The Rest of 2004

(…and a tiny bit of 2005)

WARNING: This will be very long. Feel free to read it in chunks, if you wish. Now, you may proceed, with caution.

There were two more hurricanes in 2004, one in early September (in fact this may be the same as the one I described in the last entry; I’m getting my dates muddled). But if so I’ll talk about a different significance of it. You see, there’s something I haven’t been mentioning in all these stories: a girl. In fact, a girl who worked at Excelsis, and had done so since the previous summer (of 2003), when I met her. For various reasons which I’d find it tedious to go into, I thought she was really cool and was attracted to her. So, when I found out senior year that I would be moving back to Orlando for work, I was excited about the possibility of a relationship with this girl.

Accordingly, I spent a lot of time, once I moved back, getting to know her and generally making it obvious that I was interested. At times she seemed to have caught on to the fact, and at times she seemed oblivious–to the point where my over-analytic mind wavered between deciding that she was just unaware of my feelings, and therefore I should make them more obvious, and on the other hand that she was more than aware, and simply not interested herself.

Well, after a few months of this, and just a lot of vague tension and awkwardness in the air whenever we would hang out, we were talking during that early September hurricane. The conversation got to a point where we were talking about romantic relationships for some reason, and so the context was ripe for innuendo. And innuendos did indeed fly–so clearly, in fact, that I was almost 100% certain that my second guess above was right–she knew what I was thinking, but was not interested herself. So there it was–door closed on the possibility of a relationship.

I was pretty bummed out and disappointed for a few days, but in reality felt more foolish for letting my heart get so into the possibility of a relationship than sad about or angry with her. In the end I felt much better, without this cloud of vague uncertainty always hanging around–I felt freed, and a bit cleansed. In fact, silly though it is, it was essentially an imaginary breakup. That’s how much my mind gets carried away!

Anyway, I didn’t have too much time to think about it, because just a few days later, I went to Spain! I’d flown through Madrid before, but had never had time to wander around, so the prospect of a week and a half in Madrid and Barcelona was enticing, especially given circumstances just mentioned. I was traveling with my parents, the larger half of which had business there (in fact, it was my fifth time to go on this annual trip with my parents–previous destinations included France, England, Ireland, and Portugal). We spent a few days before the business meetings in Madrid, hanging around, eating dinner at 10pm, drinking one of the two kinds of beer, or preferably sangria de cava, having a go at various tapas, and so forth.

The meetings were in Barcelona, and we were set up in an awesome hotel in the shopping district. Some of my Dad’s colleagues had brought a kid as well, including one Laura whom I’d hung out with on previous trips. Moreover, since my awesome pal Nate Akers, from Orlando, who sort of randomly knew Laura (who goes to Cal Poly), was in Italy for a semester abroad, he hopped on a plane and came to Barcelona to chill with Laura and I. So, I spent most of the days wandering miles and miles of the Barcelona streets with Nate and Laura or my parents and their friends. It was incredibly relaxing, not to mention the insane dinners that were thrown at us every evening. Time with my folks was very positive, too, as I was able to talk about everything that was going on in my life at great depth, including my endless (i.e., endlessly overrated and whined-about) struggles with the females. My folks, being wise people, were able to give me lots of helpful comments there.

Well, enough about Barcelona. I already put a photo album of sorts online, so instead of adding pictures here, I’ll just link to that: Spain Photo Album. Some pretty good photos in there, including the one from which I made the new banner at the top of this page! (It was from the inside of La Sagrada Familia).

About the time I got back from Spain, I was finishing up on transcriptions for Excelsis (I’d actually been doing a lot of that in Spain on my laptop, believe it or not). This was cause for much rejoicing, despite the fact that I absolutely loved the material I was transcribing. My next project was to be designing and implementing the web application which would serve as not only a helper application to the Excelsis desktop client, but also as a gateway into the course material and a stockpile of community tools for those taking Excelsis courses. This was to take me even longer than the transcriptions–I’ve only just finished a bare-bones v1.0 beta, at about 4500 lines of PHP code.

Anyway, so I was working on that, and then I turned 22 on September 26. This was, maybe ironically (though I can’t figure out how it would be ironic), during the last of the 2004 hurricanes. This one may have been called Jeanne. My family had a nice little dinner for me while the storm did its thing outside. The previous year had been probably the best of my life, and I was sorry to see it go, but very excited about the future, given my love of what I was doing for work. My biggest wish (or did I dare make it a prayer?) for the upcoming year was, as it has been since I was 13, that I would fall in love. Yes, it’s stupid–I just read way too much fantasy in my formative adolescent years, and now I’m stuck with the sentiment. To my credit, I’m pretty realistic about the quality of the sentiment, and am able most of the times to treat it as just that: a sentiment. On the other hand, people occasionally ask me, “What if God doesn’t mean you to fall in love?” And I just laugh. Not because I don’t believe in God, but because to me the question sounds like, “What if God doesn’t mean you to be saved?” That, of course, is a silly question (unless you believe some wack predestinatorial deal, I guess). It might be helpful (or at least less painful) to be less confident there, but I can’t.

At this point (in the story), things with the girl at work are fine, as far as I know. I’m now just doing my thing, not making a whole lot of (read: any) attempts to hang out with her after being (or imagining being) brushed aside some weeks ago. Moreover, I’ve successfully stopped having feelings for her–which is a good strategy in these situations.

Then, around the middle of October, she invites me out to this cool little indie bar that we both like to go to, just to hang out and read or something (we’re both avid readers. Or, I was until college and am trying to get back into the habit). I figured it was a good idea–you know, re-open the lines of communication, don’t burn bridges, be friends, that sort of thing. So we’re reading, and so on, and eventually I get up to leave, when she says, wait, we need to talk.

Woah. We’re actually going to talk about this using words and not innuendos? This is getting interesting. I figured she was going to chew me out for ceasing all kinds of contact after the early September conversation, and was ready to explain about how I liked her, and then felt dismissed, and had needed time to regather my thoughts and feelings, and it’s OK, I’m not really into you anymore, so don’t worry–it’s even kinda funny that I liked you to begin with, right? Let’s have a good laugh at how silly humans can be and go on with our lives.

That would have been fine and great–you know, clear the air, remove all ambiguity, make a fresh start as friends, etc… But what she said instead was more like, I knew you liked me all along, and I liked you too. However I didn’t think it was wise so I pushed you away. Then, when you were pushed away, I felt very miserable. So maybe that was the wrong decision.

Well, this was unexpected. But interesting, because rarely is the girl that I’m into also into me. So I thought, let’s see where this goes! Hours of discussion later, we were “officially” “dating”, whatever that means. Hooray! The first “official” girlfriend in, what, 2 and a half years? You, as the reader, should be asking me, But I thought you said you’d stopped having feelings for her? I know, I know…but it seemed like a golden opportunity so I made the switch back. (Note the stolid independence of the individual here, not willing to be changed by any external circumstances! Hah.)

Also during this same weekend, Chris Nyffeler asked his longtime girlfriend Anne to marry him, and she agreed. Stacking up the weddings for the upcoming summer, I see…but can it match up to 2004? But this was great news–the second of the Eastwood Posse to get hitched.

Time then started to pass very quickly, because I was spending it with her. Most of it was spent talking, because we’re both very good at talking, and inevitably we dived into the deeper things there are to talk about in relationships. Also there was a good deal of meta-relationship discussion. We talked about it, about how things were going, about how she or I was feeling, about this little problem between our personalities or about this or that big difference between our families, and that sort of thing. And because we have basically the same personality in many ways, we actually got places when we talked. We understood each other and figured stuff out when it needed figuring out. This was a new experience for me.

Anyhow, this was the way of things for about two weeks–intense but good conversations where doubts and hopes were freely expressed. I felt very positively about the relationship, and even though I knew there were some things about this girl I would rather be different, I figured that’s the way of life and community/relationship of any kind, and was willing to see where it went. Then, one morning when we were about to meet for breakfast, she just sort of inexplicably broke things off. It was more or less without warning, and so it happened and she left without it really registering for me. Then, similarly inexplicably, I felt like shit. I mean, yes, I did just get dumped, and that sucks, but a two-week relationship? I felt vastly more emotionally affected than that length of time seemed to warrant.

To this day I’m still not exactly sure why that was the moment where I’ve, thus far in life, felt the most emotionally hurt. I must have put a lot more of myself and my heart into things than was apparent to me. And if so, it was unwisely, as events proved. But it probably had something to do with everything that had come before–the year-plus of attraction, the letting go of it, then that fateful conversation which re-ignited it, the fast and unwitting descent into a kind of intimacy…who knows.

What made the situation worse was a complete lack of community here in Orlando. That is, my family was all either off to school or in San Francisco, and likewise my friends. The only person I’d been hanging out with was, of course, this girl. So, I felt very alone. Moreover, I initially had a lot of trouble with the reasons she cited for why things could not progress between us. They did not seem thought-out, and smacked of haste and fear. So our first conversations afterward consisted of me challenging, in a way, her decision and questioning its validity. Eventually, however, I realized that this mission of mine was itself driven pretty much only by emotions, anger included. I saw, though it hurt, the long-term wisdom of the decision, and started to feel OK about it.

My emotions needed somewhere to go, however, and so I began to be angry with this girl for the conversation in mid-October, feeling like that was what caused this whole waste of time and energy. And in some respects I still do think she acted unwisely there (as did I). But primarily what I felt was loneliness, and it became oppressive as I looked forward to weeks of working at Excelsis in proximity to this girl, and going home to…nobody. My usual pursuits of climbing or running or movies or reading or music or computer games or whatever seemed not to be able to cheer me up at all. I did do one productive thing, however, and that was reinstitute the working condition of this weblog! It felt good to lose myself in design for hours.

I discussed all of these things with my boss at work on Monday (the “surprise” was on Saturday), who’d actually been a confidant over the past months in which this story unfolded. He was able to give me, as a friend of both myself and this now-former girlfriend of mine, a lot of clarity and insight into why things played out the way they did. It served to cool me down and helped establish that peace I described above. He also suggested that I fly to California, to my apartment in SF, so that I could be with my parents and get my mind off of being alone. I’d wanted to visit my friends out there anyhow, and this situation was not only a good excuse for that trip, with the blessing of my boss, but I felt that the trip was necessary to my emotional sanity. So I used my vaunted status with American Airlines to get a free next-day mileage ticket out to SF.

Less than 24 hours later, I was working on the balcony of our apartment, being loved by my parents, and making plans with Stanford friends to go down there and spend a week or so just living and hanging out. Being back in California again felt so much more like home than Orlando, I knew that I had missed it deeply. In addition, getting away had lifted the huge weight that had settled on my soul–that oppressive feeling of being trapped in Florida with no friends and no (horror of horrors!) romantic prospects. A sense of adventure had returned, and, little did I know, I was about to embark on one.

Going down to Stanford again intensified that feeling of being back at home, and I spent hours just wandering around campus and its surroundings, feeling alive in the brisk autumn air (something which doesn’t exist in Florida, except for 2 days sometime in December). Being with friends was likewise intoxicating–each reunion or reconnection seemed to restore a small piece of my heart. I realized then how much I was missing out on in Orlando. I had been so focused on pursuing this one romantic relationship that I hadn’t felt the slow decay happening to me as a result of not being part of a broader community. I wasn’t going to church, of course, for a number of reasons, some of which have been discussed on this weblog previously. Most of my friends from high school had drifted away, either still at university or working elsewhere, and in any case my attempts at refocusing those connections were laughable during these months (to my shame). It was pretty much my family and this girl that were my community. So, take away the family due to travel, and take away the girl, and I had nothing to stand on! Virtual relationships, or long-distance friendships were no good to me then, and all of a sudden I sensed this huge need of mine for a strong community of loving friends, which heretofore I’d been able to satisfy via little crumbs from the familial and romantic relationships.

Enter into the context of this realization process Nick Bott, my friend with whom and Jenna I was staying (how do you like that grammar? It’s phat). We were driving somewhere and he mentioned the fact that a lot of our friends (most of whom had settled temporarily right around Stanford) were somewhat apprehensive about jumping right into what the world’s typical process is after graduating: getting a job, moving away from your friends, living alone, overworking, eventually having a somewhat mediocre marriage and family life, getting that white picket fence and your coveted personal space, spending your retirement on big white yachts, dying…

There was this sense that maybe the most fulfilling life is actually closer to the kind of community we experienced while at school, and not as much the American Dream, or whatever. As you can imagine, this sense resonated very deeply with me, given all that I had been considering. So we started to throw around some ideas and questions to tease out some more specifics from this vague sense. For instance, one of the questions was, what would it look like if, instead of people looking to their jobs to dictate where they lived, they looked to their community of friends instead? That is, what if people considered who they were with as a higher priority than what company they worked for? The most obvious outcome of a life lived this way would be financial sacrifice. But what benefits could there be? Eventually, we began to feel very strongly that there were a great number of benefits, and that they spoke to areas of the human life that were much more central than the financial.

Gradually we brought this discussion to more and more of our friends, and I even set up a weblog where we debated many of the merits and faults of forming various kinds of communities that lived out various counter-intuitive (according to the world) ideas. Because these discussions seemed to me to be very fruitful, I even extended my stay in California so that it totalled almost three weeks. When I left, I felt extremely encouraged, and the pain of the breakup had all but disappeared. It was to settle in again for a time, but I would say that my trip to Stanford did more than anything else to heal me. That, and of course the time spent with family in SF–Dav and Ellen had even been planning on visiting my folks there before I made my trip, so we were all together (sans Rachel, unfortunately), for one weekend.

For the latter part of November I was back in Orlando, continuing to work on the web app, and continuing to think about community ideas and opportunities back in California. I grew more and more excited about it as I combined the ideas that had come up in discussions with friends, and ideas that I’d gleaned from the last two summers of TCS, specifically from Graham Tomlin’s seminars. The combination effectively produced the idea that I am currently most excited about: a community of people dedicated to each other and to living the fullest human life possible together, which is at the same time no more or less than a church. That is, church would just be this community, and vice versa. No need for buildings or Sunday-morning services or potlucks. Church would just be living life together: eating, playing, wasting time, observing the world around, and yes: worshiping, teaching one another and being taught, reading Scripture, and helping the poor and oppressed. But these things would not be done in separation from the rest–for not only are worship and teaching valid activities in everyday life, but eating together and wasting time together are valid activities for church.

Around then, plans were made with a group of friends in California to have a vacation/retreat of sorts up to Tahoe in mid-December for some skiing/snowboarding and hanging out. I decided to go, and also hoped that that time would help me to make the decision which I knew would be required of me sooner or later: whether or not to move back to California. The community ideas we had been considering, while awesome and inspiring and worthy (I think) of putting into practice, come at a fairly high price: they require that one be physically involved. It’s not something that I could really be a part of from Florida. Moreover, leaving Florida, I realized, could come with its own set of sacrifices: would I be able to keep my job? How would I deal with the loss of free food/housing (I’d been staying at home in Orlando)? Serious questions, and the fact that I was thinking about them proved to me my own seriousness regarding the community. So I was hoping that Tahoe would be a good opportunity to gauge the desired involvement of others, which I could potentially use to then gauge the possibility of success of a home-church/community and thereby the probability of my move. Complicated, I know.

December 6th, when I had planned on flying to California, couldn’t come quick enough. I started to once again feel the oppression of being alone in Orlando during that interim time, and this change of optimism regarding life in general also caused there to be doubts about whether my high-flown ideas about community in California might not just be escapism, or foolish dreaming, or a subconscious way to be back where there are single women… So I had to go through a process of making sure that my motives were not completely overwhelmed by some taint, obvious or unobvious. I think I engaged in that process successfully.

Tahoe was an awesome time. Between snowboarding like a maniac, hanging out with everyone, playing games, watching movies, runs in the cold air, making dinners together, and long serious discussions about life and community, it was about as awesome as a time can be. To my disappointment, however, I didn’t happen upon the clarity I was hoping to receive regarding my own potential decision to move to California. I’m not sure exacctly why, but I think it became somewhat obvious that my idea of a home-church/community, while immensely attractive to me and a few others, did not catch on as immediately as I’d hoped. I think the context in which the idea was shared was somehow forced, for one, and also I’ve had the luxury of the past year and a half to come to grips with it and explore a lot of the ins and outs. At any rate, the primary sense I came away with was still encouragement, as there were some people who seemed interested in attempting to put some form of that idea into practice.

I was back in Orlando for a week before I went to Dallas for Christmas with family there. That week, and indeed the following few weeks, were insane times for my web app coding. I realized suddenly how much I needed to get done by January (a somewhat arbitrary deadline for v1.0 of the app), and worked frantically on it all the way through Christmas Eve. So my time was fairly well taken up with that. I did, as I mentioned, get to Dallas with my family, and we had a wonderful Christmas with my mom’s relatives, as well as various family friends like the Morrises (of whom Ellen, Dav’s fiancee, is one) and the Petersons. We were even able to go down to Austin and Temple to visit some aunts and uncles.

We didn’t quite protest the consumerism of Christmas by settling on not buying gifts for each other. Partly it’s because that’s just a hard thing to do–being consumeristic is actually fun for brief stints if you have the resources with which to do it. But mostly, we love to give gifts in celebration of Christ’s birth (whether or not there is any real spiritual tie to the Nativity), and ones that are useful (as well as thoughtful)! While handmade things tend to be awesome, they also tend to be less useful (though my sister handmade a number of useful gifts this year). So we decided to allow ourselves to buy gifts for one another, but we did away with Christmas lists altogether. That is, no one was allowed to tell anyone else what he or she wanted. We hoped that this would encourage us to focus more on the giving side of things than the receiving. In my mind, it was a great success! I put a lot more thought into the gifts I gave, and was pleasantly surprised (as opposed to barely satiated and relieved) by all the things that my family gave to me.

Well, I flew back to Orlando on the 28th, and got ready for an awesome week with the Griffin 302 boys (sans Kyle and Dave, who we seem to always be sans, unfortunately). Justin and Jonathan arrived that day from South Carolina, and we made a sweet dinner (plus many, many cocktails) with Tyson at my place. The next day the 4 of us took a little drive to Daytona and played some frisbee golf on the beach, then followed A1A up the coast to St. Augustine, where we wandered around until night time. Then it was back to my place in O-town, where we were greeted not long after arrival by Emilee Shim, who happened to be in Florida and stopped by! We made another excellent dinner, and watched a movie. The next day consisted mostly of sleeping and mini golf; but let’s not forget dinner with the Vozzas at some awesome steakhouse on Sand Lake. Dan flew in, finally, on the 31st, and it was off to Cocoa Beach for more disc golf. We got back and made a late dinner of pasta, then had a long and stimulating discussion about how we could/should aid the poor, and what that means. By that time it was nearing the new year, so we got together our poker skills and had a very long poker tournament, which I lost my money in. We were sort of keeping track of the ball on TV, but when 12:00AM came around, I realized I’d forgot to ice the champagne. So instead we took shots of vodka from shot glasses made of ice. New year’s, Russian-style! But then it was back to poker and white russians (I told you, Russian-style) until we about passed out.

Definitely the most chill New Year’s party ever–so much so that 2004 passed and 2005 came with just that one little toast, and none of us seemed to really care. But there we were, and our class year passed. Sort of sad, in a way. But with so much on the horizon for 2005, none of us are looking back.

Everyone took off the next day, and I unfortunately went to work for 7 days straight, rushing to get my app in working order. And now here we are–I’ve done enough work on the app for now, and am taking a breather, commenting my code (which I didn’t do as I coded–bad habit), fixing little bugs here and there, making a wishlist for version 2, climbing, running, playing World of Warcraft, and preparing for my next trip out to California, which will be on January 18. Hopefully this one will serve to give me any added clarity I need to come to a solid decision on California. As that guy from the Matrix says, “Exciting times!” Whatever happens from here, I feel like I’ve been a part of a little adventure which, at the least, has been helpful in my own personal, spiritual, and emotional formation. Who knows, though–maybe it’s just the start of an adventure much more epic in scope.

Oh yeah, it looks like Erin Spokes and Wes Bolsen might both be visiting me this weekend! Before a few months ago, no one from Stanford had visited me at home in Orlando–now the total climbs to 7. This pleases me greatly. Hey, if you are still reading, you’ve got some stamina. But since no one will read this anyway, I guess it doesn’t matter what I say. I could say, “you don’t got no stamina!” and it’d be all the same. Wot! Well, later. Llama love!