Went to the dentist today. That’s not what the ouch is about. It’s been 10 years. **That’s** what the ouch is about. I’d been putting it off until I had money, or barring that, insurance. Well, I don’t got money, but I got this here dental card when I started working full-time. I figured it was time for a visit. The co-pays are going up in January, so I’m trying to get my visits in ahead.
The news is bad, but not so bad as it might have been. Continue reading “Ouch”
3 to go.
Finished my first exam. I’ve got a final and two 10-page papers left. I think I did pretty good: somewhere between an 85 and a 95, I’d say. In the long essay section, I wrote a real zinger of an essay, followed by a ho-hum attempt, so we’ll see where “acceptable” hangs out.
I believe that I have two types of readers on this site. One group consists of family and friends who have known me for a while and hardly ever see me. They wish I would generally post more newsy information about what’s going on in my life. The other group consists of people I have met by visiting and commenting on other people’s web sites. These people, to the best of my knowledge, aren’t interested in the Chronicles of Kyle. I assume these people are far more interested in what I have to say. I may be wrong about this. I may be reading my own bias into things, because honestly, I’m mostly only interested in what I have to say. Nevertheless, sometimes I feel that it’s necessary to talk about events instead of ideas. When I do so, it’s my goal to tell things in as amusing a way as possible to avoid boring my readers who, otherwise, don’t really much care. I have no idea how often I’m successful at it. Sometimes life is just… boring.
With that in mind, my mom has been asking about my job. I did get the new admin position at my work. I’m not entirely sure yet what exactly it’s going to entail. The biggest area is going to be “reports,” which basically means taking a bunch of statistics and presenting them in an intuitive manner. We have a program on all our computers that keeps a log of every person’s calls—what phone line they called, how long the call was, how long they worked on the call after they hanged up. Since we are supposed to log into this program when we first get there and only log out once we leave, it also keeps a pretty good record of attendance and tardies. So I’m supposed to keep track of all that data. Additionally, I’ll be in charge of tracking schedules: vacations, emergency time off, and who worked what shift for whom. I think I’m also in charge of the department supplies. I’m the post-it note dealer on the block. I give you free samples, but then I gouge you once you’re addicted to the things.
I’m not sure about this, but I believe the second part of my job is going to be to create a standard practices handbook, so people can look up how to do their jobs. Right now the sum total of our understanding resides in the minds of the two people who were part of this department before they moved it to charlotte. Ever see what happens when 2 people know how to do their jobs, but the 30 people around them really don’t? It ain’t pretty. We do have a few people who’ve been there for over a year, and they pretty much know what they’re doing, but they all have different habits of doing things. Quite a few of them rely more on their experience working in other centers more than they do on our actual policies. We don’t have a record of our policies, so why shouldn’t they?
The great advantage of my new job will be normal working hours. Up until this point, I’ve gotten enough money to live on mostly by making sure I was on call at the drop of a hat. As a result, I’ve been able to keep my hours up nearly around 40 a week on average. I’ve also been getting up at 9:00 at night and going to bed at 2 in the afternoon, missing church services and sleep like crazy. You have no idea how much I now appreciate a nice 8-5. (Although, I suppose Valerie might.)
Other than that, I really can’t tell you much about my new job, except that it starts after the 4th of July. I haven’t started working it yet, so I really don’t know.
In other news, I’m going to a wedding in West Virginia this weekend. I’ll be getting off work at 8:00 am and leaving immediately for all parts north. It’s a 7-8 hour trip, so I expect to get there between 3 and 4 in the afternoon. I then expect to be very sleepy. This is why it is so darned all-important that I get some sleep right now instead of writing a bunch of things on my weblog. (sleep! Macbeth hath murthered sleep! Macbeth shall sleep no more!) If it weren’t for the whole sleep thing, I’d be really excited about getting to see two of my friends getting married. But all I can think about right now is how much frappuccino I’m going to have to consume to avoid causing a major traffic event on I-77 North.
And lastly: my roommate confided in me that he’s having some major difficulties with his job. I completely understand. He’s essentially the lowest paid executive in history. He gets sent all over the world to arrange million dollar deals (this is not an exaggeration) and gets paid essentially the same salary as me. Me, I’d be having a problem with the wages. He’s having trouble with the work.
The long and the short of it is that he’s good at the wheeling and dealing part, but he’s completely lost when they ask him a technical question. He usually ends up being the middle-man between two engineering companies that speak two different languages, who are trying to trade a massive piece of machinery (worth, I assume, millions of dollars). He’s a businessman pinned between two engineers throwing technical jargon at him in two different languages, and they get all snappy when he can’t talk like an engineer.
All this is another way of saying he doesn’t really understand his product very well. When it comes down to it, he just doesn’t like hugely complicated machines. He loves everything about the job, except the product.
So now he doesn’t know quite exactly what to do. He’s working a full 80+ hours a week and he’s still not able to make any headway. He’s gotten very flustered, and feels his efficiency is way low. He doesn’t know if he needs to stick it out, go ahead and ask for a reduction in his responsibilities (very shameful for a Japanese), or start looking for a new job in a different industry. Personally, I’d be asking for a responsibility reduction and start looking immediately for a new industry. I’m not too keen on the idea of trading huge machines to factories either. But that’s me, not him.
I told him I would pray for him, and he was really happy about that. He’s not a Christian, and he essentially has no real religious belief. He’d honestly like to be a Christian, but the whole “God not intervening while his dad died of cancer” thing was a huge blow to his ability to believe. I think this would be an excellent opportunity for God to make a difference in this man’s life. (If He’s so inclined, but I’d be willing to bank on what God’s inclinations were in that respect.) I’m going to pray for him. I’d be grateful if you would pray too.
I’ve been getting really excited the last week or so, because I’ve been expecting a very nice gift from my work next paycheck. See, we get paid twice per month, which normally comes down to being paid every two weeks, but if you’ve ever counted the weeks in a calendar, you’ll notice that there are 52 weeks in a year, not 48. This means that, if you’re getting paid twice a month, there are four happy occasions when you get paid for three weeks of work instead of two. Just a few hundred extra dollars tossed into your lap. The 15th of this month is going to be just such a happy occasion.
Was, I should say.
Oh, the money’s going to be there, but it seems I’ve already spent it. Every last dime.
My car broke.
It was the oddest thing. I’m driving along merrily to work when suddenly the car loses power. I thought the gear had slipped into neutral. Except when I revved the engine, I couldn’t hear any difference. Which is when I realized that the engine had died. So I put it into neutral and turned the key.
Nothing happened.
Or at least, it didn’t turn over. It did that cute little Rr Rr Rr thing, like cars do when they’re out of gas. If only I had been out of gas. I was a whole 2 miles from work, so I pulled over to the shoulder and called in, and my team lead came out to get me.
That was the night before last. Yesterday morning I had a coworker drop me off at the car and called a tow truck. I got towed to my mechanic of choice and walked the rest of the way home. They called at around 2:00 to tell me the problem. My timing belt slipped. Oh. And my spark plugs are really really dirty.
I’m thinking it was the spark plugs.
Anyway, it’s going to cost around $400. Ok. It’s going to cost exactly $400, which is a darned sight close to the “extra” that I was expecting to be taking home in about a week.
You know, the Lord is good, and He always provides in time of need. It’s just that, this one time, I wish He had at least stalled the need until the provision got there. Just 24 hours with the pleasure of a spare half-grand in my account would have been a very happy feeling.
You go talk to Him. I’m going to go home and feel grateful now.
Of all the things I’ve been thinking of all week, this is the one I end up talking about…
OK. See, I have this great little budgeting system. I read up a while back on managing your finances, that the biggest budgeting mistake that most people make is that they budget every penny into a planned expense. Because people are human, we naturally have to splurge, even if what we’re saving up for is something really really good.
For instance, even if I’m saving up for a wedding ring, which I really want to get, if I throw all my money straight into the ring savings pile, then I’ll eventually blow it on a giant aquarium instead. You’ve gotta have that exhaust valve or you’ll never make it.
So what you do is you budget your splurging. If I’ve got $50 of play money every week, I won’t be tempted to buy a $300 fish tank at the end of the month. So, miraculously, by spending $50 a week, I end up saving $100 a month.
Ok. So that sounded like that classic line “I spent $1000 at the mall, but look how much I saved!” But I kid you not, it does work. If you don’t plan to blow $50, you will eventually blow $300. And then you’ll be looking at this gorgeous fish tank in your living room, meticulously bowing before it every evening and morning, as you feed the fish. And every time you do, you’ll be thinking, “this could have been a new bookshelf.”
Not that I have a giant fish tank in my living room or anything.
As I was saying, I’ve got this budgeting system. I’ve got two check cards, each attached to a separate “free checking” account. They both have stickers on them. One card has a sticker that says “house,” (short for household), and the other has a sticker on it that says “expense.” The expense card works just like an allowance. Every Monday (which is like my Friday, since my weekend comes in the middle of the week) my bank automatically transfers a set amount from the “house” account to the “expense” account. The money in my expense account is the total sum of what I can spend that week on “fun” stuff.
That includes eating out, movies, video games… every day to day expense, but groceries and gas. Gas is so high right now, that it would really mess up my numbers. Besides, I can go 2 weeks on a tank of gas, so why should I put it on a weekly allowance?
Anyway, when Valerie was in town, a lot of that money went to “us” things, like fancy restaurants and sappy movies. Valerie gets really cuddly after sappy movies… (um. You didn’t read that, okay?) But now that mine affianced has fled to Italy, I have nothing romantic to spend my money on. Dressing up and going out to a fancy restaurant by your self is just really lame. So now I get to blow my money on stupid guy stuff.
Last week I bought a siphon for changing water in my fish tank. (Except I uh… I don’t have a fish tank. Ha ha ha ha… ?)
So last week, it was getting to be around Saturday evening, and I was thinking to myself, what is there for me to spend my money on? Fish tank is pretty much taken care of until somebody dies. New socks and underwear? No, I can last a while there. Guitar stuff? No… what I want in that department costs more than the weekly budget. Maybe I could buy a CD… But what good would that do? My car doesn’t have a CD player.
And then it hit me. My car has this gosh-awful stereo. ’91 Ford factory release tape player. Only the tape part doesn’t work. This would not be so bad—I still have the radio. If only I really listened to the radio. There’s only so much Prairie Home Companion a guy can take in a week. I’ve already priced a new CD player. But if I’m going to buy a new CD player for the car, I really need to go ahead and get the speakers replaced as well. Which comes to a total of around $250. And if I’m spending $250 on car work, there are a lot more important things to do on my car than buy a stereo. Like fix the seat belt, for instance.
But.. what I could do is buy one of those mini radio transmitters you hook up to your walkman. That probably would fit in the $40 budget.
So this morning, soon as the radio shack popped open, I popped in and got me a little radio transmitter. $32.00. Then I popped over to the hardware store and bought me a set of AAA batteries: $6.00. My weekly budget: $40. I have successfully splurged within budget.
The cool part is, when I got everything set up and was actually playing a CD on my car for the first time in nearly a year, I discovered a little cubby in my driver-side door (closest to the car antenna) that is just exactly big enough to hold the CD player on it’s side, where it won’t slide around when I turn.
Life is very happy.
OK. I’ll be good. I’ll go ahead and announce that I do indeed have a job. I’m sure a great number of you have listened to the rumors instead of waiting for the press release, but fortunately, in this case, the rumors were mostly true. I’ll start working for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association tomorrow. 8:00 am. Show up early and we’ll walk you over to devotions. Does this mean I’m getting paid to pray? It’s a possibility.
What I’m going to be doing is basically working in a call center for BGEA. Mostly, I think, it’s going to be updating addresses and accepting donations, and setting people up to receive the magazine. But there is supposed to be a bit of praying for people over the phone, leading them in sinner’s prayers, etc. The pay is very reasonable, at a rate to which I formerly referred as measly. But the hours are fewer. It’s officially part-time: between 20 and 30 hours a week, depending on the schedule you get. The manager, when I spoke to him, said that some shifts may be as great as 34 hours or as small as 16. If I get anywhere near 16, I’m going to have to take up a paper route or something, but that’s okay. I made a commitment for a year, and that’s just a little bit under how much longer I plan to stay in Charlotte. What a coinkydink.
Valerie is much more excited about this than me. My joblessness seems to have been really freaking her out. I haven’t been quite so worried. I have this amazing ability to put off fear of my life falling apart, so long as I know I’ve been doing what’s right. So as long as I was looking regularly, and keeping disciplined and busy, I was fine. It was only when I managed to goof off for a day that I got really weirded out. So far as actually getting a job, I knew that was going to happen, because God is gracious.
That’s not to say that I wasn’t very frustrated. I discovered a lot about myself that I didn’t suspect. Like the fact that I had very little self-discipline, especially where it concerns creating and sticking to my own schedule. It was very easy to goof off a whole day. Which then did make me very depressed. But then, my depression was at least partially justified because I had, in fact, made a fool of myself and wasted a day.
So what really got my attention was not that I got a job, but under what circumstances I got a job. It was the first day after I had finally decided to get out the daily planner my parents had given me 6 (count ‘em: 6) years ago and start using it. Monday was the first day that I wrote down for me an agenda, and then followed through with it. Monday was also the day that I finally gave in and followed through with filing for unemployment.
The unemployment thing wouldn’t really be a big deal, except I’m trying to teach this Sunday school. I was trying to find some way to demonstrate for them that God is really involved in our lives, and the official lesson for that day was on prayer. And the official verse was in Ezra 8:21 where Ezra announced that he specifically didn’t request an armed guard from the emperor while his people went across hostile territory back to Jerusalem. Ezra had every right to an armed guard, and he would have gotten it if he had asked for it. But Ezra had told the emperor that God watches out for the people who look to him. So he was ashamed to say, “God will protect us—can we have an armed guard?” And I said to myself. You’re not supposed to do that. That’s like those people who say that God will heal them, so they don’t go to the doctor. You’re supposed to do both. That’d be like me being fully entitled to unemployment insurance (which I am) but insisting instead upon trusting in God to keep me fed.
Now all of this would be fine, but I was trying to demonstrate to these kids that God is real and really watching out for us, just like Ezra was trying to demonstrate for the Persian king. So I announced, with only a little faith, that I was going to put off applying for unemployment until I got down to my last dregs, so I could demonstrate that God would provide. Notice I didn’t say that I wouldn’t apply for unemployment. Just not until the last minute. I wanted to see if God would provide. And I really wanted to demonstrate that God would provide.
Of course, it would be the easiest thing in the world to demonstrate that me getting a job was no miracle. I happen to consider myself one of the most employable people in the world J. But the same could be said for Ezra, that it was no miracle that he got across the entire middle east without being attacked. Maybe his group just wasn’t worth the effort, they were so poor. But it is interesting to note that I got my job offer the very day I applied for unemployment online and set a date to go down to the main office. Which would be today. Which I may still do, on the basis that I might still be entitled to the money I would have received the last 6 weeks or so.
Since I had finally gotten my life organized, yesterday was also the day that I finally did my taxes and discovered that I was due nearly $600. THAT I did on purpose. I’ve heard a lot of arguments on why you should go through this great effort to make sure that you don’t owe them and they don’t owe you. Usually the argument goes that going out of your way to make sure that you get a tax refund is basically using the government for a savings account, and they make an awful bank because they only charge interest, and never pay it. BUT. If I could ensure that over a period of 12 months I would actually save that money in a bank, I wouldn’t want to pay it out in taxes. But I know me. I’m a good saver, but not that good of a saver. There is no way I would have put that additional money in a bank. It would have gone straight into something really frivolous, like an extra bag of fritos on the way out of the grocery store… every week for a year. And even if I had invested it in a savings account somewhere. What kind of return does a bank give you? .05% ? Not much of a difference from nothing, is it? As it is, I now have $600 that I will plop down right back into savings—despite this sudden need I have to upgrade my car stereo.
And lastly. When it rains it pours. I got home last night from all my errand running, and checked my email, and found a note from a recruiter at American Express Financial Securities. They wanted to schedule an interview with me. All of this on the same day. It feels very weird to go from no interviews at all, to turning down an interview. The really weird part is that the American Express job (in the event that I actually got it) would probably have paid better. But. A bird in hand…
As always,
I have more to say,
but I’ve done enough
for today.
I may be about to go to bed, so don’t hold me to it, but I think I’m going to say something. Something beyond the standard “sorry it’s been 300 years since I posted last.”
I wrote a while ago that my job was in crisis, the medical definition of crisis being the point at which it will be determined if the patient will live or die. As of last Monday, it was official: the patient died.
It was a bad ending. I don’t want to go into a round of finger pointing, partly because I think I have co-workers who read this site, and partly because that’s just rude. Essentially, there was a difference of opinion between my boss(es) and me about how much a person could accomplish in a single day. My estimate was significantly lower than theirs. I tried my best and squeezed what I was told should be a painless 40 hours worth of work into about 45 hours, on average. If work was really really slow, I could get it all done without overtime, but at anything resembling a normal level of work, I couldn’t keep up.
In my mind there were three possibilities for what was wrong: Either the parameters for one person’s work was wrong, or there was some missing technique to getting it done that I couldn’t find out, or the worker was incompetent. I was under the impression that the parameters were wrong, but obviously, my employers decided that the worker was incompetent.
I don’t really have any hard feelings. I was getting pretty close to quitting anyway. How important, really, is a temp job? The thought of spending the next couple of years of my life under the pressure I felt for a measly $12 an hour was becoming less and less appealing.
The trouble is that, with temporary employment, that whole “two weeks notice” thing doesn’t really work. My original contract for that job was for two weeks. If I called in to my agency and said “hey, I don’t like this job any more. Can you get me a new one?” I would be gone the next day. Which would have been really bad for the people at work because I was the only one who knew how to do my job at all, and it had to be done on time every day. If I just up and quit one day, they would have been in some real hot water, and it just wasn’t the Christian thing to do.
So they hired me a replacement, and I trained him, and they let me go. Everybody’s happy. I’m now unemployed, but everybody’s happy.
My only real problem was that, two weeks ago when they brought in my replacement, I knew he was my replacement, they knew he was my replacement, but what I was told was that he was supposed to be my long asked for second person. This completely confused me. They just let somebody go the week previous because we weren’t allowed to have so many temps when business was so slow. I trained for a week, and the next Sunday I got a phone call that my contract had been terminated.
I am simply amazed at the massive lack of trust they communicated to me.
I’m not very good at picking favorites, so I don’t have a favorite bible verse, but one of my favorites is Romans 8:28—
 
“We know that all things work together for good for those that love God, who have been called according to His purpose.”
Given my uncanny propensity to perceive this whole worlds-realm as a kind of glorified game, my spin on “all things work together for good” comes out something along the lines of “all things work to my advantage,” or “no matter what happens, I win.” I made a friend really angry once, by playing this game—I forget exactly the circumstances, but I had just gotten done explaining that everything always plays into my hand, when she either did something really rotten to me, or she described something really rotten happening to me. I laughed and mildly adjusted the definition of “to my advantage” (that is to say, I turned common sense on its head).
See, the problem is we all think we know what is to our advantage. In fact, I’d bet that most of us put more faith in our knowing what is and what isn’t to our advantage than we put in the goodness of God. So when something truly awful comes along, we reflexively question the goodness of God, when in reality we ought to be questioning whether we know what is really to our advantage.
For instance: Jesus died on the cross. I think most of us can see why the disciples thought that was a bad thing. But I’d also like to think most of us can see how that actually worked out to everybody’s advantage.
So me: I just lost my job. Bad thing. But really, how bad is it? I’m no worse off than I was six months ago. In fact, I’m almost exactly in the same financial position I was in six months ago. Actually, I’m richer by three pairs of pants, two pairs of shoes (really nice ones), new silverware, a trip to my sister’s wedding, and a fish tank. (God forgive me for the fish tank). What’s more, I am now more than ever sure that I do not want a career in the mortgage industry. I’ve never seen a business that was so highly regulated by the government in all my life. Plus, I’ve learned a lot about business management (both good and bad), and the importance of distributed responsibility. I’m now used to working a solid 8-hour shift working on one thing, and despite whatever the news people are saying, the job market is much better now.
Probably the biggest advantage, honestly, is that I feel I’ve gotten a pretty clear sign to wait on the whole seminary thing. If my job hadn’t been so stressful, I might have been able, just barely, to stay in school. But His yoke is easy, and His burden is light.
So I’ve lost my job, and it was a bad break, but I have no doubt that somewhere along the line, this plays directly into my hand. My mom is convinced that God forced me out of my job precisely at this time because he had a better position immediately available for me somewhere else. That sounds good to me, but I’m not quite ready to jump for joy over a job I don’t quite have yet. I know this works out to my advantage, but I can’t guarantee that I know what my advantage is.
The problem with writing these thingys so far apart is that, by the time I get around to writing one, so much has happened, I don’t know where to start. It’s 2:00 in the morning. For whatever reason, I can’t sleep. I’m supposed to teach a Sunday school lesson tomorrow, except my lesson plans are at the assistant teacher’s house. Oops. I also have a Christmas cantata tomorrow night, including a solo, except I’m recovering from what seems to have been a cross between a sinus infection and a killer cold, and my voice is all shot to bits. You should have heard my attempts at singing at Saturday’s performance. Scratch that. You shouldn’t have heard my attempts at singing. You’d have thought, “why’d they give that guy the solo?”
I guess the biggest item, really, on my personal “current events” list is that I am not currently enrolled in seminary at this present time. Maybe a month or so ago I posted something along about my absolute surety that rest was an important thing. I was terribly behind in my studies then, but I was confident that I could apply myself and easily catch up. Funny thing about applying yourself. It only happens if you have enough time. I could tell amazing stories, but I won’t just yet. Suffice it to say that my requirements at work and my commitments at church were more than sufficient without the added burden of trying to plunge myself immediately into the pursuit of another degree.
It’s a really great story, at the end of it, though. I was going to the final class with a sinking suspicion I wasn’t going to be able to complete everything in time, and I was planning to have a nice chat with the professor to find out what my options were. I get to the school, and there’s nobody there. Not even a mouse. I pound on some doors until I find one that’s open and barge in on the painters who are making a mad dash to finish the fresco before the chapel’s grand opening. I wander around aimlessly, looking for an administrator who can tell me what’s going on.
It turns out that all the classes for the semester have already finished. The very last class (my class) met last week. I read the calendar wrong. The fourth weekend of the month does not necessarily fall directly behind the fourth Thursday of the month, particularly when the fourth Thursday of the month is Thanksgiving Day. My final exam was due in 3 days. I had missed the class where they discussed the information covered in the final exam… by a week.
I emailed my professor and asked him if there was any hope. He referred me to the dean. By this point another week had past, in which I worked nearly a 50 hour week. Did I study just in case I had a chance? I don’t think so. I wrote the dean and essentially said (in much more flowery words) “Look, man. Even if you gave me an extension, it’ll be two or three months before I can even start to turn things in.” The dean writes me back and says, “Here is a one time offer. I will allow you to withdraw from the course even though it is too late…This must happen by the first of next week.”
Believe me. I hopped on it. Little miracles are miracles too.
Now that that whole mess is over, I really have to start asking questions. Presumably, my decision to enroll in seminary at this particular time was a poor one. 1500 additional dollars of debt without a single academic credit to show for it has got to say at least that. I’m not going to say, “Oh no, that was the will and plan of God!” My other option is to say that keeping my job was the bad idea, and I just have some real problems with that. At 25 a man has got to stand up and take responsibility for his own finances. I just can’t let the debt mount any higher.
So was I supposed to go to seminary? Am I supposed to go to seminary? Was my encounter months ago with the living God nothing more than the fermentation of an addled brain? I can’t say that it was. I mean, I really can’t. the only thing in this world that I really know that I can hold on to. If I unravel them, then everything is an addlement of the brain. What is my purpose, that God has not given me? What is my nature that God has not defined for me? Everything that I am has come from an encounter with the living God. Take that relationship away, and it isn’t just that my life changes, I simply cease to be. Descarte said “I think therefore I am,” but he was wrong. Nothing can exist, except in relation to something Other, to Someone wholly different, and unchanging. Without a proper frame of reference, everything falls apart, the center cannot hold.
Sorry about sliding into philosophy there.
My only hope for now is to say that “I see Him, but not yet.” God has begun so many good works in me, and I must trust that he will be faithful to complete them all.
I don’t know many things that I’m certain of, but of this one I’m sure: that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus. It has been an embarrassingly difficult past couple of months. Probably since the moment I decided I wanted to go to seminary, I have run into so many complications, necessary errands, emergencies, meetings, and general hoopla standing in the way of getting that application done that at times, I didn’t know whether to submit to God, or resist the devil. Am I supposed to go to seminary or not? Recently, though, I found out that my path has exactly two potential courses:
In the first one, I give up on going to seminary, or put it off for an indefinite amount of time, say until I feel like it. The second option is that I pray to the God of grace and mercy and He makes a way for me to get this application done before they decide it’s too late for me to get in this semester. The crisis comes because I’m poor, and my family doubly so: I discovered recently that they changed the grace period between when you get out of school and when you start paying your loans from 9 months to 6 months. This means that I start getting a bill for 250-some-odd dollars each month starting in November, instead of January, like I was expecting. The job I have now, and am likely to have in November doesn’t pay enough for me to make that kind of payment and buy food at the same time. There are exactly two alternatives to making that gigantic ferocious payment: The first one is that I get back in school, and pronto. The second is that I apply for some little thing called forbearance.
In plain English, forbearance means “to put up with.” In law, it means “the act of a creditor who refrains from enforcing a debt when it falls due.” In theology, it describes exactly the state of a person who is unrepentant of his sins and hasn’t gone to hell yet. As I see it, this means that I have either the option of going to seminary or requesting that the US government publicly proclaim me as an unconverted sinner. Gotta love those black-and-white scenarios.
Please pray for me. Today I will be finishing up my (quite tardy) seminary application. The fear of brimstone prods me on.
Nevertheless, I really feel that I’ve grown in the past few months. I think I’ve regained a lot of ground. I’m starting to act a whole heck of a lot more like myself. I’m remembering the callings that He put upon my heart a very long time ago, and I’m remembering that the God of all things will never let me go. He is stuborner than I am, so I am sure to fulfill everything that he has planned for me. So I will say it has been a very good (if gauntlet-like) time for me.
In other news, my sister is getting married in slightly less than two weeks. My friend is duly jealous. My parents are duly anxious. Ces and Jason aren’t telling what’s going on in their thick little noggins. Me? I’m broke. I had to buy two plane tickets and a wedding present.
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
neumatikos 