bigbruise

well how about you get right the first time

dude it's fixed ok

haha spoiler fail

good

Your stupid thread is ruined. EDIT: OP's thread intention was not stupid. just a question, but its stupid now. so fuck it

Wednesday, February 22, 2012 I suppose it is time. Since October 1. Hum. Well, I briefly dated/flinged--flung?--a girl named Belle. Basically the first date went fantastic, which introduced super high expectations, that were later not met. It's entirely possible they were impossible to meet. Belle and I are still friends, though it took a couple months. In the last couple days in Rwanda, we headed back toward the airport. On the way, we visited some orphans and widows, doing missionary work like a cop eats a doughnut. The woman my group met with was 51 years old and had an amazing, tragic story. Her husband was a fisherman and died drowning when she was in her early twenties. By then she had two kids, but her parents and parents-in-law disowned her. She couldn't afford the house she was living in, and had no where to go, so she lived, quite literally, under a mat for ten years. The neighbors took pity on her kids some nights and gave them food, some of which they smuggled in their shirts, so that's how the woman survived. There was something about her owning the house they'd lived in, but not the land it was on, and the man who owned it refused to part with it. He was planning on leveling the house, but since it was government-built, it was illegal. When we met with her, she was in the process of getting the government to step in. My favorite part was that she let us take the bench in her house, and pulled down some mats for herself. One of the mats, when unrolled, revealed a giant spider. I pointed it out, expecting her to whack it with a shoe, or ask me to. Instead, she slapped it, bare-palmed, it curled up, and she brushed it aside. My sister would have run to Uganda at the sight of that spider. The day before we left the country, we had a one-day "retreat" for the World Relief staff. It was based around the five or six sections of the Lord's Prayer. We put out large sheets of paper with the section name at the top, then went around and wrote prayers that fit the section for World Relief and otherwhere. (Otherwhere passes spell check?) It was a fairly powerful experience. Afterward, it began to rain pretty hard. I walked out into it, getting soaked. The Rwandans thought I was crazy, which amused my team and me. The day after we got back from Rwanda, I had tickets with my Microsoft team and Swood to see the Seahawks. We were to meet at a bar in Seattle, but I managed to leave my wallet in my bags, still packed, at home, and my 16-year-old face couldn't convince them I was 24. Our tickets were for seats literally the furthest from the field, the nosebleeds of the nosebleeds. We lost the game, though had we made the hail-mary field goal we would have won or gone into overtime. I don't remember. When I went back to work, everything had changed. The two remaining members of the original project I was on had left to go work with my old boss. We had one new member, and two or three more on the way. Our code base had moved to an entirely different system. Seriously, I'm gone for two weeks and the team falls apart. Within two weeks, I had to do my commitments. My boss helped me with those, and midway through, I realized, I'm not going to do these. It made setting them a bit easier, when then and there, I decided I was going to quit my job. Obviously the next question was "What now?" The only thing that came to mind was teaching high school math, so I set my course, and looked for colleges. The only college that fit my schedule was SPU. For UW, I'd have to wait until the next October to apply, and start in spring of '13. Western, which would have been my first choice, had no Seattle satellite campus, and I don't want to leave my church. When I talked to HR about leaving Microsoft, she recommended CityU, but my sister is there. A few weeks later, at one of my one-on-ones with my boss, he told me, as a friend and in no official capacity, that I should start looking for a new job. I started talking to people about my decision, outside of work (and with Athena). My Rwanda trip team (we're still meeting once every two to four weeks as we did pre-trip) was all very supportive, everyone saying I'd make a great teacher. My psychiatrist said she hears people frequently say they want to quit their jobs, and she always tells them to keep them, but in my case, that I should go for it. The only two people I told that weren't thrilled were my mom and Luke's wife--both teachers. My mom didn't want me to drop out of the computer field when she knows that's one of my (if not my) biggest passion, and she's been teaching for 35 years, is burnt out, and angry at what the government is doing to the system right now. Luke's wife is a second or third year teacher, and at the time, had been having a very rough year. Both of them are junior high teachers, whereas I want to teach high school. I gave my two weeks' notice two weeks before Thanksgiving. My boss gave me the best compliment he could have: "Oh, I expected you to say you were going to Google or Amazon." My last day could have been the Wednesday before, but Microsoft has a long standing tradition of a farewell lunch, and I figured that everyone would be out of town, but be back by Monday, so that was my last day. Those two weeks were hard because it's Microsoft policy not to tell anyone except HR and your boss if you're actually leaving the company as opposed to changing groups. I spent a lot of it messing around with a MSR gadget, teasing out the peculiarities and attempting to train the guy who would take over my project. I spent a lot of it rereading QCtoo. The rest of my time, I spent talking to Vin on facebook. She is a wonderful person. The person I hadn't told, come Thanksgiving, was my grandpa. I was not really looking forward to that conversation, but I've got a bit more ... I don't even know the word ... than my mom or sister. Hostility isn't quite right; indifference; rebelliousness. Combine those but only take certain portions of each: hostdiffousnessity--the attitude of I'm doing this, and I know it to be right, so you can condemn me or not and it won't bother me either way. It's being a teenage daughter, except right. Anyway, I don't even remember how it came up, but I ended up telling my grandpa I had given my two weeks' notice and was going to become a math teacher. His response was, "Good for you!" My jaw almost dropped. I know he and Grandma knew that I wasn't happy there, in fact they were the first to know, even before me, but they'd always tried to push me toward Amazon or Google. When my mom had told him she wanted to be a teacher, he was disappointed, though my understanding is that it was because of the pay they received. Thanksgiving went well for me. Well in general, except for my cousins and sister, I think, and except for one or two parts, it went well for them too. Good food, good company, an interesting game of Apples to Apples--interesting because some people played it literally, my sister and I didn't, and my two cousins were too young to understand "Woodstock." "I like the bird." But, as the party was breaking up, my grandpa said goodbye to my sister asking, "So, are you on track to graduate?" Since my sister's taken five years to graduate, he's quit supporting her financially (or so I've heard). His concern can be interpreted as aimed at her success rather than her wellbeing. Then, he turned to me and said, "Follow your dreams!" A few moments later, when he was out of earshot, my eldest cousin turned to my sister and said in a bitter tone, "Or, you can just not go to college and have no expectations placed on you at all!" Good ol' family politics, I guess. Still, beats presidential politics. My goodbye lunch was bittersweet, half because I was leaving and would miss the people who attended, half because half the people I wanted to attend were out of town still. I'll admit it's a little selfish to wish the guy were at my lunch rather than at Disneyland with his family. A little. Of the process for leaving, I was most upset that they didn't let me keep my badge as a memento. I was tempted to leave it home that day, but my good nature prevented it. The SPU program officially starts in late July, so I had/have eight months of unemployment. What allows me to do this, and to live while in college without a job, is my recently converted buy-a-house fund, a large sum of money sitting in MSFT stock. Assuming Microsoft doesn't go out of business, or drop its value by half, I should be fine for living for 36-40 months, without taxes. What I don't have is the $17k needed to go to school, so I'm hoping to take out some loans for that. Everything just kind of fell into place for this decision. Last June, I'd planned on moving into a house I wanted to buy by February, so that's when I set as the end of my lease. As "luck" would have it, February is when Bob's roommate is moving out. (It's now one week until the end of my lease and she still hasn't so I need to do some more prodding.) Rent at Bob's place is a couple hundred cheaper per month. It's not huge, but it's some. SPU's program is 14 months, which is about the amount of living money I have, and it's somewhat targeted at people leaving the tech industry who want to teach math and science, which is me. My mom's an alumnus so I think that will help with admissions and tuition a little bit. A dozen other small things have just left me feeling at peace with this decision. It's where God wants me to be right now, and that's enough. It's quite the turn around from where I was a year ago. Christmas was good, mostly because I got to see friends from all over. Vin came back, so we had lunch together at a place in Seattle. Denna, whom I'm renaming once again to Nicci (having reread The Wizards First Rule, and deciding Denna doesn't really fit--and I'm not choosing Nicci because she's Death's Mistress [one should hope not], but because she turns into a dear friend of Richard's, though not his wife) visited, and I spent a day barhopping with her and her sister, brother-in-law, and roommate and his friend. That day, my iPhone was stolen from my car seat through my window. I forget that Seattle is not Redmond. It was really being used as a glorified iPod, since I've been using my Windows Phone for over a year. Still, it would have been nice to keep, sell, or give away. It's missing the chip that makes it act as a phone, so they'll have a little more trouble using it. After the barhopping, I took the ferry over to Port Orchard and hung out at her parents' house, with some of her other Port Orchard friends. I'd been hoping to get a chance to talk to her one on one, but it didn't really happen. At the end, it was me, her dad, and her. Her dad and I played a game of chicken, and I lost. I was a little disappointed, until the next morning when Nicci told me that a lot of wounds between her dad and her were mended and that they were on significantly better terms, which were my prayers while driving on the way home, and had been for months before. God is good. Frank was also in town, and the Quad had a good night of Apples to Apples, and dare I say it, Quelf. They are the only three people with which I could play that game, though perhaps on a different timeline, it'd be interesting with Goose as well. Much blackmail material was generated. A lot of people, people older than me mostly, have suggested that I should become a technology teacher, or assume that's what I'm going for rather than math. It's really hard, and repetitive, to try to explain that there's a difference between computer science and technology, the same as there's a difference between math and accounting. I would love to teach computer science, but first I'd have to find a school that actually teaches it. That might involve working for a few years, and then coming up with my own curriculum. I don't know how good the AP CS curriculum is, but that might also be an option. In order to become a masters student, you have to take the WEST-B and WEST-E tests. WEST stands for Washington Educators Skill Tests. The B is basic--reading, writing, and math. The E is endorsement, so in my case, math. I took the endorsement test first, and it was fun. I got something like a 78, but it's a pass-fail test with a 70% bar. The WEST-B, I got in the high 80s/low 90s for reading and writing, and a 98-ish in math. The scores they give you are on a 100-300 scale, so calculating, I'm guessing, is not a straight percentage. In order to take the WEST-E, you can't bring anything except a calculator, and they give you lockers for your wallet, watch, cell phone, and anything else on your person. I thought I'd be smarter than that, and leave all my stuff in my car. Of course, that stuff included my keys. And my wallet, which normally has my backup car key. I do so love when I outsmart myself. One of the women who worked at the testing center was super gracious, and let me use her AAA membership to unlock my car. She even gave me a little cash for lunch while I waited for them. It's so great to meet people like that. The SPU application was due February 1, but to beef it up a little, I was encouraged to volunteer at a couple schools. I set myself up to volunteer in a math classroom at a high school in Kirkland, but the Monday that week was Martin Luther King Jr Day, and Tuesday through Friday were snow days. The Civil Rights Movement strikes again! The next Tuesday, I went back to Port Orchard and volunteered in my favorite junior high math teacher's classroom on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Wednesday was insane. Because of the snow, the kids were rowdy. Also, because of the days missed, they had pushed back the end of the semester to that Friday, which meant the kids' grades were basically set in stone. No failing student was going to pass, and no high A student was going to get a B. No passing student cares that much about a percentage point or two, nor will they fail. The kids basically had no perceivable incentive for listening. Further, Cedar Heights's schedule is such that on Wednesday, he didn't have a plan period. Last, and probably foremost, he's a little too lenient when it comes to keeping the kids quiet, so when he gives that inch and lets them talk during homework time, they take that mile and don't shut up when he's trying to teach. In one period, he even lost his temper and sent two instigators outside for the rest of the period. At the end of the day, I was wondering if I even wanted to teach anymore. Also, that day, my car was towed because it was parked awkwardly, yet a legal 6" from the curb. Neither that, nor the $216 it cost to get it out of impound, helped. I decided to tough it out and stay Thursday. I wouldn't say it was a night and day difference, but a world of difference, nonetheless. The biggest thing, probably, was that I was ready for it. Second, he had his plan period, and during it, I went to my mom's classroom to see how she teaches. Her classroom management (crowd control) skills are significantly, well, better. It helps that she's been teaching longer, and also that her classes are all of a single grade, and thus she can reinvent her teaching style each year, whereas the math teacher's classes are mixed-grade, and students have expectations year-to-year. Also, apparently, the class I visited third period was her best, most respectful class. I finished that day thinking, "Ok, so this can be done." Still, the experience confirmed in me that I want to teach high school and not junior high. It was good to see all the teachers I grew up with. Having lunch with them was fun, and interesting. I got the feeling that these particular days were hard for most of the teachers, probably due to the end of the semester, and a lot of the time was spent "discussing" student behavior. One interesting comment was that a girl had asked another girl out and was rejected. She ran out of the classroom, hurt, and I think went to the counseling office. The comment was that the girl who asked the girl out was committing sexual harassment. I'm thinking, "Really? How is that different than a guy asking a girl out?" Friday was best of all, despite the Friday mayhem. During third period, I again visited my mom. She was teaching persuasive writing. The entry task was to pick a topic on the board and write a note to their parents trying to convince them of something. The topics were like "push back my bed time" or "let me dye my hair" or "give me more allowance". After a few minutes, my mom collected all the papers then redistributed them to other students. The task then was to write a reply as their parents, countering the arguments. I looked up at the board, read through the topics, and asked, "Do you realize you just put some kids on the wrong side of 'quit smoking'?" It got me a good laugh. I made a few more comments like that, and asked my mom at the end if I had been too disruptive. She said no, that having me had been good. Some Saturday in January, I went to see Goose's play. She played Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. The part fits her almost perfectly; Goose is a nicer person. I went during a matinee because it was the last day, and I know that casts have parties after the last showing, which was that night. I wanted to see her afterward, but I didn't want to impose, having not seen her in a little over a year, and that being when she broke up with me. The play was fantastic, I thought. It was no new epiphany, but Shakespeare was brilliant. It kicked off a bit of a Shakespearen binge for me. I didn't actually do a whole lot--I read a little bit, enough to discover that so much is lost without the acting--but I thought about it a lot. Someday, I want to write a play, a comedy I'm sure. It always comes back to plot, though. It's the same reason I haven't written a book yet, either. The only thing I seem to be able to write about with any degree of skill is myself. Most of the binge happened on facebook, and a friend of mine, a girl I almost went on a date with but then she got married, posted this clip on one of my statuses. I don't normally put youtube in my blog, but this is worth it. Seeing the play also kicked off a bit of me wishing I was with Goose, and I tested the waters, confirming that she is, in fact, dating Benedick. I know that she's not the one for me, but sometimes things are hard to know. Later I told a friend I hadn't talked to since high school, whom I randomly chatted up on facebook, "She'd be the one that got away, if I weren't completely certain there's a girl out there whose better for me." On the 31st, I turned in my SPU application. That's right, a full day before it was due. First time in my life. That afternoon, before turning it in, I had lunch with my old Microsoft pals, one to have lunch with them, and two, to get my letters of recommendation (which were incredibly kind) signed. It was a good thing they were signed, too, because they almost rejected one on account of it not being in an envelope. Alas, I had forgotten to print out the second half of my written thing, which was a list of teaching experiences I'd had, so I emailed that to them that night. All that's left now is an interview on March 10, and then waiting one to two weeks for an application letter. I got the feeling there were 100+ applicants per year, but ALL of the interviews, which are required in person, happen on the 10th between 8 and 4pm. I'm just trying to imagine how 100 people get interviewed in 8 hours without a LOT of interviewers. Anyway, I'm not too worried. If this is what God wants, then I'll be accepted. If not, then since I think God has me where he wants me right now, he must have a plan to get me to where I need to go next. Plus, it's not like I'm not an ideal candidate for the spot anyway. The only thing I could have done better, perhaps, was to double-major in math, but I took enough math to cover all the requirements for the MTMS (masters in teaching math and science) without taking any other courses. As for girls, as there must always be a for girls, I'm a bit put off right now. A day or two ago, I was angsty and frustrated, and way too into it, applying my girl-situation to my identity, where it does not belong. So, once again, I'm at a place where if I find a girl, cool, if not, I have other things to worry about--even though I really don't, having money and no employment. Moving! Right. Good. I was worried I had nothing to worry about. Anyway, all that's really happened since Belle is a few girls I met for lunch, none of which went spectacularly. This latest one, I met in Bellingham, and I thought it went well enough to warrant a second date, but she did not. What was great about it, though, is that it got me to Bellingham where I met with Rufus and Solomon. It'd been entirely too long since I'd talked to either of them, and seeing them again was both wonderful and nurturing to my soul. Solomon is so sincere with his Christ-like love. While talking with Rufus at the VU, I saw a good six or seven other people I knew from back in the day, pastors and friends and Fir Creek counselors. I have no doubt that the reason I ran into this girl on eHarmony was to get me to Bellingham. Besides, who wants to date a girl that enjoyed The Phantom Menace and wanted to see it in 3D? *dog with shifty eyes* The meeting with Solomon spawned off an email thread, largely about girls and what to look for in girls when looking to marry. I've read it a few times now because he is incredibly insightful. If I get his permission, I'd love to post it on my blog, or maybe a link to it. If not, well, sucks to be you, I guess. I guess saying I only met a few girls for lunch isn't fair. For a little while, I was kind of seeing this girl. We met up a few times. She was the first girl I've ever really been on a date with that was (more than a year) older than me, though not much older. I'm not really sure why we dropped out of contact, but I think we both felt we should. I don't know. Looking back through nostalgia-colored lenses, I miss her a little. Or maybe (matter-of-factly) I'm just lonely. The rest of these past months is just keeping busy. I refuse to get bored while unemployed. I've volunteered at my church and also at that Kirkland high school, though they have no place for me in the classroom right now. For my church, they have me doing repetitive menial tasks, which so far I've actually enjoyed. When they set me up to do some data entry, they showed me the software suite they're using, which only lets you search for one member at a time. I noticed that it runs on an .mdb (Microsoft Access) file, and told them I could whip together a quick program that lets you see all the people who are members in a list at once, along with all the people in the list who are new. Tomorrow I'm going to work with the volunteer coordinator to put together a rough spec, since my initial one-hour version doesn't quite do everything needed. If I'm going to make that meeting, I should probably end this post now. I've been getting up, most days, at 8:30--quite a feat when I don't have anything to do during the day--and reading my Bible while sipping Frappuccino. I was never good at reading my Bible regularly, so I'm determined to make this habit stick.

Saturday, March 26, 2011 If you've not seen Sucker Punch, stop reading this right now. Watch the movie, and then come back. I watched Sucker Punch with Swood last night. The movie itself was very good. It was shot well, very imaginative, interesting, and hard. There weren't a lot of lines in it. The main character talked only a couple times. The same could be said of Wall-E, and I only know one person who didn't like that movie. I've heard that they had to cut a bunch of the movie in order to keep it PG-13. It looks like they'll release a director's cut but according to this article, it won't quite have the scenes I'm hoping they'll have. It didn't need more action; it needed more gut wrenching or perhaps more explanation. I should clarify; Sucker Punch was plenty gut wrenching, but if there are 18 minutes more, I expect that some of that should also be gut wrenching. I know the point was to let your imagination do the work to convert the actions in the brothel to actions in the asylum, so maybe more explanation would ruin it. But maybe it wouldn't. I want to know how the other two girls (Amber and Blondie) died. I can't imagine the orderly would shoot them. Also, how did Blue "own" Dr. Gorski (the dance instructor) in the asylum? The opposite was true when Sweat Pea escaped. In the asylum, Baby Doll had to distract the guards. In the brothel, she was distracting patrons. Why would they keep her from escaping? I would expect in order to live with themselves, they would have to convince themselves that these women chose this lifestyle and were free to leave. Why would they stop her? I'll definitely see the movie again, but probably not until it comes out on Blu-Ray. I want to figure out who told the story, who the narrator was. At the beginning, I assumed it was either a grown up Baby Doll, or just an arbitrary narrator. At the end, I started to think it was Sweat Pea, since she's the only one who saw the Wise Man/bus driver or the soldier boy who ended up in the bus line in front of her. It wouldn't explain how she knew anything about Blue being arrested, but the narrator in 300 didn't know anything about the story after he was sent back either. Sometimes you can't over think things, and this is one of those. On a last note, I'm surprised that they showed Baby Doll's face at the end. Swood said she gave a meaningful blink, perhaps implying that she was more herself than she should have been, but I didn't notice that somehow. Also, that implication would take away from the movie being a tragedy a little, like the opposite of Magneto still having a little of his powers left at the end of X3. Only three times in my life have I felt the urge to kill someone. In none of these cases did I know the person, nor was I near them. The first time was watching Call+Response with a couple women from the church I was attending. The second was hearing stories before my trip to Costa Rica last year, about children who had been sexually abused by their fathers or foster fathers or uncles or anyone, really. The third was last night. The first scene brought forth such a visceral reaction in me, I needed to see the stepfather dead. I began to hope this movie would go V for Vendetta style and somehow, she would kill everyone who deserved it. I began to add people to the list, though in the end, it turned out to only be three: the stepfather, Blue, and the cook. Dr. Gorski was added and then removed. Of course, that's not what happened. In Knights of the Old Republic you have a good/evil, light side/dark side (being a Star Wars game) meter. Various actions throughout the game make you a better or more evil character, and your decisions somewhat affect the rest of the storyline. This implicitly gives you a goal of doing the right thing every time or the wrong thing to push your character in one direction or another, and based on that meter, the storyline changes and you either take over the galaxy or save it. Taking a middle of the road approach has no benefits. This goal to be fully light side or fully dark side made decisions easy. If someone deserves death but there's an option to let them live and be arrested, you've got your light side choice. If someone stands in your way, but you are strong enough in the force to Jedi mind trick them into jumping off a cliff, you've got your dark side choice. (Admittedly, I choose that one every time, even though I go light side. It's way too hilarious, and they had just beaten up a homeless person.) Mass Effect is similar, except in both cases you're trying to save the galaxy. Things just change based on your approach. Either you're a peacemaker, a Paragon and only kill when necessary and after every peaceful solution has been exhausted, or you're a Renegade who threatens and sometimes tortures people to get results. Some actions require a certain amount of Paragon points or a certain amount of Renegade points. What's interesting in Mass Effect is that they're not mutually exclusive. If the game were long enough, and therefore you had enough opportunities to gain enough morality points, you could be full Paragon and full Renegade, giving you the power to do anything to achieve your goals. In Knights of the Old Republic, dark side points are negative light side points. In Dragon Age, there is no meter. You have literally hundreds of decisions to make, you make them, and they affect the storyline, not your character. You can spare someone's life, and they might go kill someone important. You might spare someone's life, and they might turn their life around and help you later on. Your character is no more evil or good than the person behind the keyboard. Your companions care about your decisions and will either become your friends or your rivals, but those characters are also neither completely good nor completely evil, and so are also bad indications of whether you made good choices. What is a good choice in that game? You can make choices based on your own sense of justice, or if you've played through already (or have a walkthrough), you can make choices based on what you know will happen. You can make choices on what you know will make your party members like or dislike you. Your choices are just your choices. I know that I immerse myself in games like this a whole lot more than other people. I cannot make myself play Knights of the old Republic as a dark side character. I actually feel guilty any time I see that red icon indicating a gain of dark side points, even when I try to do what is right. In Dragon Age, you have to live with the ambiguity of not knowing whether you made the "right" choice, and then with the consequences of your actions. Life has no meter. You can choose to make the best actions in your eyes, actions that preserve, or you can make destructive, and often fun, choices. You can make choices to expand your horizons, choices that don't preserve the status quo, and also don't break your moral code, or you can choose to sit back and do what you've always done for fear of looking the fool. Denna and I took a trip to the Grand Canyon last December. The website said that we had to have a wide-rimmed hat for the mule rides to keep the sun out of our eyes. It snowed, however, and there was no sun. Our snow jackets were sufficient, but Denna and I donned our cowboy hats nonetheless. We looked like total fools, dorky tourist parents, but I smile every time I look at that hat in my rear view mirror. I don't dance. Sometimes I wish I danced, because people always try to get me to, but I have such a fear of looking like a complete idiot that I don't. I know that if I did, and I likely would, I would develop a terrible tic. I often lean toward not dancing than toward wearing ridiculous cowboy hats. Preservation isn't always good. Life has no meter. Sometimes you know you've made an evil decision, and you feel guilty. Often your decisions are just ambiguous. More often than I'd care to admit, I make a decision that should be ambiguous, and feel righteous about it. Last night I prayed on the way back from Swood's. God, how can you abide the stepfather? He does not deserve the air he breathes. I wanted him to die. At first I was upset with myself for wanting revenge, but then I realized he hadn't actually done anything yet. He obviously had the intent, but vengeance would be getting back at him. So what is that feeling? Righteous fury? Were I in that scene, and had I pulled the trigger, would I have gained light side points or dark side points? She did have a third option. She could have fired a warning shot at the ground, then told him at gun point to walk with her to the phone, then dialed 911. He would have been arrested, her sister would have lived. He probably would have gotten off, as intent is not enough to convict someone, and restraining orders are only paper walls. Would I have pulled the trigger? If my sister were in danger.... I'm sure I could easily plea self defense, but what about the meter? There's a freedom in having no meter. You don't have instant feedback about guilt. Life is certainly harder without one, but also a lot better. "Perfect victory." God, how can you abide the stepfather? He does not deserve the air he breathes. Let's be clear. God hates death. He hates rape. He hates evil. But did I not kill Jesus? For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Did I not do to him what slavers do? A man does not simply become a slaver. He's twisted by need into a monster. In the end, he might not even see himself as a monster. And yet God loves me. Justice begs mercy. At the INN several years ago, they were doing a sermon series that tackled seemingly contradictory virtues. At the end of each sermon, they nailed a piece of paper to the door, Martin Luther style. (wikipedia says that nailing probably never actually happened.) "Justice begs mercy" is the only thing I remember from that series, but it has stuck with me. Castrating a rapist, while poetically just, isn't actual justice. An eye for an eye doesn't help the person who went blind first. We long to make things right, but a loss of purity cannot be regained without God. God makes things new. We attempt to balance the loss by inflicting the same loss on the perpetrator. The only way to have justice is to admit that we can't achieve it, and what's left is resentment or mercy. Those are our options. Resentment only hurts the resenter. Mercy is not the same as pretending it never happened. It's not the same as reconciliation. If someone raped my sister, or killed my mom, or crippled my friend, or me for that matter, perhaps he belongs behind bars to prevent him from further damage, but when he got out of prison, has he really "paid his debt to society"? Will I feel like things are ok between us now? Of course not. I might have mercy on him in order to move on in my life, but without a miracle, I would never be reconciled to him. I would not become friends with him. God does not always call us to reconciliation. He does call us to mercy and forgiveness. Life without the meter is better than life with it. We would be slaves to the meter. It would be easier, perhaps, to do what is right, but far harder to do what is Right. In Knights of the Old Republic, you are pulled along by your decisions. In Dragon Age, you are forced into the freedom to make your own decisions, your own path. In life, we have a God that knows that's how it is. That's how he designed it. Best of all he loves you and wants you to make the decisions that are best for you and best for everyone else. Those decisions are his path for you, crafted not for mass distribution via Steam, but for you individually. He wants to help you make those decisions, and knows full well we probably won't. But there is perfect victory. In the end, the earth will be perfected, made new. In the end, we will be perfected, made new. As in Sucker Punch, perfect victory requires deep sacrifice. That sacrifice is God's own son. Baby Doll made that sacrifice and Sweat Pea survived and lived on her behalf. It was a good ending, debatably, but it was not perfect. In life, Jesus made that sacrifice and we survived. Jesus rose again. He defeated death. He gave a meaningful blink. This was no tragedy.

I ate too many Thin Mints. I was doing so well in early January with the frequent posting. No longer being on vacation was probably the reason for that end. Yet another thing the masses can blame Microsoft for. Microsoft: multipurpose scapegoat. Lots of things have happened. Thirty-six, in fact. But where to begin, or rather, where to continue after my dramatic, yet enlightening first sentence. I'm getting more plugged in at church. That's been good. A few weekends ago, I attended a Post College/Early Career retreat at Cascades Camp in Yelm. Ashley used to go there for summer camp when she was younger. I can see why she enjoyed it so much more than Miracle Ranch, though, we stayed in hotel-quality rooms, whereas I'm pretty sure she was in lodges. My goal for the trip was to meet people, and considering I went and literally knew not a person there, it would be hard not to call that a realistic goal. The theme of the weekend was "change," which was perfect seeing as how this is the first time in years that I've felt relatively stable in my situation. I spent a lot of the time wondering if God had a reason beyond meeting people for me to be there, and on the last evening, it occurred to me that my circumstances aren't changing, but I am. At least, at the time I thought I was. The first night, the speaker asked if anyone trusted him simply because he was a pastor. I did, so I raised my hand, not realizing that he was asking for a volunteer. So I went up there and we did a trust fall, only I had to close my eyes. And then he started walking away, and I could tell he was walking away because he kept talking as he did it. Then he told me to fall back, and it turned out he had silently got another guy to stand behind me. It fit his talking point pretty well, basically saying that we need to trust God even if he doesn't catch us the way we expect, or it doesn't look like he will. I feel a little deceptive though, because when I heard him starting to walk away, I figured it out pretty quickly that he was getting someone else, which still would have been a major trust thing--not blind faith, but trust that he was doing as I had figured--except that I heard the guy snicker quietly at something the pastor said, confirming my suspicions. What's weird though, and one person I talked to noticed this, is I still involuntarily tried to catch myself. Since I'd been called up there, everyone knew my name, and for the rest of the weekend, I was trying to play catch up with an already-feeble name-remembering mind. I think I can remember at least four or five people, besides the people in my small group, that I got to know at least a bit. The rest really were a blur. Somehow my synesthesia came up in one of the ice breakers, and the girl who was my teammate in Team Nertz got really interested in it, along with three or four others. I'll break my aliasing rule here with the first person I told about it, who was Sarah (and not my teammate). The first time she asked what color her name was, I said green. Then she got the other girls around me and asked again and I said red. That really bothered me, even though I had told them that it's not deterministic. It bothers me that I feel like I'm making all this up, even though I know I'm not. So it kept eating at me into the next week until I figured it out. It depends on how the person says it. It seems to alternate between hunter green and burnished red, and it all depends on the inflection of the first syllable. Exaggerating for effect, if the person says "sear-ah", it's green, but if they say "sarr-ah" it's red. Obviously, it's just "Sarah" and "Sarah," but I guess I pick up on very minor differences in the sound. The next Friday after the retreat, the PCEC group had an Olympics Opening Ceremony get together at one of the guys' apartments. I think about half of us had been on the trip, and the other half were new. I got to know a couple people a bit better. I had been hoping my Nertz partner was going to go to the Olympics thing. She had expressed interest, and she seemed cool for the time we spent together. She, like everyone else does at one point or another, called me Justin by accident. So from then until the end of the trip, we were Team Justin, as Justin was neither of our names. After Nertz, we played some Taboo, and it's like our minds were melded on a few of the rounds. Also, outside of the PCEC group, I attended the church's Foundations class, which is required for membership, and is basically a three-lecture series on the history and vision of the church, followed by twenty minutes of question and answer time with the pastor. On the second week, a question was brought up, and the pastor kind of dodged it because he was going to cover it in the third week, but then there were technical difficulties in the first two (simultaneous) services and he had to give his sermon twice, meaning he couldn't do question and answer time with us, and we never got the answer. The church's core beliefs don't mention Heaven or Hell anywhere. Clearly the pastor believes in both, and teaches regularly with both in mind, so it's kind of odd that they don't show up in the list. At the end of the third week, I filled out the form for beginning the membership process, and one of the requirements is getting involved in some sort of ministry, so that'll be good for me, even if I don't know what it'll be yet. I really don't want to do powerpoint. When I meet with my membership sponsor, I'm sure we'll go over some options. I just remembered another reason I haven't been posting lately, and that's that I accidentally lost my blog layout while trying to make a couple minor improvements. Every single time I think, "do I need to save this?" and choose no, I end up losing it. You'd think I'd learn. The mistake was having three versions of the template open at once, and one was very old. I accidentally copied that old version into the official template box, thinking it was the one with my new changes, and clicked save, because the preview button wasn't working. It was something like that anyway. Somehow I didn't have the newest version with my newest changes open, and so I lost them. Then I got sad and didn't post for a while. A couple months ago, I started watching the West Wing again with the Agathons. I believe I've mentioned this before. Then Christmas break happened and they were out of the state and we were all busy, so I didn't see them for a bit. Meanwhile, I needed my fix, and now I'm more than halfway through the last season. Again. They're still in season 3, I believe, and I'll go back and watch it with them. I'm so weak willed. Swood and I went snow boarding a few weekends ago. Neither of us had been up since my parents took us up to Crystal my first year in college. We didn't last very long either, so very out of shape. He had a better excuse than I did, which was that he was trying out some used boots that his coworker was trying to sell, but they were too small. I just ran out of steam suddenly on like my 5th or 6th run. It was fun, and worth the money, but I wish I had more endurance in the calves. I was really hoping I'd get a promotion back in January. It didn't happen though. Maybe I was hearing what I wanted to hear, but it seemed like I would have, had we had the budget. My boss says that if I maintain my current direction, he'll submit my candidacy for promotion in July. It's not that I really need the money, or even want it (though I do want a house soon), but it's not good to stay at my level for more than a year, and it'll have been two for me. Work is going well though. We're expanding a bit, so I get my own office again here soon. I'm not quite eligible for a window office, but there's no surprise there. I think the bar is four years for this coming shift. We got a new member on our team whom I really like. He transferred from somewhere else in Microsoft so he has more seniority than I do, so it's interesting being more senior within the group but less senior as a dev, and seeing what he inherently understands and what he needs explained. Recently, I've been put on some more challenging tasks, specifically having to do with C++. I finished three major tasks this milestone, checking in the last one early today. My boss gave me a box of Thin Mints as reward. Then I ate too many of them at Swood's place. I started up WoW again. I just renewed my subscription a couple days ago, starting my second consecutive month for the second time ever. Usually I'm bored after the first month. I got my druid from 10 to 56 in the first month, and now he's 58 and ready to move into the Outlands. Soon I will have bird form and be able to laugh at all the people who had to spend 600g on flying mounts. Seriously, why bother with any of the other classes? Druids are just going to be better anyway. I also restarted Mass Effect since the second one just came out. Helo has played it through a few times and told me none of the side quests are worth it. Now having beaten it without doing a single side quest, I can see why he says that. The first time I attempted it, I got so very bored wandering around doing things I didn't really care about for no real incentive. Then I got stuck on one of the missions, though at the time, I thought I had chosen a planet at random for a side quest. On the second time through, it turned out it was the mission to save Liara. Go figure. Also, I accidentally pressed the R button (rather than the R trigger) while in the Mako and discovered its cannon. That would have been useful before. That game poses some interesting decisions. One of the things I don't like about the Batman movies, even though I think they're great, is that he's placed in impossible and unjust situations with no right answer. This game has a few similar spots. I bought the second one today, and if you've beaten the first one, you can load your character into the second one and it changes the storyline a bit. I talked to Helo and asked him a few questions about the decisions I made. One was right at the end, and I don't much care for the consequences so I think I'll load right before the final boss and change some history before going on. I wonder what the second game will do with it. Maybe the first history disappears, or maybe it says "I see what you did there." My guess is the game does an autosave behind the scenes as you beat it, and then whatever happened in that save is what gets loaded into game two. Since there's only one autosave slot, the first history would be overwritten. On a side note, Amazon has gotten amazing. I bought Mass Effect 2 this morning around 11am, and it was at the base of my door when I got home at 4:30. I've been doing less reading than I did over the break, but it's been a different type of book too. When the pastor blogged about Taproot Theater's rendition of the Great Divorce, I decided to read the book. It's really short, but now one of my favorites. I wanted to see the play, too, but I never got around to it. The theme of the book is that Hell is as much man's choice as it is God's wrath. It went through numerous scenarios of how these various people all decided they can't like Heaven. The first guy doesn't want to be in a place that accepts murderers even if they have repented and he and his victim are on good terms now and everything. Another guy just wants what's due him, but can't see that no one is due Heaven. It's quite brilliant. After that, I picked up Mere Christianity again. I first started reading it in 9th grade, but then school ended, and with it, silent reading and I never picked it up again. He starts it out well, and the way he laid down his arguments reminded me a lot of a transactional database, quite possibly because I work with them. In a transaction, you do a bunch of work and then commit it all at once, so that if something bad happens in the middle, you're not in this inconsistent, wrong state. It just reverts back to how it was before you started the transaction. So, Lewis starts out by doing a bunch of quick transactions. He makes a statement, and then proves it. Commit. Statement, commit. Then a he starts taking a little longer, and he builds up quite a bit, then brings it back home to connect with what he already has committed, and adds that to his database. You can also think of it as like a construction project. He builds his foundation first in quick, flat layers, then starts to build the framework. However, after he has this framework, he kind of abandons it and assumes the building is built. He starts a new transaction and makes a bunch of arguments, then never ties them back down to what he already has, and moves on without ever committing. That bothered me a lot. Now I'm into chapters where I don't agree with at least a portion of what he's saying. It's not necessarily bad to read something you disagree with, but when you're going in, expecting to agree with it all, even in a "I know it's right even if I don't like it" sort of way, it's a little discouraging. The latest thing I've disagreed with is that he says that God only looks internally at your decisions, and not at the outward magnitude of the consequences. If you were brought up in a horrible, cruel fashion and end up murdering a thousand people, but refrain from the ten thousand deaths a "lesser man" would have committed, that person is actually better in God's eyes than the silver spooned man who lets his neighbor go hungry. (Lewis didn't actually say this, but it's what I extrapolated.) I think God must look at both the internal struggle and decisions as well as the size and depth of the consequences. Before these two books, I was at the beginning of the second book in A Song of Ice and Fire. The first one, Alexander loaned me, and I need to give it back to him. The second, I bought in electronic version from Barnes and Noble. I don't have a Nook, so I've just been using my phone, but the LCD doesn't do great things for the eyes for sustained reading like that. I really want an eReader, but I'm not sure which one I want to get, nor am I sure I have the money right now. 'Tis the season to do your taxes. I tried out the online version of TurboTax and wasn't particularly impressed. The free version seems well and good, but because of my stock awards and sales, I'd have to upgrade to the $15 version or whatever, only, when I had it connect to Fidelity to download my information, it got it wrong and basically counted twice all the income I had put into stock, and so ended up saying I still owed the government $1100. When I manually corrected it, it dropped down to $188, but I'm not sure that value is right either. Tomorrow I'm going to my mom's and until last year, she'd always done our family's taxes herself, so she has some experience. I'll see what value I (or we) end up with, and if it's not less than 0, Swood's dad offered to do my taxes for $20. The only reason I might still owe money like TurboTax said, is that I sold a bunch of stock to give toward the Costa Rica trip in December, but didn't donate it all until January, so I can't count it towards last year's write-offs. Well, it's getting late, and despite the short length of this post, I'm heading to bed.

Oh man you guys! I wrote this four thousand word blog post in between this one and the one from last night, and you will never read it! And before you go on some high horsed tirade, let me remind you I still have eight days to write as poorly as I like! My synesthesia has been acting up more than normal. I've been tasting things that don't have tastes. It's a little weird. You've probably experienced a little bit yourself. You know how sometimes things taste like they smell? This is like that except that this song tastes like it sounds. It doesn't happen with every sound or even every song. Pandora has played a lot of Sixpence None the Richer songs, though, and something about her voice just tastes very strong, and very good. I'm getting addicted, and bought their Christmas album. You should too. Ordinarily I don't like when people sing a classic differently, but I kind of like how they tweaked the lyrics of Angels We Have Heard On High. Their rendition of O Come, O Come Emmanuel is the best thing I've listened to since before Jars of Clay's Good Monsters album. She (Leigh Nash) does an interesting thing and plays with the end of the chorus the first time she sings it, then sings it normal the second time. I like that she doesn't "act" like this is how everyone should sing it. She just feels like singing it differently, but also likes the original. My approval says a lot as she's tinkering with my favorite Christmas song, and I think my record as a traditionalist is rather clear. When did I become a music critic? Soon I'll have to write a webcomic, get some bird tattoos, and stay up past 5am each morning twittering that I'm sorry the comic's so late, as if I owe it to you. Imagine if I had to write a blog post every night for a living. The post-quality would drop dramatically I think. I'm not sure I could garner thirty-six events a day anyway. I've been waking up exhausted lately, too. I don't know if I just have unrealistic expectations for sleep, or if it's not normal to always be this tired. I know I used to always be this way. But without me noticing when it began and when it stopped, for a brief period, I had energy. Maybe it's seasonal? Maybe I have more energy when the sun is out. I know I love just taking the sun in when I can. For some reason I don't do it every chance I get, and will in fact, spend a lot of free summer days indoors, slaving over a blog post. Or watching The West Wing. Whichever. It could just be my dreams. They're becoming more intense, lately. I wonder if that's connected to the synesthesia. Maybe my brain is just getting more warped all around. I took a nap today, and dreamt that Conan O'Brian hired Salvatore Maroni (the mobster whose legs are broken when Batman interrogates him about the Joker) to extort us for the firewood stacked at my mom's house. We gave him the wood, but then rebelled, and in the process, one of my coworkers was shot. Then a friend of mine helped carry him into the Batmobile and we "drove" to the hospital with little care for what carnage we caused to surrounding traffic. I woke up stressed because we weren't sure he was going to make it. He lost a lot of blood at the scene. So now I've covered my tastes in music, odd brain conditions the majority of people can't relate to, and dreams. What other pearls of great writing do I have for you? Read on, my friend. Movies! My dad saw the Matrix a couple years after it came out, and of course it had amazing reviews. So when he saw it, he had impossible expectations, and didn't really enjoy it. To be fair, I'm not sure it was really his kind of movie in the first place. Something similar happened with Donnie Darko for me. Everyone said I would love this movie. It was okay. The dialog wasn't anything special. The plot was fine, and there really weren't any time-travel issues. It was almost completely well thought-out. Does everyone else realize that his sister dies? He saves his mom, but his teacher and sister still board that plane that loses its engine to go back in time and kill Donnie. On the flight home, the movie shown was The Time Traveler's Wife. I enjoyed it, but despite it's time traveling, it wasn't really my kind of movie. I like happy endings, I guess. I can appreciate tragedies (this one was mixed comedy and tragedy), but I don't necessarily like to watch them. There were a couple time related plot holes I noticed. He has the most gray hair at his wedding day, more gray than he has when he dies. The second one is even more minor. When he first talks to his daughter, she's ten and says it's been five years since she last saw him, but in the last scene, she's nine and he visits. It's obvious the writer meant that it's been five years since he died but I'm a nitpicker. I pick at nits. SQL Azure had a successful release at PDC '09 in November, alongside the rest of the Windows Azure Platform. It's still crazy to me that we made a very stable V1 quality product in such a short time. Microsoft truly does employ some of the best minds on earth. My group's project is largely finished. There's always maintenance, but the majority of the work is shifting down toward SQL Server functionality rather than work in allowing users to connect (clearly they can already do that quite well). This means pulling out the C++ hammer after two years of it collecting dust. C# might just be the best language ever written. Certainly SQL Server has to be more performant than managed code allows, but for most of your average programs, C# is more than fast enough, and the ease of programming more than makes up for the small bit of performance gain you'd probably never use were you to use C++. C++ is indeed a powerful language, but it gets so complex if you want it to be as performant as SQL Server or any other operating system like software. Just what little I've seen since I've been moved to that code base has been crazy brilliant code. There are brilliant things I never would have considered doing that are difficult to read, but can't be refactored because they're so much faster, and "simpler" to a computer. I wish I could explain a couple, but of course I'm NDA'd. Also, I suppose you wouldn't care much anyway, seeing as how you're probably a banker. The biggest time suck for me lately has been Dragon Age: Origins. That is a great game. I don't think I like it more than KotOR, but it's certainly close. KotOR is a little more light-hearted and it's Star Wars. Dragon Age takes about 50 or 60 hours to beat. I started three games before I finally actually went about beating it. The first two I made mistakes in choosing abilities, and got stuck trying to beat enemies on easy. I, I don't like to talk about it. But, I did get a good feel for the game and earned myself a little foresight to make precognitive decisions. I don't care that some people would call this cheating. Cheating is using the console to add abilities and health and kill everyone on the screen. Mage is by far the most power class, especially on easy when there's no friendly fire. That was the class I chose for the third game. The ending is tricky. They give you an option that is inherently evil with no evil consequences. It makes you think, I suppose. My justice sense is just falling flat on its face, and that bothers me a bit. Within those three games, I completed both the female romances. I didn't go for the elf, no matter what Penny Arcade says. So, when I finished the game, I wanted to play again, this time on normal difficulty and as a different class. I figured there was no new story line to gain from being male again and started a female character. You can tell the game was written by guys, because there are few options you can choose that I don't think many women would think to say. Well, night two ends here. I still have a few more topics on which to write, but they will have to wait, as it's 3am now. top | 0 Comments Emmanuel Tuesday, December 22, 2009 I do believe it is time again to write. This shall be a post without commas. I'm not sure I could even bring myself to post such an atrocity even if I wanted to. Ew. I mean really. Ew. This is attempt number two. It's bad writing to mention mundane things like that, though. Who of you really cares that I started writing a post earlier, and now, since it was lame writing and half finished, will be discarded? Therefore I resolve in the new year to not mention writing you shall never see. A bold gesture, to be certain. How many of you would state such on a public blog? Never mind that you don't have a public blog, and even if you did, you'd probably not have this particular writing impediment in the first place. The answer remains probably none of you! There is a lot to cover from the last two months, and doubtless, I've forgotten most of what I wish to convey. This has indeed been a thought-filled blogless span. Pandora is playing in the background. It's been a long time since I've really listened to music anywhere but the car. In junior high and high school, I listened to music almost constantly when on my computer. In college, I didn't like wearing headphones and Swood and I didn't often play music when the other was in the room, which was most of the time. After I got out of the habit, it somehow became distracting. Recently, I've tried to branch out in my musical selection, inspired by several influences, but primarily Vin, I think. I figured Pandora would be the best way to find stuff similar to what I already like. What I like is becoming an ever-shrinking subset of what I have. There's some music that I'll always love, because it is genuinely good, even timeless, like Rich Mullins. His music doesn't sound like the 90s like Michael W. Smith's 90s stuff does. I'll always have a soft spot for Christian classic rock and roll, too, like early Phillips, Craig, and Dean. But a lot of what I have, or used to love, just sounds immature to me now. I don't really like songs "for the lyrics" like I used to. Ok, seriously Pandora? This is the eighth time you've played What Child Is This today. I don't care that they're all different artists. Special case this as Christmas music and realize songs with the same name are the same songs. End rant. Anyway, the day after Thanksgiving, I visited Alexander, and before I headed back up to Redmond, I downloaded the Pandora app for my phone. The first channel I tried was "Seabird." It did a good job giving me what I like, I'll admit. Most of it was The Fray and Seabird, with one or two from Jars of Clay. This, however, is not what I was looking for. I wanted to branch out -- not hear music I already knew I liked. I remember when Pandora first came out. I had the opposite problem. It didn't distinguish Christian from mainstream music, and it couldn't figure out that I was looking for contemporary Christian. Now I can't avoid it. It did better when I entered "Work by Jars of Clay" rather than just "Jars of Clay," since Work isn't one of those songs they play on Spirit1053. By the way, that album is still one of my favorites, especially Work and All My Tears. Should anyone reading this live to attend my eventual funeral, I want All My Tears played there. So weep not, for me my friend when my time below does end for my life belongs to him who will raise the dead again. After some wikipedia queries, it appears the song was originally written by Emmylou Harris. The Jars of Clay cover is better. So, yeah. Vin, as I've not talked about her here before, is a girl from CCF I always deeply admired. She and I ever only talked briefly when we did at all. But I could always tell she was consistently genuine in her life. And she loves and cares about people. That much is evident even from a distance. I wrote this description in post attempt one: There was a girl I've thought was absolutely beautiful since I met her. She's meek and funny and smart and a good writer. She's got cuteness all over. I knew her from CCF, and she was one of the people who hung out all the time with the group of people who hung out all the time, and I never really got involved with that group. I still can't decide whether I regret that apathy or not, but there's not a whole lot of use in regret in this case. One day in May or June, I got a facebook broadcast mission trip support letter from her, and so we got to talking. It turned out we had quite a bit in common, from upbringing and family life, to comedic snobstitude. It turns out she and I have a lot in common as far as pasts go, among other things. We share a similar sense of humor--Demetri Martin, South Park, Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, and a mutual hit-and-miss feeling for Family Guy--as well as snobbiness about writing and music. At first, in July, I honestly did just want to be friends, but soon I had a crush on her. I swore to myself and friends that this girl was different, and I still believe she is as a person, but perhaps not as a crush. It was humbling, after she left on her mission trip, to realize how blinded by infatuation I can still get. Don't get me wrong, she's a wonderful girl, and any guy, myself included, would be lucky to have her someday, but at the moment, that's not feasible, and I don't have those kind of feelings for her. I should quit here. This is spiraling in and downward, not up, up and away to the next paragraph. A month or two ago, my mom's cousin emailed me requesting a locally produced CD. Apparently he likes to listen to a Seattle radio station when he visits, and it produces a CD each year with the best songs it played. It's only sold at Starbucks in the area, so he asked me to get it and send it to him. I bought it within a few days, but it took me until this past Saturday to finally get it mailed. I don't know why. I just couldn't. There are some things I just can't do. It was the same feeling I got when I needed to apply for scholarships, and I just couldn't make myself do it. It's not like I didn't want to get the money, or that they were particularly challenging, but I couldn't bring myself to sit down and do it. I was afraid to, for some reason. I hate that about me. My mom gave me my favorite chair that we'd had my whole life for my birthday a year and a half ago. The cats over the years had destroyed the back, so we picked out fabric and she recovered it. Since she was working on her masters and getting married and her normal level of school work, not to mention getting the house ready to sell and dealing with the divorce, it took a year for that covering job to be completed, and I got my chair the day I began working at Fir Creek back in July. All of this should be old news to you loyal readers, who I'm sure have read and reread each of these entries at least once per entry after it, just to make sure you don't miss any of the key plot. Anyway, my cats have destroyed the back of this chair to a far worse state than the original covering. They've pulled the back halfway off, and frayed the edges of it so it can't be tacked back together. I finally figured out a stopgap, and put my white board right behind my chair and held up by the bookcase behind it, which makes the bottom half of my bookcase nearly inaccessible, but I didn't use that half often anyway. This paragraph is only relevant because right now, I'm using that whiteboard as a desk across my tub. It was tricky to figure out how to keep it from slipping off the thin lip on the walled side of the tub, but pushing a chair up against the overhanging edge seems to do the trick. None of this, however, is really that relevant to these past couple months. I don't know why I'm stalling. Denna and I have always been flirty, even since we broke up over a year ago. It's just fun, and harmless, and relaxing. I was having a particularly rough November, and one night it came up that I hadn't seen Donnie Darko. That night I was also feeling particularly out of touch, literally, and Denna suggested I should fly to Texas and promised me a movie, popcorn, and a cuddle buddy. That sounded like a good idea, and I hadn't seen her in six months, which is a shame considering we talk almost every day, even if only to say hi. Meanwhile, Bill began organizing a trip to Costa Rica and invited me on it, as well as to finance a large portion of it. When he and I went to Jamaica, I had been offered my job at Microsoft the day we flew out. I was super excited, and hoped to live on $35 grand a year, giving most of the rest away, so he was holding me accountable to that. It turns out that $35k was an unrealistic goal, but I still do have the ability to give significantly, so I am glad he asked me. On top of that, Microsoft will match whatever I give toward the trip, so it's super-effective! I pledged to give a significant amount toward the trip, but the exact figure was still up in the air. Also, I was wavering on whether I wanted to go on the trip or not. I did, but I didn't, but I did. It really depended on my mood, and my mood fluctuates irrationally since my pills don't work anymore. In fact, I ran out of pills, easing myself off them as I was told I could. Part of the thing that kept me from going was whether I could actually afford to. And I was worried that if I went to Texas, I couldn't afford to give as much toward the trip. But I really wanted to go to Texas. And if I couldn't afford to fly to Texas, what business do I have donating ten times that much toward the trip? One night, I just said screw it, and bought the tickets. Bing Travel is amazingly accurate at predicting plane ticket prices. The first night, it recommended buying then because prices would rise $50+. I thought that meant like within the next week. The next day they were up $52. The new prediction was +$100, so I bought then and there. After that, I felt completely free to go on the Costa Rica trip. The longer it's been since I posted last, the more I've come to think I was wrong about Heaven. I read the first two chapters of that book I mentioned. I'll finish it, but I've got a couple others on the stack that I'm now in the middle of. For one, my, and I'll wager your, image of heaven is greatly contorted. It's not at all harps, halos, and clouds. It's supposed to be earth as it was meant to be, what God originally envisioned before the fall. There will be perfect justice with no sin and thus no wrath. People reap exactly what they sow. Everything bad about this earth will be fixed -- not gone, instead made new, made perfect. This is good news and something to look forward to, and something to live for now. I misrepresented what the pastor meant when he said, "No one runs a marathon for the shirt." As often happens when a new, big idea breaks into my head, I get a little obsessed and ask a lot of questions. For instance, Jesus says in Matthew that there is no marriage in heaven (besides that of the church to Christ). If heaven is earth as it was meant to be, does that mean that marriage was sort of a patch to keep us safe in this fallen world? There were animals in the Garden of Eden. It follows then that there will be animals in heaven. Will our pets from this earth be there? I'd always assumed no. Now I wonder. When I purchased my tickets, I picked them as close to the front of the plane as possible, even though that put me in a middle seat each way. I've found that one of the things I hate most about flying is waiting to get off the plane. I think this hatred stems from many years of traveling with kids, and out of courtesy, waiting for everyone without kids to get off first. When I travel, if I can avoid it, I don't check any bags, so it actually does help me to get off the plane quicker, since I don't have to wait for baggage claim, like everyone else, otherwise I probably wouldn't care. Something went wrong when I booked, though. I got a couple emails about it, saying I needed to call them or look online. I did both. On the phone, I couldn't get ahold of a person, but the recording said my tickets were fine. I got another email, and checked online this time, and the status was booked and purchased, so I assumed there was a bug elsewhere. On Friday, I got to the airport, and the self checkout said there was an error, so I stood in the one-person line at the full service desk. I guess I didn't write my address correctly for my credit card, or something, so he set me up, and I ended up second or third row from the front on the aisle, so that was awesome. Until I realized that it cost me $30 for service at the airport. Nickel and diming you, I tell ya. I discovered another peeve, or rather rediscovered, because I know I blogged about this after or during my Australia trip, centered around planes, and that's that people disobey the people who tell you when to board. "Now boarding group one." Ah yes, I'm in group six. That must mean me. My justice sense (for which I really need a good made up word, possibly a port manteau -- yes, I'm officially accepting ideas in the comments section) alone is enough to increase my blood pressure a little, but the real issue, I found this trip, is that the overhead carryon space gets taken up by people who cheat, and then I have to put my bag further back, which means now after the plane lands, I have to get back, and then back forward, which probably costs me more time in the long run, than just choosing a seat further back. I needed the trip, itself, even if it wasn't that great. Had I not gone, I probably would have driven myself a little crazy. I'd also have had a lot harder time agreeing to go to Costa Rica. Denna and her roommate Cindy, both, were not in the happiest places in life, and there's not really a lot anyone can do about that. Denna's ex-boyfriend who proposed to her at one point had just died in the Iraq War. Anyway, when she had promised a movie, popcorn, and a cuddle buddy, that's about what I expected, and it didn't happen. We're not as flirty in person as we are over SMS, for one. We toured the Bodies Exhibit on Saturday. That was difficult. The first thing they show you is a knee with bone cancer. Why that? I do fine with bones and muscles, but split a bone or brain and I get a little queazy. Even the word "marrow" makes my skin crawl. Oddly, the one part I did enjoy, was the fetus section. It was the one part that seemed to celebrate life. The rest seemed to me to be macabre. On the trip home, the self check-in did work, but there was a big button for changing my seat, so I pushed it, just to see if there were any better. There was one, two rows back from where I'd originally chosen, that was in an aisle. I figured the tradeoff was worth it. The plane was late, and then I boarded when I was supposed to, when groups five and six were called together (I was group five). I got to my seat, and a woman approached me, asking if I was perchance traveling alone. I said I was, and she asked if she could have my seat, since otherwise she couldn't sit next to her husband. I caved, and ended up nine rows further back with a window seat. For a while it looked like I'd have a seat between the aisle guy and me, but the last person to seat herself sat between us. There's an empty seat immediately behind her, but she's sitting next to her husband, so it's not like I can blame her. It took me a good twenty minutes to depart the plane, compared to what should have been five to ten minutes in the seat I booked. The moral of the story is nice guys finish last. I talked to my dad for the first time in well over a year sometime in October. He facebook stalked me and wrote me a message, which I'm sure he felt heartfelt. I could still see the underlying manipulation, and his ever-selfish attitude, evidencing that he has not changed, so I wrote him a terse response. Within a few hours, I had a second message on the thread. If you give a mouse a cookie. I didn't give him milk. There's a new story that I've told probably fifty times now, because I was so excited. I went into the Company Store for a couple copies of Windows 7. I was a few moments too late, as the guy in front of me got the last copy of Professional, so I just sucked it up and spent the extra $10 for Ultimate. I stood in line, head down as I wrote my employee ID on each of the boxes. A femme called me to the counter, and I passed the two boxes over to her. When I looked up I was stunned. Like, I can't explain it other than that one if summed up all the other cute things on the earth, kittens and baby seals and everything, she'd still be a little cuter. We shared a little small talk. She asked if I was doing anything fun that evening, and I told her I was going down to Swood's like every Friday night. I asked her the same, and she frowned and said she had to work, but that her sister was in town for the weekend, so she was looking forward to that. I left the store and immediately texted Denna and Athena about the development. I started heading south, and hit heavier traffic than I've been in there. Traffic began a mile or two before the I-405 exit, and then was solid until exit 7 or so. I was in it for about an hour, the whole while thinking, "I should turn around and go get her number." I'd never been so close to doing it either. Usually those thoughts are just a silly fantasy, but this night they were urges. Eventually I decided by the time I got back, the store would be closed anyway. Or if it weren't, what was I going to do? Wait around until it wasn't busy, or until it closed and run after her or something? I looked at the receipt because sometimes those have a name on them. All it said was "cashier 10 register 3." I got to Swood's apartment's parking lot, and sat there for a few minutes, deciding what to do. I pulled out my phone and looked up the number of the company store. Then I spent another five minutes with my finger hovering over the call button, having to press around it so the phone wouldn't enter sleep mode. I finally decided I had nothing to lose and everything to gain, and without thinking, sent the call. An older woman picked up, and I told her I was trying to get ahold of the cashier I had that night, and wondered if she knew who "cashier 10" was. She asked me if I knew the person's name because the numbers aren't bound. I said I didn't, so she asked at what time, and I told her 6:00. Twenty seconds later, a giggling girl picked up the phone. I fumbled some words out including "I can't believe I'm doing this" and asked for her name and number. She hesitated and asked for my name, which I gave. I told her I understood if she didn't want to give me it, then she paused and said "sure why not?" I wrote it down, and then asked again for her name. Then we hung up (or so I assume; I don't really remember much more of that night except that I couldn't eat). Saturday began, and I called her around 1:30, expecting her to pick up and say she was with her sister, and then to get a better time to call. I got the generic Verizon voicemail message. I left my number and told her I'd like to grab coffee with her sometime. I started to get a little anxious, but not overly so, about whether she gave me her real number or not. On Sunday, she texted me. She apologized for not getting back to me the day prior--her sister was in town so they were hanging out--then asked how old I was. I was relieved three ways at once. First, that meant I didn't get the number wrong nor did she give me a fake one. Second, she was indeed my cashier, unless two cashiers had their sisters in town on the same weekend and were excited enough to mention it to perfect strangers. Third, I couldn't tell for sure how old she was when I saw her. To tell the truth, I couldn't remember what she looked like. I remember how I felt when I saw her, but I don't remember almost any features. I remember thinking she looked between 18 and 21, but I couldn't be sure. Besides, I'm really bad at guessing people's ages. Since she asked me, I could ask her. I told her how old I was, having briefly considered the "I'm 35, happily married with 2.5 kids" response, and quickly discarding it. She told me she was 21, which is perfect. So then we set up coffee for the following Saturday at 10:00. I was good and didn't contact her at all for the whole week. Saturday morning, I got there at 9:50. I sat there for a while. Eventually I texted her, describing my attire, in case she saw me and I didn't recognize her. Around 10:15, I walked out of Starbucks and called her, getting her voicemail. At 10:30, one of the Starbucks workers asked if I was waiting for someone. I told her that I was, but that I was beginning to suspect I was being stood up, so I purchased my hot chocolate then. At 10:40, she texted me, saying she was really sorry, that she had been sick all week and had just gotten out of the doctor's office. She'd meant to call me the night prior to cancel, but was so exhausted that she fell asleep. I asked if she wanted to reschedule, and she said yes and that she'd contact me the next day to tell me how she was feeling. We had a short, playful conversation after that, and then said goodbye. Sunday came and went, and she didn't text me. Thursday came, and I decided that it was time to throw in the towel, sending her a rather epic text message, which left the possibility of a future date open, should she ever change her mind. I'd been a bit excited because, had it worked out, this would have been the first girl I'd dated within 2 years and 20 miles of me since my first girlfriend. But it didn't work out. Now a month later, my PM, against my expressed wishes, went to the company store and asked about her. They told him that the day before had been her last day and she had moved back to Utah for school at BYU. He told me this a few days later, and I texted her again (breaking my vow of silence) to confirm this story (he might pull this as a prank), which she did. She's rather witty, which makes this one potential relationship loss sting a little more than normal. I like when people pick up on something and run with it. Sure, she could be a friend who was witty, and that'd be fun, but it'd also be hard and edged with a tinge of regret. This past weekend, Fircreek had a reunion Christmas party, and a bunch of us met at Bubba's house. It was good for the most part, but I'm still forming thoughts on it. Relationships were strained, or so I understand, by the end of the summer, and people from all factions were present. I may have been a little short with one of the guys, when he tried to belittle SQL Azure and asked, "One gig? Why wouldn't you just get a flash drive?" After the party, I drove Mangofiki home, and then headed to Bill's. He was up with his girlfriend in his room discussing a book, but I hung out with a couple of his housemates and Courtney. Poor Courtney had a computer virus and was running XP Media Center 2005. I tried everything I could think of, including bittorrenting the Windows ISO (which she had rights to and a CD key), but the version I downloaded was SP2 rather than the original 2005 version or something, and the key didn't work. On top of that, the virus was still there, despite overwriting all the Windows files. The whole night, I was on a roll with over-the-top sexist comments. I'm pretty sure Courtney would have punched me a few times, were I not working diligently toward her computer's recovery. The guy between us got punched for nodding at one of my comments. Alas, I didn't succeed at getting the machine working, but at least she can log on now. Courtney is going on the Costa Rica trip with us, so I'm sure I'll get to know her much better in the months to come. That's not nearly half of what I have to write, but it's what's getting posted tonight. Maybe I'll write more later this week, or maybe you'll have to wait until January or February. Sucks to be you.

As you've probably noticed, this site looks exactly the same. Of course, if you're one of those hoighty-toighty RSS feeders, you can't tell, but rest assured, if you visited the site yesterday and then again today, you'd not notice a difference. That took a lot of work, let me tell you. I was thinking about adding digg, and if digg is successful, possibly ads to my blog. See if I can't make a little money off this wailing wall of words. But first things first: how hard is it to add digg to each post? Turns out it's five lines of code, but, for lack of motivation, I hadn't changed my layout to use the new Blogger API, and digg, at least the code I found, requires use of one of the new features. So, it took me about four hours, but I finally got everything back to the way it was from one of the other sample layouts blogger offers. There is one major difference besides the added digg, and that's that comments are now only displayed on the item pages themselves, which is irritating. Since I hardly ever get comments, to my displeasure, I always liked having them right on the main page. Therefore, I have amounted more evidence that Google is evil. It appears I've evaded the important topics for two nights, and now, this third night, there's no avoiding them. I've run out of all the other padding. I suppose I could make up an entire boring scenario that has nothing to do with anything and contradicts any number of statements previously written while I wait for good ideas to pool, but then you'd be as frustrated with me as I am with Bleach. Pandora truncates "Casting Crowns (Holiday)" to "Casting Crow...". My mind extended it to "Casting Crows" and I immediately pictured throwing birds like paper airplanes. And then I saw "Casting Crow" and imagined a sorcerous raven complete with robe and pointy hat. Oooh! I've thought of two. Take that, actual content! First, my thermostats are all messed up. It's either like 65 degrees or 80 degrees with nothing in the middle. It's rather frustrating. I don't mind the heat, though it keeps guests away and I have to water my cats more often, but I do mind the doubled electricity bill. Second, during the Microsoft GIVE campaign this year, we were trying to come up with a theme for our group's code names. A lot of people had ideas (I was not among them), and most of them sucked. So, the last day of the campaign, October 30th, we had a contest, and whichever faction donated the most money that day got to choose the theme for future code names. It quickly became a bidding war, and in the end, our small group donated just under $15k, and Microsoft matched all of that. All in a day's work when there are generous people competing over something relatively small. I am proud to be a Microsoft employee, and even more so to be on the SQL Azure team. As I said in part one of this chain of posts setting the record, the gold standard, if you will, of blogged days in a row, Heaven has been pushed down on the stack of books I'm reading. The top of the stack is a book called Birthright by David Needham. One Sunday after the church service, I went up and talked to the pastor again. He gave me his email address and apologized for not responding to my facebook message. Liked I'd suspected, it just got misplaced somehow. So, I re-emailed him that one question, and three others. He answered the first one by recommending that I read Birthright. It's amazing how well the prologue of that book fits my experience. Basically he'd lived his spiritual life academically, but didn't really have the joy that seems so abundant in other Christians. So one day in college, he skipped all of his classes, and went out into the wilderness to pray all day. And nothing happened. I've not done that exact same thing, but I can easily imagine a similar situation. I recognize his frustration, and so I got my hopes up. Chapters one and two were alright, if a little depressing. They covered what it means to be human (versus being an animal) and the nature of the Fall. When I read, I take each bit of information and reevaluate it against what I already know, think, or have learned. With information on a new topic, or fiction, when the world is relatively simple and new, reading is a lot quicker (though still tedious). When it comes to reading about Christianity, it's very slow going, because there's a lot to process. And on top of that, it might pique some dark spot in my knowledge, and cause me to stop and run down a rabbit trail, usually resulting in a question, and ten minutes later, having to reread the paragraph that caused the interruption. Processing and reevaluating also means, "suppose this is true; now what are its implications?" So then those implications also need to processed and reevaluated. I'm a fan of the depth first traversal, though I frequently experience stack overflow. I just don't have enough heap memory for a breadth first traversal. Ok, that's enough computer science for now. Anyway, I suggest this method of reading when it comes to important topics, and do not when it comes to finishing reading a book before the quiz tomorrow in CP English, because you'll never finish in time. A bunch of things in chapters one and two didn't feel quite right. They didn't fit into my already-dug "trenches," as the book describes it. For reading it, I've found I had to think of it as completely hypothetical, then evaluate it as a whole when I'm done, to replace whatever trenches I already have if it turns out his thoughts are more right than what I already have, else I'm going to end up chiseling the walls with a butter knife, and that's just not structurally sound. Chapter three was pivotal. He reiterated what he'd said in the prologue, again bolstering my hope for some crucial secret I'd never been taught, nor figured out on my own. Actually, the first portion of chapter three was really interesting. He said something that makes complete sense to me (no chiseling required) that I'd never thought of before. He describes salvation as a "screen" (and uses quotes every single time he mentions it as if we'd forgotten in the last two sentences what he was talking about), and when we accept Jesus' gift, death, and forgiveness, God no longer sees us, but sees a screen, displaying Jesus. God sees Jesus' righteousness rather than our sinful nature. Essentially, we're not seen at all. This leads me to ask a question. Didn't Jesus take all of our sin? Doesn't that make him sinful and us holy in the eyes of God? So wouldn't that make that screen of his a sinful one? I think the answer is no, because Jesus was God and so when he descended to hell, he was able to atone for the sins there, and now is holy again. As for seeing us as holy, I think that's what he means by the screen in the first place. Maybe it's more like a super powerful sin vacuum cleaner that pulls the stains off us as soon as we put them there before God gets a chance to see them. Anyway, this is all a little trivial in comparison to the point he was making, and the point I said makes complete sense to me, that the screen is a completely external process. When we accept Christ into our lives, there is no immediate internal change. We are seen as holy, but are still of the flesh, still fallen. Then he went onto two internal changes that do happen. The second one becomes the primary focus of the book thereafter (I've not read that far yet), but the first one, while seemingly small, is a bridge to the second. This first internal change is this: that we are no longer enemies of God. God is now a father with open arms, and we love him for that. Alas, this is where my hopes crumbled, because that's not my experience. I love God because he is holy and good, and I love good things. But I've never really felt like he was proud of me, or that he cared at an intimate level. He's like a war general that cares about his troops three levels below him, and wants none of them to die. He makes his orders and brilliant stratagems to that affect, and if given the chance to save those soldiers' lives by dying himself, would do it in a heartbeat. But that's not a personal love. That's not the love of a father, and not what Needham describes. When he was going over this, like many times before, I tried to imagine God as a man with open arms. An overwhelming image appeared in my mind's eye. It was an irrepressible darkness deserving the fear of the Lord. I don't know what to make of that. Something happened, then, a few minutes after I let the image slip. I tried again, and this time (and every time since) it was a blurry image of a figure with open arms, with white-blue light surrounding him. But it was entirely foreign, and not of love, at least that I could recognize. Embracing this figure would be like clasping your hands, then shifting the top hand down one finger. I don't know what to make of that either. Anyway, I'll keep reading, but once again I've gotten my hopes up and then they were dropped and broken. Now I've arrived at an age-old philosophical debate, and this one has a known right answer if you're a Christian. I'm just not sure I've seen evidence of this right answer. In fact, this answer caused the reformation and split the church off from Catholicism. Is salvation a free gift? I know that it is not earned. There are any number of arguments against that train of thought. What merit could man possibly bring forth to earn salvation? Further, if he could, potentially, what need of salvation would he have? So, the answer is a resounding 'yes,' salvation is absolutely a free gift. There's an old word play. Justice is getting what you deserve. Mercy is not getting what you deserve. Grace is getting what you don't deserve. It is "by grace you have been saved through faith--and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God--not by works, so that no one can boast." (Ephesians 2:8-9) There's a bit there: "through faith." That faith has to come from somewhere, doesn't it? Is it still a gift if we're required to supply this faith ourselves? This presents a chemical simile. What if faith is like a catalyst. It's not used up, not exchanged, in the process, but still required for the reaction of salvation to occur? Another thought comes to mind. What is faith? Maybe we do have to supply it, but what if it occurs naturally from simply wanting the gift in the first place? I've heard two definitions of faith. One, that faith is "being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see," (Hebrews 11:1) and two, that faith is the substance of things hoped for. Those might actually be two ways of saying the same thing. If we take this second definition, then hoping for salvation, and acting on this hope by naming ourselves Christians, produces faith in and of itself. This is what "accepting the gift of salvation" is, so faith isn't irrelevant, but it's not an issue, I don't think. This topic brushes on the 'how' of being saved. There's a lot of theological debate on this one too. Romans 10:9-10 puts it simply. That if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. Justified was a word that Needham talked a lot about in the first half of chapter 3, what spawned his screen idea. I suppose it's ironic, then, that the believing in your heart is what produces the external effects, and confessing with your mouth spurs the internal changes. It just seems like, though, that with salvation, always comes the need to change our lives. My friend David put it this way, "I usually side on the 'salvation is a gift from God, but that gift should be reason enough to be life-changing' side." However, John (the apostle) goes so far to say to cease sinning. It's a do, not a should. (He doesn't mean completely, I don't think, as that's impossible in our fleshy bodies, but perhaps to get out of the mindset of it's okay.) Paul makes a similar point in Romans 6. What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Or don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. See, now I'm confused. We were given this gift in order that we might die? We're now losing our lives for a "free gift." Even Jesus turned people away for various reasons. What about the man in Luke 9 who is hyped up about miracles, but Jesus knows there's more hardship than glamor? What about the wealthy man in Mark 10, when Jesus tells him to give away all his possessions if he wants to follow him? At this point, I believe we're in a paradox. I'm okay with paradoxes. If we're going to argue that it's a completely free gift, and that this isn't a paradox, then God needs to do all the changing of our lives himself. All of it. In my experience, he doesn't. It probably contradicts free will, which he has promised us. The number of times I've prayed for change in my life above and beyond myself -- a total makeover of my life without letting me get involved. It's never happened. The only option left to me is that this is a paradox. What gets me is that we continue to preach that this is a free gift, and it is, and we preach that we need to quit sinning, change our lives, kill our lives, and we never want to point out that these appear to contradict themselves. The sermon on Sunday, for example, was on "the gospel as gift," in a five-week series titled "the gospel as ...". He spent the whole sermon arguing that it is a free gift, much like I just did but with different verses. And in the last five minutes switched to "now what can you give?" Wait, what? I was going to write a bit about God's love. I'm not sure that I have much to write, though. Wait, that sounds bad. There was a "sermon" given in Bellingham on God's love. It wasn't a sermon, though. That church does things differently (not wrong), and some weeks they have more of a discussion or forum, rather than a formal sermon. (Other weeks they have service projects rather than meeting at the church at all. It's actually a really cool idea. It's not my thing, but it's a really cool idea. I wouldn't mind doing the service projects, but I get the most out of a good speaker and a good worship session. That and service are what build me up the most, and I see church as the place to go to be built up. Really, I think, glorifying God should be what the rest of the week is about, but perhaps that's a different blog post.) Anyway, the pastor got up and said that he could talk for thirteen hours on the topic of God's love, and then he sat down and had everyone else talk. I've just never heard a satisfying sermon on God's love. I'm not certain I've heard any sermons on the topic specifically. It's a rather large topic. I'm not sure what you'd talk about specifically, aside from John 3:16. I find it frustrating. I don't even know what I want in order to be satisfied. Like pornography, I know it when I see it. I say I want something concrete, but what's more concrete than God sending his only Son to die in our place? I say I want something I can directly apply to my life as an action, but any time someone has taken me up on that challenge, I'm not satisfied with their answers (or they give my favorite answer: just give it to Jesus). One time I was told to journal.... I was talking to Courtney last night about Birthright and about my lack of joy. Defining joy has always been a challenge too. It's obviously different from happiness. We're expected to have lasting joy. Happiness is by nature fleeting and circumstantial. I guess that means that joy is not circumstantial, and so must then be based on something permanent, maybe knowledge? I would say faith or hope, but I find both of those fleeting -- hope more than faith. After all, hope crashes and burns due to circumstances, like getting to page 61 in a book. Do joy and disappointment, then, not contradict each other? I go round and round in circles. I get frustrated trying to define joy, trying to decide whether I have it or not. And then I remember it's moot. Whether or not I'm missing joy, I know I am missing something. I feel like Anakin feeling he's being denied some knowledge of the force. So I feel really whiny, and a little bit paranoid. But if this is it, I'm not satisfied, and I refuse to believe that an infinite God is not satisfying. One thing that always comes to mind is the excitement I see in other Christians. I think I touched on this when I was still hanging out with Paul. (I need to call him again, and grab coffee or something.) They're just so happy about what Jesus has done in their lives. Why am I not? Am I merely ungrateful? If I am, can I change? If I can, is that not just forcing my own happiness? Think happy thoughts! I guess I've been excited once or twice, like after Challenge a few years back. Maybe I just notice when Christians are excited, and I don't notice when that excitement fades or falters. I know for one thing that I don't feel forgiven. I know that I am as take it at your word knowledge. Isn't that rather core? I don't doubt my salvation, and I don't doubt that I'm forgiven, but why do I still feel guilty all the time? Why can't I forgive myself for things? I would think that if I truly realized the enormity of my situation, my grievances and the mercy and grace given instead of justice -- if I took that all into perfect perspective, maybe I'd be touched deeper down. But I'm pretty thick. It takes a lot to shake me. How can I not take something for granted when I already do? I can think about the cross and the sacrifice, but then I just feel guilty again, which is the cause of this issue in the first place, right? Like I was saying, I was talking to Courtney. She and I had a rather blunt conversation with straight forward questions. I'm still trying to decide whether it was refreshing or awkward, but whatever. She asked me if I see God's love in my life. And I don't, at least not in the moment. I see God's influence in my past, the brilliance of the General's orders after the battle is over. The biggest example of this is my not getting into Harvey Mudd, and being forced to go to Western, where I roomed with Swood and got involved in CCF and the INN, and ultimately landed my dream job at Microsoft. Had I gotten into Harvey Mudd, I wouldn't have been near my family during the divorce, and I would have taken four years instead of three to graduate. I would have been looking for a job right in the midst of the recession. She gave me a few examples of how she sees God in her life. Part of it seems to be an assuredness that whatever happens, God is in control. That's probably another thing I take for granted. Other things are like her "wonderful family." To be blunt, I don't have a wonderful family. I love my mom and sister dearly, but we are really broken and dysfunctional. Or she's thankful that she gets to go to college. I'm thankful for the experience -- in hindsight -- but it really was expected of me. It was a stressor, even if it was something I wanted to do, and something during which I was relatively carefree. Maybe this is a bad example, but imagine you're a prince. You want to be king, because you'd be a good king, but you are going to be king, and there's nothing you can do about it. Since the age of five, I was going to college. It was hard for me to count that a blessing, in fact, I never really even considered it. So is this what joy is? Being content with what you have, and the knowledge that you'll be taken care of one way or another, even if not in this life? That raises an interesting question -- why bother feeling that you'll be taken care of in this life, if you don't know that for sure? This is morbid, and I don't know exactly why I just thought of it, but one time I was feeling especially suicidal, and my dad got fed up and told me that if I tried to commit suicide and it wasn't God's will for me to die yet, then I wouldn't. Later I was replaying that conversation in my head, and I really wish I had responded, "So how about we try it out, and if I die, it's what God wanted." The last thing Courtney suggested was writing down five blessings. Blessings are tricky. At face value, they're things you're glad about, right? So if I roll a Yahtzee, is that a blessing? I don't think so. So then they're probably deeper than that. They're things, though. They're not necessarily material, but they're still temporary. The people Jesus healed still died eventually. How good an idea is it to get attached to a something you'll lose? Are thankfulness and attachment the same thing? God gives, and God takes away. I'm afraid to be thankful of things, I think. Yet, there are things I'm thankful for. Swood is the first that comes to mind, followed quickly by the rest of my close friends. He's probably first because I see him on a regular basis, and he's the least likely to leave. I run into this issue a lot. I'll be working on something or thinking about something, and I'll think about praying for or about it. Sometimes I don't want to, either because I want to do it under my own esteem, feeling I'm more than capable of doing this mundane task I do all the time, or because it's something I don't really worry about (like a plane crashing or something completely random like my sister getting small pox [just made that one up]). But now I feel like if I don't pray about, and then something goes wrong, it was my fault, or even that if I don't pray about it, something will go wrong, despite a complete lack of evidence for this. Should I then pray about every little thing? The Bible does say to pray without ceasing, but I've always been taught that means to live your life as a prayer. Also, I kind of figure that if God is listening in on my thoughts, and I've now devoted twenty-five paragraphs to God, along with all the thought that went into them while writing, as well as the two months since the last post when I was actually doing all this thinking, is that not prayer? Is thinking about God fundamentally different from thinking to God? I'm not sure I've ever read in the Bible that praying in your head "counts." Every time I've read about someone praying, it was aloud. Unless I'm in a group of people, I never pray aloud. God's omniscient, so this shouldn't be an issue. But at the same time, prayers said aloud are typically more focused and less prone to tangent than thought is. Does that make them more powerful? Have I just reduced prayer to magic, if heartfelt, words? I believe that is enough pondering for one post. It's late again, and I'm driving home tomorrow morning. I haven't seen Luigi in maybe over a year, and I am looking forward to it.

Like so many posts before, I believe I will start this one off with a sentence. How 'bout that? I last posted in January, which you may or may not be aware of depending on how long, or rather short, this post is. It also depends on how large your monitor is and whether you have it landscape or portrait, as well as whether you've zoomed in or out within the browser. Therefore, I may or may not have had a reason to tell you that I last posted in January. Still, for some reason it seems like I posted in February. I think something is fishy going on here. Yes, the goings on are smelling of fish. Look at that. Two paragraphs in and no content. I'm a self-proclaimed genius. And now three. I think I'll have to renew my subscription for walloftext.net soon. I was thinking I made this site in March, but I think I did it after I got back from Jamaica, and that would have been April. I think that because it's you all, my readers, that are reaping the benefits of this subscription, and not I, the writer and self-proclaimed genius, you guys should foot the bill, but being generous in nature, I guess I can fork over the $8. I suppose I should cover the usual suspects, that is, the things you suspect I'll write about: work, girls, faith, tofu, et cetera. Work is going well, just like it was the last several posts. In sprint 7 I was tasked with making a watchdog process, which is a program that makes sure another program is running, and running as expected (that is, when asked for pi, not returning Euler's number, as most programs in a bad state would do). This work also involved becoming intimately familiar with the cluster deployment process. After you get used to doing it, and have done it a good 20 times (successfully about three and a half times), it's not too hard. It's like installing BSD. I also wrote up a quick doc that contains a step-by-step for common deployments. If this sounds boring to you, imagine doing it for two months. Ok, so it wasn't that bad, but it's not something you wake up and go "yay for work!" about. (Two years ago, that sentence would have had to have been, "Ok, so it wasn't that bad, but it's not something about which you wake up and go "yay for work!" You gain a word, lose a period, and increase awkward sentence structure by 36%.) My cats are as sporadically energetic as ever. I have my desktop in my living room, originally so I could see how WoW looked on 1080p, but now so I can finish The West Wing on a big screen. I'm in season 6 again, and that's all I have to say about season 6. Because I need the keyboard and mouse to reach the couch, and the VGA cable to reach the TV, it's a bit of a stretch, and the cats have taken to running from one corner of the apartment to the other, sometimes jumping over the VGA cable, sometimes jumping through the VGA cable, and now, without something holding it down a couple millimeters, I only get the blue and green parts of the image. Cats are why I can't have nice things. Am I just material? I was so angry at Danza as a kitten when she started chewing on my new Bible's cloth bookmark. I get angry when the cats scratch up the walls, or snag a shirt or the couch cushions, or my computer chair (which by now has seen much better days and I don't care so much anymore). It's one thing if a child breaks a plate. Sure, the plate is broken -- sad times -- but the kid probably felt bad about it and learned to be a little more careful, and besides it was a mistake. But if the child was breaking things on purpose, wouldn't it be right to be angry at them? Then we introduce instincts, such as cats. By nature they like to run around and are curious and all, but some things they know they're not supposed to do, like get on the table or counters, or chew on wires. The way I know they know they're not supposed to is because they get skittish when they're doing something wrong, and I get up to go to the bathroom, while they don't when they're doing something fine and I get up. Anyway, I get upset when something ruins the purity or integrity of one of my possessions, such as the cooler on iPod action that took place on July third, 2005. The thing is, I hardly use my iPod anymore -- in fact it's been at least a year. Another thing that annoys me is when someone gets on your WoW character and gains six levels, even if I didn't really plan to play it again. I like to earn my status in games, especially if I can't get back to the point where I left off. If someone had taken my character and copied it to a test server to play on, I wouldn't care at all. Also, I think my Staff of Jordan was sold. I only spent two and a half times what it was worth to get it, and vendoring it is about 11 gold. Bah. It's been a weird couple of months, though. I saw a psychiatrist about my depression or whatever it is. She put me on some meds about five weeks ago, and they seem to be working, sort of. When I try to describe my mood, I usually say something like, normal people's moods are like sin(x), oscillating between -1 and 1, where 0 is neither good or bad, though more realistically, it's not as smooth -- it jumps up and down according to circumstance, and most of the time it's a flat 0, rather than steep at 0. I'm like .8sin(x) - 1, oscillating between -1.8 and -.2, and circumstance has little, if anything, to do with it. On the meds, it's more like a normal person, only my high is still .2, and my low is -1 -- but it's more flat than sinusoidal, and circumstance-dictated. I hope that makes sense. Actually, I really don't care. I still wouldn't say I have hope or expectation of happiness though. It's kind of a weird feeling. Things look clearer, in my mind's eye, but bleaker. On the bright side, I feel a little better about myself. I don't really understand it. My sister's off to Europe today for three months. Ladies, now is your chance to hook up with her boyfriend. Dear John letters don't just have to be for troops, nor for Johns. The three of us went out to The Cheesecake Factory on Sunday for her birthday and for a last visit before she forgets our national anthem, and her sense of what freedom is. She's basically committing three months of treason. I, the responsible one, with no guidance from a mother who's never left the continent, experimented and scarcely recovered from two weeks in Australia. She could have -- no, should have! -- learned vicariously, but some people just have to learn the hard way. May God be with her. My mom is nearing the end of her Master's class. Finally, people will stop saying to me, "Your mom's in college!" and I'll get to stop hospitalizing them. It's a lot of stress for her, so I'll be really happy when she's done with it. I think it ends in August, but the regular school year ends in June so the last two months should be more cake-like than the three months from now until June. Denna and I are still talking, still as good of friends as ever, though we miss talking to each other quite as much as we did before. She's visiting in May, and I'm looking forward to that. It's on her parents' dollar, so she'll spend most of the time with them, but she should be able to spend a night or two on my couch I'm hoping. She called tonight. It was good to hear her voice again. We really should just call each other more often, rather than texting. I met a girl, Emma, at work who makes me laugh. She's the first one, girl or person, that's been within two years of my age. I've got her going to Chuck and Heroes on Monday nights either at my apartment (which I finally mostly cleaned) or Swood's. I'd be interested in her romantically except that she's not looking for someone and she's not a Christian. Emma is, however, a big enough player in the game that is my life right now that I've renamed her. Several weeks ago, now, on a Friday or Saturday I talked with an old friend from CCF I never know all too well, though I always thought she was cute. (Cute happens to be one of those words with ambiguous magnitude -- it might be an understatement, it might not; in this case it's an understatement.) We had a good conversation on facebook while she was at work, typing between customers. It was a good talk, and so, for a brief stint, I thought things might, might, might go further. A few days later, we had another talk that wasn't as good. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't as good, and so for now, I don't really care. This past Wednesday (it's hard to believe that was a week ago), I drove up to Bellingham per Hime's beck, for filming of her pirate-zombie-ninja movie. The first one can be found here. I'm not in this first one because I was doing the camera work (and now we know why I didn't go into show business of any kind). Swood gave me a bad time for accepting for the two weeks leading up and the following Monday (two days ago). I took a personal holiday at work to do it. It had to be on a Wednesday for spring break reasons I think. Swood is secretly, or not so secretly, happy it was scheduled for a Wednesday so he couldn't go. Anyway, I got there an hour late (I didn't know when it officially started, nor did I quite care) around 11. We were still two hours away from actually turning on a camera. I got to know a couple of the people I'd not yet met, such as Hime's boyfriend, and caught up with a few of my friends I'd not seen or talked to in a while. We did about an hour of filming outside. One of the girls was sick, like really sick, so I don't know why we spent so much time in the 50 degree weather, especially when the ninjas, of which she was a member, were wearing summer clothing. I'm inserting a breaking paragraph here mostly for the sake of a new paragraph, but since it is a new paragraph, I had better change the topic. I'm posting here on a public website in hopes that someone with the ear of the sky can inform them that snow in the middle of March is not cool. About ten minutes into the filming, one of Hime's friends, Mallory, showed up. I never quite gathered whether she was supposed to be in the movie or was just spectating, as I managed to have the privilege to do. After an hour, hour-and-a-half of indoor filming, in which my hand was in two scenes in a laboratory lavatory, Hime called it a day. I don't want to give any plot spoilers of this summer's probably-never-will-be-completed blockbuster, but I'm the evil mastermind. With a baseball bat. Hime asked if I was going home right then. I wanted some time with friends that didn't involve directing, and suggested we should all go out for dinner to Applebee's at 9, when they have half price nachos. Then, all but five of us left, leaving Hime, her boyfriend, another male friend of hers, Mallory, and me. Hime, and the two guys not associated with the pronoun 'me' (saying "other guys" left it ambiguous as to whether I was saying Hime was a guy as well [oh man, what was the amazingly ambiguous sentence I heard or thought up this morning? There was no way to disambiguate it, and still use the expression. This is going to bug me. It was awesome!]), left to do something, so Mallory and I played a mind-riveting, tear-jerking, heart palpating, sitting on the edge of your seat, game of Sorry. I won after an unexpected comeback (ie, "your mom!"). I know there's nothing there between us, but every now and then this past week I've thought about her. She laughed at some math jokes, so that's a plus. She's ridiculously cute (no disambiguation need there). Her facebook says she's a Christian, and we didn't get into any faith-related conversations during my visit so I don't have reason to suspect differently. I just can't tell whether we'd be good together (in the very hypothetical hypothetical in which we're together at all), or if she'd drive me crazy. A couple of times she shot me down after I'd said something that I thought was fairly harmless. I've done that many times on accident, shooting someone down and making it awkward, and I feel bad afterwards but don't usually say something to the person, so maybe she did the same thing? If that's the case, I don't think I'd be driven crazy. This is the point where you all think I'm girl-crazed because I've talked about three girls in effectively three paragraphs (the one that was split up by the weather rant doesn't count). Honestly, I don't think I am. First, for the first time in a long while, I'm actually content in that part of my life. I don't need a girlfriend; I'm fine alone, or at least, I don't crave the enhancement a girlfriend would bestow on my life. That is, other parts of my life certainly aren't fine right now, but the fact I don't have a girlfriend is no such part. Second, these are just my thoughts, and any guy that can say he doesn't notice three cute girls in two months is lying, blind, or alone (but if he's alone, how did he tell you? A mighty fine question, my friend). It's past midnight now, so I should probably wrap this up soon. I wrote the first few paragraphs yesterday before heading south for Chuck, actually, but the same holds true today, so I didn't mess with them. However, tomorrow things change, as it's April, and much of this post's validity relies on it being March. I bought a PS3 this past month. I got something like $3400 back from the government borrowing too much money from me. I think $600 of that was a stimulus package, which, as The West Wing has taught me, is an advance, not a rebate, so I haven't spent that money. I bought the console as both a console and a BluRay player. There aren't many games I'm interested in playing yet, though I bet FFXIII will look nicer on the PS3 than the 360 by a little. Either way, BluRay'd Batman is pretty amazing looking. About three weeks ago, Solomon and Rufus both emailed me within a couple days of each other. I responded to both of them on the same day, with effectively a blog post. To Solomon, I noted that I'd be in Bellingham on this past Wednesday, and that I'd love to visit, but he never responded. Neither did Rufus for that matter. I'm guessing they were both on mission trips that week, but it was still a week to respond. Maybe it took a week to read it, and then they still had to pack? I'm meeting with my pastor tomorrow over lunch. I think I've said this before, but we do that about once a month or so. Sometimes I go with something to talk to him about, but this time and last time I haven't. Mostly just catching up and bouncing ideas of each other. And of course eating. There's more to write about -- there's always more to write about -- but I think I'll leave that for another day. Maybe tomorrow. We'll see. *dog with shifty eyes* Future topics of importance include Rune Factory Frontier and what's been going on with my faith.

I may have spoken a little too soon when complaining about The Fires of Heaven (book 5 of the Wheel of Time). It turns out the battle I'd just finished reading through was not the epic end-of-the-book battle, which was quite a bit better. Still, I'd have liked to have known how the fight with Couladin went. The last time Mat got to fight with description was fighting against Galad and Gawyn in Caemlyn, if memory serves. Also, the scientist in me would like to know exactly how the time paradox issues of Baelfire are resolved, not just that a bunch of people saw a few people die, but those people don't remember dying. It's a little too vague for my tastes. My own book is coming along just fine. That is, if "fine" means fixing up the first and only chapter and running into writers' block as soon as I start another one. It'd really help if I had some plot ideas, you know? It seems the only plot I know enough about is my own. Unfortunately my own story is full of plot holes, so it's hard to garner any readers. I'd start talking about Travis right about now, but at the moment, I don't have any new stories about her. Shortly after I last posted, say about 10 hours later, I left for Bellingham with my kitties. They so enjoy car rides. Kotenok actually might. He just sits in the box quietly. Calloh cries every few seconds from point A to point B, unless the music is loud enough that she knows she won't be heard. Or maybe she's just not being heard. I listened to that Seabird disk on the way up. It played through twice. I've probably listened to each song now at least 20 times, and about half of them (the ones I really like) more than that. Probably my favorite song, musically, is called Cottonmouth (Jargon). It's kind of depressing though, sort of liberating but vengeful at the same time. It makes me feel good, but dark at the same time. Those two don't mix well inside of me. Speaking of dark, I just finished Fable a couple hours ago. Alexander loaned it to me on Tuesday after Eureka. On Wednesday I was feeling kind of off, to the point that my manager noticed, and commented a couple times that I was slower than normal (which I guess means I'm fast sometimes?), and I ended up going home early. I think that was a run-on sentence. That night I put in between 5 and 8 hours. On Thursday, yesterday, I was feeling worse, and called in sick. Honestly, it had nothing to do with the game, and I wasn't even all that hooked by Wednesday night. Video games are often restful, though, and I ended up playing another 13 hours or so. The good news is that I felt better today. When I got home I finished up the remaining 4 or 5 hours. It's a decent game, for sure. The gameplay during battles is fun, though it can get a little repetitive. I was light-side, as I always am in such games (I don't know what I'm going to do in the Force Unleashed), so I got the Tear of Avo, or whatever, which is either the second best or tied for the best weapon in the game. I wished there was more storyline behind it. The evil sword had quite a bit of history. Also, there's another legendary sword you can get that's not as good, but takes a ton of extra work to earn. It really should be better than the Tear of Avo, in my opinion. It doesn't have to best the evil sword, but.... Also, the story seemed too linear. I guess I'm used to Knights of the Old Republic, where there are nine different story lines intertwined into yours, and then the villains were interesting too. Jack of Blades was just sort of always out there. And then there was the final battle. It wasn't easy per se, but it certainly wasn't hard, for a game so epic. I expected the fight to be the first of many parts, though not as many as Twilight Princess had -- that bordered on ridiculous, even if it was fun. Having a wife wasn't particularly rewarding. By the time you can really afford to start buying houses, you don't need much money anymore (you rent out houses), and the only way to buy a shop is to kill the current shop owners. Also, I wanted your sister and Whisper to return. And last, but not least, it needed some HK-47. Bellingham, right. I took my vacation that week because Hime was going to be working two weeks from then, and this past week had too many people taking vacation as it was. It turns out, however, that Hime decided to volunteer these two weeks anyway. It's certainly not that I didn't enjoy visiting everyone else, but she was certainly a major reason I went up there. I didn't get a minute alone with her, and the only time that might have been possible, was during the day she was battling through on two and a half hours of sleep, and so wasn't in the best of moods. There were two opportunities for the two of us to talk alone for a little bit, three if you count dinner on Thursday, but those two she chose to talk with Rosa instead. I know they haven't gotten to talk in a long time, but I guess I was looking at how long it would be before we saw each other again, compared to the next time she and Rosa would be able to talk. That dinner I mentioned, I was under the impression the two of us alone, or possibly a few of us, would be going out to dinner. Rosa and the Maggie (aliased for no other reason than I'm listening to a song called Maggie Mahoney, by, you guessed it, Seabird) wanted to have a barbeque on Thursday. I texted Hime saying, "Hey, where did you want to go to dinner? We could go to the bbq tonight and have dinner tomorrow." She texted back, "I can't do dinner tomorrow, but I want to go to the barbeque." At the barbeque, she basically avoided talking to me at all. Again, on two and a half hours of sleep, I can't blame her for not wanting to talk very much. I guess really it comes down to my hopes or expectations being let down. There's always a need for balance. Do you hope and get hurt, which often leads to bitterness, or do you skip a step and go straight cynic? (Do not pass go, do not collect $200 -- which is about the price of my last vet bill.) How do we balance fairness, letting people keep the money they earned, and forcing people to give to those who need it through taxes? Sometimes I think it'd be easier had Jesus been a politician. Then there's balancing giving with making wise financial decisions with spending money on things you probably don't need practically, but realistically need in order to entertain yourself. Or others! -- I technically could probably get by without the internet, but then, how would you read my blog? And then what would you do with your life? I had a conversation with Donna today over facebook about net neutrality. She's a big Obama fan. I'm on the fence, but leaning toward Obama. I realized I'd seen and heard remarkably few Presidential campaign ads, considering it's election season. Evidently, I don't watch much network television anymore. I'm sure when Chuck, Heroes, and Life start again, I'll get my share. I'm all for net neutrality, as is Obama, whereas McCain said he fervently opposed it and wanted to hire Steve Ballmer. Something tells me Ballmer wouldn't take the job, seeing as how he's had his own for a couple months. Who knows, maybe he's more political than I think. Either way, it sounds like he just wanted to drop a big name, and Bill Gates got out of the business, plus I don't think anyone hires Bill, you know? There are just so many political issues, and neither candidate fits my views all too well. Obama's pro-choice and wants to take more of my money so that they can pay today's old people for a little while longer, and let Social Security go bankrupt around the time I'd need it. McCain supports No Child Left Standing and opposes net neutrality. At least I don't have to worry about immigration. According to cnn.com, they have identical views. My conversation about net neutrality with Donna led to a conversation on net neutrality with Fran. She didn't know anything about the issue or what it was, so it was fun to taint her view for her. We only hung out a couple times, but I do miss her. She always has a nice, positive outlook on things. I find it encouraging. It doesn't hurt that she has the cutest profile picture on facebook (regarding me missing her), but that's definitely after-the-fact. For the record, as much as the record can be for'd anyway, I'm not interested in her. I've finally got to the point that I'm not really interested in any girl right now. I've been wanting to get to this point for a couple months now, but sometimes that's difficult; sometimes a girl makes that difficult. Next step: contentment in this place. It's odd to say this, but I feel too tired to be content. I'm also too tired to want anything. On Friday night, in Bellingham, I went over to Bill's place with Rosa and the other girls in her house. Hime was working. There were about ten of us there, and then three "adults," Bill's parents and uncle. The plan was to watch Top Gun, but that quickly turned into a violent game of spoons. I left for Redmond around midnight. One thing I miss about Bellingham is the spiritual high of being around a lot of Christians. I visited Rufus while I was there. He's getting moved in with his bride at their new place. We had a good lunch and talked about our lives, ending up on the topic of money. He seems to know a lot about making good financial decisions. I guess if you pay little enough on taxes (so it looks to the government that you're fairly poor), they had this deal where the government would match up to 50% of whatever you put into some sort of investment account. He owed $500 in taxes, so he put $1000 into the investment, and didn't have to pay the government anything. It was basically free money. I don't know that it would have occurred to me to do something like that. I'm also not quite clear about how my mutual fund works. I was under the impression that I gave the company (Fidelity) money and told them how much, roughly, I wanted in different categories, and they did all the trading for me. The investments, though, all seem to be different companies, rather than a pot with which to buy stock. For example, one category was company stock (Microsoft), and I have so many (2 point something) shares of it. Will they buy and sell when they think it's a good time, or will it just sit there and do whatever the market is doing? Money always has a way of making you worry about it, even when you know you have more than enough. I remember vividly going to Toys 'R' Us with a family friend for one of my birthdays. I bought an N64 game, don't remember which, and I worried the whole way home that I overdrafted my checking account even though I knew I had at least $40 more than I spent. According to that friend (I'm too lazy to think up an alias right now), I inherited that from my mother. Before and after Eureka on Tuesday, at Swood's place, we watched Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. It's spectacular, if you haven't seen it yet. Well worth the $5 on iTunes, though I'm sure you can watch it on Youtube for free. I guess it was to test the waters on this kind of comedy. I hope they make more eventually. Unfortunately, it may be too smart for network television, or maybe I'm not giving the American people enough credit. That's something I've noticed I'm really snobby about, is humor. If it's not brilliant, it's not funny, and anyone who laughs at such a plain, overdone, typical joke really has no appreciation for the art of comedy, and therefore is stupid. I need to work on that. It's only 12:30, but I think I've written enough for now. I'll probably go read some more WoT, or maybe start up Phoenix Wright again. I'm about halfway through the second one. ... a thing. top | 0 Comments Delusions of Grandeur Wednesday, August 13, 2008 I've still not figured out a good way to allow backward access to my posts. For now you can use the search bar at the top that blogger puts up there and search for "postxxxx" where "xxxx" is the post number, like "0012" for this post. Saying this here won't be too helpful in ten posts, when it gets pushed off the front page though. Hopefully I'll add buttons to the top by the time that happens. Right now I'm loving this band called Seabird. If you listen to Spirit, they sing Rescue, whose first catchy lines are "I'm pushing up daisies / I wish they were roses". The music just leaves you longing for something. It's rare that music these days can stir up that kind of emotion. The whole album ('Til We See The Dawn) is worth buying if you're an iTunes or Microsoft Marketplace fan. Also, iTunes right now is selling it in aac format for $.99 per, so no DRM, plus higher quality sound. Also lately I've been reading a lot of different things, particularly webcomics. I read all the way through Queen of Wands at least until it started over with commentary. The author quit writing them. As I understand it, she (Aerie) ended up marrying the author of Strip Tease, Chris Daily, and now they write Punch an' Pie together. I've (and am continuing to) read punchanpie, and have read most of Strip Tease now. (Note: 'read' in the previous sentence has multiple tenses.) They're alright. Like with most story line oriented web comics, most of them are a little funny, and then once a month or so they make you laugh out loud. (An example of a comic that makes me laugh out loud almost every time is xkcd which is not story line oriented.) Then there's qc, Wigu, Dinosaur Comics, Ctrl+Alt+Del, and SAMWAR. What else is interesting to me lately? I have two kitties now. My sister and mom each bought me one, though my mom wasn't there to help pick them out. Their names are indeed Kotenok and Calloh. They're both tabbies. Kotenok is short-haired, greyscale, and super affectionate. Calloh is long-haired, lynx-tufted eared, greyscale plus brown, and a bit more individualistic, though she likes to cuddle when she's sleepy. They're slowly becoming a bit more obedient with the help of Sheriff Squirt Bottle. Work's going decently. I'm actually on vacation right now; SQL Server 2008 was just released so everyone in the database side of MS gets a week off. I'd just like to point out that I feel I deserve this break. Countless hours of my life went into that release and I'd just like to take some of that credit while it's still fresh in people's minds. Today I saw The Dark Knight at the IMAX theater with Minnie, after watching Batman Begins at my apartment. Both movies gave me the same reaction, I think, though I enjoyed how demented the Joker was in the second movie. I don't like it when there are situations with no right choice. They make me irritated and feel hopeless. That said, I still recognize they were great movies, even if I didn't enjoy the themes. Anything more I say on this topic will just be spoilers. I've done a lot of driving lately, and I'm heading to Bellingham tomorrow for a couple nights, so there's another two hours there and two hours back, assuming moderate traffic. On Friday, I got off work two hours early, having expected to drive up to Bellingham to pick up Hime and head back down to Port Orchard. That day was stressful, perhaps the most stressful I've had. On top of doing the work I'd normally do in an eight hour day, I also had to leave a readme for whoever was going to pick up my slack this week, explaining everything I was working on and its current state. I have no idea whether I left enough information and it took me a night to calm down from that. Anyway, Hime ended up having to drive to her parents' house anyway, which turns out to be about 15 minutes north of my place. So, when I got home, I watched the first half of The Fellowship of the Ring. After she called me to tell me she'd gotten to the house, I left and got there as she was getting out of the shower. We left about ten minutes later, after she'd met my kitties. Traffic wasn't too bad, but we were still an hour and a half to my mom's house, where we dropped off our stuff and the got the kitties situated in my room. From there, Hime and I drove to El Sombrero, which was closed, and then to McDonald's. I must be growing up because McDonald's only disappoints me now. My McDonald's cravings cannot be fulfilled because their Big'n'Tasty now tastes Big'n'Nasty. The McChicken isn't like it used to be either. All that they have over me anymore is the Barq's rootbeer and their fries, the first of which I can get elsewhere, and the latter I don't crave. Anyway, we got to the farm where my mom's wedding rehearsal happened just as the last people were leaving. Hime was introduced to people I've known my whole life and people I didn't really even recognize at the same time with equal importance. It seems like introductions should have some weight to them, but I haven't figured out how that would work. I don't mean to say people that I've known forever are more important than people I hardly know, but my best friend was meeting a lot of the family and close friends that raised me, and somehow that felt important to me. I don't think she felt the same gravity. My aunt, whose not really my aunt -- she was my mom's foster-sister growing up -- and her daughter, Navi, were staying at our house, as well as my grandma, so we were short one bed. Hime took Ashley's, my aunt and Navi took my room, and my grandma slept with my mom; I gladly took the couch, despite the objections I predicted Hime would have. The next morning, my mom headed off to get her hair done up. The night prior, Hime had asked my mom for her hair straightener. Apparently, my mom handed it to Hime right in front of me, but somehow I missed it. When I woke up well before Hime did, and couldn't find the straightener in my mom's bathroom, I figured she'd packed it and left with it, so I called around, eventually borrowing Ashley's friend's sister's an hour or so before Hime got up. When Hime found out about that later, she thanked me for my effort. We left for Silverdale shortly after Hime woke. She had wanted to get my mom chocolates for a wedding gift. Anytime I'm around Macy's I always get a few boxes for my favorite women: my mom, my sister, and usually someone else if there's an obvious pick. My mom likes milk chocolate, while Jack likes dark, so we decided to get two boxes, and give the gift together. At the wedding, I, unfortunately, forgot to give Ashley her box, so it remains in my car. Hime and I finished off the box I bought for her of assorted dark chocolate mints within the day. Evidently I've had enough calories to last me the rest of the year, so I've started a 140-day fast. Should be interesting. The wedding itself was interesting to say the least. I think it was special. In fact, I'm glad that it rained. It seemed to be meaningful rain. The rain started when the ceremony started, and ended when the ceremony ended. Then it waited for us all to move down to the reception and started again until we all finished eating. I like the rain, and I think my mom does too. I don't know about Jack. My grandpa walked my mom down the aisle. He'd told my mom and me that he wasn't going to, because he didn't feel she was his to give away anymore. She was a grown woman, and this was her second wedding. So, I was surprised when he did. Both Jack and my mom pulled a prank on the other when presenting the rings. Jack pretended to have lost my mom's and had this entire skit play out. My mom pulled out this giant ring big enough to fit three fingers, with an enormous glass diamond on it. After the rain stopped the second time, a breeze started which didn't help Hime or me, as we were drenched to the bone, I in my full suit, and her in a sundress. So, we went back to the house, changed, and headed back just in time for the garter toss. Apparently the ones that he shot into the crowd were all the ones he'd gotten at weddings in the past. There were about eight. I did not participate in the catching. That would just be too awkward. After that, my sister and her friend (the one whose sister loaned me the hair straightener, but I don't want to think up an alias for her) fought over the bouquet. Ashley ended up with about three flowers, and her friend with the rest. Then Jack gave a short speech about a couple "batons" he wanted to pass on. The first one he started off by saying, "Is Jordan Hitch nearby?" I said, "nope," as I was walking up. There really ought to be a word for something between 'said' and 'yelled,' because that's more of what I did. My baton was a book called "A Man, A Can, and A Grill" which was a cookbook of sorts. Our handshake turned into a semi-hug which was a little awkward. I've never hugged a little person before. The second baton was to a friend of mine: bachelor 'til the rapture. I think that would have been embarrassing, but he seemed to take it in good humor. William basically fell in love with Hime as soon as he met her. He's usually my shadow, but he was anything but subtle about wanting to hang around her and not me during the wedding. I thought it was funny more than anything else. His sister had a crush on my sister's ex-boyfriend while they were dating. Tastes must run in the family. (That, of course, is not to imply that Hime and I are dating, or that I think we ever will -- even driving to the wedding she reinforced that we weren't going to go down that road.) Right before William and his family left, Hime and I played some sort of blob tag. It was fun, which I normally would not say about playing with children. It was out of my comfort zone, for sure, but it was fun. We stayed for a couple more hours, and helped clean up after the newlyweds left. Hime was feeling a bit ill and had medicine back at her parents' place, so she and I packed up at my house and left back for Redmond. She was cold the entire time despite the fact the heat was all the way up and I was sweating. I suspected she was sick on top of what she needed the medicine for. Her mom picked her up from my apartment. Just to finish the Hime-related material, I'll skip ahead a bit to Sunday night. I texted her: "Hey, if you're still here and you're not sick of me yet, would you want to go out to dinner?" She responded that she was already in Bellingham, and otherwise she would. So, I asked if she wanted to go out to dinner one of the nights I was in Bellingham. We're going on Thursday night. In the context of the moment, it seemed like we both were picturing just the two of us, and while I know her well, I don't know whether that's actually what she was picturing. Either one-on-one or with a bunch of our friends will be fun. Sunday morning I went to church. I've been visiting the one Solomon suggested I look into. It's an Assemblies of God church called Life at the Ridge. I gather it's about sixty people large, but during the summer somewhere between thirty and forty usually show up. I really feel at home there, and everyone seems alive and excited and genuinely loving. I met with the pastor last week over lunch. He and I had a long talk, basically giving him my life's story, hitting on everything from my becoming a Christian to Eowyn, to my parents' divorce, to Jamaica, to my mom's remarriage. We talked a bit about his history too, how he's lived in every state touching the pacific (save Hawaii), and knows a bit about programming, and so on. I really like him. He called me today while I was at the movie, just to say he should have remembered it was odd to see me on Sunday because I had told him I'd be at my mom's wedding still, and wanted to know how it went. Do most pastors do that? I guess I could see John at Harper doing that, but the church is too big to do that sort of thing for everyone. Last week after church, I went out to lunch with a few people from the church. Sadly, I don't remember any of their names. One guy led worship the first two weeks I was there. The other guy was visiting from the midwest, where he goes to college, and he works at Starbucks there. And the woman is a financial advisor type person in Seattle. Actually, come to think of it, I do remember her name now, but only after a friend of hers said it at church this week. Also, it won't do you any good that I remember it because I'd only alias her anyway. In fact, I could alias to the two guys whose names I don't know. How would you like that?! Man, I've had some funny thoughts lately. I wish I could remember them. They were just one-liners, typically ironic or oxymoronic. There was a line like that in Batman that no one laughed at, too. I chuckled. Then again, the movie was so loud there, that I don't think I would have been able to hear someone next to me laugh. The fire truck on fire was a nice touch. After church, I went down to Kent to go to IKEA with my grandma who was on her way back up from my mom's to Camano. She bought me two bookcases and some pictures and frames to go with them. The bookcases were heavy, too heavy for me to carry, anyway, and she's not as young as she used to be (as can be said of anyone). She asked me if I knew any of my neighbors yet. I don't, really, but I had a solution to get the boxes into my apartment by myself. See, I have a computer chair with wheels. All I had to do was put one end on the chair, and carry the other end. My grandma guided the chair, but really, I could have just gone in front and the weight of the box would have pulled the chair along. My grandma looked at me and said, "You're one in a million. Most intelligent people aren't smart." That made me feel really good. Yesterday, I didn't have anything planned, and an old friend from high school got online for the first time since January. We started talking and then she asked if I wanted to get coffee, which turned into mall pizza in Auburn. So that was another long drive, though entirely worth it. It was good to catch up with her. This isn't a bad thing, but it reminded me of the differences between Port Orchardites and people on this side of the water. Cultures are weird. In closing, I've finally almost finished the fifth Wheel of Time book. I didn't like this one as much as the past four. The climactic battle was pretty lame. It lacked description of the would-be cool scenes, and there was no real battle between Rand and one of the Forsaken, like in the last ones.

If you've not seen Sucker Punch, stop reading this right now. Watch the movie, and then come back. I watched Sucker Punch with Swood last night. The movie itself was very good. It was shot well, very imaginative, interesting, and hard. There weren't a lot of lines in it. The main character talked only a couple times. The same could be said of Wall-E, and I only know one person who didn't like that movie. I've heard that they had to cut a bunch of the movie in order to keep it PG-13. It looks like they'll release a director's cut but according to this article, it won't quite have the scenes I'm hoping they'll have. It didn't need more action; it needed more gut wrenching or perhaps more explanation. I should clarify; Sucker Punch was plenty gut wrenching, but if there are 18 minutes more, I expect that some of that should also be gut wrenching. I know the point was to let your imagination do the work to convert the actions in the brothel to actions in the asylum, so maybe more explanation would ruin it. But maybe it wouldn't. I want to know how the other two girls (Amber and Blondie) died. I can't imagine the orderly would shoot them. Also, how did Blue "own" Dr. Gorski (the dance instructor) in the asylum? The opposite was true when Sweat Pea escaped. In the asylum, Baby Doll had to distract the guards. In the brothel, she was distracting patrons. Why would they keep her from escaping? I would expect in order to live with themselves, they would have to convince themselves that these women chose this lifestyle and were free to leave. Why would they stop her? I'll definitely see the movie again, but probably not until it comes out on Blu-Ray. I want to figure out who told the story, who the narrator was. At the beginning, I assumed it was either a grown up Baby Doll, or just an arbitrary narrator. At the end, I started to think it was Sweat Pea, since she's the only one who saw the Wise Man/bus driver or the soldier boy who ended up in the bus line in front of her. It wouldn't explain how she knew anything about Blue being arrested, but the narrator in 300 didn't know anything about the story after he was sent back either. Sometimes you can't over think things, and this is one of those. On a last note, I'm surprised that they showed Baby Doll's face at the end. Swood said she gave a meaningful blink, perhaps implying that she was more herself than she should have been, but I didn't notice that somehow. Also, that implication would take away from the movie being a tragedy a little, like the opposite of Magneto still having a little of his powers left at the end of X3. Only three times in my life have I felt the urge to kill someone. In none of these cases did I know the person, nor was I near them. The first time was watching Call+Response with a couple women from the church I was attending. The second was hearing stories before my trip to Costa Rica last year, about children who had been sexually abused by their fathers or foster fathers or uncles or anyone, really. The third was last night. The first scene brought forth such a visceral reaction in me, I needed to see the stepfather dead. I began to hope this movie would go V for Vendetta style and somehow, she would kill everyone who deserved it. I began to add people to the list, though in the end, it turned out to only be three: the stepfather, Blue, and the cook. Dr. Gorski was added and then removed. Of course, that's not what happened. In Knights of the Old Republic you have a good/evil, light side/dark side (being a Star Wars game) meter. Various actions throughout the game make you a better or more evil character, and your decisions somewhat affect the rest of the storyline. This implicitly gives you a goal of doing the right thing every time or the wrong thing to push your character in one direction or another, and based on that meter, the storyline changes and you either take over the galaxy or save it. Taking a middle of the road approach has no benefits. This goal to be fully light side or fully dark side made decisions easy. If someone deserves death but there's an option to let them live and be arrested, you've got your light side choice. If someone stands in your way, but you are strong enough in the force to Jedi mind trick them into jumping off a cliff, you've got your dark side choice. (Admittedly, I choose that one every time, even though I go light side. It's way too hilarious, and they had just beaten up a homeless person.) Mass Effect is similar, except in both cases you're trying to save the galaxy. Things just change based on your approach. Either you're a peacemaker, a Paragon and only kill when necessary and after every peaceful solution has been exhausted, or you're a Renegade who threatens and sometimes tortures people to get results. Some actions require a certain amount of Paragon points or a certain amount of Renegade points. What's interesting in Mass Effect is that they're not mutually exclusive. If the game were long enough, and therefore you had enough opportunities to gain enough morality points, you could be full Paragon and full Renegade, giving you the power to do anything to achieve your goals. In Knights of the Old Republic, dark side points are negative light side points. In Dragon Age, there is no meter. You have literally hundreds of decisions to make, you make them, and they affect the storyline, not your character. You can spare someone's life, and they might go kill someone important. You might spare someone's life, and they might turn their life around and help you later on. Your character is no more evil or good than the person behind the keyboard. Your companions care about your decisions and will either become your friends or your rivals, but those characters are also neither completely good nor completely evil, and so are also bad indications of whether you made good choices. What is a good choice in that game? You can make choices based on your own sense of justice, or if you've played through already (or have a walkthrough), you can make choices based on what you know will happen. You can make choices on what you know will make your party members like or dislike you. Your choices are just your choices. I know that I immerse myself in games like this a whole lot more than other people. I cannot make myself play Knights of the old Republic as a dark side character. I actually feel guilty any time I see that red icon indicating a gain of dark side points, even when I try to do what is right. In Dragon Age, you have to live with the ambiguity of not knowing whether you made the "right" choice, and then with the consequences of your actions. Life has no meter. You can choose to make the best actions in your eyes, actions that preserve, or you can make destructive, and often fun, choices. You can make choices to expand your horizons, choices that don't preserve the status quo, and also don't break your moral code, or you can choose to sit back and do what you've always done for fear of looking the fool. Denna and I took a trip to the Grand Canyon last December. The website said that we had to have a wide-rimmed hat for the mule rides to keep the sun out of our eyes. It snowed, however, and there was no sun. Our snow jackets were sufficient, but Denna and I donned our cowboy hats nonetheless. We looked like total fools, dorky tourist parents, but I smile every time I look at that hat in my rear view mirror. I don't dance. Sometimes I wish I danced, because people always try to get me to, but I have such a fear of looking like a complete idiot that I don't. I know that if I did, and I likely would, I would develop a terrible tic. I often lean toward not dancing than toward wearing ridiculous cowboy hats. Preservation isn't always good. Life has no meter. Sometimes you know you've made an evil decision, and you feel guilty. Often your decisions are just ambiguous. More often than I'd care to admit, I make a decision that should be ambiguous, and feel righteous about it. Last night I prayed on the way back from Swood's. God, how can you abide the stepfather? He does not deserve the air he breathes. I wanted him to die. At first I was upset with myself for wanting revenge, but then I realized he hadn't actually done anything yet. He obviously had the intent, but vengeance would be getting back at him. So what is that feeling? Righteous fury? Were I in that scene, and had I pulled the trigger, would I have gained light side points or dark side points? She did have a third option. She could have fired a warning shot at the ground, then told him at gun point to walk with her to the phone, then dialed 911. He would have been arrested, her sister would have lived. He probably would have gotten off, as intent is not enough to convict someone, and restraining orders are only paper walls. Would I have pulled the trigger? If my sister were in danger.... I'm sure I could easily plea self defense, but what about the meter? There's a freedom in having no meter. You don't have instant feedback about guilt. Life is certainly harder without one, but also a lot better. "Perfect victory." God, how can you abide the stepfather? He does not deserve the air he breathes. Let's be clear. God hates death. He hates rape. He hates evil. But did I not kill Jesus? For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Did I not do to him what slavers do? A man does not simply become a slaver. He's twisted by need into a monster. In the end, he might not even see himself as a monster. And yet God loves me. Justice begs mercy. At the INN several years ago, they were doing a sermon series that tackled seemingly contradictory virtues. At the end of each sermon, they nailed a piece of paper to the door, Martin Luther style. (wikipedia says that nailing probably never actually happened.) "Justice begs mercy" is the only thing I remember from that series, but it has stuck with me. Castrating a rapist, while poetically just, isn't actual justice. An eye for an eye doesn't help the person who went blind first. We long to make things right, but a loss of purity cannot be regained without God. God makes things new. We attempt to balance the loss by inflicting the same loss on the perpetrator. The only way to have justice is to admit that we can't achieve it, and what's left is resentment or mercy. Those are our options. Resentment only hurts the resenter. Mercy is not the same as pretending it never happened. It's not the same as reconciliation. If someone raped my sister, or killed my mom, or crippled my friend, or me for that matter, perhaps he belongs behind bars to prevent him from further damage, but when he got out of prison, has he really "paid his debt to society"? Will I feel like things are ok between us now? Of course not. I might have mercy on him in order to move on in my life, but without a miracle, I would never be reconciled to him. I would not become friends with him. God does not always call us to reconciliation. He does call us to mercy and forgiveness. Life without the meter is better than life with it. We would be slaves to the meter. It would be easier, perhaps, to do what is right, but far harder to do what is Right. In Knights of the Old Republic, you are pulled along by your decisions. In Dragon Age, you are forced into the freedom to make your own decisions, your own path. In life, we have a God that knows that's how it is. That's how he designed it. Best of all he loves you and wants you to make the decisions that are best for you and best for everyone else. Those decisions are his path for you, crafted not for mass distribution via Steam, but for you individually. He wants to help you make those decisions, and knows full well we probably won't. But there is perfect victory. In the end, the earth will be perfected, made new. In the end, we will be perfected, made new. As in Sucker Punch, perfect victory requires deep sacrifice. That sacrifice is God's own son. Baby Doll made that sacrifice and Sweat Pea survived and lived on her behalf. It was a good ending, debatably, but it was not perfect. In life, Jesus made that sacrifice and we survived. Jesus rose again. He defeated death. He gave a meaningful blink. This was no tragedy.

So far today we've visited a few different places. First was a program for teaching the benefits of abstinence. In Africa, with AIDS, and I suppose a lack of condoms, abstinance is of dire importance. I guess it didn't occur to people before? I suppose, without the Bible, if we didn't have rampant STDs, maybe we wouldn't consider abstinence either, at least not by choice. Damned non-nerds. After a number the church did on Africa in the past 50 years, a lot of Africa doesn't link sex to AIDS in the first place. Let's fix that. The program appears to be effective. My one qualm is that all their answers for the why of abstience seem to be based in fear. At the end, they gave us a chance to ask the girls questions. I asked what methods they'd been taught to avoid having sex. They've clearly got the why down; I asked the how. I got the feeling they didn't understand the question. Maybe it was lost in translation. Maybe sex is different here. We next visited a barber who was a success story of a micro-loan. I guess Dietrich was particularly fond of him. He's taking care of his 11-year-old (half?-)brother whose parents had died. We almost left without praying for him, which I found sillly, so I stuck my neck out and was volunteered. Totally fine, but... why was it nearly overlooked? One of the women in my group thanked me for praying afterward and said she'd felt the same way. Bob is an amazing translator. The amount of words he can remember before needing to flush the buffer is remarkable. He seems like a generally great guy too. The third place we visited was a church doing an adult education class on marital fidelity, or faithfulness as they put it. A few different couples stood up and expressed why they thought fidelity was important. The first couple said because not being faithful could lead to AIDS, and accidental babies. Fear based, again. They did give a couple abstract benefits, but nothing concrete. The pastor then said, as we were under a time crunch, that any new answers should be new, not repeats. The next two couples gave repeats. One couple out of the five(?) that spoke shared that there had been infidelity, and, in fact, that it had brought AIDS into their marraige. That took guts. The church building was shoddily built. A cement floor, brick walls that left dust if you leaned against them, a tin roof with holes. Something in me, though, thought it was beautiful. I could also feel God's love for it. Strongly. As we were getting up to leave, I asked the translator to tell the pastor and the people there that, but he must have misunderstood, or perhaps thought I was mocking him/them with the beauty remark. I did what I could. The first and a half place we went was to visit some pigs that World Relief had microfinanced to the program that trained the girls in the ways of abstinence. The girls take care of the pigs and then sell them and keep the profit. What I think is important to remember is that they were cute (the pigs, not that the girls weren't) and that Elizabeth tried to touch a pig's head. It freaked out in fear, invoking in Elizabeth the same reaction. After these trips, Bob sat next to me at lunch. That's significant, maybe? Not sure. Check back later. After lunch we split into four groups and visited these community savings groups. Basically each village creates their own mini-bank. Each week they have a meeting, pay dues into the pot, then buy between one and five shares. If more than one share is purchased, the whole group claps for them. We left before the next part, but after purchasing shares, people of that group, only, are allowed to take out loans. The person must say what the loan is being used for--it must be used in a way that generates more money--and present a plan for repaying the loan with interest. At the end of nine months, all the loans must be repaid and the villagers receive their share of the increased pot. Everything is very private outside the group, even giving people numbers instead of using names in case people overhear from outside the building, but within, it's completely open to avoid corruption. The only involvment World Relief has is to buy the pots (metal boxes with lockable latches) and supply the curriculum books. The walk to and from the miniture barn where our group's meeting was held took about 15 minutes. The surrounding country side was among the most beautiful, I'll venture to say, there is. Washington, the Weyerhauser State, has mountains of untouched evergreens. Here, every square foot of hill is cultivated with rings of road and cut-backs. The varying colors are outstanding. Set in Washingotn mists, Weyerehauser might still take my vote, but putting our evergreens in Rwandan sunlight wouldn't touch this. The story of the Savings Group the three of us visited has many tellings. One would include me nearly falling on my butt, catching myself on my hands just before contact on the way down. This preceded our interpreter coming back to hold my hand while he walked in front of me. This is not the right telling, which has more to do with a rooster somehow making it to the top of the wall in the building, and pushing off some metal instrument, nearly hitting Lindsay on the head. That one, I think all can see, is the better one. It's about dinner time. Last night I played Nertz with Richard and Lindsay. It was back and forth between her and me, with Richard trailing. The second to last game, Richard beasted pushing both of us negative, making it a four-point spread between the three of us. I made my first big speed-through the pile and triumphed with 101 points. The whole time we were trash talking each other. It got brutal. The game ended. The scars remain. The game will return. At dinner last night, Richard had had a three hour nap and was giving Kathy, who had stayed up taking care of their baby Sahara, a hard time saying he was pumped and ready to be active. Kathy said she needed sleep and a few seconds later, Richard said, "Been there, done that." What Richard hadn't heard in those few seconds was Kathy say, "You can go sleep with Caleb." Since then, "Been there, done that" has become a bit of a team motto. Reminds me of Jerkfest '08. Tomorrow is the "Pastoral Retreat" that Richard, Susanna and I were tasked with preparing. They're confident we've got it all planned out. I'm confident we can wing it if they're wrong. Three of our four Savings Group groups had good experiences. Our group was very deliberate about the order of things, about keeping order. There are rules about talking that induce small fines to the pot. Every week, the whole group remembers the total in the pot, both, I think so they know no one is stealing, and so they can feel a sense of pride in what they have accomplished. Not remembering the correct total at the beginning of each meeting induces a small fine to the pot. Being late to the meeting induces a small fine to the pot. They asked us what we thought of their process. I was seriously impressed. I doubt many people in the US have that kind of will power to save even when it's hard. I wanted to match today's funds ($26) as an encouragement. I asked the translator if he thought it would be insulting, but it didn't get that far, because the two girls stopped me. We had been given strict instruction not to give money to someone in need. This was not just giving money to someone for doing nothing, though. This was me offering to help people who worked hard for it, to encourage them to keep at it. A guy named Phil, one of the two white people who work at World Relief (and until the day we get back, the head of World Relief Rwanda), told us about how giving money encourages the attitude of "if we ask a white person for money, he might give us some." They didn't ask. He also told us about kids who would come up when he parked and say they'd guard his car for him. He gave them money for doing so, even though they obviously couldn't beat off people who would steal his tires, because it encourages an attitude of working for money. All that aside, and I do think I was right, only because they clearly believed in this system and their own ability, and because they didn't ask for it, I think they would have declined anyway out of a sense of pride. I go back and forth on whether I can fault them for that. In January, Dietrich tried to give a different Savings Group money, and they refused. The fourth group visited a Savings Group that did not go as well. Theirs had been running since March, whereas ours started this past August, and they clearly didn't believe in its effectiveness. Kathy was out taking care of Sahara, leaving Richard and Christine in the room. The question was asked, "Are you going to financially support this group?" At that point, the translator was supposed to say that that was not the point of the visit, that we were here to pray for them and see how this curriculum was working. He did not. Richard, experienced in Africa, danced around the question. Another question, similar in nature if more indirect, was posed, complaining that too many loans had been taken out and now no one could afford the dues, and also the only person who had taken out a loan was the president of the group (sketchy and inconsistent). This time the translator interceded with a twelve-minute-long story of how he'd carried beans an extra five miles to make 50¢ more, and then traded the beans for potatoes and walked another three miles for a little more. Up hills both ways. Pastors here are extremely long winded. Anyway, I would not have even considered giving money to that group. It's unfortunate. Nertz was just played again. In a heroic, last stitch effort, I pulled into second place after trailing the whole game, significantly, as Lindsay crossed 100. Richard is frustrated. top | 0 Comments Small Print Tuesday, September 20, 2011 I'm in Rwanda. I still haven't figured out why. So far it's been good: beautiful, easy, no problems during travel. Everyone's getting along. One of our tanslators is a 22-year-old named Bob. He's studying computer science, so I sat by him on the bus ride to Musanze. It's more of a software engineering major than computer science, so that was deflating. His first language is English since that's what they teach in schools now. I always assumed the accent came from English being the second language, rather than it being taught by other people with the accent. Kinyarwanda has 17 tenses/conjugations. I think it was meant to be my native tongue but something got gunked up in the works. With the youth learning English in school, it wouldn't surprise me if the native tongue disappears in the next couple decades or perhaps generations. As convenient as that would be, it's still sad. We were told to bring nice clothing and not wear jeans. I haven't seen much evidence that that was a necessary rule. Still, I do like my new kahkis. Built in bug repellent and SPF 35. Only $88. It's a steal at half the price! With narcolepsy and the associated meds, breaking jet lag has been a breeze, though I had hoped to get further through The Sparrow, the book Porter recommended to me, on the plane rather than sleep the whole time. It's a decent enough story with a barely-too-slow pace, but I'm not a fan of third person omnicient, especially when each small section seems to be nearly third person limited... so close. The countryside is gorgeous. Land of a thousand hills, indeed. On the way from Kagali to Musanze, I saw two or three soccer fields, but those were seriously the only flat patches of land. Whenever I think of hills, I think of Mullenix road. The hills are similar, but several dozen times more numerous. Before boarding the plane from Nairobi (which, despite being clean, is the trashiest airport I've seen in my scattered travels) to Kagali, a couple English girls came over to our group to coo over our trip leaders' baby girl. Since then I've been entertraining the idea of moving to London for a year or two because "I like the accents." Obviously it would take more than that (though precious little), but it might be a valuable experience. I keep thinking "It's been too long since I've had an adventure," a completely ironic thought in Rwanda. Something about mission trips makes them not an adventure to me. Maybe it's that they're thoroughly planned. Maybe it's that I feel there's no risk, a valid thought or not. I think it has something to do with the fact that God told me to come here. I always hear the stories of the people in the Bible that God called to action. It's hard to argue they weren't living adventures. I wonder how they felt about it at the time. Maybe adventures are on the greener grass and in-hindsight-only. Anyway, we'll see if this idea persists past October the first. I wonder if Denna would move with me. And I'm back! It may have not looked like much to you, but between this paragraph and the former, our group met with members from the inter-denominational committee. Such a thing would be fantastic in the states. ♫That was a joke. Ha ha. Fat chance.♫ Sad times. A bunch of other stuff has happened since June. Go figure, right? I had my third (of three) poor annual reviews. I still have my job, at least until January, much like last year. Having my new boss, I think, will increase my odds of improvement. Also, we've all moved into a team room, rather than individual offices. Besides making me less likely to visit facebook, it's significantly decreased my blocked time. On the other hand, I get a little more distracted by conversations on the other side of the room. Enter headphones. Overall, it's an improvement. All my life I've procrastinated until a few nights before something was due and then did it in a fraction of the given time. In sports, soccer and racquetball come to mind, I've always been terrible, and then once in a somewhat-rare while, I'll do something perfectly that looks almost expert. I only blog when I sense I'm in the creative writing mood, and my writing will be good. I've thrown out dozens of stupid blog posts. I wonder if I'm actually just an average guy with sparks of brilliance that have kept me near the top. A few weeks ago, I got really bored on Tuesday night and retook the eHarmony test of humanity. This time I passed and so am now quantifiable. Either they've relaxed their partitioning algorithm, or I've changed enough in the last year as to be considered datable material. I was curious to see my answers from last time (on a different email address) and emailed customer support. They said I could look at/change my answers by clicking a link that the old account couldn't see, and then scolded me for making a new account to alter my first answers, saying I needed to be true to myself or the system would fail. ... I didn't reply to that email. Within moments of starting my profile, a girl sent me an icebreaker. I thought maybe it was the same scheme I suspect Match used in order to get me to buy a subscription. I bit. Turns out she had actually sent it. We went on what I felt was a very successful, fun first date. She went to church with me the following evening. Everything seemed great, and then she just sort of stopped talking to me. Still haven't figured out why. Kinda bites. It doesn't matter though; I'm moving to London because I like their accents. The moon here splits horizontally. While we waited for our bus to pick us up from the Kagali airport, I drew diagrams until I figured out why. Looking at them, though, I think the moon must wax upward, like filling a tub, and then wane downward like draining it. Unless I've seriously never paid attention, the moon in Washington waxes right to left, and then wanes right to left. I've yet to reconcile these. In the last week, I keep thinking I'm starting to understand why God wants me here and what he wants to teach me, but then when I try, I still can't put it to words, and it slips away. I have noticed that I'm at the 3pi/2 of the sin curve of the closeness I have with God. I don't much pray, or rely on him, not that I've ever really understood how or what that means. But I'm almost blatantly denying him access to my life. I pick and choose what use he is to me, a utility rather than a king. Today I tried a new food I knew I wouldn't like. I thought, "What's the worst that could happen? I don't eat the rest, and I get rid of the taste with Fanta." How much more should I give God my life and decisions with that attitude when I know he is for me? I guess he did get me here. So that's something. With my means, it's really not much. My mom would freak if I moved in with Denna, much more in London. Three days before I left, well, first at one of our meetings it was suggested that we bring day packs that wouldn't draw attention, so we could carry money without a high threat of mugging. We all brought $100 cash, which is a month's wages here. Those Nike drawstring backpacks you see everwhere were suggested, rather than full blown backpacks, but we should aim to not all have the same Nike one. I was almost certain I'd seen a microsoft one, but the company store didn't have them. They must have been swag at some conference. So, I looked online at a few designs. I didn't really like any of them, but there were ads everywhere for designing and printing your own. Obviously shipping would take too long, so I looked up a couple stores in the Redmond area. The two I visited three days before the trip didn't have the bags in stock, so rush delivery was like $15. The bag itself was about $2.50. Printing was about $15. $32.50 bought me a Protoss Akilae Tribe cinchbag. No regrets. I was hoping I'd get stopped by a knowing stranger in Sea-Tac. There's still time. Being in a new, beautiful country makes me want to be alone and observe the countryside, or to play my violin (which I contemplated bringing, but ultimately did not). Or blogging in my notebook (now transposed to the blogosphere). But being alone in some capacity. Not much of a mission trip attitude to take. I'm so bad at talking to new people unless they share the exact same awesomeness I have. Dark clouds are rolling in (not a metaphor). My favorite color is the blue-gray-purple of the eastern sky at sunset. People always look the wrong way at sunset, even if there is more activity in the west. The east is more serene. Done for today. Subject to change without notice. top | 0 Comments Handholding Sunday, June 19, 2011 I should be spending this time addressing support letters, but I just care about you all so much. "Support letters?" you ask. Yes, after quite a lot of nagging, and someone dropping off the Africa trip, I am on the mission trip team to Rwanda this September. It appears I've not even mentioned this in my blog before, so I suppose this begs some explanation. Sometime last September, Dietrich briefly mentioned Uganda in his sermon and that the church was planning to head there soon. As with my trip to Detroit, I inexplicably had the thought, "I want to go to Uganda." I have to admit, I couldn't have even pointed to Uganda on a map. I spoke to him after the sermon about the trip. He said that there was a small trip, two or three people, going in January, sort of a reconnaissance trip, and there'd be a bigger one in June. I talked to Elizabeth, our pastor of missions, telling her that I have no real idea why I want to go other than I felt like God was calling me to. Come January, the small trip happened without me on it (no surprise). A community group began that would plan the trip. I'd just finished leading a study group, so this trimester I wanted to do something else, either activity or service. I did notice the trip's entry in the catalog, but it did not say anything about joining the trip, only planning it and learning more about Africa. I suppose I probably should have joined it anyway, but I didn't. I instead joined an Eastside Community Service group, which was also focused on starting an eastside Bethany campus, which really has nothing to do with this paragraph. As it turns out, in order to go on the trip you were supposed to join the group. Shocker, right? My foreshadowing skills are unparalleled. Two weeks into the community group season, I happened to talk to Elizabeth and found out that I was not on the shortlist, but if someone dropped out, perhaps I could join the trip. Maybe this is bad to admit, but at the time, I didn't want to be part of the group. I hate planning things, and I get stressed if things I've planned don't happen. Mission trips are notorious for going differently than planned, and I'm not sure having me during the planning phase would have been beneficial. Anyway, I am glad I was part of the Eastside Community Service group, and I'm not sure I had time to do two groups. Ok, that's bunk. I'm not sure I wanted to use more of my free time to do a second group. So, to cut the remaining story short (read 'out'), someone dropped out of the trip, and I took their spot among the twelve. We've met three times as a group now, since I've joined. The people are splendid, seriously some of the nicest people I've ever met. One of them is Mark's sister. She's so proud of her brother; it's really sweet. The eldest guy has been on the Bethany missions board since before I was born. He's friends with my counselor, so small world I guess. The woman who's done most of the planning is amazing. I've not been on a more organized trip, and the first two I went on were planned by people who do this every year. Anyhow, I'm actually fairly excited to go, and I don't get excited about things. I think it may have to do with the people on the trip rather than the going itself. I'm also interested and slightly anxious about why God wanted me to go; and I do trust that he wants me to go, even if the trip is to Rwanda rather than Uganda. If you're interested, the support letter I should be sending out, rather than writing this post, is here. Work is going. We've more finely tuned my narcolepsy meds, so I've been getting more done at work, especially since the meds are more often used for ADHD. I've been slightly more focused. At the moment, I'm working for a partner team that's a man down. I hope to finish that work by Wednesday, realistically, but it's taken a lot longer than I'd hoped. On the other hand, I've been told by other people on that team that of the three portions of this feature, I'm the furthest ahead. I just hope that message is relayed to my boss. A few months back, Microsoft did a massive overhaul of how it will measure performance. Previously we were measured on a two-axis scale, and now it's been condensed to one. They've replaced stock rewards with greater cash rewards, and the top 93% of employees will receive at least a 5% raise, as well as a larger annual bonus. The tech market as a whole is growing its salaries, and Microsoft wants to keep its employees. My boss, while delivering this news, said that everyone in the room (my team) was going to get at least some raise, and these raises begin in September. Annual reviews happen in August, so it would follow that, at least at that point, my dismissal was not in the works, and that means promotion. I am enjoying work a bit more lately. There are a few reasons for that. One, I'm no longer the owner of the project I'd been working on for two years. I still help out a little bit, but all the bugs are being assigned to Chell. Two, my team just came out of a transitory phase, where we were trying to figure out what was next. We've always had a pretty clear goal in mind, but now we have good ideas on how to achieve it. Third, we have a new PM intern that I'll be working with as soon as I finish with the other team. Dory's pretty awesome. And though that previous sentence makes this sentiment self-serving, it seems like she's nearly a female version of me. She calls me her dev. Evidently it's been way too long since I've posted. I haven't yet mentioned Portal 2 and that was like eight years ago. I loved it. I beat it in about 8 hours, went back and beat Portal 1 in one hour, then beat Portal 2 again. It's that good. Porter and I have had lunch a few times, per usual, and one time we ended up talking about Portal, which he has never played. He thinks it's a dumb game because he's walked through doors before. Swood made the point on facebook that that's like saying he doesn't need to play Tetris because he's moved boxes before, a statement Porter later agreed with, saying that's about how he feels about Tetris. I could go on, but I'll just say, with regards to the game, that Cave Johnson is my hero. Things are being patched up with my dad a bit. A few Saturdays ago I went surfing with him. Dietrich had given an object lesson where he contrasted surfing with rock climbing. When climbing, you can stop at any point along the way and figure out where to go next, call someone on the cell phone, have coffee. When surfing, when it's time to go, you have to go or you miss the wave. He then compared this to when God calls you to do something. When he says go, it's time to go. Anyway, before conveying this image, he asked for a show of hands of people who surfed, and though it'd been at least seven years, I found my hand raised. I think I was the only one that service, so he called me out by name, and sounded surprised even. It brought back a nostalgic feeling, so I facebooked my dad, and set up a surf date. The trip there was mostly good conversation. I noticed a side of him I hadn't before, a function of an influential moment he had as a kid. At another moment, I'd been telling him about my StarCraft and Prayer community group coming up (I'm leading it). I asked him if he had any idea what StarCraft was and he thought he'd seen a commercial for it and asked worriedly, "Doesn't it have something to do with warlocks?" I realized quickly he was thinking of World of Warcraft, a distinction that set his mind at ease, so I didn't mention that I also have played that game. I still find it funny that StarCraft doesn't bother him and WarCraft does, simply because StarCraft uses "energy" and WarCraft uses "magic." Anyway, today was Fathers Day, this Wednesday is his birthday, and this coming weekend will be the first of either of those I'll have celebrated with him in four or five years. I was sore after surfing for a few days, especially my left arm. The Wednesday after surfing I had my Rwanda trip shots in the same arm, so I'm sure that didn't help. I still have to find out whether I had Hep A or B shots when I was a kid. I think I at least had Hep A. But for the next 10 years I'm immune to Yellow Fever, Typhoid, Tetanus, and Polio. So in your face, bio-terrorists who happen to try to get me sick with any of those four! Luke just got married yesterday. I don't think I've ever been so excited for someone. However, when he gets back from his honeymoon, I fear I must inform him that I checked facebook right after I got back from the reception, and at that point, his wife hadn't changed her last name. I'm worrying that something fishy's going on, since it's not official yet. Swood just bought a house. I'll only be able to complain about his slow elevator one more week. I'm looking forward to seeing his new place. Alexander also bought a new place. All my friends are either getting married or buying houses. And for the first time, a couple weeks ago I met a Microsoft employee (albeit an intern) who was younger than me! I might as well start making arrangements for my coffin to be sized, or maybe I should be cremated. I haven't decided. My battery's dangerously low at 33% and it's five til midnight. That's my cue to end this post (aka, I don't have a lot of material left until I figure a couple things out; I might have a follow-up post in a week or two).

I'm wearing one of my favorite shirts. I believe I only have two button-down white shirts, and while one looks nicer, especially untucked since it stops at waist height, this one has memories. I wore it on one of my last days in Costa Rica when I couldn't take feeling dirty anymore. The women in the kitchens at the camp thought it was a shirt worthy of weddings, which I found mildy depressing as it's a fairly average, low thread count dress shirt. Anyway, that was the day of the obstacle course with the mud pit, and despite taking the shirt off well before the event, there's still a mud stain at the bottom, just right of center. Mud is the reason I'm wearing it now. Today we "shadowed" four pastors to get a sense of their daily lives. To get to our pastor's house, (and while I'm thinking about it, the "mini-barn" that our group's Savings Group met at was actually a house) we drove down the main road ten minutes, at which point the pastor, who had been waiting for us, got in the SUV, then fifteen minutes up a rough dirt mud road, across a few log bridges, one of which looked to be pieced together with wooden fence slats that made cracking sounds when we drove over it and definitely had a few missing pieces, that is, had holes, up to a point where we had to walk up slick red dirt. His house was at the end of a ten-minute climb. The pastor we were visiting was one of the ones in my small group from yesterday. His name is John Peter, a good ol' two-parter first name. His neighbor, wife, son (about four years old) and infant daughter were there with us. Shorty after arriving, his dad joined us. We sat in their front room around a couple small tables of mismatched height. The room was smaller than my tiny apartment kitchen. Mothers here are not at all shy about breast feeding. We talked for a while about his church. His congregation is fourteen people. The Anglican Church, at least in Rwanda, feels instability reduces complacency, so he moves churches about once a year. The one he currently leads is a two hour walk from his home. He has to be at his church three days a week, and on off days, he walks down the hill to find pick-up jobs and/or do blacksmithing. Our translator, Ngoga, is some sort of liaison at the national level for World Relief Rwanda, and did some filling in to give our questions context. He also did his fair share of asking both parties his own, very helpful questions and then translated the responses. As the pastor's wife, his wife is the president of his church's mothering group and helps with encouraging women in their marriages and resolving disputes. After about an hour, we went outside to look at his land. My apartment is pretty close to half the size of his entire property. In his garden, he has a couple banana trees, probably there naturally, and has planted beans. He'll harvest about 30 kilos (do your own damn math), while he cooks about a kilo a day. Since he can't grow beans consistently, given the seasons, he can't come near to living off them. Our translator, whom at the time I only knew as our translator, gave him several different ideas on how he could more efficiently use his land. All he really said was, "That's possible," nothing committal or excited. Lindsay, Christine, and I talked amongst ourselves as the pastor and Ngoga talked, about taking a soil sample, figuring out what would grow best there, and buying seeds of something not native, and therefore in low supply, to Rwanda. He could sell that crop for a high price in the market due to being rare or exclusive. There's a hot sauce on our dinner tables that is super spicy with no added flavor that I could discern. The factory that makes it is only a short distance from his house, and is in constant need of peppers. Ngoga suggested he grow these instead of beans, then use the profits to buy beans or whatever else. Like I said, he didn't sound enthused. I have to admit, as frustrating as I find his attitude, I take the same one at my job. I'd rather deal with working around the bugs than fix them. We went back inside and minutes later it began to pour. The rain lasted a few minutes, then began again, coming in waves. We ate lunch, it now being too rainy to safely get down the hill, and there being no point in skipping lunch in order to beat the rain for the sake of the drive. Our meal was surprisingly American with ham sandwiches. There was also passion fruit, which Lindsay bit right into, when it's more of a pomegranate experience, pine apple, and some sort of meat pie. We'd come with several aluminum sack lunches, but not quite enough for everyone in the room, as several neighbors had joined us. We made sure they all got one before we did. The four of us visitors shared the remaining two. They asked us a few questions. One was whether we have poor people in America. They're always shocked that we do. We got to share about Bethany's Tabitha Ministry, a homeless women's shelter, and other programs that serve the homeless. When we'd finished our lunch, and it stopped raining, I prayed and then the pastor prayed, both translated. The pastor, his wife, Anna the infant strapped to her back, and his brother, walked us down the now slick and muddy hill to our SUV. It took quite a while, and at the end, our shoes were coated with the red, sticky mud. The journey down, even with four-wheel drive, was still a bit terrifying. I don't usually get scared by things like this, and I didn't this time either, but it was definitely a dangerous trek, especially with the rain that started back up a couple minutes before we made it to the car. I'm surprised we didn't get stuck in the mud. When we got back, we tried to figure out what to do with our shoes, clung to by mud as they were. We tried to clean them off in puddles or wiping them in grass, the effect of which seemed to only be to color the ground. When John got back with my room key, I washed them off, then showered, and changed into this white shirt. When I exited the room, to head to our team time, a guy was collecting shoes to wash for us, mine now more wet than dirty. Maybe he has a hair dryer. On the bright side, we discovered we have a balcony, when looking for a place to put my wet shoes. We debriefed a bit as a team and with our translators who were all more than translators, hearing each other's experiences, and asking questions about World Relief and the culture of Rwanda. All the information was interesting and I'm sure important to someone, but I've always had a broken filter when it comes to judging importance, and can't recall much of it now. I remember that Ngoga said he lived 100 KM from here. I remember Richard saying the foreign aid fund the US put toward stopping/helping the AIDS epidemic in Africa is almost gone. I remember Josh Lyman repeating a statistic that 81% of Americans think the foreign aid budget was too high and 72% think it should be cut, meaning that 9% of people are so bat shit out of their minds that they think the foreign aid budget is too high and shouldn't be cut. The majority of our team went out for coffee at Lava Java. I sacrificed the experience to journal (now) for the sake of you fine folks, and not because my only available shoes are dressy ones. I doubt they'd have hot chocolate anyway. If I moved to London, I'd have to spell color with a u. Eww. Accents, right. Last night after our team time, a bunch of us went to play Nertz. When more people than decks arrived, we transitioned to Uno. Around 10:30 (totally just made that time up), Richard headed for bed, saying if three people were left, he'd play Nertz, obviously indicating himself, Lindsay, and me. We played one more round of Uno, then dispersed. I went up to find him playing on his laptop hoping "those Uno playing clowns" would leave, allowing for his "game of destiny" or GOD, to commence. Well, at least he didn't come in last? I was slow at first but quickly gained momentum, slightly buffeted in the second to last round, making it a seven-point game between the two of us, Lindsay 10 points behind him. I got my remaining three points and twenty-one more. He suggested we play another 100 point series. Bad move, man. In seven games, I won with more than their scores combined. We'll see what happens tonight. I'm not convinced it was more than just luck as I don't think I was playing any differently, nor much faster, if not slower. Bring it. top | 0 Comments Accordion Thursday, September 22, 2011 Today was fantastic. We had our Pastoral Spiritual Retreat, which World Relief used as a preamble for their Church Empowerment Zone (CEZ) kick-off ceremony. It was a mix of improv and planning, all overseen by, suffused with, saturated in the Holy Spirit. The three of us had prepared three passages of Scripture about the Kingdom of God on Earth and Bible study-esque questions to go along with each. The first, Matthew 6:25-34, talks about not worrying. God will provide. Susanna presented this first passage and then we split into men and women, three groups of each. We figured women would be more likely to talk if their husbands weren't nearby. Caleb and I got Pastor Maurice as our translator. He was invaluable as an interpreter as well as a facilitator. I don't know Caleb's ability at crowd control and keeping people interested and talking, but mine is wanting. What I'm good at is asking good, usually hard, questions. The question that got the most memorable responses for the first set of verses was: How has God shown/demonstrated his provision in your times of need? One man said he felt bringing us, our team from Bethany, to him was God's provisioning. The second set was the Beattitudes (Matthew 5:3-12). Besides the Lord's Prayer and the 23rd Psalm, it's probably the most well-known Scripture. The pastors were all well versed in it. "In what ways has God comforted you in your times of mourning?" Evidently "mourning" is translated as "times of trouble or need." They had some seriously miraculous stories. One man was in a sinking boat and couldn't swim. He sank but the water pushed him back up without explanation and people rescued him. Another, during the genocide, was wounded by knives and about to be executed, when a soldier appeared out of no where and commanded that he be spared. Yet another's wife was seriously ill and so he sent her to the States to be treated. The doctors gave her a very short time to live. They said she wouldn't survive the plane trip home and that it would be better if she were to be buried there. The pastor prayed that she would survive the trip home so she could say goodbye to her family. A doctor traveled back with her and couldn't explain her successful journey. She lived another three weeks and made peace with everyone before she passed away. He is now at peace about it and happily remarried. A different translator switched out with Maurice because John had had a terrible time with him, and we wanted at least one session to go well for his group. He says it was a night and day difference, and that he couldn't get them to shut up. Our group was marginally worse, but they had already opened up a bit so it was fine. This was the same translator that was with the group with the bad experience at the Savings Group, as well as the one that didn't translate the beauty comment at the church yesterday. This passage was Luke 13:18-19, Jesus comparing the Kingdom of God to a mustard seed, among the smallest, which grows into one of the largest trees. We asked: what would Musanze be like if everyone lived with "kingdom values?" That question refined to "How could Musanze improve or grow?" followed by "What would this change?" They answered that if people gave more time to serving, more people would become Christians. On the flip side, we asked, "How is God's Kingdom visible here in Rwanda and Musanze?" which boiled into "What could the people of Bethany learn from the churches here?" One pastor pointed out that they'd never been to Bethany, but that the people here are very hospitable and welcoming, and are open to hearing the word, even nonbelievers. Both are very true. Seattle is neither. Caleb improved a question asking what gets in the way of seeking first the Kingdom of God. One of the pastors revealed they, or at least he, really got it. He said that even if someone had material wealth, and everything needed or wanted, it wouldn't be any easier to follow God. At the end of each batch of questions, we returned as a large group to share with everyone the key points each group had discussed. Brevity is not a concept known to African pastors. At lunch, Lindsay, John, and I talked to the interdenominational committee head. He had tons to say. Good stuff. He asked if Lindsay and I had fiancé(e)s yet. Neither of us do, but Lindsay has a boyfriend, which is not really a concept here. Children are assets here and in many other places in Africa and Latin America. You get married to have lots of children who can work the land. Romance takes a back seat, at least in rural areas. We've visited a couple rural areas, like where the Savings Groups were yesterday. Where we're sleeping is semi-rural. The result of that part of the conversation is that he's going to pray that I find a financée. I'd said "In London" before I realized no one at the table would get it. Two days after conception, moving to London seems significantly more farfetched. Still... the accents. After the retreat ended, World Relief held the CEZ ceremony. The phrase "new history" was used a lot. A good concept, especially considering Rwanda's history. This is the first time I've felt like I was witnessing history, or rather, a part of it. We just got back from a walk. Elizabeth, Amelia, and I went through the market while the rest of our posse went around, having seen it yesterday. They compared it to Pike Place; it reminded me more of the food court at the Kitsap Fair, though I couldn't tell you why. It was a little discouraging to see that every table held the same foods. Specializing and offering unique items just isn't built into them yet. Sometimes I hate competition, but it's the only way that their economy will improve. On the walk, Elizabeth convinced Christine that some black goats on a distant hill were gorillas. When the ruse was over, she convinced Christine to pull the same stunt on us. I'm glad I never found where the goats were or my gullibility would probably have kicked in. Like Princess Leia, I'm far too trusting. Poor Alderan. Today was... I can't even put it to words. I don't get excited. I never see what other people see in order to describe a day or event as amazing. But I'm surprised at how well, how important, the retreat went and was. I just have this sense of... off comfort. A sense that something has changed or unlocked. That things are starting to move. I'm glad God used me to make it happen.

Yesterday we met with a few pastors from various churches in the area to make reminder-to-pray bookmarks to disperse to Bethany. That's all I have to say about that. The rain just stopped. People are again walking the streets. That's the first thing you notice in daytime Rwanda. There are people everywhere. They don't have cars and so they walk. Bicycles are fairly common. They all have flat beds behind the seats for carrying people, bags of potatoes, or bundles of bamboo-looking branches. You could close line six people at once. Buses and vans are there too. The most common mode of quick transportation is paying a motorcyclist to taxi you. People carry everything on their heads. They necks must be made of cement (steel bends when compressed). When it starts to rain, everyone just takes shelter, squished together under the nearest eve until it stops. The roads aren't near as crazy as in Jamaica. While pedestrians don't have right-of-way, at least drivers will slow down and try to avoid them. They honk if a pedestrian or bicyclist is ten seconds away. Cars slow down around curves or when they're about to hit pot holes. Not so in Jamaica. Drivers aren't afraid that cutting someone off will cause an accident. Perhaps the speed limit naturally enforced by the pedestrians and road quality allow for quick braking. Though people crowd the city streets of Seattle, this is somehow different. People look more comfortable around other people. They look used to walking and taking whatever time it takes. Seattlites are determined unless they're playing the tourist for the day. My pen just dried up. Nearly the entire thing was spent in this journal. I hadn't planned on that possibility happening. I don't think I've ever written a pen, start to finish. On Friday night, a new translator arrived for the weekend named Dyanah, or Di. She and I have been a little bit of an item, an innocent, two-day African fling. She's stick thin--compared to her, I look average--about 5'9", with a face softer than most African women have. I was surprised that her accent nearly matches mine. She's going into international business, in the hopes of traveling the world a bit. The last two nights' events conspired against our Nertz tradition. No riveting writing to add there. As it is Sunday, we all went to church, or rather three churches. The church we went to was Baptist, I believe. It's a church Elizabeth visited when she was here in January. Since then, it has gained windows, doors, a roof, and a floor, half of which was still drying today. When we got there, a choir was already singing and dancing. As the rear half of the floor was dying, the front doors were locked and everyone entered by a side door near the front. We were seated in chairs immediately to our right, clearly reserved by for esteemed visitors. The choir sang a couple songs, each five to eight minutes long. We clapped. Di complained to me yesterday that all the music here is now synthesized rather than made with real drums or instruments. Such was the case here. When the music died down, the pastor welcomed each group: men, women, children, pastors from the Congo, visiting pastors from nearby, people who have been gone a while but have returned, new people, and us. He gave a short sermon on Daniel 1. More singing happened by a second choir, lots of clapping, lots of dancing. The pastor had us go to the front and introduce ourselves. More singing happened and this time the pastor invited us to join in the dancing. I wish I had, just because it's a bit of a fear of mine. Ballroom dancing and swing I love; when I don't know what I'm doing, I can't make myself move. The running-in-place the dancing men were doing was pretty simple, but I still wimped out. Next was time for testifying. Someone had gotten married this week and an aunt was proud and praising Jesus for it. Something happened for a guy that I don't remember, and to thank God, he was putting 50,000 franks in the offering this week. That's about $83--very generous here, about two weeks' wages. Each time someone went up or sat down, including when we introduced ourselves, the keyboardist played the same short tune giving it a talk show flavor. A second pastor came forth to give a half hour sermon on a few different verses scattered throughout the Bible. The long and short of it was that people need to return to God, and until that happens, don't expect any miracles. Next was tithes and offerings. We each put in our 83¢ we'd been told was an appropriate amount. More singing and dancing. The three hour service ended around noon. I was in my Sunday best, slacks, black dress shirt, shoes, and tie. Di said I looked "stunning." This morning I had a debilitating headache. Marie gave me some Advil and I skipped breakfast in lieu of lying down til it took effect. Thus, I missed the announcement that we ought to bring a change of casual clothes. It turned out not to matter as stopping back at the hotel before lunch was both on the way and the more logical choice. We had lunch at Lava Cafe, which I think the other members of my team nicknamed Lava Java. They serve white people friendly food. I got what the menu made sound like a tri-tip dip. They forgot my au jus, but all-in-all it was decent. Di ate my fries complaining for the umpteenth time that I don't eat. After lunch, we went to a national rainforest as tourists. What appeared to be a park ranger gave us a tour of the forest, complete with history and legend. We took a ton of pictures. Di stole my camera saying I don't take enough shots. I'll be the first to admit that. Africans take pictures slightly diagonally. We got a good shot or two of the two of us with arms draped over shoulders. Right at the end of the tour path, it began to rain. Heavily. It was a mad dash across volcanic stones and under vines, Indiana Jones style, to the SUVs. The rain stopped thirty feet from the start of the trail. One of the legends or historic stories had to do with a pool or spring that dried up when someone tried to tamper with it. Four snakes appeared and the tamperer disappeared, never seen again to this day. Seven days later, the pool returned to normal. We saw that pool then left for home. I'm all stuffed up with a sore throat. I think Marie gave me her cold. I don't much feel like eating dinner, which is in fifteen minutes, but I want to say goodbye to Dyanah. It's been fun.

Today I met wisdom incarnate. He's the former Bishop of Rwanda, having recently retired. He spoke for an hour or so at the beginning of a day dedicated to explaining the vision and execution of World Relief Rwanda. This is a man who represents and leads the entire country through the Anglican church, a man who speaks to hundreds if not thousands at a time, a man who speaks to and councils presidents and ambassadors, here to talk to the twelve of us. He didn't speak on behalf of World Relief, but he definitely agreed with their work and methodology. The Rwandan government relies heavily on the Church to care for the most vulnerable. That is Jesus' mandate for the Church, and the Church therefore, presumably, is the body most fit for the task. Is it the government's duty as well? Yes, I think it is, but in the US, the Church often shrugs off its responsibility, its core purpose, because we can rationalize that our government has already taken care of it. It's entirely foreign to me that government should rely on the church to do anything. It seems to me our government tries to do what would make our lives better, avoiding at all costs any relationship to the church; the church is a hinderance, not an asset. Recently I was considering whether it might not be a good idea to completely remove marriage, a religious notion, from our laws. Let the church handle religion. Hearing Bishop John's telling of how the Rwandan government and church work together, complement each other, may have turned me around on that. Of course, it's easier when 90% of the population claims to be Christian. The Bishop talked a bit about the US, where he has lived in the past, and some of the Church's failures there. One of those failures, he said, is not being able to talk about Christianity in the schools. I assume he means students not being able to, but he didn't specify. I asked him how the church could not fail in that regard and he said it needs to change its attitude; it needs to be more humble. He said the Anglican church has figured out everything, and it leaves no room for the Spirit. He then asked if he had answered my question, which I felt he had not, so I asked how that would change the government's position on religion in the schools. Essentially he said the government doesn't value the church because we no longer have anything of value to offer. "The church doesn't do magic. If you put salt in a pan and heat the pan with the food and serve it immediately, the salt won't have added any flavor." He suggested that if we humble ourselves and serve rather than rant, in a generation or two, we may see change in how people view Christianity. It's certainly food for thought. Another culture shock that I mentioned previously is Rwanda's view of Sex. "Professor" Maurice, my translator on Thursday for the pastoral retreat, talked a bit about the Mobilizing for Life program they have which teaches faithfulness and abstinence to combat AIDS. I asked a devil's advocate question, as I do so often, "When the US, historically, has taught abstinence only, it's failed miserably. It doesn't reduce the amount of sex, it reduces the amount of safe sex. (Thank you CJ Craig.) What do we expect to happen here?" In the last three or four years, the number of sexually active youth in areas where the benefits of abstinence has been taught has dropped from 33% to 12%. Maurice talked about a lot of testimonies. Pastor Phil said there are statistics to support this as well. He went on to talk about the many supporters of Rwanda, whether they be governments or organizations, that all have agendas for Rwanda and Africa. They all have their own ideals. Much of what comes in is helpful, from financial aid to education to entrepreneurial spirit. But with the good also comes the bad and the ugly, and just because the US can't keep its dick in its pants, doesn't mean the rest of the world can't. Since then (two hours ago) I've been thinking about what could cause this separation in values (and abstinence is a value in Rwanda). I know it's not belief in the Bible, as this education is still being taught to the country and roughly one in three pastors aren't even "born again." It's not ancestral roots (they're not being taught it by their parents) as polygamy is an issue here. I'm left thinking it's our media, our advertising, our obsession with sex in the first place. They have no sex appeal ads because they have no ads at all. I'm not blaming the media outright as the media wouldn't present what we don't want to see. There's a Jack Johnson song about this called "Cookie Jar". These two pointed questions earned me the prestigious Hardest Questions award during graduation from World Relief University. I overheard at the end of Bishop John's talk, on the way to tea that Rwanda is, too, materialistic. Americans put their faith and trust in the objects they own. Rwandans put their hope in the objects they think would make their lives complete. I guess Americans do that as well. It's an interesting thought, to be sure. What I've learned today is that life as it's meant to be is hard. In fact, it's impossible. The amount of forgiveness, the metaphorical seventy times seven, for every possible way someone can sin against us, whether that be accidental, misunderstanding, cruelty, thievery, rape, or murder of loved ones... how can you? With the 1994 genocide raw in everyone's minds here, it makes all of this that much more real. The amount of healing through forgiveness that's happened in the last 17 years is phenomenal. Selling your stuff to support those in need? I can easily give, and in fact enjoy giving, out of my abundance, but ask me to sell my tv, or laptop, or car to help someone? Not happening. LIfe, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? God gives us life and the liberty to do with it and fail as we please in our own pursuit of happiness. Life is the one thing we, as Americans, feel we have as our own. How can we give that up completely? It's impossible. "With Christ all things are possible." It's hard to comprehend, much less believe, much less act on. On lighter topics (and it is now this entry's tomorrow, about 18 hours since starting it), we left our hotel in Musanze yesterday morning. Before leaving, we walked up to the Catholic church about five minutes away and prayed for the region. Dyanah didn't walk with us. I thought she was being lazy since she got in a car that was to pick us up at the church. It turns out she was leaving, so I missed my chance to hug her goodbye. Nothing grieves me more than missed opportunities for relationship, romantic or not. To my future girlfriends, never tease me by offering a kiss and then denying it because of something, legitimate or not, I did. It tears me apart. The ride to our new home, where the day-university class was held, was about 40 minutes long, bumpy and upward. (We're just about to leave this place, and I just carried my bags up the stairs to where the SUVs are. To give you an idea of the elevation, not only am I winded, which would be normal, but everyone else has mentioned being winded too.) We got some beautiful shots of waterfalls and people working their fields. The retreat center we went to has the most glorious view I've ever seen, tenfold and then some. It overlooks a large lake with several islands in the middle. There's no electricity to the islands, so there are no power lines crossing the water or anything else to mar the scene. Not that I've ever been a poetic writer, but I doubt anyone but a poet laureate could capture the view. Or a photo. With the world's best camera. Yeah, you really should just visit. Glory be to God, we had a bathroom door in our room. It has rained fairly frequently, so we haven't had much opportunity to see the whole thing unclouded, nor have I had any time to journal outside. Because I don't believe I've yet stated it, and it really is one of the main points of this trip, I'm going to attempt to explain World Relief's purpose here in Rwanda. "To empower the local church to serve the most vulnerable." We've (the world) found that dumping money in Africa hasn't worked. In fact, it has worsened the situation by creating a dependency on those who've tried to help. The old give a man a fish, teach a man to fish. The only way Africa will ever succeed in betterment is if it does it itself, if it owns it itself. World Relief believes the best organization to serve the "most vulnerable," the poor, the widows and orphans, the down-and-out, is the Church, as it has been called by Jesus to do so. Further, with 90% claiming faith, it's the largest social network in Rwanda, already in place. Jesus calls himself the groom and the Church his bride. World Relief sees itself as the maid of honor, the woman whose job it is to help the bride to have everything she needs, and then to step out of the way. World Relief doesn't supply any financial incentives for pastors to join in their programs, except in the beginning for a free lunch and transportation. The pastors or other Rwandans own everything they do. World Relief just supplies training (trainers of trainers) and curriculum. If people think of a program as World Relief's, they'll become dependent on the organization. This kind of thinking is difficult for task/results-oriented people and organizations. "89¢ a day will let this child go to school." That organization will, unfortunately, never go out of business, never succeed in its goal of saving Africa. Even organizations that agree with World Relief's way of doing things are often pressed by boards for results and will pay for food and transport for every meeting. Now pastors aren't going to the meeting for the benefits of the meeting, but for free food and the extra money left over after expensing transportation. Once again, they're taught that white people will give them money. It calls into question, a bit, our (Bethany's) partnership with Living Water International. Wells are great, but it'd be better if the Africans paid for them. They also break fairly frequently, so that's another opportunity for African business. Elizabeth has mentioned this to LIving Water (whom primarily in the past has been sponsored by organizations and companies that want to boast they've put x wells in Uganda), and said Bethany is more interested in a relationship and partnership with the people our wells have gone to, and that we also want a maintenance plan in place for those wells. It sounded like, from talking to her, they were noncommittal. She said she'd call again when we get back. Last night at our team time, Richard tried to make joke to tease me about Dyanah, but accidentally said [Caleb] instead of Jordan. After a team-wide fit of laughter directed at Richard instead of me, Elizabeth asked if there was romance there and I shrugged indicating a little. I guess she had no idea. She had even pointed out at breakfast one day that the only two other single people on the trip were women too old for me, and "I guess you'll just have to find an African." This morning before our mostly-daily devotion, we did a quick highs-and-lows. At the end, I appended a sappy, half-joking low that I didn't get to hug Di goodbye. This unfortunately coincided with a side-effect of my Vyvanse, watery eyes. I don't know if anyone noticed or thought I was tearing up over it. Amongst the laughter at my bringing this up, I heard someone say I was doing it wrong, that I was supposed to be embarrassed so they could tease me. Ha. We spent some time debriefing. I've said it before: I don't really come with expectations because I don't know what to expect, and I don't want to be disappointed. The disappointments I've had were minor, a missed hug, paying more than I'd meant to on a souvenir chess set, not having as much a-few-on-one time with the pastors on Saturday. I spent the last twenty minutes of that debriefing time writing this, which is really debriefing in itself. This whole trip we've been examining poverty. This trip is based on a book called When Helping Hurts. At the beginning, it does a deep dive on the various forms of poverty. It's essentially when our relationships to God, self, community or environment are out of whack. This is to say that we ourselves are quite poor as well. We don't lack materials, but our relationships to ourselves and to our communities are really screwed up. To God, I'll leave on a per-person basis, and in Washington, we're at least trying to be environmental. Anyway, financial poverty affects all four relationships, at least in the theory presented by the book. I asked the group whether it was fair to say that Jesus experienced no poverty. The consensus was that he did not. Then I asked if he was materially poor, which he was. I'm still thinking that out. When we came back from personal reflection, Richard said something profound (or maybe this was sometime else). He said, "it's much easier to sympathize with people when they act against us when we recognize their actions as their own poverty." Last night, the Nertz crew played a couple games. Lindsay crushed us in the first 100-point series. She wanted to go to bed but we prevented it and I actually dealt her cards for her so she had no choice. It was only a 75-point round and it looked like Richard was going to finally win, but I passed him up in the last hand. Tonight, however, our dear Richard finally won, and won big, two 100-pointers in a row. After the first, he took off his shirt and ran and danced around. I'm surprised he didn't give a speech. I'm glad he finally won. I was starting to feel bad for him, but I never let anyone win. My mom never let me win growing up, and I really appreciate that. During last night's games, some wild African dogs tried to get into the room we were playing in. We shut the door just in time, but until after the games ended, they puppy-guarded us. We waited and watched for a few minutes as they ran around the yard playing with each other. It felt like they were waiting for us, and then, miraculously, they just left. We hightailed it out of there as quietly as we could, back to our rooms. About 80% there, when Richard knew we were home free, he stopped suddenly to freak out Lindsay, who had been significantly the most nervous about the run. Good times. I'm running out of pages in this 100-page notebook. Most of the left hand pages are empty, so don't you worry about losing a second of Rwandan play-by-play. Except about Saturday. I just really don't have anything to say about that day.

I suppose it is time. Since October 1. Hum. Well, I briefly dated/flinged--flung?--a girl named Belle. Basically the first date went fantastic, which introduced super high expectations, that were later not met. It's entirely possible they were impossible to meet. Belle and I are still friends, though it took a couple months. In the last couple days in Rwanda, we headed back toward the airport. On the way, we visited some orphans and widows, doing missionary work like a cop eats a doughnut. The woman my group met with was 51 years old and had an amazing, tragic story. Her husband was a fisherman and died drowning when she was in her early twenties. By then she had two kids, but her parents and parents-in-law disowned her. She couldn't afford the house she was living in, and had no where to go, so she lived, quite literally, under a mat for ten years. The neighbors took pity on her kids some nights and gave them food, some of which they smuggled in their shirts, so that's how the woman survived. There was something about her owning the house they'd lived in, but not the land it was on, and the man who owned it refused to part with it. He was planning on leveling the house, but since it was government-built, it was illegal. When we met with her, she was in the process of getting the government to step in. My favorite part was that she let us take the bench in her house, and pulled down some mats for herself. One of the mats, when unrolled, revealed a giant spider. I pointed it out, expecting her to whack it with a shoe, or ask me to. Instead, she slapped it, bare-palmed, it curled up, and she brushed it aside. My sister would have run to Uganda at the sight of that spider. The day before we left the country, we had a one-day "retreat" for the World Relief staff. It was based around the five or six sections of the Lord's Prayer. We put out large sheets of paper with the section name at the top, then went around and wrote prayers that fit the section for World Relief and otherwhere. (Otherwhere passes spell check?) It was a fairly powerful experience. Afterward, it began to rain pretty hard. I walked out into it, getting soaked. The Rwandans thought I was crazy, which amused my team and me. The day after we got back from Rwanda, I had tickets with my Microsoft team and Swood to see the Seahawks. We were to meet at a bar in Seattle, but I managed to leave my wallet in my bags, still packed, at home, and my 16-year-old face couldn't convince them I was 24. Our tickets were for seats literally the furthest from the field, the nosebleeds of the nosebleeds. We lost the game, though had we made the hail-mary field goal we would have won or gone into overtime. I don't remember. When I went back to work, everything had changed. The two remaining members of the original project I was on had left to go work with my old boss. We had one new member, and two or three more on the way. Our code base had moved to an entirely different system. Seriously, I'm gone for two weeks and the team falls apart. Within two weeks, I had to do my commitments. My boss helped me with those, and midway through, I realized, I'm not going to do these. It made setting them a bit easier, when then and there, I decided I was going to quit my job. Obviously the next question was "What now?" The only thing that came to mind was teaching high school math, so I set my course, and looked for colleges. The only college that fit my schedule was SPU. For UW, I'd have to wait until the next October to apply, and start in spring of '13. Western, which would have been my first choice, had no Seattle satellite campus, and I don't want to leave my church. When I talked to HR about leaving Microsoft, she recommended CityU, but my sister is there. A few weeks later, at one of my one-on-ones with my boss, he told me, as a friend and in no official capacity, that I should start looking for a new job. I started talking to people about my decision, outside of work (and with Athena). My Rwanda trip team (we're still meeting once every two to four weeks as we did pre-trip) was all very supportive, everyone saying I'd make a great teacher. My psychiatrist said she hears people frequently say they want to quit their jobs, and she always tells them to keep them, but in my case, that I should go for it. The only two people I told that weren't thrilled were my mom and Luke's wife--both teachers. My mom didn't want me to drop out of the computer field when she knows that's one of my (if not my) biggest passion, and she's been teaching for 35 years, is burnt out, and angry at what the government is doing to the system right now. Luke's wife is a second or third year teacher, and at the time, had been having a very rough year. Both of them are junior high teachers, whereas I want to teach high school. I gave my two weeks' notice two weeks before Thanksgiving. My boss gave me the best compliment he could have: "Oh, I expected you to say you were going to Google or Amazon." My last day could have been the Wednesday before, but Microsoft has a long standing tradition of a farewell lunch, and I figured that everyone would be out of town, but be back by Monday, so that was my last day. Those two weeks were hard because it's Microsoft policy not to tell anyone except HR and your boss if you're actually leaving the company as opposed to changing groups. I spent a lot of it messing around with a MSR gadget, teasing out the peculiarities and attempting to train the guy who would take over my project. I spent a lot of it rereading QCtoo. The rest of my time, I spent talking to Vin on facebook. She is a wonderful person. The person I hadn't told, come Thanksgiving, was my grandpa. I was not really looking forward to that conversation, but I've got a bit more ... I don't even know the word ... than my mom or sister. Hostility isn't quite right; indifference; rebelliousness. Combine those but only take certain portions of each: hostdiffousnessity--the attitude of I'm doing this, and I know it to be right, so you can condemn me or not and it won't bother me either way. It's being a teenage daughter, except right. Anyway, I don't even remember how it came up, but I ended up telling my grandpa I had given my two weeks' notice and was going to become a math teacher. His response was, "Good for you!" My jaw almost dropped. I know he and Grandma knew that I wasn't happy there, in fact they were the first to know, even before me, but they'd always tried to push me toward Amazon or Google. When my mom had told him she wanted to be a teacher, he was disappointed, though my understanding is that it was because of the pay they received. Thanksgiving went well for me. Well in general, except for my cousins and sister, I think, and except for one or two parts, it went well for them too. Good food, good company, an interesting game of Apples to Apples--interesting because some people played it literally, my sister and I didn't, and my two cousins were too young to understand "Woodstock." "I like the bird." But, as the party was breaking up, my grandpa said goodbye to my sister asking, "So, are you on track to graduate?" Since my sister's taken five years to graduate, he's quit supporting her financially (or so I've heard). His concern can be interpreted as aimed at her success rather than her wellbeing. Then, he turned to me and said, "Follow your dreams!" A few moments later, when he was out of earshot, my eldest cousin turned to my sister and said in a bitter tone, "Or, you can just not go to college and have no expectations placed on you at all!" Good ol' family politics, I guess. Still, beats presidential politics. My goodbye lunch was bittersweet, half because I was leaving and would miss the people who attended, half because half the people I wanted to attend were out of town still. I'll admit it's a little selfish to wish the guy were at my lunch rather than at Disneyland with his family. A little. Of the process for leaving, I was most upset that they didn't let me keep my badge as a memento. I was tempted to leave it home that day, but my good nature prevented it. The SPU program officially starts in late July, so I had/have eight months of unemployment. What allows me to do this, and to live while in college without a job, is my recently converted buy-a-house fund, a large sum of money sitting in MSFT stock. Assuming Microsoft doesn't go out of business, or drop its value by half, I should be fine for living for 36-40 months, without taxes. What I don't have is the $17k needed to go to school, so I'm hoping to take out some loans for that. Everything just kind of fell into place for this decision. Last June, I'd planned on moving into a house I wanted to buy by February, so that's when I set as the end of my lease. As "luck" would have it, February is when Bob's roommate is moving out. (It's now one week until the end of my lease and she still hasn't so I need to do some more prodding.) Rent at Bob's place is a couple hundred cheaper per month. It's not huge, but it's some. SPU's program is 14 months, which is about the amount of living money I have, and it's somewhat targeted at people leaving the tech industry who want to teach math and science, which is me. My mom's an alumnus so I think that will help with admissions and tuition a little bit. A dozen other small things have just left me feeling at peace with this decision. It's where God wants me to be right now, and that's enough. It's quite the turn around from where I was a year ago. Christmas was good, mostly because I got to see friends from all over. Vin came back, so we had lunch together at a place in Seattle. Denna, whom I'm renaming once again to Nicci (having reread The Wizards First Rule, and deciding Denna doesn't really fit--and I'm not choosing Nicci because she's Death's Mistress [one should hope not], but because she turns into a dear friend of Richard's, though not his wife) visited, and I spent a day barhopping with her and her sister, brother-in-law, and roommate and his friend. That day, my iPhone was stolen from my car seat through my window. I forget that Seattle is not Redmond. It was really being used as a glorified iPod, since I've been using my Windows Phone for over a year. Still, it would have been nice to keep, sell, or give away. It's missing the chip that makes it act as a phone, so they'll have a little more trouble using it. After the barhopping, I took the ferry over to Port Orchard and hung out at her parents' house, with some of her other Port Orchard friends. I'd been hoping to get a chance to talk to her one on one, but it didn't really happen. At the end, it was me, her dad, and her. Her dad and I played a game of chicken, and I lost. I was a little disappointed, until the next morning when Nicci told me that a lot of wounds between her dad and her were mended and that they were on significantly better terms, which were my prayers while driving on the way home, and had been for months before. God is good. Frank was also in town, and the Quad had a good night of Apples to Apples, and dare I say it, Quelf. They are the only three people with which I could play that game, though perhaps on a different timeline, it'd be interesting with Goose as well. Much blackmail material was generated. A lot of people, people older than me mostly, have suggested that I should become a technology teacher, or assume that's what I'm going for rather than math. It's really hard, and repetitive, to try to explain that there's a difference between computer science and technology, the same as there's a difference between math and accounting. I would love to teach computer science, but first I'd have to find a school that actually teaches it. That might involve working for a few years, and then coming up with my own curriculum. I don't know how good the AP CS curriculum is, but that might also be an option. In order to become a masters student, you have to take the WEST-B and WEST-E tests. WEST stands for Washington Educators Skill Tests. The B is basic--reading, writing, and math. The E is endorsement, so in my case, math. I took the endorsement test first, and it was fun. I got something like a 78, but it's a pass-fail test with a 70% bar. The WEST-B, I got in the high 80s/low 90s for reading and writing, and a 98-ish in math. The scores they give you are on a 100-300 scale, so calculating, I'm guessing, is not a straight percentage. In order to take the WEST-E, you can't bring anything except a calculator, and they give you lockers for your wallet, watch, cell phone, and anything else on your person. I thought I'd be smarter than that, and leave all my stuff in my car. Of course, that stuff included my keys. And my wallet, which normally has my backup car key. I do so love when I outsmart myself. One of the women who worked at the testing center was super gracious, and let me use her AAA membership to unlock my car. She even gave me a little cash for lunch while I waited for them. It's so great to meet people like that. The SPU application was due February 1, but to beef it up a little, I was encouraged to volunteer at a couple schools. I set myself up to volunteer in a math classroom at a high school in Kirkland, but the Monday that week was Martin Luther King Jr Day, and Tuesday through Friday were snow days. The Civil Rights Movement strikes again! The next Tuesday, I went back to Port Orchard and volunteered in my favorite junior high math teacher's classroom on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Wednesday was insane. Because of the snow, the kids were rowdy. Also, because of the days missed, they had pushed back the end of the semester to that Friday, which meant the kids' grades were basically set in stone. No failing student was going to pass, and no high A student was going to get a B. No passing student cares that much about a percentage point or two, nor will they fail. The kids basically had no perceivable incentive for listening. Further, Cedar Heights's schedule is such that on Wednesday, he didn't have a plan period. Last, and probably foremost, he's a little too lenient when it comes to keeping the kids quiet, so when he gives that inch and lets them talk during homework time, they take that mile and don't shut up when he's trying to teach. In one period, he even lost his temper and sent two instigators outside for the rest of the period. At the end of the day, I was wondering if I even wanted to teach anymore. Also, that day, my car was towed because it was parked awkwardly, yet a legal 6" from the curb. Neither that, nor the $216 it cost to get it out of impound, helped. I decided to tough it out and stay Thursday. I wouldn't say it was a night and day difference, but a world of difference, nonetheless. The biggest thing, probably, was that I was ready for it. Second, he had his plan period, and during it, I went to my mom's classroom to see how she teaches. Her classroom management (crowd control) skills are significantly, well, better. It helps that she's been teaching longer, and also that her classes are all of a single grade, and thus she can reinvent her teaching style each year, whereas the math teacher's classes are mixed-grade, and students have expectations year-to-year. Also, apparently, the class I visited third period was her best, most respectful class. I finished that day thinking, "Ok, so this can be done." Still, the experience confirmed in me that I want to teach high school and not junior high. It was good to see all the teachers I grew up with. Having lunch with them was fun, and interesting. I got the feeling that these particular days were hard for most of the teachers, probably due to the end of the semester, and a lot of the time was spent "discussing" student behavior. One interesting comment was that a girl had asked another girl out and was rejected. She ran out of the classroom, hurt, and I think went to the counseling office. The comment was that the girl who asked the girl out was committing sexual harassment. I'm thinking, "Really? How is that different than a guy asking a girl out?" Friday was best of all, despite the Friday mayhem. During third period, I again visited my mom. She was teaching persuasive writing. The entry task was to pick a topic on the board and write a note to their parents trying to convince them of something. The topics were like "push back my bed time" or "let me dye my hair" or "give me more allowance". After a few minutes, my mom collected all the papers then redistributed them to other students. The task then was to write a reply as their parents, countering the arguments. I looked up at the board, read through the topics, and asked, "Do you realize you just put some kids on the wrong side of 'quit smoking'?" It got me a good laugh. I made a few more comments like that, and asked my mom at the end if I had been too disruptive. She said no, that having me had been good. Some Saturday in January, I went to see Goose's play. She played Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. The part fits her almost perfectly; Goose is a nicer person. I went during a matinee because it was the last day, and I know that casts have parties after the last showing, which was that night. I wanted to see her afterward, but I didn't want to impose, having not seen her in a little over a year, and that being when she broke up with me. The play was fantastic, I thought. It was no new epiphany, but Shakespeare was brilliant. It kicked off a bit of a Shakespearen binge for me. I didn't actually do a whole lot--I read a little bit, enough to discover that so much is lost without the acting--but I thought about it a lot. Someday, I want to write a play, a comedy I'm sure. It always comes back to plot, though. It's the same reason I haven't written a book yet, either. The only thing I seem to be able to write about with any degree of skill is myself. Most of the binge happened on facebook, and a friend of mine, a girl I almost went on a date with but then she got married, posted this clip on one of my statuses. I don't normally put youtube in my blog, but this is worth it. Seeing the play also kicked off a bit of me wishing I was with Goose, and I tested the waters, confirming that she is, in fact, dating Benedick. I know that she's not the one for me, but sometimes things are hard to know. Later I told a friend I hadn't talked to since high school, whom I randomly chatted up on facebook, "She'd be the one that got away, if I weren't completely certain there's a girl out there whose better for me." On the 31st, I turned in my SPU application. That's right, a full day before it was due. First time in my life. That afternoon, before turning it in, I had lunch with my old Microsoft pals, one to have lunch with them, and two, to get my letters of recommendation (which were incredibly kind) signed. It was a good thing they were signed, too, because they almost rejected one on account of it not being in an envelope. Alas, I had forgotten to print out the second half of my written thing, which was a list of teaching experiences I'd had, so I emailed that to them that night. All that's left now is an interview on March 10, and then waiting one to two weeks for an application letter. I got the feeling there were 100+ applicants per year, but ALL of the interviews, which are required in person, happen on the 10th between 8 and 4pm. I'm just trying to imagine how 100 people get interviewed in 8 hours without a LOT of interviewers. Anyway, I'm not too worried. If this is what God wants, then I'll be accepted. If not, then since I think God has me where he wants me right now, he must have a plan to get me to where I need to go next. Plus, it's not like I'm not an ideal candidate for the spot anyway. The only thing I could have done better, perhaps, was to double-major in math, but I took enough math to cover all the requirements for the MTMS (masters in teaching math and science) without taking any other courses. As for girls, as there must always be a for girls, I'm a bit put off right now. A day or two ago, I was angsty and frustrated, and way too into it, applying my girl-situation to my identity, where it does not belong. So, once again, I'm at a place where if I find a girl, cool, if not, I have other things to worry about--even though I really don't, having money and no employment. Moving! Right. Good. I was worried I had nothing to worry about. Anyway, all that's really happened since Belle is a few girls I met for lunch, none of which went spectacularly. This latest one, I met in Bellingham, and I thought it went well enough to warrant a second date, but she did not. What was great about it, though, is that it got me to Bellingham where I met with Rufus and Solomon. It'd been entirely too long since I'd talked to either of them, and seeing them again was both wonderful and nurturing to my soul. Solomon is so sincere with his Christ-like love. While talking with Rufus at the VU, I saw a good six or seven other people I knew from back in the day, pastors and friends and Fir Creek counselors. I have no doubt that the reason I ran into this girl on eHarmony was to get me to Bellingham. Besides, who wants to date a girl that enjoyed The Phantom Menace and wanted to see it in 3D? *dog with shifty eyes* The meeting with Solomon spawned off an email thread, largely about girls and what to look for in girls when looking to marry. I've read it a few times now because he is incredibly insightful. If I get his permission, I'd love to post it on my blog, or maybe a link to it. If not, well, sucks to be you, I guess. I guess saying I only met a few girls for lunch isn't fair. For a little while, I was kind of seeing this girl. We met up a few times. She was the first girl I've ever really been on a date with that was (more than a year) older than me, though not much older. I'm not really sure why we dropped out of contact, but I think we both felt we should. I don't know. Looking back through nostalgia-colored lenses, I miss her a little. Or maybe (matter-of-factly) I'm just lonely. The rest of these past months is just keeping busy. I refuse to get bored while unemployed. I've volunteered at my church and also at that Kirkland high school, though they have no place for me in the classroom right now. For my church, they have me doing repetitive menial tasks, which so far I've actually enjoyed. When they set me up to do some data entry, they showed me the software suite they're using, which only lets you search for one member at a time. I noticed that it runs on an .mdb (Microsoft Access) file, and told them I could whip together a quick program that lets you see all the people who are members in a list at once, along with all the people in the list who are new. Tomorrow I'm going to work with the volunteer coordinator to put together a rough spec, since my initial one-hour version doesn't quite do everything needed. If I'm going to make that meeting, I should probably end this post now. I've been getting up, most days, at 8:30--quite a feat when I don't have anything to do during the day--and reading my Bible while sipping Frappuccino. I was never good at reading my Bible regularly, so I'm determined to make this habit stick.

Tuesday, August 27, 2013 I'm bored tonight, so I'm writing. Fantastic start, right? It's been a year and a half since I've posted, and this is the first time I'm so bored that I'm going to update my blog. I could write some inane sarcastic statement like, "not a lot has happened," but I'm a better writer than that, to be sure. And I know you know this is the case because you stuck around after the first two sentences. You, reader, truly are a connoisseur of fine writing. You see Isaac Asimov next to Stephanie Meyer and the choice is obvious. You've heard of Stephanie Meyer. So what has happened since February of last year? It looks like during my last post my plan was to attend SPU. That went well, in that I got an interview, and not so well in that I wasn't accepted to the university. That's fine because I ended up at Northwest University instead. You'd think, being a university you've never heard of, it would cost less than SPU, but that's not the case. On the bright side, it didn't cost more than SPU. In May, I bought a new-ish car and traveled the US. I visited 27 states in 29 days. The whole photo album can be viewed here. I could write at least a few blog posts from that trip alone, but I'm not going to. Some stories are meant to be memory, and some are meant to be told in person. Memory, it turns out, is fairly malleable. For instance, perhaps a decade from now, I'll remember having accidentally entered Mexico, rather than accidentally entering Ontario, without my passport thanks to unfounded trust in Bing Maps. And I'll remember the three pieces of graffiti I saw on three different overpasses over two separate freeways, each at least thirty minutes apart saying "I ♥ you", "Forgive, forget", and "Have a good day" in Spanish rather than English. I'm not really sure what a heart symbol in Spanish would look like, but if I remember crossing the border from New York to Mexico, I'm sure I could think of something. Perhaps some day I'll remember... nope, this was a stupid way of writing. I'll have no more of it. Fine, I'll tell you a couple more tidbits. The only place I visited or drove through in which I did not find some amount of beauty was Los Angeles. Everywhere else I appreciated some aspect to it. Washington DC is the only city I've ever considered someplace I'd want to live. I really prefer suburbs and rural areas. I actually got giddy when I first saw the Washington Memorial from the freeway. I had no idea I would feel that way. Perhaps I've seen the West Wing too many times. My favorite place to visit in DC was the National Building Museum. Petrolex's family in Phoenix was ridiculously hospitable, and even gave me $100 for gas. I loved my visit with them. I went to the Sounders/Dallas FC game with Nicci and her then boyfriend. We were three of about ten Sounders fans scattered about the sadly small stadium. Even that close to Mexico (most of the attendees were hispanic), soccer is not a big sport in the US. The three of us made an appearance on TV in Seattle for a couple seconds around half time. We won that game 2-0. It felt really awkward being an away fan. That's the first time I've experienced that. After visiting Disney (an old female friend from high school, not the company--if you're reading this it's because I didn't manage a better pseudonym for her before finishing this post) and her boyfriend in San Diego, which was super fun, I drove Phoenix-ward and got a ticket in California for speeding. 'Cause if you're going to get a speeding ticket, southern California is the logical place to get it. Texas has freeway speed limits of 80mph. "Share the road" signs in Texas are for motorcyclists. God bless Texas. My most surprisingly awesome visit was with an old church/high school friend and her husband whom I'd only met briefly at their wedding. Halfway through what had been a normal small-talk dinner, I made some nerdy science statement and things just went uphill from there. Her husband and I stayed up until 1:00am discussing the physics of light. On a month-long trip, you're bound to have some ups and downs. Aside from LA and my speeding ticket, I've only listed some ups. Some downs were missing Mother's Day and my grandpa's 75th birthday party. Also Montero scored his first, long-awaited goal of the season against the LA Galaxy at one of the games I missed, and it was a pretty fantastic shot. That's alright. He's not on the Sounders anymore anyway. A few of the visits I had were really awkward. Maybe I'll forget those over time. There are a couple other stories, but I really will only tell those in person. So if you're that interested, and you know me, ask about the girl in Chicago, or the whole story of Niagara Falls through Ontario to Chicago, as getting into and out of Canada without a passport is a feat. In mid July, I saw an old acquaintance, Mary, online. (She's aliased so for her love of British everything, such as Downton Abbey.) I knew of her from college, and I'd always thought was cute. She'd been part ofwith Vin's clique of CCFers that I was never really a part of. Up to that point in our lives "hey" was the only word we'd said to each other, so quiet naturally, that's what I said. One thing led to another and we dated from August until January. I don't know what to say about Mary. She's one of the best people I know. She's funny, compassionate, real. But there's an indescribable quirkiness that's just Mary (though italicizing her real name would make this sentence more accurate). It's that quality that most attracted me to her. We broke up on good terms. In fact we were both planning a relationship changing/ending talk for the same evening. I miss her semi-frequently, but more often than not, I miss her more than my romantic relationship with her. With September began my masters program. We began as a group of twenty-two, but in the end nineteen of us graduated. One failed a class and dropped out, one ran into healthcare/money issues, and one got super sick after commencement (which happened in May, despite the program ending in July) and had to push back her student teaching to this September, and she'll graduate when she completes that. The first three months were pretty easy, and as long as you had flexible hours, very doable while working a job. I didn't have a job, still relying on my Microsoft stock. Second, and technically third, semesters were a little lighter on class load but also had two major teaching projects--one for the school, one for the state--a forty page research paper, and student teaching. At this point, you could no longer maintain a job. There really is a ton to write about my masters degree experience, and I've exhausted tonight's writing enthusiasm and, let's face it, talent, so I'll post more about it tomorrow, or, you know, within a year or two from now.

You do know tornados are just wind right? Just put a shit ton of fans outside your house and you'll blow it back the other way.

Tell 'em babe.

copy and pasted FUCK YOU PAY ME(clevo hc/Erba and friends) SEA OF SHIT(chicago power violence) NO TIME(pitt oi/hc) KDC(buffalo melodic hc) PIZZA HI FIVE(lima grind) DISCPLES OF CHRIST(dc grind) BACKSLIDER(philly power violence) GRIN AND BEAR IT(clevo grind) PANCREATECTOMIE(cbus goregrind) KDC come through a lot and were great as always, reminds of stuff that I used to listen to in high school, in a good way. No Time was a surprise and were fucking great. I think Sea Of Shit's vocals are hilariously awesome, they were cool, and Fuck You Pay Me were insane. Frontman (clevo legend, 9 shocks, H100's etc...) was insane, running all over the place, outside, on top of the bar, slamming himself into the wall, he was entertainment 101.