3 suitcases in 10 days, again

My life is generally based on school calendars: that of Fuller and that of the Oakland high schools. So life is somewhat predictable, and every year October and April tend to be a perfect storm of work events, youth group events, and personal events. That's why I found myself traveling to three different cities, with three different suitcases, for three different reasons, all in the same ten days. (If this sounds familiar, check out my blog entry from October 2006 when I had YWAM, a business trip, and a personal trip in 10 days. Sounds a little too familiar.)

YWAM
Our youth group goes to the YWAM base in San Francisco every October to minister to the huge homeless population in San Francisco. This year we had a record amount of teens who wanted to come - 40 kids with only 5 adults. Based on the last time we were outnumbered (that nutty trip to Mexico) Danny was pretty stressed before the trip. But, the kids were fantastic! God really answers prayers (and we have great kids). I was especially thankful to get good sleep, with this group of girls who love each other and love to talk I've had trips when I only get 3 hours of sleep each night! The first night of YWAM I gave the girls a 15-minute warning before all talking had to cease, and less than 5 minutes later it was silent! I was so thrilled I blurted out into the silence how much I loved each and every one of them.


I was really impressed with the high schoolers and the way they cared for the homeless in San Francisco. They approached people boldly just to start a conversation and listen to them without any judgment. We had a large amount of freshmen and new students who had never done something like that, and they all made us really proud.

FULLER IN PASADENA
The Sunday that YWAM ended I came home early to do laundry and pack the next two suitcases. That night I flew to Pasadena for three days of meetings with the other Fuller extension staff at the Pasadena campus. I love these meetings since all the other Fuller staff from around the country are amazing people. I especially enjoy hanging out with my friend Airika from Seattle. Her and I have very similar jobs so we brainstorm a lot, and I love hearing about her wedding photography business she runs with her husband. If you're looking for an amazing wedding photographer in the Northwest, check out http://geraldpope.blogspot.com/

Our meetings in Pasadena are always busy - we get a full year's worth of meetings with all the campus departments in three days - but the face time is great! At times like that I really do love my job, and that's a great feeling. There's a lot of stress and way too much to do, but I'm proud to work for a school and ministry like Fuller.

DENVER, PART A
From L.A. I flew to Denver to attend the wedding of Cass Tallon, one of my Japan teammates and Pepperdine friends, and Alex Huffman, another Pepperdine campus ministry alum. Danny and I also took the chance to have three days of vacation together (the longest time away we've had in a long time!). We stayed at a Bed and Breakfast up in the mountains outside of Denver and really enjoyed being out of the city. We experienced local color, great homemade breakfasts made from eggs laid the same day (yum!) and ... the bird room. Our room at the B&B is called the Bird Suite, and it was full of stuffed birds, both taxidermy-stuffed and cotton-stuffed. It was cozy and very unique and we had a great time. I was sick with a bad cold the whole trip, so we did a lot of napping, relaxing, and just enjoying down time.




We did take an afternoon to explore Red Rocks Park which is famous for both its tall rust-colored rock formations, and for a gorgeous outdoor amphitheater. When we arrived we were looking forward to visiting the Colorado Welcome Center, which is supposed to be open until 4 every day. When we arrived it was closed, and we could not figure out why. Sure, it was a Thursday afternoon, but it didn't say it was closed on weekdays. Maybe it's only open on weekdays in the summer? But the sign says right there it's open from 9-4 every day! After visiting the other visitors center on site, we figured out why the welcome center was closed: it was 4:30! We had napped so long we had no idea what time it was! At that point we really felt like we were on vacation.







The wedding festivities were so much fun, mostly because I was reunited with Pepperdine campus ministry family, some of who I had not seen in years. Unfortunately, I was a dummy and left the camera in the car for the bachelorette party, rehearsal dinner, and wedding! If anyone reading this has pictures from the wedding, send them my way! The wedding was beautiful, mostly because the bride and groom have been best friends for 12 years and just recently found romance - they were glowing with excitement! It was also beautiful because it was outdoors with a beautiful mountain backdrop. An outdoor wedding in the Colorado mountains in October was certainly a gamble, but the temperature was in the low 70s and perfect. Two days before it had been 40 and frigid, and 12 hours after the wedding it dumped snow! I'm convinced God plays weatherman for occasions such as this.

It was really exciting for me to have Danny get to meet lots of my Pepperdine friends. I did a lot of introductions followed by a long list of how I know the person and who they are connected to. He was a great sport! Many of those friends I talk about constantly but Danny has never met, including Pepperdine campus ministers (and my college mentors) Scott Lambert and Linda Truschke. I loved catching up with them and they loved meeting Danny. Of course, it was special to see my Japan team: Cass, Leah and Tim (we missed you Timbo!). They are the greatest friends I could ask for and I still can't believe all three of us girls are married! If we had only known what would come when we had late-night talks about the boys in our lives and our hopes for the futures. Cass would always quote Ephesians 3:20 "Now unto him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine" and she was right! None of us would have imagined having the husbands we do now, and in fact Cass was the only one who knew her husband at the time and she never thought they would date! When we let God plan our lives for us he has a better plan in mind than we could imagine.

DENVER, PART B
I split the Denver trip into two parts because it feels a bit surreal as if it were two trips. Danny and I woke up Sunday morning to find it had snowed overnight and our rental car was buried. By buried I mean there were 2-3 inches on it, but to a pair of Californians it looked buried! While he checked out and got our breakfast to go, I scraped off the car and was starting to pride myself on my Canadian blood that knew how to properly scrape snow off a car. I was wrong - my Canadian blood has fully retreated under a California girl driver, and on the way to the airport I ran the car off the road. In my defense, it wasn't snowing when we left, but it all of a sudden came down hard. Where I made a mistake was deciding to stop and fill up the tank at that point. As soon as I nudged the wheel to change lanes, the tires let go of the road. Danny and I both felt it immediately, but at first I thought they would find traction again. As we slid more Danny said "Are you okay?" and I responded "I'm not sure." Then we knew we were in trouble, we were both trying to turn the wheel, and I tried to hit the brakes but we couldn't do anything except sit and wait to see where we landed. Eventually we impaled the car on a guardrail. Looking back, it could have been so much worse, and I'm really thankful. The only injury between the two of us is a rug burn on my wrist from the airbag.



I'm not sure if it's because the engine was so damaged or because the air bags deployed, but the inside of the car immediately stunk like smoke. We didn't think it was safe to stay in the car, so we got out - but keep in mind it was still pouring down snow. And then the thunder and lightning started. We made the phone calls to 911 and the rental car company, but it was snowing so hard that there were 5 other accidents on the same stretch of freeway and since we weren't hurt it was going to be a while before anyone showed up.



Just as we were soaked and starting to shiver, a pair of angels showed up. God is just too good to us sometimes. This sweet couple pulled over (I am still baffled as to how anyone else drove in that weather without sliding off the road) and offered to let us sit in their car until help came. I was hesitant to inconvenience anyone, but we really needed to get warm and dry. We sat in their car (on leather seats, I might add) for the next hour and in between phone calls to insurance, the rental car company, the police, etc. we got to know our rescuers. Their names were Rich and Charlotte, and Rich turned out to be a Pepperdine alum! They were on their way to church, which did not surprise me at all. As we apologized repeatedly for ruining their morning, they said it was more important to be Jesus to someone than to sit in a pew. They were such an amazing couple. When we found out it was going to take the tow truck a long time to arrive, Rich loaded our luggage in his car and they drove us all the way to the airport. I am still amazed by this couple and their generosity and kindness when we were desperate!

So if we recap, I have wrecked a car twice in the last three months, both immediately after attending the out of state wedding of one of my Japan teammates. Good thing I'm not superstitious or I would not be attending Tim's wedding when that happens! Haha. All in all, the Denver accident was traumatic but could have been so much worse! I did have a hard time driving to work the day after the accident - I was pretty paralyzed with fear, which is unusual for me behind the wheel. Old people were zooming around me and shooting me dirty looks because I was crawling along the road. I'm doing better now and trying to focus on the blessings instead of the helpless feeling of sliding off the road.

Mostly, I'm just glad to be home after so many trips! Thanks for reading my novel (if anyone is still with me) and I hope it won't be so long before I update again.

7th Favorite Movie - Traffic

Make sure you have read the first post in this series ("My 50 Favorite Movies") before you read on...

I confess that I have not seen this movie in about 5 years. The reason is because I loaned my DVD out to someone and I couldn't remember who! Don't you hate it when that happens? I was happy to find when I married Bethany that she had a copy (I was glad about other things, too). So I am sure I'll see it again soon.

In 2001, Steven Soderbergh looked to become one of my favorite directors. He had already made Out of Sight (1998) and Ocean's 11 (2001) and Traffic (2000), all of which made this Top 50 list. That ties him with Steven Spielberg and Spike Lee as the directors most represented on my list with 3 movies each. The problem is what he has done since. Solaris (2002) would probably make my top 50 for WORST movies of all time, and Ocean's 12 (2004) would make my top 5. He made a few more underwhelming movies (so I hear) Full Frontal, Bubble and The Good German before righting the ship a bit with Ocean's 13. But back to 2001... one year after being nominated for Best Director for Erin Brockovich, he won for Traffic, despite Gladiator taking Best Picture that year, which rarely happens. Apparently the Academy was as impressed as I was at the skills of the up-and-coming Steven Soderbergh.

Traffic is about drug trafficking, and it follows three different intersecting storylines. One features Michael Douglas, who is the new head of the War on Drugs campaign in Washington D.C., and his teenaged daughter, who brings the war close to home for him. Another storyline concerns the drugs getting made and smuggled into the U.S. from Mexico, where Benicio Del Toro works as a police officer. The third story surrounds a major dealer in the U.S. and his wife (Catherine Zeta Jones) and the cops (Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman) who try to bring them down. Each story has a beginning, middle and end, intersects with the others, and has a unique look to it. The scenes in Washington D.C. have sort of a blue-grey haze to them while Mexico has a yellow-gold-brown look to it, which accentuate the "scorching, brutal and chaotic reality of Mexico and the sterile, cold & bureaucratic one of the United States" (i stole this from someone on imdb.com).

My favorite character in the film and one of my favorite characters in the entirety of cinema is the cop played by Benicio Del Toro, who rightly won Best Supporting Actor. Living each day in the midst of unfathomable danger and poverty, when he gets a chance to escape and make a better life for himself, he chooses instead to make a better life for the children and families around him for generations to come. The last scene in this movie makes the whole messy journey worth it to me and never fails to bring a tear to my eye and smile to my face.

8th Favorite Movie - Almost Famous

Make sure you have read the first post in this series ("My 50 Favorite Movies") before you read on...

During the summer between 9th & 10th grade, my brother introduced me to classic rock. He had already gone off to college, but left behind his extensive collection of homemade-dubbed cassette tapes. I think that he was already buying CD's, so he didn't need to have the tapes with him at college. I probably spent 8 hours a day on the computer that summer, playing adventure games and - believe it or not - chatting with people "online". You may be surprised at that since the year was 1989, a good 5 years before most people heard of email and Al Gore invented the internet. But I had a Commodore 64 computer in my room with a 300 bps dial up modem, and there was this thing called "Popnet" where you could dial up and chat with folks, post messages to bulletin boards, or play simple text-based games like Battleship online with people. The first half of that summer, I listened to the latest pop music station on the radio whenever I was on the computer. The second half of the summer, I listened to Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. My brother refuses to remember this next occurence, but I distinctly recall the day when I grew tired of hearing "Girl You Know It's True" 8 times a day (the radio station would play it once every hour) and asked my brother if he would recommend one of his tapes for me. He gave me The Eagles Greatest Hits, which he still denies to this day. Apparently he is not much of a fan of them anymore. I listened to that tape for a few days until I got to know all the songs and then asked him for another recommendation. Again, I distinctly remember him saying, "maybe you are ready for Zeppelin", and handing me a copy Led Zeppelin I.

If you have seen Almost Famous, you know where I am going with this. There is a scene in that movie where the older sibling goes off and leaves behind her classic rock collection for her younger brother to experience for the first time. He grows to love the music, and before he is even out of high school he winds up covering the tour of an up-and-coming rock band for Rolling Stone magazine.

The premise for the film is based on the real life experience of director Cameron Crowe (one of my favorites) who toured with several bands in the 1970's - Allman Brothers, Lynryd Skynryd, and Led Zeppelin - while writing for Rolling Stone. Two lines in the film he supposedly overheard from bands while on tour: "I'm the singer and the frontman, you're the guitarist with mystique" (Robert Plant arguing with Jimmy Page backstage) and "We don't care what you write, just make us look cool" (Glen Frey of The Eagles to a teenaged Cameron Crowe). Crowe almost called the film Untitled, as a reference to the album more commonly known as Led Zeppelin 4, but settled on using this title for his Director's Cut.

With these experiences being so close to his heart, Crowe injects so much warmth into Almost Famous. Frances McDormand, who plays "his mom", turns in a wonderful performance, as does Kate Hudson who plays his crush, Penny Lane. Hard to believe how far she has fallen after winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress here in 2000.

The Director's Cut DVD has some great extra scenes in it that are actually inserted into the original film. It also has a great deleted scene in which William plays "Stairway to Heaven" for his disapproving mom, who is also a college lit professor - to show her that that not all rock and roll is about sex and drugs, that this one actually talks about Tolkein. Zeppelin's asking price to use their landmark song was too high though, so in order to watch the scene with the music you need to have your own copy of the song ready to play along with the DVD.

How much you like this movie may depend on how much you like classic rock. Essentially, Almost Famous is Cameron Crowe's love letter to 1970's rock music.

9th Favorite Movie - The Hudsucker Proxy

Make sure you have read the first post in this series ("My 50 Favorite Movies") before you read on...

Everybody has one.

A movie that you absolutely love… a movie that you have seen so many times that you can quote it almost verbatim… a movie that you could watch pretty much any day, anytime… a movie that most people have never even heard of. For Bethany, it is Big Trouble. Geoff B has I Heart Huckabees. Jessica D has A Goofy Movie. The Hudsucker Proxy is my “diamond in the rough”.

Like any Coen brothers movie, The Hudsucker Proxy features great writing, witty dialogue, cartoon-like characters and a cartoon-like feel. It's as if what you are watching is not completely grounded in reality (think Raising Arizona or O Brother Where Art Thou?). In these regards, The Hudsucker Proxy resembles an episode of The Simpsons more than any other film that I can think of. Unlike most Coen brothers movies, The Hudsucker Proxy features neither John Goodman nor Frances McDormand. But it does have Tim Robbins, Paul Newman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Steve Buscemi, Bruce Campbell (he made the Evil Dead movies) and the dad from Frasier.

The story surrounds Hudsucker Industries, a big corporation in New York City. Paul Newman is the #2 in charge, advisor to Mr. Hudsucker himself. One day a young, ambitious, and naïve Tim Robbins arrives to town, freshly graduated from business college. He is looking for a job – any job – but finds that his degree doesn’t help much. Everyone is looking for someone with experience. I first saw this movie when I was looking for a job after moving to Fresno, and discovered that my college degree did not mean as much as I thought it would. I related to this movie immediately, and whenever I watch it I am taken back to my experience of hitting a new city and feeling like I had something to offer… but after submitting over a hundred resumes and getting no calls, beginning to doubt I really had anything to offer. This film is a lesson on dealing with failure and success.

Eventually, I found a job at Fresno State and Tim Robbins is hired at Hudsucker Industries, where he hopes to move up but has to start at the bottom (he literally works in the basement of Hudsucker Industries as a mail clerk). On his first day on the job, tragedy strikes the man at the top of Hudsucker and a new CEO is needed. Paul Newman (who gets to play the villain in this film) appoints Tim Robbins to be the new boss with the hope that his inexperience and incompetence will deflate the stock so that he and the rest of the nefarious board members can buy it up for themselves, fire Robbins, and appoint Newman as the new CEO. It turns out that Robbins has something to offer after all – “you know, for kids!” The awkward title of the film (a 'proxy' is someone who is somehow controlled by another - like a patsy or a puppet) I believe is the main reason why the film flopped at the box office and continues to be ignored.

Within this movie is:

*The best 5 minute economics lesson you will ever find (high school teachers take note).

*The feel of a screwball comedy from the 1940’s like His Girl Friday with Jenifer Jason Leigh doing her best Audrey Hepburn impression of the fast talking, wise-cracking girl who can hold her own against the fellas.

*One of my favorite openings in cinema: a long, slow, majestic zoom throughout the snowy skyscrapers of NYC that ends on Robbins about to jump off the top of the Hudsucker building. (I even like this this opening more than Raising Arizona’s).

So, if you like Raising Arizona, O Brother Where Art Thou?, and The Big Lebowski, I urge you to check out The Hudsucker Proxy.