Our Dumb Blog

Okay so far here’s how it is:

1) I have an internship offer from Americans for Tax Reform in Washington,
D.C. Pays $100 a week.

2) I got a messge last night while I was out to call my former employer Dr.
Yearwood. He called me this morning to tell me to contact Ken Myers in
Charlotesville.

And this stupid computer just decided to freeze up so that everything I wrote
after this disappeared when I had no choice but to restart it. So right now
I’m seriously considering becoming a Nihilist and destroying all technology
except for my piano.

Mom woke me up late this morning (I’d been up all night downloading stuff
about the Department of Education) with Dr. Yearwood on the phone and stalled
him to give me time to become fully conscious. When she finally handed me
the phone, Dr. Yearwood told me he’d had a long converasation yesterday with
Ken Myers, a guy in Charlottesville, VA who puts out the Mars Hill tapes.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with them, these tapes are sort of an
audio magazine very much like National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered”
but coming from more of a Christian world view. I’ve been very impressed
with the couple of tapes I’ve heard from our subscription. There are 3500
subscribers, who get a tape every couple of months. Dr. Yearwood told me to
call Ken Myers this morning about an internship with them this summer.

Ken Myers said that of the three full time workers, two were leaving Mars
Hill this summer. This is at the same time that they’re moving from outside
of Charlottesville to the town itself. He’s got one intern, a seminary
student, already lined up for the summer. If I were to come on, I’d do a
variety of stuff including research. I didn’t tell him I could get lost in a
library and never emerge. “We’d have to find a place for you to live,” he
kept saying.

Evidently, Dr. Yearwood had pretty much sold him on me, because Ken Myers
kept trying to sell me on Charlottesville. He said it’s near the mountains,
so there are opportunities for outdoor activities. The University of
Virginia is there, and he mentioned a guy who wrote some works on Catholic
ethics and has been commissioned by the Vatican to do a biography on the
Pope. “I know a missionary to India,” he said when I told him about my offer
from ATR, “who said he’d rather spend August in New Deli than D.C.” When he
asked if I’d had any summer jobs I mentioned Wings Like Eagles with the “A
horsback riding program for kids with special needs” description. To which
he responded by saying that there are lots of horses in Charlottesville.

He asked me what my hobbies were. I told him reading (when I get the
chance), the internet, and playing the piano. He asked what I would read if
I had the time. “Right now C. S. Lewis’ _The Great Divorce_,” I answered.
“I want to make a radio drama out of that,” he said, “along with the Space
Trilogy, especially _That Hideous Strength_.” He also asked about my plan
for graduate school. “My professors have told me, ‘You are going to graduate
school, you know,’ so I guess I don’t have a choice. I have the possibiltity
of going to law school, but I’d almost rather be a career student.” He
laughed and said that he was one.

He said he’d talk to a couple of his board of directors and get back to me
early next week. So with Dr. Yearwood, Ken Myers, and me, that makes three
of us who are excited.

I added some philosophical observations and even a slice of poetry to the end
of this before my computer decided to rebel, but I don’t feel like conjuring
them up again.

I received a letter in the (real) mail addressed to me today. The return
address read “NBL National Benefit Life Insurance Company.” I didn’t hurry
to open it. Just another one of those useless pieces of mail that I feel I
have an obligation to look at before tossing it in the trash can. I mean,
why should I have life insurance? I die, that’s it. _I_ won’t be getting
anything out of it. Why should anyone else?

When I was looking around for something to keep me from doing homework a
couple hours later, I reached down and opened the envelope.

“Dear Parent:” it read. I’m not a parent, so I’m not sure why it was
addressed to me. But it talked about me as if my parents should be
concerned. It talked about a policy they should have on me (why, I haven’t
figured out quite yet) and a bunch of stuff I didn’t really understand. Then
is said, “For only $25 a year you get all of the above. This policy provides
coverage anywhere in the world – 365 days…” Now why wouldn’t it be 365
days? Do some coverage plans not cover you if you die on a Thursday? And is
leap year included in this one? It went on to say that this policy provides
coverage even if my parents’ kid:

Leaves School Sky Dives Drives a Motorcycle
Flies a Plane Scuba Dives Enters the Military
Contracts a Dread Disease

I laughed because my mom wouldn’t let my sister’s boyfriend give me a sky
diving trip for my birthday (he may have been hoping my chute wouldn’t open).
She said I couldn’t go jumping out of airplanes until I was paying my own
insurance. I’m trying to figure that one out as well. If I jump out of a
perfectly good airplane for no particular reason and my parachute forgets to
open, life insurance isn’t really going to be the biggest thing on my mind.
I mean, if I’m dead, what should anyone care if I’ve got insurance or not?

In any case, I wouldn’t mind doing any of those, besides Contracting a Dread
Disease (or joining the military. Hmm.. maybe I shouldn’t equate the two
like that). I wonder if that makes me a high risk candidate?

In other news, our once blue house got painted “taupe” today. It’s just
kinda tan really. Looks okay.

(date unknown)

I saw kanji today leaving his political science class today. He has the same class I do, only on TT instead of MWF. “I love Schaefer,” he says when he sees me. We talk a bit about Red Dragon. “What time do you get on each day?” he asks. I tell him about 4 or 5. “Cause I wanna kill somebody. Everytime I get on there, everyone’s dead. Except for Agamemnon.” Then he picks a piece of yew or juniper or whatever that bush around the Fine Arts Building is and hands it to me. “Have a tree,” he says. “It’s a hyper bonsai.”

“It looks pretty staid,” I say.

I walk into the building to go through it to get to my car. Two guys are
sitting in the hall engaged in earnest discussion. I go up to one of them
(never seen ’em before in my life) and say, “Here, have a tree,” handing him
the twig.

He accepts it and says, “Thank you,” without thinking…

Something funny happened to me today. I went by the bank to deposit the
remainder of my AL student grant and chose the drive through since it was
raining. A lot of other people had evidently chosen it for the same reason,
and there were at least two cars in front of each vacuum machine. Except the
last one. It had only one car. Cool, i thought, and I pulled into that lane,
suddenly, a van that had just been sitting over to the side dashed in RIGHT in
front of me to that place. I thought that was rather rude, but i wasn’t in a
hurry, I was in a relatively good mood having just completed my last final,
and I was enjoying listening to the radio. So I just pulled into another lane.
The front car in the lane beside me opened up then. I looked over to see a
whole line of cars waiting for the window right next to the bank to become
available. I thought one of them might want to pull over into this newly
shortened line, but none of them budged. i guess they all needed to use the
drop or something. After waiting a couple of seconds more to make sure that
what had happened to me earlier did not repeat itself, I pulled over into that
lane and put the car in park while I waited. After quite a while, the car
ahead of me pulled out, and I filled its spot quickly. I opened my door
(since my window doesn’t work), grabbed the vacuum tube when it emerged from
the machine, and was about to put my check, driver’s license, and deposit
slip in it when I remembered that I hadn’t signed the deposit slip for cash
removed. I rummaged around for a pen and hurriedly signed it before slipping
the tube back into the door of the machine. Then i waited. The machine did
nothing. The tube just sat there. Cars around me came and went as i waited
for the machine to react. Someone behind me honked their horn. I opened my
door again and hit the button marked SERVICE. I tried shutting the machine.
Nothing. So I waited some more. The tellers inside were swamped. Finally, a
lady in a truck got out and came up to my machine. She hit the SERVICE button
several times and tried to force the door shut. I just gazed out of my window
and smiled. She walked over to the window where the tellers were just as the
machine shut its door, swallowing the vacuum tube. I could hear her yelling
at the tellers through the window. The teller responded through my machine’s
speaker. After a while, i convinced the impatient lady that the machine was
indeed working and the teller that everything was okay. After a couple more
minutes the vacuum tube returned. After making sure that my driver’s
license, my money, and my receipt were all there, a pulled out quickly to let
the lady in the truck up to the machine. I didn’t even stop at the stop sign
leading out of there.

I’m searching for a string of characters to describe the way I’m feeling
right now. I suppose I’ll just have to use English words.

Sara Fitzgerald from Americans for Tax Reform called this afternoon at three,
just like she promised. She asked me questions like, “Would you consider
yourself a conservative, moderate, or liberal?” “Do you think the current tax
system is fair?” “Why are you interested in politics?” “Why do you want an
internship?” I answered each one in my deliberate way, saying what I really
thought. I didn’t tell her I had Libertarian leanings, however.

“Okay, Joanna,” she finally concluded, “we’d like to offer you an internship
at ATR this summer.” She went on to say that they had people come from May
to July 8, from then till August 14, and others that stayed the whole summer,
from the end of May to August. The pay is 100 dollars a week. I asked her
about lodging availabilities. She gave me the numbers to a couple of
colleges within walking distances to the Metro that offer housing, one of
which costs $210 a month and has a cafeteria. I also asked her what she
liked best about ATR. She said the connections. The president of the
organization evidently knows lots of people up there and is even an advisor
to Newt Gingrich [grin]. Then Sara told me to think about it for a couple of
weeks and call her back on April 24.

So right now I’m sort of shaking inside. I’m terribly excited. This is the
sort of thing I was hoping I’d get. And then at the same time, I’m
terrified. Is this what I really want to do? Not just the offer, not simply
this summer. Is this the field I want to explore? Is this the future I want
to have? Do I really want to focus my life toward politics and government?
Do I want to meet people in power? Make “connections”? Part of me screams
to run away. The other part sees the potential for great things if I follow
this path. This might not only hold good for me but for what I can do to
benefit others, benefit my country.

Maybe I’m just a cynical idealist.

I hate decisions. I mean, I love having the freedom to make them, but to
actually choose… to make a judgment… to set my mind and course of action
in a specific direction with no real option of turning back… that tightens
my stomach into knots.

So now I’m faced with something that has the possibility of being wonderful,
and I’m scared. I’m caught between beaming with pleasure and staring aghast
into the face of the future. The fork in the road is looming ahead, and I
must chose a path.

I’ve asked God to guide my path and have pretty much always known that he
does. I’ve been amazed to see the perfect way he has orchestrated things so
far. He seems to take delight in dropping opportunities in my lap. Instead
of pursuing, I’ve been captured by my destiny. And have had nothing to
complain about thus far. I’ve made overtures in other directions, just to
see what’s out there, and had doors slam in my face. Perhaps this is meant
to be.

When Sara asked me, “Why are you interested in politics?” I didn’t really
know how to answer. “Why is anyone interested in anything?” I began. I
can’t really explain it. All I can guess is that the Lord put this desire,
this love, in my heart for a purpose. The fun, and perhaps frightening, part
is finding out what that purpose is. But life really isn’t worth living
without him, and what he wants for me is truly what I want for myself.

In any case, I’m getting pretty excited. I asked mom if I could take the
synthesizer keyboard with me if I went to Washington this summer. “I
dunno…” she answered slowly, “Maybe God will provide a family for you to
stay with that has a piano.

Naps are good.

Except when my mom wakes me up suddenly, demands I do something and then
starts telling me something important while I’m still not even sure where I
am, what’s going on, or even who I am.

That happened early this evening. I was taking a nap because I went to bed
sometime around 11:30 last night, got up at 2, procrastinated for a couple of
hours before buckling down on my paper on Shakepeare’s _Henry IV_, finishing
around seven something. Dad was proofreading it this morning and noting,
“This is your personal philosophy, Joanna.” Mom read it and asked, “Are all
your papers autobiographical?” I reminded her that my last paper was “The
Irony of Evil” in which I discussed two of Shakepeare’s greatest villains,
Iago and Edmund. “I didn’t include it in that last paper,” I told her, “but
I was originally intending to ask how someone could be that evil and then say
that to find the answer all I had to do was look inside myself.” “I didn’t
mean it like that!” she exclaimed.

I called ATR in Washington and set up an appointment for a phone interview
tomorrow at three.

Functioning merely on caffeine and ginseng tea, I made the final alterations
to my paper and headed out the door, getting to school about 20 till nine.
With some time to kill, I wondered around the fine arts building looking at
the “Art With a Southern Drawl” exhibit and then returning to my classroom,
only to find it entirely empty. It was then that I remembered that class
starts at 9:30 on Tuesdays, not nine. I can’t seem to function in a timely
manner unless I set my alarm for one hour and 15 minutes before class starts.
And last night I got up at 2.

Feeling pretty stupid, I went to the snack shop with Elizabeth and read some
of my world religions text for the quiz we had today. The rest of the day
went fairly normally. We’re discussing Christianity in WR, and specifically
the sermon on the mount. When we got to the part about, “You have heard it
said, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ but I say to you that any man who looks
lustfully at a woman has already committed adultery with her in his heart,”
the question of what lust is came up. Andy, sitting behind me, said, “Joanna
will have an opinion on the matter.” I somehow became the spokesperson for
the females in the group on how women think. I was hoping very hard that
what I said was what they thought. But all the girls nodded when we came to
statement we agreed upon, so I felt a lot better.

I found a couple of books on the National Education Association in the
library and paid a huge fine on a book that was due about a month ago. Then
I purchased a tall cup of coffee and a pint of whole milk from the snack shop
(caffeine protein–a winning combination; kept me awake too) and went over to
Shakespeare, where one of the theater majors insisted I sit down and play the
piano. People kept asking me, “What song is that?” “Sompthin’ I made up.”

At the end of class, Allums said the papers weren’t due till Thursday. I
handed in my paper anyway. I didn’t want to work on it anymore. I suppose
the title was fitting–“The Triumph of Disappointment.”

Then I came home, ate a plate of spaghetti, and crashed. Couple hours of
sleep last night, five the night before (thanks to you), four the night
before that. I’m going to bed for real tonight.

Jonah (seems to be truly able to operate without much sleep)

Oh, got another letter of rejection today. From the Pew Younger Program.
Guess that’s the end of that chapter [grin].

Cara said I didn’t want an internship at Heritage. They’re boring, she said.