Time why do you leave me so?

How is it that I can plan to do a whole days work and actually do nothing. Oh except make more plans to do lots of work at other times. I have been doing lots of planning lately but little carrying out those plans. I am trying to finish my masters ASAP because I want to graduate in August. My parents have booked their flights so I better be finished in time! Its good to have a deadline to motivate me.

Allowing 2 months for the thesis to be marked, I will have to submit by the end of May. It will take me at least 5 weeks to write it, so I have to start writing in 2 weeks! I don’t see how that’s going to be possible, because there is still heaps of experiments I want to do! But now that I have scared my self by realising that time is short I will work extra hard (note: see first sentence). It feels like the week before exams and its time to cram, but it will be two months of cramming and little else.

Small things like eating, talking, emailing, texting, blogging, net surfing, news reading, and other ings make for mountains of seemingly lost time, add to this meetings of various kinds and the day fills whilst work lies still. How is it that 3.5 hrs of time to do some work became 2.5, which became 1 which became 45min at which point I gave up and wrote this blog.

I must say that only in the Richardson building can you step into an elevator to hear one man comment to another “I have always had a weakness for puns”. In the Microbiology elevators conversations hardly get past “which floor” or “nice day” etc. A reliable source has told me that they also find the best conversations for eavesdropping are in the Richardson elevators.

Escape

Somewhere, right now in fact, over the rainbow up high, in the land that I herd of once in a lullaby, or saw in Super Mario 64. Somewhere over the rainbow skys are blue, things are clear, open, free, and limitless, and the dreams that you dear to dream, really do come true. Someday, this day, as chaos sprawls and the world clashes, as energy falls and stress rises, ill wish upon a star, or lay my head upon my desk and close my eyes. Ill wake up to sore where the clouds are fare behind me, whistling behind me. Where troubles melt like lemon drops, away above the chimney tops, that’s where light is bright, energy is full, space immense, where glory shines, and solitude is comfort. I’ll loop, and glide, fly, and ride, spin with speed, and burst with joy. That’s where you’ll find me. If happy little blue birds fly above the rainbow, why? oh why cant I?

Listening to Eva Cassidy sing Over the Rainbow this is how I feel.

Chaos

Welcome to post number 50. A special welcome to those who have read all 50, you must know everything about me by now. Ha not even. I was talking the other day with my flatmate Dan about depth, how we like to think we have depth, which actually we do have. You know how annoying it is when someone thinks they have you figured out. I like to surprise people with my depth; it feels silly that I should feel like this. Such as the reaction I get when someone finds for the first time that I have my tongue pierced. Yes anyway that’s what deep thoughts you get out of late night talks. I love those late talks that go past 12am, though they are rare.

Right now it is 1:10 am according to my computer. That’s the problem with computers they don’t know its actually 10.41pm, for that matter they don’t even know its 22^nd of March 2006. They think its 1^st Jan 2000. I keep trying to tell my computer the correct time but every time I restart it the time resets! And! And! It then has the nerve to get all angry with me saying the time is set wrong! Uhhh! Gosh! That’s the problem with computers they don’t take responsibility for there own problems. If anyone has had this problem and knows what to do please help me. I am afraid my computer is heading down a bad road, and one day its not even going to remember its own name – dementia – and then I fear it will forget everything I have ever told it! Everything! I fear most losing photos and the music

Don’t you wish that you were psychologically linked to everything so that at anytime you wanted you could locate what you were looking for, I know Bono does. Or you could change the radio station just by thinking – this song is crap. But my head is already so cluttered that to include all physical objects would be overwhelming. Though I imagine being so linked would not have to always be at the forefront of your thoughts. Instead, when needed you could call them up kind of like a memory and you would then know the location of what you were looking for. I still haven’t found what I’m looking for, my beanie among other things.

Things feel chaotic, the mess on my desk at my lab is ridiculous. There are experiments I have done and still haven’t had a chance to properly analyse the data. Even worse there are experiments I have half done and haven’t had the chance to just quite finish. There is a back log. Yet I keep doing more experiments. More more more in the hope that some where something good will happen. More more more. Is too too much to handle. Must take a break and get a grip. Psalm 62 is awesome. He alone is my rock and my salvation. My fortress where I will not be shaken. Gotta find rest in this rock, cause its chaos right now.

Hehe there is this new guy in our lab and he is cool :) He makes us all laugh cause he dose funny stuff. Like when he was getting introduced to people he was writing everyone’s names down so he would remember (smart man). Plus he wanted to take photos so he could remember even better! hahaha. Next week he is going to make us a banana cake for morning tea. We were joking with him by saying who were the most important people in the lab and who he needed to suck up to by cutting a bigger piece of cake... then he actually started to write their names down! Hahaha. He is also really excited about everything in the lab, its quite inspiring to see his fresh zeal.

Oh man my predictive text skills are shocking, I will never impress chicks with such low skills. Today I texted someone the word violini instead of thinking and violini doesnt even use the same letters as thinking! Obviously they were confused so I had to text back saying that I menu to say thinking not violini. Gosh another predictive disaster, right when I was trying to redeem my self, ahhhh, I was actually trying to say ment, not menu. I wasn’t even spelling ment correctly to begin with, meant! Gosh! Where are my skills. Do I need to proof read my texts before sending. Another one that always gets me is of instead of me. Or select instead of reject, extra terrible because its completely the opposite meaning! Oooooooh people people the shame! The shame!

ORLANDO – Life! Love! Literature!

Orlando heaved a sigh of relief, lit a cigarette, and puffed for a minute or two in silence. Then she called hesitatingly, as if the person she wanted might not be there, “Orlando?” For if there are (at a venture) seventy six different times all ticking in the mind a once, how many different people are there not – Heaven help us – all having lodgement at one time or another in the human spirit? Some say two thousand and fifty-two. So that it is the most unusual thing in the world for a person to call, directly they are alone, Orlando? (if that is one’s name) meaning by that, Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another. Hence, the astonishing changes we see in our friends. But it is not altogether plain sailing, either, for though one may say, as Orlando said (being out in the country and needing another self presumably) Orlando? still the Orlando she needs may not come; these selves of which we are built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled on a waiter’s hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their own, call them what you will (and for many of these things there is no name) so that one will only come if it is raining, another in a room with green curtains, another when Mrs. Jones is not there, another if you can promise it a glass of wine – and so on; for everybody can multiply from his own experience their different terms which his different selves have made with him – and some are too wildly ridiculous to be mentioned in print at all. (from Orlando by Virginia Woolf)

This struck me. how many selves do we have? Can we think of our different selves as just different moods? When Im in a bad mood I think and behave different to when I am in a good mood. My mood can be determined simply by the presence or absence of “Mrs. Jones”, or by more complicated issues like what the heck Mrs. Jones just freakin said about me. Though a mood is something I can choose, I choose how I respond to freakin Mrs. Jones, maybe I choose to understand where she is coming from and so I don’t get angry, or maybe it is irrelevant what she says so again I am not angry. I can choose my emotions, my moods, my selves.

As a Christian it is easy to see two selves that war within me. As Paul puts it: I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. Romans 8:15. We war with our sinful self, even though Jesus says we no longer need to war because he died to end our enslavement to sin, we war all the same! frustration! I feel like Orlando, Im sick to death of this particular [sinful] self. I want another. But to merely call out come, come! I doubt will work. Or will it? Is it just faith, faith that yes Jesus did it all, that yes I no longer need live with this sinful self, faith to live like the hot holy self I am? Like the absence of Mrs. Jones, the colour of the wall or the glass of wine, faith is a term that draws out the hot holy self. Come, come! How can it be more practical than this when after all this holy self is not my doing, but gods? Or do I with this attitude to easily shrug responsibility for they way I live? I would say that it is in gods hands how holy I am (being saved etc), but in my hands how much I choose to live up to this, how much I let the new creation he has done in me come forth. Like my moods this faith is a choice. I choose to believe, it is written, on terms of faith come!

Lunch with Justin, so hot right now

Yes my blogg readers finally pulled through and we managed to get 18 votes on the last poll, the results:

The worst thing you could say whilst evangelising is:

28% you don’t have what it takes to be a Christian
6% God is like an onion...
6% You are so hot!
28% Behold I am an angel of the Lord, hear me roar!
33% Yes god made you fat

In all honesty I thought this was the funniest poll I have ever invented. It cracks me up to imagine saying something like that to someone! :) The idea for the poll was spawned from a conversation with a guy form another church in Dunedin where they were trying to make evangelism less scary to people in church by making it a little light hearted. They came up with evangelism points where if you said some thing like "god is like and Onion" then you got points, and if you then went on to actually explain how god is like an onion you get even more points! But the idea was not actually to get people to say these random things, just to help them see it didn’t have to be so big and serious. Anyway the first two options were from that guy and the other 3 I came up with. Ha, anyway I thought it was funny, and because all the options are terrible things to say there was really no overwhelming winner the vote was split fairly evenly between the top 3 anyway, with the fat one topping the list. Interesting.

Today I was supposed to have lunch with two people at two separate times. I have never been so popular to have to do this, so I organised one lunch at 12, and another lunch at 2pm. The plan was to eat half my food at the first lunch and save some till later, thus both people would think I had eaten my lunch with them and be satisfied with our lunching. On top of this, and to add to the illusion of my obvious popularity, both of these people actually wanted to have lunch with me yesterday. But… you see I all ready had plans to have lunch with a completely different person! Can you believe all this, but wait there is more... I usually just have lunch with my lab mates because its easy and they are cool, so today they also asked me to come have lunch with them as well! So. Hot. Right. Now. Cant touch this.

But oh it turns out I’m not so popular after all, my second lunch got canned. But oh turns out that someone else was also invited to the first lunch so I actually I did have lunch with two people and am still oh so popular. But all my scheming has left me with half a lunch still to eat, and no body to eat it with, I guess that’s what happens to cheaters, and those too popular for their own good.

The mess on my desk is like a snake on the lake

What a mess is on my desk. I wonder if you could psycho analyse my desk and discover everything about me, including the elusive internal workings of my mind, the ups and downs and many shades of the emotions of my heart, including all I love and all I hate, including everything I already know about me, and all that is still a mystery. I wonder but I doubt, because all I see is: drink bottle, keys, lamp, a pot of pens, hair gel, another drink bottle, another hair gel (so weird cause I hardly ever use the stuff these days!), a white china plate - littered with crumbs of toast (toast which was ploughman’s rye, one with peanut butter one with marmalade, both inside me now), I see two pens oh wait one is a pencil in disguise, a photocopy card – upside down and proclaiming ownership by ‘Justin’, deodorant, cheque book, cello tape, scissors, SpongeBob SquarePants, sunglasses, a rewritable CD, notes from Benna’s Sermon on Sunday night (all about Psalm 62: 5-8), ipod mini, ipod min USB cable, a letter from WINZ that has since been used as scrap paper – covered in scrawlings, a half finished cup of coffee – cold, more bits of paper, a mug rest (I actually cant remember the offical name for these things!), and this laptop. Who am I?

Well I sure don’t have to pay $3000 to figure that question out, I hope. That’s the price of Outward Bound, a course that helps you discover yourself. Initially I thought it was all about doing extreme adventure stuff, but it seems like its all about giving lost people some motivation/inspiration. Maybe they should just go to the big GOD, its free, sort of. There is tithes and there is the whole give up your life and follow me (Jesus) thing, actually it costs more to be a Christian than to do outward bound. Imagine if the price of Outward Bound was – no sex before marriage! Ha try that for cost, I scoff at your $3000 dollars!

If you could buy your way into heaven, would you? $3000 dollars and you were guaranteed a place in the illustrious heaven? What a bargain! I so would if it was true, which people used to think it was (see the movie Luther, or if you have already seen the movie simply recall it from memory so as to complement the previous sentence, or if you have not seen the move but have studied or in some way acquired a detailed knowledge of church history then you may do the same as those who simply watched the move, though you may sit back chuffed and secure in the superiority and greater depth of your knowledge. thank you). It makes me mad that people got told stuff like that! Argh, and it wasn’t even their fault that they believed, cause they weren’t even allowed to read the bible for themselves. Gosh!

I have to share with you about the speck in my eye. Wait I know what you are thinking... your thinking... 0h! My! Go0dness! look at the speck in his eye! SINNER! But you would be wrong, well ok I am a sinner, as are you, but that is beside the point. You see there was a speck in my eye and it was of the colour white (though some would say - color, and still others would say - white is not even a colour simply a reflection of all the colours. People like this are just too cool!). When I looked in the mirror I saw white in my eye, white on the brown/hazel part of my eye – as in not the typical place for the white parts to be. It wouldn’t move with blinking. It was kind of freaky to look at, especially cause I couldn’t feel it, I could have happily gone on with the rest of the day and just left it there. But then all the caring people I know would have keept telling me that I had “something in my eye”. So I had to touch my eyeball to move it, which is actually harder than I thought it would be. Every time my finger got close to touching I would blink, so I had to hold my eye lid open with one hand and touch with the other. Eventually everything was resolved and I went on with life, speckless, and wondering. After all if I had a speck in my eye then theologically there must be someone out there, in front of a mirror, shocked by the sight of a log in their own eye.

Yesterday I crashed into a DOG

It was really my fault... but that didn’t stop me being angry with the DOG. There I was just biking along the foot path which doubles as a cycle path, when I happened to approach a lady with her back to me, walking her DOG with its butt to me. I thought to my self ‘there’s not much room to get past that lady and her dog, maybe I should go off the foot path, onto the grass, around the power pole just to make sure I have lots of room’. Ridicul0se! I cried (in my head). I am JUSTIN! I can do it! VICTORY! I also thought ‘but what if the dog moves to the right and into my passing space?’ Ridicul0se! I cried (in my head). I mean what are the chance’s that at the very moment I want to pass, that the dog would walk into my path? He looked perfectly happy walking in a straight line. I am JUSTIN! I can do it! VICTORY! None the less, sensing that it was a dangerous situation I slowed down, it was lucky I did because...

Noooooooo this DOG was not happy walking in a straight line, this dog, at the very moment that I wanted to pass it, decided it wanted to investigate the extra space to its right. But no! it was denied! Denied because actually that space was reserved for ME to pass it, and so that space was not empty, it was filled by my bicycle. Access DENIED! Actually if events are to be portrayed chronologically... the dog filled the "space" first then me and my bike arrived into the "space" a short while later, by which time the dog had still not vacated the "space" so together we shared it and together we experienced the "crash".

I think we miss touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something – Graham from the movie Crash

In the moment of the crash, the moment of the sharing of the space, the DOG cried out “Yelp”! and I toppled from my lofty seat, my left knee striking the pavement, my jeans ripping.

All my jeans are ripped! I’m sick of ripping my jeans in the knees! And not just my jeans because I have some different pants that were ripped in the knee region during a crash last year. *Sigh*. I have one pair of un-ripped jeans left, maybe there is another dog out there waiting to help me rip those ones too? I bet there is.

Instantly I felt dumb for crashing into the dog. I thought ‘I should have gone aroooound the power poll!’ The situation had been in my hands, after all the dog and the lady didn’t know such a reckless yet surprisingly attractive young man was dangerously approaching from behind. I bet if she was 30 years younger this could have been one of those movie/TV moments. Opps! Sorry I didnt see you there, let me help you. Then we look up into each others eyes, love at first sight blah blah blah. “Oh I didnt hear you” the lady said “you should have said something”, “I let him [the dog] go at the wrong time”. The wrong time… so true.

After the topple I still had my left foot stuck in the foot hold on the pedal. I tired to get free but just looked like a fool. I gave out a little chuckle to make it seem like It was no big deal and that even I found my foot predicament amusing. Also I tired diverting attention from my struggle by talking, I asked “Is your dog OK?”, she replied “He’s fine... its your foot that I’m worried about”. Great, were back to focusing on my stuck foot. In the end my foot slid out of the shoe and I was able to sort it all out form there. We both appologised to each other, they went on there way, I put my shoe back on. Then I had to bike past them again, this time the DOG cowered away. I am JUSTIN! VICTORY!
But my knee hurt.

Because of Flow Cytometry

Things are busy when I let them be, when I make them be. Setting my alarm early is less sleep, is more productive, is being busy enough to have to get up early, is a feeling of excitement because there is something planned, there is direction. Being busy is tired, is less time for the less important. Too much busy all in one day is exhausting, it is recovery the next day, extra sleep is required, making up for that lost. I had a tired busy day the other day, I was absolutely knocked out all day, felt like I had worked hard enough for two days. I stayed home the next morning watching some thing about Elton John. Rain rain outside. But I escaped it I biked in and out of uni when there was no rain falling. Stoked. Cold though. Layers layers.

I thought as I was busy, that although its tiring its way better than procrastination. I even had a power nap sometime last week. Cant remember the last time I did that. I used to do them relatively often. Sometimes I find this Masters thing I’m doing hard, A friend told me what his parents told him 'University is supposed to be hard otherwise everyone would do it', interesting and encouraging.