Post 29: Twenty: Start of a New Decade of Life

My twentieth birthday is upon us and I figured I would post about it. I'll present the chronological events first, then my thoughts on it.

The day before, August 2nd, I realized that I was turning 20 and began wondering what I wanted to do with the next decade of my life, but I'll elaborate on that later. The morning of my birthday was fairly normal. Work has been unusually busy recently despite the fact we're in a drought, when it would make more sense to stay home. Today was a relatively slow day, which enabled me to act a little slower and joke around a bit more. I received plenty of "Happy birthday"s and looks of amazement when I say I'm turning 20 (I look like I'm 18).

Observing that I hadn't yet received any presents for my birthday, one of my coworkers borrowed markers from another coworker and surprised me with the picture of a slice of cake drawn on a napkin. I thought it was really neat, even though the flame was purple.

I get home and tell my girlfriend of six months, Breanna, that I was home so she could come over. She wanted to visit for my birthday and my parents didn't object. They really like her. My mother suggested I take a shower so I did so. Unexpectedly, Breanna arrives while I'm still in the shower. She and my mom begin chatting while my mother braids her hair. I get out and sit in the living room with them. Recently I've begun wearing tank tops (aka muscle shirts or wifebeaters) because I've seen Breanna wear them and with the kind of 100-degree weeks we've been having lately, I needed something that is semi-decent yet ventilated. At first they're quite itchy but now I'm getting used to it. You know how in the movies, there comes that time when the mother busts out the baby pictures and shows them to the girlfriend? That happened today, and I was not embarrassed by it. I was, however, a little displeased with how I looked between the ages of 11-15.

My father comes home from work and my parents leave for Wal-Mart to get me a cake and a present. I've really been wanting a black fedora but alas they could not find them. They come home and reveal they've bought me a 4 gigabyte memory card for my cell phone much to my nerdy delight. Later on, card problems result in me having my mother's 8 gigabyte card! Our dinner is hot dogs and French fries.

It was originally intended that me and Breanna would head to her church for Wednesday afternoon service however her grandma had some family issues that needed to be attended to and she was low on gas, so it was decided Bre would hang out at my place until sundownWhen my mother's ghost-themed shows started coming on at 6, my father went upstairs into their bedroom to rest and watch the stuff he likes. We spent the evening cuddled up, watching TV with my mother, and playing Farkle. I intermittently logged onto the Internet from my phone. I've had some 30 birthday wishes from friends and family today. Shortly after 9 Bre went home. We hugged and kissed in the living room, to which my mother just had to make a tease. Now my parents have officially seen me kiss a young woman.

Back to what I was considering. My twenties are perhaps the most influential years of my life. What I do in the next decade will largely decide what the rest of my life is. I have big plans for myself and in these next few years I'm going to make it or break it. This is the time in which I join the rest of society, bringing to the table my eccentric way of living and looking at things. I asked myself, "What do I want to do by the time I'm 30?" and here are a few ideas:

• Register to vote. I  could have this done by next week. I wanted to register when I turned 18 but I never quite got around to it. I want to get this done. I believe that as an American citizen voting is an important right to utilize. This is a nation "of the People, by the People, for the People" (Lincoln, Gettysburg Address) and since the government is chosen by the People, I want to have a say in what our leadership is. My political alignment is strange: I'm socially conservative (I believe the government should uphold traditional, in this case Christian, values) yet economically liberal (I believe the government should have an active role in the economy and helping the needy). I've used the term centrist to describe myself and also socialist to a lesser degree. The true term, as I found out, is "populist." Registering to vote can be done on the Internet in what seems like a few minutes.
• Get my driver's license. Pretty important since I'm moving three hours' worth away in a year for university. Also, get a car.
• Graduate university. With a Bachelor's of Science in computer science.
• Get a job I love. As a computer programmer of some sort.
• Start my own company. If I can't find a satisfying job, I'll make a little Web programming company. It will primarily do browser-based multiplayer games like OGame, World of Warcraft, and so on. I have some game ideas I'd like to write.
• Buy a house for myself. I really don't know where I'm going to live after university, wherever the jobs are. But I want to buy a house for myself and have a stable place to live. Of course, my parents own our current house so in later years I could probably move into this one.

• Get married. I've never considered getting married because that's just not something I can schedule. But as a married coworker told me today, I shouldn't put that off too long. I work with men in their late forties and fifties who never married. I see marriage not as a constraint but rather a blessing.

So my presents this year:

• $25 dollar check from my grandparents.
• A card from said grandparents.
• A drawn cake on a napkin. 
• A card from my grandmother on the other side of the family.
• A card from my girlfriend, who forgot to bring it with. 
• A 4 GB memory card from my cell phone, which ended up being an 8 gig card due to technical issues.
• An anime-style picture of me and Bre popping out of a cake drawn by a very talented friend.

Post 28: New Cell Phone Gets Awesomer

About a month ago I bought myself a new cell phone to replace my old but faithful Motorola W376G. My new phone is a Samsung SGH-T404G with service provided by StraightTalk. It is a prepaid phone like its predecessor however it has a bucketload of more features.

The things that really got my attention were the unlimited texting and Internet access. With my old phone I did not text many people very often because I needed to preserve the units that I had. Even then I would routinely exhaust all of them before the 90-day extension period was complete. However now I have the ability to text as much as I want without worrying about running out of minutes. I have gone from texting basically one person to as many as three or four some days.

Unlimited Internet is what also caught me. If it weren't already known about me, I'm a big user of the Internet. I spend several hours a day surfing the Web. So to get this phone with the unlimited Internet access enables me to do this when I'm on the go. I can use my cell phone as an alternate to my home computer. This is good for two reasons: first, we have a limited amount of bandwidth we're allotted each month by the phone company. I want to try and move most of my browsing to my cell phone, which doesn't quite have this restriction. Secondly, whenever I turn on my computer, there is almost always a period when I will lose Internet connection. This affects at least one other computer in the house. Plus the occasional instance when signal is randomly lost for no reason. My cell phone has much stabler connection.

As it turns out, though, there is actually a cap to how much data I can use. Uploading, downloading, and streaming of audio, video, and games is prohibited. This cap is essentially designed so that people do not bog down the wireless network by using so much bandwidth that they slow down the overall network. What does this mean to an epic Internet user to me? Not much as long as I am not constantly surfing the Web and downloading games all the time.

I haven't done much downloading since I bought the phone. I tried a couple games but they would not work right so I deleted those. I also acquired a couple free Daft Punk ringtones. But there is one gem that I've found which has totally changed the way I surf the Web on my phone: Opera Mini. Now mind you, I'm already a devout user of the regular Opera browser. It runs pretty fast and at this point I'm used to it. I knew that Opera had a mobile browser and I decided to check it out.

I was not disappointed. After a quick few minutes of fully adjusting to the interface I was able to start browsing the Web. It's truly amazing how much faster sites load and how they are easier to navigate. The browser seems to automatically detect what sites have mobile versions for people like me and use those. For sites that don't it displays them zoomed out and has a little mouse I can move around and zoom in with. Combined with the landscape mode for displaying things, which works conveniently with my slider phone, it makes things much easier to navigate. I have a list of bookmarks that I can use to quickly find my more frequent destinations. The beauty of Opera Mini that makes it run so fast, as I've found out, is that it compresses the data it received to lower the amount of data transfered, thereby increasing speed. It all runs through a dedicated Opera Mini server which does the magic. Some may see this as a security issue but I don't really mind Opera knowing my surfing habit. It's not like they'll really care anyway. The site claims that Opera Mini uses a mere 10% of the bandwidth of other browsers. I don't know the exact percentage for my phone but I imagine it's way less than what the built-in browser was using.

So here I am, a text messaging, Web surfing phone lover. I pay $45 a month for unlimited features on a nice phone. I've only found three downsides:

1. No YouTube. Flash is not supported on my cell phone.
2. No Internet radio.
3. I can't find a way to get my music from my computer to the cell phone.

Nonetheless, with the addition of Opera my phone is aweeeesome.

Post 27: Kansas, Year Two

This is five days late but hey, it's been two years that I've lived in Kansas! In that time I've found a new game to be addicted to (Minecraft), got my first girlfriend in four years, bought myself a nice new computer, and most recently a new cell phone!

Post 26: Re-Examing My Beliefs?

Over the past three and a half years I have followed the beliefs of the Pentecostal denomination of Christianity. Pentecostals emphasize the supernatural side of the faith, rooting this in the events of Pentecost as laid out in Acts 2. However in the past year I've also begun learning the beliefs of the Southern Baptist denomination which doesn't quite stress supernatural events as much as the fact that one is saved by faith. I've also dabbled in Catholic and Messianic Jewish views. This has given me several different perspectives on what the Bible teaches.

What I'm thinking I may do some day is undergo personal study to figure out what seems most logical about things such as the Rapture, the Trinity, whether or not God is still giving out spiritual gifts like speaking in tongues and prophesy like He did in the beginning, what the meaning behind speaking in tongues is and the ways it ought to be used, the end times and how Revelation plays out, and other things that I could think of. A friend of mine is Christian, very intelligent, very faithful, yet he seems to deviate from the standard accepted believes of Protestants in a couple areas. I feel I should likewise examine for myself what the Bible says. I tend to interpret the Bible in a literal sense where possible so that alone could make me differ from Pentecostal teachings. I will need to do this some time in the future. Right now, I'm too busy with college.

Post 25: Here We Go Again: Summer and Fall Classes

Let me tell you a little bit about my past. When I finished high school in 2009, I had planned to attend a local university and graduate by 2013 with my bachelor's degree in computer science. Then I learned I would be moving to Kansas after I graduated and settled on attending University of Kansas where again, I would spend four years there and then graduate in 2013. But things went weird. The start date of the fall 2009 semester for KU was in August, awfully close to my June 28 arrival in Kansas. I had also heard about there being a community college that I could attend in the city I was moving to.

I decided that I would wait for six months until my citizenship in Kansas was made official so that tuition costs would be cheaper. Hence my decision to forego the fall 2009 semester. I would simply take a few months off of school and work. Things got a little complicated. I did most of my preparation for college from home and made lots of phone calls. Unfortunately, the financial aid department answered their phones quite rarely and I estimated that about 10% of all the calls and messages I left were ever returned. After missing an important financial aid deadline in December of 2009 I found I would not be able to go for a spring 2010 semester.

Several months later I get a ride from one of my friends who is a fellow student at the college to plan out my fall 2011 classes. I take a standardized test and get my grades immediately. There were three fields: math, reading, and writing. My grades were all 95 and higher. However my math grade in particular, a 98 as I recall, was the highest the woman officiating the test had ever seen. I scored so high that I tested out of needing to take college algebra and could go straight into calculus. I talk with the woman and get my classes for fall 2010 settled. I also decide to take an online class for the summer: HTML. It did teach me quite a bit however I've been doing Web coding since high school as a hobby so it's a breeze for me.

Fall 2010 comes around and I do exceptionally well, scoring a GPA over 3.8. This semester was the first time in a year that I set foot in a classroom. All of my other friends that had gone to college were already in their sophomore years of high school. I had taken a gap year between high school and college, working in order to save money for my advanced education.

Spring 2011 was also a good semester. Most of it was online although I had one afternoon class. There were two times when I suffered burnout and struggled to maintain a decent pace. However I wrapped things up at the end and surprised myself in two classes in particular. Macroeconomics was very hard for me and I missed on two assignments. Nonetheless, I found the 14-question final exam to be a relative breeze. About a week ago I was with my advisor planning my next sets of classes and the instructor for macroeconomics asked if I would become a tutor for the class, stating that I did amazingly well in the class! The other was sociology. There was a term paper I needed to do and I didn't get it done until the day it was due. I didn't think that the paper would be any good but I was greatly pleased and surprised when I discovered I had an 85 on it! Overall this was a successful semester and I scored a perfect 4.0 GPA, making it onto the Presidental Honor Roll.

(Please pardon me if my writing style is somewhat bland. I've been reading Kings and Chronicles from the Old Testament and, well, those are hardly exciting books.)

During that aforementioned meeting with my advisor I planned out the rest of my classes for the summer and fall 2011 semesters. All but two of them will be totally online; the others will require me to go to the campus once or more per week. At least three of them will be relatively simple for me as I already have some knowledge in the subjects:

• Calculus, which I took in high school;
• American government, something that I learned up on as a hobby during my younger years. I know a fair deal about the Constitution and what it says;
• Java programming. I know several other scripting and programming languages to some extent (including JavaScript, PHP, C++, and Python) so this will be easy.

As of December 8, 2011, I will complete my education at community college and receive my Associate's of Science degree for computer science. From there I am going to transfer to one of two universities, although I have not decided which one yet: Kansas University, my original choice, or Kansas State University. The deciding factor is going to be the computer science program. I want to go to the one that will best maximize the chances of me getting a job in programming. I have not yet found a way to measure this so I have yet to make a choice. By this point in time my college-bound friends will be in their junior years of college and perhaps moved on from their community colleges to universities. I will finish community college a semester early due to a combination of college credits earned in high school and summer courses, but I will remain a year behind my peers - not that it is of any bother to me.

I also want to find a computers company in whichever city I move to (be it Lawrence for KU or Manhattan for KSU) that will take a university student with an AS degree so that I can work while I'm at university. This will serve the double purpose of providing an income and providing experience. Then I will either find a new place to work or continue there. Either way, I intend on settling in my own place of residence somewhere and beginning my adult life.

This December date makes things seem suddenly closer than before. I have yet to decide on which university to attend; I've also yet to get a driver's license. I need both of these things to move out of my current city and go to higher education. Fall 2011 will have five classes, more than I've ever done before. It's going to be hectic but I believe that with patience, planning, and prayer I'll make it through with great results.

Post 24: What Is Your Purpose in Life?

What is your purpose in life?

I consider one of the most important things a person needs to have in life to be a purpose. Unless you feel that your existence has some kind of meaning, that there is some ultimate goal you are working for, what are you really doing with yourself?

People inherently want to know that there is some reason behind why they are on this Earth. That’s why we have chased so many things throughout history: power, wealth, love, friendship, knowledge, and so on. When there is that feeling of meaninglessness, discouragement and depression sets in. The lack of a purpose is why people have committed suicide – after all, they were just taking up space and breathing air that could be put to “better” use.

I know my purpose in life. My #1 reason for living is to have a relationship with God, the Creator of the universe. This also means obeying his commands out of faith and his will for my life. One part of his will is for me to engage in ministry. This will most likely result in me working as some sort of youth pastor working with teenagers and young adults, although I could end up doing other forms of ministry such as evangelization and apologetics (defense of the faith).

In addition to this, I’m also working to complete my college education and get at least a Bachelor’s Degree in computer science, then land a job as a programmer of some sort. Plus I’m a writer who desires to complete a very long story, and I’m working on chapter four right now. I also want to learn how to play bass guitar which could then be used for worship services. Meaning, for me, is found in what I want to do in life (or more accurately, what God wants for my life). I want to serve God through these various facets of life.

One of the most unfortunate things I see in this world is people who are devoid of ambition. Perhaps disappointment and past failure has caused them to give up on trying to do something big in life. Perhaps they believe they are too old, of the wrong gender, of the wrong race, of the wrong social class, ad nauseum, and they just can’t do it. So they just exist and contribute their bare minimum to society. They may do things like attend high school, go to work, hang out with friends, attend Sunday morning church services, but they make no real progress. They don’t advance themselves in any meaningful way. They lack ambition, the drive to do great things.

This kind of apathy is all too common. Despite the amazing technology all around us we have stagnated. I want to see this changed. No more of people sitting around doing nothing because they believe they have no meaning in life. I think it’s important to use our lives efficiently.

Do you feel purposeless? Well then, here is some advice. Find out what you really love in life and go headlong into it. Make for yourself a big goal that you wouldn’t think would normally be accomplishable by you. Then go for it! If you complete it, then make another big goal and attack it! These goals could be concrete ones which have a definite point of completion, or they could be perpetual goals which are repeated throughout life. They will often be used to advance one another. Bonus points if you can make the goals intricately woven together, but that’s not required.

One of my perpetual goals is to be a good Christian (although in a sense it’s a concrete goal since I would complete this goal when I go to Heaven; of course, this thinking makes all goals concrete ones!) and one of the assisting perpetual goals is to have a consistent habit of reading my Bible daily. I can use a concrete goal to accomplish this by setting a daily time for reading. Or bass guitar: I’m going to start by learning acoustic guitar first and I’ve achieved a concrete goal by acquiring one, but now I need new strings for it – another concrete one. Then once I’ve sufficiently learned that I can shift to bass.

If you need a purpose in life, may I suggest becoming a follower of Christ? That must sound terribly uninteresting, but stop to think about it. Where else (if you find the right group of people) can you find such a sense of ultimate meaning, love, and community? Indeed, if it weren’t for my fellowship with other believers, I would have very likely never made the amount of friends I have here, because I’m definitely a homebody. I’m sure that adopting faith and really going for it would be a very satisfying thing.

Post 23: Survived that One!

Yes, another blog entry about the supposed 21 May Rapture. Look at a different blog entry on here if you'd rather not read this. :D

I had read something about this prediction several months beforehand but I gave little attention to it. It wasn't until the day before the predicted Rapture was to take place that CNN and possibly other news outlets started talking about it. It was annoying that they were saying it was "the end of the world," when it wasn't. According to Mr. Camping's theory, the end of the world was to be 5 months later.

Although I figured that it wouldn't take place, a little bit of me felt a little alerted. It was a good kick in the rear that Jesus's return could happen at any time. The Rapture is a doctrine of Protestant Christianity stating that Jesus will return to the Earth and take up all true Christians with him in Heaven. This idea was developed in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Due to this rather recent inception of the doctrine, I don't totally believe it anymore. I've only done a little research about it, but the Scriptures that support it could easily be used to describe the Second Coming at the end of the seven-year Tribulation. In fact, in the book of the prophet Isaiah there is a mention of it that mixes it with the Second Coming. Roman Catholics, who have been around for much longer than Protestants, don't believe in any sort of Rapture.

Another thing: the Rapture is said to be something so major that everyone in the world will know when it's happening and it will be immediate. But Mr. Camping said it would happen at 6 PM of each timezone. If that were so, it would give people in later timezones warning that they were going to be Raptured since I'm sure news outlets would announce the major disasters taking place in Raptured nations. So much for "like a thief in the night."

I was watching a program on television a few weeks ago called "Discovering the Jewish Jesus." The host, Rabbi K. A. Schneider, is a Messianic Jew which means he maintains Jewish traditions but observes the New Covenant (i.e., saved by faith and not by observing Mosaic Law). His show often shows how the Old and New Testaments are analogous, with parts of the OT prophesying and foreshadowing what would happen in the NT. He showed an interesting correlation between Moses leading the Hebrews out of Egypt and the End Times. Exodus 5-14 show a very stubborn Pharaoh refusing to release the Hebrews, who had become the slaves of the society. Thus in order to persuade the leader, God sent down ten plagues upon Egypt until finally the Hebrews were allowed out.

The Hebrews were still present in the nation of Egypt while the plagues were taking place. According to Rabbi Schneider, this event is representative of what the End Times will be like. As best as I can recall, he implicitly agrees with the Catholic notion of no Rapture. The Hebrews weren't removed from Egypt until after the plagues were finished. Likewise, the Christians and Messianic Jews of the last days will not be taken into Heaven until Christ's Second Coming.

I'm sure that there were people who heard about the 21 May Rapture and became believers or otherwise rededicated their lives to Christ. I imagine some of them were disappointed when it did not occur and have already abandoned that faith. Non-believers have doubtlessly mocked the event the whole time and now, thanks to this farce of a prophesy, they are now even more stubbornly hardened against God. I came across this amusing comment on the Interwebs: "Mr. Camping should be thankful that he lives under the New Testament economy. Under the OT economy and Torah law, he’d of found himself under a big pile of rocks, suffering the fate of a false prophet." (Source here.)

Despite all of this, I was enlightened to the impending return of Christ. I've long held that my life is one big bet: that Christianity is true and Jesus is coming soon. If it's false, then oh well. I won't know until I'm dead, and since I won't be conscious due to lack of an afterlife I won't regret it. If I'm right then I lucked out big time. I personally believe that the Second Coming is really soon. I'm a couple months away from being 20, and I feel I may not make it to 40 before Jesus comes again. So while I still have the time, I need to get myself into gear and try to strengthen my faith and relationship with God.

On a related note, I came across a website showing statistical analysis of prophesies listing when the Rapture and Second Coming could take place. Don Koenig admits that his predictions may be off by millenia but the numbers are fascinating and they show that things are about to get very serious very soon.