a full year of blogging my daily adventures has passed. now i have a zillion little stakes in the ground to remind me of the path that has led me to this ever changing «present» where i would hope i reside. i’m glad to see that i am not the same person i was last year, and that i am finding it easier to talk about myself rather than talking about what is around me. this is a good thing.

[i still have yet to do much of anything with css other than formatting text. silly zen garden book, just melt into my head.]

2a

i should go back and review some of my posts, or at least create links to the ones that stand out — even if only to myself. i wonder what this will all look like in 10 years [if i continue to do this for that long]. will i look back and laugh at where i was, thinking i had a grasp on reality when i was really just fooling myself? what will i have posted about my kids — courtney will be 21 and spencer will almost be driving. will i be able to draw by then?

2b

i’ve come to a place where i don’t like my friends leaving. beau, kramer, etimmy — they left at a time when it didn’t matter as much to me. maybe i hadn’t allowed people into my life and mine into theirs, getting our roots entagled to a point where extraction would be damaging. now that i believe i am getting better at being a part of a group where there isn’t much isolation, what affects one of us affects us all. there is support and protection, too.

but i do miss kramer and beau and others, and the more recent people that left just as i was understanding how to be more than my little family of wife and kids. they became family, like ami and olive, people we had become accustomed to chatting and living life with. and then they are gone. i feel as if i saved up for something special, put a lot of effort into it and then just as it arrives, it leaves. i don’t know if i have the energy to continue this pattern, but it is just how it goes. i don’t have to like it — it makes me ache.

i’ve also given up on keeping in touch at a distance working out as well as it did when everyone was nearby. roots don’t seem to survive the distance, or maybe only very rarely. there is a new forest to grow into, and the old forrest is the old forrest of fond memories and early years. you can’t take it with you.

2c

i think today is just going to be a blue day for me. blue blue blue. maybe it is tied into not being able to breathe and i’m running low on O2, but i don’t know. blue.

olive is supposed to be in town on her trip from olympia to tennessee, and i’m almost not in the mood to have her come and go — i’d almost prefer not to have a chance crossing and then she be elsewhere. maybe it is because i don”t feel like i have the energy. i’m low-powered blue-pants.

5a

i taught two classes in a row at choich yesterday, then went to a teachers meeting. i don’t prep like any of the others, and while sharing what we were passionate about, it didn’t seem like most of the others were all that passionate. i work backwards, i watch and learn and try to see what is going on and how it works/should work and then go from there. working from the bible and then saying «this is how you do it» seems a little odd if it hasn’t been tried. i have discovered far more about driving than i ever did in drivers ed or from those little books. living this all out opens it all up — THAT is exciting.

what bothers me is how evangelical protestantism [or just many of those inside there] have taken a selection of the story and drop them on mugs and comforters and posters and THOSE are the important parts. it is like they went through the bible and took all the greenish-yellow sections and built much of what they believe from that. poor scientists publish papers like that, all half formed on partial truths and later people find out it was bunk. there are so many more colors [like which is it, grace or justice?] that it can’t be grasped in a classroom. try living the whole thing out. actually, try just living one core part out and see what happens. an orthodox friend once said «we focus on all the verses you evangelicals don’t».

you won’t even need the book to follow along — you’ll have gone from an enthusiast to a participant, and soon those magazines you get every month about the topic won’t be much use at all — you may as well have written them yourself.

no, i’m not saying the books or the bible are poor choices, i’m just saying we eat and treat them like potato chips, just racing through bag after bag and not really savoring them as small pieces like charlie in the chocolate factory. each little piece sustained him for a day. i will not be a bible glutton.

oh, fun stuff: people like to throw the phrase «the word of God will not return void» which i think they mean snippets from the bible they wright on rocks and been people with — i think throwing rocks at people is TOTALLY what God is about. but they miss the part where jesus whacks the law followers of his time with «You cancel God's command by your rules!» — i would say that means the word comes back nul and void. oh yes, i like to read the whole bible and not just my favoriet colors, or the ones that work well with the structure i’ve built up. check out this and i feel bad for poor peter, getting called out like that in part 15. i swear jesus was a cage fighter.]

5b

help help help. last night spencer helped pull down grapefruit with a picker [oh yeah, it was funny] and he worked so hard at it. the three youngest helped juice a few, too. before that i helped funny clay [funclay? funclay cold medina?] toss on 26[?] more bricks on a wall. i need to build a wall or something at my house — i forget how much i enjoyed that one huge wall at our house. i should build a grill body out of block and the adobe veneer. but help was the word of the weekend.

6a

i feel like a little kid at choich, and here i am pushing 40. i’m not sure if it is because i don’t have that religious speak thing going on, or that i’m not allowing myself to act as if i am old. i am enjoying life, though with kids, i am constantly tired. i think i am like a whale right now, where half of my brain shuts off but i can still cruise and react. getting old ± getting boring, but still having the awe and wonder of a kid. i lose my awe, i die. but i still feel like a kid at church.

6b

i was chatting yesterday and the topic of reading came up. i really don’t read anymore, even though my daughters read constantly. i used to read all the time [or draw], but now, maybe a book a year? two years probably. it isn’t that i am against literature, it is that i can only take in so much. a book is like rain — if i read too much too quickly, it all runs off and it ends up being a waste of effort. when i read a good book [or movie, or conversation, or or or — just about anything «good», define it as you may] i mull it over for months. it affects me deeply — they are never ending fractals that are like chemical reactions to everything in my daily life. it doesn’t fizzle out for me — talk about a book coming alive for me.

i’ve come to find that i just need a bit of mist or dew each morning and i am fine. i am well supported by very little as it affects my biome so greatly.

one such book is actually a pair, marjane satrapi’s persepolis. maybe in a year or two i’ll be able to describe it, but right now i find it a beautiful recounting of growing up. if i was ever to interview her, it might go like this:

me: it is great to meet you. you’ve done such a wonderful job of detailing your life.

marjane: why thank you.

me: thank you so very much for sharing yourself in print. thank you.

marjane: you are so very welcome.





marjane: do you have any other questions?

me: no, not really. your life was not special or extraordinary, and you didn’t invent math or a space program, you were just you, and that is very cool.

marjane: nothing more?

me: nope, thanks a bunch.

i’d make a lousy interviewer. take a look at this excerpt, too. wonderful stuff, and yet so very simple and basic. most people don’t look at life in such a way.

6c

i’ve mentioned before how words are just sounds to me until i see them in print. only then can i understand how they are written/spoken. as a kid, i always thought «notary public» was «notar republic». can you see how hard it will be for me to pick up a second language solely by immersion? i need to see the words written out if they are to make sense to me.

7a

last night olive came over and shared what she has been doing the last year, most notable the last 6 months. it was impressive to hear her speak confidentially with humility about where she has come and where she is now as last year sentences didn’t come all that easy. she is living a life worthy of envy, not because of where/what she is doing but where she is as a person and how she is listening to God. she isn’t on a surfboard 8 miles out or on shore but in the wave where we are supposed to exist, on the cusp of it all. half way through it all i look over at sarah and jehn and a few others and they were all listening intently with big grins. «man, i love lindsay» was my next thought, soon followed with «heya, does that mean i have to tell her? aye, i probably should.» the funny thing is, i don’t believe i’ve ever told anyone other than my wife and kids that i love them. first hugs, now telling someone else that i love them — but i truly do. go figure, i’m getting all growed up.

last week i’m crying along with a friend as he was having a really rough time, this week i’m telling a friend i love them. crazier stuff has happened, but not much.

8.1

superB’s gmail status was the winner today, as well as the 3 he put up yesterday. he is on a roll:

Seeing Dann play volleyball last night was like seeing the Rolling Stones during halftime of the super bowl. You could tell they were really, really good once, but they've lost their edge- that and they both wear leather pants...

yes, i'm rusty and overweight [223 to be exact, but i look smaller. must be muscle]

12.1

i helped spencer build a huge k’nex pirate ship [it is really trevs] and it is very cool. i finally got it going and it rocked back and forth a bit, then i adjusted it and viola, it swung back and forth high enough that it finally did a loop and all the people on it screamed. so cool. on top of that, the construction was ingenious. i was wondering how the spinning wheel would work if the pirate ship hit it on the return trip, but on the return trip the top hits an outcropping of k’nex and shifts it away from the wheel. on the way back, it gets shifted onto the wheel. superB is going to love it on tuesday night. after that, i turn it into a spinning ride for spencer.

13.1

i took monday off and dropped the kids off at a choich campish kind of thing for a few hours. sarah and i got breakfast at aj’s and chatted and then came back home to work on the [green] pool. it was good stuff. we don’t get much time to just hang out and talk much with the 4 kids running around. after lunch we all went to a city pool that is very kid friendly. for starters, it is all under a huge tent kind of thing so nobody gets sunburned. the next part is that is slopes gently down like a beach so that even little spencer could go all the way to the far end [which were 4 or 5 lanes that were half distance]. at the top of the pool was a huge structure to turn water on and off, ropes to pull for showers, and fountains from the ground. over to one side was an oval pinched in the middle that was filled with strong jets to swirl the water around in one direction. that was deeper and plenty of fun. i spent the time chasing the kids around, letting them climb on me and getting the life guards to whistle at me to get me to stop. when we returned home i got to go with allie to her piano practice. she is cute. playing the piano is good for her. after that all the kids were getting glassy eyed and very compliant, so i doodled a bit while sarah visited a hospitalized friend and then she went out to coffee with the wives club.

more saturdays and sundays should be like this past monday.

13.2

while playing frisbee on thursday i ran over a huge lump in the university lawn, not unlike hitting a speed bump at 50mph. either i tore something or broke a rib. either way, lifting and moving a couch [with people on board] hurt it a bit worse so now i have a hard time laying down and a much harder time rolling over. lose some weight, will ya?

13.3

i was reading calvin and hobbes and came across this cartoon which makes me laugh, but probably not for the same reasons you think i might be laughing.

i believe a lot of people think i try to color outside the lines on purpose, or create my own doodles, but that isn’t the case. those lines are someone elses making — i draw the lines that i am supposed to draw, and that doesn’t often fit the norm. can i color inside the box if i don’t exist there? and who made this box? as i said one night when some guys were talking about how i come up witht he most random things, «i am pre-fall» — i was kidding, of course. there is some odd truth in it though [or maybe not] that somehow my thoughts are not confined like a lot of other peoples, though i know mine are still entrapped in many ways. maybe i marvel at how when everyone is to do word association and when they hear «dog» they say «cat». how do they do that, all come up with the same word? do we need all those people, then, if they all come up with the same answer? maybe it is just cultural/identity training, something to do to make sure we all fit in with one another. i’m not being different, my default is just not the same as everyone else. if i was being different i wouldn’t be me.

comments | comment

13.4

supposedly superB is saying it is 107.6°F out right now, though the airport [which he is near, but he is all concrete] is only registering 104°F. it really doesn’t matter once you see the math in a moment. the frame on my bike is oversized aluminum painted matte black. it is a 61cm frame while i really need a 61.5 cm frame. i was wondering if it would expand in the heat today like the sr-71 blackbird does:

Due to the great temperature changes in flight, the fuselage panels did not fit perfectly on the ground and were essentially loose. Proper alignment was only achieved when the airframe warmed up due to the air resistance at high speeds, causing the airframe to expand several inches. Because of this, and the lack of a fuel sealing system that could handle the extreme temperatures, the aircraft would leak its JP-7 jet fuel onto the runway before it took off. [more here]

would my bike expand to fit perfectly today? superB did the math in moments and wrote back with:

if it's 65 cm @ 70 degrees, it'll be 65.00067 cm in 110 degree weather. you'll need it to be at least 37500 degrees to get that 1/2 cm.

it needs to heat up another 37,400°F. i guess i'm out of luck. maybe tomorrow.

[update]

it turns out superB calculated what it would take for .5cm to expand .5cm. the new numbers say that a 61cm frame at 70°F would expand to 61.5cm at just 648°F. now THAT is doable.

14.1

i’ve enjoyed looking up and finding satellites, and have had fun looking for the international space station ever since i found it one time and there was a long flash from its solar panels. i usually use nasa’s applet to find all the potential viewing times [or just by city for the iss]. i woke up at 4.25 this morning and looked out the window and i do believe i saw it drop straight south out of our bedroom window. i happily rolled over and went to sleep. of course, now i’ve done a search and it wasn’t the iss but most likely an iridium satellite. i thought they all burned up. i find that seeing things in space from the ground is marvelous.

14.2

this shirt sums up the whole of christianity [or at least what churchianity often looks like]. the problem with many christians is that they don't know how not to be a dick — being a dick IS how you do christianity. it reminds be of a quote from joan chittister’s «wisdom distilled from the daily»:

in community we work out our connectedness to God, to one another, and to ourselves. it is community where we find out who we really are. it is life with another that shows my impatience and life with another that demonstrates my possesiveness and life with another that gives notice to my nagging devotion to the self. life with someone else, in other words, doesn’t show me nearly as much about his or her shortcomings as it does about my own. in human relationships i learn how to soften my hard spots and how to reconcile and how to care for someone else besides myself. in human relationships i learn that theory is no substitute for love. it is easy to talk about the love of God; it is another thing to practice it.

if people didn’t try to do this christ thing on their own, would we have fewer people being dicks? i believe so. we talked about that last night and it was more about what kind of communities we all have. turns out many of us didn’t, which is sad. we need to know and be known, to have the support and security of those around us — then we can be who we are supposed to be.

14.3

yes, olive thinks she is strong and she proved it. either she and the kitchen are diminutive or i am quite large. click for a larger image.

then i remembered an old IM with lindsay [olive]:

You know what's funny? On Saturday night, this little girl came over to help us cook for the band--her name is Kindred. Anyway, she comes up to me and says, "I'm going to call you Olive." Isn't that weird?

not weird, just «right«.

16.1

courtney came home with a wood/nail/foil craft which is pretty cool, and she wrote this [cryptic] poem on the back. the ending is the best. there is nothing like reading what developing kids are thinking:

for a father someone loves, a father someone holds dear. the letters spell Jesus. that represents the high father God who gave his only son to us sinners. it says his only son but i thought every man was his son.

oh well,
love, your oldest daughter,
courtney

oh well? hah. she is funny.

16.2

this has been a very long week, but a good one. on tuesday instead of talking about where we are [each person gets as much time as the need to let everyone in on what they are currently thinking/feeling/loving/hating — always good times] to a deeper conversation of community. i had this idea that ties into my shattered branches theme about community being like a forest [i have no idea if a forest works like this, but i do believe much of it is close]. a brief summary [of which i want to write out well and illustrate like an old 1940's boy scout book] of it is that we are trees in a forest, with our roots intended to grow underneath each other and to tie us all together. our roots break down the toxins and rocks both beneath ourselves and others, and they do the same to us. we need to be in close proximity to other trees to have this happen, as well as having trees around us help snap off our crazy branches, keeping the healthy ones there. people like to take photos of the gnarled trees on the coast but they aren’t healthy trees — they are battered trees that haven’t grown to their full potential. that may make for a good photo, but not a picture of health. in a forest, big trees help protect little trees and give them a place to grow and take root. big trees also provide little trees with an example of what a big tree looks like. there shouldn’t be a christmas tree forest where 8 feet tall is considered world record status. our roots hold us together, keeping each other from getting knocked over by storms or uprooted from erosion. we provide protection and security for each other, allowing us each to reach our potential. then there is old trees laying down for new trees to grow and plenty of other good things like sometimes staking trees is bad — is it ever good? — as sometimes the trees just hang on the lines and never grow roots. or that we hold our roots back or display fake [hologram] roots that don’t hold when they are needed. roots take a long time to grow, too. there is no miracle grow [other than tragedy, maybe?] and all kinds of things help roots grow — we just need to allow ourselves to be in those situations. in the end, we can be a healthy forest, living up to our potential as well as being more as a group as we could be on our lonesome.

the part i hit both tuesday and thursday with friends was that we aren’t growing together, but either holding our roots back from each other or living within a pot where nobody can reach us and vice versa. it is good stuff to hear a young 20+ say:

I realized, or at least admitted, that partially b/c of my social skills and personality. i am good at making it look like i have good roots in a healthy forrest. In reality, i just share about my past, appear vulnerable, avoid the present and don't establish a strong root system. I fake it to look like i'm doing good, when really i'm not. So they are kinda like (as a friend put it) hologram roots. they look real but have little actual substance. i guess i thought i had it down better and upon examination i was not as far into that process as i thought. i know allot of people, but comparitively fewer really KNOW me.

to see themselves like that early on makes me smile — people in their 60s still don’t get it, and that makes me sad. what kind of trees will there be in 5 to 10 years when they understand the very basics of what it means to invest in others and how to head towards health [which is still a very long road]. so yes, they have been good talks and the conversation continues. there is excitement and fear in the air.

16.3

for years i was considered the scout for my friends, running ahead and seeing what was ahead of us and then coming back and blazing a trail [sometimes we went there, sometimes we didn’t]. i was usually 6 to 9 months out [one time 2 years] and that was rather frustrating but exciting when i ran into other scouts and we could swap stories and maps/experiences. i think i’m still doing a varient of that now, just not so much a scout as a guide/sherpa/forward observer. i’m not a teacher as much as i am a guide, or a host, helping people over rocks and streams and helping them get to the places they need to be [which is not always the place we want to be]. honestly, i’m not sure how i got to this position. i feel like a wizened old leader, speaking only as much as needed, if that much. one friend says it is as if i am at 50,000 feet and seeing so much at once that makes this work, both in the air and on the ground at the same time. i’ll enjoy this role while i have it. it isn’t that i’m the intrusive gardener or the meddler or the ring leader, i’m just someone along the way. maybe we’ll meet, maybe we won’t, but hopefully we’ll both be better off from our meeting. it is if what is needed is sitting there, i just need you to see it. i do enjoy the time spent with others that have moved on and are now taking on similar roles. this is how it should be.

i’m not trying to grow everyone just for growth sake [as i am growing a ton, too, and that isn’t always fun] — bigger isn’t always better, but better is better.

19.1

i’ve always loved the animated version of «the man who planted trees» and i do believe that, at least for now, i seem to be headed in the same direction with people, not trees.

Having arrived at the place he had been heading for, he begin to pound his iron rod into the ground. This made a hole in which he placed an acorn, whereupon he covered over the hole again. He was planting oak trees. I asked him if the land belonged to him. He answered no. Did he know whose land it was? He did not know. He supposed that it was communal land, or perhaps it belonged to someone who did not care about it. He himself did not care to know who the owners were. In this way he planted his one hundred acorns with great care.

After the noon meal, he began once more to pick over his acorns. I must have put enough insistence into my questions, because he answered them. For three years now he had been planting trees in this solitary way. He had planted one hundred thousand. Of these one hundred thousand, twenty thousand had come up. He counted on losing another half of them to rodents and to everything else that is unpredictable in the designs of Providence. That left ten thousand oaks that would grow in this place where before there was nothing.

I told him that in thirty years these ten thousand trees would be magnificent. He replied very simply that, if God gave him life, in thirty years he would have planted so many other trees that these ten thousand would be like a drop of water in the ocean.

He had also begun to study the propagation of beeches. and he had near his house a nursery filled with seedlings grown from beechnuts. His little wards, which he had protected from his sheep by a screen fence, were growing beautifully. He was also considering birches for the valley bottoms where, he told me, moisture lay slumbering just a few meters beneath the surface of the soil.

the whole story is quite good, but the animation adds space and beauty to it. i don’t intend to plant 100,000 trees a year, but one or two would please me greatly, knowing that they'll continute on and help raise up others. there is no quick fix.

i also enjoy the part in the middle where a friend of the narrarator, a chief forrestor comes along to see the forests and talk with the man who planted trees.

I had a friend among the chief foresters who were with the delegation. I explained the mystery to him. One day the next week, we went off together to look for Elzéard Bouffier, We found him hard at work, twenty kilometers away from the place where the inspection had taken place.

This chief forester was not my friend for nothing. He understood the value of things. He knew how to remain silent....

Before leaving, my friend made a simple suggestion concerning certain species of trees to which the terrain seemed to be particularly well suited. He was not insistent. « For the very good reason, » he told me afterwards, « that this fellow knows a lot more about this sort of thing than I do. » After another hour of walking, this thought having travelled along with him, he added : « He knows a lot more about this sort of thing than anybody - and he has found a jolly good way of being happy ! »

It was thanks to the efforts of this chief forester that the forest was protected, and with it, the happiness of this man.

seveal things stand out, a small one being «he understood the value of things. he knew how to remain silent.» ah, knowing how to remain silent — that is a skill many do not have. i liked the advice meagerly handed out. there is one stack of knowledge that has been gathered through books and trials, and an additional stack of knowledge gathered from experience, or would that be wisdom? doing something daily for years, watching how thinks play out in the world over decades leads to a very different place than a handful of hours of study. i don’t believe many people want to attempt that route unless they are paid to do so.

the last line is what makes it all work for me — i have good friends that help protect/allow me to continue, leaving me with a deep sense of joy and purpose.

19.2

allie is our little swing girl — she’ll get up early in the morning and we won’t be able to find her until we go outside and hear the steady creak of the swingset. nothing but her and the swing, hair flying back and then covering her face. she’ll take moments out of each day just to swing. what a wonderful way to live.

19.3

more tree things, courtesy of carbon leaf. this tree stuff may go on forever.

And along the way, she changed her name
Lonesome Pine, rain or shine
Stands alone
Roots unknown
And I'm as brave as you
And I'm as 'fraid as you
And I'm as brave as you
And I'm as afraid as you are too
She let me in
And then, she changed her mind
With a sad echo
She's all her own
She shook the blame
She changed her name
Lonesome Pine, rain or shine
Stands alone
Roots unknown

20.1

i am once again astounded by people that build these complex structures that become their faith, most often «bible based» but the common flaw in all these is that they are usually missing relationships and emotion. funny how those two things need to flow through the sturcture, too, but are often squeezed out early on. it might be like building a tall sky scraper out of brick — but without mortar. soon living becomes all about protecting the bricks. the hardest part is that to fix the building [faith] it all needs to come down and start from scratch. very few people ever seem to do be able to attempt it. i was chatting with a friend and she wrote:

i had a discussion on sunday with a small group about that. remember the question, something like "which matters more to God, what we believe or how we act?" and it touches on that. people can have all the knowledge in the world, my dad with degrees in counseling, Bible, and Divinity, as well as education, and not actually implement any of it and so as a result, have "truncated" relationships or no relationships at all, even though they know all the tools people use to gain and sustain healthy relationships.

these people who have all the knowledge and don't use it are typically "joyless".

my dad has very little joy in his life and has very few friends. even his relationship with my mom is disfunctional, and he used to be a marriage counselor.

ah, joylessness. often graceless, too [or maybe grace if they deserve it — however that works out]. christian enthusiasts are a hoot, and they’ll attempt to try to prove everything with the bible [as well as letting the bible interpret the bible. at some point, i am still doing the interpretation]. spend 10 years really doing it [or in olive’s case, 6 months] and a different picture of christianity may emerge, a beautiful version.

20.2

song of the morning: they might be giants «she’s an angel»

I met someone at the dog show
She was holding my left arm
But everyone was acting normal so I tried to look nonchalant.
We both said, "I really love you,"
The Shriners loaned us cars
We raced up and down the sidewalk twenty thousand million times

Why did they send her over anyone else?
How should I react? These things happen to other people
They don't happen at all, in fact

When you're following an angel
Does it mean you have to throw your body off a building?
Somewhere they're meeting on a pinhead
Calling you an angel, calling you the nicest things
I heard they had a space program
When they sing you can't hear, there's no air
Sometimes I think I kind of like that and
Other times I think I'm already there

21.1

ever since we purchases our first spindle of cds i have wondered what they smell like. most of the time i think they smell like celery, yet it is also rather similar to maple syrup. i wonder why they smell. years ago a coworker and i would wander around the shop as we smelled an electrical fire [which we never found]. months later a coworker was spraying on some perfume and that was the smell — for both of us, «sunflower» smelled like an electrical fire. ew.

22.1

years ago several of us noticed that the shortening of the word «postmodern» to «P O M O» [but as lowercase] looked very close to the word «P O R N O». pomo vs porno. very close. i missread a ghana players name while reading the us vs. ghana game. his is #19 Razak Pimpong. we are now cheering for ping-pong.

in the sarajevo olympics there was a german bobsledder named dietmar. i would think a lot of people change their names in the states as we all thought it was a hoot, not to mention his goofy hat and looks. good old dietmar, forever remembered in our hearts. that is another reason i enjoy foreign sports — to see other names than the ones i am accustomed to.

22.2

we had a marvelous rainstorm yesterday which i happened to get caught in. i had walked to blockbuster and it poured poured poured. i was in flip flops and it was warm out, so i just hustled home, sticking close to the sides of buildings when i could and by the end the front of my shirt was mostly soaked. i love the summer rains — they really don't seem so much of a hinderance as they are a delight.

22.3

i’m messing people up again, and i think a lot of it is because living this xian life out isn’t about doing the things that you can check off or put in a spreadsheet. i don’t have to DO anything [sorta], it is who i AM. i think i messed up a friend, as he im’d me this:

11:44:38 AM you fooled me for a long time. i think for a while i misread your approach to your walk/faith. especially back when you ditched your bible for a year. i thought you were on this almost sub-conscious endeavor that was almost hands-off. like letting a plant grow naturally and not guiding/controling the new growth....
11:45:31 AM but i'm realizing you were busy in the backroom the whole time
11:47:29 AM i think adopted what i thought was your approach but i became lazy in my walk. so i've seen a ton about myself, but i haven't had the spiritual to handle it or keep it in context

it was like a quit school and attending classes and taking tests and looking at grades and such and went out and tried it, looked at what happens when i try this out. i’ve discovered far more out and about than in the classroom [heck, i was just cramming for tests while being a jerk]. it may not work for everyone, but i would think so for most. i also had great friends to keep my branches in check, as well as allowing me to go places they couldn’t see yet but gave me the grace to discover.

23.1

this post of a delta rocket failure might not be posted much longer, but it is crazy-fascinating. cnn has a little blurb on it, plus a small video that should stick around. i’m not a rocket scientist, but i can tell that something went wrong. in rocket people terms, it was an «anamoly».

over the weekend we found some large helicopter and rocket images online and made spencer two iron-on shirts. he was afraid/embarassed of them for a while and now he won’t take them off. i asked corcor to show him the video and this is what she wrote back:

it's sad
okay i'll try
he wants to watch again
he didn't say anything the first time
but now he was shaking his head and saying rocket rocket in a sad tone
he has really big eyes
really big

23.2

i was sharing with some friends last night about where i am at, and i have often heard of one analogy that i have now discovered is a huge fallacy. it has been said that you first work on the big problems in your life, like tall weeds. after they are all cut down, you work on the medium size weeds, then later on the tiny weeds until you have a nice lawn. that is bupkus. i’ve realized that the lawn looks great until you go around the corner and there is this huge weed the size of an oak, something that you weren’t able to see because you didn’t have the ability to see it at the time. there are plenty of things to still work on — who would seriously believe that at any given point in time that they are «there» and that now they just need to pare things down? louis added to this, with the idea that we all have more than just a yard but 40 acres or more. we’ll be discovering things to work on all the time.

this is all good and fine, too, if all one cares about is «sin management», just making sure there is nothing really bad going on. well, this is good if you are working on being healthy, but sin management is something i doubt that is ever very good. so you cut out all the things that look bad, whoopee. are you still a jerk? are you truly a different person or are you able to just act good?

i think what this might lead to is moving the guage from «bad» to «neutral». yea! i’m neutral. oh wait, nobody cares. i’m bland. no, that isn’t good. what should be happening is true change and ooomph that goes beyond just cleaning up the unattractive to becoming «better» and «beautiful». pin the needle to the other side of the guage — that will be attractive.

23.3

jehn makes an intersting point:

3:11:05 PM and the less people you let in - the easier it is to live two seperate lives [im starting to see]
3:11:15 PM like you and sarah could not hide anything if you tried
3:11:23 PM people are involved in your life too much
3:12:44 PM you guys open your lives up to anyone who will walk in the door. the good and bad. we see it all
3:14:51 PM your standing in these peoples door and not letting them shut it for the first time. and its prolly freaking em out a little
3:14:59 PM because they didn't have fair warning, and didn't clean
3:16:06 PM [me]: yeah, but that is part of it, the surprise visit
3:16:29 PM yeah. and the more people you let in and know. they just pop by....
3:16:48 PM they let you in :: i just don't think they knew what that meant exactly

i had never thought that keeping people at a distance meant that one could more readily live multiple lives. have i not been able to do that for enough time that i have forgotten what that looks like? i like only having to be me.

23.4

i’m wondering if i am just writing trivial things now, but it is 4.17 on friday evening and it feels as if it is 10pm. i think i have been riding my bike to work for 10 months and with my separated ribs i haven’t ridden this week. that means i had to purchase gas. for $20 i can smell the gas. i need to pay more if i want some to go in my gas tank. i can only see it getting worse.

speaking of gas, we are off to costco for dinner tonight [no, not gas like that, but less expensive costco gas]. i don’t like going to costco, especially with the kids. it is as if we are in the midst of a soccer riot and i am trying to keep everyone safe. i don’t like crowds. maybe i have lion king fear, trying to protect my kids from the wildebeasts. the kids love it and find it a great treat so we will go.

26.1

here is a video that might explain a bit of where i see myself. i think i’ve gone past that, now, and the next 30 seconds of the video would show everyone together. but those initial office experiences, ugh, they aren’t fun. everyone tries to dress professional and all, but it isn’t about that. they can’t shake the creation they call «self».

26.2

i am deeply saddened that the aussies lost to italy today. it was far from a good game, and italy could easily out play them, but wow could australia run. they were everywhere — so much pressure. then in the very last minute of stoppage time they make a silly penalty and the kick is good. australia returns home. i will write in australia for every candidate the next election. italy did take a ton of shots, though, with a very tight choke pattern.

what i noticed over the weekend is how the world cup excites me. it used to be the olympics, but the last few games have lacked something, and i believe i now know why. when growing up, the olympics were us vs. them plus a lot of fun little countries. over time, the us vs. them was dismantled and in its place the coverage turned to the individual. that isn’t near as exciting as the world cup as it still about the team, all the fans divied out in very clear camps. our silly winter olympic speed skaters should get slapped as it was all about them and not about the team. i will be sad when the world cup is over, and i’ll cheer every countries efforts.

29.1

today is a blues traveler morning. marco is gone on vacation so i am wearing his quality headphones he normally wears. my speakers are plugged into the pc for world cup action and i don't feel like moving them around. i believe i would like to one day see blues traveler live — they seem to pour out so much energy. one song of theirs always makes my eyes water — «regarding steven». a little bit from their faq about the song:

The song is structured as an open letter to Satan (as in "hope you guess my name") about a friend of mine that I grew up with. He was basically my only friend and certainly my very best friend. He had a very rough childhood. He lived in an art studio by a river in Stamford, Connecticut. I met him in the first grade when the teacher told us his sister had just drowned in the river. Since we each had friends before, we were officially second best friends. In his family no one discussed his sister who drowned and I was the only one who asked him what happened. In the second grade his alcoholic biological father came to visit us in class. He used to beat his mother and his older siblings, literally chasing them with hot coals. I remember he had the shakes when he came to class. He asked the teacher if he could speak with Steven and kidnapped him. His stepfather and mother eventually chased down his biological father and with the help of the FBI, got him back. Steve had another sister named Lizzy. She was really cool. In the fourth grade he offered her the front seat for the first time. She died in the ensuing car wreck. Steve was the only one awake for the hours before help arrived, traumatizing him severely. As we grew older, we got into war and army type games, turning a boyhood phallic gunlust into a way of life. I eventually moved away to Princeton and Steve moved back to Manhattan where he was born. After falling out of touch for a while, on entering New York, I bumped into him quite by accident on the street. It was 1986 and the next year Blues Traveler would be all living in New York. Steve never got over the tragedies of his childhood, especially in the hot New York summer we would sit around in his room, smoking pot, being angry. Well one day I couldn't be angry anymore. The band was giving me something to feel good about. It felt to me that this was some form of betrayal. Whether or not Steve truly saw it this way is clouded by my own view, but I felt that I had to leave and make a break. So one day I got up and left, and I couldn't look back. I still try to keep an eye out for him, but I haven't seen him since...

i hurt for steve, wherever he is. truly, there are millions — if not billions — of steves.

29.2

i forget what part of fowlers development theory this is, but last night — oooh, wait, the night before i had crazy dreams. something big was happening, and now i forget, but i still have this image of walking away from the trunk of a tree and looking up into the branches [it had a wide canopy] and snakes were falling like rain from the branches. they weren't ON the branches but inside them, and not just holed up in hollow parts. it was as if sections of the branches woule turn into two parts and the part that fell was a snake. crazy.

back to the original post: sometimes my mind goes over something that happened before and now i can see what the reality probably was at the time. for no apparent reason high school prom floated into my head, and let me remind everyone that i was socially retarded when i was young, like up until a few months ago. i think i may have only gone to the prom mostly because i was put on the royalty ballot [which i am sure was more of a joke — that part maybe someone will tell me later]. so i asked elsa if she wanted to go — she was very cool and smart, and thinking about it, all the times she was grumpy in class and she passed it off as «that time» she was hungover. like i would have caught on. i think i ditched one class my senior year, and went off campus for lunch maybe twice. i didn't do those kinds of things, i just did things that authority didn’t know how to deal with. things like taking all the stupid council posters off the walls and climbing up and putting them on the roofs. i think elsa paid for her own flower thingy, and i had zero planning ability other than «go to the place where the prom was being held». when she came down the hall from her parents house i had no response, no dinner, zippo. on top of this, my friend todd who was driving us broke up with his girlfriend [and prom date] as he drove over [i think]. i'm pretty sure he planned it. i, of course, had to wear shorts to the prom. they were white baggies, a white jacket, a yellow/white striped shirt with the stripes just under an inch wide, a yellow bow tie and yellow canvas boat shoes. we got to the prom and as i was whisked off to do royalty stuff, and i think i may have talked to elsa all of 5 minutes. it turns out i wasn’t crowned king, but stupid council members came over to tell me i had gotten the most votes but they gave it to the other guy — how does that work? from there we went to the post prom party? i’m not even sure. i do remember driving around with a convoy of cars and elsa slept the whole time. now i believe she was just hoping for the night to end and faking it. we didn't let it end. we ended up driving up to «a» mountain where i stood down hill tossing beer bottles in the air and 15-20 guys would try to hit the bottle with rocks — retarded skeet shooting. we lifted the cable/gate and let a drunk old guy drive up, his license plate revealing a missing gas cap so the gas was pouring out as he drove up. we went down to eat breakfast and we could see him taking flash pictures of the sunrise.

i was a miserable date. i was a miserable date for a long time, only lately getting better at it. i couldn’t see other people. i’m glad i’m not that poor of a date any more. trevor is very much the same way, and maybe that is why i ride him at times. what does it take to change? i don’t really know. elsa, where ever you are, i’m sorry.

30.1

i should follow up that last post with «yes, i was retarded, but how do people get beyond that? how did i get beyond that?» — good questions, and i don’t know. i am very lucky that sarah stayed with me, though at the time, i’m sure we both had a fair amount of problems [who doesn’t]. now i can see a huge difference between the me of «then» vs the trajectory of the me of «now».

30.2

this should be the last for a while — we are off to sarahs brother’s wedding next week in san diego, and we’ll be with a lot of people.

i had another great dream, one in massive amounts of detail and color. slowly decending walkways all around the east side of the university of arizona, crazy roads i took repeatedly with a dead end and roads that were like a steep half-pipe. at one point i looked across the mall into the glass enclosure where they kept the yeti and his beard was shorter than i remembered back when i went to school. he didn’t like me and would freak out when he saw me, so i tried to scoot by on the far side but he still heard me. that was okay, i had my back to him. in the howard hughes area the homes were larger apartment complexes more like beach condos, some several stories tall with brightly colored umbrella-like cloth. i wandered around the buildings and restaurants and at one point was standing and watching a show underneath an open walled building. uma thurman was next to me and she somehow kissed my cheek with the corner of her mouth. i elbowed her to knock it off.

it was nothing like i remembered college. take in my previously mentioned dumbtardedness in the above post and then add something else i have been thinking on — i didn’t have the ability to succeed there. in high school i was the smart one. i never had homework and it all came easy to me. i would get in trouble in math as i would never show my work. it was too easy to do it in my head, no matter how large the problem. i’ve lost that skill, but if i had kept it i am sure some small country would have kidnapped me and used my brain to power a small city of 2 million. that was what i was good at in high school, and nothing more. i was a brain on a stick, and an intuitive brain at that. others worked at it, i just did it. then i hit college, and it didn’t come easy. it was different. i just couldn’t glide along. i couldn’t study, and much of college was relational, and i was alone and had no clue how to express any of what was bothering me. i’m sure now that i was depressed by thanksgiving, some classes going easy but others i would just quit going to as i couldn’t face them. i didn’t drop them, i just stopped going. i remember telling on teacher's assistant that i would not go to the discussion time and i was going to do great on the test [which i did — i only read the book the night before and put it all together]. i was miserable, not liking any of college except for playing around, but i had no clue what life could be like. the rest of my college years were pretty goofy, but i had no identity, no ability to use my «smart» except for little parts here and there. my last semester i was working where i am now as making art with markers and cut paper made no sense, and taking one class so that i could stay on the university's volleyball team. i quit going to that class too. there were good times, though, doing well in art but there was no reason. life was living me. 5 and a half years of school. i would have done better in prison.

my dream was far better.