Selected Greek Doodles

Some more of my limited artistic talent for your enjoyment.

First, here's a dinosaur. It was a decent drawing day, so I got a decent dinosaur.

Here's Batty and Black looking at a bulletin board for Chao Kindergarten. It says Chao Kindergarten at the top, but it's kind of hard to read.

On the left, Black and Sunsun are riding in a hot air balloon advertising a movie that doesn't actually exist: Chao In Space 2. On the right, Batty is dangling from a helium balloon advertising Chao In Space. Poor Batty. He always got the raw end of the deal.

Here's a hippo, because none of my doodles would be complete without a hippo. You can kind of see the next one through the page.

Here's a cow. You may notice that it looks remarkably similar to my hippo. Like I said, limited artistic talent.

More chao. Here we're having some kind of pool party. Up top we have Sunsun on a swing. Ghostly is standing nearby while Gray swings on a tire swing. Below, Black and Joy are unpacking a picnic while Pickles goes snorkeling in the pool. There's also a beach ball, but it kind of got cut off in the picture. Batty is about to swing into the pool on a rope swing, but he seems to have forgotten to look before he leaps... silly Batty. Trix are for rabbits.

Llama.

This is a rocket ship. My friend Alysha and I always used to draw rocket ships in stats. I guess I was feeling nostalgic. For stats. Sure.

Here's some actual work. I only include this because of what was written at the bottom of the page, which I erased so no one would look over my shoulder during class and think, "You are a sad, strange person." Except now I'm posting it on my blog, so... don't judge, okay? I was very frustrated with this sentence when I wrote it, because I worked on the thing for an hour and I still don't know what it says. Anyway, it said something like this: "I am not [name of classmate who is very smart and also very good at all things Classics]. I am Erin. That is perfectly acceptable. Even if sentence number twenty is worse than weasel bites. Seriously."

This picture is brighter because I turned the light on. That helped. It's still rather hard to read. This is because I was writing left-handed, which I am not. Here's what it says:

[why are you smiling?]
because I know something you don't know
[what is that?]
I am not left-handed

That's a quote from The Princess Bride if you haven't seen that movie or didn't recognize the quote. I'd rather be watching it than trying to translate Greek right now. Oh well. Back to work. Sigh.

On Choosing a College Major

I'm like Link.

Link is a hero. Well, he's supposed to be.

The problem with being a hero is that he has to become one first. And becoming a hero doesn't come easily. He has to go on a journey, and not just any journey. A quest – leave the island, infiltrate the fortress, find the treasure, slay the monsters, rescue the princess, get the sword, restore the power, defeat the evil, save the world – and that's only the half of it.

The thing about quests, though, is that they aren't always that easy either.

Sometimes, while Link's out searching for the treasure so he can continue with his quest to save the world, he gets stuck. He finds himself standing in a room that's just a circle, and all that's in that circular room are doors.

Lots and lots of doors.

Link goes up to the first door, but it's locked. Link tries a different door, but it's locked too. He moves to another door, and this one opens.

But when Link gets inside, all he finds are some monsters who want to end his quest so evil can rule the world. Link fights the monsters, and in the end he defeats them. He goes to open the treasure chest, and what does he find inside?

Not the treasure he's looking for. Instead, he finds a key. A key to the next room.

Link goes back into the first room and opens another door with his key and goes on in. And there are more monsters. He fights them, and when he wins, he opens the treasure chest, and there inside it is another key.

So Link takes the key and goes in the next door, and the next one, and the next one, and it's always the same. Fight the monsters, get the treasure (such as it is), and go out. Lather, rinse, repeat. Some fights are easier; some fights are harder. Sometimes he tries his key in the wrong door; sometimes it lets him right in.

Sometimes Link gets sick of it. Can't one door have something other than just another monster waiting to attack him? Can't one treasure be something other than a way into the next room? Can't one lock just be open in the first place so he doesn't have to go back and find another key? Link gets tired of trying doors. He wants the next door to be the right one. He doesn't want the next door to be locked or to just show him where the next door to try is or hide another monster. He wants to find the real treasure and get out of here.

But he can't. That original door, the one that let him into the room in the first place, has bars over it. No key is going to let him go back. So he's stuck here, trying doors.

Eventually, Link gets to the last room. This has to be it, he thinks. Now he'll get the real treasure. He beats the monster, and what does he get?

Nothing.

He goes back out into the main room, the one with all the doors, and what does he find there but more monsters. And not just any monsters. These are the toughest monsters yet.

The battle is long and hard, but finally, finally, he does it. He wins. He defeats the monster, and it disappears in a puff of black smoke. And there appears in that room with all the doors a treasure chest.

Link is battered and bruised and beaten and broken, but he pulls himself together, picks up his sword and shield, and pries the lid off of that chest. And inside, there it is. The treasure. The real one.

The bars slide off the door that let him into the room however long ago that was. He stumbles out through it, but when he gets out he stands up with his head held high. His work isn't done – he just got the treasure so he could keep going with his bigger quest. There are more doors ahead of him, he knows. The path this door has put him on is probably going to change.

Sometimes it's going to feel easy. Most of the time it isn't. But he knows – he knows – that he has help along the way. He doesn't have to do this alone. Even when it feels like he's alone, he isn't.

I'm like Link.

Link isn't quite a hero. But that's okay.

He's just in the process of becoming one.

Double Duty

I like connections. I think it's interesting when something I've learned or stumbled across one place shows up somewhere else when I'm not expecting it. And then there are things that are similar enough to begin with that I almost expect to cross over at some point. Such were my classes today – two of them, anyway.

The funny thing about these two classes is that they take place in the same room on the same days, and sometimes the prof of one class will mention the other in passing, which I suppose comes from sharing the room. Between those two classes (and until my half semester classed finished, it was three), I spend a lot of time in that room.

I guess some points of concurrence are to be expected, since the first class is Church and Society and the second class is Christian Theology. Lately in Church and Society (or CMS for short, since it's from the Congregational and Ministry Studies department), we've been talking about the theological side of the church. Earlier in the semester it was more the sociological side. In Christian Theology (or religion for short, since it's from the Religion department), we've been talking about... theology. Surprise.

So today in religion we talked about ecclesiology, which is a big word that's short for the study of the church. I imagine you can see where this is going. Ecclesiology is pretty much what we talk about every day in CMS. I went to CMS today and we talked about sacraments, the culture of the church, the purpose of the church, a little about the visible and invisible church (spent a lot of time on that earlier in the semester) and other things. I went to religion today and we talked about sacraments, the purpose of the church, and the visible and invisible church, and other things.

I kind of feel like I went to the same class twice. The subject material is pretty interesting, so it was okay. Religion just felt a little repetitive, since we went over all these things in more depth in CMS. Part of me thinks I could've worked on my CMS research project instead. But that's not really a reason to skip class.

Connections are still cooler than less detailed repetition, though.

Keyboard Conundrums

Ah, vocabulary. If I didn't have to spend so much time memorizing it, I would probably like it much more than I do now. Although I actually do kind of like vocab. Especially since I study ancient languages – I enjoy learning new words in English by learning Greek and Latin. Or learning how to pretend I know what some English words mean by uncovering their classical language roots. And I can play with the words and use them in writing. Or name blogs after them.

There's this awesome online flashcard website that I was introduced to in eighth grade. Since then, it's gotten me through four years of high school Latin and now nearly a semester of college Greek. Typing in my Latin flashcards was pretty easy – I just had to figure out how to do a macron (this thing: ¯), and I knew everything else already. Helps that English uses the Roman alphabet.

Greek, however, does not use the Roman alphabet. The Greeks came before the Romans, and they, surprisingly enough, used the Greek alphabet (fun fact: the word alphabet comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta). So learning Greek meant learning the Greek alphabet – and for my flashcards, it meant learning how to type the Greek alphabet.

There's a handy little setting my computer has that lets me flip back and forth between different keyboards. That is, it makes the keys I press put out different characters. I have three keyboards I regularly use. There's your standard US keyboard, which I'm typing with now, the US extended keyboard, which I use to get the macron, and the Greek Polytonic keyboard, which I use to type Greek.

The problem is that I'll be typing along with my Greek keyboard, and then I have to go look something up. So I open up the Internet and type "google" or some such thing into the address bar. But instead of "google," I get this:

γοογλε.

Gah.

Thankfully, Google knows how to search for itself in Greek. But there are a lot of things it doesn't know how to search for when you accidentally search in the wrong alphabet. Plus it messes me up sometimes when I switch back to typing English, because I try to type where the Greek letters are instead of where the English letters are.

No, this doesn't really have a point. I just find myself accidentally typing in Greek sometimes. Ανδ τηατ δοεσν᾽τ μακε α λοτ οφ σενσε. Οη ςελλ. Τηατ᾽σ λιφε, Ι γθεσσ.

Why

For the past two years, I've done this crazy thing called NaNoWriMo (pronunciations vary. Pronounce it like the first syllables of the words "National Novel Writing Month," which is what it stands for, and you've probably got it). As the name implies, it involves writing a novel. In a month. That month happens to be November, which will be starting on Thursday.

I've managed to complete the 50,000 word goal both of the past two years, and while I'm going to participate this year, winning (the NaNo term for reaching that goal) may not be an option. College is busy, and I don't want to lose sleep and sanity over this. So if it gets to be too much, I'll have to stop. Some things, like research projects, final papers, and sanity are in fact more important than a first-draft novel. It might not be easy – my mentality in the past has been "if I do NaNo, I have to win" – but I think this month will be good for me. I need to train that perfectionist in me to show up at the appropriate times, and I need to convince myself that this isn't one of them.

Because of the thirty day deadline, NaNo novels aren't usually good. In fact, they're usually pretty bad. It's a quantity-over-quality kind of situation. This is why when people ask if they can read it, I'm a little hesitant. As a mostly nonfiction writer, NaNo is my biggest foray into the world of fiction, so most of my fiction is pretty bad. I'm more willing to share some of my nonfiction poetry and prose than I am to share my fiction.

Usually, when I tell people I'm going to write a novel in a month, they say one of two things: either "You're crazy!" or "Why?" I already know I'm crazy, so I'm going to tackle the second question for a minute.

Why write a novel? Why write a draft that I already know isn't going to be good? Why spend so much time with something like that? Or, for that matter, why write at all?

In response, here are just a few of the things I've learned through NaNo and through being a writer:

First, I write because I must. For me, writing is a way that I express myself, and this world would be a pretty dull place if none of us expressed ourselves. We were created to be uniquely us, and bottling that up inside don't often do us much good.

Second, I write because I learn. I've already mentioned that writing, especially this month, teaches me to put my perfectionism away and just go. It teaches me to turn toward my inner editor that says, "No, this will never be good enough. You'll never be good enough," and say in response, "Yup, I know. And that's why I'm doing it anyway."

Third, I write because I love. NaNo is a unique experience of writing in community. There's something bonding about sitting alongside other people who are also furiously churning out (or furiously trying to churn out) words into that first draft. We bounce ideas off each other. We challenge each other to keep going.

Finally, I write because I am. My writing, and yes, even my bad writing, is a little glimpse into who I am. By writing, I can show the way the world is and the way the world could be. Even if it's a silly little story set in a generic fairytale universe, I have a story that wants to be told. I write because in my writing, I can bring shalom. I can bring glory to God.

If you want to follow along with my progress this November, take a look at the graph over here once the month gets underway. My blogging will probably be a bit less frequent, but I'll try to put up a thing or two. It might be all NaNo-related. It might not. I don't know.

But whatever the case, I'll be writing.

The Adventures of Batty and Black: College Edition

Sometimes I like to doodle. I am not an artist. There are about three things I can draw: hippos, rocket ships, and hippos in rocket ships. Sometimes I can draw dinosaurs, but it has to be a good day to get a good dinosaur.

My siblings and I used to draw these little creatures called "chao" (said like "chow") from a Sonic game. Lately I've been doodling them. I don't really know why. Maybe because they take very little skill to draw, at least in the style I draw them.

(Yes, I have been paying attention in class.)

This is a chao. (Sorry, I know the pictures aren't great.)

And this is Batty. He's the main character of the chao comic strips I used to draw.

Batty was a weird little guy. He liked to eat words.

And do random things like go parachuting.

Unfortunately, it didn't always work out so well for him.

But he always made it out okay in the end.

He liked to sleep a lot.

And eat chao fruit.

He lived in a hole in the ground...

...with his brother, Black.

They also had a little sister named Sunsun.

Batty and Black would race the other chao while riding on a fridge with wheels.

But they were usually beaten by Pickles and Joy, who rode on a star.

And their friends Ghostly and Gray beat all of them, except I can't remember what they rode.

Someone remind me to go over my Greek textbook with a heavy duty eraser if I sell it when I'm done with this course.

Combing, Foraging, Scouring

I used to like the word "searching." It's not a bad word. It makes me think of a medieval type fairy tale or something. You know, the intrepid adventurers set out on their valiant quest to seek out the lost princess/evil dragon/legendary treasure/wish-granting fountain/magical herb/etc etc. The search high and low until they find their goal, and then they come back home to glory, honor, feasting, and a happily ever after. The end.

The problem comes in when somewhere between steps two and three, they run into some difficulties, and they discover they're doing a whole lot of searching and a whole lot less finding. Because searching gets old after a while if they're not finding anything. Then they just want to give up, forget about finding the lost princess/evil dragon/legendary treasure/wish-granting fountain/magical herb/etc etc, and go home and sleep. However, they do not become famous and get glory, honor, feasting, and a happily ever after, because no one wants to read a fairy tale about the guy who gave up and went back to bed.

This is why I don't see my phone being made into a fairy tale any time soon. Or my Wi-Fi connection.

...or me, judging by my ability to lose the same pencil three times in one study session. And it was in the same place all three times.

Sigh.

Topsy-Turvy

Tuesdays are weird. Well, not always. Sometimes my friends and I use them to be silly (like when people ask us things – "Do you like ______?" "Only on Tuesdays."). But some Tuesdays are just weird in themselves.

Take today, for example. I had Greek. That was normal. I was tired. That was also, unfortunately, somewhat normal. Then I went to CMS (Congregational and Ministry Studies). That was normal. Except we got out early. That was not normal. This meant I actually had time for lunch before Religion at 12:05. That was also not normal. So I texted my friend who's in Religion with me to see if she wanted to have lunch together before class. She replied that Religion was cancelled. So I checked my email, and sure enough, no Religion class today.

Suddenly I have no class until Prelude at 6:30. This is very bizarre. I am used to Tuesday being a busy day.

Not to complain about it, though – more time to study for my CMS midterm on Thursday. And that's definitely a good thing.

But for now, anyway, I'm off to lunch.

Ancient Greek Is Actually Applicable To My Life

Well, maybe.

Greek 101 is always a bit of an adventure. It's a bit overwhelming at times – new alphabet, new language, new rules that come with new alphabet and new language – and sometimes it's just kind of crazy. Plus there's lots of vocab to remember, and I have to know all the accents and different forms and the gender of the words. Crazy.

Studying Greek vocab can actually be pretty interesting, though – like with studying Latin vocab, there are a lot of English words that come from the Greek. The more obvious ones are helpful (like δημοκρατίᾱ, δημοκρατίᾱς, ἡ – or demokratia, demokratias to use a more familiar alphabet. It means democracy). The less obvious ones expand my English vocabulary (to go with a Latin example, melior, melius means better. We get the English word ameliorate from it).

And then there are the ones that jump out because they're just awesome little discoveries. In this case, I was reading my vocab aloud and I came across εἰρήνη, εἰρήνης, ἡ – eirene, eirenes to roughly transliterate it. Spoken, it sounds kind of like erin-ay, and it means peace.

I did a little research online and found that most sites that have the etymology of the name Erin attribute it to the Irish (its possible meanings are peacemaker and Ireland). I also discovered a bit about Erin/Éire/Ériu, a goddess from Irish mythology – legend has it she and her sisters Fodla and Banba represented love, peace, and hope or joy. Éire was believed to be the goddess of peace as well as the patron goddess of Ireland. As I learned in class, the name Irene for sure comes from the Greek word.

I don't know if the Irish word actually comes from the Greek, but they sound alike and have the same meaning, and that's good enough for me.

Unshod (Feet for the Path)

Here are the sounds of Wear. It rattles stone on stone. It sucks its teeth. It sings. It hisses like the rain. It roars. It laughs. It claps its hands. Sometimes I think it prays. In winter, through the ice, I've seen it moving swift and black as Tune, without a sound. 

Here are the sights of Wear. It falls in braids. It parts at rocks and tumbles round them white as down or flashes over them in silver quilts. It tosses fallen trees like bits of straw yet spins a single leaf as gentle as a maid. Sometimes it coils for rest in darkling pools and sometimes leaps its banks and shatters in the air. In autumn I've seen it breathe a mist so think and grey you'd never know old Wear was there at all. 

Each day, for years and years, I've gone and sat in it. Usually at dusk I clamber down and slowly sink myself to where it laps against my breast. Is it too much to say, in winter, that I die? Something of me dies at least. 

First there's the fiery sting of cold that almost stops my breath, the aching torment in my limbs. I think I may go mad, my wits so outraged that they seek to flee my skull like rats a ship that's going down. I puff. I gasp. Then inch by inch a blessed numbness comes. I have no legs, no arms. My very heart grows still. The ancient flesh I wear is rags for all I feel of it. 

"Praise, praise!" I croak. Praise God for all that's holy, cold, and dark. Praise him for all we lose, for all the river of the years bears off. Praise him for stillness in the wake of pain. Praise him for emptiness. And as you race to spill into the sea, praise him yourself, old Wear. Praise him for dying and the peace of death.

from Godric by Frederick Buechner 

I have a friend who has found that wearing shoes in college is an optional activity. More often than not I see her going shoeless about campus. My friend was barefoot again in our religion class on Thursday, where we read God's Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins. We also read that poem when I was in AP English last year – at least, I think it was AP English, because I could hear Mr. H's voice when our prof was reading it – and that, together with my friend's running about unshod, reminded me of Godric.

Godric was an AP English book, a fictional account of the life of St. Godric of Finchale. Buechner writes in medieval Anglo-Saxon style, which can be a little hard to understand, especially at first. At the same time, it makes the book even more amazing that it already is. There's a reason my copy of it came to college with me.

The passage above is one we spent some time on in class. Our teacher handed out sheets of paper with that passage divided into lines, and we each took one here and one there and read them. We stood in a circle in our classroom and read them. We spread ourselves out in the darkened auditorium and read them. We stood on the concrete around the landscape in front of school and read them. We roamed about the lawn – unshod – and read them.

As Hopkins's poem implies, there's something unique about walking around unshod. He references it as a connection to the earth – or a lack of it, as the feet in his poem are all shod. In AP English, we found a bit of fun in walking about unshod, and a bit of grace.

Godric, too, walked about unshod – in fact, he spent the last sixty or so years of his life that way. In fact, one of the chapters of Buechner's book is titled after Godric's feet.

"Poor feet," I said, "I've used you ill for Jesu's sake. I've tramped with you a thousand miles and more without a scrap of hide to ease your way. I've brought you to this place. I've cut all lines adrift that moored me to the life I knew. I've set myself adrift. So lead me now, old feet. Take me the way that I must go for Jesu's sake. Godric, who's been merciless to you, casts him upon your mercy now."

RVL would often pray in Discipleship not for a smooth road, but for feet for the path. Sometimes I wonder if those feet might be intended to go unshod every now and then.

Why Copy Machines and I Rarely Get Along

It's a Friday morning – just after chapel, and I have no class until choir at 2:30. This block of time is cut in half by lunch, but other than that, completely free. In other words, homework time.

So I grab my CMS article and sit down to read. There are two pages of the article per page of my course reader. I glance over the title page. I read page two. I read page three.

I begin to read what I think is page four. It makes no sense with the half sentence from page three. Turns out this is page six. Okay, well, maybe four and five were copied on the back of the page by mistake. I turn the page.

I am now on pages ten and eleven.

The next page I have is fourteen and fifteen. After that come eighteen and nineteen. I flip through the rest of the reading. This pattern continues all the way to pages sixty-two and sixty-three.

...I think I'm going to do my religion reading.

Shameless Tiger Love

I love my tiger.

Seriously.

His name is Hobbes, and I love him.

Here he is:

I'm pretty proud of my tiger. He's the first sewing project I ever undertook on my own, and I think he turned out pretty well. I mean, I know exactly where all of his flaws are, but hey, I still think he's adorable. Even if I did make him myself.

There's something about finishing a project that's really exciting. I have several projects that I've started – or gotten the supplies for, but didn't quite get to the "started" stage – and haven't completed. Hobbes is one that I saw through from start to finish. He was time-consuming, he was tedious, I've poked myself with my needle more times than I can count, and he's far from perfect – like I said, I know where my mistakes are, and I'm sure I could stand to worry less about them – but he was worth it.

Tiger hugs are pretty fantastic, too.

Not Exactly Your Average Mittens

This blog is not about mittens. That is, it isn't about the mittens most people think of when they see the word – those wonderfully warm and fuzzy things that keep my fingers from freezing during Michigan winters. This blog is actually about mittens, which happens to be my favorite word in the Latin language.

In Latin, mittens is a participle that can be translated as sending. While they are identical, the Latin word mittens is completely unrelated to the English word mittens. And that's the reason I like it. It's not a particularly exciting word on its own, but since I know the English word, it suddenly becomes kind of quirky. Or maybe that's just me – you've probably got to be a little quirky to have a favorite Latin word.

There's another reason that I've chosen mittens to be the name of this blog other than my like of the word, and that's its translation. I believe that I have been and am being sent. There are two things about sending that I think are important: one, in order to be sent, someone needs to be doing the sending, and two, I can't just be sent and leave it at that – I'm being sent somewhere for some purpose.

To do things backwards, I'll start with the second bit. I believe that I'm being sent to bring the kingdom of heaven – to bring shalom to earth. And first, I believe that I have been called to this kingdom- and shalom-bringing by God. He is sending me.

The reason behind this blog is simply for me to write on it. I am a writer, and I like to write. A blog seems like a good place to write more casually than my usual writings. I think it's a good way to think some thoughts and give the people whom I love and who love me a way to see what I'm up to and what's been on my mind lately, and hopefully also for them to respond and think with me (by way of the comments link below each post or by whatever's most comfortable).

Not everything I write here is going to be deep and philosophical (I did name this blog using a play on the word mittens, after all). I don't really know what this is going to look like. I've never had a blog before. Whatever I end up writing here, I hope that this will be a way for me to live out my sending – or to live out my mittens, as the case may be.

Peace and love,
Erin