Pustolovina Two: The Adventure Continues

underdressed

2008-04-01T11:08:00.000-07:00

I have been meaning to write about this for ages, and finally, with my temp job being extra slow today, have found the time.

Nearly a month ago, F took an Excel class in Tacoma. One of her classmates told her about a local coffee place. F, E, and I decided to make a detour on our way to Portland a few days later in order to experience it.

The coffee place, a drive-thru espresso stand called Hot Chick-A-Latte (which is such fun to say) in the metropolis that is Lakewood, was amazing. It was hot pink; there were long lines (all lone men except for us). As we pulled up to the window, we read on a blackboard that our barista was porn star Heather. (A camera phone picture of the sign is now the image that appears whenever F calls me.) We were expecting her to be in a bikini, as that is the stand’s gimmick, but she was wearing so much less. She had on lacy lime green, transparent boyshort underwear and an apron, nothing more. (Except for braces, which, at least for me, ruined her porn star image. I would recommend 'girl next door' Heather instead.) As she leaned to give us our coffees, we received an eyeful of cleavage. We worried that we would see nipple, but we also worried at the possibility of her scalding herself with so much exposed skin in such a tiny cube of a coffee stand.

It felt too early in the day for so much skin.

And, I suppose is to be expected of a place that markets the baristas looks over the quality of the beverages, my Americano was lousy.

generational

2008-03-14T13:14:00.001-07:00

I have a job - or will as soon as the contract is put together - at my parents' church. I will be the Youth Ministries Coordinator, which means I will be supporting the youth group in various ways. I'll also be sort of test-driving the position, so all of the various youth, volunteers, staff, committees, etc. can figure out how the position works before they hire someone more permanently for the fall.

On Sunday, I joined the youth group, who -- fresh from a con and daylight savings time -- were not particularly conscious. At the end of the time, we played Apples to Apples. And I realized that I was the sole representative of my generation in the room.

Most of the kids playing had no idea who Sean Connery is. True he hasn't been in anything of note in their lifetimes, except, I would argue Playing by Heart, but still. There are aspects of the culture that people just need to know.

They also didn't know who Bill and Ted are. Neither did the adult advisers, as far as I could tell. I can't work up the same level of outrage about this, but I do wonder what movies these kids watched when they were ten. Probably Pirates of the Caribbean.

I hope that part of my job is choosing the movies to show at sleepovers.

Choosy

2008-03-05T17:41:00.000-08:00

I haven’t been blogging much of late. I am still unsure what events in my life are interesting enough to be shared, but impersonal enough to be on the internet.

I have been accepted into two graduate programs and should hear from two others in the coming weeks. I am already starting to dread the decision-making process. I only applied to schools I would like to attend. Part of me hopes that the financial aid packages will be divergent enough to make my decision for me.

Another part of me wants to go to whichever school will turn me into Chris Hedges. My admiration of Chris Hedges is nothing new, but with the improved access to libraries and bookstore brought about by my return to the states, I have read more of his work. With this prolonged exposure, his is no longer my imaginary boyfriend; I want to be him when I grow up.

I could quote pages and pages of his writing to cite my case, but I will limit myself to two passages.

I read the following passage on a plane. When I landed, I immediately called a friend who has been struggling with feeling like a failure to read it aloud to her:

All lives, at their deepest level, are failures. We fail to be the person we want to be; this is inevitable for we are human. We will fail to achieve all we want to achieve. We fail those we love in small and large ways. We are failed by them. We suffer betrayal and feel unappreciated. We are never as good as our expectations. We never overcome all our faults. We act in ways that are foolish, inconsistent, mean or thoughtless. This is part of our ordinariness, part of the failures inherent in human life. We live, however, in an unforgiving culture, one that tells us constantly that what we have, along with what we have achieved, is inadequate.
But only if we can accept our failures and our ordinariness, only if we can have the courage to face this wounding pain, can we find sustaining joy and happiness.

Losing Moses on the Freeway, page 164

I read the following passage this afternoon in my neighborhood coffee place. It made me tear up. This was the second time in just over a week I have had Hedges-induced tears in that café. I need to stop reading his work in public. In describing his own religious beliefs, Hedges writes:

God is inscrutable, mysterious and unknowable. We do not understand what life is about, what it means, why we are hear and what will happen to us after our brief sojourn on the planet ends. We are saved, in the end, by faith—faith that life is not meaningless and random, that there is a purpose to human existence, and that in the midst of this morally neutral universe the tiny, seemingly insignificant acts of compassion and blind human kindness, especially to those labeled our enemies and strangers, sustain the divine spark, which is love. We are not fully human if we live alone. These small acts of compassion—for they can never be organized and institutionalized as can hate—have a power that lives after us…These acts recognize and affirm the humanity of others…Those who sacrifice for others, especially at great cost, who place compassion and tolerance above ideology and creeds, and who reject absolutes, especially moral absolutes, stand as constant witnesses in our lives to this love, even long after they are gone. In the gospels this is called resurrection.

American Fascists, pages 8-9.

This might be the best articulation of the faith of a religious liberal that I have ever read. I’m adopting it as my credo, at least for now.

Unromantic

2008-02-15T14:39:00.000-08:00

To celebrate Valentine’s Day, F, E, A, and I went to The Stranger’s Valentine’s Bash. People brought mementos of their failed relationships, told the stories of said relationships, and Dan Savage destroyed the mementos of said relationships with a blender, machete, sledge hammer, blow torch, tar and feathers, and other things. Good times.

F, E, and I told the epic saga of BC, or HWSNBN, as I referred to him two blogs ago. It was the first time in Valentine’s Bash history that three people told the story of being wronged by one evil ex. (Well, E didn’t really speak.)

The biggest applause lines of our story were when I said that BC gave me Dianetics for my birthday and when Fauna said that we were all roommates at the time of the goings on.

The object that we brought was a Scrabble game – the only time we ever played it was the night that BC told Fauna that she ‘had a sexual aura’ and wanted to ‘see her blossom like a flower,’ and watch ‘her sexual walls come down.’

Dan Savage chopped it in half with a machete.

And we became famous. Look!

(Thanks, E, for sending me the link.)

Younger

2008-02-14T16:38:00.000-08:00

I am now four days younger, at least officially.

A few days ago, I had to call the IRS to get a document. As I verified that I was who I said I was, the woman on the phone told me that the Social Security Administration didn’t have my correct birth date. I then called social security and learned that they think I am four days older than I am. I don’t understand how I could have applied for passports, filed taxes, etc. without this ever coming up before.

Consequently, I spent some of my morning at the Social Security office setting them straight. I was really dreading the experience, fearing that it would be a day-long headache. It wasn’t; the woman who helped me was friendly and kind. I was out the door within a half an hour.

It was only as I write this that I realize that why I had been dreading it so much was because I had expected the bureaucracy to be like it was in Serbia. I was envisioning a day at the MUP.

As I left the office, the woman who had helped me told me that I have the next four days as a do-over. It’s a nice thought, although I am not quite sure what I will do differently between now and Sunday.

Representative

2008-02-12T13:42:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday, I bussed out to my hometown to attend the Washington Democratic caucuses. Nerd that I am, it was super exciting to see hundreds of people taking time out of their Saturdays to state who they think should be the next president. I am often negative about my hometown, but my perceptions were changed. It was much more diverse racially than I remember (which would probably not be the case if I was at the Republican caucus), but still a strange place. I was shocked by the number of people who did not know what ‘LGBT’ stood for. Apparently the Democratic Party wanted to see how diverse the party is.

I brought Obama ’08 stickers and handed them out to fellow Barack supporters. I wanted to be a delegate to the legislative district and county conventions. There were six of us vying for five spots. My brother thinks that my generosity with the stickers and my relative youth would have guaranteed me a spot as a delegate, but I opted for alternate status. My inability to vote at the conventions will be compensated for by being able to guiltlessly leave if the proceedings bore me to tears.

This morning, I participated in The National Center for Health Statistics National Survey of Family Growth. An eccentrically dressed prone-to-over-sharing woman asked me about my sexual and reproductive history, opinions on sexual behavior, and family background. It was mildly interesting and I was paid $40 for my 45 minutes.

The interviewer kept saying that my answers represent thousands and I should be honest as possible. I don’t feel like I am a particularly representative person; I hope the sample size is large. As I answered, I kept thinking of what sort of correlations researchers might find based on my answers:

- People who have been tested for HIV because they needed a negative test to get a visa are more likely to want to have children someday.
- Unitarian-Universalists (their hyphen, not mine) are more likely to think that same-sex relationships are ‘all right’ (again, their words).
- Women whose mothers were 28 when she had her first child are more likely to have moved many times in the past 7 years.

Or something. I’ll be interested in seeing the results when they come out.

Weepy

2008-02-05T10:12:00.000-08:00

I'm really getting tired of this crying thing. It's at least once a day and it's ridiculous. I wish there was a pill to take to toughen up the skin - or at least the tearducts.

I bawled at church this weekend. (But nearly everyone in the audience did. They should have tissues in the offering baskets when they have homilies by people who were shot by hate-filled extremists.)

I thought crying at a reality show was ridiculous, but I seemed to have trumped that. Just over a week ago, I cried at the reader board at a fruit market. They had a MLK Jr. quote about universal love. I almost stopped the car for a bit, but I pulled through. I was late to meet friends at a naked spa. (More on that later.)

I will write more soon, but first I have to get through a graduate school phone interview. I hope she won't be able to hear me cry.

Nostalgic

2008-01-24T09:35:00.000-08:00

K, my replacement in

Serbia

, recently suggested that we make lists for each other about the things that we like about the places that we just left. Here is my list:

Some Things I Love about Serbia

1. blueberry juice
2. cafes that serve every beverage imaginable, so one person can have juice, one coffee, and one beer
3. the ‘Olympic-level’ people watching
4. parks that turn into everyone’s living room in the summer
5. my friends
6. Women in Black—Belgrade isn’t gender exclusive, unlike Women in Black—Seattle
7. movies are so cheap that it doesn’t feel too extravagant to go to the theater to see movies that aren’t very good.
8. FEST, the film festival, which might be my favorite week in Belgrade
9. fresh fruit in the summer
10. wandering pijacas
11. being able to pick and choose which parts of Serbian culture I adopt and engage in, which I can’t really do here
12. kajmak
13. ajvar
14. fried pepper and cheese sandwiches from Toma Pekara
15. palačinke
16. being an expat – meeting so many people from all over the world
17. going to Ada Ciganlija in the summer
18. hospitality
19. the tradition of bringing small gifts whenever you go to someone’s home
20. single use bus tickets (They do not exist here, so I end up carrying pocketfuls of quarters with me everywhere.)

Trivial

2008-01-23T14:27:00.000-08:00

Last night, I attended a reading by Ken Jennings at a somewhat local bookstore. He talked for a bit—and was super charming in his dorky way—before getting down to business and starting the trivia contest.

(On a side note, the crowd was pretty good people watching – game show fanatics are not known for their ability to dress themselves.)

The contest was divided into two rounds - Seattle-specific trivia and general trivia. My mother and I tied for third in the Seattle round, winning tote bags. The questions I missed concerned Bill Gates’s successor at Microsoft, a Sonics player who was the first unrestricted free agent in the NBA, what Ichiro means in Japanese, and the location of the first Dick’s Drive In. And in the second round… I was flawless. Well, I did argue with Ken about one of the answers, (Carolina is not a state.) but it was a poorly worded question.

And now I am the proud owner of a $15 gift card to the bookstore. Not bad for a day’s work.

Tearful

2008-01-23T14:18:00.000-08:00

At my re-entry retreat, we used a handout about the stages of grief to discuss our re-entry process. One of the stages is emotions expressing themselves at odd times. That rang true. 2008 has turned me into a crybaby. Times that I have cried – or at least have my eyes well—so far this week include:

- Reading a newspaper article's except of Obama’s recent speech at the Ebenezer Baptist Church.
- Reading further in the article – speculation about a possible assassination of Obama.
- Moments later, after telling my mom about the speculation in the article. (Her crying set me off again.)
- Watching the youtube video of the aforementioned speech.
- Talking to a group of strangers over brunch after church about when Multnomah County legalized same-sex marriage (At least they were Unitarian strangers).
- Watching Ron tell Christina how much he loved her in ‘The Amazing Race’ finale (but before he said 'Now when I say I love you, I actually mean it').

It’s embarrassing. That’s six cries—or near cries—in three days.

It’s embarrassing, but not quite as embarrassing as what set my mother crying – a comment on the aforementioned youtube videos.

Apparently I cry at reality shows now, but I draw the line at youtube comments.

Questionable?

2008-01-16T10:56:00.000-08:00

In recent years, I have developed a set of questions that I ask when I am in a group of people I don’t really know and the conversation dies. These include:

What is the worst meal that you ever ate?
What is the movie that you have watched more times in your life than any other?
What was the first CD/record/album that you bought that wasn’t children’s music?
What was your first kiss? (I am hesitant to trot this one out now, as the last time I asked it, a surprising number of the twentysomething crowd had never kissed anyone and that made me sad.)
What was the worst date that you ever went on?
Do you have a ruined song (like this website)?
How do you say, ‘that’s Greek to me’ in your language? (This one doesn’t work so well now that I am surrounded by English speakers.)

It’s a set of questions that is personal and interesting, but not personal enough to make anyone feel uncomfortable. They’re not the most typical get-to-know-you questions, so people probably haven’t worked up a trite answer. Often, people's answers spark stories and the conversation takes off again.

Unsurprisingly, I trotted them out a few times during my recent retreat. I heard about blood-soaked suitcases in Kabul, a daughter’s love of The Jungle Book, and a first date on which the woman announced that she owned a gun and ‘had trouble with her last boyfriend.’ Good times.

Near the end of the retreat, after we had all told the stories about our calls and how we chose the path we are on, after I had talked about how I want to become a minister, the facilitator told me that I ask too many questions to be a minister.

If being a minister means not asking questions (even such superficial ones) or pretending that I am not curious, maybe that isn’t the path for me. I’m hoping that the Unitarians are more comfortable with questions and doubts than the Church of the Brethren is.

Rachel + Chicago = Gluttony

2008-01-16T10:55:00.000-08:00

I spent the weekend in Chicago, reconnecting with some old friends and attending a ‘re-entry’ retreat sponsored by my volunteer program.

Also, I ate.

K, the friend I stayed with, lives in a diverse part of town that is full of ethnic restaurants. We ate the first night at an Indian buffet. I have never seen an Indian buffet dinner before (I am a country mouse.). It was delicious. It being so delicious, we ate and ate and ate. We ate until our stomachs ached and we spent the remainder of the night watching Project Runway, A Daily Show, and Colbert Report, as I enjoyed how everything shows an hour earlier in the central time zone.

The following day, we didn’t start eating quite so early, but once we started, joined by S, the gluttony continued. We drank Ethiopian coffee, ate Asian vegetarian (at a restaurant owned by some sort of spiritual community), drank rum made in New Jersey that puts everything but Flor de Caña to shame, and then found a Serbian café (the kind of café that I never went to in Serbia, the kind of café that is populated by old men watching basketball and playing cards) for burek and rakija. Delicious and a great chance to trot out the srpski again.

The following morning, we headed to a local diner to further gorge ourselves on omlettes, potato pancakes, French toast, and grits. Again, delicious.

A Tale of Two Women in Black

2008-01-05T23:10:00.000-08:00

As part of my ‘re-entry’ process, I have started to attend Women in Black vigils in Seattle. It’s very strange.

Women in Black—Seattle has a weekly vigil in Westlake Park, across the street from a downtown mall. (Not until I started attending this vigil did I realize that Seattle doesn’t really have a central place.) It’s small; I have been twice and it has been less than ten each time.

One of the things that I always found so interesting about Women in Black—Belgrade was that people would stop to watch us, even if all we were doing was holding signs and standing silently. The Seattle vigils remind me of why I thought that was so surprising. Passersby do not seem to care what we are about; they are too busy with their lives.

Women in Black—Belgrade is a full-fledged NGO that runs educational program and has lobbying activities. Women in Black—Seattle has a weekly vigil and monthly meeting, nothing more.

The most discomforting aspect of Women in Black—Seattle and a reason why I probably will not stick with them after my re-entry period ends is that they do allow men to join their vigils. I find the gender exclusivity element of feminist activism extremely distasteful. What’s the point of trying to improve things if half of the world is disqualified from participation in the struggle?

Besides, the comic book series that I am currently devouring about the world after a ‘gendercide’ that kills everything with a Y chromosome except one man and his monkey, further emphasizes the fact that men should be kept around.

I Owe Ioway All I Owe and I Know Why

2008-01-03T23:09:00.000-08:00

For Christmas, my brother gave me a knife block onto which he had decoupaged pictures of Barack Obama. While the act of sticking knifes into something with pictures of him on it is a bit troubling, it remains one of my favorite gifts this year.

I brought my new knife block (I really should get some more knives. I only have one and it lives at F&A’s house right now.) with me to a Iowa caucus returns-watching party on Thursday night. In light of Obama’s victory, it is now a lucky knife block.

By the time I got to F&A’s house, CNN had already declared Huckabee and Obama the victors. We spent the evening watching the pundits on closed captioning, talking about other things, only un-muting the TV when the candidates gave speeches. We talked over most of the speeches being snarky, listing words and phrases for the ‘buzzword bingo’ we are devising.

But when Obama’s speech began, we remained silent, listening to his words. His rhetoric is so good; he speaks so well. Inspired, I started to cry.

I have never felt this way about a politician, not even Paul Wellstone, not even when I watch and listen to RFK.

I have tried not to care too much about the primaries, since it probably will all be decided before I get to caucus next month, but I can’t claim neutrality any more. The crush that I have harbored for Barack since the 2004 Democratic Convention has blossomed.

I hope he can hold on; I worry that I am setting myself up to have my heart broken.

New Year’s Resolution

2008-01-01T23:06:00.000-08:00

This year, I resolve to be less of a snob.

I attended The Seattle Pops last month and didn’t enjoy it as much as I wanted to. The music was simplistic; the jokes were awful. Nearly everyone in the audience seemed to be having a good time. Why not me?

To counteract this, I came up with a desnobification list. I would watch romantic comedies, the number one movie in America, and NASCAR. I would listen to top 40 radio, eat at chain restaurants and read romance novels. So many people enjoy these things, but I am not interested in them. And at least for me in these areas, there’s only a short step from disinterest to condescension. It creates distance between me and other people that I don’t want to be there.

Or, maybe snobbiness isn’t really the issue. Maybe I am just having trouble re-integrating myself into US culture. I recently came across this passage in Exclusion and Embrace by Miroslav Volf:

‘Both distance and belonging are essential. Belonging without distance destroys: I affirm my exclusive identity as Croatian and want either to shape everyone in my own image or elimate them from my world. But distance without belonging isolates: I deny my identity as Croatian and draw back from my own culture. But more often than not, I become trapped in the snares of counter-dependence. I deny my Croatian identity only to affirm even more forcefully my identity as a member of this or that anti-Croatian sect. And so an isolationist “distance without belonging” slips into a destructive “belonging without distance.” Distance from a culture must never degenerate into flight from that culture but must be a way of living within that culture.’

Maybe my new year’s resolution should just be to figure out how to be an American again.

more entertaining than 'Evan Almighty'

2007-11-20T15:49:00.000-08:00

I was sitting near the back of the American Airlines flight from Brussels to the US. By the time the flight attendant reach me, he had run out of US Customs forms in English.

"Do you know French or Dutch?" He asked.
"No." I answered.
"Just English..."
I interrupted, "No, If you had the forms in Spanish or Serbian..."

He handed me the French forms; I figured I could use the 9 hours of the flight to decode it. Especially since I thought I learned French by osmosis in October.

One of the things I was looking forward to about returning to the US was being able to negotiate bureaucracy in a language I understand. I suppose that wasn't yet to be.