Dear God,

Please, no more packing. Please.

Amen.

cookies, milk and feet of many kinds

It's after midnight curfew on the second to last night at camp and I've snuck down to the staff lounge to type this about how I'm feeling right now.

Most of the time, when campers get homesick, they're fine during the day running around, playing games, getting dirty and eating carrot sticks, but at nighttime it just comes over them like a wave and it's all they can feel. Right now, it is nighttime and with every fiber of my little body

I do not want to go to China.

I do not. I do not know the language, no one knows me there, I will not be at my best friend's wedding in September, it will be cold, I will not be able to order coffee drinks in English, I won't be in college anymore, I won't be able to read anything, there will not be people who look like me, I will be Different from everyone else, I will not bake at Christmas with my mom, there won't be the waves of the Pacific Ocean on toasted sand, there won't be Friday mornings in the chapel at Pepperdine, I won't get in my car and drive up PCH late at night until I feel alive and safe, and I won't make a u-turn at Leo Carillo State Beach and go back to school and crawl warm and softly into my bed there, or even my bed in Murrieta, each place with several kinds of family within arm's reach.

I just feel like I want to turn around and run in the opposite direction, even though this is what I've been running towards for months. This is what cold feet feels like.

The two and a half days at home after camp and before I leave already feel too short, like they've already happened and I saw no one, hugged no one, packed nothing and forgot to eat good dirty greasy Mexican food before I got on a place to a place where nothing is famliar and nothing is home.

When this thing happens and I feel like this (and it's only been like twice, so don't think that this is a definite indication of what I may or may not do with my $730 one-way ticket to Harbin, or my entire attitude about these plans I have or my future job or teaching or life) there's just so much resistance inside. The resistance of not wanting to leave, of wanting to stay in my college community, with my family, with the wonderful people I've met and been working with this summer, in California, which I love more than I had previously thought; and then the resistance of knowing how I cannot take this feeling with me to China and don't even want to.

The part of me that is fighting against the empty homesick part I can already tell is the strong growing woman part that I already think will last through the year. Or she'll come out pretty often, in any case.

So, cold/beautiful/dirty feet, we're taking this one step at a time. We don't want to go right now, but there are days before that happens. In the meantime, we're going to stop typing (I am not typing with my feet, for clarification), go to bed and stop breaking curfew (Mossi, if you ever read this I'm sorry for not being asleep right now).

And I'll spend the rest of tonight, if I don't sleep, resisting resistance, asking Someone for grace and peace, Thinking and being thankful that I have many wonderful things here in this place to come home to in a year. Whatever home is.

At the end of it, though, is somewhere inside me I do want to go. I have a ticket, and in five days, I'm using it and I'm going.

earl grey latte countdown and camplove

Two weeks and five days until China. Three weeks and six days until I start my first post-graduate job. Wowzahs!

And I'm calling teaching my first job because camp is too many other things to call it a job. There's a lot to say and a lot to show (a lot to show in me, but we can talk about that later), but for now here are some Top Camper Quotes, which prove how adorably misguided many 9-14 year-old American girls are, but also how sweet and profound:

After I responded that I wasn't sure about an answer to her question:
Camper Jaime: But you're supposed to know everything!

After I explained to my cabin how richly dorky my life has been:
Camper Gloria: I'm sorry, but you don't seem like the nerd type.
Camper Morgan: Yeah, you seem more like the hot rocker chick.

(This one's a real gem):
Collective cabin: Do you have a boyfriend?
Me: Nope, don't have a boyfriend.
Collective cabin: But you're so pretty!

(This one is, too):
Camper Kenna: So do you care if you die?

And, what may be my favorite so far- After I became a victim of a spirit skit this afternoon and was coated in fake barf:
Camper Madi: It's okay, Casio, we're going canoeing.

More to come later. Eventually I'll finish that life story thing. The last-part-of-college part is pretty interesting.

almond roca mocha night off

From my journal, via Coffee Cat wi-fi…

I came to the back dock of the pond today to write about it and take a nap next to it. In the shaded spots on the water, the top of the pond acts like a mirror and reflects back to the trees a picture of themselves, the undersides of their leaves and branches hanging down tendue towards the water, where outward-running ripples run just into each other and make those curved diamond shapes that shimmer back and forth and don’t stay very long. When there’s a little breeze they go even more quickly, but a minute later it might be still again and almost perfect glass. There are spots in the shade where holes in the branches dapple the water and that mirror turns into a window. Where the sun hits the pond, the water’s clear enough to see straight to the bottom, where the leaves have come off the trees above and stay with the growing glasses on the floor of the pond, each hanging out with the other, and the sun goes down to them both without knowing the difference.

If I could shuttle back and forth between just camp and coffee shops for the rest of my life, I think I'd be happy with that forever. Trees and teas.

Actually, maybe not. Give me the ocean, give me tall cities, give me the dry desert, give me trains, cars and planes. Give me whatever life looks like.

One life, to go, please.

apple juice, part three: baileys hot chocolate college days

Welcome to my recent past! I don’t know if it’s too early to be really objective about the last three years, but that’s the point in the story that we’re at right now, so we should just forge on together, and if there’s anything in here that is surprising/news to you…well that’s the point of you reading this blog, isn’t it.

Ok. 18-year-old Rachel Who Knows Nothing About the World: Pack your things (including sewing machine and the knitting needles that you stole from your mom at 15 and then never returned…sorry Mom—they’re coming to China with me, FYI), throw them in the car and jet off to new student orientation at Pepperdine, which is essentially a country club where serious non-profit entrepreneurship, wonderful learning and world-changing conversations happen on the cliffs with the Pacific Ocean next door. Done and done.

I remember that the night before moving to school I hung out with my good friend Ryan at Harveston, which is one of those man-made pond things in the middle of this housing tract in Murrieta where everyone goes to take prom pictures. And I remember thinking that it was that ‘last hang out’ kind of thing, and I wasn’t sad about it—just so ready and springloaded almost, to start something so fresh the next day. I honestly couldn’t tell you what we talked about—we probably did a lot of repeating of those “so crazy,” “so excited” sentences that everyone uses when they’re looking forward to the next biggest thing they’ve never done before, but I remember that in the fresh-trimmed grass, on the warm clean white sidewalks under the streetlights I felt really full of life, in love with transition, holding onto friendship with one hand and feeling out newness with the other. That was a really happy night.

The next morning my mom and I woke up, for familiarity I put on these light gray cords that I loved, and we went to school, knowing that I had all the excitement and school supplies I could ever wish for. NSO was a whirlwind of signing up for things and asking and answering the following questions: What’s your name? Where are you from? What dorm are you in? What’s your major? And then…silence. After a couple days of that, I hardcore bonded with my roommate Whitney, who was from Oklahoma and loved musical theater and knitting; my RA Chenese, who had just gotten back from studying in Buenos Aries and was crazy loud and always funny; and my English major/dorm/big-brown-eyed buddy Casey, who was also from the Inland Empire and is almost the same person as I am, but different enough that we still like each other three years later.

Freshman year went so quickly and I grew up so much. I could say that for each of the three years I spent at Pepperdine, but what makes that especially true of my first year is how special the time was and how different than anything I had done before. Freedom to take little adventures was so beautiful to me, just what I wanted and very much needed, and I love thinking about those first experiences with the little things, realizing that I was smart enough to make my own decisions and young enough to enjoy doing it.

I spent a lot of time reading, because 1) I was still a nerd; 2) I was an English major and in a Great Books colloquium; 3) who doesn’t love a girl in glasses and cords with a book (kidding…kind of. But really, kidding); but most importantly 4) it blew my mind—absolutely had me head over heels—how interconnected all of my classes were and how much everything I was learning spoke from the world right to my heart, way more than I had thought was possible. Plato and Josephus and Beowulf and ee cummings and Franz Kafka seemed like they had just everything in common, and I loved it and wanted to hang out with them all the time. So for a lot of the time, I did.

I also hung out a lot with my with my boyfriend, who drove to Malibu from Orange County almost every weekend to hang out (God knows why). We went into Santa Monica a lot, sometimes to the Getty Center (one of my favorite places in the world), sometimes back to Fullerton, mostly just to my dorm. We both loved being out of Murrieta and having someone to love, in each case in whatever capacity we could. Being with him then helped me process so much about growing up, just by having him to talk to and be next to. Bummer/annoying that I spent too much time wishing we were always together. Now I know they call that neediness, how incredibly lame I was about it and how little I want that now. Apologies to all. I've changed so much since then, and now I'm just thankful for the memories and what I learned.


Also during this time I cut my hair short again and had my septum pierced. When I wasn’t in class or walking around Santa Monica, I worked on campus in the Fine Arts department, building costumes for the theater productions, which was a dream job for me. It never felt like going to work—I would just show up, cut or sew or finish things for a few hours, and then every couple weeks I got paid enough to eat and cover my bills and play a little bit. That was three years of awesome employment with a crackup boss named Carol, who was sassy and a half, super resourceful and flexible. If I ever am blessed enough to be employed again, I’d love it to be like working in the costume shop.

So freshman year happened, and absolutely before I knew it I was living at home in Murrieta again, working as much as I possibly could at my second summer job, stockpiling money and cardigans for a sophomore fall semester in Lausanne, Switzerland through Pepperdine. All I remember about that summer is being at work, being at the boy’s house, or taking walks around my neighborhood and journal-dreaming about what Europe could possibly be like. Of course, I had no idea what anything would look or feel or taste like. I had never been out of the country before. My only fear was that I had built all my hopes up higher than reality would meet. Pointless fear (the way fear usually always is).

In August again, I packed a couple suitcases with fresh journals and cardigans. I went with open arms. I had recently become single, cut my bangs short (these things are important sometimes), emptied my mind of a whole lot of preconceptions about the world. Got on a plane. Started the practice of constantly looking out the windows. Haven’t stopped.

I could talk to you about ‘when I was overseas’ forever. I mean literally hours and hours. I think I do it too much—way too many of my sentences start with ‘when I was in Switzerland.’ Anyway, I love it there, because I met myself there, and I don’t care how cliché that is. You can judge if you want. So here is what I learned during that semester, in three brief points:

1. Community.

2. Everything is gifts. Every single day there was like waking up on my birthday, if my birthday was on Christmas, which was combined with Valentine’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day and I was incredibly in love and Irish. The most common emotion I felt that semester was a combination of elation and gratitude. Greatlation. Elatitude. Something that was complete awe of life and energy.

3. I am alive.

There were a lot of evenings that after classes before we’d walk to dinner that I would stand in front of the glass door to our little balcony behind the curtains like a little kid and watch the sun go down over Lake Geneva.


Almost every weekend I was on a train out of Lausanne to somewhere else. All the hours I had spent working in crappy Murrieta that summer turned into trips to Zermatt, Cinque Terre, Paris, Berlin, Corsica, Dublin, Barcelona, Aix en Provence; into nights out in Lausanne, groceries, conversation desserts; became cups of hot chocolate and those little bottles of wine in the park.





I wrote a lot, looked out so many windows, had those conversations with people on trains and on the street that I hadn’t even known existed until the minute before. Those trips were I think where I learned that I love to be in transition and know new things. Looking forward to arriving or leaving puts me at so much peace.

This will be added to soon, but for now I need to stop being on the internet in my new friend's house and join in on the knitting party. Until the next tea,
Rach

apple juice, part two: decaf soy misto teenagehood

I am currently stationed in a laundromat in Boulder Creek, obvi a very high-class establishment with hand-drawn caution signs and grapevine wallpaper, exchanging dollar bills for excessive amounts of quarters and detoxing from my first week of campers. And by detoxing I mean already missing them, two hours later. There's so much to say about them and so much to be thankful for. The thanking is already underway and the saying will happen soon.

But in the meantime, there is more to my moving life story and quite a bit to the part that those campers are paralleling right now. Heavy stuff. Alright, let’s get down to business!

You’ll notice a gap in photos beginning around age 11, which is due to the fact that my awkward stage (where we left off) was significantly less cute than the surrounding time periods. There are three or four of my mom’s photo albums that serve as more than sufficient evidence of that. And I’m not yet humble enough to call them funny.

Anyway, what you should know about post-fifth grade Rachel is that we moved half an hour northwest into suburbia when AD and UD started travelling a lot and relocated to the east coast. Leaving Aguanga’s space and my friends was way lame, but you get over those things when you have to.

Enter middle school and awkwardness. It didn’t take me long to make new friends in Murrieta, but I was definitely still a teacher’s pet and a ‘smart kid’ in a ‘regular class,’ which is the worst torture for a new girl with glasses. But the good thing is that I slowly grew out of that, and by eighth grade I was having fun and becoming cool. Okay that second part is so not true, but I did have my first love then, and I started figuring out what I thought about the world and everything in it.

Cue discovery of: music, J.D. Salinger and C.S. Lewis (at the same time, for which I am grateful), and journaling. THANK HEAVEN.

So ninth grade rolls around, and of course I’m going to the brand new (and therefore not cool/artistically typical American enough for 14-year-old Rachel) high school in Murrieta, which correlates with first heartbreak and beginning of teenage misery. I was just super, super introspective and probably too bored, which I’ve learned is a bad combination. But there were always books around, plenty of cul-de-sacs and little parks to take walks in and endless scarves/bags/skirts to be made. Crafty nerd central. I started to embrace my glasses again around this point, and I did a lot of hanging out in Barnes and Noble, drinking mistos and reading Tale of Two Cities over and over.

I would like to take this opportunity now to thank Jimmy Eat World, Death Cab for Cutie and Damien Rice for providing the background music and thematic movements of 2003-2005, which are incredibly important when you’re doing the ‘growing up in suburbia without a car’ thing. Honorable mentions to Cool Hand Luke and Sigur Ros. Couldn’t have done it without you.

(And myspace, definitely could have done it without you. It was fun while it lasted...not.)

I did the AP class thing for all of high school, and somewhere along the line I figured out I didn’t have to justify liking to learn. I could just do it and no one had to care. I cared, though, and I totally had ambitions of being a Mr. Holland or John Keating (a la Dead Poet’s Society) for future generations of artistically typical American high schoolers. I still do. I loved English, loved social justice, did a huge amount of community service, protested war and big oil on Murrieta's busiest street corners (which were not very busy but made my mom nervous and most of Murrieta pissed) and almost always took the left-er side of class discussions because I really believed the ideal is possible. The humanities were really my thing starting freshman year even. And I owe such a debt of gratitude to those teachers that taught way more than they had to. How do you even begin to thank someone for just the forum to do that? Anyway, even if I complained about it, I loved (still and will always love) school.

Which meant that college was the place for me. I had people telling me that starting in eighth grade, so even though I grew up with a single mom and no real idea how to do college, I knew it was going to happen. And my resume was just fine, peppered with honor roll/service club things and yearbook editor-in-chief-hood (which was a HUGE part of high school for me and where most of my time went. I will always have a big thing for layout design, copywriting and grammar-fixing. NERD). So, craft nerd idealist 17-year-old Rachel who knows nothing about the world, choose where to spend the next four years of your life. Ok!


(That's me getting into Berkeley and receiving my financial aid package from William and Mary at the same time. Cool coincidence, fates of college. Way to herniate me.)

To make a longish back-and-forth story shorter, by April my choices came down to The College of William and Mary, UC Berkeley and Pepperdine. I ruled out W&M because of the distance from home (and, let’s be honest, boyfriend. I didn’t realize I was doing it at the time, but you make those kinds of choices when you’re 18 and I don’t regret it) and nixed Berkeley because of the size (which I know was the right decision, as incredible as that opportunity was and as hard as it was to give up). So that left Pepperdine, land of future entrepeneurs and ring-by-springers. I was still stoked out of my mind to go, though, and I knew it was the edge of a big deal thing in my life. I had no idea just how great of a thing I was getting myself into.

So, the summer after I graduated from high school, my first job was at a discount home goods store in Temecula that I didn’t realize was really terrible until my next summer job, which was mostly less terrible. I did too much vacuuming and too little getting paid that summer. But it didn’t matter, because in August I busted out and started being way cooler than I had ever been before.


And the dryer buzzes. To be continued!

ice water summer camp

Before last Tuesday, my limited interaction with northern California involved two inland drive-bys on the 5 freeway with my freshman roommate en route to San Francisco. Both trips (each as impromptu as humanly possible) combined probably amounted to a grand total of about 47 hours spent between San Fran and Berkeley, so northern wonders like redwood trees and banana slugs were essentially fairy tales for me until this week. But now I’ve been to the mountaintop and can attest that both are real and very cool.

For the next 50-something days (which run scary close into depart-for-China time), I’m a counselor at Camp Hammer in Boulder Creek in the Santa Cruz mountains, and even though I don’t know where anything is up here yet, I’m in love with it.

Because I really love camp. Lame sentence. I love trees, I love sunshine, I love KP duty, I love running around in the forest, I love singing, I love yelling, I love games, I love campers. I love that all of these things mixed up with summer sky and breeze are always warm and familiar. And even though I’d never been here before, I can tell you that this is a wonderful place, very different from what I’ve done before, and wonderful, warm familiar things go on here.

It’s so different up here from anywhere I’ve been or camped before. Redwoods and cedars are so different from Jeffrey pines and manzanita, and moss grows on everything. Everything! I would show you pictures, but I have yet to take any, and it would take a million years to upload them here with mountain-internet. But at some point you’ll be able to see mossy sunshine trees and lots of smiling faces, because I’m pretty sure it will be impossible to take an uninteresting picture in this place.

Le sigh. This post is not at all verbally representative of the calm and happiness of being here. Sometime soon I’ll sneak away into the forest, find a large-ass tree and curl up underneath it with journal or something, and then the next time you read this it will be way prettier. In any case, I’m blessed that this summer I get that warmth and familiarity right up until I run away to China. So the last ‘thing’ I’m doing in the States is one of my favorite things in the world. Cool.

In other news, part two of my childhood life story will be on its way soon . And so will invitation papers from my future-university in Harbin! It feels so good to have another wave of certainty on the way. Peace and blessings.