regarding relaxation and stuffed chicken

I am sitting at home, hearing thunder rumble in the distance, and smelling the scent of vegetation soaked by 24 hours of rain. My dog is barking at another dog across the street. I am waiting for my parents to be ready to start a movie. It's good to be home, not thinking about much for a couple of weeks. Summer didn't leave a lot of time for rest, between classes, jobs, more jobs, etc. etc. If I were in EL at this exact moment, I would probably be knocking on doors trying to recruit frosh to come to IV.
No offense to those of you who are doing that right now, but I am very much enjoying not having to think and worry about it. You will do a wonderful job, and I am with you in prayer.

I cooked a delicious dinner tonight (no humility here). Thinking up extravagantly creative and original recipes is one of the ways I enjoy relaxing. Tonight it was chicken breasts, stuffed with ricotta, parmesan and mozarella. I covered them with tomatoe sauce and cheese, baked them, and served them with pasta and sauteed zucchini. I would have taken a photo to post, but most of the food was eaten before I thought to.


Anyway, that's the charm of my domestic life these days.

"it's hot" or "a really boring post" or "Tim is killing time before dinner"

Really hot. It hasn't gone below 90 in East Lansing now for three days. It's nice to have sunshine, and I enjoy heat, provided I have a way of escaping it. Too bad that living in a dorm room and working in a bakery do not provide anything in the form of airconditioning or swimming pools.

I had trouble sleeping last night. I'm not sure if it was the heat, or my itchy brain that kept me awake. Probably a pleasant combination of the two. I put movies on to help me sleep. I got through all of "The Matrix: Reloaded" and part of "Napoleon Dynamite" before the sand man won out.

This posting is really boring. I think I will change the title. No, wait. I will add a secondary title.

I did find a really crazy/cool website last night. It is here. Apparently this guy just follows the Newsboys around the world, and records his exploits on the internet. Kinda funny and surreal. I am glad that other people do these things, so that I can enjoy them vicariously, as opposed to wasting time doing it myself.

Speaking of travel, I am considering joining the Peace Corps when I graduate in a year. I would like to work at their project in Jordan. It would give me good overseas experience, and hopefully increase my odds of getting into a hot grad program. It's strange to be thinking about life more than a semester in advance. I hope I don't have one of these "quarter life crises" that you hear people talking about. I am having too much fun living on the edge to go into a crisis. In a month, I will be in Bangladesh. In a year, I could be in Jordan. After that, who knows?

I must think of a time to go on my grand adventure journey. Here is a map of how I would like to go. (I start in Pakistan, and end in Europe...)
Interested in coming along? Let me know.

It's been a while since I posted, and I am not sure why I am posting now. I have a paper due in about an hour, and I think it is still missing one or two key elements. The class frustrates me, so maybe I am posting out of a desire to protest. Down With Dumb Classes! I don't mean 'dumb' as in 'unintelligent'. More like kind of pointless and convoluted. I feel like the whole relativism thing has the potential to turn most conversations in the social sciences into wildly spinning loops. Like yesterday. We were talking about news coverage of the Romanian revolution in 89/90. People kept making references to "what really happened". So this one kid pipes up and says "I feel that the discussion of truth in this situation is irrelevant. We can never know what really happened in the Romanian revolution, because we are all stuck inside our perspectives." I thought it was a cop out. As social scientists, our job should be to get around the lenses. We should be trained to work as hard as we possibly can to understand the way that our perspective is coloring our assessment of a situation, and then do our best to over come it. I was hoping that others would agree with me, but I was sorely disappointed.

So much for social science.

in between...

Thirty six minutes until class starts, so I may as well share some thoughts with the world. Today I am finding myself wondering why we (students) push our bodies to such extreme limits for the sake of learning. It strikes me as counter intuitive, and more than a little ironic.

Here's the story that brings me to thinking about such things: This weekend, I was at a conference out of town, learning how to minister cross culturally. It was excellent, but the busy days of processing combined with the late nights of talking with friends added up to a less than refreshing weekend. This was supplemented by the fact that on Thursday night I was forced to play police officer in a raid on a beer pong party on my floor. I will write a longer entry on this occurence later. It is a good enough story to deserve it's own posting. The point, though, is that Thursday night provided me with only three hours of sleep, headed into a busy weekend. I returned home Sunday afternoon needing to complete both a scholarship essay, and a draft of a paper for a class that is at it's best radically confusing, and at it's worst utterly non-sensical. So I stayed up until roughly 4 AM finishing what I could of those. I was helped along by some really good coffee from my Christmas stocking (thanks, mom), the music of Bob Dylan and Leonard Nimoy (not together, separately. And yes, Nimoy DID record quite a bit of low quality music. Live long and prosper, Spock, but definitely not on top of the music charts.), and one or two breaks to read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, to keep the stress low.

So when I finally went to bed, I realized that it would be a necessity to sleep through my first few classes. This is because I have a mid-term tomorrow morning, and will need to stay up late studying. As such, it was necessary to stock up on sleep. The conclusion of this long, slightly boring diatribe is that I can't wait to be a grown up who is allowed to leave his work at the office, and enjoy a semi-normal sleep schedule. Oh what dreams I have.

Speaking of dreams, the word came through today that BRAC definitely wants me to intern in Bangladesh. So it looks like I am going. It's exciting. I'll get to spend a semester soaking in the things I've only read about for so long. I am glad I am going to the sub-continent. I guess it's as close to home as most places I have lived. It will still be new, but I think there will definitely be some sense of familiarity. That being said, I am really looking forward to the adventure.

Also, I am thinking about making a movie after I graduate, and before I begin real life. Stay tuned for more information on this.

Basketball lost to Minnesota on the road on Saturday. 15 points. Not pretty, but the gophers played hard and deserved it. The real test is going to be Wednesday at Iowa. If we come into it with a game plan, we will be able to smoke them. Anything can happen in this league, though. Gotta love the big ten.

Me. I am experimenting with this photo publishing thing. Ugh, now it's time for bed.

beginnings

This is not my first blog. A few years ago I made an attempt at keeping one up regularly. For my true fans, you can find it here.

So why the change of venue, you ask? I feel the need for a change. I want to do this more regularly. It could be fun.

So what is new in my campus jungle? Not a whole lot. It is February, and the ground is finally covered with snow. So much for these brutal winters that Michiganders like to boast about. This is the second mildly significant snow fall we have experienced this winter. That sure sounds to me like Global Warming. For more info and commentary on that, check out my dad's blog.

Enough about the weather.

I watched part of a documentary about Ronald Reagan tonight. My neigbor, Jairus, is enamored of the late President, and is the owner of 4.5 hour long documentary that contains everything you could ever want to know about the good ol' gipper. Jairus has been wanting to watch the documentary with me for quite some time, and we chose what would have been Reagan's 95th birthday to begin the viewing.

Did you know that when Reagan was an actor, he was an FBI informant regarding communism in Hollywood? I'm not sure I feel good about that. The work of McCarthy in American history is no point of pride for me. Lots of lives were destroyed. Some might say it was worth it. It kept that big red dog from digging in our backyard. I suppose fear is a powerful motivator.

Time to retire. I must go learn about global economics at eight oclock in the morning.

One final note: The ESPN bracketologist currently has us at a no. 2 seed in the Atlanta bracket. Duke is the no. 1 seed there. Our chances of capturing the big ten title are also high, as long as we can win our remaining home games, and two of the three remaining road games. I have a good feeling. So all is well in the basketball world.