An exercise in knowing oneself.

I like pretty things. I like strong things. I like color. I like coffee. I like men's hands. I like being with Jordan the best. I like good questions, but I like great answers better. I like typing. I like drawing naked people. I like watching a friend of mine set up a photograph. I like roses. and organized gardens. I like running. I like laying in the sun. I like porches. no, I love porches. I like dancing, slightly intoxicated. I like reading. I like pizza. I like looking really pretty. I like people with style. Kind of hate them too. More like though, I guess. I like what children look like. I like lips. and skin. I like fields of grass. I like the mountains. I like Dad dancing, and Will. I like Polaroid photographs. (how could you not? who doesn't? who wouldn't?) I like sushi. I like dreaming about love and romance and adventure and wars and creating and laying in the sun with someone and homes and children and music yet to be written and colors and styles and pictures from the future. Yup I do.
What else? I love my piano. I love the newer Pride and Prejudice. I love Patrick. I love my black short boots. I love photographs and good drawings. I love sleep. I love Jordan and Luke's little pea brain baby. I love the hope of living like a disciple. I love Joseph's music. I love traveling far, far away. I even love jet lag... I love fires, and baths. I love beautiful and tasteful interiors. I love huge beds. I love red hair. I love the idiosyncrasies of my friends. I love stories about miracles. I love hearing about the work of God on the earth today. I love starbucks coffee. (yes i do.)
I hate hypocrisy. I hate snobbery. I abhor gossiping. I hate bratty-ness. I hate pettiness. I hate spiders and moths. I hate false representations of God. I hate lies. I hate it when people believe lies. I hate negativity. I hate the struggle for faith. I hate broken things. I hate how hard life is. I hate bad piano music. I hate being pushed to make decisions by people who refuse to. I hate selfishness. I hate lack of design. I hate bad design. I hate the weird thick cloud of lies enmeshing the western judeo-christian mind, keeping it down, keeping it content, keepin it scared, keeping it powerless. I hate that it has me. I hate when God doesn't heal people that I want him to. I hate bad jobs. I hate bad bosses. I hate that I can't make my posts go all the way across the page of my blog. I hate walking. Okay..... y'all come on back from that dad-burned G.S. weekend now.

so sad...

Hello friends, and people that read my blog. You should really comment occasionally and not just be ghost blog readers. I hate those.
I guess I couldn't really explain to a single one of you why I am so sad this evening. I am thankful, as I glance down, to see that it is already 7:17 PM. That means I can go to sleep pretty soon...like in 3 hours. I only have to make it three more hours. I don't like it when my deep vulnerabilities are brought out where I can see them. When something happens to trigger me being uncontrollably sad, or angry. Or both. It makes me panicky. I know that my heart is not resting completely in Jesus. (please, don't be concerned, yours probably isn't either.) When something can totally undo me, totally unnerve me, have me acting in opposition to what my logical precepts would dictate.... then my heart, my self, is not my own. And that makes me panicky, which in turn stresses me out, so then i'm feeling uncontrollably sad, angry, panicky, and stressed out. I fucking hate emotions. I hate loving. I hate being hurt. I hate need. I hate needing, anything. I hate want, desire, longing. I hate my vulnerability. I hate my weakness. I'm so tired of being hurt, and wanting and not being filled, of needing.....and needing and needing and needing no end in sight. This life, as good as God is, in my opinion offers so, unbelievably much pain and hurt, and the good here is a joke in the face of the weight of the pain. I know God works, and redeems, and brings hope...but are you fucking kidding me!!! I'de take heaven, now, over every thing this life has to offer me today or tomorrow(s). Course I don't really know tomorrow. Never been there. So I speak foolishly, without authority...i know.
Just being honest.
It is now 7:33PM.

Me. (photo by Jon Rule)

I've got two quotes today....

The first one is,

"Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation."

— C.S.Lewis, The Four Loves

And the second,

"There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, thought the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke. "

-said by Ishmael, Moby Dick

I really like these. They both make me think of ways that I and my loved ones deal with life. I think, perhaps, they are both to be avoided. The second one not nearly so much as the first, but still... one can find too much comfort in a joke, find recourse in sarcasm, a home in self-pity and self-focused humor. To pity yourself, even with a smile, because the joke of life is on you, to have the touch of the sardonic in every bit of beauty you find left, will poison you, in the end. Damn you. Just like Lewis said, in the first. And the flip side? What to do? Anyone want to counter these? When your heart is not cold... but broken? When you deal with the momentous head on, earnestly, without humor, and it is too much? The tribulation of the momentous is too much?

(Or I guess I could go back to work.)

"The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run."


This came last week to me in Moby Dick. How fabulous, really. How wonderful. I am just enjoying that book more than I have enjoyed a book in a long time. I hope that this time in my life will be looked back upon and characterized by the reading of Moby Dick. I do that, you know, with the seasons of my life. Find something to attach them to, to associate them with. Helps me stay organized in my memories. Kind of love doing it, too. This book has so much beauty and so much roughness, I can literally feel the wind and the salt water cracking my lips, that songs of the sailors, the fears of the first mate and the wild vengeful anger of Ahab. I am there. I am always there when I'm reading. Perhaps that is why I love to read, so much. I can read this book slowly, soaking it in, paced, and I can't do that usually. I can read it with rain, or with dark, it takes me in so completely and deeply, albeit slowly, that I am gone from now and so exultant to be there, with Ishmael.
I miss my friends this morning. I want to have a party. I want it to be New Years. I want to see Knox and Emily. I want to watch Luke play a game. I want to play red rover with Jordan, Anna Laura, Emily, Samantha, Knox, Marshall, Matt, Josh, Katie Gray, Luke, Will, Ran, Crystal and Britta, Jaden, Shiloh, Dawnie, and perhaps more people that want to play, anyone who wants to play. I want to have a pick-nick in the park, have my Dad pay for all of the food, invite all my friends, and play red rover. And I want Shiloh to win. And me. Too. I want to sit in chairs and talk to the women folk about gardening, and men. I want to see Jaden and Shiloh fly kites. I want to go to the mountains. I want to swim. And have pizza at the pool. And have a handstand contest. I want to count deer in the loop, and walk back into the woods to see that old house, or that old church. I need anna laura to be there, to see the old house or church. Maybe she will have her camera. I hope we listen to music in the car on the way there. I hope I don't have to drive. I hope gas is free that day. I hope nobody forgets cream or foil. I hope we have an easter egg hunt or maybe play freeze tag or whiffle ball. I hope Pastor Mitch is there...he was always there when we had easter egg hunts. In the mountains. It will be so cold to swim in the mountains. Maybe we'll go to the lake instead, and ride on the tube, or better yet watch Jordan and Emily ride on the tube. And they'll be grinning so big and trying to hang on for dear life and screaming and maneuvering to balance the tube against the incline. And I will be getting a tan. And the pickles will be so good, whether we are at the mountains, or the park, or the lake. The pickles will just be so good. Ummmh.

http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/swineflu_you.htm

What should I do to keep from getting the flu?
First and most important: wash your hands. Try to stay in good general health. Get plenty of sleep, by physically active, manage your stress, drink plenty of fluids, and eat nutritious food. Try not to touch surfaces that may be contaminated with the flue virus. Avoid close contact with people who are sick.
-Center for Disease Control

I think we should take this seriously, people. I will be participating in doing my part to fight the swine flu at 5:30, preservation pub. Joiners? I will walk there, I will drink, I will eat, I will de-stress, and then I will go home and sleep.