babysitting, baking and other stuff

…I’m just gonna say it: I’m tired. I think it’s because I’ve been pretty busy the past couple of days, and I haven’t been doing a good job getting enough sleep. I got about 6 hours (not enough for me) on Tuesday night, took a two-hour nap on Wednesday afternoon because I wasn’t fit for anything else by two o’clock in the afternoon, but then – of course – proceeded to have trouble falling asleep on Wednesday night! Then I had to get up early yesterday morning to go babysit, babysat until 2:30, and then took 2 ½ hours of ballet classes last evening. So, even though I got about 8 hours last night, I’m still catching up.

I’ve been babysitting my four-year-old cousin for the past two days from 8:30 until 2:30, and it’s been going really well. It’s nice for me that he’s introverted, because he pretty much plays by himself. So considering that I’ve been tired these past few days, I basically got to read while he played. Now, don’t get me wrong, I did play with him some, but I didn’t have to be at his beck and call all day. :) Now, starting next week, things will be much different because my nearly-six-year-old cousin will be there to for me to take care of, so I will have to juggle the dynamics of two brothers playing together. I better make sure that I’m well-rested by Monday afternoon, because I think it’ll be pretty much non-stop with the two of them together.

As the second topic of this post’s title states, I’ve been doing a good bit of baking recently as well. Yesterday evening, I made poppy seed muffins (or more like cupcakes) to go with the rest of some lemon cream cheese frosting we made for my dad’s birthday cake. (I made one recipe, my mom looked at it and said, “This won’t be enough for a layered cake,” made another half-recipe more, then it was too much! Hehe. :) Today when I got home from babysitting, the urge to bake seized me again, so I settled on trying to make some scones for an afternoon tea for me and my dad (we’re the only ones home until late tonight). So I found a recipe for oatmeal raisin scones in The Joy of Cooking – wonderful book! – but of course, I changed the recipe a bit. :) Why use all white flour when you can use some whole wheat flour? And why use only raisins when you have dried cherries and apricots too? So I whipped those up, along with some mock Devonshire cream – cream cheese, sour cream, and confectioner’s sugar…mmm :) – and cranberry-apple iced tea, in under an hour, and my dad and I had a nice snack. I have to admit that I am proud of myself for being able to make everything quite efficiently, and I’m also very happy with how the scones turned out. I can’t claim much credit for that though, because when the recipe contains more than a stick of butter and you follow it closely, how could you go wrong? :)

In other news, I was trying to accept my financial aid this evening, but for some odd reason, my scholarship is not showing up as a financial aid award this year like it did last year, and my university is offering me loans to cover my expenses like I don’t have a scholarship! Aaaaaaaaah!! I’m a little aggravated that I won’t be able to figure out what’s going on for three more days, considering that it is already past close-of-business for the week. Another annoying thing is the fact that my uni’s website is so badly organized and infrequently updated that I can’t figure out exactly how much my tuition and room for this year will cost me and my parents. I can figure out how much they cost last year, but that’s not as helpful as it could be, now is it? Everyone knows that tuition and room always increase… :P

So, I guess that’s pretty much it…I get to have special time with my dad tonight :) because my mom and sister are on their way back from visiting a university that my sister is considering for grad school, and my little brother is on a Boy Scout beach camping trip this weekend. So we are having appetizers for dinner, and watching the rest of Two Towers that we couldn’t watch last night. Really, we only started it last night…I think we watched maybe 45 minutes, so we still have about 3 hours to go! The Lord of the Rings movies are some of my favorites, but since my mom doesn’t like them and my brother is still too young for them, I don’t get to watch them very often. (Plus, they are so long!) So I am planning to enjoy my evening immensely and try to catch up on sleep. :)

May the grace of our Lord be with you all!

blogging again...

...and hoping to become more consistent. :)

I'm having quite a nice day today. I had a car to myself, so I got to go to ballet and do some shopping. I thought that the ballet class started at 9:30, so I arrived at the studio at 9:15, but discovered that the class times for this week had been shifted to 10:30. So, I left and made a bank deposit, bought a headband for my short hair :) , and also bought a book called DragonLight that is the fifth and last book in a fantasy/allegorical series called the DragonKeeper Chronicles. I've been so busy that I've only read the first 3 pages, but I'm really looking forward to sitting down later this evening to read it. I'm supposed to go with my mom and sister to my aunt's house to visit with my grandmother tonight, but I'm sort of tempted to stay home with my dad and brother to read! :-l I shall resist that temptation though...have to value personal relationships over fantasy worlds contained in books, however lovely it is to retreat into them! I'll have plenty of time for reading tomorrow, so I shall exercise patience through the Holy Spirit for a while longer. :)

Ballet class was lovely...there was a guest teacher (Alexis Borovik) from the Pennsylvania Ballet here, and he gives a simple class, but one that will still tire one out because it provides the time and mental room to focus on executing movements correctly, which is always harder than doing them the wrong way. :) In addition to a regular class, we also had an hour of partnering, which I really, really enjoyed. We had four guys for about ten girls, but one of the guys was a boy who's just nearly thirteen years old. So, Mr. Alexis put me with that boy, Chandler, which was really fun, because I got to coach him and show him what a girl needs from her partner to keep her balanced. I also got to dance a little with the older, more experienced guys, so overall, it was great. Now I suppose that's enough of ballet for those of you reading who don't really have a clue as to what I'm talking about. ;)

After partnering class was over, I relaxed at the studio to eat the lunch I had packed, then went to the Christian book store and found a new Bible. (Yay!) I've had my last Bible for several years now, and it has been well-loved (the binding is broken and it's got some water damage), so I figured I could justify the purchase of a new one, especially since I had a good coupon. :) I also wanted a copy of the English Standard Version since Derek is always using that during his teaching, and something smaller. Two extra bonuses are the concordance, which, for a pocket-sized Bible, is rather large, containing about 12,000 references, and the fact that this copy is a red-letter edition...I guess some might find that unnecessary, but I find it quite practical to be able to tell at a glance if a verse is something Jesus said in person or not. Although, on second thought, I suppose it doesn't really matter, since every word that comes out of God's mouth is Jesus, the Word, anyway. (That was for you, Derek ;)

So now I'm at the library, posting from the internet connection here, since ours at home isn't working. I was telling my best friend yesterday that I actually like having to go out of the house to get on the internet. It's kept me off of my laptop a lot more, and it limits the amount of times per day I check my email and Facebook since I have to make the extra effort to drive over here (even though it's not more than five minutes from my house). After this, I'm going to grab some necessities for our dinner from the grocery store, and hopefully my mom will let me put dinner together, because she's really tired this evening, for some reason unbeknowst to me. I've been truly enjoying helping with the cooking this summer, and I'm excited that I changed my meal plan yesterday to just $400 on my meal card and that I'll be able to do more of my own cooking in the fall since I'll have a kitchen. As a friend so aptly put it, dining hall food is "dead." Thank you, Mrs. Grose, I couldn't agree more! :)

Well, it's off to the grocery store with me now...I hope that you have enjoyed my newsy ramblings! :)

it's been too long...

Well, I had kinda given up on blogging for a while, but thanks to a reminder from Pablo, I'm back. I was wondering what to do with my free time today, so now I have an answer. :)

So what happened: I must not have had anything that I really wanted to blog for about a week and a half after my last post, and then I got pretty sick about 2 weeks ago. I had a bad viral sore throat, and the doctor prescribed me a broad-spectrum antibiotic because other people had gotten worse without it. But the problem is that I didn't know what broad-spectrum antibiotics do, or I might not have taken the darn thing. You see, it wiped out all the good bacteria in my intestines. We normally have a 80%/20% ratio of good to bad bacteria living in there, but all mine, good and bad, got lysed, i.e. killed. When I quit taking the antibiotic, the bad bacteria started repopulating first, and this really nasty breed called Clostridium difficile overpopulated. Guess what that gave me...diarrhea. Bleck, yuck, and major misery. :P So I got it about two Tuesdays ago, and by Sunday the first of June, it was so bad I came down with a fever. I was laid out from Sunday afternoon through Thursday on the couch, basically just sleeping on Monday and Tuesday, and reading on Wednesday and Thursday, and not eating much of anything at all. Finally got the test results back from the doctor this Monday saying that it was C. dif. not rotavirus like he initially thought, which is a problem, because I had been taking anti-diarrheal meds, which is exactly what NOT to take when you have C. dif...way to go doc! Needless to say, my mom is a bit fed up with him for the two boo-boos he made, and when he prescribed me another antibiotic to get rid of the C. dif. she wasn't willing to take that answer, so did some sleuthing and decided to call a friend who knows a lot about natural medicine. So we got up with her on Tuesday morning, and she set us straight about what I should eat and take to get my intestinal bacteria back in balance. So I'm much better now! :) The prominent God-thing in all this is that I had put on about 5 extra pounds for some reason in the past month (never could really figure out why), but God knew I needed them: I lost about 7 pounds while I was sick because I couldn't eat/didn't feel like eating. I'm pretty glad I lost them, so I'm going to watch what I eat carefully and get a lot of exercise so I can keep at my current weight.

Alrighty, so that's probably much more than anyone wanted to know about intestinal bacteria, but I'm a nerd, so I just had to explain it all. :)

As for other interesting developments in my life, I've been enjoying being my best girlfriend's confidant on her developing romance :), and I've discovered I love snail-mail letter-writing, so if anyone wants a pen pal, let me know and I'll write you epistles as long as you can make interesting conversation! ;) More seriously, I've been reading two more really provocative books that are changing my whole way of thinking and the way I'm living my life/going to live my life. The one that I've finished is Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope by Brian McLaren, and I'm about half-way through Jesus For President: Politics For Ordinary Radicals by Shane Claiborne & Chris Haw.

Everything Must Change was a great follow-up to Claiborne's Irresistible Revolution because it is more structured and less anecdotal and lays out a whole new theory of viewing the world and the Gospel as a first-century Christian would see it...kinda a "what Jesus really meant in His own political/historical/social/economic context" thing. McLaren explains the world's system is built on "the imperial narrative", a narrative being the framing story the people use to view their lives. The big lie of the imperial narrative is that we as human beings are unlimited; that is, we don't have to live within the limits of our environment, and we can consume as many nonrenewable resources as we want and produce as much waste as we want and live however we want, without having to deal with the consequences, whether they be things like global warming or things like an unplanned pregnancy. McLaren also explains that a way to understand our world is to break it down into three system that are all interconnected: the prosperity system, the security system, and the equity system. The way our world does things, these three systems interact to form what McLaren calls "the suicidal system" because it's in a rapid downward spiral that can't be changed using the world's own remedies. The prosperity system has created a gap between rich and poor that keeps widening because the rich use the security system to keep their wealth safe from the poor, who are oppressed and jealous of the wealth of the rich and resort to violence to get it. And thus, the equity system doesn't really bring equity at all. We keep living under the illusion that we don't have any limits, so we keep consuming resources and producing waste to increase our wealth, exploiting the poor to do so, and then continually building bigger and bigger weapons systems to protect our wealth from the poor, who then turn to violence and crime to get what they want/need.

There are other narratives too: the counterimperial narrative that runs opposite to the imperial narrative, but still uses the empire's methods, i.e. violence and dominance; the dual narrative, in which people keep their faith in their "private life" and use the suicidal system to their advantage in their "public life"; and the withdrawal narrative, in which people retreat from "public life" because they think it is hopeless to try to change things with their faith. Needless to say, Jesus rejected all these different narratives - imperial, counterimperial, dual, and withdrawal - to propose the Good News.

And then Claiborne & Haw's Jesus For President is another great follow-up because they take the whole imperial narrative theory back to Scripture and do a short exposé of the theme of empire throughout the whole Bible, and show how Jesus' message was neither counterimperial nor withdrawal, but a third way...neither resisting imperial violence with violence nor retreating from it, but responding with a creative nonviolence that forces your persecutor to acknowledge your humanity...responding with love and peace, not with dominance and violence, because it does no good, affects no change, to deal with the imperial system on it's own terms. We are to disobey the empire when it runs counter to God, but we are to be subordinate to it when it seeks to punish us for our disobedience. We are to live in God's economy of love, never responding to anything with bitterness or hatred, and living in God's system of jubilee - debt cancellation, unprecedented generosity, extending the love of family to everyone. Claiborne & Haw show just how political Jesus' message really was: words like "Christ" and "Lord" and "Good News" and "kingdom" and "Son of God" and "faith" were all used to refer to the emperor and emperor worship during Roman times, and Jesus took them and was using them subversively to refer to Himself. No wonder people got so mad and wanted Him to shut up...and eventually did shut Him up...or so they thought. So essentially, when Jesus is talking about not being able to serve two masters, He is saying that our allegiance to one must should destroy our allegiance to the other. So here comes the clincher: today, we as followers of God in the Way of Jesus, should place our allegiance to a King and His Kingdom, to the Slaughtered Lamb, not to our nation-state, because the community that we have been reborn into is so much bigger than our country, and why would we want to pledge allegiance to an empire that is part of an unjust, violent suicidal system anyway? Maybe the patriotism that we've been taught growing up in the church isn't very important after all...maybe it's actually wrong, partially because we make it more important than our allegiance to His Kingdom of love that doesn't have borders of nation, race, age, sex, or socio-economic status, and partially because we are pledging allegiance to a nation that operates counter to the Kingdom of God.

I have to admit that all of this really appeals to me, because I've never been interested in politics and government and power. So for someone to show that it isn't necessarily my "Christian duty" to be involved is nice. What I'm not saying is that I won't work for justice in our country and my community, but what I am saying is that I'm not going to work for justice on the system's terms...I'm going to do it lovingly, peacefully, creatively on God's terms, not just working respectfully through the system for change - like trying to change unjust legislation - but doing things creatively outside of it - like having lunch weekly with a homeless person and hopefully using some of my own resources to effect equity between us...now that's a revelation! sharing my wealth in common to work to eradicate inequity! :) But honestly, I'm more interested in loving the people than being involved in politics...but if loving people means getting involved in politics, I will, but I'm never going to make or let politics be my focus.

That being said, I'm not really sure if I going to vote or not...regardless of whether I do or not, one thing's for sure: I'm not going to let politics rule my life during the election process; I'm not going to live my life in a way that pledges more allegiance to the nation than to my King, because I know that I'll affect more change working in creative ways outside of the system than trying to put new wine in the old wineskin of the flawed system.

And all that being said, one of my favorite songs remains Derek Webb's A King and a Kingdom:
~
Who's your brother? Who's your sister?
You just walked past him, I think you missed her
'Cause we're all migrating to the place where our Father lives
Because we married into a family of immigrants

So my first allegiance is not to a flag, a country, or a man
And my first allegiance is not to democracy or blood...
It's to a King and a Kingdom

There are two great lies that I have heard:
The day you eat of the fruit of that tree you will not surely die
And that Jesus Christ was a white, middle-class Republican
And if you want to be saved, you have to learn to be like Him...

So my first allegiance is not...
~
And I've been listening to a lot of other Derek Webb too...his lyrics are very cut-and-dry and prophetic, but loving...and I like the folk style of the instrumentation and harmonies...great music!

Oh, and one more thing - I just got on the Emergent Village website today, and I'm poking around to see if I'll be helping start a cohort in Greenville...there were some people from eastern NC going to the Raleigh/Durham one, but they were interested in one closer to them, so I suggested Greenville, 'cause I'd love to be a part of a cohort, which is basically just a group that meets to discuss new, creative ways of following Jesus in a different way than conversations in the church normally occur...check it out at www.emergentvillage.com