545 People

I got an email this morning from my father. It was a simple email containing no words, but a simple attachment I was beckoned to read (you can read it at the bottom of this post).

As is normal with nearly every email my parents forward to me, I immediately hit snopes.com to investigate the email’s validity. To my surprise the email was true and in fact was written by Charlie Reese. To my further surprise, this was originally written 25 years ago. (To see two more versions other than the one above hit up this piece on snopes.com.)

After reading the three versions I’ve found (I’m sure there are more) I’ve come to the conclusion that good old Charlie was either a brilliant clairvoyant or a vitriolic idiot. I’m inclined to lean toward the latter. For twenty five years the conservatives in this country have been blaming Congress for every single woe we’ve faced. In fact, the conservatives have been blaming Congress for far longer than that (even way back when the Democrats were the conservatives).

So does this little missive, with its updated names and places, serve as the “I told you so” to the rest of America? I don’t think so. What it does show is the real problem: a lack of personal responsibility. The piece touches on it a few times, but lays that responsibility mostly in the hands of the infamous “545 people.” What about our responsibility as voters? (It’s mentioned once)

There certainly are more than 300 million people in this great nation, but good old Charlie neglects to mention voter turnout. There aren’t 300 million people voting in these elections, not even close. According to infoplease.com voter turnout was only 56.8% of registered voters.

And I bet some of you are saying “Oh wait, what’s this registered voters thing?”

Me: “That? It’s just the number of people in the country who are actually of age to vote; 18 or older.”

You: “Oh. So there aren’t actually 300 million people who could replace these 545 wicked sinners?”

Me: “Not even close, but I was just talking about the number of people who could vote. There’s an entirely different number of people who are eligible for any of these 545 positions.” (I’ll direct you to the Wikipedia page on the qualifications of a Senator and a Representative so this rather generous number shrinks even farther now.)

You: “Damn lazy reporters.”

Me: “Damn right.”

Then again, voter turnout is only really high every four years during a Presidential election. On the “off years,” as I call them, the voter turnout is closer to the high thirtieth percentile. (37.1% – roughly 80 million voters)

The only part of good old Charlie’s letter I agree with is the last few lines, which comes down to this: “Bitch, follow, or do it yourself.” The first two do no one any good, but the last is imperative to the health of any republic. The personal responsibility lays with us. Every registered voter in the United States has an obligation not just to bitch and whine, but to actually do something. Get out and vote your opinion. Don’t just scream it. Don’t just grouse behind a computer screen or newspaper. Support the representatives you support with your votes. But before you can even do that, they must be supported financially and physically. If you can’t donate $5, then donate a few hours of your time to help the people you believe in get to where they can do some good. And if you don’t find anyone out there who agrees with you then run yourself and find others who believe in you.

If you’re unwilling to do any of the previous, then the Common Sense Committee hereby revokes your right to bitch about this or any future situation the United States finds itself in.

Attachment follows the jump:

The Speech

On September 8, 2009 President Obama will give this speech to schools around the U. S. This speech is designed to:

Help get America’s students engaged! On Tuesday, September 8 — the first day of school for many students — the President will talk directly to students across the country on the importance of taking responsibility for their education, challenging them to set goals and do everything they can to succeed.

Ever since the announcement there have been people screaming about how it is illegal, immoral, and just propaganda. This, coupled with the Right’s attempt to paint President Obama’s health care initiative in a similar light, just goes to show how far they have actually fallen.

Let me assure you, it is not illegal. The President is not setting curriculum. To do that he would have to say something to the effect of “Today all science classes will now teach Intelligent Design.” This is not something he’s doing, nor will he ever. The President is not changing all schools over to the metric system. He is giving a speech. About personal responsibility. Something that I will agree should be taught by the children’s parents, but a concerned country and member of this society can only blame the parents for so long until action must be taken.

For that reason alone, it is not immoral either. The right wing, and many others, in this country want the government out of their lives. I can understand that and can even sympathize with that. I want corporate control out of my life and feel that’s a much bigger issue than government, but that’s an issue for another time. However, personal responsibility, a skill that very few members of my generation learned and thus, were not able to pass on to their children, is something that must be taught. If we did not learn it from our parents and we did not learn it from school, where were we supposed to learn it? So as a concerned citizen and leader of a society President Obama is stepping up to address the challenge of that very question. He’s not trying to supplant parents, nor is he trying to supplant schools, he is merely challenging the youth and future of our nation to do better than the generation before them. What loftier goal is there?

As far as propaganda is concerned, yes it is a bit of propaganda, but so is education. In fact, every educational system on the planet is designed to lay out the propaganda of that society. “U.S.A. is #1!” The pledge of allegiance and all that jazz. Yet President Obama is not putting a left spin or a right spin on the speech. He is trying to use his own experiences and the experiences of others like him to motivate our children to do better. Not because they’re failing and not because they’re lazy, but because as a parent he knows, just like every parent out there knows, that our children can do better.

It is a speech to our kids about something important that the vast majority of you never would have even hinted at to you own children, but because someone else is doing it, you have to scream and whine and moan about “parent’s rights” and “government influence.” Get real and wake up. There are far worse influences than the government speaking to our children every day.

As a final note, I would like to challenge everyone out there who is a member of the “screaming me-me’s” to tell everyone else where they were when President Bush did the same thing? Where were you when any President addressed the nation like this? I’ll tell you where you were. You were safe at home, or at your jobs, or at your bars not worrying once about it because that time it was “no big deal.” That President was just “one of the boys” what harm could he do?

It’s your day.

Happy Birthday, son.

Wherever you are I hope you got everything you needed, a few things you wanted, and a nothing you didn’t.

Poetry

I took a poetry class in the fall semester of 2008 and here is the outcome of that endeavor. I wrote several free-verse poems; Hate, I Run, and Splash. My favorites though were the ones with form. Hubris, a villanelle was the hardest of the bunch to draft. Reality, an Italian sonnet was a challenge because of the subject material, but still fun. Lastly, Skyline is the one I wanted to write from the very beginning of the class, but took the longest to write and was by far the most difficult. It is a series of haiku written about this picture. I don’t know the story behind it, nor do I know anything about him, but I hope the poem did the event justice.

• Hate
• Hubris
• I Run
• Reality
• Skyline
• Splash

You don’t say…

So I’m checking my email this afternoon and get a reply from a professor regarding a really late paper I turned in. (It was due November 10 and I turned it in yesterday.) At first I was completely terrified of reading his reply. I was so afraid he was going to tell me that I was going to get no points for the paper or that I had to have some serious audacity to turn in the paper so late. Surprisingly enough, none of that was in his message. It was short, to the point, and completely unexpected. In fact, I’m still dumbfounded and reeling from my initial read-through of his two sentence email.

He called me brilliant.

WTF, Mate?

I’ve slipped. Slipped back into a depressed slump. I’m trying to focus on my work and get back on track, but all I can seem to concentrate on is this near-overwhelming feeling that I need to lay down and cry. Right now I really wish I could do just that. I feel like there’s something welling up inside me and the stopper on my bottle won’t come loose; maybe if I was able to just get a good cry going I’ll feel better. I can’t though, maybe because in western American society it isn’t acceptable for men to show emotion at all let alone cry, but maybe it’s because I don’t really have anything to cry about.

I have three papers due in less than a week. In reality this shouldn’t be difficult to accomplish. I’m trying to work on one as I sit and write this, but as can be seen I’m getting distracted. I don’t want to pull an all-niter on Sunday because I’ve procrastinated this working time away. I don’t want to be distracted by these irrational feelings either.

I’ve been doing so well for so long. I haven’t had an episode like this in almost two years. I know this isn’t my fault and I know this is just a disease with no real cure, but I still wonder how long I’ll be sabotaging my success because of it.

Depression has been my constant companion for longer than I could define it. He is constantly trying to derail my every plan and all my life’s ambitions. I’ve let it absolutely destroy my life once, but did not realize it until I awoke one day curled up in the shadow of a trash dumpster. I had lost my son, my job, and I thought my will to go on as well. My mother helped me then and it was because of her sacrifice that I now wake up in my own apartment with a job I’ve held on to for the last four years and a future I never thought possible.

I can’t let it win.

Dreams and Portents

Cliche I know, but it felt right.

It’s quite normal to daydream and fantasize about things. What isn’t normal, or at least what doesn’t feel normal, is being a bystander in your own fantasy. In recent months, when I’ve fantasized or daydreamed about whatever may come to mind, I find myself relegated to supporting cast. I’m not the hero, I’m not the villain, I’m not even a plot device; just a random guy in the crowd.

For example: I used to fantasize about being Captain America, Professor Xavier, Magneto, or Dr. Strange. Now though, I find myself in background roles; often being one of the unfortunates who are killed in the destructive path of the villain before the heroes can stop them.

I feel as if I’m not special, not unique, not cared about, nor wanted. I know none of this is true, but it’s there all the same.

Now I have to discern what to do about this. How do I fix this? Is there anything to fix? Is there something wrong with me? Unfortunately I don’t know the answers to any of these questions.

And for someone who prides himself on being able to find the answer to whatever question is thrown at him, this situation just makes me mad.

Interesting searches

I find it interesting that someone has been searching for the name drakkar harley. I wonder if it is someone who has read my story and remembered the name, or if it is someone who knows my son, or if it is my son.

Wow. That’s a scary thought. He will be 12 this December and more than old enough to use a computer. I was pretty computer savvy at that age. Did he just get curious? Is his adopted parent doing this search?

Questions I’ll never get an answer to I guess. I better put these thoughts away or I’ll drive myself insane. But if it is you, Drakkar, who happened to run across this site; as much as it scares the hell out of me to say this, I’ll answer any questions you may have.

Yes we did

As the world well knows, on November 4, 2008, the United States voted to elect Barack Hussein Obama to be it’s 44th president.

I volunteered for the Obama campaign that day. I was asked to drive out to Republic, a short 15 miles from Springfield, because they needed more help than any of the Springfield offices did. It was a small office in the corner of a shopping center; decorated with every bit of campaign paraphernalia they could find. We were going out to canvass neighborhoods to ensure Obama supporters knew where their polling place was and that they actually got out to vote.

I was astounded to learn that I would be one of three team “captains” because I could drive and I knew the area. They needed people like that because, unbeknown to me, the Obama campaign had bussed almost 50 volunteers from Texas to Missouri. Not just for the 4th either; they had been in Missouri since Saturday. I was amazed, touched, and embarrassed all at the same time and all for the same reason; these people spent their time and energy to volunteer in a place they had never been before, to help people they had never seen before, to help a candidate they believed in, but I only had time for a single day.

I have always said that the faith most important to me is the faith I have in human potential. I will always remember November 4, 2008 as the day that faith was proven to be fact. There is no limit to what humans can do when we work together.

And did we work. I drove and we walked and the hours just slipped through our fingers as we knocked on door after door. After six very long hours the whole of Republic was finally canvassed. Then they sent me and six other out-of-town volunteers to a southern district in Springfield where a very large section of democrat-friendly voters had not been canvassed. Out we went again at 4:30. For the next two hours we rushed to talk to as many people as we could.

We were given two packets consisting of 8 streets each. I had been given two people. I gave them a street to walk and I took a street to drive. Thankfully the alignment in my car is still spot on. As I approached one of the houses on the list I would hop out of my car, let it continue rolling, talk to the person at the house, and then jump back in the car before it rolled away from their property. Dangerous, yes, but it allowed me to cover the same amount of ground as two people on foot.

It was 6:20, the sun had gone down, and the street lights were of no help in finding the addresses on our list, but I was able to talk to one last person. His garage door was open and I found him sitting outside enjoying a cigarette. I introduced myself, told him I was with the Obama campaign, and asked if he had voted yet. He told me he hadn’t and that he wasn’t sure if he was registered. I was kind of stunned. I said “sir, you’re registered to vote. And if you’re sure you are registered to vote, but your polling place doesn’t have your name on the rolls, they have to give you something called a provisional ballot. It’s only 6:25, your polling place is not that far from here, and if you are in line by 7pm they have to let you vote. This is possibly the most important election you will ever have the change to take part in. Don’t pass this up.”

He looked at me for a second, glanced at the ground, and then looked at the clock hanging on the wall in his garage. “You know what? Fuck it” he exclaimed as he dashed over the get the helmet for his scooter. “I’ve still got time right? And they have to let me vote right?”

“Yes sir they do. Thank you sir!” My heart was pounding as he drove his scooter off into the night.

I don’t know whether he was able to vote or not, but I am so excited he tried.

It was projected that Greene county only needed to have 42% of the vote for Obama to take the state. We capped out at 41%. Our efforts made this state undecided even three days after the fact. 5859 votes separate the two candidates.

That night, as I sat with a few friends watching the results at a downtown restaurant, I was speechless as I watched Senator McCain stroll out onto that stage and concede the race. The place erupted in deafening applause. A hard-fought campaign season was finally over. We could all rest, if only for a moment, and enjoy our victory. Now the hard work begins.

Yes we did.

Proving a point.

Recently, a… friend accused me of googling or copying the following text. This was said after I made mention that I was playing the part of Cyrano DeBergerac to my phone’s part of Cyrano’s mouthpiece, Christian. This is not my best short work, but I thought for a piece only taking me a few minutes it was humorous. You be the judge.

As I told her, this is 100% accept no substitutes original me (c) 2008.

(the following is in response to a text message I received from my friend which read: shoppings beating me…cant…let…it…win)

“You are strong! Let no clerk’s apathy keep you down. Let no friend with lesser conviction keep you from the next great deal. Let your passing, like the conquering queen, be marked by the corpses of empty reciept rolls!”

I hope she will be reading this soon as I challenged her to try to find it online.

Vacation over…

Well I’m home after almost two weeks on the road I’m glad to be home, but I’m also sad to be home too. There was so much to see and do in the 4,750 miles driving across the country. If you would like to see a map of the journey, you can see it here. You can also see some of the photos from the trip in my Flickr.com feed at the bottom of this page or at www.flickr.com/photos/michaelstorm/.

In my most previous post, Wyoming Pit Stop, I mentioned a story about my son Drake, here. I had inadvertently left it password protected when I put it up, but that restriction has been removed. My apologies for any misunderstandings.

Eventually I will write further about my trip, some of the sights I saw, the relatives I was able to reacquaint myself with, and how much of a grand adventure the entire thing was. For now though, I am tired and will probably sleep for a while.

Wyoming pit stop

I am currently sitting at Turtle Rock Coffee, etc., in Laramie, Wyoming trying to wake the hell up. While the countryside in Wyoming is beautiful, it stretches on forever and there is not much to look at. I didn’t have this problem through the plains of Kansas, but perhaps this time it is just fatigue (it also probably did not help that I stopped by the New Belgium Brewing Co. and sampled a few of their beers, not something I would suggest if you have to drive a long distance immediately after). I had also heard a song on the radio and had to send a message to the certain someone it reminded me of.

It has been a blast thus far and I have seen things I never thought I would see. I’ve taken a lot of pictures and they can all be seen on my flickr feed, along with short descriptions of the shots. I might be a little more than halfway to my destination in Oregon and that makes me excited, but at the same time very nervous because it is only Tuesday and I don’t have to be in Washington until Friday. I won’t actually make it to the University of Oregon today, but I will be close. Still, even if I get there on Wednesday, Washington is close enough that I will make it later that day. I don’t know what to do with myself for Thursday and Friday…

I’m planning on attending the Yakama Treaty Signing Days in Washington this weekend with a previous instructor. He is a Yakama tribe member and has graciously welcomed me to intrude on his weekend. I’m truly looking forward to it.

I’ve come to realize that my life is not as private as I once thought it was. I am extremely internet savvy and thought I had insulated myself from the simple google search. After a conversation I had this past weekend with that same certain someone mentioned above I have had to re-evaluate this stance.

On my MySpace profile there are pictures of myself and my son. I think it is time I let that cat completely out of the bag. Anyone who wants can read the story in its entirety here. (Caution it is quite long and somewhat disjointed as I had blocked a lot of what happened out and am still in the process of remembering it all). Posting this was frightening, but I guess no more frightening than driving across the country all alone.

Finding someone new

Over the past several weeks I have gone from a Hillary supporter to an Obama supporter, but beyond charismatic qualities I could not really tell anyone why.

Until I came across this post: Hillary Clinton: The Psycho Ex-Girlfriend of the Democratic Party

Awesome in more ways than I can truly count; it sums up in a laughable way Senator Clinton’s arrogant attitude of self-entitlement and utter lack of ability to read the will of the American people.

http://www.barackobama.com/

I hate cars

I used to love them. I used to dream about having a fast car that could only get me in trouble and cost me a mint in gas. Some cool convertible painted british racing green that could just scream.

But then I got in two accidents in less than a year.

Miraculously neither of them were my fault. The first one, as posted here, cost me my deductible and the ability to trust if anyone ever carried insurance but me. The second one happened tonight and it was by far a totally different experience.

I was taking April home after some conversation, coffee, and spinach dip at Rendezvous downtown. I was in the right hand lane of Republic road driving east and there was a green suv in the left lane. We had just passed Freemont and I was gaining on him when he just pulled over into my lane. I slammed on the brakes and his bumper caught my driver’s door, creasing it from the back of the door to the wheel well, and nearly taking off my side mirror. Luckily no one was seriously hurt.

As you can see, there is some pretty extensive damage and I can only roll my window down about halfway, but the door still works and shuts most of the way. All I could do was stand there and laugh.

The most entertaining part of the whole thing was the guy who hit me. He was just a nice old man who was sincerely sorry he didn’t pay attention. He was in his 60’s, maybe even his 70’s, and he just retired three months prior from his job with the railroad. The guy hopped out of his suv and started asking if we were alright and how it was his fault. He said this was the first accident he had ever been in. For some reason I believed him.

I want my bicycle back. I took it in to one of the shops downtown to get it tuned up and they said it would be Monday or Tuesday before they got it done. I took it in last Wednesday. Hopefully they call me tomorrow.

I love my bike. It is blue and starting to rust slightly around the fork of the handlebars. Its a Schwinn and I got it for Christmas when I was 12. I’ve had that bike for 17 years and I don’t ever want to get rid of it. Hopefully I will get it back soon and I can leave my car alone for a while.

This has not been a great day.

I was wrong

Obama is right. And I should have supported him from the beginning.

And bravo to him for finally putting it out there. We are bitter and resentful. Now he may not be on the mark 100% for where those emotions get displaced to, but its a good start to being honest with us. Which is a whole hell of a lot better than McCain and Clinton have been. At the end of this post you will find the full text of what was supposed to be a closed fundraiser dinner.

My father, who is neither a democrat nor an Obama or Clinton supporter, has put it more eloquently than I have been able to. We talk often about the political state of the country we both cherish so much, and even his hardcore conservative republican roots whither before what is represented by these three opponents; you are either for change, or not. With Clinton and McCain, a vote for either of them is a vote for old money and an established way of doing things. In this modern era the average American understands this as merely giving lip service to those you want votes from. That is the Clinton and McCain legacy; we’ve done it like this for so long, why change? Obama on the other hand, represents change and a new way of doing and thinking within this republic for which he wants to stand.

Clinton and McCain both (with a surprising amount of similarity in their responses) said that Obama is out of touch with the average American. Are these two stoned? Are they so wrapped up in their own elitist dogma that they actually think they know what an average american goes through? Clinton paid her own brand of lip service to Pennsylvanians when she said she met “people who are resilient, optimist positive who are rolling up their sleeves.” This reeks of Republican pull yourself up by your own bootstraps rhetoric, and makes me sick to hear it from a Democrat I once supported. McCain called his comments elitist condescension, or rather an aide did, because it seems like McCain wants to be able to distance himself from sounding like the Republican hypocrite he really is.

We have to admit there is a problem before we can even begin to fix it. It’s time to talk and I think the Obama camp said it best in their press release regarding Clinton’s and McCain’s statements.

Senator Obama has said many times in this campaign that Americans are understandably upset with their leaders in Washington for saying anything to win elections while failing to stand up to the special interests and fight for an economic agenda that will bring jobs and opportunity back to struggling communities,” said Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor.

“And if John McCain wants a debate about who’s out of touch with the American people, we can start by talking about the tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans that he once said offended his conscience but now wants to make permanent.” (taken from this post)

What follows is the full text of the speech Senator Obama gave that started this. You can listen to it at this website.

“So, it depends on where you are, but I think it’s fair to say that the places where we are going to have to do the most work are the places where people feel most cynical about government. The people are mis-appre…I think they’re misunderstanding why the demographics in our, in this contest have broken out as they are. Because everybody just ascribes it to ‘white working-class don’t wanna work — don’t wanna vote for the black guy.’ That’s…there were intimations of that in an article in the Sunday New York Times today – kind of implies that it’s sort of a race thing.

Here’s how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government, and when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn’t buy it. And when it’s delivered by — it’s true that when it’s delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama (laugher), then that adds another layer of skepticism (laughter).

But — so the questions you’re most likely to get about me, ‘Well, what is this guy going to do for me? What’s the concrete thing?’ What they wanna hear is — so, we’ll give you talking points about what we’re proposing — close tax loopholes, roll back, you know, the tax cuts for the top 1 percent. Obama’s gonna give tax breaks to middle-class folks and we’re gonna provide health care for every American. So we’ll go down a series of talking points.

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Um, now these are in some communities, you know. I think what you’ll find is, is that people of every background — there are gonna be a mix of people, you can go in the toughest neighborhoods, you know working-class lunch-pail folks, you’ll find Obama enthusiasts. And you can go into places where you think I’d be very strong and people will just be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you’re doing what you’re doing.”

Updates, conferences, and vacations

It has been a while since my last post. I’ve been busy with school and frankly I had nothing to write about. I had meant to do some blogging while attended the Midwest Sociological Society’s annual conference the weekend of March 28th, but the hotel did not have free wifi and I refused to pay $10 per day to use what they had. It was the best time I’ve had in years.

I’ve gone to a couple of conferences before for the Student Government Association when I attended O.T.C., so the general format I was prepared for. It’s quite simple; people present their research for review to an audience. Sometimes it is under the umbrella of a theme and other times it stands by itself. What I was not prepared for was how open and willing to talk to me everyone was. It was an atmosphere thick with legitimately intelligent people who wanted to talk to other intelligent people about their passion. I was like a kid in a candy store. I talked to as many people as would talk to me and I had such great fun.

The highlight of the conference for me was twofold. First I attended a session titled: Research in American Indian Communities. First, a woman by the name of Susanna Carlson presented her paper about how “agents of the law have interacted with Native Americans in reproducing identity,” then Mrs. Carlene Sipma-Dysico presented research on “education and the juvenile system in South Dakota’s Indian country,” and finally, Dr M. Kayt Sunwood presented research on “culturally responsive curriculum in Alaska native schools and communities.” Fucking brilliant from beginning to end. This session just hit home for me and refocused my attentions. Ms. Carlson started discussing a historical view of how the image of the Indian has been formed through a semi-symbiotic relationship with authority, and then Mrs. Sipma-Dysico began speaking of how Indian children in public schools are treated with institutionalized racism and are being groomed into the Indians the whites want them to be, and finally Dr. Sunwood brought it all together by presenting the research she co-authored in Alaska about using Native cultural icons to help teach children the basic units of school. Take note that none of these women had planned this or collaborated on what they were going to present or how it was going to be presented; in fact there were supposed to be five presenters and two never showed up. But there it was: from the historical roots of the modern Indian as created by white dominance to the tree of institutionalized racist policies that grew from them and ending with research that showed a more than promising solution to the problem! Just writing it down almost two weeks after the fact gives me goosebumps. It was a very moving experience, but the second, and ultimate, highlight came when I was able to talk to one of the presenters from that session several hours later.

I went to another session, the last round of them that day, and saw Mrs. Sipma-Dysico walk in and sit in the back. The last presenter to this session had shown up late and had just started to talk when I saw Mrs. Sipma-Dysico head for the door. I knew seeing her was providence and so I excused myself from my companion and bolted after her. What followed was the most fascinating conversation I have ever had with another human being. I had wanted to talk to her about an idea for a paper I was working on to present next year, and since it was on the image of the Indian I thought she would be an invaluable source of information. Not only did we talk about my paper but we talked about everything else you aren’t supposed to talk about with a stranger: religion, sex, and politics. It was the best three hours of my life. Yeah, we sat outside the conference room on a rather uncomfortable bench for three hours laughing and talking about everything. My only regret was I never had a chance to see her again before my group had to leave.

More than ever I am confident in my choice to go on to grad school. I’m looking forward to the summer intersession when I am going to drive to the west coast to step foot on some of the schools I’m courting for my masters degree. The first week of June I’m going to Washington State University in Pullman, the University of Oregon in Eugene, and then Colorado State University in Fort Collins. It’s going to take me about 5 days of driving time and I’m giving myself around 7-ish just to account for whatever might happen. I’m really looking forward to it as the farthest west I’ve been is Salina, Kansas.

This is the route I’m planning on taking:

View Larger Map

Eventually I will be able to append Dr. to my name. This makes me giggle internally because even if it takes me the maximum time, about 7 years, I will still get the degree before my ex-girlfriend does. I know that is horrible, and it isn’t the reason I’m going for the degree, but it will give me a small sense of satisfaction when I get to mail her letterhead from the institution I’m teaching at with Dr. appended to my name in the salutation. It is the small things in life that make me happy.

Fear

No matter if you’re running: out in the open air, on a treadmill, on an elliptical machine, or on any other kind of exercise equipment for long distances; eventually your body just takes over and your brain is given free reign to do whatever it wants. Sometimes I will go over sociological theory by reciting the tenets of different theorists. Sometimes I will try to solidify my own theses by going point-counterpoint and picking it apart piece by piece (it sometimes helps to clarify where I need to do more research). Although on some occasions memories will wash over me with such force it seems as if they just happened minutes ago. One such recall happened this evening.

I was nearly 45 minutes into my elliptical endeavors when one of the handful of last conversations my ex and I had strolled past my vision. We were arguing, as we were wont to do, and I remember clear as day she said to me “You’re problem is you’re afraid of success. You’re comfortable where you are and if you change it will mean encountering something you’ve never had to deal with before. You are overweight not because you can’t do something about it, but because you won’t do something about it. You constantly make excuses about why you can’t do something. You find comfort in failure because it is what everyone expects out of you.”

I was stunned but of course I retorted with a vehement denial of everything she said. I was not ready to hear it at the time. I think tonight I was. As much as I loathe to admit it, she was right. (I hope someday the vapid self-centered bitch who’s face is not worth sunburning reads this and gets one last laugh out of me) I’ve made great strides since we parted company and fallen a good distance too.

I am afraid. It is and has always been fear that governed my life. At the heart of everything I am afraid of three things: success, failure, and death. As confusing as it may seem, yes we can be afraid of both success and failure at the same time. Humans always seek balance; we don’t want things too hot or too cold, nor do we want to eat too much or to starve. I understand part of me is still making excuses when I say “I don’t know how to take risks.” I know that is not entirely true and that if I just start I will eventually learn how. The twins rejection and failure are not the end of the world to a sociologist from the mid west.

I think the biggest difference between then and now is that I know I can fall. It isn’t the end of the world and it will not preclude me from succeeding later. I went through my childhood at less than mediocre because while I was taunted and bullied, I never did anything to stop it since I found a small amount of comfort in going home and crying to mom. It felt good to get that kind of attention so I never stopped. I don’t believe it was a conscious decision, but it was a decision nonetheless. Even now when I’m almost 30 I refrain from standing up to someone who triggers the bully alarm. It kills me because I know I’m better than that. It isn’t failure because I didn’t try, but it isn’t success either; I’ve achieved balance. I don’t like that kind of balance anymore. I am smart, and witty, and well above average in the brains department.

So yes, I am afraid. Am I going to continue allowing this fear to rule me? I can’t say for sure. I don’t want it to, and I can recognize when it begins to fill my head with poison, but is that enough of an anti-venom. Is admitting you have a problem really the first step to conquering it?

Hello, my name is James and I’m an Atychiphobian.

The plan pt 2

I have been working on “the plan” for a while now. I’ve looked through several books listing colleges with sociology departments and what they specialize in. I’ve talked to the two people in the behavioral sciences department at my school who are actually sociologists multiple times. I’ve talked to friends, family, other students, and other teachers. They all applaud me for my initiative to start the search now rather than next semester.

I’ve narrowed it down to eight schools:

• Political Sociology and Theory
  • Boston University
  • Cornell University
  • University of Oregon
  • Harvard
• Policy Analysis/Public Policy, Theory, and Environmental Sociology
  • Colorado State
• Social Linguistics and Environmental Sociology
  • University of California-Santa Cruz
• Public Policy, Political Sociology, Theory, and Nationalism
  • University of London-Birkbeck

Notice that I included a couple of schools that are off the deep end. Namely Harvard and University of London-Birkbeck. I included Harvard out of a lark; they have a good sociology department and are doing some really neat research in the subjects I’m interested in, but that ivory tower is near impenetrable for a poor midwestern kid without 4.1 gpa and tons of money to throw around. I’m going to submit an application and send all the required stuff, but if I get offered an assistantship at some place like that I’ll have kittens on the spot.

Now the Birkbeck school, I would probably perform lewd sexual acts on the cheap and on command in order to get offered an assistantship. That school is pretty much in the center of where sociology is moving to academically. Plus its in another freaking country and how cool would that be to basically get paid to live in London for 4+ years?

Realistically though I’m leaning towards University of Oregon. The west coast of the U.S. is a hotbed of progressive political thought and that instills an intrigue within that rivals Curious George’s innate inquisitiveness.

What concerns me though, beyond the ability to pay for it all, beyond the several metric tons of writing and research I will have to do (I’m excited to do statistical quantitative research – according to my colleagues I’m insane), and beyond moving away for upwards of 5 to 6 years; I have only a very vague idea as to what I want to study. I have to narrow my interest down somehow to a quantitative topic or thesis statement before the end of summer.

This is the glitch in the plan so far. Plus I need to actually go visit these places before I submit an application to see if I actually could see myself living there for several years.

I’m currently planning a trip around the first week of June to head out west. I’m planning on visiting University of Oregon and Colorado State by taking a little over a week off and driving out there. Perhaps even by myself. I may even include Washington State University just for kicks since they have a pretty awesome sociology department too and one of my instructors will be out there for his tribe’s celebration marking the signing of it’s treaty.

I’m excited to be on the path. There is a certain calming effect that comes with knowing exactly what you want to do in life. Now I just need to stop talking about it and do it.

The plan

I want to get out of here.

To facilitate this, I’m going away to grad school for a minimum of three years. I’m going to study sociolinguistics/sociology of language or sociology and public policy; if not both. I’m going to pursue a doctorate degree. Then I’m going to come back to do research and teach.

That, in theory, is the plan.

I have no idea how I will fund it, nor do I have any idea where I’m going to go, but I know it needs to happen. I’ve been strapped down by this area for far too long. I look forward to trips I take with my father to see cars so that I can travel. I’m going to a sociology conference this month in St. Louis, not far enough. Sometime in the fall my cousin Anne is getting married in New York and I’m really looking forward to that.

Hopefully I’ll be able to get a teaching assistantship overseas. I can’t get much farther away than that can I? I need to travel and see the world, to breathe the air of a different space, to walk in the soil of a different land, to get lost in the countryside of my ancestors, and to experience life. I’m not happy here. Not at all. I don’t think I ever have been.

I love my friends and I love my family, but I need more I guess.

Yet even as I write this and begin to research these plans there is this nagging voice in the back of my head that explains the definition of a plan. It’s dark and grating voice seductively whispers in my ear “You remember what it means, a plan is nothing more than a list of things that invariably and inevitably go completely wrong.” And then I hear laughter, cold and frightening laughter devoid of any trace of happiness.

This is my plan…

Bulk smash

I’m angry. Why I’m not sure, but I’m angry. I can feel it in my soul. Yes I still believe in a soul, but not in the biblical sense. More of a consciousness kind of way. The collection of everything that makes us who we are. All of our past, present, and future rolled up into the being that sits here now typing this paragraph. Because it is so intimately mine I can feel when raw emotions are affecting it. And this is definitely causing a disturbance.

If only this intimate connection was a bit more intimate then maybe I could trace this anger coursing through my very blood to its source. Sometimes I feel it welling up like a pan of water slowly coming to a boil. Other times its like getting hit with an unexpected punch to the gut; altogether surprising, all-encompassing, and debilitating. Those are familiar, like putting on an old comfortable pair of shoes or getting into a nice warm bath. They are aspects of an emotional imbalance I have dealt with my entire life. There just seems to be an overabundance of anger in the cauldron of emotions stirring within my head.

Yet the previous aspects are not even the scarier manifestations. There are times when I will turn a corner and the anger, the rage, the sheer animalistic ferocity just be there like it always was there. The feeling is the same as flipping a switch in a pitch-black room with your eyes wide open; startling but comforting. Its just there and I feel like I’m looking out of eyes no longer mine, staining the entire world in a gray haze. Contrary to what most think seeing red is not an indication of extreme or unconscionable anger. What really happens is the power of the emotion swallows so many of your other emotions that nothing matters. The world has no color to it at all, and certainly no meaning either.

One day I will understand what it is that causes it, but until then I will have to rely on my intellect to prevent me from doing anything I will later regret.

See Jack…

bang his head against a wall.

I am such a damned coward. Every time I try to bring myself to talk to a woman the only thing that exits my mouth is silence. I’m embarrassed and I’m scared and I’m nervous and I lose the ability to think strait and I just lose it and I chicken out. I’m so frustrated I just want to scream!

I went with some friends out to a really fantastic diner here in town. The food is amazing and the atmosphere is so welcoming and relaxing. I’ve been there once before and most of my friend have been there multiple times. The same waitress that was working the first time I went was working tonight. If there is a god, this woman was surely his Eve. She’s not fitness or runway model perfect, as she has some excess in places, but it fits her and makes the woman all the more gorgeous. Standing about 5′4″ or so, with long curly reddish-brown hair, and when she smiles it isn’t just with her mouth, but her whole face lights up. She had on a low-cut baby blue long sleeved sweater, black knee-length skirt with black hose on under. A few freckles adorned her face as well as what skin the sweater exposed. I wanted so desperately to talk to this woman, to ask if she was seeing anyone, to say something to her beyond “dinner was excellent.”

But no. I smiled, nodded, and then walked out the door of the restaurant and waited to look back until I was safely in my car.

What the hell is wrong with me?

The extremely sad thing is that I shouldn’t even be concerning myself with women at all. I have far too many other concerns to deal with right now. Namely school, work, and time at the gym. The first two take up nearly all of my time and the last takes up the rest of it. I barely have time to even say hi to my friends on the phone, resorting to texting them while I go between work and class or class and the gym. I thought that if I just turned all of my focus to school I would eventually forget about the gnawing loneliness within me. How foolish. It took one woman being just remotely nice to me to bring it all crashing back on top of me.

It’s pathetic and I’m so completely tired of it. I guess I need to redouble my efforts to dive into my work. Scholarship, theory, and reading shall be my mistresses for they have never caused me fear nor the knotting of my entrails.

Potential

While driving home from my weekly visit with the family, I was listening to classical music on the radio and trying to fit together several of the sociological concepts I’ve been working with over the last few weeks when this phrase came to mind:

What if the reason we have faith, or believe in things we can not see, or need to escape into a fantasy world; is because we don’t want to take responsibility for our own self-development?

Before you call the mob, sharpen the pitchforks, and light the torches; allow me to explain.

I am a very firm believer in a simple truth. We messed up the message. We were not created in god’s image, god was created in ours. We took the best things about us, what we wanted to exemplify, and created an anthropomorphic deity that takes care of everything for us. In the history of mankind we have done it not once, not twice, but countless times. We created this god and then he “gave” us a specific set of rules that allow us into a paradise after all of this “suffering” on earth. Instead of dealing with the problems that arose to cause this suffering, we took the easy route and put all the responsibility for our “salvation” into the proverbial hands of god.

But think about what this world would be like if every single one of us took responsibility for our own self-development, for our own failings, and for our own arrogance? Instead of throwing our hands up and saying, “god has a plan,” we instead worked on solutions to problems, where would we be as a culture? Is this what blind faith leads us to?

I understand faith because regardless of what people may think of me, I do have faith. I have an extremely strong faith. It just doesn’t lie with religion. My faith does not allow me to fall into a trap wherein I find myself in a situation that looks for answers from some figurehead that has never talked to his people or actually solved any problem. Where every solution to every problem has failed the test of time.

The argument needs more work, but I have faith that it holds more than just a ring of truth to it. Perhaps the greatest achievement of god’s so-called “plan” is the realization that we don’t need it and never did. Perhaps we just need to own up to our own potential.

A Montague’s Woe

I am currently sitting at the Mudd Lounge drinking a Bogtrotter (a delectable combination of Guinness and espresso) and doing my homework. Reading through my sociological theory book on the chapter regarding Max Weber. I decided to take a break to start work on actually writing down my responses to the questions assigned me for the class and found that I have wireless connectivity here, woohoo!

I’ve been thinking about something in the back of my head ever since I got here over an hour ago; how in the hell can I get any meaningful studying done in a place such as this? Oddly enough though, I find I actually study better in a loud and semi-crowded environment. This place is hopping right now too. There is a D.J. up by the door spinning some great groove tracks and there are friends talking, laughing, and generally enjoying themselves all over the place. Is it possible that I have an easier time studying about the underpinnings of sociological theory when in the social world? I am a student of society. I’ve decided to make it my career, my life’s work, what better reason could there be?

If any of my previous posts have been read you’ll know I’ve been in a funk since pretty much the beginning of February. But somehow when I sat down here in the corner where the black and white tri-fold wall decoration sits and began reading and watching everyone, my funk has slowly been ebbing, washed away or at least partially muted up by my work. Do I dare let my work consume me? Is the answer to some of my problems merely to give my heart and body over to the work that already consumes my soul? I want so much for the answer to leap out at me and say something, but I fear that is a pipe dream.

I love school and my studies, it is the one mistress I could never leave, and woe to the significant other that asks me to. Yet this funk, this streak of procrastination, this whatever it is has paralyzed me to an extent. I have been unable to keep up with my studies instead letting it sit for another day. Two weeks I have let work and readings pile up. Speaking of which, what the hell am I still doing here?

Hell is in my mouth

I have been slowly getting some dental work done over the last several months. To date I’ve had: a root canal and temporary crown put on, two fillings, and six teeth removed. I have to admit the root canal wasn’t really as bad as the rumors say. It did feel weird for my dentist to insert the files into the deadened root canals and start tapping them against my skull. I’ve never had to force myself not to vomit so hard in my life. I could feel it, it didn’t hurt, but I could feel the tips of those tiny files tap, tap, tapping away at my skull. All the while the brain is going, “this should hurt and I’m far too confused that it doesn’t so I’m going to flip out now, ok.”

But what has been the worst experience by far has been the extractions. I’ve had three wisdom teeth removed and the molars in front of them removed as well. I didn’t have enough room in my head for the wisdom teeth and when they came through, it was at an angle. They really screwed with the molars in front of them and so everything started to decay because of them. I had the first wisdom tooth/molar combination pulled years ago due to the pain, but nothing bothered me up until about six months ago. Now I’ve had dry socket, not once, but twice!

For those of you who don’t know what dry socket is, let me enlighten you. When a tooth is pulled it leaves a hole in your gums that leads strait down to your jaw and the exposed nerves. Normally, this socket fills with blood, forms a scab, and begins the healing process. Sometimes though, when you smoke, when you spit especially hard, or when you don’t keep the area clean enough, the scab process gets screwed up and a dry socket can occur. What this means is that there is no protection or covering for your little nerve ending and sweet baby jeezus does it hurt like hell.

I had the last two teeth pulled last thursday and went to the dentist today about some minor pain I was having. Since I had gone through this on the last round I figured I wasn’t going to screw around. Now that whatever particles were in there have been flushed out it hurts worse, but I guess it beat having an infection in there. From what I’ve been told that is a fate nearly as bad as inquisition torture. It is a persistent dull ache that feels very much like needles are being scraped along my jaw bone while iodine is being slowly poured over the wounds. It hurts clear up into my ear and gives me headaches that can take me to my knees if I don’t keep ahead of the pain with lots of ibuprofen.

Hell, I have found thee and thy name is dry socket.

This is for you…

It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted last. I would like to say that I’ve been too busy. With work, school, and a gym schedule that keeps me going from 8am to well past midnight nearly every day; who has time to blog? I would like to.

But I can’t.

I have had work, and school, and I’ve been trying to keep up with my workout schedule, but I just haven’t been able to. A few weeks ago I got sick, really sick. So sick that I missed almost three full days of work. I was also too sick to do my workout. When you have a fever spiking 101 you don’t need to be in a gym raising your body temperature even more. So I stayed away from the gym and even missed a class in there too. (That’s very telling of how sick I was; I never miss class) While going through all of this I had to re-schedule a dentist appointment.

Then everything kind of went to shit, again.

Somehow during all of this missing work, school, and gym time I got into a pretty screwed up funk. I started avoiding my responsibilities; I haven’t done any homework in over a week and I went back to the gym for the first time in about two weeks last night. I went to the dentist last Thursday and had the last two really troublesome teeth removed. Because of that I missed most of work on Friday. Then I go out last night after the gym to a friend’s birthday party where a couple of people managed to drop a drama-bomb that I had to clean up after. One of them had the audacity to look at me and say, “thanks guys for starting this shit.” After yelling at this woman for 10 minutes basically telling her how dare she blame me, and by proxy the rest of the group, for something we never did, I woke up this morning to find I had no voice; yay me. I toughed it out and went to work so I could mainly sit around, take up space, and do odd jobs so I could try to keep my hours from tanking too much more than they already have.

Somewhere during all of this crap it hit me how lonely I really am. This is where the funk came from. On Thursday, singles awareness day, (or valentines day for those of you keeping score) my best friend texted me several times over the day and I finally told him the nature of my funk. He said, and I quote, “:( well I don’t have boobies but you can always call me for someone to hang out with.” I laughed slightly and rolled my eyes, finally replying with, “I know that, but its not friendship I am lonely for. I have numerous friends who want to spend time with me, but they are just that, merely friends.”

I need more in my life, but something keeps holding me back. I know it is probably my own insecurities, my abundance of procrastination, and my inexperience in the dating world. I have stared down a Dean of Student Affairs, I can hold my own in an intellectual row with students and faculty at both institutions I have attended, I have blown the whistle on an entire board of directors and had my picture on the front page of our local newspaper because of it, but for all of that I simply do not know why I fail at being able to go beyond “hi” with a woman I am interested in.

I can walk up to anyone and start a conversation. I’m not the best conversationalist in the world, but I can hold my own. I am friendly, outgoing, and some people even say I’m charming, but I can’t talk to a woman. Somewhere between “hi” and “can I get your number,” or “would you like to go out sometime,” I drop the damn ball because I have no idea whether this woman is actually interested or not. More often than not, within the span of the smallest of conversations I slip right into the friend zone with me being the last person to know it.

So this is what has been going on recently. I need to do a lot of things; get back in the gym and get my damned homework done, but somehow during all of this crap I really need to find a date before I lose it. One that doesn’t look like Quasimodo or have the brains god gave a turnip.

What the..?

I just got one of those automated calls, the kind that goes like, “we have an important call for you, please press 1 to hear it.” But this one was for…

A Church!

What is this country coming to when I get bombarded by religious propaganda, witnessing, and proselytizing by an automated system! I find it rather disturbing, yet very telling of our current age, that any self-respecting christian would leave the fate of a soul to a soul-less machine.

Well, when put like that, it almost sounds funny. They won’t even sully their hands with our redemption anymore.

An explanation

I feel the need to explain the “emo” post. I’m normally not like that, but sometimes I just have the need to get these things out and felt for the first time able to do it on here. The thing was bad poetry, bad writing, and just plain bad. Yet I still feel better for doing it because it is out there.

I have had dreams of this nature for decades. One of my earliest memories as a child is waking up screaming from the dream I described. Ever since then Death and I have had a very intimate, if not long distance, relationship. The kind where we never see each other but often talk on the phone. Up until a few months ago, I hadn’t had that dream in over two years, and now I have it at least once a week again.

I’m not a religious man. At least, not anymore. But this leaves me in a strange quandary. I grew up in a household that had varying degrees of religiosity. My mother and her family are Lutherans and my father and his family are all Mormons. My immediate family never went to church, so my father’s parents decided to take up the task themselves. So I went to a Mormon church every Sunday for nearly 5 years of my life. I learned quite a bit but never really had what could have been referred to as a “religious experience.” The kind where you realize there really is a god. I noted everything everyone was trying to teach me and regurgitated it upon command like the good little sheep I was being trained to be. Eventually though I was tired of being teased by classmates about being a Mormon and so I stopped going. I started going around to the different churches in my town (we had more than our fair share with a population only several thousand strong) attempting to find one that fit what I vaguely understood as my beliefs. After getting kicked out of a Baptist church for asking too many questions I eventually followed my friends to a non-denominational Christian church every Wednesday night.

I went to bible study with the rest of the kids and asked questions. Lots of questions. Questions like, “If Adam and Eve were the only two humans on the planet, where did Cain and Able get their wives?” Also, “If Christians are supposed to ‘turn the other cheek’ as Jesus said, why are there so many wars fought in his name?” And my personal favorite, “Why does God say, ‘Thou shalt not kill’ yet commanded us to kill so many times in his name?”

The poor woman who taught the class was never happy when I showed up. I think knowing she had an intellectual fight on her hands with someone half her age was something she could not deal well with. More often than not she flatly refused to answer my questions and instead referred me to the pastor himself. On the day I asked that last question, she was teaching about the ten commandments. I was very curious to understand how God could put down so many rules for his sheep children and then ask us time and again to break them. I believe she snapped when I asked the last question. I had tested her faith one too many times and she believed she had failed. Bursting into tears she stormed out of the room and several minutes passed as the stares leveled at me in the room ranged from loathing to puzzled fascination to votes of confidence. The pastor finally came in and told everyone to leave except for me. He talked to me for a few minutes, visibly angry but keeping a level tone, and finally asked me to leave and not to come back.

Two churches in the same town ask a child to leave their walls for the simple reason of asking too many hard questions. Over the years that followed I came to the conclusion it was not the fault of the people, but the religion they professed to believe in. They were indoctrinated to believe a certain way and it prevents them from seeing the world in any different light.

I digress.

So this is one of the many reasons I’m no longer religious, but it is because of the early attempts at indoctrination that I have this fear of death. More specifically, what happens after I die. The pure scientist in me says I’m just done, and I eventually decompose to rejoin the cycle of life on the planet. The small, but very loud religious holdout in me screams about the judgment of my soul. Then finally, I have this newly acquired third voice that seems to be an amalgamation of the two. The conservation of energy law in physics “states that energy can not be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.” So if we are made of energy, and that energy cannot be destroyed, what happens to it when we die? Is it just stored in the earth until bits and pieces of it are consumed by the various plants and animals our descendants cultivate until we are eventually reborn?

This last explanation tends to comfort me momentarily.

I know there is no heaven or hell, for others there might be such places waiting for them when they die, but for me I have a sneaking suspicion that my fate lies in the cold inky black of nothing.

Pause for an emo moment

Sometimes I dream of death

endless blackness

crushing nothingness

where even light has been forsaken.

Was I ever real

did i live

did I die?

Panic-stricken fear

comes over me in waves

“I am not done yet!

I can not die yet!”

screams into the endless silence.

I feel wet

I feel cold

I feel the sharp tinge of air rushing to meet my lungs

as I find myself

Awake.

Elliptical machine! Who’s your daddy?

I’ve been jamming on the elliptical machine’s hill climb mode for the last few weeks and all that time it was kicking me like I was its bitch. The program’s length is adjustable and up until today I had gone no longer than 45 minutes. The hill climb program breaks down your desired length into time segments and starts out at resistance one for one segment. Each segment on a 45 minute time is roughly 1.5 minutes long. Resistance one this is supposed to simulate relatively level terrain. Following a short “warm-up” of this, the program ramps up to a resistance of eight for two segments. Eight is similar to about a 12 degree incline, or a flight of stairs. Then it drops back down to resistance one for one segment. When the second resistance one is done the warm up is officially over.

The machine goes back up to 8 for six segments, down to 1 for one segment, up to 10 for two segments, back to 1 for one segment, up to 12 for two segments, back to 1, then up to 14 for two segments, then down to 8 for four segments, and finally down to 1 for five segments. By the time I get to resistance 14, it feels like I am walking up a 70 degree incline or running through really thick and clingy snow.

Every time I managed to complete this, and every time I felt like I was going to die when I had. Today though I completed my first full hour on it. I am still psyched about it. The machine shows an approximation of how many calories burnt and when I was done it showed approximate 945 calories! That’s two to four of my meals for the day. I’m stoked and I think if I can keep this up I will see some very small results at the end of the month.

I also tried out the low-volume training yesterday and I have to admit I was surprised by how much I actually worked. Last year at this time I was doing a reduction-increase weight lifting program. This is where you do five sets, starting with a low weight at 15 reps, then increase weight and reduce to 12 reps, increase again and reduce to 10, increase and reduce to 8, then increase again and reduce to 5. By the time you were done you should be lifting the maximum you can lift. It always seemed like I was wasting a lot of time changing out weights or going from machine to machine. I have decent hopes for this new plan though.

As I left the gym today, my sweat-soaked garments clinging to me, I told the machine “you aren’t so tough. I’ve used can openers that made me work harder.” The foot pads and arm bars moved slowly, nonchalantly telling me, “I’ve been doing this for years. Come back when you can actually work, fat man.”

I’ll show you.

Return to Sweat and Pain

After some soul-searching as mentioned in the post “Shock” I have come to realize that I can do this. Not really that I can do this, but that I can do it alone. I don’t necessarily have to have someone along with to keep me going. I believe I have surrendered myself to this obsession and have finally made it a priority in my life rather than just a secondary or tertiary thing.

On my page “Fitness Goals” I said I would be re-evaluating them as time went by. While I haven’t been able to keep up with the first point, I’m establishing a commitment and since the 30th of December I haven’t missed a day in the gym. In the spirit of ensuring that I keep up on my fitness regiment I have decided to really revamp how I’m going to spend my time in the gym.

This decision came about after spending the last two hours at a website called ExRx.net. Because of the theories and ideas mentioned therein I believe I have come up with the next phase of my workout.

ExRx talks about low-volume, progressive intensity training. My understanding of it is thus: according to prevailing evidence, higher reps at lower weights less often does just as much as lower reps at higher weights more often. In fact, in keeping with the studies, using this method the weight lifter only has to go through a warm up set and then the workout set once for each muscle group they want to work. This coupled with their explanation of the myth of the high rep fat loss workout has intrigued me to try a different approach.

For the next month I will be trying an alternating upper/lower body routine broken up by pure cardio on off days. For example: the next week starts out with upper body on Monday, followed by cardio on Tuesday, then lower body on Wednesday, then cardio on Thursday, then upper again on Friday, then cardio on both Saturday and Sunday.

I think as long as I: stick to eating healthy, keep my caloric intake below 2000, and keep up on the cardio on the off days, I’ll still be where I want to be come end of July. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for this new workout and will keep my progress updated as best I can.

As the saying goes, “the third time’s the charm.” This will be the third and last time I have to return to the sweat and pain.

A New Year

I despise new year’s resolutions. Rarely anyone sticks to them, and I’m no exception. However, on New Year’s Eve this last Monday, I had a rather strange encounter that set me aback.

I left work for my dinner break and I went to a little Chinese restaurant not far from there. I was the only customer in the restaurant and the waitress and I talked at length about a great many things. Surprisingly enough she remembered me from the last time I came in there almost eight weeks ago. It was almost like talking to an old friend you had not seen in ages. It was a more than refreshing change of pace from the hectic woes of the call center where I work.

We were talking about the end of the year and the beginning of the new one and she was genuinely giddy about the concept of the new year. I have seen enough of them and most have not been in the best light so I can generally take them or leave them without a care. This woman had such an energy about it though she almost made me feel guilty for being blaze about the whole affair. What shocked me was when she asked, “so what are you looking forward to for the next year?” I looked at her rather puzzled with my head cocked to one side like I was trying to wrap my head around a vision my eyes would not accept. She started listing off all of the grand things she was looking forward to and the thought of each one seemed to make her even happier than she was before. It was an astonishing sight. When she asked me the question again I could only reply, “I have no earthly idea.” I have been thinking about it ever since.

I just returned from the gym and it dawned on me I had forgotten what I was looking forward to. I had let myself get so down in the last several weeks because of my own different holiday woes that I forgot some of the things that are coming up this year. Tonight I’m going back to the restaurant to thank her for showing me “the light” so to speak and for being that one person who was just in the right place at the right time.

Also so I can tell her what I’m looking forward to:

• Being fit enough to run on the beach in Ecuador and enjoy myself.
• Losing this extra weight.
• Seeing my best friend get married.

…

This could turn out to be a good new year after all.

Shock

Sometimes things startle you so much, to the very core, that you don’t know how to deal with them at the time. I believe the proper term is shock. And that pretty much describes the last several days. But first, I’m going to talk about something that shocked me at the gym a month ago.

I was on the elliptical machine trying to keep my heart rate up around 160 and trying desperately not to think about anyone else that might be watching me. (I’m a bit agoraphobic in that sense) Its also really late at night, probably around midnight, so the tinted windows in front of me show a remarkably clear reflection. Half the time I watch the TV just above and to the right of the windows, the other half I’m trying to peer through my reflection to see what’s going on outside. Being on the third floor of the building provides a rather striking vista when you can see it. When it happened I was near the end of my time on the machine and I was just starting to get that ache in my thighs and triceps. I glanced down to the pad on the machine showing all the pertinent information like time, distance, calories burnt, etc., and when I looked up to the windows in front of me I missed a step and almost got thrown off the machine. I saw only myself since there wasn’t anyone else in the room, but it wasn’t me. It was a whole new body image of myself. For the first time ever I saw in my reflection someone who wasn’t fat. I saw someone who wasn’t bulbous and distended. I saw a lean, good-looking, strong man working to rid himself of his excess. For once I didn’t see a fat kid trying to become something else, but a skinny guy trying to get out of the body he was stuck with.

It scared the hell out of me.

The vision scared me so much in fact, that until last week I didn’t go back to the gym. When a person becomes so used to something it becomes comfortable and safe, they rarely ever give it up. Having my body image altered like that was an eye-opening experience. It took me a while to realize it, but that moment showed me I was not powerless to change myself. I was not always a fat kid. And I don’t think I’m going to be anymore.

Something happened Saturday night that really threw me for a loop. I had gone out with my friends Jana, Travis, and Chelsea (I think that is how her name is spelled) to the Springfield Brew Co for dinner and then to Bailey’s for martini’s. We had a great time, and Jana and Chelsea wanted to go back to Chelsea’s house to continue the drinking and merry-making. I went with them and Travis went home. The drinking continued in earnest at Chelsea’s house and we all just laughed and had a great time, until they realized I was the only guy in the room and started talking about girl things. I was fine with most of this, until Chelsea started talking about her “type,” and then she described it. When she was done with that she looked at Jana and then directly over at me and said, “I would date you.”

I’m floored by this little tidbit of information, coupled with the fact that she is already dating someone else, I wanted to hit myself over the head repeatedly with my bottle of Samuel Adams®. That little shock was twofold: first, this girl is just hot, and second, to think that she would date me just caused me to loose all sense of coolness I had up to that point. What a cruel world it is.

The last little shock happened Sunday night. I received a rather random text message from a girl I know asking if I wanted to “hook up.” While this was a shock unto itself, when I asked her to clarify (I’m kind of naive like that), she said I was a cute and nice guy.

Two complements in less than 24 hours. Someone out there is trying to build up my ego for some reason, and I beg them not to stop shocking me.

4am

It has been a while since I just wrote. Not about some some meaningless review or about some half-hearted attempt at saving the world, but about me. The people who write every day about what is going on in their heads and their hearts are much braver than I will ever be. For that I admire them. It is probably this admiration that did some small part in getting me to start this thing in the first place. My grandfather also kept a journal. I’m not sure how often he wrote in them, but I know there are several boxes of them. My father has yet to gather the strength to read them and I don’t blame him. He has to come to grips with his father’s death and with the nagging question; “would he want me to read them?”

It is a question I have struggled with myself as the months have droned on about this blog. Do I want to make my most intimate thoughts privy to the world? Should I? Does anyone even want or care to know? At first I didn’t care what the answer was to any of those questions, but as time wore on I have begun to think on them harder. I believe I can distill the questions down to the one that really matters to me; do I truly want to know what other people really think about me?

I believe the answer is yes.

But I am afraid. I am afraid of knowing what kind of man I really am. I have been called everything from amazing to wasted space, from awful to wonderful space, and from heroic to villainous. Who are we really if not reflections of the world that views us? It burns me to know that people think poorly of me. That I have done something to affect them crossly in some way wounds me. Because of this I really and truly get along with everyone. I harbor no long-lasting ill will on anyone. Even the two people who betrayed my deepest trust are spared my curses. Sure I may talk bravado around friends who either know them or know of them, but when it comes down to it I have no desire or will to keep that kind of hate in my heart.

My friends say I am a good man. They trust me (I think). I am a good friend. I am loyal to a fault. I wear my heart on my sleeve. I am the stereotypical “good guy” who always finishes last. I have a paralyzing fear of rejection. I am afraid of women I am attracted to. I am smart, not brilliant like some people say I am, but I am smart. I have a difficult time selling myself because: a) I have a well-bruised self image and, b) I am far too modest about my accomplishments.

Yet I continue to write in this thing and the question begs to be asked, why?

One of these days I might actually get around to answering that.

Stuff has a story

At least, that is what Annie Leonard says from the documentary video “The Story of Stuff.” You can watch it at www.storyofstuff.com. Never before have I seen the process of consumerism brought under the magnifying glass like this has. From where the raw materials come from to where they eventually go to; this movie walks the viewer step by step through it all. No matter your level of education about this issue, no matter your social or economic status, you should watch this film.

We all know: from the lowest-paid worker in the overexploited nations to the meagerly-paid blue collar American, that there is something wrong, we just can’t seem to all put our fingers on it or wrap our collective heads around it. Annie Leonard helps put some of the pieces together.

One of the interesting concepts she brings up is “externalized cost.” As she explains on the website: “[...] the price tags on consumer products don’t capture the true cost of producing and distributing all this stuff.” In the big box stores, or in any stores for that matter, when consumers want a product sold to them cheaper the store only has a few options to them. They can either: take a cut in profits (highly unlikely), buy it cheaper (more likely), cut their cost in the item, or not care what you think. The problem comes in when the store chooses option two or three. To cut their cost in the item, or rather, their cost of storing and staffing the store house, they have to cut pay or benefits. Failing to meet the customer’s price at that point, they will buy it cheaper. This results in the same problem as before; too many people get their wages or benefits cut just so the consumers can have something they didn’t need in the first place cheaper. By putting the excess cost of the items on the actual people that produce the goods, distributors and manufacturer can enjoy the same amount of profit and still provide consumers with the lowest price.

This has to end. And only the consumers can end it. We are the ones who create the demand. We are the ones who settle for products that will not last longer than a few weeks. We are the ones who are turning a blind eye to the injustices visited upon our planet, our fellow people, and ourselves.

Visit www.storyofstuff.com and get educated on what we are doing to the planet, our friends, and ourselves.

It is time to ensure the continued story of our planet.

3am

It is, as the title says, 3am. I point this out not because that is the time where I am, but because I am awake to see said time. I am having one of my many sleepless nights. Where the mind is racing in all manner of directions while the body is trying to tell it to shut up and go to sleep.

I am exhausted, but alas, sleep is not on the menu tonight. Or is it this morning?

I have several things floating around the gray matter tonight, and perhaps I should share them with my electronic friend since I haven’t been able to articulate them to my living friends. My monitor’s warm silhouette has kept me company on many a lonely night, and tonight is no exception. Which leads me to my first bit of soul-baring; I am a coward. This, to me, is a rather recent realization. Having always been the one to step up and take charge when necessary, the thought that I might be a coward never occurred to me. I have always been afraid of different things, but most of them I have either conquered or have enough of a respect for them that I know my limitations. For instance, I have a terrible fear of heights, but I have climbed to the top of a three story house and survived to tell the tale. I also have a similar fear of drowning, but I know how to swim. When we are faced with obstacles that create fear within us, it is our ability to overcome those fears or move on in spite of them that makes us leaders, but it is when we can not do these things that we know we are cowards. I have come face to face with the cold hard reality that I am a coward. Even if it is only temporary and amounts to nothing more than a momentary speed bump on my road through life, this realization has given me pause.

Thankfully, my dear e-journal, I do not have to listen to or see the groan when I divulge what ails me. The fear that I have thus far run away from every time I am confronted with it, is women. I am an absolute coward with women, and I have told people as much, but never before have I felt like a coward until the other night. I invited this woman I know out to a birthday part for my roommate. I’m not going to go so far as to say that I am smitten with this woman, but I find her funny, attractive, and intelligent (I am always attracted to this combination). So I would like to take her out on a date; nothing more or less. This is normally when I get the groan, everyone tells me to just say something, and while I understand how easy that sounds I just can’t bring myself to do it. The words will not form, my vocabulary goes on vacation, and my mouth goes on strike. She is already a friend and so I am comfortable enough around her, but every time I think of putting her in the role of “a date” my confidence falls apart completely.

Bless my friends, I love every one of them, but their prodding, albeit gentle, did not help the matter. I just don’t have the confidence to do it, and at this stage of my life I don’t know if I ever will. And this, this my electronic friend, is what depresses and angers me the most. I start thinking that I will never get over this, or that I will never get past it, and start feeling sorry for myself, but then I just get angry at myself for throwing the pity party to begin with. I am a grown man and I shouldn’t be doing this to myself. Yet there it is. My real greatest fear is that I will never have the family I want so badly. That I am going to grow old with only a couple of friends and maybe my nephew to keep me company. No wife to laugh at me when I lose my glasses on my head. No children to pass on the family name and heritage to. I am frightened that my life will be devoted to work, married to research and learning, and my only children being the papers I write and the students I teach.

I can’t be the only one like this, I just wish whoever it was would get over that one fear; telling others. So I can at last get the feeling that I’m not alone. Do not let your fears run your life. It is sad and very lonely existence. When I wake up I will have replaced the masks and locked all of this back up behind them, but right now, at 3am, I am sad and I am lonely.

Good night, maybe morning…

Non-traditionality sucks

The singular issue I have with being 29 and still in college: everyone is younger than me. I have so very few people to relate to in college because of this. Anyone that is even remotely close to my own age is about to graduate and go on with their lives. I get invited to parties and they are nothing but drunken frivolities that I want nothing to do with. I’ve outgrown those lecherous alcoholic desires. I like the occasional beer now and then, but the thought of hanging out with several people in the 21-22 range just does not sound like fun to me. I remember what I was like 8 years ago, and I know these people would not have liked me then. Gah!

I guess this next semester I am going to further socially segregate myself by going to night school. As much as I dearly love the atmosphere at Drury’s day program, it is far too expensive for me to continue, and so I’m shipping of to night school. I’m not really looking forward to it, as one of my required classes wasn’t offered in a classroom setting so I have to take it online.

Being labeled as non-traditional sucks so much. You are expected to be able to do everything that the 18-22 crowd does at their pace and sometimes above their level because of your age and experience. It is really just annoying and I’m quite tired of the ageism within the system. Perhaps at night school I’ll be treated like the adult I am, rather than the child they expect me to be.

Yay

Standards

I hate the standards associated with American masculinity. Men don’t cry. Men do not show weakness. Men must be strong. Men must not show fear. Men must have a long list of conquests. Men must be aggressive. Men must be able to fix everything. Men must dominate those weaker than them.

I want to know who the hell said I am no longer a man if I cry! I want to know who created the social stigma that keeps me from being labeled as one of the guys. My best friend in the entire world told me that I’m just a “sensitive guy,” but there wasn’t anything wrong with that. Yet ever since then he has tried to “train” me in the ways of men. Giving me pointers and advice and in a way telling me who and what I am is wrong. But there’s nothing wrong with being a sensitive guy. Right? Right. Bullshit.

Everywhere I look there are ads showing ridiculously cut and highly tanned men doing all sorts of “manly” things. These ads are showing the myth of the regular guy. This is what a man is supposed to look like. This is what a man is supposed to be doing on his days off. This is how you are supposed to be doing it. I am so sick of this crap.

I’m overweight, granted, but I’m working on that and it is a slow process. I’m just so tired of being ignored because I don’t fit the model. I am the nice guy that no one believes is around anymore. I’m courteous, I’m nice, I’m genuinely concerned about my fellow humans, I would not hurt a fly unless it bit me, but because I’m overweight, because I’m not an aggressive prick, and because I don’t brag about my conquests over other human beings, I’m ignored.

Case in point: My best friend is everything I am not. He is in fantastic physical condition. He is a braggart. He is aggressive. He rarely ever shows weakness. When we go hang out to grab a bite to eat or some coffee, I get ignored. The waitress will walk by and ask him specifically if he needs anything and will then walk right away. I remember at the last restaurant we were at, he got a refill three times, while my glass sat empty for twenty minutes. I know, I should have said something sooner, but I didn’t. I wanted to tell her when she asked if we would like to go cups that I would if she ever would have refilled my drink, but that it wasn’t necessary now. Of course I didn’t say this though.

I’m tired and I’m done. I’m also late for work, crap.

updates

Another semester draws to a close and with it brings another round of finals. I’ve spent the last few hours studying for my first final of the week and while I’m not completely confident about my breadth of knowledge in the course, I think I will do just fine.

I two finals tomorrow and one more on Thursday. Between those I will be hanging out with a friend from my online gaming days who came down this last Friday to spend part of his vacation with his friends around here. Wednesday I’ll be driving him to Kansas City for his flight home.

I also went to my insurance adjuster on Friday to get an estimate on the damages to my car. It came to a grand total of $1800.00! For as little visible damage as was done it surprises me the price tag was so high. But I still get to pay $500.00 out of pocket thank you insane deductible and lady without insurance who hit me.

Christmas is drawing ever closer and with it my birthday. There came a point several years back when I stopped giving a damn about my birthday. I don’t think I wanted to have yet another reminder that another year had slipped through my fingers.

I miss…

I miss my son and my grandparents. I’m missing them a lot today. I woke up missing them.

I haven’t seen my son in nine years, my grandpa passed away six years ago, and my grandma passed two years ago.

I always get like this around the holidays. Feelings of familial absence are always more strongly felt in times where the prevalent culture’s social norm is to be or get closer to the traditional family unit. Thanksgiving and Christmas are just those times. Maybe it is because so many of my family was born around this time though. My grandpa and my sister were born on January 20th. My son’s birthday is the 29th of December. Somewhere out there, I hope he will have a fantastic birthday party with cake and friends and adopted parents who love him. Sometimes it is that hope alone that lets me sleep at night.

I miss my son and my grandparents.

The biggest ad for windows functionality… ever!

I was using Google Dice, which is pretty much a random website function of theirs. It’s entertaining, especially when you run into this awesomeness: http://www.aflynn.com/times-square/

If you click on the picture it will zoom in.

This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in quite a while.

Imperfections

Today was an interesting day. I finally started feeling better after pretty much two strait weeks of being sick, and then my voice starts to go again so I take it easy from the phones. I go through a relatively uneventful day at work. But I have to say that a couple of things stood out; First, I have a friend who works in the same shopping center as I do, in a bakery/restaurant, and because of this I regularly visit her while I’m buying food and drink. One of these days I’m going to work up the nerve to actually hit on her and see where that takes me. Secondly, I’ve come to the realization that I have no patience for grown men and women who act like three-year-olds. Well, this isn’t as much of a realization as this: I will actually now say something about it to them. Before now, I would quietly seethe about how imbecilic they are being, but now something in me has changed enough that I won’t be quiet about it.

I’ve done this twice already and I’m just now realizing it. The first time was when one of the people that I work with was running their mouth about another employee, something that this person had just recently been complaining about because they were on the receiving end of it, and I chewed her out for it. This was about a month ago. Then, just recently, I chewed on someone else for snapping at a new employee and for their attitude in general. Now normally I can stand a little bit of grumpiness and complaining at work, everyone does it and its almost expected, but when someone’s attitude is so foul almost every second they are there that it starts to affect my mood and the moods of the people around them, it is time for something to change. It pains me to have to point out others imperfections, even more so when I have to use my own to do it, but sometimes people just need to come back down to earth and get a little truth now and again.

After work was said and done I had to go over to school to start on the last leg of my last group project. We designed and administered a survey on campus. We’re down to the number crunching and seeing if our theory was proven, disproved, or neither. I have to say, (and thank the gods for this because if not I would have a very boring career future ahead of me) that I love number crunching. From coding the surveys to entering in the data to organizing the data into understandable chunks of useful information from the mountain of unreadable numbers to filling out charts so the numbers become visible things, I love this work. Tonight I got to see our hard work begin to pay off. Tonight I got to see what happened with the variables over time. Tonight I got into the dirty work of a researcher and I don’t ever want it to wash off.

My day ended on a rather good note. One of my group-mates, a stunningly attractive mid-twenties exercise and sport science major with long reddish-brown hair and a cute, almost bubbly, personality, looked at me after I had finished explaining some rather technical thing to everyone and had shown them what I had gotten done in their absence and told me that I “rocked her face off!” One of the guys in the group coughed and in the most masculine way possible said roughly the same thing, that I had “impressed” him. I was stunned that they both had such a high opinion of me. All I could do was say thank you to them both, then kick myself later for missing an opportunity to strike up a non-group related conversation with the girl.

Ah well, they can’t all be perfect days, and I’m just glad this one ended on a better than good note.

Thanks

This is just a quick thank you to the close friends in my life who are always uplifting, who always do their very best, and who inspire me every day I know them.

April, Jason, Mikaela, and Jana. Thank you, all of you, for all your kind words and help over the years. I can not say enough how much I have appreciated it.

Wondering

What did I do? For someone who completely believes in Karma, that what we put into the world will be returned to us whether it is good or bad, it has been driving me nuts for the last 2 hours.

I was on my way to take one of my best friends shopping for a birthday present for his wife when someone hit my car. I was driving south down one of the four lane streets in the left lane. On the right shoulder was a wrecker with its red and blue lights twirling, so I knew there had been an accident there recently. I slowed down like everyone else around me, but this maroon toyota slowed down apparently to get in behind me. I couldn’t really tell this because her left turn signal was not on (I later found out it didn’t work at all). The truck in front of me stopped short and swerved slightly, and so I applied my brakes just as rapidly. I looked up in my rearview mirror (as I always do in these situations) and watched as that maroon car I saw a few seconds ago was not slowing as fast as I was. In a futile amount of pleading, I begged her not to hit my car, but alas she either didn’t hear me or couldn’t stop sooner. Her driver’s side headlight met the passenger side corner of my bumper with a weird mix of crunch, creak, and metal being forced into new shapes. This of course caused my head to whip back into the headrest of my chair. I’m only just now feeling the effects of that: a slight headache, my right shoulder is hurting, and my ear is giving me issues for some reason.

I get out of the car and can see that a woman was driving, there is a male passenger, and there are two children in the back seat. I could not tell if the children were in car seats, but I can’t remember seeing them in subsequent passes of the car. I ask if everyone is ok before I check the damage to the car. Physical injury is more important than property damage and I wanted to make sure everyone wasn’t hurt. This woman was near to hysterics. She immediately started talking about how she was a single mom and how she would work with me on paying it off or back. This little diatribe of hers set off the warning sirens in my head. I looked her strait in the eye and asked, “The cop is outside of earshot, I need you to tell me the truth, do you even have insurance?” All she could do was shake her head “no.”

Thankfully the police officer never asked me that question. I gave him my insurance card and she gave him her old card. While we waited I took some pictures of the damage to my car with my phone. They didn’t turn out very well or I would post them here. Nevertheless I can tell by the damage I will have to replace the bumper. There is a crease in my trunk lid as well and by some small miracle my taillight came out unscathed. All of it is expensive and all of it will have to come out of my pocket.

I haven’t gotten mad, and I don’t think I’m going to, but I’m upset. I’m hurt and I just don’t know what I did to deserve this. I certainly hope anyone answering doesn’t use my previous post as an example of what I might have done.

I’m tired now and am giving up on this day. But I am still wondering…

Tradition

It always seems to work out so much better on paper. Millions of Americans are traveling today; going somewhere in and out of the country to see friends, family, or a beach with a paper umbrella laden drink. We do this out of tradition. We are supposed to be expressive of our thanks on this most thankful of days. When exactly it became a day that is more thankful than others is beyond the best of us. And somewhere along the line, we decided to include the Native Americans as partially responsible for the propagation of this little debacle we deal with once a year; because godless heathens couldn’t be thankful on their own, we had to show them their Gods were false and that only the white god could give them something to be thankful for.

Sanctimonious prats.

But I digress. For all my ranting and raving about the idiocy of our holidays, (I will be writing about the Christmas season) I am still a sucker for tradition.

Happy Turkey Day to everyone out there. May your chosen deity bless you and keep you.

/geek on

This is the absolute shit right here.

“Paralysed man’s mind is ‘read’”

I read about it first from /. (slashdot) here -> Major Breakthrough in Direct Neural Interface

If this works the possibilities are astounding. If we can translate speech impulses in the brain, not only will we be able to assist those people with birth defects that prevent them from speaking, but we will be able to help those with physical injuries.

I understand this is a big “if,” but I try to see hope in even the smallest of ifs.

I just want to know when I get my neural jack.

/geek off

Numbing numbers

I wanted to get some numbers out there as a follow-up to my 1 in 4 post. I realized that one in four doesn’t really mean much when you don’t know how large the one in four population comes out of. The report, from the National Alliance to End Homelessness, “Vital Mission: Ending Homelessness Among Veterans”, tells us that almost 200,000 of the homeless population are veterans.

When looked at from the context of the almost 210 million people that veterans can come from, (United States men and women aged 18 and over), it is only 10 percent of the population, and doesn’t seem to be that alarming. But when taken into the context of the homeless population, which is estimated to be 744,000, having 195,827 of your population coming from one very specific sector of the parent population is as astounding as it is alarming.

The United States spends $622.8 billion on national defense. (This includes $481.4 billion for discretionary spending and $141.7 billion specifically for the war in Iraq. You can download the press release here.)

The United States spends $86.7 billion on Veteran Affairs. (You can download their press release here.)

This is disgusting. It is granted that the cost of care for an active member of the military will be higher. But having fully one quarter of the homeless population being none other than the men and women who fought and lost for our country is appalling.

This. Should. Not. Happen.

This section of the homeless population should never have been and should never be homeless in the first place. There is no reason for it. We can end this epidemic in this country. So why don’t we do it?

Do not let the numbers numb you to the fact that we are rapidly approaching one million human beings homeless in the United States.

One million mothers.

One million fathers.

One million sisters.

One million brothers.

One million children.

In a country with an expendable income in the billions, there is no reason for any of this to be happening.

1 in 4

Our veterans. My grandfather, for one. This is him in his Navy blues at his 1982 reunion. When he returned from World War II, the G.I. Bill gave him plenty of opportunities, but from what I could tell he never needed to take advantage of them. He was one of the fortunate ones.

Many of his fellow brothers and sisters of the Navy succumbed to the mental ravages of the horrors of war. My grandfather never talked about his time in the pacific theater.

This tradition continued through every war since then. The stresses placed on the mind during times of war is insurmountable by many of the men and women who volunteer to protect this country. We pump billions into the maintenance of the war effort, we pump billions into the recruitment and training of troops, but when it comes to what happens afterwards we largely turn a blind eye to their suffering.

The Associated Press sent out a story today highlighting the startling realization that 1 in 4 of the homeless population is a veteran. This disgusts me in ways that I have been having a hard time quantifying since I read the piece.

This country, this self-righteous, hypocritical, fear-mongering, war profiteering, god blessed country, has hit an all time low for me. We run around demonizing those people brave enough to speak out about the war, (not the men and women fighting it), but turn up our noses in disgust when one of those people from the armed forces pleads for help.

1 in 4 homeless in this country is a war veteran. Not some poor schmuck who washed out of boot camp and is feeling sorry for themselves, but an honest to god war veteran. That guy you saw dragging the plastic bag full of aluminum cans, dirty from head to toe, who hasn’t seen a shave in what seems like 20 years, and has a look of dementia in his eyes, could very well be the guy who ran out of the foxhole and saved your father. Or he could be the one who took an extra minute searching the field and found the land-mine that would have surely taken out your mother. The guy that watched your brother’s back while searching and clearing buildings in Iraq? That could have been him. Do you remember the story your sister told you about the crazy marine who drove the Humvee through a hail of bullets, bombs, and blood to get her out of the crossfire she would have died in? That guy you just venomously told to get a job was him.

We have one day, Veterans Day, set aside to honor and remember those who fought and died for the freedoms we take for granted. It is observed on the 11th of every November. Yet this day is so much an afterthought that we do not treat it nearly as well as the more commercial holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. God forbid we ever take a day off to spend with the people that fought to protect our nation.

Next time you step over, around, on, or cross the street to avoid a member of the homeless population, stop and wonder whether they might be that one in four.

Fleet Street News

Sweeney Todd has got to be one of my all time favorite musicals. Right behind Willy Wonka and The Wizard of Oz. And as all good things must come to an end, so must all good things become a Hollywood movie. Having read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz when I was a child, seeing them on the screen as a child was a treat that I have only been able to compare to seeing Transformers on the big screen as an adult. Now I get to see a modern day version of a classic tale with a decidedly darker twist.

With the extremely dark and deadly themes of Sweeny Todd, it is fitting that the team who brings it to the grand screen for the second time is none other than the cinematic dynamic duo of the macabre and strange that is Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. Their collaboration; Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, comes to theaters in December. Re-imagined for the big screen from the Broadway play of the same name.

I can’t wait to see this movie, and I hope I am not disappointed.

Running better than sex?

I was planning on heading to the gym after work last night. I told everyone this, and my roommate was feeling down so I told him that he needed to come with me. I told him it would be good for him.

He’s been trying to figure out when and how to work out as much as I have been. I was just the first to take the plunge and buy a membership.

So I finally convince him, and I show him around the place. I had taken my workout clothes in a gym bag so I had to take some time to get changed, but after that we were off.

As I mentioned in this post I got on the elliptical first instead of the treadmill. Kept my pace at around 160-ish strides per minute, and my heart rate stayed at about 140. I tried to figure out how to get my heart rate up higher, but couldn’t at the time. The machine said I burned about 400 calories. I am not impressed. Maybe if I increase resistance?

We went downstairs to the weight room and I started on an abdominal/oblique/back workout. Incline sit ups are my zone exercise. I will always include 3 to 5 sets of 15 to 20 sit ups on an incline bench regardless of the workout. Throw in back hyperextensions ( 3 sets of 15), and weighted oblique bend (3 sets of 15 reps per side holding 40lbs dumbbell), and a sit and twist machine that worked all of those same areas at once (3 sets of 15 reps per side with the machine set to 70lbs) and I freaking hurt. I’m still working through a cold and therefore am still coughing on occasion. This workout makes me want to cry every time I cough.

After we got done with our respective workouts. I asked him how he liked the gym.

He said that it was great, better than “going out and having random sex to feel better.”

I drove in stunned silence all the way home.

Sweat and pain pt 3

Sweet jeebus. I forgot how much this hurts.

I went back to the gym tonight for the first time since April or May. Ouch.

I did an alternating walk/run circuit on the treadmill for 30 minutes (walk 5 min warm up then 5 run/5 walk/5 run/3 walk/2 sprint/5 walk/5 cooldown). This kept my heart rate bouncing from 160 to 110. Not for sure if I like that.

I think tomorrow night I will try the elliptical machine and try to keep my heart rate around 16o for the full 30 minutes.

Then I went downstairs to the weight room. Christ on crutches that sucked ass.

I tried part of my old arm/upper body pyramid circuit routine involving targeted biceps, targeted triceps, and the pull-down machine. The circuit started with 15 situps on the incline bench, then 25 overhead tricep @ 15lbs, 20 pull-downs @ 80lbs, and 20 isolated biceps with a 20lb bar. I repeated this set three times, each time going up in weight and down in reps, but doing the same number of situps and ending with an extra set of situps for a total of four.

• 1st set:
  • 15 situps
  • 25 tricep @ 15lbs
  • 20 pull-downs @ 80lbs
  • 20 biceps @ 20lbs

• 2nd set:
  • 15 situps
  • 20 tricep @ 20lbs
  • 15 pull-downs @ 90lbs
  • 15 biceps @ 30lbs

• 3rd set:
  • 15 situps
  • 15 tricep @ 25lbs
  • 10 pull-downs @ 100lbs
  • 10 biceps @ 40lbs

• 4th set:
  • 15 situps

Took me about 20 minutes and towards the end it sucked a lot. My arms still feel like jelly and my legs don’t want to work right, but I’m glad I went. I forgot to weigh myself before I worked out, (mainly because I couldn’t find the scale) but I did afterwards and I was surprised to find out that I didn’t gain as much as I had thought. Post workout I weighed 263. When I started working out back in January I weighed 315. I lost about 40 lbs in 4 months and lost/kept off another 10-ish lbs since April. The treadmill showed that I burned approximately 450 calories in that run, and I probably burned another 50-ish in the weight room. So a total 1 hour session got rid of about 500 calories. That’s breakfast and some of lunch. Right on.

Tonight comes the sleeping, tomorrow morning comes the pain, woohoo!

The Crud

I have, as a friend put it, “The Crud.” I have been thusly afflicted for the last two days. I hate being sick: having a nose that acts like a leaky faucet, a throat that feels like sandpaper, minor aches that appear and disappear all over, and the occasional chill that seems to have a mind of its own.

The Crud caused me to miss a class today. My body was apparently in repair mode and decided it would better be able to accomplish that if it kept me asleep through my alarm. It would have been nice had we been able to have a little conference before my sluggish body just made the decision on its own. This, much like America at the hands of the President Bush regime, is not a democracy and what I say goes. But it appears that my body must have deemed a coup in order to help me recover was more important that global futures.

Vitamin C, echanacia, orange juice, and tylenol cold and flu have been my best of friends today. Maybe with their help I can clean out The Crud and hope to survive another flu season relatively unscathed. My biggest disappointment today though, was that The Crud caused me to miss my fitness evaluation at my new gym. What a glowing first impression I’m leaving. Maybe I can reschedule it for Thursday.

Low point today.

My roommate’s father died at 7 pm. He is a wreck.

As I told him earlier, I hope that it is a very long time before I have to understand what it is he is going through. It is so hard to fathom someone who has always been in your life not being there anymore. Just picking up the phone to say hi seems like such a trivial thing to do, but when the option is no longer available it becomes so much more.

I don’t want to imagine my mother or my father not being just a phone call away.

Don’t leave things unsaid. Don’t wait to see the people that you love. It is said so often, but bears repeating: once they are gone, you won’t get the chance again.

Don’t leave things to regret.

Sweat and pain pt 2

Motivated by the events of Saturday night: read about it here!, and taking the post from Sweat and Pain pt 1 a bit further, I went out today and have paid far too much for a membership to a local gym. It’s an annual membership so I have an entire year with said gym. I go tomorrow for my free fitness evaluation… HA! More like unfitness evaluation. This is going to be quite humorous. I shouldn’t really be that bad, I stopped working out every day back in late may/early june and dwindled off from that. I think I know where I’m at physically, but I’m not looking forward to seeing the cold, flabby, facts.

I’m probably going to post the results tomorrow after I get out of class. This should prove to be entertaining.

Memories

I found a one use camera a few years ago during one of the many moves I’ve had to make over the years. When I found it I had a good idea of what was on it, and because it was so soon after a breakup, I decided not to get the film developed because I did not want to wrestle with harsh feelings mixed with good memories.

So I re-found that same camera a few days ago and decided it has been long enough that I can deal with it. I went to the local Wal-Mart, which made a part of my soul die, and took it to the 1-hour photo center. Thinking that my friends would be fashionably late as the usually are, I figured I would have enough time to get them that night. I was pleasantly surprised that they were not late and called me to inform me as such. So I left the film there safe in the knowledge that I could come get the pictures the next day.

That night, while we were celebrating the birthday of my good friends’ wife, we saw many different costumes come wandering through the establishment we chose. From the Mystery Inc. gang, to the mummy, to Robin, to the “Dick in a Box” guys.

Then she walked in.

Consciousness

As a burgeoning sociologist, my colleagues and classmates are constantly talking about the differences that: separate us, bind us, keep us downtrodden, keep us uplifted, or just generally keep us. We have had a very limited opportunity to study these things with two tragedies: Hurricane Katrina and the California fires.

Reading through news stories, blog posts, and listening to news programs, it lifts my heart to know that the discussion is not focusing on one aspect of the problem. No one seems to be focusing purely on race, or class, or economic status, or education. It seems that the talks are on all of those subjects and several not listed. Unfortunately I am seeing a deadlock in the discussions.

It seems that since we, as a society, are unable to put one single perfect all encompassing label on the problem, we are leaving it, frustrated that the problem is too hard and multi-faceted to tackle. What is happening to the discussion? There are many of us out there who are blaming it on one single thing, yet these people and their arguments are quickly becoming passé to the grand majority of the country when confronted by other arguments who say it is something completely different.

This may seem like a very clear “duh” moment, but it has to be said. There is no single perfect label to place upon this mess that Katrina and the fires of California have opened our eyes to. The problem is systemic; meaning that it has integrated itself into every aspect of our lives, is perpetuated from several different angles of society, and has as many outcomes as it has reasons.

Douchebag fitness center

So I am looking for a gym. My requirements are thus: I have limited times that I can actually work out; either at the ass crack of dawn or after I get off work around midnight-ish, I do not want to exercise with four hundred other people, I don’t want to have to drive to get there, I do not want to work out with douchebags, (sorry adam, that means you can’t come), and I don’t want to spend a fortune on it. One would think that these minor requirements would be able to be accommodated. Alas, it has been much more difficult that I could have guessed.

#1 I have gone to two that are supported by the city’s park department. While both are nice, have ample space, and have plenty of classes, they miss the mark on two out of my list. They are not 24 hour and do not stay open past 8 or 9 and unfortunately they are both completely packed in the mornings. Both of those are down.

#2 A few days ago, I went and checked out a place run by a local hospital on the north end of town. The place was nice, albeit a little on the small side, is less than 3 blocks from my house, is open 24 hours, the staff is extremely nice, and they don’t want my entire arm and leg, they will settle for my hand and possibly the lower half of my leg. It is a little small, and the place does not have a huge staff, but I can’t as of yet find any major defects beyond those two.

#3 Today, I went and met with a guy at the local superclub that is a short bike ride from my house. Again, they have ample space, not very many people, are open 24 hours, and as I said I can bike there. Sadly though, they want an arm and a leg for the privilege of using their saintly facilities and unless you want to sign up right there and then without trying the place out they want you to spend even more! Plus the guy that showed me around was like mighty morphin power douchebag. This guy used every single trick in the salesman’s book to try and get me to sign up, which I can’t fault him for, but when I told him that I was probably not going to be using his gym, the look that came across his face almost made me sign. The guy looked like I had just kicked his dog! He was so sad and despondent that I almost felt sorry for him. I hope that losing my sale did not cost one of his imaginary three children to not get braces.

I don’t know. I may have to try out number 2 for a week or so and see how it works out.

Oops!

The title of my last post was, “and now for something completely different.” While it may be referring to something completely different, Wil Wheaton chose to use the same title on an earlier post for his blog. I must have read it the day before and my overloaded and addled brain must have thought it was so cool that I had to use it too.

Sorry Wil Wheaton, I didn’t mean to step on your toes.

Yay for mouth pain! pt 2

Naps are a wonderful thing. Especially after a particularly draining session in the torture dentist’s chair. If you have never had the exhilarating experience of the first part of a root canal, let me be the first to tell everyone to go out right now and ask their dentist for one!

My face still hurts and it is quite difficult to talk. The painkillers that the good doctor injected into my gums is starting to wear off and I can finally feel my nose. Not being able to feel one side of your nose is a very strange sensation, especially when it is combined with everything from the top of your cheekbone down to the bottom of your jaw.

I am alive, but barely.

Yay for mouth pain!

I am leaving in a few moments for a dentist appointment. The goal: to scale and plane one quadrant of my teeth, and while he’s in there, treating me to my very first root canal! I’m so excited I think I’m going to go have several stiff shots of jack before I go.

So I probably won’t be making it to work tonight. The last time I went to the dentist, he gave me morphine! I was worthless after that until the next day around 2pm.

Have I mentioned I’m not looking forward to this?

Sweat and pain

It is time to be honest with myself. It is time to face a fact that has been known to me my whole life and is painfully obvious to all that know me away from the digital world. Sometimes in conversation I say this in a joking manner to alleviate the tension caused by my appearance, but this time I say it with deadly seriousness.

I am overweight. I am fat. I am obese. I am: plump, chubby, stout, portly, heavy, large, and corpulent. And I have been this way for as long as I can physically remember.

I am not morbidly obese to the point that I can not get out and walk or ride a bike (of which, I do both often), but I can recognize that my shape is not one of a healthy individual. I am conscious of what I’m eating and I try to stay away from foods that prevailing science believes to be unhealthy for me. I’ve even recently decided to look into a more vegetarian lifestyle, particularly macrobiotics. As I feel that red meat is not good for me, I have never really liked pork, and the texture of chicken has taken a decidedly foul (pun intended) twist to my taste buds.

But as so many in the health industry has said, diet alone is not enough. To that end, at the beginning of the year, I had a gym membership to a 24-hour club that I frequented for approximately four months. During that time I lost about 40 lbs, and felt better than I had in years, but succumbed to distractions of my own creation as so many of us do. I want to be healthy because I want to live a long and fruitful life, because I want to see my grandchildren, and because I know it will benefit me in the here and now.

Now comes the difficult part: committing to the change. It is a complete change in lifestyle, eating better and going to the gym, and I hope that this time I will stick with it. I’m going down to a gym that is just two blocks from my apartment so distance will not be a problem. I took a tour of the place today and the people who run it are fantastically nice. And the place is open 24-hours a day so time will not be a constraint. I think that I have made every attempt to remove the readily available excuses from my path.

Now I just have to commit to the sweat and pain.

Wish me luck.

Choices

It is never quite clear when a choice is made how that choice will affect your future self. Like the choice I made when I was 15.

I had just gotten paid from my very first job. I was a dishwasher and busboy for a family owned diner in the small town I grew up in. It was a Friday and I had just been handed a check for $200. Now I realize that children should never get paid that much. Having found myself newly rich and 15 with no bills the money needed to be saved for or any other expense. I hoped on my blue Schwinn mountain bike and rode around town with a desire to get rid of the burning wad of cash in my pocket. My trip would be very short.

The first place I came to was a computer shop being run out of an unused office of the local newspaper. It advertised a “Complete home pc with monitor, keyboard, mouse, and preloaded with Windows for Workgroups 3.11!” For only $125 it could be mine. I marveled at this sign, wondering to myself all manner of questions about this home pc thing, and what windows for workgroups was, and if it was anything like the commodore 64 we used in my computer class at school. Let me tell you it was not.

I walked in the door of the newspaper office, and this is where I was first hit with the clambering business of a fast-paced news office, but where those impressions led me is a story for another time, so back to the computer. I asked a very nice receptionist where the computer sales were and she pointed me in that direction. When I walked in the small office-turned-computer-store, I was inundated with small led lights and the sounds of dozens of small computer fans pushing air across the hot innards of the little beige machines. Monitors of all sizes sat atop the beige boxes, some displayed DOS prompts and some displayed swirling colors or changing pictures or text that moved across the screen at different rates of speed or star fields moving with different speeds. To say the least I was stunned. I had never before seen a computer do these things and I never thought I would. I had a super nintendo, (and a nintendo before that, and an atari 2600 before that), and it was about the coolest thing I had ever owned, but I could feel this was somehow different.

The man behind the counter asked if he could help me and I descended on him with questions like a pack of wolves on their first real meal after a long winter. He answered them all graciously and without any kind of smugness, superiority, or the “buy something or get the hell out” attitude that so many retail salespeople seem to have these days. He told me of this thing called “the internet” and how I could go online to pages where people come to look at pictures or news or any number of things that couldn’t be listed but had to be found. He showed me the computer advertised on the window: it was an intel i386 processor with 256k of ram, a soundblaster16 card, and a 200MB hard drive.

I asked if it could get to this online he spoke of and he said that I had to buy and install something called a modem. After he explained that the modem was the piece of hardware that allowed the computer to talk to others over the phone line, I bought it for an even $25. So $150 of my $200 was gone and I walked home with a computer and some parts.

The thrill for me in any new adventure is figuring out how it works. I knew nothing of static electricity dangers or ZIF or PCI or ISA or RAM or any of the technical jargon that accompanied learned computer people, but I was bound and determined to find out. After several days of pouring over the Windows 3.11 manual (yes I read the manual, it was much larger and more informational than the help system joke that accompanies MS now), and reading the manual that came with my 14.4k modem, I installed it and was ready to embark on the journey to the World Wide Web.

My first experience with the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death), occured when I booted up for the first time oddly enough. Apparently I forgot to install the drivers first, and then I had IRQ conflicts, and then Windows didn’t like the drivers or the connection software. At one point in time this was all great fun. I learned so much about computers and software and how it all worked together from this, my first experience, than I ever could have from a class or a tutor. I loved every minute of it.

One simple choice led me to where I am now, writing this blog, sharing with anyone who would listen. I’m giving a shout out to all the people I used to hang with on the Springfield Chatmaster BBS (my first ISP), and to all the people on the many IRC channels that I used to frequent. I truly miss those initial days of discovery that one simple choice led me to. Here is to being young and wide eyed.

And the journey begins

So here it is, my first actual blog.

I started an irregularly updated blog on a myspace page, and that is great, but I have problems with the format flexibility of that blog so I decided to come to WordPress.

So what is it that I’m doing here? That is a fantastic question. I’m still looking for the answer to that one, but I hope that this project will help me find it. I will be doing some reviews on books I’ve read and music that I like. I will be interjecting this with comments on topics like politics, globalization, ethnocentrism, racism, and social problems. All topics that I find entertaining to talk about and that I feel should be talked about in a public forum.

I will do what I can not to pull punches, but that will be a trait I will have to learn. I want this to be an open forum, free from reprisals, where anyone can come to speak their mind, and where everyone can be civil to each other.

This means for anyone who decides to comment there will be some rules just to keep things civil:

1. Do not attack the person.
   1. Everyone here has a right to their own opinion.
2. Do not use foul language.
   1. It will be censored and/or the comment will possibly be prevented from being posted.
3. Keep all comments on topic.

I think that’s it for now. I will publish again soon.