ftfdb! we're pretty cool.

2008-12-14T14:55:00.000-08:00

Roots and rocks...

During church today, the passage we were reading was from Isaiah 61: "The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lords favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; to provide for those who mourn in Zion- to give them a garland instead of ashes, olive oil in exchange for tears...For as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations." Isn't that beautiful? We often do lectio divino instead of a sermon, where the people reflect on verses that especially stand out to them from the scripture reading. I reflected on the metaphor of "shoots" for the springing up of righteousness and praise. Shoots are temporary. They spring up, and then they die. This was especially moving for me because I have been feeling down since around Thanksgiving. It's like the steadfastness, and freedom inside me have withered and died. My roots are in really shaky ground, so my sense of self collapses for no apparent reason. While I am somewhat reassured in knowing that my shoots of righteousness and praise will no doubt spring up again in time, having my sense of rootedness dislodged is disconcerting. When the pastor asked us all the Adventen question of what vision of God we hope will be born on Christmas morning, I responded, "God the rock." I miss my groundedness.

We then paired up and discussed who God calls us to be. The man I talked to responded immediately with "father, husband, teacher." I was struck by how he found his sense of self and calling in his relationships to others. My relationships are always changing, so I can't find anything more than an impermanent identity within them. I always need to put down roots in a community (here come the horticultural metaphors again), and yet I struggle to identify myself by that community because it changes every year. I shared these reflections with my dialogue partner, and he brought up willows and poplars. The EPA is planting them in poisoned areas because they put down roots very quickly and are able to draw toxins out of the soil and metabolize them. At the same time, they do not last very long. I resonated with that image of the willow tree. I am trying to put down roots and draw toxins out of this community for the short time that I am here. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to find a grounding that will endure past this year, or simply develop the ability to pull up roots and grow in new soil very quickly when this year ends. Both seem very daunting to me.

2008-10-12T19:15:00.001-07:00

I wrote a poem.

2008-10-01T18:22:00.000-07:00

All right, computer's wonky. Song's in the comments.

2008-10-01T18:19:00.000-07:00

On Fridays at the drop-in youth tutoring program, we have the kids journal for 20 minutes. The youth services supervisor advised us to find some bit of work that we need to do or list to make during the time, so we would be modeling the writing for the kids. I usually use the time to write stories and poetry or whatever's on my mind, and I turned one of my stories into a song. My first song ever! Whoa.

2008-09-28T11:38:00.000-07:00

My dad may be reading this! Yay! He's creating a blog, and you should go reading it. It will have lots of Buffy and politics stuff among other things.

2008-09-22T19:21:00.000-07:00

Sometimes my own wangst overwhelms me.

2008-08-30T20:53:00.000-07:00

So, here I am back in Oberlin. Whew. The rush of moving in and unpacking is over, but my room is still not neat. Unsurprisingly.

Before I left I went to Montreal with my mom & assorted, which was okay. We were going for a business conference of Drew's, and the convention was like a bad movie. Montreal was also stereotypical; everyone there was uber-fashionable and the night life was great. I hadn't realized how easy/fun it was to learn a language when you were actually exposed to it, and picked up some French while there, at least enough to understand ~20% of everything that was said to me. Of course, I wasn't doing any business or engaging in conversation, so I feel the language thrown at me was pretty common. I had a good time, and would be glad to go back, though next time not with my little, super-tense siblings.

After Montreal most of my time was spent on the final for my Financial Analysis class and moving everything out of the house, which is being sold. I thought it was going to be torn down, but apparently it's going to be sold and rented out. I would actually rather nobody else got to use it, but I suppose it's better than yet another condo in the neighborhood.

So. Yes. In Oberlin. Nothing much happening yet; so far I'm enjoying the house, as opposed to the dorms. The apartment is cheaper per person and we get a pretty sweet kitchen. Having a private bathroom is also cool. I took advantage of the privacy of the bathroom recently to take a shower, only to realize that I didn't actually have any anymore, having had to ditch them in the frantic scramble to vacate my room quickly enough. So I decided a nice casual walk down to my room sans clothing was probably the best way to get some stuff to dry off with (aka my dirty-but-not-too-dirty laundry). Ha. Danielle chose that moment to come up the stairs with two of her (male) Aikido friends. Apparently my modesty was preserved by my very quick escape to my room, but still. The dangers of thinking you can walk around naked in a shared apartment, I guess.

TTFN

2008-08-17T16:48:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone,

I've started a new blog with the other Cap Corps folks. The address is http://capcorps0809.blogspot.com.

2008-07-30T06:15:00.000-07:00

I'm not saying the Firecones! are going to have to have to cover this, or anything, but we'll have to have a multi-lingual chorus of it, sometime.

2008-07-26T17:31:00.000-07:00

I just saw Mamma Mia! at the cinema and I absolutely loved it. You should totally go see it (except for Liz, who would detest it). It made me miss you guys a lot.

2008-07-20T18:13:00.000-07:00

So I'm getting more and more immersed in this whole "health care" thing. It's a little creepy how calloused everybody is, especially since I've frequently heard that to be a nurse you have to be super-empathic. It's chilling to contemplate how much constant exposure to human pain has dulled their emotions, and was even more chilling when I considered what would happen to a "normal" person. If the best, most compassionate of us can't handle this, who can? And what happens when someone not super-compassionate becomes a nurse? I know they must be out there, but I can only hope they all quit before they can do too much damage.

It's actually very calm in an emergency room - nurses move sedately about, even in a code blue (cardiac arrest). I guess because people have dealt with these issues so many times before, they become commonplace. When I was riding along in an ambulance the other day, we went to a nursing home to transport a person in a coma to her nursing home. She was lying there, arms flexed tightly to her chest, a stoma in her neck (so she was breathing through her throat, not her mouth and nose). Her head had a bulge, so it was obvious that she had suffered some serious brain damage, and the look on her face... she looked so young because of that, like a child of six or eight. Her eyes were open and constantly moving back and forth, like she was dreaming with her eyes open, and the only time she moved was when we had to stick a tube down her throat to clear her airway. I was applying suction, and had to put the tube down her throat until she spasmed (the tube started to enter the lungs).

The two guys I was with were pretty jaded, but you could tell they were affected by this call, probably because I was affected. It was just so sad. Nobody really knew her name - there were three different medical charts we encountered, and all of them had a different name. She was 22 years old, and had been in a car accident 3 (!) years ago and had suffered massive brain trauma. She was married too. That's just so strange and tragic. This chick got married young, and it was like... how must her husband feel? Why aren't they divorced so he can move on? Because it was obvious to me that this was one chick that was never coming back. And all she could feel was pain. That was the only sensation she showed any response to.

It was just like, why isn't she dead? Is she really going to have to live the rest of her life like this? At least 40 years of just lying there, sores all over her body and constantly needing suctioning, which hurts her. She's never coming back. She doesn't need life support, so there's no "plug" to pull, but she should be dead. No one should be forced to live like that, constantly in pain and with no way to be anywhere but outside your own head. That's enough to drive a person insane, and if you're trapped in your own head and insane, I'd be willing to bet that you'd enjoy death a great deal more than life. It was just so sickening. It was like, this woman should be dead. It is horrible that we haven't killed her, because what she's living is so... awful. I know that I can't see inside her head and tell what she's really like, but it was obvious that she was in pain, if nothing else, and if I were her I'd long for death. It just makes me so angry that we're forcing her to live in this limbo.

2008-07-20T08:12:00.001-07:00

I just finished the last season of Angel, Joss Whedon's spinoff of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. While I didn't get as into Angel as much as I got into Buffy, I was sad that I no longer had any Joss Whedon works to devour. My TV-related relaxation time was on the verge of dissolving into anarchy, lacking form, direction, or hope.

Two days ago, my little brother and I were driving down to Chicago to meet my mother, when I heard on NPR the words "horrible sing-along" and "Joss Whedon." I got so excited my brother was afraid I was going to crash the van. This would be unfortunate because we were nearing our destination after three and a half hours of following computer-generated directions that were at best unnecessarily and at worst sadistically complicated, taking us by the least sensible route it could conceive. Anyway, it turns out Joss Whedon's created a new three-part musical called "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog," which is only available on the Internet. Its arrival could not have been more timely. It's about a scientist who's trying to become a super-villain, and it stars Neil Patrick Harris, whom I totally saw on Broadway in a revival of Assassins. Nathan Fillion is in it, and it turns out he has a pretty respectable singing voice! It's really, really good, and I think you all should watch it.

2008-07-13T20:21:00.000-07:00

Philosophical fragments...

Tonight I've been thinking about life and death and eternal life. I'm not exactly sure why. Part of it, I think, is because I'm in a transitional space, which makes me think of all the unknowns in my life, and death being just about the biggest one. In any case, it's occurred to me lately that my body is a very complex world unto itself, in which cells are born and die every day. They all serve the larger purpose of contributing to the complex functioning and the unique essence that is my body. When that cell dies, I have always assumed, nothing about it in its particularity persists eternally. So what if all of creation is like that?

Catalyzing this stream of thought, this book I've been reading at one point discusses Einstein's philosophy of life, which the author describes as: "we can easily become imprisoned in and blinded by our own thoughts and feelings because they are concerned solely with the particulars of our lives and our desires as separate beings... we all come into and go out of this world as passing gatherings of structured energy... as eddies and waves, our lives do have a certain uniqueness, but they are also the stuff of a larger whole expressing itself in ways that ultimately surpass our comprehension." If you add God into that equation, then all of creation becomes one large and dynamic force life evolving out of God's imagination. The matter and energy that make up Steve Hammond says he believes in afterlife because God is a God of life. But I don't think there needs to be an afterlife for me for God to still be God of life. The story of creation is not about me. It's about God. I'm only a tiny part of that story. And life endures. Creation endures. Global warming could ravage the earth and change what life exists on it, but I believe life would still remain. It's plucky that way. And the energy and matter that make up my body and my life will always be a part of that life. I in my particular uniqueness (is that redundant) will cease to exist, but the matter and energy that make up my life will not. In that regard, death is not really a loss of life, but a change of life from one form to another.

So what if that is all there is to eternal life? Right at this moment, I think I would be okay with that. As D. Kamitsuka pointed out once, we will all still be remembered by God, and in that way our particular existence will never be lost. On the other hand, I'm in pretty good shape right now. I'm happy and healthy, with a roof over my head and adequate food. I can afford to say that I would be content if this life is all I have as myself. I don't know if it's enough for me when I am suffering. Who says the particular, self-focused viewpoint afforded by suffering is a less accurate lens for understanding creation than the more meditative, emotionally-neutral broader view. I'm not sure if the view of life as one unified and dynamic force gives adequate due to the power of evil in the world. For my own justice work, I need to believe that evil is real and God opposes it. What would evil even be in this schema? Where is the justice? I don't know if I could in good conscience tell a parent who had lost a child to try to look beyond their pain and at the bigger picture (which, evidently, is what Einstein did). The nice thing about afterlife is that it offers justice of the true and divine kind, done by God who knows everything about everyone, rather than the imperfect and often narrow-minded justice that humans can mete out.

The view of life as unified is much easier for my sense of reason to wrap itself around than the idea of eternal life and divine judgment. It goes much more neatly with what I perceive of myself and of the world. But who really cares about reasonableness? But even while reason is important for my evaluation of theology, I also agree with Kierkegaard that reason cannot fully tell us about God and the true nature of things, if it can tell us anything at all. Because of that, a worldview that's internally cohesive, or one which causes no cognitive dissonance at all, may not necessarily be the best one.

At this point in my reflections, I have not yet come to any kind of conclusion about what I believe is the most adequate way to view death and afterlife. Between my studies about conceptualizing life after death as bodily resurrection, and my new thoughts (at least, new to me) about no life after death, I am filled with an ever-deepening sense of awe and reverence for life. There are so many beautiful ways to understand it, maybe it's better that no one has reached a definitive conclusion. Knowing that is deeply joyful and God-ful for me. In any case, I am dead set (originally, no pun intended) against having my body pumped full of chemicals and put inside a vault where I will turn into jelly instead of rotting. As soon as I'm dead, please stick me in a pine box and dump me in the ground in the nearest state where that's still legal. Soul or no soul, this body is going to compost.

2008-07-13T10:57:00.000-07:00

I preached in my home church today. I talked about how listening and being open to dechurched people can be really hard but it's also really important, and I drew on reflections that I had reading Mary Hammond's book.

My family and I spent last weekend visiting cousins in rural Missouri. It was pretty neat. It's a really different cultural setting there, and everyone was always asking me if I was married or engaged and saying that they hoped I would be soon and stuff. I didn't make any promises. The family reunion separated into two conversation groups, one of women and one of men, with me and my little brother, who were the youngest by at least 25 years, flitting back and forth between the two. At one point, some of the men were talking about their churches, and so I asked them what they thought "evangelical" means. One of them, caught somewhat off-guard, said "Well, it's about being born again and accepting Jesus Christ. That's very important." Another one, who had been a pastor at one point, talked about how he'd visited St. Paul's Cathedral in London and it seemed cold and more museum than church, and evangelical was like the opposite of that. It was about reaching out to show love to others, and reaching out to God by reaching out to others and showing God's love for them. I felt like I couldn't have said it better myself, and it was really touching to find someone who had such a similar view of evangelicalism in this small, conservative community.

Later, when I was sitting with the women, I heard one woman proudly sharing stories of her daughters and her daughter-in-law. She talked about how one of them insisted that the Southern Baptist missionary board accept her years of preaching children's sermons as fulfilling the preaching requirement for being a missionary, which they were not initially inclined to do. She spoke of her other daughter, who refused to read any books in high school that went against her moral code. And she talked about her Turkish daughter-in-law, a prosecuting attorney for ICE, who refused to let liberal judges be lenient with immigration laws for Mexican immigrants. Now, I don't believe in refusing to read books that offer opinions I disagree with, and I tend to be more sympathetic to Mexican immigrants. At the same time, I felt myself revelling in this cousin, strong woman that she was, and in her pride in her daughters' assertion of their opinions over and against authority figures.

This reunion was deeply affirming to my sense of myself and belonging to a community that is very different than the communities I engage on a daily basis. We may have different cultural and political opinions, but we share a lot of the same spirit, which is very encouraging to me. It again reminds me how complicated people and communities are, and how we transcend the labels which put barriers between us. It's important not to let those labels govern the way I think about my family or anyone else, because it creates separations that just don't exist.

I devolved into preaching a bit there. Sorry, I guess the preacher in me hasn't quite dissipated since this morning.

2008-06-27T03:15:00.000-07:00

Hello dear friends!

Today's adventure: a public bath! I'm continuing with the plan I've been using all along, which is not to really have expectations, so I don't end up really surprised.

Also today's adventure maybe: finishing the second front half of my cardigan. That means only sleeves and button bands and then finding buttons in St. Petersburg!

Tomorrow's adventure: the Hermitage!

Also, Anna, I don't know if you read this blog, but I hope you do and you should, and I thought of you last night. (I think of the F-cones every time I see them in the street, but this is different.) Because SPAIN (where you will be in the fall) and RUSSIA (where I am now) were competeing in the semifinals for the European Cup. So basically, I watched your study abroad country beat the pants off mine in football. 0-3. Ow. Well, good luck against Germany, anyway.

Also, to mimic Linden, I just want to make sure you all know about my other blog.

Now, off to search the internet to find a new monument in St. Petersburg that I can tell my conversation class about on Monday. (p.s. I just had to look up monument right now, because all I could think of was памятник. Whoa.)

2008-06-22T16:56:00.000-07:00

Also, I think it is strange, upon reflection, that the main pic for this blog shows more of a sketchy, hilariously clad man visiting the dorm that it does of me. But perhaps it is appropriate, for I am rather sketchy myself. Much love!

2008-06-22T16:43:00.000-07:00

So currently taking an EMT class and putting off various paperwork tasks I must accomplish. Eek. However, I have a tan/sunburn because I went to the doggy beach today with a German Shepherd puppy. He's so cute, and I have decided that if I had time, I would go German Shepherd instead of Rottweiler. However, seeing as I will be in med school soon, somehow it feels like I will not have the time for a German Shepherd, since they are high maintainence (though super-cool). FYI, I am still covered in sand from this trip, since I have not yet showered. So you know.

An advantage of this summer: I now know how to save lives. I'm literally like a super-hero, though not like Superman, since you have to be born that awesome. I'm still waiting for the radioactive spider, however. Until then, I will settle for administering oxygen and resetting bones and strapping people to backboards. *Le sigh.*

Starting my accounting class this Saturday, which is less heroic but still pretty damn cool when you get down to it. I mean, taxes should be a cinch next year. Right? Right?!?!

In my EMT class there is actually a girl who is my year, in Wellesley, who was on the swim team back in high school! (The grammar in that sentence made my teeth clench in angst, possibly because I am parsing sentences or something, but I care not. Gwahahahaha!) It was rather bizarre to walk in and see her. It's funny, because the first day it was weird and I didn't really enjoy conversation with her, mostly because she was acting pretty shallow and I was probably being pretty bitchy. I left the class saddened because we had actually been pretty good friends in high school. As time passed I realized that we had both just been shy, and though we had both changed, we had changed in ~the same direction. The wonders of a liberal arts education in America, I guess.

Finally, I have something to show y'all.

AHAHAHAHA! It was AWESOME! IT'S AWESOME! Despite the swelling and slight pain. Getting it was so zen and painful, but in a grounding way. You all should definitely get them. Though you should pay less than I did, because the tattoo was more painful for my bank account than for my back. ERG. My next one shall be a Superman symbol. I tingle in anticipation - but not in a creepy X-Filesy MOTW way.

2008-06-17T19:10:00.001-07:00

My brother and his wife are having a baby in January! I'm going to be an aunt!!

2008-06-16T19:21:00.001-07:00

I was just on IMDB looking up Robia LaMorte, the actress who plays Jenny Calendar on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I found out that she got her start as a backup dancer in Debbie Gibson's Shake Your Love video. Hot damn.

2008-06-15T14:55:00.000-07:00

i'm in st. louis! missouri! state #4 of the trip! and i'm not dead yet!!

i'm biking! still!

crossed the mississippi yesterday (on a bridge, alas we did not ford by bike)

today is a rest day; we're staying at courtney merrell's house; that's kind of cool. i mean, it's pretty cool inside, rather warm outside.

basically, feeling like a hooligan nomad, and liking it a lot.

also biking, did i mention that?

i'm now also splitting myself between two blogs, which i think you all know, but just in case:
http://onebigbike.blogspot.com

also, have converted a few people to kate bush. quite excellent, was finally able to do the wuthering heights dance for the first time in a long time. SO GOOD. still.

less than two months till the new x-files movie! get pumped!!

love,
linden

2008-06-14T23:30:00.000-07:00

As many of you know, (and the rest of you might be surprised to find out), I have never (before today) been outside of the Central and Eastern US time zones. My family and I spent about a week in Canada several years ago, but that hardly seems international.
So, the transatlantic flight was an adventure. Lufthansa is a very nice airline. The food was good (I have so much to compare it to, of course… but other well-traveled students said it’s really good for airport food). I had never even been on an airplane that served a meal, come to think of it. Anyway, it was pretty good. I sat between two people and didn’t realized you could adjust part of the headrest forward, so I didn’t get a lot of sleep, but I knit a bunch, and by the time we got to St. Petersburg, I was halfway through Huck Finn (which I have so far found extremely enjoyable).
The airport in Frankfurt was nice; their airport police ride around on bikes, which is neat. On the way back I might try to bring a few Euros, since we were thirsty, but didn’t have the right currency to purchase anything.
St. Petersburg has been lovely. I am so happy I am here. We stayed in a hotel the first night (Morskoi Vokzal) on Vasilevskii Island, which is the island Smolny Institute is on. Between lunch at the hotel and dinner at a nearby restaurant the first night, we went on a bus tour of the city, narrated by the woman running the cultural portion of the program. The intention was to give us a basic idea of the layout of the city, to show us around so we could recognize things. It was really helpful, even though we were all tired and might have fallen asleep on the way to Smolny Cathedral, and it might have taken us the rest of the tour to figure out where that was on the map. I’m not naming names.
Today (I left Minnesota on Thursday and arrived in St. Petersburg on Friday because I’m 8-9 hours ahead of y’all, depending on which time zone you’re in, but I’ll let you figure that out for yourself) we had orientation in the morning, with breakfast and lunch at the hotel. They went over the main points in the handbook, and there wasn’t much that surprised me. The couple days before I left, I started to worry about safety-related things, but I realized here that it’s probably safer here than in Chicago (the main threat to me is petty theft), and the fact that it stays light so late helps, too. In the afternoon, they did a little bit of oral testing and then drove us to our host families. There’s four levels of teaching, and they were using the oral tests to decide between putting people in level three or four. I think I'm going to be in group three. The upper two levels get to take a class on either literature or politics. Guess which one I picked.

2008-06-11T22:26:00.000-07:00

Whoa!

Russia!

Departure to Minneapolis/St. Paul airport commences in 3 hrs 45 min.

I seriously need to sleep right now.

G'night.

OH ALSO I made a reference to Star Trek TNG earlier tonight and felt quite accomplished in my ongoing pursuit of geekdom. (Kathryn - I was reflecting on the fact that you noticed Sci-Fi was playing little introductiony things at the beginning of a couple of the Firefly episodes during that marathon, and I realized that the TNG theme kind of serves as a basic introduction.) I have seen two (2) episodes, and have now referenced the show twice (2x) in my life. I doubt I can maintain that ratio, but we'll see...

2008-05-30T20:30:00.001-07:00

I found something by Kierkegaard on my shelf at home that I haven't read yet! My life is a little bit brighter.

2008-05-30T09:36:00.000-07:00

Adventures at home:

I got a guitar! It's very pretty, and I got into a conversation about religion with the guy at the guitar store while I was buying it. I named it Tara. She and Dulcinea are getting along quite well. I also got my hair chopped off. It's now chin-length, and sometimes it makes me feel like a two-year-old. I tried out the granola recipe in How It all Vegan. It's quite tasty. For my next adventure, I'm going to bike over to the bookstore and check out yoga videos so I can have an inexpensive way to work out that can adapt to different kinds of spaces. I suspect that will be useful in Milwaukee.

I got a guitar!

2008-05-30T08:28:00.000-07:00

Hi all,
five days and counting until the bike trip departs! it's kind of unbelievable, but we're all putting finishing touches on our bikes, we've got our truck and tents, we're finding places to stay across the country and whittling down our possessions to suit a nomadic lifestyle. suffice to say, i'm really excited and still have no idea what i'm getting myself into.

2008-05-11T14:21:00.000-07:00

I was just procrastinating by surfing the net for more funky images of Jesus, and I found a logo that said "What Wouldn't Jesus Do?" and had an image of a cartoon Jesus on a hang glider.

Bitchin'.

2008-05-11T14:10:00.000-07:00

I was just settling down to write the stunning conclusion to my Job paper, and I was listening to "Two Kids" by Anais Mitchell, and I started to wonder what the heck she's saying in the Arabic section. So I searched Google looking for a translation, and ended up reading Anais Mitchell's blog, which as far as I can tell does not include a translation of the Arabic lyrics in Two Kids. It made me wonder how people can be so awesome and witty and insightful in blog format. I guess Anais Mitchell inspired me to be not-witty and insightful in blog format. So here I am. The other day, I was helping out at Sunday dinner crew and we started talking about if folk singers were illegal drugs, what kind of drug they would be and why. It started when I asked if Dar Williams was for-real famous or just folk-world famous. Someone said she's a little of both, and I said, "Oh, so she's like a gateway drug. The marijuana of folk, if you will." And then Ivy said, "I guess that makes Anais Mitchell the heroin of the folk world[as well as a heroine, I might add. Ha]." I decided that Odetta was like crack cocaine: enjoyed by all sorts of people, but Black people are busted for it in disproportionate numbers.

I've been wondering lately whether or not you all will write on the blog next year after I'm gone but you're still at Oberlin. I would be interested in staying apprised of your travails. If you all are able to keep each other apprised because you live together, please transcribe your conversations onto the blog so that I may partake of their richness.

Now to that stunning conclusion.

2008-02-01T20:48:00.000-08:00

i have a drivers license!! egad!

my plane gets into cleveland at 4:30 tomorrow afternoon.

so, let's have a dance party!!

sweet. see you guys there.

( in oHIo! )

((OBERLIN, OHIO!!))

<333333

2008-01-27T23:18:00.000-08:00

please watch this right now.

wow.

2008-01-23T17:57:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure how Linden does the thing where she posts a YouTube video directly onto the blog, so here's the link to a movie I shot at the Bar Cinzano in Valparaiso.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krGk-kJPvCg

2008-01-22T15:25:00.001-08:00

news bulletin #2:
linden has booked a behind the wheel driving test for friday, february 1 at 10:20AM pacific time. prayers appreciated.

2008-01-22T11:04:00.000-08:00

news bulletin:
i have now seen all episodes of firefly.

!

2008-01-22T09:11:00.000-08:00

Hey all,

So, I've been like, pretty saddened by the dead state of campus for the last week, so I'm going to mom's house! Woohoo! Yeah, pretty excited. Also, going to see Avenue Q, which is also exciting. So yeah.

It's funny how when you have the expectation of something really cool happening, everything from now until that point seems that much better.

Also, you guys should watch the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Hilarious!

<3

2008-01-20T22:00:00.001-08:00

what i've been doing:

-arts and crafts
especially: making earrings, still knitting a sweater for my mom, other things with beads.
- writing my story which is currently about 10.5 pages single spaced and doing illustrations for it in cheap acrylic paints and pastels.
- cooking vegan desserts: cupcakes, pumpkin-oatmeal-walnut cookies, maple-walnut-caramel blondies, very elastic and silly chocolate pudding (i let it cook too long; it wasn't supposed to be elastic)
- making dumplings with my mom
- buying dresses, mostly at goodwill
- buying cds at any independent music store i find myself in
- listening to cds: tegan and sara, jens lekman (new cd is SO excellent), jolie holland, avett brothers, ghost world soundtrack (which i found after a long absence)
- oh! i organized my cds. ridiculous.
- watching firefly and x-files while making arts and crafts.
- reading for fun, a little bit: so far on the road by jack kerouac and currently anansi boys by neil gaiman.
- bantering with my brother. who is dragging my chair away from the computer.
farewell.

2008-01-20T21:58:00.001-08:00

2008-01-20T21:55:00.001-08:00

2008-01-20T18:03:00.000-08:00

So, I've been having a mostly unproductive and distressing winter term sojourn at Oberlin, because I'm having trouble getting in contact with all of my friends that are actually on campus.

On the bright side, I have actually begun to read the book Swann's Way. It is pretty good sometimes, but Proust is a whiney little baby and is so French I frequently want to slap him. Also, I got the Neuroanatomy coloring book and it is so fun. Other than that, nothing is happening. Nothing at all.

2008-01-20T17:59:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of about.com

2008-01-19T18:52:00.000-08:00

KATHRYN IN CHILE, POST #7 (Final)

I have returned home safely to Madison, after a red-eye flight out of Santiago that was supposed to live at 11:30 pm and ended up leaving at 2:00 am. I'm still a little loopy. But I came home to a joyous reunion with my tap shoes (and, you know, my family). Today my family and I helped someone from church move into her new apartment, and it was -9 with a windchill of -30 outside. That's about a 120 degree shift for me from about two days before. It was intense.

2008-01-16T14:19:00.001-08:00

KATHRYN IN CHILE, POST #6

It´s been really interesting watching my mom work these past two weeks. I haven´t seen her work since I was little, and then I couldn´t appreciate how good she is at what she does. She works one on one with law students on teaching them effective legal writing, and she teaches law professors how to teach their students to write well. It´s downright eerie how similar her approach to coaching writing is to my approach to coaching writing as a Writing Associate. As a college student, I also have a new appreciation for her teaching style. To illustrate the difference between legal writing and literary writing, She told this true story to her seminar about a judge who retired from law after like 40 years in the field. He finally had time to read for fun instead of reading legal memos, so he started reading some classic novels. He opened up A Tale of Two Cities, and read

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it ws the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way."

He thought to himself, 'WTF? It contradicts itself, it jumps from subject to subject with no apparent connection in between, it´s redundant, and it doesn´t tell me anything. This is crap!' And he throws the book away.

Five years ago, I would have thought, Oh, Mom, there you go again. But now I think that´s a pretty funny story and a pretty effective demonstration of the difference between the legal writing audience and the reading for pleasure audience.

2008-01-16T13:14:00.000-08:00

KATHRYN IN CHILE, POST #5

On Sunday, Mom and I took a ski gondola-type thing up to the top of one of the cerros (they´re big hills) in Santiago to where there´s a statue of the Virgin Mary in the immaculate conception. It was put up to celebrate the date the dogma of Mary´s immaculate conception was made official by the Catholic Church. There´s a little chapel near the statue, and I discovered when I entered that they were playing Taize music. Later that day, we went to a cathedral in downtown, where a cantor was also singing Taize music. It was a very special moment for me. It´s really cool to think about how Taize has gotten all over the world into all different kinds of worship contexts. It has been a recurring theme in my college experience. During my first winter term, I went to the Taize monastery. During my third winter term, I went to a Taize service in Atlanta, GA, and then this winter term I hear Taize music in Chile. And then of course there´s the services in Oberlin and Madison, and the service at the FTE conference in Chicago. Taize renews my hope for the possibility of successful ecumenism.

On another note, today we went to the museum of precolumbian Latin American art. I don´t think I ever realized just how many different cultures and societies there were in Latin America before the genocide of European conquest. I knew about the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas, but there were dozens of others. Anyway, the museum had an exhibit up called 'Morir para gobernar: sexo y poder en la cultura Moche' or 'Dying in order to govern: sex and power in Moche culture.' It was about the Moche people of Peru´s rituals surrounding the death of a king. Sex, and especially non-procreative forms of sex like oral and anal intercourse were really important for ensuring that the king had a successful journey through the land of the dead, the land of the ancestors, and then back into the land of the living where he ruled in the form of his successor. All the ritual sex was heterosexual or masturbatory, because the association between penises, masculinity, domination, and life was very important. The exhibit largely consisted of exquisitely (and remarkably anatomically accurate) carved pots, water jugs, and figurines showing people engaging in oral sex, anal sex, and masturbation. Outside the exhibit was a sign that said 'Minors ought to be accompanied by their parents.' Boy, would that ever be an awkward parent-child conversation.

After lunch, we walked down a street that was occupied almost entirely by stores that sold knitting and crocheting tools and inexpensive yarns. We must have passed at least five or six yarn stores. I thought of you guys. I guess you'll have to visit Chile now.

I got asked for a third time today if I was Brazilian. Next time someone asks, I'm going to say yes.

2008-01-15T22:41:00.000-08:00

i don't have much to say, but here are two cool things.

2008-01-15T10:00:00.000-08:00

I found this really amazing website, called Lasagna Cat.

Live re-enactments of Garfield cartoons!

http://www.lasagnacat.com/

2008-01-14T18:37:00.000-08:00

Hey everybody!

Well, after some brief agonizing, I'm about to rip out more knitting and redo it. The last part of this project (for Danielle) is SO going to go right the first time. If it doesn't, I will scream so loudly Liz will be able to hear me from Chicago.

Off the knitting front, things are going well. I got to see a really neat concert last night at the church where my mom works. These two performers, Jonathan Rundman and Beki Hemingway, led a 5:00 worship service and had a free concert at 7. Beki lives in Colorado, so I don't get to see her play that often, so that was cool, and Jonathan always puts on a really fun show. Also, he has two adorable children, Paavo and Svea, and Paavo was there. In a sweater his grandmother knit for him out of Homespun!

Jonathan is the guy that I've been trying to get to come play in Oberlin. I realized that when he comes, the Firecones! should open for him. It would be so great!

I was actually going to see Jonathan play twice this weekend, but the first opportunity (at a coffee shop) fell through. Why?, you ask. Because my mother was having surgery on her foot. It was a three hour surgery, scheduled to begin at noon, and she didn't get into the OR until 3. Since one of us needed to be around to pick her up, my dad and I didn't make the 7:00 show. Instead, I went out for pizza with my brother. I guess that was okay.

Musically, I'm off the obsessive Hairspray kick, sort of. Been listening to a lot of Daft Punk.

2008-01-14T17:50:00.000-08:00

KATHRYN IN CHILE, POST #4

One more thing...

I bought the most amazing pair of pants at a craft market the other day. They're knit wool pants. It's like a sweater for my butt. Take that, Midwest winter!

2008-01-14T16:16:00.001-08:00

Sorry for my extensive blog literature. I don't mean to be a blog-hog. I just want to remember this stuff, and I'm more inspired to write about it on the blog than in my journal. My hands cramp less.

2008-01-14T16:00:00.001-08:00

KATHRYN IN CHILE, POST #3

Chilean accents are a bitch to understand. It makes me feel dumb sometimes when I have to ask people what they said two or three times.

Dafna told me another funny social encounter story. Evidently, her dad was at a party, and he saw a woman who looked really familiar, but he couldn't figure out how he knew her. It kept bothering him, so he went over and asked her, "Excuse me, you look very familiar. Do I know you from somewhere." The woman replied, "Well, I'm the First Lady."

Somebody else asked me if I was Brazilian the other day. I asked one of Mom's colleagues why everyone thinks I'm Brazilian (or at least two waitresses did), and she said it might be because of my wickedly curly hair. I found that affirming, because it makes me feel more like Inara (Morena Baccarin, the actress who plays her, is Brazilian).

I found out that one of the repercussions of America's antiterrorist policies is that it has become a model (or an excuse) for other countries to take a heavy hand with discontented minorities. Many Mapuche, or Natives who live in the south of Chile, have been held without trial and interrogated harshly in the name of anti-terrorism by the government in recent years as they struggle for rights to their land. Soledad, this really amazing woman who invited Mom to teach the workshop in Chile, is worried that it could escalate to genocide if there is not enough international publicity. After she said that, I poked around on the Internet, and I was surprised to find that Amnesty International had almost nothing on the Mapuche, and the Human Rights Watch has only one two-year-old report. I e-mailed Steve Volk to ask him if he knew anything else about international coverage of the Mapuche. He said there was very little, though he had seen international media coverage of a Mapuche university student who was killed by police while demonstrating for land rights.

So...that's pretty much what's up here. And I've discovered that I really love empanadas.
And I'm really going to miss the fruits when I leave. You buy raspberries by the pound here, and they're way cheaper than in the US. I've never pooped so well in my life.

2008-01-14T00:11:00.000-08:00

guys, x-files is awesome.

just saying.

you know, i wanted to give you a little heads up.

2008-01-13T18:14:00.001-08:00

KATHRYN IN CHILE, POST #2

Today we went downtown, and there were some amazing street shows going on, like puppets and mimes. One guy was giving another guy a haircut while lots of people watched. I didn't get why it was so fascinating, but it reminded me a little of Sweeney Todd so I felt a little creeped out.

Last night, one of Mom's colleagues, Patricia, her friend Ester, and Ester's daughter Dafna took us to Valparaiso and Vina del Mar. Often when you stop at stoplights there are people selling things and washing windows from car to car. In Valparaiso, a guy came out while we were at a stoplight and rode a unicycle and juggled in front of us in the street. It was one of the more amazing things I've seen.

We went to this little hole in the wall for dinner where these locals who are all at least 75 years old sing and play Chilean folk songs every night. It was pretty fantastic. I'm trying to upload a video of it onto Youtube so you can partake in the awesomeness, but have been thus far unsuccessful. In the meantime, my new Facebook photo is of me and Dafna (who's about my age) sitting on the lap of one of the singers after we asked him for his autograph.

At dinner, my mom's colleague's partner leaned over to us and told us that the man sitting at a table next to us used to be a judge. She was the court reporter on a case that he had presided over, of a rich man who had been accused of murdering his young mistress. All the evidence pointed to the rich man as the murderer. The judge was offered a bribe by the rich man's family, but he sent him to jail to await trial anyways. So the rich man's father went to him, upping the bribe, and the judge accepted it. But the father actually had something else in mind. He had tape recorded the conversation, which he then spread publicly, demanding a new trial for his son. The request was granted, and a new judge, whom the rich man's family already had in their back pocket, was assigned the case. The rich man was acquitted, and the original judge, who had been exposed, was disbarred. Meanwhile, a poor man in a local neighborhood was found hanged in his house with what was supposedly a suicide note, in which he "admitted" to killing the woman and felt so bad about it that he committed suicide.

Evidently that kind of thing happened all the time during Pinochet's regime, and it's really common to run into famous and infamous people in public places in Chile these days. Patricia said that she and Ester were out at dinner one night and Ester leaned over to her and said, "See that guy sitting next to you? He was one of Pinochet's primary torturers." The current president of the country was in an elevator where the door opened and the man who had tortured her stepped onto it next to her.

As you can see, this evening led to a whole mess of "when I ran into a famous person in Chile" stories by Patricia, Ester, and Dafna. Ester evidently had to interview Sr. Lagos, the last president before the current one, while he was Secretary of Education. She couldn't find a babysitter for little Dafna, so she brought her along with her. During the interview, Dafna announced "I hate politicians!"

So I hope you made it through my rather long blog entry, and I hope life is going well back in Los Estados!

2008-01-08T05:45:00.000-08:00

KATHRYN IN CHILE, POST #1

Hi everyone! Chile is very warm and sunny. It's a little overwhelming sometimes. I keep thinking how much easier this trip is than my trip to Nicaragua. There's hot running and drinkable water, and lots of buildings and paved roads and wireless access. There are also self-appointed parking attendants who hang out near markets and stuff and they help you park. You then tip them on your way out. I wonder how people would react if I appointed myself a parking attendant and asked for a tip in Oberlin.

Yesterday I was on my own for the midday, and I had lunch at this little cafe. I ordered a quiche, and the waitress paused and looked at me and said "Es brasilena?" I still have trouble intuiting subjects when they are left out, and I thought she was asking if the quiche was Brazilian. I said, "Ummm...si." Then later she asked me which part of Brazil I was from, and I got all confused and realized that she had thought I was Brazilian. I explained to her that I had misunderstood; I thought she asked if my food was Brazilian, and when I don't understand a question properly I say "Yes" instead of "Huh?" She probably thought I was crazy.

2008-01-04T19:29:00.001-08:00

Hi, guys! ...So I just checked my grades, and for the first time at Oberlin, I got all As and A minuses. I'm smiling so much my eyes are squinty. X-D

2008-01-04T17:30:00.000-08:00

happy chile, kathryn!

we got a new kitty! we called her veronica, after ronnie spektor. like 'just like ronnie sang.' pictures included for comparison. we got her from the peninsula humane society. she is 11 months old and the best kitty in the world. she also looks kind of like muu muu. as my mom has said, 'isn't it amazing that we've had the best cat in the world three times in a row?' it IS pretty incredible, actually.

i uploaded a new album of pictures onto the facebook. there are silly pictures of all of you in it, i'm sure. so go comment, fools.

i started working on the kids book. it's gonna be pretty sweet. i just need to figure out how to sit still for that long and make stuff. when i get into it, it's awesome, but it's hard not to be distracted/unfocused. especially with a new cat. and a freaking comfortable bed. i end up sleeping too much.

it's also raining a lot, but our power hasn't gone out yet. we're going to go to berkeley tomorrow and get indian food anyway. i mean, and do other things too.

so the new year is starting well, if a little lazily. i think i'm going to try to get allie to play some intense cards with me. also, all of the pictures of the cupcakes are on her camera and she's not uploading them. maybe i'll steal it. then you could see more of what's been happening in my life, if you felt so inclined.

2008-01-04T06:22:00.000-08:00

I'm going to Chile today. Yay Spanish-speaking countries! Did you guys know that Chile is way east of here? It's three hours ahead of Central Standard Time! I was like, "great googly-moogly, I didn't know that."

2008-01-01T20:34:00.001-08:00

Happy New Year all! I've been watching so much Buffy the Vampire Slayer and reading Philip Pullman's Dark Materials that my real life suddenly seems mundane and vapid. Who's up for averting an apocalypse over spring break?

2007-12-31T12:39:00.000-08:00

Wow. I've been looking at that picture (at the top of the page) and only saw the four of us. Just now I noticed that guy by the microwave. I am, literally, laughing out loud, because I'm remembering how crazy that guy must have thought we were. We are of course, more awesome than crazy, but I really like how that guy is just bumming around in the background of so many of the pictures from that night.

2007-12-30T14:32:00.000-08:00

Sorry about the e-mail you all received from Blogger Support. I logged on and it said I wasn't a member of any blog, and I got confused. But it's all worked out now. One of the problems with having two Oberlin e-mail addresses is that I sometimes forget which one I'm using for different things.

I preached in church today, and I talked about how God loves bodies and all that. I even talked about Jesus' sexuality. I quoted you anonymously, Linden, as one response I had received when I talked about Jesus' sexuality (I quoted you as saying AAAAAAHHHH!).

I got a lot of comments like "That gave me a lot to think about" and "It's nice that you shook things up a little." I don't know whether or not they agreed with me, but they were at least proud and supportive. One person commented to my dad that "I guess Oberlin has really radicalized Kathryn." I took that as a compliment. I only had one person tell me that she disagreed with my proposition that Jesus was a sexual being (of course, more people might have thought it).

This was a very important step for me, because I really wrote this theology for my home church communities like First Baptist Madison and PCC. At the end of the day, they didn't even throw me out of church like Jesus' home church members did. I guess I'll have to try harder next time. :)

2007-12-28T13:46:00.000-08:00

I went to see Sweeney Todd yesterday. Since the movie was so hyped, I expected to really love it or really hate it. As it turns out, neither was the case. I liked the acting, though it was a little odd how much Alan Rickman's character and the guy who played the Beadle resembled their respective roles in Harry Potter (Snape and Wormtail). Helena Bonham Carter was more able to separate Mrs. Lovett from Bellatrix Lestrange. I was a little sad that they cut the chorus numbers from the show. No "attend the tale of Sweeney Todd/he served a dark and a vengeful god" to be had here. But I thought the boy who played Toby was stellar.

2007-12-28T08:22:00.000-08:00

That had absolutely nothing to do with cupcakes. Neither does this: I went to Half-Price Books (20% off everything sale!) and got Teenagers from Outer Space for $4, which I then watched and enjoyed with a friend. As it turns out, they watched TfOS on Mystery Science Theater 3000. It may be necessary to find that episode (404).

While I was poking around H-PB, I looked at this book called 'Picture Knitting' and read some of their instructions for colorwork. When I went home and worked on that thing I'm making for Danielle, I did the color changes correctly, so there are no little nubs of color in the wrong places! I have always been really terrible at knitting when it comes to colorwork. So it's really cool that I sort of understand it at little bit better now.

Also, I got an iPod for Christmas! Any ideas on the coolest knit case I could make for it? I made a friend one that looked like a squid...

2007-12-27T21:07:00.000-08:00

Speaking of cupcakes... I went to the doctor to see if we could figure out why I had so many episodes of diarrhea and vomiting last semester. She had me collect a stool sample, which I at last was able to successfully complete tonight. It's rather fascinating to dig out pieces of my poop to put into little containers. In a, you know, disgusting kind of way. And then I got to seal the containers in plastic Ziploc bags that had orange warning signs and BIOHAZARD written on them. It tickles me that I regularly emit biohazards into the world.

2007-12-26T16:51:00.001-08:00

i got got 'vegan cupcakes take over the world!' for christmas. be prepared. there will be cupcakes. it will be joyous. stay tuned for pictures.

2007-12-25T16:48:00.001-08:00

Also, website = amazing.

2007-12-25T16:27:00.000-08:00

So... Merry Christmas!!!!!!

How is everyone doing?

Also, I have been sick(ish) and do not have to go to an onerous family party where I am made very conscious of the fact that I am not, actually, a blood relative and should go hide my face in shame. However, my brothers will bring me cookies. So everything is perfect.

2007-12-25T12:36:00.001-08:00

I heard "Last Christmas" by WHAM! in the doctor's office yesterday, and thought of you guys.

2007-12-25T09:19:00.000-08:00

Hey all - the blog's lookin' shiny!

Things are going well in Minnesota. There's a sufficient amount of snow to justify it being the end of December. Two of the three services I played in this weekend went well. The third (the Christmas Eve service last night) would have been great...if I'd been miked on either of the two songs my dad and I played. Oh well.

My dad's new 12-string guitar is really neat. Everything played on it sounds really Beatle-y. (The recognizable jangly sound in the Beatles songs is due to the 12-string guitars they played.) Since that's the new guitar, I no longer feel quite as scared to play my dad's other really nice 6-string (normal) guitar. So I've been playing that a lot. And, of course, practicing 'Girls Just Want To Have Fun' on his mandolin.

I hope you are all having a merry Christmas!

2007-12-24T14:45:00.000-08:00

I like what you've done to the site, Linden.

Okay, team, so I've sent you all my Capstone project. I have to turn it into a 12-minute sermon by Sunday. I would appreciate any ideas you might have.

Merry Christmas!

2007-12-23T14:57:00.001-08:00

also, i started knitting my mom's christmas present. which is this:

http://knitty.com/ISSUEfall07/PATTneiman.html
bethany, i know you've already seen it.

so yeah, hopefully i will have it done before february. also, if you guys want anything special for february presents, let me know! especially with post holiday sales and all that.

my friend allie is flying in from texas tomorrow and i am super excited to see her. she's going to be here for like two weeks. it will be intense. sadly, though, esther is going to france on january 2. lame face. i mean, actually, it's pretty awesome that she's going to france, just lame that i won't see her for a long time.

it was also cool to be at church today and it's really great to be able to walk around outside without a jacket on.

sweet.

i'm going to go watch christmas movies or go to goodwill now. or both. hmmmm.

2007-12-22T19:26:00.000-08:00

So... As you all may have noticed, I missed our breakfast on Thursday, reason being that I slept until 11:30. Yeah. So... thanks to Cassie I didn't miss my actual flight, but I did miss you guys. :(

I'm currently in Missouri, listening to my brother (Sam, the older one) and Elly play catch with a Nerf football, which I told them was wimpy, but apparently Sam actually broke a lamp with it, he threw it so hard. Seriously, how hard do you have to throw a *nerf* football to break a fixture reinforced with metal?

Also, am trying to study for Orgo. It's easier here than it ever was at school, which makes me wonder how condusive to anything productive that whole atmosphere is. Like... here, everything is much clearer and easier to focus on. That might just be because my mom is here or I'm home, but for whatever reason, everything academic simply makes more sense. Arg. So, yeah, really glad I took an incomplete.

Um... that's basically all I have to say right now. Everyone should post, and then we would all, you know, kit. And such. So... yeah, merry christmas!

2007-12-22T10:31:00.000-08:00

well, friends. i have again successfully traversed the vast wilderness that is our dear country to return to my humble point of origin. within the first few hours of being home, i met friends from church i haven't seen in ages and went on a slurpee run, my parents made vegan chocolate chip bread, my uncle flew in from portland (oregon, thank goodness) and my brother left his scythe, his phone and his computer in my room after trying to chop me up and showing me clips from episodes of scrubs. (the scythe was actually plastic). and then i slept for a long time. and now i am having a difficult time spelling words correctly, but due to the miracles of modern technology, it is probably difficult for you to tell. also, listening to regina spektor a lot.

so i'm psyched to be home, but also miss you guys already. so, keep in touch already! also, if you send me your addresses, i promise i will send you weird postcards. :D

sincerely, l. face, esq.

2007-11-16T12:54:00.000-08:00

2007-11-16T12:00:00.001-08:00

Huzzah! I have joined. Now I am one of the elite.

2007-08-02T07:37:00.000-07:00

If you've had access to news coverage, then you probably heard about the collapse of the 35W bridge in Minneapolis at around 6:05 last night, where Intersate 35W crosses the Mississippi River. 35W is one of the main freeways in the Twin Cities; about 50% of the time when I drive, I'm on the chunk of that road that's in the northern suburbs.

I'm okay, as is my family. To the best of my knowledge, everyone I know is safe. I was working at the Metrodome (base/football stadium) during the collapse, and my carpool to work drove over the bridge about 2 hours before it went down. The Metrodome was really close to the site of the collapse, and it sounds like the only reason the game was played at all was to keep the 20-25,000 people off the roads for a few hours.

Fortunately, my parents both work in the suburbs, so they won't have to deal with the extra traffic (there's tons of road construction going on everywhere), but getting to the Metrodome to work at the games in the next few weeks is going to be interesting.

I hope it doesn't take too long to find and identify the people who are still missing. I can't imagine how it would feel to not be able to contact someone who's often on that stretch of road. Also, it appears that this might be drawing the needed attention to older and weaker infrastructure across the country that needs repair. Despite the inconvenience of huge construction projects, this is definitely worse.

It's kind of scary. My dad, brother and I went to the Twins game on Monday night, and we crossed that bridge at around 6:05. If it had been two days earlier, it might have happened to us.

2007-07-28T07:13:00.000-07:00

I've been back in Oberlin for about two weeks now, working at the admissions office. I've met some pretty neat prospective students. Whoever thought "fearless" would totally change the demographic of students applying to Oberlin was off their nut.

The National Council of Churches Faith and Order Conference in Oberlin went down last week. I was fully expecting to be reminded just how much of a
low church/congregational polity fan I am, but I was not expecting the
number of people on panels reading papers full of high churchy and academic jargon. In short, it was a lot of creed and a lot of tweed. It concerned me how disconnected the
papers were from the practical realities of living ecumenically. A lot
of the discussion centered on theories of ecumenism, which I often found
somewhat behind my own experience of relating to people of both
different denominations and different faiths. It made it difficult for
me to wrap my mind around questions like, for example, does pursuing
interfaith dialogue interfere with Faith and Order's ability to work for
"visible Christian unity?" Since to some degree both tasks are simply
unavoidable parts of my everyday life experience, I don't understand how
they could be at odds. I also found I was much more comfortable with the idea of there being no overarching Truth that applies to everyone than many of the older (50+) members of
the conference.

I also felt like the ecumenical and interfaith dialogue that I am
currently defining myself within was rarely present in the dialogues
they were talking about. I'm defining myself within the crossroads of
racial, faith, and sexual identity. My denominational identity, if
anything, is subordinate to these.

I was actually surprised how many white men were presenting. Out of
about twenty-five presenters, there were only three women and perhaps
five people who weren't white. There would have been four, but
Jacquelyn Grant couldn't make it at the last minute. I was more than a
little disappointed, since I was looking forward to her presentation
more than anyone else's.

We were told in orientation that we were not there to represent
ourselves, but our denominations. Luckily, I avoided the complex
ethical question that presents because my denomination has no beliefs of
its own. Later on, though, a National Baptist minister in my discussion
group pointed out how we were being asked to separate our denominational
identities from our personal identities. As an African-American woman,
she could not separate the history of her people from her theology, and
her cultural identity and religious identity were similarly inseparable.

I had a delightful conversation with an Australian scholar named Jione
Havea. He gave a presentation about viewing the Bible as storytelling,
a la Kwok Pui-lan and Musa Dube. He affirmed my suspicion that a Watson
Fellowship might not best suit my goals for going abroad.

I learned that the proper term for denominations that don't play well
with others, like Assembly of God, Southern Baptist Convention, and
Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, is "ecumenically cautious." I also
learned that Hebrew is easier to learn than Greek because Hebrew
translates directly into ebonics: "God be in this place."

2007-07-18T12:14:00.000-07:00

I agree with Kathryn about Daniel Radcliffe, though I must say, I'm quite partial to Rupert Grint myself. In fact, I recently watched Driving Lessons, which is a very Harold and Maude-like movie from 2006 that Rupert is in with Julie Walters (who also plays Molly Weasley). It was pretty good.

I've (sort of) found a job! I've been working at the Metrodome, the stadium where the Minnesota Twins (and Vikings) play. It's been okay. For some reason they scheduled me to work Friday night, but I've expressed that I'm not available. There will be no Bethany Draeger in existence Friday evening, only Charlie Weasley. Needless to say, I'm psyched.

Speaking of awesome Harry Potter-related events, on Monday my dad, brother and I went down to Minneapolis and saw Harry and the Potters live! WOO! It was awesome. They're really funny guys, and they were really happy to see so many wizards and Muggles rocking together. We decided that Voldemort never went to rock concerts. Apparently, 7th year Harry inherited his guitar from James via Dumbledore, who used to go and see James' band play in the basement of Hogwarts every weekend, back in James' school days. 4th year Harry inherited Lily's tenor saxophone (she played in the school band). I was worried that they didn't have music classes at Hogwarts. Now I feel better.

I've still got to reread Half-Blood Prince, and knit a few various things before Friday. And make some Chocolate Frogs. Perhaps I'll bring the frog molds to school with me this fall, and we can get some chocolate from Gibsons, melt it down, and pretend to have visited Honeydukes.

My mother is coming home today from Maine. She's been visiting her mum and two of her brothers. They went on a puffin watching trip a couple of days ago! Too bad she forgot the camera.

2007-07-12T19:15:00.000-07:00

If you want to watch the Harry Potter movie completely without bias, don't read this....

I declare that Daniel Radcliffe is now officially old enough to be eye candy. I sympathize with the decision to cut out most of the Harry and Cho relationship, but unfortunately it precludes the possibility of creating a decent "Human Hosepipe" fan video for youtube. I was a little disappointed by Harry's general lack of Emo-ness. I was hoping for some truly inspiring angst.

2007-07-11T14:33:00.000-07:00

University Presbyterian Church in Austin, TX wrote a show called Taize: The Musical. Thereby combining two of my favorite things ever.

Oh the awesomeness. Words fail me.

2007-07-04T23:48:00.000-07:00

Happy Independence Day, Linden!

Unfortunately, it's too late to wish the same to Kathryn, seeing as how it's 1:50 A.M. CST/2:50 EST. So... happy Thursday? I hope your Independence Day was enjoyable and that your neighbors aren't setting off fireworks right now. I think mine have (finally) stopped for tonight. Not that the one's they're shooting off are even legal in Minnesota...

2007-07-02T20:54:00.000-07:00

I got a new retainer. It's bright pink with orange polka dots. It makes my mouth happy.

2007-07-01T21:07:00.000-07:00

I've decided that whenever I lose the connection when talking to someone on a cell phone, it's because the person suddenly had to fight a demon.

It takes away the frustration.

2007-06-30T11:45:00.000-07:00

PS: In my effort to recover from my infatuation with Firefly, I've started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy definitely used "Scully" as a verb in this one episode to mean, as far as I can tell, to refute the suggestion that something is supernatural with the use of logic and historical evidence. Rock on.

2007-06-30T11:18:00.001-07:00

I just got back from the Fund for Theological Education Conference on Sunday. It was fantastic! I greeted this guy by saying "Hi, you're David Reese's friend!" and the conversation proceeded from there. When I told people I went to Oberlin, some of them said "I hear they have really good mozzarrella sticks there." And they'd never even met David! It turns out he and Andy told the mozzarella stick story at the conference talent show last year, and the story percolated through the ranks of some of the older FTE Fellows.

Speaking of modern and improv dance class, Bethany, I got to do liturgical dance at a couple of the worship services. We danced to a psalm that we semi-choreographed, and I added the obligatory Kate Bush bow and arrow move to the choreography. It went over well. I also got to dance in with a jug full of grape juice for Communion. It was a little scary, but I'm glad we covered props in improv dance! It was a really worship-tastic experience for me.

I left feeling very reassured about the future of America's churches. I found 200 passionate, intelligent, visionary individuals committed to dialogue with others with diverse beliefs and experiences. They came from various denominational, theological, and geographic backgrounds, and yet they had a lot of the same questions, concerns, and hopes that I do. It was a thoroughly empowering event.

I also got to visit Adalberto Methodist Church, which has become famous in recent news for sheltering an illegal immigrant named Elvira Arellano and her American-born son Saulito so Elvira won't get deported. It was the most unique Methodist church I've ever visited. It was started by a group of Mexican Catholic immigrants who were not accepted at the local Catholic Church, so they asked the UMC if they could start their own Methodist Church. They asked one of those who left the Catholic Church with them to go to seminary to become the minister for their little storefront church. It's the only Methodist church I know that has an icon of the Virgin of Guadalupe in it, where people come to pray the rosary. They have also developed their own liturgical calendar based on the life of Jesus and the Holy Spirit, and their ministries and focuses follow that seasonal rotation. I thought that was a really powerful idea. The Christian tradition in which I was raised did have a liturgical calendar, but aside from individual days like Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, plus Advent and sometimes Lent, the vast majority of the ministries and worship in the Christian year was not defined by a season. Adalberto's method shows a cyclical understanding of time and ministry that I think sounds healthier, and it also shows the influence of Native American thinking in this church's theology. It sounds healthier to me because it recognizes that substantial time needs to be devoted to just praying, and discerning God's will. Sometimes I think that I have so little time to accomplish my ministry on Earth that I always have to be doing, doing, doing, and I forget that God calls us to pray, and pray A LOT. Like the time I spend praying should seriously rival the time I spend acting. I've resolved to do more nothing next semester, if I can help it. It's hard: Americanized, consumerized Christianity tells me that successful ministry can be quantified, and more is better. Backing away from active ministry to spend time in prayer is downright countercultural. I have to remind myself that Jesus only needed three years of active ministry out of 33 to make his lasting contribution to the world.

I also learned about the dangers of the octopus church that has one tentacle chasing after everything but never actually gets anywhere. That's another reason it's important to pray a lot for vision: realizing the kingdom of God often means doing one thing, and doing it well. Adalberto Methodist is proof of that.

In other news, I've finished my coursework (finally!) and I feel much better now. I'm going back to Oberlin on July 14.

2007-06-26T12:30:00.000-07:00

I have fairly exciting news. Or, at least I'm excited about it.

So in modern dance (it might have been improv, I forget) we did this motion sort of like going into a handspring, but we didn't flip over, we just sort of went forward onto our hands, our feet hang out in the air for a couple seconds, and then come back down onto our feet from the direction we came from. It's pretty fun, so I do several of them from time to time.

Friday morning I started to do one of these motions, but I put a little too much energy into the first one of the day, and my left arm kind of collapsed. I fell on my head. I hit the floor sort of above my left eye/that side of my head, and my left shoulder. I was fine. However, the left bow of my glasses (the side part) got bent upward at about a 35 or 40 degree angle. I spent a long time trying to fix it, and eventually went to Vision World. The guy there tried to fix it, but either the hinge was going to be REALLY weak or he had to tilt the lenses slightly, which disrupts eyesight, since I'd end up looking through the lens at a different angle. Fortunately they were having a sale on frames, so we stuck the old lenses in new (identical) frames. What a day!

In other news, I still don't have a job, but I've been planning my actions for this Harry Potter release! The Borders stores in MN are each having a Grand Hallows Ball, where people can come in costume, or dressed up for a ball, and enter the costume contest! I'm totally planning a Charlie Weasley costume so Awesome the adjective needs capitalization. People can also participate in the Great Snape Debate (Friend or Foe?)(Answer: Friend!), so I'm refining my main arguments. I also have some frog shaped candy molds from a couple of years ago, so I think I'll get some chocolate and make myself some Chocolate Frogs, too!

Also, there's this really cool book called 'Charmed Knits', full of projects inspired by the HP series. I'm getting around to finishing that Ron Weasley Animal Cracker hat from the PoA movie. Woo! I also made a hat that looks like watermelon. It has black pony beads for seeds.

And X Files Season 9 Disc Four came in the mail today. I'm kind of scared to watch the end of the season, to be honest. Reaching the end of Harry Potter and X Files all in the same summer? I better wait to watch more Firefly with you, Kathryn. I don't think I can handle this many things being over.

2007-06-24T22:59:00.001-07:00

first day of camp is over!
nuts man.
i feel this is going to be an intense summer.
i am pretty excited.

2007-06-18T21:51:00.000-07:00

As you know, I've been thinking a lot about resurrection this year. I'm not exactly sure why. But in the process of writing my 17-page paper about it, I decided something. I can work for resurrection in this life, and hope for it after death. Or I can work for resurrection in this life and try to find peace in the thought that I sow the seeds of peace that will lead to resurrection for my community one day. On a practical level, the difference boils down to facing my own death and the deaths of others stoically, or facing it hopefully. I choose hopefully. It may be in part in light of the fact that if I become a minister I will be dealing with death and mourning on a fairly regular basis. It's also partly due to the fact that I want to be able to hope and love and be vulnerable unto death. I can only make myself vulnerable unto death if I do not fear it, and I will only not fear it if I can find hope in it.

2007-06-17T15:35:00.001-07:00

I've finished my paper about crucifixion and resurrection. Yay! Now it's back to figuring out my paper about holy sex. I have a sneaking suspicion that it's going to turn out that my resurrection paper is more scintillating and passionate than my sex paper.

2007-06-09T11:29:00.000-07:00

bah. i'm bad at updates!

i just got back from the ashland oregon shakespeare festival! we saw four plays and they were: the tempest, the taming of the shrew, tom stoppard's on the razzle, and a new musical about san francisco and coffee and the 1950s called tracy's tiger. they were all super amazing. kinda makes me miss theater. especially the musical, since sometimes i forget that not all musicals are stupid. this one was like, lifechanging.

i bought too many things! but they were all really really amazing. there was this store that sold all kinds of things made from recycled products, like bowls and clocks made out of old records, doormats made out of flipflops, and jewelry made out of forks. maybe i'll post pictures someday of those too. also, in most of the little stores hung out the owner's cats or dogs so we got to play with animals while looking at pretty things i probably shouldn't have spent so much money on. kind of like the ginko gallery (but, of course, no cats are as cute as those cats).

i got this cd by the puppini sisters, contemporary singers who specialize in 1940s harmonies a la the andrews sisters, and they do a rendition of wuthering heights that pretty much completes my life.

bethany, there were two amazing yarn stores that we went to. i took some pictures for you. they had yarn made out of bamboo and yarn made out of corn and yarn made out of soy and yarn made out of all kinds of things. and it was called "llamas and llambs." i think you should work there, personally, but you would have to relocate to jacksonville, oregon. it IS a pretty cool random little place though!

gah! i have to go pretty soon.
so, quickly.
i'm going to camp on monday: way super exciting!
but i have to pack, and i'm bad at that.

and, i'm really hoping to be done with the tmnt sweater before i go to camp. i've finished all of the main pieces and stitched down the pockets and done the neck and pocket borders and connected the front and back pieces. mainly left to do now is the front borders with buttons, the embroidery on the big turtle picture (but i wove in all the freaking ends! be proud!!) and sewing the sleeves and side seams. okay, that's kind of a lot. but it's starting to look like a real garment, which rules.

so do you guys!

kathryn, i hope your paper writing is going better. please know that there are few people i have more faith in to write good papers than you.

i may or may not check in again before rushing off to camp... love you guys!

~linden :D

2007-06-05T12:02:00.000-07:00

I have good news, and some more good news and some bad news. The first good news is that when both my parents were gone last week (my mother was in St. Cloud for Minnesota Annual Conference, and my dad was, and is until this Saturday, on business in Houston) and my brother and I were alone in our house for three and a half days, things went well. We saw an awesome baseball game at the Metrodome on Tuesday night, and the Twins beat the White Sox 9-2. (Though next time I talk to Andy, I'm going to have to break it to him that Joe Mauer is no longer my second favorite Twins player. The Canadian, Justin Morneau, is, how shall I say, FANTASTIC.) The rest of the week was pretty good. I bought the new Nine Inch Nails album, which is pretty good. Also, the disc is heat sensitive: when you take it out of the case it's blackish, and taking it out of a cd player when it's still warm, it's more tannish. This was extremely startling at first!

The other good news is that the good news lasted through most of the weekend and even Monday morning. On Sunday, I met a United Methodist bishop from (Sweden, but currently serving in) Russia. I also read this brilliant little story in the paper Monday about how this railway worker in Poland went into a coma in 1989 and he just woke up and thinks the world is 'so much prettier after communism'. Even my work, which was canvassing for U.S. PIRG's clean energy campaign in Minneapolis, went okay Friday and early Monday.

Aaaand the bad news. After the first two hours on Monday, work sucked. I didn't raise any money, and could hardly get anyone to stop and talk to me. We decided at the end of the day that it wasn't a good fit for me and I shouldn't stay with them. Which was okay. Kind of expected. However, I went outside to find my (dad's) car, and couldn't. It was drizzling off and on, and I wandered around for over an hour looking for it before calling my mom to come drive around and help me. She did, and we still couldn't find it. We ended up calling the local police, who confirmed that it had been towed. I guess I parked in a no parking 9-5 zone, even though I parked it not more than ten minutes before 9 and the whole no parking 9-5 zone was full at the time. My not paying enough attention cost my mom $138 to get it out of the impound. And there's a $34 parking ticket. I was supposed to leave work at 5. I didn't get the hell out of Minneapolis until almost 8:30. And I have to find another job now.

Uuuugggghhhh.

2007-06-04T15:12:00.000-07:00

I still can't write a paper without being plagued by the fear that this will be the one that I simply fail to finish. This will be the one that completely doesn't make sense and causes the Oberlin College Religion Department personified to say, "I'm very disappointed with you, Kathryn."

2007-06-01T10:16:00.000-07:00

I have completed the work for my survey courses, and have embarked on my 15-page endeavor to sex Jesus. I shall start from square one, "Jesus did, in fact, possess a penis" and work from there. I think I'm going to argue something along the lines of understanding Jesus as a sexual being who had sexual relations is crucial if one is going to engage in fully loving divine-human and divine-human-human relationships.

If you have any ideas, please let me know.

2007-05-30T11:27:00.001-07:00

i just got my driver's permit! woohoo!

i can legally drive now.

2007-05-28T20:54:00.000-07:00

Oh, and the song that everyone processed in to was the tune to the hymn "Thine is the Glory." While I realize that Handel wrote the piece a good long while before someone came up with the lyrics to the hymn, I don't think it will stop me from belting out next year as I process (because it's one of those songs that can only be belted):

Thine is the gloooory
Risen conq'ring Son
Endless is the Viiiict'ryyyyy
Thou o'er death hast woooon!

2007-05-28T15:49:00.000-07:00

It's been a rather eventful weekend. Saturday evening, I attended a benefit concert featuring Oberlin students singing Broadway songs. I left at intermission, partially because I was tired and partially because a butchered rendition of The I Love You Song from Spelling Bee, a song near to my heart, left me disinclined to return.

On the way out to the show, I thought I saw what may have been alumni painting a rock. It said "Fear this!" and had "war" written in the middle. I thought that was pretty awesome if they were alumni. Then on the way back I saw that they hadn't been painting that, they'd been painting over it and it said "Many died for our freedom."

On Sunday, I got to sit on the stage in Warner Concert Hall for the entire Baccalaureate service in order to read four verses from Philippians. I felt a little silly. I read Philippians 1:3-5, and I was sad because I didn't get to read verse 6, which is something like "I am confident that the one who started a good work in you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ." I asked the Catholic chaplain why the reading didn't include verse 6, and she said "Let me see it and I bet I can figure out why." And then I realized it's because it drops the J-bomb (which, when dropped, by the way, does not explode but bursts into a puff of little flowers).

It seemed kind of silly to me that we were trying not to use the name Jesus when the service was so very clearly Christian. Rashid did read from the Qur'an to offer wisdom from a Muslim perspective on environmental issues, but that alone cannot make a service interfaith. The music was entirely jazz gospel hymns. Muslims never sing to worship God. They think it's a distraction. And have you ever been to a shabbat that picked out Christian gospel songs that didn't mention Jesus to use in their worship? It just seems like a bit of a useless pretense to avoid the name of Jesus.

Anyway, the music was great. Andy wrote some songs for it, but I honestly can't tell you how good they were because the performers and the guest vocalist could have made the Sesame Street theme sound great as jazz. In the excitement of the music, I think we totally skipped over Fred Lassen's closing prayer. He made up for it by doing a nice long invocation at commencement this morning.

After a two-hour nap following Baccalaureate, I proceeded to Steve and Mary's open house, where Heather KirkConnell told us about her work on Tent Watch. It was actually her job to sit in Wilder Bowl from midnight until 8 in the morning to make sure no one tried to steal the tent or, you know, light it on fire.

Sunday night was Illumination, which according to Steve Broadwell is the climax of the year for the town of Oberlin. They string up Japanese lanterns all over Tappan Square, and everyone comes out to mill around and listen to an orchestra and eat pie. He told me that it was the time when he gets to see all the people from high school that he really hoped he would never see again. It was pretty amazing, though I only made it through about twenty minutes before my body announced that it was time for bed. I've never seen my professors, classmates, and town friends all in the same place before. It never occurred to me that they all dwell in the same plane of existence, to be honest.

Sunday morning, I executed the plan that I'd plotted all week. At 8:00 in the morning, I tapped lightly on Stephen's door, then ran in and started jumping on his bed, shouting "STEPHEN! Wake up you silly sleepyhead! We're going to Candy Mountain. Candy Mountain, Stephen! It's a land of sweets, and joy...and joyness!"

I think he was really glad I did it. I then asked him if he enjoyed Illumination. He said he did, and he didn't see nearly as many people that he didn't want to see. He sounded disappointed.

I then went to the beginning of commencement, mostly to see everyone all dressed up, and especially the professors, in their academic regalia. I can only hope that I one day assume a profession that will allow me to wear a big, fancy, ridiculous robe. I saw one student who had a duck hat on underneath his motorboard. A professor I didn't recognize wore a pirate hat along with her academic robe. There were lots of pretty colors and fancy hats. I approved.

And then I drove back to Madison with my dad. I passed the time by reading him stories from David Sedaris' book, Me Talk Pretty One Day. I had to censor it a little. Some of the stories just aren't appropriate for parental ears.

And now I'm home. THE END.

2007-05-27T13:24:00.000-07:00

happy pentecost!

besides christmas, i think pentecost is one of my favorite days at church. partly because we get to wear all red! and it's like a birthday party for the church! awesome!

what have i been doing lately? let's see.
there are some pictures on facebook documenting some of my activities, if you're interested.
i've been spending a lot of time in san francisco in various capacities. mostly eating, buying things and walking around. i've been to three different goodwills. i also got my cpr recertification which was long and tedious, but fortunately my friend hannah came to the same class so it was not as bad as it could have been. plus we found this palce with tasty organic and vegan soups for lunch. yesterday esther and i went to a park near her house and made a chalk mural celebrating the summer and some kids came over and helped us. i'll probably put pictures of that up soon too. that was way fun but i'm still getting sunburned despite liberal application of sunscreen. dumb skin.

in knitting news, the purple sweater is FINALLy officially finished, zipper and everything. i've finished the front pieces of the tmnt sweater, and am now starting the sleeves. i'm also hoping to make some hats for the camp staff auction before i head up there. but that's not for a while.

also, i'm getting my drivers permit on wednesday! (provided i pass the test). woo hoo!

~linden

2007-05-26T13:45:00.000-07:00

I've been getting a healthy amount of sleep lately - I can tell because I've been having dreams. And I actually remembered one, somewhat, or at least part of it:

I was in Oberlin, still, and it was during reading period. I was in this building that was supposed to be Peters (it looked an awful lot like it and had languagey things in it), standing in an entryway, by some stairs, next to this person who in "real life" I knew was in 2nd year Russian (I don't know if this person actually exists), but was somehow in the other section of 102. Anyway, we saw our teacher, who had foofy curly hair, slightly Trelawney-ish (not a real Russian Dept. faculty member). She started talking to us. Then, (one of those weird dream transitions where I'm instantly somewhere else - kind of like electrons?) the three of us were in this computer lab that was on the east side of Peters, not actually in a separate room, but just a bunch of macs and desks over by a wall. And some potted plants. There were several rows of two computers each, and I think there were Russian students at all of them. The teacher was walking around them explaining things to us. I was in the computer in the back corner, next to the wall, and she came over and stood behind me. And all of a sudden - this is the exciting part - Linden came in and walked over, smiling, with her arms out, carrying my stuffed pig. Everything paused for a moment, and she handed Piggy to me, and I probably smiled. Then I woke up.

Hm.

On an entirely different note, this article was on the front page of the St. Paul Pioneer Press today. I think the swap registration is closed. Dang. Here is what it said:
KNIT IF YOU LOVE HARRY POTTER
The boy magician's tales inspire a community of tribute knitters
BY MOLLY MILLETT

Harry Potter fan Catherine Mandle is sure glad she's a knitter: Her knitting needles are helping her pass the time until "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" is released July 21.

The Minneapolis Muggle has joined an online Hogwarts Sock Swap, in which knitters from around the world are knitting socks for each other that are inspired by author J.K. Rowling's magical series. They're part of a growing community of Harry Potter tribute knitters.

"We're knitting socks in preparation for Book 7," Mandle said. "Everyone is so excited. It's something to keep our hands busy while we wait."

Right about now, you might be thinking: Harry Potter? Knitting? Huh? But knitting references are woven throughout the series:

Molly Weasley, the mother of Harry's friend, Ron, gives hand-knit sweaters as Christmas gifts.

Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore enjoys reading Muggle knitting patterns.

Harry's friend, Hermione, knits hats for house elves.

In the movies, the characters wear lovely, hand-knit scarves, sweaters, socks and hats.

"Knitting is an ancient craft, and if you go back to a magical, historical environment like Hogwarts, it makes sense that you would find knitting and hand-knit things around," said Mandle, a 33-year-old stay-at-home mom.

The Harry Potter knitting niche began building slowly and has only recently exploded, thanks to the growing online knitting community. In the early years, knitters had to search hard to find published patterns. Some of the more dedicated crafters began designing Harry Potter tribute knits, especially the striped scarves and the oversized monogrammed sweaters featured in the movies.

"I was a knitter before I was a Harry Potter fan," said Alison Hansel, a popular knitting blogger and author of the new book, "Charmed Knits: Projects for Fans of Harry Potter" (Wiley Publishing Co., $14.99). "But then I just happened to see the first two Harry Potter movies on cable TV. As a knitter, I really wanted to make those letter sweaters that Molly Weasley makes.

"I found a small site on the Internet that had posted images from the films and made suggestions about how certain sweaters were constructed. Then I found that one of the large yarn companies had published an 'official' pattern for the sweater. I bought it, and then that pattern went out of print, which is I why I wrote my version and put it on my Web site."

Hansel began to develop a reputation as a Harry Potter tribute knitter, especially because of her Harry Potter knit-alongs, in which knitters work on Harry Potter projects at the same time and share their patterns, progress and finished garments online. Her book, which was published May 7 and includes a number of projects from contributors, is already in its second printing.

"I went through all the Harry Potter books again and looked for knitting references, like the socks Dobby the house elf gave Harry for Christmas - one is green with broomsticks and the other is red with snitches," Hansel said. "From there, you have to come up with the details. I also searched the movies. For a Harry Potter fan, any excuse to reread the books or watch the movies is good."

Knitters don't just watch the movies - they study them.

"The knit items in the movie are really nicely made, and knitters will go back and pause scenes to see how the items are constructed," Hansel said.

Still, they're apparently hungry for more information. Locally, knitters asked about Hansel's book at yarn supply shops long before it was released. Yarn suppliers have been answering Harry Potter queries and stocking Harry Potter colors for years.

"When the first movie came out, it took yarn stores by surprise," said Karen Rumpza, owner of Needlework Unlimited of Linden Hills. "People would come in and say, 'I'm making a scarf like in Harry Potter - do you have this color or that color?'

"Now, they make a lot of other things, too. We just had a group of younger, college-age girls come in who were looking to make some sort of hat they saw Ron wear in the trailer for 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.' They want to wear it to the premiere."

The tribute knitters also make socks - there are Quidditch socks as well as different socks for the four Houses within Hogwarts School of Witchcraft Wizardry - House sweaters, House mittens and more ornate projects, like the frilly housecoat that Molly Weasley wears.

Harry Potter projects and knitalongs are heating up along with the buzz for the July 13 opening of the fifth movie, "Order of the Phoenix," and the release of the seventh and final book a week later.

"The knitalongs all start cropping up when a book is about to be released or a new movie is coming out," Hansel said. "Folks want to wear their items to the premieres and parties. It's a way to show they are excited about the books ... It's this secret world that you can be a part of, even though you look like any other Muggle."

Randi Arnar, 36, of Excelsior, had been making Harry Potter-inspired clothing for her three kids when she recently discovered the Hogwarts Sock Swap while searching online for Harry Potter knitting patterns. In the swap, members are organized into Houses and then knit socks for an assigned pal, sending along their creations with other small gifts, such as knitting needles.

"I thought it was hilarious that there were other people out there who would think that this was fun," said Arnar. "I am now knitting the ugliest pair of black-and-yellow Hufflepuff socks for my pal, and I need to get them to her before the book comes out on July 21, because we all want to dress up in our geeky socks when we pick up our books."

Molly Millett can be reached at mollymillett@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5505.

2007-05-25T12:21:00.000-07:00

It's currently pouring and sunny outside. I love Oberlin

Team Kamitsuka has expressed concern for my capacity to take care of myself (buy groceries, do laundry, etc) in my present condition. After talking it over with my parents, I've decided to go home for awhile. I'm sad to leave Oberlin. I feel much more isolated in Madison because my community there is so spread out. I like being able to walk over to people's houses when I'm in the mood for a visit.

I really hope I can be back in Oberlin in time to carpool to the Peace Conference, because Rita Nakashima Brock, a leading feminist theologian, is going to be there, and she's agreed to meet with me to discuss her work. Linden, she's the one I was talking to you about in the hospital, remember? My seminar papers both draw heavily on her work. It's an opportunity I really don't want to miss.

So I've decided to use this time to rest, recover, and become more Emo. Let me know if you have any advice.

2007-05-22T20:39:00.001-07:00

I just received my new Oberlin College Religion Department T-shirt. Because of a minor puffy paint mishap, I have to add a phrase to the front of the T-shirt. It currently says "Oberlin College Religion", and underneath there's a row of various religious symbols. I need to put something underneath that. My current ideas are as follows:

Oberlin College Religion: It takes all kinds.
Oberlin College Religion: Hedge your bets. [or "Hedge your eternal bets."]
Oberlin College Religion: Glory be to Jeebus [kind of leaning against that one, as no one will understand]
Oberlin College Religion: Keeping your eternal bases covered.
Oberlin College Religion: Get your ya-yas any way you can get them.

I think I'm leaning towards "Hedge your bets."

Just for context, on the back of the T-shirt it says "Eff the ineffable." I plan to cross out the "in" to make it "Eff the effable," and then add a little addendum that says "Because if it can be expressed with words, it's probably not worth expressing at all."

2007-05-22T18:07:00.000-07:00

I also made it home safely, though I guess I'm lucky: I had two days in the car to transition between Ohio and Minnesota, a much shorter distance than Ohio-California. I got home about 6 pm (central) on Saturday, got up in time for church on Sunday. It was lovely. I watched Borat and Shrek, and started a couple of books and a new knitting project.

Blaine has a lot of new developments these days. Every time I come home there are all sorts of new buildings. The best of all of the changes though, is the addition of a new restaurant on Highway 65:

Space Aliens Grill & Bar.

Apparently there's six of them, three in MN and three in ND. I hear the music isn't as sci-fi-y as one might expect. There was a complaint that, like many other bar & grill joints, they had baseball on. But, of course, we know that baseball has quite a bit to do with aliens. Perhaps they've done more research than the populace expects? I shall (hopefully) venture within and find the truth. Or at least a tasty meal. (They're well-known for their ribs?)

grace and peace,
Bethany

2007-05-21T11:27:00.000-07:00

Hi friends!
Happy summer!
WOOOOOOOOO!

well, i made it home safely. i made it to the lct just in time, and was the only person on it, aside fromt the driver. and i made it to the plane somehow, dragging my overflowing carryons, including a plastic bag filled entirely with yarn. then i fell asleep. hooray for direct flights! pretty much i slept the whole time, just waking up when we started the descent. it was so relieving to see bay area city lights as the plane landed. i think told kathryn this yesterday, but it's so weird and disorienting to know that in a matter of a few hours i can travel most-way across the country and be in an entirely different place with entirely different people. in some ways, it's convenient, but in some ways i wish there was more time to transition. plane trips are a pretty lame way to transition.

so yeah. my larger checked bag exploded on the plane, but they were kind enough to duct tape it up for me. literally, the seams split. everything was poking out of the sides when it came down onto the baggage carousel. but whatever! i made it home! my brother is a crazy nutcase. we watched charlie the unicorn together and recited most of the lines. and woke up really early because i'm still on east coast type time. now i'm bumming around and listening to the new tori amos album and unpacking and reading and it's really great to have nothing to do.

love!
linden