so there's wisdom everywhere.

the somewhat troublesome thing about that is that there's a certain level of wisdom required in knowing when and where to seek it. sometimes stuff in life works to bring you to a point where you, maybe not reach the end of your rope, but you just sorta realize that there's not just a whole lot you can do to help yourself, at least in the sort of self-reliant way that you've been so conditioned to accept.

there's tons of people that i've met who are smarter than me, hard to believe i know. going a bit farther, however, the number of people who've got the kind of wisdom that just sort of illuminates in a way that's helpful has been smaller. i've felt the need lately to seek out that sort of help, mostly because i've just felt that i could gain the kind of insight i've felt lacking.

there was clarity too, i kinda felt like i needed some of that, so i called randy. i've written about adam, not too long ago either, in fact, and the mentor he was to me and stuff like that, well randy is adam's dad, who i also worked with when i was in illinois. he's just one of those guys that when you hear his voice, he just sounds wise. what was really cool about talking to him is how i could nearly literally hear his influence on me in that conversation. i told him what was up and when he evaluated the situation the stuff that came out of his mouth was nearly verbatim what i had been thinking. since i know the character this guy has and the level of integrity with which he carries himself, i could see his fingerprints all over the development of my character which isn't so much a tribute to me as it is to him, i think.

so now i'm fairly certain about where to look.

feeling: humble
thinking of: loose change
music: "see the lite" sorta

thought for the day

all men seek happiness. whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end.

the cause of some going to war and others avioiding it is the same desire of both, attended with different views.

the will never takes the least step but to this object.

this is the motive of every action of every man, even those who hang themselves.

--pascal

so it was great.

i'm back now, the weekend was great, seeing annie was awesome, everything i'd hoped it'd be. i picked her up on friday evening, in azusa. if you know anything about geography out here, driving from long beach up to azusa around five on friday evening would be at or near the bottom of anyone's list of fun things to do. so yah, traffic was horrible, and missing the exit to get on the 605 on the way back didn't help any.

anyways, we just sorta kicked back on friday night, which was relaxing. annie is one of those people who i can be with and not say anything at all and not have it be all weird and crap. the weather the whole weekend was gorgeous, which was pretty schweet cause we went down to huntington beach on saturday and then drove up to santa barbara on sunday.

i've lived here over a year and a half and hadn't ever been to santa barbara. annie had a relation, second cousin, i think, out there and she wanted to see westmont, one of the colleges she got into, so we headed up there on sunday afternoon. santa barbara's a lil over a hundred miles from my front door, which on a sunday afternoon meant around two and a half hours of driving, and even though i had to get there and back all on sunday, the company was good, and the road trip addict in my hasn't been satisfied in quite a while, so i was pretty stoked to do it, and man, was it ever beautiful, hills overlooking the ocean, gorgeous trees and flowers, just amazing.

so we spent most of the afternoon and evening there, annie stayed there that night, and like i said, i drove back that evening and the trip back was so peaceful and i got to spend that time just being reminded of how cool it is to be around someone who really knows you.

feeling: lucky
thinking of: CA 101
music: "august in bethany" the juliana theory

i pick up annie today in azusa.

this weekend's gonna rip, i'll be back monday.

feeling: amazing
thinking of: a patio
music: "one" U2

on a desert road that steamed the sky
with the windows up and the air on high.

i was off the stage, i was on the mend
for a solo drive and a holiday weekend.

my thirsty car came to a stop
at the reptile gardens curio shop.

when a wind came hissing through the vents
my forehead broke in a cold, cold sweat
and in the rear-view mirror was a silhouette

then i heard the doorlocks take a dive
and a whisper screamed "don't turn around, just drive!"

scratch!
pointy tail and a horn-rimmed head
and a widow's peak like eddie munster.

i sat frozen in my seat
we haven't had a chance to meet.
are you a singing telegram or something?

he just flashed a hellish smile--"let's go driving for a while."

he held something in his hands i'd never seen before.
it was my chevrolet's pink slip.

scratch!
evil eye, "step on it boy, if you wanna stay alive!" he said
"don't look surprised, you know what i want
i've lived for years inside your trunk, so drive!" he said.
"let's get talking business son, you ain't fooling anyone
i know just what you wanna be, now it's time to work for me! so drive!"

if this is a nasty dream.
i'd prefer to wake up here
i believe the point is clear.

scratch!
outta my car!
he said "ha, i've come too far, besides, i kinda like the velour seat covers."
God, help me, what do i do, he said "shut up boy, it's too late for you! now drive!
all you phonies get it wrong, double lives take half as long
should have kept your windows clean, now i'm part of this machine, so drive!"

you've got a good eighty thousand miles left. . .before the recall.

if this is a nasty dream
i believe the point's quite clear
i'd prefer to wake up here

i started humming amazing grace
he said "come on boy gimme a break!"
so i hit the brakes with both my feet,
and sent two horns through the bucket seats.

then the locks shot up as the grace came down.
i said "here's the keys, i'll be walkin back to town."

--"drive, he said" steve taylor

meaning fascinates me.

so anyways, i've written about sociology here before, just some real basic stuff, mostly about theoretical perspectives and my tendency to observe and perceive the world around me using lenses that seem to correspond to those perspectives. i remember sitting in my urban sociology class and later in my social theory class and hearing about the symbolic interactionist or interpretive theory and suddenly feeling like the entire world made sense. basically what that perspective is concerned with is meaning, how people perceive the world around them, how the specific things they see and hear and subsequently and interact with are assigned their value.

what really blew my mind was when the reality that what we read and hear as words are no more than mere symbols in and of themselves. that is to say that the essence of something as clear as what i'm writing this very second is not at all what is seen and processed by your eyes and your mind; even though we see and hear symbols and representations that are identical, the nuances of meaning that those same representations and symbols convey to us are not always perceived identically.

so i'm writing about all this because i've been a bit frustrated with the process of interpretation, trying to understand what it is that people mean when i'm pretty sure that we percieve things in radically different ways. maybe it's not that, maybe it's more than that and i'm just frustrated because i suspect that people aren't shooting straight with me, which if it's the case puts integrity as opposed to misunderstanding at stake, which is far more serious.

i'll stop, i'm getting tired of this already.

feeling: a spinning head.
thinking of: clarity
music: "faith like a child" jars of clay

i bowl.

or i used to, it seemed that the last summer me, dunx and brad were all in dallas, summer 2000 i think, and it seemed as though we made it to either don carter's or the bronco bowl or someplace like that no less often than every other week or so. we did it often enough that i got pretty good at it, but after that summer i think i can count the times i went on a couple or three fingers.

so i guess i still do bowl. i'm in a class anyway, there's a bit of a story behind it, and it's dumb, so i'll spare you, plus it's the kind of thing that might take away from the aura of invincibility that i work so hard to promote and protect for myself as well as the good of the general public, but i digress. so anyways, this class meets tuesdays and thursdays and though it's through long beach city college, it meets at a bowling alley on PCH, which i guess makes sense, seeing as there's no bowling alley on campus.

i only go on tuesdays, mostly because that's league day and thursdays are just for practice. our team's actually pretty good, we have the second lowest handicap in the league, but we're not very consistent, and we're not so much better than everyone else that we don't get screwed by handicaps every once in a while. like as a team our handicap is right at 150, mine is 48, and the other guys' are 60 and 42.

the ball i use is pink.

feeling: scatterbrained
thinking of: summer 2000
music: "big D boogie woogie" reverend horton heat

i used to wrestle.

i'm pretty sure that i've mentioned that before, mostly because every once in a while it pushes itself to the forefront of my mind, like over the weekend for example. this past weekend was the ncaa division 1 wrestling championships. the tournament was in st. louis, so there was really no chance that i'd be there. in fact the likelihood of me making it to one while living on the west coast is slim, pretty much because amateur wrestling isn't nearly as big here as it is in the midwest and there, comparatively, aren't nearly as many quality college programs here as there are in other parts of the country, so they don't stage the tournament here. all that is a shame because if there's a single sporting event that i'd choose to go to year in and year out, i think that would be the one.

anyways, i didn't wrestle in college, let alone for a division 1 program, so my interest is relegated mostly to hobby/fan status. so saturday afternoon/evening, the championship finals were on espn2, and while i was watching them, i got to thinking about that silly six degrees of separation game, and i'm happy to say that in the process, kevin bacon didn't cross my mind a single time. back to the point, however, i was thinking about how there were several guys wrestling in that tournament who i didn't wrestle myself, but who had wrestled someone that i'd wrestled, who were in my second degree, as it were.

i really don't know why i'm going on about this, maybe it's just a personal inventory sort of thing, or maybe i take some perverse pleasure in telling the world about how this one guy i wrestled in high school slaughtered me on more than one occasion. see, my connection was specifically through this one guy i wrestled named tom grossman. this guy was an animal in high school, three time state champion, didn't surrender an offensive point his last two years and ended up getting a scholarship to the university of oklahoma at a time where pretty much nobody recruited texas for wrestlers. anyways, i wrestled this guy twice, once in the semi-finals at the north texas open, and again in the finals at the grapevine duals.

now imagine yourself a halfway decent wrestler, which i was, rolling along, winning your first couple or three matches to make it into the semifinals or finals of a tournament, making it to that round and subsequently getting your innards handed to you in less than two minutes. or worse yet, when i wrestled him at grapevine, the tournament was set up in a round-robin format, and i had to win eight matches for the privilege of getting destroyed by him in the finals. normally, going through all that just to get it handed to me in the finals of a tournament would be a cause for tons of frustration and consternation, but since i knew going in that without the aid of a loaded nine, which i'm not certain would have ensured victory anyway, i was going home with a silver medal, it didn't bother me so much.

so anyway, this guy grossman, for as awesome as he was and as bad as he beat me, didn't make all-american while at oklahoma, which makes me respect all the more what the guys i was watching over the weekend were able to do and understand the level of competition at that tournament, and sorta works to keep me humble.

that silver medal still hangs from my car's rear-view mirror

feeling: old
thinking of: my old knee brace
music: "monkeys at the zoo" charlie peacock

i have a neat job.

so thursday is my day off, and it's a good day to have off since wednesdays are usually on the order of anywhere from eleven to thirteen hour days. i denote it on the blog with lyrics thursday, which will come back next week after taking this week off to commemorate lisa's birthday. i guess the whole point of mentioning that is to show that there are exceptions, there are always exceptions.

like once a month on thursday i meet with a few peers, guys, and a couple girls, in the same like of work as me, for lunch and even though it's "work" i never mind giving up part of my day off in order to have that. so anyways, we met this past thursday, a couple days ago, and we were talking about discipleship, which isn't as esoteric as it might first sound. mostly because even though the word seems to be relegated to this sort of evangelical lexicon, the root word of discipleship is the word discipline. everybody's a disciple of something, and in as much as people discipline themselves, either consciously or unconsciously, into certain behaviors, they practice discipleship.

"discipleship". . .it may not sound esoteric anymore, but it still sounds heavy handed. nobody likes discipline, it usually conjures up thoughts of time-outs from when you're a lil kid, or detention or getting grounded when you're in junior high and high school. move beyond that though, because beyond that there lies a point at which you (hopefully) reach a level of maturity such that you understand the role that discipline plays and that more than being mere punishment, it's a vital component of the search for pleasure.

with that understanding comes the realization that discipline is employed as a means to the end of acheiving something worth the effort put forth. we're very utilitarian people, generally, and we assign value to things based on what they can get us, which is to say that it's rare that we want to, will, or even can evaluate something on its own merits, without demanding to know its relevance to any number of other things that we perceive to be more important. now i got where i am on this because here lately i've been reading and listening to a whole lot of john piper whose whole life's work it seems is to get people around him to understand that our pursuit of pleasure and God's pursuit of glory, both of which require discipline on our part, are not at odds, they're not different things so much that they're exactly the same.

he cites c.s. lewis (surprise, surprise) who writes that though we perceive our desires to be too strong, when our attention is called to what we could be desiring, we find that our desires are instead too weak. he says to imagine being offered infinte and immeasurable joy and pleasure and instead accepting in its place things that are totally mundane, a good job, some nice stuff, sex maybe. we want what we want, and we want it now, mostly because we don't know any better that what we want right now pales in comparison to what we could get if we could train ourselves to desire those things that are inifinitely greater.

if it sounds like we have to train ourselves to want the really good stuff, i think it's because we do.

feeling: liberated
thinking of: wrestling
music: "thought menagerie" sixpence

it's like there's a birthday every other day this month.

well, maybe just today and the day before yesterday. so there's adam, who to be really honest, when i first met him, i thought was sort of a goofy, maybe a bit of a nerdy guy. i don't think that it was any vibe that he gave off himself, because he's definitely not nerdy, i think he just reminded me of, looked like another guy i knew who was a bit nerdy. anyways, i met adam at the beginning of my junior year of college, christian education was one of my majors, it was a major that required completion of a ministry internship in order to satisfy the requirements for graduation, so it was getting to the point where i'd have to think pretty long and hard about what i would do for it.

actually, that's not true at all in fact. growing up, in junior high and high school i'd volunteered during the summers working on the rec staff at kids camps back in texas for sid, who's a pretty awesome guy in his own right, so i'd pretty much made up my mind that that'd be what i'd do for my internship; i'd done it before, it would fulfill my requirement and it would be easy to do again. so anyways, i was taking to adam one morning after church, after church, i guess i woulda been afternoon by then, and i think we were talking about school or something like that and i mentioned that i had to do an internship for my CE major. but like i said, my mind was pretty well made up as to where i'd be, and that was most definitely not illinois, so when he proposed that we have lunch that week to talk about the possibility of me doing my internship ther, pretty much the only thing i was excited about was the prospect of scoring a free lunch.

if you know me, or have stalked me for an extended period of time, you know how that ended up, i did end up spending the summer in illinois, interning there, having adam as my supervisor and mentor. i never expected that i would develop the kind of relationship with him that i did, even with his family. even though i was the intern and he was the supervisor, he made obvious the fact that he cared not just about what i was doing for him and the church and stuff like that, but he cared about me, good gravy, he let me live in his house; how i was doing, what was with me, i could always count on him to shoot straight with me, even with stuff that wasn't easy, which is more than can be said for others i've encountered, even in the profession i'm in, but that's another entery for another day, i guess. all that put more succinctly, there are a handful of people in this world whose influence i can point to and say spending time with that person changed me profoundly. i learned a lot about how people should relate to each other from adam.

thanks adam.

feeling: grateful
thinking of: 2 S 361 Glen Park Rd, Lombard, IL 60148
music: "escher's world" chagall guevara

a friday five? here? there's a first time for everything.

if you. . .

1. . . .owned a restaurant, what kind of food would you serve?

i'd probly open up a lil taco stand, where you can get real tacos, you know like carnitas or fajita or lengua or chicharron or something like that, wrapped up in two corn tortillas with limes and fresh salsa. flour tortillas too, cause they're just good, but no taco would be crunchy, there's no such thing as a crunchy taco.

2. . . .owned a small store, what kind of merchandise would you sell.

books and guns. yes, books and guns.

3. . . .wrote a book, what genre would it be?

dunno really, i've toyed with writing some short stories, but nothing really serious. f. scott fitzgerald said that a writer is a person for whom the task of writing is much more difficult than it is for anyone else, if he's right, i feel like i'm a writer maybe two or three days a week.

hold a gun to my head, i'd probly say a sort of expository book that would blend my affinity for theology and social theory, or if i was talented enough a narrative of a fictional character who encounters that kinda stuff.

4. . . .ran a school, what would you teach?

me and bone have talked about this on several occasions, we would take over the vaunted st. mark's school of texas and turn it into a sort of academy where we would design the curriculum to our tastes and teach various forms of hand to hand combat. we'd get rid of all the sports teams except wrestling.

5. . . .recorded an album, what kind of music would be on it?

i dunno, but if i did an album of celine dion covers, it would the the crappy kind. not even i can salvage what comes out of her mouth.

so today is march 18th.

a year ago today i was on a plane to chicago, guess it was sorta my spring break. i hadn't been there since graduating the may before and there were people i hadn't seen in that ten months or so that i was really looking forward to seeing, so i was pretty stoked. that was a great week, i did get to at least see everyone i wanted to and reconnected with some awesome people.

so like i said, i went out there on march 18th, which also happens to be my friend lisa's birthday. now me and lisa go way back, well, not really way way back but we got to be pretty good friends starting three years or so ago. lisa's awesome, we share the indiginty of being taken to a roller skating rink for our respective birthdays as well as a lot of other stuff, mostly slurpees in the yard at wheaton, lots of drives around chicago's vaunted western suburbs, and trips to baker's square either to commiserate over a cruddy week or wrap up an awesome one.

happy birthday lisa, you're the coolest.

feeling: bittersweet
thinking of: baker's square
music: "the rub of love" chagall guevara

happy st. patrick's day

may the road rise up to meet you.

may the wind be always at your back.

may the sun shine warm upon your face,

the rains fall soft on your fields and,

until we meet again,

may God hold you in the palm of his hand.

--traditional irish blessing

i'm sore.

what this has to do with anything, i've yet to figure out.

that is all.

feeling: sore
thinking of: two weeks til 24 starts again, that's what
music: "eye of the tiger" survivor

so the strike is over.

what i'm talking about is the grocery store workers strike that started back in october. hindsight seems to bring clarity in places where it was lacking previously, since the whole thing started workers lost, i hear, over three hundred million dollars in wages, i don't know the toll it took on the stores, i know business was way down, mostly because with minimal staffing and picketers outside hassling everybody, shopping at union grocery stores was little more than a pain that could be avoided if there was a stater brothers or food-4-less anywhere near.

the other fallout is that i'm not shopping at wal-mart anymore. the whole reason for the strike was wal-mart's expansion into the grocery business coupled with their non union status which enables them to offer lower wages and fewer benefits and make the grocery companies squeeze their workers to remain competitive. the workers, wanting to protect themselves, strike when the upcoming bargaining agreement proposes to cut their benefits. that i didn't have a problem with, but i did get rubbed the wrong way when i went to albertson's early in the strike to get something i wasn't able to find anywhere else and a picketer asked me not to shop there until the strike was over. that i understood, but it's sort of ridiculous to ask people to not shop where you work and then to come back when you want them to, i mean you're actively driving business away from the company that employs you.

i went grocery shopping last night, which is the first time i've had to do that since the strike ended at the beginning of the month, and upon reflection, i decided not to go to albertson's, which is where i went before the strike and to instead go to food-4-less, which is where i went during the strike. i'm not entirely sure why i chose to do that, i think it's the slight segment of my personality that's vindictive, i mean if the stores and workers could hold out on each other and the general public for five months, i figure they deserve at least that much from me.

feeling: a cut on my fist
thinking of: completion
music: "rigged on a fix" rancid

i watch wrestling.

i used to anyway, i guess i still do, but certainly more sporadically than i have in the past. watching it seemed to be a pretty big part of my experience growing up, and i'm still not sure what drew me to it initially, i guess it was something exclusive to the Y chromosome, some sort of acceptable outlet for aggression or maybe a source a bit off the beaten path for a young boy's heroes, who knows for sure? anyways, growing up i'd go to my grandparents' house on monday nites to eat dinner and watch wrestling, and when he was *ahem* hooked up, i'd go over there to watch the pay-per-views.

so today is wrestlemania, which is sort of the centerpiece of the wrestling calendar, i think the last one i saw was fourteen, the main event in that one was stone cold steve austin vs. the heartbreak kid shawn michaels, austin won and became the champion for the first time. i taped it and one time me and agnich ditched class on a friday afternoon, i bought us lunch at gazeebo using petty cash from the student council cash box and we went to his house and watched it. today's wrestlemania is number twenty, and they use roman numerals like the super bowl, so i guess the last one i saw was really XIV and today's is XX.

agnich thanked me for lunch and i said don't thank me, thank the st. mark's student council.

feeling: like a little boy
thinking of: the sportatorium
music: "carnival of carnage" insane clown posse

HAVE YOU
Ever cried over a boy/girl? it looked like it
Ever lied to someone? certainly

Ever been arrested? nah

NUMBER
Of times I have been in love? between zero and one

Of times I have had my heart broken? zero

Of hearts I have broken? i'm pretty sure at least one, and just that one
Of girls I have kissed? couple dozen
Of boys I have kissed? platonically, like on the forehead? two
Of girls I've slept with? slept? like zzzzzz? two
Of boys I've slept with? zero
Of drugs taken illegally? zero
Of people I would classify as true, could trust with my life type friends? can be counted on one hand
Of times my name has appeared in the newspaper? probly a dozen or so
Of scars? i can think of three without getting up to take inventory
Of things in my past that I regret? there's probly a few, but regret is of no use to me

FAVORITE
Movie: princess bride, tombstone

Disney movie: probly peter pan
Smell: vanilla or bath and body works moonlight path

Word: unbelievable
Video Game: fifa 2004, tho i haven't played in a few months
Eye color: green
Flower: stargazer lillies, yellow roses (texas and all)
Color: grey, brown, navy blue, in that order
Cereal: i haven't had cereal in like two years, but rice krispies
Actor: ed harris or morgan freeman

Actress: ashley judd
Band/singers: reverend horton heat
Holiday: christmas, no contest

DO YOU THINK YOU ARE
Good Looking? i'm pretty
Funny: no doubt
Friendly: to a fault
Amusing: i amuse myself
Pessimistic: cynical
Optimistic: like you wouldn't believe
Dorky: annie called me a dork last week

RANDOM
Spell your first name backwards: iuqir, OR euqirne
The story behind your screenname: ricv56, ric=nickname, v=last initial, 56=number i wore in HS playing football
FOUR words that sum you up: thoughtful, patient, tenacious, fearless

DESCRIBE YOUR
Wallet: brown leather, i got it at target
Hairbrush: gun metal grey
Toothbrush: blue and white
Jewelry worn daily: not so much

Pillowcase: green and white checks

Blanket: green plaid comforter
Coffee Cup: blue and yellow
Sunglasses: don't own any
Favorite Underwear: green, white, blue checked boxers
Favorite shirt: probly the donut curl

Piercings: not so much
Hair: dark brown
Wishing: to be more adequately understood
After this: work
Talking to: right this second, no one

Something you're looking forward to in this upcoming month: annie!!!

Something that you are deathly afraid of: losing parts, important ones

Do you like candles? tons in fact
Do you like incense? not enough to get any
Do you believe in love? indeed
Do you believe in soul mates? i think so
Do you believe in forgiveness? i do
Do you believe in God? with all my heart
Who is your worst enemy? someone without the guts to tell me

If you could have any animal for a pet: probly a dog

Can you eat with chopsticks? yah
What are 5 cities you wouldn't mind relocating to? Chicago, Dallas, El Paso, San Antonio.

What’s something that you wish people would understand? the significance of context

What’s something you wish you could understand better? probly people with two X chromosomes

Someone you miss that you haven't seen in a long time? Ashley

i have parents.

two of them in fact, i remember when i was in middle school, my level of maturity was such that people would get shocked looks on their faces when they found out that i had parents. well i'd like to think it was my level of maturity, it could have been that they believed i was some sort of hellspawn with neither the hope nor the possibility of any connection to natural processes of life.

so i'm 23, and they're young too, in fact, when my dad was my age, i was three, and when my mom was my age, i was five. anyone who knows me realizes the total frivolity of the idea of me being married, let alone with any sort of extra-generational interest. in any case, that would put my parents in their early 40s, and in fact the reason i'm writing about them is that today is, in fact, my mom's birthday.

one of the neater things about growing up has been being able to see the relationship between my parents and me evolve. knowing that's not the case for everyone, i feel pretty blessed that there's nothing really contentious there, and more blessed when i realize that they've contributed more to who i am than i'm really aware.

happy birthday mom! :-)

feeling: pretty good
thinking of: woof
music: "faith my eyes" caedmon's call

as i survey the ground for ants
looking for a place to sit and read
i'm reminded of the streets of my hometown
how they're much like this concrete that's warm beneath my feet

and how i'm all wrapped up in my mother's face
with a touch of my father just up around the eyes
and the sound of my brother's laugh
more wrapped up in what binds our ever distant lives

but if i must go
things i trust will be better off without me
but i don't want to know
cause life is better off a mystery

so keep'em coming these lines on the road
and keep me responsible be it a light or heavy load
and keep me guessing with these blessings in disguise
and I'll walk with grace my feet and faith my eyes

hometown weather is on tv
i imagine the lives of the people living there
and i'm curious if they imagine me
cause they just wanna leave; i wish that i could stay

but i get turned around
and i mistake my happiness for blessing
and i'm blessed as the poor
but still i judge success by how i'm dressing

so keep'em coming these lines on the road
and keep me responsible be it a light or heavy load
and keep me guessing with these blessings in disguise
and I'll walk with grace my feet and faith my eyes

so i'll sing a song of my hometown
i'll breathe the air and walk the streets
maybe find a place to sit and read
and the ants are welcome company

so keep'em coming these lines on the road
and keep me responsible be it a light or heavy load
and keep me guessing with these blessings in disguise
and i'll walk with grace my feet and faith my eyes

and i'll walk with grace my feet and faith my eyes.
and i'll walk with grace my feet and faith my eyes.

--"faith my eyes" cademon's call

i've chewed gum every day since eleventh grade.

winterfresh gum.

that is all.

feeling: rotten
thinking of: nothing good
music: "hold me down" gin blossoms

i joined bally's

this happened about a month ago and it's something i thought i'd never do, i mean i'd see their commercials which would pretty much solidify in my mind every good reason i had not to join. on top of the meat-market vibe they gave off, any company that uses justin timberlake, jessica simpson, kylie minogue, and ace of base (?!?) to advertise themselves is no company that deserves my business.

so anyway, i'd been running since last august, like two miles, if not every day, then at least four or five times a week, but once december rolled around, i got out of the habit. once that happened it seemed to start a bit of a domino effect because when discipline in one area of my life falls by the wayside, the door swings wide open to letting the same thing happen in others. so then sometime in january, i noticed that my energy level was really low, like get up, go to work, come home, do nothing, kinda low.

that's pretty much where i was, more or less just tired of walking around worn out all the time. i got sick twice in january, sinus infection or the lightweight flu, something like that, which i'm pretty sure i was more susceptible to because of the whole diminished energy thing. so like i said i started a month or so ago, the first week of february and since then i've noticed that i've definitely been better off for it.

good gravy, ace of base? they were dumb by seventh grade.

feeling: pressured
thinking of: the word "perfunctory"
music: "counting the cost" charlie peacock

so today is march 8th.

winter's not even over, not officially anyway, so imagine my surprise when the temperature climbed into the 90s today. the temp didn't bother me so much, in fact, i didn't even really think it was that hot simply because all the natives were going on about how hot it was and i know what wusses they are when it comes to weather, normally when the temperature climbs over 80 it's cause to talk about how hot it is and ponder moving to cooler climes.

in any case, it was kinda nice to get a shot of the summer so early, and it's the kind of thing that brought back a sort of applied memory, a few of them in fact. like that summer in college when i worked for 7-11 and had lunch outside in the courtyard every day until it became absolutely unbearable, which ended up being about 103. there was that and the time my brother and i were driving around on a sunday afternoon that was over a hundred degrees and the car started to overheat, so we had to turn the heater on, which is remarkably similar to the time i was with him and we had a tire that happened to go flat on the freeway on the way home. as if that wasn't enough, when i was changing the tire, one of the bolts broke.

i don't seem to have the best of luck on hot days, makes me wonder why i'm such a fan.

feeling: conflicted
thinking of: luck
music: "it's not the heat, it's the humanity" bouncing souls

You're Adventures of Huckleberry Finn!

by Mark Twain

With an affinity for floating down the river, you see things in black
and white. The world is strange and new to you and the more you learn about it, the less
it makes sense. You probably speak with an accent and others have a hard time
understanding you and an even harder time taking you seriously. Nevertheless, your
adventurous spirit is admirable. You really like straw hats.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

i live in southern california.

and i have some really cool friends, but i'll get to that in a bit, i think. so anyways, it was about a year and a half ago that i moved out here after spending four years going back and forth between chicago and dallas, school and home. the cool thing about being in those two places is that it wasn't at all difficult to make it to one place or the other if i had a long weekend or something like that. since pretty much all my friends were either in the one place or the other, i never went too terribly long without seeing friends that weren't where i was.

living out here is a bit different. make no mistake, i love where i live, i got a great job, the people here are as nice as anywhere and i'll never complain about the weather, but geographically (not topographically, there's a difference) this place is in about the worst possible location. head west and you can't go very far before you wind up in the ocean, which is pretty to look at, no doubt, but it's an ocean, and there's really not anywhere to go there, well not anywhere for me to go there anyway. head east, good gravy, have you ever headed east of here? there's nothing until you get to phoenix, and i still have yet to figure out what its excuse for existance is or who the joke is on.

basically what i'm saying is that long beach being where it is, is pretty geographically isolated and limits the opportunities i get to see old friends, the ones that live in other places. now instead of getting in the car and road tripping for a long weekend, i gotta take vacation days and buy plane tickets to do it, complications that are pretty mitigating. so when i get the kinda news that i got today, where i hear that one of my friends is coming out here, well it's the kinda thing that makes you not mind being surrounded by ocean and desert so much. annie's coming out at the end of this month from chicago, in less than three weeks actually, i could write tons about her, i've already written a bit, but i'll just say the list she's on is very short. i haven't seen her in a year, so it definitely feels like a long time coming.

it does mean i gotta clean my place up tho.

feeling: stoked
thinking of: blowing up the desert, but that's been tried i think
music: "tonight tonight" smashing pumpkins

this time won't be any different.

i'm gonna prove you wrong.

feeling: challenged
thinking of: deficiency
music: "avenues and alleyways" rancid

eat steak, eat steak eat a big ol' steer
eat steak, eat steak do we have one dear?
eat beef, eat beef it's a mighty good food
it's a grade A meal when i'm in the mood.

cowpokes'll come from a near and far
when you throw a few rib-eyes on the fire
roberto duran ate two before a fight
'cause it gave a lot of mighty men a lot of mighty might

eat steak, eat steak eat a big ol' steer
eat steak, eat steak do we have one dear?
eat beef, eat beef it's a mighty good food
it's a grade A meal when i'm in the mood.

eat meat, eat meat, filet mignon
eat meat, eat meat, ear it all day long
eat a few T-bones till you get your fill
eat a new york cut, hot off the grill

eat steak, eat steak eat a big ol' steer
eat steak, eat steak do we have one dear?
eat beef, eat beef it's a mighty good food
it's a grade A meal when i'm in the mood.

eat a cow, eat a cow 'cause it's good for you
eat a cow, eat a cow it's the thing that goes "Mooooo"

look at all the cows in the slaughterhouse yeard
gotta hit'em in the head, gotta hit'em real hard
first you gotta clean'em then the butcher cuts'em up
throws it on a scale throws an eyeball in a cup

saw a big brangus steer standing right over there
so i rustled up a fire cooked him medium rare
bar-b-'qed his brisket, a roasted his rump
fed my dog that ol' brangus steer's hump

eat steak, eat steak eat a big ol' steer
eat steak, eat steak do we have one dear?
eat beef, eat beef it's a mighty good food
it's a grade A meal when i'm in the mood.

--"eat steak" reverend horton heat

i'm not much for labels.

that's not always been the case, and it seems as though, for the majority of the population, it's not presently the case either. it seems as though everywhere you go there are people who really want you to know, who won't hesitate to tell you exactly who they percieve themselves to be.

personally, i've never figured that out, like when people define themselves as either conservative or liberal and the biggest insult they can levy at someone else is to call them a conservative or a liberal, whichever one they themselves don't happen to be. that sort of identification process is definitely not confined to that pair of "ideal" types, however, because anytime people start to define and label themselves ideologically, they do the same thing.

what i've never understood is the air of moral superiority that seems to inevitably show up with that kind of identification, as though there was some sort of virtue that came from simply being conservative, or liberal, or a feminist, or a communist, or a white supremacist, whatever. the troublesome thing is that methods of identification that aren't even inherently dependent on ideology become dependent, well maybe not dependent, but they develop an ideology of their own.

a nickel to anyone who can think of an example.

feeling: in need of a deep breath
thinking of: socks
music: "days like this" van morrison

today is texas independence day.

i guess it's time for a bit of a history lesson, because if you didn't grow up in the greatest country in the world, then you didn't take texas history in fourth grade and seventh grade and likely have no idea about how God's greatest creation came to be. so anyways, on march 2, 1836 at washington-on-the-brazos, the texas declaration of independence was adopted. the subsequent fight for independence attracted people from all over who wanted to lend aid. davy crockett came from tennessee, and after being defeated in a run for congress there told his constituents "you can all go to hell, i'm going to texas."

independence wasn't actually won until a month and a half later or so, on april 21st at the battle of san jacinto, in which texans showed they could be as sneaky as mexicans and attacked during their afternoon nap. the legend goes that they attacked while the mexican general santa anna was laying down eating chicken and stole his wooden leg, which eventually ended up in a museum in illinois.

you can learn a lot watching king of the hill.

feeling: texan
thinking of: texas
music: "God blessed Texas" little texas

when i was little, i was terrified of thunderstorms.

that's not a very useful fear when you grow up in texas, where thunderstorms can occur at the drop of a hat. severe thunderstorms. violent thunderstorms. the kind that, at the age of eight, make you ponder your existance and the very real (to you) possibility that your house will be struck by lightning and you'll burn to a crisp inside, you and your cabbage patch kid who you're sure is every bit as scared as you are.

eventually, i got over my fear, so much so that now i really enjoy a good thunderstorm, even if i don't happen to be inside for it. the first time it rained after i moved out here happened to coincide with the first time i'd locked my keys in the car in about three or four years and i didn't mind that much, having to stand outside and wait for the locksmith. so it's been raining here the past few days, and when it rains here, the showers aren't usually accompanied by any thunder and lightning or anything like that, which is just as well, at least for the "anything like that" case, because that stuff is usually hail or tornadoes or something like that and who really needs that?

that donald o'connor, he was a genius.

feeling: shortchanged
thinking of: laura
music: "saved by love" amy grant