Sermon Junky: Taize’s not for me

My dear Pastor Arthur (now Reverend), God bless him, has taken to doing “taize” (pronounced “TI-zee” I think) style services for mostly scattered and sporadic occasions. Lately, however, it seems as if we’ve been having more and more of these very mellow and very different services at TJCAC and I’m not too sure I think this is a good thing.

Domestic Violence

Psalm 55 : 9-14, 19-21

9 Confuse the wicked, O Lord, confound their speech,
for I see violence and strife in the city.
10 Day and night they prowl about on its walls;
malice and abuse are within it.
11 Destructive forces are at work in the city;
threats and lies never leave its streets.
12 If an enemy were insulting me,
I could endure it;
if a foe were raising himself against me,
I could hide from him.
13 But it is you, a man like myself,
my companion, my close friend,
14 with whom I once enjoyed sweet fellowship
as we walked with the throng at the house of God.
[...]
19 God, who is enthroned forever,
will hear them and afflict them—
Selah
men who never change their ways
and have no fear of God.
20 My companion attacks his friends;
he violates his covenant.
21 His speech is smooth as butter,
yet war is in his heart;
his words are more soothing than oil,
yet they are drawn swords.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this (i.e. disputes within church walls) for the last little while and I honestly don’t know what to do, or whether what I’ve already done or said was correct. To my rescue comes this passage brought randomly to my attention as I searched for passages on a completely different topic on BibleGateway.
I’m one of the most confrontational people I know and if you don’t think so, you’re wrong. Even though it’s generally accepted that we, as adult members of a civilized and modern society, ought to settle disputes in a manner as diplomatic and courteous as possible, meaning that people like me are generally labeled “inconsiderate” or “insensitive”. But I think sometimes (not always, for sure) certain subjects require a certain degree of “I think you’ve got it all wrong on this one” — even more so within Christian-à-Christian relationships.
This, of course, is because within the community we call the Body of Christ we are to fellowship with one another through the Spirit. We ought to be able to encourage as well as criticize, teach as well as rebuke, and share as well as disagree with one another all in a loving and God-fearing manner. We ought to be able to confront one another and not have to beat around the bush with nice words or flattery to get our point across. That kind of tactic (i.e. excessive tact, ironically) is dangerously close to manipulation if you ask me. Sure, it might work for people outside and inside the Body but it’s not something a godly person should stand for (v. 21). Convincing and persuading others to an opinion treated as objective truth would go along with this too.
It’s a tragedy when conflicts break out in the “Outside World” but when it happens within the walls of a congregation, it’s a shame. The psalmist here is archaic-ranting about just this all-too-common phenomenon: infighting between people of God. Really, we (you and I both, along with the rest of Jaffray) should do better if we remember why exactly we gather and why we do the things we do. Well, we could change our ways, or we could end up like those who don’t (v. 19). Aside: I don’t think we do enough threatening (to match Biblical content levels) within our walls.

FWD: You’re going to die a lonely, painful death if you don’t foward this to everyone and eat dirt and…

I don’t know why but I got the sudden urge to hate on forwarded messages during the car ride home tonight. I’m not going to rant (I promise I’ll keep it short this time). I’m just going to ask you (all of you, there are now no exceptions or special favourites to be excused) to never ever pass along one of those “Read this or you will have 70 years of bad luck” type emails to me (as if I expect to live to be +80 anyway). I hate them. I never pass them along and I never read them. If you send one to me, you’re basically condemning me to whatever the hell is promised inside that email as a warning against ignoring it because I intend on and will succeed in ignoring the damnable thing. With the number of “Read this only if you have time for God” emails I’ve passed up, I probably need to convert to Roman Catholicism and buy an eternity load of indulgences to get my condemned self out of purgatory. It seems I might have offended some people with that last remark so my work here is done for tonight.

PS: Really, don’t send me them, unless you want to be goatse‘d. Trust me, you don’t want to get goatse‘d. I never was but that doesn’t mean I’ve never thought of passing it along.

Blueprint

…was the name of this year’s edition of the Vic Park yearbook. It was a long year of hard work and to be frank, I’m not sure it payed off. Before I go headlong into a rant about all the things wrong with it, I want to at least give congratulations to Amreet in particular since his sports section was nuts (in the good way). I also want to mention that the cover is pretty neat looking and some other pages (few and far apart) are pretty nice too. Now, let’s get into the heart of things: why does this yearbook suck?
First off, let’s just get this out of the way: not everyone on the committee/team was cut out for the job in the first place. When working on pages that are going to go into a yearbook, graphics and a good sense of design is very very necessary. I’m going to come right out and say that nearly everyone on the yearbook committee this year, honestly, had little to no experience working with Photoshop/digital image manipulation software. This isn’t coming from having to field questions about how to do things (which I did) or from having them admit the fact (which no one did), but from just looking at the kind work put out by some of the members.
Designing a page around the theme of “blue prints” is a little more than tacking on a graph-paper background and throwing text on top (well, at least not for every single page). I did that once, but the idea of the page was to keep things clean and simple (the page was titled “Basic Principles” and it was the principals’ page). This also happened to be the page I had to rush because the head editor “forgot” n times over the course of 6 months (while being reminded by me quite often) to get the photos and write ups I needed, not to mention losing the write ups once after finally getting them.
Lesson #1: Only take people onto the yearbook committee who actually have Photoshop experience. The reason those people (mostly Indian girls, not that that has anything to do with anything) even got on the committee was because they all happened to be Sheliza’s friends. Therefore, the blame falls mostly/completely on Sheliza for this one.
Next we’ve got the fact that many simple things went completely catastrophically wrong for no good reason apart from negligence on the part of people doing administrative work. The way we do things is as follows: first, pages are mocked up and then created as semi-roughs which are sent for “proofing” to the plant which sends us back what the page would look like in the book so that we can make corrections and send back the good copy with changes and extra info (such as spot colour hue and positioning). For one thing, I had pages with spot colouring that I didn’t even want to be coloured (thus effectively wasting the colouring we payed for) since it’d look better without it.
Whoever was on admin decided for me that these pages would receive spot colour treatment anyway. To make matters worse, the tones of blue chosen for my pages were completely off. For example, let’s take an example of graph-paper blue vs. a dark but not quite navy blue. Those two are both blues but the latter makes black text placed on top completely illegible and reading painful to do. To make things even worse, the positioning/shape of the colour (which is printed separate of the first B&W printing) was totally off/not quite enough, leaving blank white bits all over the place. Ugly.
Another thing that admin screwed up on was the submitting of corrected pages. After getting the proofs back, we make corrections and then send the plant finalized versions. I remember correcting and resubmitting a candids page (basically a page with loads of photos) to be resent to the plant. Well thanks to the awesome admin people we’ve got (who are still remaining nameless until I finish ranting about this) the plant never got the updated/fixed page because of, well, nothing. I’m guessing the person doing the collection and distribution of corrections just… never got around to it and sent out “corrected pages” (the same pages we got back with all the mistakes) without actually repackaging the final pages. Way to stay on task.
Lesson #2: Make sure your administration staff/person is reliable and knows what they are doing. I do believe this year’s admin person was mainly… oh that’s right, Sheliza again, the head editor. Thanks for screwing with my pages Shez, you’re the best.
One thing that was told to me and everyone else on the team by both Ms. Leung (the staff supervisor) and Sheliza our head editor was to make sure not to put loads of photos of ourselves in our own sections since that is generally frowned upon. I actually got told off for putting three photos from the yearbook camp/retreat of not only myself but other members too on my candids page (which had at LEAST 100+ small thumbnail sized photos). Then lo and behold, we find about a zillion pictures of certain people on yearbook in the final section of the book (which is devoted to messages from the yearbook executives). That wouldn’t be a problem since those pages ARE to recognize the committee members, but when 99% of the photos include either only the head editor (who is responsible for the section) or photos of the head editor and her friends, then we’ve got a huge problem. Can you spell hypocrite?
The messages themselves were all written up and handed in, but some people were given much more page space than others for no reason. Sheliza had tons, but she’s the head editor so she’s supposed to have lots of stuff to say. Mona, on the other hand, was just another editor but also had an ass-load of space to write up, whereas other people–who, in my opinion, did much more work–had to settle with very little. Simply astonishing.
I wouldn’t have too much of a problem with hypocrisy (since we are all tempted into doing it from time to time) if the rest of the messages from the committee were at least typed up properly. Scanning through the messages written, I found a few people’s messages (including mine) were completely screwed up. This screwage includes double typing some sentences as if the copy+paste went completely berserk or something, irregular text formatting (e.g. making some letters within a word black instead of white when failing to highlight the entire paragraph for formatting), and even cutting messages short, in mid-sentence! It’s almost as if… hm… the pages were done in the final minutes before the due date. Great work ethic, whoever was responsible.
Lesson #3: What can I say? Teams can only work as well as the heads. And when leaders are petty, sloppy, incompetent slackers who play favourites, well, you can guess at the kind of final product you’d get from it all. This year’s head editor was… Surprise! Sheliza! Let’s have a round of applause!
So all in all, I’m pretty angry about how this yearbook turned out (especially at how some of my pages look). The spot colouring was off completely–in my defense, I mentioned not having it on those pages because they’d look better than way but Sheliza ended up doing it anyway because “we paid for it” and what kind of reasoning is that by the way? The corrections I made weren’t even submitted. My message at the end of the book was one of the ones that were completely raped, hands down on the ground. This whole year’s worth of working under Sheliza has been by and large a huge hassle. At this point I’m pretty much miles past the line of diplomacy and I’m just bashing her but really, find one argument I’ve made that wasn’t valid. I’m sure I haven’t nailed everything in this one post but I doubt we need anymore to work with. This rant is ending here and I hope I never have to do this kind of thing again.
Final Lesson: Get rid of Sheliza. Really, just, do it. Get her gone. That is all.

NOTE: I’ll post some photo evidence/examples after Mediamax gets back online from maintenance.

EDIT: Here are the pics of what I’ve been ranting on about.
The Good:

• Alexander’s Cover
• Amreet’s Sports Collage
• Amreet’s Sports Pages
• Mustafa’s Division Pages

The Bad:

• the numerous “ZOMG HAND IN SOMETHING!” Filler Pages
• the botched Yearbook Committee Messages

The Raped:

• Candids Page
• Grade Nine Day (1, 2)
• Principals’ Page

I think that about sums it up. I’ve only got one or two pages that I am proud of in the entire yearbook, and one of those is the World Events Spread (click here for my original digital render). I’m pretty sure the only reason that one turned out the way it was supposed to was because I didn’t leave any part of it to anyone else to take care of. Sorry, but that’s how I’m saying it.

Killer AC

I don’t know if you know, but I happen to spend a large chunk of my day behind my computer. I’ve got everything I could need pretty much here (short of a washroom and food). My desk also happens to sit directly beneath the AC duct. My dad is insane about blasting the AC at you’ve I’ve got some body core temperature problems. I am now a few days before exam week and am coming down with something along the lines of a pseudo-cold (since I’m only feeling sick because my body thinks something is wrong… or at least that’s what I’m assuming from what I’ve learned from biology this year).

Black Gold and Black Death

Everyone has got their panties up in a bunch over oil nowadays. Environmentalists like Al Gore are finally complaining about its burning on our environment (even though he never actually did anything about anything while he was still the Vice President…). OPEC nations are bitching about profits and tightening their valves (causing those of the rest of the oil-dependent world to tighten our belts). And bandwagon know-it-alls (yeah, you North American teenage boys who think you’ve got everything figured out) are hating on Bush for starting a Vietnam-esque war over in the Middle East for oil. Everybody loves oil.
Here’s another problem to tack onto oil that’s probably not nearly as obvious: the poverty and desperation of LDCs can also be linked to oil and the greedy buggers in the market. Something I learned about in Economics from Mr. P. Messere that I found extremely interesting was what are called “Petrol Dollars”. What happened was, when the OPEC nations struck it big a few decades ago, there were huge profits for a very small number of fortunate individuals. Fearing economic and political instability to which those nations are generally prone to, these vast fortunes were deposited in foreign financial institutions (i.e. American banks). With such huge inflows of capital (economics babble for moolah) and nowhere for it to be spent, these banks grew promiscuous and daring in their lending to other countries. This ultimately led to a huge boom in borrowing done by LDCs that went towards paying for consumption rather than development/investment.
What happens when you spend all your money on, say, food and going to movies with friends? You’re left with no money left for more… lasting pleasures (like a pair of socks or an external hard drive!). Similarly, countries like Mexico and some South American nations borrowed tons on money and spent it in ways that would not pay off much in the long run (eg: buying an ass-load of strawberries sure is tasty, but buying a tractor to farm them will yield more results in the long run). So what happens when the debt matures and it comes time to pay up? There are no more strawberries. Now we get governments forced to cut back spending (goodbye welfare and social strawberry programs) and even screwed to the point of defaulting on debts (which effectively screws over future prospects for getting new loans).
Oil seems to do a lot of cool stuff (like fry my bacon and stuff) but has really caused a lot of problems for people all over the world. If you haven’t caught on already, I’m trying to get myself in the Economics exam writing mood, and I’m starting with the more interesting section of Development Economics. I’ve got to write this beast of an IB exam in about 2 or 3 weeks. I don’t want to get raped. I also don’t want to do bad on the exam. O.o

info @ the P.Pole 04.26.07

Just one item for today’s list.

1 restaurant I might actually have to eat at from time to time that I hate the most:

• McDonald’s

Most people who complain and whine about McDonald’s probably do it because of the “nasty food” there. Not “nasty” as in “tastes bad” or “made of fecal matter and newspapers” sense, but more in the “it’ll make you fat as the Halls of Hell” sense. I personally don’t take issue with their food too much. I’m not overweight, nor do I eat there a lot. I don’t watch my weight or try and manage my diet too much. On top of that, I’ll eat anything that won’t kill me so I don’t mind McDonald’s for those reasons.

What I do take issue with, though, is their terrible advertising. Not really “terrible” in a “what a terrible job that was” or “she looks terrible” sense, but more of a “f*** the unfortunate” kind of way. I’m pretty sure I need to explain.

If anyone reading this has ever driven northbound on McCowan (a tiny ways after Sheppard) in the past couple months, I’m sure you’ve spotted the McDonald’s billboard with a slogan on it. It was to promote one of their breakfast wraps and it read something like this: “Toast is just cooked bread.” Now, that might not seem like a big deal (and I’m trying not to make one out of it) but really, doesn’t that line sit just a bit left of proper with you? Just cooked bread. “Just” cooked bread! I don’t know about you, but there are people out there with no bread at all, and McDonald’s thinks we’re going to buy food just because it’s more than just cooked bread?! What kind of a person would actually be motivated to go out and pay good money based on an ad like that? Well, maybe it was just a blip. It’ll be changed in a bit.

The sign was indeed changed recently, to another McDonald’s ad. This one wasn’t much better (or better at all, if not worse) than the last. This one was advertising a chicken wrap of theirs, if I am not mistaken. The board read: “Lunch and dinner are so far apart.” Damn right it is, but for people starving in LDCs. Lunch and dinner for us is approximately 5-7 hours apart (depending on how late you like to eat) but at least we get to eat. For some people out there, there is no lunch. Just dinner, which is their one and only meal a day.

I don’t know why, but something about all this doesn’t sit right with me on a personal level. I feel almost as if it’s my fault that this kind of hyper-consumerism mentality could even be targeted by marketers. Is it really that our society has gotten so fat and full of itself that it doesn’t even bother us that this is how companies think they can get us to buy their stuff?! Does this bug anyone else at all?!

info @ the P.Pole 04.16.07

5 things I wish I could do better:

• sleep: I’ve started to run into some trouble falling and staying asleep at night, and I can’t figure out why. Perhaps it has something to do with a lack of quietness in my head. I realize this may sound a bit out there, but I’ve got a lot of noise inside in the quietest settings–especially so when I’m lying awake at night.
• work: I’m not someone who generally works too hard or too little, but I do think I could stand to pay a bit more attention to what’s going on. Some people think I enjoy the feeling of slacking off and finishing up stuff at the last minute but that’s just the opposite of it all. I don’t like to rush–who does?!
• kill: I’ve got a thing for driving the bird at the net when I clearly have the chance to kill it… I mean, when I get the chance to make the winning shot, I usually choke and manage to screw it up. Not only does this piss me off, this pisses off Henry (the Greatest Partner** I’ve ever had) too. Oh the woes of not being able to finish.
• move: Whether on or off the court, I’m pretty sluggish when it comes to moving or being moved. My parents will testify to this. Let’s just say motivation isn’t really something I… Oh you finish this sentence.
• conclude properly: Need I say any more?

**I played with a terrible doubles partner/player today. Playing with someone of this caliber really helps to put things into perspective. Like Henry playing with Dennis as his partner, I wanted my “normal” partner back so badly I almost refused to play with this other guy. It seems we always treasure something more after/while its gone rather than when we’ve actually got it. Henry, don’t go anywhere. You complete me in a completely un-homosexual/literal way. And I’ll leave it at that.

Opera Hates Me

There’s been a lot of buzz about different web browsers (Firefox, IE, Opera, etc…) and after having checked what this page looks like from a friend’s Opera install, I’m thoroughly disappointed. My precious time spent coding my pretty pretty sidebar menu seems to have been wasted as far as Opera users are concerned, since they don’t render properly–I’m sure it’s probably got to do with my coding rather than Opera’s capabilities but nevertheless, boo.

Of course, they pan out perfectly from Firefox (if from nothing else–IE you’re just as screwy too). After all, I did code it for Firefox.

I’m not too concerned about this issue, though, since, well, Opera users are few and far apart and I’m sure anyone using Opera would know to just, you know, look up the page source for all the linking goodness otherwise lost. Still, I wonder why there must always be such inconsistencies from one platform to another. Can’t we all just play nice?

Coach’s Wine

Alright, so if you read about me getting a new pair of shoes (badminton shoes) over the weekend, you’ll understand why I’m currently totally pissed (I believe the Chinese word is “mung as bloody hell”) about my coach. You see, we were supposed to have a team practice today after school. Not only was it canceled, it was 15 minutes from the end of the day. I happened to be totally psyched to get to play today and try out my kicks. Because of Ms. Lam and _________ (whatever she thought took precedence over coaching a planned and regular practice for twenty or so people), I won’t get this chance until tomorrow afternoon. Sure, it sounds selfish of me to expect the coach to actually be around for practices that she scheduled and whatnot, but hey, I thought it pretty frustrating to find out about the cancellation 15 minutes before we were supposed to start. Why not let everyone know in the morning along with the rest of the announcements?! At least I wouldn’t have said to myself, “Alright, this class is boring, but at least I’ve got practice today to look forward to.” Man, I sure whine a lot… But damn it, I wanted to play! I suppose this is what I get for… Wanting to practice?!
Anyway, I’ll be swimming after dinner to blow off some energy and boredom. I sure hope hockey on Friday won’t be canceled for any reason short of something tantamount to the Second Coming.