Friday, June 29, 2007

Tagged!

Cragar tagged me. Thanks, Cragar!

Here are the rules:

* We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.

* Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.

* People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.

* At the end of your blog post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.

* Don’t forget to leave them each a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.


1. I am the youngest of three girls. I am a typical youngest child in many ways (attention seeking, entertainer, adventurous), but I also confound the stereotype in others (I hold more academic degrees than a person needs, and can be super competitive at times).

2. I am addicted to Carolyn Hax columns, the Washington Post advice columnist. No matter where I am in the world, if it’s a Sunday, Wednesday, or Friday, and I’m online, I will look her up.

3. I have four nephews and a niece and I love being an aunt. I’m a damn good aunt, too, or so I keep telling them. We make up games like Tickle Monster and the Pillow Game. I melt whenever I hold my 1-year old niece and she puts her head on my shoulder, body completely relaxed, and sighs. Next best thing to being a parent, I imagine. Though actually, it’s quite possibly better because I still get a full night’s sleep, and when they’re grouchy I give ‘em back to Mom & Dad.

4. I am on my second passport – I love to travel! I am still proud of going on a solo backpacking trip in France and Italy when I was a mere 22-year old college graduate. I have visited about 25 countries so far.

5. I am opinionated and can be stubborn, just like my dad. At the end of the day, even if I ask others for advice or input on some decision I need to make, I will make the decision for me and nobody else. (Which works out just fine for now, since I don’t have a husband or kids to take into consideration.)

6. I live close enough to my job that I can walk, bike, or take the bus. A long commute to work would kill me.

7. On a related note, I hate suburbs. I have degrees in architecture and urban planning, and I have serious issues with our car-centric approach to sprawl-style development in the United States. It is dehumanizing, isolating, damaging to the environment, and, quite simply, depressing (I believe I have also called it “soul sucking”). Gated communities make my blood boil; in our built environment, we keep separating ourselves more and more from others who are not like us, both reflecting and exacerbating our irrational fears about the “other”.

8. I am an idealist and often long for what “ought” to be. But I can also flip a switch and be a pragmatic realist. I think this latter tendency may have prompted the faith questions that are now tumbling out, one after another. Quite simply, the empirical, real-life “data” as it relates to God doesn’t match up to the ideals about God that I have believed most of my life.

I’m new enough to the blogging world that I don’t have people to tag yet, or they have already been tagged by cragar or others...

2 comments:

OneSmallStep said...

Do you think your educational background prepared you for your deconversion? Because both would require a huge knowledge of logic, and how pieces fit together without any gaps. It's only natural that you'd apply that mindset to your faith.

Slapdash said...

Yes, definitely. In fact much of what I do professionally probably helped lay the groundwork for it. (Conflict resolution stuff - the idea that our perceptions aren't necessarily reality, that people can have differing but equally legitimate views about something, that there's much more gray out there than black/white, etc.)

I'm certainly drawing on that and other pieces of my educational background as I sort this stuff through now... though at the time that I was acquiring all this education, somehow I was still close to God and a practicing Christian. I don't know what to make of that...