Animus

There was also a new organization being started by a group of male RAs that year.  They called it Animus, and it was basically a creative redirection of the school's focus on discouraging alcohol use.  It was also a deliberate attempt to get the male students in the school more involved in campus events and culture.  There was a 3:1 girl to guy ratio, but any organization or event was closer to 10:1, with the guys just not involving themselves in anything.  So these RAs basically got a budget approved to just go do fun events, focused primarily on getting male freshman out of their dorm rooms.  I was more than happy to be onboard, since there was no downside, but it still took a while to catch on.

The first event was a BBQ at a beach house in Malibu, and there were only about ten of us there.  I went swimming in the ocean, and actually enjoyed it for the first time, because it wasn't too cold.  There were dolphins swimming around a little farther out, and we played ultimate Frisbee right at the shoreline.  Eventually a kayak was brought out, and we started taking turns on that.  When I got on, I headed out and broke free of the surf.  Pretty quickly I found myself a quarter mile off shore, surrounded by dolphins.  This was both surreal and quite scary.  They are cute and all, but it is kind of like coming across a bear in the woods.  They are large animals, and they were jumping out of the water no more than a couple feet from me, and swimming under my boat.  They are extremely fast underwater, and I had no illusions about escaping if they suddenly decided they didn't like me.  I started hearing everyone on shore yelling as loud as they could and waving frantically, and wondered if they were trying to warn me about something.  I made pretty good time back to the beach, riding a wave in.  They were all pretty excited, but just because I was the only one that the dolphins hadn't avoided when they paddled out there, so they had just been cheering.  Anyhow, college was turning out to be quite the adventure, and I was only a couple weeks in.

The next Animus event was about a month later, when word was passed around the cafeteria to show up at the Senior Apartments at 11:30 that night, and wear dark clothing.  In a school where everything was over advertised to get minimal participation, 50 guys showed up that night, with no advertising, and no idea what was planned.  It turned out that one of the girl's had pranked Mark, the leader of Animus, by stealing his hat and leaving a ransom note.  His response of massive retaliation, was to round a huge group of guys, make a complicated plan with maps, diagrams, teams, hand signals, and such, to raid the girls' house and get it back.  I was amused at the process, but figured it was unlikely to actually work.  So after we went over the plan, and charcoaled our faces, we set out, marching in formation down the middle of the street around midnight, armed with squirt guns and such.  We were pretty amused when Security drove by us and didn't even stop, although I hear that led to some urgent phone calls a few minutes later.  Surprisingly enough, the plan basically worked, and the "2nd floor team" actually found it within a minute, after we had herded the residents into the living room.  A little victory speech was given, and when the girls complained about the mess we made (the "back door team" had some mud to contend with) it was promised that it would get cleaned up the next day.  And it was.  That was probably the most successful Animus event, and I made a pretty good video of the mission.  The rest of the year they focused on throwing BBQs before sporting events and other ordinary events like that.

Life at Cal-Lutheran

My class schedule was heavily stacked in the mornings, with only one class after noon, but my earliest one started at 7:45.  Since I was used to getting up at 6am in high school, 7am wasn't too bad freshman year, but I was staying up a lot later than I had been.  So with all my classes in the mornings, I had to figure out what to do with my afternoons and evenings.  I applied for a couple of technology related on-campus jobs, and ended up with two, in the media dept and the IT dept.  Back then they had LCD projectors on carts with laptops, for professor to use with the cutting edge presentation tool: PowerPoint.  There weren’t very many projectors, so these carts got rotated between the classrooms daily, depending on which classes were being taught.  I was the only one on campus allowed to fix both the projectors and the laptops, since I worked for both relevant departments.  Between those two jobs, and being enrolled in both the Computer Science and Multimedia programs, was pretty well connected on campus for dealing with any technology needs.  This also led to me brokering a lot more inter-departmental cooperation than they had ever had in the past.

Besides that, I got involved with a variety of different organizations on campus.  First off, I went to a meeting for people interested in student government, intending to run for the freshman senate.  With seven of us aiming for three seats, I was quick to recognize I had no chance there, so I opted to fill the uncontested position as the Pederson Residence Hall President instead.  I had no idea what that meant at the time, but it ended up being my job to put on events for the hall, and rally students to get involved with campus wide events.  Never has there been a residence hall president less suited to that job, but I did manage to survive the year in that role.

I also joined an intramural flag football team that fall, and started an indoor soccer team that winter.  There was a club team for rugby, which competed in an intercollegiate league, but was student run and without a coach.  I was not about to take up rugby, especially since I am not built for it, but I was intrigued by the setup, since I am not a huge fan of coaches.  Any other sport with a club team, and I would have been all for it, but that was the only one we had.

After years of not being involved in any spiritual or religious organization, I started attending a number of different weekly events at the university.  The on-campus congregation called Lord of Life met with about fifty people on Sunday and Wednesday evenings.  That was a fairly hard group to break into socially, especially for someone who isn’t particularly outgoing.  I found out later that most of the people had known each other for years, having met at nation-wide Lutheran youth events as they were growing up.  My approach was a persistent application of brute force.  I just showed up to all the events, and stuck around afterwards when people were socializing, even if I didn’t have anyone to talk to most of the time.  After a few months that eventually worked, and members of that group played a key role in my social circle for the rest of my time at college.  I also began to get more involved with committees for Lord of Life, and ended up helping put on a concert called Faith-Fest that year.  It least in that instance, my stubborn perseverance had paid off, but in the following years, there was a deliberate attempt to make the congregation more welcoming to those who weren’t naturally outgoing and/or hadn’t grown up in the Lutheran youth movement.

Besides that, I attended a Bible study on Tuesdays and university chapel on Wednesday mornings.  There was also a more evangelical organization, called JIF or Jesus Is Freedom, which met on Thursdays.  My peer advisor Scott actually led that group my freshman year.

Heading off to College

College was a time of big changes in my life, even more than High School had been.  I had lived in Auburn all my life prior to heading off to Cal-Lutheran in Southern California.  One thing that I decided before I left, was to try to avoid being stereotyped as the "smart guy" at the expense of all other characteristics.  That basically entailed playing dumb, all of the time.  That was something I was never very good at in the past, but I was fairly committed to the idea.  Trying to break outside of that box was one of the reasons I had chosen to go to college at CLU, so I might as well maximize that effect, since the sacrifices were being made regardless of the outcome.

When I showed up, one of the first people I met was my "peer advisor," a senior named Scott.  To be honest, he had very little effect on my life in that role, but eventually did years later in a slightly different capacity.

Months before, I had opted to live in the suites of "Pederson" which was traditionally known as the wilder dorm, with residents who were more social, over the more isolating "Mt Clef" with pairs living in long hallways with no interior windows.  Ironically my year the trend ended up being reversed, and Clef was where the wilder students ended up, but that was okay with me.  I preferred the suites overlooking a central courtyard anyway.

I was assigned to a room in the residence hall with four other students.  The five of us would share a relatively small suite and bathroom.  These rooms were clearly designed to house four people, but the school had been growing.  The five of us could hardly have been more different, with a soccer player, a football player, a beach bum from Santa Barbara, a Jewish Russian, and myself.  Justin was a soccer player from Hawaii and talked even less than I did.  Travis was a football player who was never around, and moved to another room after a few months.  Keith was from Santa Barbara, didn't really stand out much.  Alex was quite an interesting character, having escaped Russia to Israel during the fall of the Iron Curtain, and then recently having escaped Israel to avoid compulsory military service as he was 18.

The first day was pretty intense, meeting everyone, moving in, getting familiar with where I would be living, and saying good bye to my parents.  That whole week they had freshman orientation events planned until at least two in the morning every night.  The first night there was an event in the gym after midnight, designed to try to introduce you to every other person in the class of 3-4 hundred.  Prior to that night, I had a flawless memory for names and faces, and could pretty much identify anyone I had ever met at a moments notice.  That night just overwhelmed that part of my brain, and it just never recovered.  For months after that, I would be walking around, and someone would say "Hi Mike" and not only would I not be able to recall their name, but I couldn't even remember where I met them or how I knew them.  I have regained some of that ability since then, because I usually meet fewer people now.  But I usually still need some detail beyond a name before I can really remember someone.

It was a long week of orientation activities, keeping us busy from early in the morning until late at night.  The last day that week we took a bus to Zuma beach, which wasn't too far away.  I ended up spending a long time standing at the edge of the surf, talking with J, a sophomore from Santa Barbara.

Resuming the Story

I am planning to continue the narrative aspect of my writings here.  The story will pickup where I left off in September, at the point of graduation from High School.  I started that initial narrative phase when I was traveling, because I didn't have the time for the type of writing I usually do on here.  This time it is the reverse, and I am resuming that aspect because I have the time available to do my college story justice.  The first half of that story is already written, courtesy of two intercontinental flights, and a long laptop battery life.  Two ten hour stints trapped in a metal tube resulted in over twenty pages of text to sort through.  But I wrote it as a continuous stream of consciousness, so there is still some work to do cleaning that up and breaking it into separate free standing posts.

As the story moves closer to present day, I deliberately intend to be more ambiguous about certain details, and will even occasionally tell sections out of chronological order to obscure the identities of certain other involved parties.  They aren't the point of the story or its individual parts, but they play important roles in the plot, so they can't be totally ignored.  On the flip side, the story will also get more in-depth as I get closer to present day, as the events I describe will be having a more significant effect on my current situation and perspective.

The summer after I graduated high school was uneventful.  At my parent’s insistence, I unsuccessfully tried to get jobs at UPS and Radio Shack, and attempted to land a video deal with a manufacturing company.  Instead I ended up sealing driveways to make some money, and did little else of lasting significance, which motivated me to find something better the next summer.  The story really picks back up when I packed up to move down south to start college in Thousands Oaks, at Cal-Lutheran University.

Dreams for the Future

A lot of people have been asking me about my goals and dreams recently, and that has been frequently on my mind, since I am at a transition point from a number of perspectives.  As previously noted, the first one that comes to mind is always that I look forward to eventually getting married, and having a partner and companion to share life with.  There are other things I want to do in the future, but most of my other goals and plans do hinge on getting married.  Having kids is an obvious one, as well as figuring out how to raise them properly.  Dealing with children clearly has a tremendous impact on people, and probably gives them a better perspective on the important things in life.  I hope to have at least one son and one daughter, since I am sure there are very different things to be learned from each gender.  But I figure that focusing on that too much is putting the cart before the horse, so I just take things one step at a time, and hope that God will lead me to a suitable wife.

I also plan to build my own house someday, but have decided not to do that until after I find a wife.  A friend of mine came with me to look at RV Park Homes one time, and after observing her interest in cabinet finishes, carpet options, color, trim, and upholstery, I realized that my wife would probably have much stronger preferences in that regard than I do.  So I figure I should probably just wait, instead of choosing at random now, and re-doing everything after I get married.  And while it may be more efficient to just buy a house, I would rather spend my time building one myself, preferably with my family, than be off making money to pay someone else to do so.  I don't yet have the skills to fulfill this goal, so gaining some of that type of experience on other projects may be a good intermediate step.  That may be my next significant undertaking if the right opportunity comes along.

I have also seriously considered touring Europe, or taking a round-the-world-cruise, but those don't seem very appealing to do alone, so they can wait as well.  If I took a four month cruise around the world, I would want to have some other purpose to be working towards during that period, like writing a book in my spare time, or something like that.  I am finding that I don't respond positively to undirected idleness, without some objective on the horizon.

Life is a Delicate Balance

A friend of mine was very recently diagnosed with a form of cancer, and goes in for surgery tomorrow afternoon.  The fact that he is younger than I am kind of hits home, but the short time frame involved is what I find most startling.  The initial tests that discovered the issue were done on Friday.  I don't know if he had any warning signs leading up to it, but one day everything seems fine, and the next you discover that your body is failing you.  Now if all goes well, this case shouldn't be life threatening.  And after recovery, few long term effects are expected.  But any surgery is a pretty big deal, and especially if they are going to knock you out.  His response to the situation has been admirable.  He is conscious that nothing he did caused the problem, and that he has little control over the outcome.  He has faith that God has a sovereign plan, regardless of the outcome, and has accepted that.

I initially prayed for his pain to be minimal, that the issue would not spread beyond the tissue that they are removing, and for his body to heal quickly.  After a few minutes I decided to pray instead that they would discovered that the problem had totally disappeared, preferably before starting surgery.  But the situation is in God's hands, as always.

And I guess I should get that shoulder checked out.  I am not a huge fan of doctors and hospitals, so that has been put off for six months.  But part of me is afraid to find out what is wrong.  And God knows what else is going on in my body.  Life is an incredibly complicated process, and mankind has only scratched the surface of understanding the intricate balance that God created.

31.5 Million Seconds Later (Not that I am Counting)

It was a year ago today that I initially created this blog, and published my first post.  A whole lot has happened over the course of that year, and this site provides an interesting perspective on that series of events.

I aim to put something up about every other day or so, when I have the time.  I haven't skipped posting for more than four days in a row, no matter how busy I am, regardless of where I am.  With 130 posts, I am reasonably close to the 180 that would represent publishing every other day.  I need to get better at making shorter posts, allowing me to do it on a more frequent basis, without consuming so much of my time.  Hopefully this one will be a step in that direction.

I have made point not to go back to re-read my posts once they are published, so that I am not forever editing and revising them, and so that they more accurately reflect my views and their progression over time.  My original intent was to wait at least a year before going back through them.  I remember the first couple of posts pretty well, so I will wait a while longer before starting that process.

On two separate instances recently, I have dealt with people being opposed to some of what I am doing on here, which I found kind of surprising.  They both seem to hinge on others valuing my privacy more than I actually do.  It may be true that I am "over-sharing" on here, but maybe I am just trying to compensate for 20 years of under-sharing.  Regardless of what some of my friends and family may think about it, I don't regret anything about this process.  I believe that it has been a positive thing in my life, and a healthy undertaking to pursue.  And Lord willing, I will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Obstacles to Marriage

I happen to have been reading a lot of books about marriage recently.  I didn't set out to do that deliberately, and there are varying reasons why each one made it on my list, but it has been a consistent theme.  While I very much DO pursue the study of relationships and their development, reading about how to maintain a healthy marriage feels a bit like putting the cart before the horse.

But maybe looking at how to maintain a marriage isn't such a bad idea when exploring who to develop a marriage relationship with.  Better to know what one is looking for before trying to determine how to find them.  While I look forward to getting married, I don't want to rush to impulsively marry the wrong person.

My biggest hope and dream is to have a successful marriage.  I really want to get married, almost as much as I want to NOT get divorced.  In a certain regard, getting married is easy.  It's staying married and maintaining a fulfilling relationship that is the extremely challenging part, for anyone.  Getting married for its own sake or as a response to loneliness is probably the worst idea in the whole world, so I try to maintain a balance in pursuing that goal in a healthy way.

But the big question is, how does one do that?  While I can't know who God has in mind for me to marry, nor how to prepare to meet their specific needs, there are other things I can do to prepare for marriage.  So my primary goal at this point, is to remove any obstacles placed in the path to finding a Godly wife, being a Biblical husband, and having a successful marriage.  I have been working at that for a while, because there are a lot of obstacles to deal with.

First off, I can't be afraid of girls, if I want to marry one someday.  Coming from a family that is nearly all male (and that ratio isn't getting any better in recent months) I have little understanding of the female perspective.  Over the past few years, I have put a lot of effort into interacting with girls and developing friendships with them.  That has been quite successful, and I am now capable of interacting with most females in a much more relaxed fashion.

I also have to be capable of vulnerability and intimacy, which I was not for a long time.  I would attribute working at camp, (and the people I have met there) to my progress in that regard.  It is no coincidence that my first "significant relationship" was developed directly after my first summer working at camp.  I previously feared having a level of connection at that depth, and was unwilling to experience the openness required for it, prior to that point in my life.  I have continued to make large strides in that regard since then.

I only recognized the distance I had come, after a very significant conversation with one of my friends, who had nearly gotten married in the past.  We were extremely close, but not in any romantic sense, so I was using that relationship as an example when explaining to her how I couldn't imagine achieving the deeper level of intimacy required to marry someone.  Her response was that, based on our relationship, there was not some higher order of intimacy that I had yet to experience.  Her contention was that we knew each other well enough to be getting married, that there was not some mysterious deeper level of closeness beyond how close we were.  Obviously a sexual relationship would be physically closer, but since a Biblical perspective presupposes that won't be happening until after marriage, that level of intimacy can't be expected as a prerequisite for getting married.  Realizing the significance of what she was saying made the idea of eventually getting married much less intimidating.  I am capable of being close to someone, it is just a matter of finding someone who is a suitable match to become close with.

The Wrong Side of the Road

Driving through the English countryside has been an interesting experience, and I am not even behind the wheel.  I am just navigating for my brother, who is just focusing on staying on the right side of the road-I mean left.  The signage is better in England than it was in France, but it is far from perfect.  My favorite difference is that if a sign on the left side of the road points right, it actually describes something that is directly ahead.  That caused us all sorts of problems.  The roads all have both names and numbers, but they use them sporadically.  My phone only shows the names, my dad’s map uses the numbers, and the signs usually just display what the road leads to.

I was beginning to doubt that we would survive the trip, after a day or two in England, not from an accident, but from each other.  Things have calmed down a bit over the last few days, as we got more used to things.  (Things referring not so much to English roads as to “occasionally being lost”)  Unlike in France, I do not have a perfect track record for always leading us the right way.  Round-a-bouts and double round-a-bouts can be extremely confusing, and down-right dizzying if you miss your exit on the first pass.  The fact that my phones GPS frequently acts up or is delayed doesn’t help, especially with limited cell service in most rural areas.  It has taken some adjustment to get used to the reality that I am not "always right" in this environment.

I took a spin around the parking lot, but I am quite certain if I were to try driving on the public roads, I would land in the wrong lane at the end of every turn.  It will be interesting how unnatural the right side of the road will feel when I get back to the States next week.

On the flip side, I got a chance to ride in a Formula One car on the British Grand Prix track.  I didn't have to navigate, or worry about anything else for that matter, besides how to stay in my seat when we cornered.  It was a pretty exhilarating ride, blasting down the straight-aways at 150mph.  I am a bit more apprehensive about taking my turn at the wheel when we are back at the track on Monday.  Among other things, clutched manual transmissions are not my favorite thing, even with my dirt-bike, so that will be quite an experience.

Three Engineers in Paris

That sounds like the title for a new movie, or the opening line to a bad joke.  No one in my family speaks a word of French, so I have no idea what possessed us to go spend three days in France.  The French are well known for their distain for Americans, and I am sure we have been feeding their stereotypes over the last few days.

The foreign language thing is a pretty big barrier.  They even had English menus at dinner, but we still couldn't tell what we were ordering.  They basically used French words with English grammar in their descriptions.  Asking for clarification rarely shed any more light on the issues.  In England, sometimes it "felt like" they were speaking another language, but in France they actually are.

They drive on the "right" side of the road, and seem relatively sane compared to drivers in London.  Their road signs are not very intuitive, even though they are symbolic instead of in French.  That was the first place we had to drive, and it would appear that similar to America, it is required to check your brain as security for your rental car.  I was just the guy in the backseat, calmly giving directions based on my GPS enabled phone, while my dad and brother, regardless of which was actually driving, panicked every time we came to an intersection, or heaven-forbid, a toll plaza.  The French navigation system wasn't helping, especially since it was usually configured incorrectly, but my dad was convinced that the rental company was tracking us with it, in case we were speeding.  It did give us warnings when it thought we were speeding, which was a little weird, but its speed limits didn't always match the ones posted on the signs.

There was a picture of a naked girl in my hotel room, which I guess is the French idea of art.  The building we were staying in was built in the 1400's, which makes it one of the relatively newer ones in the area.  Normandy is an interesting place, because it had it's hey-day in the 1100's, shortly after William the Conqueror invaded England from there.  And with the exception of the D-Day landings during WWII, not much of significance has happened there since.  There is a village every two miles in any direction, with a church and about ten buildings, and then narrow winding roads to each of the surrounding villages.  I do find it amusing that the French spent the last 1000 years trying to prevent the English from invading their shores, and then suddenly in the 1940s, were doing everything they could to encourage them to do so.

Our visit to Mont-Saint-Michel was quite impressive.  The fact that people were able to build a huge cathedral on top of a steep mountain, on what is essentially an island, without any form of power tools, is pretty amazing.  It is a marvel of engineering, in a variety of ways.  Of course that explains why it took them a thousand years to build it, and they are still working on it.  It would have been impressive to see it at high tide, which creates a serious moat, but instead it was just really swampy and gross at the base of the wall.  Anyhow, it was interesting to see, and I am quite confident that there is nothing like it in America.

Thoughts on being American vs English

Seeing how things operate in a different part of the world causes one to examine the world they are familiar with from a different perspective.  It has only been a couple of days, but I have already been able to observe a number of interesting patterns and differences between England and the US.

The first one is related to the way museums are laid out.  Anyone who has ever been to an Ikea has to have noticed that those stores are designed differently.  It is a linear experience, where you get directed from one section to another in order.  Good luck skipping ahead, and make sure you don't have to go back for something you forgot.  Almost every other store in America is laid out completely differently, giving customers the freedom to go where ever they want to, in any order.  But Ikea is a Swedish company, and they think differently in Europe.  In regards to museums, a similar pattern is visible.  Most of the ones I have seen in England are laid out with a specific path for the viewer to follow.  Sometimes this is enforced by the design and layout of the walls, while in others it is merely recommended.  This rarely happens in the US, because Americans value their freedom, and could even take offense to the idea that someone is going to dictate the path they should take through a museum.  I know a few people who dislike Ikea for the same reason.  America was originally colonized by groups of people who highly valued their individual freedom, and while certain specifics may have gotten off track over the course of a couple hundred intervening years, the underlying idea is still prized in our culture.

Traffic in England absolutely blows my mind, and not because they drive on the opposite side of the road.  No one seems to follow any conventional traffic laws, and people generally do whatever they want.  They park on both sides of the street, and totally ignore "lanes" or any of those frivolities.  There is no "English" translation for the term "jaywalking" and good luck trying to describe the idea to anyone here.  There are cops on every corner, but I have never seen them actually "do" anything.  On the flip side, everyone appears to be very conscious of the importance of taking care of themselves, because no one else is going to.  You look both ways before crossing the street, not only because cars could be coming from either side, but because they aren't going to stop for you, or even slow down.  That intuitively seems like it would be a much more American (aka selfish) idea, but on the contrary, from what I always hear, even in Boston or LA, traffic in the US is the most civilized in the world.

Americans expect the government to protect them from everything, including bad drivers, and even the weather.  This may stem from them originally expecting the government to protect them from religious persecution.  Besides that, it seems like a very un-American idea, for a country founded by a group of independent individualists.  But Americans are big fans of law and order, and it is reflected in our driving patterns.

Americans are also big fans of big things.  There are no pickup trucks or full sized SUVs in London.  And our hotel rooms were pretty tight to say the least.  And the three of us couldn't fit in the elevator at once without touching.

I read up on a few of the dialog differences before I left, but there were a few terms that seem to have gotten overlooked.  I ordered a lemonade on the flight over, and was handed a can of what was essentially Sprite.  And don't even get me started on water; I have no idea how Europeans don't die of dehydration.  The fact that sausage is referred to as a "banger" is quite amusing to me, since the primary link I can imagine there refers to sex.  And when the next question is "how bout a whack of mash with your banger?" it's hard to keep a straight face.

I passed through the Chunnel, 600 feet below the sea, while writing this.  So that was yet another remarkable feat of engineering to experience.  Anyhow, it will be interesting to see how England compares to France, over the next few days.