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.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
A brief word regarding the matter of so-called stalking
Several friends have confessed to me recently that they've been, in their words, "blog-stalking" me. They say it apologetically like it's something they should be ashamed of, as if it's some medium-grade venial sin for which they attempted to atone during reconciliation on Saturday.
Friends, brothers, lovers, people I don't know, be thee not ashamed. I'm so glad you're here! The truth is, I love it when people read what I write. I'm just too shy to tell them I have a blog, and also the word "blog" makes me giggle when I say it out loud. So instead, I put a link to it in my facebook profile in hopes that people would stumble upon it. And to those who have, thanks! Write me some comments and let me know what you think, or at least that you've stopped by. And heck, in return, maybe I'll start posting more than like three times a month.
Why would I even have a blog if I didn't want people to read it? Definitely not because I just like to say the word "blog," because I don't. Secrets are for my diary. Thanks for being a stalker. No, but seriously.
Love,
Susan
Friends, brothers, lovers, people I don't know, be thee not ashamed. I'm so glad you're here! The truth is, I love it when people read what I write. I'm just too shy to tell them I have a blog, and also the word "blog" makes me giggle when I say it out loud. So instead, I put a link to it in my facebook profile in hopes that people would stumble upon it. And to those who have, thanks! Write me some comments and let me know what you think, or at least that you've stopped by. And heck, in return, maybe I'll start posting more than like three times a month.
Why would I even have a blog if I didn't want people to read it? Definitely not because I just like to say the word "blog," because I don't. Secrets are for my diary. Thanks for being a stalker. No, but seriously.
Love,
Susan
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Wow, you have changed
Has anybody ever said that to you?
An overarching theme in my African Politics class is the idea of growth vs. development. A lot of times, we tend to equate the two. But if you look at empirical evidence, you see that just because a country's economy is growing doesn't mean that the country is developing infrastructure or improving education or sending its girls to school or remedying its human rights record. Economic gains have a way of getting tied up at the top and confusing an already-confused social and economic order. So a country might look good on paper, say, enough to stamp its monthly reports to the IMF, enough to end up on the cover of Newsweek with a headline that reads, "Why the world is looking to (insert nation here)." Meanwhile, life hasn't actually gotten any better for 97% of the population, and all it takes is one pull-quote in the New York Times a month or two down the road that reads, "We were better off before they came in and changed everything," under a picture of something burning in a street or a mother kneeling over her innocent son for the rest of the world to stop a minute, set down their collective cup of breakfast blend and concede, "ooh.. touche."
That's how a semester abroad is treating me right now.
I need microfinance.
An overarching theme in my African Politics class is the idea of growth vs. development. A lot of times, we tend to equate the two. But if you look at empirical evidence, you see that just because a country's economy is growing doesn't mean that the country is developing infrastructure or improving education or sending its girls to school or remedying its human rights record. Economic gains have a way of getting tied up at the top and confusing an already-confused social and economic order. So a country might look good on paper, say, enough to stamp its monthly reports to the IMF, enough to end up on the cover of Newsweek with a headline that reads, "Why the world is looking to (insert nation here)." Meanwhile, life hasn't actually gotten any better for 97% of the population, and all it takes is one pull-quote in the New York Times a month or two down the road that reads, "We were better off before they came in and changed everything," under a picture of something burning in a street or a mother kneeling over her innocent son for the rest of the world to stop a minute, set down their collective cup of breakfast blend and concede, "ooh.. touche."
That's how a semester abroad is treating me right now.
I need microfinance.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Song of the Body of Christ
We come to share our story,We come to bread the bread,
We come to know our rising from the dead...
Monday, February 4, 2008
Gaudate Monday
You know that feeling you get when you have a huge crush on someone and you want to shower every morning and wear skirts and you're awake during class and you walk faster and your heart feels like that experiment in the children's museum with the orange construction cone over a blow-dryer and a ping pong ball that looks like it's floating above the cone, because of the air, and you're five times wittier than normal and your two-hour Starbucks shifts go by in the blink of an eye and it seems like you always see ten people you know right in a row on your way to class and you never fall asleep before praying at night, and you're never hungry and you laugh louder and smile brighter, and you're not even trying to do any of that, because it just happens, and all you can think about is that scene in The Little Mermaid where King Triton's like, "what's with her?" And her sisters go, "Isn't it obvious, Daddy? Ariel's in love!"
It's like that.
Except I don't have a huge crush on anyone.
I think it's a good day when you realize that the only thing getting you out of bed in the morning is life.
It's like that.
Except I don't have a huge crush on anyone.
I think it's a good day when you realize that the only thing getting you out of bed in the morning is life.
Friday, February 1, 2008
Laundry and Dishes Friday
I love that, every Tuesday and Thursday, I get an hour and fifteen of monastic peace in the middle of every city street week, and it doesn't come in the Basilica but rather in DeBart 126, and that I look forward to every Monday night because it's the night I get to sit in a CoMo armchair with another brilliant C.S. Lewis novel in hand and, breathless for pages at a time with joy at the words strung together before my eyes, do my homework.
I love 4 a.m. conversations in the booths of LaFortune with people for whom honesty flows like water.
Whenever I can feel myself falling asleep in class, I love to watch my hand move the pen to write the words of the notes I'm taking, because it makes the words mean something and infuses them with this mystery, somehow, as if I'm playing historian to my own right hand, contextualizing my sentences and paragraphs even as they appear in loops and dots on the lines. Sometimes I pretend I'm in Peace Corps training, taking my final notes in a tattered, sun-warped, recycled-paper spiral, three short days before my departure to the heart of Mozambique.
I loved the time Joe Edmonds came and sat down across from me and gave me one ear of his headphones and there we sat, me with my social movement theory and he with his highlighted lines, listening to some indie gypsy folk band and drinking tea and bridging the time between page turns with witticisms about anything inappropriate [him] or choir [me]. So gloriously liberal arts.
I love working the Sunday night late shift at Starbucks, and I love that my boss lets me clean tables and windows and the pastry case and sweep the floors as an excuse to talk to my brilliant beautiful blinding lights from heaven friends who come to visit.
I love folk choir dance parties. Especially when they're called "Putting the '-izzle' back in Gethsemanizzle." I love looking around the room and seeing no one who I couldn't just go up to and hug or make weird face at or in front of whom I couldn't act like a complete fool, belting out songs that weren't even good until that moment, waking up hoarse and exhausted, head swimming, smile lingering, with the kind of nonalcoholic hangover only the notre dame folk choir can provide and no advil need cure.
I love thinking about high school [sometimes], how I was somehow perpetually pale and sunburned at the same time, braces and wide, wire-rimmed glasses, film camera and reporter's notebook always on hand [the very incarnation of every early '90s teen show school paper editor], unabashedly optimistic, unavoidably dorky [it followed me like a shadow], and one summer I nannied for a woman with two little girls. She told me, one day, before I left, and I can't even remember what prompted it, not to worry that I didn't have a boyfriend, because once I got to college, she said, they'd all open their eyes. I didn't believe her but hung onto it anyway.
Come all you blessed ones,
Blessed of a loving God,
Enter into the joy prepared for you...
Sometimes I think we think too big when we wonder about being blessed, and then we decide we're not really, not too much. Just regular old moderately-blessed, run of the mill people with our lives and families and educations and health and oh when you put it that way I guess we should consider ourselves lucky and you're right it is good to put it all into context sometimes I'm glad you brought that up. Ordinary. Which is funny, because all I remember about this week was that it wasn't an easy one, but all it took was talking to Whitney till LaFun turned out the lights around us and sharing cool-because-no-one's-ever-heard-of-it music with Joe Edmonds and falling asleep on Jessica's futon after a Saturday night of homework and Wednesday night solidarity with a Fagerberg-paper-writing Stew and dancing with Politano and all those crazy kids at the SugarTones concert [thereby reclaiming the soul I'd feared I'd sold just hours before at the career fair] and dancing with Andres at the folk choir party and north dining hall and "Evita"-themed date nights with the ravishing Merissa Yellman and reading, breathless, "Pilgrim's Regress," and breakfast with Keane and lunch with Panhans and dinner with Nava and quarter dogs with everyone, homework nights in CoMo with Stephen, Thursday night surveys, Friday class in the Dome, staying standing for Rian Phadriag and turning to face one another for Ubi Caritas, that first, exploding note of Out of Darkness, the sign of peace and, looking across the baptismal font and the quick calculation of minus three, minus two, minus one and the smile and "yesss!" and feeling so lucky no matter who it is we realize we get to hug, the rays of light that shoot through the sliver of window above the side door next to the loft, resilient, resplendent, remembered...
It doesn't take optimism or extraordinary innocence. Really just eyes.
Blessed.
I love 4 a.m. conversations in the booths of LaFortune with people for whom honesty flows like water.
Whenever I can feel myself falling asleep in class, I love to watch my hand move the pen to write the words of the notes I'm taking, because it makes the words mean something and infuses them with this mystery, somehow, as if I'm playing historian to my own right hand, contextualizing my sentences and paragraphs even as they appear in loops and dots on the lines. Sometimes I pretend I'm in Peace Corps training, taking my final notes in a tattered, sun-warped, recycled-paper spiral, three short days before my departure to the heart of Mozambique.
I loved the time Joe Edmonds came and sat down across from me and gave me one ear of his headphones and there we sat, me with my social movement theory and he with his highlighted lines, listening to some indie gypsy folk band and drinking tea and bridging the time between page turns with witticisms about anything inappropriate [him] or choir [me]. So gloriously liberal arts.
I love working the Sunday night late shift at Starbucks, and I love that my boss lets me clean tables and windows and the pastry case and sweep the floors as an excuse to talk to my brilliant beautiful blinding lights from heaven friends who come to visit.
I love folk choir dance parties. Especially when they're called "Putting the '-izzle' back in Gethsemanizzle." I love looking around the room and seeing no one who I couldn't just go up to and hug or make weird face at or in front of whom I couldn't act like a complete fool, belting out songs that weren't even good until that moment, waking up hoarse and exhausted, head swimming, smile lingering, with the kind of nonalcoholic hangover only the notre dame folk choir can provide and no advil need cure.
I love thinking about high school [sometimes], how I was somehow perpetually pale and sunburned at the same time, braces and wide, wire-rimmed glasses, film camera and reporter's notebook always on hand [the very incarnation of every early '90s teen show school paper editor], unabashedly optimistic, unavoidably dorky [it followed me like a shadow], and one summer I nannied for a woman with two little girls. She told me, one day, before I left, and I can't even remember what prompted it, not to worry that I didn't have a boyfriend, because once I got to college, she said, they'd all open their eyes. I didn't believe her but hung onto it anyway.
Come all you blessed ones,
Blessed of a loving God,
Enter into the joy prepared for you...
Sometimes I think we think too big when we wonder about being blessed, and then we decide we're not really, not too much. Just regular old moderately-blessed, run of the mill people with our lives and families and educations and health and oh when you put it that way I guess we should consider ourselves lucky and you're right it is good to put it all into context sometimes I'm glad you brought that up. Ordinary. Which is funny, because all I remember about this week was that it wasn't an easy one, but all it took was talking to Whitney till LaFun turned out the lights around us and sharing cool-because-no-one's-ever-heard-of-it music with Joe Edmonds and falling asleep on Jessica's futon after a Saturday night of homework and Wednesday night solidarity with a Fagerberg-paper-writing Stew and dancing with Politano and all those crazy kids at the SugarTones concert [thereby reclaiming the soul I'd feared I'd sold just hours before at the career fair] and dancing with Andres at the folk choir party and north dining hall and "Evita"-themed date nights with the ravishing Merissa Yellman and reading, breathless, "Pilgrim's Regress," and breakfast with Keane and lunch with Panhans and dinner with Nava and quarter dogs with everyone, homework nights in CoMo with Stephen, Thursday night surveys, Friday class in the Dome, staying standing for Rian Phadriag and turning to face one another for Ubi Caritas, that first, exploding note of Out of Darkness, the sign of peace and, looking across the baptismal font and the quick calculation of minus three, minus two, minus one and the smile and "yesss!" and feeling so lucky no matter who it is we realize we get to hug, the rays of light that shoot through the sliver of window above the side door next to the loft, resilient, resplendent, remembered...
It doesn't take optimism or extraordinary innocence. Really just eyes.
Blessed.
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