Two great Wikipedia snippets I chanced across today. About Tetris.
According to THIS (click) playing Tetris can actually improve the efficiency of cognitive functioning AND help people recover from traumatic events faster than NOT playing.
But…
It can also make you go crazy. (click)
We report, YOU decide. I just want to go play some Tetris now. The voices agree with me.
If you were like me, and didn’t get in on the Wii phenomenon early enough to get the Opera-based Internet Channel download for free, Nintendo would like to make it up to you.
Starting now, and running until the end of the year, you can visit the Wii Shop Channel, download a quick update, and click to download any one 500 point NES Virtual Console game.
The Internet Channel is a free download again (and was recently updated with slightly better Flash support… sorta) so download or update that if you haven’t already done so since September 1st of this year.
(PS: I downloaded StarTropics for free last night. Never played it all the way through when I was a kid, although my sort-of-brother Chris and I logged several hours on his copy.)
There’s a great post up at Ars Technica (click) which should answer any nagging “What the heck is JC going on and on about with this Ubuntu thing lately?” It makes for a good (quick) read if you’re even SLIGHTLY curious.
Still flying Microsoft-free, and still loving it. You should too. Seriously.
Our pastor finished up a four week series on the book of Jonah this morning. The following is a hodgepodge of my reflections (and his) on the fourth and final chapter… and one of the most overlooked, least understood “resolutions” in the Bible. In my opinion.
Jonah has just finished (begrudgingly) delivering a three-day message of “repent-or-yer-gonna’-burn” to the 120,000 citizens of the heathen city of Ninevah. And it’s an evangelist’s dream-come-true: every man, woman, and child (even the king!) fall on their faces in mourning for the lost lives they’ve led, and beg for God’s forgiveness. Everyone. Billy Graham probably never saw results like that.
But Jonah isn’t happy. To the contrary, he starts raging against God, because “I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Now, O Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.” (v. 2-3, NIV)
Seriously? What is this guy’s problem? And God calls him on it: “Have you any right to be angry?” (v. 4)
I draw two important insights from this:
One, God can use me EVEN if I don’t have all my thoughts, motives, intentions, or ambitions in the right place. All I have to be is willing.
Two, I can’t trust my feelings. I may believe in my heart of hearts that something is right or wrong, but that doesn’t mean a thing if it doesn’t line up with the TRUTH of what God knows.
Jonah ignores God’s question, by the way. Instead of answering him, he gets up and “went out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city.” (v. 5)
He was hoping that the people’s salvation wasn’t for-real! Even though he was the one who brought them the message! He still hated them enough to want to hang around for 40 days or so and see if they would get an almighty smiting of fire, thunder, coconuts, whatever.
That’s devotion. I guess.
And of course, God isn’t done with Jonah. He still wants him to understand his way of seeing things. So he sends a nice, green, shady vine to grow up and keep Jonah cool. (Causing, as the pastor pointed out, Jonah to be happy for the FIRST time in the entire book.) Then he sends a worm to chew up the vine, which sends Jonah into another bout of suicidal self-pity.
And God asks again, “Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?” (v. 9) Slightly different question, but still relevant.
Jonah finally stops ignoring God, and whines some more: “I do… I am angry enough to die.”
God ends the chapter with a question challenging Jonah, and all of us, to try to take on HIS perspective on things. Jonah was so sad about a stupid plant drying up that he wanted to die, but the 120,000 people who were so screwed up that they “cannot tell their right hand from their left,” (v. 11) didn’t even trigger a tear of compassion from the very man sent to save them from themselves.
How could he… or better yet, how can WE get our priorities so screwed up that we wail and moan over things… our cars, our wardrobes, our 401k, our baseball card collections… and don’t give a second thought to the hundreds or thousands of people who die EVERY DAY without knowing God?
We call ourselves children of God, but where’s the family resemblance? Why don’t we yearn more to know our dad’s heart? Why don’t we listen to him, and want the thing that he wants most more than ANY other stupid, finite, earthly pursuit that we spend our days hungering after?
If we’re not spending every minute of every day thinking about how we can help, serve, and love people… then we’re missing it.
(Many thanks to Pastor Marshall Ford of Grace Fellowship Church, Borger Texas, for his continued and contagious fresh look at words I thought I knew so well, yet are being made new to me every week through his unassuming teaching and leadership.)
Yesterday found me in a dark depression about my job.
Backing up a bit. About a week ago, my boss called me in to get my side of the story on something that I did. Something I did which was stupid. VERY stupid. Being the amazing man he is, he turned the situation into a learning experience and promised to help me get things right. Seeing as how he COULD have just fired me and hired a sane person, I thought this most gracious of him.
Then yesterday, I had what was probably the WORST day yet with my 6th hour class (which is REALLY saying something… ask me sometime), was already more than a little off-kilter due to sleep deprivation, and was battling a touch of… umm… intestinal difficulties.
And I get an email from my boss saying, enigmatically, that he “wants to see me during my conference.” Again. And I get this right at the end of the day.
I have been very slow to move all my stuff into my new room. I guess I’ve felt like it’s not really “mine,” I guess. Anyway, I’ve had this big box of smoke-scented college textbooks sitting in my front passenger seat for about a month now, which I only recently have been taking in to my classroom, a few at a time. I doubted whether I should finish doing so… after all, if the administration and school board changed their minds and DID decide to fire me, what would be the point? I’d just have to box them all up again anyway. At least this way I have a head-start of sorts.
So I came home, monster headache, feeling like something that fell off a poop-wagon. My wife immediately sends me to bed, where I stay for an hour. As I wait for the Tylenol and Sudafed to kick in, I really let God have it:
“What were you thinking bringing us here? What possible good can I do for THESE kids? I don’t have it in me to change them. They are SO far-gone. What good will it do us if you brought us all this way, away from our home, church, friends, cozy little house, and established job security, only to let me get myself unemployed a few months later?”
Then I told him I didn’t believe what I was saying… but that I could REALLY use a sign. And soon.
This morning before the bell rang, I got several. My department head asked me how things were going, and I told him (a bit of) the rotten situation I have been having with my 6th hour kids. He offered a little advice and encouragement, and then said…
“Well, we’re glad to have you here. I’ve walked by your room quite a few times, and everything in there seems to be going well. If there’s anything you need, please ask.”
I somehow kept from crying tears of relief and release then, as I am fighting crying them now.
Another teacher in the department expressed similar sentiments to me, not more than a few minutes later.
I met with my boss, who told me that despite several irate board members asking him about his hiring practices and whether they should “terminate my contract immediately” he, the superintendent, and the assistant superintendent all went to bat for me. Undeserving me. Unknown quantity me. Guy who pulled the idiot move and made them look bad me.
Okay, that did it… I’m crying now. Getting hard to see to type.
On top of all that, my lab demonstration worked today. First time, no kinks.
And I found my dinky little green iPod Shuffle I lost about a month back. Wasn’t even looking for it.
I love how God answers me in ways that even oblivious, idiot me can’t miss. Exactly when I really need it.
I am baffled sometimes at how one as repeatedly unworthy as me continues to find love, patience, and acceptance from the God of the universe, and those he puts in my life. I’m glad he does though.
I don’t need to go back to Egypt. I’m bound for Promised Land.
DISCLAIMER: There are probably no references to vampires in this post. Besides this one. Google is not your friend.
Many of my last seven years as a parent have been spent in a state of twilight. Not entirely lucid, not quite asleep. I’ve come to regard it as normal, and even to cherish the feeling brought on by days, weeks, or (sometimes) months without an uninterrupted night of sleep.
It starts when they are newborn, especially with your first. You are getting MAYBE an hour or two of sleep at a stretch, which deprives your brain and body of the good REM sleep that you need. As a result, you start to go bonkers. This is a good thing, because if you were entirely aware of the psychological, spiritual, and moral implications of the new arrival of a human life — that you had a hand, so to speak, in creating and bringing into this world — you’d likely go far more deeply and irreparably insane.
Then they get sick. There will be no rest on the nights when you “sleep” camped out on the recliner with a trash can under one arm, ready to spring to full alertness and catch the vomit at the slightest noise or other cue… most of which are false alarms, but which you can’t afford to ignore. Or it might be the spiking fevers, the whooping or wheezing of a cough, the sharp cries of pain from newly-cut teeth or the ubiquitous ear infection.
Even when NOTHING’S WRONG you will lose sleep, because the predatory fears of the future do their best hunting at night. When all seems calm, it’s easiest to remember that the world is a scary, dangerous place… and despite our constant reassurances to the contrary, monsters DO exist. Twilight hours spent in prayer for our little ones come so often, but never as often as they should.
So, why bring this on yourself? Why bring on the heartache, backache, and forced insomnia? And WHY would anyone choose to bring an innocent, defenseless, undeserving human being into a world with such evil and suffering?
I can’t explain it if you haven’t been there too. Sorry, it’s a little bit of a “red pill, blue pill” thing.
I’ve taken the red pill four times now… and I am eternally grateful for each of them. Because whether they occurred on my timing or (much more often) not, I am blessed with each nighttime cry I comfort, each diaper I change in a pitch-dark room, each nose I wipe, each bedtime story I read, each sleepless night I undertake.
There will be plenty of time to sleep when they’re grown, and these rooms are quiet and empty. In the meantime…
… have to go. She’s crying again. Where did I put that Tylenol…
The Great Ubuntu Experiment had a major hiccup today.
I was fiddling around with my video drivers, trying to improve performance for both windowed and fullscreen video playback (mostly divx rips of some DVDs I have) and I somehow end up crippling my video settings, so that they will ONLY display 1024 x 768… on my widescreen monitor. I HATE having all my stuff look squished, so I did some more fiddling and somehow managed to delete the GUI entirely AND get myself locked out.
Terrific.
I almost did one of two things: (1) install Vista again, or (2) wipe and reinstall Ubuntu… and lose all the tweaks I’ve been making these last two weeks.
Fortunately, I kept my cool. This was a puzzle to solve, and I’ll be d*mned if I’m going to wuss out in the face of a geek-problem of this caliber.
Long story short, I managed to figure out a password that would let me back in, boot into recovery mode (which I had forgotten existed,) removed and reinstalled several packages via command-line interface ONLY… and an hour or so later, I’m back to as-good-as-it’s-been.
And that feels good. Original problem NOT solved, but at least I fixed what I broke in the first place.
Still Windows-free… unless you count using my wife’s laptop to look up all the crap it took to fix stuff. And I don’t. Or so I keep telling myself.
weekend ( \ˈwēk-ˌend\ ) n. — The period of time following each work week, typically spent trying to track down medical care for a sick child. This holds even more true when (a) one lives in a small town with no weekend clinics of any kind, (b) other individuals in the household, adults included, are also showing signs of illness, (c) incliment weather is a factor, and/or (d) if it is a “long” weekend, due to a holiday or other planned absence from work. Not to be confused with “free time” or “rest.”
Why is it that some dreams really stand out while so may others fade away?
This morning, shortly after awakening I suddenly recalled, with crystal clarity, a dream from last night. Get your Freud on for me, folks…
In my dream, I remember deciding that I would try playing the guitar. So somehow I found myself learning some chords, becoming a rock prodigy, and signing up for a slot at some kind of concert festival thing to single-handedly belt out my own version of “Face Down” by Red Jumpsuit Apparatus. And I sounded pretty darn good, too.
Anyway, the night came for my performance. As I geared up to play to a crowd from the top of my tower stage, I realized with horror that I couldn’t really play the guitar, and what I had taken to be a real guitar was just a collapsible plastic toy guitar with fishing-line strings.
After a few minutes of furiously trying to get my rock on, I resolved to never try to do something like this again… and I had the overwhelming sense that this was at least the second time I had tried going rock ‘n’ roll and failed horribly.
Still a pretty cool dream, though.
Anyway, the actual high point of my day involved finding out that I have lost eight more pounds over the last three weeks (and was actually dubbed “the biggest loser” by the school nurse that weighed us all in!!) That was followed by a free lunch of tasty cold-cut and veggie sandwiches, and FOUR HOURS to work in my classroom before they let us go home. Woo hoo!
Oh, I got to kidnap my wife from the new kid for an hour and whisk her off (in the chilly rain) to an ice-cream mini-date at Braums. (Thanks, dear sister-in-law.)
“I need to laugh, and when the sun is out, I’ve got something I can laugh about.”
PS: Facebook folks reading this… I can’t read any comments you leave ON FB. Please click over to my blog and comment there so I know you still love me. 
I’ve been thinking a lot about loneliness lately.
I recently picked up a novel at the library called “Eleanor Rigby.” I was drawn by the title due to it also being the name of one of my favorite Beatles songs, and I can’t help but hum it (or at least think it loudly) as I read. The book is about a woman in her mid-thirties (named Liz… NOT Eleanor) who has come to accept her solitary existence as a fact of life. She lives alone in a sparse condo, never has visitors, is indifferent to her job and co-workers, and would probably continue to do so if she hadn’t gotten that phone call from the hospital, telling her…
Ah, gotcha. I’m not going to spoil things, because you either (a) want to read it now, or (b) could care less. Anyway, that’s not what this is about.
Personal events have led me to the choice to evict Facebook from my life effective midnight, last night. Whether it turns out to be a temporary or permanent eviction remains to be seen. In short, the interactions on Facebook, while purportedly increasing my “social interaction” has, for me, done the opposite. I have spent far too many moments interacting in a vicarious and superficial manner with the 250-some “friends” on a website, while relationships with the real-life people I run into daily have gone by the wayside.
It wasn’t an easy split to make. So I started thinking about that: why SHOULDN’T it be? Why am I so tied-up emotionally in this silly website?
And am I the only one who feels this way? Nah… can’t be.
I think that more people in this world, though more connected in a plethora of ways than any generation of people before them, have become detached from “reality” with their relationships. I can only conjecture as to why… could be that FB and other sites of its ilk lead to a sort of emotionally inexpensive false intimacy. We feel more free to share information and emotions across cyberspace that we would NEVER have the courage, the gall, the lack of inhibitions, or the shortage of discretion to impart to someone else face-to-face.
I can’t just lump this into a bucket labeled “BAD” however. In some ways we are all too repressed… we hold things inside ourselves above and beyond safe levels for doing so. Unvented angst, unforgiveness, or other negativity can simmer to a violent boiling point, or can stagnate into bitterness. The latter can poison our souls. The former can hurt or kill others AND ourselves.
The problem is that the traditional avenue for getting these emotions out – in fellowship relationships with other real, non-judgemental people who are ALSO in need of a good emotional venting – has gone by the wayside. It’s too inconvenient or too scary for us to choose to do so with any degree of regularity… especially when semi-anonymous venting on the internet seems like it should do just as well.
Here’s the problem. When we don’t have other, hurting, human beings to share in this journey with us, face-to-face, hand-in-hand, heart-to-heart… we lose a little of our humanity. It’s not REAL, somehow. And any relief we get is cheap, temporary relief… like popping a couple Soul Tylenol.
So I’m kissing FB goodbye for a while. Possibly forever. There are so many hurting, lonely people out there who need some time in the presence of other folks on that same, sad road. And I’m one of them.
“All the lonely people… where DO they all come from? All the lonely people… where DO they all belong?”
