A Letter to My Body

(Editor's note: I just discovered the word asservations and really want to use it in daily conversation but recognize that I can't, so I just wanted to drop it in here and improve everyone's vocabularies. Heh heh asservations heh heh.)

Hey Body,

Let's have a quick heart-to-heart. Get it? Because, like, you've got a physical organ labelled the heart and I've got a metaphorical heart and both of them are apparently important to life, except yours is probably more so. Right?

Yeah, I'm going to take your silence as the reason we don't chat more often.

But listen, what I wanted to talk to you about is how we've been getting along lately. I know, I know, I promised you that we'd eat better and exercise more (though you have to admit, you've gotten more workouts since September than you've had in years, right?), but I have to tell you, Body, you're doing well. You've adjusted to the new time zone and the different food and the complete and utter lack of light after 3:30pm. You even put up with me spending hours in the same chair when I'm doing work. You've been really patient, and I appreciate that.

I wanted to tell you that because I know I've been down on you lately. It's not your job to get us noticed and I was expecting that from you and I shouldn't have. Not that you can't, of course! You've been doing a phenomenal job with the hair lately, I think the eyes and the eyebrows have been on point, the nose is solid as always, and, let's be honest, the whole sweater-jeans-boots look suits you. It's just that I felt your heart sink when I compared you to the people around you and reminded you that your friends are prettier than you and of course that's why no one looks at you the way they look at them, you useless sack of dead weight. I was wrong. It was a moment of weakness. Forgive me. Especially for the dead weight thing. Both the dead and the weight parts.

What I'm saying is that if you ever need affirmation, I'm here for you. You're beautiful and wonderful just the way you are. I think it's just that we don't look up, you know? I think that's all it is. We just don't see it. Also, you have immense value and worth outside of the male gaze and I'm very happy that you carry me around from place to place and also allow me to eat stuff and drink whisky. You're lovely and I'd like for you to stick around as long as you'd like.

Love,
Me

PS- Sorry for never putting Neosporin on our cuts.
PPS- And for injecting ink into your skin without asking you. But you've healed up real well!
PPPS- Also for that time I opened up that tupperware and thought, "Eh, this is probably still good" but it wasn't. You and you alone paid the price for that, my friend, and I'll never forget your valor.

The Post-Thanksgiving Post

I sometimes think that I'm thankful for only the things I think I deserve, that thankfulness is something I pay lip service to rather than something I genuinely feel. I use gratitude as justification, something along the lines of, "Listen, I know that I have a beautiful and wonderful life- I just don't have that thing that I really want yet," like saying that I understand how good I have it makes it okay that I'm still not satisfied. Justification and Thanksgiving- the two times that I feel obligated to express thankfulness.

So, in light of that cynical yet accurate representation of who I am as a person, here's a list of things I know I should be thankful for and cause me to shrug and say, "I can't complain," when asked about my life:

(1) I have lived in beautiful places. I won't make you jealous with glamour shots of Chapel Hill and Edinburgh, but, like, my life is lovely on a daily basis. And for three years, my job was to drive around the prettiest state on God's green earth. And also, we live in a universe that has stuff like this:

The Pinwheel Galaxy, featured on APOD

(2) I went to undergraduate for free. The Carolina Covenant is a gem.

(3) I can read and write and I spend my days in a place where I can spend every day reading and writing and that is valued. I can't imagine leading a life where that isn't true, that's how fundamental it is to me.

(4) I have wonderful friends who fly across oceans to see me and make videos for me and skype with me and send me random pictures of funny things while affirming my existence and a wonderful family who care about me even though I'm not there. I also have wonderful friends who are here who listen to me and care about me and give me good people to spend time with.

(5) Netflix. And online music. Honestly, the fact that I live in a world where I can experience the joy and wonder of other people's imagination and talent through my computer screen and have my life improved by that should be enough for me to be on my knees thanking the powers that be. I mean, did you see Alabama Shakes on The Late Show?

Brittany Howard is a gift from above. 

Ugh. Why are there so many nice things in the world? Why? 

Why Forever Matters

(Editor's note: I came up with this title who knows when and in order to have something in the body of the post, this is the note I left for myself: "Tell me why, Self. Tell me why you thought this was a good idea when it's really just a topic needling at the back of your mind." I thought that doubt was worth sharing.)

I gave up on forever a long time ago, probably around the time that I realized that some of the rules I had been taught for who goes to hell are pretty damn arbitrary. That time may also have coincided with one of the times I convinced myself that I was just going to be alone and unhappy for my entire life, so, to the version of myself that I was then, nothing really mattered anyway. I can hear the gears ticking away in my brain as I type those sentences, deconstructing influences and reconstructing beliefs, editing the picture that I want to present, but I think it needs to stand as is. For most of my life, eternity was linked with purpose which was linked with who I was going to love for the rest of my existence. I had a very clear idea of what I wanted each of those things, eternity, purpose, and love, to look like and it's been a perpetual source of angst when one of those things doesn't show up like I wanted it to. 

I'm sure forever was the first to go, because we can't really know what eternity is going to look like, can we? Just like the hour of the Second Coming, it's for God to know and for us to find out. And I've never really liked that aspect of God, that idea that God keeps things from us because we're too stupid to know them. That's not how it's expressed, of course, but that's what it feels like when, say, God says that you can't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It'll break you. But I tend to have a "Come at me, bro" view of knowledge. Tell me the information. I'll take what comes. How bad can it be? 

I can accept that the afterlife looks like something that we can't understand. I'm okay with that. Like the dragonfly nymph that leaves the water or the matter falling into a black hole, there might not be a way of communicating the information back to us. Or like an ant trying to understand a skyscraper, it might be beyond our brain's current ability to grasp. What I can't accept is that we have any way of knowing who will be going where or if there's a place to go to after we die. I cannot accept earthly condemnation that echoes into eternity, or that a magical prayer has the opposite resonance.  

Eternity is tough to wrestle with, so I think I set it aside as a question that I could say, "I don't know," to and carry on with the rest of my life. I hate to keep bringing it up, but there are a lot of people we could be helping here on this planet and it doesn't require a knowledge of the world to come to do that. Grow a little bit of empathy and help make life here and now better for somebody else. Maybe a lot of somebody elses. How hard can it be?

And I still stand by that, to some extent. If all we have is what we know, the eighty (if you're lucky) years of breathing this air and walking this ground, we can help each other in the time that we have. If we get those eighty years and forever, we can still help each other in the time that we have here together. But I don't think that eternity is about what I thought it was about anymore. There was a line in Time & Eternity in a section on eschatology that talked about eschatology as "what we may hope for."

What we may hope for.

It may well be that life is incredibly unfair and painful and then you die, robbed of the chance to be truly happy, that there's no purpose to the universe and nothing really to live for except that mysterious thing we call love, in all its forms. But we can hope for more than that. We can hope for a forever that rights the wrongs of this world. We can hope for a forever that redeems the brokenness we may have brought or that may have been brought upon us. We can hope for justice. And mercy. We can hope for reconciliation. We can hope for a peace that we may never see in our time on earth. 

The danger of that hope is escapism, and I know that. I know the danger of shrugging and saying, Well, things will turn out all right in the end, I'm sure. But I don't think that hope is meant as an excuse for the lazy. I think it's meant as a comfort for the exhausted. Blessed are the peacemakers because they need to be blessed. Some way, somehow, the peacemakers need to have their faith rewarded because it is not easy to make peace but it is so necessary that we try. It is so necessary that we believe that we can live together on this planet in love and kindness. 

Maybe we believe that peace can be made because we want to leave a better world for our children and our grandchildren, that though our past struggles can never be justified, there may one day be a day on this earth when war and greed are facets of the past, a day whose seeds we are sowing now. I think that's an important belief. I think that it's crucial that we start striving for the good of others instead of good for ourselves. I think if we're to have any kind of real peace on this earth, we have to think that it's at least possible, one day, for someone else, maybe. 

But we're allowed to hope for more. We're allowed to hope for justice for all, not just the temporally fortunate. 

And I don't think we need to walk away from that. 

Thoughts From A Londonish Adventure

I rolled out of bed at 6:08am Friday morning to catch a train down to London. It felt like a regular PLANETS trip- getting up before the sun, leaving a nondescript hallway to go out into the world with my one little bag to destinations known only in theory with not enough sleep and barely enough coffee. 

I actually didn’t have any coffee on Friday morning since I planned on sleeping on the train journey, all 5 hours of it. It’s the earliest I’ve been up since I got here- I basically crashed from jet lag and told myself that I’d never see the dawn again. I didn’t realize the dawn would start happening at such a convenient hour for viewing- the sun’s going to start coming up after 10am in a month or so, I hear- but nonetheless, I haven’t see the early side of seven o’clock in months. 

I was the third person on the platform for my train, about twenty minutes early. It’s weird to me that I can get on a train and be in another country, despite having done this at least a dozen times before. It’s weird to me that I’ve packed an overnight bag for a weekend in London. And it’s all even more odd at 6:45 in the morning. 

***

The train was delayed by about an hour because of a failed train on the tracks north of Newcastle (I know this because they announced it at every stop along the way) but I’m not sure I minded. It was actually quite a lovely ride from Edinburgh to London and it was the more sun than I’d had on my face in weeks. I listened to the Nerdist Writers Panel episode with Maureen Johnson which I cannot recommend enough- there are multiple stories in which Maureen puts out literal fires and Marc Evan Jackson, Sparks Nevada himself, comes in at the end. 

Once of the first Vlogbrothers videos I watched was one where John was in Amsterdam and gets on a train to Antwerp and goes to a zoo, among other things. It's a fun video, but what I distinctly remember is him being on the train, typing away on his keyboard and thinking about how soothing that must be, what a perfect way to spend time and what a wonderful place to write. 

I can now confirm my initial suspicions as true.

***

In the internet age, it’s easier to maintain constant contact with someone who’s an ocean away, so the trope about talking to someone you haven’t seen in months and it’s like no time’s passed at all has changed. I’d say it’s been months and I’m still as comfortable around them as ever. And genuinely happy to see them. 

In our first London afternoon, we:

-went on a walking adventure

-got tea and scones

-fist-bumped a giant statue and casually saw the Rosetta Stone and bits from the Parthenon

-went on more of a walking adventure

-found a pub and had fish and chips

-saw Kinky Boots

London has been lovely to us.

***

Oh hostel life. How I did not miss you. After years in hotels with a room to myself, going back to bunk beds with people who may not speak my language no longer seems fun and exciting. It’s the way to do it, if you’re backpacking and broke, but once you’ve gotten used to queen beds and your own bathroom, going back to anything less feels like regression. 

Oh god, I'm bourgeoise. 

---

On our second day in London, we walked everywhere. We walked to see if we could get tickets for Les Mis or Wicked, which ended up involving walking by Buckingham Palace and past more police and people than I expected. Then we walked by Trafalgar Square, which had more lions and sculptures of horse skeletons and gigantic white painted bronze fingers than I expected. We walked into a tea store and smelled all the teas and then to Starbucks to get caffeine and plan and we walked to a pub to watch Manchester United play (which was the most I’ve ever enjoyed watching a football match). 

Then we walked to St. Paul’s and I asked, “Where is this?”

This is has been the source of much existential angst for me because I walked by St. Paul’s daily the last time I was in London. I didn’t use the tube at all and so I would take this walk from the hostel down to St. Paul’s, across the Millennium Bridge to the Starbucks, then up the river past the eye until I could see Big Ben, then back home again. I loved that walk. I loved St. Paul’s. How did I not remember this? I can remember the TV room of the hostel we stayed in with near perfect clarity, but not the facade of one of the most famous sights in London.

Memory. Weird, right?

Pamela sold me on climbing the absurd number of steps up the dome of St. Paul’s and thought I complained at the time, it was worth it:

Then we walked across the Millennium Bridge 

Pictured: the World's Smallest Kite

and to the Globe and to the market and back across London Bridge and to Leister Square and to the St. Martin-on-the-Fields where we listened to Mozart and Schubert and Beethoven. Then we walked to a tube station and then we walked home and planned all the walking for the next day.

My feet were thankful for my bed that day. 

---

Oxford was kind to us as well. I don’t know what I was expecting from the place that gave us a clarifying comma and every academic handbook known to man, but I was relatively pleased with Oxford. Quaint isn’t the word I want, but I think it’s the word that comes closest. It’s Chapel Hill if Chapel Hill’s architecture were a tad older and basketball wasn’t a thing. 

We went to church at St. Michael at the North Gate and the mayor of Oxford was there, golden chain and all. It was a lovely Christ the King Sunday service, if you’re into that, and I was. Then we went for a walk (which included a market and a bookstore [bookstores do the heart good]) and lunch and a climb back up the tower, which offered this view:

Then a little bit more of a walk and coffee and over to Christ Church for a little Harry Potter and a little John Locke and a little John Wesley,

 then a long a river walk 

and down to, eventually, the Eagle and Child, where CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien and friends had deep conversations and where we played Trivial Pursuit with makeshift pieces and dominoes instead of dice. 

Back to the train and Paddington Station, then out to a pub,

then back to the hostel and I remember what it was like backpacking, how you would spend days walking everywhere known to man and seeing everything made by man, and then, in the days of my youth, going out at night with friends from the hostel and crashing before waking up to do it all over again. I was never good at the second part, the going out and making stories part (though you’re welcome to read through that summer if you click here), but I was good at seeing things and thinking about them. That’s who I am. I’ve been told that’s okay. 

Sometimes, I feel like I’m doing it right. I feel like I’m experiencing things and making memories and sucking the marrow out of life in the best way I know how. It’s a calmer life, more separated and safer, but I wouldn’t think it less fulfilling if I didn’t have others’ lives to compare it to. 

Actually, I don’t know that I do think it’s less fulfilling, come to that. Not in any way that matters. 

Informal Review- Time & Eternity

So I read this book, Time & Eternity: The Question of Time in Church, Science, and Theology by Antje Jackelen and I have to review it for class and I need to get it out in plain language before I dress it up with those multisyllabic words academics like so much.¹ And I figure if I’m going to break it down, I may as well break it down on my blog.

As you may have guessed from the title, Time and Eternity talks about time. But time is hard to talk about. Think about it for a second. What is time? If you were explaining time to a kid, what would you say? Is time seconds, minutes, hours, days, years? Is time history? Is time both? Is time neither, is it something that we measure with clocks and place history on? It’s a big task to talk about time on even the most basic level, so it’s doubly impressive that the author would want to toss Jesus and Relativity into the mix on top of time.

Since time is hard, Jackelen doesn’t start from definitions or a history of thought about time, though she’ll get to both over the course of the book. Instead, she starts with hymns. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur believes that time is best understood through narrative and the author takes that as a truth. And what better narrative form is there than hymns? Hymns are the words of the people, sung with theological implications but without theological rigor. What questions do they ask about time? Due to her background, I suspect, the author surveys German, Swedish, and English hymns for mentions of time concepts and while the first few pages of that chapter are dense, packed with graphs and charts of relative frequencies of seasonal, day-to-day, and eternal time words, the story comes to life in the qualitative analysis. There’s a lot that she pulls out of her analysis, but the kicker from the chapter is that modern hymns (those written after 1960 or so) are less likely to talk about eternity as this far away place, separate from now, that good Christians get to go to one day. We modern people are more concerned with bringing the future into existence now and eternity, whatever it means, isn’t so crucial to us.

The first time I read through the book, I couldn’t figure out why eternity was important. Couldn’t you just talk about it as infinite time or whatever it is? But that’s exactly the point. Like you and your ex on facebook, time and eternity have a complicated relationship, more of a dance than anything else. The author makes the point at the end of the first chapter that people who don’t have an idea of eternity have to depend on their lifespan to fit all their needs. FOMO is real, y’all. So, with the idea that eternity can be important to us in how we view the world, she moves on in the next chapter to biblical and theological ideas about time and eternity.

Now this is the chapter that I got stuck on. Analyzing and quoting hymns? Perfectly fine. An overview of scientific ideas about time? Can’t wait. Pages upon pages about what one old guy whose name I can’t pronounce thought about the nature of time and God? Um, I’m good, thanks. Just hit the highlights. But the author is a professor of systematic theology and if we’re going to be talking about time in the church, we’re going to have to dig into the bible eventually, so vegetables before dessert it is.

As far as the bible goes, there’s not one theology of time spread throughout, which makes sense for a book that’s actually made of a bunch of smaller books written over centuries. According to the author, the Hebrews have both cyclical (things that repeat, like yearly festivals) and linear (like history, events laid out one after another without regular repetition) ideas of time that interact throughout the Hebrew Bible. The New Testament is more influenced by Greek thought about time, but really, it’s focused on eschatological time, looking forward to the time when the kingdom of God will be a reality on the Earth. The New Testament has, as the author puts it, this idea of “already” and “not yet”. Jesus came and saved us, but we’re still waiting for the total fulfillment of that act of salvation.

So far so good, but how do we make sense of these different ways of understanding time? And where’s that time/eternity dichotomy, that idea about time as something we’re stuck in and eternity as something outside of that? Well, that comes into Christian theology from Plato via St. Augustine. God, as the perfect Creator, is outside of time and eternity is where God is, and where we’ll go when we go to be with God. ² But how does God as perfect and separate work with a God who comes to Earth for the saving of many, or a God that loves and sustains those that love God? Humans stuck in time and God in eternity isn’t going to cut it.

And that’s where we bring in the Trinity. Now, I have a lot of thoughts on the Trinity and I think it’s an idea that we Christians all kinda shift sideways on, but when you come down to it, if you want a perfect God that creates and a loving God that sustains, you’re going to have to have a God who can hold multiple natures in one God. God is the Creator, the Son, and the Spirit, just as time is something that’s passed, something that exists right now, and something that will be in the future. God is best viewed in relationship and the author makes the case that so is time, whether that relationship is past/present/future or eschatological old and new time.

But where is the science, you may be asking?³ Well, the point of the book is to consider a theology of time and so that’s the emphasis, which is why we spend a chapter on hymns, a chapter on the bible and theology, and at the end of the book, a chapter on a possible theology of time. But science has some insights on time and those can be passed along to theology. Or, if you like, we can use scientific ideas to help us narrow down what we want from an understanding of time. Science can inform theology.

So the third chapter gets into it. It starts by talking about Newton, who settled on absolute time, thinking of time as something that passes at a second per second everywhere in the universe. That’s why our clocks agree- they’re measuring something fundamental about the universe. From there, we get to relativity, which takes the speed of light as a fundamental constant, which makes time relative. It doesn’t pass the same for different observers travelling at different speeds or in different gravitational fields. That’s something that we can measure, something we know to be true. So if time isn’t absolute, what is it? Well, don’t look to quantum mechanics for the answer- that’s only got the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle⁴, We can at least say that time flows forward, from the Second Law of Thermodynamics⁵, but chaos theory tells us that even if we know the initial conditions of a system, we can’t predict the future. That’s what modern science tells us- we don’t know exactly how best to describe time, but we know it isn’t absolute.

Okay, so we’ve done a lot of work, all in the spirit of understanding what time is, but we haven’t come around to anything definite. That’s the frustrating thing about ideas about time- it’s really hard to come to a definite answer on any of this. But, at the very least, with the backing of science, we can say that time isn’t absolute, and with the backing of biblical studies, that eternity isn’t absolutely outside of time either. At the very least, we can get rid of that Frozen Chosen idea of eternity as unchanging perfection. Time is best understood as a relation, or as a dance. If you like, you can try to measure it up with the Trinity- Creator/past/faith, Son/future/hope, Spirit/present/love.⁶ But the relation is what’s crucial for us in our lives. Rather than separating and breaking things down, we should be looking at how they interact. Science can tell us that time is that which is measured by clocks, but we can look at the way the past has brought us to the present which is moving toward the future, or how eschatology, or how we hope for the future, bleeds back into how we live our present.

Now, academically, I’m supposed to have some criticism of the book at this point. That’s problematic for me, because I’m still working to make sure I’ve grasped the point of the book and represented it accurately. I found the book dense, something that you have to work through to understand, which is the nature of working with time. I had hoped for something more accessible- a book that starts off talking about hymns, pokes through biblical ideas about time, then brings in some science? I’m about that. But this book is aimed at an academic audience and so the concepts aren’t spoon-fed to you, they’re wrapped up in nuance and arguments and long words that carry definitions sentences long.

And, for a book that is considering the question of time in science and theology, science surely has a small part. The author’s already come around the idea of time as relational and complex and uses science to support that. Science as a confirmation of a theology is fine, but in the book, it feels extra, like the chapter on science could have been a footnote in the larger argument. The hymns, too, feel added on, once you’ve gotten into the book. They could have been a sidebar in an overview of the history of theological thought about time- we would have come to the questions they posed either way.

But the author didn’t set out to write a book for popular consumption (though I think that would be a worthy project out of this, especially with the author’s emphasis on the importance of eternity and relation in our daily lives) and so I can’t fault her for her language. And by starting from questions pulled from the available Christian narrative and incorporating scientific ideas, she does present a more holistic view of time than a purely theological treatment would. She takes a tack within the science and religion story of bringing the two sides to the table to discuss one topic, one that both are going to have more questions than answers about, and comes out the other side with the importance of relationships and the metaphor of the dance, and I do very much like that.

All in all, what we’ve got here is a book whose topic sparks the imagination and whose contents you can sink your teeth into, whether you’ve specialized in religion, science, or neither. It’s not a simple read (nor should a book on time be) but a rewarding one, putting forward an argument for relationality and complexity in our views of time and God.

---

¹ Actually, I think that I have to boil it down for purposes of my own understanding. Having the freedom to use an uncommon word to express a complex idea is one of the benefits of academic- they’re space-savers. But they’re also barrier-makers and I need to fix that for myself
² Augustine actually has this idea of time as being something inside the human soul, where we remember the past, exist in the present, and anticipate the future, but that’s not the point.
³ You would be asking this if you were me and you were begging for a reason to continue trudging through this book.
⁴ The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is that thing that says that you can’t know both particle’s position and its speed, and since time is part of the equation for speed, it fuzzies up time a little as well. 
⁵ The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that in a closed system, entropy increases over time. Entropy is a measure of disorder, so over time, things become more disordered.
⁶ That's Michael Theunissen's way of delineating the Trinity in Negative /theologie der Zeit (p. 360, according to the endnote)

Stand By Me

Before I start, all I want to say right now about this past weekend is in this video:

French father and son have the most precious conversation in i...
A father and son have the most precious conversation during an interview by french media at the scene of the Bataclan attacks. I saw that it hadn't been subtitled in english yet, so I made a quick edit to show the rest of the world how freakin awesome some of our citizens are. They're my heros. I feel better too now! (Courtesy of Le Petit Journal) #paris #bataclan #parisattacksThanks you so much to LPJ for this interview and a very touching segment yesterday! Also, thank you for letting this video be accessed by all and not putting it down. <3 Original Segment: http://bit.ly/1Lix9L2Original Video (without subtitles): https://www.facebook.com/PetitJournalYannBarthes/videos/1013093998733798/
Posted by Jerome Isaac Rousseau on Monday, November 16, 2015

Now, in purely selfish news, I have a paper due today and you'll hear more about what that paper is about on Friday, but that means that I have no great desire to write anything extra. Plus, everything I want to write about is heavy and will require some work to pull together and I want to sit with it before I bring it you, lovely readers.

So instead, have a song! I have a new appreciation for podcasters who apologize for terrible laptop mics, but we work with what we've got. This particular video is doing double duty as a Flight of the Vlogyries video, in case you want to check out other ramblings between my good friend Joy and myself.

Yes, I know about the overly dramatic eyebrows. I'm stuck with them, I'm afraid. 

I just want it on the record that I think we can get through this together. Even if it turns out that we're an accident all alone in this vast universe and there was no meaning after all, I think, despite all the terrible things we're capable of, we can get through this. I believe in us.

And I needed to say that.

Stages of an Academic Life

(1) The Beginning

You look out over a landscape of books and PDFs of journal articles and papers and everything looks desolate and chaotic and you're sure that if you take even one step down into that maze of tiny pathways between the stacks, the walls of this world will collapse upon you, leaving you buried forever in other people's words and complicated ideas. And you go in anyway.

(2) The Panic

You walk up to an article, pick it up, and realize how woefully unprepared you were. You spend more time looking up the terms used in the paragraph-long sentences than you do actually reading the words on the page. You dig at the ground underneath it only to find a connecting series of tunnels papered with concepts that you may have heard of but certainly don't understand. The sky above you has yet to change from the stormy gray it was when you walked into the maze and so you choose the tunnels. At least it'll stay dry down there.

(3) The Shaky Confidence

The weather seems a little better as you climb out of the tunnels, a storm breaking up rather than waiting to break. You understand the groundwork here, how easy it is to get sucked into old thought patterns and old ideas, but also how so many of these stacks are connected, are built upon each other. You've emerged back into the book-scape in a completely different place than you were before, but that's fine. You've got a compass now, the vaguest ideas of a mental map beginning to form.

(4) The Exploration

It's actually exhilarating, being around this many ideas, this many thoughts, now that you feel like you've found your footing. So you read and you read and you read and then, for a change, you read. You read. There are some suggestions for other things you can read. You start to recognize names and concepts, to know where the tunnels are going to lead you if you take them again, and to see that some tunnels are regular thoroughfares and some are collapsed and some have fallen into disrepair but still have their merits. It was the easiest thing to be lost among all these words, and sometimes you still do, but you know the major streets. You've figured out how to get home and that's a comfort to balance the excitement of leaving in the first place. There's actually some sunshine in this place after all.

(5) The Building

You've noticed some gaps in the walls as you've walked, some question mark-shaped holes in the stacks. Before, you'd thought that surely someone would have considered this possibility or made that connection or clarified this point, but it seems like that's not the case. You settle in, leaving only to pull other words toward you, to help lay the foundation upon which your own thoughts are going to stack. Sometimes what you build tips sideways and sometimes it tumbles completely, but each time you have to correct, you find a better way to build, some way of shoring up the walls or strengthening the joints. You've seen this done before. It just takes time.

Or at least, I assume it does. But what do I know? This is my first time here too.

Roses

Last Thursday was a good day. I got up, I went to Starbucks, I got some work done, I went to go sit in Rainy Hall and I knocked out at least 45 pages in my book for my book review, then I went home and made my best approximation of a Sunrise Ski from B-Ski's and took a really well-timed nap and got an episode of Daredevil in before I went out with friends to go see Bonfire Night fireworks then watch V for Vendetta.

Last Friday was a good day. I got up, went to an extra masters-level session for my Philosophy of Time class and not only understood everything that was being talked about but asked a question that led the discussion to an interesting place that produced a clear framework for understanding various ideas about time, came home and made french toast, then went to a seminar on the academic job market, came back home and took an academic break by writing several scenes that made me happy in my NaNoWriMo novel.

Last Saturday was a good day. I slept in and when I got up, I spent the day alternating between writing, academic work, playing my ukulele and television while watching the rain from my window before going out in the evening to a nice little place down the street with some people from my building, where I had one of the best whiskies of my life and talked about everything from arriving in town to working jobs before going back to school to buying pizza at 2am and regretting nothing, then walked home, listing off favorite TV shows and chatting about life experiences.

Last Sunday was a good day. I lazed about, walked with friends to church, got to sing Come Thou Fount, had a real emotional moment with God, several real emotional moments with God, actually, went home, made a better version of the Sunrise Ski, watched some Simpsons, which was on the television in the common room, and got some work done before going to a movie night and having a deep discussion about good and evil and why I still go to church.

Monday was a good day. I got up, took a shower, ate some cereal, went to Rainy Hall, knocked out some reading, wrote a post, then went to a group discussion where the topics ranged from the image of God to transhumanism to Superman.

I'm writing this on Monday night, but let's just assume that Tuesday was also a good day. It promises to be. They're showing Treasure Planet through the film society and I have a friend to go with me and there's talk of nachos.

I don't say all this to be Little Miss Sunshine and Roses. I say all this because there are different definitions of good. I have a friend who is at this very moment reading my definition of what a good day is and yelling, "NEEEEERD!" in the most loving way possible, and that's a good thing too. It's good that there's not just one answer the question of What Makes People Happy, that our experiences of happiness are as diverse as we are. We're all little islands, little worlds inside heads that have to struggle to come together, to connect in any way. The world this week granted me a hundred ways to connect with other people, a thousand graces and miracles.

Which is rather nice, come to think of it.

Music Videos Part 2

Oh hey! It looks like I didn't have time to write a post this week, or that I wasn't happy with the posts I wrote, or that I just want something to be easy for once, okay, Patrice¹? Just for once. So here's another list of fantastic music videos that I think you'd like to watch, Dear Reader.

1. Thinking Out Loud by Ed Sheeran

I find this to cinematographically beautiful and you can't convince me otherwise.

2. Ghost Story by Charming Disaster

Another Welcome to Night Vale weather selection (seriously, have you not started listening to Night Vale yet?). The story told through the song is my favorite thing about it, but the costume changes are compelling as well.

3. Dearly Departed by Shakey Graves

A story within a story and one of the more catchy ooo sections you'll find in life.

4. Bad Self Portraits by Lake Street Dive

It's a twenty-something anthem for the ages, with just enough sincerity and determination to get you through the years. As a bonus, give their cover of I Want You Back a listen/watch as well.

5. St. Joseph's by The Avett Brothers

If you thought you were going to get away from this post without a little Avetts in your day, you were wrong. I like the concept, I love the song, and I can't say no to any live performance by The Avett Brothers.

BONUS: Hello by Adele

So excited for some new Adele in the world, but also in love with the apparent instagram filter they applied to this whole video.

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1 I don't actually know someone named Patrice that I'm yelling at here. It's a HIMYM reference. But also, I'd advocate for Patrice as, like, the best fake-anger name to exist.^↩

God Save the Queen

When I was in college, or maybe right after college, I was playing with the bell choir, so I was in my black dress pants (permanently borrowed from my roommate after she lost some weight) and my black long sleeved dress shirt, purchased many moons ago for one concert or another. The last hymn in the service was Here I Am, Lord. I don't remember what the sermon was about or even what songs we played as a bell choir, but I remember standing, being on the front pew, and singing my little heart out, never glancing down at the hymnal. And the pastor came up to me after the service and said, "On that last hymn, it looked like something was happening there." I think I smiled and stuttered something and returned to packing up the bells like I was supposed to be doing and the pastor went back to greeting people like he was supposed to be doing, but what I was really thinking was:

"There's always been 'something happening there' with this hymn, ever since the first time I heard it in high school. It's always spoken to me, always been a part of my life. It's been the hymn that I go to, when no one's around and the piano and the sanctuary is all mine, the one that I play and sing and cry to. This is a part of my DNA, it's a part of my soul, it's the very definition of my relationship with God, put into lyrics and tune. I can't help but feel something here.

"And where was this noticing of my reaction to this hymn three years ago when I was sitting two-thirds of the way back in the sanctuary, freezing my face so I wouldn't break out in sobs? Where was this caring when I was lost, when I didn't know my purpose, when I had broken my heart and realized again that I can't even stand on my own two feet by myself? Did you see how I stared at the top right corner of the sanctuary, how my voice failed? Could you feel my heart begging for God to use me instead of setting me aside again and again, for God to call me, just me, no one else but me, to some real and good and concrete purpose? Did you see that? Did you see?

"Or was I too far away?"

On Wednesday, I was singing with the New College Choir at the installation of one of New College's professors as a Chaplain-in-Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen (pulled that straight off the order of service) and since it was an event with a musical group, I was in my black dress pants (stretched out over the years as I've gained and lost weight) and my black long sleeved dress shirt, a little frayed at the edges of the sleeves. The last song in the service was God Save the Queen, which I could not in good American conscience sing, but the song after the sermon was Be Thou My Vision. I stood on the second row, and glanced at the screen because those Brits changed the words on me, and sang my little broken heart out. No one came over to me after the service. No one commented on what it seemed like I was feeling. But that's all right because those years ago in Chapel Hill, I wasn't really talking to the pastor. What I meant was:

"God, there's something happening here. There's always been something happening here.

"God, this is us. This is You.

"God, why don't you speak to me?

"God, where have you been?

"God, why don't you call me?

"God, do you see? Do you see me, here and hurting and alone again? Do you see what's happening?"

Because I do want to rest here. I want to stay in these hymns and these words and these walls. My heart breaks for the Church like it breaks for nothing else. I want to stand beside it through its travails and trials, to stand in familial shame with it when it falters and to burst with quiet pride when it succeeds. I don't want holiness for myself, but I would strive for it for the Church, to see it built again as a bastion of Christ's love for the world and a perpetual reminder of the deep truth of God in a world that skirts the surface of everything that's out there. I could, in complete unfeigned humility, spend a lifetime in service to a Church bent on loving and caring and saving the world around it, the world it's placed in, to live and breathe and move in. That I can do.

I just need God to tell me that that's God's plan as well as mine. I need God to tell me that I'm leaning on a desire that's true and real and good. I need God to come into my heart like Jesus overturning the tables of the money-changers and wreck the parts of me that I shouldn't have had in the first place. I grab hold of dreams like I'm grasping at straws and I build up capabilities like a person abandoned in a desert. I can weather many a storm. That doesn't mean that I should. It doesn't mean that I have to. And all these thoughts and fears and bastions I've built, some of them may be holding me back from the place that I am best suited to be.

I need to know where that is, like a touchstone, like a path I've walked before, many moons ago. I need to be sure that I'm not sending my life off to live for some cause that's seen its day and its usefulness. If I'm going to invest heart and soul and give up the things that I feel deep in my bones would make me happy, I need to know that this, at least, will give me a happiness worth having. If I'm giving up the world for God, I need to know God's going to catch me on the other side.

I want it to be true. Like a longing in my heart, I want it to be true. But like anything else to do with my heart, I don't trust it.

Not yet, anyway.

Sports Envy

I have a sports problem.

Actually, lemme clarify. I feel as if that statement misrepresents me. I have a sports-access problem. Because, see, I'm really good at cheering for sports teams.

Good enough for ACC TV, good enough for anything.

And I miss having that in my life.

For example, my Tar Heels are RANKED in football, are 7-1 on the year, and are undefeated in ACC play AND I CAN'T WATCH A SINGLE GAME. I live in Chapel Hill for EIGHT YEARS and rarely if ever experienced this kind of hope and happiness when it came to life on the gridiron. The UNC-Duke football game, which is happening at noon, is sold out. Sold. Out. I went to a UNC-Duke football game when I was a kid because the tickets were cheap and group rates fill seats. What is going on in the world and why am I not there to experience it?

In a related example, the UNC Basketball team is preseason #1 for a record ninth time, according to the news articles, and I have a really good feeling about this year and as long as we don't have a Kendal Marshall situation happen with Marcus Paige, there could be some really good things happening come March. This could be somebody's year. Not mine, though. I'm across an ocean and I don't think they even know what ACC basketball is over here. Dear God, so help me, I don't think they even know what the ACC is.

Hell, even THE PANTHERS are having a knock-down season. I DON'T EVEN WATCH PANTHERS GAMES AND I'M JEALOUS.

And don't tell me that I could get into soccer. It's not even a real game.

Listen, nobody feel sorry for me or anything because I'm living my dreams and having a great time and all of that stuff and I definitely have not been missing crisp fall mornings turn into perfect fall afternoons than lean into chilly fall evenings whose time and tenor is directed by the travails and triumphs of the eleven men on the field wearing the right color jersey. I definitely do not have a deep-seated longing to walk into the Dean Dome one more time and Jump Around and scream and shout and cheer and put my arms around my friends while we sing Hark. I also do not need at all to dry my eyes right now.

All I'm saying is that I have some pent-up energy that is usually reserved for active following of athletics and I'm unsure of how to address that issue. Ugh. Maybe I'll take up baking or something.

Adventures in Shaving

When I was maybe a sophomore in college, I went out with a bunch of my SAI sisters to Cold Stone after a meeting and one of the sisters starts telling this story about how she had just shaved her legs and needed someone else to feel how smooth they are and ended up calling an ex-boyfriend of hers and... you know how that is. This story was then followed by a complete reenactment of her dance audition to be a cast member on a Disney cruise, in the middle of the Cold Stone lobby. I tell you this so that you have context for the story to follow as I take my place in the proud tradition of sisters sharing more information than is maybe necessary, but just as much information as is pertinent to the amusement of others. With that in mind, let me tell you that I shaved my legs this weekend, for the first time since I left. 

Yeah. I know. Let me tell you about it.

There are several reasons why I hadn’t shaved, which I shall enumerate below.

1. You may remember the packing list fiasco way back when. Razors were on the list of items that I could “more than likely buy when I get there”.
2. When I got here, I reserved all pre-bank account spending for the essentials. I pulled out £200 from an ATM using my American debit card and I figured I’d go on a big cosmetics run once my Scottish bank account opened in a week or so.
3. I had to wait until I had my BRP (basically, my permanent visa for the year, not just my entry clearance) until I could put in the paperwork for a bank account. I couldn’t get that until September 20th.
4. I went to the RBS branch nearest campus, which was swarmed with students. It took them three and a half weeks to open my account.
5. It took a full week after my account was open for my financial aid check to clear. 
6. All of this meant that my big cosmetics run didn’t take place until the last day in October. 

I’m not sure why I stuck to this “wait until you have money” plan- I’ve charged maybe an extra £100 on my credit card than I had planned on in the first place, and I could have just as easily spent some of that money on proper shampoo, conditioner, soap, and razors. I certainly feel more settled now that I have cosmetics that smell more like me as opposed to the stop-gap shampoo and conditioner I bought upon getting off the plane, desperate to no longer smell like I'd been on a plane. But for whatever reason, I waited until now and man, did that have some interesting results.

At first, I was actually pretty excited to be living somewhere where jeans would be the norm and where I would have next to no occasion to show my legs to the world. Not that I’m Victorian about it, just that my legs are nothing to write home about and I'm always ready to cull unnecessary parts of my beauty regimen. Plus, my new bathroom doesn’t exactly offer ample space to work with when shaving and, as I am fond of saying, with complete innocence, there’s a lot of real estate down there. I felt like I was dodging a bullet.

But then I realized that it’s not as frigid here as I expected it to be and that I could have been wearing the one dress or one of the two skirts I brought with me if I wanted. And while yes, I wore them with tights, the tights weren’t exactly necessary for warmth. They were necessary, however, if I wanted to preserve any semblance of my femininity. 

See, my German genes come out primarily in how much hair my body produces. While it’s a benefit when we’re talking about the Disney princess-esque locks that flow from my scalp, it’s less fun when we’re taking about underarm hair or leg hair, both of which I’m fairly certain I could have braided as of Saturday morning. I could feel the hair on my legs move in the breeze when I was wearing shorts in my room, which was not an unpleasant feeling, but also not a feeling that you can openly discuss. Unless you’re a dude. Which, dudes. I get it. I now have an appreciation for why you could prefer shorts even in winter. 

Also, I have weird bald patches on my legs and I’m not sure if I should be concerned about them or thankful for them. 

So, having gone shopping with my newly-recovered cash, I returned ready to take a shower and get down to business (she again said completely innocently). For reference, this is the size of my bathroom:

Itty-bitty living space

It's like I never left the plane.

Clearly, shaving in the shower was not an option. Slightly better was the idea of shaving in the sink, so this is what I endeavored to do. What ensued is what I imagine happens when a teenager finally goes to shave a struggling beard. I had to rinse the razor after each swipe. Pretty soon there were clumps of hair in the sink. I started to worry that I should have invested in a pair of clippers for the first pass. I didn’t think the razor would make it through even one leg. 

I like to think that all my life was preparing me for this moment. Those thirteen years of ballet were not wasted as I balanced on one leg and stretched and twisted and turned to reach opposite sides of my ankles and to get the best possible view of my kneecap, a repeat offender for harboring escapees from the razor. And there was a fair amount of dedication and tenacity required because you haven’t shaved your legs until you’ve waited fifty-two days to get around to that. And I’m going to hazard that there was some physics in there as well, maybe some calculating of the coefficient of static friction of bare feet on a water-soaked bathroom floor. Also some praying. But in the end, I prevailed. I walked out of there with the smoothest legs I’ve had in months and not a drop of blood on the floor. Boo-freaking-yah. 

Now, I’m not one to submit to the patriarchy. I’m a whisky drinking, football watching, action movie loving, change-my-own-tire kind of person and if I wanted to wear my skirts with hairy legs, ain’t no power in the ‘verse that could stop me. But damn, it feels nice to have smooth legs again and toes that don’t look like they could stand in for hobbit feet. It’s a matter of taking control over my appearance. 

I was talking to one of my friends in Sunday School a couple of years ago, shortly after she, her husband, and her preschool son had moved into a new house and she said, “The trick is to unpack the kitchen first. You do that and you can tackle basically everything else.” And I cringed a little internally because a woman, saying that you need to get your kitchen in order? How much more stereotypical can you get? But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. As the Night Vale novel put it, if you know a place, if it is or has been your home, you’re going to know where the silverware drawer is. It’s a way of getting settled, of knowing where you are, of returning your circumstances to some kind of normalcy. 

I can generally be about some kind of normalcy. 

So, my friends, when you move to a new country and you’re trying to “settle in”, take all the help you can get. Even if that comes in the form of pink razors and bathroom gymnastics.