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I've tried sleeping tonight and that didn't work so I'm trying wasting time. It appears that a change is on the horizon for me. God is at work. Stomping out the grapes of wrath or the grapewraiths which I suppose is like the ringwraiths only where the grapes are the one fruit that in the darkness binds them. I've got a lot not working all over and it strikes me, as I am in the throes of the rebuild process that I am horribly unhappy. Some of that is the result of the rebuild, that's true. Nothing puts the kabosh on a good time like desperately trying to save a piece of hardware. The good news is that I have successfully saved all of my data files, except for a very few which were locked by the OS, and those will be on the backup from pre-Swiss.
But a lot of it is coming from the nasty nature of my existence right now. Part of this is a result of Sunday going to meeting and the resulting conversation that L and I had on Sunday. I am very ready to toss my ticket in with these folks, the powerpoint church people who meet in a gymnasium. L more reticent: I think that she would prefer to never go back. She's looking for people from the university, which she was totally against when she taught there. I am not so fond of academics: they tend to be boring people. I am searching for someone who is interested in the types of things that I am and since the comics shop guys are weird even by my standards I don't have any great thoughts about finding them. Maybe I feel intimidated by academics or maybe I am just pissed off still at having thrown away my life and moved out here to the desert for no good reason. But maybe staying in the big city wouldn't have been so great. Since we have been out here, only two couples and two singles have been out from the City to see us. A couple of missionaries come back to raise money and they come out all the time. (We really like them.) A guy we barely know from Romania comes over to see them and insists on coming to our house. But the people from the City? Nope. And we have a guest bedroom and everything. Maybe our life there wasn't that great after all. But it was a life. I had a job, contacts, movement. Living out here is stagnation somehow.
So I'm ready to join a church. This new one is better for me because there are no set cliques or "pillars". You can make your own church there, which appeals to me. I can jump right in and do things. Their theology is relatively consistent with mine (I'm generally an adherent to the Westminster Confession, just like my hero Chuck Spurgeon except with an acceptance of infant baptism) and I have come out of there each time feeling like God was sitting beside me saying, "That's the stuff! Listen to this!" It seems to be the whole package. They want youth leaders (!) and actors for an Easter drama. I am really excited. I just want to get involved.
Since we never talk about this stuff any more, here's what I am reading. You will be very pleased to note that I am reading a novel! I wanted to try out Winslop's Kung Pao Chicken scifi series but the library here had every book but the first one. I am not going to read from book two! I refuse! Sure, I'll buy issues 1, 2 and 4 of a miniseries but I have limits with novel sets.
Reading currently:
I've learned some valuable lessons in all of this. One is to never do anything to this machine. The other is that the Windows 2000 disc has some pretty interesting tools. Another has to do with how my Dell laptop sounds like an airplane taking off when it runs the CD. I've rebooted from that blasted CD enough times to get a medal. Of course, any installation of a MS OS requires multiple reboots.
I've been reading several other folks blogs recently and I have to admit that I really don't have much more to say that is all that interesting. I'm about to start hitting some major debt soon -- I'll be selling the bassoon whenever I can get down to ISU to see Mike again -- and that clarifies a lot. I've also succeeded in reducing my community to an almost null set. Hosing this laptop is simply the last straw in a long line of haybales I've been pitching out the loft and onto the camel. I have a very strong camel, which has allowed it to maintain such an intense balance.
When I started this, I figured that it would be fun to see what it was like and it would give me a place to put all my notes. Normally they simply clutter up a variety of notebooks. I'm partial to a mid-size writing notebook and have a stack of them that should never be read by anyone other than me. I've mentioned this before. They fill up with outlines for novels I'll never write (remind me to bore you with the 10 book series of fantasy novels I'll never finish) and articles I will never bother publishing. And the endless amounts of random wordplay.
Years ago, as an oppressed miniature person in southern Louisiana, I dreamed of having my own comic strip. Not comic book, mind you: strip. Daily with Sundays. A more ridiculous career one could not imagine. At least so thought my dad. As the token smartest kid in the school, I had a reputation for weirdness and seriousness to keep up. While I could continue to enjoy stripart, and even collect massive amounts of comics from the 1950s, I couldn't actually pursue it as a career. This explains why you stop seeing any comic strip stuff in my notebooks after about freshman year in college. You stop seeing lots of stuff midway through sophomore year, when I became a hopeless basket case who spent most of his time in the women's dorm. They had food cards and lots of stuff, and apparently considered me some type of lost puppy. I spent one of my junior years in John and Scott's room, when I wasn't loungin around in L's watching her study. About the only book I remember reading that was assigned was Jane Jacobs's Death and Life. But that led to me reading her other stuff which meant I didn't read the stuff the teachers assigned. I didn't even finish Gareth Morgan's Imagining Organization. I had to finally polish off all the parts I had missed later.
Sure, I have backup. But it's too many days old and I need the data that's on it.
It all started when I tried to install Linux. Instead of trusting the old standby (Redhat 9) I trusted a friend's suggestion for using another distribution. That and a new release of my old standby, System Commander, led to my Windows 2000 partition no longer booting. The Win2K repair facility ended up failing on me.
I've now got to install Win2K on the partition I had intended to install Linux to. I've had to boot from my Win98 partition (thank goodness for small mercies of old OSes!) and run the install program.
I have two potential contracts coming up, and I'm in the position where I have to take what I can get.
One is with INFOSEC at the Big Insurance Group (BIG). The pay is about what I made four years ago and it's only half-time. The other is with European Investment Bank (EIB) but pays less than half the hourly rate of the other contract. Which means that of the two, I would have to say that BIG looks better, since I can make as much as with the other and save on the daily commute. (BIG is away every other week, while EIB is a 2 hr train commute.) Wow. And I'm really happy about this.
The conversation with the contracting firm was with the owner, something pretty rare. I can do the job, no sweat, as long as it isn't with a particular person who has become a EIB employee. I can guarantee that I will be rejected out of hand by her, and for good reasons on her part.
So it goes. You work long enough, you ruffle a few feathers.
WARNING: I fully realise that this makes no sense at all and I bloody well don't care.
I wonder if the so-called Emerging Church is simply generational politics or a corrective reaction against the failures of hypermodernism. Think the French Revolution rather than the English or American ones. Let's follow the manasclerk train of thought on its way past the Dunes and Michigan City!
In many ways, the Emerging Church people are reacting against the Le Corbusiers, the Managed Economies, the Five-Year Plans, the Centralized Fascism. They attack CENTRAL Central Intelligence's IT from Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time. (Is anyone else kind of freaked out about MIS now being called "IT"?) And they are right to reject these hyper-modernist, hyper-rationalist fascisms.