Contrariwise

After Mass tonight, all of ACE 15 gathered together to take photos and film video reflections for the DVD the second-years produce every summer. My hair and makeup were a little off, since I woke up to Claire’s alarm this morning, an hour after I expected mine. I had worked out two stories for two of the three pillars of ACE (community and spirituality, the other is teaching), but our allotted time went from 90 seconds to 60 to 30. I tested the micro-version on Maureen while waiting in line. She started crying along with me.

The final cut:

Spirituality: finding God in community
I found God in my community this year. When I laid head-to-foot on my bed, sobbing, I found God in Sarah, because she stayed with me. And then she brought me a flower. I found God when I crashed my car driving home sick, and they dropped everything to come see me. I found God when I accidentally let a possum into the house, and they did not kick me out. I found God in my community, and that has made all the difference.

May 29: Bad Habits

1. What bad habits do you have? I lick my fingers when I eat. Sometimes I overshare. I also talk with food in my mouth; I’m afraid the moment to jump into the conversation will pass before I finish chewing. Really need to work on that second one.
2. What bad habit would you most like to break? Oversharing, definitely.
3. Have you ever overcome any bad habits? What were they? I used to pick at my fingernails. I didn’t bite them; I just pulled away little bits. (There is no way to make that sound less gross–or even just less gross than biting.) I managed to break it, and now I have really great nails.
4. Do you have any habits other people consider bad that you rather like about yourself? What are they? I tend to live most of my life by habit. There are some things I just need to do a certain way in order to function properly. Some of my habits rub other people the wrong way (though, helpfully, actually rubbing people is not one of my habits).
5. What habit annoys you most in other people? I hate when other people leave things unorganized: chairs not pushed in, food packages not closed, drawers open. If you can straighten things up, just do it!

June 5: Good Qualities

1. What do you feel is the most important quality in a close friend? Ooh. It’s a tie between communication and trust. I couldn’t be friends with someone I couldn’t talk to, but I wouldn’t want to talk to someone I couldn’t trust to keep my secrets.
2. What is the one quality in a stranger you’d just met that would make you want to get to know them better? Holiness is such a hard quality to assess, but it’s an important one. I also love a good sense of humor and a practical intellectual spirit.
3. What do you think is the most important quality in a good leader? Confidence. If you don’t believe in your plan, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone else who’ll believe in it–or in you.
4. What is the one thing that makes a child likable to you? This is absolutely influenced by my adolescent development class, but I have to say a good sense of self-perception. The children I’ve spent the most time with lately are my students, and I always appreciated when they understood themselves. Even if they only understood that they were lazy and not doing their work, but wouldn’t kick the habit, I was satisfied.
5. What do you think is the one thing that makes a good parent (other than loving their children)? Sacrifice. As I’ve gotten to understand more about Catholicism and the way it affects love, marriage, and parenting, I’ve come to realize that a spirit of sacrifice can aid everything we do. If you’re willing to give up everything, and you lose it all, you are still content in the end.

June 12: School Days, School Days

1. What was your favorite class/subject in school? My favorite subject was always English. My favorite college class was either Language and Humor with Dr. Coleman, Major Works of Shakespeare with Dr. Leinwand, or the Buffy class. And of course, Doc’s high school class was my favorite in ACE.
2. Who was your favorite teacher? I really loved my kindergarten teacher, Ms. Bond. Adkins was great in high school. I learned so much from that man. Leinwand and Dr. Coleman were my favorite profs; I took two classes from each of them. And I love Doc Doyle. You can’t not love Doc. Even when he scares you, he is incredible.
3. Why was your favorite teacher your favorite? Ms. Bond was so kind. I think you have to be kind to teach kindergarten. Leinwand was the best lecturer I have ever had, hands down. He thought everything in Shakespeare was about sex, but he was so engaging. Doc is just Doc. He defies explanation.
4. What would you have liked to major in in college? Or what will you major in if you go to college? I like my major. English made me happy in a way engineering never could. I do wonder where psychology would have taken me, though. I wouldn’t be on the same path in ACE; that’s for sure.
5. Would you rather go to a small, medium, or large college, if you had the money to go to any of the three? I still love Maryland, and it’s huge. Even though I wound up with a very cookie-cutter major/degree, I needed to be surrounded by that level of diversity (racial and academic) and the enormous campus. The very first time I drove onto campus, I knew I would go there and love it. I was right.

June 19: Random

1. If you could go back in time to change one choice in your life, what would it be? I would not have gone back to work in February until my flu was completely gone.
2. What would you like your dying words to be? The Act of Contrition? I have no idea.
3. If you HAD to change bodies with someone you knew for 1 year, who would it be? You know, it might be interesting to be Doc.
4. Choose your favorite license plate combination. What does it read? Since I had to buy Bernadette out of my home state, she has those tags, so I might go with TRP4LIF or IMATERP. I actually did look into getting UMD plates, but it was not meant to be.
5. What fantasy world would you live in (i.e., movie, tv show, book)? The wizarding world of Harry Potter. Duh. I’m already pretty pumped for the HBP movie. I brought HBP and DH all the way up to Notre Dame with me. Once you go all in to Potterdom, you can never go back.

So far, second summer at Notre Dame is going well. I’ve only been here for two weeks, but it already feels like the summer is slipping away.

Classes are good. It’s lovely to get up early, go to class at 8 a.m. and not have to teach it. Remembering how to be a college student was tricky at first. I let my laundry get way out of hand, I had to go back to taking notes during lectures instead of giving them, and homework still takes forever. I forgot that graduate school is supposed to be tougher than undergrad (though, in the typical ACE way of things, nothing is quite like it’s supposed to be). I only have to take three classes, which is glorious because there’s a three-hour break built into the afternoon. Once I finish lunch around 12:30, I don’t have to be anywhere until 3:10. Some days, I run errands.

The best part of the summer, by far, is being back around some of my favorite people in the world. My summer roommate, Claire, is wonderful, but goes to bed earlier than I do and stays up later, which is slightly awkward because it means all my sleep takes place during hers. (As my ever-wise Carpool Buddy pointed out, that’s a common problem between me and my roommates.) As far as Claire knows, I don’t actually go to bed. Seeing my favorite ACE friends has made for some good times. Just this night at dinner, I laughed so hard that I choked. Twice. Note to self: Don’t breathe water.

There’s a lot of adjustment happening at the same time. Since I’m changing communities, schools, houses, courses…basically everything, I find myself caught in the middle a lot. It’s like I’m fourteen and having an identity crisis, not to mention the awkward conversations and introductions because moving is so rare. My old community was amazing; they have permanently changed who I am and the way I live my life. Adjusting to my new community will take at least as long as it took to gel with the old one, but it will be different. I come to New Community with a (terrible) year of (halfway decent) teaching behind me, and a year of (unbelivably nourshing) community life with a whole different group of people. On the up side, my new school will give me a chance to figure out this whole teaching gig, and I get to fill an interesting role that doesn’t even exist in most ACE communities.

I think it sums everything up to say that my life is not how I ever imagined it would be, but at the same time, better than I could have ever hoped for.

One of these days, I will post a Friday Five on an actual Friday.

1. If aliens were invading, what would you do, hide or wait by your TV? I’m more likely to wait by my computer than by the TV, honestly. Constantly refreshing CNN sounds like a more Lindsaylike strategy than anything else.
2. The aliens have landed and they haven’t blown the planet to bits, how would you react if they looked like us? I’d probably wonder if life was imitating art again, and I’d stumbled into Star Trek: First Contact. (I haven’t seen the new Trek movie, but I wouldn’t mind going.)
3. What if the aliens were disgusting looking (like a pile of rotten cheese), then how would you react? In between being grossed out, I’d wonder why no one had started pounding them yet.
4. The aliens are about to make an announcement and all communication goes out. Your neighbor says that she/he heard that the aliens have announced they are going to destroy Earth. Do you believe him/her? Why? We don’t know any of our neighbors, so probably not. Technically, though, talking to my neighbor is communicating. (Yes, I quibble over semantics. I’m an English teacher.)
5. The last question is so inappropriate that I’m not going to dignify it with an answer. Check the link if you’re curious.

I realized as I was posting yesterday that I don’t really blog anymore. I do bloggable things, but I don’t love this space like I used to. The reason I began journaling in the first place was to have a record of my life. This year in ACE has been unbelievable. I’m already going to forget so much of it, and that’s a tragedy in itself. I want to take a step towards changing that.

As I caught up on Catholic Carnivals today (I’m so far behind that it completely changed formats on me!), I stumbled across what may be the gateway to my revitalized blogging: 7 Quick Takes Friday. It’s hosted by Catholic blogger Jennifer at Conversion Diary. Unlike the Friday Five, it’s not purposely secular, but unlike the Catholic Carnival, it’s not explicitly religious, either. It might be the happy medium I’ve been searching for.

1. I have three weeks of school left. This is exactly nine days of instruction (including review days), three half-days of final exams, and two staff development days. Depending on when I leave to go back to ND, I have between twenty and twenty-one days left here. Where did the time go? It’s exciting, though, because I won’t be a first-year teacher once I finish this one, and I never have to do it again. Not like this. Never ever. Praise God!
2. In ACE, we have two supervisors for our communities: a site supervisor, who watches our teaching, and a pastoral administrator, who watches our community. Our pastoral administrator, Sarah, told me on her last visit that my Carpool Buddy and I relate like siblings. This week, some things went down at school that made me feel more like his little sister than I have in a very long time. I love that he wants to protect me, but I worry that he’s taking on too much responsibility for watching out for me. My situation will be changing dramatically very soon, so I’m taking the recent issues considerably better than I’ve handled anything this year. He’s away this weekend, and I absolutely supported his last-minute decision to go because he needed a break: from me and from this place. I’m not sure if I’m handling this the right way, though. How does a little sister take care of her big brother?
3. My car is under recall for a shift lever problem. It turns out that, when I put it in park, it might not actually shift into park, and it could roll away. Wonderful. I’m taking her to the dealer for a check-up on Monday before work.
4. Becca wrote me a letter back! Predictably, I haven’t been able to write back to her since I got her letter last week, but the point is that someone wrote back. Maybe this whole task of rekindling authentic relationships with my long-distance family and friends will work after all.
5. I read about the heresy of monophystism for the first time in Catholicism for Dummies this morning. It taught that Jesus’ divine and human natures were totally separate, leading to the definition of the hypostatic union. I must say, “hypostatic union” is one of my favorite technical terms. It just sounds so rock and roll, you know?
6. I observed (can’t say “had” because I wasn’t really that involved) a great conversation about the nature of the priesthood last night. McShane brought up an interesting point about priestly celibacy: if married priests are an allowable exception, why hasn’t it been validated further (say, in an order of married priests) rather than a continued exception? Thoughts for a full post later, perhaps.
7. I watched the season finale of Grey’s Anatomy with Sarah last night. Holy cow. I have not yelled and cried (and accidentally fallen asleep because I was very tired) that much in a long time. At least since the end of last season.