i got a job! i can afford the internet!

my 20 minutes is almost up at the public library. more later.

Alright. It is 2:30 in the morning here and I had to get out of bed to drain my head of these things. I've turned on the television to keep me company.

In the past few months (years?), my prayers have amounted to, more or less, "God, please exist."

The more experiences I have and the more I learn in life, the less I am able to believe that God exists. By the same token, the more experiences I have and the more I learn in life, the more I realize that I have a profound need for God's existence.

If you think about it, this is an absurd prayer. If God doesn't exist, I'm not going to will him into existence with a plea. If he does exist, he doesn't need me asking him to exist. Maybe what I'm really saying is, "God, please manifest yourself in my life."

Goodness, there is really nothing on television this late. Only infomercials for appliances and advertisements for phone sex lines. The line between the infomercials for appliances and advertisements for phone sex lines is beginning to blur, too. I think I just witnessed a buxom saleswoman demonstrate the wonder of an extremely sexy food processor.

Anyway, my feeling of separation from God dovetails with my tentative plans for my thesis. Whether or not I'm able to incorporate my thoughts into the culmination of this particular degree, I'm interested in addressing it on my own time.

Here goes. When I was a senior in college, I wrote a paper about the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude for my Literary Criticism class, the thesis of which was "Language is a symptom of mankind's separation from God." The assignment was only meant to be a 15-page paper, so I ended up taking on a lot more than I could reasonably tackle in the paper. My professor ended up giving me a B on the paper, but he gave me an A for the course because of what he called my "enthusiasm for the subject."

Really, that enthusiasm was the product of my excitement in finally having learned the vocabulary to discuss the ideas I'd been having about the things I'd been reading. I had found the words. You know? Oh, good, Roseanne is on.

I think there's really something to this idea, that language exists because of our separation from God. Imagine Siamese twins whose brains are somehow connected. They share thoughts, and there is no need for any symbolic representation of these thoughts (the definition I'm giving to "language). They simply know everything. Then imagine that these twins are miraculously separated into two distinct entities. They no longer share the unity that facilitates unspoken understanding. The need for language--grunts, hand gestures, words, any sort of symbolic representation of ideas--is born as a symptom of the separation.

I cannot pretend to have any special understanding of the nature of the God/Christ/Spirit dynamic, but when I try to make sense of Jesus' removal from God through his physical manifestation, I return to the Siamese twins idea. Interestingly, Jesus is "the Word."

Because my discipline has been literature, I want to come at this from a literary perspective. In Judeo-Christian tradition, the Bible was written, essentially, by God. I would like to explore what has been written by men, anything related to the purpose of language. Wouldn't it be fascinating to see how writers have expressed the human use of language? Words as band-aids to hold together post-op Siamese twins!

Why do you think language exists? Why do we have a system of symbolic representations of ideas? Why can't we just have the ideas themselves and be done with it? Again, language facilitates communication between human beings, between men and God, that is impossible because of our lack of unity.

I mean, I don't know. I'm just thinking these thoughts and wanted to give them words.

Although Ellen has received her fair share of frantic phone calls from me asking where I am, getting around in Fort Collins doesn't pose much difficulty because the major streets meet at right angles. The mountains sit to the west of the town, so I look to them when I'm not sure which turn to make.

Even with its small size, Searcy was somehow more difficult for me to master, perhaps because I did not need to. But after five years, I had a triumphant knowledge of the backroads.

Relationships with towns are like relationships with people. Searcy and I didn't need each other anymore. I had learned all of the backroads.

I made myself dinner tonight in my apartment alone for the first time since I moved in. New stove heat, new microwave ding, new faucet spray. New backroads.

sorry for the lapse. i've been too busy riding my bike and eating granola. yes, that's right--i'm in colorado.

the whole moving process is starting to become positive, which i suppose is what happens when it nears the end. there were a few problems with my apartment being ready, so i have spent the last week on josh and ellen's couch while the drywall in my itty-bitty kitchen was being finished. i'm supposed to be able to move in today.

my apartment is in an older woman's basement. "basement apartment" doesn't scream luxury and adulthood, but i prefer it to living in an apartment complex because now i get to live in an Actual Neighborhood with trees and stop signs and flower gardens. i have a small kitchen, an average bathroom, a reasonably-sized living room and a large bedroom. the homeowner is a member of the local pottery guild and spends her free time throwing all sorts of ceramics. all of this and i'm still within reasonable walking/biking distance to the school!

i haven't gotten a steady job yet (mostly because my apartment is still packed up and i have very little in the way of job interview attire). in the mean time, ellen got me an intermittent position working at the elk's club assembling, maintaining, and disassembling parties (in this case, wedding receptions). i refer to this experience as Dr. Elksclub or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Food Service. i realize that it was just one ten-hour day, but i think i could write a whole book about this.

the earlier reception began at 5:30, the later at 6:30, and we arrived at noon to begin setting up. this included bringing to each table dinner plates, salad plates, cake plates, saucers, coffee mugs, dinner forks, salad forks, knives, spoons, napkins, champagne glasses, water glasses (full of water and ice, which made them the last thing to do), coffee pitchers (we brewed the coffee), salt and pepper shakers, and sugar and creamer. there were 21 tables total, each table seating 10. 210 people whose place settings were meticulously placed hours begin the reception. we also brought out and arranged the chafers for each buffet, monitoring and refilling as needed. after the food was eaten, we picked up all of this and brought it to a back room to be scraped and returned to the kitchen for cleaning. the receptions were on two different floors, neither of which was the same floor as the kitchen. one squeaky, plodding elevator.

i won't describe the entire evening in such detail, but i offer now a list of what i've learned from my night in food service.

1) hungry people are unkind.

2) buffet-goers see ranch dressing not as a substance to be drizzled lightly atop their dinner salads, but as a beverage.

3) table settings for 210 people do not simply appear. they are the result of hours and hours of work.

4) nobody wants to keep their unused salad fork for cake, but everybody wants to complain loudly that they have no utensil with which to eat their cake.

5) the wait staff is not allowed to leave until everything is in the kitchen soaking, so surrender dinnerware as soon as you are finished. honestly, the spoon is not the necessary partner of the champagne glass. just give it back. i'm tired.

6) old men would rather intimately know the contours of your body than move their chairs a few inches forward.

7) i cry at weddings even if i'm refilling rolls or scraping uneaten pork into the garbage.

8) the only thing that makes this kind of work bearable is the people with whom you work, and ellen and i work well together.

9) groomsmen are awkward flirters.

10) tips can turn a minimum wage job into a $23/hr job. and it is awesome.

i hope to work there about once a month. as ellen points out, it teaches you humility. i think i'm going to be a better customer because of this.

hey, maybe i'll sleep in my own bed tonight!