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I had a very relaxing weekend, something I haven’t had in quite a while. I spent this Saturday largely by myself, getting some quality alone time. I chatted with my housemates in the morning over breakfast. Then, I went out for a run. Although I got a bit overheated (I’m just not made for warm weather), it was wonderful to get outside in the sunshine. I came home, showered, grabbed a book, and headed back outside to soak up the sun while it lasted. I paused in my reading for lunch and to talk to some of my housemates, but otherwise, I continued until around five. I came inside to bake some cookies while listening to Ben Folds (who I saw in concert on Thursday, but that’s another story). After finishing with my baking project, I walked over to Walgreens and back to the house. I went back to reading. Meg came home, and then, I drove her downtown to meet some people. The view of the sunset over the Sound was amazing. I jammed to Green Day in the car on the way home and as I made dinner for myself (KNDD was doing an A-Z marathon of their music in celebration of their new album). I laid down on the couch in our living room, and I just enjoyed the silence and calm of our house. It’s shocking how much more serene I feel after such an enjoyable day. I read a bit more and headed to bed early.
Today, four of us headed out to the University of Washington to do some canoeing. The view of Rainer and the other Cascades from out on Lake Washington was unparalleled. We spent about an hour and a half on the water. Then, we went out on a dock to eat a picnic lunch. Afterwards, three of us took the bus to Green Lake and sat outside of a good portion of the afternoon. I left early, intending to go to mass at St. Therese. I got down there early, so I stopped for a cupcake at Verite. On reaching St. Therese I decided not to go in, because they were having their first communion service, and I was horribly underdressed. I came home and crashed, exhausted from walking around Madrona.
Although it sounds ludicrously boring, this weekend was blissful for me, and admittedly, it’s the first time I have been able to say that in a while. I didn’t have any obligations to anyone but myself: no applications, no visitors, no duties, no stress. I finally got back to the simplicity I’ve been lacking for so long both in my own life and in community life. We try to cram our schedules so full that we miss out on the beauty of a day alone or with a few friends doing nothing at all. The past two days reminded me of those days during college where we would just sit in the quad chatting about life or studying, some of my favorite times. Conventional society calls such behavior lazy, but God, there is so much value in slowing down to enjoy life. Too often, after a weekend packed full of useless movement, I find myself more exhausted than when it began. Rather than rejuvenating ourselves, we convince ourselves that constant motion is necessary and find ourselves a slate of activities. I’m advocating that everyone must take one weekend a month to be “lazy,” to buck popular notions of productivity and relax and recharge. Our outlooks might improve with such a requirement.
I’m home suffering from a wicked stomach bug. I swear I have never been sick so often as I have been this year. Blame it on poor self-care or high stress, I guess.
I’m also suffering from a serious case of the blues. I keep looking at the coming weeks and seeing how busy they are, and I just feel sort of…bummed. I’m happy to be here and I’m excited for all that’s coming, don’t get me wrong, but the next few months are going to fly between people visiting, Folklife the Seattle dinner, and a possible visit home or to Fairbanks (I haven’t decided yet). I want so much to enjoy what I have left, but I’m afraid that we’ve all overscheduled ourselves. There’s very little time to just be (As testament to JVC’s influence on me, I beg those who knew me before this year to imagine me saying that last year: hilarious, right?). I couldn’t tell you the last time I had good one-on-one time with some of my housemates, let alone some quality time with myself.
Because overextension was something I hoped would disappear from my life, I have to say that I’m disappointed. I don’t want to go back to being a person who tries to cram too much into an already busy schedule. I want to remain liberated from modern standards, but I’m beginning to see that life probably has other plans. My worst fear is to become someone who focuses on time as a commodity, rather than a gift. One of my housemates has mentioned that she hasn’t had nearly enough time to enjoy the spring, and I agree with her to a certain extent. I feel too many obligations pressing on me, especially with a trip to Spokane that will take up most of our weekend. I miss the times when there was an overabundance of free time.
Alternatively, maybe it’s just beginning to occur to me how little time we really have left. Our nine month anniversary is next week, and I can hardly believe it sometimes. A year ago, I was finishing classes and studying for finals (let’s not even discuss Quad Party). It shocks and saddens me how much time has passed since I’ve spoken to some of my friends and how I wanted that time to slip by as quickly as possible: that is one error I won’t be making again.
To make an official announcement on my decision on grad school (i.e. the next two years of my life): I’ll be attending Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio. It was an eleventh-hour decision, given that I found out that I made it off of their waitlist on Monday after work, and they wanted a decision today. I’ll be getting my M.A., but I’ll be serving as a Teaching Assistant (TA) and in their writing center. They offered me a nice package, so I won’t need to find a job (at least until the summer). I’m relieved to have that chaos eliminated from my life for the time being so that I can be more focused on the rest of my year here in Seattle. I’ve been breathing gigantic sighs of relief all day.
And April showers bring…bad metaphors?
I apologize for the complete lack of posts over the past month or so. Life has been unbelievably busy. I can swear to be better in the next months, but the sunny weather of the past few days has made me even less eager to post. To pay some quick catch-up, in the past month, I’ve: travelled to San Francisco and Whidbey Island, entertained my parents and youngest sister in Seattle, read a ridiculous number of books, started training for Bloomsday, a seven mile race in Spokane, snowshoed for the first time (it’s my new favorite activity), and received more rejections from grad schools than I’d like to admit.
Admittedly, my lack of posting is completely due to the last point. I’ve been so distracted by my future plans that I knew that a post on any other topic would inevitably swing into discourse on the unknowable future. I’m not even sure that it’s wise for me to post any speculation on the point right now, given the unstable nature of grad school admissions, but I need to get it out somewhere, and I know that my housemates are tired of hearing me complain with impatience. I applied for grad school in one of the worst seasons in years. Cohorts have shrunk dramatically, and funding has dried up, so my options are dramatically different than they would have been in years past. My options are much more limited, especially in terms of funding. The landscape of academia is changing, and it’s unfortunate that such alterations are occurring in the year I have decided to enter into graduate school.
It’s when I realize facts like this one that I almost regret my decision to enter JVC over grad school, but then, I remember that I never would have come to know of my passion for academia without JVC, and I’m snapped back to reality. As many people are eager to remind me, if I had gone straight to grad school, I’d be finishing my first year of law school right now. I can barely wrap my head around that now. I understand myself so much better than I did a year ago, and I give JVC all the credit for being a catalyst to positive change. I can’t imagine handling the stress of admissions with the state of mind I had right before graduation last year. More importantly, I can’t imagine making the decision I must make with that mindset.
So, enough suspense, here’s my current situation: I’ve been accepted to two master’s programs. One is at the University of Rochester; this program has everything I want: the good name, small cohort size, a decent ranking, a great contemporary literature program, and potential for overlap into film and theater studies. The other is SUNY Buffalo: again, I have a good name and decent ranking, but here I know people. Buffalo’s program isn’t what I want, but it offers familiarity. I miss the city and the people in it like crazy. It’s the safe option, and that’s never been a good option for me. I don’t know anyone in Rochester, but from what I’ve heard, it’s a good city for someone with my background. My mom went to college there, and she really liked it. I’ve also been wait-listed for my Ph.D. at Case Western in Cleveland, but I don’t even want to think about it and get my hopes up, but it could throw a wrench in everything. I’m forcing myself to focus on the two master’s acceptances and not dream about full funding for five years (I don’t want to even imagine making that choice).
I’m leaning toward Rochester, as if that isn’t obvious from my tone. I don’t want to say for sure that that’s where I’ll go, but I’ve given it a whole lot of thought. I’m required to decide on Buffalo by April 15th, but I don’t want to decide yet. I don’t think I’m ready to sacrifice comfort as an option.
We are now well past the six month mark here in Seattle. It’s a bit scary to think that we’ve only been here that long, but at the same time, it’s astonishing that that much time has already passed. It seems so strange that it was in August that I met my community, my Seattle family. Time has flown, but simultaneously, it seems that no time has passed at all.
That said, every JV in the Northwest has been fed the fact that February is the most difficult month. Most people, I think, believe this idea is a crock, some superstition cooked up by FJVs to make you appreciate your early days together. We often hear, “Oh, yeah, the first few months are great, but just wait until February; that’s the most difficult part of the year.” We’re told that February is a make-or-break month for community, that some communities completely fell apart or came together in the depths of a Northwest winter. At work, we read a passage by L’Arche’s founder claiming that members of community see each other as angels, then as demons, and then finally move to seeing each other as human.
Well, we’re midway through February, and I have to say that this month hasn’t been a picnic. I’m not saying I’m unhappy, in fact, I feel pretty great, but the honeymoon has been over for a while now. People are exhausted, homesick, overworked, and Vitamin D deficient (where’s the sun? Why’s it so dark? Why’s it so grey?), and we’re starting to really learn about each other, which includes the not so pretty flaws and histories we carry with us every day. We did this revealing but anxiety-ridden activity where we had to tell each person how they hinder community and how they help community. Though people worked through their issues at the end, the process was rather painful. I had enough nerves for the six of us, and in part, this anxiety was justified. I was told some jarring things, things I never expected. Overall, though the experience has been positive, because I understand something more of how other community members see me and what they need from me to be happy. As much as I mock Non-Violent Communication, the expression of a need was the key to getting a positive response.
Despite the difficulties of community on a day to day basis (why can’t you do your dishes? When are we going to talk about the bathrooms? She said what? He did what? Why can’t you just do your dishes already?), I feel that we’re being more and more honest with each other every day. Sure, tension still exists, but I’m optimistic that we’ve been showing each other more and more of our true selves. Maybe, if we can continue this trend, we can really know each other and understand each other in the way I’ve seen FJVs do. Hopefully, we won’t leave here as strangers. I would wager a guess that we’re on the right path, given that the veneer is falling away to reveal the real person beneath: vital, raw, and vulnerable.
One thing I reallly love about JVC is that it forces you to be creative in ways of entertaining yourself. The standard weekend events are typically out, unless you’ve saved some stipend for splurging. If you’re me, you’ve spent all of your budget for the week on bus passes and coffee (and the occasional book). I’ve had to diversify my ideas of distraction. I’ve caught a few movies (a second viewing of The Dark Knight and Waltz with Bashir), but nowhere near the extent of how many I used to see. Going out tends to get too expensive, unless you go for Happy Hour or are adept at getting men to buy you drinks (needless to say, I’m not). Additionally, I like to go dancing but have been disappointed with the Seattle club scene. So, what do you do to entertain yourself?
Personally, I’ve become heavily reliant on the library. Not only do they have a great selection of movies, but their interlibrary loan system is great. I’ve never had such a great selection of CDs, books, and movies at my fingertips. I’m sort of enamored of Seattle’s Public library system. Our house must hold some sort of record for the amount of movies we watch.
I’ve also rediscovered games. I’ve always liked board games (Count the number of times I played Cranium or Life, and it will astound you), but I never appreciated the simplicity and fun of just sitting around with good friends and playing games. Our house is well known for rousing games of Charades, and we had a legendary game on Thanksgiving. We had Mercy House over for a game night last weekend, and it was a blast. We “hosted” a murder mystery, and everyone was really into it. People were assigned a character and dressed and acted the part. The game itself was a little overcomplicated and contrived, but we had such a blast playing it. Likewise, Stephanie introduced us to the game “Brown Bag”: you stand on one foot and try to pick up a bag with your teeth, after you go around once, you cut an inch off the top of the bag. It sounds easy, but it got challenging as we got further down. Additionally, we played Draw the Thing for community night on Sunday, which is possibly the best game in existence, and all you need to play is a pen and paper.
I’ll be on retreat on the Oregon Coast from Friday through Monday, and I’m excited to see the Pacific for the first time.
My walks to and from work afford me a great deal of time to think and analyze the world in which I now dwell. This experience has been, to use a cliché, a mixed blessing. I tend to overanalyze situations, so an extra hour and twenty minutes of solo time does not remedy this situation, but it does give me time to come up with creative and unusual ideas. Anyway, I had a thought while walking to work yesterday, coupled with an experience I had at the gym on Sunday.
This whole train of thought came about when I went to the gym at Seattle U on Sunday. I was suffering through a workout. Working back up to my level of fitness is difficult, and I especially hate that the treadmills face mirrors: I know that I look like I’m suffering. I was in the midst of the second half of my workout when a student came and used the treadmill next to mine. I tried not to stare at him as he jumped onto the machine and to focus on my own running. After a while, though, I heard something through the song blaring on my headphones. I thought at first that the guy on the treadmill was talking to me, an unusual, though not novel, phenomenon. I’ve had people speak encouragement before. After a minute, however, it became obvious that the guy was singing as he was running. I had to smile, because I’ve done that during runs in the country to kill the pain and boredom of a seven mile run. The experience made my day. I wished that I had the confidence to burst into motivating song in front of a gym of strangers. I’ve never been that free, though I would guess that few people are.
I walk by a multitude of people in my travels around the city, and something I’ve noticed is that people largely dwell in their own worlds as they walk. I’m apt to believe that this coldness comes from living in a large city. We’ve all heard the stereotypes of people in cities marching to their offices, focused only on getting to their destination. I hope that I don’t embody this stereotype now, especially since it’s something that I’ve never really done before. We remain strangers, trapped by our technology and these strange mandates that restrain affection for life. I’m reminded of a quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!:
Love is implicit in every connection. It should be. Thus when absent it makes us insane. It breaks our equilibrium and we have to flounder for reasons. When we pass someone on the street without telling them we love them it’s cruel and wrong and we all know this. We live in a constant state of denial and imbalance.
Now, I’m not saying that I want a hug and a conversation with everyone I pass, but I’ve grown used to forms of greeting when I pass people, given my experiences at Canisius and at home. On the way to class, for example, if I walked by someone I didn’t know, I’d at least give them an awkward smile, a great skill of mine. At home, the situation was even friendlier: if I chose to walk to work, I’d say hello to most everyone I met. In Seattle, on the other hand, people are very wrapped up in their own lives. Most walkers, myself included, are tethered to IPods or cell phones. One of my housemates mentioned this fact during our first week here, complaining that no one would make eye contact as she passed them on her way to work. It’s an interesting statement of society that we barely acknowledge all the other people around us, though the streets team with strangers.
On my walk to work yesterday, I had a fun thought, as result of the guy at the gym: what if all the people who had IPods on their morning walks had to burst into song or the people on their phones had to shout their conversations? What would that reveal about people’s inner lives that we don’t get from just walking past them without acknowledging their individuality? I’ve seen people sing to themselves downtown and in Pioneer Square, but I’d be very interested to see it happen in hipster Capitol Hill. Maybe the skinny hipster kid actually listens to Verdi, while that mother walking her dog listens to AC/DC. Maybe the man on his cell phone is talking about the way his wife makes coffee. How much could we reveal of our inner lives to the world if we’d only allow ourselves to be vulnerable and a little unusual sometimes? Maybe saying hello to strangers is the first awkward step forward on the path to breaking open a shell imposed by the world.
I’m back in Seattle after almost two weeks at home. I’ve been here for nearly three weeks, and the transition back has been easy, surprisingly, especially after the time off work due to snow. I came back with a renewed desire to explore this region. In this burst of exploratory energy, I filled my first Saturday back with activity.
In the morning, Bonnie and I rode to Greenwood. Actually, we meant to head to Fremont, but we were off in our directions. We decided to loop around back to Greenwood at the end of the bus line. We stopped at the legendary Gorditos, known for “burritos the size of a small child.” Needless to say, the description was accurate.
Bonnie and her burrito
Me looking lovely with my burrito
After we got back to the house, a bunch of us headed down to the Seattle Center for the Winter Solstice Fire Festival. I was not particularly impressed by the performers, but people breathing fire can’t be called boring. The Seattle Center was really beautiful all lit up with fire, and it offered a spectacular view of the Space Needle. The sculptures were really cool, but my favorite thing was this keyboard hooked to blowtorches. Here’s a video of Stephanie, our area director, playing it.
Additionally, our house went skiing (or snowboarding) at Crystal Mountain. The Jesuits from Seattle offered us passes and to pay for part of our rentals. It was a lot of fun, but I’m still a bit sore from the trip, especially from sleeping on the chapel floor.
The view from the bottom of the Bunny Slope
My housemates getting ready to ski
Taking a break
Now, I’m more energized to go on adventures than ever. I’m hoping to go snowshoeing in the next month, since I’ve never had the opportunity before.
I wrote this entry about a week ago whilest waiting for my plane at Sea-Tac.
This entry doesn’t exactly hail the halfway point of my year, but I suppose it comes close enough. I’m headed home for Christmas, but it seems like I’ve been living in Seattle forever. I’m not quite in love with the city, as some other JVs in the area are, but I like it for what it is, a liberal, green, overall pleasant city. The main issue for me is the distance from home; I’ve often said that if you put Seattle in place of Boston, I’d definitely live there. Sometimes, the ridiculousness of the city is enough to make me like it a little more.
The past few weeks, for example, have been a bit silly. I never imagined that three or four days of snow would mean that work would be closed for a week, that half of the buses would shut down, and that the airlines would run out of deicer. Well, I was proven wrong. The city is extremely hilly, for one, making clean-up difficult. Further complicating the problem is that the city refuses to use salt, in fear of endangering the wildlife of Puget Sound. Additionally, the county only owns twenty-something plows, a tiny amount for such a densely populated place. The snow last week, therefore, caused mass hysteria. It was truly unlike another other first snow I have ever seen. On the morning of the first big snow, after I found out work was closed, I sledded with my housemates, at eight in the morning. The city was eerily quiet, and that feeling has held through the past week or so. This statement should not serve to say that Seattleites are loud; in fact, most are pretty calm, in my experience. The quiet, however, gave the city the strange quality of an alien planet, only interrupted by downhill skiers and snowshoers who have taken over the streets. The Core Members at Noah Sealth are stuck in the houses until the snow melts, and I feel badly for them, since they have to miss out on the beauty of this ridiculous snowstorm.
The storm awarded me a few unique opportunities. I had the chance to sled with my housemates. I went downtown for Vietnamese food, which was delicious. I checked out a coffee shop in Madrona Beach that I’ve thought about trying pretty often. Most notably, my journey to the airport today amounts to an epic: I left the house at four. Then, I hauled my baggage downtown to the library, which I couldn’t find for some reason, even though I’ve been there at least five or six times. I actually had to call Beth to find out where it was. After that, I headed to the underground tunnel to catch my bus, which I also struggled to find, making two rotations around Benaroya Hall before I found it. I waited for a bus for about forty-five minutes; I only made it on the bus by chance. The ride to Sea-Tac took about half an hour. I only had time to sit down after checking in and finding someplace to eat. I have never eaten Chinese food so quickly.
Here’s to a week on the East Coast, just in time to eliminate some of the routine.
The future is my ultimate muse; nothing can inspire me like the promise of tomorrow. Here I am, sitting in a chain coffee shop – I will give you three guesses which, and the first two don’t count – and all I can focus on is what is to come. Sure, a few events of the past few days live in my frontal lobe, but overall, my mind is consumed by what could be, rather than what is. Yes, I might be mulling over the GRE that I just finished or how far I ran today, but I’m not completely committed to this moment. I’m not feeling my fingers move over the keys or enjoying my coffee in the way I could. Anyone who has a conversation with me will understand what I’m implying. Though, through motivation, I have been moved in a way that I have utilized in the past, taking part in JVC has made me analyze my actions, rather than just sinking into the pattern I would normally inhabit.
In JVC, there is a lot of talk about living in the present moment, about utilizing what you have, feeling what you feel right now and not what you hope to feel in the future. “Be present,” they encourage us. “Be intentional.” L’Arche also pushes this philosophy. We’ve spoken extensively on the idea of attachment, the most obvious of which for me is speculation on the future. How can you truly enjoy the world around you if your mind is two years ahead of you?
I know that you only have the present moment. I recognize this fact; I had it hammered into my head in philosophy classes in college, on Kairos, and even in English class in high school. Somehow, though, it never stuck for me. I often tell myself that I’ll live in the present next week or after I finish grad school applications, but the time to live in the present never seems to come for me. I’m already checked-out, waiting for what comes next. For example, I cannot get my mind away from applications, and I’ve been struggling with work as result. I may be sitting at lunch with the Core Members, but thoughts about next year dominate my mind. Where will I be? What will I be doing? It doesn’t matter right now; I recognize that fact, but I can’t fix it. I’ve never been a “sit and be” sort of person; that reason is precisely why meditation has never worked for me. I’m afraid that I’m wasting time, treating it as a commodity, rather than a gift. I don’t know precisely why this situation exists as it does. I guess I’m a busybody. I never used to be this way, so I’d have to say it’s something I’ve grown into in the past year. I think I’m reacting against how lazy I feel I was in the past.
Will a new goal arise out of my ramblings? I’m not sure. Sometimes, journaling is a way for me to organize what I’m feeling – see especially my last entry – so I can bring them up in community meetings later. Other times, I merely use it to vent ideas I’ve been hiding. Especially given the nature of these perceptions, I would favor the latter in the given situation. I cannot completely rid the idea of the future from my head, particularly with deadlines looming on the horizon, but I want to change the way I function. Unfortunately, I think this situation will be one where I say that I’ll have to wait to focus completely on the present. I want to focus on now, but I’m afraid that I’ll run out of time if I don’t give my applications their due. I think the situation is doomed to remain the same, at least for now.
