the back burner

buttress

invaders from the west

Here's who I'm listening to at the moment.

Also, we should all be happy that friends are coming to see me this week... technically, there are some other reasons for their visit, but I prefer to think of myself as the main one. Everyone who hasn't visited me yet, take note.

You could learn from this.

Sometimes I get all subdued-feeling about the lack of quantifiable results from my work here. Even though there are papers and language ability coming forth from me, those don't feel like what I want to see. There are also, as always, lots of experiential lessons, but those are even harder to quantify. I want community organizations springing forth. I want injustice rolling back. I want inter-ethnic dialog to be normal. I want local partners to grow in effectiveness. I want new workers recruited. I want all of that now.

Fresh eyes and ears arriving here always carries the mixed blessings of helping us realize what a great amount of things are being accomplished while challenging us with the temptation to make the complexity of our tasks understandable, trendily-packaged, and easy to express. In other words, it's going to be easy to feel good about things and to tell lots of untruths this next week. Good thing there will be people among this group who are used to that challenge. And used to me.

In other news, I have a new roommate. Expect pictures as soon as (translation: "if") I can make that a culturally-acceptable thing to do.

pigeoncote

we should totally do this.

you, me, and everybody else. brooklynvegan has the line-up for the sasquatch music festival, and it's phenomenal. of course, it's completely out of the question for me to get all the way over to washington state for some weekend festival, but hey, i can dream.

quote of the day

"BLAH! that's my general feeling."
– sister

In other news, one should never go shopping right after a swim. By sheer force of will, I made it out of Aldi with only milk (the only thing I came for), juice, broccoli, and pickle-flavored potato chips ("pickle crisps").

And the new version of Pride and Prejudice, region 2. Speaking of which, why isn't VLC working on my macbook?

christian witness

out of the blue, you came
shining down to make this mess.
you were happy, you were content
to sit on the porch until the stars went out
and birds started to sing, not speaking a word.

in the end, i burnt it down.
that might surprise you, knowing
as i do that you never saw a downside
you couldn't love, never got a complicated joke,
never got knocked around or kicked while you were down.

while my history went to ash
i thought maybe i'd be out of reach
this way, unfindable to you or anyone
selling something i couldn't afford. maybe
you would give up, let me be. we could co-abandon.

turns out what you really wanted
wasn't a gold medal, after all.
you just wanted to behave
with integrity and hope
towards me.

statuary #6

de vrijdagmarkt

Today's Friday. This is my market. I bought a goat cheese with herbs and some Leerdammer*, both for tomorrow night's dinner. And here's a thought scribbled down in the laundromat, yesterday: "Not journaling is like not doing laundry, in that one experiences an inverse relationship between need and motivation. It's like poetry or exercise or dishes or sorting one's trash for recycling – any of the things that require either cultivation of just plain force of habit."

Ain't it the truth. My kitchen still stinks from sorting the trash, and trash day was last Thursday. I'm sure those lingering odors could be a metaphor for something.

Equality Ride

I'm surprised more people haven't posted about this. Are people posting and I just missed it? *deeply qualified nods to the dirty calvinist, in the sense of good for you for posting thoughtfully but i'm not necessarily in agreement* Below is an excerpt from an email we received from Marshall Rowe and the Alumni Office, followed by a couple of my thoughts.

"Late last semester an organization called Soulforce contacted Covenant to say they would like to bring the Equality Ride to our campus. The Equality Ride is a national bus tour of college campuses sponsored by Soulforce to challenge policies that they claim discriminate against homosexuals. This group targets colleges and universities that maintain a biblically-based stance on the issue of homosexuality, as Covenant does, and attempts to generate negative media attention to these institutions...

"We presented the organization with a proposed Letter of Agreement, to be signed by both Covenant and Equality Ride officials. The Letter of Agreement stipulated guidelines and a schedule for their visit. The schedule included meetings with key administrators, faculty, and student leaders in a designated room...

"Equality Ride officials stated that, while they would agree to not enter [sic] residence halls of distribute literature, they would not agree to only meet [sic] with designated people in a designated room; they want unsupervised access to roam the campus and meet with any student or community member. Because the Equality Ride officials have chosen not to accept our offer, we are considering not allowing them on our campus. We regret that they have chosen this course of action..."

The upshot of all this is that they're still coming. And possibly meeting with students off-campus. Here are my first thoughts, from an email to my friend (for some reason, I really thought it was called Equality Train, hence the E-Train reference... I really can't explain this):

"part of me is really mad at how heavy-handed the equality people seem, on this. granted, the alumni office is not an unbiased source. but i generally feel with events like this one that if i took away their 'race card,' THEY would be the bigots. 'hi, let's come into your community and tell you what you're doing wrong. and use potentially scary stuff to shake you loose.' of course, there's another part of me that's excited about the possibilities of (a) Covenant people learning new stuff and examining their grids, and (B) E-TRAIN people being exposed to COVENANT PEOPLE, nay, the GOSPEL. Hope that happens. Talk about rocking people's grids.

"in general, i'm expecting the e-train people to earn the same criticism from me that a lot of christians earn, by handing out easy answers and being formulaic. place your bets now, people."

Since writing that, I've had a few more criticisms pop into my mind concerning Covenant's administration, mostly concerning some of the language you see in this letter, but I'm not sure I would have done anything differently, so far. It's the responsibility of our faculty and staff to protect students and to model mature Christian thought and life for them. I see a lot of that in the administration's response, mixed of course with some "back off because you're really scary" reacting, which seems natural.

Of course, if the Equality Ride is eventually banned from our campus, I'll be sad. But I'm so out of the loop, that might well have already happened. When does all this go down, anyway?

cute

how to be rude

I find myself going around shutting down interactions with people, lately. This is odd because I've been craving some good interaction. There's this neurotic urge to fit into the language and culture that can easily turn into plain old fear. DON'T LET THEM SEE ME MAKE A MISTAKE! AAAACK!

Just today, I think I walked away from random encounters with five people who must have thought I really didn't like them (three old ladies in a cafe where I was studying and two guys working in a kebap shop). Each time, it was just a case of me not really understanding what they were saying to me. That's a perfect opportunity to abandon propriety and start laughing at how dumb you sound. Instead, I played the, "what on earth are you saying to me?" card. It's like wearing a shirt that says, "All the doors to having a spontaneous relationship with you are CLOSED and LOCKED. So SCRAM."

Ugh. I hate it when this happens. It's so counter-intuitive to behave like that.

graffiti #4

This is a fairly accurate metaphor for my community:

Brightly-colored idealism marred by reality. These folks are always trying to make public spaces look bright and wholesome; the backdrop here is a series of murals depicting multi-racial children uttering affirming statements about their community. I haven't seen as much energy or resources spent on addressing systemic problems, though. Art is easier to create than justice.

Anyway, I'm backposting a few photos of graffiti from around these parts. This one was taken in an underpass on the edge of my commune. It's one place I've been told by a well-meaning passer-by to put my cell phone away or have it stolen.

(And in case you're wondering, the black spray-paint scrawl isn't polite language. Don't use it with your francophone friends.)

statuary #5

musicians

Why write so many songs about politics,
as if to change the world
by sleight of hand and fireworks,
as of one verse could outweigh
the great machinations of history,
as of the man at the wheel even cared?

Why not write a book instead,
or love another person well,
or learn to cook,
or raise a child?

When we go down
into the filth and garbage
of the sidewalk world
and come up again into our flats,
gasping and clutching for decency,
our oily souls slough off conviction's coil.

We find it simpler, all around
to stick it to the man
and write a song
and go to bed.

reasons to love it

(1) They have a great website for all arrival information.

(2) "Flight information is not announced over the airport loudspeakers. Travelers are informed about check-in rows, departure and arrival times, gates, baggage carousels and other operational facts through hundreds of monitors that are located throughout the terminals. This 'Silent Airport' concept adds to the pleasant atmosphere in the terminal."

Now if they would only become a European hub. NONE of the low-cost airlines use my airport on a regular basis. Bah!

wallonia

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)