a bit of a katie girl.

I work out regularly but eat chocolate everyday
I don’t like chivalry but I will let a guy buy me drinks
I like Alanis Morisette and Dolly Parton
I am very passionate but rarely show emotion
I am not scared of large dogs, horses or llamas but I am terrified of rats, mice and long legged bugs
I think professional athletes are grossly overpaid but I watch the Superbowl every year
I am easily bored by romantic comedies but I enjoy cheesy love songs
I have many strong opinions but I probably won’t share them unless you ask
I am often annoyed by the way the media portrays women but I tune into Desperate Housewives every Sunday
I am very sarcastic but will lie to keep from intentionally offending someone
I think Facebook’s News Feed is a ridiculous invasion of privacy but I frequently read it
I love to be with friends but I will only exercise alone
I love to travel but I have trouble reading maps
I am a pro-choice carnivore but I have trouble eating an egg when I think of a baby chick
I take pride in my independence but I am constantly seeking the approval of others
I don’t like to fight but I love to win
I have many layers and wear many masks
I am complex, unpredictable and sometimes hypocritical
I am a Katie Girl

special thanks to the author for this week’s contribution…a true study in paradox! interestingly enough, the word paradox comes from the greek word paradoxon which means “contrary to expectation or opinion” (para=contrary, doxa=opinion). kudos to all the katie girls out there embracing paradox in their own lives by being willing to defy the expectations and opinions of others in favor of being a better version of themselves. as walt whitman once said: “do i contradict myself? then i contradict myself. i am large. i contain multitudes”…maybe he was a katie girl too? (wink).

xoxo.
ellie

p.s. for more information on the katie girl project or to submit an entry, click here!

i have written in the past on the difficulties of “living green”. as part of the volunteer program i am currently participating in, we are required to make a good faith effort at reducing our consumption, eating vegetarian, recycling, etc.

while living simply certainly has had its positives (i can now cook more things with lentils than you may have never known existed), from time to time our efforts toward sustainability take on a decidedly hilarious bent. case in point: the brick in the toilet.

our house has three toilets. in an effort to reduce water consumption we “let it mellow” in all three. we also use a graywater system (read: bucket in the sink) to manually flush one of them. last weekend when my little brother was visiting, the toilet on the second floor broke….something that was remarkably inconvenient for those of us who live on that particular floor. we called our landlord, who paid us a visit last night and then sent us the following e-mail this morning:

A brick was leaning against the fill valve in the tank which prevented the float from moving up and down. The handle is also broken. It looked as thought the handle was broken when the brick was installed, but I can’t be sure. I recommend not putting objects in the tank in order to save water. I can adjust the fill valve to allow varying amounts of water into the tank. Reducing the amount of water below what the manufacturer suggests can affect the ability to flush properly, however.

now, this may seem a bit ridiculous to you. who puts a brick in a toilet? but as it turns out, this is a time honored, water saving trick. which i learned from a quick google search of “brick in toilet”. take for example www.toiletology.com. in addition to providing helpful advice on the topic of “lazy flushing” (which apparently means that you need to flush the toilet twice to get, ahem, all the “stuff” down)…it says the following about bricks in the toilet:

Unfortunately, there is a water saving idea that has circulated for years, that says if you put a brick in the toilet tank you use less water per flush. It’s a bad idea and shouldn’t be used, because the bricks can disintegrate and crumbs will wash into the bowl channel and clog the holes. If the channel becomes clogged with brick crumbs, you are probably going to have to replace the toilet bowl. You can achieve better results using a plastic milk jug filled with enough marbles or gravel to keep it from floating.

In addition, a brick will not displace enough water to matter. There is always an inch or so of water left in the tank when the flapper closes and the tank begins to refill. Bricks are heavy; you could crack a tank if you accidentally drop the brick inside the tank.

well then. it appears that (in the never ending effort toward green living), one of the women who lived in the house before us plopped a brick in the toilet thinking that it would save water. no dice. instead we ended up with a big ‘ol mess on our hands and two toilets for nine people over the weekend (gross). so as i’ve said before, it isn’t easy being green.

this weekend we learned that some efforts toward sustainability can be hazardous…but (as ever) that doesn’t mean we’re get to stop trying. being a good steward of the earth’s resources might not mean putting a brick in the toilet…but there are a host of every day ways to save the planet. you can check out some of my favorites on treehugger.com which has a host of helpful articles including “how to green your sex life” and “how to green your funeral”. hmm.

happy wednesday, everyone! stay tuned for a new katie girl story later this week.

xoxo.
ellie

i need to preface this by saying that i absolutely love my church. and i mean that. i go to a great, progressive, interesting lutheran church in northwest washington d.c. that is filled with all kinds of wonderful, supportive people who have made my time here much less lonely.

i also happen to love liturgy. of the high church variety. incense, pipe organ, chanting the psalms…i can’t get enough of it. i love the structure and the order. i love that when i stand in the chancel with the augustana lutheran church choir and sing “a mighty fortress is our god” my parents and my brother are halfway across the country doing the same thing. i love that if i could look back to a sunday morning seventy years ago, my great grandpa draeger would be preaching a sermon in his little lutheran church in brownton, minnesota. and that if i looked back one hundred years before that, my ancestors would be sitting in a lutheran church somewhere in northern germany singing the same hymn, listening to the same stories, believing in the same god. so when people talk about “finding jesus” i feel a little confused, because in my family…we never lost him. my christian faith is a faith that goes back generations, it is communal, and i stand in my faith knowing that it is not entirely my own. it has been bequeathed to me by generations of faithful men and women. by a church that, although imperfect, still reflects the movement of a living god, here and now. in this place. in these times.

with all that being said, i move to the humorous part of the entry. this weekend at church the smoke alarm went off. right at the beginning of the service. this is largely because augustana has what i like to delicately refer to as “an incense problem”. we love the stuff. seriously. we use it as often as possible. and since we are still celebrating the easter season, we’re rocking it every week. along with “he is risen, he is risen indeed!”

it has recently warmed up in d.c. that lovely point where neither air conditioning nor heat is immediately necessary. so the church (full of stingy lutherans, god bless them), had neither on this past sunday morning. my guess is that this decreased the air flow through the sanctuary and the billowing smoke from the incense burner made its way to the ceiling and hung out there long enough for the smoke alarm to go off. right in the middle of “this is the feast”. but my favorite part about all of this is that nobody moved. no one said anything. sure there were smiles, perhaps even a few giggles (i plead the fifth on this one), but the service went on.

and when we started chanting psalm 68 (may god arise, may his enemies be scattered;may his foes flee before him. as smoke is blown away by the wind, may you blow them away)…no seriously, the service still went on. the ritual continued. as i sat there trying not to laugh i realized that this anecdote could be used in two very distinct ways as a metaphor for faith. either (1) you need to persevere in spite of interruption or (2) an emphasis on ritual can blind people to what is really happening around them. perhaps needless to say, i choose the former rather than the latter.

the thing of it is, god interrupts our lives all the time. in fact, there are times when i feel like my entire path in life has consisted of interruptions. there have been multiple times in my life when i thought things were going on swimmingly, when in fact there was a major detour coming my way. there are those of you out there who might call this fate, or karma, or perhaps even bad luck…but what i’m reflecting on this morning (and have been over the course of this project) is that the most complicated times in my life are often the most interesting. the interruptions in the path i’ve created for myself are where the real divinity in my life seems to sneak in. just like some of the most complicated women i know, the katie girls, are the most beautiful. they radiate the knowledge that life rarely turns out the way you have it planned…but somehow god, or luck, or buddha, or the universe…pulls a fast one on you and you end up in a better place than where you started.

when i was going through a “dark night of faith” a couple years ago, i had the following quote on my mirror from renowned christian author c.s. lewis:

“god whispers in our pleasures, but shouts in our pain. it his megaphone to rouse a deaf world”

what i believe, and what the smoke alarm reminded me of this weekend, is that the painful parts of life are often an awakening to something greater. put another way by john lennon:

“life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans”

and finally, from the gurus we all hold so near and dear, the sex and the city gals:

“maybe mistakes are what make our fate… without them what would shape our lives? maybe if we had never veered off course we wouldn’t fall in love, have babies, or be who we are. after all, things change, so do cities, people come into your life and they go. but it’s comforting to know that the ones you love are always in your heart… and if you’re very lucky, a plane ride away.”

more katie girl stories tomorrow, until then happy monday.

xoxo.
ellie

i really like kathleen norris. “dakota: a spiritual geography” is one of those books i wish i had written. that i think i could have written, if i had significantly better writing skills and a bit more introspection. in “dakota” kathleen norris writes of her family’s homestead: “(it is) my spiritual geography, the place where i’ve wrestled my story out of the circumstances of landscape and inheritance”.

my dad and i were talking about kathleen norris when i was home this weekend. we were also talking about our spiritual geography. my spiritual geography. about the fact that (on his side) i am a sixth generation resident of the prairies of southern minnesota. i know that in our increasingly mobile world, this is more and more rare. very few people have that kind of tie to a specific location. we have to create our own geography.

its like those advertisements for the phone company that combine the names of major cities to explain to you the places that call most often. for me its owaolaftwincitiesmetro. next year it will be washiolaftonna. or maybe twinonnawash. depending.

i guess the point of all of this is that the older i get, the more i realize that home isn’t really home anymore. at least not how i originally envisioned it. like so many other things in my life, it is never going to be again what it once was. your geography changes. and even the places you think haven’t changed, actually have. because they now mean something completely different. so while blast softserve is still on the corner of rose and north oak, and still serves my favorite cookie dough ice cream treats, i saw it with new eyes when my brother and i went there last week. same teal shutters and walk up window. different heart.

i was attempting to explain all of this to my best friend a. over dinner in northfield on friday evening and how much it used to bother me. how i used to look at the ice cream shop, owatonna high school and the steele county free fairgrounds and wish i could go back. that i could do it all over again and somehow fix things. prevent a broken heart. walk away sooner. live my life without being afraid of losing him. i used to look at these places, see these places, and only feel hurt and betrayal. the only thing i took away from home was how much i had missed. how much time i had wasted. the same with st. olaf. frankly, i decided to move to washington d.c. because i was terrified of missing my own life. which is what being at home used to make me feel like.

but as i told a., this trip was different. my lame-ass analogy went something like this: do you know how your foot feels when its asleep? numb, but when you try to move forward at all by putting pressure on it, it hurts like hell? that is what my life felt like, my whole body. i felt trapped by this searing pain every time i tried to move forward. because everywhere i looked i saw who i was. and i thought that was who i was supposed to be. but this time visiting home was different.

for the first time it felt like mine again. my own home. not the home of something and someone i’d rather forget. and while i don’t believe in signs, when i was driving up to st. olaf to visit some old friends, i heard the song. you know the one. that song we’ve all claimed as our own that resurrects the skeletons in the closet and makes a scarred wound feel like its bleeding again. mine happened to come on 89.3 the current just as i was pulling onto i-35. and i listened to it. for the first time. in two years. from start to finish. and there were no tears and no hurt. memories, certainly. like the time i recorded myself singing it on his cell phone. but as i remembered that it felt so distant from my life right now. more like a movie that i had watched once than a person i had ever been.

a couple months ago, when i was being super angst-y about staying in d.c. or moving home to minnesota, my brother (wise beyond his years at eighteen) said roughly the following to me: “i know that it took a lot of courage for you to move to washington d.c. and i know why you did it. but you’ve done what you went out there to do. don’t you think the really courageous thing to do now would be to move home and start the new life you’ve created here, where you belong, with your family?”

yes, russ. i suppose you’re right. and as much as moving to washington d.c. has complicated my personal geography, it has somehow managed to simplify it as well. home is home. d.c. is d.c. and i am myself in both places. finally.

xoxo.
ellie