So much love in you...

Stated quite simply, I love my life. I have chosen to fall in love with the awkward, widespread, chaotic tangle of relationships and experiences that are my life. Don't get me wrong, I go through ebbs and flows with the best of them, I wish I could say I spend everyday as brilliantly content with things as I am today- but I would contend as I've gotten older I've learned to spend more of my days this way.

I've come to terms that I will not ever live in community the way I did in college again. IWU and my life there was a unique and beautiful chapter of life... its over now- lets be honest it has been for awhile, so its time to see the unique beauty in my current chapter and let me tell you, it is an amazing chapter that I cannot wait to go back and look over and understand more fully all I'm learning. Things are different these days. My friendships look dramatically different. The way I spend my days looks different. But at the end of it all when I take a moment to step back and look what my life has become I just have to confidently and emphatically state- I love my life.

Change is on its way!!

So, this is officially my last week of being unemployed... well that is until I get the bright idea to quit another job without having any lined up for afterward (lets just be honest, its fairly likely I'll do it again, I'm a loose canon these days. haha). I finally snagged myself a paying job. I'll be working just a few miles down the road from my apartment- a quick half hour bus ride will get me to my new office where I'll be working for a company that plans tours around the US for foreign exchange students. I'll be traveling again with this job, going with the exchange students on the tours- however I'm keeping my fingers crossed that these tours will be to places a little warmer than Northern Minnesota and South Dakota!!

The search has felt long and its been frustrating, but its good to know that at least the search for a paycheck is done for now. PTL. :)

Life's not fair

Last week I was heading to a friend's house up on the northeast side of Chicago- I had just gotten off the train and was walking the few blocks to her home while talking with a friend on the phone. I noticed a police car slowing down beside me and immediately felt a little parnoid- worrying that in my distracted state I'd somehow broken some sort of walking law. A moment later the car pulls into the drive a half a block in front of me and the officer steps out and stops a couple walking in front of me- asking for their ID, what they'd been doing that night etc. The couple was just walking along- just as I had been (except maybe less distracted as they weren't on phones!). I was baffled by this. I'd heard people in my life talk about being stopped by the police when they were walking, my neighbor jokes that he can't leave the house to walk to the garage without ID, just in case- but I always thought it was just jokes. I have found myself wondering time and time again in the past week why this officer saw fit to stop this man- to keep him from his intended destination.

A little less than a month ago, while I was out working, my roommate was startled in the middle of the night by the sound of gunfire- shots had been fired just across the street from our house. She got out of bed and discovered that in addition to the gunfire, a car that was parked on the street had been set on fire. I got home at about 6am the next morning and she filled me in as she got ready to head to work- it just all seemed surreal. I'd heard gunshots from my old place and even once since moving here- but to have it that close...

Reality is a hard pill to swallow. To walk home at night and see kids that should be tucked in bed out running around cursing at each other, to see men and women standing on the corner begging for mercy- for help, to watch people as they get on the bus just to get out of the elements for a little while, it can all get to be too much. I find myself wishing to go back to my former life, to go back to a place where the reality of the inner city doesn't have to be known, or at least to find away to hide myself from it somehow. I struggle to know how to deal with these realities. I realize its not my job to fix them all, but I also realize its not my place to stand back and pretend injustice, corruption and pain do not exist.

Once again as I sit here writing- I feel like this is all just an incomplete thought. I miss being able to write out what I'm thinking and being able to come to some logical conclusion.. beyond that life's not fair.

Hi, my name is Katie and I'm a hypocrite.

Consistency is something that I hold in very high regard. I love people who I know I can count on and who regularly commit to some symbol of friendship. For a few months a friend of mine would call me every week, without fail, pretty much always on the same day at around the same time- the most beautiful part of this though was that it wasn't something he and I planned out each week, setting a date for the next week, instead, he just consistently called. I honestly loved it and love him for it... now, in the past month those calls have waned, both of our schedules look quite a bit different than they did when we first began our solid phone friendship- but I still feel I should count him a good friend because for months he was so spectacularly consistent. Another friend, when I moved away for the first time and was living with people I barely knew took it on as her mission to call me very regularly- close to every day, she would send mail and in general just find ways to make sure I knew she was thinking of me. Again, during that time this consistency made me feel so loved and cared for.

You would think, being that I hold consistency in such high regard, I would be a more consistent person. Sadly, the opposite is true. I'm awful at things like remembering birthdays, calling when I say I will and really, all and all doing ANYTHING with consistency... I realize this makes me a hypocrite, but I also realize this is part of what makes me, well, me. I like to think that if I saw someone in need of me consistently that I'd be able to pull that off, that I could be dependable and come through for those people. Maybe this is a bit of hypocrisy in my life I should start working on...