Ten Best Things About Being Back Home

(in no particular order)

• My parents meeting me at the airport (a total surprise to me)
• Welcome home voicemail
• My own shower
• My own bed
• A cranky-yet-pleased Apollo
• No more exchange rate math
• No more lugging everything I own on the whole continent around with me
• Cell phone service
• Easy and convenient access to drinking water
• Driver's wheel on the left side

Trip details forthcoming....

Are you kidding me?

I don't know which is the most surreal....

• My apartment is the cleanest it has been in weeks. Possibly months.
• I am totally packed and almost completely ready (physically) for my mega-trip.
• The mere fact that this trip is going to happen.

I feel very small and young. Definitely not the sort of person to be heading off on her own for one leg of a trip before meeting up with another person only slightly older than myself for the second leg, and ANOTHER person only slightly older than both of the first two of us for the majority of the trip.

I am 28. We have put a lot of planning into this. We will have fun.

I'm feeling bad about leaving my bird for 12 days, but he will be fine.

I already miss my parents and my brother (Jeremiah will be in Mexico next week; we're world travelers), but it isn't like they live in the same town as I do. It is sort of like we talk every day, though, so that will be different. No cell phone and no internet for 12 days. It's like a fast.

My next post will have pictures from Europe. How crazy is that?

Mainly on the plains?

In Spain, maybe. I was checking the weather report for while we're in Europe and almost EVERY DAY shows a good chance of some form of precipitation.

This made me laugh. I am glad I bought a travel umbrella and a poncho.

A Song for Me and My Dad

I heard part of a much-loved Paul Simon song called "Father and Daughter" on my way home tonight. It's a song about a father who is always there for his daughter, and who looks out for her, and who believes in her. So even though it was me and not my dad who first heard this song, I still kind of think of it as our song, because it reminds me of him. He always tells me I can handle things on my own, but is always ready to offer advice and assistance when I ask him for it, and I have never doubted that the chorus of this song is true of my dad, and that the vice versa of that line is true, too.

I'm gonna watch you shine
Gonna watch you grow

Gonna paint a sign

So you'll always know

As long as one and one is two

There could never be a father

Who loved his daughter more than I love you

Happy Father's Day, Dad! Thanks for loving me and showing it in a bazillion different ways. I love you, too.

Next week in Vienna

Bizarre, yet true: if all goes as we've planned, next week Kerri and Angie and I will be in Vienna, probably taking pictures of feet. ;) Several months of frantic planning (okay, frantic mostly on my part), of research, of collecting possessions and possible luggage choices into little piles, and it's practically here.

This will be the first major trip I've taken without an adult. Visiting Rachel in Manhattan didn't count. Going to Austin for Sabrina's wedding didn't count. Visiting Kerri in Denver didn't count. Those were Friendly Visits. This is a Major Vacation, with hotels and trains and foreign currency and languages other than English. Not that I'm anxious.

Ha ha! No, seriously, I am indeed worried about this trip. I'm worried about the planes. I'm worried about the trains. I'm worried about the automobiles. I'm worried about John Candy...oh, wait...sorry, got on the wrong track. I'm worried about missing important deadlines. I'm worried I've set too many deadlines and that I won't enjoy the trip. I'm worried I'll show up at church in jeans and get dirty looks.

This morning the Sunday School teacher was talking about the relation of fear and faith. He talked about holy reverence, and then he said something like, "But it's also okay to hold on to God because you're so scared about doing anything else." Which is what, in the practical realm, I am doing for this trip. And I know that He has surprises there for me, and even if they're scary at the time, they will end up being really great things.

So, enough with what I'm scared about. I'm not just scared, I'm excited, too. (Maybe all great endeavors come with both.) I'm excited about spending a week with Kerri, a kindred spirit who enjoys most of the same things I do and can also calm me down when I'm getting too worked up about something. I'm excited about seeing places in England I've never seen before. I'm excited about being able to say that I drove successfully on the wrong...I mean, left side of the road. I'm excited about taking trains, especially the sleeper car between Salzburg and Vienna. I'm excited that my packing is pretty much done. I'm excited about my beautiful little trip journal that Lisa bought for me. I'm excited that I'm up on the church prayer list for this Friday, the day before I leave, and that church snacks for adults are ending this June so I won't have to arrange someone to bring cookies in for me when I'm gone. I'm excited about all the other "small" providences that I will witness over the course of the next several weeks.

Next Sunday, I'll be in Vienna. Wow.

My Life's Soundtrack, V.3

Jeremiah posted this on his page, and so now I'm posting it. A different version on almost every page blog I have. Because it was That Fun the first time.

RULES:
1. Open your music library
2. Put it on shuffle
3. Press play
4. For every category, type the song that's playing
5. When you go the next category, press the next button (duh)

opening theme:
It’s Nice To Be With You – The Monkees

waking up:
Who Will Buy – from Oliver!

first day at school:
There’s a New Sound - Scooter (the Muppet)

shopping:
Spooky – The Classics IV

hanging with friends:
Sundays in September – Ruth’s Hat

first kiss:
Seven Wonders – Nickel Creek (not as good a song for this category as the title may imply)

birthday:
I Will Always Love You – Whitney Houston (how could you ever hate birthdays?)

party scene:
Sue Me – from Guys and Dolls

falling in love:
Trashin’ the Camp – Phil Collins & N’Sync

fight song:
The Circle of Life – from The Lion King, London cast version

breaking up:
By His Wounds – Wes King

prom:
Lady of Spain – The Amazing Marvin Suggs and His Muppaphone Players

college:
Getting Into You – Reliant K

life:
Holding Out for a Hero – Frou Frou

mental breakdown:
How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You) – James Taylor

driving:
I’ve Got the World on a String – James Darren

flashback:
Achy Breaky Heart – The Chipmunks (quite a flashback band, truly)

getting back together:
He Lives In You - from The Lion King, London cast version

wedding:
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun – The Chippettes

honeymoon:
Never Say Die – Dixie Chicks

birth of child:
Delhi.com – from Monsoon Wedding

final battle:
The Longest Time – Billy Joel

death scene:
Suzy Q – Creedence Clearwater Revival

funeral song:
Into This Town – Rachel Zylstra

end credits:
Be Prepared - from The Lion King, London cast version

Why is it...

...that you can be thoroughly absorbed in feeding every wretched sensation and indulging every evil impulse you have, knowing full well that you'll regret it the next day if not sooner, and yet you just keep going? And go ahead and change all those pronouns to "I," because of course that's where I'm really going with this.

Is getting to feel so bloody sorry for myself ever worth the morning after? No. Do I resent that? Yes.

*sigh*

(I believe eternal life is a free gift from God, but I don't want to get to heaven and have anybody surprised to see me there. "You were a Christian all this time? For real? It was so hard to tell....")

Over the past year or so it seems I've lost an awful lot of certainty. This is good in that a lot of arrogance was simmering (and sometimes boiling) in that certainty. But it's kind of scary, too. My opinions seem, mostly, either unimportant outside of myself or Viciously Important. My motivations barely ever seem as pure as I used to think they were. I act with at least three or four different levels of intention, and what's that about?

I've been thinking that this is a new phase that will last forever, but really that is probably a ridiculous idea. Maybe what this is instead is a time of getting used to seeing in a new way, being freed from many a fancy and many a foolish notion.

Or as Burns was getting at, before you can de-louse, you have to know the lice are there.

Self-sufficiency

Saturday I got an email about weird activity on a credit card. Since I did in fact have weird activity on that card, and since I have been increasingly frustrated with a number of things, and since I wasn't thinking, I clicked the link and GAVE OUT MY PERSONAL INFORMATION. Contact info, Social Security number...great. I'm an idiot. How many times have I warned people about telltale signs, and I fell for this like a total internet newbie. At least I wised up before they got my credit card number, too.

I found a list of recommended actions to take after you give out personal information, and it's long. So it can join my many other long lists of Things That Need Doing.

I am so sick of taking care of myself. I want a break. I want to go back to when my parents handled everything. I feel like the only person looking out for me is me, and I know that isn't true, which hasn't yet been making it feel better. And then there's the superstitious part of me that thinks that God is going to have my identity stolen to prove a point because I have been so unforgivably self-sufficient. And then there's the part of me that is still really, really fighting to take care of myself, because I don't trust anybody else to do it properly.

Clearly I can't do it properly either. Great.

Finger Length Predicts SAT Performance

According to an article I found on Yahoo! News, having a ring finger that is longer than your index finger (or at least long compared to your index finger) indicated a higher exposure to testosterone in the womb. It is also supposed to indicate that you have good mathematical and spatial skills.

Naturally, since reading this article I've been staring at my hands for an inordinate amount of time. My ring and index fingers are just about level with each other. BUT a careful measurement with my tape measure (something I just thought of now) shows that my ring fingers are 1/16" longer than my index fingers.

Observation 1: Why, then, do I stare at stare at restaurant receipts for several minutes before finally coming up with the right amount for a tip?

Observation 2: On the other hand, this may explain a lot....

Observation 3: “Uh! I have more testosterone than estrogen!” -- Rachel Gesch, fall 1999

New every morning

Tonight it struck me how beautiful it is that "great is thy faithfulness" comes right in the middle of a book called Lamentations.

Snags and Reminders

I was very proud of myself this week. There I was, booking car, plane, train, and hotel reservations, making definite progress on this Europe trip. Then Saturday came and I found out I had gone over my credit limit. In my head, my credit card had a large enough limit to handle the costs of my trip. And it does. However, I have been booking trains and hotels for several people. That makes a difference.

First response: horror, even worse than the horror of being late returning a library book. Second response: panic--my entire trip was going to fall through, and the reservations I'd placed were all worthless, and we'd have to book new hotels at higher prices, and everybody was going to be so mad at me. Third response: Suzanne, you're supposed to have it more together than this!

Tonight at church the guest pastor preached on our weaknesses, and how God makes use of them to broadcast His strengths to us and to the watching world. I was sitting there, half paying attention and half trying to solve all the Europe problems in my head, and suddenly I thought: "Control freak."

Blast.

That one again.

Nowhere in all of yesterday's reactions to the news of the credit problem did I stop to pray about it. I mean, really. Pray about hotel reservations? Come on. God has bigger problems. This is one of those things I can handle this on my own. What does He even care?

The part of me that acknowledges that I'm not quite as independent as I act most times knows that He does care, even about relatively minor things. And this is relatively minor. This is not a scenario in which someone died (or even could have died) because I didn't do math properly.

So there's a wrench in my plans, and tomorrow I'm going to be working on getting it out. And on remembering that from an ultimate perspective, they're not really my plans, anyway.

Because I was curious about any other quiz trends....

And apparently there are none in Lost....

Your Score: Jack

You scored 58% kindness, 45% courage, 28% seedy past, and 48% secretiveness!

"We're not savages, Kate. Not yet."

You are Jack. You are compassionate, heroic, and a bit of a martyr. You are brave and a natural leader. However, you shouldn't keep so much bottled up inside. You are so busy taking care of others that you have no time or energy to take care of yourself. Take a load off once in a while and play some golf with Hurley. You need to relax pretty soon or else you'll be no good for anyone anymore - including yourself!

Your polar opposite is: Shannon. You are similar to: Boone and Sayid.

The Which Lost Character Are You Test


Your results:
You are Mr. Eko

Mr. Eko 75% Sayid Jarrah 65% Boone Carlyle 65% Claire Littleton 60% Michael Dawson 56% Kate Austen 55% Charlie Pace 52% Shannon Rutherford 48% Jin-Soo Kwon 45% James "Sawyer" Ford 43% Sun Kwon 40% Walt Lloyd 40% Dr. Jack Shephard 36% Hugo "Hurley" Reyes 36% Ana-Lucia Cortez 36% John Locke 30%

You are neither a leader nor a follower. You are a Bible reader and are motivated by God's will. Many people have respect for you.

Click here to take the Lost Personality Quiz

You scored as Sawyer. You are Sawyer. Your raw sarcasm amuses everyone. You are rebellious and may even be onsidered a loner because of it. Your biggest mistake in life has been conforming to the ways of someone you despise. Sawyer 83% Charlie 75% Jack 42% Kate 42% Locke 42% Sayid 33% Hurley 25% Michael 25% Claire 8% Which "Lost" Character Personality are You? created with QuizFarm.com

What Lost Character Are You?

You are Jack!You are a kind and considerate soul, and always put others before you. Maybe you need to take some time out from helping others, andinstead help yourself.
Take this quiz!








Quizilla
Join

Make A Quiz More Quizzes Grab Code

You scored as Kate. You are Kate! Even with your spotty past of bank robbery and trouble you are a known as a nice girl who loves adventure. You are one of the guys and will always volunteer to go exploring. Kate 44% Boone 31% Claire 31% Sayid 25% Jack 19% Locke 19% Michael 13% Shannon 13% Sun 6% Charlie 0% Sawyer 0% Which Lost Character Are You? created with QuizFarm.com

Which Lost Character are you?

And because quizzes are addictive....

You Are 20% Girly

Um... you're a guy, right? If not, you're the most boyish girl in the world. And for you, that's probably the ultimate compliment.

How Girly Are You?

Survey says....

"You are a Hermione at heart! You are obviously smart and sophisticated...but you tend to get a little annoying at times. I would put down the books for a little while and get out more!"
-- The Ultimate Harry Potter Character Quiz









-- Which HP Kid Are You?










-- Who Are You in the Harry Potter or Hogwarts Universe?














-- Harry Potter Personality Test










-- Which Harry Potter Character Are You?



I fear that perhaps I am going to drive my fellow European travellers nutters before we even meet up.

God helps those who can't help themselves

Yesterday afternoon I received a message with a strange injunction: "Allow the God-appointed powers time to do their work." Where such a message could easily have been followed up with a call to action, this was a call to prayer, which is a call to recognize that our actions are not, in and of themselves, of ultimate significance.

There is a part of me that hates that. It's the part of me that wants to be in control, that doesn't think God knows what He's up to, that wonders how much good my pathetic little prayers could accomplish, or that wonders why my exquisitely worded prayers don't accomplish more.

I listened to the other part of me as I turned my energies towards prayer today, the part of me astounded and humbled and excited about the notion of God-ordained powers. Prayer is numbered among the God-ordained powers. Whether they are long or short, whether they flow swiftly or drag along torturously, whether or not the vocabulary is formal, they all go through the same person, who has become the holy veil for us, simultaneously mediating for us and ushering us into the presence of God.

My prayers, joined with those of hundreds of others, have been heard. Good has come out of an evil situation. Also, things went really well at my office today. I don't think this is a coincidence.

The part of me that hates to be subservient to another rushes to find "scientific explanations" for all of these things. To get me off the hook from praying, I guess, under the guise of keeping myself humble. But a deeper part of me knows that God is working in the world. That somehow, as Charlotte Brontë wrote, "God, who does the work, ordains the instrument." And that out of His mercy, God has appointed me to join His orchestra.

Bless the Lord, o my soul,

and all that is within me

bless His holy name.

He has done great things.

England and parts east

I'm heading out to England, France (well, Paris), and Austria this summer with my friend Kerri and her friend Angie and maybe some other people. Any must-see suggestions for our intrepid group of travelers?

Juxtaposition

The other night I was watching the news at the gym, and there were two big stories:

1) The gunman in Virginia
2) The Supreme Court decision to uphold a partial birth abortion ban

The focus in reporting on the first was on the madness of this kid who somehow thought that he had the right to determine who was fit to live.

The focus in reporting on the second was on the madness of groups who said that killing a child--oh, wait, fetus--halfway delivered should not happen.

Most of the people I heard talking about the court case were upset, saying that this could lead to further bans. And one person said something like, "Well, this just means the fetus will have to be dismembered inside the mother, which is dangerous for the patient."

The difference between what happened at Virginia Tech and what happens in clinics across the country must be that life experience grants you the right to expect that there are safe environments in which people will not kill you. Which explains why we value our elderly so much, right? The cumulation of life experience?

In the reporting on the Supreme Court decision, some people were expressing concerns over having women required to view ultrasounds or learn more about the abortion process before going through with it. Isn't that a championing of uninformed choice? Or the right to choose what a somebody tells you to choose? Are they afraid that the women might think, "That looks like a baby...a human baby. I can't kill it!"

If that's so, given what happened last Monday, they don't have grounds to get too concerned.

Greater is He

After another horrific event, the usual shock is setting in amongst my fellow Americans. The usual rounds of "How could somebody do this?" are beginning.

It's possibly more horrific that some of us, myself included, are jaded to all this. I expect war, and tragedy, and murder. Some people believe in the basic goodness of people, in the face of evidence like this. Like Anne Frank, they believe that people are good even when they are faced with evil in one of its most purely obvious forms. I, on the other hand, often believe in the overwhelming power of the wickedness of people, even in the face of God.

I believe in the Fall. I'm surrounded by its evidence, and I don't have to look to a campus in Virginia for that evidence. I see it in my preference for the comfort of solitude over the messiness of community. I see it in my quick scorn for those who cross me, even accidentally. I see it in the way I judge my self-worth by others. I see it in my readiness to cede ground to the devil--in a land increasingly devoted to the pursuit of what feels right at the time, what's another school shooting? Can't we expect that's going to happen more and more?

It is only the sustaining hand of God, I say, that keeps me from doing just what that student did today. And although I don't know where it ranks alongside mass murder, I know the casual hatred for others I feel spring up in my heart all too often is called murder, and it is odious in the sight of God.

I know it is by the Lord's mercy we are not consumed. I am not surprised when I witness, in myself or others, the evidence that we need every bit of that mercy.

This is what amazes me--that in the face of all the evil in the world, and even in His people, He has not consumed us. "His compassions fail not. They are new every morning." Great is His faithfulness.

Wickedness shows us we need drastic measures to be saved.

Christ shows us there is a God who is willing to take those measures to save us.

How could something like this tragedy happen? How could it not, on this side of heaven? But remember and believe: this side is not all there is.

Wait, what?

One of the many convenient features of the Consumers Energy website: reporting a power outage.

It's been a very revealing two weeks

In the past two weeks, I learned/relearned:

• I can write a plot outline and follow it through to completion
• Critiques from others can be useful
• Critiques from others do not have to be taken as ultimate truth
• I would love to write and be paid for it--not millions of dollars by any means, just enough so all I would have to do to support myself was write
• I can be a glory hog...gotta watch out for this one

And I learned all this writing and posting fanfiction. Who says it's just a silly hobby? (Oh, wait, I know who.... But I learned I don't have to be ruled by critiques OR critics, and so I choose not to be.)

Another thing I learned, on a different note, is that there is at least one real person out there with the last name of Wronski. Anyone else recognize the significance of this last name?