Trinity’s World

Posted Tuesday, March 29, 2005, 10:44 AM

The following are things I have learned while driving to and from my new job. They mostly come from bumper stickers, advertisements and from songs on the radio.

“Buy a gun, piss of a federal” -Window sticker on a truck sporting the NRA member emblem on the tail gate.

“U.S. Pride, prepare for payback” -On the back of a Ford F150

“I really want to care, but my give-a-dam’s busted” -Country Song

“Retirement: Half the money, Twice the husband” -Station wagon bumper sticker

When in high school, as long as you have a car you are cool. Even if you are driving to pick up your brother/sister at their middle school, in your car that is missing a wind shield, the truck is flapping open because it can’t stay shut, the paint is literally flaking off as you drive by, and your stereo is so bad that it only makes a mumbling hum, you can still drive down the road with a smile on your face. Just put on your emergency flashers, and all will be well.

Its an interesting world that we live in. We are bombarded every day by advertising, and by people telling us that we have to live up to a certain kind of image. These are the kind of things I have to tell my kids at work to not listen to, so that they can find who they are without being told what they should be. The sad reality is that I find myself fighting the same battle every day. When I go home, when I watch TV, and when I go to the store to get food, I am constantly bombarded with stimuli like this. I’m just glad that I have the chance to be that one person, who might be able to get a Kid to think about what they want, as opposed to accept what everyone tells them what they want.

Posted Wednesday, March 9, 2005, 03:38 PM

Figures that I would finally get a job, and I would have to drive to the end of the earth to get there. No, you don’t understand: I have to drive to the end of the 909 area code! For those of you who do not live in LA, Riverside, San Bernardino counties here in wonderful California, let me explain. The 909 area code had been referred to as, “the land of the dirt people,” “where the refugees from LA relocate after completing probation,” and my personal favorite, “Fon-tucky.” I basically get to commute sixty miles one way, using four freeway interchanges, during rush hour traffic going both ways.

So, with that at the backdrop, here is what I experienced my first day on the job. I left my house at 6:30 am in hopes of getting to work on time at 8:30 am. It seems the gods needed something to do today for amusement, because on the way there were three accidents. And not just small accidents either; one accident involved a school bus, a truck pulling a large fishing boat, a mini-van, and a compact car.

I sure hope that this job turns out to be worth it. Because I’ll be working with children as a councilor, you won’t see much posted about what I do at work. But I will be able to share very general things, and I will be able to vent all my frustration at stupid drivers I meet along the way ?.

I hope it gets better, becuase I don’t know if I can handel that long of a drive every morning. And I’m not getting paid enough to burn half a tank of gas (at California prices) sitting in traffic every morning.

Posted Saturday, March 5, 2005, 11:29 AM

I’m reading a book on writing by Anne Lamott and came across this really great sentence.

“To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass–seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one.”

She’s right. Sometimes the best cure for being so stuck in your own world you can’t see past your own nose, is to look to something outside your self and observe it. It can be as simple as watching a bird fly though the air and land on a telephone wire, or going and volunteering at a food kitchen in the city, or even as mundane as watching a little league baseball game where you know none of the players.

Stepping outside one’s self is the first key to writing well, but it is also the key to living life in a meaningful way. If we can observe the world around us, and listen to it’s lessons without thinking we are too learned for them, we might learn something about how much we really know.

Posted Monday, February 28, 2005, 08:36 AM

Ever notice how when you have done something for a long time, you sometimes forget how confusing it was when you first started? Yeah…I came face to face with his reality two weeks ago, and again this weekend.

I’m low on funds, as anyone who has read my blog knows, and needed to come up with some kind of a cash flow. Well, one of my closest friends approached me and said that I should consider judging speech and debate tournaments. They pay about $10 per session you judge, and you can judge as many as 8 rounds in a typical day, and most tournaments last three days. The math wheels in my head, which admit ably never have spun quite right that I can remember, started to spin. It was not the best money in the world, but If my fiancé and I were to both judge a whole week end, we would actually walk away with enough money to pay the bills we have to pay (credit cards be dammed) and eat too.

All I had to do was go on the internet, read a document, and send an e-mail to some organization stating my name, and contact info, and promise that I meet the requirements to be a judge (College Degree or equivalent experience for higher levels). Essentially, it was easier than getting licensed as a Minster over the Internet; you have to pay to be licensed as a minister.

So we did our first tournament, which consisted of kids ages 12-18. I latter, after the fact, found out that the tournament that weekend had consisted of mainly home schoolers and various small Christian schools. Let’s just say, I should have know after hearing debate rebuttal statements like “there is no threat of war in the Middle East at this time, we have removed Sadam Husain from power.” Not the most open minded, or most informed kids, but fun nonetheless.

We also judged college level debate this last weekend. College debate was a world of difference, and a welcome changed most of the time. The pathetic part was finding college competitors that were far worse than some of the mediocre 12 year olds form the week before. But I digress.

We show up to judge our first round of debate, and are given an orientation. “Just fill out the form, and judge them on the quality of their argument.” Not hard right. So, we look at the form, and suddenly I feel like I’m reading something from a chemistry class. Lots of boxes to rank, evaluate, and give comments on. And then, someone mentions that you will have to time this event as well. And, don’t forget, that you will need something to trace your arguments on as the debate proceeds.

I never took notes in high school, and very little in college. I just don’t work that way. And timing with hand signals to let the debaters know how much they have left? This is not what I singed up for. I thought I was going to sit there, circle some markers for performance in different areas, and write down why I though one side as better than the other. At my fiancé’s suggestion (she honestly is the brains of this outfit) we sit the first round out and observe a debate.

We then ambush the judge after the round, and see what she did. We got a brief over view of time signals, and how those work. But then she showed us her notes. I then saw, what looked like a time line mapping out humanity. Here on her legal pad, this judge had the whole debate mapped out in detail. She had every point each team brought up, and how each team had countered. She had “flowed” everything over that had been dropped and not addressed, and she had connected all the stuff that was addressed. AND IT WAS COLOR CODED!!!!!

Needless to say, we did not judge any debate rounds. we did Individual events where you just have to rate one speaker on weather they deliver the speech well, did it have relevance, and did they stay on topic. We also got see a great round of of Humorous Interp; you take a comedy piece and trying modify it to fit into a ten minuet block. All in all, we were fine doing the Individual events, but avoided the Debate like the plague.

Week two, we were now in College territory. And we had to judge debate, because that is all there was the first day of the tournament. We hunkered down, and pulled on our limited instruction, and did our best. Thankfully, it was not that painful. The competitors are apparently used to getting “new judges” and were very nice to us. So as the day went on, I developed my own kind of judging style. Because the first rule that anyone will tell you is…”The judge is ALWAYS right.”

I look back on my experience these last two weeks and wonder, after all the stress I had of not know what the hell I was doing, how many times I take for granted that I know how to do some complicated things. And not only that, but I sometimes put unrealistic expectations on people, that they should be able to do something like I do without much training/teaching. But the reality is that sometimes I get so immersed things that I forget what it is like to be on the outside looking in.

Are we confidant in our judging skills? Hardly! We both have a long way to go before we feel we can not only judge who is the better debater, but do justice to the effort that the teams put into the event. It’s one thing to walk in and say that one team wins because they were more convincing. The point of these tournaments is to let the competitors know WHY they were more convincing. But, I think with some practice, we can become speech and debate judge pros. We have a tournament coming up in two weeks (wee need a break), and we are looking forward to it.

Posted Thursday, February 17, 2005, 11:29 AM

Ever notice how things sneak up on you in weird and mysterious ways? Well, life has a wired way of blindsiding people. Weather it’s a disastrous change in life, or a sudden realization of something, Murphy’s Law dictates that things always happen when you least expect (especially bad things). I was delivered a bit of sobering news yesterday, as I was getting back from my morning walk with a good friend. My brother called me to say that our former band teacher from high school had passed away the previous night.

OK, I’ll just get it out in the open and admit that I was (probably still am) a band geek. In high school I was in two bands, jazz band and marching band, and my life centered on music. When I was not doing stuff for the school band and small groups, I was also in the church choir singing tenor. I had learned to sing tenor and play a multitude of brass instruments by the time I had graduated. When I attended college, I was on voice and instrumental scholarship for almost the whole time. Music was my life.

John Hicky, my high school band teacher, bares a lot of the responsibility for my appreciation of music, as well as my appreciation of different kinds of music. Band was a place and time where everyone was welcomed to come, and where everyone worked hard. Music was not something that was part of our checklist of things to make us look good on a college application. Music was something that we all had to take ownership of, we all had to feel, and that we all worked hard to master.

This is going to be really cheesy, but if you have ever seen the movie, “Mr. Holands’s Opus,” you can start to see what Mr. Hicky meant to those of us that sat under neither him. His life was dedicated to teaching, and to seeing us excel to the best of each person’s ability. When our band went places and scored first place, he was just as proud of us as when we placed last, as long as we gave our best. We were a family, and to some in the group he was the only good Male roll model in their lives.

I hang out with a lot of people who are in the Psychology field. So I’ve had a lot of my personal traits analyzed and looked over by people who are working on their degrees. When I look back to try to see where I developed a lot of the work ethic and personality I have now, I can draw a line right back to my experience under Mr. Hicky. He had this quote from Aristotle that hung above the black board that read, “You are what you perpetually do, therefore practicing with excellence will create excellence.” I’ve taken that with me ever since. That and, “Early is on time, on time is late, and late is very, very bad.” Things that I find myself quoting in casual conversation, end up being things that I can trace back to phrases and ideas that were drilled into me (literally) in marching band.

I guess that as I grow older, I tend to forget what it was like when I was in high school. Mr. Hicky was there for us when we were at our ropes end, when we made mistakes, and when we were triumphant. Through him I was able to see a good decent man that have very strong moral beliefs that resonated in everything he taught. In an age where teachers are afraid to lecture on moral standards for fear of prosecution, Mr. Hicky found a way to teach us morals and the lessons of life, without ever give a single lecture on the topic.

I hope that one day, I can be as effective as John Hicky was in his life. I know I’ll see him across the field, when it is my turn to embark on the adventure known as the after life.

Monday, February 14, 2005, 07:54 AM

My whole life, I have been quietly searching for something to make sense of the chaos that is existence. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do those who cheat, lie, and break the rules, get rewarded for a job well done. Why does God seem to be there when life is going good, but abandon allow his followers to wallow in misery when life is in crisis? All of these questions and more I have sought to answer.

Then I met a woman, and nothing happened. I’ve always known that I would meet the right woman some day. A woman who would look up to me as her protector, as a provider, as the missing piece to the puzzle for her life. I always knew that there was a woman out there that God had intended for me to marry, and make a good life with. In my mind I knew that there was a woman out there that would bear my children, and support me in everything I would ever do. I was wrong. The woman I met was so much more than I could have ever hoped for.

The day she came into my life was an ordinary one. The time we spent together was no different then any other I had spent with a friend of a friend. And five years latter, we were friends ourselves. Something had drawn me to her, something I can’t explain. There was a feeling about her, an aura, of a kindred spirit. College can bring about many changes in a person, and we had gone down very different paths. However, there was something familiar about her all the same. As if we had know each other for a very long time.

Today, I am shocked and amazed at how she captivates me. The simplest thing can make me stare in awe at her. The way she laughs, the way she smiles, the way she makes silly faces, and the funny noises she makes, all punctuate the magnificent inner-beauty that she hides so carefully. Her soothing voice, her soft touch, and her deep brown eyes, bare a sense of compassion and love of the likes I have never encountered before. She is caring, endearing, and most of all she is filled with understanding.

She puts up with me. Not many women could endure the random lapses in my memory, my inability to articulate my emotions, and my propensity to argue anything I don’t understand or agree with. With grace and poise she exchanges intellectual blows with me, and can better me in a fair debate. In a loving and kind way, she tolerates my illogical and thoughtless behavior, until I realize and confess my wrong doings. In a word, she loves me.

I do not know what the future holds. No matter what the circumstances or how life plays out, I do know that she will always love me. I also know that I will always love her. I will remain faithful to her always, because there is no other that can give me the kind of love that she gives. I will be by her side though the good times and the bad times; sometimes holding her hand, other times holding her up against the strain of life. I will be her companion, her confidant, and her biggest fan, until the day that she draws her last breath.

I still have not found the answer to the questions of the universe. But it sure is nice to know that I have a partner to help my in my search, for the rest of my days. I have someone to share in the joys of triumph, and the agony of defeat. I have been blessed with someone who can discuss the meaning of life, as well as the importance of good wine. I have a person to share every aspect of my life with and to become one with. What use are the answers to the secrets of the Universe, if you don’t have someone to walk though your time in the Universe with?