Ask-me-questions meme

[qatarperegrine]

I've just spent a happy 45 minutes taking all kinds of silly web quizzes. I always love seeing my friends' webquiz results, but I feel kind of lame posting my own, so I will forbear.

Instead, I'll do the old standby five-questions meme (from kyra_ojosverdes), since it's more participatory.

Hit "Post a comment" and ask me five questions, and (as long as they're not too nosy) I shall endeavour to answer them truthfully.

Comments

[kyra-ojosverdes.livejournal.com]

1. How did you and foobart meet and grow to love each other?

2. When recently in the US, what did you most miss about Qatar?

3. Upon returning to Qatar, what did you most miss about the US?

4. We've known each other since 2001. How would you describe your life, yourself, and how both have changed in that time?

5. What is your current "dream job" and why?

[qatar.livejournal.com]

Yay, someone asked questions! :-)

1. IIRC, the first time I laid eyes on foobart was at a youth group retreat in early 1992; he ran to get a first aid kit when I sprained my ankle. Awww. We got to know each other at a week-long church conference called Jubilee '92. I was going through a really difficult time at that point, and he became my lifeline to sanity. I was seeing someone else (and then saw someone else after that) but eventually badgered him into dating me. We were 14 and 16, and our relationship was predictably juvenile. I couldn't pinpoint a time -- or even a year -- that I really started to love him. I suppose, in a way, we are still growing to love each other. Every day there are new lessons in figuring out what it means to care about someone this deeply and how to make that care manifest in everyday life. For me, that's one of many very cool parts of being married. :-)


2. I missed my friends. Also, the calls to prayer, and my treadmill.


3. I miss my friends. :-) And my family, and my puppies. And trees, and snow, and hills, and the ocean.


4. Hmmm. Describing my life and myself sounds rather unnerving, so I'll concentrate on what's changed. I think since 2001 I've put myself in several situations that did not make for my happiness: unemployment, and then a school I didn't enjoy, and then the stresses of being a therapist. In the process I think I've learned a lot about what it takes to keep me happy and healthy and sane. (Specifically, I'm getting better at distinguishing between courses of action that make me happy and courses of action I guiltily feel ought to make me happy -- like being a social worker.) I am also a lot more aware of my own moods, and a lot better equipped to manage them. As a result, I'm a lot more emotionally stable and sure of myself than I was in 2001. Still moving onward toward perfection, though. :-)


5. Yesterday I did the Your Perfect Major Quiz you took a while back, and I got 100% in both philosophy and journalism. I think that's pretty accurate: reflecting on, and communicating about, philosophy/religion is really important to me. Someday I'd like to have a job where I get to do that more. At this point I'm sort of imagining becoming a religion professor who also does a bunch of writing, but that's subject to change without notice. :-)

[kyra-ojosverdes.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[materjibrail.livejournal.com]

OK I waited for friends to jump in, but here goes:
1.You've been to India and Jordan as well as Qatar. How have these trips changed you or your ideas?
2.Are you still reading as much as when you started the blog? Best books of the last year?
3.How is this year at CMUQatar different from the first year?
4.Compare the usefulness and difficulty of the languages you have learned or dabbled in.
5. What ware your plans and Foobart's, for when you return to the US

[qatar.livejournal.com]

1. I think I've learned a lot on each of my vacations here, I guess because for me, "vacation" tends to mean "choosing an area and visiting all its sites of historical/religious significance." Visiting India made me realize how sheltered my entire life has been, and how Western an understanding of religion I have. Visiting Egypt made me realize that the Arab world is not all like Qatar, and that Rameses II was the most narcissistic person ever. Visiting Jordan made me realize that the ancient world was a lot more interconnected than I realized -- that, although I think of Greece, Rome, Israel and Egypt as very different civilizations, they traded together, lived in each others' cities, even borrowed each others' gods pretty much willy-nilly.


2. No, I'm not. Last fall I read a lot, because I didn't have very many or very defined job responsibilities and our center was desperately underutilized. This year I actually work for a remarkable proportion of my workday. :-) My favorite two books of the last year were Wilfred Cantwell Smith's Faith and Belief (in the nonfiction category) and Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees (in the fiction category). Bonus prize goes to the remarkable Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which I technically read in 2004 but never reviewed. I'll try to do a more thorough reading list update soon.


3. All the main differences have to do with size, I think. When I first arrived, all the CMU-Q faculty and staff were in one wing of the building, with room left over. Now we're pretty spread out through the Cornell building, so much so that I have coworkers I haven't seen all year. The growth affects our social network in a lot of ways. There are more people to interact with and the campus is more vibrant, but at the same time it's harder to do stuff like have all the TAs over. (We're not all in the same compound anymore.) My job is a lot more fun this year, because we're getting more students in the ICC. On a personal level, I think we've got some pretty awesome new people here, although I deeply miss the coworkers who've gone back to the States. From the students' perspective, I think this year is much better: there are more electives, more student clubs, etc.


4. Easiest to hardest: ASL, Spanish, Koine Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Arabic. (Not coincidentally, this is also their closeness-to-English ranking, isn't it.) Usefulness is harder to gauge. Spanish, for example, was abundantly useful in California, useful in Pittsburgh only because its rarity ensured I was always the only employee who could talk to Spanish-speaking clients, and likely to be useless for my continuing education. Koine Greek (my favorite of the bunch) has been completely useless in my life so far, but I expect it'll be more useful in grad school. And so on. Overall, I'd say that having learned another language at all -- regardless of the language -- has been completely necessary to my job this year.


5. Sneaky!! :-) At this point I'm planning to apply to Harvard, Chicago and UC Santa Barbara; by this time next year I'll probably have a few more options picked out. When we move back, we'll have to swing by Pittsburgh to pack up our stuff, and then move to wherever I'm going to school!