he's calling the hump

sorry for the super large pause.

i've taken this time to acquire the intertubes. but it blocks piratebay. boo

the classes have started. i have the class on saturdays and all other days. schedule changed.

so this is going to be a 2 part series, kind of as a basis/background for this blog. cause it might be long.

so i grew up in the church. my parents both grew up in the church. my dad grew up lutheren and my mom grew up reformed.

i have a lot of memories of growing up in the church. I remember my mom practicing organ. I remember running up and down the aisles as fast as i could. i went to awana with two older girls cause my mom didn't have the time to drive us there. i remember sunday school and such.

anyway, i grew up in a very traditional church. the RCA (Reformed Church of America), better than the CRC (Christian Reformed Chruch). which it isn't. it was just the rivaling denomination. It was very much a logos church. I knew all my bible stories. i knew mary and martha, i knew Job, i knew noah, i knew the pillar of salt/Lot's wife story cause it was my sister's favorite. idk...

In the summer before my sophomore year, i went to TEC (teens encounter christ). it was a weekend retreat run by students meant to bring bring christ into a more personal relationship to high school teens. it led to a mini-revival among the youth groups of the area. it was started by the catholic church, but the RCA was in charge in my area of the world.

this was the first time that i was introduced into the spirit. i felt him move and i saw the effects that he had in people's lives. it was a weekend of worship and testimony. a total of 10 testimonies were told by a combination of students and sprititual leaders. i made a lot of new friends during this time because i found people that were alike in their religious backgrounds and people who were excited about Christ. i went back and helped serve at other TECs. it kind of became a popularity contest and had a clique of people that were associated with it. i had a seperate TEC group about an hour away from me and i had my school group and i even had my church group. i had 3 different communities that i was a part of. i found the most acceptance in my TEC friends and so i started to hang out with them more and more. it was a break from high school.

by the end of my time there, i began to notice things that really made me feel uneasy and i started to question if it really was the spirit that i had experienced or if it was a psychological phenomenon that was orchestrated. there was a formula that the weekend followed. the windows were covered so to keep the 'outside' world away from the weekend. it was to keep the focus on what was going on inside the building. (it was held in a larger church) large amounts of candy and pop were freely dispensed. each testimony had a script to follow about topics that were supposed to be covered. they had to be approved by a moderator. each day ran deep into the night, and started early in the morning. so there was a large amount of sugar running through the candidates bloodstream, along with sleep deprivation, and hugely emotional stories. i wasn't surprised that people broke down and cried for no reason. i became skeptical of how it was run and if all the events were authentic.

well, then i moved on to college. my freshman and sophomore year were spent at Northwestern College. i took biblical studies with vonder bruegge. it wasn't bible study. it was biblical studies. it had nothing to do with a personal faith. it wasn't time to talk about how Jesus' sermon on the mount applies to our faith. that stuff was checked at the door. it was a class to look at apologetics. and the historical bible in a cultural and social context. it was my first class as a freshman. and it rocked my world. it addressed subjects that i had never thought of, nevertheless been introduced to. issues of originality, fallibility, and divinity.

i suffered through that class. these were foundational issues that i was struggling with, and because i was a little freshman, i didn't have any answers, and i didn't want to bother anybody with. a friend of mine from elementary school that went to NWC also found out about and talked with the prof. this was after the class was over, and he felt a deep sorrow that he had such an effect. that wasn't the point of the class, but it was too late.

i lost my faith. for the next two years, accompanying evidence and acts and words of others fully eroded my faith. i still went to church and bible study, but i wasn't in it. my flame was extinguished. the flame that i had found and had tried to hold on to in high school had been hit with a tornado. i was introduced to ideas of intelligent design, the clockmaker theory, creationism, and evolution. i was introduced to occum's razor. i was introduced into all these theories, and there weren't any answers for me that i thought could compete with the scholarly information. faith began to become second rate. i saw it as a poor excuse for irrational behavior. i began to see religion as a opiate. i hated the niceties of christianity, along with the formal, traditional rules.

no extra's today.

always gone too long

piano: my devil.

RADAR MANUAL

i'm so hungry.

so today, the house got together and we worshiped together. it was a time of thanksgiving for the gifts we had been given. how each of us had come together, for the house, for the food in the house for the ability to provide for ourselves.

well, during this time, matt asked us what we would think about fasting for a day. i was up for it. i had done some fasting before and it wasn't too hard. it was harder to explain to my mom why i was not eating the supper. i could usually get away with not eating lunch, but supper was always together. i usually faked being sick or something. well, so matt was like let's do it. so right before lunch, we started a fast.

so i'm hungry. looking in the frig is awesome. i mean, look at all that wonderful food. i just want to eat it. we are only drinking water, and i'll have some toast tomorrow cause i had a big day of work. but we will eat again tomorrow for lunch.

the physical toll it has put on me is kinda becoming apparant. i have a slight headache and when i exercise, my fingers get all tingly and numb. right, i know, that's not good. and my legs are really restless. i should be taking this time to really meditate on scripture, but it's not possible for me to do in the studio. i wonder if it will be fruitful or not.

tonight, i found a couch on craigslist. so matt will have somewhere to sleep tomorrow. so far, he's been sleeping with charlie or on the floor. i offered for him to sleep with me, but he didn't want to. i did give him my blankets for some extra padding, but it's really not that great.

They were the best consoles that Neve ever made

they sound are alright. the 8078.


well, here i am. new house. new kitchen and living room. A yard. new neighborhood. new roommates. things will be different.

ah the roommates. always interesting to talk about different people and then compare them. pico chico is going to be the most interesting. he has so many different facets to his personality. the chico around girls he likes, guys he gets along with, when he's tired, around his family. he took matt back to his home this past weekend, and i asked matt about what his family was like, cause it's always interesting to know abou the family to understand the person. chico is nothing like his family. i wonder what he doesn't like about home.

today's famous list: Amy Grant

oh, technology is making us dumber. just a little homophily. there is a divide, another social way to seperate us. for me, i find that i almost live in necessary connection to the interwebs. my draw of information is enormous. over the last 30 days, i have had 1328 different items delievered to my reader. i read about 95% of them. over the last 5 days, i've visited over 40000 web pages. the last 3 days, i've been without internet acess at home. 359 bookmarks (that's w/o submenus). over 3 hours of my own music, plus a good 4 hours of an elvis christmas song. just one song. i don't think that my time is 'wated' or that i'm getting dumber. i agree that there is a lot of information overload.

here's a good article on my beef with everyone must go to college, even if it is to fix a car. because you aren't any good w/o one. oh, a BA may show that you can work independantly, but how often do i do work that i am not supervised over. or that i have a well balanced education, because that makes america a better social scene because we can all discuss British Lit (aka bitch about how much we hated that class). why is college is even structured? if there is one insitution that could use a good reform, it would be the university. not in the idea of financial reform or of zoning or other crap like that. No, it should be on the cusp of new ideas and readily look at them. instead, it has gotten too huge, and is a slow footed-lazy ass-gum nasher. it makes me despise the monster i feed.




















MRI looks to be in my future. i would almost give anything right now to go for a run.