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Earlier today, I had to endure the pain of having someone mention that my accent sounded Southern. I was horrified by the thought, and somewhat still am.

As I was walking through a hallway here at the university, it suddenly struck me: this isn't the first time that someone has made assumptions about where I live just from my mannerisms. A few weeks ago, someone else asked me if I happened to be from New York. It struck me as odd that someone would assume that I could be from New York. I mean, how do I seem like a Newyorker? Apparently, my style of dress, my nickname up here (Tony) and my slicked-back hair gave her the impression that I was some type of mafioso.

The irony is that… I actually am from New York. Technically, when I was really young, we did live in New York. So apparently, my Newyorker ways have not left me or something like that. Well, being from New York is kind of maybe something to be proud of. What I mean by that is that it certainly beats being called from the South. Still, I wish that someone could mistake me as being from some place cool… and when I say cool, I pretty much mean with a cool accent like… New England or New Orleans (even though it is technically in the South) or even right here in Minnesota. I've said it to people before, and I'll say it again: accents are one of the sexiest things about a person. I totally want to marry a broad from Minnesota just so that my daughters will have an awesome accent and such.

Anyway, regarding compliments, in that same hallway where some hours later, I remembered the New-York thing, some couple was walking through the corridor from the direction that I was headed. The female got my attention and said right in front of her husband, “You are such a snazzy dresser. I just wanted to let you know.” That's pretty much exactly what she said. I would hope that mom's proud of me. It's a far change from t-shirts and sweat pants.

Today, someone told me maybe the most depressing thing that I have ever heard in my life. I'm still young, and I'm sure that there are going to be moments of disappointment in life, but I don't see how any of them can compare to this.

Someone told me that I had a Southern accent.

Oh, I can understand how that might have come to be. After three years at a substandard university in the South, eventually, it will get to you, so I've been told. Well, I sound perfectly normal to myself, but I'm not the one who has to listen to myself all the time. It's other people who hear it.

So what's wrong with the South? You might be thinking that question. Honestly, the South has it's good points. Rock, jazz and blues (also known as the holy trinity of music) all had their roots in the South. Still, the South gave us country music as well, and that's a good enough reason for it to be blown of the face of the earth. Also, jazz and blues originated in New Orleans, and New Orleans is kind of an exception to the “South Sucks!” rule. Why's that? Well, in New Orleans… they have an accent of their own combined with a good deal of French heritage. It's the French that does it because most Southerners kind of see the French as queer/communist Formula-One fans, and that doesn't mesh well considering that many normal, non-Southern Americans just hate France anyway because it seems to be the cool thing to do.

The South also saw the birth of NASCAR. Don't get me wrong: NASCAR is great… if you like watching cars drive around in circles all day. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: NASCAR is pretty much rollerskating on steroids, or rollerskating is NASCAR on depressants. Contrast the NASCAR of the south to the ice hockey of the North. Now, ice hockey is a sport with action to it. Just to make things interesting, there's an average of a little less than one fight per game. Oh, people might call it violent and unsportsmanlike, but when you think about it, what's so unsportsmanlike about boxing? It's two guys hitting the teeth out of each other, and it's completely sportsmanlike. So, why is it bad to have a little of that in hockey?

Regardless of my musical or sport-viewing preferences, my accent has apparently taken on that of the remnants of the Confederacy. I know that there are several psychos in the South who would rather be spending the better part of a Saturday playing nineteenth-century dress up and reenacting the Battle of Shiloh or something. I am not one of them. My accent doesn't reflect that anymore. That's too bad because I like the fact that I don't drop y'all into my sentences. I like the fact that where I come from, we make fun of country music and square dancing. Still, I can't make too much fun of it, or else I'll end up the victim of a lynch mob kind of like those guys from Top Gear who drove through the South and almost died.

So, a Friday night means no classes the next day. With that, it's spectacular to spend the evening doing nothing. Well… by nothing, I mean nothing constructive. Well… by nothing constructive, I mean that we stayed up way past midnight. Still, that's when people have their best conversations.

What is it about tobacco that whenever I smoke it, the topic of conversation switches to theology? I think there's something in the plant that maybe makes us more theologically aware. Look at C. S. Lewis. I could picture Paul or Augustine puffing a pipe, but Europeans and Near Easterners didn't even have tobacco until the sixteenth century.¹ However, it's not what we were smoking that was important; it was the conversations afterwards that held the most meaning.

I realised that I still needed to complete an assignment due at noon on Saturday. Details aside, I ended up in the Smith basement at 2:00 AM. I happened to have to bum a quarter off of someone for a Coke, and, to be polite, I joined in on their conversation. We discussed communion, liberal Christianity, the problems with Pentecostalism, how the gift of speaking in tongues would apply to deaf people who utilise sign languages,² Christian kids songs³ and apologies. It was the last topic that aroused my attention. It was about should we or should we not apologise for minor errors.

Personally, I used to be a big believer in apologising for everything, forgiving everything and overlooking nothing. Today, I still believe in apologising for everything. I still believe in forgiving everything. However, my thoughts on overlooking things have changed. There once was a time when I didn't talk to my own brother for nearly four years because of a very, very minor fault that he never apologised for. It's sad that I didn't overlook it; I valued an apology more than a relationship.

Regardless of whether or not a fault should be overlooked, I do not believe that we have a privilege to assume or suggest that someone should forgive our faults; that's completely up to them. If we are going to go through the trouble of suggesting that someone overlook our faults, we might as well just admit that we screwed up and apologise. It's the prime example of schmuckness when we mess up then tell someone else not to be upset — even if it is true!

Despite the amazingness of 2:00 AM conversations, they don't make for good 3:00 AM reflections. In short, I'm going to sleep and sleep in.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange
2. Since all topics regarding language at SIL will always be reevaluated in light of sign languages.
3. Specifically, “I am a C-H-R-I-S-T-I-A-N”.

I just quit my job. I'm happy, but what am I going to do for money? Well, I have two other jobs, so I don't think that I'm screwed.

In the ninth century, Latin broke up into several different languages: Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian, Romanian… well, it just broke up. Latin was like the global language… in Europe. Today, English kind of acts as more or less of a global language. With communities of English speakers on opposite sides of the planet from Scotland to Australia, it would make sense that English might follow the example of Latin and break up into a dozen different languages.

I disagree. When you think about it, today's world has a neat little asset that they didn't have back in the ninth century: electricity. The period of time that we're living in is called the information age. I can sit in my little dorm room up here in Grand Forks while I watch my future wife get the tar beaten out of her by Venus Williams while it's happening on live television being broadcast to all four corners of the globe. It's kind of amazing when you stop to think about it.

Pretty much, geography has little to do with language now. Really, geography has little to do with anything now. Oh, I say that now, but later on, the world will probably have even faster means of transportation making it even more insignificant. Many Americans will listen to English rock stars and have no clue that their English. Still, people listen to ABBA and have no clue where they're from either. When the differences are that insignificant, I doubt that a case can be made that they're separate languages.

Why is it that when you wake up, hit the snooze button and then go back to bed that those eight minutes of sleep in the morning are more precious than the eight or less hours of sleep preceding those minutes?

He was a pest.

By he, I'm talking about my middle-school archnemesis. I don't apologise for calling this kid a pest or an annoyance because he was, and he knew it, and he was proud of it. I cannot tell you how much this kid annoyed me. For one thing, he wasn't a kid in the sense that he was younger than I was. In fact, he might have been older than I was. Still, he was incredibly immature to the degree that to this day, I still call him a kid.

Fast forward about seven or eight years. Here I am a senior in college. I've progressed in life. I'm up at a prestigious linguistic school. To pass the time, we will all occasionally go to a “restaurant” across the river in Minnesota. The greatest conversations that I have ever have have been coming back from the Blue Moose in East Grand Forks, Minnesota.

Tonight was such an evening. Coming back, we got on the topic of Honduran food because there's this really great Honduran restaurant in Siloam Springs. Someone asked me what Honduran food was. I responded that it was the same as Mexican food… or Colombian food or Cuban food or any sort of food “south of here”. Well, we happen to be pretty far north already just as far as the United States is concerned, so the phrase “south of here” could mean a whole bunch of things. One of our group happened to note that even though there was a lot of stuff to the south, there was still a lot of stuff to the north as well: Canada, Alaska, Siberia… As soon as he said Siberia, I had to point out that Siberia isn't technically to the north. You see, there is a point where you can go so far north that you can't go north anymore. Likewise, a similar situation exists with the south. In the Bible, God talks about how He separates our sins as far as the east is from the west.¹ I noticed that it was important that He didn't separate our sins as far as the north is from the south. Had He have said that instead of east from west, than there would have been a finite distance that our sins would have been separated from us.² However, a person cannot measure the distance from the east to the west. If you start walking east, you will never reach a point where you can't go more east. The same is true for the west.

With that said, another topic came up. This time, it was from the New Testament. It's significant that God would talk in infinite terms like that. However, there's an instance where He doesn't. In the New Testament, he talks of forgiving your neighbour 490 times.³ Obviously, that passage isn't to be taken literally, but it's implied to mean that we should never stop forgiving our brother.

Being the schmuck that I am, I can remember a time when I actually counted to 490 whenever this kid got under my skin which he did on purpose. I remember dreaming about what I was going to do to him once I reached that far off number of 490. The most that my imagination would conjure was to punch him in the head. I was a small guy myself, and this guy was one of the few who was smaller than I was, so I could manage it.⁴

With my self-reflective personality, I can say with no doubt that I was a schmuck. I mean, think about it: I was keeping track of the number of times that I had to forgive someone so that there would finally come a time when I could extract revenge. Seriously, how is that at all keeping with the principle of the rule?

I've come to the conclusion that rules are evil. It's guidelines that we need to keep in mind. Sure, I probably could have counted to 490 and been perfectly legit, but how would that have fit in with the theme of unconditional forgiveness?

I've probably committed more than 490 transgressions in my lifetime. Actually, I'd bet dimes to dollars that I have. I certainly don't want to be accountable for those, but how can I hope to not be if hold people accountable for their sins after the first 490?

1. Psalms 103:12
2. 20,000 kilometres exactly
3. In my school that fanatically used the King James Version, they taught that it was seventy times seven. In the New International Version, it says seventy-seven times. Regardless, the passage is not meant to be taken literally, but to be taken figuratively. If that is the case, then it really doesn't matter if we're talking seventy-seven times or seventy times seven, does it? (Matthew 18:21-22)
4. I never had to because my brother was bigger than the both of us combined, and we were both afraid of him, but, in the end, he was on my side.

Today or yesterday¹ was Canada Day. Canada Day is something like Independence Day in the United States. It celebrates when Canada was formed.² However, this isn't a history lesson; this is a story.

For Canada Day, we decided to go to Canada. Supposedly, the Winnipeg Zoo was offering free admission, and there was a jazz festival there as well.³ So, after church, we had lunch, and we took off.

In short, Canada didn't happen. We took two cars to Canada: mine and a car that belonged to another women who didn't come along.⁴ We practised the time-honoured, American tradition of segregation and had all the females in one car and all of the men in mine. We were about forty miles north of Grand Forks when we got a call saying that the ladies' car had broken down. We had to turn around and go rescue the damsels in distress despite the fact that none of us men knew anything about vehicles. We opened the hood to discover green-blue coolant splattered all over the underside of the hood. While we really didn't know what we were doing, I noticed that a hose had come completely loose going from the radiator to the reserve tank. We reattached it, and I took my car into town to purchase some coolant. We got back and mixed half of a litre of coolant with half of a litre of water into the radiator.⁵

Just as we thought that we had fixed the car, a gentlemen stopped to lend us a hand, and this guy really knew what he was doing when it came to automobiles. He looked at the radiator and discovered that it was more substantial than a simple hose coming loose: the entire radiator exploded which caused the top of it to crack apart. So, there was no way that we were going to Canada.

Fortunately, the car broke down right at an exit, so we didn't have to drive even more than a mile before we were at a gas station. We waited there while one of us called AAA to have the car towed back to Grand Forks. Ironically, the tow man happened to be the same good samaritan who determined that the radiator had exploded in the first place. I got to drive a car onto a tow truck, and that was pretty sweet. After that, we all piled into my car and made the trip back down to Grand Forks. When I got back, I was feeling really disappointed and depressed, but I had work to do, so I did the work instead of doing the things that I normally do while disappointed and depressed like watching pointless television, reading Ecclesiastes or writing masterpiece philosophy.⁶ I finally finished, and I'm ready to sleep, but I felt the need to recount the story to you here. Enjoy!

1. Depending on whether you want to consider yesterday to be the time before your last period of sleep or the last period before midnight.
2. Some would say that it celebrates when Canada became independent. I would say that celebrates when Canada formed. From my studies of history, I would say that Canada did not achieve its independence until the Statute of Westminster of 1931, but some people would argue with that.
3. Of course, if you truly know who I am, you would know that I love jazz.
4. Ironically, both cars had Colorado plates.
5. I happen to be the shiznit when it comes to eyeballing a perfect mixture of fifty percent of water and fifty percent of coolant. Congratulate me when you see me.
6. Well, I think that it's masterpiece philosophy.

While I really like SIL, it's nice to get away from it all occasionally. It's nice to just be able to get out and go for a night on the town. Grand Forks isn't bad at all on the weekends as long as you know the right place to hang out. I just got back from hanging out across the river in Minnesota. It was really great to share in conversation with other people about topics ranging from a school teacher's handling a situation with an abused girl to Benjamin Franklin. As we were leaving, I said something that I thought was really weird, but I feel like telling you.

If there were any period of history that I could live in if given the choice, I guess that I would pick the late nineteenth- early twentieth-century. Back in that period, it was soon enough to have modern conveniences such as electricity and cars, but early enough where you still had empires and kings and queens, and there were still parts of the world that were unexplored. I wish that I could be some rich socialite with a trans-Atlantic identity. I'd probably hope to be some hard-core Methodist/Salvation-Army member in an industrial-revolution England. That just sounds to hardcore awesome, and I don't know why.

I'm weird. Don't tell me that. I already know that.