Word of the Day spat out something interesting at me again:

comity: a state of mutual harmony, friendship, and respect.

Respect. It’s an interesting thing, particularly in relation to something Sam and I talked about on the way home today.

To summarise, some time before lunch Sam, Laura and I caught the train and reminisced about childhood related things until Box Hill, whereby Sam and I left Laura to continue her journey into the city to meet a uni friend.

We made our way fairly quickly up to the curiousity of a shop that we both like. Japanese stuff – like all those bits and pieces, which we ignore and instead go to look at the fantastically different, exceedingly cool skirts and tops and dresses and things. Poked amongst the wild shoes and compartively cheap bags. It’s a tempting shop. Not ridiculously overpriced but not exactly cheap either. I had my eye on a skirt I saw there last time but couldn’t quite justify spending $40 after all the money I’ve already spent this week. We wasted a lot of time trying various things on and being honest critics.

haha… “to summarise”, maybe not. I think this might be long winded again. Appologies.

So after we’d done that shop over we wandered into those slightly less interesting ones tried a few more things with no such success. We decided to give Breadtop a miss for lunch (despite the most wonderful soft choc-chip rolls in the world) after we happened to wander past some shop selling chips with gravy. I think it was the gravy thing that made us both look at eachother with a knowing, that’s lunch look on our faces. How sad. Best lunch I’ve had in ages. The guy practically drowned them. Needed a fork to get the last chips out of the bottom of the bucket.

I honestly don’t think I’ve fully gotten over whatever made me sick yet. My appetite is really strange. I’m hungry, then eat, then feel yuck etc. It wasn’t just too much gravy and bad food, happened at breakfast too.

We wandered outside and Sam suddenly informed me that we weren’t meeting the others at the station’s McDonalds but one along Whitehorse Road. Hohum. Neither of us knew where that was. Jas calls up, they don’t know either. Some meeting place. We ask at a servo, they don’t know. So I take an educated guess (being the slightly more familiar with the area) and walk down towards/past Centro. We reach a set of lights and change our minds and start walking back. We get another phone call, the others have just driven past us and we have to turn around again back to the lights. Picked up, they have a Melways, they know where that McDonalds is. I was right in my direction, but it would have taken us a long time to get there.

We meet Joel (Jonah on gush) outside McDonalds. He somehow remembered me (picked me from Sam) – the last time I would have seen him was when I was about 8 or 9. Had lunch down the street at a cafe called Columbos. We watched/helped the others eat. The latte I ordered was extremely decent. Good talk. I wasn’t in a super introverted mood or at least less of one compared to yesterday. Sam I seriously think you help loosen my tongue

We end up at Blackburn lake (?) minus Joel who had to leave, and wandered, sat, talked, messed around, threw rocks at ducks and laughed at random stuff for quite a while. Sam and I get dropped back at Blackburn Station and here, thats right I’m getting back to my original point now, is where that previously mentioned conversation happened for the first time.

The second time was later on, she told me to write a blog about it, so I guess that’s what I’m doing and I still don’t know how to word it all. Forgive the awkward explaining.

The flirt thing. For we could not find any other way to put it. But we were discussing the different ways guys act depending on who the girl is. It has absoultely no prerogative (in this case) as to one girl being liked above the other. I mentioned something about having this aura of standoffishness around me. I’m not saying this is a bad thing infact I like it the way it is, I don’t think I’d cope hugely well otherwise. Sam and I are incrediblly different and it is very interesting as to the way that guys will interact with her as opposed to me. She placed it all upon reaction and tone of voice.

I am still massively curious if guys have this internal radar thing that says, “No you don’t say/do certain things to/with (for example) Rebecca, but it is entirely permissable with (for example) Sam. I am talking about certain ways of teasing.

I have a fairly big personal space thing and I somehow, usually without words I think, show that.

ARGH! Blogger just made me lose a heap of what I wrote! scowl and angry. How frustrating, I had things almost wrapped up nicely.

I am all for comity (to use the word from before), but don’t know if it’s because of who I am or just my personality that demands a greater level of respect/distance. Sam I am not belittling you in any way. This is hard to explain. I do not like playing around with flirting as I do not see the point in messing with people’s emotions unwittingly, or purposefully.

I guess I’ll leave this open now. I am curious as to what you think about the whole deal, how do you know (if you are a guy) when to back off or to not go there? Even still if I explained it clearly enough for you to understand what I’m on about.

“You know what? you are about as mysterious as that picture you have up there (msn display picture). I have no idea what you are like these days.. it is interesting to think about.”

Hi Josh

Before I run off to do things today I’d better mention the rest of yesterday or the some of the poor deprived blog readers will get extremely cut.

So after the whole fire drama thing, Paul, Jas and John arrive – we head up to the main street to find food, fairly unsucessfully. The first bakery has one pie and hardly anything else, the fish and chip shop is closed and so we are left with the second bakery or Morrison which is yet another expensive cafe (too much for lunch). I truly do not understand this town at this time of year. Serves me right for living so far from proper civilisation.

Back home we do the whole nerd thing after Paul sets up his wireless. The dog goes slightly insane with all the new people and we sit on the back deck (I refuse to type the word I was corrected on) with various computers/pda’s etc. Sam comes down to meet more strange internet people.

The dog is let on the ver.. deck and leaps over Jas’s head and onto his computer. Which was incredibally funny (particularly the noise made and the look on his face) but a bit, “Argh… thats my dog, what has he wrecked?!” for me. It was all fine apparently, and thinking about it later it just got funnier.

It was, to sum up the afternoon, an interesting experience.

They ended up staying for dinner after Emily decided she’d make us all pizza. So there were ten of us. With the sisters buzzing round but being non-annoying all the same. Parentals stayed out of the way. I don’t think Mum didn’t know what to do with having so many ‘boys’ in the house. I asked her this morning and she said she quite enjoyed it, “As a change”.

In the evening after some thinking around all manner of things and praying about some of them, I decided there was nothing to do except to escape into a movie and take time out from my head. So I pulled out Amelie, which I’ve been saving since Christmas. Made some tea and sat in my beanbag and watched it in the dark. I love the scene where she takes the blind man by the elbow and talks him through the street. Wonderful movie. Fit my mood extremely well and was still as effective in playing with my insides as it was the first time.

Sat in bed for a while after, liking the now long enough network cable – with computer on my lap arranging plans for tomorrow and listening to classical music throw me into culture now and then. I like it very much.

I was outside with my dog, sitting on the top of the stairs and I hear, “Laurie, Laurie” being called fairly urgently by a male voice. Laurie is our slightly excentric neighbour who apparently grew up in Afghanistan and across the world. He is a third culture kid – in the late 50 year old sense. He has has an old once white toweling hat that never leaves his head, writes frequent petitions to improve the area, keeps old pink vans, his house is surrounded by bush, he cuts his grass in the middle of the night (so I’ve heard), is paranoid about bushfires yet still leaves his gutters uncleaned, and otherwise seems quite nice.

So I look over to see if I can find the owner of the voice and in surprise I see smoke billowing (there’s a cliche word if I ever heard one) out of the back of the house nextdoor. The voice is from the front neighbour – battleaxe block. I watched for a little bit and decided it wasn’t just burning off, the urgency in the voice confirmed that. There was no-one home – the silver van was not around. I walk inside and casually tell Dad he might want to take a look. He goes out on the verhanda and returns inside to the phone 000. There is more smoke.

Three fire trucks arrive. The other neighbour beat us to informing them. I am laughing at the situation, Laura is glaring at me and trying to wear a concerned face.

Dad lets us know that a burn off pile has reignited and climbed a tree. We cannot see any flames as the house is in the way.

The four of us watch from the verhanda and listen to the fire brigade’s loud speaker. He will most probably get prosecuted for burning off in a total ban. Hannah smartly tells me to get my camera.

The fire is put out quickly, but not before half the street have wandered down to check out what is going on. The silver van pulls in.

Conclusio.

I don’t know exactly how well I can summarise, I have a funny feeling this could be relatively long however I am pretty tired after a rather full day. Being sick, then not sick and all other such things.

Okay. Soul Survivor. It was good – maybe not so great as last time. I was in a very different spot than I was a year ago which made a fair bit of difference as I’ve dealt with a huge ammount of ‘stuff’ over the past 10 months. So we rock up (finally), register, then drive around aimlessly trying to find a camping spot in section 1. That looks all full so we basially say, “Hang all” and move to section 2. We end up directly behind a toilet block, which actually was not a bad idea. Two tents up from Dave, next door to Miranda (yits ocean grove), in the same area as Alice so all good.

Sam and I started setting up the small dome tent and Jess VW and Laura attacked the ‘big’ one. We had ours all done by the time L&J figured out that it was stuffed or too old or something. Laura unzipped the bag of the other dome tent which we’d pretty much bought on whim – there is a pole missing. Hence followed an indepth discussion on ‘what to do’ with multiple plans including sleeping someone in the car at least until the next day. Sam eventually mentioned she owned a six person dome tent, “Why didn’t you mention it before!” (Jess) so we get her dad to promise to bring it up for us as Jess had to take the car back down to make it in time for work.

To cut that story short. Sam’s dad got there about 6:30ish. We had enough tent room.

So, the first main session was reasonably low key. I forget how we spent the inbetween time (oh, some of it was me trying to Sam to ‘talk’ more about her holiday but that’s a conversation that had to be re-had as I picked my time haphazardly). There was not a whole heap on later that night, so Sam and I went to watch Hitchhikers – which I have seen before. I still find it entirely funny as I picked up a heap the second time, as you do. The movie finished and as we were leaving this older guy behind us appologised for laughing so hard and asked if we’d read the books. I have, Sam hasn’t. Some personalities really weird me out, so after a highfive (?raise eyebrows?) from the laughing stranger and my ‘OK he’s a bit strange, lets go now’ look to Sam we found our way back to the tent. Dealt fairly patiently with noisy neighbours and eventually fell to sleep.

Thursday. I had to work. Got the 9:22am train which is pathetically early for an 11am shift, but that’s the way it had to happen. Worked four hours stickering books and nothing much else. Met Jas for lunch afterwards (3pm) as I hadn’t had time to get any. That was pretty good. I was curious to see how the introversion thing was going to play off as it was my understanding that Jas was as big an introvert as I am and I haven’t spent much time with him (being a WAlien haven’t really had the chance). Anyway, that was all fine and talked our way around all manner of things – much of it site related. I got the train at 4:30ish… maybe a bit later, after I watched Jas miss his into the city. Back to Belgrave, where the others came down to pick me up and get dinner.

Friday. Morning session with Jim Reiher on Women in leadership (and the church). Which was good but more of a refresher than a lot of new stuff. Some interesting things about the name and person of Junia (in Acts I think) which was a surprising recall from Year 12 Texts and Traditions. Good old Mr. Youl… ho hum

Analise and I drove down to the station to pick up Jas. After two phones had run flat and other delays his train finally pulled in. Got back just in time for the 11am main session.

It’s always interesting bringing someone you either don’t know exceedingly well or just don’t know how they react to certain things, to something that you can be a bit self-concious about – particularly when it has been talked up either by you or others. I truly suck at explaining what Soul is like, except that it doesn’t have all that manufactured hype of Planetshakers type things – which is why I like it.

Sermon wasn’t the best I’d heard (to be honest) but not bad, had a bit on leadership at the end. Which got me thinking. Katie who seems to be super obeservant of Bec’s sometimes unusal facial expressions asked me if stuff was okay. Not exactly, but I found it incredibally hard to explain as I couldn’t really work it out myself. Something about knowing say, you’re in a leadership position but not feeling it… words still don’t do it justice. I shoved it to the side of my brain.

Lunch was had down at Salsa Viva (such a horribly daggy/tacky name). Nachos which got forgotten. It was nicely comfortable with Sam, Katie, Dave, Jas, Katies friend (another Katrina) and Laura briefly. I’ve had better Nachos. Bring back the Tabor ones!

I was in a, ‘must do something other than just sit’ mood. So after some significant stalling Sam, Jas, Laura and I went up to the Video workshop where we bumped into Jess. Did some listening/video stuff. It was okay, I never find the workshops that brilliant but yeah the guy had some interesting stuff to talk about around a documentry he was doing on some slavery/priest weird stuff in Ghana. Look for it on Compass one day (perhaps).

Jess, Sam and I took Jas back to the station. Returned for the afternoon session. I went off on my own to Youth Leadership. Mike Pilovachi was running it and he’s funny, does a good job Biblically etc… I sat with Chrissy (Jess C’s friend whom I’ve met once before) so I wasn’t an entire londer.

God was kind enough to put all those unwordable questions/feelings into context in that session as it turned more into something just about leadership rather than youth leadership. So I left rather encouraged and extremely satisfied in chosing it (?). I think of my time up at Soul and am fairly sure that this was my highlight.

Free sausage sizzle for dinner. The first one I got given was really not cooked so I threw it out. I got a second one, but it was more like 2/3rds of one. Evening session. Rather full on. I had another debate within myself about being comfortable and feeling ‘conformish’ when it comes to worship (and I hold that term lightly within this context as worship is a lifestyle thing and not just a singing thing etc). How can I be me, be authentic when I’m in that kind of situation? I was hungry – hence my stomach was screaming at me in strange ways (not vocal, but pain-like). There was a lot being said about joy. I hit 3/4 (or more) time and thought, no I can’t be in this room any longer as it was getting too much, I felt extremely disengaged and horribly worn out from being around people for an extended period of time with none to myself. So I left, mid session on the pretence of needing the toilet (which I did need).

I took my journal out with me when I left, intending to write something down. I realised I’d left my camera in with Sam and because of that, realised that I was not meant to be writing or phototaking (Bec logic believe me, it works).

So I walked. I found a backstreet in Belgrave and had a serious chat with God (actually a lot of listening). I don’t know how smart it is to walk around there when it’s almost dark – but I did and I’m still here to talk about it. I was reasonably upset (although thats far too strong a word to use and it’s an annoying word at that) confused is better.

After praying and walking I found this moon. God told me then and there that he was happy with me as I was (context)and somehow found a short, non-wordy way to deal with all the ‘where am I in relation to this whole worship thing?’. The moon was brilliant. Entirely full with an orange glow. I stood on the curve of the road with this strange bent tree almost sillohetted against a beautiful sky and this moon that was quite incredible. God does not need us each to be like the other in our response (or whatever you want to call it). Why be false to who you are? Futhermore, why not appreciate others in the way they were made to connect with God and really appreciate it instead of sitting in your ‘this is uncomfortable’ chair, sitting on your hands staring at the ceiling.

The moon was one of those moments I wished I’d had a camera and knew entirely that I wasn’t meant to have one on me all at the same time.

I wandered back. Several cars distrupted what was previously silence. It was if things had been said and heard and met and confirmed and now the world was free to include me again.

They were still going when I got back. I went back inside. A huge contrast from time alone to a large auditorium full of noise and people. It was interesting, but I saw things differently. I was glad (I guess) in who I was and didn’t feel the pressure that was there beforehand.

And thats probably a very sloppy explanation of the whole deal, but it shall have to do.

Saturday morning:
Mum eventually rocks up, she, Laura and I go for morning tea to kill some time before my train (Mum came up to pick up Laura for work and me sort of). I started feeling vaguely sick and left a good proportion of the custard tart I had. I got the train to Flinders feeling incredibally sick the whole time. The best thing then and there would have been for me to throw up, but no. Got tram to Lomah Cafe. Where we had our ‘gush’ meeting. Matty Hill met me a few stops before I got there – just because (I don’t know the whole story behind that, I think he was bored). It was a really productive time with more people there than I expected.

I managed hardly any lunch and felt like chucking my guts roughly every five minutes if not constantly (I’d say nauseaus but I can’t spell it properly and I can’t stand the word). I lamented the fact that I’d used the last panadol I’d had in my bag so suffered in silence after asking Christina if she had any (no). Paul, Jas and John ate the rest of my lunch for me. I played more of an introvert than I would have liked (particularly as yeah, I wasn’t initially intending to so much because if you start off louder then you have to keep it up) which was largely due the fact that I felt so blah and so ready to puke. Sorry all. I did have good intentions (sure sure).

We Craig and Carly’ed it in the evening. Ended up eating pizza (or trying pathetically) and playing Scum King (Warlords and Scumbags – a card game). Which I ended up winning – as much as you can with a game that has multiple rounds. I scored some drugs (panadol) off Carly so things got fractionally better.

Refused to drive home (when Dad came). Christina was with me, so small talked it out on the way home. Hurrah, keen eye to spot her ‘Red Frog’ tshirt = conversation topic that lasted.

I played the host(ess), “This is where things are” and left her to her own devices as I felt mightily crap and so went to bed.

6:30 start. I wake up fine. By breakfast I am feeling a bit sick. On the train I feel horrible, I tell Christina there is no way I am eating lunch. Got to Essendon Baps on time. Interesting service, a bit of a time warp. Feel absolutely shocking until just before they finished up, lunch is a possibility. Back to Lomah where we are upstairs with some of Paul’s church friends. I managed lunch and felt okay.

Wandered Southbank etc showing the non-Victorians a bit of Melbourne. Watched two guys play giant chess and stopped to watch some jewellery shop adverstisement about ‘how to impress girls’, which was funny (context) and lame and only half right. Whereby Christina asks if either of the three (P,J,J) had girlfriends to my, “No they don’t” and so we decide to set up a weekly ‘impress the girls’ tip/column for them… which wont happen obviously, but in light of the striving adverstisment and the fact that we stood and watched the whole thing – more the fact that they stood and watched the whole thing, quite appropriate.

I somehow got convinced to go to city church (Planetshakers) which was a horrific shock no not really, to my laid back system. I really don’t like it much, too much hype and screaming and jumping and ‘We all live happy lives’ and take verses WAY out of context. Had a good inner laugh at my thoroughly indoctrinated mind and the theological radar in my head which was bleeping on high alert.

Reggie Dabs. To be entirely honest I don’t see why people make such a huge fuss about him being so good. He was okay. A billion times better than the last thing I heard there, but mmm. still not quite… Yes thats right, I’ll just be a complaining/critiquing whinge who is long overdue for more sleep.

Hmm and I should just about call it a night. This is long winded and has taken a bit of time surprise surprise. Possibly badly writen either gramatially, informationally (which is not even a word) etc… but ha stuff that, deal with it.

Paul, Jas and John shall be here tomorrow (hurrah, saves me another 2hrs on public transport) at my place. We shall scourge the hole of a town I live in and probably frequent Morrisons (which is somehow not part of the ‘hole’). Sam if you happen to read this before I get on to you. Feel free to come down to meet them.

Bed for me now. I may have missed a lot, but hopefully got some of the standout moments down. Managed to half work out something else I’ve been thinking about/questioning but I’ll save that for another time perhaps or more than likely, never.