Another day late and one year older...

This post is mainly for all the old Grove City/WPACO crowd, but all the rest of you are welcome to read it as well.  (I know you're dying to hear about Sarah and I.   We're doing pretty much amazing.   More on the topic will have to wait, however, as it didn't really fit into the context of this post. --AC) 

It's strange how time passes.  Four years ago I was a shy kid still adjusting to life two months after moving to Grove City.  Three years ago I was dealing with the slump that follows high school graduation, and aiming for the academy.  Two years ago I was heading for college and still trying to figure out my life post-academy.  One year ago I was reminiscing on PB and looking forward to life in the apartments.  Now I'm here in Illinois, 20 years old, in a relationship, and about to start my Junior year of college.  The remaining two years of school have never seemed as short a time span as they do now.

When did we grow up?  The changes occured so slowly at the time that we hardly noticed them, yet here we are on the brink of adulthood.  My little sister's now the same age I was when I competed with WPACO.  Isn't that weird?  Those memories seem almost like yesterday, but at the same time, they seem so far away.  Cleaning my room before the move, I came across some things I had saved from back then...evidence, 1ACs, pictures, all of that.  It was strange looking through it all.  I found one of the original JJ pins... do you remember when we made those?  It's kind of funny looking back that I came up with the design--I didn't even really know JJ at the time....  All of my trophies, medals, certificates in different events...they were all such a big deal at the time.  Third place PA closed...Third place Maryland open...Fourth Place PA open...etc, etc, etc...they meant so much to me at the time, yet there they were collecting dust.  When I found my debate award from the PA Closed it was literally covered in rust...I guess some water had somehow gotten under the front plate and into the metal itself.  It seemed a rather fitting picture...Mrs. Moon used to talk about how it wasn't the trophies that mattered, and that we wouldn't care about them in the long run.  I guess I proved that from personal experience.  The awards mean almost nothing with the passage of time.  It's the memories, the friendships, and the growth that matters.

It's strange how even friendships fade.  Three, four years ago we had our groups, both in Grove City and at WPACO, and those friendships that were invaluable to me.  Graduating high school was painful for that reason--the thought of losing everything we had built up was, at the time, almost unthinkable.  Probably one of the most depressing things I've ever heard anyone say was when Bekah came up to me at the Pemberly, the night before my graduation and said "Goodbye, Drew, I'll probably never see you again."  Of course, I didn't lose you all then--most of our friendships grew even more over the next year than they had while I was still in high school.  With Carmen, judging at tournaments, various trips (remember the ski trip? or hiking?), and all the random get-togethers we had, it was almost as if nothing had changed.  A couple people moved on, but for the most part, everything was constant up through the summer before my freshman year.

Then college happened, and things changed.  It's amazing how much things can change just in going to a school 45 minutes away.  We were seperated, and those miles made all the difference.  I developed new groups of friends, and so did all of you.  The number one thing that I heard from people that first year when I came back was how much I had changed...not for the worse, not for the better, I had just become different.  I really didn't notice it myself, and no one could really describe it to me at the time either.  I had picked up new mannerisms, new interests...just changed in general.  In many ways those "changes" were just a continuation of the changes that had begun when the academy had turned me down, because the academy had been my life through high school.  I know that, because I had deliberately made it that way.  In New Jersey, I had generally been pegged as the "quiet, smart, nice kid," to the point that some people had their doubts I could make it at the academy.  Or at least that's the impression I got from some people, such as other cadets at Civil Air Patrol.  Maybe I was just reading my own doubts into other people's reactions, I dunno. 

Either way, though, when we moved from New Jersey to PA, I made a conscious effort to form my motivations and mannerisms around the military academy.  People always remarked on my stiff military step whenever I was walking, or the stern look that I had developed as my default facial expression whenever I wanted to look serious or motivated.  It was deliberate.  Many actors talk about taking on a role that they're playing in a movie to the point that they adopt that character's personality in real life, just to make it authentic for the movie.  In a way, that's what I did with the academy.  I took on the role of a military officer.  I put it into my step, my thought processes, and all my decision making.  Sometimes I took it too far.  Apparently I intimidated the judge at one debate tournament enough with my military demeanor that she commented negatively about it on the ballot.  Other people brought up to me how I always looked "stiff", "tense", "angry", or "like I was about to kill someone".  Apparently those attributes aren't desirable in everyday life .  Some of those things I changed a bit.  I actually remember one night my dad showing me how to slouch and walk with a bit more of a swagger so that I didn't look like I was marching everywhere.  Overall, though, I kept the military personality until the academy turned me down.

The academy turning me down essentially caused a pendulum swing in the other direction.  I was confused, and trying to figure out what my life should look like now that I wasn't aiming for the military.  I grew my hair and beard out (to the point that I pretty much looked homeless, as many of you were kind enough to point out, haha ), lost a lot of motivation, and slouched a lot more.  I dropped a lot of the image I had built up for myself around the academy, such that people at Geneva now can barely believe it when I tell them that I had almost been accepted to the academy, or that that had been my goal for ten years.  Shoot, I think some of my friends at Geneva still may not know, which is surprising to me, considering how much I talked about it when I first came to Geneva.  It wasn't until later that I realized that I was still bitter about the academy when I first came to Geneva.  It's taken time for me to really accept that Geneva's a better place for me. Especially as I am now, haha...the current me wouldn't last a week at the academy.

My first two years at Geneva, then, involved a lot of me trying to figure out who I was and what my life should look like.  For example, by the year after high school, I had myself convinced that I was an extrovert, mainly because that's the kind of person I thought would do best at the academy.  It didn't take long at Geneva for me to realize that I am actually very much an introvert, and get worn out by too much activity very easily.  It's been difficult sorting it all out...trying to figure out how much of the "military" behavior/mannerisms are really me, and how much of the "pre-military" behavior/mannerisms are really me.  (For those of you with interests in Philosophy, it's almost a thesis/antithesis/synthesis model, with the original thesis being my pre-military self, the antithesis being the military self-image I constructed for myself in Grove City around the academy, and the synthesis being where I'm ending up now.)  I dunno, I guess it's partly made difficult by my easy-going personality--I tend to behave as I think others expect me to behave.  Thus, when going for the academy, I behaved as I thought an ideal academy cadet would be expected to behave.  Similarly, at Geneva, I tend to behave in such a way as to fit in with the guys from PB/Y2.  (I guess everyone does that to some extent, especially upon starting college but I think I was affected by it more than others, especially coming into college after being rejected by the academy as I was.  I dunno.)  Anyways, that "chameleon" feature of my personality has made it rather difficult for me over the past two and a half years to figure out how I should be acting post-academy. It's been difficult to figure out how much of my driven academy personality was really myself, and how much was part of the "role" I was playing, and it's been something I've struggled with on occasion.  As time goes by, however, things have tended to sort themselves out.  This past year has seen the end of that pendulum swing away from the academy (characterized by confusion, uncut hair, long beard and a lack of motivation ) back towards more of a middle ground.  I'm not extreme military now, but neither am I as confused and unmotivated as I was freshman year.  We've hit more of a synthesis.  What that synthesis is, well, you'll have to judge for yourself. 

Anyways, that was all a long digression.  I guess it was kind of applicable since I was talking about changes over the past two years.  I don't think I've talked about it to that extent before, as it was something I was trying to figure out more towards the beginning and middle of this past semester, and I haven't posted in forever.  If your eyes glazed over while reading it, and it made no sense, I apologize...just skip to the next paragraph.

I started out talking about how things have changed since I started college.  I changed.  You all did, too.  As time went by that first year, the frequency of our conversations tended to drop down as we started having less in common.  As this past year progressed, I've lost almost all contact with all but a few of you.  You developed your own friends and groups, mostly at GCC, and I developed mine at Geneva...and somewhere in the middle, I kind of faded out of the Grove City picture.  It's strange how time changes things...  I used to be at the core of the group, but I realized this past semester that whenever I came back to Grove City I was now a visitor to the group, simply because we no longer had the same experiences to talk about... You all would start to discuss classes and professors and events at GCC and I'd be lost, and I'd talk about things at Geneva, and beyond a certain point you all could only nod and smile...and we slowly lost touch.  Some of you I talked to almost every night before college, and now we talk maybe twice a semester.  The same thing happened with WPACO.  As people have graduated and moved on, I've lost touch with most of you, and with the club itself.  I showed up at the fundraising banquet this spring and barely recognized anyone. 

Maybe because of all this, the move to Illinois has really had very little effect on me...in many ways I was already gone from Grove City before I left.  I've moved to Illinois, but in one way or another, we've all moved on, and we never really saw it happening.  It's bittersweet.  I think what Douglas MacArthur said of old soldiers can be applied to friendships as well: "Old friendships never die; they just fade away."

That being the case, even though I'll probably be around a bit in the future, I just want to thank all of you from Grove City and WPACO for those few years we had when we were together.  They were short, but they were good.  Thank you all for being there for me, for laughing with me (and at me ), for putting up with me, for trusting me, for including me.  Thank you for everything you taught me, as we grew together.  Thank you for the memories.  Two different songs come to mind here...the first is The Leaving Song by Stephen Speaks. The second, for those of you unfamiliar with Stephen Speaks, is the Breaking of the Fellowship track off of the Fellowship of the Ring soundtrack.  I know most of you have that one.  Listen to it for me, and remember the way things were back then.  For a brief time, for those few years our paths lay side by side on the journey God has marked out for us.  Now our paths are separating.  Just a couple more years and we'll all be on our own out in the world.  Strange, isn't it?  This time seemed so far away back then, yet here we are.  Four years ago I was just meeting all of you.  Four years from now, who knows where we'll be? 

I'll probably see all of you again, but for all of you I pray God will be with you, strengthening you on your journey for wherever you go.  For those of you I won't see, God bless, and I'll look forward to catching up with you on the other side of the Jordan.  All of you, thank you for everything.

The Lord bless you and keep you;

                       the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

I know, I know, it's been awhile.  Everyone wants to know how my semester's going.  I guess if I had to summarize it in one phrase, it would be "harder than expected."  This semester's very different from last semester...the social dynamics have changed a lot.  My group of friends has tended to fragment.  Some people are in relationships; others are hanging out with different groups of friends more.  Not that that's necessarily bad; it just means that some things are more complicated, some are a bit more awkward, and overall people are hanging out less this semester.  I dunno, I guess I'm not helping any--my school schedule has been a lot more demanding than I had expected, and has left me doing homework even during open hours.  Shocking, I know.  I'm only taking 18 credits this semester, which is one less than last semester, and had therefore anticipated that my workload would be about the same or less than last semester.  It only took me about a week to realize how wrong I was in that assumption. 

Hebrew is around the same amount of work as last semester, only more difficult.  It was after receiving a D+ on the second quiz that I realized that I was going to have to study a lot harder for it this semester than last semester.  I had my first exam on Monday, and I think that went pretty well, but we'll see how it turns out.

Greek 202 is focusing on exegesis of the Greek text of the New Testament.  The first couple of weeks involved some preliminary reading in the book of Colossians, along with a crash course in textual history and criticism...we were covering roughly 90 pages per class.  After that introduction, we focused on individual exegesis projects in Colossians (mine was from 2:6-9), involving lexical studies, sentence structure analysis, passage outlining, verse-by-verse commentary, and examining the applicable textual variants.  I had a bit of fun with that...I turned in my sentence form-function diagram done entirely in crayon on posterboard, mainly because I can, since it's Dr. Watt. The rest of the semester will be focused on individual exegesis research projects...I'll be working on I Corinthians 15: 42-49.  That'll culminate in a 20-30 page paper by the end of the semester.  Greek remains my favorite class, I think. 

I'm taking Humanities 203 this semester, in the honors section.  I can't say it's my favorite class, but it's not as bad as it could be.  For the honors section, there is no midterm or final, only weekly quizzes, a 2 page paper due each week, and then a research paper at the end of the semester, so it's fairly easy for me.  It's essentially an overview of Western history and culture.  The material is marginally interesting, but lecture tends to feel rather long.

I'm taking a ministry elective as well, Discipline of the Pastoral Call.  It's interesting, because it's not really set up like a traditional class at all.  It's pass/fail, 2 credits, with a discussion on Monday afternoon.  Dr. Frazier has us assigned daily Bible readings and journaling, and various books to read throughout the week on pastoral ministry in general.  Later in the semester we'll be traveling to a few churches to hear some different preachers, and we'll have some various other exercises as well.

The class with the biggest workload for me is probably Gospel of John.  Dr. Shidemantle opened the semester explaining that his philosophy was that "Pre-med students have to work all night on their material, and I don't think it should be any different for Pre-ministry students."  I usually have to spend at least 3 hours working on the exegesis due each class.  Throughout the semester he has scheduled presentations for students involving a research topic, a paper of at least 7 pages, and a 20 minute in-class presentation complete with powerpoint.  Guess who got to be the lucky one to get the first one of the semester?    Needless to say, that was a bit stressful, considering that I ended up with essentially a weekend to work on what others are working on two months in advance.  It became even more stressful when I couldn't find any information on half of my research topic.  I ended up throwing together what I thought was the best explanation I could with the information I had, pulling an all-nighter and finishing the paper about 2 minutes before class last Tuesday.  The presentation was Thursday, and by Wednesday night I was pretty much a wreck with trying to figure out how I was gonna pull everything together to present in class, knowing that Dr. Shidemantle and the two assigned respondents would be analyzing my paper and questioning me on it.  So I was really stressed out about that, but then a friend reminded me of my December 3 xanga entry, and that was really encouraging and helped a lot.  I managed to finish putting the presentation together just before class on Thursday, and it went really well.  I got Dr. Shidemantle's comments on the paper and presentation yesterday...apparently I managed to get something right, cause he apparently liked it. :-p  So thanks to those of you who were praying for me on that.  (I called Ethan on his birthday, and he informed me that he had been praying about it for me, and that "God knows what we need but he waits for us to ask him."  It was really cute. )  That's pretty much the biggest thing I'll have in that class until the term paper, so I'm glad to have it out of the way.

My philosophy class, Postmodernism, is really interesting.  I'm learning a lot in it, but it will be a lot of work as the semester goes on.  Dr. Meek explained that the problem with philosophy classes was that the beginners who were taking it as an elective were always struggling to keep up while the philosophy majors weren't being challenged enough.  So she created two syllabi--one for the novice track, and one for the advanced track.  I, of course, being a philosophy minor, was placed on the advanced track, which means that I serve as a group discussion leader and facilitate the group presentation in April--except I won't get a grade for that.  I'll get a grade for the fifteen page thesis paper I present in conjunction with the group presentation, and the annotated bibliography to go along with it.  This is in addition to the term paper.  So, needless to say, that will take up the majority of my time after Spring break.

The last class I have is the honors book discussion on calling, which just started up a couple weeks ago.  Dr. Opitz is a pretty cool guy, so the discussion is thought-provoking.  I have to admit, though, so far it's going on the back burner in terms of my class priorities.  There'll be a couple short papers and a presentation later on in the semester, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there as we kill those two birds with one stone after leaving the kitchen because we can't stand the heat, because a penny saved is worth two in the bush.  Or something like that. 

Anyways...the past few days have mainly been recuperating from last week.  The weekend was fairly relaxing.  Sunday especially was nice...after church and lunch, we came back here and hung out for a while, and ended up singing some praise songs with the piano and guitar before going to dinner and then evening church.  Like I said, I had my first Hebrew exam on Monday, but it was hard to get stressed about that after coming off of last week, lol.

Today I took part in the quartet DD organized to sing Billy Joel's "The Longest Time" to his girlfriend.  It was going to be a quintet, but we lost our Baritone at the last minute (haha...sounds like he died or something...), and as a result they switched me from Tenor II, which mainly followed the melody, to Baritone, which had a bunch of weird sharps and such in it.  I'm pretty sure that when we actually sang it, I was only hitting my notes about half the time, and the other half was going along with the tenor or bass.  I don't think it sounded horrible, though, so that's a plus.

I dunno, there's not too much else going on.  I applied for Discipleship Coordinator for next year.  It's a student leadership position...I'll mention more about it if I get selected. :-p

Also I'm going to the Jubilee conference in Pittsburgh this weekend.  I get my way paid as a sophomore honors student.  Plus it's required.  So, yeah, that means I won't be able to come home to visit this weekend, for those of you who were asking.

Apparently I was also tagged in my absence to say 6 things about myself people won't know.  That's kinda difficult, because things some people won't know will be known by others.  I'll give it a shot, though.

1) I'll be TA-ing Greek starting in the Fall, since Dr. Watt accepted my offer to do so.  I offered mainly because I thought my schedule wasn't busy enough already.  Actually, I do think it'll be fun, and it'll give me a chance to brush up on some of the fine grammar rules and such.  A lot of people I know are considering taking Greek, so it could be very interesting.

2) My music tastes are very eclectic, especially since coming to college.  I'll listen to pretty much anything except rap and screamo.

3) Very few people have actually seen me really angry.  I have a very high tolerance level, and will avoid conflict whenever possible.  The angrier I get, the cooler, quieter, and tenser I get.  It doesn't happen often.  You've probably seen me frustrated, yes, annoyed, yes, but not truly and deeply angry.  One thing that does make me angry: people taking advantage of other people, especially those weaker than them.  Be forewarned.

4) Going along with that one, I guess you could say that I'm extremely cautious about committing to things, because I care deeply about the things I commit to.  My dad told me once, probably about ten years ago, never to start a fight that I wasn't willing to see through to the end...I've never forgotten that.   As I mentioned above, I don't get angry easily at all, but in the rare case that I do, I get really angry.  When I care about something, I really care about it.  In terms of friendship, I don't make friends easily.  I tend to keep people at arms length...I have a lot of acquaintances, but there are very few that I would put in the inner category of "friends."  The very few people that I do consider in the inner circle of my friends, however, I would do almost anything for.  I hurt when they hurt; just knowing they're struggling or having a rough time can throw off my entire day.  I don't trust people as friends easily, but when I do, I'm completely committed.  As far as relationships go, the same rule applies.  I refuse to start something I'm not going to finish.  I think that's part of why the superficiality of the dating game angers me so much.  I've never been able to understand how people can take relationships so casually.  Maybe that's just my personality.  I don't know.

5) I've never been in a serious fist-fight, or anything remotely similar.  See number four, sentence two above.  Sure, I've sparred with friends, but I avoid actual fights at all cost... there are very few circumstances in which I would enter a fight, and pretty much all of them would involve me being willing to kill if necessary.

6) Umm...I dunno, I'm running out of things to say.  I'd say I have a weird sense of humor, but I'm pretty sure you all know that.  So we're going to go with saying that I have a scar on my arm from falling off my bike when I was ten years old.  So there. 

Happy, everyone?  The post you requested.  I think it's long because I'm procrastinating on homework.  For those of you who skipped to the end because it was long, I'll summarize it for you: 1) Many things this semester are more difficult than I anticipated, both in and out of classes; 2) Don't make me angry.  That's about it in a nutshell.