Re-direction

Hey all

Hoss is hanging up his blogging hat. It's time to shed my ineffective anonymity for something a bit more real. And practical.
http://johns-excellent-adventure.blogspot.com/
Consider yourselves re-directed.

So long and thanks for all the fish

Confessions

Mostly just one confession for you, nameless internet. I have a great and terrible secret i should share with you:

I have never watched Bonanza.

Not an episode. Not a season. No more than a couple 2-minute clips. Every "Hoss" reference is a fallacy. Every picture an elaborate ruse. If you've been paying attention as long as my first story about Carlos, you know how I got the name. I'm Canadian. I'm not even convinced you can watch re-runs of Bonanza up here, and even if you can I probably wouldn't. I'm not really interested.

I know you might be reeling in shock, so I'll try to keep this brief. If the world begins to spin around you, please seek medical attention. In fact, just sit down. It'll be over soon.

This particular hypocrisy fits in nicely with my collection of other ones. But confession is step one to fixing hypocrisy. So I'm sorry. I repent of mis-leading any of you. And I beg your forgiveness, nameless internet. (Well, except for public followers. You have names)

Glad I got that off my chest.

As a bit of a side note, it's entirely possible that I might entirely axe this blog. Since I don't use it. But it was a fun ride. I'll waffle on the decision a bit longer - cause that's how I roll - and then probably do it. In case I do: So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Weird Night

Tonight was a weird night.

We hit the bar this evening. It's not usually my scene, but wednesday nights are cheap wings night and I love chicken. So I was there. I met up with a bunch of friends, who I barely have energy or creativity to invent fake names for. (I've become aware that among some of my more familiar readers, he practice of guessing the pseudonyms is the game you play. I'm going to start giving fewer hints and just use names whether I've introduced them or not. Be confused.)
The waitress came by and asked if we wanted anything. To my shame, I didn't look up. I usually try to be friendly to wait staff; they have a hard job that i admire. But this time I was tired and just asked for a water. I looked up and recognized Maria, I girl i'd been tutoring for some extra cash. Weird. We had a brief conversation, but it was busy and every minute spent talking with me was a minute not spent serving customers who were actually going to buy booze. It was weird. To say the least.
I think I've always indulged myself with this fantasy that I can go to the places where the non-Christians are and relate to them and meet them and try to talk to them without my real life showing up. But I'm going to be recognized from the outside. I'm going to have that accountability.
it happened again when I was in line for wings. Behind me was a guy I'll call Felix. who used to be one of my supervisor's when I worked at a fast food joint last summer. He was a tad inebriate,d but he recognized me and we caught up. I was instructed to give him a call. I'm seriously thinking about it. But I never expected to meet so many people at the bar. I was beginning to have reservations about whether or not I was all that comfortable being seen there.
Either way, most of the people peeled off until it was only myself, Kermit, Bruce, Melody, and Brumhilda left. The girls wanted to dance pretty badly, and since there were a lot of creepy drunk guys around I was uninterested in letting them go off on their own. I'd be useless in a fight, but they don't call me "Hoss" for nothing. I can pretend to look intimidating. Long enough to usher a girl off the dance floor, anyway. So I went with them.
I am not an excellent dancer, but I tried to have fun. the other guys went nuts but soon left to get some air. Which left me as the sole protector for a good while. I didn't want to leave, really, but I wasn't enjoying myself. The more I listened to the music, and saw the people around me, the more I found myself in the background of people's drunken photos inevitably destined for facebook, the more crammed the dance floor got and deeper we were crowded into the corner, the less happy I was that I had come. I couldn't leave the girls there, and they seemed to still be enjoying themselves. But I became acutely aware of the increasingly untenable position I was in. Trying to reconcile my role as man of God with bar-dancing fool. It was disconcerting and uncomfortable.
Mercifully, the girls got tired and we left not too long after. But walking home in the cool summer air I couldn't help but wish I hadn't gone. I'm glad I did because I think that Kermit and Bruce on their own would've probably dropped the ball on being there for just-in-case purposes. But it wasn't a tonne of fun, and I think I shall decline the invitation in the future.
I think the contours of navigating how to be a "light of the world" while "mak[ing] every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him" is hard and has no easy answers. I heard and saw a lot of stuff I didn't want to see. But I also had opportunities to meet other people where they were and to be there for my sisters in Christ. So I don't know.

Just found this

Made my day:

Hoss sound bite  LOST sound bites

I don't know what hardware Sawyer is alluding to, but I love his show and I love that he knows my name. Whoo!

Home Stretch, Part II

Update

Just saw more people coping very badly with the home stretch.

In the school cafeteria, abandoned since it closes at 4, there were two women sitting at a caf table, poring over notes and talking hurriedly and importantly about something they were working on. So far no surprise. But as I walked past, I noticed they had open on the table a game of Monopoly. Money, board, dice... everything. A full game of Monopoly in full swing by themselves in the abandoned cafeteria.

That wasn't the weird part. The weird part was that they still had open notebooks and pens out too, frenziedly writing as if they were working on something very important.

I am unsure as to what conclusions I am intended to draw. Perhaps they are conducting an assignment assessing probabilities of landing on certain spaces? Or revising and planning a business model for a revised version of the game?

Or maybe they're education students. This is exactly the kind of weird junk that we've all grown accustomed to watching them do. If it's not model cars or balsa wood catapults, it's Monopoly in the cafeteria at 7pm.

I hope the end comes soon. I'm losing hold of the already-tenuous grip on sanity I possessed in the first place.

Home Stretch

The last days of school are upon me, and this is beginning to affect me in interesting ways. I've noticed my sentences getting longer and my patience getting shorter. My hours of sleep have all but vanished, but my hours of staring into space have increased exponentially. I've decided I'm getting basically the same amount of mental downtime. I'm wrong, but that's what I've decided.

Noticeably, however, the same phenomenon has been affecting the people around me. Today, after kicking the proverbial posterior of my final exam (Boo Yaah!) I retired to the library to work on my last assignment before I graduate (Boo Yaah-er!). About an hour ago, a couple guys were sitting at a study booth just around the corner from me. In eyeshot, but not making-you-feel-like-you-should-say-hello eyeshot. One of them was booting up his laptop, or at least that's what I figured he was doing. I was wrenched from my blissfully ignorant-of-the-world work zen (by which I mean head-on-desk catnap) by a garishly over-volume-ed Windows startup music.

This wouldn't have been so bad, really. It happens. I felt kinda bad for the guy. I remember it happened to me. You feel like you've ruined everyone else's day. Which, I suppose, you have. But people need to relax a bit, breathe, and re-establish their study-Chi on their own.

But about a minute later, another sound blasted out from the computer. It sounded like the Muslim call to prayer, except not the opening part, because there weren't as many "a"s and a lot more "ee"s and "oo"s. I don't speak Arabic, but it is a beautiful language and I'd love to fail hopelessly at learning it some day in the future.

But this time it was not so much beautiful as it was loud. And disruptive. And long. And I looked over, the guys chuckling to themselves. I thought one might have even looked over at me and snickered.

Instantly I felt embarrassed and self conscious. Why should I be mad, maybe he has that as his startup music...after the startup music? Why were they laughing at me? Was it 'cause I was napping? Maybe that was the part of the morning call to prayer that says "prayer is better than sleep"? How could I tell? Should I speak Arabic? Are they still looking?

Eventually, I arrived at a tried-and-true answer to most of these questions. It's an answer that has served me well for many of my ponderings and confusions. It goes something like this:

"Hoss, you're being an idiot."

That helped me feel better. Like I said, I'm running on a bit of a short fuse. But I'm also, after four years of this song and dance, getting pretty good at talking myself down from some of the smaller cliffs. An hour later, though, I'm still perplexed as to what possibly could have prompted that musical outburst. And unless one of them reads this post and lets me know, I shall forever be condemned to mystery and wondering.

Bummer.

Part III: “What’s this? Two meals in one week?” – Dr. John Zoidburg

And now, the exciting conclusion!

When last we left our hero, he had been assaulted and robbed at awesome-point my men stronger, if not bigger, than he and left in a pile of laundry and hurt and shame. He could tell from the laughter outside his again-locked door that everyone was having a great time at his expense, but he was no longer in a mood to laugh.

It was at this point that Hoss decided that he was out of escape options. Which left only the window. Donning shin and knee pads and affixing a bike helmet to his head, he prepared for the escape and fight for freedom. He opened up his window, climbed up onto the fence outside and down onto the neighbours’ driveway.

After discovering the front and back doors to be locked, and realizing he had lost more than just the door key in the combat earlier, he returned into his room which, at least, was warm.

It was at this point, as Hoss had half-climbed back into his room that he was met with some company. Greta had come in, bearing some cold leftover food and a glass of water. She deposited them on the table and escaped the room before Hoss had a chance to make a break for the door, but the thought was appreciated.

AT least, it was appreciated for a couple minutes. For a short while later, an assailant burst again through the door, throwing a cloud of small green plastic BBs over the room already reduced to chaos. Hoss wouldn’t have been so upset, if the food he had been enjoying was not now filled with small green beads.

Despairing of freedom, Hoss found something else to do. He sat down at his desk and wrote letters. Some time passed. Eventually, the sound of the door opening broke him from his linguistic composition-ing. It was Greta.

“Y’know, the door’s been open for, like, 10 minutes?”

Hoss sat, finished his letter, and then emerged.

Ultimately, I sense, as an author, an anticlimax. But, like the nature of most pranks, it was never as much fun as it was in he first 10 minutes. I am encouraged to know I have so many friends who are willing to drop what they are doing and gather to taunt, mock, and in some cases attack me. Together. Like a family.

And it’s going to take a couple days before I work up the energy to try and fix everything in my room.