your friends. your life. your facebook.

so this morning i got an email from facebook.com inviting me to join the group for the national sleepout i'm participating in (tothestreets.org). i had forgotten i even made a facebook profile, but it turned out i had, obviously, and i think it was because my friend dubie told me to check it out and you can't check it out unless you have a profile.

the funny thing is, when i looked on it, i had a message, from a one "Christopher Tinglof" at West Point. i've never met a Tinglof i'm not related to, so that was a trip -- except he could be related to me. but he doesn't look like me.

but then i looked up North Park people, and there are a ton, and for a second i thought i could fill out a new profile and have all these friends, but then i felt overwhelmed (much like in the kitchen yesterday) and just closed out the site. i wrote Christopher Tinglof back though.

everything turned out ok

except for a few grains of crunchy rice, the dinner was a success.

in addition, i got a phone call from one of my former youth group students tonight. unprompted, he said "Christina, you're the coolest Caucasian I know. I want to thank you for coming into my life."

that was way better than a successfully cooked crockpot meal.

plus!

how do you even know when a crockpot is working!? this one doesn't have a light or anything!

fellas, if you want a "traditional" little wifey who's going to cook and clean for you, don't come near me. i'm a slob with good-flavored mush.

good flavored mush

peeps, i'm trying to do this slow-cooker chicken thing for a small crowd that's coming over tonight, and i'm really scared it's going to fail. first, i have never tried slow cooker meal before. second, it called for 3 cans of cream of mushroom soup condensed, and i only had two cans, NON condensed, and one can of cream of chicken (also non condensed). third, i read the reviews AFTER i started the recipe, and they were all like "good flavor, but mushy!" FOURTH, my roommate walked in and was like "milk? why are you adding milk? won't that come out weird? milk comes out weird in a crockpot" and i was all "the recipe called for it, see, SEE????"

good gracious this is going to be a mess. it'll be like bridget jones diary when all of her friends came over and ate that blue soppy soup. i'll have to make everyone promise to still be my friend when it's all over.

how much do i love dancing?

so much. in fact, i always make my friends from boston go out dancing, even though no one really likes to dance as enthusiatically as i do...i think they do it just to humor me, much like when we go bowling. someone said to me once "i've never seen someone dance as energetically as you do while completely sober." which may not have been a compliment, but i'm taking it as one.

anyway, a seminary friend had a little dance party in her apartment tonight with some funky african music, and i had a good time. it's been a long time since i got down.

church update

after going to Al Green's church in Memphis last week during Sankofa, i kind of took Torgo's advice. i didn't go Quaker, but I went to Reba Place, which is a Mennonite church. it was cool, but my problem isn't with the first time i go to a church, it's with the second and third time. really, it's with my attitude. i have a shopping list for what i want, and i don't think that's the best way to go about it. finding a church home isn't (or shouldn't be) another consumeristic venture (finding a boy, however, that's another matter). anyway, i have an appointment with the women who was my spiritual director for a class we took last semester -- she was incredibly helpful in figuring out some crappy stuff that was going on last year, so i'm hopeful she'll help me figure out this Debbie Downer attitude I have towards going to church.

oh, did you want to hear more about Al's church? yes, he sang. "one day at a time, sweet Jesus." yes, in falsetto. and there were people there from all over the world (literally: Japan, Sweden, New Zealand, Canada). i kind of thought it would be this lavish place on a main street, but it was this little podunk church off the beaten path in a neighborhood. and just about 60% of the people there that day were visitors. and Al Green totally called out this woman who came in late. she was trying to sneak in and he says "Sarah, i thought you weren't going to make it today."

get on board, children

Sankofa is a Akan word that means "We must go back and reclaim our past so we can move forward; so we understand why and how we came to be who we are today" (don't you wish one English word meant as much?)

the sankofa class at the seminary is one done to promote racial righteousness/reconcialiation -- whites are partnered with people of color and we take a trip down south to revisit famous landmarks and museums from the civil rights era. the museums were as museums are, but i really liked seeing the actual places -- the 16th st. church in Birmingham Alabama (where we were stuck for a day and a night while our bus was in danger of exploding), where the bomb killed those 4 girls, Medgar Ever's home.

But the best part was meeting Hollis Watkins, a former member of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), who is now doing leadership training and community organizing in Mississippi. he's not a young sprout anymore, but honestly one of the coolest people i have ever met in my lifetime. the civil rights movement is glamorized in a way, and it makes it hard for people to fight injustice today. racism today is more subtle and nuanced, more dangerous, as Hollis told us, because the subtle nature allows people to exist in a state of denial. but because today's freedom fighters are not leading marches (as much) or pushing dramatic boycotts or getting shoved off lunch counters, it's not getting as much attention. he also talked about lessons that could be learned from the movement, like working intergenerationally and encouraging indigenious leadership. he was also so freakin' humble, i didn't know what to do with him. amazing.

and he closed by singing with us:
get on board, children, children
get on board, children, children
get on board, children, children
let's fight for human rights

mechthild is kinda cool

so for my history requirement at seminary i'm taking medieval female mystics at a seminary in evanston (about 20 minutes away) and these mystics are something else -- they were being subsersive within a pretty constricting system, mostly by using accepted doctrine and theology and adding their own flavor to it. hildegard, the first mystic we studied, talked about virtue all the time (they're all big on chastity), which was done, but envisioned the virtues as women, which was NEVER done. the women would also talk themselves down, call themselves lowly, because if they were too confident, men wouldn't read their stuff. so we've been wondering in class how much of their self-depreciation is real and how much is just to get a wider audience for their work.

anyway, mechthild (and, really, is there a cooler name possible?) is big on relating to God as a lover -- indeed a lot of her stuff reads somewhat like a romance novel -- which she did on purpose. she was also a poet, and a lot of her work is in poetic form, which is exciting for me. here's one i like:

Book I, 8
The Most Lowly Praises God in 8 Things
O you burning Mountain.
O you chosen Sun.
O you full Moon.
O you bottomless Well.
O you unscalable Height.
O you brightness without measure.
O Wisdom without ground.
O Mercy without restraint.
O Might without opposition.
O Crown of all honors!
The most lowly person you ever created praises you.

i'm going to have some weird dreams

if you haven't seen Grizzly Man...i don't know whether i would tell you to see it or not to see it. quite possibly the strangest movie i have ever, ever seen.

i have to start exercising

i'm going to alaska in april! with a good friend who has to go home, and because she's a resident of alaska, gets a $60 companion fare. and i get to be the companion. i told her i want to go hiking in the tundra, so it's time to start getting in shape. i'm also glad she has all that mountaineering-special-north-face jacket kind of stuff, because i don't, and it would be embarrassing to try and go hiking in the alaskan bush with my winter jacket, which looks like a burgundy sleeping bag.

whenever i try to go out into nature it's funny. i love the woods, don't get me wrong, and if i am choosing to vacation, i'd rather it be out in the middle of nowhere (since i'm in cities all the time) but i'm pretty clueless. narrative example:

at my college, we had to do some sort of outdoor orientation, and when i was looking at all our options i thought to myself "hey, i can do a thru-hike!" at the same time thinking "what exactly is a thru hike?"

i had to buy all my supplies, including a monstrosity of a frame pack that was leftover from when Eastern Mountain Sports used to rent frame packs. it was external, so it made me look like a hippie, especially when i filled it and walked through my neighborhood.

ok, i didn't really do that, but i did fill it and go to the closest place to hike near my house (a "hill" that takes 20 minutes to summit).

and not that there's anything wrong with being a hippie. or a hill.

but anyway! then i bought a stuff sack for my parents' old school sleeping bag (cloth, olive green on the outside and a duck pattern on the inside). it didn't matter that this wasn't the type of sleeping bag to be stuffed, because i didn't really know how a stuff sack worked. i rolled my sleeping bag up and tried to fit it in the sack. not surprisingly, it didn't fit. so much for stuff sacks i said to myself.

when we actually started the trip, there i was, cut off jean shorts ("make sure you don't wear jeans!" our leaders said to us the night before -- but those were all the shorts i had -- city people don't wear shorts!), gargantuan frame pack, rolled sleeping bag hanging from the bottom. next to all these other first years who obviously had done this before, as evidenced by their sleek internal LL Bean fram packs (sleeping bags inside, apparently, in their stuff sacks), their swishy Umbro shorts, and their Nalgene bottles (dudes, i had never HEARD of Nalgene! or North Face! or Umbro! or stuff sacks, fergoshsakes!)

as it turns out, i wasn't the slowest hiker, but all that meant is that while one leader was at the front of the pack with everyone who knew what they were doing, the other leader was at the back of the pack with the SLOWEST person, and i was by myself in the middle, red faced, hair frizzed out from sweat and rain (cuz it rained the first few days) (i looked like a lion).

but i did it. and i made it.

and in just about a month i'll be doing the same thing (only slightly better) in the alaskan tundra!
wahoo!

andy griffith is always right

so torgo posted on his blog that don knotts just recently died. poor don knotts -- a life time of playing second fiddle doofuses (doofusi?) to people like andy griffith.

my parents watch andy griffith every night -- it drives me CRAZY. andy is the smartest, nicest guy in town. he hardly ever screws up, and when he does, it's because of something someone else did. barney (don knotts) never knows what to do, always does the wrong thing, and is easily duped. aunt bea never knows what to do (besides cook), and is easily duped. opie's pretty smart, but also pretty small, so there's no competition there -- and who else is around? Goober? the town drunk?

anyone remember the episode where they were making a commercial with aunt bea in it and she didn't realize they were making fun of her (but andy did!) and then got all mad when andy wanted to shut the operation down. andy griffith suffers for being right!

or the one when the government was sending money through the town and told andy and barney to keep it top secret and barney told everyone so the town came out and held a parade. andy griffith keeps your dirtiest secrets!

sigh. don't get me started on leave it to beaver.

church hopping is like dating

i have been church hopping around Chicago since i got here a year and a half ago. i always GO, i just always go to different places, which sounds cool in the beginning, but when you get down to the nitty gritty, it's actually not that cool.

at the beginning of the year i told myself i was just going to stop and settle someplace, but whenever i would actually do that, i would think to myself "hey, wait, i don't want to be here" and then i would move on.

my "things i want in a church" list is slightly longer than my "things i want in a guy list," and goes a little something like this:
non-heretical
challenging, interesting, not-hard-to follow sermons
commitment to social justice/ awareness of social injustice
diverse congregation
hospitality
use of gender inclusive language (not just from the pulpit, from the hymnals, Bible translation, etc.)

on Sunday, i went to Lasalle St. Church on the West Side of Chicago with some friends from seminary, and i kind of liked it. it for sure had the first 3 things going on, it was rocking with the last thing (even used non-gendered language for God -- things like Godself and God's instead of pronouns), and there was a woman pastor.

we left pretty quickly, so i didn't get a chance to see hospitality in action, and it seemed pretty white (but the woman we went with said that changes week to week), but on the whole, i think i'll go back.

i'm not going to talk about it anymore as there's a chance i could get all excited and then decide that the church sucks next week. but i feel like the tide may have turned.

mail call

my parents are totally random in this completely awesome and generous way. today in the mail i got a pack of chocolate covered cherries and then seperately a letter with $20 in it from my dad. his letters are usually no more than a page, and he always always staples some money to it.
this letter started with "What's gnu?" and ended with "One parting thought, what would you call a country populated only by male deer?" then, written upside down at the bottom of the page, "stag-nation"

busy-ness should be illegal

now that i'm embodying my new role as extrovert, i'm finding balancing schoolwork and people really difficult. take wednesday for instance -- we didn't have a lost party like we usually do, because it was a rerun (darn you, lost!) -- but a bunch of peeps came over and there was ice cream and dance dance revolution, and what's a girl to do? go to the library instead? please.

this weekend, though, for reals, i'm cracking down, catching up on all the history reading i have neglected because history annoys me (sorry Binah!).

go here

i'm not explaining how or why i found this, but this story needs to be told.

http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/content_pages/record.asp?recordid=54463

there is a girl inside

so for one of my classes we are reflecting on our adolescence.

i had a revelation this weekend that factors into this reflection process for me.

lucille clifton, my favorite poet, has a poem called "there is a girl inside"
this is it:

There is a girl inside.
She is randy as a wolf.
She will not walk away and leave these bones
to an old woman.

She is a green tree in a forest of kindling.
She is a green girl in a used poet.

She has waited patient as a nun
for the second coming,
when she can break through gray hairs
into blossom

and her lovers will harvest
honey and thyme
and the woods will be wild
with the damn wonder of it.

i got inspired by this in writing my reflection -- in my adolescence (and in some sense after as well), there was a girl inside. the girl i was at 2, and 6, and 9, wild and imaginative and smart and quoting anne of green gables and flying on spaceships got enclosed somewhere in the summer i turned 11. i shut her up except in safe places during high school, and every during college, because as soon as 6th grade came around there got to be consequences for letting her out. teasing, exclusion, funny looks. she's been creeping out, i think, inch by inch, as my world gets safer or i get braver.

i have always considered myself an introvert, but that was my weekend revelation, i don't think i am anymore. i think i was just inside.

a long view...

the title that is. this prayer, by Archbishop Oscar Romero, has been my theme for my time in seminary, well, really, my whole life. i feel like whoever chooses to begin to work for social justice has to take the attitude in this prayer, or burn out and despair are inevitable.

It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.

The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying
that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the church's mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted,
knowing that they hold future promise.

We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation
in realizing that. This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well. It may be incomplete,
but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference
between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
Amen.

I'm a blatant copycat

...and a lemming who just follows people all over the internet. but this is the last place i'm going. don't come at me with facebook, or any other crazy new thing, THIS IS IT. (did that sound firm enough)?

and to all my friends? STOP MOVING AROUND!
(but i still love you)