Just Nichols » Family

Nathans Big Day

Justin — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 01:10:13 +0000

Nathan turned 18 yesterday. Most likely my parents will kick him out of the house with a pair of clean underwear and a guitar…. Since we have a lot of relatives that live close by, everybody came to celebrate his Americanized cultural ‘coming to manhood’. I don’t get it: in Israel you become a man at 13, and in America you have to wait all the way to 18!?
13 relatives joined us. Of everybody there we had a magician, two circus performers, two actors/directors, a poet, a baby, and a physician and a dentist (just in case anyone got hurt). Our relatives are verily talented!
My brothers B-day kicked off with bowling. Good thing we didn’t literally kick it off with a bowling ball. Everyone got very bad scores- except my uncle. Everybody tried different ways of throwing that big round plastic ball: grandma throws, spins, speed throws, and countless bouncing gutter balls. We made a ruckus applauding anything from knocking all ten pins over to just barely nicking the edge.
Back home, Dad made potatoes for everyone and then we sang every song we could think of except for “Happy Birthday”. Finally we gave in and Nathan blew out the candles on all the brownies as we sang. I made a big present hunt. I hid about 25 clues all around the property that lead to each other. Some of the most creative places I hid clues included inside a balloon, on a cats collar, in a link at the top of our swing, in the mail box, in a e-mail sent to Nathan, inside a ceiling fan, in Nathans journal, in aunt Katie’s pocket, and at the top of a ladder. Some of the hints where verses. One clue just had “Ecclesiastes 3″ written on it. That chapter is all about a time to do things. The next clue hung behind the clock. Another clue had 2 Kings 4:32 on it- “When Elisha reached the house, there was the boy lying dead on his couch.”
The last present at the end of the clue trail I hid near the top of a tree. Nathan climbed for it.
Nathan took his AKG K240 (huh?) headphones, his mandolin, and his super-nice keyboard to the church to jam with some friends about Jesus. Finally we went to bed and I read his new ESV study-bible. All our relatives had fun, Nathan got to climb a tree, Josiah helped run around looking for clues, a cat got to carry a clue in her collar, and everyone got a brownie. What a scrumptious day.

Confessions of a Third Culture Kid

nathan — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:23:44 +0000

“Mom, could I get two 5 dollar bills for this $10? Oh wait, do they even have $5 bills?”
“Whats that sound dad?”, “That’s the ice cream truck.”, “Seriously? I thought those were only in the movies!”
“Uncle Brad, how do I dial 1-800-FREE-411? There’s letters in this…”
“Grandma! Can I flush the toilet paper!?”
“I’m from Santa Clara suburb.” (pronounced with a heavy Spanish accent)
“Oh its a nickel. I thought it was a quarter.”
“Who is Opera?”

An uncanny mystery of disease…

Justin — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 04:10:23 +0000

“Ugg, what are these bumps on my arm?” I slept solely on my left side, so immediately the assumption walked through my brain that somehow the blood had cluttered together and got stuck. A parallel section on the back of my hand was bright red, appearing rashly that morning. The crimson streak ran up my arm. Of all this, I made no relationship.
My parents counseled me as to what I should do. We arrived at the decision that I should drop by the college clinic and have them look at the bumps. Dad thought they were weak sections of my veins that had swollen with blood. Renae and I stopped by the clinic and found that it opened at ten. It was seven in the morning.
After music class, we went back and I tried to book an appointment. The lady at the front desk could not have me come in until next week. I asked her to feel my bumps. She did. Abviusly she was worried.
Something was wrong.
Soon the nurses whisked me into a room with a blue bed and a paper white pillow on it. Sitting awkwardly on the bed, I looked around the room. The cubicle was tiny. Across the room, a dresser stood holding bottles and tissues and all assortments of strange tools. They left me necessary paperwork, as I arrived a newbie to the clinic.
What could it be?
I was not scared. I told my parents jokingly what to do in case I died. In music class my head whirled in circles, and blood pulsated hard behind my eyes. My head was exploding. For a moment, reason impaired. Thinking was too hard.
Am I going to die?
A doctor walked in, pulling a demeanor of high spirits into the room. She asked questions, and examined my arm under a light. Tracing the waterfall of red down my arm, she arrived at my left middle finger.
“Can you flip your hand over?”
And there it was. Mystery solved. The connections were made: the bumps, the rash, the dizziness and the fever. The symptoms fell up my arm like a domino track. She informed me I had cat scratch fever. Basically what had happened is somehow I suffered to get a small cut, didn’t wash it, and had it licked by a cat. About half of all cats carry intracellular bacterium Bartonella around in their mouths. It effects them in no way, but it can prove fatal for humans. The poisoned blood creeps slowly to the heart, causing death on rare occasions. The mysterious bumps where actually lymph nodes; little filtering traps for foreign particles of bacteria. Lymph nodes inflame when they fight an infection- thus the bumps.
The symptoms of cat scratch fever that I felt where as fallows. Slight fever, headache, chills, backache and confusion. For some reason I felt every single one, but none very strong. The doctor prescribed me to get some very expensive antibiotic at BiMart, and then I came home on the bus. Few, what a long day. Renae still is not home, although it is 8:00 pm. We usually stay at Lane Community College all day long, finishing math homework and such. I know this post sounds kinda’ depressing, but don’t worry. I’m doing snazzy well!

Learning and Loving

Justin — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 03:34:08 +0000

My family used to sit down and munch through books. Feeling like an envious outsider, I would watch every one else licking their lips with the delight of language as they gulped down sentences. “How come everybody else can read and I can’t read!?” Even everyone in my second grade class knew how to do it. The mysterious code of reading seemed impossible to crack! I cried my way through the struggle of learning.
My parents did not force me to read. Later I struggled to learn how to decipher the written language from my mother. It was my individual choice to pick up books. I eventually developed an almost unnatural taste for reading, like a glutton among anorexics.
A large, plastic gray crate comes to mind when the word ‘book’ is said. My siblings and I used to go to the library chattering and bickering in the car. We filled up a crate with books and came home in complete undefiled silence dumping the knowledge from the crate into our minds. Within a week we would be back again.
Reading always inspires me to write. I’m working on three novels, a journal and a website right now. My goal is to be an author before I slam eighteen. I think as a writer. I think as a creator, a describer, and a history-teller. I find myself describing gnarled roots, stray kittens, broken swings, up-side-down blurs on windshields that look like faces, or people’s conversations. Sometimes I can’t help but listen in to dialogs, studying how people talk, think and express themselves.
Yesterday I rushed through my first day of winter term College; meticulously taking notes on any word I didn’t know that respired through my teacher’s mouth. Unfortunately I forgot a pencil. Oh! The horrors! My notes for that day are written in bold blurred letters, for my sister’s pencil we shared was dulled down until its tiny slope of lead ground flat.
At times during my life I’ve loved learning but loathed school. Mostly I’ve enjoyed both. In public school, it was grades over learning. I never knew anyone who would admit they liked school. In second grade I had my father as a teacher, and I started to love pottery and art. In third I figured out I liked to write, even though my spelling was so horrific I couldn’t read my own writing. I’ve grown a lot since then, filling up my own books with art and writing. In fifth grade, while living in Spain, many people influenced me for the better. For example, I learned the very technical method of how to shoot rubber-bands at pesky flies. That year transformed my life in several distinct ways.
Every day we’re learning, right? Every hour, every minute, every second, every moment our brains are sucking knowledge through our heads, keeping some pieces, and slaughtering others. Learning is a part of life. What you learn about is your choice, a very important and life-changing choice.
Life isn’t about life. All the smug vanities add up to zip. True, thinking and ice skating and writing and marriage are all great things, but the Bible says this: ‘But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.’ (Mathew 6:33).
We all have a conscience. We all have some sort of standard behavior that we agree upon, and if someone breaks it we think he’s ‘wrong’. What or who gave it to us? Some sort of great being who made us? Well, if that’s true, then he must be ignoring earth, or letting us do all the evil we want for some odd reason, or maybe he tries to stop us but isn’t powerful enough to do anything about it.
This creator, known as ‘God’ is good, and must want us to be good because he gives us a conscience. Another clue to this creator is the creation. Just look up any night and see the searing-hot stars piercing through the curtain of our atmosphere, and then try to rethink the word ‘big’ from Gods perspective. (Warning: serious risk of brain overload.) We Christians have a pretty gigantic God out there, who somehow cares about every one of his children. He cares about everyone on earth so much that he gave his son to die on a cross, in our place.
The penalty of sin is death. He died so our sins would be forgiven. The awesome part is that God raised Jesus from the dead. The vast abyss of sin between God and man disappeared. All man has to do is believe that God’s son died for him, and his sins are forgiven. The book of Mathew is supernatural thriller.
When my father asks me to do something, I don’t always understand why he’s having me do it. Like singing at old people’s homes or simply obeying when I don’t see the logic. There are times in my life when I know my God has a bigger plan for me than I could fathom. He formed me into the human I am today using my past experiences, mistakes, and even my tardy reading to help me realize what a beautiful God we have. God has a way of twisting situations around for love’s benefit. I love my God, and try to obey him. Now that is the point of life.

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls, who when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it.”
Mathew 13:45-46