The Bipolar Otaku

I went to take a look at a couple of new build housing developments today, one in Sterling Heights and one in Clinton Township. The Sterling Heights one had houses upto 2000 sqft, but the layout wasn't that great, and it just made the house look a lot smaller than it should be. The one in Clinton Township, though... I fell in love with the model. Too bad the model was 3000 sqft and probably cost well into the $350 range. But they had a 2400 sqft model, the Huntington... well actually it can be 2500 sqft with some upgrades. And it basically had everything I liked about the model, less a few completely unnecessary rooms. Cathedral ceiling master bedroom, awesome master bath, great big kitchen, huge great room, big dining/family room, spacious closets... it was just fantastic... But it would cost me $300k, but it might be a lot more if I don't reserve the house by the end of the month: Friday. Arg... What to do, what to do?

Lately, I've been listening to the soundtrack of the musical Godspell. When I was in high school, the school theater group performed it, and I've had the song Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord stuck in my head ever since. Then just recently, I bought the CD and have been listening to it ever since.

That being said, I've had several of the other songs stuck in my head too. One of them, in the 2001 touring cast version, features a modified version of the quote I posted yesterday. That song is call Tower of Babel. Here are the original lyrics of the song [Lyrics] and here are the lyrics from the 2001 version [Lyrics. If you read the lyrics, you'll see that it's just a whole bunch of paraphrased philosophies, which collectively make nothing but a whole bunch of meaningless babelling rabble.

But it's making me start to think once again... Why do I believe in God? Or what is the God I believe in?

I guess I'd have to start by looking at the garden of Eden and the creation of man. The couple was told that he was not allowed to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Lucifer talked them into eating the fruit. They were banished from Eden. Some mythologies (I can't site anything, though) seem to point out that there was also a Tree of Life, and that if they were allowed to stay they would figure out that eating this fruit would have given them immortality, and therefore put humanity on even footing with God. It's also interesting to point out that Lucifer the bringer of light appears also in Greek/Roman mythologies as a Titan Prometheus rather than as an Archangel, but still is cast off by God for giving humans the knowledge of fire. So what we have in both mythos is a blessed being who shows humanity the knowledge that was to be preserved for God alone. In Greek/Roman, this being is revered; in christian, this being is codemned. In both cases, God acts as if in fear of his own creation.

The point I'm trying to make? God didn't want us to think. I find it offensive that we should have had no intellect whatsoever. Granted, perhaps we all would have had a simpler life, but it just seems our moronicism wouldn't have allowed us much pleasure either.


So how do I believe in a God that wamted us to be stupid? What if I were to presume that he originally planned us to stay dumb, but later decided the smart us was still good (as long as we were willing to follow the rules). That might be what I think... But doesn't that imply that God made an error initially, that we wouldn't be able to handle the responibility if logical reasoning? Or have we been proving that we aren;t wprthy?

But why were we allowed to eat the fruit in the first place? If we weren't supposed to do it, we shouldn't have been able to do it...


Well, there it is... DOUBT.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant,
gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people won't feel insecure around you.
We are all meant to shine, as children do.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously
give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.

a return to love - marianne williamson

Did my first review with my boss. Good but need more field experience. Pretty much the truth.

I didn't wake up, though, so I missed my doctors appointment. Rescheduled 9AM Tuesday... I couldn't wake up for a 12 o'clock, what makes me think I can wake up at 9?

And my emails are getting pathetic... The typical day now gives me 11 emails advertising something, 2 of which I read, and 58 spam emails. That's right, no personal email... Pathertic, I say.

Crippy... A new update for FFXI... is taking 3 freaking hours to fricking download... which is wierd because I could have sworn it said all the files had been downloaded already.

Tomorrow... hmm...

Boss is going to come to the plant tomorrow. As he hasn't seen me all year (probably not since October, actually) he figured he'd come in the beginning of 2nd shift and visit.

I've got another psych appointment tomorrow. Haven't seen her in 6 weeks, I think. A lot has happened since then... What should I talk about? Competitions, retreats, road trips, mortgages... And some things in there I won't mention, friends I never met, friends who didn't meet me.

I've been stalling on picking a real estate agent. Maybe I should do that tomorrow too.

So I get to work today and notice a voicemail... one of the guys asking me if it's true that I'm moving to a new position in the company. Hmm. Odd, I haven't applied for any new jobs. And when I get inside, another guy finds me and asks what me new job is. What new job? I guess I'm being transferred out of the group. Why haven't I heard about this?

Well, part of the rumor can be dismissed by a misunderstanding... A guy from my old company came in and introduced himself as the guy that's replacing me after I took a job at my new company. Someone overheard this conversation and mistook it as me being transferred.

But another part I'm not sure about. Evidently my boss, in a group meeting, said that someone else would be leaving the group and the implication is that that person would be me. Huh?

So, yeah, I'm home. I slept 9 hours. It was a long week, but certainly not long enough. I still have to go to work tomorrow, and I'm not looking forward to it. Plus I'm coming down with a cold, and it might even bronchitis.

While I was down at the FIRST National Championships, I did a lot of different roles: realtime score keeper, (unofficial) official score keeper, field resetter, queuer, radio signal watcher, announcer's assistant... But it was definitely worth driving down there. Now I plan on volunteering at more events, like the Great Lakes and Detroit Regionals. Maybe they'll let me be the official scorer or a ref next year. I think I'd make a good ref. I've already talked to some of the Ford mentors, and they might put me in charge of scoring at Sweet Repeat this October; if they don't need me there, I'll be a ref.

But long before that, I want to come up with a plan to make my team self-sufficient as far as engineering, deisgn, and manufacturing goes. We'll be ditching our current lead engineeer because he simply couldn't work with the team... he designed the robot pretty much ignoring input from the team, he built the robot pretty much by himself with as little help from the students (he even kicked some students out of the build team because a student "filed a piece wrong"), he refused to listen to anyone about how to make things work correctly, he got pissy and angry when there were too many people helping out on the robot, and he was pissed at the teachers because they gave him too many restrictions when they told him to let the students do more. In other words, he has pissed off everyone and he has been voted off the island. We might be keeping some of his engineers, though.

For now, I've pointed my brother in the direction of a number of companies that might be able to sponsor the team. I've had a couple of ideas for simple tasks that I think might help the students solidify a design team. I'm pushing to have them build a FIRST Lego League team at their middle school. I might even donate a Lego Mindstorms kit to help them get started. But first, I have to get out of vacation mode, I have to get into house shopping mode, and I have to get my act together in general.

I'm home... zzz...

The Wings won their game! (Yay!) I got to see the finale of the Apprentice! (Yay!) Real-time scoring is a much more boring job than I initially expected! (Yay!... err, boo...)

While my brother and I were golfing this morning, I was doing terrible... missing the ball over and over as overextended my swing... We finally got to the 17th hole (we started on 10), as my frustration got worse and worse... Then grabbed my 3 wood and thought to myself, "If God needed me to be a golfer, then I would be golfing." Needless to say I hit the ball semi-consistently for the last two holes.

Welcome to the 2004 FIRST National Competition, held at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, Georgia!



I dropped the field resetter role and took up the real-time score keeping role. I'll be taking care of either Red or Blue on the Newton field. I have no official impact upon the competition, but I still have to watch and try to keep it as accurate as possible. Well, I guess I better read up on the rules for penalties...

I'm here! My brother and I drove down (he finally decided to come along sometime Monday night) so we finally checked into the hotel. Luckily, they have wireless internet access in the hotel, so it works out pretty well.

Golf is the first thing planned for tomorrow, I think. Tomorrow night is the FIRST volunteers banquet. Then field resetting for the rest of the week....

So, I went to Fast-A-Thon. Not eating for 31 hours wasn't a struggle at all. But it did get boring at times. First of all, there were only about half the number of people there usually are. Second, there was only one other guitarist to learn from. Third, there were no other fluffy bunnies. Yeah, she ditched on me. I don't know why, but she ditched on me. I guess it saved me from dealing with the confusing question of how to tell her that it would be really cool if we could stay in touch, instead of letting this just be a friendship that starts and ends without a whimper. But it also meant that there was no 3-hour math of "You Suck You Lose", or whatever random game we would end up creating. But before the retreat, I tried to buy a carton of Aberfoyle water, but I couldn't find any at Nino's; perhaps that was just a coincidence.

But it was okay. We ended up just doing a lot of Mafia (though I never did get to be anything besides Sheriff). And I spent some time working on my D Major. And I helped teach Marius how to throw a frisbee. And we did a human knot, after a couple of other mediocre attempts at group events. I jumpstared the youth minister's car twice. I let my car get used for grocery runs. It was a lot of fun, as always... but it seemed like it could have been so much more. Oh well. I better get ready for Easter Vigil. I gotta start packing after that's done, also.

I've got things packed pretty tightly...

Thursday night (tonight): Laundry
Friday morning: Last meal
Friday noon: Good Friday Mass and start of Fastathon
Saturday 8pm: Easter Vigil and end of fastathon
Sunday morning: Easter mass
Sunday afternoon: Easter celebration at aunt's house
Monday afternoon: Work
Tuesday afternoon: Start driving to Atlanta
Turesday night: arrive at hotel
Wednesday day: sightsee
Wednesday night: volunteer's banquet
Thursday - Saturday: volunteering and stuff
Saturday night: start driving back
Sunday morning: get home
Monday afternoon: work

Well, for one thing, today was the single busiest days I've had at work for months. One problem after another... Things that we had explicitly fixed returned... Just a mess.

But besides that, a delusion of grandeur is starting to bloom... that is my grand arrival as a big time real estate investor! Yes, I think it can happen! That shall be my golden parachute! Yet I still think about my parents' condo down in Florida, the one that the property management company could never rent out, and my mom even ended up selling at a loss (but somehow making a profit, as her accountant had over depreciated, thus making her income taxes higher. I hope to do better than they did. But at least thinking about it makes the risks feel real...

Bluetooth... heh heh. There was always something about hearing about Bluetooth that made me want to go buy stuff. So now, the latest one is Logitech's DiNovo set. Kind of nice having a separate keypad, because it lets me do player control with my left hand (like in RPGs if you hadn't figured it out), and the cordless mouse is always a good thing (no mor tangled wires, and even this keyboard is easier to type on (though my laptop area is totally ergonomically challenging).

But I guess it's kind of wierd that in the past 6 years, I've bought more keyboards than I've bought computers..

So I think I mentioned that I drove around the neighborhood in Whitelake, where that one property I was talking about was.

Well, I made it to the street, and found that the neighborhood was a pretty nice one, as you would expect. There are a bunch of little canals and rivers that lead out to the lake. Most of the houses are on these canals, but the house in question openned out to the lake itself. An absolutely gorgeous view, judging by the view from the street. But since the house isn't even on the market, I wasn't really sure which house it was. I snapped some pictures of houses that fit the supposed description... I was looking for a 2500 sq ft. house, which really limited it to one... so I assumed that the basement must have been counted in the calculation. That left a couple of houses that looked to be in really good condition. And there was one house that I kind of just glanced past, because it really didn't look like it was sellable. For one thing, the driveway slanted downward, and the garage was in the basement. Well, when I talked to my buddy about it a couple days later, I found out, that was the house. The only house on the street that I didn't like...

So, perhaps waterfront isn't for me right now. Or perhaps there is something about this house that I haven't found out yet. I don't know...

But on a related note. I've gotta pick a real estate agent.

And on an unrelated note, I've gotta make hotel reservations for Atlanta. Or maybe I should cancel altogether. I'm really leaning toward bugging out.

So, I walked outside the city of Windhurst today, and was promptly killed by a nearby rabbit, just as I predicted (albeit, jokingly). But after that, I managed to eke out a couple of levels, finished up some quests, caught a few fish, and despite becoming almost completely broke, I've managed to make my finances rebound into the 300's... Not rich, buy I can finally start to afford spell ingredients for other quests. But its late, and I'm having problems keeping my eyes open. So that's it for tonight.

First time I've been able to blog since March 31, because the hotel we were in didn't even have a business center or any internet access whatsoever.

So we did pretty well, 5 wins, 3 losses, 15th place over all. If we would have had a slightly higher overall score (2 pts or so), we would have become the 8th seed. But, we didn't. Nor were we selected as an alliance partner. Despite all that, some teams were afraid of us; they felt the need to specifically block off our chute a couple of times. And we won the judges award, so that's cool too.

But, I was tired and decided to drive home in the early afternoon instead of waiting for the awards ceremony. I'm guessing we haven't won anytihng else.

That's about it for now.