So, I forgot to mention the important clincher to my apocalyptic inklings: an earthquake, the first significant shaking of the earth to be felt in Delaware in decades. (I actually didn't feel it -- the fitting rooms in Christiana Mall's H&M didn't move me... But everyone else in the mall was freaking out, the food court emptied out so fast you wouldn't believe it, and nobody's cell phone worked immediately afterward. No one is quite sure why.)
And now here we are, the entire eastern seaboard holding its breath for the category 3 Hurricane Irene (which should really only be a tropical storm by the time it hits us). We're currently almost one half hour into the twenty-four-hour hurricane warning extended to the Wilmington area, and New Jersey is being evacuated. Two nights ago I was Facebook chatting my friend Zach in Norfolk, Virginia, who just moved there to start teaching and is worried about flooding. "I really have no idea what to expect," he wrote, and he's not the only one. I realize that I am unique in having vivid, if perhaps skewed, recollections of the category 4 Hurricane Georges that hit St. Croix back in 1998. Yes, I do historically find myself fascinated in disasters of all kinds, but I unarguably survived on the Bunsen-burned Spam we ate and lived to see an annoyingly resilient cactus torn from the roots in our backyard. There was one moment I got scared, when we let our German Shepherd mix, Baloo, out to pee during the temporary calm in the eye of the storm, and she took off. But I find myself yet again this time around assuaging my sister with scientific details, statistics, and backyard streaking during teaser rainstorms. Meanwhile I'm feeling in the pit of my stomach a roiling thrill and a maddening calm, while the popular radio station broadcasts on-air calls from women named Irene, and a playlist of Irene-themed songs, The Scorpions' Rock You Like A Hurricane, and Save Tonight by Eagle Eye Cherry.
Swanson Household Hurricane Task List 2011:
- Buy and stash candles, water, and non-electricity-dependent food items
- Assemble phone list for my dad's congregation
- Charge cell phones
- Update blog before potential indefinite internet/electricity fail
- Shower...?
On another note, I've been running around with my mom for the past couple of days. As I see it, the CEL should really push mom-shadowing, or even just my-mom-shadowing; because she really is quite a capable woman and I'm fascinated at how she gets around and gets everything done without totally going over the edge. Also she's just great in general. The other night she took me to an ice cream social at a church up on the university end of town, where I met a lot of the ladies from Lutheran Community Services, her office's parent organization. Some of them were asking me about my plan. "What are you doing now?" they asked at first. I told them, straight up, that I'm trying to meet people and get acquainted with the area. "But what's your plan?" they pressed. I felt that old anxious irritation welling up in my chest but took a deep breath (the way my mom does when she's answering a difficult question) and said, "I don't know." I continued to explain that I have a lot of interests but I'm not sure yet how they're going to be expressed, and they noted that I can't really do anything sociology-related if I don't go into further studies... For the most part I managed not to get sucked into that WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE anxiety, or even resentment toward that anxiety, but the conversation did get me thinking: where am I going? I think it lit a healthy fire under my ambition, which I'm starting to stoke now.
So the next day I got up at 6:40 (my alarm went of at 6 sharp) and rode the bus into the city with my mom to work at LCS's F.A.I.T.H. Center. The F.A.I.T.H. Center takes appointments with people who need some money to get out of a tight spot (like a final notice for electricity or eviction) after extenuating circumstances, and draws from several different funds to write a check just to bring financial survival within reach. I was interested to note that a family can only come to the F.A.I.T.H. Center for help once every 7 years, which changes the service relationship and raises client accountability -- because they have to demonstrate that they can, overall, manage their own finances and maintain a certain standard of living, with a roof over their head and lights on. So I got to sit in on a few interviews and get a feel for the kind of work they do. While I was tired by the end of the day, I wasn't overwhelmed. I think this could be a type of service I could do, although I still feel like a prim little white girl who doesn't know how to talk about the things that really matter. The kind of girl who went to school with the man in the suit on the New Castle County government page, the man who looks so out-of-place on a computer screen in a downtown office that I want to punch him, that he could never fathom the kind of people who use his page as a resource. I can almost guarantee that he has never spoken with any of the people my mother and her coworkers spoke with throughout the day, and that, like me, he wouldn't know how if he met them on a city bus, which he would never ride in the first place.
My mom is also good at grocery shopping, although I think she got excited to have me along because I may have coerced her into buying a few things she didn't really need, that I probably wouldn't even buy if I was grocery shopping on my own. She did say, when I was waxing poetic about Greek yogurt and fresh produce, "That's the kind of thing you can eat if there are only two of you. I'd really like to fit that into our lifestyle, but it's just not practical." But she looked for it anyway.
She also asked me, after a decently-dressed gray-haired man in glasses and a nametag sidled up to me with an umbrella at the bus stop in Rodney Square, "So was that guy trying to pick you up?" He caught my eye as he was approaching, and then positioned himself so that I was blocking him from her line of sight and said slyly, "I can bring my umbrella over here I guess." He asked me a few questions about which bus I was waiting for and where it goes, and what time it was supposed to show up. Having never taken this particular bus before, I couldn't really answer, and my mom mostly could, so the entire thing turned into a mild fiasco he was probably regretting the entire time. "I was gonna ask you that!" I replied, and we laughed about it. "I get a lot more attention when I go out with you," she remarked on the walk home when a neighbor waved from his truck as he passed. I was just thinking everyone was friendly, although I think I misrecognized a guy on the bus and talked to him as though we'd met when, in retrospect, I'm not sure we actually did. Also, on our early-morning run today Maria and I saw the mythical cute guys in our neighborhood all on their way out to highway 4. So there is hope.
My dad came home this morning from an EKG and announced, "I have a beautiful heart!" Most people who have met him could easily say this figuratively, but the physiological confirmation of this fact proved startlingly joyful. He described the feeling of watching his own heart beating on a medical monitor, of watching the valves contract and the blood pump in and out on its way through the rest of his body. I thought of the time I went to a fertility doctor for my first pelvic exam, and he showed me a live ultrasound of my reproductive system. It's pretty sweet to watch your own body working. It's a pretty incredible piece of work, if I do say so myself. Eric once scoffed at intelligent design because of how often the body breaks and fails, but there's something so beautiful about that delicacy that I can't really disbelieve that it all makes some kind of sense.
And now here we are, the entire eastern seaboard holding its breath for the category 3 Hurricane Irene (which should really only be a tropical storm by the time it hits us). We're currently almost one half hour into the twenty-four-hour hurricane warning extended to the Wilmington area, and New Jersey is being evacuated. Two nights ago I was Facebook chatting my friend Zach in Norfolk, Virginia, who just moved there to start teaching and is worried about flooding. "I really have no idea what to expect," he wrote, and he's not the only one. I realize that I am unique in having vivid, if perhaps skewed, recollections of the category 4 Hurricane Georges that hit St. Croix back in 1998. Yes, I do historically find myself fascinated in disasters of all kinds, but I unarguably survived on the Bunsen-burned Spam we ate and lived to see an annoyingly resilient cactus torn from the roots in our backyard. There was one moment I got scared, when we let our German Shepherd mix, Baloo, out to pee during the temporary calm in the eye of the storm, and she took off. But I find myself yet again this time around assuaging my sister with scientific details, statistics, and backyard streaking during teaser rainstorms. Meanwhile I'm feeling in the pit of my stomach a roiling thrill and a maddening calm, while the popular radio station broadcasts on-air calls from women named Irene, and a playlist of Irene-themed songs, The Scorpions' Rock You Like A Hurricane, and Save Tonight by Eagle Eye Cherry.
Swanson Household Hurricane Task List 2011:
- Buy and stash candles, water, and non-electricity-dependent food items
- Assemble phone list for my dad's congregation
- Charge cell phones
- Update blog before potential indefinite internet/electricity fail
- Shower...?
On another note, I've been running around with my mom for the past couple of days. As I see it, the CEL should really push mom-shadowing, or even just my-mom-shadowing; because she really is quite a capable woman and I'm fascinated at how she gets around and gets everything done without totally going over the edge. Also she's just great in general. The other night she took me to an ice cream social at a church up on the university end of town, where I met a lot of the ladies from Lutheran Community Services, her office's parent organization. Some of them were asking me about my plan. "What are you doing now?" they asked at first. I told them, straight up, that I'm trying to meet people and get acquainted with the area. "But what's your plan?" they pressed. I felt that old anxious irritation welling up in my chest but took a deep breath (the way my mom does when she's answering a difficult question) and said, "I don't know." I continued to explain that I have a lot of interests but I'm not sure yet how they're going to be expressed, and they noted that I can't really do anything sociology-related if I don't go into further studies... For the most part I managed not to get sucked into that WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE anxiety, or even resentment toward that anxiety, but the conversation did get me thinking: where am I going? I think it lit a healthy fire under my ambition, which I'm starting to stoke now.
So the next day I got up at 6:40 (my alarm went of at 6 sharp) and rode the bus into the city with my mom to work at LCS's F.A.I.T.H. Center. The F.A.I.T.H. Center takes appointments with people who need some money to get out of a tight spot (like a final notice for electricity or eviction) after extenuating circumstances, and draws from several different funds to write a check just to bring financial survival within reach. I was interested to note that a family can only come to the F.A.I.T.H. Center for help once every 7 years, which changes the service relationship and raises client accountability -- because they have to demonstrate that they can, overall, manage their own finances and maintain a certain standard of living, with a roof over their head and lights on. So I got to sit in on a few interviews and get a feel for the kind of work they do. While I was tired by the end of the day, I wasn't overwhelmed. I think this could be a type of service I could do, although I still feel like a prim little white girl who doesn't know how to talk about the things that really matter. The kind of girl who went to school with the man in the suit on the New Castle County government page, the man who looks so out-of-place on a computer screen in a downtown office that I want to punch him, that he could never fathom the kind of people who use his page as a resource. I can almost guarantee that he has never spoken with any of the people my mother and her coworkers spoke with throughout the day, and that, like me, he wouldn't know how if he met them on a city bus, which he would never ride in the first place.
My mom is also good at grocery shopping, although I think she got excited to have me along because I may have coerced her into buying a few things she didn't really need, that I probably wouldn't even buy if I was grocery shopping on my own. She did say, when I was waxing poetic about Greek yogurt and fresh produce, "That's the kind of thing you can eat if there are only two of you. I'd really like to fit that into our lifestyle, but it's just not practical." But she looked for it anyway.
She also asked me, after a decently-dressed gray-haired man in glasses and a nametag sidled up to me with an umbrella at the bus stop in Rodney Square, "So was that guy trying to pick you up?" He caught my eye as he was approaching, and then positioned himself so that I was blocking him from her line of sight and said slyly, "I can bring my umbrella over here I guess." He asked me a few questions about which bus I was waiting for and where it goes, and what time it was supposed to show up. Having never taken this particular bus before, I couldn't really answer, and my mom mostly could, so the entire thing turned into a mild fiasco he was probably regretting the entire time. "I was gonna ask you that!" I replied, and we laughed about it. "I get a lot more attention when I go out with you," she remarked on the walk home when a neighbor waved from his truck as he passed. I was just thinking everyone was friendly, although I think I misrecognized a guy on the bus and talked to him as though we'd met when, in retrospect, I'm not sure we actually did. Also, on our early-morning run today Maria and I saw the mythical cute guys in our neighborhood all on their way out to highway 4. So there is hope.
My dad came home this morning from an EKG and announced, "I have a beautiful heart!" Most people who have met him could easily say this figuratively, but the physiological confirmation of this fact proved startlingly joyful. He described the feeling of watching his own heart beating on a medical monitor, of watching the valves contract and the blood pump in and out on its way through the rest of his body. I thought of the time I went to a fertility doctor for my first pelvic exam, and he showed me a live ultrasound of my reproductive system. It's pretty sweet to watch your own body working. It's a pretty incredible piece of work, if I do say so myself. Eric once scoffed at intelligent design because of how often the body breaks and fails, but there's something so beautiful about that delicacy that I can't really disbelieve that it all makes some kind of sense.
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