This Crazy Small World

Disney was dead right when he wrote that song "It's a Small World After All" (or whoever actually wrote the song was right.)  It's a crazily small world out there, and it never fails to blow my mind when I find out that I know someone who knows someone else that I know and I didn't know that they know each other.  Take for example, these most recent scenarios in my life.  And be recent, I mean all within the last month, with the exception of one that is within the last year, but ties into one that happened just the other night.

• Let's start with the fact that Elenatintil, whom I've known for six years now (where does the time go?) married someone who lived no more than thirty minutes away from me my entire life.  I've driven past his house multiple times over the years, he knows a few people that I know, but we never met until he moved to Minnesota and started dating Elena.  And now they are married.  Crazy!
• Tying into that... the other night I was sitting in my Microsoft Office class, and as I had a few minutes before class started I headed over to Elena's facebook page to wish her a happy birthday.  As I'm typing, the guy I've sat next to all semester happens to glance over and says in surprise, "Wait... you know the _____?"  Turns out he's the younger brother of a friend of Elena's husband.
• The other week, we welcomed a wonderful new addition to our choir at church.  She seemed like a nice girl, and I was hoping to get to know her better. The next week we had an awkward moment during the "Our Father" when we almost held hands, but didn't, but then did.  After Mass, she explained that she wasn't used to holding hands during the Our Father as the school she graduated from always did the Latin Mass.  I asked where she went, she replied Saint Thomas Aquinas, I said "Oh hey, I have a friend who went there!" Turns out she knows Clare and her husband...
• And then a few weeks prior to that, I received a facebook message from Ms. Iris exclaimed "What! You know ______????" To which I replied "What! You know ______???"  She said "Yes! We met because through a retreat with the Miles Christi." And I said "YOU KNOW THE MILES CHRISTI PRIESTS??????? WE LOVE THEM!"  Guess that means the family and I are going to have to head up and visit the priests so the two of us can meet!

These aren't the only crazy connections I've made throughout the years, they are merely the most recent ones.  Whenever it happens, it always makes me pause and laugh a little at how big the world really isn't.  We are all connected, someway, somehow.  Mutual interests can unite us, but there's nothing like finding out the person you just met knows someone else you know to spark and instant connection.  The spark might end up being just that, only a spark, but for the moment it lasts it helps us remember that we really aren't alone in this world after all.

Simple Acts of Kindness

We tend to complain about the state of the world these days, how horrible people are, the jerk that cut us off on the road, the rude woman who let the door slam shut in our face.  It's easy to give up and look at the world through cynical eyes.  But every once in a while someone goes out of their way to do something unexpected, something kind, something selfless and it gives you faith in the humanity again.

Chicago got slammed with snow this past Monday.  (I presume that other places got hit too, but I don't pay much attention to the rest of the world outside of home and New England.)  I got out of work at my internship early and faced a long drive home... it's almost an hour on a normal day.  My mom had the foresight to suggest I pack a bag before I left that morning, just in case, so as I drove towards the highway and tried to see around the snowflakes I contemplated just driving down the road and staying at my Aunt's.

I was riding on a quarter tank of gas, and I wanted to put a little bit in there just in case I did decide to go all the way home.  I also needed power steering fluid because my car goes through it like, like. I don't know, something fast.  So I went inside to buy a bottle and prepay about twenty dollars on the gas pump.

Well, I tried to pay, only to have my debit card rejected three times.  The cashier tried it as a credit, still denied.  I just have the one card and only had $10 in cash, so as I looked helplessly back and forth between my car and my wallet I said "Well, I should be able to make it home", and just paid for the power steering fluid.  As the cashier checked me out, he asked if I had enough.  I responded that I had a quarter of a tank, I thought I could make it.

And that's when he asked if I wanted him to put ten dollars on the pump and pay later.  His English wasn't that good, so at first I wasn't sure what he was saying.  He had to repeat himself a few times before I understood, and then I was a bit bewildered.  I couldn't pay for it now.  That's alright, he said. You come back and pay next time.  Tomorrow?  "I'll be back Wednesday"  I replied hesitantly.  He smiled at me and said, "That's good. Drive safe."

The world hasn't gone to the dogs yet.  There are still people out there who have sympathy for a young woman confused as to why her debit card won't work and worried if she'll make it down the road in a snowstorm and offer them a helping hand.  Its those simple acts of kindness that go to show that there's still good in this world and it's worth holding out for

Shall We Skate?

Yesterday I went ice skating for the first time in... oh gosh, at least.... five years?  If not more than that.  It actually may be something more like seven years.  Sister T had been trying to plan out a day where she could take her friend from Ghana out ice skating, as she had never been skating.  Between weather and scheduling and such, it finally worked out that we were able to go yesterday.

Now we've been watching the Olympic Figure Skating pretty religiously for the past week, so despite not having had any contact with ice outside of a parking lot or sidewalk for the past however many years, I was hoping that I'd get out there on the ice and magically look something like this

Or, at the very least, you know... something like this guy here.

Haha, yeah right.  In reality, my figure skating ability turned out to be much closer to this right here:

Okay, so maybe not that bad.  I did get myself to the point where I was able to at least move around the ice (slowly) with minimal wobbling and having to catch myself, and I only fell twice.  And my falling at least was very graceful, so that a mom who was hanging out in the middle of the rink with her daughter and husband said to me "Wow, that was the most graceful fall I've ever seen!"

Sister T and Sister R were the best at getting the hang of skating, though Sister M did pick it up a little more towards the end, and friend from Ghana made it to where she was able to shuffle along on her own and caught herself from falling (once).  I think we all considered ourselves to be accomplished beginners.

We'll have to hit the ice again sometime before another six years passes, and see if we can't get any more graceful in our movements.  In the mean time... Figure skating Short Dance program is on tonight!  Whohoo!

Some Thoughts of Love

But not mine.  Rather, in honor of Valentines' Day here is a small sampling of some of my favorite thoughts and quotes about love... enjoy!

 "Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into one's life with pomp and blare... perhaps, perhaps love unfolded naturally out of a beautiful friendship, as a golden-hearted rose slipping from its green sheath." ~ Anne of Avonlea 

"I fell in love with him. But I don't stay with him by default as if there's no one else available to me. I stay with him because I choose to, every day that I wake up, every day that we fight or lie to each other or disappoint each other. I choose him over and over again, and he chooses me." 

 - Triss, "Allegiant" 

Amy Pond, "The Girl Who Waited"

"Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own." 

 — Robert A. Heinlein 

Gilbert: It'll be three years before I finish medical school. Even then there won't be any diamond sunbursts or marble halls. 

Anne: I don't want diamond sunbursts, or marble halls. I just want you.

Happy Valentine's Day!  

Do you have a favorite love quote/saying/song lyric? Feel free to share in the comments!

Maybe It's the Story

Spoilers for Allegiant

(I tried to be as vague as possible, so if you haven't read the series at all you should be good.  If you are familiar with the books... you might figure some things out.
Read at your own risk.)

If you've finished reading Allegiant (third book in the Divergent series by Veronica Roth), and you are like most readers, you were probably heart broken.  You were probably angry.  You may have even felt like crying when you went to the movie theater and saw the poster for Divergent and yelled "I can't look at this it makes me too sad". (That was me.)  Based on the few articles I've read, the ending of Allegiant made a lot of readers angry, to the point of death threats.

I wasn't that angry about the ending of the book.  I was very sad and upset, yes.  But then, after it all had time to sink in, and after a helpful quote from a friend, I started thinking that maybe Roth wasn't as horrible a person as I thought she was.  Because

In this case... yes. I think it was. 

The Divergent trilogy, and Allegiant in particular have a very powerful story to tell.  Roth wove together themes of forgiveness, sacrifice and love that actually meant something deep, and real, and weren't just another example of teenage romance and oh I'll forgive you because it really wasn't that terrible.  It's all about the choices that her characters make, and those choices to forgive, the choices to love and the choices to sacrifice are very real and very hard.

Throughout the series characters mess up, big time.  People lie, sometimes because of ill intent, but a good part of the time because they are honestly trying to protect their loved ones.  People get hurt physically and emotionally.  And yet throughout it all, they somehow find the strength to forgive each other.  The group of friends that emerges through the story slowly grows smaller as people die, and not all of them are killed by the enemy.  Some of them die through the acts of their friends, but even in a situation that seems impossible to forgive, the characters manage to find it.

As a young adult novel, it's natural that there be a central romance to the series.  (No love triangles, thankfully!)  Refreshingly, it is a very real and natural romance.  Tris and Tobias get mad at each other. They struggle to communicate.  They mess up and lie because they are trying to protect and end up sheltering.  Our culture would normally look at this relationship and say "Why go through all the trouble?  He's not worth it.  She can't be worth all this trouble and frustration!  Clearly you aren't compatible, so give up and move on."  Tris does question her relationship with Tobias at one point in Allegiant after Tobias does something she doesn't know if she can ever forgive.  (No, he didn't cheat on her.)  Something another character says, however, makes her stop and think about why she loves Tobias and she realizes that despite all their difficulties, he truly makes her a better person and she makes him a better person as well.  In what I found to be the most poignant and powerful and true passages in the book, she realizes that love isn't easy and it isn't supposed to be.

"I fell in love with him. But I don't stay with him by default as if there's no one else available to me. I stay with him because I choose to, every day that I wake up, every day that we fight or lie to each other or disappoint each other. I choose him over and over again, and he chooses me."

In the end, I think the message of sacrifice is what makes the way the series ends... worth it, even if it doesn't make it any less heartbreaking.  The way the story of these characters was told, the way it had all led to that point, if it had ended any other way it would have fell flat and shallow.

Sacrificing other people for a greater good isn't sacrifice, it's tyrannical and it's evil.  The only sacrifice you can make is the sacrifice of yourself.  But self-sacrifice has to be made for the right reasons, and not through desire for heroism or selfish emotion.  You can only sacrifice yourself when you do it from love, when you do it from necessity, when you do it because other people need a strength that only your sacrifice can give. That's the message of sacrifice that Allegiant gives, and as painful and tragic as that lesson was, it is one that young adults need to hear.

So maybe it isn't about the happy ending.  After all, life doesn't always give us happy endings and if you want a happy ending, is dystopic fiction really the category you want to be reading?  Maybe it is about the story, and maybe that's alright.


For anyone who has finished the series and wants to read what Veronica Roth has to say about the ending, she wrote up a blog post of her own here.