emb3r.com

Of Wedding Rings and Deeper Things

I have, what i think to be a pretty strange view of marriage.

It stems from the fact that I don’t believe in “the one”. I’m not talking about Neo, I’m talking about that one person who you are destined to be with forever. Most people who hold that view conclude that you should never get married or if you do, you cannot have any reasonable expectation that you will be together forever.

I reach a different conclusion.

I don’t think that there’s one person out there who you are pre-destined to be with forever, and as such, I think that there are probably thousands of people on earth you are extremely compatible with. You will encounter maybe fifty of these people in your life. Most likely you will date at least one of them. It’s up to you, to decide who the person is going to be that you are going to spend your life with.

Deflection: Some Christian folks might get a little bit Calvinist-ic on me here, but I really don’t think that God forces upon you the person that you are going to marry. So many people say, “I know that God sent you to me.” And then when things go bad, “Well this marriage is hard and it hurts but this is the wife that God chose for me so I’m going to stick it out.” This makes the marriage a chore instead of an act of self will and unconditional love. It can also build resentment against God.

Back to my perspective.
Once you have decided that the person is the one you want to marry, that’s it. You have made a declaration to the world, that while there may be another person out there with other qualities that you find wonderful or other levels of compatibility, you are never going to leave the person you have committed to - irrespective of anything.

Marriage is the firm commitment to a person, to a relationship, to never give up hope, to never quit and to never give your heart to anyone else.

That’s my view. In that view, there is no flippancy about marriage. It is one of the most important commitments you can ever make, second only to your commitment to Christ.

For those who are single or dating, you have a freedom and liberty to find that person - the person you can commit to forever.

Here’s the really sad thing, my entire point…*winces*…can be summed up… I can’t do it…Oh God.
MyentirepointcanbesummedupbyoneofthosegoddamnedStarbuckscupquotes.

God help me.

“The irony of commitment is that it’s deeply liberating – in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around as rational hesitation. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life.”

– Anne Morriss
Starbucks customer from New York City. She describes herself as an “organization builder, restless American citizen, optimist.”

The Laker game Friday was stinkin awesome. Technically, it was a Clipper game versus the Lakers. And my Clippers dominated! w00t.

After the game I came home to a LAN that we had planned for that night. We had a great time, one of the best and most successful lans we’ve ever had. We started with a new game, Star Wars: Empire at War. It was alright, not a huge fan of the land battles, but the space combat was pretty sweet. All in all, I give it a 3 out of 5 stars.

After that we went back to the good old COD2 (Call of Duty 2) and played that for the rest of the time (5:30am). Man, that game looks gorgeous on my upgraded box. So a good time was had by all. My brother was there for COD portion, which was awesome. I love gaming with my bro. I managed to pwn Marky a couple times which is a feat in itself as he is the master of that game.

I crashed after that and got up around 10ish. Took it easy the rest of the day and did some more gaming. By afternoon, most of the greyhats gang was over just hanging out and having a good time. We had dinner and watched movies, all that jazz.

I don’t know how to blog on what happened later that evening except to say, that a dear friend in the group left behind a period in his life that was exceptionally important to him. The event was painful and all my prayers are with him during this difficult time.

This is the second time in my life where I have been given the the opportunity to bear someone elses burdens with intense, divine empathy. There’s something about the intangible human heart effects all the other members of the physical body. I had fitful sleep last night and a general, nagging in the back of my mind telling me that everything is not okay. This is my friends sorrow to endure, but the emotion of it has been shared with me for this time so that I might bear up his burden.

My body has started getting used to being up at 5:30am. I mean, I still wake up every morning going, “No way…aww come on…”, and I bet I make really pathetic faces and sounds. I guess I’ll just have to wait until mid-September when I won’t be sleeping lonely anymore. But once I’m up and at my desk I actually am pretty lucid.
Even if I’m not… no managers are in until 7:30 or 8 anyways so I have about 2 hours to do the early morning maintanence and to write assorted blog entries.

Another thing I’ve discovered about myself, a weird paradox, I get lost whenever I have to drive somewhere I’ve never been but I frick love maps. One of my favorite things at my desk is my world map. I’ve taken to researching one country a day. The other day it was Ireland, very interesting history and culture there, and yesterday it was Zimbabwe. Did you know that the ancient Zimbabwe(ans?) developed the technique of platinum working? Very interesting. Additionally, they currently have the highest literacy rate in Africa with about 95% of the population being able to read and write. I found that just plain amazing. I mean, I bet 50% of the people who play WoW couldn’t form a complete sentence if their loot roll depended on it.

Here’s an interesting note, this guy I know *cough* started a really sweet website called The Stash. If you want to download good music or watch funny videos, for free, on a site with no pop ups and spy-ware, check out The Stash.

Tonight, I’m going to a Laker game with my fam-damn-ily. It’s a Laker/Clipper game, but it’s a home game for the Lakers so technically…ya…
But it should be a good time, you know who I’ll be rooting for.

Go CLIPS!

I think my blogging will start to be a bit more frequent with my role I’m performing at work. It’s easy enough to do parts of my work with a little notepad open in the corner so I can type of the post and actually post it later.

Here’s my job description, for the benefit of people who don’t know or don’t understand what I do. *cough* Andy *cough*

Purpose of the Job
Supports telecommunications and data communications network to meet customer needs.
Evaluates, plans, recommends, implements and refines telecommunications and computer
communications networks and systems. Analyzes, monitor, tune, troubleshoot and
document network system capacity and performance to ensure stable network and
systems performance. Provides input to facilitate development of future local and wide-area
voice and data network strategies, philosophy, direction, planning, etc. Provides
technical guidance to other IT personnel.

What that means, practically, is that I work on Network related projects, solve network related problems and do network deployments.

In Andy-speak, I do things my boss tells me, I help out employees who can’t get to the intertron, I fix broken intertron pieces and I put new intertron pieces where they should go.

The majority of the work is reactive, rather than proactive so sometimes I find myself at my desk, monitoring the status of different network devices or working on trouble tickets or troubleshooting issues that people have. Other times, I’m in warehouses 50 miles from here fixing a stupid mainframe printer. It really depends. Sometimes it’s boring and there’s nothing to do. Sometimes there’s so much going on and so much to learn that I lose track of time. Mostly it’s just plain enjoyable.
I’m blessed with good co-workers who I enjoy working with. My direct supervisor is fairly lax when it comes to friendly chit-chat so I have a good degree of freedom there as long as work gets done.

As of last Monday I became a full salaried, non-intern employee. Which is good and bad. No overtime, but more flexibility in hours, etc. So I’m happy about that.

Realization:
I derive a good deal of my self-worth from other peoples appraisal of my skills and performance.

I know that this is not necessarily such a good thing, it allows me to become overly sensitive to what other people think. But one thing I noticed is that I am much more responsive to positive appraisal than negative appraisal. That is - when someone comments positively, I experience a big boost in how I generally feel about my life experience, as it were. When people comment negatively, I don’t really experience a very significant decline.

I do think, however, that my feelings about myself should not be so dependant upon other peoples valuations, which are partial at best. My own comprehension of my value is also incomplete and subject to ego and mood.
Not to wax too poetic, but I’d rather my sails be billowed by the One who knows my seaworthiness.

God that’s a lame, but I think correct, analogy.

Well, my brother buying me this domain has made me rethink my entire site. Basically, I’m going to create a couple different portions to it. I’ll be brainstorming as things go on - but long term plans involve some XML integration and Flash animation. It will be a rejuvination, an expression of my imagination, a reason for celebration with all the pomp of a coronation I’ll reveal the next generation of emb3r’s blog.

This just in, my brother got me what is perhaps the most functionally sweet birthday present ever. Check out http://emb3r.com
Ya that’s right…you’re back here. Mad props to the brother for the domain.

Wow.
Things are going pretty well, now that I’ve survived my encounter with … a spider.

No more details about said incident, as the doctor cancelled my appointment.

Revelation: Doctors don’t even say “I have to cancel for your appointment”, it’s “I cancelled your appointment.” Like he reached down and smashed my appointment with a hammer and said, “Sorry, but I’m undoing what two phonecalls to an automated appointment system wrote in digital stone.”
Something about that, him canceling my… I’ll drop it.

Anyways. All things are pretty much looking up. I have details to share and all that it’s just I don’t have the time to do so at the moment. So here are some words to guide your thinking.

Close your eyes.
Picture me. (Clothed, please.)
Then think these words. Links have been added for those without imaginations.

Work.
Irritation.
Glee.
Love.
Enjoyment.
Apprehension.
Excitement.

So I wake up Wednesday morning at 5am (a week ago) with the most severe
pain of my entire life in my left arm. I’m talking pulsing, throbbing,
stabbing, sharp, fiery pain from the shoulder blade down to my pinky.
Unable to go back to sleep I fitfully worked through the events of the
previous day.

Hmmmm, was I in a fight? No. Did I fall on my shoulder? No. Did a
million nanobots invade my body and decide I shouldn’t use my left arm?
Maybe.
This pain continued to a slightly lesser degree throughout the day. That
night after I walked Sarah out to her car and came back in, I started
feeling ill and feverish. I was nauseated, shaking uncontrollably,
severe stomach pain and the pain in my arm increased significantly.

That night I got about 2 hours of sleep probably. The next morning when
it was time to get up, I started thinking about the pain I was
experiencing and about the feverish fits I had had that night. The only
thing I could compare the pain to was the time I was stung by a sting
ray while surfing in San Onofre. The pain was almost identical in type
and severity. So that gets me thinking, what in or around my house has
venom. The only thing that came to mind was the month before when I was
cleaning off lawn furniture outside and found about half a dozen black
widows.

So I hit up the good old WebMD, also known as Doctors Bane for it’s role
in countless patients’ self-misdiagnosis. I had every symptom of black
widow bite, except abdominal stiffening and spinal pain. This was cause
for concern.

I hopped in my car and drove down to the ER, got there around 7 and
waited till about 8. Got into a gown and a room and saw a doctor about
15 minutes later. She said spider bite was a possibility but I didn’t
need any kind of anti-venom because of the fact that I was without those
two symptoms and that it had been 24 hours since I first experienced the
symptoms. She prescribed me extra strength Motrin 800mg (normal is
200mg) and a muscle-relaxer called Flexeril.

I spent Friday-Monday without really leaving my house. I can’t remember
a thing from Friday or Saturday when I was taking the drugs 3 times a
day as prescribed. Sunday was kind of a blur too. On Monday I decided to
take the drugs only twice, once in the morning and once in the evening.
I definitely noticed the pain in between but I also noticed another
strange sensation toward the afternoon- a numbness around the crown of
my head, like I was wearing a sweat band. After I took the medication
again in the evening, the sensation went away and I forgot about it.

Tuesday I got up and went to work as usual taking only normal strength
Advil. Try explaining all this too your manager. Then try explaining it
to your coworkers…10 times. About noon-ish, the strange sensation in
the crown of my head came back. It doesn’t hurt or anything and when I
touch my head it goes away where I touch it, but comes back within a
minute. The day continued that way.
When I got up this morning, one week after the incident I still have
muscle pain in my left arm, mostly in the forearm. If I try rotating
motions with resistance, I get an extremely painful muscle spasm in my
forearm, like the tendon did a rubber band snap that shoots up to my
triceps. I can stand all that, without any worries because it’s getting
better. But this stupid numbness in the skull came on about 8am this
morning. It’s worrying me a bit. I looked up the side-effects of
Flexeril and I have or had all of the common ones (dizziness,
drowsiness, etc) and I have or had about half of the rare ones.
Ready for the list? I removed the ones I didn’t have.

Less common or rare side effects may include:
Abnormal heartbeats, abnormal sensations, agitation, bloated feeling,
blurred vision, constipation, decreased appetite, depressed mood,
difficulty speaking, disorientation, fatigue, fluid retention,
heartburn, increased heart rate, indigestion, lack of coordination,
nausea, nervousness, ringing in the ears, stomach and intestinal pain,
swelling of the tongue, thirst, tingling in hands or feet, urinating
more or less than usual, vague feeling of bodily discomfort, weakness.

As of this morning, the abnormal sensation on my head and the “urinating
more or less than usual” (less, if you care to know) is all of the side
effects that remain. I’m making an appointment with my normal doctor to
make sure I’m okay.

Well, if you didn’t know any of that - this is probably extremely
shocking.
And I know you and I are all asking the same question: When do I get my
super spider powers?