FaithLife - The Chronicle of a Christian in Progress

So, I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want

2011-10-17T00:28:00.001-04:00

For most of my life, I'd have sworn the answer to that question was marriage and family. For some portion of my life that was probably true; but it's been decades since that time, and I only just realized it today.

My life plan in all its incarnations has centered around being married with a family. As a young girl, I dreamed of ten or twelve children, and picked out their names; as an early teenager I moderated my family size somewhat, but I still thought my greatest gift to the world would be my amazing, Christian children. I knew that as a young woman I had made many choices contrary to pursuit of this goal, but I assumed that I was being tempted away from what I truly wanted.

It's dangerous to take life lessons from the movies, but a line in "The Wedding Date" has always stuck with me: "Every woman has the love life she really wants." The point of the sentiment (and the movie) is that you choose the kind of relationships you have and the way you want to react to them; if you choose to hang onto destructive ones, it is because you've decided that is the kind of life you are most comfortable with. So I figured my series of terrible relationship decisions was about some underlying belief that I was unlovable, or a deep-seated fear that no one would love me forever and so I'd rather pick relationships I knew were going to end, or some other such thing. The real answer requires far less psychobabble.

I do want marriage and kids, and to a degree my insistence that I treasured these things was genuine. But what I failed to acknowledge is that the more important goal for me, going back some 20 years, is this: I want to prove that I am irresistably desirable to every man I meet, regardless of his race, age, business relationship, partner status or other obstacles. If all men don't want we and don't at some point yield to that desire in ways small or large (preferably large), my true life goal remains naggingly unfulfilled.

Of course, the trouble with that goal is that it's fairly incompatible with my marriage (not to mention those of most other people around me); I can't exactly focus on being a suitable life partner while pursuing the attentions of every man I come into contact with. And so I prioritize: if I have to pick an objective, go with the one that I hold most dear.

The end result is that I do have exactly the love life I've chosen. I have a magic number so high that I've lost count and forgotten some of the associated individuals. I have married men pining for me. But because my goal is unachievable - I mean, let's face it, I'm no supermodel - I am constantly unsatisfied. Not, as I thought, because I don't have my dream family; nor, as I also thought, because my lust is insatiable. My disappointment is simple, basic: I'm not able to do what I set out to do.

Which leaves me with a few questions: now that I've acknowledged my goal and the impossibility of getting there, can I give it up? Knowing is certainly half the battle, but what exactly is that other half? And if I were able to apply my zeal to the kind of relationships I say I want, could I still be successful?

Hear no evil, see no evil

2011-09-29T19:03:00.005-04:00

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

When we hear this quote, we think of the "great" historical evils; the quintessential example for those of us who grew up in the 20th century is the Holocaust. It's a way of wagging a finger at the moral failures of the ordinary people in those situations, the ones who knew better and should have spoken up but didn't. In our heads, we wonder how they could have allowed such things to pass when they were so obviously wrong. In our hearts, we congratulate ourselves because we are good people who would have done the right thing, if we'd had the chance.

But this quote is not applicable to the "little" evils of our day, things so minor that they don't really justify being called evils. They are "unfortunate" events, when poor and disenfranchised people suffer around the world or in the next neighborhood over. If someone in Ethiopia loses access to their land or water so that a richer country can take advantage of those resources, or if someone in North Minneapolis is struggling to find shelter or food or a safe place where their children can play, this is not a manifestation of evil. It's sad, of course, and it would be great if something could be done, but poverty is intractable and the causes are too complex for us to fix, and all we can do is shake our heads while we sip our latte and realize that we can't really change those things. Quite frankly, those things are distant "third-world" problems; and while we may self-deprecatingly laugh at our "first-world" problems, those are the ones that we have and they are the only ones we can really deal with.

Some might say that the real first-world problem is that we are reliant on the existence of the third world to support our standard of living. Without it, our goods would not be so cheap and plentiful, our lives not nearly so convenient, our growth not so rapid, and our favored status not so clear. That is why third-world problems both cannot be evil and must not have solutions; otherwise, any investigation into their roots might point a finger too near our direction. But even if this were true, it is not our fault. We did not make these systems, and we certainly can't change them. This is just how it is, and we have to get along as best we can.

Martin Luther King said that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," but these things are not a threat to us, and they are not truly injustice; that would imply that there is a right and a wrong to these situations. And that can't be true, because if if were, then we would know it, and we would be doing the right thing. We are good good people, not like those other good people, and if there were a true moral question we would be on the right side of it.

Comfort is not the reason good people do nothing. What is wrong with comfort? Comfort is a reward, a sign that we have done well, worked hard, followed the rules, and earned your rest. If other people don't or can't achieve what we have, it is not good for them, but has nothing to do with us. It is certainly not our responsibility to change anyone else's life, or to make sure they are secure. Because our comfort and their discomfort are separate things, and we owe those people no debt. The fact that we worry at all is a sign of our sensitivity, our generosity; we don't have to think about those things at all, but since we do, that shows that we are good people, people who will definitely fix injustice if we see it.

And we know what justice is about; it is about rights, about documents, about equality before the law, about voting. It is about equal opportunity, anti-discrimination, a level playing field, and merit. It is about individual aspirations and the belief that everyone can succeed if they try, and those who deserve it will be rewarded. Sometimes it is about keeping people from being killed, but that is only under some circumstances; there are many reasons why people are killed. But if someone is killed and it really is unjust, justice will allow you to get everything you are entitled to under law. Justice happens in law; and if we have any duty, it is to be honest jurors and vote for good legislators.

But justice is not about what we buy. It is not about where we live, or where someone else lives. It is not about who goes to what school and the kind of education they get. It is not about who owns what. It is not about who is hungry or who is healthy. Those things result from a tangled web of individual, corporate, and government decisions, and you can't even assign responsibility to anyone. Supposing you could - you still would be hard pressed to find anyone doing evil. We are just trying to earn a good living and have decent lives and make good decisions for our kids, and we aren't hurting anyone else. We certainly aren't responsible for what happens to unfortunate people in the world around us. But we are good people, and when we have the chance to fight evil and injustice, we definitely will.

The Poetry of Last Resort

2011-09-19T05:39:00.001-04:00

I am not a poet;
But as the blood pounds in my ears
And the sighs rise in my chest,
I want to write about
Decades wasted --
When I thought so little of myself
And others thought less.

What is the point
Of balling my fists
Or raising my voice
Against my own foolishness?
I have filled years that will not return
With bitter remembrances of a prophecy
That I did hoped for but did believe.
And so it did not come to pass.

Instead, I write bad poerty that flows
From the constant spring of tears.
I grow tired of the deep well
That means I am always crying.

Oh, right. That's why I don't like people.

2011-05-13T15:38:00.004-04:00

OK, fine; I actually do like people. Mostly. Sometimes. On their good days. And mine.

But I've been having a set of experiences this week that remind me why I don't like opening up to people and why I spend a lot of my time in protection/game face mode. I realized that I've been in a "friendship" for several years that was mostly me trying to make the other person feel admired and cared for while I spent most of my time feeling like I had to beg for this person's attention. Not unsurprisingly, that person really felt like we were good, close friends, while I felt kind of like the contents of poopy diaper. And I can't decide what pisses me off more about that situation: the fact that despite much progress over the past few years, there are obviously still situations in which I have the self-esteem of a gnat; or the fact that I even had to tell someone that yes, friends are actually supposed to initiate words and deeds of caring and concern for the other person from time to time.

I'm getting better at understanding who makes a good close personal friend for me; but I still have some hangovers from the time when I wasn't as willing to prioritize my emotional needs. It makes me so angry to feel like I have to fight with someone to explain that being my friend isn't a burden, and that I have more positive than negative characteristics to make spending time with me worthwhile. What a stupid, stupid conversation to try and have with anyone; why in heaven's name would I spend any amount of time trying to convince someone of that if they don't already see it and respond to it? I fell into an idiotic thing where I found someone I really admired and wanted them to like me so much that I decided I didn't need to be valued or respected in return. But I don't need to be liked that much.

It's part of my continued wrestling with what it means to have "friends" in my life. That word means a great deal to me, but gets tossed around in our society so casually; and then I end up feeling bad for not wanting to call people friends who I don't think I can trust and rely on and who honestly don't know me all that well and don't have any interest in doing so. It's not that I think being a friend is some sort of ball-and-chain obligation to be attending to someone else all the time; I certainly don't think of my friends that way. I feel like having to explain the actions and activities that make up a friendship makes it sound like a list of to-dos without any of the joy or magic: call and text every so often, ask someone how they're doing, ask them out for a meal, invite them to an event you know they'd like, let them call you at weird hours because they need to talk, spend time thinking about who they are and what they need and what interests them and what you like about them. A friendship is more than the sum of all those parts, more than a checklist of things you've done that day or week or month.

But I guess that's the point: if you have to explain to someone what it would mean to be your friend, that's not a trip either one of you should take together. Because the other person will only resent the list of tasks they've been given, and you'll resent being with someone who'd rather be doing something else.

Watching history?

2011-05-02T00:05:00.004-04:00

So, unless you're asleep or under a rock right now, you've heard the news about Osama bin Laden. Someone on MSNBC just said that "this marks the end of something, marks the end of ... an important period for the nation." My first reaction is clearly heresy at this moment but: the end of what? Do we know why we're cheering? What do we think was accomplished tonight? And did we learn anything at all from these last 9-1/2 years?

We won't know for a while yet what effect bin Laden's death will have on terrorism around the world. It would truly be a gift if his absence caused the al Qaeda networks' acts of senseless killing to stop. But I am afraid that we remain as unreflective as ever about the context within which those acts are taking place, and the changes we've allowed in ourselves since September 11th.

Will we actually seek to understand the social, economic or environmental drivers that caused bin Laden's message to be so attractive to so many, and will we do anything about those issues? Will we stop using "security" as an excuse to destroy our own civil liberties and civic life, to say nothing of how we treat those who are not American citizens? Will we examine our prejudices toward Muslims, the Middle East, and non-white immigrants that we allowed to persist and intensify throughout this period? Will we confront our own nation's role as an agent of violence and injustice around the world?

As I listen to flashmobs cheering outside the White House, my heart has become incredibly heavy, because we are so busy rallying that we cannot ask ourselves what this should mean to us. Much like the national mood after September 11th, I fear that we'll be whipped into a false sense of unity that cuts off any opportunity to think about who we want to be following this event. We will cheer our military might and congratulate ourselves for the path that got us here, without ever wondering about the assumptions that underlie how we act on our own soil and abroad.

We are overflowing with a frenzy of gleeful hate because we killed the scapegoat on whom we'd placed all the blame for our decade of deep fearfulness. Yes, Osama bin Laden bore significant responsibility for the September 11th attacks; but the story of what happened to us that day - and certainly the story of what has gone on since - is much more complicated than that. It's hard for me to cheer, because I'm struggling to understand: did this moment really make us safer, or better?

Finally! Higher education is not the end-all-be-all

2011-04-18T12:48:00.002-04:00

Even though I'm just weeks away from getting my Master's degree, I think this article totally hits the spot:

Education is a bubble in a classic sense. To call something a bubble, it must be overpriced and there must be an intense belief in it. Housing was a classic bubble, as were tech stocks in the ’90s, because they were both very overvalued, but there was an incredibly widespread belief that almost could not be questioned — you had to own a house in 2005, and you had to be in an equity-market index fund in 1999.

Probably the only candidate left for a bubble — at least in the developed world (maybe emerging markets are a bubble) — is education. It’s basically extremely overpriced. People are not getting their money’s worth, objectively, when you do the math. And at the same time it is something that is incredibly intensively believed; there’s this sort of psycho-social component to people taking on these enormous debts when they go to college simply because that’s what everybody’s doing.

We're convincing too many of our children that higher education is the path they have to take to be successful at anything, we're burdening them with tremendous debt loads to buy into the system, and we've decided that going to college is the solution for all that ails us in terms of poverty and inequity for disadvantaged communities. I think higher education has a purpose and can be very valuable - but I also know that I got the most value out of it when I went back to school at 25, at which point I had worked and supported myself for several years and had a much better sense of who I was and what I wanted out of college. We need to recognize and support that there are a much wider range of alternatives for a fulfilling life, and that many of them don't require going to college at 18 - if ever.

This similar article by the same author who posted the above interview with Peter Thiel also discusses why higher education is not the safe route to success that we all keep telling ourselves it is. Here, he quotes Paul Krugman:

The belief that education is becoming ever more important rests on the plausible-sounding notion that advances in technology increase job opportunities for those who work with information — loosely speaking, that computers help those who work with their minds, while hurting those who work with their hands.

Some years ago, however, the economists David Autor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane argued that this was the wrong way to think about it. Computers, they pointed out, excel at routine tasks, “cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules.” Therefore, any routine task — a category that includes many white-collar, non-manual jobs — is in the firing line. Conversely, jobs that can’t be carried out by following explicit rules — a category that includes many kinds of manual labor, from truck drivers to janitors — will tend to grow even in the face of technological progress.

Finally, I feel validated, as I've been arguing for years that pushing kids into college just because everyone says that's the thing to do isn't a particularly good idea. If The Economist says so, I must be right! I'd also like to note that I was arguing something similar about the push to an "ownership society" in housing well before 2008. Maybe I should become a predictor of bubbles?

A public schools paradox

2011-04-15T23:05:00.004-04:00

I should be writing a paper, but I'm hopping onto the blog for the first time in four months. The impetus? A desperately perplexing civic issue that I needed to talk about in public, in the hopes of finding some new ways to think about it.

I've been wondering for many months now: what happens to public school systems when parents who have the means and/or care to do so exit in order to give their children a better education? As more and more of my friends who live in urban areas start having kids and making these decisions, this question has really been weighing on my mind. In the past few months, I've heard many different friends and acquaintances mention how and why they chose not to send their child to the public school where they were residing at the time. The methods vary - whether they put their child in a private school, a charter school, or changed school districts by moving. The nature of the school systems also vary - some are uniformly dangerous and of poor quality, some have quality that varies widely depending on the school your child gets placed in, and others are just considered less than the best.

This might not be such a remarkable set of stories; but the part that I'm struggling with is that all of these people are also individuals who care about social and economic justice, and who care about preserving a strong public school system. Looking at the research about education and school systems, the key factors that make a difference in a good education and a good school environment are the socioeconomic status of the families attending a school, and the level of involvement of the parents of a school's students in their education. And so, a mismatch occurs between the values of socially-minded individuals and the choices that they make about their families, when inequity of education for others is a highly likely result of those choices.

It's a hard decision to argue against, when you balance the direct consequences for your child with the indirect consequences for people to whom you don't have any specific responsibility - or even any concrete connection. It's also a really hard thing to talk about as a question in our public life together, because everybody gets really defensive and crazy. People who've decided to take their children out of a low-performing school or system get kind of ticked off when you ask about it, and tend to vehemently defend why they couldn't make their child a social experiment for the sake of abstract justice. People who've kept their children in public schools tend to argue that they schools are just fine, thank you, and, by the way, people who took their kids out don't care about schools and are kind of elitist. And of course, I have to defend my right to even be a part of the conversation, because I don't have kids and so I can't really have anything worthwhile to say unless I've been in the situation myself, and also, it's a private decision and none of my damn business.

But I feel like that standoff is just destined to continue the downward spiral of some of our most challenged schools, while we all throw up our hands and decide there's nothing to be done. I want to try and open up this conversation, even if it makes us all uncomfortable, because I feel like we need to develop another set of options from the ones we feel stuck in. We keep throwing money and new educational or organizational models at low-performing schools in the hopes that it will all magically work out into some improvement, without realizing that if there aren't enough people holding a school directly and personally accountable for the education of its students every day, those resources are largely wasted.

I'm not trying to vilify anyone who made the choice to move their children to a school or system that they thought was better. But I am trying to figure out how we don't abandon the children who weren't fortunate enough to make such a move, and how we save ourselves the future costs of that abandonment as a society. I think some of the answer is structural and systemic: changing our systems of school funding so they are no longer tied to the local tax base, and/or directing our statewide/nationwide education resources for facilities, materials, training, assistance and staff to the communities and schools facing the most challenges first; making sure that the incentives for school staff - and board members - are aligned with the achievement of the outcomes we want for our kids (although we've got to think through those incentive systems very carefully).

But I feel like the other part of the answer (and in fact the greater part, because without it the right structural changes won't happen, either) is a way for us as citizens of our localities, states and nation to really own our responsibility to take concrete action to ensure the best possible education for all those children who aren't our own, and especially for the children who won't get to move up and out to "better options." We need to make that concept moot in terms of instructional quality, educational outcomes and adequate preparation for their lives as adults. It might be through running for school board; or it might be through showing up at school board meetings. Maybe we teach, or tutor or volunteer to make up for the gaps while we work on building a better system. Really good afterschool opportunities matter, too; although we can't rely on afterschool to make up for the failings of in-school.

Anyway, I'm really trying to sort this out. How do we as individual citizens, both with kids and without kids, make choices in the short-term that don't compromise our future for the long-term? Your thoughts on the topic would be greatly appreciated!

Love is a battlefield

2010-12-13T01:25:00.001-05:00

So, it turns out that my ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend doesn't like me. I suppose that's not really surprising ... it's rare for that situation to prompt a warm bond between two women. What's irritating, however, is that the "not liking" being specifically translated into pressure for my ex not to remain friends with me - and what surprises me is how readily he may acquiesce.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at that, either; but I guess I was left off guard by the fact that our friendship had seemed so durable over the year since we'd stopped dating. We'd certainly had to adjust to certain types of affection being out of bounds, and to our friendship becoming long distance after he relocated to his hometown. But after all of that, we'd still remained close confidants and advisors to one another, and it seemed that we both had appreciated such a smooth transition allowing us to preserve the best parts of our relationship.

Suddenly, that relationship is a battleground, or part of one, anyway. It's frustrating because this is certainly not a battle of my own making; I've got no interest in preventing my ex from moving on to other successful relationships. But somehow I find myself an unwitting party to a her-vs-me tug-of-war that seems both immature and completely unneccessary, and my only options are to be combatant or casualty.

Well, actually, I'm a casualty either way. I suppose I could try to fight for my role in his life, but ultimately that's not something I can claim on my own, and I'm not sure that he'll defend the territory against the pressure of his new relationship. Perhaps it's cowardice or a lack of faith, but my current inclination is to yield the field; it doesn't seem like the best use of my emotional resources to try and hold on to someone who doesn't want to hold on to me. It's also an attempt at self-protection, I guess: leave before I get left.

I'm going to count this as another benefit of not dating anymore: thankfully, this is the last person with whom I'll find myself in this particular situation. Not that other friendships don't have the potential to end badly, too. But in most of those cases, I can trace it back to a bad situation I had a hand in creating, so it feels a little less unjust.

Water, water everywhere - but only if it's properly filtered and bottled and wrapped in an attractive package

2010-10-15T20:01:00.005-04:00

I just found out from a friend that it's Blog Action Day 2010; I'm not so plugged into this whole sphere o' bloggers. The topic du jour is water ... so here goes.

Like food, I only just recently started paying much attention to water. The first piece that sparked my attention was when I realized a) that I ought to be drinking more of it and b) that I really like it. A few years back, I started listening to all the nutrition advice that said I should be drinking a lot more water and a lot less soda; and slowly I transitioned over to water and juice, and then just varying kinds of water (bubbly and non). I like fizzy water, especially if it has a little flavor; but on many days, there's nothing that beats the incredibly refreshing taste of a cold glass of water. (I've never understood, BTW, why people say water has no taste. It tastes like ... water!)

My water justice awakening came through the Boston Faith & Justice Network (also, the ultimate source of my food justice awakening), at their Gratitude & Creation event in February 2009. The event included a session by Corporate Accountability on corporate water rights and their devastating effects on local environments and economies both here at home and around the world. This started me on a trail of water-justice exploring, from the abuses and folly of the bottled water industry to the availability (or lack thereof) of water fountains in public places. I'd always thought that the bottled/filtered water craze was silly and unnecessary (full public disclosure: I do own a Brita pitcher), but around this time it went from "unnecessary" to "unjust."

I don't know that I can make the case for water access better than others who have spent a lot of time doing it. But I think this is one of those clear and easy issues on which a simple behavior shift can have a powerful effect for justice: those of us who are blessed with ample supplies of extremely safe potable water have a wide variety of ways to get that water and carry it around with us that don't degrade the environments and livelihoods of others. So for Blog Action Day 2010, I hope you'll commit to making the water that we all need to live a resources that we all have by right.

Tech Talk, Part II

2010-09-25T12:35:00.002-04:00

As you may remember from Part I of our saga, I obtained a Blackberry earlier this year, and used it successfully (if not quite with a full sense of satisfaction) for many months. But a couple of months ago, the touch pad started acting a little funny; it seemed a bit hypersensitive, and would occasionally select things at the slightest touch. Sometimes it was annoying, but it didn't seem like a big deal.

Fast forward a few more weeks, and we had a major problem. Suddenly, a brief tap on my touch pad opened a variety of random programs; attempting to select anything on my phone was like using Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" function. After a while, it became difficult not only to use the touch pad, but also the buttons to the side of the touch pad, as they would set it off. My Blackberry became a very expensive phone-only handset.

At the same time, a second crisis loomed: the impending demise of my laptop. My laptop was purchased in 2003, and it has served my incredibly well for the past several years. However, it has become sluggish as computers do over time, and I've been considering a laptop replacement for about 2 years. Unfortunately, life transitions - like, you know, quitting my job and going to grad school - required my funds to be expended elsewhere, and so I've been putting off my purchase again and again.

My computer, though, was longing to be released to the great computer recycling center in the sky (not China!). The early warning signals came about a year ago, when in the middle of the fall semester my laptop screen just went black. I had a massive freak-out, followed by desperately trying to peer into the barely visible image of my screen so I could log in and backup all my files. Thankfully, another reboot made my baby feel better, and I made a backup promptly thereafter (not to mention, a couple of times since). But I knew my time was running out.

As I put off the purchase again this spring, I think my laptop decided it was losing patience with me. So it gave me a second crisis warning, this time by refusing to recognize that it was plugged into its power supply. This is actually the culmination of a long-standing battery/power supply issue, where my laptop battery no longer holds any charge and the power supply cord sometimes had to be positioned in just certain ways in order for the laptop to acknowledge its existence. (I never bought a new battery, BTW, because I kept thinking I'd be replacing my laptop in just a couple months anyway.) Change that "sometimes" to "always" and the "just certain ways" to "just one very specific way" and you arrive at our current situation: my power cord ghetto-taped to the back of my laptop with the screen at the exact right angle to serve as the anchor for the adhesive bundle, and me afraid to even shift my laptop a few inches on the table lest it bug out for good.

Suffice it to say, I'd reached a critical point for both of my primary devices, and something had to be done tout de suite.

The penultimate chapter: Part III - Why I Should Never Second Guess Myself When I Already Know What I Want, and What Really Drives My Computing Choices

Reflective practice

2010-09-19T11:21:00.005-04:00

One of the things I often say to people who ask how I like graduate school is how much I appreciate the time to think, especially the time to reflect on past experiences and understand what I can learn from them. In my first semester, one of the things that struck me about my classes was how relevant they were to both my current and previous nonprofit management experience. One of my first classes even triggered a PTSD-like emotional response to an exchange with a professor that felt a little too much like certain unhappy conversations with my old board of directors; and while that doesn't sound like a good thing, it actually gave me a chance very early on to recognize feelings and defensive strategies that I was still carrying from my past position and to make a conscious decision to adopt some new ways of responding. (The class ultimately turned out just fine, BTW.)

As the year went on, it seemed like reflection on my past job moved into the background, and the focus shifted to my current organizational involvements in the real-world challenges I would bring to my class discussions and assignments. It was a shift that made sense, of course, and allowed me to become a reflective practitioner in real time as well as after the fact. The trend seemed like it would continue into this year; but as I realized that in planning some of my topics for course projects and papers, I noticed an unexpected sense of regret that I wouldn't be able to process more of that past experience through my current work.

Turns out, I'm not quite done with studying my past job, and I'm very glad for it. I'm taking a course on adaptive leadership this semester; and as I tried to figure out which organization to use as a basis for the papers I have to write, I realized that none of the present situations fit so well as the situation I found myself in just before I left my old job. There are some difficulties in trying to use that position and organization as the basis for my work: both I and the organization have moved on since then, and I've deliberately limited my contact with my past colleagues to provide some emotional space for all of us. I'm not at the point where I want to discuss the events surrounding my departure with most of the people directly involved in the conflict, because even a year and a half later there are still things that make me upset when I think about them.

But that is one of the advantages to studying the situation as a school project: I think it will help me to move past the old tensions and hurts and make the experience as productive as possible for my future development (as a person as well as a manager/leader). The reading material raises probing questions not only about what I thought was going on with other actors in the organization, but also about my own assumptions, values and behaviors. I need to be able to take a closer look at what I did as the situation progressed, because the fact of the matter is that many of my own strategies were just as maladaptive and unfruitful as those applied by my colleagues. In order to become a better colleague, manager and leader in my current and future roles, I have to recognize my own weaknesses as well as strengths and try to develop new ways of addressing change and conflict.

I'm hopeful about what will emerge from my writing, because I feel like I have many opportunities in the present to test out new methods for handling organizational situations. In particular, my challenge areas are dealing with politics, with personality conflicts, with my own tendency to inflexibility in how I want things done and a lack of openness to the suggestions of others, and with trying out new skills or activities that I haven't already mastered. I'd like my work to give me some additional layers of analytical process that can provide a buffer between what's happening around me and a my very sensitive emotional core; I don't want to become emotionless, but I want to get better at managing how my emotions are expressed and how I can use them to better advantage in my dealings with other people.

I think there's a lot of this that will be fun as well as deep and difficult. Case in point, the following excerpt from today's reading (The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, p. 94):

One way to understand the challenges raised by external loyalties is to use the metaphor of a vegetable stew. To make a good vegetable stew, you have to cook the ingredients just enough that they give up some of their original color and taste; otherwise, you'd have a pot of crunchy vegetables, not a stew. But if you cook the vegetables too much, each of them will lose so much of its distinctive qualities that you will end up with a pot of undifferentiated mush.

Imagine these vegetables as stakeholders, and suppose you get the stew just right. When those carrots and onions go back to carrot-land and onion-land, having sacrificed some of their distinctiveness in the interests of contributing to the stew, their old friends and family at home will noticed they have changed. "You ... smell like an onion," the carrots will say. "You're not one of us anymore. You've sold out. We sent you there to represent us and champion our views to the others, not to come back contaminated with their juices on you. What did they do to you there?"

Note to everybody: in no professional conversation anywhere does anyone want to hear about who did what with their juices. It's like my professor who said on the first day of class that he "gets off" on people writing down what he says when he lectures. Even if he didn't mean it literally, it is still just so gross.

But also, very funny!

Help! 'Cause I need somebody.

2010-09-18T14:37:00.003-04:00

I know, it's way too early in the semester, but I am already a) super-tired and b) a little behind on my assignments. D'oh!

This last week has clearly been the Week of Adjusting to Reality, following the first Week of Naive Optimism About the Year Ahead. The adjustment started when I was trying to figure out why the heck I was so tired all the time; and then I remembered that going to work and going to school at the same time is kind of insane. Clearly, my experience at my alma mater was like childbirth: a very painful experience that your body and mind promptly forgets in the bliss of your ultimate accomplishment ... which is what allows people to keep having children, and me to embark on my second year of grad school after taking on a new job.

Of course, I loved my undergrad institution and was one of its biggest fans, before as well as after I graduated. Similarly, I still adore my job and I am really glad to be back in school. I appreciate the good feelings that helped me take on the upcoming year; and I also appreciate that I'm getting my reality-check now, so I can prepare myself for the hard work ahead.

I did get a little extra fright from my boss this past week, as he mentioned that he was concerned about how well I would perform in the spring, which is both the busiest period in my job cycle and my final semester. He was suggesting that perhaps I should take the semester off, and come back to school in the fall, as there wasn't any real rush to get my degree by May (from his point of view). I initially balked inside, feeling like if I took a leave, all of a sudden school would dragon forever and I'd never get finished. Then I remembered that, if I had to do my second summer fellowship during the academic year, I'd been planning to take a semester off and come back in the fall anyway - so honestly, if I had to do it for work, what's the big deal? It just illustrates one of my primary personality failings that I'm working on, which is that I tend to reject ideas that don't match with my initial conception of what should go on, without giving them proper consideration before reacting. The good news is that, after a couple of minutes, hours or days, I'm generally able to stop being so stubborn and consider alternatives. :-)

Things I have to remember as I get into the rest of the semester:

NO GRAD SCHOOL DIETS. My body gave me heck this past week for my indulgence in carbs and candy on Monday and Tuesday. Big no-no; regardless of how crazy my schedule gets, I have to keep on my good food regimen, because it keeps me happy and healthy.
I am not a socialite. I'm giving myself a couple of additional weeks of being a social butterfly (mostly because of things I already committed to doing), but starting in October, I am shutting down my social scene. I have a job, a graduate fellowship, and 4 different boards to serve on in addition to school; there's no time for partying.
TV will wait. It's why I have a DVR, so that I don't have to watch everything at once. And I know full well that I get half as much done in twice the time if I put on the boob-tube for "background noise."
Don't procrastinate. Procrastination may be my number one bad habit, but I have to get it under control and bring out the time-management superstar I know I have within me.

There's probably some other stuff, but I'm due back in class. Cheerio!

Professionalism vs. participation

2010-09-07T18:42:00.003-04:00

So, I had my first class of the year tonight - hooray! It is quite nice to be back in school. I think that it's a good sign of how much I really like my program that I haven't been dreading coming back, but actually looking forward to it.

I have to say that I was worried about the class as it got started this evening; the professor has a speaking pace that is very ... slow. He's not monotone, and he's not boring; but after 5 minutes I had a real fear that class was going to feel excruciatingly long. I did feel kind of long, but in the end I felt like he'd presented some interesting topics, and he had an amusing sense of humor (of the dry wit variety, to which I can relate very well as a speaker).

One of the interesting topics he brought up was the conflict between a society built on democratic (and sometimes radically anti-government) ideals and the whole concept of professional public administration. He mention that as a country and a profession we've never quite come to terms with the fact that public administrators, who are not elected or even in most cases appointed officials, are the biggest class of policy-makers we have - far more influential than our elected leaders (not to mention generally more focused on managing the country than political posturing to retain their position). This topic has come up in a couple of classes before, as has the idea of a "politics-administration" dichotomy that is supposed to keep public administrators focused on implementing the policies decided in the political process. But the reality of the complex systems we've set up to govern and manage our society is that our elected leaders don't end up having the time or the knowledge to work out all the details of how our public systems work, and they leave that to the staff of administrative agencies - who become policy-makers every time they create and administrative rule and decide how it should be applied.

On the one hand, there's the argument that we need administrative staff with professional training who can use their discretion based on specialized expertise to determine the minute details that bring vague and far-reaching policies into daily practice. On the other hand, there's an argument that administrators with no direct accountability to the people over whom they exercise power should not have power to make such important decisions about where public resources go and what happens to them when they get there. For the past year, I've kind of thought of this as an academic discussion; but I realized today that it is incredibly personal, and a tension I've been wrestling with for years.

So much of my vocational and avocational philosophy is about community and citizen empowerment, and recognizing the right and the ability of regular people to play a meaningful, dominant role in the decision-making that affects their lives. But at the same time, I'm in the middle of my second degree program that trains people to be professionals in their field - presumably based on the assumption that to do architecture or to manage organizations well, you generally need significant training in the tools and techniques of the trade. The very idea behind these schools is that, excepting the rare geniuses among us, the untrained individual will design or plan or manage or administer very poorly; and in practice, rare genius is rarely recognized unless you've gone to the trouble of getting the credentials to prove what you know.

This is a potentially serious philosophical conflict. How do I argue for open access to governance and decision-making on the principle that we all can participate without the need to be specialists - and then at the same time, defend the value of specialized training in making sure that people are well-prepared to be good decision-makers? If enough of this kind of training can be given to the general public in a simple, inexpensive way that allows them to participate fully, then why do we have all of these specialized schools (and more importantly, why am I spending my money on them)? And if this kind of training can't be gotten expect with specialized study, then doesn't that imply that there is a limit to how much or how well our citizenry will actually be able to self-govern?

Folks will probably argue that it doesn't need to be either-or, there's a balance, different roles for different times, etc., etc. But I feel like there's a little bit of a cop-out there, and a refusal to recognize that the conflict, while negotiable, is still real and sometimes very, very challenging. This is a question that gets played out over and over again, as public agencies are asked both to do their jobs efficiently and professionally and to be accessible and responsive to the demands of the public. It may be almost impossible to satisfy both of those requirements.

I have to head off to class now - but this is an item for further discussion! Heck, I may even turn it into my paper topic; isn't that clever of me?

A weekend of walks

2010-09-05T21:33:00.017-04:00

This weekend, Hurricane Earl huffed, and puffed - and decided he didn't feel like vacationing in the Cape and Islands. Thus, after a rainstorm of normal heaviness on Friday, the Greater Boston area was blessed with an absolutely gorgeous weekend.

So, back about two years ago, I wanted to start increasing my daily walking as my exercise, rather than working out. My adherence to this principle was pretty spotty, up until this summer, when the location of my fellowship placement allowed me to walk to and from work every day. As noted yesterday, a similar location is one of the a wesome things about my job, so I get to keep up the regular walking for the foreseeable future. But this weekend I got an extra walking bonus, as two friends accompanied me on long-awaited wanders.

For many years since I have lived in Boston, I've been an admirer of the Southwest Corridor Park. You can rea d a bit about the park's origins here; suffice it to say that any park that results from a successful community battle against a highway is a must-see in my book. I've been on portions of the Southwest Corridor, but I have wanted for ages to walk the whole 4-1/2 miles. Finally, I was inspired by the unexpected good weather yesterday, and found a ready companion for a spur-of-the-moment excursion.

One of the reasons I hadn't walked the corridor before is that I was afraid I would tire out before the end. Four-plus miles seemed daunting, and it just wouldn't be the same to do it in bits and pieces. But Saturday my friend and I set out to go as far as we felt comfortable; it turned out to be a nice and easy stroll over a couple of hours, with just two brief breaks in the second half of the journey for rest and water. The park is fun and gorgeous, dotted with community gardens, athletic fields and playgrounds all along the way. Some of the Orange Line stations also have beautiful entrances facing the park; I think Ruggles Station was my favorite.

I was tired after a few hours in the sun, and slept well when I got home. Today, I woke up rested and ready for walk #2, a shorter stroll through the Wellington-Harrington and East Cambridge neighborhoods. With pup in tow (or more often, doing the towing!) a second friend and I spent a good hour catching up and gossiping along the streets of Cambridge, glorying in another sunny day and perfect temperatures. Both of us are more sedentary by nature; my top pastimes are reading books, watching TV and movies, and playing board games, and it's not until you get to bowling or salsa dancing that I get off the couch to entertain myself. But we decided that social walking is a good, natural and fun way to keep our activity levels high and our lives up-to-date. We walked a little over 2 miles, I think, and it was a lovely start to the day.

I feel pretty happy with myself this weekend. I know that weight and clothing size can be useful health indicators, but they're not the only ones, and I feel like these last two days were symbolic of the way I want to keep track of my health going forward. For me, it is more about making sure that the way I eat, the way I sleep, and other aspects of taking care of myself don't prohibit me from doing the things that I want to do. As long as I can take myself on a good long walk at a moment's notice, I figure things for my body are going reasonably well.

Tech Talk, Part I

2010-09-03T23:38:00.004-04:00

I haven't done a good gadget post in a long time, but it's not because I haven't had gadget news to tell. It seems like a good time to revive my consumer electronics musings, given new promptings on both the home and work fronts.

As you all know, I have a deep love of HTC phones; my last phone posting in December 2008 was a rave about the AT&T FUZE. I couldn't bring myself to indulge in the crazy purchase price, and after trying out multiple unsatisfactory phones during the previous month, I found myself an HTC 8525 on eBay to provide me some comfort. It should be noted that, immediately after this debacle, my blogging frequency declined precipitously. Coincidence? I think not. I still mourn the 8125 days, when my phone was happy and blogging was easy.

Fast-forward to a year later; my 8525, at the end of a couple of months of weird sluggish performance, dies an untimely death just before I'm set to travel home for Christmas. (As a bonus, my cordless phone battery died at the same time, so for a solid day I was without any phone at all.) I felt nervous about traveling without a cell (how quickly our technology aid becomes a technology crutch), so I headed into the T-Mobile store to convince them to show me the good handset love. In the intervening year, both the HTC craze and the Android craze had swept the nation. Somehow, I allowed myself to be talked into a Motorola CLIQ, in the belief that T-Mobile's online backup features would make up for the contact sync failings of the G1.

Not so fast, sister. Attempting to sync my contacts through T-Mobile Backup was as aggravating as any other Outlook-to-Android solution previously tried; plus I discovered that T-Mobile had somehow creepily kept copies of test pictures I took when I was trying out my Blackberry Curve (I didn't even know they'd been synced online in any way). But the true deal-breaker was the fact that the CLIQ with its MOTOBLUR functions was like a hyperactive child that drains all your energy - literally, all my battery power was out within 8 hours. Yes, I was charging up the battery properly, and yes, I tried turning off all the social networking features; despite all that, and despite turning my phone off for much of my train ride home, I had so little battery power that I had to borrow a stranger's phone to call my sister to pick me up from the station, instead of using the brand-new phone I'd purchased days earlier.

In a white rage, I returned to the T-Mobile store when I got back to Boston, and convinced the store manager that they'd darn well better give me a new smartphone for the sale price at which I had bought the CLIQ, regardless of whether their holiday sale was over. (I think he may have been afraid that I was about to go all Mad Black Woman on him.) Irritated and exhausted, I took the manager's recommendation for time-tested reliability over flash and fun, and I finally boarded the Blackberry bus, with a Bold 9700. Pros: email setup is the easiest thing in the world, and syncing with Outlook is the second easiest. Cons: small keyboard (but thankfully QWERTY), small screen, no stylus, no touch screen.

I've had a love/hate relationship with my Blackberry since I bought it. It does my PDA stuff pretty well - certainly much better than any Android phone - but there are little features of its PIM applications, its phone options, and how screen selection works that just drive me batty. There are a number of useful and entertaining applications from Blackberry App World; but I always feel cramped by the small screen I have to work on. The keyboard also cramps my style, because as much as I have developed my skill at Blackberry typing, writing anything longer than a couple paragraphs is very uncomfortable. (Also, see aforementioned screen issue for trying to read what you just typed.)

So I've been struggling since January with the fact that I have a basically functional phone, but I just don't like it very much. Or, at least, I had a basically functional phone for a while ...

Up next: Part II - The Phone That Didn't Love Me, and Why No Laptop Lives Forever

In preparation

2010-09-03T20:26:00.003-04:00

I'm currently celebrating the end of a very busy, very productive and very positive summer. There's been travel, good food, exercise, family time, friend time, career development, and a good bit of R&R. Honestly, I long for the days of my phone that made my want to blog all the time (HTC, I miss you!) ... somehow, my Blackberry seems all business and not quite enough play. Well, that's not quite true; I play XXL Gems and Facebook all the time, but the urge to write out my thoughts at length feels incompatible with my current keyboard.

Digression. The real point I was ambling toward is that there's so much I want to write about, because the summer has been amazing. But the thing that struck me most today is how clearly I can see the path that has been leading up to this really cool point in my life. That's not always the case with me; there are many things that God has worked on in my life that I didn't understand until much, much later, and quite a few that I don't yet get. But at this moment, all these threads are coming together in a pattern that is crystal clear - and very beautiful.

It hit home this afternoon in the bathroom (where I do all my best thinking, of course). I'd just taken a break from the mind-numbing task of starting to clean up a mailing list database at my new job. The task made me want to scratch my eyes out a little; but then I thought how cool it is to have this job that makes such full use of all my skills - from the big ones like strategic thinking to the seemingly little ones like database design and management. As much as the thought of sifting through those 6,000 records was daunting, I appreciated being able to do it, and being able to plan for how to improve our database design to help make these tasks easier in the future.

I can't describe how much I love my new job; it's like a puzzle piece that exactly fits to make the picture complete, only I didn't even realize it was missing until it came along. The story of my hire is definitely one of those you-find-it-when-you're-not-looking events (as much as I hate that phrase in other contexts): a connection from my summer fellowship gave my name to the organization, as did another person within the organization; I got an email about coming in for an interview the morning after I'd even heard that I'd been suggested for the position; and within the month, I was hired. I hadn't been planning on looking for a job until next year, I hadn't thought that I wanted to work in nonprofit management again for a while ... and I even realized, after looking back through some emails in the spring, that I'd ignored an earlier heads up from a friend about the fact that the position was opening up, because I didn't think I wanted a job like this at the moment. But when the opportunity came back around again - thank God! - it was so obvious how perfect a fit it is for me right now, that I can still hardly believe I've been so blessed.

It feels weird to insert a bulleted list in the middle of a rapturous story, but it's the clearest way I can think of to illustrate all the large and small ways that this job is so just-right:

My last experience with nonprofit management was stressful to say the least, and I really didn't want to go back to the nonprofit world for a while. Or so I thought; it turns out that what I didn't want was not to have to deal with the crazy stressful aspects of my former job. My new job is everything I loved about my old job (working on design and planning, social responsibility, travel, collaboration, public speaking, writing, graphic design, organizing panels and forums, having autonomy and flexibility), minus the things I didn't (board management, finance and accounting, fundraising), plus the supportive work environment I really needed.
My first interview was like the best first date ever. :D Example: as my new boss explained all the reasons why he had started the award program in the first place, I was thinking in my head, "I don't have to give you my rant on architecture awards, because you just gave it for me!" And then my fabulous predecessor began explaining all the people they'd been partnering with over the years and the new relationships they hoped to build; it was a list of all the people I either already loved working with from my last job or was already dying to partner with sometime soon. When I was finally hired, I had to remind myself to stay on vacation for the couple of weeks between the end of my fellowship and my start date, because I was so eager to get into my new role.
One of the things I loved about my summer fellowship was the fact that I could walk to work every day; it was so much fun, and I loved getting in that extra bit of exercise. I kept thinking about how wonderful it would be to have my permanent job within walking distance, but I thought I couldn't possibly restrict my job search to within a mile of my house. Lo and behold: my new job is exactly a mile from my house, and a mere two blocks from where I was working all summer. I still love the walk just as much as ever!
Speaking of my summer fellowship, I was actually awarded two this summer, and when I first started interviewing for the job, I was trying to figure out when to schedule the second one sometime during the upcoming year. It was my one hesitation about taking the job; how could I start a new job, and then tell them that I needed three months off within my first year to go work in Washington, DC for a bit? And alternately, how could I go back to my school and tell them that I had to turn down the prestigious fellowship they'd awarded me? My new boss answered the question for me in my second interview, when discussing my part-time status: "The hours vary throughout the year, and things get pretty quiet in the summer, so you can use that time if you want to make some extra money." Me: "Well, there is this thing I'm supposed to do next summer ..."
And as it turns out, the part-time hours are one of the things I love about my job. In the immediate term, it means I can finish my final year of grad school and my second fellowship as planned. In the longer term, it means I have more time for all the volunteer things that I love to do, but that are so hard to squeeze in around a full-time schedule. But it's about more than just scheduling. As I have already discovered in my first week, the flexibility of my hours relieves a tremendous amount of the stress of working every day, and helps me to find that elusive work-life balance: I go to work when I am awake and rested, I get judged based on what I accomplish rather than when I clock in and clock out, I come home with plenty of time to take care of things around the house, and I can make time for friends and family with much more ease. It's a big step for me towards a new kind of lifestyle; one that is not built on rushing from place to place, but rather on making time for what matters most to me.

So I feel like this job has been prepared just for me, at this exact moment in my life. And what's more, I feel like I've been preparing for it over the past several months and even years, although I didn't know it. Where I've gone to school and my last job are obvious tie-ins; but so is the fact that my tech training and gadget geekiness let me have intelligent conversations about the tools we use in our office, or that the hours I spent and the skills I built researching and writing for papers this spring and my project report this summer are perfect preparation for the site visit reports and case studies I'll be responsible for in my work. Even living on a student budget this past year has been a preparation for me, odd as that sounds. When I look back on the amount of income I had this year, and the fact that for most of the year I was paying for my apartment by myself, I realize that I've been learning what are luxuries and what are necessities in my budget, and learning that I can live very, very well on much less than I've been thinking I needed. My part-time salary is actually an abundant gift.

This is one of those mountaintop moments for me. God has been hard at work clearing my mind and heart over the past year to be able to receive this gift and appreciate it. My joy is very full right now, and I can see so many amazing things both in my past and my future. I know that the path ahead will contain stressors and challenges as well as delights; but I am so thankful for the restful space in which to celebrate all the goodness around me.

I love travel!

2010-06-14T20:02:00.003-04:00

So, it has been kind of a grueling month - I started my summer fellowship in mid-May, and then promptly began alternating between being at the office and traveling up and down the East Coast and across the country. This past Saturday was my one day at home between two week-long trips, one to DC and the other to San Francisco. I'm tired, and I miss my own bed and my cats. But as I sit here in the Yerba Buena Gardens enjoying a fabulous late lunch at the Samovar Tea Lounge, I realized one critical fact that makes it all worthwhile: I love to travel.

It doesn't really matter how many names I call the TSA in my head, I still love the getting there - whether by plane, train or busmobile. And I love the being there: discovering Root at Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (look it up, then buy it and drink it with ginger beer); BBQing with my family and my best friend; watching the Nationals in the rain with my sister; standing in the Supreme Court; talking Doctor Who with my brother-in-law; finding out at the farmers market that emu eggs have two blue layers inside; getting my butt kicked on the Work-It Circuit at the gym with my hostess; and having tea and quiche in the California afternoon sun.

Mind you, as much as I love going away, I am always eager to get back (especially to these two adorable ones). I consider it the best of both worlds - there's no place like home, but those other places are still pretty awesome.

The opposite of anorexia

2010-05-21T00:09:00.002-04:00

Whatever that would be called, I think I must have it. You see, with anorexia, you look at yourself in the mirror and no matter how thin you are, what you see is a horribly fat person, so you keep starving yourself to try and make that image change. But for me, no matter that I'm apparently a "big girl"; when I look in the mirror I see someone nicely-shaped and attractive, not fat.

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what other people see when they look at me. I look around on the street and on the T and most of the folks I see are definitely much thinner than I am; so I'm constantly searching for a person my size so I can say, "Aha, that's how I look." Sometimes I see women who I think are my size, but then I look at my arms and my thighs and they look decidedly larger than the other woman's. Then I see women who I think are heavier than I am ... but I keep wondering if maybe I only think they're heavier than I am, because I can't admit how large I really am. I know I'm not so special that no one else is my size! At any rate, it is all very confusing and mentally exhausting.

I spent five minutes in the bathroom today trying to convince myself that I really am fat. I don't know if it stuck, though; I don't feel fat. It's not that I am oblivious to my weight gain over the years - all I have to do is find an old pair of pants to remind me that I used to be many clothing sizes smaller. But it doesn't bother me as much as it seems like the world around me is telling me it should: the advertisements for every exercise plan and gym, the body mass index, even my mother (who, Lord love her, makes comments about my weight out of a sincere concern for my health given our family's medical history, which makes it hard to be mad at her). I guess I ought to feel more guilty about my weight, but what I feel instead is pretty happy. I'm physically active, I try to eat well for myself and the world around me, and I have clothes I love to wear. Excepting the periodic morning when I wake up cranky, I really do feel pretty, and witty, and bright.

I remain perplexed. What bothers me, I suppose, is that I don't know if other people see the same good things I see when I look at myself, and I'm always trying to figure out how I look in their eyes.

What doesn't kill you helps you graduate!

2010-04-28T19:59:00.002-04:00

I have so many things to be thankful for right now:

Start of April work count: 3 papers, 3 presentations, 2 final exams, 1 case study, 1 reflection paper. Current work count: 1 presentation, 1 paper. Hallelujah!
I chose my fellowship placement for the summer, and we are all mutually delighted to have me.
I had a great interview as the final source for my last paper; education + networking = awesome.
My intake today consisted of actual foods with recognized nutritional value.
I can go to bed whenever I feel like it tonight, with no guilt about staying up late or going to bed early. I choose early!!

I wasn't sure I'd make it through today successfully - so an extra hooray for that! Thank you, and good night.

Getting an education

2010-04-11T16:12:00.002-04:00

When I started my graduate program, one of the things I loved was how clearly relevant the course were to me as a non-profit practitioner. When we studied questions about how non-profits related to their constituencies, or the legal issues surrounding their governance and types of activities, the relationship was clear and direct to the actual issues I'd faced as an executive director. It gave me a sense of confidence that I wasn't in a program of frou-frou academia; I was going to be learning about things that mattered to my daily professional life.

That trend has continued, but I'm struck with a new aspect of it this semester. I find that I am learning things that are not only relevant, but that significantly transform the way I think about my professional practice and my life as a citizen of my community. This realization became particularly forceful today, as I am working to complete a paper on the role of non-profit boards and their members. When I was dealing with the board of my former organization, I had pretty specific ideas of how boards should and should not operate, and what their relationship to the staff should be. These ideas were reinforced by experiences working with other boards in the past, by the advice of our donor organizations, and by the common best practice guidelines in the field. A major part of the reason I ended up leaving was that members of the board executive committee wanted to define the board's work in ways that seemed directly contrary to the best practice recommendations, and I didn't feel that I could support the changes they wanted to make.

I took these same ideas with me as I joined the boards of two community organizations this past fall. I wanted to use my experience - and the new knowledge I would be gaining in my studies - to help these boards become more professional and more effective. I knew that each organization and its board has particular conditions and characteristics, and that you can't just ram a "preferred" model into place; but still, I expected that the best way forward for these boards would look like the models I knew with only minor adaptations to local conditions. (In retrospect, for a girl who is so passionate about the necessity for organic localization in other aspects of public life, I find this especially ironic.)

I started my current research paper with the goal of delving into and defining non-profit board best practices, so I could present them with knowledgeable confidence to my colleagues. But what I am finding instead is that my own perspective is being transformed and expanded, to understand the common and recurring challenges of the traditional governance models. I'm also being introduced to alternative ways of thinking about and doing board work that make me have to revise my own rigid preconceptions. Normally, I hate being wrong :-) ... but in this case, I'm really digging it, because I can feel myself being stretched and can see all the ways that it will help me to become both a better board member and, if I ever go back to non-profit management, a much better senior executive. I love it when being challenged ends up being fun!

A very Good Friday!

2010-04-02T15:44:00.005-04:00

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions. Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are proved right when you speak and justified when you judge. Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me. Surely you desire truth in the inner parts; you teach me wisdom in the inmost place. Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones you have crushed rejoice. Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquity. Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.
-- Psalm 51:1-12

Today is a beautiful day - literally and figuratively. Turns out, last night was not a mope; it was a wonderful, freeing calling.

God is calling me to be single. That's something that we talk about as a hypothetical, but rarely as a concrete reality of someone's life. In single Christian circles, it's the holy thing you're supposed to say: "If God calls me to be single, then I will accept it ..." But no one talks about receiving that calling, and what it might be like; there's always kind of an assumed "... but I'll also be ready when He brings me my mate." If we do say someone is or was called to be single, it's more something that kind of happened to them over time, as the hoped-for mate did not appear and they resigned themselves to their situation.

I suppose I could also fall into the category of someone whose hoped-for mate hasn't appeared, and maybe some would describe my current mood as merely resigning myself to the facts of the case. But it doesn't feel like resignation ... it feels like revelation, a moment of clarity when I am understanding what God has for me - and when I am looking forward to what that means for me, not trying to accept what I'm leaving behind. A friend today was also referring to it as my decision; and I guess it is a decision in some ways, but it's not like I just laid in my bed last night and decided that celibacy for the rest of my life was the best option I could come up with. The decision is to follow the leading I received, not from within me, but from a Spirit beyond me.

It's a decision to be obedient to what I heard, and it fills me with excitement. I think of the disciples, when Jesus came to them and called them. They immediately got up, left what they were doing and what they had, and followed him. I imagine them tossing aside their nets and their money boxes and springing up, only looking at Jesus, knowing something amazing was ahead.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it."
-- Matthew 16:24-25

These verses have a very real and tangible meaning for me today. I always interpreted them as the ongoing work of taking up your cross as a Christian every day - and I still believe that is a valid and helpful interpretation. But I also now understand how one can have a specific cross given to you to bear, a particular thing that you must be willing to take on or give up as part of God's path for you. Amazingly, I also understand how one could take up such a cross with joy and expectation of what you will find, instead of with fear and weariness at the thought of the long road before you.

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
-- Matthew 11:29-30

This passage describes how I feel today: light, and free. When I was praying and crying yesterday, I told God I wanted to be free from having to keep going through this cycle; but it was more of a wish than an intentional prayer, and I figured I was destined to keep slogging through with the burden of a spirit that was so untoward. I never imagined He would answer me!

It's not that I don't expect there will be times that I wrestle with this calling, or that there's not still some transition and ongoing formation of my mind in this area. But I feel so happy, and peaceful, in a way that I could not have thought possible, at the notion that I don't need to worry about pursuing relationships and marriage for fulfillment, that I can just take that off the table. In the past, the mere thought filled me with dread at a lonely life stretching on for decades; but now, I am overjoyed at being unbound to do His work and to enjoy all that He is doing in my life. It's a wonderful, inexplicable, powerful change.

... but I called it a lesson learned.

2010-04-02T01:05:00.002-04:00

I don't know if this is a revelation or a mope or what, but it seemed worth putting out there.

I have a real basic issue with relying on God for my emotional needs. It's not just as far as men and dating, although that's the area with the most visible carnage; it affects the way I view all my friends and what I expect of them, and even the emotional maturity (or lack thereof) with which I respond to professional situations. My constant, black-hole need for affirmation and affection to validate my existence and all my thoughts and actions creates a lot of ridiculous drama, and causes me to do many things that are quite stupid. The fact that my life is fairly stable and. successful is very much the grace of God in protecting me from my own faults.

Nonetheless, I still have a major lesson to learn about who God is, and therefore who I am; and it occurred to me that my singleness may be a very deliberate, purposeful teaching mode on God's part. I've had multiple rounds of opportunities to sort this out, and it may have gotten to the point where I'm going to have to take the most long and painful (for me) route to gain this knowledge.

It's possible that I'm not going to be granted a husband and children, because in order to deal with this sin issue of mine, I need not to have that source of affirmation that I yearn for the most. It's not a punishment, just a consequence; because I've turned having a family into an idol, I can't be trusted with it. It's like alcoholism, or any other addiction - while the situation might be OK for many other folks, it affects me differently and I'm not able to handle it properly.

I feel a little like part of me just died saying that, but that might not be a bad thing, as there's a part of me that obviously needs to die to sin and have a renewed spirit after God's heart. I don't feel like crying; just regretful, wishing I'd taken the opportunity to do differently when I had it. That's life, though ... you don't get to go back, you just get the chance not to make the same mistake the next time.

A bad Lent

2010-04-01T19:45:00.004-04:00

I am having a very, very crabby day, mostly because I finally came face-to-face with the fact that I wasted my Lent in disobedience. Much crying ensued during the noon service, which didn't set a great tone for my afternoon and evening.

So my Lent resolution was to give up dating in thought and practice - no online sites, so trying to get the attention of guys at school or church or elsewhere, no flirting, no fantasizing, nada. This was supposed to be my time to take a break from my constant search for a man to complete my life, so that I could recognize that I am only complete in Christ.

It was hard for me to decide to do this at first, because a little flirtation with a friend seemed to be starting, and I wanted to enjoy it. In fact, when this idea came into my head, I recoiled from it like a shot ... which was how I knew this was an important topic to commit to. So I made the resolution; but it's become painfully clear as we approach the end of Lent (and honestly, well before that, if I'd been willing to admit it) that I never kept this commitment in my heart.

I still held on to the little flirtation with my friend. Maybe I didn't actively flirt; but I was always checking to see if he was online to talk, or if I could drop by for a visit. I welcomed it when we would kiss or cuddle on the couch, all the while pretending to tell myself that it didn't mean anything and I was just treating him as a friend. I found excuses to stay the night and cuddle, and got disappointed and irritated when he didn't pay enough special attention to me.

This particular friend wasn't the only problem. With other men I knew, I indulged in inappropriate fantasies, and seeking to spend a little extra time with them. When I was out in a club, instead of just enjoying the music and dancing and the company of my girlfriend, I was jealous and bitter because she got all the attention from the men in the bar and I didn't. All the time, I was still doing the thing that I had set out not to do during Lent: making my enjoyment of a situation and my sense of value dependent on the attentions of men, and letting that pursuit of attention consume my thoughts.

Sadly, this realization wasn't prompted by a sense of my own sin; it was prompted by extreme disappointment when I realized that my flirty friend had no interest in me beyond that. SO I did what I normally do: I got aloof and irritable and started imagining all sort of situations where I could give him the cold shoulder. And then I got to church, and I realized what I'd been doing all the morning, and all the six weeks before ... and finally, my failure to keep my promise to God became real to me.

I couldn't quite ask forgiveness this afternoon, because I am just so ashamed of this constant, willful pattern in my life that I never seem to have the discipline to break. The worst part is that God would forgive me, because I will just take advantage of His grace to sin some more. I feel like I can't keep asking Him to forgive me over and over again, when my supposed repentance is so fleeting.

The easiest major life change I ever made

2010-03-25T19:23:00.006-04:00

So, I commented back at the beginning of the year that I was struggling with the change in my diet because I hadn't planned it out very well, and I was a little worried at how well it would take. Turns out, I didn't need to worry so much. I've discovered a number of things over the past 3 months, which kind of make me laugh at how big a deal I was afraid this would be.

It started when I went shopping shortly after that post, and realized how little my shopping list really changed. I do eat a lot of non-meat items already: cereal, pasta, fruit, veggies. The first time I went shopping, the only major difference was that I just didn't get kielbasa. In the time since, I've found myself buying more salad greens, trying to get a few more different types of veggies (in addition to just getting broccoli, buying asparagus and sweet potatoes and regular potatoes) in addition to broccoli), testing out a new fruit or two (I love avocados!! Also, I want to get some grapefruit when it comes into season), and getting more dried fruit to snack on. I am hoping to get more adventurous as I go along, but it was nice to know that I could take meat out of my diet and still eat things I like.

I also couldn't have picked a better place to live if I wanted to make this change. Right after I discovered that my shopping list didn't change much, I also discovered that it's not all that hard for me to get sustainable meat. In the summer, I have my local farmer's market, and I can't wait for it to open again. But even now, I have the option of joining one of multiple meat CSAs in addition to regular produce CSAs, buying at Harvest Co-op or at Whole Foods - or just walking down the hill from my house. That's right: last fall, a local cafe opened up a market as part of its operation that only sells locally produced goods - bread, cheese, veggies, chips, toiletries, dairy, and yes, meat.

This store, Sherman Market, has totally transformed my idea of shopping. The first time I went in, I asked the shop owner what she knew about the farms where the meat was coming from - and she answered! She told me about the two different farms, and we discussed their practices and which she liked better. In my later visits, I got taste tests and recommendations for good cheese from another employee; I discussed jams with the owner; and we went on a web fact-finding search in the store to see what information we could get on the sources of meat processed at a local smokehouse. Grocery shopping is a completely different experience at this store: friendly, personal, interactive, informative, deliberate. I look forward to the times when I get to go shopping there, which is unheard of for me and groceries, and it makes me realize the personal value-added in a local economic network.

Finally, as if all that didn't make my life change easy enough, my community of friends takes away almost all the social challenge of becoming a sustainable-local-meatatarian. In the first couple of weeks, I had a hard time remembering to tell folks about my food restrictions; but I've gotten better at that now. However, the part that surprised me is how often my friends were already eating sustainable local meat! Within my first month, I went to an event where someone brought delicious pulled pork, and I was afraid I might have to break my resolution in the first 30 days. But when I asked my friend where her meat came from, expecting to be disappointed, she told me that her mother had bought a pig from a local farm, kept an eye on its raising, and then now they had killed and were eating it. In another case, friends invited me to dinner and we ate beef sliders made with meat from their CSA (not to mention homemade bread); and in yet another, a friend had chorizo sausages from animals raised in the mountains of Spain near where he visits his family (local and sustainable in the place where it came from, and hand-transported, so I'm counting it).

The point is: I feel amazingly blessed to be in a place where I can make this transition in a very supportive community. It makes clear the whole pattern of all of the steps that God has been leading me through to get me to this particular point in my life (at least as far as my food-ecology consciousness), where everything would come together in this way. Pretty cool, huh?

Things I am glad I didn't think too much about before becoming a semi-vegetarian

2010-02-19T16:04:00.006-05:00

So, I was tortured with meat by my sisters on our ski trip last weekend. Apparently, they forgot about the whole major-dietary-change thing ... and kept forgetting about if for THREE DAYS. I'll get you all.

We'll start with a happy story: we stopped for pizza on our way up to the mountain Saturday, and I figured I'd have to get some sort of plain cheese thing, or some sort of veggie nonsense with olives and peppers and onions. (There are many vegetables I love, but those are not among them.) I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I could custom-order a slice of veggie pizza with just broccoli and mushrooms. But the awesomest thing about my pizza was that when they said broccoli and mushrooms, they literally meant, "I am going to take a head of broccoli and some mushrooms, cut them up into awesomely giant chunks of flower and stem right now, put them on your pizza, and bake it for you." I had fresh broccoli on my pizza, just like I'd cut it up and steamed it myself. Dominic's in Pocono Lake, PA, you rock!

But my tide of vegetarian happiness was broken on the rocks of Saturday night dinner. I enjoyed a lovely salad, baked potatoes, and garlic bread. But what I did not have were the ribs. Sweet, tangy, pork ribs. Tender ribs, smothered in barbecue sauce. Ample ribs, whose delicious smell teased my nostrils as my companions returned for second helpings. Sad, origin-unknown ribs that I therefore could not eat.

The next morning was the bacon ... but I can live without bacon. (Sausage is another story.) The bacon did prompt some morning nausea, but it's possible that was more alcohol- than meat-related. (Did I mention that the tagline of our trip was, "We do go skiing ... eventually.") I was also not swayed by the deep fried chicken wings the night before, and especially not by the deep-fried Slim Jims that were produced by some of the boys as the evening wore on. (That was also an idea more alcohol- than meat-related.)

The true meat mourning came with Sunday night dinner. At which point, just to be cruel, a plate of sliders was waved in front of me. Not just any sliders: White Castle burgers, fresh from the frozen food package. And they were literally waved in front of me.

This was when I realized that I don't miss meat - I miss junk meat. I miss beef jerky. I miss Chinese food pork spareribs. I miss bourbon chicken. And if someone had pointed out to me at the time I made this decision that I would never again eat a White Castle burger, it is entirely possible I might not have gone through with it.

I'm glad this revelation came after I've been doing this for more than a month; I feel like it's too late to turn back now, and I have to stick to my guns. I'm trying to figure out if I can morally declare an annual junk-meat holiday, but the jury's still out on that one. In the meantime, I'm passing through some delayed stages of meat grief. (Huh, is the junk-meat holiday evidence of bargaining?)

I love math! Part 2

2010-02-19T15:59:00.002-05:00

So, I didn't get to blog during class yesterday because we were working on some serious inferential statistics - z scores, t scores, confidence intervals, appropriate sample sizes. The massive migraine that I went into class with only got worse by the time I left.

Nonetheless, I totally love it. Just thinking about all that math this morning made me start trying to factor polynomials in my head, which made me want to go dig out a calculus book and do some more awesome math. I knew that I'd get to do all of this reading and writing when I came back to grad school, but it never occurred to me that my inner math nerd would get to come out and play again after being dormant for nearly 15 years. I am so dorky, and so happy!

I love math!

2010-02-04T20:13:00.003-05:00

I'm in my Quantitative Analysis class, working on probability exercises in class. And as much as probability is sometimes frustrating and confusing, it also makes me realize how much I miss doing math, and how much I love doing math. I always say I can't wait until I have kids to do math homework with; but it's nice not to have to wait until that far-off event. :-)

Also, statistics and probability are all about precise wording ... beware of data that's not well-defined, and pay attention to the definition if it's given!

Humor Fail

2010-01-28T20:53:00.004-05:00

A friend just posted this following joke on Facebook. I was sorely tempted to argue with her conclusion there, but I have no desire to get into a social networking comment war. So I'll indulge myself here ... and then link this post on Facebook, so people can comment war me anyway. ;-)

A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost. She lowered her altitude and spotted a man in a boat below. She shouted to him, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The man consulted his portable GPS and replied, "You're in a hot air balloon, approximately 30 feet above ground elevation of 2,346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude.

"She rolled her eyes and said, "You must be an Obama Democrat."

"I am,"replied the man. "How did you know?"

"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is technically correct. But I have no idea what to do with your information, and I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help to me."

The man smiled and responded, "You must be a Republican."

"I am," replied the balloonist. "How did you know?"

"Well," said the man, "you don't know where you are or where you are going. You've risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. You're in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but somehow, now it's my fault."

Of course, the point of the joke is to demonstrate the general superiority of Democrats, and the cluelessness of Republicans that makes political disagreements their fault. Amusing, but specious, for a number of reasons I fell compelled to point out:

There's no indication that the lady doesn't know where she's supposed to go; she just doesn't know exactly where she is. Last time I checked, Democrats also sometimes get lost.
There's no indication that she doesn't know how to keep her promise (i.e., how to navigate her balloon to reach a destination once she knows the directions), merely that she is lacking a piece of information that would help her complete that task successfully.
She doesn't expect the man to solve her entire problem (i.e., take her to meet her friend); she is requesting help with the information she lacks.
She didn't blame the man for her being lost; she blamed him for not providing information that was helpful to her.
And this is the key problem that the smug Democrat's response obscures: his technically correct data was not something that the woman could use. Perhaps she doesn't use GPS data to navigate; maybe she needs a town name, or a street name, or a landmark, because that's how the directions she has are written.

It should also be noted that Democrats are just as frequently full of hot air, balloon-powering or otherwise. :-)

Ultimately, this is a failure to communicate, and it's on both parties. The woman and man were equally at fault getting snitty with one another instead of trying to establish a common language and resolve the situation. The woman could have followed up by being more specific about the kind of data she needs; the man could have sought to improve the usefulness of his information by finding out the kind of data the woman had at the time and figuring out how to adapt his response to that data type and framework to fill the gaps.

Yeah, yeah, I get that it's a joke; but like a racial joke, it's an indicator of a potentially serious underlying problem with stereotyping people who are different from us. The joke will be a lot funnier when the divisions it highlights aren't having such serious consequences for all of us. Which will be good, 'cause I like to laugh!

Waiting for the Kingdom

2010-01-28T00:10:00.003-05:00

It's been a very political two weeks - between the Massachusetts Senate election and the State of the Union, I feel very aware of my elected leadership.

This evening's address left me uninspired; the speech was fine, but it made me realize that the power of large government bodies to address our needs as individuals and a society is limited. There's so much about how we interact with each other that can't be legislated. For other things, when you try to legislate them, they become so complex that they are incomprehensible to many - and perhaps - most citizens who might wish to participate in the details of their own governance. (The health care is the obvious, but by no means the only, example of this problem.)

At any rate, I was hit very forcefully with the understanding that real peace, or justice, or safety, or health, will not be achieved until the Kingdom of God comes. That doesn't mean - as the accusation against Christians often goes - that I don't care about or will cease to work and live for as much of that good world as we can find now. But I think that work (for me) will be less about changing policy, and more about building the community of people around me who are modeling justice in their lives every day.

Which is a funny thing to say as a graduate student of public administration. But my sustainable urban commune will be the best managed community in the world!

For the record ...

2010-01-25T13:29:00.002-05:00

... I think my posting consistency is hilarious: nothing for two months, then three posts in a wekk, then four posts in one day. It keeps everyone guessing, I suppose - including me!

Looking back, it's clear that 2008 truly the year of my blog: at 133 posts, that's four times as much activity as in any other year. Plus, I was actually consistent; I wrote entries every month, right into December. Plus, in May, June and July, I even maintained a second blog about my family's camping trip. (Anyone who has not read this blog is missing out; it's hilarious, if I do say so myself, and I do.) I was the blogging queen in 2008.

Based on number of posts, 2010 is roaring out of the gate, but I think this month is anomalous. We'll see how February goes.

Redirection

2010-01-25T12:50:00.003-05:00

I have to say, my least favorite piece of advice when I am feeling depressed about my relationship status is, "It will come when you're not looking for it." I always feel bad complaining, because it is always so well-meant; but I find that statement singularly unhelpful for three reasons:

Dude, I'm depressed. If I had the ability to successfully project and believe in a future in which I felt content and fulfilled ... well, I wouldn't be depressed.
The flip side of that statement is, "It hasn't come because you want it and our looking for it." Which makes it my fault that I don't have a relationship because I want it so much, which only makes me hate myself for wanting it too much.
Wanting a relationship and not having it is no fun. If I knew how to not want it and be content, I'd be doing that already.

The other advice that often rankles is some version of "Don't focus on the relationship thing; go do other things and be fulfilled." Because despite the recurring temptation to hide out in my house and give up on the world in general, all I do is do other things: Go back to school and finish my degree. Start a nonprofit. Volunteer professionally. Go back to school for another degree. Volunteer in my community. Join a small group. Have lunch with friends. Travel with my family. Research CSAs and become a sustainable meat-eater. I can always find something new to do - and enjoy it - but that wave of loneliness is always waiting in the wings to swoop down in an unguarded moment.

I am going to try a new strategy, however; I don't know how well it will work, but I figure it is worth a shot. All of the above advice is about redirection: trying to put my thoughts and energy into something other than mating. But since I already have a lot of thought and energy going to other things, it seems clear that the problem is much deeper. There is a soul/spirit redirection that has to take effect at the root level of this struggle. Interestingly, that is something I have no ability to control; spirit transformation is God's alone.

So my only option is to try to put myself before him as much as possible, as much as I can remember to. In small group, we've been going through Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline, and just this past week we did the chapter on solitude. I was trying a little experiment on Saturday of not filling all of my transitional time (time waiting, time riding the bus or T) with activity (reading a book or the paper, texting, playing games on my phone), and instead, just being still outside and in. It was hard, and weird, but interesting; it's amazing what you hear around you when you're being still that you don't hear when you're filled with internal noise.

I think I'm going to give that an ongoing try. As a bus rider, I have a lot of transitional time! If I use that time in silence, alternated with reading my Bible, I think I might be more open to God's work in this area of my life. I'm not going to call it a resolution, because I never keep my resolutions; I like the notion of an experiment. My hypothesis: using the opportune spaces in my day for Spirit-time will develop an attitude of openness to and peace with God's will. The empirical method has been described. Results to be announced!

As intense as the Superman ride ... but less scenic

2010-01-25T01:40:00.002-05:00

Reading my last few posts makes me laugh - I'm up, I'm down, I'm up, I'm down. I'd say I need to be on something, but I already am on something. Isn't that a hoot? If you think I'm a blast when I'm on meds, you should have seen me when I was off; amazingly enough, this is me being functional.

I'm going to go to bed, so I can go back to pretending to be normal in the morning. Ciao!

Unpretty

2010-01-25T00:12:00.005-05:00

So, I was riding the T home from service tonight, convinced that my lack of life partner was a punishment for my many sexual sins. Well, that took all of a week.

In the course of my discussion with the Lord, which continued onto the bus and through my walk home, I was trying to figure out why I had such a difficult time releasing this relationship thing to the Lord's control. The very idea of waiting for His timing brings me such a terrible sense of distress, and that seems strange to me given how much else I have seen God do in my life and the lives of others. When I know the amazing things that happen when He is in control, why am I so convinced that I'm going to have to make my own way when it comes to dating and marriage?

And then this nagging little voice popped up in my head: "No one ever picks me." It's hard for me to believe that one day, without me fishing for it, someone is going to look at me and what they know about who I am and think, "There's a special person I'm really attracted to," because the last time that happened was over a decade ago (in July 1999, if you're curious about dates). That was also the last time any Christian man showed more than a "sisterly" interest in me. I look at my dating life here in Boston since college, and I see that the only time I date is when I put up the big "Available" billboard on the internet; no one else who gets to know me in my regular life - work, school church - ever seems to think I'm a worthy candidate.

No matter what I say in the front of my head, that history is always rumbling around in the back of it. And I wonder why it's like that, and what happened or what I did or what I'm like that makes me ... undesirable. I got fatter, that's for sure; 1999 probably marks the last time I could be described as "athletic," let alone slender. And I may have gotten more depressed; sometime the following year marked the start of my serious adult depressive episodes, after a break during the high school and college years that I didn't appreciate nearly enough at the time. Perhaps there's an air of dating desperation than began wafting off me about that same time, as 24 was the start of the period when I was supposed to get married according to my 20-year plan. Could be a big fish/small pond phenomenon: while might I look amazingly smart and sweet and normal among the pool of online dating ads, I may be only so-so in the ocean of the real world.

Whatever the reason(s), history has me convinced that I have to mount a determined campaign to make myself a dateable woman. For kicks, I'm equally sure that my bedroom skills are the only things about me in high demand; neither my intelligence, my accomplishments, my caring, nor my beauty (such as it may be) are nearly as memorable or worth keeping around. I am clearly the woman you sleep with, not the woman you marry ... which is a laugh riot for someone who so passionately desires to be married.

Of course, it is my fault in the end. Had I chosen to remain virtuous and obedient, I wouldn't have been able to become that woman in the first place. I can hardly whine because my choices have consequences; it's not like I wasn't warned.

I want to hand all this over to God, but I am deathly afraid that means committing to a life of celibacy and singleness, because I have lost the opportunity for anything else. And looking into a future of singleness feels like looking into a black hole, so filled with my own despair and loneliness that I'd rather just end it now. Or just throw up my hands, give up on finding real love and partnership, and resign myself to getting whatever I can, whenever I can. Only the fear of what God will do to me at the Judgment is keeping me from either course.

(To any single women reading this: Don't listen to me. Do not take on my screwed up thoughts as any judgment or prediction for your own lives. Go live the beautiful lives God has given you, and please do a better job at being thankful and contented than I am currently doing.)

I hate myself for being so ungrateful, so untrusting, and such a freaking whiner. Blah blah blah blah blah; get over it already, and go do something useful.

A quickie

2010-01-21T19:39:00.002-05:00

One fun thing about having a computer class is the ability to blog during breaks. :-)

It's day #2 (for me) of school; I'm looking forward to the semester. This week has already been stressful - not because of schoolwork, but because of a summer fellowship application I've been working on that's due tomorrow. (I swear I didn't procrastinate; I had a really hard time getting the words together for my personal statement.)

Anyway, this application is making me super nervous ... I want the fellowship so much, I'm afraid that I'll jinx it or something. It's this perfect opportunity, working for a local government agency for 10 weeks, and earning a delightful stipend in the process. I think my application is strong, and the program coordinator said I was an ideal candidate. But there could well be twelve equally fabulous graduate students out there who are just more appealing to the jury than I am. I hope not!

The single life

2010-01-18T01:41:00.003-05:00

Yes, 'tis true - I am single. After not quite a year and a half of an unexpectedly wonderful relationship, The Architect and I decided that the end of 2009 would also mark the end of our romantic time together.

It's interesting to reflect on how this came about, and on how I've been feeling about the whole thing since it happened. First thought: given that our relationship started out of a very deliberate rebellion against God phase, it is both a big surprise and a gracious blessing that I found, hands down, the best man I've ever dated. I finally learned what it's like to be in a relationship with someone who cares for you, wants to be with you, communicates with you, and allows you to be totally yourself, without reserve. It took me a few months to really accept that good things were going on, as my blog faithfully chronicled; but eventually, I came to realize that I was with an amazing person who I could share so many things with, and who really did love me for who I am. What's more, I discovered that I loved him, too.

Which doesn't sound much like the opening of a break-up story! But as my relationship with God healed while my relationship with The Architect progressed, I had to start facing up to something I'd known all along: this wasn't a relationship with God at the center. The Architect is a pretty committed atheist, and while that could be ignored when we were hanging out and having fun together, it kept resurfacing every time I thought about - or we talked about - the future of our relationship. I could see us going on for months, even years, having a fantastic time together; but I could never see him as my husband, or the father of my children. I couldn't even fathom a marriage ceremony in which we could both participate.

In keeping with the amazingness of our relationship, this was something we could discuss quite openly and honestly, without rancor. We knew who the other person was, what they saw in their future in the moment, how their worldview was formed. And after many conversations, we realized that despite all we shared, we were missing some critical common ground to move forward.

Out of the best relationship I've ever had also came the best break-up. It was a joint decision, and we both understood why it was necessary. We are still friends, and we talk every day. I still get to keep "his" friends. :-) It was hard, and sad, and is an ongoing adjustment ... when you put two sexy folks in a room together, it takes a lot of effort to stay platonic! Nonetheless, I feel more at peace in my spirit than I have in many months, because I feel like I really trusted the Lord's leading and was obedient to His command for me.

I don't love being single, but I'm getting used to it. It's weird - and annoying - to think that I'm "back out there." The idea of The Architect dating another woman fills me with trepidation. The idea of a renewed dating search is equally unappealing, but I also do want to be in a relationship again. I am trying to adopt a mindset that allows me to trust God with the desires of my heart and not think about it so darn much (= all the time!). I am trying to be hopeful about the potential for a life partner, but also at peace regardless of my relationship status. It's tough.

But one of the best things, of so many, that came out of my relationship with The Architect is that I know what a good relationship is - and I don't have the patience to deal with anything less that the awesomeness I've experienced. It's all stuff I shouldn't have been settling without anyway, but now I know those qualities of being with another person aren't theory; they are a reality that God wants and can absolutely provide for me. Since I don't always learn very well just by hearing, I appreciate the hands-on lesson ... I am much less likely to forget the next time, and accept less than what honors and respects a child of God.

I also know I have to wait for a relationship that fully honors Him, and where He is the center. I know that even the most wonderful boyfriend won't be enough if we aren't seeking God together. I have definitely learned this past year that no matter how angry I get, how frustrated, how lonely or tired or discouraged, I just can't live without God in my life - and that's a beautiful certainty.

So 2010 starts with many changes, and many good things that keep going. I hope it will be a year of obedience and trust that produces amazing fruit in my life. I am a little nervous, but also excited!

Feed me, Seymour!

2010-01-14T21:43:00.004-05:00

One thing you should know about me: I pretty much always want to eat. And when I want to eat, I want to eat meat.

Which makes my 2010 dietary change to mostly vegetarian a real kicker. I blame it on The Omnivore's Dilemma, which I read as part of my continuing exploration of my personal and our societal relationship. I strongly recommend the book; I think if you read it seriously, it's hard to avoid taking a deep look at what and how you eat. My transformation began with In Defense of Food, which I read this summer and loved for its reminder of the common-sense basis of eating, rather than all this nutrition/diet fad nonsense. The Omnivore's Dilemma put me face-to-face with some of the realities of industrial food production (both meat and vegetable); some of the stuff I'd known anyway, but I guess for some reason this presentation made it impossible to ignore the health and justice issues behind the way that most of us eat as Americans. So, it was time for a change.

Don't get me wrong - I still love me some meats. And I will still eat it, but only if I know where that meat comes from, and enough about how it was raised and how it was processed to feel comfortable that it was done in a good way. I don't have a moral issue with eating meat, but I think the way our current food system produces meat has changed something natural and healthy into something gluttonous, wasteful, cruel and unjust.

It's a tough adjustment, though; I didn't really plan out what the change would be like. Figuring out what to eat, how to shop, how to eat out ... and I guess I need to tell folks, so they know. I've never had dietary restrictions that people needed to work around, so that's kind of an odd thing to have to do now. I'm also still thinking through the fish part; right now I'm eating it regardless of the source, but I think that's going to change over the course of the year.

I'm discovering that the food system and food justice is becoming a big topic of interest with me, particularly local/urban agriculture. I'm hoping to do a couple of CSAs (produce and meat) with my landlords and/or some friends nearby, I'm getting to know the awesome new market in my neighborhood that sells local food of all sorts, and I'm starting to hook up with urban agriculture organizations and interested people in the area. I have a feeling this is going to become a bigger and bigger part of my life; I'm quite curious as to how it will play out over time.

On the plus side, I just had a surprisingly super-delicious bowl of Target-brand pasta. Cheers!

Sometimes I am very crabby ...

2009-11-10T02:11:00.002-05:00

So, I just sent out an invitation for folks to go salsa this Saturday, which I guess means that I am not going to hide out like a hermit crab in my apartment. So what's your point?

The good news is that I am feeling better today; had a very good night at school, had lunch with some fellows alums of my last school, and cleaned out my porch - formerly known as the place where shoes go to multiply - in preparation for receipt of a lovely new table and chairs from the antique store down the hill. (They are closing! It's very, very sad; the proprietor is one of the sweetest ladies ever, and I loved going in there.) I talked to my mom, and she encouraged me to keep enjoying my social time and try to remember that people seem to enjoy being with me and maybe that means I can feel a little less self-conscious and uncertain. We'll see if I can establish a reasonable frame of mind by the time the weekend rolls around.

She did suggest that this is probably all part of the adjustment period from my boyfriend leaving, not to mention some emotional coloring from my grandfather's death. I'm just hoping I can get adjusted sooner rather than later, so I can be less cranky and cry-ey after all my major social outings. It leaves me rather tired.

Of course, I could help myself on that front if I went to bed before 2AM!! Adios, amigos.

I think I might do better if I had been raised by wolves.

2009-11-09T00:03:00.007-05:00

Or lions, or bears, or other random animals that periodically have taken care of human cubs. Not monkeys, though; they may be our genetic cousins, but they give me the heebie-jeebies.

The point is, I don't think that socializing with people is really working for me. I've given it a good try - 33 years is a definite commitment - but I just don't have the hang of it. Unfortunately, at this point, I've been trained to believe that hanging with other people is the way to go, so it's hard to undo those decades of drilling. Even if I do stop hanging out with people, which it's possible I should, I'll always be wondering if I might be able to do it right with just one more try. It's a pickle!

It's not that my parents socialized me poorly; they're reasonably well-adjusted people (as much as any of us are), I had siblings, they taught me how to be polite and considerate and aware of other people's reactions and all that good stuff. They taught me how to be responsible, and to always try and do your best, and to own up to your errors. They allowed me to experience the whole range of human emotions and didn't try to repress me; they were supportive and loving and encouraging.

Theoretically, all that should have set me up well for being around other people. But despite good coaching, I fear I lack some of the basic talent and inclination for socializing that is essential for success. It's just one of those things, like the gift of being able to invent and execute a musical composition. Some folks have it; I don't.

I just never learned the happy medium of being delighted to be around people if they're available, but not caring so much if they aren't. Billy Joel and I apparently share a problem with moderation: either I must be a social butterfly, the center of attention, popular and beloved by all; or I need a cone of silence where no one will bug me. And I either need to have a deep, intense, consuming relationship with someone, or I'd rather just not bother investing any energy.

Ultimately, that usually leaves me quite lonely, which is the state of being I'm delighted to rediscover these days. My boyfriend kept it at bay for over a year, blessings be upon him; but since his recent temporary relocation 450 miles away, I have re-realized that no one else is up for providing the constant attention and affection I seem to need for my emotional security. Since he left, I've been in an increasingly desperate search for substitute social tokens of the admiration and approbation he used to provide through his presence; my lack of success has left me highly insecure and irritable.

It is, of course, not the fault of my social circle any more than my parents; they're all busy leading normal social lives and they don't realize that there's a crazy woman moving among them. (It's better that way ... they'll feel safer.) Who but a crazy would expect that all her friendships be intensely intimate and constantly involved? Who would expect to have other people appear and disappear as her emotional desires dictate? Who gets mad at not having an all-access pass to other people's homes and lives, and jealous of the time they spend with other people when I'm not included?

The answer, of course, is me - but we've already stipulated that I'm a nutter-butter, so those questions are clearly rhetorical. It's obvious I have a problem with boundaries. And repeatedly expecting others to accommodate my invasive neediness and then being angry when they remind me (always kindly, subtly) that their lives are not all about me ... that's got to be a close match for the definition of insanity.

At any rate, the recurring battle between my crazy and the real world is just getting to be exhausting. I can manage it in professional settings, where I only have to act appropriate for discrete, purposeful periods of time. But in my off-hours, I really don't have the stamina for that emotional facade; at some point, my true nature will start leaking out, and in case the dam breaks, it's best that I be in a controlled environment where the damage can be minimized. My bedroom has proven exceptionally durable.

I do have to say, I enjoyed the feeling of belonging - I had stopped wondering so much if I was saying or doing the right thing, if I was overstaying my welcome, if I fit in. I liked it when being me was relatively effortless, and fun. I shall truly miss it; but as they say, all things must come to an end.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming ...

2009-11-08T23:50:00.002-05:00

... which is not regularly scheduled at all. Welcome back from another random two month break, followed by a double post.

What continues to fascinate me is that all the while, I have a million things I want to blog about. I make lists of entries I want to write, topics I've gotten interested or excited about, rants I long to give to the world; but somehow, that never gets out of my head and into a computer. Sometimes it is because I'm busy. But given how much time I spend in YoVille (and now FarmVille) on Facebook, you'd think I could get myself over to Blogger.

I do think the problem is often that I want to write too much. I have these big giant speeches in my head, but to really get them out takes thought and organizing my arguments and that takes way more time than a quick post while I'm on the bus. I just now realized why folks love Twitter so much - or at least why I do: even if it's only annoyingly 10 characters long, it gives me a little outlet for the bizillion thoughts that go across my head all the time. I even have to restrain myself, so I don't update my status every 10 minutes. (Of course, if I was able to de-link my Twitter from always updating my Facebook status to just sometimes updating it, that wouldn't be such an issue - and hence, the rationale for Selective Twitter Status! Man, I come up with all the good ideas ... just a year too late.)

Anyway, it just frustrates me, because there's so much I want to say, and never enough time to say it. Especially not with grad school papers looming around every corner! :D

Roommate Update

2009-09-10T22:32:00.002-04:00

My new roommate is awesome!!!

That may seem like a premature announcement a mere 3 days into our house-sharing, but he's seriously such a sweet, friendly guy, and we all (me, my landlords, my boyfriend) love having him here.

What's funny is that we didn't meet in person before agreeing to live together; he was overseas right up until the day he was here in the States. But what got me was his initial email in response to my post; as I told him when we Skyped, it was the email I would have written to myself to prove that I was an honest, reputable, non-scammer making a legitimate move to another country for work. References, verifiable details, good grammar (you have no idea how much that counts in an online exchange) ... I know that might sound like a strange set of reasons to really get enthusiastic about an email, or to feel like you could trust the person behind it. But I just got this great feeling that overwhelmed my hesitations about the distance and the short sublease term. Our chat online kept that good feeling going, as did meeting his labmates at MIT who came over to video the apartment for him. Combined with his quick response to providing documents and exchanging info to set up our arrangement, I felt like I had finally found the right one.

That feeling has definitely been borne out by these few days; and while I know we'll get to know each other's ups and downs as the next several weeks progress, I feel really blessed to have found him. Here's hoping his lab keeps him on through the winter and spring!

My sister is a Mrs.!

2009-09-10T21:54:00.002-04:00

How on earth do you describe the week before a wedding? Exhausting, elating, exciting, full of errands. I feel a little like I did after Inauguration, actually; it took a few days for me to recover (in January from the cold, this time from sleep deprivation) so that I could look back on the week and see all of the wonder of it, but when I did, it was pretty darn amazing.

There were so many moments that were just incredible: my sister tearing up during her speech at the rehearsal dinner; the look on my brother-in-law's face as my sister walked down the aisle; my father weeping during the father-daughter dance; my sister dancing with our 91-year-old grandpa; my nephew showing off his moves to Michael Jackson. My sister and brother-in-law's amazing group of friends who came to share their day. All my family - including my uncle - gathered together for the first time in years. My boyfriend there to share the week with me.

The wedding definitely marked the end of the summer for me, and the transition from vacation to fall activities. This was my summer of family, from the wedding to my nephew's Boston visit all the way back to my six weeks of Virginia vacation. I needed the break; but more than that, I needed to center myself with my most important people before I moved on to my next stage of things. It's a little strange being back in Boston without them.

Y'know what else is strange? My sister changed her name! Not that this is unusual in terms of what people do when they get married ... but I still can't get used to her new appellation. Not that she stops being one of us - the gravitational pull of our family is too strong for that! ;-) - but we're now down to only two of us with our maiden names. Who will preserve the family surname for future generations, with all of us being girls? Between me and my youngest sister, who will be the next to change her name on Facebook? (Yes, that's right - it hasn't really happened until it happens on Facebook, no matter what your other legal documents might say.)

Anyway, it was gorgeous, moving, fun, crazy, busy, and fabulous. Just what a wedding should be! It was very labor intensive, though ... as I told my sis, I definitely expect her and her husband to stay together, because I'm only doing all of that for her once. :-)

Eeny, meeny, miny, mo

2009-07-16T23:47:00.003-04:00

As it turns out, one other part of this transitional time is the upcoming departure of my roommate, who is leaving for the greener pastures of his girlfriend's home. I admit this was quite the stressor for me, as I tried to imagine how on earth I was going to find a new housemate remotely from another state, to which I would not return until 3 weeks before the potential move-in.

I finally got off my duff last weekend and began the search process (nothing like some good procrastination to make everything better!). In addition to dispersing the notice among my friends, I also tried the tactic that worked for me last time I was entering school: using the campus housing office to find possible candidates. One of the delightful advantages of this from last time - besides finding my best roomie ever, who was darn hard to replace when she left - is that having a roommate who's in the same school with me meant that we had instant common ground, and could provide some mutual support and information exchange as we both moved through the program. It was not just helpful; it was great to have a buddy exploring that new territory with me.

The campus housing post was fruitful; I've now spoken with two interested folks. One male, one female; one a law student, the other in the business school; both were good conversations about the house and neighborhood and rooming habits and communication, etc., etc. The twist: both are coming from out of town, and there won't be any chance to meet either of them before I need to make a decision (for my sanity as well as theirs). How do I choose between two folks I've only spoken to via phone and email?

The last time I did a search, for my current roommate, it was a multi-interview process where I felt like I got a pretty good sense of who he was and was able to share my concerns and expectations. I was particularly paranoid and cautious because the woman before him turned out to be so awful, when she had seemed so nice upon meeting her. Excepting college, I've never roomed with someone I didn't at least get to meet face-to-face; while both of the folks seem cool, I still feel very nervous.

I think this is going to be yet another of those trust-in-the-Lord for guidance situations, because I don't have any way to do all the things that would make me feel "secure" in this decision (even if that security is an illusion). I'm having a lot of those this summer; but the good part of that is that I keep re-learning that when I leave things in His hands, they do get taken care of, quite well. I'm going to give this some meditation, and pray for clear hearing ... I'd appreciate your prayers as well, plus any practical tips for out-of-town roommate assessment!

Time for the good stuff

2009-07-16T23:28:00.002-04:00

Well, I'm 2-1/2 weeks into my 6-week Virginia vacation, and the most descriptive term for it is: awesome! Other excellent terms: fun; relaxing; sun-filled; sneezy. (Yeah, that last one is a little weird, but my right nostril is having an allergy fit. Yes, just one nostril.)

My nephew and I haven't quite had a specific schedule, but we've been good about getting out of the house - to the pool; on a very interesting suburban public transit excursion; on errands. He'll also go out and play at a friend's house or at the park, so even if I have to be inside taking care of some business, he's still out and about. We have a limit of about 30-60 minutes of Xbox a day; we're working on cutting down the TV time. (It's tough; we both love TV! Although I think I've had enough cartoons ... at least I'd rather watch the live action teeny-bop shows, if I have to choose among the kid offerings.) Often, when we're in, we do play board games, which are a family favorite pastime; he's beaten me at Payday more times than I like to admit.

I've been shopping, cooking dinner, doing laundry, cleaning up the kitchen, minding the young'uns. It's encouraging, in that I actually don't mind some of the activities that could be a part of housewife-hood and parenthood ... well, the parenting of a well-behaved, fairly independent 10-year-old. (They pop out like that, right?) I even manage to get in occasional periods of personal productivity, like taking care of bills or roommate searching or school-related stuff, or working on the little research project I have going this summer, or working out, or planning wedding things for my sister. I need to work a little more on my discipline in getting up and getting dressed at a reasonable hour (= before 11AM or noon), but overall, I feel like I'm not exceptionally, embarassingly lazy.

The best part of all this is just being here, being chilled out, and getting to make time for all of this. I feel very un-stressed, which is such a lovely change from where I was, and I continue to feel happy and contented. Finances are tight, but not worrisome, and at least I'm earning my room and board by being a useful household and child caretaker. Getting to spend this amount of time with my nephew rocks, because even at close range and constant company, he remains the best boy ever: sweet-natured, funny, loving, smart, goofy, adorable. I don't get to spend as much time with my sister because she does have to do this crazy thing called work; but when she is here, we hang out and have fun. It's great to watch the two of them together, because they so completely love each other. My sister is a great mom, and I am so proud of her for that.

I know I'll have to get ready for more work and less play as September approaches. But I also hope I can take some of this peace back with me, and remember to make time for the best part of my life, which is spending it with people I love. There's nothing like just being able to bewith your friends and family at home; not even necessarily doing anything, but just being together. Good times, yo.

Random observation

2009-06-17T13:19:00.002-04:00

OK, so I'm not fit by any stretch of the imagination, as both my ever-present belly and my consistently low cardiovascular endurance demonstrate. But I also feel like I'm a reasonably active person; I get around to many places by walking, and I have to go up that darn hill to my house every single day. Not to mention, while other very fit people are doing that with only 120-160 pounds on them, I'm carrying 200+ with me all the time.

I've always wondered: why doesn't the simple act of hauling myself around count for more towards my fitness? I mean, I'm not slouching around on a couch or in a car all the time; I walk, I take stairs, I still have to run for that bus or train and I can usually make it. I can walk 2-3 miles on a whim when I decide it's a nice day and I want the fresh air ... I feel like I should be much more fit than I appear.

Mind you, I'm also firmly convinced that I'm a very muscular person - it's just hidden under a mostly opaque layer of fat. I swear, if you took away my belly, my abs are like a rock. :-)

Match

2009-06-10T21:47:00.002-04:00

I just watched a screening of a very good movie, (500) Days of Summer, which I highly recommend seeing. It's a relationships movie, and a surprisingly accurate one - sometimes painfully so. I saw the ghosts of my own dating history in more than one scene.

[Please note: I will try to write the following without giving away too much plot, but if you're one of those people who absolutely hates even the hint of spoilers and might want to see this movie, don't keep reading. But do go see it - it's good!]

It's funny: I loved the movie, but I also kind of hated it for that accuracy, and at the end I felt sad. I suppose it wasn't a movie that helped along my desire to believe in happy endings, the way I want my romantic comedies to do (but I also at the same time hate them for giving me hopes that are never matched by reality). I didn't want to be reminded of my relationship misfires, and to wonder even now if I'm in another one but I just haven't had that moment of realization yet. There is a message intertwined in the movie about how right it is when you know you found the one ... but I think I'd feel much better about that message if I was already sitting in that place of certainty.

I couldn't help but think of all the men I've dated in my life, most of whom have found life partners - ironically, those are the ones who squashed my heart like a pancake. It's not that I wished them evil, or an eternity without finding happiness in love (at least, not after I sufficiently recovered from the heartbreak); but I certainly didn't want them to find it before me. It seems unfair somehow that they should go so quickly - sometimes directly - from my misery to their destined mate, while I am still left wondering.

It also kind of made me want to have a "future" conversation with my boyfriend, which I had just gotten comfortable with the idea of not having for a while. If we already know that we have major differences in some of the things we believe and want, should I cut my losses before I get even more invested than I already am? Can I still manage to get out without getting hurt? Our relationship seems so good right now, and has always felt open and honest and comfortable and peaceful and consistently enjoyable and pretty matched in caring - not like my others - but I am a) historically prone to ignoring big red flashing signals that say "Turn back from this relationship!" and b) used to having the rug pulled out from under me just when I think a relationship is making good progress.

I think I've been pretty cautious this time, and I don't think I have my rose-colored glasses on; but that doesn't mean I'm not still waiting to find out exactly how and when this will end. While I try not t be such a downer in my daily interactions, I feel somewhere in the back of my mind that the best I can hope for I that the end doesn't totally suck, and that I get over it fast. Much like one of the characters in the movie, I am pretty sure that this soulmates/true love/find your life partner nonsense is a big pile of stinky poopy. I do have friends whose marriages seem to suggest otherwise ... but I think I am not destined to share their happy fate.

Gee whiz - from my description, you'd think this was a terribly depressing movie! It's not, though ... it's very cute and funny and smart and you should absolutely go see it; despite my mournful reflections, I truly enjoyed the film. And my dire prophecies probably have much more to do with fear of the past than any particular prediction of future behavior. While I don't know how long my boyfriend and I will be together, I am thoroughly thankful for the wonderful time that we've had so far, and I plan to enjoy all the good times that remain for us. I do hope that one day I can let go of that bad history, that it will lose its power to rise up, remind me, and run me over all over again.

Cheers! ;-)

Solving poverty

2009-06-05T15:50:00.002-04:00

This may be an incredibly naïve - not to mention completely unoriginal - post; I'm putting that right out front, in the hopes that I'll get a pass if this turns out to be pure nonsense.

I'm at my second conference in 3 weeks, as my high-travel post-employment period draws to a close and my schedule-free period begins. I'm listening to the panelists and responders in a fabulous presentation on community food systems and environmental justice, which is a topic that has grown increasingly near to my heart over the past couple years. And as I've been attending all these sessions at these two conferences about improving cities and designing communities and engaging all stakeholders, this recurring question of addressing poverty and its affects seems to lurk just below the surface of many discussions.

I mentioned tongue-in-cheek in a previous post that, following my rant against and intellectual non-producer class, I had also come up with a simple solution to poverty. This was only half in jest; as I was sitting in sessions later that day, I really started thinking about what poverty is and how we define it. We typically define it by income - but as with pretty much everything about money, that measurement is merely a proxy for the real issue at hand. To wit, I asked a friend: if you lived in the US and made only $15,000/year but you had secure access to safe, healthy, good quality housing, food, health care and education, are you actually poor? I'd argue not; poverty is not about any specific amount of wealth you have, but about whether your available resources allow you to reliably meet your basic needs.

Well, duh. Who would argue with that? But while we might all agree on that basic definition of poverty, I think we generally put our resources and efforts in the wrong place. The error starts with money, actually; we've forgotten that money is a proxy for real things, not a real thing itself. So we focus on solving poverty through "wealth creation": giving people ways to earn money to buy their basic needs. We think this is a much better long term alternative than just giving people food, housing, etc., directly ... and I'd agree with the idea that we don't want people to be dependent on others to get their basic needs and unable to be more self-sufficient.

Except: the phrase is "Teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime," not "Teach a man to work a job that gets him money to buy fish and he eats for a lifetime." The fallacy is that having money to purchase the goods we need makes us independent; but it actually makes us totally dependent on a production and distribution system for basic goods that most of us don't understand and aren't involved in except at the very end stages. Not to mention that we are also dependent on the vagaries of the employment market to provide our income, over which we also have very little control.

I think a real solution to poverty and dependency would take out the money proxy and the middle man's profit that raises the barrier to goods, as much as could possibly be done. My solution to poverty has three pretty simple stages:

1) Provide basic necessities to those who lack them, immediately. Rent all the high-quality housing on the market for everyone currently defined as poor. Hire doctors, rent space to increase clinic capacity and buy equipent and supplies to provide free care for their medical needs. Buy all the food we can from local and organic farmers and distribute it for free to those who need it. Get everyone clothes and shoes appropriate for the climate they live in. Do all necessary school repairs for immediate health and safety, hire a huge number of the best teachers we can find and purchase all the up-to-date materials they need to teach the best classes to the poorest students. And don't tell me we lack the money to do it; we can always find money for whatever we decide is important enough to fund. We just dropped uncountable billions on the most asinine bailouts of the most irresponsible companies in the world; we could feed, house, heal and educate everyone in the country if we actually wanted to.

2) Once folks are initially settled into their homes, having regular healthy meals, receiving medical care and basic education, now we can start skills building, teaching people how to meet these basic needs for themselves: how to grow food; build; keep healthy and treat the sick; make clothes, furniture, and other household goods and tools; and how to share knowledge and civic responsibility with others in their community. I absolutely agree that it's critical to establish a level of independence and self-sufficiency where people can do as much as they can for themselves. I also agree with another principle behind "welfare-to-work" efforts: the time where you can depend on others to keep providing for you should be limited, and extended only in rare circumstances. Let's use 2 years as a time frame to start with, although it might not be the right one; during that time, after basic needs are initially met, anyone receiving services has to be actively participating in training toward being able to provide those services for themselves and others. Over the two years, they should move from being service provider trainees to the highly competent leaders and organizers of these services for their community. They should be building the new homes, schools, shops, clinics or hospitals, and governing and knowledge-transfer systems that they will need for themselves; and the outside helpers who were initially needed to provide those services will increasingly release responsibility and involvement to the people themselves.

3) In order to move from the emergency systems that were initially established to opportunities for ongoing self- and community-sufficiency, people need access to space and initial materials to build from. It's the 40 acres and a mule principle, which we're still paying for not properly implementing at the time: you can't just set someone loose from a position of systemic oppression, not give them some resources that can generate their future, and expect them not to end up back in a system of oppression in the near future. I actaully think the more difficult part of this process won't be the material goods, but rather the space question. Our conception of land and property ownership and its conncetion to status make us loath to consider giving it to others without making them pay for it, to say nothing of yielding up what we've already laid claim to. Land control and exclusion have been key tools for those who are in power (or want to be) to maintain dominance over another person or group. Sharing and/or giving back use, rights and control over land is a critical component of addressing poverty in the US and abroad, and without recognizing and responding to that, we will never solve the problem.

4) Almost finally, there has to be the flexibility to determine the kinds of exchange systems that people want to establish related to meeting their basic needs. Beyond a fairly basic level, it's highly likely that any one person or family will need help from other members of their community in continuing to meet basic needs. (None of us are actually self-sufficient, even the most wealthy.) There should be a variety of accepted and easily facilitated ways to exchange between communities members - and preference should be placed on those systems that don't require money. Money not only represents distance between people and the goods or services they consume, but also between people themselves; it's a way to make exchange possible between people who don't know or trust each other enough to exchanges goods and services directly. We should encourage communities to form relationships that allow exchanges of trust with one another; this is true social capital, the stuff we're always trying to create in our communities.

5) Really finally, while a traditional capitalist market for manufacture and exchange may arise and thrive for non-essential/luxury goods, certain things must be protected from the vagaries of markets and ensured for our citizens at all times. This sounds like total blasphemy to our capitalist ears, but we already do this with one important aspect of essential citizen services - public education. We've made a societal commitment to providing public schools for every child no matter where they live or how rich they are, rather than leaving that up to someone's ability to generate a certain level of income. (Mind you, we've tied quality to income through the way that we fund and maintain said schools ... but at least part of the system was trying to head in the right direction.) What's odd is that we seem completely unwilling to provide that same universal assurance of access for other services even more essential, and without which it's unreasonably difficult to take advantage of public education: we recognize a right to education that must be protected, but not to housing, food, clothing or medical care. How do we expect a homeless, hungry, naked and sick person to get through schooling or training well?

I call this solution simple, and I think it is. It's tempting to say that we're going to need a huge new bureaucracy to manage all of this; but I'd argue that we have plenty of existing bureaucracy that can not only be used, but also simplified to focus on easily and quickly meeting these goals. The problem may not be so much complicated as just plain difficult, because of the radical change in our priorities and will to achieve them that all of the above assumes. (Yes, I'm back to radicalism again.)

At any rate, I've been writing this post all day, and missing pieces of conference sessions, so it's time to close out. I'll be thinking about this some more ... People may call me crazy, and hypocritical because my life doesn't look like this yet - but I still think there's a gem of truth here to be dug out and shared, and that it's important to shake it free.

The Plan

2009-06-03T16:56:00.002-04:00

(No, not the Cylon plan to destroy the human race ... for that, you'll have to wait for the upcoming BSG movie!!)

Things are quickly settling down as to where I'll be and what I'll be doing in the coming months; this period of my life is quite exciting and fun, as it combines the peace and enjoyment of resting and waiting to see what God puts into place with the surprise of discovering exactly what those next pieces will be. It's like Christmas presents: I know what I put on my wish list, but I never know what gifts I've gotten until the day comes and the package is opened.

Gift #1: I got into grad school! Full time in the Master in Public Administration program at Suffolk University. I found out just a day or two before I went down to see my family in DC/VA, after anxiously watching the mail for weeks.

Gift #2: I got money for grad school! About half of my tuition is covered by a grant/employment fellowship, which totally rocks and makes school quite feasible. I'll still have to take out some loans, but not nearly what I was afraid I might have to do. I'm also going to see if I can try to get another on campus job a few hours a week (ideally, in some way related to what I'm studying) or, alternatively, a little outside job (again, hopefully related to my field, but not so involved that it distracts from my studies) to help with the bills. But the bottom line (no pun intended) is that I should be able to stay in Boston and in my current apartment for the fall.

Gift #3: I still get to spend time in VA with my family! Killing two birds with one stone, I'm going to help my sister out by watching my nephew in July and August (eliminating day care costs and allowing her to work an extra job during those months), and I help myself out by subletting my place so I don't have to worry about paying rent and utilities out of my limited cash reserve for that same period. In a special bonus benefit, I get to be near my other sister while I'm helping her with the wedding planning, and I'll get to see my parents and youngest sister all throughout the summer. So, if you know anyone looking for a July and August sublet, drop me a line! :-)

All in all, it's been a delight to keep seeing what happens next, and to do it in a different way than my normal angsty, trying to figure out how to make everything work, trying to create the options for myself kind of way. I have the blessed luxury of resting - not being lazy or inattentive, but being content in where I am at the moment and knowing that when the next step comes, it will be clear to me and I'll be ready and able to take action. There are still some things that I get nervous about at times - will I find the right sub-letter? do I have enough money to get all the way to September? will I have enough time to get back to Boston and settle in before school? will my relationship with my boyfriend change because of the time apart? - but I'm doing pretty well at turning those worries back over when they pop up. And I remain very, very happy; there's no doubt in my mind that I left my job at the right time, and everything I've done since then has been wonderful time with family, friends and new people I meet. My mom's still a bit concerned for me, but I think she's getting used to my new-found free-time status.

*****

Speaking of free time status, I realized after two weeks of a rather variable waking-dressing-leaving the house routine, I have to give myself a bit more structure. For June, I'd like to make sure I get up, take an exercise walk around the neighborhood, fix myself breakfast and shower and dress before 11AM. For July and August, a friend just inspired me to plan some regular weekly activities for me and my nephew. Not necessarily getting up at the same time every day, but having a day where we go walking or biking around the neighborhood; a day where we go to the library; a day when we go visit my parents at their apartment (and take advantage of the pool in their complex); a day when we go into DC for activities at the museums or other cool places. Hopefully, it will keep us both from watching the Disney Channel and playing Xbox all day ... Although there's sure to be some of that, too!

What to do?

2009-05-21T18:26:00.001-04:00

So, I just finished up this conference of young urban leaders from around the country, who are all doing pretty good things. As usual, I started holding forth in a conversation about the radical restructuring of our society; and a fellow Vanguard quite reasonably asked how much I was doing some of these radical things in my own life. I made some response about works in progress and the need for a community to exchange with, blah blah blah. The honest answer is that my life is still not particularly radical ... But I appreciate the question, because it prompted me to reflect more on this new radically just and sustainable lifestyle I keep talking about, and whether or not I'm really moving toward it.

There have been some changes, albeit pretty incremental (darn those incrementalist for being right! at least this time). I pay more attention to my energy use, waste disposal, and the source of my food (often) and clothes (much less often). My Lent resolution helped me get back into tithing, and realizing that I have abundant resources I can give to others. But I live mostly the same: same nice house and neighborhood (no sharing the lot of the poor by living among them), frequent spending of my disposable income on non-necessities (no curbing my expenses to give away even more), lots of accumulated possessions (no large-scale disposition of stuff to simplify my life). I'm a big one for insisting that making radical change is just a matter of firm decision; but apparently it's a decision I have no small amount of trouble making.

This is a frustratingly slow process that often makes me feel quite hypocritical. If there's anything that this recent experience with my faith and job has taught me, it's that the Lord will change my heart and give me the grace to make the right choice at the right time; I suppose I'm just eagerly awaiting the period where he starts to strip me of some of these cultural and material encumbrances. Wait, maybe I don't exactly mean eager ...

*****

This is sort of related to the above, but also not. I've always thought that my real vocation should be philosopher more than anything else; I want to be able to think and talk and write about things and encourage others to think about them, too and put them into practice. It's kind of why I want to go back to grad school, for the freedom to think more.

But as I was also railing in the above-mentioned conversation about people who generate intellectual "products" but no useful goods or services to meet the basic needs of themselves or others (i.e., dependent on a producer class so I can be an intellectual leader whose needs are provided for in exchange for my beneficent wisdom and rule), I decided I'd better start learning to produce some things. So I'll see if I can use this free time to become a philosopher-maker (as opposed to philosopher-king).

In another bit of randomly inspired goal-setting, here's what I'd love to do by the end of the summer:

1) Learn to cook. I can prepare some very basic meals, but I lack a general understanding of how to cook meat well (especially poultry) or how to season anything with some modicum of deliberateness. I'd like to feel like if you dropped me in a kitchen with a random assortment of common meats, vegetables and spices, I could create something passably tasty.
2) Learn to make something with my hands. My first thoughts are learning to sew or knit ... I feel like I lack a basic level of self-sufficiency with not being able to sew properly. I also feel like I could make cool, useful things for myself or other people if I could knit.

*****

My last set of revelations for the day, besides a simple solution to poverty, had to do with the need to get really civically involved in my city. I need to know and have talked to my alderman; I need to start attending some of these public meetings and keeping myself informed; I need to subscribe to my local paper. I was also railing at a different point during the day about how we aren't active enough as citizens and we don't acknowledge our responsibility to be consistently engaged in our own governance. Again, if I'm to avoid being a total hypocrite, it's about time I did some more of that active citizenship myself.

Everything I learned about leaving, I learned from Scrubs

2009-05-14T10:57:00.003-04:00

Last week was the Scrubs season - possibly series - finale, with lead actor Zach Braff doing his last episode. It was a pretty emotional little moment for me, because I absolutely love Scrubs, and if it doesn't come back for another season, I'll be really sad. Even if it does come back, it will definitely be different, and it'll be interesting to see how they re-form the show with a new dynamic. The finale included at the end little outtakes from the final shooting, and clips of the season wrap moments for various actors. I unashamedly admit that I teared up, particularly at the one with Judy Reyes (who oddly, I saw just a week later in an episode of Castle, where she was a totally different kind of character ... nice contrast).

When I woke up in the morning, I discovered I was still agitated with the emotions from the previous night. Yes, some of it was for the show it self (I do seriously love it), but the rest had to do with the resonance the show had for my own personal situation, and some things I had to resolve about leaving a place where I've invested a lot of my time, evergy and self.

[SPOLIER WARNING: If you haven't watched the Scrubs finale and don't want to know what happens until you do, don't keep reading.]

As J.D. prepares for his last day at Sacred Heart, he is looking forward to a day that will appropriately mark the end of 8 years of learning, growing and contributing in this place. The experiences he went through, both personal and professional, were so significant to him, and he wants someone to sum these years up in their actions that day (as he usually does in his voiceovers). There are funny bits about his friend Turk starting off with a big farewell gesture and trying to maintain that intesity throughout the day ... but for the most part, the J.D.'s final day at Sacred Heart is disappointingly normal. Except for one or two small (but touching) moments with close friends, no one really remarks on what is happening; there's no party, no sendoff, no occasion created to show how much he was loved and respected. (There are some other funny bits on this point, about sendoffs for other folks who are going on maternity leave or week-long trips.) J.D. does manage to engineer a final tribute speech from his gruff mentor (and his long-desired hug), but in the end, he has to make his own quiet peace with leaving.

My agitation of the morning after was my own realization that my final days were likely to be much like J.D.'s - largely quiet, unmarked, a business as usual for the rest of the world. No one from my organization was going to fete me or shower me with flowers, tributes and awards; there would be no giant announcement lamenting my departure; and I was going to walk out of the office without ceremony, to go on to the rest of my evening and my life. I was a little bitter that morning, because I thought that someone ought to honor me, gosh darn it; but as my sister reminded me, I had to be at peace with the choice that I had made, and not dependent on others to validate my time here.

She was right, although I hated to hear it at the time and thought she was being very unsympathetic. :-) But my decision to leave my job wasn't a power play to get people to recognize me, or a way to say a giant screw-you to the people I worked with, or with the intention of watching the organization crumble in my absence. I'm leaving because I reached a moment when it was clear that my time at the organization was done, and even though it seems strange to leave a secure job in an uncertain economy without another prospect lined up right away, I feel very confident and at peace that this way the absolute right decision. I feel like God was preparing the way all this time; it was kind of fascinating to me how on Easter Sunday I finally felt reconciled with him, and then that Tuesday I had a meeting where it became clear that it was time to go. At first, I said, "Wait, you take me from all that joy to this crappy day?" But it was actually perfect timing ... I'd been going through this conversation with myself and my board about leaving for months, since almost a year ago, and agonizing and trying to figure out alternate solutions and line up other possibilities. It never seemed to work out where I could feel comfortable leaving; but when this day came in April and I came out of that meeting, the decision was so clear that it was hardly a decision at all, just the obvious thing I was supposed to do next.

Since then, I haven't really had any doubts, and I've been almost unbelievably happy. I don't know if I've gotten into grad school; I don't know if I'm going to have income to be able to stay in Boston through the summer, let alone beyond that; I might have to make a major move back to Virginia to be with my family. But none of that troubles or worries me; in fact, the only times I felt agita during this whole process was when people tried to suggest that maybe I should stay on a couple more months (which raised a horrible twisting feeling inside), and when I wasn't quite letting go of a project that I've been working on and felt a real investment in (kept me tossing and turning over the past weekend, until I realized that all that tossing and turning was a sign that I was taking a wrong approach, and I realized that God would either make a way for me to continue to be involved that felt absolutely right, or He wouldn't and I wasn't meant to keep being involved). Spiritually, God restored my relationship with Him so that I could have complete faith in what He is doing during this time; and financially, God gave me some extra cushion that I would usually never have, which allows me to spend the next few weeks without worry.

And that's that. I don't yet know what He's doing with me or where He plans for me to be, and tomorrow is my last day at my job - but I can't wait to see what the days after tomorrow will bring. I'll keep you all posted ... withouth this whole distracting "work" thing, I have much more time ot spend online. ;-)

God's Victories

2009-05-14T10:38:00.003-04:00

This past Sunday at church, a young woman getting baptized gave a beautiful testimony about her coming to faith in Christ. As she spoke, she mentioned not only the joy of discovering and abiding in Him, but also the struggles that she had in her journey. There were times when she truly felt the devil was reaching out to try and draw her away from the new life that God was giving her; but she triumphantly hailed her presence at the baptismal ceremony that day as "one of God's victories."

It seems the best way to describe my journey over the past several weeks - and years - as well. The period of confusion, doubt, dismay, distrust and rebellion that I've gone through over the past two years took me to a place where I came the closest I think I ever have to wondering about the very existence of God. I certainly wasn't convinced of His beneficence, at least toward me; I was pretty sure He was actively ignoring my needs and pleas, and possibly trying to see how much He could throw at me before I just gave up and killed myself. And those weeks where I decided to go back to church for Lent ... yikes. That was awful.

Right up until the end. Somehow, when we got to Palm Sunday and that last Holy Week, something shifted. I honestly can't describe what: I don't know that I had a giant revelation, or that something I hadn't heard or understood before became especially clear, or that I heard a voice telling me everything would be OK. But starting with Palm Sunday, I was able to hear praise songs without bitterness and anger, and I was able to listen to Scripture and find that there was something good in it for me. Going to Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services felt like part of my own walk that I was taking out of darkness and into what was promised after, and when Easter cam at home with my family, I was able to sing again with a sincere and joyful heart.

I could propose a bunch of different theories: God wanted me to have a deeper understanding of suffering as Christ experienced it. I needed to confront all that bitterness and disappointment by going back to church instead of ignoring it. I had some faith lesson that I had to finally work through to get to the right answer. I guess if an explanation, a "reason" is needed to help this make sense to someone, I can pick one of those. By my simpler answer is that God healed my spirit, by His grace, in a way that I don't really understand but am incredibly thankful for. I don't know exactly why I can trust Him again, but I know that I can, and that knowledge gives me incredible joy and peace.

So much joy and peace that I can leave my job at the end of this week and feel very confident about the future. There's a teaser ending for you, huh? :-)

BTW ...

2009-04-27T13:48:00.002-04:00

... I have plenty of post-Easter news, but it's all so big I don't quite know where to start writing about it. The quick and dirty summary is:

I feel much better spiritually, and am not fighting with God anymore.
I decided to leave my job.
I am still struggling with the whole "having community" thing, and I may choose to resolve that struggle by moving back to be near my family.

Not-quick versions to come, as soon as I can figure out how to write about each of those things in some sort of relatively-organized manner.

Healthy Lifestyle Update #3

2009-04-27T13:08:00.003-04:00

OK, so I haven't posted about this in a while, mostly because I've been doing an abysmal job keeping my healthy lifestyle resolutions. So, in the spirit of any annual resolution, I'm trying to get back on the wagon now that spring is here and the sun is making me feel more inspired.

Today is the first day of my new healthy lunch plan. I've been struggling with this, because I have a hard time finding things that a) I like to eat, b) are healthy for me, and c) require almost no preparation. I was doing OK with making sandwiches for a while, but finding lunch meat that didn't have a giant cupful of sodium is quite difficult, and the packs that I did find were expensive and tiny.

So then I feel off the wagon, and starting eating burritos every day, plus the occasional fast food breakdown (in my defense, it was very occasional, like, twice in total). And I didn't have any food at home to cook (again, must meet criteria a, b and c), so Lord knows what I ate out/ordered in to satisfy my meal requirements. Suffice it to say, it wasn't pretty, and when I discovered over Easter weekend during dress fittings for my sister's wedding that I'd gone up another dress size, I was very, very unhappy.

Two weeks later, here I am, trying to establish a reasonable eating plan (and get myself a dress size down, because I refused to order a dress in the size that fits me right now ... don't judge me for being a little irrational). I don't know if this quite counts as balanced, but I'm going with hardboiled eggs and oatmeal or cereal (in an appropriate portion) in the AM; another hardboiled egg and tuna/carrot/lettuce salad for lunch; trail mix of nuts and dried fruit for a little snacking when needed; and pasta or rice with tuna (and some greens, when I remember to make them) for dinner. Portion control is equally important for lunch and dinner, although I feel pretty OK if I decide to gorge myself on carrots (not so much on rice or pasta, though). I'm trying to get in good protein, fruits and veggies, the healthy-for-you oils and some not-too-evil carbs. As another snacking or breakfast option, I also have cantaloupe.

When I eat out - which I want to reduce for cost as well as health reasons - I'm working to focus more on salad-y type items with chicken, and less on red meat and carbs. Also, since the weather is nicer now, I'm trying to get back on my walking program, and to try and take at least one longer weekend walk, too.

On that note, here's a cruel contradiction (which may include a little TMI, so forewarned is forearmed as usual on my blog): because I'm a lady of ample thighs, they move back anfd forth against each other when I walk, and during the summer when I'm not wearing pants or stockings, it causes irritation. In a terrible trick of fate, this happens because I actually do walk around quite a lot, but it also happens because I apparently don't walk (or do other forms of exercise) quite enough to lose the thigh weight. So amazingly, the problem is the result of being both too active and not active enough, all at the same time. Ay, there's the rub ... literally. :-(

At any rate, so far today my lunch and breakfast have been tasty and filling, and I walked home from the store with my groceries last night; I hope it's a good sign. I was a little disappointed that my healthy eats weren't quite as healthy-earth as I wanted them to be; my carrots, lettuce, cantaloupe and tuna definitely don't qualify as local eating. With the advent of summer and the farmer's market season, I'm looking forward to being able to go more local on some of those items over the next 4-6 months.

I don't hate markets. I just don't believe they bring justice or balance.

2009-04-16T11:31:00.001-04:00

Commerce - in the broad sense of people making exchanges with other people for things that you want - has been around for millenia, and seems to be a pretty fundamental human social activity. It's not a bad idea at all; in fact, it's essential because very few if any of us have the skills to do everything we need in our life for ourselves. Markets - again, in the broad sense of vehicles for facilitating these exchanges on a larger scale, whether they are physical or virtual - are a very useful tool.

But none of that says anything about how our society - which includes these markets and exchanges - should function. Markets are just things, like forks, that don't have much value except in how they are used and the results of that use. If I use my fork to put food in my mouth and I get fed, it's a great tool; if I use my fork to stab you in the eye and you end up blind, it's not a good thing at all. Forks are not intrinsically good ... but they are generally considered positives in our society, because they result in vastly more feeding and than stabbing.

Markets are not intrinsically good either; so in the evaluation of our "free market" economy, we have to ask how they are used and what they produce. Right now, our markets produce two main things, in my opinion: lots and lots of throwaway goods, and exponentially growing inequality in access to resources. In fairness, the market also results in lots of "jobs", but the quality of those jobs varies widely, and the distribution of that quality also tends to be very unequal across different groups of people.

What makes a good market are the underlying principles that are built into its rules (and their enforcement). The rules surrounding appropriate use of forks place a severe penalty on using them to stab people, so stabbings are few. The lack of rules in the definition of our current markets of exchange to penalize environmental damage or gross pay disparities between a CEO of a company and the factory workers who make that company's products mean that those behaviors are rampant in the way that people operate in our markets.

The rules that we have in our markets prioritize individualism and self-interest; make lowest cost and biggest profit the highest goal with the best reward; encourage low quality and continual waste; and ignore diffuse costs in evaluating costs and benefits. The rules that we should have need to prioritize honesty and integrity; respect individual liberties but prioritize the public good as the goal of the market; require equitable sharing of the direct and diffuse rewards and costs of the market among the individuals and groups who participate; set high quality standards for the content, function, useful life and production methods of products and services exchanged. Finally, these rules must be enforced; the value placed on goods and services exchanged must be tied to these principles so that the best behaviors are rewarded; and penalties for violating these principles, in spirit as well as in letter, must be severe.

Some folks will argue that all of this fetters the market's "free" operation and keep people from exercising their preferences. But let's be real: the market is not free. It is very directly influenced by subsidies, regulations, loopholes, and indirectly influenced by cultural standards, that privilege certain behaviors over others. Those who are currently benefiting the most from the existing system would like to convince us that protecting the system protects our right to choose; but what they are protecting is their right to determine our range of options to maximize their own benefit.

If we're going to institute rules for our markets - which we will always do - then let's institute the ones that make our markets and the people who participate in them healthy, stable and sustaining. And if we're not willing to do that, then let's at least admit that we are choosing to be sick and broken, and take responsibility for the destruction we wreak. The current state of our system is a surprise only to those who were deliberately ignoring the reality of the world around them.

Geography of Nowhere

2009-03-30T10:34:00.009-04:00

Time to switch topics! Let's talk urban design.

So, the weekend before this past one, I was spending a couple of days in Virginia with my sister following a business meeting in DC. In a departure from most of Northern Virginia, my sister happens to live in a place where you can actually walk to do errands. There's a whole shopping plaza just a couple of short blocks away, and its even one of those New Urbanism-inspired ones where they try to make it look like a little village and include sidewalks around the seas of parking so you can in fact walk from store to store, even the Home Depot. Sarcasm about the architectural results aside, it is a much better amenity that what I see just about anywhere else in the region. (Excepting places, of course, that have actual town or neighborhood centers still standing, like traditional Reston. Oh, and don't get me started on Reston "Town Center".)

Anyway, so I was walking home from the grocery store with my nephew, and came upon this little intersection:

This is actually a view back the way I came, walking along the sidewalk pictured here. The building to the right-hand side of the picture is the library, I think; there's also some sort of public building and a church on that side, so I tend to forget what order they go in. On the left-hand side of the picture you can see the shopping center from which we recently departed. Again, not the best architecture or the friendliest street, but it's nice to have all of these things so close by.

In a different direction across the intersection, you can see that this is also one of the denser reidential developments you'll find in the area; while most places are single-family house on lots ranging from a postage stamp to an envelope, here, we have a mix of town-homes, apartments, and a little hotel across the way.

In these two views, you can see the housing and another view of the shopping center. You can also see the sidewalks, which are very important to note in light of the next image:

Now, I spent a lot of my growing up time in Northern Virginia; ten years. I'm incredibly familiar with the disappearing sidewalk problem, where you're walking on one side of the street, and then the sidewalk on that side disappears, and you have to cross to the other side of the street. LEED-ND (a new "green" rating system for neighborhood development from the US Green Building Council) even has a point - possibly a required one - for having sidewalks on both sides of a street, in order to reward people for having basic common sense about pedestrians moving around a neighborhood. I'm also familiar with the suddenly stopping sidewalk, where in the middle of your walk you just abruptly come to the end of pavement. Both of these are common features of the Northern Virginia landscape.

But I was stopped short (literally and figuratively) but this curb cut. Far more than Palin's Bridge to Nowhere, this is really incomprehensible; I mean, once you roll up on this curb cut, where exactly are you supposed to go? Did they just want to give you a little safe haven where you could observe the intersection from all four corners, just for a sense of completeness? Are they hoping for sidewalk funding to come later? Are they trying to facilitate a smooth transition from on-road to off-road for off-road wheelchair adventurers?

Faced with this boondoggle, I found myself with a limited number of unattractive options: cross the street to get to the remaining sidewalk, then cross back a block later to get back on the side where my sister's development is located; muddle my way through the grass for the next block; go diagonally to my left across a charming asphalt parking lot, then take a short but steep grassy incline to end up in my sister's neighborhood. I choose option (c), thankfully not twisting my ankle in heels as I ran down the parking lot edge to the street. I forgot to take a photo of that; also, interestingly, no stairs to descend that incline, nor a sidewalk at the bottom on that side of the road that the incline leads down to ... just hill, curb, slip between parked cars into roadway, cross quickly to the sidewalk that goes around my sister's street.

Ah, the suburban adventure. Nothing makes you appreciate home like going somewhere else for a while, and then realizing just how good you have it. :-)

When Church = Soul-Wrenching Torture That You Only Put Yourself Through Because You Made a Commitment to Go Until Easter

2009-03-29T18:44:00.002-04:00

That's right, chicas y chicos, another awesomely awful blog post. Let's all be glad that Easter is in 2 weeks.

So, today was the 4th week of Lenten church attendance; I also went last week when I was in Viriginia with my sister. That week was kind of sad and reflective, but more somberly thoughtful that spirit-wrecking bucket of tears. It seems those home runs are reserved for the home church.

"Delight yourself also in the LORD, and He shall give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the LORD, trust also in Him, and He shall bring it to pass." -- Psalm 37:4-5

I used to believe that passage wholeheartedly; it was one of those comforts that I could repeat to sustain myself in rough times. Even if things seemed dark right now, if I trusted in God, let him direct my steps as Proverbs 3:5-6 says, He knew what I needed and what I deeply desired, and He would bring it in just the right time.

I don't really believe that anymore.

"My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, and from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry in the daytime, but You do not hear; and in the night season, and am not silent." -- Psalm 22:1-2

It is, of course, fascinatingly symbolic how my whole experience of this Lenten season is so perfectly summed up in this Psalm, quoted by Jesus himself on the cross. And though I am not literally being pierced, or surrounded by evildoers casting lots for my clothing, the desperation of the first half of the Psalm could not more accurately reflect my inner state. This does make me think I must be going through some Easter object lesson, in which case I am incredibly sincere in my prayer - nay, plea - for a transformation and resurrection of the spirit that will be just as clear, powerful, visible and tangible as that Easter miracle. Two weeks more is about all I can handle of this emotional horror show.

I finally talked to my pastor a bit after service, because he was available in the prayer corner; this is a small blessing I will try to recognize and be thankful for, because I probably would be in pretty bad shape if I hadn't gotten some prayer and talking through some portion of what is going on. I told him I keep feeling like I'm desperate for a community of Christians where we are intimately involved in each other's lives and going on this crazy journey together; but it never quite materializes, seeming to occasionally appear and then disappear just as I get excited about it. I feel like I'm always hearing this "rely on God alone" message, and like over the last couple of years He even started to pull out from under me the bits of community I felt I had or was gathering; and maybe some other folks are good at going it alone with just them and Him, but I am not built for that, and I can't get past that hard fact of my need to be with other people, other partners in my walk, no matter how hard I try to make it without.

So I don't understand why He would make me that way and then seem to constantly withhold the deepest desire of my heart. I have no cohesive posse here in Boston, no life partner, and I am tired of trying to patch community together all the time from disconnected strands that never weave themselves into a whole, and that I always have to juggle and hold onto to try and create some semblance of a safety net. If God knows that I need this, so much that I have been crying out to Him because of its lack for more than a decade, why would He not povide it? Why make me who I am, and then just leave me here so sad and lonely? In my limited human perception, it's hard not to perceive that as a terrible cruelty.

Look, I know that I am physically healthy, materially affluent and secure, and that there are any number of severe emotional and mental traumas through which He has not put me. I am grateful for all of those things, and I do not take them lightly. I work really hard to try and keep my emotional woes in perspective. But this is not the self-centered whining of a girl who has everything casting about for something to complain about. I feel crushed to the point of despair by this loneliness and emptiness that never is satisfied, I cannot think about these things without sobbing uncontrollably, and I spend most of my time deliberately choosing not to think about any of this so I can continue to function and find reasons to get up in the morning. When I let myself think about these things, it is really tough to figure out why in the world or beyond it I am still here and breathing. I am tired, worn out, and exhausted to my bones when I have to be confronted with this aspect of my emotional and spiritual life.

I'll keep my commitment through Easter, because I said I would. If nothing changes by then, I really don't know what is next ... So I am going to try and hold out what is left of my faith and believe that God is listening, and that he will move me to the second half of Psalm 22 in a form that is not mysterious or incomprehensible, but in a way that a small, scared person like me can know and trust again. I hope you all will pray for me.

Returned, Lost

2009-03-15T23:53:00.002-04:00

I was going to write this two weeks ago, but then the second half of the story wouldn't have happened yet.

So, I got Lent off to a bad start by not going to Ash Wednesday service, but I made two resolutions anyway: to tithe my spending every week, and to go to church every Sunday I was in Boston. The first one is going fine, but that's not what this story is about.

I went to church on Sunday, March 1, the first Sunday of Lent and Communion Sunday at my church. Humorously, I was assigned to be the reader at the 6pm service; I actually thanked the Lord for that, because it helped to make sure that I would start off keeping my resolution. As I read practiced my passage that Sunday afternoon, I had to laugh: the passage in 1 Peter chapters one and four was all about understanding suffering as a normal part of the Christian life; how it refines your faith, connects you to the sufferings of Christ, moves you toward salvation. The Lord's sense of humor amused me ... and the amusement continued as praise song after praise song talked about reliance on him, being stripped of everything else to depend on him. The prayer of confession from Psalm 51 asked that the Lord "renew a steadfast spirit within me ... Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me."

If you've ever had one of those days where events around you seem to all be sending a very direct, very personalized message, it was that kind of experience. The obvious conclusion was that all the trials of the last couple years were about training me to totally depend on God, and giving me understanding of a teeny, tiny portion of the anguish Christ experienced. A conversation with my mother later that evening seemed to confirm this, and even to provide additional comfort in realizing that what God had seemed to break, he eventually restored, perhaps even better than it had been before.

I was driving back from the Poconos last Sunday, so fast forward two weeks to today.

I just tried writing a whole paragraph about what I felt today, but I can't get the words right. It comes out too flippant, and overdramatized at the same time. "Disconnected" sounds too technical, too calm; I wasn't disconnected in service today. I was lost, in a church full of people singing to and speaking about a God I feared I had no relation to anymore.

I keep trying to write about this afternoon, but I still can't find the words to describe it, and ultimately I'm not sure the details of my afternoon are relevant. The point is this: it's not that I don't believe in God. It's not even that I think he doesn't take care of me; my family and I are all well, I have a good job, a good home, an income to take care of both needs and luxuries. But I don't know if he cares what happens to me on the inside, if I am hurt or confused or so broken down in spirit that I can barely walk from one room to another. It's like it doesn't matter, so long as I get up and go to work and do my duties like I'm supposed to.

He doesn't speak to me or comfort me in my distress, not even if I beg and plead in tears for some sign that will help me know he's not just waiting to see how long I'll go before I fail and lose my faith completely. I hear and read his words but there seems to be no love in them, just a set of vague orders that often leaves me wondering what I'm supposed to do to get it right. Every time I try to pray, I don't really know who I'm talking to anymore.

It was easier not going to church, because then I didn't have to come face to face with the reality that my faith feels all hollowed out, with only a narrow shell of habit and regulations still holding it in place. I liked not dealing with it, because then I didn't feel so abysmal. I guess I'm going to try and work through this with someone who can give me good counsel, and hope for an outcome I can live with.

Brandy's Oscar Blog

2009-02-23T00:13:00.000-05:00

OK, so here's my running commentary on Oscar night, for anyone who cares ... I just don't want to be updating my Facebook status every 5 minutes:

7:37