Yesterday I got a new watch. It was tired of not knowing what time it was when I was driving around. I found a nice, cheap ($20) one at Super Target. It has a plain analog face, it’s rather small, and it has a leather watchband. Analog faces look more classy than the packed-with-every-feature digital watches, and many of the digital watches had plastic or velcro (extremely tacky!) watchbands. The small face is good because I have small wrists, and so many of the men’s watches simply look oversized on me, like I was a kid playing at being a man.

I wear my watch when I go to sleep at night. I’m not sure why. It’s just a habit. I think that for a while, I slept without a clock next to my bed, so I wanted to know what time it was in the middle of the night without having to scramble around on my bedside table for a watch. Now, I think it’s just because I’m too lazy to take it off. Besides, who knows when I’ll suddenly have to jump out of bed and rush outside in an emergency? I might get outside and need to know the time!

Today I finished my book High Adventure, by Sir Edmund Hillary. Hillary is a good, if unpolished, writer. That just adds character, though. For instance, he finishes the book with, “And that was the end of our adventure!” like a schoolboy finishing his creative writing assignment. He’s very proper, too, being sure to credit everybody else on the mountaineering expedition and downplaying his own contribution.

I’ve been reading the book bit by bit before I go to bed at night (the only time I have all day to read). It’s taken me quite a while to read it; much longer than it usually takes me. That’s okay, I guess; I just have a long list of books I want to read, and have been anxious to get on with the next one. In fact, I just bought a new book today: Searching Issues by Nicky Gumbel. It’s a short book on apologetics, dealing with the seven main questions people bring up during the Alpha course.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Alpha course, it’s a seeker-sensitive low-pressure introduction to the Christian faith. Its key selling points are that inquirers are allowed to ask any question, and the course includes a dinner together at each meeting, so inquirers are invited not just into intellectual response, but into a community of faith.

Anyway, I bought the book because our church is doing an Alpha course, and I was interested in learning more about the angle from which they approach apologetics, and because all my apologetics books are very thick, and I wanted a nice thin (and unintimidating) book to give non-Christian friends of mine who aren’t readers. Moreover, some people are really not readers of any kind, and I wanted a book that would help me remember the high points of a subject when I have to explain it on my own.

Today I went to see Mel Gibson’s new movie, The Passion of the Christ. It was very emotionally draining for me. I had read a number of reviews of the movie; some claimed it was anti-Semetic, others claimed that it was a fantastic work of art (but the latter came from people who liked Matrix Revolutions, so I was a bit suspicious). I had also heard that it was an exceedingly graphic movie.

First off, this is simply a really good movie. After innumerable low-budget “Jesus” films, it’s nice to see one done professionally. After seeing blue-eyed, blond-haired (or even red-haired!) Jesuses, it’s nice to see a brown-haired, brown eyed one. (Although Jim Cavaziel, the actor who played Jesus, has blue eyes, they digitally changed them to brown for the film.) After seeing skinny, pink-skinned Jesuses, it was nice to see a dark(er) Jesus that looked like he had been moving lumber around for most of his life. The film is done in Aramaic and Latin, with English subtitles, but subtitles have never fazed me. In a number of places, the conversation is so easily understood from context and gestures, they didn’t even bother to put the translation down.

The last Jesus film I saw was the Visual Bible’s “Matthew.” That film was flawed from the start; they decided to use the word-for-word NIV scripture of Matthew as the movie script. While that saved having to pay a scriptwriter, the plain fact is that written accounts seldom translate well directly to screen. Mel Gibson has done a fantastic job interpreting the starkness of the gospel accounts and adapting them into a movie. He’s not afraid to make up scenes that never appear in the gospels, but nevertheless fit the character of Jesus and could have happened. His scenes with Mary the mother of Jesus are especially strong (as befits a Catholic filmmaker).

There were very few “cringing” moments, where I saw something historically inaccurate. (He gets nailed through the palms, not the wrists, for instance.) Gibson works in a number of very specifically Catholic scenes that may not be recognizable to Protestants, though. For instance, there is a scene on the Via Delarosa involving the legendary Saint Veronica. Those not knowledgeable with Catholic saints or even the Shroud of Turin are unlikely to catch the reference. There’s also an exceedingly creepy scene where the androgenous Satan carries a demon-baby in blasphemous mockery of the Madonna-and-child paintings popular in iconography.

To answer the main questions about the movie: is it really that graphic? Yes. I know of a number of ways it could have been more graphically violent (for instance, the Visual Bible’s “Matthew” shows him getting part of his beard torn out; that’s not in here), but it certainly deserves its “R” rating. Gibson put the violence there for us to see. If we avert our eyes from it, it’s our decision, the camera doesn’t do it for us. Is it unnecessarily graphic? No. Absolutely not. You have to be confronted with the awful offensiveness of the crucifixion to understand the absolute seriousness of sin. The more you understand what it cost Jesus, the more you love him.

Is it anti-Semetic? No more than the scripture. Certainly, we see the murderously schemeing High Priest and the fickle crowds of Jews – but we also see the casual brutality and sadism of the Roman troops. But this isn’t Gibson’s point – he includes Jesus’ line “Nobody takes my life from me; I lay it down of my own accord.” We sent Jesus to the cross. In fact, the only time we see Mel Gibson is in the crucifixion scene – it’s his hands that drive the nails.

Is it as amazing and wonderful a movie as everyone talks about? Well, yes, if you haven’t listened to the hype. If you have, of course you’re going to be let down. Nothing but the Second Coming itself could live up to the hype. If you go into the movie expecting the Rapture, you’ll be disappointed. If you go in there looking for flaws, you’ll find them. But if you go in there prayerfully, with the heart attitude of “Lord, teach me,” you’ll be deeply affected and hopefully changed for the better.

For me, the film brought home the humanity of Christ and the apparent ridiculousness of his claim to divinity to the priests and Jews. He’s standing there, a man, beaten and bloodied, and still claiming to be God. I mean, come on, that’s a no-brainer. But then, you hear how he prays for his executioners, “Father, forgive them,” and you hear what he says to the thief on the cross, and you understand the dispirited disciples that thought, “Oh, if only it could have been true! Oh, if only he had been the Messiah! That would have been good news beyond all hope.” And then you remember exactly what it is you believe, and exactly who it is that you are looking for to appear in the sky with his hosts of angels, and the longing gets so unbearably strong you just want to weep that it isn’t here already.

But in situations like this, it’s hard to tell which part is the movie’s doing, and which part is God’s doing that’s specific to you alone.

I’m writing this blog really fast because I want to play Starcraft with Dann and I’m not going to let myself play the game until I get this blog done. I’ve had a hard time trying to find something to write about; I’ve already written about food (several times), Atlanta traffic (several times), the things on my desk (several times), things that annoy me (several times), Dann’s cat Sifa (several times), and even about not having anything to write about (if I recall correctly). Dann suggested I write about Starcraft, a video game we both enjoy, but I said that writing about it would make me look like a nerd. “Too late,” Dann said. Dann’s encouraging like that.

What I guess I’ll talk about (for lack of anything better) is discipline. I mean, the kind of bulldog discipline that says, “I didn’t get home until 8:30 this evening, and all I want to do is play a video game and go to sleep, but I’m not gonna until I write my 500 words today.” The kind of discipline, that is, that everyone else thinks is utterly incompetent. Yep, I’m disciplined in the incompetent kind of way. Maybe I should have been in the military. Starcraft is a strategy game, after all. (Strictly a fanciful jest! Against the military, that is. Starcraft really is a strategy game.)

Sometimes you set a goal to do something and then things get really hard and you wish you hadn’t set that goal. Like now. I wish I hadn’t set a goal of 500 words a day. Cause I could be doing something fun otherwise. I guess now is the time to put a “but,” and follow it with all the reasons I should keep on doing my 500 words a day, but for the life of me, I can’t think of any good reasons right now. Like, what, writing 500 words a day is reallyn going to improve my computer skills? More than playing video games? I don’t think so. In fact, when I interviewed for my current position, they asked me if I played video games. They told me afterwards they feel very wary hiring people who don’t – people who play video games are people who love computers and tend to pay lots of attention to the details of how they work. Needless to say, they didn’t ask me anything about how often I write.

Hmm, come to think of it, the only thing keeping me here is the brief thought that I must have known what I was doing when I decided to try this little experiment – except that now I’m not so sure, and the only thing keeping me going is the bulldog determination to hit 500. Which isn’t really a “reason” at all, as it doesn’t involve logic in the slightest. So, I think I’ll go ahead and play Starcraft now. Not quite there yet, so I’ll leave you with . . .

Quip for the Day:

Dann: It’s full of creamy mediocrity.
Me: Much like my life.
Dann: Your life isn’t creamy!

I woke up this morning and looked out the window. It was snowing. For the first time in two months, I had seen snow. I promptly went back to bed and slept for another hour. When I woke up, I realized it was only about a quarter of an inch, and it hadn’t even stuck to the roads. My boss probably wasn’t going to lose a day of business for something like this, so I hurried and got to work.

Dann didn’t have to work. His company announced a state-wide closure of their business because of a quarter-inch of snow. Surprisingly to those of you who have never lived in the South, my boss’s decision to stay open was more unusual than Dann’s boss’s decision to close. Once, a couple of years ago when I was at the University of Georgia, they canceled classes on the mere threat of snow. And then it didn’t snow. We were wearing T-shirts and throwing the Frisbee around outside on our “snow day.”

Tonight was to be our cell group night, but when I got there, I discovered it had been canceled because of fear of ice on the roads. It’s not fair – I still have to work, but the fun stuff gets canceled.

I used to be like they are around here – and then I moved to Missouri. Up there, you can’t shut down businesses for snow; you’d have to shut down for three straight months. You just learn to drive in the snow and deal with it. Of course, they have salt to put on the roads in Missouri, and snowplows that clear the way, but that’s only for the major highways and interstates. Most people still have to travel several miles of unsalted roads to get to a cleared road. You just learn to go slower and learn how a car feels when you start skidding, so you won’t panic. It’s not that hard.

I remember the first time my car started to skid on ice going downhill. I had it in first gear (of course), and was only going about 5 miles an hour, but I had to turn, and when I applied my brakes, my car didn’t stop. And it started to turn sideways. I knew you had to turn into it to pull out, but if I did so, my car would go straight into a deep ditch. It was touch-and-go there for a few minutes, but fortunately there wasn’t any traffic on that back road, and I was able to inch it along without undue stress until I pulled out of it. I thought I was home free after that, but no, just as I started to climb the next hill, my car lost its momentum and traction and started sliding back down the way I came. I pulled into a cleared area at the bottom of the hill and walked the last 200 yards home. After those experiences, the roads didn’t seem nearly as scary anymore.

Last night I decided to splurge and get a sub at Subway. I eat pretty light, most of the time, and I generally always walk around with a dull twinge of hunger I can just ignore if I concentrate on something else. At 6 p.m., though, I discovered my apple (for my regular 6 p.m. apple-and peanut-butter snack) had gone bad. I threw it away. I was really hungry by the time I started home, so I decided to go ahead and spend a little money. Sometimes its okay to eat until you’re full! So I bought a foot-long meatball sub with extra cheese. I gobbled it down. It was yummy. I’ll remember that taste and savor it for the next couple of weeks, as I go about eating my gruel and porridge and occasional frozen dinner.

Maybe I need to start packing a bigger lunch. For the life of me, though, I don’t know what I’d put in it. Maybe two chicken sandwiches instead of one? I’d have to buy and boil a lot of chicken. See, the problem isn’t that I have bad eating habits; it’s that I’m cheap. What I usually eat is very nutritious, and nutritious food is notoriously expensive. Moreover, fresh fruits and vegetables don’t keep very long, so I end up having to throw out expensive food. It’s hard for me to spend money on food, because it feels like I’m eating money. I could spend my money on some thing that has value and will give me more than a moment’s pleasure. But pleasure from food disappears all too quickly – as does the money you spent on it.

Speaking of chicken sandwiches, I was boiling some chicken this evening for my sandwiches on Dann’s gas stove. I went down to check on it after a while, and the living room and downstairs smelled strongly of gas. I saw the eye under the pot of chicken had gone out, and I quickly surmised that it had boiled over and put the flames out. I shut off the eye and thought about what to do next. My first option, which was to light the eye again, was immediately rejected as images of the house exploding suddenly filled my mind. Nope, try again. I decided instead to open the windows and let the downstairs air out before I put the chicken back on to boil. It was really cold outside. Really, really cold. Dann and I both went upstairs and put on some more layers while the downstairs aired out.

See, it’s little things like “don’t start an open flame when the room smells strongly of gas” that make all the difference between success and failure in life. Many people don’t realize it, but it’s the little decisions you make along the way that eventually determine whether you’ll be a computer technician or a fireball. Me? I like to think I have a good dose of what it takes to succeed.

Quip for the Day:
Dann: I’m fat.
Me: What are we going to do about it?
Dann: Eat ice cream until it goes away.

I work in a very relaxed and laid-back environment. For most people, that would be a big bonus, but I’m not so sure that’s the case with me. I think I like “professional” work environments rather than “laid-back” work environments. In “laid-back” environments, everybody is kind of buddy-buddy, making jokes and being pals as they work. This can be great if you’re working with the types of people you would normally be friends with. The problem comes when you work with people of very different personality types. You don’t enjoy their sense of humor, you don’t particularly want to be their friend, and it would be fine if you could just focus on getting your job done, but you have to be social as well.

Not to say that I don’t enjoy my work. I get along with my coworkers rather well. But I keep getting these little twinges of annoyance that make me think, “You know, if they would just be professional and do their job, I wouldn’t have to put up with this.” It has the potential to be much, much worse, though, if I worked with people any more different than these are.

Being “professional” is a lot like being “civil,” I guess. The more people I meet, the more convinced I am that lots of people are just barely held together by a thin film of civility. They are almost totally dysfunctional in normal relationships. You can see the irrational anger gnawing away at them when they come in to get some service done on their computers. They think they are entitled to have a computer that always works. Well, that would be very nice, I wish they made computers like that. But they don’t. You can’t get them anywhere. We’ll fix your computer for you, but it’ll take 4-7 business days. I’m sorry about the inconvenience. You can see them straining to hold in their vindictives, but veiled threats keep slipping out. “You’d better have this done when I come in by 3!” etc. These people are just looking for someone to lash out against. What do you think it’s like to live with these people? The only reason they’re able to hold it together is because they think it’ll get something done for them.

Granted, I’m seeing them when they’re under stress, but then, these people are always under stress because they’re never able to let it go. I can understand being sad, disappointed, frustrated, or disheartened by a computer failure, but I seldom ever see these emotions. All I see is anger. These people get in their cars and go home, thinking angry thoughts about their boss, their computer store (us), their air conditioning repairman – and then someone cuts them off in traffic, and they imagine that the person did it just to be rude. That’s where road rage comes from, my friends.

To be “professional” means to keep your personal life out of your business life, to suck it down in so that others don’t have to see it or deal with it. Being laid-back is good if you’re all buddies and all well-adjusted, but some people are scary enough that I wouldn’t want to be exposed to their personal lives on a daily basis.

When people bring in their computers to be serviced, they come in various stages of filth. The computers, that is, not the people. Well, I imagine the people do, too, but the salesmen have to deal with them up front; they seldom come back here to the techie section. People don’t understand just how sensitive computers are to dirt and dust. It clogs the innards of the computer and leads to overheating and short circuits. Cat hair and cigarette smoke are especially hard on them. Moreover, most people put their computers on the floor next to their desk, where dust and cat hair settles. By all means, put your computer on top of your desk next to your monitor! And don’t smoke around them. In the long run, you’ll save yourself major stress.

Well, I bring this up because a customer brought in an especially dirty machine today. It looked like someone had spilled Coke all over it. The head of the service department was cleaning it with Windex and complaining about it the whole time. Then he took the cover of the computer off. Inside was – I am not making this up, exaggerating, or in any way using hyperbole for emphasis – inside was a HUGE PILE OF DEAD ROACHES AND ROACH DROPPINGS. Additionally, a few of the roaches were STILL ALIVE. And CRAWLING AROUND. Inside the COMPUTER. Yep, I think I figured out your computer problem there, buck-o. My diagnosis is, “roaches.” That’ll be $70, please. No, sorry, you’ll have to call Orkin if you want your problem fixed.

The “Coke” that we thought was spilled on the outside of the case turned out to be roach droppings as well. I can only shudder in horror as I think of the environment this poor guy must be living in. I mean, if I got a bit of money, I think I’d use it to hire some exterminators or something, maybe move to a better apartment in a nicer neighborhood, before I bought a computer. That’s just me, though. Other people have other priorities. Apparently.

You find some weird things inside computers sometimes. Once someone (a child?) had mistaken a computer for a piggy bank and had stuck a bunch of spare change through one of the cracks. Needless to say, this quickly caused a short. On the list of unusual things I’d like to find inside a computer, though, money is near the top of the list, while DEAD ROACHES would rank pretty close to the bottom. There might be some things worse to find inside, but frankly, I’d rather not exercise my imagination in that direction. As I’ve mentioned before, I used to work as a garbage collector, and I’ve seen and worked with some pretty disgusting things in my time, so I have a pretty high “gross-out” threshold. This computer, though, exceeded even my limit.

Our boss came to the back and looked at the computer. He said, in his thick Chinese accent, “It make me be itching!” I think that just about sums it up.

Before I write this blog, I need to get something out of the way. A confession, if you will. I really, really like zucchini squash. Specifically, I like it a long, long way from wherever I’m eating. Because zucchini squash is just wrong.

I’m not sure what brought that on. I haven’t seen or thought about zucchini squash in quite a while. But sometimes, you know, you just need to get something off your chest that’s been bothering you subconsciously for a long, long time.

Now, on to my blog: I like Lego blocks. I got to thinking about this last week when I blogged about giving Dann an imitation-Lego set for his birthday. I’ve grown up with the little toy building blocks, and made some amazing things. I remember when I got the battery pack and motor for Christmas and build a remote-controlled Lego car. Uncle Wallace commented to my dad, “If we got as smart as we did with TinkerToys, how smart are they going to be?”

Well, now we know. I’m this smart. Not one smidgen less, and not a whit more. Frankly, I’m kind of disappointed. Being smart is like having money: the more you have, the more keenly you feel the need for more.

But back to Lego blocks: I’ve been separated from my little plastic bricks for far too long. I got a small set in my Christmas stocking a couple of months ago, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed playing with them here at my computer. Whenever I get around to going back to our house in Northeast Georgia, I need to dig my old plastic tubs of blocks out and bring them down here to Atlanta.

I’m considering buying some more Legos. Several years back, they came out with a set of robotic, computerized Legos that you could program with Artificial Intelligence on your PC, called Mindstorms. One guy built a Rubik’s Cube solving machine with it. I’d love to get it, but two things are holding me back. One: It costs a couple of hundred dollars. Lego blocks aren’t cheap – if you go to your local toy store, you may be seriously surprised at what a small set of Legos can cost – but several hundred dollars is far beyond mere “not cheap.” Two: There’s a pretty steep learning curve for AI, and it doesn’t get any easier just because you’re building with Legos. I’m already up to my neck in computer projects, both programming and building, and that pretty much covers both aspects of Lego AI. I don’t think I’d have time to significantly appreciate and enjoy the Lego set after I got it, especially in proportion to what it costs.

All that playing with Legos, though, seriously sharpened my mechanical abilities, I believe – abilities that are coming in handy now that I’m putting computers together. I wonder how many other toys I played with instilled in me the skills I’m using today? (Sudden images of sitting playing Space Invaders for hours – well, if we ever do get invaded, I’ll have the skills to handle the situation!)

Today I went to the Coke Museum and Underground Atlanta with Dann and Pan and Katt (her recently-arrived Thai friend). I paid $7 for a ticket into the Coke museum, which was sort of overpriced for what amounted to a huge, multistory commercial. The highlight of the trip (for most people) is the tasting room, where you can guzzle all flavors of Coke and Coke-produced beverages from around the world. Since I don’t drink anything carbonated, and never have, this was a bit of a loss for me. I was much more interested in the history of Coke advertising – Coke advertising has made a prominent change in American culture. Three Coke jingles I can sing from memory – the “I’d like to teach the world to sing” song (the later one, not the earlier one), the “Coke is it!” commercial (my sister and I used to sing it on long car trips instead of the “Song that Never Ends” or other childhood favorites), and the “Always Coca-Cola” song. Few people know this, but the modern image of Santa Clause comes from the Coke ads. Before that, Santa was pictured as a dwarf, not obviously human. In “A Visit from Saint Nick,” he’s described as “a right jolly old elf,” which belies the way he’s drawn in (post-Coke ad) storybooks that feature this poem. Anyway, I had a pleasant time watching the archaic commercials. I’d like to go back by myself and go through it at my own pace.

Underground Atlanta was okay. There weren’t any bookstores, but they had some kind of street magician and a saxophone player, so it was atmospheric and entertaining, at least. I spent some time watching a caricaturist at work, and then spent some more time watching a candlemaker. Most of the shops were eating establishments, though.

This evening, my cell group helped clean up after a massive consignment sale. It was moderately enjoyable, and I was glad to be of some service, but the more I get to know my fellow members of my cell group, the more I realize how little I fit in with them. I simply don’t connect mentally with anyone. For example, I’m a big C. S. Lewis fan. At our meeting a couple of weeks ago, I tossed out, “Does anyone like C. S. Lewis?” Nobody had read anything by Lewis save the Chronicles of Narnia, and those that had, had read it so long ago they had forgotten most of it. One girl said, “I got a C. S. Lewis book, but I was afraid he’d be hard, so I never read it.” I mean, I can understand not reading a book because it’s too difficult (although I find C. S. Lewis to be one of the easiest of the “deeper” Christian writers to read), but not to read a book because you’re afraid it’ll be too hard? That’s simply . . . incomprehensible.

Maybe I should find another cell group. There are two other groups of twentysomething singles at our church; I think I’m going to try out one of the other ones. I like my church a lot; I hope I can find some area where I fit in.

Some days at work are better than other days. Today, for instance, was pretty good. An older (retired) gentleman came in and wanted to know how to burn a CD. He’d bought a computer with a CD burner from us a year ago, but had never gotten around to figuring out how to get it to work. I sat down with him on a computer and showed him, step by step, how to do it. He said, “Oh, that’s so easy!” when I was done. It is pretty easy, but I was glad I had gone slow enough and explained things well enough that it all clicked in his mind. I enjoy helping people. I enjoy teaching people. I enjoy teaching people computers. And other stuff.

I took a tech support call today because my two techie coworkers were on a smoke break. I don’t normally take the calls, since they have much better technical skills than I do, but I was the only one there this time. It was one of our regular customers, a man whose business gets all their computers from us. One of his employees decided to open up the computer and poke around. He pulled a bunch of wires out, but he had put them back incorrectly and the computer wouldn’t work right anymore. He asked me to direct him in putting them back in correctly. I was kind of at a loss, since I couldn’t see inside his computer, and it was an older model we don’t carry anymore (so I couldn’t grab one off the shelf to look at). I asked him to read the labels on the plugs the wires go into. “I can’t see them; the printing’s too small and I don’t have my glasses!” I rolled my eyes. What kind of miracle worker did he think I was? “Well, the positive wire is the colored wire and the negative wire is the white wire. Usually. On most computers, all the negative wires go in the same direction . . .” I directed him for a while, trying to stall until the other guys got back from their smoke break. “Hey! It’s working now!” I heard from the other end of the line. I was startled and a bit at a loss. “Uh . . . It does? Are you sure?” “Yep. It works fine. Thanks. Bye.” “Uh, well, feel free to call us back if you have any more problems . . .” >click<. I think I solved that one as much by luck as anything else. But I’m not picky. I’ll take what I can get.

Maybe as I learn more and get better, I’ll be able to take more tech support calls and solve more problems successfully. I mean, I took tech support calls in college, but they were along the lines of, “I pressed a button and my paper disappeared! Where did it go?” Which is a lot easier than trying to direct someone in rewiring their computer over the telephone.

Woohoo! I (we?) got blogged about. My roommate Dann has started a blog of his own, and discussed this blog in his post entitled “Why I’m Better Than You.”

Quote:
“Mark's blog is interesting by itself, but that's not really why I read it. He's living with me at the moment, so most of the time he's blogging at his computer a full five feet away from me as I blog on mine. I read it because he keeps such interesting company. His friends and family routinely show up and comment on a wide variety of topics. I guess you would have to know his friends and family (or at least read their comments) to fully appreciate it. It's a bit like what you would get if you had a horrible nuclear accident involving a set of encyclopedias and an episode of Seinfeld. And some chickens thrown in for good measure. Shake vigorously and refrigerate after opening. Kind of like that. Except smarter.”

I guess it’s not really much of a review of my blog as it is a review of the blog comments I get. Since the comments are seldom even related to what I blog about, I guess I can’t really take much credit for anything but hosting the site and picking cool friends. So, thank you, I take credit for both.

Since it seems the sideshow is rapidly becoming the main attraction for my blog, I want to take this opportunity to encourage my regular posters to keep posting, and to poke any lurkers and say, “Participate!” You hear me, Mom and Dad? Uncle Wallace? Feel free to jump in! I’ve started checking my blog comments as often as I check my email (that is, four to five times a day). If things slack off, I might have to stir things up with a little controversy!

Well, maybe not. I guess I’m not really much of a controversial person. I’ll have to rely on Sunny to get things going, I guess. :-) In the meantime, though, I just wanted to express my appreciation to everyone, for paying attention to my daily ramblings, and slogging through it with me when I pull out another “describe an ordinary object” blog for spacefiller.

I’m hoping to punch up the website with a little HTML, and add some links along the side to my friends’ blogs. I’m also hoping to put a couple of links to the “good stuff,” the blog entries that stand out, so visitors’ first impressions won’t be one of those “what I ate for lunch today” posts ruminating on the consistency of Blue Plate mayonnaise versus Bama. So, if anyone has any suggestions for which blog entries they like the best, put your suggestions up in the comments section. I’ll see if I can’t put up links to the best three to five entries.

If anyone has any other suggestions on how improve this blog, please let me know (i.e., post it in the comments section). I’m always happy to entertain ideas.

This morning, on of my coworkers brought in a box of white chocolate macadamia nut cookies. I eagerly devoured two, and then someone else brought in a box of Dunkin’ Donuts. Wow! I ate one. About an hour later, my sugar high wore off and I crashed. It was just 11:30 a.m., and I felt like going to sleep. I haven’t been eating much sugar lately (despite my posts on chocolate), and I guess my body couldn’t take it. The lesson I learned today: never let your body lose its tolerance to sugar! (Kids, make sure your parents learn this as well.)

An annoying customer called again today. One of the advantages to being a techie (instead of a salesman) is that you don’t have to deal with annoying customers. What makes customers annoying? Generally, calling us for tech support to fix problems they caused. Every user is bound to screw up things every once in a while, but when you have somebody that thinks he knows what he’s doing, and goes into the settings and fiddles around with things, he’s going to screw things up sooner or later (probably sooner). When this happens, we shouldn’t have to go up behind him and clean up his mess. This is doubly true when the customer comes in being pushy and aggressive and claiming we sold him faulty equipment so we should give him his money back.

I suppose most jobs involve dealing with annoying people, but when you’re a teacher, you can just kick them out of class and/or send them to the office of whoever deals with troublesome students. When you’re in a store, you have to be real nice to everybody so they want to spend more money. It’s a little better at a private, locally-owned store like My Computer Store, but I can only imagine what it’s like working for a retail chain. Employees have a measure of pride, too, and it’s dehumanizing to make them bow and scrape. As a security guard, I once had a caller threaten me because the air conditioning had gone out in the building and his servers were overheating. I learned after that, that we were allowed to say something to the effect of, “Sir, you sound very upset, and you certainly have good reason to be. However, if you would like to continue this conversation, you are going to have to be polite and respectful, just like I’m being with you.” If they start hurling more abuse, we can hang up.

The tables are turned, though, when our boss gets involved. He’s the only person I know who can scream at an angry customer until they give in and buy something else. And he does this while scratching himself in, uh, “places” – he gets itchy when he gets angry, apparently. I guess that’s why he’s the businessman and I’m just a computer techie. I wouldn’t have his job for anything in the world, though – give me a salary and a bunch of semi-operational computers, and I’m a happy camper.

The Saga of the Office, Part 2
(continued from yesterday, below)

After that, I wound up working with C. C was a thin old man of about 70. He never stopped talking, but would drone on endlessly with these stories of his, all of which were about how someone had cheated him, or how someone had tried to cheat him, but had been caught by C. C had a serious anger problem. I once got inspired, grabbed a scratch sheet of paper, and noted everything he was angry about in a single half-hour of time (remember, I worked with him for 12-hour shifts).

Things C is Angry About:
Social Security tax
his spoiled granddaughter
his wife making his favorite horse a gelding (several years ago)
kids in the parking lot
X ratting on B
a Marine sergeant back in the Korean War
burned out light bulbs in the parking lot
the antiquated fire-alarm system
a woman that ran a red light and hit his car
air conditioning repairmen that overcharge

Eventually, C got in a shouting match with a guy over a ticket C had put on his car. X reported C.

C was balding, so he liked to wear A Major National Security Firm cap to cover it up. He had been told that K, general manager of the building (not the general manager of A Major National Security Firm; not related to A Major National Security Firm in any way), didn't like it, so not to wear it inside. Well, one day he was sitting at the front lobby desk (inside), wearing his cap and reading a newspaper when K comes up. K has rich businessmen with him who had arrived in limos. C is sitting there reading, and doesn't even glance up. He never notices K or the businessmen. K calls G and has him fired.

On Mondays and Tuesdays, I worked with D. D is a North African Muslim from Tunisia who speaks four languages and is in school here in America for HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning repairman). D also has an anger problem, but he's professional enough to keep it under control, except when he's complaining to me. Well, D thinks the supervisors on the site are out to get him. He keeps complaining about all the crap he puts up with from them. D thinks that one of the supervisors discovered that D makes more money than he does, and is jealous because of it. D finally has enough and gives his two weeks' notice to G. G talks him into staying, because D is intelligent and competent, two qualities we desperately need at this post. D says okay, but isn't happy. That Tuesday, he complains some more. I say, "I'll see you when I relieve you Friday night," and he says, "I may not be here Friday." Friday night I come in and discover that Wednesday D went to K and complained about all the crap he had to put up with. This is a no-no, since K employs A Major National Security Firm to provide security at his site. D is fired for "insubordination."

When C got fired, E came on board. She was an African-American grandmother in her late 40s. We worked together on the weekends, and we got along great. She's lots of fun and laughs a lot. Well, she had been employed by A Major National Security Firm at a different site when she slipped and fell, hitting her head on the floor and knocking her out. She was hospitalized and had some brain injury that gives her migraines and impairs her memory even now, 6 months later. She sued the people (who were definitely negligent; they had been warned several times about the slippery spot and had done nothing about it), and so when she came back to work after 6 months disability leave, she started at a different post -- ours. E felt like G mislead her -- she hadn't been told she would be working 12-hour shifts overnight. The poor dear got nausea and dizzyness about 4 am every morning. Then there was an alarm about a hydrogen spill at one of the tenent spaces inside (which is a story in itself), and she grew upset -- she hadn't been told that she would be working a site with dangerous chemicals. She requested a transfer to a different post, and her name was removed from the schedule this weekend, so I assume she got the transfer. I missed her when she left.

The Saga of the Office, Part 1

For want of anything interesting to share, I’ve decided to relate the “Saga of the Office.” Last year I worked at a Major National Security Firm in Kansas City. I worked with some . . . interesting people. Once, we had five people quit or get fired over the space of six weeks or so. This is a complex but sometimes hilarious story. All I can say is, I'm beginning to understand Dilbert more and more. I'll refer to the people here by letters, just because some of them have the same first name, and I think it makes things funnier to use letters.

Okay. So, A was a compulsive overeater. He was 30 and still lived with his mother, and was about 200 pounds overweight. I didn't work with him, but he got tired of his job, and decided to act passive-aggressive instead of quitting. He would eat, then refuse to clean up his mess, leaving it for the next shift to clean up. He would "miss the opening" when he had a bowel movement in the bathroom and not clean it up. The officers put up with it. But then more things started occuring. X told me some employees in the building had heard a closet door rattling. When they opened it, there was A, lying on the floor in the closet, snoring! A denied that it was him, but frankly, he wouldn't have been hard to identify in his uniform. C (who worked with him) told me that, while C was on patrol in the building, A would sneak out, drive down to the 24-hour Hyvee (grocery store) and binge at their all-you-can-eat pasta bar. A also denied this. Eventually, G, the general manager of A Major National Security Firm in Kansas City, made a surprise visit and discovered him outside, talking on his cell phone, with no one inside monitoring the security console (telephone and security camers), so he fired A.

B was also seriously overweight, but not quite as much as A. He was 40, never married, and (apparently) pretty seriously ill. He took upwards of a dozen prescription drugs and had diabetes, IIRC. Anyway, I worked with him over the weekends. He had a game leg (his ankle would swell up when he stood or walked around) and had a doctor's excuse. What this meant was that I would have to do most of the walking patrols during the 12-hour shifts that we worked together. His eyes were also very sensitive to light, so he would wear sunglasses all the time, and would request that we turn off the overhead lights. I hadn't worked with him very long when I came back from a patrol to discover him, legs propped up in a chair, lights out, sunglasses on, head back, snoring away! At first, I was angry. But then I thought, "Wait a minute. I like him better when he's asleep." When he was awake, he was one of those annoying people that tries to draw you into arguments about conspiracies, UFOs, and whether Catholics are Christians (no, according to his Paranoid Protestant mindset). And he kept the phone by him and always awoke and answered promptly when it rang or when I contacted him by radio. So I let it go.

After A was fired, there was some shifting of schedules and X wound up working with B. She wrote him up (reported him to the supervisors) first thing for sleeping. G made another surprise visit at night, walked in, and found him sleeping. He was fired.

Tomorrow is Dann’s 27th birthday, so today we had a birthday party for him at Bien Thuy, a well-known Vietnamese restaurant here in Atlanta. I’ve only had Vietnamese food a couple of times in my life (when I was visiting Dann, naturally), and so I haven’t tasted much variety of that nation’s food. For the party, though, there was an extended meal with lots of different kinds of dishes made with beef, shrimp, chicken, noodles, and more exotic foodstuffs (like papaya and jellyfish!). I’ve decided I really like Vietnamese food. It doesn’t have the heavy fried taste like American Chinese restaurant food has; rather, it is spiced in such a way that it doesn’t overwhelm the natural flavor of the food. Sometimes it can be very spicy, but that’s not necessarily common. It was excellent, and we finished it off with an ice cream cake and coffee.

His father and stepmother were there, as well as his stepbrother and (step-)sister-in-law, as well as Pan and a number of her Japanese and Thai friends. It turned out to be quite a party. There were balloons all around (not all of them were appropriate – one of them said “Happy 1st Birthday!” while another one said “Old As Dirt.” Maybe they planned it like that; I don’t know.)

It was good to see Dann’s dad again; I haven’t seen him in several years, and I used to see him all the time when I went to hang out at Dann’s house in high school. I didn’t know most of the other people (I’ve only met Dann’s stepbrother once or twice before), but they were all friendly, so it was still good.

Dann got a DVD from somebody, a knife from Pan, and I gave him a G.I. Joe imitation-Lego set. (The first thought I had when I saw it on the shelf was, “G.I. Joe and Lego! Two great tastes that go well together! Why didn’t anyone think of it before?”)

Dann’s 27, and I’ll be 27 soon. Somehow, my life just isn’t as exciting as I thought it would be. I mean, 27 falls into the “late 20’s.” I always thought of my late 20’s as being the time I was settling down, finally having studied and explored and done everything wild and crazy – now I was Mature, and would be Doing Stuff Important. Yes, I have studied and explored (though not done much “wild and crazy” stuff), but I often feel like I’m sitting in front of a pile of jigsaw puzzle pieces – and suspecting that they don’t all come from the same set. In other words, I have a long way to go before I start to “get it together.”

The important thing, though, is that even now, I’m still doing it all with Dann. Even after so many years, we’re both still hanging in there and facing life, dishing it back as hard as we get hit. Hats off to long road slowly trod – as our senior class T-shirt put it, “What a long, strange trip it’s been!”

Today is Valentine’s Day, or, as a friend of mine dubbed it, Singles Awareness Day (SAD). Sometimes, Valentine’s Day can be kind of depressing, but it wasn’t today. Part of it is because I didn’t know of any “Valentine’s Day” activities going on (which are always designed for COUPLES ONLY), and also because I’m still feeling a lot of relief at getting my car fixed.

I got a valentine today from my friend Sunny (thanks, Sunny!) that was handmade and very artistically decorated, with a poem inside. Sunny signed it “your friend,” which she hated to do, because it sounds so cheesy, but is just the right way to sign it if you’re going to send a valentine to the opposite sex without him getting the wrong idea. (No wrong ideas taken, Sunny!)

I had a lot of errands to do today, but I felt good getting them all taken care of. I got my room cleaned, my check deposited, a bill paid, and bought several items I’ve been needing around the house, as well as getting my keys duplicated. Mom told me to keep an eye out for sales on long-sleeve shirts, since it’s getting to be the time of the year for sales on them, but I only found one shirt I liked. I did, however, see a sale on blue jeans, so I got every pair they had in my size (30 x 32), which was five pairs. You see, a while back, my old jeans were getting too ragged to wear, so I went to get some new ones at sale. They were all out of my size, but they had several 29 x 32. Since I was getting “relaxed fit” anyway, I decided to go ahead and get a few pairs.

I have regretted it ever since.

Let me tell you, there is little as uncomfortable as wearing a pair of jeans that’s too small. I was okay, as long as I didn’t move around much, but I’d get out of them and put on some sweat pants as soon as I’d get home. It’s a lot worse during the winter, because I often wear long underwear (polypropylene). When I tried to pull my jeans on over them, the bottom cuffs would slide up around my knees, and I’d have a wretched time trying to reach up under my too-small jeans to pull the cuffs down around my ankles again.

Now that I got five pairs of jeans in my size, I can take all those old 29 x 32s and give them to Goodwill or something. In the meantime, it sure does feel nice to wear comfortable, relaxing jeans again. They’re the kind of jeans you could almost wear to sleep in at night – they’re soft, loose, and don’t bind you or hinder your movement at all.

Dann was gone today getting measured for his tuxedo (his wedding is in a few months). When he got back, we played a three-hour game of Starcraft.

What I’m Wearing: New relaxed-fit jeans, a solid blue T-shirt with a breast pocket, and black Reebok Classic sneakers.

Postscript (Thursday, 02/19/04): Sunny also called me Saturday morning and left a special Valentine’s Day message on my answering machine. I just checked the messages today. Thanks, Sunny! And to Sunny and everyone else: email is the most reliable way to get in touch with me.

I got my car fixed today. Dann drove me to work this morning. I called an auto repair place nearby, and they directed me to a recommended towing company, which I called and gave directions to for my car. They called me back several hours later, having diagnosed the problem: two of my spark plugs were bad. One was completely burned out, and another was only hanging on by the wires. My valves were sucking in air, and they said if I’d driven it any longer, it’d have sucked the valves right out of the engine, which would have required a complete engine overhaul, crossing the “it’d cost more to fix it than it would to get a new car” line. Fortunately, they were able to fix it for less than $300 (including towing, tax, labor, parts, etc.). They had it ready for me by the time I got off work, so I drove it home.

I’m tremendously relieved. My car simply purred all the way home. It sounds better now than I ever remember it sounding. I hope this is the last I have to deal with it for a while. I’ve just paid off my student loan, and I have a job now, so I’m trying to put some money aside for emergencies. I was hoping the emergencies would come after I had set the money aside, though, not before.

The mechanic who worked on it said it was good to go, and should last for a long time yet. Of course, that’s what the mechanic said who worked on it last month, and look how true it turned out to be. But Mazdas are known for having long life spans, so I’m hoping this time, he’ll be right. I’m just glad they were able to get it fixed so quickly; I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to make it to church Sunday. I definitely wouldn’t have been able to if I had to scrap it and buy a new car. (That would have been a headache!)

Dann’s really helped me out a lot during this. He took a good bit of time out of his day off to drive me around taking care of my business. Good friends are not only nice things to have, they are positively irreplaceable.

I wish I knew more about cars and engines and things. It would make everything related to my car so much easier (and cheaper). One can only do so much, though, and I’m focused on learning computer stuff now. It’s great whenever my computer goes on the blink – I can fix it and get on without much trouble. It just doesn’t do much for my car. I guess it’s the same way with knowing medicine – you can diagnose an ailment in the family without having to go to the hospital every time you get scared about something “not feeling right” inside. Since I got to college, I’ve begun to appreciate just how nice it’s been having a nurse for a mom.

Today my car died. I had just left work, headed for my cell group (which I had been looking forward to all week) when my car suddenly started making the most horrible noises. I pulled off the side of the interstate immediately, got out, and checked my tires. Surprisingly, they were fine – I thought I had a blowout. So I got back into my car and started it up again, and heard the noise again. This time I realized the loud “CHUGGA-CHUGGA” sound occurred in time with the engine turning over.

I turned the engine off and considered my options, as the wind from passing semis rocked my car back and forth. I didn’t have a cell phone. I could just sit here and hope that a police car would stop, or I could get out and walk the mile or two to a pay phone to call for help, or I could try to see if my car would hold together for the next mile or two until I could drive to a gas station or something. I decided to wait a little bit and see if a police car would stop. About two minutes later, I lost my patience waiting. None of my options were good; all of them involved danger. If I tried driving, my car might get worse and burn the engine out beyond repair. If I tried walking, I could get hit by a car or mugged or something. In the end, impatience won out and I started the car again. There was a sign just ahead of me that said the next exit was ¾ of a mile, so I decided to try for it. I put on my hazard lights and pulled out into traffic, my engine protesting in the most nerve-rattling noises imaginable.

The car held together for that next mile or two until I could pull into a Shell station and use the pay phone. I called my parents, but my dad couldn’t diagnose my problem with my vague descriptions, so I just called Dann to come pick me up. The attendant at the Shell station said it was okay to leave my car here overnight, as long as I took care of it in the morning.

So, I didn’t get to visit my cell group; I just sat at home and played Starcraft with Dann. Tomorrow I’m going to try to get my car looked at and find out what exactly went wrong. After having sunk nearly $700 into it last month, I really hope it’s something that can be fixed relatively easily (and cheaply). I just feel kind of numb. Whatever kind of bad it is, it’s already happened. I’m just waiting to find out how bad the bad is. Right now, my main thought is that a cell phone (much as I loathe them) would have come in really handy tonight. Maybe I should think about getting one for emergencies like this. I could turn my ringer off permanently, and use it solely for dialing out.

Today at work, one of my coworkers noticed that the 13th falls on a Friday this month. He noticed it because February 13 is his birthday (he’ll be 47). We started talking about that and other superstitions and how they got started. One of our salesmen wandered into the back room where all of us techies hammer away at the computers, and said, in all seriousness, “You know, I think people were scared of Friday the 13th even before the movies came out!”

Anyway, I need to resolve some of my foreshadowings. Since nothing else noteworthy happened today, I’ll describe the sticker on the front of my computer (as I foreshadowed yesterday). The sticker is the logo of the computer store I work for, and has the name of the store and a picture of an atom, with three electrons in evenly-spaced orbits around an invisible nucleus. The sticker is a 1” x 1” square of aluminum, with an adhesive backing. It’s a metallic blue, with the logo scratched into the surface.

Although it’s a rather attractive sticker, as far as computer stickers go (no neon colors, a strictly minimalist design that catches the eye), it bothers me. The reason is, the model of the atom with each electron making a discrete orbit has been discarded by scientists. That old model was the one used in the first half of the 20th century. Now, they’ve decided that electrons don’t hold to discrete orbits – that around the nucleus, there is an “electron cloud” of rapidly and erratically-moving electrons. They hold to the same distance from the nucleus, depending on their energy level, but they don’t make neat circular or elliptical circles around the nucleus like planets around the sun, much as scientists visualized them doing several decades ago.

So, if you’re going to be a cutting-edge tech company, the least you could do is stay on top of current nuclear physics. Although I must reiterate that I highly approve of the graphic design.

It’s not just my computer store, though – the “electron cloud” idea just doesn’t seem to be penetrating the cultural consciousness. Take comic books, for example. They’re always drawing pictures of atoms. Heroes with names like “Nuclear Man” or “Atomic Man” or “Radioactive Man” always take the atom as a logo, but it’s always the old model of the atom – never the new.

I somehow doubt that my complaints will be regarded. The old model of the atom is just too symmetrical, too iconic, too symbolic to change. It would be like saying, “No, the yin-yang symbol can only be rounded on one side – the other side has to have right angles for the metaphor to work properly.” Besides, I have probably just give our store’s logo more attention than all of our customers for the past year combined. In the grand scheme of things, such trivial details are irrelevant. But as Michaelangelo is reputed to have said, “Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.” Maybe, when I found a computer store with an atom logo, or write a comic book about a superhero who got his powers from a radioactive toothbrush, I’ll do it right – but until then, I’ll just complain about it here.

Today it took me an hour and a half to get home from work. An hour and a half. For a 25-mile drive. That’s insane. The traffic was bumper-to-bumper at 25-30 mph for most of I-75, and then, when I thought I had almost made it home, a huge garbage truck ran off the road into the ditch, and they needed three tow trucks (parked sideways across the two-lane country road) to pull it out. What a mess. I’m glad I ate an apple before I left work.

I just ate the last bite of my Toblerone bar. Good thing I wrote about it yesterday, because after today, I probably would never have thought of mentioning it again. Which segues nicely into a fundamental operational question of blogging, “What do I write about?” Many people would find writing 500 words a day extremely difficult, but once one learns to write, the question instead becomes, “What do I not write about?” At first, you hope for something interesting to happen to you so you’ll have something to write about. After words start coming, though, you realize you can babble on about pretty much anything for 500 words. Twice now I’ve springboarded off a common item sitting on my desk to fill up a blog. (I wonder if it’s coincidence that both of the items were chocolate?) Someday, I’ll probably wind up writing a blog based on the sticker on the front of my computer. (More foreshadowing!)

But the act of writing about something within a word-limit requires that you not write about virtually everything else. What events are worth remembering? What things are worth reflecting on and writing about? I have mentioned two events that happened today: the drive home from work and the chocolate bar I ate. All other events from this day will be lost forever, never committed to the bits and bytes of the computer, and fading quickly from my neural synapses. I must make a value judgment when I write, and I must make that judgment within a few hours from the time the event happens; that is, without the perspective that time gives. I am basically guessing what will turn out to be important or worth remembering. Already, I can think of a dozen minor things that happened today, which, in and of themselves, are not worth writing about, but, combined with events that might happen in the future, could lead up to something quite newsworthy. Who was it that said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards?” Which makes it difficult to utilize common literary techniques like foreshadowing. Like it or not, my life cannot be blogged like a novel, complete with dramatic unity and artistic coherence. At one point in my life, this would have bothered me, but I’ve come to appreciate the intrinsic artistic merit chaos and limited perspective have to offer.

Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage,” but from here onstage, it’s hard to see it.

Today I got a new computer. Dann traded some extra computer stuff for a complete (though old) machine from a friend of his. He gave it to me so I could set up a different operating system – like Linux or Windows NT – and mess around with it without screwing up my “real” system. Dann is nice like that. At least to me. :-) Apart from that, today has been very boring. Nothing cool happened. You know what that means? It’s time to play “Describe what’s in front of me!”

Just below my monitor, next to the M&Ms, I have a bar of Toblerone chocolate from Switzerland. Pan gave me and Matt each a bar a couple of days ago. It’s very good chocolate (although I don’t consider myself a connoisseur); it has honey and almond nougat in it.

Which brings us to the question: What, exactly, is “nougat?” It is, of course, a creamy, syrupy filling for chocolate candies; I’ve known that since I was little. But what is it made of? The ingredients listing on the chocolate bar tells what’s in the bar as a whole, but doesn’t list “nougat” or which particular ingredients make it up.

Of course, if I was really interested, I’d just look it up online, but I don’t really care. What I do care about is the number of things we accept as “explained” when we’ve really just been given a name. “What’s this stuff in the chocolate bar?” “Nougat.” And everything is in its place, because the sweet creamy stuff has a name.

There are a lot of directions I could take this entry from this point: a commentary on the power of names and naming, epistemological speculation on names as signifiers and signified, toss in a reference to Burber’s “I-thou” relationships, maybe conclude by drawing a theological analogy and hey presto! Instant blog entry. But I want to take this in a different direction.

When I wrote “I’d just look it up online, but I don’t really care,” just now, it wasn’t exactly the truth. I did look it up online, and discovered that the information was prosaic enough that I couldn’t really write much about it. But I did care, and I always have cared, not just enough to ask the questions, but enough to poke around for the answers. Most any electronic toy I got as I kid finally wound up in pieces (much like Sid’s toys in the Toy Story movie). It wasn’t enough for me to know “press the button and the electric truck moves forward,” I had to know what the switches and gears looked like, how they connected, and what “really happened” when I pressed that button. Needless to say, one of my favorite toys was (and is) Legos.

Maybe that’s why I’m enjoying my job so much. I’m not content to know a computer as just a “magic box” that lets me surf the web or play video games – I want to know how everything connects up inside.

Today my church had a special lunch for “young, single adults.” I guess they know how to attract the college crowd: “free food” always gets me to come to any meeting. Ironically, they held this free lunch the same day they started their all-church 21-day fast. More ironically, they are holding a free lunch for singles over 30 next week. Mixed signals? You betcha.

Yummy gumbo soup was served to us. But, “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” – well, actually, it was free, but we had to listen to an advertisement for the upcoming “young singles” retreat (only $70!) and be introduced to the “young singles” cell group leaders.

I guess that was all right, but they said they hadn’t planned any speaker for the retreat – it was really just a “free time, hang out in beautiful North Georgia outdoors” kind of retreat. Except that I can have that kind of retreat any weekend I want, and I won’t have to pay $70 for it. Of course, they had “scholarships” for people who wanted to go but didn’t have the money. Technically, I have the money, but $70 is far too valuable to me right now to spend it on hanging out with people I barely know. Possibly I would make a great friend over the weekend – but probably not. I’d be better off, statistically speaking, buying 70 $1 lottery tickets.

Well, nobody said I had to go. So I won’t. I was happy to get the food, though. I hope they have more free lunches like this in the future. Maybe we’ll have a potluck! We often have them in Southern churches, and it’s one of the things I missed when I was away. I especially miss the summer picnic potlucks – held outdoors, with napkins keeping the flies off the fried chicken and potato salad, and lemonade. And lots of little kids running around playing tag.

Different churches have different food customs, though. A Salvation Army church I went to wouldn’t celebrate “communion” – they celebrated “love feasts,” which were whole meals. They were good. (I always ate well at that church – its captain was a former Navy cook, and he was very good at it.)

I know of a church here in Atlanta, the Blood-N-Fire Vineyard, that gives a free fried chicken meal to the homeless every Sunday. There’s only one condition: people who want the food must go through a “hug line,” receiving a hug from every member of the church staff. Some people refuse the food and the hugs. Many of those who receive them, however, are changed.

Food is like a yin-yang thing in the Christian life. On one hand, it’s seen as a great blessing – Jesus fed the 5000 by miraculously providing food, and Heaven is described as a “wedding feast.” But then, fasting has also been embraced by the church, and there are many examples in the Bible of Godly men refraining from food for Godly purposes. A “yin-yang” thing being that both feasting and fasting are complimentary, that there is an appropriate time for each.

My church, it appears, just can’t decide which time is which.

Last night, Matt came for a visit. Matt is a college friend of Dann’s who is now in the Marine Corps. We went out to Outback Steakhouse and had a good time talking and laughing. He likes computers, and brought his high-powered laptop with him. We plugged him into the network and played multiplayer strategy games all day today. I had planned to get a lot of important stuff done today, but instead, all I wound up doing was playing video games. I mean, it was great and all; we were all on the same team in the same room, shouting strategies at each other over the sound effects of industrial resources being blown sky-high by the enemy, but I didn’t get the “real-world” things done that I wanted to get done.

That doesn’t matter, though; I’ll get them done next weekend. In the meantime, Matt leaves tomorrow, and he’s heard word that he’s being sent to the “sandbox” (i.e., somewhere in the Middle East), and he doesn’t know how long it’ll be before he can return home.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, both Dann and I had thoughts of going into the military after high school. (I later found out that my personality type often goes into the military, academia, or the clergy. They really pegged me; I’ve seriously considered all of them.) Neither one of us joined up, though; for my part, I was a little unsure of then-President Clinton’s ability to command the military, and I felt I was probably a little better suited to academic life than military life, so I went to college.

Matt also went to college (that’s where he met Dann), and joined the Marine Corps afterwards, for various reasons of his own. He likes it there, and is glad he joined. I’m glad I didn’t join up, even though as a rule I admire and respect those in the military, because I just don’t think I’d have fit in. The more I learn about military life, and the more I reflect on it, the more I conclude that it is neither adapted to my strengths nor adjusted for my weaknesses.

I think back to all the time I spent playing with G.I. Joes and watching the cartoon series when I was a kid, but that didn’t really implant the desire to actually do those things in me. I wonder how many of our troops out there got their start playing with the war toys I played with, and it did lead them on to joining up. At any rate, I certainly won’t be forbidding such toys to my kids, considering how much fun I got out of them (and am still getting, if you lump in the war strategy video games I spent all day playing today).

I wish Matt all the best, and I support our troops in foreign countries, but I’m glad I don’t have to go. May God’s grace be with all our troops, and bring them back home safely.

This morning I was reading my Bible at breakfast when I heard a long, drawn-out, high-pitched cry over the barking of the dogs next door. I’m used to distractions while I’m trying to study my Bible, so I just blocked it out. It kept on, and then I thought it sounded almost like a human scream. I listened closely for a few moments, but I couldn’t distinguish any words. I thought if someone was in trouble, they’d yell, “Help, help!” or something equally intelligible. I decided it must be some particularly loud bird call; maybe the dogs got a hold of a bird or something. I turned back to my Bible.

A few minutes later, Dann came down the stairs. “Did you hear that domestic disturbance?” he asked. I was a little startled. “I heard that high-pitched cry, and all the dogs barking,” I said. “No,” he said, “You didn’t hear the slaps and the obscenities being screamed?” “Uh, I missed that part,” I said. Dann put on his shoes and headed for the door. “Holy cow,” he said, “The fire department, Sheriff’s Office, and half the neighborhood is milling around outside.” He left to go to work.

Later on, Dann gave me a call at work. “Have you been listening to the news?” he asked. “No; what’s up?” “That disturbance this morning. It turns out that a small child was mauled by a stray pit bull. The child’s in stable condition at the hospital. The dog got away, but not before some guy stuck it with a kitchen knife. Be careful when you go home.”

Wow. I have several thoughts on this. One: How could I not realize that was a human screaming? I don’t really have a satisfactory answer to that. I’ve heard enough screaming (on TV and such) that I ought to recognize it. In my own defense, it was such a calm, peaceful morning otherwise, broad daylight, etc., and I couldn’t make out any words in the screaming, so it just didn’t set off any alarm bells in my mind. Two: What if I had been attacked? What if I am attacked? I really don’t want to get in a fight with a pit bull. I’ve decided to start carrying my Gerber EZ-Out, a serrated pocket folding knife that I can open with one hand. I used to carry it for “self-defense,” before I realized that it’d probably get me into more trouble than it’d get me out of. I also realized that I just wasn’t going places where I would need to use a knife. Now, it seems, I might need to use it in my own neighborhood in the suburbs.

I hope that kid heals up soon and is able to go on and live a relatively normal life. I also hope they catch the dog, or find it dead, or something. Until then, I’m going to have to be exceptionally wary when I’m going to my front door, or unloading groceries from the car.

Tonight we had our cell group. This time there were much fewer people; only about half a dozen. It was good, because I got to know each of them a lot better, and we got to have a good time going in-depth in our Bible study. The number of people seems to fluctuate quite dramatically from week to week. I’ve seen anywhere from 6 to 18 people show up on a night; I wonder if it will continue to fluctuate, or whether it’ll level off.

I like swords. I used to be in a fencing class, which was really cool, because I got to learn how to use a saber, but then the five-week session ended and I moved to Georgia. I say this because Dann has two broadswords hanging on the wall to my right, and if I’m not careful, I’ll bump into them when I’m sitting down or getting up. Or swiveling my chair around. Or just generally not paying attention as I flail my arms about in excitement over beating my previous high score in a video game. They’re sharp swords. That would make bumping into them A Very Bad Thing.

When Dann was in college, he and his friends would whack each other with swords made of PVC pipe wrapped in foam pipe insulator and duct taped together. I did it with them when I came back home over break. The highlight of my experiences with the foam boffers was when I whacked a 50-year old college English professor in the face. I went to bed feeling good about myself that night, I tell you what.

Some people who are really into swords take some form of Japanese sword martial art, like Kendo or Kenjutsu. Or else they just buy a katana and strike poses they saw in the movie, “Conan: The Barbarian” while they fantasize about knowing how to use a sword. I have never done this. I saw a guy with a katana at a Renaissance Festival one time and thought to myself, “Really, that just crosses the boundaries of absurdity. The boundaries are pretty flexible at places like this, but he just crossed them.”

I own neither a katana nor a broadsword. I do, however, own a very cool wakizashi (Japanese short sword, often used as a back-up weapon to the katana). My uncle gave it to me. He’s a very cool uncle. He was cool even before he gave me the sword, but he’s really, really cool now.

Maybe someday I’ll take fencing lessons again. They were fun. I mentioned I had taken some fencing at my cell group, and immediately, someone said, “That’s what we need to do! Take fencing lessons!” Maybe I’ll get some friends together and do it. I really would like to learn. Not like it would be really useful (like Judo or some other martial art), but that just makes it even more fun. Doing something for exercise and fun that has no other practical value – like racquetball.

Last night I had a cool dream. I dreamed that Dann and I and several other friends of ours from our high school Boy Scout troop had all joined the Special Forces. Dann and another guy were in the Navy SEALs, and I was in the Green Berets. We were sort of sad because we weren’t all in the same unit, but we were also kind of glad, because we didn’t know whether I’d be able to make it into a Special Forces unit at all.

Maybe there’s some secret significance to this dream; I don’t know. I know our Boy Scout troop really tried to model the Special Forces any way we could (they wouldn’t let us have guns), although none of us eventually wound up going into the military. It was, however, the best kind of dream: the one where you’re doing something you’ve always wanted to do, but after you wake up, you don’t wish it was real.

This is very uncommon for me. Most of the time, I hate dreams. For the most part, when I wake up, I feel as if I’ve just finished watching an eight-hour stretch of MTV: weird, surreal, and completely nonsensical. Sometimes, though, I have dreams that make sense, and they don’t generally fall in the “innocuous” category. Usually, they’re either terrifying or unbelievably great. Terrifying dreams need no introduction, we’ve all had them, and the less said, the better. It’s the great ones I hate. In them, I’ve often found something I’ve been looking for for a long time, or gotten something I’ve been desperately wanting for a long time. This is wonderful – until you wake up. For instance, once upon a time, I had a book that I really loved. It was the sequel to an earlier book, and I had never read or seen the earlier book. (It had been turned into a TV movie one time, and I had the vague recollection of the last few minutes of the movie.) I searched and searched for the book, but never found it. One night, I dreamed I found it in a used bookstore. A lifelong dream had been finally fulfilled – and then I woke up! AAAAARGH! That’s why I don’t like good dreams (usually).

This dream, though, was good in that it wasn’t something I “really wanted” to do, it was just sort of an adolescent wish-fulfillment fantasy – the kind of dreams I wish I had more often. Besides “Green Beret Mark,” I’d like a “Kung-Fu Master Mark” dream, or maybe a “Billionaire Crimefighter Mark” or even a “Space Explorer Mark.” Unfortunately, these seem to be few and far between. Most of my dreams are the MTV dreams.

In fact, that’s one way I help myself go to sleep. Instead of counting sheep, I free associate things as quickly as I can, and before I know it, my conscious, logical mind has lost control of the associations, and my unconscious has taken control. I actually dream myself to sleep.

As a side note, I eventually found the book I was looking for, many years later. It was as good as I hoped it would be.

Today, I want to talk about computer viruses. A virus is a program, a piece of software, that makes copies of itself and transmits itself to other computer systems, without the permission of those systems’ owners. It does this to put a program onto a system that a knowledgeable user would never put on his or her system deliberately – a program that causes some computer malfunction or other bit of mischief, like erasing files. Hypothetically, one could write a virus to do some helpful function, but since viruses operate without the users’ knowledge or consent, if one was to be written, most people infected by it would be offended and angered anyway.

I bring this up not only because the “myDoom” virus is making its rounds, nor only because a friend of mine wrote me an email today asking for help with a possible virus, but also because of a woman whose system was brought in this week. As a normal precaution, I ran a virus scan on it.

The virus scan discovered 690 files infected with viruses.

Six-hundred ninety!

That’s a lot of infected files. Normally, you might find 2 or 3, or over a dozen on a really bad system. But 690? That’s just mind-boggling. It’s especially mind-boggling because protection is so easy, when you know what to do.

Step 1: Avoidance Viruses are caught in two major places – pornographic websites and file-sharing networks like Kazaa. If you don’t look for porn, and don’t trade music illegally, you’ve eliminated most of your risk.

Step 2: Alertness If you think your computer has been infected, and you have internet access, run an online virus scan to check things out. Don’t sit around in fear: find out for sure. If it identifies an infected file, delete it!

Step 3: Aggression Be proactive in stopping viruses before they get into your system. At work, we recommend Norton Antivirus software, which retails for $50-60. Included with the price is a one-year subscription to their online updating service, which identifies new viruses as they appear and releases updates to stop them.

In other news, I got to explore another part of Atlanta when my coworker’s truck broke down while he was on a computer delivery. I got to have my lunch break interrupted (grumble, grumble) and drive down to pick him up. It was on Buford Highway, which has lots of stores with names in Korean or Japanese (with no English translation). He was at “Ming’s Auto Service.” All I could think about was Ming the Merciless, the archenemy of Flash Gordon in the newspaper serials and Saturday afternoon movie cliffhangers. (Needless to say, there was no intergalactic dictator running the auto shop. That I know of.) We had to leave the company van in their service center, and we don’t know how long it’ll be before they get the radiator fixed. At any rate, it was good to get out of the back room and see the sun for a while.

Today I’m officially a Georgian (again)! I got up an hour early this morning to head back down to Woodstock. It was cold and rainy; the bank clock said it was 34 degrees. I was afraid there’d be a long line at the tag office, but I only had to wait a few minutes before one of the four tellers opened up. I thought to bring my car title along this time; I had forgotten it Saturday, so even if it had been open, I wouldn’t have been able to get the tag. I had a minor snag – my car insurance policy wasn’t in their system like State Farm promised. Fortunately, I brought along my policy as well, so they just made a xerox of it and everything went smoothly after that. They gave me my tag (my first thought was “Where’s the other one?” before I remembered Georgia only has to put a tag on the back of the car, not the front also, unlike Missouri).

I headed out and changed my tags in the cold rain of the parking lot, like several other people were doing around me. I had my handy Leatherman with me, so the work went swiftly, even though my fingers were numb and the bolts were wet. I would have stepped back to admire my work, but it was too cold and wet to sit back and reflect on how much better my car looked with a nice orange Georgia plate on the back and nothing on the front.

It was with a sense of relief that I went to work today, glad that all the bureaucratic nonsense of moving has finally been taken care of. I got to work supra-early; I had allowed a lot of time for waiting at the tag office. The rain was so relaxing, I put my seat back and took a nap in the parking lot and waited for the store to open.

I turned my calendar over to “February” today. For the last several years, I have been getting a “Tolkien” calendar every year for Christmas. For the last couple of years, it’s been a “Lord of the Rings Movie” calendar, with pictures from the movies for each month. Well, guess what the picture is for this month? The back of Aragorn’s head. That’s right, no face, no background, nuthin’. He’s wearing the crown he gets in the last movie, and that’s the only way I knew it was him. I mean, really, why would I want to look at the back of someone’s head for a month? February is dreary enough as it is. I wonder who it was that thought, “I know! Out of all the cool action shots and movie images I could put in this calendar, I will use one of my twelve slots for the back of Aragorn’s head! I’m sure people are dying to see a close-up of every greasy strand!” Come on, even last October’s shot of the half-slaughtered orc was better-looking than this.

Today is the day I’ve been looking forward to for quite some time. No, not the Superbowl; today is the day I change the blade on my razor. You see, I change the blade on my Gilette Mach 3 on the first day of each month. I guess I’d change them more often, but they’re pretty expensive, and I don’t really need to (it’d just be a little more comfortable). I knew a guy in college that used a new blade every day, but his skin was especially sensitive. Plus, his mom was a stockbroker and they were loaded, so they didn’t have to worry about things like “how much do razor blades cost and how often can I afford to buy them?” Ah, the little perks of being rich that the rich never notice. They can afford to have sensitive skin.

I got my first real razor blade (not disposable or electric) as a senior in high school. As a part of some promotion, Gillette mailed me a free Gillete Sensor razor. I was hooked immediately. It shaved smoothly, and much closer than my Remington (“as close as a blade” my foot!). The Sensor had two blades. Then came the Sensor Excel, which I had to have in my Christmas stocking. Then the Mach 3, which had – are you ready for this? – three blades. I think the newest model is the Mach 3 Turbo, but I haven’t gotten one in my Christmas stocking yet. :-( Anyway, all this is to say that during the Superbowl, I saw an advertisement for a shaving razor with four blades. All I’m wondering is, where is the line dividing “a noticeably closer shave” and “rampant consumerism that always believes more is better?” I have this ridiculous image of us in a couple of decades, using a razor the size of a trowel, with so many blade edges it looks like a Venetian blind.

The Superbowl was fun. I watched it with Dann while we ate a pizza. The first half was boring; the second half was great. The commercials were okay, but not quite up to the usual Superbowl standard. I noticed that I was getting bored near the end of the game, when the action was heating up and everything was at its most tense. I guess for me, if I’m going to spend four hours watching something on TV, it better be an Extended Edition Lord of the Rings movie.

Well, I’ve given my annual tribute to the lowest common male denominator: sports. Now, fortunately, I can avoid them completely until the next Superbowl, unless I decide to watch a few minutes of the annual Alabama-Auburn or the Georgia-Georgia Tech games. I don’t know why I don’t enjoy sports as much as other guys. Maybe it’s just because I could never get excited about chasing a ball around. I like other sports, specifically the “combative” sports – fencing, wrestling, judo, kickboxing – I can watch these for hours at a time. But baseball? Basketball? Tennis? I don’t think so.