If you'll take a look at my wesume...

Woooot Dean's List! And in honor of that fact and as a direct result of the confidence which has been reinstated in my mental capacity, I decided to take on Blogger.com and figure out my password, which apparently got forgotten due to random facts about the Constitution taking over my memory bank or me reformatting my lappy so all passwords were lost.

In any case, Susan, here is your long-promised blog.

I was just filling out my application for ACE and it's funny how fast I can go from thinking "I'm exactly the kind of person they're looking for" to thinking "Wow, this transcript says nothing about me -- how will they know who I am?" I stressed myself into a stomach almost-ulcer this semester, when in all reality, the very best semester GPA I've ever gotten moved my overall GPA no more than 0.02. Don't get me wrong. I'm very proud of my grades, and I enjoyed working hard for them, but in the long run, what do they mean?

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It's strange being home after I've been away for so long. In some ways, I fall right back into the swing of the rhythm of home, but in some ways it seems all the more foreign. And I don't necessarily mean home as in my house on my street, but I do mean the entire culture and all that "home" entails. But I think I already wrote a blog on that.

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I really like potato salad. We had some SCRUMPTIOUS potato salad today at lunch. Just enough bacon, just enough mayo. Mmmm. Also at lunch, bacon and artichoke dip which politely reminded me why I was taking Pepcid. Also, Heineken mini keg, thanks to my father, and oranges and grapefruits cut into perfect little squares thanks to my mother. That's one thing I miss when I'm gone -- bowls of ready-to-eat sliced oranges and grapefruits swimming in their little sugar-water marinade. Sweet and tangy, always there, oh so good.

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This morning at 7 am I rolled over in my bed to find myself face to face with Thomas Merton's No Man Is an Island, (courtesy of Mr. Nava), and the bedside lamp still on. Really, it's a good book. So good that I read it until I fell very deep asleep. As in, didn't stir for 6 hours deep. I'm kind of feeling like a wimp, as I always do after I leave school. I work hard-core for 16 weeks, then as soon as it's all over, I can't even bring myself to read two pages of the Henri DeLubac I'd been dying to be able to read when I was swimming in NPR. I promised myself I'd read DeLubac and Clement over break. I also promised myself I'd finish a dozen rosaries for soldiers, knit a baby blanket, ace the GRE, write 7 essays for applications for next year, wrap all the presents, go to the Debutante ball....

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I can't wait for second semester. I'm excited for a chance to start fresh on a few things and to go even deeper with others. There are a lot of things that make me anxious about this coming semester, but I know that in the end, all will be well.

"Be well, do good work, and keep in touch."

ps my left shift key is dying again. sad.

Who Says You Can't Go Home?

When I ordered my sandwich, she said, "Do you want a Coke to go with it?"


Welcome home.

From Sea to Shining Sea

The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. What an invention. What a system. What a beautiful thing.

Think about it. First of all, someone way back in the day started numbering roads. Well, that’s not a great system for naming roads. I’ve always been more of a word person than a number person….until I realized that EVEN numbered roads go EAST-WEST and ODD numbered roads go NORTH-SOUTH. Genius. I’ve lived practically my while life at the intersection of I-65 and I-10. Always two digit numbers. But the day I realized that I-465 was a three-digit number, and even more specifically, a three-digit number with an even first digit, because it went around Indianapolis, I saw the true beauty inherent in the system, and my love affair with the Interstate System began. Those glorious, reflective numbers on the stately green signs increase from west-to-east on the roads of odd-numbered persuasion, and the sister even-numbers increase from south-to-north, for the most part. The main interstates are all named as multiples of five. Such precision, such organization, such grace.

Millions of Americans zip to and fro from Sea to Shining Sea safely and efficiently (for the most part) without the use of traffic lights or intersections. But our interstates aren’t just for taking Grandma on vacation. In the event of a nuclear war….or hurricane, our national network of roads can be changed in a matter of minutes into dual arteries of evacuation.

My knees sometimes go weak when I think about the warm glow of interstate signage and markers. Think about it. Those adorable glowing white letters and symbols on the handsome green field glimmer in the darkness not of their own luminescence, but simply utilize and multiply the light of your own headlights and return it to you in the shape of “Pine Apple 1 Mile” or “I-65S to Huntsville Keep Right” or what could warm your heart more than that “Dauphin St. Exit 4” sign that has been the apple of your sore eyes for 880 miles?

Even the hairiest of interchanges, like the love-hate relationship I have with the I-24/I-65 interchange in Nashville, can’t help but bring a smile to my face when I consider the graceful curves converging and diverging under the watchful guidance from above of my dear friends MapQuest, GoogleMaps, AAA, and Rand McNally. The way the third, fourth, and even fifth lanes join the dancing, weaving, waltz as cars merge and glide across lanes, and then, as quickly and quietly as they came, those lanes pull off and go their own way, taking cars, and trucks with them on to the east or west or north or south.

Even the rest stops on our lowly non-toll-road I-65 bring a smile to my face, if only for the sense of familiarity every time I stop at one I’ve been to before, maybe with my family where my brother pushed the button for a Grapico and 12 came out, or maybe with the band in the middle of the night one time, or with Chris on the way back to school. Or the way the rest stop never fails to draw patrons from the same pool as the DMV, the Bebos Car Wash and the Wal-Mart on the Beltline. That and the lock on the bathroom stall that had been moved to the top of the door and had crooked black crayon letters and an arrow <-- LOCK. In case you didn’t know.

Some may think it strange that I have such a love for the interstates. But I say if an American Studies major doesn’t see the beauty in a road named after an amazing president that takes us all over the land of the free and the home of the brave, then she has missed something; and if a Theology major can drive all the way down I-65 and never see the beauty of God in the sun setting over the Mobile River Delta as she crosses the aptly-named Dolly Parton Bridge, or at the very least thank God she made the left hand exit in Nashville, then she has lost sight of something, too.

The Interstate. Drive it. Love it.

Edit: It occurs to me that I almost forgot to mention those reflective little bumps that serve as lane dividers. Who ever invented those deserves to be sittin' in a hot tub soakin' it up with his soul mate right now. They practically light up the entire road! Not to mention the guy who invented the reflective stickers for road pylons and guard rails. Where would America be without them? Dark, probably.

"Well, believe it or not, I invented the Post-It" -- Romy

**Reader beware: This is a non-profound post.**

Reasons I love making lists:
1. You can scratch things off
2. You can always add more items at the bottom
3. You can recognize kindred spirits by their similar lists (like my cousin's STDT -- Shit To Do Todays....or STDs for short)
4. You can compartmentalize, visualize, organize, and itemize your life
5. gubb.com
6. Post-Its

Movies I've Seen This Summer:
1. Hairspray
2. The Legend of Bagger Vance
3. Mission Impossible
4. My Cousin Vinny
5. Catch Me If You Can
6. 50 First Dates
7. Radio
8. Harry Potter (the new one)
9. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
10. Thank You For Smoking
11. Talladega Nights
12. Surf's Up
13. Some horrendous movie with Lindsay Lohan and what's-her-name Fonda


Local South Bend Places I Like
1. Macri's Bakery
2. Chicory Cafe
3. Rocco's
4. Fiddler's
5. Macri's Deli
6. Indulgence Pastry Shop and Cafe
7. Mazatlan Mexican

Top 5 Songs Played on my iTunes
1. Gabriel's Oboe (Vaulted to the top after a binge-listen while writing a paper)
2. Light in Your Eyes
3. Find Love
4. Collide
5. Bless the Broken Road

Top 9 Things I'd Take To A Deserted Island
1. Blistex
2. Charmin
3. Post-its
4. Rubik's Cube
5. Southern Pecan Coffee mixed with Community Coffee's New Orleans Style Chicory Roast
6. Catechism
7. New York Times Tuesday Crossword Puzzles
8. Dark Chocolate
9. Matt Lucci, Alpha Male

Reflections on a Bean

A recent trip to Millennium Park got me to thinking about our obsession with faces -- our reflections and others'. Think about it. You get to the park and the first thing you see when approaching from the South is a giant stack of bricks that has a video of a huge face on it. People stand there for the longest time just looking at a face -- blinking, twitching, and apparently every 12 minutes spitting a huge stream of water onto the squealing children waiting excitedly below.

And then you walk a little to the North and there's the Bean. It's so shiny and pretty. You just want to touch it. But the very first thing everyone does is spot themselves in the reflection. And not only that, but then you walk up right under the bean with about 75 other people you don't know, everyone craning their necks up, staring, moving, waving, smiling, taking pictures. If you didn't know what was going on, it would look like some sort of alien ship waiting for everyone to get in.

What really struck me about the bean, however, is the distortion in the reflection. It’s your classic fun-house mirror amusement: you walk up closer at just the right spot and your head gets small and your legs begin to stretch – or underneath, just the right position can make your face distort to be almost un-recognizable.

And it seems that often in our lives – or at least my life – I’m approaching the bean looking at myself, and it’s a consistent image, not stretching too much out of control, and then one more step and suddenly I’m looking at a face I barely recognize. Who is that? Is that me? When you’re standing 5 feet over from me, who do you see? Do you see the person I thought I was, or do you see the distorted image, or can you just look into my eyes on my real face?

Obviously, my face that’s reflected in the bean is the true me, the fully-human me that God is calling me to be, the one He’s known from the beginning. But sometimes I can’t see that me. I see the me people tell me I am, I see the me I sometimes want to be, but most frequently, I see the me other people want me to be, that me that I want to be because it will make others (and thus myself) happy. And sometimes, I see a face that neither I nor anyone I know recognizes – which scares me beyond belief. I’d like to be able to stop being fixated on the bean and turn to look right into the eyes of the people in my life and stop looking at their reflected eyes in the bean, scared of letting them see my real face.

Maybe I’m just scared that my real face will spit gallons of water every 12 minutes.

But that might be kinda cool.

Sister, when are you going to kick that habit? Oh wait, you did.

I spent the first part of this week working at a conference held by the office where I work. No, let me rephrase myself. I spent this week sitting behind a table full of posters and various "privately published" books, observing a gathering of the strangest mix of people who had come together for the triennial History of Women Religious Conference.

Now you may think, "Oh cute! Playing with old nuns!" Yeah. That's what I thought too. But then they came. It would be hard to really paint an accurate picture of what I observed over the four days I sat at my post, but there are a few words and phrases that might send you in the general direction.

Socks and sandals. Pedometer. Elastic-waisted culottes. Wash-and-wear hair. "Can I get a refund? That cafeteria is just too loud." "My bedroom in that O'Neill Hall was so sparse! And having to share bathrooms? Why, I hardly slept a wink last night." "Did you see which way the IHMs went? We were going to Happy Hour at the Morris!" A box of books mailed in advance with about 50 $0.39 stamps to cover postage. Plastic Bookstore bags covering permed hair in the rain. "Are you going to mark down those posters to half price? $5 is just too much."

These nuns were too funny. Not at all what you'd expect. Only one wore a veil (who happened to be the sweetest lady I met, and the biggest Notre Dame football fan.) She told me that she stopped a huge guy in the DH wearing an ND football shirt and inquired if he was indeed on the team. When he said, "Yes, Sister," she said, "Well, I just want you to know that there are twenty or so sisters in Pennsylvania who pray for you to win every week! We love you!"

There's something magical about a nun in a habit. An aura of mystique, a beauty, a grace. So simple, yet so elegant. Strangely enough, on my lunch jaunt to SDH, I was flanked on either side in the stalls in the Powder Room by Dominicans in full white habits. I immediately wanted to introduce myself at the sink, simply because they were wearing habits. I never would have felt like I could do that with any of the sisters at the conference. The habit says, "I am here for all, to be Christ's hands and feet, to show Our Lord to the world." And yet, seeing in the mirror the reflection of the two of them giggling as they floated off to lunch, they reflected so much joy, so much mirth, such light hearts. (And such adorable Nashville accents.)

I can't help but I wonder if the weight of a veil could give me such a light heart.

I could only hope that my body's temple of the Holy Spirit is half as beautiful as this

St. Joseph's Chapel~Spring Hill College~Mobile, Alabama

An extra 15 minutes turned into a prayer for you

My parents were married at this altar

All I got was "God-bearing Virgin, conceived without sin....--- were placed at this altar
--- something Society of Jesus and those something --- May 1910 A.D."
There's 5 years of Latin at work.

"Her winter ended, and she felt the return of her own extravagance" --A. B.

The return of my own extravagance is usually marked by a noticeable dent in my stack of Christmas books and the return of hours upon hours of knitting. Here I am, five months later, finally cracking the spine of a book that I've kept tucked neatly between my cotton gingham-clad mattress and the wooden frame of my loft bed for all of spring semester. It became almost comforting as I crawled sleepily into bed in the wee hours of the morning to see it there, though the words on its pages were as mysterious to me as that boy across the room in my Theo class: the familiar external brought a feeling of calm, though what was inside I had no idea. Obviously my days and nights were filled with academic reading, so as not to have even five minutes for such frivolities as pleasure reading, much in the way my attention in class was dominated by the need to diligently copy down notes, not daydream about said boy.

Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation is nothing less than an absolute delight for an American culture nerd like me. In fact, when my older brother handed me the book, his comment was, "You're an American Studies major. You'll love this." Vowell is a contributing editor for the ever-popular Chicago-based radio program This American Life. My brother introduced me to This American Life, as well, when he gave me a copy of a story Vowell had done about her experiences in the high school band. Vowell's voice (also the voice of Violet in the Incredibles) sticks in my mind and I can barely read a whole paragraph without hearing her voice in my head, describing part of her halftime show as being, "A little Latin-flavored number called Tico-Tico."


Vowell writes with an amusing and endearingly dry sense of humor. The book, which follows Vowell across the country on a tour of sites important to the history of American presidential assassinations, is immediately engaging, even for those not as interested in random presidential facts as I. The first passage to elicit an audible snicker from yours truly was a vignette Vowell recounts of an awkward Bed and Breakfast table scene the morning after she saw the play Assassins, a "'musical in which a bunch of presidential assassins and would-be assassins sing songs about how much better their lives would be if they could gun down a president'" (3).

"Now a person with sharper social skills than I might have noticed that as these folks ate their freshly baked blueberry muffins and admired the bed-and-breakfast's teapot collection, they probably didn't want to think about presidential gunshot wounds. But when I'm around strangers, I turn into a conversational Mount St. Helens. I'm dormant, dormant, quiet, quiet, old-guy loners build log cabins on the slopes of my silence and then, boom. It's 1980. Once I erupt, they'll be wiping my verbal ashes off their windshields as far away as North Dakota" (3-4).

Other favorite lines include, "Going to Ford's Theatre to watch the play is like going to Hooters for the food" (21); and "...the National Park Service dedicated this restoration, duplicating the setting of one of the most repugnant moments in American history just so morbid looky-loos like me could sign up for April 14, 1865, as if it were some kind of assassination fantasy camp. So how sick is that?"(22).

I'm only 45 pages in, but I expect that this will be a quick read, as I'm very happy to get to know this ever-close, but yet-unknown friend, between scarf-knitting bouts (Yes, I know it's May, and I live in Alabama, but I knit nonetheless). As for the boy in Theology class....we may never know.

N.B. You can find more from Sarah Vowell, including free weekly podcasts from This American Life here. As a side note, if you do visit This American Life online, look for the 2007 Tour Poster in the store, which my brother's girlfriend Lilli designed (click to enlarge it to see the whole thing.)

Item #38

That's right, we're domestic.

Who wants to pick 'em?

Can you tell the Mama from the Papa?

She and I Felt a Little Crabby....

So we went to the Bay!

File this under "reasons I love the South"

Mmmm....lunchtime.

2 down, 8 to go.

These guys did not go quietly. I think they heard the boiling water calling their names.

"We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us" -- Joseph Campbell

So I've been back in Alabama for about 3 days now, and everytime I venture off my quaint little cul-de-sac I'm reminded both of why I love Alabama, and why I will not be moving back here, for a while at least. Here are a few little snapshots of both:

• I wheel my car into the small strip of parking in front of one of my new favorite stores: Initial Impressions. It's a monogram shop. That should be enough said there about why I love Alabama. But I look over to my right and adjacent to the monogram shop is a wine tasting shop where couples are sitting on the patio enjoying the sticky-sweet afternoon, in no hurry to be anywhere. Love it.
• Continue on my way toward town intent on getting the winter salt and spring love-bugs scrubbed off my car. I enjoy my cruise through the carwash, thinking about what the three different colored soaps actually do, and how I used to be deathly afraid of carwashes as a child -- sobbing uncontrollably from the back seat of the station wagon. Pleasant enough this time around. But then I get to get out and wait on a bench while they vacuum. And that means enjoying the company of every red-neck and their brother sitting around me. A middle-aged woman in 8 inch wedges and a low-cut tank top with badly-hidden bra strappage was indeed a delight to observe. The blonde, weasly-looking young man wearing a wife-beater had absolutely amazing "hocking and spitting" talent, post-cigarette. I know there's trash everywhere, but I forgot how much more prevalent it is here.
• On my way home from mass, I drove down Government Street towards the historic district. I couldn't help but notice the gigantic, elegant oak trees that shade the entire street -- the limbs of the trees on the south side of the street enmeshing with the limbs of the trees on the north side of the street. Those trees have been there for decades, weathering the coming and going of people and trends...standing strong, roots deep, reminding us of Southern elegance and tradition.
• Driving west, up the Hill, I get mixed feelings. Part of me knows that this is the best side of Southern culture, and at the same time, it doesn't feel like it used to. Large, gracious homes represent the old blood and old money that flows through this city. Family names mean everything. Growing up, I always saw myself here, working with the Junior League and doing philanthropic things with my husband's money, when I wasn't decking my children out in hand-made, monogrammed bubble-suits. But now, I begin to feel like I could never be that woman I used to think about when I was younger -- I could never settle to live this life, where ideals seem shallow and achieved dreams seem ultimately unfulfilling.
  

Three of my friends are flying to Africa today. Africa. It is a completely different world than the one I know. When I see the pictures people send back from their experiences in the Third World, I can't help but think to the images I have in my mind of the life I planned for myself for so long -- the big, white Suburban to haul my well-dressed children to their prestigious private school. I know that that's not really what I want now. I don't know what the new image should look like. What is the life that is waiting for me? Yes, I want to raise a strong family, yes, I want them to have the privledges I've had, yes, I want them to wear monogrammed clothes, gosh-darn-it, but there is something more that I want....that I have yet to figure out.