shindotvwelcome to shindo's world

I have been busy with meetings all week. This took up as much time as being at an MLA conference, which can take up the bulk of the day, even with a few breaks in between.

As part of my internship at City College, I attended several meetings/lectures on learning issues and syllabus preparation. I also went to a meeting put out by DSPS, the services for disabled students.

The workshop on WebCT was late one afternoon but it was fun to learn that system. I have also been learning how to use Blackboard, another online education system, this week because of my other job, which is working as a GA for a literature professor. She is going to deal with the lecture, which is over 200 students, and I have to deal with 60 of those students in two different discussion sections. I also had to go a meeting of the GA’s earlier this week.

A few of the meetings involved food. The English Department meeting did for sure. The adjunct meeting the next day did as well. So I as the starving student/intern got to eat some good food for free this week.

Since I work at City College’s English Writing Center in addition to all this good stuff and being a grad student, I went to that meeting this morning.

I’m really tired and I need to get this place cleaned up because I have the feeling there won’t be much time to do that this semester.

I’m halfway done with cleaning the place. I hate it when I have to do the big production clean ups but I do it to myself.

I did get out earlier today but I never made it to the lovely Ralph’s. I went to Pokez, which is a very good but cheap Mexican restaurant close to the Central Library and the Post Office. The food is always good. Most of the people who hang out there are arty-sloppy in the way they dress and I wonder how many of them are trust fund kids. But it has a nice atmosphere and the offbeat way the restaurant is decorated makes it fit int with the downtown environment. I like the skateboard with Che Guevarra painted on it. I like downtown a lot. My neighborhood is fabulous but I like it because I can walk anywhere. I don’t have to drive. If I don’t feel like walking, there is is the trolley.

After walking around, I slowly did the cleaning. I got to listen to a lot of music in the process. I haven’t had the opportunity to listen to my CD’s lately so it’s nice. For the past couple of months, Modest Mouse’s “Good News…” was the CD that wouldn’t leave my player but it was getting old so I listened to some old favorites–Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry, Duran Duran, and Nina Simone.

More cleaning to be done tomorrow.

With my mom’s computer problem, a friend of mine gave me a solution. He told me to go to the Micros$oft website and download something to debug the computer since it may be a virus downloaded from an affected website. I now have to go to another computer and download the de-bugger. I don’t have a PC (Mac user) so maybe I’ll download it and burn it on a CD when I’m at SDSU on Monday. Thanks Andrew!

I’ve decided to get a move on on cleaning up the place. I’m taking a break, of course. I just threw away some papers and filed some others. There’s still a lot of clutter and I can’t believe I let things get to this.

I know it would be easier to “maintenance” cleaning every other day but I just can’t get my mind around it somehow. I know I don’t want the Queer Eye guys to come in here because they would be really unforgiving. I remember the “Queer Eye for the Gay Guy” episode and I’m sure it would be something similar. But at least a visit to a hairdresser and a shopping trip would come out of it. But is it worth the abuse?

Even though there’s no hair appointment or shopping trip involved today, I need to get back to work. I may take a walk to Ralph’s behind Horton Plaza to deal with the cabin fever but this has to get done. No agreeing to spontaneous meetings with friends or saying yes to visit my niece and nephew if they decide to call out of the blue.

Signing out for now.

I put off cleaning up the place today. I got off to a late start (10am. I’ve been staying up until 3 or 4am this week) and I spent the morning online.

My niece called me at 2:30pm so I showered & dressed quickly to catch the 3:00 trolley to go to Mission Valley. It was late and I missed my connection to the 927 by the Ikea Shopping Center. I wound up catching the 13 and I walked up the hill from the Qualcomm Stadium.

By the time I arrived at my mother’s house, my niece and nephew started swimming without me. I joined them and played a couple opf games with them. My niece thinks her brother always cheats on the games.

I hung out until 7:20 and caught the 927 bus to Mission Valley, jumped on the trolley, and went to the YMCA to excercize. On the way home, I saw a weird guy on the trolley. He had a drag along suitcase, a shopping bag, and a golf club. His clothes were covered in paint and he was talking to a Snoopy doll with Snoopy’s nose in his ear. He kept blaming Snoopy for the paint on his hands.

I feel like I’m often in the closet about being an ex-Christian. I don’t feel I have to hide this from my family or my friends. I think my family is actually quite relieved I don’t practice Christianity anymore. It freaked out my mother and I was mean to my brother at times. I regret that very much. And I regret getting messed up on Jesus in the first place.

I know a couple of people who are Christians and I don’t discuss my Christian history with them. My building manager, whom I get along with very well, is a devout Christian. She never proselytizes her tenants but she is vocal about things she believes and her involvment in her church. There is the professor I worked with at City College. He and his wife (who just graduated from the MFA program last year) are Evangelical Christians. I haven’t said anything about my “former life” because I don’t want to open up a whole can of worms. It’s easier to be seen as simply heathen than it is as an apostate.

A buddy of mine and his girlfriend had some discussions with the professor and his then fiancee a couple of years ago at a party. My friend’s girlfriend was raised Christian and went to Point Loma Nazarene for for undergraduate degree but she no longer practices Christianity. She’s more interested in Buddhism now. When she mentioned this to the professor’s fiancee, my friend told me she was very mean to his girlfriend. He told me that this woman made comments that Buddhism was a pagan belief and some kind of reproving comment about my friend’s girlfriend not practicing the faith she grew up with. I’ve never dealt with this from the professor or his wife but they may just tone it down for their colleages. Or they are not as severe Christians as they were a few years ago.

Every once in a while, I run into people I knew as a Christian. I tend to keep the conversation pretty banal, hoping they never bring up Jesus or what Church I’m going to now. When the question comes up, it’s just more comfortable to say I’m not going to church. I don’t feel like hearing “It’s not too late to come back to the Lord.”

Posting on the ex-Assembly BB has been interesting but “outing” oneself in an online medium is much different than “coming out” in real life. It has been interesting what kind of insecurity an ex-believer can evoke in some people, hence the really offensive posts from some die-hard Christians. From my perspective, I find it amazing people can leave the Assembly and remain unchanged in their beliefs and the way they treat others. The only thing for them that has changed is Brother George is wrong. Yeah, he was wrong but so were his cronies and everyone else under them that perpetuated or enabled the abuses within that “church.”

I wonder what is it about Orange and San Diego that cults and Christian fundamentalism flourish? It is scary to think the Assembly got started in Fullerton and then spread out through the entire nation and some cities in Canada. Even scarier was that it found its way to the UK, France, China, and Africa. Then there is Calvary Chapel, which also seems to have a fundamentalist influnce nationwide in a more mainstream sense. There’s some of these churches (and similar ones) in San Diego and they are always full of people. And then they produce bands like Switchfoot, which I wish would just go off the air radio-wise.

Several years ago, when I was losing my faith, it seems like every Christian I knew just got too damn nosy and they had something proselytizing to say. It made me wonder if I should move to Stockholm or Japan, anywhere where this type of mentality is not prevelant.

This is just a rant.

This is something I usually don’t share with my friends–I used to be in a cult. It’s much easier to share with people that I’m gay than it is to tell them I was in a cult. Religion is not a comfortable topic for a lot of people, especially when it is meant to proselytize. And I hated proselytizing when I was in this group, which was known as The Assembly. Like the Boston Church of Christ, this was a Christian fundamentalist based fringe group. They often recruited people from college campuses and this is how I got into it. I was a born-again Christian at the time (I was 21 then) and these people seemed really serious about their beliefs. Plus, my faith really messed me up about being gay and joining the Assembly really didn’t help things.

It was several years of Bible Studies, prayer meetings, Sunday worship meetings, and campus Bible studies along with various convocations and seminars in Fullerton. The central figure of the Assembly was a sixty-ish man named George Geftakys, whose secret adulteries would be the Assembly’s downfall. Though many of the members lived together in “brother’s homes” or “sister’s homes,” I never moved in with any of them.

I left the group early in 1997. I read a write-up about them in cult expert Ronald Enroth’s Churches That Abuse (his bias is very Christian) and decided to leave. I tried fitting in another church but I would soon lose my faith within a year and a half after leaving the Assembly. I also came to terms with being gay and I decided I didn’t want to be in a religion that would exclude me. Plus, I was fed up with a lot of things Christian, cultish or not.

The Assembly fell apart last year. “Brother George’s” adulteries became known and he was excommunicated from the group he founded. I heard about this from a member I would occasionally run into at the SDSU campus. It was news that simultaneously makes you gleeful and sad at the time. I felt like there was justice and that perhaps there was a God; however, I felt sorry for the people who were duped until the very end.

So this brings me to what I wanted to talk about. Several months ago, I found a BB for ex-members of this group. I joined, I posted, and I mentioned in passing that I was now an agnostic. Most of the people welcomed me even though a majority of the posters on the board were still hardcore fundamentalists. I would post things on various threads but very few of the posts would get responses. One person started a thread about Governor Schwartzenegger’s “girlie men” comment, the poster’s tone being very anti-gay. Several other people spoke up with similar comments and then two of the BB’s resident non-Christians spoke up against the derogatory posts. I decided to speak up as well, saying these posts bothered me, and then I came out several posts later. This, of course, invited some of these people to bait me into arguments or go on the offensive with attacking me or the other non-Christians in their posts. The discussion soon took a really stupid turn. Maybe I feel it’s stupid because I’ve heard these anti-gay arguments so many times before and these people have said nothing new. The positive thing is that I have developed correspondences with one of my non-Christian allies and someone else who is very open-minded.

I wonder what a “Survivors/Escapees” reunion would be like. I would imagine that the fundamentalists would take up most of the tables and there would be the corner for the agnostics, atheists, liberals, gays, etc. Hopefully us heathens would be able to get some food (I think we’d certainly be the ones with good drinks).

I envy my friends who will never know what it’s like to have gotten sucked into a system like that. I guess it makes for an interesting past but it took away a good part of my twenties that I will never get back. At least I’m not 50 and feeling I lost several decades due to this.

It will be nice to start grad school & work again after a summer’s break. This week, I just have too much time on my hands.

I spent a lot of time on the computer today. I woke up to a late start (close to 10), went online for a few hours and then spent the rest of the day more or less working on my website. Since I had a lot of the images done from the other day, I worked on creating HTML files to present them. I just want to present Resplendence in a way that satisfies me. I also worked on a few other things for the site as well. The new things will be up soon.

I had to get out of the house, so I went to the Y for some exercise and a relaxing swim. Funny thing is I always wind up watching the Food Channel when I’m using one of the cardio machines.

I took the trolley home and then I went to the Twiggs across the street, had some coffee and read Borge’s Ficciones. I just started reading it yesterday (I’ve read the “Tlon” story before), and I love the use of paradox. It certainly kicks Fiction International‘s ass! And it puts the Missouri Review to shame as well. Anne Waldman’s and Lewis Warsh’s Angel Hair Anthology kicks those journals’ asses too.

I need to clean my apartment. Yuck. I think I’ll do this tomorrow morning.

I’m not too happy about the former student complaining about her grade. Maybe I’m out of line here but, as a teacher, I don’t believe disrespect should be rewarded with a plum grade. This person was constantly disruptive, left class early a lot, had more unexcused absences than excused absences, glared, and saw it fit to verbally assault me. A B+ is quite generous for it is reflective of above average level of competence but it’s not exemplary. Her conduct certainly was not exemplary.

Somehow, I don’t think I’ll hear from her. I think she talked to my department head to leave a sting, to make me look bad. I also wonder if it’s attention seeking. I’m certainly not going to contact her. I’m certainly not going to change the grade.

I just want to get on with this semester. Can I have a boring life again? At least I’ll have my imagination to entertain me.

Today has been the day of computer headaches.

This morning, when I was formatting some tifs on Photoshop into gifs for my website, my Zip drive crashed. I tried restarting the computer over and over and inserting Zip disks to no avail. It works now but it’s irritating it took being away from my computer all day for it to be ok.

I went to my mother’s house in the afternoon to install the DSL modem & software on her computer. Everything went ok but the computer crashed after everything was in place. It has had a nasty habit of crashing for the past 8 months within minutes of the computer being online. In order to install the DSL modem, I had to enable some networking software. When I enabled it, I thought the problems would be gone. After the computer restarted after installation, it crashed after it went online. It crashed a few times after that. I now suspect it’s Windows is not reading the internet program very well. The crash has occured sometime after a friend of my mother’s installed a version of Windows to allow for Japanese input. Since I’m not a computer expert, it’s only a theory and it has me banging my head.

After that, I went to the YMCA in Mission Valley to work out. I haven’t worked out in two weeks and exercizing can really kick your ass if you’re out of the loop for a certain period of time. So now I want to get back into the swing of things. After the workout, I had a nice relaxing swim like last night.

I just read Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s of reminiscent of her Hainish material though this new stuff isn’t related to it at all. Travel to these worlds is by inter-planary (which almost sounds interdimensional) instead of taking years to travel by NAFAL (Nearly As Fast As Lighht) ships. Instead of the Ekumen, there is the Interplanary Agency. For communication, instead of the anisble (which makes communication across light years possible), there is the translatomat to facilitate communication between people of different planes. There are diverse worlds in which to explore humanity through many different types of cultures, beliefs, and in some cases, phenotypes.

With the planes, one society is riddled with the consequences of genetically engineering living things from plants to people without understanding genetics or evolution (they did not have a Darwin or a Mendel), another society follows an avian pattern of migration in their life cycle (reproduce and raise family in the north, live life in the south), while another society lives in silence. Some of the societies have been interfered with by others, such as the avian migration pattern society. A group of foreign visitors represent themselves as a rational society and try to force their patterns of industry, high technology, medicine, life without a cycle, and migration at any time on these people. Some enterprising Americans, people from our plane, commercially colonize an island archiplago in another plane and turn it into a grotesque, worse than Disneyland, worse than Las Vegas, artificially touristy place. The Interplanary Agency is able to prevail on the behalf of these societies and freedom from colonizers is restored.

Changing Planes is reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones and Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. Borges’s story “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” certainly comes to mind with the mythic, pseudo-historical realm of Tlon where mirrors are forbidden comes to mind. The way people are able to move from one plane to another in Changing Planes evokes the teleportation in The Stars My Destination, which renders most forms of transportation on Earth obsolete.

A delicious read indeed.