This is to keep you entertained Ellen 🙂
Yesterday I almost died…I spun my car around on the slick ice that formed on the street, and was staring down on-comming traffic from the lane I was in. This was better than the cross-traffic that just started moving at the light that changed at exactly the wrong time for me to make it through by running it, or to stop on a sheet of ice. So I turned the car sideways, partially cuz it was going that way, partially because I knew spinning like that would stop me faster converting some of the cars forward momentum to rotational momentum. The lady that caught up with me first in a jeep was laughing at me, I know this cuz I was looking right at her by the time I stopped. I pulled the car around, and used the turn lane to get around, and backed right to where I should have been if I would have stopped normally, so no harm, no foul.
I made it to work an hour late. Traffic was a nightmare because of sed sheet of ice that feel all over the place. The freeway was a parking lot. The part of my trip that normally takes about five minutes, took 45. I got through the tunnel thing on 94 at about the time I normally arrive at work. I also almost hit a ford focus, and generally remembered and got better at pumping my breaks to stop with the car under control. I’m a pretty darned good driver, but this kind of weather is worse than snow, and my car no matter how well it is BMW balanced is not cut out for driving on a sheet of ice.
This is how I am going to frame the rest of my day.
At work I was a little jittery when I got there. I screwed up a bunch of stuff, not bad, but still annoyed me that I was making stupid mistakes. I sat through a meeting about what my boss should talk to our suppliers about when he is in Taiwan. I had very little useful input, at least I had some though. Lunch time rolled around, I read my LJ comments, started posting back, realized I was a little pissed about what I was writing about, and shouldn’t have even posed the question in the open if I was still upset about it, so I stopped answering most of the comments…maybe a few here and there, but I detatched myself from it emotionally, or I let the rest of it go in private.
Jeff emailed me this really nice email, almost made me cry at work…the bastard….making me all emotional at work. Said a lot of good stuff. Stuff my wife already thinks about me mostly, stuff that I have no idea how to process. I base so much of my identity in my ability to learn from things (past experience, others experiences, books, school, etc) and my current level of knowledge, and finally my ability to inturpret those things and use them to make informed opinions and decisions…problem solving.
My wife says my gifts aren’t primarily as a problem solver, but as a leader. My pastor says I need to give all that up and just learn how to be loved. The problem is that it is easier for me to love than to be loved, so leading is not a problem, but it will default to me trying to make peoples lives better (problem solving) which isn’t always good leading. And mostly it sets me up for a martyr / savior complex depending on the situation.
Why can’t I feel loved? I don’t know. I wish I knew. I wish I didn’t have to pick a fight every time I wanted an honest assesment of something….cuz I will often get one. I wish I didn’t thrive on conflict. I wish people would see my willingness to challenge everything as an asset, not as an annoyance, or just me being beligerant. I wish that if that last one isn’t how people see me, that I wouldn’t percieve that as how people see me. I wish I didn’t have a fear of not being heard when I say “the way we have always done it is not an acceptable answer.” (I don’t actually ever say that, I just think it a lot and then shut up for fear of being ignored) I wish I felt trusted, all around me I see words fly and actions that don’t match, it might be my intepretation of the actions that makes them not match, but either way I don’t feel trusted.
I think that last bit boils down to responsibility and respect. When I am given responsibility I feel trusted and respected. But that isn’t important because I’m not sure if that is how I feel loved. I don’t want to start leading to feel respected. I want to feel like I can respect myself, or that I can gain my respect from God first.
Well at anyrate, I still feel weird and small. I don’t know what is going to change that.
I wish when I dreamed big, I saw myself in those dreams. I wish I knew what my deepest desire was for myself…like how I fit into my big dreams, since all I can seem to dream big about is laying the foundation for a huge church.
Anyway, that is all for todays session of Ben getting touchy-feely on you, while being dark, brooding and not so mysterious. If you want to read more crap like this go so www.i-suck-at-life.com (don’t really I just made that up to be funny)
honey_mustard says
touchy feely is good 🙂
tehuatzi says
Jeff emailed me this really nice email, almost made me cry at work…the bastard…
Isn’t that just like the guy? 🙂
tehuatzi says
Traffic was a nightmare because of sed sheet of ice
That sounds pretty awk ward. 🙂
rockyrockstar says
I have spent a lot of time trying to lead people by gathering up all of my previous knowledge and ideas and using them to try to get people to live better lives. There are few better ways to cause misery and suffering.
Leadership is seeing God’s work in other people’s life and being thrilled by it. When our hearts are warmed by God’s work, we ask him (eagerly) whether we might have a place in that work. In his mercy and love he grants us place and time to touch the work he is doing. Leadership is a function of received grace and learned humility. Otherwise it is evil.
j
rschmit says
I think it is merely that the Law of Conservation of Suck is not swinging your way lately.
I also think that some of this is due to the separation anxiety from the Brain Cell.
That said, you suck at driving. That’s why the lady laughed at you.
bigcat2k says
That said, you suck at driving. That’s why the lady laughed at you.
Says the guy who drives no rear-wheel, and would have been in the intersection. 😛
hmmm…I guess it could be the suck piling my way, it happens like that sometimes…also the brain-cell is missed…I can feel that in my thinking muscle.
bigcat2k says
Does that mean you won’t let me lead a small group.
j/k
I wasn’t gonna try to start one until I felt right about it anyway.
bigcat2k says
He is that kind of guy 🙂
BTW, Congradulations on Sammy getting a sibling.
tehuatzi says
Hey, thanks. Completely unplanned, again. And right before we’re moving, again. Pretty smooth operators, we.
bigcat2k says
My knowledge of grammer and spelling is down right aw ful, so in my head, that sentence sounds fine…but I’m sorta odd like that. Would it be “said” instead of “sed” since I’m talking about the same giant sheet of ice I mentioned earlier in the post?
Well, this is the only thing that ever hampers me from getting really good grades on papers, so I figure I can’t be perfect, and I made the not-so-smart Liberal art’s TA’s happy to be better than me at something.
rschmit says
That said, you suck at driving. That’s why the lady laughed at you.
Says the guy who lives in a city where streets get salted and ice isn’t a problem, therefore making said rear wheel drive pointless.
tehuatzi says
Actually that was my little attempt at UNIX humor. sed and awk are command line utilities; sed is a stream editor and awk operates on text files (pattern recognition, find & replace, etc.)
And yes, it’s “said sheet of ice” as in “the sheet of ice I said earlier.”
bigcat2k says
The city I live in was salted…it was too damned cold for the salt to work thank you very much mr hoitie-toity.
FYI the city of Minneapolis is much cleaner, and more well kept than your city biatch.
Also, not knowing how to drive well w/ rear-wheel or a manual means you aren’t covered in all situations…and that automatically makes u suck.
bwahahaha
>P
bigcat2k says
ah, unix humor that i’m unaware of, not to uncommon since I only use it enough to speak level 1 unix geek, maybe level 2 now that I’m becoming familiar w/ SQL92 syntax. That sounds like at least level 4.
why did I remember someone spelling it “sed” then…..damn you and your funny spelling of things.
tehuatzi says
Just a guess, but maybe he was punning on UNIX sed when he said that.
Actually, sed and awk are pretty basic; there’ll be a chapter about them early on in any bash book… but I guess it depends on what you use. As a Fortran 90 scientific programmer I used ASCII data files a lot, and awk was handy for quick fileformat changes, data cuts, etc. Whereas I don’t know jack about SQL, or scripting languages or anything like that.
bigcat2k says
UNIX is huge, it amazes me the complexity and flexibility that got built into that from the ground up. Much how like the itanium rocks my theoretical CompE world. But in the end, it is just simpler to stick w/ windows and x86, widely adopted and accepted as the standard. This is what will always keep me from being the true *NIX / BSD geek I could be.
Perhaps I’ll ask seth to comment on that since he hasn’t posted in quite a while and isn’t checking this as fequently as he used to.
rschmit says
Look, i know how to drive rear-wheel, you fucking sally. The minivan I drove throughout high school was rwd.
I could figure out how to drive manual. You have to spot me a clutch though.
And well, I’ll take that extra 10 degrees of warmth in winter, plus no need for an engine block heater, plus (and most importantly) the BEARS over a little cleanliness every day. Besides Minneapolis/St. Paul isn’t that clean, like Canada. And Chicago is definitely not New York dirty. Therefore I win.
And yes, the athletic teams from my area are superior to the athletic teams from your area.
bigcat2k says
touche on the first sports bit, but I believe (to my dismay since I’m not a Vikings fan) that the sports team from my area is in a position to get into the playoffs where yours is not. The T-wolves are also much better of a team than the Bulls, even though they lost the other day, and the Twins don’t suck. And lets not even get into college football. You have me in college basketball.
You don’t know my city very well…it is damned near canada clean, and I can walk through the ghetto here…i already have, and it looks cleaner in the ghetto than a lot of the nicer places in chicago. The desparity here is what makes the difference, not the level of cleanliness compared to the cleanest and dirtiest places that we know. This isn’t a normalized thing amongst cities….it is me trashing the trash in your city, while talking about the cleanlieness of mine. New York and Canada do not figure into it at all, you only bring those up to make your city look less dirty, and compared to here….it is still dirty.
Finally, I’ve never seen a mini-van that is rear-wheel. So until you provide proof, I will in no way believe your claims Nancy-boy.
Reguardless of whether you think you could drive manual or not, does not bear on the fact that you currently do not know how, and subsequently suck, so I win until you learn about the specific physics of Driving and the techniques that seperate the sucks from the suck-nots. Driving stick is the bare minimum to even enter the game…sucky.
You get more mean faces ….but you must imagine them with circles so they can truely be Juju making fun of you…and trust me, he makes fun of you every day, just to rebalance the suck.
>P
V_V
rschmit says
Maybe, but I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night!
Rear wheel drive minivans.
Older minivans, like the one I drove, were predominantly rear wheel drive. It wasn’t until the 90’s, and the major redesigns, that front wheel drive came into prominence in minivans.
bigcat2k says
I stand corrected.
Ur still a hooker.
bigcat2k says
I was thinking more about what you said here.
I am really thrilled when I see God’s work and that warms my heart more than anything (it might take a while to tell the difference, but when I try to push things I can usually feel it after a while), and I do eagerly desire to be a part of it. I think the problem is sometimes it is hard to tell when my desire to be prepared, trained, or equiped ends and God’s ability to control a situation I can’t control starts. I know we need to be trained, have knowledge, and work at being better leaders that way, but it is hard for me to let myself be a better leader by trusting God sometimes. I think that might be a problem.
rockyrockstar says
This is the right tension to live in. This will make your life much happier 🙂
kelglitter says
Hey… funny thing… I once drove a manual rear wheel drive minivan. That was interesting. I was like “What the?!?” when I got in the driver’s seat because it had just blown all paradigms I’d ever had about minivans.
ca_chick says
How can you properly love others without knowing of love yourself?
sspain says
hey, man…leave me out of this one! I CORRECT your spelling, typically. Though, well, my last post is chock-full of mistakes…I actually had to restrain myself from editing it, cuz, well…bah.