Talk to the Face

Because you should only say on the internet what you would say to someone's face.

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Daily 30 - Faith

Realized my last post was during crap season at work. Time for another 30 minute three-way between words, ideas, and good music.

Tonight's music: Bowie - Hunky Dory

When you grow up evangelical you become acquainted with the term "testimony", which is usually when someone who is born-again tells some personal version of the prodigal son tale and how they came to be a Christian. AA does it too but it's the story about how someone became sober. Basically, it's a tale about recognizing that you ain't shit and something else out there is more powerful than you are.

I never had that tale. I remember being like...7 and wanting to be baptized. In a lot of ways it connected with me personally. I liked being on stage, and the baptismal at our church was in the very front of the church and up above everything. The congregation had to look forward and up to see you. It was also kinda forbidden at that age to enter the baptismal when it wasn't in use. Plus, I've always had a relatively well defined spiritual life even as a kid. When I was 3 or 4 I told my mom that I wanted a twinkle twinkle little star like the baby Jesus had. I'm sure Freud would have a field day with that one. But yeah, I loved bible stories, I loved Sunday school, singing, the whole deal. So why not get baptizezd?

TO THIS DAY, I can say with almost no irony that my moral code was set in stone the day I read this.

Thanks to this comic, the Dallas Cowboys, and Friday Night Lights, if I ever had a son I would want to name him Landry. In this comic, Tom Landry says that in life God comes first, family second, and work third. I would go even further into how this comic shaped my overall world view had Sarah Vowell not beat me to the punch. "He said that despite the wins, the love, the success, the family, he said that SOMETHING WAS MISSING. That is, until he accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior. But before that, SOMETHING WAS MISSING. I gasped. I thanked the Lord for my certainty, which was the certainty of Tom Landry—faith in God, in the Cowboys, in America. It never occurred to me that something might be missing, and so I prayed every night that when I grew up, nothing would be missing. Prayed that prayer every night up until the day I lost my faith in God."

Unlike Sarah Vowell, I still have a belief in God and I do think that belief fills Pascal's God shaped hole. Unlike a lot of the Christians I was surrounded by as a kid, I don't use that belief as a scapegoat for being a shit in the past and a paragon of perfection in the present and future. I can't quote whatever philosopher made this next point, but it's the one I stick by; If there is no God, then all of our rules are manmade. If there is a God, then who am I to fight his nature? Basically, if I were an atheist I would be a Nietzche atheist doing some kind of Dionysus Jesus thing.

That's my logic, but faith isn't logic. If I can point to something in my adult life that completely changed by concept of God but increased my faith, it would be the death of my nephew. The boldest and quickest way I can explain my experience is that I cursed God out and felt His presence. I didn't drink myself into a stupor, beat my wife, and then see the light. I wasn't a jerk to shot rubber bands at kittens and then became a happy-go-lucky chap. I called God out and experienced something that communicated that my nephew's death wasn't right, but that everything was alright.

Take what you will of this, it's my story. I'm a Christian but I reject a lot of dogma because I believe a belief in God is a very personal relationship, and I think God communicates to us in ways that speak loudest to the individual.

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Still Here

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Taken with instagram

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Medicine cabinet mirror (Taken with instagram)

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Instagram rookie (Taken with instagram)

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I always thought Frito Kyle was very unattractive.

Overheard in a bookstore. I think she meant "Frida Kahlo."

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Daily 30 - Pink Slips

Music: (Listening to an episode of "Intervention" in the background.) I really haven't written in awhile for a few reasons. I threw a dart at a map of those reasons, and it metaphorically hit the word "layoffs." I work with three people. In workspeak however I have a manager and I work with 1.5 FTEs (full time employees). In the near future however, I will work with no FTEs and a fraction of a manager. I found this out a few ways. The first was months ago through a rumor. The second was when one of those FTEs told me they would not be working with me come the beginning of the fiscal year. The third was when the manager told me our .5 FTE would be leaving and that "Our office is being cut by 1.4 FTEs and you are not a part of that." Workspeak lacks emotion in an effort to avoid lawsuits. FTEs are people. Two people are losing their jobs and one person is having their job slashed. I feel like I ducked quickly enough through either skill or luck to evade enemy fire, and as the smoke clears I'm wading through the bodies. My platoon was decimated, and I'm checking on the body counts of the other platoons. There's another thing going on right now called "bumping." Bumping is when someone who has been given their walking papers can pass those walking papers onto someone with less seniority. It's like having your captor point a gun at you and ask, "Do you want to die, or do you want me to tag your buddy in the corner?" I haven't been writing because the theme of this blog is that you should only say things that you would say to someone's face. If you have a complaint about work, speak to your boss, or in some cases, your boss's boss. Don't whine about it on the internet. Any issues I've had at work have been delivered to the rightful recipients. And regarding layoffs in my office, I've pled my case to those in power to try and retain those that I feel deserve to keep their jobs. I spent the past ten minutes writing and deleting a lot of text that would have essentially given away what I do and who I do it for. That's why I haven't been writing; I feel very strongly about what's going on at my work, but it involves too many other people for it to be written about on the internet. I hate for anyone to lose their job. Especially anyone with kids or a family to support. I hate that teams that have been developed over the past few years are being disassembled and that those who remain will be asked to work harder for the same or less pay. But I have no voice to lament. I can't complain because I still have a job and I can't complain because I sincerely feel that the people dealing with the big picture are doing so in good faith. It takes money to make money. If you have money, then give it up. Create something that will give someone a job and make money off of it. Private sector or the government, I don't care. A job is a job and there's no good argument that either sector handles money any better than the other. Then use that money to create more jobs. Saving for a rainy day is ok, but when you horde it, you change people's lives for the worse.

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oneword.com

There's a website called oneword.com There's a new word each day and users have 60 seconds to write about that one word. Good stuff. I may not read everyone's entries, but it's a good excuse to at least write something creative everyday. Even if it is for only 60 seconds.

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My test using Storify

Storify is, according to them, "a way to tell stories using social media such as Tweets, photos and videos. You search multiple social networks from one place, and then drag individual elements into your story. You can re-order the elements and also add text to give context to your readers."

Here's a test story I just wrote using Storify. It continues my new found passionate lack of interest in horses.

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Daily 30 - Coffee

Daily 30 - coffee Music: Spencer the Gardner Note: It is not by my own free will that I am listening to Spencer the Gardner. I'm at a crafts fair he is playing at. This might turn into Daily 30:30 for the thirty seconds it takes me to walk over and smash his guitar a la Belushi in Animal House. I took a suggestion for today's theme and got "coffee." The first thought I had upon hearing this for some reason was Central Perk. So I'm rolling with it. The idea of six friends gathering daily at the same coffee shop to talk doesn't make much sense especially when you consider four of them lived either with each other or across the hall from each other AND two of them were siblings. Was Central Perk just a neutral location for all of them to hang with Phoebe? A coffee shop is a terrible place for six people to talk. I imagine there was some Philosophy Doctoral candidate from Columbia who went to Central Perk to work on his dissertation. It was probably a nice quiet cafe during the day. He would talk Hegelian dialectics withs Gunther. And then around four or five, while he's meditating over absolute idealism, he hears "HOW YOU DOIN?" His teeth grind. His fist clinches and snaps a pencil in three. Upon further thought, "a nice quiet place to drink coffee" is an oxymoron. It's like doing coke in a Japanese garden. Or taking a nap at a rock concert (which I've done. Sebadoh in Seattle - 1995.) The thirty minute timer just went off. Time to wrap up. Final note: I think the moral of the story is: coffee - good. Studying philosophy at coffee shop in the vicinity of six hopped up multimillionaires - bad.

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Daily 15 - Horses

just realized I haven't been posting what I've been listening too while writing these. For this post I didn't listen to anything. I bought an iPad recently with the idea that I will write more if a digital writing tool is more accessible. It's working great so far and the only problem is that my fingernails are the size of a toy poodle's so I sometimes merely click on the screen when I really want to type. Today's thirty minutes is on horses. Last night I was talking about writing with a friend and I mentioned how restrictions are good because they require you to be more inventive or not be so critical. I said it was good to write about something as random as horses. The output might suck but that's ok. If I can write a good post on the same average that Tony Gwynn gets hits, I'm doing ok. I rode a horse once and only once. I think it was named Gus, but maybe I'm just projecting the field goal kicking horse onto the gray Pinto I straddled. I don't know if he was actually a pinto as I have no clue what a pinto is. I was just comparing him to the 70s Ford hatchback that was unfairly known for catching fire. It was a summer camp and horse riding was an activity choice. Seriously, there is no reason for me to be writing about this non-event. Let me try another tact. I grew up in an area with a lot of horse stables. My brother worked at one shoveling hay and poop. I frequently run the trails near my house and just as frequently have to skip over piles of poop. I thought it was pretty funny too how everything was so immaculate and in it's right place for the royal wedding, and yet the street had tiny hills of horse crap when William and Catherine were paraded in front of the crowd. Anyone seen Equus? Or the documentary "Zoo?" I guess the moral of the story is I am pretty indifferent to horses and when I think of them I'm reminded of poop. Even the Patti Smith album. I keep thinking I should give it a listen because it's consistently listed as one of the greatest rock albums of all time. But I just don't care. I just don't care about horses.

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Computer keyboards are nasty.

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NPR Three-Minute Fiction

NPR occasionally holds a Three-Minute Fiction contest. The guidelines are simple. Write a short story under 600 words and follow a simple rule. For Round 6, the rule was that a character had to tell a joke and someone had to cry. NPR's joke was that I wasn't one of the 20 finalists. Joke's on them though because I didn't cry. I don't want to fill this post with sour grapes, but here's the intro to the winning entry. "My father tells a joke about a saint and a criminal who meet at a bar. He forgets the punchline, but I get his meaning. I am supposed to be one, my brother the other. Until yesterday, I might have known which one I am, but now I could be either." Commentary: If your father is telling a story where the criminal is a metaphor for your brother and the saint is a metaphor for you and there's no punchline, it's an allegory. I recommend reading through the finalists and especially through some of the comments.

But before you do that. Go ahead and read my entry, titled "Crackers." I didn't tell the joke because there was a chance the story would be read over the air, and I really didn't think NPR would read the joke over the air. If you'd really like to hear it, email or message me on Facebook and I'll tell you. It's pretty bad though.

Alright. Here's "Crackers."

(P.S. - When I searched NPR on google images, multiple photos of trucks came up.)

Susan gripped the leather steering wheel and pulled the gold sedan through the entrance of “The Abbey at Johnson’s Glen” at fifteen miles over the speed limit. The car dove, hopped the driveway, and hiccupped to a stop. Why was the back gate wide open? Had she and Dan been robbed? She slowly backed the car out of harm’s way as her fingers fumbled for the phone in her purse. It was no use, as the reception was showing zero bars. She dodged out and leaned her elbow against the trunk at such an angle that gave the phone a single bar. She hoped to hold long enough to call Dan when the phone buzzed with the announcement that he had left a voicemail.

“Crackers --- hit. Damn gas meter reader…GUY! -eft --- gate open! We’re at th- -et. Doctor –ndry. -36. --46. –all me when you get this. I lo— y-. Crackers is going to be ----.”

Susan bounced around the kitchen searching for a release. She controlled herself short of tearing down the magnets off of the refrigerator. The house was as Dan had left it. His breakfast interrupted by a neighbor knocking on the door to get help for Crackers. His industrial size coffee cup was two-thirds empty with a ring around the top third. The television looped the same commentary from that morning’s “Get it Right with Chuck White.”

“David, the Palestinians have a right to not live under the threat of the Israeli government destroying their settlements.”

“And they will earn that right when they stop killing innocents.”

“This is their land-”

“That is such a joke.”

“-was their land until 1948 when –“

“Oh lighten up, Randy.” David told a joke comparing Palestinian suicide bombers with self-inflating sex dolls. The discourse escalated until Chuck White told Randy he should watch himself before he landed in legal hot water.

The rhetorical white noise went unnoticed to Susan. She could only think of Crackers. Dan brought him home after Susan’s definitive in vitro failure. Crackers was four years old, fifteen pounds with perfect markings, and if you asked Dan and Susan they would tell you he was a spy for the CIA, played banjo at night with other neighborhood animals, and preferred reading the Weekend Journal. He would browse the travel section and dream of moving to some exotic country. Dan would hand Crackers an ice cube and remind Crackers that he, Dan and Susan were already a perfect family in a perfect country. If he behaved then maybe the family could visit Italy, Costa Rica, or Tibet. Susan would ask Crackers if he was a “conventional little doggy” in the same way she asked him if he wanted to go to the park. Crackers’ front and rear would stay planted while his middle oscillated and he delightfully barked “YES! YES! I want to go to the park!” And Susan would give him an ice cube for being a “polite conventional gentleman.”

Susan searched veterinarians in the yellow pages. “Bandry? Candry?” Of course Crackers would be ok. He was just stunned. Shaken up. “Fandry? Gandry?” She breathed deep and slowly counted each finger with her thumb. She smiled at a photo on the fridge of Crackers wearing a top hat.

The back door opened and Dan walked in. “Crackers is dead.” Dan frowned at the lukewarm coffee and dumped the rest out. He brought Susan’s head to rest on his shoulder, and felt a tear press against his cheek.

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Book of the Month - The Seven Storey Mountain

Sometimes you get messages telling you to finally read the book that's been sitting on your nightstand for the past few months. I finally decided to read this as I was reading some Flannery O'Connor short stories this weekend. (At some point this week I will discuss how O'Connor blew my mind.) I read the intro to the Flannery O'Connor short stories by either Farrar, Strauss, or Giroux and he discussed how O'Connor and Merton were close. The Capote/Lee relationship is fine, but I'd much rather see a movie on the Merton/O'Connor relationship. If anything, Merton's death was made for the screen. (He was accidentally electrocuted in Thailand.)

The time felt right to finally pick this book up. I'm off work this week and by batteries need recharging. As I previously might have said, I'm a Christian who doesn't go to church because I rarely feel safe in a sanctuary. That said, I'm hoping this book addresses a lot of the questions I have regarding faith and acts as a catalyst in my spiritual journey.

By the way, when I saw things like "spiritual journey", it's because it sounds a little less goofy than my "walk with the Lord." I'm a big fan of creative expression and language - when people create something unique that resonates with a large group. When I hear the cliched religious phrases...I understand they have a place and a purpose...but I wish people used phrases that said more about their relationship with God and less about how they feel the need to say the same phrases everyone else says so they can remain a part of the group. My faith isn't a "walk with the Lord." That sounds too much like faith is a romantic sunset stroll. My faith isn't really a spiritual journey, either. That sounds too much like I'm on the Starship Enterprise. I'm thinking my faith is more my "fishing trip with God." There's a lot of silence. A lot of waiting. I occasionally fall out of the boat. And the goal of the trip isn't necessarily to catch fish.

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Daily 30 - De La Soul is Cross Stitching

Music: Gorillaz - Plastic Beach

I was cruising Etsy until I decided to cruise regretsy and saw the following:

My lady started a cross stitch recently of the union jack. It's going to take forever but it's going to look cool. When she saw me having one of my three times a year crack ups at the Golum cross stitch, she said, "Oh no. Now you're going to think every thing I do isn't that great." She's wrong. I love that our space is filled with the things she makes and I would be disturbed to find it all replaced with golum cross stitching, three wolf t-shirts and black velvet Admiral Ackbar paintings.

However, there is a market for things like this and I think I might have to enter the rap album cover cross stitch market. It's perfect. As a work of art it's got a homey sensibility for most ladies, while reflecting on music from most men's youth. From there, it's onto skateboard decks. One day I want to sit in a breakfast nook of a house I own, sip espresso and watch the sunrise under my cross stitched cover of The Low End Theory.