Category: Personal

I’ve been living in Kalamazoo for eight months exactly today. For a number of reasons (that I hope to get into soon), it has taken me that long to find a church home. Before college, I belonged to a wonderful church – Town & Country Christian Church in Shelbyville, IN – that I still consider home to this day. In College, I found two churches that I attended regularly – World Gospel Church and Maryland Community Church, both in Terre Haute, IN. My move to Michigan began what turned out to be an eight-month drought, with respect to my Christian fellowship. Now, I’ve finally found a church that I am very happy with – Kalamazoo Valley Family Church. Most importantly, I have connected with a great group of people my age there. Brett, Jason, and all you guys, I really look forward to the time we will spend together.

I’m also attending the church’s Get a Grip on the Basics class, a prerequisite to church membership, and also to serving in the church. Not only does the church’s beliefs align very closely with my own, I am also stretching my faith for the first time in a long time (and I will get into this topic soon, also). I mentioned in the Theater section that participating with the Kalamazoo Civic Theater made me feel for the first time that I was a part of the community here. Kalamazoo Valley Christian Church has made me feel for the first time that I am finally at home in Kalamazoo.

Okay, so I’ve been procrastinating a *little* bit since my last entry.

Strike that – I’ve been downright lazy…

Do you realize how much can happen in three and a half months? So much, in fact, I would be just as well-off starting this little journal project over from scratch.

Let’s see if I can bring myself back up-to-date. I’m now living in Kalamazoo, MI. I graduated May 27, and moved here June 9. I’m here because I have accepted a job offer – for those of you familiar with previous entries, this job is in fact with the same company with whom I interviewed right before Spring Break – the one with whom I had a second interview. All told, the process ended up taking FOUR interviews – one at school, one in the office in Indy, another in the Indy office with the Kalamazoo manager, and a final interview in Kalamazoo with the manager and the five guys already working here. By the fourth interview, I was fairly certain that I would be getting an offer; but, to make things interesting, the offer didn’t come until the day before graduation.

I think a lot of people don’t understand the culture of my school, with respect to job offers. At my school, all the *top* prospects have job offers within the first couple of months of senior year. The majority of students actively looking for jobs have offers by the time graduation rolls around. Thus, it is generally the slackers, whether it be scholastically, or in the job search, who graduate without standing job offers. Well, due to my financial situation, I wasn’t able to even start my job search until the middle of January, putting me eons behind all the other graduating seniors looking for jobs. Looking at the companies I interviewed with, I actually had a 50% offer rate; granted, I only interviewed with two companies.

So anyway, now I’m living in Kalamazoo, a good four and a half hours from my old life in Terre Haute, iN. By far, the most ironic occurrence related to my move had to do with dating. In my five years in college, I had never dated anyone for longer than, oh, three weeks. So, now we come to the end of my senior year, and what do you suppose happens? If you guessed that I started dating someone, well, I guess you’re just psychic, or managed to pick up on my completely non-subtle segue. I was actually “dating” a girl from the Woods. I say “dating” and not dating because, in all actuality, it was never anything very serious. But, even though it pretty much ended with my move to Kalamazoo, it was fun while it lasted, and upped my three-week barrier up to three months.

So now, I’m starting all over in Kalamazoo. I’ve been here for almost a month now (today actually marks four weeks). I’m situated at work, and when my parents get in later this evening with a truckload of furniture from home, I’ll pretty much be all set in my apartment (except for the state-of-the-art entertainment center that I haven’t bought yet, since I’m being good and staying out of debt as much as possible). It’s a really nice feeling to be able to make, save and spend money, instead of living the poor, starving college kid life. But, right now anyway, it’s a tradeoff for having to start my social life all over from scratch. I’m getting the seeds planted – I’ll be visiting my second church this weekend, I’ve gotten information from the Civic Theater about getting involved there, and I’m trying to find people to play tennis with. I figure it all happens slowly, especially with not having the college atmosphere – the ready-made social circle. Fortunately, Kalamazoo is also a college town – Western Michigan University and Kalamazoo College to name the two biggest ones – which means, starting in the fall at least, there are plenty of people my age here.

I’ve also been doing my best to keep up with the Atkins Diet (the lack of tennis hasn’t helped matters, but hopefully that will change). For those keeping track, I’m at about 205, which represents a total loss of 65 pounds since January. And actually, I’ve been “maintaining” that weight since the beginning of May. That comes out to an astonishing 16 pounds per month that I lost between January and May. Between the tennis season ending (thus, two-hour daily practices ending), and a major life-changing event (graduation and moving), I haven’t made a conscious effort to lose recently. Now that I’m pretty much settled in, I’m starting back up again. My intent is to take a martial arts class, which, combined with a regular tennis regimen, should provide ample exercise to keep the fat-burning fires ablaze. I actually only want to lose another 25 pounds or so. I have a week-long conclave to attend for my chemistry fraternity, for which I am a voting delegate, and I will have to buy a new suit for the banquet, since the one I (my mom) bought in March is also now getting too big. I would like to lose as much of my 25 pound goal as possible before the middle of August, so that the suit-buying trend won’t keep up at the same rate that I’ve had to buy new belts. At $300 a pop, it gets to be a bit much!

Well, now that things are getting more back-to-normal, I should be able to be much better with keeping up with the journal.

Only time will tell…

Q E D

Today was a very strange day. Wednesdays have become my “recovery” days; since I’m so busy the rest of the week, I have made a habit of doing a lot of relaxing on Wednesday. That habit pretty much held true today. Other than my one pointless class, I pretty much did nothing until tennis practice and the tennis meet this evening. Our meet with the University of Chicago was at 6:00, so we went ahead and practiced at our usual 4:00. When practice ended, I changed shirts and put on my sandals, expecting to be finished playing for the day. But, as I always do, I stayed around for the meet, to root on the rest of the team. As the coach was announcing the lineup, he looked over at me and said, “Chip, you’re going to be playing singles tonight.” To which my reply was, “wh..what was that? I don’t think I heard you right.” So he repeated it. I was pumped…I was actually going to get to play a match. Sure, it was #8 singles, so it wouldn’t count toward the meet score, but it was still a match.

Since I wouldn’t be playing for at least another hour or two, I decided to go put in an hour of work study at the phonathon. Maybe it was just my attitude since I was in such a great mood, but in about an hour, I made over $1000…not a bad night given the full three hours of work. In my excitedness, I even called Amanda to tell her that I was going to get to play. She had a really bad headache, but said that if she was feeling well enough, she would try to come.

As it turns out, it’s a good thing she didn’t make it. The #7 singles player for UC claimed to be sick, so he backed out of his match. That’s fine…at that point I was thinking, “well, isn’t that just my usual luck…I actually get to play, and the guy gets sick.” But hey, that’s life; it sucked, but I understood.

No problem.

Pretty much, that meant that their #8 player would move up to play in the #7 position, and there was no one to fill the #8 spot. Which of course, meant no match for me to play. So, I went back to watching the matches and cheering the team. We were ahead 3-0, and close to winning two a couple of other matches (4 points win the meet, so we only needed one more). I decided to go watch the #6 singles match, since it was close and the guy for our team is one of my fraternity brothers. As I was walking over to his court, I saw that the UC #7 singles player, the same player too sick to play a match, was out hitting on one of the courts. He was out there hitting for a good hour. I don’t usually get angry about anything, but that pissed me off. I don’t think I let on very much that I was upset, but I commented to our coach about it, and he was upset about it, too. Well, we ended up winning the meet 5-2, and I went home just looking forward to practice tomorrow, when I would be able to get back on to the court to play.

I got back to my room, and started talking to Amanda on ICQ. I was telling her about what had happened, and she pretty much tried to tell me not to worry about it, because “things don’t always go the way you want them to.” Now, of course she was right, but that was about the last thing I wanted to hear at the time. Now, because of her shoulder, she has not been able to play softball. Her passion for softball is pretty much equal to my passion for tennis, and she had to admit that she knew how I felt. I really wasn’t in a good mood, and I think I made some curt comment and went into the other room. At the time, I didn’t tell her that there was a lot more to why I was in a bad mood than just the tennis meet. It had to do with how I reacted to the situation in light of other things going on in my life. But I didn’t want to talk about it at the time, because I didn’t think that she really wanted to hear it then. So I went to hang out in another room for like an hour or so.

Rene was in the other room, and I don’t remember how it came up, but she also mentioned that she had heard that someone at the Woods was interested in me. I told her that I wanted a name, and since she’s cool like that, she told me. She also said that I should really try to meet her if given the opportunity, and that she was “really pretty, and a really nice girl.” Apparently, she’s a graduate student, and about 23, which is fine, because I’m 22. I was really tired, experiencing a little bit of heat exhaustion (from playing tennis in the afternoon sun and not drinking enough water), and wasn’t in a really good mood, so I hope she didn’t get the impression that I wasn’t interested in meeting this girl. I am, but I just wasn’t really able to demonstrate much enthusiasm at the time.

I decided to go to bed, since I was pretty tired, but when I got back to my room, Amanda had sent me another message asking me where I had gone. I replied, and intended to take care of the good-night formalities and just go to bed, but she actually pressed me to talk about what was wrong. So I started going into it.

It was, and still is, really difficult to explain. My mind saw the excitement I experienced when I was told I was going to play, followed by the disappointment right at the moment of fulfilling that excitement, due to a situation over which I had no control, and which could have been prevented altogether had the person involved been honest from the start. Somehow, my mind made an analogy between that experience, and pretty much every experience I’ve ever had with a girl in my life (which, by definition would be a disappointing experience). Now, you may think that I’m exaggerating, but I’m really not. I could compare that tennis meet with what happened with Sarah, with what happened with other girls at the Woods and at Rose, what happened with girls in high school…and on and on. I’ve honestly never had a successful relationship (by that I mean, I’ve never actually had a “girlfriend”)…the longest I’ve ever dated anyone before is three weeks. Most of the time, it doesn’t bother me. But sometimes, it just seems like I’m in some never-ending cycle (what the CS majors would call a recursive loop) that I can’t find any way out of. The optimist in me says that I just haven’t found the right girl yet, but the realist in me wonders if I’ll know how to handle myself when and if the “right girl” ever comes around. If all I’ve ever experienced is failure, how will I ever know how to be successful?

I started thinking about all of that, and it really got to me. I started to explain it all to Amanda, but we were both really tired and needed to go to bed, so we really didn’t get to talk as much as I would have liked. Oh well; that’s why I have this journal…so that I can air some of these kinds of thoughts and feelings.

It was a lot to digest for one day, and it made falling asleep pretty difficult. But, tomorrow is another day…

Q E D