Halloween

So, it's been almost two months since my last post. Sorry.

Anyway, yesterday was Halloween. Duh. The day before, one of my co-workers was talking about how "everyone" was dressing up. Turns out, 3 people did, and everyone else was normal. It was a "if you want to" approach. I had a speech ready to explain why I didn't dress up and everything. Oh well.

I was thinking about it, and part of it is that I don't like Halloween. However, a big part of it is that I don't want to be someone else. I like being me. Most of you will know how big it is for me to be able to say that.

My speech was going to be something like this: My costume is simple. I'm a new and (hopefully) improved version of Martin from last year. Sure, this version is around $1,000 in debt for every year since he was born, and he was born in the Reagan administration, and he's got a job that barely beats minimum wage. However, the job is a full-time one, so he's making enough money to pay the bills and work down the debt. He's even talking about next year's version being debt-free (other than student loans), having multiple bank accounts, a 401k, owning stocks, and having health insurance from HIS OWN job! It's like he's becoming a real, human adult or something.

Sure, yesterday (Halloween) would have been his parents' 29th anniversary, but 3 years after their divorce, he's finally coming to terms with it.

Sure, he's still single, but he's still relatively young, so there's time on that. Besides, about half a year ago, he was saying that he shouldn't get into a relationship until he gets his "stuff" together, and he's getting his "stuff" together.

So even with all his flaws, why should I be someone other than Martin? And again, he likes himself. And how many people can be as convincing in their costume as I was?

And now out of the speech. I was conversing this morning with a friend, and he asked why I like this job better than the one at Wal-Mart. I was able to come up with 3 answers then, and I've come up with another since then.

1. The pay is enough to actually pay bills, rather than just hold back the tide of debt
2. I generally know what a work day is going to entail: if I'm on checkout, the first thing I do will be to cover the last break of the morning person, then I'll do odd jobs for the managers until the morning person goes off for the day, then I'm at the register for the rest of the day. If I'm not on checkout, it's odd jobs all day--find a manager, get assigned a task for the next half hour to 2 hours, then repeat until time to go home. At Wal-Mart, I was never sure what a day would bring.
3. The third reason is that I actually feel like a "valued member of the team." (and if you ever get a chance, try to get me to say that last sentence. I think my brain rejects the corniness of that, because every time I've tried, my voice turns snooty and British) At Wal-Mart, it seemed like I could just skip a day and it wouldn't really be noticed. At Walgreens now, I walk in, and all my co-workers and the managers say hi, ask me how I'm doing, what hours I'm working, etc.
4. I realized while writing this that I also like this job better because I went into Wal-Mart expecting to only work for a couple months, while this is a "work here until I figure out what I want to do" job, and might be a job for a couple years.

And just for fun, here's a counter for one of the items mentioned in the speech.

Blargh

It feels like I've spent the last few weeks falling apart and trying desperately to hold the pieces together so that nobody will notice. Now I'm simply exhausted. Job hunting sucks. Debt sucks.

I feel so alone.

'Merica!

So, I never actually took the blog down like I planned to. I was going to do it at O'Hare, but their internet is evil, so it never happened. Anyway, I'm back. There's a lot to tell, so for this post I'm just going to list a bunch of firsts. These are things that happened to me for the first time in the Chiner.

1. Sat in a train for 4 hours without it going anywhere (the tracks were flooded)
2. Rode a train (a week after sitting in one for 4 hours)
3. Ate at Subway (Seriously. I had to go to the Great Wall to eat at Subway for the first time)
4. Watched 5 movies during one plane ride (Wall-E, Up, War Horse, The Incredibles, and Shrek)
5. Ran through 6-inch deep water and pouring rain while carrying a 6-year-old
6. Sang at KTV (the Chinese version of karaoke) I went with some Enrique, and later joked that I was "trying to win me a little Chinese bride"
7. Rode a chair lift that didn't make me nervous (I know, riding the one at Adventureland freaks me out, but riding one over a deep valley and up the Great Wall is okay. I'm weird)
8. Saw a sunset at over 30,000 feet above ground--and far enough north where dusk never ended, and sunrise came again before dark
9. Ate lamb

I'm sure I'm forgetting some cool things, but whatever. More info to come in later posts.

Bye (for now)

Well, it's less than a week (counting travel to the airport) until I leave for China. I'm going to be taking this blog down while I'm there, so if it disappears, sorry. If you're reading this for the first time after I get back, hello again! I'm sorry for the disappearance.

But yeah, minor update on my klutziness. I played basketball with some friends on Tuesday night, and I was fairly sure I broke my finger for a while. The swelling and discoloration have gone down since Wednesday morning, so I think it was probably just jammed badly. Then yesterday, I was cooking something in the oven, and when it came time to take it out, my thumb somehow bypassed the potholder and hit the oven rack. So now I've got injuries on both hands.

And while waiting for China, I've been packing a little bit at a time. I've got a fair bit ready now, but I'm still a while from getting it all done. The main thing left is clothes. But yay! only a week left!

3 weeks

21 Days from the time of this post, I shall be on the first of three planes to take me to the Bring Me Hope camp. (In case you can't tell, I'm excited) With the time change, it'll take 32.5 hours for the first two planes.

I woke up at 5:30 this morning to a dream about getting on the plane.

Anyway, I've got a job interview on Tuesday. Hooray for chances to work!

Yeah, short post. Whatever.

Response

Okay, this is going to be mostly in response to recent comments from my uncle on this post, this post, and this post. But first, I'm going to apologize for not posting for a long time. My computer died on me, and so I have to hit up libraries to get online--or use my iPod, where typing is all kinds of fun.

Anyway, on to the response. Firstly, the main reason I post on this blog is so I can sleep at night. If I don't get thoughts down in some form, my brain gets locked on them, and I can't get to sleep. The secondary reason is to let my friends know what I'm up to. So the primary and secondary audiences are mostly--if not all--Christians. So, people who would agree with that kind of thing--just like anywhere else on the internet that uses first person pronouns--and therefore, it's going to look wrong to people who disagree.

Now as to the specific posts. The first thing I'm going to address is from the second linked post--where he wonders what the "impossible that had to happen" was. At this point, I wasn't aware of the possibility of a chiral anomaly. The impossible was the breaking of the conservation of baryon number. Now as near as I can tell from that (and I will admit that that dense wall of quantum mechanics-speak is unintelligible to me and makes my head hurt, so I may be wrong) we don't have evidence showing that that has happened (other than the fact that we exist) so they're only hypotheses--again, unless I'm reading that wrong. And if I'm wrong, I won't say the old "it's only a theory," because I think that people who say that should be dragged to a dictionary, be forced to read the scientific definition of "theory" out loud, then smacked across the face with the dictionary. Like I said, I might be wrong, and if I am, then I'm wrong. I am human, after all.

As to the "argument from ignorance" complaints.... Yes. Exactly. I made logical fallacies. I didn't actually prove the existence of God. I am of the opinion that God cannot be proven or disproven logically--if He could, the debate would have been over long ago. Unfortunately, it may appear that I was trying to prove His existence. The main reason for those posts is that I get frustrated when atheists go in and point out internal inconsistencies in the Bible, and acting as if science has all the answers. There are still holes in science--and in my opinion, there always will be, but that's just my opinion. Now, my belief is that the inconsistencies in the Bible are due to human error--a common factor no matter what field you look at.

As to whether or not scientists should give up because I don't think they'll figure everything out, of course they shouldn't. They should continue trying to increase our knowledge of the universe. And yes, for the most part, the holes have been getting smaller, but we've also found new ones--quantum mechanics vs. classical physics, for example. It's my belief that as they find answers to the current issues, they will find new holes in understanding, so that no matter how long our species survives, we will never have a complete understanding of things in science--only my opinion. Should that be taught in schools? Only the part that there are currently gaps in our understanding--God should only be mentioned in religious studies or biblical studies courses, since it's not science--at most. Show the gaps, talk about experiments that are attempting to close them, that's it.

Anyway, I'm bored with this, and I'm hungry, so I'm going to close this out and head home.

Nerding out

This morning, I had some nerdiness busting out. I was thinking, and I figured out a way to determine how many decimal places come from a fraction. The first step is to reduce it to the simplest form--1/2 instead of 4/8 or 5/6 instead of 25/30. Then you can ignore the numerator. The denominator is all that matters. The next step is to attempt to reduce the denominator to the form (2^x)(5^y) where x and y are whole, non-negative numbers (0, 1, 2, etc.). If the denominator can't be reduced to this form, the decimal version goes on infinitely. If it can be reduced to this form, compare x and y. The higher of the two  numbers is how many decimal places your answer will have. For example, a denominator of 40 would reduce to (2³5¹), giving 3 as the higher of x and y. This is how many decimal places will always be in a number with 40 as the denominator (unless it can be reduced to a smaller denominator). This stems from the fact that decimals come from exact powers of 10, which can be written as (2^x5^x) and anything with those numbers the same (or lower) fits evenly.

Now is there a way to figure out what denominator(s) you should pick to have a decimal that is a certain length? Yes. Let's imagine that you are a math teacher, and you want a problem to have a decimal with 3 places. So you take your (2^x)(5^y) form and set x or y equal to 3. With x, that gives 2³. Then vary y from 0 to 3, giving you (2³)(5⁰)=8, (2³)(5¹)=40, (2³)(5²)=200, and (2³)(5³)=1000. Then starting from this last, vary x down to 0 to get (2²)(5³)=500, (2¹)(5³)=250, and (2⁰)(5⁵)=125. Then you can always multiply the numerator and denominators by whatever number you want to make the problem seem harder. Just be careful to not make it possible to reduce the fraction further than you wanted.

I ran through all of this in about 15 minutes this morning--for no real purpose. Yeah, I'm a nerd. And proud of it.

Support

Well, I'm sending out the first round of letters here in a few minutes. I've got a bunch stuffed and addressed, I just need to get to a post office, which is going to happen as soon as I finish typing this post. So yay! Some of you will be receiving an envelope with my poor handwriting in your mailboxes within the next couple of days! Then you will have a chance to send me money! Hooray for everything! I DON'T KNOW WHY I'M SHOUTING!

Um, yeah. Sorry about the excitement. I'm tired. Bye.

Letters

Today, I bought envelopes. Lots of envelopes. I still need to actually write my support letter, but I should have more than enough envelopes to send it out. I have to start getting going on things for this trip. They're recommending that I have 2/3 of the money raised by June 1--and that's about $2,000. It feels like there's so much to do to go on this trip. And school's wrapping up. And I need to start looking for a job. And I need to sleep occasionally or I get really paranoid.

Anyway, if you're not sure if I've got you on my list of people to send a letter to--or you want to make sure I have an address--and you want to be on the list, feel free to shoot me a text/email/fb message/whatever and let me know.

Anyway, I should go now. I've procrastinated from studying long enough, and I've got a test this evening.