Coming to you live from the belly of the beast!

So I'm finally doing it: writing the fabled blog post on just exactly where on earth I've been and what I've been doing for the last 53 days (egad that's longer than it seemed). The fabled travel post is fabled no more.

I'm sitting at the office after a potluck and chapel service in the conference room. The speaker this week was Brian McLaren who scored extra brownie points with me by featuring St Francis heavily in the sermon. He's said to be Mr 'Emerging Church' which is a movement for postmodern Christianity as a way of moving particularly Western Protestantism forward. It aims to keep the best of traditional Protestantism but negotiate where possible and allow multiple interpretations on non-core issues as a way of broadening and consolidating the church and avoiding irrelevant arguments and dissension. At least that's what I think it is.

Anyway I spent a week in San Francisco, discovered the Native American (re)invasion of Alcatraz island, spent a full day cycling across Golden Gate bridge and back and then through Golden Gate Park and back through the Haight-Ashbury hippie district (involving a stop to get over cramps in my legs from all the cycling), drank a four-shot 'Black Velvet' espresso in the Haight-Ashbury and spent the rest of the day in a caffeine-fueled daze, drank a cider in the Vesuvio and crossed Jack Kerouac Alley to see City Lights bookstore both famous Beat hangouts and was regaled by Pommy backpackers about their night hanging out with a bar-owner who gave them free drinks, drove them around in his car (a lookalike of Travolta's in Pulp Fiction) offered them crack and weed, showed them his gun collection and his 1000 rounds of hollow-tipped ammunition and then asked them to teach him rugby union. So that was interesting.

Anyway, DC. I haven't seen so much of DC since I've been being-welcomed and then working since I got here. When the parents showed up we did a few of the tourist spots, Lincoln Memorial, Whitehouse, Georgetown etc etc.

Rashida, one of the other interns, dragged me and another intern along to a gospel choir concert/service at Howard, the African-American university and that was definitely an experience - imagine a church service with the volume at 11, driving funky rhythms to the music and bombastic energy to everything from the announcements to the service. As Roland would say, they really are like they seem on TV (he says this is true of all Americans though).

Earlier on I went to the big anti-war protest in the Ellipse and then outside the Whitehouse (the first protest to get so close in some time) and another 100,000 to 300,000 people showed up too (depending on who you listen to). The downside of being part of a huge example of democracy in action was mind-numbing delays whenever the march bottlenecked though. One of the sponsors of the rally was a controversial protest group called ANSWER and as I found out afterwards their rallies are notoriously long because they are a coalition of special interest groups and every single group has to get two minutes with their speaker on the stage and their chance to hijack the rally over to their cause - so that was definitely disappointing. But it was worth going and good to see the amazing range of groups involved especially the Christian ones like Pax Christi (Catholic), Quakers, Mennonites and others.

So I made a list of the things I do here at Sojourners the other day when I was reviewing my workload with my supervisor, and here it is:

• Convert the magazine from Word docs and magazine sized images to stuff suitable for the website.


• Cannibalize old magazine articles for a sermon preparation resource we distribute called Preaching The Word.


• Write two to three short (~150 words) pieces for the news briefs section of the magazine, Between The Lines (aka BTL).


• Do minor edits to the website, like one day I'll update the staff page so I and eleven other interns are on it.


• Update our mailing lists (one's 190,000 addresses) for users not technically literate enough to do it themselves.


• Scan the 40 or so magazine and 20 or so newsletters we get sent each week for BTL stories not to mention the 300 emailed press releases and 20 faxes.


• Spend Friday morning at a seminar of all the interns discussing faith and politics issues, doing book reviews, talking over how things are working out or doing what Steve calls 'right-brain stuff' like Enneagram personality descriptions.


• Two half-days a month (yes, weird, I know) we do a Personal Enrichment Project of our own choosing. I'm planning to try to spend the time writing - mostly articles which I'll try to submit to a variety of publications - but really just any kind of writing. It's something I want to focus on this year.


• Attending editorial meetings where we decide on the magazine cover and the headline and sub-heading to go with it - and sometimes just say a bunch of silly stuff to make each other laugh instead of doing that - and try to 'slot' articles for upcoming issues.


• Meet with my supervisor where I complain about how much work I have to do and how noisy my room is and she promises to get some volunteers in to do my work for me and talk to the office manager about getting me a door.


• Handle sundry tech support related emails, phonecalls and handle-scribbled notes. Seriously, there's a hand written letter stuck to my wall from a subscriber who wanted to be added to our email list... I'm waiting for someone to send a request for some database contents by carrier pidgeon.


• Slog through the ~50 office emails people spam around each day. As a result I have grand plans to...


• Propose sundry technological advances that could make our lives easier.

So that's my job. Let us never speak of it again.

I've been on the go since I hit DC with welcomes, seminars, parties, dinners, services, meetings, Work, house dinners (Terracites will recall these with amusement), house meetings (Mission-housing-ites will not recall these at all) and even a spot of volunteering. Before I left I had the vain notion that I'd have acres of time to devote to brushing-up on my guitar, practicing my writing, reading and thinking about politics and faith and so on. All this because of course I DON'T HAVE A COMPUTER (at home) so what else was I going to be doing? Ah, what a quaint antipodean delusion.

Anyway, if you're like me you find most travel emails interminably boring - Lachlan assured me of this before I left hence I had to blog it (you never know, he might like travel blog posts) - so I'll leave any further remarks for a future post. Except to add a little section I've shamelessly plaigiarised from Mike Aitken (you may have heard him reporting for a little radio station we like to call TRIPLE J)...

Fun Facts

• American toilets have handles, not buttons, and instead of churning when you flush and emptying they start half full, empty and then refill.


• An Americano coffee is an espresso with hot water added after its made. It is also repellent.


• Bagels are standard breakfast food in the US, as common as toast.


• Most of America is falling-down, even roads in tourist areas are as likely as not to be full of pot-holes and otherwise run-down.


• American power points have no on-off switch


• Three/Four-shot 'large' coffees are served in most US cafes, they come in milkshake like containers and have finally managed to introduce me to the joys of a coffee buzz.


• Religious diversity is alive and well in the US. I've probably been to more varied religious services since I got here than in my whole time in Aus: community churches modeled on Latin American base communities, Lutherans, high Presbyterians, Mennonites, Quakers, Baptists, 'Gospel'/Black Baptists and many more. However, Roland has apparently hit the jackpot, Pittsburg where he's studying is possible the most religiously diverse place in the country if not the Western world.


• Americans are much more politically involved than Australians, either by party or by issue, they wear T-shirts, stick stickers on their cars, attend protests and counter-protests and just generally let their opinion be known on everything and anything. This seems to stem from a college system that places more emphasis on expressing an opinion well in group discussion than actually being right.

So there you go. Wish me luck, or providence at least.