set of foods to eat and enjoy, foods that can be made for just one person. I tried making things I'd never eaten. And I learned that leaving extra cookies, cake, and soup on the boy's counter next door made food making extra satisfying. After the first cracker fiasco, I ended up eating really well this semester. And I'm grateful. I'm grateful to know that I can make a mean eggplant parmesan and that I can make satisfying pasta without spaghetti sauce. I'm grateful to watch the people around me cook. I'm grateful for the many who drove me to stores so I could buy food this semester and crafted a more watchful relationship with food shopping.

But something still feels unresolved.

Carols and Hymns

2010-12-17T09:18:00.000-08:00

I realized as I began to consider this post that I didn't know the difference between a carol and a song. According to my yellow pocket Langenscheidt's pocket dictionary, there is not a difference but a unity:

Carol: a song of joy or devotion.
Hymn: A song of praise, especially to God.

This year, my friends felt a special compulsion to sing Christmas hymns and carols together. Perhaps it was not special or unique for them, but I do not remember times in past Penn State Decembers where there was so much singing going on. As one who has recently lamented the semester schedule (which, in fall and spring, I love dearly) that prevents me via Thanksgiving break, weekend assigned trip, and Christmas break from attending the advent services at Oakwood Presbyterian, these nights of singing have been especially valued. After a Navigator dance party, we gathered in the Plex living room and sang through all of the songs on a website of lyrics, Abi and Ben Reimold leading the singing with their creative vocal improvisations. I don't have practice in singing so there were times I sat quiet and listened. The other time was this Wednesday during the annual camp out, moved indoors this year because of the cold. Justin and Ben built a lovely fire in the Park Ave Cru house fire place and we attempted to sing with music sheets found in someone's guitar case.

I've been a bit leery of Christmas this year, disgruntled with false expectations of perfect felicity and joy. I no longer enjoy songs about "winter" fun but find them rather frustrating. What I've found in the the carol and hymn singing is a patient reminder that Christmas does not contain undiluted or, perhaps it is better to say a joy that comes from lack of experience. Rather, the joy is coming from heavy experience, from the pain of the incarnation rather than an idea of its ease. It is a wonder because incarnation is not "easy", but comes in the most natural of hard ways: through birth. Nor do these songs pretend that the world is well, even at their most joyful or content. Rather, they are full of imperatives: rejoice, joy to the world/ let men their songs employ. Or "the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight." One has to be reminded that joy does indeed come out of the birth of Jesus. Remembering against every day life is not natural. There is fear involved in this salvation.

"O Come, O Come Emmanuel" may be my favorite, poetic words with a lovely, mournful melody.

O come, Thou Day-Spring, come and cheer
Our spirits by Thine advent here
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night
And death's dark shadows put to flight.

The writer acknowledges that there are gloomy clouds and death has a dark shadow, things that humanity cannot "put to flight". It is answered by "Emmanuel shall come to thee, Oh Israel". Hearing Abi sing this while I grew sleepy on the Plex couch was a gift. I did not sing but closed my eyes and prayed with the voices around me for such an answer to be given.

Even "Joy to the World", a song very exuberiant in the celebration of victory presents a request in the midst of the joy:

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,

The Christ has come but all is still to be made right.

There is a double presence displayed in these songs. There is the joy in what has been given. There is the hope of what is to come. We remember the longing Israel had for the Messiah, to "ransom captive Israel", knowing that we still sing that line for ourselves, in hope that the Messiah then is returning for us someday.

Rejoice, rejoice

And in the knowledge of difficult life and the command to rejoice, there is great comfort.

Word Party II

2010-12-08T19:58:00.000-08:00

More lovely times at Irvings. I think Word Party is going to have to become part of regular life. I spent three hours at Irvings with some fascinating people. We talked about our writing processes, read some Annie Dillard and a play called "Arcadia" and Elizabeth Bishop and what makes us scared to write.

My favorite moment was when Alan read from "Candide" by Voltaire. "I know I am supposed to bring a favorite book. So I brought Candide. Except I haven't read it yet. I thought we could start on the first page together."

Big Apple

2010-12-08T19:55:00.001-08:00

Amanda Wise (philosopher and poet and dance friend) told me this weekend about her "life list". She keeps a list of things she would like to do in life. Not normal things. She once added "sail a tall ship". She was then part of a crew. She also adds things "retro-actively", an act of gratitude for the moments in life she couldn't have planned but would have wanted if she could.

Consider this my retro-active Big Apple Dance competition List.

-Saying my feet were sore on the way to the performance Saturday night. Zak Al Balushi picking me up and carrying me for a few yards. There was something rather appropriate about being carried through the streets of New York.

-Cherry coming up to me on Sunday placing one hand on cheek. Squinting. "This is you with make up?" she said.

-Making sphagetti. Seidle and I breaking into a chacha in the middle of it. Becoming the "Ballroom Mom".

-Two stepping with Zak across the hostel dinning room.

-Alan falling asleep in the locker in the boy's room.

-The cheering that broke out from the Penn State corner when James and I did a traveling step that Sam (love her!) taught us.

-Walking arm and arm through Central Park with five lovely friends and being silly at the castle.

-Talking philosophy, word games, theology, and poetry the entire way to New York with Alan, Amanda, and Sarah.

-Frying with water.

-Jolene shaking my wrist in a game of "ghosts" to get me to say the correct letter.... that would make me loose.

-Thinking I was abandoned in the New York Starbucks. But I wasn't.

-"Ballroom drama" in central park. So many people were heart broken after all of that.

-Trying to v waltz over an arched bridge.

-Catching up with Cecilia on the drive home.

-Running to the front of the wrong line and almost making it onto the floor to compete in the wrong level of latin. That was a classy moment for me and James.

-Watching the show case performance Saturday night. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyAPG43crso

The waltz was my favorite. I get chills each time I watch the video.

-Walking through the tiny grocery store on Broadway. It was Wegmans. Even better than Webmans. Just completely compressed as if the shelves were bending over to get more space to breathe. Things kept falling off the shelves and onto my head.

-The semi finals for quickstep. Something happened to James and he went crazy and we spun the entire way through. It was brilliant.

-Hearing Mel and Seidle teach Christie the use of "Navtastic".

-Loving my classmates, loving music, loving dancing. I want this to happen again soon.

What makes a good film adaptation?

2010-11-30T15:39:00.000-08:00

We had a lively debate today in my senior seminar today. Christmas is a noted time for film companies to send their film adaptations of books into the theaters for a go. Some films are noted failures. Others make absurd monetary amounts. For many movie goers, these adaptations are likely to be the first introduction to various texts. For example, I would say that the majority of my college peers have seen the Lord of the Rings films, simply based on their wild popularity in our high school years. I would also say that only a minority have read the books in their entirety. Those that have read them are likely to be committed fans of Tolkien, and have read well beyond the primary Lord of the Rings volumes. The disproportion of these numbers will likely be less for The Hobbit, but chances are it could increase again after the film. After all, why read the book when you know the plot from the movie? The plot is all there is in a book, right?

(Dana chokes)

I'll admit: it isn't possible to live in a world these days where the book is always read before the movie. I accidentally watched "The Painted Veil" before I knew it was a Somerset Maugham novel.

But the questions surrounding adaptation and quality adaptation remain. What is it about a book that makes it worth putting on the screen? Why do it at all, except, of course, to make money? Are there ways to have quality in the film and be faithful to the text? Does faithfulness matter.

My own opinions in this matter have changed over the years. I was once an utter purist of the sort that most abhors the pleasure seeking movie goer. If it didn't in every aspect look, smell, taste, sound exactly like the novel, down to subplots, then I deemed it unworthy of existence. Now, I allow a little more room. For example, the Ang Lee version of "Sense and Sensibility" is a noted film adaptation that is excellent. It takes significant liberties with the plot and with unifying motifs, such as the use of Shakespeare's sonnet 116.

But before I dive into some examples of my favorite adaptations, I want to hear: what do you think qualifies a film to be an "excellent adaptation"? And don't say "Faithful to the book." Define what you think faithfulness means.

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No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,