Tue Jan 22 22:50:44 PST 2002

I dropped by the computing support center and after a half hour of reboots and driver installs, it looked like the wireless card was happy. When I got home I fired up the laptop, stuck in the card and it worked perfectly. I’m really happy about that. Now I can work from home, anywhere in the house which is really a nice advantage.

I also picked up at 120GB WD hard drive to put in pooh for a ‘media drive’ for all the .mp3 and video files. I got a really huge one (I remember buying a 80MB drive for my 386) since it’s the last open IDE slot in the server so I figured I’d better go all out since adding more space beyond that would involve replacing a drive, which usually is undesirable. And about $40 per 20GB from 80 to 100 and from 100 to 120, I figured it wasn’t too bad of a deal anyway. I’ll drop it in the linux machine sometime later this week. There isn’t too much of a rush as I don’t have video recording set up just yet.

Instead of Bible study this evening the group takes one week a month off to help with a program called ‘Tuesday Treasures’. It’s basically a outreach program for people with mental issues. This week it was a consolidated group of around 150 treasures and helpers with a concert. I was told that normally it’s more of a children’s Sunday school format with a Bible story, a few songs and a craft of some kind.

It’s probably a good thing to start out this way with a little less interaction the first time. I think everyone avoids people and situations that remind them of their own fragility or mortality. It’s not that the people who are often avoided are contagious, it is that "healthy" people don’t want to think about being sick, or loosing capabilities that they take for granted or being dead. I’m fairly certain that is why many people avoid hospitals, nursing homes, funerals and other similar events and locations.

For me, it’s brain-stuff. I could handle loosing my hearing, or the use of a limb or two. Maybe even going blind. I could still envision myself living a happy productive life with a number of physical handicaps. It might be really frustrating, but it seems possible. But the one thing that I can’t really imagine is having some kind of mental handicap. Quite honestly, it kinda freaks me out a bit. And so that’s probably part of the reason that I’m not comfortable around these kind of people.

The other part is also that people who aren’t exactly playing by the same social rulebook aren’t predictable, and society is based a lot on people using the same social rulebook to interact so that people can predict reactions in other people and use that to prevent problems. I’ve always found it concerning whenever I notice someone that appears to be acting outside the social norms. What most people would call "behaving strangely" even when they don’t know the person, they are referring to the unwritten rules about what should be done in public, and how to react in basic social circumstances.

Anyway, I’m not trying to justify my initial discomfort, but rather to understand where it is coming from, so I can try and deal with it. This is really fairly important because they are people too. People who God loves and cares about, and so I need to care about them too, and I can’t do that if I’m preoccupied with thinking about the other stuff. So I need to at least deal with it mentally so that I can start working on figuring out how to show them that God loves them.