Source image from NASA.

I’ve actually done quite a bit of writing over the last year, mostly for work. Since this website was at one point supposed to be a portfolio, I figure I’ll cross-post some of the pieces I’ve written for anyone who’s interested.

So! Since it went live on Monday, here are my thoughts on singleness via my workplace.

4 Reasons Accountability is Critical for Singles

“It is not good for man to be alone.”

If you’re at all familiar with this verse, you’re probably used to hearing it in the context of marriage. Perhaps you’ve heard it in a sermon or during a wedding ceremony.

And if you’re living in prolonged singleness, perhaps every time you hear it, you feel somewhat less-than-sufficient for not having somebody. Or maybe the opposite is true, and you have a sense of smug superiority, and you think to yourself, “Relationships are for other people. Me? I can do it all on my own.”

But this verse is about more than marriage. Nobody, not even those who choose singleness, is ever called to do life alone. Jesus always sent the disciples out in pairs, and Paul always traveled with companions. Or consider James 5:16, which says, “Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another so that you may be healed.”

In reality, we singles need to stick together. Those of us who live alone are especially vulnerable to temptation simply because there’s nobody there to walk in on us. So whether our temptations are to watch pornography or to waste our lives on TV or video games or to wallow in bitterness over our lack of relationships, accountability is critical for us to continue growing in Christ.

Read the rest…

This is my local grocery store. More to the point, this is the construction blocking my usual parking spot at my local grocery store.

I was…less than thrilled when I saw this, mostly because this work required a change in the flow of traffic, and also because there was no advanced warning. Most construction areas have some sort of sign, advertising the future site of some building or other. Nothing here, though, just signs telling you that all of a sudden the drive is one-way, and lots of fences and confusion. All this on a busy Sunday afternoon when the students are back in town. Needless to say, it was not the most enjoyable shopping trip I’ve ever had.

A friend called just after I finished unloading groceries. She’d had a bad week and, understandably, needed to decompress. (Among other, more personal things, she was forced to switch offices because hers had black mold.) And she asked me how a rather large personal project was going. (The answer? Stressful.)

And after she hung up the phone, I thought about the grocery shopping experience in conjunction with my friend’s and my stress, and thought: “Construction is irritating and inconvenient. But this means improvement follows. Sometimes the outcome is visible; sometimes it’s not. But it often means good things are coming.”

1. Visible Outcomes

Inconvenience is easiest to deal with when you know why it’s happening. For example, I’m usually patient with road construction, especially if it’s on a road I drive frequently. I can handle a few months of slower traffic if it means that a large patch of potholes are going away. Or Weight Watchers. I’ve been on it for a year now. It’s a pain to forego the candy or french fries, and I know I’ll always have to be careful about what I eat, but the positive goal of actually being a healthy weight for the first time since high school means I’m willing to keep at it, especially since I’ve already seen certain benefits.

My personal project falls in this camp. It requires a lot of hard work and eats up a lot of my free time, and there’s no guarantee of success, but if things work out it will be well worth the trouble.

(By the way, I’m not quite ready to talk about the personal project on public channels, but I’m willing to talk about it if you ask.)

2. Invisible Outcomes

It’s harder to deal with inconvenience (or worse) when you don’t know why it’s there. My friend’s office move falls into this category. My own office had its own set of stupid drama about a year ago. I’ve seen a depressing number of people lose jobs. My dad was (semi-voluntarily) unemployed for several months. Several friends have had rough pregnancies. At least one has had a miscarriage. My car has broken down more times than I can count. Some of these are worse than others, and I feel bad about lumping things like, say, my office drama and my friend’s miscarriage in the same category. “Inconvenience” is far too mild a word. But large or small, such things result in a (hopefully short-term) lifestyle alteration, often with no visible purpose.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not there. I’m a firm believer that “All things work together for the good of those that love God.” For instance, at my workplace, we had constant upheaval for months. It seemed like just as we finally adapted from the previous change, some new chaos was introduced. But we finally shook things out, and honestly, all the turmoil truly did make the Marketing department, at least, a much better team than we had been. Or for my friend, the inconvenience of having to switch offices may result in better relationships with her new officemates. Or, in a rather dramatic example, my company’s president lost his wife and children in a horrible accident with a semi, and eventually used the settlement money from the trucking company to start the company. I quite possibly would not have a job had he not lost his family years ago, not to mention the fact that the service our president created has helped countless people overcome Internet pornography addictions.

This don’t make inconveniences, big or small, much easier to handle. But just about all inconveniences can be opportunities if you let them.

One of my workplace’s traditions is a Christmas decorating contest. We’re encouraged to go all out on decorations, and one day at lunch the executive team will wander through the office, freely accepting bribes. The winners receive things like free bagels for the department.

Here’s the thing about our Marketing department. We are a busy, jaded bunch who manage to squeeze in more stuff than we can probably technically handle. We’ve had a surprising number of bonding experiences and enjoy each other a lot, but we also don’t really know how to justify “fun” (e.g. “decorating”) when we really have about 20 things to do within the next 5 hours. Last year we pulled together a last-second haphazard Star Wars Christmas theme (complete with a tree topped with a cutout of the Death Star), but our judges being the wrong kind of nerds, we (deservedly) did not even remotely place. Last year’s winners were our Customer Service Representatives (they completely wrapped their desks or something); our User Experience department for creating an interactive event focused on the execs’ experience; and the Developers, for going with a “We’re Developers” theme and doing things like a Christmas tree made out of Mountain Dew cans.

So how would a marketing department compete with that?

A depressingly accurate artistic rendition of the Christmas Ball

Fast forward to this year. Our Project Manager came in carrying something the Internets tell me is called a “Kissing Ball.” This green garlandy thing had silver-painted bells and holly pinned to it and a loop for convenient hanging. It jingled when you moved it. It was also pretty dang ugly when hanging like that. On the other hand, it immediately garnered several unique reactions.

“It looks like intercontinental ballistic mistletoe.”

“It’s the Death Star masked in shrubbery!”

At some point in there, we started discussing what we would actually do for our Christmas decorations.

“You know what would be great?” our blogger said. “We should just leave it at this one decoration and do a full presentation on why the Christmas Ball is the ultimate decoration.”

From there, an idea was born. We started gathering reaction quotes from coworkers (“What do you think of our lovely decoration?” “It’s lovely.”) The blogger and I brainstormed some of the features of the Christmas Ball, which we fleshed out in a PowerPoint presentation. The Christmas Ball even invaded my dreams. I woke up at 4:30 last Thursday morning and couldn’t stop giggling because of the way the blogger was presenting it in my dream.

I then got up and created a landing page and lead nurturing campaign.

Oh yes. You see, we’re good little marketers after all the training we’ve had this year. We can spit out stats like none other and run successful presentations in our very dreams. We are marketing machines.

This landing page was followed by two more nights of insomnia (long story), the result of one of which was a brochure. The night before, the Project Manager had the awesome idea of buying some dollar store flashlights to shine on the Christmas Ball, and the day of the judging (12/20), she added the idea of doing a singalong to that great Christmas classic, “O Christmas Ball.”

And the presentation? You can see it for yourself. (The password is MarketingBall79.)

All in all, it was a success. We won third place (coffee and pastries), and we got to make fun of ourselves in the process. For what’s the fun in life if you can’t have a little madness every now and again?

So this post by danah boyd popped up in my RSS feed. Go read it – it’s short – but the gist is that a girl who is forbidden from using Facebook by her parents but uses it anyway has a therapist who (a) lets her use Facebook at her office and (b) actually talks about what she’s doing online.

Now, there are a few things to say about that. First, the girl should have obeyed her parents as long as she’s underage. I mean, it’s one of the 10 Commandments. Even if you don’t agree from the moral perspective, they still have years of experience (and theoretically wisdom) on the girl, and are looking out for her. Second, I don’t think the therapist should have allowed – and actively encouraged! – the girl’s disobedience, even in a controlled environment.

That being said, there’s a remarkable amount of good stuff to glean from such a short article:

1. Parents (probably) shouldn’t forbid their kids from using social networks. danah rightly points out that such parents “don’t understand that they’re pushing their kids to choose between social status and parental obedience.” This girl chose disobedience, which I suspect contributed strongly to her depression.Now, no parent will ever be perfect – my own, for example, in trying to teach me to make wise food decisions, tightly controlled what I ate, and thus made food a bigger deal in my life than it should have been, which partially led to my overindulging and current weight problems. (I think they did an excellent job in most other areas, but fully admit I’m biased.)Point being: prohibition, especially of things other people do commonly (whether it be keeping candy around the house or going on Facebook), may actually encourage disobedience.
2. Parents should talk to their kids about what they do online. The therapist is actually doing the parents’ job for them – “They have discussions around her photos and her friend’s status updates.” This is exactly what parenting is about (and what Covenant Eyes provides) – actually talking through decisions. “Is this photo appropriate for a profile pic? Why or why not?” “How much personal information should you share?” “What privacy settings do you have set up? How can we change those?”

The marketing professional in me says it’s now time to sell you on Covenant Eyes. However, since most of the people who I expect to read this aren’t parents (and since this is supposed to be my personal blog, not a corporate one), I’ll spare you the pitch and instead, close with danah’s final thought:

If you’re a parent, please think twice before you get all control-freak on your teen kids. They need space to engage with friends in a healthy manner. And regardless of how you grew up, that means the Internet today. Exclusion isn’t a solution.

In fact, the main reason I finally broke down to write this post is because it’s 4:00 AM, I have the kind of insomnia that’s curable only by sleeping aids or by solving my problems, and I don’t have my work laptop here to work on the new website.

(“Problem solving” insomnia is my most frequent form. I’ll wake up after 3-4 hours with a problem cycling through my head and be unable to sleep until it is solved. Given that we launch our new website on Monday, I don’t expect to sleep much between then and now.)

So: blogging.

My last blog post was posted in August, but set in June. Since then my life has felt like a series of catastrophes.

• My deadlines have been increasing deadlines at work. See also: new website launch scheduled for Monday.
• My car has been in and out of the repair shop all summer (I’m taking it in again on Friday, in fact). This culminated in a dead battery on Thursday night, followed immediately by a flat tire on Friday (a slow leak, fortunately). I think I’ll have put in around $1500 in repairs all told.
• Two good friends have moved out of state.
• My internet went out again for 3 weeks (not the ISP’s fault; just took me too much time to fix).

In all honesty, none of these things would have been unbearable had they been spread out. But when there’s a new crisis every week for three months straight, it gets to be a bit wearing.

Meanwhile, there were roses.

The thing about the pruning is this: it did indeed lead to rather beautiful roses all summer long. I think the new growth started within a day or two, in fact. They finally died, though, somewhere between mid-August and September. No growth of any sort; just dead buds.

And I thought: this is it for the season.

Between that time and now my car had its second batch of issues (the first batch took 3 mechanics to fix, mind). And the second of the two friends moved. And my modem had issues. And the deadlines increased.

I began to regret choosing roses as the symbol for my apartment.

Except: there is one thing still. And that is this: There is always new growth.

I walked outside about five minutes ago and took this photo. It’s not very good, but it shows something I noticed…yesterday, I think, or the day before.

It is Fall. The buds may not survive a cold snap. Or maintenance may come through and hack away again. Or something else unimaginable may happen to halt their growth.

But there is growth, and there will be growth again. And for now, this is enough.

The Last Rose faded to oblivion on a Wednesday. On Thursday, I read Did I Kiss Marriage Goodbye? while waiting for the technician to arrive. On Sunday my car died. Long story short, but I did not like the dealer where I took it, so I only had them fix one of the two things that went seriously wrong with it. (It since died again and I got the real problem fixed…another saga for another day, perhaps.)

These things are not why it took me so long to write this post.

A friend of mine loaned me a car while mine was in the shop. Driving back from work that Tuesday in late June, my mood still black, I parked and looked in the rear view mirror and nearly cried.

My rosebuds were gone. Maintenance had come through and hacked at the roses. Pruning, technically, but in the same way that tying your hair in a pony tail and chopping it off in one fell swoop is a haircut. One had even been starting to open. Only one bud was left, and for the sole reason that it happened to be lower than the rest.

I picked up my car the next morning, half-fixed, and contemplated Job on the drive. Job, who lost literally everything in a very brief period.

At 3:00 that afternoon, the managers pulled the entire company into the conference room to make an announcement.

Trying to explain this tactfully is why I’ve had a hard time writing this post.

I was only tangentially affected by the announcement, but (keeping this purposefully vague) the decision they announced was not one I – or many coworkers – wholeheartedly agreed with. And there was a distinct sense of loss associated with this decision. I trust them to have not made the decision lightly, and am still happy there. But there was discontent among the ranks for a time after the decision was announced, and for me personally, this moment marked the end of the Honeymoon period. Things are still good there, but (cough hack) the rose-colored glasses are off.

One of the nice things about where I work is that there is strong support for walking – a mile at 11:00 and 3:00 every day for those who want to go. At 3:45 that day many of us took off for our customary walk around the block. All of us were buzzing: “What? Why?”

All I could think about, though, were my roses, so roughly pruned the night before.

There’s a concept – resource allocation. Carefully distributing your resources. In business, this means investing more heavily in one project with higher impact than a low-impact project. My friend Lindsey studies a similar concept in house wrens. I’m probably summarizing her research badly, but basically wrens will invest more heavily in eggs of a certain shell color – a better quality – than others. Plants, I think, are the same way. Sure, you can let a plant go everywhere, but my very rudimentary understanding of, say, grapes on a vine is that grapes grow larger on pruned vines because there are fewer places for a plant to distribute resources than in an untended vine.

This is one of the reasons my rose bushes were pruned, though an actual gardener (as opposed to the apartment maintenance guy) would have probably left more of the buds for me. Pruning happens. Sometimes it is painful, but it is necessary for growth.

And that’s the third lesson of the rose bushes.

When I got home that night, still unhappy from the day, I turned to the last remaining bud.

“You had better be the most beautiful rose yet,” I told it.

Of the two rose bushes , the one on the left bloomed first. Seven or eight roses, all at once. The one on the right, meanwhile, only had one bud on it. It finally bloomed as the roses on the left bush were starting to fall apart.

I named it. It was the Last Rose. I greeted it each time I came in or walked out the door. And it was my favorite part of the apartment, especially since that was the week my Internet died.

I wrote the relevant blog post on a Sunday. I lost service the previous Tuesday and didn’t get it back until the following Thursday. Given the fact that the service box was about 300 feet from the Internet Service Provider’s service building, which itself is located right next to my apartment complex, needless to say I’m slightly bitter about the fact that it took so long and so many phone calls to finally get it fixed.

Wednesday was the worst day. By this point I was convinced that I would never get the Internet back and I was going to die a crazy cat lady, alone and unloved. (If something’s going wrong for longer than expected, I have a slight tendency to imagine the absolute worst, whether related to the current situation or not.) This was conviction was strengthened when I looked in the rearview mirror as I pulled into my carport and realized the Last Rose was gone.

It had seemed strong that morning. Definitely starting to wilt, but I didn’t expect it to be…gone.

There is a life cycle, and part of this cycle is death.

Things break.

The story of my last few weeks can be illustrated through my roses. I have a few rose bushes growing right next to my apartment door. Note that I had nothing to do with their existence; in fact, as they weren’t in bloom when I looked at the apartment, I didn’t even realize they existed. Over the last month, they’ve become one of my favorite things about this apartment. At least part of that is because of what I’ve learned from them. Since there’s a surprisingly long list, I plan to write several entries.

Today’s story is tied up with my fridge. I started my lease a week before I was due to move in. The first day of the lease, I did three things. The first was to unpack a very small number of items I had brought with me. The second was to start the inspection process (during which I discovered a major leak in the downstairs bathroom sink). The third was to buy groceries, since I was coming from renting a basement and had very few refrigerated or frozen supplies. With these things done, I left and didn’t return again until Thursday.

My friend Ellen came with me that time. “Ooh, you have roses!” she said. I still hadn’t noticed, though they were probably starting to bud at this point. I gave her a quick tour and, in the process of this, opened the fridge door to reveal that the fridge (which, I could tell, was brand new) had stopped running, ruining everything that was in there. A call to maintenance had me pressing the reset button on the outlet. Fridge running, I left.

I stopped by on Friday again, mostly to drop off sandwich materials for the move the next day. I then discovered that the fridge was no longer working and I couldn’t reset the outlet.

There was a rumble of thunder as I called maintenance. (His solution, for the record, was to run an extension cord to the living room.)

Saturday was the move, followed by the discovery that the pilot light on my gas had burned out, meaning no hot water. Monday I lost water pressure in the kitchen sink. The fridge saga lasted until the following Thursday, when they finally brought me a new fridge. A month and a half later, this one still works, but there are a ton of other minor maintenance issues that I’m just avoiding for the time being.

What does this have to do with my roses?

On Saturday, as I escorted my parents out of the apartment, I happened to look at my rose bushes and discovered a little toad, hiding from the heat among the thorns. I think I sat and watched him do absolutely nothing for a good five minutes. It may have been just a brief pause for him; I haven’t seen him since.

But object lesson 1 is this: There is shelter, even among the thorns.