/karen/

Tumble in the rough

Tuesday, 24 June, 2003

Life has been catching up with me again so I haven't had time to stop and reflect by way of blog posts the way I'd like to.

Two weekends ago I attended the Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students (AFES) girls' weekend away at Otford (see pic). There were about 35 of us there—drawn from all over the country: Perth, Melbourne, Brisbane, Wagga, Albury, Bathhurst, Canberra, etc. It was good to meet other MTS trainees and senior staff and hear about their experiences of doing ministry on different campuses. Some of them are the only female staffworker. I can't imagine how hard that would be and it made me so grateful for the abundance of staffworkers at the University of Wollongong and the University of New South Wales! It also brought home to me the great need that exists in other parts of the country for people to do ministry with students.

Anyways, last week was something of a holiday for us even though I was working. To recap and make it clear for people who don't understand what's going on in my life, I work at the University of Wollongong. For three days of the week, I'm the administrative assistant for a research centre called the Centre for Asia Pacific Social Transformation Studies (CAPSTRANS for short). For two days of the week I do what's called MTS (MTS stands for Ministry Training Strategy) with Evangelical Christian Union (ECU). MTS is best described as being an apprenticeship in Christian ministry. MTS trainees have a very fluid job description and doing MTS can involve anything from leading Bible studies to meeting up one-on-one with other people to designing PowerPoint presentations for special services. The goal of MTS is to give you a taste of what ministry is like as a vocation. Ben is also doing MTS but he's full-time and he has to raise all his own funding. I do it part-time and my job at CAPSTRANS funds it.

But getting back to last week. Most of my non-work hours were spent pottering around the house and getting stuff done on my To Do list which was nice. We hired out The Usual Suspects on Wednesday night and enjoyed it so much that we watched it again on Saturday. On Thursday I went to a friend's place for lunch and had a picnic on her front lawn. On Friday Ben preached for the first time ever at IBM (International Bible Ministries—it's the part of ECU devoted exclusively to overseas students). He preached on Psalm 51 and it went very well. People said some very nice things to me about his preaching afterwards during suppertime. I was so proud of him! Especially because he had been so stressed about it beforehand—stressed almost to the point where he didn't know whether he'd be able to open his mouth once he got up there. Now he's really enthusiastic about preaching and wants to do it again sometime.

On the weekend a friend invited me to a Harry Potter party at the Unishop because she had pre-ordered No. 5 and they had given her an invite for her and a friend. We were the only grownups who were not staff who bothered to dress up. There were heaps of kids everywhere and they looked so cute in their costumes. Some of them were quite inventive too: one came as an owl, one came as Gilderoy Lockhart and one came as a pre-liberated Dobby the house elf. I came as Moaning Myrtle which was rather boring. I wanted to go as Rita Skeeter but I didn't think I could pull it off. We played trivia games and had a barrel draw and, even though me and my friend didn't win anything, I still had a good time and was glad she invited me.

On Sunday Ben and I visited our old church again for the 9:30 and 7:00 pm services. We were interviewed so that people could hear about what's been going on in our lives and then we performed a song together (Ben played and I sang). We had yum cha with my father, went hunting for portable MP3 players with tape decks and hung out with Ben's family all afternoon. I got roped into accompanying Liz (Ben's sister) for her singing eisteddfod on Friday so that gives me five days to practice.

Today and tomorrow I've got Dreamweaver training. I thought this morning's training session was a total waste of time. I was sitting there, bored, for the whole of the three hours because the instructor had to teach everyone else in my group (there were 6 of us) really really basic stuff like how to open folders on a Mac and how to create tables and change the colour of fonts. I didn't learn much except how to use Dreamweaver for stuff that I normally do in code (and I haven't changed my mind about Dreamweaver's code output; it's terrible). During the second half of the session, the instructor got us to put together a webpage using pre-existing images stored on our training computer and tables tables tables and tables within tables. This went against everything I've ever learnt from Ben about web design and it made me a bit angry because the people who ran the training course were, in a sense, being quite deceptive; sure, they were teaching people how to write webpages and how to use Dreamweavers to write webpages but they weren't teaching people how to write good webpages. They were teaching people only as much as they wanted them to know about webpages from a University of Wollongong point of view because these are the people who are going to be responsible for maintaining the webpages for different departments and units within the University, and therefore will have to know how to use the University's Dreamweaver templates which are all table-based for layout with CSS for in-line elements. I asked one of the staff there why they didn't use CSS for layout and he said it was so that the University's site would still be compatible with older browsers (which is kind of understandable because Netscape 4.77 is the most common browser on campus). I then asked him what the University would do about accessibility in the future when people start downloading the web to their palm pilots and he said that they hadn't implemented anything yet but would probably do so in the future in such a way that would enable them to keep their table-based templates. Sounds crazy to me; everyone should just upgrade. Perhaps that is a very imperialistic way of thinking.

I've realised that I can't stand being bored. I have this really active brain and I have trouble sitting still if my brain is not being engaged (for example, by television or a movie or a book or a good sermon). If I'm bored, it seems to me more justifiable to do something sinful like being rude and not paying attention, or going off to do something else, or just tuning out entirely. I also experience great urges to be rude to the person who is the cause of me being bored (eg. preachers, instructors, teachers, etc.) I don't like the fact they're making me bored and stealing precious time out of my life. I don't usually carry these thoughts out in real life (with the exception of today when I got told off for checking my email during the training session) but I still have them.

So it's another 3 hours of Dreamweaver training tomorrow morning followed by a meeting with the web design team who are revamping the CAPSTRANS website in accordance with University governance and templates. I thought they wanted me to redesign it but they don't; they want me to maintain it when it's up there. In the afternoon I'm meeting up with a friend to read the Bible and then we're going to Simon's house for dinner and a cheesy movie. Sounds fun.

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