Just had to put a quick note on about today, before I forgot how cool he is :)
Today is my 27th Birthday...and to be honest when I woke up this morning I was more than a tad depressed. Some prayer and the birthday cards that some of you managed to negotiate through the US mail system to me helped - thank you so much.
The day wasn't really going fantastically however, I even had to cancel a phonecall with Nai because my worship leader emailed me asking to fill in this weekend at the last minute. Nai was concerned that I would spend my birthday alone, which, to be fair, was kinda my plan but God had other plans.
When I arrived at the practice I should probably have realised something was up - there didn't seem to be an obvious shortage of singers, or for that matter male singers. After practice it was revealed that they didn't really need an extra singer, they just needed an excuse to get me there. One of the other guys on the worship team is also leaving soon and they had set up a gathering of the worship team to give us a send off - complete with Tom Jones-kiwi-cake! (The other guy is from New Zealand hence the fruit - picture of cake will be appearing on my photo blog soon). They even gave us gifts - CDs of some of the worship sessions we had done and photo albums complete with some pics of the team (one of the group had even brought a photo printer so they could add the group pic from tonight to the album straight away).
So basically God rocks because I really didn't need to spend my Birthday alone and he provided, even a party with cake! :D
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Sunday, April 29, 2007
America's cutest puppies
I wish I was making it up but the above title is a real TV show here. I guess that's what happens when you need 3 digits for your channel numbers. It's not even a one off, its a series...I think the next thing on the schedule was something like "Adventures in animal daycare", I really wish I was making this up...scratch that, perhaps I don't want a mind that would come up with that.
As usual I was about to type that not much has happened since my last post, then remembered just how long it has been since the last post.
So the biggest thing was probably flying down to Orlando for a couple of days to meet up with my brother and his family. I have finally done Disneyworld!!!.....and Busch gardens kicks it's butt :P. My mission, which I certainly chose to accept was to take my brothers kids on the rides he didn't want to touch. So we hit Universal studios and tried to do all the big coasters, we did a fair job, unfortunately the nemesis style twin one that does a fantastic job of convincing you that you are about to hit head on with the twin coaster, finished my brother off for inverted rollercoasters. (The collision thing couldn't have had much to do with that though as he freely confesses to closing his eyes for the entire ride).
On the first evening we went to Disneyworld and managed to fit in space mountain(very cool but totally different to the european one) and the runaway train ride, just - my nephew and I ended up racing the big light parade thing to get to the second coaster in time, am sure it is very pretty judging by the startled looks of the people we were running round who were actually watching it.
The second day was Busch gardens day, and that is where the cool coasters were :D We managed to get my brother on one more inverted one before he dug in his heels.
The flights to and from Orlando allowed me to add two more states to my "visited" list and gave me experience of why traveling with only carry-on is a good idea and negotiating round delayed flights and missed connections (ok basically I prayed and God sorted it but that is a good summary of how to deal with most anything :)).
The flights on the way home were kinda fun too (the aforementioned brother would use a different description :P) with too much turbulence to even allow cabin service and a cloud base so low that most of the landing was conducted with no sign of the ground but the knowledge that it must be close as you just heard the landing gear and we really are slowing down quite a lot, ah theres the ground - thud.
I have actually got a small group now - well am supposed to attend for the first time this week, though worryingly it is the over 30's singles group, which is odd as I am neither :P
What else? Well I sung with the church easter choir and this morning I did my second sunday with the worship group, and am signed up for at least three more by early June so I guess I passed the audition.
Spiritually this last period has been one of the hardest I have been through. The lack of christian activities and groups has exposed my pattern of not having much dedicated time with God on my own, with predictable results. Time to change...now if anyone can explain to me the balance between striving and not doing it in your own strength let me know - 100 words or less :P
Sorry for sucking at keeping in touch with you all. Looking forward to catching up, if God's plans for my future allow I think I will have to do a mini-tour of the UK to make sure I see everyone.
love ya all (note I didn't use the full US contraction, though there was a moment today when I think my chameleon accent tendencies sent me out west)
Dxx
As usual I was about to type that not much has happened since my last post, then remembered just how long it has been since the last post.
So the biggest thing was probably flying down to Orlando for a couple of days to meet up with my brother and his family. I have finally done Disneyworld!!!.....and Busch gardens kicks it's butt :P. My mission, which I certainly chose to accept was to take my brothers kids on the rides he didn't want to touch. So we hit Universal studios and tried to do all the big coasters, we did a fair job, unfortunately the nemesis style twin one that does a fantastic job of convincing you that you are about to hit head on with the twin coaster, finished my brother off for inverted rollercoasters. (The collision thing couldn't have had much to do with that though as he freely confesses to closing his eyes for the entire ride).
On the first evening we went to Disneyworld and managed to fit in space mountain(very cool but totally different to the european one) and the runaway train ride, just - my nephew and I ended up racing the big light parade thing to get to the second coaster in time, am sure it is very pretty judging by the startled looks of the people we were running round who were actually watching it.
The second day was Busch gardens day, and that is where the cool coasters were :D We managed to get my brother on one more inverted one before he dug in his heels.
The flights to and from Orlando allowed me to add two more states to my "visited" list and gave me experience of why traveling with only carry-on is a good idea and negotiating round delayed flights and missed connections (ok basically I prayed and God sorted it but that is a good summary of how to deal with most anything :)).
The flights on the way home were kinda fun too (the aforementioned brother would use a different description :P) with too much turbulence to even allow cabin service and a cloud base so low that most of the landing was conducted with no sign of the ground but the knowledge that it must be close as you just heard the landing gear and we really are slowing down quite a lot, ah theres the ground - thud.
I have actually got a small group now - well am supposed to attend for the first time this week, though worryingly it is the over 30's singles group, which is odd as I am neither :P
What else? Well I sung with the church easter choir and this morning I did my second sunday with the worship group, and am signed up for at least three more by early June so I guess I passed the audition.
Spiritually this last period has been one of the hardest I have been through. The lack of christian activities and groups has exposed my pattern of not having much dedicated time with God on my own, with predictable results. Time to change...now if anyone can explain to me the balance between striving and not doing it in your own strength let me know - 100 words or less :P
Sorry for sucking at keeping in touch with you all. Looking forward to catching up, if God's plans for my future allow I think I will have to do a mini-tour of the UK to make sure I see everyone.
love ya all (note I didn't use the full US contraction, though there was a moment today when I think my chameleon accent tendencies sent me out west)
Dxx
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Deja vu
So having started this adventure with the realisation that I have a tendency to just mark time and not get on with living I of course changed my ways and have spent the intervening two months living life to the full... :)
Yeah, well not so much. Why does it take so long to get a lesson learned in the head to actually change you? Or is that just me?
I've been trying to learn the 'don't leave work to the last minute' thing since GCSEs - my brother Phil will probably remember escorting me to get my results and my full journey monologue (babbling) about how I should have studied better, earlier (at all? - it is hard to call my revision methods 'study' with a straight face).
It is a sad fact but one of the things I haven't been doing to the full since I got here is writing my thesis. Suddenly I've woken up again and look, wow I'm kinda behind.
It struck me last week that having been here for two months right next to DC I have been into the city a grand total of once. I still hadn't seen the Lincoln memorial which I had planned to visit as soon as I could, having not quite managed to get that far when I visited in the Summer.
So last weekend I actually took a Saturday off not doing anything and went into DC to see some monuments. It appears I accidentally chose a good weekend as apparently DC has a reputation for having amazing cherry blossom displays and they are really beginning to kick in (will try to put the pics up on the photo blog later but having a digital camera has kinda made my shutter happy camera habits even worse so I need to sort through quite a few first).
I had meant to go shopping as well (weather is beginning to hit the high 20's - when it isn't below zero - yeah the weather here is nuts - and I brought a wardrobe for -10degC weather).
But in the end by the time I had walked round all the main monuments my feet couldn't face shopping so I headed back and watched the latest '24' disc supplied to me by netflix that morning.
So anyway I walked from Union Station (worth a few photos itself - so of course I have several fews) up to the capitol and took a few pictures looking down the length of the mall. Was very pretty, though somewhat spoiled by the anti-circumcision banners of the protest going on :) Stopped moving for too long putting my camera away and was engaged in conversation with one of the protesters, was a strange conversation including some claims that'll put you off anti-aging products for life. The guy was earnest, sketchily aware of science and German, which also seemed a little odd.
Once I managed to get away from him I found that as well as being cherry blossom season it also appeared to be kite season, with literally hundreds of kites lining 'the avenue' and even a fighting kites competition at the end.
The monument (big spike thing - it appears the US went through an egyptian envy stage) was tall and unfortunately out of tickets to visit the top. The war memorials were suitably reflective (in more ways than one - see pics) if a little focused on 'the power of the human spirit' in the case of the WWII one, but the one that surprised me the most was the one I had most wanted to visit - the Lincoln memorial.
The thing is it was ever so slightly wrong feeling. The pictures and glimpses you see of it in movies don't really give you an idea of just how big his statue is and there is just something about it that is ever so slightly un-american and un-Lincoln.
Inside a massive statue of him sits on a throne like a king at court. Above his head is an inscription talking about him as enshrined in a temple and in the hearts of the people. I don't know that much about Lincoln but what I do know speaks of a man who would be horrified by his own monument. I associate him with humility and wisdom, and the words of his famous state of the union addresses, inscribed on the walls of his 'temple' are the words of a man with a deep respect for God. Yet his memorial seems like a temple to a god of ancient Rome or Egypt.
The building and the numbers of mainly american tourists are a clear sign of the extent to which he is revered in America, but the strange thing is that it is clear from the very words written on his temple walls - his own words - that if he made the same speeches today, noone would even vote for him.
His speech refused to demonise his enemies in the middle of war with them. His speech places doing the right thing above and beyond the very survival of his country. And it is all based on his respect for God. His monument is so very impressive but it seems to have been built without a memory of who he was and what he believed.
Kinda reminds me of the human church in some ways. How much have we built hallowed structures that bear little or no relation to the foundations?
I walked back to the metro station via the white house (see photo blog for picture of a white house squirrel) and got an unexpected bonus. The post office here is about to release a range of Star Wars based stamps and as a promotion they have made up some of their post boxes to look like R2-D2. I found one on the walk back and got a shot of it (again see photo blog).
So not much to report really, even though I have managed to wibble on for quite a bit.
Hmm slightly scary - just watching a news item about a guy wandering round the area I was in on Saturday randomly stabbing people. Fortunately seems to happen at the time of day I don't see much on weekends - I think it's called morning.
I have managed to get involved with the music at church and will be singing in their easter choir this weekend. Still not in a smallgroup as the coordinator is on holiday at the moment, which means I am without much Christian friendship(or just real friendship). Am really missing you guys back home on that front. But all being well I will be seeing my bro and his family in Florida soon, so hopefully some more interesting blog entries to come.
Right now to make sure all those photos I referred to actually exist by the time you read this.
love
Dx
Yeah, well not so much. Why does it take so long to get a lesson learned in the head to actually change you? Or is that just me?
I've been trying to learn the 'don't leave work to the last minute' thing since GCSEs - my brother Phil will probably remember escorting me to get my results and my full journey monologue (babbling) about how I should have studied better, earlier (at all? - it is hard to call my revision methods 'study' with a straight face).
It is a sad fact but one of the things I haven't been doing to the full since I got here is writing my thesis. Suddenly I've woken up again and look, wow I'm kinda behind.
It struck me last week that having been here for two months right next to DC I have been into the city a grand total of once. I still hadn't seen the Lincoln memorial which I had planned to visit as soon as I could, having not quite managed to get that far when I visited in the Summer.
So last weekend I actually took a Saturday off not doing anything and went into DC to see some monuments. It appears I accidentally chose a good weekend as apparently DC has a reputation for having amazing cherry blossom displays and they are really beginning to kick in (will try to put the pics up on the photo blog later but having a digital camera has kinda made my shutter happy camera habits even worse so I need to sort through quite a few first).
I had meant to go shopping as well (weather is beginning to hit the high 20's - when it isn't below zero - yeah the weather here is nuts - and I brought a wardrobe for -10degC weather).
But in the end by the time I had walked round all the main monuments my feet couldn't face shopping so I headed back and watched the latest '24' disc supplied to me by netflix that morning.
So anyway I walked from Union Station (worth a few photos itself - so of course I have several fews) up to the capitol and took a few pictures looking down the length of the mall. Was very pretty, though somewhat spoiled by the anti-circumcision banners of the protest going on :) Stopped moving for too long putting my camera away and was engaged in conversation with one of the protesters, was a strange conversation including some claims that'll put you off anti-aging products for life. The guy was earnest, sketchily aware of science and German, which also seemed a little odd.
Once I managed to get away from him I found that as well as being cherry blossom season it also appeared to be kite season, with literally hundreds of kites lining 'the avenue' and even a fighting kites competition at the end.
The monument (big spike thing - it appears the US went through an egyptian envy stage) was tall and unfortunately out of tickets to visit the top. The war memorials were suitably reflective (in more ways than one - see pics) if a little focused on 'the power of the human spirit' in the case of the WWII one, but the one that surprised me the most was the one I had most wanted to visit - the Lincoln memorial.
The thing is it was ever so slightly wrong feeling. The pictures and glimpses you see of it in movies don't really give you an idea of just how big his statue is and there is just something about it that is ever so slightly un-american and un-Lincoln.
Inside a massive statue of him sits on a throne like a king at court. Above his head is an inscription talking about him as enshrined in a temple and in the hearts of the people. I don't know that much about Lincoln but what I do know speaks of a man who would be horrified by his own monument. I associate him with humility and wisdom, and the words of his famous state of the union addresses, inscribed on the walls of his 'temple' are the words of a man with a deep respect for God. Yet his memorial seems like a temple to a god of ancient Rome or Egypt.
The building and the numbers of mainly american tourists are a clear sign of the extent to which he is revered in America, but the strange thing is that it is clear from the very words written on his temple walls - his own words - that if he made the same speeches today, noone would even vote for him.
His speech refused to demonise his enemies in the middle of war with them. His speech places doing the right thing above and beyond the very survival of his country. And it is all based on his respect for God. His monument is so very impressive but it seems to have been built without a memory of who he was and what he believed.
Kinda reminds me of the human church in some ways. How much have we built hallowed structures that bear little or no relation to the foundations?
I walked back to the metro station via the white house (see photo blog for picture of a white house squirrel) and got an unexpected bonus. The post office here is about to release a range of Star Wars based stamps and as a promotion they have made up some of their post boxes to look like R2-D2. I found one on the walk back and got a shot of it (again see photo blog).
So not much to report really, even though I have managed to wibble on for quite a bit.
Hmm slightly scary - just watching a news item about a guy wandering round the area I was in on Saturday randomly stabbing people. Fortunately seems to happen at the time of day I don't see much on weekends - I think it's called morning.
I have managed to get involved with the music at church and will be singing in their easter choir this weekend. Still not in a smallgroup as the coordinator is on holiday at the moment, which means I am without much Christian friendship(or just real friendship). Am really missing you guys back home on that front. But all being well I will be seeing my bro and his family in Florida soon, so hopefully some more interesting blog entries to come.
Right now to make sure all those photos I referred to actually exist by the time you read this.
love
Dx
Thursday, March 15, 2007
So yeah I'm still alive
Ok so very quiet blog, sorry about that. Guess I haven't had anything profound to say, but that didn't stop me at the start :)
It is hard to believe I have already been here 6 weeks. Time is as usual running away from me. So 6 weeks in America.
The pronunciation sucks, the people are lovely, the snowboarding rocks and infomercials are cruel and unusual punishment. Oh and the weather makes back home look predictable (50degree temperature swing in 2 days?! Ok that's F not C but still!).
Oh and if I ever meet the woman with the irritating laugh in the quiznos advert I will turn violent...which means nothing to any of you but trust me Job would have slapped her...well he'd be harbouring violent thoughts anyway.
I still wouldn't say I'd established a life here yet but I have at least found a church, with a cool creative arts emphasis which I will hopefully be getting involved with.
I've been snowboarding twice and would now actually be comfortable saying that I can snowboard, just a shame the season is finishing here this weekend :(
I'd like to apologise also for...grr just wasted a couple of minutes trying to work out how I was misspelling apologise, then worked out that I wasn't, apparently Blogger uses a US spell checker :)
Anyway, yes sorry for not being in touch with you all back home (and scattered around the globe) I've been doing my usual thing of letting life run away with me.
By way of an apology here is a little sample of a cultural experience I enjoyed early in my time here - The Superbowl....adverts. Frankly I couldn't remember a darn thing about the game 10 minutes after but the ads were funny and this one is my fave.
I also love a recent one for the caffeinated beverages of a certain well known 'restaurant' chain unfortunately I can't find anywhere to link to for that, it is one I think Clairy Fairy would particularly appreciate.
Hopefully I will have something more interesting to say in my next entry, oh and will get round to putting some more pics up (I have some cool DC-in-the-snow shots which apparently doesn't happen much).
I have two draft entries for the 'accidentally' blog too but don't know if they will ever see the light of day. Ah well babbling so will stop :)
Love you all
Dx
PS. any remaining spelling mistakes are due to me rushing and being stubborn and refusing to use US spelling rendering the spellchecker slightly useless :P
It is hard to believe I have already been here 6 weeks. Time is as usual running away from me. So 6 weeks in America.
The pronunciation sucks, the people are lovely, the snowboarding rocks and infomercials are cruel and unusual punishment. Oh and the weather makes back home look predictable (50degree temperature swing in 2 days?! Ok that's F not C but still!).
Oh and if I ever meet the woman with the irritating laugh in the quiznos advert I will turn violent...which means nothing to any of you but trust me Job would have slapped her...well he'd be harbouring violent thoughts anyway.
I still wouldn't say I'd established a life here yet but I have at least found a church, with a cool creative arts emphasis which I will hopefully be getting involved with.
I've been snowboarding twice and would now actually be comfortable saying that I can snowboard, just a shame the season is finishing here this weekend :(
I'd like to apologise also for...grr just wasted a couple of minutes trying to work out how I was misspelling apologise, then worked out that I wasn't, apparently Blogger uses a US spell checker :)
Anyway, yes sorry for not being in touch with you all back home (and scattered around the globe) I've been doing my usual thing of letting life run away with me.
By way of an apology here is a little sample of a cultural experience I enjoyed early in my time here - The Superbowl....adverts. Frankly I couldn't remember a darn thing about the game 10 minutes after but the ads were funny and this one is my fave.
I also love a recent one for the caffeinated beverages of a certain well known 'restaurant' chain unfortunately I can't find anywhere to link to for that, it is one I think Clairy Fairy would particularly appreciate.
Hopefully I will have something more interesting to say in my next entry, oh and will get round to putting some more pics up (I have some cool DC-in-the-snow shots which apparently doesn't happen much).
I have two draft entries for the 'accidentally' blog too but don't know if they will ever see the light of day. Ah well babbling so will stop :)
Love you all
Dx
PS. any remaining spelling mistakes are due to me rushing and being stubborn and refusing to use US spelling rendering the spellchecker slightly useless :P
Sunday, February 4, 2007
And now in colour, or should that be color?
I have 'finally' got round to taking some pics of the house so you can see where I am. It feels like finally because I have been meaning to for oo days, even though it has taken much less than a week (see previous entry) :P
I am not going to put them on here because it will really slow down the page display for those of you with slower connections so I have created a separate blog for the pics. If one of my brothers could download them to show to mum and dad that would be cool, thanks in advance Dx
Oh yeah almost forgot the picture blog is at dannieinamericapics.blogspot.com
I am not going to put them on here because it will really slow down the page display for those of you with slower connections so I have created a separate blog for the pics. If one of my brothers could download them to show to mum and dad that would be cool, thanks in advance Dx
Oh yeah almost forgot the picture blog is at dannieinamericapics.blogspot.com
Saturday, February 3, 2007
A welshman an indian and a nigerian walk into a bar...
Well that was my Friday evening anyway :)
It also illustrates something I have realised in the last 24 hours - I haven't actually really met any Americans yet! After work on Friday I went to the local pub for happy hour with the aforementioned guys from work to meet a few more of my colleagues. I met a dutch person, a macedonian a few africans an aussie and several french people. Having been in the US for 5 days I still haven't had a proper conversation with an actual american person - though to be fair I have somehow managed to not meet one of my housemates yet which is possibly stranger.
This came as a surprise to me as I feel like I am settling in quickly but when I stop and think there is still so much left to do before I can claim to have set up a life here. There is still for one thing the question of finding a church, which is rather trickier when you don't have a CU to suggest a few dozen to you, and when the entire place has been designed for people with cars. Then of course there will be the problem of getting past my instinctive cynicism towards preachers with american accents (this is potentially a very big problem).
The trouble is that generally the representations of such speakers we see in the UK are stereotypes in some film or TV show, or targets of exposé documentaries being accused of conning people. So I unfortunately associate the sound of an american accent talking about the bible with conmen and people commiting spiritual GBH with bible verses taken out of context. This is not going to help me settle into a church!
{At this point the post takes on a doppelganger existence as it turned into a musing on Christianty and the media which will probably be published on my other blog at some point but was rather off-topic for this one :) }
The funny thing about living here is that everything is just not quite the same. It's a bit like one of those sci-fi shows where someone stamps on a bug whilst visiting the past and screws up their present or spills coffee on a dimensional warping device that has been carelessly left sitting around the kitchen and ends up in a parallel universe where everything is almost the same apart from a few very important details. For example, when crossing the road look left first not right...or is it r...no it's definitely left. It's probably best not to jay walk here when you arrive, not necessarily because it is a crime, just because you may find yourself stepping in front of 40 tonnes of fast-moving steel staring fixedly away from it happy in the knowledge it isn't coming from that direction.
What I mean is that we have equivalents of almost everything here back home and so you assume that they work the same way here and up to a point that works, but there is normally some small detail of the working that is different and catches you out. This then leads to a paranoia that means you end up catching yourself out when you find something that does work the way it does back home because you keep looking for the catch - for instance you almost had a blog entry here on how most US homes don't have a kettle...when in fact they probably do. My first clue to that one being wrong should probably have been that I was basing the assumption on a sample size of one household which contained precisely zero americans.
So in short I really need to get to know some americans, or this blog is going to be spectacularly mistitled. See I knew this blog might turn into a series of rants, so anyway I'm settling in pretty quick but in danger of living a rather ghetto-ised life which I would like to avoid.. This is I think one of my big weaknesses - I go with the flow too easily, it would be very easy for me to settle into a minimal pattern of life and just exist here as I would anywhere else in the world, as in fact I did for my entire placement year and huge parts of my time in uni. I settle far too easily when God may have much more exciting plans, there are of course times when we are supposed to just get on with living but I tend to just assume that is always the case. Actually that is really no justification at all - in those times I wasn't living I was just existing, letting time happen.
So I need to somehow get out there and get to know this place and why I am here, perhaps watching the superbowl tomorrow will help (even if I am probably more interested in the adverts).
Speaking of adverts, which you were if you normally read things out loud, one thing that amuses me about the adverts on TV here; you know that bit at the end of some commercials where they fire off a quick disclaimer, well here that takes like 50-60% of the ads duration and normally includes "side effects including death" :P
It also illustrates something I have realised in the last 24 hours - I haven't actually really met any Americans yet! After work on Friday I went to the local pub for happy hour with the aforementioned guys from work to meet a few more of my colleagues. I met a dutch person, a macedonian a few africans an aussie and several french people. Having been in the US for 5 days I still haven't had a proper conversation with an actual american person - though to be fair I have somehow managed to not meet one of my housemates yet which is possibly stranger.
This came as a surprise to me as I feel like I am settling in quickly but when I stop and think there is still so much left to do before I can claim to have set up a life here. There is still for one thing the question of finding a church, which is rather trickier when you don't have a CU to suggest a few dozen to you, and when the entire place has been designed for people with cars. Then of course there will be the problem of getting past my instinctive cynicism towards preachers with american accents (this is potentially a very big problem).
The trouble is that generally the representations of such speakers we see in the UK are stereotypes in some film or TV show, or targets of exposé documentaries being accused of conning people. So I unfortunately associate the sound of an american accent talking about the bible with conmen and people commiting spiritual GBH with bible verses taken out of context. This is not going to help me settle into a church!
{At this point the post takes on a doppelganger existence as it turned into a musing on Christianty and the media which will probably be published on my other blog at some point but was rather off-topic for this one :) }
The funny thing about living here is that everything is just not quite the same. It's a bit like one of those sci-fi shows where someone stamps on a bug whilst visiting the past and screws up their present or spills coffee on a dimensional warping device that has been carelessly left sitting around the kitchen and ends up in a parallel universe where everything is almost the same apart from a few very important details. For example, when crossing the road look left first not right...or is it r...no it's definitely left. It's probably best not to jay walk here when you arrive, not necessarily because it is a crime, just because you may find yourself stepping in front of 40 tonnes of fast-moving steel staring fixedly away from it happy in the knowledge it isn't coming from that direction.
What I mean is that we have equivalents of almost everything here back home and so you assume that they work the same way here and up to a point that works, but there is normally some small detail of the working that is different and catches you out. This then leads to a paranoia that means you end up catching yourself out when you find something that does work the way it does back home because you keep looking for the catch - for instance you almost had a blog entry here on how most US homes don't have a kettle...when in fact they probably do. My first clue to that one being wrong should probably have been that I was basing the assumption on a sample size of one household which contained precisely zero americans.
So in short I really need to get to know some americans, or this blog is going to be spectacularly mistitled. See I knew this blog might turn into a series of rants, so anyway I'm settling in pretty quick but in danger of living a rather ghetto-ised life which I would like to avoid.. This is I think one of my big weaknesses - I go with the flow too easily, it would be very easy for me to settle into a minimal pattern of life and just exist here as I would anywhere else in the world, as in fact I did for my entire placement year and huge parts of my time in uni. I settle far too easily when God may have much more exciting plans, there are of course times when we are supposed to just get on with living but I tend to just assume that is always the case. Actually that is really no justification at all - in those times I wasn't living I was just existing, letting time happen.
So I need to somehow get out there and get to know this place and why I am here, perhaps watching the superbowl tomorrow will help (even if I am probably more interested in the adverts).
Speaking of adverts, which you were if you normally read things out loud, one thing that amuses me about the adverts on TV here; you know that bit at the end of some commercials where they fire off a quick disclaimer, well here that takes like 50-60% of the ads duration and normally includes "side effects including death" :P
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Planes, trains, automobiles and shopping bags
I was going to say that I haven't actually been on a train this trip but then remembered the monorail between the terminals at Newark so in fact the title is very apt.
So it is my second full day in the US and my first evening in my house proper, having stayed with my landlords for the first two days. That was lovely and they were happy for me to stay longer but I knew I wouldn't be able to settle in here properly until I was in my own place.
Actually I suspect there is more than a little pride involved in that desire to move into the rented house. I am discovering that I have a strangely (as I am quite a lazy person) independent (pride) streak in me, whilst it was fantastic to be cooked for and have everything provided part of me didn't like it. I like to be the one doing the serving and helping, I don't like needing help. Too much not paying my way, or not helping out just makes me feel uncomfortable.
Two incidents have brought this home to me, both involving the aforementioned modes of transport especially automobiles. Yesterday (wow it seems longer ago than that) I spent over an hour waiting at a bus stop in sub-zero temperatures for a bus that I now know was not going to come, before walking half the way home and catching a different bus.
As I stood there in the bitter cold I lost about 20 years of ‘maturity’ ending up in the horribly familiar mode of whining at God for not immediately answering my prayer as I wished, over a frankly stupendously trivial matter ( I was wearing a snowboarding jacket – there was no danger of hypothermia!). It happened again today as I trekked home in the cold and growing dark overloaded with shopping in bags designed to withstand the weight of…oh at least the weight of a fully inflated helium balloon. Inevitably the bags broke one after the other in a well choreographed comedic sequence. Leaving me cursing and whining on the side of the road again as no bus turned up. A text to the ever helpful landlord resolved the problem with only a further 15 minute wait as he sped across to pick me up.
Now both of these things were stupid small inconveniences coming right on the heels of perhaps the most concentrated and sustained series of obvious answers to prayer I have experienced. To put them in context, in the last 8 days God has orchestrated me (not the most organised person in the world to understate it massively) to move several thousand miles to a different country. He has made packages move faster than they should, synchronized multiple events, pointed me very pointedly to the most enormously helpful landlords I have ever known (they seem to have made a wonderful confusion between the definitions of landlord and friend, because their attitudes and actions have nothing to do with the images with which ‘landlord’ is loaded). He has sorted out all the complications of organization and travel that my diabetes brings. He got me hitch free from car to plane to monorail to plane to car (the latter being my landlords’ – they picked me up from the airport which is on the other side of the city of which they live outside!!!).
And yet one nonexistent bus is enough make me feel that God has let me down! Putting aside the fact that both the situations that undid me were entirely of my own making – I didn’t make sure I had accurate bus times and I chose the quantity of shopping and bags with which to carry it – why did these silly little things bother me so? I realized as I waited for the landlord with the car that the answer was both the aforementioned pride and faith with arm bands. In both situations I felt helpless and vulnerable. Stuck in a strange town in a strange country on another continent with none of the support networks I am used to having (in uni or at home I would have had any number of friends and family to call not to mention my own car). I was helpless and needed to rely on people who had no reason to help me, no history or relationship with me to compel them to help me, no history of favours exchanged to assuage my ego at having to admit my need. My help credit history with them was all in the red and my ego hated that. But it wasn't just pride - although in the last month I have time and again had to put matters related to my time here and future in general in God’s hands (and seen Him sort them out) all the little leaps of faith have been with a safety net. If this trip hadn’t worked out I still had funding to finish my Phd until March anyway, if my Phd fell through I still had a masters and ultimately parents and family who would catch me when if it all fell through. So even though the stakes were so much lower with the bus and the bags (I could have just dumped what I couldn’t carry after all) I had no safety net that wouldn’t hurt my pride to use.
Perhaps that is the first lesson He is teaching me here (the first answer to the title of the blog), that trusting Him means trusting Him not just saying I do and adding on “and if not I can always…”
The other thing I am learning is that you really do need a car to live easily in the US. Everything is set up for driving, things are just that little bit further apart, so walking anywhere useful is just a bit further than you would want to walk. The sidewalks (as opposed to the more usefully situated entities to which we are used that are called pavements) appear and disappear (mainly the latter on dangerous blind bends) and meander in vaguely the same direction as the roads. You can even see it in the shopping bags here, they seem to have been beautifully designed to hold together just long enough to make it to the car but to explode if you attempt to walk them home.
Tomorrow I start work proper (an admin error had the computer sending me to Colorado and it has taken this long to get that sorted – well hopefully it has) so I should get an early night (cue the laughter) and I think that is enough soul baring for one post (rather more than I intended in fact).
Missing you all, but knowing I am where I am supposed to be even if I have no idea why
Love
Dannie
P.S.
I really am not as negative about this whole thing as the above may suggest, it is worth repeating, God has very obviously gone before me. The people are really friendly, I forgot to say that after I had contacted my landlord to pick me up with the shopping a couple of strangers stopped in their car and crossed the busy road to see if I needed help!
So it is my second full day in the US and my first evening in my house proper, having stayed with my landlords for the first two days. That was lovely and they were happy for me to stay longer but I knew I wouldn't be able to settle in here properly until I was in my own place.
Actually I suspect there is more than a little pride involved in that desire to move into the rented house. I am discovering that I have a strangely (as I am quite a lazy person) independent (pride) streak in me, whilst it was fantastic to be cooked for and have everything provided part of me didn't like it. I like to be the one doing the serving and helping, I don't like needing help. Too much not paying my way, or not helping out just makes me feel uncomfortable.
Two incidents have brought this home to me, both involving the aforementioned modes of transport especially automobiles. Yesterday (wow it seems longer ago than that) I spent over an hour waiting at a bus stop in sub-zero temperatures for a bus that I now know was not going to come, before walking half the way home and catching a different bus.
As I stood there in the bitter cold I lost about 20 years of ‘maturity’ ending up in the horribly familiar mode of whining at God for not immediately answering my prayer as I wished, over a frankly stupendously trivial matter ( I was wearing a snowboarding jacket – there was no danger of hypothermia!). It happened again today as I trekked home in the cold and growing dark overloaded with shopping in bags designed to withstand the weight of…oh at least the weight of a fully inflated helium balloon. Inevitably the bags broke one after the other in a well choreographed comedic sequence. Leaving me cursing and whining on the side of the road again as no bus turned up. A text to the ever helpful landlord resolved the problem with only a further 15 minute wait as he sped across to pick me up.
Now both of these things were stupid small inconveniences coming right on the heels of perhaps the most concentrated and sustained series of obvious answers to prayer I have experienced. To put them in context, in the last 8 days God has orchestrated me (not the most organised person in the world to understate it massively) to move several thousand miles to a different country. He has made packages move faster than they should, synchronized multiple events, pointed me very pointedly to the most enormously helpful landlords I have ever known (they seem to have made a wonderful confusion between the definitions of landlord and friend, because their attitudes and actions have nothing to do with the images with which ‘landlord’ is loaded). He has sorted out all the complications of organization and travel that my diabetes brings. He got me hitch free from car to plane to monorail to plane to car (the latter being my landlords’ – they picked me up from the airport which is on the other side of the city of which they live outside!!!).
And yet one nonexistent bus is enough make me feel that God has let me down! Putting aside the fact that both the situations that undid me were entirely of my own making – I didn’t make sure I had accurate bus times and I chose the quantity of shopping and bags with which to carry it – why did these silly little things bother me so? I realized as I waited for the landlord with the car that the answer was both the aforementioned pride and faith with arm bands. In both situations I felt helpless and vulnerable. Stuck in a strange town in a strange country on another continent with none of the support networks I am used to having (in uni or at home I would have had any number of friends and family to call not to mention my own car). I was helpless and needed to rely on people who had no reason to help me, no history or relationship with me to compel them to help me, no history of favours exchanged to assuage my ego at having to admit my need. My help credit history with them was all in the red and my ego hated that. But it wasn't just pride - although in the last month I have time and again had to put matters related to my time here and future in general in God’s hands (and seen Him sort them out) all the little leaps of faith have been with a safety net. If this trip hadn’t worked out I still had funding to finish my Phd until March anyway, if my Phd fell through I still had a masters and ultimately parents and family who would catch me when if it all fell through. So even though the stakes were so much lower with the bus and the bags (I could have just dumped what I couldn’t carry after all) I had no safety net that wouldn’t hurt my pride to use.
Perhaps that is the first lesson He is teaching me here (the first answer to the title of the blog), that trusting Him means trusting Him not just saying I do and adding on “and if not I can always…”
The other thing I am learning is that you really do need a car to live easily in the US. Everything is set up for driving, things are just that little bit further apart, so walking anywhere useful is just a bit further than you would want to walk. The sidewalks (as opposed to the more usefully situated entities to which we are used that are called pavements) appear and disappear (mainly the latter on dangerous blind bends) and meander in vaguely the same direction as the roads. You can even see it in the shopping bags here, they seem to have been beautifully designed to hold together just long enough to make it to the car but to explode if you attempt to walk them home.
Tomorrow I start work proper (an admin error had the computer sending me to Colorado and it has taken this long to get that sorted – well hopefully it has) so I should get an early night (cue the laughter) and I think that is enough soul baring for one post (rather more than I intended in fact).
Missing you all, but knowing I am where I am supposed to be even if I have no idea why
Love
Dannie
P.S.
I really am not as negative about this whole thing as the above may suggest, it is worth repeating, God has very obviously gone before me. The people are really friendly, I forgot to say that after I had contacted my landlord to pick me up with the shopping a couple of strangers stopped in their car and crossed the busy road to see if I needed help!
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