my existence in three relatively short paragraphs

i'm working as usual. for some reason things are a bit slow at the company - i'm not generating many transfers. for the most part i have steered clear of trouble (it always looms of course). i live in three worlds: the faith baptist bible college bubble (and the churches and relatives connected with that bubble), the world of work, in which i have one or two peeps i would call friend, and the friends i've collected in cafes. the third group has banded together into a ragtag motley crew which has nothing in common except we all need friends and we all need jesus. the first group of people, the super-conservatives - these are folks who i sometimes love and respect, and other times wish i could just say goodbye to. there are some really good things happening, but a lot of stuff that really bothers me (its exclusivity among other things - it really is a self-contained little world with its own rules and regulations for those who live in it). i follow some of those rules because i live with faith seminary students who i respect. the best kind of respect brings about generous and considerate lifestyles, which i think is happening in my house. i'm learning not to judge so much; i'll never see things the way the faithers / baptists do but some of them are good men / women.

meantime i really live for those times when i'm with my ankeny crew: abbi, bri, jess, sarah, tommy, and whatever other ragtags happen to wander along.

i sorta left my church out. not intentionally, church simply isn't a good place for building relationships. it is a good place for thinking and learning though.

and beth is probably wondering why i didn't come to her thingy tonight - laundry and food is why.

trust

eden. a perfect world in which nothing is breakable. including relationships.

what did those relationships lack, something which can be broken?

trust.

god introduced the possibility of destructive potentials (the tree) so that people could trust him. he made a special relationship, a relationship of trust, possible.

on a side note, it really is a gigantic deal when someone breaks your trust. and the fact that there are laws in place that assume men are untrustworthy is a good example of the state of things.

sin

sin is this heavy nasty word which is means bad or evil or all kinds of stuff we want it to mean. i don't think we should get rid of the word or anything, but it should be a little more concrete what it means when i think that word. so here's what i think sin is.

a sin is an act of destruction on man's part. not so much burning a house, but an act which destroys relationship, trust, another person, or ourselves. some actions destroy our relationship with god. some acts destroy the sanctity of a word (using god's name as a cuss word) - words are part of reality too. sin is not a force so much as it is a potential for destruction inherent in man's nature. (this is just brushing the surface of all of this really.) i would rather talk about a sin, as an an action, than sin, as if it were just some nasty evil force floating around seeping out of our toilets and into red light districts.

strange thing: if the possibility of the potential for destruction had not been made available, there would have been no potential for trust.

A tornado...

...has recently passed through room. unable to decipher if there is still a floor beneath the rubble.

ps. this is an attempt at humor. those who are literal minded may experience confusion if they notice my house is structurally intact and has no sign of wind damage.

another week

has come and gone. notables this week: going through a haunted house; watching "ju-on" a very creepy japanese movie (clean but it really gets under your skin); getting my car cleaned out tonight; consolidating my clothing into bags now lying in the middle of the floor of my room (i have nowhere else to put them, literally); i also had a conversation with a catholic priest on the phone, which was interesting. that's all i can remember from the week.

i haven't been able to find my treasured book xenophon's "aeconomicus", but even if i did i probably would read it for 30 seconds and then grow bored. bipolar crap seems to be cycling every two weeks - about every two weeks i get into a fairly extreme down.

great cheese my room is so bloody crowded. i only have a sofa, a little table, 2'x2', and a dresser. and 3 milk crates. but its a place. i hate it when i dont have enough space to keep clean, cuz it reflects poorly on me and i lack the creativity and funds to do anything to make this place nice. the room always feels like its teetering on the verge of chaos, i keep it together but just barely.

okay bedtime for me, then i get up and go to work and go to small group and go to bed and go to work and do groceries and laundry and go to bed and go to work and go to youth group and go to bed and go to work and then its thursday, which is not so bad.

God, why telemarketing?

God's Answer

"1. Don't ask me, you're the one who applied."

"2. It's good for you. Should help you develop a thick skin; that's been in short supply in your clan."

Oh.

Why pastors don't listen

They are too busy thinking up answers.

I find greater benefit talking to the average friend.

Medicare Dreams

All night every night, if I wake up, I wake up from dreams asking people questios about their medicare coverage. Or explaining the government's standardizations in 1992. If you were in my dreams, probably we were having a conversation about your retirement health plan. This may mean I'm going a bit loopy.

PS on green walls

I now like my ninja-turtle green walls. It's not as nice as the green room I grew up in but it does ring up a little bit of that happy green feeling. It took awhile to grow on me.

Horcruxes

A few months back I was playing world of warcraft. (Right now its good I don't have it, it would be a fun escape.) In the game, I had a hunter dwarf with a pet boar named "piggy." And then last night I had this dream that a wizard like gandalf and dumbledore was a sellout and thought maybe by joining the evil wizard (kind of a sauron-voldemort) he could get real political (since he thought himself too weak to actually beat him) and help save a few people. All the same it was a wimpy decision. And in this dream the evil volde-sauron dude could kick some serious butt, he was basically killing like fifty people at a time with a sweep of his hand. But gandalfuldore did one nice thing, he gave me this pill that would let me make a horcrux with anything I wanted, which is strange cuz its a bad idea to do horcruxes generally. But in the dream I had a pet boar which, just like in world of warcraft, first attacked me but I subdued and tamed it and it was very loyal. So I made a horcrux out of the boar and in the dream, as long as one of us was alive, the other could not die (so a little better than a horcrux really, more like "dragonheart"). We attacked sauron-mort but still got our butts kicked it was sad.

So it's sort of like my new telemarketing job. To keep my sanity I split my personality in two, and when I hear the beep part of me wakes up and enters into the happy-smile world of telemarketing, and then as soon as the call ends it withdraws and a different me resumes existence and draws pictures or taps out drum rhythms or just pretends I was taking a nap. 30-60 seconds later phonejosh wakes up and I go to sleep. By the end of the day I only have about five minutes of memory from the whole day, I might have spent five minutes on the phone except that I feel poopy from fluorescent lights.