plants

I've been trying my hand at houseplants this year. The first attempt was about a year ago, with two plants from the supermarket. I just used topsoil from the garden and they dried up while I was gone over Christmas.

This spring I tried again with some cuttings from neighbors, wild English ivy, and a couple of orchids. I've had mixed success. I could imagine that growing plants is like raising children. It takes a lot of attention and care and you have to be paying attention and know when to prune or discipline, but there's also a lot of waiting and being patient and realizing that there is nothing I can do. I just have to wait.

It's a lot of fun, though, to watch a plant really take off. My little spider plant just sent out a little spiderette!

hanging out

I'm not very good at "hanging out." I kind of prefer a set agenda, or at least a pretense for coming over. Definitely prescheduled, too.

It might have to do with growing up living so far away from other kids my age. We usually had to make plans beforehand and then we would ride home on the bus together.

In high school, one of my friends who had moved to our rural area from a larger city invited me over. We walked over to her house in town and got a snack, watched some tv, lounged in her room. It was so unusual! We weren't "doing" anything. We didn't have a plan. We weren't going to study together. It wasn't a sleepover. I felt like what we were doing had no purpose. Years later I realized what we were doing. It was "hanging out". And I had never experienced it before.

And I still lack the social ability to casually hang out. I want to have an idea, like making cookies together, or watching a tv show together, or going for a walk. Part of this is that I like creating memories and tend to measure quality time by joint experiences. However, it's also because unscheduled together time can be boring and uncomfortable for me. And how can I know if the other person is having a good time or not? I fear that people initially may find me interesting but later become bored with me.

I highly value being able to spend unstructured time with people, and I have experienced it in my life. But it's not natural for me.

So if anyone wants to help me practice, I've got some beer in the fridge.

bacon and burning fields. And chocolate.

I recently lowered my life age expectation by making and ingesting several "chocolate bacon cupcakes." Very delicious. Amazingly, you can put chocolate and bacon together and it forms yummy flavors. It's not just a joke.

Some farmers in the fall will burn the stubble in their fields or the grass growing along the road in the ditches. It can help prepare the field for spring planting and also prevent snow buildup from blowing across the roads. Burning fields have a distinct smell, a very good smell, actually. My high school's senior class survey consistently listed "burning fields" as a favorite smell.

Driving along these fields one fall, my brother took a deep inhale and said "That smells so good. If they could make perfume out of burning fields for women, guys would be all over them. Also bacon perfume."

Someone should probably inform Bath and Body Works of this.

Be kind to the missionaries

I was at my alma mater a few weeks ago, visiting some friends. On Sunday I ended up running into a lot of people I knew from college, and most of them knew that I had been in Mexico for a few years. But it seemed that most didn't know I was back in the States permanently. [I actually ran into the converse of this when I was preparing to leave Mexico. I told my friends there I was going back to the US and they thought it was just a trip or vacation.] Perhaps I was a bit sensitive, and definitely people were busy trying to get to where they needed to be on Sunday morning, but I have noticed that we feel uncomfortable around people who have done long-term missions work. I think that most people don't know how to interact with them.

This is unfortunate. Probably most of us don't have corresponding experiences to be able to really understand what it's like to live cross-culturally and all the highs and lows that come from that. I think that a lot of Christians have a skewed view of missionaries - that they have a particular calling on their life, are more spiritual, trust God more, they know what their life purpose is. This isn't necessarily true.

I definitely was a "missionary" for two years in Mexico; I went with a Missions organization, I raised support, the organization engaged in specific Christian evangelistic work. Honestly, though, I moved to Mexico because I wanted to live in a Christian community, because I wanted cross-cultural experience, because I wanted to learn Spanish, because I didn't want to jump into the rat race, because I wanted to learn to trust God. I didn't feel a call, I didn't experience a burning need to tell people about Jesus. Honestly, I never wanted to be a "missionary." I think that a better definition of my time was simply that I was living in Mexico.

So from my experience, missionaries who are back visiting in the US experience awkward situations. Others know that they have this different life experience that they may or may not identify with. But a big aspect of it is, I think, that for the most part missionaries rely on the donations of others. Raising support was one of my biggest challenges while in Mexico. I don't like asking for money; I felt uncomfortable when someone said they wanted to support me but then nothing came of that; it was difficult feeling like support only came a few specific people; I imagined that others saw me as being nice or writing update letters just to let them know that I needed money.

Yet, I learned to be more generous with my own money as people were generous towards me. I tried to trust God for providing for me through other people. I wanted to be faithful with the work that I was doing and a good steward of my resources.

It is hard to keep up with all the acquaintances we have in life, if they're in another country or moving to a new location. And I'm sure people feel odd when they know someone who is either directly or indirectly asking for money or support. I wish that we didn't have to feel that though. Living cross-culturally can be stressful, including returning to your native country. Raising support can be a constant struggle.

One other thought about missionaries is update letters. We were required to send out update letters at least quarterly, and I receive some weekly updates from missionary friends. I struggled with writing a good update letter for a wide audience that accurately portrayed my life and experiences. I didn't want to feign joy (with all of those exclamation points!) or seem disproportionally depressed, (even if I was struggling with things). How to honestly express my experiences? I think that this another area that is difficult for missionaries, to give such frequent reports or updates of their life.

So people become missionaries for a lot of different reasons and there are many different philosophies of what a missionary can or should do. But from my experience, they really are regular folk trying to straddle two cultures, with a lot of demands or expectations placed on them. My guess is that they feel as awkward as you do when you see them there on Sunday morning.

Abbi Valentine

My cousin has a band called Upsidedown Cat. She recently made this fun music video for the song "Abbi Valentine." Since tomorrow is el día de amistad y de amor, I'm posting it so that you can enjoy it.

Abbi Valentine official music video from Laura Cat on Vimeo.

happy groundhog day

Well, it's Groundhog Day...again.

Cute little breakfast

When I was a child we had a high chair that you could disassemble into a table and chair. To create the high chair, you set the table on it's side and put the child-sized chair on top. It was easy to put together and take apart.

One day I decide that I was going to make myself a little breakfast. I didn't think of as being "my size" or "child-sized." Thinking back, I didn't conceptualize myself as being short. I was my height, which wasn't relative to the adults around me. I was just the right size, and the table and chair were "little." They were "cute."

So I set up the little table and the little chair. I got a small baby spoon and a small bowl. I poured myself some cereal and got out the little container of milk from the fridge. I had everything set up, sitting by the doorway into the kitchen. I was so proud of putting all of these cute little things together.

I took a bite of cereal. I think at first I was confused. It tasted bad. Really bad. My eyes filled with tears. Mom saw me and pointed out what was wrong. The little carton of milk was buttermilk, and it doesn't taste good on cereal.

We had rules that we had to eat all of our food, and I was sad thinking of finishing the bad-tasting cereal. But my mom was gracious; she let me pour a new bowl of cereal. I had to use the big carton of milk, though, and it sort of ruined my cute little breakfast