a bit of a katie girl.

my mom is one of those delightful people who dispenses a lot of advice. and i mean, a lot of advice. she has spent the last twenty three years advising me. and while i wish i could say that i listen to all of her wisdom…i don’t. like most willful, sassy children i tend to let it go in one ear and out the other. until later on when it bites me in the ass and i think…i should have listened to mom.

there are many mom-isms that i’ve only recently come to understand, even though they are all advice that has been offered to me over and over again. these include (but are certainly not limited to):

1. if everyone else says it is a bad decision, it probably is. if everyone else says you are wrong, you probably are.

2. everyone deserves to love and be loved.

3. the people who are worth it fall in love with you because of the journey you are on. not because of the destination.

i often call my mom for advice. i also often call her when i am bored, sick, irritated, happy, excited, nervous, anxious…well, you get the picture. the woman has been subject to my every mood swing and tear since birth and as a result, knows exactly how to deal with me. so when i called her last night, after a weekend of moping where my internal dialogue went something like this–

i’m so bored. why aren’t r. and d. home. i miss my family. i want to move home. i’m sick of washington d.c. i’m never going to get a job. i’m irritated with my housemates. i want to travel. everyone else is getting married. everyone else is having babies. i’m fat. i’m ugly. i’m bored. my life is so uninteresting.

–i was expecting sympathy. no such luck. she was in the middle of finishing her final paper for her multicultural health class (because on top of the full time job of being my mother and managing an entire emergency room…she is getting her master’s degree) and after patiently listening for a few minutes she offered a new kind of advice. in the form of the following, simple question:

where is your spunk?

where is my spunk? what a pointless question. i’m tired, i’m crabby and for heaven’s sake I DON’T KNOW where it is. boy, was i irritated. i hung up the phone irritated. i went to bed irritated and thrashed around for awhile like a two year old. and i woke up this morning still annoyed. then, in an effort to make myself feel better, i went on dictionary.com and looked up the word spunk, because for some reason etymology tends to have a pacifying effect on my moods. here is what i came up with:

Definition #1: pluck, spirit, mettle.
Definition #2: touchwood, tinder or punk.

hmm. i cross referenced (good english major that i am) and came up with the following definitions for pluck:

1. to pull suddenly.
2. courage or resolution in the face of difficulties.

and then (finally beginning to feel a bit better), i cross referenced mettle:

1. courage and fortitude.
2. in the position of being incited to do one’s best

use it in a sentence, please?

the loss of the first round put him on his mettle to win the match.

okay. so maybe mom was right. although i’m anxious to be done with lvc…to move forward with my life…i need to face where i am right now with a bit more excitement. with a bit more spunk. i need to be on my mettle to come out of this year with a sense of achievement. a better sense of self. an unshakable belief that i have grown this year.

and in the name of personal growth, here are the areas of my life i’ve identified as needing to approach with a bit more pluck:

1. my commitment to exercise, eating right and personal health.
2. the eternal, awful search for employment.
3. my community.
4. healing my heart and forgiving myself.
5. enjoying my life in washington d.c.

so, in the name of pluck (and because mom is usually right), here it goes. i have seven weeks left and i am going to enjoy them and keep moving forward. because the truth of the matter is, when it is freezing cold in minneapolis next november, i am going to be pissed at myself if i don’t take advantage of the time i had to be myself, here.

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