Forget those trite WWJD bumper stickers and bracelets. Here's a contemporary example of ethical behavior and fairness with which many of us could more easily identify -- Atticus Finch, one of the main characters in Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. So, the next time that an ethical dilemma confronts you, just ask yourself...
"What would Atticus Finch do?"
:J
The more astute among you might have noticed that I've been curiously inactive here and on Flickr since I entered law school. It's true; I've been incredibly busy and, though things have happened on which I'd like to comment, I just haven't had time to write anything.
The title here is a tip-o-the-tuque to Bill Engvall, but has nothing to do with common stupidity. Often, when at an important crossroads in our lives, we might ask God for a sign of what action we should take or for affirmation that we're on the right path. Though I'm unsure of what God was signaling, a sign came through LOUDLY and CLEARLY two Sundays ago.
Chris and I went to church at College Park Baptist Church in Greensboro and sat near the back (Though American rather than Southern, it's still a Baptist church.), next to the aisle. A few minutes into the service, as we were settling in for the sermon, I heard a VERY loud crash and a womon's scream. I don't think that I realized what happened because I don't remember jumping or being startled; I think that I had one of those moments where your hearing goes out for just a split second and you miss a syllable of a conversation. I noticed what looked like bird's feathers drifting down from the ceiling into the aisle next to me, looked down to see the little, grey bits covering the men in the aisle across from me, and then looked on the floor to see the vent diffuser from the ceiling now lying on the floor. This 3-feet-across hunk of metal had somehow become dislodged from the vent and dropped 25 feet to the floor in the middle of worship! What's more, it had missed me by about 6 feet and the gentlemen across from me (who were now covered by bits of insulation and compacted dust) by only 2-3 feet!
Everyone in the sanctuary just sat quietly for a couple of minutes, stunned, wondering what to do. The Pastor paused, conferred with the worship leader, then announced that we were moving worship to the smaller chapel. We made our way out of the sanctuary, filed the much smaller chapel, and finished our worship. (Ironically and, perhaps, foolishly, I sat directly beneath a brass and glass chandelier in the chapel.) I shared this event with several church-going friends and discussed the shared experience with a staff member at school who also attends church there, but mostly got on with the week and just enjoyed the shock value in telling the story.
Chris and I returned to College Park this past Sunday and, upon entering the sanctuary, looked up to see what had become of the gravitationally-challenged diffuser. It had been reinstalled in its proper place. During worship, the pastor reassured us by sharing the news that a professional had reinstalled the diffuser and checked the others to ensure that they were secure in their spots.
The funniest part of all this happened during the offering this past Sunday. As the ushers approached the altar in preparation to collect the offering, we noticed that they were wearing hard hats, which they then used instead of collection plates to collect the offering! Ha! A congregation with a wry sense of humor--I could make it my church home! :J
This weekend was Chris' birthday and in his honor, some friends came over on Saturday for a cook-out. After eating burgers, hot dogs, cake, and ice cream, we ended up playing Beyond Balderdash. The original Balderdash involves coming up with definitions for unusual words and tricking your opponents into picking the wrong one (hopefully your own), while trying to figure out for yourself which is the correct definition. Beyond Balderdash find the players bluffing movie plots and the significance of dates, abbreviations, and then names of famous people. Among the terms for which we made up explanations were two movie titles for which we came up with a group of plots that were so creative that I had to share them here.
New PasturesWhat a hoot! This was a fun game, one that I look forward to playing again, perhaps with some of my new law school classmates! You'll have to cut me some slack on the title of this entry; I couldn't think of any other B word related to cinema with which to achieve alliteration with Balderdash. By the way, in both cases, the third plot outline is the true one. :J
Shorty entry tonight.
Roomie Leslie heard about a man-made white-water facility in Charlotte, so on Saturday, several of us headed down to the US National Whitewater Center. Chris; my cousin, Jenny; two of Leslie's work friends, both named Debbie; and I piled into a rubber boat with helmets and flotation vests with a guide and two other tourists and spent two hours on rapids in classes 2-4. It was awesome! I was quite anxious about the whole affair, not knowing what to expect and wondering what I'd do if I went overboard. Fortunately, the facility gave us a good run-down of basic paddling techniques and safety procedures, so I felt fairly well prepared before I got in the boat. Our boat did tip twice, but my feet stayed wedged fast under the inflated cross-braces, so I stayed in, though the womon in front of me went for a dip. Our biggest mishap was arriving a few minutes late for our appointed time and having to wait for 90 minutes until they could squeeze us in. If you go, DO make a reservation and DO check-in at the training pavilions early! Leslie; Christopher; and another of Leslie's work friends, also named Debbie (I'm beginning to think that all of Leslie's work friends are named Debbie, even the guys.) went flat-water kayaking due to Christopher's age. Debbie's boyfriend elected to bring his bike and he enjoyed the several miles of trails that meander around the facility. We'd entertained notions of stopping at Northlake Mall or Concord Mills on the way home, but we were so beat that we headed directly home, stopping only after we arrived in Kernersville for a yummy dinner at Don Juan's.
Law school orientation starts Thursday, just 3.5 days from now. I'm excited, but I'm also a bit bummed because I've scarcely made a dent in the list of projects that I wanted to work on between leaving work and starting school. I'm going to Rockingham to visit Mamaw and Papaw for a few days this week, but I'd also like to visit Mum if only I had a bit more time. If I were to be realistic about it, I could lay out until Christmas and still not get everything done! You'll recall that I have to wear a suit to the first two days of orientation (the first day for photos and the second day to look presentable for big-wigs). Well, I had a look at the forecast for Thursday and it's calling for a high temperature of ONE HUNDRED degrees F (38 C)! Yikes! I guess it's all in a day's work. Er... :J
Just before my final days at work this past Monday and Tuesday (30 and 31 July), Chris and I headed out of town for a brief get-away. We had wanted to go to New York and see Fantasia Barrino play Miss Celie in the Broadway version of The Color Purple, but that trip fell apart as we studied our respective budgets. We scaled back our plans and decided on a couple of road trips instead of one big, fantastic voyage.
So, last Friday, Chris and I piled into the car and headed north to Lynchburg. Chris lived in Lynchburg for a few years and I had visited Lynchburg often over the previous several years, as it's the hometown of my ex, Jeff, and his family sstill lives there. Upon arrival in Lynchburg, I met Jeff's mom to exchange some of his and my possessions that had gotten shuffled in the moves. I brought her some of her favorite candy treats and Chris and I both enjoyed chatting with her. We then met a friend of Chris' for lunch at a Lynchburg-style Chinese buffet (complete with all of the normal, Americanized Chinese fare, plus french fries, pigs in blankets, pizza, cheese and seafood tartlets, and an array of dishes made by combining the same six ingredients in different proportions; kinda like Taco Bell, but "Chinese" instead of "Mexican"). As much as I deride it, I enjoy an occasional dose of Lynchburg-style Chinese food. After Lunch, I paid homage to tradition by hitting the J.Crew outlet (J.Crew is based in Lynchburg and this is a real outlet attached to the warehouse!) and the outlet of the Old Virginia Candle Factory, which is always a good place to find Christmas and birthday gifts.
I'd planned a surprise for Chris on Saturday, who organized and surprised me with several adventures when I visited him in the Philippines. (I'd have no idea where I was going and end up on a donkey headed up a volcano or on a plane to Fantasy Island.) We were planning to go to church at Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh on Sunday and I wanted to find a hotel near Raleigh so that we wouldn't miss church like we did the last time that we tried to attend Pullen when we ended up too hungover to go! So, I was poking around on Google Earth to find a nice hotel with a spa and spotted the Carnivore Preservation Trust, an animal rescue facility near Pittsboro that has tigers, leopards, ocelots, servals, jaguars, and other carnivorous cats and keystone species. It sounded like fun, so I made a reservation and we ended up enjoying an educational, 90-minute tour of the facility and introduction to several of their eighty resident animals. We watched tigers feast on whole chickens, saw a male tiger spray (Think garden hose.), and enjoyed the antics of a deceptively comical kinkajou.
Leslie, my roommate, had gone to the Raleigh-Durham airport to pick up her nephew and her sister, so we met them and had dinner at Southpoint mall in Durham after screening Knocked Up on our own. After dinner, we headed to Raleigh. I gave up on finding a hotel with a spa in my price range, so I just got us a room at the Holiday Inn next to Pullen so that we'd have minimal excuses for missing church the next morning. We did roll out of bed and attend church, where we were treated to a Taizé-style worship service (the main feature of which are musical chants in-between the components of worship) that also incorporated vignettes of prayerful dance.
After church, we visited some of Chris' friends, Andy and Megan, who'd recently become parents. Another friend, Brooks, who knows all of us one way or another (I met him at Wake Forest Baptist Church.) and who happens to now be the youth minister at Pullen, also joined us and we spent a lovely afternoon catching up and taking turns holding the baby. Andy is a software developer, Brooks used to work as a Macintosh technician, and I was until just recently a database administrator, so it was predestined that the three of us would end up geeking out for a while. Sure enough, we headed up to the Andy's study to "ooh" and "ahh" over the Commodore 64 that he'd recently purchased on eBay to relive a bit of his youth. I mistakenly identified it as a Commodore 128 until he pointd out that it was a 64 in its second-generation case. He'd kitted it out with a monochrome monitor, two disk drives, and a HUGE mouse that plugged into the joystick port. He demonstrated the GEOS software that he'd installed that put a Macintosh-style GUI on the Commodore. I mentioned that I had a TI-99/4A and we went on for awhile about the TI's superior graphics and sound, the Commodore's greater popularity, and the deficiencies of the two (TI's curious implementation of BASIC and convoluted code interpretation, Commodore's crippled serial bus that made access to disk data slow). All we lacked was the tape on our glasses, the goose-honking laughter, and our tri-Lam sweatshirts! We visited for a long time and ended up going for dinner immediately after leaving Andy and Megan's house. I was able to talk Chris into going to one of my favorite restaurants, Sweet Tomatoes, whose nearest location is in Raleigh. Yum!
The weekend gave way to a short work-week, since Tuesday was my last day at work before beginning law school next week. I tied up some loose ends and snuck out, wanting to avoid any long goodbyes. My law school text books have begun arriving and information about orientation has been arriving steadily. I have recently learned that I must wear a suit for my first two days! I might as well get used to it, since gone are the days of wearing camp shirts, cargo shorts, and hiking sandals to work. Silk ties, starched shirts, and wool suits will soon replace them. I might just have to rebel a bit and wear seersucker or olive drab and, to be sure, my faithful bow-ties shall make frequent appearances! Feh. Trust me to rebel by being über-traditional! :J
