Beautiful

Just a friendly reminder on the side of a building on Main Street in Santa Monica (which I pass on my Monday rose-pick-up route).

International Human Rights Day

Yesterday (December 10) was International Human Rights Day. We went to a demonstration put on by the L.A. Human Right to Housing Collective. I urge you to consider: Do you look at housing as a universal human right? It is an easy thing to keep out of mind, since basic shelter is so taken for granted in our lives. Yet, in L.A. County alone, over 50,000 sleep on the streets every night because of the incredible lack of affordable housing.

"Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, closes to home -- so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person: the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world."

-Eleanor Roosevelt in remarks at the United Nations, March 27, 1958

Decked Halls

I spent not an insignificant amount of time decorating Bread and Roses for Christmas. I had pretty little to work with on the decorations front, but I think I did a decent job, and we are ready for the holidays! Well, we're really only ready for one holiday (Christmas), but St. Joseph Center has a pretty clear Christian connection, so we'll just let that slide...

The lights, by the way, say "ho ho ho," not "no no no," or "hooker," as various clients have suggested.

Memorial of the Martyrs

December 2 was a special day for Casa Maura Clarke, Casa Ita Ford and Casa Dorothy Kazel of L.A. It was the anniversary of the deaths of the namesakes of our JVC houses. The fourth martyr, Jean Donovan, also had a JVC community, Casa Jean Donovan, until it was consolidated into DK and Ita this year. All four women were beaten, raped and murdered by a Salvadoran death squad on Dec. 2, 1980. Two were Maryknoll sisters, one an Ursuline sister, and the fourth a laywoman; all were Catholic missionaries working with the poor in El Salvador before their untimely deaths.

We attended a memorial service at Mount Saint Mary's College last Friday night, with about 30 sisters, including a few Maryknoll sisters and more than a few who knew the women. Rather than recount the service, I'll share a quote from each of the four martyrs:

"We have refugees, women and children, outside our door and some of their stories are incredible.  What is happening here is all so impossible, but happening.  The endurance of the poor and their faith through this terrible pain is constantly pulling me to a deeper faith response. My fear of death is being challenged constantly as children, lovely young girls, and old people are being shot and some cut up with machetes and bodies thrown by the road and people prohibited from burying them. One cries out:  ‘O God, how long?’  And then, too, what creeps into my mind is the little fear, or big, that when it touches me very personally, will I be faithful? I want to stay on now.  I believe now that this is right. God is very present in seeming absence."

-Sister Maura Clarke, M.M.

"Several times I have decided to leave El Salvador. I almost could except for the children, the poor bruised victimes of adult lunacy. Who would care for them? Whose heart would be so staunch as to favor the reasonable thing in a sea of their tears and helplessness? Not mind, dear friend, not mine."

-Jean Donovan

"[El Salvador is] writhing in pain—a country that daily faces the loss of so many of its people – and yet a country that is waiting, hoping, yearning for peace.  The steadfast faith and courage our leaders have to continue preaching the Word of God even though it may mean ‘laying down your life’ in the very REAL sense is always a point of admiration and a vivid realization that JESUS is HERE with us. Yes, we have a sense of waiting, hoping and yearning for a complete realization of the Kingdom, and yet we know it will come because we can celebrate Jesus here right now."

-Sister Dorothy Kazel, O.S.U.

"I hope you come to find that which gives life a deep meaning for you; something worth living for -- maybe even worth dying for; something that energizes you, enthuses you, enables you to keep moving ahead. I can't tell you what it might be -- that's for you to find, to choose, to love. I can just encourage you to start looking ahead and support you in the search."

-Sister Ita Ford, M.M., in a letter to her 16-year-old niece

World AIDS Day

(Delayed posting that I've been meaning to write for over a week...) For spirituality night last week, we as a community attended an interfaith prayer service for World AIDS Day, which was on Thurs., Dec. 1. Interfaith services truly inspire me. It was a beautiful demonstration of how compassion, among so many other things, is a common thread among world religions. The atmosphere was somber and powerful, with just about 40 people spread in the dimly lit St. Monica's Church.

Photo of a random wedding I found online to show the inside of St. Monica's.

The service was comprised of meditative singing in the tradition of Taizé Prayer, a form of prayer that originated with an ecumenical monastic order in Taizé, France. My favorite Sunday evening Mass at Georgetown often featured post-Communion Taizé meditations, so I was already familiar with the melodies and words, but I've never experienced an entire prayer service with these meditations. Apart from being a powerful communal experience of music, listening to these short, repetitive songs can also be a great way to center yourself as you begin personal prayer. Here are a few of my favorites: Ubi Caritas (Where Charity and Love Prevail), Laudate Dominum (Sing Praise and Bless the Lord), Nada Te Turbe (Nothing Can Trouble). Ignatius, a big fan of repetitio, would probably endorse this form of prayer.

In between each song, a different religious leader reflected prayerfully on a different aspect of the reality of AIDS in our world...for those who have died, hope for the cure, women affected, minorities affected, LGBTQ community, caring for those in need, orphans of HIV/AIDS. Simply living in D.C. exposed me to one perspective of the reality of HIV/AIDS (in the District, 3 percent of adults are infected with HIV, and another 3 percent are infected but don't know it), and working with a research team at Whitman Walker AIDS clinic for a year helped educate me a little bit more. Still, it was shocking to hear the congregation speak so many names during the intercessions of people in their lives affected by AIDS.

On one hand, I am grateful that AIDS is an easy thing for me to forget about on a day-to-day basis. Yet my ignorance is still embarrassing, since it has such a global and tragic impact in millions of lives daily. I recognize that I cannot be involved in the fight against every global injustice; but the injustice of HIV infection interacting with racial and socioeconomic disparity is something I hope to delve more deeply into in medical school.

A JVC Southwest Thanksgiving

I know Thanksgiving was a while ago, and I know people quickly moved on to Christmas. However, this was my first Thanksgiving away from family (not away from home, though, since we celebrated in Scotland one year), and I think it bears recounting on the blog since it was a great weekend! Thanksgiving with 35 JVs in Phoenix isn't quite the same as Thanksgiving with the fam, but if there's a group of people I'd want to spend this Thanksgiving away from home with, it'd be these fools.

Two 21-pound stuffed turkeys, 25 lbs. of mashed potatoes, 18 lbs. of sweet potatoes, 12 pies, and a whole lotta love.

   

 And, as JVs do, we went on a hike up Camelback Mountain.

   

Sunsets in Phoenix apparently always look this beautiful.

This torta was legitimately one of the top-five sandwiches I have ever eaten. Just amazing. And maybe this photo from an art exhibit we went to in L.A. a few months ago gives you an idea of how I feel about sandwiches.

We found a Christmas parade in Tempe, followed by a tree lighting. We were older than all the kids and younger than all the grandparents in attendance, but it was a fun way to mark the beginning of the Christmas (well, technically Advent) season.

Kid at heart

There is a baby-shaped hole in my heart.

My life at Georgetown had at least seven hours of kid time built into my schedule on a weekly basis. I taught dance to little ones at the YMCA with Dance DC, and I volunteered in the Child Life Department at GU Hospital -- playing and socializing with the kids in the pediatric ICU and the Hematology/Oncology Unit. I was even promoted to "cuddler" senior year (you know, kind of a big deal), which just meant I wore a different colored volunteer vest and was allowed to hold babies in the NICU. I saw a lot of sad things in the PICU and NICU and even grew attached to a few kids who didn't survive their diseases. But I loved seeing the same little face smiling at me from room 5301 every Tuesday and Thursday; I loved nearly falling asleep with a chubby baby in my arms after a long night in the library; and I loved seeing the kids at the Y get excited about dancing, even amidst their fits of bouncing off the walls (literally).

Performance day at the YMCA.

Now, though, the only kids I see are the ones wandering past the Culinary Training kitchen from the Early Learning Center with their parents in tow. I do have a great vantage point from my desk to adore them, but that gets creepy and I don't get to play with them. There were the occasional young clients at Bread and Roses during the summer (who brought me both great joy and great sadness), but thankfully they're all attending school by now.

This is all reason why I'm grateful to have my kid volunteers around at Bread and Roses. Yes, they have a lot of energy. Yes, they spill a lot of things. But they are so genuinely eager to help and so precious while they do it. One of my twenty-something volunteers convinced this sixth grader yesterday that every time he buttered a piece of bread he had to make a "whoop" sound -- loud but hilarious. Another girl was stopped dead in her tracks when I responded to her sassy question about serving spaghetti at breakfast time by explaining that a lot of these folks wouldn't eat until they came back the next day. It's exciting to think that I might be shaping -- ever so slightly -- these kids' perceptions of service and homelessness. I know that service during my youth, whether wrapping presents with my dad for the McKey Christmas Club or making and distributing sandwiches with my Girl Scouts troop, truly fostered an attitude of service in me. Hopefully the same will be true for the kids who come through B&R...hopefully I can show them how fun service can be, and how easy it is to treat every person with dignity.

a good book is hard to find

Well, that's actually not true at all. Good books are quite easy to find, but that's the title I chose because I feel like I'm dating this book I'm reading. It's called Cutting for Stone, and I love it. I really do. But I just can't finish it. Abraham Verghese is incredibly talented. He writes beautifully and sophisticatedly and tells a story unlike any author I've read recently. But my goodness, I cannot get into the plot, and it breaks my heart. Perhaps it's because after a day of work with homeless folks and housed-but-unemployed folks, followed by hours spent in intentional community, I need something with a bit more levity. Perhaps it's because being out of school has shortened my attention span or dulled my intellect. If it's the latter, then I'm in big trouble for the rest of my adult life because it's been only four months since I was last studying (MCAT). Maybe I'll come back to it. I hope I do. It is bizarre how it feels like such a big decision to walk away from this book. The fact that it's monsoon-ing outside, I'm sick, and I drank six cups of coffee this morning only intensifies my feelings.

As a memorial to the time we spent together, here is a quote from Cutting for Stone that I liked: "But you don't always know the answers before you operate. One operates in the now. Later, the retrospectoscope, that handy tool of the wags and pundits, the conveners of the farce we call M&M -- morbidity and mortality conference -- will pronounce your decision right or wrong. Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel."

I'm now accepting book recommendations that are not The Hunger Games, with which my housemates are obsessed but which I'm just not interested in reading (not least because it was written for a 13-year-old audience).

Wisconsin Pride

People in L.A. have pointed out to me that I have a lot of Wisconsin pride. Even at Georgetown, somehow all the 20-odd Wisconsinites knew each other, and that just bred more cheesehead love. There are a lot of things I dislike about Wisconsin, such as this embarrassing fact, but then there are things like this that just make me laugh and miss the kind folk of the Dairy State...

The red is an area where there are more taverns than grocery stores, and yellow is the opposite. Enough said.

Things that have happened

Sorry for neglecting you, blog readers. My only explanation for my absence is that I got hooked on the show Parks and Recreation (go watch it immediately), so every time I opened the internet to write a blog post I got sucked into the next episode...it's a wonder I didn't fail out of college. Here's a crash course on the mid-October to mid-November happenings of my life: 

We went to San Diego for Halloween weekend.

The seven casamates of CMC dressed up as loose interpretations of the seven days of the week. I was Wednesday (from the Adams Family).

San Diego was beautiful (especially Balboa Park, pictured below), and further convinced me that L.A. is ugly.

But then Los Angeles tried to make us think it was pretty with this sunset on our drive back.

On Halloween night, we walked down Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood with a couple thousand other Los Angelenos in costume.

Jackie and I "volunteered" at a gala benefitting a fellow L.A. JV's agency, which actually turned into us just being the youngest, least-wealthy guests at a ritzy country club in Pasadena.

My parents visited! In typical Arnold fashion, we spent the weekend eating good food and drinking good wine.

We visited a winery in Temecula.

And drove along the coast to the Mission at San Juan Capistrano.

My parents took the whole casa out to a Korean BBQ restaurant, where the waitress shot us disdainful looks all night long for being Korean BBQ beginners. But we didn't care because the meat was so. flavorful. 

We met with some of Casa Ita Ford for a hike near Pasadena.

Other news-in-brief: St. Joseph Center had a staff-wide retreat, where I was reminded of all the great things going on at our agency. We did a few 5K walks for local organizations, including the food bank I visit every week for Bread and Roses. We sent a new class of almost-graduates from the Culinary Training Program to their externships. And Bread and Roses is getting ready for a Thanksgiving feast on Tuesday!

Oh, and the Packers are still undefeated, which I will now enjoy from the Packers bar I found in West L.A.

A Voicemail Chronicle of 2011

I recently emptied my cell phone's voicemail, and found a pretty entertaining chronicle of the last year of my life (the oldest message was from Dec. 2010). A couple exciting job interviews and offers; my five-day spiritual director before I knew she'd be so fantastic; our contact person in Tupelo, Miss., for Habitat for Humanity showing hints of her insanity (which I didn't pick up on at the time); my bank informing me my account was overdrawn (oops); my current supervisor setting up my Bread and Roses interview in March; a tricky near-reveal of the NSO 2011 theme; a friend's happy birthday message; a couple MCAT well-wishers; and a few proud-dad congratulatory messages along the way.

I got sentimental for a minute and thought about how blessed I am to have had all these people and experiences in my life...and then I deleted them all. (Which means my voicemail is back open for business, folks!)

Writer's Block and Falling Leaves

I've felt inspired to blog on many occasions recently, but I have been facing a peculiar case of writer's block. A couple weeks ago, one of the volunteers at Bread and Roses passed away unexpectedly. Although I didn't know this almost-thirty-year-old fellow well, it was a jolting experience with reality that I couldn't move past without somehow processing it in writing. I don't want to eulogize him or reflect on my guilt over feeling that he was an inefficient volunteer; instead, I just want to post this poem (sent to the JV's by a nun who knew we missed autumn) in his honor. I considered quoting a theologian or philosophers who had spoken eloquently on the reality of death, but poetry expresses something prose simply cannot.


The Falling Leaves by Joyce Rupp


with a constant chorus of cicadas
the leaves tumble down,
from long, thin silver poplars,
they twirl to the ground,
dancing the Autumn death dance
beneath the great blue sky.


the leaves seem glad at the going.
(is there something I don't know?)
sparkling in the October sunshine,
they fill the air with gentle rustling.


one, then another and another,
on they skim down from above,
bedding the forest table before me
with comforting crunches and crackles.


this gigantic death scene of leaves
does not smell of sorrow and sadness,
rather, the earth is colored with joy
and the leaves make music in the wind.


why is this dance of death so lovely?
why do leaves seem so willing to go?
are they whispering to each other,
urging one another to be freed?


maybe "you first and then I'll follow"
or: "you can do it, go ahead"
supporting one another gladly
in their call to final surrender.


I have not yet discovered the secret
of the serenity of sailing leaves;
every autumn I walk among them
with a longing that stretches forever,
wanting to face that death-dance
and the truth of my own mortality.

In good company

I was hesitant to share this profile initially because a. she misquoted me a few times and just has some incorrect statements (fact check much?), b. it's really awkward that she interviewed me for this before I even had JVC orientation, and c. it's sort of like saying, "hey everyone come see how good I look!" But what is cool is that I am in the company of some pretty exceptional Hoyas; I think it's safe to say that this is the last time I'll be on the same list as Bradley Cooper anywhere, ever. (Click on my name on that list to read the profile.)

autumnal imagination

Fall is my favorite season. Sophomore year of high school, I had to defend fall as the best season in a three-minute impromptu speech, and I've never looked back. Spring in D.C. is pretty great (cherry blossoms!), but my springtime allergies keep it in second place.

Unfortunately, fall does not exist in L.A. Palm trees don't change colors, it's too warm to drink hot apple cider without sweating, and I've been told I won't be able to wear my fall clothing until December or January...sigh. So my fellow fall-loving casamates and I have taken it upon ourselves to create fall in Los Angeles...

- I don't pay attention to the weather and wear my fall wardrobe anyways.

- Jackie and I have kept our calendar on September instead of switching it to October because it has nice Georgetown foliage shots.

- I think the sadness about not having football in my life has been building up over the past four years (Georgetown won a total of maybe three football games during my undergraduate career). But I've been extremely excited (and potentially annoyingly enthusiastic) about the fall sports action. Packers are undefeated, Brewers are stumbling but still were in the NLCS, and I just enjoy the fact that Michigan beat Notre Dame even if they lost to State and probably don't deserve their current ranking.

- Emily and I make a point of searching out city blocks with foliage on our afternoon runs. This has been our most successful find thus far:

- We went to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery and watched Poltergeist with a couple hundred of our closest friends (and a BYOB picnic) to get in the Halloween spirit.

 


- And I look at pictures like this one from my mom to remind myself that somewhere out there leaves are changing and people are putting corn stalks by mailboxes...

On the other hand, if fall weather takes place during "winter" in L.A., this means the Advent/Christmas season will be even more fantastic. I love snow, but a week of it in Wisconsin will probably suffice.

'Cause This is Thriller

It was my turn to lead community night this week, and [not to toot my own horn but...] I would call it a pretty big success. I decided to teach my casamates the Thriller dance. It wasn't exactly like the music video (I only had about a half hour to prepare and learn it), but I do hope to one day master the actual dance. I blended the music video version with the version we've taught to our five-year-olds in Dance DC and came up with the newly minted CMC version. It's awesome.

If you're interested, the dancing in the official music video (below) begins at about 8:30.

CMC's Spiritual Soundtrack

Part of the commitment to JVC is a commitment to incorporating spirituality into our lives -- individually and as a community -- and one way we do that is by having a weekly spirituality night in our community. (We also have community nights, alternating weekly with our support nights.) We take turns leading spirituality and community nights, and for my first spirituality night, I decided to focus on music.

I'm not sure I was cognizant of how important music was to me until fairly recently. Certainly my track record of quitting various musical instrument lessons after five or six years would suggest that I didn't care much. Yet music was a constant presence in my life, from Grandma Arnold's family party piano sessions to violin, guitar, piano, and drums lessons (guitar and drums were the only ones that stood a chance, as I thought they were "cooler" than piano and violin...). In high school, making the decision to quit volleyball in favor of dance, the fall musical and show choir was probably the first time I acknowledged that music was something that truly made me happy.

Even slower was my acknowledgement that music is important to me on a spiritual level, beyond but including its role in liturgy (the quality of music at a Mass is a deal-breaker for me). Music can move me or calm me in a way few other things can. For me, it adds a further dimension of emotion to psalms and religious sentiment: song is poetry to the prose of my prayer.

With this in mind, I asked each person in CMC to send me one song that has been meaningful on a spiritual level. I compiled the songs in a playlist, read this prayer, and we all just listened. It was a practice in silencing ourselves to be open to what we might hear and an exercise of stretching our definition of spirituality.

Here's the playlist of all seven of our songs (can you guess mine?), with links to youtube videos of really questionable quality:

• Turn the Page Again by Tim O'Brien
• Blessed to be a Witness by Ben Harper
• Don't Worry, Be Happy by Bob Marley
• Down to the River to Pray by Allison Krauss
• Go Light Your World by Chris Rice
• Something Beautiful by needtobreathe
• Sweetly Broken by Jeremy Riddle

I was between a few (Awake My Soul by Mumford & Sons, Take My Hand by Shawn McDonald, You are Loved by Josh Groban, Pachelbel's Canon in D, Debussy's Claire de Lune), but ultimately I settled on Blessed to be a Witness, which I first heard at my DSHA freshman retreat, as my song.

Good Morning!

We watched Singing in the Rain this week in CMC, and I'm thinking this is how every morning, nay, every meal, at Bread and Roses should begin...now that my tap shoes have arrived in L.A., I just need to recruit two unsuspecting volunteers or coworkers to join me.

the little things

This week a client (let's call him Bob) called me over to his table and asked me if I remembered a different client (made-up name of Greg) who used to eat with him all the time. I said yes, and that I missed Greg and was wondering how he was doing. Bob then informed me that Greg had gotten a job driving trucks, and that as he was driving from Omaha to Chicago, he called and asked Bob to say hi to me at Bread and Roses. Not only was this great news for Greg to have gotten a job, but I was touched that Greg wanted to say hello and that Bob cared enough to pass the message on. As much as I loved greeting Greg every morning (he would say his name to me, followed by "numero uno, number one!" every day), I hope I'll never see him walking into Bread and Roses for food again...

It's the little, wonderful things like this that will keep me smiling all year at Bread and Roses, even in the face of the dire outlook for homeless individuals in L.A.

Memorable Moments

I take myself too seriously sometimes...which is why I'm glad I have the oddities of daily interactions with homeless folks to remind me that you really just can't take yourself too seriously in the field of non-profit work. Some memorable moments include:

"Do you know the Bible?" "Yeah, sure." "Well you know, then, that you're going to Hell for using that computer, right?" Right.


Client to me, for no apparent reason: "This place gets worse and worse every day." Same client later that day asked me out on a lunch date.


In response to a Georgetown t-shirt I was wearing: "You went to Georgetown? I thought you were more normal than that." More normal than what?


Same day, same t-shirt, different client: "Georgetown? Wait, you are smart enough for that and now you're working here?" Yes.


Security guard, on me being a volunteer for a year: "So you don't want to go into the restaurant business? Why are you here, for the 'experience' or something? I don't get it."


Volunteer: "Yeah, despite whatever you say, I kind of just do what I want." Awesome.


Never a dull moment at B&R...there will, no doubt, be more to come. 

What I Should Have Said

I've been having a lot of "what I should have said" moments lately. I think, in part, it has something to do with being in a new place, starting a new job, and being with entirely new people (I knew one person when I moved out here). This year presents an opportunity to be my best self -- without past experiences and mistakes intruding on first impressions -- and with that opportunity comes some hesitation as I navigate the appropriate times to assert myself, defend myself or to share openly.

My most recent "what I should have said" moment came as I was introduced to a Bread and Roses donor (a rather unconventional donor, who periodically brings himself and his credit card to the grocery store while a shop-til-you-drop situation ensues for B&R). After he asked what I planned to do with the theology part of my studies, my response was, "Well, nothing. I'm planning on applying to medical school."

It was a tiny insignificant moment (made even more insignificant by the fact that the guy could barely hear me), but I felt ashamed selling myself and my Jesuit education short in that moment because the truth is, studying theology -- even just as a minor, not a major -- at Georgetown has enhanced my life in a huge way. Of course, my Georgetown education cannot be limited to theology or even to the classroom; but it was the theology courses at Georgetown that brought structure to the chaos of my doubt as I learned about world religions, traced the "the problem of God," and critically questioned the Catholic Church. In studying theology, I deepened my understanding, both intellectually and emotionally, of Creation, human dignity and the common good. In this way, I bridged the now obvious connection between faith and service, and accepted the challenge to orient myself toward the world as a woman for others.

I gained an Ignatian way of proceeding through life, one that acknowledges no divide between the spiritual and the secular. And that's why I felt I was slapping my theology professors in the face when I said I didn't plan to do much with my theology background. In accepting his definition of theology as vocation to the religious life, I was accepting a compartmentalization of spiritual and secular that I do not endorse. On the contrary, I hope to integrate my faith into every part of my life, so that I am a life-long student of theology, even as I am also studying to be a physician.

Of course, it would have been ridiculous if this had been my response to the poor old guy's half-joking question about me becoming a nun, but it got me thinking...

H O L L Y W O O D

This past weekend, we explored Hollywood on our way to a BBQ hosted by one of the other JV houses. Since we were avoiding museums with entrance fees, we just wandered up and down Hollywood Boulevard and admired the walk of fame and the handprints of stars outside the Chinese Theatre.

Some of my favorites:

  

I was back in West Hollywood on Monday at the House of Blues for an Obama fundraiser/rally. I wouldn't say I'm his biggest supporter of late, but when someone offers me a free pass to a $250 event that gets me 20-25 feet from the president of the United States, I accept. I volunteered to help staff the event after I met a classmate at a Georgetown Alumni Association event who is currently working full-time for the Obama re-election campaign of Southern California.

My job as a volunteer was to be a gatekeeper of a staircase for VIPs only, which happened to be only feet from the stage...

The event was emcee'd by Jesse Tyler Ferguson (Mitchell on "Modern Family"), and there were performances by the Gay Men's Chorus of L.A. and the rapper B.o.B. (who actually has some songs you might recognize) to warm up the crowd. I'm really not sure what target demographic they were going for with this event, but it seemed to work.

So because my fellow stair-guarder and I spent a fair amount of time with Jeff the Secret Service guy (Is his name really Jeff? We'll never know...), we were allowed to sneak into the front section before President Obama came in. Not a bad vantage point:

  

  

The president spoke about the economy and the jobs bill he introduced, about his campaign for re-election, and about the 13 months until then. The overarching theme was that the vision he put forth in 2008 is the same vision he has for the country today. There were a few jabs at the GOP, but it was primarily a positive message directed at a lot of frustrated people. (Speaking of frustration, folks were paying $38,000 for the fundraising event that followed this one later in the evening; meanwhile, people are homeless and hungry down the street.)

The bad part was the commute, which was easy on the way there when streets were open, but quite an adventure on the way home when my phone was dead and I was wandering through West Hollywood...whoops. I knew where I was the entire time but just couldn't find any buses that were running, and in the end it only took me an hour and a half to get home. However, taking the bus did afford me the opportunity to do more sightseeing than I could while driving, and I can definitely understand why people who live in West Hollywood/Beverly Hills like L.A. It is a very different Los Angeles than the one I work in every day...

Mini-me?

We saw this girl at the beach, and my casamates tell me this is how they imagine me as a child...it took her about ten minutes to set up her coloring station, umbrella and hat before she could start coloring. Not sure when in life I developed my organizational skills, but I like the way this girl thinks.

CMC Mission Statement

We have two FJV (former JV) "support people," who come to our casa on a biweekly basis to support us in various ways. In preparation for our Program Coordinator's area visit in October (when a JVC staff person stays with us for a week to assess how everything is going, meeting with each of us and our supervisors one-on-one), our support people led us through the activity of creating a mission statement for our community. The activity was somewhat redundant after our many discussions at JVC Orientation, but it is nice to have something written out. Here it is:

In the tradition of St. Ignatius and our namesake, we the intentional community of Casa Maura Clarke seek to act selflessly, challenge lovingly, and communicate honestly, so that we can support one another both in joy and in struggle. We will foster individual and communal growth as we deepen our spirituality, work for social justice, and find solidarity in simplicity.

It doesn't read that smoothly, but we had a lot to fit in!

long week

Last week was LONG. The long week after a short week is always a struggle, and work is starting to feel more like work...which is nice in the sense that I'm settling into a routine. There were a couple of later nights at work (read: 5 p.m., and I recognize that is "early") because of interviews for the next CTP class, and the week was also full of after-work activities. For community night on Tuesday, Megan took us to LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) because it's free on the second Tuesday of each month. Then for Wednesday's spirituality night, Sarah took us to the beach for a peaceful meditation. And on Thursday night, there was a Georgetown alumni event to welcome the Class of 2011 to the neighborhood! Come Friday, I was exhausted.

Lights outside LACMA (of No Strings Attached fame).

The only piece that I loved in the contemporary art building...I was more into the European art building.

Since the week was packed, it was great to get out of town this weekend. We headed to Malibu to hike the Escandido Canyon and Waterfalls. After reading reviews that raved about the hike, and also warned of its dangers, we ventured past the gorgeous homes of Malibu to find Escandido falls! (Literally, the trailhead was at the end of a long residential drive where we were reminded how we'll never be able to afford such huge, expensive homes.)

The first waterfall was easy to reach...

The second required a bit more work but was quite beautiful.

  

The "third waterfall" was actually just a higher view of the second waterfall, and was significantly more difficult to reach. It was less of a "hike" and more of a "rock climb."

 

But the views at the top were gorgeous!

And finally, the triumphant group photo.