It's All Fun and Games Until...

The level to which our games indoctrinate us and try to shape our values is actually pretty incredible.  Classics like Monopoly and Payday instill the singular value that whoever gets the most money wins.  The most extreme case is the game of Life, which clearly communicates that acquiring the most money the is whole point of Life.  I played these games as a kid, not recognizing the absurdity of that idea, and the process that has been at work for quite a while, continues to this day in living rooms across the country.

I have been aware of that issue for a while, but it seems to be manifesting itself in a new way recently.  Instead of promoting excessively greedy materialism, the new trend seems to be games that promote eco-friendly behavior.  I saw one strategy board game at a Christmas festival that was all about renewing the forests.  They were being sold by the inventor in his booth, and he attempted to explain the rules to me.  I am actually curious whether the underlying game is a good one, before being re-skinned to its green theme.  Then I got the newest addition to Settlers of Catan today, which it turns out is all about oil.  If you use too much oil, it will eventually destroy the island, and deliberately foregoing oil is rewarded.  They directly address the polarizing nature in the rules, but claim they don't want to involve themselves in the political debate, that it's just a game.

I am not necessarily opposed to the shift towards games promoting more conscientious behavior, but it is getting kind of ridiculous.  I am for being a good steward of the earth's resources, as we are charged to do so in the Bible, but the idea that our individual choices effect the climate is a pretty arrogant assertion.  Kids don't need to be bombarded with this propaganda.  I found all sorts of things to worry about growing up, based on selective exposure to age inappropriate information. (Nuclear weapons, viruses, rapture, etc.)  The last thing kids need is to be filled with a fear that the world will be a barren wasteland by the time they grow up.  And of course on top of that, it's their parents’ fault, for driving an SUV.

So it might be worth taking a look at the games we play.  Most video games are based on the idea of staying alive as long as possible at any cost, which may not be the most Biblical model for values.  On the other hand, SimCity might hold they key to rebuilding the country, in that it illustrates what happens if the government spends more than it brings in in tax revenue.  Maybe we need to send free copies to everyone in Congress.

When Rejection is not Culturally Acceptable

I didn't realize the degree to which this was a problem, until talking with a friend of mine who works in a retail environment.  She is an attractive girl, and was telling me how customers frequently hit on her or ask her out.  I am of the opinion that relationships should be developed on the basis of more than just physical appearance, which is all that anyone is going on in that situation.  On top of that, many of the people approaching her appear to be twice her age.  So the question, which I had never really thought much about, is how does one respond in that situation?  Instead of just telling them no, or that she doesn't date people over 30 or 40 or whatever, she tells them that she is seeing someone.  While that is an admittedly affective way of closing the issue, regardless of whether it's true, I find it interesting that a more direct and truthful answer would not be considered as acceptable as a convenient lie or passive avoidance.  Both parties seem to prefer the charade, but that doesn't promote trust between the genders at a cultural level.

In a very different scenario to illustrate the same issue, I have a story that my Mom always used to tell.  My parents met as neighbors, and shortly after my Dad first asked my Mom on a date, his roommate did the same thing.  In this case, the parties involved actually know each other, so I would say the initial question is a more legitimate one.  The part of the story she would always get most excited about was, "and then he made me come up with an excuse for every night for the next two weeks."  As in he didn't take a hint that the answer was no.  After hearing her tell others this story many times, she brought it up to me during one of our conversations about relationships.  My response was to ask, "isn't it your fault for not giving him a straight answer?"  She paused, thought for a second, and then responded, "I've told that story to hundreds of people, and no one has ever said that."  "Does that make me any less right?"  The possibility of giving a straight answer doesn't even occur to most people.

I frequently hear something about wanting to get to know each other better first.  Isn't that the point of dating?  I guess I have Joshua Harris and the whole Christian anti-dating movement to thank for that, right?  Or another popular one is, "I am not ready to be in a relationship right now."  Regardless, the end result is the same, no progress, and no closure.  This leads to an interesting trust problem.  Sometimes those excuses are given hoping that the guy will take a hint, but other times they are legitimate, and the guy just needs to be patient.  The trick is to determine which is which, and I make no claim to be able to tell the difference.

I am not certain whether it is an American thing, or universal, but I am certain that it has a negative impact on people and their relationships.  It decreases trust in the idea that people will mean what they say.  I am not sure what the source of the problem is, maybe television, but it could be something else.  Solving the issue isn’t simple either, but deliberately communicating as clearly as possible is a good place to start.

Aiming in a New Direction

My previous post marks the halfway point in my college career.  That was as far as I got into writing the story while I was traveling, and it is a good stopping point.  I have a variety of other topics on my mind anyway, so it is probably a good time to switch gears for a while.

Among other recent projects, I have been building my own rifle.  I first looked into the idea a few months ago, but I wasn't sure if that is what I wanted to do, and wasn't in any hurry to start..  Recent national events have increased the urgency of that project.  After a good bit of research on the subject, from a variety of perspectives, I have decided to pursue that project, in part because I feel like it is an important civic duty.  Specifically I think it is important to take responsibility for one's own safety and freedom.  I would never look to the government to take care of me in regards to provisions or finances, so the same should be true of safety and freedom.  The government is supposed to take responsibility for the bigger picture issues, like making sure there is food in the grocery stores, but not to the point of making sure that I can pay afford to pay for it.  That is were my part of the responsibility comes in.  They are supposed to provide roads and bridges, not the cars to drive on them.  Americans have been given a high degree of freedom, at great cost to those who came before us, and it is our responsibility to both make appropriate use of that freedom and protect it.

With the current political climate surrounding the future of gun control, the market for firearms is through the roof right now.  So it is a bad time to be on the buying side of the transactions, but I have the same reasons and motivations as everyone else, in that it may be now or never.  Cost is not so much the limiting issue right now, as much as availability is.

The process of actually building a firearm is quite interesting, due to the strange nature of the laws we have.  It is my understanding that everything I have done is legal, but at times it has felt the way I would imagine a drug deal would be.  Buying parts in industrial areas on weekends, doing everything with cash, and learning how to finish milling my own parts, has been quite the adventure.  I am looking forward to actually having a finished product, but certain pieces may take quite a while to find.  But I have learned a lot in the process, and will eventually end up with a valuable tool, which I intend to pass on to my future children.

Riding the Relationship Rollercoaster

I spent a lot of time with J that summer, especially since my internship had fallen through, and I was on campus all the time.  She helped me re-paint the multimedia lab, and other parts of that project in the evenings.  Her roommate for the summer was one of my friends from the TV Production class, and therefore the Vegas trip, so we all hung out together in the evenings.  And she lived across the hall from the guys I worked with, who I am still friends with now.  I helped her take care of her roommate, who would come home drunk out of her mind on occasion, and we had all sorts of other adventures that summer.

Shortly before school resumed for the year, J was house-sitting for one of the faculty members, and I went to visit her.  After watching a movie, the conversation turned to our relationship.  She basically called the question in regards to whether or not I loved her, and was ready to tell her.  I told her I needed to think and pray about it.  So I had a lot on my mind while I was biking home that night.  My eventual conclusion to do so was based on two things: one I was conscious of, and one I was not, but which is obvious now.  I figured I should be able to say that to her and mean at least as much as she does when she says it, so that can't be wrong (and I was probably afraid of losing her, because I appreciated the role she played in my life).

So the next night when I went to see her, and at the appropriate moment, dropped that line.  The response was not what I was anticipating.  She was stunned for a moment, and then confused, and eventually started sobbing, but not in a good way.  Over the course of a half hour, it was revealed that basically she had been bluffing.  She had called that question expecting me to refuse, as I had in the past.  That would have given her grounds to break up with me, but leave it my fault. (Not that we were really even "together" but there was no real question that we basically were.)  It seems she was starting to develop feelings for the guy she was working with in San Jose, and was curious to explore that possibility.

So that night we ended with her being the one that needed to think and pray about things, and make a decision.  At a certain level, my role putting up with all this was ridiculous, since I wasn't even that emotionally attached to her.  But I was "used to" her, and she played a significant role in my life.  I liked spending time with her, and was probably not emotionally mature enough to have a deeper relationship with someone else, so I was sacrificing little by sticking around.  But the process probably had a serious impact on my ability to trust females, especially in regards to meaning what they are saying.

This time around, she ended up choosing me, which was a nice change, and probably a positive thing in regards to growth and confidence.  That marked the point of us definitively being back together again, and in a deeper and more significant relationship, as we went into the next school year.  Looking back, it’s hard to believe that whole on-and-off series of events took place in less than a year, from when Lindsay originally schemed to set us up together.

At School Over the Summer

When the semester ended, only about 60 students stayed on campus over the summer.  I was staying there to do my internship, and continued working at ISS to qualify to live in the dorms.  J stayed to work on her biology research project, and worked in the business office to earn her spot in the dorms.  Alex went home and while he only lived 30 minutes away, he was hardly heard from.  A week or two into summer, he broke up with J over the phone, and that was that.  He had only been interested in using her for his own purposes, in extremely selfish ways, and he was done with her.

Both J and I had gotten cars from our families at the beginning of the summer, but were used to staying on campus all the time, so we saw each other a lot.  My internship basically fell through before it even started, after being delayed a few weeks into the summer.  They ended up hiring another student who had just graduated, because he planned to stay there, instead of returning to school at the end of the summer.  The teacher who introduced me to that company had originally had a talk with me about the temptation to stay once I got established there.  I don’t think he could fathom how much my parents would have killed me if I had dropped out of college, regardless of who much I would have been paid there.  So instead I was at ISS full time that summer, which was okay, since I was committed to staying there and paying for my dorm room.  But in hindsight, I should have just stepped away from all of that, and returned to work at camp again.

My other major project that summer was to rebuild the multimedia lab, and help setup three new editing rooms.  The department had gotten a decent grant, and bunch of new high end computers, so we had to setup the infrastructure to support them.  I had taken on the role of Departmental Assistant, and oversaw most of the practical technical details for the program from then until I graduated.  The entire lab had been built haphazardly over the previous few years, as the department grew, with no real plan or organization.  So I tore the whole room apart, repainted it, rebuilt all the desks, and rewired the network.  It was similar to my Eagle Scout project, but on a much larger scale, and with a reasonable budget.  Across the hall, I started from scratch with another room, and after a few walls were build, I wired up three new edit rooms, and setup all of the computers.  All of the systems were cleaned up and optimized, and setup to actually communicate with each other, so students could learn to share digital assets, and truly collaborate together on complex projects.

J and I were staying two floors apart in the same small building, where all of the summer students were housed, and returned to eating all of our meals together, since there were very few other people around.  Our relationship slowly returned to its previous state over the course of the summer, without much conscious or deliberate action on our part, but we didn’t really define or formalized it.  That conversation was probably my job to initiate, but I had no clue how to do that back then.  She was also making occasional weekend trips to San Jose for her research project, and working with a guy up there on some joint microbiological experiment.  We spent a lot of time together, and gradually reconnected in steps over the course of the summer.

Finishing Up Sophomore Year

I had continued being friends with KC, my neighbor freshman year, and she ended up living with a different group of girls that year, all of whom I already knew.  Most of them were taking sign language, although we were not all in the exact same class.  I was over in their room practicing once a week, since that is what I was using to satisfy my foreign language requirement.

The strangest thing happened that spring, when they asked me to help them with something.  They were more excited than usual to see me at dinner that evening, and they all sat down to eat with me, which wasn’t particularly unusual.  But they were definitely looking for something.  It turns out, they were going to do a dance performance to the song “My Boyfriend’s Back” at the talent show that Student Life was putting on that evening.  And they wanted me to be the boyfriend who was returning to avenge his girlfriend’s reputation.

I was not a huge fan of the idea, for a variety of reasons.  First off I don’t really like acting or performing, even though my actual role was minimal, arriving at the end to cap off the song.  On top of that, the comedy of the plan really hinged on the fact that I was the least likely candidate for my role.  And while that was true, I wasn’t a part of the subculture that was concerned about appearances and gaining social position by who I was dating, I wasn’t really sure how I felt about what that ironic portrayal said about me either.  But they were all friends of mine, and a handful of attractive girls can be mighty persuasive, so I eventually agreed.

KC was the ringleader of this new set of roommates as well, so she was the “girlfriend,” while the other four were the “backup.”  The guy she was threatening the whole way through the song was one of their friends, who had the image at least, of being a smooth guy with the ladies.  The girls all started off looking as conservative as possible, with sweaters, long skirts, glasses, and hair in a pencil bun.  And over the course of the dance, all of those were discarded for more “attractive” wardrobe underneath.  I came on-stage at the end, and shove him out of there, to reclaim “my girlfriend.”  My unexpected appearance at the end definitely had the reaction from the audience that the girls were looking for.  But once again, I wasn’t exactly sure how I felt about that, and what it said about the general perception of me, even though I was well known and respected around campus.

Anyhow, the performance went off as planned.  I wasn’t real stoked about the way it all worked out, but I survived the experience.  Ironically the other guy ended up being assigned as my roommate when I stayed on campus that summer, but we were both gone a lot, and rarely saw each other.  And then we connected up two years later as potential business partners, when four of us looked into starting a company upon graduation, but he ended up flaking out before we ever really got going.

I planned to stay on campus that summer so that I could do one of two required industry internships as part of the Multimedia program.  I had gotten what was basically an actual job lined up with Paradise FX, the leading company in Hollywood at the time for stereoscopic 3D work.  There were only a couple of main people in the company, and they were loosing their main technology guy for a while, so it was a perfect fit.  But there were still details to work out by the time the semester ended, so I stayed on with the ISS Dept at the school as well, and waited to work things out at the end of May.

First Time in Las Vegas

I attended my first of many NAB tradeshows my sophomore year of college, with a large group of students from my TV production class.  We carpooled, and I was assigned to ride with two guys, Gil and Rob, in Rob’s car.  They were late that morning, and everyone else had already left by the time we connected up.  Rob had been up all night, and was clearly drunk.  That was supposed to be okay, because Gil was going to drive.  So we set off, with Rob immediately passing out in the passenger seat, and me stuck in the back.  Gil didn’t know how to get there, and while I didn’t either, I at least knew the general direction.  It became clear the Gil had no idea where he was going as we headed south through Los Angeles instead of northeast to Nevada.  Rob just kept mumbling about staying on 5, while I was in the back, trying to convince him that he was going in the wrong direction.  They eventually figured it out when Rob woke up as we past Knott’s Berry Farm and asked why we were there.  We got back on track, another hour or two behind as we left the city, and then we stopped for gas in the high desert.  Rob decided he wanted to drive, which I was obviously opposed to.  But it was his car, so I was left with the option to get in, or be left in the middle of the desert.  Because we were so delayed, there was no way to catch a ride with one of the other cars, they were hours ahead.

So I reluctantly got in, and we resumed our drive through the desert.  Things seemed fine, so I started to fall asleep.  I woke up for a moment to realize that Rob was head down, eyes closed, as we hurled down the straight line of pavement at 80 miles an hour.  “HEY!  How about I drive?”  Head pops up, eyes wide, car swerves a bit. “No, no, I’m fine.”  Even Gil was with me now that he had woken back up, but Rob refused to pull over.  So I sat in the middle of the back seat, and glared at him through the mirror, but even with me staring at him, his eyes would slowly close, until I would yell at him.  We did eventually make it, but it was a stressful couple of hours.

There were about fifteen of us that went, and because of a mistake by Rob who helped plan the trip, we had only had two hotel rooms to cram into.  I actually was lucky enough to get a bed, but I never ended up getting to sleep anyway.  That night we arrived, those over 21 went out drinking and gambling, after leaving the six of us who were under 21 with a bathtub full of ice and alcohol bottles in the hotel room.  I had never drank before, but am not strictly opposed to it, so that was my first time.  We played a variety of games and such that night, while they all tried to get me drunk, since I was the only one who didn’t do this frequently back at school.  I drank all sorts of stuff that night, but felt no effect of any of it.  The best they could claim, was that I was a bit more relaxed than usual.  So between the cost, the bad taste, and no effect on me, alcohol has never held much appeal to me.  Anyhow, we eventually headed to bed around 3am, but other people were constantly showing up from their night on the town, and all sorts of things happened, so for the first time in my life, I got absolutely zero sleep before heading to the show the next morning.

One of the other multimedia students was showing his work at one of the booths.  When we arrived on the show floor that morning, he realized he was missing a bunch of the files he needed.  This was another project supervised by Dan, so we ended up flying another student out to Vegas that afternoon, to bring us another drive of data.  I spent the day seeing the show, and hanging out with others in the group we had come with.  There was all sorts of dramatic fallout from the drunken exploits of the previous night, which I got to observe with amusement.

We spent the whole next night in Dan’s hotel room, working on a borrowed laptop and beta software to rebuild the project with the new copies of the data, to present the next morning.  I was the only one left awake by morning, due to their excessive consumption of alcohol while working all night, so I took the files in and setup the demonstration.  This made me look good with the company we were doing the presentation for, a San Diego software company called Cineform.  Once that was done, I headed back to connect up with the larger group that was heading back to school that morning, and made sure I had a different ride back home.  I ended up finally sleeping in the back of that suburban for the drive home, after being up for 60 hours straight.  It was one hell of a day in Vegas.

Avoiding my Roommates

I wasn’t a huge fan of dealing with my roommate situation that year, which might have been a factor in why I got involved with so many other things on campus.  J’s presence had been a mediating balance in our room the first semester, because she was friends with my roommate, and girls have this mysterious connection with gay guys.  She probably played a significant role in keeping the peace, but she was not around the second semester, so I just survived the issues, and avoided being in my room when I wasn’t sleeping.  Basically every hour of my day was scheduled with things, from work at 8am, to project groups and meetings after midnight.

Our TV show had grown, and in an effort to get some level of credit for all of the work we were doing on it, we involved Dan, our multimedia professor, in the process.  That allowed us to use the TV show as our required project for the sophomore Intermediate Multimedia class, but turned it from fun, into work.  We were tasked to increase the production value to the point where it was unfeasible to continue making the show, and it fell apart after three episodes that “season.”  But it had gotten to the point where we had a set, and a band, and outside media pieces being created.  I still have copies of the tongue in cheek special-report interviews we did, with people from around campus, and they are some of my favorite pieces of content from that whole endeavor.  I have no idea how our investigative reporter Julie could keep a straight face during those interviews.

One of the students we interviewed as a guest the previous semester, after breaking a school football record, liked the TV show idea so much, that he started his own sports show as well.  Our production values were far higher, since I had the most talented technical people in the school working for me, but his actual content was probably better.  Anyhow, we got credit for the show from Dan, but that ended my stint as a live TV producer.

The Lacrosse Team was finally coming together as well.  We bought our own gear and uniforms, and started practicing seriously.  We had about eight games during that spring season, but lost all of them.  Most of the guys on the team didn’t lose so well, and with no coach to keep them in line, there were a few brawls on the field during fourth quarters and such.  We probably hold the record for most penalty violations as well.  Penalties are similar to hockey, with offenders removed from the field for a minute or two, giving the opposite team a temporary numerical advantage.  We were frequently down two or three guys at times during the second half.  I wasn’t very good at the game itself, but I was extremely fast, and had a gift for extracting the ball from a crowd fighting for it on the ground.  I had to pass it off ASAP, because my stick work wouldn’t hold up against decent defensive coverage for more than a couple of seconds.  They got their first win two years later, but I was long gone by then.  One season was enough for me; I helped them get the team started, so my job was done.

I also worked on one other significant video project that semester, for my Advanced TV Production class.  It was a fairly creative mixture of live action and Lego miniatures to tell a story I had come across in Bible class back in 8^th grade.  I worked on it together with Julie, from our TV show, and we actually took 2^nd class at the school film festival for it.  Something else I did for with my TV production class, was take my first trip to Las Vegas, for the NAB tradeshow.  And that was one hell of an adventure.

Conflict in Relationship

J had thrown around the phrase "I love you" fairly early on in the process, and I had explained that while I was okay with her saying that, because the word "love" has many levels of meaning, I wasn't ready to say it.  When I said that phrase, it was going to mean something more than she was saying with it.  She didn't seem to have a problem with that, and regardless of that word being used by her in the context our relationship, it wasn't very emotionally deep from either of our perspectives.

Unfortunately Lindsay transferred to a school in Seattle at the winter break.  No more Lindsay Translation.  We broke up two weeks into the next semester, although that was not the only reason.  Over Christmas break, J had been on a biology trip on a boat in Hawaii.  My ex-roommate Alex, from Russia had been on the boat, and upon their return, she talked constantly about how annoying he had been.  But I was conscious of the fact that it was a prime focus for her.  Anyhow, she broke up with me one evening, shortly after we got back from break, which was not as surprising as it could have been.  It was unexpected, but in the same way that everything else that happened in that relationship was unexpected, because it was all new to me.  It was hardly heartbreaking, because we didn't have a strong emotional attachment.

I was definitely going to miss J’s constant presence in my life, but I hadn't been under the illusion that we should get married or anything.  We did have certain things in common, but very different personalities and backgrounds.  Her stated reason for breaking up, was that we had been absorbed with each other to the exclusion of all others.  There was no denying that was true.  So I accepted the change as I had each of the other steps in our relationship. 

Then two weeks later she was back, saying that she wanted to be together, but in a more balanced and less extreme relationship.  From my perspective, it was like: "okay, so we are still going to hangout together, just not as much, that's fine."  And then two days later, she changed her mind again.  At that point even I knew that things were getting ridiculous, but what do you do?  So we returned to being "broken up" since we had hardly even started to tell anyone we were “back together.”

Shortly thereafter, she and Alex became a couple.  At one level I didn't care, because I didn't prefer J in particular over other girls around.  But it was implicitly obvious that she had chosen Alex over me, which doesn't boost the ego any.  Ironically I didn't see what they had to offer each other.  I have no idea what she saw in him, because in her words, both before and after, he was "an annoying jerk."  And I didn't see J as anything particularly special, worth the effort to "steal" her from me.  It is strange to look back now, but I remained friends with both of them, and we usually went out to eat on Saturday nights.  But Alex had a car, and it is amazing what a guy will put up with for a chance to get some decent food.  And I had a lot of other stuff going on that semester anyway.

Initial Experience with Romantic Relationships

Those talks with J about our grandparents started a process that continued over the next few weeks to develop a deeper relationship between us.  She was always over to see me and my roommates, and I was always visiting her and her roommate, so we became relatively close.  She had a lot more experience with relationships than I did, and was not intimidated by guys, so she sort of took the lead in most parts off that process.  There was no single point where that relationship went from friendship to something more; it was one tiny step at a time.

I initially resisted many of those steps, but girls are well known for using the right tricks to get guys to do what they want.  I was in no way "wrapped around her finger" but I was consciously appreciative of her attention.  Neither of us had cars, so we spent all of our time on campus, much of that together.  She was one of the only other students on campus who rode a bike, and did much more once we were together.  We ate nearly every meal together in the cafeteria, and were already both involved in all of the same groups and activities.  Living around girls for three months at camp that previous summer, as well as all of the social boundary pushing activities that take place there, had also helped prepare me for this situation.

J had a couple of close friends who were also a year older.  I knew them, but not particularly well.  One day they cornered me in the cafeteria and "interrogated" me.  I was not at all comfortable talking about anything like that.  So when I was finished, I was proud that I had answered every question without really telling them anything of significance.  My view was that none of it was any of their business, and I didn't understand until years later that they were actually trying to help me.  Talking to my family about it was interesting as well.  I had never had conversations like that before, so I put it off as long as possible.  When J discovered that I hadn't told them at all, months in, she was not pleased, which totally blindsided me.  I couldn't care less whether she told her family or not.  I finally told my family over Christmas break, only when directly asked by my Mom: "So when are you going to get a girlfriend?"  I wasn't going to lie about it, so there we went.  This resulted in my parent’s insistence that I order her flowers for her birthday, which was over break as well.  Not a bad idea, but not really from “me” at the time.

Females were about a foreign to me as aliens would have been, but I did have one advantage.  Her roommate Lindsay was good friends with me, and the three of us hung out together a lot.  The presence of a third person alters the dynamic, and relieves some of the tension in many situations.  Much more importantly, she was the source of the "Lindsay Translation."  Girls and guys speak completely different languages, but I had an interpreter.  (J: “That juice was really good.”  Lindsay: “Mike, she wants you to get her more juice.”)  It was extremely blatant, and that was okay with all of us.  I had my own personal relationship advisor, and it definitely helped me learn how to pickup on those “little signs” that girls give.

That relationship was also an interesting time for experiencing and discovering boundaries to intimacy, in me and others.  I did a lot of reading and study about relationships and purity during that time, but didn’t really talk with anyone else about that directly, because I wasn’t even remotely comfortable talking about those subjects.  But J had much more experience with those types of relationships than I did, so she took most of the initiative in pushing things forward.  She was the first girl I ever kissed, and my conversations with her were my first experiences in communicating about those topics.  But I definitely learned a lot more about girls that semester.

Creating New Ways to Keep Busy

The University had just opened up a whole new building my freshman year, the Education Technology Center, which included a fully functioning TV Studio.  At the beginning of my sophomore year, they relocated the campus TV channel gear to the same building.  To that point, the campus channel had only ever been used to playback tapes and DVDs of previously recorded content.  But I convinced the TV production teacher to let us patch in the output from the TV Studio, giving us the capability of producing a Live TV show, broadcast into the dorms on cable.

So with the help of a few others in my TV Production class, I set about creating a TV show to produce.  I didn’t really care what the show was about, and since I didn’t watch TV myself, I had no idea the degree to which “CLU Late Night with Brian Wynn,” was ripping off “Late Night with Conan O’Brien.”  But it didn’t really matter, we had a TV show.  It was not associated with any class or organization, and not supervised by any staff member, so we could do what ever we dared.  We shot and aired it on Thursday nights at 11pm, and we never did get around to advertising it beyond our immediate friends, but later discovered that word had gotten around, and nearly half of the school was watching.

Brian and his sidekick Jack wrote and performed the content, while I had recruited the two guys from my 3-Screen project the year before to run the technology side of the picture and sound mixing.  We had communications students run the cameras, and multimedia students doing design for the on-screen graphics, which I created an innovative system for ingesting to the switcher in real-time.  It became quite the operation to run, and everyone involved was just volunteering their time, to be involved in something cool.  Our planning meetings were frequently scheduled at 1am or 2am, and we basically did whatever we wanted with it.  The content was very much college humor, and full of inside jokes that limited the potential audience to our students.  We never did anything that was inappropriate enough to get us kicked off the air, but Brian definitely pushed it as far as he could.  We managed to create four episodes by Christmas break, and things were going well.

I also began to get involved in another venture, that wouldn’t fully come to fruition until the following spring.  A number of the guys from Animus the previous year had set about starting a new sports team at the school, to play lacrosse.  I had never even seen lacrosse, let alone played it, but I had previously said I would play any other club sport besides Rugby, and I am a man of my word, so I agreed to join the effort.  It was another totally student led initiative, and we didn’t have a coach or administrator.  We started acquiring gear and practicing at a field across the street that fall to prepare for the season.

As part of my leadership role in the Lord of Life congregation, I had taken on the job of leading a small group bible study that year as well.  Technically I co-led it with a classmate, Micah.  We had about six people who regularly attended every week.  Micah was the child of two distinguished pastors, so he was familiar with the shepherding aspect of leading, and I guess you could say I focused on teaching, although those roles weren’t deliberately defined at the time.  It is amusing to look back on the fact that we used to meet at 11pm, and that wasn't considered strange.  We were the only small group of the seven or eight that were started that year, to actually persist past the semester break, let alone the entire school year, a fact that I was pretty proud of.

Bike Like Mike

Living across campus from the cafeteria and most of the classrooms, I started to make good use of my bicycle to get around, and started using it instead of the golf carts to do most of my work for the IT dept.  Most of the staff there had graduated the previous year, and the new student supervisor wasn't very reliable, so I was given that job within a few months.  I pretty much worked for them whenever I wasn't in class during normal business hours.  I was granted exemptions to most of the usual rules for student jobs, in regards to hours and pay, and it was essentially was my first real job.  Most other workers used golf carts to get around campus, but I stuck with the bike, which gave me a much faster and more flexible option.  Being the only guy to regularly use a bike to get around campus became a part of my identity there.  Even my screen name was BikeLikeMike, and everyone got it.

That bike probably also had a significant impact on my social life.  I didn't have the patience for the ten minute walk that everyone else took to the cafe for every meal, so biking there and back probably saved me an hour a day.  But that means I missed out on an hour of social time everyday that I would have gotten from walking to the cafe with my friends.  And showing up on the bike means I didn't just finish wandering across campus, collecting people to eat with.  I rarely ate alone, but it did lead to less random social interaction than my freshman year.

It was only a couple weeks into the school year when I got a call from my dad, informing me that my grandfather had passed away during a trip back east to his brother's funeral.  That was the first time someone close to me had passed away, so I had never really dealt with that before.  After my roommate’s deep analysis of the situation "Bummer dude, see you later," I went to go see Lindsay for comfort.  When I arrived, she was on the phone with a mutual friend who had transferred away over the summer. Before I could even say anything, she immediately handed me the phone and said "say hi, while I go to the bathroom."  That resulted in a very stuttered two minute conversation that I was not focused on at all.  Once I was able to communicate what had happened, she elegantly passed me off to her roommate J, who had recently lost her Grandmother.  That led to a little heart to heart talk that evening, and a few more over the rest of the week.

I caught a ride north with my cousins from Orange County, to get to the funeral that weekend.  It was a quick trip, less than 24 hours up there, and pretty intense.  I was conscious by now of the fact that my cry reflex was fairly suppressed at a subconscious level, and expected that this event would probably change that, and wasn't fighting that.  But the only time that I really felt the urge to cry was thirty seconds before I was supposed to go up to do the reading at the funeral service.  That was the one moment that I DID consciously suppress that reflex, but it never returned when I was done.  Probably the combination of the situation AND the public speaking in a stressful environment was the reason that was the most challenging moment.  We left early the next morning, and I made it back in time for the 10:30am Sunday service at the school.

I ended up editing a video of the memorial service together with pieces of family videos and pictures, and put together a DVD that was distributed to the rest of the family.  My mom was probably the most affected by it, and I am told would watch it repeatedly over the next few months as part of her grieving process.  Probably the most emotional piece of work I have ever put together.  I may make another DVD with footage from my Mom’s service, but I am not sure who it would really be for.

Sophomore Year Living Situation

After camp was over for the summer, I only had a few days before I had to head back to school.  I would be living on the opposite side of campus, in the upper class dorms this year, with a couple of new roommates, and Keith from the year before.  All of them were from Santa Barbara, and therefore frequently went home on weekends.  Lindsay, who I had spent a lot of time with at the end of the previous semester immediately sought me out when she arrived from Washington, and we continued to hang out a lot.  We both arrived at school early that semester, as we had leadership roles in the student congregation that we were supposed to prepare for.  She had become roommates with J, who I had met at the beach the previous year.  All off us worked together on certain events for the church, but I didn't know J as well since we didn't have any classes together.  But she was also from Santa Barbara, and knew my roommates, so we ended up seeing each other quite a bit during that period.

My roommate situation had changed, and I had two new upperclassman in my suite, who were both from Santa Barbara, and knew Keith, but were strangers to me.  Living with Keith hadn't been too bad the previous year, especially compared to my other roommates, so I had opted to live with him again.  That ended up being a mistake, which had a dramatic impact on my whole year.  There had been some rumors about him being gay, but I had never asked him directly, and he never said anything about it.  I wasn't sure if it was true, but I tried to keep an open mind and not be too judgmental.  It wasn't like that was a contagious condition or something, but at a certain level that was none of my business unless he made it my business.

Unfortunately, a few months into the year, that question was cleared up when he introduced us to his new boyfriend.  That would be strange enough for me to deal with, but it was compounded by the fact that he practically moved in.  He didn't go to school at CLU, so he wasn't staying anywhere else, and lived hours away.  He also never had to go to class, or anything else for that matter, so he was just always there.  He basically lived in our living room, and usually he was playing video games all day.  He was a big Samoan guy, and the place really smelled, since our living room was one of the few with no windows or ventilation.  My suitemates initially made friends with him, but that situation got old after a few weeks, and became a source of conflict for the rest of the year.  One of the problems was that the school had few rules to govern that situation.  Officially, members of the opposite gender were not allowed into dorm rooms between 2am and 7am.  That technically didn't apply, although it did in spirit, but then there was the guest policy, which stated that someone couldn't visit for more than three days without special permission.  Since he went home once or twice a week, he was rarely violating that rule either, in a technical sense.

This was an interesting time for a liberal institution, that was opposed to discriminating based on sexuality, but whose rules didn't reflect that.  So basically everyone was afraid to take any official action against them, for fear of appearing intolerant of their lifestyle.  I on the other hand was not afraid of appearing that way, because that is exactly how I felt, and was not ashamed of that.  But I don't like to provoke further conflict unnecessarily, and didn't really want to fight the larger battle at hand.  I just wanted my room back.  But every time I and my other roommates confronted the situation, we were assured by Keith that it would improve.  And they would for a week or two, and it definitely "changed" each time in some way, but it was a constant issue that never totally went away.

The result was that I never went to my room during the day and instead stayed very busy, being involved elsewhere on campus.  I would also crash elsewhere for the night whenever possible.  Shortly before the end of the semester, the Student Body President had lunch with me.  He lived across the hall, and knew about the situation, but so did everyone else on campus, because it was "unique" at the time.  He acknowledged that there was no way the school was going to step in to resolve the larger issue, but offered to try to get me transferred to a new room at the semester.  The dorms were way overcrowded, so there were few openings, and it was common knowledge that the only openings would be from people escaping bad living situations.  I was more afraid of the unknown, than the situation that I had at least become accustomed to, and was surviving.  So I declined his offer, which ended up being stupid, because as it turns out, a decent spot did open up unexpectedly, with some of my other friends, but was taken by someone who became the bad living situation for them.  Ironically that newcomer was my old roommate Alex.

Working at Camp for the Summer

That spring I had been surprised to see a familiar table setup outside the cafeteria one day, from Wolf Mountain.  They were out recruiting summer staff members from Christian colleges, so we had a good talk.  After not doing anything of significance the previous summer, I was looking for something like that, so I ended up working there for the summer after my freshman year.  If I thought being the residence hall president was pushing the limits of my social capacity, being a camp counselor was even more so.  But on the positive side I was much more comfortable with the outdoor nature of the job, with climbing, horses, and paintball.

Everyone on staff had camp names, which were acquired at some point during staff training.  That process is an interesting study in identity.  By the end of that two week session, most of the Wild Oak staff had not been named, so we sat around a campfire late into the night discussing possibilities.  Given the preference, I was pushing for "Ghost" based on an incident that took place when playing Mission Impossible against Impact Staff during training.  But eventually Palm Tree, one of the female counselors, came up with BullsEye, based on an event during archery training, and that definitely stuck.  I have gone out of my way to keep that name in the years since then, and many of my friends still call me that.  It has definitely become an integral part of my identity, at least at camp and online.

Dealing with children was a new challenge, and as the youngest Sportsman Camp counselor, I was given the youngest cabins.  So I usually had eight campers following me around, who were all 11 or 12 years old.  It was quite the experience, and I definitely learned a lot.  I was in top physical shape, so I really enjoyed playing paintball with the kids, and facilitating the ropes course.  I spent much of my free time helping out down at the course, and took advantage of various opportunities to climb myself.  Paintball was a huge deal back then, and the program there was well-known.  I had never played before, but I became a fan.  The games against the staff were the highlight event of the week for the kids, which everyone else tried to get in on every Friday evening.  It was also my first serious experience working with horse program during certain weeks, and ended up riding every Saturday.

As a counselor, one of my jobs was to write and preach a campfire sermon.  I ended up doing that near the end of the summer, examining the concept of dedication and perseverance, primarily as seen in Galatians, if I recall correctly.  I figure perseverance is something I am pretty well qualified to speak on, so that topic was a good fit, and it went pretty well.

There were many other students from CLU working at camps that summer, primarily at El Camino Pines above LA.  One thing that I had noticed when interacting with that group, is that every single person who had worked at camp knew how to play the guitar.  It is amusing to look back and remember how I, with zero musical talent or appreciation, blindly expected to learn how to do that at camp.  That was definitely not to be, especially since we only had one guitar player on the whole staff, who had to bounce between services at various locations every evening.  I was ahead of the game if I could just manage to clap in rhythm properly.

The social aspect of being on the staff was a significant part of the summer.  About twenty of us worked in our part of the camp, and we usually spent our off time together and crashed at a different staffer’s house every weekend, going to church with their family the next morning.  So I went to a lot of different churches that summer, including the one I attend now.

Finals

The last week of school for the year was finals, and all of mine were scheduled in the first two days.  That meant that I was totally done with school by Tuesday of that week, and most other events and organizations were finished to make time for students studying and writing final papers.  But my Dad wasn't scheduled to come pick me and my stuff up until the following weekend.  So I had three or four days free, to spend however I wanted, with no more homework or other responsibilities to deal with.  Most other people were busy with finals or leaving early as they finished.

But there were two girls I was friends with, who lived at the end of the hall, that were from out of state.  They were both in the same position I was, since their flights had to be booked weeks before the finals schedule was released.  They had both been in Humtut with me, and Moriah had helped me make the T-Shirts for that class, while Lindsay had done a lot of church stuff with me in Lord of Life.  So I spent most of that week in their room, helping them box up and ship all of their belongings, and just otherwise hanging out.  It was probably the most extended unstructured social experience of my life to that point.  I greatly enjoyed it, but it was also quite stressful at times.

I had never spent that much time with any female before, and there I was with two attractive girls for most of the week.  So I was kind of on overload, trying to adjust to that situation.  I had numerous one-on-one talks with each, about all sorts of topics.  I learned a lot about developing close non-romantic relationships with females, which is probably good prerequisite experience for developing strong romantic ones.  It is ironic that being in that situation wouldn’t even faze me now, but I guess that just goes to show how much I have grown and changed in the last ten years.

I also spent time with a variety of other people that I had gotten to know over the course of the year.  A large group of us walked to the nearest shopping center to go out to dinner one of those evenings, since the single characteristic that had united us to that point, was that none of us had cars, and usually were “stuck” on campus all the time.  It was a pretty good week all around, and I probably learned more in that week than I did from any class I took.

My Dad showed up on Saturday, we loaded up all of my earthly possessions, and I was on my way back to NorCal for the summer.  And that summer would be a whole new adventure, to grow and stretch me, both socially and spiritually.

My Second Semester

One thing that changed when I got back to school after Thanksgiving Break, was that I forgot to "play dumb" for a while.  It wasn't until entering finals two weeks later that it dawned on me that I had totally forgotten to scale back on the "know it all" approach to things, primarily in class.  Obviously that can't be reversed, but I still was conscious to temper that reflex for the rest of my freshman year.  By then, everyone important had pretty much figured it out, so there wasn't much point in hiding it.  Since academics weren't highly valued there, I don't think people were too intimidated by my capacity in that regard, at least not the way they were in High School.  Regardless, it had the desired effect, and intelligence was not the only thing people associated with my identity.

The second semester I got to chose my own classes, and jumped right into the Multimedia track, opting to defer many of my general education classes, because I was in a hurry to get involved in projects I was more interested in.  The most significant was the 'Surround Video" class, which was an experiment dreamed up by a music teacher, inspired by surround sound.  The task was to create an immersive experience that spanned multiple discontinuous screens.  It took me a while to wrap my engineering mind around the discontinuous aspect, but once I did, I took a fairly technical approach to it.  My group did a piece about the technology involved in making that work, which was meant to introduce the projects from the other groups in the class.  Since none of the other groups in the class ended up being technically capable of completing the assignment, ours was the only completed project, and appeared very self serving and inward focused in its content.  But it was an innovative marvel of precise planning and execution, both in how we did it and the idea behind it.  The end product was an installation where two people wandered between various screens, altering the content on them, and explaining how we made the system they were seeing.  It was hundreds of hours of work for a one credit class, but established my key role in the technology side of the multimedia department.  It was also the first time I worked with “Dan” who was just starting out as a professor at the University, after being an Imagineer at Disney, among other things.  He was the head of the department by the time I graduated, and I worked closely with him to advance the program and our facilities.

I also took a Digital Music class, since music is something I have little understanding of.  Unfortunately the operative word was digital, which I was already very familiar with, and the music part was presupposed.  The rest of my classes that semester were insignificant, besides the second half of HumTut.  That group had bonded by then, after countless hours of work, and many field trips and outside activities.  We ended up making T-shirts at the end of the year, to commemorate the experience.  I helped in that process, and still have mine.  I ended up getting a B+ for the 2nd half, which broke a 5 year streak of straight A’s.  I hadn't even been consciously trying to maintain that in college, but certain habits are hard to break.  It was probably good to break that streak, to take the remove the pressure that naturally builds up in that situation.  I only ended up getting 3 or 4 B's in college, but that is fine.  Ironically my college grades have had zero effect on my life since then.  They probably only would have mattered if I had gone to grad school, and even that is debatable.

Two Minutes

We interrupt our regularly scheduled program for this important announcement: "You never know what will happen tomorrow, so don't waste today!"

Last night on my way to Bible Study, I came upon a serious accident on the highway.  As I approached, I could see that the road was blocked, but couldn't make out through the haze what it was.  As I rolled to a stop in front of it, I realized I was looking at the bottom of an SUV, silhouetted by headlights of cars on the other side.  It must have happened in the last two minutes.  There was another car in the ditch, and a couple people nearby.  A man was laying on the ground while a woman held him, with someone standing over them calling 911.

There were flames visible in the engine compartment of the overturned vehicle, but the fire wasn't very big.  The person lying on the ground was "okay" by my evaluation, conscious and no visible blood, so I proceeded towards the burning vehicle carefully.  There were pieces of vehicle all over the road.  It was clear that it had been a head on collision even though what was left of the vehicles involved were now resting tails toward each other.  As I came around the flaming engine compartment, I heard people looking for assistance.  About 5 people had approached, and were trying to extricate someone from the vehicle.  It was hard to see because it was so dark after having been staring at the flaming side of the vehicle, so I didn't get a good look at the victim, but I could see that he was covered in blood.  I have no idea how he got there, but he was half way out the passenger window, stuck between the roof and the ground.

As more people approached the car, we started pushing to roll the car off of him, while others pulled on his shoulders.  I took position at the hood, closest to the fire, but I didn't want to have to deal directly with the victim.  There were a few comments about the possibility of the gas tank blowing at any moment, and you could see fluids on the ground, but everyone stuck to the task at hand.  Once we had about four guys in each role, we managed to succeed after a couple of tries.  I then lent the flashlight I had grabbed out of my truck to one of the guys who had opened the back and was looking for other passengers.  It was hard to see in, because the passenger side windows were against the pavement and the driver side windows were nearly out of reach.  And it was super dark inside, even though there were lots of headlights pointed at us.  Or maybe all of those headlights were blinding us, I am not sure.  The other car in the ditch was clearly unoccupied.  The whole experience was pretty surreal.

The other four had dragged the victim about thirty feet away while we were searching and they were preparing to start CPR on him.  They seemed to be doing all that could be done for him, and I was afraid to even go get a closer look.  Once we had confirmed that the vehicles were empty, safety became a higher priority, and everyone was yelling at everyone else to get away from the vehicle before the gas tank blew.  The guys I was with started focusing on what to do about the fire.  I thought I had an extinguisher under my seat, so I went back to the other side to check, but I was wrong, and no one else had one either.  I heard a neighbor was getting one, but the only thing I eventually saw a few minutes later, was a guy shooting what looked like a can of silly string, into what was now a roaring blaze that had consumed the engine compartment.  I believe I could have suppressed the blaze if I had found a regular fire extinguisher in the first two minutes.  (Keep a fire extinguisher in your car, I know I will from now on.)  But it was not to be, and the fire very rapidly consumed the entire vehicle.  At one point the engine tried to start, as melted cables must have crossed, which was a bit spooky, but that only lasted about ten seconds.

The first fire truck arrived about five minutes later, since the firehouse in only about a quarter mile away, but the car was long gone by then.  They showed up on the other side, and when the people on my side tried to yell to the fireman about the other victim on our side, the burning vehicle's horn went off, for a very annoying minute or so.  I figured that was just as well, since the guy on the far side was clearly more in need of immediate medical help.  According to the news report, eventually all three victims were Life-Flighted to Roseville.  Eventually a fire truck appeared on our side, followed by an ambulance.  Once the firefighters evaluated the scene, the ambulance was waved to pass the burning vehicle, clearly to see to the victim on the other side.  At no point did the firefighter seem interested in dealing with the flaming vehicle, which I thought was interesting.

About that same time, we started hearing very loud explosions from the vehicle, as ammunition in the back began to cook off.  At that point, the firefighters had taken over, so I saw no need to stick around, I had seen enough.  I headed back to my truck, snapped a couple of photos of the fire, which had become quite the inferno, and then turned around to head out.  I passed about a hundred cars that had stacked up behind the accident, and headed back into town to take an alternate route.

It wasn't until I had left the scene that it dawned on me how significant it was to get the guy out of the car, based on the speed the fire spread.  Then once I was at Bible Study and had a chance to "process" a bit, I realized I hadn't been too conscious about the idea of praying, throughout the ordeal, which kind of bothered me.  I know it had been happening subconsciously, but I hadn't put any conscious effort into it.

I had recognized immediately that if I had arrived sooner, I would have had to take a more direct role in treating the victim, which was a scary thought.  But later the idea that it could have been me in one of the vehicles involved, if I had been two minutes earlier, was even more of a wakeup call.  And I am not sure what the fact that I was more afraid of seeing the victim than the danger of the burning car says about me.  I hadn't wanted to know the victim's state when I was on scene, because I was afraid to find out if he was dead, but later I was curious as to whether our risky rescue had actually mattered.  The latest news report says he is in the hospital with life threatening head injuries, so at least he is still alive.  It also says "an unidentified good Samaritan" pulled him from the burning vehicle.  Well, there were actually a few of us, and it only took two minutes.

Balancing College and Family

Since I didn't have my own car, I didn't head home very frequently, only for major holidays.  It is pretty much a miracle that I didn't hear much from my parents once they left.  My dad must have done something, because my mom is not the type of person to just let-go like that.  I talked to them about once a month while I was at school, on the dorm room phone, since I didn't have a cell phone.  That meant that occasionally my roommates were unfortunate enough to pick up those calls, which usually went something like this: "Dude, your mom called for you this afternoon...and she talked for an hour."  She had met all my roommates when I moved in, and I guess didn't hesitate to ask them how things were going.  Alex on the other hand, my roommate from Russia, got a call from his parents at 7pm every day, to check on him.  He was obligated to answer it, under the threat of his father driving the hour to the campus to enforce that rule.  While his parents tried hard to control him, he still did whatever he wanted, and could be quite the wild one.  He had the tricked out car with the big speakers, and drove like a maniac.  He had not fully adjusted to our culture, which was fairly amusing at times, and while he spoke good English, certain phrases eluded him.

My first visit back was at Thanksgiving, where I went to a High School football game, and then hung out late with a few of my former school mates, most of whom had stayed in the area after graduation.  They had taken up a routine of getting together to play computer games all night long.  LAN parties were just becoming popular at that point, but I was not into first person shooter games, for a variety of reasons.  I preferred real-time strategy games that required some thinking, and didn't like the perspective many FPS games had on violence and gore.  But I realized what everyone I knew from college was probably doing right then, namely drinking alcohol and getting into trouble, so LAN parties seemed like a positive alternative that I could support.

I also returned to my fencing class while I was in the area, and took 2^nd place in their Thanksgiving Tournament.  Not bad for no practice for three months.  That was the last fencing class I attended until last week, when after nearly ten years to the day, I connected up with the same group again.  It clearly will take a while to return to the same level of skill that I had before.  And if I finally ordered the equipment for it, since I could never afford any of it back in high school.

By Christmas break, even my parents who were usually opposed to both technological entertainment and staying up late, agreed to host a LAN party at our house over New Years Eve.  I figure they were more concerned about my brother getting into trouble than me, and that gave them a chance to keep an eye on what was going on.  It became an annual tradition for a few years, until it went out of style.  Back at school I actually got my roommates into Age of Empires, which is about the only thing we actually did together.  I even got a few people from other dorms involved, with a little creative use of the schools network, which I was becoming more familiar with based on my job.

My Christmas break was over a month long since my school was on the semester system.  So in mid-January my Dad and I connected up with my uncle in Colorado for a couple days of great skiing.  My brother started joining us on those trips once he entered college and they have become a biennial tradition for our family that continues to this day.

HumTut

Of my actual classes, only one that semester was even remotely challenging.  Humanities Tutorial, or HumTut as it was called, was a combined English and Philosophy class that lasted an entire year.  Enrollment for it was hand selected from the top students, and it was deliberately the most intense course in the school.  It was also the first step into the new "Honors" program that they were starting that year.  The class was taught be a team of three professors, and much of the lecture phase was actually a dialog between them.  We had four papers to write each semester, on topics of our choice, which was very open ended, but they had to be edited by our classmates, with various revisions submitted.  I did my first one on Sun Tzu's Art of War.  I was more concerned about getting it edited than writing, both because I didn't know how long to expect that to take, and because it involved asking someone else for their help.

When I finished my first draft a week early, I took it over to the girls next door.  Four of the five of them were in the class, so I figured I would be able to get one of them to review it for me.  No one else in my room was in that class, not even close.  KC was sort of the ringleader of the group, and her reaction caught me a little off guard.  "I hate you!"  "Uh, come again?"  "I hate you!  You’re already done?"  "Uh, yeah…sorry?"  None of them had even started yet, so it was a huge weight over their heads.  In hindsight, the best response would have been "I love you too," which would have put a stop to the hate comments, that I later recognized were her way of showing affection.  But I was nowhere near being able to joke around about things like that with a girl, especially one as attractive as she was.  She did a pretty good job of giving me feedback on it, and it soon became apparent that beyond being good looking, she was quite intelligent.

I slowly became friends with her and the rest of her roommates, at least to the degree that I was capable of being friends with girls at that point.  They were also involved in student government, and KC was one of the people I would have lost that Senate race to.  She was from Littleton CO, and had survived the Columbine massacre back in high school.  She had a boyfriend back in Colorado, and eventually confided in me that she was planning to transfer away from CLU at the end of the year, because it was a joke, academically speaking.  I agreed with that assessment, but I had recognized that getting into it, so I wrote her a letter over spring break encouraging her to reconsider that plan.

I have no idea if that had any influence on her choices, but shortly after we returned, there was a field trip with HumTut, to the Getty Art museum.  I ended up riding down there with her and a few others, and learned over the course of that conversation that she had broken up with her boyfriend, and decided to stay at CLU.  That was quite the revelation, but at that point I was not prepared to take advantage of that opportunity.  A number of other students who valued academics left by the end of the year, but she stayed.

HumTut was the source of a number of other perspective changing epiphanies.  At one point the professor asked, “What is the meaning of life?”  By the end of class the discussion had concluded that the answer was relationships.  I find this to be accurate, even from a Christian perspective, just with a special focus on one particular relationship.  I had never really seen things that way before, instead aiming to live a productive and full life.  It has taken awhile to figure out how to align my practical decisions with that perspective, but I am getting there.  It has only been ten years, right?