Thursday, April 24, 2008

Yesterday lunch: a peeve thwarted and a vaguely related theory. Beware of a sharp turn and an abrupt stop.

I bought some strawberry yogurt at Whole Foods to have for breakfasts. I got some organic, some fat free and some regular so I could compare and see what kind I'd like for future breakfast purchases. Yesterday morning, on the drive to work, Jill had one of my yogurts. Which is fine. Food is food, and our policy is that any food in the house is for anyone in the house, resident or no. And she even asked, which she didn't even have to do. So that's cool.

On the drive over to pick up Adam, the smell of yogurt filled the van as Jill stripped the foil lid off most of the way (so it wouldn't fall off and she didn't have to throw it away separately (a very responsible and considerate on-the-go packaging maintenance procedure, says I)) and stirred the lurking strawberry puree off of the bottom.

Now, I didn't say anything at the time, it would have been ridiculous and rude (this is going to sound a little absurd) but that kind of thing really bothers me. Not the eating in the car, or the smell of yogurt. I'm cool with that. It's the packaging. I don't have a lot of neuroses (the sound of people blowing their nose is one), but half-unwrapped food is probably my number one irrational pet peeve.

There is little in the world that grates on my nerves more than a cheeseburger half-wrapped in paper, or a popsicle with the wrapper pulled down, or a Chipotle burrito with the foil stripped around to show half of the thing. Or a yogurt's foil lid incompletely removed.

I know, I know. These eating techniques reduce the mess. And I'm a person the frequently finds mustard on my shirt. So you'd think I'd adhere to a culinary modus operendi including packaging-come-barrier, but no. I want my food out of its wrapper (a word I hate for some reason). I want my burrito laying on the foil not in it, my burger fully naked in my hands, and my popsicle accompanied on its journey to my mouth only by a wooden stick. I even pull the little paper cylinder off of ice cream cones.

Maybe it's a bizarre fear of biting into paper. Maybe it's that I don't like to take any unnecessary breaks from chowing down. Maybe I'm just weird. But I always, always, fully unwrap my food before I eat it. That sometimes means messy hands and more napkins (I also don't like used napkins, or especially Kleenexes, by the way). But I'm more willing to have half of the burrito innards in my hand than keep that thing under wraps. Ketchup, mustard and onions on my fingers? Sure, just as long as there's no wax paper on it when I'm eating.

So when yesterday, a beautiful day, even with the clouds, maybe because of the clouds, a great day for walking, on the 20 minute stroll down to Sonic for lunch, the food took so long to prepare that when it finally it came, I was forced to take burger in hand, water in the other, book in back pocket (Irresistible Revolution still) and start my trek back, I completely unwrapped my burger, and ate it as I walked. Dripping a wee bit o' mustard down my shirt in the process, as you might expect.

It's a funny thing, walking down 119th street from Renner (ish) to Ridgeview. They have nice, wide sidewalks, but the entire area is very clearly a non-pedestrian zone. I feel iconoclastic. I'm breaking the taboo. Lookit me, lookit me, I'm walking, I think. Same with the burger yesterday. Lookit me, lookit me, I'm walking with a burger and a cup with a straw. Ain't I crazy and stuff. Lookit.

That sort of desire for other people to see me walking is part of that whole interpersonal relationship theory that Don Miller writes about in the first third of Searching for God Knows What. How once upon a time people got continual exterior validation from God, and now we don't, due to that whole fall of man business, so we're always looking for external validation from somebody.

Even introverts are always looking for someone outside of ourselves to tell them who they are. When your mom or your teachers tell you not to care what other people think, they're kind of asking you to go against the very nature of being a person. Not that it's a good thing, per se, to always be concerned with what other people are thinking; it's just sort of who we are as people

I think the theory explains a lot of human behavior. That is, people are always trying to get someone else to validate their identity, to tell them that they're loved. They then act accordingly, to try to get someone else to tell them these things. It's why kids act up in school, and people get into bad relationships, and people try to be famous, why people tell jokes.

It's even part of why I write this blog.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Back on the wagon.

I've been reading again. Dangerous, I know. I don't mean reading articles and magazines and blogs. That's kids' stuff. I can do that at work and no one notices. Those kinds of reading just give you a cheap high and only make you want something harder. Heck, I do them all day and have no adverse effects.

What I mean is the real hard stuff: books.

I know, I know. When I'm on books, I can get irritable, and I get nothing else done, and I get kind of obsessed. Like every book I read is the greatest thing ever, and other people should really give it a shot, man, everybody's reading it, c'mon.

But at least I'm not using novels hardcore yet; I'm only sampling at the moment. Mostly because I'm still plodding through Susanna Clarke's Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrill, which is good stuff, don't get me wrong, but hasn't sucked me in like most novels do. I'm not sure if it's the characters or the plot or the writing (which is genius, and hysterical, by-the-by), but I'm just not that deeply into it. In the meantime, I'm not interested in picking up some other novel. I want to get through the one I'm in. So at least I've been able to stave off the novel demon for time being.

And yeah yeah, Jill and I will get together in the late evening, in the privacy of our own home, I might add, and take hits off Steven King's Dark Tower series, but that's purely recreational. Only keeps us up too late now and again.

But, I have been on a serious non-fiction kick for a few weeks, getting beat up in the best way by Jesus for President by Shane Claiborne, and Everything Must Change by Brian McClaren. Feeling discontented with my life, but not guilty, if that makes any sense. Next, I'm re-reading Claiborne's Irresistible Revolution for something lighter, if that's any indication. May re-read Walsh and Keesmaat's Colossians Remixed after that; I've changed my thinking so much even since I read that last year, and I'd like another shot. Anyway, I buzzed through all four of these books, not wanting to get bogged down in the details and lose the big picture. So now I want to go back and savor the specifics.

Reading has always been my gateway to changing what I believe. Then what I believe drives the engine of what I do. I'd like to write more here about these books, how they're changing me, teaching me, but I need even more time to process. The short version is that I don't feel like I've given near enough of my life to the things I believe in, the people I believe in, the capital P person I believe in. I am too content with what is safe, complacent, with what is socially normative, with what is uncreative, anti-creative, even. I'll get stoked up by something, and then come home, or close my book, and just want to play a game or flip on the TV, even for 10 minutes. Consume something to numb the discontent. Like turning on the radio do dull the boredom of car trip. It's exactly what I'm discontented about, and especially what to do about it, that's going to take more time to figger out enough to be able write about.

In the meantime? Mmm, books.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Overtime Illuminated

Saturday workdays, the lights start cut.
I don't switch them on.
Only once, has a co-conscripted lit the office for our weekend duet.
Most times, we're isolated, half-lit by our under-shelf tubes,
the distant windows casting brightshadows of the parking lot across the ceiling.

Pick any day, and I'm drenched in fluorescence and
the voices of problem solvers trapped in cloth-covered cells,
walls on three sides; the fourth still cages.
Take a call, fix a call, close a call, take a call. Make 'em happy,
so they can buysellsteal the houses.

But this day, it's two voices like golfers,
I take a swing, he takes a swing, we take a swing.
Take a call, fix a call, close a call, take a call.
We wander the aisles quiet like vigil.
Here's a break, there's a break, queue fills up, tap it,
and it dries.

Saturday workdones, the lights stay cut.
I'm through the tinted doorway
and the sun's switched on.

Friday, April 18, 2008

Why, two nights ago, I meant to go to bed at 9:30, but got to sleep after 11

Note: Although in-text links in blogs tend to be either lazy replacements, or unimaginative springboards, for content, I've been including more of them lately. Mostly this is so those of you who want to actually see or experience what I'm referencing, can, without having to Google them yourselves. I try to only link directly, and sparsely, and then only for those who might not have seen something and would like to. That is, you won't see things like "I was reading this today, and I am so mad about cheese now." More like, "I was watching the Dramatic Chipmunk video today, and it reminded me of blah blah blah." So, the goal is that you don't have to go off to a link and read something and then come back to get what I'm talking about. Think of links in this blog as more of bibliographical footnotes, or examples for a richer experience. Let me know if they're intrusive. Or I suppose, if you want more links to things I mention.

I took off Tuesday from work because I had spent the previous six days of work talking with the most uncooperative, anti-listening group of people I'd experienced in the previous 16 months of work. As weary as I was of that, and the fact that I'm working my 3rd Saturday in 6 weeks this week, I figured I'd be out longer than a single day if I didn't get some rest. That day was awesome.

But for some reason, though, I didn't sleep well that Tuesday night, and I spent most of the next day in a stupor, and by Wednesday night at 9, when we left Dragonfly from playing Scrabble at Dragonfly with Dave Weatherford, I was beat. Home by 9:30, in bed, by 9:45, you might think. But in reality, I got to sleep after 11. DUN DUN DUN.

Here's the story.

The fall after I stopped teaching, I was temping at a Perceptive Software. You know, the place with the twirly slide from the second floor to the first, and the free pop machines, and the frequent free leftovers from training classes, and the occasional fancy breakfasts, and occasional fancy lunches, and we went bowling my first week even though I was a temp and got paid for it even. Yeah, that company.

But it was pretty menial work -- entering information from trade show contact cards into a database program and then assigning the contacts to three people to do the follow up. Not much to it. I got good quick, and was buzzing through those things faster than they expected. So to entertain myself, I brought in some of my CDs. After a few dats of that, I started to get a little board. Most of the time I can only listen to a given CD three or four times before I need to put it away for a while. Historically, The Violet Burning has been the most frequent exception to that rule. But even so, and even with my surprisingly high tolerance for repetition of things that I like (my own jokes are an embarrassing example of this, also flash games), there's only so much I can take of the same songs over and over.

I'm not sure if it was from Wil Wheaton's blog that I first heard about it, but this is about the time I first started listening to Pandora stations, which I do pretty frequently these days when I'm in the mood for music, and some of those first stations I made are still in frequent rotation in the QuickMix we play when people are over at our house on Saturday and Sunday nights. But even Pandora got a little dull after a while. I guess I'm not huge music person.

On the way to work every morning, though, I was listening to the radio, and while I listened to the Buzz for music, I've always been more of a 810 sports talk or 980 news talk, or 89.3 pretentious talk kind of person. And sometimes, even though I'm not a big fan of the excessive southern accents of Christian radio voices, I even listen to 92.3 Christan talk (even though as rob Bell says, Christian is a lousy adjective), where it was either Ravi Zacharias or Chuck Swindall, depending on whether I hit the end of the 7-7:30 half-hour, or just the 7:30-8.

So one day, I thought I'd look up Ravi Zacharias, and listen to his stuff at work, because he has a wonderful lilting voice, and is one of those apologist people, who I had always liked, considering how they made me feel so smart. Once I started listening, though, I found that most of his online sermons and lectures were kept in that supremely annoying Christian radio format.

You know the one, where they take a 45 minute sermon, break it into three 24-ish minute sections with large overlaps so it'll fit into their half-hour-a-day programming format. They sandwich the sermon in the middle of some annoying theme music and local commercials with way more investment opportunities than I'm comfortable with, especially on a station that purports to be about the guy who liked to go around and say things like, "Blessed are the poor." But that's indicative of a whole freakin' culture of Christians, and is a whole blog for some other day.

Then towards the end of each day's sermon section, they play sappy music over the speaker as he (or much more rarely, she) talks. You know, like it's ending; so it doesn't sound like they are actually breaking the sermon up into smaller bits, and so it fits in their paradigm of Christian things need crappy music, especially at the end of a sermon; so it's more emotionally stirring. Because if you don't feel something, every time, it's not real, or whatever the bizarre logicemotion is. Because, you know, audience manipulation isn't a huge criticism of Christians these days, or anything.

And then the announcer comes on and reminds you of how great the ministry is, and how you really ought to send them some money if you've been 'blessed' by the ministry, or whatever, and they do such good work. (Ok, seriously, how often does a person who doesn't call themselves a Christian voluntarily listen to a Christian music radio station, let alone a Christian talk at you radio station? Just pull an NPR and ask for donations for the program if you like it. Why disingenuously drag 'ministry' into it?)

And then sometimes they'd do another 5 minutes of the sermon, closing with more sappy music, like it's actually ending (hint: likely it's not), or sometimes the speaker comes on and does a little interview, or explanation of his talk, or announces there's going to be a cruise that you should pay for. I am not making that up. (Nor am I making up the time that I got a brochure from a company advertising a cruise for the whole family!/missions trip to the poor in South America.)

All of this format isn't SO bad if you're listening on the radio. Where you hear part on one day, part on the next, and there's some overlap so you don't forget where you were the day before. But when you're listening to five sermons a day, it gets kind of old. And as much as I liked Ravi, it all started to feel a little excessive. Just gimme the guy's words, and leave the rest.

After getting frustrated with that, I thought I'd listen to some Tim Keel sermons that I'd missed from back before we went to Jacob's Well, because they are not made for radio, and I like listening to Tim Keel, and they go back a full two years, and a Tim Keel sermon does not have commercials (Unless it's for the KU Jayhawks, but we all have our foibles). After I caught up on the year of those I hadn't heard, I went and listened to Rob Bell's sermons from Mars Hill Church (Grand Rapids, not Seattle, srsly) because we'd read his book Velvet Elvis in our small group and it had been pretty paradigm changing for me. But their archives only go back twelve weeks, and I could easily listen to five or six sermons in a day. So I ran out.

Looking for more at-work listening fodder, I did a search for "Tim Keel" and "Rob Bell," looking for other people I could listen to. I found a couple of people that I didn't really get into, but that's where I first heard of Rick McKinley.

Ok, that's not entirely true, Rick is the cool pastor that Don Miller writes about in Blue like Jazz and other books, which I'd read. But I hadn't actually heard him yet. Rick sounds like a stoned-out hippy, and looks like a football player, and his church, Imago Dei, in Portland, has almost all their sermons online, all the way back to the beginning of the church in their archive. So I blazed a trail through through the entire three or four year archive, and by November, having switched to another temp job labeling accounting archive boxes for a conglomerate of industrial building part manufacturers in Lenexa, I even caught up to that week's sermon. So, besides the two weekely sermons from Rob and Rick, I was out of material. I spent the last weeks, before Thanksgiving, listening to the four gospels free from the open source World English Bible project.

Around that time, I listened to the November 16, 2006 message from Imago, where Rick laid out the seeds of what became the Advent Conspiracy, something Jacob's Well participated in this last year. Jill and I were inspired to join in on their relational gift giving and their spending less, making Christmas more Jesus-y. We even shared that sermon with the group we spend our lives with, and a bunch of them hopped on the Give More, Spend Less wagon. The whole thing is hard for me, because I really, really like spending money on people, especially at Christmas, but it's been a good learning experience, trying to break free of the religiously consumerist story we find ourselves living in.

So for that Christmas, we tried making gifts. I spent most of December making hollowed-out books, for example, and we gave some people times for us to go and hang out with them, and we gave Sam laundry facilities for a year. And after a year of seeing Sam a lot (we kinda like the guy), the following Christmas, we gave him another year.

Which brings us to Tuesday night. Our drier had been kind of laming its way through it's supposed job of drying clothes for the past week or so. Taking an extra half-cycle to wring out the water, and so on. Sam needed to do laundry, and we told him we wouldn't be there, but he's one of a number of close friends with keys to our place, so he went over while we were still in Olathe. We get home, ready to sleep at 9:30, and Jill went down to run another load of laundry, because we are trying to keep up with it, rather than let the clothes pile up all over our room like a lumpy patchwork carpet.

But Sam's clothes were wet in the drier, and our clothes from the load Jill had started that morning were wet in a basket, so I figured I'd run the drier longer. Even just air, hot or no should eventually do the trick. But the button didn't work. I checked the door. It was closed. Checked the lint screen. It was clean. Hit the button . . . nothing.

So while Jill and I argued about the state of cleanliness of the basement, and how months ago, to make room for games, I had moved a bunch of stuff into the area she had cleaned, and now there were spiders, and it was too cluttered to be able to vacuum, and she was unhappy about the whole thing, I unhooked the drier, slid it out of the way, moved all of the stuff off of Amanda's drier, walked it over, plugged it in, tested it (it works), spent a long while of sore fingers reconnecting the exhaust tube and it's wire fastener, and went to put Sam's wet stuff into the drier. But it was dusty, so Jill vacuumed it. Then it was uneven, and the feet, which are supposed to be adjustable, were not adjusting, so Jill went upstairs while I was figuring that out. Her suggestion of sticking the one corner of the drier on the carpet worked. So at least it was level and wouldn't walk all over the basement in the process of flinging water out of soppy garments. Then I put our drier back where Amanda's had been.

By then, for whatever reason, I was no longer sleepy, and in one of those rare, late-night cleaning binges, and spurred on by Jill's displeasure on the state of the basement and the need to put things away that we'd moved to get the drier away, began the long process of completely reorganizing the basement so that her laundry area would be clean, and, if I could swing it, we could still play games somewhere in the basement.

I had just finished folding up the table in the game room, so I could use that as a temporary staging area, when Jill came downstairs. She sat on the stairs, and I sat on a chair, and we talked about cleaning and organizing the basement, and about Jesus for President, which she is finishing and I've already read, and how challenging it is, and about our feelings on the basement and the cleaning and organizing. Then we went to bed and because I wasn't sleepy now, read some more of Wizard and Glass, which we've been ignoring for a while.

And I pulled on my stocking cap, and belatedly texted Adam to let him know we couldn't carpool to work because we were going to see Wes and Katy for dinner the next night, and slept.


BONUS LINKS:
1. I've seen some tie-lapse photography in my day, but nothing as beautiful as Eclectic 2.0 by Ross Ching.

2. Lauren Thompson's is my favorite of the whole series. But the whole Youngme - Nowme series makes me love humanity. A lot.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

My licence plate is the image of the invisible corporate website. Ah-ah.

I'd like to quote selectively from, and comment on, a recent memo I received on his behalf from the executive assistant of the president of the company I work for.

"You’ve all just heard my recent State of the Company address [No I didn't. I needed to either go to an late-in-the-day cocktail reception, which wasn't important enough to close our call center, or important enough to invite spouses to, so it wasn't important enough for me. Or I could have listened in on another time he gave the address during the work day. When I'm supposed to be on the phone. Doing my job.] and have some understanding of where we’re headed. You also should understand by now the importance of all of us contributing to the greater good [Emphasis mine. Nothing like using language most recently used in popular culture to justify killing undesirables in order to win the title of 'Village of the Year' in the hit comedy HOT FUZZ starring Simon freakin' Pegg, a comedic genius.] and that I’m looking to each to you to be thinking constantly of creative ideas to push the marketable concepts of our company to the consumer [No, no, not giving anyone in the company any raises at all this year wasn't enough motivation to stick around contribute joyfully. Now we're all being asked to do the job of the marketing department in our spare time? I'm gonna work here forever! I love being treated so well. Nigh unto a king. Sarcasm filter off. Ok, I mean, yeah, it's nice to be considered for input on things in a company. But how about any input what-so-ever on the methods in which we do our job, or the software we deal with on a daily basis? Oh, we're not smart enough for that? I guess we're also too dumb to give you marketing ideas for free, either.].

"A few people have already brought ideas [Never mind. Not all of us are dumb enough to keep our ideas to ourselves.]. . . . [O]ne that you saw in our presentation . . . was that of the license plate frame. The frames are being sent to each of you over the next few days so that you can put them around the license plates of your cars. The idea, of course, is that people will see [WEBSITE PRODUCT NAME REDACTED] and be curious enough to log in [to the website]. . . . [<stunned silence from me>]

"This is strictly a voluntary program. Consider, however, as shareholders and as workers with jobs, everything we do can only help to increase our company’s worth [Yes, master. I am your slave. My life for yours.]. As you help to increase the worth of our company, you may increase your own, as it may be worth your while to have one of these frames on your car. [Note how threatening these words are. Strictly voluntary" (I promise, no promotions or considerations will ever be given to those who uncompensatedly attach these advertisements to their cars), "consider," (or else!) "workers with jobs" (who can quickly become workers without jobs, if you know what I mean), "it may be worth your while" (Or I'll send a large man with a baseball bat to convince your knees that it would be).].

"Thank you for your participation!" [Thank you in retrospect for your condescension! (Which means talking down to)]


Now, look, I'm not against working for a company. Nor am I against spending time telling other people how great the product my company sells. If I think it's good. But in such a religiously consumerist society as we live in, I have a hard time plastering the iconography of any company on anything I have, let alone something unrelated to the product that it's on.

I have a hard enough time with the fact that I have a Sony TV, a Dell laptop, and a Panasonic TV (among other things) and that they all present their icon for through-worship (re: consumer envy) to anyone who looks. But I paid for (or was given) all of those things that have those icons on them. I'm not adding advertising on top of an already branded item. I.

But to be asked to tack advertising onto my car by a company that boasts at every quarterly meeting of how it puts its workers first, boasts of how hard our division worked this year, making the only profit in the entire corporation, boasts of sending a large dividend to the stockholders, and then decides that the standard (and only annual) less-than-inflation size raises are too much for the company to handle, is insulting. I mean, look, I don't need more money. In fact, I really need to learn how to live more simply, and have less money for me, and more to give away. But in a culture of a company where money is so important (Seriously, every meeting, the VP gushes over how big "the check" was we sent to the stockholders), it's just another reminder of the excessive power structure of our society, a narrative, I'm more than interested in deconstructing, if you get my drift. Think more 'demolition' than 'Derrida.' Heck, give my raise to other people. I'm fine with that. But don't ask me to shill.

Actually, come to think of it, the real estate industry is entirely obsessed with image. Here are some example email addresses that are not too far from the truth of email addresses I get on a daily basis: johnsells4you@besthomesinthegalaxy.com, or executivepremiereRealtorofthedecade@cheatstowinreaestate4you.com, or theonlyrealestateagentinamericasoyoubetterhiremesuckersImtheonlyoneinthgame@remaxbestestagentever.com.
I'm only slightly kidding. I have agents alk to me on a weekly basis FREAKING OUT that their image in our system is stretched or out of date. Not to mention the obsessive nature with which some agents pour over comparative statistics, asking me for the most esoteric minutiae of data in those reports.

So maybe it would be a good idea to plaster my 199x Toyota Previa (can I get a Juno shout-out?) UFO/baby blue egg with slogans for my company. We wash it once every few months, honest. Nothing says "Buy a New Home That You Can't Afford. It'll Make You Finally Happy in Your Loveless Marriage, Honest" like that van. Then again, maybe someone important will see it and realize it's in their best interest to pay me off to remove the ad. Like, bills in an envelope slide under my cubicle wall at midnight. Then I'd give it to a homeless shelter or something, just for the irony.

Mmm, irony.

Friday, April 4, 2008

Never Gonna Give You Up.

I woke up this morning, a little groggy, but much awaker than I have been the rest of the week. Jill and I have been having a very hard time getting good sleep as of late. Sometimes we find ourselves awake at the same time in the middle of the night, and have conversations like, "I'm going to pee," and "Get me some water while you're up."

But this morning, I rolled out, showered, and dressed, all the while plotting today's blog post. It's Friday, and we take fewer calls. So I'd have plenty of time. I haven't written as much lately as I'd like. As I emerged from the closet, I had it. I had two recent events, tied together with another thought I'd been having lately, all shooting on ahead to a larger idea I'd been wanting to talk about. It was gonna be good. Not too long, but real punchy and relevant. Genius, I thought.

But now I can't remember it.

I've spent at least 20 minutes in silence today, trying to rework what it was, not to mention other thinking times throughout the rest of the day, and a couple of times trying to trick myself into remembering by playing a video game until I got lost in it, and then jumping out and thinking nonchalantly about writing. I took several hours off and thought nothing of blogging or writing or deep stuff. Went to lunch with Nicholas, read some webcomics, played some Chrono Trigger . . . nothing. I even drank some delicious green tea with lemongrass and mint that Dan gave me. But all to no avail. Maybe it'll come to me tomorrow.

It was something about . . .

See I tried to type just there to see if it would just come. Rats.

So, in lieu of my brilliance, here's some YouTube video brilliance. nothing too profound, but worth hearing from time to time. (And no, it's not our old friend Rick.): Music and Life

Oh. And as I completed that link, I just TOTALLY remembered what the idea was from this morning. Haha. I'll get back to you on that. Should be good.

Friday Night Art.

Friday evening, Jill and Adam and Sam and Emily and I went to John Raux's art showing at Bad Seed over on McGee, which is usually the farmer's market/headquarters for a particular urban farm over around Bannister and State Line. But they allowed John to come in spend several months painting in their space, and then include those in a larger exhibition of his work exploring the last year or so of his life.

The space they own is two storefronts next to each other. On the the left side, the farmer's market side where they sell fresh fruit, and art, and baked goods on Fridays nights through the springsummer, John took a whole wall to document, in a kind of timeline, his last year's hike along the Pacific Northwest trail, a trail that runs from the desert along the US-Mexican border, through high desert and then mountainous forests, all the way up to a pass in the mountains at the Canadian border. He used photographs, and diary entries, and explanations penciled right on the wall to tell the story of his journey. He also hung some of his gear along the path: an icepick that he said he had first taken as kind of a joke symbolizing the end of the trip on the snow, but ended up as one of his most useful tools, even becoming a significant player in a 40-person, 4-hour ordeal that kept a tree lit ablaze by an exploding Sterno can from becoming a forest fire; his resewed backpack which had held the fish oil tablets that prompted a six-inch-from-your-face-400 lb.-black-bear wake up call, followed by a wild, screaming (two voiceless weeks followed), barefoot chase after the bear which concluded with a full-frontal charge at the bear, who finally dropped the now fishoilless, but ripped apart, bag, but didn't rip John to shreds somehow; and a Nickelodeon brand toy camera which he used before it crapped out in the middle of the most beautiful part of the hike, but still got some great pictures form none the less.

I took my time with the journey. Read the diary entries. Meditated on the pictures. Was moved by his essential humanity that I saw sparkling in each little piece of the whole wall. By the time I reached the mid-point, however, Oriole Post, a folksy band helmed by Rachel Bonar, had set up in the corner and started playing. I finished up the diary entry I was reading, John's tightwild handwriting on long thin cards, and listened to a couple of songs.

On the way home from work, we had dropped by our house to grab our new wireless router off the porch (our new, fancy wireless network is called TheRectory), and then headed over to to the Freak Show to decide where to go for dinner before we went to Bad Seed. Chipotle was the first suggestion, and a good one, and a delicious one, oh indeed, but I thought it might be cooler to go somewhere more sitty-downy, which is the kind of meal I like best. You're comfy, and friends chat longer than they should really have time for, and it's good.

We narrowed it down even further to family-style eating, and decided on Buca di Beppo, Korma Sutra or New Peking. Adam didn't want Indian, and Jill didn't want Italian, and Sam sometimes works at New Peking and knows the menu quite well as a result, and even gets a discount sometimes, so there we went. We had the salt and pepper shrimp, which comes whole and you're not even supposed to shell them when you eat them; and Adam's favorite the House Beef; and some spicy beef fried rice with broccoli and tofu. Also, because it's so fun, the five of us shared an appetizer sampler for one person -- because it comes with flaming gel in a little iron pot that's supposed to be used sear the one beef kabob it comes with. Fire! Every meal is better with a fire to sit around, no matter how small. Candles, and campfires, purple flaming gel for beef searing, whatever. Our server, who looks Asian, but endearingly used the term "ya'll," gave us extra gel for extra fire, and the bus boy guy was refilling our waters faster than we were drinking them almost, and we had a good time.

The house beef has garlic. And I had the house beef. So at Bad Seed, I found myself in the middle of a large tight gathering crowd of Oriole Post listeners, friends and strangers and people who I know, but I can't count among friends for a wide variety of merely circumstantial reasons, with garlic breath. Ah, alas.

After a couple of songs, Rachel's brother Kyle jumped in on the muted trumpet, an instrument he'd only picked up at Christmas, she said, as a gift from their grandmother who had wanted to learn her whole life but learned that starting at 70-ish does not supply you with sufficient lung capacity. Rachels' mom and dad were sitting up at the top of the stairs by one of those classic second story warehouse offices, and they confirmed the story. The place was packed with people I know from church, Mike Crawford and fam, the Keels, Beth Mercer, Tim Bridgham . . . like, everyone, really. It's cool to see an artist like John so supported by the whole community. I love the fact that our monthly leadership community dinners, the artists are invited along with the prayer team, and the music people, and the small group leaders. Let the artists see the vision too.

Anyway, We were standing by Don and Lori Chafer, and I heard them mumble something about 'going around.' Then I saw them leave the building behind me and a minute later reappear on the far side of the crowd.

At this point my heart was already stirring in that deepwater feeling of art that I get sometimes. Something akin to the feeling of getting delightfully lost in a large library, and then the added bonus finding books you'd sort of always hoped had been written. I hadn't seen the paintings yet, which were the real reason I'd come. For a while, when I'd seen him in passing, John had been talking and hinting about these huge paintings that he'd done to express what'd been going on in his mind and heart since coming back from the trail. So, the Chafers reappearance on the far side of the crowd prompted me to seek out the other gallery. I grabbed Jill and we threaded out of the crowd to the street to go see it.

On the right side of the building, the Bad Seed has a retail space, which (as I understand it) they're trying to lease out, but in the meantime, let John use to paint and exhibit. The walls were white, and the floor was concrete, and the six paintings hung like they were supposed to be there. And they were. Painted and shown in the same room. Not something you see often.

When we came in, John was standing in the middle of the gallery, talking with some people. I told him something too gushy (and maybe a little garlic-y), I'm sure, about how good the whole show was, and how impressed I was. He looked a little shell-shocked, even that early in the evening. I know he's an extrovert, but he's talked about how being out alone on the trail for so long made it really hard to be around lots of people. Maybe that's still going on.

But the paintings? I don't even think I can describe them. I've never seen abstracts like these. Strong lines and scandalous colors layered on huge canvases, each with a title and a poem to help explain. John let me take a picture of one. I forgot the exact title, but it's something like 'the hope and sorrow of time travelers.' This picture does not capture the scope and color of the piece, but at least it'll give you a vague notion of his brilliance.



















I spent some time engrossed in the paintings. And I meandered back behind to where the Chafers were, and listened to some more Oriole Post, and talked to Dave Blattner. And then I meandered back. On a table in the gallery, there was a guest book. I wrote something about there being enough time in the world to let the all this art dribble down from the corners of my mouth; there was too much. Next to the guest books was a single poster advertising the show. I thought about taking it, but it didn't seem right. It looked good on that table. But a few minutes later, Oriole Post finished up, and I was able to get back over to the other side and finish looking at John's journey. And on the way, Sam showed us a poster he'd found in a stack on a chair somewhere, and we took one from the stack, and Jill got it signed, and now it sits on top of our book shelves, sandwiched between our poster that says "Despair: It's always darkest just before it goes pitch black," and out ostentatious large canvassy picture of us that my aunt and uncle made with their new business that does things like that.

After I went through the rest of the journey timeline, Jill and I hung around talked to Kyle Bonar, and then later Jenn Nolongeragneiwishicouldeverrememberhermarriedlastname. The garlic did not help the easy flow of conversation, but such is life. In the course of the conversations, both Jenn and Kyle asked what we were doing later. We said we were going to Halliday's fashion show, but only later did I realize they were maybe inviting us to hang out with them. Which is cool, because, growing up at OBC, Kyle was a cool guy, PK, off with his own stuff going on, someone I never thought I'd hang out with. And Jenn and I never seemed to be able to get along in youth group, ever. So to find ourselves in a place where we might evers pend time together intentionally is pretty cool.

It's been a lot better lately, but I've spent most of my life just assuming that I'm offending, like, everyone I spent any time with. Jenn especially, looking back. I got to the point where I didn't trust myself to make a good impression, so I just went with being me, bold and over-intellectual, sometimes at the expense of other people's feelings. But I'm trying to learn. Kind of like how I like Chinese food these days, and can tolerate mayo and Miracle Whip on sandwiches, and even pets sometimes (but seriously, people, I know they're cute, but do you realize how much we as a country spend on pets). But it's slow. Some days I get excited and say things that don't make any sense, or come off wrong, or I get all brainy and Jill gives me a a look. But I guess we've all got our brokenness to live with.

Then we ran into Andy Woolard, and talked about his blogs, his dad's blog, and the Interwoven Threads shirts (the new line's coming in a couple of weeks) we've been buying for presents for people since Christmas, and some other stuff. We met Andy in the first small group we were in at Jacob's Well, one that didn't end so well, with people with hurt feelings, and nobody talking about it. The remnants of that group eventually merged with our pre-existing Saturday night group. So it was cool to get to talk to Andy.

And then we left. Adam and Emily seemed ready to go, and Sam had to be home to go see Run, Fatboy, Run with his friend Tonya, who he works with at the Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre, and some other people, and we were going to Halliday's show.

But Jill called Halliday's roomate, Jill's friend, Jo Lee, and Halliday's show was already over, so those of us who were left walked down to the plaza on a gorgeous night and saw Run Fatboy Run, which was a typical comedy, but still funny becuase of Simon Pegg and Hank Azaria.

And then we went to bed because we were going to the farmer's market the next day with Amanda. and to see John talk about his show. And to set up the wireless network. but that's for another post.

Note 1: If you want to see some more pictures of what went down at John's show, a glimpse of some of the other pieces at least, check out the bottom of this set at Tim Samoff's Flickr.

Note 2: This blog post has been composed listening to the following: the sounds of other people answering the phone here at work; On Soundclick: Jukebox Heart, Radio Sky 70, Creeps, What You Got, Traveller, Taking Away my Good Feelings, Imo Fight You, and 4th of July [heck, yes] by Lowry; several people restarting their computer on the phone; and an awful lot of background talk about some sort of national championship.

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Short, but pointed. Like a dagger, even.

I am having one of those days where I really wish people would fix their own common sense computer problems (A pop-up is getting blocked? Why would you call me for that? Consider, please, simply allowing pop-ups on one of the fifty toolbars that you installed. You know, the ones that crowd the top of your screen to the point that every website gets scant inches to display information?), stop expecting me to do their job for them, be willing to trust me when I tell them that for certain subjects their local board is a better place for information, look at the screen and read off what it says when asked to do so, and just quit being such whiners.

But today, apparently, is not that day.