Packing it all in now, stuff for project, stuff to go home, but I’m glad I’m not moving houses because I don’t want to have to pack everything up.

I managed to fit everything that I’m packing for North Africa into one medium duffel bag. In fact, I fit one week’s worth of clothing into a dry bag! I’m quite proud of that accomplishment.

With stuff winding down and people gone, the summer is looking more exciting as each day comes and goes. I am finding myself to be more satisfied with the way the year ended with people leaving and stuff, because it has to happen. I think I’ve found closure.

Here’s my thought on how to say good-bye: it’s important to think about when you might see someone next. Like for some friends it’ll be “see you maybe at staff conference!”, or others “see you at Tim’s cottage!”, and others “see you in the fall!” But it’s really horrible when you need to part ways and you both end up saying “have a nice life!” That has to be the worst way to part ways — there is no closure, no hope of seeing each other again, no… peace.

I’ve got some peace now.

And I just found out that I passed all my courses this past semester! Woohoo!! That sure gives me a lot more peace of mind as well.

Today was definitely an adventure as I spent the day mainly with Graydon, as he came over to do some laundry, helped me deliver a package, returned beer bottles for $3.90!!!, and headed to Toronto (late, but we made it). We found our own non-Mapquest way to Byron’s, and then somehow made to Heather’s house. And then about an hour on the subway (end to end!) before getting picked up by my parents to grab some food before going to the Missions Conference of my church.

What fun!

Exams are done, my support raising is going well, and I’m finding interesting ways to spend my time.

I’m really eager, but not excited, to get my final marks back. The main deal is that I want to know if I passed all my courses. It’s a weird situation, because most people don’t want to see them because they could be bad, or really want to see them because they are good. I guess I’m different that way.

Support raising has been more of an encouragement this week. Last week I was totally unsure about whether I would even be going to North Africa on project. Now I have about $3900 in support and I’m expecting more to be coming in through the mail. Those phone calls to follow up on the letters were really intimidating at first, but it got easier and more comfortable. Talking to people about what I’m really excited about this summer is not a difficult thing to do, so I’m glad. So in just less than a week now, I’m flying out! Woohoo!! And Angela, who is also on NAP, is going to be coming a bit early on Wednesday to Toronto to stay at my family’s house so that we can give her a ride to the airport as well — that will be really good to see her, pretty much since Summit last year.

These past few days have seemed so long. It’s only Wednesday. But I don’t want them to go by fast. I spent Sunday hanging out at (the late) Staffer House and (the soon to be late) Awesome House for literally the whole day, watching Futurama (6 episodes in a day!), playing President (Futurama-style positions!) for a good 2.5 hours, and making tons of food left over from their freezers (mainly the fish that Jen Lumsden left behind). As Rebecca Napier said it, that was probably the longest period of time I’d ever hung out with her — at least 12 hours.

Monday was the day for me to get my immunizations done, although I managed to slip in a lunch with Mike Weber at East Side’s first. He’s going to Spain for 3 weeks for a language-saturated time living with an old couple with some school there. After that was the first real Servant Team meeting of the year. We ate at Mountain Caf for dinner together — it really brings you back to first year when you experience the slow service, moderately tasty food, and utterly dirty furniture near the TV’s. Which is a good way to get back into the ‘reach first-years’ mindset before our meeting. When I got back to Fort Superior from the meeting, Jason and I moved furniture around ’til 1.30am, as in the random draw for rooms, I got the master bedroom, Jason got the medium room, and Alex has the small room. It takes a bit of time to get used to so much space in the master bedroom.

On Tuesday I pretty much spent the time moving stuff for Kirsten and Ben. Kirsten had rounded quite the horde of amateur movers, so it made the whole job pretty fast. I would just like to say: Kirsten, you have good taste in furniture.

Tonight to wrap up 1) a day of biking all around town to find a freewheel removing tool for a bolt-on hub (to no avail) and ending up buying a new bolt-on single-wall cheapo wheelset with the cheapo freewheel to go with it, 2) helping Mere a little in taking a shelf apart, 3) cooking what’s in my freezer left by the other guys and hosting Romesh for dinner, I did something crazy and ’spontaneous’.

I was thinking for a week that I wanted to do something eccentric. My idea was to sidewalk-chalk a mural on the black pavement outside of Thornbrough, something cheery and agreeable. It was to be a giant clock with the four seasons at the four sides instead of 12, 3, 6, and 9 o’clock markers. So it would read Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer, and the clock arm would be pointing at the Summer part of the clock to represent the warming up of the weather. But after I carefully measured the 10 ft radius out with my feet and started drawing the perimeter circle, a campus cop pulled up in his vehicle. He told me to leave otherwise he’d charge me with mischief. How annoying… the line he said was “What if someone doesn’t like it? You need to get permission for this stuff, even it is artsy.” So all I could do was respect his warning and leave immediately, even though I know that it’s not wrong to sidewalk chalk stuff on campus. Besides, when has everyone liked something that is done on campus, or anywhere? Keith Haring did it the way it should be done.

Oh well, I guess that’s how structured and uptight our society has become.

Done exams now. The last one was the toughest I’ve ever written, I think. I don’t think I completed a single question. But for that, I rest assured that I needed 7.5/75 on the exam, or 10%, to pass the course. I really just want the credit, because meteorology is interesting, but I have discovered that I am just way more passionate about other things than environmental sciences to consider grad school or a full-time job in the field.

Played Capture the Flag (heh yeah Ben, more like Capture the Towel) in the Arboretum. I took it as an opportunity to break out the camouflage paint and cover my face, neck, and hands in black paint. Many people commented that I appeared like a floating smile, since my teeth were so white in comparison. Unfortunately no pictures, but great memories of crawling around with Carts, climbing a tree and yelling “Van Damme!”, and capturing the flag in the tie-breaker game and running like the wind to just before the river, where Laurel tagged me. How often do you get the chance to get to run full-tilt in the dark in full-camouflage?

Things are shutting down around here. Everyone’s leaving. My roommates are all gone, although Mark and Jason are returning on Monday for their last exam. New graduates are leaving, packing up what they’ve filtered out of the things they’ve acquired over the past years in Guelph.

It leaves me a bit scared, actually. It is the feeling of being ‘left behind’. That so much will change, because integral people in my life won’t be here next year. I’m not sure if it’ll make me want to cry… rather I kind of want to curl up in a corner and let my head sink. Or sleep and pretend nothing is happening. It’s not that I’m totally sad. This feeling is more about… uncertainty about the future. That’s one reason why I can’t give a sigh of relief after exams.

The other big reason is support raising. I still need to raise 3/4 of the funds necessary to go on project, let alone for the full summer. This is making me scared and anxious, and I’m starting to feel the same stress as when an assignment is late 2 weeks. I need to make phone calls to supporters to follow-up the letters I sent them, and it’s really intimidating in my mind.

So to somewhat attempt to combat this feeling, today I got my immunization for hep B, and on Monday I will get another one for typhoid. And I also shaved my head. My plan was to shave my head before going on project — now that it is shaved, I’m hoping that it will make me even more committed to going, so that I will put more effort into support raising and follow-up. I’ll be in Guelph for another week and a half, because this is the address I’m telling everyone to send support to. Please pray that God will provide… everything.

The inverse law of usenet bandwidth that Beth described (the less of a life you have, the more you blog, and vice versa) can definitely be applied to exam time. I don’t want to study, but somehow I’m getting myself to sit down and read through stuff, even though I want to go and play baseball or go for a bike ride or buy some ice cream. However, I think I’ve reached saturation point for my brain, so I’m going to blog some more.

I’ve thought about this post for a while. Some people at Campus for Christ call me “Singer”. It’s a nickname that sprung out of my first few street hockey games in first year when Graydon forgot my name. But it seems to have stuck, and thankfully it’s fitting. Heck, I even bought a domain name that makes a pun out of my nickname.

For sure, singing is one of my biggest passions. It’s probably my most honest way of releasing my emotion. I’ve never taken singing lessons, but I have been in a children’s choir as a youngster, the high school choir, and numerous worship bands. I would have to say that Calgary and Guelph have been the first places I’ve actually led worship to a group of people. And singing songs that I make up on the spot to people is also a blast.

So what I want to tell you about are the singers who have influenced my singing. I’ve listened to many great singers (usually on CD, rarely lucky enough to see them live) and here are the main ones that I have taken cues from and emulated.

Martin Smith of delirious? is probably my biggest influence. I have almost all of their albums, and gone to a concert. Martin has perfected his falsetto to the point that it’s indistinguishable from his normal voice. He commonly (and easily) sings a song at one octave, and then belts it out another octave higher when he’s really into it. And one more thing: when they compose songs, they frequently write them so it’s in Martin’s perfect vocal range, so that at concerts, it’s a real challenge and pleasure to try to sing along.

Michael W. Smith is one of the greatest worship leaders, in my opinion. He sings songs in a very dynamic and influential way. He leads when he sings, and he makes it totally about God when he sings. Michael is probably my role model when I am looking at ways to lead while playing piano, because he doesn’t do anything fancy, but it sounds amazing.

Tim Hughes and Matt Redman are both examples of singers who know how to lead worship without saying a single word to the crowd. I’ve been to conferences where they’ve lead worship, and they just sing their songs, and let God speak to people’s hearts through the words in the music. I find that my vocal range is closest to these two guys, and the songs they write are absolutely honest and raw. Still, they are willing to re-play their songs in fresh ways so the songs aren’t “overplayed”.

Chris Tomlin sings high. Really high. But he’s humble enough that when he places his capo accidentally too high in concert, he states “I can’t sing that high!” It’s awesome though, when on CD, Chris will play a song in capo 4, and then perform it live in capo 2, and then when I play it, it needs to be in open tuning in order for most people to sing. That shows where Chris’ normal vocal range lies.

Chris Martin of Coldplay really influences me in terms of my singing because his music forces me to train my falsetto a lot more. When I throw on the Coldplay, I’m usually singing along, and it takes a lot of vocal control to hold the chorus in “Clocks” and hit the high notes in “Fix You”.

John Mayer, Jack Johnson, Downhere, Switchfoot, Relient K, Maroon5, and dc Talk are other artists whose lead singers I’ve been affected by in many ways in the contemporary singing sense. Other singers like Josh Groban, Michael Buble, and Andrea Bocelli I’ll give an occasional listen to work in some more classical/refined singing influence, and then there’s stuff like Metallica and POD that I admire a lot as well.

There’s something about singing a song as high as your voice can go, as if you’re using your voice to the best of the ability God has given you. I would much rather have the speech part of my voice to be taken out over the singing part of my voice.

After seeing my counsellor today, I decided to take his suggestion of doing whatever it takes to get the information into my head, and make studying fun.

So I went to Zellers and bought sidewalk chalk and studied for 2 hours on the driveway by writing out notes on the pavement. The looks I get from people driving by and kids biking by (4 times, to try to read what I’m writing without looking nosy). But I don’t think a single person understands what I’m writing because it’s all about technical differences between supervised and unsupervised classification of pixels in digital images into clusters AND I’m writing in shortform. If you drop by (please do! I want some company as the house is empty!) you’ll get to see just how much it makes me look like a (silently) raving lunatic.

Now I either hope it doesn’t rain so more people look at our driveway and wonder, or hope it does rain so it all gets washed away and then I get to chalk about meteorology all of tomorrow.

Do I think I learned much from chalking? Maybe. But most of all I think it just showed me that I am actually interested in this stuff and I might just spend the rest of the evening really soaking it in because I want to, not because I’m studying.