I decided to wait for two days until I calmed down so my post could have some meat to it instead of just ranting and raving. I've been having a small problem with church lately. It seems most times I go the pastor speaks about Islam or the end times or something of the sort. I was talking to my roommates about this Saturday as we were trying to decide which church to go to. I told them I'm tired of the same old shit services (sorry folks), and that if the pastor spoke about Islam or the end times I might walk out. They assured me this pastor was on a series and it wouldn't include these topics. So I went to our church here on campus (about 1200 people attend). Everything was going fine, the worship was a bit dry for me, but lately it has been. The pastor started speaking and he was talking about narratives and how important they are. Everyone has one, it's important to who you are...blah blah blah. He starts to tell Jesus' narrative and it's going well, I'm looking at Christ in a bit different way and everything is fine. Then he decides to compare the fundamentals of the Bible cross-religiously...yup you guessed it --he picked Islam. He only said one sentence but it caused silent, hot tears to flow. He said something along the lines of the narrative of the Qur'an being a god of vengeanceand no wonder Muslims are so...dedicated to the things they do. Clearly, to me meaning suicide bombing. Then he moved on to another topic. Just real quick but real deadly. All I could think about was the 1200 people who were there just filled their knowledge bank about Islam with one more slanderous fact. I think I became slightly dehydrated with the amount of tears that flowed down my cheeks at how sad, angry and upset his one sentence made me.
In other news, I had a confrontation with one of my friends on Monday night. There has been what I would definitely call a rift between my suite now and the suite I used to live in. I have felt for the past few weeks that they had just written me off and were ignoring me. Turns out I was partially right. I talked to my friend and she said everyone is just feeling 'weird' about me being back. I'm back but apparently different and they don't know how to be my friend. Again, for the second time in two days I started crying those silent, hot tears. I want to live my life here like I've been changed. If I go back to being the same old Mandy then the last seven months of my life were done in vain. I will NOT pretend to be someone I'm not. Who knows what will happen with all of us.
Also, I put in my application for Student Body President yesterday--we'll see what happens.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Monday, February 26, 2007
No I'm not engaged
But it was fun to see people's reactions. I think you all deserve to hear the full story so here it is:
Diana and I work at the computer Help Desk at Asbury. We have a very interesting staff at the Help Desk and in Information Services in general. We're a close knit bunch, like a family (these are the same people I work for that I told you were Orthodox and I now attend church with). Well while I was gone they adopted a new policy of asking student workers for their blog sites and reading their blogs. This lead to a few rather humorous interactions.
Before I left for Egypt Laura and Jordan (two student employees) were dating. The Jordan broke up with Laura. Laura posted on her blog site that it was really weird that Jordan broke up with her and was now dating her best friend. My boss Bert read this and assumed that Laura's best friend was Diana. Bert then went down to confront Diana about this who got a big kick out of it.
Well over Christmas break Diana wrote a fictional blog post, that was labeled fiction, in which she talks about being engaged to a guy she hardly knows. She's quite the writer and was just writing it for fun. Well my boss' boss Paul (the IS manager) read it (you can read it if you like) and assumed that it was real and congratulated her. Later he realized that it may not be real and had Bert go and ask her if it were real or not.
Well a few weeks ago Diana and I started dating and we thought it would be fun to intentionally mess with our bosses' heads, mainly Bert though. We initially did this by not announcing to many people we were together, not changing our status on facebook or elsewhere, etc. It was really fun, some days you could tell he was wondering if we were together, but was afraid to ask due to past mistakes and other days we had him wholly convinced that he was imagining things.
What many of you witnessed was the last step in this game of mental cat and mouse where we faked an engagement. We even when out and got a fake ring, fake pictures, and made up fake stories (my story is on facebook her's is here: http://didims7.wordpress.com/2007/02/26/dreams/).
So anyway it was fun to mess with my bosses, but we are not engaged and won't be anytime in the near future. Hope I didn't mess with your heads too much!
Diana and I work at the computer Help Desk at Asbury. We have a very interesting staff at the Help Desk and in Information Services in general. We're a close knit bunch, like a family (these are the same people I work for that I told you were Orthodox and I now attend church with). Well while I was gone they adopted a new policy of asking student workers for their blog sites and reading their blogs. This lead to a few rather humorous interactions.
Before I left for Egypt Laura and Jordan (two student employees) were dating. The Jordan broke up with Laura. Laura posted on her blog site that it was really weird that Jordan broke up with her and was now dating her best friend. My boss Bert read this and assumed that Laura's best friend was Diana. Bert then went down to confront Diana about this who got a big kick out of it.
Well over Christmas break Diana wrote a fictional blog post, that was labeled fiction, in which she talks about being engaged to a guy she hardly knows. She's quite the writer and was just writing it for fun. Well my boss' boss Paul (the IS manager) read it (you can read it if you like) and assumed that it was real and congratulated her. Later he realized that it may not be real and had Bert go and ask her if it were real or not.
Well a few weeks ago Diana and I started dating and we thought it would be fun to intentionally mess with our bosses' heads, mainly Bert though. We initially did this by not announcing to many people we were together, not changing our status on facebook or elsewhere, etc. It was really fun, some days you could tell he was wondering if we were together, but was afraid to ask due to past mistakes and other days we had him wholly convinced that he was imagining things.
What many of you witnessed was the last step in this game of mental cat and mouse where we faked an engagement. We even when out and got a fake ring, fake pictures, and made up fake stories (my story is on facebook her's is here: http://didims7.wordpress.com/2007/02/26/dreams/).
So anyway it was fun to mess with my bosses, but we are not engaged and won't be anytime in the near future. Hope I didn't mess with your heads too much!
Sunday, February 25, 2007
life is beautiful
ok so I just signed on to facebook and basically, well everyone needs to check out Bryan's profile, because holy crap! I'll leave it at that.
Ok anyway I thought I'd let u know that I had my first arabic lesson and deffinitely still can't pronounce my letters. But at least my teacher's a lot more patient than turban Nahed, and he's freakin hilarious, and his kid hates me already. We're still learning letters, thank God.
Also, remember how we had to do that big Qur'an paper last semester. Well I'm continuing that project for one of my classes this semester. I'm doing a cross-cultural, cross-religious look at interpretation of the story in the Qur'an about Adam and the tree in the garden. I have three interviews in Egypt and three interviews here so far. I interviewed Fatiha, who I'm teaching English, and she wants me to interview her husband. I got invited to her house to get to know each other better too, yay! I interviewed my housemate and her boyfriend from India too. Its really interesting guys.
O and tonight, by another of the weird coincidences that seem to make up my life, the two guys at Calvin from Egypt sat next to me at LOFT (its our sunday night worship service thing) and so after the service I was like, "hey you're the guys from Egypt right?" Haha, smooth I know. The one I met freshman year was actually like, "and I met you on a plane," haha, yay he remembered. So we talked for a good while, it was great. They're really nice and funny and were trying to speak arabic to me. However, the guy who's actually from Cairo said Agouza was a ghetto. I was like, "uhh, not really, its pretty nice."
Otherwise in my life, I did my weird thousand hand buddha dance performance this weekend, for those of u who saw the early stages of my practice a few weeks ago, haha. It went well. That basically ate my life this week.
I had an amazing really long conversation with my boss on Monday morning about theology and judgment and if we could judge people or say that anything was automatically wrong or evil, the nature of evil, the nature of humanity, the nature of God, sexuality, homosexuality, American culture and how ridiculous and protected and pornographic it is, etc. I've realized after this last semester that I thrive on these conversations. The real, important, deep ones.
It snowed really beautiful, huge fluffy snowflakes tonight and now all the trees and everything are covered in like an inch of fuffy snow. Its beautiful, but no one will play in the snow with me. If only David were here with his snowpants.
Guys I love u all, and I'm glad I have u all to struggle with all this weird crap with.
Ok anyway I thought I'd let u know that I had my first arabic lesson and deffinitely still can't pronounce my letters. But at least my teacher's a lot more patient than turban Nahed, and he's freakin hilarious, and his kid hates me already. We're still learning letters, thank God.
Also, remember how we had to do that big Qur'an paper last semester. Well I'm continuing that project for one of my classes this semester. I'm doing a cross-cultural, cross-religious look at interpretation of the story in the Qur'an about Adam and the tree in the garden. I have three interviews in Egypt and three interviews here so far. I interviewed Fatiha, who I'm teaching English, and she wants me to interview her husband. I got invited to her house to get to know each other better too, yay! I interviewed my housemate and her boyfriend from India too. Its really interesting guys.
O and tonight, by another of the weird coincidences that seem to make up my life, the two guys at Calvin from Egypt sat next to me at LOFT (its our sunday night worship service thing) and so after the service I was like, "hey you're the guys from Egypt right?" Haha, smooth I know. The one I met freshman year was actually like, "and I met you on a plane," haha, yay he remembered. So we talked for a good while, it was great. They're really nice and funny and were trying to speak arabic to me. However, the guy who's actually from Cairo said Agouza was a ghetto. I was like, "uhh, not really, its pretty nice."
Otherwise in my life, I did my weird thousand hand buddha dance performance this weekend, for those of u who saw the early stages of my practice a few weeks ago, haha. It went well. That basically ate my life this week.
I had an amazing really long conversation with my boss on Monday morning about theology and judgment and if we could judge people or say that anything was automatically wrong or evil, the nature of evil, the nature of humanity, the nature of God, sexuality, homosexuality, American culture and how ridiculous and protected and pornographic it is, etc. I've realized after this last semester that I thrive on these conversations. The real, important, deep ones.
It snowed really beautiful, huge fluffy snowflakes tonight and now all the trees and everything are covered in like an inch of fuffy snow. Its beautiful, but no one will play in the snow with me. If only David were here with his snowpants.
Guys I love u all, and I'm glad I have u all to struggle with all this weird crap with.
Friday, February 23, 2007
Alumni Website
Here's the alumni website:
http://alumni.bestsemester.com/login.aspx
I tried logging into it myself and had trouble, so take it with a grain of salt. When it works it may prove to be quite spiffy.
-Peace
http://alumni.bestsemester.com/login.aspx
I tried logging into it myself and had trouble, so take it with a grain of salt. When it works it may prove to be quite spiffy.
-Peace
Ana tabaan
I’m tired of school. I’m tired of doing meaningless things. I’m tired of trying and failing in all of the areas of life that I care about most. I’m tired of feelings. I’m tired of caring about things. I’m tired of the rat race. I feel empty. I want answers, but God seems to think that it makes more sense to keep me in the dark. Is this God's way of making me more reliant on him or something like that? I have some super tough decisions that I have to make in the next couple of days. There isn’t an easy way out. Nor is there a clear "right" path in the multitude of situations that confront me. Mokhi fadi. Ana fadi.
I just want to forget everything that I know and everyone that I know and go somewhere far far away. A remote village in the Amazon rainforest would probably suffice. That just might take me far enough away from everything. The problem is that no matter how fast I run, I cant outrun myself...
PLEASE pray for me. I can’t begin to put into words the shit that I am going through right now.
Perhaps I have said too much. Perhaps. I just feel that writing anything less would be a complete lie.
For now, I’m just going to take it one day at a time and persevere and make it through to better times.
I just want to forget everything that I know and everyone that I know and go somewhere far far away. A remote village in the Amazon rainforest would probably suffice. That just might take me far enough away from everything. The problem is that no matter how fast I run, I cant outrun myself...
PLEASE pray for me. I can’t begin to put into words the shit that I am going through right now.
Perhaps I have said too much. Perhaps. I just feel that writing anything less would be a complete lie.
For now, I’m just going to take it one day at a time and persevere and make it through to better times.
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