this explains my life so well

I live in a super zip, and it means my life is so, so strange, and you should read this article.

some interesting quotes:


“It’s a megalopolis of eggheads,” said William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution.


Life surrounded by affluence can also breed worries that might seem absurd to people who do not live in Super Zips — such as whether to hire a professional tennis coach to help a child make the school team, or get an iPhone for a child in elementary school.


When Kulp travels outside the region, he says he realizes that people he meets don’t talk much about things such as foreign policy and countering nuclear terrorism, as he does at home with other people with advanced degrees. Instead, he said, “people elsewhere talk more about what they see every day.”

“They mention ‘those people in Washington,’ ” he said, echoing a common feeling that the words are perjoratively pinned on everyone who lives in the region, not just its politicians and bureaucrats.

what a weird day

Thia: It's still funny to me that you like hockey now.

Me: I learned something about the Stanley Cup the other night. When it gets full of names, they can just - it's on rings, the names are, I mean, and they can just slide the top one off and put a new blank one on the bottom.

Thia: [blank look]

Me: So each name is on it for like - 13 years.

Thia: So the names aren't on it forever?

Me: No. But they have a vault to put them in!

Thia: What - [helpless giggling] - How did you even -

Me: I saw this picture online and it looked like it was getting full of names, so I wondered what happened. When it got full of names. So I googled it -

Thia: [more laughing] Classic.

Me: - and there were all these threads on Yahoo Ask about the same thing, and they were all answered pretty much the same way, so I figured it was probably true.

Thia: ... It's like David Foster Wallace, setting the novel-about-everything in a Tennis Academy. Maybe this will be important to your writing, someday.

Me: ... maybe.

--

I almost missed the bus today coming out of work - there's construction or something going on in front of the bus stop and the lane was closed and my bus almost drove past without stopping. I ran out into the closed lane and waved at the bus and the driver pulled over half a block down the street, and I ran and got on. It kind of felt like I had suddenly turned into one of those city-slicker New Yorkers from the movies, or something. Like when people very confidently hail a taxi in a crowded street. 

--

Conversations with the Boss always makes me feel vaguely panicky. I could feel myself flushing today when he was asking me about my results/experiments... "Hey, no pressure," he said, "just as long as you're having fun."

Right. Let me just stop sweating nervously and then we can talk.

--

I thought for about half an hour today that my identity got stolen, thanks to a charge I didn't recognize on my bank statement. Then, after I had already called the bank in a panic, I realized it was actually legitimate. 

It was one of those moments that made me feel 'incompetent at life.' One of these days, I keep thinking, I will actually have everything under control. I won't make any more embarrassing mistakes. EVER.

That probably isn't true, huh. : )

5 signs you're part of generation y

1. you have a blog.

2. people follow you on Spotify.

3. you are weirded out by #2, but not enough to make your playlists private.

4. you go to a cabin in WV with college friends and feel a sense of shock when you realize no one in the whole group has a smartphone.

5. your thought at that moment of realization was I should put that on my blog. 

transitions

I have six days left at camp hebron this summer.

That sentance shocks me. I have been through orientation, been a counselor for five camps, worked in the kitchen, spent a week at the beach, and I have one week left. And that's it - then I am getting ready for school.

I don't know how, yet, to process the last six months of my life. Leaving the States to fly to the Middle East, witnessing beauty and tragedy, normal life and revolutions, calling out marhaba! kifek? to people in the streets of Beit Sahour, eating a Shabbat meal with two Jewish families, praying in the church of the Holy Sepulcher, planting grape vines in the West Bank -

and then coming back to work alongside people who have never seen the sun set over Jerusalem, who do not know what it is like to descend the cliffs of Arbel looking over the Sea of Galilee, who have never watched the news in Beirut with a quickening heart, hoping, hoping that peace will win, that democracy will take root, that revolution will spill into Damascus; coming to work alongside people who do not carry the horror of knowing that what you hoped for is coming to pass, that revolutionary things are happening and people are dying and you could leave, because you are wealthy, because you are lucky, blessed, because you are American -

and friends of mine are working in Colombia, are giving two years of their life to seek out the heartbreak, the ugly, the pain of a new place and breathe life into it, bring redemption, hope, Jesus into it -

and I am here. loving kids and their families and singing silly songs and planning devotions and eating pizza and swimming in a swimming pool that so many syrians, egyptians, palestinians, jordanians can only dream of. i am here and what is my purpose, what am i doing -

it is difficult. beyond difficult; perhaps the hardest thing I have ever done. trying to sort through the emotions, the memories, knowing I need to be present now, that I have been asked by leadership here (and by God) to throw myself wholeheartedly into loving people here.

I am still confused about so many things. And I don't know when, if ever, I will come to the place where my questions will find their answers, where I will feel like at long last, to use music terminology, the suspension will be resolved.

But I am able to testify to this: God is in the transitions. I've felt like I've gone through whiplash the last few months, and it's been painful. Through it all, though, I know I've never been alone.

camp hebron

It's been a long time since my last blog post. I think this is because I have been having a hard time figuring out how to put my experiences into words. The things I have seen, the thoughts I am having are big and messy and don't feel like they fit well into a coherent format.


So now I am at camp, after a month of sleeping and reading and hanging out with people who are important to me, and it is only about a day and a half until I get my first campers of the summer and I am SOOOO excited. It is crazy to realize that I am here; that I am not in the Middle East, or at home, or at EMU, but back at camp hebron after a full year of school.


On Thursday the staff had a footwashing service and one of the counselors prayed for me: she said, God, thank you for the complexity of Emily's heart. I heard that and felt free; that it is okay for me to feel confused and overwhelmed and torn between worlds right now. God looks at the complexity of my heart and smiles; takes pleasure in the intricacies of creation.


Here are some things I am hoping for this summer:
hikes through the woods
catching lightning bugs with 8 and 9 year old girls
letters from friends and family
baked oatmeal
explorations of the Bible