News.RttP{OCT 30th @ Worcester’s Club Oasis: THE FLAWLESS VICTORY HALLOWEEN FRIGHT-FEST feat. SCAPHISM, DESPOILMENT, WRECKONING, SARCOMANCY, and DECONFORMITY}

Enthusiastic by Association Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Oh, where to begin. Well, first off, I should not begin with "where to be gin," as I originally wrote. Alcohol and I don't mix. Besides, gin and tonic rolls off the tongue much better than gin and Jordan. Then again, I said be gin, not be mixed with gin. Now I can't even keep my own story straight. Good luck deciphering the rest of this post.

I suppose I ought to start out with the most exciting news in my life. That's right, I finished reading Eldest for the fourth time, and have since traversed 232 pages into rereading Brisingr. The Bumblebee of Life once again inspired me as no other writing has. I'm pretty sure on one of the pages I most recently read, Paolini got switched up on which entity, Eragon or Saphira, was talking (thinking to each other in italics). It was like six paragraphs back and forth with no ", Eragon said," and suddenly Saphira was asking questions of Eragon, and Eragon was answering with what only Saphira should have known. PS, I didn't notice that Eragon was just Dragon with an E until halfway through my fourth read of the first book. Also, I once thought that "I am" was the shortest complete sentence. It's actually "Be."

I started seeing a counselor, mostly because after the E/Dragon thing, I realized my brain wasn't functioning as well as it once was. Maybe I'd always been mistaken, but aren't most counseling sessions an hour long? The ones with this guy are 45 minutes, which usually run a little late. So far, and yesterday was my fourth session with him, he's really only been getting to know me rather than talking me through things or giving advice or whatever, not that I'm an expert on counseling. Yesterday I ended up saying something I didn't expect to. That's happened a few times before when I talked with Solomon or other counseloresque people, but this was slightly different, as in hindsight, I'm not sure what I said was true. I ended up saying that the nondescript sickness that I always feel, as described in the second paragraph of Restless, might as well be synonymous with shame. It seems like it would be true in the abstract, but not when I think about it concretely.

This brings me to another important if not mind-numbing point. It's the idea of absolute value verses relative value. I bought A Few Good Men on BluRay the other day, because it was on sale for $10 at Fred Meyer. Seemed like a good deal to me, and I love that movie and don't currently own it, so I bought it. After I bought it, I looked it up on Amazon, who was selling it for $11, but it occurred to me that if it had been on there for $7 or something, would I have still thought it a good deal? Clearly, at some point, I thought the movie was worth $10. Would the value of owning the movie be less if I found a better deal? This is obviously a simple case, but I think it can easily be applied to our lives in bigger ways. It also reminds me of the parable of the workers in the vineyard.

Do cats have adam's apples? Kotenok, get over here.

I was thinking about it a couple Sundays ago, and I think my goal for counseling, though I've not mentioned this to him yet, is to be able to say that my relationship with God is amazing, to really think that. I know that it is, for why should the creator of heaven and earth die that I might have such a relationship? But I think I take that for granted. If God is good, the ultimate good, he loves us as much as he says he does, and has the chance to save us, I don't want to be so arrogant to argue that it would be required of him to do so at the cost of his own, or own son's, life, but it seems to me to be the logical choice. I think for that reason, I take it for granted. I would never argue that I was worth that sacrifice, but that too is folly, for God said I was, and I shan't argue with him. I guess if I really beheld the gravity, the enormity of the relationship I have, I would repeatedly fall on my knees and cry out in thanks and ... disbelief? There's some irony. And if it were truly as intimate a relationship as it ought, I would feel more stable in it, and more thankful and awed. I would say it's amazing. As it stands, it simply is.

On the other hand, a couple times I've tried to live without it, and I couldn't do it. I feel like I'm stuck in limbo, "wrestling" with an impassive god. And I know that is not his nature, so why do I feel that it is? Why does the evidence in my life point that direction?

Well, that took a depressing turn. While I'm at it, I might as well write the rest out of my system. My counselor said something at the end of our session yesterday. It didn't immediately throw me off, in fact, it elicited an odd sense of pride. Today, I felt jumbled though, badly enough that I felt physically sick and stayed home from work. I watched Minority Report for the first time in a few years. The scene where Agatha, John, and his wife are all at his wife's house, they're up in Shawn's old room, and Agatha is talking about the life Shawn could have had actually brought a couple tears to my eye. I rarely get choked up over movies, especially action movies. I'm not sure why it happened, but it was just immensely sad to me. Also, the scene where the murder was supposed to take place and Agatha is reliving the present was done incredibly well. I really felt for Agatha, and it was hard to watch. I've probably seen the movie a good six to eight times. I'm not sure why this was the first time I had such emotions about it. Or, I'm not sure why I had emotions about it this time. I haven't decided which.

So, I maybe exaggerated a slight amount, the teensiest amount conceivable, in fact, if exaggeration were tangible, I'm pretty sure I would have split the atom, when I said that the most exciting thing in my life was finishing Eldest. Maybe. God save us all if Stephen Colbert ever happens upon tangible exaggeration. The earth might just gain enough mass that the sun would start orbiting it. Anyway, if there is something more exciting than reading a book for the fourth time, it's this.

A few weeks ago I went to the eleven o'clock church service because the Costa Rica team was having a post trip thank you party for our supporters up in Bellingham. At this particular morning service, it was rather full, and I ended up sitting next to a girl named Kaylee. The lead singer in the worship band said something about playing an old song, and then started the chords for Shout to the North. I commented, "Old? This was written like eight years ago." Kaylee laughed at that. After the service, I asked her and her cousin if they wanted to go out to lunch. I've been out to lunch with several people after church services both at Harper and LatR so this was no big deal to me. They checked the time and her cousin's schedule, and then we went to Chipotle in Northgate. Kaylee's got to be one of the most interesting people I've met. If she had more character, she'd have to appear on the USA channel. She's super bright, laughs at corny jokes, and can hold her own in a banter. You can't ask for much more than that. But wait, there's more. Call in the next thirty minutes and she'll own Firefly and Serenity on DVD. That's nerdier than I am! Her one flaw is that she's not seen Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Of course, having no room for improvement, for growth, would also be a flaw so, damned if you do, damned if you don't, and damn the torpedoes!

So, I may have laid it on a little thick there (really got into the groove, which I guess means I've found my muse for writing hyperbolically), but really, based on first impressions, she's a great person. A week later, I asked her out to coffee, and she suggested the following Friday. The next day, coffee changed into dinner, and the day after, dinner into dinner plus Iron Man 2 with friends. You've got to admire someone who was looking forward to Iron Man's sequel more than I was, especially someone of the female persuasion. I don't think I'll say much more than that tonight, lest I too stumble upon tangible exaggeration.

It's now getting late, and I have three unequally viable choices. In order of descending meritoriousness they are go to sleep, read more Brisingr, and watch A Few Good Men again. I did get five hours of extra sleep earlier today, so I'm not too tired, but tomorrow might be painful if I'm not awake. We're having a morale event (I almost forgot about it) at 10:00 in Seattle. I hate driving in Seattle. I hate parking in Seattle.

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Anonymous said... At June 17, 2010 9:58 AM
Wow, that is one impressive wall of text.
Stranger than Fiction Saturday, April 17, 2010
Bah, I can't write fiction. I try from time to time, and it's always boring. Part of the issue is that I really only want to write something if it's not been written before. And part of the reason is I have no talent there. I'll stick to what I'm good at: writing paragraphs upon paragraphs of unread text so it looks like I have a life, at least one interesting enough to write about, so long as the readers don't actually get past the first paragraph.

This time I thought I had it. The last few attempts have been attempting fantasy, but I don't have any good ideas of magic systems (which are my favorite part). I'd rather learn than teach, read than write. I also tend to get hung up on the plot, which was the case this time as well. This time I thought I'd write the story of boy meets girl (because that's never been done before), but only write during the moments they're actually interacting. The first "chapter" was five lines long, from the moment a mutual friend was introducing them until the moment after they shook hands and got distracted by other friends at the party. The second chapter was just the friend confirmation email from Facebook. For the third, I was attempting to write an instant message chat log. I actually wrote a program to generate the HTML for me. It turns out talking to myself on paper isn't as fun as talking to myself aloud. Five minutes into the "conversation" I alt+F4'd without saving.

On a side note, I couldn't figure out how to get a WebBrowser Winforms object to autosize, nor make it scroll to a certain point on the page (i.e. the bottom). Using LINQ's XDocument and XElement objects, though, made the page generation itself a breeze. Even ctrl+z was simple. I just kept a stack of each of the XElements I'd added, and then to undo, popped the stack and called .Remove() on the object, which removed itself from the XDocument. Magic!

I think maybe the hardest part for me, writing fiction, is creating a character other than myself. I just can't leave my own head. I think most authors, at least in their early works, write with the main character being the author. Alexander, for instance, gets woozy from the height of a chair unless he's over water, much like his character Longshark (whom, in my head, I pronounced Lawnshark) in his latest story. I would guess that Paolini acts quite a bit like Eragon, at least in his inquisitiveness. But then both them have supporting characters that are quite different from than the authors. I just end up writing copies of myself, or possibly my friends, though it turns out the way I perceive my friends is a lot more like how I perceive me, than it is how they actually are. They wouldn't say this. I would. Bah.

I do wonder what happens if you add an element to multiple XDocument objects, because .Remove()'s documentation says it removes the element from its parent, and in this case, there are multiple parents. I could try it, and report back, but I'd rather wonder than know in this case. All my friends would too.

So yes, I keep attempting and failing fiction. Mostly this happens when I reread Eragon. Two thoughts always come to mind while reading that book. One, this was make a great MMO. It really would, but the whole magic system would be incredibly complex. You'd have to write a run-time compiler for it, and then you'd have to convince people the game is fun enough to play to learn a completely made up language, and then you'd have to figure out the whole "an expert might say water and conjure something completely unrelated, like a gemstone, because he can see the link between the two" thing. After all that triviality comes the part where you have to enforce no deceit when someone speaks the ancient language. The other thought is always, "I can do this." And time and time again it proves untrue.

The last few weeks I've been thinking about something that the pastor said, that when we want to feel good about ourselves we revert to doing what we do best, specifically mentioning writing, among other things. I think that's true of me, not that I'm saying I'm necessarily a good writer, only that I take pride in it. The sermon he said this in was on Easter, and about "giving God the pen" of our lives, letting him dictate what will happen in our lives. I think God gives us certain aptitudes, and it would be foolish not to use what God has given us, so I'm wondering what God wants me to write. There is this blog, but I'd like to write a book someday too.

I guess if I want God to answer a question, like what does he want me to write about, I should ask him--I should pray. I certainly don't pray religiously. It's a habit I should get into. Hime and I call each other best friends, but we haven't seen each other since her birthday in January.

I'm in bed now, or rather, on Bill's couch in Bellingham the day after I started writing this post. Before I let it slip another day, I think I'll just post it now, short and sweet.

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Alexander said... At April 17, 2010 12:18 PM
Now it shall be terribly hard for me not to think of him as the Lawnshark!
Four Words Sunday, April 4, 2010
He is risen. He is risen indeed. It's Easter right now, so happy Easter if you happen to be reading this post today, or if you happen to read it some Sunday between March 23 and April 27 in the future, and that day also happens to be the first Sunday after the first full moon after the first day of spring of your current year. Yeah.

Easter is the most important day of the year, with Christmas a close second. I don't think that's a very popular opinion, but it's mine. It is the day Jesus Christ conquered death. It is the reason we have The Good News. If I have my metaphysics right, Good Friday was the day our sins could be forgiven, but no one would believe it had Easter not happened. Or maybe I have them wrong, and it is in the act of rising again, conquering death, that we may have victory in Christ as well.

I don't think Easter is celebrated correctly. I don't really know how to explain it, but the fact that Easter is so diminished in the minds of modern society, on par with Groundhog's day or Valentine's day, speaks to the fact that it's important, and that someone or something wants it suppressed. Because it's fun to blame the greeting card industry, I'm going to do just that. No one buys Easter greeting cards, probably because so few really appreciate the resurrection of Christ. Without cards, there are few ad buys, and without the media, there's little hype. Any church that tried to make an Easter awareness commercial would probably be pegged (by me) as a little silly. But no, I can't legitimately blame the card industry. While I've never been one to find the devil under every rock (or really almost any rock), leaving no stone unturned leads me to find Satan at work here.

I find myself frustrated this morning. I go to the evening service at church for two reasons today -- one, I normally go to the evening service because I like to stay up late on Saturday evenings, which I did last night; and two, because we were asked, if we weren't bringing friends that would not normally go to church, to go to either the early morning service (not happening) or the evening service, so that there was space and parking at the nine through eleven o'clock ones. I'm frustrated because this is the first Easter that I didn't go to a morning service followed by brunch or family time of some sort, except for the Easter I was in Jamaica. This morning I got out of bed at 12:30 (having been awake for two hours before that), tagged some photos posted by Courtney from Costa Rica, and then got Arby's. It was not exactly my traditional Easter morning.

Somehow I associate tradition with observance, and so I don't feel like I've really observed Easter, the most important day of the year. Even the fact that you go to Easter service in the morning is observing that Christ rose in the morning, that the stone was found rolled away in the morning, and that the rest of the day people could marvel at it.

I actually feel guilty, like the traditions were something I was supposed to do, or else I'm in sin or something. I know that's absurd but that's still how I'd describe it.

Anyway, there's no good reason to feel bad on Easter unless you mock its meaning, and I don't believe I've done that.

This week went pretty well. Last summer, after Fir Creek, I was pretty burnt out at work for another week and a half. Somehow after the trip, I was actually doing better than I had been before the trip. I'm not sure if I was burnt out from working harder than I'm used to (three big features, basically on my own), or because it was the last few days before vacation, or because I had a feature dropped on me and it was still in black box, mountain mode because I hadn't really had time to evaluate each part to realize it was only a medium sized hill. Anyway, when I got back Sydney was my acting manager because my actual manager is on vacation (for his kids' spring break). Sydney split my feature into three parts, and I ended up with about a third the work I was expecting to do, and of that work, I'd already done about a quarter, whereas I hadn't touched the other two parts. That made it much easier for me to get back into the groove of the faster life, and on Friday I made a ton of progress. I still have to write tests (which undoubtedly will uncover another thirty necessary changes [anecdotal edit: I did indeed introduce a bug where renaming a databases shrunk it to the minimum size]), but I made it to the jiggle phase. That's where you put all the pieces loosely together and then jiggle it until it all fits. This is not an official software development term. Yet.

We had a preview feature in our last release that I wrote. Now that it's no longer a preview feature, I had to tear all the code out. It felt weird deleting a bunch of code I wrote, when I had a meeting scheduled to discuss how that code would work after they deployed it (they haven't yet released the last release with the preview feature).

I'm looking forward to work tomorrow.

Friday night, I went to Swood's for our weekly hangout time. I've never been to a Good Friday service before, and because I was at Swood's, I didn't go to one this year either. Next year I think I'll try to make it. I had a good time at Swood's, though. It might even have been better that I went there than church. Hanging out with him is therapeutic for me, restful. We ended up watching The Men Who Stare at Goats. It wasn't what I was expecting, but still pretty good.

It got me thinking about a couple things. I think everyone (or at least, of the one person for whom I can speak from experience, it's true for this one person) likes to pretend at some level that they can do things they can't. I pretend to use the Force to change traffic lights, which may or may not coincide with me watching the other lights of the intersection. I wish I were telekinetic. When I go by street lights, they turn off a lot more frequently than they do for other people I've talked to. That's either because I'm more observant to it than other people, or I really am special -- and what an amazing super power that is, especially as it's involuntary, sporadic, and makes it harder for me to see. I like to play the game in my head, but I would never actually believe it like the people in the movie did, at least without some hard evidence. This knowledge fuzzes the line for me between game and spiritual gift. I believe that all Christians have spiritual gifts, and absolutely believe that the Spirit can give them and take them away at will for a given situation. But I do also believe that some are persistent regardless of the situation. Hospitality and teaching are two such gifts, and really, I think most are like that. But it makes me wonder how much of these gifts was there to begin with? Why do we call them spiritual gifts now that they are Christians, when they probably had the same personality before they were Christians? A few times I've taken spiritual gifts tests, which are essentially aptitude tests. They don't very well cover things like the gift of healing as they assume those are more self-evident. I've consistently scored high on discernment and prophecy, and very low on every other one. So, this blurred line makes me wonder if it's actually gift, or merely the game I play in my head. It's disconcerting.

The other thing, though only roughly related, that the movie got me considering was something talked about at the PCEC retreat in February. The speaker had talked a small bit about superstition, and how so many people have it engrained in us, whether we recognize it as superstition or not, that we'll say things like, "It's going well, but I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop." I do this a lot. I play this game of karma in my head, this game of balances, and for some reason, I can't accept that there is good without there being bad to come. Maybe it's just a common pattern in our lives, so we accept it as fact or fate. We have days of sun, and eventually they're followed by days of clouds or rain, and so we think that if it's sunny, soon it will be rainy. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. This, I think, weakens blessings.

It's almost time for me to leave for church. This is perfect as I have nothing else to say.

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¡Viva Feliz! Tuesday, March 30, 2010
The trip is over. I haven't journaled as much as I expected. We're on the flight back to Charlotte, then have an hour layover in which to grab our bags, rush through customs, recheck our bags, and board another plane to SeaTac.

After our adventure on the way here, US Airways is giving us a $400 voucher, so I might be making another trip here soon, possibly to visit Denna again. We'll see. She's supposed to come visit me here soon, too. I haven't looked at the details of the voucher, but if they're smart, it'll have no restrictions.

We were at the orphanage from Sunday (which I've already posted about) until Friday morning. We split into five groups: painting, groundskeeping, construction, pulling nails, and a miscellaneous group that taught, made trinkets for kids and other things. Most of the groups changed jobs from day to day except for the construction group, because they were building cabinets, and it was beneficial to work the project through to completion. I was on pulling nails the first day and painting the second day.

Kaleo is a great guy. He's the biggest morale booster I've met. He can be a bit obnoxious and sometimes says things that seem to have no connection at all (though after a lengthy discussion, he usually brings it back home), but you can't be mad at him. It's impossible. He was able to just mumble his way through conversations in Spanish, knowing very little himself. Anyway, during the first day, we were pulling nails, and as if I were pumping metal, he'd start shouting for that extra little adrenaline boost. During one of these chants, he decided to call me JJ, despite my name having a single J in it, and it stuck. It actually helped a bit because it disambiguated the other Jordan on the trip.

There was another guy, Derek, that was with us the first day. He's fluent in Spanish and was our main translator throughout the trip. He didn't actually fly down with us because he'd been in Honduras for a year or two, and this trip was his last hurrah before returning to Whatcom County.

The last member of our group was Bill's girlfriend, Jane. She and I have always gotten along really well. She just has one of those personalities. We got a bit closer this trip, because she was the other person in my orphanage house.

Before lunch, while we were unnailing hardwood floor boards, the businessman turned missionary who started the chicken farm (he did not start the orphanage) came and took me to attempt to fix their wifi repeater. I did my best, but I wasn't really happy with the way it turned out. I know there's a way to do it where you can name the repeater's network the same as the router's and then laptops will switch between the two seamlessly, but at least I got it working with [mynetwork] and [mynetwork2]. The signal was still a little weak in the house we all slept in, but it was usable, though, we couldn't get Jeremiah's laptop to connect. I'm not sure if it was just an old machine or what.

The second day Jane was transferred to the miscellaneous group, and I don't know where Derek went. Kaleo and I switched to painting. That was pretty unremarkable except that I don't particularly like painting. I talked to Kaleo a little bit, and asked if he thought it meant something if a girl asked if you were seeing someone.

In the evening, we visited the homes again. Our mom was keen to my tastes that night and gave us the best chicken I've ever had, and a good portion of salad. It was the first time in a long time that I ate too much. That night or the next, I think the next, we had a translator who, for Jane and me, was one of the staff members. We played a "game" called Get to Know You or something. Basically, it was just some open ended questions on 3x5 cards and each of us in the house answered two. At team time, it sounded like every house had a different experience with that game. Some had kids bouncing off the walls that didn't take it very seriously, and some wanted to each answer "Who's your best friend?" with their personal reasons for why God was.

That night, the businessman gave his testimony during our team time. It was a lot more powerful, I felt, than most testimonies, at least resonating with me because it wasn't this huge turn around in his life, and mission work was a struggle for him. He wouldn't trade it, but he would in a heart beat if God told him too. It makes me feel a little better about working at Microsoft rather than out on the field, because I really do think God got me that job, and I can't imagine he would have if he didn't want me there.

The next morning we visited a slum called Los Quitos.

It's crazy how like-minded our group is. At team time each night, we went through our thoughts of the day and our struggles. Several struggles per night which hadn't been priorly voiced received head nods all around. Every struggle I've had has been had by most if not all the rest of the group.

Wednesday night, we all felt bad that when we visited the slums, we were thinking, "This isn't that bad." It was that bad. It just wasn't what we expected, which was African poverty. Los Quitos is a thirty thousand person shanty-town run by two organized gangs with drug rings and prostitution. The streets were so unsafe that the staff that were with us told us to remain on the bus.

Here's where my experience diverges a bit. Tuesday night I was not at all looking forward to the visit. I have a hard time going to a place on a mission trip with no real objective to make lives there better. The way I saw it, we were going to observe poverty and to break our own hearts. From my point of view, this feels wrong. Wednesday morning the exact same sentiment (minus the wrongness) was expressed, along with a strong argument as to why this is important. I agreed, but I still was resisting going. I hate to say it, but part of it was my shoes. I bought shoes on the way to visit Denna last December. I don't mind spending too much money on shoes because I wear them virtually every day for a year and a half until the insides are full of holes and causing blisters. Then I spend too much on another pair to abuse. The businessman had said that we shouldn't wear our nicest shoes because we might end up stepping in something icky. Well, I only have my shoes and my flip flops, and I'd rather lose a pair of shoes than have to wash icky off my feet. We'd been expecting to walk around the town. Then the staff member told us that there was a miscommunication and that it wasn't safe. I was relieved (for more than just my shoes). Everyone else was severely disappointed.

During the discussion that night, we talked about it. We felt awful because we were touring a shanty town in a tourist bus, as if they were animals on safari. But it really wouldn't be too much different if we were walking around, twenty-two obvious Americans with cameras taking pictures and walking into shops, talking to people in English. Something struck me about the place, though. People compared the slums to other slums: Derek to Honduras, Kaleo to the Philippines, several to Africa. I compared it to pictures from Hoovervilles during the Great Depression. The difference I noticed was that these people had some hope in them. They weren't broken, despite their poverty. They're there because they think (probably mistakenly) that they have a higher chance at a better life there than where they came from. (A lot of the people are illegal immigrants from Nicaragua.)

My favorite part of the trip was visiting the site of the new building the orphanage's organization has been promised by the government. They were given it five years ago, but have been struggling to get the money. It's a four million dollar building, and they're halfway there. For an organization this large in the US, two million dollars would take very little time or effort to raise. As soon as she told us what that fenced area with trees was for, it suddenly struck me how much healing will happen to that community when this building is built. I seriously can't describe it better than to say the areas where this organization has buildings are like lights in an otherwise dark place. When I get back, I will do my best to get Microsoft to recognize the organization for the GIVE program (though I heard it already does), and then get people to donate to it. Two million dollars. Seriously, it's not that much, and the results far outvalue the costs.

After Los Quitos, we visited one of the organization's day care centers. I was feeling a bit depressed after the slums. I didn't have any real "this is awful" thoughts while there, but just being in the area was disheartening, I think. Among the last things I wanted to do was to be in a noisy cafeteria surrounded by kids who don't speak English. I sat back as much as I could while the soon-to-be teachers of the group hand fed toddlers. Eventually I moved to putting cups on tables. I didn't eat lunch that day. First, the meal was nowhere near my limited palette, and second, I wasn't hungry even had they been serving sloppy joes and banana cream pie. (That was a total exaggeration -- I would have been all over sloppy joes and/or banana cream pie. They might have lifted my mood a bit.)

The night before, I had asked the businessman why there were only 20% new kids each year if kids only stayed one to three years, when 20% would require a five year rotation, on average. Evidently this stuck out to Jeremiah and Bill, and on Wednesday I was switched over to the construction team because the second cabinet would have tricky angles. However, there was some sort of assembly that day in the building with the cabinets, and we switched to other jobs. I took up the brush again.

Wednesday night was our last night in the houses. Saying goodbye to our mom was difficult. She's such a great woman with a larger capacity to love than I've seen in anyone. She's a single mother, the only one in the orphanage, with a thirty-year-old son we didn't meet, and a teenage son, who's an inspiration, of her own, and then five foster boys and five foster girls. I have no idea how she does it.

Thursday we did work. We built an entire shelving unit save the doors, and finished up the one from Monday and Tuesday. I loved working with my group. Monday or Tuesday night I had a lengthy talk with Jane's sister, and Thursday she and I ended up doing most of the cutting for the cabinets. Joe did most of the measurements and design, and the other two members worked primarily on the doors from the first set. The wood we were given was ridiculous. The 2x2's (or that's what we called them; they were 4cm by 4cm) were almost all either bowed or twisted length-wise. With nails, we got them as close to straight as possible, but the next morning, the whole cabinet and twisted a bit. The wall wasn't flat, and half of it had another concrete part sticking out of it, and of course it wasn't parallel with the rest of the wall, nor was the wall parallel with its opposite in the room. Considering all that, I feel we did a pretty good job. Channeling Kaleo, while Jane's sister was doing some hammering, I said "Do it KK!" realizing a moment too late that her name starts with C. (I'm rather slow, so she had to point out the discrepancy.)

Thursday night was our best team time. The two staff members I keep talking about gave their testimonies, and then a couple of us did. Testimony in Costa Rica is quite a bit different from what it is in the US. I like their version better. In Christianese, your testimony is just the story of pre-Christ, how you came to Christ, and what differences he's made since then, and it's usually a little prepackaged. People who've been Christians all their lives don't typically have "an amazing testimony," as say my dad did until six years ago. (Wow, has it really been six years?) In Costa Rica, it's an abridged (or less abridged) version of their life's story, where Christianity is a part of that, but also how they met their spouse, how they came to work at the orphanage and whatever else seems important at the time. I spoke that night as well, one because I kind of wanted to, and two because no one else seemed to. It surprised me though, what I said. I talked about how I became a Christian at three, and never really had a defining moment. I talked about my tick disorder and bipolar disorder, and how I've been suicidal from time to time. And I talked about new life, and how that's a new concept I've been throwing around in my head. I wasn't sure how they're all related, but I knew they were. What surprised me is that I didn't mention my parents' divorce at all. Bill's sister talked as well. She told roughly the same story that Bill told two years ago in Jamaica. Back then, I was having trouble keeping all 30 people straight, and I remember wanting to check in again with him about it, but until she started sharing, I'd completely forgotten about it. I felt retrospectively awful about that.

One of the things I liked about Jamaica was that after team time, we could stay up a little late and get to know people better. Between being exhausted and needing to get up at times I wasn't even aware existed, we didn't get to stay up very late. The other thing I liked in Jamaica, and I know this is rare, was that we were almost always one big group working on a single project. In Costa Rica and in Detroit, we split up into smaller groups to tackle lots of projects. I don't feel we got to know each other as well as we did in Jamaica as a result.

On Friday morning, the two staff members debriefed us and then prayed over us in Spanish. They are great women, especially the older one. And the younger one. After that, the cabinet crew finished four of the six doors remaining (also discovering the overnight skew), while other people did work on other projects, worked on making bracelets for the kids, and packed and cleaned. It was kind of inspiring to me to see everyone working on a day with no planned work.

Between work and dinner each of the nights, we played a different sport: first baseball, then soccer, then basketball, then soccer again. While warming up for the baseball game, one of the kids was purposely throwing the ball hard and uncatchable to someone as basebally challenged as I, and one throw hit my wrist and unclasped both sides of my watch. I was ok with this; I'd just go to Fred Meyer's and get the jewelers to fix it for me or something. Usually they do that kind of thing free of charge. Then one of the kids noticed it was broken and tried to fix it. He put the clasp on backwards (not the end of the world), and as soon as I put it on, it broke again. During his second attempt, he dropped one of the pieces in the clasping mechanism, and that was the ball game, so to speak. I might get it fixed, or I might go get myself a nice watch. I liked the watch my mom gave me, but it wasn't as water resistant as it claimed, and eventually I had it replaced with the one that just broke. I didn't like that one as much. I, of course, don't mean to say I was irritated with the boy. I was appreciative that he wanted to try to fix it and nearly succeeded. I'm just telling the story. For the rest of the trip, I've been using it as a pocket watch.

We just boarded our second plane. It was mercifully delayed eighty-three minutes, so getting through customs and grabbing a quick dinner was easy. We ended up sitting next to a (strange) girl at the gate who was from Bothel and actually was going to high school with Joe's cousin. It's a small world after all.

Friday afternoon, we, all the kids, and a bunch of other our-aged volunteers got on two large busses and headed to Bible Camp. They were both overly full and the counselors (called captains at this World Cup themed camp) had to stand, but some of the rows with only two kids invited us to squeeze. One of the kids from my house fell asleep on my lap. He was my favorite kid I think, though he reminded me of my cat in that he's always vying for attention. That can be draining. Our bus got lost on the 40 minute trip, and ended up sitting in traffic for another half hour.

There's too much to write about when it comes to camp. I wasn't one of the captains very often. I was on staff, and mostly worked in the kitchen. The way they had presented it was "creative team" and that we'd be setting up activities. That wasn't quite the case, but it was still fun. Meals were the best times for me. I loved all the dashing around trying to fill 130 plates in a matter of minutes with seven people all occupying the same space, then moving plates that were in reserves up to the front so they didn't get too cold. After the first meal or two, we added another parameter, meal size. Small kids got very small portions, bigger kids got medium, and captains got huge ones. I think the best part of being on staff for me (semi-jokingly) was that after everyone had eaten, we got to fill our own plates, so I didn't have get stuff that I wasn't going to eat anyway.

We were so drained at the end of each day that team time was severely diminished. People were burnt out on the first day of camp. I burned out on the second day. Mission trips are sprints to missions' marathons. Sprints for more than a week are difficult. It was kind of interesting to see how different people reacted to burning out. Some got emotional. Some slept a lot. Some cut themselves out of activities and such. I forsook God. On my average day, I think I think about God fairly frequently. On mission trips, it's a whole lot more frequently since I'm around people who like to talk about him and who pray. When I burned out, I completely tried to rely on myself. It didn't go too well.

On the first evening of camp, one of our group's favorite kids, whom we would see just wandering around from time to time, found a very large frog (they were common), picked it up by its arms, and flung it Mario-Bowser style yelling, "¡Viva feliz!" The captains couldn't keep a straight face long enough to scold him.

It was a very structured camp with close to no free time. I think the only free time was immediately after meals, which was also medication time. Gringo (green-go) (us, as opposed to tico) captains really just followed the kids around since we didn't really know what was going on. There really wasn't much disciplining either, and the kids seemed to know where the line was. Every now and then, one would act out and a tico would step in. The rest of the time, we were huggers and jungle gyms.

The activity yesterday was sort of a multi-station obstacle course, but the main event was the mud pit. Almost everyone, everyone who wasn't running one of the other stations, was forced in, and covered head to toe. In the first station, spinning in a circle around a pipe and then trying to shoot a goal, I fell after shooting, and skinned my knees. I hope the mud didn't have anything in it my immune system can't fend against. When the pictures get posted to facebook, perhaps I'll link a few. Scott, by the way, is an amazing photographer. He, his girlfriend Justine, KK, and I were the main gringo staff members. The tico staff members were mostly much older than us.

At the end of each night, we all went to the stadium. There they recapped the day with pictures, and sang some songs. One night they played a Moses movie or something. I was feeling crowded and need to be alone for a bit, so I'd left before that started. Last night, though, they all said goodbye to us. The presentation and subsequent hugs must have gone on for thirty or forty minutes. A lot of the kids, and most of the gringo counselors were crying. To my surprise, I was swarmed. I didn't realize I had even been noticed by some of the kids that latched onto me. After all the hugging, one of the girls from my house came up to me and I carried her a bit. Then she told me that since her mom wasn't there to say goodbye, I should call her. That wasn't really feasible, and Jane and I had said our goodbyes to her already, more than once. We'd also written letters to her, though they hadn't been translated yet when we'd left. I hope the letters bless her. I told the girl to tell her my goodbye for me.

I didn't get emotional during the event. I don't know if I kept my distance or what. Not to be morbid, but it felt a lot like Justine's funeral (actual Justine, not aliased Justine). There was a lot of weeping there, too, but I felt surreal and almost happy. I have about eighty more people to get to know in heaven someday. Justine (aliased) was the other gringo that I noticed wasn't in tears. I can't speak for her, and maybe she felt as the others did, but she's the other one that is more business-minded, and less teacher-minded.

Today was pretty uneventful. I count that a plus. I had been looking forward to dropping by Swood's place between the airport and home, but because of the flight delay, I think it'll be too late. Plus I stink like nothing before smelt. I feel bad for the dude next to me. So now I'm looking forward to a nice long bath, some reading, and tomorrow, a clean shirt followed by my mom's place and kitties.

I've decided I really hate being infatuated. I can't think straight, can't act myself, seem unable to break out of my need for approval. It gets in the way of real relationship with the girl, and it gets in the way of my relationship with God. On top of that, I can't really evaluate the merit of a potential relationship with the girl objectively. I find her attractive because I'm attracted to her.

That need for approval, though, I feel is the most disturbing. I fear I'm projecting my lack of a father onto this helpless (in this area) girl. That's not fair, nor healthy. When that approval is granted, as in the case of Denna or Fey, well, I don't know. It actually seemed to go pretty well. But in both those cases, it had nothing to do with me earning the approval. They just liked me before I could attempt to impress them. My mating feathers are ugly and dim-witted. I'm only attractive when I'm confident and not trying to impress, or at least, not trying to leave that kind of impression. Even when I'm confident, I like to be funny, and that's a sort of attempt to impress. I just care less about the results, and thus am more confident. Rinse and repeat.

I need to shave.

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Italian Sausage Sunday, March 21, 2010
Fifteen minutes to journal? Bahahaha.

It's the end of day one: our free day. Typically we'd like to have these at the end of the trip, after all the team bonding, but this was the only way the schedule worked out, and we all are pretty bonded anyway.

Last night we got in around 9:00pm, and it took about an hour to get through immigration, customs, and onto the bus. Customs was far more lax than I've seen in any other country or Hawaii. The customs officer just took each of our forms, briefly glanced at each, and had us throw our stuff through the x-ray scanner. I don't think there was even anyone on the other end in case something was caught.

From there we took a trip with this guy who helps sustain the orphanage. The story goes that he's a brilliant businessman who did quite well in the US, then spent time in Central America, and decided to either start or significantly help this orphanage and a couple others in other countries. Rather than do the administrative stuff, though, he started a business whose profits go to the orphanage, and it's now one of the largest chicken farms in the country.

We got to the orphanage, which is a collection of houses, and got a few instructions. Mostly we just unpacked, found beds, ate pizza, and took in our surroundings. Then we sang a single song as chosen by Joe, and went to bed. (Also I had Jeremiah, who was excited about his alias, read Finally Done Right. He approved of my sharing his stories.) I realized when I took off my shoes before bed, that I'd been wearing them for thirty hours straight. That's a smell I'd like not to repeat.

I've yet to shower since Friday morning, but I plan to after these fifteen minutes are up.

Today we went to the beach. There was an adventure on the way there. We lost a human. There was a tourist pit stop on one side of a bridge. The river beneath the bridge homed several very large crocodiles, and the crocks hang out there because people "fish" for them with whole chickens. Seeing them in the zoo is one thing. Seeing them uncaged, if a good 30 to 40 feet below us, is something else.

From there we went to a ritzy, almost American, grocery store to get drinks and fruit and whatever else. Then we started heading to the beach. Almost there, someone asks, "Where's Leigh?" We do a quick count and realize there are only twenty-one of us. Questions abound. Did anyone see her at the grocery store? I have a vague memory seeing her there next to the cakes, vaguely remember her smiling at me. Someone else remembered talking to her there. So we did a quick u-turn and headed back. Someone asked another relevant question: "Who sat next to Leigh between the bridge and the grocery store." No one raised their hands. I then lacked confidence in my memory. Five guys jumped out and raced into the store. They were long in returning, and without success. Then we stopped and prayed.

Poor Jeremiah was frantic. I've seen him stressed a couple times when things like broken planes came up, but this was an entirely different level. If we hadn't all been feeling worried about Leigh, Jeremiah's flailing would have been funny. (Some of us thought it was funny despite. There was a mix of panic and humor to avoid panic.)

We got back to the crocodile pit and one of the merchants waved us in. Out comes a laughing Leigh. She said that she was uncharacteristically calm about the whole thing, not worried at all. Phillipians comes to mind. Prayer in thankful supplication leads to peace that passes all understanding.

The beach was great. I don't think I'd ever successfully caught a wave while bodysurfing before. A board is still easier and less saltwater-up-the-nose inducing. (This is as far as I got in the allotted 20 minutes.)

After an hour or so in the water, we went looking for food. We ended up at a bar on the beach. It's pretty common in the US for friends to just join a table before ordering, and for people to be indecisive, and then if the table gets too big, to split into two. It doesn't happen all the time, but waiters wouldn't think it too horrendous, would they? Anyway, this is not the case here. Here, you sit down, you order, you eat, you pay, you leave. (I'm exaggerating.) To cut a boring story short, the waiter was not happy with us, and was doing everything he could to hide his vexation. It occurred to me that "funny in that awkward not quite used to our culture sense" was us this time. Also, I still feel like the normal one.

Joe, Derek, Fifa, and Bill were just freestyle rapping in one of the guys' bedrooms. They're amazing. I lack the sense of beat, the ability to talk, and the rhyming to be even close to starting. Other than that, though, give me a few days and I'd catch up. They each took a turn on the way home from the beach too. Crazy folks.

On the way home, we stopped by a fruit stand. I sampled a couple things I didn't recognize, but didn't buy anything. Lots of people bought mangos. I don't know if I'm missing out or not by not getting any. I just didn't want any. Do you force a "cultural experience" for the sake of the experience? Will I be any better or worse off for doing it? I've had other mango before. It's alright, but among my least favorite fruits. It's not sweet enough.

Something I realized about myself on the drive back was two more situations where I don't act myself. I don't actually maintain a list, but if I did, bipolar episode would be on it. These additions are one, when in groups larger than five or six, and two, when I'm around someone with whom I'm infatuated. The first case, I think, is what made youth group and bible studies always so awkward for me. It has its exceptions, like at the end of mission trips and conferences when I'm really close to everyone, or at Fir Creek when I'm most myself around a few counselors regardless of the twenty kids around us. I think maybe I don't try to impress kids, so they don't count toward the quota. The second case is probably why I've only ever found a girlfriend when I wasn't really looking for one, or was looking at the wrong girl. It's quite irksome, because around someone with whom I'm infatuated is the time I most want to act myself.

We got back, and even as we drove up, droves of kids ran out to the bus. I'd kind of hoped for a shower before dinner, but that was pretty out of the question, especially if everyone had similar hopes. It's fairly common knowledge that mothers in Central America will be offended if you don't eat what's on your plate, and before Wednesday, that was my greatest concern about the trip. I don't do well with rice or beans or potatoes. That's a lot of what they eat here, especially the first two. I was told to tell the mom "un pico," "a little." I'd planned on just swallowing it with a gulp of water.

So we got our three person group house assignments, only Jane and I were the only ones with only two people. (I believe Leigh's boyfriend, the guy who had his mind changed, was originally in our group.) That also left us without a translator, but it worked out perfectly because our house is the only one with a longer term volunteer from Connecticut who's been here a couple months. She's now 85% fluent, and helped us get through dinner. I told the mom that I really only eat a very little amount, especially of rice and beans. She gave me the same portion as everyone else, with a slightly diminished portion of salad. Also, instead of water we got something I don't recognize. It looked like apple juice from concentrate but poorly stirred, and it tasted a little like barley tea, which to me tastes like watered down ash, thus eliminating my swallow-it-like-a-pill method. The salad was fantastic, though different from any I've had before. The only beans I tasted, and I almost couldn't keep them down, were what had been stuck on the apple slices in the salad. The rice must have rated an 8 where 1 is already amazing, because I really enjoyed the taste, overpowering the texture that usually gets me. Still, it's a starch, and like the starches I normally enjoy, it filled me up quick, and an hour later I was starving. This is why I brought a years's worth of granola bars, energy bars, and dried fruit.

Anyway, she didn't seem offended at all that I couldn't finish. In fact, when I mentioned that I don't even like rice, but enjoyed hers, we began the ever-entertaining conversation about how picky I am. She told me on Tuesday I would have toast and jam and fruit. Bless her. Tomorrow night the moms of the orphanage are meeting, so there will be subs, which causes chaos enough. Adding us to the mix would be problematic. So! our group is having a barbecue.

My house has five boys, five girls, and two older children-by-birth. The kids kept trying Spanish on me. I'm impervious. Two of the boys have the same name. During dinner, they kept trying to ask me questions, but I was at a loss, and Jane and our translator were at the girls' table. Every now and then the girls' table would quiet and I'd have a turn being able to understand a question. Eventually they gave up and the kid closest to me just imitated my eating and drinking, which was rather entertaining. After dinner, we got a tour of the house. I was freaking out a little internally because I had no idea what to do next. Normally they have devotional after dinner, but because it's Sunday, they had church already. What am I supposed to do with ten excited kids that I don't understand? Then one of the boys pulled out a chess board. Awesome.

They seemed like normal kids to me. I hadn't really thought about, in regards to everyday-living, how a sexually abused kid would act, but I think if I had, I would imagine them reliving the trauma continuously. Thank God this is not the case.

At eight o'clock, we left and gathered for team time, which ended with fifteen minutes for journaling.

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Finally Done Right Saturday, March 20, 2010
This hat has history. I couldn't find my hat today, while I was packing. It's my hat because it's the only one that has ever fit me well, so well, in fact, that when my dad, with a similar problem, offered me $50 for it, I refused. But the hat I have on me has history. I got it at my first Mariner's game, with Luigi and his family, back when the King Dome was still standing. We won that game 17-4, and were leaving right as a grand slam was hit. I got to see it, but everyone else with us left prematurely and missed the indoor fireworks. I remember before the game, Luigi's dad insisted that we get candy at the store. I tried to refuse, but he almost seemed angry. I later learned that's just how he acts.

We're on the plane to Charlotte right now. Why we have to go all the way across the country when Costa Rica is only halfway across, I'm not sure. Houston or Dallas would make a lot more sense to me.

It still has yet to really hit me that we're actually on our way there. That's just how I am, but it's certainly a lot closer on this trip, than it was at the airport (or on the plane) on the way to Jamaica. I think it mostly was the last meeting we had, last Wednesday. We got a secondary education professor from Western, who was also a trauma specialist, to talk to our group. He was really down to earth, and you'd probably think he talked weird if you didn't realize the gravity of the whole situation. I walked in ten or fifteen minutes late. Traffic on the way up from Redmond was a bit worse than the last two times. So, it took me a few minutes to fully grasp what was being talked about.

What I say next is ... hard. I can't remember if I blogged about it or not a year ago, and I know that if I did, it wouldn't have been the full thing. A year ago, though, a couple women from LatR and I went to see a "Rockumentary" about human trafficking. I guess I'll just out and say it. I wanted to kill the slavers and the people who used their slaves. How can man have sunk so low? Sunk, past tense, is probably the wrong word. It seems like this has been an issue since the beginning. But how in this day and age, with all our talks of equality and freedom and liberty, how can we allow this to go on?

In the fifth season of the West Wing (skip this paragraph if you plan to watch it and haven't gotten there yet), Donna is on a trip to Gaza, and on her last day there, her car gets hit by a road-side bomb. She almost dies, but makes it to the hospital in time. Meanwhile, Josh is distraught, and while senior staff and national security are talking outside the oval, they're all talking about possible retaliation. Josh says, "We need to kill them. We need to kill the people who made the bomb. We need to kill the people who planted the bomb. And then we need to kill everyone who was happy about it."

I hadn't realized at the time that human trafficking was just another humanitarian fad. It makes me sick. How can we sit idly by? I know it's easier. I'm guilty of it. But why is this not a high priority in Washington, where we hire people to do hard things with our hard-earned money? The thing is, it's not even just an issue abroad in "remote countries" in Africa. It happens here. It happens in the liberal, well-adjusted city of Seattle, and in Tacoma. I'm sure it happens in every port, which I guess means it happens in Bellingham, and possibly Port Orchard. You can't hit more home to me than those four cities.

Anyway, human trafficking was not intended to be the focus of this post, not that my posts ever really have a focus. Except the last one.

Since that night and until Thursday, I'd never felt that urge to kill again. Then one of the guys, we'll call Jeremiah, who went to Costa Rica this past summer, told a couple stories about the kids we're going to "help." The first was a kid who was reading a book while sitting on his lap. Then one of the adults came in and said something in a raised voice (in Spanish), and the kid scampered off to his room. Evidently that kid wasn't ready for physical touch yet, after his abuse. He couldn't yet associate any touch at all as non-sexual. In the next, a girl of five, her first night at the orphanage, woke up in the middle of the night, stripped, and walked into her foster parents' room. She got up on the bed, and woke the man, and said, "I'm ready." At the age of five. Trauma, by definition, cannot be put into words, and clearly mine have failed. How can we, mere privileged kids in and just out of college, help these kids? There's some small, though it ought to be large, comfort that it is God who is helping, and we are merely his vessels, or vassals.

It didn't really hit me until the next day, but on the way to my mom's to drop off my cats, I began to think a bit more about these stories. I thought about what kind of people could do this to these defenseless children. And I decided they should die. This is a disturbing thought coming from someone who professes himself a Christian. If this isn't the first post you've read of mine, you know that I've had some pretty dark thoughts. This was not these. This was not tainted the same way bipolar thoughts are. I was listening to Brave Saint Saturn, and especially during the Anti-Meridian songs (Starling, These Frail Hands, Invictus), I just burst into tears on the freeway. These are just two stories from one guy, while still in Washington. How much harder will this be among the actual victims?

Raise your souls up to the sky
Why must helpless creatures die?
I've never agreed with people who value children over adults. A life is a life. There's the notion that children are innocent, but none are innocent; all have fallen short of the glory of God. I would say, however, that sexual abuse, or really any abuse, against children is worse than it is against adults, because adults have at least some capacity to know they don't actually deserve this, to know that this is not what love is. Kids say, "I'm ready."

I don't know, don't think, that even with the opportunity, I would or even could actually kill someone. I think it would be easier to light them on fire with my mind, but 22 years trying (to light inanimate objects) with no success is a discouraging precedent.

There is no good segue to nicer things.

After the meeting, I ended up eating at Courtney's and her roommates' place for Saint Patrick's Day. I used to hate corned beef. This was rather good. I still abstained from the cabbage though. Bill and Scott ate quickly and then went off to their Bible study. After that began talking, card games, and drinking. It was just a genuinely good time. We listened to some good music, and a lot of bad music. (Such were the opinions of the other males in the room. I didn't really care one way or another, though if I were alone, I'd probably not listen to any of what was played early on. I did try to analyze some of the music theory -- common beats, sequences of notes, et cetera. If only I knew any music theory.)

There was a girl there, I gathered a foreign exchange student, who was quite funny in that awkward not quite used to our culture sense. There was nothing wrong with her sense of humor, but she had that and then the other thing as well. There was one point during the evening though, that we were talking about drugs (not the helpful kind), and she said that back in her home country, she did some. It's not like she went on and on about it or anything, but I could tell she was trying to explain it all because she was feeling judged, and in fact, at the end, apologized for it because she "didn't want [us] to judge [her]." At that point, every Christian in the room erupted, broken from our trances, with "we're not judging you." Yeah, we were. It wasn't deliberate but, well, let's face it, we've never been in that situation (at least I haven't), and it wasn't a healthy situation, and I have some amount of pride that, by choice, I've never been in that situation. I don't think any of us straight out thought, "you bad person you," and truthfully the reason we were in the trance was because we couldn't relate. For me, though, it was something else entirely. It was like we responsible Americans were her parents or moral superiors somehow. Like, we knew drugs were bad and we wanted to teach this poor person from another country how to live. That's something I have to continually work at. People who aren't as fluent in the language as I am aren't stupid, but subconsciously, I somehow see them as slower. Sometimes it makes working at Microsoft hard.

I got one of the guys there hooked on Seabird. Their second disk is as good as their first, if you've not bought your copy yet. Before we listened to them, we were listening to a group called the Black Keys, I think. What little I heard of them, I enjoyed, so I might have to test an album of theirs when I get back.

We're now at Charlotte Airport. Some of us are trying to sleep. I tried for a while and gave up. A bunch of us got Jamba Juice for like three times the normal price, but alas, I set mine on a chair, and it fell somehow. Then the bottom got punctured, and I ended up being able to drink about half of it. I suppose there are worse fates in life.

My knees are killing me. They just do that sometimes, but it's unpleasant. When this happened when I was younger, my mom said I was growing. I don't think I'm growing anymore, at least not top to bottom. A few hours later now, Leigh, after reading what was written before this point, gave me Tylenol and I feel much better.

It's completely irrational, but over the past couple weeks, I've had this sinking feeling that I won't be returning from Costa Rica. Again, just a feeling. The odds that it comes true are close to nil, and probably independent from the feeling entirely, like rolling two dice and ending up with the same number.

Another many hours later now. Maybe my irrational fear (though to be quite honest, I was never afraid; indeed I was quite at peace) had some merit. Shortly after the paragraph before this one, they announced that the plane (757) that had just arrived was undergoing some between-flight tests and had some mechanical difficulties. This meant they had to find a new plane and a new crew for us. The one they found, for two hours later, was an A320 which is a good fifteen seats fewer in capacity. They basically held a raffle, and those who couldn't fit would have to fly tomorrow. I believe six of us did not keep our seats, including our fearless logistical leader, Jeremiah. Meanwhile, they allowed the ability to volunteer one's seat for a night in a hotel, meals, and $550 in US Airways credit toward one's next flight. Some of these volunteers got on the next plane that day that had a stop in Florida. The rest had to wait until tomorrow. Twelve total volunteers came up, and all six of our people were lucky enough to receive the newly opened seats.

Of course, the new plane didn't quite leave on its newly scheduled time, maybe 45 minutes late. We got into the air, and then about 45 minutes into the flight, at 17,000 feet, the plane started a sharp turn. The turn continued 180 degrees, my stomach hating every bit of it. Then the pilot spoke over the intercom that there was a minor hydraulics failure, that it wasn't a big deal, but because the runways in Costa Rica aren't as good as the ones in Charlotte, we were turning around.

People were pretty upset at this point, as you might imagine. Surprisingly to me, I kept my cool. I guess I kind of figure that I donated this time, these eleven days, completely to God, and if God wants us to spend it in airports, that's up to him. Our group, mostly, was just tired, rather than angry. Some passengers, though, had booked non-refundable $3000 cruises.

The next, hopefully final, plane got in on time, but we started boarding when we were supposed to be taking off. I don't remember much after boarding, because mercifully, I found sleep. I do remember the pilot (a new pilot) saying over the intercom that we had roughly a 45 minute delay while still on the tarmac because two people hadn't reboarded. On international flights, by US law, if people don't board, but do have checked bags, they have to locate the bags and remove them from the plane. I agree that it's both safe and practical to do that, but today just wasn't our day for traveling. It turns out the people who got to Costa Rica quickest were the first ones to volunteer with the stop down in Miami. That last plane is where we are now, with about 90 minutes remaining.

One of the guys who was supposed to come on the trip felt very strongly, suddenly, a few weeks ago that he should not, and instead should spend spring break recording with his dad (he's a music artist). Before boarding the circular flight, Leigh talked to him on the phone, and his grandfather, long in coming, could possibly die today, so we prayed for that situation, and also thanked God that he did not come on this trip. From what little I heard, it sounded like the guy was fairly ready for this, but his dad was a wreck. A psalm came to mind, but I don't think it's very fitting for the situation. Joe disagreed though, when I told him about it.

The Lord reigns
Let the earth be glad
Let the distant shores rejoice
Clouds and thick darkness surround him
Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his thrown
A fire goes before him and consumes his foes on every side
His lightning lights up the world
The earth sees and trembles
The mountains melt like wax before the Lord
Before the Lord of all the earth,
the heavens proclaim his righteousness
and all peoples will see his glory!
Going back to before the trip, on Thursday I had to drop off my cats at my mom's place. Thursday night was lonely, and Friday morning, I kept thinking that my cats were the cause of noises, or that it was odd that they hadn't run across my keyboard that morning and woken my computer up from hibernate mode, or that their food dish was empty so I had better feed them. I hadn't realized how much I like having my cats. Sometimes I wish I had only gotten one of them, because they are a handful and a half, but to pick now would be incredibly difficult.

I told my mom about the murderous (or castraterous) thoughts. I guess I hadn't told her that the orphanage we're helping is for sexually abused kids. She kind of calmed my nerves a bit. I knew I wasn't psychotic--I didn't revel in the execution of their deaths--but the thoughts still worried me. The people whom I've had read this so far seem to have similar thoughts. They never outright said thoughts of execution, so maybe that's just me, but certainly of anger and grief. Thursday night, my mom told Jack what the orphanage was geared towards, and he pretty immediately said that the abusers should be castrated. He's a pretty dang liberal guy, too. That helped a bit.

On the way home, I stopped at Swood's to watch our weekly TV. At four o'clock on Friday, I was several hours done packing, just watching Law & Order repeats, and txted him, inviting myself over. We watched Dulalalala (a confusing, yet entertaining anime) and played some Smash Bros, before I headed to Minnie's to pick up another guy on our trip, onto my grandpa's, and finally to the airport.

I think that is probably enough for one post. We should be landing here soon. If I have internet access tonight, I'll post this after having Jeremiah read it. I haven't asked permission to retell his stories.

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Bunny Crab Cow Monday, March 15, 2010
I really feel like writing (hence the post), but I seriously have nothing to write about. This has happened before, and I usually end up writing quite a lot, and it's usually fairly good, yet I'm apprehensive about this. So I guess I'll see if this gets posted, and if you're reading it, then I guess it did. Unless, I decide to have someone else read it before I post and you're that person, and then they say, "This is crap," and you never get to read it. I'd say "But I digress," but I'm seriously considering making this the primary focus of this post.

I've been having really vivid dreams lately, though I don't remember much of them in the mornings. The vivid dreams part has happened before, but the not remembering at least most of one is new. If there's a purpose to the dreams, not being able to remember them kind of defeats it. The latest one of which I still remember bits and pieces included Hime and a high school rival of hers fighting over something, but then joining forces when a pig on a motorcycle showed up singing a show tune about being the real measure of a man -- a Persian man -- riding straight up a large totem pole and breaking off all the decorative limbs. That would actually seem pretty normal to me except that the vivid portion was the entire song he sang, and how it was actually as decent as any other garden variety show tune, and yet has never been written. Something similar (in my mind) happened when I dreamt that my pastor was talking about his sermon series and how a lot of what he was talking about was covered in such-and-such books (including Mere Christianity which I'm currently reading) but the "such-and-such" were actual titles and authors that sounded right. Of course now I can't remember the titles to find out if they existed and thus I divined them. I doubt it. I don't know which would be crazier -- that they actually exist, or that I pulled book titles out of thin air while dreaming. I don't think I could even do that while awake.

Is it still epiphany if someone teaches you the thought that came? Is epiphany the part where everything clicks together, hits home, or is it the spontaneous, "So that's why cats sniff fingers!"? Anyhow, every week at church something new makes sense. Romans 8:1 stuck out to me tonight. "Therefore there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ." For whatever reason I always took this to mean when we died, or from God's perspective while we're still on earth. That's not what it says though. It says there is no condemnation period. Not from other people, and not from ourselves. All we need do is confess our sins. I think a lot of people don't confess, or put off confessing, for fear of condemnation, but if there is none, what is there to stop us? And if there is nothing stopping us, then "He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness." What's great about that verse (1 John 1:9) is the word cleanse. It's not just forgiveness, not just -- there really is no other word as deep as forgive -- but to clean, purify, makes us new. Anyway, I found tonight's sermon practical and eye-opening. One thing he mentioned is that people in Christ are quick to confess and slow to justify. I frequently find myself imagining being pulled over because I'm speeding or whatever, and rather than just telling the officer, "Yeah, I was wrong," I end up on this logical tirade about the spirit of the law and how it was actually better that I was doing whatever it was that I was doing.

The last few nights I've been pinging random friends on facebook that I haven't talked to in a while if ever. It's got me thinking about all the friends I don't still talk to, and even the ones I now only talk to over the internet. It got me kind of depressed, because I have a lot of friends that I care dearly about, but will probably never see again. That's a sobering thought. And then it suddenly struck me that I'll see them in heaven. I don't know in what capacity, but sometimes it doesn't even matter if I'm talking to them, and just being around them would be nice. Proximity is an interesting thing.

I'm leaving for Costa Rica on Friday. It's so weird to me that it's happening this week, and is no longer a while into the future. I think the oddest part is that it actually happened. This wasn't organized by an organization that does these regularly or anything. This was a couple guys being asked by another guy to organize a trip of twenty or so people to come do some work for an orphanage, and five months later, here we are. The whole work situation around the trip (mostly just taking vacation) has got me thinking about last summer with the summer camp, and whether or not I want to do it again this summer. The few I've talked to are strongly in favor of it. First I'm not sure I have enough vacation. I probably do. I should have had about four and a half weeks by then had I not gone on the mission trip, and the mission trip is only 9 days, so I should still have three weeks left. Yeah, there's nothing stopping me there. I guess I'm just feeling non-committal right now. Also Hime has a job at a bank now, so she won't be there, not that she's the sole reason for me to go. I wonder how she'd react if I did go again, while she couldn't.

I've been thinking lately about my future children, sometimes a son, sometimes a daughter, depending on the instance. Wondering what it would be like if my son ever asked how many girlfriends I had before "Mommy." Would I go into all the details of each relationship, Ted Mosby style? I can't imagine answering a flat seven or whatever the number would be by then. I suddenly feel weird. I'm going to stop writing now.

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Alexander said... At March 15, 2010 7:55 AM
If a thing is going to be done, it must be done in the style of Teddy Westside.
Theory for the Moment Saturday, February 27, 2010
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.

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nertzfan said... At March 13, 2010 9:26 AM
It's cool to see others that know about Nertz. You should definitely check out http://www.playnertz.com/ , the site for the National Nertz Association. There is a bunch of interesting Nertz information, videos, and photos there AND you can play Nertz on-line for free. I recommend it to all Nertz players! So cool. =)
Jordan said... At March 15, 2010 12:11 AM
I do love it when people try to advertise their sites on my own. Jokes on you! No one reads this blog! Still, it was clear this wasn't a bot, so I guess I'll give you that much. I think Nertz online would be like Speed Idiot's Delight -- it defeats the purpose of the game. Idiot's Delight is played to kill time. Nertz is played for the physical scramble.
Fingernails Saturday, January 2, 2010
It's 3am. I guess now's as good a time as any to start a blog post, a post whose predecessors took an average of four hours apiece. I'm sure this one won't take that long, because I already have it all written out in my head. They say people can only keep track of seven things at once. I've got 3700 words, so beat that with a trout and smoke it.

First off, I think I should write a bit of a disclaimer here. I'm by no means an authoritative voice when it comes to theology. Super Mario RPG, yes, theology, no. What I've written, and will likely keep writing, are just what I'm dealing with, my thoughts in the order the neurons send them to my fingertips. I'm sure that early in most paragraphs, I make a faulty assumption, and then the rest of the paragraph can and should be disregarded entirely. Also, though I always thought I did, I don't enjoy arguing about close to anything, among the least, theology. I like discussing it, but as soon as it crosses some invisible line I can't even define, I get frustrated and no matter how right or wrong you or I may be, I'll basically completely ignore any further statements made. This, of course, is not relevant, as no one has really read my blog except those couple whom I've asked to, and they didn't argue. Still, just a warning. This is the last one you get before I release the hounds. The hounds of silent treatment. Their bite is worse than their bark.

That said, I did have both Bill and my mom read Always Winter, Never Christmas. They had some interesting insight, my mom especially. She pointed out something I knew even as I typed, that my view of God--a general rather than a father--is almost exactly how I view my dad. I don't really know what to make of that, but I suppose as of twenty-seven hours ago, I am free to pick a counselor of my choosing, so perhaps I shall get on that.

One thing I've considered in regards to my free gift paradox is that accepting Christ into your life is a change. The gift itself is a changed life, so how can changing your life be a cost? If I give you a Wii, is it a cost that you now have to own a Wii? When I was quoting Paul, saying that we're being given a gift and a call to die, I was speaking of dying to one's self, so we can live as Christ, live by the spirit. I had hoped that was obvious, but neither Bill nor my mom, smart people each, read it that way.

I did, in fact, get the answer I was looking for when I purchased Birthright per my pastor's suggestion. It was as he said in his email, too, though the book had more explanation. The night I read the answer, I tried to summarize it and post, but words failed me. I'll try again, but I bet I won't get it right, and you should just go buy and read it yourself. Essentially, being "born again" isn't just metaphoric or ceremonial, but literal. Jesus spells it out, but for some reason I thought he was talking somehow abstractly whenever I'd read it. It turns out Nicodemus was smarter than I am. God makes everything new, and when we're born again, we literally have a spirit born in us. I haven't figured out whether our spirit was dead and the Spirit breathed life into it, or if there was nothing there at all, and our spirit is then birthed, but it's one or the other. It's interesting that he uses the word "born" rather than "revived"--or more accurately vivified, as our spirits were never alive in the first place. That leads me to believe that there was nothing there, and then there was, like a baby. However, there are a ton of verses that say things like "while we were dead in our transgressions," which push me the other way. Anyway, this is just half the answer, and it's one or the other, so I'm not worrying about what was there before, and am instead considering what's there now, and why this is significant. It turns out that this spirit is what is eternal, what lives on with God in heaven. At the same time, it is who we truly are. It's what God made us to be, and it's not a clone. I've not studied too much, nor gone much further in the book, but I would assume this spirit, then, has all of our personality, but perfected, and all of our quirks, but without sin. We have a holy spirit that is each of us, when we become born again Christians, a child of the Holy Spirit, a child of God. Somehow this is harder for me to grasp than the Trinity. So, freedom from sin--no longer being slaves to sin--means that we can now live lives that are truly ours; we can be ourselves, but who we are has in fact changed. It is in our heavenly nature to now be sinless, and when we do things that agree with our nature, we're… happier people. More joyful people.

In explaining this, Needham walked through several different scenarios, or rather one scenario played out with different approaches with outwardly the same outcome. He asks us to imagine being tempted to watch something on TV that invokes some sort of lust--sexual, material, what have you--and you resist. In every one but the last one, and I've played all of them out at one point in my life or another, you're left feeling guilty. It's a come from behind victory that you probably couldn't pull off again, and leaves you weakened. It's concave up. We want an oppressive victory, oppressive toward the fallen, sinful nature, a victory where we're on the top looking down, grabbing and smothering evil, rather than trying to stand up under it. In all the first run-throughs, the thought process leads to denying our own sin nature, this nature we have engrained in ourselves. In the last one, we're agreeing with our heavenly nature, and being true to ourselves, which is what makes this a victory. It reminds me of a sermon I heard at Life at the Ridge about a year ago. "We can't say no to something unless we know what we're saying yes to."

While this is a fairly major break through for me, until I've devoted a lot more thought-time to it and really start living it out, I don't think much will improve in my spiritual life. Also, I really need to start having quiet times. I hate that phrase because it's a cliché, but what are you going to do? I need to read my Bible and I need to pray. I was telling my mom, as she and I worked through my last post, that I felt like God was a manager who put instructions on a poster up on the wall, and then skipped town. I know what I'm supposed to do generally, but not specifically, and not like I know what I'm supposed to do at Microsoft under the fairly constant guidance of my Microsoft manager. "I want my weekly one-on-one." My mom quickly responded that I can't meet with God without talking and listening to Him.

I just have such trouble reading the Bible. It's dry and deep, and I never seem to pull out the meaning that I'm supposed to. Maybe it takes practice. I also find myself distracted a verse or two in, thinking about just about anything else. Sometimes, it's a completely different point about God, and I end up on rabbit trails. I don't then know whether that was divine intervention or unholy intervention or neither.

Last Sunday I'd nearly given up. There are some dark thoughts people can think up, and I was thinking up some of the darker ones on Saturday night. Frustration with faith and life can so easily lead to hopelessness and despair. I almost didn't go to church. I'd gone to the Christmas eve service four days before, and the friend that usually goes with me now was busy. I concave-up convinced myself to get in the car, though, and God met me at the service. It was no mere coincidence that the sermon was "The Gospel as Longing." It talked a lot about joy and what it means. It didn't offer the answers I'm seeking, not wholly, but during communion, God met me and gave me the hope to carry on.

I've been procrastinating on getting Microsoft acquainted with Mosaic. Mosaic is Bill's church and the front for our rogue mission trip to Costa Rica. I've got until the 15th of this month to convince them that this is a philanthropic fund, rather than a religious one. Hopefully I can just email MS Give and give them the phone number of the guy at the church and they can iron out the details in an hour or two on a phone call I don't need to hear. Hopefully. Else, we're going to need a bunch more money than we expected. I trust God in this, but I don't trust my procrastinative nature.

It's 2010 now, if you hadn't noticed. Though, perhaps for you it's 2011, you futuristic hoodlum with your year-late-reading ways. That's right, back in 2010 we were silver tongued. Nuance is our weapon of choice. I have a lot to look forward to this year, which is a sentiment you'll seldom find from me. Final Fantasy XIII has been released in Japan and Swood never ceases to throw his bilingual hackery in my face. I have to wait until February, or more likely March when it won't be sold out, to play it, and then in the English lameness. Swood showed me the same clip in Japanese (translating it for me) and in English, and it's just sad. Why don't good English voice actors exist for video games and adult cartoons? They exist for robots in live action films, though admittedly, all the good ones have English accents. Anyway, I'm hoping against hope that they let you switch to Japanese with English subtitles. I've seen at least one game that lets you do this, but I can't remember now, which.

I predict The Old Republic will come out this November, with no actual basis for this release date. I think if it doesn't, by the time it's released, there will be something more exciting on the horizon. It's kind of a law of gaming that you need to get something released within two years of conception, else it'll be outdated before it arrives.

Iron Man 2 comes out in May. The first Iron Man movie is probably my favorite super hero movie yet, so I have high hopes for the next one. Also, while I never really minded the original actor for Rhodey (while some people found him whiney), getting Ocean's Basher to play him shall be great.

Speaking of good movies, I saw Sherlock Holmes the other night. I was grinning basically the whole time. It's so very clever. Somehow, Denna fell asleep when she saw it the night after I did. I don't get that. Maybe it's just a different sense of humor. She said it just never got good. I'll admit it doesn't have the same flow as other action movies, but I don't think it's meant to either. The bickering between Holmes and Watson is great, as is all the dialog, really. I don't know. I don't get her sometimes. She doesn't like Demetri Martin. It never would have worked between us.

Toy Story 3 is coming out. Pixar has yet to fail me, though I never saw A Bug's Life 2, and Ratatouille wasn't my cup of tea. Toy Story 2 was great, arguably as good as the original. During one of the orchestra summer camps, we played a piece written to be played during the short for that film, and we played the actual piece sung by the cowgirl doll about being neglected by her kid. Anyway, yet more high hopes.

The last three in my list are a bit bigger. Windows Mobile 7 is supposed to be released this year. I have high expectations for this, and I'm confident it'll look as nice or nicer than the iPhone and be more functional than either the iPhone or the Droid.

Costa Rica, as already mentioned, is in March. I'm actually a bit anxious and antsy about it. I wasn't this way at all, if I remember right, about Jamaica. Then again, I'm a different person from who I was two years ago. I remember telling Lulu like six days into the trip, that with the way my mind works, that day I'd finally decided I should go on the trip. She didn't get it. Oh well. But yes, I don't know what to make of this trip. I expect it will be good, and I am looking forward to it, but I'm also worrying for some reason. I think I feel a bit more like one of the leaders since I was one of the first to say I'd go on it, but I have really no idea what's going to happen there, nor do I want to be one of the leaders so, yeah.

Last, and least probable, I'm making it a goal to make big steps toward owning a house by this time next year. I don't like paying rent. I don't like having a litter box. And perhaps most of all, I don't like noise complaints. For some reason, they just get me at my core. Yesterday I bought a Wii Fit, both for the fitness aspect, and the unrealistic hope that someday I'll figure out how to program with it. I tinkered with it a bit before going with Swood to Hime's New Year's party. When I got back, I decided to play with it a bit more. I actually had considered the noise, and thought that between the pad itself with its springs, the feet covers on the bottom of the board, and the carpet, that it wouldn't make a whole lot of noise for the people downstairs. I guessed wrong. So, at three in the morning, an angry neighbor knocked on my door. She could have been less rude, but then, I did wake her up at three in the morning. I apologized, but I don't get the feeling she accepted it. So, I guess that's a pre-quiet hours toy, like my violin. I suspect they'll still get angry when I use it, though. I don't know exactly what I should do in this situation. I spent $100 on a new toy, and I have every right to use it during the day, but at the same time, I don't want to make enemies. They do live in an apartment. Noise comes with that. Also, the minigame I was playing involved a lot of swift running in place. I think that most of the stretches and pushups and things won't make much if any noise, so maybe there's the happy medium.

After watching Sherlock Holmes with Swood and Nikkie, and not realizing that it was already 12:30am, I suggested Swood and I hang out, so we drove to his place and watched (500) Days of Summer. They advertised it as a chick flick, but it's an excellent movie. It's got a lot of good dialog like Lucky Number Sleven. The last line in combination with the subsequent facial expression is one of the best things ever. I purchased it tonight, and it should arrive here on Tuesday.

I've been spending a ton of money lately. This is worse than good. I remember I was in the same habit this time last year. I wonder if it's just the time of year. Last year I bought a TV and a vacuum. This year I spent about $200 more on Christmas and then bought myself two Blu-Rays, the two expansions for Dragon Age, Wii Sports Resort, and Wii Fit at a time that money already wasn't that high. As always, I'm by no means hurting for money, and I have a heftyish savings to fall back on, but I'd rather not. Alexander says that most banks have a direct deposit deal where they'll give you 3-5% interest on your checking account, in which case, with a little will power, you just put all your money there and nothing into savings. I'm fairly certain Chase does not have this deal, so it is time to find a new bank.

After the movie, Swood and I stood around and talked of old times. All of two to four years ago. The golden days, some might say. Mostly we tried to remember the names of everyone that lived on our floors. We came close. Also, the next day I was going to Seattle to hang out with Vin, and Swood mentioned that I should park in Tukwila and take the Light Rail into town, thus saving money on parking, but costing an extra hour of travel time. The drive to Seattle is about the same as it is to Tukwila.

I ended up at the meeting fountain about ten minutes late and no one was there. I couldn't imagine that they'd already all met and then left to go off some place, and I couldn't get ahold of Vin on her cell phone. Some ten minutes later, Vin and her friend walked up. They'd been in a minor car accident, and Vin had left her cell phone at her home and had her friend's with her. Go figure. So we stood there a bit longer and some eleven of us showed up in all. I knew about half of them, I think, so I made some new friends. Three were particularly interesting, but not interesting enough to rename yet. Sorry. It's 4:30 and my creativity wanes. One was the guy that walked up with Vin. One was a girl with more spunk than she knows what to do with. She just seems fun loving without being a thrill seeker. Her mom works at Microsoft, so we had a brief conversation about that. She's also, evidently, outgoing enough to make new friends without being forced to talk to them. I don't really know how else to put it. The first guy is kind of shy around new people, but everyone else was talking to other people, so he and I ended up talking. The girl seemed to make a point of knowing everyone in the group. Sometime around six, she and her friend left the group, and the rest of us ate at Red Robin. After that, a couple more departed, and the remaining seven of us went to one of their houses twenty minutes north to play board games and whatnot. The third guy who was interesting was the guy who drove me to the other guy's place, and then afterwards, drove me all the way back to downtown Seattle so I could again ride the train, even though he was headed north. At the guy's place, we did a group-effort crossword puzzle, then played Yahtzee followed by Clue. It's certainly a good memory, that day. It was good to see Vin too, though I'm realizing it'll most likely never be more than friends.

She was telling me she's at a confusing point in her life because four months into the trip, she feels like Philadelphia is home, but then she came back to Seattle, and Philadelphia hardly exists in her mind anymore, but neither does Seattle feel like home. The trip, she says, has changed her a lot more than she expected it would too, and she's trying to figure out who she is. I guess now I'm blogging her life more than mine, but. I don't know. It gives me pause, and it's food for thought. Part of me wonders. Should I not have jumped right into corporate Microsoft? A lot of my friends from Western are going into nonprofits. I don't think I was called to be that person, but I admit it's appealing. I believe Microsoft and my working at Microsoft both will do more good for the world than my working at a nonprofit, but in my mind's eye, nonprofits have an instant gratification that donating vast sums of money and releasing business software just don't have. I think that's probably not true, and like with any job, satisfaction comes over a long period of time, but still.

I'm finding I'm returning to being content while single. For the past several months I have certainly not been. I'm pretty sure the word that best described me was desperate, but I'm not sure if that's entirely fair. But yes, at the moment, while I'd like to have a girlfriend, it's not really my primary focus. I'm realizing again, that what I'm constantly looking for in a girl probably won't be found there, but in God. Also, I used to think that Vin was perfect for me. As far as personality goes, she really is the girl of my dreams, what I always expected would be my perfect match, and yet, hanging out with her doesn't feel like a good fit. She's a great person, and a great friend, but we'd be hopelessly indecisive together. We don't have that flirty banter I had with Fey or Denna, even though she and I share more in common than I did with either of them. I'm starting to think that looking for specific traits and commonalities and whatever else in a person to heuristically decide compatibility is just folly. There's an X factor that you just have to find from hanging out with them over a long while. And perhaps I'll eat these words later, but I don't think any of the girls I currently know are a right one for me. I like one of the lines from (500) Days of Summer. The guy is being interviewed about his girlfriend of like ten years, and he says that the girl of his dreams would probably have a bigger rack and be more into sports, but that his girlfriend is better than the girl of his dreams.

Well, it's now 5am. See? Two hours, not four. Though, it's now definitely tomorrow morning and no longer tonight. I need to sleep.

[QUOTE="Galileo:1114740"]Enthusiastic by Association Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Oh, where to begin. Well, first off, I should not begin with "where to be gin," as I originally wrote. Alcohol and I don't mix. Besides, gin and tonic rolls off the tongue much better than gin and Jordan. Then again, I said be gin, not be mixed with gin. Now I can't even keep my own story straight. Good luck deciphering the rest of this post.

I suppose I ought to start out with the most exciting news in my life. That's right, I finished reading Eldest for the fourth time, and have since traversed 232 pages into rereading Brisingr. The Bumblebee of Life once again inspired me as no other writing has. I'm pretty sure on one of the pages I most recently read, Paolini got switched up on which entity, Eragon or Saphira, was talking (thinking to each other in italics). It was like six paragraphs back and forth with no ", Eragon said," and suddenly Saphira was asking questions of Eragon, and Eragon was answering with what only Saphira should have known. PS, I didn't notice that Eragon was just Dragon with an E until halfway through my fourth read of the first book. Also, I once thought that "I am" was the shortest complete sentence. It's actually "Be."

I started seeing a counselor, mostly because after the E/Dragon thing, I realized my brain wasn't functioning as well as it once was. Maybe I'd always been mistaken, but aren't most counseling sessions an hour long? The ones with this guy are 45 minutes, which usually run a little late. So far, and yesterday was my fourth session with him, he's really only been getting to know me rather than talking me through things or giving advice or whatever, not that I'm an expert on counseling. Yesterday I ended up saying something I didn't expect to. That's happened a few times before when I talked with Solomon or other counseloresque people, but this was slightly different, as in hindsight, I'm not sure what I said was true. I ended up saying that the nondescript sickness that I always feel, as described in the second paragraph of Restless, might as well be synonymous with shame. It seems like it would be true in the abstract, but not when I think about it concretely.

This brings me to another important if not mind-numbing point. It's the idea of absolute value verses relative value. I bought A Few Good Men on BluRay the other day, because it was on sale for $10 at Fred Meyer. Seemed like a good deal to me, and I love that movie and don't currently own it, so I bought it. After I bought it, I looked it up on Amazon, who was selling it for $11, but it occurred to me that if it had been on there for $7 or something, would I have still thought it a good deal? Clearly, at some point, I thought the movie was worth $10. Would the value of owning the movie be less if I found a better deal? This is obviously a simple case, but I think it can easily be applied to our lives in bigger ways. It also reminds me of the parable of the workers in the vineyard.

Do cats have adam's apples? Kotenok, get over here.

I was thinking about it a couple Sundays ago, and I think my goal for counseling, though I've not mentioned this to him yet, is to be able to say that my relationship with God is amazing, to really think that. I know that it is, for why should the creator of heaven and earth die that I might have such a relationship? But I think I take that for granted. If God is good, the ultimate good, he loves us as much as he says he does, and has the chance to save us, I don't want to be so arrogant to argue that it would be required of him to do so at the cost of his own, or own son's, life, but it seems to me to be the logical choice. I think for that reason, I take it for granted. I would never argue that I was worth that sacrifice, but that too is folly, for God said I was, and I shan't argue with him. I guess if I really beheld the gravity, the enormity of the relationship I have, I would repeatedly fall on my knees and cry out in thanks and ... disbelief? There's some irony. And if it were truly as intimate a relationship as it ought, I would feel more stable in it, and more thankful and awed. I would say it's amazing. As it stands, it simply is.

On the other hand, a couple times I've tried to live without it, and I couldn't do it. I feel like I'm stuck in limbo, "wrestling" with an impassive god. And I know that is not his nature, so why do I feel that it is? Why does the evidence in my life point that direction?

Well, that took a depressing turn. While I'm at it, I might as well write the rest out of my system. My counselor said something at the end of our session yesterday. It didn't immediately throw me off, in fact, it elicited an odd sense of pride. Today, I felt jumbled though, badly enough that I felt physically sick and stayed home from work. I watched Minority Report for the first time in a few years. The scene where Agatha, John, and his wife are all at his wife's house, they're up in Shawn's old room, and Agatha is talking about the life Shawn could have had actually brought a couple tears to my eye. I rarely get choked up over movies, especially action movies. I'm not sure why it happened, but it was just immensely sad to me. Also, the scene where the murder was supposed to take place and Agatha is reliving the present was done incredibly well. I really felt for Agatha, and it was hard to watch. I've probably seen the movie a good six to eight times. I'm not sure why this was the first time I had such emotions about it. Or, I'm not sure why I had emotions about it this time. I haven't decided which.

So, I maybe exaggerated a slight amount, the teensiest amount conceivable, in fact, if exaggeration were tangible, I'm pretty sure I would have split the atom, when I said that the most exciting thing in my life was finishing Eldest. Maybe. God save us all if Stephen Colbert ever happens upon tangible exaggeration. The earth might just gain enough mass that the sun would start orbiting it. Anyway, if there is something more exciting than reading a book for the fourth time, it's this.

A few weeks ago I went to the eleven o'clock church service because the Costa Rica team was having a post trip thank you party for our supporters up in Bellingham. At this particular morning service, it was rather full, and I ended up sitting next to a girl named Kaylee. The lead singer in the worship band said something about playing an old song, and then started the chords for Shout to the North. I commented, "Old? This was written like eight years ago." Kaylee laughed at that. After the service, I asked her and her cousin if they wanted to go out to lunch. I've been out to lunch with several people after church services both at Harper and LatR so this was no big deal to me. They checked the time and her cousin's schedule, and then we went to Chipotle in Northgate. Kaylee's got to be one of the most interesting people I've met. If she had more character, she'd have to appear on the USA channel. She's super bright, laughs at corny jokes, and can hold her own in a banter. You can't ask for much more than that. But wait, there's more. Call in the next thirty minutes and she'll own Firefly and Serenity on DVD. That's nerdier than I am! Her one flaw is that she's not seen Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Of course, having no room for improvement, for growth, would also be a flaw so, damned if you do, damned if you don't, and damn the torpedoes!

So, I may have laid it on a little thick there (really got into the groove, which I guess means I've found my muse for writing hyperbolically), but really, based on first impressions, she's a great person. A week later, I asked her out to coffee, and she suggested the following Friday. The next day, coffee changed into dinner, and the day after, dinner into dinner plus Iron Man 2 with friends. You've got to admire someone who was looking forward to Iron Man's sequel more than I was, especially someone of the female persuasion. I don't think I'll say much more than that tonight, lest I too stumble upon tangible exaggeration.

It's now getting late, and I have three unequally viable choices. In order of descending meritoriousness they are go to sleep, read more Brisingr, and watch A Few Good Men again. I did get five hours of extra sleep earlier today, so I'm not too tired, but tomorrow might be painful if I'm not awake. We're having a morale event (I almost forgot about it) at 10:00 in Seattle. I hate driving in Seattle. I hate parking in Seattle.

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Anonymous said... At June 17, 2010 9:58 AM
Wow, that is one impressive wall of text.
Stranger than Fiction Saturday, April 17, 2010
Bah, I can't write fiction. I try from time to time, and it's always boring. Part of the issue is that I really only want to write something if it's not been written before. And part of the reason is I have no talent there. I'll stick to what I'm good at: writing paragraphs upon paragraphs of unread text so it looks like I have a life, at least one interesting enough to write about, so long as the readers don't actually get past the first paragraph.

This time I thought I had it. The last few attempts have been attempting fantasy, but I don't have any good ideas of magic systems (which are my favorite part). I'd rather learn than teach, read than write. I also tend to get hung up on the plot, which was the case this time as well. This time I thought I'd write the story of boy meets girl (because that's never been done before), but only write during the moments they're actually interacting. The first "chapter" was five lines long, from the moment a mutual friend was introducing them until the moment after they shook hands and got distracted by other friends at the party. The second chapter was just the friend confirmation email from Facebook. For the third, I was attempting to write an instant message chat log. I actually wrote a program to generate the HTML for me. It turns out talking to myself on paper isn't as fun as talking to myself aloud. Five minutes into the "conversation" I alt+F4'd without saving.

On a side note, I couldn't figure out how to get a WebBrowser Winforms object to autosize, nor make it scroll to a certain point on the page (i.e. the bottom). Using LINQ's XDocument and XElement objects, though, made the page generation itself a breeze. Even ctrl+z was simple. I just kept a stack of each of the XElements I'd added, and then to undo, popped the stack and called .Remove() on the object, which removed itself from the XDocument. Magic!

I think maybe the hardest part for me, writing fiction, is creating a character other than myself. I just can't leave my own head. I think most authors, at least in their early works, write with the main character being the author. Alexander, for instance, gets woozy from the height of a chair unless he's over water, much like his character Longshark (whom, in my head, I pronounced Lawnshark) in his latest story. I would guess that Paolini acts quite a bit like Eragon, at least in his inquisitiveness. But then both them have supporting characters that are quite different from than the authors. I just end up writing copies of myself, or possibly my friends, though it turns out the way I perceive my friends is a lot more like how I perceive me, than it is how they actually are. They wouldn't say this. I would. Bah.

I do wonder what happens if you add an element to multiple XDocument objects, because .Remove()'s documentation says it removes the element from its parent, and in this case, there are multiple parents. I could try it, and report back, but I'd rather wonder than know in this case. All my friends would too.

So yes, I keep attempting and failing fiction. Mostly this happens when I reread Eragon. Two thoughts always come to mind while reading that book. One, this was make a great MMO. It really would, but the whole magic system would be incredibly complex. You'd have to write a run-time compiler for it, and then you'd have to convince people the game is fun enough to play to learn a completely made up language, and then you'd have to figure out the whole "an expert might say water and conjure something completely unrelated, like a gemstone, because he can see the link between the two" thing. After all that triviality comes the part where you have to enforce no deceit when someone speaks the ancient language. The other thought is always, "I can do this." And time and time again it proves untrue.

The last few weeks I've been thinking about something that the pastor said, that when we want to feel good about ourselves we revert to doing what we do best, specifically mentioning writing, among other things. I think that's true of me, not that I'm saying I'm necessarily a good writer, only that I take pride in it. The sermon he said this in was on Easter, and about "giving God the pen" of our lives, letting him dictate what will happen in our lives. I think God gives us certain aptitudes, and it would be foolish not to use what God has given us, so I'm wondering what God wants me to write. There is this blog, but I'd like to write a book someday too.

I guess if I want God to answer a question, like what does he want me to write about, I should ask him--I should pray. I certainly don't pray religiously. It's a habit I should get into. Hime and I call each other best friends, but we haven't seen each other since her birthday in January.

I'm in bed now, or rather, on Bill's couch in Bellingham the day after I started writing this post. Before I let it slip another day, I think I'll just post it now, short and sweet.

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Alexander said... At April 17, 2010 12:18 PM
Now it shall be terribly hard for me not to think of him as the Lawnshark!
Four Words Sunday, April 4, 2010
He is risen. He is risen indeed. It's Easter right now, so happy Easter if you happen to be reading this post today, or if you happen to read it some Sunday between March 23 and April 27 in the future, and that day also happens to be the first Sunday after the first full moon after the first day of spring of your current year. Yeah.

Easter is the most important day of the year, with Christmas a close second. I don't think that's a very popular opinion, but it's mine. It is the day Jesus Christ conquered death. It is the reason we have The Good News. If I have my metaphysics right, Good Friday was the day our sins could be forgiven, but no one would believe it had Easter not happened. Or maybe I have them wrong, and it is in the act of rising again, conquering death, that we may have victory in Christ as well.

I don't think Easter is celebrated correctly. I don't really know how to explain it, but the fact that Easter is so diminished in the minds of modern society, on par with Groundhog's day or Valentine's day, speaks to the fact that it's important, and that someone or something wants it suppressed. Because it's fun to blame the greeting card industry, I'm going to do just that. No one buys Easter greeting cards, probably because so few really appreciate the resurrection of Christ. Without cards, there are few ad buys, and without the media, there's little hype. Any church that tried to make an Easter awareness commercial would probably be pegged (by me) as a little silly. But no, I can't legitimately blame the card industry. While I've never been one to find the devil under every rock (or really almost any rock), leaving no stone unturned leads me to find Satan at work here.

I find myself frustrated this morning. I go to the evening service at church for two reasons today -- one, I normally go to the evening service because I like to stay up late on Saturday evenings, which I did last night; and two, because we were asked, if we weren't bringing friends that would not normally go to church, to go to either the early morning service (not happening) or the evening service, so that there was space and parking at the nine through eleven o'clock ones. I'm frustrated because this is the first Easter that I didn't go to a morning service followed by brunch or family time of some sort, except for the Easter I was in Jamaica. This morning I got out of bed at 12:30 (having been awake for two hours before that), tagged some photos posted by Courtney from Costa Rica, and then got Arby's. It was not exactly my traditional Easter morning.

Somehow I associate tradition with observance, and so I don't feel like I've really observed Easter, the most important day of the year. Even the fact that you go to Easter service in the morning is observing that Christ rose in the morning, that the stone was found rolled away in the morning, and that the rest of the day people could marvel at it.

I actually feel guilty, like the traditions were something I was supposed to do, or else I'm in sin or something. I know that's absurd but that's still how I'd describe it.

Anyway, there's no good reason to feel bad on Easter unless you mock its meaning, and I don't believe I've done that.

This week went pretty well. Last summer, after Fir Creek, I was pretty burnt out at work for another week and a half. Somehow after the trip, I was actually doing better than I had been before the trip. I'm not sure if I was burnt out from working harder than I'm used to (three big features, basically on my own), or because it was the last few days before vacation, or because I had a feature dropped on me and it was still in black box, mountain mode because I hadn't really had time to evaluate each part to realize it was only a medium sized hill. Anyway, when I got back Sydney was my acting manager because my actual manager is on vacation (for his kids' spring break). Sydney split my feature into three parts, and I ended up with about a third the work I was expecting to do, and of that work, I'd already done about a quarter, whereas I hadn't touched the other two parts. That made it much easier for me to get back into the groove of the faster life, and on Friday I made a ton of progress. I still have to write tests (which undoubtedly will uncover another thirty necessary changes [anecdotal edit: I did indeed introduce a bug where renaming a databases shrunk it to the minimum size]), but I made it to the jiggle phase. That's where you put all the pieces loosely together and then jiggle it until it all fits. This is not an official software development term. Yet.

We had a preview feature in our last release that I wrote. Now that it's no longer a preview feature, I had to tear all the code out. It felt weird deleting a bunch of code I wrote, when I had a meeting scheduled to discuss how that code would work after they deployed it (they haven't yet released the last release with the preview feature).

I'm looking forward to work tomorrow.

Friday night, I went to Swood's for our weekly hangout time. I've never been to a Good Friday service before, and because I was at Swood's, I didn't go to one this year either. Next year I think I'll try to make it. I had a good time at Swood's, though. It might even have been better that I went there than church. Hanging out with him is therapeutic for me, restful. We ended up watching The Men Who Stare at Goats. It wasn't what I was expecting, but still pretty good.

It got me thinking about a couple things. I think everyone (or at least, of the one person for whom I can speak from experience, it's true for this one person) likes to pretend at some level that they can do things they can't. I pretend to use the Force to change traffic lights, which may or may not coincide with me watching the other lights of the intersection. I wish I were telekinetic. When I go by street lights, they turn off a lot more frequently than they do for other people I've talked to. That's either because I'm more observant to it than other people, or I really am special -- and what an amazing super power that is, especially as it's involuntary, sporadic, and makes it harder for me to see. I like to play the game in my head, but I would never actually believe it like the people in the movie did, at least without some hard evidence. This knowledge fuzzes the line for me between game and spiritual gift. I believe that all Christians have spiritual gifts, and absolutely believe that the Spirit can give them and take them away at will for a given situation. But I do also believe that some are persistent regardless of the situation. Hospitality and teaching are two such gifts, and really, I think most are like that. But it makes me wonder how much of these gifts was there to begin with? Why do we call them spiritual gifts now that they are Christians, when they probably had the same personality before they were Christians? A few times I've taken spiritual gifts tests, which are essentially aptitude tests. They don't very well cover things like the gift of healing as they assume those are more self-evident. I've consistently scored high on discernment and prophecy, and very low on every other one. So, this blurred line makes me wonder if it's actually gift, or merely the game I play in my head. It's disconcerting.

The other thing, though only roughly related, that the movie got me considering was something talked about at the PCEC retreat in February. The speaker had talked a small bit about superstition, and how so many people have it engrained in us, whether we recognize it as superstition or not, that we'll say things like, "It's going well, but I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop." I do this a lot. I play this game of karma in my head, this game of balances, and for some reason, I can't accept that there is good without there being bad to come. Maybe it's just a common pattern in our lives, so we accept it as fact or fate. We have days of sun, and eventually they're followed by days of clouds or rain, and so we think that if it's sunny, soon it will be rainy. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. This, I think, weakens blessings.

It's almost time for me to leave for church. This is perfect as I have nothing else to say.

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¡Viva Feliz! Tuesday, March 30, 2010
The trip is over. I haven't journaled as much as I expected. We're on the flight back to Charlotte, then have an hour layover in which to grab our bags, rush through customs, recheck our bags, and board another plane to SeaTac.

After our adventure on the way here, US Airways is giving us a $400 voucher, so I might be making another trip here soon, possibly to visit Denna again. We'll see. She's supposed to come visit me here soon, too. I haven't looked at the details of the voucher, but if they're smart, it'll have no restrictions.

We were at the orphanage from Sunday (which I've already posted about) until Friday morning. We split into five groups: painting, groundskeeping, construction, pulling nails, and a miscellaneous group that taught, made trinkets for kids and other things. Most of the groups changed jobs from day to day except for the construction group, because they were building cabinets, and it was beneficial to work the project through to completion. I was on pulling nails the first day and painting the second day.

Kaleo is a great guy. He's the biggest morale booster I've met. He can be a bit obnoxious and sometimes says things that seem to have no connection at all (though after a lengthy discussion, he usually brings it back home), but you can't be mad at him. It's impossible. He was able to just mumble his way through conversations in Spanish, knowing very little himself. Anyway, during the first day, we were pulling nails, and as if I were pumping metal, he'd start shouting for that extra little adrenaline boost. During one of these chants, he decided to call me JJ, despite my name having a single J in it, and it stuck. It actually helped a bit because it disambiguated the other Jordan on the trip.

There was another guy, Derek, that was with us the first day. He's fluent in Spanish and was our main translator throughout the trip. He didn't actually fly down with us because he'd been in Honduras for a year or two, and this trip was his last hurrah before returning to Whatcom County.

The last member of our group was Bill's girlfriend, Jane. She and I have always gotten along really well. She just has one of those personalities. We got a bit closer this trip, because she was the other person in my orphanage house.

Before lunch, while we were unnailing hardwood floor boards, the businessman turned missionary who started the chicken farm (he did not start the orphanage) came and took me to attempt to fix their wifi repeater. I did my best, but I wasn't really happy with the way it turned out. I know there's a way to do it where you can name the repeater's network the same as the router's and then laptops will switch between the two seamlessly, but at least I got it working with [mynetwork] and [mynetwork2]. The signal was still a little weak in the house we all slept in, but it was usable, though, we couldn't get Jeremiah's laptop to connect. I'm not sure if it was just an old machine or what.

The second day Jane was transferred to the miscellaneous group, and I don't know where Derek went. Kaleo and I switched to painting. That was pretty unremarkable except that I don't particularly like painting. I talked to Kaleo a little bit, and asked if he thought it meant something if a girl asked if you were seeing someone.

In the evening, we visited the homes again. Our mom was keen to my tastes that night and gave us the best chicken I've ever had, and a good portion of salad. It was the first time in a long time that I ate too much. That night or the next, I think the next, we had a translator who, for Jane and me, was one of the staff members. We played a "game" called Get to Know You or something. Basically, it was just some open ended questions on 3x5 cards and each of us in the house answered two. At team time, it sounded like every house had a different experience with that game. Some had kids bouncing off the walls that didn't take it very seriously, and some wanted to each answer "Who's your best friend?" with their personal reasons for why God was.

That night, the businessman gave his testimony during our team time. It was a lot more powerful, I felt, than most testimonies, at least resonating with me because it wasn't this huge turn around in his life, and mission work was a struggle for him. He wouldn't trade it, but he would in a heart beat if God told him too. It makes me feel a little better about working at Microsoft rather than out on the field, because I really do think God got me that job, and I can't imagine he would have if he didn't want me there.

The next morning we visited a slum called Los Quitos.

It's crazy how like-minded our group is. At team time each night, we went through our thoughts of the day and our struggles. Several struggles per night which hadn't been priorly voiced received head nods all around. Every struggle I've had has been had by most if not all the rest of the group.

Wednesday night, we all felt bad that when we visited the slums, we were thinking, "This isn't that bad." It was that bad. It just wasn't what we expected, which was African poverty. Los Quitos is a thirty thousand person shanty-town run by two organized gangs with drug rings and prostitution. The streets were so unsafe that the staff that were with us told us to remain on the bus.

Here's where my experience diverges a bit. Tuesday night I was not at all looking forward to the visit. I have a hard time going to a place on a mission trip with no real objective to make lives there better. The way I saw it, we were going to observe poverty and to break our own hearts. From my point of view, this feels wrong. Wednesday morning the exact same sentiment (minus the wrongness) was expressed, along with a strong argument as to why this is important. I agreed, but I still was resisting going. I hate to say it, but part of it was my shoes. I bought shoes on the way to visit Denna last December. I don't mind spending too much money on shoes because I wear them virtually every day for a year and a half until the insides are full of holes and causing blisters. Then I spend too much on another pair to abuse. The businessman had said that we shouldn't wear our nicest shoes because we might end up stepping in something icky. Well, I only have my shoes and my flip flops, and I'd rather lose a pair of shoes than have to wash icky off my feet. We'd been expecting to walk around the town. Then the staff member told us that there was a miscommunication and that it wasn't safe. I was relieved (for more than just my shoes). Everyone else was severely disappointed.

During the discussion that night, we talked about it. We felt awful because we were touring a shanty town in a tourist bus, as if they were animals on safari. But it really wouldn't be too much different if we were walking around, twenty-two obvious Americans with cameras taking pictures and walking into shops, talking to people in English. Something struck me about the place, though. People compared the slums to other slums: Derek to Honduras, Kaleo to the Philippines, several to Africa. I compared it to pictures from Hoovervilles during the Great Depression. The difference I noticed was that these people had some hope in them. They weren't broken, despite their poverty. They're there because they think (probably mistakenly) that they have a higher chance at a better life there than where they came from. (A lot of the people are illegal immigrants from Nicaragua.)

My favorite part of the trip was visiting the site of the new building the orphanage's organization has been promised by the government. They were given it five years ago, but have been struggling to get the money. It's a four million dollar building, and they're halfway there. For an organization this large in the US, two million dollars would take very little time or effort to raise. As soon as she told us what that fenced area with trees was for, it suddenly struck me how much healing will happen to that community when this building is built. I seriously can't describe it better than to say the areas where this organization has buildings are like lights in an otherwise dark place. When I get back, I will do my best to get Microsoft to recognize the organization for the GIVE program (though I heard it already does), and then get people to donate to it. Two million dollars. Seriously, it's not that much, and the results far outvalue the costs.

After Los Quitos, we visited one of the organization's day care centers. I was feeling a bit depressed after the slums. I didn't have any real "this is awful" thoughts while there, but just being in the area was disheartening, I think. Among the last things I wanted to do was to be in a noisy cafeteria surrounded by kids who don't speak English. I sat back as much as I could while the soon-to-be teachers of the group hand fed toddlers. Eventually I moved to putting cups on tables. I didn't eat lunch that day. First, the meal was nowhere near my limited palette, and second, I wasn't hungry even had they been serving sloppy joes and banana cream pie. (That was a total exaggeration -- I would have been all over sloppy joes and/or banana cream pie. They might have lifted my mood a bit.)

The night before, I had asked the businessman why there were only 20% new kids each year if kids only stayed one to three years, when 20% would require a five year rotation, on average. Evidently this stuck out to Jeremiah and Bill, and on Wednesday I was switched over to the construction team because the second cabinet would have tricky angles. However, there was some sort of assembly that day in the building with the cabinets, and we switched to other jobs. I took up the brush again.

Wednesday night was our last night in the houses. Saying goodbye to our mom was difficult. She's such a great woman with a larger capacity to love than I've seen in anyone. She's a single mother, the only one in the orphanage, with a thirty-year-old son we didn't meet, and a teenage son, who's an inspiration, of her own, and then five foster boys and five foster girls. I have no idea how she does it.

Thursday we did work. We built an entire shelving unit save the doors, and finished up the one from Monday and Tuesday. I loved working with my group. Monday or Tuesday night I had a lengthy talk with Jane's sister, and Thursday she and I ended up doing most of the cutting for the cabinets. Joe did most of the measurements and design, and the other two members worked primarily on the doors from the first set. The wood we were given was ridiculous. The 2x2's (or that's what we called them; they were 4cm by 4cm) were almost all either bowed or twisted length-wise. With nails, we got them as close to straight as possible, but the next morning, the whole cabinet and twisted a bit. The wall wasn't flat, and half of it had another concrete part sticking out of it, and of course it wasn't parallel with the rest of the wall, nor was the wall parallel with its opposite in the room. Considering all that, I feel we did a pretty good job. Channeling Kaleo, while Jane's sister was doing some hammering, I said "Do it KK!" realizing a moment too late that her name starts with C. (I'm rather slow, so she had to point out the discrepancy.)

Thursday night was our best team time. The two staff members I keep talking about gave their testimonies, and then a couple of us did. Testimony in Costa Rica is quite a bit different from what it is in the US. I like their version better. In Christianese, your testimony is just the story of pre-Christ, how you came to Christ, and what differences he's made since then, and it's usually a little prepackaged. People who've been Christians all their lives don't typically have "an amazing testimony," as say my dad did until six years ago. (Wow, has it really been six years?) In Costa Rica, it's an abridged (or less abridged) version of their life's story, where Christianity is a part of that, but also how they met their spouse, how they came to work at the orphanage and whatever else seems important at the time. I spoke that night as well, one because I kind of wanted to, and two because no one else seemed to. It surprised me though, what I said. I talked about how I became a Christian at three, and never really had a defining moment. I talked about my tick disorder and bipolar disorder, and how I've been suicidal from time to time. And I talked about new life, and how that's a new concept I've been throwing around in my head. I wasn't sure how they're all related, but I knew they were. What surprised me is that I didn't mention my parents' divorce at all. Bill's sister talked as well. She told roughly the same story that Bill told two years ago in Jamaica. Back then, I was having trouble keeping all 30 people straight, and I remember wanting to check in again with him about it, but until she started sharing, I'd completely forgotten about it. I felt retrospectively awful about that.

One of the things I liked about Jamaica was that after team time, we could stay up a little late and get to know people better. Between being exhausted and needing to get up at times I wasn't even aware existed, we didn't get to stay up very late. The other thing I liked in Jamaica, and I know this is rare, was that we were almost always one big group working on a single project. In Costa Rica and in Detroit, we split up into smaller groups to tackle lots of projects. I don't feel we got to know each other as well as we did in Jamaica as a result.

On Friday morning, the two staff members debriefed us and then prayed over us in Spanish. They are great women, especially the older one. And the younger one. After that, the cabinet crew finished four of the six doors remaining (also discovering the overnight skew), while other people did work on other projects, worked on making bracelets for the kids, and packed and cleaned. It was kind of inspiring to me to see everyone working on a day with no planned work.

Between work and dinner each of the nights, we played a different sport: first baseball, then soccer, then basketball, then soccer again. While warming up for the baseball game, one of the kids was purposely throwing the ball hard and uncatchable to someone as basebally challenged as I, and one throw hit my wrist and unclasped both sides of my watch. I was ok with this; I'd just go to Fred Meyer's and get the jewelers to fix it for me or something. Usually they do that kind of thing free of charge. Then one of the kids noticed it was broken and tried to fix it. He put the clasp on backwards (not the end of the world), and as soon as I put it on, it broke again. During his second attempt, he dropped one of the pieces in the clasping mechanism, and that was the ball game, so to speak. I might get it fixed, or I might go get myself a nice watch. I liked the watch my mom gave me, but it wasn't as water resistant as it claimed, and eventually I had it replaced with the one that just broke. I didn't like that one as much. I, of course, don't mean to say I was irritated with the boy. I was appreciative that he wanted to try to fix it and nearly succeeded. I'm just telling the story. For the rest of the trip, I've been using it as a pocket watch.

We just boarded our second plane. It was mercifully delayed eighty-three minutes, so getting through customs and grabbing a quick dinner was easy. We ended up sitting next to a (strange) girl at the gate who was from Bothel and actually was going to high school with Joe's cousin. It's a small world after all.

Friday afternoon, we, all the kids, and a bunch of other our-aged volunteers got on two large busses and headed to Bible Camp. They were both overly full and the counselors (called captains at this World Cup themed camp) had to stand, but some of the rows with only two kids invited us to squeeze. One of the kids from my house fell asleep on my lap. He was my favorite kid I think, though he reminded me of my cat in that he's always vying for attention. That can be draining. Our bus got lost on the 40 minute trip, and ended up sitting in traffic for another half hour.

There's too much to write about when it comes to camp. I wasn't one of the captains very often. I was on staff, and mostly worked in the kitchen. The way they had presented it was "creative team" and that we'd be setting up activities. That wasn't quite the case, but it was still fun. Meals were the best times for me. I loved all the dashing around trying to fill 130 plates in a matter of minutes with seven people all occupying the same space, then moving plates that were in reserves up to the front so they didn't get too cold. After the first meal or two, we added another parameter, meal size. Small kids got very small portions, bigger kids got medium, and captains got huge ones. I think the best part of being on staff for me (semi-jokingly) was that after everyone had eaten, we got to fill our own plates, so I didn't have get stuff that I wasn't going to eat anyway.

We were so drained at the end of each day that team time was severely diminished. People were burnt out on the first day of camp. I burned out on the second day. Mission trips are sprints to missions' marathons. Sprints for more than a week are difficult. It was kind of interesting to see how different people reacted to burning out. Some got emotional. Some slept a lot. Some cut themselves out of activities and such. I forsook God. On my average day, I think I think about God fairly frequently. On mission trips, it's a whole lot more frequently since I'm around people who like to talk about him and who pray. When I burned out, I completely tried to rely on myself. It didn't go too well.

On the first evening of camp, one of our group's favorite kids, whom we would see just wandering around from time to time, found a very large frog (they were common), picked it up by its arms, and flung it Mario-Bowser style yelling, "¡Viva feliz!" The captains couldn't keep a straight face long enough to scold him.

It was a very structured camp with close to no free time. I think the only free time was immediately after meals, which was also medication time. Gringo (green-go) (us, as opposed to tico) captains really just followed the kids around since we didn't really know what was going on. There really wasn't much disciplining either, and the kids seemed to know where the line was. Every now and then, one would act out and a tico would step in. The rest of the time, we were huggers and jungle gyms.

The activity yesterday was sort of a multi-station obstacle course, but the main event was the mud pit. Almost everyone, everyone who wasn't running one of the other stations, was forced in, and covered head to toe. In the first station, spinning in a circle around a pipe and then trying to shoot a goal, I fell after shooting, and skinned my knees. I hope the mud didn't have anything in it my immune system can't fend against. When the pictures get posted to facebook, perhaps I'll link a few. Scott, by the way, is an amazing photographer. He, his girlfriend Justine, KK, and I were the main gringo staff members. The tico staff members were mostly much older than us.

At the end of each night, we all went to the stadium. There they recapped the day with pictures, and sang some songs. One night they played a Moses movie or something. I was feeling crowded and need to be alone for a bit, so I'd left before that started. Last night, though, they all said goodbye to us. The presentation and subsequent hugs must have gone on for thirty or forty minutes. A lot of the kids, and most of the gringo counselors were crying. To my surprise, I was swarmed. I didn't realize I had even been noticed by some of the kids that latched onto me. After all the hugging, one of the girls from my house came up to me and I carried her a bit. Then she told me that since her mom wasn't there to say goodbye, I should call her. That wasn't really feasible, and Jane and I had said our goodbyes to her already, more than once. We'd also written letters to her, though they hadn't been translated yet when we'd left. I hope the letters bless her. I told the girl to tell her my goodbye for me.

I didn't get emotional during the event. I don't know if I kept my distance or what. Not to be morbid, but it felt a lot like Justine's funeral (actual Justine, not aliased Justine). There was a lot of weeping there, too, but I felt surreal and almost happy. I have about eighty more people to get to know in heaven someday. Justine (aliased) was the other gringo that I noticed wasn't in tears. I can't speak for her, and maybe she felt as the others did, but she's the other one that is more business-minded, and less teacher-minded.

Today was pretty uneventful. I count that a plus. I had been looking forward to dropping by Swood's place between the airport and home, but because of the flight delay, I think it'll be too late. Plus I stink like nothing before smelt. I feel bad for the dude next to me. So now I'm looking forward to a nice long bath, some reading, and tomorrow, a clean shirt followed by my mom's place and kitties.

I've decided I really hate being infatuated. I can't think straight, can't act myself, seem unable to break out of my need for approval. It gets in the way of real relationship with the girl, and it gets in the way of my relationship with God. On top of that, I can't really evaluate the merit of a potential relationship with the girl objectively. I find her attractive because I'm attracted to her.

That need for approval, though, I feel is the most disturbing. I fear I'm projecting my lack of a father onto this helpless (in this area) girl. That's not fair, nor healthy. When that approval is granted, as in the case of Denna or Fey, well, I don't know. It actually seemed to go pretty well. But in both those cases, it had nothing to do with me earning the approval. They just liked me before I could attempt to impress them. My mating feathers are ugly and dim-witted. I'm only attractive when I'm confident and not trying to impress, or at least, not trying to leave that kind of impression. Even when I'm confident, I like to be funny, and that's a sort of attempt to impress. I just care less about the results, and thus am more confident. Rinse and repeat.

I need to shave.

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Italian Sausage Sunday, March 21, 2010
Fifteen minutes to journal? Bahahaha.

It's the end of day one: our free day. Typically we'd like to have these at the end of the trip, after all the team bonding, but this was the only way the schedule worked out, and we all are pretty bonded anyway.

Last night we got in around 9:00pm, and it took about an hour to get through immigration, customs, and onto the bus. Customs was far more lax than I've seen in any other country or Hawaii. The customs officer just took each of our forms, briefly glanced at each, and had us throw our stuff through the x-ray scanner. I don't think there was even anyone on the other end in case something was caught.

From there we took a trip with this guy who helps sustain the orphanage. The story goes that he's a brilliant businessman who did quite well in the US, then spent time in Central America, and decided to either start or significantly help this orphanage and a couple others in other countries. Rather than do the administrative stuff, though, he started a business whose profits go to the orphanage, and it's now one of the largest chicken farms in the country.

We got to the orphanage, which is a collection of houses, and got a few instructions. Mostly we just unpacked, found beds, ate pizza, and took in our surroundings. Then we sang a single song as chosen by Joe, and went to bed. (Also I had Jeremiah, who was excited about his alias, read Finally Done Right. He approved of my sharing his stories.) I realized when I took off my shoes before bed, that I'd been wearing them for thirty hours straight. That's a smell I'd like not to repeat.

I've yet to shower since Friday morning, but I plan to after these fifteen minutes are up.

Today we went to the beach. There was an adventure on the way there. We lost a human. There was a tourist pit stop on one side of a bridge. The river beneath the bridge homed several very large crocodiles, and the crocks hang out there because people "fish" for them with whole chickens. Seeing them in the zoo is one thing. Seeing them uncaged, if a good 30 to 40 feet below us, is something else.[/QUOTE]

yuh