Sunday was City Project Site Visit Day (I know, what a long title!) This meant my Structure and Growth of Cities class group went into Philadelphia to explore the site we’ve been given. It is called the Russian Orthodox Church of Our Lady, Joy of All Who Sorrow. As a requirement of entrance, we had to don head scarves and skirts (provided by the church).

Russian Orthodox Church of Our Lady, Joy of All Who Sorrow

I felt the fear of lice but, needing to enter, I did as I was bid.

It was all very strange for me. I’m a Baptist/Pentacostal and Russian Orthodoxy is about as far from Pentacostalism as you can get. Where Pentacostals are all about singing and dancing and interaction and kinda being crazy, the Orthodox church is all about ritual and physical signs. There were photos of large-eyed saints on every wall, halos surrounding their heads. The incense burned thickly enough to shroud the room in smoke. Almost the entire service was standing and the chief liturgist mainly stood upon the pedestal or behind the elaborate facade erected in the front of the church.

I was highly estranged from the whole thing, unable to relate much of myself and my beliefs to their method of relating to God.

My Sunday Funday Photo Boxes

On my return to campus, I participated in Student Activities’ “Sunday Funday.” This week was making photo boxes. I decided to go as I rather need some additional nicknacks to decorate my room. There I took the free candy and plastered as much printed paper and tape as suited me. I think my boxes turned out fairly nicely. I really do love taking advantage of the many campus activities. There are just so many free things waiting to be gotten…for example, the other day, I and a couple friends burst into an AMO (Alliance of Multicultural Organizations, I think) meeting and stole their cookies and pizza.

Sighs. C’est la vie que j’aime.

So,

It’s Fall Break.

I’m sitting in my dorm room.

And somehow, even when I feel free, I know I still have too much I should do.

I guess I can’t really (don’t really) want to believe it’s the half-way point. I haven’t done as well this year as I would have liked and already there have been a couple setbacks for me. But I’m pressing on.

This week I: scampered around trying to atone for my previous grade-related mistakes, had a Chamber Singers performance, and an Econ midterm. It is only after the break that I’ll see if I hath salvaged myself from the jaws of defeat and despair.

The Chamber Singers performance was an interesting experience. The play, the Events, is about a women who has part of her multi-cultural choir killed by an extremist. It attempts to highlight the mental experience of going through a traumatic event like that. As a member of the choir, and hence the show, who was also supposed to be an audience member (I’d never seen the script and was only given a vague idea of what was going to happen) I know I came away with a difference experience than the rest of the audience. I was constantly waiting for my queue and sometimes couldn’t hear the actors/didn’t dare listen so I didn’t miss my queue. I feel I would have processed the whole thing better if I’d had a reaction-mate–meaning a sister to gasp and whisper with. Often, it’s how I make sense of the world.

Overall, I do feel like the performance highlighted how both victim and perpetrator get swept up emotionally in a traumatic event.

My other tidbit is a result of the Bryn Mawr stress-game. As I am want to do, on Thursday I went into my roommate’s room to harass her. However, she was moping: feeling bad about class stuff. An intervention was required to get her back to her normal crazy, cat-noise self. This namely consisted of: two Sara Bareilles songs (I’ll post one), snickering (heh) at this book The Dark she tried to read (it’s by Lemony SNICKet), and giving her a lesson on Liberian vernacular [all movies, TV programs, whatevers = shows].

That’s how to handle the Mawrter-stress machine, in my opinion. Annoy the heck out of people. They’ll be so irritated they’ll forget all problems but you!

Hehe 😉