This was a line from the customer review of a resort were I might work next summer. The reviewer wasn’t very impressed by Sol Duc Hot Spring’s state of maintenance.

Please pray for me as I make decisions about this upcoming semester, the next summer, and even next school year. Pray for smooth transitions, good relationships, and fruitful ministry. Please pray that any fresh pain won’t hurt.

Every year, a committee in Chicago puts together a series of cultural events downtown that runs for about three weeks and focuses on an apt theme. This year’s theme was climate change. Apt indeed. The events include panels, movies, concerts, and speakers. Hmm. It sounds like I’m advertising. But seriously, it’s quite nice.

Trinity gets to send four students as Chicago Humanities Festival fellows each year. This is my second year going, and both years I’ve really enjoyed the experience. This was an especially fun weekend and I found it to be quite relaxing, actually.

Friday: Finished up classes and around-campus errand running. Carrie and I spent some good side-by-side time. I tried to do a little homework, but then I ended up talking to my long-lost friend Amy on the telephone, trying to catch up on a trimester of happenings. Talking to Amy comes before homework any day, especially Friday. Then I filled my camelbak, a pleasant reminder of many happy adventures, with stuff for the weekend, left my laptop on the desk and the books on the shelves, and headed off to the train station with my friend Kendra.

We armed ourselves with three-day unlimited CTA passes and rode the L downtown to the hostel, where we soon went to bed. I got more sleep than I had gotten in a long time, but Kendra couldn’t seem to sleep. One of the things she kept thinking about was how we had completely forgotten to pay for parking. When she told me this the next morning, I shared in her sense of alarm, but there was nothing we could do about it.

After breakfasting at Panera, we attended The Paper Bag Players presentation of On Top of Spaghetti which really had nothing to do with climate change and was geared for 3-6 year olds. It made us laugh a lot. Next was a panel entitled, “What do philosophers have to offer?” (A lot.) Then we went to a concert of the Chicago Complaints Choir. Here’s the general idea: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eBPHDyu9jE. Hilarious and inspiring.

While waiting for the next event, “Writing Nature,” I wrote my own list of complaints, including “the dishes fill up the sink within a few hours of washing them,” “there is a whole in the bottom of my right foot black croc,” “my joints pop,” and “people are too refined in the wrong way.” Now I just need to set my complaints to music.

Saturday’s evening event was by far my favorite event of the festival. One eighty-year-old man performed the entire Apology of Socrates from memory with skill and humor. It was incredible to watch because I felt that this man was actually Socrates. Who knows, maybe instead of executing Socrates, they actually froze him and thawed him out just recently so that he could speak to us. And indeed, Socrates has much to say to our generation. A favorite quote: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Incidentally, this performer also performs this work in the original Greek when he is called upon to do so.

When we returned to the hostel, still reveling in our encounter with the real live Socrates, we set the alarm for 7:00. Thankfully, this was on a auto-resetting cell phone, so we did take advantage of the extra hour of sleep. I wonder if Spain has daylight savings time. Will I have to loose an hour sometime next semester, or will I just throw that in with the jet lag?

Sunday morning we breakfasted “with” and listened to E.L. Doctorow at the Symphony Center. I’ve never read his works, but he sure is a great guy to listen to. Next we heard Kim Stanley Robinson talk about how much fun it can be to combat climate change. He asked us to examine our activities with these questions: Did I pay for it or do it for free? Did I do it indoors or outdoors? Did I do it alone, or did I do it with others? Did I watch someone else do it or do it myself? Usually the latter answers to these questions are both more fun and better for this planet. I also appreciated his renunciation of monocausotaxophilia.

We topped off the festival festivities by attending a panel called “Religion and the Environment.” The Muslim representative talked about Islam’s tradition of setting aside land for sanctuary. The Jewish representative talked about the idea of the Sabbath, even suggesting that America should take a sabbath year to reflect on where to go from here and realize that it isn’t true that ‘the more we have, the more we are.’ But the Christian representative had few positive things to say. He could’ve talked about the purpose of God’s creation and the Bible’s explicit call for stewardship. Instead he focused solely on the reasons why evangelical America has failed to respond to climate change. As much as I was upset that Christianity was not fairly represented, I agreed with what he had to say. When we evangelicals see humans as exclusively important, expect a rapture at any moment, fear agreeing with New Age followers on any issue, and value objectives by corporate interests, it is no small wonder that we fall short of doing all that we can to care for the beautiful creation God has formed.

When we got back to my car, there was no ticket waiting for us, and we rejoiced in an answered prayer. We returned to this campus refreshed and ready for the Social Justice Chapter meetings, homework, and piled-up emails that awaited us.

Something remarkable: tonight as I strolled from South to Tibstra, thinking about the beauty and diversity of relationships, my head tilted back and my eyes opened wide. There above me were stars. Normally I can only make out about five stars thanks to the city lights and smog. But tonight I saw more stars than I’ve ever seen from the suburbs. I saw the Pleiades, I saw Orion, and I saw Cassiopeia.

“And I do this to remind me that I’m really very tiny
In the grand scheme of things and sometimes this terrifies me.”

And though this world, with devils filled, should threaten to undo us,
we will not fear, for God has willed his truth to triumph through us.

In the innards of the night
there is a hollow cave,
a space where time does not feel tight,
so dark that I am brave.
The threat I risk is sure to come
but I do hope it won’t.
I risk the slap of running out,
but I sure hope I don’t.
Soon I’ll run out of energy
just when I need it most.
Yes, I feel fine and dandy now,
but I don’t dare to boast.
For I have battled all night long
and forced my mind to play.
Then rode to morn on rising sun
and slept along the way.

I do not regret my quest.
I did it not to fail.
I do not regret my stops
to talk beside the trail.
I do regret I ever thought
that I could do it all.
Sleepsick in the cave of day,
for health to God I call.

Ahora– right now– I am thinking en una mix de Español y English. I’ve just come from la clase de Español, and I am happy to say that this class makes me think in Spanish rather than stop thinking, which was the case a year ago. On the sidewalk, I have to stop myself from saying “hola” and I thanked the person who held the door open for me with “gracias.” But now I am in cross-cultural psychology, an appropriate place to write about this code-switching, and the professor is talking about education in America, and he is using English to do this, and I must write in English para ustedes (for yall), so I am thinking more and more in English now.

As for my typing, also Spanglish. It just takes a keystroke to switch from the English layout to the Spanish layout, which is just a slight modification of the QWERTY layout. But my fingers lag a little behind, and when I try to make parenthesis, it doesn´t work right )like this=. Typing in Spanish used to be very slow for me, with the accents and the switched up punctuation, but now the only thing I am slow at is the switching back and forth thing.

When I went to Kentucky for a week each summer during high school, I would switch to their way of speaking within hours. When I came back, it took a little while to switch back. I noticed this especially when people would ask me about my week in Kentucky and I would slip into that beautiful Appalachian drawl subconsciously in order to tell the stories that took place in that place, in that dialect.

When I get to Spain, how long will it take me to switch from hearing the speedy Spanish flying around me as foreign musical syllables to hearing it as facts and opinions? How hard will it be to pick up the phone, punch in three dozen numbers, and say, “Hello, is this Alissa?” instead of “¿Hola, estás Alisa?” Pero no creo que será un problema muy grande.

But here’s where a problem may lie: (Remember how I couldn’t talk about Kentucky without slipping into Appalachian speak. Remember how it took me weeks and weeks of story-telling to debrief from my summer at Mt. Rainier. Realize that there are no words to perfectly describe any experience to anyone who didn’t experience it themselves. And think about this: I usually describe my summer as FABulous or SOOOper or AWEsome, English words pronounced with a Glacier Dorm accent.) How will I ever describe my experience in Spain to English speakers?

Today is a good day.

At supper I just sat and basked in the sound of friends speaking Korean. It is good to just sit and know that ideas are flying past your face, but you have no obligation to understand or process or respond to them. You just get to listen to it like instrumental music. And it is beautiful to know that, in fact, they are not speaking a foreign language. They are speaking their own language, the one they don’t even have to think about. It must feel good to go to supper and let their mouths spew ideas freely after a long day of classes in English.

Will I miss English next semester? I am sure that I won’t be completely removed from English. Many of the students in the program will just be taking beginning Spanish courses. Today at Honors tea we were talking about facebook, which led to a discussion of things that people give up for lent, which led me to think, “Could I give up English for lent?”

Only if I found Keith Green’s Albums in Spanish.