Well, faithful readers, my blog is back after a while of technical difficulties. And it’s also 2012. I rang in the new year on the Hillsborough River with some good friends, watching the city downtown fireworks display.
January 4, 2012 by Emily
Happy New Year
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November 10, 2011 by Emily
Tuberculosis Songs
My friend Jessica recently started working for the health department, helping tuberculosis patients. T.B. (or consumption, as it was called, due to the weight loss and physical wasting away that sufferers experienced) is a common theme in old blues songs, so I told her I’d make her a T.B. mix cd. Here are the tracks I put on the cd, with a little backstory, too. You can (hopefully!) click on the links below to hear the songs.
Tuberculosis has been around for centuries, and was so common that in the 19th century it was the leading disease-based cause of death in the United States. You are probably familiar with lots of famous people from the 19th century (and some from the early 20th century, too) who either had the disease at some point in their lives or–mostly–who died from it. Wikipedia tells me that the list includes at least two of the Bronte sisters, Charles Bukowski, Camus, Stephen Crane, Dashiell Hammett, Washington Irving, Kafka, Keats, George Orwell, Thoreau, Thomas Wolfe, Vivien Leigh, Frederic Chopin, Stephen Foster, Igor Stravinsky, Eleanor Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, Florence Nightingale, John C. Calhoun, James Monroe, and Ringo Starr.
Before germs were discovered and understood to be the way diseases were spread, people thought that consumption was something that ocurred spontaneously in people with weak constitutions, or that was inherited from one’s parents. Some have speculated that the idea of vampires was inspired by people with TB, as they were often pale and coughing up blood. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that for a time in the 19th century, it was considered fashionable to try and look like you had TB by trying to make the skin very pale and appearing generally weak and sickly. Many wealthy people, and many famous people (including the many writers and musicians listed above) had the disease, so it became sort of chic, and women especially valued the idea that the disease might indicate to others how naturally delicate and feminine they were. Of course, the disease affected people from all walks of life, so it was never realistic to think of it as a disease of the wealthy–and it was also incorrect to think of it as a disease of poor black women, as would become the case in the decades between the Civil War and World War II. But if the Tea Party movement has taught us anything, it is that the things people think do not necessarily need to have any connection with reality, as long as they have a connection with the feelings a group of people have.
In the late 1800s, germs began to be understood–in large part by studying diseases like TB. Though it took time for the concept of germs to be accepted by the general public, eventually people came to understand that their own habits of cleanliness, as well as their exposure to other people, was the cause of these diseases. This was frightening for people, especially because at this time, more and more people were moving to cities, and thus were exposed to crowds of possibly-infected strangers more and more often.
This also coincided with another event: the emancipation of slaves. Former slaves moved in large numbers to urban areas, and women especially took on jobs as domestic servants, working for white families. Black women already had the cultural stigma of being “jezebels” who were to blame for seducing men and passing along venereal diseases, so it was not a big leap to begin thinking that they–newly released into the world and assumed by many white Southerners to be incapable of basic tasks like personal hygiene without white supervision–were the cause of tuberculosis as well. There was not a significant increase in the disease at this time as far as I know, and it was also clear that the disease affected all races and classes fairly equally. People were simply unfamiliar with and afraid of these newly-discovered germs, and needed a way to help themselves feel safe and place the blame for their spreading on someone else.
The discovery of germs also resulted in the formations of public health organizations that worked to educate people and help poor people who were afflicted by T.B. and other diseases. By the time World War I rolled around, the stigma against black women was fading.
Still, all this indicates that T.B. was an extremely common disease, and a majority of those who got it eventually died from it. Blues musicians in the early 20th century wrote songs about the circumstances of their daily lives and about stories of the lives of others, and thus there were many songs sung about T.B. By the time people took interest in recording the music of African Americans, some of these songs had become well-known standards, which is why many of the recordings I’ve found are variations of each other, despite being recorded by different artists at different places and times.
But all of the songs are very, very sad. It must have been very lonely to die of tuberculosis. People were so afraid of contracting the disease themselves (and rightfully so, I think) that they avoided friends and relatives who had it, leaving them to die (slowly, often over the course of years) by themselves in hospitals and sanitariums.
Here are two songs recorded by Victoria Spivey in the 1920s. The second song is just a slight variation on the first.
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Here’s a modern version of the song by Nina Van Horn, which shows that these songs have remained part of America’s standard blues catalog even as the disease itself has become less and less prevalent.
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The next four songs are all called “T.B. Blues,” but all are different. The first one is a third song by Victoria Spivey, who did not have tuberculosis herself, from what I can tell, but who must have been close to someone who did (a common thing at the turn of the 20th century, of course).
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Leadbelly’s version is a little different, but still has the same plaintive chorus of how it’s “too late, too late, too late.”
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Otis Spann, a Chicago blues pianist from the 1960s, does a completely different song called “T.B. Blues.”
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I think that the best-known “T.B. Blues” might be by the famous yodeler, Jimmie Rodgers.
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Jimmie Rodgers also recorded the optimistic song, “Whippin’ that Old T.B.”, but this recording was made in 1933, the same year that he died of the disease. He was only 35.
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The song I knew best before starting on this music project was John Lee Hooker’s song “T.B. is Killing Me.”
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A recent song about T.B. is Van Morrison’s “T.B. Sheets,” which at 9.5 minutes was longer than my website will allow me to post, but here is a Youtube video of the song. The song tells the story of him sitting in the room of a friend who is dying of tuberculosis. Unlike the other songs here, “T.B. Sheets” is more about the suffocating feeling one gets in a hospital room where a loved one is dying than about the experience of having the disease itself.
This, I think, could be the most depressing mix of music I have ever compiled, but I like it, too. Music is at it’s best when it tells the stories of what really happens in people’s lives. Medical advancements, germ theory, and vaccines are allowing us to live in a world that would be fundamentally different than the world our ancestors of a hundred years ago lived in– if only because this kind of disease is becoming less and less common. Luckily, those people who DO get them can be helped out by good people like my friend Jessica, who I hope enjoyed this blog post!
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November 9, 2011 by Emily
Happy Birthday to the Music that Made Me a Music Fan
Yesterday, November 8, was the 40th anniversary of the release of Led Zeppelin IV. What can be said about Led Zeppelin IV? I am probably one among millions who really became a music fan in my own right the first time I heard that album. Without question, it has had a bigger influence on my life than any other single album. And also, in the whole scope of all music ever made, I think it could be easily argued that no more perfect set of songs was ever created. Led Zeppelin IV! I would not be me without Led Zeppelin IV. I would be some other person all together.
When I was growing up, there was always a lot of music being played in my house. My dad played the guitar, and when I was very small, he would sit on the bathroom counter and play and sing Beatles and Creedence Clearwater Revival and Joni Mitchell songs on the guitar while my brother and I were in the bathtub. We listened to recorded albums, too, but my main memories are of my dad playing the songs for us himself.
One day, when I was in middle school, I was watching VH1 (back in the day when the internet was young and you would watch music videos on TV) and happened to see a clip of Led Zeppelin performing Whole Lotta Love (which is from Led Zeppelin II). I knew the song, I had heard it a thousand times, but something about that day was different. Maybe I had never seen the band perform before. Maybe I had never really listened to it on my own before. Either way, I was mesmerized and excited and knew instantly that that was just the coolest SOUNDING, coolest LOOKING thing EVER. This is not the clip I saw, but it will do. I tell you what: I am still just as excited about it as I was back in middle school. In my mind, everything that is cool is judged against this.
I was so excited about it that I remember trying to bring up the song or the band in conversations with my best friend at the time, Jennifer, and she, frustratingly, had no interest whatsoever.
In my memory, it was within the next few days that my dad, always looking for duets for us to play together (as we were both flute players), suggested that we learn the beginning of Stairway to Heaven. To help me learn it, he lent me his Led Zeppelin IV CD. I ended up listening to the whole thing (and how could I not, when the opening track is one of the greatest opening tracks of all time? )
…After that, I was hooked for life. Instead of just listening to music, I was suddenly a FAN of music, I wanted to listen to every album they had, I wanted to listen to other bands they were associated with, I wanted to seek out other great bands, I wanted to go to concerts to see bands perform–I thus embarked upon a life of music fandom that not only was the way I made it through being an insecure and socially awkward teenager, but that also informed my whole life to follow. Most of my friendships have hinged upon similar musical tastes, many of my greatest experiences have taken place at concerts, and all of my significant life phases and experiences have been soundtracked by music I came to love as a direct result of loving one band– Led Zeppelin, of course.
Zeppelin IV itself had an enormous influence on me in non-music-related ways. For one, the band’s love of and use of traditional American blues songs (in songs like When The Levee Breaks)…
…was the reason I became interested in listening to old country blues. My subsequent interest in learning about musicians like Son House and Howlin’ Wolf and others like them is the precise reason why I became interested in studying the Southern US– I’d enjoyed American History before, but the area I chose to specialize in was, you could say, because of Led Zeppelin.
I think it was Chris Rock who said that whatever music you are listening to when you first become interested in sex is the music you’ll like for the rest of your life. I don’t really remember my exact progression that well, but I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to think that the point in my life when I went from thinking that sex was a frightening and repulsive act that I hoped to avoid forever, to becoming suddenly interested, could not have been too far removed from the day I became a Led Zeppelin fan. I ask you yet again: How could I not?
I, being a shy and awkward teenager, did not get to put any of it to use for a long, long time, but I think I still owe mostly everything I know about sex to Led Zeppelin. I pity the poor souls who were listening to N*SYNC and the Backstreet Boys during their developmental years. They must have an awful time.
Strangely, considering the widespread belief that Zeppelin lyrics are loaded with Satanic messages and the fact that the band lived a sex-drugs-and-partying lifestyle so intense that my favorite band, Jethro Tull, refused to tour with them, Led Zeppelin is the reason that I was never an atheist. It sounds weird, but whenever I really thought about whether I believed in God–even when I believed that Christianity just could not be possible–I would listen to Led Zeppelin IV and know, just know, that there had to be a higher power, because music like that could not come from humans alone. I wrote about those feelings often as a teenager, and theologically dubious as it may be, it honestly is the reason why I never could convince myself that there was no God.
On a related note, many Zeppelin songs– especially songs like Four Sticks and The Battle of Evermore from Led Zeppelin IV–
…reference or tell stories of The Lord of the Rings and other Tolkien stories. My dad had given me a copy of The Hobbit when I was 9 years old, and I was crazy about that book. I had read it many times by the time I became a Zeppelin fan, but they then inspired me to read Tolkien’s other books, and I went through a huge period of time where I was deeply involved learning about J.R.R. Tolkien and his life and influences, and the fantasy world he created. I learned that he and his good friend and fellow fantasy-world-creating author, C.S. Lewis, were both strongly influenced by their Christian faith. After meaning to for years, I finally read some of Lewis’s books on Christian apologetics, and those books are one of the main things that helped me realize that I did believe in Christianity after all. So–though it is a long road from one to the other I suppose–Led Zeppelin is also, in a way, why I am a religious person, too.
It would be impossible to really capture the huge influence that this one album has had on my life in a single blog post, but suffice it to say that it would be hard to name any thing in my life that could not somehow be connected to Led Zeppelin IV. I’m glad it stood the test of time. I hope in another 40 years, after all the Katy Perrys and Rihannas and whoever else is long gone, we’ll still have Led Zeppelin. I know I will be doing my part to keep it around!
• • • • •
October 16, 2011 by Emily
Vertical Ventures
Today, my friends Kelly and Heather and I went to a rock climbing gym in Tampa called Vertical Ventures. I am afraid of heights and have been rescued in tears from the top of many high things I ventured to climb over the years, so the idea of paying twenty bucks to repeat the experience seemed, at first, unwise. But I decided to go along anyway, and it was really fun!
Kelly had been before, so she was the most expert climber of all of us.
Ropes and harnesses were available, but we were just free-climbing.
I was really happy with myself, because I didn’t really feel that afraid of the height, and I was able to climb higher and longer than I expected to be able to.
Heather had also never been, and she did really well, too.
There were normal, straight walls, walls that tilted forward, walls that tilted back, and walls with areas that jutted way out. There were all different types of hand holds, from nice easy half-cup-shaped ones to tiny little shards that you could barely put your foot on. Even as a total novice, there were lots of areas where I could climb, but there were also plenty of places where I could only stand at the bottom and watch the really experienced people make their way up.
The different colors of tape were supposed to indicate different paths you could take of varying difficulty–pink was supposed to be an easy path, for example–but I was never able to figure out how to follow them.
I didn’t have to be rescued! Hooray!
There was also a tightrope that Kelly tried to walk on.
I was very impressed by how far she made it while barely holding on.
Anyway, it was fun and I’m glad we went. I definitely plan to go again!
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September 11, 2011 by Emily
September 11
For today I thought I’d post my journal entries from September 11th, 2001. I have kept journals pretty consistently throughout my life starting from about six years old, and while most of them from my teenage years are your typical entries about insecurities and boys, I’m glad that I captured some reflections on things that turned out to be major events. One of the areas I focused on in college was the way average people experienced major events rather than just the way ‘important’ people like generals and presidents and statesmen experienced them. My story is probably pretty identical to your own reflections of that time, but I think that it has some historical value anyway. In September of 2001, I was 16 and had just started the 11th grade. I will start with the journal entry from the day before just for context. It seemed appropriate.
9/10/11
Today, I walked out of school and I didn’t feel the usual cloak of humidity upon me. It was hot, yeah, but walking along to my car, I felt perhaps a hint of cool breeze blowing along somewhere. Could it be a first sign that autumn is approaching? I hope so. I’m eager for sweater weather, and a life themed by the string of year-end holidays: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas.
I want a simple life like that: to watch the sun rise in the morning, to watch the stars at night, to feel good in my skin, to know that today is September 10– to be conscious of the fact that today is September 10, 2001, and God made today, and everything about it is gorgeous. [A friend of mine] doesn’t believe in God. How can you have a night like tonight-where you look up and realize that today the sky is crystal clear and there are a thousand stars–and not?
I’m very material, though. I like to have things, and things make me happy. … Eventually I should get over this, but… I’m not going to worry myself over it. Well, it’s late, so I’m going to bed now before I start another topic (trust me, there’s many) and end up awake all night.
Adios– Emily
9/11/01
I walked out of my math class at around 9:45 or 9:50 today, and Mr. Asher [our principal] came on over the loudspeaker. “I’m sure you’ve all been watching… TV…terrible tragedy…don’t panic.” I assumed it was just another indecipherable announcement, but “don’t panic” got me wondering. Nobody knew what was going on. I heard snippets of information as I walked to photography, and when I got there I went straight to the television, around which three or four others who’d beat me into class were crowded. I saw the hazy New York skyline and smoke billowing from the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Two planes had crashed into the Center, the Pentagon had been bombed, the White House had been evacuated. I sat down, aghast. My upset photography teacher first expressed her anger at the students joking about the situation in the halls, then said that it would be best to get on with our work, and she would leave the TV on. While I worked on my pinhole camera project, another plane went down in Virginia, and the World Trade Center collapsed. The school was abuzz with talk about the incident all day, and we spent the last half hour of English watching the TV as well. After school activities were cancelled, West Palm Beach schools were closed. By the time I got home from school, half the country was shut down and not a plane was in the air.
Here is what happened, as I understand it: Just before 9am, a hijacked plane crashed into one of the WTC towers. Both buildings were evacuated quickly- though many were trapped in the building. No one knew what had happened. I’d assume they thought it was a freak accident. But 50,000 people work in the WTC, and the second plane crashed into the second tower only a few minutes later. People- law enforcement, firemen, and rescue workers- came to get people out and put out the fires. Many people were trapped above the planes, and the worst video that’s been shown on TV are the people hanging out of windows trying to get air or make themselves known to rescuers. Later, people simply jumped out of the buildings. Within an hour or so, the WTC simply collapsed. Another hijacked jet crashed into the pentagon between the initial crashes and the buildings’ collapse. Dad said that tens of thousands may have died. Planes were rerouted to Canada, nearly everything was closed, major cities were evacuated. Later, another hijacked planes crashed into the Pennsylvania woods. I’ve seen the WTC second crash and the buildings’ collapse from every angle. I’ve seen New York pedestrians racing down the streets pursued by huge clouds of dust… I’ve seen video of rescue missions through tremendous piles of twisted rubble and thick floods of dust. I’ve heard dozens of eyewitness stories. On the news now, stern angry military men are making statements. “This is indeed the most tragic hour in American history,” a senator, John Warner, just said. My favorite subject, American history, and I just lived a huge moment in it.
Another building, 46 stories, next to the remains of the WTC, has just collapsed as a result of the earlier collapses. No one will give an estimate of the casualties, but we know 266 died just in the planes alone. That’s nothing. President Bush is arriving at the White House now (6:55 pm). Everyone’s comparing this to Pearl Harbor.
Don’t go to war. Used to be, I’d be excited by a big event, by America doing something more important than looking at Britney Spears. But not now. I just want to have a simple introspective life like I talked about last night. I don’t want to think about this. I really don’t. I have to, though. No escaping it! I’m just not thinking about the people- innocent civilians like me, thousands who died today. I acknowledge that fact but I won’t think hard on it. I hate this! We better not go to war.
9/12/11
Well, it’s Day 2. The FBI is in Vero right now [so much for living in safe old Zero Beach) investigating three homes. It's something to do with Flight Safety, the pilot's training school, that is here.
I'm... I want to say I'm mad. Yesterday morning I was happily thinking that I was finally feeling good and in-control and I had just been happy and eagerly anticipating the holiday season. But now this has occurred, and taken over my (and everyone's) life! Why? The terrorists were expressing hatred for something- capitalism, our government, I don't know. But I'm not involved in any of that in the slightest! I'm the same person regardless of which country I live in. Now some total stranger gets to upset my whole life because of- because of what? I don't want to deal with this and I shouldn't have to!
So suppose we go to war. You know, I didn't even know we were helping to protect any people in the Middle East? Call me ignorant of current events, but I don't know which countries we're against or which we are for. People keep mentioning the Gulf War, but I don't know what that was about either! So why should my life be changed over something I don't even know about? Over something that I really am not affected by?
If we go to war, more people- more civilians- are going to die, and it will go on until somebody wins or loses, but after all that, do I have any more involvement in the original cause for war than I do now? No! It's like in the world there is this elite class of politicians who organize their little soap opera and then when the game goes wrong, all the bad stuff happens to us unsuspecting peons. I want to go to the Middle East and find some other high school kid and be like, "Hey, do you know what's going on? No? ME either. Well, you seem to be okay, want to go live on a remote island until everybody finishes blowing themselves up?" This is the stupidest thing that ever happened to me.
9/13/01
For those of us who didn't lose anyone on Tuesday, the past two days have been a kind of psychological nightmare. I have felt every emotion, and I have felt numb, all at the same time, meanwhile trying not to feel anything. Too afraid to sit and think about anything, I was left with this jumble of unsettled emotions... like I was feeling really stressed and weird and different than I ever have. You can't life a normal life, it [becomes?] a part of every thought yo have. You see a sitcom on TV and you think, they’re so happy and carefree. I wish I could do that. I find myself wishing all I had to worry about was boys and school. I feel like a very old person wanting youth back. Three days ago, I had no idea. I found I wasn’t the only one up in the middle of the night thinking I heard airplanes. Airplanes are scary now.
It isn’t over. I just didn’t think about it today. The news I heard was of people being miraculously saved from beneath the rubble. Today was a good day emotions-wise for me. We got all our class ring order stuff. I found out that [a boy I had just met in school] not only looks like [another boy who I had a crush on], the nice Zeppelin-loving guy in my writing class who sadly has a girlfriend… he also has a really good voice and hangs out in my English class all the time. Well… gonna go now… bye!
9/14/01
People always discuss whether people are naturally good or naturally bad. But I don’t think there is an answer to that question. Does Osama bin Laden have any good in him? I don’t know. Most would be inclined to quickly say “no,” but that isn’t fair. He might. But supposing bin Laden is a naturally bad guy… People can be good or bad and probably both. But I think that most people are more good than bad.
So, it is believed that one of the WTC pilots not only trained at Flight Safety, but lived in Vero up until a couple weeks ago. Two other residents were proved to be involved. Terrorists and their families have been living practically within walking distance from me! I’ve probably seen these people personally on more than one occasion. Plus, the four guys who were arrested in an airport somewhere else had Flight Safety stuff on them. When we first heard about the attack, we were all like, Thank God we live in Vero Beach, where nothing ever happens. And look! It should scare me I guess but it doesn’t. Perhaps I haven’t fully realized the full possibility of what that means, but for now I’m just like- hey! Terrorists! [note: I am not sure whether this really happened or whether it was just a rumor around town. I think that most towns with flight schools probably had this rumor circulating, and I'm not sure whether anything came of it or not.]
Involved people have been found not only in the US but also in the Philippines and other countries. This was a huge thing. This IS a huge thing. I’m not thinking too hard on it, so that doesn’t scare me right now either. We’re going to war, I can tell you that. Dad says that it could be a huge war, if it comes to that, and I think war is stupid but if people are going to kill ten thousand people all of the sudden… you can’t just hold peace talks and compromise. Even if you tried, the problem would only come back. So something must be done. But I wish it didn’t have to be now.
—-
That is my last entry in that journal before I moved on to another book. Anyway, I hope my reflections from those days have been at least sorta interesting on some level.
• • • • •
August 15, 2011 by Emily
Old, Old Pictures
Well, nothing too exciting has been going on around here lately. Mostly, I’ve just been working and looking for even more work. And that is fine and everything, but it is not much to blog about. So, instead, I shall entertain you with exciting photos from my past. This may not appeal to every one of my dear readers, but hopefully it will appeal to some of you.
I shall start with the best photo of all, and here it is!
Yes, it is infant Greg wearing a tuxedo! HOW ADORABLE! It even has a tiny bow tie! Have you ever seen anything cuter in your entire life?
Also, that is me when I was two years old, and I have to ask this question of my dear mother: was a bow of that size really necessary? I guess it isn’t the worst looking thing on earth, but most mothers adorn their baby daughters’ heads with enormous hair accessories, and I can’t figure out why. I pledge to you, my daughter of the future, even if you are totally bald until you are in Kindergarten and everyone mistakes you for a little boy, I will never affix any giant bows or flowers or ribbons to your little head.
Check out my dad in this photo:
He looks about 19 years old! And Dzia-Dzia somehow looks almost exactly the same. And the way Mema looks in this picture is how I remember her in my mind. Oh how I wish that you could have stayed the same age you were in this picture forever, Mema, so that you would still be around! I have so many things to talk to you about! I only got to talk to you about kid things. I need to know your thoughts on adult things!
Here’s my mom and dad from the early nineties sometime. This is how they look in my memories of being a little kid.
Olivia! What happened to your neck? Where is it? You look like a cartoon version of an adorable child!
Here is Olivia again, a little older, in my childhood bedroom. I wish I could go back to that bedroom again!
Olivia and Greg playing the piano.
Dzia-Dzia and Greg! The brown wooden tables in this picture are the same tables that I have in my house now, only now they have many coats of paint on them.
So, I remember this very well. We made a zipline for the Ninja Turtles from one doorknob to the other, and we were very proud.
I’m pushing Aunt Dotty on my bike here, and that’s my mom pushing Greg and Olivia:
This is my first-grade classroom, and I am reading my mom a story I wrote. I have no idea what the occasion was… but the story was about a runaway peanut.
You know, all my life I have tried hard to be fashionable, but I always fall terribly short somehow. I match, I wear stylish things, but when they are assembled on my body, they are just not even close to what was meant to happen. Case in point:
Here’s Grandpa and all the grandkids! (Well, minus Andrew, but he wasn’t born for another three years.) If the date stamp on the picture is right, this is July of 1993, which means I’m 8, Greg is 6, Olivia is 3, and Erik is about 3 months old. And Grandpa is a mere 68 years old!
Well, I hope you enjoyed this little blast from the past here. I did. I HOPE that my next post will be that I have a second part-time job, and my finances are secure, and I can support myself at last, but I suppose only time will tell. I will let you know!
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August 4, 2011 by Emily
Don’t Wait For Me
In case my last post was too long for you, here is an abbreviated version. This is another song by Josh Garrels called “Don’t Wait For Me,” whose lyrics summarize everything I was saying, only much shorter and much prettier (though less specific). It is a beautiful song. I hope you like it.
Please don’t wait for me
I lost my way again
I lost my job, I walked away
From the life that I was leading with my friends
When I was young I dreamed
Of a life that had freedom that had joy
Oh, life, it crushed my soul
With its cruel demands and fool’s gold
Please don’t wait for me
I lost my way again
I lost my house and my good name
When I found the road of my king
When I was young I dreamed
Of a life that had beauty that had joy
But now I lost my life
For the one I dreamt of as a boy
Please don’t wait for me
I ain’t coming back again
I cannot turn around
From the place I’m going
To where I’ve been
• • • • •
August 4, 2011 by Emily
This Is Our Chance To Crawl Under The Wire!!!
This is a Song of the Day with a very, very long, autobiographical backstory. But I hope you will read it, because even if you hate the story, the song at the end is PRETTY great. (I think so, anyway.)
I spent a long time living under the assumption that white people were incapable of writing music about God that wasn’t horrible. As silly as it sounds, that is an absolutely true statement. Of course, there’s more to it than that.
See, I grew up going to church, participating in lots of church activities with my family, going to church camp, etc. It was a significant part of my life. But even though we went these places and did these things together, and we said our memorized prayers before dinner and bed, we didn’t really talk about God at home at all. We thought that those people who talked about being “born again” and “having a personal relationship with Jesus” were taking things way too far and reaching over into the crazy side of things. I understand now that my family was Christian from a cultural perspective, and very involved in the Christian cultural lifestyle, but we didn’t have a strong faith backing that up.
When I was in middle school, the church we attended introduced a ‘contemporary’ service before the regular, more traditional church service. Instead of our pretty awesome choir singing old hymns, which were always my favorite part of church (and still are!), the music was lead by a ‘praise and worship’ band comprised of youth group members singing their interpretation of modern songs from the ‘Contemporary Christian Music’ genre. The band was very earnest about the whole thing, and I’m sure that it helped them and some other church members feel close to God, but to me–and, as I recall, the rest of my family members–this was the most horrible music I had ever heard in my life. It was just awful. I have to say, when I hear those songs now, sung by their original artists, I still think that it’s some of the worst stuff ever. Just totally unlistenable crap. (But that’s just my opinion. I really mean that! If it does it for some people, that’s fine. For me, though… I just can’t do it.)
For some reason, when I went through my church’s Confirmation program, I was required to attend this contemporary service each week. Overall I loved Confirmation, but I hated every minute of those contemporary services. Over time, the Christian activities that my family participated in both inside and outside of church began to take on a distinctly ‘contemporary’ style. Church clothes were replaced by jeans and t-shirts and lots of dudes with gel-spiked hairstyles, worship services featuring a sedate and respectful altar replaced by full-on stages with expensive concert lighting setups, electric guitars and drumsets, and insightful ministers were replaced by embarrassing ‘worship leaders’ going through various levels of histronics trying to appear sincere and overtaken by spiritual emotion but really just hoping to look cool. To me, it was all very shallow and seemed designed to try to attract young people who were ultimately disinterested in church but who might be interested in attending a free weekly concert. Worst of all, the music was terrible.
Though I didn’t understand it at all at the time, because I participated in church on a mostly cultural level and didn’t have a deeper connection to God beyond the activities I took part in, the changes that were taking place in church were a total dealbreaker for me. I hated ’contemporary’ style Christianity, but it was fast becoming the only type of Christianity that I could really see happening anywhere, so I didn’t want to take part in it anymore. I didn’t help that all of this perfectly coincided with both the George W. Bush presidential administration and my first awareness of national politics, and I took great offense to the way that stories I’d thought were about compassion and acceptance were being used politically to promote what I saw as exclusivity and cruelty. With the loss of church culture, and my opposition to church politics, I lost all of the religious connections that I had. I never really understood the Bible and never had a real internal relationship with God, so without church activities, church music, or politics, I wasn’t a Christian anymore.
As a person in my late teens going to a superliberal college far away from home in Boston, I was excited to embrace ultra-left-wing culture and take part in the great things I thought I’d missed out on in high school because I was too shy or too uncool or too SOMETHING to have participated in them. For a couple years, my main concerns were mostly getting very little sleep, socializing, drinking heavily, smoking a lot of pot and cigarettes, and having sexual experiences (as I had made it to my 18th birthday without ever having kissed a boy, and felt horrifically embarrassed by that fact, that part was particularly important for me). I wanted to just party all the time. So I did, and I felt really, really cool. Except for the part where I felt totally empty and cripplingly insecure, which was also all the time. Suffice it to say, I gave very little thought to any sort of spiritual topics for that phase of life, except on the sort of cosmic, yoga, Buddhism, New Age level that people who have recently discovered marijuana typically get involved in.
It was sort of an inconsistent, gradual, and overlapping process of life changes that moved me from that life to being a basically non-partier (in my former definition of ‘partying’), living with Mike in Tampa and being an active member of a Unitarian Universalist church. I’m not really sure how or when the changes all occured, and if I was it would probably be pretty boring anyway, but suffice it to say that life happened to me as it does for everyone else, and years later I was different than I was years before. I had decided that I could get a better handle on life by exploring philosophy, spirituality, and the ideas of great thinkers. I did this mainly by joining the Unitarian Universalist Church of Tampa, which made me very happy for a few years (a church that I still believe is a great help to our community and full of good people, though I now disagree with their philosophy), as well as continuing on to grad school, reading books on all sorts of subjects, and trying to learn about the world.
The Unitarian church was full of people who’d had negative experiences with Christianity, and though the church claimed to be a place of all faiths, in reality it was a place of all faiths except for Christianity, and only to the extent that you believed that any faith was a nice philosophy but didn’t have any reality to it. I initially had no problem with that, because I’d had bad experiences with Christianity, too, and I was a fully secular humanist who believed that all religions were valuable merely as life philosophies, all equal. But gradually, for reasons I didn’t understand, I started to feel uncomfortable when Christianity was talked about in a negative light. It started out as just unemotional, practical thinking: that if we as a church were going to advertise ourselves as a place of ‘all faiths,’ we should stick to that advertisement or change it. The feeling changed and intensified over time with no real conscious input from myself, until Easter Sunday one year when the leader of the church said, offhandedly and without meaning to make any sort of major point, “Today is the day when Christians celebrate the ressurection of Jesus Christ. Of course, we don’t believe that.” A loud, persistent voice in my head shouted out, “WAIT, I BELIEVE THAT!” In fact, I had no idea that I did believe that. I thought that I actually didn’t belive it, but that my mind was just reacting indignantly for the failure of the church to live up to it’s professed creed. But either way, something in my head said that to me.
Considering that thought, I realized that I had never taken the time to read the Bible all the way through in my whole life, and that there were major aspects of the Christian doctrine that still made no sense to me even though I was supposedly a Christian for my entire childhood. (I remember being in my early teens and trying to get my Sunday School teacher to explain to me how the idea of Christ dying for sins made any sense whatsoever, and she had been entirely unable to explain it to me. The basis of the entire religion was one of many things I just never figured out.) I decided that it would be a good idea to read the Bible, just from an intellectual perspective. So I read the whole New Testament, and I also read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Maybe just because I was older, I understood everything, how it all worked together and made sense. But I also understood a couple of other things: one, that this was the best stuff that was ever written, and two, that even though I didn’t want to agree with some of the things the Bible said, didn’t like some of what it said, I knew, in my heart, that it was true and that not living by it would be going against reality and things that were undeniably true. Maybe you will think it’s silly, but I think that maybe God knew that I’m just a book person, and He just had to get me to read His book for once and everything would work out from there. And it did.
For about the first year after I became a Christian, I assumed that I wouldn’t be attending a church or participating in any Christian culture or politics, and especially not listening to any contemporary Christian music. In today’s world, I thought, churches are all just glorified concert venues promoting shallow messages and expensively-displayed, horrible music. Christian politics are all about joining the Tea Party and denying that the Founding Fathers believed certain things even when any fool can go on the internet and see a scan of a letter in their own handwriting saying that they believed that thing, and voting for candidates who behaved in a very un-godly way just because they were the only candidate who said they were a member of your same church denomination. And the music, well, Contemporary Christian music is just awful, of course. That was the surest thing of all.
But over time, my perception changed. I visited about ten or eleven churches in the Tampa area and eventually found one (Temple Terrace Community Church) that was small and traditional but didn’t express strict political or social opinions apart from Biblical ones. After attending the church for some time, I officially became a member two weeks ago, and I am so happy about that!
I also discovered that there are many intelligent, thoughtful people out there who stick closely by what the Bible says and use that to participate in social justice and the rights of all people, not just middle-and-upper-class American white Christians, and who also believe that protecting the planet is part of our job as God’s stewards of the Earth. (Just a few examples of these people and groups are The Simple Way/Shane Claiborne, Sojourners, Reject Apathy, and The Evangelical Environmental Network.)
And most surprising of all, I discovered that some ‘Contemporary Christian’ music is actually amazingly, wonderfully, unspeakably good. I don’t know how to talk about religion, really. I don’t know how to explain what I believe or why I believe it (though I hope that someday I learn how). I try, but I can’t– I can’t even explain it to Mike, and I try all the time, and then he tells me why I’m not explaining it very well, and I try a different tactic later on, but it still doesn’t work. But there are musicians out there who are singing songs with lyrics that just explain perfectly everything I feel and believe in one little song– and it’s a GOOD song, with good music, not just good lyrics!
But the lyrics are also so good!
So because I don’t yet have the ability to explain my faith in a way that makes sense, I think that instead, I will post some good songs by people who can do that for me. The first song I will post is a song called “The Rabbit and the Bear” by Josh Garrels. This song makes me so happy I can barely even stand it. This song is what it feels like inside my body when I think about how I used to not believe in anything, but now I believe in something, not just something, but something that is real and true and awesome and wonderful.
“Praise God, He rescued us all!”
So happy!
_____
Run, run so fast
Over fields and grass
At last, at last
We escaped from the trap
With the rabbit and the bear
And the sparrows of the air
Come one, come all
The hunter is gone
And this is our chance
To crawl under the wire
Through the darkest wood
On up to the mountain of fire
Where everything is free
In the light of the sun
Where every creature sings
Oh Lord, you rescued us all
Don’t listen to the snake
For he lies and he takes
Your hope, your faith
Away from you
But when the lion comes around
With his claw and his crown
Follow, follow
His every move
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July 21, 2011 by Emily
Discovering My Career
I started babysitting when I was 15, I think. It was long enough ago that I don’t remember the details of the early days that well, but it always seemed like easy money to me. Sometimes the kids I’d babysit for would be cranky, and sometimes their parents would make parenting choices that bothered me even as a high school student, but even on the crankiest and most challenging day, there was nothing too hard about the job. The fun parts always far outweighed the bad parts overall.
When I first went to college, I had big plans for my career. I was going to be a famous writer. I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about, but I was going to write, and that was going to be my job. I knew I was good at writing, everyone knew me as a writer, and I felt it was thus my cosmic destiny to be a writer. My generous and supportive parents sent me to a very expensive college up North where I majored in Writing, Literature, and Publishing with an emphasis on Creative Writing.
For a short while.
By the middle of my second semester, I realized that while I liked writing for myself, I hated being given writing assignments. On my first day of my first creative writing class–Poetry– I completed my assignment to write a poem about myself by thinking about it for a long time, then writing “NOPE” on my sheet of paper. I promptly transferred to another class, Magazine Writing. I enjoyed it, but I had the feeling that writing for work was not my destiny after all, and I became a Marketing Communications major for my third semester. I did well in my classes and enjoyed the assignments, but found myself disgusted by the idea of trying to convince people to purchase things they didn’t need and couldn’t afford. I scanned the list of available majors at my school–which had a comparatively small list– and decided that the only other thing I could see studying was history, which I had always liked outside of school but had never enjoyed during school. Emerson only had a minor in history, so I decided that I would have to transfer to another school. I had been accepted to my school’s study abroad program for my fourth semester, so I decided to go on the trip, spend the time considering what else I might like to study, and apply to big universities back home in Florida.
The history classes I took during the semester abroad, the history I experienced while traveling around Europe, and my discovery that there was such a subject as American Studies– focusing more on American culture and arts rather than traditional political and military history–solidified my decision. I applied to all the big Florida schools that semester, and decided to attend USF and study American Studies. I had no idea what career this might lead to, but I decided that education was not about finding a career. It was about studying something that you absolutely love, and the career part will fall in line afterwards. I still believe this very firmly, but I realize that I only have the luxury of living by that belief because I have fairly wealthy parents who paid for my entire college career.
Between leaving Emerson after my semester abroad and beginning at USF, I worked at a daycare in my home town. It is still the best job I have ever had.
I worked in the three-and-four-year-old classroom, which had between 15 and 20 students depending on the day. It was a preschool that primarily served low-income families whose childcare was funded by the government, and I encountered parents and children who were vastly different than the other families I’d worked for that had the luxury of hiring a private babysitter while they ran errands or went on dates. But it was a great job. I loved all of the kids–even the ones who were real pains–and was excited to go to work each morning because I wanted to see my little students.
While I was an undergraduate student at USF, I continued to babysit part-time.
And then graduation rolled around, and I thought, what am I supposed to do with this American Studies degree? The only possible option was to continue on and get a more advanced degree, and then probably work as a college professor. So, I went to graduate school at USF, this time majoring in American History because it had broader possible applications than American Studies. I loved being in grad school. I loved studying history, traveling to learn about history, and listening to lectures. I loved telling stories about history to my family and friends. But I also learned that I didn’t enjoy one main component of a working historian’s career–coming up with new theories about history and writing lengthy essays about my research and discoveries. I much preferred just researching other people’s theories and then simplifying the story and relaying it to someone else. I also realized that the actual day-to-day life of a college professor was very unappealing to me. Graduation was coming, and I realized that the only career I had truly prepared for was to be a professional student. Preferring to become self-sufficient at some point in life, I informed my advisor that I no longer intended to continue on to get my PhD. Maybe I will work in a public school and teach history, I said.
You will hate that job, she told me. It is all about bureaucracy and politics and not about really teaching. Maybe if you could work at a private school, it would be okay. Or maybe a museum. You might have to get a second Master’s degree in museum studies to do that, though. On our last meeting before my graduation, she loaded me up with resources for finding careers after getting a Master’s degree in history, and wished me luck. Stubborn as I am, I decided to try working in a public school anyway. I left the part-time job that I’d had throughout grad school–which was, not surprisingly, babysitting.
I fretted about my little charge and knew I would miss him, but at 24, I was too old to be a babysitter anymore. I needed a real job. Childcare was fun, but it wasn’t my career path. I was an educated person and I needed a real career fitting of my degree. So I went and worked at a middle school–just in a low-level assistant position, but with hopes of getting certified to teach over time and moving up the ladder.
And oh, how I hated that job. I loved all of the students, but there aren’t really words to describe how much I hated the actual job. It truly was all about bureaucracy and politics, doing well on standardized tests, being as politically correct as possible, avoiding any possibility of frivolous lawsuits brought on by neurotic parents–all at the expense of giving the children a decent education or any sort of useful life experience. It was awful. I know that this was just one school, and that there are many others where I might have had a more positive experience, but before the school year was even finished, I had to run screaming away from that horrible place! Honestly, I still have nightmares about working there.
Of course, I didn’t just quit out of nowhere. I realized that I needed to stop having fantastical visions of never-tested careers that I might enjoy, and just get down to working somewhere I knew I wouldn’t hate so that I could actually support myself. Honestly, I have no idea why it took me that long to realize that there was only one job that fit that description, and it was the job I’d had since I was 15.
Today I work as a nanny. I’m still only working slightly more than part time, with two families, and searching for another part-time job to fill the rest of my hours, but that is due to my own belief (based on experience) that families are prone to change plans and needs unexpectedly, and I will have more security spreading my work out over more than one family. I have interviews regularly and there is no shortage of families looking for nannies, even in this bad economy. I am still paid more doing this than I was at any other job I have ever had. But by far the most important thing, to me, is that I love my job. I don’t always love the adults I work for (some are awful, but some are wonderful!), but I love every kid I take care of and I truly look forward to seeing them each morning and spending time with them each day. When I’m not working, I am always wondering what my little charges are up to.
When I go to job interviews, I am frequently asked what my long-term career plans are. I always respond that child care in some capacity is my long-term plan. I might switch to caring for children in my own home once I have children of my own. I might open a daycare of my own and switch to working in a more managerial capacity. I would love to find a way to incorporate my love of history with my love of kids, maybe by writing history books for young children. I really don’t know what the future holds. But I do know that I feel very blessed when I drive to work each day that I have the opportunity to do something that I really love. I like some families better than others, I wish I had a third family to work for, and I sometimes would prefer to just spend my day on the couch reading a book, just like anyone else would. But being a nanny is one of the great joys of my life.
Many people say to me with some level of pity that I am not “using my degree.” As I alluded to earlier, I think it is very sad that in America we consider college a means of getting a job and not something to do purely for the joy of learning–even for the brain exercise and the increase worldliness that it provides–though I understand that hardly anyone has tens of thousands of dollars to spend on something that is not going to lead to a career. Were I to do it again, I would have worked for a few years after high school rather than going to college, so I would have a more realistic view of the working world and what kinds of jobs I actually enjoy. But as it is, I consider my college experiences to have been a wonderful privilege and I am so thankful for them. I continue to study history on my own to this day and hope to keep doing so for the rest of my life. College also gave me many invaluable life experiences that I put to use each day. So, I have no regrets about “not using my degree.” I am using my degree, just by carrying the things I learned around in my head each day! But ultimately, my concern for my career is that I never spend my life waiting for the weekend to come. I want my career to be fun, exciting, and enjoyable. At this point, I cannot think of anything better than the job I have now. I feel truly blessed to have it.
• • • • •
July 12, 2011 by Emily
Greg Gets a Dog
So, I looked through my pictures of our trip up to Hiawassee, and to be honest, none of them were really up to par in terms of posting them on the internet. Those of you who were there, be thankful that I am not posting generally unflattering pictures of you, and those who were not, suffice it to say that we all got together and hung out by the creek and had a great time!
After the family gatherings were over, and my parents went home, my brother went to the Humane Society near Helen to see if he could find a dog to be his road trip companion, as he has left Boston and is now planning on traveling around the country for a while, seeing where he might like to live and what he might like to do.
I think we spent a few hours at the Society, checking out each dog and taking a few out for walks.
Greg found one dog in particular that he thought he liked, so we went out to lunch to give him some time to think on it.
Afterwards, we went back so that Greg could take her for a walk and see how she took to him.
She liked him.
She is about 10 months old, and was found when a nearby restaurant saw a nursing mother dog going underneath their building. There were three puppies there, and this dog was one of them. She had been living at the Humane Society ever since. They listed her as a border collie/hound mix.
She was pretty nervous about getting into Greg’s van, and she was clearly a little weirded out about being inside a house once we got home, but she took to things pretty quickly.
Greg and I took her for a walk around the neigborhood shortly after we got home. She walked on a leash pretty well, and was generally just a pretty nice, mellow, friendly dog.
Back at the house, Greg had to introduce her to his various musical instruments. She was not crazy about the drumset, but she liked the guitar well enough.
I think Greg picked out a really sweet puppy who will be a good companion for him! The Humane Society named her “Tubs” because she was the fattest puppy in her litter, but Greg was trying to think of a better name for her. Last I heard, he was leaning toward naming her Stella, though hadn’t made a final decision.
Hooray for puppies!
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