In the past I’ve enjoyed reading travel blogs, from friends in Ghana, the Netherlands, Uganda, and India, among other places. I want to do the same thing. Its a good way to both process the experience and to keep people updated about how things are going. But I don’t necessarily want to start a whole new blog, so I’m just going to write on here.

With that, here’s part one. I’ve been in Camden, NJ, for almost two weeks now. For you all you West Coast peeps (which is almost everyone), Camden is the city across the river from Philadelphia. It’s been a pretty important place historically – the poet Walt Whitman lived here, Campbell’s Soup started here, the first record player, radio, TV, and drive-in movie theater were all created here. But like a lot of cities in the Northeast, in what’s come to be called “the Rust Belt”, Camden’s experienced a serious decline in the last 50 years and is now one of the poorest cities in the country. Among the things that contributed to this were a highway being built that cut the city in half, factory relocation that eliminated about half of the jobs in the city, block busting by real estate agents, red-lining by banks, “white flight”, and racial discrimination in the GI Bill.

This summer I’m working with Urban Promise, a Christian organization that’s been ministering in Camden for the last 20 years. Urban Promise runs after-school programs throughout the school year for elementary and middle-school kids. During the summer it puts on day camps. For high schoolers, Urban Promise has a “Street Leaders” program that basically hires high schoolers from Camden to help run the programs for the younger kids.  Which is cool because its empowering people from the area rather than always just bringing in people from the outside. But UP does need extra help with running the summer camps, so enter myself and the other 49 summer interns, mostly college students from around the country. I’m working at Camp Faith, the camp for 1st through 4th graders, at the main Urban Promise building in East Camden. Our sister camp, Camp Spirit, is for junior high kids and is across the street. There are six other camps at three other locations around the city; one for South Camden, another for North Camden, and one fairly close to us in the Northeast.

The first week we had training, and it was pretty non-stop. Didn’t even have time to unpack. I think I’ve actually had more downtime since camp’s started. And of course there’s been the challenge of trying to get to know a whole crowd of new people. I got tired of having 10ish hours of scheduled time each day. But there was a lot of good content: we even got to hear some sociology profs from Harvard speak on research they’d done in Camden.

I’ve been glad to actually start camp though. I’m teaching art, which for the most part is a blast. Kids are usually pretty creative and enthusiastic, and I enjoy encouraging that.
Other notes of interest so far:
1. I’m living in an Extreme Home Makeover house. Apparently the show did an episode in Camden, but the family couldn’t afford to keep living in the house, so Urban Promise ended up buying it. So while the other 46 interns are living in muggy non-air-conditioned houses, four of us guys randomly got placed in this super nice house. It’s actually a little TOO cool at night, but I think if we told any of the others that that they’d kill us.
2. One day during training a guy named Cleve took all fifty of us interns and whipped us into a gospel choir in about an hour and a half. Then we found out that the next day we’d be singing in front of  about 1,000 people at a megachurch, before Tony Campolo spoke. Which is exactly what happened.
5. The church was at a beach town called Ocean City, so I got to go swimming on the East Coast for the first time.
6. A girl on my team goes to Samford University in Alabama. Which is where Beck Taylor, our new Whitworth president, used to be. She says he’s awesome and they were all sad to have him leave.
7. They’re really into this Italian Ice kind of dessert here in NJ. They call it “water-ice” and are offended if you think its like sno-cones. Quote: “Water-ice is completely different from sno-cones.” And I have to say: water-ice does rock.
8. My camp’s theme is pirates. Today “the Pirate” came and tried to steal the “treasure chest” (really a toolbox), and the kids went insane. The guy dressed up as the Pirate literally got mobbed. I’m surprised he made it out of the room. It was pretty funny, actually.

Summary: Life working with Urban Promise is pretty exciting so far, but also really full. And I’m still adjusting, getting to know people, ect. I’ll keep you guys posted.

Of course I read Lord of the Rings when I was old enough. Though I think I jumped the gun a bit on that one, because I literally got lost the first time I read it. I mistakenly thought that the mines of Moria were a passage into Mordor, and was confused the whole second book. I was thinking: Why are they wandering around so much? What’s with this random Rohan horse place? Just throw the ring in the volcano already. I re-read it a few years later, when the movies were coming out, and my comprehension was a lot better. There were other series I got into once I was old enough for them as well: Garth Nix’s Sabriel, the Bartemaeus Trilogy, Mistborn (well, in that case, the series just wasn’t written until I was older).

In short, growing up I really thrived on young adult fiction, and the fantasy genre especially. I can’t say the same about “adult” fantasy. It just seems to me that, for whatever reasons, “young adult” fantasy is more innovative and well-written than its older sibling. I’m sure there are good novels out there (I’m open to tip-offs). But most of the ones I’ve tried to read are either overly verbose, un-creatively derivative of Lord of the Rings, or both. Maybe the page limits that publishers imposed on young adult writers pre-Harry Potter encouraged more stream-lined writing. Maybe young-adult writers don’t have pressure to write in gratuitous sex scenes. Maybe adult fantasy publishers are focused on marketing to the Dungeons and Dragons- playing population, who expect elves and dwarves as par for the course. Well, I like playing on new courses. It could be that its not the books themselves, but myself that’s changed; I’m no longer content with writing I feel is too escapist. I want to read books that made me think, that challenge me, that expand my view of the world.

So I’ve been branching out and reading more literature, classic and modern. High school English classes introduced me to a number of good books: the Great Gatsby, the Grapes of Wrath, Brave New World, To Kill a Mockingbird. A couple summers ago I read (most of) the Brothers Karamazov, and Dracula (I guess that’s technically fantasy…old school). Last summer I read the excellent Evening is the Whole Day, a novel about a family in Malaysia, and this spring What is the What, Dave Egger’s novel about a Sudanese refugee in America.

So I’ve been gradually overcoming my childhood prejudice against fiction set in the “boring” real world. Being a sociology major has helped, I think. Classes like Race and Ethnicity, Cities and Urban Life, and Social Stratification have opened my eyes to the diversity of human experience. Knowing that there are people who live in very different worlds than my own has lead me towards works that are able to put me in others’ shoes and come to a deeper understanding of life. That is, after all, the power of the best writing; to allow us to get out of ourselves and experience life as someone else for a time.

Taking Creative Writing this Spring has also been a catalyst for the transition. Our teacher encouraged us to do research for our writing, to be inspired by and curious about the world. If you’re writing a poem about a hummingbird, go find out what colors hummingbirds are in this part of the country, she told us. We had an assignment to come up with a list of any ten questions we were curious about, and then to research the answers. Among other things, I looked up what the deepest human-made hole in the world is and why penguins’ feet don’t freeze. And of course we read lots of good poems and short stories that are grounded in the real world. Because of that class I’ve come to a much greater appreciation for how much one can draw from “mundane” regular life when writing. Think about it though: everything “new” in fantasy and science fiction is really taken from the real world, just rearranged or tweaked.

Anyways, the point of this whole essay is to introduce a new series for this blog:  I’m planning on writing brief reviews of my summer reading, as well as sharing poems and short stories I’ve written.

So look out for Review #1: “Angle of Repose” by Wallace Stegner.

So, this is me right now:

When I’m busy, I long for free time, to escape from the shackles of schedule. And a day off is wonderful. But when summer hits and I have whole weeks of freedom, it isn’t actually that great. I think work and rest compliment each other, and we get out of sorts when we only have one and not the other.

I’ve been thinking: It’s kind of existentially straining to not have any routines. There’s comfort and strength to be found in repetition. Think of the fundamental rhythms that under-gird our lives: day and night, the three meals, the holidays, the weeks, months and years. People associate jazz with spontaneity and improvisation, but really that improvisation takes place within a highly structured skeleton of tempo, key, form, and style.

I would argue that likewise humans in general work best when we have a foundational skeleton of routine and tradition to “improvise” on top of. There’s only so much choice we can handle psychologically; if we have too many decisions to make, we get overwhelmed and have trouble making any of them. And socially too, some things need to be set, if only for coordination. We drive on the right side of the road. Why? Because we all have to drive on the same side! So it’s too simplistic to say that the more freedom a person has, the better, and that anything that reduces the amount of choice in a person’s life is to be labeled as constraining (and thus to be fought). That being ‘tied down’ means unhappiness. I’d say it’s just as likely that not having a place to tie down would lead to unhappiness.

I think having structure can actually be enabling at the same time that it’s constraining. Routine in one area can allow for greater freedom in another; being able to take some things for granted allows one to focus more on other things.

Anyways, I’m rambling, but the point of all this is that now that I’ve had a lot of my structure stripped away, I’ve been trying to build anew. I don’t want to just do random things all day. I feel more fulfilled when my days have form. But I’m used to having other people (ie. teachers) providing a lot of that form. And I’m used to resisting that form, in a passive-aggressive sort of way, because of its external nature. But I think creating structure is usually a communal thing, and the expectations of others can in fact be a resource. It’s weird (and also more difficult) when I have to do it all myself. It takes discipline to say: ok, I’m going to practice Spanish an hour a day. I’m not naturally a super-organized person. But like I’ve been saying, having those kind of routines is good for well-being and growth. Having a routine of practicing Spanish is the best way to learn it.

Of course, in a couple weeks when I go to New Jersey, this same uprooting will happen over again. But there, I’ll be entering a new communal routine rather than just trying to create my own here at home.

Ok, maybe I’m being melodramatic. Suffice it to say, bluntly, that it’s been more than a year since my last post. I think my journal competes with the blog, especially when time is limited. Still, they’re different mediums. Here, there’s an audience (such as it is). In my journal, I’m writing to my future self, and that changes what I focus on and how I write.

But ideally, since the journal and the blog are different mediums and serve different purposes, I would write for both.

And writing in general is something I want to be more intentional about.

For one, it keeps me sane. Life in modern America is fast-pasted and complex. When I don’t write I can lose track of a coherent and organizing narrative for my life. When I do write, I can live more thoughtfully and intentionally. I can discern the topography of days.

Writing also helps me think. I can put the thoughts down, store them more easily than in my memory, return to them, revise them. Share them across time and distance. This is not to degrade the spoken word, with its irreplaceable qualities of emotion and tone, or memory, which I think is overly neglected in our writing centered society. Writing is an invention, and like others it shapes us, for better and worse. In this case I think part of the better is that it helps us cope with the flood of information we’re confronted with today, which is too much for memory alone. Of course, it’s also what enables that flood of information in the first place. But this is what we live with.

In that context, part of me welcomes the simplicity of not spending much time on the internet. It can be an addiction, narcissistic escapism, and in general consuming. I usually am online longer than planned, and I hate the dull feeling I have afterward, knowing I have killed hours of time. When I could have done something productive and physical, like going for a walk, cooking, drawing, gardening. But it is not a simple real is good and virtual is bad. The virtual is real, as real as the words I speak and the newspaper and the chessboard and photograph.

If I’m right about that, our choices of action in the virtual world are as important as the choices we make about what actions to take in the real world. And thus values matter. What am I living for? I can play mindless games. I can look at porn. Or I can write a message to the friend I haven’t talked to in a month, asking them how they’re doing. And I can bring this blog back to life. I can seek to live my life reflectively and not just drifting along.

So I’m bringing the blog back, zombie-esque as it is. Because, by nature and nurture, I’m a writer. I’m more alive and whole when I write, and having a blog encourages that. Because I want to organize and share my thoughts on life. Because if I’m going to get stuck on the Internet, I’d rather do this than stalk acquaintances on Facebook, watch movie trailers on apple.com, or play some flash game.

So I’ve decided to create my own band.

Its going to transcend genre, but if one had to classify our style, I would call it post-Mongolian nihilist folk opera.

Here’s concept art for the first album. =)Actually, this is a result of a hilarious activity/game I found on a friend’s facebook page.

Here are the rules:

Design challenge: Album Cover

1 – Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random”
or click http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://en.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FSpecial%3ARandom
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 – Go to “Random quotations”
or click http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://www.quotationspage.com%2Frandom.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3 – Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://www.flickr.com%2Fexplore%2Finteresting%2F7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 – Use photoshop or similar to put it all together. Preferably in a square format layout, like a nice old-timey vinyl album cover.

Me choose?
No.
I am choice,
I am impetus and consequence.
When I was a child
I thought I was myself
When I was a child
I thought I was more powerful
Than the world
Though now I know.

I am seaweed in the tide
Of a haunting moon.
And seven devils too

At war and in love
At midnight and on Mondays
We are legion
Mongrel, and knotted flesh
And not superheroes
None rises above
A mutant race
The world
Is supersaturated with souls
And lives spray, drift, crash, shift
And the waves mock the lines
We’ve scratched into our maps
The boundaries
The ink blurs, runs, stains
And the pitched waste roars
We are never ourselves alone
And nothing is untouched
Nor free to be indivisible
But history was always a universal solvent
Before I knew so
I was solute
I am myself a bit
But millions inscribe my soul
The cemeteries are lies
We are the gravestones of our fathers
We are the prisoners
Of a dead moon hanging.

Ghosts of old men’s acquaintances haunt this place
Where I grew up
There is no quarantine here
There is no clean break
Though I cannot see them
I cannot escape
Reverberations of their words
The familiar and weary beams of their houses
The corpses that linger from their mistakes
Made tame, respectable
In tombs
As block letters and boxes of stone
Dull the smell
Of the unchangeable
But time and death do even better
Unasked and generous
To bury
The cold hearts
Of the architects

Birth was a plummet
A push off precipace
Birth is sentence
I am choice
I have my choices too
They are improvisation
Sometimes
No. Often
Desperation
Often relent
To that dead moon
Relent
To the seven devils
I take what my hands find
I was dumpster diving
I disappeared in my own mind
I was left a shell
In the storm we lost
The north star
In the fire we lost
Our humble moss
We were young heroes
In simple uniforms
In the trenches we lost
Our dragons
To mustard gas
And our maidens
To ourselves
And ourselves, we lost too.

O, Oregon trail
Well-worn
To new places we set out
But we were old
And we are old
Our fathers birthed us
Of blood and steel and hunger
And we live in ruts
Deeper than our dreams
When the rains come
Over this place
Will we have the strength
To slip through the foul mud
To some higher ground?
I said when
But the rains are falling now
Streaking across the sky
And I am tomorrow’s phantom
I am a link in the chain
The unseen influence
And one day
I will have crystallized completely
And become another statue
On the lunar plane
Or perhaps in some crater
And of the great shifting of the sea
One millimeter will be mine.

Our choices are prisons
And action conceives impossibility
The past is sharp diamond
Though less transparent
And every moment
We hurtle out over edges
And are all falling.

I am impetus by Kyle B. Broeckel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://prisonersofhope.wordpress.com.

At the beginning of Fall semester this year, as part of the Bonner leadership program, I spent a night and a morning at the House of Charity homeless shelter.  That morning, we had devotional in which we read meditatively one of the psalms, and there was a woman there whom we had talked to the night before, under the freeway. She had confessed to having schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder, and a host of other mental problems (and had joked about everything her boyfriend had to put up with- he met this with a shrug and a wry smile). Sitting there that morning, she confessed with equal honesty her doubts about God. But there was a part in the psalm we read about God caring for the weak, using the weak, and while we were talking about it she eventually spoke up and said: “This gives me hope. If God loves the foolish, then maybe I have a chance.”
I echo her sentiment, and would claim her hope as my own as well, and maybe Paul would join us too. I am at a point right now where I have been trying to serve God, walk in his footsteps, live a life of love, but have become increasingly aware of my weakness. I find myself in dificult times. And I must admit that I overestimated my strength, enthusiastically taking on too great a burden without having a sufficient spiritual foundation. In all that I took on, I expected perfection of myself, or at least excellence. In this, I was as foolish as Peter, asking to be second to Christ in the kingdom but having no idea what that means. But Christ still used Peter, and he still uses a fool like me. He speaks comfort. He says, “I love you.”
I don’t know if I understand God’s love yet, or what he has prepared for me along with the others who love him, but I pray that his Spirit would be born in me, and search my heart, and teach me the fullness of the love that is in the crucified Christ.

This American Life – Episode 355: Giant Pool of Money

This American Life – Episode 375: Bad Bank

This American Life, by the way, is an awesome radio show / podcast, which basically just interviews regular people and tells their stories. Every week has a different theme. Very good if you’re something like a sociology major, or aspiring writer, or any kind of person who’s interested in the diversity of life experiences in this country called America (I myself could tell you, and maybe will, sometime, how many interesting people you can find in just one building).

Also, once again we’ve had a hiatus. Basically this whole school year has been a hiatus for this blog.

But.

I refuse to let the dream die. =)

The blog lives on.

26For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 27But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; 28God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, 29so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. 30And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, 31so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”"

1 Corinthians 1:20-30

I am weak, but Christ is strong. Can I confess this? My salvation does not come from my own strength and understanding. It is a hard thing, to need help. This is the place where something in me dies. This is where I am freed, and begin to live. In open confession of brokenness, in return to the open arms of God, something new is sparked within me, and I begin to mature in Christ. In the words of Paul, I am “being saved”. I am one of the saints, the “set apart”. What does that mean? Right now, I can tell you that it means pain. It hurts to die to oneself. It hurts to constantly have to relearn what true wisdom, strength, and power are. But I also rejoice. As God has worked in me, I have come to see the wisdom of his foolishness, the greatness of that different way in which he works. I have experienced it in my life. Though stubborn, I welcome the outpouring of his grace, even though it brings discomfort, even though it brings the unexpected.
However, that doesn’t mean that it still doesn’t look like foolishness sometimes. I take joy that Christ would use a broken person like me, but often lose heart at the brokenness of the church, of the many mistakes the “saints” have made throughout history.  God is saving the world through a man who died, a “rebellious people”, and an old book? Often, I feel inclined to trust instead in what I understand, what I can touch: modern sensibilities, American pragmatism, the wisdom of the universities, the march of technology, the comfort of middle-class suburban life. It can be a challenge for me to believe that the church and the Bible are the answers to the world’s problems, and I’ve had trouble for a while reading the Bible on a regular basis. There are so many awkward parts, so many weird passages that seem to miss the point of what I think really matters. I feel the peer-pressure of a culture that stereotypes faith in the Bible as backwards and ignorant. If one wants to do some good in the world, study and action often seem to make more sense than prayer, and overshadow what should be the priority.
But I have chosen this month to return to the Bible, to one book, 1 Corinthians, because I believe that God’s “foolishness” will shame the wisdom of the world, and that he uses the weak to shame the strong. I pray that God would give me eyes to see the reality of his power and the wisdom of his “foolishness”. I pray that the blindness of my old humanity would be more fully stripped away. For it is Christ that I put my trust in, and Christ has chosen to work through a called people, imperfect as they may be, and through their writings, as hard as they may be to understand.

And to continue where I left off, it should suffice to say, “And it got busier from there.”

But now we’re in January, and I’ve been making changes to open up more space in my life, and I’m going to start writing again, because writing -whether in my journal, publicly on this blog, or even for class- is something that’s very important to me. Besides being something that makes me feel complete, something I take joy in, I think it’s actually crucial to my well-being. I love words- I love choosing them carefully and arranging them into sentences and paragraphs to bring out meaning, beauty, emotion, and story.

So the blog is starting up again.

First on the line up will be reflections on Paul’s first letter (well, the first one that has survived) to the Corinthians (which I’ve been studying for the last month).