Odds and ends, what’s been happening…

Wow, so much has happened in 15 days!

First of all, I want to sincerely thank everyone who responded to the church post. I didn’t respond right away because I wanted to think about everyone’s answers, but I do definitely appreciate them. I read them all closely, followed all links, and spent a lot of time pondering them.(I also want to especially appreciate Frank Sousa for UPSing me 2 books that I can’t wait to read: The Holy Bible and Answers To Tough Questions.)I talked to some friends outside of the I.M. world about this, too, and am still very fascinated by it – I guess it’s just a topic that’ll never have a clear answer.

In Other News…

If you’re following me on Twitter you already know this, but I decided not to go to Europe. It was really weird, but everything surrounding that trip was going wrong. I was getting incredibly stressed (which is not a word I typically feel) and bad thing after bad thing kept happening.

I’d driven to Philly from L.A. so my sister could take over my car, and the insurance company was saying she wasn’t allowed to drive it. I couldn’t find important things that I needed, people on CouchSurfing weren’t getting back to me, etc. The final straw was when I ordered an international cell phone. It came 2 days before I was supposed to leave and was missing the SIM card. When I called to ask about it, everything just surfaced up and I ended up bawling on the phone to the poor lady who answered.

There were 2 people I wanted to talk about the situation to – Jaime and Brian. Not surprisingly, when I first called Jaime, she picked up and then the line broke up as soon as she said “Hello?”. (I’m telling you, EVERYTHING was going horribly.) When I finally talked to her an hour or so later, she gave me awesome advice – to go to my “centering place” (which was a bookstore) to calm down and think about things.(When I got there I read an awesome book by Sonia Choquette – “Love Yourself, Live Your Spirit” – but that’s another blog post :)).I still didn’t know what to do but I did feel a ZILLION times calmer. I got a hold of Brian, and…

He Offered Me Quite The Deal!

I told him how I felt – that I didn’t know if I should go to Europe or just stay in Philly and head to Australia in January.

The first thing he said was that he’d be angry with me if I stayed at home. He said he’s never been angry with me (and we’ve gotten in some quite heated battles), but he’d really be mad if I let myself stay home and not explore like I wanted to.

He immediately told me right after that Rio De Janeiro was an option. He has an amazing 2 bedroom penthouse with an unoccupied bedroom that he’s been living in for 10 months.

I decided to go (I actually got here this morning!), and once I did, good things started happening again. The insurance company said my sister could take over the car, amazing emails were pouring in, unexpected money to my PayPal account, etc.It definitely feels much more right over here, and it’s awesome to be hanging out with Brian. I think it’s going to be a phenomenal thing and feel ridiculously blessed to have been able to live with 2 of my best friends. I’m also really looking forward to learning Portugese!

It Kind Of Sucks Though…

…To be in a country where you don’t know the language. Some people said since I know Spanish I’d be okay in Brazil, but that definitely hasn’t been the case. Portugese and Spanish have some cognates, but they say everything with a different accent here. It’s kind of like, “so close, yet so far”. I have no fear that I’ll pick it up, it’s just hard to feel ignorant.

(Also, “It Kind Of Sucks” makes a great headline. :))

On the plus side, this all makes for AWESOME people-watching. They say 60-90% of all communication is via body language, and since that’s all I can observe, I’m very much appreciating that.

(The beach is going to be amazing too. :))

I guess that’s it for now. There’s a few more things I want to post about soon… things that have been on my mind bigtime lately (how I feel about marketing, abortion, and a slew of other things), so I’ll try to post about them soon.