Happy Halloween

From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!

Let's Go Red Sox!

Let's hear it for the

BOSTON RED SOX

2007 WORLD SERIES CHAMPIONS

WE WON! WAHOOO!!!!

This is a RED SOX NATION!!
Second four game sweep in four years!!!!

Show me what Democracy looks like (this is what democracy look like)!

Yesterday morning I joined a group from Rutgers and thousands from around the region to protest the US illegal occupation of Iraq and its policies of imperialism. The day was rainy and kept some in, but we were motivated. I rode in with some members of RAW and the Central Jersey Coalition Against Endless War and met up with the student contingent. Following a march in some parts of the city with which I'm less familiar (that being anything below 14th street - bourgeois, I know).

Following that I went with a friend to have lunch with some members of Solidarity in the New York area. Very interesting and extremely informative time. As someone far less familiar with the labour movement than I should be, it was extremely enlightening.

Ended up going out for a drink with someone I met at the group to learn more about a women's conference being planned and later met up with a good friend from York who is working at Columbia for dinner.

Now for the pictures... they aren't great in part because of the weather and in part because I really wasn't paying attention when I took them.




The president in his native dress.

So evidently,I didn't take this one.
Or this one...




Amazing bookstore (around Broadway and 14th



Let it rain! Let it pour! Together we can stop this war!








Some guy was dressed up as V.


And of course, the live shots!!! The guy hold the banner yelling is Ian. He is awesome (and not as crazy as he appears in this shot).






Longer and better....

The opposite of war isn't peace, its creation.

Why demonstrate?

This is a frequently asked question, posed by both those in and outside the activist movement, a question that I often asked myself, and, in full disclosure, as this is my journal, this entry is as much, if not more for me than anyone else who may or may not read it.

I spent yesterday morning with about 10,000 other people standing in the rain.. We yelled, shouted, and waved our signs, and sometimes, I have to wonder for what.

What do demonstrations accomplish? When I was in the DC area we would protest the capitol and the White House -- on a Saturday. I could understand wanting to obstruct regular business as occurred when the Rutgers walk-out closed down one side of Rt. 18 last year, but most of these don't. They don't change legislation, and they seldom seem to change the way our legislators vote. My first demonstration was just before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. A went with a group from my church. Close to half a million people showed up to proclaim their opposition to this illegal and awful war.

Turns out we were right, for whatever thats worth.

So why do I still go to these things?
Aside from feeling like part of something and knowing that others feel the same way. I know that letter writing, hassling congressmen, etc is more effective (yes, I do that too), but this is far more energizing, and reminds that we are not alone.
A friend of mine was on the organizing committee of the Campus Anti-War Network. I asked him what his point is?
The first of course is that feeling of togetherness, and unity.
Next, is for networking. Connections help keep a stronger movement with more voices. Similarly, its gets new people out and keeps them out. It makes them unified with other groups.
It also lets different movements know what other movements are doing -- student groups, labor groups, women's groups, etc. and also lets different groups know what other group are doing (or that they exist) if they aren't on mailing lists.

So is it worth it, yes. It reminds us and the world that we are part of something and that we are here. It helps us stay motivated and brings out new people, lets us know what others and doing, and if nothing else, makes us a bit of an inconvenience.

Pics forthcoming.

Prayer Request

Just a quick prayer request for my roommate and her family.

I've known Suzannah since 9th grade, and her older sister Nicola was one of my best friends. Nicola died in a car accident about 4 years ago.

S's mother was diagnosed with breast cancer this week. S is handeling it surprisingly well, but it clearly upset at the possibility of losing someone else so close. To make matters more complicated S is also a pharmacy student and has some major exams this semester that she needs to pass.

Anyhow, her mother has surgery scheduled for Tuesday and they are doing to check her lymph nodes etc. then. Her mother has a number of medical conditions and adding this clearly wouldn't help. They found this in her first mammogram in ten years, so if nothing else, its good that she had to get one.

So prayers please, this family has had a huge number of burdens and they need all the prayer they can get.
thank you

Best work in scrabble

I just scored my highest point word in scrabble-- airplane for 158 points. Its a bingo that crossed two triple word scores. Thats about 80 points higher than anything else I've ever scored... and its 12:18 at night (playing online) so there really isn't anyone else to share it with, so I'm sharing it with you.

Wild Turkey's take to suberbs and cities

The Boston globe reports:

On a recent afternoon, Kettly Jean-Felix parked her car on Beacon Street in Brookline, fed the parking meter, wheeled around to go to the optician and came face to face with a wild turkey.

The turkey eyed Jean-Felix. Jean-Felix eyed the turkey. It gobbled. She gasped. Then the turkey proceeded to follow the Dorchester woman over the Green Line train tracks, across the street, through traffic, and all the way down the block, pecking at her backside as she went.

"This is so scary," Jean-Felix said, finally taking refuge inside Cambridge Eye Doctors in Brookline's bustling Washington Square. "I cannot explain it."

Notify the neighbors: The turkeys are spreading through suburbia. Wild turkeys, once eliminated in Massachusetts, are flourishing from Plymouth to Concord and - to the surprise of some wildlife officials - making forays into densely populated suburban and urban areas, including parts of Boston, Cambridge and, most recently, Brookline.

Read it all....

COMMENT: There was a stretch of road on my way to high school that would be crossed by a line a wild turkey's at 7:55 every morning. (School started at HR started at 8, so if you were running late you were either screwed or had to remember to take a different route). They are smelly and nasty and ew.

Maybe the Turkeys in Mass. just want to enjoy the World Series as much as the rest of us

Rainy Day meme swiped from Jess D

What is your favorite adjective? Be creative (and please don't pick "cool")

Video

Here is the promised video of Dennis reading the letter from MP. As I said before, I didn't realize my phone records audio, hence the randomness of the clip.
enjoy.

Open mouth, insert foot?

edit: Photos in next post down


This could likely be the motto for my life, and may be the reason I came across as "quiet" on Monday. Yes Tarin, Jacky, Anna, etc, I was as described of being "quiet and shy"... go ahead and laugh.

However, as we all know, I have rather severe head to mouth control issues... I'm working out.
But in the most recent one, I actually told someone that he was "nicest activist I've ever met." Who says things like that?!

Oh wait... me.

I'm not sure who felt more awkward after that comment.

Or in class when the dowdy substitute doctoral student asked what we thought the professor was doing in Wisconsin, drinking beer? (his disertation was up for some award) and I shouted back (its a large classroom) I'm sure that [drinking beer] is at least part of it.


or the, "she doesn't want a guy who thinks she sucks, she wants a relationship...."

and these are the tame examples...



Yeah.... working on that whole head to mouth control thing.

Okay... now back to my regularly scheduled homework (its 1:25am)


Oh, and we just started an organization at Rutgers focused on raising money and awareness for medical supplies for women in Burma, and are scheduling a RAW concert, so I can blame that for a bit of the procrastination... kinda....


Oh, and demonstration in the city on Saturday WAHOO....
I was going to go protest Horowitz at Columbia on Friday, but I was asked to play acolyte/chalicer at a wedding at GraSP, so I'm all about that instead (so, I guess I can be bought?).

okay, back to homework... really...


oh, and I love ellipsis....

Me, a dork, what?

edit: check out the last pic, can you find the difference?

So, for those of you who don't know, I went into the city today to hang out with some other Anglican bloggers (and do some research for my OI design project).

It was a great time, starting with tea and wine, followed by Solemn Evensong at the General Seminary chapel and dinner. I was fortunate to sit next to Tobias Haller, who an incredibly insightful and intelligent human being, and Grandmere Mimi, who is just as amusing and interesting as her blog appears. It was wonderful to finally meet some of the other crazy people who grace the pages of OCICBW and contribute on their own to the wonderful Anglican Blogosphere, especially (but by no means limited to) Eileen, Pseudopiskie, Dennis, Doug, PJ and Johnie and everyone else whom I'm forgetting because its late, as well as to FINALLY speak to Elizabeth Kaeton.

Anyhow, here are the unPhotoShopped pics... improvements likely to follow.


MadPriest... or as close as we could get (although much better behaved)... at least he's wearing a name tag!
Dennis reading the official welcome note from the great Mad Man himself.

Pseudopiskie's fabulous shirt which read "neither death nor life nor angels nor Bishops nor the Anglican Communion can seperate us from the love of Christ."
Hanging around in Matthew's Lounge.
At the restaurant...table 1
Table 2 (minus me)
and table 3 (after +Elizabeth got there but after Fr. Jake left)
The other side of table 3


Chillin at the restaurant

+Elizabeth and Grandmere Mimi, a wonderful duo! (which should thoroughly scare MP)

The bloody lot of us (minus +Elizabeth and ReverendBoy). If you want a roster let me know, but MP, you should be able to figure it out... there's a bit of a trick)!

Can you find a difference in this picture and the one above it... it isn't that well done, but I'm still working on it.

This was a great night!

Car etc

MY CAR IS FINALLY GETTING FIXED TOMORROW!

(and I'll get a to spent the rest of the day with my godmother, a friend from undergrad, and a bunch of really cool people whom I've never met)

Perfect....

"You should be sloppy enough that the unexpected happens, yet not so sloppy that you cannot figure out what happens after it has happened. "

(From Eduson, Bernice. Scientists, They Psycological World, quoted in "Question-negotiation and information seeking in libraries" by Robert Taylor)

Hilarious hymnody

A friend just sent this to me, and to be honest, I couldn't make out the words with my eyes closed, I'm shocked the subtitlers got that close!

Autumn Blaze= awesome

Saturday night a friend and I went to Autumn Blaze - its a Christian concert held annually at the Meadowlands that attracts some 14,000 teens and adults from Pa, NJ, NY and Ct.

Music included Reilly, BarlowGirl, Thousand Foot Krutch, and TobyMac. There were also a few other singers, a speaker, and an altar-call like invitation during which those who wished could meet with volunteer counselors and the rest of us took part in a GREAT worship session.

I STRONGLY recommend everyone take their Youth Groups there. Its great music, great speakers, very empowering, and the theology tends toward the generic. We had the cheapest seats available and it didn't hurt the show at all.

I came out of it renewed, invigorated, slightly deaf, and a bit conflicted. As an undergrad I attended an Episcopal Church but was also involved with IVCF. At first I got involved with them as they helped me during a personal crisis at the start of freshman year, but I later found that really enjoyed the worship, although I stopped attending for theological and personal reasons (and couldn't deal with the cattyness of many of the members).
But that really ended junior year.

I now find myself trying to balance a love of traditional worship with needing to break loose as part of my relationship with God. About loving Autumn Blaze and contemporary worship and getting a lot out of it and often having it truly help my personal relationship with God, while having sincere issues with some of the theology that often accompanies it.
I also found myself pondering some of the same things I did when in IVCF.... Am I one of them? I'm a Christian. Am I a Christian - by whose definition? Am I afraid to be, when I often dislike "Christians" so much. Where do I belong? Why do I feel as if I have to pick?

I guess in part because of the sort of activisty type work I do, its turned out that most of my friends are atheists, and I'm used to being a "token" theist. Even with friends who are theists are much more passively so (there may be a God, there may not be, lets move on). So there is something reassuring about being in a room with 14,ooo Christians... even though I suppose that many of them wouldn't "approve" of me, if they knew much about me... which may or may not be true.

Although I'm at Rutgers, I'm still deeply involved in the parish 50 minutes away where I spend middle and high school. I'm the youth group leader (I'm not particularly good with kids), webmaster, an acolyte, etc. However, as much as I love this parish, many of the people, and its worship, I find myself sometimes missing the possibility of being able to throw up my hands in praise of God... a rather embarrassing proposition for a standard Episcopalian liturgy snob.
I'm a bit hesitant to join a campus group because of the problems that stemmed from that as an undergrad. So I hope to spend the next few months when I don't have responsibilities my parish church hopping. I'm not looking for a place to land, but I'm sure God knows what he is doing.

...that They might live.

"If we didn't aspire to live a better life than our parents, then the rest of the world might live"

As I posted a few days ago, a few of my friends and I went down to the Episcopal Church at Princeton to hear Bishop Robinson preach. I said that I would write a reflection later, clearly that didn't happen. He was a great an evangelical preacher as always (its was the third time I heard him preach) and I felt blessed to be there, but it was really the above quote that struck me - struck me enough to bring it up yesterday during the Episcopal Ministry at Rutgers' weekly dinner.

We were talking about water quality, global warming, and the basic care of the environment and the world in general - about our environmental footprint and what we can and can't do to lower it.

Some of the foreign students in my classes often comment on how strange it is that you need a car to get around, similarly, our Californian seminarian said that when he was younger he would drive everywhere. Our communities have developed with the assumption of a car. Even in areas like New Brunswick where one doesn't NEED a car, the few walktoable grocery stores are vastly overpriced. Communities that are structured around the assumption of a car (and electricity...) leave little possibility to lower the ecological footprint that we leave. A member of the organization mentioned that the wealthy are now moving back into cities in part for environmental reasons.

The "American Dream" of my parents generation was to live better than their parents -- this seems to move to the suburbs, have two - four kids, have a free standing home and cars for each... to take a family vacation and eat out once a week. There is now another generation that similarly wants to live "better" than our parents. What we need to realise is that this simply cannot be tied to physical things. There aren't enough resources, there isn't enough capitol.

Since the turn of the last century America has decided to build an empire as its means to get the stuff we want. Bishop Robinson pointed out that Jesus fought imperialism - he fought it and died a humiliating death for it.

We need to fight the empire as well, but most of all, we need to realise that we cannot -- neither morally nor sustainably -- live "better" than our parents if others -- those who make that which we want - are to live.

The US, China, Darfur, and the Big Bad Worf

While I am saddened and angered by the violence in the Darfur region of the Sudan, for the past few years I've been unable to get my head around why the US cares so much about Darfur.
There are humanitarian crises across the globe and no Americans care, but for some inexplicable reason, even the Republicans are all for "Save Darfur."

Why? I mean, since when do most Americans care when "brown people" are being tortured or killed. There are always a few of us referring to Human Rights Watch or Amnesty and crying out over the mistreatment of people in other states, but normally we are looked at with scorn at best.

So why, why Darfur?
I've come up with a reason, and you aren't going to like it...

Ready...


Oil.


Yes, I'm serious... oil.

Since World War II the US has struggled to take control of the oil-rich Middle East. However, while we have been bombing the hell out of (or into) the Middle East, China has been working with oil-rich states in Africa. They have control of much of Southern Sudan, and the US government views of the humanitarian crisis in Darfur as a means to take control (and protect) the oil there. As an Iraq vet and IVAW member put it this past weekend "If the US sends troops to Darfur they are going to first put them in the same place they put them in Iraq - protecting the oil fields." Indeed this sentiment has been echoed by many, oil fields first, people second - if at all.

A few weeks ago MadPriest posted a picture of a starving Darfurian child. We'd have to be incredibly naive to believe that that would move the American government to actually want to help people. No, but this does.

Apologies

My apologies for the minor freakout yesterday. I don't normally get like that. As my best friend reassured me, it was at least in part due to transition anxiety. I knew from the beginning that the MLIS program wasn't fun, and apparently its pretty common to feel upset at this stage in it. I'm meeting with a professor tomorrow, which should be helpful, and Saturday is Autumn Blaze (Christian concert day in North Jersey) with a good friend.
Thank you to everyone who sent hugs, comments or wishes... and I'll try to keep freakouts to a minimum.

Ready to cry, trying not to break down

I'm sitting here in the graduate computer lab, I just snuck out of class.... I have no idea what's going on, but its only Tuesday and this week isn't working out for me.
We were working on something in class, but my files from last week disappeared but as I was trying to figure out something for next class, I didn't hear when he asked who didn't have the files. I have a group presentation in 2 hours and I can't make my section work because of this ridiculous program called Dialog that I will never use as no where that I will ever work will be able to afford it.
I'm sick of theory and to be honest, I don't think I even want to be a librarian. I'm tired, I'm bored and I'm completely unmotivated... and that's what scares me the most -- even when I don't care about work I'm always motivated about something... but I'm sick and tired of all of it. Sick of getting chatty when I'm nervous or being told I have more energy than (fill in the blank)... its a defense mechanism people.... I miss YCP - miss always having someone to go to for a hug or to knock sense into me, but to knowing that people love me, and having people I care about... I have so many opportunities here at Rutgers but I feel so lost.
I want to help people but I'm sick of getting knocked down, I'm tired of fighting and struggling but I don't see any other choice. I don't know where I'm supposed to be -- I'm sick of always being second string... I don't always need credit, but its nice to be acknowledged. I'm sick of people, tired of responsibilities, yet without them, what's the point? I can't see myself as a librarian, I can't stand this program - down the line, I want to be a priest, but what is my family telling me, what is God telling me, does God even want me there? I thought I had found a place where everyone was accepted in TEC, but now I'm not sure if I or others I love are welcome there... if people don't want to go to Lambeth, fine, don't go. The Anglican Communion is great, but so are God's children. So many of my friends are so passionate about so much, they know what they want to do, all I can tell you is that I want to somehow serve God and humanity and I can't even figure out how to do that.
But most of all, right now, I want to find a quiet corner, curl up in a ball, and cry.

+VGR at EC@Princeton

Last Sunday I joined a few of my friends to hear Bishop Robinson of New Hampshire say mass and preach at the Episcopal Church at Princeton University.

I hope to write my thoughts out later today, but below are the notes that I scratched out in sharpie.... topics and quotes....


"If we didn't aspire to live a better life than our parents, then the rest of the world might live"
-defying empire
- disciples rather than (mere) admirers
- will we become the disciples to be until we lose or tax exempt status?
- where are the voices against empire
- Jesus was against the empire (- roman), Is there any doubt if Jesus were around today which empire he'd be defying?
- As episcopalian we don't worship a God locked up in 2000 years of scripture... ... we worship a living God.
- The holy spirit has changed the minds and hearts and it is not going to stop until all are accepted into God's church.

2 Quesions

Just wondering 1. is anyone other than Paul (a) and Tarin reading this?

And does anyone want a really amazing hummus recipe (from Cathy Roe)

oh, and does anyone want a puppy (see below)

Lesson #1 for the day

Never make hummus that starts with a 15.5 ounce can of chickpeas in a 1cup capacity food processor. Adding ingredients to something makes more of it.

The hummus is still amazing though.. just took a while

Puppies need a home

These adorable puppies need a home, don't you think you need one?

I love my job

I love my job

How rediculous is this...

So, as most of you know, the main place I go for news is the bbc website. And most of you also know that I don't know much of anything about pop culture. So, I was on the site, and just by rote the first article I read was about Brittney Spears losing custody for K.Fed. I don't even know why I care, I just do... arg.

Marching Home

Rutgers Against the War (RAW) and the Central Jersey Coalition Against Endless War are sponsoring a weekend Conference entitled "Marching Home: a conference on the Iraq War and its consequences for veterans."
Amy Goodman and Jimmy Massey are the keynote speakers. For more information visit Marchinghome.org