If you ever wanted to see the feeding of the 5,000...

I heartily recommend spending some time at your local community center.

Well, I guess I can't say this for EVERY community center out there, but at the one here in Bend offers up a miracle every Sunday. The community center, or BCC for short, runs a program every Sunday called "Feed the Hungry." Volunteers and a few staff come together before 7am to prepare breakfast, sack lunches, and a full meal. Typically 100-200 homeless and hungry are served. BCC also offers other services on Sundays, including a shower truck and occasionally a dental service, as well as a space to get out of the cold for a while. Most if not all of the food is DONATED by local businesses, churches, organizations, and individuals. Volunteers and staff work hard to meet the individual needs of the community and to avoid wasting any food.

I've only spent a few hours volunteering at the BCC, but it's pretty amazing to watch the food and the volunteers to prepare and serve it come out of nowhere every week. And okay, maybe it's not the equivalent of the feeding of the 5,000, but it's still a miracle for people who really need it.

If you have time between church services on Sundays or if you don't go to church or if you're just looking for something to do that benefits the members of your community, email Diane at volunteer@bendscommunitycenter.org. 

Learn more about the community center at http://www.bendscommunitycenter.org.

Of course I would create a library metaphor

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be. - Douglas Adams

I believe that whenever you end up anywhere you have a story to tell about how you got there.

And I believe in sharing your story.

Today I was really struck by the beauty that can be found in that, even if it's just small moments and chapters that are shared. Because when you've made the journey and your story is bound, there isn't anything worse than locking it up and pretending like those footsteps never happened. Your memories should be like a library, ready to share and be made new in someone else's eyes. A journey made is wisdom gained, you can't pull the difficult books off of the shelf just because the covers are worn.

And that is as far as I will even attempt to push that metaphor, it stops well before past due fines and the Dewey decimal system.

I feel a little bit like a fortune cookie, but I'm serious: Take every good opportunity to kindly, wisely, and meaningfully share the moments and the chapters of your story.

What I love even more than bucket lists...

"I am so glad that I did this" lists.
"I can't wait to tell my grandchildren about this" lists.
"I will never regret this" lists.
And "I never would have thought to put this on a bucket list" lists.

Think about it!

Bucket lists became a big part of pop culture after that movie came out - what was it called? (just kidding)

And they're popular because they're great! I have written out many a bucket list in my time (which is almost embarrassingly short, yes I am aware). Seasonal bucket lists, before I get married bucket lists, before I graduate bucket lists. Sure, I know the real idea behind the thing is things to do before you die, but when you're young you have so many other milestones ahead of you- who wants to wait for the last one?

How many bucket lists have I completed? Ummm...

How many listed experiences have changed as my tastes and comfort levels and dreams change?

In my mind, bucket lists should be inspirational outlines at best. They should be a starting point but not a roadmap.

Because what I've also discovered in my time is that often the best experiences in life are the ones you never had on a to-do list.

That's where the whole idea for "I am so glad that I did this" list came from. I'm a believer in the power of reflection and of knowing the paths you have already walked over and learned from. There is hope and inspiration and magic to be gained from remembering the times that you took a chance, embraced the crazy, or stayed true. The things you never planned on doing but changed you anyway.

Here's part of mine.

The things I am excited to tell my grandchildren:
- I took the reins hat were offered to me in downtown St Louis in 2007 and drove a horse drawn carriage down the street
- I played a fateful game of red rover in which I took a hard fall and went back in to keep playing, and my foot was broken he whole time
- I emailed my favorite professor about a tv show and ended up starting an independent study that could change the course of my education and career
- I wrote back to the boy in Seattle who would end up changing everything
- I went to Shari's at 3am in a formal dress and heels just for kicks with three of my best friends
- I played twister in an elevator
- I sent my grandpa a joke
- I listened to my father when he told me that I was only 18 and closed minded and he thought it was sad
--- and all those times when I answered the phone, said "sure I'll go!", almost drowned, got sunburned, didn't finish the book, and drove too fast.

Even if this doesn't make you look at bucket lists differently, I hope you are able to look back on the beautiful moments in your life and take note of the lists you've already conquered.

With love, Jaz.

Alright, so it's been a few days

But I don't want to waste typing energy on excuses that you and I don't care about anyway.

Most people have habits. Little quirks or strategies or systems that they put into place in order to live the way they want to, or think they should. Some people drive the same way to work every day, some people always draw a line through their 7's, others tie their right shoe before their left. Me, well I clean my room.

Sure, it's about as often as I blog, but I clean it. And when I do, I usually blog about it.

Please don't make any rash judgements about the psychological implications of following cleaning my physical space with cleaning my mental and emotional space.

This time I went deep, I dug through every drawer and box and old container that once held cheap stationary and purged. Purging is hard for me because, let me just admit it right now, I am a hoarder. A 20 year old hoarder. About a dozen five year old magazines, movie tickets from 2001, too many notebooks with only one page of writing in them to count, and just about everything else you could think of.

Literally, everything you could think of.

Napkins from special restaurants, baggage tags from trips, notes, every birthday card I've received in the last 10 years. If I ever babysat you and you colored me a picture, I still had it. Pictures of people I don't know, event flyers, bottle caps, even my wisdom teeth.

I have no shame.

But as I think I've attempted to explain before, I'm a believer in remembering. I believe in the power of memories you can touch. I love the idea of having a physical legacy to leave behind. I love the idea that, someday after grad school when I have children and after they have children, they will have a piece of my life to look at that isn't an iPad or digital photo frame.

I found this red-violet Crayola crayon that I found while I was dancing in the leaves in Drake Park the morning of my last day as a 17 year old. With Kaitlyn.

I also found this little journal with 4 pages that I made with paper and bound with ribbon when I was 8. I wrote about camping and Star Wars and popcicles, which I really spelled like that. I also wrote about the time when my parents were busy playing an intense game of Sequence, and it happened to be during dinnertime, and I happened to be hungry, and they told me to eat marshmallows for dinner. The journal ends with "Life is full of departure, isn't it?"

I had pen pal in the Philippines eleven years ago that I had completely forgotten about. In one letter she said "You asked me if our country is really good. Yes, it's good because God made it" and in the other she said her birthday was coming soon - on January 17. I discovered that letter in my room-cleaning... ON JANUARY 17.

This is the beautiful, weird stuff in life that you just can't make up, you don't even want to make it up. Because really, who wants to find their wisdom teeth in a box of cards?

Requesting permission to fail:

When I was 6 or 7 years old, there was this time when my dad picked me up from a friends house at night and it was snowing. As we were driving home, he said he had something cool to show me. Because I was a skeptical person even then, I questioned him: "huh?"

He waited till a car passed us, then he turned on the bright headlights.

At this time, our family drove a 1986 Isuzu Trooper. The thing always felt like it was two speed bumps away from a rusty metal grave, and as it hurtled into the darkness that night when dad had something to show me that only the bright setting of the headlights could make possible, it felt like we weren't in a car at all. Maybe a time travel machine, or a b-wing starfighter.

When he turned on the brights, the snowflakes that only moments before had appeared to be gently floating through the night sky and coming to rest softly on the windshield turned into terrifying stars hurtling toward us at the speed of light, comet-like tails streaming behind them.

I was enchanted.

It took me a while to realize that turning on the brights wasn't going into warp speed, we weren't really moving any faster and neither was the snow, we could just see the flakes more clearly when the lights were at full power. Enchantment slightly abated.

I feel a little silly about it now, but then again, who didn't believe something ridiculous when they were a kid? Santa, the Easter Bunny, the monsters in the closet, the idea that fire fighters do nothing but hang out with dalmations and slide down poles and save cats from trees, and that cookies are good for you.

One of the things that was nice about being a kid was that you had permission to fail. As a very small and still-developing (physically and cognitively) person, one was granted permission to believe crazy things, dream impossible dreams, make grand plans, try new and unusual things - and with that permission went the clause that said: "Since you're small, we won't hold you to this. You have permission to fail. You can say you want to be an astronaut and decide to be a chef two weeks later, you can get bad grades on tests, you can accidentally mess up friendships (sorry I took your legos) - and you can recover." That's what children are told, at least ideally, and I have to confess that I want to be told the same thing.

I want permission to fail.

And I think a lot of people want the same thing. Having permission to fail means having permission to try crazy things, dream crazy dreams, and live a life that won't leave you wondering "what if I had done ____."  We give kids that permission, who decided that adults shouldn't have the same freedom? Yes, adults have more responsibility and it gets harder to recover from failure the older you get - but I think we're all more afraid of failure than we should be. There is no real success without some element of risk.

All that said, I'm not waiting to get permission from you, friend.

I don't want YOUR permission to fail.

I have to give it to myself, because ultimately I'm the one who has to live with me and my successes and my failures.

Just a thought.

I now understand why people punch glass.

Because I just punched an icicle, and it felt GREAT.

There's nothing like the sensation of winding up your fist and hurling it like a kamikaze into a transparent yet solid mass and watching it shatter at the force of your very touch.

(Please disregard the fact that if I punched anything else, say, a basketball player (like Pau Gasol), he would react in a way similar to that of an orc that had a heavier-than-usual butterfly land on it's arm: with annoyance, confusion, and a slight ticklish sensation. )

(All that was a roundabout way of saying I'm not that good at punching things)

But today I felt lost in a library. And I realized that that has never happened before. This is what happened: I had to go to the Redmond library because I needed a book for my childrens literature class that wasn't anywhere to be found in Bend. And I have this thing about always looking very purposeful while in a library, that way people will know that I can really read. But I discovered that it's really difficult to look around confidently and nonchalantly when you don't even know where to look for something to look at. This was unfortunate but not disastrous: thanks to the Dewey Decimal System: i found the book.
And I discovered that the library is right next to the police station, which is convenient for at least two reasons:
(1. if anyone at the library gets out of control during a book reading, discussion of library fines, or fight over the next Nicholas Sparks book (emotional women get dangerous when they're going after their chick lit fix), the police only a sprint away
(2. if anyone at the police station tries to throw down a fact about the history of baseball that is so obscure it can't be found via the Google, the library (and winning a bet) is only a saunter away.

Also today: my mechanic wouldn't call me back! I called him and left a message to see if I could bring the car by to have him see what the ever-present Check Engine light is coding for this time, and he wouldn't call me back! I mean, it's probably something that the marriage counselor will be able to resolve once we start all that, but I really wish he wouldn't do this to me. I always call him back when he tells me my car is done and this is what I get to pay him, and I haven't seen any other mechanics since I started seeing him exclusively. I wouldn't cheat on my mechanic, not even when he won't call me back!

And I don't get to pretend to be a sorority girl with my best friends this weekend because I have to work, which is always sad.

And Portland traded Pryzbilla, which makes me SO sad because he was the bomb.

I'm done complaining now, because it's ridiculous and also because my mom just gave me a shirt fresh out of the dryer to hold on to. Win.

Epic battle of Anthro vs. Soc

Note: "Anthro" and "Soc" are not the names of sexy Greek gods, as you may have thought when you clicked on that link to read this. Sorry. 

So I hate Anthropology.

And writing that is a little bit awkward because I'm sitting in my Anthropology class right now, and I'm sitting by my dear friend Kaitlyn who has made Anthropology her major, and I'm pretty sure if my professor read that she would weep hysterically and immediately give me a failing grade.

But the point stands: I haaaaate Anthropology.

I wish I liked it, I really do, but I don't. I'm more of a Sociology person.

"What," you may ask, "Is the difference between Anthropology and Sociology? They're both social sciences that end in 'ology' that no one under the age of 50 without a doctorate blogs about."

Well, since you asked, I'll explain it.

Say there's a big empty cardboard box.

An Anthropologist would approach the box and stand there looking at it for a while, to see if it might move. Then she would touch the box, to see what it felt like. She would probably also listen to the box to see if it makes sounds. Then she would climb inside the box and repeat the looking, touching, and listening. Then she would gently sweep up any crumbs or bits of trash inside the box and look at, touch, and listen to them to try to figure out what they are. She would camp out inside the box for about seven years, trying to figure out how the box feels and what it does and why.

A Sociologist would walk up to the box and try to figure out it's function. He would analyze how it could fulfill this function better and what else the box would do. He would look at the outside and at the inside, and then he would take the box apart. He would see how the seams fit together, how to maximize the space within it, appreciate and critique the design of it. He would take a sample to figure out what the box is made out of and if it's the best material for the job. He would go through records and do tests to figure out what was in the box.

So... yeah. Back to class.