Big blinking neon life arrows

I feel like the universe is presenting me with a bunch of enormous, blinking, neon arrows (and did I mention "with bling"?) pointing to this job I just interviewed for.

I got in for an interview because the girl who worked my internship last year now works at the agency. She gave me the supervisor's name and number after I didn't hear anything further from the web submission of my resume.

One of the counselors at my internship said, "Oh, who's the supervisor? I know so-and-so," who, it turns out, is the program director and sat in on my interview. I was able to name drop (fun!), "Oh, I think we have a mutual colleague . . ."

I had mixed feelings about the job, though; preconceived notions that, though the interview smashed through them, were hard to shake.

So I went to talk to my favorite professor. "Is this agency good? Is this position worthy?" She said yes, and mentioned that she thought a former student of hers, D--, might work there. "D--?" I said. "What's his last name?"

It turns out that he is the same man I corresponded with after I was accepted to grad school. He was just finishing up his last year and had volunteered to contact incoming students to answer any questions they had. I had a million. We e-mailed each other for 2 months!

So I called him at work. I think he vaguely recognized my name. He was very nice and helpful (just like two years ago) and gave me his work address so we could e-mail further and I could pick his brain about this job.

The upshot of it all is that, if I don't get called back for a second interview, or even offered the job, I'm going to be seriously pissed.

Super Tuesday

I voted today. Did you?

My dearest one says it so eloquently:

"Yes, I am political. My heart swells with pride when I go to vote. So maybe it's not surprising that this brought tears to my eyes. I rarely ever cry when I'm hurt or sad but I do it all the time when I am filled with hope, with inspiration and grace. There's something going on right now in this country, there is a wind of change, and for one of the first times in my political life I am full of hope and joy. That's the kind of feeling you want to pass along."

When I was very little, one year I asked my mother who she voted for. She said, "It's a private matter, who you vote for. I don't have to tell anyone." And she didn't.

I think you should be so strong in your conviction that the person you vote for is The One that you shout it from the tops of buildings, but I've always remembered what she said, and that turned voting into a special thing for me. It makes me appreciate a democracy where I'm not beholden to anyone, and my vote is my own action.

Now I think my mother was close-mouthed about it because we lived in a conservative, wholly Republican area. Maybe she was worried I'd blab to my classmates that she voted for a Democrat? A few years ago, we were talking about the ways that Kansas has changed my parents, made them more conservative in some ways. I think my dad was talking about his job and social services, but my mom pounded the table and said, "I am never going to vote Republican!" I was so proud!

The first time I voted, I was 19 (I think). I just missed Clinton's first term, but I got to vote for his second term. And I'm sure I voted for him. My family (at least on my mom's side--not sure about my dad's) has a long Democratic history that I'm proud of. I'm sorry I don't remember it--did I vote in the town where I went to college, or in my hometown? I don't know.

And since then, I've voted in every election, though the one I will remember most was in Alabama.

Tim and I may have gone about things in the wrong way, transferring our residency to Alabama instead of keeping it in Chicago for those two years. Because of that, we had to pay out-of-state tuition for my first semester at school. But that debt aside, I wouldn't change what we did for anything. Within a month of living there, we had the car tags and license changed, and with that, registered to vote. We were there for the second Bush election, but more importantly, the local election as well. There is no better way to feel like a part of the community than to vote for your representatives, I think.

One evening at the theatre, I mingled with the young professionals of Montgomery at a martini night. A young African-American woman came up to me and introduced herself. "I'm running for circuit judge," she said, and at that moment, I couldn't have cared less what she stood for. I was just thrilled to see a woman who seemed to be my age, striving for judge-hood. I wrote down her name, and included it on my cheat sheet that I took to the polls voting day.

Voting day, I left work early, but it seemed like everyone else did, too. I left my apartment and walked through the park to the Modern Art Museum that sat in the middle of it. This museum was the most beautiful building in Montgomery, if you asked me. The outside was ringed with Greek columns, and the foyer was a two-story high atrium. It was gorgeous and stately.

I got in line behind, I swear, about three hundred people. The line wended its way throughout the museum, and people were able to pass the long wait by looking at the art. I remember the last stretch before the auditorium was the high school hallway, where the more talented students from area high schools were able to display their work. Finally, I reached the auditorium, and walked up to the stage. It was a punch ballot, and I was worried that I'd accidently punch the wrong name, or I wouldn't punch it correctly, and it would be a hanging chad fiasco. I so desperately wanted my minority Dem vote to count.

As it turned out, Montgomery, both the city and county, surprisingly went Democratic (despite the ubiquitous "W - The President" bumper stickers on all the cars), but I was still so proud to have been a part of it all.

Again with the spirits

A few ladies at the shelter tonight are asking about the presence of spirits here. It's not the first time I've heard it, though, thank god, the rumors started after I'd been working long enough to get solid nights of sleep.

I yelled at them (joking, of course) that I didn't want to hear about it--not when I was about to fall asleep in not-my-own-bed-safe-at-home. There are nights here when the ancient house settles and creaks, or maybe there's something more there. I am comfortable enough now to sleep soundly every Tuesday, but in earlier years, I'd toss and turn, jerking awake at every slight sound. My dreams would be vivid, near hallucinations. (Once I woke in the morning, certain that a man had been walking the porch outside my room all night, and when my boss took it seriously, I couldn't be sure if it actually happened or if it was part of my half-waking dreams.)

I believe that these women believe in spirits, but I can't say for sure that I do. I also can't say that I don't. When I was little, I saw and felt things all the time, but no one ever validated them for me--or assured me that I wasn't crazy--and of course I didn't tell anyone. I chalked everything up to my overactive imagination, too many Nancy Drews and Agatha Christies before the age of 10. So by the time I'm an adult and Tim finally tells me maybe what I thought I saw and felt maybe have actually been what I thought, it seems too late to take seriously.

But still I tread lightly when talking about that, and am respectful of the ideas and others' beliefs. You just never know.

Mary of the underpass

At a Kennedy expressway underpass, the one at Fullerton, there's a shrine against one wall to the Virgin Mary. I didn't know why until Tim explained that someone thought they could see an image of Mary in the waterstains. I bike past it daily, but didn't think to look more closely until tonight, when I saw three people standing at it.

I could see her. There was a ghostly pattern there that, given the suggestion of a face, was clearly visible.

I have always loved the idea of Mary. I love that in all the male-dominated spirituality that's out there, she has such a devoted following.

And I love roadside shrines. Handmade shrines have always been special to me. They're a place to lay tangible mementos of your spirituality, and a place to collect and center your thoughts. Far removed from gold-encrusted cathedrals, they are accessible to commonfolk, indeed, created and cared for by them.

Camp

I listened to This American Life today; it was a rerun from 1998 about camp stories. It reminded me so much about my own camp experiences, and my heart ached a little at missing it so much. Things ended really badly for me--no perfect final summer to round out my memories--so for the longest time, I pushed thoughts to the back of my mind and when I thought about it at all, it was while sleeping, in nightmares.

But the truth is, mostly camp was a little crystalline bubble of perfection, an escape from the normal angst of teenage years, a wooded oasis of peace for six summers. I'd give anything to be able to return in some capacity. Like maybe there's a summer camp out there in the wilds of Wisconsin or Michigan who needs a social worker on staff?

I felt like I was a completely different person there. Still me, I suppose, but electrified. (The things I would do to make a kid laugh . . .) Maybe I remembered being a camper--of course I did--and as a counselor I wanted to make sure the kids took away wonderful memories like I had.

Two things stick out in my mind as important and special. The second year I counseled, during a junior high week, we had Invitational during vespers. The invitational was the one night during the week where we took communion and invited everyone in camp to accept Jesus into their heart. For campers who had been coming back summer after summer, this was a meaningful tradition, and the cabin chosen lead vespers tried its hardest to make the service a tearjerker. The counselors stayed behind to talk to any kid who needed it. Technically, this was for discussing spiritual issues, but inevitably kids who had gone through rough patches, like losing a friend or having parents get divorced, would stay to cry on someone's shoulder. I don't remember what happened at the service, or after, I just remember going back to the cabin and putting the girls to bed and laying down myself. A few minutes after I turned out the lights, one of my girls got me, and said another camper was crying. I crawled up to the girl's top bunk, and said, "sweetie, what's wrong?"

I wasn't the type who called people "sweetie" or "honey," but the girl was crying so hard that it slipped out of my mouth before I knew what I was saying.

"Sweetie, what's wrong?" and I gathered her in my arms.

She said, with difficulty through her sobs, that she didn't know whether or not she had Jesus in her heart. How do you know if you do?

That was a conundrum for me as well. I was supposed to be some sort of spiritual advisor for these girls, yet I wasn't even sure how I felt about things myself. At that very moment, I didn't know if I had Jesus in my heart. Was he supposed to wave and say hi once he got there or what? And since he hadn't, did that mean he hadn't shown up? I was only 18 or 19, fairly new to Christianity myself, and not 100% sold on it. Honestly, I think I was a camp counselor more for the kids and less because I was an avid Christian.

But you don't say that to an 11-year-old kid in spiritual crisis. You don't admit that you have no answers when she's sobbing and looking to you to ease her pain somehow.

So I asked her things about her belief, and I talked about how you never know anything for sure--you just have to believe. And believing makes things real. She stopped crying, and thanked me, and we both went back to sleep.

I don't know why this ranks up at the top of my experiences, but it seems so special to me.

The second thing happened my final year of counseling, for the most part, a pretty miserable time because of my co-counselors, not because of the kids. Senior high week towards the end, we had a closing ceremony for the graduating seniors--yet another opportunity to wring the most possible tears out of an evening. This particular class was special to me. They had been freshman when I was a senior, so I had been both camper with and counselor to them. After the ceremony, one boy said he had something important to talk to me about, and could we go for a walk. We ended up sitting by the lake under the stars. I was slightly nervous, because I knew I had to be careful about anything with the slightest hint of inappropriateness, and a counselor and camper of opposite sexes off somewhere alone could fall into that category. But he and I had been friends since we'd met, at a youth rally four years before.

He talked about meeting me then. As a senior, Kurt Cobain and grunge had finally hit Marion, and I embraced the combat boots, flannel shirts, and what Hannah called my "elephant" pants. I ran around the youth rally, according to him, this really cool person, unlike any Christian he had ever met. Like him, he thought, and he decided he maybe could find a place for himself in religion. (It didn't hurt that he was a hot little skater punk. I have a weak spot for them.) He said he considered me his spiritual mentor. I didn't know how to respond, how to let him know that no one had ever said anything more wonderful or meaningful to me in my life. How to thank him in a way that conveyed how honored I was. I don't remember what I said.

I'm not the person I was back then. But I suppose I don't have access to the same environment, and the world seems like a harder place now--no place for the same blissful summers where you're closed off from the real world, existing in a special dream place like camp.

The first summer counseling, I felt alive and hypersensitive every single moment, drinking in the experience. I made friendships with my co-counselors that I thought would be rock solid for the rest of our lives, but the intensity that camp fosters rarely translates successfully to the mundane world. I thought I'd fallen in love, too, and remember like it was yesterday a walk we took, on the way to the chapel, revealing our feelings and the tragedy that we could not be together (for myriad reasons).

Oh, everything was so dramatic and important back then. (Maybe it came from being 18, too.)

My last summer counseling was night and day different than the first. I felt I was on one side of a canyon, my co-workers on the other, and I couldn't figure out how to build a bridge across to them. It didn't seem like they were trying to connect with me, either. I felt so isolated, and threw myself into the work, ignoring the importance of connecting with them. The tone was different, too. I always looked forward to immersing myself in a deeply spiritual summer and making new friendships, but suddenly the space was no longer safe. I was no model Christian during my college years, but the woods were sacred to me. The other counselors were profane, disrespectful, pretty much assholes, really.

The hardest week was senior high. I was 20, so not much older than some of them, but a few of the counselors were where I was two years previous--just a summer out of their own camping experience, and good friends with some of the very people they'd have to take charge of. S, the boys' counselor I shared a cabin and responsibilities with, he was my age, with a year or two of counseling experience, thus theoretically more capable than some of the younger counselors. Yet he was one of the worst. It was more important to him to be liked, and he took inappropriateness to an extreme.

In the middle of the week, he supervised the kids who wanted to drag their mattresses out to the communal porch to sleep. I stayed in my bunk on the girls' side with a few of the campers who didn't want to brave the mosquitos. The porch crowd didn't get much sleep, and I didn't close my eyes all night. I don't know what reality S was experiencing that made him think that sex, sexist, and race jokes were somehow appropriate in that setting, but nonetheless, that's what he was telling. Then he started talking shit about the other counselors. I could hear everything clearly through my open window in the quiet woods that night, and I felt like I was being kicked in the stomach over and over and over. Today, though, I don't remember if he said anything bad about me. Everything about the night was so horrible, him talking cruelly about me would not have made things noticeably worse. I don't know if it was an idea that has only come to me over the years, or if I thought it but couldn't execute it: I should have gotten up, gone out to the porch, and asked S if we could take a walk. The kids, of course, would have known as soon as we were out of earshot, that he would be in deep trouble--or so he would have told them later. I was so meek and passive that I probably couldn't have said how I really felt. Or maybe I would have just started crying.

I am slightly proud to believe if this happened today, I have grown enough that I would have addressed it. Back in 1995, though, I stayed in my bunk, crying and praying all night.

And then I think of the "Footsteps" poem, and I felt God with me that night, but what I would have given not to be there, listening to hatefulness where there should have been love.

I wanted to leave the next day. I was leaving early anyway, to study in Ireland, skipping the last week of the summer. I only had a week left before then, and I didn't think I could make it after that night. The only person I felt close to was the camp director, and she asked me not to go.

So I stayed, and got through the end of senior high week, and the next week. I don't know how, or what happened. That night was burned so deeply on my consciousness that, more than ten years later, it's really the only thing I remember from that hellish summer.

I relived it in dreams for years after. My photos are stuffed far out of sight; last time I checked, it even hurt to look at them. My whole love affair with camp was obscured by that last summer. It seemed so unfair that I couldn't even locate my good memories of it; my sleep self only recalled the bad.

But ten years have passed. I'm a different person now, which is good. Maybe someday, back in Kansas, visiting for the summer, I could go back and make peace with the woods again.

Tattoo talk

I never really thought my tattoos were particularly symbolic. I know they're "supposed to" be, and I might be dismissed by people truly into tattooing, but I really just like them visually. I want something pretty tattooed on my body for all eternity. Though color really works well on other people, I don't want any in mine. I don't want any of them to ever be mistaken from a distance for a sorority-girl-butterfly or anything.

But really, I think they all do have quite a bit of significance. My first is an ode to my background, a Kansas one. I lucked out quite a bit. Ad astra per aspera is beautiful in the Latin and the English: "To the stars through adversity." I love it. I could have been stuck with Alabama's "We dare to defend our rights," or Maryland's "Manly deeds, womanly words."

My second was a me tat. Gotten on a whim after seeing a letter on the ankle of another woman, a script initial. It's just plain beautiful and delicate, and in a bitch of a spot that sure to inspire awe among those who know the most painful parts of the body to put a needle to.

My third was the wedding image. I love sharing a tattoo design with Tim. It too is very striking, beautiful, and meaningful. Doubly so, since mom designed the art for her wedding with dad, and we used it for all our wedding graphics. (Ever since I saw their invitation as a very young girl, I vowed that, should I ever get married, I wanted to use the exact same thing. I was very lucky to find a partner for whom the image fit perfectly.)

And the fourth is one I've wanted for yeeeears. Since I was 18. It's a reminder of who I was back then, who I wanted to be, and who I've become. Staggeringly meaningful, I suppose. This week, a few classmates and I were discussing tattoos, and they asked me about my wrist; I'm sure I drunkenly babbled a portion of that explanation but in a less articulate way. I almost forget at times that the image is one Tim also has tattooed on his back, so lest anyone think I copied two of his tattoos, I have to tell the full origin of mine.

Each time but the last, I swear the pain is enough to keep me away for good. And so far I've gotten everything I've ever thought of tattooed on my body, so maybe this is it. But it's true, what everyone says: you get addicted to it, and I still have a spare ankle and a spare wrist . . .

Then, and now

This has been stewing in my brain for a while. A few months, really, since I started school and really got absorbed back into Chicago.

This time it's different. I've started to distinguish my Chicago lives as in Single Chicago and Married Chicago, and while that's not necessarily always the best descriptor, it is mostly apt. There was an excitement, an unpredictability, a wildness to Single Chicago. I was discovering everything for the first time. I don't know if I expected to pick up where I left off by moving back.

I'm seeing a whole new part of the city now. A part that feels old and settled, and not so flighty. More real. For one, I live further in the city than I used to. School takes me to an area I've never been, as well as my internship on the south side, and my school tutoring, on the west side. These areas and existences are so far removed from the (it seems like, now) priviledged life I used to have.

Sometimes I miss the constant rapture, the moments where I absolutely lose my breath over the fact that I live in Chicago. It feels more solid in my bones. Not something I even think about anymore.

And I think about what I used to love about the city, and most of it revolved around a life I don't have anymore. One that I can't afford to have anymore. It gives me a different perspective, not having money to do the things I used to. But really, I used to have the money to do whatever I wanted, and now I just have the money to do what I need to do.

I don't think Married is any better than Single, or vice versa. Just different.

A tangle in the brain

My brain has been knotted up lately over something, and I'm not really to articulate it yet, but it's not going away.

How do you deal when for years you've believed one thing, held one aspect of a belief--subjectively and objectively speaking the right side to take--and then one day, you suddenly have a different feeling about it, one that just doesn't seem right, or PC, or proper, but you still have changed your mind, regardless of how wrong or guilty that makes you feel? How do you regain your equilibrium?

Self Portrait Tuesday

Jamie intrigued me by posting about Self Portrait Tuesday. I decided to attempt it. Not by actually following the SPT blog's assignments, but by making my own up.

Then it immediately occurred to me that taking my own picture is basically my worst nightmare. It gets worse the older I am. There's something about a camera in my face that makes me panick. Something akin to that pathetic Friends episode where Monica and Chandler try to get their engagement photos taken, and Chandler makes a hideous, pained face in every one. I feel my face freeze in a grimace as the camera flashes each time.

I don't want to take pictures of myself warts and all. I want to take pictures that show me as devastatingly beautiful, graceful, and stylish. Because in my head, that's what I am. But then I see photos, and I look pudgy, blotchy, gangly, awkward. I don't want those photos to be a physical reflection of me, because it's not who I feel I am.

So it kind of breaks my heart every time I see an ugly picture, because the more I see, the more I start to think, "but what if I'm just delusional? What if I really am this unattractive?" I know everyone really is her own worst critic, but I do have Tim agreeing with me that I'm not a very photogenic person.

The hardest part for me is that I've always struggled very hard to find myself beautiful and be at peace with my body. It's been so important to me to have self-confidence, and I feel like, nearing 30, I should have had it figured out by now.

It's strange--I expected that being in love would do it for me. Not having to worry about being "perfect" all the time, because I finally have someone who tells me no less than a million times a day, in all seriousness, that I am the most beautiful person he has ever seen. But it's almost too much. I don't believe it. I still thrill for the moments when he mentions a co-worker or classmate has said something to him. It usually takes the form of "how'd you get such a beautiful wife?" And I blush and say, "No really, they didn't say that! Ok, wait. Tell me again!" And he'll smile, and boast again how he's always been picky, and only dates really outstandingly gorgeous women.

And I hate myself a bit, for not believing it until I see it reflected in someone else's eyes. I want to be better than that.