So here's the deal, y'all. Summer's over. There's a lot going on in my life now, and things aren't as simple as they were in the summer, 'cause there's lots of things to keep track of. I had to buy a planner. A PLANNER! Me! The girl who just keeps it all in her head and makes a list or two a day, just to make sure it's all still there. But no more. Or maybe just allinoneplace, lol.
What am I doing, you ask? Well. For starters, I'm in classes. Of course. I have been for the past many years of my life (read: I only have two more years of this, then comes the REAL WORLD. How do I feel about this? I have not yet decided, but I'm guessing it's somewhere between scared and curious). Classes are filling my head with thoughts of translation, translatability, borrowing, being able to read and write, and what-do-words-really-mean. I love words.
That's another thing. I am discovering that I love a lot of things in life. I love sunlight in my room of a morning. I love waking up and putzing around my flat and biking to campus. I love ESL tutoring (oh, I'll tell you about that in a minute) and I love all of my small groups (another hing I'll tell you about in just a minute, maybe) etc. I guess what I'm discovering is the ability to say that I love things, the ability to tell people, when they ask me how I'm doing, that it's been a wonderful day, or that I love my classes, and my jobs, and my life. This pervasive - can I call it joy? - is almost bewildering. God is good.
Life feels substantially different to me this beginning. It's partially the old love of change and fall, and schoolstart, but it's also... well, more than that. For one thing, I am somehow in a place where I can be strong for other people now. I'm in leadership positions too, which is new and strange. You know what else is very different this year? The amount of time I'm spending in the Bible. Yes, it's true. I suppose now would be a good time to mention all those small groups I was talking about. I'm participating in two and helping lead one. The two I'm a participant in are vastly different from one another, which is good. All of them, however, require some intense study of Bible passages.
All this newness and happiness are giving me space to be able to ask myself some tough questions. What those are, I will preserve for another night, because I just sat staring at the screen for the past 5 minutes straight. Lol. Clearly, it's time for sleep. Tomorrow is another full (FULL) day.
I will leave you with this thought:
I'm hoping that I become a conglomeration of all the people I admire, plus a little something extra; every text is a translation of and draws on the ones that have come before it.
over 'n out.
E.O.
Friday, September 17, 2010
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
if my day were nominalized
Good heavens. Could there have been a fuller day? I really hope I get some downtime tomorrow...
Godis.
Emily.
Laurie.
Cameron.
Joni/Stephanie/Sara (& me).
Cece.
Anne.
light convo. blustery presences. um?? so much to say, so choose wisely. spilling my guts. BOMBSHELL. buoy.
Godis.
Emily.
Laurie.
Cameron.
Joni/Stephanie/Sara (& me).
Cece.
Anne.
light convo. blustery presences. um?? so much to say, so choose wisely. spilling my guts. BOMBSHELL. buoy.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
On C&A
To the next person who tells me that they think I'm so awesome/amazing because I think so much/deeply/interestingly or something to that effect:
You canNOT have a piece of my heart. NO. Go bother someone else. Why are you acting surprised? Don't you know brain and heart are of a piece? Like I said. Go bother someone else.
over 'n out.
E.O.
You canNOT have a piece of my heart. NO. Go bother someone else. Why are you acting surprised? Don't you know brain and heart are of a piece? Like I said. Go bother someone else.
over 'n out.
E.O.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Literacy Log 1 - I don't get it!
What is literacy? This question is deceptive, as all simple questions are The dictionary definition of literacy is a person's ability o read and write. Immediately however, his raises several more questions. What does it mean to be able to read, and what level constitutes "reading"? Should the literate person be vaguely familiar with letters and the ways in which they combine to form sounds? In that case, my six-year-old cousin is literate. Or should a literate person be capable of reading something as complex as "The Count of Montechristo" or the entirety of "Les Miserables"? Does being literate include a working knowledge of literature? And then what of literary history? And these are the easy questions; if I start asking what it means to be able to write, this paragraph will be extremely long (is knowing the standard length of a paragraph included in literacy?).
Coming into this discussion, my ideas (or preconceived notions, perhaps) are thus: a literate person can look at written symbols in a given language and recognize their meaning insofar that they understand (if without knowing that they do) its grammatical structure and a follow general gist of the text. Also, a literate person has probably undergone a certain amount of formal or informal schooling to arrive at this skill-level.
As I go through my day, I encounter words. The DUC worker's tool box says "ORKIN" on the side, and I only need a quick glance to know that, it seems, almost without the effort of thought. A kid's shirt on the street reads "DUKE". I read academic papers for classes, as well as textbooks and literature books. I also read statuses on Facebook and e-mails from friends, work-colleagues, automated systems, professors, class mates... I read webcomics and blogs, directions for setting up a bookshelf or a wireless modem so that I can have internet. The written word so surrounds me that I don't even think about it as such, unless it's to bemoan that my eyes, my synapses move too slowly for me to be able to take in the 150 pages of reading I have to do for the day after tomorrow. It takes something out of the ordinary for me to realize that reading is a skill I acquired at some point in my long-seeming life. If you udenrsatnd tihs anoniyng setnnece of mnie, tehn yuo mgiht be fimailar wtih waht I'm aubot tlak aubot. An e-mail circulated a few years ago claiming that, if the first and last letter of a word were kept the same, it didn't matter how you scrambled the middle letters, you would be able to read it just as easily as well-spelled English. This sort of word-play aside, my verbal abilities are second nature to me, and while I can think of literacy-events in my life without batting an eyelash I am very certain that there are many things in my life affected by my own literacy that I don't even realize.
It seems so clear-cut to me that I think the first question that needs to be asked, the first idea that needs to be justified is this: does the word "literacy" need to be redefined? After all, that is the basis of this class, it seems: to figure out what it means to be literate. I confess, I do not find this to be a particularly prepossessing question. If you can read words written on a surface, if you can write words and form them into meaningful thoughts, you are literate. The end. Every other question that we have posed as a class as to what literacy means appears, to me, to be not a question of literacy, but rather of knowledge. It seems to me that we have been exploiting the word literacy as a metaphor for being able to extract and convey information in as many possible different situations as we can think of. In one way, that is fair, since the very basis of language is attempting to codify information using a commonly understood pathway so that others may then decode that information. The term literacy includes the idea that one is able to do this. However, in using the word "literacy" to think about that idea alone, we ignore the other, vital, part of its significance, namely its specific reference to the written word.
In all fairness, the New London Group has a point when they talk about understanding that the first world's current culture uses images as a sort of language, an that people need to achieve literacy in that language to be successful in their lives. But I would like to argue that the other types of literacy (they call it design) they mention, namely spatial, visual, audio, and gestural are simply things that people have been manipulating for centuries, as part and parcel of our natural environments, and that one will pick up as the child of a culture without the necessity of specific schooling. If I may be so bold as to make yet another statement of semi-informed opinion, social understanding is not literacy. It is culture. To call it literacy is calling cultural knowledge by another name. There is no need for such misnomers, and indeed, this is only one aspect of general knowledge of how the world works that has been suggested as “literacy” in the past two weeks. If literacy means everything from knowing how to dress in a certain situation, to knowing how to greet someone, to being able to read a textbook, to knowing all the details of tree-husbandry, to knowing all the ins and outs of the Belgian legal system (and these are tame examples), then what, in fact, are we discussing? Let's just call literacy a synonym for knowledge, and a literate person a discerning Jack-of-all-trades, and be done with it. It is possible that I have missed something in this class- maybe I am not understanding the readings fully, or lack the discernment to understand the issues at hand, but though I have found the discussions of how knowledge and standards of knowledge differ across societies, cultures, and social standings fascinating, I am still not convinced that the dictionary definition of literacy is somehow insufficient or incomplete. What seems to be the problem? Why are we framing the changing importances of different kinds of knowledge as lack of literacy?
Coming into this discussion, my ideas (or preconceived notions, perhaps) are thus: a literate person can look at written symbols in a given language and recognize their meaning insofar that they understand (if without knowing that they do) its grammatical structure and a follow general gist of the text. Also, a literate person has probably undergone a certain amount of formal or informal schooling to arrive at this skill-level.
As I go through my day, I encounter words. The DUC worker's tool box says "ORKIN" on the side, and I only need a quick glance to know that, it seems, almost without the effort of thought. A kid's shirt on the street reads "DUKE". I read academic papers for classes, as well as textbooks and literature books. I also read statuses on Facebook and e-mails from friends, work-colleagues, automated systems, professors, class mates... I read webcomics and blogs, directions for setting up a bookshelf or a wireless modem so that I can have internet. The written word so surrounds me that I don't even think about it as such, unless it's to bemoan that my eyes, my synapses move too slowly for me to be able to take in the 150 pages of reading I have to do for the day after tomorrow. It takes something out of the ordinary for me to realize that reading is a skill I acquired at some point in my long-seeming life. If you udenrsatnd tihs anoniyng setnnece of mnie, tehn yuo mgiht be fimailar wtih waht I'm aubot tlak aubot. An e-mail circulated a few years ago claiming that, if the first and last letter of a word were kept the same, it didn't matter how you scrambled the middle letters, you would be able to read it just as easily as well-spelled English. This sort of word-play aside, my verbal abilities are second nature to me, and while I can think of literacy-events in my life without batting an eyelash I am very certain that there are many things in my life affected by my own literacy that I don't even realize.
It seems so clear-cut to me that I think the first question that needs to be asked, the first idea that needs to be justified is this: does the word "literacy" need to be redefined? After all, that is the basis of this class, it seems: to figure out what it means to be literate. I confess, I do not find this to be a particularly prepossessing question. If you can read words written on a surface, if you can write words and form them into meaningful thoughts, you are literate. The end. Every other question that we have posed as a class as to what literacy means appears, to me, to be not a question of literacy, but rather of knowledge. It seems to me that we have been exploiting the word literacy as a metaphor for being able to extract and convey information in as many possible different situations as we can think of. In one way, that is fair, since the very basis of language is attempting to codify information using a commonly understood pathway so that others may then decode that information. The term literacy includes the idea that one is able to do this. However, in using the word "literacy" to think about that idea alone, we ignore the other, vital, part of its significance, namely its specific reference to the written word.
In all fairness, the New London Group has a point when they talk about understanding that the first world's current culture uses images as a sort of language, an that people need to achieve literacy in that language to be successful in their lives. But I would like to argue that the other types of literacy (they call it design) they mention, namely spatial, visual, audio, and gestural are simply things that people have been manipulating for centuries, as part and parcel of our natural environments, and that one will pick up as the child of a culture without the necessity of specific schooling. If I may be so bold as to make yet another statement of semi-informed opinion, social understanding is not literacy. It is culture. To call it literacy is calling cultural knowledge by another name. There is no need for such misnomers, and indeed, this is only one aspect of general knowledge of how the world works that has been suggested as “literacy” in the past two weeks. If literacy means everything from knowing how to dress in a certain situation, to knowing how to greet someone, to being able to read a textbook, to knowing all the details of tree-husbandry, to knowing all the ins and outs of the Belgian legal system (and these are tame examples), then what, in fact, are we discussing? Let's just call literacy a synonym for knowledge, and a literate person a discerning Jack-of-all-trades, and be done with it. It is possible that I have missed something in this class- maybe I am not understanding the readings fully, or lack the discernment to understand the issues at hand, but though I have found the discussions of how knowledge and standards of knowledge differ across societies, cultures, and social standings fascinating, I am still not convinced that the dictionary definition of literacy is somehow insufficient or incomplete. What seems to be the problem? Why are we framing the changing importances of different kinds of knowledge as lack of literacy?
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Off-Campus, y'all!
How to set up house incl. a few useful tips:
1. collect all the things in your parents' house that look a little bit like it kinda might be yours.
2. force parents and siblings to carry said stuff out to the driveway, and pack it into your car for you, so that they feel useful.
3. drive to new place, dump stuff into it.
4. disperse the stuff around your new place, realize that you really only own odds and ends of anything useful, though you have more office supplies than you will EVER NEED.
5. realize you forgot some of the actually useful things that you own at the parents' house, 'cause hey, it didn't look like it ought to belong to you- it was useful. Call parents and beg for them to bring you said items.
6. Go shopping for the rest of the things one actually needs in a household - just the bare minimum to keep it clean. Example: TP, paper towels, comet, 409, broom, trash can, trash bags - THEN realize that your pocketbook will be severely hurt by acquiring these small, generally unnoticed items. Cringe.
7. (simultaneously w/6) CLEAN EVERYTHING. Seriously. If you don't you will regret this later, especially if you have dust allergies and inherited a sofa with the place.
8. Realize that you forgot a few steps in there somewhere- OH YEAH, SHEETS. Frantically run around looking for sheets that actually fit your bed*.
9. Exultantly use your new:
a) dishwasher
b) washing machine/dryer (in a closet no less! so efficient!)
c) stove/oven
d) GARGANTUAN bed. Seriously. You could fit three people in that thing, nevermind two. You could put up walls and call it a bouncy castle.
10. Don't even worry about decoration. That comes later, when you can breathe again.
And the crazy thing is, the whole ordeal is actually a lot of fun. Yes, it's hectic. Yes, you have to be extremely practical, and can't daydream around. But. Having your own place is just cool. Making it look like a real people house instead of a dorm-room-pretending-to-be-the-room-you-had-at-home = awesome.
This is the last post I will make in this style... I promise to return to ideas and such next time around. =)
*Note: no, "full" is not the same as "queen". Do not buy "full" sheets if your bed is queen sized. You will regret this.
1. collect all the things in your parents' house that look a little bit like it kinda might be yours.
2. force parents and siblings to carry said stuff out to the driveway, and pack it into your car for you, so that they feel useful.
3. drive to new place, dump stuff into it.
4. disperse the stuff around your new place, realize that you really only own odds and ends of anything useful, though you have more office supplies than you will EVER NEED.
5. realize you forgot some of the actually useful things that you own at the parents' house, 'cause hey, it didn't look like it ought to belong to you- it was useful. Call parents and beg for them to bring you said items.
6. Go shopping for the rest of the things one actually needs in a household - just the bare minimum to keep it clean. Example: TP, paper towels, comet, 409, broom, trash can, trash bags - THEN realize that your pocketbook will be severely hurt by acquiring these small, generally unnoticed items. Cringe.
7. (simultaneously w/6) CLEAN EVERYTHING. Seriously. If you don't you will regret this later, especially if you have dust allergies and inherited a sofa with the place.
8. Realize that you forgot a few steps in there somewhere- OH YEAH, SHEETS. Frantically run around looking for sheets that actually fit your bed*.
9. Exultantly use your new:
a) dishwasher
b) washing machine/dryer (in a closet no less! so efficient!)
c) stove/oven
d) GARGANTUAN bed. Seriously. You could fit three people in that thing, nevermind two. You could put up walls and call it a bouncy castle.
10. Don't even worry about decoration. That comes later, when you can breathe again.
And the crazy thing is, the whole ordeal is actually a lot of fun. Yes, it's hectic. Yes, you have to be extremely practical, and can't daydream around. But. Having your own place is just cool. Making it look like a real people house instead of a dorm-room-pretending-to-be-the-room-you-had-at-home = awesome.
This is the last post I will make in this style... I promise to return to ideas and such next time around. =)
*Note: no, "full" is not the same as "queen". Do not buy "full" sheets if your bed is queen sized. You will regret this.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
SFO
It's beautiful here. It really is. I LOVE the scenery and geography and botany.
But mostly I just miss my niche back 'home'.
Tomorrow I go adventuring into the actual city, instead of helping
move furniture,
scrub the kitchen,
buy groceries,
go computer shopping,
trying to keep sluggish conversations going.
Oh, and generally messing around on the computer. So hopefully tomorrow will be much better. There will be sights, sounds, smells, and probably some confused wanderings and getting-lost moments.
Stars, kiss my friends and family back at my two-year home goodnight.
over 'n out.
E.O.
But mostly I just miss my niche back 'home'.
Tomorrow I go adventuring into the actual city, instead of helping
move furniture,
scrub the kitchen,
buy groceries,
go computer shopping,
trying to keep sluggish conversations going.
Oh, and generally messing around on the computer. So hopefully tomorrow will be much better. There will be sights, sounds, smells, and probably some confused wanderings and getting-lost moments.
Stars, kiss my friends and family back at my two-year home goodnight.
over 'n out.
E.O.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Confessions of a (no-longer) Teenage Drama Queen
Things I Have Done so Far to Avoid Packing:
1. Put clothes in the wash
2. Go to a work-day at my church in the city
3. Go for a long, long walk
4. Watch Pirates of the Caribbean 1 and 2
5. Watch sundry TV shows including, but not limited to: iCarly, Sky high, and the Nanny
6. Cooke rice & lentils
7. Bake chocolate chip cookies and made pancakes.
8. Write this blog post.
I must therefore conclude and admit that Something is Going On. I do not avoid packing. I like packing. I like traveling (as has been well-established in previous posts)- I even did a little happy dance on the way to my car last week because I was thinking "I get to pack for a trip!!".
The only possible conclusion is that the very idea of this trip is making me nervous. I have also avoided checking in for my flight online, and deciding whether or not I want to check a bag. Let's not beat around the bush here. I'm scared spitless. I'm going to see the person I've been calling one of my best friends, the friend I've known the longest out of all my current friends. And I'm not sure I can follow through with it without breaking something (not literal THINGS, you know, friendshippy things) because I'm not sure how far apart we've grown in the past year or more. I'm also going to see my fCA- THAT's driving me to distraction too.
Now, time has come to the point where if I avoid preparing for this trip any longer, there will be consequences... but all I can think is "I don't wanna pack, I don't wanna!" - and try to come up with other, unrelated things I have to do that might help me avoid this big scary week.
That said, I can't imagine not going. I have to go, and I will. It's just... YIKES!
Okay. Watch me, internet-reader. I am going to go pack now- promise.
over 'n out.
E.O.
1. Put clothes in the wash
2. Go to a work-day at my church in the city
3. Go for a long, long walk
4. Watch Pirates of the Caribbean 1 and 2
5. Watch sundry TV shows including, but not limited to: iCarly, Sky high, and the Nanny
6. Cooke rice & lentils
7. Bake chocolate chip cookies and made pancakes.
8. Write this blog post.
I must therefore conclude and admit that Something is Going On. I do not avoid packing. I like packing. I like traveling (as has been well-established in previous posts)- I even did a little happy dance on the way to my car last week because I was thinking "I get to pack for a trip!!".
The only possible conclusion is that the very idea of this trip is making me nervous. I have also avoided checking in for my flight online, and deciding whether or not I want to check a bag. Let's not beat around the bush here. I'm scared spitless. I'm going to see the person I've been calling one of my best friends, the friend I've known the longest out of all my current friends. And I'm not sure I can follow through with it without breaking something (not literal THINGS, you know, friendshippy things) because I'm not sure how far apart we've grown in the past year or more. I'm also going to see my fCA- THAT's driving me to distraction too.
Now, time has come to the point where if I avoid preparing for this trip any longer, there will be consequences... but all I can think is "I don't wanna pack, I don't wanna!" - and try to come up with other, unrelated things I have to do that might help me avoid this big scary week.
That said, I can't imagine not going. I have to go, and I will. It's just... YIKES!
Okay. Watch me, internet-reader. I am going to go pack now- promise.
over 'n out.
E.O.
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