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Okay so that's my own little pun implying that some of my more recent ramblings have strayed from my original intent of a positive and positively humorous random outlook on this thing called life.
So in case you all were terribly sad at not hearing from me last week, I got a little swamped with work and church stuff. Both of which are going quite well right now. Student Community (aka the student ministries at Community Christian Church) is getting ready for this thing called Project Serve - which is a massive day of service projects in May that's a fundraiser for the ministries - and it looks like this year is going to be about ten times larger than last (going from 15 volunteers to 150!)
The most surprising thing about it all, though, is that yours truly is somehow in charge of it. Well, technically, I'm second-in-command but I'm overseeing a large chunk of the administrative and communication aspects of it. As of now I pretty much have no clue what I'm doing (and I half wonder why I end up being trusted with leadership roles in the first place...heh heh...) but the people working with me are super encouraging and have worked on this project for the past 2 years. I'm excited. I think it will be cool.
I have to pause for a second here to give an apology/shoutout to Heidi E (aka Hiiii-deeeeeeee....j/k!) because in my ranting about V-Day I forgot to mention that Feb 14 is her birthday!!! Happy B-Day on V-Day!!!!!!!!!!!!! And while I'm on the subject of birthdays, happy birthday this Thusday to the super spiffy Tony "Ant-nee" G (who reminded us on Friday why we originally coined the phrase "Tony Time" ...hee hee j/k)
So yeah, I was watching part of the Grammy Awards last night. It looked like Norah Jones was walking away with quite a slew of little gold phonographs and all I can say is "I Don't Know Why" everyone likes that song! Personally I find her annoying to the same degree as Michael Bolton and Kenny G. but they probably won lots of Grammys too. The three of them should collaborate on an album that would instantly go to the top of the best selling charts of "Music To Be Played In Dentist Offices and Elevators". Oh well. Anyone who wants to can join my "Avril Lavigne is Much Cooler" anti-Norah club. Or you can write me a three page dissertation style reply to this about why you love Norah and think she deserved every award she got. In that case I'll just laugh at you.
Just Kidding. I guess that lst paragraph kind of destroys my "can't believe it's not bitter" subject. I really don't have an Anti-Norah club. I do have a COPPs club though (and a shoutout to "Roxie" who knows what it stands for cause she's a COPP too).
Okay this e-mail is really boring. The only funny work story I have to tell involves an Australian Bill Gates. It's not that hilarious but for lack of anything funnier right now, here goes. The main computer in our lab is always having problems with Microsoft Office programs (yes, "Auto Format" is the single most helpful and annoying feature ever invented) so Helen, our lab manager, is always complaining about "Bill Gates Problems" (linking Access and Excel files was exceptionally problematic). Anyhoo, later on we got a document sent to us for editing and collabarating on and it was from Australia. It must have had some sort of virus or weird format protection on it because every time changes were made the whole computer froze up or crashed. needless to say, every computer problem in our lab was explained with "Blame Bill Gates" or "Blame Australia" [no offense, Beth ;) ] It was then that we developed the conspiracy theory that Bill Gates might really be Australian and can be blamed for every technology issue we have from now on.
Wow. That's pretty bitter as well. For the sake of ending on a non-bitter note - I'll be in Champaign-Urbana (aka Shampoo-Banana) for a little while this weekend! Yay! Woohoo for visiting Chambana! Cool beans if anyone wants to hangout call my cell (the number's in my sig file below!)
Not Bitterfully Yours,
lisa :)
p.s. I promise that my next LoL will be much more worth the read and much less a total waste of your time and inbox space!!
Okay so I'm not technically a cynic in the sense that the true pessimists out there would lynch me before counting me as one of them but alas, I do have my cynical ranting moments (flashback to "CamPAIN Season") and this is going to be one of them. Why? you ask...
Because it's Valentine's Day. yay. hooray. (Tosses confetti in a most unexcited manner with a monotone-Ben-Stein-style shout of "woo hoo".) Call it V-Day, Happy Hearts Day, the Feast of Saint Valentine, or Single's Awareness Day but whatever spin you put on it it's inescapably cheesy and annoying to the max with it's froo froo Hallmark-iday sap. (Spoken like a true single, eh?) I was tempted to fill this message with all of my spewage about the day (Never trust a holiday that relies on pink as it's main marketing color...) but I've found that there are many more intelligent and amusing comments to be made and so I turn the floor over to various other authors. Plus, to the best of my knowledge only 38% of this list is currently single like me so I'm guessing the majority of you will be spending tomorrow with your sweeties and wouldn't fully appreciate all that I could share. All the quotes are somehow realted to love, Valentine's Day, relationships or something related to all that. (All the authors will reamin anonymous too so some of you are quoted here along with poets, lyricists, random people from work, and even yours truly.) Enjoy.
Quotefully Yours,
lisa :)
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"Courtship, like PCP, brings out the hidden reserves of strength and bravery that you didn't know you had. It also makes you do dumb things that end you up in the hospital or jail."
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"...there will be more [guys in your life]." "What if there aren't more?" "Then you'll get some cats."
***
"Actually there are a lot of women out there who hate themselves and are
plagued by eating disorders and self-mutilating tendencies and they live
with a lot of shame. They feel like they are complete failures and messes and their parents, teachers and pastors disapprove of them. They begin to find their identity in the things that they do to punish themselves....I'm just really mad that our culture makes little girls hate themselves."
***
"Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."
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"I'm so sick of these reality dating shows. Like what's the deal with Joe Millionare? I mean I could see the appeal of the show if the guy maybe had more than three active brain cells! Joe Caveman is a little more like it!"
***
"Live right now and just be yourself. It doesn't matter if it's good enough for someone else."
***
"Actually over time I've ceased to see beauty in runway models or any
models for that matter. They all look sad and they are just a sack of
bones and they have to maintain this falseness in order to keep their
jobs. They have to defy nature and be something totally "other" then what was intended for women to be. It's to a point where they have become the standard for beauty even though they are just a bunch of freaks of nature. And they even have to go under the knife to maintain the freakdom. Of course that's all we have to compare ourselves to so we think we're the freaks."
***
"How can the world want me to change? They're the ones that stay the same."
***
"Do you think pre-meds ever send anatomically appropriate Valentines? Like 'I love you from the bottom of my left ventricle'? Or maybe 'I love you with all of my heart and my aortic arch and my superior vena cava and my pulmonary arteries.....'?"
***
"I have a theory. It goes something like this. In America at least, the single greatest deterrent to the advancement of the kingdom of God is...breakups. Is...unreconciled relationships. In our culture. In our generation. Unforgiveness is our death amd our destruction."
***
"I don't buy into all this nonsense about scaring a guy off by calling him. We're talking about the gender that stormed the beaches at Normandy, and yet suddenly they're standing on a chair screaming 'EEK!' because the phone rang and it's a female on the line."
***
"He's the one who will be missing you, you'll only miss the man you wanted him to be."
***
"So basically you see realtionships as a means to an end where that end is your own happiness?" "Uh...yeah" "And how is that not the definition of selfish?"
***
"In literature as in love we are often astonished at what is chosen by others."
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"Girls are like clowns, both wear makeup and scare me."
***
"Just remember two things: number one - he's a boy ; number two - boys are s-t-o-o-p-i-d!"
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"Everyone quotes Romeo and Juliet as this great story of love, but, hello! they both die at the end of the play! Where's the love in that?!?? In fact the only one with any chance of a happy normal life is the narrator! Heck with love, I just want to narrate!"
*
"There's a reason Shakespeare said 'Never was there a tale of more woe'." "Well, yeah cause if he said 'Never was there a tale of more love' it would have to be Juliet and Romeov and that just sounds stupid!"
***
"Be happy. But don't be happy like a honeymoon, be happy like a health club. Work hard. Mature. Challenge and be challenged. Grow stronger. Be happy."
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"Every guy is at least 10% jerk, it's just that some actually reveal it right away."
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"Valentine schmalentine!" "Did you just say....schmalentine??"
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"I don't wanna lose you, I don't wanna use you just to have somebody by my side and I don't wanna hate you. I don't wanna take you, but I don't wanna be the one to cry. There's a danger in loving somebody too much
and its sad when you know its your heart you can't trust. There's a reason why people don't stay where they are cause sometimes love just ain't enough"
***
"Being single is like being Spiderman: it is my gift, it is also my curse."
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"Immature love is to love someone because you need them. Mature love is to need someone because you love them."
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"It's one thing to know one's heart. It is another thing to admit it.
It is something altogether different to follow it."
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p.s. I have 6 or 8 more really awesome quotes - some from the world's coolest authors! - but they're faithfully recorded in my Quotebook Notebook which is the only one of 80 some notebooks in my bedroom that I can't find at present! But I guess I've said enough. Shoutouts of the week go to those of you who will recognize your own quips from this list. ...even bigger shoutouts to those of you who are brilliant enough to recognize mine ;)
p.p.s. Happy Valentine's Day.
Welcome (back) to my crazy weekly e-mail ramblings! (LoL = lisa on life = life of lisa = crazy semi-coherent caffinated thoughts!)
Before I go too far on the tangent du jour I want to give some birthday shoutouts to three super spiffy people who just recently or will very soon celebrate being 22: Igor (sometime end of January?), Nick (February 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or 5th?) and Cindy (February 8th)! (and pardon my lack of specific days) Happy Birthdays!!!
And also I just have to say how cool it is that it's now FebRRUUUUary! Back in sixth grade "February" was one of our spelling words (remember the good old days of spelling tests??) and my super cool English teacher Mrs. Brons told us all to pronounce it FebRRRUUUUUUUUary (with a super long "rooooooo" in there) because everyone always spelled it Febueary or Febuary or Feburary or some other wrong spelling. And a week of shouting "FebRRRUUUUary" along with my entire class must have worked because now I can spell it right! :)
So anyhoo, I think therefore I'm not TOO bored. This is my own unique ripoff of "I think therefore I am" or if you prefer the more sophisticated Latin "cogito ergo sum" (doesn't it just sound cooler in Latin???). But basically this cheesy little phrase is the foundation of Cartesian philosophy (aka the philosophy of Renee DesCartes) that proves without a doubt that I actually did learn something from Philosophy 101! (In truth the only reason I remember this is because I had a TA who was way too fond of the phrase "Cartesian philosophy" and our class syllabus was cluttered with countless weeks of "cogito argument" assignments as well as a movie night of The Matrix relative to DeCartes...fun stuff!)
Now before I go too far overboard with Latin phrases and sophmore year memories, I have been keeping myself unbored with some cool philisophi- theolgic- psychomental thoughts that I've for some strange reason decided to share. Forgive the bizzarre and slightly offbeat nature of what will most likely seem out of character for the typical LoL, but I have a little story that I've been pondering about franchises. Now's where you're probably thinking to yourself, Self, what is this nonsense about franchises and how in the world is this going to spawn a philisophical and theological point?? Stay with me.
Think for a minute about franchises.... I was gonna use a McDonald's analogy but that's a little too big so think instead about a local bank. There's a bank manager who has a specific plan for his bank and how he wants things run (customer service, account policies, days off etc.) So he sets up his plan in a certain community and hires a couple good people to run The Bank. Years go by and The Bank does well. The bank manager reaches the community and provides them with good interest rates, good service and free checking and in return the community invests their money, avoids bouncing checks and is generally happy. But then as even more years go by the bank manager decides that he can try something new and expand things. See if he had multiple Banks all over he could reach even more people with his awesome services and banking innovations. So he decides to go for the franchise route. This way there can be a Bank in any and every community but throughout all this expanding he stays firm to his original design of what he wants his Banks to look like and how they are run. The manager can then go on cross country tours and know that each one of his banks - regardless of what the building or neighborhood is like - is designed by his specifications and he can walk into any one, anywhere and feel right at home.
I thought up this analogy on the train the other day. I'm not going to go too deep with explaining the comparison but I was reading a really boring part of Exodus (this goes with one of my 2003 resolutions, and after all the Bible is a bestseller) where God's talking to Moses about building the Arc of the covenant (think Indiana Jones & the Raiders of the Lost Arc...). Anyhoo, God's got all these extensive specifications about what he wants done (sizes, materials, layouts,etc) and the whole point is that God's presence is going to come dwell in this Arc (basically a fancy way to say God wants them to build a super spiffy box for him to live in). It occurred to me though that just as God was specific in the Old Testament about having a place to occupy among His people, in the New Testament it translates to specifcations about how Christians should model their lives (i.e. God chooses to live within people and wants their lives to reflect his designs). So essentially modern day Christ followers are kind of like franchise versions of the Arc of the Covenant.
Like I said it's philisophical, theological and psychomental...kind of like me!! ;) And if that was a little too crazy and Bible-y for you just smile and nod and know that when it comes to me and my random thoughts they're as random as they are mine.
philisophi-theologic-psychoment-ally yours,
lisa :)
p.s. In the spirit of sharing really random radio commercials there was an ad for Eric & Kathy's morning show on Mix 101.9 and they were interviewing John Mayer and he was joking around with his own spoof of his song "Your Body is a Wonderland" and the part that I'm still laughing about is him singing "Your body is a taco stand..."
