Start again...again

Deep breath.

Okay, so I failed again.

I tried, over and over again I sat down to write, but a mixture of stress and other psychological factors kept getting in the way, and writing for even 20 minutes was just too much.  I have been a dry well lately; more than usual that is, and as much as I would like to deny it, I need help.  One of the reasons I want to do this 'project' (I guess it can be called a project) is because I do find it difficult to articulate myself, particularly in writing.  Also, I think it will be useful to exercise my writing skills for the sake of sermons, and of course just general creative stretching is good for the soul.  But what is a girl to do when she can barely form a single sentence while staring at a blank screen?  The dreaded prompts.  I so very much did not want to tie myself to a predetermined set of prompts, but I suppose some of us just need training wheels at first.  I am no stranger to God cutting back my pride, it happens all the time.  So if prompts are what I need - then prompts are what I need.  So I looked, and honestly the internet has little to offer and the writing prompt books in the bookstore were not much better.

But after a while I did find this: http://www.creativewritingprompts.com/#   They are okay, and they will do.

So I will start at the beginning and use these.  Hopefully writing will come more easily long before I get through all of these prompts.

sociological and theological reflections on 'Cabin in the Woods',(beware of spoilers!)

I went to see 'Cabin in the Woods' again tonight.  I am constantly fascinated by the work of Joss Whedon.  He uses such common genres to make truly interesting statements about us and the world in which we live.  But it can be easily missed; the themes he explores can be easily missed or confused.  It is not that what he does necessarily has a particular message, but rather it poses questions about how we view ourselves and our relationship to each other and to the world. 

One of the themes that is present in all of his work, but in a real significant way is our relationship to the powers, whatever they may be, and how we let those who are in authority control us.  So in 'Buffy', it was the watchers council, and later the system that created and maintained the single slayer lineage.  In 'Angel' it was the ‘Senior Partners’ who controlled all the evil in the world.  In Firefly it was the Alliance and in 'Dollhouse' it was the Dollhouse itself.  In 'Cabin in the Woods' (spoiler alert!) it’s the evil gods who used to rule the world and now are placated by the horror story that is acted out by the unwitting campers. 

In every instance the protagonists rebel against the status quo.  The idea of doing something because that is the way it has always been done is never an option for the characters in Joss Whedon’s stories.  Now this is not unusual for movies, standing up against an evil regime or unjust system is common theme.  But where Joss approaches it differently is the idea that the system should be questioned always.  In ‘Cabin in the Woods’ the purpose of placating these evil gods in this way is to keep them from destroying the world in a gruesome and terrifying way.  Basically the small evil is done in order to prevent the larger evil from taking place.  The main characters refuse to participate and the end is world annihilation.

 

Of course Whedon doesn’t offer any solution to the problem, he never does.  There will always be systems that are in place to maintain order, and those systems will always sacrifice little goods for a so called larger good.  But he begs the question, is that larger good really good at all if it has to be upheld by the allowance of evil?

I have a lot to say about how Christianity has failed to step up and fight against the status quo(most of which I will not be saying here).  The lives of most Christians are no different than the lives of most secular persons.  We are just as entrenched in the system that is constantly upheld by little evils.  We each like to think that our lives are not tainted by such things, but they are.  Look at your clothes, where were they made?  Or your Apple product?  Or your food, who picked it?  Christians, look at your house and tell me that Christ wouldn’t tell you to sell all you have and give it to the poor.  We live within a system that perpetuates haves and have nots, and we always think that we are among the have nots, but if you are reading this blog it just isn’t so.

Now of course I am among the worst offenders I enjoy the benefits of a first world lifestyle and generally don’t think about the system that always has me worrying about superficial crap.  And I would really like to say that I don’t know what the answer is, but of course I do know, every Christian knows.  Joss Whedon knows, and that is why his protagonists chose not to placate the great evil by performing a ‘small evil’ because of course there really is no such thing as a ‘small evil.’

As I went down to the river...

We drove down to the river, my father and I.  It was muggy outside and there were people milling around, a couple of tents set up and some booths selling food.  A group of people were sitting together playing Irish music.  We started to walk down to the shore, only two bateaus had come in so far.  As we go down to the river’s edge we saw some people from church sitting on the lawn waiting.  My mother was on one of the bateaus, The Lady Slipper.  They were late coming in and we had time to kill.  As I sat there with my Dad, sharing my skittles with the women of my mother’s church I looked out over the river.  There was a large bridge that crossed the river, but right next to that bridge, a little lower down were the remnants of an old bridge.  It no longer went across but it was beautiful, just sitting there on either side of the river covered over in ivy. 

I asked my Dad if there was a way to get up onto the old bridge, he told me where to go, and then said that I should be careful because the bridge has a bunch of rotting boards across it and there is the potential to fall through.  I thought about it for a second.  I would hate to fall through and be the person to ruin everyone’s evening by getting hurt or dying, but I would also hate to deny myself the experience of seeing this old bridge up close and personal.  So I decided to go.  There is something magical about manmade structures that have been reclaimed by the natural world.  The bridge looked secure enough so carefully and slowly I walked out onto the bridge.  The red rust cross beams contrasted the surrounding greenery nicely.  There were a few holes in the wood floor, and it was certainly rotting, but overall it seemed pretty sound structurally.

I walked out to where the bridge fell away, just over the edge of the river and I sat down.  I must have sat there for over 2 hours.  One by one the bateaus started to come in, they each had their different ways of announcing their arrival as they came around the river bend.  A couple of them blew horns, one blew a conch shell, another fired a flare gun.  I watched and in between boats  I examined the bridge.  I looked at the rusted nuts and bolts; I examined the pealing metal and green wood underneath.  I marveled at the crossbeams up above me  and I stared across at the matching ruins on the other side of the river and I wondered what the world looked like from that angle. 

At one point I was joined by two ‘bubbas’.  They walked up loudly smoking cigarettes and drinking beer.  These guys were the epitome of the southern white trash stereotype, it was as if they fell straight out of a B movie.  There was Bruce the loud joker, whose accent sounded like an imitation of itself, and there was his friend, I honestly don’t remember his name, but he had a more serious quality about him.  At first he seemed to be less of a caricature than his loud friend, but then I saw the “white power” tattoo on his forearm and I realized that he too was a B movie character but instead of the drunk uneducated bubba, he was playing the part of the angry white supremacist. 

Needless to say I did not feel entirely safe sitting with them on that quiet bridge, but I decided it would make more sense if I were to stay there and let them leave first.  I did make sure to point out, when they asked if I was there alone, that my Dad was right down there by the side of river, not very far away at all.  And when they asked my name, and upon hearing it exclaimed “Shireen! That’s a weird name.”  I decided it would not be a good idea to tell them where it comes from (Iran).  When Bruce remarked that it sounded like “Charlene and Irene mixed together” I said “Yes, it’s a combination of both those names.”

Eventually they decided to leave.  My only regret is that I didn’t get their picture, but being up their alone I did not want to encourage them in any way.  I know, I know, they probably didn’t mean any harm. 

After my two new friends left I continued my river reverie until finally I could hear the voices of women in the distance.  It was The lady Slipper.  They came in singing Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz”.   

And that was that, my James River Experience.

Day Three.

The bridge 

This is one of the Bateaus coming in to port

Annoyed is an emotion, right?

So I am in the middle of CPE right now.  This is making for a very very long summer.  I am getting used to the patient visits, and I actually enjoy them to a certain degree, but the days are long and I am exhausted easily.  But the work in the hospital is nothing compared to the ever increasing hell that is the ‘group’ work.  Two days a week I sit in a tiny room with 7 other women where we analyze patient encounters that we have had.  If that is all the group work was, everything would be fine, but it seems that we spend much more time doing exercises that require us to analyze our feelings.  One of the things that has been pointed out about me on several occasions is that I don’t approach things emotionally enough.  Okay, I may be more analytical than your stereotypical female, and I am sure that there is something to gain in me learning to share my emotions, but I can’t but help to notice that those who are all emotion are not being pushed to think a little more logically. 

Why is that?  Is it because we are all women and despite the best efforts of feminism we are still stuck in these stereotypes that require women to feel deeply about every little thing?  Do we think that the emotional response is the final response?  I mean, I often have an emotional response, but it is my initial response, I move on from that point.  I wonder if the problem is that I have already done the processing of my issues long before I came to CPE. 

I have been sick this week and that is making me tired and defenseless.  Which means I now feel free to be emotional about my CPE experience and the emotion I am feeling is irritation. 

Of course that irritation might be gone by tomorrow, as I will have processed it and learned to think more logically about my situation.  That is, what good is it to be irritated by something that I have no control over and really, in the end, just need to get through?

Day Two

(Not the most inspired writing, but it is writing all the same, and at this point that is all that matters)

Could we start again, please?

So, I haven’t written in a long while, and even when I did it was sporadic.  But I thought about it almost every day, I suppose that doesn’t count.  I am going to give it another try, writing every day.  This is harder than it sounds, for someone like me who has no capacity for self motivation.  I spend a lot of time thinking about the things I want to do, and very little time actually doing them.  So this is an attempt to overcome that in myself, and believe me it is hard.  Right now even I have this feeling of dread inside of me.  I wonder if there is a word for a phobia of truly accomplishing something…

One of the problems is that I don’t really feel like I have anything interesting to say.  Sometimes I have stories and I can always write in a sort of memoir kind of way, but I don’t want this to be just a journal, this is a different sort of writing exercise that should cover a wider range of writing styles.  Prompts would be nice, some sort of outside source that would give me prompts that I could use as inspiration.  But outside prompts kinda feel like cheating.  At times like these I feel like I am desperately trying to hold in my crazy.  Usually I can throw the focus off of myself so that no one notices how strange and insecure I really am, but if I am writing in a blog, it is bound to come out. 

This may be one of the reasons I should write, both at my field education parish and in CPE I have been asked to allow myself to be more vulnerable, more emotionally available.  Part of me finds this offensive and a total intrusion of my privacy, but I also know that I have created some pretty amazing walls over the years and perhaps it might be useful to create some doorways as well.

So, here I go again, day one.

A girl walks into a bar - a short journal entry

Let me tell you something about myself.  I am not someone who absolutely has to stick to a plan.  That is not to say I don’t like making plans, it just means that if something better comes along I am not adverse to the idea of changing my plans.  In fact, many times I am well pleased with evenings that do not go strictly as planned.  Soooooo, after exercising I got it into my head that I was going to study in 1823 this evening, which I did for a while anyway.  I am now done with 2 papers, and while they still need some editing I am left with only one paper and 2 exams left to prepare for, that is if you don’t include the 7 pages of field ed. reflection that I have to do, which I don’t, but I should.

ANYWAY, I did my best to help Grey find a ‘suitable’ song to play in church (I put quotes around the word suitable because it is more subjective than you could possibly imagine) which was fun though I don’t think I was of much help.  And then after I was as done as I was going to be with my papers, I watched some hockey ball on the television.  The Caps won, hurray (if the Rangers had won I would have said ‘The Rangers won, hurray) then I wondered why only the winning team did the big group hug after the game, when it was the losing team that really needed the hug.

I then told my friend to stop poking me with his banana (get your mind out of the gutter, it was a real banana and he was poking my arm, sheesh!).

I then had a great conversation about trains and how cool they are.  I do like trains a lot…anyway that was my evening, how was yours?

Star Wars, Post-modernism and various other tidbits from my life...

I had a bunch of different things I was going to write about today.  For instance, I was going to tell the story of the super strange dream I had last night, but I was going to tell it like some surreal story so that you didn't have to be annoyed that I was actually telling you a dream.  Or I was going to write a poem about myself as a child and how my viewpoints have changed, not necessarily for the better.  But I had a pretty decent evening and I think I will just do a brief journal entry about my evening.  Nothing special, probably a bit boring, but there it is.

Taking a step back I realize just how varied my day can be as a seminarian.  This morning started out with Ethics where we talked about the nature of Christianity in relation to Just War.  This was interesting not necessarily because of the subject matter (which was interesting, but kind of beside the point) but because I got to examine what happens when a realist and a post-modern thinker try to have a conversation.  The realist is just that, empiricism is everything, and there is no room for ambiguities or paradoxes.  While facts are important for the post-modernist, the way in which those facts are talked about is much looser, leaving room for hyperbole, absurdity, and humor.  Paradoxes and ambiguities are not only allowed but expected.  There is no need to go into detail about the conversation but let me just say that this was my major contribution to the argument:  http://trextrying.tumblr.com/post/21277804071/t-rex-trying-to-flip-a-pancake-trextrying

After that Chapel,

After that Lunch,

After that reading on a bench.

For no particular reason, at least none that I care to go into, my day got a bit rocky, which contributed to a major moment of vulnerability where I told a classmate about some pretty deep insecurities that I have not ever really shared with anyone.  I am still processing how I feel about this.

Anyway, I went on from there to my next class which consists of me, two other students, and my professor. We are reading through Catherine Pickstock's book After Writing.  Not the easiest book in the world to read, by the way. I had this weird moment where I started commenting about something I actually know nothing about, and the professor responded by reading a passage of the book, which actually sounded like gobbledygook to me, she then turned to me and said "is that what you mean?"

To which I start babbling, and everyone is staring, so I keep talking hoping to God someone will interrupt me, but no they don't.  Eventually I stop, the class ends, and we leave.

I am told that I actually gave the impression of being knowledgeable.  I wonder if Dr. Sonderegger bought it.

Fast forward to the evening where I went to watch a one woman show about Eunice Kennedy Shriver that was written and performed by a high school parishioner from my field ed. site (the church I attend while in seminary).  She did a fantastic job, and I was impressed by how much these high school kids in Arlington, VA are overachievers.

I then spent the evening hanging out with other seminarians and having very deep, very theologically relevant conversations about which student/faculty member would be which Star Wars character.  I somehow ended up with Darth Maul.  Sure the guy gets cut in half in the middle of what is arguably the worst of the Star Wars movies, but he did have some Kung-fu badassness going on...

maybe I can trade up and be Grand Moff Tarkin instead.