Joplin

Let me tell you a little bit about Joplin.

Joplin, Missouri is located just shy of 300 miles southwest of St. Louis. Down in the lower left corner of the state by Kansas and Oklahoma. Population roughly 50,000. And on May 22, it was the location of what can be considered the worst tornado since we started keeping records about that kind of stuff. Touching down over a stretch of land a mile wide and seven miles long, the tornado demolished 9,000 homes and claimed 159 lives.

When I visited the town seven weeks after the disaster, I expected to see pretty much what I saw. Total devastation. Spaces that used to be homes but instead were wooden shreds. I didn't quite expect the trees, the haunting trees that were still standing but almost all of their leaves and branches were ripped off, leaving them bare and out of place in the full summer foliage. The feeling I got from the wreckage reminded me of Port-au-Prince six months after the quake or even the deathly stillness of the 9th Ward in New Orleans three years after Katrina. A terrible, terrible thing had happened and people simply needed a moment or two to collect themselves.

There were some incredible stories of heroes - some supernatural, some not. In the local Pizza Hut, everyone had been trying to cram in the walk-in freezer as the sirens were going off and there was enough room for all but one person. A brave man stepped out from behind the door and held the latch shut, keeping the others safe inside. He was the only casualty from that restaurant. In a house not far from there, a father threw himself on top of his two little daughters as the tornado passed by. After they all made it through the storm, the two girls said, "Daddy, Daddy, did you see the big butterfly that was holding us down during the tornado?"

Even in the midst of all the darkness and pain, there were angels. There was hope. There was a sense of acceptance and solidarity that can only come from such a shared experience.

My trip to Joplin, as heartbreaking and emotional as it was, will - I believe - be a pivotal moment in my story. It was there that I found freedom. Freedom from things that have stuck with me and drug me down over a period of years, freedom from guilt and shame, freedom from a past I could not shake.

Do you know how good freedom feels?

In my quest to figure out why I moved to St. Louis, I can say with confidence that Joplin, Missouri is pretty darn near the top of my list.

eastward wind

After reading several recently-acclaimed books in the past few months (you know, books an English major is supposed to read to, like, broaden her mind more), I found myself staring at my bookshelf. Now, my bookshelf at my parent's house - where most of my things still live - is super full of all kinds of good stuff to read. I only brought a smattering of my collection with me and it's interesting to muse over my choices four months after packing them up to bring all the way out here.

The Great Gatsby
Snow Falling on Cedars
several installments of both the Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket series
my favorite Donald Miller books
Gone with the Wind (natch)
(French Rosetta Stone CDS - technically not books but sitting on that shelf nonetheless)

Add to them my recent finds from a local book fair:

Under the Tuscan Sun
The Joy Luck Club
Memoirs of a Geisha
an introductory French textbook

You know, stuff I'm supposed to read.

I don't know if it was the warm weather that got into me or my ever-present desire to escape, but I picked up Bergdorf Blondes, a bood about Park Avenue princesses. And I don't even want to admit how many Sex and the City reruns I've been watching.

Today I got called a "white girl from the northeast." As a rule, I am against labels and putting people - including myself - in boxes. But that is one box I will always fit. As people start to ask me what I'm going to do next year, I don't know what to tell them. I like it here. I never know what I want to do next in terms of jobs, but I like it here and I just got here, so I plan to stay for at least a little bit.

But I'm a white girl from the northeast, and it's hard to make real, satisfactory substitutions for everything the northeast offers. So will I stay here in the end or migrate back east? Or end up somewhere completely different for a little while, and then move on from there too? We shall see. The grand adventure of my life is not so far along - let's find what's in store.

One Year Ago

May 23, 2010 was a pretty big day in The Life of Amy Joy. I had spent the previous year completing all requirements for my Master’s degree, and on May 23 I got to walk across the stage in John Paul Jones Arena and take my diploma (largest diplomas in the Commonwealth of Virginia, what?). I said see-you-later to a lot of wonderful people I had gotten to know during my Charlottesville stint. I was getting ready to head to Haiti the next week, a trip I knew would change me but I did not know how much.

But let’s be honest. Something way more important than these things happened on May 23, 2010.

It was the series finale of LOST.

Yes, I am one of “those” people. Yes, I am writing about LOST a year later. Accept it and move on! I know that some people were not too happy with the show’s ending. Upon my first viewing, I too was in shock. At 11:30pm that night, the TV screen turned to white and there was no more Jack, Kate, Sawyer, or anyone else, and I thought, “What the h*** just happened?” I didn’t hate it or love it at first. The jury was very much still out because I didn’t know what to think.

Then I ruminated. I read some online commentaries. And I watched it again.

And I loved it.

The moral of the LOST story? That it’s not about what you do in your life that makes it so important. Sure, the setting is this magical, moving island and there are all these mysterious people trying to save the world by protecting whatever that light thing was in the center of the island. In my interpretation of the ending, the setting was simply a mechanism. The setting could have been anywhere and anything because it doesn’t matter what you do in life. What matters is the people with whom you spend your time. It’s the relationships that make a life mean something.

I could not agree more.

After leaving grad school and spending the month of June 2010 in a third world country, I had had it with the rat race. I cannot express the amount of relief I felt that I didn’t have a job to get to once returning from the Caribbean. That I had the option to take an “unreal” (as opposed to "real") job in a coffee shop and be able to spend the fall with my sister and new brother-in-law helping to plan their wedding was huge. That I could move to Missouri on blind faith and know that everything would be fine because I knew that the community here would be incredible is nothing short of the best thing ever.

It’s not about what I’m doing in life, it’s about the people I’m living life with.

If you’re reading this, that means you’re one of my people. Thank you for being so incredible and for being a blessing in my life. I appreciate it more than you will ever know. So when the world goes white just like the end of LOST, please know that whatever God wanted me to see or know about this life, He showed me through you.

I am thankful for...

- Carondelet park and it's trail, and how they are only a few blocks from my house
- elderly couples I pass while walking who say "Afternoon" to me - in those moments it feels like Jesus is giving me an afternoon greeting
- food stamps
- Reese's peanut butter eggs
- how food stamps will buy me Reese's peanut butter eggs
- dogs, specifically Effy and Cooper and Bruno
- jean jackets and sweaters and weather that accompanies those items of clothing
- Skype
- extreme weather (like hurricanes or tornadoes or wind storms. especially wind storms)
- my literacy
- how roughly 1980 years ago, Jesus died on the cross for you and me and was dead for three days and then ROSE AGAIN and that one act was more than enough to cover the sin for everyone who ever lived ever

Happy Birthday, Jeremy!

To the right is a recent photo of my brother, Jeremy Allen Bulgrien. He is currently finishing up his Master's Degree in Foreign Policy, isn't that cool?! Ok, so his birthday was a week and a half ago and I meant to make this video a week and a half ago but I kept forgetting. :( However, I figure people like to get presents anytime, even if they are a week and a half late. So here is a video of me giving the top ten reasons I'm glad Jeremy's my brother (and you should be jealous because he's a really great brother).

as fast as I can

I live with two other girls. One of them got engaged this past February 4th. The other one got engaged this past March 6th. After No. 2 came home with a ring, I made the joke that - in order to keep the pattern going - I would have to get engaged on April 8.

This was an unlikely task. I don't have a long-term boyfriend nor am I dating anyone. To start a relationship and get engaged within six weeks is possible, sure, but improbable. Well, ladies and gentlemen, April 8th was this past Friday and I am still ringless.

At my church, Pastor Noah talks  a lot about people getting married. Like, just about every Sunday. He talks about all the married people in the church and how they should love each other well and go make lots of babies. Then he talks about the single people and how they should get married so they can love each other well and make lots of babies. And I agree with him that it is God's plan for many of us single folk to get married and love each other well (and have lots of babies). Tonight when he talked about men loving their wives enough to buy them back massages, I thought "heck yeah! I want to be married so my husband can buy be a back massage!"

But that's just it, isn't it? There are some days that I am lonely and miss having a boyfriend and want to be dating someone attractive and smart and funny and nice (not too nice yet not a liar) but there are many more days that I think of marriage in terms of the financial benefits that would be open to me if I had a husband with a "real job." In those moments of indulgence, I know that I should want to be married to share my life with someone, not because I could travel on his dime. In those moments, I am thankful that I'm not married. If I were married right now, I wouldn't necessarily be able to do half the stuff I do. I wouldn't necessarily be able to jet off to Haiti for a month to live in and serve an orphanage. I wouldn't necessarily be able to think about getting a second Master's or even a PhD because, well, why not? I might be able to drop my entire life in Virginia and move to Missouri but I definitely wouldn't be able to spend the entire month of July and half of August lounging by the pool of my brother's apartment complex, recuperating from grad school and the stuff life threw at me.

As my friend Emily once said, it's a different type of adventure. Some people choose to stay put and get married. Some people move to Scotland and trek around Europe making the rest of us get crazy wanderlust. It's just a different type of adventure. So right now I am having this St. Louis adventure, and I think probably I'll get married sometime in the future, and that will be a different kind of adventure. If it happens that I start dating someone tomorrow and get married in a year, hey, that's cool, I'll just start that new adventure pretty soon.

 

On the days I am super frustrated about not being married now, I often think of a specific episode of How I Met Your Mother. I thought of it in church tonight and when I got home, it just happened to be on TV. It's that one in which Tony breaks up with Stella and she appeals to Ted to talk Tony back into marrying her (he was the one who talked Tony out of it, after all). Stella and Ted are sitting in the car after getting Barney out of jail and Ted, in a moment of vulnerability, spills to Stella that he wants what she and Tony (and Marshall and Lily) have. And Stella tells Ted that somewhere out there is a girl who will be that person for him, who will give Ted what Stella and Tony have. Stella reassures Ted that that girl is getting there as fast as she can.

I'm getting there as fast as I can.

an anecdote of my house being burglarized

Last night I came home from work to find some of our front windows smashed in.

It's a very surreal experience, having your own house broken into.

They hardly took anything. In fact, the only thing we have identified as missing is my monogrammed jewelry box that my mom gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago. Let me tell you, those robbers were not smart enough to realize that any girl with a plastic dresser does NOT have expensive jewelry.

The cop who was dispatched to respond to my phone call walked around the house for a while until the crime unit came (in the form of a stocky man named Harry who mumbled things that sounded hilarious) and dusted for finger prints. It was all very uneventful. Roomie/landlord was pretty pissed and had to get wood from Lowe's to cover the smashed stained glass windows. We all had plans to be productive that night and instead were relegated to waiting around for the police to finish and then eating everything in sight since it was 8:30pm and, seeing as how we hadn't eaten dinner, we were quite hungry.

Thankfully, those crazy robbers didn't take the TV or any computers or anything expensive like that. My guess is they got spooked when the alarm went nutso after the 30 second grace period and, as they fled the scene, the top of my jewelry box flew open to spill contents all over the front lawn (it took me a while to collect my things. Earring studs hide well in grass and dirt). Thankfully, my grandma's pair of glass mosaic earrings were one of the first I found in the grass. My fleur-de-lis earrings were neary (this is actually the second pair of fleur-de-lis earrings I have from New Orleans, the first pair having mysteriously disappeared in my parents' house).

Things that unfortunately went missing: assorted necklaces and earrings people have given to me after traveling to far-off places. My hieroglyph name cartouche from Egypt. The pearl necklace and earrings from my mother as well as the matching bracelet I wore to my sister's wedding. My Randolph-Macon class ring.

We have concluded that it was someone inexperienced, probably a couple of kids. This makes me really sad. And mad. It breaks my heart that we still live in a society where it is acceptable to teach children the art of breaking and entering so that they can steal people's memories.

Me and my roommates, we got lucky. We didn't lose much materialistically, and what we did lose is easily replaceable. But I think we all also lost our sense of safety. And that might take a while to get back.