so, i guess it's time to update.

i though of a few things: first off, my blog won't specifically trace my life out so some creepy stalker would know my routine, but i also figured it ought to parallel it in some way. so in order to talk about my life now i'm going to talk about sub arbore.

i went to high school in a little town called Virginia Beach (lol). Va Bch is actually a huge place with lots of people and we get a ton of tourists all summer, it's crazy. but that's all beside the point... one day i was waiting for a teacher. we had been talking and then she was rudely interrupted by a mandatory faculty meeting (which i'm still not sure they needed to have for 90 mins every week...). well, i wandered outside because it was reaching that point in the day where they would throw me out, so i went out towards the teacher's parking lot. it being a nice spring day, i sat... sub arbore... (under a tree) and delighted in the warm sun on my face.

see, i had only been in the church for about 2 months, and at this point, i had been clean for like 2 weeks... which was a feat back then. and i was meeting with a really awesome, down to earth, teacher. as i was sitting there, a jamaican security woman walks out of the back on her way home and greets me with,

"boy! boy! are you ok?!"**
to which i reply: "Yes, ma'am, just waiting on someone."
to which she replies, "chile, you ought to take care of yourself of someone's gowna think u're crazah"**
to which i slightly nodden and she continued walking.

this experience is actually quite humorous to me. she was right though... if i don't chose to act according to what is socially norm, i will be considered outlandish... so, after many years in church leadership, i've given up. i'm not normal, why should i try? i love Jesus, i love his church, and i love theology. i enjoy myself in almost everything i do, and if i find myself in that particular circumstance where i'm not enjoying myself... i make it fun (drawing comics at the bottom of my calculus tests that i will have had failed, theorizing about flux capacitors at the end of my physics homework...)

another thing that makes me crazy: i like watching people react. i don't do anything particularly bad to them, just not normal... for instance: want to get a girl to remember u? propose to her, on a knee, loud, in public, in front of all of her friends... but be wary, if she says yes, u HAVE to marry her.

and to sum up my eccentricness... i've never looked at the world in an "American" way... my parents always encouraged my outgoingness... when i was young, a black german woman lived with us, my family always encouraged us kids (i have 2 brothers) to bring our friends over, and they often took us to friends' houses - black, white, italian, mexican, whatever, it didn't matter... so, now that i'm at a school with a large mutli-cultural population and a large group of foreign students... I LOVE IT!!! there's something about sitting with people who do things differently than you and experimenting with their culture (mmmh, eating curry with your hands while sitting on the floor... i miss my nepalis). i view culture as a group of traditions that i get to sit and enjoy. it's wonderful to try to gain the perspective of someone completely outside of your normal schema... they might not speak your language, share your religion or even think about food in the same way, but these aren't differences... THEY'RE OPPORTUNITIES!

so, yeah, that's a small anecdote and some ideas about myself... my egotism of this post is now ending, i hope you've enjoyed it. :D

** i've tried to reproduce an authentic jamaican dialect here, but i feel like i've horribly failed...