Kyle Matthew Oliver

Author: Kyle

  • My On-Call Week Reflection Paper

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    What have I learned and seen during my week of being in the hospital for seven days in a row? I’ve learned you don’t have to be a cantor to leaf through a hymnal and sing to a woman who’s used music to keep her going through twenty-some years of cancer treatment. I’ve learned you…

  • I Write (/Think) Like…

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    Kyle
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    I recently plugged a couple graphs of my review of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (excluding quotations, of course) into the Web site I Write Like. The humorous and perhaps unsurprising result was that I apparently write like David Foster Wallace: http://iwl.me/s/d7939cdb Granted, I’ve always written in a childishly DFW-esque way; that’s part of why…

  • Hundred-Word Highlights

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    Our official mid-unit evaluation day at CPE took place on Tuesday, which means my time in New York is more than halfway done. One of my late-emerging CPE learning goals is to be more concise when speaking and writing, so let me offer a few hundred-or-so-word highlights of my time here. Here’s some of why…

  • Soccer in the Hospital

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    Kristin has a new post up about soccer in the port. The soccer-aiding-chaplaincy factor is definitely present in the hospital as well. I met one cancer patient yesterday who is almost always asleep when I swing by. They were saving her a seat for the U.S.-Algeria match, though. She told me she’s more of a…

  • Newbie Soccer Thoughts

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    I am a systems person; I enjoy watching new systems in action and trying to figure out what makes them tick. I’m also, as one of my CPE supervisors pointed out to me this week, an associative person; I like making connections between seemingly disparate things (both a blessing and a curse in the CPE…

  • CPE Placement

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    Well, we’re three days into our CPE, and we visited patients for the first time today (shadowing full-time chaplains). I was struck by how fast it all went; in an hour we

  • Brief Review of Brief Interviews

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    I’ve written a fair bit on this blog about one of my top two or three favorite authors, David Foster Wallace. I’m hoping to use this summer’s respite from required reading to finally finish slogging through his rather daunting catalogue. Of the three books that remained for me, I decided to start with Brief Interviews…

  • Kyle’s Blogging Tips (80% of which are too specific to be useful)

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    Kyle
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    I am probably the worst kind of blogger (OK, maybe not the worst kind: see Exhibits A, B, and C). I know a lot about blogs (I used to evaluate them for Newstex) and about blogging best practices (having edited many words on the subject), but I don’t put that knowledge to very good use.…

  • A Lesson and Some Highlights from BookExpo America

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    My friend David Meerman Scott was at the Wiley booth today at BookExpo America, signing copies of his new book, Real-Time Marketing & PR: How to Engage Your Market, Connect with Customers, and Create Products that Grow Your Business Now. Since I now live in New York but haven’t started working yet, I was able…

  • My Favorite Preacher Unexpectedly Reminds Me Why I Miss Him

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    [First, a guarantee: I will post something about my life and not about church very soon. Probably when I get back from the Brewers-Twins series this weekend!] I remember reading at the beginning of the school year some article in which the author claimed, “Good preaching changes lives.” I know that statement is true when…