Category: Captain’s Log

Hello, readers.

After several months of unintentional hiatus, my blog is back! I would like to welcome any new readers that I have solicited.

If you would like to be more active, please register and you will be able to comment, and if you were to contact me, there might even be the possibility of a guest post. Also, if you are good with editing, and would like to help, I might distribute a few editing privileges.

On Saturday past, I graduated from Messiah College, the liberal arts college in small town Pennsylvania that I have been attending for the past three years. I graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in English.

I have also recently moved into a splendid little apartment, one with windows and a tall airy ceiling, and I feel like my life is moving forward. However, I have been unable to find a job, but for the moment, I am very glad that I haven’t. The past few years have been really tough for me, and I am physically exhausted from the past few days of graduating-moving-cleaning and am mentally exhausted from all the college.

But, while I am weary, I am also excited for the future. Part of that future is a commitment to regular blogging, something I really enjoy but, as a college student with a myriad of other things to write, never really had the time to do. Now that I am free I want to write something every day, for the discipline in writing and for the joy of sharing my thoughts.

I have devised a simple schedule of one topic per day, to help me plan and keep writing, and also to make sure things stay easy to follow for my readers. The schedule, tentatively, is as follows:

Monday is iGeek, and I will post about my iPad, Apple, and other tech things which excite me.

Tuesday will be a double post day. I will start with Q&A. If you have a question, query, or wondering that you want me to write about, email me, and I will select one and write about it. I will finish with a poem. I consider myself to be a poet, and will write, or revise, a new poem every Tuesday.

Wednesday is about literature and language. iRead day will be the day I disseminate and parse through whichever book(s) I am currently reading. Nothing too formal or academic, just my thoughts based upon my college degree.

Thursday will be my iLife day, the post being about myself, and my life, and something interesting or significant that occurred during my week.

Friday, always a fun day, will be about baseball. I love the sport, and watch every game that I can. I am a die-hard Cleveland Indians fan, and will be till the day I die. (Today’s game vs the Kansas City Royals starts soon!) I have also become a Philadelphia Phillies fan, but will always love the Tribe first and most. Anyway, Friday I will talk all about baseball.

Saturday and Sunday I will take off, though there maybe eventual guest posts if anyone wants to contribute to my blog.

Anyway, sounds like a plan, and I hope that you can enjoy the experience.

Follow me on Twitter @PhilipJoelM, and email me stormrider@wordflood.net.

Be seeing you!

Hello There!

Last week I took a new, rather large, step in my life: I put down a security deposit on a small apartment. This will be my first independent dwelling place, and I am very excited (though not as excited as my fiancee…more on that later).

It is a one bedroom apartment, actually located beneath a large house about 2.5 miles from the campus of Messiah College. It has a rather large bathroom (and it is private!! which, after 4 years of sharing a bathroom with college guys, is a Really Big Deal) and a large, spacious kitchen. The bedroom is about average sized, and the living room is slightly small, and all-in-all it is a terrific place to live.

I will move in around the 15th of May, and live there for year. Hannah, my fiancee, will move in the middle of December, but won’t start living there until we get married January 3, 2010. This would be why she is soo excited! Hannah is realizing that this will be our first “home” together, and where we will spend the first 5 months of our married lives. She literally bounced all the way home, and couldn’t keep a large smile off her face. It was very cute!

The grounds around the house are large and beautiful, with two weeping willow trees and many shrubs and flowers. A small creek runs along the edge of the property. Next to my apartment is a recreation room, which my landlords have graciously allowed me access to, which includes a pool table which is also a table tennis table, and a treadmill for exercising. This is a huge plus.

Also, this apartment is at a fair price, especially considering that it includes utilities, cable television, and internet access.

I am very excited, and cannot wait to move it. I praise my Father God for his provision and blessing.

This will be another big step for me, and I feel ready to make it!

When one first encounters Lithuania, the most striking feature for many is the language. It has its own melody, a cadence that is mesmerizing. Life here is the same way: melodic and rapturous; but this isn’t something that you can see, that is obvious, it is an undercurrent, that comes at you from behind and sweeps you along. Suddenly, you realize that you are in Lithuania, and it is amazing. But this culture did not appear, or gradually evolve: it was fought for, and forcibly built over one thousand years of history, occupation, oppression, revolution, and finally freedom.

When the Roman Empire spanned the breadth of the Mediterranean and further, Lithuania was there, though not in a strictly national form. The loose Baltic tribes that would become this amazing nation mined a rare golden substance, and traded it with other “barbarian” tribes, who in turn, carried this strange jewel to the centers of Rome along what was know as the “Amber Road.”

At the turn of the first millennium these amber traders were immortalized forever, this time as a nation called Lithuania, for in 1009 a brief entry in a German manuscript notes that the first person who tried to bring the growing religion of Christianity to the pagans of Lithuania was killed in the attempt. Lithuania would be the last European nation to adopt Christianity, desiring to remain free, even from the religion of their neighbors. Russian manuscripts from the next 100 years make mention of Lithuania, usually to note battles fought with the Lithuanians. Ironically, the Russians should have listened to what was already evident: Lithuanians do not take to being ruled by foreign powers.

By 1253 a man by the name of Mindaugus unified the loose Baltic peoples into the State of Lithuania and he was crowned king of the Lithuanians. Lithuania grew until Vytautas the Great came to power and instituted a rule that encompassed Belarus, Ukraine, and parts of Poland and Russia, but the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was not to last. By the 1400’s Lithuania as a nation was starting to break apart, and under threat of a growing Russia, they formed a union with Poland in 1569. This lasted for almost 200 years until 1795 when Russia grew to enormous size and swallowed Poland and 90% of the land that was Lithuania. They would not be free again until 1918 when Lithuania would declare its independence from the Russian Empire.

Even though the political nation was under much duress and change during the latter half of the first millennium, the culture was stronger than before. In 1547 the first book, a catechism, was published in Lithuania. Books would become a unique feature of the culture, and a sign of rebellion, once Lithuania fell under the control of Russia. By 1865 there was an underground publishing movement that printed books by the thousands and smuggled them throughout Lithuania. The Russians had forced the populace to learn Russian, and only allowed Russian to be printed, but these illegal book makers preserved the language, and through it, the culture of Lithuania in a time of oppression. Fascinatingly enough, the majority of those involved in this process were ordinary peasants, and not intellectuals. The common people of Lithuania fought a revolution, not with swords and bullets, but with culture and literature.

For forty years Lithuania struggled to maintain itself, and in 1940 a new Russia, the Soviet Union, occupied Lithuania. Utilizing their self-reliance and deep commitment already learned under hardship, the Lithuanians maintained their culture and endured. From the 1970s and beyond, a small cultural revolution was being fought, again, mostly through culture: music, films, and literature. The Soviets were cruel, and ruthless, but they could not conquerer, only occupy, and when, in 1991, the Iron Curtain shattered, Lithuanians were there to sweep away the pieces and found a new Lithuania for the second millennium.

Since March 11, 1991 Lithuania has been free, joining the European Union and NATO of a free will, and in 2009, on the 1000 year anniversary of their first mention, they will become the cultural centre of a unified Europe. Surely this is a moving tribute to the long standing Lithuania that refused to die.

Throughout their history, Lithuanians have been set apart by fierce independence as a nation, and unyielding devotion to language and literature as a people, building from that a culture truly unique.

I have something to confess: I traffic in cultural stereotypes. The French are pansies and hate America; Canadians are bumblers; Mexicans just want to cross the border illegally; Americans are the best. I tell jokes about them, I laugh, I amuse with my stereotypical ideas. I tend to think that American has it going on, America is right, and the rest of the world is trying to be America, and they just aren’t right until they have Wal-Mart and Wendy’s.

That is, I used to stereotype. I don’t so much anymore. What caused this change? I left America. I saw a few small corners of the world. First: Papua New Guinea for a year. Second: Japan, for twelve hours. Third: Quebec, for three weeks. Fourth: the Netherlands, for four days. Now: Lithuania, for 19 days and counting. Even my short times in Japan, the Netherlands, and Quebec were enough to give me glimpses and snapshots into the lives and cultures of the people who live there.

Papua New Guinea for a year was certainly a time of personal revolution. For the first time, I was a white minority in a black majority. For a white southern American, the reversal was startling. Other things changed my thinking as well: for instance, we shopped for our vegetables at an outdoor market. We didn’t buy the imported American brands at the local store because they were at three times more expensive. We walked. How much we walked…something a bit odd for an American to do.

In Japan, everything seemed small, conservative. The cars were half the size of American cars. Space was a premium commodity in Tokyo. My mother, surfing channels in our hotel room was perturbed that there wasn’t a channel in English. And then it struck me: why should there be? We don’t have Japanese channels back home.

Quebec showed me French people that weren’t anything like I imagined them. Despite cynicism that says French Canada is different that France itself, I found many Quebecers who had only recently moved from France. Most everyone I met was kind, gracious, and very friendly.

Holland, the Netherlands, was peace itself. Quiet, homely, and tranquil. I marveled at the slowness. Bicycles outnumbered cars, and pedestrians had the right of way at any roadway. People were friendly, others-centered, and hospitable.

And in Lithuania, I have found a new home. For me, it is a culmination of the past four years of experience. I am once again living in a country that is not my own. I am not passing through in hours, days, or even weeks: I am here for a third of a year. I buy, work, walk, and breathe the air day after day. I wake and sleep under the same sun at a new angle. I insinuate myself into a culture, into the lives of people who are not like me. We speak differing languages, and have different ideas, but I feel at home. I feel settled.

For me, the breaking of stereotypes comes in the infusion of experience. Moving beyond borders, boundaries, and barriers. Shopping for food by picture and deciphering strange alphabets; riding buses and walking rather than jumping in a car; counting hours to 24 instead of 12 twice. All of this is the experience that breaks down stereotypes, for me. I look around and realize that here is a culture, similar and contrary to mine in many ways, and it works every single day for thousands of people. They find joy, happiness, and contentment just as I would back home in America, and suddenly I can find no criticism, no joke, no feeling of superiority: only a feeling of community, of oneness with the family of humanity.

I am so glad that God moved my family to become missionaries, and moved us far beyond the borders of the “Land of the Free” so that I might encounter the free souls of a hundred cultures and lands in places I could never have imagined. I pray that through my own change, I may enact change in others. I would like that the image of ugly America the world tends to see is not reflected in me, and that I can play some small part in changing the ideas of those that would see me as I once saw them, as facades of what they are not, instead of seeing them as the people they are.

I have a new niece with me in the world: Katherine “Katya” Elizabeth Martin. My sister-in-law Christine gave birth yesterday, and my brother’s family just got a little bit bigger.

Ever since I was old enough to understand, I have thought it strange that people tend to refer to children only as separate entities once they have been born. You don’t “become” a father, or mother, or uncle, or grandmother, or whatever until the baby is born. As I understand human biology, the unborn baby is completely dependent upon its mother, but is also a completely separate individual, according to one example, it is even possible for a baby and a mother to have different blood types. The baby is certainly by all accounts alive, and although the debate rages about when actual life begins in the womb, it is common thought that the baby will be its own person after birth.

But why? if they are separate biological entities, if they will be individuals, why can they not be understood to be alive and among us while remaining unborn? The question of dependence does not, to me, make much sense, as a newborn is hardly any less dependent upon its mother than a few weeks prior. Indeed, most new people are completely helpless until 3 to 4 years of age, perhaps at the very earliest. So why do we not speak of them as people until they are born? I have yet to figure that out.

I, for one, refer to unborn babies as the people they are, and continue to be after birth, from the moment I know the mother is pregnant. I “became” an uncle the moment my brother and his wife conceived their new daughter. Katya was as much a niece to me then as she now, all wrinkly and beautiful as a newborn.

If I can get my wife to agree, my children will always have two “birthdays” a year: the date we can most accurately identify as conception date, and their birthday, to impress upon them the personhood of the unborn baby.

Why should someone be less than a person merely due to their physical constraints and situation and for no other reason?

Hello there…

it has been awhile since I have posted, and I will try to update ya’ll on since then the happenings to me…but first, something that didn’t happen to me: my brother (Nate) got engaged! Congrats to the happy couple and many happy days ahead to them both!

Now, we (me and 34 others…1 leader, 1 co-leader, 5 interns, 27 American students) have toured Vilnius (the capitol of Lithuania), Trakai, Nida, Kretinga, and finally Klaipeda where I will be living for the next four months attending the Lithuania Christian College International University.

While in Vilnius we saw the presidential palace (where you can walk right up to the front…not something you can do to the White House), a KGB prison which was in operation right up until 1991, much of the old town and amazing architecture and many many cathedrals.

In Trakai we were able to tour a castle that had been operating the late 1500’s. Hannah and I took a walk around the outside, and just inside the courtyard, but declined to pay to see the rest of the castle, though we may try to get back when we have more time available.

Nida is on the Baltic coast, and is host to the massive Great and Parnidis sand dunes, and between them the valleys of Death and Silence. Essentially a tourist/resort town, the panorama of the Baltic Sea is stunning and the huge dunes and wide valleys were amazing. The only thing close to the dunes I have seen is near Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina. Simply amazing. We hiked to the top and looked around…breathtaking. Also of note, I took an unplanned dip in the Baltic Sea, upping my total of large bodies of water swum in to 3 (Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and Baltic Sea). I tried to see how cold the water was, but the concrete pier was slicker than it looked and as I leaned down, I slipped in. I soaked my shoes and my jeans, so I spent the next 45 mins looking for a shop to buy shoes and pants, which I did, and was able to spend the remainder of my time there dry. Also humorous, when Hannah and I sat down on the beach to eat lunch, several pigeons who were just hanging around became curious in our meal, and started to walk in circles around us…it was hilarious. I felt like a pioneer headed west being circled about by Indians.

Kretinga is a small town near Klaipeda. We visited there a Catholic mass, and afterward received a tour of the church including a tall tower overlooking the town. After that we were taken to lunch at this massive restaurant that had a great many tables, and was so big that there was a basketball court and playground in the courtyard so that you could play while waiting for your food. Very cool. This was today, and we were officially taken off of our leashes, and told that our hands would be held no more, though the study abroad staff were still available to us, and we have other trips to take together. We were challenged to write letters to ourselves that will be mailed to us at the end of the school year including our first impressions and hopes for the semester. At the end of the four months, we will write another letter looking back. A very cool idea and it will be interesting to see what we wrote and how we thought nine months from now.

I am very ready to start classes and get into the routine of the semester. My schedule is as follows: I have History of Western Civilizations from 0830-0930 MWF, Introductory Lithuanian 0945-1045 MWF, Introduction to Theology 1330-1430 MWF, Hebrew Prophets 1445-1545 MWF, Lithuanian Culture 1200-1300 F, and Linguistics which will be online. I have Tuesday and Thursday completely free of class! I can’t wait…this will be an awesome semester. I will try to keep up to date on this blog, and am working on an independent web site for pictures to accommodate those without access to Facebook.

Thanks for reading,

Phil in Klaipeda, Lithuania

So, there we were, in the Frankfurt (Germany) airport, handing our boarding passes to the attendant, and being excited about heading finally to Lithuania. We go down the walkway, turn right, down again, and turn left to…go outside….to..a BUS??

Just when we were thinking we had REALLY gotten gypped by the travel agent, the bus took off across the tarmac and pulled up to a row of planes that did not have proper gates, and were only parked along the vast airport runway system. We filed out of the bus, and up a flight of movable stairs into our aircraft for our final flight.

Once inside, the seats were the most comfortable seats I have every had the privilege of sitting in while aboard an aircraft, and I settled in for a very luxurious flight. Above the grey skies and thick cloud banks, bright horizons and a blanket of snow white clouds beneath put my flight into the realms of serenity.

While not quite so poetic, my travels today have been very smooth and, dare I say, relaxing. We had breakfast in the Netherlands, lunch in Germany, and dinner in Lithuania. No problems with luggage, customs, airlines, or anything else for that matter. There was even no checkpoint in the Vilnius airport….no one asked for our insurance information (as we were told they would) and no one stopped us. We only paused to change dollars into litas, and to catch a taxi to our hostel.

Currently it is in the low 50s F, about 17 C, and rainy, like a fall day in the north-east United States. Hannah and I are settling in for a hopefully quiet and relaxing evening.

More to come, plus pictures…

Peace and Love

Phil

Hello everyone,

I have added photos from my stay in the Netherlands…head over to my facebook to check them out. For those of you without Fbook, I am working on getting them on my web site, but that will take longer, so please have patience.

Thanks.

Phil