the top ten things i've learned this year.

My sister-in-law has lots of good ideas, and blogging is one of them. In honor of her recent foray into the world of internet freewrites, I am copying her idea to meditate on the top ten things I've learned this year, though after writing them out it seems like, for a most part, a list of stuff I'm still learning.


10. How to change a flat. I resisted bicycle maintenance for a long time.


9. I eat a million times better when I avoid grocery stores. After a summer of farmer's markets and a fall of shopping at Reading Terminal, I feel so much better. Quality produce makes such a huge difference.


8. Blush. Voila, cheekbones! Voila, I don't look so tired and pasty and hungover! It's a makeup miracle.


7. The neighborhood I live in has significant implications for the life I lead. I am glad that I live close to friends, lovely bars, and good public transportation. Although it means a slightly longer commute (which is good for staying fit and having a little longer to decompress), my quality of life has improved greatly. Put succinctly: god, what a good time I'm having in South Philly!


6. I need beautiful language. The book of e.e. cummings always on my desk at work and the prose of Updike always next to my bed have eased my mind.

5. Something about men and agency and what I want from my life and having a voice. I can't say exactly what I've learned about those things, but the tension between them is finally coming into view and has brought with it some needed clarity as I consider what I want and expect from relationships, who I want to be in those relationships, and who I want to be with in relationships.

4. I don't think America is really being governed in a way that is constitutional. My readings for graduate school have made me aware of this, but haven't presented any clear solutions- but I'm pretty sure a solution would involve an immense collective rethinking of federalism, a reduction of the powers of the court and policing systems at all levels, and an intensive expansion of the number of positions in legislative bodies... or something. 

3. There is a small way to reconcile my work with how far from home it takes me. It's called doing research on where I'm from. I can't wait for that brilliant idea to pay off next summer.


2. The present is all we have. We can value and learn from the past, and we can anticipate our futures, but now- now is it. 


1. Reciprocity. As my nieces get older, I'm finding that they love me as much as I love them. I don't know why this shocked me, to suddenly feel aware of who I am in their lives. Their generosity of spirit is disarming. It's not just that they fill my life with a big love- it's that they teach me to expect nothing less than a big love. 

on graduate school, clifford geertz, and the process of finding peace.

Earlier this semester I swore off the academic study of religion.  It was an abrupt conclusion I came to as I realized that it put needless constraints on what topics I approached and how I approached them, so for the time being I decided to set it aside.  It’s been freeing to just hunker down and get to know the methods and possibilities of the field of political culture, especially in this odd moment when I don’t have any kind of major research going on. 

Of course, I got my start as a historian studying religion- going to a Lutheran school as a devout Mormon can have that effect on a person- and they say you can leave home but it never really leaves you.   (Now that I think about it, though, my efforts to swear off religious studies were in vain because I’m in a religion class right now- ok, so I’m around the study of religion but it’s so steeped in ethnic terms that I’m not noticing it.  Which probably gets to this whole other notion of “being present” in my life that I’m working on, for obvious reasons that include my forgetting that I just spent 3 hours of my day talking about Catholicism.)

At any rate, I don’t think a lot about religion as it relates to myself any more, that is perhaps the real change here. I am happy with my relatively unexamined life (which it turns out IS worth living).  I lack a religious identity rooted in present practice- the best I can usually muster is an oblique "I used to be Mormon." As the flat on the ODT remains unfixed and I find myself worshipping at the Church of the Folding Bike—a sacred space I tend to plow through so relentlessly that I do very little actual reflection—I just don’t have much of a spiritual focus anymore.  That realization, somewhat ironically, gave me  pause this evening.

I didn't come to it in overtly spiritual consideration, but more in pondering the question of what I might take from my experience in graduate school if I were to quit now and go to work full time.  I’m not necessarily contemplating dropping out as much as I am trying to extrapolate some meaning from this life that I chose a year ago—a life in Philadelphia that is intensely fulfilling and abundant, and simultaneously wrought with deprivation and uncertainty.  The best answer I could come up with was that my time in graduate school has given me a framework to help me understand and appreciate my world.  I felt that as an undergraduate, but there is something deeper and richer about that awareness in the midst of year three of graduate school and year twenty-five of life.  It is a feeling that is difficult to express.

So I was happy tonight, reading an essay to prepare me to start grading a stack of midterms tomorrow, to find an eloquent articulation of what I felt.  It was, perhaps not unsurprisingly, in an essay about religion.  Clifford Geertz writes:

"There are at least three points where chaos—a tumult of events which lack not just interpretations but interpretability—threatens to break in upon man: at the limits of his analytic capacities, at the limits of his powers of endurance, and at the limits of his moral insight.  Bafflement, suffering, and a sense of intractable ethical paradox are all, if they become intense enough or are sustained long enough, radical challenges to the proposition that life is comprehensible and that we can, but taking though, orient ourselves effectively within it—challenges with which any religion, however “primitive,” which hopes to persist must attempt somehow to cope."

(Here's the link for Geertz’s essay “Religion As a Cultural System”)

To some degree, as a historian, my supreme confidence in the interpretability of everything has made me somewhat impervious to chaos.  It’s a post-modern sense of confidence- there is so much gray area and there are so many possible right answers and explanations- but yet it''s a confidence that imposes a fair amount of order on my world.  The intensity of “bafflement, suffering, and a sense of intractable ethical paradox” is tempered both by the overwhelming scope of history and the inherent mysteries imposed by silences and forgetting and losses and suppressions.  To “do” history is to dedicate myself to the possibility that I am capable of understanding in spite of my limits, and maybe even because of my limits.  It is a simple, stark, and seldom acknowledged sense of hope that has relieved me of the constraints of what in the present seems possible, necessary, or planned.  Even adrift, I am oriented.

I would have never imagined finding the infinite and spiritual and plain in the secular realm of my work, but it is one of many unexpected encounters that has made this process  worth the effort. And for me, right now, that's the answer I need.

five things the universe is screaming at you.

I will promote any website that features pop art depicting Scandinavian folk symbols. That's a COTGB guarantee.

I follow Rainn Wilson on twitter, and finally made it over to his site SoulPancake. The mission there is to "chew on life's big questions." It's a neat site to check out. As my faith orientation has shifted over the past few years, I find that sometimes I get so caught up in the living of life to its absolute fullest that I don't stop as much to reflect as I could- or the things I do reflect on are more logistical than spiritual. So in the interests keeping it real, I am taking the SoulPancake challenge to

List 5 Things the Universe is Screaming (or Whispering) at [Me]:

1. Stop making lists of people to call and actually call them.

2. Sincerity matters just as much as being nice does.

3. Hiding in bed for another hour won't change anything.

4. You are good enough, smart enough, and gosh darnit, people like you.

5. Just because you are living the dream doesn't mean you get to stop pursuing a higher quality of life.

That's harder than it looks, but a worthy exercise. What are your five?

a poem from my previous life that's been on my mind the last few days.

The Character of a Happy Life

HOW happy is he born or taught

That serveth not another's will,

Whose armor is his honest thought,

And simple truth his highest skill;

Whose passions not his masters are;

Whose soul is still prepared for death,

Untied unto the world with care

Of princes' grace or vulgar breath;

Who envies none whom chance doth raise,

Or vice; who never understood

The deepest wounds are given by praise,

By rule of state but not of good;

Who hath his life from rumours freed,

Whose conscience is his strong retreat,

Whose state can neither flatterers feed

Nor ruins make accusers great;

Who God doth late and early pray

More of his grace than goods to send,

And entertains the harmless day

With a well-chosen book or friend.

This man is free from servile bands

Of hope to rise or fear to fall,

Lord of himself, though not of lands,

And having nothing, yet hath all.




Sir Henry Wotton

I think of the last line of this poem daily.

reflections on "the way 'we' live now."

David Brooks' column really got me today. I have been following the Sotomayor confirmation pretty closely because I've found it all together horrifying. The questions mustered under the euphemistic concern over her "identity"- her race, ethnic heritage, and gender (pick your construct!) have angered me deeply. Is this the America I live in? Why is her racial identity an issue when John Roberts' wasn't?

So I've been mad because it's so out of control and as a homeless person I can't open the safety valve with a quick email to my elected representative (Utahns, do you know what your senior senator has been up to today?). Fortunately the Brooks column helped me to see a different side of things. He looks at Sotomayor's biography and says, yah, it's an awesome American story about civil rights coming a long way, but also, "It’s the upward mobility story — about a person who worked hard and contributes profoundly to society, but who also sacrificed things along the way."

Brooks then goes on to catalog Sotomayor's relationships throughout her life- an extended family as a child, mentors, friends, and a spouse as an adult. This was the part of the piece that really hit me. Excuse the lengthy quote:

"This isn’t the old story of a career woman trying to balance work and family. This is the story of pressures that affect men as well as women ... It’s the story of people in a meritocracy that gets more purified and competitive by the year, with the time demands growing more and more insistent.

These profiles give an authentic glimpse of a style of life that hasn’t yet been captured by a novel or a movie — the subtle blend of high-achiever successes, trade-offs and deep commitments to others. In the profiles, you see the intoxicating lure of work, which provides an organizing purpose and identity. You see the web of mentor-mentee relationships — the courtship between the young and the middle-aged, and then the tensions as the mentees break off on their own. You see the strains of a multicultural establishment, in which people try to preserve their ethnic heritage as they ascend into the ranks of the elite. "

I wish I didn't feel this so deeply. I'm not pretentious enough to say I'm apart of the "elite" or to seriously self-identify as "a high achiever," nor am I naive enough to think that these strains are limited to those of a particular educational level or class attainment. But, I can say wholeheartedly that I have felt what Brooks describes, and to see it on 'paper' freaked me out, but it also gave me a lot of comfort. Particularly when I consider the crazy semester I just finished, where the work I loved started to feel like my undoing and I struggled to negotiate my role as a "mentee," it was nice for someone in the world to point out that yes, this is common.

Brooks concludes powerfully that in Sotomayor's story, "You see the way people not only choose a profession, it chooses them. It changes them in a way they probably didn’t anticipate at first.... You don’t succeed at that level without developing a single-minded focus, and struggling against its consequences."

Every time I read that quote, the tears come right into my eyes. I don't think I ever could have comprehended how consuming graduate school would be- the development of my single-mindedness was for me a somewhat painful process. It happened as soon as I started my program, as I confronted what it meant to miss my nieces' birthday and how little time and energy I had to manage the significant issues I had with my faith. It wasn't that those things quit mattering or that I became immune to the sting I felt from them, but like pioneers chucking stuff out of a wagon to lighten the load, I learned how to tune stuff out that wasn't right in front of me so I could handle the tasks at hand. I think that's been the craziest part-- somewhere between those heartrending first couple of months and the moment towards the end when moving east didn't seem like such a big deal because it felt like the only deal. It's still something that's constantly being reconciled, but I would say by and large, at some point the consequences stopped feeling sad and ultimately I've gotten to the point where doing what needs to be done so I can do what I want to do makes me really happy.

Nobody told me that that would happen.

(Brooks doesn't talk about the happiness element much, but that's what this article made me think about. Being successful isn't entirely about surrendering relationships as he runs the risk of implying, but man, you do learn how to become happy spending time with yourself).

me too.

Today I was reunited with a lot of old friends. After all the catching up and reflecting, I totally felt this postsecret.  I feel like kicking ass and taking names. I feel like a powerful woman. I feel totally immersed in and sustained by familial love.  I feel so completely in tune with so many possibilities and potentials that I never would have imagined for myself.  I turn 25 in two months and I could not be more excited for the rest of my life. The present is a magical time.

don't bunt.

My cousin posted this picture on facebook this week. It brought back a lot of memories. Back during my days as a receptionist, I always looked forward to when it was my turn to take the company cars for cleaning at the Elephant Car Wash. It was an hour and a half out of the claustrophobic hallway office that I shared with three other women, a kind of sacred time for listening to NPR and The Mountain. It's funny what a picture brings back. I can almost hear the Tom Petty coming out of the radio as I headed down 5th Avenue.

I was connected yet again to that transitonary period of my life (between educational institutions, and, little did I know, out of the church) when I discovered a cannister of change in one of my dresser drawers as I was packing today. In addition to the change, there were barrettes and other detritus that I'd been stashing for no real reason. I was happy to find one of the bits was meaningful.

On my first day at Callison, my co-workers took me out to lunch at Palomino, a restaurant in the building we worked in. I felt so grown-up and professional-- until we sat down at the table. There were little cards on the table with inspirational quotes inside. I saved mine because it horrified me at the time-- here I was starting a new job, only to realize on my very first day that it was not enough.


Needless to say, it set the tone for my employment there. I finally reconciled my aspirations with my faith (at least temporarily), secretly applied to graduate school and ended up here in Utah. I was glad to find this little reminder of my time in Seattle, that profound year of deciding to be somebody. For all the doubts I've had lately about where I decided to do my PhD, it was reassuring to remember that this is not the first time I've gone jobless in my little Honda car towards the unknown.

i love postsecret.

One of my favorite parts of the weekend is on Saturday night/Sunday morning when the new postsecrets for the week go up. Knowing that my secrets are nowhere near as interesting brings a little sanity into my life.

food for thought.

"It doesn’t seem fair that we can look back and connect the dots in life, and see what led from that to this, but we cannot look forward and anticipate in any way what constellation today’s dots will form in the vast space ahead of us. I guess it’s just best to assume that heaven is right here, right now, and let the stars fall where they may."

-Margaret Gunther

indexed.

I came across this site called Indexed today and thought it was just the thing that to promote on COTGB. Wisdom like this:

and this:

and this:

totally merits a spot on the sidebar. Indexed also has a widget for Mac dashboards that you can put next to your horoscope, urban dictionary word of the day and graduation countdown calender. Handy.

UPDATE: Also added to the sidebar... Big Brother's blog: http://tacomabikeranch.blogspot.com/

A must read for two-wheeled, granola lifestyle enthusiasts, or those interested in a family's journey into happier living. After cataloging some recent changes made in the household he wrote, "Of course, this all started with biking to work." BEWARE. He is very skilled at selling bike riding as a positive lifestyle choice and you might be inspired to start riding your bike, losing weight and feeling happier. IT WILL BE SO AWFUL. ;)

who will do it again.

When I went to the nurse practitioner to see about my sleeping problem, she banned me from reading history before bed and prescribed fiction reading. It didn't take long, suddenly reintroduced to the grand world of literature, to get into the works of John Updike (some had compared his book Couples to Revolutionary Road. I like them both for very different reasons). In my opinion, Updike is the perfect writer to read before bed. From what I've read of his work, he seldom leaves you with cliff hangers or chapters that you just have to finish-- in some of his books he hardly even uses chapters. Instead his long, meandering, paragraphs, rich with lyrical imagery just beg to be closed at any time. I like the story topics-- my selections have been his works about relationships in the post-war suburbs-- and the way he sells the comedy of people feeling trapped. I like how he gets into the trouble regular people got into when confronted with sexual revolution and feminism. I have found that I can just read and read John Updike.

So I was a mite sad when I found out that he died today. One of his poems emerged over the course of the coverage that made me a little bleary eyed, not because John Updike has passed but because it really gets at what loss is and what each person in our lives brings to the table.

Perfection Wasted

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market --
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories
packed in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.

i wonder if bicycle jesus had a hand in this.

Ugh! I feel like today is taking a big dump right on my head. It's cloudy but it won't snow, but it's cold enough to make one's lungs exhausted from riding the bike. The bike elevator is broken down, yay delightful carrying of the ODT down and up three flights of stairs. I wrote down the wrong deadline to one of my schools, so I missed it, which I found out from one of my recommenders incidentally, which filled me with embarrassment and self loathing. My computer continues to gradually manifest its assholeness by growing slower, which probably portends its imminent death. Not to mention I have a billion things to do that aren't getting done because I just feel so tortured by the day.

So I found it almost annoying when I saw this picture. Ugh! I hate it when the positive energy of the universe speaks to me in my own language, right down to the bottle dynamo. I want to be negative, dangit!

Sounds like a challenge to me. I think I'll have a Peppermint Patty and engage in some intensive rewriting.

UPDATE: I went to check the mail and it is spitting snow (yay!) and my Bicycle Jesus shirt arrived. Redemption is nigh, perhaps?

deep thoughts.

"Would you kiss Phyllis Schlafly with that mouth?"

-Bob

more words of wisdom.

"You can't cure hemorrhoids by kissing the owie."
-- my work grandpa

Hillary might do well to appropriate that advice...