Easter

Usually, the first thing i look forward to when the Easter season comes around is mini eggs. I love mini eggs so much that I could eat them as my meals for at least a week straight. I'll eat them as my breakfast, as my snack, as my lunch, as my snack, as my pre supper snack, as my supper, as my dessert, as my midnight snack. Pretty gross, eh? But now you know how much I love these. Unfortunately, I've only had 10 or so of the small bags this time around, but I will wait until Easter is over so they go on sale, then I will unload on them until I get sick beyond my metabolism.

After I get past the mini eggs, I can consider it mission accomplished. However, the second thing that appears most obvious about Easter is the extended weekend that everyone gets. What fun! I love long weekends, and when you get both friday and monday off, BONUS! I don't know any other weekends where you get both friday and monday off, so that is just awesome. What makes this weekend even more awesome is that it usually comes around the time of Spring Break, so the time off during Easter weekend can cover for the negativity towards school that Spring Break instills in you. Whoa whoa whoa, wait! I'm in post-secondary now, and Spring Break and Easter weekends don't amount to anything anymore, dang. Well, I guess it's time to move on.

Then, finally we arrive at the reason for Easter; the time we remember Jesus for dying on the cross. If this never happened, we would never be celebrating Easter in the first place, so why did this appeal to us last about Easter? I'll be the first to admit that I often look past the whole "dying on the cross to save our lives" thing because I've grown up hearing it, I've drowned in this information, but when you really think about it, you're only alive today because of this happening. If you are one to be lucky enough to be hearing about this time of year, you should be SO thankful that you are blessed enough to know it. And this is just kind of my thing, but the Easter weekend is the one weekend where I believe you should take off completely. From Friday morning to Sunday (Monday for some) night, it should be a time of reflection and worship; no work whatsoever. For me, it works just like the Sabbath day, if you have work that needs to be completed for the start of the next week, finish it earlier. Then you'll really come to appreciate this whole Easter business.

So here it is, thank you Jesus for giving me a chance, even though I don't deserve it.

Where the River Flows

I never would have thought this day would come, to see myself finishing my first year of post-secondary education. Throughout most of the day, I had something to be excited about regarding school. It is a sad thing to have to resort to being excited for the end, but I guess it shows you what my year was really like. I think all I can really say about this past year of school is simply, a learning experience. Many people that have talked to me about leaving the U of A to go to Bible college means that I've wasted a year of schooling. I don't think I see it that way; I saw this year as one where I got to do a bit of "soul searching" to see who I am as a person now and where I want to go in the future. I've mentioned all along over the year that I was going to devote myself to finding out where the river flows for my life.

So here I am, finished the "learning" part of my first year of university with only four massive beasts of final exams in about ten days time seperating me from the four month summer I've longed for since, who knows when. This brings me to a thought that crossed my mind today. From all three classes I had today, all three profs had a little preview of what our exams will be like; I must say, do these profs enjoy and plan on throwing all this misery onto the students by putting such huge crap loads of stuff to study for the finals? I mean, seriously, my first class' professor was extremely close to ruining my final day at school by telling us all about the sh*tload of garbage we have to know and do for our final. Then, same with my next music class. And finally, to cap it all off, my English professor tells us that the entire course is cumulative on the exam; WTF. It seems like it's a goal for these profs to torture students, so I've just decided that it is because they are miserable people who have no other way but to be sadistic and watch students cry in pain from all the studying they do.

Anyways, finishing classes marks step one to my "plan" to a new beginning, complete. Step two will be to make something of the upcoming finals, and hope that I don't get overkilled by the failure to study and failure to pass the exam. If I am still alive, step three will consist of focusing all my attention to making Bible college work out. As of right now, I'm still sort of clueless as to how it's gonna go down, but I know God has a plan for me and I just have to keep waiting on Him to show me the way. I had a nice chat with my dad while I was practicing driving over the weekend about how we could make this work, and I got some good pointers.

So if you come across my blog and read this far, let me ask you: what makes a great pastor? If you are one in a million that attend seminary, what might you want to have that could seperate you slightly from everyone else? Just something to think about, because I need to think about it.

Time Out

I decided that I wanted to waste time to watch some Oilers fail today, so I turned on the game. Sportsnet loves to be low budget so they play the same commercials over and over; these commercials are garbage commercials, too.

If anyone is awake during these boring commercials, you'll come across one of the most poorly constructed advertisements ever. This commercial starts off with a background voice saying something cheesy about big questions needing to be addressed, and here are my take on the answers to one version of the commerical:

1) Are we running out of oil and gas?
Unless you've had your face shoved up someones ass for the last twenty years, you will know the answer to this one.

2) Why aren't we doing anything about the rapid climate changes?
Because apathy is a dick. We "citizens" of this earth are really horrible people, including myself. We tend to have a selfish view on life in the sense that "if it doesn't benefit me, I don't need it." We're not doing anything because the global climate changes aren't bad enough that it affects people to a certain severity, therefore no one really cares enough to act on it. By the time it does take its toll, it will be game over

3) Why use oil and gas when there are other alternatives?
Money. Money runs the modern world. You have money, you're set; you don't have money, tough luck. Oil and gas is cheap because it's easy access. Other alternatives are expensive and isn't the easiest to produce.

Just thought I'd give my take on what really NEEDS to be common knowledge amongst people.

.. And it's really awesome how life can be so miserable after just a couple things, that don't go your way, happen. I will go to bed singin' the blues once again tonight.

Hey look, it's April! Since when did this happen?!

Starved

Some of you may or may not know, I am a huge fan of RPG games. I've loved them ever since I was too young to even know what the purpose of them were. I think the first thing that caught my attention with these games is the really really cool weapons some characters have. Chrono Cross was probably the first RPG that did me in. Before that game, it was all about Mario games for me, because those were the only ones I ever got to play. I really loved racing games as well, but not so much anymore.

So now that I think I'm old enough to be able to play these RPG games properly, they have become my only incentive to gaming. I am not a big gamer at all, but when there is a good RPG that is available for me to play, I will do it. However, the problem is that I've been following the Nintendo consoles for most of my life, and we all know how crappy the RPGs are for Nintendo, so I've never really had the taste of the RPG world as much as I would've liked. Thanks to my cousins, the only time I was able to play some of my favorite RPGs was at their houses. The most surprising thing about me as an RPG fan is that I have never ever finished an entire Final Fantasy game. I came pretty close on a couple of them, but never did I beat that final boss and watch the credits roll. And since the Wii has come out, I have been incredibly RPG starved over the last few years. While the Gamecube was still hot, I had a few pretty awesome games that I played, but I've grown out of those ones. So since the Wii has only had one legit RPG, Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, my gaming life has just died off completely, also to note that that game was a let down to some sort.

Well, like the economy, things don't stay down forever; there is hope! I have been working really hard to narrow down my options on how I can revitalize my RPG crazed ways again. I have discovered that Final Fantasy is a good path to follow, given that there will be over 13 of them pretty soon. So therefore, I ended up with the Sony Playstation. I have convined my dad to get a PS3, the only thing is when we'll get it. Then, after we get it, I will purchase all the Final Fantasy's I can get my hand on, and beat them all!

My order of playing will start with Chrono Cross, because I never beat this one and it's still arguably my favorite game, and Final Fantasy IX. Why FF9? Because this was the closest I've come to beating a Final Fantasy game excluding the major letdown Crystal Chronicles for the Gamecube. Then after that, I might go after the popular ones such as FF10 and FF7, but it will have to wait and see because I'm sure there are other fun RPGs that came across the Playstation console.

Man am I excited to be playing again. I even went as far as buying a Final Fantasy IX today, it should arrive within a couple weeks (= And I also must mention that FF13 looks really good.

Now to actually go out and buy that PS3.. Hopefully by the end of April.