journeys of reconciliation

Last Wednesday (5/18), I flew to Billings, Montana with this program called Journeys of Reconciliation sponsored by my school. It's a great concept: a small group of students/faculty/staff make a journey to a part of the world where gross injustices have occurred and attempt to understand the situation(s) and listen to the stories of those oppressed. We basically internalize as much of the situation as we can with hopes that maybe one day, whether through our own actions or through those of people we pass the stories on to, reconciliation of those discriminated against and their oppressors may be one step closer.

I came to Montana to hear the stories of the indigenous peoples of North America, specifically the Crow and the Northern Cheyenne.

What did I know about Native Americans before this trip? Only what I read in the two paragraphs devoted to them in my US History text in high school. Oh yeah, and I also read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee in high school, which was torture because I simply didn't care.

So again, what did I know about Native Americans before this trip? NOTHING.

I've been here six days and I am overwhelmed, so I'll write more on that later.

I'm exhausted--just got back from a two day blitz through Yellowstone National Park, travelling with 14 people in a 15-passenger van that definitely does NOT fit 15. The place is surreal, like nothing I've seen in person. More on this later, too, because we're leaving at 8 am to go to the Northern Cheyenne reservation.

graduation!

So I graduated on Monday!! Well, I walked across the stage at Commencement and received a fake diploma, which is almost the same thing. :) I won't get my real diploma until August, but what made Monday so special (other than the fact that it means I'm almost DONE with college!) is that I wasn't granted permission to walk by the school. Haha...yeah that's right. I was told that I couldn't walk, but I did it anyway. Since when do I care about authority? ;)

I just finished my third year in college. After I take a couple classes over the summer, I'm going to be completely done with my degree requirements, i.e., I'll be done! Students in this situation normally walk in the Commencement ceremonies in the following year, which means that I should have walked in May 2006. There's one little problem--I'm joining the Peace Corps, and I'm scheduled to leave in September. This means that I won't be here next May, and because of PC policy which requires that volunteers stay in their service countries for at least a year before returning home, I couldn't come back to walk even if I wanted to. So what would have been the most logical thing to do to satiate my parents' need to see me walk (because I didn't really care about walking and sitting through a four-hour ceremony)? Walk this year, right? Not according to the dean responsible for such matters at my school. He suggested that I return in THREE YEARS and walk with a class I barely know. Does that make any sense?? After all the money my parents paid, you'd imagine that they wouldn't give me grief about walking. I spoke to the dean twice with no luck, so some people suggested that I walk anyway. So I did. :)

I used my brother's gown from last year and showed up at 7:15 am (yuck) with all the other graduates. Everyone had white index cards with their names (and their pronunciations) on them--I brought my own. ;) We were told to hand the index cards to a person standing by the stage right before we walked across the stage. Easy enough, right? Except when the time came for graduates to walk across the stage, I realized, with horror, that the person calling out names was the aforementioned dean with a stick up his... Yep, just my luck. He knew I wasn't supposed to walk and I knew that I wasn't going to let him stop me. So I just played it cool, crossed out the real spelling of my name on my index card (leaving the pronunciation there), and handed the card to him when the time came. He looked at my card and hesitated. He waited for what seemed like forever, and then HE CALLED OUT MY NAME as I walked across the stage. Knowing that the same dean who denied me my right to walk called out my name and probably felt like an a-hole at that moment was AMAZING. I think it was my biggest accomplishment at EU. HAHA...well...maybe not, but I think I would've made Ferris Bueller proud. ;)

so weird...

It's so weird how you're feeling a certain way, and every song you hear on the radio will be relevant to your feeling. What's really strange is when people's away messages on aim are freakishly applicable to your own life. AGH! I'm too tired to write more, but this really makes me think:

You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you don't trust enough.

It was on the away message of someone I ceased to trust many years ago, but recently reconnected with. I am dumbfounded at how appropriate it is. Damn ironies...

finally.

I meant to do this last month. Actually, that's not true. I meant to do it 5 months ago, when I began my last full semester of college. I never got around to it, of course. Today, I turned in a paper on semantics and word licensing for my linguistics class--it was my last assignment for the semester. It's sad that it took me this long to finally get around to this, but at least I'm here now. That's what counts, right?

I've spent three years learning in school things that will supposedly help me in life. But today, my pseudo-last day of school, I feel like the most valuable lessons I learned were because of my own (usually impulsive) actions. Like how great days will always be balanced by bad ones, or how every step that's brought me closer to the person I thought I wanted to be has actually taken me further away from some other good thing. It's incredibly scary to wake up one day and realize that while I was changing, so was everyone (and everything) else, and that the reality I'm now waking up to is not the same one that existed when I went to bed.

Is it bad though? I don't know yet. But I hope not, because today really is the first day of the rest of my life.