Creative Away Message

I thought this was a pretty creative away message:

"Forest Fires Run Rampant As Lazy Local Ian Neglects Countless Warnings That Only Ian Is Capable of Stopping Forest Fires"

(Edited to have real name instead of AIM screenname.) Credit goes to my friend Joe for posting the away message!

Friends, Novels, and Nephews

It has been a week since I launched this blog of mine, and you've hardly heard a thing about my life. I've spent some time unpacking, though I didn't do it fast, and I've also spent some time with friends and kin.

Last Friday, I saw Jesse, a good friend from high school, along with his new girlfriend Amber. We hung out and talked, then went to our town's annual Heritage Festival, where I saw a great many people from my high school robotics team. (The team runs a large tent at the festival. Apparently, you can celebrate Heritage by celebrating competitions of robotic brawn and ingenuity.) Fortunately, despite leaving the team, I am still welcome among them.

I have also been spending bits of time with a variety of other friends, trying to catch up before I go off to college. College is a fairly short drive along city streets, but strangely enough, the college world and the home-town world stay fairly separate, especially socially. I actually showed Jesse where my dorm was in person on Friday, so maybe he'll visit me this time around. :-)

I've spent a fair amount of time continuing work with my friend Leif on a novel we are co-writing about a land called Ondar. Novel-writing is challenging, and co-writing also presents its own unique challenges, but we are making some progress. That progress involves rewriting the beginning of the book, not inventing the brave adventures of the heroes in their travels, but it is amazingly valuable nonetheless.

In more mundane news, I have found that unlike on-campus construction, my home is not an injury-free zone. I managed to jam my toe fairly badly on my way out the bedroom door. I was just about to put my shoes on. A
mysterious "7" showed up on the toe afterwards, perhaps in memory of my daring and courage. (After all, how many people would dare to walk out of their bedroom without wearing shoes?) I'd be curious if anyone has any better dramatic meanings to assign to the number "7" as applied to my toe. :-)

I had to limp about the rest of the day, but ironically, I was quite restless. After stubbing my toe, I took a walk around several blocks of my neighborhood and also visited Walmart to get floss heads. I limped the whole time, but I felt like I wouldn't have a clear mind if I didn't do it. After I had lunch, though, I did the more sensible thing; I sat down at my laptop with ice on my toe and started researching the making of blogs. You are familiar with the result.

Today, perhaps in honor of the one-week anniversary of my toe, I climbed a little way up the tree in my backyard, and made a cut in my wrist. This cut was not from the bark itself, but from my Medic Alert bracelet. The cut itself wasn't bad, but it seems to have gotten infected, so it still hurts, as does the toe.

Yesterday, I got to go to the eye doctor. My vision is improving slightly, but not so much I really need to replace my 5-year-old glasses. :-) A little later, I went to visit my nephew, who was being babysat by my mother. He was shy at first, but we made friends, and played with his blocks together. He finds it very entertaining if I lift a box full of blocks while making growly construction equipment noises, move it over to the side, and dump all the blocks out. At first, I think he quite enjoyed the noises, but seeing things fall to the ground proved a somewhat more enduring source of pleasure. I would hold an empty Kleenex box and prompt him to put blocks in it. Putting blocks in things is still hard for him, but he gave a valiant and largely successful effort when it came to playing construction equipment.

Mangos etc

I'll get around to telling all y'all what I'm up to a little later, but I just found something that I wrote last year that made me laugh. I think I'd run out of ideas for what I was actually writing, so I just wrote something random instead:

"Dance like a mango, live like a banana, sleep like a kiwi."

I like the irony: kiwis, since they are birds as well as fruit, can actually move, but I chose them as models for sleeping of all things.

Societies

We are sometimes tempted, or even encouraged, to use the views of different societies as a litmus for what is really good and evil. Generally, it's used as an argument for relaxing rules: "That society thinks it's OK if people do this, so maybe we're just being a little silly when we think it's a horrible thing."

The Bible teaches that societies can fall into immorality. The view a society has on what is right and wrong could be horribly twisted. This seems to me quite easy to believe—it's not easy to believe that everybody would become totally bad with no thought for good, not at all. But it is easy to think that people's views could gradually shift farther and farther towards evil, to the point where the people who think of themselves as normal, and just as good as anyone else, would be horrible in another society, or even in their own society a few decades earlier. Moreover, I find it fairly easy to believe that those people would be bad by an absolute standard of right and wrong.

This shifting is believable to me because morality works so much by trend: people think it might be wrong to do the things that shock and offend others, but they think it's OK to do the things that others aren't concerned about, even if the law or the moral codes contradict them. People may take some interest in those codes at first, but most of them seem to think that the final answer lies not in the written rules, but in the general sentiment of people around them. If people can approach morality that way, then it is a malleable thing of society, and it can drift with the personality of the society. Once the code itself drifts, people will happily perform their favorite once-sins, those which are now perfectly moral in their eyes. Thus, not only the abstract beliefs, but the actual actions of the society will degrade.

Now, if morality can drift in that way, and a society can fall into moral decay, as I think it can, is there any reason to be concerned about the validity of our own moral beliefs simply because some other society is less strict? I expect a few will land in my comments, but at least from the tack I'm taking, the answer seems to be a clear "No" to me.

OTOH, this raises a new line of thought. How indeed can we rate our moral code, if not by other societies? Clearly, if a moral code can drift so easily as I imply earlier, we have some reason to keep an eye on it. And what shall we compare it to? Perhaps, to our knowledge of God, and even more, to what it says in His Word. Perhaps, to what stings our conscience; but will our conscience not be silenced if we brush it off enough? More often than not it will. I think the Bible is the only real way to approach the matter, with God being our source of instruction about the meaning of His Word, but I'm looking forward to some interesting comments about this.

Safe Construction

I noticed this a while ago, but only now do I have a blog where I can share it with everyone. It is on the gate to a construction zone. My school is building a new engineering building there.

I like this summary of the signs: "Danger: You are now entering an injury-free environment."

After all, if you can't get injured there, it must be very dangerous indeed!

Let flight begin!

Let us leap into the air and soar among the clouds, rising on eagle's wings and bearing a lion's grandeur. May the wind, in its wildness, carry us away on a journey through things as old as Time.

I just finished my internship with Amazon.com, and am now in a relaxing interim placed between work and college. I suppose that I am more likely to post now than at any other time, though relaxing hardly seems like a good way to inspire posts. I'm thinking of making posts about adventures of the kind worth sharing, and about any thoughts that I think other people might like to see. My greatest hope for this blog is that it will help me in that challenging endeavor of keeping in touch with my many friends, who are scattered to the four winds. With that in mind, I am hoping that people will leave comments or email me about my posts.