Megatokyo

Earlier I added Megatokyo to the sidebar, but I didn't say anything about it. Well, it's a very good webcomic/manga. You should read it. It's a little bit like Fruitsbasket, in that it's funny and deals with problems, but the problems are quite different, and there's l33t sp34k. Oh, and it's by an American (two, at the beginning), but he seems to be bilingual, etc. It takes a little bit longer to get into, but it's worth it. At least, it's worth it if you want to have a new addiction in your life... um... Here are a couple classics from the early days to give you its general flavor: "Sim Life" and "Speak L33t?"

Soli Deo Gloria

I like this song. It's from Go Fish's CD, "Part of the Proof."


Will You Dance?
words and music by J. Statema

Hey there angel, I wonder what you're lookin' at
When I see you starin' up at me
I got a polka-dotted piece of lint in my pocket
Whatcha think about that?
Well, I thought it was kind of freaky
Or maybe it's just me

Do you ever feel like the only one?
Like a fried up bug in the magnified sun
Eyes fall on you like a 2-ton ton
And you wonder what it was that you begun

If I sing for you, will you dance for me?
There's a place I had that I gave to thee
Look into my soul, I've laid it out to see
So, if I sing for you, will you dance?

Magically delicious, soothing to the soul
Put it all in a pretty package, Look at junior go
I love it when you go crazy
But I won't flatter myself
'Cuz if you weren't here clappin' for me
You'd be clappin' for someone else

Say what you mean if you mean what you say
It's common for me to get carried away
Lord, those around me I pray they will see
It's not what I have, but who gave it to me


Like most songs, it's better accompanied by music. The music especially emphasizes the lines, "'Cuz if you weren't here clappin' for me you'd be clappin' for someone else" and "It's not what I have, but who gave it to me." Part of the reason I like the song is that it shows the heart of the band, and I appreciate their honesty and humility (and silliness). I also enjoy it, though, because of what a good reminder it is of what my attitude should be, whenever I'm on stage in any sense. These days that's mostly when I'm part of the worship band at church, but it's especially important then! To help lead worship so that people will see what a beautiful voice I have is ridiculous. I think making beautiful music (as opposed to making music that's just barely good enough to not distract people from worshipping) can bring glory to God, but that's what it needs to do. Not to us, but to Your Name, be the glory.

12th child, 1st child; what's the difference?

You Are Likely a First Born

At your darkest moments, you feel guilty. At work and school, you do best when you're researching. When you love someone, you tend to agree with them often. In friendship, you are considerate and compromising. Your ideal careers are: business, research, counseling, promotion, and speaking. You will leave your mark on the world with discoveries, new information, and teaching people to dream.

The Birth Order Predictor

Yeah, I had a feeling while answering the questions that it wasn't going to come out right. For one thing, they didn't have "silly" under sense of humor! How can you have an accurate quiz without "silly"?!!!! (=

On the Implausiblity of Borrowing Grammatical Morphemes

“Finnish speaker here meets Swedish speaker there and says ‘Oh! We’re lacking a definite article! Can I borrow one?” -Dr. O'Herin

This is one of my old favorites, from my historical linguistics class.

That was... different...

There's a street near my parent's house, Wilmington Avenue, which has three lanes at an intersection near the freeway. The rightmost lane has to turn right, so the middle lane is the one you want to be in to get into the right lane after the intersection, to get on the freeway. Getting on the freeway is popular there (especially with trucks -- Wilmington is a harbor city), so the middle lane gets a bit backed up in the afternoons. People tend to get into the right lane before the right lane even properly exists if they want to turn right at the intersection, so as to avoid Middle Lane Congestion.

That's normal. What is not normal is when a big truck decides he doesn't want to be in the right lane after all, and he starts edging into Your Space. That's what happened today. I was towards the front of the truck, and I sort of looked at him disbelievingly and kept going at first. Then we all stopped for the red light. The truck continued to edge over, this time into the foot or two of space in between me and the truck in front of me. I looked at him incredulously. I can understand a little car sticking his nose in to force his way into the lane, but there was no way that big rig was ever going to fit. I stayed where I was. The truck honked at me. I looked at him again, and said something like, "What the heck are you doing?!" The driver then gestured at me to change lanes. I said, "I want to be in this lane, sir, I don't want to change lanes!" (I can be very polite when I'm mad) and I changed lanes. He was a lot bigger than I was, so it seemed the thing to do. I was able to get on the freeway still, no thanks to him. I just had to cut in line to do it.

I guess there's a first time for everything, even being very purposefully forced out of your lane by a big rig...

On Flamingoes, in the way

“Whoa, flamingoes! We can’t go that way.” –Andrea

To be fair, I agreed with her sentiments.

Public Transportation

I think it's time for me to actually post again about stuff going on in my life, rather than just quotes or reviews. Don't you think so? Good! Now that we're all agreed...

Money's really tight for John and I, with him going to Talbot. So far we're attempting to do it without any loans. I don't know how long we'll be able to keep it up, but we're trying. Anyway, this lead John to ask me one day if it would be possible for me to take public transportation to work. I didn't know, but I said I'd look into it. I did, and the results were quite intriguing. It came down to this: my commute would take longer (at the time it looked like 15 minutes longer each way -- now it seems to be 30 minutes each way, if I don't miss a bus or train and the bus isn't late), but I'd be able to read the entire time. And it would save a lot of money -- instead of filling my tank with $30 of gas (and rising fast!) almost once a week, I could get to my house for $15 a week (or so I thought -- now it seems that a zone fee brings it up to $22.50 a week), plus I wouldn't be spending as much on maintenance. And then there's the adventure aspect (=.

After a bit I decided to go ahead and try it. Because I still needed my car at work for a while, the first time I tried I left my car at work and took public transportation home. Then, of course, I took it again back to work. That was the 18th and 19th of August. Since then I've done it a few more times (leaving my car at home though, instead of work). I'd taken the green line and the blue line for a class once, but that was with a few classmates and with directions from the teacher. This was my first time on this route, and the first time by myself. It was interesting. I was nervous at first -- just that I'd miss my stop or something, which I thought I had done a couple times. I'm getting more relaxed about it now though, so it's easier to read. I'd still rather not try to concentrate on nonfiction, but I have plenty of fiction on my reading list to occupy me for some time to come.

One "con" I've recently discovered is that I seem to get sick more often after having taken the bus. Wednesday I was in bed pretty much all day with some stomach ailment which hasn't completely gone away yet. In future I will be more careful to wash my hands after I've ridden the Metro.

I'm having fun people watching a bit too. Sometimes there are cute little kids to look at, and once there was a beautiful Mexican girl, around my age, with a baby and small child. She looked quite happy, and she reminded me of the Zapotec women on my internship in Oaxaca. Who knows, perhaps she was Zapotec. Mostly the buses are filled with lower class people, teenagers, and college students, but the green line has some middle class people, too. Mostly people seem to do it because they don't have cars, and yet the park and ride at the Norwalk Station has tons of cars parked there. It seems that John and I aren't the only ones trying to cut costs, especially with the insane gas prices.

When I started researching the system online I wondered about our American mentality about public transportation. I mean, it's not something we think much about at all. It's almost never considered as an option by the middle class, even when a car has broken down. So I wondered if that's because our system is so bad, or is the system bad because of our mentality and the low demand? Or is the system really that bad at all? My tentative conclusion is that it isn't so bad. I mean, it's not as good as the system in Europe, but it's really quite tolerable, at least the little experience I've had of it so far. So why the mentality? Just another symptom of our rich, individualistic, materialistic culture? Maybe. And if you didn't like to read as much as I do you'd probably be less patient than I am. Or if your work hours weren't quite as flexible. Of course, other routes may be worse, and it looks like it'd be a huge pain if you had to keep switching between city transit lines (unless you bought the "EZ" pass for $58 a month) -- I can take the Metro the whole way, fortunately.