Circular Language

Outside I hear chanting.  It is from the Greeks because it is… rush week!  What is interesting about Eureka is that they do two rushes, a spring and a fall, and freshman can only participate in the Spring Rush.  I think that allows freshman get their heads on straight when it comes to college, not to mention that on a small campus like Eureka you get to really know who is in each fraternity or sorority.  By the way, the chanting ones are the Delta Delta Pi Sorority and the Delta Sigma Phi Fraternity.  I’m pretty sure I won’t join a fraternity at this point, but if I ever did, it would probably be the Sigs.  I’m friends with quite a few of them.  Sorry Ronnie and Paul… I just don’t know any of the TKEs!!

On to more pressing matters!  It’s quiet around here tonight.  Most of my friends are at the Reagan Leadership Retreat, others are watching the Lord of the Rings, and yet others are doing college things in which I do not wish to partake.  You know how it goes, right?  So I am very solitary tonight.  Not a bad thing at all, as I have had a very frantic week with many a paper due and the continued acclimation into my new lifestyle.  One never has as much free time as he or she thinks that they do. 

It is also funny how what we think will be hard is actually easy.  Like my Spanish class, for example.  I thought that Spanish would be horrible to take this year, and I was 99% sure I was going to change it.  I’m glad that I didn’t because it has been my easiest class by far and I am still strengthening my language acquisition skills.  This is where I want to give a nice little shout out to one of my favorite teaches, Kris Earle, for not only instilling in me great amounts of practical knowledge, but also the love of learning something so foreign as, well, a foreign language.  Everyone should try to learn another language if they have the opportunity, because it opens so many doors. 

Speaking of which, I do want to point out that learning a language, particularly Spanish, but any language for that matter, is not “un-American”.  Many people know this, but when I hear “that one or two” it goes all over me.  Learn a language instead of fearing it, because whenever we hear more “protectionist” language, it is simply vocalizing fear.  (I could open a can of worms there, but I won’t.  But… if you really DO want to go there… email me!)  If you're dead set on not learning another language, don’t!  Just don’t fear those that speak in a different tongue than you.  Come on, it’s silly and it tends to make you look more foolish than you actually are.

Speaking of which, English is such a wonderful language because it is incredibly diverse.  It all goes back to the Battle of Hastings in 1066 (My writing teacher taught on this the other day, but I already knew it… so I feel the need to give partial credit to Dr. O’Malley).  That is when a Norman named William the Conquer did what his name implies and conquered what we now know as England.  He was from France (Norman… Normandy- see the connection?) and he brought in his Latinate French language to our Germanic style language.  So while English is Germanic at its core, many of our words are also French.  French is a Romance language, which means it originated in Latin (Hence Latinate French “back in the day”).  Latin has its base in Greek, which is what I’m studying now.  Whoo-hoo for circles!

Anyhow, long story short is this.  English was the collision of two very different languages and that is why it is not only the largest language, but the hardest language.  That is why it is so delightful to write in English (what I’m doing now!) because of the plethora of words.  In fact, we are the only language that requires a thesaurus. 

If you don’t know how we got from chanting Greeks to thesauruses, I don’t blame you, as I only vaguely understand it myself.  Oh well!  However, if you don’t understand any of the words below I invite you to look them up in the only book to outshine the thesaurus… the dictionary!

The Importance of Naming Things Properly

I know, I know.  I skipped not one but two whole days of blogging.  I apologize for the emotional damage I caused many of you (I’ve counted upwards of three).  I was incredibly busy with my “real job” A.K.A- college.  I hope to actually get ahead on my homework this weekend.  Don’t worry. I probably won’t, but the hope is always there, right?

So there is this one girl in a few of my classes.  She has a name but most of the time I call her Annoying Girl.  She’s that person that whenever she opens her mouth, you immediately start dreading the next five minutes of your life.  Not only is she obnoxious, but she never knows when to stop.  It’s logorrhea, or diarrhea of the mouth with this chick.  I curl up in disgust every time she comes near. 

It’s not totally out of place, mind you.  She’s a very hard person to love… a very, very, VERY hard person to love.  She curses frequently for public reaction, thinks she’s cute, and says things out of context in the hopes of sounding intelligent and analytical.  In other words, think of the whole nine yards of annoying, wrap it up in a five foot body and you have Annoying Girl. 

And today she shut up.

I was flabbergasted.  My whole week (I have her in one class every day) depends on bracing myself for her voice which cuts up my patience with the efficiency of a steak knife.  Okay, not my whole week, but a good minute before class starts.  But today, miraculously, she was silent.  I was worried.

I saw her this evening on campus as I was talking on the phone to my grandmother (Meme Janice will now be ticked as it was not her) and she was walking towards me so I waved and she courteously waved back.  When she came close enough to whisper I asked, “Doing okay?”

She replied, “No- bad phone call from my sister.”  She was dejected… emotionless, something Annoying Girl never was.  I patted her on the shoulder and she kept walking and I felt like even more of a jerk.

I feel rotten for having these emotions about her until she does something so nerve grating that I forget all humility.  However, when she does act vulnerable, I remember that no matter how hard she is to love, I HAVE to love her.  I have no option, I have an obligation. 

So this is the last time I call her Annoying Girl.  Ever.  Instead I go from today treating her more like the Child of God that she is.

Pray for me, as I will have difficulties, but I go into this looking for deep success… and most of all, love. 

Common Ground

My labor day was characterized by two things, in all.  Beyond sleeping in (which was a possible third), I did/am doing homework and Sam and I re-arranged our dorm room.  The fun part about the redo, besides the fact that it felt like I was on an episode of Trading Spaces, was that in twenty minutes it felt like I accomplished tons of things.  We organized our new setting so that all of the spare room we had was held in the middle of the room so that we could actually use the little spare room that we did have.

It involved moving my bed so that the foot of the bed was near the foot of his- our beds now make an L.  My desk then goes between the wall and my bed.  Under my bed is my dresser, my kitchen-esque supplies, and we have a large area for storage.  Then on the wall where my bed used to set is his dresser and desk.  The wall that holds his high lofted bed is now bare, so a couch or chairs can fit underneath and the entire middle of the room is open. 

                                   

What I noticed as I was moving all of my furniture around with Sam was that it involved a lot of trust.  Dorm rooms come designed to be two halves.  On one half is a closet, a bed, a dresser, a desk, and a chair.  The other side is the exact same.  Now we have broken the “mine/yours” barrier.  There is no “Colton’s side of the room” because the lines are blurred.  My bed ends and his bed begins; my desk is near his.  We hold the middle in common, and our fridges are now stacked on top of the other. 

There is a higher sense of community between my roommate and me.  There is less mine and more ours.  We share the empty space under our beds as mine is storage and his is the living area.  We have been able to become comfortable enough that we can do this, but we can also do this successfully.  It required a lot of trust on my end, at first I honestly didn’t want to do it.  However, because I did, we now have the most free space of almost any other dorm, and it is the most aesthetically pleasing. 

The only payment that was required was that over-individualism that we all too often harbor.  I had to replace the rigid ownership I held over “my stuff” into the trust that we can still respect it the same. It sounds like I got married… Promise I didn’t, but I think the thought process must be similar, but on a grander scale.

Never fear- I still have my own bed, and fridge, and desk.  But it’s on “his side” and his stuff is on “my side”.  However, the resulting bad news is we get to both clean “our room”.  Alas and alack, some things never change.

The Third Chair

Yesterday was a fun day that involved playing in the rain and friends and many memories that I cannot even begin to think about and recount.  Alas and alack, that is the problem with waiting to blog.  So you, my most loyal readers, will have to suffer through only today’s adventures and forgive me for not giving you the ¾ I left out of yesterday’s blog.

Today was incredibly exciting as I worshiped at the First Christian Church of Pontiac, Illinois.  It is almost the farthest on my list, with only one other being the same distance away at 39 miles away.  I chose it because of the time I would have to go and experience Pontiac.  Tomorrow I can do the homework I would have done today, and it turns out I will definitely need tomorrow to complete all of the piles of work left to me by the good professors here at Eureka College.

 I left Eureka at ten to nine.  The church was an expected forty minutes away, so I knew that I would just squeeze in with no time to spare.  Naturally I got behind a truck with a camper on it that felt it was a deep sin to go any other speed but 51 miles per hour.  The camper added the complexity of seeing around the cab to pass, so I tailed, slightly agitated, for roughly fifteen miles. 

I made my way to the town of Pontiac, which is a decent sized town with 12,000 residents and countless farmers who use that community as their “urban hub”.  However, I did not copy the address from the Disciples website correctly and navigated myself to 1314 E Indian, when I wanted to go to 1314 E Indiana.  IndianA not Indian!  I decided not to be the stereotypical egotistical male and to stop at the gas station just ahead of me to ask for directions.  I soon understood why men rarely stop for directions- the attendant spoke little English. I don’t begrudge him this, but it did make my quest for FCC of Pontiac even slower and by now it was 10:40.  My hope was that somehow, someway, they started services at 10:45 or that they were even one of those radical churches that pushed the limits and started at 11:00. 

On a stroke of desperation, I whipped out my iPhone and told it to calculate to “First Christian Church, Pontiac IL”.  In my mind I thought there was no way it would get it, but it identified the location!  I was shocked, and I told it to navigate the some odd two miles to the church.  Please note that I don’t consider navigating and driving with a smart phone very safe, but it is not the same as texting while driving… although, even I will admit that they are very similar.  So I’m cruising the streets, checking the phone, looking for the streets, fixing the errors I make along the way (which if you're me, which I was, it was every other direction that I was missing) when I look up and I see a big truck coming down in my lane. 

“Look at that idiot!” I think as I’m in my compact Saturn staring down this double cab Chevy Silverado, “He’s passing a car on a city street!  Wait a second, that’s a white line!!” I soon realized that I was going the wrong way on a one way road and I quickly ducked into a parking lot to let the truck go by.  As he passed he did the “turn and gawk” and his face clearly read, “Look at that idiot!”  Karma stinks.

So I get to the church at five minutes until eleven, clearly late even by normal standards.  I ran the car into a parking spot, jumped out, clicked the lock button and did a half jog to the doors.  According to Murphy’s Law, the plate beside the door declared that Sunday Services started at 10:30 (for those of you not too fond of math or have had trouble keeping up with all the times floating around in this blog, it makes me 25 minutes late to church).  So I took a deep breath and barreled into the church.

I desperately hoped that all that I missed was the “call to worship” or the beginning, slightly more boring, things.  For once luck prevailed and I walked right in as the minister was instructing people to “please turn in your bible to Luke…”  I plopped down in the last row and started paying attention to the half of service that I made it to.

The message was okay, fairly basic on joy that Christians should have.  It was an older audience where gray hair was the norm, just like in most churches in the denomination.  From the looks of it they were a church long gone that were now living the days of “hospice ministry” and if I had to guess, this minister had even been plucked from the congregation to give a sermon on Sundays.

I was wrong, thankfully.  However, it was almost worse news.  The man, Pastor Jerry, was an interim until they found an acceptable part time minister that could accept the reduced salary package the church was offering.  Not only that, but the church had just recently gone through an “advanced membership reduction” or “split” as most of us would call it.  It was just a mess, and the twenty five left in the sanctuary were saddened to see death was written on the walls, and they now were urging their eighty year old bodies to do all they could to see life for their beloved congregation.

Two people, a mother in her eighties named Wanda and her fifty year old son Bruce invited me to go with them to the Threshermen’s Annual Parade.  They said they had set up three chairs, and that I was welcomed to be the third.  I was scared to accept, because I was planning on going back home to the college, but I decided friendliness was to be the order of the day.  They lived in Saunomin around seven miles out and had brought their lunch as they would make their day in Pontiac.  They offered me part of their meal, but I declined as I did not want to make three portions out of two, so I ran through the Dairy Queen (a leap of faith for me because I suffered from food poisoning the last time I ate there) and grabbed a bite to eat.  I consumed my food (read: inhaled) and headed back to the church to meet up with Wanda and Bruce. 

It was yet another leap of faith I took when I accepted their proposal to carpool to the parade.  Wanda drove her Chevy Venture, which was a good thing, because she definitely needed all the safety a minivan offered.  God was absolutely in the car with me, but he too was screaming his head off as he worked miracle after miracle to prevent an automobile accident.

We arrived at the parking lot safely and we then watched the parade.  It was lovely with tractors, old cars, new cars, bands, walking groups, and the infamous politicians.  It was almost two hours’ worth of parading!  I then received a tour of Pontiac from Bruce and Wanda and saw one of the highest maximum security prisons in Illinois, Chicago’s trash mountains (the landfills were literally as tall as mountains) and a Caterpillar factory.  It was lovely and I got to know the mother and son on a deeper level.  They were family already.

 Bag Pipers!!

 Very neat American flag

 Pontiac Firebird- probably the coolest car ever.  Christmas, anybody?

The American Legion of Flanagan's Water Tank.  Kids throw water balloons at the tank as it shoots a water gun at kids and adults in the way.  Not sure if this has any deep psychological problems to worry about later on... ha ha.

The time to say good bye had come once more.  I thanked them for the time and the invitation.  I thought to ask them why they had set up a third chair.  Miss Wanda replied that they had the three, and they thought the minister or someone from the church would want to come so they thought it would be nice to go ahead and set it up.  Little did we know that God would set up a situation where I would be the one to stay in the third chair.  I wrote it down as a God thing. 

Today was good and I saw a place that I can be used.  It is possible that I can be an instrument of hope and change for Pontiac, and if I could I would love to go there each and every Sunday.  However, by the same token, I would do the same with Eureka Christian Church.  So I press on, and I will complete my list.  It gets hard though when you know that happiness could happen anywhere, and that in my own way this is a delayed gratification.  Church doesn’t work well like this, it is in the community of faith that the bonds and the workings really take the presence of God- but that is also how it works for me.  So I am getting tastes, not the real thing. 

By the time this is over, I will have sampled every flavor of ice cream I can get my hands on from this one ice cream shop.  However, the more pressing question is will I be full?  Or will I be so full I won’t want to eat a single scoop and that my samplings will be sufficient for me?  Or could it be that eating all of this different ice cream makes me sick?  Oh the questions I ask before my bedtime snack. 



Really Just a Quarter...

Today was a long day but it was a fulfilling day.  I decided to stay local and explore more as well as take time to build up my fledgling relationships with all of my campus friends.   So I just stuck around here, talked, swam, goofed off.  Not much homework… which means tomorrow will be hefty.

This is really like one quarter of a blog, as I will flesh out today’s adventure later.  So sorry for posting this both late and incomplete, but I figured that if Minor Musings was a DAILY blog, I needed to put something up.

Speaking of writing, I have been thinking about it more lately.  My dear youth minister friend from Sulphur, Kathy, is always telling young adults to have the “second job” that you do on the side.  I think mine may be writing.  I doubt I’m that good at it, but for some reason I have been hearing a lot of positive feedback from this blog.  The compliments are stroking my ego- enough that I think writing may be a part of my professional life.  We’ll see.

Blessings to all.  I will put pictures of today’s travels up tomorrow with the full story!

Ardmore No More!

Never before have I wanted to go to an Ada High School football game more than I do tonight, 702 miles away.  It’s not because I want to go be a part of that ritual, because I really don’t, even though I would love to see my friends and my Ada community.  Rather it is because my brother is playing tonight. 

Chase (who gets to be a part of the first stinking play, against Ardmore, as a SOPHOMORE!) will be out there tonight and I desperately want to be there to watch him.  I actually thought about driving, and if I would have made the game (leaving at 7:00-8:00) I would have totally been there for the weekend.  However, alas and alack, I cannot and I did not, but it took a lot of self-discipline. 

So while I heard the faint whispers this morning of “Ardmore No More” all the way from Ada this morning, know I won’t be there to yell it with you.  But I can say that I am earnestly saying it in my heart.  You have supporters, even 702 miles away.

Chase, you’re going to do well!  Know I am watching the best I can!  Love you brother!

Community

I have been blogging late for the last two days.  I promise, it isn’t intentional, but it has indeed been the pattern.  Not totally sure why, but I have been busy with a lot of nothing.

Yesterday, my Resident Advisor, Cody, took me into his room for our introductory session.  Basically, he asked questions about if I was doing okay, classes weren’t too hard, he could do anything to help etc.  However, we soon came upon the subject of homesickness.  I could tell that he wanted to get there; I don’t know how that “6^th Sense” is suppose, so I bluntly addressed it.  Yes, I write many letters and it looks like that I am the most homesick guy here.  But I’m really not.  I simply have rekindled my love of writing and I keep myself well entertained.  I love the college life and this is my home in many ways.  I’m a red devil! 

However, I also noted that I am cold to the guys on this floor.  I discovered this during my personal reflection time last night, rather accidentally.  I realized that I hadn’t spent time in the lounge, by and large I kept the door closed, and when open I was busy at my desk and rarely invited community or conversation.  So far, I was doing well at avoiding the young men on my floor.

I’ll fess up, some of it was elitism.  Some of it was that I enjoy my private time.  A lot of it was that I keep my door closed because my room is right outside of the lounge and therefore it acts as an “extension” of the lounge when my door is left open.  But, it really doesn’t matter why I was acting cold, the simple fact of it was there.  The part that really kinda twisted and turned in my heart was not only was I not responding to the community, the guys were really trying to reach out to me. 

So today I resolved to be more a part of the community.  I don’t know if they realized it, but I did.  I spent an hour just talking in the lounge, particularly on Affirmative Action.  I did my readings in the lounge with them, I just spend a half hour talking to Louis about God and the great things that surround us.  Life is so much better when lived in community, and I cannot believe that I forgot that.

For that is how it happens.  We slowly and surely start shutting people out until we realize that our community is a shoe string and we are hopelessly lost alone.  Here’s to people, here’s to friends, and here is to living with people rather than without.