It's a funny place, this new world I live in. I think England may have felt more familiar than working for the government; at least they spoke English there. It's not nearly as scary as I presumed it would be, but it is new and different, and I am still walking on shaky legs. Shaky, but proud - tentative and slow, but moving forward. The last few weeks have opened my eyes to the adult world, to [more of] what goes on behind the professional facade, to the humanity of my coworkers and supervisors, as well as to their wisdom. It is surprisingly less intimidating, and I realize it is because I am really getting acquainted with myself. When I went to Europe I had no idea what was to become of me; I knew that my independence would be tested, and that I would either gain confidence or come home and stay tucked away in Tennessee for the rest of my life. Thankfully I grew - to love Europe, to love travel, to love challenge, to embrace "hard", "scary", "new". Which has further spurred me on in the other terrifying encounters I have in this fast world where the crosswalk character and ensuing cars wait for no man, old or young, and the outdoors are only experienced and enjoyed by a select few professionals who find the time. I find joy in the silliest idiosyncrasies of this working life...the way my heels tap on the tile floor walking up to my office; that this sound does not depend on how perky or motivated I feel - it sounds important no matter what, though more important the quicker the pace....How the receptionist differentiates between the two Stephanies in the office by calling me Lily on a regular basis. At this point, I don't think she knows my real name anymore....The way the frozen yogurt store downstairs plays a movie every day that reaches into my long-term, dusty memory and pulls out a smile. Today's was Big. Yesterday was the old Charlie and the Chocolate Factory....How the man at the top of the metro escalator announces all the biggest news stories while he passes out his papers...How the milk steamer hisses as I pass Starbucks, and the coffee scents follow me down the hall...How my chair is comfy enough to sit curled up on my feet all day long...
As a side note before I get back to work, let me just say that even though I voted today, and I like who I voted for, the sweetest part of the whole experience was standing with my husband at 7 in the morning, jacketed arm in jacketed arm, chatting before we went our separate ways for the day. I think voting is mostly a great excuse to stand in line for inordinate amounts of time with someone you care about and less about the names you circle on your ballot. Suffice all that to say, we're going to be ok, Mitt or Barack, and in 4 years, this all happens again. The only thing I'll do differently when I vote in 2016 is bring coffee.
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Friday, October 5, 2012
october!
Just yesterday I think I spoke of the approach of summer and how all the vegetables were raring to go, and all I could think about was shorts and sunshine. Funny that as I write this it is hot probably like the day I awaited summer, and a fan is blowing in face, and every few minutes I sneeze as it picks up the dust in the room. Now I anticipate fall. Not that I look forward to greeting the outdoors with misery - walking everywhere has it glory until it's cold - but I am looking forward to the first few days of cold cheeks and wind tears.
I can vouch for DC from last November that fall here is gorgeous. I'm really excited to experience it. Last night we went to our first small group meeting, and we had chili and seasonal sierra nevadas and pumpkin cream cheese bread. And it was everything that it is every year; except that there is really nothing like the first pumpkin ale, the first changed japanese maple, the first frost of the season...
I start a new job in two Mondays. There is a lot of excitement and anxiety I'm experiencing, because it's the first big jump I've ever taken into adultness. Honestly, my hope is that I can still be young. At the end of the day I am 23. Except at the end of November 10th. But in reality, as much as I try to be grown up and responsible and essential in the work place...I still want to be my age. Something I've felt since moving up here is that I can't be silly anymore. Silly is one of the greatest expressions of candor out there, and, when expressed in small doses, it brings the sweetest fragrance of youth to even the oldest someones.
In other news I'm knitting a sweater. This is important to know, because you are now my accountability partners as I struggle to finish it. It is necessary to finish before it gets cold or else I don't know what I'm doing. Also...to friends two sizes smaller than me and a few sizes larger, you may be getting a surprise Christmas gift if this sweater does not go as planned...
I can vouch for DC from last November that fall here is gorgeous. I'm really excited to experience it. Last night we went to our first small group meeting, and we had chili and seasonal sierra nevadas and pumpkin cream cheese bread. And it was everything that it is every year; except that there is really nothing like the first pumpkin ale, the first changed japanese maple, the first frost of the season...
I start a new job in two Mondays. There is a lot of excitement and anxiety I'm experiencing, because it's the first big jump I've ever taken into adultness. Honestly, my hope is that I can still be young. At the end of the day I am 23. Except at the end of November 10th. But in reality, as much as I try to be grown up and responsible and essential in the work place...I still want to be my age. Something I've felt since moving up here is that I can't be silly anymore. Silly is one of the greatest expressions of candor out there, and, when expressed in small doses, it brings the sweetest fragrance of youth to even the oldest someones.
In other news I'm knitting a sweater. This is important to know, because you are now my accountability partners as I struggle to finish it. It is necessary to finish before it gets cold or else I don't know what I'm doing. Also...to friends two sizes smaller than me and a few sizes larger, you may be getting a surprise Christmas gift if this sweater does not go as planned...
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| a couple weeks ago |
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| collar! |
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| the goal |
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| most recently... |
Thursday, July 26, 2012
you know it's cool if it's worth blogging about
Yard Sales. They are so intriguing. There is a whirlwind of emotions I feel when I have them. On the one hand I so hope to sell everything no matter how cheap I have to make everything and no matter how much money I don't make. On the other hand, I feel so indescribably sorry for the people buying my knick knacks because I KNOW how worthless they are. Someone bought my vanilla-smelling, half empty package of tea candles, and I felt bad that they were spending a whole 50 cents on something that had sat in my drawer for the last 5 years. And yet really that's a positive thing--that my trash is someone else's treasure. It's just that when I see the old men buying 10 cent coozies that aren't cool and the unopened package of unsharpened #2 pencils and the tiny UT foam football that I proudly boasted on my bookshelf as a student, I immediately imagine how these items will all end up in this old man's stack of hoarded crap. I don't guess feeling sorry for him will change any of the circumstances, except that I will continue to get richer off of the persons like him who love worthless preowneds.
I was in DC the other day and as I pranced around pretending to be a Washingtonian, I felt one with those other working women because I had on a dress and cardigan for an interview. Suddenly, as I was comforted about my non touristic appearance, I realized there were slowly forming blisters on my heels and pinky toes, and I was struck knowing that I would never be one with the women because my feet hurt so badly. And I was wearing flats. But then I stood on the escalator, and in front of me was a woman climbing up quickly (on the left side...that's important apparently), and just as I was about to look away--ah ha! her heels slid off her feet just enough on each step for me to see the two band-aids on each heel...Soon thereafter I went to CVS and bought CVS brand bandages, and I felt like I could pretend to be a city gal again.
A humbling experience indeed is an overnight bus trip. If you were super human before, you are completely and unfortunately just a tired tired person after a trip like that. I have now taken several of these--one to Boston, two to Knoxville, and two to DC. The next morning all I can think about is espresso and fluffy pillows and the sighs you heave just before falling asleep in your own bed. On this last trip, I got the coveted spot on the Megabus to sleep--the back row on the upper level with 5 seats that if you stretch out on early enough and the bus is empty enough, you can sleep there the whole time. When a big boy, without asking, sits in the very middle seat of this row, it makes the sleeping process a bit more difficult, the arthritis in the knees more inevitable, and the respect for humanity just...not...there. I struggled all night long to find a place where I could fall asleep for more than 20 minutes and not be bitter toward this person taking one of MY five seats. It really never occurred to me until afterward that his sleep was just as important as my sleep. I think I am much more comfortable thinking of other humans as THERE instead of as CREATED. It doesn't change the fact that I was exhausted the next day because of his space in that seat, but it does make me consider that the space in that seat was taken by someone as important as me.
I was in DC the other day and as I pranced around pretending to be a Washingtonian, I felt one with those other working women because I had on a dress and cardigan for an interview. Suddenly, as I was comforted about my non touristic appearance, I realized there were slowly forming blisters on my heels and pinky toes, and I was struck knowing that I would never be one with the women because my feet hurt so badly. And I was wearing flats. But then I stood on the escalator, and in front of me was a woman climbing up quickly (on the left side...that's important apparently), and just as I was about to look away--ah ha! her heels slid off her feet just enough on each step for me to see the two band-aids on each heel...Soon thereafter I went to CVS and bought CVS brand bandages, and I felt like I could pretend to be a city gal again.
A humbling experience indeed is an overnight bus trip. If you were super human before, you are completely and unfortunately just a tired tired person after a trip like that. I have now taken several of these--one to Boston, two to Knoxville, and two to DC. The next morning all I can think about is espresso and fluffy pillows and the sighs you heave just before falling asleep in your own bed. On this last trip, I got the coveted spot on the Megabus to sleep--the back row on the upper level with 5 seats that if you stretch out on early enough and the bus is empty enough, you can sleep there the whole time. When a big boy, without asking, sits in the very middle seat of this row, it makes the sleeping process a bit more difficult, the arthritis in the knees more inevitable, and the respect for humanity just...not...there. I struggled all night long to find a place where I could fall asleep for more than 20 minutes and not be bitter toward this person taking one of MY five seats. It really never occurred to me until afterward that his sleep was just as important as my sleep. I think I am much more comfortable thinking of other humans as THERE instead of as CREATED. It doesn't change the fact that I was exhausted the next day because of his space in that seat, but it does make me consider that the space in that seat was taken by someone as important as me.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
reality
when I was little, I used to think that someday we'd use up all the variations you can possibly make out of music notes, and there would be no more new songs. It depressed me to think about because I loved music so much. In a quirky way, I think this fear helped me enjoy all my favorite songs from the point of first-listen fascination and subsequent goose bumps to the complete memorization of every lyric, background harmony, instrumental solo, and key change...
On that note (pun intended), random as this tie in may seem, there is a lot I can say similarly about people. There are a world of combinations that happen in chromosomes between two people when they are making a new person...and those two people were separately created by two people with a bunch of combinations of chromosomes, and so it goes back and back and back. Anyway, that makes me consider the fact that with all these mash-ups we call people, they're beautiful and memorizable, and the person who created them thinks they are It. Then I further continue to think about people I meet who, by the world's standards, are completely messed up and will never be "anything". One of them being myself, the other people usually don't have a home, have drug issues, probably have been in prison a few times, mumble so I can barely hear them, don't realize that nobody over age 17 wears Hollister or Abercrombie shirts (especially not from heaven-forbid a thrift store), and may use 12 packets of sugar in their coffee. And to that person, Jesus says the same thing he says to me and to Obama and to my grandmother and to Ryan Adams, "You are not what you did." I was listening to this pastor (Scott Sauls) today, and his big thing was that we as humans look at people for what they have done in their past, completely dismissing the fact that messy people may actually have a story...that there is a narrative behind whatever horrible that-which-we-don't-speak-of's they did. I really don't need Jesus to look at me for the very worst I've done or thought...
Then that pastor talked about how Jesus comes into places in our hearts that we don't want our parents to see and makes redemption happen. He told a story about a man, Bill, who had been sober for about a month and somehow ended up in his church even though Bill didn't smell like Old Spice, had kids who misbehaved, and had a wife who wasn't in a better place than himself. This guy became a big part of the church, despite his issues. His family kept coming. The point of his story wasn't that Bill made it to the finish line as an associate pastor of that church or started a recovery program for addicts (not that this wouldn't be beautiful)...but that he came to a place in his life where he wanted to be permeated by the Gospel. The thing is, people don't always end up in brown paper packages tied up with strings. If we are going to love people, we can't expect our results. You know those great stories? The ones where drug addicts finally give it up and have a family and start to make money and go to church and then they get their big break in Chicken Soup for the Soul? Unfortunately as great as it is, it doesn't happen that way all the time or even most of the time. The homeless people may always be homeless, the dads who left their families may not come back, the stephanie gilman's who try to have all their ducks in a row may constantly fall on their faces. But when our cities can come around those fellow strugglers and point them to Jesus and ACTUALLY love them, the story is beautiful. It just may not look exactly like the suburban culture would have it look.
So...I'm convinced that Jesus made an infinitesimal amount of music notes, words, and chromosomes, and more and more beautiful combinations are constantly being made. Certainly they all need revision, but what imperfect things don't?
On that note (pun intended), random as this tie in may seem, there is a lot I can say similarly about people. There are a world of combinations that happen in chromosomes between two people when they are making a new person...and those two people were separately created by two people with a bunch of combinations of chromosomes, and so it goes back and back and back. Anyway, that makes me consider the fact that with all these mash-ups we call people, they're beautiful and memorizable, and the person who created them thinks they are It. Then I further continue to think about people I meet who, by the world's standards, are completely messed up and will never be "anything". One of them being myself, the other people usually don't have a home, have drug issues, probably have been in prison a few times, mumble so I can barely hear them, don't realize that nobody over age 17 wears Hollister or Abercrombie shirts (especially not from heaven-forbid a thrift store), and may use 12 packets of sugar in their coffee. And to that person, Jesus says the same thing he says to me and to Obama and to my grandmother and to Ryan Adams, "You are not what you did." I was listening to this pastor (Scott Sauls) today, and his big thing was that we as humans look at people for what they have done in their past, completely dismissing the fact that messy people may actually have a story...that there is a narrative behind whatever horrible that-which-we-don't-speak-of's they did. I really don't need Jesus to look at me for the very worst I've done or thought...
Then that pastor talked about how Jesus comes into places in our hearts that we don't want our parents to see and makes redemption happen. He told a story about a man, Bill, who had been sober for about a month and somehow ended up in his church even though Bill didn't smell like Old Spice, had kids who misbehaved, and had a wife who wasn't in a better place than himself. This guy became a big part of the church, despite his issues. His family kept coming. The point of his story wasn't that Bill made it to the finish line as an associate pastor of that church or started a recovery program for addicts (not that this wouldn't be beautiful)...but that he came to a place in his life where he wanted to be permeated by the Gospel. The thing is, people don't always end up in brown paper packages tied up with strings. If we are going to love people, we can't expect our results. You know those great stories? The ones where drug addicts finally give it up and have a family and start to make money and go to church and then they get their big break in Chicken Soup for the Soul? Unfortunately as great as it is, it doesn't happen that way all the time or even most of the time. The homeless people may always be homeless, the dads who left their families may not come back, the stephanie gilman's who try to have all their ducks in a row may constantly fall on their faces. But when our cities can come around those fellow strugglers and point them to Jesus and ACTUALLY love them, the story is beautiful. It just may not look exactly like the suburban culture would have it look.
So...I'm convinced that Jesus made an infinitesimal amount of music notes, words, and chromosomes, and more and more beautiful combinations are constantly being made. Certainly they all need revision, but what imperfect things don't?
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