it bothers me how, whenever someone asks me if i'm an RA, i feel this need to try and explain to them why i chose not to be, like i should have a good excuse for why i would make such a selfish decision. and then they always feel like it's their job to console me, as if there's no way in the world i could possibly still feel like a good person. you know. since i'm not an RA. "it's definitely not for everyone," they say. like irresponsible people, and people who get in trouble a lot, and people who hate other people. but that's okay, you know. we need both kinds of people in the world. the bottom line is usually them attempting the silver lining of encouraging me to think about how much free time i have. you know. since i'm not an RA.
the weird thing about not being an RA and still living on campus is that i don't feel responsible to anyone. it's a strange independence, even more so than i would if i lived off campus, because then, i would probably have roommates and we would cook and share and coordinate things and be home sometimes and live a nice life. independent, but not in a good way. closer to unnecessary. i miss being good for something. needed. by people. by anyone. that's selfish. but there it is. cool.
i think i should go write my locke paper now. okay good.
Monday, October 6, 2008
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Fact
If ever you should find yourself at the crossroads of sleep and conversation, the right choice is always the latter.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Film Noir
My brother gave the world a great gift a few days ago and got a haircut. Somehow, in fifteen magical minutes, our favorite Great Clips lady transformed the lethal-looking mushroom cloud of dark brown on the top of his head - so molded by his unshakable insistance on fitting his house paint-covered DU baseball cap over the waves on waves - into something so... normal-person-looking that, as he emerged from the chair, I was struck by the realization that my almost-twin bro is actually a pretty good looking guy.
Until last week, I hadn't seen Matt since January. And from the new, pared-down 'do, another startling realization: my brother is going gray. Three weeks shy of 20, he's speckled all over, with this badass, X-men looking streak running from the back of his head to above his left eye.
I'm pretty sure that my dad was gray and balding by the time he graduated from high school, so it's not some earth-shattering, freak-out thing that my brother has taken his place in the circle of Bigelow teenage gray hair. But it's kind of like witnessing my pubescent eighth-grade baby sister navigate her way through training bras and shaving her skinny little legs and using deodorant - once you start wearing a bra and shaving your legs, you'll never not wear a bra and shave your legs ever again. And once you have gray hair, you'll never not have gray hair again. I don't know why, but there's something strangely incredible to me about the idea of being an adult alongside the same people with whom I used to be a kid - even if those people are my brother and sister, and even if that's completely obvious. We all get along like a dream now. We respect one another and laugh and make jokes and we're generous with each other. My sister is hilarious and witty and gives of her time volunteering in a way that most people twice her age haven't figured out. My brother cooks and buys gass and doesn't get mad at me for using it and makes a pot of coffee and pours me a cup. We treat one other like people. We pray for one another, we tell each other that we love each other, and we mean it. And it's cool. I like it. And I think it's cool that my brother has gray hair and that my sister is almost as tall as I am.
Then again, next May, she'll graduate from middle school the same week that I graduate from college. Which will be nice, because I have a feeling that next spring is about the time that this whole grown-up thing will suddenly be looking less intriguing and more scary as hell.
Until last week, I hadn't seen Matt since January. And from the new, pared-down 'do, another startling realization: my brother is going gray. Three weeks shy of 20, he's speckled all over, with this badass, X-men looking streak running from the back of his head to above his left eye.
I'm pretty sure that my dad was gray and balding by the time he graduated from high school, so it's not some earth-shattering, freak-out thing that my brother has taken his place in the circle of Bigelow teenage gray hair. But it's kind of like witnessing my pubescent eighth-grade baby sister navigate her way through training bras and shaving her skinny little legs and using deodorant - once you start wearing a bra and shaving your legs, you'll never not wear a bra and shave your legs ever again. And once you have gray hair, you'll never not have gray hair again. I don't know why, but there's something strangely incredible to me about the idea of being an adult alongside the same people with whom I used to be a kid - even if those people are my brother and sister, and even if that's completely obvious. We all get along like a dream now. We respect one another and laugh and make jokes and we're generous with each other. My sister is hilarious and witty and gives of her time volunteering in a way that most people twice her age haven't figured out. My brother cooks and buys gass and doesn't get mad at me for using it and makes a pot of coffee and pours me a cup. We treat one other like people. We pray for one another, we tell each other that we love each other, and we mean it. And it's cool. I like it. And I think it's cool that my brother has gray hair and that my sister is almost as tall as I am.
Then again, next May, she'll graduate from middle school the same week that I graduate from college. Which will be nice, because I have a feeling that next spring is about the time that this whole grown-up thing will suddenly be looking less intriguing and more scary as hell.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Home
The day I left Gulu the second time, the adorable tiny Italian Comboni sisters were hosting the St. Louis Sisters of St. Joseph, who arrived in Uganda around the same time I did and are planning on staying for some three years in one of the camps not too far away. At lunch - an incredible, delicious Italian spread, a far cry from the rice-beans-cabbage I'd grown somehow fond of and am presently missing - one of the American sisters, upon hearing that I was leaving for the States the following night, commented, "It's incredible how easy it is to adjust back to the American way of life."
I made some ambiguous comment of affirmation, but in my mind, of coursse, my self-righteous little mind, I'm screaming, "Of course it isn't! Things are never the same. We are never the same! We can't be! Home won't feel like home and I'll walk in my front door and look around and feel displaced, and I'll look with scorn and disgust at the silly, stupid, godless, materialistic, sprawling, overdeveloped, overweight, empty, whitewashed American life and react in outrage! And then I'll give away all of my earthly possesions and be the change I wish to see in the world and blah blah blah blah blah...
But here I am. I'm back. And Sister St. Louis was right. It is easy. It's incredible how easy it is. It's disgusting how wasy it is. These two worlds, these two imaginary first and third worlds, the classifications we invent, because if we can classify it, explain it, then it's how it is, and it's okay. I'm here and I borrow the car, or I walk to the store, I shop, I buy things with my debit card, with dollar-off coupons. I eat frozen yogurt and Kashi granola and sea salt and vinegar chips and soy milk and other things that happen to by lying around (for the record, my stomach and digestive system have been making it very cleaar to me throughout thepast week how much they prefer rice and beans and tea and toast). I see clothes I want to buy, and other things I don't need. I watch the Olympics; I cry at every replay of the Opening Ceremonies, and even at the Coca-Cola commercials interspersed(you know the one, with Yao Ming and LeBron James). In short, I have re-taken my place in the circle of American life, without missing a beat. I'm home. Once again, I'm a consumer in a consumer culture. And even as I'm too lazy or dazed or freshly home to fight it, I'm sick of it already. It really is what we do. we consume. Even when we think we're conserving, we consume. Even when we think we're doing something completely unrelated, we still paarticipate, we're constantly buying something or buying into something; we are ever being sold; we are ever selling. I'm tired of buying and selling. I just want to live. It's not the same as working for a living; we're created to love and labor; "ora et labora," after all. It's when our very existence, the very act of living becomes itself a consumer act - when time becomes money and every decision becomes the sum of its economic implications and family becomes the fuel efficiency of the minivan we drive them around in and God is the one we remember to thank for this quarter's higher-than-expected earnings and our four-deb-three-bath beige and tan cookie cutter house and the kids with their bright futures...
If I leave the U.S., I'll always question my movites; if I don't, I'll always question my soul. It's not just the "America!" thing - being in Africa has made me genuinely grateful for a lot of what America is and has. A very damn good constitution, for one. Education, for another. A reasonable expectation of post-graduate employment. Opportunities to see more than the town - or country - in which I was born. Free and fair elections. Relative governmental transparency. Human rights. Women's rights. Children's rights. Health standards. Mint chocolate chip ice cream. But there is a genuine, concrete difference in the way - not just the way - a fundamental difference in what it means to be an individual. like the market, like the everything here, personhood is intimately bound up in capitalism. To be an individial in America is to be a consumer or a potential consumer. To be an individial outside of America, to America, is also to be a present or potential consumer. But the thing is, I don't want to be a consumer. Everyone eats and buys and makes a living. But don't want my very personhood - my very essence - defined by my nature as a consumer. Or maybe I do; maybe this is what it means to conform what I consume to the person I desire to become. But even then, it's all externals - like wearing a "Save the Whales" tshirt so that everyone says, "Look at her - she's an environmentalist for sure." Of all that I consume, I hope the only thing that defines my is the Body and Blood - as if anything else I eat or drink or buy or support or read or study or discuss has any comparable bearing on who I am. So yes. I am tired of being a consumer, simply a consumer. I would rather be any other sort of statistic. Things here are so in order, so methodic, so by-the-book, by-the-rules, by-the-laws, so clean, so black and white, that sometimes I feel like a little plastic number on a pocket calculator. And no wonder.
I have no idea where I'll be on August 11, 2009, one year from today. But I hope to God I'll be some place where living means living.
Also, I'm working on keeping everything I say or write or think from desintegrating into an angry angsty rant... so pray stay tuned.
I made some ambiguous comment of affirmation, but in my mind, of coursse, my self-righteous little mind, I'm screaming, "Of course it isn't! Things are never the same. We are never the same! We can't be! Home won't feel like home and I'll walk in my front door and look around and feel displaced, and I'll look with scorn and disgust at the silly, stupid, godless, materialistic, sprawling, overdeveloped, overweight, empty, whitewashed American life and react in outrage! And then I'll give away all of my earthly possesions and be the change I wish to see in the world and blah blah blah blah blah...
But here I am. I'm back. And Sister St. Louis was right. It is easy. It's incredible how easy it is. It's disgusting how wasy it is. These two worlds, these two imaginary first and third worlds, the classifications we invent, because if we can classify it, explain it, then it's how it is, and it's okay. I'm here and I borrow the car, or I walk to the store, I shop, I buy things with my debit card, with dollar-off coupons. I eat frozen yogurt and Kashi granola and sea salt and vinegar chips and soy milk and other things that happen to by lying around (for the record, my stomach and digestive system have been making it very cleaar to me throughout thepast week how much they prefer rice and beans and tea and toast). I see clothes I want to buy, and other things I don't need. I watch the Olympics; I cry at every replay of the Opening Ceremonies, and even at the Coca-Cola commercials interspersed(you know the one, with Yao Ming and LeBron James). In short, I have re-taken my place in the circle of American life, without missing a beat. I'm home. Once again, I'm a consumer in a consumer culture. And even as I'm too lazy or dazed or freshly home to fight it, I'm sick of it already. It really is what we do. we consume. Even when we think we're conserving, we consume. Even when we think we're doing something completely unrelated, we still paarticipate, we're constantly buying something or buying into something; we are ever being sold; we are ever selling. I'm tired of buying and selling. I just want to live. It's not the same as working for a living; we're created to love and labor; "ora et labora," after all. It's when our very existence, the very act of living becomes itself a consumer act - when time becomes money and every decision becomes the sum of its economic implications and family becomes the fuel efficiency of the minivan we drive them around in and God is the one we remember to thank for this quarter's higher-than-expected earnings and our four-deb-three-bath beige and tan cookie cutter house and the kids with their bright futures...
If I leave the U.S., I'll always question my movites; if I don't, I'll always question my soul. It's not just the "America!" thing - being in Africa has made me genuinely grateful for a lot of what America is and has. A very damn good constitution, for one. Education, for another. A reasonable expectation of post-graduate employment. Opportunities to see more than the town - or country - in which I was born. Free and fair elections. Relative governmental transparency. Human rights. Women's rights. Children's rights. Health standards. Mint chocolate chip ice cream. But there is a genuine, concrete difference in the way - not just the way - a fundamental difference in what it means to be an individual. like the market, like the everything here, personhood is intimately bound up in capitalism. To be an individial in America is to be a consumer or a potential consumer. To be an individial outside of America, to America, is also to be a present or potential consumer. But the thing is, I don't want to be a consumer. Everyone eats and buys and makes a living. But don't want my very personhood - my very essence - defined by my nature as a consumer. Or maybe I do; maybe this is what it means to conform what I consume to the person I desire to become. But even then, it's all externals - like wearing a "Save the Whales" tshirt so that everyone says, "Look at her - she's an environmentalist for sure." Of all that I consume, I hope the only thing that defines my is the Body and Blood - as if anything else I eat or drink or buy or support or read or study or discuss has any comparable bearing on who I am. So yes. I am tired of being a consumer, simply a consumer. I would rather be any other sort of statistic. Things here are so in order, so methodic, so by-the-book, by-the-rules, by-the-laws, so clean, so black and white, that sometimes I feel like a little plastic number on a pocket calculator. And no wonder.
I have no idea where I'll be on August 11, 2009, one year from today. But I hope to God I'll be some place where living means living.
Also, I'm working on keeping everything I say or write or think from desintegrating into an angry angsty rant... so pray stay tuned.
Monday, May 19, 2008
You'll take the high road and I'll take the low road
Folk Choir is leaving for Scotland and Ireland in four hours! Oh my goodness! And three days after we get back, I'm flying to Uganda for the rest of the summer.
...I should probably go finish packing now.
...I should probably go finish packing now.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Ode to Club Hes
I don't think the Hesburgh Library has enough copies of the Imitation of Christ. Just four shelves full? And we call this a Catholic school? Really, Fr. Jenkins. Ad hoc committee THAT.
Also, after using bathrooms on the 12th floor, 2nd floor, and basement yesterday, combined with the evidence I have carefully gathered throughout the past three years, I am now officially convinced that there is not a single air hand dryer on this entire campus on which "1. Press button" has not been scratched out to read, "1. Press butt."
My Catholic Reformation final paper tracing the motif of exile in the writings of St. Ignatius and Thomas a Kempis should have been turned in two hours and 54 minutes ago. Sometimes I think I can feel all the coffee I've consumed throughout the past three weeks actually eating away at my stomach lining. I hope that's not what's really happening. Finals. Love it.
Also, after using bathrooms on the 12th floor, 2nd floor, and basement yesterday, combined with the evidence I have carefully gathered throughout the past three years, I am now officially convinced that there is not a single air hand dryer on this entire campus on which "1. Press button" has not been scratched out to read, "1. Press butt."
My Catholic Reformation final paper tracing the motif of exile in the writings of St. Ignatius and Thomas a Kempis should have been turned in two hours and 54 minutes ago. Sometimes I think I can feel all the coffee I've consumed throughout the past three weeks actually eating away at my stomach lining. I hope that's not what's really happening. Finals. Love it.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Heaven will fall down to earth
I walked out of my room after waking from an unsatisfying nap on a frustrating Friday afternoon only to look down and find a pink daisy wrapped in green tissue paper perched on top of my shower shoes. And then I understood a little more what we mean when we talk about being God's love.
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