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| i'm in a pretty rotten mood.
that's all.
oooh, despite the onslaught of myspace i remain faithful to xanga.
for real. sort of. | | |
| i'm keeping an absolutely maniacal pace lately, i mean at least twice as busy as when i lived in california. for example tonight is the first night this week that i've been home before ten. anyway, i don't have anything at all substantive to say, which means that obviously this entry will be long enough to put a dissertation on quantum physics to shame.
*new year's was good, this despite the fact that both dunx and bone were gone that night. really, truly and honestly, staying home that night would have been all the same to me, and i've spent no small amount of time since then wondering if that might not have been the wise thing to do.
*there's this rule i have about books, basically it's that i won't start (read:buy) a new one before i finish the one i'm in the middle of. anyways, last time i was here i was in the middle of this book called the man who was thursday by g.k. chesterton. i didn't finish it, not because it wasn't good, i'm about two thirds of the way through it; it's really engaging and i'm excited about finishing it in the next week or two.
the book i broke the rule for is titled blue like jazz and it's buy a guy named donald miller. this past summer i read another book he wrote that was called searching for God knows what and it pretty much blew me away. i was sort of jealous because it's one of those books that puts forth a lot of the same ideas that i kick around in my head with some degree of frequency, and what's crazier is that stylistically it's written in a extremely similar way to the stuff i write.
anyways, blue like jazz is doing the same stuff that searching. . . did this past summer and in a lot of ways it's sort of pulled the cover back on some of the legitimate inadequacy of my relationship with God, not just the perceived stuff that people beat themselves up over, but substantive stuff that's really given me a lot to think about.
*i'm way excited about watching the rangers this year. they did end up getting kevin millwood to front (perhaps?) their rotation. there most likely won't be any further off-season tinkering, their lineup is set and the only piece that could potentially be added to the rotation is a $20+ million roger clemens.
barring that, the rotation goes:
millwood, eaton, padilla, loe, dominguez
and the lineup will be
c barajas
1b teixeira
2b kinsler/jimenez
3b blalock
ss young
lf mench
cf nix/matthews
rf wilkerson
dh dellucci/nevin
solid, up and down. the spot with the least certainty looks like second base, kinsler's a pretty highly touted prospect (rightly so) but will be a rookie and isn't an absolute lock to break camp with the team. there are no automatic outs in that lineup and it's the most balanced they've put together in years.
*it's done, before this weekend is over i'll be getting a longhorn tattoo somewhere on my person. watching that game pretty much makes it worth it though. i know i haven't seen as entertaining a football game since last year's rose bowl.
*i'm doing cardio again. it's been really good, i'll never know why i ever stop doing it. the nine months i worked out consistently, february-december of 2004 was the best i've felt physically since high school, when i wasn't smart enough to appreciate it. in fact, i think all the working out i was doing and the relationship i had with my trainer back then was pretty vital in helping me to stomach all the crud i was going through at that time.
*lately i've been in a weird mood, so when jimmy walked in to see me at work on tuesday night and told me pretty much everything that was on my mind i was pretty amazed, but at the same time not at all surprised. there's a lot that i'm happy about, but at the same time, there's a lot about life that i wish was different, not in an "i wish i was someone else" or "i wish i had this" kinda way, honestly, i'm not even sure entirely what i'm talking about.
*that's pretty much it, i'll try to be more coherent next time, but i'm not making any promises. | | |
| i can't think of anything to say. or more precisely, i can't think of a way to say what it is i want to say, so here are some lyrics, the song is "wishlist" and the band is pearl jam:
i wish i was a neutron bomb, for once i could go off
i wish i was a sacrifice but somehow still lived on
i wish i was the sentimental ornament you hung on
the christmas tree i wish i was the star that went on top
i wish i was the evidence, i wish i was the grounds
for fifty millions hands upraised and opened toward the sky.
i wish i was a sailor with someone who waited for me
i wish i was as fortunate, as fortunate as me
i wish i was a messenger and all the news was good
i wish i was the full moon shining off a camaro's hood
i wish i was an alien at home behind the sun
i wish i was the souvenir you kept your housekey on
i wish i was the pedal brake that you depended on
i wish i was the verb "to trust" and never let you down
i wish i was the radio song, the one that you turned up
i wish i wish i wish i wish
i guess it never stops | | |
| happy holidays. i'll get to that in a bit, i guess.
*i've picked up reading again, i'm doing more of it now than i have since i first moved to california and getting through a book every other week or so. right now i'm in the middle of the man who was thursday by g.k. chesterton. it's the first novel i've read since i read angels and demons a year and a half or so ago and it's really brilliantly written.
*i went to the cowboys game a week and a half or so ago, they beat the chiefs. believe it or not, it was the first time i'd ever been to texas stadium to watch the cowboys. the last time i was there was with mike whalen and shawn wildt to see duncanville play lewisville before we drove back to wheaton for thanksgiving and the first time i was there i saw the von erichs in a six-man tag team match against the fabulous freebirds, crazy. the atmosphere was more like a high school or a college game than i'd expected, the crowd spent a lot of the game on its feet. i also learned that a eighteen inch or so high margarita costs eleven bucks. i guess that's not bad, it comes out to a buck sixty-three an inch.
*has anyone ever told you something that you would rather have not known? like on one hand you feel honored that they would trust you, but on the other it's the kind of thing that you're not at all prepared to hear. i may or may not be able to relate right this second, i'm not saying.
*the rangers made a trade, although i'm not sure how i feel about it just yet. they got a adam eaton, a starting pitcher, from the padres and they didn't have to give up hank blalock to do it. in chris young, however, they give up a pitcher who'd had some degree of success with them early in his career to get one who's got similar career numbers, although an admittedly higher national profile, in a park that is about as different from the temple as different gets.
i'm not sure the biggest value in the trade is necessarily the players exchanged as much as it is a tool to show free agent pitchers that the organization is interested in revamping percieved areas of weakness and taking risks to do so. for example if the trade helps the rangers sign a guy like kevin millwood, so much the better. if that happens, then the rangers go into the season with a rotation that's got millwood, eaton, vicente padilla and kameron loe as its front four starters; juan dominguez likely figures into that picture as well with a handful of other guys fighting for that number five spot. i'm not sure how much better that would be than having kenny rogers, chris young and kameron loe as your front three, but at least it's different, which is a plus, cause the same crap they run out there year after year has gotten them all of nowhere.
what they need to do is once and for all get roger clemens to agree to play here for a year, i say offer him a one year fifty million dollar deal, but then i'm not the one writing the checks.
*it's december, which opens up the whole "merry christmas" "happy holidays" can of worms. my general rule for the whole thing is that when i'm talking to people i don't know i tend to say happy holidays and when i greet people i do know, i say merry christmas. part of the rationale is that with people you don't know, you have no idea where on the map they might be with the whole thing. you don't know if they observe christmas, but you know for sure that there are plenty of holidays this time of year and that most likely they claim at least one of them, i mean festivus if nothing else.
i suspect that that's the sort of thing that will get me accused of deferring to the pc police, but really and truly it's not about that at all. i've noticed at work particularly, when i greet people with happy holidays, more often than not, i get an unusually emphatic "merry christmas." i could be wrong, but i suspect that the tone of the response is the result of the backlash against the decidedly non-sectarian bent that's come as a result of the percieved intrusion into the season's rhetoric by the guardians of the political correctness ethos.
near as i can tell, however, the hijacking and appropriation of the christmas season has been for the purposes of serving a culture outside the church, but not the kind of political correctness liberalism that many would point the finger at. more specifically, i have in mind the market. beyond that, the church has been a willing, if halfway unwitting accomplice in the hijacking of christmas by the market. in fact, the church has been a willling if halfway unwitting accomplice in pretty much everything the market's done in the last hundred or so years, but that's likely another entry for another day.
so basically lots of christians are pissed that it's not always ok with everybody to say merry christmas and what i guess i'm trying to say is that we're more responsible for the state of affairs of which we disapprove than we realize, sort of an if you're part of the solution, you're likely still part of the problem sort of thing. i suspect if more christians saw their primary citizenship in the kingdom of God as opposed to a political entity like a particular nation-state, the state of affairs would be markedly different.
for example, in church this past year, sunday morning services to be more specific, i remember acknowledging, if only momentarily, the national holidays of memorial day and the fourth of july. in fact, this summer there was a wednesday night video series that detailed america's perceived religious heritage. i don't mean at all to detract from those acknowledgements or to say that they're wrongheaded or otherwise inappropriate. contrast that however with the season of advent, the four weeks that lead up to christmas and celebrate the anticipation of the coming king, Jesus. it's a celebration exclusive to the church, which is to say that there is no national or state-sponsored, observance or acknowledgement of it. want to know how many times during this year's four weeks of advent, i heard even the word advent mentioned?
if you guessed none, you'd be right.
does anybody see a problem with that? like i said, the problem isn't at all with honoring our country or those who have served it. however, when those acknowledgements garner more attention in church than a season that is exclusive and particular to it, one that helps form the spirtual foundation for a holiday that, in all reality, provides an incredible platform from which to express the wonder and light of God's gift to humanity, then i'd say that's problematic. at the very least it's a partial explanation for why our celebration of christmas has been so compromised.
so, since the church, or a large part of it, seems to have abandoned any formal celebration of the anticipation of God becoming flesh, the culture is more or less free to do with the holiday what it sees fit. think back about four years, right after the attacks on new york and d.c. in the days that followed, our leaders told us the best thing, the most american thing we could do for our country was to keep going to work, keep buying stuff, spend the money to go to ballgames and movies; that stopping those activities would be tantamount to admitting defeat to the perpetrators of those attacks. now think about a church that, in many ways considers itself more american than christian, or at the very least, tacitly believes the terms to be roughly equivalent. is it any wonder that christmas has become what it has?
it's food for thought, anyway. | | |
| i get sick like every other week now. i blame it on kids. usually i'll get a little cold virus or something to fight off twice a year or so.
this is the second time i've gotten one in less than a month. it's really not just a whole lot of fun.
my brother's birthday's today, he's 21. other than that, there's not really just a whole lot to say.
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