Rings and things.
As my desk-bound life rarely gives cause for me to produce new and exciting blog entries, I feel that I have to wait for major, life-changing moments to actually strike the "create new post" icon. Such a moment has come, my friends. One major advantage of dating someone who travels to Africa with alarming frequency (like three times in a month and a half) is getting a share in the acquired frequent flier miles, so last week Jason and I took a little walk on the beach in Hawaii. During the course of our sunset stroll, we decided that two years of dating was quite enough, and so he got down on one knee and I said yes before he finished talking and, well, to make a long story slightly shorter I have a beautiful ring on my finger and a ridiculous grin on my face.
Though we are still tweaking the exact date, we're planning an August wedding--if any of you plan to be in Idaho this summer I hope to see you there. :) Other than that little tidbit, we had a great time in Hawaii and I can't believe that I am now watching the predicted 5-7 inches of snow fall outside my office window. (Okay, that's a lie, because I don't really have a window at my desk, but instead must look through a crack in the bookshelf to see a sliver of light coming through my coworker's window.) Springtime, where are you?
That's all from me for now. Until the next life-changing experience...
Missy
Beginning the world
"True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility. If you love something, you want to look after it."
~ Philip Pullman
Yes, this subject line is the title to one of the chapters in
Bleak House, but it's also an
Innocence Mission song:
Aren't you bursting with butterflies
on the fourth of September?
Like you'll have to get on the bus
in your tartan dress, with your lunch box.
Though your body is twenty-nine.
Though your mind is an old thing.
I mean, don't you ever sigh?I guess what I'm trying to say is...I have an announcement. Through a very interesting series of events (which only began about two weeks ago), I'll be moving back down to Colombia to teach English at a primary school towards the end of next month. This just happens to coincide with a trip to India that my roommate will be taking at about the same time (although she'll only be gone until mid-May...for me, it may be two years)--so we'll be closing up shop soon.
No one knows yet but for family and a couple close friends--who are all much more thrilled than I would ever expect them to be. (Of course, my family is on cloud 9. :)
Colegio Bureche is a tiny school in Santa Marta, on the northern coast of Colombia (on the Caribbean). I have dual citizenship, so I don't need a work visa--only to renew my identity card.
The past couple weeks have been nuts, as I'm sure you can imagine. I've run the gamut of emotions on this one. I've always known that I would someday love to return to Colombia to teach or work with children--to do anything worthwhile there. The work I've been doing on Deborah's documentary has only increased this longing for the other half of my identity. (In fact, her original idea was was to explore what it meant to be bi-cultural and have a father who was an exile in her own country. It soon broadened into an excavation of the displacement issue in Colombia--of people who have become exiles in
their own country.)
Yes, I've been nonplussed by how this amazing opportunity comes just as I've stiffled my nagging demons on the question of grad school. Obviously, I've waited two years--what's a couple more? But it has taken so much effort for me to arrive at the place where I was ok with myself to merely apply! (This fall, the program at the University of Durham that I wanted to apply to was "reorganized," and with the retirement of their T.S. Eliot professor, I was left in the lurch. But I kept working, settled on three schools, and am finishing up my applications this weekend. If I get in, I'll defer.)
Yet the upside to this is that I'll be getting some teaching experience. Getting an MA would've only taken one year, and then what? I had no idea as to what I would do afterwards. My choices were: teach high school English (with an MA, but zero experience) or find my way into a PhD program (more school, and then teaching first years with zero experience). I know having a class of 18 six-year-olds isn't exactly the same thing, but hey--a girl's got to start somewhere. And then I will know more if this is what I truly want to pursue.
I also realize that this will change the course of my life and challenge me in unimaginable ways. But at this point, I welcome it with open arms. Nothing could be worse than the hell I've been living in for the past two years. I desperately need change...and to be able to focus on the needs of others; to step outside of my own head.
Thank you for the encouragement you have always been to me. You've given me hope that "the world is tall and wide," and that possibility is still alive and well.
This is not goodbye. I'll have internet access there, and will continue to maintain my online presence as much as I can. I appreciate your thoughts and prayers during this transition (esp. regarding my English profs--I don't know how I'll tell them). But after all,
We know good enough
is a thousand miles from grace.~ Over the Rhine
Happy Birthdays
Just wanted to say Happy Birthday to Krista and Colleen. It's a little late for you both...so sorry. I don't really know how to contact Krista otherwise, but I hope you both had great birthdays!
Extortionist foreign Metro 'police' (and other adventures)
Okay Ana-Maria (or amc as you now call yourself), I am posting to get things going. I am also procrastinating, but we all have our ulterior motives.
So, let me preface by saying I am
not trying to brag that I live in London where cheap airfare to fabulous nearby places is a huge perk. If you lived here, and you're anything like me, you'd use every spare quid to plan a trip too.
So, a couple weeks ago Jen and I took a trip to Rome, about a week after I got back from California. Two hour flight, no big deal aside from what a huge pain it is to get to Stansted Airport early in the morning. But that's why Ryan Air is so cheap. We arive without incident, and buy Metro tickets to get into the city center only to discover that the ticket machine which stamps your ticket with the time and location where you boarded is broken. A uniformed Metro employee opened the gate and was waving everyone through, though, so we thought it was no big deal. Upon arriving at our destination, we almost get out of the underground station before being accosted (okay, not rudely at first) by a uniformed Metro employee who asks to see our tickets. We show them to him, and of course they aren't stamped so he asks for our passports.
This becomes one of those moments when internally I am thinking 'Am I supposed to give it to him? He does have a badge. What do I do?' We ended up handing the passports over, and he walks us over to a woman seated at a table he tells us will speak better English. The woman starts off nicely, but quickly becomes very rude when we try to explain that a person in a uniform identical to her own had told us to go through without the stamp. This would not be such a big issue if not for her insistence that we pay a €100 fine (!) for improperly using a €1 ticket, which we purchased, as instructed by her conterpart. By the way, a €10 fine would be understandable, but 100? Seems to me like an excellent scheme to entrap and extort money from tourists. I figured this all out 60 seconds too late, and now all I was thinking was 'How are we going to get our passports back and get out of this?'
Mid-explanation, the 'Nazi cow' (as Jen and I later affectionaely dubbed her) cuts me off and very rudely says 'You can't expect things to be like in your country,' by which apparently she meant the expectation that we should obey the instructions of agents of the government with authority to fine us, and not get in trouble for doing so. 'You stop talking,' she says. 'We are finished'. I was seething mad, and more so for her lumping me together with the jerks who give American tourists a bad name, while I was attempting to be quite reasonable with her. We told her we had no money (which was true) and she proceeded to write us tickets, which Jen (being a good law student) refused to sign because we couldn't read Italian and we might be admitting we committed a crime, which we felt we had not done. She gave us our passports back with the tickets and threatened that the company would track us down in the United States and send us a bill. We left.
All this took place at a small complex of tables where the Metro gestapo were running their little racket, and several other obvious tourists in backpacks (like us) were dealing with a similar situation. The lone Italian man who had been stopped was royally pissed off and looked like he was going to hurt someone. Who could blame him?
Our first look at daylight in the city of Rome came immediately after this incident. The guy at the hotel told us to talk to a police officer, so we went back to the dreaded station and visited their office, where half a dozen polizia were lounging around drinking coffee, waiting for some action. Fortunately for Jen and I, one guys spoke English and passed our tickets around for the inspection of all the other officers. I was pleased to see the looks of disgust on some of their faces as they shook their heads and handed the tickets back to us. The English-speaking policeman asked 'Did you give them any money?' We said no, and he replied, 'Then there is nothing they can do. On the 'address' space they put 'care of embassy,' so they can't very well send you a bill.' We left feeling much at ease, and on the whole less inclined to regard Italy as a fascist dictatorship since the polizia were so friendly and helpful. The rest of the trip was fun, and the cloud left by that incident disappeared. We learned our lesson, and meticulously made sure to have our Metro cards stamped for each journey. We also decided that anyone who wasn't a real police officer didn't get to see our passports, which we left locked up at the hotel just in case. Unfortunately we arrived that afternoon at the Sistine Chapel an hour after it closed, and the next day being Sunday did not get another chance to go before leaving Monday morning. I blame this on the Metro people.
So, boys and girls, the lesson is... well obvious enough. I would expect this sort of thing in Latin America or the Middle East, but was a bit surprised to see such a scam going on in Western Europe. Then again, in most of our country you can't smoke indoors except in your own home (not that that affects me particularly), so I guess standards of 'civilization' are relative. I hope you at least found something entertaining in the story. Cheers!
