#always so funny weird to me to see things about the chapel or the de menils bc theyre just such hometown things to me

[azariaspace]

My RA Application Essays

Nobody wants to read these?  Good.  Here they are anyway.  It’s been at least two months since I first thought about this and I can’t let the idea go.  It’s been two weeks since word of my continued-resident status, and I’m still thinking about it.  I’ve accepted my fate but my life now is geared towards being one as a junior.  So I’m flinging these into the void for...  I dunno why.

Why do you want to be a Resident Assistant? (200-400 words) Calvin has grown to become home for me, and I want to give that to others.

I love authentic community.  It's something I've cherished my whole life, and I want to instill that love in others.  I define authenticity as honesty coupled with vulnerability, and genuinely believe it's the greatest gift we can give to each other as people.  Authenticity allows us to see who we truly are as people by being honest with ourselves and others, and allows us to form true, genuine relationships with each other.  In addition, people are complex.  They're funny, weird, and ridiculous, especially young adults who are learning to be independent, and nobody gets to see that transformation and that funny, weird, ridiculous reality more than an R.A.

In addition, my R.A. in particular has helped me a lot.  She's walked with me through some difficult situations and supported me through some really cool things that I've been fortunate enough to experience.  [She] is such a strong support for individual members of our floor and the community at large, and I'd love to be able to offer that support for a floor myself one day.

Finally, I want to bring a new look at inclusion to the way a lot of floors operate.  Inclusion is often pictured as simply physically bringing members together and making sure everyone shows up to a certain number of events.  But I think inclusion relates back to authentic community.  It's not enough to personally invite people to floor events instead of just sending mass emails, though the personal connection is definitely a part of it.  I think inclusion involves really knowing who each resident is and what makes them unique, embracing their similarities and differences, and celebrating them as individuals and as a community.  Inclusion is often a joyous time, and can look like having international students teach the floor how to cook dinners from their home countries or celebrating residents’ first snows, but it also can involve difficult conversations about race, gender and sexuality, and disability, among other things.  Inclusion can be hard, but it's worth it, because it's part of truly knowing and being known.  It's part of community.  It's part of living wholeheartedly, and it excites me.

Please describe 2-3 personal traits do you possess that will help you be successful as a Resident Assistant. (200-400 words) The first trait I possess that would help me be a successful R.A. is my flexibility.  I’ve always been able to adapt to changing circumstances fairly easily, but working on the set construction crew in Calvin Theatre Company this past semester really helped me hone this skill.  In the scene shop, you have to do different things each day, from cutting wood with power saws to rigging lights to designing a lighter version of a certain prop, and everything in between.  While I imagine being an R.A. would involve a lot less sawdust, no two days in Residence Life are the same.  An R.A. has to be ready for any circumstance, from an impromptu floor event to a crisis, and a good R.A. would be able to navigate the dynamic landscape of a floor, and the dorm at large, with a cool head and grace.

The second and third traits I possess that would help me be a successful R.A. are intertwined.  They're the traits of being passionate and being committed.  I believe passion and commitment are two sides of the same coin.  If I'm passionate about something, then I'm committed to seeing it through, from its conception to its fruition.  If I'm committed to something, then the passion — if it didn't exist at the beginning — will develop as I work on it.  Basically, if I want to see something happen, then I will make sure it happens or it gets to the people who will make it happen.  If I've been tasked with making something happen, then I will grow to love it as if it was my own idea while still recognizing the unique qualities that whoever thought of it brought to the table.  This passion and commitment extends to coursework, to ideas for floor events, and to finding ways to make Calvin a more welcoming place for all of its students.

What practical strategies do you implement to keep your life organized and follow through on tasks? (100-250 words) I use three tools to keep myself organized and ensure I follow through on tasks.  The first is a Google calendar, my primary method to track time commitments — like classes.  Whenever I find out about an event, I'll place here.  If it just happens once, I'll indicate that, but I can also plug in recurring events.  I also indicate time for studying and free time, so I have a full understanding of what my day looks like.  Finally, it’s color-coded, so I can easily see what I have going on at a glance.

Secondly, I use a physical calendar.  While I use the Google calendar to only see one week at a time, this calendar shows me a whole month.  On this calendar, I write down all my big assignments, such as papers, as well as things like sporting events.  This calendar helps me get an overview of what my month looks like and helps me budget my studying and free time wisely.

Finally, I have a to-do list on my phone.  There’s a section to keep track of things I need to do throughout the week, like working on a paper, and a breakdown of everything — both tasks and events — that I need to do on each day.  It’s a very specific combination of the two calendars that takes the items from both and combines them in one space.

Taken as a whole, this system helps me stay organized and on top of all my commitments.

In addition to dorm or KE [apartment] worship times and Bible studies, please explain how your personal Christian faith would be demonstrated in your work as an RA. (200-400 words) I hope that my faith is demonstrated in everything I do, even now.  I imagine many of the ways my faith would be demonstrated as an R.A. would be the same as now.  I attend chapel and LOFT [the weekly not-church service put on by Campus ministries], and invite people from my floor to come with me, go to church on Sundays and talk with my floor-mates about our different church experiences each week, pray for people when they ask and sometimes volunteer that service, and maintain my own personal relationship with God through prayer and devotions.

In addition, there are some things that I would do for my floor as an R.A.  Not all of these ideas are mine, so I’ll try to credit their authors.  The first comes from [my brother] R.A.  He noticed that, Biblically, people made great sacrifices for and highly prioritized prayer.  As such, he gets up at three in the morning and wanders up and down his hall, praying for his residents.  He sacrifices some of his sleep for his residents, and even if none of them are aware, it’s still strengthening his floor.  I want to do that.

The second idea is a collaboration between my R.A. and myself.  [My R.A.] started a Community Development Team.  After our first meeting, she told me her ideas for praying for the floor.  She mentioned [our brother R.A.’s] prayer walks, and her attempts to do the same every week but doesn’t always succeed.  I mentioned that we as a team could take turns doing it each week, and she threw out the idea that we could have one night of praying for the dorm, where we each have an hour-long shift with a partner.  If I take the idea of the Community Development Team with me (which I plan on), I’d want them to do something similar.  If I don’t, I’d still want to bring the night of prayer in some capacity.

The final idea comes from a previous [dorm] Barnabas [the spiritual leader of a floor].  It’s the idea of having a time to de-stress and plug into the Word in the basement.  The way they did it last year was by, on Saturdays, having coloring pages with Scripture passages on them and worship music, and anyone from the dorm could come and color.  I think that’s a really cool way to build community throughout the whole dorm and strengthen people’s faith in subtle ways.

In both challenging ways and fun ways, what do you believe is the role of an RA in bringing about Calvin's vision for community in the residence halls? Calvin’s mission is to equip students to think deeply, act justly, and live wholeheartedly as Christ’s agents of renewal in the world.  All staff are charged with facilitating this goal, and R.A.s are in the unique position of being both students — the people being equipped — and staff — the people equipping others.

Calvin wants its students to thrive, and it wants its students to thrive together.  An R.A.’s job is to create an environment on their floor where community can happen.

On the one hand, that involves challenges.  An R.A. has to enforce policy, because a community needs rules and boundaries in order to function.  From gently reminding residents to keep it quiet to calling out and dealing with far more serious breaches of the Calvin Student Conduct Code, an R.A. has to be capable of and willing to deal with every violation.  In addition, an R.A. must abide by all the standards — they must hold themselves to an even higher standard than their residents.

On the other hand, bringing about community is a fun task.  It involves eating with people, planning and executing events with people, having planned and spontaneous conversations about everything from music to life stories.  Community can involve going to your residents’ events, showing up when one of your residents has desk duty, and singing “Happy Birthday” to your residents as loudly and as obnoxiously as possible in the dining hall.

Community involves living life together, and life is often messy, but it’s also so much fun.  Life is like a painting — the palette sometimes looks like a wreck, but the final product is beautiful.

Do you have any reservations or concerns about being placed in a particular hall or with another particular RA candidate?   Also, list any RA candidates you are dating or have dated. I’m nonbinary.  That means that I’m not a guy or a girl.  I’m a little hesitant about being placed in a traditional residence hall, or really anywhere that is divided by the gender binary, because I have no place in that system.  I’m outside of it completely.  But I know I’ll only be a sophomore next year, so if I am chosen to be an R.A., it’s extraordinarily unlikely that I’d be chosen to be an R.A. for [upperclass housing] (and, in fact, I wouldn’t want to be an R.A. for [the apartments] if I had other options, and I would be the first to admit that it would be weird for me to be an R.A. in [upperclass-only dorms]).  I spoke to my R.D. about what it would look like to be a nonbinary R.A., and she said that it would probably be the best fit for me to be somewhere in [the living-learning communities where the wings are connected by a shared lobby space on each floor, unlike other halls], as gender is de-emphasized.  But honestly, I just really need a staff that is not only supportive in general, but actively supportive of the LGBTQ+ community and affirming of my legitimacy as a leader and a resident wherever I live.  It’s going to be a little weird no matter where I wind up, assuming I wind up an R.A.  But weird isn’t necessarily bad.  I’m excited for the opportunity to grow with my (as of now theoretical, but hopefully real) staff and my residents, just as I’ve grown with my floor this semester and will continue to do so throughout this year.  In addition, I have some health complications that might make being on [a specific living-learning floor] challenging, with the emphasis on outdoor activities.  (These would in no way impact my work as an R.A. on any floor; rather, they would impact my ability to be a participant of [that floor] under any circumstances, R.A. or resident.) I have not dated any potential R.A. candidates in the past and am not doing so now.

That’s that. That’s what they saw on the essay front.  I only edited this to take away names and locations, and to clarify what some terms meant for people who don’t go to Calvin.  The grammar is as-is, meaning that there’s something I picked up on that I should’ve changed.  But we’ll see.  We’ll see if anybody else wants to edit and has any thoughts.  Because I’ll be damned if it slips away from me again.

#ra ndom thoughts #so much for it being a dead tag

[shewpthewewp]

State of the Shewp

Haven’t done one of these for a while.  But I’m up late and feeling ramble-y, so here we go!  We’re gonna get weird. Maybe.  Depending on what you consider weird.

Starting off easy with some reading recs.

Oathbringer, the third book in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive dropped earlier this month.  It’s the usual Sanderson experience, which means I loved every word of it.  I won’t talk too much about it because we’re already nearly 3,000 pages into the series BEFORE this book and it adds another ~1400, so I can’t really do it justice in a few paragraphs.  If you want to get into Brandon’s works (specifically, the books in the Cosmere setting) I would start with Warbreaker.  

The other thing I wanted to mention regarding Cosmere stuff is that reading this  has left me very hungry for a Cosmere-setting tabletop game.  I played in a Mistborn game in college and I’d be all over something set on Roshar (or Scadrial, or Sel, or... anywhere really).  Also really wanting to cosplay something Cosmere-related.  Anastasia suggested Vin & Elend, which I think we could pull off.  I’ll toss it into the ‘I will probably never do this because it would take effort’ pile, but you never know!

The sequel to WORM is out!  It’s titled WARD.  I haven’t started it yet because I am waiting for a larger backlog to be written (also Oathbringer devoured my reading time.  As a friend told me, she THICC).  I talked a bit about WORM in a previous post, so check that out if you want to know more.

I also discovered the genre of LitRPG recently.  It’s an umbrella term for any fiction that features RPG-like elements - i.e. classes, levels, etc.  It also frequently features isekai-like themes, like modern-world protagonists dropped into a fantasy setting.  Unfortunately, these things also mean that it has an overly-large share of garbage tropes like stupidly overpowered protagonists and blatant wish-fulfillment, but not to a significant degree more than most other types of fiction or fanfiction.  Three pieces of fiction in this genre that I enjoyed the most:

The Wandering Inn (summary from the website) -  An inn is a place to rest, a place to talk and share stories, or a place to find adventures, a starting ground for quests and legends.  In this world, at least. To Erin Solstice, an inn seems like a medieval relic from the past. But here she is, running from Goblins and trying to survive in a world full of monsters and magic. She’d be more excited about all of this if everything wasn’t trying to kill her.  But an inn is what she found, and so that’s what she becomes. An innkeeper who serves drinks to heroes and monsters – Actually, mostly monsters. But it’s a living, right?  This is the story of the Wandering Inn.

This story seems to have been written specifically to go against the grain of some of the negative tropes I mentioned before.  A world full of classes and levels, and our protagonist ends up as an Innkeeper. The first couple chapters are a bit rough, but I think the author finds their stride pretty quickly after that and things pick up across book 1.  Yes, book ONE.  There are two full-length, complete books in this series and a third is well underway.  Check it out!

Worth the Candle (summary from the website) -  From the age of nine, Juniper Smith began filling notebooks with his worlds, at first places of fantastical imagination, but later with each as an expression of some theme or idea that momentarily grabbed his interest. Over the course of eight years, he shared these worlds with his friends through twice-weekly sessions of tabletop gaming. Now at the age of seventeen, he finds himself in Aerb, a world that appears to be an amalgam of those many notebooks, stuck trying to find the answers to why he's there and what this world is trying to say. The most terrifying answer might be that this world is an expression of the person he was back on Earth.

I have absolutely loved this so far.  The story is frequently intermixed with flashbacks to the protagonists tabletop sessions (where he GM’d) and it talks a lot about what makes a good character and how to run a game.  The only negative for me is that it’s incomplete and the author updates sporadically (but when they do update, they tend to post quite a bit).  It is broken up into several ‘books’ that are mostly completed plot arcs, but unlike the Wandering Inn I think this is still very, VERY early on in its overall length (if I had to guess).

Finally, I’m a Spider, So What? is a translated web serial or light novel (I’m honestly not 100% sure which).  It’s also slowly being converted into a manga, I think?  Either way, the premise is that a class of students gets murder-blasted into another dimension by an evil demon lord.  Most of the class ends up as humans with bright futures and mysterious powers, but one ends up as a spider in the depths of one of the most dangerous dungeons on the planet.  Funny and very engaging, though the translation threw me for a loop sometimes.  It’s also not fully translated and it seems like a bunch of different people are all translating it and are are different parts.  A less serious suggestion than my previous two, but enjoyable nonetheless.  

Moving on to slightly more personal stuff!  Ooooooo weird ooooooo!

Still engaged to Anastasia!  Current plan is to get married in Hell, Michigan in late 2018.  They have cute little invitations that say “A marriage that starts in Hell can only go up!” (or something like that).  It will be a very small event, I think - the ‘chapel’ there can hold maybe 15 people, counting us and the officiant, so that’s pretty much going to be only family.  We’re planning to have a larger reception/party afterwards instead.

Getting close to finishing the second RPG I am GM’ing.  It’s an original superhero setting run in the FATE system.  I lost steam for a while pretty close to the end and started it back up recently, and it’s a relief to do honestly. I missed the characters, the story, the players.  Overall I have really enjoyed my time GMing but I do find it much more stressful than playing.  I think part of the reason I got a bit burnt out at first was because I was trying to run two games and play in at least two others.  I think a good rule of thumb (for me at least) is that running one game takes about the same mental effort/time/etc. as playing in 2-3 others, but maybe it’s just because I’m still (relatively) inexperienced at it.

Still working at the same place (the lava factory).  I asked for a raise recently and was very embarrassed to find out that I had actually gotten a pretty good one a few months ago and never noticed.  In my defense, HR never told me either, but I still should have seen it on my bank statements... Also, starting in January I’ll get THREE WHOLE WEEKS of vacation.  Not sure what to do with that much!

Still seeing a therapist.  Not entirely sure it’s helping me, but I think being open about that is helpful not only to me personally but also just in general to help de-stigmatize therapy and mental health in general (something I’ve always kind of struggled with).

Got a vasectomy.  I kind of want to be a bit more open about it - it would be a big deal if Anastasia and I were going to have a kid and we’d be totally ok with sharing that, so making a permanent decision to NOT have kids should be just as important, right? - but on the other hand it feels like it’s not their business and I feel like most people probably don’t want to hear about my balls.  Not that I’m keeping it a secret or anything either.  Also, after being told many, MANY times that “I’ll change my mind and want kids some day” I kind of want to be able to shoot them down.  Fortunately that didn’t come up at all during Thanksgiving and I wouldn’t have actually been rude like that anyway, but the temptation is there...

Actually taking some decently strong painkillers right now (sorry if I’m  a bit incoherent), since I started getting super sore this evening (and it’s only kind of Anastasia’s fault ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)) .  All the external sutures have healed, but the internal stuff still has a way to go.  They cut, cauterize, tie-off and then stitch together the internal bits, so those will take longer to heal.  

If you’re a guy interested in permanent birth control or a lady who’s just plain curious, I’d be more than happy to answer any questions you have!

Not much else going on.  I move from thing to thing and binge - FFXIV for a while, then DOOM, then Overwatch, currently WoW, maybe XCOM next, with books and writing and tabletop gaming sprinkled in between.

That’s all the important stuff for now, I think.  I’m honestly kind of boring.

#shewp rambles #state of the shewp #personal