Monday, November 26, 2007

Every day should be Thanksgiving.

This past week was amazing. I got to spend some nice relaxing time with my family, enjoy my friends company, and got to think about everything going on with me nowadays.

Thanksgiving day was a small event, with just my parents, brother, aunt and cousin. My mom cooked an amazing meal, which is usual, my family does like to eat. We got to laugh and joke, watched some Dane Cook, Cheech and Chong, and Robin Williams. After eating an enormous amount of food, we rested, watched grey's anatomy, and about midnight fell into a turkey induced coma. It was good, happy, and just what I needed.

Friday I spent time with four of my favorite women. We went out for Jessica's birthday, begining the celebration at the pub. Now here is the interesting part. Basically this place is full of people we graduated high school with, so of course we got to see some of the lovely folk (sarcasm of course) that we graduated with. We danced around for a bit, Stefanie eventually dancing with this guy, who as all creepy men do came up behind her and just started dancing with her. After about 15 minutes, she gets this scared look and flees from him, and he disappears as well. As the other four ladies decide to go, I ask what he did, and she told me he stuck his hand down the front of her pants, and she freaked out and ran away. (Understandably so). The girls head out in front of me, but I stop and turn to the guys he was with, who previously had attempted to take Stef's picture. I walked up to one, tapped him on the shoulder, and asked him if he had taken a picture, that I would appreciate him deleting it. He showed me that it was too dark to actually get a picture, and apologized, to which I explained to him that he was lucky his friend had disappeared otherwise i would have made sure he got his due. Apparently this guy did not realize what happened and when I told him, he apologized and said he would tell his friend. I left and informed a bouncer of the trouble that had occurred, and told him that he may want to watch out for that guy. The girls thought I was heroic, but I was just taking care of the loose ends, and hopefully striking fear into that dudes heart. But the fun doesn't stop there....

So the next day we were going to meet up to have lunch before the five of us would be broken up till the next holiday season. As I am headed to lunch, I stopped for gas. I told the attendent to put 20 dollars of regular into my tank, he started the tank, and left to go charge my card for the 20 dollars. As you are not allowed to pump your own at this station, I just sat there and stopped paying attention. He came back and realized that he actually filled my tank instead of just putting in 20 dollars worth. He disapeared to return with my card and two charges, totalling up to the 46 dollars the whole tank had taken. I told him I wasn't going to pay for the rest of the tank, because that is not what I had asked for. He didn't speak great english, so he kept just trying to pawn the recipts off on me by saying, "I'm sorry, thank you." After arguing with him for 5 minutes, I asked for a manager or owner. He asked me to pull away from the pump so he could take more customer's, so I pulled instead up to the office, which is not somewhere he wanted me to go. I got out and walked into the office, which scared the attendent, and he came rushing over. I then explained the situation to the guy in charge, who then tried to guilt me into paying the whole thing, because, "he only makes 8 dollars an hour." I explained to him my 0 dollars an hour, and my negative 10,000 in the hole for school. He shut up about money then, but still argued with me, until finally he conceded to void the application, but he told me he would have to pump out some gas. I told him to do it quickly, because he had already made me late. So the attendent attempted to siphon some gas, which he apparently couldn't understand, and the manager came over again, he again asked me if I had any 'cash money' and I told him no. So then he asked if I could bring him money the next time I came. I told him no, because I didn't ask for my tank to be filled, and I was leaving the state. He finally just gave up, took out the pumping tube, and closed my gas tank door. He told me to, "just go." I asked if my gas cap was on, and he said yes, just go. I had a feeling it wasn't. So my house was only 2 blocks away, I went home, checked, and sure enough it wasn't there. So I convinced my brother to get in the car, in case I began beating on the man, there was someone to stop me. I ripped into the station, threw open the door to the office, and demanded, "Give me my gas cap back!" He said something in arabic, and then handed me the cap. I slammed the door and left. Finally, I was on my way to lunch, now being 45 minutes late.

So those are really the 'crazy' parts of my week, but only added to the fun of it all. I really enjoyed being home with my family, taking silly photos for our Christmas cards, watching the decorations go up for Christmas, and not participating in the consumerism of Christmas!

I am sure I will write a rant about Christmas and consumerism sometime soon, but I really should get back to listening to my Greek Prof. Peace and Blessings.

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Sunday, November 11, 2007

Some sort of grace rant...

So why is it so hard as a woman to move on from a guy? Why is it so hard to emotionally disconnect after something is so obviously over? Why do woman always look into these things like they could have done something to change it, like it is their fault, or they are not good enough.

I’ve discovered this isn’t true. It’s not a woman’s fault, she may have a part in it, but a relationship crashes because of two people. A relationship has always been about two people, two people with trust, compassion and love for one another. It is when one of those things disappears that relationships fall apart. If we all truly cared for other people, we wouldn’t have all these hardships. It would be easy to break up with other people, letting them know we love them for the person they are, but that we just can’t spend the rest of our lives living with them in romantic love. Respecting human beings seems to have disappeared from society. People cannot even respect each other on a purely primal level in order to not kill each other. Instead we have let ‘things’ get in the way of our ability to recognize the humanity in another. Society has become so obsessed with objects, that it is more important to shed blood in order to have money, then to see that poor defenseless flesh in front of us. Greed has done corrupt things to us, on so many levels. It all comes down to the fact that we don’t see the human in one another, we don’t respect one another.

People destroy one of the most intimate connections that they have with one another, when they stop realizing that we are all made of the same things, have the same emotions, and cherish life. I hope that is something we can realize through our relationship with God. That God created us, and although we do these terrible things to one another, and sometimes don’t even respect God, God still loves us. God puts up with all our crap, and still gives us eternal salvation, now that is love, that is respect and that is pure grace.

We could all use a little more grace in our lives towards one another. Show someone some love, even if you don’t think they deserve it, because let’s face it, did we deserve to have Christ die for us? No, but he gave that gift to us out of his love for us.

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