Fun with fonts!

Oh, I do love messing around with fonts.  You're just lucky that there are only eight to choose from here on blogger and they're all kind of boring, or I'd be changing it up every time, sometimes within one post.

I taught tonight at the young adults group, and I think it went well.  I was just piling Bible verse on top of Bible verse illustrating that what God wants from us is all-out love for him and for our neighbors, who just happen to be everyone, oh, on the planet.  We are clearly charged to take care of one another, and our love for God is supposed to take up all of our being.  As one guy said tonight, it's a little scary because there are no loopholes out of this.  All of you.  Everyone. 

So, I decided to do a power point presentation because I had about 11 Bible passages, some long, and I didn't want people to have to flip all over the place and not really be able to look at the text and concentrate.  Naturally, every slide was in a different font.  In fact, most slides had 2 different fonts: one for the title and one for the text.  All the titles were the same, "What does God want from us?" but I started changing it up even beyond the font by putting it in different language.  Thank you, Google translator!  For the most part, I was able to double-check and figure out if the translations were right/close, except for with Welsh.  I was just going to have to trust that one.  I had Spanish, Welsh, French, Swedish, and German.  It was great fun, I tell you.

Here, you can look at it to see how crazy I went.  I even have 1 piece of clip art. I was into this. Core PPT
*note that one the slide with the link to the movie study, we just skipped through the preview & watched the short clip from lesson 4. 

I love friends!

Uh-oh. This was going to be about specific friends and bonding, but it might turn into a long-winded treatise on why I love facebook and twitter. You've been duly warned. Oh, and I just thought of another friend-themed rant. Woah. Focus, robeena. Pick one and move on.

Okay, today's topic is: we need more words in English for "friend." Alternatively, I need to grow up. The issue is that I am a fairly affectionate person who also happens to need a decent amount of affirmation herself. (It is quite natural that these things go hand-in-hand. My #2 love language is "words of affirmation," so I give that easily.) So I find myself calling this person or that "my best friend" or "one of my best friends." Then I also have to qualify that with "in California" or "in the whole, wide UNIVERSE," or some such 3rd grade nonsense.

Why do I do this? I think part of it is that, especially when introducing someone to "one of my best friends," I want to emphasize how special this person is to me. I'm trying to express that I love this person a whole lot and I'm excited for you to meet them. I just with there was a less childish way of doing it.

People mean things to me in different ways. Obviously, Seth is my best friend, period. I suppose that my sister would be next. But from there it starts to get confusing. There are long-time friends who have known me forever. There are friends who have been there through thick and thin. There are the people that I can rely on in any situation. There are the handful of people that I could talk to for days on end with no break and we'd still be having a great conversation. There are the friends that know me and I can just be near them and be completely myself with no walls. There are the few people out here in CA who I feel I have a lot in common with and with whom I can be sarcastic and watch TV. Obviously, some of these categories overlap, but all of these people are precious to me, and I want everyone to know it.

Maybe I should start collecting foreign words for "friend." There have to be words for some of these things out there. Of course, I would still have to explain the word to someone if I used it in public, but I think it would make my heart smile to have a word for just what someone means to me.