and the Word became flesh

I feel so stifled right now. I have all these words that are stuck in my throat and I can't get them out. If words are my air then I am choking and I can scarcely get a breath in. I feel like I am made up entirely of verbs, nouns, adjectives and modifiers; my entire essence is defined by a necklace of strung syllables, wrapped in a cocoon of written lines on a page. When a musician listens to the beating of their heart it gives them a beat, a rhythm that is in every piece that they write, every piece that they perform. When I listen to my heart beat it beats out words - it thrums a story with every beat and when I pause to listen I see the letters coming together to form words and sentences, spelling out the world.

Every time I feel the words boiling up out of me I always am drawn to John "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. There came a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness, to testify about the Light, so that all might believe through him. He was not the Light, but he came to testify about the Light. There was the true Light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man. He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and those who were His own did not receive Him. But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.

It's so good - like honey on my lips, sunlight to my soul, a cooling rain after a drought. I love these words - not just how the role off my tongue, but how they strike truth into the heart. My heart beats with the words, with the Living Word. It infuses my very being with light, truth, goodness and holiness. My words belong to God - my heart and soul belong to the Creator, my Creator who infused my mind and body with the joy of the spoken and written word.

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing to Him. To Him be the glory now and forever. Amen.

Sexual Harassment

As most of you know I work in a security office, so there is a lot of training that needs to be done for new employees. We recently hired a new security officer named Judah, and let me tell you, he is a really nice guy with a great sense of humor (you sort of need a big one to work in our office). Because there are so many facets of our office and different things that we do, training a new officer takes a few weeks. During the training process the new officer goes from one person to another getting training in the different areas (i.e. parking, dispatch, front desk, security services, etc). Because Judah just started I have been placed in charge in making sure that he has all the tools in place before he starts like setting up his e-mail account and making sure that he watches the necessary training videos about FERPA and HIPA laws.

This afternoon my boss called me to her office where she was chatting with Shaun (one of our other officers) and Judah. She said to me, "Rebecca, Judah has finished watching the videos do you think you could teach him sexual harassment?"

Talk about akward.

At this I paused and tried really hard not to laugh. I couldn't help it, a snicker escaped. Pretty soon Shaun, Judah and I were bent over at the waist laughing. Between gasps of air I managed, "Cheryl, I think Shaun would be better umm... equipped to handle that." We all started laughing again. The banter went on for a while after that, but I think that my boss might have an interesting view on my relationships with the officers.

I'm not sure I will be able to escape that one. Already Nathan has asked me about teaching him sexual harassment.

Stolen from Patti's Blog:

The top 100 or so books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users.
Bold the books you have read, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish, bold and italicize the ones you read for school.

Wow, I'm totally blown away that I have read over half of these books. Granted, some of them I absolutely detested and did my darndest to forget what they were about (Great Expectations, Frankenstein, etc). A lot of them I did have to read for class, but over all I enjoyed my readings. Silly english majors...

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion is this
There is Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

Bad Management

I am so unbelievably pissed right now - and not just pissed, I am filled with righteous indignation. My fury stems from the outcome for a rather long and slightly twisted story. Let’s start at the beginning shall we?

To begin my story, some background information is needed. Part of my job includes overseeing parking, parking regulations and parking enforcement for a medium sized university. This includes going after students who refuse to register their car so they don’t have to pay for parking or any citations. We go after the worst offenders (more than 5 citations a quarter) and try to find out who they are so we can charge their student accounts. We also tow cars from campus in extreme circumstances.

This year we had one student, I will call him Adam, that not only was at the top of our list for acquiring more than 26 citations this year, but also deliberately avoided our officers as well as tow trucks coming to remove his vehicle from reserved parking spaces going as far to pay people to call him if a tow truck showed up. After some very rigorous detective work from one of my favorite officers we discovered his identity along with his all important ID number which allowed me to place just under $650 worth of parking fines on his account. Let me tell you, that was a great day, until I received an e-mail from the director of Student Accounts stating that Adam had come in to pay his account and to his completely dismay there were charges on his account that weren’t his. Adam requested to speak to the Director and told him a sob story about how Security was out to get him and how he didn’t own a car, let alone drive one on campus. This frustrated me, but not as bad as I am now. With even more detective work Greg and I managed not only to get pictures of Adam driving the car, we got video footage. Along with an a letter detailing his parking habits I sent the Director of Student Accounts copies of the footage and stills. The director was understandable upset about being lied to and chagrined that he had actually fallen for the sob story. A month later we finally towed Adams car from campus – it was parked in the President’s parking space.

The very next day Adam came into our office and asked to speak to me. He gave a pretty bad sob story about how he couldn’t pay and how he didn’t know that the citations had fines (even though the fine schedule is in big bold letters on the citation) associated with them. He said, “I thought they were just warnings.” It really took all of my self control not to sneer at him when he said that. He asked if he could do community services instead of paying the fines. Honestly, I was surprised, after all the pleas and bullshit I have waded through regarding parking petitions this was the first time any had asked if they could do community service. I told him that wasn’t an option but that his two options would be a: pay the fines and park on the street and not in the lots or b: pay for a year’s worth of parking and half of his fines. He told me that he would think about it and e-mail me with his decision.

You can imagine my surprise when an hour later I get an e-mail from my director asking me to speak to him about Adam because he sent the following e-mail: (all personal identifies have been removed or changed)
“Hi my name is Adam and this past year I have made some mistakes that have led to a great amount of parking tickets. I think that someone in the department has contacted you about this, but I just wanted to send you my sincere apology and regret for not taking matters into my own hands and continuing to be oblivious to the situation. Fall quarter I thought my roommate signed us up for a carpool pass and when the pass never arrived in the mail he told me that we could just park anywhere until it came. I never questioned this and went about parking and getting citations, which I thought were only warnings and did not have any ramifications. I continued to do this all year and was unaware that they were fines and that I never even did have a pass. I know that I should have gone to you guys myself but I just didn't think it was that important. Now I have come to realize I have over $600 in parking tickets and I cannot afford this. My parents would be so disappointed in me, even more so than I am in myself right now. If there is anything I can do at all to have these dropped from my account I would be ever so grateful. I really wasn't trying to get away with anything, it was just stupidity and being unaware on my part. I really will do anything and everything possible to take the tickets off. I would suggest community service of some kind in helping you and your department out or whatever you might be able to think of. All I'm asking for is grace and mercy from you. Please understand my situation and how terrible I feel right now about all of this, not because I got caught, but because I had no idea what was happening. I pray that you will find favor in my situation and make an exception for me. You have no idea how thankful and grateful that I would be. Thank you for taking time out of your day to read this. God bless.”

I just about choked on the syrup coated BS that was dripping from this e-mail. When my director forwarded me this e-mail I went through and looked at the accounts of his roommates, and e-mailed them if they had ever applied for carpooling. They had not. I included their attached e-mails as well as the e-mail from the Director of Student Accounts as well as the pictures of Adam driving the car and sent it to my director. He agreed with me that we wouldn’t be removing any citations or fines due to the student’s duplicity. I felt extremely validated when I informed Adam that those where his only two options.

This is where the story gets good. Adam came back in today because he couldn’t register for classes with fines on his account. He demanded to speak to the Director; after having him wait I went back and let both the Director and Associate Director know what was going on and they met with him in the front conference room. I was so sure that they were going to tell him that because of his past behavior and the fact that he was lying through his teeth that they were going to pin him down. You can’t imagine how furious I was when I found out that that my director was letting him get away with only paying for one parking pass. That’s right, one parking pass. $650.00 worth of parking tickets reduced down to $57.00. That doesn’t even cover the amount of time my student workers spent writing him tickets! What the hell? What happened to backing your people up? I am supposed to be the final authority on parking citations; how the hell am I supposed to do my job if my authority gets cut out from under me? This sets a precedent; Adam will go out and tell all of his friends that he got off fairly unscathed and now all they have to do is refuse to register their car and not have to pay for parking. Not only does this significantly undercut my budget, but it also makes it extremely difficult for me to do my job. If the money from parking fees and citations funds my budget and the money from my budget gets taken away it means I have a hard time operating under budget. This is so completely ridiculous. This isn’t just a university it’s a business and needs to be treated like one.

Blah.

Bones

Recently I have been re-watching all the episodes of Bones. For those of you who aren't familiar with Bones it is a hit TV show on Fox that is based off of the books and life of Forensic Anthropologist Kathy Reich. The show details the adventures of Dr. Temperance Brennan and her FBI partner Special Agent Seeley Booth. There are a variety of great reasons why I am hooked to this show. First off, it has a great cast of characters that are perfectly executed by a very talented group of actors including David Boreanaz as Booth and Emily Deschanel as Dr. Brennan, also called Bones. Secondly, the writing is phenomenal. There are few teams of writers in Hollywood that I would class as exceptionally talented, Joss Whedon is the first that comes to mind, but the writers of Bones are not too far behind. Not only is there an appreciation for the intelligence of their audience, but they include wit, humor, suaveness, action, gore and the all essential 3D humanness of their characters. The most important thing is that for 45 minutes a week the cast and crew of Bones transports its audience into their world so completely that it is hard not to become addicted. Even my husband who tends to get squeamish around gory tv shows and dead bodies can't help but but want to know what's going on - even if he has to leave the room for the finding of whatever gruesome murder Booth, Bones and the team at the Jeffersonian are investigating that week.

I have lots of favorite episodes, and parts of episodes that I love and would be happy to watch over and over again. The infamous Santa in the Slush kiss, The Widows Son in the Windshield where the introduction to Gormagon is made, The Superman in the Alley about a dying teenager who dies trying to save an abused woman... my list goes on for a bit more (not to mention season 3's finale which was mind-blowingly good. But I think that my favorite episode is from Season 2 Aliens in a Spaceship. Now, it isn't anything like it sounds, honest. The plot features the investigation of Booth and Dr. Brennan into the murder of two kidnapped teenage twin boys some 5 years before. The boys were placed in a spaceship-like capsule, in reality a brewing container, and buried alive underground by someone the media dubbed the "Grave Digger." The kidnapper would bury a person in a container, demanded a ransom and if it was paid he would send the location and directions for where they were buried. If the ransom was not paid, the kidnapped person would die. Soon, Brennan and Hodgins, one of the scientists at the Jeffersonian, find themselves victims of the "Grave Digger", and Booth frantically searches for them as they slowly run out of oxygen underground.

There are a lot of things that make this episode a great one: fabulous character development, establishment of a new relationship (Angela and Hodgins), thrilling plot, amazing acting, etc. But for me, what really made this episode poignant was Booth's quiet and expressive conversation about God. Throughout the series, especially this episode, Brennan asks Booth questions about God and his faith trying to understand why he would place faith in something that was arbitrary and completely illogical. A good example would be where Brennan compares God to the Grave Digger, "Has it occurred to you that God is a little like the Gravedigger?... He lays down the rules. No way to question Him or negotiate and then it’s as though He doesn’t care how it works out. It’s just, do as He says, make some sacrifices and are delivered. If you don’t you end up in hell." At this point the writers interject a comment from Booth "Don't say that, I don't want to be struck by lightning!" While it may seem like the writers are talking about the Christian faith and God with derision, it is obviously not the case as you get to the very end of the episode. After Booth comes to the rescue of Bones and Hodgins we see him and Brennan sitting side by side in an cathedral. Obviously praying, Booth's head is bowed and he crosses himself before looking up:

Brennan: What did you ask for?
Booth: That’s between me and a certain saint. Although I did ask for a little help finding the Gravedigger.
Brennan: Good move…
Booth: And I said thanks. You should try it sometime.
Brennan: If I were going to pray, I would have done it just before we set off the explosion.
Booth: You mean, you didn’t?
Brennan: No. See. If there was a God, which there isn’t…
Booth: SSSHHH! Don’t you see where we are?
Brennan: And if I were someone who believed He had a plan…
Booth: Which I do.
Brennan: Then I’d be tempted to think He wanted me to go through something like I went through because it might make me more open to the whole concept.
Booth: It obviously hasn’t.
Brennan: I’m ok with you thanking God for saving me and Hodgins.
Booth: That’s not what I thanked Him for. I thanked Him for saving all of us. It was all of us, every single one. You take one of us away and you and Hodgins are in that hole forever. And I’m thankful for that.

This ending completely blew me away. After all the different things that Hollywood has said about Christianity and how they have completely misinterpreted or simply have no idea about what it is or says - this was refreshing. Not only did they get it right, it shows the sincerity and awe that a lot of Christians have when they think about the sanctity of human life - all human life - and that Christ, God himself, died for the whole world, for each individual. That He died so that every person would have the opportunity to have a deep and personal relationship with Him, so that all could be saved. To find that in a secular TV show on a major network... it was absolutely astounding - something I deeply appreciated.