Chaos

Dear World,

What a week. It was busy, productive, eventful, exciting, and, of course, fun. What could have caused such a plethora of experiences, you might ask? Well, let me tell you.

There was a lot going on around here this week with the election and different convention-type things (including the Missions Awareness Emphasis this week), so that made things really exciting. Monday was greeaatt. It was actually the perfect way to start off the week. I went to Spanish, finished early and wandered around the mission organizations area. There were some really interesting things there, but it is sort of hard to plan missions trips when you're in college. But Messiah has a lot of really great opportunities for missions through the school for people interested (myself included). Anyways, from there I went to check my mail, and was thrilled to find a wonderful package from Katrina, including a package of encouragement cards from people at church. If you are one of the people that wrote me a card, thank you soo much. It was really moving to realize that so many people are still thinking about me and praying for me back home.

Continuing with Monday, I visited the annual Career Expo that afternoon. They basically just fill one of the gyms with booths from all sorts of employers (big and small) and graduate schools from all over. It's an excellent opportunity for juniors and seniors, but I figured I would check it out anyway. Nothing leapt out at me. From there I headed to my advising session for Spring semester. I had a few ideas of courses I wanted to take, and my advisor basically just said they were good choices. I have to wait a while before I'm allowed to register, so if I can get into what I want, I'm basically just going to take more General Education courses.

Tuesday? hmm.. Tuesday was an exciting day, alright. Election Day in America, for one, but also the day of my job interview! I went to classes, filled out the application form, and then headed over to the main office building (which I've never really explored) for my interview. They call the building Old Main, and rightly so. It's nice inside, but also very old. Up on the third floor, you can actually feel the floor drooping to one side as your walking down the hall. Oh well. If that building is as old as the school, it will be 100 years old in a few months.

Anyways. The interview went smashingly! It was long -- almost an hour -- but I felt really confident, and the lady was really nice. We talked about her, we talked about me, we talked about the Student Impact Fund, we talked about Messiah in general, we talked about things that could go wrong during a call, we talked about how I handle stress and rejection, we talked about how nice it is to be paid $10/hr, and finally she told me I could start as soon as possible! That was actually really nice of her, because the min. number of hours Phonathon callers have to work in a week is 10, but she said I could start with however many hours I could fit into my schedule; if that was 0 until the Spring, she said that's fine too. So that was really exciting! I had just been offered a position on the spot with the highest paying student job on campus!

From there, it was too late to go to swimming, so I headed up to the church just off campus and cast my ballot for the ill-fated Republicans. Oh well. They tried their best. A lot of people around here were pretty upset when Obama won (and a lot were really excited). Whatever. He seems like a nice enough guy, and there's no point getting all upset about it now. Haha, but it was funny how a bunch of my friends were saying to me, "We're moving to Canada." I then informed them that if they are really trying to flee raised taxes, universal health care, pro-gay marriage, and pro-abortion legislation, they might want to look elsewhere.

Wednesday was a long, work-filled day. I had four classes, a presentation on anxiety disorders in Psychology (that actually went really well), and two big assignments due for Thursday. Not very much happened that day aside from a lot of work. Oh, but it was mine and Katrina's big one-year, nine months! Woohoo! Ha.. but I spent probably over three hours preparing for a five minute speech on Wednesday. I could have (and should have) picked a topic much smaller than 100 years of musical history, but hey, it was very informative and I learned a lot in the process of preparing it. I worked until 12:00 that night, and then woke up five hours later for swim practice.

Exhausted, I delivered my speech in Comm (and it went really well), ate, and then ran back to the room. I also had a 1000 word book review due for 1:20. So lots of reading and 995 words later, I clicked "print" at 1:10 and ran to class. But I was really happy with the final product (and it was only the editing that I finished before class, Mom, don't worry. I'm not slipping into procrastinating ways just yet...). After class, I came back, played guitar for a little, and then took a solid three hour nap. Oh man, it was nice. Other Thursday highlights included: late dinner, a really great Powerhouse (thursday night worship service), and watching a scary movie with Austin before bed (BAD idea).

Friday was nice as well. We had two really interesting visitors to our Psych. class. Tying in with our chapter on Psychological disorders, one of these guys had schitzophrenia, and the other had been abused as a child and had bad hallucinations and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. They were both really articulate and extremely interesting to hear. So that was really neat. Then I enjoyed a nice, relaxing afternoon, went to dinner down the street at my Professor's house (the Amish seminar one). Then I ran back to campus and helped out with ticket swiping for the big Conor Oberst concert. Woohoo! Long story short, it was an incredible show with really energetic performances and TONS of people. We sold around 1300 tickets, and probably 1000 of them were kids from off-campus. What a night!

Yesterday, I had a nice, light Sat. morning swimming practice, then off to a service project at a local nature reservation with the team. That was definitely a great bonding experience that really made me glad I'm on the swim team. I might have to drag myself to practice sometimes, but there are a ton of bonuses to being on the team too. Austin's dad was here yesterday so later last night we threw a surprise B-day party for him... he loved it. Basically, my dinner yesterday consisted of two slices of ice cream cake, some pecan pie, brownies, and some oatmeal cookies to round out the meal. Then we all went to the regional soccer championship game, and, of course, Messiah Men won 7-0. NCAA here we come!

I was really tired last night, and even though I really wanted to go to church, I ended up sleeping in until 11:30. Oh well, it was much needed rest. I've got team bible study later tonight and I'm really looking forward to that.

Yup. So that is that. As you can see, a LOT happened this week, and I didn't even include all the alternate chapels and various other things I got to do this week. This has taken almost an hour and a half to write, so I should get on to studying for my Spanish test tomorrow. You are all very important to me, and if you want to know anything else, or you just want to contact me personally, I'd love to hear from you.

Love you all,
Josh

p.s. I didn't get a chance to read over this again, so please pardon the blaring errors.