Sometime last year, onmilliontinytinyjesues was playing at Davey's Uptown, and because they are so good for dancing and improving self esteem and breaking Calvary rules, apparently, I went to see them play. It was a Thursday, and Jill had to get up early in the morning, but she insisted I go. This was back when I had the ten-to-seven, and a one in the morning still netted me a good eight hours of sleep. I remember it being cold, and I forgot to bring cash, so I had to go to a deserted ATM a couple blocks down. Which was a little disconcerting. I didn't even finally decide to go until late, so when I showed up there was this other band playing called Lowry.
Lowry's a folky (antifolk, actually, whatever that means) band originally from Kansas City but now based out of New York and I dug them right off. So did Brianna, who was there, too. I know because she bought a CD, and also she said that they might be her favorite band, which was a pretty good indication to me. They've got a lead singer guy on the acoustic guitar whose last name is Lowry, believe it or not. And a drummer, and a keyboards guy. They also have a singer named Heidi Sidelinker who is now a 'friend' of mine on MySpace and Facebook due to the fact that I placed myself on Lowry's email list and that after leaving her in that Myspace I-don't-know-if-this-is-a-real-person-or-not-and-if-so-how-do-I-know-them-anyway limbo for a few months. That night Heidi was totally getting into her singing, and dancing some like she meant what she was singing, if you know what I mean.
Later on, while we were waiting for thejesusues to go on, there were a number of us standing around and talking and choking (Davey's Uptown is the smokiest place I have ever been). One person (I don't remember who, so don't ask.) commented on how into singing Heidi was, and someone else (Again, I don't know who; quit asking) said that that was just because she was sleeping with the band leader. I thought this was pretty crass myself, and a little too cynical for my tastes.
Now, I'll come back and tackle cynicism some other time, doncha worry about that one, but what really bothered me, though, is the idea that this person had a mindset that said for Heidi to be that enthusiastic and into her music, she had to have some ulterior sexual motive. Well, bullcrap. I mean, maybe she does. I've got no idea whatsoever. I kind of doubt it, but I'm really not sure. Thing is, to jump to that conclusion, that person was just objectifying and commodiying Heidi. They were saying, essentially, that they could figure out someone's motives just by looking at them. That their ivory tower knowledge let them in on the inner workings of another person, and you can predict how they'll act in certain situations. I'm not saying there aren't psychological clues out there that you can read to get a vibe for how someone is feeling or if they're lying. I am saying that using those clues, or your own preception of those clues to deduce things like that is absurd, and very self-serving. I seem to recall whoever it was having a smirk. Let me tell you, if you say something with a smirk, most of the time, you shouldn'ta said it.
And add on top of that the person was adding some sort of sexual slant to their impossible-to-know knowledge. Booooooooo. Rob Bell says that most people view sexuality through the lens of everyone being either an angel, with no sexual or physical needs or desires, or through the the lens that everyone's an animal that can't control their desires. He says that maybe we need a third way where people are seen through the lens of being people who have desires and can control them.
I listened to some Lowry last night on the way home from writing with Amanda. We've still got a tape deck in the van because I've been too lazy to replace it with the old CD player Adam gave me far too long ago. So I can use the old CD-player-to-tape-deck cord hook up thing to plug my laptop into the van's stereo. I listened to 'Radio Sky', 'the Creeps' and 'Jukebox Heart' where Heidi and Alex Lowry harmonize about letting the nickel slide down down down down, and I was happy, because that song is so good. I meant to listen to 4th of July, which mentions hobbits, but I didn't queue it up right. I decided I would go stand at an ATM in the cold, in a deserted part of town, to see them again.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Friend of a Friend: a recent recalcitrant relationships rant
I have a friend who has had two relationships fall apart lately because the women he's dating want to go further physically than he does. Women who are pretty hardcore into shaping their lives around their faith it seems. And it's like they think that because he's not willing to go further than kissing that there's something wrong with him. Maybe like he's less of a man because he's not letting his sexuality override his dedication to chastity. Well, bullcrap. I call shenanigans.
Look, I realize that women in our society are overrun with a negative narrative about their body image. That pretty much every woman out there is being emotionally (and maybe even sexually) abused by advertisements and women's magazines. I get it. And it makes me really sad, because I think women are beautiful people, and they're getting the crap beat out of their self worth. It's especially devastating because I think that woman need to feel wanted, and more important than that, they want to feel beautiful. So they're trying to fill that need while all the while everything they see and hear tells them that they have to look a certain unobtainable way to be beautiful, and if they aren't beautiful, they can't be wanted.
But my friend is trying to honor that inner beauty. Trying to say that the person inside the body is more important than the body. And more than that, I think saying that beauty is not this thing that all the messages out in the air say that it is. And that she doesn't have to be that kind of unobtainable beauty to be wanted. He's trying to treat them like people, rather than objects. Which, having read Lauren Winner's Real Sex, is the whole point of chastity, taking the consumer mentality out of relationships.
But these women don't know how to handle that kind of relationship. They're told by the things they consume that they not only need to consume, but need to be consumed. That being used as a disposable totem of self-worth bestows self worth on them. But that's not the story they're supposed to be listening to as people trying to follow Jesus.
When someone like my friend doesn't consume them like they expect form all these twisted narratives, they reject him. It makes me want to shout at someone(if Love and Logic hadn't taught me that shouting is ineffective). I want to shout at the faceless culture and tell it that it's ruining these women. It's telling them all the wrong stories. Stories that sneak in and cut their throat. Like I've said before, I do think there's a secret society running everything in the world. Thing is, it's all of us. So what can ya do other than speak and hope someone hears you. And at the same time, I want to yell at the women, "Come on, ladies, he's treating you right. Woman up to not being a sex object. You're worth more than that. And he sure as swearword is, too."
Look, I realize that women in our society are overrun with a negative narrative about their body image. That pretty much every woman out there is being emotionally (and maybe even sexually) abused by advertisements and women's magazines. I get it. And it makes me really sad, because I think women are beautiful people, and they're getting the crap beat out of their self worth. It's especially devastating because I think that woman need to feel wanted, and more important than that, they want to feel beautiful. So they're trying to fill that need while all the while everything they see and hear tells them that they have to look a certain unobtainable way to be beautiful, and if they aren't beautiful, they can't be wanted.
But my friend is trying to honor that inner beauty. Trying to say that the person inside the body is more important than the body. And more than that, I think saying that beauty is not this thing that all the messages out in the air say that it is. And that she doesn't have to be that kind of unobtainable beauty to be wanted. He's trying to treat them like people, rather than objects. Which, having read Lauren Winner's Real Sex, is the whole point of chastity, taking the consumer mentality out of relationships.
But these women don't know how to handle that kind of relationship. They're told by the things they consume that they not only need to consume, but need to be consumed. That being used as a disposable totem of self-worth bestows self worth on them. But that's not the story they're supposed to be listening to as people trying to follow Jesus.
When someone like my friend doesn't consume them like they expect form all these twisted narratives, they reject him. It makes me want to shout at someone(if Love and Logic hadn't taught me that shouting is ineffective). I want to shout at the faceless culture and tell it that it's ruining these women. It's telling them all the wrong stories. Stories that sneak in and cut their throat. Like I've said before, I do think there's a secret society running everything in the world. Thing is, it's all of us. So what can ya do other than speak and hope someone hears you. And at the same time, I want to yell at the women, "Come on, ladies, he's treating you right. Woman up to not being a sex object. You're worth more than that. And he sure as swearword is, too."
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
I didn't get a hurumph outa that guy.
I saw it first on Metafilter, which is an odd place to get breaking news. As of this writing, Fark and Digg haven't mentioned it, and as you'd expect, it's the top story at the Drudge Report. William F. Buckley is dead.
Even when I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh daily, no other person inspired and directed my political self image like WFB. I stopped subscribing to National Review some time ago, some time before I my care of politics dropped to its current low mark. It was around the time that I still daily drank in enough of the magazine online to no longer warrant the selfishness of possessing my own paper copy.
Last week at Borders, I picked up the latest issue, and thumbed through it while waiting for Dave to show up. I also picked up Rolling Stone and Mad Magazine, a juxtaposition I always hope someone picks up on. Sometimes I add in a comic book and Mother earth to bolster my own overdeveloped sense of irony. I glanced through his columns. I remember reading one, but its content escapes me at the moment. A lapse in the quality of my reading, not of his writing. There was a time getting the magazine that I'd just skim his columns because I'd already read them when they were published online. Just this morning, I was thinking about subscribing to his RSS feed.
I have a book of his speeches published just after he stopped giving speeches called Let us Talk of Many Things. I have two of his spy novels, and an early book of his essays. I have never read anyone as lucid in his thinking or erudite in his prose. Rather than listening to be blather on forever about the man (and believe me, I could go on for pages) go find something of his, anything at all, and read that instead.
Even when I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh daily, no other person inspired and directed my political self image like WFB. I stopped subscribing to National Review some time ago, some time before I my care of politics dropped to its current low mark. It was around the time that I still daily drank in enough of the magazine online to no longer warrant the selfishness of possessing my own paper copy.
Last week at Borders, I picked up the latest issue, and thumbed through it while waiting for Dave to show up. I also picked up Rolling Stone and Mad Magazine, a juxtaposition I always hope someone picks up on. Sometimes I add in a comic book and Mother earth to bolster my own overdeveloped sense of irony. I glanced through his columns. I remember reading one, but its content escapes me at the moment. A lapse in the quality of my reading, not of his writing. There was a time getting the magazine that I'd just skim his columns because I'd already read them when they were published online. Just this morning, I was thinking about subscribing to his RSS feed.
I have a book of his speeches published just after he stopped giving speeches called Let us Talk of Many Things. I have two of his spy novels, and an early book of his essays. I have never read anyone as lucid in his thinking or erudite in his prose. Rather than listening to be blather on forever about the man (and believe me, I could go on for pages) go find something of his, anything at all, and read that instead.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Observations from a day off.
Dune the extended cut movie still leaves out what I consider the most important parts of the story. If you don't talk about the choice Paul has to make about what he sees in the future, you missed the whole point.
Overheating almond bark turns it to thick frosting, not creamy, dippable, confection.
Iceman likes to stand in doors during timed missions, making Storm very angry.
A case of cans may last longer than a 2-liter, but it never lasts long enough.
A spot of alcohol in any form, NyQuil liqui-tabs or schnapps or anything, makes my eyes sae heavy of a morning.
The best day of many blankets on a bed is never the first. They have to meld into one cohesive thermal fortress over time.
Living in a house you pay for is much better than attending it from time to time. The varying lighting conditions alone are worth staying in now and then.
I write a lot more when I am undistracted. I'm able to let it flow, and come back later, rather than gtrudge piece by piece.
Julia Child's instructions for boiled eggs are still perfect.
I am reresolved that hamburgers with odd bits of seasoning are a waste of time, and all you need is chopped onions in the pan. Also, Munster is still the champion cheeseburger cheese.
Computer speakers with a USB power attachment sound better than those with a wall power attachment. Especially for techno.
When no one gets out of bed until ten, it's hard to get the trash out on time.
A day off without any time off is not a day off at all. I could do this for a living, man.
The Jill=all the kinds of amazing. I think I will keep her.
Overheating almond bark turns it to thick frosting, not creamy, dippable, confection.
Iceman likes to stand in doors during timed missions, making Storm very angry.
A case of cans may last longer than a 2-liter, but it never lasts long enough.
A spot of alcohol in any form, NyQuil liqui-tabs or schnapps or anything, makes my eyes sae heavy of a morning.
The best day of many blankets on a bed is never the first. They have to meld into one cohesive thermal fortress over time.
Living in a house you pay for is much better than attending it from time to time. The varying lighting conditions alone are worth staying in now and then.
I write a lot more when I am undistracted. I'm able to let it flow, and come back later, rather than gtrudge piece by piece.
Julia Child's instructions for boiled eggs are still perfect.
I am reresolved that hamburgers with odd bits of seasoning are a waste of time, and all you need is chopped onions in the pan. Also, Munster is still the champion cheeseburger cheese.
Computer speakers with a USB power attachment sound better than those with a wall power attachment. Especially for techno.
When no one gets out of bed until ten, it's hard to get the trash out on time.
A day off without any time off is not a day off at all. I could do this for a living, man.
The Jill=all the kinds of amazing. I think I will keep her.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Sunday afternoon a 17, Sunday afternoon a 24. And a 25?
Sunday afternoons have been filling up lately. I'm sure this will die down after the Intuitive Leadership book discussion is over in a few weeks. But it's kind of supposed to be Jill and my day off together. That's continually negotiated, though. I'd like to be able to say, "Here's mah schedule," and just leave it. But it's constantly changing. We have to keep sitting down and talking about when's what, and how we're going to get rest in, or us time, or see friends we hardly ever see. Seems like it's the same thing with everything. Saturday night group; sit down, talk it out, change. Tim talks about that in his book in the chapter we've been in for a couple weeks. How Israel got all obsessed with the ark, and used that as a totem, instead of maintaining relationship with God. They stopped being creative and stopped the relationship, and got the crap beat out of them for it.
Last week, we were scheduled to go to lunch for Juliet and my Aunt Heidi's collective birthdays. You ever notice how some people just have a title in front of their names from here until forever? Aunt Heidi. Like her identity to me is entirely wrapped up in the fact that her brother had a kid. If I met her in any other circumstance, her identity would be formed by what she did, and who she was. As it is, her name has the word 'aunt' in it, so that's who she is to me. And to her kids, she's 'Mom.' and no matter how close she might get to her daughter, I don' t think that Becca will ever see her mom outside of that strict familial context. That's one of the things Jill is most concerned with about having kids; that they won't see her as a person.
I have lunch with my dad every week (when he's in the country, that is), and some weeks we have good conversation about all sorts of deep and personal ans spiritual topics, and some weeks, we just kind of sit there and chit chat. Depends on the mood. We've had a pretty substantial conversation over a long period of time about the nature of truth, and what we can know, and how much our lenses and biases get in the way. A lot of it all swirling around the word 'objective,' which we keep having to renegotiate and grapple with. And it all stemmed from a conversation with Dave at Borders one Wednesday about Mark Driscol saying that Rob Bell was a heretic for not believing the Bible was inherent. I said I though that inherent wasn't such a good word for a book like the Bible, and that led us into discussing objective truth, and how I think that objectivism leads to oppression, and that everyone has a lens they see the world though, and you can very be fully objective. My dad likes to state my position as 'strict objectivity,' which I think is a bit redundant, but I'll accept it for the conversation.
One time we were sitting in Chipotle, by the window, and I'd finished my burrito bowl, with the barbacoa and the black beans, oh! the black beans, and he was still going on with his as he usually is, since I am such a quick eater. We were talking about this objective truth business. And I heard something almost desperate in his voice when he was talking about how if we didn't know something for sure, 100%, how could we know it? Like, he'd based his whole life on a thing, and our conversation wasn't questioning the thing itself, but the way that he knew the thing. That was shaking, I thought. That was a lucid moment for me of knowing my dad outside of the existing familial context of 'father.' He wasn't just my papa, he was a guy that I knew with things that he clung to as real, and hopes and dreams. Those moments are always hard to come by with people I know well, but I cherish them, because I love knowing people for who they are, not who I've set them up in my head to be. The actual, not the image.
So I ended up giving my Dad the Intuitive Leadership book because I thought it might end up casting some light on what I was saying about objectivity, but we got our communication lines confused, as we do almost all the time (yay, family) and he thought I was having him read it to make my point about inherency. But he enjoyed it none the less.
Even though she doesn't have an appellation tied to her name (unless you want to include 'the'), I get that same dissociative way with Jill sometimes, too. Sometimes it's hard to clarify where the line is between us. We've been together for a long while now, and we think in the same ways about a lot of things. Sometimes I just have to ask her opinions of things so I can hear her voice instead of mine.
I guess it's that way with almost everyone I know. I have to force myself to see them for who they are. I like the peopleness of people, and if I'm not careful, I can miss it pretty easily. I'm not a good listener. It's something I'm working on. Knowing how to listen, and actually doing it is hard. Of course, it's that way with almost everything in life, eh? Knowing how to do a thing comes easily. The doing it is what comes hard.
So, that Sunday, when we were supposed to go to lunch with the family, Aunt Heidi got sick, and it was snowing with a slush of epic proportions, so they canceled. Instead of going to lunch with the big ol' family, Jill and I went to lunch with Jeremy and Juliet. We talked about Lost, and I had a far-too-many-points-but-oh-so-good cheeseburger (because it's one of the cheaper things on the menu), and Jill had a tropical breeze drink thing and Juliet had a strawberry margerhita, which is much better than the caramel appletini she had the week before for her birthday, on the way to her surprise party that she did not yet know about. I watched some soccer out of the corner of my eye for part of it, which is sort of because I don't like looking at people when we're talking. There're a lot of reasons for this, I think. One is that I'm such a visual learner that I get very distracted by what people are doing, and I have a hard time paying attention to what they're saying. ANother is that since I'm so visual, there's a lot of emotion and authenticity in faces, and I don't always like engaging with that. I have a hard time being serious sometimes, as I've said before. I do this at plays, too. A lot of times I'll be staring off into dark space while the show's going on. Just listening to the voices.
So, after lunch, I was kind of sleepy, but there wasn't enough time for a nap before I went to the book discussion, seeing as how I had to finish some reading first, and I'm still off caffeine (grr/yay). Something odd happened there: I didn't talk much.
If you've been in a group discussion with me before, you know that I like to talk. A lot. And the chapter we were discussing was on a topic that I love talking about: post-modernism. Chapter 5 of Tim's book is pretty heady, and there were a lot of heady conversations going. But for the most part, I stayed out of it. Maybe it's because I was tired, and maybe it's because postmodernism is something I've talked a lot about already, and maybe it was because some of the other guys are even more in love with their voices than I am (hard as that is to believe) and maybe it's because I really wanted something relevant to my life to talk about, and we weren't getting anywhere.
So I was quiet for at least 20 minutes. Of course, I jumped in after a while, you know how I do. But being quiet for so long was interesting. And kind of dull. I don't know how so many people handle it. Just listening. Weird.
Skip forward a week, and we go out to lunch with the whole family, grandparents and all, and I watch a little bit of a prison show out of the corner of my eye, and Jill and I share nachos, which are a pretty good size to share, but also oh-so-many-points, and we have a laughing sort of good time with everyone.
Back at the book discussion, I'm silent for a long time again. Same reasons, I think. But maybe, also, I'm finally learning to shut up. Which would be nice, but I ain't promisin' nothin'. Maybe it's maturity creeping in. Who knows.
Today's a day off, and so is tomorrow. Jill and I have turned off our cell phones, and although I'm sure I'll check my email at least once to find out when exactly Adam's flight is tomorrow night, Jill and I are getting our Sunday afternoon on for two whole days. I'm still blogging, and I worked on my book this morning. Jill's watching movies still. But we have nothing really planned. Ah, yeah.
Last week, we were scheduled to go to lunch for Juliet and my Aunt Heidi's collective birthdays. You ever notice how some people just have a title in front of their names from here until forever? Aunt Heidi. Like her identity to me is entirely wrapped up in the fact that her brother had a kid. If I met her in any other circumstance, her identity would be formed by what she did, and who she was. As it is, her name has the word 'aunt' in it, so that's who she is to me. And to her kids, she's 'Mom.' and no matter how close she might get to her daughter, I don' t think that Becca will ever see her mom outside of that strict familial context. That's one of the things Jill is most concerned with about having kids; that they won't see her as a person.
I have lunch with my dad every week (when he's in the country, that is), and some weeks we have good conversation about all sorts of deep and personal ans spiritual topics, and some weeks, we just kind of sit there and chit chat. Depends on the mood. We've had a pretty substantial conversation over a long period of time about the nature of truth, and what we can know, and how much our lenses and biases get in the way. A lot of it all swirling around the word 'objective,' which we keep having to renegotiate and grapple with. And it all stemmed from a conversation with Dave at Borders one Wednesday about Mark Driscol saying that Rob Bell was a heretic for not believing the Bible was inherent. I said I though that inherent wasn't such a good word for a book like the Bible, and that led us into discussing objective truth, and how I think that objectivism leads to oppression, and that everyone has a lens they see the world though, and you can very be fully objective. My dad likes to state my position as 'strict objectivity,' which I think is a bit redundant, but I'll accept it for the conversation.
One time we were sitting in Chipotle, by the window, and I'd finished my burrito bowl, with the barbacoa and the black beans, oh! the black beans, and he was still going on with his as he usually is, since I am such a quick eater. We were talking about this objective truth business. And I heard something almost desperate in his voice when he was talking about how if we didn't know something for sure, 100%, how could we know it? Like, he'd based his whole life on a thing, and our conversation wasn't questioning the thing itself, but the way that he knew the thing. That was shaking, I thought. That was a lucid moment for me of knowing my dad outside of the existing familial context of 'father.' He wasn't just my papa, he was a guy that I knew with things that he clung to as real, and hopes and dreams. Those moments are always hard to come by with people I know well, but I cherish them, because I love knowing people for who they are, not who I've set them up in my head to be. The actual, not the image.
So I ended up giving my Dad the Intuitive Leadership book because I thought it might end up casting some light on what I was saying about objectivity, but we got our communication lines confused, as we do almost all the time (yay, family) and he thought I was having him read it to make my point about inherency. But he enjoyed it none the less.
Even though she doesn't have an appellation tied to her name (unless you want to include 'the'), I get that same dissociative way with Jill sometimes, too. Sometimes it's hard to clarify where the line is between us. We've been together for a long while now, and we think in the same ways about a lot of things. Sometimes I just have to ask her opinions of things so I can hear her voice instead of mine.
I guess it's that way with almost everyone I know. I have to force myself to see them for who they are. I like the peopleness of people, and if I'm not careful, I can miss it pretty easily. I'm not a good listener. It's something I'm working on. Knowing how to listen, and actually doing it is hard. Of course, it's that way with almost everything in life, eh? Knowing how to do a thing comes easily. The doing it is what comes hard.
So, that Sunday, when we were supposed to go to lunch with the family, Aunt Heidi got sick, and it was snowing with a slush of epic proportions, so they canceled. Instead of going to lunch with the big ol' family, Jill and I went to lunch with Jeremy and Juliet. We talked about Lost, and I had a far-too-many-points-but-oh-so-good cheeseburger (because it's one of the cheaper things on the menu), and Jill had a tropical breeze drink thing and Juliet had a strawberry margerhita, which is much better than the caramel appletini she had the week before for her birthday, on the way to her surprise party that she did not yet know about. I watched some soccer out of the corner of my eye for part of it, which is sort of because I don't like looking at people when we're talking. There're a lot of reasons for this, I think. One is that I'm such a visual learner that I get very distracted by what people are doing, and I have a hard time paying attention to what they're saying. ANother is that since I'm so visual, there's a lot of emotion and authenticity in faces, and I don't always like engaging with that. I have a hard time being serious sometimes, as I've said before. I do this at plays, too. A lot of times I'll be staring off into dark space while the show's going on. Just listening to the voices.
So, after lunch, I was kind of sleepy, but there wasn't enough time for a nap before I went to the book discussion, seeing as how I had to finish some reading first, and I'm still off caffeine (grr/yay). Something odd happened there: I didn't talk much.
If you've been in a group discussion with me before, you know that I like to talk. A lot. And the chapter we were discussing was on a topic that I love talking about: post-modernism. Chapter 5 of Tim's book is pretty heady, and there were a lot of heady conversations going. But for the most part, I stayed out of it. Maybe it's because I was tired, and maybe it's because postmodernism is something I've talked a lot about already, and maybe it was because some of the other guys are even more in love with their voices than I am (hard as that is to believe) and maybe it's because I really wanted something relevant to my life to talk about, and we weren't getting anywhere.
So I was quiet for at least 20 minutes. Of course, I jumped in after a while, you know how I do. But being quiet for so long was interesting. And kind of dull. I don't know how so many people handle it. Just listening. Weird.
Skip forward a week, and we go out to lunch with the whole family, grandparents and all, and I watch a little bit of a prison show out of the corner of my eye, and Jill and I share nachos, which are a pretty good size to share, but also oh-so-many-points, and we have a laughing sort of good time with everyone.
Back at the book discussion, I'm silent for a long time again. Same reasons, I think. But maybe, also, I'm finally learning to shut up. Which would be nice, but I ain't promisin' nothin'. Maybe it's maturity creeping in. Who knows.
Today's a day off, and so is tomorrow. Jill and I have turned off our cell phones, and although I'm sure I'll check my email at least once to find out when exactly Adam's flight is tomorrow night, Jill and I are getting our Sunday afternoon on for two whole days. I'm still blogging, and I worked on my book this morning. Jill's watching movies still. But we have nothing really planned. Ah, yeah.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Things from what happened today so far.
I didn't get a chance to work on the book much this morning because we had to leave early due to the weather getting it's winter on. Again. Hurrah for having a real winter for once. We're still out a tarp from giving it to some people who needed it a lot more than we did, so this morning, we had to scrape some serious freezing drizzle off the van. The roads were pretty slick, too, so we circumvented the uphill 43rd and Rainbow intersection, where we've seen a lot of people get stuck. Civil engineers RULE, which is a lie. And even with all the accidents and whatnot out in Kansas City Winter Drivers Can't Drive Land, I made it to work early.
Which can't be said for everyone else in the call center here. In fact, we had a bunch of people out 'sick.' Riiiiight. I'm sure. So you're telling me it's super cold and icy, and you're somehow 'sick?' I really believe you. Anyway, on the way in, my boss asked me to hop on the phones early to cover for the 'sick' people. Dan also came on early. So, I'm gettin' 15 minutes of overtime. I'm gonna be rich, baby. Then Mr. Guy who is a Boss, asked us to take half hour lunches, and we'd get overtime for it, and he'd provide pizza. Sure, I thought, PIZZA! Which is not good for me because pizza is about fourteen thousand kinds of fattening and when it is free, it is even tastier than when you pay for it, and I had maybe three days of points all , but ohmygoodness it was delicious. Also, I have a bit of a headache, which at this point, I can no longer pin on that darn caffeine monster, so I'm going to have to point at gluten, and be all, like, "YOU THERE!"
That being said, there hasn't been a lot of time for writing or anything besides helping people fix their problems by walking most of them through the basic recommended settings for our software.
No really, I'd say sixty percent of the calls that I get in a day could be easily fixed by the person just running the system setup utility for our software. The one that every user is told to do to set up the system. And I'd call another twenty percent of the calls hand-hold calls. Where the person either can't look for themselves at the obvious place on the screen to find what they're looking for, or look at the extensive help guides and videos provided to explain how to do what they want to do. And because we're nice, even though it isn't in the contract to go beyond tech support, we help. Another fifteen percent on top of that are problems that could be fixed if our programmers made the changes. Like the aforementioned utility requiring library files that not every version of Windows has. Or the fact that our navagation bar object is called banner.aspx, so every ad-blocking piece of software blocks it.
Jill came to my work today after her work where she set up a new printer. Today is a good day for her Snowcialist platform which she will explain sometime in a super-fancy guest post. She's set herself up in the cubicle catty-corner (or kitty-corner, or catty-whompus, depending on your regional preference) to mine, and she's trying to learn French on her computer. But Steven is over there being gross about something I can't quite hear, so I don't think think she's learned a word yet. He's probably lick Al or something. He does that.
This lady I'm talking to right now has a keyboard from South American that doesn't have a colon on it, or if it does, she can't find it. Crazy time.
Jill and I are both off work Monday and Tuesday, so any posting I do then will be affected by that mid-winter vacation.
Good e'en, friends.
Which can't be said for everyone else in the call center here. In fact, we had a bunch of people out 'sick.' Riiiiight. I'm sure. So you're telling me it's super cold and icy, and you're somehow 'sick?' I really believe you. Anyway, on the way in, my boss asked me to hop on the phones early to cover for the 'sick' people. Dan also came on early. So, I'm gettin' 15 minutes of overtime. I'm gonna be rich, baby. Then Mr. Guy who is a Boss, asked us to take half hour lunches, and we'd get overtime for it, and he'd provide pizza. Sure, I thought, PIZZA! Which is not good for me because pizza is about fourteen thousand kinds of fattening and when it is free, it is even tastier than when you pay for it, and I had maybe three days of points all , but ohmygoodness it was delicious. Also, I have a bit of a headache, which at this point, I can no longer pin on that darn caffeine monster, so I'm going to have to point at gluten, and be all, like, "YOU THERE!"
That being said, there hasn't been a lot of time for writing or anything besides helping people fix their problems by walking most of them through the basic recommended settings for our software.
No really, I'd say sixty percent of the calls that I get in a day could be easily fixed by the person just running the system setup utility for our software. The one that every user is told to do to set up the system. And I'd call another twenty percent of the calls hand-hold calls. Where the person either can't look for themselves at the obvious place on the screen to find what they're looking for, or look at the extensive help guides and videos provided to explain how to do what they want to do. And because we're nice, even though it isn't in the contract to go beyond tech support, we help. Another fifteen percent on top of that are problems that could be fixed if our programmers made the changes. Like the aforementioned utility requiring library files that not every version of Windows has. Or the fact that our navagation bar object is called banner.aspx, so every ad-blocking piece of software blocks it.
Jill came to my work today after her work where she set up a new printer. Today is a good day for her Snowcialist platform which she will explain sometime in a super-fancy guest post. She's set herself up in the cubicle catty-corner (or kitty-corner, or catty-whompus, depending on your regional preference) to mine, and she's trying to learn French on her computer. But Steven is over there being gross about something I can't quite hear, so I don't think think she's learned a word yet. He's probably lick Al or something. He does that.
This lady I'm talking to right now has a keyboard from South American that doesn't have a colon on it, or if it does, she can't find it. Crazy time.
Jill and I are both off work Monday and Tuesday, so any posting I do then will be affected by that mid-winter vacation.
Good e'en, friends.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Weak week
A while back, Jill and I stopped hosting our Monday night prayer group, which had been a Tuesday night prayer group, and then became a Thursday night prayer group when Adam started it back up a month or so ago. We stopped because we were getting seriously stretched on having time off. And now that it's back, as much as we love it, time's getting crunched again. I don't know if we'd feel the same way if we were watching Lost with everyone on Thursdays. I think we would. Besides, I'm really getting into the 1gb 720p versions I can download on Fridays. Mmm, resolution.
Mondays are our free day now. Unless there's a surprise birthday party or something.
Tuesdays I run the small group for the Jr. high guys at church, and then I write with Amanda.
Wednesday, I play board games with Dave Weatherford at Borders in Olathe. It used to be Scrabble, but it's more Three-Dragon Ante and Ticket to Ride these days.
Thursday is Conversations. We pray and eat sandwiches and take communion.
Friday is Friday. Now and then, we get that free, but the people who don't have anything going during the week like to plan things to do. And I like to do them.
Second Saturdays, we have the service project at church. I work one of the others every month. That leaves two Saturdays a month open during the day, and usually one of those at least is taken up by an all-day thing. Then, at 6:00 we have group at our house.
Sundays, I help with the youth at church at 11, have Jacob's Well Institute book study at 3:30, Church at 5:30, and then we usually eat together afterwards.
Amanda and I are trying to finish a draft of our book as soon as we can, so we're gettign together every night we can. I'm trying to get my own book writing going every morning.
The only thing I can see to cut, we already cut, and got brought back by popular demand.
Jill says we should try to convince everyone to do what we do for Conversations on Saturday night. I like this idea, but I also think Bible study is beneficial. Maybe prayer is more so. I dunno.
Brett asked me the other day if I was fine with not having free time. At the time, I said, I thought so because I have this job where I can do as I please most of the day. I've been playing a lot of Awesome Awesome Ball Game the last couple days. And finally organized a bunch of things how I liked them in an RSS aggregator, which makes keeping up on blog updates a lot easier than clicking bookmarks every ten minutes. But after I had that conversation with Brett, I think the weariness of it all started to set in.
I don't live in my house much. I mean, I attend plenty of events there. But as far as actually spending time in it as a resident? Not much. Sort of a waste of a house if you ask me. At least I'm not teaching and trying to do all this stuff at the same time. I think I'd pass out after week one.
And that's part of the conundrum. I'd like a job where I can feel meaningful, and do engaging work. But how can I do that, and keep up the after-work busy-ness I'm so deeply embroiled in now? Then add in kids at some point in the future. Kinda gotta be around them, too.
This is part of why I'm waking up early to write. Nothing like residuals to make your day job less necessary. Get a couple 'o books on the market, and I could cut back to a part-time thingy, I'd bet, and still be able to maintain my level of activity.
People ask me why I don't watch movies or add any more TV shows to my stable. Besides the influence of the heroin-like nature of books on my experience of story that I discussed last week, it's time. I'm all full, thanks.
Mondays are our free day now. Unless there's a surprise birthday party or something.
Tuesdays I run the small group for the Jr. high guys at church, and then I write with Amanda.
Wednesday, I play board games with Dave Weatherford at Borders in Olathe. It used to be Scrabble, but it's more Three-Dragon Ante and Ticket to Ride these days.
Thursday is Conversations. We pray and eat sandwiches and take communion.
Friday is Friday. Now and then, we get that free, but the people who don't have anything going during the week like to plan things to do. And I like to do them.
Second Saturdays, we have the service project at church. I work one of the others every month. That leaves two Saturdays a month open during the day, and usually one of those at least is taken up by an all-day thing. Then, at 6:00 we have group at our house.
Sundays, I help with the youth at church at 11, have Jacob's Well Institute book study at 3:30, Church at 5:30, and then we usually eat together afterwards.
Amanda and I are trying to finish a draft of our book as soon as we can, so we're gettign together every night we can. I'm trying to get my own book writing going every morning.
The only thing I can see to cut, we already cut, and got brought back by popular demand.
Jill says we should try to convince everyone to do what we do for Conversations on Saturday night. I like this idea, but I also think Bible study is beneficial. Maybe prayer is more so. I dunno.
Brett asked me the other day if I was fine with not having free time. At the time, I said, I thought so because I have this job where I can do as I please most of the day. I've been playing a lot of Awesome Awesome Ball Game the last couple days. And finally organized a bunch of things how I liked them in an RSS aggregator, which makes keeping up on blog updates a lot easier than clicking bookmarks every ten minutes. But after I had that conversation with Brett, I think the weariness of it all started to set in.
I don't live in my house much. I mean, I attend plenty of events there. But as far as actually spending time in it as a resident? Not much. Sort of a waste of a house if you ask me. At least I'm not teaching and trying to do all this stuff at the same time. I think I'd pass out after week one.
And that's part of the conundrum. I'd like a job where I can feel meaningful, and do engaging work. But how can I do that, and keep up the after-work busy-ness I'm so deeply embroiled in now? Then add in kids at some point in the future. Kinda gotta be around them, too.
This is part of why I'm waking up early to write. Nothing like residuals to make your day job less necessary. Get a couple 'o books on the market, and I could cut back to a part-time thingy, I'd bet, and still be able to maintain my level of activity.
People ask me why I don't watch movies or add any more TV shows to my stable. Besides the influence of the heroin-like nature of books on my experience of story that I discussed last week, it's time. I'm all full, thanks.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Writing, right?
This morning I woke up early and worked on my book. Last night Amanda and I worked on our kid's book, as we will do again tonight, and tomorrow, and the rest of the week. All day I record what I do to help people fix their computer problems. I talk on IM to people who talk to me. I've got a really good post idea, and no entrance to it yet. Maybe it'll come tomorrow.
Monday, February 18, 2008
A short prognostication.
Today I can feel spring coming. Like the smooth roll around the corner at the top of the roller coaster before the drop. There's no real indication, no hint in the taste of the air. But my muscles are tense for it, waiting to explode. My heart expects like a sixteen-year old on the afternoon of a first date.
I've known that I've had some sort of seasonal affective disorder since high school. Most years, I don't even know that I'm depressed until some day in March when the wind brings brings the hint of cool afternoon naps and wet earth, and I wake up, realize I've been under the blanket of winter for so long, I've forgotten what fresh air is like. This is why you see spring so often in my poetry. It's not a pro-spring sentiment per se, but anti-winter.
I don't think I'm in the season affection this year. I didn't get it last year. I think learning the new job went a long way to staving off the winter doldrums then. Rtght now, I don't feel depressed, but suppose I'll have no real idea whether the darkness of the early evenings and the cold have gotten to me until the spring finally gets here. But that doesn't mean I'm not anticipating.
Come on, spring. Get your act together. I'm tired of waiting.
I've known that I've had some sort of seasonal affective disorder since high school. Most years, I don't even know that I'm depressed until some day in March when the wind brings brings the hint of cool afternoon naps and wet earth, and I wake up, realize I've been under the blanket of winter for so long, I've forgotten what fresh air is like. This is why you see spring so often in my poetry. It's not a pro-spring sentiment per se, but anti-winter.
I don't think I'm in the season affection this year. I didn't get it last year. I think learning the new job went a long way to staving off the winter doldrums then. Rtght now, I don't feel depressed, but suppose I'll have no real idea whether the darkness of the early evenings and the cold have gotten to me until the spring finally gets here. But that doesn't mean I'm not anticipating.
Come on, spring. Get your act together. I'm tired of waiting.
Friday, February 15, 2008
It's a private matter.
Yesterday at lunch, I finally got caught up on the first episode from this new season of Lost. Across the way from my cubicle is a set of six abandoned cubes, and I rolled my chair over to the back ones and set up the laptop on the desk. On the way over, my boss asked me what I was doing. I told him about Lost, and he was disappointed. He had thought I was moving Jeff's cube. That is, taking all of his stuff from a guy's cube to another and setting it all up exactly the same way. You know, as a prank. They did that to my supervisor a couple of times, like, took pictures and everything to make it looked exactly the same. I told my boss that I don't pull pranks , but he didn't believe me. But it's true. Unlike pretty much everyone else here, I'm not a big fan of pranks. Maybe it comes from not liking them played on me. I dunno. Never been a prankster.
Anyway, I really enjoyed Lost, back there in my private cube. Just put my feet up and watched it in HD. For week two, I've downloaded the super HD version, which I'll watch at lunch here in a few minutes. The picture is gorgeous, I checked this morning.
I really really enjoyed sitting back there, watching a new chapter one of my favorite stories. It got my heart rate up, and I started speculating on various motives and possibilities, and teared up when they talked about Charlie. And in the midst of all that, I finally realized why I tend to not like to watch movies as a group activity, even though I really, really like movies. It's because I like books so much.
I've been a crazy reader most of my life. One time, I lost out on the prime job hunting days in Emporia because I was reading the first four books of Harry Potter. In third grade, I got a pink slip (i.e., office referral) for continually reading when I was supposed to be cleaning out my desk. I've put off writing important papers because I had a novel I was in the middle of. I've stayed up past three the night before a test to finish a book. I've skipped church. I like to refer to books as my personal crack. When I read, I do nothing else. Oh, and woe to the person that tries to get my attention when I'm reading. I get snippy.
It's because when I'm reading a well-written book, I space out and start reading automatically, the words creating pictures in my head. It's like dreaming, relaxing and delightful I imagine it's like what women feel when they eat chocolate. Endorphins firing like crazy.
So, take my long history of book reading into account, and my aversion to watching movies in a group makes total sense. To me, stories are personal, a private pleasure.
My summer before (and during) my first year of college, I was working at Big Bubba's Bar-B-Q, and I got a membership card to Movie Gallery. Yeah, even back then, I didn't care for Blockbuster. I always thought it was stuck up or something. Someplace the cool kids went. Besides, Movie gallery was cheaper. And I'd stop by on the way home from work, and get, like, three or four movies at a time, sometimes watching two a night. One time I got home from school at 10:30, watched Dark City, and then went to the AMC 30 and saw the Matrix for the first time. I cannot recommend this to anyone who does not want to believe that they can fly only with the power of their mind.
But now, I rarely watch a movie unless it's something that I really want to see. Or when my desire to see a story, and share it with someone else, overcomes my selfish hedonism. Couple all this with my extroversion, and maybe this is also part why I like the movies I like. They're movies whose stories are such that I want to share them.
Anyway, I really enjoyed Lost, back there in my private cube. Just put my feet up and watched it in HD. For week two, I've downloaded the super HD version, which I'll watch at lunch here in a few minutes. The picture is gorgeous, I checked this morning.
I really really enjoyed sitting back there, watching a new chapter one of my favorite stories. It got my heart rate up, and I started speculating on various motives and possibilities, and teared up when they talked about Charlie. And in the midst of all that, I finally realized why I tend to not like to watch movies as a group activity, even though I really, really like movies. It's because I like books so much.
I've been a crazy reader most of my life. One time, I lost out on the prime job hunting days in Emporia because I was reading the first four books of Harry Potter. In third grade, I got a pink slip (i.e., office referral) for continually reading when I was supposed to be cleaning out my desk. I've put off writing important papers because I had a novel I was in the middle of. I've stayed up past three the night before a test to finish a book. I've skipped church. I like to refer to books as my personal crack. When I read, I do nothing else. Oh, and woe to the person that tries to get my attention when I'm reading. I get snippy.
It's because when I'm reading a well-written book, I space out and start reading automatically, the words creating pictures in my head. It's like dreaming, relaxing and delightful I imagine it's like what women feel when they eat chocolate. Endorphins firing like crazy.
So, take my long history of book reading into account, and my aversion to watching movies in a group makes total sense. To me, stories are personal, a private pleasure.
My summer before (and during) my first year of college, I was working at Big Bubba's Bar-B-Q, and I got a membership card to Movie Gallery. Yeah, even back then, I didn't care for Blockbuster. I always thought it was stuck up or something. Someplace the cool kids went. Besides, Movie gallery was cheaper. And I'd stop by on the way home from work, and get, like, three or four movies at a time, sometimes watching two a night. One time I got home from school at 10:30, watched Dark City, and then went to the AMC 30 and saw the Matrix for the first time. I cannot recommend this to anyone who does not want to believe that they can fly only with the power of their mind.
But now, I rarely watch a movie unless it's something that I really want to see. Or when my desire to see a story, and share it with someone else, overcomes my selfish hedonism. Couple all this with my extroversion, and maybe this is also part why I like the movies I like. They're movies whose stories are such that I want to share them.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
A ticket, a tacket, some notes.
Took communion with Dave and Terry and the Jill last night at Borders before playing Killer Bunnies. Dave said it was the most laid back communion he'd ever had. And I thought i was being kind of formal about it.
Next time, when given the choice to look at the labels of the pita bread I am buying for my portable communion kit, I shall look, and thus not buy the whole wheat pitas. Bleached flour, you are my best friend; I don't care how bad an influence you are. So delish.
On the way home, Jill realized that I have no free time and mentioned it. It's true. The evening in which I am not engaged in some sort of activity is rare. Even more so having one alone, almost non-existent. But I'm cool with that. As long as I have a job that I can lollygag about on the internet all day, and write this blog, and IM Steve about politics and faith, I'm coo.
The guy who is supposed to get a forum up for Nation States still hasn't done it yet. Even though he had it ready, like, a month ago. Sorry, New Flamretarnesians. Oh, but when it's done, there shall be Qanian justice, oh my brothers.
Is 'Pinot Evil' brand wine a good choice for portable communion? There's some debate. I say, "Ohyes."
Got our van somefixed yesterday. The steering wheel no longer shakes, and it turns like a steering wheel rather than a steamboat wheel, and the brakes are much tighter. But 'twas nae cheap, my droogs.
Still haven't gotten to the first episode of Lost yet. I'm hoping to catch it today at lunch. We shall see. Depends on how many notes I have.
Jeff, the guy who sits behind me here at work bought a nice laptop at Best Buy a week ago. Two days later, he saw it for $1700 bucks at Costco. His price? $476.
There's a picture of New York. There's a picture of New York. There's a big fat crazy picture of New York.
Yesterday, I broke a very odd streak of over a week in which I really wanted to listen to music as I worked, or wrote, but no songs sounded good. No matter what I turned on, I switched it off right away. Even di.fm's vocal trance, which is always good work music. Counting Crows got me over the hump yesterday with some hard candy, and Pandora ran all morning.
I'm reading Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrell for the first time . And while I enjoy the language and the clever, the story really hasn't pulled me in yet. I'm still waiting. And plodding.
Run DMC's Rev Run is on tour with Kid Rock according to Rolling Stone. He said he put his collar aside to go. I wonder what he means. Like, putting away the physical trappings of his faith, or putting aside his faith? Every Christian's a minister, says I.
The phrase "on fire for God" is one of my least favorite phrases of all time.
How in the world does laundry stack up so fast? I wear the same pair of jeans for three days running, but it seems like every week, I'm completely pantsless of a morning. Some sort of vast denim conspiracy, I'd bet.
There's some notes. Merry Thursday, all.
Next time, when given the choice to look at the labels of the pita bread I am buying for my portable communion kit, I shall look, and thus not buy the whole wheat pitas. Bleached flour, you are my best friend; I don't care how bad an influence you are. So delish.
On the way home, Jill realized that I have no free time and mentioned it. It's true. The evening in which I am not engaged in some sort of activity is rare. Even more so having one alone, almost non-existent. But I'm cool with that. As long as I have a job that I can lollygag about on the internet all day, and write this blog, and IM Steve about politics and faith, I'm coo.
The guy who is supposed to get a forum up for Nation States still hasn't done it yet. Even though he had it ready, like, a month ago. Sorry, New Flamretarnesians. Oh, but when it's done, there shall be Qanian justice, oh my brothers.
Is 'Pinot Evil' brand wine a good choice for portable communion? There's some debate. I say, "Ohyes."
Got our van somefixed yesterday. The steering wheel no longer shakes, and it turns like a steering wheel rather than a steamboat wheel, and the brakes are much tighter. But 'twas nae cheap, my droogs.
Still haven't gotten to the first episode of Lost yet. I'm hoping to catch it today at lunch. We shall see. Depends on how many notes I have.
Jeff, the guy who sits behind me here at work bought a nice laptop at Best Buy a week ago. Two days later, he saw it for $1700 bucks at Costco. His price? $476.
There's a picture of New York. There's a picture of New York. There's a big fat crazy picture of New York.
Yesterday, I broke a very odd streak of over a week in which I really wanted to listen to music as I worked, or wrote, but no songs sounded good. No matter what I turned on, I switched it off right away. Even di.fm's vocal trance, which is always good work music. Counting Crows got me over the hump yesterday with some hard candy, and Pandora ran all morning.
I'm reading Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrell for the first time . And while I enjoy the language and the clever, the story really hasn't pulled me in yet. I'm still waiting. And plodding.
Run DMC's Rev Run is on tour with Kid Rock according to Rolling Stone. He said he put his collar aside to go. I wonder what he means. Like, putting away the physical trappings of his faith, or putting aside his faith? Every Christian's a minister, says I.
The phrase "on fire for God" is one of my least favorite phrases of all time.
How in the world does laundry stack up so fast? I wear the same pair of jeans for three days running, but it seems like every week, I'm completely pantsless of a morning. Some sort of vast denim conspiracy, I'd bet.
There's some notes. Merry Thursday, all.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
-Morning-Lent-Community- a exercise in unmarked parentheticals
After the party on Monday, I got to sleep around 11:30, assisted by ye ol' stocking cap, with added caffeine molecule hoodie action, as ya might expect. Sam left the party at 8:17, which may have seemed early to you when you read about it in the Monday liveblogging, but this year, he's giving up sleep for Lent.
That is, he wakes up at seven every morning to pray, no matter how late he was up the night before. He also doesn't believe in naps, which makes the whole day more challenging. I'm a firm believer in naps. Naps and I are good buddies. We hang out whenever possible. Although I really enjoyed the potential hour of disconnected solitude the abandoned part of the office building afforded me, back before the far-flung subsidiary of our company moved in there last month, the lack of ability to go over, lie down under a cubicle desk, and zonk out for twenty minutes is my real sorrow. Mmm, naps.
Teaching at Turner, I had to be to work every morning by seven. Sometimes I'd nap from 7:35-7:55 under my desk with all the lights but the emergency row off and my neck cradled by a satin pillow the museJill made for me back in high school. This is back in the the days of the clear blue Nokia cell phone with the Nicholas-esque ten ninjas sticker on the back that I got when it was included with the ten ninjas hoodie I bought him. That phone had the best alarm ever. It started with a real quiet dong . . . . . . . . . . . . dong . . . . . . . . . . dong dong dong dong . . . . . . . . . . . . (a little louder then) dong, and so on. And right before it went off, it buzzed, so you could hit it before it even made noise if you were quick. It's nothing like the absurd and cacophonous and obnoxious rings that come with the Samsungs Jill and I both have now.
Most mornings these days, I'm up by seven. Of course, I got off work at 2:30 back at Turner. It's 6:00 when I'm off now, and I live further from work. But I only have to get up early during the week. Saturdays where I don't work or have second Saturdays, I stretch out sleeping as long as I can. Mmm, blankets. Sundays, I don't really have to get up until 10:30 to make it in time to hang out with the youths at eleven. The thirty-second walk to church helps there. lemme tell ya. I've even woken up after eleven and made it up to the third floor by the time everything got going. But Sam's got that seven hanging over him every day. No thanks.
Yesterday morning was an even earlier experience, as Sam had decided to participate in the lectio divina at Church at 6:30. Lectio divina is an hour-long prayer exercise centered around experiencing a chunk of scripture in various ways. And since Sam only lives eight blocks away, he couldn't in good conscience drive, so he walked. In the freaking cold. And because Jill and I believe in supporting the people we live our lives with, we were there with him at 6:30. Cold and early together in the dark.
I have always liked being awake when it's dark. Though, I think the reason I'm not a morning person is the same reason I get fed up with rain that quits after an hour or two, when the sun comes out and makes the super-happy-fun rainbows. Sun showers are one thing, but when it rains for real, I want it to rain. For days and days even. It feels more real for it to keep going like that. Short rain keeps you from forgetting the sun. Hard to get an aching appreciation for something that's only gone for a minute. It's pretty much the same for me with snow. Snow needs to fall long and deep and stay on the ground for a week, getting piled on by another layer after layer. That's what I think.
I want my life invaded by the weather. I want to feel it in my bones, fight to get out of my house, to feel hemmed in and then conquer it, or cow and stay in, enjoying seeing it through the windows. If it's gonna rain, let it torrent. Snow, let it drift. Hot, let it burn. Dark, let it stay dark. The worst part of an early morning is the dawn. The sun comes up and ruins the whole earliness of it all.
My sophomore year of high school, before I got embroiled in the world of high school drama (theatre and relationships, if ya believe it) I took an AM hour. Which was a voluntary 7:15 class. I'm not well self-motivated, and combine that with the really awful international school I'd gone to for a few months in Belarus, I'd fallen behind a whole year in the maths. I wanted to catch up, so I added in a Algebra II/Trig Class to my not at all burgeoning Geometry-centric math schedule. Geometry was a breeze, which impressed Charlie Pope enough to let me take two math classes at the same time.
This is also about the time that telling my teacher that I'd read War and Peace over the summer got me bumped up from no-one-cares English to Honors English with Teena Winter herself, author of Demystifying the Magic: Strategies for Creatively Teaching the Writing of the Narrative, the Essay, and the Poem, a photocopied copy of which I have somewhere in a stack of teaching paraphernalia in a clear plastic box down in the basement. Even thought I now can buy it for five bucks online. The English class switch also changed my gym hour, which became relevant the next semester when I couldn't run due to tendinitis and was able fit in early a required Geography class from Jim Rostello, the oddest little man who has ever taught a social studies class. What the crap, Tina Turner obsession.
So, me, being my just-back-from-Belarus-ride-my-bike-all-the-way-across-town-to-visit-a-girl-who-could-care-less-about-me-but-on-whom-I-had-a-crush-in-the-middle-of-the-summer-heat self, I'd get to school at 6. So, up at 5:30. I love a vacant building that's usually brimmed with people. It's got an expectant atmosphere kinned to a library. Only instead of the weight of all the potentially known knowledge lurking, swirling around and pressing down on you, it's the emptiness of no people.
So, yeah, I'm no stranger to early mornings. But that doesn't mean we get along. I don't think they get along with Sam these days either. But for a guy who works in theatre, I've got to say, it's pretty impressive to make it up by nine, let alone seven. I mean, there are nights I remember where Sam got home at six in the morning from serious all-night theatre business. All in all, a valiant effort, and something I hope is beneficial to his spirit.
As I mentioned before, I, too am observing Lent again this year. Last year, in an attempt to up my own personal conviviality, I decided to give up eating by myself. I only ate if I was able to eat with someone else. A couple of times I ate in friends' presences, when they weren't eating, but for the most part it was all about sharing meals. While this was fun and good for my waistline, I don't know that I could consider it to be a drastic change from how I live anyway. Yes, occasionally I have a banana in the morning all alone (wail and sniff), but I mostly skip breakfast. Yes, I know this is not good for my metabolism. But when you're watching your weight, there is a serious dearth of satisfying breakfast choices. And yes, I have soup at my desk at lunch, or occasionally make a fresco-style Taco Bell run on those very off days in which I have not pooled in a car out here to Olathe. But for the most part, my meals are communal. So having tried it, I can say that giving up alone-eating isn't really much of a good way to ritually and somberly prepare myself for Easter.
I've been thinking for a few weeks of what to do for Lent. I've never been big on giving up a thing for Lent that you ought to give up anyway. Like, back in high school, people I knew used to give up chocolate or pop or whatever, and I would say in a snarky tone that I was giving up drinking and smoking and cocaine and murder. You know, things I didn't do anyway. Part of it was that I saw Lent as a meaningless Catholic ritual, ala only eating fish on Fridays (a practice whose genesis come from a glut in the Italian fish industry), and part of it was that I saw a lot of Catholics that I knew who went to mass 'a week and didn't have a thing in their lives to show for it. All ritual, and no substance. I'm not trying to disparage Catholicism, a lot of people from all kinds of demoninations and e'en other faiths do these same kinds of rituals that have no meaning for them, but that's how I saw it at the time.
This is part of why I quit caffeine a week and a half before Ash Wednesday; I didn't want quitting something I wanted to quit anyway to be part of Lent. Last year, Tim gave a sermon agreeing with me about how Lent shouldn't be something you give up that you should anyway. That it should be a time or reflection and preparation. This year, Jacob's Well is doing a whole series on various practices and disciplines of the faith. And without any good ideas at the time, I decided to get all creative, and try to take on each of the practices the week following the message on that particular one. Now, I had no idea what they were going to be, and this week when Shayne came out and spoke on communion, I had no idea how to incorporate that into a week. I mean, we take communion already on Sunday, and on Thursday nights for the prayer thing, and on Saturday nights sometimes, so, where the heck was I going to fit it in in addition to those other times?
When we do communion at Jacob's well, it's an individual thing, pretty much. We're all doing it at the same time, of course. Well, one after another. But you go up when the line gets down to your row, and you take the bread from the person, and dip it into the grape juice that stands in for wine, and they tell you that it's the body of Christ broken for you, and the blood shed on your behalf, and then you eat it. A process called intinction, for those who care. And then you go back and sit down. Married couples sometimes take it together. On the whole, though, like in most churches, I think, communion has become this private matter where you get your face all holy-lookin' for a second and then eat and drink some morsels. Kind of uncommunal if you ask me. Sometimes we've been sneaky, and we grab all the people sitting in our row, and we all go up and take it together. Communally, you know. And on 'Conversations' nights when we pray, we get a big loaf of really good rosemary bread from Farm to Market bakery, and some wine which we pour in small amounts out into glasses, and then someone breaks the bread and passes it around, and reminds us to remember, and we munch on that for a while. You can get seconds.
Shayne focused in on the communal aspect of communion in his message, and then had us go up in groups of four, and really look at these other symbolic members of the body of Christ with whom we were symbolically taking in the body of Christ. I ended up with a couple people that I didn't really know, which was a cool experience.
But now I was stuck as to what to do for the week, seeing as how it's a very other-people sort of practice. Not like fasting or giving or prayer, which are all things I can easily and creatively come up with ways of practicing for a week on my own.
After church on Sunday, we went over to Amanda and Katie's for spaghetti, for the third night of four in a row of people over at there. You could tell it was wearing on Amanda by Monday; she does not get energy from being with people, and she was beat. We usually eat food together after church, and the Jill was getting her own introvert on, so we had to go somewhere besides our house, which, like I said, is a thirty-second walk from the church and so convenient. Brett and Jake brought the sauce and some noodles and ground beef, and so Ben and Mike and I collected some money and went to Dillons, which I hear is closing, sadly.
I grew up on the Dillons chain of grocery stores. I remember biking back and forth on my one gear red bike to the Dillons on Sante Fe to rent a movie one hot day when my dad was really sick. It took three or four trips before I got the signature and the money and everything sorted out and got back home with Back to the Future. Turns out I got a VHS instead of a Beta, so my dad actually got in the car and drove me back over there for the exchange. Another time, my History of Technology class walked over to Dillons and cataloged all the various magazines and their subsequent sub cultures. When Jill and I lived on Harrison, we even shopped there. We lived for two years next to that amazing Price Chopper on Roe, and I don't have a Chopper Shopper card any more. But I do still have the Dillons Plus Card I got back in high school. So, yeah, affinity.
Ben and Mike and I got some pies and some linguine and some low-cal non-carbonated soft drinks and some garlic bread and some cheese bread. And then Ben, because he has a weakness for baked goods got a third pie. Once we'd gotten back and were eating, I asked everyone what I should do this week to observe communion as my practice. Sam said, that I could only eat with other people again. But I didn't want to just run through same ol' same ol'. Steve said that I should take communion with people that I normally didn't take communion with. I was like, "What, like homeless people?" And he said, no, I wouldn't likely take communion with homeless people, it should be people that I really wouldn't ever take communion with. I said, "Oh, like Mike Bickley." The whole room laughed. Half because they thought I said Mike Bickle, who is the paster of IHOP, a really charismatic/fundamentalist church out in south KC. The other half laughed because they all used to go to the church with me that Mike Bickley pastors in south Olathe, and all of them now go to Jacob's Well instead for a variety of reasons.
Then Sam said he had a hard idea, that I should go have communion with Danon and Cara, who are people that Jill and I and Amanda and my parents and Nick and Martha and Lynn and Sam all performed with a couple of summers ago. They kicked Jill and me out of their theatre group a year ago December. It was a big to-do, and there were a lot of hurt feelings on all kinds of sides. And although we've patched it up a lot, we really haven't become friends again. We were accused of being divisive in the group, and we didn't think we were. So as hard as it might be, it seems to me to be a great group of people to get together with and take communion, sharing our common identify as followers of Jesus.
My goal, then, this week (and it may stretch further into Lent, depending) is to take communion with other Christians that I normally wouldn't. So far, I've taken communion with my mom, and my group of jr. high guys group that meets on Tuesday. So, not much so far. Pretty easy, really. On my list I've got Mike Bickley, Danon and Cara, my boss, and Mike Huckabee. I think I'll be able to get the first few. I'm carrying around a backpack with a bottle of wine, a bottle of grape juice, some pita bread, and some cups. So, I am action ready.
One of the other things going on this Lenten season at church, although not directly related to Lent, is a series of seminars and discussion groups they're calling Jacob's Well Institute. There is one about practicing Lent, and one discussing the physical aspects of spirituality led by this cool philosophy professor at a chiropractic college who is an elder at our church, and one that Steve's leading that is a read-through of Mark, and a couple that are just weekly chances to get out in the community and meet peoples' needs. I'm going to a book discussion on Tim Keel's Book Intuitive Leadership that Shayne is leading on Sunday afternoons.
This last week, we got into a discussion about community living that stemmed from Tim's story about how Jacob's Well is kind of based on this experience he had in a tight-knit community of people he went to college with. They ate and played and prayed together. And it had a huge impression on him. He didn't see that kind of shared life once he got out into other churches and locations, so he wanted to create it in the church he started.
One guy said that this kind of thing in college was very common, that his daughter just interned at a church and the group got really close. But after it was over, they just scattered and didn't do much together. That it was all very artificial, that communities like that are artificial, and that people stop living like that once they get out into the 'real world.' Another guy who comes with his grandfather, which (and who) I think is very cool, and he said that the only reason he lives with other guys and they share things is that they're all poor, and that he thinks this is the only reason that people end up in community-living situations.
I'm trying to learn to be a more organic and less strident in large group discussions, so I didn't, like, stand up and shout at these guys or anything, but I disagreed with both of them. Especially the guy who said that community was artificial. Another guy made the very good point that this idea that living in a close-knit community is artificial is only a post-industrial revolution idea, and that most of the rest of the world, and the rest of times for that matter, thinks differently.
I said that our culture strongly discourages communal living. Our culture thinks that people who aren't trying to be independent, to get a house for themselves, and a nice car, and a great job, and live without depending on anyone are weird. I told the story about how much resistance we got to trying to get a house to live in with a few people. How the financial industry doesn't have a niche for people who want to get a large house or an apartment building, but aren't trying to make it an investment. How people that we knew flat out rejected the idea of living together in a community with married people and single people.
I got kind of sad, because I like to believe that Jacob's Well is this progressive kind of place, forefront of the new kinds of Christianity, where people are trying to live out lives that are different, that break the status quo. Lives that only make sense if there is a God. That are less and less concerned with the trappings of our culture, and more concerned with believing the things that Jesus and Paul say about love. And here was a whole room of people that are dedicated enough to the place that they signed up for a discussion group about the book the lead pastor wrote, and most of them were locked into this mindset that community that makes you rely on other people is an artificial.
The grandpa guy said that he's been through a lot in his life, and he doesn't trust very many people anymore. Except his family, who had recently come together to help him through a tough time. And he gave his grandson a very grandfatherly sort of look. I wanted to be like, "YES. EXACTLY." Only I meant more the metaphor where Jesus says that the other people who follow him are family. That sometimes you have to give up your biofam to follow him. But the brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers you find can end up being even sweeter than the people who share your genes. But I didn't want to rain the guy's parade or anything, and twist his words to mean something he didn't mean exactly. Like I said, I'm getting better at group discussions.
Later, right before we started singing down in the service, I asked the grandson if he really thought that community can only come through economic hardship. And he said that all money does is alienate you, and turn you inward. Making you want to improve your station rather that help other people and be helped in return. Then we sang a song about being fellow travelers on the road.
I hope what he said about money isn't true. But I think that it can be for a lot of people. That the more money they have, the harder it is to give yourself up for other people. And that only by really being poor can you actually depend on others. Maybe that's what Jesus meant by the whole camel and needle bit. It's hard to enter into and live with a group of people if you're entirely self-reliant because you're so well off. I know it's hard for Jill and I to ask for help with things when we're not doing well financially.
I'm an extrovert, for sure. I get my energy from being with other people. But I think that there's something very special about being able to trust and rely on other people. To follow a road with others. To have a family, even if it's not biological. I don't think it's artificial at all. I think it's necessary to healthy living. I think it's paramount to mental health.
I went on a missions trip one summer to Belarus with a group of 11 other people. We taught Belarussian kids conversational English, and helped other, shorter-term groups do the same thing. We ate and slept and prayed and laughed and cried together. I came out of that with the idea that if you can sustain that sort of life for three months, you might be able to do it for longer. That's where the whole communal living idea genesised for me. Shane Claiborne's book Irresistible Revolution showed me that someone else had tried it and it was working. And Tim Keel's message that God honors choices you make spurred us on to action.
And I find myself now in the midst of the kind of community that depends on each other, even if they don't all live together. That when one of them decides to get up early in the morning, some of the others get up with him. And when someone goes on a trip, some people hop in a van and take him to the airport. And when someone's out of money, and need a deposit on an apartment, the others pitch in. When someone needs moved, they get moved quick. When someone's out of ideas for what to do for Lent, he can ask for advice and get something challenging. When a surprise party needs thrown, it gets thrown. When someone's out of money, and everyone goes out to eat, they get paid for. When one person makes a lot more money than a roommate does, they pay more for rent. I think community is possible. It's not just an artificial construct.
I'll take and eat and drink to that. Just lemme know. I've got a backpack.
That is, he wakes up at seven every morning to pray, no matter how late he was up the night before. He also doesn't believe in naps, which makes the whole day more challenging. I'm a firm believer in naps. Naps and I are good buddies. We hang out whenever possible. Although I really enjoyed the potential hour of disconnected solitude the abandoned part of the office building afforded me, back before the far-flung subsidiary of our company moved in there last month, the lack of ability to go over, lie down under a cubicle desk, and zonk out for twenty minutes is my real sorrow. Mmm, naps.
Teaching at Turner, I had to be to work every morning by seven. Sometimes I'd nap from 7:35-7:55 under my desk with all the lights but the emergency row off and my neck cradled by a satin pillow the museJill made for me back in high school. This is back in the the days of the clear blue Nokia cell phone with the Nicholas-esque ten ninjas sticker on the back that I got when it was included with the ten ninjas hoodie I bought him. That phone had the best alarm ever. It started with a real quiet dong . . . . . . . . . . . . dong . . . . . . . . . . dong dong dong dong . . . . . . . . . . . . (a little louder then) dong, and so on. And right before it went off, it buzzed, so you could hit it before it even made noise if you were quick. It's nothing like the absurd and cacophonous and obnoxious rings that come with the Samsungs Jill and I both have now.
Most mornings these days, I'm up by seven. Of course, I got off work at 2:30 back at Turner. It's 6:00 when I'm off now, and I live further from work. But I only have to get up early during the week. Saturdays where I don't work or have second Saturdays, I stretch out sleeping as long as I can. Mmm, blankets. Sundays, I don't really have to get up until 10:30 to make it in time to hang out with the youths at eleven. The thirty-second walk to church helps there. lemme tell ya. I've even woken up after eleven and made it up to the third floor by the time everything got going. But Sam's got that seven hanging over him every day. No thanks.
Yesterday morning was an even earlier experience, as Sam had decided to participate in the lectio divina at Church at 6:30. Lectio divina is an hour-long prayer exercise centered around experiencing a chunk of scripture in various ways. And since Sam only lives eight blocks away, he couldn't in good conscience drive, so he walked. In the freaking cold. And because Jill and I believe in supporting the people we live our lives with, we were there with him at 6:30. Cold and early together in the dark.
I have always liked being awake when it's dark. Though, I think the reason I'm not a morning person is the same reason I get fed up with rain that quits after an hour or two, when the sun comes out and makes the super-happy-fun rainbows. Sun showers are one thing, but when it rains for real, I want it to rain. For days and days even. It feels more real for it to keep going like that. Short rain keeps you from forgetting the sun. Hard to get an aching appreciation for something that's only gone for a minute. It's pretty much the same for me with snow. Snow needs to fall long and deep and stay on the ground for a week, getting piled on by another layer after layer. That's what I think.
I want my life invaded by the weather. I want to feel it in my bones, fight to get out of my house, to feel hemmed in and then conquer it, or cow and stay in, enjoying seeing it through the windows. If it's gonna rain, let it torrent. Snow, let it drift. Hot, let it burn. Dark, let it stay dark. The worst part of an early morning is the dawn. The sun comes up and ruins the whole earliness of it all.
My sophomore year of high school, before I got embroiled in the world of high school drama (theatre and relationships, if ya believe it) I took an AM hour. Which was a voluntary 7:15 class. I'm not well self-motivated, and combine that with the really awful international school I'd gone to for a few months in Belarus, I'd fallen behind a whole year in the maths. I wanted to catch up, so I added in a Algebra II/Trig Class to my not at all burgeoning Geometry-centric math schedule. Geometry was a breeze, which impressed Charlie Pope enough to let me take two math classes at the same time.
This is also about the time that telling my teacher that I'd read War and Peace over the summer got me bumped up from no-one-cares English to Honors English with Teena Winter herself, author of Demystifying the Magic: Strategies for Creatively Teaching the Writing of the Narrative, the Essay, and the Poem, a photocopied copy of which I have somewhere in a stack of teaching paraphernalia in a clear plastic box down in the basement. Even thought I now can buy it for five bucks online. The English class switch also changed my gym hour, which became relevant the next semester when I couldn't run due to tendinitis and was able fit in early a required Geography class from Jim Rostello, the oddest little man who has ever taught a social studies class. What the crap, Tina Turner obsession.
So, me, being my just-back-from-Belarus-ride-my-bike-all-the-way-across-town-to-visit-a-girl-who-could-care-less-about-me-but-on-whom-I-had-a-crush-in-the-middle-of-the-summer-heat self, I'd get to school at 6. So, up at 5:30. I love a vacant building that's usually brimmed with people. It's got an expectant atmosphere kinned to a library. Only instead of the weight of all the potentially known knowledge lurking, swirling around and pressing down on you, it's the emptiness of no people.
So, yeah, I'm no stranger to early mornings. But that doesn't mean we get along. I don't think they get along with Sam these days either. But for a guy who works in theatre, I've got to say, it's pretty impressive to make it up by nine, let alone seven. I mean, there are nights I remember where Sam got home at six in the morning from serious all-night theatre business. All in all, a valiant effort, and something I hope is beneficial to his spirit.
As I mentioned before, I, too am observing Lent again this year. Last year, in an attempt to up my own personal conviviality, I decided to give up eating by myself. I only ate if I was able to eat with someone else. A couple of times I ate in friends' presences, when they weren't eating, but for the most part it was all about sharing meals. While this was fun and good for my waistline, I don't know that I could consider it to be a drastic change from how I live anyway. Yes, occasionally I have a banana in the morning all alone (wail and sniff), but I mostly skip breakfast. Yes, I know this is not good for my metabolism. But when you're watching your weight, there is a serious dearth of satisfying breakfast choices. And yes, I have soup at my desk at lunch, or occasionally make a fresco-style Taco Bell run on those very off days in which I have not pooled in a car out here to Olathe. But for the most part, my meals are communal. So having tried it, I can say that giving up alone-eating isn't really much of a good way to ritually and somberly prepare myself for Easter.
I've been thinking for a few weeks of what to do for Lent. I've never been big on giving up a thing for Lent that you ought to give up anyway. Like, back in high school, people I knew used to give up chocolate or pop or whatever, and I would say in a snarky tone that I was giving up drinking and smoking and cocaine and murder. You know, things I didn't do anyway. Part of it was that I saw Lent as a meaningless Catholic ritual, ala only eating fish on Fridays (a practice whose genesis come from a glut in the Italian fish industry), and part of it was that I saw a lot of Catholics that I knew who went to mass 'a week and didn't have a thing in their lives to show for it. All ritual, and no substance. I'm not trying to disparage Catholicism, a lot of people from all kinds of demoninations and e'en other faiths do these same kinds of rituals that have no meaning for them, but that's how I saw it at the time.
This is part of why I quit caffeine a week and a half before Ash Wednesday; I didn't want quitting something I wanted to quit anyway to be part of Lent. Last year, Tim gave a sermon agreeing with me about how Lent shouldn't be something you give up that you should anyway. That it should be a time or reflection and preparation. This year, Jacob's Well is doing a whole series on various practices and disciplines of the faith. And without any good ideas at the time, I decided to get all creative, and try to take on each of the practices the week following the message on that particular one. Now, I had no idea what they were going to be, and this week when Shayne came out and spoke on communion, I had no idea how to incorporate that into a week. I mean, we take communion already on Sunday, and on Thursday nights for the prayer thing, and on Saturday nights sometimes, so, where the heck was I going to fit it in in addition to those other times?
When we do communion at Jacob's well, it's an individual thing, pretty much. We're all doing it at the same time, of course. Well, one after another. But you go up when the line gets down to your row, and you take the bread from the person, and dip it into the grape juice that stands in for wine, and they tell you that it's the body of Christ broken for you, and the blood shed on your behalf, and then you eat it. A process called intinction, for those who care. And then you go back and sit down. Married couples sometimes take it together. On the whole, though, like in most churches, I think, communion has become this private matter where you get your face all holy-lookin' for a second and then eat and drink some morsels. Kind of uncommunal if you ask me. Sometimes we've been sneaky, and we grab all the people sitting in our row, and we all go up and take it together. Communally, you know. And on 'Conversations' nights when we pray, we get a big loaf of really good rosemary bread from Farm to Market bakery, and some wine which we pour in small amounts out into glasses, and then someone breaks the bread and passes it around, and reminds us to remember, and we munch on that for a while. You can get seconds.
Shayne focused in on the communal aspect of communion in his message, and then had us go up in groups of four, and really look at these other symbolic members of the body of Christ with whom we were symbolically taking in the body of Christ. I ended up with a couple people that I didn't really know, which was a cool experience.
But now I was stuck as to what to do for the week, seeing as how it's a very other-people sort of practice. Not like fasting or giving or prayer, which are all things I can easily and creatively come up with ways of practicing for a week on my own.
After church on Sunday, we went over to Amanda and Katie's for spaghetti, for the third night of four in a row of people over at there. You could tell it was wearing on Amanda by Monday; she does not get energy from being with people, and she was beat. We usually eat food together after church, and the Jill was getting her own introvert on, so we had to go somewhere besides our house, which, like I said, is a thirty-second walk from the church and so convenient. Brett and Jake brought the sauce and some noodles and ground beef, and so Ben and Mike and I collected some money and went to Dillons, which I hear is closing, sadly.
I grew up on the Dillons chain of grocery stores. I remember biking back and forth on my one gear red bike to the Dillons on Sante Fe to rent a movie one hot day when my dad was really sick. It took three or four trips before I got the signature and the money and everything sorted out and got back home with Back to the Future. Turns out I got a VHS instead of a Beta, so my dad actually got in the car and drove me back over there for the exchange. Another time, my History of Technology class walked over to Dillons and cataloged all the various magazines and their subsequent sub cultures. When Jill and I lived on Harrison, we even shopped there. We lived for two years next to that amazing Price Chopper on Roe, and I don't have a Chopper Shopper card any more. But I do still have the Dillons Plus Card I got back in high school. So, yeah, affinity.
Ben and Mike and I got some pies and some linguine and some low-cal non-carbonated soft drinks and some garlic bread and some cheese bread. And then Ben, because he has a weakness for baked goods got a third pie. Once we'd gotten back and were eating, I asked everyone what I should do this week to observe communion as my practice. Sam said, that I could only eat with other people again. But I didn't want to just run through same ol' same ol'. Steve said that I should take communion with people that I normally didn't take communion with. I was like, "What, like homeless people?" And he said, no, I wouldn't likely take communion with homeless people, it should be people that I really wouldn't ever take communion with. I said, "Oh, like Mike Bickley." The whole room laughed. Half because they thought I said Mike Bickle, who is the paster of IHOP, a really charismatic/fundamentalist church out in south KC. The other half laughed because they all used to go to the church with me that Mike Bickley pastors in south Olathe, and all of them now go to Jacob's Well instead for a variety of reasons.
Then Sam said he had a hard idea, that I should go have communion with Danon and Cara, who are people that Jill and I and Amanda and my parents and Nick and Martha and Lynn and Sam all performed with a couple of summers ago. They kicked Jill and me out of their theatre group a year ago December. It was a big to-do, and there were a lot of hurt feelings on all kinds of sides. And although we've patched it up a lot, we really haven't become friends again. We were accused of being divisive in the group, and we didn't think we were. So as hard as it might be, it seems to me to be a great group of people to get together with and take communion, sharing our common identify as followers of Jesus.
My goal, then, this week (and it may stretch further into Lent, depending) is to take communion with other Christians that I normally wouldn't. So far, I've taken communion with my mom, and my group of jr. high guys group that meets on Tuesday. So, not much so far. Pretty easy, really. On my list I've got Mike Bickley, Danon and Cara, my boss, and Mike Huckabee. I think I'll be able to get the first few. I'm carrying around a backpack with a bottle of wine, a bottle of grape juice, some pita bread, and some cups. So, I am action ready.
One of the other things going on this Lenten season at church, although not directly related to Lent, is a series of seminars and discussion groups they're calling Jacob's Well Institute. There is one about practicing Lent, and one discussing the physical aspects of spirituality led by this cool philosophy professor at a chiropractic college who is an elder at our church, and one that Steve's leading that is a read-through of Mark, and a couple that are just weekly chances to get out in the community and meet peoples' needs. I'm going to a book discussion on Tim Keel's Book Intuitive Leadership that Shayne is leading on Sunday afternoons.
This last week, we got into a discussion about community living that stemmed from Tim's story about how Jacob's Well is kind of based on this experience he had in a tight-knit community of people he went to college with. They ate and played and prayed together. And it had a huge impression on him. He didn't see that kind of shared life once he got out into other churches and locations, so he wanted to create it in the church he started.
One guy said that this kind of thing in college was very common, that his daughter just interned at a church and the group got really close. But after it was over, they just scattered and didn't do much together. That it was all very artificial, that communities like that are artificial, and that people stop living like that once they get out into the 'real world.' Another guy who comes with his grandfather, which (and who) I think is very cool, and he said that the only reason he lives with other guys and they share things is that they're all poor, and that he thinks this is the only reason that people end up in community-living situations.
I'm trying to learn to be a more organic and less strident in large group discussions, so I didn't, like, stand up and shout at these guys or anything, but I disagreed with both of them. Especially the guy who said that community was artificial. Another guy made the very good point that this idea that living in a close-knit community is artificial is only a post-industrial revolution idea, and that most of the rest of the world, and the rest of times for that matter, thinks differently.
I said that our culture strongly discourages communal living. Our culture thinks that people who aren't trying to be independent, to get a house for themselves, and a nice car, and a great job, and live without depending on anyone are weird. I told the story about how much resistance we got to trying to get a house to live in with a few people. How the financial industry doesn't have a niche for people who want to get a large house or an apartment building, but aren't trying to make it an investment. How people that we knew flat out rejected the idea of living together in a community with married people and single people.
I got kind of sad, because I like to believe that Jacob's Well is this progressive kind of place, forefront of the new kinds of Christianity, where people are trying to live out lives that are different, that break the status quo. Lives that only make sense if there is a God. That are less and less concerned with the trappings of our culture, and more concerned with believing the things that Jesus and Paul say about love. And here was a whole room of people that are dedicated enough to the place that they signed up for a discussion group about the book the lead pastor wrote, and most of them were locked into this mindset that community that makes you rely on other people is an artificial.
The grandpa guy said that he's been through a lot in his life, and he doesn't trust very many people anymore. Except his family, who had recently come together to help him through a tough time. And he gave his grandson a very grandfatherly sort of look. I wanted to be like, "YES. EXACTLY." Only I meant more the metaphor where Jesus says that the other people who follow him are family. That sometimes you have to give up your biofam to follow him. But the brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers you find can end up being even sweeter than the people who share your genes. But I didn't want to rain the guy's parade or anything, and twist his words to mean something he didn't mean exactly. Like I said, I'm getting better at group discussions.
Later, right before we started singing down in the service, I asked the grandson if he really thought that community can only come through economic hardship. And he said that all money does is alienate you, and turn you inward. Making you want to improve your station rather that help other people and be helped in return. Then we sang a song about being fellow travelers on the road.
I hope what he said about money isn't true. But I think that it can be for a lot of people. That the more money they have, the harder it is to give yourself up for other people. And that only by really being poor can you actually depend on others. Maybe that's what Jesus meant by the whole camel and needle bit. It's hard to enter into and live with a group of people if you're entirely self-reliant because you're so well off. I know it's hard for Jill and I to ask for help with things when we're not doing well financially.
I'm an extrovert, for sure. I get my energy from being with other people. But I think that there's something very special about being able to trust and rely on other people. To follow a road with others. To have a family, even if it's not biological. I don't think it's artificial at all. I think it's necessary to healthy living. I think it's paramount to mental health.
I went on a missions trip one summer to Belarus with a group of 11 other people. We taught Belarussian kids conversational English, and helped other, shorter-term groups do the same thing. We ate and slept and prayed and laughed and cried together. I came out of that with the idea that if you can sustain that sort of life for three months, you might be able to do it for longer. That's where the whole communal living idea genesised for me. Shane Claiborne's book Irresistible Revolution showed me that someone else had tried it and it was working. And Tim Keel's message that God honors choices you make spurred us on to action.
And I find myself now in the midst of the kind of community that depends on each other, even if they don't all live together. That when one of them decides to get up early in the morning, some of the others get up with him. And when someone goes on a trip, some people hop in a van and take him to the airport. And when someone's out of money, and need a deposit on an apartment, the others pitch in. When someone needs moved, they get moved quick. When someone's out of ideas for what to do for Lent, he can ask for advice and get something challenging. When a surprise party needs thrown, it gets thrown. When someone's out of money, and everyone goes out to eat, they get paid for. When one person makes a lot more money than a roommate does, they pay more for rent. I think community is possible. It's not just an artificial construct.
I'll take and eat and drink to that. Just lemme know. I've got a backpack.
R.R.
So sorry, everybody. I've got a bunch of good writing done for today's post. But I'm no where near finishing it. Another busy day. And I'm leading the small group for the Jr. High guys tonight so I can't just go home and finish. Also, I'm really tired. I'll tell you more about that in the post, which I'll get to you tomorrow.
So, in lieu of a real post, I give you a link. Shocking, I know. And not just any link. A link to footage of last night's party of the year.
Bonus link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2b1D5w82yU
So, in lieu of a real post, I give you a link. Shocking, I know. And not just any link. A link to footage of last night's party of the year.
Bonus link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2b1D5w82yU
Monday, February 11, 2008
Special liveblogging attempt.
5:22 - At work. After work, I shall be going to go to dinner with Amanda and Jill and Juliet and Jeremy as a celebration of Juliet's birthday. Should be exciting. My goal is to blog about this. AS IT HAPPENS. We'll see how that goes.
6:01 - Off to Amanda's.
6:28 - Holy crap, it's cold. Have arrived at Amanda's. Parked west of the apartment for extra sneakiness. Now I can clue you in that this is actually a surprise party for Juliet. I hope she doesn't know. On the drive over, Eric called me to get Amanda's phone number because he and Jones were party hat-less. And this is a party hat party.
Our mom, and Grandparents, and Jeremy's mom, and Katie, and Becca Ford, and the whore, and JESSICA (who we all thought would be here via webcam), and Nicholas (who is making spaghetti), and Jake Petty are all here.
Steve is hanging streamers with Jeremy's mom's help. Grandpa tickled his belly as he stretched up to pin the streamer into the ceiling. Steve says he's more pragmatic. Wants to know if there's a bridge he could build instead.
There are balloons over the door on strings and every time they open the door, the balloons fall out. So we have to move them so they don't ruin the surprise with out of the doors balloons.
Eric and Jones arrive in all their just-married happiness. Vika asks them how married life is. They do not respond, "The sex is GREAT!" Although this would be my response.
I won't post this until after Juliet arrives.
6:40 - Jill is still not here. Kate and John and Courtney and Jeremy's dad and Bethany and Sam have just arrived.
6:41 - Jill has arrived. I go off to acquire a kiss.
6:43 - Failure. No kiss. Jill brought my stocking cap. All drunkenesque behavior I may exhibit for the rest of the night is now Jill's fault. Jill brought my mom's birthday present and our card. We gave her Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrel. Off to try for kiss again.
6:46 - Success!
6:48 - SUCCESS!
6:51 - Juliet and Jeremy are getting a drink treat on the way. Even though we're supposed to be going to dinner after this. Sigh. Where is my drink treat, O Fate! They'll be here in about 20 minutes, apparently.
6:59 - We made Omi's spaghetti (Prego+beef+crock pot). Nick and Martha brought spaghetti. Pasta is apparently Juliet's favorite food.
Amanda tells a story where she texted Juliet with a message for me asking if we were bringing food. Jeremy intercepted. Whew. Spoilage averted.
7:01 - Success!
7:06 - Texted Juliet "Are you drunk?" This is an inside joke. She calls Amanda. They are on Shawnee Mission parkway and shall arrive in 5 minutes. I doubt this can be spoiled now, so I'll post now.
7:42 - About to light the cake and sing. She was definitely very surprised. There was an awful lot of shushing as she was about to arrive. There were noise makers
7:44 - Presents: Juliet sits in the brown round chair.
Also, my stocking cap has been off for a while now. I feel much more lucid than I did when Juliet arrived and we were all wearing out party hats. Bonus Fun Fact: Jill safety pinned an orange pom pon in top of my stocking cap.
HINT: The name of the puzzle is the three symbols put together minus the second symbol's 'A.'
8:17 - My father calls to say hello to Juliet. And to me. And to my mom. We tell him I'm live blogging. Hi Papa!
Sam leaves. I will see him in the morning at far too early in the morning for Lecto Devina. It starts at 6:30. Blech.
8:35 - We learn that Sarah Childers decided to be a U.S. marshal from watching the Fugitive with Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones. Brett reveals that he, too, decided on his career from this movie. That is, a doctor turned fugitive. But he gave it up because the schooling was too expensive.
We also decide to play the notecard game.
8:40 - Near success. Sadface.
8:50 - Question 1. From Amanda. "Why are you running from the government? Like in Serenity, for example." My answer: I refuse to bow to the 100 ft. tall President Obama statue when the lute and the tambourine and the drum and the trumpet and all kinds of music play.
8:53 - Jill is knitting a sock.
8:58 - Amanda guesses me right. Musta laughed at my own too hard. Some other good answers: "Because I'm a doctor and a fugitive," "Because I just hit one of my employees" (The Office reference), "This headstrong working class genius had one too many run ins with the law (Good Will Hunting DVD back copy reference, which Brett was holding), and "To show the government how fast I can run."
9:03 - Brett. Tell your life story in exactly six words
9:07 - God embraces as I attempt evasion.
9:12 - Nicholas is ten ninjas. So, yeah.
9:17 - Jake: What animal would you steal from the zoo, and how?
9:18 - Elmo. Something about a candy and a white van ending in Ha Ha Ha. (I don't have my paper.)
9:21 - Some animals: Jim Sturgis. Elmo. Monkey. Johnny Appleseed. Monkey. Wolf. A little monkey-like thing. Rhino (or a pet snake). Orca. Some methods: Take him by the hand. Candy and white van. Replace with small child. No method written. Small child swap again. Dress like a sheep and as a level 10 ranger make it an animal companion. Is having sex with ten ninjas. Light a fire outside and take advantage of the natural firefighting instincts of rhinos. Put a boat on the other side of the wall.
9:33 - Nicholas. What is your style of Kung-fu? I answer "either 'BXB' or 'Q and X in the same triple word score word ki-yi!'
9:34 - Martha style combined with kicking. Elbows of Fury. Drunken Brawling. Jessica style. RockFist style. Monkey steals and rhino stomps the peaches. Ten Ninjas.
9:39 - Me. Which book are you and why?
9:42 - Hafta pay attention. I'll pick up blogging in a bit.
10:23 A long bit, apparently. I'm starting to drag here. Questions: Katie: What should be done to a person who solo blogs in a co-op blog? Juliet: What book's world would you live in for a month? Jessica: The answer is 'frosting,' what is the question? Martha: What would you be the master of that you currently have no natural ability at?
10:26 - Nicholas wants to sing like all four Boys II Men.
10:35 - Juliet skims this blog post and learns of Grandpa's Steve-poking as Steve leaves. Also mentions that it was an Atlanta Braves hat, not KU. Also, the towel was there because she had one she'd never used and had nothing else to wrap in. Also, Grandpa giggled (!) in the kitchen.
10:37 - Jeremy. a. What is Jeremy thinking about. B. What should he be thinking about?
10:43 - While we're answering, Brett mentions how much more adult we all are this year considering how many of the answers involved sex.
10:44 - It's BUSINESS TIME.
I mean, I'm done blogging. G'night. I'll do a little wrap up tomorrow if I think of it.
6:01 - Off to Amanda's.
6:28 - Holy crap, it's cold. Have arrived at Amanda's. Parked west of the apartment for extra sneakiness. Now I can clue you in that this is actually a surprise party for Juliet. I hope she doesn't know. On the drive over, Eric called me to get Amanda's phone number because he and Jones were party hat-less. And this is a party hat party.
Our mom, and Grandparents, and Jeremy's mom, and Katie, and Becca Ford, and the whore, and JESSICA (who we all thought would be here via webcam), and Nicholas (who is making spaghetti), and Jake Petty are all here.
Steve is hanging streamers with Jeremy's mom's help. Grandpa tickled his belly as he stretched up to pin the streamer into the ceiling. Steve says he's more pragmatic. Wants to know if there's a bridge he could build instead.
There are balloons over the door on strings and every time they open the door, the balloons fall out. So we have to move them so they don't ruin the surprise with out of the doors balloons.
Eric and Jones arrive in all their just-married happiness. Vika asks them how married life is. They do not respond, "The sex is GREAT!" Although this would be my response.
I won't post this until after Juliet arrives.
6:40 - Jill is still not here. Kate and John and Courtney and Jeremy's dad and Bethany and Sam have just arrived.
6:41 - Jill has arrived. I go off to acquire a kiss.
6:43 - Failure. No kiss. Jill brought my stocking cap. All drunkenesque behavior I may exhibit for the rest of the night is now Jill's fault. Jill brought my mom's birthday present and our card. We gave her Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrel. Off to try for kiss again.
6:46 - Success!
6:48 - SUCCESS!
6:51 - Juliet and Jeremy are getting a drink treat on the way. Even though we're supposed to be going to dinner after this. Sigh. Where is my drink treat, O Fate! They'll be here in about 20 minutes, apparently.
6:59 - We made Omi's spaghetti (Prego+beef+crock pot). Nick and Martha brought spaghetti. Pasta is apparently Juliet's favorite food.
Amanda tells a story where she texted Juliet with a message for me asking if we were bringing food. Jeremy intercepted. Whew. Spoilage averted.
7:01 - Success!
7:06 - Texted Juliet "Are you drunk?" This is an inside joke. She calls Amanda. They are on Shawnee Mission parkway and shall arrive in 5 minutes. I doubt this can be spoiled now, so I'll post now.
7:42 - About to light the cake and sing. She was definitely very surprised. There was an awful lot of shushing as she was about to arrive. There were noise makers
7:44 - Presents: Juliet sits in the brown round chair.
- Kourtney leaves. Can't tell if this is part of the present giving.
- In a black bag with red tissue pager. From aAmandaSome hair product. Across the Universe. Wee giraffe keychains to share with Amanda . Necklaces. Wee notebook.
- Our present. Ribbon-sewed envelope/card. Inside: Jill makes a skirt with Juliet. I have written this before she was able to get the envelope open. So if she'd just looked down to her right where I was typing, she'd have seen it. But she is too intent on the present-opening.
- Card from Gma and Gpa. KU hat. 4th of July visor. I'm sure she will where it every day. This is certainly not sarcasm. Towels.
- That's it. OH WAIT. Jeremy has a present. All the rest are friends who do not give presents. They think their presence is presents enough. Lies. Phooey on them. The outside of the package says it's not what the box says. The box says it's a computer. But it IS a computer. So, surprise, even. Juliet is so surprised AGAIN. She says, "This is way better than a cat." She wanted a cat. A lot. She even cried the other day when Jill revealed at Applebee's dinner that Katie (not the one here. Jill's good friend) said that there was a free cat. But Juliet and Jeremy's apartment makes it too expensive. Phooey on them, too.
- Jake gives a placemat with Kat's signature from she is at work.
Also, my stocking cap has been off for a while now. I feel much more lucid than I did when Juliet arrived and we were all wearing out party hats. Bonus Fun Fact: Jill safety pinned an orange pom pon in top of my stocking cap.
HINT: The name of the puzzle is the three symbols put together minus the second symbol's 'A.'
8:17 - My father calls to say hello to Juliet. And to me. And to my mom. We tell him I'm live blogging. Hi Papa!
Sam leaves. I will see him in the morning at far too early in the morning for Lecto Devina. It starts at 6:30. Blech.
8:35 - We learn that Sarah Childers decided to be a U.S. marshal from watching the Fugitive with Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones. Brett reveals that he, too, decided on his career from this movie. That is, a doctor turned fugitive. But he gave it up because the schooling was too expensive.
We also decide to play the notecard game.
8:40 - Near success. Sadface.
8:50 - Question 1. From Amanda. "Why are you running from the government? Like in Serenity, for example." My answer: I refuse to bow to the 100 ft. tall President Obama statue when the lute and the tambourine and the drum and the trumpet and all kinds of music play.
8:53 - Jill is knitting a sock.
8:58 - Amanda guesses me right. Musta laughed at my own too hard. Some other good answers: "Because I'm a doctor and a fugitive," "Because I just hit one of my employees" (The Office reference), "This headstrong working class genius had one too many run ins with the law (Good Will Hunting DVD back copy reference, which Brett was holding), and "To show the government how fast I can run."
9:03 - Brett. Tell your life story in exactly six words
9:07 - God embraces as I attempt evasion.
9:12 - Nicholas is ten ninjas. So, yeah.
9:17 - Jake: What animal would you steal from the zoo, and how?
9:18 - Elmo. Something about a candy and a white van ending in Ha Ha Ha. (I don't have my paper.)
9:21 - Some animals: Jim Sturgis. Elmo. Monkey. Johnny Appleseed. Monkey. Wolf. A little monkey-like thing. Rhino (or a pet snake). Orca. Some methods: Take him by the hand. Candy and white van. Replace with small child. No method written. Small child swap again. Dress like a sheep and as a level 10 ranger make it an animal companion. Is having sex with ten ninjas. Light a fire outside and take advantage of the natural firefighting instincts of rhinos. Put a boat on the other side of the wall.
9:33 - Nicholas. What is your style of Kung-fu? I answer "either 'BXB' or 'Q and X in the same triple word score word ki-yi!'
9:34 - Martha style combined with kicking. Elbows of Fury. Drunken Brawling. Jessica style. RockFist style. Monkey steals and rhino stomps the peaches. Ten Ninjas.
9:39 - Me. Which book are you and why?
9:42 - Hafta pay attention. I'll pick up blogging in a bit.
10:23 A long bit, apparently. I'm starting to drag here. Questions: Katie: What should be done to a person who solo blogs in a co-op blog? Juliet: What book's world would you live in for a month? Jessica: The answer is 'frosting,' what is the question? Martha: What would you be the master of that you currently have no natural ability at?
10:26 - Nicholas wants to sing like all four Boys II Men.
10:35 - Juliet skims this blog post and learns of Grandpa's Steve-poking as Steve leaves. Also mentions that it was an Atlanta Braves hat, not KU. Also, the towel was there because she had one she'd never used and had nothing else to wrap in. Also, Grandpa giggled (!) in the kitchen.
10:37 - Jeremy. a. What is Jeremy thinking about. B. What should he be thinking about?
10:43 - While we're answering, Brett mentions how much more adult we all are this year considering how many of the answers involved sex.
10:44 - It's BUSINESS TIME.
I mean, I'm done blogging. G'night. I'll do a little wrap up tomorrow if I think of it.
Friday, February 8, 2008
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Part II of my top Ten List of RoTTIHEiaWBRHEA
Part II of My Top Ten List of Reviews of Things That I Haven't Experienced in a While, But Recently Have Experienced Again.
Right. I originally made my list of top ten things that I haven't experience in a while, but recently have experience again a week ago, Thursday. The problem is, I no longer care enough about the remaining eight original items that were on the list to write a full review of any of them.
Ok, that's not entirely true. One of them was Lost, which, last Thursday, had not yet been aired. I had assumed that I could complete part I on Thursday and then have a clever Friday post with Lost appearing in part II. But, alas, such was not the case. So, I haven't even experienced Lost yet. So a review is impractical.
Here, then, are the remaining six items from my list, in no particular order: lower back pain, Arkham Horror, the first chapter of my novel, writing, snowfall in Kansas City, and an evening of doing nothing at all.
All of which I was stoked about writing about last week, but this week, I've lost my passion to really delve into each one. Let this be a lesson to me to finish things when I start them.
In related news, tonight is the second episode of the season of Lost, and my lack of having seen the first episode not withstanding, I would not be watching it anyway. Adam has rescheduled Conversations for Thursdays. And should I decide to participate in anything of a Thursday persuasion, I think it will be that. Conversations is where some of us get together and pray, and eat sandwiches and take communion. It's very laid back, which is my style doncha know, and the food is good, and the conversations splendid.
Not to disparage the Lost-watchers, nossir. Lost is soooo good. I just like Conversations, and a while ago I told Adam I'd be there on occasions when I wasn't anything at all of an evening. On evenings like that, while you might think I'm working on my novel, or playing Arkham Horror, I just hang out with Jill.
Thing is, on nights where I don't get to spend the evening at home alone with Jill doing nothing in particular, we usually end up staying up late and hanging out, reading a book or watching Russell Brand on YouTube (In BED! Hurrah for laptop presents.), for example. Last night was no exception. Jill got home from watching Napoleon Dynamite at the Freak Show at about 10. And we stayed up for at least an hour or so watching two full episodes of the aforementioned Mr. Brand's show on pondering things. And then we woke up early this morning to pick up Adam and carpool out to Olathe. And I'm tired. As much as I've been since I quit caffeine. At least, I'm less groggy than I was before. Hurrah for no withdrawal anymore.
I'm going to try to get in a nap before Conversations tonight. At least it hasn't snowed again, or we'd take forever to get home in time for the nap, and then I'd be grumpy for talking to God. Which is not the best plan.
Lower back pain. There. I fit them all in, still. Boo-yah.
Right. I originally made my list of top ten things that I haven't experience in a while, but recently have experience again a week ago, Thursday. The problem is, I no longer care enough about the remaining eight original items that were on the list to write a full review of any of them.Ok, that's not entirely true. One of them was Lost, which, last Thursday, had not yet been aired. I had assumed that I could complete part I on Thursday and then have a clever Friday post with Lost appearing in part II. But, alas, such was not the case. So, I haven't even experienced Lost yet. So a review is impractical.
Here, then, are the remaining six items from my list, in no particular order: lower back pain, Arkham Horror, the first chapter of my novel, writing, snowfall in Kansas City, and an evening of doing nothing at all.
All of which I was stoked about writing about last week, but this week, I've lost my passion to really delve into each one. Let this be a lesson to me to finish things when I start them.
In related news, tonight is the second episode of the season of Lost, and my lack of having seen the first episode not withstanding, I would not be watching it anyway. Adam has rescheduled Conversations for Thursdays. And should I decide to participate in anything of a Thursday persuasion, I think it will be that. Conversations is where some of us get together and pray, and eat sandwiches and take communion. It's very laid back, which is my style doncha know, and the food is good, and the conversations splendid.
Not to disparage the Lost-watchers, nossir. Lost is soooo good. I just like Conversations, and a while ago I told Adam I'd be there on occasions when I wasn't anything at all of an evening. On evenings like that, while you might think I'm working on my novel, or playing Arkham Horror, I just hang out with Jill.
Thing is, on nights where I don't get to spend the evening at home alone with Jill doing nothing in particular, we usually end up staying up late and hanging out, reading a book or watching Russell Brand on YouTube (In BED! Hurrah for laptop presents.), for example. Last night was no exception. Jill got home from watching Napoleon Dynamite at the Freak Show at about 10. And we stayed up for at least an hour or so watching two full episodes of the aforementioned Mr. Brand's show on pondering things. And then we woke up early this morning to pick up Adam and carpool out to Olathe. And I'm tired. As much as I've been since I quit caffeine. At least, I'm less groggy than I was before. Hurrah for no withdrawal anymore.
I'm going to try to get in a nap before Conversations tonight. At least it hasn't snowed again, or we'd take forever to get home in time for the nap, and then I'd be grumpy for talking to God. Which is not the best plan.
Lower back pain. There. I fit them all in, still. Boo-yah.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Part I of My top Ten List of RoTTIHEiaWBRHEA
Back to striving for popularity. Here's another list. Yay, lists.
Part I of My Top Ten List of Reviews of Things That I Haven't Experienced in a While, But Recently Have Experienced Again.
10. The Sandman
What is it?
A graphic novel written, but not illustrated, by Neil Gaimen, involving Morpheus, the King of Dreaming and struggle with change. Published in serial form in 75 issues, over the course of 7 years, from 1989 to 1996.
Who else has experienced it? Sam has, and Jill, and Erika, and Becky. And, like, millions of other people, apparently.
When did I first experience it?
Hmm, 2006, I think.
What was my impression back then?
I liked it. A lot. Enough to ask for it for Christmas, even.
Why hadn't I experienced it lately? Didn't have a copy of my very own.
How'd I get back to it? I asked for the Ultimate Sandman Vol. 1 and 2 for Christmas or my birthday. And my wife and my sister teamed up to get me the two volumes for a wonderful, wonderful birthday present. Thanks, ladies. I read through the two volumes by the end of February, usually at bedtime. Wearing a stocking cap.
Rating: Dreamy.
How was it this time? The story is still great, yes sir, yes sir. And the new inking and coloring is all very nice as well, la-di-dah. I love seeing how the seeds he plants in the story (that I don''t even think he even knew would) grow up later, and how he plucks just the right ones to maximize the mystery of the universe. And the world he weaves is so rich. It's storytelling at its finest. Especially impressive considering the main characters are mostly personifications of the basic attributes of the universe: Death and Dream, and so on. Kind of hard to identify with, you'd think.
But there's a problem. See, when I first started looking into acquiring this rich graphical narrative for my very own, I looked at the prices for the paperbacks that collect the 75 issues into ten volumes. These run about fifteen bucks on Amazon. Ergo, about $150 for the set. Sometimes more. But then I saw that DC was doing an ultimate version of The Sandman, and looking at the size of it, thought that it would comprise about half the run per volume. And at $75 each, I thought it'd be a good deal, especially considering the larger pages, new inking, new coloring, and bonus material. Which is all very well done, as I've said. Problem is, each volume is only about a fourth of the series. And I have to wait until May to get the third one, and December for the fourth.
So, Sandman=awesome. My ability length vision and present research skills=not so good. The fact that I'm now going to own the beautiful larger editions that I never would have bought otherwise=even more awesome.
9. Disc Golf
What is it? Well, it's like golf, see. You're in the out-of-doors, and trying to get a thing in another thing in as few thing tries as possible. Only instead of expensive balls and and really expensive sticks and little holes on expensive, private lawns, you throw cheap round pieces of plastic with your own hands at rather expensive chain baskets on mostly public tractor mowed land.
Who else has experienced it? More than you know, my friend.
When did I first experience it? I think it was back in ought two or three. I was subbing at the time. And I'd get off work at 3:00 and go play 18 in Olathe. And my days off, O my brothers, that was horrorshow. Also, I seem to recall a summer in which I was job-hunting and played frequently.
Why hadn't I experienced it lately? Well, I can't rightly say. I've played on and off, here and there. But nothing like it used to be. Seems like part of my overall lifestate of finding other things to do with my time. For a while there, Jill and I only had occasional Thursdays off. We cut out our Monday night prayer group thing, and that's freed some time up. And we don't do nearly as much on weekends as we used to. But with a job that lets me out at 6 (was 7 for have the year), it's hard to get out for a good couple hours in a park. Especially since Jill doesn't play. And for some reason, she didn't like it back then. Neither of us can remember why.
What was my impression back then? Like Halo 2, I really enjoyed anything I thought I could try my hardest at. And it was a good way to hang out with friends. I never really got my throw down the way I'd like it. But some days I was spot-on. I liked it for the same reason, I think, people life golf, a chance to prove yourself mentally.
How'd I get back to it? Brett invited me to go a week ago Sunday. This was in the middle of my weekend of caffeine withdrawal, and I wanted to take a nap. Instead, I went to Rosedale, and then, because there was a tournament, we headed out to Blue Valley Park, out east on 27th street.
Rating: Ow.
How was it this time? Ok, look. I don't mind dparticupating difficult activities. Not, especially when it's something I enjoy. But I do have a real problem with things that are made stupidly hard for your average participant. I can't throw like a Pro. I'm an amateur. I'm trying to learn the game. It usually takes me about an hour and a half to play Olathe with a partner. Olathe's a short course, I get that. No problem. Rosedale Up Top takes about two hours for all eighteen holes. Now, last Sunday, Brett and I played six holes of Blue Valley Park in about an hour. That's a three hour course if we'd played the whole thing.
And I was worn out after 6 holes. It's all hills. And the pins are impossible to see from the tee, even with the super-fancy-I-want-them-at-every-course topographical maps with attached pegs for hanging your bag, which I also want at every course. Most of the holes we saw are uphill after teeing off, and some are uphill from the tee. And they're long. Hole 18? 600+ feet. 900+ at the long pin. I looked it up, 14 of their holes are over 400 feet. The world record is 820 feet. On a level surface. With wind help. And hole 18? There is a row of trees about a hundred feet in front of you. And I threw out my shoulder on the approach for 18. Which hurt for about five days. And It was muddy, so it was hard to throw. Heck, we couldn't even find the tee box for hole 14.
So, yeah. I'm totally going again when I get the chance.
8. Taking more than 60 calls in a day
What is it? See title.
When did I first experience it? Today.
Rating: Two reviews out of five
How was it this time? Way better than I thought it would be. I remained chipper even being underslept and uncaffeinated. There weren't too many annoying people, and some were actually helpful. But still, 60!
Part I of My Top Ten List of Reviews of Things That I Haven't Experienced in a While, But Recently Have Experienced Again.
10. The Sandman
What is it?A graphic novel written, but not illustrated, by Neil Gaimen, involving Morpheus, the King of Dreaming and struggle with change. Published in serial form in 75 issues, over the course of 7 years, from 1989 to 1996.
Who else has experienced it? Sam has, and Jill, and Erika, and Becky. And, like, millions of other people, apparently.
When did I first experience it?
Hmm, 2006, I think.
What was my impression back then?
I liked it. A lot. Enough to ask for it for Christmas, even.
Why hadn't I experienced it lately? Didn't have a copy of my very own.
How'd I get back to it? I asked for the Ultimate Sandman Vol. 1 and 2 for Christmas or my birthday. And my wife and my sister teamed up to get me the two volumes for a wonderful, wonderful birthday present. Thanks, ladies. I read through the two volumes by the end of February, usually at bedtime. Wearing a stocking cap.
Rating: Dreamy.
How was it this time? The story is still great, yes sir, yes sir. And the new inking and coloring is all very nice as well, la-di-dah. I love seeing how the seeds he plants in the story (that I don''t even think he even knew would) grow up later, and how he plucks just the right ones to maximize the mystery of the universe. And the world he weaves is so rich. It's storytelling at its finest. Especially impressive considering the main characters are mostly personifications of the basic attributes of the universe: Death and Dream, and so on. Kind of hard to identify with, you'd think.
But there's a problem. See, when I first started looking into acquiring this rich graphical narrative for my very own, I looked at the prices for the paperbacks that collect the 75 issues into ten volumes. These run about fifteen bucks on Amazon. Ergo, about $150 for the set. Sometimes more. But then I saw that DC was doing an ultimate version of The Sandman, and looking at the size of it, thought that it would comprise about half the run per volume. And at $75 each, I thought it'd be a good deal, especially considering the larger pages, new inking, new coloring, and bonus material. Which is all very well done, as I've said. Problem is, each volume is only about a fourth of the series. And I have to wait until May to get the third one, and December for the fourth.
So, Sandman=awesome. My ability length vision and present research skills=not so good. The fact that I'm now going to own the beautiful larger editions that I never would have bought otherwise=even more awesome.
9. Disc Golf
What is it? Well, it's like golf, see. You're in the out-of-doors, and trying to get a thing in another thing in as few thing tries as possible. Only instead of expensive balls and and really expensive sticks and little holes on expensive, private lawns, you throw cheap round pieces of plastic with your own hands at rather expensive chain baskets on mostly public tractor mowed land.Who else has experienced it? More than you know, my friend.
When did I first experience it? I think it was back in ought two or three. I was subbing at the time. And I'd get off work at 3:00 and go play 18 in Olathe. And my days off, O my brothers, that was horrorshow. Also, I seem to recall a summer in which I was job-hunting and played frequently.
Why hadn't I experienced it lately? Well, I can't rightly say. I've played on and off, here and there. But nothing like it used to be. Seems like part of my overall lifestate of finding other things to do with my time. For a while there, Jill and I only had occasional Thursdays off. We cut out our Monday night prayer group thing, and that's freed some time up. And we don't do nearly as much on weekends as we used to. But with a job that lets me out at 6 (was 7 for have the year), it's hard to get out for a good couple hours in a park. Especially since Jill doesn't play. And for some reason, she didn't like it back then. Neither of us can remember why.
What was my impression back then? Like Halo 2, I really enjoyed anything I thought I could try my hardest at. And it was a good way to hang out with friends. I never really got my throw down the way I'd like it. But some days I was spot-on. I liked it for the same reason, I think, people life golf, a chance to prove yourself mentally.
How'd I get back to it? Brett invited me to go a week ago Sunday. This was in the middle of my weekend of caffeine withdrawal, and I wanted to take a nap. Instead, I went to Rosedale, and then, because there was a tournament, we headed out to Blue Valley Park, out east on 27th street.
Rating: Ow.
How was it this time? Ok, look. I don't mind dparticupating difficult activities. Not, especially when it's something I enjoy. But I do have a real problem with things that are made stupidly hard for your average participant. I can't throw like a Pro. I'm an amateur. I'm trying to learn the game. It usually takes me about an hour and a half to play Olathe with a partner. Olathe's a short course, I get that. No problem. Rosedale Up Top takes about two hours for all eighteen holes. Now, last Sunday, Brett and I played six holes of Blue Valley Park in about an hour. That's a three hour course if we'd played the whole thing.
And I was worn out after 6 holes. It's all hills. And the pins are impossible to see from the tee, even with the super-fancy-I-want-them-at-every-course topographical maps with attached pegs for hanging your bag, which I also want at every course. Most of the holes we saw are uphill after teeing off, and some are uphill from the tee. And they're long. Hole 18? 600+ feet. 900+ at the long pin. I looked it up, 14 of their holes are over 400 feet. The world record is 820 feet. On a level surface. With wind help. And hole 18? There is a row of trees about a hundred feet in front of you. And I threw out my shoulder on the approach for 18. Which hurt for about five days. And It was muddy, so it was hard to throw. Heck, we couldn't even find the tee box for hole 14.
So, yeah. I'm totally going again when I get the chance.
8. Taking more than 60 calls in a day
What is it? See title.When did I first experience it? Today.
Rating: Two reviews out of five
How was it this time? Way better than I thought it would be. I remained chipper even being underslept and uncaffeinated. There weren't too many annoying people, and some were actually helpful. But still, 60!
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Beating
It's been almost fifteen years since I lived in Belarus. It's funny, but before even the people, it's summer I remember best. Like God dipped all the leaves in deep green paint, and the wind is spring all the way through August, cool and new life's herald.
You think it'd be winter that I remember. Where after the first snow fall you would only see the ground when weeks-long winds erased the white down to the gray dirt. Out the train windows, white birch faded in and out of the snowfog. And it was cold. Really, really, freaking cold.
But in summer, the rain felt like it belonged in the air, and after it finished falling the mud was snow's cousin: you walked cautious and didn't drive in the country.
But after summer, in my mind, it is the people that stick with me. Ex-pats like Lisa and DeeDee and Nathan and the Laughlins. And Belarussians like Andrei Andreyev.
Andrei lived three doors down from me, on the ground floor, on the right. Next to the walkway under the Karbisheva 7, our building. I have so many regrets from our friendship. Yeah, we lit off fireworks, and played video games together, and I taught him baseball. But I never learned his language, even though I spent two years in his country. And there were so many freaking times I told him to come back and play zaftra even though I'd told him the same thing the day before. The worst of it is that I have a letter of his somewhere. I had a friend translate it. And in the letter, he gives his address five or six times. That first summer back turned into my first year of high school, and that turned into the following summer, and I always found good reasons to put off writing him back. If there's anything in my life I regret it's not writing Andrei.
I' m sure he went into the military. Everybody does there. I remember he went to church with his grandmother. I hope he found a church later. He once offered me sausage and I thought it was gross and politely declined. I remember his apartment was always dark, but you could always see the motes drifting in the air.
More than once I've dreamed of meeting him and apologizing. The first time I went back to Belarus, all I wanted to do was hop on the tramvai from the Komorovski market and head up to Zyeloni Lug, and knock on the door. He would open the door, and I would say, "Eta ya." Which was something he always used to say as a self-deprecating joke for some reason. And then I would say, "Ya durak." And we would be friends again. But that never happened. Even the whole summer I spent there, I never even got back up in that area. Never stepped of the 1 or the 3 tramvai and walked across the green meadow park with the concrete waterfall you could see from our window before we put up the satellite dish. Past the place where Amanda got hit by that car and ran home on adrenaline and didn't walk for a month. Past the place where that drunk guy started beating me up until he found out I was an American, and then let me go and gave me a hug. Past the merry-go-round where Juliet cracked open her skull and the blood splattered on the elevator, and she didn't know, and Amanda didn't tell her when she asked.
I used to really have this problem where there would be this thing that I wanted to do, or wanted to be, and there would be no good reason not to, and I wouldn't. And Andrei's a great example. But it could be picking up my socks or asking a girl out, or doing my homework, or remembering to call someone I said I would, or floss, or take medicine, or eat less. Anything beneficial. It was part laziness, and part the fact that I liked seeing things go wrong. I liked the randomness. The feeling of knowing I caused something to fail. Maybe I liked the control.
I've gotten beyond that in a lot of ways. And I can only attribute my desire to actually get up and want to do things that I don't want to do to following Jesus. I know it sounds hokey to some of you, but I can point back to a very specific time where I spent hours a day listening to sermons and thinking about God, and spontaneously, out of that time, I started to want to do. To want to clean the house, or make the phone call that I needed to, or lose weight.
Lately, I've felt that desire to not do coming back.
And I think I rode the wave of good feelings for too long without actually bucking down and disciplining myself to do. So this year, for Lent, our church is going through some spiritual practices. Disciplines if you will. One for each week. I'm going to do them all, each week as they come. Plan out a way to make it work. Because I don't want to see another Andrei happen to me. I can't take that again.
You think it'd be winter that I remember. Where after the first snow fall you would only see the ground when weeks-long winds erased the white down to the gray dirt. Out the train windows, white birch faded in and out of the snowfog. And it was cold. Really, really, freaking cold.
But in summer, the rain felt like it belonged in the air, and after it finished falling the mud was snow's cousin: you walked cautious and didn't drive in the country.
But after summer, in my mind, it is the people that stick with me. Ex-pats like Lisa and DeeDee and Nathan and the Laughlins. And Belarussians like Andrei Andreyev.
Andrei lived three doors down from me, on the ground floor, on the right. Next to the walkway under the Karbisheva 7, our building. I have so many regrets from our friendship. Yeah, we lit off fireworks, and played video games together, and I taught him baseball. But I never learned his language, even though I spent two years in his country. And there were so many freaking times I told him to come back and play zaftra even though I'd told him the same thing the day before. The worst of it is that I have a letter of his somewhere. I had a friend translate it. And in the letter, he gives his address five or six times. That first summer back turned into my first year of high school, and that turned into the following summer, and I always found good reasons to put off writing him back. If there's anything in my life I regret it's not writing Andrei.
I' m sure he went into the military. Everybody does there. I remember he went to church with his grandmother. I hope he found a church later. He once offered me sausage and I thought it was gross and politely declined. I remember his apartment was always dark, but you could always see the motes drifting in the air.
More than once I've dreamed of meeting him and apologizing. The first time I went back to Belarus, all I wanted to do was hop on the tramvai from the Komorovski market and head up to Zyeloni Lug, and knock on the door. He would open the door, and I would say, "Eta ya." Which was something he always used to say as a self-deprecating joke for some reason. And then I would say, "Ya durak." And we would be friends again. But that never happened. Even the whole summer I spent there, I never even got back up in that area. Never stepped of the 1 or the 3 tramvai and walked across the green meadow park with the concrete waterfall you could see from our window before we put up the satellite dish. Past the place where Amanda got hit by that car and ran home on adrenaline and didn't walk for a month. Past the place where that drunk guy started beating me up until he found out I was an American, and then let me go and gave me a hug. Past the merry-go-round where Juliet cracked open her skull and the blood splattered on the elevator, and she didn't know, and Amanda didn't tell her when she asked.
I used to really have this problem where there would be this thing that I wanted to do, or wanted to be, and there would be no good reason not to, and I wouldn't. And Andrei's a great example. But it could be picking up my socks or asking a girl out, or doing my homework, or remembering to call someone I said I would, or floss, or take medicine, or eat less. Anything beneficial. It was part laziness, and part the fact that I liked seeing things go wrong. I liked the randomness. The feeling of knowing I caused something to fail. Maybe I liked the control.
I've gotten beyond that in a lot of ways. And I can only attribute my desire to actually get up and want to do things that I don't want to do to following Jesus. I know it sounds hokey to some of you, but I can point back to a very specific time where I spent hours a day listening to sermons and thinking about God, and spontaneously, out of that time, I started to want to do. To want to clean the house, or make the phone call that I needed to, or lose weight.
Lately, I've felt that desire to not do coming back.
And I think I rode the wave of good feelings for too long without actually bucking down and disciplining myself to do. So this year, for Lent, our church is going through some spiritual practices. Disciplines if you will. One for each week. I'm going to do them all, each week as they come. Plan out a way to make it work. Because I don't want to see another Andrei happen to me. I can't take that again.
Monday, February 4, 2008
In a strange reversal of middle-school literary precident, your adventure chooses you. Pikachu.
Even on Mondays when my dad's out of town, and I get my whole lunch at my desk, it's hard to get good writing done here at work. It's easily our busiest day of the week. And most of my calls were very attention-intensive. So, I'll keep what I have written for today's post for another day (just like I'm keeping the remnants of last Thursday's post, doncha know) and come back to it later. I've got all kinds of great ideas for things to write about from this weekend, it's just been a busy day.
So what I want to do before I head home is to jump off of what Adam was saying in the comments of the Friday post. At first, I skimmed what he read, because I am always nervous putting out a post where I didn't have as much time as I would like to revise. I feel defensive when I read any comments on those days. But that isn't the exercise, is it? One post, every day.
Anyway, I came back today and re-read his comment, and I think he's got some good ideas:
I have a few.
I want to be a writer, but I keep telling myself I'm not good enough, and keep putting off the doing of writing in order to either spend time with people or dink around 'relaxing' or getting entertained. Ask me why I don't like to watch movies, and I'll tell you it's not relational enough Part of what I don't say is that I've got stories of my own to tell, and seeing other people's makes me sad that I haven't told enough of mine yet.
I want to live in a bad part of town so I can identify with people who live there, but that usually means getting a house that requires a lot of fix-up, and I'm not very handy. Remember how I cut corners in Scrabble to play above my ability? And how Halo 2 made me actually work? I don't do so well in situations where I have to just get it right, where thinking outside the box isn't helpful. Like drywalling s room for example. Or carving. I'm way to impatient to ever carve anything. I cut too deep to get done quicker.
And also, I want Jill to feel safe. It's easy enough to say that I can trust God and let bad things happen to me if need be. But what does it mean to be in authority (and by authority, I mean only: having the responsibility of covering protection) over someone who I can't always be there for to step in the way of bad things that might happen and take them on myself?
I want to live simply, but I don't know what else to cull from my life, and especially what to keep that assists in hospitality. Anymore, I mostly keep the X Box, and Nintendo and N64, in order to play with people who come to my house.
I also want to live in physical community, but I value our privacy and our emotional space to make that sacrifice right now. We got so close to dropping into that half-pipe, and at the last second, we didn't. Now I feel like street courses are good enough for me. No need to go back and brave the dangers of vert. As it were.
I want to work hard, but my job trains me to put things off and be easily distracted have you seen how good Married to the Sea has been lately? Which I do well enough already without that help.
I think there are many more, but I am afraid that if I draw them my mind clearly enough to be able to write them down, they will blow away into dust. This is partially, as I've briefly mentioned before, and said I'd come back to, and haven't yet, but will now, that I think my Blyian/Eldridgian 'father wound' is that I always feel like I'm failing at everything I'm part of. That my hand in a process guarantees doom. Not that I can point to a specific time in which I was wounded, or a particular person who wounded me. For example, I can recall no time, my father, although imperfect as all fathers are, emotionally wounded me in any deep or lasting way.
In fact, I think I may have caused this 'wound' myself in some way. But that, again, could be part of the same thing. Ahhh, psychology, is there nothing you can't twist?
But I'll try to come up with more adventures I think my life is made for, and try to share them with you. But enough about me. I talk enough as it is. How about you? Any adventures calling you from the deep?
So what I want to do before I head home is to jump off of what Adam was saying in the comments of the Friday post. At first, I skimmed what he read, because I am always nervous putting out a post where I didn't have as much time as I would like to revise. I feel defensive when I read any comments on those days. But that isn't the exercise, is it? One post, every day.
Anyway, I came back today and re-read his comment, and I think he's got some good ideas:
If we're supposed to be living an adventurous life, what kind of adventure is it? What kind of adventure do you want it to be? I think different people have different adventures that they want to live out. I also think that we talk ourselves out of doing something adventurous. There's a dirty side to adventuring; it gets messy and doesn't look very pretty, and we let ourselves pass things up because it didn't quite look like the thing we had in mind. Maybe if we talked more about the adventures we want to live, we could talk each other into actually doing them instead of individually talking ourselves out it.So, I'll ask you, here on the cold internets, before I ask many of you in person, what adventures do you think your life could have in store for you? Ones that you keep wanting to talk yourself out of?
I have a few.
I want to be a writer, but I keep telling myself I'm not good enough, and keep putting off the doing of writing in order to either spend time with people or dink around 'relaxing' or getting entertained. Ask me why I don't like to watch movies, and I'll tell you it's not relational enough Part of what I don't say is that I've got stories of my own to tell, and seeing other people's makes me sad that I haven't told enough of mine yet.
I want to live in a bad part of town so I can identify with people who live there, but that usually means getting a house that requires a lot of fix-up, and I'm not very handy. Remember how I cut corners in Scrabble to play above my ability? And how Halo 2 made me actually work? I don't do so well in situations where I have to just get it right, where thinking outside the box isn't helpful. Like drywalling s room for example. Or carving. I'm way to impatient to ever carve anything. I cut too deep to get done quicker.
And also, I want Jill to feel safe. It's easy enough to say that I can trust God and let bad things happen to me if need be. But what does it mean to be in authority (and by authority, I mean only: having the responsibility of covering protection) over someone who I can't always be there for to step in the way of bad things that might happen and take them on myself?
I want to live simply, but I don't know what else to cull from my life, and especially what to keep that assists in hospitality. Anymore, I mostly keep the X Box, and Nintendo and N64, in order to play with people who come to my house.
I also want to live in physical community, but I value our privacy and our emotional space to make that sacrifice right now. We got so close to dropping into that half-pipe, and at the last second, we didn't. Now I feel like street courses are good enough for me. No need to go back and brave the dangers of vert. As it were.
I want to work hard, but my job trains me to put things off and be easily distracted have you seen how good Married to the Sea has been lately? Which I do well enough already without that help.
I think there are many more, but I am afraid that if I draw them my mind clearly enough to be able to write them down, they will blow away into dust. This is partially, as I've briefly mentioned before, and said I'd come back to, and haven't yet, but will now, that I think my Blyian/Eldridgian 'father wound' is that I always feel like I'm failing at everything I'm part of. That my hand in a process guarantees doom. Not that I can point to a specific time in which I was wounded, or a particular person who wounded me. For example, I can recall no time, my father, although imperfect as all fathers are, emotionally wounded me in any deep or lasting way.
In fact, I think I may have caused this 'wound' myself in some way. But that, again, could be part of the same thing. Ahhh, psychology, is there nothing you can't twist?
But I'll try to come up with more adventures I think my life is made for, and try to share them with you. But enough about me. I talk enough as it is. How about you? Any adventures calling you from the deep?
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