Getting Philosophical

Things are progressing in the New York trip category. Not much is “confirmed” thus far, but I think we’re pretty much decided on going with the flow with definite end points for a few of the days. I realized a few days ago that this trip is during the third week of the month. My IMA meetings are always the third Tuesday of the month. Whoops. I get to try and find someone to stand in for me for this meeting. I’m the ever important Collector of the Money and Distributor of the Meal Tickets person. Heh. I just kind of completely forgot about it. I hadn’t put the meetings on my calendar when I looked for a good time for New York. Oh well. It’s not exactly an unsolvable dilemma.

In the apartment arena, things appear to have kind of worked themselves out. This is assuming those ladies at Breezewood really know what they’re talking about and I’m not going to bank on that. They informed us that the current tenants in our apartment are actually leaving at the end of August rather than the end of September so there should be no problem with us moving in a week or so before the end of the month, thus avoiding a “must move in 30 seconds” type situation. They had told us this previously before we signed the lease. When we went there for our appointment, the lady who was there had no idea what we were talking about. It’s precisely this kind of communication problem that makes me nervous. But as Adam says, we were both on the line when they said the people would be out by the end of August. I’m not sure what kind of legal recourse that could give us should they have been full of shit, but I’m hoping it all works out. I put in my Intent to Vacate form last Friday, so I’m moving out at the end of September no matter what.

Now I’m left with the tedious task of changing addresses and otherwise preparing to move. Thankfully I had the great idea of getting my PO box 5 or so years ago so I avoid most of the moving address changes. According to my calculations, the only addresses I need to change are the ones that Bemis has (which I changed this afternoon) and the IMA mailing list one (which I can do online.) All the other (important) ones go to my PO box already or have already been changed to do so. I’m so organized. Tonight we plan to head down to the Time Warner office and put in the switch for cable and the internet. After that, all I have is my electricity. They have an online form I could fill out, but I think I’m going to call their 800 number anyway just to be sure it goes through. When I moved last time they somehow “lost” the request to stop service and I ended up paying for a month that I didn’t live in the apartment because the stupid landlord would never call the electric company to accept the charges. Ok, it was only $20 or something, but still. It was annoying. I’m going to do it right this time.

Those are the two major happenings in my life right now. Other than preparation for these two things I basically sit at home watching movies, bad tv, or playing “text twist” on Yahoo games. My life is boring. I’ve been heading to bed at around 8 lately and I end up accidentally falling asleep before Adam calls me around 10. I usually wake up when the phone rings, but I get the feeling that I don’t make much sense during those conversations. Or I come off as very crabby. He has been spending more and more nights over at my apartment these last few weeks. It’s nice, although he doesn’t ever seem to want to get up in the morning. I’ll have to come up with a more creative way to wake him up than poking him and saying “get up.” We’ll see.

And now we regress back to something that happened a few weeks ago that I forgot to mention previously. When Adam was ref-ing for the 3-on-3 tournament put on by his church, he invited me to attend the Saturday evening mass and then go out to dinner with him and the other organizer people. While he is full-on Catholic, I jokingly refer to myself as “Catholic on Christmas Eve for a few years in high school” because I would play my cello with an ensemble developed by my mom at Holy Name in Sheboygan. We never actually stayed for the service though, as we were just the before mass entertainment. So this was my first “real” Catholic service experience. It’s not like it was a big shock. I mean, I was Lutheran for a few years a while back and they’re really quite similar (no matter how much Lutherans deny that.) Of course I felt like a dork when everyone got up to do the communion thing, but there’s not a lot to be done about that. The lector (or whatever the person who leads the service is called) had a beautiful voice. I could have just sat there and listened to her all evening. The priest was kind of interesting although some of the things he said made me snicker. All in all it wasn’t a bad experience although I’m not sure how much of it I could handle on a regular basis. All that sitting and standing and kneeling stuff gets confusingand annoying. I kept getting my hands crushed by the guy in front of me.

I have a general problem with the format of both Catholic and Lutheran services. They both are very structured and involve statement, response type interactions between the priest/minister and the congregation. I learned from my time with the Lutherans that you can basically memorize your “lines” and go on auto-pilot through the whole service. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t that kind of defeat the whole purpose of gathering and worshipping? If everyone is there saying all the right things at the right time while in reality they’re making their shopping list in their head or thinking about what they have to do when they get home, what is the point? You basically have to remain alert enough to hear the dude in front say “the lord be with you” so you can respond “and also with you.” I’m not a fan of organized religion (or actually, any kind of religion) but it seems to me if you’re going to make the effort to go to church for an hour or so every week, you might want to go somewhere that can keep you on your toes. Otherwise you're basically just going for show. That’s just my thought on it though. The most interesting and engaging church I ever went to was the Evangelical Free Church. They had all kinds of music, interesting sermons, and other things to keep the congregation fully participatory during the services. None of this “lord have mercy, Christ have mercy” stuff. There is no way you could tune out an entire service. It’s too bad they replaced their pastor with a complete asshole who had a problem with my mom so we had to leave. It was a fun church to be a part of.

Wow, I kinda went off there for a bit. Enough of that. I do my best not to make a mountain out of a molehill or whatever that saying is. I’m trying not to place too much importance on that kind of thing but it’s difficult given my upbringing and previous doomed-from-the-start relationship. Oh well.

Anyway, after the church thing we went to Victoria's for a dinner thing. Aside from the fact that I was probably still slightly hungover from the previous night and hadn't eaten all day so I was kind of crabby, it was a good time. The folks there did the requisite shit giving about me dating Adam (or AJ, as he is known there... heh.) They were a fun group of people. I didn't interact with them as much as I probably would have if I had been all there, but oh well. Next time. After a few bites of chicken parmigean (I know, I spelled that wrong), we packed up Adam's plate full of the ocean into a box and headed back home.

Well, right now I’m going to go focus on figuring out how I’m going to get all my crap packed up and moved to Neenah. Ugh. I hate moving.