My School!!

I'm little-kid-with-a-drawing-look-mom-look-mom proud of the school I work at.  Our development office put this together.  It's a fair snapshot of the remarkable place we have, though I don't think anything short of a documentary would really capture the wonder of it.




(For my fam: yeah, there's one shot of me in there, and I'd guess about a fourth of those photos are mine.)

My Little Baby Ansels

To the shock and surprise of absolutely no one, I joyfully accepted my principals suggestion I teach a photography elective this year.  Equally shocking, I got all geeked up about it and made a photoblog for them.  I'll update it weekly with their newest work. 

My kids might get pretty geeked up if they get a few comments (hint, hint, nudge...)

Watch out, Lange.  Your legacy may soon be overshadowed.

Round Three...

After many weeks of sky-high stress academia and life alteringly-awesome people and a couple weeks of utter relaxation with my family (who are equally as awesome), I'm back in Brownsville for year two at my school and year three in the teaching gig. I write from my bare classroom, being used today and tomorrow as the in-service room, after which I will begin plastering the room with butcher paper, border, clever posters, schedules, motivational sayings, Bible verses, and my own tangibly high expectations for my students.

Meanwhile, my community (minus four from last year, plus four newbies) is already having a ball. We spent yesterday evening plotting, over tacos and beer, which room of the house to convert to a chapel.

Frankly, I'm just giddy about the start of the new school year. I suspect it will be, to use the ubiquitous phrase, totally awesome.

Stay tuned.

This is absurd.

It's early march. i'm sitting in my car with the sunroof open. I went to the beach two days ago. I love south texas.

Palms

Brownsville, Texas
January 2009

One Thing I Love About the Valley

The Rio Grande Valley is a thriving region, full of life and culture, and a hot-bed of political and social activity. On this side of the river, there's the economy, the border wall, and assorted other craziness. On the other side of the Rio Grande, there are constant struggles between the Federales and the drug cartels, a lot of which directly affects the people of the Valley because they either have immediate family over the border or cross daily or weekly themselves.

And yet, what's the top story on my Brownsville news feed?

Suspect Caught with Stolen Saw.

Wasn't doing anything nefarious. Just stole it.

Oh, Brownsville.

I'm Off!

Our school is closed today and tomorrow because the entire faculty (well, nine of the twelve of us) is going to a conference in New Orleans. Our school is part of the NativityMiguel Network, which is a very particular model of school. This serves as your notice of not only what I'm up to, but how un-secretly excited I am to be both out of school and in New Orleans. Yee. Haw.

I've cued up a few posts to magically appear while I'm away, including the picture of the day. They'll all be of my last trip to New Orleans in 2007 as an insignificant speck on a research team with a professor and some peers. This will ironically make my posting while away more regular and predictable than my posting when I'm home.

Back Saturday night. Please pray for my co-workers and me, and all those attending this conference.

Dismissal

Dismissal at Guadalupe, December 2008

My New Baby!!

Alright, so I mentioned I finally got that digital SLR I've been pining for since... well, a long time. Here's the abbreviated, heart-wrenching story:

My sophomore year of high school, I signed up for a photography elective, kind of on a whim. I'd always liked taking pictures, so I figured it'd be fun but there wasn't much more to it than that.

Little did I know those old hunks of metal would become my first experience of falling head over heels in love. I was utterly intoxicated by the magic of photography, of freezing light, of taking a person or a moment and holding it forever. I could wax poetic about photography for a long time, but I'll spare you. Suffice it to say, I was hooked. Photography is lighting in a bottle, and I wanted more.

By the time I graduated from high school, I had managed to collect three high-quality film SLRs (Moses, Jezabel, and Elijah, Canons all), and my hands were chronically chapped from all the darkroom chemicals. The frustration and triumph of exposing, developing, and drying the same frame six different times just to see what an extra two seconds in the developer would do was addiciting.

I started college as a photojournalism major. By the end of my first semester, I realized two things: that I was simply not naturally talented enough to get into the tiers of photography I would have to be in to satisfy my mania, and that I was not willing to do what it would take to get there anyway -- all my information told me being the kind of photographer I wanted to be was hell on your personal life. So I switched to education. At the same time, I became quite poor (yay, college!) and could no longer afford to support my habit (buying and processing film is expensive). Photography dropped out of my life for a while, until I got my first digital point-and-shoot (and the second, both of which I have literally used to death, both also Canons).

I resisted digital for a long time, both because the quality was not remotely comprable to film until very recently, and because I thought it was cheating -- honestly, I still think taking the darkroom out of the process kills half the fun, but I've accepted it's just a different kind of hobby. Finally, after months and months of saving and a very generous Christmas, I was able to get this Canon Rebel XSi. Her name is Guadalupe Luz, or Lupita.

In case anyone was unclear: I am a little excited about this aquisition.

Below are a self-portrait of my girl and a few choice frames from our first shoot, followed by a slide show of some others. On a side note, that shrine is our backyard here in Brownsville (I love the randomness of my life. I really do). Lupita and I are getting used to each other. I've had four other SLRs and two other digitals, but she's my first digital SLR. It's like learning to drive a new sports car when you've only had SUVs and towncars.

The 500th Post, or "On the Gifts of (the) Spirit"

(I wrote this Thursday, January 15th, but am only just posting it now.)

It's 7:30 a.m. I just got to school, and I have already been to Mexico (yes, the country) and Wal-Mart today.

When I got to school, I took a moment and glanced at my blog feeds, discovering this really wonderful video Paul posted.

And, because I am not quite mentally... normal, to me these things fit together.

Fret not, I'm going to attempt to explain. First, I need to back up.

I finally ordered a digital SLR last week. The days following saw me obsessively watching UPS's tracking site. The UPS man didn't show until Wednesday night about 6:30, when we were at dinner. When the doorbell rang, I quite literally leapt up, threw my chair back and ran to the door faster than I've run in at least six months. I came back with my package and the jitters, and one of my housemates said, "I would never have expected that from you."

"Well," I said, "I've wanted this for years." I looked down at the beautiful brown box and shrugged. "I love taking pictures."

Despite my overwhelming glee, I went to bed early. Two of my housemates are going on a ten-day mission to Mexico in April as chaperons for their students. This weekend was a pre-mission retreat, and they loaded the buses in Mexico at 6 a.m., so I volunteered to take them over the border. In the midst of my anxiety over getting my Volvo back into the United States, I could not help but smile and be stirred: it was an hours before daylight, but there was so much life, energy, and enthusiasm on and around those buses.

This brings us to the part where I’m thinking about Beethoven (watch the video) and sitting back in my teacher chair, suddenly struck by the power of passion.

I strung these events together in my head, and 1 Corinthians 12 leapt to mind: “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit”. Generally, that’s applied to purely spiritual gifts. In that moment, though, I pondered that those gifts extend far beyond the invisible, mystical spirit. No, perhaps I should rephrase that -- the invisible, mystical spirit extends way beyond what we think it does.

You look at Beethoven and what he did, and you see extraordinary brilliance driven by other-worldly passion. You look at my housemates the other adults on that trip, and my coworkers, and you see depths of dedication fed by unearthly patience. You look at a dork like me and you see school-girl giddiness inspired by an unending wonder of everything around her.

We’re not a body with a spirit, or a spirit with a body; we’re both at the same time. That’s why we take certain physical postures to pray, and why a song that stirs your soul gives you goose bumps. It seems to me that saying “the physical world” and “the spiritual world” isn’t really accurate. They’re aspects of the same world, like the up-and-down and side-to-side threads of a loom. You’re not living a full life without something that drives you. I know it’s a cliché, but clichés exist because they are often true.

God gives us gifts in the form of abilities and talents, of course. What good would those gifts be, though, without one other: simply giving a damn about something. Anything. Maybe it’s a Mother Theresa like drive to serve, or maybe it’s a love of marine life. Maybe it’s your friends or your children. Hopefully, it’s a couple things. Isn’t having the drive more important than having the talent? What has ever been accomplished without passion?

Beethoven had passion. Anyone who teaches, or works with kids at all, better have passion for it, even if it’s often shrouded under exhaustion and frustration, or get out of it. Parents are passionate about their children. Heck, even the relatively meaningless hobbies we have – taking pictures, knitting, doodling on napkins -- serve the purpose of giving us meaning. All of it puts a ribbon of significance into everything we do.

Which is kind of the point of this little nook of cyberspace. There’s a lot of theophany going on, both as vast, encompassing, and stunning, and as frequently unnoticed as the sky. I suppose I’m a cloud watcher. Sometimes things take forms and shapes that force me to take a moment and sit back in my chair, and just take it in.

Oddly enough, this time coincided with my 500^th post here. Funny, eh?

Another Day

I love that my road home every day takes me right into the sunset.

A Look Back, a Little Early

Just like last year, here's a photographic, slightly epileptic, look back at this year for me. Highlights:

• My 2nd VIDES formation camp, this time having a clue
• My 2nd semester teaching, still without a clue
• The St. Vitus Fools, our drama club, and our production of "Looking Glass Land, which was a sucess largely because no one could tell none of us had a clue.
• More nuns, all indescribably wonderful.
• Leaving the nuns, with a full heart and some tears...
• ...and arriving at Notre Dame to start ACE...
• ...where I met some of the most incredible people ever, and certainly the heaviest concentration of awesome I've encountered yet
• My second convent full of community mates, this time unconsecrated my own age
• My second year of teaching, with a little bit of a clue
• And meanwhile, my family continued to be awesome and weird

Please note: There are two people who were as important in my life this year as anyone else, and more important than most, even though I only saw them once in April for a few hours each (hence the painful dearth of pictures and sinful under representation). You know who you are. This year would not have been nearly as wonderful without your constant long-distance support, laughter, and presence. Thank you. I love you more than I know how to say.



All the pictures in the movie are available here, should you be inclined to take a more leisurely look.

Houston (and everywhere else), we have a problem

Here's the deal, Dear Readers: our house's internet is down. Because of our location, we have to have satellite internet, and satellite puts a cap on our bandwidth in any consecutive thirty days. We have seven adults in our house who use the internet on a regular basis. That means, basically, that we WILL go over our quota. When that happens, we're penalized with a serious squeeze on available bandwidth (or something like that).

What that means is that while our internet is still technically there, it's useless for anything other than basic HTML e-mail checking. I can only do most internet activities from school.

While this is a good thing for the amount of work I will get done at home, it is a bad thing for the amount of blogging I am able to do. I'm sorry. This is just how it has to be. It's not you, it's me.

In America, this doesn't qualify as news.

...but then, I don't live in America. I live in Brownsville, in the Rio Grande Valley. An in the Valley, this sure is news.

"The low temperature in Harlingen dropped to 39 degrees; which was the coldest morning since February 1st of this year. "

I don't think I need to comment on that.

Its fall in brownsville!

the gloves and scarves are out to help combat the unseasonably cool temperature OF... 80 degrees.

Another sunset

do you notice how no two are quite the same?

Normally i would have missed this.

Sometimes its nice to have traffic to slow us down.

Clearly ccd has been writing on my board

Id be curious to see what people turned in.

Brownsville Sunset

I love having a sun roof in bville in the fall! Forgive the recent utter absence of posting. There is always a lot going on but a lot of it is not bloggable. Never fear, dear readers, i live and i live well.

Illegal Aliens from Outter Space

I gave my kids the in-class task of drawing a picture to help them remember the definition of one of their vocab words.  The pair who got "alien" came up with this drawing, along with this explanation:

 

"Alright, so an alien is something foreign or from another planet, and Mexicans get called aliens all the time, so what we drew is a Mexican sombrero abducting a person."

 

The student proudly indicated his sombrero-shaped UFO with abductee in a cone of blue light.