Journal # 17
Well, it’s the beginning of a new week. A lot has happened since last weekend and my trip to Alexandria. I think my format for this journal is going to be like how I was taught to triage patients in a mass casualty incident, I’ll start where I stand.
This evening was one of the best that I’ve had in the time that I’ve been here. I had started to feel a little disconnected from the rest of the house in a few ways, and tonight we got together to reaffirm why we are here, for ourselves but more so, for each other. We’ve been so gifted to have an amazing Former JV community in the area who have come over for dinners and to help out plan our community nights. Right now, I am just coming off a gossip girl high, combined with a feeling that I feel has been steadily dying down since I’ve started the program, excitement with a sense of purpose. Tonight, we made Tibetan prayer flags, of our own creation. We took sheets of cloth and were told to in half of the square, to represent what we hope our community to be this year, and in the other half, what we hope for ourselves. I’ll say that first, I was impressed with the artistic (and in some cases modern artistic) abilities of our house members. Most importantly, there was a lot of thought behind the art. There was a reason for everything we painted, marked, scribbled, and wrote on our flags. I drew a watercolor representation of a table, with 6 chairs sitting around it, each with a different colored person sitting in it, representing the diverse backgrounds which we all bring, whats more, it represented my hope that we as people would always have that space to come together at face value. That we would come together, bringing our joys, our sorrows, our hard times, our tears, our successes, our laughter. The table itself was drawn to be multi-colored, the colors seeming to mingle together in what I hope is what will continue to happen at our house.
I also drew a friendship bracelet, demonstrating that when we step back and think about it, each one of our lives is like a string. Whether you believe it be by divine intervention, fate, or what have you, our strings are braided together, as we are now sharing some of the same experiences. Its crazy to think about how a year ago, I would have never dreamed I would be doing exactly what I am doing right now. Lying on my bed, in a foreign but not-so-foreign city, writing about how I’m being impacted by the people I’m living with. All our flags have been hung up in the ‘family room’ area, and will remain there, I’m sure, for the rest of the year, maybe longer. Kristina put it well when she said this year we are making this house into a home for future JVs, that this year we are the first of what I hope to be many JVs sharing company in the house we are living in.
In other less ‘deep’ news, I had a great weekend attending a DC United vs. Seattle Sounders soccer game, for free! The soccer league that I’m in sent out an email about some tickets being donated, so I immediately emailed back to see if one was still available and it was! It was a bit of a trip, I met some new people there as well, who had also gotten tickets from the same person, who I later learned was also from Seattle, so we already had that connection going on. After the game we went to this cupcake store, Red Velvet I think, (PS, cup cake stores are super trendy right now, I don’t really get it, how can one business survive on one product???, ungh, I don’t get it!) and despite my feelings about these types of establishments, did have a pretty darn good cupcake. After that we toured the monuments and memorials at night, until my feet were begging forgiveness for whatever they had done to deserve such merciless treatment. The next day I had a soccer game, and I’m soooo sore now, and I think I have shin splints, for the record, the first shin splints I’ve EVER HAD. They SUCK! So now I’ve been iceing them and hoping for a speedy recovery. I’m also planning to run a 12k, so I need to rest up for that, its coming up in November. The shin splints are probably a result of me running a lot, I think I ran over 15 miles last week, maybe I’ll get some more in this week. Anyhoo, its 12am and I need to get up tomorrow! Until next time!
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