haha...welcome to Vermont...

This is the car I drive around Brattleboro when I go off campus. haha A very nice fellow let's me borrow this car whenever I want. It doesn't have a muffler or power steering and is very temperamental. So it's always an adventure.

lovely downtown Brattleboro

another hippie bookstore

this is the view from our dining area! amazing...

part of our rugged campus :-)

Oh yeah, the homework is stacking up. Bring it on. This is going to be fun.

By the way, I've decided to study Russian to fulfill my language requirement here. So here I go once again, learning a language from ground zero. It's both exciting and daunting. What I'm both scared and excited about is learning to read a new alphabet. It's so amazing to be able to read a language with a script so different from your own.

I remember when I first read the word "ice cream" in Korean writing. I almost fell out of my chair!! "Oh my gosh! I just read that!!" It's an amazing experience. It gives you a different perspective on your own language.

Now Cyrillic script-that's a mixed bag. It's close enough to English that you think it's familiar but really many of the letters that look the same have a totally different sound. For example, the letter "p" in Russian sounds like the letter "r" in English. How confusing is that!

Thankfully, my goal at this point is just to familiarize myself with the language, so I can travel more easily in Central Asia and of course, fulfill my graduation requirements. I'm not trying to be an advanced speaker, so that kind of lifts the pressure off and just allows me to enjoy the process.

haha

Last night I got out of bed around 1am to tell my subwoofer loving next door dorm neighbor to please turn it off. It turns out this time that the rhythmic beats that were boom, boom, booming through the wall were actually her snores! haha I kept quietly knocking and then put my head against her door and realized that indeed she was snoring crazy loud. haha

Here at SIT people often ask me where I am from then always gasp and tell me how great San Diego is when I answer. You know, for some odd reason I've realized this slightly annoys me. I think it's because it happens again and again here. They start telling me about how great the weather is and about some touristy place they went to that I never go to. And I want to answer, "Yeah, yeah, yeah...it's overrated." haha

thoughts...

What if we physically reflected our emotional scars? Would I look around at this classroom of seemingly confident, mildly interested students and see a whole new truth?

People covered in scars. Some old and deep, others fresh and still bleeding? Then maybe I'd see them differently, with more empathy.

Maybe I'd look in the mirror and I'd gasp. If you could see the scars on my skin, there'd be no hiding.

Gotta love that group work, baby!

Yes, mission accomplished....very time consuming team presentation presented and finished!

"Every step that you take / Could be your biggest mistake / It could bend or it could break / But that’s the risk that you take."

Okay, at the prompting of a couple people I now have an AIM account, too. My id is the same as my msn messenger account. AIM seems less straight forward than MSN messenger but I guess I'll figure it out.

Well, I guess the honeymoon is over. Today I felt lonely. Lonely for my friends. Lonely because I'm tired of moving. But what can I say, at least at this point in my life-it's my fate to move frequently. But mostly I felt lonely because I'm tired of getting in impossible romantic relationships. *sigh* That also seems to be my fate. (*weak smile* cuz I know I'm being overly dramatic as usual)

Despite these inevitable feelings, I know good things are happening here and in many ways I couldn't have asked for a smoother transition.

One funny SIT cultural thing I've noticed here is that students generally don't complain that much or say anything negative for that matter. When my friends and I have started to share some of our negative feelings about the intensive Organizational Behavior class we're taking right now, we've ended up being really vague and looking at each other sheepishly.

I've also heard a couple people cut themselves off mid-sentence, "Oh...ah...I don't want to spread "bad energy"." I've never experienced this kind of implicit social pressure in a secular setting.

In fact, it's been my experience that at most academic institutions it's the favorite pass time of the students to complain about almost everything. So this is intriguing for me. I'm often analyzing what the roots of this mentality might be.

It's quite fascinating to be around a lot of humanistic do-gooders. It makes me think a lot about what really is the difference between them and I. We both have unusually strong senses of wrong and right, are willing to sacrifice the ease of Western life to help others and are passionate about speaking up on behalf of the oppressed/underserved.

After leaving a former peace corp volunteer's room that was covered with paraphernalia from Africa, I was struck by how much her passion was similar to a Christian missionary's passion. Just minus the Christian part. She's passionate about the people of Mozambique, passionate about seeing them succeed and planning on sacrificing to work with them.

So what's the difference between her and me? And all the others that are fighting for important causes here? Yeah, it goes back to what that guy brought up at orientation. "Where are we moving from and where are we going?" or said another way, "What's the problem and what can fix it?"

That's it. How her and I would answer this question-that's the difference between us. We might be doing a lot of the same things in our target countries but how we answer this question reveals how great the divide between us actually is.

If a person believes that corrupt social structures are the main problem, then working towards their end should be our goal. If lack of access to education and resources is at the heart of the problem, then once fair access is secured the problem will begin to dissolve.

Even though I believe in fighting for these issues, in my view the heart of the problem is always the state of the human heart and the only source of conclusive transformation is found in a restored relationship with our Maker.

Whew, anyway, I didn't mean to get into that right now. Especially being as I'm not in the state of mind to do the topic justice. Oh well.

In other news, amazingly there are a lot more Christians here than I thought there would be. We've been delighted to find each other and are trying to plan weekly prayer meetings to discuss issues like this.

okay good night....sorry this entry is all over the place...

Hey, if anybody uses msn messenger my new id is: "jatieness" if you want to add me. I used to use another id but found that so many of my Korean students were online that it was totally overwhelming each time I got on.

So maybe I'll use this one more often. Oh, I was so looking forward to blogging but somehow my blog time got away from me. Hopefully, soon....

haha...in the tradition of Calvin, "Academia, here I come!"

One of the school buildings on campus :-)

I wish you guys could see what I see everyday. It's so beautiful here on campus.
So far I totally love it here and every day I'm so thankful I made the choice to enroll in this program even though it was a really scary decision.

The more I learn about my program and classes the more excited I get! It's going to be busy but so good. Classes start Monday. Hopefully, I'll write more this weekend when I'm not totally exhausted.

I already have questions and thoughts that I'd like to hash out a bit. In one of our orientation sessions a student asked a question that I think resonated with all of us, "SIT talks a lot about "social change" but my question is change from what and to what end."

And I thought this is where everything gets sticky because the goal of positive social change depends on your view of "what is good". This is where the arguments begin and where finding common ground between varying worldviews becomes a fine art. Anyway, enough mumbly, barely processed ideas.....and off to bed!

Well, well. Here I am in rustic, rural Brattleboro. Brattleboro has a unique, artsy feel. But man, it's the polar opposite of LA.

The campus of SIT resembles the set of Anne of Green Gables with its rolling green fields and white old-style buildings. The campus really looks like that.

I've been meeting amazing people all day and I'm a little sick so I'm totally beat. The more I meet people here, the more I'm amazed by how much we're all so similar.

Apparently, this school is dominated by ENFPs...something like over 30% of the campus (according to the career development center on campus). haha Crazy. A whole campus of people with my personality type.

Sad news...I have zero cell phone coverage here! I spent 20 minutes on the phone with verizon trying to get a smidgen of coverage-no success! We'll see what I'm going to do about that.

Early tomorrow morning I'm leaving Sandy and taking a plane into the unknown.

I'm nervous.

All this time I've been saying good-bye and not thinking much about the place I'm actually going to. But tomorrow baby bird is being pushed out of the nest and......whooosh...

I'm on my own.

As I was jogging around Sandy's area here in Baltimore, I couldn't help thinking about what architecture expresses about an area. We live in the same country but I still stare around in wonder when I visit friends on the east coast.

In the case of Sandy's area there are "row houses" lining every street. Row houses are basically houses that share a wall and in Sandy's area whole streets of houses share walls. And as I jogged by porch after porch, I thought about how the architecture reflects a sense of community.

In my community development class at San Diego State we talked a lot about how the relationship between the community and city design is cyclical. For example, peoples that value community tend to build structures that promote interaction thus further continuing their emphasis on community.

This also got me thinking about a book that I haven't read but I'm often referring to. haha That's so "Joyce". Just imagine the profound intellectual contributions I could make if I actually thoroughly read the books I quoted.

Even though our teacher just summarized the premise of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community for class discussion, the ideas still had a lasting effect on me. It's like it just clicked together something that I had been thinking about and discussing with various friends for a long time. I remember in college Tristen and I went through this period of time when we were on this "community" soap box. Whenever we got a chance we'd go on long tirades about the lack of community in our generation and what we should all do about it.

Apparently, it's something we've all been thinking about because when this Harvard prof. who was previously unnoticed by the masses wrote an article on it, he was shocked by the out-pouring of response.

In this alarming and important study, Putnam, a professor of sociology at Harvard, charts the grievous deterioration over the past two generations of the organized ways in which people relate to one another and partake in civil life in the U.S.

Few people outside certain scholarly circles had heard the name Robert D. Putnam before 1995. But then this self-described "obscure academic" hit a nerve with a journal article called "Bowling Alone." Suddenly he found himself invited to Camp David, his picture in People magazine, and his thesis at the center of a raging debate.

In a nutshell, he argued that civil society was breaking down as Americans became more disconnected from their families, neighbors, communities, and the republic itself. The organizations that gave life to democracy were fraying. Bowling became his driving metaphor. Years ago, he wrote, thousands of people belonged to bowling leagues.

Today, however, they're more likely to bowl alone:
Television, two-career families, suburban sprawl, generational changes in values--these and other changes in American society have meant that fewer and fewer of us find that the League of Women Voters, or the United Way, or the Shriners, or the monthly bridge club, or even a Sunday picnic with friends fits the way we have come to live. Our growing social-capital deficit threatens educational performance, safe neighborhoods, equitable tax collection, democratic responsiveness, everyday honesty, and even our health and happiness.

And by the way, thanks for all your kind, encouraging comments on my last post! I have orientation Monday! Pray for me!