more life in limbo

it's been almost a full 4 months since i've been in limbo, and i've thought of enough stuff to write up a bit about life as of late. how does a person manage infinite time?

in an average life, most people can divide their time in 4 sections: productive time (work or school), church/fellowship/serving life, family and friend relations, and fun free time. the productive time usually is a very large part for most people, but for those unemployed, this time now becomes freed, and as a result must be distributed between the other parts of life. therefore, any issues regarding those 3 sections of life are also magnified. i've already said my bit about difficulties living at home. that's been diverging to a plateau, so it's been manageable as of late. i have tried to do more things at church, but for obvious reasons i cannot just DO things at church to fill time, but there is a very direct connection between serving and your spiritual life and your relationship with God. i experienced 2 worship teams at a time for the first time, and that was a party and a half. i had something like 5 worship practices in 2 or 3 weeks. i got to experience the differences in style in 2 teams and that was interesting. i have since said no to a group and things will be back to normal. teaching the gr12 sunday school's been going okay so far, but the real test is coming up this week. the one thing out of the ordinary that i've been doing is the tutoring, which is starting to get a bit routine but it's moderately enjoyable and keeps my brain working. it's a shock when you see something an engineer would consider fundamental and how you have actually forgotten it (what is a cross product again.. and how do you do vector proving questions :|)

i taught on "spiritual identity" at sunday school this week, with some material taken from the "making sense of church" sermon series by jon tyson, and i find it quite relevant to what i am experiencing. in the sermon, he defined modernism as "where reality validates media" and postmodernism to be "where media validates reality". we are in a postmodern age. we are so entranced by the media and overstimulated senses that it begins to shape our worldview (looking out) and our identity (looking in). we begin to see real events like it was from a movie. how did we get so desensitized to pain and suffering in the world? maybe because we watched too many movies with people dying. but not only that, our timing moves at the same rate as a movie. we never see movies that have boring scenes because it is not fun to watch. but in life, there are times where it has to be boring, but we cannot accept that because that is not the same pace as a movie. our timing is screwed up and we don't know how to wait. i don't know how to wait for a job opportunity.

secondly, i said in class that people often define you by what you do. we start our conversations with "what have you been up to?" if you know them, or "what do you do for a living?" or "what do you study?" if you don't know them. well lucky me, those questions do not apply to me. limbo means you do not fit in the social definition of identity, and we are looked down upon. an article i read up in a business week magazine says that unemployment is getting worse for those just graduating from university, because there aren't enough jobs opened and people won't retire because of the instability and risk. when employers look for people, they naturally frown upon those with gaps in their resume, but really they are subconsciously discriminating those victims of the recession-induced unemployed generation, who are probably more than capable to do the work (ahem, me). the work force says they want me, but they don't actually want me.

we naturally agree that we can get along best with those most similar to us. i am no longer a student, but i am not a working professional. well lucky me, guess what all my friends are. i have seen a pretty obvious decline in interactions with people, whether i was close to them or not before.. but the change occurred in the span of months. and the reasons sometimes understandable. people just don't have as much time to sit in front of their computers to just talk to me. but it is clear that the things that all the students and young professionals are doing.. i am not doing these things. so you have just lost one very large slice of conversation pie because i don't do the things that you do. interesting enough that the people that i've been seeing more often are also unemployed.. granted that they are close friends, but they are in the same stage as me. i am not complaining, but i just think people should smarten up a bit, because these boundaries as mentioned are at best defined by society and relationships should not be based on stupy society. for some time i panicked that i have become less interesting because i'm in limbo, but then i shook it off and realized that was bull crap. we can all do better, no matter what stage of life we are in.

i'm coming to enjoy some of the perks of limbo. some of you would pay me if i could transfer sleep to you.. 10 hours of sleep a day is just a beauty. doing quadrant 4 stuff is sometimes a waste of time.. but with infinite time, you can afford a few hours to play video games or whatever haha.. quite fun. procrastination never felt better because i give myself a full week to do stuff.. and if you don't make it, then there's always next week. if i wanted to, i can take trips whenever i want, while you are all chained to your school and work. and because i tutor, i get money by teaching kids stuff that is engineering bread and butter.. easy stuff after you glance at your old textbooks again haha, so it funds my fun activities, toys, etc.

the good? the bad? if only we could decide what we want.