a week in the life

Here are some snippets (quotes/pics) from a typical busy, varied week!

I gave a lecture to a first-year calc class on Monday, and according to the two undergrads sitting in front of my prof during the lecture (he asked them afterward what they thought of me): "Deniz [the usual lecturer] is mathematically organized, she seems personally and spiritually organized."

Housemate Sonya brings home desserts for the rest of us!  :)

in discrete math, more fun with words...
Professor: A regular graph is strongly regular if  it's regular and... *pauses*
Classmate: It's strong.

The day *after* Halloween, the pumpkins were free.  So I brought one home and carved it up a day late...

Thursday afternoon: a hailstorm.

Also Thursday afternoon:
Christina (at 5:00): "So I'm going to go work on measure theory with my classmates.  I'm hoping to be home by 7:30."
Christina comes home at 1:30. 

This is what math looks like: four people collaborating on one proof.

My supervisor, today: "So I realized we had that nice long chat about research and so on on Wednesday...and I'm going to be on sabbatical next year." 

The distribution of grades on a rather challenging algebra midterm: 

Going for a walk in the afternoon before the time changes and it gets dark at 5:30...also taking advantage of the rare full sunshine. 

extravagance

Sometimes it's tough being a poor grad student. Today I heard about Canucks tickets being scalped for less than a thousand dollars as a *decrease* and I sighed...that's two months of rent. Or several months of groceries. How on earth can someone justify such extravagance?

Then I place my own life up for sale.

My life includes a a roof over my head--a roof that shelters me and many others in an expensive Vancouver neighborhood. It's my own room with a warm bed, donated flowering plant and stupendous view of North Van across the water. It's a shared kitchen where we talk about the day, envy other people's good cooking, and sometimes people leave out cookies on the free board.
My life includes food to eat; professional medical care (physical and psychological); a cheap bus pass and reliable public transportation system; a bike to ride; the advent of summer after an endless rainy spring.
My life includes learning ideas that are not mere abstract concepts, but breathing wisdoms to be inhabited and worn to change the world. It's the classes at Regent, the public lectures, the movies shown, the prayer retreats, the conversations in the atrium. It's chapel and singing songs and taking communion together.
And my life includes people. It's the crowd that assembles for community meals on Wednesday nights and it's Davi serenading the house with hymns and praise songs. It's the folks I'm planning to live with next fall. It's the kindly couple who sit in front of me at church. It's spot prawn dinners and hockey-watching with friends. It's the brilliance and kindness of my peers in class. It's the pastoral care, advice, teaching and lived life of Regent faculty and staff. It's exchanging letters and emails with dear friends from far away; it's being able to go home and spend time with my family. It's the gift of a new but beloved relationship.

How on earth can someone justify such extravagance, indeed.

kind streets

One of the aftershocks of my time with LVC is a rather more serious consideration of how I treat the people I run into when I'm walking around a city.
Normally it's quite simple--you try not to run into anyone, and if by chance you make eye contact, you may smile or nod or say hello. However, it's a lot more challenging when someone is trying to get your attention--and here I'm thinking of those hoping for your literal change and those hoping for greater change--canvassers for various advocacy and relief organizations.
I confess that I don't always know what to do with street canvassers. The easiest tactic is to just walk by, keep my eyes down, and shake my head vaguely. But that doesn't feel quite right to me--no matter how passionate you are about something, it's got to be hard to have hundreds, thousands of people giving you the brush. So lately I've been making eye contact, smiling, and then saying I'm not interested, so that I don't waste their time.
Today I did that, and then, since I was waiting for the bus anyway, ended up talking to one of them. And in the course of this conversation, I had two new insights for dealing with street canvassers in a way that is respectful and potentially beneficial to both sides.
1) I feel like this should have been obvious to me ages ago, but ask about alternative ways to help the cause that doesn't involve making a donation. The gentleman I talked to today was speaking on the behalf of an animal rights organization. Aha, I said. I don't have money to join your organization (plus, I'm not sure I agree with it). But what can I do in my daily life that will make a difference? He suggested free-range chicken products. I could easily have followed up with more questions along that line, which could have been a very helpful conversation informing my practices as a consumer.
2) Provide yourself with an easy out, aka, these particular canvassers were fortunately located in front of a bus stop. At the beginning of the conversation, I said that I would have to scoot when my bus came and sure enough, just as I was being presented with a form to fill out, my bus arrived and I scampered away. As someone who dislikes saying no, it made it much easier to engage, knowing that I would have a viable excuse to leave the conversation.

exploits in the garden

Before today, my only experience of plant pruning was watching my parents wrestle with both our productive peach tree and overly-enthusiastic bougainvillea. Today, it was my turn. I suited up in a Vancouver drizzle to do battle with a wannabe-stately forsythia bush that was due for a severe haircut. At first, nearly every cut I made seemed counter-intuitive: I was lopping off all the big, high-growing green stuff--that couldn't possibly be right! To keep on track, I kept reminding myself of the goal: a more contained bush, with green shoots on lower branches.
It was impossible to do this task without calling to mind Jesus' parables about pruning, vines and branches. As I nervously hacked away, I wondered how much of my life is like the branches I was pruning--beautiful, green, but ultimately not heading in the right direction.
However, I think my forsythia bush had something else to say to me. I was comforted in my work that this particular forsythia bush, as established as it is, was pretty much indestructible. As long as I left it in the ground, with some green branches, it was going to survive. And in fact, my final result looks surprisingly robust, considering that I eliminated at least 60% of its foliage.
And that's hopeful. In the midst of painful pruning, it's good to remember that we're rooted and are ultimately going to survive, and not only survive but maybe even look better than we thought.

overheard in...

- Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
"Don't you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty? You wouldn't marry a girl just because she's pretty, but my goodness, doesn't it help?"

Lady Beekman: "It's a tiara."
Lorelei Lee: "You DO wear it on your head. I just LOVE finding new places to wear diamonds."

- New Testament Foundations
"Dick and Jane. The ice cream people. No? Ben and Jerry's? I'm not up on my North American culture..."

re: Moses confronting Pharoah
"What does his staff turn into? Not a beaver, sorry Canadians."

- Christian Thought and Culture
"Mennonites rule! Calmly, peaceably, quietly..."

- in the Atrium, today, at lunch
"We're in charge of the US!"
Followed by
"We are gullible sheep!"

Re: the last two: A fellow student and I are organizing the United States contingent of Regent's "Taste of the World" aka international potluck extravaganza.

brief update

Christmas holidays were great, back in Canada, already behind, classes are awesome, and this has been my day...
Hopefully life will proceed without too much excitement for the next couple of weeks.

sailing into harbor

Well, I have navigated myself through the academic seas of Regent College and have emerged mostly unscathed! (Hopefully my GPA is in the same boat.)
Ah...I've loved my classes this term, but there is an undeniable release that comes with being totally done with everything for the term, especially when, for the most part, you feel like you've done your best work.
Now I get to return to the real world and all of those things that have been sadly neglected while I closeted myself away in academia-land. This means cleaning, shopping and mailing of Christmas presents, writing a Christmas letter, writing a family update, catching up on correspondence, and maybe a few more blog entries (lots of writing, you notice). Tomorrow I get to see Sarah and then on Sunday its down to Washington to visit Katie before heading home for Christmas.
It really is like returning from the high seas and needing to get all your shopping in while you're at port!

entering a new age!

My facebook status today: "Christina is no longer a prime age...and won't be for another five years." I thought it was rather witty. :)
So another birthday in another country. I must admit I'm suffering from a bit of the culture shock (and future uncertainty) blues so the day has been a little uneven. But! I've received many birthday wishes from friends and family, got to talk to my mom, got treated to coffee and also received this *awesome* pair of mittens.


Tomorrow...spice cake!

just desserts

Today marked the exciting occasion of the Old Testament Foundations midterm. It's the first major test at Regent for most of us new students. We were told to study hard and I think most of us did. Before the exam, our professor remarked that the real value of the exam had already occurred by the time we were all sitting in the chapel at 1:00--we'd been sufficiently intimidated to put in the time and energy to think through our lectures and reading. Unsurprisingly, the exam is just an afterthought in terms of learning.

For all its anxiety, exam preparation is a great communal bonding experience. There's actual studying together, the exchange of random questions, and our fabulous review tutorial, where three teams (self-named "Babylonians," "Israelites," and "Anti-Theonomists") squared off, jeopardy style.
However, the greatest part of the test-taking happened afterward. When I emerged from the chapel with the first wave of finishers, there were pieces of paper (seven, to be exact), saying C-O-O-K-I-E-S, with an arrow. In the atrium there was a spread of cookies and a sign congratulating us on completing our first Regent midterm, organized by a group of kind second-years (mostly), who were in our shoes not too long ago.
If that isn't Regent (and Regent students) in a nutshell, I'm not sure what is.

graduate school?

This year of LVC has been like a graduate course in "real life." I haven't missed college this year because my mind has been so engaged with all the new, real-life stuff that I've been learning about through my work, my housemates and living in DC. At our house retreat last weekend, Nora shared something she'd written for her school's alumni network--alums were invited to post mock-courses that described what they were living and learning in their time after college. Aha! I said. It's not just me. So this is my list of "courses" that I have taken this year (with thanks to Nora for originating GWS/MUS 287).

EDUC 350: Advanced Topics in Adult Education (no prerequisites)
RMCS 230: Washington Natives: the story of Washington D.C.'s black community
MATH 005: Elementary School Math for Former Math Majors
ENGL 200: Basic Grammar and Usage for Writers of GED Essays
ECON 215: Simplicity and Sustainability in Collective and Personal Budgeting
GWS/MUS 287: All the Single Ladies: Female Empowerment through Communal Living, Pop Music, and Learning to Like People Different from You Even Though They May Drive You Crazy
PE 207: Urban Biking
HEALTH 115: Cooking for Food Allergies and Picky Eaters
EVS 010: Composting for Dummies

a hospital kaleidoscope

In LVC we throw around the word "community" a lot but it can be hard to know what that really means. As cheesy at it sounds, this week I got to see community in action.
The setting? One of my housemates was in the hospital. The hospital was far away. We were all busy with work. It would have been easy to just carry on with our lives...but that didn't happen. Everyone pulled together and did what it took to make sure that we made it out to visit--whether that meant missing work or taking two buses back to the house at eleven at night. I was waiting for the bus with two of my housemates after a hospital visit and realized that (at least for a little while) my priorities had become community-first, self-second. For someone who lives very much in her own head, this was an incredible thought. And considering we've only known each other for nine months, I can only marvel at a) my housemates (who are quality people) and b) how we are slowly becoming greater than the sum of our parts.
That realization also made me see how far I have to go. It took some prodding to work up the energy to make the trek to the hospital. I also realized that community-focus and my compassionate attention shouldn't just be a hospital thing. A person zoning out in the living room may need my company just as much as my physically isolated housemate in the hospital.
Our hospital visits also hammered home another lesson that I've been learning this year: the more narrow your "problem" or interest, the wider your world. For example, my job is pretty specific--I teach adults. However, education with adults, especially when centered around attaining a high school credential, becomes a swirl of other issues including parenting, relationships, fair housing, just wages, employment, child care, and much more. In the same way, going to the hospital became much more than one housemate being sick. It made me realize (not for the first time) that there are very few hospitals actually IN the District, especially in the center of the city. Those hospitals that are in the city are generally dismissed as inferior. My housemates and I thought that our hour-plus commute to Sibley was arduous--but for some people, that's how long it takes to get to school/work every day. We spent three days with a 'second job' of hospital visits, but some people spend years visiting their loved ones who are sick. And what happens when concerned family members don't have the privilege of taking two buses to see their loved ones? Or the luxury of taking off work?

All in all, I come away from this week feeling undeservedly fortunate. I think that's what they call blessing.

New computer!

Here she is, my new laptop!
I think her name is Penelope. My next computer can be Ulysses. :D