Merry Easter

Shalom! It's funny, this year is the only ever year of my life thus far where I have worked for a church, and yet this year I feel like Easter crept up on me more than any other. You would think, being in the resurrection business and all that, I would have been more prepared. But no. Maybe I'm just out of the loop but I just feel like more than other recent years it's been less of a hype. I was trying to work out today whether a) this is true or false, b) whether it's just because I'm not 4 and my parents don't feel the need to dress up as large chocolate bearing animals or c) whether it just reflects people generally being a bit distracted with life. I didn't conclude upon any of these points (well, apart from b, which I think is definitly true) but it did make me realise that it's pretty cool that however much I might be an eventist and not having an egg hunt round my garden and a bonnet making contest and a stations of the cross and 15 gamillion creme eggs might make me slightly dissappointed it's also pretty cool that every day is kind of Easter Day. Not just because Esther brings home hot cross buns on a daily basis, but because Jesus is the reason for the season. And He is risen. Not just today, but tomorrow and tomorrow's tomorrow and tomorrow's tomorrow's tomorrow. And, despite the whole Good Friday thing, even yesterday and yesterday's yesterday. Yesterday, today, forevermore. That's pretty cool. Even if they don't give you chocolate on Cathedral Green every day to remember it by.

So..what else. We had fun in France visiting Ross. There's a fairly select(elite?) group in the UK that recognise his coolness, but I feel like the whole of France is Ross keen. This obviously makes me want to start the official backlash, but we had a good time eating and drinking Frenchstyle, pottering around, having balloon animals made etc etc. It was a good break in the way that I felt in the middle of it refreshed and like I was having a good time, but also like I would quite like to go home and get on with that life too. Generally made me feel excited by things again.

The Simple Life is offically done as of this morning and the ending of Lent. I'm not quite what I would conclude from it. I think I thought it would be easier than it was. Not that I found myself having to be pulled off of H and M window fronts or owt, but just I really wanted stuff. And not in the, "Oh dear my flip flops are falling apart" type way (which they are), but in the most ugly, covetous, "Ooh my life would be so much better if I just had more....stuff" type way. Doing the charidee shop thing quite a lot I think I thought that maybe I might be above all that material greed thing, but, I realised, I'm not at all. I'm not sure what that means now though. I definately learned I don't need to buy packaged sandwiches, and that's a good thing I can continue not doing, but I do want to continue to muse upon the needing stuff thing.

Right, I was supposed to be getting down with the parents and watching Lewis but I have failed miserably by writing this instead, so I should drop in for the last few minutes. Merry Easter everyone...

Cheers and Boos

Cheers and Boos used to be a very, very important part of my life. My youth group (which may well have been The Coolest Youth Group In The World Ever) met on a Sunday night, we were in fact the imaginatively named Sunday Night Group, and amongst many other important things involving lard, jelly and the Lord Jesus Christ, we celebrated, commiserated and generally put the world to rights through cheering and booing through one another's lives. Here are mine today.

Cheers

Getting ready to go on holiday to France on Friday. Est, Rach and I are taking an aeroplane at Early O'Clock from Southampton and we are going to Ross town for a few days. I'm in the habit of being a bit blaise about holidays (having been fortunate enough to have done quite a few of them), but this one I'm really excited about. I'm not sure if it's because I'm looking forward to seeing Ross, or if it's because real life can be a bit mundane sometimes. I'm gonna tell him it's the former.

Googling. My actual job is fairly dull. It is data inputting, it is filing, it is spreadsheets, it is moving files, it is redirecting phonecalls, it is being told off for having crap posture. Fortunatly my colleagues have realised this of late and have given me the extra special job of googlin' questions they have. I have a piece of paper taped to my desk and they write stuff on it and I reserach it and give a small presentation on the subject. This has enriched my knowledge in the last few weeks on subjects as varied as Snow White, viaducts, concertinas, large bumble bees, pencils, Luke Perry and the cast of Dallas. Every day's a school day.

Exeter. This sounds barrel scraping, but it's sunny. Exeter in the sun is fricking brilliant, and life is just better. It means you can go to the Quay and the Cathedral and Weigh and Save....just better and more beautiful and just generally more full of wonder. And I can wear flip flops and it doesn't look too strange.


Boos

Getting up in the middle of the night to go to France. I don't want to do anything, ever, when it affects my sleeping pattern. I literally think the world might end.

Feeling a bit end of termed out. As much as I might pretend to be all grown up now, I think that I still only function properly in 10 week spurts (preferably with "reading week" thrown in the middle). Everything is fine but I feel slightly like I'm running on empty. A break will be good.

Not everyone has such as easy and enjoyable a life as me. This makes me a bit sad sometimes.


That was fun. Now, I need to revise for my New Testament exam on Thursday quite badly. If the exam is just on the first three chapters of Mark then I think it's fair to say I will probably kick quite a lot of arse. If it, in any way, broaches any of the rest of the NT, I think it is fair to say at this precise time I shall be a little bit troubled. Still, there's always a chance...

Home Alone

Hello. This literally only happens when I am home alone, I reckon there could be a scientifically measured relationship between the frequency of my blogging and the sociability of my housemates. As soon as I have paid off my student loan I may well fund the research myself. Watch This Space. (I have just realised that by the time I have paid off my loan it will be the year 2065 and the others might have moved on a bit by then...).



I havent worked out if I am only meant to do this when I have a Point or not. And I am only really driven to write when I have some kind of emotion which feels like it needs to outburst, but this does not necessarily reflect the status quo of my life. http://www.davegorman.com/ is very important to me. Dave blogs a lot. He is both my blogging and vegetarian role model. He always seems quite happy in his blog, but my knowledge of his (fairly public) borderline personality disorder thing suggests that this probably isn't always the case. So is there some kind of blogging etiquette I need to find out about?? Hm, an example of the very unimportant things which plague my mind.

This means a lot to me...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dxf6keoYV0

New news. The Simple Life.

When did Come Dine With Me get so big? When did it stop being in the Richard and Judy have gone on holiday slot at tea time (if you live in East Northants) and become the most important thing that could ever happen to television and something that *even* Top Trumps the Friends/Scrubs trade off?! When, I wonder, when. I say this because I am watching it now. (Instead of Scrubs).

Last year Esther and I gave up meat for Lent. Easily one of the most challenging but rewarding personal experiences of my 23 or so years. I have no will power (hence having to take on the challenge in a tag team) but we did it. Give or take a bacon and brie panini. So this year I felt a bit of a burden to out-do that experience, or at least meet it. The result of this has been a commitment to The Simple Life. This seemed a fairly simple concept in my (and my faithful friend's) head/s. Give up the things in life which are comfortable for a few weeks. Easy..well, it seemed so.

With the meat thing it was fairly easy to discern what was allowed and what wasn't. If looked delicious and like it formerly lived in a farmyard, we couldn't eat it. If it was brown and soggy, we probably could. But this thing involves giving up stuff that aren't necessary. It means not buying snacks from Oasis at work. Done. It involves not checking internet on my phone. Tick. It means only eating, drinking and buying the things that I really need. Hard. So it's been 4 days and I have eaten and drunk out every day. Forsaking one drink and a couple of fruit scones does not equate to living simply, it's just a little bit of a joke. Now, it doesn't matter that I haven't met the rules, they are simply put in place for the sake of a personal challenge, but it makes me a bit sad about how much comfort cushions my life. I have money so I spend it. I have time so I burn it. Now I know I should be grateful not to be in need - I am - but I don't want to become numb to the reality of it.

So I'm not really sure the point of this challenge at the moment but I hope that there might be one. It would be easier if it were more absolute and measurable, but I hope that there might be some benfit from keeping vague. If I'm not counting it in terms of BTP trips missed then it might make me dwell more on the why rather than that what. I think it's about being able to recognise what real need is. And I do know what need is. I've lived among it in Calcutta for a few months. Not enough food, not enough shelter, not enough love...that's need. But all of these things exist in abundance in my life in Exeter and so I think I live in real danger of forgetting what to live in plenty means, and just to accept my ridiculously comfortable life as being normal. Now, nothing of what I might give up would ever even dare to be a comparable experience to living in such extreme destitution as what I have mentioned. So that cannot be the point of it. But my experience of living amongst physical need has been spiritual richness. I have at times tried to convince myself the God of Calcuuta is more real than the one of Exeter. But this is just so, so, so not true. But there is less stuff getting in the way of hanging out with Him there, I make less obsticles for myself, I rely on Him before Dominoes. (Actually, not entirely true. Dominoes tastes pretty flippin good there too, but *slightly* less readily available). So maybe that is the point just there. Not that this tiny attempt at living more simply might genuinely convince me that I am in geographical Calcutta, but that through seeking God before stuff, on some occassions, might help me refind my own personal Calcutta..with Jesus, in 73 Park Road.

That said, I'm off out for a curry now. It's a learning curve....

Old news. Literally.

For the benefit of my readership of Esther and Nathan, this is the much famed drafted but not published, now ridiculously out of date and completely unfinished blog entry of two weeks ago. I would delete it, but there might be someone out there somewhere who didnt live through the tooth incident, and I wouldn't want to lose out on any belated sympathy....


I have had a tooth ache for the past few days. I woke up this morning feeling horrible with it (to the point that I was sucking frozen peas in an attempt to ease the pain..comes slightly recommended!). Anyway, then I went to visit the nice Indian men with the shop up the street and asked them for some Ibruprofin and mouthwash (whilst refusing to move my jaw to speak...I think I may have looked slightly like a grumpy ventriloquist (without a puppet)). They obliged, I came home, swilled and swallowed, cried, and then decided that maybe I should attempt to acheive something today! So my hair is busy dying some potentially horrific shade of red and I thought I would blog a little. But it's only when I sat down to write that I realised that A) my mouth wasn't hurting very much at the moment and B) such has been my obsession with mouth pain in the past three days that I literally have forgotten how to think about anything else!


It's been snow week this week! Except it hasn't made me feel very !, it's just made me feel a bit old and grumpy. Slipping and sliding and having wet shoes and socks and rising damp all the flippin time...I hope it's just been that I have been too busy for snow fun rather than me just having died a little inside. Est and I did go to the quay on Tuesday with a friend's daughter who was off school, which was fun, but I just found myself saying dont touch the snow/take off your coat inside or you wont feel the benfit outside/it probably will be gone tomorrow and you can go back to school etc etc. and just sounding Old! Not cool.

10 minutes thinking time

I fully intended that I would have updated this before now, but it hasnt happened. I want to say I havent had time but that's just not true. I just haven't made time to do it. The other day I decided it would be really helpful if life came with ten minutes thinking time before each activity to think it through properly, like in exams. The trouble is though, yet again, that there are millions of ten minutes I could choose to take but I choose not to spend it thinking. I choose to spend it chasing demons, working out how he did meet their mother and removing slats from beds. These things do enrich my life on the minute by minute basis but potentially the bigger picture might be slightly more composed if I thought it through better. Ach.

Things are sehr gut at the moment. I feel like before Christmas I had wound myself in a big knot of stress and emotion and stupidness that I could never quite unwind myself from. I'm not really sure why it started, but it was a bit troublesome. Anyway, after considering several different options to make things better (on a sliding scale of scariness) I did as a last resort decide to pray a bit. Someone at church today said that the more you pray about things the more coincidences you seem to start seeing happen...and when you stop, they stop too. Well, to my great benefit, I have been the lucky recipricant of some of these conincidences of late. My situations and pace of life havent altered but my head feels a bit more sorted about it all. Which is cool, whatever you might attribute it to...

In other news...I have had my hair cut slightly too short...I'm considering doing some kind of teaching type qualification next year, maybe in further education...I won Absolute Balderdash today...We might move house in the next month...I realllllly want to go on holiday (which may or may not be massively influanced by watching Slumdog Millionaire this week, brillaint)...Our lovely uni friend Ellie has stayed for the weekend and we had super fun hanging out.

Babble over. Watch Slumdog. x

Beginnings.

I've wanted to blog for a while now but I haven't because I've been scared. I've been scared that A) I wouldn't have anything interesting enough to write about, B) I would create some kind of wierd cyber Fran that would pretend to be a lot cooler than the real thing and C) That it's just a really arrogant thing to do. I think I still hold on to all three of these things as legitimate worries, but I might just risk it. This is the kind of dangerous thing that happens when I'm home alone (a previous example being my disasterous, albeit accidental, hair bleaching).

However, I think this has good potential. Firstly, I spend a lot of time in Devon (being where I live and all) and a lot of my most brilliant friends don't live here, so it's a good way of touching base with far flung places like East Northants. Secondly, I don't think my life is that interesting, but I do think it's quite compartmentalised so it would be good to share it in a balanced way. Thirdly (and lastly) some days I have thoughts. Some, I happen to think, could be the beginnings of radical social revolution, others, sadly, might just simply be stupid. Whilst I'm not suggesting that they're of any wider interest, I think I might benefit from writing them down.

So yeah, that's about it. It's 5th January 2009, I am 23, I live in Exeter, I graduated with a degree in International Relations in the summer, I have no idea how I will use this degree, I live with three lovely people in a house we like to call Parklife, I spend 21 hours a week doing various forms of admin at the RD&E hospital, I spend 20ish hours a week working for my church, Belmont Chapel, I like scrabble and travel, I love Jesus and people, I have started writing a blog.

Exciting times. x