May 2003 – neumatikos

Thought to Ponder

Epicureans believe that “personal happiness is the only sensible goal in human existence. Individuals are powerless to change the world and are not obligated to try, just seek to be happy.”

People have a longing in their lives that they cannot explain. They try to satisfy this longing with worldly love, possessions and relationships. Many people try to fill this void in many ways: love and human relationships, social causes, work and personal achievement, and religion. Becoming busy in life in order to achieve “happiness” does not fill the emptiness that people feel. John Choron said that “if you work hard enough, long enough, work (love, relationships, social causes, achievement, religion, etc.) becomes your ultimate goal and you’ll probably be too tired and too involved to be disturbed by the possibility that your existence is meaningless.” Satan has been very successful in blinding people from the more important things in life by means of fear, worry and making people “too busy” to think.

I’m not saying that you can’t be happy in life. Life is a test of faith, and there are things that are more important than those things that the world can give to us and puts so much emphasis on. Without a personal connection with the source of life, how can we claim to have found meaning and feel happy?

For the Record

I just want to make sure that everybody knows that I’m not a blithering idiot with no plan. I had a plan. I had a very good plan. Seminary was about step 15 in that plan, not step 2. It’s the sudden shift that’s causing me irritation. As far as going to Seminary is concerned, I’m actually kind of excited. I’ve only been wanting to learn to read Greek and Hebrew for 5 years. I was very disappointed when they didn’t have it available at MorningStar

The biggest sheepskin for me is money. I don’t have any intention of going through the dirt poor thing any more. I can live off of $13 K per year. I have no desire to. If I go right back to school, I’m still going to want an income of close to $20,000 a year. That would cover house, car, food, a movie now and again, and hopefully something to pay off school money problems as well.

Another thing I want is a lot of people to tell me, “Yes, Kyle, I’ve prayed about it and thunked about it, and this is exactly what I think you’re supposed to do.”

I suppose if I was being a real Gideon, I’d ask for something extravagant, like snow in July or something, but I guess I’m not that interested in avoiding going back to school.

Yesterday I did my research and found that there were basically four seminaries in Charlotte: Two Presbyterian and two inter/non denominational. One Presby school was at Queens, and it was the liberal branch of the Presby church. I’m not that liberal. They also had a degree plan that fit neatly into six years. I’m not that liberal. The other was called Reformed Theological Seminary, and they were very impressive in their academics and mind blowingly conservative. They believe that the Bible is the absolute truth, dictated word for word from the mouth of God. I believe that all scripture is God-breathed, and that it’s all true, but word for word? If that’s word for word, then we’ve got a lot more to worry about than evolution and the ordination of women. If the bible was dictated verbatim, then He’s got major multiple personality disorder. I prefer not to believe in a God who is crazy. RTS also included a copy of the statement that every professor must sign every year. Basically if they have any misgivings about the Presbyterian creed that was established every year, they are required to notify the school immediately. I got the distinct impression that the creed was more important than the scripture. What if they found that a conservative interpretation of the bible necessarily contradicted the creed?

The third school was called Southern Evangelical Seminary, and they scared me from the get-go. Let’s start with the portable buildings for offices. Then we can move to the general… lack of affability… in the admissions staff. I got my admissions info and left. I never even looked at it. Later, a friend described them as the “fightin’ fundies.” Rigid fundamentalists. In my opinion, the fundamentalists have moved as far to the right of a plausible interpretation as the ultra-liberals have moved to the left.

The last one seems to be the zinger. Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Interdeominational, the school has students who go on to minister with Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and a whole host of other denominations. It happens to be the same school that my good friend graduated from, and he highly recommended it to me. Good solid biblical background, he says. I was a little scared when I first found them—they were in a business park. But they were finishing their actual campus to open this fall, and the interior was much more comfortably furnished than the scary school. It seems silly to judge by the furniture, but you have to wonder, if this is what they consider appropriate to welcome students, what will they do after you start attending classes? The Admissions counselor at Gordon-Conwell was also the most helpful of any of the schools I went to. He was very encouraging, asked questions, gave helpful suggestions.

It was pretty easy to pick my favorite out of the schools. What’s been hard has been obtaining advice from qualified counselors. Friends and family have given me their input (Family has stood firmly on the side of getting a job before even considering going back to school), but pastors and school counselors have not been so easy to catch. I have an appointment tomorrow with my pastor. One day my school chaplain will give me a call. I think she may be on an international school field trip. I tend to forget they have those.

I also finally got my appointment with Adecco today. Someday, I’ll manage to get a job.

You should be proud of me. Only 1 ½ pages today. J

Voice of God

Okay, let me tell you a story. About six years ago, I was a lowly freshman at Oral Roberts University. I have terrible habits when it comes to picking schools. ORU is a pretty well-known religious school in the area, famous among charismatics, of the straight-laced, button-down shirt and tie persuasion. I picked it because it was eight miles from my parents house. I hate moving. I didn’t apply to any other schools. I got accepted, got a reasonable scholarship deal, and left it at that. I hated it. Oh the atmosphere was great, but the rules drove me crazy.

I’m trying to avoid backtracking too many times, but we’ll start with this: When it comes to hearing God for basic direction in my life, I’m as deaf as a post. Oh when I finally get it, I’m pretty confident. I know I’ve heard Him. But it’s usually about 15 minutes before I’m supposed to be there. I started looking at ministry schools. Bible schools. There were lots of them in town. But the two that really grabbed my interest were both over 1000 miles away. One was a Vineyard school for worship leaders in Langley British Columbia, Canada. The other was the MorningStar School of ministry in Charlotte, NC. I acquired brochures for both, and instantaneously settled on MorningStar. I still don’t remember why.

Well, that’s not completely true. The MorningStar brochures said they were planning to give their students a BA in Church History or something like that (Maybe it was Biblical Literature). But that plan never materialized. And yet I doggedly stayed at MorningStar, fully confident that God had sent me, despite the fact that I have never fully learned what it was I was supposed to get out of the experience.

As I was saying, I’m deaf as a post when it comes to hearing God, especially when it comes to personal direction. I mean, the clouds could roll back, I could hear an audible voice, I could write it down verbatim, and it would still be months before I got the message.

Folks, it could be years.

So back to my freshman year at ORU…My second semester, for whatever reason, I opted to take only 12 hours of classes, which left me optimal time for prayer and fasting, and that sort of fanatical behavior. Somewhere in there I got a really clear message to hide out every night for a week in a typically vacant study hall and pray for an hour or so and write down whatever God told me. It was a pretty powerful experience. God told me all sorts of things that I didn’t listen to. There was a girl I was kind of interested in, that I thought was seeing my roommate. The Lord told me that this girl wasn’t going to end up with anybody who was living in the state of Oklahoma. That should have included me and my roommate. I ended up dating this girl for about 6-8 months. It was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life, and lo and behold, I didn’t end up with her. (Neither did my roommate.)

The big message that I got that week though, had to do who I was as a person and how He was molding me. I’ve lost my journal since then, but what I wrote down was something along these lines: The picture was of a earthenware jar that had already been fired. The potter, however, thinks that the pot just isn’t quite right, and decides to start over. He has two options. Either he can throw the old pot out and start over with a new batch of clay, or he can grind that clay back down to powder, add water, and start all over again. (Today I would make references to “a bruised reed he will break and a smoking flax he will not put out”). At that same time, I know I had been praying something along the lines of “fall on the rock and be broken, or the rock will fall on you and you will be crushed.” Except that I had the brilliant revelation that “crushed” is a more developed state of “brokenness” than merely “broken.” Since the highest state for a Christian is brokenness before God, I had been praying that He would go ahead and give me the advanced treatment and crush me down to powder.

Folks. Let me give you a tip here: Just go for “brokenness.” “Crushed” is generally more of an experience than you’re bargaining for. But no, in my pride of humbleness I was shooting for the big time. So I had a message. I was going to get broken down to powder and put back together again, completely from scratch. Yippie skippy! I don’t remember all of it, but He gave me a list of about 5 or 7 things that he was going to take away from me. Friends is the only one I can remember off the top of my head. Did I mention that I acquired almost no long term friendships my first four or five years in Charlotte?

So it’s six years later, and suddenly it’s occurring to me that those words (as best I can remember them) have been fulfilled to the letter. While the basic stuff I’m made of hasn’t really changed, everyone who’s known me will tell you I’m a completely different person. Do you know that in all the junk I went through, that prophecy never even occurred to me, to look at and say, “see, this is exactly what I’m going through!” Never. Not once.

Skip ahead a bit. Charlotte. Present day. I’ve just graduated from college. BA. English. Does anyone know why I chose to major in English? Me neither. Why is it that the only positions that have come up that seemed even remotely viable have all been ministry positions?

I just recently joined a Baptist church. This is pretty strange for me. I come from a very de-structured religious background so all the procedures inevitably attached to any kind of denomination always gave me the sense that I was bound to up and break a rule. But I joined for a number of reasons. The first one was that I pretty much decided that non-denominational churches on the east coast were too flakey for me, while most moderate to conservative denominations seemed to be about what I was used to from the midlands. It isn’t just in politics that they get more liberal on the coast. The second reason was that I have a friend that I love very dearly, and I’ve dragged her already through two churches that have zero order in the service whatsoever. I figured I owed it to her to try the Baptist route for a while. Mikey tried it, Mikey likes it, and that’s the life for me.

Immediately upon joining the Baptist church, my school chaplain starts handing me letters from Presbyterian churches pretty much begging for full and part-time youth ministers. With much prayer and thought, I decide not to apply, despite a promised glowing recommendation from the chaplain, because I just joined a church and I’d hate to immediately leave it. So what happens? The music director leaves and our church decides to replace him with two positions: A part-time choir director, and a full-time associate pastor position. I look at the job description for the associate pastor, and it fits me perfectly in all but two points: they want a Masters in Divinity and 3-5 years full-time ministry experience.

Nothing is catching my attention like these ministry positions, despite the fact that I know that pastoral work is the hardest and most underappreciated in the universe. Despite the fact that, after MorningStar I practically swore a vow never to return to any kind of attempt at public ministry. Despite the fact that I’ve been talking about getting a job in the business world for three years now.

I had a big long piece that I was going to do, discussing my charismatic non-denominational background and how it compares with the Presbyterian and Baptist denominations (the only two I’ve had any kind of real first-hand experience with). Essentially, the typical charismatic non-denom church has the government structure of the Presbyterians (plurality of leadership!) with the theology of the Baptists (no infant baptisms!). There’s a Methodist influence as well, but we won’t get into that. We’re getting close to my self-imposed 3-page limit, and I think I’m going to end up going over it this time.

My original point was to mention that I was actually considering going back to school for a theology degree instead of joining up the workforce like a real man. I was then going to point out that there were a total of 3 accredited seminaries in the greater Charlotte area, none of which are Charismatic. Then I was going to hash out all those details for your reading pleasure. But at about the 3rd paragraph of this essay, my hands started to shake. By the 10th paragraph, it was so bad, you’d a thought I was a strung-out addict. I had to stop typing. I thought maybe I had low blood sugar (you know, it happens all the time at 1:30 in the morning), so I got up and made me some toast. I could barely get the bread in the toaster. The more I tried to frame how I was going to say that I was looking at going to a seminary, the worse it got. The more I worked at it, the more it became less of a “how to discuss the issue of…” and more of a “Lord, do you want me to…” And then I started to cry.

I’ll be honest with yuns. It’s been years since God and I had a serious man to man. You know that whole “crushing to powder” bit? Incommunicado. That was His deal, not mine. By the time I got to college, I think I had given up, it was so rare. I was basically praying, “If you don’t like this one, just stop me, okay? Hello? Anything?” Every once in a while I’d see Him from across the room and he’d wave at me. Real friendly like.

And then tonight. 1:30 am. “Hello, God, are you—WHOA.” It was, uh, pretty intense.

I won’t say I’m really happy about it. I did have myself set on not going back to school full-time for a while, if ever. I also happened to have myself set on getting some business experience under my belt. I’ve always planned to go on to seminary, but I was thinking sometime around when I turn 50. As it is, I’ve probably got three months to figure this out, and I’m still pretty scared about it. I may be a mule, and only half a horse, but I know a hard road when I see it. Not to mention Somebody could have given me a little heads up about it. I spent a lot of time tonight saying “If this is the way you treat your friends, it’s no wonder you have so few of them.” Then I’d start crying again. He may seem capricious at times, but His presence is so good.

As far as I’m concerned, for the next little while, my name is Gideon. You will not believe how many sheepskins I’m going to be laying out. Before I start to do this thing, I’m going to know it’s God. I’m also not going to be flying it blind. As I mentioned before, there are at least three schools in the Charlotte area I could go to, and none of them are the same background I grew up with. I’m going to be talking to a lot of people.

As it is, please pray for me. I’m kind of scared, and I’m tired of this.
KB

News

I’m still not very good at regular updates. I can’t seem to keep from writing 3 pages if I write a word, and it takes so long to put out three well-composed pages, that I never want to start. Go figure.

A few quick points to finish up my graduation story, and then I’m on to better things:

They don’t tell you your final grades until well after you walk. So it’s always a big surprise to find out if you got any honorariums. Remember that I was worried right up to the last about whether I was going to graduate at all, my scores in “Modern American Drama” were so bad. Judge to my surprise when the dean of students announced “Kyle French. Cum Laude.” I have the proofs here from photograds.com, cute little 1×2 inch spots on the order form, and looking at these pictures, I would say I was pretty surprised. Either that, or I always look like a dorky idiot in a cap and gown, (plus a hoodie).

Since then, I’ve gotten my final grades from the school. My total GPA was somewhere around 3.51 or .52, I forget which. Every class I ever took was an A or a B, except one. Modern American Drama. That professor gave me my first and only C-. The way I figure it, the only reason I didn’t get a D is because a D in your major means that you have to take the class again to graduate. I don’t like that professor any more, so my assumption is that, since he’s the only one who teaches that class, he gave me a C- because that was the lowest possible grade he could give me and still guarantee that he would never see me again. Had he been a nice guy and had I been an idiot who was trying his best and just not getting it, I’d be much more willing to believe that my non-failing grade was a sympathy score. But I don’t like that professor, so I’m going to assume that I got the grade I did because he’s not just a jerk, but a lazy jerk. It may be an opinion, but it’s a unanimous opinion.

After my parents left, my sister stayed (remember, she flowed in, instead of driving). The plan was for her to come up and spend a week hanging out with me, and then fly back. And so she did. It was a pretty uneventful week. Somebody has been living it up, and managed to spend the entire week in a semi-coma. She would come up for meals and a single trip to the mountains. Here are the pictures she took in NC. There would probably have been more, but somebody had a digital camera, and through various foibles, had managed not to bring either a memory card, or a USB cord. She had a limit of 20 pictures, and no cheap solutions for getting them off the camera until she got back to Oklahoma. Alas.

My dad wanted her to take pictures of my done up apartment, including new bed. However, Ces opted instead to take pictures of her present for me. A fish. Actually, she got me a tank and a filter, and some rocks, and a goldfish. The breed of fish she got is called a “black moor” which translates roughly as “Black Muslim.” Pretty special. Not only does it have a race, it comes with it’s own religion. Apparently, I have a very angry little goldfish, determined to fight back against the man. I would like to make it clear to any Muslims in my readership that I intended no slight or socio-political commentary when I named my little fish “sushi,” which translates roughly into “light snack.”

On Monday, while Ces was sleeping till some ungodly hour (like noon—everyone knows that God frowns greatly on noon), I went down to Wal-mart and bought some accessories for my new fish tank. A lid, for instance. I had two options: one with an incandescent lamp for $18 and one with a fluorescent lamp for $30 something. After much deliberation, I decided that , over a period of 30 years, I would probably save money on the fluorescent lamp. I’m a sucker for long-term savings, so I bought the expensive lid. I also bought two plants, an algae eater, and another black moor. I can’t tell male or female by looking at a fish, but my hope was that, with any luck, I’d get a matched pair, and within a few years I’d have a bunch of discontented little er fish. As yet however there have been no further breeding developments.

However, within a few days, the did determine that the algae eater invasion of their holy land was not to be tolerated, and I had to have a small funeral. What I think actually happened was that I got a species of fish that wasn’t particularly hardy. Or it could have been just that I got the poor thing from Wal-Mart, which is roughly the equivalent of saying he came from the SARS ward of the local Hong Kong hospital. Poor feller didn’t have a chance. I have since bought all my fish supplies from PetsMart, which is closer anyway.

I now have 2 goldfish, 3 plants, one window cleaner (a replacement for the algae eater), and a frog. I got the frog mostly because my mom couldn’t stop me. That and he was only like a dollar. He’s about an inch long, likes hiding in corners, and lets the fish eat all his food. It’s also really hard to tell if he’s alive because frogs don’t breathe underwater. They just sort of soak the O2 in through their skin. But when one of the fish mistakes him for the landscape and tries to nibble on him, you can tell he’s alive. Little water rocket, he is. And they don’t just taste like chicken, they are chicken. Anything and everything sends him hurtling into the hidey hole he’s made. Including food falling from the sky. On several occasions I’ve also seen at least two snails that I think were stowaways with the plants. But I haven’t seen them in over a week, so I don’t know what’s up with that.

Currently, however, my fish are sick. Some kind of fungus showed up (probably another result of buying your aquarium supplies at Wal-Mart) and put white flecks all over them, ate away at their fins and made them generally despondent. I gave them some really powerful medicine, and now I have happy fish with crew cuts and no white spots, and blue water.

Very slowly, I assure you, I am running out of news. Very soon I will be getting back to the really important things, like philosophy and poetry.

Thas all for today.
KB

Our Story Continues

Enter our hero (shocked and slightly embarrassed at the sight of Larry in a towel). I finished my magnum opus in a matter of eight days, proving that man is still better than machine, then I lay down my hammer and died. That was Wednesday. Then, looking up, I realized I had only two days before my parents showed up for my graduation. (Good thing I checked with the registrar to make sure I was actually graduating—I’d to have to re-take that class taught by Satan.) The trouble is, when I get stressed, my place gets trashed. For me, picking up after yourself is a function of a peaceful mind. A man on the edge of a breakdown doesn’t have time to do laundry. I called in my trusty friend and for two days straight we cleaned (this is incontrovertible proof that she loves me). I was lucky: after only 24 hours of digging, we hit carpet. By Thursday night, everything was finished except scrubbing the bathtub and the tile in the bathroom (it still need some scrubbing, if anybody wants to volunteer). Valerie went home around 10, and I stayed up to wait for mi parientes.

It’s officially a 16 hour drive from Tulsa to Charlotte, 17 with the time change. They had their own minor catastrophes on their end which had them leaving Tulsa at around 8 am instead of my mom’s preferred 5:00. (If anyone ever managed to live according to my mom’s planning, they would have conquered the world by the age of 24, all while managing to be healthy, well-rounded, and a parent—proving that Alexander the Great was nothing more than a sissy.) This meant that they should have gotten in sometime between two and three. A painful trip, but worse things have happened. Around 12 or 1 I went to bed and set an alarm for 2:00. I got up at 2 and called my mom’s cell. They were on Interstate 26 heading toward Asheville (away from Charlotte!). Apparently, lovely Mapquest had told them to go from I-26 to I-85. The actual preferred route from Asheville to Charlotte is to take I-26 to US 74 to I-85. I-26 meets I-85 in South Carolina, adding another 20-50 miles to the trip if you go that way. My parents knew they weren’t supposed to go to SC, so when they hit the border, they turned around. I gave them the proper directions and went back to bed, resetting my alarm for 4:00 in the morning. At 4:00 I called again. This time they were on I-85, having driven all the way through to the other side of town. Apparently sleep deprivation can do bad things to your ability to recognize your exit. I gave them new directions and decided to just stay up and wait for them. I was also informed that cell phones were dying. Somehow the car battery adapter got put in the wrong car. At 4:30 I called again. My dad’s phone was already gone. My mom’s phone said it should be. But they were finally on the right road to my apartment. They were also so tired that they were inadvertently driving at about 20 miles an hour. It was exactly 5:00 when they pulled into my parking lot. They were on the road for 20 hours. I love my parents.

Needless to say, they were out for a while. For me though: Graduation rehearsal, Baccalaureate, picking up sister from the airport (a job done by my lovely assistant)… I had fun trying to explain to some , whose parents weren’t religious enough to attend Baccalaureate, how there was no way that a service at a moderately liberal Christian university could possibly be “spiritually significant” enough to my zealous parents. True to form, we had the exact discussion afterward that I was anticipating. Let’s just say that a service that can be applicable to all faiths is pretty much useless to any particular set of beliefs. Ironically, that evening we went to MorningStar for their standard Friday night service, where we all promptly fell asleep. We left in embarrassment after the music. They were about to get downright Pentecostal on us and we figured it would make them feel bad if even a shouting service lulled us to sleep. Sometime during the MorningStar service, my cousin and her parents showed up from Virginia, and they came over after we came home and stayed and talked with us until I kicked them out around midnight.

That was Friday. Then Saturday: Graduation, lunch with Yujiro’s (my former roommate’s) family, help Valerie move, and then came the cool stuff.

We have a slight genetic disorder in our family. It’s not something I’m particularly proud of. I call it a compulsive giving disorder. It’s bad. Really bad. For years now, the Christmas presents have never managed to fit under one tree. We won’t discuss birthdays. My mother has it, and her mother before her. My sister and I (very carefully) are trying to balance this against my dad’s side of the family, which has a compulsive saving disorder. Between the two sets, Ces and I hope to come up normal, well-rounded people. But you never know.

My family isn’t particularly well off by any standard (except for Yujiro’s, since he measures wealth in square footage. Japanese families typically live in 2 bedroom apartments). Nevertheless, for a combination of graduating, and my birthday coming up in a month or so, I was given a “new” car, a new bed, and an aquarium (which would be from my sister).

I was pretty blown away by all this.

Basically, my dad has a bunch of cars (like five or six) all sitting in his driveway that all work about 80%. They rotate. They get one fixed just in time for the next one to break. So my dad decides to give me a car. He picks the Ford Taurus station wagon, which needs a new transmission. He doesn’t have the money for a new transmission, which is why the car has been sitting there for a while. My dad calls up his dad, who gives him money to help with the transmission. They fix up the Taurus, and then my dad’s mechanic friend decides that they need to re-do all their work before it’s done right. So, the day before they leave, I get the Honda Accord that’s been working for a month or so now. (see how this rotation thing works?) This has several advantages for me: first, the Accord has a CD player in it. The Taurus has a CB radio. Don’t ask. Secondly, I just like accords, no matter what auction they were bought at.

Then for the bed. My parents had $200 in budget to come and find me a magical bed that only costs $200. I’ve spent months looking in ads and places, finding most complete bed sets in the minimum range of $400—500. This I want to see. Saturday afternoon, after further playing with the car and generally making me nervous, we went out to look for beds. We found ads in the newspaper (miraculously) that spoke of complete queen sets for only $169. We also found (not so miraculously) that nobody responded to our calls at the listed number. We also found several furniture stores that sold unpleasant looking beds for more than we could afford. And then we found one only moderately store that had banners proclaiming complete bedroom sets for only $260. We also found that most of Charlotte has not yet caught up with the idea that they live in the largest urban area between Atlanta and Washington DC, so they close at 6:00 on the week end. It was after 6 and shopping was over.

Sunday, directly after church we went to this store again, and discovered that, while they did have bedroom sets that sold for $160, the ones where you couldn’t feel the bedsprings cost between 2-3 times that much. They had $200. I had a check from my mom’s parents for the difference. We thought, maybe we’ll check the classifieds one more time.

And there it was. Sealy posturpedic mattress and box frame with maple frame. Originally bought for $1300. Now selling used for a mere $300. Free delivery. I called the lady up, she answered the phone, I agreed to come look at the bed at 7:30.

My parents wrote me a check for $200, told me to buy a nice bed, and left Sunday afternoon around 3:00. We are all very glad that they stopped over night in Tennessee on the way back. I am almost finished resting up from my parents visit.

Of course, I have more to relate, about my sister’s visit, and further foibles with the car, but I’m almost to the three page mark in MS Word. I’ll be shutting up now.

Evil Dairy Queen

I have a very important message to bring you about Dairy Queen: They’re evil. Evil I tell you. Temptation central. And it’s only compounded by the fact that there are so few of them left in the world.

I’m a very neat eater. I’m not finicky, but I almost never have to use my napkin. I feel like a failure if I have to clean up after myself. I’m prone to eating restaurant french fries with a fork. Yet I have a weakness for Dairy Queen. And not just any kind of Dairy Queen treat—dip cones. Yes, my friends, dip cones. The most vile form of consumable malfeasance known to man. See, it happened like this:

I was out on an afternoon jaunt—nothing really, just a tireless quest to find a real Christian bookstore in Charlotte. I heard that the Family Christian Store had a place in Charlotte, on the southside, and I set out to find it. Only took me about 2 hours driving up and down the same street, searching every shopping center. When I finally found it in the last shopping center on my list, I suddenly realized that it was Sunday, and all good Christian stores are closed on Sunday. I was reminded this by a neat little “Closed” sign on the door at Family Christian. As a result, I am still unaware if there is a real Christian Bookstore in Charlotte. From the outside, it looked disturbingly like your standard taffeta flavored Christian Boutique.

So, there I was, driving off, distraught as could be, when out of the corner of my eye I saw a Dairy Queen. Dairy Queens have dip cones. How could I resist? Immediately, I pulled back into the back access, and drove all the way around to the store. I checked my wallet. Two Dollars. I went in and checked the prices for dip cones. A small was $169.

I knew it was wrong. I knew that Dip Cones were the messiest method humanly possible to consume ice cream. I knew that messy eating was anathema to everything I stand for. Nevertheless, I could not resist. I was weak. So I patiently stood in line, and when it was my turn, I asked that question:

“What flavors of dip cones do you have?” And came the answer:

“We have chocolate, cherry, and butterscotch.”

Butterscotch, the rarest of rarities, barring toffee crunch. The Cheap-o DQ’s I was used to only ever had chocolate.

From here, the events were inevitable.

I bought my Dip Cone, knowing full well that the car I was driving had no power steering, and a tendency to die at stop lights. Knowing full well that I had to make at least two right turns from a full stop to get home. What I didn’t know was that a “small” dip cone at this particular DQ was “only” seven inches tall, including the actual cone. It was raining outside. My clothing didn’t have a chance.

DQ has soft-serve ice cream. Really soft-serve. A Wendy’s Frosty is thicker than a DQ ice cream cone. And Wendy’s is so messy I refuse to ever eat there. I had a drop of ice cream on my pants before I even got in the car.

I set myself straight to work, backing out of my parking space and licking frantically. I cleaned up the between the hard shell of and the cone and started biting down the top. You have to get to the ice cream immediately, or by the time you get through the hard shell, it will all be liquid. But I was too slow. Biting the top caused the shell to , releasing leaks all over the cone. Just as I was pulling on to the highway, I made the bite, and three huge pieces of hard shell broke off. One fell on my shirt, one on my pants, and one flipped up onto my nose and all over my mouth. Each piece had it’s own coterie of thoroughly melted ice cream. I couldn’t do anything about it but to continue merging onto the highway.

The rest of the trip home consisted of attempting to get the cone under sufficient control so that I could reach down and try to salvage the hard shell all over my clothes. I had to eat the remaining pieces of shell that stayed on the ice cream in precisely such a way as to avoid getting another nose-barrage. When I finally go to the hard shell on my shirt, it wasn’t hard any more.

It’s a conspiracy, I tell ya. DQ is out to get me. But I’ll show them. Tomorrow, when I go to Family Christian to apply for a part time job (and if that fails, there was a used bookstore next door), I’m going to sit myself right down and order another dip cone and eat it right there in the store. I’m going to prove that I can eat it without dripping a single drop.

I will not be conquered by nothing more than cream and sugar!!

News

Wow. I’m still not sure it’s over (can’t believe it’s really over).

I’ve graduated. No more school. No more assignments. No more homework. No more impending sense of doom. Well, the doom hasn’t left yet, but I suppose that’ll fade with time. Before I went back to school, I kept having these recurring nightmares. You know, the typical “public place with no clothes on” type scenario. Except with these, it was me, the last few days of school discovering “oh yeah, there’s a class you’ve been signed up for all semester that you forgot about. Now you need to take this final exam or never graduate.” Have that dream about three nights in a row and it’s going to get really kooky. Now that it’s all over, I’m having a similar problem. I keep dreaming that there’s some major assignment that I’ve missed and they’re going to take back my diploma.

This really stinks. Technically, the diploma is no big deal to me. I didn’t get palpitations of the heart when we got in line. I didn’t think “now I’m really something.” Because I got a piece of paper. But they made me really work for that thing, and for some reason, when it comes to education, it’s embarrassing to say I had to work. It felt like work, but I know so many other people who actually work for their grades. Work for them looks like a piece of well-oiled machinery. Work for me just means I managed to make myself sit down and put out content. I can’t help feeling that, next to some people, my work ethic is just a bit flighty. Nevertheless, what was intended not to be work has turned out to be a great labor. I’m so glad it’s over.

Let me see if I can give a quick synopsis of recent events and where I stand today: Everything was backed up all semester. First, I had an incredibly awful semester last fall. It was so bad that I had two (count ‘em, two) papers that I didn’t turn in until about mid-to-late February. Basically my “ethics” class kicked my butt, and I worked on it so hard that I ignored the classes that I knew I could handle relatively easily. (It had to do with differing with the faculty on what issues were actually ethical dilemmas.) I got done with the semester and spent the entire Christmas break staring at a computer screen not actually doing any writing. I got both English papers about 98% done and decided to finish them up the first week back at school.

Enter “The Problems…”

I’m sure I’ve related all this stuff before. Nevertheless, for the sake of context (and a really really long blog), I’m going to rehash most of it: Instead of flying back as my ticked designated, my parents decided to drive me back, because I was going to be moving into an apartment approximately three months ahead of schedule. Blame that on a bad economy and a few choice words my mother would like to have with the governor of the state of North Carolina. The NC budget went bad, so they went out cutting corners, and they came up with a really nifty loophole: they decided that college campuses are no longer actually part of the state. I had been receiving about $5000 per semester in state grants, which required me to be an in-state resident. No problem. I’ve been living here for six years. But the North Carolina budget boys decided that “on campus” cannot count as a permanent address. It’s just a temporary address. So, if you are living on campus, obviously your real address is where your parents live. For me that would be Oklahoma. I had no idea I lived in Oklahoma. My driver’s license says NC. So do all my taxes. But as far as North Carolina is concerned, I live in Oklahoma. I’m pretty sure the great state of Oklahoma would be willing to debate that, since they won’t give me any grant money to go to school in NC either. So apparently I’m living in limbo land.

It’s nice here in limbo land. Temperature’s always a pleasant 72 degrees… No place to sleep though. Or to put your books. My solution was to move off campus and cut all my classes to the bare 9 hours I had left to graduate. Suddenly I’m a part time student, reducing my cost by… $5000. What a coincidence. Suddenly I also have no furniture, no food, and no car. So we drove up and brought all my old stuff and threw it in the apartment. It was hectic. Anything that involves both parents driving over 1000 miles and staying just for the weekend is always hectic.

So, I spent all my spare time last semester acquiring things like lamps and a desk and a dresser and all that stuff, and walking three miles to school (up-hill both ways…)

Anyway, all of this would have been fine. Two out of three classes this semester were not only a breeze, they were really kind of fun. I loved my literary theory class. Wish I could have taken it before all my other lit classes. But this one class was coo-coo. I won’t go into details because this is too long a blog in the first place, but he kept insulting the students, he graded more on grammar than on content, and he was terrible about communicating the proper criteria for getting a good grade in the class. It put me in the exact same position as the previous semester of focusing all my energy on the crappy class and ignoring the ones I liked. I was seriously in danger of getting a D in that class—a failing grade when it’s part of your major.

I had no final exams this semester (amazingly), So I spent the entire last week of school locked in my apartment working on a single 12 page paper. I turned it in exactly 8 days late. Fortunately, that professor had heard about problems with the other guy and said he wouldn’t take off for being late.

OK. I’m going to stop here. I”ve got more to say, but I’ll say it separately. Graduation was a whirlwind, to say the least…