The last time I logged into this thing, all of my friends had blogged so that there were about twelve different posts to read and I was thinking to myself, "What happened? Has it really been that much time?" It had been. I get so easily thrown off by cumulative travel. I drop things completely, blogs, friends, cooking delicious foods, if it's not nailed down, it might get lost. Sorry, friends. I still love you more than life.

Have there always been this many Halloween parties to go to? Costume inspiration is at an all-time low. I think I'm going to be Little Red Riding Hood because I saw a red cloak at Target for $8. I hope it's still there... Halloween isn't the holiday I go gaga over. It's Thanksgiving and Christmas that I love. I am practically counting down the days till we can start putting up Christmas things in our apartment, writing a Christmas letter and cards for all our friends and family, going shopping for a tree and ornaments (what theme should we do? Of course, whatever we pick now will be outdated by the time our kids are old enough to have opinions about that sort of thing), finding the perfect presents, making buckeyes, drinking eggnog, and you can never forget the Amy Grant Christmas album. No Christmas is complete without it.

My class is going a lot better. We're working on costumes for the party next week, and they are loving it. We get to paint, and today we're going to start working on props. Mario hats and gloves, a Spongebob spatula, sunglasses, other things. Yesterday I started to win over one of the slightly difficult kids. I loved seeing the light dawn in his eyes that I actually cared about him. More good to come. I am glad I work here. Last week we got to carve pumpkins with our kids, and that was great. We were outside so they could be as loud as they wanted. I love doing things like that where it's just pure fun. Telling them about roller coasters at Disney during snack is also wonderful. They want to know if they are tall enough to go.

Time to go look for costume parts, for me, for them.

This morning I woke up one minute before my alarm went off with a feeling of deep satisfaction and contentment with my life. I'm not perfect. I can't accomplish everything, but I'm starting to begin with that expectation. It's okay if I don't. At the Bible study I go to, one of the ladies has this saying, "don't persecute yourself." It's a good one.

They're Just Kids

My job=incredibly volatile. Good days bad days, days that I have no idea what to call them.

Today. Drive home. Time to decompress, but not really enough time. I'm too serious to shake off a bad day on a thirty minute drive.

I'm too strict. I'm not strict enough.

They walk all over us. They don't respect us. We don't draw the line enough. because there are too many things to keep track of: can I go to the bathroom, can I get a drink, can I get something out of my backpack. I don't want to sit down. I don't want to do my homework, or this project, or anything. I hate school. I hate everything. Slamming chairs, slamming fists into cabinets, biting other children. No, we aren't in the Dominican anymore, we're in the United States where children bite each other in the second and third grade to get what they want.

I'm not sure if this is the job for me. I'm not really teaching. I'm doing behavior management, and I'm not even doing it that well. Maybe because I'm not trained for any of this. I'm not sure if I want to have a job longterm where I have to tell people not to touch each other.

Add on all the expectations of the school that I don't know about. Things that no one told me. I'm supposed to be out of the room at a certain time? Do they even know I'm new? Why isn't there an information packet on this? I want to do my job, but someone has to tell me what that is, preferably before I mess up.

And for behavior, what am I supposed to do? What do I tell a kid to do when he gets angry instead of lashing out at whoever's closest? Count to ten? And I'm still disappointed in them when they don't listen to me, but I can't make them. I can't make them do what I want them to do. They have to choose it themselves. And that's kind of the frustration and the freedom of it. It's not up to me if they adopt the behaviors I suggest to them. It's up to them. It would greatly benefit me, and I'm going to keep telling them to listen the first time, keep their hands to themselves, raise their hand before they talk, tell the truth, use words, and I'm going to keep punishing them when they cross lines, but sometimes it feels so futile. I believe in them and I want them to change and develop these behaviors, but they have to want it too. I believe in them, so I am overly disappointed when they don't listen to me. I shouldn't let it affect me so much.

Maybe I'm not communicating my expectations. Maybe I'm not being consistent. There are just so many things to keep track of and someone always needs something. Also, I'm not that uptight. I want them to have a good time and enjoy what they're doing, but we have to put up the rules at the beginning because it's really doing us a favor longterm.

I discipline other people's children. I went to a Bible study today, and the children's teacher got up there and said how much love was in their classroom and how they were teaching Bible truths and singing hymns and the classroom was such a great place and they were giving love to all the kids who came. And I wondered about what would happen if I invited one of my kid's moms to the class. Would that child would be loved so well in the children's class? It's easy to love well-behaved children. Good little Christian children who have two parents with steady jobs. They want to spend time with their kids and don't swear at them. It's harder to love kids with bad attitudes who lash out at you when you ask them to do something. They get angry seemingly for no reason. Everything is life and death with some kids.

I don't feel in control, and I don't know how to get there. I am the adult, but I am at their mercy. This is not how it should be.

I don't have training for this. But if I'm not supposed to be here, then where am I supposed to be? If I'm not an elementary teacher, am I some other kind of teacher? Crisis of meaning in the world... time for dinner. Tomorrow will probably be better.

Small Little Just-Right World

I don't want a lot of influence, just a little. But I want it to count.

I don't want to live in a big city. with traffic. With tall buildings and places to get lost.

I don't care about California and the food carts. I will never know what the "next thing" is.

I like my things to be nice, but I don't want to have that many things.

I don't want to go to school to know God more, that will only make me tired of him.

I don't like twitter or excess autobiographical devices. I want my world to be real with colors and dirt and the pages of books.

I like the old people at book club with their old ways and old brains.

I can resist change.

Maybe I should move to a small town. I like my town. It is just right for me.

I like little routines like rowing, little worlds that no one else knows.

I still have that longing my friends have, but I don't know what it's for.

I want to be the fullness of myself, relaxed, able to receive others, ask how they are and really mean it because I'm not thinking about myself. I want to be full. and free. and new.

I want music to be a more regular part of my life. and worship.

I like my small world. It is hard enough to manage. To me it feels just right.

I will never be a great dresser, but I am great at other things.

I will never be perfect, but neither will anyone else.

I wish them well, I wish myself well.

What are my dreams? Will I reach them? Will they show themselves in time? Will they come upon me unexpectedly while I'm in the middle of living them?

Am I getting left behind? Is it wrong to have no ambition?

I used to be full of ambition, but it was for things that didn't mean anything like getting a Ph.D by a certain age.

I think this season is called "wait and see."

Everyone searches for contentment, but now that I seem vaguely content, I wonder if it is wrong to be so.


"Ambition, which is only a craving for honor and glory when you alone are to be honored before all and you alone are glorious forever" Confessions, Book II Ch 6. 

After Jonathan Safran Foer*

Wow, a whole week without a blog post, probably because the week was filled with more people than thoughts. I did consider posting a list of all the things I had run into in the past week, but that wouldn't have been very interesting. I also thought about posting "Church with the Homeless" and I still might at a later date.

On Tuesday night I started job training, and I have that again tonight. I think I am going to love my job, and that is a great feeling.

Loving Caleb more is also a great feeling.

Reading a book that talks a lot about people dying is not a great feeling. The book is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and I think I am too much like the kid protagonist to read a book like this. He thinks of too many bad things that can happen, and it's not good for me to read all of his ideas about fear and danger around every corner. The story is very good and it's very intense, but I realized yesterday that I should take smaller bites. I'm almost done now... I do like reading about September 11 for some odd reason. I don't know if that's good for me either. I think part of me wants to get close enough to grief so that I'm not afraid of it anymore. I like reading about people who are able to move on through the pain, but the characters in this book haven't been able to yet. I want to punch this one guy really bad: this is the second book I've read in the last couple of months where the husband selfishly leaves the pregnant wife. I like way that the book is written with pictures and other unconventional devices. I also like all of the ideas that the eight/nine-year-old kid has. They are fascinating. Too fascinating for a nine-year-old. He is a weird kid, but endearing.

Wednesday night we had dinner at Laredo's (yummy Mexican food) with a couple from church, and agreed that we need to do more things like that because they fill up your soul. Not just Mexican food, but being together.

Also, this morning, we had perfect water for the first time in over two weeks. It was a beautiful and wonderful and awesome and secret and perfect gift. Rowing isn't fun if you can never actually go out on the water. That's why people row-- not so they can erg all the time. I got to stroke, and it was wonderful. So refreshing. Best workout I've had in weeks.

Monday at waffle night Tom Fowler presented his 2040 presidential campaign and we had a great discussion about what would happen if the states broke up and blah blah blah Hunger Games. I love talking with those people. It feels like college because everyone is from somewhere else. I don't usually have conversations about what-if scenarios because my brian doesn't work that way. That's why I can't write fiction. It's hard for me to stop seeing what is.

I got up at 4:30am on Wednesday so that I could write a letter to Dr. Stackhouse about our little article toss back and forth on beauty because I knew that if I didn't get up and write it while I was unable to stop thinking about it in bed at 4:30 am that I would never write him a letter at all. I still think I'm mostly right. It started to get too philosophical because I started talking about people's pain being based in the true reality of their circumstances or being based on lies they think about themselves, but all pain is felt pain no matter what it's based on-- lies or truth-- so then that didn't work. And I was stuck.

List of the beautiful and good: Kickapoo coffee, Kelly, Danielle, Kathy, Ashleigh, Katie Van, strip of Whitney Way with yellow leaves, weekend vacation, family coming in one week!, perfect water, Water the person and Elizabeth, Caleb, Brittaini, fall, pumpkins, purple nail polish, new job, discovery of path by pond with two long-legged birds, wearing high heels.

*This is why the tone is how it is in this piece. Once I read someone for a while, I start to write like they do. He wrote Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. 

This Week's Cooking Adventures

This week, we had two significant cooking adventures. For waffle night on Monday, we decided to make a feast of apple goodness since we had just gone to the orchard. We were planning meals for the week, and Caleb took down the German cookbook we had been given as a wedding gift and started looking for apple-y things. He found an apple compote with clear and very detailed instructions. I love when there are detailed instructions that answer the "why" questions. I kept looking through the book for other apple things and found a recipe called "apples in nightgowns" where you wrap an apple in pastry and then bake it. We decided on apples in nightgowns and Dutch babies with apple compote. 

Needless to say, making all of this took a very long time. This was not helped by that fact that I didn't realize until I got home that the new apple peeler/corer I bought couldn't core without also slicing, so I had to go back to the store for an additional tool. The compote didn't look very syrupy, but it tasted oh so good and we ate it all on the first batch of Dutch babies. The apples in nightgowns were very involved because I had to make the dough, and there were various phases of chilling and rolling and stretching it out over a springform pan, which I'm not sure what that accomplished or if I did it the right way. Caleb peeled and cored all the apples, and then I rolled out the dough, stuffed the hole where the core had been with a mixture of raisins, cinnamon, sugar, and marmalade, and then wrapped each apple in dough and sealed it with milk. They turned out about average as far as beauty. Some of the apples had sort of melted out of their nightgowns onto the pan. And they were not sweet at all. Caleb said that he forgot how not sweet German "desserts" are and that next time we should roll them in sugar. I'm not sure if there will be a next time.

Adventure two was yesterday. I really wanted to make butternut squash soup this week. I don't know why, but I did. It's fallish and yummy and yesterday ended up being the perfect day for it because it was cold and windy. This soup presented a slew of firsts: buying and cooking a squash, buying and cooking a leek (I still don't really know what a leek is), making a homemade soup, going to the Willy St. Co-op, and more.

The soup: the squash was perfect-- bright orange and it cooked really nicely. I didn't know how to cut it and probably did so in a very dangerous manner (I know that because I watched a youtube video about squash after I had already cut it and she kept saying how dangerous cutting it could be... whoops!). Then, once it had cooked, I didn't know how to get the skin off and couldn't find anything on the internet about this, so I used a peeler! Is this right? Does anyone know? The rest went fine, it was just kind of comical. Here's this huge vegetable that I have no idea what to do with. We put the soup through the blender in batches-- never had done that before either-- and it turned out really creamy and nice. In the end, it was a little gritty and had too much cayenne pepper in it, but Caleb liked it. We ate it with perfect buttery crescent rolls. So good. 

The store: quick word about Willy St. Co-op-- I went to the one on the west side because I suspected they would have great produce, and I was right! They also had my favorite coffee, Kickapoo Coffee. It's a local thing. It's the house coffee at Harvest restaurant downtown, and it's sold in the coffee shop Bradbury's, also downtown, and also at Willy St. It is so yummy. The aroma in the morning is like a soft blanket surrounding you. The other great thing about this grocery is the spice shelf. They have three or four shelves filled with glass jars the size that you would normally see candy in, but these are filled with spices-- whole, ground, they've got it all. I love this because instead of buying a $5 spice jar of something like ginger root that you're never going to use again, you can fill up a little bag with just the amount you need and get it for 23 cents. What a genius idea. Not for the germaphobes or those with allergies to certain spices, though.

I am learning how to choose my stores based on the item I'm looking for. For example, it's better to buy squash at the co-op vs. at ALDI because it will be a much better squash, but it's hard! It takes so much time to go to two or three different stores. I'm hoping it pays off in the end. ALDI is nice because you save money, but then I always wonder if the food tastes weird because there's something from ALDI in it. Example, I made homemade chicken fingers this week. They always taste amazing and this week they tasted awful. Was this because some of the supplies were from ALDI? Or was it because I accidently put parsley in the breading? Still learning what's okay to buy there and what's not. When I go there, I want to buy everything because it's so enticingly cheap. Caleb says it's so cheap because of the way the store is set up, but I wonder if that's not the only reason... How do you know where your food is coming from? Questions, questions.

The butternut squash. What a color. 

What's for dinner on Friday: Spinach Pie! 

Book Club: West with the Night

I'm in a book club at the local library, and I love it. My grandparents are in multiple book clubs (two, I think) and read great books with fun people, so I was inspired to find my own in Madison. The book for this month was Beryl Markham's West with the Night. It was one of the best books I've ever read, although there was great controversy about it at the book club discussion. I love book club because there are so many interesting people. There can also be annoying people, intriguing people, and people with accents. There are lots of old people, and this probably contributes to how exciting it can be. The older people who come to book club can be grouped into two categories 1) those whose personalities have crystalized on the very outspoken side so you learn a lot about them throughout the course of the evening as their eccentricities leak through every word and 2) those who are quiet and nice and only say one thing the whole night. 

This was a great book, West with the Night, and I've been recommending it to almost everyone I know, so I was surprised that there was so much controversy about it. The book is a collection of stories about the author's childhood and life in British East Africa in the early 20th century. She tells exciting stories about hunting with the Masai, learning how to train and race horses, learning how to fly primitive planes and scouting elephant from the sky. She is an excellent writer and has a couple of really powerful prophetic moments. The descriptions of the land are captivating. From a writing standpoint, it was one of the best-written books I've read in a long time. To me, the most exciting part was when she described a horse race. I read it at the airport in D.C. and I could barely stay in my chair. 

The first issue raised at book club was that the book was false advertising. The title, West with the Night, was deemed too misleading by one thirty-something woman who only wanted to read about flying, not about Africa or anything interesting. Only flying. And she elaborated her point, which, when stripped down to what she was actually saying was only that she wished the book had had a different title, for about ten minutes. A lady we will call Jane who was older agreed and suggested an alternate title, "Africa Made Me," and I laughed in spite of myself, not in a mean-spirited way, I just thought it was funny, and I couldn't believe we were disputing the title and content of the book. Usually you don't spend so much time on this in lit. class. Not only were several people upset that she had written about her life growing up, but they were also a little miffed to find out that she had been married three times and failed to mention anything about it. I was sitting there thinking to myself, "she's the author, she can write about whatever she wants. It's her book, she can choose what to include and what to leave out. She obviously had reasons for making the decisions she did. It wasn't an autobiography, it was a memoir." Someone from my side said that the Africa stories were the frame/context/background/what shaped her growing up. If she had written a book just about her flight across the Atlantic, it would have been way more boring than the book she actually wrote. An advantage of writing it the way that she did was that it was believable when she wrote so nonchalantly about the trans-Atlantic flight because it matched the way she did everything else. 

I'll cover another incident involving the only woman I knew by name who I remembered from a different bookclub. She had been waiting to bring up her point, because at this book club, everyone talks, and you have to fight to get your piece in. It's Madison-- everyone is smart, and everyone has thoughts they want to share. So, my friend finally got her turn and brought up the issue of Markham being a really cold person because of the way she wrote about the people she was close to. I disagreed, citing the passages when she has to say goodbye to important people or when people that she is really close to die. She always used distancing language in those passages because I think she didn't know what else to do with her emotions. There is a really powerful passage when her, well, I won't spoil it in case you read it. Then, my friend brought up another passage where Markham wrote about a destitute woman, and my friend gave a really pointed accusation that the author was cold-hearted and there was tension in the air, and then about two seconds later, another character on the opposite end of the table started talking about something completely different that didn't answer the question at all. My friend got an expression of anger mixed with disbelief mixed with scorn on her face-- that look you get when you throw your hands up in the air and say "ugh! I can't believe that!" It was not a good moment, but I seemed to be the only one who noticed. Again, I laughed, because it was a ridiculous moment. I talked to her about it afterwards, and she had an interesting theory about why certain people liked the book and others didn't. She thought it was about projections, and the people who wanted to have adventures like Markham's liked the book, and those who didn't want to didn't like the book. That fit with me because I would love to have had half the adventures she had. 

Some people thought there were too many animals in the book: elephants, dogs, horses, parrots, zebras, wild hogs, ants, giraffes, and more. They reasoned that she liked animals so much because she couldn't connect with people. How could anyone write about Africa in the early 1900's without writing about animals? It turned out at the end that the woman who wanted the book to be all about flying was a pilot herself, and that's why she was disappointed. After that information was revealed, the book club turned into flying club and everyone asked her questions about flying and where she took lessons and where she flies to and what it's like and had she ever flown at night, etc. Coupled with this, Jane, who was by far the funniest, kept asking us questions like, "Have any of you ever been to Africa?" We said no. She said, "Well, one time I went to Kenya and this and this happened..." Or, "Have any of you ridden in a helicopter?... Well, I have and it was like this..." Or, "Have any of you ever been in a hot air balloon?... Well, I have..." It was a great time and I left feeling happy, very amused, and shocked that there was so much disagreement about a book that I loved. 

Before I left, I checked out the movie Out of Africa with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. This movie takes place in the same community as West with the Night, and watching it was like seeing the world I had read about. I was talking to Caleb the whole time we watched it, "Well, there should be telegraph lines running alongside the railroad because she talks about all the animals getting tangled up in them." Later in the movie, it showed them installing the wires. "He's in the book! He turns out to be one of the most legendary hunters in British East Africa." It was such a sad, sad story, but the Africa was the same. I wish I could do Meryl Streep's Dutch accent. She was fabulous. I looked her up afterwards, and it turns out we have the same birthday!

I must mention that I was surprised to learn how racy the society was during this time. You didn't get any of that from the book, but the discussion leader mentioned several things about it, as did another man who found a biography on Markham. The movie did a better job at revealing how the values of the society played out in relationships, and that's part of why it's so sad.

Today, I just finished reading Roald Dahl's book Boy, and it turns out that he also went to British East Africa around the same time. I want to see if he has written any books about it and if he knew any of the same people. I have discovered a new world, and now I want to learn everything about it. 

Screwtape Ch. 7 & 8

Wow, chapter 8 is amazing. I wish I could type the whole thing into this post.

It begins by exploring the theme of undulation in humans' lives. In everything we do, we have times of peaks and times of troughs, in "interest in his work, affection for his friends, his physical appetites" (pp. 37-38). Then, Screwtape talks about the differences in the way that God uses the trough periods in our lives and the way that devils use them. The following section contrasts God and the devil's driving motivations as they look at humans.

[He wants to fill the universe with] creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct. p. 39

Wow! Isn't this sweet?! That's the beauty of God, and for someone who's supposed to sound like a demon, he sure is good at proclaiming truth about God and praising him for who he is. I love these images of God because they are so freeing. They show a God who is full and flowing over-- a God of abundance who doesn't need us but wants us. The structure of the paragraph with the barrage of paired statements really makes it effective from a literary standpoint, too.

We can use this list as a measuring rod for ourselves in our relationships with people. Are we acting out the first part of the paired statements or the second part? Are we full and flowing over in our relationships or empty and trying to be filled? We can act out either of these roles, the dark role or the light role, in our relationships, and I think whichever one we act out reveals something about the state of our heart and whether or not we are living for God that day or if we are living for ourselves. It can be easy to try to suck in or control or manipulate or seek affirmation from friends, but isn't it better to already find ourselves full so that we can love them? Living a "full and flowing over" life shows evidence of the Holy Spirit in us.

I love the last phrase "united to Him but still distinct" from p. 39. We are united to him through Jesus and we have peace with God, but we are distinct because we retain our selfhood and our human will. Looking back to creation, we are united to God in another way-- we are made in his image. We are like him in whatever way "his image" refers to. From creation, we also learn that God loves to celebrate. We see a bunch of diversity in creation-- really weird animals, think about it. Creatures who are not only functional, but beautiful, and superfluously beautiful, colorful, patterned, tall, small, almost invisible. Planets, galaxies, things that humans will never see but God still made them because he wanted to. And then, think about the passages that describe the body of believers-- one body, many parts. Think about all of your friends who can do very different amazing things-- artistic abilities, musical abilities, incredible brains, incredible athleticism, people who build things and know intuitively how parts fit together. People who can see beauty, people who get math, people who are inexhaustibly kind to others. When God made humans, he didn't make them boring. His plan was never "to cancel or assimilate" (p. 39) but to celebrate. His character of freely "giving out" and blessing shines in his creative design of humans and his lavishing of gifts, abilities, and uniqueness on us.

Where does the human will come into all this? It seems to be the focus of Lewis' attention in much of this chapter-- the devil wants to take more and more ground in humans to control them, but God wants humans to freely conform their wills to his. "Merely to override a human will... would be for Him useless... His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve" (p. 39). The two ideas-- the trough period from the beginning of the chapter, and the human will-- are connected through God's felt absence. Read the fascinating and powerful passage below:

He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs-- to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual temptation, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot 'tempt' to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys. pp. 39- 40 

What a faith! These ideas go back to one of the first chapters when Screwtape says something along the lines of "He leaves them to do it on their own" and this leads to less reliance on emotions. These trough times can be agonizing though. We just want to get out. We feel like we're in the dark and we don't know what, if anything, is happening to us in terms of "growth." And we don't really care about growth even if it is happening. Everyone has these periods of feeling forsaken by God. I love one of the lines from earlier in this chapter, "some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else" (p.38). The troughs offer us the opportunity to cultivate obedience, even though it hurts. But God doesn't demand that we execute the task perfectly. "If only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles."