It has now been a little over a month since I left GE. I was doing lunch Wednesday with a friend and he asked me a question which should have been pretty easy but actually caught me a little off guard - simply what my goals were for the summer and how I was doing. I certainly haven’t suffered from boredom yet! But my plans changed quite a bit at the beginning of the summer - I was originally planning to go to California for a few months but totally dropped that at the last minute. After changing everything up I was left a little disoriented about exactly what my goals and purpose are this summer. So it’s time to make a list and define it a bit. None of this is new; it’s what I’ve been working on for the past month - but until now I just haven’t actually sat down and said “these are my goals for the summer.”

Three major goals this summer:
1) Volunteer at Emmaus to the maximum extent I can become involved
2) Complete two night classes at DePaul
3) Finish up my summer reading list

The summer reading list is the real kicker. I want to read 5695 pages total this summer. As of right now I have read 759 pages (13%) and finished two books. I want to finish all of it by the end of August (two months away). Here’s the list…

Christian:
- Through Gates of Splendor (268p, Elliot)
- Shadow of the Almighty (250p, Elliot)
- Wesley and Men Who Followed (263p, Murray)
- Bible (cover-to-cover 1873p, NAS translation)
Oracle:
- Oracle Insights: Tales of the Oak Table (406p, multiple)
- Cost-Based Oracle Fundamentals (451p, Lewis)
- Expert Oracle DB Architecture (703p, Kyte)
- Oracle Wait Interface (331p, multiple)
Male Prostitution:
- Times Square Hustler (142p, McNamara)
- Young Men In The Street (112p, Snell)
- Children of the Night (262p, Weisberg)
- The Sexual Outlaw (307p, Rechy)
- Downtown Street Hustlers: the role of dramaturgical imaging practices in the social construction of male prostitution (327p, Thesis from UCal-SanDiego)

The plan right now is to finish all of this by the end of August then pick up a contract working with Oracle somewhere downtown.

Interesting how my brain works.

I started about 45 minutes ago when I clicked on this headline story on the BBC about a new gravity lab in Germany. It will hopefully be able to detect gravitational waves. It’s not the first; in fact I’m pretty sure that two such labs are under construction in the US.

That got me curious about gravitational waves. So I googled it and ended up reading a wikipedia article and a website from UIUC (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign). Those article got into how the idea of the existance of gravitational waves comes from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. Apparently it hasn’t been without controversy - some scientists have apparently not agreed that it exists. One of the things that these gravitational wave detectors would do is prove that gravitational waves do in fact exist.

So then I was on some website reading about Einstein and it mentioned a comment that he’d made about religion. So I googled that and ended up on this website about Einstein’s religious views. As I was perusing that website I ran accross this article by Einstein where the last paragraph sortof resembles the teleological argument for the existance of God. (This is particularly interesting because this argument is very similar to the “Intelligent Design” idea which many supposed “science-minded” people vehemently reject. Apparently Einstein wasn’t quite so opposed to it…) That popped into my head because of a short email conversation I’ve been having with a friend about the existance of God and during that conversation I had stumbled accross this wikipedia article about arguments for and against the existance of God. (I had learned this stuff in philosophy classes at college too but of course it’s been awhile and the refresher was very good.)

After that I stumbled accross this page on the Einsten site where he has a quote about quakers. That got me curious about quakers. So after googling that I ended up at this wikipedia article about them and that led to another email to my friend:

hrm

was wandering around the ‘net again just now and ran accross another interesting website. the end of this article by Einstein appears very similar to the Teleological argument for the existance of God:
http://www.einsteinandreligion.com/irrec2.html

that whole site is interesting~

found a comment einstein made about quakers which got me curious and now i’m reading the wikipedia article about quakers and it’s really cool too. btw, i don’t mean the oatmeal. :P
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_Society_of_Friends

“Quakerism includes a strong sense of spiritual egalitarianism, including a belief in the spiritual equality of the sexes—remarkable for the mid-1600s.”

hrm… why do i keep emailing you this stuff? ok this will be the last one. promise.

have a great day!

later,

Jeremy

Yeah so anyway now I’ve wasted another 30 minutes writing this blog and IM-ing about swing dancing later tonight. And I’m supposed to be:

• posting endurance ride pics for emmaus
• putting down a few ideas I have for new emmaus cards
• writing another update about emmaus for the blog
• catching up on six hours of lecture from class
• writing a newsletter
• writing a summary of last Thursday for Doug
• writing a letter to my sponsored kid in the Philippines
• reading the next chapter of Tales of the Oak Table
• finishing Through Gates of Splendor
• starting The Sexual Outlaw
• making a stop at State Farm
• getting the emissions checked on my truck
• shopping (groceries/misc)
• laundry
• dishes

I think it’s time to actually do some work now.

WOW! These guys were amazing. Especially the drummer - but in fact every one of them was great. Went with Rich and Dawn - and on the last song Dawn and I couldn’t resist and had to start dancing. So it turns out that every sunday and monday night the Smoke Daddy has live jazz — walking distance from my house and no cover! This is why I moved to Chicago.

Uploaded by thesongboy on 25 Jun ‘06, 11.12pm CDT.

You can find more info at prideparadechicago.com and www.chicagopride.com/ html/pride - including photos. Tessa put it very aptly: it’s like Mardi Gras in Chicago.

Uploaded by thesongboy on 25 Jun ‘06, 1.30pm CDT.

Another chance to get some extra cash this summer. Worked a promotion for the website www.myhivlife.com/ at the Pride parade. Basically I just spent 5 hours wearing a branded tank-top and handing out hand-sanitizers with the website on them. And I got to watch the parade! It was pretty crazy. And packed - I don’t even know how many people were there but I’m thinking several hundred thousand.

Uploaded by thesongboy on 25 Jun ‘06, 12.23pm CDT.

So it’s now 5am and I just got home. Did summer dance, then went to Bennigans for some chatting [see picture], then Rosa’s for fantastic live blues [they loved us so much they gave us all free passes to come back], then to Joachim’s for an impromptu late-night party. Plus I ran into a few people I didn’t even know were in Chicago - Christine Garby from Purdue and Amie Patchen from Oberlin! Wow!

Uploaded by thesongboy on 24 Jun ‘06, 10.24pm CDT.

Thought there was a game of pick-up soccer at Lincoln Park this morning but apparently it didn’t happen - so I get a few hours of much needed time to just relax. Listened to a little John Piper and journaled a little bit at this park downtown.

Uploaded by thesongboy on 24 Jun ‘06, 10.48am CDT.

First time I’ve played paintball in a LONG time… and it was AMAZING fun! Went to a place called CPX sports which is one of the most amazing paintball places I’ve seen. They have tons of awesome “arenas” for play; including a city and one called “armageddon” which was a city that looked like it’d been blown to pieces! Also had various other terrains; open fields with objects to hide behind and forested areas. Had a great time playing paintball and catching up with everyone from GE! The only thing that sucked was that it took me two hours to get home because of traffic… but I guess that’s Chicago for you. Uugh.

Uploaded by thesongboy on 22 Jun ‘06, 11.35am CDT.

Spent all day today with the old Global RIS Team from GE Healthcare playing paintball! It was a “corporate outing” for the group to celebrate the 2.2 release and since I did so much work for that release while I was there they tipped me off to show up even though I’m not on the team anymore. It was a blast!

Uploaded by thesongboy on 22 Jun ‘06, 11.20am CDT.

Wow. I have such cool friends through swing dancing!! By the way, I’m in the back row wearing a blue bandana - Spider is on my shoulders. So here are a few photo albums:
www.flickr.com/photos/shaugran/sets/72157594172271695/
www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=695uvo6.5gqz2g1u&x=0&amp…
www.flickr.com/photos/ohtoberich/sets/72157594163239552/

Main CUBE site: chicago.lindyblues.com/

Uploaded by thesongboy on 21 Jun ‘06, 11.57am CDT.