Service Work and Stuff

I didn't mean to leave the page blank for so long. oops.

Today was a pretty good day. I kept pressing snooze on alarm clock this morning, so much that I almost was late for class. I did NOT want to get up. What woke me was the Old Main bell tower ten minutes before my class started. Classes were good today, and it was SO nice out! I did some homework outside, which was super awesome. I also went with three other people from the Values in Action group at Hamline to rake someone's yard. This person was part of the Hamline Midway Elders group, and watched us very intently as we worked. We swept and raked all around her house and trimmed a few plants for her. I enjoyed it. I really like doing service work, and it was nice to meet some new people. I talked to them about their majors and jobs and it made me think about what possibilities I have for my co-major. I have already declared having an Education co-major, but I have not declared the other major yet. ASL is awesome, but I REALLY really enjoy religion classes. And I think I would really like social justice classes and maybe history classes. I really just don't know. Part of my problem is that if I want to do an ASL major, I have to make a flex-curriculum major and the next few years will be planned out.

So that is something I am thinking about. I feel like I am constantly changing my mind. I would pick religion in a heartbeat, but I feel like it wouldn't be beneficial to an education co-major. That is what hinders me. I like ASL a lot, but I like religion a lot more. I would like to do an education and religion double major and an ASL minor (and maybe make it a major later on). That would be the absolute best. But is it better to do what I want, or what would be better for my career? I welcome thoughts about this in the comments.

In other news, due to the awesome weather today, I decided to eat on the third floor patio of the student center today. I also happened to eat at the time that the people I used to hang out with eat. So when I saw someone trying to get the door open with their full hands, I got up to help them, and then realize it was my old roommate and a friend. Another two of them came as well, and they sat down at the same table that I was at. And began talking to me like nothing had changed. We all joked and it was fine. Now I am sitting here and it seems a little weird now, but it makes me think that I shouldn't try so hard to avoid them if they are going to be decent. But I am not going to seek them out. It is just a weird situation. Sigh.

Overall, though, it has been a pretty good day. I have to go do some homework now and think some more about what I want to do with my life. No pressure.

Trying something new today. We'll see how this goes!

Stuff (because I don't Know what To title This...)

I just ate a tomato. Yep, me. Ate a tomato. I bought a salad with cheese, chicken and cherry tomatoes on it, and I thought, 'I am going to eat that tomato.' Result: disgust. Tomatoes are gross. I think I could deal with them if they were more like red peppers. It's the slimy inside stuff I can't cope with. I probably could deal with peppers. Maybe even like them. But tomatoes. Unless they're on bruschetta.
Apart from my horrid relationship with tomatoes, I want to share about the fact that I had a bad Tuesday. I thought that my ride to my clinical was coming later than it actually did, so it left without me (totally my fault. sigh.) and I was late to my clinical. Luckily, the teacher I work with was super cool about it, and was glad that I was safe (I had to walk part of the way). And then in my Schools and Society class, I was called on to answer a question that I had JUST talked about five minutes earlier, but I couldn't come up with an answer. I was paying attention when my group was talking about the issue, but it just left my head the minute I went back to my seat. When I attempted to answer, the majority of what I said were sentences that I failed to finish. I finally said, "That's a good question. I am sorry, I don't feel good (which was true: headache, lack of food causing lightheadedness, and neck pain)." So then my professor allowed me a "life line" and asked someone else to answer the question. Maybe the fact that I wasn't feeling 100% was a large contributor to why I was unable to answer, but I still felt like a huge idiot. When I tell people, though, I feel like it is not as bad as it is in my head. I feel like a lot of the time in this class, I am not making any sense and have trouble with connecting my thoughts to certain ideas/concepts and prior reading material. I felt like this today when one of my friends was like "How does that connect to this?"
Speaking of 'friends', I feel like ever since the issue I had with my last roommate, my self-confidence has both increased and decreased at the same time. This is actually really hard to admit. I think it all depends on the mood that I am in. Sometimes I feel kind of awkward around some of my friends/when I text them, and sometimes I don't. I think my issue is that the people I hung out with before didn't care at all, and so I don't know when I am pestering people and when I am not, and I am not exactly good at asking people to hang out/get together/etc. And when I share things like this, I feel like I am holding a little personal pity-party. Which is not what I mean to do.
This is not how I meant for this post to go.
So, on another note, today I ran into my old roommate and some of my past friends coming into Anderson this morning. All of them except my roommate said hello to me, which leads me to believe that they believe that my side of the argument that my roommate and I had to be somewhat valid. if they didn't, they wouldn't even say hello. This I find interesting. I don't necessarily have the grudge that I did, but that doesn't mean that I wouldn't be angrily in shock if they decided to ask me if/why I was mad at them.
On other note (a happier one too; this is turning out to be a lot more negative than I planned...), I didn't really study for my religion quiz as well as I could have the other day, and I came into class hoping to do better than I expected (but we get to drop one quiz grade; the professor has seven quiz grades in his gradebook and we take eight), and he announced, "In lieu of talking about grace yesterday, everyone who showed up to class today gets an A on the quiz and you don't have to take it."
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Talk about luck.
He gave us the answers and said that the material would be on the final. But hey. Wow.
And now I am sitting here eating string cheese and planning to watch the BBC version of Robin Hood. My parents got me addicted to the show. (Thanks, Mom and Dad.) And I have to do more homework. Such is my life.
The End. Bye until next time!

Pastrix

 Today I want to talk about a book I am reading for my religion class called Pastrix: the Cranky and Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint by Nadia Bolz-Weber. Upon reading the first few pages, I told my mom that she should check it out, but I should mention to my mom and anyone else who possibly wants to read the book: Nadia is very opinionated, straightforward, and extremely (as she likes to put it) "misanthropic". She is very interesting and I like how I really have to think about what she writes in this book, but I think that last characteristic of hers is what makes it hard for me to really connect with what she writes. I am not really misanthropic in any way. Yes, I think that there are extremely senseless and heartless and (insert word here)less people out there, but the definition of a misanthrope is "somebody who hates people: somebody who hates humanity, or who dislikes and distrusts other people and tends to avoid them", which is not me. At all. Anyway, despite that, I LOVE the book and how I can really hear her tone; she is incredibly funny, and I am... I don't want to say "in awe" (of her life story (so far)), because that sounds wrong... it's more like I think that the fact that she was on a path that was (in my opinion) in the complete opposite direction from God and Jesus and somehow got there anyway is really intriguing.
Nadia talks about the experiences that she has had throughout her life with church/religion. As a kid, she went to a Church of Christ (I don't know what that is, and the internet says a lot of things about it, but the most common is: "a group of Christians who use only the New Testament as the source for Christian doctrine and practice and who consider themselves to be part of the original church (Wikipedia)") and stopped going when she realized that she was smarter than the Sunday School teacher. When she was in her late teens/early 20s, she discovered Wicca, which she loved, but that was just a period in her life when she (paraphrase) "hung out with God's aunt." She says she never stopped believing in God during these periods in her life, but that the way she was told to behave/the ways that the groups of people with these beliefs acted were either wrong for her or only right for certain periods of her life.
At one point in her life, she attended AA meetings, and she says that getting better felt "like I was on one path toward self-destruction and God pulled me off of it by the scruff of my collar, me hopelessly kicking and flailing and saying, "I'll take the destruction please." God looked at tiny, little red-faced me and said, "that's adorable," and placed me down on an entirely different path." After this, she met her "unicorn", Matthew. She visited Matthew's church and fell in love with the Lutheran religion, and attended seminary, and became the pastor (or Pastrix (hence the title), which is "a term of insult used by unimaginative sections of the church to define female pastors.") of the House for All Sinners and Saints (which apparently is quite famous; I plan to learn more about it). I like that Nadia gives me a alternative way of thinking about God. She states in a video on her website that she never fit into the 'atheist' category, but that she has "struggled with what God looks like" and means for her.
Anyway, wow. That was pretty much a synopsis of (only) the first five chapters of the book. I pretty much gave a summary of her life. But I wanted to share all that before I made my main point.
MAIN POINT
Before Nadia encounters the Lutheran religion, she dabbles in Unitarianism, but says that it wasn't right for her because "Unitarians just don't talk much about our need for God's grace." For her, the grace of God was necessary; she believes that God interfered with her life and repositioned her. The best way I can define what the grace of God is for her is when God interrupts someone's life and repositions them the way he wants. I don't know if this is what Nadia means; she gave a fair number of examples, but I wasn't able to come up with a clear definition.
But, personally I don't see this to be true. I always feel like I want it to be true, like I want to believe that there is a God out there somewhere, but I don't. And at the same time, I don't like the idea of there being a spirit or power that people are supposed to submit to. Belief in God makes me feel like I am a chess piece; I don't really have a choice about where I will be moved and that the outcome is already planned. And I have not experienced anything like what I believe her grace/grace in general to be.
I don't really support the idea of God or gods because I feel like it is the same concept as a supreme dictator; why can't we have any say or figure things out entirely for ourselves? And the idea that we are made by God makes me feel like someone took a chunk of clay and shaped me. And maybe all of that is correct. I just don't like that idea.
But at the same time, I want a category to fit into. I want to be part of a group; not religious, necessarily, but with common beliefs that gives me a label. I feel like one flaw with humans is that we don't want to be put into categories or boxes, but at the exact same time, we want confirmation that we are not the only ones who think, believe or act how we do; so really, we do want categories. Our issue is that we don't want to be confined to ONLY that category; we want the freedom to change and not be held down by the original belief.
It has taken me a long time to type this, and I am starting to get tired, so I apologize if I make typos or don't make complete sense. But to conclude, I like Nadia's book, and it makes me want to find a category that I fit into, I just don't know what category that is. I feel like humanism might be it (which is exactly the opposite of what the awesome misanthropic author prefers), but I need to know more about it, as well as other religions and beliefs. But that is the main point that I wanted to make; I can't believe it took so long. Sorry about the long read! Thanks for checking it out!