It's feeling a bit like KS today. Thundering constantly, rainy and humid. I managed to write, or rather, rewrite, a sentence. Then in frustration I went to Washington Square and sat before I had lunch with Pax Christi folk.

I'm tired of money. Yesterday I spent the better part of the afternoon haggling with my health insurance company, otherwise known as MMA. I'd like to get rid of it, since we have good insurance with Tom's job, but we don't know what we will do for insurance in the future whenever we leave NY, and with my health history, it would be difficult to get any other insurance company to take me. Even a guy at MMA once said they probably wouldn't take me if I dropped the insurance but came back later...

It is depressing. Knowing that not only am I trapped by my body, I am trapped by institutions and the fact that I don't have money.

People often pray for the Second Coming. I would like cheaper medicine at least.

Come quickly, socialized medicine, come.

I've just been a-wandering with Tom and Ted handing out condoms and info near Astor Place. It was great to see Tom at work, hollering out for folks to take condoms. This is the shy boy I met at EMU.

I also took a bunch of pictures of the neighborhood with Ted's digital camera for a website I'm building to show friends where I live. I think I've fallen in love with the city again just looking through it through a camera.

It has been 1 year since I began my radiation in Boston--as well as begun this blog. Life's a weird crazy depressing exhilarating ride.

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  

 

 

 

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.

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.”

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.

This is the thing. In a little more than a month, it will be the first anniversary of my entry into the photon-proton world. It seems somewhat unreal that it even happened. That I daily went in to have protons or photons shot into my head, that I can never have radiation directed at that part of my body for the rest of my life. It also seems unreal to me that in twoish months it will be the third anniversary of my brain surgery on Sept. 11. I've written in my journal the various places I've been in the past years: 1) On an operating table in NOVA (northern virginia for the uninformed, near DC). 2) Sitting on the steps of Washington Sq. United Methodist Church in Manhattan. 3) Having protons shot into my brain in Boston, MA. It is only a sick coincidence that I have been near the Pentagon on the day of, in New York City, near a park where I've been told one could once see the WTC, in Boston where two of the planes took off. I wonder what will be number 4. Supposedly it will be Sarah Lawrence, but I have ceased to expect what I actually expect.

This is one of the essays I submitted to Sarah Lawrence for my application:


Essay #1: Autobiography

I tend to look at my life as a series of stories—The Religion, The Body and The Adventure—all of which overlap and make a messy meld of a life.

The Religion

I am a Mennonite caught in a Mennonite embrace—for good or for ill. A definition of this embrace is tricky. Some Mennonites dress plain and live in tight-knit communities. Some do not. Some live quietly with their beliefs in simple living, nonviolence and justice for the economically and politically oppressed. Some do not. Some believe in the literal Second Coming of Christ. Some do not.

I come from a group known as the Molochna Colony Mennonites from the Ukraine. The older generations still speak Plautdeutsch; we make New Year’s Cookies and Paypanate during the holidays; Zweibach, Borscht and Verenika the rest of the year. I grew up believing the rest of the world lived as we did, since almost everyone I associated with was Mennonite.

My world-view experienced a shock when I went to a different Mennonite sect’s university instead of my own. I was still among Mennonites, but all were Swiss rather than Russian, had little to no ethnic food, sang different hymns and some had a different, more liberal view of everything. This was all rather bewildering

“Don’t be surprised if people think you are a lesbian when you come back,” I was told before I left. Apparently, this was a place where students, women especially, came out.

I wouldn’t be surprised if people back home wiped their foreheads in relief when I was married to a man—though they can’t understand why I’ve kept my own name.

I have many disagreements with the church. But I’ve also kept to my faith—though not necessarily in ways acceptable to some Mennonites. I feel liberated by these things my religious identity has granted me: the notion of living in this world, participating in the stories that surround me while having a counter-culture vision. I live with the belief that the last shall be first and the first shall be last is not merely for a future time, but is here among us, right now.

The Body

At age three I was diagnosed with Ollier’s Disease, a rare genetic disorder that causes cartilage tumors to grow on one side of the body. It stunts the growth and strength of the bones and twists them out of alignment.

Throughout childhood, I had a dozen surgeries to lengthen and straighten my left leg. A contraption called the Illazerov fixator was used three times for this purpose. My leg was broken and metal pins were drilled into my bones. The pins were held by a brace. Three times a day little screws were turned with a wrench, which pulled the brace apart. The bone created new bone as it healed. The skin was stretched at the same time.

In 2000, I discovered I had an Ollier’s-related brain tumor. It had slowly grown from the base of my skull until it began touching the left frontal lobe, which caused seizures. A little over a year later, they began to intensify, finally resulting in a grand mal seizure.

On September 11, 2001, I had a surgery to remove part of the tumor. It is a strange experience to wake up to a world so utterly changed both individually and globally. When someone told me about it, I came out of the fog of sedatives to angrily state I already knew. Perhaps I had heard people talking or saw in a haze a television report. Perhaps certain sorrows are felt keenly, by osmosis.

It took an entire year for me to heal. My right side was partially paralyzed and I had difficulty speaking and writing. It is frightening for anyone to be subjected to such a paralysis of words— especially when one has linked their entire identity with them.

This summer I opted for proton beam radiation to treat the remaining tumor. For seven weeks in August and September 2003, I went into Massachusetts General Hospital in Cambridge every day to lie on a table and be strapped down in the Cyclotron machine. It looked like the inside of a giant dryer. I was inserted into the drum (i.e. the dryer) and a huge telescoping cylinder shot protons at me for twenty minutes. Afterwards I went home, wrote the day’s story in my web log, sometimes puked, and slept.

The Adventure

In the fall of 1999, I went to the Middle East for a semester-long cross-cultural, a requirement for graduation at my university. My group studied religion, history, literature and Arabic in Egypt, Israel/Palestine and Jordan.

While at Gaza University, I draped a veil over my head and entered a world I didn’t really understand. The women of our group were led to the women’s side of the campus. Our men heard arguments about Americans’ lack of comprehension of the significance of English literature. On the women’s side there were no such debates. The women we met were more eager to hear about our lives, our families. They wanted us to take off our veils and show our hair. To encourage us, they took of their veils and chadors. I had seen this again and again with Muslim women: in refugee camps, at weddings and at this university. It was a gesture of intimacy that intrigued me, this unveiling of one’s body but also of one’s spirit. I am sure these women had many disagreements with our culture and way of life, but they chose to learn about us as individuals. I felt honored to be given such a gift.

Another gift given during my time in Israel/Palestine was when some of us were invited to a Shabbat meal on a cool Friday evening with the family of National Public Radio’s Linda Gradstein. Her two gorgeous children tried to give us their few shekels when they heard we were poor students; her husband invited us to a Shakespeare play for which he had suddenly been recruited. As the wine and challah were served in silence, and the sushi and saki were served amid laughter, I had a sense of connection with an ancient tradition made new. A fresh chapter in an unbroken story.

And

The logistics of story-telling is fascinating. Every time a person hears or reads a story, he or she can find something new to interlace into the narrative. The tale does not end with the final paragraph. Life works the same way. My religion, body and adventures do not merely exist in the past; they are ongoing because my perspective of them changes with time. I recall something differently or more clearly than before. Each morning when I wake up I have that many more memories between the self then and the self now. They have inspired my visions as a writer in my fiction. But the true essence of my story remains the same.

Yesterday was sunny; today it rained or drizzled. Yesterday Tom, David and I wandered Bronxville and ate lunch on Sarah Lawrence's lawn; today we wandered to Coney Island, ran around on the beach wet as it was, stood on the pier staring out into the fog and ate a hotdog by the boardwalk.

How on earth does someone explain the Israeli/Palestinian conflict to a ten year old? Especially when this Japanese-American child lives in a world devoid of any faith-leaning (as he says, he's got no religion)and a world which is very diverse racially, culturally, you name it. (There isn't a single blonde, blue-eyed kid in the bunch that go to this after school program, they are all Hispanic, Asian, Bangladeshi--mostly first generation Americans.) Leo was trying to answer some pretty sophisticated questions based on the tiny article in the Times for Kids magazine. One article to explain something that's lasted fifty years.

How does one explain this without getting her own views on the subject, but telling the truth (as I see it, so of course the question is "what is truth?").

This morning I saw my coworker's friend (see previous blog) on the front page of the Times. Her naked body was found in Inwood Park. I sat there, eating my raisin bran and drinking orange juice and this person I'd never met was dead. She was only 21. And her story was over. Just like that. Over.

Death (?) Marriage Drunk Missing Song

It's been a weird few days. Friday moring a guy called me and said he had gone to this church back in 2000 when he was suicidal, and he was suicidal again. He kept saying what was the point of living. The world was fucked up. Did I think so? Yes, I said. Doesn't that make me want to kill myself? Yes. Everyone thinks of it, I said. But life is precious; we really don't know what awaits us on the other side. So I'd never do it. Because maybe I'd never get a chance to live again. Had I ever been fucked over by life, he asked. Yes. I told him about my brain tumor etc.

This went on for awhile. I didn't quite know what to do. I'd never dealt with this before. No one was around except for me. I didn't know if he was even serious. I just kept talking and listening. He said he had a 38 and what was the point etc. He would get back at the world by doing this. He had been sexually abused by his father, now dead, and his mother was dying.

At one point he got cut off. I about freaked out. I *69'd him, but was told it was a private number. I felt responsible.

When David and Ronnie came, I told them. There's not a whole lot you can do, they said. Sometimes they just need to talk. Sometimes they're faking. Sometimes they want to place the responsibility on another person. Tom said the same when I told him.

Pretty much the whole day was shot for me. But as I left for the day, a group of homeless folks were sitting on the church steps. One of the men said, this is sort of our home--it's our sanctuary. Everyone needs a sanctuary, I said. Then he asked me to marry him, I was so cool. I'm already married, sorry. He laughed. I laughed, and felt a little better.

Friday night we had a crazy Menno House party as an Alicia sendoff. I got drunker, etc, than I'd ever been. I drank tequila for the first time and made vodka shots. As the evening progressed, some craziness of other kinds surfaced. But I'll leave it at that. I woke several times during the night. I got totally paranoid, thinking I would feel this way for the rest of my life.

Monday morning I told the Metro staff about my Friday eve. They loved it. And I loved that I was telling Baptists. It was like the first time I'd ever consumed alcohol in the presence of a religious figure; I had Thai beer with a nun.

Monday morning I found out that one of my coworkers friends was missing. I'd seen her on a flyer that morning as I zoomed to work. I studied it on the way home. I felt an emptiness. I can't explain it. This was life fucking someone over. You go out for a run in a park and don't come home.

Monday afternoon the suicide guy called again. His first words were Why are you fucking around with me?

I was in a meeting at the time, and I was amazed at how calm I replied, mainly because he was alive: I'm in a meeting right now. Can you be more specific? He continued on the fucking mode, and finally I got his name, though I don't know if it was true. He said he'd cut himself and gone out into the street and no one cared. I said, do you want to talk to the pastor, he's here, and more qualified to talk to you. I passed him on to David. I don't know what happened after that.

This morning David gave me a recipe for Ugly Rum Cake. He smiled as he showed it to me.

I'm listening to Cat Stevens right now. Trouble and If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out totally fit my conflicting moods today. A few weeks ago, some Menno Housers and I had a hymn sing. When I'm singing that is when I truly believe there's a God. How can something as beautiful as music just fly up to the sky unheeded?

A horrible day behind me, I boarded the A train at Times Square, followed by two fellows in the usual rapper gear. As the train pulled out of the station, they whipped out two violins and began a duet. It was great. They played in time to the train rushing along the tracks. I found myself smiling and smiling at them the whole time. As the train stopped at my stop, they did a little flourish, and as I got off and the doors closed, I heard them begin again, to a never-ending audience.

I took off-brand NyQuil last night, so now I'm doing the floating thing at work...

This morning I talked with an EMU friend I hadn't seen in years--literally--she's thinking about moving here next year. Her parents met in this very house. It made me think about how Menno House is this weird nexus of Mennonites and Mennonite converts. That like Lancaster, Winnipeg, Newton, Harrisburg, Harrisonburg and Fresno, you're destined to come to these places at some point in your life, if even for just a moment. No wonder some call it a cult. And some non-Mennonites who come to this house get swept up into this whirlwind of these people, never to be quite the same again.

Apparently one of those boy band boys is Mennonite. Which is weird in its own way.

COMING SOON: Woolf T's

Apparently, there's this web thing called cafepress, and you can sell t-shirts etc. on your website or blog site with slogans or artwork you send in to them. It doesn't cost you any money up front. They set a base price that they will collect when someone orders something, and you profit from whatever you price above that!

So, all my creative friends and/or enemies, start thinking. I'm definately expecting something from you, Ted.

The reason I haven't written lately (the usual excuse) is because I've been crazy busy...the director of the afterschool program is in Thailand, so I'm taking over that, a major project that is due at the end of the month, and all the little things that take up time are upon me. Now I'm just hanging around the office, waiting for a banquet to begin. It's to honor the church's volunteers. Which is great, really, but it's Friday, and I have to come back to work a stint at a flea market down the street...I just don't wanna be here!!

I too took the belief-o-matic quiz (a set of questions about my spiritual beliefs, then rates your answers to what faith group they go with), and here's my results:

1. Liberal Quakers (100%)
2. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (95%)
3. Unitarian Universalism (94%)
4. Neo-Pagan (86%)
5. Mahayana Buddhism (84%)
6. Theravada Buddhism (84%)
7. Orthodox Quaker (79%)
8. New Age (78%)
9. Secular Humanism (77%)
10. Taoism (76%)
11. Reform Judaism (72%)
12. Jainism (67%)
13. Bahá'í Faith (60%)
14. New Thought (57%)
15. Scientology (54%)
16. Hinduism (51%)
17. Sikhism (50%)
18. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (49%)
19. Nontheist (47%)
20. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (44%)
21. Seventh Day Adventist (43%)
22. Orthodox Judaism (39%)
23. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (39%)
24. Islam (35%)
25. Eastern Orthodox (28%)
26. Roman Catholic (28%)
27. Jehovah's Witness (25%)

Here's the kindness of Mennonite institutions revisited:

Hesston College has been advertising an opening for a Theatre prof with guarantees of full-time work. The woman who previously held the position is an aunt to one of my housemates, Anya. This is how she came to leave said position:

Theatre and costume loft was infested with toxic mold. For quite some time, apparently. After 12 years working in such an environment, the woman, with a master's in theatre and a seminary degree, fell very ill. Now she cannot be near deoderant, car fumes, perfume, etc. without her chest constricting and keeping her from breathing. She has moved back in with her mother in Ohio and basically can't leave the house unless she wears a mask. She has applied for worker's comp through the college, but apparently the college isn't liable for anything to do with this toxic mold. So, no worker's comp. The college has taken no responsibility for the illness and subsequent disablilty of their former faculty member.

Ahhh...the usual community spirit that is so advertised in the Menno world...makes my MMA struggles look harmless.

I read a disgusting pro-violence pro-bush pro-everything the US does, even shits smells good blog site. I won't even tell you where it is. It just reminded me of the saying: fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity. So true.

On Wednesday, Tom and I trekked up to Bronxville (which is a pretty nice place as far as suburbs go--an idealized version of Harrisonburg) for a poetry reading and info session at Sarah Lawrence. It was New Englandish, the weather, ie wet, but we slopped around campus and got lost. One of SLC's drawbacks is they have little signage. We stared at the undergrads--they looked young young young. Tom and I tried to pick out who the theatre students were, and waited to see where they went. Some entered the theatre eventually and we hooted when they did. Then we made our way to the library for the reading. The library reminded us of Tabor College's library, somewhat of EMU's--kind of 60s/70s attempt at futuristic architecture. There must've been extra funds around that time for small colleges to build libaries.

The reading was good. They were all alumni/e (sp?) of SLC, which was a heartening thing. One man had very heady works, the woman had very Mennoish poetry (you know, writing about PA, coal mines) and the last fellow was very sensual. He was the only one who read the poetry well. Not that cadence poets often get. It seemed he was the poetry, that it took over his body.

The info session was good. But I tried to ask a question by raising my hand (I can't help it) and people kept butting in on me. Finally I gave up. I'll email the admissions person later.