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DanAeRi
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Name: Danielle
Birthday: 9/16/1984
Gender: Female
Interests: Dreams, family life and memoirs. I'd like to only stay a little behind in homework and miles behind the Joneses. Being an inviting person, making an inviting home. I am married to a very patient, loving, and humorous man. Every single sort of human relationship intrigues me so I study them a lot and try to maintain my own. I wonder about your background and what you meant by that. I'm terribly uninterested in movie stars and idiosyncrasies of people's pets. I enjoy blended fruits, chopped salads, mashed potatoes and bottled soda. I like watching people's non-verbal language and am told that I don't smile enough. I'm growing a thicker skin but hopefully not a calloused one. Ryan has beaten me at Backgammon approximately 13 gazillion times but I'm gonna hit my winning streak any day now. I wish I didn't need sleep but I've come to terms with it. I try to think collectively.
Occupation: WorldImpact, grad student
Industry: Non-profit
Message: message meEmail: email me
Member Since:
11/5/2003
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| I am so mad.MAN!!! Okay, last night - no, Friday night, I went to Kayse's bachelorette party. I met the girls at the Beauty Bar in Hollywood since they were coming from one direction and I another. I got there first and greeted the bartender and waited for the girls. He totally looked familiar but I didn't think about it much. The limo with the girls got there and we were there for about 2 hours for "Martinis and Manicures". He mentioned to one of the girls that his name was Vincent (to Jenn, who had arranged it and was asking if he was the guy who she'd talked to on the phone). I just happened to overhear the conversation. Eventually the party moved on to Universal City Walk and the Hard Rock Cafe.
Well late Friday night when I got home, I realized that Mr. Vincent Bartender looked like Adam Banks - the star player kid in Mighty Ducks that got traded from the Hawks when Emilio Estevez found out that the district lines had been ignored and who all the Ducks shunned for a while because they hated the Hawks and whose wrist got broken - only all grown up!! OHMYGOSH!! So I mentioned it today to Adam (my brother) (who was the reason I grew up on Mighty Ducks movies) and he, knowing exactly who I was talking about of course, looked up the name of Adam Banks and guess what - it's VINCENT!! It's totally the same guy and I am kicking myself for not thinking for 5 seconds about who he reminded me of at the time. I've never seen a famous person not in context of an event or you know, when the sighting doesn't count, here in Los Angeles, until now, but I didn't even realize it at the time. UGH. Also, we were going to take a picture with him - just because he was nice and the bartender and we were taking pictures of everything for Kayse's party - and never did. GRRRR!
I think I would've called him a Cake Eater and said something about how it's not worth winning if you can't win big. :) I am so mad.
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| It's summer again.
Sometimes it takes a while for something to sink in and my internship last summer is going to be a slow, and heavy one of those. It's somewhat odd considering that even as it was occurring, we were all mindful of its significance and recorded the pieces we could articulate. Often, things that make us think later simply arise because we didn't note them when they were current. The chaplaincy internship is different, though. We, the interns, noticed it...but it continues to re-surface in my thoughts, unwilling to go dormant, and endures as one of the most poignant seasons I've experienced.
Last summer, working at Methodist Hospital of Southern California in Arcadia was one of the most draining things I've done. The bus ride just about killed me, and Ryan. It was tough having completely different physical, emotional and social experiences throughout the day than Ryan after working in the same area, with the same purposes, with the same people, the entirety of our marriage. I hated looking very professional every day and how much of the weekend I spent ironing. Towards the end of the internship I felt extraordinarily tired and a little sick and soon came to find out I was pregnant... unexpectedly. It was a hectic time.
At the hospital, I was challenged. We were made to reflect; we were forced to disclose. And we were expected to care. Care for the demanding patient who latched on like a leech and became irrate when we would not do everything they wanted. Care for the morbidly obese man who required a special bed, followed none of the dr's orders, left regularly to smoke, and treated the staff terribly. We were expected to care for the dead. I became almost comfortable around dead bodies and knew how to present them in a way that would be most helpful to the family's mourning. We were to respect and communicate to other staff their cultural and religious customs. We were expected to care for the people we recognized in the hospital beds--the ones that reminded us of those who had hurt us in the past.
I hope I always remember the transvestite in her sixties who told me her rock star dreams and the AIDS patient whose family had given up. I will remember the bony back I spread lotion on as I silently prayed for healing. It belonged to the woman I spent the most time with, who was buried before my internship was over. I will pray for the patient who had lost his wife and kids to another guy and believed that if he overcame his drug addiction, everything else would fall into place. I will pray for the family whose daughter I already knew, who was beginning the well traveled, yet lonely road of cancer treatment. And I will remember many others.
Chaplaincy is an interesting role because to most patients, you are safe. You are the visitor who will not do painful things to them, who offers no medical advice or news, and who they do not care about being brave or pitiful in front of. They might ask you big questions or dump all their spiritual, historical baggage at your feet, but this is a privilege. You could be a chaplain and perfect a balance of warmth and distance so that your patients feel decently cared for and open without you losing too much of your emotional energy. You could go home at the end of the day, knowing you had gone to "work" just like everyone else, and you could resist the impact of another's life on your own. But you wouldn't be a very good chaplain. The thing about the internship - clinical pastoral education is its official name - is that you spend as much time reflecting on yourself as the patient, as the one who is incomplete and growing, as the patients themselves. And this helps you. It helps you not become numb and it helps you not become overloaded. It's a reciprocal thing... like all things that affirm and stimulate our humanity as it was created. I'd like to think that if I ever were a chaplain, I would discipline myself to reflect... why did I say that to that person, what makes me visit this person over and over, what is the meaning and what would be good news to that patient? The internship sustained our ability to care and, thus, our vulnerability, by expecting our hearts to engage the actual tasks. It was crazy and it was good and I continue to learn what it means to me.
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| Strengths FinderWell, I took the Strengths test again. Mostly because I was curious. I've taken it a couple times before and I always get Responsibility, Achiever, and Belief with the first two always being my first two (supposedly the strongest). The others vary (I've gotten Developer, Relator, Learner and Focus before). This time I again got Responsibility, Achiever, Belief and Relator but none of them were my first. This time I got Individualization for my #1. Weird! Ryan was just commenting yesterday how between the two of us, we've at some point gotten 14 of the 34 identified strengths from this assessment but have never gotten any of the same ones! Well I ruined that because Ryan got Individualization when he took it freshmen year at APU. We finally have a common strength. :) The description of Individualization reminds me some of Developer but it's interesting that Developer did not come up this time on my top 5. I think it's an amazing and well-designed tool and am always curious how our context and recent personal growth and development affect the outcome. Obviously, since the results are not completely new each time I've taken it, the test is dependable. But I am interested in connecting the ones that have varied (more specifically the change itself) to that particular season of my life.
It was fun to hear the students yesterday say their strengths and to discuss how they related to leadership and the trip we are going to take next month. It's a whole new language and some of them I could tell were "fading" after we had discussed it for a little while but I think that by the time our trip is over, they will each be able to see the benefit of the assessment and be familiar with the meanings. The test was difficult for most of them to take, since it uses adult-reading level vocabulary, but we helped reword things as best as we could. The questions are skipped if no answer has been given in 20 seconds, but I think that that helped the test be accurate for them. The ones they could respond to quickly were the ones they could understand and are therefore the most accurate of them. Since the test is designed to weight those more, I think their results are still dependable. I'm looking forward to seeing the kids use this tool in the future!
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| Let's take a vote - is this guy's e-mail rude??So I wrote this:
Hello,
My name is Danielle Cummings and I am graduating and participating in
the commencement next week. I also have a 6-week old baby and wondered
what was going on from 8:30-10 that morning - if we are occupied that
whole time or if it would be feasible to see any of our guests (or
feed my kid...). Kind of an odd question but since the ceremony is so
long, I'm trying to figure out how to make it work for my family.
Thanks for your help!
I got this response:
Danielle,
It is not feasible to see your guests, or feed your wee one. Have breakfast with your guests. Fox's is good, up on North Lake Ave. At 8:30, you'll file into the student Lineup and your guests will go into the main sanctuary, and I hope your little one has a fabulous time in the nursery. Once you are in Student Lineup, the time is given to instructions, seating placement, putting on robes, lineup, moving into the sanctuary, and the like. There is simply too much going on to try and add YOU visiting or being responsible for a feeding.
If you want to try a feeding during the ceremony, and your child is in the sanctuary rather than the nursery, and if your alphabetical placement puts you at the edge of a row, and your guests find where that is, and they can claim the seats nearest to you, and they don't mind having a fussy baby sit with them for four hours, and you can figure out how to tackle the feeding in black robes with people moving all around you, I'd still say 'no', at least until you've gone across the stage. After *that* happens, it doesn't matter what order you sit because you don't need to meet your name on the list the Dean will be reading.
Does that help any?
(end of e-mail)
Now, when I first read it, I thought it was a little over the top weird... but then I read it again and I started thinking that this was rude... what do you think??
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