Galileo said

[orig][quote]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm looking forward to work tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The next morning we visited a slum called Los Quitos.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I need to shave.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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