leaving for the bush

first, my oldest brother celebrated his 24th birthday this past week and i completely bungled the whole operation. i'm sorry, matt! happy birthday! hip, hip, hooray! (here, they cheer that more often than the little "and many mooore..." diddy.)

in a few hours, we'll pack up into smaller buses--a small group will go by train--and make our way an hour and a half north, near gosford. it's not far, but it'll be likely far enough away to be right in the middle of nowhere. we'll be there for five days, mostly hiking and learning from oomera, our teacher.

this trip connects directly to the second half of our asc course: indigenous cultures and history. our prof is a very smart aboriginal woman named oomera, who has a very self-controlled way about her and also has that sort of inner calm and wisdom that me feel like she can see straight through me. she's really cool. we took a field trip with her on friday to a park in one of the suburbs. it was awesome. if the area of the park is any sort of indication of what we'll find in "the bush," it's most like the wilderness at home i've seen yet. i'm from the ozarks, and used to hills and trees and water and rocks. that is my nature. the place we visited had all that: hills, trees, birds, rocks, PLUS a particular seed that would lather when water was added and a plant one can "drink" moisture from. party time.
i mean, the outback was cool, don't get me wrong, but all that flatness and red earth isn't really my bag, no matter how pretty the stars are.

so we'll be learning from oomera about aboriginal peoples and how they interacted with the land. they never really subdued it in any sort of way a western culture would. as we're doing all this homework and reading about human's connection with land, i'm thinking about my home, the "my kind of nature" as described above and wondering if i find myself loving it there because of the more comfortable things about it (knowing where everything is, usually i'm not under huge amounts of stress while there) or because there is something comforting about the land itself.

no laptops or internet out there, so i'll be off for a little while. in the meantime, enjoy this video of me singing backup vocals for my friend joel. i'm on the far right, jeans and black jacket looking incredibly awkward. i don't think you can even hear me! this was probably over a month ago, and i'll get to explaining it all soon.



happy week, everyone. see you thursday.

silver lining

today has altogether not been good.

i fell asleep at my computer last night working on a paper. when i awoke, my screen was black.
my computer has been acting strangely for the last week or two. it doesn't appear to be a hard drive thing, but more an electrical thing. sometimes the screen will just shut itself off and take the rest of the computer back with it, sometimes the battery reader will jump from 45% full to 0%. last night, i assume, the battery just kicked the bucket. sleepy and defeated, i crawled into bed with my paper not done and plugged in the computer, hoping for the best.

i woke up this morning as my class was starting--hollaback if you know what oversleeping for class again feels like--and my computer still would not awake. no way this paper was getting done.

i make it to class an hour late, only to discover that older versions of indesign i'd been working with were incompatible with those at school. yippee. at least i got some paperwork taken care of during that time. also talked to my prof for whom the paper was due and explained about my computer. she was understanding but firm. i figured okay.

straight from class i head out to the western suburbs to run some errands that i had planned and couldn't change. i jumped on a train and pulled out a copy of mere Christianity, which i had checked out of wesley's library a week or so ago by chance. (it has been a good call, by the way). a couple pages in, the fellow behind me popped over my shoulder and started to ask me questions with a bit lip and concerned look on his face. this entire interchange was probably the brightest spot in my day.
it was like every hypothetical scenario i've ever been given about a non-Christian seeking God fell into my lap. he wanted to know about Jesus and the forgiveness of sins. He wanted to know about Passover and the sacrifice. he wanted to know about the teachings of Jesus and if we have to do anything more than accept Him to gain Eternal Life. we touched on Communion, Grace, the Holy Spirit, repentance, free will, prophecy, Islam. it was amazing. i ended up missing my stop to ride with him as he got off the train, and left with his contact information. be praying for him, he looked totally on the brink of something big. it was so cool. his name is sam.

so i ran my errand, but missed my opportunity to go by a "we close so early in the day" apple store. the good news, and the entire reason i can post right now, is that my roommate had a spare ibook (my computer) battery on her. she suggested it as a solution, i jumped at the idea. she handed it over, i popped it on. i pushed the power button and heard my little lappy whir to life. all i need now is to get to a mac store and tell them what's what.

three statements to cap off: God is amazing. i have lots of work to do. music (jack's mannequin) has a way of lifting me.

woops

i guess this blog is what happens when life happens to you. i have a lot to say, but i am tired and have some things to work on in the immediate time being, so i'll bullet-point them and tell a brief story and have to call it a day:
-the outback: sunsets, tree climbing, boomerangs, johnny cakes, sheep shearing, niffler birds, emus, kangaroo "hunting", stars, red dirt and farming thereof, original homesteads, quiet, and drought. and a dang good time.
-further notes on the auburn gallipoli mosque
-haircutting
-the scary things you find yourself saying in class (and the resulting accountability)
-the awesome factor of snailmail
-concert practice! singing! milk!
-lots of work and papers
-preparing for the BUSH trip?! already!
-two months in. already?

all those topics, and others i'm sure, but now my story for today.
and of course it has to do with buses.

i was hopping on the 370 bus today, which takes me from my house in leichhardt to my service placement at newtown mission . i'm never quite sure if i'm going to make this bus or not, but it comes infrequently enough that i can tell from a distance by the amount of people at the stop whether i've missed it. i haven't yet!
i walk up to the bus stop, proud of my timing skills, to join the small crowd queued up there, including an elderly woman with a seeing eye dog. the bus pulled up a few moments later, and we all crowded to climb aboard. i caught a look at the dog leading the woman and had to do a double take--this dog could have been brother or sister to our dearly departed family dog, princess. it had the same black face with same greying patterns, same chilled out sort of walk. this dog was a little heftier and its tail a little less perky than the puppy i'd loved, but it made me miss her something fierce.
princess came into my life when i was about three, and remained a constant in my life until spring of 2006. when i found that she had passed away, it was like a true end of an era. today on that bus, a part of that era lived on, guiding that old lady around sydney. right on, princer-puppy.

preppin' for the outback

one: there was an anniversary last week! happy 50 to my grandparents on august 30. i remember being just a little one (or was i ten? wow.) running around your 40th anniversary party and watching that amazing photoslideshow with many of your friends and our family. hope you found an amazing way to celebrate. here's to many more!

two: we leave for the "outback" bright and early on tomorrow morning. we'll drive about eight hours west to the town of conodobolin. my photo teacher told us on monday that you haven't really reached the outback until you've passed a town called broken hill, which is another eight hours west. however, considering we have class next week and it doesn't make sense to spend the better part of the next three days on a bus.

not sure what to expect--been told to layer, been told to expect hots and colds. been told to purchase a mosquito net to go over my head to keep the flies out of my face.
a word about australian outback flies. they are aggressive. they are stubborn. apparently, they will pick a spot on your anatomy and become single-mindedly interested in it, no matter how much you swat at them. they also know no respect for nostrils, eyes, lips, or ears. this is what we hear.

been told that we'll be hanging out with some cool aboriginal artists and learning about that culture through it, been told to expect not to shower for scarcity of water, been told that it's going to be amazing.

three. here's a few images i took at the national museum in canberra a few weeks ago. this place is totally awesome, but i thought these signs were comical. apparently, the horizon(s?) is just upstairs and eternity is to the right.




and to think all those poor people who have been searching for this kind of stuff since the moment the concepts were conceived--they just needed to go to canberra.

confusing posts, the common room, and the strangeness of wheaton

i realize that my last post is kind of hard to follow if the rules of chronology are to be applied at all. all apologies. one ridiculously long day makes for one incredibly confusing blog post. which leads me to a basic quandary: does one go back and correct old posts, making them readable for those who aren't following along, or are they like diary entries for a specific moment and to go back and fiddle with them is to fiddle with a testament to a moment? as the author, i will always know what i'm trying to say, so as the reader, i'm hoping you'll throw in your two cents on this.

sometimes the common room of epworth house is my favorite place to be. there's something about the mix of american and wesley students and the characters in those categories that make it a room of crazy ideas and laughter. i tell you this story in full confidence that no one will lose their respect for me, the asc program, or australians in the telling but rather that we all have a good laugh and it brings us closer together. that being said, the following just transpired in the common room:
a girl with a computer turns on "it's raining men," adjusts the computer to play to the rest of the room with a smile as big as the sunset. two or three of us start bopping (myself included) and the RA turns to me and says, "it's sunday night and we're listening to gay anthems!" i reply, "we should do this every sunday night!" he says to our friend, who is very conservative but has a great sense of humor, "milo! break out the buttless chaps!" milo just shudders and says, "naaaaaaw, man, naaaw!" it was a fantastic interchange and some of us are still humming the tune.
a note on australian stuff: "milo" is a kind of cocoa powder one mixes with hot or cold milk for an added chocolate milk flavor, not dissimilar from nesquick. [a note to future ascers: you will be introduced to milo and directed to put it in water. don't do it. it's meant for milk, unless you're in malaysia. i know some people who still put it in water and try to do tim tam slams out of it--no no no. it's milk, accept no substitutes.] it's got it's own flavor, for sure, but you use it pretty much the same way. the fellow i just mentioned as "milo" isn't really named milo--it just became his nickname because he likes the stuff so much. pronounce it "mallow" and you're halfway to australian.
one more note on things australian: i just had a proper piece of vegemite toast made for me! it's bread, butter, a very thin layer of vegemite, and a slice of a particular cheese. it was pretty good! if you're ever in australia, ask an aussie really nicely to make you a vegemite fan. they'll happily oblige.

classes at wheaton started this week. it's so odd to realize that they are just starting their experience where i am almost halfway through mine. as a smart friend told me while i was finding myself a bit in the dumps about it, "a day with rome is a day without paris," or something like that. i'm learning to be fully where i am and be happy about it. to all you wheaties: have a great time. explore, attend, learn, invest, skip, metra. go to the wade center, the billy graham museum, the balcony of edman chapel, king's arena, and most importantly, arena theater. appreciate the bottom of the beamer center, because it might not always be there, as we learned last year! miss you much.