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.

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...

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.

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.