Tom showed me a website that has counted the number of times words in the English language are used. I know it probably shows how much time i have on my hands, but here are the ratings for the above sentence:
Tom (1822) showed (947) me (72) a (5) website (not in count) that (7) has (43) counted (5990)the (1) number (171) of (2) times (287) words (365) in (6) the (the) English (390) language (510) are (22) used (136).
The first ones are obviously the usual in between words. Frankly I was surprised to find the as number one until I realized I used it twice in my starting sentence. Following that, it is interesting to note what words are put next to what words. For instance, man is 142 and might is 143. Woman is 393 and real is 394.
There are names as well. Tom is 1822 (1823 is the word widely--Thomas is 1510 with 1511 being rock), Jessica is 8982 (8983 is consolidated--Dawn is 3712 with Nicholas being 3713), Kirsten is 42341 (thrice is 42342), Jason is 6810 (athelstan, meaning "King of Mercia and Wessex (924?-939) who was the first Saxon ruler to establish his authority over all of England" is 6811), Holly is 7099 (7100 is saints), Reuben is 42187 (42188 is museveni, meaning "Ugandan president (since 1986). A former guerrilla leader who worked to overthrow the dictatorship of Idi Amin, he is noted for his efforts to maintain political stability by repressing opposition parties and creating a strong economy"), Bethany is 56956 (56957 is misreprentations), Miriam is 15390 (15391 is blot--also Kansas is 20528 with 20529 being fiesta), Diana is 3876 (3877 is spell), Jennifer is 8472 (8473 is curled), and so on.
Don't think it means anything if you weren't listed, it means nothing about my love for you.
Check out the website: http://www.wordcount.org
Thursday, July 29, 2004
Tuesday, July 27, 2004
Tom and I have gotten cell phones.
Yes.
After mocking everyone in this city who had them, we've fallen into the trap ourselves.
Enough said.
So, I am now unemployed. And pretty happily so. I would make a horrible housewife, however, or thank God. i have spent most of this "precious" time sleeping, wandering thrift stores, watching too much TV and renting movies, making random cell phone calls, etc. Though I have been slightly responsible with wrangling with Sallie Mae, Aetna and looking for SLC jobs. Little writing however.
So I've made the decision that I will spend time writing every day. To work myself up to the deluge that will be school. You would think someone who calls herself a writer would actually write without having to force herself, but no. A lot of it is laziness. A lot of it is also that I can barely write anything down because I have too many stories in my brain that I don't know what to do with.
So.
Yes.
After mocking everyone in this city who had them, we've fallen into the trap ourselves.
Enough said.
So, I am now unemployed. And pretty happily so. I would make a horrible housewife, however, or thank God. i have spent most of this "precious" time sleeping, wandering thrift stores, watching too much TV and renting movies, making random cell phone calls, etc. Though I have been slightly responsible with wrangling with Sallie Mae, Aetna and looking for SLC jobs. Little writing however.
So I've made the decision that I will spend time writing every day. To work myself up to the deluge that will be school. You would think someone who calls herself a writer would actually write without having to force herself, but no. A lot of it is laziness. A lot of it is also that I can barely write anything down because I have too many stories in my brain that I don't know what to do with.
So.
Monday, July 19, 2004
A Final Reflection of Mennonite Voluntary Service
When I left Pax Christi Metro New York, I was given a three-sizes-too-big Pax Christi t-shirt, a Pax Christi button and a relief of Dorothy Day. When I left Rauschenbusch Metro Ministries, I was given a book called Vertical New York and a pair of movie tickets, which I think are past their due date, though I am not sure. Despite the sizing and due datedness of some of the gifts, I am fond of them all because they have symbolized some parts of my experiences in New York so far.
I’m fond of Pax Christi’s gifts because there was not a Pax event that didn’t have a gaggle of nuns wearing some kind of peace t-shirt, a cap or button. In the winter, Sister Liz wears a giant yellow coat covered in protest buttons. I’ve seen her arrested several times in that coat—six times last year, in fact. It was always convenient because then I could find her in the crowd of folks being hauled off to jail. When Grandparents for Peace staged civil disobedience at the recruiting station at Times Square, I saw her like a beacon among the brave but huddled group of elderly folks (one was 90 and wheel-chair bound) making their own stand on an issue that was three-sizes-too-big for them. But they were there anyway.
I am fond of the relief because Dorothy Day is one of those saintly people I was first introduced to when I started hanging out with these crazy Catholics. The fact that I’ve spent time where she lived and worked at the Catholic Worker and saw how the place was a place of refuge and beauty even though the lighting is somewhat dubious and the paint job is cracking and peeling, even though I’ve heard the rumor that Dorothy Day could be rather difficult to work with at times—I feel more comfortable with those facts because who wants a saint who isn’t a little rough, a little smudged around the edges?
I’m fond of Rauschenbusch Metro Ministries gifts because they come from a bunch of Baptists who have wandered their way north to serve people who are being slowly pushed out of their neighborhood with the encroachment of gentrification—and have stayed on because they have fallen in love with this city. This city that has an emptiness, yet a spirituality all its own. Like the aforesaid movie tickets, they give whatever they have to that place: they run a free afterschool program, free English for Speakers of Other Languages lessons and a summer day camp for neighborhood kids—where ostensibly the charge is $100, but few people pay more than $25—a food pantry, a clothes closet in the winter. All this on a rather narrow budget.
I am fond of the book Vertical New York, which has vertical pictures of the city and quotes about the city from various artists and elected officials. Here are a few of the quotes:
“New York’s a place where even the ugly returns you to the beautiful boundless soul of its inhabitants.”
“A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: it is a beautiful catastrophe.”
“I’ve always thought that the look of New York, the architecture was fundamentally religious. Manhattan is a cathedral you know—the modern cathedral.”
I have often felt that this city, this cathedral, is where I truly found God. God in the ugliness of the Port Authority; in the nearby Probation Office. God in catastrophe of the hundreds of thousands of souls who wandered by my office window each day. God in the frustration and beauty of a kid who would rather tap his pencil and sing Outkast songs than do his math homework.
These few epiphanies have come between hundreds of aggravations of the lack of organization and too-many-visionaries-and-too-few-managers of the non-profit scene; the monotony of stuffing envelopes begging for money to keep a tiny Pax Christi office going; the bland boringness of writing grants; trying to take charge of 30 children who want to do anything but the homework at hand with only two tutors available; the bewilderment of teaching ESL when one has had no training in the field; not to mention the months I spent in Boston voluntarily having radiation pumped into my brain. These epiphanies have been hard won, and are by no means complete or even understandable.
So, my time with MVS is closing. I’m now officially unemployed, heading to grad school in the fall with a large debt to the federal government looming in my future—but I’m pretty happy. I guess service in the city makes one more than a little crazy; one smiles in the face of negativity. Two things happened yesterday to make me feel like I’ve become a true New Yorker: Tom and I bought cell phones, for one thing. And two, I found myself thinking smugly of a Vertical New York quote as we were out in the wilderness that is Brooklyn waiting for the G train and seeing the Statue of Liberty from underneath the huge canopy of concrete:
“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”
When I left Pax Christi Metro New York, I was given a three-sizes-too-big Pax Christi t-shirt, a Pax Christi button and a relief of Dorothy Day. When I left Rauschenbusch Metro Ministries, I was given a book called Vertical New York and a pair of movie tickets, which I think are past their due date, though I am not sure. Despite the sizing and due datedness of some of the gifts, I am fond of them all because they have symbolized some parts of my experiences in New York so far.
I’m fond of Pax Christi’s gifts because there was not a Pax event that didn’t have a gaggle of nuns wearing some kind of peace t-shirt, a cap or button. In the winter, Sister Liz wears a giant yellow coat covered in protest buttons. I’ve seen her arrested several times in that coat—six times last year, in fact. It was always convenient because then I could find her in the crowd of folks being hauled off to jail. When Grandparents for Peace staged civil disobedience at the recruiting station at Times Square, I saw her like a beacon among the brave but huddled group of elderly folks (one was 90 and wheel-chair bound) making their own stand on an issue that was three-sizes-too-big for them. But they were there anyway.
I am fond of the relief because Dorothy Day is one of those saintly people I was first introduced to when I started hanging out with these crazy Catholics. The fact that I’ve spent time where she lived and worked at the Catholic Worker and saw how the place was a place of refuge and beauty even though the lighting is somewhat dubious and the paint job is cracking and peeling, even though I’ve heard the rumor that Dorothy Day could be rather difficult to work with at times—I feel more comfortable with those facts because who wants a saint who isn’t a little rough, a little smudged around the edges?
I’m fond of Rauschenbusch Metro Ministries gifts because they come from a bunch of Baptists who have wandered their way north to serve people who are being slowly pushed out of their neighborhood with the encroachment of gentrification—and have stayed on because they have fallen in love with this city. This city that has an emptiness, yet a spirituality all its own. Like the aforesaid movie tickets, they give whatever they have to that place: they run a free afterschool program, free English for Speakers of Other Languages lessons and a summer day camp for neighborhood kids—where ostensibly the charge is $100, but few people pay more than $25—a food pantry, a clothes closet in the winter. All this on a rather narrow budget.
I am fond of the book Vertical New York, which has vertical pictures of the city and quotes about the city from various artists and elected officials. Here are a few of the quotes:
“New York’s a place where even the ugly returns you to the beautiful boundless soul of its inhabitants.”
“A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: it is a beautiful catastrophe.”
“I’ve always thought that the look of New York, the architecture was fundamentally religious. Manhattan is a cathedral you know—the modern cathedral.”
I have often felt that this city, this cathedral, is where I truly found God. God in the ugliness of the Port Authority; in the nearby Probation Office. God in catastrophe of the hundreds of thousands of souls who wandered by my office window each day. God in the frustration and beauty of a kid who would rather tap his pencil and sing Outkast songs than do his math homework.
These few epiphanies have come between hundreds of aggravations of the lack of organization and too-many-visionaries-and-too-few-managers of the non-profit scene; the monotony of stuffing envelopes begging for money to keep a tiny Pax Christi office going; the bland boringness of writing grants; trying to take charge of 30 children who want to do anything but the homework at hand with only two tutors available; the bewilderment of teaching ESL when one has had no training in the field; not to mention the months I spent in Boston voluntarily having radiation pumped into my brain. These epiphanies have been hard won, and are by no means complete or even understandable.
So, my time with MVS is closing. I’m now officially unemployed, heading to grad school in the fall with a large debt to the federal government looming in my future—but I’m pretty happy. I guess service in the city makes one more than a little crazy; one smiles in the face of negativity. Two things happened yesterday to make me feel like I’ve become a true New Yorker: Tom and I bought cell phones, for one thing. And two, I found myself thinking smugly of a Vertical New York quote as we were out in the wilderness that is Brooklyn waiting for the G train and seeing the Statue of Liberty from underneath the huge canopy of concrete:
“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”
Saturday, July 17, 2004
The other day Tom and I had a New York moment.
We were sitting in a park on Houston and 1st, eating Chinese dumplings and drinking Coke, watching a yupster mom push her kids on the swings, listening to Arab taxi drivers argue loudly in Arabic and English and watching a man having a conversation with himself and chain smoking.
To sound a cliche--only in New York.
We were sitting in a park on Houston and 1st, eating Chinese dumplings and drinking Coke, watching a yupster mom push her kids on the swings, listening to Arab taxi drivers argue loudly in Arabic and English and watching a man having a conversation with himself and chain smoking.
To sound a cliche--only in New York.
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