thoughts on grad school

In a hotel room now. I'm in Newport Beach all week at a training class (Part I of III) starting to learn everything about motor vehicle registration for my new job (since my "promotion") at AAA.

When telling people about my AAA job, I invariably add, "I hope to go to grad school in a year or two..." I'll add "in London" if I'm especially determined to preempt their judgment against lazy/unambitious/unskilled recent college grads.

I've realized sometime early last fall that grad school preparation was just not in the works my senior year at Point Loma. I didn't want to think about it then and the benefits of waiting convinced me easily in favor of taking a break from school after graduation. Having decided, while still studying abroad my junior year, that I'd be spending more time abroad (I was thinking mostly mission work then and more leisure travel), I came to think that grad school in England would be awesome. Perhaps I was encouraged by a good friend doing the same in Nottingham and another prepping for a year at the London School of Economics, but mainly I wanted to revisit/recreate/expand upon the amazing, searching, and joyful year I spent abroad.

My research revealed that a one year MA program in London would easily cost me $45-50,000. Well...I came back from Europe with just enough money to keep my bank accounts open and even owing my brother a couple hundred dollars. And my parents, who dutifully paid $60-70,000 for my undergrad degree, will not be helping me with grad school. Of course, I could have taken out loans and be prepping for London year right now...but loans scare me and I don't care to leave for Europe knowing that Fannie Mae owns me when I return. To me, owing over $10,000 seems so limiting like a straitjacket or two left foot shoes that bend me in a certain direction (job I don't care for or more education for the sake of deferring loans).

I like my freedom. And that's why I decided to work. The Auto Club, where I've worked since May 2006 (excepting the months abroad) has been really good to me. Flexible and understanding when I was in school, they're happy to keep me 40 hrs/week now. Plus, there's the friendships and social/professional capital that are earned and won't be transplanted immediately (or are even guaranteed) with a new job. And the pay isn't bad. I know a couple people making less out of college, some others in the $40,000 and plus range, and couple others who are making more (a lot of money by their own characterization) but I'm not sure what that means.

So now I wait. In this year of reading, learning, and saving, I have to decide if I should go to London in the Fall of 2009 or Fall of 2010. I really have little idea what this year will hold for me (and I'm speaking of the tenor), how I may change, what I'll want when... Will I even stay at the AAA? What if something better and better paying comes along? What's the end goal? Which job am I aiming for?

and Am I delaying my life?

Well, yes...my professional/most exciting dynamic life at least. It's funny, but I think I've found an advantage to being a late-bloomer (and I am talking puberty). I'm going to say that those couple high school years of agonizing "my-friends-are-hairier-than-me" bought me a couple years now.

A co-worker who learned that it was my birthday recently, guessed that I was turning 20. Sounds good to me...when I'm 24, I'll look 22--and that physical immaturity is reason enough for me to excuse the professional/academic one. :-)

I wonder

...can watching all 94 episodes of SATC in the span of a little over a week be considered a life experience?

words

they elude me. these blogs and notes (e-deliveries of my over-analytical psyche/internal life) don't feel so simple right now. neat packages of lessons learned or neuroses tied-up aren't coming so easy. no surpise that they weren't at the top of my priorities list in the final weeks of school.

but now the neutering stress of school has been replaced over the "what-comes-now?" thoughts of a post-undergraduate dutifully passing out maps and license tags at the autoclub between entertaining thoughts of grad school and mission trips abroad in a milieu dotted with the accomplished "isn't-that-cool?" post-graduate plans of friends and peers.

two things hold me in san diego: money and the lack of a life here.

if I stay in sd, working...those abroad dreams become less fanciful, the return to america less ominous, the debt burden reduced.

if I stay in sd, I can begin to build a life of service/of meaning here. regular church attendance, involving myself, maybe even serving. maybe, I'll prove to myself that I can do it here and be fulfilled, that I need to do this for God, not for europe and God.

other things push me out abroad now.

I should "start my life" now. a year or two of autoclub work will hold me back, peers will advance as I languish.

people do loans. don't let fear of debt delay life, wasting some of the most free, dynamic years life.


also on my mind now: my desire for love and being authentic.

I'd rather not so manage my interactions with others. I want to be myself and I want to be liked just-as-I-am: a sometimes stagnant, reaching, self-aware, laughing, hurting person with a well-earned low opinion of himself and quite the theology/Jesus consciousness.

I don't mind managing this so much with co-workers and acquaintances (people who don't have the time to get to know most of me). but doing it with my good friends is so frustrating. I don't want to push them away. I want to keep interacting with them as a normal, psychologically healthy, listening, calm/deliberate headed, well-adjusted person that I've aspired so hard to be. who gets excited about perceptions of transgressing the borders of appropriate male gender and/or happy/well-adjusted communication? plus, lots of self-help-y "be yourself" mantras are all about affirming our fallen, broken state, misdiagnosing the ills and prescribing terrible remedies. I want to do this right. I want to do what's whole and growing and right.

but I aslo want the people who withhold intimacy and love and understanding to grab me, look me in the eyes and tell me that I matter, that they care. that they'll take me as I am help me become better. that they don't lord over me enjoying the unequal sharing of power and meaning, purposely withholding openness and listening. frack...that they'll give me anything more than blank stares, inane or themselves-centered talk, or insincere smiles.

it's so selfish and I waffle, not knowing what would be good for me.

how much would help and how much would reinforce everything wrong about me?

I'm weak and I'm strong--not wholly one or the other. I want to be better (and to which degree or of which virtues I need to pursue, I don't and can't articulate right now at least).

again, my apologies for spilling this here. thank you.

ohhh

i made a thousand dollar mistake recently

a flight to europe
a nice camera
a couple iPod touches

no

instead, I get a lesson

siiiiiiiiiigh

humans are so loathsome. conscious of the past but too small to undo.

a rash sorry

google stalking
i found a poem
the subject--me
a punch to the stomach

i have to respond

the time is not right
our paths diverged
i pray that my looking back
is not a new injury
or even a nuisance

how soon regret replaces nostalgia
face-saving jumps to the fore
that’s not how i want to be remembered

i forgot about the pain
about the tearing

i used you to grow
split myself open
demanded the same from you

when i should have loved
i demanded understanding
i wanted a mess to match my own
someone to get me
someone to fix me

it was wrong
but not deliberate

we were children pretending to be adults

for the past--forgiveness
thanks
fondness
laughing

into the future--good luck
love

unregenerate, hellbound

"Well, I suppose my overarching problem is that I don't think I'm a Christian"

And so were the words I uttered during a counseling session some weeks ago.

I can't be sure of the numbers, but I have to imagine that I'm one of the very few theology majors who doesn't attend church, has never been baptized, and brings up their studies only in the most narrow ways that make him or her look good without unmasking all of the defeat, malice, and sorrow.

At times I identify with the label "Christian" but I know (at least, I'm mostly convinced) that theologically I'm not. I mean, I know/feel that I haven't been reborn, justified, etc.

I like Grace...just as long as it's cheap, can be referenced briefly before, during, and after a transgression, and somewhat encourages me that I'm valued, special, self-aware, and not-all-that-bad.

One component, perhaps the heaviest and most-guilt inducing, is the addiction that chains me to the past and to sin. There's nothing quite like the highs and lows of hope and shame--the juxtaposition of the holy with sin--to bloody and stupefy the soul. Scattering sin into even my most healthy relationships has also been a such a treasured result of the I-could-not-give-a-damn spells I entertain.

My environment and readings have encouraged my doubt--my school's church (part of the Holiness Movement) and the accompanying theology and education have fostered a concern for righteousness and moral/ethical purity that was far greater than any related concerns held when I was more intellectually immature (I'd add spiritually immature too--but I'm losing faith in things not reason). In turn, I reflect on my choices and my thoughts and I can't help but conclude that I willfully choose sin when I know better. How can I claim to be a child of God reborn in the image of His Son when I ______________ (insert sin)? I can't and I don't.

So I acknowledge the God and creation that allow for rebirth, but I won't choose to allow God to regenerate me. Sometimes I chastise myself and let others chastise me. Sometimes I'm hopeful and let others encourage me. Bust mostly I walk like God's pretty far away, and only briefly immanent when I weigh (also briefly) on him during my latest existential crisis.

In the other moments when I dentify as a Christian, I have to abstract it out to something quite odd--like beliefs that are only assented to but rarely lived (the practical atheism that is most of my life).

The faith/good works (what God does/what I do) debate is infuriating. At a certain point, I realized that the altar calls, the sobbing, and the confessions didn't effect anything lasting. Those momentary outbursts of raw emotion instilled false hope. At another point, my works of reading and conversation stopped helping me grow. Regimes and strategies of discipline--"do this for faith"--seem a little cart before the horse to me. Dialogical/dialectical approaches and tensions and paradoxes make my head hurt--and worst of all, for me at least, they lend themselves better to sin than to faith. They don't exactly open me up to the divine mystery of God nearly as much as they focus my attention inward and on my own humanness. I'm left with stultifying confusion rather than any type of propelling mystery. Clichés of journeys and commitments (sometimes proffered by well-meaning friends or found in some popular Christian literature) bespeak a hypocritical and proud faith suited for an individualistic, 21st century faith. Then again, the toothpaste is already out of the tube--and I'm looking at the gobs in the sink like they're tea leaves. I'm an analyzer and a skeptic--far too cynical and detached to ever have a 19th century, fire-in-the-belly pentecostal revival spirit about me.

I just want to be fixed, preferably right now.

I have a consciousness of God and of love and of Christ and of a saving gospel. But that consciousness doesn't induce action/choice/faith/surrender. This fact (that 1. I often hope I won't die in the immediate future (before I'm saved) because I'm hellbound and 2. believe this but won't allow God to change me] makes me feel (and think) hopeless. I'm inward looking and ego-centric and the truth that I shouldn't be--that I need to re-orient outwardly and upwardly (be theo-centric)--hasn't encouraged my faith.

I don't know what I'm trying to get out of posting this here. There is sin even in this writing, in this reaching writing. I can't help but see it everywhere. It's everywhere infecting my whole mind. Is this all a waste? I can't even do this right.

This is where I'm at. I'm not sure if insights or lessons will help me--I don't believe/live most of the ones I already know. Maybe nothing. Maybe just God. Please come becaase I can't save myself.

"More faith! More discipline!" I don't know what this means. I usually don't care what this means.

God give me a strong will and faith. God, the part of me that faces you, the part of me that looks up in the sky during a walk and speaks out loud, the part of me (if it still or ever existed) that shook at those altars really wants your help in making me right. please

God, brothers, and sisters: please help me.