INTERVIEW GAME

1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."
2. I respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better ! If I already know you well, expect the questions may be a little more intimate!
3. You WILL update your [online journal] with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions

These question are from my cousin:

1. Do you find yourself gravitating towards/exploring any particular subject matter in your writing lately? Say a little about that...

I wish I was more disciplined in my writing so I could answer this better. I’ve noticed that disappointment—in others (particularly leaders and mentors), in the protagonist’s self—comes up quite a bit. I’m haunted by what the English language means to the rest of the world, but I’m struggling with a way to express my thoughts about it. In my songs, the idea that God is everywhere keeps popping up. In free writing, these ideas of what the blues means to me are brought about three or four times per session. I don’t know how to write about that because everything I could say about it, James Baldwin has already said better in Sonny’s Blues. I’m not really working on a particular piece at the moment, so this question is a bit hard to answer.

2. How do you and your brother relate differently to your parents?

He might disagree, but I always figured Ian could relate better to my mother than I can and that I relate better to my dad. I have a lot more in common with my dad and ha, know how to get what I want out of him. I’ve always been able to put the cute on so he’d run out the door to buy me a pack of skittles. My mom doesn’t operate that way. I’m being silly here… Actually, I think it’s because my personality is more similar to my dad’s. Even though I don’t talk to him as often as I’d like, I find that he pops up all the time in my actions and reactions. For instance, the other day an Indian gentleman tried to sell me something at the market--like a lottery ticket or something--by buttering me up, saying, “Hello Beautiful. Where are you from, Beautiful?” And I looked at him straight in the face and said, “India,” and walked away. That’s the kind of gruff thing my dad pulls on salespeople. Also, when I come up against something that hinders productiveness—people dallying around trying to make decisions, I tend to get overly frustrated and grumpy. Not to say that all that I get from my dad is being gruff and grumpy… we’re both quick to act, looking for ways to be wise, apt take adventures, prone to talking a lot and too loud (something that separates me from most Thais. Ha.), sociable, and uninhibited. I think we usually attack assignments in a similar way and that’s why we can communicate well. My mother is a dear, but we misunderstand and misinterpret each other a lot.

As far as how my brother and I relate to our parents as a contingent, well, I guess that is always changing. He sees them more than me now, but when I lived with my parents, Ian coming was kind of a phenomenon. I think my parents have been trying, for the past few years, to figure out how to relate to me as I am not really living with them, but they still believe I am under their authority (from a Haskell principle I was reminded of many times about a woman being under the authority of her father until she got married…) Ian never had this kind of philosophy to factor into his relationship with them. So, though I’m not sure of the specifics, I know that Ian and I relate to them quite differently.

3. How do you think other people see you; is that something you think much about?

Whoa, what a question. I have had a lot of relationships with people—blame it on years and years of theater friendships, when I’d have three weeks to try to spend enough time with someone to feel comfortable on stage with them, the performance-run time of feeling like I’d gained a new best friend, and then another two weeks of show-friend with drawl. In this context, I am quite used to the fact that people see me as quiet and mousy at first. Maybe even ditzy because I get quite nervous and stammering when I am with people I don’t know. Then, they hear me say something like, “that shit cracks me up!” and they know I am cool and have a naughty sense of humor. As a short person, I will probably always try to compensate size with volume—and I don’t just mean verbal volume.

Those are the generalizations. People who know me well probably all see me quite different. I think at the office they think I’m the loud American who never stops playing around. I’m not sure, but that’s what I think. I’ll always wonder what my Christian brothers and sisters think of me—they are the people I whose opinions I think about the most.

So I think about this stuff a lot. I will admit that people’s opinions of me don’t factor into my actions much. Ha.

4. Your experience of coming to faith seems much different than mine, but I've only heard scraps. Can you talk about that--give your "testimony," in a nutshell? What made you follow?

Coming to Faith. Right. I guess my testimony would be just an account how my faith has grown… It’s all in phases, you know, but I do believe it gets bigger every time. Some people would condemn my story as maybe an account of “roller coaster faith” but get real… resurrection requires dying and being brought back to life. Okay, I’ll try to stay nutshellish.

I can’t remember a time I didn’t pray regularly. I do remember a time when my mother and I prayed for me to receive Jesus. I’ll be damned if I was older than four. As a child, I always talked to God and God got out of all kinds of messes. When I was about seven or eight I told God that I felt pretty comfortable with him but I didn’t know who Jesus was. Around the age of 11 I heard Jesus talking to me around a campout fire and pretty much made a deal with him that if he let me do theater, I’d follow him. Two years later I got baptized and my mother started bringing me to Haskell’s Weds. Night study. I noticed that it spoke to me and that was probably where I learned how to use the Bible—as an opportunity to listen to God. After a break-up and what my HS teacher called me “hitting rock bottom” (I would later find out to be my first major fit of depression) I gave my life to Jesus again, this time no strings attached. That was on my seventeenth birthday, the day I decided to hate the world and find life in Jesus.

Then I went to college and my faith was tested, but it didn’t take me long to find out that God was a living creature and not someone that could just disappear if I decided He didn’t exist. I did decide that a few times, but it didn’t last long. It was as ridiculous as saying Erinn didn’t exist. I’ve known them both for about as long.

Then I got out of depression and had a lovely phase of “no condemnation” that some might call my Zooropa days… Ha, you know, “the greater the fall the greater the grace.” I joke about that, but it actually happened. I’m probably still in that phase but honestly, I know it is necessary and that God is in on it with me. Because of it, I have been able to be more vibrant about the gospel, fall in love (not in a romantic sense) with tons more people then when I was trying to be a careful Christian, and be all together more alive. So, the current phase of my faith is God showing me how to actually live it… you know, Living Hope type stuff. Eternity starts today, type stuff. This is the best phase yet. I have learned how to ward off depression with solid, life-giving truths. I still have a lot to learn, but the best thing about learning to follow Jesus is that there are no deadlines.


5. How have you changed during your travels?

Each travel experience has been it’s own beast and changed me in different ways. I’ve only had three major experiences. Here they are:

a) Traveling around the country basically taught me that I am a human. It’s the kind of stuff I’ve heard most learn after being married for a year or two—all of our own annoying qualities. If you sit in the car with someone (who is not involved with you, romantically) for two months and only spend about 6 hours away from them the entire time, you get the crash course self-horror… and you don’t get the make-up sex to help you deal with it. Ha, I mean, the romantic euphoria.

b) Going to South Africa felt like a major failure. I learned that the world is full of terrible people and most of them are Anglos. You’d think that 13 years in Detroit Public Schools would have taught me that, but visiting Post-Apartheid South Africa was like the icing on that white-guilt cake. That said, I look back at South Africa as being the most beautiful country in the world—the astounding landscape, the misery, and the beauty that has come out of the misery. I’d go back there in a heartbeat. Plus, not a week goes by when I don't think of the wonderful friends I made there.

c) Moving to Thailand has given me a lot of confidence; I have better sense that God is leading me. I feel that everything in my life was necessary so that I might have ended up here … it’s a really solid feeling—all the bad things that led up to me wanting to leave the states, like that horrible van with no heat in the winter, being in debt when it was time to pay taxes, getting bombed with huge medical bills for a misdiagnosed eye--all of that bullshit has just paved my way for this fabulous experience. On the material end of things... From Thailand I've learned so much about globalization, about asian culture, about how to tolerate chili peppers (and how once you start eating them you must apply them to your food, lest you eat a tasteless meal...)

Overall, I've learned how to travel. It's a skill, ya know. You only learn it by doing it. Like Tai Chi.