The Return to Blogging

I hope that this will mark my return to the blogosphere.

I hope with this return to revamp my blog and shift it's direction.

I hope that the fact that I'm typing this on a keyboard with no backspace key doesn't make me quit part way through out of frustration.

It seems to me that there are people in this world who seem to have the sole purpose of hurting and tearing down those around them. I'm not talking about the little remarks between friends, or even constructive criticism, I'm referring to the complete and utter de-personization of someone.

It is remarkable to me how any person can be so cruel as to manipulate everyone around them, and manipulate through derision and coercion. What kind of person demands 100% of a "friend's" time, to the exclusion of all else, to the detriment of their "friend's" well being and other relationships?.

What kind of person talks brags about receiving unconditional love and then refuses to give unconfitional love?

What kind of person spreads lies about someone in order to better their own image?

What kind of person thinks that others need to earn unconditional love?

What kind of person is only validated by what they think other's think of them?

What kind of person flip flops day-to-day, hour-to-hour on their most basic opinions of a person?

What kind of person points out the splinter in someone else's eye while ignoring the log in their own?

To some extent we are all that kind of person, we all suffer from these failures. The deciding factor in how these affect our relationships with those around us is common sense and discretion.

Some individuals seem to think that somehow their opinion is the only one that matters, that somehow they have been selected to deliver judgement. While judgement is a nearly unavoidable part of being human, voicing this judgement without care for the people affected is irresponsible and will inevitable lead to one's own rejection. A person cannot go through life passing judgement on people, and tearing them down and expect to keep it up forever.

We all struggle with a need to feel important, loved, wanted and validated. We all have our own ways of dealing with that need. None of us should tear down and deride the people around us to meet these ends.

Whoa long time no blog!

It seems somehow appropriate that my return blog is also my 100th. (I'm not entirely sure why it is somehow appropriate, and yet it is)

It's remarkable to me that it has been almost 10 months since my last blog, 10 months that lasted both an eternity and flashed by in the blink of an eye.

Over these past 10 months I've experienced life in ways that I never expected, I moved multiple times, enjoyed working multiple jobs and having plenty of money, have been unemployed and living on the barest scrapings of my savings account.

I've worked in jobs that have forced me to evaluate what I want to do, and how I want to accomplish it. I've exceeded expectations and smashed them to pieces.

It has been a year of contrast.

I know what my plan is for the future, and yet have no idea what is in store for me. And remarkably I don't mind, it doesn't bother me that aside from a few decisions my future is a mystery to me.

Biking

So I asked a good friend of mine if she would like to go on a bike ride today, I do this thinking that I will just pump up my tires and go. It turns out that my tire has a hole in the inner tube, so I fight with it to get the wheel off and ready to change the inner tube. This is kind of an older bike that has a disc brake instead of the standard calipers. I finally get it all ready and run it over to the bike shop where I am informed that my tire has a giant tear in it and that there is no point in a new inner tube without a new tire. 

I get the new tire, costing $21 instead of the $8 I expected. I take it home and begin to reattach it and find that part of the bolt that adjusts the brakes in the back is stripped. So I grab my friend and head over to Wal-Mart (blech) and get a washer so I can tighten the bolt without getting to the stripped part. Finally I get home and get everything back together only to find that the brake cable came off up on the handle end which takes me a while to fix. After all this the bolt that gave me the trouble in the first places completely strips and makes the back brakes unusable. 

At this point I decide that its not worth it and that I will work on it another day. I take a friends bike and discover part way along the ride that one of the front gears is unusable, the biggest one, and that the handlebars are dangerously loose in the front to back direction. 

None of this put me in a bad mood remarkably, in fact I had an amazing time. We get to campus hang out with a third person, bake cookies. (I even wore a "man-pron." It's like an apron but for a man) After it gets kind of dark (read: pitch black in the woods) we make our way home. The handlebars at this point are so loose that it takes all of my forearm strength to keep them upright. My legs are dying and I ran into a boulder. 

Overall though, it was an amazing time. Wonderful fellowship, good exercise and perfect weather. It was an incredible day.

A new leaf

I've turned over a new leaf. Well, I'm trying to turn over a new leaf anyways. I had long conversation with a good friend of mine in the upstairs of the MEC and in the end was convinced that it would be worth my while to do away with my cynical, negative side and instead work on bringing out my fun, happy side. 

On the one hand I know that by putting the effort into being a generally more outgoing and "uppy" person that I can more easily acquaintance myself with new people. Inevitably this will pay off at whatever new job I end up getting, it will allow me to make new friends and grow in new areas. It won't be easy though, it means putting effort into my encounters and working at drawing people into a new realm of interaction. It means moving outside my immediate comfort zone and examining who I am in order to redefine that in myself. 

I thought I had figured out a living situation for this fall, but it seems that my Plan A won't work, which means trying out Plan B.

I have 5 days to finish moving, and I'm not at all looking forward to it. Particularly the large boxes of books, it is a lot of effort to move those and a lot of stairs to get them down.

I think this week I'm going to begin looking for a full-time "real" job for this academic year. As long as it is a living wage and something that will stretch and bring me growth then I think that I will be happy at it. I'm going to various human rights organizations around town, maybe they need a college graduate for something?

I'm not sure how this next year will go, I feel like it will either be amazing or miserable. If I can find the kind of job I want, then I will be fed and grow and having an amazing year, if I'm stuck in retail or something like that I will try to make the best of it but don't have particularly high hopes that that will be a positive experience necessarily. 

I went to coffee with a friend from high school today, caught up a little bit. She wanted to know about Cambodia, which made me remember that I haven't really talked about it a lot recently, or even thought about it. I think to some extent I'm done processing it for the time being, but at the same time it is interesting to see how I react as I think about it again.

If I end up living with someone not NCC related, it will mean that I will make new friends and have new adventures. It will mean a more concerted effort to stay connected with the friends I've made over the last few years. It will mean new 'temptations' pulling me in directions I've never been pulled in. None of these are bad things, but simply ideas to be aware of. 

Maybe I'll try to redesign my blog a little.

Moving

I made a decision, I talked to my school and confirmed that I'm deferring a year. 

I've begun the process of living in a new home.

I'm tired way too early in the day.

It's been an odd past few days, mostly because all of them are a blur. Something about working outside in the sun, all day, everyday, doing mind-numbing activities has an effect of making the days pretty much impossible to distinguish. 

It's hard to wrap my mind around this huge shift in my life, I think that it will really sink in once everyone else starts going to school and I do not.

I talked to one of the co-regional ministers of Oregon and she offered to see if there wasn't a church that I might work in part-time over the next year. While I hadn't really intended to work in a church it might not hurt to get some more experience, in an area outside of youth work. 

The next year will be an adventure, to say the least.

All over the place

I feel as though time is speeding up. It seems like just yesterday that I was walking down the aisle at my college graduation, and yet here I am approaching two months later and it feels like it has flown by.

I still don't know what I'm doing, not really. I'm going to call the seminary tomorrow and chat with the admissions person, but somehow I have a hard time seeing any possible way to be financially responsible and still attend school this fall.

If I don't attend then I have to try to find a more permanent living situation, I have until October to find a more permanent job. I have to figure out if I can be a "student" on my parents' health insurance if I take one graduate level class. I have to figure out what to do recreationally for the next year, I can think of a few things but even so.

On the other hand, things that I assumed were given or at least real possibilities are beginning to fall away. I'm left wondering how I'm going to make it through the next year, no matter what. 

At the same time, my life right now has been an adventure. I rear-ended someone at an intersection a couple days ago. He started going and then slammed on his brakes for no reason, just as I looked away for half a second. It was unbelievable as we got out and chatted when he told me that his car was a rental and therefore he didn't really care about the damage.

In a few days I'm going to have to move from my townhouse to another house with some friends, but as it stands I have to be moving out by the last week of August or so. 

My driver side window has come off of its mechanism inside, and now it slips around wildly inside the door. 

I got a phone call the other day from our translator in Cambodia, he wanted to let me know that he talked to the kids at the orphanage and wanted to let me know that they missed us. I periodically think back to those three weeks, and wonder how they've changed me. I don't even know, I'm sure that it did but for the moment I can't nail down what changed. 

Choices

I am faced with a choice that could easily affect vast portions of my life in the near and far future. This is not a choice that I sought, or one that I am particularly looking forward to making.

It is perhaps easiest to start at the beginning and work my way to the present as it will make the the "why" of the decision more clear.

In February I applied to attend the Pacific School of Religion this fall, to begin work on my Master of Divinity degree. I applied well before the priority deadline, both for acceptance and for financial aid. Part of the application is a number of recommendation letters from current professors. I handed out all of the forms to various professors, sent off my transcript and began the waiting process. A number of my professors informed me that they had sent the letters and were eager to hear whether or not I had been accepted. Unfortunately I didn't know, I kept not hearing back from the school. Finally I called the admissions office to find out what was going on, and found that a particular professor had yet to fill out his recommendation and that it was keeping my file from being processed. I immediately confronted the professor to find out what was going on, to which I got a sheepish "I should get around to that, and other students' as well."

Fortunately I was able to find another professor to write the recommendation and fax it in that same day, so as to begin the process.

In the end I received word of my acceptance immediately before graduation, and just a couple days before my mission trip to Cambodia.

When I got back from Cambodia I had finally received my financial aid letter, which I promptly opened and began to take in. If I were to accept the full amount of aid listed it would more than double my current loan load, taking it from a reasonable and doable amount for clergy/ non-profit worker and putting it squarely in the realm of terrifying.

I spent the next two nights sleepless and stressed out, how could I possibly rationalize and reason my way to accepting these loans. Granted, I could reduce them a bit with a scholarship from the Disciples Seminary Foundation but only to simply doubling my current loan load. At one point the stress of it was such that I began tearing up simply because it was too overwhelming to deal with.

One of the struggles I had was that getting my acceptance late meant that I couldn't apply for outside scholarships. (Everything requires having actually been accepted.)

I began to ponder something that a friend of mine had talked about, someone who was in a very similar situation due to the same professor. He talked about deferring attendance to seminary one academic year (which is permissible) in order to reapply for financial aid before the priority deadline, as well as apply for various outside funding sources.

My first response when I thought of that was that there was no possible way for me to do that, going to seminary is what I've planned on and felt called to do for a couple years, why would I possibly change or delay that now?

I began to ponder it though, realizing that attending school with the loan load could easily lead to financial ruin down the road. Taking a year to recuperate from my experience at NCC might do me good. It would certainly give me the opportunity to explore areas within my field of interest, particularly outside the church, an area I've not explored extensively in the realm of human rights. I could save money and better prepare myself for PSR. I would be able to reapply for financial aid as well as apply for outside scholarships. It would give me a break from academia, which no matter what I tell myself I am beginning to be burnt out on.

It would mean changing my plans, everyone I've talked to knows what I am planning on doing this fall and where. I don't change plans of this magnitude often, if ever. To me it would feel like I was letting everyone, myself included, down in some way.

But on the other hand it is the financially responsible course of action, it will allow me to further narrow my field of interest. I could explore new areas of ministry, in the traditional church setting or otherwise. I could experience relatively true "independence," without the crutch that a small college can be.

I do not know what I am going to do, this is a huge decision that will be down the road a bit. There is not a huge hurry to make any choices right now, but I will have to make the choice, certainly within the coming few weeks.


I do not know what to do.