Well ain't that just a kick in the pants?  Just starting to move on with life and feel like everything's OK and I don't care,  then.....He's engaged!  Fascinating....so much for the insintence that he wasn't cheating and was just freaked out by marriage talk and serious relationships..... But whatever.  Life is good.  Most days.

I've been reconnecting with old friends, which makes me really happy.  It's nice to have people to talk to, even if just online.  I tend to be horrible about staying in touch with people, so I am very glad that seemingly random meetings and unprecipitated online messages have been helping me in that area

Yesterday I went out and shoveled snow in our parking lot.  Really, it was as much a procrastination technique as anything else, but it felt good to be productive.  And by productive, I mean that it warmed up later in the day and melted most of the snow........Anyway....While I was out there, I turned down help from a couple of guys walking by who seemed about my age, because I thought I was almost done (OK, and maybe a little because I didn't want to be outside with two guys I didn't know in a neighborhood like mine...), but then a little while later another guy came along and helped.  Turns out he's living at Stepping Stones, which is a transitional-type house on the next street over.  But he's from Fort Wayne, and looking into taking some adult ed courses at AU next semester.  We had a nice little chat, and I was very glad that he stopped   I even told him about the Mercy House, and I really hope he comes sometime.  That would make me happy.  Being neighborly is a wonderful feeling. (Cue Mr. Rogers music...)

I really wish this semester could just end without my having to finish it......life is too stressful and I just need a break.  Instead of a mental health day, I need about a month.  Then I'll come back and finish.  That would be nice.

I must admit, this summer feels very wierd to me.  For the first time ever, I am renting a place by myself, about 100 miles away from my parents, trying to support myself, and just generally figuring out how to live on my own.  Granted, Dustin is a huge help, but he's about the only social contact I have on a daily basis right now.  I've always considered myself an introvert, and I don't change that claim, but even introverts were made to live in community.

This week Dustin and I are going to hunt for summer jobs--maybe together, maybe not--but wherever I wind up, it needs to be someplace where I am in contact with people.  Because, let's face it, sitting in a computer lab by myself for about 1 hour a day doesn't constitute a real job or contact with the rest of the civilized world.

". . .Christ will indeed give you a real personality: but you must not go to Him for the sake of that.  As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all.  The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether.  Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as your are looking for it.  It will come when you are looking for Him.  Does that sound strange?  The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters.  Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making.  Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.  The principle runs though all life from top to bottom.  Give up yourself, and you will find your real self.  Lose your life and you will save it.  Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life.  Keep back nothing.  Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours.  Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead.  Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay.  But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in."

                          -C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

This is taken from a passage I had to translate for a Spanish class.  I love it.  Not just that Dr. Fox gives us material of real substance and applicability to translate, but this particular passage really speaks to me.  No matter how many times I have heard it before, it seems I always need to be reminded that this life is not about me: not my wishes, not my dreams, not my expectations for myself.  When I accepted Christ, I agreed to lay down my life and all the baggage I brought with me, so that I could fully seek after Him.

Don't get burned by the Candles....or the Carols

Ah, Candles and Carols week....When everyone in the music department gives up what little bit of free time we have left for extra rehearsals and two nights of performing under bright lights with about 10 cameras following our every move so that during the month of December people on virtually every continent (with the sole exception of Antarctica, we're told) can receive the message of Christmas through our All-American, glossed-over, perfectly edited final product.  Nevermind that the performers are almost all on the verge of a nervous breakdown, at each others' throats over the smallest irritation, and absolutely sick of the music by the time we get to Friday night's live concert. 

I do recognize and appreciate the potential we have for sharing the Gospel with nonbelievers through the production, but the hoops we jump through to get there often make me feel like we are perpetuating many common misconceptions about Christians and Christian institutions.  The image of Anderson University provided by Candles and Carols would probably lead someone unfamiliar with the actual campus to believe that everyone here is modest, clean-cut, totally sheltered, and white.  Honestly.  We get an entire page of guidelines on how to dress, what kind of makeup and jewelry we can and can't wear, how to fix our hair, reminding everyone to make sure tattoos are covered (for everyone, read: the second bassoonist who has a very visible tattoo of a music staff on her upper chest)...you get the picture.  A few of my friends, no longer in the music department, used to play "count the black people" at Candles and Carols.  This year, the game would be short as always, with a grand total of one mulatto tuba player and one black singer/euphonium player.  Funny thing is, they were both recruited for wind ensemble just this semester.  OK, there's also a Korean playing portatiff piano for the orchestra........  But I doubt anyone would guess from that showing that AU actually has a pretty decent number of international and minority students, many of whom are very involved with music and other campus activities.

And now for something completely different......

I had a very odd conversation with one of the other clarinetists yesterday.  He told me Monday night that he had an odd and possibly uncomfortable question for me, but there wasn't a good time for us to talk until yesterday after class.  He began by asking if at some point in my childhood a close male friend had died.  I hadn't had any idea what kind of question to expect, but a question like that would never have crossed my mind.  But the question wasn't just odd, it was eerie.  When I was in elementary school,  my sister and I were good friends with a family who lived down the street, especially with the three youngest children; two boys and a girl.  I was best friends with the youngest boy from about kindergarten until fifth grade, and the girl actually attends Anderson University.  But the other boy, Tom, is frozen in my memory as a tree climbing daredevil and avid Little League player.  Sometime when I was in early elementary school, Tom was diagnosed with leukemia.  I didn't see much of him after that.  Not until his viewing, the first I had ever been to.  The vision of  Tom laid out in his casket, with his discolored, bloated body dressed for the last time in his little league uniform, with the cap on to cover his bald head, haunted my dreams long after he was buried.  I didn't go into any detail, but I told Jeremy that I had in fact lost a male friend when we were children.  What he proceded to tell me was even more bizarre.

He began by saying that He does believe all the Christian conventions about death, Heaven, etc., but he also believes that the dead can communicate with the living.  Furthermore, he believes he has been given the ability to see these dead spirits.  At this point, I was beginning to be a bit sceptical, but I decided to hear him out.  Jeremy told me his tipoff was the "chills" I often get, which almost never happen when I'm cold.  The first few times he saw them, he didn't think much of it, but after a while he started paying more attention.  Jeremy decided to talk to me about it this week because he said that Monday when I got one of the "chills", he saw the boy tap me, trying to get my attention.

I am still mostly inclined to call this a load of bunk.  However, I do believe in the existence of angels and demons and their presence among us.  So perhaps it isn't so farfetched that Jerome saw some spiritual entity trying to get my attention.  That doesn't necessarily mean it had to have been the ghost or spirit of Tom Quigley, but who knows.  Any thoughts?