amazing things

are happening.

indeed.


-------------
[edit]

a) wow. a thousand impassioned cries for justice, equality, and the kingdom of heaven, and what does it take to get you all to talk to me? someone to drop the "msichana" bomb. blood in the water...

b) some of us have real jobs, and we can't log in every five minutes to keep up with the latest gossip.

c) yes. sure. my meaningless and pathetically miserable existence, hunched in a darkened upper room with only my books and the meagre light of candles to keep me warm, could only be brightened by the advent of civilizing femininity. How have I borne the awful cares and toils of this world without the tender hands of a woman to lift me up from my cares and sorrows and make me complete? O, John Eldredge, I am the man without woman, without captivating romance and adventures, without hope in the world! Deliver me from my boredom, my listlessness, the vanity of my existence, for the bane of the single man is to know nothing but sorrow and a chasing after the wind...

d) yah know, i must have been so eagerly awaiting the joys of miscommunication, excruciating sexual tension, a strained and broken budget, differing mores and expecations, clashing gender roles, mood swings, emotional firestorms, blind mistakes with horrifying consequences, polite-relationships-with-her-obnoxious-friends, failed expectations, more miscommunication, isolation from friends, agonizing weeks of breaking up and getting back together only to break up again, not to mention something to do with all of my overabundant spare time!

e) I must be longing to escape the hell of singleness, with its mild stresses, cordial relationships, time for reading and laughing and watching movies, casual wardrobe, open and flexible schedule, freedom of expression, freedom to go and do without fear of offending some arcane and twisted feminine logic...

ya'll are hilarious.

except.

y'all are kinda right...

but I really have to go to work now. it's a twenty minute bikeride and I have twenty minutes to get there and I don't have my boots on yet.

I shall write more...baadaye.

:)

yeeeah killing time so's i don't fall asleep

triads

books i just bought:
-Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
-Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
-How Soccer Explains the World by Franklin Foer

groceries i just bought:
-fresh hummous
-hummous mix in boxes
-six pack of Pete's Wicked Wanderlust Cream Beer

books i just finished:
-Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
-Snow Leopard by Peter Mathiessen
-Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

firsts this week:
-pub crawl on St. Patty's day
-buzzed by red-tailed hawk in cemetary on the way home from work yesterday morning in the middle of the city!
-got paid to watch a troupe from Mexico perform various ethnic (and awesomely rhythmic) regional dances.

books i'm halfway through:
-King Lear
-Bread and Wine by Plough Press
-A Season in Mecca by Abdellah Hammoudi

cool grown up accomplishments:
-clean, orderly room with visible floor for over a week now
-set up serious appointment to inspect/possibly buy a truck to live out of for a year
-planning schedule for summer w/multiple engagements BEFORE the first day of spring

excellent new tunes on miPod:
-Wayfaring Stranger by 16 horsepower
-Sunday Bloody Sunday covered by Pillar
-It's Too Late by The Streets

my wicked awesome drinking vessels
-handmade Paul Christensen awesomely-massive pottery drinking mug
-pink nalgene with flower and pink lid
-stolen cafeteria cup with "I was stolen by a sinner" written on it in black magic marker by the indescribably profound Ben Howard

ladies i thought were really cool but turned out to be elsewhere enamored:
-girl i never asked out, and it was way too late
-girl i finally made up my mind to ask out only to discover that i had made my mind up...too late
-girl i was just about to ask out, but discovered i was: just too late

films recently watched:
-Pulp Fiction
-Hero
-Blackhawk Down

excellent articles:
-living with constant wireless interaction: "Continuous Partial Attention"
-Zakaria on Iraq: "Apalling but not Hopeless"
-William Jennings Bryan: when a promising leftist Christian populist social movement was nipped in the bud in favor of the urbane secularists, setting the ground for today's culture wars...possibly.

great conversations this week:
-Elinor Ostrom-ish analysis of potential incentive programs for EMS workers and difficulties posed by current Computer Aided Dispatch system with new (my new) supervisor; also perverse corporate shareholder-driven cost-cutting incentives in the absence of market-driven quality control due to the nature of EMS work and public contracts in the urban/suburban economic divide
-Surprise reacquaintance with old Paramedic friend Geoff Boone from Houghton Volunteer Fire Department days, over patients at the ECMC of a random.
-Inanely cheerful banter and rediscovery of The Streets with friend who only last week was sailing (metaphorically) through rough waters under iron skies.

quotes:
-Voltaire:

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."

-Stephen Levy:

"A live BlackBerry or even a switched-on mobile phone is an admission that your commitment to your current activity is as fickle as Renée Zellweger's wedding vows. Your world turns into a never-ending cocktail party where you're always looking over your virtual shoulder for a better conversation partner. The anxiety is contagious: anyone who winds up talking to a person infected with CPA feels like he or she is accepting an Oscar, and at any moment the music might stop the speech."

-The Streets:

"We first met through a shared view/she loved me and i did too."

notes to self:

-there is an infinite supply of irresistably great deals on tantalizingly clever books, cds, and dvds, which are capable, if not carefully monitored, of making swiss cheese of drastically finite budgetary resources.

-ask out the next encountered "fly bird" without the customary four or eighty weeks of introspection, uncertainty, tentative get-to-know-you-first thing. absolutely no mandatory 40-day waiting periods, homeschool inexperience be darned!

-eat cheese! and hummous! listen to crazy apocalyptic gothic folk music while chatting aimlessly with friends! listen to backlogged NPR podcasts while doing nothing really productive! and do it more often! life is bueno!

places i would still rather be right now
-Tanzania with my brother
-Tanzania with my sister-in-law
-Tanzania with my darling neices

pictures that keep me happy in my exile

-neices playing in the Indian Ocean

-yeah, it really does get that green and beautiful and warm, and good people actually sit outside for the fun of it and don't get frostbite. and birds sing too.

-just look at those crazy people!

enjoy!

my day!

it must have been my day!

a) i like drizzling rain

b) it was gospel choir day at the Catholic church down the street

c) the ladies in front of me at Tops were foreign so I politely asked them if they were speaking Kiswahili (in Kiswahili) and we had a pleasant conversation. in Kiswahili. and they were impressed. so was I. still decently functional...

ooofff

there are so many forces arrayed against human happiness--I wonder if I will leave this place alive. so many people are crumpling. the light in their eyes dies and they are just flesh walking around. the harsh winter bores right through their souls and consumes them--heartless they tread the earth neither seeing nor knowing until their bodies stop.

it's like we are in a fight with great violence for the survival of ourselves, our souls, and we are reeling and blinded and if that is not enough, all around us those who have succumbed to the disaster have become agents of its brutality. they reach out with cold eyes and decaying limbs and teach cruelty to the next generation.

it's a good thing I have a balcony. I think I'm renaming naming my (relatively) new room from the Stronghold of Solitude to the Stronghold of Refuge. it has an attached balcony (half of which is something of a bog) which has recently become the place to sit, drink beer, bundle up against the cold and hurt communally. disappointment, loneliness, emptiness, the silence of God, the cruelty of people--strike right at the will to live. you feel yourself getting bitter, harsh, apathetic, like the very people who wound you and use you and look you in the face afterwards and expect nothing from life but cynical laughter and whatever can be had by manipulation, trickery and power.

so, we've been taking refuge on the balcony, hunched against the frigid wee hours of the morning, waiting for the sunrise. it's a sacred place, set aside with no other purpose than communing. symbolically, it gives us a place in the harsh elements but removed above them--a safe place but not a hiding place, a strategic vantage point but not a retreat. gather, regroup, commit, tend to the wounded, never give up. without committment, without community, we will not make it out of here alive.

yeah, i like my balcony.

huh...

I'm losing Lent this year. I can't think of anything I can really fast--I need my meagre strength and focus for work, so I can't do anything that jeopardizes food and sleep. I guess I could give up beer--but I think it plays a really important part of my social life right now, and my social life is more than a luxury--it's part of my duty, my calling. I want to give up my bike--the discipline of walking everywhere would be phenomenally awesome. It would slow me down, I'd discipline myself to plan more, and I'd experience so much more of the world around me instead of just flying by. I'd also walk through a lot of shady neighborhoods after dark, and I wouldn't be able to get to the classes I kind of need to take in order to keep my EMT certification. So, scratch that.

I can't think of anything else that could be profitably fasted--anything that is unbalanced or unhealthy or in need of perspective and discipline. Except, maybe, my solitude--I spend too much time alone, too much time on the nocturnal schedule (it's been four months now) by myself. I need to fast being alone--I must be the only person in America who doesn't have a deficit of quiet solitude and reflection.

What I really am sad about, though, is missing Ash Wednesday. I just finished six twelve-hour overnights in a row, went to an employee meeting on my night off, and today I'll start another five straight. The whole entrance to the season just got lost. I wanted to go to St. Joes, I wanted the priest to take the ashes of last Palm Sunday's branches and mark with the sign of execution. I wanted to know, wanted to remember and kneel and ponder in stillness, that "dust you are, and to dust you shall return."

I can say it and write it a thousand times and still not know it. The death is in me; I am decaying, and today or tomorrow or another tomorrow I will finish decaying and return to the earth and be forgotten. It is certain, and when I knell in that quiet place and hear those words, I know that certainty and it is a part of my life, and I will keep somber celebration of my mortality until ignoring my impending death is no longer a part of the pattern of my day to day life.

This is why I love prayer and ritual. Ignoring my place in the world--my smallness and my impending death--is a frantic and sickeningly empty way. On Ash Wednesday I bear that truth on my forehead and for a moment, in the quiet of that cathedral, in my life. And with luck and repetition, I will begin to laugh at myself and my self-importance later when I catch myself living out some myth of my own importance and significance of business for impressing others, or ignoring some person's humanity because it feels inconvenient. And maybe some day the grace of a thousand Ash Wednesdays will transform my life until I carry that certain truth about myself around with me every day as a part of me.

Yeah. I missed Ash Wednesday. I guess I'll have to celebrate it on a Friday instead...

i'm sorry the bliss of your existence...

was interrupted by poor quality coffee. whether or not your coffee is laced with blood should always be a secondary concern to consumer quality, not to mention your miserly power-hungry pursuit of near-extortionate market prices.

read the provocation

a) Vive Hugo! his country has a long history of being pushed around ("dictated to?") by the United States. he donated millions of dollars worth of oil to New Orleans poor in the wake of Katrina. And it's pronounced "Ooh-Go," by the way.

b) Adam Carman has now joined Jason Schambach on my list of Houghton people who strain out gnats while swallowing camels, pleased to play around as if they had big ideas and important causes while playing havoc in others' lives over inconsequential and oversimplified, overpompous pontification. There are more important things in life than chapel scanning and paying a few extra cents for gas. I am generally tolerant of childish idiots--until they begin running amok, frustrating others, destroying communities, and making life rougher for people for whom life is difficult and unbuffered already.

c) people at Houghton live such wealthy f*****g existences that they are completely removed from complicated things like earning honest bread, sustaining spiritual lives independent of a church-camp-like structure, or dealing with people and things who do not fit into neat little good guy/bad guy perfect-individualistic-capitalist black and white worlds.

d) speaking of people without the luxury of pompous moralizing and ideological faith in capitalism, what would the impact of a boycott on the Houghton gas station be on the local folk who work at that gas station? are you comfortable with causing them to, oh, lose their jobs or take pay cuts to add a notch to your ethical-ego-belt?

e) there's a bigger world out there, Adam. one where sixteen-year-olds OD on heroin (for the third time) and nasty corporations burn families off their lands and out of their houses and people are mainly occupied with finding a way to make it to tomorrow or next year. I don't care if you're rich and stupid--at least you contribute to the trickle-down. but when you start f*****g around with people's livelihoods and dismissing with self-congratulating laughter the hard work of people trying to make it easier for the economically poor to get just a few of the advantages you take for granted...

then you have a Jesus problem my friend, and you have a problem with me.

lazy thursday

ahhhh...
funny how it takes a whole day off of complete sloth just to get around to being able to take the second day off and get something done. cleaned my bike and listened to all the stacked-up NPR podcasts I haven't listened to of late. which is wonderful because now I want to spend a lot of money on books and movies and music. those rags behind the bike? they started off perfectly white. good, quality downtime...



interesting stuff:

blogging, marriage, and the new electronic world

dreds + violin = awesome

brokeback...to the future

king kong: children and violence

in lucia's eyes (cassanova's lost, bitterness-inducing first love)

michael w. smith in a really interesting social justice film about faith and class?

russian vampire movie grosses more in two weeks than Lord of the Rings

and, finally, the two you should delve into:

mercy killing in new orleans

recently my medic and i sat down and watched the two great ambulance movie classics of all time: Mother, Jugs and Speed (with a young Bill Cosby) and, more importantly, Bringing Out the Dead (with an excellently chosen Nicolas Cage). (yes, Mr. McSteele, I finally watched it...freaky doesn't half describe it--scary was that nothing that happened really surprised me)

working nights on the street is a different experience--very different. there are no soft covers on sharp edges, no blurring and no buffering and no carefully constructed upbeat conclusions to anything. it's a revolving door of ugly, harsh realities that you cannot alter or make pretty enough for normal society, but you will experience again and again and again without any sense of closure until you find yourself laughing at a bad joke while doing CPR on some guy who fell over dead in front of his family, wondering if you'll get the call over quick enough to get lunch before the India Gate closes.

one of the most un-American things you have to do on the job is expressed, appropriately, by the borrowed French word "triage." it's when you step into a situation where you have to decide who you try to save and who you leave to die. then you make those decisions and there's absolutely no way you can even come close to knowing for sure whether you made the right decisions or not--it's not clear cut, there's no slow-motion replays, or clever omniscient narrators. just a lot of educated guesswork and three seconds to make a choice.

it's not American because it's neither victorious nor heroic--you admit defeat, and not just defeat, but defeat due to failed systems of infrastructure, supply, and support. the outcome has everything to do with institutional and situational factors that are insurmountable by individual actors, heroic or not.

on the seventh floor of New Orleans' Memorial Hospital, choices were made to inject critical patients with enough morphine to put them to sleep forever, in the face of dwindling supplies, rising heat and floodwaters, and the chaotic uncertainty and miscommunication surrounding possible evacuation. the doctors and nurses were in a triage situation--they made decisions based on the guesswork and information they had. it's something that makes perfect sense to me--but I do not know what it sounds like to people outside the emergency healthcare system.

watch Bringing Out the Dead: its slow descent into the absolute insanity of bureaucratically institutionalized emergency management is not pleasant--but it's accurate and ungarnished. and enlightening, in a nasty fashion. visit a few city nursing homes and take in the ever-present smells of human urine and decaying people. then you can talk about the ethics of mercy killing and assisted suicide.

dada

in that vein, the dada phenomenon has once more entered my consciousness. the "Christian" worldview tends to present upturned noses to dada art, at least in my experience. to put it briefly, without rant, dada is important. it began, during the bloodshed of World War I, as a response to the absolutely blood-chilling insanity of life in a world that was assumed to be advanced, logical and modern. it was a protest against the gruesome horror and lunacy of existence in the kind of world that could produce chemical and trench warfare, the mental reduction of people and their interrelations to the cold numbers of the mechanistic social sciences, and the inhumanely barbaric actions of "civilising" colonization.

there's definitely a place for dada today. people are waking to a terror about their existence--that our lives are embedded and ingrown with the ugly and the evil and the meaningless, our very society is dying under the weight of an illusory happiness. popping up from Fight Club to I [Heart] Huckabees is the idea that a true examination of our existence will be a horrifying nihilistic trip into cynically twisted ideals and empty significance.

i think that there is nothing more Christlike than the unveiling of emptiness, sickness and insanity of the society we live in and, to a large part, uphold and create with our actions. it's truth-telling to examine and reproduce the things we take for granted to be good in such a way that their vanity and depravity and insanity are plainly and inescapably obvious. to my limited understanding, that's what dada did in its time, and we are ripe for that self-examination, unpleasant and shocking as it may be, in times where it takes more and more effort to ignore or explain or drug away the absolute insanity of our lives.

go dada!

ps--podcasts aren't just for iPodders--you can download then to any computer and, with the appropriate media player, listen to them through your computer's speakers. NPR is an amazing treasure trove of fun things to listen to.

pps--for those of you in western new york--Nils the Norwegian paramedic introduced me to 970AM, where their overnight content is broadcasts by the good ol' British Broadcasting Corporation. if you're up late and want good international news and commentary--tune in!

heroin

i think we create panic and feed on it. we want to fear, and there is a little masochist inside each of us that wants to feel pain. bored old ladies make up a different ailment every day so they can go to the hospital and break the routine. young mothers fake seizures on the way to the hospital for the same reason their young daughters fake being raped--significance. pity. attention. tragic posturing. importance.

basically the same reason, on a night like tonight, i'm tempted to binge in a little "i'm lonely in the big city" blogging, or perhaps some "my tragic history" indulgence, or mainline some "let me tell you about my childhood" misery. i didn't realize until putting on my uniform that Powers was planning on covering for me tonight so that I can take his Friday night shift and he can enjoy a night out with a beautiful lady. so sit here long enough and the ennui sets in and off runs the heart to the public pity medium to try to convert excess boredom into cheap significance via emotional gluttony. you aren't bored while in the sick throes of angst and over-worn-out personal tragedy.

huh. i'm a funny-lookin' person in the mirror.

so, Plan A down the drain, it's time to work on Plan B. I have decided that I am altogether too serious and dour. the Kingdom of Heaven is no place for the mopey/self-obsessed. it is an all-out party replete with wine, women, and song (and, hopefully, hibachis and steak...) and party poopers are frowned upon. I have discovered, to my dismay, a certain weakness in the celebration-side of life. Put me in a room with angst-ridden-sense-of-importance junkies and I will passionately be bitter about all the evil and bad isms that keep people frowning and shuffling along. But call up the dance and light the candles and pour out the alcohol of choice and I am stiff and looking for my bitter coffee. Declare a feast and I sit awkwardly and try to make polite conversation or introduce some subject that I can frown and feel important and sophisticated while discussing.

And there's Jesus over there whoopin' and hollerin' and making more wine when it's obvious everyone's had enough and pulling grouchy old Aunt Edna out on the dance floor for a cha-cha and I am at a loss for what to do because being important is not important while celebrating. rejoicing and laughing and playing games and other childlike traits--they are important.

So I need to get a lot better at celebration, which generally involves a deflated ego and a good bit of unsober gleefulness and laughter and--hah! Nickleback just started playing on my pretty little iPod. Case in point. Nickleback is a popular band that makes its living making sad-tough-guy music about how my girlfriend broke up with me and my family wasn't perfect and I'll never be allright and I'm angry and I'm sad and--dim shadows, empty whiskey bottles, browns and grays and dust always fading to black. Couldn't make a dancing tune to save their lives. God save us from seductive preprocessed canned some-one-else's-misery to titillate our carefully safe, carefully cultivated, carefully bored, carefully cool lives, and somehow empty selves. God save us from people who's favorite words (followed, of course with weighty and important sighs) are "God save us..."

Well. I'm going to try to find some way to redeem this evening that involves

a. laughter

b. absolutely nothing "serious", "important", "weighty", or "tragic."

c. unless the "tragic" could also be categorized under "schadenfreude".

d. because as the merriest of monks and ascetics knows, weightiness, dourness, seriousness and other forms of self-importance are bad.

e. and rejoicing is good.

p.s.--check out the hilarious Mormon guy's faux pas on Jeopardy

a little after the fact

yup. one more valentines day spent alone. or, in this case, working, with a decidedly unattractive male medic, so that Powers could go watch Cirque de Soleil from a corporate suite and hit on wealthy lawyers. oh well. Happy St. V's and to all good luck and good night!

goodbye vocabulary

so yesterday morning i couldn't sleep even though i knew i would pay for it later. so instead of sleeping the morning away in preparation for work, i curled up in my sleeping bag in my not-so-comfy comfy chair next to the big windows in my room and pulled back the curtains a little (the room is cold enough as it is) and drank cider and listened to Christmas music and watched the rain fall. i love rain, especially watching it fall as all the typically inconsiderate aspects of life tiptoe around selfconsciously because "ssssshhh--the rain is talking!" and I love Christmas music because it is, and i didn't get to listen to any at all except for a few snatches on the radio about how grandma's drunken stupor led her into the path of an inconsiderate grass-guzzling all-brawn no-finesse H3 of a reindeer.

except that it was actually yesterday afternoon, cause there i was trying to sleep days again and i screwed up my sleep schedule again so that now i want nothing more than to wake up around ten a.m. and go to sleep around three p.m.--the former being four hours into my off-time and the latter being just about when it's time to get up and get ready for work. but spending yesterday afternoon watching the-rain-fall-with-a-cup-of-hot-cider just doesn't quite cut the mustard. you're missing half of the great experience that i had, and i wouldn't want to rob you of that.

well. and now i'm sitting here wondering if i can type another five hours until bedtime, because i have to stay awake until about six or seven so that i can sleep and get up at six (that's a.m., as in the actual morning) for my eight to midnight overtime. yeah overtime. that should be me into bona fide overtime for this pay period, and then everything else extra that i tack on is time and a half!

and i used to get excited for christmas break. i warn you all: be ready for the ensuing gosh-darn-i-feel-old-what-do-they-teach-children-in-schools-these-days posts, because i'm sure i shall age all of my characteristic grace, and i seriously think my arthritis in my right hand is flaring up. booh-yah--anyone want to talk about the price of perscription drugs?



in other news, the "email me" is fixed. so you can email me now if you don't know my address. and i got to drive to Pennsylvania and back last night, lights and sirens the whole way! made a two-hour trip in an hour-fourty, in the pouring rain! yeah backroads! picked up a little newborn Am-let (that's little Amish lad) and drove him back, just as fast, and now he breathes a lot easier. hoo-ray for me!

things that must be said

upon a quick review, I have decided this is important for re-mention:

the process is cloudy, but Dr. Bradley Beach of Houghton College, originally on the tenure track, has been told he will not recieve tenure if he so applies. The college stands to lose a professor both popular among the student body and his fellow academics.

for reading:

see'>http://www.xanga.com/Houghton_Dialogue">see especially Dr. Benedict's statemtents--three cheers for Dr. B
the'>http://www.xanga.com/PopeCharming/391517743/item.html">the pope
save the Beach

lobby. please. lobby. emails and letters from alumni much appreciated. more later.

having not written in a while...

it behooves me to say that trips to Houghton can be rather strenuous. you'd be amazed to discover what wonderful things simply leaving can do for your popularity. but popularity aside, i must work, and work, and work, and work (and then pick up a little overtime) so i must off rather quickly. for your enjoyment, my little neice, who is well known in the marketplace for her vociferous "Shikomo"-ing of the elders. My neice is a little shiki-bird!















grand kudos and thanks to another dan for his kindness in making a Houghton visit possible by ferrying me back and forth from the land of my exile.

and, who are these wierd people? yeah, they would be my friends, wouldn't they?






more to follow, at another time. peace be with you all!

bouncing off Mr. Stowell...

[reflecting on Ethan's most recent post]

i think that love is an inevitable response to recognizing humanity in another person. when the static of our imperfect communication and communion is mercifully broken, for a rare moment, one person gains a momentary glimpse of the quite literally glorious, glory-filled truecreated eternal self of another.

what response can there be to such beauty but worship to god upon viewing the creator's art, and what response but horror and sorrow at every mar and wound laid upon than creation and every noisome wrack and noxious fume that obscures it from perception?

i follow the creed that love is first and most important, and all faith and morality follow. remembering the concealed glory bourne by every human individual, it's difficult to want to be one of the ones burning the library of Alexandria, chiselling the fingers off of Michaelangelo's "David" and spraypainting the Sistene Chapel. remembering each other's all-too-obscured and confused humanity becomes the hard work of love, and self-sacrifice an act of nurturing and restoring that which is truly important: the work of a master artist, the rebirth and life of dead souls.

maybe this is why Paul spoke of heaven as a place where none marry or are given in marriage: when the kingdom of heaven comes, and we no longer see through a glass darkly, maybe we will have no preference. the veils will be pulled back and the Sons and Daughters of God revealed in full glory, for which all creation holds its breath. each and every one of us will finally be able to see and hear each other's true self beyond the misunderstanding, pain and hatred that alienates us in this world.

we will love all of us with the depth of knowledge that blows away even the intimacy grown with eighty years married progress peeling away the loneliness and miscommunication of our present condition and drawing near to each other.

we will no longer need to continually remind ourselves of the hidden glory in our neighbors because we will be too busy drooling and reeling at the revealed beauty that was present and unfinished all along in tax collectors and good friends and annoying co-workers and great-aunt martha. and we will spend all eternity not being able to get enough of each other.

new toy

see, this is my new buddy--
and it goes pretty much everywhere with me.

but i need a little help.

first of all--it needs a name.

secondly--it needs music.

thirdly--it needs more pictures.

fourthly--it's got a crapload of options that i have no idea about. know something cool i can do with my ipod? tell me...

fifthly--it has absolutely no recorded messages/goofy greetings/amusing anecdotes from my friends to spice up the "shuffle" option.

donations enthusiastically accepted. especially pictures of you. because then i can carry them around with me, and if they're silly pictures, so much the better.

[where i have been lately - a pictoral journey]

grandpa's house for christmas


playing Pirates of the Barbary Coast, with my awesome little brother (who just scored a full-ride to MSU with free lodging tossed in to boot...)


florida


with these guys


a wedding with these guys (hey, that's And James!)


and working eighty hours last week

my excellent afternoon of fine reading, tucked away in my sleeping bag

i think perhaps that this book could be the most important book of the next twenty years. the only comparison i can make is with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's succint, conversational, and devastatingly intelligent Social Contract--but entirely different. Quinn is telling us what is painfully sinful, unhealthy, wrong, silly, deadly, or unsustainable--chose your adjective--about our way of life. and he is calling for change.

Despite all the indicators of misery we live with--the ever-growing incidence of social disintegration, drug addiction, crime, suicde, mental illness, child and spousal abuse and abandonement, racism, violence against women, and so on--most people in our culture are thoroughly convinced that our way of life smply cannot be bettered by any means whatsoever. Adopting anything different would therefore have to be a comedown, an act of sacrifce.

"Very typcally, when people question me about the future, they ask if I really believe people wll be willing to "give up" the wonderful things we have for the mere privlege of avoiding extinction. When I speak, as I did in Ishmael, of "another story to be in," they seem to imagine I'm touting a sort of miserable half-life of voluntary poverty, donning sackcloth and ashes to do penance for our environmental sins. They're sure that living in a sustainable way must be about "giving up" things. It doesn't occur to them that living in an UNsustainable way is also about giving up things, very precious things like security, hope, lightheartedness, and freedom from anxiety, fear and guilt."

"When in doubt, think about the circus. [the circus has been touted as an example of an non-hierarchical organization where people belong rather than work, and where all the members of the organization identify with and take personal responsiblity for the business.] People never run off to join the circus to give up something. They run off to the circus to get something."

--Daniel Quinn, The End of Civilization


which, oddly enough, is about spot on how i think about (i) monasticism, and (ii) redemption. what we give up, we do not really want. what we get--is worth giving up one's life for.

fullness

i feel there is too much going on for me to take in. literally. there are so many letters i feel a pressing need to write that i write none of them at all. there are so many phone calls to make and bloggy blogs to write and movies to watch and ideas to mull over and amazing books to read and bills to pay and tickets to settle and applications to write and decisions to make and...

and too much working my tookis off and fending off the restlessness long enough to put in the kind of hours that make money. i'll be sitting on top of an 80 hour work week saturday morning. three days off and i'll hit the grind again and probably start picking up overtime again...so the promised pictures and news are going to wait. my resolution to write a journal entry every day, inspired by the author of Snow Leopard, is going to wait. riding to the post office to get a stamp for that speeding ticket is going to wait. and everything else too. i need sleep. but at least i need sleep in a good way. good night...err...morning. something...

well...

i'm here-ish. in my new room. but fear not--it's the same address. i moved across the hall to my sweet new room: same rent, twice as big, two windows AND a door out to...a balcony! i'm (almost) moved in completely, so naturally it's a mess. but instead of vertical, cramped mess, i have horizontally slouching American suburban sprawl mess. and a walk-in, bang-your-head-on-the-pole closet. a place to put my boots!

and i'm off to work again--i've got to pay for those holiday adventures which have kept me hoppin'. pictures to follow.

i have little to say...

but if you're interested in someone who's positively just a pleasure to read, you should check out the Pope's latest. words worth reading just for the quality with which they were placed.


and for something completely different, a must for lovers of CS Lewis and 80's rap everywhere. thank you thankyou thankyouthankyou o thankyou sooooo much for making my morning Dan

belatedly as usual

Merry, Merry, Merry Christmas to all and everyone from the bean and the bear.