Month: September 2008

mmmbye

Apparently I have a “getting off the phone voice.” I’m not disagreeing with that assessment, I’d just never thought about it before. A friend told me she needed to go “pretty soon” after we had been talking for a while tonight. That says to me “this conversation is done right here. Everything from this point on is just reminders and fluff.”

Maybe that’s not how everyone looks at it (feel free to chime in on the comments), but I do. It could be that I’m just efficient. It’s probably just that I’m impatient and I don’t like transition (I’ve got a draft waiting for completion that’s about hating transition… you might see it one of these days).  But once the thought enters my head that the conversation will at some point end, I immediately reach that point in my own mind. And I just don’t like the rest of that “fluff.”

My “getting off the phone voice,” in my opinion and after only about 3½ minutes consideration, gets more intense the longer the farce of a conversation lasts after any variation of the “I’ll need to go soon” line. As I’ve said before, this reminds me so much of a couple of loathe-to-answer-the-phone relatives of mine that I have to laugh at myself a little. But I feel like you should be definitive about whether you are having a  conversation or not. Don’t be unsure whether you’re still really talking about anything meaningful anymore.

Which brings me to another realization. One of those strange things that annoys me is when people get off the phone and instead of saying simply “bye,” it is drawn out into “mmmbye” (You’ll notice now that either you or someone you know does this).  I remember noting that several people I know do this sometimes, but I can think of one person in particular who does it every time she gets off the phone with anyone.

Why does it annoy me? I’ve never known until tonight. I actually mentioned this to Riley the other day at work. I was cut off in the middle of a sentence by the person on the other end (like me, trying to get off the phone as quickly as possible once the primary purpose of the conversation was accomplished) and accidentally committed the crime of elongating my adieu by cramming in a “bye” before the click and also before I’d stopped speaking my last syllable. Justifiable, I would say, but still obnoxious coming out of my own mouth.

Another friend of mine has noticed this particular personal pet peeve, but didn’t quite hit the nail on the head. She thought I just hated talking on the phone period, which I do not. I love talking on the phone, probably more than most guys and certainly than anyone as genetically predisposed to avoice tele-oration as myself. But I do enjoy it, particularly with every single one of the individuals that have been anonymously mentioned herein. But say you’re thinking of anything other than staying on the phone for the next six hours and not only am I finished, but I want a three-letter valediction.

Grown Man Playing Video Games

Four in a day. That’s a record. Sorry.

A friend of mine works at Wal-Mart, and he happened to be the one ringing me up today when I went to purchase The Force Unleashed for my XBox360.  Now, the only reason I even own a 360 is that I heard last year that this game was coming out, and I therefore needed a seventh generation console to play it.

My friend picked it up and looked at it and shook his head. “Grown man playing video games,” he said a little jokingly, and a little disdainfully.

I’ll ignore the rest. I just think it’s funny that I got called a “grown man.”

Three In One Day?

I know, I know. I’ll scare people away if I give them too much to read. But this one’s a little lighter than the several preceding entries and I just had to write it.

Driving back from class today, I was going down Southern Avenue. For those unfamiliar with Elizabeth City, Southern Ave. is a pretty long street (it’s even longer if you take into consideration that it, Park Street, Riverside Ave., and River Road are all the same road, and really, you could extend that to Pitt’s Chapel Rd. as well) that goes from town through and to a large chunk of residential area and past the main entrance to Elizabeth City State University.

This woman was driving a van down Southern Avenue towards town.  She was not up to the University yet, and I was past it already, headed home. I’m not sure what compelled me to glance inside the car at the actual driver, but when I did, I realized that both of her hands were not only not on the steering wheel, but over her eyes! And she wasn’t just coasting along either, I’m pretty sure she passed me doing 35 or 40.

Because of the glare from the sun on the windshield, I couldn’t see if there was some kid in the passenger seat who she was just terrorizing for a couple of seconds on that straightaway. And yeah, I know it’s a little dark that that’s the only explanation I could come up with for that action, but it’s something I would have thought was funny from the backseat while my brother freaked out if somebody had done that to us when we were little.

At any rate, I watched her in my rear view mirror (which means that neither of us were looking at the road) and she didn’t crash either within my field of vision or anywhere back along the course of the road when I went back down it later.

So basically this is a pointless post, except maybe that it’s quite interesting what you’ll see if you stalkerishly peer at people inside their cars.

Probably Blew This One

Adam, Jerry and I were the only ones at Discussion Group last night. I probably didn’t even have to say it out loud, but I suggested, to instant and unanimous laughter and agreement that we go to Taco Bell.

The discussion was actually really good, and went on some tangents, but was originally (and for the most part stayed) about the inerrancy of Scripture.

But, like so many times lately, it wasn’t the discussion or anything else revolving our entire purpose that stuck with me the most from last night. It was the guy that knocked on the glass window next to us and then came inside to talk to us.

It was pretty easy to tell he was going to ask for money as he came up. He was a really good-natured guy,  and hilariously creative at that. But you could smell the booze on his breath, and though I could continue, I’ll stop the description of the assault on our senses right there.

Long story short, we chatted with him for a minute (we had to, he sat down in the empty space on the booth next to me, so I was trapped) and eventually got across to him that we didn’t have (or weren’t willing to give, in my case) any money to him and he got up and headed to the bathroom. The three of us had long been finished with our food and had already said our closing prayer, so the second the bathroom door closed behind him, Adam caught my eye with a look that said “Let’s go,” and our trio was out the door and in the van much faster than anyone that full of tacos should be able to move.

I started talking about this on the way back to church with them, and have since continued to contemplate it. It reminds me a little bit of Billy’s story, after reading about us finding the man who had been mugged on the street in Quito. He drove past a guy sleeping outside the old library on Main Street. Wondering if the guy needed help, he threw the truck in reverse, stopped in front of the library, rolled down his window and said “Hey, man, do you need some help?” The figure rolled over and said “Leave me alone, you son of a *****, can’t you see I’m drunk?!” Billy just laughed and drove off, but I doubt he’ll stop again anytime soon to ask someone apparently sleeping on the street if they need help.

Granted, the kinds of situations where people seem to be in need or ask for help are much different in the United States than they are in a developing country. But how easy it is to be discouraged from helping people at all.

I am not going to give money to somebody who I know will spend it on alcohol (though I wonder a little bit about that upon further consideration- he did smell like alcohol, but we were inside a restaurant and I could have offered him a taco to see what he’d say). And I’m actually pretty sure this particular guy has asked me for money before. And his language left much to be desired. But I still have pretty much no excuse except my own discomfort for not asking about who he is, finding out some of his story, and at least giving him an ear and maybe a little bit of the Gospel (which I feared would piss him off, but have since decided that he’d be better off pissed than not hearing it).

Didn't Mean To Rant

I just want to recognize that that last one came off as a little more of a rant than originally intended. And everyone at First Methodist that called me Dan and everyone at First Baptist that called me Daniel… you’re not funny.

What was funny was the text message I got from a friend in Greensboro who called me “Dan” last week. It said something to the effect of “Sorry! Won’t happen again!” I laughed and told him he wasn’t who I was flipping out on and apologized as profusely as possible in under 300 characters and lots of smileys.

At least someone’s still reading my blog.

What's In A Name?

Several people have called me “Dan” this week.

I’ve been “Danny” all my life. Unless I’m in a Spanish-speaking environment, I introduce myself as “Danny” or “Danny Peck,” which tends to be transmuted into “Dannypeck,” one word. My family calls me “Dan,” which I don’t mind, and would never have even really taken notice of except that my aunt once introduced me to several people at her church as “my nephew Dan,” and I thought that was a little strange (as this is how those people would know me, rather than “Danny”) until I realized that that’s pretty much all she ever calls me and would have seemed strange to her to introduce me as “Danny.”

But other than from my family, I hate being called “Dan.” There are some notable excptions, though. Like when I was a sophomore in high school, a certain group of my female friends got lazy and began calling everyone by the first syllable of their name, whether it sounded right or not. Somehow, in coming about that way, I don’t mind being shortened to “Dan” even to this day, but only amonst that group.

Then somewhere around junior or senior year of high school, Celia coined the nickname “Dirty Dan” for me (a mantle from which I’ve tried to distance myself more and more lately). The audience present at the time happened to be a rather large group of my guy friends, and among this group the name stuck, also sometimes simply shortened to “Dan.” It’s not so much that I liked it, but I perferred “Dan” to “Dirty Dan” in that context and didn’t argue with the moniker.

Jerry has called me “Dan” for years because of that second occurance. I actually asked him to make an effort to call me “Danny” before we left for Ecuador so that other people there wouldn’t pick up “Dan.” For the most part, I tended to get both syllables and ignored the couple instances of laziness.

Now in the words of Ron White, I told those stories to tell this story. The three extra-familial instances of being “Dan” this week got totally different reactions from me, all because of the sources from which they came. One I ignored as a normal occurance, one just seemed a little strange, and one quite frankly ticked me off. I decided that was a little out-of-proportion emotional response and have since totally recognized how ridiculous it is to think somebody needs to earn the ability to call me “Dan,” especially when I don’t usually publicize my general loathing for it.

On a related note, I also hate being called Daniel. Yes, it’s my real name (which funnily enough surprises a lot of people) but I just think it’s an ugly name. Sorry, mom. Maybe it’s just because of the fact that for the first twelve years of my life, only three people ever called me “Daniel.” Two were my grandparents, and they gave in to “Danny” pretty early on. The third person, my Great Aunt Mary, still calls me “Daniel” to this day, but when you’re anyone’s Great Aunt Mary, you can call them whatever you want.

I said that no one else called me “Daniel” for the first twelve years of my life because when I moved to Clarksdale, Mississippi, I actually somehow accidentally started going by “Daniel” at school. It became so stuck even in the first couple of days that introducing myself as “Danny” for the proceeding two years and signing all of my assignments that way never got any friends or teachers that I can remember to call me anything other than “Daniel.” My best friend called me Daniel. My band director called me Daniel. I even dated a girl who knew me both at school and at church (where I was “Danny”), and went back and forth between what she knew I perferred and what she heard everyone else called me.

I actually like “Daniel”‘s biblical meaning and feel it to be pretty appropriate for me. That doesn’t make it any more phonetically pleasing. I therefore quickly corrected all of my teachers’ class rolls when I moved to Elizabeth City and thus managed to preempt almost every use of my legal name.

Upon thinking about this whole Dan/Daniel/Danny thing, I’ve actually realized how many other nicknames I’ve picked up at and for varying times in my life. “Hawaii,” “Yoda,” “Stary-McScarykins,” “Dirty Dan,” “The Bearded Wonder,” “Phantom,” “Prince Charming,” “Wheels McGrath,” “Lord Farquad,” and “Fanny Pack” all symbolize different people, places, and times in my life. No, I didn’t make any of those up myself, and I can’t believe I actually even wrote a couple of them. Several more are staying off the list.

The point is, that while my outlook, experiences, attitudes, plans, and location have changed with just about every one of those nicknames, I probably shouldn’t get mad when people call me something other than “Danny” or “Dannypeck.” If I can deal with Daniel (in a Spanish accent) and recognize it as just a word that symbolizes a person (that happens to be myself), and certainly if I can do that with “Fanny Pack,” (an unfortanate similarity in sounds that no one in my life ever noticed with my name until this summer) I can get over people being lazy.

But still. Don’t call me “Dan.”

Gideon Followup

I got in Jerry’s car tonight to head down to the City Wine Sellar [sic] to see who was playing. As he cleared out the passenger seat, he picked up one of those Gideon New Testaments from school. He waved it and shrugged and said “Whatever. I’ll have one to give somebody now.”

I’m a jerk.

Gideon Day

When I started walking in from the parking lot this morning, I noticed the Gideons were passing out copies of the New Testament. I tense up when I see them, not because I don’t want a Bible, but because I know that undoubtedly there will be some student in one of my classes fuming about the “Jesus freaks” harassing them.

I park in the “A Building” parking lot because there are usually spaces there, and because I come out of my last class each day from there, so I have a short walk to my car and beat everyone back out of the parking lot. The side effect of this is that on Mondays and Wednesdays, I have to walk down the front length of campus to the Forman Center. To give you an idea of what that entails when you park at the “A Building,” until last year the Forman Center was called the “E Building.” I actually like the walk (or I’d park in the FC lot), but on Gideon days it means that as I stroll along in front of all five buildings, I have to walk past every single Bible-bearer at each door and every sidewalk corner.

Again, I don’t mind that in and of itself; but it means telling every one of them that I have a copy already, and I always feel bad doing that because I worry that they are thinking I’m lying because I’m an atheist and I just don’t want a copy. Yes, I know how exactly how ridiculous a thing that is to worry about and there are several solutions, ranging from 1) carrying the copy I keep in my car with me so they can see it to 2) taking a few extra seconds on my walk to class to actually be more sociable and talk to them instead of breezing past and trying to make it on time to a class with an ADD professor who talks about the weekend’s football games for the first 10 minutes anyway.

I got past Gideons #1 and #2 without having to speak to them (and I’m proud of that accomplishment in a way that scares me as I note the similarity of that statement to those of a certain antisocial family member of mine). Gideon #3 caught my eye at the sidewalk between “B” and “C” and asked if I’d like a copy of God’s Word. I smiled, thanked him, and said that I had one already, all as I kept my pace, intent on quickly finishing my trek past two more buildings. He nodded and said “Okay,” and I thought “Darn, he thinks I’m an atheist,” all the rest of the way to FC222.

But a few paces down from him, a girl a little older than me passed me on the sidewalk as she headed the other way towards A or the A Extension or the parking lot. She said “Don’t you hate it when they do that?” with something between a knowing smile directed at me and a sneer directed at the nice guy with Bibles that she obviously felt she’d soon have to “endure.”

It made me think. I mean, if I’d been as vocal a person as I’d like to be I would have told her that I think they do a real service and that she had a bad attitude. But you know what, so did I. Here I was actually almost agreeing with her in the sense that I have kind of hated “Gideon days” because I worry about ridiculous things that I imagine the guys thinking about me. I tense up when I see them because, invariably, somebody freaks out about being hounded by the guys, probably only because they expect to be hounded by the guys and get defensive as soon as they see them, reading implications into “Would you like a copy of the New Testament?” and imagining thoughts in the Gideons’ heads the same way I do, whether for different reasons or not.

I also wish I had had long enough to think this through to take my second opportunity of the day when one of the girls came into my Spanish class and (as predicted) dropped into her chair breathless, having actually run away from one of the guys and telling him she was late for class. (It was 9:52. Who’s going to buy that anyway?) Unfortunately, I was already right on thinking about the preterite tense of verbs in Spanish.

Once again, I needed the Evangelism Linebacker today.

Seriously? Again?

I just want to announce that I’m an idiot. I did one of those not-who-I-thought-it-was things again.

One of my friends just got on facebook. I put his name in the seach and found him. The first one that came up said this guy was friends with 4 of my friends. So I added him. Then, upon further consideration, I clicked on the “4 friends” link. It was 4 people from Greensboro who do not know this person in Elizabeth City. They just know some guy with the same name at a school with 14,000 people.

You can’t cancel a friend request, so I was freaking out about how this guy was going to wonder who I was and send me inquisitive wall posts.

I just blocked him.

The Spiritual Discipline of "Presence"

In the United Methodist Church, there are four specific areas that are outlined as ways that we give, that we are involved in the church. Any time that anyone takes any kind of vows in church, whether becoming a member of the congregation, or at confirmation or a non-infant Baptism, they are mentioned in the liturgy. Especially during stewardship campaigns (this year’s is ongoing) you hear a lot about how we support the church through our prayers, our presence, our gifts and our service.

My mom wishes she could hear Barbara Walters say that.

This morning, the start of the 2009 stewardship campaign at First UMC,  the focus of the week was on presence.  Sandra Ray gave a short testimony on how her presence at church makes an impact on her spirituality, how she is recharged by going to worship, and how the community of Christians around her encourages her and challenges her to stay on the right path and to grow in her walk with God.

Especially as someone who has been making an effort to go to worship services to worship (what a novel idea) and to do so actively, that one struck home for me. Mike’s sermon helped it along, and so did Mason’s when I went over to First Baptist. But also being who I am, two things that really Speak to me are the stories of individual people, and music.

When I got to First Baptist for what I consider my “do nothing at this service but worship” service, I decided to sit in the balcony. Unlike those people who lay claim to a specific pew and chase others away from it, I rotate around, particularly in that sanctuary, depending on my mood and my level of up-front participation. I like the balcony because the other two, occasionally three people who consistently sit there are musicians and they don’t look at me funny when I actually sing, and when (as Billy says) I “put some [guts] in it.”

Having an hour to kill between music with my munchkins and the start of the 11:00 service at First Baptist, I was there pretty early. So was Bruce, who was preparing the sound system. Something I like about Bruce is that, whether he knows this about himself or not, he’s very people-oriented. When you ask him “How’s itgoing?” you don’t get “pretty good” or “busy” or some other true but half-hearted answer. You get a conversation, an honest and deep one, usually pretty funny however long it happens to be.

Bruce talked about exactly the entire point of the service to which I’d just been. He’d struggled a little bit during the week in his attitude and his outlook on his own life. But among other things, Sunday School, Sean’s prayer requests, and (this one is my personal observation) a Godly perspective walking into church this morning made him reflect on all of that. Describing going to church and getting both the opportunity to worship, and to be among the fellowship of believers, he used the word “refueled” to express that sense of getting something out of church- which, much as it should be our goal to give to God rather than to take an emotion away from worship (that’s why it’s called “worship), is one of those sweet side effects of being present in the Presence.

I apologize to those of you who aren’t this ADD and have to follow those kinds of sentences and breaks in thought. Okay, back to it.

Music is the other thing I mentioned. I got to hear Billy Caudle and Trey Clifton and Douglas Jackson all just rip at least one piece of music today (for non-musicians, “ripping” is good). All three of them are people who I get to see truly give glory to God through their gifts- but that’s a different spiritual disciple and a different blog entry. For me and my presence at each of those services today, though, it also gives me worship time, and usually some reflection on my own struggles with the combination of my music and church.

The Hymn this morning that caught my attention was “Brethren We Have Met To Worship.” Usually I see a Call to Missions in this kind of thing (not that I didn’t) but along with everything else, it just emphasized to me the importance of the church, of coming together to worship, and of the true value (to ourselves, to others, and to God) of our presence among the Body of Believers.

That’s really interesting for me, considering how much I used to argue with Shelly about going to church, specifically me not going regularly at all when I was in Greensboro (I went about three times, not counting that conference that Megan Roberts and I went to in Wake Forest, NC). I could write several entries on my logic for that and my views on a certain congregation or the attitudes thereof, but all of that is irrelevant. The important thing is that I basically did not go to church for a year of my life, and not remotely coincidentally, that’s the one year of my life that I consider to have been almost entirely wasted in eight of the ten areas into which I’d mentally divide my life at that time. As Sarah would describe it, extremely “dry.”

I’m nourished by my church family, which even locally is pretty huge for me. This morning I saw people I know from churches from Rocky Mount to Manteo. I talked to Episcopals, Baptists, Presbyterians, Catholics, and even a few Methodists. I hugged clergy and laity, played music with people both fractions and multiples of my age, shook hands with a District Superintendent, heard our Bishop preach, sang two different Doxologies and had communion three times in three different places. And if I made a couple of phone calls right now, I’d start adding denominations, time zones, countries, and languages really fast.

Why is that gigantic, diverse assemblage so important to me? Because I see Christ in them. I see wisdom and talent and uniqueness in every individual, but all because of the love that comes from our shared faith. Like Sandra, I’m challenged by the people around me. Like Bruce, I get a reality check when I look around with a Godly perspective. Whether it’s a theme that carries over through three services at which only I am present for each one, whether it’s Heather getting something exactly the same out of a Scripture as me or Dave appreciating my humor and purposely-not-quite-right Biblical references, I’m connected, nourished, and refueled simply because of my Presence and the way that God works through each one of us. And maybe I should look at the way I might be able to give to others simply by being myself and letting God use the strengths he’s given me to be a blessing to those around me.