... 51 hours and counting

argh!

i got feedback today that was very encouraging. i'm going to go out for dinner tonight and relax a bit and the rest of the weekend will be taken up with laundry and sermon refinement.

later folks!

... update

draft number 2 is done and emailed to the guy who's been helping me out with this sermon. i was planning to have an early night tonight, but beauty and the geek is on in the background as i write this. hopefully, when i publish this post, i'll just go straight to bed.

i don't know. thank you all so much for praying for me. it's good to know and i truly believe i've already seen some of the fruits of that prayer support already. i think the sermon will be about twenty minutes... i'm sure it'll be pruned down and i just don't want to talk too fast! argh!

argh...

... we have progress

still wearing brown trousers but i've done a first draft and forwarded it along to be looked at by my assigned... coach? whatever. one of the guys from church is having a look at it. depending on feedback there i may also pass it along to my minister or go over it again and then bounce it back. argh.

i'd feel a bit less frazzled with more time to prepare but in a way it's good: i've only got a short space of time to have my nerves fried - any longer and i might really go berko. i don't think i'll be able to build up enough of a head of steam to go berko over this. argh.

argh.

... honest to blog

after commenting to a friend that not really enough was happening in my life to blog about, i have some news: i will be preaching a sermon this sunday at my church!

i'll be considering john 1:1-5. i was up very late last night thinking about it, reading through books i have and comparing different versions of the Bible to see how it's translated. hopefully i'll be able to bring out one or two points that will link last week's passage (on the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus in john 20) and next week's passage (genesis 1, first in an 8-week series on genesis 1-3). something that stood out for me last night was john "why" for writing his gospel:

now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. - [john 20:30-31, esv]

i guess we'll see how i go.

i'd really appreciate prayer for this endeavour. i was only asked to do this yesterday and had only a few hours to consider my answer but who knows if this might not be God asking me to step up and try something i've not done before? i've given talks and run small groups for a long time and perhaps this is a chance to exercise a nascent spiritual gift i didn't know i had.

plus, i'm very scared. i want to do a good job.

... thoughts on moving house

i hate moving house. i've done it a few times now but i think i can solidly say that i hate moving house.

as an aside, i saw watchmen at the pictures last night. two thumbs up. i thought it was a more powerful story than v for vendetta but for contemporary audiences i think it's less accessible than v.

i've heard rumours that there's a movie version of shazam in the works. if that's so then i'm intrigued that such a dark and morally/ethically murky story like watchmen could be followed up with a film about a character like captain marvel, whose heart is the purest of any character in the dc comics (and probably marvel) universe(s).

... let's have a meeting in a brewery...

... and another thing i was thinking was this:

i received a letter from citicorp the other day. not me, actually, it wasn't addressed to me personally but i figured, "i'm the householder, i guess i can open it..." guess what it was offering?

yep. a credit card.

i hardly trust myself with money i have, let alone money i don't have. if i may paraphrase groucho marx, i wouldn't want a credit card from a corporation that would give me one.

surely, at least in australia (where statistically i feel like i have more personal credit card debt than i'm ever likely to pay back, even though i have no credit card of my own), it might be considered reckless endangerment to be giving anyone any kind of encouragement to engage in further credit card use.

i know, i know - credit cards can actually be a strong and positive force for wise and productive use of money in modern society. of course, that would be why there's a global credit crisis, wouldn't it? because obviously we're all being so wise and productive in our use of credit cards.

using credit cards isn't even using money. using credit cards is promising to use money to pay the debt incurred by using the credit card. using money is taking cash from your wallet, which you earned through your mode of employment or received as some form of allowance or stipend, and giving said money to (or maybe - if we're really stretching it - using an eftpos transaction with) another individual or business in exchange for goods and/or services. well, actually, that's spending money. you could use money for all kinds of things... lighting cigars, chocking a table leg to level a wobbling table, marking a place in a book, fertilising your orchids...

i think sending applications for credit cards to australians is like advertising an alcoholics anonymous meeting in a brewery.

... bet you didn't expect to read this...

i've been taking salsa dancing lessons. don't get excited, thinking i'm going to burn up the dance floor at your next formal event - i'm looking at it more in terms of a growing experience. apparently the instructor believes that i have a good sense of rhythm and if i can relax more, my instincts for the mechanics of the movements will stand me in good stead learning the dance moves.

hmmm...

in other news, i see that bonds and king gee are moving 1800-odd jobs offshore. that, to me, in these hard economic times seems, on the one hand, to be shrewd business sense. on the other hand, it does seem to be the kind of business practice that will harm australia as a whole, certainly in the short term and probably in the long term.

call me crazy but putting almost two thousand people out of work must be tantamount to commercial terrorism, don't you think? if a drunk person were to drive their car into someone's house and in doing so caused a fire that burned the house down, wouldn't they be held accountable? so how can a business in cold, sober deliberation, effectively set a match to almost 2000 people's lives? not to mention families, their debt loads, other businesses that rely on their money earned being spent with them?

i've said it before and i'll say it again - this is what happens when accountability is shifted from the stakeholder to the shareholder.

here's an idea. turn businesses into co-operatives with a cap on the number of people involved. have the co-operatives organise into unions or whatever but keep the business decisions made by people actually involved in the businesses on a coal-face level.

how about this? make it the responsibility of corporations to find work for those workers who are being "let go" before they're fired, or made redundant, or whatever lame-ass phrase the business community is using to deflect from the fact that a person who has a job today won't have it tomorrow. say, "sure, move those 1800 positions from here in australia to overseas, that's fine, but find all those out-of-work people jobs first".

maybe this kind of labour externalisation could be called treason. it might be acting in the shareholders' best interests but it's hardly acting in australia's best interests...

... immoral?

in an offhand comment a couple of weeks ago in discussion with a work colleague about aspects of different faiths, i mentioned that one of the things i like about Christianity is that, in a sense, we not only get our cake but we can eat it too - and before we've had dinner! we are offered heaven on a stick and need do nothing before saying yes in order to receive it. (kind of true and kind of not, i know.) she remarked that she felt it was immoral.

it's a remark that's been bugging me a bit over the last few weeks while i've been trying to finish a zine about how i came to be a Christian. it's an aspect that i want to address in my zine, since it does form a part of my understanding of my salvation experience (if i can use the phrase), but every time i try to pin down what i think about it my word count blows out. i'm thinking maybe this would make a good issue #2...

that being said, i thought i'd voice a couple of things here and see if people had any thoughts.

i guess the thing that bothered me most is, in the absence of God, from where does a person's moral compass gain its direction? or, if the person does believe in God, or a god, then what do they believe God to be like and how does this, if at all, inform their own moral compass?

it seems to me that, absent God, there is no real need for a moral compass. one simply acts according to one's desires, weighing outcomes against risks and rewards, and considering the gains or shortfalls of long- or short-term investments in pastimes and relationships. if a person feels there is no God and they do not believe they will be caught and punished by authorities, then it truly is up to the whim of that person what they will do with their day - they might be a murderer or a meals-on-wheels driver for invalid shut-ins. they choose their own moral north.

social mores and norms vary with the group, obviously, but even if one does not consciously choose to adopt the moral north of their "developmental context" (shall we say), not consciously choosing an alternative may well yield the same result, albeit with less conviction of belief. however, in the absence of an unchanging moral north, immoral is merely a question of perspective. (see star wars - return of the jedi for more discussion on truth and disparate points of view.)

my faith in Christ is rooted in the Cross and in Jesus' resurrection from the dead. i take these as matters of historical fact, aside from their salvation-meaning for me and in the sweep of Bible history as a whole. that Jesus lived and was killed is corroborated by sources external to the Bible canon, with no vested interest in such corroboration and with far less reliable history/provenance of transmission from antiquity to now.

the Bible tells me that Jesus' death is a sacrifice that turns aside the burning anger of God towards me and directs it upon his innocent Son (mercy, where i do not get what i deserve) and that since i am now counted, according to what may be considered the legal salvation framework within which God deals with human beings, as entirely and completely innocent of any and all wrongdoing, i am accorded adoption as one of God's own children and entry into heaven and eternal life with God (grace, where i get what i do not deserve).

so, heaven is my cake and i can effectively eat of it immediately. there is, of course, a but.

if i claim to be a hawthorn football club fan but dress in essendon bombers red and black, go to training at windy hill and can sing every word to "see the bombers fly up!", people would be forgiven if they thought that i were simply saying one thing and doing another. likewise, if i become a Christian but make no change in the way i live my life, who can say if i'm a Christian at all?

i think that this is what was being thought of as immoral, this salvation-before-works mechanism, that is so alien to pretty much every other religion i've heard of. many seem to be variations on a theme: do this, do that, make enough converts, kill enough chickens, kill enough infidels, do enough good deeds and maybe you'll get into heaven.

maybe. there's no assurance that i can see. the idea popularised in movies like the siege, that islamist extremists believe there to be seventy virgins waiting for them in paradise after a successful suicide bombing attack, is something i don't know the truth of. i've not had any serious discussion about this kind of thing with any muslims. it is about as close to the tangible assurance that Christians are offered as i've seen or heard of anywhere else. the idea that annihilation is the best chance of escaping an endless cycle of reincarnation jells with me, since an eternity in hell and an eternity of reincarnating on earth might (tongue in cheek) not look terribly different.

so how much is enough? how good is good enough? and what yardstick is there to measure by? "i've never killed someone" holds little water if you've never actually wanted to and yet restrained yourself, but is the person who genuinely wants to kill somebody the kind of person you want to meet in heaven? this moral north is pretty wobbly, especially with a good so relative!

Christianity is a funny thing. it offers salvation at no cost to the consumer with a three and a half thousand year old manual on care and feeding of that salvation. God didn't say to the israelites in egypt, sacrifice ten thousand bulls and i'll get you out of there. nope. he said to pharaoh (the guy in power who'd enslaved the israelites), let my people go. once they were let go, then he told them what to do. he took them camping, fed them, their shoes never wore out! once they got to the promised land, conquering it was pretty easy - when they did it the way God said to do it. follow the manual because you have salvation, not in order to have it.

God loves human beings and God loves his creation. the Bible makes pretty clear throughout what it considers to be moral. basically, love God, love others. in many ways, to love is to serve, thus: serve God and serve others. loving someone doesn't necessarily mean agreeing with them, or letting them run riot, or letting them hurt themselves or ruin their life or the lives of people around them. restraining a child from running across a busy street might be a slam-dunk moral choice to protect the child - so why do we not automatically put convicted heroin addicts into that fast detox programme they have in israel, or bring that programme here? if market forces combine (if not conspire) to make medical care or pharmaceutical treatments expensive beyond the reach of people requiring those treatments, why should those forces be allowed to persist?

why should people starve or be homeless when there is anecdotal evidence aplenty, if not statistical proof, that the west produces more food than it can eat, and has unemployed people who could be employed building housing for those who have none?

when enough is as good as a feast, a few in this world stand on their right to keep the leftovers to themselves and despise their responsibility to feed those who have not eaten. this is what comes of having a moral compass that points due relative north.

i'm not perfect. i believe that i am being made perfect. the Bible says it and I believe it. what do you believe?

... travelling man

well, i'm moving house - again.

before i moved out of home, i think we'd moved twice, the third house we lived in being the one my mother still lives in. i shared a flat in north wollongong for a while before making the big move to sydney, where i lived in:

• penshurst,
• penshurst,
• carlton,
• mortdale,
• hurstville,
• kogarah,
• chatswood,
• then chatswood again.

since leaving sydney, i've lived in:

• carnegie,
• elsternwick,
• and soon to be glen iris.

that's a fair bit of moving around, since i moved to sydney in may of 1994.

i never expect the next place to be the last, so i wonder how long it'll be before the next move? hopefully not until some other similarly life-changing thing...

... ahhh! the southerly change!

hot damn! bring on the rain, bring on a decent storm! (or is that too much to ask for?) bring on the cooler temperatures!

roll on winter!

... postgrad wedding blues

i'm not married, i'm not a postgrad (on account of never having grad'd) and at the moment i'm not blue, but i saw this comic strip on phd comics and felt it was a ripsnorter.

two jobs ago, while i was still living in el norte, we used to have a lot of people coming into the shop looking for paper products for creating their own wedding stationery. it's the kind of combination logistical-creative problem i love, since you can work out what you're going to do by considering such variables as:

1. how much money you want to spend,
2. how much time you have available,
3. how much time you want to spend,
4. how creative you'd like to be,
5. how creative you know you actually are,
6. how many flunkies you have available to you in the time you have available, and
7. how many friends and relations would disown you if you actually did elope after all...

i think it's an interesting challenge.

having been involved to varying degrees with a number of weddings now, i have considered from time to time a variety of wedding-related career paths, including:

• professional m.c. (for about five seconds),
• wedding planner,
• wedding stationery consultant, and
• celebrant...

crazily enough, the last one has had the most lasting appeal and i've actually looked into courses and whatnot regarding this.

all of which is thinking-out-loud, random, by-the-by thoughts, sparked by the funny comic strip.

... bitter and cynical?

hmmm...

wow! how amazing. scorching temperatures and the public transport system collapses. quelle tragédie!

why is this a surprise? just as i'm not surprised we have tennis players passing out or retiring hurt at the australian open, i'm not surprised we had the "transport chaos" we experienced today. i'm expecting bushfires and do you know why? because people do stupid things all the time (i know i do) and it doesn't matter how many fire warnings you put up or how many bushfires you fight, there will always be people who want to set fires. so many people operate under the assumption that whatever the statistics or conventional wisdom (neither of which are always right, either), "it won't happen to them".

the australian open operates during summer under insanely variable conditions, usually varying for the worse regarding the players' health. wimbledon always seems to be stopping and starting for rain - certainly the cricket seems to stop and start with the rain. one of the risks you run playing in the australian open is that you may collapse from heat exhaustion.

if you rely on public transport during a heatwave, expect problems. take some water bottles and a book. charge your ipod. do dinner and a movie after work. carpool. do not expect to catch your usual train/tram/bus and have everything working perfectly. think.

i saw a story on a current affair (i think it was) tonight, reporting on drivers who will not wait for rail crossing signals and instead drive around boom gates to cross ahead of trains. how insane is that? this is the world we are living in, where people have such an infinitely high sense of entitlement that even in the face of six train cars full of passengers and travelling at up to a barely brakable hundred kilometres per hour they persist in believing that whatever might happen to someone else stupid enough to try this, it won't happen to them.

perhaps it's too much to expect that people who will try to beat rail crossing signals that have already dropped boom gates might seek to elect governments that will provide infrastructure for the future of people other than themselves...

... i'm reviewing... the situation...

i'm thinking about moving house. i looked at a bunch of for lease ads last night and actually sent out a few tentative inquiries. i don't know if i'll do anything straight away but i feel i'd like to live closer to church and closer to work. it's something i'm toying with at the moment, so if you feel so inclined, please pray that i will make a full, prayerful, considered, thoughtful approach to this... rumination.

... happy new year

it was asked of me that i update my blog. here, then, is the news...

it's a new year. i don't know what you did on new year's eve. i was invited to a boozeup in northcote. since i'm such a boozer, i gave a reluctant "maybe", thanking that it's probably not a terrible thing to get out and meet people and maybe even enjoy myself. however, after buying a bottle of bailey's, having a shower and a shave, getting dressed and heading out with a locked door behind me, i decided that i didn't really want to go.

hard to say, really, what the kicker was. could it be my utter lack of desire to get plastered? my poor inclination in meeting new people and making friends of strangers? my general preference not to surround myself with uncreasingly drunk strangers in any given situation, especially at new year's? or my eminently reasonable desire not to navigate melbourne's otherwise stellar public transport system in the wee hours of new year's day from northcote to south caulfield? hmmm...

so for new year's i ended up at home, listening to music and reading, with a cup of coffee (and some bailey's), and sent a few text messages when the hallowed hour rolled around. happy new year to everyone.

Christmas passed quietly also. my mother visited from el norte and i enjoyed dinner with my mother and sister, and my sister's boyfriend. it's taken me a long time to meet him and i like him. that my sister is happy to hitch her wagon to his speaks a lot more to me for his character than my first impressions, which were good. he seems to me to be very down to earth, which i think is a good thing.

Christmas day i was at church. i had been invited to join my minister's family for lunch, which i gratefully accepted and thoroughly enjoyed. there had been an orphans' lunch planned for some of us neighbours here in my block of flats, which i had factored in but which everyone, it seems, did not. the invitation was providential and i am very glad of it.

my minister now has been my minister before. i think he was at the church i went to when i was at school - certainly he was there when i left - and i'm confident he was there before my conversion but to be honest, i can't recall. i remember being given a copy of leon morris's book the atonement, which i was meant to read a chapter of and then meet for breakfast with my minister and another man at church. it was a great thing to do and i'm glad the effort was made by these two men, whom i so poorly repaid with my efforts at reading the book. i learned important lessons about meeting regularly with people outside church, about deliberate fellowship (and accountability, a lesson that i never seem to stop being taught), lessons which served me in good stead for the years i was part of a prayer triplet at another church. it's something i miss.

work is good. i realised that this Christmas just passed was my 20th retail "xmas". i began working at venture ("venture - value - value with a double-v!") in october 1989, making december 2008 my 20th working in retail. frightening. also, my first rostered sunday in about eight years. i am getting to know better my workplace, my role, my co-workers, the customers and the area we service. all places (workplaces or workplace locales) have their quirks. i'm told i'm doing very well but i continue the pessimist, convinced that i'll make a mistake and the rug will be pulled out from under me and i'll be revealed for the fraud that i fear i am... so nothing really new there, i suppose.

i am looking forward to visiting el norte in february for a while, seeing some friends and taking in a trade fair while i'm there. with any luck i'll get a decent thunderstorm or two, which i sorely miss down here, south of the border. i would like to visit the united states in august to attend the portland zine symposium and i am hoping to sock away enough cash to make that happen with a minimum of fuss. we'll see.

i finally saw grindhouse at the astor on friday night - i can't believe it took me so long to see it! it was great. i'm just over halfway through the peter biskind book, easy riders, raging bulls, about hollywood in the 70s that i have borrowed from a coworker. i'm thoroughly enjoying it and every chapter brings with it flashbacks to my cinema studies at uni and the marvellous lecturers i had then.

i was invited along to a cafe after church on sunday night and had a grand old time. the cafe had to serve us on split tables because we didn't all fit in at once but that was ok. i ate a thoroughly delicious lemon tart and enjoyed very pleasant company throughout, something definitely to be repeated on both counts.

coming up next, what are the obama kids having for lunch today? (ask jon stewart on the daily show) then sports...

... reading...

wow, i've been reading a lot lately.

• eragon, christopher paolini
  
• twilight, stephenie meyer
  
• breakfast at tiffanys, truman capote
  
• the jane austen book club, karen joy fowler
  
• the gargoyle, andrew davidson
  
• notes from undergound: zines and the politics of alternative culture, stephen duncombe
  

...and they're just the ones i've finished!

i'm also working on (albeit infrequently or haphazardly):

• how to eat, nigella lawson
  
• war and peace, leo tolstoy
  
• type, david silverman
  
• easy riders, raging bulls, peter biskind
  
• intimate ephemera, anna poletti
  

... and, of course, the Bible!

all this in the space of the last three and a bit months, since i began my new job. imagine if i were working in a video store!

... do we really think they'll be left out anyway?

bloody telstra!

how long did they have a monopoly (virtual or otherwise) in australia? under whatever name?

so if all there is to the report is what appears on the face of it, why should they whinge and moan about being left out of the tender process for our national broadband network?

this is classic. what is the thinking? "wow, we live on this huge island and we're so far away from each other! why don't we just try and make more people talk to each other on those really long pieces of string with tin cans attached instead of making new strings with better tin cans?"

it is yet another example of what happens when responsibility to the stakeholder is superseded by obligation to the shareholder. the consumer is consulted only in order to find some new product or service to sell back to them!

with better communication lines, broadband, satellite services, whatever, the need to clump people together like a tonne of marbles on one corner of a giant trampoline is reduced further. large-scale administration can be decentralised and opportunities for growth can be passed to rural and provincial cities, such as grafton, dubbo, cobar, broken hill, griffith, shepparton, warnambool, mildura, ballarat, bairnsdale, mount gambier, mount isa, cairns, longreach, cunnamulla, port hedland, geraldton, albany, kalgoorlie. why not encourage the growth of as many of these rural cities as possible, instead of contributing to the ridiculous urban sprawl that is such a blight on our country?

wow... perhaps with better communication and people moving out of the capital and satellite cities, there might be a greater demand for better rail and air connections? (oh don't be an idiot! people will simply bitch about having to sdrive their cars so far! what were thinking?!)

i don't know. telstra sucks. we could have had a far better network if we'd invested more in it decades ago. of course, that would have required a bit of foresight and that was so abundant in the 1980s...

... not quite in the club yet

i watched the jane austen book club today, just now (about half an hour ago, in fact), and i really enjoyed it. i think i'm tempted to actually read through the jane austen canon. pretty scary, given my terrible experience of jane austen at high school.

we had to study persuasion and i really didn't enjoy it at all. i enjoyed less that austen had lengthened the book from 29 chapters to 44! that said, i always felt guilty that i hadn't given the book a better chance, especially since our teacher was such a huge jane austen fanatic - i always worried that my dislike for the book was received more as a personal insult and less as coming from a sci-fi nut having to read period romance and social commentary.

so i'm going to get the novel of the jane austen book club, read that, and then perhaps read the novels afterwards.

... i am wrong

...apparently.

i was told today that i cannot be discriminated against.

not that there is a law that says discriminating against me personally is illegal but rather that, by virtue of my skin colour, sexual preference, religious preference, socio-economic background, personal tastes, age, country of birth and place of residence, it is a political-logical impossibility that i should be discriminated against.

... things to do when you're home sick

well, when you're home sick, feeling nauseous and dealing with diarrhoea, sometimes you end up casting about for things to do to pass the time. here's a list:

1. sleep;
   
2. read a book;
   
3. watch a movie;
   
4. follow the united states presidential election on various tv channels;
   
5. play dune 2000;
   
6. make a zine;
   
7. do some washing (if you feel confident you can get to the laundry without needing the loo!);
   
8. update your weblog;
   
9. clean the bathroom;
   
10. trawl wikipedia and other websites, trying to understand how the u.s. electoral processes work.

of course, i could call refund home loans and try to find out how on earth buying into a home loan provider franchise could possibly be a good thing for anyone but me (maybe). o me! o life!

... and among other things, i took a test!

Your result for What Your Taste in Art Says About You Test...

Traditional, Vibrant, and Tasteful

1 Islamic, -2 Impressionist, 1 Ukiyo-e, -2 Cubist, -4 Abstract and -12 Renaissance!

Islamic art is developed from many sources: Roman, Early Christian, and Byzantine styles were taken over in early Islamic architecture; the architecture and decorative art of pre-Islamic Persia was of paramount significance; Central Asian styles were brought in with various nomadic incursions; and  Chinese influences .  Islamic art uses many geometical floral or vegetable designs in a repetitive pattern known as arabesque.  It is used to symbolize the transcendent, indivisible and infinite nature of Allah.

People that like Islamic art tend to be more traditional people that appreciate keeping patterns that they learned and experienced from their past.  It is not to say that they are not innovative personalities, they just do not like to let go of their roots.  They like to put new ideas into details and make certain that they will work before sharing them with others.  Failure is not something they like to think about because they are more interested in being successful and appreciated for their intelligence.  These people can also be or like elaborate things in their life as long as they are tasteful.  They tend to prefer geometric patterns and vibrant colors.

Take What Your Taste in Art Says About You Test at HelloQuizzy