So the husband pointed out that it’s been over a year since my last post and perhaps I was due to start blogging again. Oddly, the past few years since coming back to the US from Bangkok – specifically to Maryland/DC I just haven’t really been inspired to blog…as I’m sure you can tell from the copious lack of posts freakishly apparent on this blog. It’s difficult for me to write without a reason.

So in a random turn of events I just decided to check this blog…today is July 15, 2013. My last entry was July 16, 2012. Coincidence?

I find it humorous that this blog has taken the form of most of my journals (diaries) where I have fits where I write everyday and periods of no activity until one day I randomly decide to write again. I don’t particularly advertise this blog aside from the facebook linking for family and friends that might be interested and I think you can find it via google searching. But this white screen that I type into is more for reflection than anything else, if others derive benefit from that, great.

Perhaps it’s providence that I’ve decided to check my blog. My last entry was about ‘dreams’ and where I was at. Since then life has been eventful but I still struggle with what will make me happy in my work…similar musings as to my last entry. Since then, I’ve gotten married, been quite productive if not incredibly frustrated at work, been back to Thailand to teach a workshop, been to Europe to attend a workshop, started a teaching blog for things I learn at workshops, started online newsletters for my field so others can tap into what I find on the internet, finished up a teaching fellowship, explored DC during free time… Life is clipping along as it should…

Somethings I’ve figured out in the past year:

Devotional Blog:

“Regroup”, 7/15/2012, Proverbs 9:9

So last weekend I was talking to my mom and last night I was talking to my sister and with both conversations I found myself pondering my choice of ‘life path’. If you’ve read previous entries in this section of my blog you will know that I’ve said that I’ve always just walked through the paths I feel like God has opened to me assuming that’s direction he wants me to go. It is after all the only path that’s opened up, so I just walk through it. Did I think ‘this’ is where my path was leading? Actually no.

Devotioanl Blog:

“Looking for love in all the wrong places”, “You Can”, “There is a Plan”; 6/23/2012, 6/22/2012, 3/12/2012; 1 Peter 4:8, Luke 13:12, Jeremiah 29:11

You ever hear the joke that you should listen to country songs backwards? Why? Because then they become exceedingly happier…you get your house back, your dog back, your woman back, your tires un-slashed and your guitar un-smashed.

I’ve noticed a trend in many entries of this book. In many examples of people’s lives that she uses…when it rains it doesn’t just pour–it’s a fricken hurricane and it’s not ‘waves of life’ that hit people, it’s a damn tsunami!

Devotional Blog:

“Lights Flashing”, 6/21/2012, 1 Corinthians 4:5

Ok, back to the book after quite the hiatus.

When the Lord comes, he will bring our deepest secrets to light and will reveal our private motives… ~1 Corinthians 4:5

Well now isn’t that a scary thought? How many secrets does one carry throughout life? How many thoughts do we think would we be ashamed of if someone were to actually crawl into our head and listen to. Thankfully people can’t crawl into each others heads and truly hear the thoughts that roll through them.

Funny thing is, growing up this verse made us wary of the ‘big’ secrets…infidelity, sex before marriage, stealing, physically hurting someone etc. Our pastors would often times use the image of a huge projector screen showing all our sins and evil thoughts to the world for all our family and friends to see. Oh the embarrassment! Oh the judgement! Oh the pain we would cause ourselves and other people with our hidden sins that haven’t been brought to light and forgiven. I used to live in fear as a kid, paranoia even that when I died God would put me on a stage and broadcast my entire ‘evil’ life of every little thing I’d ever done that wasn’t 100% ‘saintly’, down to beating the crap out of a stuffed animal because I was angry. Yes, as a child I occasionally beat the crap out of dolls and stuffed animals out of frustration. I ripped pages out of my journals and threw tantrums in my room out of sight and earshot of anyone. Much of my anger and frustration growing up I kept inside, in fact all of it I kept inside. And while these ‘tantrums’ and stuffed animal beatings seem harmless enough at first sight, my thoughts got darker as I grew up.

What about the little ‘secrets’ the thoughts no one hears about, the thoughts that will never be voiced but are nonetheless there… the dark thoughts.

Now to be fair, this was a particularly hectic week and the ‘busiest’ my desk has been but upon reflection it pretty much sums up my existence as a postdoc…”semi-organized chaos”. Click on the picture to enlarge. What you don’t see is the 3 pairs of shoes under the desk along with 2 bags and flat rate mailing boxes. On the cubicle wall out of view are several postcards from friends in Boston, Jackson, WY–now Australia and Great Falls, MT, 3D dengue sequence structures and a post it note to pay bills–the line between normality and nerd is definitely a blurry one.

Devotional Blog:

Burdens, 03/02/2012, Galatians 6:1-5, Romans 15:1-7

Are you a worry wort? I can be. I can worry about the most inane irrelevant things sometimes. Things I cannot control I worry about…I’m absolutely ridiculous sometimes, keeping myself awake at night worrying about things that are utterly pointless to worry about. And I worry about them at the MOST inopportune times as well…such as when I am taking off in a plane and I’m like–huh what if we crash? It’s really dumb as the statistics support me getting  pwnd by so many other causes before dying in a plane crash (1 in 7,032-lifetime odds, Source).

I find it funny that in the same source I have a 1 in 120,864 chance of dying by being pwnd by someones dog. In their wording–“bitten or struck by dog”. Ya that’s right, don’t you just hate it when Mitzy comes up to you and ‘bitch slaps’ you, haha, really bad joke–but really one day, her strike could kill you!

I digress…I think I’ve made my point about pointless worrying.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” ~Charles Darwin It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything… Amazing how quickly life can go from a single path to a different path in mere days. It would be nice if the paths in our lives to success was straight and we merely had to find the right puzzle pieces in the path…

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Take Responsibility”, 01/25/2012, Romans 13:1-7, Galatians 6:5, 2 Corinthians 5:10

It’s her fault. It’s his fault. It’s their fault. The dog did it…

Kid’s Excuses:

1. One child to another: Whenever you tell a big fat lie to get away with breaking an ornament, vase etc.  Tell your mum, dad etc. that it threw itself off of the mantle piece, table etc and then add in that you always believed that there was something out there!
2. Mom:  Where’s your report card?  You:  Um, mommy I’m really sorry and everything.  But I didn’t do it or anything but you know how I walk to school?  Well, the bell rang and I went to my locker to put it in my backpack and some very mean kids took it and started playing monkey in the middle then someone yelled that there was a big fight so the kids dropped it and ran outside.  Then, I was walking & was looking at it and a dog chased me and got it and chewed it up!  Sorry!
3. I do what the cheerios tell me.
4. When I was little, I cut up my sheets, my excuse was, “Jesus did it!”****
5. The clowns made me do it…I sware!

Excuses given to police officers:

1. One night many years ago I was on patrol and observed a vehicle blow through a red light at a major intersection. There had been plenty of time to stop, yet the vehicle had not even slowed down. I stopped the car and asked the young female driver why she had done that. The girl told me she had just had her brakes repaired, it had been very expensive, and she DIDN’T WANT TO WEAR THEM DOWN! Usually I give people a pass if I haven’t heard their excuse before, but in this case she got the ticket. …………………………………. Submitted by… Dave Hoffman, Sergeant, Naperville IL PD

2. I stopped a car in a rural area of our county for going 80 MPH in a 55 MPH zone. The driver explained that he had a bee flying around his head so he sped up to 80, hoping that the bee couldn’t fly that fast and would not be able to fly out of the back seat area to get at him…..Submitted by…Gary Lenon, Mecosta County Sheriff Department, Michigan.

Amazing what we say to avoid blame not only as children but as adults as well.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Cultivating the quiet”, 01/08/12, Psalm 23: 1-6

Hey…I’m into January in this book…well actually I’m backlogged and still have some blogs from December’s month in the book to write but I kind of just dog-ear them and will get to them, eventually.

Interestingly this one came up. In a previous entry in the book the author had encouraged us to spend our time productively and not waste it and I wrote a blog about how taking moments to ‘space out’ and how valuable that can be for ones mental health. Now in this entry she encourages moments of quiet stating that a ‘quiet heart is a receptive heart’. 1 Peter 3:4 states, pulling from the previous verse–beauty…”should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.” Pslam 23: 2 states: “He lets me rest in green meadows; he leads me beside peaceful streams…”

Flipping through the book this morning to find an entry dog-earred to write about I came across this and it hit a nerve for me. In the past few weeks my life has taken a tremendous turn.

So I don’t believe in resolutions because inevitably its not something that’s kept and its a waste of mind space…so I don’t do them. This year I opted to reflect on last year so I dug into my facebook (timeline is handy for this indeed) as well as some of the other emails, blogs or things that I’ve done to get a feel for last year…

Here are the highlights, anecdotes from my facebook wall, blog, reading, general musings, links etc:

All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it’s like being ambushed by a grotesque.

~Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Devotional Blog: 10/22/2011, 10/26/2011, and 10/28/2011; “Being true to yourself” and “Fact and fiction”; Romans 12: 12-18, Acts 2: 32-39, and 2 Peter 1:15-21

I’m lumping these entries together because they speak of similar things regarding how we see ourselves compared to others, how others make us feel about ourselves and the alternate realities we concoct of a life ‘we want’ rather than the life we are supposed to be living.

This past weekend Tyghe and I went to the beach thankful for the ability to escape flooding Bangkok, play some frisbee and enjoy the beach. We went to Phuket, a highly built up island in southern Thailand that is run for the most part by the Thai mafia from what we’ve been told and perhaps has links with Russian mafia as well–given the influx of so many Russian tourists, and all three languages (Russian, English and Thai) present on the island, it wouldn’t surprise me. In essence many who travel to Phuket accept the fact they will be overcharged for everything…absolutely everything. But I am not going to talk about our holiday…Tyghe will do a great job of that on his blog so see that for the vacay story and I believe he mentions what I will talk about. His blog will be a great sum up with pictures–the happy stuff which was indeed happy and I had a great time in that respect. Instead I will highlight one not so awesome experience as it resulted in an interesting topic related to faith. This is not a ‘devotional blog entry’…it’s a life entry…life based on faith.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Mark It”, 10/21/2011, Joshua 4:15-24

First I have a confession…I’d forgotten that Joshua was a book in the Bible! Horrible of me! Raised in this faith and when I saw the verse for the day I did a double take and asked myself–“This is a book in the Bible?…DOH!”. Bible literacy fail. Yes, I know the story of the fall of Jericho is in this book but for some reason I had it in my head that this story was in Deuteronomy–don’t ask why, I don’t know. So, in all fairness when was the last time I heard of this book? Eighth grade Bible history class at Bellevue Christian School where I attended one semester, does that excuse it? Probably not, but its what I’m going with.

The book of Joshua is about the Israelites journey into the promised land. When the crossed the Jordan, the Lord dried up the Jordan momentarily so they could pass. God then asked Joshua (who was leading them, he was the right hand of Moses by the way), anyway he asked Joshua to pick 12 men to take 1 stone each from the riverbed of the Jordan = 12 stones. When they’d stopped at Gilgal the western border of Jericho God told him to set up the stones as a reminder for generations to come that the Lord had pushed the waters back for their forefathers to walk on dry land into the promised land.

Pam, the author talking about ‘marking’ things that matter in our lives to solidify a memory in a solid shape of sorts, like making a stepping stone and putting into a garden then adding stepping stones. Thinking back I can remember all my ‘mementos’, my ‘mark it moments’ and when I got them, how I got them and where they are today and why they mattered. Compared to other families we had a more mobile life growing up so some of these ‘moments’ are no longer with me so I carry them in my heart instead…in no particular order…just as they come to me.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: Slippery Slopes, 9/22/11, John 15:1-11

So I realize the author only has a page to get these topics aired out given this is an ‘on the go’ devotional, but this one…

Excerpt: “In my twenty-plus years of ministry, I have seen the slippery slope in many a woman’s life. She didn’t ‘mean’ to have an affair. She didn’t think a few glasses of wine would lead to alcoholism…”

And then she spends the rest of the section on women who ‘unequally yoke’ themselves to unbeliever men and how that leads to a slippery slope of marrying a non-believer and how that’s not right…I could tell she was trying to find a way into this topic specifically so she could spend the majority of her time there. Now I have grown up staunchily ingrained with this belief system. Don’t unequally yoke, don’t date a non-believer, don’t associate with non-believer men…And Christianity isn’t the only faith to somewhat ‘demonize’ (ok that’s a strong word) relationships with the non-believer. Infidels to islamic extremists, it doesn’t even have to be religion–mixing of cultures historically was taboo as well. An Indian buddy of mine during my internship at Yale said that his family specifically told him in college to ‘have as much fun as he wanted’ but marry an Indian girl. During the 1940’s in Russia it was unthinkable for a Jew to marry a Christian…and many of these values/divides between religions and cultures remain today.

This whole manner of thinking rather religious or cultural –I really hate it.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: Who is God to you?, ⁹⁄₁₈-¹⁹⁄₂₀₁₁, Ezekiel 34:25-31 and Psalm 34: 8-14

So I grew up your ‘typical’ Christian kid or perhaps ‘typical’ isn’t the right word since I was raised more on the pentecostal/evangelical side and many other Christian sects think we’re pretty nuts…fair enough. I grew up in with a Christian bent toward pentecostal/evangelical due to where my parents chose to go to church. We started out in Calvary Christian, fairly conservative along with Cornerstone Christian churches then moved into the Vineyard ‘movement’ which was akin to house churches (they were usually small) and they popped up in random places whereever there was space…a strip mall vacant store, a school gym, another churches rec room, someones . To me the Vineyard churches felt very odd…sort of like the ‘hippy movement’ for Christianity. But this was my perception as a young child…

On a side note: It was in a Vineyard Sunday school where I learned about communion and received a piece a bread which is supposed to symbolize the body of Christ/Jesus…at which point I turned to my friend and squeezed the bread to ‘make it talk’ telling my friend ‘jesus loves you’…my sunday school teacher was not amused…

We attended such churches til I was 11 and moved to Hawaii. In Hawaii we attended a First Assembly church which was really small and has since expanded enormously to have satellite chapels all over the Pacific Rim and a congregation that I’ve seen attend at most 1,500 people–yowza! When we first started going I think 50 people on average…maybe 75-80 would attend. The church went from being a First Assembly Church to breaking off into it’s own entity now called King’s Cathedral headed by Pastor James Marocco, a man with several degrees including a Ph.D. from reputable universities such as USC. The man knows his history and theology.

Why do I say all this? Because this is what I grew up in. I didn’t question my faith growing up, it just was what it was. People lifting their hands and dancing in church? Ok…sure. People getting prayed for and ‘falling out in the spirit’…ok no worries. People receiving prophecy from pastors or prophets…this was all on par with my upbringing and it wasn’t ‘alien’ to me, though I’m sure all of this in one place might freak out a non-Christian or Christian with more sedate upbring in the faith. Our church in Hawaii wasn’t like this to begin with, they went through a series of ‘revivals’ and before y’all have nightmares of some backwoods area of a southern state…it wasn’t like that–I think.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: Breaking patterns of trauma, 9/15/11, Isaiah 57: 12-14

This entry in the book was ‘interesting’ and amounted to saying ‘get over yourself’ at the end or you are going to seriously $#@! up your kids. The simplicity in which she treats this topic bothered me a little. Now, I agree I just ‘summed’ up the topic above in one sentence but her approach and link to the verse was unclear to me until the end and I still was like…does this make sense in light of her ‘verse of the day’….so I dissected it.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: A reason you are ‘here’… 9/11/11: 1 Timothy 2:1-7

I thought it uncanny and eerie that I should read about this today…it being the 10th Anniversary of the World Trade Center tragedy. Last week in my perpetual hunt for books I came across several accounts of ⁹⁄₁₁, no doubt because the anniversary was coming up so they were encouraging people to read the first person accounts and stories surrounding that day. There are a lot of first person accounts from survivors and from those who watched and tried to help. BBC wrote an article asking the question “Is there a novel that defines the ⁹⁄₁₁ decade?” and sums up the novels and stories that have come out of ⁹⁄₁₁ since it happened. I ended up downloading to my Kindle “102 Minutes” by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn which has had incredibly high ratings about the collapse of the world trade centers towers and “Who they Were” by Robert Schaler, which discusses those who ‘jumped’ from the towers during that day and others which forensics teams struggled to identify; which has received mixed reviews. It is widely supported that “Tower Stories: An Oral History of ⁹⁄₁₁” is also one of the best books about what happened as well.

Simple perusing of the news pops up hundreds of accounts from survivors all of whom struggle with memories from that day, people, friends, family they lost and why they survived…why them. Artie Van Why wasn’t actually in the towers but in a building next to them, him and co-worker ran out to see what happened then ran toward the towers to help amidst falling debris and people. He says that he always thought that when you fall from high enough you are dead before you hit the ground…but he realized that these people were very much alive holding their arms out as if to cushion the impact as they fell. When the towers collapsed they all ran…he made it, his co-worker did not. [his story here].

Survivors of any terrible experience grapple with survivors guilt…the perpetual question of why me? Why did I survive. I am sure soldiers go through this trauma as well after coming from a fight where they saw fellow soldiers fall and die. The documentary Restrepo deals with this in their portrayal of a group of Marines who were sent to the most dangerous part of Afghanistan, The Korengal Valley, for deployment…not all came back.

Survivors of the holocaust oftentimes will tackle the emotions and convictions that come with being the only survivor in their family and having witnessed such atrocities enacted on them and their friends. I wrote about this in an earlier blog after having visited the Holocaust museum in D.C.

Though we all might not ascribe to the same belief I am sure many of us wonder about our purpose for being here, why we survive things while others do not, how watching someone die makes you realize how infinitesimal your life can seem and how easily it can be snuffed out. There are those of us that ascribe survival and such as “God’s providence”…we have a purpose in life and we will not be taken, not die, til that purpose is completed. This is the general thinking. But as soon as that purpose has been accomplished–poof…time for snuffing and many accept that, although the prospect of death is still hard to grapple with. Not so much because it’s ‘death’…I think many people are more terrified of ‘how’ they might die than actual death itself.

In the end, for those left behind or those that survived, the question remains…were you saved/spared for a reason? Do you have a purpose to accomplish greater than yourself though you may not know it?

So while I was during Christmas I encountered many friends I have had since moving to the islands when I was 11 (10? 11?–ah doesn’t matter)…and I saw almost all of them between Oahu and Maui and talked to the rest via phone.  And between the people I know from home, all the friends I met and have through school and family–I have realized there are really two types of people. Those who live and those who exist. Not that one is particularly better than the other, just depends on the person.

I’m back from Brazil! I am not going to relate the specifics of my trip if you want to know that stuff check out the blog I kept: http://springinbrazil.blogspot.com but suffice it to say it was absolutely amazing. When I decided to go to Brazil I went to refocus and clarify somethings in my life about my future and where I am supposed to be following the completion of my thesis.

So yesterday at 8:29 am (according to facebook) I posted an article from the Economist entitled: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic and it’s quite interesting the responses I’ve been getting. The article is at: http://www.economist.com/node/17723223.

Some people whole heartedly agreed with the article, others were slightly offended at the insinuation that 5-8 years of labor was all for naught.

I thought the article was quite dispiriting and portrayed obtaining a PhD as this ‘waste of intellect/life’ and honestly you’d be hard pressed to find any PhD student that doesn’t think that at some point during their degree process. If you don’t believe me, check out PhD comics (www.phdcomics.com) where their tag line is: “Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD) is the comic strip about life (or lack thereof) in academia.” They even mention graduate education as learning the ‘dark arts.’ I was and still am an avid reader of the comic.