Thought I had been posting on this blog once per year

Thought I had been posting on this blog once per year. But actually its been 3 years since I last thought I needed to share something with the internet.

Somewhere, deep down inside, I want to be a writer. But perhaps I don't have anything trying to get out of my head right now.

Photos

As we were preparing for the funeral, my Mom asked me to go through old photos of my Grandma and scan them in to make a slideshow.
I knew that my grandmother took nonstop photos, but I really wasn't prepared for what we found.

 Photos were everywhere in her house. She had an entire bookshelf of albums just from the 90s. My favorite were the black-paper-bound scrapbooks she had kept from the 40s through 60s. She had pictures of herself as a pre-teen all the way through when my Mom was a little girl. They all had captions and there were even a few full-page stories written out. I was astounded that when I started removing photos to scan them in, there were usually negatives behind them!

There were boxes and boxes of Kodachrome slides from the 1950s and 60s that I couldn't have gone through even if I had 3 days to look. For some of them, I could get my uncle or mom to tell a story. Others were just precious moments frozen in time 50 years ago.


I had grown up expecting her camera to be out wherever she was. And as I grew older, I started to really not  enjoy having candid photos snapped of me while we were eating dinner. But she would always give us a little album from the previous visit, and I have kept every one. And as I thought about that, I realized that hers are the only photos I have of myself all the way up until I was a teenager.
My grandma's dedication to keeping moments of her own live in a frame has given me memories of my own life. And for that, I am very thankful.

There are so many things I learned about my grandma in the past few weeks that I wish I could have known years ago. If I have a new years resolution this year, it will be to try and actually get to know people.

Teacher

Two weeks ago while I was on second shift, I had a brief conversation with one of my third-grade teachers. She happens to take music lessons from my mom. She began talking about me when I was in third grade. She said that I was popular and creative, and shared a few anecdotes that had me feeling nostalgic. Its weird, because I don't remember a whole lot about my third grade career. She probably remembers more than I do, really. I've forgotten most of it. And how much alike are we to our third-grade selves?
It had me thinking about just how much we change as we grow from children to adults, but nevertheless we are the very same person. In the 16 years since she was my teacher, I have become, for all intents and purposes, a very different person. After all, I'm no longer a child. Yet I can recall moments from my third-grade life: I still have the same identity. I remember making native american dioramas, I remember only eating coffee yogurt for lunch. But in the time since then, I've been through twice as many lives as I'd lived at that point. I've had so many more experiences, made so many more decisions. I find that fascinating.
After we took a family vacation to Hawaii a few years ago, I started keeping a daily journal. Its mostly just mundane facts about my day, but my hope is that some time in the future I can read back through and learn something about myself. Maybe if I'd kept a record when I was in third grade, I could re-experience the thoughts I had back then and better retain the lessons I've learned over the years.

Lesson

I realized today one thing that I am learning at work, and that my experiences at church are reinforcing. I am learning to be less passionate and to invest myself less in the things that I do for other people. I can't be emotionally attached to the work I do at my job, because that work doesn't belong to me. I could spend a week working hard on a project and have a manager change his mind or coworkers change directions, and just like that the labor and effort disappears. If I were to pour myself into what I do for work, I would put myself through constant heartache.
I'm going to try be more conscious of this concept. I cannot be attached to work that I do for other people; I need to be able to give it away completely.

On Apple

Last week, Apple announced the latest stamping of its iPhone property: The iPhone 5s and the iPhone 5c. Phil Schiller first introduced the newly-conceived 5c. It is a "beautiful" plastic phone with pricing from $99 on-contract. The crowed cheered just a little less enthusiastically than in years past. Maybe its because everyone already knew that it was coming.

What is stunning to me is that after this product announcement, Apple's stock tumbled 5%.
And 5% of $500 is significant. 
The reason Apple's stock fell isn't because the new iPhones aren't a great product.
It's that the analysts at wallstreet weren't happy with the pricing.
See, the iPhone 5c is a $99 phone. Apple's competition has phones for that price and even cheaper.
And in the years since Android and Samsung have come on the scene, Apple has been losing market share. According to the analysts, the iPhone 5c isn't cheap enough to allow Apple to gain back the segment that it created.
It may be a fantastic device.
It may even be an engineering marvel.
But someone, somewhere, published a report stating that it won't gain market share.
And therefore, people bailed out their Apple stock, sending the price down.

There are two problems with this thinking.
The first is that the market listens to analysts.
In the past few months that i've been paying attention to markets, i've learned enough to know that "analysts" don't have any idea what they're talking about, especially when it comes to tech stocks.

The second problem is more fundamental.
The analysts assume that "market share" = "success".

I believe that if Steve Jobs was still alive, the analysts wouldn't have dared to make such a report.
Because Steve Jobs never seemed to be after "market share".
His persona was someone who worked in "beautiful" and "magical".
He talked about numbers, sure.
But he always made products for his own sake, not for the mass market.

If Apple is still following its late cofounder's lead, then the analysts are dead wrong to assume that Apple's success lies with its market share.



I believe that we all face our own challenge with "analysts". People hold opinions of each other based on a combination of outward actions and the internal assumptions of the "analyst". I can accomplish something that makes me successful in my own eyes, but to someone else I may not be gaining market share.
The best thing that I can do is to ignore people who don't measure success the same way I do, and to continue pushing myself regardless of opinions.

Duration

Time is absolutely flying by. I noticed today that it feels like paychecks are coming more and more often- i measure time by weeks now, instead of by days. This is pretty frightening to me. I have a list of books that I intend to read concerning not getting stuck in a boring unfulfilling routine. But I suppose the real trick is to just "do something". I feel very much like this past summer escaped me and I have nothing to show for it. Every saturday, I tell myself that I need a project to work on. Instead, I end up lazing around. I'm not sure how to get the cure for this. I'll keep you posted.

On Proximity

We're coming up on the first Autumn in 18 years that I don't have to go to school. It's every bit as surreal as you'd expect. Thinking about school reminded me of a thought that I kept coming back to all last year.
I took a music credit both semesters of last year. It counted nothing towards my degree, but I finally decided to take upright bass lessons with one of the best players in our area. It was a lot of work, but in many ways it was a lot more fun and more rewarding than my coursework. That could have been entirely because it allowed me to escape from my engineering courses and hole up in a practice room. After all, practicing was required coursework. It was for school. I had to.

What truly fascinated me was how close the two buildings are together. That is, the art building and the science/engineering building. Their entrances are literally on opposite sides of the same road. And they are, together, the two largest buildings on UNH's campus. Yet for all their proximity and relative sizes, they are worlds apart on the inside.

Inside the science/engineering building are clean modern classrooms that were built in 2005. Students pour over textbooks at all hours of the day and night. The 24/7 unlocked doors provide access to project rooms whenever necessary. There is a dedicated library inside, just for engineering texts. In a word, the building is designed to be accommodating to its students. The system is designed to maximize success.

Inside the art building are cement-block walls from the 60s that have never been renovated. Students pour over music and studio projects. The doors lock at a reasonable hour most days, which means that the students sometimes break into the building in order to get their practicing or projects done on time. The system is not as nice to the art students. It forces them to break rules, and bends them until they create what their professors want.

I have no insight into art education, though I believe it may be broken. But I am floored by these two buildings. Because when I thought about it, they represent two very fundamental ideas that separate humanity from the rest of the world.
We frequently consider "art" to mean "expression". That is, you can consider anything as "art" if it is the product of someone's imagination, a free-flowing work from inside of someone's mind. Animals do not generally exhibit art-making behavior. It is a concept unique to us, that you can draw a picture and I can appreciate it, and somehow you can express very complicated ideas that could never be vocalized, and relate them without saying a word.

And on the other side of the "right-brain left-brain" is Mathematics, another fundamental concept unique to humans. Mathematics is a tool that we've created, and yet are still trying to discover. It is a completely different form of expression, one that uses numbers and expressions to model the universe that we live in.

For some reason or another, individuals tend to specialize in either "art" or "math". We put the buildings right next to each other, but few people manage to use both of them. The mere proximity isn't enough to make artists out of engineers, or mathematicians out of musicians.

Not sleeping.

This blog post is a letter to a specific individual. If it makes no sense to you, just imagine it as a creative writing exercise.
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Here's a story that I never tell people, partly because I loath having a diagnosis as a crutch.
The summer after the 8th grade, I was prescribed Prozac by a psychiatrist. We had been seeing him because I was diagnosed with a Nonverbal Learning Disorder. Go ahead and read the wikipedia. I just did, and honestly I was surprised at how well it pins me down. The doctor's reason for the Prozac included some kind of mumbo jumbo about "switching gears" and "holding on" to things too much. I never noticed a difference. Before I left for the weeklong NNED summer camp, I decided that instead of dealing with the incredible hassle and embarrassment of bringing medication to a teen camp and having to go to the nurse for each dose, I would simply not take the medicine to camp. My parents were fine with this idea, because I think all of us thought it was ridiculous that I was taking prozac in the first place.

After we told the doctor that I wouldn't be taking the medicine for a week, he gave me a stern look and said that if my behavior were to get me in trouble, that it would be my fault for not continuing the medicine.

I don't think I will ever forget how I felt after the conversation I had with that psychiatrist. I was physically upset because he had implied that I would have behavior problems due to not taking my prozac. That some how, chemicals were the only thing keeping me from being an insane child that needed mental help. The man didn't know me, but he had diagnosed me. That's not fair.

Here's a challenge. Me and you are out of touch. The only actual conversations that we've had in the past 2 years have been sitting down, in an office, with serious faces. Please honestly consider that you cannot be a judge of my character if you have not spent significant time with me. You need to talk, laugh, and dream with someone before you know their character. If anything is offensive to me about this situation, it is that you have diagnosed me, like a psychiatrist.

I wrote this as an email to myself in April. It is something that I've struggled with for a very long time:
"Im tired of fighting for my ideas. I dont have anyone who believes in me as a partner. I went to Troy but couldn't get anyone to visit the largest walmart in noth america with me. I went to engineering school alone with no support from anyone at the church. I worked on a project at work for a summer and no one supported the research I did on the EPA's diesel regulations. I did my senior project alone. I had a hard time getting people to play music with me, the one time it was for course credit. I hate sticking up for myself because deep down i feel like I shouldn't have to. Growing up, people always tell you to think for yourself and to be an individual, but what they really mean is to "think anything you want, as long as you think like me." 

My parents switched churches about ten years ago and never looked back. I've had plenty of conversations with them about why. The most of a reason that I could get is that they "just didn't fit". And that is completely alright. In fact, that's precisely why there are so many churches in the US. I'm not just saying that I "don't fit". I think I believe it.

I get along with plenty of people. But for some reason, I do not get along with the select handful of people who really matter in this situation. And that is why I am not convinced that its Me. I believe that there is a culture of offense in churches. I offend you, you offend me, and then neither of us talk about it until our friendship has disintegrated. In the "real world", which I am suddenly privileged to be a part of, people talk about their problems. But more often than not, we simply don't offend each other. When I understand that no one is being intentionally malicious to me, all the offensive old people that I work with are hilarious, and I genuinely enjoy hanging out with them.
Somehow, in the church, everyone takes everyone else with grave sincerity. That's a load of hooplah, and I don't want to attend a church where we can't make fun of each other.

But I will play along, at least for now. If you squeeze something hard enough, it will fit in just about anywhere.

Change

Just read this:
" If you adopt the rhythm of stability, then change is a threat. Adopt the rhythm of change, though, and you'll get restless right on schedule."
-Seth Godin

He's talking about how, when we're kids, we have the yearly change of moving to a new grade. Then we turn 18 and maybe go to college, but when that's over, its it. I'm feeling that right now- I could live the next 33 years with no change. Sure, I have some major life decisions left: marriage, house, kids, retirement. But I'm already restless about being stuck. I need to figure out how to get into a rhythm of change, before i've missed all the chances.

Genius

Read this in my Roman Civ textbook and couldn't pass it by:

"Every man has his own customs and his own religious practices. Similarly, the divine mind has given to different cities different religious rites which protect them. And, just as each man receives at birth his own soul, so, too, does each nation receive a genius [guardian spirit] which guides its destiny."
-Symmachus, Dispatches to the Emperor

That passage was written in the year 384, as part of a protest against Christianity's rising dominance in Rome.
It caught my eye because Symmachus mentions the idea of national spirits, which the Bible mentions in passing in Daniel:
"I have come to answer your prayer. But for twenty-one days the spirit prince of the kingdom of Persia blocked my way. Then Michael, one of the archangels, came to help me, and I left him there with the spirit prince of the kingdom of Persia." -Daniel 10:12/13

One subject that I have always wanted to learn more about is the intersection between Judaism and Greek culture/religion. Because I think that it must exist somewhere. Here we have a late-era Roman senator fighting against Christianity, and using language that we generally don't accept in Western thought, but that would have made perfect sense in Daniel's time.

Daniel presents us with the idea that nations are alive, that they have representatives outside of the physical world, and that they fight each other.
This is very much like Greek and even the Roman view of the gods.

I continue to believe that modern christianity has lost the vast nuance of ancient understanding somewhere in our quest for systematic theology.

Space between Words

I just went to a thesis recitation from some grad students in UNH's English department. It was entirely outside of my routine. The pieces included creative writing, poetry, journalism, and a novel. I attended specifically for the journalist, but the poet mentioned something in one of her tormented, grief-stricken poems about death: "the space between words."
I don't remember what, if anything, she had to say about it. Her pieces were stream-of-consciousnesses and hard to follow as a recitation. But it struck me that she for some reason or another found interest in the space between words.

As a musician, I've heard it said that "space" is one of the most important and under-appreciated parts of music- that the notes we don't play are just as crucial as the notes we do.
I've heard critical comparisons of "yesterday's music" to "modern pop music" where the major difference is the amount of "space": classic rock has room to breath, so to speak, and the instruments sit loosely with each other. Modern music is much more tightly packed, with studio limiters turned all the way up to give the illusion of loudness. And people of all types generally agree that the space that we used to put around notes is a good thing.

My senior capstone project uses little chips for sensing temperature and for software-controlled switches. The product line I chose is called "1wire" because the devices receive their power from the same wire that they send data on. (using only one wire between them: 1wire). The design challenge that this presents is that when a device is using the line to send data, everything else connected loses their power source. (the line is pulled high when idle, and when a device uses it, it gets pulled low.) This requires that each 1wire device has a little capacitor inside that stores enough energy to allow it to "hold its breath" when the line is in use and then recharge when the line is let go. If something keeps the line low for too long, all the devices in the chain will eventually use up their stored energy and reset themselves. Communication over a 1wire buss requires space between commands in order to work.

I think people must fundamentally be the same way.
When I have something important to say, I find myself talking slower, giving space around each word.
And I think about all the sermons or lectures I've sat through where the stream of words coming at me was so endless and deprived of space that I simply stopped listening.
Picture this:
You're stuck in a conversation with someone and you're distracted.
Maybe something is happening outside, like a sudden steam leak or a guy riding a unicycle, and it has stolen your attention from the person you were talking to. They continue to talk and you continue to nod and fake your engagement while secretly wishing that they would let you go investigate that sudden steam leak.
And then, they pause, mid-sentence.
Their words stop.

What do you do?

You realize that you've been caught. You turn your head and look them in the eye and maybe apologize for being distracted. Or maybe you pretend that nothing exciting is happening outside and that you really were present for the whole conversation.

Regardless, this is what occurred:
A space in between words caught your attention.

We become so used to words without spaces in between them that a pause is truly meaningful.
Perhaps, like 1wire, we need the pauses to catch our breath.
But people tend to avoid silence.
Silence is scary in a conversation. It means that someone is thinking instead of talking. It forces you to think, too. Maybe that's why we don't like the spaces between things. A space is somewhere that isn't, and that is just too meaningful for us to enjoy.

I would like to bring back space as a part of what I do.
If I play less notes, I will have to be more deliberate about the ones that I do play.
If I say less words, I will have to think about what I say before I say it.
If we let our conversations have pauses, we will be able to make better decisions.
If our lives have pauses between running around doing this or that, we will be able to enjoy the time that we actually have. We shouldn't need to take a vacation to hawaii in order to notice the ocean. We should have that space built-in to our lives.

Pacific

I have never particularly paid attention to the ocean before. But being in the middle of the pacific is a whole new experience.  I noticed the waves for the first time in a long while. It was very interesting to fly over the ocean between Oahu and Hawaii, because you could look out the window and just see water forever in every direction. But the water out there in the open ocean is just so calm. Like the water is peaceful. My dad said thats why they called it the pacific, and i think that i believe him. But sitting on beaches around this island, the rhythm of the ocean is very clear. There is a wave front that washes up on the beach and as it falls back into the water it runs into the next front which struggles to overtake it before reaching the beach again. The ocean pulses with energy just like our voices fill the air with energy. The ocean is talking to us. When the weather is calm, the ocean is peaceful. When the weather is rough, the ocean cries out to us.

I also never really paid attention to streetlights before our trip to Hawaii.
One of the most striking things about the island that we weren't expecting is how downright dark it as on the roads. Away from cities, there are no lights. And inside of cities, the only lights are dim, yellow LPS lamps spread rather thin around the road. I showed my family the craziness of the single-spectrum LPS light by showing them different colored soda cans in a walmart parking lot. The light turns everything "black and white" looking, as in, the color disappears.
I did some quick googling and confirmed my hunch that the yellow-only light is due to a law that supports all of the observatories on Mauna Kea. As in, the work of the astronomers on the island is so important that public policy has allowed them to control what kind of outdoor lighting is in use across the island. I find this quite fascinating. It makes me want to live on Hawaii, because Hawaii is awesome and cares about scientists. But the absence of light pollution made me think about light pollution. Why do we light up everything so brightly? Why do we make our planet glow at night, spending gobs and gobs of electricity just in case we want to see something?

I've also been thinking about airports.
Every time we went through an airport or got off of a plane during our vacation, I sincerely wanted to work in the airline industry. There are so many things that are just plain broken about it. I became acutely aware of the amount of time people waste in airports. You have a connecting flight with a 2 hour layover. Well, that's 2 hours of your life that you want to be traveling, but you are stationary. Airports have figured out this apparent 2-hour time suck. You spend twenty minutes waiting to get off of the plane, twenty minutes trying to figure out where your next terminal is, twenty minutes getting yourself there, twenty minutes in line for another TSA checkpoint, twenty minutes in line for a bagel... and sure enough, after you're done being lost and confused and angry at the people who design airports, you are just in time to board your next flight.
Whether intentional or not, airports are designed to waste time.
In fact, nearly all of them very much resemble malls on the inside. There are overpriced shops all over the place, and at the very end of your miserable walk through all of them, your terminal awaits you like an anchor store. I think that malls are also designed to waste our time, only instead of travel, they waste it with shopping. There ought to be some statistic out there comparing how much time people spend in malls and how many things they actually buy.

Being in Hawaii made me very aware of how we were spending our time. We spent a lot of time driving places. Sometimes it felt like a waste of time, like when we were driving back and forth between places. But most of the time it was an adventure. We were exploring Hawaii. The goal of driving was to get somewhere, leave the car, and experience the island. We therefore spent many hours tromping around on frozen lava flows, hiking a volcanic crater, snorkeling, eating at restaurants, and visiting with family. When it comes down to it, the time in the car wasn't wasted at all because there was always some incredible scenery outside the window, and always some conversation happening inside.

I thought about how back home, I spend countless hours on the internet. I waste so much time not doing anything in particular. I think we all probably spend far too much of our time not telling a story. Somehow, Hawaii didn't fall victim to that. We spent as much time as possible exploring and having an experience. With 60 days until my college graduation, I can't recall the last time I was able to spend a week just experiencing things. I hole up in my room tricking myself into thinking that i'm doing homework. Or maybe I actually do school work. We don't notice the ocean because we're too busy working. We don't think about our streetlights because we're too busy driving.
It may be that I noticed so many things during this one week trip because I wasn't distracted with anything else. I didn't work on my senior project, I just enjoyed being.
 
I'm trying to figure out how to use my time like we did on Hawaii.
I don't want to let any of it go to waste.

A Million Miles

I just got back home from a one-week family vacation to Hawaii.
The last time we took a family vacation, I think I was 12, so it has been about 10 years.
The background is that my aunt moved to the Big Island over the summer for a new job and my mom decided that during spring break, we should all go down and visit and see hawaii. Hawaii!

I can't possibly sum up the week as a blog, other than stating that one week is not long enough to visit Hawaii. But I do have lots of things I've been thinking about.

First, time.
There is a 6 hour time difference between the East Coast and Hawaii. This means that our 11-hour plane ride there from new york was actually only 5 hours long. Subsequently, we left Hawaii at 8pm saturday night and arrived at our house more than 24 hours later.

But time is so much more than just the numbers on our clocks.
That week in Hawaii was a trip that stopped time.
Perhaps because of the jetlag, none of us could ever keep straight what day of the week it was.
By the time Friday rolled around and we were exploring Volcano National Park, Wednesday's coral reef snorkeling felt simultaneously  an instant and a year in the past. The Island is so diverse and varied, and we saw so much and did so many things that it all became a blur of the past. I have immediate, happy memories of this vacation.

And yet, this was a family vacation.
Every moment of it felt like I was 12 again.
School disappeared and it was just me and my brother sharing the backseat of a rental car while Mom and Dad carted us around to all the things we had to see. These memories became memories of a time that was literally 10 years ago, and may be 10 years into the future, as well.

I left hawaii absolutely dreading to have class tomorrow morning. Vacation should last forever. There are too many mountains to climb and too much lava to see.

This trip is also significant because I started and finished a book on the plane. Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years has been in my pile of books for a while and I figured I'd finally give it a go. And that book sure did speak to me.
It's significant because Don's point in the book is that we need to be using our lives to live stories, interesting ones. Hawaii is a story to me. But this trip isn't the whole thing. I feel as if that little (big) island started a chapter of a story in my life. I feel almost how people talk about feeling when they come home from missions trips, all bubbly about how such and such a country changed their life and everyone needs to go there to experience the wonderment. There is some sort of inexplicable pull and draw for me now. Like, now that I've been there, and spent a week trying to pronounce the names of places, and driven all over and shopped at their walmarts, that it is a familiar place to me. That I should want to visit any chance I get and be exited any time someone mentions the Big Island. The same way I feel about Troy, where I called home for 9 months and spent uncountable energy exploring and habitating.

But most of all, it drops me off back here, at UNH, with 2 months left before I have the great and sincere privilege of beginning a life so expectedly boring that I am honestly quite frightened about it.
Don reminded me that I never really wanted a boring and regular desk job, but has left me asking myself what I could possibly expect myself to do about it.

Don also has me thinking that I need to start recording my memories, so that I can't forget them and so that I can figure out the story of where I've been.

2 months

Sometimes, you go through a season where time just straight disappears. I returned to my dorm room just now and realized that it had been 12 days since i crossed off a day on my calendar.
2 months from now, I will be graduating UNH with an engineering degree.
There might be some blogs here shortly.

Registration

Today, I registered for 3 things:
-The Undergraduate Research Conference, where I must present my senior design project.
-The FE Exam, the first of a long process to becoming a Professional Engineer.
-Intent to Graduate, where I tell UNH where to send my diploma.

It is the last one, which was the easiest form, that was the hardest to submit. I've been getting away with calling myself a student for almost 17 years. I've been a student in 3 states. Soon, I will no longer qualify for discounts on Adobe software and Apple products.

It is downright surreal.

Resolution

I'm somewhat agnostic towards New Years Resolutions, but here's something I've resolved for 2013:
I'm not going to be bullied.
I'm not going to let adults talk at me like I'm a child.
And when I am pushed, I will push back.

This came from a discussion that I had with my father this past weekend.
I know this sounds super college-graduation-trite, but as I've gotten older, I have developed more and more respect (and thanks) for my parents.

Not a reflection

Ever since transferring to UNH, I've been somewhat fascinated with the placement of the engineering building (Kingsbury) and the art building (PCAC). These two buildings are directly across from each other, yet hold two very different groups of students.
Engineering students take art classes to get As and to satisfy annoying graduation requirements.
Art students use Kingsbury for the cafe inside.

My favorite feature of Kingsbury hall is that the doors seemingly do not contain locks. The building is simply always open. I assume that this is the carefully planned result of faculty and administration acknowledging the wonky schedules and workloads maintained by their students, and I for one would not be able to complete most of my school work without constant access to the building.

The art building is a different story. It locks every night at around 11pm, and is not guaranteed to be open on weekends.

My story from Hurricane Sandy is that, while the University was closed for two days, Kingsbury remained open throughout the storm. I was able to quietly do homework with the building mostly unoccupied. However, the PCAC stayed locked from Sunday night.
I currently have an instrument inside that building and try to practice it every night, so I tried the door every time I walked by.
Every time I tried, it was locked.

Tonight (Tuesday), the door is still locked. But while walking by, a student inside opened the door for me and then quickly propped the door open with a rock. Not a large rock, otherwise "they might notice". I asked how she got inside and the response included "breaking in through the theater".
I notice that, while the building had been officially locked for 2 days, the music wing was quite full of students who had been forcefully kept from their instruments for too long and were becoming desperate to play them. It was downright lively inside.

But Kingsbury remained open and silent.

Somehow, Engineering students have a forsaken gift: a facility that is always available, but not always used. Yet across the street, Art students are waving their arms trying to get someone inside to notice and hold the door open for them.

I don't know what this means. I just know that there is something funny going on, something strange about the crosswalk between these two buildings.

Don't Forget Combined Services

There was a sort of combined worship service tonight at the Whit. I love going to events at other churches because I love to see how other churches do things.

Important note: I almost always walk out being happy that I am at the church I am.

They do these "combined" type events every now and then. The latest iteration is "new hampshire" churches. There were maybe 2,000 people in the arena, and they said about 170 churches were represented.
Pretty cool, especially since the vast majority of churches in our area are in that sub-200 congregation size.
Now there are lots of people who like to advocate for churches "getting together" and I honestly agree. America's church is very fractured, there are denominations inside of denominations, and it keeps me up at night that there are probably 20+ churches in Dover who do not communicate or collaborate or anything together.
HOWEVER, I am convinced that there is a good reason why we don't do combined "worship services" very often.

I walked into the Whit and saw what I was hoping to see: good sized line arrays, a Venue and a grand MA at front of house, and IMAG on a stage that could have been 60'x30'.
The music was familiar but mostly not what i'm used to.

Here are details that rubbed me the wrong way:
1/2 the stage was a choir.
the other 1/2 of the stage contained 3 percussionists, 2 or more acoustic guitarists, 3 keyboards, 2 violins, a bass, an instrument that I can't even identify, a varied smattering of vocalists, and possibly some others. Amongst all that I only ever heard 1 electric guitar at a time. Now there is nothing inherently wrong with 3 percussionists in a band,
But I have a personal vendetta against crowded stages and sloppy instrumentation.
All of those musicians were probably very good.
However I don't think I would have noticed if you had removed 2/3 of the people on the stage.
Another way to say it: You give a church a bigger stage and they figure out how to fill it with more people.
I don't have anything personal against choirs. I think they are pretty neat.
However I do not like my ears being pierced with the sound of 40 amplified voices that are louder than the entire 6-person rhythm section.

I think it all boils down to culture.
My church has gotten away from the culture of hanging flags inside our auditorium and waving streamers around. This event contained more than one middle-aged man waving a streamer and also 2 hand-held flags for the entire music set.
There was a dance element, which is cool except it was during a worship song which just felt weird. There was a kids choir complete with kid solo which always make me feel uncomfortable and weird. There were kids on stage waving streamers/flags/ribbons, which triple-whammeyd the squirmy-kid feeling inside of me.
There was a song in spanish. I have ALWAYS made fun of people who sing worship songs in other languages, because I speak ENGLISH and do not know what spanish words mean, therefore there is no point in having lyrics. I will let this one slide because I'm sure there were hispanics in the room and it was a pretty fun latin song.

The lighting director harshly reminded me of church volunteer techs. I did not appreciate his use of the blinders on the top of his rig, and the rainbow pixel-map across his backlight rig that he aimed at the crowd was just plain silly.

There are more things, tons of little details that I just plain didn't like.

It sounds like I'm being harsh.
And yes, I am.
But I can do that, because these people like what they do.
And I like what I do.
I'm not going to tell you that anything at this service was wrong, because there are very few wrong ways to do anything these days. And THAT is why there are so many different churches.

If there's any big problems in the evangelical or charismatic or non-denominational church in America, the biggest one is an identity problem. So many churches just plain don't know what they're going after.
They don't have a vision for the music, so they let 3 people play percussion: no vision = no reason to say no. But if we are able to define our identity, we can work towards fostering that identity. And different churches develop different cultural identities, which is good.

It just makes combined "multi-church" gatherings really awkward.

Any further conversations I have with people about "combined church" events will be about how we need to ally our ministry and forget about church services.

On Rhetoric

Stumbled into a UNH Cru vision-type meeting tonight. (I was told there would be free food, which makes both of my meals today pot-lucks. hashtag winner.)

They passed out a transcript of a speech that John Mott once gave about "Spiritual Awakening in a University."

Here's a paragraph excerpt:

"Is there not an urgent need for a spiritual awakening in the universities of every land represented in this Conference? ...Let us remember how many Christian students there are who, by inconsistent and sinful lives and practices, are dragging the banner of Christ in the dust. Let us reflect on the intense spirit of the world which in so many places is invading the Church... Let us not forget the terrible consequences which will follow if these students are not reached for Christ - the consequences not only to themselves, but also to the cause of Christ, and even to ourselves if we do not seek to win them. As we ponder all these facts deeply and prayerfully, are we not impressed with the great need of a spiritual awakening? "It is time, O Lord, for you to work."

This one paragraph in particular stuck out to me, because it sounds just like a lot of modern church rhetoric. Students need a revival, and there is an "intense spirit of the world" which is "invading the church"... sounds like a lot of things you hear people talk about in churches.
But what is striking to me is that this speech was given in 1898. 114 years ago.

Here are some things that come to my mind:

-Perhaps the Church has not done a very good job in the past 114 years of being influential in the lives of students.
-Perhaps this speech and its language has influenced 4 generations of christian ministry, and we have just been repeating the same words over and over again.

I don't think the former statement is true. I think that the church has and continues to have a tremendous impact in the world, especially on students.
However, I think that there is danger in the words about the "influence of the world invading the church". As soon as you start to read into that, you start to "see" places where the influence of the world has invaded the church. Modern music and production standards come to mind. There's a movement of people who believe that rock music in the church is satanic and surely a "worldly influence".


Here is what I think:
If the only influence on the church is generations of the church's own influence, then that church is operating in a vacuum and has ceased to serve its purpose.

A church in Dover, NH ought to look like Dover, NH.
It should not look like 14th century Europe.


Now it is very likely that Mr. Mott was not speaking about "worship styles", and was instead talking about "christians" living a worldly life. In that case, maybe his words bear repeating. Either way, his speech doesn't sound 114 years old. I think that the church should think more about its rhetoric.

On Using Soap

There's a strange phenomenon that happens in mens restrooms, specifically after urinal use.
Of the people remaining when you ignore those who don't wash their hands altogether, most of the remaining do this weird little faucet-dance. They turn on the water, stick their hands under it juuuust long enough to get them wet, turn off the water and then dry their hands as if nothing ever happened.

Soap is not frequently used.

I don't understand this.
Soap is provided in restrooms because it helps to remove things such as bacteria from your hands. When you use the sink, you invariably add bacteria to the mix, and getting your hands wet most likely attracts more of the critters.

I have read cases for not using soap, but they all require the use of scrubbing, which is something guys definitely do not do when they wash their hands.

I can think of 2 causes for this behavior.
One is that we are taught early on that we always have to wash our hands. However with no adult supervision, it becomes a routine "reflex" where there is no ambition to actually clean the hands, but the actions are part of muscle memory so the sink is used.
The other is that our society expects us to wash our hands when using the bathroom, and even though most men probably don't pass judgement on others who don't wash their hands after peeing, its seen as an acceptable way to pretend that there really is hand-washing going on.

Here's how I view it:
A complete waste of time.
Rather than accomplishing something practical and useful (Such as cleaning your hands), you are spending effort, time, and resources (water and paper towels) with zero net result. Those resources and that time and effort were destroyed, turned into heat, lost forever to the forces of entropy.

It may be trivial, but we do that same thing with so many other aspects of our lives.

Now, I'm an adamant believer that every christian song written about "going through the motions" is a song too many about "going through the motions", but we do that.
We waste time and energy in situations because we've been trained to think a certain way or are afraid of the societal consequences of being ourselves.

Here.

To answer my question for myself from the last time i blogged:
The music never leaves. It's as inseparable as your native language, and as recognizable as your name. Even when it doesn't feel like there is time to sit down and practice, everything you live is a song.
Am i disappointed that I have let my life "take over" and squeeze out the things I love?
Absolutely.
But then you realize that some things are just so integral to your being that they can't ever be squeezed out.
I will allow everything I do to be musical.
And in the meantime, I will force myself for one more year to play the "BS EE Degree" game, and 9 months from now let out a sigh of relief. And then start something new...

On Projects

Its summertime.
-Senior Project involves forcing myself to learn Python and think about SMT components.
-Thinking a lot about IT type things. Trying to rig up a distributed file system without spending money.
-Trying to become a better audio guy.
-Not sleeping nearly enough.
-Working full time for unrelated things.
-Not reading anything I planned on reading.
-Wanting to sell old textbooks and other stuff. Not discovering the time for it.
-Where's the music?

Theater

I had to write a 5 page paper on stage lighting for a class that I am pretty sure every student has an A in, regardless of how much work they did or how much they cared.
Here is a paragraph that I couldn't figure out how to fit in.

Engineering and theater have this in common: they both strive to make the world a better place by enriching the lives of an audience that doesn’t understand or know who these players are. But they are different in how they accomplish it. Engineers design products, services, and systems that allow people to do less and less by thinking less and less and knowing little about what is actually happening. The stage forces people to examine themselves, to think, to question what reality really is. For all I know, this might be a more noble cause.

Proof

I went to an Intervarsity meeting yesterday. The IV group at UNH meets on thursday nights, and because of band rehearsal I haven't had a chance to go. We read the second half of Mark 1, "manuscript style", where they just give you a page of text with the verse numbers removed. It is something I have only ever heard of Intervarsity doing. Must be some kind of centralized training.
Here are two things I gleaned from the study:

Mark 1:35-37:
"And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he[Jesus] departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed. And Simon and those who were with him searched for him, and they found him and said to him, 'Everyone is looking for you.'"
I think that is fantastic foreshadowing for the next 2,000 years of history.

There are two ways to spin that.
1: Everyone is looking for Jesus.
2: Jesus' disciples keep trying to find Jesus and then telling him, "everyone is looking for you".
But Jesus keeps leaving and going to a solitary place to pray. These other people did not look for Jesus, his disciples did. Perhaps we too much have the mindset that everyone is looking for Jesus, when in fact, everyone is not, and it is the job of the disciples to tend to the ministry.



A little bit later in Mark 1, Jesus heals a leper. It's really pretty neat, because after he heals the man, Jesus instructs him to tell no one what happened, but to "go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, for proof to them."(Mark 1:44)
Don't tell anyone that Jesus healed you, but follow the law that Moses wrote concerning leprosy. (Which is in Leviticus 14)

I think that we have forgotten some of this.
People who are not christians need proof of what Jesus does in our lives, whether it's curing leprosy or just some emotional healing. We need to show them proof in their terms.
Creating christian radio stations and an entire genre of books called "Religious Inspiraton" doesn't quite cut it. Heck, there's a whole section of Barnes and Noble for "Christian Fiction". What the junk is that?
Far too often, instead of showing people proof for Jesus on the terms of the law, christians show them the proof for Jesus by being lunatics.

Gay marriage is a terrific subject for this. Instead of being reasonable and showing the world that Jesus can heal broken families, the Church has for a large part fought a losing political battle that has alienated millions of people. The Church's definition of Marriage is not political. It is religious. Have marriage ceremonies in the Church. But for crying out loud, let gay people have hospital visiting rights.
Nonchristians do not appreciate you bringing your religious beliefs into politics, especially when it appears to impede the progress of social justice, which is something that Jesus particularly cared about. 

Bring the world some proof on their own terms, within their "law".

Complicated Explanations

The most profound quote I heard this week was from my stage lighting teacher. He's an old guy who has clearly done theater for his entire life, stagecraft and lighting and all that drudgery. "I remember working 62 hour days." Technical theater indeed.
But he was going over some terminology in class and had this to say:
"When you don't really understand something, you can only explain it in complicated ways."

That is to say, when you really understand something, you can explain it easily, and could write the Simple Wikipedia article about it. But when you don't understand something and someone asks you to explain it, you find yourself BSing some sort of answer that sounds like you know what you're talking about.
Example, I could probably explain calculus to a middle school student, because everything I've done in school for 4 years has been based on calculus. I could not, however, explain to you Spanish grammar. I could probably fake it because i long ago studied latin, but I really know nothing about spanish.

This observation is important to me because it really makes sense of so many "complicated" things in the world.
Economics, politics, theology, non-newtonian physics, the history of ancient cultures, global warming, global hunger, the weather. These things appear very complicated. There are all sorts of scientists dedicated to studying them, writing textbooks about them, debating the importance of different theories.
But the bottom line is, no one really knows how the economy works.
And that is dangerous for two reasons: One, lots of people have successfully convinced politicians that they do, in fact, know how the economy works. And Two, because of this, people/government try to control the economy based on their inaccurate models that don't really work. But this regulation is complicated because that is the only way people know how to explain the economy. The result is things like housing bubbles, debt crises, and inflation.

How about theology?
There are disgustingly long books written about theology. You can devote your entire life to just studying a single religion, and you would never even know what the guy down the street believes. Theology is complicated because it is invented by people to describe things that we don't actually understand. Think about the Romans. They had hundreds of gods, all responsible for little things in daily life, and the result was a ridiculously complicated set of social observances to make sure you didn't offend any deity.


Now, there is nothing wrong with studying complicated things. But I believe that there are far too many people out there who talk like they know more than they do. 
As an engineering student, I am surrounded by other students who think they understand how transistors work, but really, no one knows for sure why electrons behave the way they do.

This is one of the coolest things about Jesus. He said simple things. Short sentences. Little stories. Because He actually understood what was going on, so He could put it in simple terms. And christians have been complicating it ever since.

One million workers

I love this time of year because its when big companies publish fancy, good looking reports about how great they are. Apple routinely toots their own horn over their environmental record and their labor policies.
Here's a quote that caught my eye:
"Apple-designed training programs have educated more than one million supply chain employees about local laws, their rights as workers, occupational health and safety, and Apple’s Supplier Code of Conduct."
(from http://www.apple.com/supplierresponsibility/reports.html)

Apple has literally Hundreds of factories in China working to produce your glass-coated consumer products. Imagine if instead of outsourcing all of that mindless labor, Apple opened a manufacturing plant in America?
There are certainly a million highschool dropout Americans who could benefit from a solid manufacturing job. Apple is really about the only American company that has enough financial resources to do something like that. And they don't, simply because everyone wants cheap electronics.
Instead, we're fueling economies that are at odds with us, putting the nail in our own coffin by being a lazy society that doesn't particularly want to work for a living.

Postmodernist

My family is all musicians.
My mom is a classically trained violist. My dad plays so many instruments that I don't even know what they all are. My brother plays piano. I play bass. My family has also always been involved in church music.
So a few weeks ago my dad brought home a book by a church worship leader called "Why I Left the Contemporary Christian Music Movement". The author is a former rock musician who transitioned several evangelical and baptist churches from "traditional" style services to "contemporary" styled services. The big differences being organ music and hymns vs. CCM rock-style music.
In his book, he maintains that CCM is generally a bad thing and urges churches to retread and go back to holding traditional services. He has a number of arguments, most that don't make sense to me, but my family has had some pretty neat discussions about it.
What we all seem to agree on is this:
The author associates ALL rock music with bad things that don't belong in church services, and he believes that the music- driven beats that virtually everyone enjoys listening to, is inseparable from evil, lustful desires.
As a musician, I am mostly taken aback by this claim.
Music is a wonderful thing, and, to quote Jack Black, "Rock is not the devil's work, it's magical and RAD."
My family decided that the author of the book has a personal issue with rock music: in his mind, he cannot separate it from immoral things, even if many other people have no problem with it. The problem with that is he seems to believe that people the world over are being influenced by rock music for worse.
One claim he made to support this is that rock music was born out of rebellion.
Which it very likely was.
But my mom, who has a masters degree in music education and seems to know all sorts of things about music history made the point that all art movements are born out of rebellion to the movement that preceded it.
So yes rock music is rebellious. But the romantic movement was rebellious against the classical period, which was rebellious against the baroque period, all the way back to forever. Each generation throws off the customs of the generation before it. It's just the way human society seems to work.

The deeper thing at work here is Modernism verses postmodernism.
The author appears to have grown up in the 70s, when Rock music was really taking off.
My dad grew up in the 60s, and made an off-hand remark about how ever since the 60s, music has been junk. Now i'm no psychologist or philosopher, but it seems to me that everyone loves the music they grew up with. My dad loves music from the 60s and earlier, and it can't just be coincidence that it's the music that was around when he was growing up. Old people listen to old music. Everyone knows that.
But the time period when my dad was growing up is considered to be part of the modernist movement. Like all philosophical and artistic movements, modernists revolted against the styles and thinking of their parents and grandparent's generations.

But the age we're in now is considered Postmodern. To quote the first sentence in the wikipedia article, "Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth."
That is to say, postmodernists reject the idea of objective truth, whereas modernists embraced it.
"Truth" to a Modernist is absolute; it is the way things are.
"Truth" to a postmodernist is all in our heads; it's how we perceive the way things are.
The author of that book is modernist; he believes in objective truth.
I am a child of postmodernism. That means that INSTINCTIVELY, I believe that the author, as a modernist, believes that his truth is the only truth.

It's different ways of looking at the same thing, and arriving at a completely different conclusion.
Growing up in church, I never believed that truth was relative. That's absurd. Truth is out there, it's fact, and it exists.
But as i've grown older, my ideas about truth have changed. I haven't ever studied postmodernism but maybe the people who label our society know what they're talking about. I still believe in absolute truth. I'm a Christian and I believe that Jesus taught Truth with a capital T.
But i've also realized that absolute truth isn't nearly as important as church people make it out to be. Because our society is postmodern. Truth isn't objective in our culture. Truth to each person on the planet is completely different, because each person perceives the world completely differently. And PEOPLE, it turns out, are more important than anything else on the earth.

Especially in an age where your insurance premiums are determined by an algorithm and not a friendly lady over the telephone, people out in the world are becoming more and more in need of being understood by other people.
Jesus's ministry was all about the people he taught.
If we don't try to understand people, if we don't realize that the truth we think is right isn't the same truth that everyone else thinks is right, we will be completely useless to help those people.
 And that's why I  have a personal aversion to CCM; not the style of music, but the Industry. Making music for other christians isn't inherently bad, but it encourages us to ignore the entire world. That's absolutely not what being a christian is all about.

Us vs them

"One of the things that the Church has to understand about people... The lost world, they're not the enemy. Its not us vs. them."
-Perry Noble

If I can't think of any other reason to not like christian radio, that's it right there.

Indispensable Man

The following was in the "drafts" section of my blog. I didn't even know I had a "drafts", apparently I never posted this:


I must have reached that point where i'm realizing how smart my parents actually are.

Over this thanksgiving break my dad shared some apparently Rickover-era "shipyard wisdom" with me. Being a '90s child, I googled it and there is a poem by one Saxon N. White Kessinger, and this is the stanza that my dad quoted to me:

Take a bucket and fill it with water,
Put your hand in it up to the wrist,
Pull it out and the hole that's remaining
Is a measure of how you will be missed.

But the problem is that when you pull out your hand, it is wet.  There is no indispensable man, but that's not the point. The point is the sticky nature of human relationships. We all wear pieces of each other everywhere we go and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

On What Sort Of Greeting

Luke 1:26-30
"In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said, 'Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!' But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, 'Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.'"

This is from the Christmas Story. I think its tremendous that Mary was staring at an Angel, and she had to sit there and try to figure out what the junk was going on. Because seriously, how often to angles show up and announce to you that you're pregnant? It's happened once.

I think we spend a lot of time trying to discern "what sort of greeting" God's giving us. Every time I face a major life decision, I spend hours "trying to discern". I think it might be endemic to evangelical christianity. We teach ourselves that we need to listen to God. You tell someone, "i'm thinking about studying abroad", and all they say back to you is, "Pray about it. Listen to God."
That's more or less a useless answer, obviously I asked for your advice because I wanted your advice, not a canned response that's just going to paralyze me with inaction.
How do we get over the trying to discern part? Mary didn't have to understand what was going on. For all we know, she didn't know what was happening until after Jesus rose from the dead. Somewhere along the way, like His disciples, she must have thrown in the towel on trying to discern and just let Jesus reveal himself to her.
How do we do that?
How do we let go of trying to understand the universe? And how do we let go of always trying to figure out what sort of greeting this is?

Retreat

Matthew 15:21:
"And Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon."
...this passage introduces the story where a Canaanite woman asks Jesus to help her daughter. Jesus tells her no, that he's only there to help the Jews, and she answers, "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table." And Jesus heals her daughter.

What struck me is that Jesus Withdrew to an area where non-Jewish people lived. The way its written makes it look like Jesus decided he needed a break from religious people. He Withdrew. He went somewhere else. He got away from there, and went to go hangout with people who didn't try to make him fit into their religious box. And if you knew that everyone around you wanted to kill you, you would probably do the same thing...
We make religion into a huge deal here in America. We play politics off of it, we get into family feuds over it, we allow it to steer our choices and dictate which brands of toilet paper we boycott or not.
Jesus had to withdraw from religious people.
Can't blame non-christians for not liking something that even Jesus couldn't deal with.

study

an hour ago i found a love note that was hidden for me to find, dated over 4 years ago.
how am i supposed to concentrate on BJT amplifiers?

What's a libertarian?

I'm pretty sick of bipartisan politics.

The Left wants to tax business owners and wealthy people, and then give money and aid to poor people.
The Right only contains those people who are wealthy and business owners, so they naturally oppose this.

The only problem with the Left's ideals is that they aren't fair, and they essentially amount to Robin Hood and certainly close in on socialism.
The Left will stand there and yell at you all day about how the Right isn't fair.
Look, if you were wealthy, you wouldn't want to have a 30% tax, either. That's just plain ridiculous, and it discourages anyone from actually wanting to succeed.
The Left then turns around and tries to convince you that you can make life better for millions of people by giving them jobs in the government doing literally nothing for a paycheck. Funded by the Right, those people who were blessed enough to make it to your higher tax brackets.

I'm sorry that you don't like capitalism. I hear that China is nice. Go move there and enjoy the good life.

Now, are corporations greedy? Absolutely. That's the whole reason they exist. Public companies exist for the sole purpose of making money.
The problem is that we've built society around a lie, the idea that stocks go up and jobs are added every year. That's simply false. The stock market isn't supposed to go up every year. It's supposed to go up and down. We've built companies, markets, jobs, families, and government on the assumption that bear markets are a terrible, rare catastrophe. Then we try to force reality into that lie, creating bubbles and then crying when they burst.

Stop electing politicians that promise to make you richer. For the love, can we just find someone who wants to have a sustainable government? I don't even care if its big or small or in between. I just want it to be sustainable. Like, on a balanced budget. After we fix that, we can worry about greedy people and lazy people. Or we can forget about them, because its the people in between who have been hurt the most.

Or maybe Apple can build an assembly plant in the USA. that would literally solve 1/2 of the problems we have, and it would prevent the government from spending billions on an ambiguous "jobs" act that claims to give americans jobs by spending america's money. Preposterous.

Zelda

Remember the bosses in the Zelda games? Like the baddies in those caves. They swung stuff or shot stuff at you, and you hopefully made it through the dungeon with full hearts so you could shoot your sword of power or whatever at them. You would have to wait for them to be done with their routine of deathly killing, and for just a moment, you could take a break from running away, shoot at them, and then go back to playing defense. Invariably you would get hit, and then you would have to either use special whatnots or just melee attack the thing, swinging your sword with no regard to how much you got hurt back.
But mostly, you avoided the boss's attacks.

That's the closest simile I can make to being an EE student.
At the end, I've been told, there is a princess. 

This isn't my english homework.

I don't talk much about things that go on in my life, mostly because I don't think much about things that go on in my life. But I'm starting to grow weary of just taking life as it comes. I want to accomplish something, and in order to do that, I have to figure out how to organize my thoughts, organize what I stand for, organize who I am.

I'm listening to Rob Bell right now. He's almost as funny as Francis Chan and Judah Smith. Why do so many people have issues with him? Also as far as I can tell, he's the among the most thoughtful speakers in the christian community.

But that's unrelated.

Over NNED Summer Camp this year, I sketched out a word in my notebook.
Parable.

I remembered a note in the ESV study bible for Psalm 78:2 (I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark saying from of old, things that we have heard and known, that our fathers have told us.)
The note says, "Parable and dark sayings are the tools of wisdom teachers, and require imagination to unlock their meaning."

If you've ever read the Gospels, you know that Jesus taught in Parables a few times. He pretty much never just went out and told people (crowds) something. He always did it with a story.
I've heard sermons preached about parables before.
Almost all the time, the pastor will talk about a parable like a story with a one-to-one correspondence to something about Jesus. But that's not the impression I get from the term "dark saying". In fact, I have never ever seen the word Parable described as a "Dark Saying". I think that's an awesome perspective of them.

These things that Jesus taught about weren't just a nursery rhyme like we reduce them to in sunday school or a trite lyric from a christian song. The words Jesus spoke in parables contain the absolute truth about reality. Nothing underscores this better than a dark saying. Like this is important stuff, the very fabric of the universe. That verse in Psalms and the ESV note imply that the truth in Jesus' words is locked up in meaning. I don't think that Jesus' parables were just a metaphor for the afterlife. I think that they contain truth that can't be expressed any other way.  Like how you can only store hydrofluoric acid in a plastic container, some truths need to be contained in a dark saying.

I think that's one area that the modern Church has neglected.
Evangelism has been a booming business since the 200s.
We talk a whole lot about Jesus, and that's great.
But I don't think we spend enough time saying what Jesus said.
Obviously it was important enough for him to say it. We probably should, too.

I think that Movies are the modern-day parable.
Sadly, so many of them are created for the sole purpose of consumption.
People pay for movies, so people make movies to make money.
They are selling a story. The best ones make the moviegoer think. Usually they leave a happy cathartic feeling at the end. But few movies successfully tell a parable of truth, a dark saying of old, something that really, truly introduces people to reality as it really is.


For some reason, christian subculture hasn't embraced the idea that you can't tell someone something that they don't want to know. They will just ignore it or reject it or explain it away. Even if its true. Even if its the gospel. The vast majority of people I know do not want to hear someone talk about the bible. That is boring and sober. In order to get truth inside of someone, it has to go in sideways, through a dark saying, a parable, a movie, a carefully constructed discography, anything that isn't direct. It has to dwell in them unnoticed in order to survive.
If we diverted any small percent of the resources that the church spends on ineffective ministry strategies into getting truth inside of people without them rejecting it, we wouldn't have to spend billions of dollars sending food to starving people, because starving people wouldn't exist.
But I don't want to talk about food, food is one of the most broken, messed up things in America.

Where this is going

I love stories. I love "serial dramas" because they take years and years to tell a story and by the end, there are millions of people watching every move on screen.
I also love some of the new advertising techniques that are getting people completely absorbed into a whole made-up world, uncovering minute details and telling the story as its made.

I think its absolutely incredible that there are artists who spend their entire careers telling a single story. We live in a world where FAST and NOW and SHORT and CHEAP are important action-words. We have musicians or singers releasing a new album each year while touring nonstop. Production lead-times on movies and TV shows have been reduced substantially since years past. And the result is more and more quick projects that consumers will buy over and over again.

I want to spend my life telling one story. Whether it's creating one to tell others or just living my reality, I want it to be one story, unified from beginning to end.

Rumor

There's a line in the Bible about the end times that there will be "Wars and Rumors of Wars".
I always wondered what a "war rumor" is.

Here in modern times, we always know about wars. Thanks to the televised and internet-driven media, we as consumers can be there with the fighting right as it's happening. We know about the war we are fighting in the middle east. We can turn on a screen and watch it.
But will there be a time when great America is harboring secrets and rumors about wars?

I'd say that ever since the transition from Colonial militias to the Department of Defense, we have kept war out of the eye of the general public. Sure, the public is aware of it and is involved, but people who aren't actually in the armed forces don't have a clue what's going on besides what we watch on TV. Our country has around 80 submarines in the ocean and no american citizen knows what they are doing at any given time. We don't know what all the air force's fighter jets are doing. We don't know where infantry units are heading.
It's safe to say that War breeds Secrets.

Successful war demands successful secrets. That's why there is wartime propaganda and its why we don't know what the military is doing or where they're planning on going tomorrow.

John Locke, one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers, compared Nations to Individuals. He noted that one of the problems with leading a state is that there is no individual who is more suited to judge a nation than any other individual, hence the need for democracy. But there is much more than that.

In Daniel 10:20, Daniel has a vision of a messenger.
"He replied, 'Do you know why I have come? Soon I must return to fight against the spirit prince of the kingdom of Persia, and after that the spirit prince of the kingdom of Greece will come. Meanwhile, I will tell you what is written in the Book of Truth. (No one helps me against these spirit princes except Michael, your spirit prince. I have been standing beside Michael to support and strengthen him since the first year of the reign of Darius the Mede.)'"

Now, ignoring all the prophesy things, it is absolutely incredible to think that Nations have Spirits.
Not only do they have spirits, but they have names and they fight each other. Other Bible translations call them just "princes" or Angels, but there are spiritual beings that represent the nations on our Earth.
Nations are alive. Not just as a collection of people. They are living. They have personality. They fight.  Just like you and me.

I believe that one of the big problems with politics today is that we have lost this realization. Politicians and business executives treat countries as a line separating two groups of people that is crossed very easily by the internet. But these nations are individuals. We have ignored that they have spiritual underpinnings and as a result we have mistreated them.

I think that will probably change soon.

150

This is the 150th post on this blog.
Don't go reading all the ones you missed.
Or do.

I listened to a podcast today where someone said the average tenure of a church Technical Director was 18 months. This is the same lie stat that they say about full time youth pastors.
People always talk about how miserable and lonely ministry is.

I don't think ministry is miserable or lonely.
Here's what I think the issue is.
Tech directors and youth pastors both work for "senior pastors".

Now i've never been a pastor, and don't have any plans on being a pastor.
But at the moment, I have plenty of friends who are in bible school because they feel called to be a pastor.
Here's my question:
What in heck are the odds that everyone who is called to pastor a church or preach are also gifted with excellent management skills?

I'm learning a lot about management this summer.
The managers I see every day spend about 2/3 of their time putting out fires, and the remaining 1/3 trying to stay connected with their personnel.
Even if you are a senior pastor who is also a great manager, if you're a preacher you should be spending your time being a good preacher. Or if you're a councilor you should be counseling. If there is time left over to properly run a church and manage your staff, you are probably cheating something somewhere.
Jesus Preached and taught.
He let other guys deal with the logistics.

I think the "average tenure" of ministry positions is so low because too many pastors don't realize when they should let other people be in charge of things.

I'll be impressed when I see a church with an excellent main communicator who doesn't also pretend to run the whole show. But that's a book, not a blog post.

Piano

A long time ago, a family from our church moved out west. I don't remember where they moved or why they moved, but since they moved from new hampshire, any of the 48 states to the left are all "out west" to me.
They gave our family a spinet piano that has been in our dining room ever since.
I quit piano lessons when I was in 3rd grade, something that I regret now. But it has meant that I hardly ever touch the piano in the dining room.
Every now and then, when no one else is home, I noodle around on it. But that's the extent of my experience playing piano.

With that said, I have just experienced something that every person reading this needs to experience.

Find a piano sometime when no one is around. I suggest a big room. There are few things in the World of Man-Made-Things that I love more dearly than enormous empty rooms.
Play a single note up high.
For your sake right now, just imagine it.
Its just a note.
A single, solitary note that has almost no effect.
It has a brief life, but no matter how hard you play that high note, it quickly dies away.

But then you have to try using the sustain pedal.
When you hold down the sustain pedal, you unlock every string in the piano and allow them all to move freely. When you hold down the pedal and play the exact same note, you get something amazing and pretty unnerving.
Instead of just quickly dying out, that note causes every string to make noise. It literally effects everything around it. That same note now lasts almost forever. Even after the initial note has faded, the entire piano keeps talking and talking and talking. Its chilling to listen to.

I'm just a little bit obsessed with how I don't know the name of any of my great-great grandfathers. After 4 generations, I have no idea who those people were. But they set in motion a chain of events that caused me to be born, in the process causing God only knows how many other things to happen on this earth.

Usually in our heads, we think about our actions like a single note on a piano. We go about our lives as a string of isolated incidents. But the reality is that everything impacts everything.
Everything we do that comes in contact with the rest of Humanity reverberates like a note on a piano.
Our actions die out quickly. We live and die. But the results and consequences of even the little things last for a really, really long time.

Mending Wall

There is a Robert Frost poem that we read in highschool english class. "Mending Wall". I don't remember what year we read it, or what we discussed about it or the conclusions we came to about it. But I will always remember that we read it, and the proverbial line that "Good fences make good neighbors", that Frost may or may not have been telling us not to believe.

I'm not one to examine myself much. It's not something that I have ever left time in my day for me to do. I hate when people talk about "love languages" and Meyers-Briggs personality tests and junk like that because from what I can tell, if you're an adult, you should already know what makes you tick, what your personality is like, and whether you like hugs or getting gifts more. None of that is quantified, because by golly there is no human way to quantify your brain. So instead, we have to use subjective words to describe ourselves, which isn't really useful.
But one thing that I have noticed about me is that I really, really can't stand walls.

Walls are something that you jump over.
Walls are something that you knock over.
Walls are something that you can watch as they slowly fall apart over time.

We all spend our childhood within the confines of the walls that adults put around us.
Usually for our "protection" or "own benefit" but even if most kids can't see the "real" benefit of these walls, most if not all can see that they are just a wall.
Not even a real wall.
A metaphorical one.
Walls inside your head are easier to jump over than a wall made out of rocks.
So I did a lot of that when I was growing up.
And today, when people put a wall in front of me, my first reaction is to break it.
Every time.
It usually takes a great deal of effort for me to decide to let it be.
Maybe i'm just combative. I'd like to think of myself as never being content with status quo.

Yesterday morning, I watched Dean Kamen tell about 70 extraordinary highschool seniors to chase after their dreams and that if people who care about you try to hold you back, it probably means that you found something that needs to be done.

Easy words for an incredibly successful person to say to a bunch of kids who have never experienced failure. But hey. He's on to something.

emotional

yesterday, I ate breakfast at 7:30, took a final at 8, wasted a lot of time, and 12 hours later found myself at a place that desperately tried to be home almost 2 years ago. I laughed, I stared, I played Angry Birds, I ate ice cream, I watched laundry, I met new people, I climbed an insane staircase to a bell tower full of bird poo and bat skeletons, sat on a roof, searched in the dark for a place to put my feet, found out that I could have shared an apartment with a 12 foot Pepsi sign, and tried to sleep at 4:30 am. Today I ate breakfast at 10 and then put food on plates for a room full of homeless people, each one with a story screaming to be told and understood, and used to change the lives of others.
then I was gifted lunch from Chipotle.


tomorrow, reality returns with its usual unforgiving, trips-you-down-the-stairs ways.
i think.
i thought i knew which was the dream and which was the staring at the ceiling with your head on a pillow, but I suppose i really don't. and perhaps I never will.
maybe its all a dream, and you wake up when you're 65 and realize you slept through your alarm and you're going to be late for school, once again, and you graduate with the most number of tardy marks in the senior class.

i need to understand how to use multivariable calculus to describe engineering probability models before 8:00 monday morning.

before i forget

if there's anything I have learned as an engineering student so far, it is that you can't solve a problem by looking at the problem. you have to look past the problem to the other side and see the answer. the solution is what connects the two together. Engineering doesn't care much for the answer, you usually already know what that is (for instance, better life for all). It's the solution, the substance that allows us to reach the answer, that is elusive.

Magical

This past saturday I spent the morning waiting for the Comcast guy to show up at the Strand Theater to install internet. After 5 hours and a no-show, I at least got to spend the time with my best friend. Also changed the marquee, which is exciting because people always stop and ask what's going on or tell their children to watch out for that guy struggling with the ladder.

More importantly, i caught the saturday performances of Berwick's dance shows this year. Even disregarding how awesome it is to walk into a building and immediately have people running up to you asking how your life has been or having people you don't remember meeting start talking to you, i love watching production happen. Especially in a place where i spent hours upon hours trying to make musicals and dance shows happen as smoothly as possible from a lights/sound/video perspective, tech booths feel like home to me. I could do technical theater for the rest of my life and enjoy every minute of it. Watching stressed-out performers and producers and stage managers fight and yell and pour their passions into something that everyone has to share, that is more magical than an iPad.

Million Miles

I've been reading Donald Miller's blog for a while now. Awesome stuff. He's giving away copies of his book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.
 Get it and read it!


What story are you telling? from Rhetorik Creative on Vimeo.

On Smell

I just read through Jonah.
Chapter 1, Verse 17 reads:
"And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights." (ESV)
Jonah then goes on to say a 9 verse prayer from inside the fish.

Yesterday at restoration church, a certain someone's office smelled pretty terrible. Chris said, "i think someone put poop in here." and he wasn't joking.
After looking around for a while, he found what was making the smell. A white paper bag that at one point had someone's lunch in it. I believe he accurately attributed it to chris tower. It was in the trash can. Now, you could smell this thing from the hallway. It was strong.
When we leaned over the trash can, it became difficult to take a breath.
And when chris picked up the bag and brought it to his nose, he choked, i'm pretty sure he teared up, and he quickly put it down.
No doubt about it. A 5 day (possibly plus a few weeks) old sandwich can smell pretty horrible.
Lets suppose that whatever fish Jonah was in had a stomach about the size of chris's office.
Fish, or wales, or whatever you have here, eat more than a sandwich from Calef's every day.
Raw fish, on its own, isn't really the best smelling stuff.
Imagine what stomach bile, half digested carcasses, and potentially other animals probably the same size of Jonah would smell like all mixed together.
With no fresh air.
For 3 days and 3 nights.

It was difficult for me to concentrate in that office, because there was the constant nagging of foul odor.
I couldn't have lasted a few minutes with my face next to that sandwich bag.

Jonah prayed for 9 verses, thanking God that he was in the fish.
If you can read through that without being completely taken aback, you simply don't understand it.

None of us have ever been swallowed whole by a whale.
But then again, most of the times, we don't thank God for the smelly situations we are in, either.

Shoes

There are a few decisions that I made in Highschool that I'm proud of. One of them was running cross country.
You hear sports analogies a lot. High profile coaches from all sorts of sports teams in all sorts of leagues routinely take the "motivational speaker" track. People can relate to sports, and sports can relate to life. But Running is different.
Most sports require a combination of Teamwork, Athletic Ability, and Strategy. We like this because it makes us feel good that we can apply a similar formula to things like the workplace, or family life, or whatnot. But distance running has nothing to do with teamwork. It has very little strategy. Success in running is being both the most athletic person, and the person most able to push himself far beyond the point of giving/throwing up.

Does this lend itself to good motivational speaking?
It should. Unlike just about every other sport, running is not learned or taught. There is no official rulebook. There is just your feet. It is a part of us. Everyone is a runner. We are born with it. Something so fundamental to our bodies ought to have many things to teach us about ourselves.

I got new shoes this weekend. In highschool I started wearing "last season's" shoes as my everyday beaters, and its a habit that I continue. Modern running trainers are one of the most noticeable types of shoes. They are all made out of mesh, they are usually reflective, and they always have an enormous heel cushion. They are built for utility. That heel cushion is designed to absorb impact and help reduce injury from the constant pounding that running puts on your body. They are great.
They are also lousy to run races with.

In fact, a great deal of runners run races with "flats", if not spikes. Flats are still mesh and reflective, but instead of a heel cushion they have a thin piece of rubber under your foot. They can hurt your feet. They can damage your body. But they make you run faster, because they are light and don't absorb energy that you should be using to run with.

During cross country season in highschool, race days were pretty much the best day of the week. On a training day, you would spend 2 hours running as much as you can, constantly wondering why you were putting yourself through so much misery. You would try to eat healthily, since you wanted to be in shape for races. In fact, large lunches made practice super-ultra miserable, so you learned to only eat just enough to not be hungry.

But on a race day, you could eat more lunch because races were later in the day. We got to ride on a bus for an hour or three and relax, do nothing, and enjoy our afternoon. Then you would race for 20 minutes, whereby you put everything out of your mind and do what you trained to do. Then you eat as many cookies as you could possibly hold in your stomach, drink as much vitamin water as you had fit in your bag, and enjoy the ride home.

Race Day is a party.
Except race day is absolutely meaningless if you never put the effort into training.
On Race Day, how good your feet and knees feel is not a concern because running fast is the only concern.
But training is grueling, and precautions have to be taken to ensure that training doesn't interfere with racing.
On Race Day, you need to replenish the hundreds of Calories you burn during a race.
But during training, you need to eat a balanced diet.

Everything in life has a preparation stage and an action stage. You prepare for your career by training in school. If you don't work hard in school, you might not have what it takes to be the top of your field. You prepare for your marriage by maintaining good character and living with purpose, not by listening to Avril Lavigne lyrics. By all accounts, training days are more difficult than race days. But when it comes down to it, the race is the only thing that matters.

Torn

currently cleaning my room, which means going through the plastic tubs that hold my life as it was one year ago, preserved as if time was at a standstill.

I'm very sentimental. As i'm looking at a bulletin from Terra Nova church, I realize that I hardly remember anything about it, and that I may never in my life go there again.

Having transferred schools feels a lot like having an ex girlfriend who is now married. Its as if my life is divided up into pieces of a timeline that roughly fit together, but are in no way related to each other, and can never be re-visited. I am literally burying my past, inside a filing cabinet, just in case I ever need the warranty papers for my computer.

Annual Report

My church released its annual report this week, and I've read through it.
First let me say: I love my church. With all of me.


According to the numbers, it looks like my church spent about 7% of its total budget on "missions" this past year.
Most of that was out of the separate, not-tithes "mission fund".

Which means that we spent 93% of the church's total resources on ourselves, and we relegate most of that missions money to the extra offering that people are asked to make.
In perspective, our church spent almost as much money on our mortgage payment as we spent on all "missions" for the year.

From my experience reading about the Church in America,  this isn't a problem with my local church. It's a problem with The Church as a whole. If our money is where our mouth is, then we're saying that the 20-years-ago purchase of a wooden building is almost as important as spreading the Gospel.
I'm uncomfortable.
I want you to be uncomfortable, too.

New

2010 is gone.
In 2010, for the first time, I made a New Years Resolution.
It was to read the Bible cover to cover Four times, in Four different english translations.
I almost realized this goal. Over the past 365 days, I read the entire NLT, AMP, and MSG versions. And I'm exactly 2/3 of the way through the ESV study bible I started in October. It turns out that It's really hard to read a study bible cover to cover, especially in 3 months. And especially when you're busy. I made barely any progress in the past 2 weeks, due to having an irregular schedule and spending 57 hours at church last week, and about 20 hours at church this past tuesday and wednesday. Hopefully by the end of January I'll be done with 2010's goal.
And then I will move on to my goal for 2011:
Over the course of 2010, every time i read a bible verse that interrupted me, made me think, stopped my train of thought, i wrote it down. This year my plan is to re-read all those notes i took, and make sense of them on an individual basis. Maybe I will try to make sense of them on a collective basis too. But no promises. If i stay consistent, there will be more than enough material for 2 blog posts each week.

theology?

I sent this as a text message to myself in July. I just realized that i never actually posted it.

sometimes it feels like the church is losing influence. in the changing culture that we live in, people don't necessarily want to have anything to do with Jesus. What they want is answers. I think that very few people actually believe that this is it, that we live and die and then there's nothing else to it. So i think there has go to be something wrong with the way we're presenting the gospel. In Acts, they reported having thousands of people being converted at a time. We have the same basic message that they had back then. But even huge, enormous churches in America get excited about just a few hundred salvations in a weekend. What is it that we're lacking? The world we live in is trying desperately to pretend that it isn't lonely. I think thats a key. For more and more people, the world is doing a good job pulling the wool over their eyes. We have fancy toys these days that take our mind off of reality. We have more drugs that we can medicate ourselves with. We have relationships, friends, family, maybe a happy marriage here and there.
But the reality is that none of those things can ever change the fact that everything you and i have ever experienced in this life has been flawed. Everything we have ever seen and felt has been seen and felt removed from our Creator.
The world is lonely. Not the kind of lonely that you feel when you don't have a girlfriend or when you first go to college or your parents leave you home alone for the first time. The world is lonely in a deep, tangible way, lonely in a way that we sometimes don't notice because we have never not felt it. Because the world does not offer us God, our creator and dad, the only one we can have a perfect relationship with. The only one who can make us not lonely. People don't realize that. And maybe that's on us because we don't do a good enough job telling people. It might have been easier converting Jews to Christians 2000 years ago because Jews already had half the story. They were waiting for Jesus for hundreds of years, and the Early Church just had to convince them that Jesus was who he said he was.
We face a different challenge now, where people have no idea what to believe or where to start. Back then, their challenge was to complete a theology. Our challenge starts with defining what theology is. Not too many churches that i've been in do that.