serendipti's Diaryland
Diary
8:15 p.m. - Monday, Jul. 11, 2005
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
my assignment: why amy is unique
i just read megan's entry and laughed out loud and remembered why I insist that she has a column in a newspaper that I get to read to my toast and OJ every morning. She is the shit. Speaking of people who are the shit, I am specifically going to post a piece I wrote earlier today. It was a sit and write piece, not edited or anything, but I just let it flow. Amy has to write a piece for her application for residency, and one part is 750 words on why she is unique. I know, i know, can we just imagine the unique individual who conjured this up from the imaginative recesses of thier mind?
So I told Amy that I would write a piece on why she is unique, and then she could only see it once she has written her piece (as sort of an incentive to get her to write in that vein.) So amy, if this is you and you have not written your piece: STOP READING. FOR REAL. STOP. YOU ARE NOW OFFICIALLY A CHEATER. Anyway, here is the email I am going to send her once she sends me her piece (which hopefully she will not have read because she stopped reading a few lines ago!) why amy rodriguez is unique:
as amy's friend and number one fan, being limited to 750 words will be the greatest challenge I have faced since being trapped in a cage with a rabid cheetah back in '93.
Amy Rodriguez is a doer. That is one of her most salient attributes. She is an active person and when one thinks of her, it is in the context of a verb.......the Arod fishing, trekking, climbing, skiing, kayaking, lifting, moving, going, doing.....so whether we are talking about lifting weights or lifting boxes to help the seventh person she has helped this month move, or fishing for albacore (i had to think of a fish name, amy, I don't know many fish names, and forgive me if albacore is on some endangered list, but it is what i came up with) or fishing for one more way to make the life of those around her rife with movement and flow....Amy Rodriguez is a doer.
But maybe that can be said about a lot of people, in life, I guess. I think many could describe "governor" schwarzenegger as a doer. But where Amy and Arnie diverge is where her doer status is coupled with another one of the strongest attributes of her personality.....Amy is a thinker. Yes, much like the statue bent forward, head propped by curled fist. She is an analyzer, a cogitater, brain-ransacker, a connection-maker. Amy is not the kind of doer that goes forth blithely through life, doing and doing and doing as people and events whizz past her in a flash. She is the kind of doer that will go to Galveston to do a month of Burn at the Shriners Children's hospital, and try and explain what she is seeing by drawing a parallel to the book she had me read by Ann Patchett, which describes the effects of the tissue expander on her friend's face. And so out of this beautiful duality of thinker and doer comes a human being whose actions in life stem not from the thoughtless desire for flow or movement, but from a mind whose actions come from deliberation, and thus are deliberate. And so it is Sunday and she is in a town where she knows nobody, but after a couple of phone calls to make sure she is not getting ripped off, she buys a surfboard and goes out surfing in a town where she knows nobody. There is an undeniable fierceness to her independence, an unmistakable love of expressing her autonomy, a clear manifestation of the boldness of her spirit in the most natural of her actions. That Amy is a natural adventurer and thrill seeker, in this day and age of repeated use of anti-bacterial hand sanitizing gel in any given 2 hour period, in a time where forgetting your water bottle constitutes an emergency.....Amy is nothing, if not unique.
When I think Amy, I think verb. One of the verbs is always travel. Whether it is to practice medicine in Nepal or Bolivia, trips that, of course, knowing Amy, have to coincide with monarchial or governmental overthrow.....it is never a dull moment when you know Amy. So you may not know where Burkina Faso is, but you can bet that Amy has been there. And these trips are never the sort of trips that most of the people we know take.....lounging by the pool, umbrella in drink sort of trips....no, no, these are trekking in the mountain, kayakking in the river sorts of trips. And with each trip come new characters, people who are invariably drawn to her intrinsic generosity and sensitivity. It is Amy who people open up to. Amy who is friends with the Nepalese tour guide who tells her about his tough time adjusting to a new country, a new marriage, a new child. It is Amy who gets the call from Ecuador about a friend's friend who is in jail, and guess who is the one who posts bail? It is Amy who makes the extra set of keys and hands them off, who makes the trip to the airport, who is the one that everyone knows will come through, even at a personal cost.
these things are not small things. It is the sum of each of her actions that speak to her character, her integrity, and the way she moves through the world, with a consciuosness of word and action. She is not one to stomach an inconsistency in principles, least of all her own. And so she struggles to decide on a 'quit date' for seafood, because she cannot reconcile her self-realized vegetarian beliefs with this one exception (and people who were not brought up vegetarian, in my books, ALWAYS get maddest of mad respect)......and if she is hard on anyone, she is hard on herself. And if she is guilty of any one thing in life, it is her inability to truly look at herself and celebrate herself in all her radiance of spirit.
Amy Rodriguez is the person that people think of when they are in trouble. The person you turn to when you are in dire need. She is the one phone call you make from jail. And this, more than anything, is why I view her not simply as a person, but as a blessing.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
previous - next
|
|
|
|
|
|