Take, for example, my bike riding incident from my freshman year at Arizona State University (ASU). I used to park in Lot 59 at ASU which is hella long from my first class, so I would either ride the FLASH bus, a horrible but free ride to class, or walk fifteen minutes to class. Of course I would often ride the bus, but it would take a long time for the bus to show up, and by the time it did, I would have to stand cramped next to people with hangovers and yesterday’s pants.

Based on the logistics of riding the bus, I pulled my dad’s bike out of the side yard, brushed off the spider webs, WD40′d the chain, and pumped up the tires. The next day I hauled the bike down to ASU in my truck (I used to commute 45 miles to school) and planned to ride it to my first class. I pulled it out of the back of my truck, rode past all the sorry saps waiting for the bus, and I swear I rode it 50 yards before the tire fell off. I flew over the front handlebars in the middle of an intersection and right in front of the bus stop full of people. This is what I would define as getting “Screwed by the System.” Mind you, the system doesn’t only specialize in catastrophic bike failure, but this is one of the many ways.

By definition, the ASU bike incident was a large deposit into my system bank account, so I was bound to make a withdrawal within the next few days (or perhaps even over my lifetime). Wouldn’t you know it that three days later I see a girl ride her bike into a muddy flower garden and fall over much to my delight? A couple weeks later I saw a skateboarder cruisin’ at full speed and hit a rock. He quickly turned into a human sled. I chuckled because I knew that I deserved to see that. I paid the system, this was my payoff.

So, regardless of the past, if you know me, you know I daily get screwed by the FLASH bus system. I don’t know how many times I’ve ran beside the bus waving my arms yelling, “Hey pick me up, bus driver.” Or how the buses are supposed to run every 10 minutes, but more often than not, when I need the bus to show up on time, it’s running every 20 minutes because they don’t time the buses properly. Or how they now run a “FLASH express” that doesn’t pick up, it only drops off. I need to get picked up. Well, today I got my payoff on the FLASH bus screw me bank account. I saw someone who reminded me of myself. This guy spotted the FLASH at a bus stop and was bookin’ it trying to catch it. The bus was stopped, and he was running full speed at the doors. He made ‘the jump’ into the bus, but as he jumped the doors closed and he slammed into them. The emergency open door function was activated so he slumped into the bus while rubbing his head. I laughed and I thanked the system for paying me off for all those days I was screwed.

It was an unnerving feeling that caused Greg to cease his activity. “Is someone looking at me?” he wondered. Only his beloved friend Steve was in the room, busied by the limitless diversion of the Internet. Greg slowly, quietly put down his pencil and ruler and allowed his gaze to intercept Steve.

Steve sat innocently at his keyboard, undoubtedly listening to a new Foo Fighters song or that U2 cover by Johnny Cash. Greg, satisfied that his paranoia was completely without cause, resumed the application of graphite to paper.

It was not long before that nagging gut feeling came back. This time Greg quickly snapped his neck up from his work, instinctively, to the only other person in the room…Steve. As he did so, he shouted the vile accusation: “STOP LOOKING AT ME WHILE I WORK!!!”

Steve, with feigned surprise, said, “Hey man, I’m just checkin’ out these phat tunes from Pat Benetar…calm down.”

For a moment Greg’s hands shook with rage and he felt an instinctive pull toward the x-acto knife on the edge of the table. Realizing the absurdity of his sinful impulse, he bitterly continued his seemingly endless task. Was the constant monotony of forming hundreds of Roman characters on a sheet of paper making him go insane? His mind flew to a memory of a story he’d heard about the art professor who worked too long at developing the holy grail of fonts, Times New Comic Sans Bold, and then completely lost his mind. “I’m just imagining things,” Greg thought. If only he could believe the comforting lies he told himself. He resumed the scrawling…

…Steve, upon hearing the telltale sound of pencil against paper, turned from the screen displaying his formidable library of Neil Diamond songs and began again to stare.

My knee is killing me. Today, for the fifth time in two days, my right knee buckled as I was walking. Inconveniently enough, it happened as I was descending three flights of stairs…had I not been clamped onto the railing, I would have had a much quicker, albeit much more painful trip down the stairs. I shambled my way to class, looking like some mobility-impaired denizen of “Night of the Living Dead”. The crappy thing is that this weekend I’m going on one long mug of a hike and I’m afraid that I’m going to have to be airlifted out. I can see it now:

Paramedic: “So, were you experiencing symptoms before you had the horrific knee blowout while hiking?”

Steve: “Well actually it’s been hurting for a few days…giving out on me on a regular basis.”

Paramedic: “What? And you decided to go on a 15 mile hike? You moron…”

–insert Steve’s muffled whimper as paramedic mercilessly punches him in the kidney–

Sorry…back to reality. I thought it would be wrong to post without mentioning last night’s incredible second preview service. Everything went really well; it started out with great music, Ben’s teaching was spot on (except for that part dissing ASU…watch your back Ben), and even the video from Highway was moving and thought provoking. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want it to be about the outward appearance…everything was great, but I think the real sweetness behind the experience was knowing what kind of people are behind it and knowing that they’re throwing everything they have into serving God. As much as all the new people liked the service (and from what I heard, they did), their excitement will be tenfold when the get to know everyone, get involved, and see that things are as they appear. God’s definitely working and it’s stinkin’ exciting. This week the onecommunities (small groups) start and I’m definitely excited to see how all the energy will filter down into that part of oneplace. As usual, I’ll throw in my two cents after it all goes down…

On the side, I’d like to apologize to everyone at the service last night who I feel I didn’t spend enough time with. A lot of my great friends were there and I feel like I wasn’t with them much. All I can do is offer up my explanation: I just wanted to make sure new people felt welcome and got hooked up. I know how much it sucks to come into church and have no one talk to you. If that happens it’s a terrible thing and certainly I need to do my part to show everyone that people at oneplace care about them and want to know them. So, for everyone I know, I dig you already and I’m always available to you and if it doesn’t look like that at service, it’s because I want to bring others into the circle. Maybe it wasn’t a big deal to anyone, but it was on my mind, so please forgive me.

Peace out…

1) Almost all the black characters (and I use the term characters loosely, because they’re all stereotypes) are played by white characters in blackface.

2) There’s a scene in which a room full of black political representatives recline, put up their bare feet, drink whiskey, and yes, I kid you not…eat fried chicken. I guess that wasn’t an offensive clich頡t that time yet.

3) The hero of the story founds…oh yeah, brace yourself…the ku klux clan. His “noble” purpose…to liberate the south from oppressive carpetbaggers and racially impure peoples.

On top of all this sludge, the “silent film” is not really silent at all. All three hours are accompanied by the most horrific, monotonous organ music.

I won’t say the movie was worthless because there’s a lot to be learned from it as far as the technical aspects of filmmaking. DW Griffith essentially put together the entire existing repertoire of film shots into one movie and thus paved the way for more modern cinema. It doesn’t change the fact that he was a whacko. Some could argue that it’s hard to be “beyond your times”…in short, everyone was racist at that time. Well, this movie brought before the high courts the first case of film censorship…lots of people were offended by the racism and boycotted the movie. Crazy, interesting stuff.

My first two classes were early and late British lit, which I have one right after the other at 9:40 and 10:40, respectively. Both of my professors seem really cool and in the second class, I’m going to have my American lit teacher from last semester as a TA. She’s very nice, very intelligent, and a very fair grader…all desirable qualities in a TA and a teacher. The professor in my first class is the most unpretentious guy I’ve ever had teach me in college. Right off the bat when he gave us our Chaucer reading assignment he said, “Here’s the thing with Chaucer: he was a funny guy. If you read Chaucer and don’t laugh, you’re either reading it wrong or you’re a stick. You don’t want to be a stick, do you? And don’t take yourself too seriously when you read this stuff. You don’t need to be marking in the margins of each page and highlighting text. There’s actually historical proof that yellow markers weren’t present when Chaucer wrote. Just read it and try to enjoy yourself.” That’s pretty refreshing stuff coming from a tenured English professor at ASU. I think he’s going to be great.

Continuing on with cool things that happened today, I reached my goal of meeting a new person. I know that probably doesn’t seem like a big deal, but my goal wasn’t just to make small talk with someone, my goal is to get to know someone, care for them in a Christ-like way, and generally reach out to them like Christ reached out to people around him. That’s a big thing I’ve been praying about and I was encouraged by the results that I saw today. Don’t get me wrong, there was no super-spiritual breakthrough or anything, but I talked with someone on a deeper than surface level and that’s something I can build off of in the weeks to come.

Another great thing that happened today regards my application to the teaching program. I, being a constantly worrisome guy, wanted to show my completed application to my advisor. I constantly think whatever I write or produce is crap, so I was incredibly happy when my advisor keep telling me what I good job I did on the application and whatnot. She said I should turn it in while I was there, which I did. That saved me a few more days of worrying about it. Now it’s all done and I just wait to see if I get in. I’m pretty sure it shouldn’t be a problem, but today just made me feel really good about it. I was looking at this application as one of the big hurdles that stood before me being a teacher and now that it’s behind me, I feel really good.

I thought that the day couldn’t get any better, but then I went to my night class, which I’m taking with TJ…independent film. I had high hopes for this class and I wasn’t let down. It’s exactly what I thought it would be: an easy class where we just watch great, great independent films from people like Soderbergh, Jarmusch, Smith, Romero, Rodriguez, and tons of other people. We watched a film tonight called “Living in Oblivion” with Steve Buscemi and Catherine Keener. It was hilarious and entertaining in every way…AND I WAS IN CLASS. Crazy man, crazy. I didn’t know it could be this fun.

Now I better go read…

Oh yeah…two out of three teachers today made an ASU porn joke. Classy…real classy.