Archive for July, 2005

harry potter and the angry philosopher

Published on July 27, 2005 in koinonia/community and zoe/life. 0 Comments

In Harry Potter’s 5th Year (book: Order of the Phoenix), he is angry. He often lashes out at his closest friends, refuses to take advice from the people that care about him the most, and has the hateful/vengeful/paranoid inner monologue of a bonafide nutjob.

I feel I’m a lot like that.

Except I don’t have the oh-so-convenient excuse of being a 15-year-old boy still going through puberty and high school.

I just read in the paper yesterday that one of the reasons high schoolers have so many, well, issues, is that the brain doesn’t fully finish forming its connections between logic and consequences until the early twenties. Well, dammit, now I don’ t have any excuse for the irrational shit that runs through my head.

We are moving. We’re leaving Colorado — a place that I’ve called home for the last 7 years, and in a sense, the only real home I’ve had. See, before this mountainous state, I lived in a place called South Dakota (which, despite its deceiving name, is terribly far north and cold) and in the town of 1300 where I spent the first 16 years of my life, I never fit in. You can ask just about anybody — it’s kinda hard being a musician/artist in a small, rural town… I’m not exactly the football type.

Anyhow, Colorado has been my home and now we’re leaving. We’ve got a really cool (albeit pretty small and inexpensive) townhome here right up against the foothills of the Rockies and we’ve got our 300 days of sunshine a year (not what most people think of when they think “Denver,” but it’s true) and we’ve got that feeling of stability that comes from having lived in a place for 7 years. No, all our friends aren’t here anymore, but we know where all of them are, and since this is a home base of sorts for most of them, here we are almost guaranteed to see them again, someday.

But Colorado doesn’t have an ocean. And because we’ve been here so long, it doesn’t really have any sense of adventure. It’s very limited in its possibilities for music and entertainment industry work. And now it doesn’t have some of our closest friends — who were honestly our connection to a social outlet — because they are moving in two weeks.

And so I feel unstable. Because part of me doesn’t want to let go of that secure feeling of “home” that I’ve been building for 7 years. But part of me doesn’t feel like this is home anymore anyway. And sometimes I’m excited to sell this house, but other times I think of how much time and sweat we put into this place making it OUR house and I don’t want to anymore. (Sometimes those thoughts happen at the same time, which really sucks ass.) Part of me longs so badly for an adventure of the grandest kind, but part of me is terrified at the thought of it. I want to do music for a living, and that would be a much more likely possibility somewhere else, but the truth is that it’s often more appealing to stay here where the competition is slimmer (and often not very competitive, to tell the truth).

Sometimes I wonder what the point is in upsetting all this peace for a crapload of unneeded turmoil. Often, I am conflicted, angry, vengeful and paranoid and I feel like a 15-year-old hormonal boy.

Then I remember why we decided to do this in the first place, which was really quite simple — because we can. We’re young with no kids and we just don’t want to grow up yet… and we don’t have to! Sure, it’s going to be tough, but we’re doing this because we WANT to.

Truthfully, I think a big part of both of Allison and I NEEDS this — we desperately need some adventure back in our lives. We need a change of scenery. We need a clean start, not because we had a bad one here, but because it feels SO good to go to a new place with new opportunities and feel new feelings and see new sites and breathe new air. To be able to be whoever it is that you want to be, because nobody knows you yet! To make new friends. To do new things to make money. To have new experiences, to see new sunsets, to go to the ocean…

…to not have to shovel 8 feet of damned snow off my car in January…

Yup, California… here we come. (Cue the Phantom Planet…)

If you liked that, then try these…

two kingdoms

jim wallis on the daily show

honest

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hope

Published on July 20, 2005 in epilogei/choice and zoe/life. 0 Comments

It amazes me that someone can run a thread of purpose through our miniscule, pain-filled lives, but I do believe it.

If I didn’t believe there was a someone else that I don’t understand able to do this something (creating purpose) that is utterly impossible, from my perspective, I’m just not sure what there would be to live for.

For some reason, I have hope — and sometimes that’s all I have. But most of the time, it’s enough.

If you liked that, then try these…

in good company (meaning)

diplomatic immunity

language

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just a dream

Published on July 18, 2005 in zoe/life. 1 Comment

I wish it were raining right now; for some reason I think it would feel a bit more appropriate, more pensive. At least it’s still somewhat dark and those early-morning clouds haven’t completely cleared yet.

It’s 5:37 in the AM and I just woke up from a dream in which I saw this girl I haven’t seen for a long time. Put that way it sounds so insignificant, but you have to understand that this wasn’t just any girl. This was the first girl that I had a tremendous crush on, the first girl that I desperately wanted to date (but never did), the first girl that I… loved. Seriously; it’s classic tale of unrequited high-school love. That stuff hurts like hell.

I haven’t seen her for YEARS — probably like 7. I haven’t even THOUGHT about her for probably, oh, I don’t even know — two? How is it that dreams can access these random points of memory that have been so long dormant? That’s not to say that I’m still in love with this girl; I’m not, and haven’t been for many, many years. But the fact is that I cared about her so much and wanted her friendship so badly (that sounds so terribly corny now, but it was true) that every couple years her face will pop into my brain, and I’ll do a people search on those sites you do people searches on, and I’ll always come back with absolutely nothing. Of course, she’s probably married now with a two-year-old and one on the way (that’s what people from South Dakota do, you know) with a new last name and an asshole farmer for a husband.

Of course, in my dream she was a twenty-four year old version of the girl I knew — beautiful as ever, and of course, happy and carefree (as I always wished she’d turn out to be).

So why were we at in a ski town? I don’t ski, really, anymore. And this husband, or at least fiancee, was in the dream too — but I don’t remember him from real history. But I do remember thinking (in the dream) that he was even a bigger dork than me (no small feat, I assure you, and some cruel twist of dream-fate for her to have married someone even dorkier than me). And honestly, why did it have to be in a little room that housed a Starbucks? (Working too much, Josh?)

But oh, the look on her face when she saw me — it was… perfect. Of course, I don’t think this would ever happen if we actually saw each other again anywhere outside my own dreamworld, but it was the look that can only be elicited by years and years of non-contact built on years of friendship, and, what I hoped at least, part mutual crush from back in the day.

Maybe if I keep my eyes closed, I can stay there happy and laughing and reminiscing and catching up, things that two old friends would do — even though I’m not sure if when she thinks back if she would remember me as a friend or just some strange kid that hung around a lot. For awhile there, I really was that friend she’d talk to about the problems she was having with her boyfriend (who also always happened to be one of my best friends; tragic, I know) and then eventually I’d move to being the guy she’d cry to when something irreparable happened between them. She even put her head on my shoulder once. Funny how you remember that stuff.

She never knew, by the way. In all the years of pining and watching her date other guys and make really stupid choices, I never ONCE told her how I felt. I suppose in a way she’s the reason I started writing songs. No, really, she IS the reason, now that I think about it. You’ve gotta get that crap out of you, man, or it’ll eat you from the inside out like some kind of liquid plumber shit.

I’ve been writing this dream down for twenty minutes and the pictures, the feelings, are already almost gone. I hope it’s OK that this is a part of me that I just don’t want to let go. I guess the pain just lets me remember that I’m alive, and sometimes the pain of a memory like this starts to feel good, even. Maybe you know what I mean. Eh, maybe not.

Of course I had to check my email when I woke up, just in case she emailed me out the blue. But that wouldn’t even qualify as out of the blue; that would be some kind of direct miraculous work done via the internet. And here’s something weird — if I remember right (and I’m quite certain I do), her birthday is July 19. That’s tomorrow.

Creepy.

So here I am before 6am in the morning, trying to write all this stuff down, just so I can hang on for a few more seconds. I wanted to stay there for awhile, in my dream, but of course you can’t. Something woke me up, and now I know that I’ll never get that moment back, because it never really existed. Because when you’re asleep, that’s all you get… just dreams.

It was always just a dream.

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reality

Published on July 14, 2005 in epilogei/choice, koinonia/community, techni/art and zoe/life. 0 Comments

Sometimes I hear people criticize a movie or a TV show for not being realistic. But the truth is, we don’t really want realistic, do we? I mean, I figure that if we really wanted REAL real life, we’d set our lawn chairs outside the neighbors’ house and watch them every night.

Ew.

No, we want romanticized snapshots of what real life can be — those ideal moments when life is beautiful and good. We want a glimpse out of the confines of our own lives, with our 40 hours of work and our 2 hour commute and our 5 minutes of bliss into “that” — that something else that is interesting and magical and dramatic and adventurous.

Or maybe what we’re looking for is meaning. Maybe TV shows and movies are just condensed to the point where it’s easy to find purpose in them, and so we gladly lose ourselves for a couple hours for the overwhelmingly fair trade of belonging. It seems to me that our real life “moments” are so spaced out, it’s often hard to connect the dots, to make stars into constellations.

Maybe we just want “Friends,” or for “Everyone [to] Loves Me,” instead of just Raymond, or maybe we’re even just looking for drama — to live in “The OC” or to be a “Survivor” of something exciting. Know what I mean?

Maybe all filmmakers and TV writers are just packagers of purpose, guilty of creating some kind of thematic gravity that pulls us in and allows us to see life at its most simple and refined — life that actually makes sense, most of the time.

Or maybe I’m a complete whack-job who thinks too much.

(I suppose it could be both.)

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supervisoring

Published on July 14, 2005 in dikastis/justice, politik/politics and zoe/life. 1 Comment

I just got back from my interview to be a “shift supervisor” at the magical wonderland of Starbucks. After one finishes something like an interview, the choice question is always “how did it go?” Well, “it” went fine, I guess; my interviewer, District Manager Kim, is a fairly nice lady who is probably the most passionate-about-the-Buck-person I’ve ever met, but I’m pretty sure I’m not going anywhere. After 10 minutes observing me taking exorbitant amounts of people’s money for liquid caffeine, she came to the obvious conclusion that I really need to work on my leadership “aura.”

A good money-taker needs a strong aura, you know.

I could be all off-base; maybe she’ll let me go be a supervisor, but my instincts say she’s gonna bench me at barista for the next month, at least.

Just like everyone else, I suppose, I like to blame others for shitty things that are done to me, but in this case, I’m pretty sure it’s not my fault that I don’t have a great aura. I do think — and this will come as NO shock whatsoever to you who know me — that this is a fault in the leadership of my store. My manager, while a tremendously sweet person, has let me spend the past two months getting “ready” to be a supervisor by giving me NO feedback. Therefore, obviously, I’ve been changing NOTHING about what I do at my job.

I feel like the last two months of my working life have been effectively wasted by this poor excuse for a leader.

After being interviewed twice already (before today), with very little guidance on what I was supposed to “improve” on (what I did get pretty much consisted of “make sure the lobby is cleaner”) I was told by said manager that she “thinks there’s something I need to work on… but she doesn’t know what it is.”

What!?!

What the hell does that mean? And what am I supposed to do with that?

Well, I’ll tell you what I did: the best job I know how to do, only to find out that it’s just not good enough. Not enough aura, baby, sorry.

Maybe I should have pushed harder for feedback. Maybe I should’ve visited the local metaphysical store for some aura-rebuild-powder or something. Maybe I should have done SOMETHING differently. That’s fine, but it doesn’t change the fact that I feel pretty crappy for something that was MOSTLY somebody else’s fault. What’s a manager there for if not to take care of their people?

You know what, though, maybe it is about me; maybe the apathy I try so hard to hide is showing through. I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point within the past 3 years or so, I dropped my title of Mr. Overachiever from my business cards. Anymore, if I don’t see the relevance of something, I just don’t bother with it, really. Unfortunately, the majority of Starbucks work fits into the “irrelevant” category in my head, and I’m sure to some degree, my attitude shows it; I’m not very good at hiding my disapproval for something ideological.

So who knows what will happen; it’d sure be nice if I could find something that would pay me that I also really care about, though.

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honest

Published on July 8, 2005 in alethia/truth, epilogei/choice, koinonia/community and zoe/life. 0 Comments

Allison just said in this blog that she “just wants honesty” (and got lambasted by one of her “friends” for saying it, actually).

But it got me thinking, and it occurred to me that Allison and I both have an intense desire for honesty, and maybe that’s one of the big reasons why we get along so well.

I also thought about what I said in my last post about seeing the world through really dark-tinted lenses, and I think this probably has a lot to do with it. When I take a good, honest look at this planet (especially America, actually), I don’t see very many happy people. I watch The Real World and I see really good looking people who really don’t like themselves. They generally aren’t very happy — but every once in awhile the cameras will capture a moment of their honesty. Most of the time it’s a breakdown on the phone to their mom or to a confessional camera or something, but it’s still honest. And I do like that. There’s something about truth (real truth, I mean, not just someone’s opinion; I think most of the time we can tell the difference) that no matter how painful it looks on the outside, it seems to have some level of beauty hidden within it.

And Allison and I — I think we really find each other in really similar places on this. To some degree, I think both of us value honesty and truth over happiness — not that these two things are necessarily mutually exclusive. But honesty… there’s just something about it. When someone is honest with themselves, it puts them in a position to grow, to go… somewhere. When someone is truthful and open — and by the way, truthfulness should never be separated from the notion of an accompanied love (which is where I think Allison’s friend really missed the ball) — it seems to turn a moment of darkness and hurt into an opportunity for something very colorful.

Honest.

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distracted

Published on July 1, 2005 in alethia/truth, epilogei/choice and zoe/life. 0 Comments

Perhaps the most evil thing about humanity isn’t our propensity for malevolence but our ability to get distracted.

The other day we toured Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, and Henry Ford’s replica of Menlo Park — where Thomas Edison created history in the form of invention after invention and gave me the artificial light by which I write this blog post.

At the Village, I discovered that Edison and I could be friends; near the historic buildings they have character actors playing the parts of these fantastic people, and Edison seemed like the kind of guy I could get along with (assuming he was even close to still being alive). He was apparently intense and passionate and never, ever gave up. And… he was just a little crazy.

Yeah, we could definitely be friends.

So, during all this, I wondered where the light bulb of today is; I mean, the light bulb was completely revolutionary, has impacted the entire planet, and honestly hasn’t changed all that much in the past 125 years. Where are these new ideas? Of course, I’d probably put computers and the internet in this category, but cars and airplanes — they were invented back in Edison’s day, too.

In any case, my point with the whole distraction comment above is just that I wonder some things: if people wouldn’t get distracted so easily by the pursuit of dollar signs, if the greatest minds on the planet could be harnessed to better mankind instead of dis-integrate it, if we could somehow look past ourselves and think about somebody else once in awhile…

I think we, as humans, find a lot of ways to distract ourselves. This idea probably doesn’t sound too ridiculous if you stop and think for a moment — I personally think about what things really make me smile and the fact that I rarely spend much of my day doing those things, and I realize that humanity — particularly western “civilized” humanity — has created an entire ecosystem of material distraction. It makes me sad, because what comprises the entirety of one’s life can be almost nothing but a series of distractions from what’s truly important to that person. Now I hope and pray that at the end of our lives, this situation will describe neither you nor me, but I know a lot of people that already live in this place.

And you know, I’m sorry that my writing dwells so much on the sadness of life; sometimes I wish I were a more happy, carefree individual. But there just seems to be something hardwired into me that sees the world through these darker tinted lenses of mine.

Maybe that’s OK…?

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