I just wanted to let everyone know that I am doing great. I'm headed off to class in about 20 minutes and it's freakin' exciting. I mean, the idea that I only have to pay my immortal soul to have people teach me things that I don't know for four years... I mean, that's a deal that can't be beat :-D.
I have made at least a starting group of friends, so that's great. My room mate and I get along pretty well, we don't have a whole lot in common, but that's not really a big deal – at least we get along personality wise. It's been nice to have someone with me at all times, because it means no matter what happens I'm never alone, which is a very comforting feeling.
I feel like I am living by the seat of my pants, always on the move, never able to stop and just be, because I am on the move so much, trying to be with people and trying to figure out everything I need to get done, and then on top of that I have to call people from Nashville (the one's who have called me) back, and then call other people (like my parents) and tell them how I'm doing – which I haven't really found time for.
Things are going well, I am making friends, people are nice, the girls are pretty, and there's just so many different opportunities I don't even know where to get involved first. I don't really know what the hell I'm doing, but I'm keeping my eyes open and learning on my feet. We'll see what happens :)
Monday, August 27, 2007
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
I think I found it
To say the least, right now I am doing absolutely, fantastically, stupendously, fantabulously wonderful. I went to my college orientation up in Chicago (Loyola! WOOT!) – my dad came along. Our initial plan was to just go up the day before orientation and spend a few hours in the city hanging and just doing whatever and then head back to the hotel and then head back and get some sleep (since orientation started at 8... well it sort of did anyway...?). However, that plan was immediately thrown out the window when my dad realized that the CrossRoads Guitar Festival (Eric Clapton's big raise money for Drug and Alcohol rehabilitation event) was the day before, so my dad bought tickets to that, and we changed our flight and the only way – that made any sense anyway – that we were going to make it to Toyota Park (which is where The Chicago Fire soccer team plays.... the idea that Chicago has it's own soccer team is too exciting for words) was to rent a car. So, we flew up Saturday morning (two days before orientation), rented a car, and then immediately headed over to Toyota park. CrossRoads was actually pretty freakin' amazing. We saw – in no particular order – John Mayer, Jeff Beck, B.B. King, Allison Krause & Union Station, Vince Gil, Sheryl Crow, Willie Nelson, Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, and last – and my personal favourite – Bill Murray – yes, that's right, Bill Murray was hosting the event so we got to see him come out on stage after pretty much every performer and just hang out and do funny stuff (like talk about how the Cubs are gonna win the World Series this year... we all had a good laugh over that one). The event last from twelve noon until eleven o'clock that evening. We ate bad food, had too little water, too little sleep, we were jetlagged, we were rocked, my dad had an amazing time watching bands he'd hadn't seen in 20 years, or hadn't seen ever even though he wanted to and I enjoyed just getting to see my dad being himself and happy – it's a rare thing to see my father worry free, and just truly enjoying everything around him, it's something I'll probably remember for the rest of my life and strive to be like (although I would prefer to reach that place of joy and care-free-ness far more often than he does).
Day 2: After the events of CrossRoads we drove down to our hotel (it was in Lansing, about 40 minutes outside of down town Chicago) and got some shut eye. The next morning we woke up whenever the hell we wanted (which might have been the first time my dad has slept-in in – maybe – years) and got out of our hotel around lunch time. We went to this interesting little place in Lansing area that served just about everything, from gyros to steak, and just about everything in between. After we waddled out of the restaurant (for the portions were gigantic) we made our way north to see if we could find a "Park and ride station" where could park our car and ride the train up into Chicago/near Loyola. We were on a hunt for the elusive "two day pass" but being the newbs that we are we thought maybe, if we continued up State street we would find a station along the way that we could park our car and ride the train up to Loyola. By the time we reached the outskirts of downtown we had given up on the idea of finding such a place and just decided that we would use the gas that we had pre-paid for at the airport and just drive up to Loyola to explore the area.
We got to Loyola about mid-afternoon, and since my dad and I had already been up to Loyola earlier in the year for a visit we decided that we didn't need to see Loyola we needed to see around it, and for me, I wanted to find a coffee something, that will fill the void that will be left by my absence from Portland Brew (since I spend every monday there). So drove around. For a while. A good long while. We found lots of things that were amazing, and cool and exciting like the local Baguette store, a bunch of hispanic markets, an amazing amount of housing just off the Loyola campus, but last but not least Starbucks – I am fully opposed to drinking Starbucks coffee (at least if there is anyway that I can avoid it) – so I was not satisfied, I had not accomplished my goal of finding a coffee shop and I was a little bummed by that fact. We continued driving around however, and eventually found ourselves a little lost – we knew how to get back but we didn't know where we were.
[this is where the story gets really good] We drive down this street (which ends up being down the street from Loyola) and my dad spies a sign a coffee cup on a sign that says "Caffé Bocacho" and we quickly turn at the nearest street and park – my dad and I had spent the entire day trying to find places to park and never could find any, so we took this as a sign that there was something special about this place. We get out of the car and head towards Caffé Bocacho scratching our heads what language the word "Bocacho" was. We walk up to the place and the door is open, we look over and see a sign that says what they sell and it says "Espresso, Latte, Ice Cream, Popsicles, Juice" (not necessarily things that you can really sustain a business on – keep this in mind while we continue on). I want you to imagine this very carefully and I will try to explain the sheer awesomeness of this room: there we two men sitting at a table by the door speaking a language that my dad and I couldn't recognize, there is a bar with stools, there is a row of stools with a bar against the wall opposite from the main bar; there is very low light in the room, like maybe a couple lights on dim, and the light from the door. I head for the bar to sit down and a man walks out from a door in the back and walks up to us, but says nothing, he just walks around us and goes behind the bar, and after we sit down he asks us what we would like, I say "do you have coffee" he says "yes. espresso or latte", my dad and I not really ever having had either are a little slow on responding, finally my dad asks for an espresso and I order the same just for ease – you should note that the man who came out of the back room and was serving us had these eyes, they were really messed up, we thought maybe he was part of war involving chemical weapons because of the way his eyes were. So the man with the eyes makes us our drinks and gives them to us, and we start drinking them and they are actually really good, like this was actually pretty high quality coffee. So we're sitting there drinking our espressos when a man comes out of the back room (the same one as mentioned earlier) with cash in his hands and starts talking to the guy with the eyes in the same language that we can't quite place. The man with money goes back into the back room and the man with the eyes goes back behind the bar. This whole time the two guys at the door keep looking over at us questioningly, like they were asking "what the hell are you doing here" the whole time. Yet another man comes out from the door in the back, this man has money as well, but there's more of it, and he comes around to the man with the eyes and sits down at the bar and starts talking to him, probably about the money...? All the while my dad and I are just sitting there drinking our espressos talking about our day, and whispering about how deliciously awkward this coffee shop is. While we are sitting there I look up at the mirrors that are placed above the main bar and see that the second man with the money is just sitting at the bar – it was a U-shaped bar, my dad and I were on the bottom part of the U and the man was sitting on the top left – staring at us, but he doesn't realize that I can see him just staring (he's not saying anything, he's just staring, however whenever he does say something to the man with the eyes he stares at us like he is checking to see if we can understand what it is he is saying. I want to make special note that in the fourty-five minutes that we were there that nobody else came into Bocacho besides the people who were coming in from the door in the back – which if you don't know this is usually a sign of criminal activity (haha). So here my dad and I are seemingly being watched by the three men in the room, with a parading cast of characters, nothing of any real substance being sold (I don't know how a business with no customers and sells only what they sell can stay open in an expensive place like Chicago), in a dimly lit room probably originally built as a seedy bar, and slavic folk music being played in the background.
We left Bocacho with espresso running through our veins a skip in our step and the experience of a life time in our minds – everytime I think of Bocacho I can't help but laugh because of how deliciously awkward the whole thing was... like that scene from Garden State with the shirt that matches the wall paper. Bocacho is the stuff of indie film greatness.
The rest of Sunday consisted of a little bit more driving around until we found the East African Restaurant – that was actually what the sign said, there was no name on the outside of the building – that we had found earlier and ate an amazing meal – I had beef suqaar with mofa... it was quite scrumptious.
Day 3: We had originally to get up at five-fourty-five and get showered and get out of the hotel no later than 6:30, because we were driving up to the airport to drop the car off so that we could take the train up to Loyola (since Loyola has it's own stop it makes a lot of sense to avoid trying to find parking). Well my dad didn't set the alarm on his cell phone right so he it didn't even go off, thankfully we woke up at seven and got out of there by seven-thirty, which means there was butt loads of traffic and we were already an hour behind. We got to the airport, dropped off the car and got on the train, the L if you will. I have, or rather, had never been on a train before so this was a new experience in so many different ways. We get on the orange line and we find ourselves a seat and spend about thirty minutes just getting downtown so we can switch from the orange to the red line. On the trains nobody looks at anyone ,or rather nobody looks at anyone while the other person is looking at them to keep up minimal eye contact. It's a very weird thing to me to try to avoid eye contact with so many people for so long – it's funny cause even though they try not to make eye contact there's a certain amount of connection that happens with two people just being in proximity with each other for that amount of time, unlike in Nashville where there is no connection because the only time you see people outside of their cars is when they're in a restaurant or a mall (I think that's why coffee shops are so popular here, it's about connecting in some small way). So we spend about an hour and change getting from Midway up to Loyola and by this time we are two hours late (we were supposed to be there at eight and we got there right about ten o'clock), but it doesn't really matter cause it meant we avoided most of the boring stuff and got right into the good stuff. The first day was cool, it was nice to meet people who I could get along with and I at least got a feeling for what I was getting myself into socially, so that was good. All in all it was a good day, but it's funny cause even though nothing really happened I enjoyed the second day, WAAAAAAAY more. The first day was really structured and the second day they gave you a schedule and basically said, "you go here and do these things if you want, they will all be helpful to you, but it's not required" and I liked the fact that they showed you around everything and gave you everything you needed to know in a structured way and then just gave you the freedom to be. I met this cool girl while I was walking over to the sports center where they had a bunch of tables set up so you could find out more about the different programs you can get involved with outside of the academic stuff, but by the time I got over there they had taken everything down. So, like I was saying, I met this girl because she was walking over there too and we both got there and they told us that it was closed and as we were walking out she was like "were you headed there too?" and I was like "yeah, I had an early..." so on and so forth. I introduced myself and as we were walking back over to the building where all us freshmans were staying we just talked (she told me I looked like an indie folk singer... so I guess my appearance is a reflection of who I am, haha) and then I had to go do some final stuff and so when I came back for lunch I couldn't find any body to sit with, because all the people I had met were either just not present or had gone home already, so I sat by myself. Heh, but she came in and was like "you shouldn't sit by yourself" and so she sat down and we just started talking about classes and stuff, and then a girl that I had met the previous night came in and sat down too, and we all just talked about classes, and school, and music.... and man, I am just so pumped about the whole thing, being in school, being in Chicago, maybe being able to play some shows while I'm up there, who knows maybe I'll be able to put a band together and get something going musically.
Meeting all the new people, realizing how intense Chicago is, riding the L, thinking about concerts, being in the city that's so ethnically diverse, living on my own, living in a dorm, having a roommate.... just everything in general got me thinking about all the stuff I have learned from my mentor, with all the stuff we have talked about about engaged, and using our energies for connection, being a part of a local community and bringing people into Christianity not by conversion but by living together, being authentic, being genuine and kind, Christians being the inviters, about them being the people that break the ice, shake the hand first, humanize all those around us. All those things become real and true when you put them together. When you talk about a social gospel here in Nashville, when most of who you see is the same as you because you never get out of your car in Jo Johnston, and you never drive out to 68th street because there aren't any malls out there, the apple store is not on 12th and Jefferson – but Mary's Ribs is, when you talk about a Gospel that's genuine and authentic and your story is Starbucks, designer jeans made to look like you've worn them for years and American Cheese then you've missed the point. But when what you are surrounded by is people seeking to help the world (one biologist who works at Loyola is trying to figure out how to stop the Malaria virus at any of it's many stages, and if she accomplishes this she could saves millions of people from a disease that when you look at a map of the world that shows the density of how many people have malaria and you put up to a map that shows the same information for poverty they line up almost exactly.) Chicago, Loyola, Bocacho, the L, the buses, the people... it all makes me want to jump up and down screaming "IT'S REAL! THE GOSPEL IS REAL! THE GOOD NEWS! don't you get it? Jesus loves you, and I see you, I see you for what you are, you are not what you do, you are not what you say, you are not defined by the things that you own, you are God's creation, you are made in his image and he loves every ounce of you!"
Day 2: After the events of CrossRoads we drove down to our hotel (it was in Lansing, about 40 minutes outside of down town Chicago) and got some shut eye. The next morning we woke up whenever the hell we wanted (which might have been the first time my dad has slept-in in – maybe – years) and got out of our hotel around lunch time. We went to this interesting little place in Lansing area that served just about everything, from gyros to steak, and just about everything in between. After we waddled out of the restaurant (for the portions were gigantic) we made our way north to see if we could find a "Park and ride station" where could park our car and ride the train up into Chicago/near Loyola. We were on a hunt for the elusive "two day pass" but being the newbs that we are we thought maybe, if we continued up State street we would find a station along the way that we could park our car and ride the train up to Loyola. By the time we reached the outskirts of downtown we had given up on the idea of finding such a place and just decided that we would use the gas that we had pre-paid for at the airport and just drive up to Loyola to explore the area.
We got to Loyola about mid-afternoon, and since my dad and I had already been up to Loyola earlier in the year for a visit we decided that we didn't need to see Loyola we needed to see around it, and for me, I wanted to find a coffee something, that will fill the void that will be left by my absence from Portland Brew (since I spend every monday there). So drove around. For a while. A good long while. We found lots of things that were amazing, and cool and exciting like the local Baguette store, a bunch of hispanic markets, an amazing amount of housing just off the Loyola campus, but last but not least Starbucks – I am fully opposed to drinking Starbucks coffee (at least if there is anyway that I can avoid it) – so I was not satisfied, I had not accomplished my goal of finding a coffee shop and I was a little bummed by that fact. We continued driving around however, and eventually found ourselves a little lost – we knew how to get back but we didn't know where we were.
[this is where the story gets really good] We drive down this street (which ends up being down the street from Loyola) and my dad spies a sign a coffee cup on a sign that says "Caffé Bocacho" and we quickly turn at the nearest street and park – my dad and I had spent the entire day trying to find places to park and never could find any, so we took this as a sign that there was something special about this place. We get out of the car and head towards Caffé Bocacho scratching our heads what language the word "Bocacho" was. We walk up to the place and the door is open, we look over and see a sign that says what they sell and it says "Espresso, Latte, Ice Cream, Popsicles, Juice" (not necessarily things that you can really sustain a business on – keep this in mind while we continue on). I want you to imagine this very carefully and I will try to explain the sheer awesomeness of this room: there we two men sitting at a table by the door speaking a language that my dad and I couldn't recognize, there is a bar with stools, there is a row of stools with a bar against the wall opposite from the main bar; there is very low light in the room, like maybe a couple lights on dim, and the light from the door. I head for the bar to sit down and a man walks out from a door in the back and walks up to us, but says nothing, he just walks around us and goes behind the bar, and after we sit down he asks us what we would like, I say "do you have coffee" he says "yes. espresso or latte", my dad and I not really ever having had either are a little slow on responding, finally my dad asks for an espresso and I order the same just for ease – you should note that the man who came out of the back room and was serving us had these eyes, they were really messed up, we thought maybe he was part of war involving chemical weapons because of the way his eyes were. So the man with the eyes makes us our drinks and gives them to us, and we start drinking them and they are actually really good, like this was actually pretty high quality coffee. So we're sitting there drinking our espressos when a man comes out of the back room (the same one as mentioned earlier) with cash in his hands and starts talking to the guy with the eyes in the same language that we can't quite place. The man with money goes back into the back room and the man with the eyes goes back behind the bar. This whole time the two guys at the door keep looking over at us questioningly, like they were asking "what the hell are you doing here" the whole time. Yet another man comes out from the door in the back, this man has money as well, but there's more of it, and he comes around to the man with the eyes and sits down at the bar and starts talking to him, probably about the money...? All the while my dad and I are just sitting there drinking our espressos talking about our day, and whispering about how deliciously awkward this coffee shop is. While we are sitting there I look up at the mirrors that are placed above the main bar and see that the second man with the money is just sitting at the bar – it was a U-shaped bar, my dad and I were on the bottom part of the U and the man was sitting on the top left – staring at us, but he doesn't realize that I can see him just staring (he's not saying anything, he's just staring, however whenever he does say something to the man with the eyes he stares at us like he is checking to see if we can understand what it is he is saying. I want to make special note that in the fourty-five minutes that we were there that nobody else came into Bocacho besides the people who were coming in from the door in the back – which if you don't know this is usually a sign of criminal activity (haha). So here my dad and I are seemingly being watched by the three men in the room, with a parading cast of characters, nothing of any real substance being sold (I don't know how a business with no customers and sells only what they sell can stay open in an expensive place like Chicago), in a dimly lit room probably originally built as a seedy bar, and slavic folk music being played in the background.
We left Bocacho with espresso running through our veins a skip in our step and the experience of a life time in our minds – everytime I think of Bocacho I can't help but laugh because of how deliciously awkward the whole thing was... like that scene from Garden State with the shirt that matches the wall paper. Bocacho is the stuff of indie film greatness.
The rest of Sunday consisted of a little bit more driving around until we found the East African Restaurant – that was actually what the sign said, there was no name on the outside of the building – that we had found earlier and ate an amazing meal – I had beef suqaar with mofa... it was quite scrumptious.
Day 3: We had originally to get up at five-fourty-five and get showered and get out of the hotel no later than 6:30, because we were driving up to the airport to drop the car off so that we could take the train up to Loyola (since Loyola has it's own stop it makes a lot of sense to avoid trying to find parking). Well my dad didn't set the alarm on his cell phone right so he it didn't even go off, thankfully we woke up at seven and got out of there by seven-thirty, which means there was butt loads of traffic and we were already an hour behind. We got to the airport, dropped off the car and got on the train, the L if you will. I have, or rather, had never been on a train before so this was a new experience in so many different ways. We get on the orange line and we find ourselves a seat and spend about thirty minutes just getting downtown so we can switch from the orange to the red line. On the trains nobody looks at anyone ,or rather nobody looks at anyone while the other person is looking at them to keep up minimal eye contact. It's a very weird thing to me to try to avoid eye contact with so many people for so long – it's funny cause even though they try not to make eye contact there's a certain amount of connection that happens with two people just being in proximity with each other for that amount of time, unlike in Nashville where there is no connection because the only time you see people outside of their cars is when they're in a restaurant or a mall (I think that's why coffee shops are so popular here, it's about connecting in some small way). So we spend about an hour and change getting from Midway up to Loyola and by this time we are two hours late (we were supposed to be there at eight and we got there right about ten o'clock), but it doesn't really matter cause it meant we avoided most of the boring stuff and got right into the good stuff. The first day was cool, it was nice to meet people who I could get along with and I at least got a feeling for what I was getting myself into socially, so that was good. All in all it was a good day, but it's funny cause even though nothing really happened I enjoyed the second day, WAAAAAAAY more. The first day was really structured and the second day they gave you a schedule and basically said, "you go here and do these things if you want, they will all be helpful to you, but it's not required" and I liked the fact that they showed you around everything and gave you everything you needed to know in a structured way and then just gave you the freedom to be. I met this cool girl while I was walking over to the sports center where they had a bunch of tables set up so you could find out more about the different programs you can get involved with outside of the academic stuff, but by the time I got over there they had taken everything down. So, like I was saying, I met this girl because she was walking over there too and we both got there and they told us that it was closed and as we were walking out she was like "were you headed there too?" and I was like "yeah, I had an early..." so on and so forth. I introduced myself and as we were walking back over to the building where all us freshmans were staying we just talked (she told me I looked like an indie folk singer... so I guess my appearance is a reflection of who I am, haha) and then I had to go do some final stuff and so when I came back for lunch I couldn't find any body to sit with, because all the people I had met were either just not present or had gone home already, so I sat by myself. Heh, but she came in and was like "you shouldn't sit by yourself" and so she sat down and we just started talking about classes and stuff, and then a girl that I had met the previous night came in and sat down too, and we all just talked about classes, and school, and music.... and man, I am just so pumped about the whole thing, being in school, being in Chicago, maybe being able to play some shows while I'm up there, who knows maybe I'll be able to put a band together and get something going musically.
Meeting all the new people, realizing how intense Chicago is, riding the L, thinking about concerts, being in the city that's so ethnically diverse, living on my own, living in a dorm, having a roommate.... just everything in general got me thinking about all the stuff I have learned from my mentor, with all the stuff we have talked about about engaged, and using our energies for connection, being a part of a local community and bringing people into Christianity not by conversion but by living together, being authentic, being genuine and kind, Christians being the inviters, about them being the people that break the ice, shake the hand first, humanize all those around us. All those things become real and true when you put them together. When you talk about a social gospel here in Nashville, when most of who you see is the same as you because you never get out of your car in Jo Johnston, and you never drive out to 68th street because there aren't any malls out there, the apple store is not on 12th and Jefferson – but Mary's Ribs is, when you talk about a Gospel that's genuine and authentic and your story is Starbucks, designer jeans made to look like you've worn them for years and American Cheese then you've missed the point. But when what you are surrounded by is people seeking to help the world (one biologist who works at Loyola is trying to figure out how to stop the Malaria virus at any of it's many stages, and if she accomplishes this she could saves millions of people from a disease that when you look at a map of the world that shows the density of how many people have malaria and you put up to a map that shows the same information for poverty they line up almost exactly.) Chicago, Loyola, Bocacho, the L, the buses, the people... it all makes me want to jump up and down screaming "IT'S REAL! THE GOSPEL IS REAL! THE GOOD NEWS! don't you get it? Jesus loves you, and I see you, I see you for what you are, you are not what you do, you are not what you say, you are not defined by the things that you own, you are God's creation, you are made in his image and he loves every ounce of you!"
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