Cities are Lonely Places

Psalm 139:13

For you [God] created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

God formed me in my mother’s womb. He designed me with these features and this personality. He created me to be an ENFP. This means that I am enthusiastic and wildly creative. I am the idea person. It also means that I work best when other people are working along side me. It means that I need to have people around to thrive. It means that my life has been profoundly lonely.

I wonder if ENFPs deprived of community feel loneliness more deeply because the need for people is so intense. All I know is that it has plagued me my whole life. These past few years have been great, though. Erik and I have spent wonderful time together and enjoyed lunches during the week when he worked from his home office. Before we met, I was living in a garage with two cats. I would go for weeks without having another person touch me. I worked on sculptures by myself, went out to eat by myself, and went to bed alone each night. This isn’t to say that I didn’t have friends or even an active social life, but my day-to-day moving through time was largely time alone.

One fateful day, I scheduled a meeting with a professor at Hood College to ask her some questions about the Humanities program. That day, she offered me the job in the slide library. That slide room was my life-line for several years. I had several student workers who I grew to dearly love. I had a little community for a few hours a day. Then came summer. I was all alone in a cold, dark building. Some days, I felt as if I’d chew off my own leg just to escape. The next summer, the department hired a girl to help me over the summer. What a lovely time we had together and are still friends.

Then I met Erik. My life was filled with love and flowers. We’ve built a really fantastic life together and I have felt as if the sunshine of happiness has shone down upon me!

Recently, Erik’s job has moved us up to rural Pennsylvania. It is a good job and we thank God for it. Erik enjoys the new challenges and solving new problems, but the hours are long and there are no more lunches together. What’s more, I don’t have a slide library, a dean’s office, or classes to attend. I don’t have any friends, yet, either. I signed up for a sleep study down at the University of Pittsburgh to further medical research on sleep. For now, the technicians in the lab who put me to bed and wake me up are the familiar faces in my life. During the day, I spend time in wifi coffee shops and at the beautiful Carnegie Library. I don’t know anyone here, even though I see a thousand faces passing by.

I’m lonely.

So I ask God, “Why did you think that it was a good idea to give me this personality if you knew that I’d spend so much time alone?” I get mad at Him sometimes. I feel like I have a lot of gifts, a lot of passion, a lot to do. But I’m not flourishing. Sculpture is a lonely pursuit, unless we operate as a part of a workshop or cooperative studio setting. Thesis writing is lonely. Housekeeping is lonely. I am alone too much. So, God, what gives?

I have to trust that He does good work and that He made me exactly the way He intended to.

Photo Meme

I got tagged by Ben at Unbreakable Joy.



Here are the rules:
1) Choose the 4th folder where you store your pictures on your computer.
2) Select the 4th picture in the folder.
3) Explain the picture.
4) Tag 4 people to do the same.
No cheating (cropping, editing, etc.) Have fun!! Here is the picture:

This is the pergola on Hood College's campus. The photo was taken by my long-time friend, Salina, when she visited Frederick in June 2005. This pergola is covered in wisteria and is amazing in the springtime.

Tagged:

Paul at quare id faciam? , Bike Bubba , Katherine at Drawing in Sanguine, and Kelly Klages

Economic Situation

I am not sure what is going to happen in the next five to ten years, any more than anyone else, but I think that we can all agree that it won't be pretty. I really enjoyed this article that offers useful tips from the economic collapse in Russia. The article was written by Dmitry Orlov, who maintains a blog here: cluborlov.blogspot.com . I'm off to read his blog, get a donkey, and learn to do something useful in an economic crisis. Place your orders for golden candleabras at www.HempelStudios.com.

Teaser quotes:

"All sorts of silly things were happening [in the 1990s]. Professor Fukuyama told us that history had ended, and so we were building a brave new world where the Chinese made things out of plastic for us, the Indians provided customer support when these Chinese-made things broke, and we paid for it all just by flipping houses, pretending that they were worth a lot of money whereas they are really just useless bits of ticky-tacky. "

"One final transportation idea: start breeding donkeys. Horses are finicky and expensive, but donkeys can be very cost-effective and make good pack animals. My grandfather had a donkey while he was living in Tashkent in Central Asia during World War II. There was nothing much for the donkey to eat, but, as a member of the Communist Party, my grandfather had a subscription to Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, and so that's what the donkey ate. Apparently, donkeys can digest any kind of cellulose, even when it's loaded with communist propaganda. If I had a donkey, I would feed it the Wall Street Journal. "

"Justice will once again become a personal virtue rather than a federal department."

"Some legal impediments are really small and trivial, but they can be quite annoying nevertheless. A homeowners' association might, say, want give you a ticket or seek a court order against you for not mowing your lawn, or for keeping livestock in your garage, or for that nice windmill you erected on a hill that you don't own, without first getting a building permit, or some municipal busy-body might try to get you arrested for demolishing a certain derelict bridge because it was interfering with boat traffic ¬ you know, little things like that. Well, if the association is aware that you have a large number of well armed, mentally unstable friends, some of whom still wear military and police uniforms, for old time's sake, then they probably won't give you that ticket or seek that court order. "

Capitalism at its worst

"Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalized, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism. "

(Carl Marx, Das Kapital, 1867)

(HT: Buck Hempel)

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