I need a visa

Lately I've have been checking my email in hopes of seeing one about my work visa invitation letter.  I finally got one last night.  And now, it's looking like I might not get the invitation letter that I need to apply for my visa for another two weeks.  So the visa probably won't arrive until the day of or a couple days before I leave.  Yikes. I'm hoping to fly out August 26th, so that I can get over at least some jet lag before teaching starts on September 1st, but that might not happen.  Well, either way, I am getting more and more excited!  Now to figure out how to stuff 10 months worth of my life into a couple suitcases...

a crash in the night

Our house had no air conditioning, so the heat hit me like a fury whenever I left the frigid St. John's University after a day of class to come home. Some nights were awful--I pulled up a small fan next to my bed and set it on a chair to cool me off point blank, but that didn't always make sleeping easy.

One particular night, I was dozing off and on until something like 3 am, when I thought to myself, this is the last straw, and pulled the fan up even closer. I woke an hour later (or maybe I never fell asleep again) by a tremendous crash. I sat up, bleary eyed and feverishly hot, wondering if the crash came from outside or inside. Then, as I sat debating what to do, I heard whispering and giggling from the hallway. I cracked my door and peeked out, and saw that Naomi's door was open, and so was Lisa's. I stumbled down the hallway as I put my glasses on, and saw that Naomi was in Lisa's room, peering out the window into the front yard and...giggling.

I stepped inside the room and they both started and shrieked a little, and then they started telling me what was going on. Our neighbor next door, who is renting a room in the large house there, decided to install a contraband AC window unit in his room. Who could blame him? However, his landlady does not allow them because they drain so much electricity, so this guy thought he'd be smart and install his unit at 4 am. So he put it in his window, and it promptly fell out...and smashed in our tiny flower garden three stories below, between the two houses. Yeah. Naomi was basically falling over herself, just laughing and laughing as quietly as she could, because the man could probably hear us since we had all the windows open. It was such a pathetic sight, that AC unit all smashed up. I can only imagine that the man was wringing his hands or shaking his fist at the sky.

Then, the doorbell rang. And rang again. But we stayed upstairs, giggling and still feverishly hot, because we weren't about to go down there and answer the door at 4 am. The poor man probably thought we would call the cops on him if he didn't alert us first, but he eventually gave up. And left the broken thing in our flowerbed so that he wouldn't have to deal with it.

We all went back to bed, and I think I slept after that. All I know is I needed loads of coffee the next morning.

an unwelcome visitor

A week and a half after I moved in to Naomi's house in the Bronx, the Roberts' cousin Emily moved in. Emily and I became fast friends, but before this, there was an intruder in the house that threatened her when I was away at school. Emily was setting up her newly moved-into room, and began to hear something making its way up the stairs. A fuzzy black head and beady eyes protruded over the top stair as Emily watched, I can only picture her in horror, from her room. The black squirrel dashed into Rachel's room (next to Emily's) and hid itself, and Emily screamed out the window for Jesse (her cousin, whose backyard is shared with Naomi's house) to come help her.

So Jesse, whose pride and joy is a well-muscled Rottweiler named Scrapper, came inside to help--all Jesse had to do was yell "Scrapper! SQUIRREL!" and Scrapper betook herself up three flights of stairs and into Rachel's room to hunt around. There was no squirrel to be seen. Emily and Jesse began to talk in the hallway, and all of a sudden, the squirrel raced out between their legs, bounced off the closed door at the end of the hallway, and ran back into Rachel's room...where it was met with Scrapper. The squirrel made one last desperate leap to the windowsill, but Scrapper met it mid-air with her jaws, and shook it, and killed it. Poor squirrel. From what I heard and what I saw as documented in pictures, Jesse was beaming as if his daughter had won an Olympic medal.

So, the squirrel was disposed of, and Rachel moved in the next day--to the room where it met its end. The squirrel smelled awful, I'm told, so when Rachel moved in, I watched her closely. She said to me at one point, "does it smell funny in here?" I told her to ask Jesse why.

I have been home now for a week after a month living in the Bronx, and honestly, I miss being there! I got used to Spanish music blasting at all hours of the day and night, cars honking just for kicks, riding the subway every day for class, and walking with my eyes straight ahead instead of saying hello to anyone. Definitely a switch from the casual grocery store conversations you often have in the South. But besides all those negatives ( I guess you could say, unless you're really into Spanish music at 2 am) I listed, there were so many other things I loved about living there that those were canceled out.

The house I lived in was fantastic--a lady from the Roberts' church, Naomi, rents out rooms to women, and I was one of five renting from her. I had a great time getting to know them, and I was surprised at how fast I felt at home there with them. We hung out in the backyard a lot with the Roberts family, playing knockout and Dutch Blitz. I beat some people soundly at knockout, but sadly, I didn't win a single game of Dutch Blitz. They beat me every time. But, it just gave me a great incentive to get better at it, because I'm part Dutch anyway--I should be decent at it, or so I'm told. :)

I went to Chinatown three times while I was there, which is kind of funny to think about in retrospect. I wanted to go there, but I didn't know I'd go back two times after the fact. My friend LiLi Roberts, who is Chinese herself, introduced me to the world of haggling. I am not a natural-born haggler. I smile too much. I look like someone who would just give in, because lowering the price 2 dollars doesn't make that much of a difference. Oh, but I have changed my ways, and I am now on the road to being a better haggler than before. However, I think I might still need a friend with me to make it look more convincing. Here is our haggling routine:

Me: "How much?"

Chinese man: "15 dollars. Very quality. Very nice."

Me: "That's too expensive. 12 dollars?"

Chinese man: *wrings hands* "You make me go out of business! 14 dollars."

Lili: "C'mon, Laura. We can get it cheaper at another store."

Chinese man: "14 dollars, best price!"

Chinese woman:" Don't listen to her. She is ugly. Best price!"

Me: "12 dollars."

Chinese man: "13."

*LiLi and I start to walk away*

Chinese man: "WAIT! Okay, 12 dollars."

On a side note, the man's counterpart at the store (possibly the owner) was very rude, but that was a pretty hilarious moment. Don't listen to her, she's ugly. Goodness.

I have to stop writing for now, but next time, I will write the squirrel story and the AC unit story.

Dad and I are going up to NYC tomorrow morning on the Amtrak, and I can hardly believe I'm finally going! I had to laugh, talking with my friend (who lives in the house right behind the house where I'll be living in the Bronx) about it. He said, "oh, you're bringing your dad with you? he might want to take you right home when he sees our neighborhood!" Yikes. But owing either to being naive or just brave, I'm not that worried about the neighborhood. I'll have friends nearby who grew up there, some friends who will be new there as well (including Rachel and Noah, yay!), and I'm more than excited about the classes I'll be taking, enough not to worry too much about the rest.

thoughts about words

Everywhere I look lately, words come into my mind. Hemingway, Faulkner, and Percy keep on coming back to me, because they wrestled so much with words and meaning too.

When I am at work babysitting, and using as much creativity as I can muster to interest the twins (five years old and struggling to use any words at all) in an activity that most children would take to naturally, I think about all of the words that the children can’t say. There is such a huge gap of understanding between us without words. And every word that does come from between their garbled sounds is exciting. At their speech therapy, the therapists show the kids pictures of ordinary items, and sometimes the children are able to retrieve the right words from their minds to label the pictures, but other times they just stare and no meaning connects from the pictures to their brains. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be five years old and unable to communicate what is going on inside my mind. Whenever the girl starts screaming, I have to remind her “tell me! Tell me!” because otherwise she forgets to use words when she wants something.

Our language is so wonderful and full of words of such abstract and ambiguous meanings, which we can associate with both concrete and abstract subjects, but communication is such a broken, fragmented thing. People shout at each other when meaning doesn’t get across, or even to get their meaning across, and even then we all build walls so that words won’t penetrate. We pretend not to understand what is said, or simply ignore what is said unless we can find something in it to use. We treat words like dirt: both our own and those of others. Promises are meaningless, truth is whatever suits at the time, and memory is not reliable to speak about the past. In literature classes, we talk about degrees of reliability in narrators. It seems like we are all unreliable narrators, whether we’re talking with each other about ourselves or talking about other people. We bend words to suit our purposes.

I wonder what freedom, both from language and within language, would look like. What I mean is, freedom from language in the sense that language does not limit the meaning that we seek to describe or know; and freedom within language in the sense that words give us the means with which to wholly and satisfactorily express ourselves. I believe that Christ did not come only to redeem people, but he also is redeeming the rest of the created order like it says in Romans. The whole creation groans as it waits to be freed, and languages groan under the weight of sin as well. But the Word will redeem words.

What does it mean that Christ is the Word? I would love to hear sermons on that subject. From what I can think of right now, it seems that he is the only trustworthy and pure Word, so he is the truth made Incarnate. He not only speaks the truth, but he is truth. It's hard for me to wrap my mind around that. But I do know that God cares about words, because he chose to speak to us through the written language of the Bible and through the Word, Christ. Since God cares so much about words, and as they are a part of his creation, it seems as though the words themselves have fallen with us, twisted and in need of redemption. I feel all the time that the words I use in conversation or in writing are never adequate or careful or thoughtful enough. I'm looking forward to seeing what it is like to have every part of me made new, including my language.

the post-grad life, take one

I drove to the library today after work to get a new library card. It's been so long since I checked a book out of a non-school library, and when I walked in, it was a beautiful feeling. I actually miss GCC's library, because having so many books at my disposal 2 minutes walking distance away was pretty wonderful. Over the last week, I kept on thinking of books on my Amazon wishlist that I have time now to read, and then remembering that I need to go to the library since I can't fork over all the cash I need to buy books right now. When I move out and get another job a year from now, I feel bad for whoever has to help me move, because I have accumulated so many books. Moving people with books is the worst.

No, moving people with pianos is the worst.

The Brothers Karamazov is on my desk now, waiting to be read. I'm pretty excited about this one, because so many people have told me to read it and I wanted to before I read Notes from Underground.

Most nights this week I've been reading Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but I must still be sleep-deprived because I give up and go to sleep after 10 minutes, so it's either boring or I just need more sleep. Yeah, it's not boring. I just checked.

I've also been applying for my work visa this week, which seems really complicated, but it should end up fine. I just hate paperwork. My employer sent me the contract to sign, but as my parents pointed out to me, it would be dumb to sign it yet because the part that details my salary and the dates I will be there wasn't filled out yet. So I'm waiting for them to send me a legit contract, and then I will sign my life over to the PRC.