Youth Misdirector

On Monday morning I stumbled across the photo stream of a man who I respected for a while twenty-three years ago. He was my youth minister at Beech Street FBC, back when I was an evangelical born-again. In his stream, he posted old photos of his time there, the years he was at the helm of the youth in his congregation, leading, teaching, preferring. Among the fuzzy-faced kids in those pictures, faces beaming with purpose, camaraderie, inclusion, there were a few of me, standing in the background.

For years I walked in his flock; I hung out with his sheep. They knew me, and I knew them. But even in the middle of things, I still felt like the outsider. As it went, my sister and I were the charitable causes of the church. We couldn’t afford the numerous trips and excursions the group went on, so the youth minister, seeing how fervent we were, made calls and found donors to sponsor our way. It was a good thing to have done. Good for a while. But charity cannot buy company.

After a few years of this, the flavor of my relationship with him changed. It became a relationship based on me asking for help, and he being the provider. He took interest in helping, because it was his mission and calling, but towards the end, when he talked to me, he wasn’t talking to Shawn the fellowship member, he was talking to Shawn the needy. He never sat me down and explained the rules of life, how I needed to step up and earn my keep. Instead, it was the same line of charity until I graduated out of the youth group.

Following my exit from the faith, it took me a while to reflect on this and understand what went on. I wasn’t among his friendly charges in the youth group; I was the obligation. All of my prior perceptions of his interest and genuity flew out the window. He did what he did, and it damaged my respect for him.

I saved a few of the pictures from his stream, most of the ones I’m in. Little low-res reflections to bolster my memories of what I used to be. The wide-eyed, pimply-faced kid from the wrong side of the tracks, surrounded by the well-heeled fresh faces of the kids who, save for a few, didn’t really know me. I’ll file the photos away and move on with my life. Everybody changes.

In some small way, I hope he tries to contact me. Maybe then I’ll tell him as much.

Creep

Every once in a while, my self-image gets a hard reset, and the positive, hopeful, well-adjusted facades I’ve built crumble to reveal the greasy machinery underneath. It takes a long, long time to build it back up.

So apologies to anybody I creep out, worry, or push away. I’m working on it.

Crumble, Fall, Break

It’s scary when we see our friends in long-term relationships splitting up.

We look up to them as the Lovers-Forever people. They are our rock, our hope. When they eventually call it quits on each other, that rock crumbles. It shakes us up, destroys our belief in love eternal. If they didn’t have it after all, even though they thought they did, then what chance do we have?

Most of the relationships I know fizzle out within weeks, sometimes months. It’s sad to see the relationship statuses go back to “Single”, but that’s a constant fact of life among people. The long-term relationships, though, the ones that go on for years, those are the ones we take as granted. Those two lovers, that love, that social unit, although we are not they who are in it, they are in our world. Their unity is woven into our social fabric. When they split, they rend the cloth. It’s our job, as their friends and support, to help them mend the rips and tears, but in the process we have to relearn the unsettling lesson that not everything in this world is permanent. In helping them pick up the pieces, we are left feeling socially awkward in how to approach the subject of “they” and “them”, with questions like “so, whose side do I take?”, “is it possible to stay friends with both of you?”, and “what about social functions where both of you happen to show up?”

I am not the same man I was 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago. I suspect a long-term partner would be the same way. To stick together that long requires a strange sort of tenacity, a dogged determination to make it work, a mutual need to keep at it (children, business, property). It also takes a blindness to the unsavory stuff and a bit of comfortable distance and space. But not everyone has those capabilities. Not everyone is consistent. Not everyone is persistent. I change. Everyone changes. Our relations change.

My sympathies go out to loves lost. I hope you find your peace.

C Is for ANSI, That’s Good Enough for Me

In a bid to expiate myself, I’m currently reading “The C Programming Language, Second Edition.” Written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Richie, the inventors of the language, this book is the bible when it comes to learning the language. Most modern languages owe their existence to this one. All modern operating systems are primarily written in C. Most client applications are written with C’s direct descendants. Since I work at a high technology company, it would behoove me to bother trying to learn it again. Most of the high-level languages I’ve used in the past 2 decades cannot match the speed, specificity, and hardware-level capability of C. But these aren’t reasons enough for me to learn it.

When I say “expiate”, I mean to make amends for failing a semester of C in college. In a class of 3 students, it was difficult to stand alongside my classmates and lean on them for support. When they started excelling, I fell behind and somewhere around a month after learning about pointers and indirect references, I just gave up. I swore I’d never bother learning the language again. But that’s all changed now. I could do well if I could wrap my head around it and succeed where I failed before.

What bothers me is I still have a lack of support from my fellow programmers. Even the guys who I thought would support my decision to take up the language again are saying things like, “Man, why are you messing around with C?” or “You must really want to punish yourself.” I say they’re missing the point. I’ve had my time with the high-level languages. I know that I can split a sentence into an array of words in three lines in Perl; I know that doing the same in C would require a bit of memory allocation, a handful of variable declarations, and a set of functions to perform each bit of the search and copy operation. But you know what? I don’t care. I’m getting thrilled with seeing how it all actually happens under the covers of all the other languages.

I want to succeed in this. I want to use C to make stuff that runs fast. I want the chance to flip bits in hardware without needing special libraries. I want to have a shallow learning curve if I decide to go into microcontroller programming. Some people put puzzles together; I have this.

Making Room for Two

If I am to overcome being alone, my first step would be to acknowledge that I would no longer be living for myself; that I, being not alone, must consider the partner in my decisions; that my self-intent necessitates the mental presence of another person in my self-view. That I must change my thinking and build out the room to accommodate two people. It could be a sudden change, like picking up a new hobby, moving to a new neighborhood, working a new position; there’s a mental click that happens at some point (usually mediated by oxytocin) where the connections in my mind fuse together to create a redefined sense of self and my self’s place in the world. This is necessary.

I must admit, not necessarily verbally, but to my own self, that being not alone requires an expectation of chaos and surprise. My partner will make decisions on their own, just as I would. I must elevate myself above the simplicity of living for my own self and be ready to respond to novelty, trouble, and surprise without losing track of my own goals. I must adapt, adjust, acknowledge change, and seek out novel ways to fix the things that break and work out agreements to overcome potential troubles down the road.

The idealist’s view is that “coupling” is the continual act of hitching two horses together; if the wagon is to go anywhere, it requires the horses to act in some semblance of a unit. Each horse cannot act alone of its own free will without diminishing the momentum and direction of the whole. You and I know that this image is too simple and far from the truth. In reality, a couple is more like a pair of first-graders tied together with a bungee cord and sent into the big kids’ playground. First, there’s strain, there’s struggle, there’s compromise, then finally there’s planning and partnership. Both partners must be willing to commit to it to attain the greater rewards.

Talking is necessary. Without talking, there is only uncertainty, fear, and failure. The most successful of animals chatter a lot. It’s not something I do very well, but with practice I could get better. Being a deaf-mute dreamer means I won’t be troubled with the relationship for long. I cannot afford that.

Most people have learned these lessons in their youth. I, for some reason, must keep relearning them. Bear with me.