What’s been going on, part 2

It’s way past time for another blog. This time I’ll continue with my general life update as I said I would.

My personal life right now consists of my projects, church, and some occasional social interaction. I’ll organize this entry around those. Since my mind is always kind of a blur, I need outlines like that so I can think of what to say.

I have too many projects going on right now. It’s kind of overwhelming to think about. There are two major ones, the first of which is that I’m reading ANTEHRJ (well, it’s on hold right now), which I will use to start developing an at least semi-formal language for describing philosophical arguments. There are already formal ways of stating certain kinds of arguments, but this one will fill in the gaps. It’ll be a glue language, like Perl was. That will take forever. But I’ll do it iteratively.

Project number two is a rule-based algorithmic music composition program. I got to work on that some this weekend when I was in Colorado. That will also take forever, and I will also do it iteratively. I’ve been wanting to write something like this for ages. It will write tonal music, as opposed to the fractal music generators that pop up around the net. Once I have that, I’ll be able to be lazy and still write nice music.

These two projects are probably too ambitious, but oh well. I want to try them anyway. I think I’m just obsessed enough that they might happen.

Then I have other minor projects that involve programming, such as an RSS feed creator and a programming code indexer. I work on those here and there when I feel like it.

I’m also editing Brandon‘s Lord of the Rings parody. It’s really a parody of TheologyWeb using LotR as a backdrop. My other major projects are on hold until I get that done, which will hopefully motivate me to finish it sooner.

Church is just kinda there. I manage to make it every week, except occasionally when I oversleep. The main thing I’m doing there is a small group. I have had an “interesting” relationship with this group. I like the people well enough, but for a while I was considering dropping out. With all my issues, I’m just on a very different page spiritually from most other people in the group, and I didn’t think we could be of much help to each other. But I have pinpointed the exact reason I first became uncomfortable there, which I’ll blog about later, and I think I can deal with things better now. We have also started a new series of lessons that I am helping to teach. These are much more in my field because they’re about Bible study, so I will definitely be able to make a contribution.

Social occasions are few and far between for me, but I have had a couple. When Superman Returns came out, my friend Joel from work invited me to go see it with his friends, and then he invited me to his 4th of July party. I really appreciated those gestures because I basically have no friends in the area that are around my age. Well, okay, I’m exaggerating slightly, but I do need to get my social life together.

The biggest social thing recently was my friend’s wedding two weeks ago in Colorado. I was a groomsman. I believe this was the best wedding I’ve ever been to. It may even have surpassed John’s last year, which was also in Colorado and I was also a groomsman in. What I loved about John’s was that it wasn’t just a ceremony. It was a gathering, with a picnic the day of the rehearsal and a lot of sharing at the rehearsal dinner. And that’s what I loved about Cam’s this year too.

My impression of most weddings is that they are largely a collection of strangers who happen to know the same two people, and they celebrate the marriage but still maintain a polite distance from each other and mostly keep to themselves. In this wedding there was some of that (regrettably I was in turtle mode the whole time), but what struck me was that the families of the bride and groom weren’t strangers, or even acquaintances. They were friends. They obviously liked each other and had fun together.

An explanation came during the wedding ceremony, which Nicolette’s father conducted. He said that instead of dating, Cam and Nicolette courted, because Nicolette’s family felt that was the biblical way to do things. Courtship, as I think of it, is where the guy basically dates the girl’s whole family. In Cam and Nicolette’s case, both of their whole families seem to have dated each other. They all got to know each other, and it clearly showed that weekend. I always thought of courtship as an odd, fringe activity, but I now have a positive opinion of it.

I also loved getting to know Cam’s family, his old roommate John, and Nicolette a little better. They are great. And I got to meet some Australian girls who were there visiting Cam’s brother. Yay.

Oh yeah, and the wedding had a Scottish theme, because that’s Cam’s ancestry. He and his brother and John wore kilts. The rest of us were cheap and wore suits. I thought it was kind of a random and strange set-up, until the wedding party processional when I watched Cam walk down the aisle in his kilt with uilleann pipes playing in the background (“The Woman’s Mountain” from Piper’s Call by Liam O’Flynn—yes, I know it’s Irish. It still worked. :P). It was an evocative image and brought out the significance of this moment in my friend’s life.

When I got back home, I found out that our apartments had been bought again, and this time they’re being converted to condominiums. I can’t afford to buy anything right now, and I didn’t want to settle here anyway, so it looks like I’ll be moving! Fortunately I’ll be able to stay for the rest of my lease, which ends next July. Over the next nine months I’m going to try to get rid of a lot of my junk and a lot of my books too so I’ll have less to move. I’ve been meaning to do this anyway, and now I have more of a reason.

Did you know that the software that runs Wikipedia is open source and that you can download and install it on your computer?? Yes, and I have done just that to create my own personal wiki. It seems like a better way of organizing my random thoughts than the separate journals I keep for different subjects. Maybe it will even help me get my thoughts into writing more quickly. I used to be so much better about that. We shall see!