I Love the Java Jive and it Loves Me

Quick entry tonight, and on a much lighter subject than last night.
Let's talk about coffee.

Growing up, my Nana would often take us out to breakfast at a restaurant called Huckleberry Square in Burien. She would always get a cup of coffee, and she would drink it black. I remember her telling me how everywhere she went, waiters and waitresses would always ask if she'd like milk and sugar. She'd always refuse, but they would always bring it anyway. As associated with my Nana, a cup of black coffee seemed as classic as a little black dress. It's what Holly Golightly drinks with her danish as she walks down the sidewalk in the opening of Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Another habitual experience with coffee growing up was with my dad. He'd take us to coffee most Saturday mornings. Whichever kids were up early enough could come with him, and get a donut and a cup of hot chocolate or steamed milk with vanilla. Or maybe we had to choose, donut or drink. I can't remember. My dad's famous rule was, "Don't come, don't get," meaning he wouldn't bring us back something if we chose to sleep; but if we came, he would give generously. There were actually many times when he would bring home donuts anyway for the kids who chose to sleep, but we knew not to expect it. All this to say, my dad's drink of choice was always, "Vente americano, no room, light ice." I remember tasting it on several different occasions, each time saying something like, "Gross, how can you drink that?"

At some point in high school, James decided he was going to start drinking coffee black. He literally made himself like it. James could always do things like that. He'd just decide, and then actually do it. I was a dreamer and an idealist, but I rarely exercised my will like that. Anyway, he decided to drink coffee black because it was an awesome thing to be able to do. Black coffee seemed so much more impressive than coffee with milk and sugar.

Ironically, I also accomplished James' plan. I think James succeeded too, though I can't remember when. I started drinking coffee with milk and sugar on occasion when I was 12 or 13; it was delicious. Then, Starbucks became a huge craze, and I switched to frappuccinos and caramel macchiatos. Then, at some point--I can't remember exactly--perhaps Junior year when I commuted to HCC and had no money, I switched to americanos. Ever since, I've been a devoted fan of cafe sin leche ni azucar.

While I may not be as much of a coffee addict as Lorelai Gilmore (we must keep striving after something, after all), I adore the drink. The smell was something I loved long before I could stand the taste. I used to open the burgundy canister that held our coffee grounds and smell it, sometimes scooping some of the contents into the coffee pot for one of my parents with the little wooden spoon that hung on the side of the canister. That smell is thousands of years old, and if you close your eyes you can feel ancient Arabia or Machu Picchu in the steaming, rich aroma. Coffee is another name for Tchaikovsky's Arabian Variation from "The Nutcracker Suite" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua6aCFJqhQs).

Those are all the random stories related to coffee that I can recall at the moment. How it relates to living in the moment and finding color in life? I love that it's something you can experience with multiple senses. You smell the aroma, even from across the room; you see the deep brown color; you feel the heat of the steam on your face, and the smooth liquid on your lips and tongue and even down your throat; you taste the bitterness--not too harsh. It's a four-sense experience in a world where we use one sense at a time. They say one of the best ways to retain information you learn is to study it with as many of your senses as possible.

Christian application? I'm going to have to rely on my dear friend Gilbert Keith here, and say the way I drink coffee is an expression of wonder. What is wonder? I'm going to quote Professor Bruner here, and say that Wonder is one of the four elements of joy. It is manifested in curiosity and deference, and is a disposition of the body. It directly opposes boredom, distraction, and autonomy. To live in a state of wonder is to notice the amazing occurrences that surround us--to make too much of them, even. It reminds us we are not dead (for more on this, muddle through G.K. Chesterton's Manalive). Too often, we do not even realize we need that reminder.

So here's to coffee, one of those simple pleasures that allows us to take a deep breath and escape into a few moments of comfort. Tonight, it rescued me from drowning in Marxist Literary Theory.

Stream of Consciousness Thoughts on Death

A few years ago, James (my older brother) and I were up late in the back room of our house, talking about philosophy and life and ourselves (a common occurrence over our high school years). I remember describing myself as a "passionate person," in the sense that I want to fully experience whatever I am feeling in the moment. We talked about the pros and cons of that, and decided that intensified negative emotions like sadness, or anger, or jealousy are outweighed, overall, by immense joy. Yes, we were crazy kids who enjoyed dissecting our psyches too much.

This story came to mind because the idea of living in the moment seems almost beyond reach right now. In the second Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants book, Lena describes feeling too stretched out. In various books, characters have the feeling of watching themselves from afar as they do things. When I feel detached from reality like this, it's akin to the color seeping out from the scenes of my life and leaving them in grayscale. I'm walking on a stone street by a river in a city I don't know, stuck in black and white; I sit on a bench, and the rain falls all around me, but I don't feel it. Maybe I'm the indifferent heroine of The Postal Service's song, "Clark Gable."

This entry is disconnected and wandering because that's how I feel. I've already missed my family much more this year than I did last year. I miss Seattle too, that feeling of autumn with the smoky air and the misty rain. I have a boyfriend who'll remain 3,000 miles away from me until Thanksgiving. And tonight my mom called to tell me that my Grandpa probably won't make it through the night. He's been deteriorating for a while, and we thought he was close to death earlier this summer.

Death is an odd phenomenon. The ultimate gray, if you will (Tolkien's "Gray havens"), death seems a place of mossy, quiet decomposition. Even in the Bible, the Hebrew 'sheol' evokes images of a shadowy underworld. Rocky Votolato wrote, "I'm going down to sleep on the bottom of the ocean...there's a secret place that I know, and if I could I'd dig a grave and then climb underground for good" ("White Daisy Passing"). This summer, I read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Before that, I'd never read anything explicitly about death.

Dr. Glyer said (and I believe she was paraphrasing Lewis) that death is one of the strongest clues we have to the fact that we are eternal beings. It's so unnatural. When someone gets ripped out of our lives like a picture from a magazine, how can we read the page? The edge is jagged--raw--and the torn remnants of the page are left to be creased and crumpled as the rest of the magazine goes on living, unscathed.

As Shauna Niequist reminded the student body of APU at chapel on Friday, God brings life out of death. We often want to forget about the death part and skip to life. But before He resurrects us, we have to die.
The last week was one of death for me; death of idolatry, death of self-pity, death of absorption in my struggles. Missing someone, dead or alive, is a feeling that makes each of those things--idolatry, self-pity, absorption in my struggles--far too easy. It interferes with how I live in the moment, for the thought of what or who I'm missing invades my studies, my work, my eating, my waking.

Here, I'm throwing out more lyrics, because this song came to mind. It's one of the few songs that hit me the first time I heard it. Jon Foreman wrote this:
"And I said, 'Please,
Don't talk about the end
Don't talk about how every living thing goes away'
And she said, 'Friend,
All along, thought I was learning how to take
How to bend, not how to break
How to laugh, not how to cry
But really
I've been learning how to die'"

If I were to choose one biblical connection that's floating around in my head right now, it would be from Hebrews 11.
Verses 13-16,
"All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country--a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them."
Then, verses 38-40,
"The world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground. These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised. God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect."

We can grasp bits and pieces of this death-to-life concept while we're here on earth, but we cannot grasp what we hope for--Whom we place our hope in. We will die hoping. We will long for a better country. We will wander. Perhaps this is why we miss people; perhaps God wired us with those emotions to remind us to long for something, someone.

But one day, we will be made perfect. The author of Hebrews gives the children of faith the eulogy that every human on this earth wants: "The world was not worthy of them." We want to be made for something more. We want to exceed our surroundings.

When I don't know how to feel alive--when the color is gone, because it sometimes is--I declare my life anyway. Job said, "Though He slay me, yet will I hope in Him" (13:15). I am a daughter of the Living God, raised with Christ, and so I rejoice in Revelation 21-22, and maybe sing something like what The Afters wrote,
"My heart is in You
Where You go
You carry me
I bleed if You bleed
Your heart beats
Inside of me
You're keeping me alive...
You're like the morning air
Before the light arrives
No more lonely and
No more night
No more secrets to hide"


"I will extol the LORD at all times; His praise will always be on my lips. My soul will boast in the LORD; let the afflicted hear and rejoice. Glorify the LORD with me; let us exalt His name together."--Psalm 34:1-3

The Experiment

Last year, I began this blog as a way to keep friends and family updated on my life as a student. Unfortunately, I was a hopelessly negligent blogger. I wrote more facebook notes than blog entries. Most of those consisted of quotes from literature I was reading at the time. This year, inspired by one of my roommates (Kate, whose blogging expertise far exceeds my own), I'm going to attempt to resurrect this blog. However, I would like to have a focus in my posts. For the next few weeks, I'll try out one or more options for the focus of this blog. If the first one works, I'll keep it. If not, I'll try another.

Thus, for the immediate future, I will be attempting to find and describe the color in my life. I use the term color as a concrete concept, but also as an abstract one. I will write about ways I have encountered color in what I read, see, hear, and experience. However, I will also include ways my life has become more colorful in the sense that it has become more full. There are several reasons I'm doing this. First, I am a student. As such, my education should be a process that leaves me more enriched--better able to live a fuller life. Second, I am a student of literature. The only reason to study literature is to gain a broader knowledge of the human experience, and thus to live a fuller life. Third, I am a student of Christ. Learning to imitate Christ brings the freedom to live a life full of color, rather than the gray life of enslavement to sin. Paul said that we learn to walk in righteousness so that we can "take hold of the life that is truly life" (1 Timothy 6).

The Dead Poets' Society read poetry in an attempt "suck the marrow out of life." Patients of Freud and Lacan embraced new theories in an attempt to break out of their psychological imprisonments. Jesus' disciples followed Him because they saw that He had the words of eternal life (John 6:68). The people in these three cases were searching for that "life that is truly life," that life full of color. The reason I think noticing moments of color, literal or figurative, is so important in our lives is that I believe these moments give us a glimpse of the world we were made for. The imagery of heaven in the book of Revelation is one filled with hard, shining color. Much of it seems harsh and glaring when I read it; it's for creatures more powerful than I with my unresurrected body (yes, I'm recalling Lewis in "Weight of Glory" and "Great Divorce" here). Learning to pay attention to the moments when that world of terrible beauty breaks through ("the kingdom of God is forcefully advancing") can make an enormous difference in our lives. Living in a state of wonder at these moments reminds us of God's presence, of what we were created for, and it brings us great joy. Truth be told, that's the real (selfish) reason I'm focusing on this in my blog. I need to be reminded to pay attention, to look for color, and to live in wonder.


It's late on a Saturday night (or early on a Sunday morning), so I'll just give one example before I get some sleep.
Boys Like Girls' newest album, "Love Drunk" has a song called "Real Thing," and the chorus goes like this:


"'Cause this is the real thing
When love changes everything
This is the night when every heart's exploding
The real thing
Slow down, it's happening
'Cause you got time to burn in the heat of the moment
That summer radio
Fireworks off the patio
A 3am string of green lights in a row
And the real thing
Love can change anything
If you can just let go"

First off, I have to say that the "string of green lights" reminded me of "The Great Gatsby," (sorry, sorry, I couldn't help it!). But the real reason for me posting those lyrics is that they demonstrate that we all recognize the feeling of the "real thing." Yes, this band's talking about a crush, but a crush can be a kind of color in our lives. This is "just" a punk/pop song written by some twentysomething boys, but it might as well be Byron's "She walks in beauty like the night" when it comes to describing human experience. It feels like summer radio, driving with that song turned up loud, singing with your friends on the freeway. It's like fireworks, making you jittery, exploding in light and sound, giving you a rush like when you light them off your patio.
The initial crush is an obsession with a person as a whole (yes, this is Lewis on Eros in "The Four Loves"). Every little thing about them seems perfect. It's infatuating; it reminds you have great life can be. It can actually be a quick snippet of unconditional love; for a short time, the beloved can do no wrong--we feel he or she was "made for me." Like all glimpses of color in this world, this life, it comes to an end. It may come and go, or it may disappear forever. For a brief time, however, it brightens our sight with crackling fireworks of color.

P.S. Sorry for writing about something as shallow as lyrics and crushes, but it's Saturday night; what's on your mind?