Various

I got to hang out with Joe, Brandon, and Kenny on Saturday night. It had been a while since all of our schedules matched up so we could hang out, and we had a great time eating Mexican food and then going to see the movie "Domino." I will defer to Kenny's review of the movie since I am in total agreement with his assessment of the film. Anyway, during dinner my Brandon busted out his new camera. His old one (that he loved) had gotten wet on that camping trip he and Kenny had taken a few weeks ago. So the camera gets passed around, and when it comes to me I dropped it in my soup! I never order soup and all the other plates on the table had been taken away except mine. Kenny and Joe were like "You didn't just do that?" Brandon was dying laughing and could hardly contain himself. The camera seemed to be acting weird, but we managed to take a picture with it and it seemed all good...until we got in the cab to come home. Brandon was checking it, and it basically kept asking him to turn it on and off over and over again. Needless to say I wasn't too happy with myself (and neither was Allison when I told her). I have been assured though that it is in fact working.

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It's "Jack Jack" from the Incredibles! Levi wasn't too excited about wearing the mask for his costume. That's why we only have this picture of him (and it's the good one) crying. Allison did a great job making his costume, but he didn't appreciate it as much we did. Perhaps Joe was right to not get sucked into this whole Halloween thing until his daughter absolutely forces him to. What's funny is that Joe wrote that post about Halloween and then we tried to get another picture of Levi in his full costume at the church, and he wasn't having any of it. All of this played out right in front of Joe and Sophia and I am sure he was thinking to himself "Bingo, that's why we don't do Halloween".

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It's hard having a kid who is in between sizes. Nothing fits, and it's not like he can go without a coat for the winter. At least he thinks he looks good!

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I received a great e-mail from the illustrator of the cover of YouthWorker that I posted about. He said that he actually agreed with my assessment of the illustration, and was telling his wife that he didn't like how it turned out, but that he was under a deadline and the art director for YouthWorker liked it. Interestingly enough the original character on the cover was Caucasian, but the editors asked him to add some ethnicity.

Tony Arnold asked what I define as the "fringe kid." The kids that I happened to be around that were on the fringes of the youth groups I was in or lead happened to be into the goth scene. Aside from embodying a certain type of kid as the fringe kid, I think that the fringe kid is more of a phenomenon than one single type of teen. That was one of my problems with the magazine cover, it made a pretty clear declaration of what "type" of kid was a fringe kid. Instead I would have liked them to illustrate the phenomenon of kids who separate themselves, or aren't accepted by the larger group because of a variety of reasons. As a youth minister I plan things to say or do that will resonate with the greatest number of kids that I work with. That means that the things I plan or say don't resonate with everyone which means I have to be more deliberate and personal with the teens that don't, won't, or can't hear me as the larger group does. That to me is the heart of any "fringe" teen or person.