Pride Goes Before the Fall

I'm not proud of it, but I love sugar wafers. Even though I bellyache about processed food, MSG, transfats and addictive chemical additives to our food more than most (as my wife will be glad to attest) I just can't get enough of the eerily preserved pink, brown and yellow wafers filled with some sort of sweet tasting goo invented to trap rats in WWII. Ah, well, we all have our vices, right?

This past week has been effing murder. Tuesday saw two very important and very difficult tests both covering a glut of information on disparate topics come and go, followed by my faculty review for practicum today. I just ate a package of 'strawberry' sugar wafers; it seems to have taken the edge off.

See Below

I'm not quite sure what's been going on inside my head for the last week or so, but I'm think I might have transmittable spongiform encephalitis. Damn the cattle industry and their cost-cutting ways. In all reality I’m probably just more stressed than I’m willing to admit, but I have been dropping the ball on a variety of life tasks for the last few days ranging from badly butchering the cornbread recipe tonight to somehow mistaking a class’ start time. Classic. While my life has been swirling, however, there have been three things that burn brightly through my mental fog. Apropos as it may be, one of them actually happened to me (I think) and the other two manifested out of the morass that is YouTube.

1. While tutoring earlier this week, I looked up to see one of my students hastily retrieving his left index finger from his right nostril. I cocked my eyebrow at him, and he looked slightly abashed for a moment. He then scrunched up his face in an entirely unabashed fit of laughter and confided in me, “I pick my nose almost every day!” Nuff said.
   

2. I somehow stumbled across a Phil Collins video that had me dumbstruck for nearly 15 minutes. I honestly can’t even remember how I found it, but after blindly clicking through a completely random series of ‘linked’ videos, I saw the MTV video for ‘Against All Odds.’ Great song. Inexplicable video. I can’t say much more without totally ruining everything, but I will say bare-chested Jeff Bridges + Count Collin-acula = solid gold music video.

3. As my test for psychopathology approaches, I surf more and more blogs. I found a link to a guy beat-boxing several different songs on a flute on Cory’s. On a FLUTE! If you want to know what it feels like to actually do what this guy is doing in the video, keep sucking in air and blowing it out as fast and as hard as you possibly can for about 3 min. But before you start, go ahead and call the Ambulance because you'll probably fracture your skull when you pass out and smack your noggin at the 53 sec mark. Props, dude.

PS: My dad played flute as well as starting flanker for Hughson High in 1965. We live in a different world now.

PPS: If you watched Phil, check out IMDB for more background on the video.

Shout Out

Yo yo you, holla atcha boy. Imma give a shoutout tuh ma boy JRCO for strait hooking my blog up wid a sweet new look. Wurd.

All My Exes

Through some unlikely twist of fate, I have had six ex-girlfriends in my 25 years at large on the general public. Some of those relationships split because of intense stupidity on my part, some broke off because of fairly erratic behaviour on their part and some simply drifted apart as lives are wont to do when you're still in 5th grade. As much as I'd like to say that my relationships with these girls all ended on good notes, my sophomoric and inexperienced approach to the dating realm left me with really only half of them wrapped up in a mature fashion. I have never regretted dating anyone, however, and still genuinely respect and enjoy all of them as people. That being said, there is no more peculiar experience than bumping into an ex at an unexpected time. I ran into my ex from Jr. High with alarming frequency at unfathomable locales. I found her on the Presidio in Monterrey one Fourth of July casually lounging with her Firefighter boyfriend. Several years later, she happened to start working at the rock gym I climbed at after I graduated college. Just creepy stuff. The funny thing about running into exes, however, is the flood of memories that return. Relational interactions you imagined long dead rear their heads again in spectral imitation of a life long past, questions of etiquette stare you harshly in the face and all the bad memories dash back into the wainscoting.

Tonight I went back to the Church I grew up in for the first time in a very long time. Confronted with the dichotomy of returning from a leadership retreat for the church I currently attend and returning to a service at the Church which I credit with forming me into the man I am today, I'm left feeling like I just ran into my ex while shoe shopping with my current girlfriend¹, and it’s left me reeling a bit. The message delivered tonight was impeccable, the friends I still have in that Body were enjoyable and the building itself folded me back like I had never left. And yet, I have left. In the six years since I have attended that Body regularly I have graduated college, moved six times in two different states, gotten married, worked diligently through 3^1/2 semesters of graduate school and maintained a full beard for nearly 3 months. I’ve undoubtedly changed, but I can’t say that I have 'moved on,' because University Presbyterian Church will always be my home church and cannot be supplanted. I think that The Well has a lot of great things going for it, and am entirely confident in my worshiping there; I am very glad I had the chance to sit in University Chapel tonight and enjoy worship with the Body there.

Same Ol Feeling

I hate Tech. Again.

My Normal Life

I was a pretty boring guy all the way through college. I had a soap opera quality social life, but I never got arrested, crashed the ‘Girls Gone Wild’ filming or even had a car to smash into anything. I don’t like loud parties much, being drunk actually kinda freaks me out and the only time I was sitting in a circle having the Magic Dragon passed ‘round I turned it down more out of plausible deniability than moral fortitude. My wife has told me on several occasions that she always wanted to marry a nerd, so I guess that makes me one lucky guy, right? One September night my senior year of college, however, I drove to Austin, Texas with two friends in a bright red Jeep to sound my proverbial ‘YAWP.’ I had just finished a long hard summer of classes and putting my heart back together from a messy relationship the year before. It was a sticky summer of close friendship, head shaving, toe painting and soul searching that left me with a lot of emotional steam to release and I found my catharsis when I heard Chris Carrabba pipe,

‘And the picture frames are facing down
and the ringing from this empty sound
is deafening and keeping you from sleep.
And breathing is a foreign task
and thinking's just too much to ask
and you're measuring your minutes by a clock that's blinking eights.’

And so it was that I made the pilgrimage to see this sage for myself; to sit at his feet and behold in person the angst which flowed so palpably through his plaintive voice. To for one night lap up what MTV had been pitching. When Lee, Karen and I made it to 6^th Street in Austin, found some parking and made our way to Stubb’s BBQ, I had officially left College Station and found myself instead on the set of Wild On. The kaleidoscope of humanity, bouquet of olfactory sensations and cacophony of traffic mixed with shouts of revelry mixed with the deep resonance of driving bass grabbed me like a shore-breaking wave and easily subsumed my person into its energy.

Just outside the gate to the venue, I happened to run into my roommate from the year before, his eyes already glazed and lolling. Needless to say he was thrilled to see me. From there we barely dodged some projectile vomit from a young looking blonde and then somehow managed to keep her from plummeting to the ground after it until an EMT could be found to attend to her. From the midst of the throng of several hundred revelers, we let the music wash over us and felt our sweat mingle with that of our impossibly close neighbors and the water from the hose they intermittently sprayed the crowd with. After several hours of roiling participation in the rite, we made our way back the Jeep cotton-eared and reeking of God only knows what. I had never experienced anything quite like it before and never have since.

My cousin had jello shots at her wedding reception last night, and it kinda brought it all back for me.

Fresh Eyes

Binocular vision is a tricky thing. I've never had the experience of monocular vision, but from personal experience I can say with certainty that the former is far from perfect. Although purported to sport the functional benefits of depth perception and improved detection of distant objects, I seem to have a startling propensity to completely miss what is sitting two inches from my own nose. I could have sworn that's what binocular vision was supposed to fix. One of the many valuable features on slate.com is David Plotz's blog through the Bible. Starting in Genesis and currently extending through Ezekiel, his unique and intelligent take on Scripture has been refreshingly binocular to my customary fashion of addressing The Book. Plotz by no means provides a scholarly commentary for serious Biblical study, but the blog is rife with perspective and priceless for brain fodder.

Another example of completely missing what's in front of my nose: Today I bought a mountain bike with a huge dent in the down tube. It wasn't until I was prancing it around in front of my friend Scott that he said, "Hey, did you see this big old dent here in the down tube?" I wonder if that's what those Mennonites have harping on and on about . . . ? Tomorrow I go to Herb Bauer's to do battle with James the cycling manager.