Ramblings

Lots of random thoughts tonight:

-         “It’s a Wonderful Life.” I always cry at the very end when George reads the inscription from Clarence in the book: “No man is a failure who has friends.” I liked the movie when I was little, but I remember the first year that it made me cry. I was surprised, because I had watched it so many times before, but I had never really understood the depth of what it was about. This year it also made me start thinking about how the world would be different if I had never been born. Am I living life in such a way that my absence would cause a noticeable difference?

-         “Dr. Who: The Big Bang.” I think it has surpassed “Blink” as my favorite episode of Dr. Who ever. The character of Amelia Pond is brilliant, and of course it would be her part that I like the best in this episode:

Amy: Sorry everyone, but when I was a kid, I had an imaginary friend, the Raggedy Doctor, my Raggedy Doctor. But he wasn't imaginary, he was real.

I remember you! I remember! I brought the others back; I can bring you home too! Raggedy man, I remember you! And you are late for my wedding!

I found you; I found you in words just like you knew I would; that's why you told me the story, the brand new, ancient blue box. Oh clever, oh very clever.

Rory: Amy, what is it?

Amy: Something old. Something new. Something borrowed. Something blue.

-         Family: My parents and brother are with my Grandma, and they were here yesterday. So near, so far at the same time. If I could choose any super power in the world, it would be teleporting.

-         Luna’s allergies are kicking in again. Now her eyes are all dug up.

-         I’m super excited to go to Ha Ha Tonka State Park on Saturday. Yes, it really is called that.

-         Violins are my most favorite instrument in the world.

-         A couple of days ago, I was pulling out an old photo that my Grandma wanted back from me. I took it to Wal-mart to make a darker copy of it, and I was telling Josh and Ben about it. I told them it was of a soldier and I strained my brain to remember what his last name was, and I came up with “Winters.” Josh asked, “Dick Winters?” And I said yes. Josh said, “Nah-uh.” And I said, “Yes. Well, I think his last name is Winters. I know his first name is Dick, because he signed the picture. Why?”

Josh explained that Dick Winters was the guy from “Band of Brothers,” and the three of us spent the next couple of hours Googling Dick Winters and comparing pictures, trying to figure out if it was the same guy (since it turned out that Dick Winters was from Pennsylvania.) It wasn’t until the next morning that I remembered that his last name was “Peters” not “Winters,” but we had a fun time with it for a little bit.

On This Day

The basic information about events on this day was taken from
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/index.html. All of the added information was from various other places. I just thought it was all rather interesting.

On this date in: 1653 Oliver Cromwell became lord protector of England, Scotland and Ireland.  Not the prettiest of men. Also, he was part of a group who tried to abolish Christmas, obviously unsuccessfully. 1770 Composer Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn, Germany. 1773 The Boston Tea Party took place as American colonists boarded a British ship and dumped more than 300 chests of tea overboard to protest tea taxes. (Please see earlier blog posting discussing this event: http://nomadicinklings.blogspot.com/2010/10/late-night-history.html) 1809 Napoleon Bonaparte was divorced from the Empress Josephine by an act of the French Senate. (I was curious, so I looked it up: It seems that Napoleon initiated the divorce for political reasons, and they were both quite sad about it.)  1901 Margaret Mead, the American anthropologist who authored 44 books and over 1000 articles, was born. (She's the one that the Christian anthropologists throw fits about because of her very first major work "Coming of Age in Samoa.") 1916 Gregory Rasputin, the monk who had wielded powerful influence over the Russian court, was murdered by a group of noblemen.  (I've always thought he was particularly creepy, and read this, taken from SignaVeritae, a Catholic website: A certain Khionia Guseva thrust a knife into Rasputins abdomen, and (graphic content warning) seeing his entrails hanging out of himself, convinced that he was dead, walked out onto the street, yelling out that Rasputin was dead.  After intense surgery, however, Rasputin recovered.  Later he was properly killed because of his influence over the Tsaritsa, among other reasons.) 1917 Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke was born in Minehead, England. 1944 The Battle of the Bulge during World War II began as German forces launched a surprise counterattack against Allied forces in Belgium. (This was an absurd plan of Adolf Hitler's that seemed somewhat successful at first, but failed.) 1950 President Truman proclaimed a national state of emergency in order to fight "Communist imperialism." 1985 Reputed organized-crime chief Paul Castellano was shot to death outside a New York City restaurant. 1990 Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected president of Haiti in the country's first democratic elections. 1991 The U.N. General Assembly rescinded its 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism. (I never knew there was a UN resolution that said that Zionism=racism.) 1998 President Bill Clinton ordered a sustained series of airstrikes against Iraq by American and British forces in response to Saddam Hussein's continued defiance of U.N. weapons inspectors. 2000 President-elect George W. Bush selected Colin Powell to become the first African-American secretary of state. 2007 British forces formally handed over to Iraq responsibility for Basra, the last Iraqi region under their control. 2009 Iran test-fired a missile capable of hitting Israel and parts of Europe. Quite an interesting day in history, I must say.

Onward

Why I want to live in:

-         Bulgaria: You can buy a 3-bedroom home for 21,000 dollars in beautiful areas. 

-         Turkey: There are so many interesting places to see there. Check out just a few:

 

-         Anywhere in the UK: the accents, the literature, the history, and I like BBC shows.

-         Italy: Rome, beaches, and mountains. Plus, you can buy an AMAZING ruined house for 30,000 dollars.

I think I’m going to have to move to Europe.

Santa Claus is Coming to Town

Ever since I was little, I’ve enjoyed the thought of making Christmas gifts for people. Maybe it was my obsession with Little House on the Prairie, maybe it was the fact that we lived overseas and didn’t have the overabundance of stuff that there was available here. Whatever the reason, I am in love with the idea of making people gifts for Christmas.

Not that I ever do it. I remember one year as a kid thinking that I could use the cool animal pictures on yogurt cups to make some kind of gift, or maybe advent calendar. (I don’t know why I have this obsession with reusing yogurt cups, but there you have it.)

I don’t think that I have actually ever succeeded at making a gift for anyone for Christmas. I tried to last year. I was going to make a Dr. Who scarf for Josh that would look something like this:

Now, I did get started. The scarf I am making is about a foot wide and by Christmas it was at half of my desired length of twelve feet. Today it is at about six and a half feet long…

I did make some purses this year. I wasn’t intending to use them for Christmas gifts, but I’m going to send at least one to my Grandma. These are some of the purses I made: (The orange one on the bottom is the one I’m giving to my grandmother.

I think I’m pretty good at coming up with good ideas for gifts. I’m not always great at following through and getting them. Usually I think of a great gift a couple of months before Christmas, then I get busy and forget about it until it is too late.

Most years I think it’s difficult to get gifts for Josh, but this year, I’m about done shopping for his gifts. I got every single one of his gifts online, and that made it much easier.

Along the way, I found some other very cool ideas for Christmas gifts. Here are just a few:

Some jewelry I think is pretty cool: 

(Rings of Power)

(I'm kind of getting into the whole steam punk thing.)

(I like trees... what can I say?)

And some jewelry from books/movies/tv shows:

(Firefly)

(The Elder Wand, the Resurrection Stone, the Invisibility Cloak)

(From the "Blink" episode of Dr. Who... my favorite.)

 Things to hang:

(You can get this in any color you want...)

(Yay! I love this!)

(Especially if you have guests coming...)

 Things to wear:

(I'm pretty sure the whole poem is there.)

 

(They're hairpins!!!)

 And some final randomness:

(Apple Snitch)

(It's caffeinated shower gel.)

(So everyone thinks you're a ninja.)

Happy gift-buying everybody! I'm off to knit a scarf...

Drivers of Missouri

I must just say that I really hate Missouri driving. I have never gotten more frustrated on a more consistent basis than I do driving here in Springfield. Here are just some of the things that make me crazy:

1-     People in Springfield don’t use turn signals.

2-     People in Springfield text and drive. This may be true of drivers everywhere, but I never really saw it until I came here.

3-     People in Springfield are overly cautious about starting through green lights. I think this is my biggest annoyance. Today I watched as a turning arrow turned green, then yellow, then went out before the first car had turned, and it was NOT a short green arrow. I have seen people sit and watch for a full twenty seconds before venturing timidly into the intersection. When people finally do start into an intersection, they take about twenty seconds to get up to 40 mph.

4-     People in Springfield do not know how to work the right-of-way at four-way stop signs. If two or more cars pull up to a four-way stop at the same time, they will sit there… and sit there…sometimes they wave, each trying to get the other to go first into the scary intersection.

5-     People in Springfield have no idea what to do with nice drivers. I don’t know how many times I’ve tried to let a car from a side road or lane into traffic by slowing down. They don’t get it. The drivers sit and stare at you as if there is something wrong. Even if you wave them in… they don’t come. Or if they do, they wait the mandatory twenty seconds before venturing into the roadway. I’ve quit trying to be a nice driver here because it just causes problems.

6-     People in Springfield don’t know how to use multiple lanes. This is what the typical car lineup is at a stop light:

 At first I thought it was people turning (and not using their turn signals), but no, cars just stack up in one lane. Cars will wait for the next green light to stay in their lane. It’s not always the right lane, either. Sometimes it’s different lanes at the same intersection depending on the time of day. I don’t understand it. I really believe that you can cut down your travel time by 30% just by switching out of the busy lanes.

All that being said, people here do seem to wear their seat belts pretty consistently. I guess that’s one thing they’ve got going for them….

Harry Potter

Spoiler Alert: Don’t read this if you want to be surprised by the final movies.

With the seventh Harry Potter movie part 1 rapidly approaching, I must take the time to talk about why I love the Harry Potter story:

1 – Because of sehnsucht. C.S. Lewis described sehnsucht as the “inconsolable longing.” He describes it in his book Till We Have Faces:

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.

Fantasy literature is an attempt to embrace that other world that we all long for, and good fantasy makes you believe that it is possible to do so. Harry Potter is good fantasy.

2 – The Harry Potter books create a uniquely wonderful fantasy world. People, and especially children, love to imagine that they can become invisible, or open locked doors, or fly (I remember using an umbrella to try to fly once.) In the Potter world, all of this, and so much more, is possible. Also, the characters live in a castle with secret chambers, and hidden passageways, and password-protected doors. Who wouldn’t want to live someplace like that?

3 – The Harry Potter characters are wonderfully developed. They are flawed. They make mistakes, big mistakes, and they pay the consequences for them. It is always important to me to have characters who make mistakes that can’t be undone, because that is how life is.

And there are just so many of them. Check out this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Harry_Potter_characters

4 – The story pulls you in. You CARE about what is going on in the story, what is happening to the characters. Delores Umbridge made me angrier than any other character EVER. The situation seemed so hopeless; Harry felt so helpless against her, and I felt helpless too. I really did. Especially when she gave Harry, Fred, and George a lifelong ban on Quidditch. GRRrrrr… it still makes me angry just thinking about it.

5 – Harry Potter is good literature. You could teach an English class about these books and be able to give examples of symbolism, all types of conflict, different character types, etc, etc. What impresses me even more is how much Rowling builds on classical literature. Just one example of this: The Divination teacher’s first name is Sybil. The word sybilla in Greek means “prophetess,” and the most famous Sybil was the Cumaean Sibyl, the priestess who presided over the oracle at Cumae.

6 – The Potter books have such good themes: Love is important and is stronger than the pull of evil (we can see this both with Harry and with Severus Snape); Might does NOT mean right; it is important to keep fighting evil until the very end, even when it seems hope is lost; friends are important; courage is important; and on and on.

7 – There are great quotes in the books / movies:

“It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”

“It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high.  Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledore knew - and so do I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents - that there was all the difference in the world.”

“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”  

8 – Harry Potter has moments that make you want to dance – when Fred and George escape Delores Umbridge; when Neville kills Nagini (taking care of a Horcrux AND getting back Gryffindor’s sword from Griphook all in one heroic moment); when Ron finally kisses Hermione…

9 – The Harry Potter books are not “Christian” as our society has come to think of “Christian,” but the worldview presented is undeniably Christocentric. It is an epic story of good versus evil, in which the main character ultimately must die in order to get rid of the evil. Then he comes back to life and whips evil’s butt (doing so without even using the Avada Kedavra curse – score one for non-violent resistance, sort of.)  

Here are some other Biblically aligned ideas / themes:

-         Having faith and persevering even when you don’t understand the reasons or what exactly is going on.

-         Loving someone means you are willing to die for them.

-         Resisting the temptation of power.

Here is a great article about the Christian themes and influences in Harry Potter: http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=3507 This article appeared in The Christian Century, January 15, 2008, pp. 24-27.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from the article:

On the other hand, John Granger, author of Finding God in Harry Potter, argues that the books speak to something deep in the human heart. "All humans naturally resonate with stories that reflect the greatest story ever told, the story of God who became man," he writes. He believes that the Harry Potter novels "touch our hearts because they contain themes, imagery and engaging stories that reflect the Great Story we are wired to receive and respond to." Granger maintains that Rowling is following in the footsteps of authors such as C. S. Lewis in using magical themes to point up archetypal human experiences that relate closely to salvation history as understood by Christians.

Indeed, Rowling, who describes herself as believing in God (though with a faith more akin to Graham Greene’s than Lewis’s), has stated on several occasions that Lewis’s fantasy stories were a major influence in her life and that to this day she is incapable of being in a room with a Narnia book and not picking it up to read. Certainly her books can be seen as attempting to carry religious, and specifically Christian, ideas past the "watchful dragons" that Lewis wrote about in his own reflection on the role of magic and fairy tales.

In a seemingly post-Christian era, there is an urgent need to articulate the basic themes of the Christian mystery in ways that are fresh and original, yet faithful to the truth of the gospel. Since the publication of Deathly Hallows Rowling has actually spoken about the Christian theme of the books, saying that to her the religious parallels have "always been obvious. But I never wanted to talk too openly about it because I thought it might show people who just wanted the story where we were going."

G. K. Chesterton wrote about this issue in his essay "Magic and Fantasy in Fiction." He speaks of the net of St. Peter and the snare of Satan, each of which represents a different kind of magic in which one can become enmeshed. "I am convinced," he wrote, "that every deep or delicate treatment of the magical theme, from the lightest jingle of Peacock Pie … to the most profound shaking of the phenomenal world … will always be found to imply an indirect relation to the ancient blessing and cursing; and it is almost as vital that it should be moral as that it should not be moralizing."

Anyhoo, I just had to take a few moments to express my excitement about the opening of the movie tonight, and how else would I do that other than basically writing a paper, complete with sources and citations…??

Together

For the last couple of weeks, Josh and I have made a point of having date night every Thursday. Last week we went to HuHot and I discovered just how much I adore their peanut sauce.

We’ve also gone for bike rides, visited the Taco Wagon II, tried out The Pizza House and the Bistro downtown, taken pictures from the Walking Bridge, and had pumpkin concretes from Andy’s.

It’s made me think of other things I’ve done with Josh:

On our honeymoon in Hawaii, I got so mad at him when he couldn’t keep his facemask on while we were trying to snorkel. I think I saw a total of five fish that day, because Josh scared them all off with his thrashing.

In Turkey, Josh insisted that we miss our connecting flight on purpose so that we could tour Istanbul. We let a taxi driver who didn’t speak any English take us to a random hotel, we walked through Hagia Sophia half asleep, and we made our way across the country using trains, planes, buses, and taxis. Most of this was done between midnight and 5 o’clock a.m. We bought some strange meat from a bus terminal, and we got help from a Dutch lady who was trekking across Turkey with her boyfriend.

In Jordan, we walked along the same pathway into Petra that Indiana Jones uses in the Holy Grail movie.

On our way from Pennsylvania to Texas, Josh swerved to miss a two-by-four in the road, forgetting that we were towing my car. The towed car started jackknifing, and we screeched down both lanes of the highway for quite a while before Josh got it under control (he’s an amazing driver.)

One time on a road trip from Texas to Missouri, we spent about 4 hours singing every old church song we could think of.

We’ve put together several massive puzzles.

We’ve gone four-wheeling countless times in Montana sunsets.

We sat in front of the clicking schedule machine in the Frankfurt airport for four hours, after getting yelled at by a large German woman.

We took a helicopter ride.

One thing we haven't done together is a blog... JOSH, IT'S YOUR TURN TO POST SOMETHING.

Lost Marbles

For the last several weeks I seem to be more scatterbrained than usual. Maybe it’s because I am working full days now, and my brain is not quite used to it. Maybe it is the changing weather. All I know is that I think I’m losing my mind:

At least three times now, I have gone to go to the bathroom, and I have closed the toilet lid before sitting down. Not put the seat down, closed the lid.

Last week, my mom had to wave me down before I drove off with a drink on the top of my car.

A week ago on Saturday Josh made breakfast burritos. I put my tortilla on my plate, and put my eggs, sausage, cheese, and ketchup on top of that. Then I poured milk all over it.

Just the other day I had to stop myself in the middle of getting into the passenger side of my car when I was on the way to somewhere… by myself.

I left a huge pot of soup just sitting on the stove last night and had to send Josh home from Trunk or Treat to put it away.

I have lost things almost every day now for the past couple of weeks including my camera, my jump drive, my leggings for my Halloween Costume, my phone, Josh’s paycheck, my free drink from McDonald’s…

If anyone has seen any marbles rolling around, I need them back.

Flannery O'Connor

I love, love, LOVE Flannery O’Connor. And here are a few of my favorite quotes of hers:

1 - "All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal."

2 - "Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."

3 - "The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree."

4 - "You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd."

5 - "I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing."

6 - "Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe."

7 - "People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them."

8 - "All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful."

9 - "She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick."

10 - "I write to discover what I know."

11 - "If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you."

12 - "I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted."

13 - "Total nonretention has kept my education from being a burden to me."

14 - "The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience."

15 - "Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not."

16 - "Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive, and very limited way."

17 - "I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial."

18 - "The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled."

19 - "The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."

20 - "When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathe News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax."

Which ones do you like?

School Happenings

Working at a school has brought up a lot of memories of my own schooldays:

Going to first and second grade in a war-torn country was quite an experience. First we had to make it to school. For a while, this meant going through a checkpoint manned by soldiers who wanted to see our passports every morning. Once we got to school, it was often a difficulty staying there. There were a lot of strike days when my parents had to come back just a few hours later and pick us up.

Being at school could also be dangerous. Soldiers tear-gassed our playground several times that I remember, and once the bomb sirens went off and we all had to don gasmasks.

Also, discipline was enforced through slaps across the face and rulers across the hands. (I never got slapped and was only rulered once during an all-class punishment.)

Third and fourth grade were in a different city that was a lot more stable. Still, discipline was the same, and the kids were pretty rough. Every Saturday we walked home from school because it took the bus over an hour to go the one mile.

I homeschooled for a while, and that was great. Mom and Dad rented a little room downstairs from our apartment, and we did school there. I remember spending a lot of time coming up with “extra-curricular” activities, such as watching a swarm of ants attack a centipede-like bug that was very poisonous.

When I was in junior high, I attended a VERY conservative Christian school. We watched movies about the end times and how Halloween is the Satanists’ “high holy day” and how all rock music was based on satanic rhythms and was “Hell’s Bells.” One other movie I watched there was about how the United States government has concentration camps scattered throughout America that are just waiting to be filled with Christians.

I LOVED high school. There were students there who had lived all over the world. One day in Math class we discovered that we could say the “Hail Mary” in eight different languages.

I had one teacher who was terrified of birds, which was unfortunate, because his classroom had a balcony where the pigeons liked to land. It was amusing.

Another teacher, during his second week there, refused to let us leave the class when the fire alarm went off. When he finally let us go about ten minutes later, we discovered there was a real fire in the building.

I remember a friend hiding under her desk when fighter planes flew over. One year we attended a funeral for a schoolmate. We put on a lot of Shakespeare plays. I was in our bell choir.

Schooldays were some of the best days of my life.

Nomads

Josh and I have never had a plotted plan for our lives. We have some goals for the future. We have some dreams. But no solid plan.

Usually we move somewhere and hang out there until we get tired of it or decide that it’s time to take the next step in life. Deciding on a “next step” usually involves five or six different ideas, and narrowing those down to one. Then we pick a date and go.

Since we have been together, we have lived in four different places:

 Minneapolis, MN

 Waxahachie, TX

 Belgrade, MT

and

 Springfield, MO

Here are some of the places we thought of going to, but didn't quite make it:

Boston, MA

Pasadena, CA

Seattle, WA

Alaska

Ellendale, ND

and

Japan

The Alaska and Japan thoughts were a little less defined...

We’ve been in Springfield for just over a year, and it is about time to consider moving. Right now we have a LOT of ideas, and we will probably look into all of them to some extent. Here are some of our possibilities:

Alaska

Seattle

Minneapolis

(which are all returning ideas)

or:

Pennsylvania

 Lebanon

 Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

 or:

 Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates)

 Of course, more options may appear. It will take some effort to decide where we want to go. But, a year from now, we should be there.