"How are you?"

Being a student at a Christian school I find myself consistently affronted with this question. It is to me a deceptively simple question which is in reality very difficult to answer. Lately when I am presented with this query I am speechless for a few moments, I don't want to be shallow, lie or give more information than people want to hear. So what should I say? How is this question best answered?

More often than not the simple answer is "good, how are you?" of course this answer is met with dissatisfaction. On the one hand if the person asking doesn't really want to know how you are doing then that succinct answer is great and they feel like they fulfilled their social duty in asking you, but you might be left feeling the dearth of their care and maybe a bit unresolved. You are unwilling to dump your emotional load on them until they ask and if they don't you have certainly been the victim of a terrible crime. On the other hand if the inquirer really wants to know how you are doing then you have not met their expectations with a simple, "good" or "fine" or "okay". They may have been expecting you to delve deeply into the emotional and complex parts of your soul. A simple answer, when given to that caring person, is usually countered by something like, "yeah, but how are you really doing?" to which they expect the essential truth behind your painted mask to reveal itself in all its burdened, unholy, glory. If you're in a hurry this is just annoying. If you've heard it thirty times that day it's also annoying. Who new that fine, meant Freaked out, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional? I was under the impression it meant "fine". Now this doesn't mean that everyone who wants to know how their friends are doing shouldn't ask because its annoying. May it never be so. however, maybe there should simply be a little less reading into simple answers, or maybe there should be more thoughtful answers. Trying to come up with a different greeting than "how are you?" may be an appropriate solution.

Community -

The other day I had a moment where there was a lull in an otherwise busy day and happened to wander into a very pleasant conversation. Some women were reminiscing about the days when we had laundry hanging outside on a line. Well that was the apparent subject matter anyways. The underlying idea was a sort of nostalgia about the community which they enjoyed as children. Laundry is one of those simple things that reveals and represents a sense of community which seems to have been more easy to come by in past years. They observed the openness of putting your delicates out on a rope for all the neighbors to see and in return seeing their linens, blowing in the breeze. You could watch the neighborhood's children growing up as you saw first diapers, then tiny dresses and little overalls. Now we carefully stow our laundry in washers and dryers, efficient and low profile. In a similar fashion, families carefully sequester themselves in their homes and leave quickly in their traveling box, tinted windows make them a little less visible. Things now are fast, they work so perfectly, life is a well-oiled machine! That means relationships are a bit farther off on the radar. When you can drive by the old neighbor mowing his lawn instead of having to walk by there's no danger of being stopped for a conversation, that might make you late to work. Things fit so well in boxes and the more private the better.

Wait -- that doesn't seem quite right.

Community is beautiful.

People laughing, talking, working together to create a better more nurturing living environment, thats more like it. I'm afraid that that form of community has flown away on the wings of time. And yet, hope is not altogether gone, communities still exist and people still speak to one another. O God let us not forget the blessing and yes the necessity of the comfort and company of our brothers.

We're Back

I only put in one earring this morning before leaving my room, I'm having trouble typing, I have no appetite, my eyes are red and burning. Every muscle in my body aches so I can barely lift my arms or legs. I am having trouble focusing and when people ask me questions I have to ask them to repeat themselves, sometime more than once. I keep tripping while I walk across perfectly smooth surfaces and my vision goes fuzzy from time to time. My brain feels as though is shutting down one compartment at a time. No I'm not old, no I'm not dying of any terminal disease. I am a sophomore, nursing major in the Torrey program with an alter ego who is in ROTC three times a week. 'Welcome back troops' reads the banner announcing our dorm mixer, intending to get the students excited about being back at school. Don't get me wrong I am happy to be back, 'a life without learning is like being blind and can't see' but I could do without the symptoms of a mentally ill patient. On the plus side I have already read 1/3 of the Psalms, Machiavelli's 'The Prince" and the first book of Edmund Spenser's "Faerie Queene" and just beginning 'A midsummer Night's Dream'. Welcome back troops! Fight for an education, for self-actualization, for meaning, for friends, for food, for rapidly diminishing parking spaces, for sleep. Good luck all.

Santa Monica

Walking through Santa Monica is a trip. Although its a beach city you get an LA vibe because of all the different people who live there, work there, and tour there. Stopping in the promenade to watch a group of self-proclaimed acrobats and break dancers I began to experience this new place. One of the performers was from Brazil, another form Argentina and a third from San luis Obispo, the host introduced them so his port of origin remained a mystery. They shamelessly panhandled for money and made racial jokes which produced some nervous laughter and lowered eyes from the surrounding crowd. They urged us to come closer and advised us not to leave. Promising to give a good show in return for rich white people's money. They started their work doing some pretty amazing stunts. Someone in the crowd shouted something about the American dream. After the street show the crowd dispersed leaving the odd dollar or two behind them.

A man plugged into a speaker strummed loudly on a guitar, his black vest embroidered with celestial bodies glinting in the sun. Not far from him a rather forlorn looking girl snag "My Heart Will Go On" pleading with the passersby for an audience with her look.

We passed numerous homeless people sleeping on the grass with piles of blankets and cardboard boxes, or working their daily job. Begging. They held up their bits of cardboard declaring their homelessness in bold black marker letters. One man sat in a wheelchair cradling a sign in his lap that told each passerby that he was in need of hand surgery. He rested his withered hands on either arm of the chair. As I walked down the pier I ran into another crowd watching a man who claimed he would be the first "black African American to fly" and that he was happy to be out of prison, but "DON'T RUN"! he yelled as his face shifted rapidly from an impish smile to a serious, hard mask. "The police are right there"

He played music through a speaker from a gold iPod nano and danced to an "animation" mix he said he made while in prison rather than fighting. He would occasionally reach down into his bag and pull out a Michael Jackson, or Obama mask and continue his dance. At one point a little black girl gave him two dollars and he yelled "Thank ya sister! Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King!" The little girl looked confused and looked back at her dad asking what he was talkin' about.

A little farther on a woman with a painted face, in a faded purple belly dancer costume clanking together a pair of zils in either hand and balancing two swords horizontally atop her head. I continued on past the caricature stalls and cotton candy vendors to the edge of the pier. Several people had set up fishing lines, some possibly hoping to catch dinner. As the faces lined up on the railing stared out at the vast ocean I turned to look at them. Some stared longingly at the sea, others gazed at their lover standing by. A man who clearly carried his house on the purple mountain bike next to him jerked up his fishing pole and I watched him start to reel something in. I looked at the people several of whom had turned with interest to this small commotion. He seemed accustomed to people stare at him like another attraction on the pier as he tried to catch fish beneath the pier. He hauled up a small fish and a man above him asked if it was a catfish, he replied through several missing teeth that it were a drag'n fish. Another voice said nice cat and he said even louder that it were a drag'n fish if you would look its cuz it has a face just like a drag'n. No one seemed to hear him.

Walking back along the pier I noticed a poster board sign hoisted above my head by a wooden stake assuring me that God (& Jesus) were the energy in the universe, and more that I didn't catch. On the backside I was given the opportunity to see David the preacher man's youtube video all about it. I looked at the man who I assumed to be David, holding up the sign, walking down the pier with his eyes straight ahead. I passed the flying man, who had restarted his act, promising to fly again for a new group of people and the acrobats were still dancing and "passing the collection plate a second time like church". A black man wearing nothing but a neon green thong hanging some scraps of leopard print cloth was talking about just standin' there bein' blessed and nek'ed.

Most of these people were asking for money, but they had another common thread. They had no time for shame. People bared their bodies, danced, sang, exhibited their lagging, or lack of hygiene, and need for clothes, slept, caught fish, ate, and spoke to crowds of people, without missing an opportunity to ask for more money. Most of these things are considered private by the middle class. Desperation and pleading did not seem to be a part of the mentality of these people. Rather they acted as if this was their daily job and they were just doing what they needed to do to get by. For the majority that means exploiting themselves and accepting that they have been stripped of their privacy because they have been stripped of their homes.

I get to these points in my life where I am simply, and thoroughly overwhelmed by the amount of information in the world. It begins when I become truly interested in some train of thought or genre of discovery. One such example is recurrent in books. As they say, one thing leads to another, and this is no less true in a library. As I'm sure that I am not the first person to realize this I will simply restate an idea here. Every book is somehow connected to the others. Whether it be an obscure reference, an obvious allusion, a connecting quote, or the need for support, authors continually refer to their predecessors and contemporaries throughout their work. As I read I begin to make dent in whatever reading list I currently have going. Then to my great delight I discover those connections which will lead me to other great authors and engrossing books. I add the manageable handful of book titles, lets say three, to my list. I move on to those books and find a few more, then to my dismay my 'to read' list has suddenly become ten times as long as the list of those I have finished. The realization of how much there is to discover and, along with that, that my life is limited, often result in a cessation of my trail. This not suddenly but gradually. My fear of the ever growing mountain of literature before me causes my noble quest to ebb, and I simply leave off at the tail end of the book I'm just finishing. I would assimilate this feeling to a soap-box car's journey down a hill, It begins rolling, not propelled by any motor and gradually, due to the incline of the hill, it picks up speed. The only problem is as I realize I'm going too fast and move to implement the brakes, I realize I have none and shut my eyes anticipating a crash. at the bottom of the hill, rather than impact, I feel a gradual decrease in in speed and eventually roll to a stop thanks to gravity. There are certainly more books in this world than I could ever read. It is only after I forget about that that I can actually read again. Then of course the cycle begins all over again. However, it does not end in hopelessness, rather it causes me to stare at the world which contains so many books in wide eyed wonder. Leaving me in utter awe and dazzled amazement at the sheer magnitude that the written word covers both spatially and conceptually.

Ella Minnow Pea. Good book, easy read I think it at a Jr. high reading level but the idea was really interesting. Its about the importance of language and introduces the reader to a fictional island which has been founded by the creator of the palindrome (sentence which contains all the letters of the alphabet) "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". The society begins to lose letters of the alphabet as they are banned by the council, the only government the small island has. It is interesting to see how even the loss of a seemingly less frequented 'Z' can affect the language of a group of people.

Read always.

I have been recently recommended to the books 'Tuesdays With Morrie' and 'Ella Minnow Pea'. I was directed to the first by a blogger whom I have only just discovered and have been reading avidly since then, A drifter at chaseandre.com. He wrote that he hasn't met a person he doesn't like who has read this book. So I figure theres no harm in reading it, right? So I did. I started on a Tuesday and finished by Thursday it was an incredible journey and now I'm sorry I ate it up so fast even though I had other things to do and needed the time for. Anyways I enjoyed the read and would recommend it to anyone. It is heartbreaking to watch a man degraded by a disease that he cannot overcome but the book is more than that. It includes that man's conquering in a different way, through passing on his wisdom to the next generation, a wisdom that he could not pass on if it weren't for his imminent death. He says that one learns how to live when they are dying. These lessons that he learns from death are vastly important and could mean so much to someone who would slow down to realize that life is about living. Some people get to the end of their life and suddenly see that they have tried so hard to prepare for their life that they never actually lived it! what a tragedy. So read always its a part of life. I'm going to read 'Ella Minnow Pea' recommended to me by a good friend, over thanksgiving break and tell you how it is.