St. Paul's Blog 2: Acts 13:1-15:35

Guess what! We went on a missionary journey!!! It started out with some pretty stiff opposition and went downhill from there. You’d think that people would be happy to hear good news, but noooo. All they want to do is yell at us. The governor of Cyprus seemed willing to hear what we had to say, but his blind friend--well, at least he was blind by the time we’d left--was a little less willing to “see” things our way.

Barnabas’s whiny little cousin Mark couldn’t take it, so he was gone before we even left the first little island. It’s a good thing too, because I think I’d have helped him “see” things my way by the end of the trip too, if you know what I mean…

In the next town we were able to expound at great length on the gospel, and they even asked us back the next week. But we must have done something to offend the Pisidian Antioch Ladies’ Society because they ran us out on a rail. That was OK; the town was real dusty anyway, so we cleaned our feet off and headed for Iconium…

Iconium was a lot like Pisidian Antioch, except that the people there weren't very welcoming and also they tried to stone us.

We hoped we might get a warmer reception in Lystra, and we weren't disappointed. All we did was heal one guy and suddenly they were convinced that we were gods! (I was kind of offended that Barnabas got to be Zeus and I had to be Hermes.) After a lot of talking, we managed to keep them from offering sacrifices to us. But then our old friends from Pisidian Antioch and Iconium came to town, and pretty soon, the rocks were flying again.

Next, we visited the town of Derbe. I'm not sure why they call it that, because it doesn't even resemble a hat or a race. But the people there were friendlier, so that was nice. Even better, we reached a lot of people there for Jesus! This missionarying can be pretty exhausting sometimes, but it's worth it.

St. Paul's Blog 1: Acts 8-10

For the past week, I have been writing a blog in the voice of St. Paul for a Bible camp's daily newspaper. The kids were studying Acts, so they thought it would be kind of fun to have a "different" take on the reading. And I am nothing if not "different."

I kind of banged it out between doing other things, so the quality varies, but I figured I should probably post it here because I'm so bad at posting other things. :-)


This week I had a real eye-opening experience. It was pretty unexpected; I guess you might say it kind of blind-sided me.I had just finished a very successful campaign against a fanatical cult of peace-loving zombie worshipers in Jerusalem, and I was on my way to Damascus to do the same thing there. I was all set; I had several faithful thugs, letters from the religious leaders in Jerusalem, and a nearly full bottle of my new Threats 'n' Murder Brand Mouthwash ("It makes heretics say, 'Ouch!'"^©).

Suddenly, a blinding flash exploded across my retinas, and that was the last thing I remember seeing.

So it turns out that I had been wrong. Really wrong. The people I had been persecuting in Jerusalem -- the ones who had insisted that the infamous Jesus of Nazareth had been the messiah and had risen from the dead after his crucifixion -- hadn't been lying. I spoke with their living Lord myself that day on the road.

After the voice stopped, I continued on with my companions to Damascus. We stayed at Judas's house on Straight Street, where I fasted and prayed for three days and three nights. During that time, the only thing I remember seeing was a vision where a man named Ananias came and laid hands on me to heal me. So it wasn't that surprising when a man named Ananias came to the house and did exactly that.

The first thing I asked after the scales fell from my eyes was whether I could be baptized. I was amazed by my experience, and I was convinced beyond doubt that Jesus was the messiah.

I guess this means I might have to start using my knack for troublemaking in a more constructive way in the future...

I am aware of all internet traditions

Tee hee... I found out about this via EB and TLQ.

(Mostly) Annotated Books of Pretension

Well, that whole thing clearly didn't work out, did it? The first of the year hit, and with it came mega-lots of overtime. I have been storing up all of my brilliance so as to share it with the Internets some day, but until that day arrives, I felt compelled to partake in a meme I picked up from Evil Bender. I would link to the original, but you can click through if you really want to, and I am too lazy. Speaking of having one's English degree(s) revoked, failure to properly cite might be due cause... :-)

Italics: I have read
Strikethrough: Started, never finished
Normal: Never even tried

* Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
* Anna Karenina (seemed like a good idea at the time)
* Crime and Punishment (a labor of sheer stubbornness)
* Catch-22 (I was reading a friend's copy over at his house, set it down, and then never saw him again. Not by design or anything; it just kind of... happened.)
* One Hundred Years of Solitude
* Wuthering Heights
* The Silmarillion (It's no There and Back Again: A Hobbit's Holiday for readability...)
* Life of Pi : a novel
* The Name of the Rose
* Don Quixote (In Spanish - beat that!!)
* Moby Dick (too... much... whale)
* Ulysses
* Madame Bovary (I always associate this title with hidden lady-parts)
* The Odyssey
* Pride and Prejudice
* Jane Eyre (I know I read both this and Wuthering Heights when I was younger, but now I can't for the life of me keep them straight. I think Wuthering is the one with the crazy wife, right?)
* The Tale of Two Cities
* The Brothers Karamazov (see note on Anna Karenina)
* Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (never heard of it, but it sounds awesome...)
* War and Peace (see note on all Russian novels I have ever read)
* Vanity Fair (Anyone else just adore Thackeray?)
* The Time Traveler’s Wife (Is that anything like The Time Machine? Mmm... delicious, plump, lazy Eloi...)
* The Iliad
* Emma
* The Blind Assassin
* The Kite Runner
* Mrs. Dalloway
* Great Expectations (Best... Dickens... Evar)
* American Gods (did I mention I love Gaiman? srsly.)
* A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (pretty funny when it's not being all self-indulgent... which is heartbreakingly often)
* Atlas Shrugged (still can't think of my attempt to read this monstrosity without getting visuals of that terrible, terrible scene written by the Ayn Rand fanboy... you know the one. Ew.)
* Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
* Memoirs of a Geisha
* Middlesex
* Quicksilver
* Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (Only if reading through the first chapter in Barnes and Noble counts as an attempt to read the book...)
* The Canterbury tales (Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to to roote...)
* The Historian : a novel
* A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (How can anyone NOT read this?)
* Love in the Time of Cholera (see note on Catch-22)
* Brave New world (Ford is in his flivver and all's right with the world!)
* The Fountainhead (ugh, TWO by her? I SO wish I could rinse my brain out.)
* Foucault’s Pendulum (want to read)
* Middlemarch (Did you know that George was really a woman?!)
* Frankenstein (the monster is so much more articulate in the book than he has been in any movie... why is that? Maybe because 10-page monologues don't translate well to the silver screen, I guess, but it's still a shame. Hulk smash.)
* The Count of Monte Cristo (want to read)
* Dracula (I kept hoping for the good part, and then it was over. Ripoff.)
* A Clockwork Orange (I read the British version with the very moral final chapter still intact. What up now?)
* Anansi Boys (want to steal from EB's shelf read)
* The Once and Future King (should have, didn't. ah, well)
* The Grapes of Wrath
* The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
* 1984
* Angels & Demons (sweet Moses, no. why? Seriously, why?)
* The Inferno
* The Satanic Verses (I would probably put out a death sentence on him too... because I WISH I WROTE THIS WELL!! little religious/geopolitical humor there for you)
* Sense and Sensibility
* The Picture of Dorian Gray (Spoiler: the picture is HIM!! but only sort of)
* Mansfield Park (sadly, no)
* One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
* To the Lighthouse (I am ashamed.)
* Tess of the D’Urbervilles
* Oliver Twist (typical, depressing, quirky Dickens. Gotta love him)
* Gulliver’s Travels
* Les Misérables (I don't seem to do well with Hugo... unless, of course, it's Hugo Gernsback)
* The Corrections
* The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
* The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
* Dune (I want to kiss and marry this book. seriously.)
* The Prince
* The Sound and the Fury (this reads like a tale told by an idiot)
* Angela’s Ashes : a memoir (want to)
* The God of Small Things
* A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present (yes, I know I am a freakin' pinko commie leftist hippie. And yes, I'm ok with that.)
* Cryptonomicon (I thought this only existed in scifi movies?)
* Neverwhere (want to)
* A Confederacy of Dunces
* A Short History of Nearly Everything
* Dubliners
* The Unbearable Lightness of Being
* Beloved
* Slaughterhouse-five (See note on Catch-22)
* The Scarlet Letter
* Eats, Shoots & Leaves (Yes, it's pop linguistics. Yes, it's prescriptionistic to the extreme. But it's also sort of funny.)
* The Mists of Avalon
* Oryx and Crake : a novel
* Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
* Cloud Atlas
* The Confusion
* Lolita
* Persuasion
* Northanger Abbey (nope - on the list, eventually)
* The Catcher in the Rye (insert angst here)
* On the Road (didn't understand or appreciate it much, unfortunately... I was too young)
* The Hunchback of Notre Dame (more Hugo... I really do mean to read this stuff)
* Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (sounds fun but also too self-aware for my taste)
* Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values (want to)
* The Aeneid
* Watership Down (bunnies!)
* Gravity’s Rainbow
* The Hobbit (now THAT is high-quality fantasy that doesn't put me to sleep.)
* In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
* White Teeth
* Treasure Island (of course - I was homeschooled, duh)
* David Copperfield (second-best Dickens evar)
* The Three Musketeers (Surprise, a Hugo I finished!!)

Thing Four

Thing four is instant messaging. How did we ever live without such an indispensable tool before the tidal wave of IM programs swept over us in the 1990s? I remember with great fondness how I used to chat with my friends, including EB and Marshwiggle, on ICQ back when it first came out. Then, AIM and MSN Messenger, of course, and eventually the Google Chat client. There was something empowering and delightful about being able to communicate instantaneously in a written format. It also made roleplaying online much easier, but that is a whole different thing to be thankful for. :-)

I am currently on my third job that involves extensive use of instant message clients. My first job that required IM was at the student newspaper where I served as online editor for a single, lonely, enraging academic year when I was a junior. It came in very handy when I had system-related questions for the techies and the former editor... and also when I was just lonely and bored and wanted to chat with a pretty girl while the incredibly buggy scripts ran on my Mac G4.

I dated the woman who would become my wife over IM for almost a year while I was teaching at a mission school near Four Corners between my undergraduate and graduate programs. The mission's phone line was expensive and unreliable, but the Internet uplink was essentially free and hardly every went down. It was a very, very good way to stay close to the woman I loved.

At my most recent two jobs, chat clients have been simply indispensible. I literally could not have done my job without them. When I worked for a news-gathering service based out of Washington D.C., it was four months before I met any of my colleagues in person, although I worked with 5-10 different people every day to get our products put together. Everything we did was via IM. In my current job at the call center, I am able to provide excellent, value-added customer service in real time because of the intraoffice IM client there.

And last but not least, instant messaging is also an excellent medium for bugging people about things that they should be doing without being too confrontational. For instance, Marshwiggle popped me up via intraoffice IM the other day (yes, he works in the same company I do, more or less) and said, "Hello, sirs. I would like one of your two day weeks, please." This was his way of letting me know he had noticed my absence of "things I like" posts during the week after my power went off. If he would have e-mailed me about it, I might not have responded as well as I did to his subtle hints. :-)

There is much more that I could say about IM clients and the communicative genre of instant messages, but I should probably just close this particular topic with a simple reiteration of my original point: IM is a wonderful thing.