This page contains the archives of the blog I kept last year, compiled into one page and sorted with the earliest entries at the top and latest entries at the bottom for easy reading.
fri jan 17 09:55
maybe i should be delighted that i 1) went to bed at 1am 2) forgot to turn on my alarm clock 3) woke up spontaneously at 9:03, the exact minute when my alarm clock would have woken me 4) am about to go to work. but as happy as i am about all that, i am more confused about why. what i've been doing the past few days (exactly what i should be doing) is not a solution, since the real problem is that i don't know why i do what i do (and why i don't do what i don't) and that is as far from being solved as ever; i'm still just as confused now about why i am doing the right things as i was confused before about why i was doing the wrong things. i think that few people know why they do what they do, though, so maybe i can't expect to understand myself. but now i think it's worse, because i'm very much inclined to just forget it and not worry about why i was doing all the wrong things before and am doing all the right things now, again like i think most people do, but if i do that, i'm giving up trying to understand myself, and setting myself up for another period of doing all the wrong things and having no idea why. well, perhaps this problem is solvable, but not right now at least. i have a diesel injection pump to rebuild, and failing that, a motorcycle to make road-worthy.
sat jan 18 17:26
well, it's as i expected, my streak of do-goodedness only lasted a few days. today i slept 13 hours, getting up at 16:00. this is bad, but not critical, as it's saturday and the difference is not that i miss work but that i miss fixing my bike. and it was somewhat expected, i was tired at around 11pm and would have gone to bed then but stayed up till 03:00, mostly because sarah called and we talked for awhile. my thoughts yesterday about the problem not being solved have been proven true today, i suppose, so at least i'm right about still not knowing why i do what i do. that said, though, it's far better to do the right things and not know why than to do the wrong things and not know why, so i'm still aiming for doing the right things, and hoping to figure out why. today is not wasted, though, i finally brought my bike parts and funny computer desk thing in from the car, so now i have 2 big productive things available for me to do in the evenings, but probably not this evening since i'll likely be at marc and gayle's trashing them in games of rook. we'll see how tomorrow goes with church and what i do or don't get done in the afternoon.
sun jan 19 18:42
today was a bit odd, i suppose. i wouldn't have considered it odd a few years ago, just perfectly normal, but compared to me lately it seemed odd. i spent the night at marc and gayle's, i finally got to teach them rook but then i found out i don't like it as much as spades, but i don't know how to play spades with just 3 people, maybe you make a dummy hand or something. then we went to church this morning at grace community something except it wasn't there, and genna was confused why we drove to the church building and then left right away, because she couldn't read the sign that said go to UTA for our special 15th anniversary service. so we did, and we were all expecting to be not impressed, but we were, and not in a good way. I HATE STUPID CHURCH ANNIVERSARY SERVICES, THEY ALL JUST BLOW THEIR OWN HORNS AND IT GETS LOUD AND STUPID AND GOD LAUGHS AND WEEPS. ok so maybe it wasn't that bad, at least i didn't think so but marc did, so over halfway through, we left. that's the first time i've walked out of a church service but i couldn't help it, my ride was leaving and it's a long walk home. we had communion in these stupid little pre-packaged pieces of jesus in a box that you pick up as you go in - individual, unholy, and NOT COMMUNION. we sang a lot but it was hard to praise or worship since i didn't know any of the songs except amazing grace, and it was hard to not think about everybody dancing and jumping. i guess that's good for them but hard for me. the pastor talked to us on tv, which was dumb because he was there, but he said more on tv than on stage. i wanted to go backstage and find the pastor and say hey why don't you give us a sermon, why isn't there any communication between people, isn't teaching and fellowship what church is about? but we left instead. then i was sleepy and had a nap on the couch for a few hours, then got up and came home. i took pictures of my rabbit with bob's digicam, which sucks, but that's ok. i guess i didn't really do anything else, so i still have to wash my clothes and make a web showcase for the pics of my car, and write some emails, and send money to my bloodsucking credit card company.
mon jan 20 08:34
last night i decided i had to start and finish the work on my photo gallery of my rabbit, so i did, and it turned out very well, but i was up till 05:00 doing that and other necessary things. now i remember why i hated being busy so much, because then you realize that there actually isn't enough time, whereas if you're lazy it seems like there isn't enough time but you know that's just because you're lazy and you can think that it would be different if you were busy. so i'm wearing dirty socks because they're my last pair, but that's ok, i'll wash clothes tonight, or next month, or something. bob helped me wake up this morning because he heard my alarm go off and figured that if i'm up then i can take the trash out to the street for him, and because he knew i was up at 05:00 and he gets a real schadenfreude kick out of that. i suppose i can never be certain about another person's motivations, but if their actions and words consistently show them to be selfish above all else, i can pretty safely assume that he didn't wake me up only for my own personal benefit, since he can't know whether or not i'm benefited by waking up at that time. it's also not as though i don't pay them enough to have them wait on me hand and foot, but they still consistently whine when i don't do what they want when they want it and never say a word when i do, and often ask me to do this or that for them and deride my efforts to improve my schedule. not like i'm resentful or anything...anyway it is to my benefit that i'm up this early, which is why i set my alarm, because harrold said friday at 10:30 that it was too late to start rebuilding my injection pump that day, and he needed me to work in his shop that day, so i did, but he said that monday would probably be a good day to rebuild my pump so i hope it works out. if not, i guess i just get to work 8 hours today, which would also be a good thing. i'll be tired tonight...
wed jan 22 03:17
i would have written this morning but i slept till 14:30, and got up and dashed about and went to work. yesterday i started at 09:00 and worked all day on my car, taking off the diesel injection pump and putting new seals in it. the stupid kit from the supposed-to-know-everything bosch place had the wrong front shaft seal, and i had destroyed the other one trying to get it out before i found that out, so since joe was nice to loan me his car i went up there again, in downtown dallas, and they took like 20 minutes to find the right one, so that set me back like 2 hours and i thought i wouldn't get done but i did at 18:30, and it runs now so i didn't screw anything up, i guess that means that what they say about diesel injection pumps needing to be serviced ONLY at authorized places isn't really true. and today it started after only 1 second of cranking, so i sure did fix the leak. yesterday night i was super tired, i had only slept like 2 hours before working all day, so i went to bed at 23:00, and slept for 15.5 hours, but i sure had crazy dreams. i really love having crazy dreams, but i only have them when i sleep for way too long during the day, so although it sucks because i don't get anything done, it sure feels like things are happening till i wake up. i love working for harrold, i only worked for 3 hours today but felt like i got some important stuff done, because i did. and clean socks! well they're dirty now but i washed all my clothes last night so that's all that's dirty, and i won't have to wash clothes again for weeks. and i guess now i'll be writing at night until i skip a day again, since it would be pointless to write tomorrow morning, all i'm going to do between now and then is sleep, which i'm going to start doing right now.
thurs jan 23 02:29
i think i have to play guitar tomorrow night at our bible study, which is always fun even though i'm never very good. i did last week, and only had about 15 minutes to pick some songs and tune my guitar, and my fingers hurt, which is what you get when you don't play for way too long. that, and you embarrass yourself when you miss easy chords. at least only one other person there can play guitar, so only one person knows how bad i am. maybe nathan will be there and play well and i won't have to. i found out i'm supposed to be using a blog for bragging about my dvd catalog or collection or something, but since i don't have any dvds or a dvd player, i guess i can't do that. maybe i can brag about my 30GB collection of MP3s, 5,858 songs, which is over 17 days straight of unique music. so there, i have it and you don't, ppptthhbbbtt. that was boring. apricots aren't, though, and i'm almost out, so i guess i'll have to go to walmart again to get them. i think i should start including my bible-reading habits in here, if only to motivate me to read more. i started reading the bible consistently again about the same time i started writing this, for some of the same reasons i guess. i had been reading in leviticus, which is full of little neat things but it's like digging for gold, at least for me, you pull out a lot of worthless dirt and find a few nuggets, but it's really like in nevada when they were digging through a lot of strange blue mud to find gold, when in fact there was like 10X the value of silver in the blue mud they were throwing away as in the gold they were looking for. the blue mud was really sticky and was a big pain to everyone, until someone found out it had a lot of super-pure silver in it, and then nobody cared about the gold anymore. maybe the pentateuch is like that for most people, they wade through tons of sticky blue weird goop and try to wash it off in their search for gold, when really they're throwing away the most valuable thing. i think i killed that analogy now, and i don't even know if it's true. esther would love it i think, but what matters to me is whether i read it and whether it sticks to me. i'm reading in numbers now, which is a pretty odd alternating narrative and law. then the people did this, and moses and aaron did this, and god said oh btw you need to have this ritual for some obscure event, and then korah rebelled and the earth swallowed him up, and the king of edom said NO YUO so he was cursed or something, and god said yeah and do this and that when your brother's step-father's rabbit dies...it all looks like sticky blue mud to me.
fri jan 24 04:42
bleh. maybe this is where the line is crossed between "hobby" or "habit" into "obsession". well, i set out tonight with a number of things to do, and i did them all, so i guess that's good, but my timing sure isn't. i wasn't up today till 14:30, which makes the second time this week, and while starting work at 15:00 isn't late enough to get me fired, it's late enough to make my bank account cringe (more than it already does). that makes a pattern of staying up and getting up too late, which has been demonstrated to wreak havoc in every area of my life. well, i put out a big feeler on a great forum, to give me ideas and leads on how to turn my dead subaru into living money, and i did a lot of work today talking and thinking about how to get my dreamy quantum from maine to here, and communicated it all to colby, so...well i just really want that car, and almost hope something doesn't work out so i return back to earth hopping about in my rabbit instead of putting so much effort into something so material and temporary. maybe i should do another short nap/up all day thing like monday...i hate being up this late, but at least i have a lot to show for my time tonight.
fri jan 24 18:37
tonight i'll be at marc and gayle's, then tomorrow i'll be taking care of genna for some time while they're gone. i talked to steve today, which was great, but it made me late, so that wasn't great. i did do a lot of stuff at work, though, mainly by dint of rushing around. and i got to talk to harrold about my car, and get some good ideas on what to do to it and when. maybe i should have waited to write later, since i can't think of anything else to say.
sun jan 26 00:17
the reason why poets used to write things like "oh muse, where art thou" is because they only wrote (or at least only published) stuff when they were inspired and had something useful to say. i think entertainment has long since taken the place of art in society, and this has caused music, movies, writing, and much of the "visual arts" to become non-art. artists of any nature produce works that are inspired and thoughtful, while entertainers simply distract you for awhile, usually with humor. art is driven by the artist, entertainment is driven by the consumer, so art is scarce and valuable, while entertainment is an industry of which anyone can have as much as they want. in case you're confused, this is a roundabout way to rant about my previous post or 2, which have been completely devoid of valuable content. i guess i started writing because i had things to say, and also because i wanted to keep track of myself so that i would have more motivation to be not so damned lazy, but i think it's devolved into some chore, or some bland commentary on my life and habits, in which i don't think anyone is interested, unless maybe you're just overly curious. in other news, i'm going to buy the quantum, which means a long and probably fun adventure to maine, and i'm selling my subaru this week and next, and tomorrow is church, i'll probly go with marc and gayle to the episcopal church steve and kristen went to, and taking care of genna was fun today, bla, bla, bla.
mon jan 27 03:10
i've done a bit of research on blogs, since i don't know much about them, and figured some knowledge about what i'm doing here might come in handy sometime. i found a lot of sites that offer to host your blog, which i guess if i didn't know any html and was stuck on a dialup, i might go for, but they all just seemed so cheesy and lame. and most of the people that have blogs on those sites can't spell, and use bad grammar, and talk about nothing. i guess i talk about nothing sometimes too, but at least i can spell, so i'll keep my nose in the air and my blog on my own server. i also found some good blogs, but they were mostly by people like professional writers or high-profile people. my blog is very influenced by jade's, and i didn't realize his was so unique till now. it seems that the quality of many things is in direct proportion to the expected size of the audience, instead of in proportion to the quality of the producer. i decided to put a bit of context and organization into this project, maybe because every other blog has some of that, and maybe because february will be here soon and i think i want to keep the months separate. i wonder if writing every day is going to change my life in any significant way...in some ways i hope so, and in some ways i hope not. i guess i think that about a lot of things, though. while i'm saying nothing, i might as well say that i got a myrealbox.com account, which = w00t, and i need to write an info page on myself, and i didn't go to church because i would have gone with marc and gayle but they didn't go, so i got up really late, and i have a million things to do this week, or maybe just 999,999, but whatever.
tues jan 28 02:27
sex. that's what it's all about, anyway. i mean, here are these guys wandering through the desert, led by some prophet/priest/king dude who alone speaks for god, since he's the only one god will talk to without getting all pissy, and you can't blame god for that anyway, he probably should have destroyed them like he intended to about 50 times before moses talked him out of it. but all they have to do is follow about a jillion seemingly pointless commands, and god kicks the butt of anybody who messes with them. balak saw them coming and got all scared, so he tried to hire balaam - who is this guy anyway? - to curse the israelites, since apparently balaam talked to god even though he wasn't part of the promised people. and that's another thing entirely, but still, god had a nice little chuckle while balaam blessed the israelites 3 times, and prophesied and everything. balak really got shortchanged, but that doesn't matter since all he cared about was himself, so he didn't leave any room for god to care for him. then they went home, and nobody heard from them again.
While the Israelites were camped at Acacia [Hebrew: Shittim], some of the men defiled themselves by sleeping with the local Moabite women. These women invited them to attend sacrifices to their gods, and soon the Israelites were feasting with them and worshiping the gods of Moab. Before long Israel was joining in the worship of Baal of Peor, causing the LORD's anger to blaze against his people.
yeah, that's what i'm talking about. you want to really get those israelites, don't pull out your sword, pull off your clothes. but what made god mad wasn't that the men defiled themselves by sleeping with all these moabites, or even that they did it while (i assume) they weren't married to them, but that they started worshiping their gods, and thus not worshiping YHWH.
So Moses ordered Israel's judges to execute everyone who had joined in worshiping Baal of Peor. Just then one of the Israelite men brought a Midianite woman into the camp, right before the eyes of Moses and all the people, as they were weeping at the entrance of the Tabernacle [Hebrew: Tent of Meeting]. When Phinehas son of Eleazar and grandson of Aaron the priest saw this, he jumped up and left the assembly. Then he took a spear and rushed after the man into his tent. Phinehas thrust the spear all the way through the man's body and into the woman's stomach. So the plague against the Israelites was stopped, but not before 24,000 people had died.
what? this is classic scripture, just describes the most crazy stuff in this dry and sparse narrative. since when does sexing moabites = worshiping other gods? and was that couple that phinehas skewered screwing? was that plague like some kind of mad god-breathed STD? obviously that stuff isn't important. i mean, it would be to us, since we're concerned with proof of individual wrongdoing, and we had a cow over 3,000 people dying in the WTC, but moses, or whoever wrote numbers, just leaves it out.
Then the LORD said to Moses, "Phinehas son of Eleazar and grandson of Aaron the priest has turned my anger away from the Israelites by displaying passionate zeal among them on my behalf. So I have stopped destroying all Israel as I had intended to do in my anger. So tell him that I am making my special covenant of peace with him. In this covenant, he and his descendants will be priests for all time, because he was zealous for his God and made atonement for the people of Israel."
we would have liked to have seen phinehas stand trial for his gruesome double murder, but god said you go boy, kill them fuckers. and again, god tries to wipe out his chosen people, but changes his mind after some dude does something he thinks is cool. we can see what's important here, and it's not the details of the sins or sinners, who did what and died, but who stuck up for god. phinehas saves the day, and god gives him a huge promotion, and his own special covenant! here's the point: concern yourself with the things of god, and not only will you be not screwing midianites, but you'll be saving half your brothers and sisters who are screwing them. but if you're a midianite, or moabite, or whoever, there's no hope for you, since your head didn't pop out between the legs of an israelite woman, except for balaam. this reeks of favoritism, until you read a few verses ago: god was about to kill all of the israelites, too. i guess there's only a few people he wasn't just itching for an excuse to kill, and that's probably still true today, except for this:
And so, dear brothers and sisters, we can boldly enter heaven's Most Holy Place because of the blood of Jesus. This is the new, life-giving way that Christ has opened up for us through the sacred curtain, by means of his death for us. And since we have a great High Priest who rules over God's people, let us go right into the presence of God, with true hearts fully trusting him. For our evil consciences have been sprinkled with Christ's blood to make us clean, and our bodies have been washed with pure water.
wed jan 29 00:07
huh. maybe harrold is right, maybe i need to stop killing myself for a schedule and try to find something that fits me instead of trying to fit myself to a schedule. but i still think i need to work through school. i'll find out when i do the seminar thing with wycliffe in may, i'll at least find out what i do need to do, school or not, or maybe just that i'm back to nothing, not knowing what i want to do. huh. i hope i'll be able to register for summer classes in time, if that's what i decide to do. well, really i hope i'll just get through tomorrow. 13:00 or bust. maybe if i go to bed now i'll be able to wake up on time tomorrow.
wed jan 29 01:27
i think i finally figured out what stress is, and i think i'm stressing myself out. stress is basically just the effect of realization of personal failure, and since i fail a lot at a lot of things, and make an effort to be honest about everything, i fully realize my own failures and the effects of them, and that stresses me out. you could say it's because i try too hard at things, or you could say it's because i don't cut myself enough slack, but if either is true, which i don't think they are, neither is what causes my stress. this is stress: realizing the standard to which god calls me and realizing how far short of that i fall. isn't this where grace comes in? yes, but even a full realization of grace doesn't negate a realization of personal failure. grace covers failure, but it does not cover rejection of grace and the one who offers it. i wish i could say that despite all my faults, failures, shortcomings, i'm still god's, and he has all of me, so it's in his hands. i wish that were true, but it's not. my failures are not that i suck at anything; my failure is that i live for myself and not for christ. i don't feel like i'm incapable of living for christ and not myself, or inadequate for the job god has for me, i rather feel the shame and guilt of one who has full knowledge of his abilities and duties, and instead does either nothing or purely selfish things. in short, i feel like a waste of god's work, a waste of mind and body; both of which are excellent and fully capable of every good work, but neither of which submit to their created purpose. instead of glorifying god in all i do, i do nothing.
If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God. Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much more severely do you think a man deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God under foot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace? For we know him who said, "It is mine to avenge; I will repay," and again, "The Lord will judge his people." It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
thurs jan 30 02:08
it has occurred to me that somebody might be reading this, thinking that i write to publish, that i write this with a person in mind. i don't. i write for me, not you; that is, i do write with a person in mind, that person is me, and i do it for the value of writing down what i think, not for the value others may get from reading. i don't put it on the web out of vanity but because it's easy, and because i realize that it's a somewhat unique window into myself, and that might help someone to begin to understand me, or them, or something, better.
fri jan 31 04:01
every night i plan to go to bed before 02:00, and every night i'm up till 04:00 or so. and every day i plan to be up around 11:00, and every day i get up at 12:40, which is 20 minutes before i have to be at work. then i rush to get to work 5 minutes late, and don't get done any of the 10 little things i plan to do every day before going to work, like brushing my teeth, having breakfast, taking checks to the bank, calling the VW dealership to order a part for my car, etc. i'm sure some of it is just the sleep schedule and pattern that needs to be re-set about 2 to 4 hours earlier, but the pattern is the way it is for a reason, and that reason is that i'm generally as lazy and procrastinative as i can possibly be, which isn't good for me, and you'd think i'd change, since i've obviously figured out what the problem is, but that's just it: i don't understand myself. years ago i alternated between priding myself on my uniqueness and despairing of ever finding someone who really understands me, but then i realized that since i don't understand myself, i'm not sure i want to find someone who does. i mean, it would give them some kind of awesome power over me, and i'd just have to totally trust them and try to learn from them something about myself. i think that's the main reason people don't like shrinks, because it makes it painfully obvious that they don't understand themselves and are thus not in control of themselves, and everyone hates not being in control of something, especially themselves. but what's hardest for me to reconcile to understanding is that god does understand me completely, and not only loves me, so i know i can trust him, but also is sovereign over my life - so why doesn't he do something about it? of course, if he just controlled me, i'd have no choice and would be unable to love him, so i don't see how he'd benefit from that, but it just seems like an awful lot of "trials and tribulations" i'm going through in order to bring my life under his control.
This suffering is all part of what God has called you to. Christ, who suffered for you, is your example. Follow in his steps. . . .Dear friends, don't be surprised at the fiery trials you are going through, as if something strange were happening to you. Instead, be very glad--because these trials will make you partners with Christ in his suffering, and afterward you will have the wonderful joy of sharing his glory when it is displayed to all the world. . . .And since we are his children, we will share his treasures--for everything God gives to his Son, Christ, is ours, too. But if we are to share his glory, we must also share his suffering. . . .But this precious treasure--this light and power that now shine within us--is held in perishable containers, that is, in our weak bodies. So everyone can see that our glorious power is from God and is not our own. We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed and broken. We are perplexed, but we don't give up and quit. We are hunted down, but God never abandons us. We get knocked down, but we get up again and keep going. Through suffering, these bodies of ours constantly share in the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be seen in our bodies.
sun feb 02 01:55
i was going to do a lot of stuff to my car today, but i was up at 09:00 because genna was running around making noise, so i had a nap in the early afternoon and then went to the shop and just balanced my wheels instead of doing a lot more. whoo, that made a huge difference, i can actually go faster than 55 without the car shaking like it's about to come apart. working on your own stuff isn't much fun, but fixing it sure is, at least after it's done, i had a big grin on my face driving home because it was so easy and had such dramatic results. this is why people become workaholics, and have affairs, because human relationships just aren't like that. sometimes you put in hours and years of effort and find only pain and emptiness and frustration, and sometimes an absolutely magical connection, very fulfilling and satisfying, just falls in your lap. which would you choose? i'd like to say i'd be faithful, but i haven't had to make that choice. and when i balanced my wheels, i did it wrong at first, so the machine kept giving me weird numbers and i couldn't get them right, until joel showed me i had to put the spacer on the other side, then it worked just fine. in life as in balancing my wheels, it would have been a lot easier and not taken so much time if i had done it right the first time, but i was lazy and quit school twice, and don't have joel here to show me which side to put the spacer on, so i'm waiting and hoping to hit something right sometime. i hope that when i make a decision about marriage, i choose right the first time...maybe somebody will be around to show me.
mon feb 03 02:11
so, the big news, i guess, is that i finally got a domain name and web hosting. it's kind of expensive, and i don't really need it, which is why i didn't get it before, but i think it's worth it for the stable email address, all the server space and bandwidth i'm likely to ever use, and the general coolness factor of it. how many people do you know that have their own domain name? i can think of 4, myself included. sure, any shmuck with $100 and an email address can do it, but what you put on it is what matters, and i hope to rock the internet with my website content, or failing that, get the internet stoned. i'm having trouble with my web host, it seems like they didn't get everything set up right, or maybe i'm just pushing the wrong buttons. anyway, in a few days the dns will propagate and i'll have everything there, and i'll be free to fill it with various and sundry digital things. right now, though, i'm going to bed, and i hope i'll be able to get up tomorrow earlier than usual. i think my blog entries have been somewhat loony and useless lately, in the sense that a year or 5 from now i'll consider them worthless, and i think i should start writing when i get up, instead of before i go to bed, but that requires that i get up with enough time to do that, and that's just not happening, at least not yet.
tues feb 04 00:46
i can't think of anything worth saying tonight, so instead i'll put in some lyrics of a song by rich mullins that fits how i see myself and the world right now.
you who live in heaven/hear the prayers of those of us who live on earth/who are afraid of being left by those we love/and who get hardened by the hurt
do you remember when you lived down here where we all scrape/to find the faith to ask for daily bread/did you forget about us after you had flown away/well i memorized every word you said
still i'm so scared, i'm holding my breath/while you're up there just playing hard to get
you who live in radiance/hear the prayers of those of us who live in skin/we have a love that's not as patient as yours was/still we do love now and then
did you ever know loneliness/did you ever know need/do you remember just how long a night can get?/when you were barely holding on/and your friends fall asleep/and don't see the blood that's running in your sweat
will those who mourn be left uncomforted/while you're up there just playing hard to get?
and i know you bore our sorrows/and i know you feel our pain/and i know it would not hurt any less/even if it could be explained
and i know that i am only lashing out/at the one who loves me most/and after i figured this, somehow/all i really need to know
is if you who live in eternity/hear the prayers of those of us who live in time/we can't see what's ahead/and we can not get free of what we've left behind/i'm reeling from these voices that keep screaming in my ears/all the words of shame and doubt, blame and regret
i can't see how you're leading me unless you've led me here/where i'm lost enough to let myself be led/and so you've been here all along i guess/it's just your ways and you are just plain hard to get
wed feb 05 01:16
ugh, i'm tired. i guess that's good, since i really do need to sleep now and get up early tomorrow...i'm hoping to go to maine this friday, what a trip. there's a ton i have to do between now and then, and i need some money too, but i think it's going to work. i'm almost hoping something doesn't work out, so i have to wait another 2 weeks, but i know i'd just put everything off till the last minute 2 weeks from now and it wouldn't be any better. i didn't used to want money or even understand why so many people are so driven by wanting money, but this whole car thing is starting to teach me. i mean, if i had a bunch of money, i'd just buy a relatively new car around here that doesn't need all the time and effort put into it, and that sounds really nice. of course, i'd have no real satisfaction in doing a lot of my own work, and i wouldn't really learn anything, but it sure would be nicer and easier. that's all money does, just make life easier, not better, in fact it usually makes the person lazier and stupider and more selfish. the easy way to do anything is almost never the best way, and the best way is almost always a royal pain, so i guess i can take comfort in thinking that at least doing the whole car thing the hard way, buying old junkers and always having to work on them, is probably closer to the best way than just having a lot of money and buying new or nearly new cars. this is just a complicated way for me to rejoice in all circumstances, i guess. it's not fun, you know, rejoicing when you don't feel like it, but it sure beats the alternative.
wed feb 05 22:26
"nobody notices until you make a mistake." "maybe i can't make you do it but i sure can make you sorry you didn't!" "no good deed goes unpunished." "no matter how much you do, you'll never do enough." i used to think these were made up to be funny, and as such had some grounding in someone's reality, but i didn't realize that some people actually live like this all the time, even after living with them for over a year. the latest episode in my adventures in living with bob and joyce has taught some things, things that i hope are completely useless to me. yesterday at work i cleaned off harrold's forklifts, and got my shoes kinda muddy in the process, but i didn't notice till i walked in and made tracks to my room on the carpet. i had genna with me for the evening so i couldn't clean them up right then, i just ran the vacuum cleaner which did pretty much nothing, then i was gone taking care of genna all evening. then at around 02:00, bob poked his head in my door and said that joyce about had a cow when she saw them and i had to clean them up by the time she was home tomorrow or...something, i don't know. i've never understood threats, and that's the form used exclusively by bob and joyce to communicate that they want me to do something. so when i got home from work today, i did exactly as i had planned when i saw i'd tracked dirt in last night; i cleaned it up as soon as i could. only it didn't get clean, even after using half a bottle of 409 carpet cleaner and scrubbing for 45 minutes. i mean, it's pretty much clean, but the cleaner stuff made the carpet really clean where i scrubbed except for a few spots that wouldn't come off, so now there are patches of super clean with small stain spots in the middle of them. so, joyce poked her head in tonight with a pretty dour expression, and informed me (not in these words) that it was my unqualified responsibility to clean the carpet, and that whatever i'd done wasn't cleaning it. she didn't even seem surprised when i told her that i'd scrubbed for 45 minutes and used half the bottle of carpet cleaner, and said i'd just need to find some carpet cleaner tomorrow that works, and shut my door. sometimes i wonder if they think ill of me for not communicating with them, but then i realize that the reason i communicate so much and so well with many friends, but rarely talk to bob and joyce is because i just can't ever seem to communicate with them regardless of what i try. i don't understand them, and i know they don't understand me, and i'd much rather have understanding and communication, but having tried different methods over about a year and a half with pretty much no success, i don't think that's possible, and i often think they don't want that. the fact that they don't often talk to each other, and can't ever seem to communicate or understand each other just serves to validate my ideas about the lack of communication being because of them, not me. communication is 100% the responsibility of each party, not 50/50, but there are also times when 2 parties simply can't communicate, because one or both is unwilling to admit fault, or try to think differently in order to understand. in this case, i think i'm learning a lot about communication and relationships that i don't really want to know, things that may be of great help in the future, but i hope to never need. knowing how to work around the brokenness and problems in the world can be a good thing, but knowing how to build relationships and proper communication in the first place is infinitely more valuable, and at my age, i'm far more interested in building good and right relationships than i am in mending broken ones.
fri feb 07 03:22
i think the 3 things i hate most in life are time, money, and stuff, in that order. life is about god and people, and those 3 things are the worst corrupters and destroyers of those relationships. i've pretty much always hated time, with its ability to make you start or stop doing something not based on whether it is good to do or not do it, but based only on some nearly meaningless concept - "it's time for _______". and it makes me feel universally bad, because i always feel like i should be managing my time better, doing better things with the limited amount of it that i have. time isn't exclusively evil, but the good things it can do or bring to life are so far overshadowed by the negatives that the few minor good things about it are effectively cancelled out. and money...every time i need a lot of money and don't have it, i hate money mostly because i'm so dependent on it and in so many ways a slave to it, constrained in what i can and can't do by it, and when i have what money i need, i hate it because of the feelings of self-sufficiency and greed that it immediately invokes. it's really true that nobody can have enough money, since it makes you want more than you have, and the hindus figured out a long time ago that unfulfilled desire is the root of pain and suffering. it's true that desire would still exist if money didn't, but money's quantifying effect on everything irritates and magnifies what desire you have, and creates such a focus on it that it becomes the apparent cause of the pain and suffering. stuff is in one sense an extension or different form of money, but its real power lies in its ability to make you think it's what life is about and make you focus on stuff to the exclusion of people and god. when i think about how much time, money, effort, and thought i spend on stuff which is so temporary, and how it so often distracts me from people and god, which are eternal, i just get so disgusted with myself i have to stop thinking about it before i become an ascetic. there is a value to renouncing money and stuff, but doing so immediately cuts you off from the vast majority of people, since their lives are so entwined with stuff, that in the end ascetics lose more than they gain. gautama buddha figured that out and invented a dualistic system of reality and illusion to try to escape the inevitable consequences of dealing with stuff, but in the end what happened is that buddhists became schizophrenic in their dealings with people, and eventually became unable to distinguish the illusion they'd created with the reality which kept invading, so they lost any hope of making life better for anyone, themselves included, and in all their efforts to free themselves of this world, they ignore the only real salvation from this world and its misery, so they just make their lives miserable and then go to hell anyway. i guess what it all boils down to is that time, money, and stuff are all necessary, but dealing with them properly is just too tricky for me, and it's easier to claim incompetence and oppression than to actually use the power of christ to learn to live victoriously like he did. it's the only way to live a life worthy of the calling of christ, the only way to have real peace, and the only way to be of real help to any other person, but it's just so hard and out of this world, and i'm not superhuman like jesus.
He was despised and rejected--a man of sorrows, acquainted with bitterest grief. We turned our backs on him and looked the other way when he went by. He was despised, and we did not care. Yet it was our weaknesses he carried; it was our sorrows that weighed him down. And we thought his troubles were a punishment from God for his own sins! But he was wounded and crushed for our sins. He was beaten that we might have peace. He was whipped, and we were healed! All of us have strayed away like sheep. We have left God's paths to follow our own. Yet the LORD laid on him the guilt and sins of us all. . . Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the priceless gain of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I may have Christ and become one with him. I no longer count on my own goodness or my ability to obey God's law, but I trust Christ to save me. For God's way of making us right with himself depends on faith. As a result, I can really know Christ and experience the mighty power that raised him from the dead. I can learn what it means to suffer with him, sharing in his death, so that, somehow, I can experience the resurrection from the dead!
sat feb 08 07:35
liar, liar, pants on fire, hanging from the telephone wire!! that's moses, you know. i think god only kept him around for as long as he did because he was the most faithful of the israelites, not because he was really who god wanted. anyway, so here's moses and the israelites just about to enter the promised land and stuff, and moses is giving the people this big speech to remind them why their parents all died, the whole wander-around-in-the-wilderness-till-we-all-die thing, because they were ninnies and didn't believe god and felt like doing whatever they wanted, and moses is apparently trying to get the new generation to not make the same mistake, so he's like giving them a history lesson.
"When the LORD heard your complaining, he became very angry. So he solemnly swore, `Not one of you from this entire wicked generation will live to see the good land I swore to give your ancestors, except Caleb son of Jephunneh. He will see this land because he has followed the LORD completely. I will give to him and his descendants some of the land he walked over during his scouting mission.'
"And the LORD was also angry with me because of you. He said to me, `You will never enter the Promised Land! Instead, your assistant, Joshua son of Nun, will lead the people into the land. Encourage him as he prepares to enter it. . . "At that time I pleaded with the LORD and said, `O Sovereign LORD, I am your servant. You have only begun to show me your greatness and power. Is there any god in heaven or on earth who can perform such great deeds as yours? Please let me cross the Jordan to see the wonderful land on the other side, the beautiful hill country and the Lebanon mountains.' "But the LORD was angry with me because of you, and he would not listen to me. `That's enough!' he ordered. `Speak of it no more. You can go to Pisgah Peak and view the land in every direction, but you may not cross the Jordan River. But commission Joshua and encourage him, for he will lead the people across the Jordan. He will give them the land you now see before you.'
he says TWICE in different places that the reason he can't enter the promised land is because god is angry at him for the people's sake - what the heck? not only is that false, but it's also defamatory towards god, in the speech that he's giving to make them follow god and all. moses was proud and angry and struck the rock instead of speaking to it like god told him to, and that's why god said NO YUO to him and he was locked out of the promised land that he'd worked so hard for. so it was his fault the whole time, but he tells the israelites it was their fault, or really their parents' fault. what a blame-shifting loser! i mean, i used to have a lot of respect for this guy, he's the only one god will talk to, and he keeps pleading for the people, and does whatever god says except for this one mistake with hitting the rock, but what's all this cowardly blame-shifting? why can't he own up to his mistakes and tell the truth? this is like the enron scandal or something, corrupt damned politicians, except moses isn't damned, he even gets a spot in the coveted hall of faith. moses supposedly wrote the pentateuch, also, so who knows what he got right and what he conveniently omitted? i bet he was a lot more sneaky and wimpy than he looks in his autobiography of sorts, and god was only using him because he was available, not because he was a really great guy. that holds for israel the whole time, too, god needed a nation into which to pour himself so he could introduce the messiah later on, and he picked abraham and thus the israelites more because abraham had faith and was available than because he was an especially good guy. the same is true of anyone, though, salvation is by faith, not our merit, and grace covers all our demerits, even sneaky stuff like moses pulled. this is the mystery of the gospel, which is good news for everyone - i know i'm not any kind of especially good guy, but i can be useful to god, and he saves me from my own stupid pride, because of my faith and availability to him, and his grace covers my many failures.
How thankful I am to Christ Jesus our Lord for considering me trustworthy and appointing me to serve him, even though I used to scoff at the name of Christ. . . Oh, how kind and gracious the Lord was! He filled me completely with faith and the love of Christ Jesus. This is a true saying, and everyone should believe it: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners--and I was the worst of them all. But that is why God had mercy on me, so that Christ Jesus could use me as a prime example of his great patience with even the worst sinners. Then others will realize that they, too, can believe in him and receive eternal life. Glory and honor to God forever and ever. He is the eternal King, the unseen one who never dies; he alone is God. Amen.
mon feb 10 01:11
if i thought this were possible, i'd think god was orchestrating situations to conspire against me so that i can't get anything done. early friday evening i had a 3 hour nap, then was up the rest of the night although i tried unsuccessfully to sleep for a few hours. that's really confusing since i've had the same sleep schedule for about 2 weeks now but just couldn't sleep during the time when i'm always sleeping. then i figured since i'm up i'll get stuff done saturday, but the shop wasn't really open, so i couldn't work on the tire machine or my car there. i did get my oil changed, but it took most of the afternoon because i had to go to my aunt's house to do it. today i was going to do bla bla bla, but went to eat lunch with marc and gayle, then decided to go with them to get marc's motorcycle, but the bike place was closed so we went to some monstrous mall and got mauled instead. so i just wrote one email this evening, whoo. why wasn't i magically up all night, say, monday night last week so i could easily effect some change on my sleep schedule for the week? why was it so dang cold saturday so i really didn't want to work outside on my motorcycle? why am i looking for excuses? maybe it's not really the case that i could be doing a lot more than i am, although that certainly seems true, but maybe if i were trying a lot harder to get stuff done i'd just run into more and more obstacles. this whole schedule thing just really has me confused and whipped, and i've only just started trying. it's probably supposed to get better as i go, and i sure hope so, 'cause all this crap is discouraging, but i haven't lost hope or will to keep trying, and i guess that's the important part.
wed feb 12 01:05
where is the line between positive self-esteem and selfish pride? where is the line between humility and self-deprecation? those are lines i'm trying to walk, but i can't seem to even figure out where they are. i do think that a large part of why i've been so lazy is because of my selfish pride, which feeds rebellion against anything i either don't feel like doing or am "supposed" to do, so instead i do whatever's easiest or most fun for the immediate moment, which is usually nothing that is in any way helpful. and i do think that much of my recent facing up to that and trying to change has been simply self-deprecation, which instead of inspiring me to do good, just makes me feel worthless and hopeless. and the times when i do have some positive change, when i find that i can actually accomplish things that i plan to do, my feelings change from worthlessness to selfish pride in myself, instead of humbly and honestly realizing what i can and can't do, and allowing myself the freedom to learn and grow. i need to both constantly realize my faults and failures, and also give myself the grace to overcome that, and with the power of christ in me, humbly do the work i'm here to do. the battle is not fought in my actions, whether or not i get up for work on time, whether or not i follow through on my commitments to people, it is rather fought in my ideas and attitudes, and if those are right, my actions will of necessity follow.
wed feb 12 20:56
i talked to esther and sarah monday night, and after thinking about what was said, i've come to a few conclusions. i've been trying to observe, gauge, and measure myself, measuring my actions and my thoughts, trying to figure out why i do and don't do the things that i do, because i figure that if i can figure out myself and the reasons for my actions, then i'll be able to affect some change in my life for good. i think that's been a good thing to do, but i also think i've been hitting the wrong nail on the head. i've never fully understood the idea of exactly how to bring your life under the control of christ. i mean, is it an act of self-discipline, where you crucify yourself, beating your body to make it your slave, taking every thought captive to the will of christ, or is it about giving up yourself, not trying to "be good" but resting in the grace of god, since jesus has already done it all for us? it seems those are the only 2 ways to make yourself be christlike, and those are kinda polar opposites, both with some support in the bible, so it looks like either a contradiction in commands, or an attempt to describe something that's not understandable without experiencing it. for a long time i've suspected that the whole idea of becoming christlike is something that you can't write a 12-step plan for, and can't provide a blueprint or roadmap for, so all the ways it's talked about in the bible are attempts to make this most mysterious part of the gospel something that can be understood, but it's ultimately something that can only be understood as it's experienced. i think that instead of the process being one of the opposites i mentioned, or some combination of those, some place in between, it's rather a third thing which can only be described in terms that sound like contradictory polar opposites. and i've been trying to measure myself, comparing myself against the glory of god, realizing how far i fall short, and comparing myself against others i know, realizing that even compared to most people i know, i'm pretty bad at doing what i plan to do. but that's the wrong nail: i need to stop looking at where i was, where i am, where i'm going, and stop looking at where others are and where they're going, because i can't accurately measure myself, i can't know where i am or where i'm going, whether i'm making progress in whatever path god has for me. it's not for me to know or decide what kind of progress i'm making in my path towards godliness, in my path towards fulfilling god's calling for my life, i can't properly analyze where i've been and compare that with where i am, and make projections about where i'm going. even hindsight isn't 20/20, because i can't know the value of my past or present experiences until i'm done living. it's very easy and tempting for me to look at my life, especially since leaving nc state, and coming to the conclusion that i've done nothing useful with my life, that i've wasted the years since then, but i don't know the value of what i've done, so while it may be true that i've wasted a lot of time and opportunities, i can't decide that, and i can't live as though i have to "make up for lost time" or something. it's tempting to try to figure out exactly why i do and don't do what i do, and try to understand the mystery of christ living in me, but knowing and understanding myself or christ in me won't bring about the change i'm looking for. instead, i need to focus only on the time i have right now and make the most of it, doing what i know to do, learning the mystery of christ as i live it. i know god has plans for my life, but it's not my job to figure out what those are, it's my job to do what i know, and that'll keep me busy while he works his plan through me.
fri feb 14 01:07
steve and kristen are in town for a week, i picked them up from the airport tonight and took them to steve's brother's house in ft. worth, where they're staying while they're here. it was really great to see them again, and i realized how much i miss them being here. i don't often think about having few friends here, and when i do, i don't think negatively about it, but i really love steve and kristen, and it really is great to see them again. on tuesday, after having successfully gotten my butt into work on time (13:00) every day for 2 weeks straight, i decided to start working earlier, so i just got up and called harrold yesterday at 10:45 and he said sure come in now. i talked to him about it and we decided i'd start work at 11:00 every day now, which is still later than i really want, but a ton better than i was doing say last month when i was sliding in to work whenever i could get my lazy butt out of bed and only working like 15 hours/week. i know harrold is pleased with my timeliness now, and i'm able to get a lot more done at the shop, and all that feels great, helps motivate me to do better tomorrow, and having the set pattern makes actually doing it a little easier. i'm still getting up just as late as i possibly can and rushing off to work asap every day, leaving me no time to take checks to the bank (i now have 2 piled up for the trip i plan for tomorrow) or call the vw dealer or anything else, but i have been a little more industrious in the evenings, so i guess overall i'm doing better. and now i'll be able to clock out early some days and work on my own stuff, so maybe soon i'll have my motorcycle on the road, and make my rabbit legal, and get done whatever other nefarious deeds i've been trying to do for months. i have some tentative ideas on why this pattern of small changes has occurred, but until i'm sure this will last more than a month or 2, i'm hesitant to really say whoopee or hey look mom no slacker butt. anyway, next week will be busy i'm sure with steve and kristen here, and then i'll be going to maine at the end of the week to get my car, so it appears that at least until i get back, i won't have time to be lazy, and i'll have some momentum and habits set for being somewhat responsible and industrious, so i think that'll carry over into march. if this keeps up, i'll be in school this fall for sure, which i think would be a Very Good Thing™.
wed feb 19 02:47
i haven't written for several days not because i haven't had anything to say but because i haven't had any time to say it, or i was too tired to feel like i could write coherently, so i've been waiting for some time when i'll be able to write something real, but that time hasn't come yet, so maybe i shouldn't be writing now but i feel like it. i feel like my life is kinda coming together, i've been getting to work on time and feeling like i'm really doing well there, and i may have found a church, and the accompanying doctrine and lifestyle, to belong to, although it's not at all what i might have expected to belong to, and i've been having great communication with some of my friends, enough so that i feel connected to people again instead of just wandering the wasteland alone. my plans for going to maine are pushing my time hard, and it's hard to find time for anything, but i guess that means i'm making use of my time, and i'll know later if it's good use or not, but right now all i'm worrying about is right now - i have decisions to make and responsibilities and actions, so that's what i'm thinking and doing.
thurs feb 20 03:39
aahhh!! maine!! at least i've been slowly panicking for the past 2 days, instead of waiting till a few hours before i had planned to leave to actually do anything about it. it's weird, but a number of things have kinda fallen into place for this trip, stuff has happened in just certain ways or at just certain times so that i can actually make this trip and get the car. my parents live like that all the time, and i used to, but for quite a long time i've either planned every aspect of something or it hasn't happened, so it's weird to plan something and start it all in motion and then see other things just fall into place instead of falling how they usually would, which would mess up my plans. i know a lot of christians who would point to that as the work of god, and say that's a sign that i'm "supposed to" go on this trip to get this car or something, but if god has an opinion about me going to get this car, i don't need to know that, i just need to live as i'm called to and what i need will be taken care of, maybe this trip and this car and maybe something else. besides, if god is actually orchestrating situations to "help me" get this car, he is sure picking the most obscure ways to let me know he's interested. anyway, i'm only concerned about what i can change, and that's my attitudes and actions, so i don't care to discuss things that can't be known, especially about god, i just need to do now what's required of me for righteous living, and at this moment that means going to bed.
sat mar 01 16:37
tired, sad, lonely, maybe even depressed. i just got back from taking steve and kristen to the airport, they're on a plane back to medford now. having them here was like streams of white light into darkened corners, i guess, and now i'm looking at the next several months kinda by myself, back to the daily whatever, and feeling like the dreary drizzly sky outside, cold and lonely. i feel like sleeping, but i have plenty of stuff to do...maybe later. these past 2 weeks feel like a sort of slow ascent and rapid descent, being busy and doing fun stuff, then going to maine with them, meeting veronika on the way there, and coming back and saying bye to them. the high point was having veronika on the way from lancaster to maine, it was super neat to see how she and steve and kristen interacted, and to feel like i had enough time with her that we didn't have to be talking all the time, we could just spend some time together and (at least for me) it didn't feel very rushed. i've realized how lonely and desperate for friends i am, getting my feelings all wrapped up in 2 different girls at the same time, and i think it's just because i've had so little good interaction with good friends that when i start talking to and seeing these wonderful people i somewhat instantly have these feelings of attraction to them. the fact that i've liked them before has some effect also, there are certain things that i always find attractive about them, but now it's been kinda magnified and fed to the point where i have to watch myself and my motives for communicating with them. we'll see if that means more or less real communication and friendship with them, i hope it means more but i don't have a lot of control over that.
tues mar 04 01:52
orthodox christianity has taken a hold of me like nothing else i have ever experienced. i could make analogies but they would fall apart and not fully describe it. the more i experience and read, the more i am convinced that this is truth and life and the true Church, the body of Christ, the path to true communion with God and with other christians. this is not to say that i have ditched the protestantism in which i was raised or think that there is no salvation outside orthodoxy, but i do think that the orthodox church is the one historical true christian church and doctrine, and while many other churches have parts of the truth and their members share in the body of christ in some way, none of them are as complete as the orthodox church, which has remained true to its founding since peter, paul, james, and the other apostles founded the church. i have only been really aware of what orthodoxy is since i first went to st. seraphim's with steve and kristen 2 weeks ago, and i still have a lot of questions and ideas that need to be worked out, and i expect it will take quite some time before i feel comfortable with the tradition and culture of orthodoxy, but from what i have experienced and learned so far it seems that is the course i am taking. i feel as though i'm becoming acquainted with my home for the first time.
sun mar 09 02:49
well, i'm back to sleeping and being awake at all the wrong times, and doing nothing, although i suspect it's only for one day. bob and joyce are gone for a week to some big deck expo in atlanta, so i'm here by myself, and all i did was talk to steve on the phone, take a nap, wash my quantum (but i missed some spots so it looks worse now), then took it for a drive to see if it overheated this time...and i stopped at best buy and it wouldn't start when i came out. some nice people gave me a jump but that didn't make any difference, i think the starter's bad, so they just took me home and i made supper and watched tv all evening. it's not as though i didn't have 100 things i could have done, and kinda wanted to do, but i just really felt like doing nothing all day, and the only things i did turned out to be counter-productive, as i have to go get my car from the best buy parking lot tomorrow. i don't really feel bad about wasting a day, though, as i'm doing pretty well with generally getting stuff done, so i think doing nothing for a day now and then can serve as a good break, my holy sabbath day, except that it's not set apart to the lord, but at least i didn't do anything, which would have been good enough for the pharisees to call it holy. divine liturgy at st. seraphim's starts in 6 hours, i hope i can wake up in time, and i hope i don't have too much trouble getting back to doing stuff next week.
mon mar 10 01:15
perhaps this is part of keeping a balance, but if so, i'm that much more sure of my own depravity. i did all of nothing this weekend, which means not just that the time could have been better spent, but that i spent most of the time just filling myself with a lot of damned idiocy, mostly by watching tv. it's a sort of drug, like a narcotic or barbiturate, it just lulls you into its nothingness, and even after just 2 days of watching it for a few hours, i've even stopped laughing or shouting at ads, and just cynically accept them. that to me is a sure sign that i've had way too much of the public and common garbage, and need to in some way flush it out or something. i guess it's possible that after like a month or 2 of being disciplined and for the most part organized and productive, the selfishness and that which loves evil and darkness in me has struck back and claimed a weekend. if that's true, then i need to somehow find a way to keep myself in a healthy sustainable balance between goodness and evil, a way to satisfy or nullify my desires for evil and destructive things, while keeping myself overall active and productive for the good that i want and love. this back and forth stuff is a hell of a lot better than the rather consistent evil void to which i was mostly a slave in months past, but i still realize in myself a capacity for goodness and beauty far beyond what i'm attaining even in my best moments, and that makes me feel as though anything less than perfection is unacceptable. this battle between good and evil, light and darkness, god-inspired effort and lazy selfish inaction that i'm fighting inside myself is really no different than any other person fights, and is also the same as god fought and experienced in the person of jesus. i don't know if perfection is attainable for humans on this earth, but i know that it is that to which we are called, given an example of, and given power to attain, so my path is set out for me, if i will participate in the divine mystery which is christ in me.
sun mar 16 01:18
i've been trying to figure myself out again, which is because i haven't been doing the things i want to be doing. it wouldn't be bad except that i want to do good things, but most of the time i do bad things or nothing. i've been doing very well with working consistently, which is good, but that doesn't mean i've been doing everything i want to do or plan to do. i missed church last week, and i'm not doing lent, and i'm feeling like a heathen, just working and eating and sleeping, and not even doing stuff like take a shower or clean the house or write email or work on my stuff. i haven't been reading the bible regularly either, which is the real barometer of my spiritual health and thus the rest of my life. i'm still somewhat undecided about myself, if my very real tendencies towards staying up all night and sleeping all day and always disregarding time are just a "normal" part of who i am, something i should accept and work around, or if it's something evil that needs to be sacrificed as i strive to be like jesus. i'm sure that my usual disrespect of time and being busy nearly always is worked out in my life in a selfish, evil way, and that being busy and timely usually presses me towards godliness, but i'm not sure if that's because there's something inherent in those different ways of handling life that makes them evil or good, or if it's just the way that i personally react to time and doing stuff that makes it seem like being on a schedule is somehow better. i often wish i had a pillar of cloud or fire to lead me, but instead i have the church, the bible, the holy spirit, and my will to try to balance and lead me on the path to christlike perfection. i know i don't need the micro-specific direction, both because i know i'm smart and willful, and because god gives every person just what they need to follow him, so i'd have the pillar of cloud if i needed it. tomorrow is church again, and there's some cool speaker dude in town so there'll be fun stuff in the evening too, and bob and joyce will probably be back in the evening, so i've got lots to keep me busy, if i choose to do it.
thurs mar 20 01:04
life goes in cycles, at least for me. or maybe it's just up and down, like a rollercoaster, or back and forth, like a pendulum. i'd rather throw up than keep time, though, so i'll say up and down. life seems flat right now, but really it's going somewhere and i just don't know where. sometimes you think you know where you're going, and sometimes you know you're lost, just along for the ride. am i a cynic, or depressed, or something? i like to think of myself as a realistic and well-adjusted person, and i know i come off as such most of the time, but i can't help but realize my inadequacy to deal with life, and not just because of the life i've chosen and the society i live in, but because of myself - living in some very different environments with different expectations has shown me that i consistently just screw around as much as i can get away with and never really pursue the kind of life i want. god's grace is something i'll never really understand, why does he care enough to give me a chance to defeat the slavery to my desires that grapples so hard for control? and why does he give me the power to live for him if i choose to, when he's all powerful and doesn't need me? life is a mystery, but at least it's an up and down mystery, never truly boring even when it seems like it.
mon mar 25 00:45
i've figured out two questions for myself, the answers to which i think would make a huge difference in my thinking and practice. is it possible for my selfishness to frustrate the will of god for my life? are my desires for specific things in life given by god and thus to be pursued and fulfilled, or results of my selfishness and thus something to be sacrificed on the path to holiness? the only other thing that i don't know that i'd like to is godly answers to a number of decisions i'm having to make, but that's somewhat insignificant in comparison to the overall life-changing effect i think the answers to the other 2 questions would have. over and over i'm impressed and almost surprised by the amount of things that i cannot know and don't need to know, and almost amazed that i continually seek to know these things. i'm not sure if these questions i have fall into that category, but at least right now it seems that knowing how my selfishness affects god's sovereignty and plan for me and knowing which of my desires are righteous and which are selfish would make a huge difference in my faith and life. one thing i do know, however, is that god can be fully trusted to provide everything we need at all times, so i know that i'll have the answers i'm seeking when i need them, if ever, and i'd like to say that since i don't have them now then i obviously don't need them now, but that gets back into a facet of my selfishness affecting god's sovereignty and provision - might he be providing the answers to these questions and i'm just stubbornly ignoring them? here's another question about which i've made a quick decision: should i eat something before i go to bed, or just hit the sack right now? for this, i'm relying on my own wisdom: i'll have a snack and then go to sleep. i wish all of life were that easy.
thurs mar 27 01:02
today my alarm clock mysteriously didn't ring, and i slept till 13:00 before i woke up. at first i thought the power had gone out or it was saturday or something, but then i realized it really was 13:00 on wednesday, meaning i was 3 hours late for work. that's the first time since january i've done that, and i think i'll start setting both alarm clocks again to keep that from happening again. harrold and i talked again about this job, whether it's the right one for me and what needs to happen to make me reliable. well, i don't know. there's so much i can't know about how i'll react to certain things, so while i'd like to say this is what needs to happen, i know that's just guessing. i am sure that i want to keep this job and be reliable, but i'm not sure that's what's best for me - it's so unnatural to have a regular daytime schedule and be reliable, and i have to fight myself so hard to fit into that, i'm sure there's something that fits me better, but i can't imagine what it is. i mean, people say "imagine the perfect job" and i can't, really. neither can i imagine the perfect wife, or the perfect government, or the perfect church, but that doesn't mean i'm not looking, and sometimes finding surprising things where i hadn't expected, like the orthodox church. life is just a bunch of guessing, and educated guesses aren't any more valuable than blind guesses - how can you know that the education in your guess points it in the right direction? sometimes i think i'm too much of a skeptic, doubting and deconstructing every belief, but that's certainly not my intent - certainty of truth is my intent, and apart from revelation, it seems pretty much inaccessible.
tues apr 08 03:23
inconsistency has hounded me yet again, such that i started this blog writing lots every night, and now i'm writing once a week or so. it's taken me 8 days just to put april up properly. it's partly because at first i was saying a lot of things i'd had stored up in my head for months, and then i kinda ran out and just said things as they came to mind. but i think it's more a change in my attitude and motivation. since coming back from maine over a month ago, i've pretty much either been doing what's necessary for survival or being lazy. well, i did replace the diesel injectors in my rabbit, which made a huge difference, but only took a few hours. i've still been good about getting to work on time, which has meant that i have an hour or 3 in the late afternoon when i feel compelled to do something useful. today i used the time to clean my subaru and put the roof rack on my quantum, and it looks a lot better on the quantum. so i guess i haven't been so lazy, but i haven't been writing emails or blog or sending a set of gaskets to a guy online who needs them or...yeah. i think in a week or 2 i'll be ready to sell my subaru, which will be nice, more to have it gone than to have the few hundred it'll bring. i really have to do something about my quantum or motorcycle soon so that i'll have something to drive for a week while i change the head gasket and other parts on my rabbit. that needs to happen...oh wow, next week or the one after. i did get hooked up with the total linguistics thing in waxhaw, so i really do need to fix my rabbit now so i can go to that in 3 weeks. life seems to be just an endless string of things i must do for this or that reason. being a street bum certainly looks attractive sometimes.
thurs apr 10 03:52
today marks another sort of turning point in my life, i think. i didn't wake up till 11:00, or 14:00, or something, and called to tell harrold i was sick (which was true) and couldn't come to work (which was not true), and proceeded to sleep until almost 17:00. well, that does it for that job. even during the best of times, these past few months that i've been consistently getting to work on time, i've continually noticed that a rigid schedule that keeps me up during the daytime has no real effect on my tendency to stay up all night and sleep all day. i don't know why that is, but it's something that seems pretty concrete in my life - regardless of what kind of schedule i keep, i'm pretty much always tired during the day and never at night. i seem to always be able to easily sleep in the daytime and easily stay up at night, regardless of how much sleep i've had or on what kind of schedule. i've often written it off to laziness and/or rebellion, but that really only accounts for part of my nocturnalism - even when laziness and rebellion make me want to stay up all day and sleep all night, it's still hard and feels unnatural. they've done studies that have shown that humans are diurnal, and naturally operate on a 25-hour circadian rythm. i've noticed that's quite true for nearly everyone i know, but i'm fairly sure i'm naturally nocturnal, and i seem to prefer a 36-hour rythm. it would be interesting to do some of those sleep tests on me to be able to verify that i'm somehow biologically different, but that's not the point. the point is that i'm going to have to quit working for harrold and find a night job somewhere. not many places are open between midnight and 08:00, but i have applications for four: three gas stations and a wal-mart. the gas station nearest here said they need a night manager - well, i could do that, and it's just a 10-minute walk from home. heck, with 2 weeks or less of training, i could do pretty much any job at any gas station, restaurant, or retail store. not that i really want those, but those are the places where it's easy to get a night job. besides, i never have, and maybe never will, look for a career job that pays money, so every job i do for money is just so i can pay the bills, and 30 hours per week at minimum wage pays the bills for me. harrold and i have talked about what kind of job would best suit me, and i had decided that while working for him didn't suit my apathy towards time and tendency towards nocturnalism, it sure was a great job, and could maybe prepare me for college, which needs timeliness, diurnalism, and above all self-discipline. i've been making slow progress in self-discipline, but i don't think i need to be more timely or diurnal than i am - those don't affect my godliness, as self-discipline does. but if i'm not working for harrold, what am i doing here? something, for sure, but nothing worth staying here for, i think. i've long wanted to move out of this house, but the cheapest place i can rent around here is $400/month, which is a bit more than i pay to be oppressed here, and if i'm getting a job at a gas station or a wal-mart, i could do that anywhere - and might as well move somewhere i could do something good or useful, or at least somewhere i could be around more friends. as soon as most of my friends find out that i really might move pretty darn soon, they'll probably be clamoring for me to move to wherever they are, since they've been known to clamor for me to visit or move near them anyway. since i have to be in NC like 3 or 4 times this summer, and have friends whose hospitality i could wear out, it seems wise for me to move there at least until i go to the philippines this fall. after that, i really have no idea what i'll do or where i'll live. i'm hoping to find some answers at the total conference soon, hoping to find some career of service to god that suits me. pretty much everything i know about that i can do either seems unbearably boring and stupid or requires something i haven't got - discipline for college. i keep thinking of moving to cesko, thinking that it would solve all my problems, but as neat and different as it might be, i'll still be me, with all my abilities, hopes, quirks, and failures. what i'm really looking for is not a job or place to live, or even friends or adventures, but wholeness - knowing and feeling that i am truly living a life worthy of the calling and sacrifice that's been set before me by jesus. i can really only find it in him, who gives me overwhelming victory in all things...why do these words sound so hollow? i haven't been finding victory or fulfillment, just failure and misdirection. maybe if i could overlook my failures and see christ in me and his grace, i'd be able to stop thinking constantly of my inadequacy - and then i'd turn straightaway to selfish pride, and reject the grace of god, his sacrifice for me, and his offer of freedom from slavery to self and sin. i just don't know...i need to talk to my wise, trusted, and caring friends.
fri apr 11 00:04
just as i expected, just like how it always is when i do this: on just 3 hours of sleep last night, i was pretty tired all day, especially this morning and early this evening, but now that it's midnight i feel fine, like i could stay up another 6 hours or so, and i know from having done it that i really could and not feel tired till sometime in the morning. well, that's how i am, even after several months of getting up at the same time every day and going to bed within the same 2 or 3 hours every night. whatever. i have exactly 3 weeks until i plan to go to NC, and if i'm going to move there, that means 3 weeks till i have to have a lot of this stuff gone and the rest in my car...and figure out what i'll do with my car and bike that i'll have to leave here, and change the brake lines on my car, and...and...and...huh. you know, with my personality, i would have killed myself long ago simply from the hopelessness of trying at life, if it weren't for the hope and assurance that god gives me. solomon was right about life being meaningless and futile, but he also had hope in god, so he left it at that, and i will too. heck, i've got the holy spirit of god in me - what good thing do i lack?
sat apr 26 17:05
i feel like doing nothing, but i can't think of nothing to do, and i haven't written this in awhile, so i thought i would. maybe if i try doing something, like writing, then i'll feel like doing something, or at least think of something to do. maybe this is what happens when i do nothing for awhile, i start feeling like nothing. i was late to work for the last time monday, meaning that harrold and i had decided previously that if i was late again i'd quit, or he'd fire me, or something, so i worked that day and tuesday finishing up the work i'd been doing on the garage doors, and that was it. i've since applied at 4 more places (had applied at 2 before) for a night job, and although most of them said they needed night people, and seemed interested in hiring me, i've yet to hear anything concrete from any of them. well, selling plasma isn't a job, but it pays, so that's what'll keep me afloat till i find a job. maybe i need to apply at more places, maybe it takes applying at more than 10 places before you get a job...that's how it's seemed before, anyway. i guess i should work on my car, try to ferret out whatever electrical gremlin is running around in there, but i really don't know what else to do - haven't found anything obvious and even harrold's suggestions haven't helped any. it runs with a hot wire in the right place, so that's all that matters, right? i guess there are about a million things i could do, but at least for right now i don't wanna do half of them because i sprained my ankle playing at the park with genna yesterday, and i just feel like life isn't really worth doing whatever other things i can think of. you'd think the pressure of planning to leave for NC in like 5 days would spur me into action, but instead it just makes me feel powerless, like there's no way i can do what i need to before then, even though i know i have the time and ability to do it all easily and quickly. oh muse, where art thou?
No blog entries were made in May, largely due to my traveling for 2 weeks and moving from Dallas, TX to Medford, OR. In June, I wrote a retrospective "Alex's Adventures" page with the events of the past few months. The text of that page follows here, after which my blog entries from the month of June resume.
A Short History Leading Up To April 2003
In August of 2001, I moved to Duncanville, TX from Waxhaw, NC, where I had been living with my parents. I lived in Duncanville with my aunt and uncle. My uncle owns a company building decks, arbors, fences, etc, and I worked for him for the first several months after I arrived there. The work was somewhat inconsistent during the winter, so I started working for Medieval Times as a phone drone, answering questions, making reservations, and reading or talking with co-workers between calls.
In September, I started working at Mechanical Excellence, an auto shop, for Harrold Andresen, whom I had gotten to know through other friends in the Dallas area. My duties were basically whatever project I was capable of that he wanted done - every day he had a list of things for me to do, and every day it was something very different. That was easily the best job I've ever had - not only did I enjoy the work and was able to learn from Harrold's incredible storehouse of automotive knowledge, but I really appreciated his thoughtfulness, sense of humor, and integrity.
The job was also a sort of testbed for me to find out the nature of my self-discipline and ways to either increase it or work around my lack of it. For the first few months, I didn't have a set schedule, I simply planned to be there 20 hours per week or more, which is what Harrold had said he wanted and we agreed on. I found that even with something that's required, beneficial, and rather enjoyable, if I'm not forced into doing it, I'll do it pretty inconsistently. That is to say that I sometimes arrived earlier than I'd planned, sometimes on time, but often an hour or 2 later than I'd planned. By the beginning of 2003, I had decided that I simply did not have enough self-discipline to rely on for anything, and that if I wanted to be consistent with anything in my life, I'd have to find or create an environment that regularly forced my actions. So, Harrold and I agreed on a rigid schedule, and if I was more than 10 minutes late 3 times, I'd quit, or he'd fire me, or something. This started in January, and it worked fairly well - I was usually about 5 minutes late, but only twice was I more than 10 minutes late, and in those cases I was a few hours late. My struggles and thoughts during this time were somewhat inconsistently chronicled in my blog.
On April 21, I was late again to work, but had already decided that if I were to keep living in Duncanville, I wanted to find a night job to see if I really am naturally nocturnal (a theory I've been repressing for years). I had applied for a few night jobs by then, and quit work that week, and applied for quite a few more, at gas stations, Wal-Mart, etc. It seemed that one of the places would hire me soon, but I didn't get a real job offer from any of them. I had for months been planning a trip to Waxhaw for a one week Wycliffe-organized linguistics course May 4-9, and my little sister Debbie graduated from Bryan College in Tennessee May 10.
I was packing for that trip on Wednesday, April 30, when I happened to be chatting online with Kristen Michaelis, a friend I'd met in Duncanville, and she said her husband Steve was going to be doing wildlands firefighting this summer in Oregon where they now live. I asked if I could get hired for the same job, and by Thursday afternoon, as I was preparing to leave that night, I talked to Steve and found out I basically had a job waiting for me if I could get to Oregon for the training session, which I thought would be the Monday after Debbie's graduation. I knew I might have to leave my car and fly from somewhere in the east to get to Oregon on time, and I might not be back in Duncanville for the entire summer. I quickly packed everything I had there into boxes, arranged for some of it to be stored and most to be sold or given away, arranged for the 2 cars and motorcycles I'd accumulated and was leaving to be sold there, and left Friday afternoon instead of late the night before as I'd planned.
May 2003 - Perhaps The Busiest Month Of My Life
I left Dallas Friday May 2 at 4pm, and drove straight to the Georgia Renaissance Festival near Atlanta, arriving there Saturday morning, met several friends there, spent the day with them, and left the next morning to take a friend back to Raleigh, NC, before driving to Waxhaw that evening. I was several hours late for the start of the linguistics course, but was able to do everything necessary and fully participate the whole week, while staying at John and Leah Anderson's house.
The first day of the course, as I was coming out of the cafeteria line at lunch with my food, I saw my mom standing there and was so surprised I nearly dropped my tray. My parents had been in the Philippines for over a year, and I had thought they would be in the Waxhaw area on Wednesday or so. I spent lunch with them for the 3 days they were there before they left to get a car and go to Bryan College, and it was great to see them again and really talk to them. E-mail usually works well for communication, but nothing comes close to actually spending time with someone you love.
The linguistics course was interesting, educational, and fun. I enjoyed the classes and found that I was able to learn the material fairly easily, but the best part was the evening "field reports" from missionary linguist/translators who had spent their lives doing what we were investigating. Although I have wanted to become a linguist and Bible translator for a few years, and have been planning in some way or other to make that happen, I hadn't been very sure of that direction for my life or had a very full understanding of what that life and work is like until that week. Now I can say that I'm ready to pursue that wholeheartedly and work with what I've learned about my personality and lack of self-discipline to use my skills and desires for Bible translation.
Debbie's graduation was a sort of final condemnation of my failures in college so far - my little sister, 2 years behind me in highschool, graduated college before I even got a full year's worth of credits from 2 different schools. Despite that, I enjoyed being there for her big day, being able to express my genuine proudness of her hard work (she graduated magna cum laude), and being with my entire family for the first time in about 8 years. Immediately after the ceremony, we all packed up the stuff in her dorm room and put it in the 2 cars that were going with her to my older sister Naomi's house in Nashville, and found that it didn't all fit. I was planning to leave that afternoon from Bryan College to drive to my friend Sarah Marrow's graduation at Campbell University about an hour south of Raleigh, NC, but we decided that I'd have to drive to Nashville to take the rest of Debbie's things there. That meant that I wasn't able to make it to Sarah's graduation, which was a real disappointment to both of us.
So it happened that I was at my sister Naomi's house in Nashville with my whole family Saturday night and Sunday, and having talked to Steve, I found out that he was going to a training class scheduled for that Tuesday the 13th in Portland, and if I could get there by Monday night, I could participate and thus qualify for firefighting this summer. That meant I'd have to fly from Nashville to Portland on Monday, and I had spent all my money on my trip to NC, so I knew that the only way for me to do wildlands firefighting would be if someone else bought me a plane ticket to Portland. Although it was Sunday afternoon and I had to fly on Monday, I had unshakable faith that it would happen, so I started talking to family and calling friends to ask if they could finance my trip to Portland. After several people declined, John Anderson found a ticket for about $300 and bought it for me. So, full of gratitude and faith, I packed my things in 2 boxes, left my car with my sister with instructions to sell it there, and flew to Portland.
As I had been talking to Steve about wildlands firefighting, I had also been talking to a few friends about it, and just as I was leaving John and Leah Anderson's house to go to Bryan College on Friday the 9th, Jeremiah Hunter called and asked if he could do firefighting with me this summer. I referred him to Steve, and he found out the same thing - if he could be in Portland Monday night for training Tuesday, he had a job waiting for him. He had been out of work for over 2 months, so he was ready to quickly pack and fly west also. He flew to Portland Monday, met me in the airport that evening, and Steve picked us up there. We stayed with a friend of ours from Duncanville who now lives there, and went to the hotel where training was scheduled on Tuesday morning.
We drove into the hotel parking lot before 8am Tuesday morning, and found nobody there. A room had been reserved for the training class, so we knew we were in the right place at the right time, but even after calling the company owner and trying to figure out what was going on, nothing appeared right. We stayed there till after 10am, and being unable to find out anything about the training class, we left to see Multnomah Falls, which is about an hour east of Portland. Multnomah is 620 feet high, and quite impressive, but we didn't have a camera with us, so its beauty remains only in our memories. We hiked a 6-mile trail which switchbacked up a very steep slope on the side of the falls and had an overlook from above the falls, then snaked around to another nearby river which ran straight down the side of the gorge through rocks and fallen trees, white water the entire way. The
Multnomah Falls website has a lot of info and pictures of the area.
The next day, we were again at the hotel at 8am, but by now our boss had found out that the class had been cancelled. We stayed in Portland for the next 2 days, since Kristen was there for a training class with her job as a county personal property tax technician. We got to Medford Thursday the 15th, and on Friday we met the owner of FireTech West, Don Jacobs, and did some work on a piece of property he had recently bought. Jeremiah and I worked for him that Saturday and several days the following week, which was nice to be earning a bit of money, but more valuable for us to get to know Don and for him to get to know us. We filled out the necessary paperwork to be employed and got acquainted with some of the other employees, especially Patrick Stephens, the director of the company, who goes to the same small Orthodox church that Steve and Kristen go to. He and his wife are close to Jeremiah's age and have a 15-month old son.
On the weekend of the 17th, Patrick and his wife Gabriella had gone with Steve and Kristen for a day to the Redwoods State and National Parks area in northern California, about 3 hours from here. They wanted to go back and camp for a few days, and invited Jeremiah and I along for a trip Memorial Day weekend. We got there a few hours before dark Friday night, and hiked a 4.5 mile trail through redwood and fern forests to the beach. We set up our tents on the beach right at the mouth of the trail, built a driftwood fire, ate some food, and collapsed in our sleeping bags. The next day we wandered the beach, played frisbee, climbed a rock face near our tents, froze our feet in the ocean for a few minutes, etc. On Sunday we took a long walk up the beach and climbed on some rocks that jutted out into the water, taking a lot of pictures on Patrick's digital camera. Monday morning we packed up, extinguished the fire, and hiked back out. The area, which is small mountains usually covered in fog jutting right up to the sometimes rocky beach, was really pretty amazing for me, with my experiences of the comparatively mild beach and mountains over 6 hours away from each other in the Carolinas.
Steve and Don are similar in some ways, in that they're both pretty knowledgeable about and good at what they do, and take pride in that. They had some disagreements about some company matters, and Don began viewing Steve as hostile and disrespectful, and after some unfortunate events, decided that he wouldn't work with Steve. Steve had already been trained as a crew boss, but because the earlier standard firefighting class had been cancelled, didn't have that certification. Jeremiah and I went to another training class which took place the last week of May, again in Portland, and after sitting through three days of videos and slow lectures, all done in English but translated into Spanish for the benefit of the 90% of the class which didn't speak English, got our certifications. From that point, we became technically ready to be called to work on a fire at any time, with as little as an hour's notice.
mon jun 23 19:35
back to the beginning, in some sense, with this blog. it started as some messages i wrote to esther on aim but never got to send, and now i'm at her house for the start of what i guess is blog part 2. i didn't write for such a long time mostly because i was busy and didn't have much computer access, but also because it seemed not as necessary - i guess what really motivates me to write is some problem in my life that i'm trying to resolve, and lately life has just happened however it did, and i haven't felt like i'm broken so much. the only real conflict in my life now is trying to keep myself being merely a friend to esther instead of pursuing her romantically as i sometimes feel like doing. that's a settled issue, though, and it remains only for me to weather the storms of my truant emotions - storms that have been far worse in the past few days that i've been here and seen her and spent time with her. that was my only hesitation about coming here for faith's wedding - i knew i was really looking forward to it more because i'd get to see esther than because i'd get to see faith get married, although it really was great to be at the wedding, see her and eric consecrate their new life together. they're going to china in a month, with college degrees and starting a career in overseas missions - i am SO jealous! well, that's their plans and not mine, and my life has happened as it has for reasons, even if they're bad reasons. anyway, i knew how my emotions were excited about planning to see esther, and i was afraid that those emotions would really get in the way of me being only a friend to her. but esther is busy every day this week and i'll be back in oregon in a few days, and once i'm there it's easy - never seeing her, never talking on the phone, occasionally writing and less often getting emails is the recipe for letting emotions die, and i think it'll work, given enough time. sometimes it feels like playing a silly game, not being myself, hiding behind some mask of "i'm not actually attracted to you" but we've decided that's what has to happen for now, and so far it seems to be working. she's the one who really knows if it's working, but that doesn't matter to me, i still am responsible to do what i agreed to almost 2 months ago. help me, save me, have mercy on me, o god.
tues jun 24 20:02
tomorrow i fly back to oregon, out of one life and into another. it's been great to be here for a few days, great to see many old friends again, but also somewhat odd to be here with all the familiarity and memories from this place and this not be my home or my life now - i have a totally different life that i'm living now, almost disconnected with this place. i tell friends in oregon about friends here, and friends here about friends in oregon, but the experiences of the 2 separate lives are mine only. that's always true of anybody's life, of course, but it just seems weird to catch little snippets of life here, eating, driving around talking to people, being a part of their life for a few moments before being whisked off to what i expect will be a lot of firefighting, which is something entirely other than what i've been doing in oregon so far. sometimes i wonder what kind of friendships i really have, since i'm pretty much just floating around in all different places all the time, whereas i guess a lot of ppl stay in the same place most of their lives, but i think friendships are not dependent only on being with the person, but more on what kind of communication i have with them, and i think long-distance friendships can be more significant or close than friendships with ppl i see every day - it just depends on what kind of effort i make to keep in touch with them. i need to write some emails.
mon jun 30 00:21
i'm glad that steve and kristen have armstrong and trinity, mostly because i can pet them and give them physical love and it's ok to do that to the dog and cat. steve and kristen touch and kiss and hold each other, and it makes me aware of how much i miss being able to express love that way with friends. for this reason i also appreciate the physical connection required in orthodox greetings, and for that matter latino and eastern greetings - a hug and a kiss communicates so much more than a hi and a handshake. i like to think it's because humans benefit a lot from love expressed through physical touch, and desire that, but it may just be that i'm a 23 year old male and feeling like i need a girlfriend or something. if that's true, i'm glad i'm able to stave off what could be destructive desires for someone to have and hold by just petting and loving the animals here.
wed jul 02 00:16
we haven't gotten a fire call yet, and they keep saying it'll be any day now, and we better be ready, so it's always in the back of our minds, but my bag isn't packed, and although i could probably throw all my stuff together and be where they need me when they need me, i wouldn't say i'm ready for it. it's like always wearing your seatbelt for the accident that never happens, or i guess more like jesus saying he'll come back soon - i believe it'll happen at the right time, and i'm living in a state of semi-preparedness for it, but it's just floating in the back of my mind, never really feeling like a real possibility, more like a story that i have faith in but haven't seen happen yet, and the difference between believing something and experiencing it can be huge in your mind. in some ways, i guess this experience of waiting around for a fire call, living life with the shadow of expectation looming over me, but not really living in total preparation for it is a sort of life on a small scale and short time frame, and it'll be good for my faith in the promises don has made when we actually do go fight a fire - that preparation and living in wait will be rewarded by the actuality of the expected event, and it might build my faith in other things that have been promised to happen that i'm just waiting for, like jesus coming back. except that when the fire call comes, i'll probly be rushing around panicking, whereas when jesus comes, i'll just say with st. john the revelator:
"Yes, I am coming soon." Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.
sat jul 05 02:22
today we went to a july 4 parade and festival thing in ashland. st. gabriel's had a booth there, and steve and kristen had agreed to be there part of the time to help talk to ppl if there was actually that much interest. we hung out there some, went and played in lithia park, wandered around and saw the booths, bought expensive vietnamese fair food, and had a good time. i think there was not much actual interest in st. gabriel's booth because it was just some other thing that somebody was pimping at the fair - you wander past the baha'i ppl and the legalize marijuana ppl and the save the animals ppl and the little orthodox church just blends in as another group of weird ashland ppl trying to save something. at least, that's how i saw it. we had icons, though, and nobody else did - they all had loony modern neo-hippy interpretive art that doesn't mean anything. anyway, as we were sitting around, i was watching the ppl in the park and there's this girl, about 18 or 20, walks by topless. at first glance, i thought she was a guy with long hair - there were lots of guys with long hair and no shirts on, but she was unmistakably female. she walked back awhile later and sat down in a group of ppl her age under a tree about 30 feet away - we could hear them talking and laughing. i asked kristen if there are laws against public nudity in ashland, and she said there are, so i knew a police officer would come around eventually and do something. it was kinda hard for me to sit there and talk to the parishioners and father isaac and not keep glancing over every so often just to see if she was still topless - she was until about an hour later, when an officer rode by on a bicycle, and the next time i noticed, the girl had a shirt on, which for some reason made the whole thing seem amusing. in a similar way, it's kinda hard to live here with steve and kristen and act normal around kristen - not that she walks around topless, because she's quite modest, but because she's such an amazing woman, and she makes me despair of ever finding someone as amazing that i might marry. steve says i should look at it from a different perspective, that i should be glad and hopeful to know that such women exist, and i do feel that way, but i often think kristen must be unique, and that i'd be silly to look for someone like her, hold out for the "perfect woman". of course, nobody's perfect, and nobody's perfect for me, and although i have a good idea of what kind of woman i'm looking for, nothing's in a hard and fast list or anything, so i just evaluate women as i get to know them. i guess i know kristen as well as or better than most women i know, so it's certainly possible that i already know some amazing woman and just don't know her well enough to know how amazing she is, but it seems as though my standards in choosing a wife have been raised so high by kristen that i'll just have to become a monk. that's not as extreme as it sounds - i keep noticing how much i lean towards asceticism, and a life of study and worship with like-minded men, away from the distractions of the everyday world, seems pretty attractive. i don't know whether that would be the best way for me to spend my gifts and abilities, though - being a missionary bible translator is at least as attractive, and has been for quite some time, and seems like it would be the best way for me to serve god and become more like him in this life. i guess i just have to get over my vision of married life and accept what i'm given, both in friendships and in vocation - not that i don't have a choice, but just that my choices are limited to what opportunities arise. so far, i haven't made the best of even the rather limited opportunities i've been given, so i have to work at that first, and trust that all else will fall into place in the divine timing and will of god.
tues jul 08 03:39
late this afternoon i got a call from don, saying that there's this big fire in the rogue river, near ruch or somewhere, which is like 50 miles from here, and it's over 100 acres, and he wanted to put us "on alert" so that we'd be ready if we get a call tonight or sometime really soon. i really appreciated that he gave us a kind of heads-up when he expected to get a fire call soon, so that we wouldn't be so panicked when it comes, but he hasn't called back this evening, so for now it seems like a false alarm. that has a good effect; that is, we're now pretty much all packed and could leave the house in less than 30 minutes and feel pretty much all ready if we got a call now. but it's also setting us up for losing even more faith in don and what he says, because if we don't actually work on this fire at all, that'll make it really hard to believe what he says, and even if he is full of bullshit, i think i need to act like he's not. this is like something mr. christie said about prayer and faith when i was in nc last time: he said that many christians erode their faith away by the way they pray. they pray that they'll get this job, or do well on this test, or that this person will get well - the common litany of things talked about when prayer requests are asked for are mostly things that somebody wants, things that may or may not happen, things that have little or nothing to do with either our becoming more like christ or with his kingdom being established on the earth. then anytime the things they prayed for don't happen, the person is forced to assume either that they didn't have enough faith, or it wasn't god's will, or that god just doesn't care or something. all of these responses are degrading to a person's faith in god - every time you ask for something that you don't get, that makes it that much harder to trust god next time, and after a number of times of asking for things that you don't get, you start to just expect your prayer to not make any difference - you start to lose faith in your prayers, in your god, in the whole christian experience. the antidote to me losing faith in don is either for me to experience the things coming true that he keeps talking about, or for him to just say it was all baloney, or for me to turn a blind eye to the facts which seem to contradict him and just focus on the things he's promised. well, for now i have to just wait and see with don, act like what he says is true even if i have serious doubts. but with prayer and faith in god, i have to realize that his will is not mine, and start praying for his will to be done instead of mine. orthodox people pray the lord's prayer so often you start to wonder if they got stuck and can't figure out any other way to pray, and the answer may be that they can't. if we want to pray in god's will, we pretty much have to stick to the method and formula revealed in the bible. prayer is for our growth, our benefit, not god's, and i think our obedience to him in prayer and submission to his will is more important than our expression of our desires and needs - he knows everything we can tell him better than we do, and the only question that remains is our obedience and submission - god wants to hear us praying his will because it's about us sacrificing ourselves and submitting to his will in prayer. that's the kind of prayer that builds faith, and thus enables us to get and do what we want - by transforming ourselves into god's image, we transform our wants into his will, and then we get what we've been praying for. my doubtful faith in don may never be validated, but my tiny faith in god will certainly grow and be fully realized as i pray for his will to be done.
mon jul 14 23:59
today i was going to wash clothes and mow the grass in the yard, neither of which would have taken that long, but neither of which i actually did. our wireless router came today, so i thought i'd just pop it in and get it going so we wouldn't have to mess with the wire thing anymore, and either i'm not such a computer master as i once was, or this was just super funky, because it took all afternoon until i gave up, and then a few hours in the evening to get it working, and i still don't really know what i did that made it work - i was just guessing at a bunch of stuff the whole time and then suddenly it was working right. i guess it's good to have that running now, it means the whole internet thing is set up as it will be for awhile, no messing around planned. but not having gotten done what i planned to do today might mean those things never get done, since we might be leaving for somewhere in the midwest tomorrow. patrick has been pursuing work with corn detasseling in illinois, iowa, or nebraska, and blueberry raking in maine (2 jobs he's done for several seasons before), both for a crew from firetechwest and for himself personally. he heard from his contact in maine that they want at least 4, probably more, people to go pick blueberries this season, and that starts sometime during the first week of august, so it appears quite likely that we'll all be in maine for the month of august, maybe longer, raking blueberries as fast as we can. just friday morning he got a call from his contact in iowa or somewhere that they wanted him to go detassel corn for at least a few weeks, so he left later that day and i think he's in nebraska working now. steve has been pursuing corn detasseling also, and he's supposed to find out tomorrow if they want him (and possibly jeremiah and i also) to go detassel corn somewhere in the midwest. we may also find ourselves leaving as soon as possible to drive there tomorrow, and that would mean that all the little things that have not felt urgent would be left undone. if that happens, we'll probably be going to maine straight from wherever in the corn we are in the last week of july, except that steve has to be in dallas the 9th of august for his brother's wedding, and he wants to get my quantum and motorcycle from there and drive them...somewhere, eventually back here, so i'm not sure how it's all going to work out, but i know something will happen. i guess i'm a little apprehensive that we'll have to get out of here in a super hurry tomorrow, and that we'll leave a thousand things undone, as happened when i left dallas, but i seem to have managed ok since having left there in that way, so i guess it's not as bad as it seems. anyway, this all means i have to go to bed now, even though i'm not really tired - i've gravitated back to a night schedule lately, having nothing to make me be up in the daytime, and even if we don't go do corn, we're pretty sure that we'll be doing blueberries, and both require me to be up super early and working hard all day, so i need to at least get in better shape than i am now, and it might help to force myself into a daytime schedule before it's forced on me, but i don't know how that'll happen. i guess, and hope, that this all means we won't actually work on a fire this year - i'm not sure what i'd do if we don't go do corn detasseling, but get a fire call tomorrow - maybe i'd just say no, don, you had your chance to call me to go work on a fire, and now i'm doing other stuff. this means i get to keep my hair long and not subject it to the selfish whims of don being imposed on it, so that as much as any other reason is why i hope we don't get a fire call. after having the big fires so close, and other crews sent to them but not us, it seems very unlikely that we'll actually get called to a fire, but i suppose anything is yet possible.
tues jul 29 23:16
lately i have not written here, because the things i would have written about would have violated trust, but now i think i can write about other things, so here goes. again i plan a trip to maine, in fact the same place i got my quantum in february, but this time to make money, not spend money. it appears i will leave just after midnight this friday, which means i have only 3 days to make $150 at labor ready, a job which so far has been a myth, but god has given me more faith in his plans than i'm used to having, so i'm inclined to believe that it will all happen. jeremiah went to work on a fire last week which lasted 3 days, and i declined to go, a decision which i expect will be largely misunderstood, but what's important is that i have chosen to go to maine and rake blueberries, and he has chosen to stay here and wait for another fire call. i'm glad for that, not because i'll be away from him, but because he'll likely be here much of the time when everyone - and i mean everyone - except kristen, will be gone, and i'm glad she won't be here by herself the entire time. i've been throwing around plans in my head for what i'll do after blueberries, and many of them have been dependent on making a lot more money this summer than i think i'll actually make. i still expect to make more this month of august than any previous summer, but that will probably only be enough to pay my debts and give me enough to find a job and live here this winter, which seems a perfectly good plan. hmmm...i seem to have run out of things to say. or, really, i guess i just don't feel much like writing tonight - i can think of many interesting and possibly worthwhile things to say, but i don't really feel like writing them. maybe tomorrow...
mon aug 04 13:05
it's like falling in love, but it's not, it's somewhat different. it's quite different emotionally, but similar in some of the thoughts i've been having. the times that i've fallen in love, my heart jumps at the sight, or even thought, of my love, and i start scheming ways to impress her, make her happy, make me look good in her eyes. i can't stop thinking about her, and feeling like i have to be with her all the time. well, it's not that way this time, but i have been spending a lot of time with kristen lately, really enjoying her company, talking a lot with her, sharing things i only share with close friends, which she has been for years now, and it's made me think, hey this is really great, i don't want to leave and go to maine and bla bla bla, i just want to stay here, keep doing what i've been doing. i've been working enough to pay my bills now, so that is a possibility, but really i've been working to save for a bus ticket, which will get me to maine where i can earn in one month not just enough to pay my bills right now, but pay off most or all of my debts, which is what i really need to do with this opportunity. anyway, another thing about these past few weeks that makes it kinda like falling in love is that it was quite a surprise - i mean, i've been friends with steve and kristen for like 2 years now, and have gotten to know them both fairly well, but it wasn't till steve left for a few weeks that i got to spend much time with just kristen, and it's been surprisingly fun to be doing things with her, often also with jeremiah or gabriella, but since steve has been gone, i guess some of the time and attention she usually gives steve has been free to give to others, and i've been around most of the time. she asked if i knew if there was a way to adopt a brother or sister, and i don't think there is, but i think it's a great idea - i could be steve and kristen's brother! i don't know what the ramifications of that might be, but they feel more like close family than friends, and not just because i've been living here with them for like 3 months now. well, i'm leaving in a day or 2, and i'll be in maine with steve and patrick and gabriella for at least a month raking blueberries, and it'll be interesting to get back and in some sense start another chapter of life here - i'll probably be looking for a regular job around here, planning to stay for awhile, and trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life, as always. i'm looking forward to that, partly because i'll probably make a plan and stick with it for longer than a week, but partly also because i'll have an opportunity to get engaged to the orthodox church formally, and maybe even be formally baptized and joined in the mysterious community that is the body of christ. as ever, we'll see about that - it's all in the future.