Aloha!
Tamika’s doing very well, thank you very much for all of your prayers! She’s been taking it easy. We’re hoping she’ll be able to go in sometime this week for a checkup.
We had a lot of fun this weekend. Jocelyn, my co-worker, held a surprise birthday party, for her husband Steve. She invited a bunch of their friends over and we watched a few episodes of “Arrested Development”, (funny show, I’d never seen it before), played games and had pizza & cake.
One of Jocelyn’s friends, Becca Rogers, I’d met before. I thought she had looked familiar when we arrived, and then realized the connection when I found out that she had worked in the Writing Center at Messiah College.
I had always been pretty good at writing term papers and essays in college, but my senior year I had Senior Seminar, a class taught by Ted Prescott that was basically a “last hurrah art class”. We were lectured on various important subjects, from Art Movements in History to what seemed like scare tactics on what we were going to do with our lives once we graduated. Most people agreed that the class was nearly universally a waste of time, but it didn’t meet too often and most tolerated it (though few did their homework). I found it entertaining, especially since most of the Art faculty had gained at least a mild distaste for me by this point, and many of them rotated in to give us lectures.
The curriculum was interesting to me. Most of my classmates talked like Modernism and Dadaism were things that they had learned in their Highschool AP classes, but it was all still new to me. I ate it up and devoured the recommended reading that Mr. Prescott prescribed, even though it became more and more obvious that he disapproved of how rebellious I tended to be.
Much to my dismay, the culmination of the class, the “Fusion Paper”, came along with the demand that we go down to the Writing Center for help on our paper.
At that point, I had a general dislike for the entire English department. I had originally tried to make a minor out of it, but was turned down by professors when I tried to take writing and literature classes (they gave preference to “serious students”; not “moonlighting engineers” like me). The one literature class I did get into; African American Literature before (a certain period I can’t remember) was so badly taught by one Peter Powers that I nearly gave up going to the class altogether. He was smart, very smart, but barely knew the subject matter beyond the pre-written curriculum that he later admitted to following (a part of the college’s effort to promote multiculturalism).
I had gone down to the writing center once before, but the English majors hired there seemed more interested in talking amongst themselves about various cult classics they had watched than working on me with my paper, and treated me like I was an intrusion.
So, with a heavy heart, I trudged down to the Library, with my Fusion Paper and a form to be signed by an English major.
There, I met one Becca Rogers. She read my paper several times, made three or four minor marks on it, asked me why the heck I wasn’t an English major, and requested a copy of the paper so she could read it again later. 🙂 The nicest English major I had ever met. 🙂 She lives just (North?) of Baltimore, where she has the enviable job of working with writers to create the content for textbooks. Her dream job. 🙂
At the party, we also met Mel & Donny, two friends of Jocelyn & Steve that we had been encouraged to meet for a long time. Very cool people.
On Saturday, we hung out with Chad and Mati, who came down from Harrisburg to meet us. I was feeling a little under the weather, and lay down for a bit. Later that evening, we went out to the Cheesecake Factory on the Inner Harbour. We waited for nearly THREE HOURS to get in. I won’t list the price here, but th’ food wadn’t cheap, y’all. We had a nice time, though, and it was good to just hang out with friends. Chad came up to the office with his laptop, and I gave him a few Photoshop lessons. He played some of his music for me; he’s a DJ and can really produce some beautiful scratching! I was very impressed with his skill.
Sunday morning, we met up with with my coworker Paul and his wife Natasha for church. They’re Catholics, which actually made me feel very much at home. We went down to St. Augustine’s in Washington DC. THAT is a beautiful church. It’s at least 6 or 7 stories high in the main sanctuary, with tonnes of ornate gold-painted wood carving. All the pews were the creaky comfortable kinds that felt like they were hewn by hand. And it was full! Very little space was left; there must have been at least 200 people there, of all shades and colours. The crowd was a majority African American, but behind us stood some Islanders, to the left an elderly Caribbean gentleman, and a smattering of European Americans in the front of us.
The service itself is what reminded me of home; the tiny Anglican church on the reservation was often headed by a Catholic priest, and even so, Anglican services are very similar to Catholic. I was confirmed and baptized by a Catholic priest (though I have always practiced being non-denominational). The service was beautiful. The priest there is a strong, quiet speaker.
We went to Wendy’s for lunch after church, and then went to visit at their house.
Their house is amazing. They’re doing the kind fo work my dad did to our house back home. My father bought our house for about $300, a tiny house that was set to be demolished. With the help of people from my parents home church we busted a porch out the back, built a greenhouse around it, raised a master bed and bath above the church, added a bay window in the kitchen, shuffled around a couple walls, and added three dormers on the front.
Paul and Natasha are doing similar work, and have added huge amounts of space onto their house. We lounged around with them for a while, and then Paul, Tamika and I went down to their basement for our first Karate lesson. We’re hoping to begin going there almost every week; with lessons in return for housework. 🙂
Things are definitely shifting around at work. Pray for Tamika, Jocelyn and I, we’re having a difficult time there. It’s been difficult to determine the expectations of our managers, and becoming more and more difficult to make them happy while still being effective workers. Tamika and I are seriously seeking God’s guidance with what we should be doing in this time.
Thank you so much for all your emails to Tamika and I about the baby! I’ve been reading them and sharing them with her, and I will be replying to them all. Thank you so much for all your love and support. 🙂
Peace, love & chocolate-chip cookies…
~Benjamin