Community Conversations

These conversations are probably definitely only amusing to me, but these gems crop up too frequently for me to not document somewhere. Most of them occur in the context of my super classy and wonderful community, hence the incredibly cryptic title. {quick, go find your decoder ring! make haste, make haste!*}

***

My friend and pastor recently mentioned that upon seeing that people are dressed waaaay down on Sundays, new people at our church frequently claim
"This is just like my church back in Alabama!"
His response? (Every time) 
{Big smile} "F#ck yeah, Jesus!"

We're a classy, classy bunch.

***

We've been gathering every day during Lent from 7-8 in the a.m. to pray. Usually we start with twenty minutes of silence to pray or meditate or to sometimes drift off to sleep. what? Around the third or fourth day of this, I suddenly turned into a twelve year-old girl and was overcome with an inexplicable and uncontrollable case of the giggles. And then it became A Thing. As in, every morning I disrupt everyone's peaceful twenty minutes of silence with my twenty minutes of stifled laughter. Today was particularly bad. After about four failed attempts at being silent, my friend Eric interrupted with this goldmine 

Eric: Just out of curiosity, are you laughing at the pipes banging?
Chey: Nope. I'm actually not laughing about anything even remotely funny.
Eric: Okay  l o n g  p a u s e  because I always imagine cockroaches banging on the pipes like they are playing a giant xylophone.

At that point, pretty much all hope of taking our silent time even slightly seriously was lost. And for once that was not my fault. 

I will now never not think of that when I hear pipes making a racket in old buildings.

***

I was looking at an apartment** with a few of my friends. We were pretty excited about it because some of our other friends live on the third floor of this particular house. Our neighborhood consists largely of old triple-decker victorian homes in which more or less each floor is a separate apartment. In our neighborhood, there are two houses that our community have completely taken over. A commune, if you will. only less hippie-ish? maybe not. Basically they are entirely leased out by people in our community. Community living at its finest. Anyways. We were pretty stoked about potentially starting another one. Let's see how many more times I can use the word "community" in one paragraph. 

Riah: Oh, I think we actually met you before! At Scout's*** first birthday party!

Landlord (who happens to live on the first floor): Oh, I seem to remember something about walking outside and being really confused by a dog piñata. 

Ash: Haha, yeah, we're pretty excited to live in community like this. There are two other houses around here where we've sort of taken over.

Sarah: Communes, basically.

Landlord: p a u s e Just no animal sacrifices in the kitchen.

Noted. We'll be sure to perform those outside. 

I love these people.

C


*A la Mr. Collins. If you do not understand that reference, I don't know that we can be friends anymore. 
** There is actually a decent chance that I will not be living here and instead will be living overseas for a year. Exclamation points!! Future plans! Excitement! That I can't quite talk about here yet because internet jinxing is a real thing.
***Scout the cat. Any reason for a party around here.