Fear the Turtle!: Redux

I know, I know. I'm preoccupied with the turtle. But it roars, can you blame me?

Today I managed about 1/2 mile in the lake, which I feel is quite an accomplishment. As I swam with my head in the water, I kept seeing it swim at me, all brown and green, with mouth agape, bright pink. Why can't I have a turtle shell on my underside? Why do I feel like I must look like a carp floundering in the water?

The second half of the swim, I did breast stroke, which I prefer. I could have a conversation with my mom, and kept my head above water. We figured out that if there are 200 swimmers in the lake for the race, my chances of getting attacked by a vicious turtle are far slimmer than when I'm the only body over 100 pounds in the whole lake.

At least this swim has shown me that I am getting more comfortable in the lake (pools are not a problem), and that I can stay in the water for 25 minutes without losing all bodily control.

Two days ago I went for a bike ride, doing around 35 miles. The ride on the W&OD is peaceful for the most part, although there tend to be a number of intersections so that you have to unclip from the pedals every half mile or so.

The half-way point for the ride was Leesburg, VA, which is really quite pretty:












I asked my mom if I'd ever been there before, since I didn't remember it at all. Every time we go to Leesburg, it's to go shopping in their outlet mall.

Can you guess which version of Leesburg I prefer?

Chinatown Bus

For the last few days, I've been in Brooklyn visiting a good friend from High School. She offered a number of options for getting up there and back, and I, magically, misunderstood the fact that she only provided one link (the link for the Chinatown bus) as a recommendation. Oops.

Getting up there was quite easy: show up to Chinatown in DC, hop on bus, appear 5-6 hours later in NYC's Chinatown. Finding the subway line was also quite easy, helped by lyrics from a Regina Spektor song. A few stops down, and I was in Brooklyn.

The next two days were fun, relaxing, and a good reminder of why I stay in touch with my friend. Episodes with cockroaches (I'm convinced she has other people kill them so she's not reincarnated as one--she's Indian), calls to the police because of disturbance of the peace (her neighbours regularly play loud music on the front stoop past 1 am), and falafels made the visit.

But the most memorable part of the visit was probably trying to get the bus back to DC. We miss the 6.30 bus by a few minutes, and wait for the bus to come the next hour. It pulls up...nearly full. The five free seats quickly get filled, and two more stand empty. The women sitting next to the seat pretend not to understand a word. We get off the bus, assuming they are saving the seats. People with babies get on. They aren't allowed to sit in seats, as they are at the front of the bus and therefore deemed unsafe. Ugliness ensues.

Several more buses depart, but for Philly. People desperate to leave the city push to get on each bus that pulls up, as there is no system for queuing. Push, push, yell, yell. The woman at the station continues selling tickets, and also keeps saying that the next bus is coming in five minutes.

8:30; we've been there nearly two hours. A bus pulls up, and my friend and I put the system to the test. She's five feet tall, and more forceful than me. I deal with the bags, she pushes forward to get two seats.

The bus is full, she's on, and I'm outside. She calls to tell me to get my @$$ on the bus, as she is holding a seat for me. People will not let me, nor the man whose wife and baby are on the bus to get on.

Panic.

Bus driver comes forward, after I've yelled out (to no one in particular) to please let me on; my seat is on the bus. No movement, just blank stares. He points to man, says, "wife?" The man gets on. He looks at me. "Friend?" "Yes, yes, my friend is on the bus and has a seat for me!"

I get on.

People shoot me stares of death.

They have not been there for two hours like we have.

The ride home is punctuated by rudeness from the family seated around us; passive aggressive remarks and actual pushing of my friend occurred. Apparently one woman was mad at my friend for holding the seat for me. B, clever girl, asked the woman what she would have done if she were traveling with her family. "Hmfff" came the singular reply.

Sadly, that ride was also racially charged. So much of the bus ride proved that different groups of people have different ways of dealing with these things. Behaviour that's common in Asia is not tolerated by the non-Asian riders here. Several groups expected service, even though they only wanted to pay the $20 for the ticket. And me? I longed for timely, calm Swiss transport.

Yep. You read it here: I wanted order, timeliness, kindness. Foolish me for riding the Chinatown bus.

Triathlon training: Least favorite work out

So, you may now know that I am training for a triathlon August 15 in Fall Creek Falls, TN. It looks to be a gorgeous course, with a wooded trail run, bike ride through the park, and lake swim.

Lake swim?

Now you may have heard me thinking about doing the July triathlon in Nashville, but I was hesitant about swimming in the Cumberland River and then, around 10 am, trying to run 10 k through the downtown streets. Asphalt + buildings + summer heat = misery.

So when I found this other triathlon, just two hours away and in a state park where we can camp (yippeeee!), I thought brilliant. And I can practice the lake swim when I'm in Reston, visiting my family.

But I forgot 1. how nasty the lake gets this time of year
2. That these guys have been scarring me ever since I can remember:


"What?" You say? That doesn't scare the bejeezus out of you?

Okay, how about this:








No, not the bald guy. The TURTLE! FEAR THE TURTLE! (Ok, not the University of Maryland).

I always imagined one of these guys pulling me under, as I've seen happen to carp.

So imagine my chagrin as I lower myself into the filthy water and, for 20 minutes (I only managed about 1 km), tried not to show my mother, who graciously paddled alongside me, the fear that was pulsing through my body.

Now, as my brother told me later, my mother would not have been able to save me from "Old Snapper". And he's right. But she could have at least told the rescue team where to find my body.

In the future, I'll work on getting moves like this guy, and not fear the next few open water swims I'll be doing while in DC.

And just ask me: I can already do that thing with my voice. Happy to perform in person.

Othering the Other

Every once in a while, a sermon comes along that speaks to the high and it brings them low. That same sermon can speak to the low and bring them up. This, I've read, is the goal of every good sermon. It upsets the comfortable and comforts the upset. Today's sermon did both, and with good reason.

The lectionary from the epistles was from Galatians:

Galatians 3:23-29

Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise.

The sermon focused on the second part of the reading, which is often neglected in favor of the easier to preach first part, in which we are all children of God through faith. The NIV has "sons" in place of "children", and in some ways makes the second part of the reading more salient. "Sons" points out the tradition of inheritance, of the rights afforded to men only in this society. But what to make of this "sons" when "there is no longer male and female"? The sermon went back to the promises of Genesis 12, but I'd like to take this a bit further back, to Genesis 1. In the creation myth, the first account of how God created human kind is as follows:

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27)

Note how God creates one single man in the beginning. It's a singular. Yet in the third line, both genders are present, as well as the plural, "them". "Man" is able to stand on its own, a placeholder for all of humanity. But once man, created in the image of God, must be explained in depth, the words for gender are used, side by side, made equal by an "and". And yet, for millennia, female has been relegated to a place below male. This has been done by making woman the other to the man; she is what he is not, and helps him define his masculinity. We do this even today: when we speak of politics, there are either issues or women's issues; seldom do we hear speak of a "male issue". This is not because men have fewer issues than women, but because their experiences are counted as central, and women's experiences are reduced to a smaller sphere. I'd like to add here that you shouldn't ever call abortion a woman's issue. In the same vein, giving women fair treatment is not a women's issue. It is an issue for all of us, just as affirmative action is an issue for all of us, because we live in one single society. We are all responsible for the ramifications of that society's actions.

Back to Galatians 3: this distinction disappears in Christ. The ideal before the Fall, which becomes corrupt with the Fall when a man rules over his wife, disappears completely in Christ. There is no distinction. What does this mean in the case of politics, where we have "women's issues" and "minority issues"? In Christ, that is to say, in the body that is the Church, these things disappear. Or at least, they should. But do they? If we take Fr. Jerry's charge that the three instances in which the field gets evened are race, politics, and gender, then does the Body now reflect that?

On Sundays, the church shows that selective segregation is alive and well. Clearly, we've allowed for there to be a distinction made between "Jew" and "Gentile", now simply replacing them with "Black", "White", and "Latino". And, wherever we can, we allow those distinctions to stand, talking dismissively about, as my friend P. says, "those people".

"Slave" and "free" gives us a bit more trouble, as today it is not so easily made visible. And it is perhaps more troublesome: these political differences are not simply the false dichotomy of "Democrat/Republican" or "Liberal/Conservative". Poor, rich, upper class, working class would be these instances of "other".

The last, "male and female" is a bit more difficult for me to address, for I'm not one of "those" people, I'm "these people". In the two above instances, I'm not among the disenfranchised, so I'm in a position of power when I point out the wrong the church has done. Race, politics: I am not the trampled calling out for justice, I am in the group that can offer it, but don't. And that accountability falls on my head, to my shame. But in the case of male/female, I am not in power. Women are disenfranchised in the church, and in most, they only have access to positions of authority and teaching through their husbands. This requires women to marry in order to have any standing. And so I cannot speak out, because to speak out would contradict the rules imposed on me concerning speaking, teaching, and "obeying". For reasons I would love to get into, but will not for brevity's sake, the allowance of female standing only through marriage dangerous and does not keep in line with the gospel; it is a blatant abuse of Christ's teachings on marriage.

The Galatians reading calls us to the difficult work of not only accepting the gospel, but living it.

It's time to accept the concept of "living water" and live what we've been called to.

Dress Making

This week seems so full of sorrow and hope. Deaths, conclusions, beginnings. The Mary candle remained lit while I went to university and then to dinner--a minor miracle in itself because of how I usually check things 10 times before leaving the house. Truly a prayer candle.

Yesterday I met with my D M, and she had encouraging things to say. A few weeks previous, I handed in my first chapter (chapter 1 of 5!) at a whopping 58 pages. And it was a draft. A very, very rough draft. Which I let her know, along with my uncertainty about the shape of the chapter--there was no central organizing factor; the chapter had been written in the course of the month, three, four, five pages a day. Topics as well as the order of motifs lead my approach; I was unsure of how to structure it all.


Her advice was very helpful to me, the way in which she tried to describe what needed to happen to the chapter. The work, she said, was good, and I couldn't doubt that, and that the theory is woven into the close reading. What I had, according to her, was fabric I had woven, and I needed to read it over and figure out what the pattern was. Like making a dress, where you have the material and you need to lay out the pieces to figure out how to cut them out properly.

For me, this is a beautiful metaphor. As we sat there, discussing this theoretical text, I considered an image that is written deep in my memory. My mother, a skilled seamstress, would kneel on the floor, where she would place material for a dress on the hardwood floor of the living room. She would carefully consider how to best use the material, being as efficient as possible, while still paying attention to the warp and weft of the material. The salvage must line up properly so that the dress, once the pieces are sewn together, falls properly.



I remember the care she would use to pin the material to the pattern, and then the sound of her heavy metal sheers echoing against the floor. As she cut each piece, she would set them aside so that she could complete cutting around each piece before taking the pattern off of the fabric, turned wrong side out, then pinning, sewing, ironing edges, and sewing some more.

The craftsmanship which went into every article of clothing she made--the work of her hands, which was a visual puzzle and a exercise in skill.


I hope this continues to be the metaphor for the writing process. It is well engraned in my memory, a comfortable pattern for me to follow.

Dissertating the Dissertation

If I say/read it really quickly, it looks like I might desert my dissertation. Which, I'll admit, is tempting.

There's a certain problem I run into when I sit down to write my dissertation, one that involves me getting ever so slightly distracted. Now, I'll write two or three pages a day, but the amount of fiddle-faddling around is attrocious. Any new blog entries on my reader? Facebook posts? What is the headline on the Post? The Times? Any new blog entries in the last 2 minutes? Any more new Facebook posts? ... You get the idea.

So, rather than knocking out my two to three pages in an hour, it takes me three to four. Why can't I just focus, do my work, and then enjoy the rest of my day? Dunno. Something of the procrastinator lurks in my type-A personality that keeps me from being as productive as I can.

In a few weeks, I hope to have access to a program a friend of mine has developed, one which can either block out websites for a certain amount of time or allow access to only a few for a block of time. I'd say that I'd want to block out just a few, but I know that I'd just get more creative in my procrastination. Derg.

Still, I've written approximately 20 pages in the last 11 days. Will I meet my deadline of a chapter (40-60 pages) by the end of the month? I'm not sure, but I can hope....

Building a Boat

If you are outside of middle Tennessee, odds are you have not heard that perhaps one of the largest natural disasters to strike the US hit Nashville last weekend. The forecast just called for rain and storms, so of course we expected tornados. Par for the course. What we didn't expect is what some folks are calling a 500 year, even 1000 year flood.

Whole subdivisions are underwater. At least ten are dead within Nashville/Davidson County. Damage is around 1.5 BILLION DOLLARS. And they're only done with accounting for approximately 80% of damages so far. One of the larger employers in Nashville is underwater and may not be operatable for another six months. Water conservation measures has folks going without showers for three or four days, and then only taking Navy showers.

And the news cycle missed out on us because there wasn't enough of a narrative.

So if you've not heard (or heard little), I understand. Check out sites like our local paper, the Tennessean. Donate to small, local charities. Tell your friends.

Hopefully you'll also hear about the good stories: Water conservation measures caught on, and we are slowly building back our reserve. Strangers are showing up in the flooded neighbourhoods to help tear out dry wall, dispose of carpet, take out insulation. Others wading waist-deep into flood waters to save stranded motorists who can't swim. Folks on jet skis saving people whose houses were flooding and, tragically, burning down around their ears.