Trying to follow

Once during the winter, prompted by my friend Peter’s experience in China, I turned off the heat in my apartment and tried to live life as normal, but without the modern convenience (and privilege) of heat. Here is a bit of Living without Heat:

I wondered about how much the quality of your apartments building layout affects your expenses to keep it warm. Can you imagine living in a low income housing situation where not only was your rent high for extremely low quality, but you had to leave the heat running constantly to keep it at all warm.
Friday night I went to sleep with a sheet, a comforter, a blanket and then a sleeping bag (rated to 20 degrees) on top of me. I was warm, but it felt like being outside. Saturday at about noon I stepped outside and realized it was considerable warmer out there then it was in my own apartment and it was only 46 degrees out there. I tried to open the window shades to let the sun in, but the angle our house is at didn’t allow for much direct sunlight coming through.
After it got cold enough that I had to put on a shirt, long sleeve shirt, sweatshirt and sometimes a vest I was starting to get miserable. I don’t have a hat or gloves and so I had my hood on and I tried to keep my hands in my sleeves a bit. My hands where getting quite cold which didn’t feel good. I tried to think of it like camping outdoors or something, but I couldn’t break out of the fact that this was my home! I feel like I should be comfortable in my home. I thought in my mind that maybe I should try and make it through Saturday evening, making it a full 48 hours. I sort of made that up on the spot cause I think I wanted to feel like I had achieved some sort of goal, or survived through something. Truth is I just wanted to turn the heat back on.

Read the rest here.

Could you imagine actually living without the ability to control the heat in the winter and the air conditioning in the summer? Would we be angrier and more difficult people just because of that inconvenience, or would we learn how to cope?

At the risk of jumping in with the media frenzy surrounding the situation at VT, I just wanted to quote a part of the story that terribly saddens me.
From Yahoo News:

Classmates in Virginia, where Cho grew up, said he was teased and picked on, apparently because of shyness and his strange, mumbly way of speaking.

Once, in English class at Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va., when the teacher had the students read aloud, Cho looked down when it was his turn, said Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior and high school classmate. After the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho began reading in a strange, deep voice that sounded “like he had something in his mouth,” Davids said.

“The whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, `Go back to China,’” Davids said.

Stephanie Roberts, 22, a classmate of Cho’s at Westfield High, said she never witnessed anyone picking on Cho in high school. But she said friends of hers who went to middle school with him told her they recalled him getting bullied there.

“There were just some people who were really mean to him and they would push him down and laugh at him,” Roberts said. “He didn’t speak English really well and they would really make fun of him.”

…

A 2002 federal study on common characteristics of school shooters found that 71 percent of them “felt bullied, persecuted or injured by others prior to the attack.”

The report said that “in some of these cases the experience of being bullied seemed to have a significant impact on the attacker and appeared to have been a factor in his decision to mount an attack at the school. In one case, most of the attacker’s schoolmates described the attacker as the kid everyone teased.”

When will we learn that “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” is a lie? When will we learn that teasing and bullying is as terrible as murder. And before you think I’m making an erroneous stretch of a claim, it wasn’t my original thought.

I long for the day that adults and kids seeing teasing as disturbing as a school shooting. That it becomes something so wrong and inappropriate that schools call off classes to debrief, parent’s leave work to comfort the victims and correct the perpetrators.

I don’t mean in any way to diminish the mourning and heart ache of those involved in the situation at VT, I just think we need to expand those feelings and our attention beyond incidents were people are killed, and move to addressing as well were words, teasing, hatred, and bullying have killed people inside. Where is the love?

I don’t have the time or energy right now to write a crafty response in reply to this comment, so I thought I would enlist the help of my brilliant friends to reply to this commenter with their own life experiences and thoughts.

The most popular post on my blog is entitled, Why I ditched Dave Ramsey. It’s gotten ton’s of comments, mostly it’s become a ground for folks to debt Dave Ramsey, but that wasn’t my intention. I originally posted that while Dave had written a caller’s concern about saving $30 a month on gas by driving a more economical and energy efficient car as being a ‘tight-wad.’ I felt he should have affirmed her concern and encouraged her to be a good steward and sacrificial steward with her finances. I said, “She was not being a “tight-wad” she was being a wise steward, one that sees the money she has been given not as her’s that God “blessed her” with, but for her to use wisely as God entrusted her with it.”

Yesterday, a reader replied with this comment:

As to the original blogger, geez, do you live your entire life in sadness? I think it’s great that you want to spend ALL your extra money sponsoring kids and such, but are you sure that’s God and not your own efforts to alleviate a “guilt complex” of some type for living a nice life in America? Enjoy the blessings God gave you and be wise with your money, and you can affect your world in far greater ways.”

I’d love to hear what you all think of that and your thoughts (even if you agree with him. Feel free to comment on this post or on the post after his comment.

In the absence of time to write myself, I want to highlight some friends writings…

My buddy, Ben, writes:

This Virginia Tech shooting is really sad, but its also a reminder of how sad our media is. Nowhere on TV, print, or radio is safe from what seems like deep exploitation for ratings. Each news channel seems to be putting on a show of sadness, while they are probably giddy to get a change to create new graphics, horrific segment titles, and story after story about why you too should be scared for your life. As the president of Virginia Tech said, “we live in an open society,” and while that brings with it incredible freedom and joy, it at times is open to unpreventable tragedies. Yet, even here in Seattle the local news can’t help but pain the local colleges here as the next possible place for terror, and older members of the media continue to talk about how more violent and worse off this generation is compared to the “good ole days.” While the media is busy painting this generation as violent and heartless they are missing…

Read the Rest of his Post here.

The Internet came to a crashing halt at the house. Josh said the wiring is really messed up which means it might be a while before it’s fixed. And knowing our landlord’s it’ll be even longer then that. It’s been nice not having the internet for a little bit, but I’ll appreciate when it’s back. Mindy’s has a lot of homework to catch up on so we’ll be spending sometime at a coffee shop that has free wifi I’m sure.

I’m gonna write a few post here quick so you won’t miss your daily dose, but just know that won’t be too lengthy, and I’ll be slow to reply to comments as well (what else is new?).