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...