It's Christmas, so I might as well tell you about the time an angel came to visit me.
It's a long story, and to tell it properly, we have to go back to the afternoon March 16, 1995.
I was a junior in high school and at my surgeon's office for a final appointment before I was set to have knee surgery. It was to be a fairly standard arthroscopic procedure the next morning to fix a torn meniscus and remove some wayward cartilage I had suffered from a bad triple jump landing in track practice.
But the doctor entered the room with a frown carrying my MRI results.
He had noticed a small abnormality that no one had seen when they first got the results back. It might be just a smudge, he said, or it might be partially hidden tear of my ACL. Either way, he said, he needed to cancel my surgery in the morning.
They couldn't know exactly what was going on in my knee until they went inside, and if it was a ligament tear, the swelling would need about another week to subside before it could be operated on.
The doctor suggested rescheduling my operation another week so that they could fix whatever it was they found.
This was bad news on multiple fronts.
An arthroscopic surgery was a fairly minor deal from which I could recover in a matter of weeks. My track season would be over, but I'd be just fine long before basketball season next year, which is what really mattered to me.
A ligament tear meant full reconstructive knee surgery, months of rehabilitation and a strong chance I'd never fully recover. This possibility was devastating to my high school mind.
The world seems smaller in high school, so I was just as concerned with what the news meant in the short term. I'd been hobbling around my high school on crutches for 8 days. The foam in my crutches had absorbed my sweat from the exertion and was starting to smell bad. My classmates had grown beyond tired of helping me carry my books. Another week of begging for mercy seemed excruciating.
Plus, I had told the world I was having surgery in the morning, and one of my teachers had gone to great trouble to videotape a "Get Well Soon Party" in my absence. I was going to have a lot of unwelcoming explaining to do if my surgery turned out to be a false alarm.
I couldn't face it. I had to have surgery tomorrow.
I begged the doctor to go ahead and do the operation, just in case they were wrong about the ACL tear. He explained that it could lead to lots of unnecessary trouble if it turned out that I had to have another surgery a week later. And I didn't have insurance, so my dad was looking at the possibility of two $10,000 operations rather than one. It made no sense to do the operation.
So the expression on my face must have been one of abject misery, when, against all logic, both my dad and the surgeon relented and allowed me to have an operation the next day, even though I might need another one just one week later.
I went into the operating room nervous, not just because I was 17 and had never faced anything like it, but because the next year of my life, my promising basketball career (and a whole lot of my dad's money) was at stake. I would wake up from the operation either a couple weeks away from being as good as new, or I would wake up facing another surgery, a chorus of "I told you so," and months of rehab before life seemed normal again.
I didn't sleep well the night before, but once I was prepped for surgery the nurses gave me the happy drugs. I quickly fell asleep.
The next thing I knew, my eyes groggily half-opened to see a figure standing over my left shoulder. "Your surgery was successful," a woman's voice told me. "And you don't need another one."
I wanted to scream with joy, but I was barely awake and couldn't yet respond. I saw her disappear behind me and didn't have the strength to move my head.
After a minute or two, I managed to gather my wits and fully open my eyes, but the nurse in the room with me had her back turned across the room.
"That's great news," I managed to say.
"Oh, you're awake," she said, although her voice suddenly sounded very different from the one I had just heard. "But what are you talking about?"
"My surgery. That my ACL wasn't torn. You just told me I didn't need another surgery."
She had no idea what I was talking about.
The nurse had been assigned to the room I had been wheeled to to let the doctor know when I was awake, but she knew nothing about my procedure or my results. I asked if another nurse had been in the room, but she said it had just been her and I in the room for the last half hour. I looked behind my left shoulder in the direction where I had noticed the woman disappear, and saw nothing but a cinder block wall.
The only door to the room was on the other side beside where the nurse was standing.
A few minutes later the doctor came in. I met him with an exclamation: "My ACL isn't torn!!!! I don't need another surgery!!!!"
"Oh, it was torn," he said, as my heart began to sink. "But the tear was so small we could fix it with the laser. You were right about having the surgery." After a moment's pause he then asked:
"But how on earth did you know you wouldn't need another surgery?"
I hadn't had time to process what had happened, so I just shrugged off the question. But, in fact, there was no earthly way I could have known my surgery results. Instead, an audible voice that the nurse in my room didn't hear had accurately described my surgery and then disappeared into a wall.
Sounds reasonable, right?
It sounds even crazier considering that I don't know why it happened. I would have found out the same news from my surgeon five minutes later, so I never understood the point of this visit. And when I had a colonoscopy earlier this year that found three polyps, I was disappointed my Guardian didn't visit again when I came-to, forcing me instead to wait five days to hear whether or not I had cancer.
I haven't shared this story much because I couldn't come to grips with the point of it all. On one hand, there was no rational explanation for how I knew my surgery results before anyone at the hospital had told me. On the other hand, while I believe in the theoretical possibility of divine intervention, I couldn't grasp the point of it coming to give me a five-minute heads up on news I would have heard anyway.
No, an angel didn't come to tell me my surgery results. There would have been no point in that. As I consider it now, a much more likely possibility strikes me, though. My Guardian had been there for my whole surgery. She just happened to tell me my results on her way out the door.
Or rather, her way out the wall.
---------------------------------------------------------
As it turned out, I never fully recovered from my slightly torn ACL. My left leg is bigger than my right one, and I have back problems from the lack of cartilage in my right leg. I could never run as fast or jump as high after my injury as I could before it, and I didn't score as many points in my senior basketball season and I didn't get that basketball scholarship that I had dreamed of.
But now, every time my right knee barks at me when I run in the cold or don't stretch before working out, I'm reminded of the time that God sent an angel and proved he loved me.
All in all, that's a pretty good trade.
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
Sunday, December 23, 2012
The Meaning of Christmas? The same as last year.
I was busy selling a house this year, so I didn't even start Christmas shopping until December 20th. In the frantic rush of selling a house and buying presents, there hasn't been time to blog.
My brain has turned to mush anyway after enduring the ups and downs of 2012, so it might be for the best.
Don't yell at me.
There will be one or two more columns coming by the end of the year, so check back often. In the meantime, here's a peace offering.
It's last year's Christmas blog (Disappointed in my gift? Well, what did you get me for Christmas?).
I'd tell you what this post is about, but I really don't remember. Something about Christmas, and why it should be meaningful to everyone, and I think there's a reference to my favorite sitcom (Community) in there somewhere.
It was pretty good. I just can't remember the details. So see it for yourself.
http://www.andrewsmithsthoughts.blogspot.com/2011/12/real-meaning-of-christmas.html
My brain has turned to mush anyway after enduring the ups and downs of 2012, so it might be for the best.
Don't yell at me.
There will be one or two more columns coming by the end of the year, so check back often. In the meantime, here's a peace offering.
It's last year's Christmas blog (Disappointed in my gift? Well, what did you get me for Christmas?).
I'd tell you what this post is about, but I really don't remember. Something about Christmas, and why it should be meaningful to everyone, and I think there's a reference to my favorite sitcom (Community) in there somewhere.
It was pretty good. I just can't remember the details. So see it for yourself.
http://www.andrewsmithsthoughts.blogspot.com/2011/12/real-meaning-of-christmas.html
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Fighting the Good Fight Against Bad Christmas Songs
Everyone has a favorite holiday tradition. Mine is making fun of bad Christmas songs.
Don't judge me. Or go ahead and judge me, if you want, because I don't care. I will still drive my wife crazy overanalyzing every song on the radio for the next two weeks regardless.
I will even bear the burden of being called a Scrooge if I must. I know the holidays are a happy time when no one wants to criticize anything, but I am sticking to my principles on this.
Just because a song is about the holidays doesn't give it the right to insult the collective intelligence of humanity.
I believe this firmly.
It's not that I hate Christmas or the holiday season. I actually think it's the most wonderful time of the year. (you see what I did there?) Because I do, I feel justified in saving the holiday season from being corrupted by an endless avalanche of stupid holiday songs.
My favorite example is a holiday song so bad it's actually sort of entertaining. With the song "Do they Know it's Christmastime," a collaboration of musicians known as Band Aid got together and decided to advance every negative stereotype of Africa they could think of in the hopes of benefiting the people there. The melody is catchy and the song nobly attempts to raise awareness of hunger in Africa, but its actual lyrics couldn't insult the population more thoroughly if the musicians had flown to Africa and given every person there an atomic wedgie.
In the chorus, the song proclaims that the entire continent of Africa has no rain, rivers or plant life whatsoever, and the people there are too stupid and poor to own calendars. What's more, it presents as tragic the fact that people there might not even "know it's Christmas time at all," when the majority of the continent are not Christians and wouldn't celebrate it anyway. It never occurs to the well meaing but ethnocentric musicians that maybe the people there know about our Western holiday, but just don't care.
Similarly, the song bemoans that "there won't be snow in Africa this Christmastime." Is this really a bad thing? If the children are as barefoot and shirtless children and the song suggests, wouldn't they be thankful that it isn't going to snow? They'd freeze their butts off!
But I digress.
Plenty of traditional Christmas songs are dumb as well. "Away in a Manger" is a sweet, melodic and good-intentioned song, but the line stating "the little lord Jesus, no crying he makes" is flat-out heretical. The Bible records Jesus crying as an adult when his friend Lazarus died. So the song's suggestion that baby Jesus was free of human emotion is demonstrably offbase. More importantly, it runs counter to the central message of Christianity that God loved us enough to come to earth to live exactly like we do.
It's actually amazing how many religiously based Christmas songs get the details of the Christmas story completely wrong, considering the songs exist to celebrate the story.
For instance, take "The First Noel." According to the Bible, the shepards didn't "(look) up and see a great star, shining in the East beyond them far." Actually, the shepards saw an angel; it was the wise men who saw the star. And they came from the East, so the star would have had to appear them in the West. They also didn't "come sailing in" on "three ships" on "Christmas Day," they walked through the desert from Babylon and arrived long after Jesus was born.
Also, while the little drummer boy (who is not recorded in the actual Christmas story) might be a poor boy, Jesus was not. He wasn't born in a manger because his parents were broke, it was because the inn was full. In fact, by the time the wise men got to the scene, Mary and Joseph had already acquired their own house in Bethlehem, even though they didn't live there and didn't plan to stay. (If you don't believe me, look it up).
Secular holiday songs don't have to worry about getting factual details right, but they don't fair much better in the logic department. While "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" is one of my favorite holiday songs, I still don't understand why it references telling "scary ghost stories" along with tales of the glories of past Christmases. Who tells ghost stories at Christmas? And why? Is it to scare children into hiding in their rooms on Christmas Eve so the parents can play Santa?
That particular line is curious, but at least the premise of that song is logical, which is more than one can say about "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus." The song is about a kid's confusion that his Mom and Santa are making out, as the unsuspecting doofus of a kid is unaware that his own Dad is the one in the Santa costume. But here's my question: why exactly is Dad dressed as Santa?
I can understand Dad dressing up as Santa while the kids are around. But in this story, they are supposed to be asleep already. So why is dad bothering to put on the costume? Is this some kind of role-play fetish on Mom's part?
I feel gross even thinking about this.
But even this song isn't as bad as the "Christmas Shoes." In fact, no song in the history of time is.
In the song, a hapless boy leaves his mother on her deathbed in an attempt to buy her some shoes, for the totally logical purpose of giving them to his mom so she can impress God with her pinache in the afterlife.
The boy is oblivious to the facts that he has no money to buy the shoes and that his mom can't take them with her anyway. It's never explained how the boy expected to pay for the shoes, and I can't help but think that maybe Mom would be in better health if she didn't have to worry about Junior roaming the streets and blowing what little money the family has on dumb, pointless crap.
But ultimately, someone steps in and covers the charge for the shoes on the boy's behalf, notwithstanding his lack of forethought. In the end, Mom gets her shoes and dies.
Uplifting, no?
I'm not sure what the message of this song is supposed to be, but it offends on every level. It exalts materialism over relationships, as it applauds the boy's choice to spend his mother's last moments shopping for her instead of being with her. It suggests that God cares more about how we look and what we acquire than how we live or what's in our hearts.
The plot rewards the boy's failure to think ahead about his decisions. Every time I hear it, I wonder how many kids are inspired by the song to take an expensive item to a department store counter in the hopes that someone will buy it for them if they look sufficiently downtrodden.
It's also an open question why the little boy's dad let him wander out of the house and into downtown while his mother is dying in the first place.
Whatever the message of the song is supposed to be, when I hear it, I mostly have grave concerns about this little boy's future. His only living parent is his irresponsible enough to let him wander around the city alone, and the boy has come to believe that the world at large will cater to his wishes whether he can pay his fair share or not.
In other words, this boy is the embodiment of Mitt Romney's 47 percent!
Merry Christmas!
Maybe I'm thinking about all this too hard. Christmas is supposed to be the time we stop analyzing things and enjoy the moment. There's no real harm in any of the logical or factual errors noted above, except maybe some cultural insensitivity and a heaping dose of consumerism.
So maybe there's no real harm done, and we shouldn't complain. After all, some people, even in this country, never get the opportunity to discuss in heated comfort the silliness of the songs they'll listen to as they enjoy an upcoming week of paid vacation. Instead, they'll be delivering your mail, bagging your groceries, or policing your streets while you and me enjoy our eggnog.
So instead of complaining, we should do something to show our appreciation.
What to do? Well, according to Band Aid, there's only one to express our gratitude at winning life's lottery and being free from the miserable burdens other people have to carry. I think we should do it now.
So tonight, thank God it's themmmmm insteaaaaaad of yooooooooooooou!
Merry Christmas, and enjoy whatever bad Christmas songs come your way! If you're like me, you'll miss making fun of them come December 26th.
Don't judge me. Or go ahead and judge me, if you want, because I don't care. I will still drive my wife crazy overanalyzing every song on the radio for the next two weeks regardless.
I will even bear the burden of being called a Scrooge if I must. I know the holidays are a happy time when no one wants to criticize anything, but I am sticking to my principles on this.
Just because a song is about the holidays doesn't give it the right to insult the collective intelligence of humanity.
I believe this firmly.
It's not that I hate Christmas or the holiday season. I actually think it's the most wonderful time of the year. (you see what I did there?) Because I do, I feel justified in saving the holiday season from being corrupted by an endless avalanche of stupid holiday songs.
My favorite example is a holiday song so bad it's actually sort of entertaining. With the song "Do they Know it's Christmastime," a collaboration of musicians known as Band Aid got together and decided to advance every negative stereotype of Africa they could think of in the hopes of benefiting the people there. The melody is catchy and the song nobly attempts to raise awareness of hunger in Africa, but its actual lyrics couldn't insult the population more thoroughly if the musicians had flown to Africa and given every person there an atomic wedgie.
In the chorus, the song proclaims that the entire continent of Africa has no rain, rivers or plant life whatsoever, and the people there are too stupid and poor to own calendars. What's more, it presents as tragic the fact that people there might not even "know it's Christmas time at all," when the majority of the continent are not Christians and wouldn't celebrate it anyway. It never occurs to the well meaing but ethnocentric musicians that maybe the people there know about our Western holiday, but just don't care.
Similarly, the song bemoans that "there won't be snow in Africa this Christmastime." Is this really a bad thing? If the children are as barefoot and shirtless children and the song suggests, wouldn't they be thankful that it isn't going to snow? They'd freeze their butts off!
But I digress.
Plenty of traditional Christmas songs are dumb as well. "Away in a Manger" is a sweet, melodic and good-intentioned song, but the line stating "the little lord Jesus, no crying he makes" is flat-out heretical. The Bible records Jesus crying as an adult when his friend Lazarus died. So the song's suggestion that baby Jesus was free of human emotion is demonstrably offbase. More importantly, it runs counter to the central message of Christianity that God loved us enough to come to earth to live exactly like we do.
It's actually amazing how many religiously based Christmas songs get the details of the Christmas story completely wrong, considering the songs exist to celebrate the story.
For instance, take "The First Noel." According to the Bible, the shepards didn't "(look) up and see a great star, shining in the East beyond them far." Actually, the shepards saw an angel; it was the wise men who saw the star. And they came from the East, so the star would have had to appear them in the West. They also didn't "come sailing in" on "three ships" on "Christmas Day," they walked through the desert from Babylon and arrived long after Jesus was born.
Also, while the little drummer boy (who is not recorded in the actual Christmas story) might be a poor boy, Jesus was not. He wasn't born in a manger because his parents were broke, it was because the inn was full. In fact, by the time the wise men got to the scene, Mary and Joseph had already acquired their own house in Bethlehem, even though they didn't live there and didn't plan to stay. (If you don't believe me, look it up).
Secular holiday songs don't have to worry about getting factual details right, but they don't fair much better in the logic department. While "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" is one of my favorite holiday songs, I still don't understand why it references telling "scary ghost stories" along with tales of the glories of past Christmases. Who tells ghost stories at Christmas? And why? Is it to scare children into hiding in their rooms on Christmas Eve so the parents can play Santa?
That particular line is curious, but at least the premise of that song is logical, which is more than one can say about "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus." The song is about a kid's confusion that his Mom and Santa are making out, as the unsuspecting doofus of a kid is unaware that his own Dad is the one in the Santa costume. But here's my question: why exactly is Dad dressed as Santa?
I can understand Dad dressing up as Santa while the kids are around. But in this story, they are supposed to be asleep already. So why is dad bothering to put on the costume? Is this some kind of role-play fetish on Mom's part?
I feel gross even thinking about this.
But even this song isn't as bad as the "Christmas Shoes." In fact, no song in the history of time is.
In the song, a hapless boy leaves his mother on her deathbed in an attempt to buy her some shoes, for the totally logical purpose of giving them to his mom so she can impress God with her pinache in the afterlife.
The boy is oblivious to the facts that he has no money to buy the shoes and that his mom can't take them with her anyway. It's never explained how the boy expected to pay for the shoes, and I can't help but think that maybe Mom would be in better health if she didn't have to worry about Junior roaming the streets and blowing what little money the family has on dumb, pointless crap.
But ultimately, someone steps in and covers the charge for the shoes on the boy's behalf, notwithstanding his lack of forethought. In the end, Mom gets her shoes and dies.
Uplifting, no?
I'm not sure what the message of this song is supposed to be, but it offends on every level. It exalts materialism over relationships, as it applauds the boy's choice to spend his mother's last moments shopping for her instead of being with her. It suggests that God cares more about how we look and what we acquire than how we live or what's in our hearts.
The plot rewards the boy's failure to think ahead about his decisions. Every time I hear it, I wonder how many kids are inspired by the song to take an expensive item to a department store counter in the hopes that someone will buy it for them if they look sufficiently downtrodden.
It's also an open question why the little boy's dad let him wander out of the house and into downtown while his mother is dying in the first place.
Whatever the message of the song is supposed to be, when I hear it, I mostly have grave concerns about this little boy's future. His only living parent is his irresponsible enough to let him wander around the city alone, and the boy has come to believe that the world at large will cater to his wishes whether he can pay his fair share or not.
In other words, this boy is the embodiment of Mitt Romney's 47 percent!
Merry Christmas!
Maybe I'm thinking about all this too hard. Christmas is supposed to be the time we stop analyzing things and enjoy the moment. There's no real harm in any of the logical or factual errors noted above, except maybe some cultural insensitivity and a heaping dose of consumerism.
So maybe there's no real harm done, and we shouldn't complain. After all, some people, even in this country, never get the opportunity to discuss in heated comfort the silliness of the songs they'll listen to as they enjoy an upcoming week of paid vacation. Instead, they'll be delivering your mail, bagging your groceries, or policing your streets while you and me enjoy our eggnog.
So instead of complaining, we should do something to show our appreciation.
What to do? Well, according to Band Aid, there's only one to express our gratitude at winning life's lottery and being free from the miserable burdens other people have to carry. I think we should do it now.
So tonight, thank God it's themmmmm insteaaaaaad of yooooooooooooou!
Merry Christmas, and enjoy whatever bad Christmas songs come your way! If you're like me, you'll miss making fun of them come December 26th.
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Answered Prayers
It was a long and winding road, but one that finally-- after a longer journey than seemed possible-- led to a happy ending.
After five-and-a-half years of trying, we finally have a contract to sell the house in St. Louis we left in 2007!
I repeat: WE ARE FINALLY SELLING OUR FLIPPING HOUSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This changes everything.
It marks the end of a very long walk in the desert. It's the end of:
Five-and-a-half years of unanswered prayers, and wondering where God was in my life. Sixty-five straight months of making two house payments, while only living in one. 298 consecutive weeks where I saw something fun happening the upcoming weekend but couldn't afford to do it and dreamed of the day when I could. 2008 nights in a row of going to bed with a giant unresolved problem on my hands, and nothing I could do to fix it.
The worst part of owning two houses isn't the wasted money, though, it's the chains the situation puts around your life. There's a constant uncertainty about everything.
You can't visit distant friends and relatives very often, because you never know when you might need that airfare money to go toward closing. There are constant maintenance needs that you don't even know about until they've mushroomed into something huge, and the ever-looming threat of a break-in.
We had three.
You can't make any long-term plans whatsoever, because you haven't the faintest idea what life is going to look like a few months down the road.
It's a never-ending source of administrative headaches, from having to supervise repairmen from long-distance, to remembering to pay two sets of bills every month, to pleading with heartless insurance companies about writing a policy for a vacant house that's been broken into three times.
All that is ending now.
The house is selling, the extra bills are disappearing, and soon, whatever else goes wrong five hours away won't be our problem.
But that isn't even the best news I've received in the last eight days.
As I've noted here before, it was March 15th of this year when we heard that our former tenant at that St. Louis house was not going to buy it after all, and, in fact was breaking her lease and moving out.
But that wasn't the worst news of my day--far from it.
About two hours earlier, I listened as an emotionless doctor casually told my brother and his wife that he had a 48 percent chance of beating cancer and still being alive in five years.
It doesn't make sense, and my brother's issues were a million times worse, but the two problems had sort of been spiritually linked in my mind from that day forward, and I rarely prayed for one without the other.
After his appointment, my brother endured 12 grueling sessions of chemotherapy. His treatments ended at the end of the summer, but the doctors wanted to wait a couple months after to see if the treatment had been effective, or if the cancer had returned.
On Monday of last week, he checked out clear. No sign of cancer whatsoever.
It was late afternoon of the day before the results came, when my realtor called. The last few showings hadn't gone well, so I assumed he was calling with yet another maintenance issue. My wife even said that theory out loud when I announced who was calling.
Instead, the realtor was calling to say that a woman had offered to buy our house on the spot upon her first viewing of the house. And somehow, at that moment, I knew then that my brother was going to be just fine.
As I told a close friend today, it's funny how God seems to disappear for the longest time, only to beat you over the head with reminders of his presence at some point later on. In my case, God waited much longer than I would have liked to answer my two defining prayers, but when he did, he answered both of them at the same time.
I can't prove that God made all things new in my life in at once to show that he never deserted me when it all went South at the same time back in March. I don't believe in easy answer to complicated questions, nor do I pray to a Cosmic Vending Machine who answers prayers according to a specific formula or even in ways we are meant to understand.
But when I think about how the two defining problems that have shaped my 2012 were solved at the same time, and on the weekend after I'd come to the place of being able to write a blog about being thankful for life notwithstanding its difficulties, I can't help but shake my head and wonder how things look from the other side of Heaven.
After five-and-a-half years of trying, we finally have a contract to sell the house in St. Louis we left in 2007!
I repeat: WE ARE FINALLY SELLING OUR FLIPPING HOUSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This changes everything.
It marks the end of a very long walk in the desert. It's the end of:
Five-and-a-half years of unanswered prayers, and wondering where God was in my life. Sixty-five straight months of making two house payments, while only living in one. 298 consecutive weeks where I saw something fun happening the upcoming weekend but couldn't afford to do it and dreamed of the day when I could. 2008 nights in a row of going to bed with a giant unresolved problem on my hands, and nothing I could do to fix it.
The worst part of owning two houses isn't the wasted money, though, it's the chains the situation puts around your life. There's a constant uncertainty about everything.
You can't visit distant friends and relatives very often, because you never know when you might need that airfare money to go toward closing. There are constant maintenance needs that you don't even know about until they've mushroomed into something huge, and the ever-looming threat of a break-in.
We had three.
You can't make any long-term plans whatsoever, because you haven't the faintest idea what life is going to look like a few months down the road.
It's a never-ending source of administrative headaches, from having to supervise repairmen from long-distance, to remembering to pay two sets of bills every month, to pleading with heartless insurance companies about writing a policy for a vacant house that's been broken into three times.
All that is ending now.
The house is selling, the extra bills are disappearing, and soon, whatever else goes wrong five hours away won't be our problem.
But that isn't even the best news I've received in the last eight days.
As I've noted here before, it was March 15th of this year when we heard that our former tenant at that St. Louis house was not going to buy it after all, and, in fact was breaking her lease and moving out.
But that wasn't the worst news of my day--far from it.
About two hours earlier, I listened as an emotionless doctor casually told my brother and his wife that he had a 48 percent chance of beating cancer and still being alive in five years.
It doesn't make sense, and my brother's issues were a million times worse, but the two problems had sort of been spiritually linked in my mind from that day forward, and I rarely prayed for one without the other.
After his appointment, my brother endured 12 grueling sessions of chemotherapy. His treatments ended at the end of the summer, but the doctors wanted to wait a couple months after to see if the treatment had been effective, or if the cancer had returned.
On Monday of last week, he checked out clear. No sign of cancer whatsoever.
It was late afternoon of the day before the results came, when my realtor called. The last few showings hadn't gone well, so I assumed he was calling with yet another maintenance issue. My wife even said that theory out loud when I announced who was calling.
Instead, the realtor was calling to say that a woman had offered to buy our house on the spot upon her first viewing of the house. And somehow, at that moment, I knew then that my brother was going to be just fine.
As I told a close friend today, it's funny how God seems to disappear for the longest time, only to beat you over the head with reminders of his presence at some point later on. In my case, God waited much longer than I would have liked to answer my two defining prayers, but when he did, he answered both of them at the same time.
I can't prove that God made all things new in my life in at once to show that he never deserted me when it all went South at the same time back in March. I don't believe in easy answer to complicated questions, nor do I pray to a Cosmic Vending Machine who answers prayers according to a specific formula or even in ways we are meant to understand.
But when I think about how the two defining problems that have shaped my 2012 were solved at the same time, and on the weekend after I'd come to the place of being able to write a blog about being thankful for life notwithstanding its difficulties, I can't help but shake my head and wonder how things look from the other side of Heaven.
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
There's a Coon in My Attic!
You can add "wild coon" to the list of problems I never thought I'd have to face in life.
But that rustling noise coming from above my head tells me I was wrong.
I hear the banging as I try to go to bed at night. It wakes me up at unnatural hours before dawn, as my uninvited visitor burrows in my insulation in an attempt to build a dream home. As I watch primetime television, I hear it trying frantically to burst through my ceiling so it can watch football beside me.
I've been leaving out some extra chips and salsa, just in case.
The worst part is that I'm helpless to get rid of my new house guest. What used to be the attic in my house was renovated into the master bedroom, so there's only a few inches of space between my roof and the ceiling. The coon has managed to find it, and there's no going up there to drag it out. I could patch up the hole in my porch's roof through which the coon probably entered, but that would just as likely trap the coon in as trap it out.
In my desperation, I briefly thought about rat poison. Moral issues aside, I don't know how I'd even get it up there, and it would result in either a festering rotted raccoon carcass above my living space, or a Really Angry Raccoon Out For Revenge, and neither of those situations sound like much fun. Plus, it would make for a really awkward vibe if the raccoon ever finds its way inside to watch football with me.
I tried to bang on the ceiling in the hopes of making it scamper way. Instead, all I managed to accomplish with that effort was to weaken the strength of the thin layer of material separating me from the wildlife above me.
At my lowest moment, I thought about just deeding the house over to the coon and moving back to St. Louis, where we moved from five years ago and still have a house. But if I tried this strategy of appeasement, the coon would probably follow us in the hopes of annoying us into another lucrative real estate deal.
So, faced with one raccoon and no options, I called a wildlife removal company today. I'm sure it will be expensive beyond reason when all is said and done, but there wasn't any other choice. And now, a few hours later, I've now became identifiable to all my neighbors as the guy with a giant coon trap sticking out of his roof. And I don't mean that metaphorically.
I find myself walking outside to check the rooftop trap every 20 minutes or so. I'm sure I'll be scared out of my wits if there's ever an actual coon inside of it, but I just can't help myself. Having a coon in one's attic will do strange things to one's mind.
There is great irony in this ridiculous situation. I grew up in a rural setting on the outskirts of town. I hated living 15 minutes from the closest grocery store and risking my life at the hands of poisonous snakes every time I tossed a football into the bushes, so my childhood goal was always to live in a bigger city, and the most urban atmosphere I could find within it.
I did that. I made a point of finding a house within walking distance to most everything I could want. I ruled out living in a subdivision, because even that felt too remote. We live four houses away from one of the busiest streets in town. We have a very small yard, and even that was only because my wife absolutely demanded a modicum of space between us and our neighbors. In every single way, I've made a point to depart from the rural lifestyle of my childhood.
Basically, every major housing choice I've made in my adult life was geared toward avoiding having to worry about stuff like "what would happen if there was a coon in my attic?"
But I have one anyway.
At least I think it's a coon. It actually could be something much worse, I suppose. All I really know for sure is that it's big, it's loud, it comes out at night and it seems to like football, so it could be a coon, a panther or maybe even John Madden.
My neighbor saw a raccoon on my roof a few weeks ago, though, and the wildlife guy who examined our roof spotted what appeared (to him) to be raccoon poop, so I'm going to assume that's what we're dealing with.
That beats having to learn how to distinguish between raccoon poop and other types of feces.
Besides, if it's something bigger, I really don't want to know.
Although I might buy some extra chips, just in case.
But that rustling noise coming from above my head tells me I was wrong.
I hear the banging as I try to go to bed at night. It wakes me up at unnatural hours before dawn, as my uninvited visitor burrows in my insulation in an attempt to build a dream home. As I watch primetime television, I hear it trying frantically to burst through my ceiling so it can watch football beside me.
I've been leaving out some extra chips and salsa, just in case.
The worst part is that I'm helpless to get rid of my new house guest. What used to be the attic in my house was renovated into the master bedroom, so there's only a few inches of space between my roof and the ceiling. The coon has managed to find it, and there's no going up there to drag it out. I could patch up the hole in my porch's roof through which the coon probably entered, but that would just as likely trap the coon in as trap it out.
In my desperation, I briefly thought about rat poison. Moral issues aside, I don't know how I'd even get it up there, and it would result in either a festering rotted raccoon carcass above my living space, or a Really Angry Raccoon Out For Revenge, and neither of those situations sound like much fun. Plus, it would make for a really awkward vibe if the raccoon ever finds its way inside to watch football with me.
I tried to bang on the ceiling in the hopes of making it scamper way. Instead, all I managed to accomplish with that effort was to weaken the strength of the thin layer of material separating me from the wildlife above me.
At my lowest moment, I thought about just deeding the house over to the coon and moving back to St. Louis, where we moved from five years ago and still have a house. But if I tried this strategy of appeasement, the coon would probably follow us in the hopes of annoying us into another lucrative real estate deal.
So, faced with one raccoon and no options, I called a wildlife removal company today. I'm sure it will be expensive beyond reason when all is said and done, but there wasn't any other choice. And now, a few hours later, I've now became identifiable to all my neighbors as the guy with a giant coon trap sticking out of his roof. And I don't mean that metaphorically.
I find myself walking outside to check the rooftop trap every 20 minutes or so. I'm sure I'll be scared out of my wits if there's ever an actual coon inside of it, but I just can't help myself. Having a coon in one's attic will do strange things to one's mind.
There is great irony in this ridiculous situation. I grew up in a rural setting on the outskirts of town. I hated living 15 minutes from the closest grocery store and risking my life at the hands of poisonous snakes every time I tossed a football into the bushes, so my childhood goal was always to live in a bigger city, and the most urban atmosphere I could find within it.
I did that. I made a point of finding a house within walking distance to most everything I could want. I ruled out living in a subdivision, because even that felt too remote. We live four houses away from one of the busiest streets in town. We have a very small yard, and even that was only because my wife absolutely demanded a modicum of space between us and our neighbors. In every single way, I've made a point to depart from the rural lifestyle of my childhood.
Basically, every major housing choice I've made in my adult life was geared toward avoiding having to worry about stuff like "what would happen if there was a coon in my attic?"
But I have one anyway.
At least I think it's a coon. It actually could be something much worse, I suppose. All I really know for sure is that it's big, it's loud, it comes out at night and it seems to like football, so it could be a coon, a panther or maybe even John Madden.
My neighbor saw a raccoon on my roof a few weeks ago, though, and the wildlife guy who examined our roof spotted what appeared (to him) to be raccoon poop, so I'm going to assume that's what we're dealing with.
That beats having to learn how to distinguish between raccoon poop and other types of feces.
Besides, if it's something bigger, I really don't want to know.
Although I might buy some extra chips, just in case.
Monday, November 19, 2012
Why I'm Particularly Thankful This Year
I have only a few rules in life, but one of them is this: if a doctor (or anyone else) is going to poke around in my intestines, I'm going to know the reason why.
So, about this time a year ago when something felt "off" with the back end of my digestive system, I didn't say anything. I didn't know how to describe what was going on, who to attempt to describe it to, and I sure didn't want someone, who may or may not be the right doctor, digging around down there on a fishing expedition.
Besides, if I couldn't put the issue into words, it probably wasn't all that serious. Or so I told myself.
I was probably just constantly dehydrated. I never did drink those 8 glasses of water a day the experts say we're all supposed to drink. That was probably it.
So I went on with the assumption that nothing too serious was happening. Or at least I did until February, when my brother was diagnosed with colon cancer.
His symptoms sounded much worse than mine, but there was enough similarity that, once I was ready to face it a few months later, I had a colonoscopy of my own. It was everything I had always heard it would be, except that no one tells you anything close to how bad it actually is. But that's a different column.
For the sake of this column, the most important thing about that procedure was that it showed I had three polyps, two of which were the most dangerous kind of precancerous growths. They were in the exact same spot in my colon where my brother's cancer had developed in his.
I was almost relieved to hear the news. It meant I'll have to have many, many future colonoscopies, (before which I'll have to relieve myself in entirely different ways), but it meant I wasn't crazy, at least in this one regard. The reason it felt like I was having a minor operation every time I went to the bathroom was because something was stopping up my plumbing. I still have the pictures to prove it!
It didn't occur to me until later that what my older brother was facing likely would have been my future down the road, had he not suffered it first. I'm not thankful that he got cancer--in fact, I would have gladly taken it for him--but I am thankful that I got what feels like a second chance to live a healthier lifestyle in the hopes of avoiding this thing. It's a chance many people don't get.
I'm not thankful for those developments in my life, but I am thankful that my outlook has changed because of them. More than anything, since that fateful day in February when life forever changed, I'm thankful for every single day I get, and every single day that I get to spend having meaningful relationships in my life, whether they are in town or a phone call away.
I'm thankful that I get to see some of those people on Thanksgiving, but Thanksgiving has become my favorite holiday regardless. It's a day of celebration that requires only the preparation of cooking for it, which itself is kind of relaxing because the recipes are probably familiar and the world basically stops for four days, so there's nothing else to do anyway (Unless you work at Walmart, in which case you have to be in by 5 p.m. to start getting ready for early Black Friday sales).
More importantly, it's a day where no one is allowed to be negative. It's easy to be sad at Christmas if you aren't having the Stereotypical Perfect Holiday Season our Culture Practically Demands, and it's easy to be down at New Year's if you don't have exciting plans.
But Thanksgiving is a day about looking on the bright side. There's no cultural stereotype to live up to, except for eating too much food. Even if you end up spending it alone, there's no better setting to pause and consider the blessings in your life.
It hasn't been an easy year for me, but my life has still been blessed in ways I can't describe. For all kinds of reasons, there's been more pain this year than any other I can remember, but probably more joy as well. I've even begun to wonder if the two go hand-in-hand.
As I think through every good thing in my life, I remind myself that I'm not entitled to any of it. I'm lucky to have every single meaningful relationship in my life, I'm lucky my bills get paid and there's food on the table, and I'm lucky that I love my city and I don't dread going to work every single morning the way I used to at a different time in my life.
Still, I keep waiting for the day when life gets easier--when money is rampant, sickness isn't an issue and my relationships are free from interpersonal conflict. I'm not holding my breath that such a day will ever come, and if it does, I know it probably won't stay for long.
In the meantime, though, I'm going to live in the present. And now that I think of everything I have that I might not, it looks even better than I had imagined. I'm blessed with things that bring me comfort, causes in which I believe and people who I treasure. All in all, that's not so bad.
And I'm so very thankful for all of it.
Happy Thanksgiving.
So, about this time a year ago when something felt "off" with the back end of my digestive system, I didn't say anything. I didn't know how to describe what was going on, who to attempt to describe it to, and I sure didn't want someone, who may or may not be the right doctor, digging around down there on a fishing expedition.
Besides, if I couldn't put the issue into words, it probably wasn't all that serious. Or so I told myself.
I was probably just constantly dehydrated. I never did drink those 8 glasses of water a day the experts say we're all supposed to drink. That was probably it.
So I went on with the assumption that nothing too serious was happening. Or at least I did until February, when my brother was diagnosed with colon cancer.
His symptoms sounded much worse than mine, but there was enough similarity that, once I was ready to face it a few months later, I had a colonoscopy of my own. It was everything I had always heard it would be, except that no one tells you anything close to how bad it actually is. But that's a different column.
For the sake of this column, the most important thing about that procedure was that it showed I had three polyps, two of which were the most dangerous kind of precancerous growths. They were in the exact same spot in my colon where my brother's cancer had developed in his.
I was almost relieved to hear the news. It meant I'll have to have many, many future colonoscopies, (before which I'll have to relieve myself in entirely different ways), but it meant I wasn't crazy, at least in this one regard. The reason it felt like I was having a minor operation every time I went to the bathroom was because something was stopping up my plumbing. I still have the pictures to prove it!
It didn't occur to me until later that what my older brother was facing likely would have been my future down the road, had he not suffered it first. I'm not thankful that he got cancer--in fact, I would have gladly taken it for him--but I am thankful that I got what feels like a second chance to live a healthier lifestyle in the hopes of avoiding this thing. It's a chance many people don't get.
I'm not thankful for those developments in my life, but I am thankful that my outlook has changed because of them. More than anything, since that fateful day in February when life forever changed, I'm thankful for every single day I get, and every single day that I get to spend having meaningful relationships in my life, whether they are in town or a phone call away.
I'm thankful that I get to see some of those people on Thanksgiving, but Thanksgiving has become my favorite holiday regardless. It's a day of celebration that requires only the preparation of cooking for it, which itself is kind of relaxing because the recipes are probably familiar and the world basically stops for four days, so there's nothing else to do anyway (Unless you work at Walmart, in which case you have to be in by 5 p.m. to start getting ready for early Black Friday sales).
More importantly, it's a day where no one is allowed to be negative. It's easy to be sad at Christmas if you aren't having the Stereotypical Perfect Holiday Season our Culture Practically Demands, and it's easy to be down at New Year's if you don't have exciting plans.
But Thanksgiving is a day about looking on the bright side. There's no cultural stereotype to live up to, except for eating too much food. Even if you end up spending it alone, there's no better setting to pause and consider the blessings in your life.
It hasn't been an easy year for me, but my life has still been blessed in ways I can't describe. For all kinds of reasons, there's been more pain this year than any other I can remember, but probably more joy as well. I've even begun to wonder if the two go hand-in-hand.
As I think through every good thing in my life, I remind myself that I'm not entitled to any of it. I'm lucky to have every single meaningful relationship in my life, I'm lucky my bills get paid and there's food on the table, and I'm lucky that I love my city and I don't dread going to work every single morning the way I used to at a different time in my life.
Still, I keep waiting for the day when life gets easier--when money is rampant, sickness isn't an issue and my relationships are free from interpersonal conflict. I'm not holding my breath that such a day will ever come, and if it does, I know it probably won't stay for long.
In the meantime, though, I'm going to live in the present. And now that I think of everything I have that I might not, it looks even better than I had imagined. I'm blessed with things that bring me comfort, causes in which I believe and people who I treasure. All in all, that's not so bad.
And I'm so very thankful for all of it.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
This Blog Sucks
Sometimes, when I'm feeling down, I go back and read my old blog posts that were meant to be inspirational. When I do, I'm usually struck by one sobering and inescapable thought:
"What a load of crap."
Seriously. As an answer to life's enduring problems, this blog sucks.
Blog posts, you see, have to wrap up neatly in the end. There's closure at the end of the story, or when there isn't, there's at least a new way of looking at the problem that I couldn't fully solve in 16 inches of type space.
That's what you have to do in writing a blog column. Send everyone home smiling with a happy ending and lesson learned. Otherwise, there would be no pointing in writing for public consumption in the first place.
The only problem is that real life doesn't work that way.
The problems in your life (and mine) that existed at the start of this column will still be there waiting for you (and me) when we are finished, no matter what I say here.
So when I go back now and read how I managed to put a happy bow on a crappy situation from the past, I don't always find my own words all that comforting. I still believe what I wrote in all those old posts, but I'm just sometimes annoyed at myself over how simple I made everything seem.
God is with you.
Follow your dreams.
Live to the fullest, even when life seems hard.
The best is yet to come.
All of those sentiments are good advice. They are easy things to write when you need a snappy, happy way to end a column. But at two in the morning when you feel desperately lonely and your dreams look crushed, none of it helps a bit.
One thing in which I've found comfort over the years is the fact that our minor problems usually go away quickly and without a discernible trace, even when they seem major at the time. But I haven't had as much figuring out how to deal with life's bigger problems.
They seem to linger forever, and all too often, repeat on an endless loop. I don't know how to keep those kinds of things from battering me down over the long haul, even if I can overcome them in my better moments. If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
Really, I'll wait.
Nothing?
Ok.
I guess it's up to me. Fair enough. It's my blog, after all.
This is usually where I'd pivot the column and write about how even though we can't control whether bad things happen to us, there's a joyous freedom in recognizing that we have almost no control over lives, throwing our hands up to Providence and going along for the ride.
Truth is, I started to go in that direction here this time too. I'd write that when I signed up for my faith in God, I made the deal that I was willingly giving up control of my life. Maybe I wouldn't always understand what is happening or why, but in the end, I would take whatever comes, because life with a God who doesn't make sense is still better than life with no god but my own comfort.
That's all true. But if I wrote that now, part of me knows that six months from now I'd look back at it and feel that I oversimplified things. I'd feel that I brushed away genuine angst under a rug of platitudes rather than exploring it head on, putting a post-it note in my mind to return to the pain at some other more convenient time and place. And when I came back to read the blog when I was ready to have that conversation, I'd feel unsatisfied with what I'd written.
Truth is, the big problems in life just don't resolve themselves very often, or often, very easily.
That means that when you finish this blog, you'll still be lonely, wish you had better friends, a more active social life, or a family that better supports you. Or you'll still have a person in your life who drains the energy from your soul but from whom you are powerless to break free. Your job will beat you down, money will be still be tight, or you'll still regret the road not taken when the on ramp has already passed.
These things will be true whether I put together a nice little bow that wraps up all the loose ends of this column or not.
So I won't do that this time. Instead, I'll tell you that I get frustrated that I can't solve my own problems, let alone yours, in this space. I feel as though I'm wasting all of our time by writing here, when I can't tell you why bad things happen to good people, or why a God who loves you doesn't always make your dreams come true.
What tends to encourage me, though, when I look back at my life through the prism of this blog, is not that I was able to reason my way to answers to my problems. It's that notwithstanding how badly I felt during the flood that destroyed my city, the cancer that struck my family, or when people I trusted let me down, I can think of so many moments of joy in between each new catastrophe.
And that tells me more joyous moments are on the way. Even if I can't imagine them now.
Besides, pain isn't always such a bad thing. Pain is life's warning siren that something inside of us needs attention. It forces us out of our comfort zone. It leaves us no choice but to accept our limitations and give up our illusion of control. Nothing else is quite as effective at focusing our attention on the things that really matter. It helps us understand joy a little bit better.
I don't wish pain on anyone. I wish we could achieve perfect enlightenment without it. But it's just not possible.
Life's innumerable frustrations and crushing disappointments will still be out there at the end of this blog. I'm actually kind of glad that. If I, or someone smarter than me like C.S. Lewis or Rob Bell, could reason away our problems, we'd never have the chance to grow. There are lessons in our pain, if only we will look for them.
The problem is that some of these lessons seem to last too long. And sometimes the pain lasts well beyond the time it takes to learn the lesson it taught.
I don't know how to fix that. I don't think anyone does.
Here is what I do know:
If you convince yourself that your dreams don't come true, or that heartbreak and failure are the backdrops of your life, there is plenty of stuff out there to reaffirm that notion and you can easily walk through life in the shallow comfort of your own misery. Plenty of people do.
If that doesn't sound appealing--if you want your life to be about something other than your own victimhood--the best way to do that is to invest in something you love.
Find it. Spend time on it. Give it your best, and leave the results up to God.
Doing so has a way of bringing the beautiful things in life come to the forefront, even if only for a little while. The world seems a little brighter when you're doing something that matters. Or at least something that matters to you.
Author Rob Bell wrote that we were created for the "relentless pursuit of the person God created us to be."
That sounds great, but I don't really like relentless pursuits. I like leisurely pursuits where I can get started at 11, after I've had a chance to sleep in and have a nice breakfast with some coffee.
So sometimes it takes a little (or a lot) of pain to get me going again, to focus my energy on what matters and whether I'm doing the right things with my life. I realize that, even if I don't particularly like it.
I probably come back to read this space when I'm feeling down, because it's the best tool I have to process life when it doesn't make sense, and it's my best effort at helping you do the same. It doesn't always work, but it's something I feel strongly about trying, even when I fail.
And even when my blog is full of crap.
"What a load of crap."
Seriously. As an answer to life's enduring problems, this blog sucks.
Blog posts, you see, have to wrap up neatly in the end. There's closure at the end of the story, or when there isn't, there's at least a new way of looking at the problem that I couldn't fully solve in 16 inches of type space.
That's what you have to do in writing a blog column. Send everyone home smiling with a happy ending and lesson learned. Otherwise, there would be no pointing in writing for public consumption in the first place.
The only problem is that real life doesn't work that way.
The problems in your life (and mine) that existed at the start of this column will still be there waiting for you (and me) when we are finished, no matter what I say here.
So when I go back now and read how I managed to put a happy bow on a crappy situation from the past, I don't always find my own words all that comforting. I still believe what I wrote in all those old posts, but I'm just sometimes annoyed at myself over how simple I made everything seem.
God is with you.
Follow your dreams.
Live to the fullest, even when life seems hard.
The best is yet to come.
All of those sentiments are good advice. They are easy things to write when you need a snappy, happy way to end a column. But at two in the morning when you feel desperately lonely and your dreams look crushed, none of it helps a bit.
One thing in which I've found comfort over the years is the fact that our minor problems usually go away quickly and without a discernible trace, even when they seem major at the time. But I haven't had as much figuring out how to deal with life's bigger problems.
They seem to linger forever, and all too often, repeat on an endless loop. I don't know how to keep those kinds of things from battering me down over the long haul, even if I can overcome them in my better moments. If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
Really, I'll wait.
Nothing?
Ok.
I guess it's up to me. Fair enough. It's my blog, after all.
This is usually where I'd pivot the column and write about how even though we can't control whether bad things happen to us, there's a joyous freedom in recognizing that we have almost no control over lives, throwing our hands up to Providence and going along for the ride.
Truth is, I started to go in that direction here this time too. I'd write that when I signed up for my faith in God, I made the deal that I was willingly giving up control of my life. Maybe I wouldn't always understand what is happening or why, but in the end, I would take whatever comes, because life with a God who doesn't make sense is still better than life with no god but my own comfort.
That's all true. But if I wrote that now, part of me knows that six months from now I'd look back at it and feel that I oversimplified things. I'd feel that I brushed away genuine angst under a rug of platitudes rather than exploring it head on, putting a post-it note in my mind to return to the pain at some other more convenient time and place. And when I came back to read the blog when I was ready to have that conversation, I'd feel unsatisfied with what I'd written.
Truth is, the big problems in life just don't resolve themselves very often, or often, very easily.
That means that when you finish this blog, you'll still be lonely, wish you had better friends, a more active social life, or a family that better supports you. Or you'll still have a person in your life who drains the energy from your soul but from whom you are powerless to break free. Your job will beat you down, money will be still be tight, or you'll still regret the road not taken when the on ramp has already passed.
These things will be true whether I put together a nice little bow that wraps up all the loose ends of this column or not.
So I won't do that this time. Instead, I'll tell you that I get frustrated that I can't solve my own problems, let alone yours, in this space. I feel as though I'm wasting all of our time by writing here, when I can't tell you why bad things happen to good people, or why a God who loves you doesn't always make your dreams come true.
What tends to encourage me, though, when I look back at my life through the prism of this blog, is not that I was able to reason my way to answers to my problems. It's that notwithstanding how badly I felt during the flood that destroyed my city, the cancer that struck my family, or when people I trusted let me down, I can think of so many moments of joy in between each new catastrophe.
And that tells me more joyous moments are on the way. Even if I can't imagine them now.
Besides, pain isn't always such a bad thing. Pain is life's warning siren that something inside of us needs attention. It forces us out of our comfort zone. It leaves us no choice but to accept our limitations and give up our illusion of control. Nothing else is quite as effective at focusing our attention on the things that really matter. It helps us understand joy a little bit better.
I don't wish pain on anyone. I wish we could achieve perfect enlightenment without it. But it's just not possible.
Life's innumerable frustrations and crushing disappointments will still be out there at the end of this blog. I'm actually kind of glad that. If I, or someone smarter than me like C.S. Lewis or Rob Bell, could reason away our problems, we'd never have the chance to grow. There are lessons in our pain, if only we will look for them.
The problem is that some of these lessons seem to last too long. And sometimes the pain lasts well beyond the time it takes to learn the lesson it taught.
I don't know how to fix that. I don't think anyone does.
Here is what I do know:
If you convince yourself that your dreams don't come true, or that heartbreak and failure are the backdrops of your life, there is plenty of stuff out there to reaffirm that notion and you can easily walk through life in the shallow comfort of your own misery. Plenty of people do.
If that doesn't sound appealing--if you want your life to be about something other than your own victimhood--the best way to do that is to invest in something you love.
Find it. Spend time on it. Give it your best, and leave the results up to God.
Doing so has a way of bringing the beautiful things in life come to the forefront, even if only for a little while. The world seems a little brighter when you're doing something that matters. Or at least something that matters to you.
Author Rob Bell wrote that we were created for the "relentless pursuit of the person God created us to be."
That sounds great, but I don't really like relentless pursuits. I like leisurely pursuits where I can get started at 11, after I've had a chance to sleep in and have a nice breakfast with some coffee.
So sometimes it takes a little (or a lot) of pain to get me going again, to focus my energy on what matters and whether I'm doing the right things with my life. I realize that, even if I don't particularly like it.
I probably come back to read this space when I'm feeling down, because it's the best tool I have to process life when it doesn't make sense, and it's my best effort at helping you do the same. It doesn't always work, but it's something I feel strongly about trying, even when I fail.
And even when my blog is full of crap.
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
A Thank You and a Sick Day
Thanks in part to people who shared my love of October and were entertained by my embarrassingly awkward trip to buy feminine hygiene products, the blog had its best month ever last month with 715 views.
Thanks for reading!
How am I going to reward you, my treasured loyal readers, for this unprecedented level of dedication to this site?
I'm taking the week off.
"Why?" you ask? Well, as I used to hear quite often, it's not you, it's me.
You see, for the last three days I've been fighting a sinus infection that I can't seem to shake. My coherent thoughts are pretty much limited to "is it time for another pill yet?" and "I should make some tea."
I'm so out of it, I made a doctor's appointment for yesterday but forgot to actually go.
So I have nothing to offer this week, except my thanks for being a great audience last month. Rest assured, you wouldn't want anything else that I have right now anyway.
But I'll meet you back here early next week, when a new adventure awaits. Until then, I'm off to grab some kleenexes.
Thanks for reading!
How am I going to reward you, my treasured loyal readers, for this unprecedented level of dedication to this site?
I'm taking the week off.
"Why?" you ask? Well, as I used to hear quite often, it's not you, it's me.
You see, for the last three days I've been fighting a sinus infection that I can't seem to shake. My coherent thoughts are pretty much limited to "is it time for another pill yet?" and "I should make some tea."
I'm so out of it, I made a doctor's appointment for yesterday but forgot to actually go.
So I have nothing to offer this week, except my thanks for being a great audience last month. Rest assured, you wouldn't want anything else that I have right now anyway.
But I'll meet you back here early next week, when a new adventure awaits. Until then, I'm off to grab some kleenexes.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Random Thoughts: To Make a Long Story Short
Usually on the week of my birthday I offer a reflective an inspirational message on living life with greater purpose. I did that two years ago, and I did it again last year when I turned older than Jesus.
This year, though, that doesn't feel right.
After all, half the country is underwater from the impact of Hurricane Sandy, and people could probably use an emotional break. When Nashville flooded two years ago, laughing about it in this space is the only thing that kept me (sort of) sane.
So in the interest of some lighthearted relief from tragedy, I'm making the executive decision that it's time to resurrect another edition of "Random Thoughts."
If you don't like it, get your own blog.
And if you read this and are underwhelmed, I have a thought (or more) for you:
How come people are overwhelmed or underwhelmed, but no one is ever just "whelmed"?
And why is it that being called "out of whack" isn't all that different from just being "whack?" (at least when that term was last used in 1992). And why is nothing ever "in whack."
Why is it that people will write things on your facebook page that they'd never actually say to you in person?
And speaking of which, there are three things you should never do while drunk: (1) drive; (2) text or call someone you haven't spoken to in the last two weeks or for whom you've ever harbored unrequited romantic feelings; or (3) anything on facebook.
Election years are to Saturday Night Live what October is to a costume store.
Whenever someone uses the phrase "to make a long story short," you can rest assured that you're about to hear a very long story that also isn't very interesting. Kind of like how if you ever hear start a sentence with the words "I'm not racist but" you should just immediately run screaming the other direction.
When costume stores are selling a woman's costume entitled "Sexy Super Mario," they've officially run out of ideas.
The election would be more entertaining if it started with a series of competitions, such as arm wrestling, in which the winner gets a 500-vote bonus in a state of his choosing.
Or, maybe it makes more sense to just determine the whole thing in a best-three-out-of-five series consisting of Chess, Risk, Poker, Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly?
There's a bar in Nashville that is publicly advertising Moonshine sales on Halloween night "Full Moon Party." But is it really still moonshine if it's legally obtained?
There are three kinds of people in the world: those who can count, and those who can't.
So Disney bought the rights to "Star Wars" today. How long until Goofy and Jar Jar are paired together for a wacky adventure that goes straight to DVD?
A good portion of the really intelligent people I know are terrible at small talk. At least that's what I keep telling myself, in an attempt to boost my self esteem.
I'm trying to think of the most random "treat" I can give to trick-or-treaters tomorrow night without it being entirely obvious that my treat is a farce. So far, my best ideas are tea bags, apples and containers of floss. My wife talked me out of distributing loose grains of rice.
I'm sending prayers out to everyone I know (and those I don't) on the East Coast today affected by the storm. If you live there and are able to read this, I hope this blog provides a moment of distraction from the ongoing saga. If you've lost power, take heart. At least you get a brief respite from political commercials.
Take care. Better things are yet to come.
This year, though, that doesn't feel right.
After all, half the country is underwater from the impact of Hurricane Sandy, and people could probably use an emotional break. When Nashville flooded two years ago, laughing about it in this space is the only thing that kept me (sort of) sane.
So in the interest of some lighthearted relief from tragedy, I'm making the executive decision that it's time to resurrect another edition of "Random Thoughts."
If you don't like it, get your own blog.
And if you read this and are underwhelmed, I have a thought (or more) for you:
How come people are overwhelmed or underwhelmed, but no one is ever just "whelmed"?
And why is it that being called "out of whack" isn't all that different from just being "whack?" (at least when that term was last used in 1992). And why is nothing ever "in whack."
Why is it that people will write things on your facebook page that they'd never actually say to you in person?
And speaking of which, there are three things you should never do while drunk: (1) drive; (2) text or call someone you haven't spoken to in the last two weeks or for whom you've ever harbored unrequited romantic feelings; or (3) anything on facebook.
Election years are to Saturday Night Live what October is to a costume store.
Whenever someone uses the phrase "to make a long story short," you can rest assured that you're about to hear a very long story that also isn't very interesting. Kind of like how if you ever hear start a sentence with the words "I'm not racist but" you should just immediately run screaming the other direction.
When costume stores are selling a woman's costume entitled "Sexy Super Mario," they've officially run out of ideas.
The election would be more entertaining if it started with a series of competitions, such as arm wrestling, in which the winner gets a 500-vote bonus in a state of his choosing.
Or, maybe it makes more sense to just determine the whole thing in a best-three-out-of-five series consisting of Chess, Risk, Poker, Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly?
There's a bar in Nashville that is publicly advertising Moonshine sales on Halloween night "Full Moon Party." But is it really still moonshine if it's legally obtained?
There are three kinds of people in the world: those who can count, and those who can't.
So Disney bought the rights to "Star Wars" today. How long until Goofy and Jar Jar are paired together for a wacky adventure that goes straight to DVD?
A good portion of the really intelligent people I know are terrible at small talk. At least that's what I keep telling myself, in an attempt to boost my self esteem.
I'm trying to think of the most random "treat" I can give to trick-or-treaters tomorrow night without it being entirely obvious that my treat is a farce. So far, my best ideas are tea bags, apples and containers of floss. My wife talked me out of distributing loose grains of rice.
I'm sending prayers out to everyone I know (and those I don't) on the East Coast today affected by the storm. If you live there and are able to read this, I hope this blog provides a moment of distraction from the ongoing saga. If you've lost power, take heart. At least you get a brief respite from political commercials.
Take care. Better things are yet to come.
Friday, October 26, 2012
A Tragedy, and Maybe a Miracle, on Mobile Bay.
I used to think that a miracle happened to me on March 9, 1995. I'm not so sure now, but maybe one really did.
It was on that date that I shattered my right knee into a thousand pieces as I practiced the triple jump on my high school's poorly-cared-for long jump pit.
If that doesn't sound very miraculous to you, then you haven't heard the whole story.
On the foggy morning of Monday, March 20, 1995, in my hometown of Mobile, Alabama, there was a 200-car pile up on the 8-mile bridge over Mobile Bay. It was, as I quote from the first link below, "the worst fog-related accident in American history."
You can read about it here: curry.eas.gatech.edu/Courses/6140/ency/Chapter8/Ency_Atmos/Fog.pdf (page 2) and here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_Parkway
The thing is, it would have been a 201-car pile-up, but for the fact that I had to cancel my trip to the beach that weekend to have knee surgery. I had already planned to spend Sunday night at my parent's condo and drive over that very bridge over the bay that Monday morning to get back to school, and I would have crossed it at the exact same time the accident started.
Were it not for the surgery that ruined my plans, I might have broken more than just my knee. I might not even be here at all. My high school best friend might still be wondering what might have happened had he accepted the invitation to come along with me.
My whole life changed that day in ways I wouldn't fully realize for over a decade. My knee injury ended my track career. It ended any realistic hope of getting the college basketball scholarship, as I was never able to run or jump the same after it happened.
To this day, my torn ACL, folded meniscus and lack of cartilage has left my left leg both bigger and longer than my right one, which gives me chronic back problems and makes it impossible for me to stand still for more than about five minutes at a time.
But the whole incident might have saved my life. I can't imagine what life would have looked like had I been in that wreck, which is exactly where my own plans would have led me.
I don't know if what happened was a miracle, for reasons I'll get to in a bit. But I learned a couple of lessons from it, only one of which was good.
First, my unlikely good fortune taught me that good can come from even the crappiest of situations. As the authors of "Freakonomics" (a book I highly recommend) state, there's a hidden side to everything. Even our worst experiences sometimes shield us from things that might have hurt even more, or if not, help us appreciate what we have.
That was the good lesson. It's why, if I ever break down and get a tattoo, it will be in the form of a yin-yang symbol. As the dot on the yang side indicates, there's a hint of good even in life's seeming darkness. Even when it seems impossible. I believe this. Really, I do.
But that isn't all I learned that day. The other lesson, though, I no longer believe.
Whether it was a coincidence or divine intervention, I was shielded from the destiny that would have occurred had I followed my own plans that foggy weekend. But in my high school mind, I came to believed that God had protected me, even while ignoring those other 200 victims who suffered on the body of water originally called the Bay of the Holy Spirit. I must have a special destiny, I thought, that would justify God's saving grace on my life. Or those other people must not have loved God like I did.
Maybe my wildest dreams wouldn't always come true (and usually they didn't), but in the really important, basic stuff, God would make sure I was okay. I went to church, memorized bible verses, and prayed a lot, so God would stamp a special blessing on my life. God might let bad things happen to me, but only up to a point, and never anything beyond what I could handle.
Those other people who suffered senseless tragedy or pain beyond explanation or their ability to cope with it? Well, they must have just deserved it.
Of course, this lesson was so completely wrong that I'm embarrassed to admit to having believed it.
In 1995, I would have never guessed that the same God who extended my life via debilitating knee injury would some day allow me to have an unsold second house for 5.5 years, or that I'd have a series of other seemingly intractable problems. I would have never believed that inexplicable tragedy would be, at just about the same time, striking the family of the woman I'd later marry. I would have never expected that my best friend would suffer the same tragedy a few years later.
I know enough good people who have suffered beyond the pale that I now know that believing in God isn't a magic shield against the inherent problems that come with life, even a little bit. Maybe a few miracles happen in every lifetime (and I've certainly had one or two, whether my life-saving knee injury qualifies or not), but God isn't, on a routine basis, magically protecting any of us against every significant calamity simply because we say our prayers. The great promise of my faith is not even a one percent easier ride through life, nor even the vague notion that an invisible God is somehow beside us, while also everywhere else, suffering in kind when these things happen (even though I do think that is somehow true).
That promise is that when life is more than we can handle, we'll somehow get through it anyway and find enough healing to still experience joy on the other side. It's that the pain of life's worst moments will somehow cleanse our soul of the stuff that shouldn't have been in there to begin with, and force us to focus on the things that matter. As my friend's facebook post happened to say yesterday, it's that we can never know real joy unless we also know real pain.
It sounds ridiculous that it took me 34 years to realize these things, but this is what happens when you grow up hearing about Daniel surviving the Lion's Den.
Life is hard and full of stuff we can't handle on our own. Some find strength to endure it through their faith, but that doesn't magically make the ride any easier. Not even a little bit.
I know this now. It's actually liberating, in a certain way.
I'm just like everyone else. So when life seems inexplicably hard, as it eventually will for everyone, it doesn't mean that God has abandoned me. I'm just experiencing life, like everyone else.
Maybe God saved my life 17 years ago or maybe the whole thing was a coincidence. But whatever happened, it wasn't because I somehow deserved God's protection by virtue of being the only guy in my high school who didn't drink. And it didn't give me the right to feel superior to anyone.
I have no rational explanation for why I wasn't involved in that foggy March tragedy, but God didn't intervene on behalf of 200 others. I guess I'll never know if it was divine intervention or just a fortunate circumstance. But I understand now that the question really doesn't matter. Even if God saved me that day, it didn't mean God would give me a free pass out of every horrible situation life offered.
I just get the promise of healing, and true joy, on the other side.
And you know what?
That's a miracle enough for me.
It was on that date that I shattered my right knee into a thousand pieces as I practiced the triple jump on my high school's poorly-cared-for long jump pit.
If that doesn't sound very miraculous to you, then you haven't heard the whole story.
On the foggy morning of Monday, March 20, 1995, in my hometown of Mobile, Alabama, there was a 200-car pile up on the 8-mile bridge over Mobile Bay. It was, as I quote from the first link below, "the worst fog-related accident in American history."
You can read about it here: curry.eas.gatech.edu/Courses/6140/ency/Chapter8/Ency_Atmos/Fog.pdf (page 2) and here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_Parkway
The thing is, it would have been a 201-car pile-up, but for the fact that I had to cancel my trip to the beach that weekend to have knee surgery. I had already planned to spend Sunday night at my parent's condo and drive over that very bridge over the bay that Monday morning to get back to school, and I would have crossed it at the exact same time the accident started.
Were it not for the surgery that ruined my plans, I might have broken more than just my knee. I might not even be here at all. My high school best friend might still be wondering what might have happened had he accepted the invitation to come along with me.
My whole life changed that day in ways I wouldn't fully realize for over a decade. My knee injury ended my track career. It ended any realistic hope of getting the college basketball scholarship, as I was never able to run or jump the same after it happened.
To this day, my torn ACL, folded meniscus and lack of cartilage has left my left leg both bigger and longer than my right one, which gives me chronic back problems and makes it impossible for me to stand still for more than about five minutes at a time.
But the whole incident might have saved my life. I can't imagine what life would have looked like had I been in that wreck, which is exactly where my own plans would have led me.
I don't know if what happened was a miracle, for reasons I'll get to in a bit. But I learned a couple of lessons from it, only one of which was good.
First, my unlikely good fortune taught me that good can come from even the crappiest of situations. As the authors of "Freakonomics" (a book I highly recommend) state, there's a hidden side to everything. Even our worst experiences sometimes shield us from things that might have hurt even more, or if not, help us appreciate what we have.
That was the good lesson. It's why, if I ever break down and get a tattoo, it will be in the form of a yin-yang symbol. As the dot on the yang side indicates, there's a hint of good even in life's seeming darkness. Even when it seems impossible. I believe this. Really, I do.
But that isn't all I learned that day. The other lesson, though, I no longer believe.
Whether it was a coincidence or divine intervention, I was shielded from the destiny that would have occurred had I followed my own plans that foggy weekend. But in my high school mind, I came to believed that God had protected me, even while ignoring those other 200 victims who suffered on the body of water originally called the Bay of the Holy Spirit. I must have a special destiny, I thought, that would justify God's saving grace on my life. Or those other people must not have loved God like I did.
Maybe my wildest dreams wouldn't always come true (and usually they didn't), but in the really important, basic stuff, God would make sure I was okay. I went to church, memorized bible verses, and prayed a lot, so God would stamp a special blessing on my life. God might let bad things happen to me, but only up to a point, and never anything beyond what I could handle.
Those other people who suffered senseless tragedy or pain beyond explanation or their ability to cope with it? Well, they must have just deserved it.
Of course, this lesson was so completely wrong that I'm embarrassed to admit to having believed it.
In 1995, I would have never guessed that the same God who extended my life via debilitating knee injury would some day allow me to have an unsold second house for 5.5 years, or that I'd have a series of other seemingly intractable problems. I would have never believed that inexplicable tragedy would be, at just about the same time, striking the family of the woman I'd later marry. I would have never expected that my best friend would suffer the same tragedy a few years later.
I know enough good people who have suffered beyond the pale that I now know that believing in God isn't a magic shield against the inherent problems that come with life, even a little bit. Maybe a few miracles happen in every lifetime (and I've certainly had one or two, whether my life-saving knee injury qualifies or not), but God isn't, on a routine basis, magically protecting any of us against every significant calamity simply because we say our prayers. The great promise of my faith is not even a one percent easier ride through life, nor even the vague notion that an invisible God is somehow beside us, while also everywhere else, suffering in kind when these things happen (even though I do think that is somehow true).
That promise is that when life is more than we can handle, we'll somehow get through it anyway and find enough healing to still experience joy on the other side. It's that the pain of life's worst moments will somehow cleanse our soul of the stuff that shouldn't have been in there to begin with, and force us to focus on the things that matter. As my friend's facebook post happened to say yesterday, it's that we can never know real joy unless we also know real pain.
It sounds ridiculous that it took me 34 years to realize these things, but this is what happens when you grow up hearing about Daniel surviving the Lion's Den.
Life is hard and full of stuff we can't handle on our own. Some find strength to endure it through their faith, but that doesn't magically make the ride any easier. Not even a little bit.
I know this now. It's actually liberating, in a certain way.
I'm just like everyone else. So when life seems inexplicably hard, as it eventually will for everyone, it doesn't mean that God has abandoned me. I'm just experiencing life, like everyone else.
Maybe God saved my life 17 years ago or maybe the whole thing was a coincidence. But whatever happened, it wasn't because I somehow deserved God's protection by virtue of being the only guy in my high school who didn't drink. And it didn't give me the right to feel superior to anyone.
I have no rational explanation for why I wasn't involved in that foggy March tragedy, but God didn't intervene on behalf of 200 others. I guess I'll never know if it was divine intervention or just a fortunate circumstance. But I understand now that the question really doesn't matter. Even if God saved me that day, it didn't mean God would give me a free pass out of every horrible situation life offered.
I just get the promise of healing, and true joy, on the other side.
And you know what?
That's a miracle enough for me.
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
The Night Before Court
It was 6:30 p.m. and I was caught in traffic on the outskirts of Cincinnati. I got a sudden but severe sinus infection the day before that had left me unable to breathe, barely able to speak and had drained all semblance of life from my body. I had maybe the most important court case of my life the next day before an Important Federal Appeals Court, and the case could go either way. I don't know how I'm going to be able to do this.
Little did I know how much worse things would get:
6:35: Usually when I have travel to Cincinnati for appellate argument, I use my per diem for a nice working dinner. I'm usually so stoked about appearing before the jurisdiction only one notch below the U.S. Supreme Court that I have too much energy to stay in my hotel. Tonight, though, I'm just thrilled at the site of a gas station with a built-in pizza hut on the highway. Now, I can eat there, have a powerade, and then not have to leave my hotel room once I crawl inside of it.
7:02: Cheap pizza consumed and 1.5 powerades finished, I'm back on the road.
7:30: Traffic finally subsided, and I'm glad to check into my hotel. I have a heavy suitcase, lots of files, a garment bag and my breakfast for the next morning with me, but I can barely manage to carry it all myself. Which is good because I only have a $20 and that kind of tip would be insane.
7: 31: Take the elevator to the top of the hotel and delicately balance my possessions as I walk to the end of the long, winding hallway where my room awaits. Drop everything to slide my key through the door. And it doesn't work.
7:32: This is interesting. Do I leave all my earthly belongings here on the floor while I go back to the front desk, or do I gather them back up, delicately balance them to walk back to the elevator, only to return right back here with it all?
7:34: Pondering.
7:37: Still thinking. It's a pretty nice hotel and I have a pretty remote room on the far end of the hall. And I'm so achy and drained that every single step I take feels like a session of P90X. But if my stuff disappears I'll hate myself, and some of my files probably shouldn't be out of my sight. But I don't think I can balance all this stuff again if I tried. So I try the key again. Still nothing.
7:42: My ship has come in! A bellman happens to walk by and he lets me in my room, promising to return with a valid key. Things are looking up.
8:00: Working. Telling myself I can do this.
10:59: Very suddenly, my energy vanishes. There's more I'd like to do, but I must go to sleep, and I must sleep now.
11:01: How in the world did I forget my toothbrush? The hotel has complimentary ones, but I'm too tired to go back down to the lobby. I'll get one in the morning. I'll just take my sinus medicine and go to bed.
11:02: How did I leave my sinus medicine in the car? If I don't have the energy to go to the lobby, there's no way I'm going to the parking garage
11:03: Oh well. I have dirty teeth and congestion, but I think I can sleep through it. At least I have one of those little wiry things that cleans the space in between my teeth. That will have to do. Except that it immediately breaks when I used it.
11:05: Barely extract my contact lens from my tired, dry right eye. The way things are going tonight, I'm shocked it didn't rip.
11:06: But my left one just did.
11:08: Holy crap! The other half of it is still in my eye! This hurts like mad. And I can't figure out how to get it out!!!!!!!!
11:10-11:30: AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Make! It! Stop!
11:31: Finally got it. That was miserable. I have no spare contact, so I'll have to wear glasses tomorrow. But, at last, now I can go to bed.
11:34: My room is directly over the hotel bar. It sure is loud down there. And why is there a baby crying in the hallway at this time of night? Is this one of those hotels where a child died 100 years ago and people still claim to hear it?
11:36: Thing is, I'm not even scared, I just don't want to put up with the noise. I want to sleep. Go haunt someone else.
11:38: Go out in the hallway to look for a visible baby. There's no evidence of one, but I see a woman who might possibly be its mother. She appears to have human form. Good enough for me.
11:40: Just need to shut down the computer before bed. Since it's still up, maybe I'll check facebook. I had mentioned yesterday that I was nervous about my ability to pull off this argument while barely able to talk and encased in an all-encompassing sickness-related mental cloud. Maybe I'll have an outpouring of encouragement and prayer support from my vast and wonderful array of highly spiritual and uplifting facebook friends! That would life my spirits like nothing I can imagine! What a wonderful way to go to sleep!
11:44: Or maybe I'll have nothing new whatsoever. Oh well. It was worth a shot.
12:00: Bed.
7:30: Roll out of bed after hitting snooze for 45 minutes. I need to leave in 45 minutes. I can probably just pull it off, even if I do have to shower, get coffee, put on a suit, eat breakfast, and run downstairs for a toothbrush. Man, do I feel awful.
8:30: Arrive to court just in time to check in for my argument. Learn I'm the last case on the docket and probably won't go until about 11:30. Request (and receive) permission to go back to my hotel and lie face down on my pillow for the next two hours. Which is exactly what I do, with some groaning added in for good measure.
10:30: Rouse myself, and make it back to court, where things are running behind. My argument won't be until noon. Maybe that will give me enough time to feel better.
12:00: It's on. The other side goes first.
12:12: It's my turn. Adrenaline pumping, I confidently walk to the podium, ready to introduce myself to the court and wow the panel of judges with my limitless verbal abilities. That plan works fine until my voice disappears in the middle of my attempt to introduce myself to the Court.
********************************
I recovered, and somehow, against all odds, things went fine from there.
A person or two must have said a prayer for me after all.
Little did I know how much worse things would get:
6:35: Usually when I have travel to Cincinnati for appellate argument, I use my per diem for a nice working dinner. I'm usually so stoked about appearing before the jurisdiction only one notch below the U.S. Supreme Court that I have too much energy to stay in my hotel. Tonight, though, I'm just thrilled at the site of a gas station with a built-in pizza hut on the highway. Now, I can eat there, have a powerade, and then not have to leave my hotel room once I crawl inside of it.
7:02: Cheap pizza consumed and 1.5 powerades finished, I'm back on the road.
7:30: Traffic finally subsided, and I'm glad to check into my hotel. I have a heavy suitcase, lots of files, a garment bag and my breakfast for the next morning with me, but I can barely manage to carry it all myself. Which is good because I only have a $20 and that kind of tip would be insane.
7: 31: Take the elevator to the top of the hotel and delicately balance my possessions as I walk to the end of the long, winding hallway where my room awaits. Drop everything to slide my key through the door. And it doesn't work.
7:32: This is interesting. Do I leave all my earthly belongings here on the floor while I go back to the front desk, or do I gather them back up, delicately balance them to walk back to the elevator, only to return right back here with it all?
7:34: Pondering.
7:37: Still thinking. It's a pretty nice hotel and I have a pretty remote room on the far end of the hall. And I'm so achy and drained that every single step I take feels like a session of P90X. But if my stuff disappears I'll hate myself, and some of my files probably shouldn't be out of my sight. But I don't think I can balance all this stuff again if I tried. So I try the key again. Still nothing.
7:42: My ship has come in! A bellman happens to walk by and he lets me in my room, promising to return with a valid key. Things are looking up.
8:00: Working. Telling myself I can do this.
10:59: Very suddenly, my energy vanishes. There's more I'd like to do, but I must go to sleep, and I must sleep now.
11:01: How in the world did I forget my toothbrush? The hotel has complimentary ones, but I'm too tired to go back down to the lobby. I'll get one in the morning. I'll just take my sinus medicine and go to bed.
11:02: How did I leave my sinus medicine in the car? If I don't have the energy to go to the lobby, there's no way I'm going to the parking garage
11:03: Oh well. I have dirty teeth and congestion, but I think I can sleep through it. At least I have one of those little wiry things that cleans the space in between my teeth. That will have to do. Except that it immediately breaks when I used it.
11:05: Barely extract my contact lens from my tired, dry right eye. The way things are going tonight, I'm shocked it didn't rip.
11:06: But my left one just did.
11:08: Holy crap! The other half of it is still in my eye! This hurts like mad. And I can't figure out how to get it out!!!!!!!!
11:10-11:30: AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Make! It! Stop!
11:31: Finally got it. That was miserable. I have no spare contact, so I'll have to wear glasses tomorrow. But, at last, now I can go to bed.
11:34: My room is directly over the hotel bar. It sure is loud down there. And why is there a baby crying in the hallway at this time of night? Is this one of those hotels where a child died 100 years ago and people still claim to hear it?
11:36: Thing is, I'm not even scared, I just don't want to put up with the noise. I want to sleep. Go haunt someone else.
11:38: Go out in the hallway to look for a visible baby. There's no evidence of one, but I see a woman who might possibly be its mother. She appears to have human form. Good enough for me.
11:40: Just need to shut down the computer before bed. Since it's still up, maybe I'll check facebook. I had mentioned yesterday that I was nervous about my ability to pull off this argument while barely able to talk and encased in an all-encompassing sickness-related mental cloud. Maybe I'll have an outpouring of encouragement and prayer support from my vast and wonderful array of highly spiritual and uplifting facebook friends! That would life my spirits like nothing I can imagine! What a wonderful way to go to sleep!
11:44: Or maybe I'll have nothing new whatsoever. Oh well. It was worth a shot.
12:00: Bed.
7:30: Roll out of bed after hitting snooze for 45 minutes. I need to leave in 45 minutes. I can probably just pull it off, even if I do have to shower, get coffee, put on a suit, eat breakfast, and run downstairs for a toothbrush. Man, do I feel awful.
8:30: Arrive to court just in time to check in for my argument. Learn I'm the last case on the docket and probably won't go until about 11:30. Request (and receive) permission to go back to my hotel and lie face down on my pillow for the next two hours. Which is exactly what I do, with some groaning added in for good measure.
10:30: Rouse myself, and make it back to court, where things are running behind. My argument won't be until noon. Maybe that will give me enough time to feel better.
12:00: It's on. The other side goes first.
12:12: It's my turn. Adrenaline pumping, I confidently walk to the podium, ready to introduce myself to the court and wow the panel of judges with my limitless verbal abilities. That plan works fine until my voice disappears in the middle of my attempt to introduce myself to the Court.
********************************
I recovered, and somehow, against all odds, things went fine from there.
A person or two must have said a prayer for me after all.
Monday, October 8, 2012
What Columbus Day Means: My Ongoing Feud with Chris Columbus
Not too long ago, I was at a cathedral in San Juan, Puerto Rico, looking at Christopher Columbus' ornate ivory tomb. As I stood there, I couldn't help but think deep, complicated socio-political thoughts such as: how do we know he is actually in there?
Eventually, I moved on from that question. Next, the cynic in me began to wonder how many civilizations I'd need to destroy to get similar luxury post-mortem accommodations. When I went there, I should have known Columbus' spirit would avenge my lack of reverence at some point.
So I should have seen it coming when I woke up on this Columbus Day with chills all over and a throat in need of rescue by whatever local fire department might happen to be open today. After all, if Columbus could overcome native resistance by those who outnumbered him by at least tenfold to help colonize the Americas, surely he had the power to give me a cold from the grave.
I'm sure it didn't help that I'm part Native American, and Columbus wasn't particularly fond of my kind. In fact, he's been giving my ancestors diseases for which we had no immunity ever since he arrived. If Columbus wanted retribution for my graveside slight, this was absolutely the path of least resistance.
Although today was not a scheduled holiday for me, like it or not, I ended up being forced to celebrate Columbus Day. My celebration has mostly included eating a lot of soup and the spiciest, most sinus-clearing foods I can get find, but that's beside the point. I'm pretty sure Ole Chris just wanted me to stay home from work.
If the spirit of Columbus so badly wanted me to stop and appreciate what Columbus Day means that he infected me with illness from the afterlife, I guess I should take time to do that now--if only so that I don't get sick again next year.
So today, I'm here to write about the wonders of the most obscure holiday observed by federal employees and roughly 28 other people. If you wanted meaningful analysis of Columbus's life or the historical impacts of his voyage, you probably shouldn't have clicked on the blog of someone whose all-time most popular post was about an invasion of red-eyed bugs.
With that in mind, let us explore what, exactly, Columbus Day means.
It means that, for about 8 percent of the population, it means a chance to have a day off when the weather is nice. For the rest of us, it means that bill that we should have paid last week will now definitely be late, because the post office won't deliver today, and we didn't remember to mail it on Saturday.
Columbus Day means more than that, however. It also means that we when we arrived at work today (having faced slightly less traffic than usual--a fact that Mr. Explorer certainly would have appreciated), we looked down at our calendar to see something printed on the square representing today's date. And then, collectively at 8:47 a.m., we said to ourselves, "Oh, yeah. Too bad I'm not off today. What a waste."
In some city somewhere, there is probably a parade today, but I can't imagine what kind of floats it would have or who would go to it.
For me personally, Columbus Day meant that the line at the bank was unusually long last Friday afternoon, and when I finally got to the window, the teller said something about a long weekend coming up and I gave her a funny look because I had no idea what she was talking about.
Most importantly for me, Columbus Day meant that when I woke up feeling crappy today, I had an excuse not to call in sick, because, hey, the courts are closed today anyway.
I'm pretty sure this is the type of remembrance Columbus had in mind when he set sail from Europe in 1492. In fact, historical records tell us that he had three goals when he set his ships to sail: (1) establish a spice trade; (2) explore new worlds; and (3) secure himself a holiday in the country near where he would eventually land that would someday be observed by only bankers, postmen, and federal employees.
And if this was, in fact, what he wanted, then job well done.
That is what Columbus Day means to me. I encourage you to find your own meaning in this most solemn and important holiday. Your options are nearly limitless:
Find a furniture store having a "30-percent off" sale.
In the spirit of exploration, find a quicker route to work, because, hey, you probably didn't get today off anyway.
Talk like a pirate, because without Columbus, there wouldn't have been any in the Caribbean.
Make a pilgrimage to Columbus, Ohio.
Order a pizza.
Take someone else's land.
Kill an Indian.
In other words, do whatever you need to find a way to make this day your own.
As for me, I plan to continue my Columbus Day celebration in my own special way. What little energy I have left from the Revenge of Columbus Death Bug, I plan to use by fending off the advances of a hyperactive and under-stimulated cat named Trouble, who is foaming at the mouth at the unexpected prospect of having weekday daytime companionship.
The man who brought Trouble Cat's ancestors to the New World surely would approve.
Maybe he'll even release his grip on my sinuses.
Eventually, I moved on from that question. Next, the cynic in me began to wonder how many civilizations I'd need to destroy to get similar luxury post-mortem accommodations. When I went there, I should have known Columbus' spirit would avenge my lack of reverence at some point.
So I should have seen it coming when I woke up on this Columbus Day with chills all over and a throat in need of rescue by whatever local fire department might happen to be open today. After all, if Columbus could overcome native resistance by those who outnumbered him by at least tenfold to help colonize the Americas, surely he had the power to give me a cold from the grave.
I'm sure it didn't help that I'm part Native American, and Columbus wasn't particularly fond of my kind. In fact, he's been giving my ancestors diseases for which we had no immunity ever since he arrived. If Columbus wanted retribution for my graveside slight, this was absolutely the path of least resistance.
Although today was not a scheduled holiday for me, like it or not, I ended up being forced to celebrate Columbus Day. My celebration has mostly included eating a lot of soup and the spiciest, most sinus-clearing foods I can get find, but that's beside the point. I'm pretty sure Ole Chris just wanted me to stay home from work.
If the spirit of Columbus so badly wanted me to stop and appreciate what Columbus Day means that he infected me with illness from the afterlife, I guess I should take time to do that now--if only so that I don't get sick again next year.
So today, I'm here to write about the wonders of the most obscure holiday observed by federal employees and roughly 28 other people. If you wanted meaningful analysis of Columbus's life or the historical impacts of his voyage, you probably shouldn't have clicked on the blog of someone whose all-time most popular post was about an invasion of red-eyed bugs.
With that in mind, let us explore what, exactly, Columbus Day means.
It means that, for about 8 percent of the population, it means a chance to have a day off when the weather is nice. For the rest of us, it means that bill that we should have paid last week will now definitely be late, because the post office won't deliver today, and we didn't remember to mail it on Saturday.
Columbus Day means more than that, however. It also means that we when we arrived at work today (having faced slightly less traffic than usual--a fact that Mr. Explorer certainly would have appreciated), we looked down at our calendar to see something printed on the square representing today's date. And then, collectively at 8:47 a.m., we said to ourselves, "Oh, yeah. Too bad I'm not off today. What a waste."
In some city somewhere, there is probably a parade today, but I can't imagine what kind of floats it would have or who would go to it.
For me personally, Columbus Day meant that the line at the bank was unusually long last Friday afternoon, and when I finally got to the window, the teller said something about a long weekend coming up and I gave her a funny look because I had no idea what she was talking about.
Most importantly for me, Columbus Day meant that when I woke up feeling crappy today, I had an excuse not to call in sick, because, hey, the courts are closed today anyway.
I'm pretty sure this is the type of remembrance Columbus had in mind when he set sail from Europe in 1492. In fact, historical records tell us that he had three goals when he set his ships to sail: (1) establish a spice trade; (2) explore new worlds; and (3) secure himself a holiday in the country near where he would eventually land that would someday be observed by only bankers, postmen, and federal employees.
And if this was, in fact, what he wanted, then job well done.
That is what Columbus Day means to me. I encourage you to find your own meaning in this most solemn and important holiday. Your options are nearly limitless:
Find a furniture store having a "30-percent off" sale.
In the spirit of exploration, find a quicker route to work, because, hey, you probably didn't get today off anyway.
Talk like a pirate, because without Columbus, there wouldn't have been any in the Caribbean.
Make a pilgrimage to Columbus, Ohio.
Order a pizza.
Take someone else's land.
Kill an Indian.
In other words, do whatever you need to find a way to make this day your own.
As for me, I plan to continue my Columbus Day celebration in my own special way. What little energy I have left from the Revenge of Columbus Death Bug, I plan to use by fending off the advances of a hyperactive and under-stimulated cat named Trouble, who is foaming at the mouth at the unexpected prospect of having weekday daytime companionship.
The man who brought Trouble Cat's ancestors to the New World surely would approve.
Maybe he'll even release his grip on my sinuses.
Monday, October 1, 2012
Why I Love October
In the history of this blog, only two posts have attracted more than 250 hits. One was about the invasion of Giant Killer Insects of Doom that happened in Nashville the summer before last.
The other is my post from last year about why I love October.
Since the month just started, it seems like an appropriate time to re-post this now. It's timely, it's appropriate, you all liked it the first time, and even more importantly, it will allow me to be lazy this week and not have to think of anything new to write.
So enjoy both the blog, and the great October weather. Just do the first before you go out and do the second!
The other is my post from last year about why I love October.
Since the month just started, it seems like an appropriate time to re-post this now. It's timely, it's appropriate, you all liked it the first time, and even more importantly, it will allow me to be lazy this week and not have to think of anything new to write.
So enjoy both the blog, and the great October weather. Just do the first before you go out and do the second!
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
I Hate Facebook
If the United States government ever collapses, it won't be because of a Chinese takeover, our imploding debt burden or because of internal moral decay. It will be--and I feel strongly about this--entirely because of facebook.
Facebook continues to become more intrusive, powerful and annoying with each passing day.
I used to like facebook. It didn't require all the customization or creativity that Myspace did. Most of my friends were on there, many of whom I hadn't spoken to in awhile. It gave me a way to talk to people without picking up the phone, which is every introvert's dream. Signing up seemed like a good idea at the time.
Now, however, facebook is ruining my life. And pretty much running it too.
Facebook has entirely too much control over my existence. It tells me how many friends I have. It tells me when someone I thought was my friend no longer is. It dredges up unflattering photos from 20 years ago that I am powerless to delete. It provides an unerasable diary of all the intimate thoughts of my daily life.
Facebooks decides for me which of my friends update I get to see, even though I manually change the default setting from facebook's self-determined "top stories" to "most recent" every single time I sign on. But facebook insists on being the gatekeeper of my social life, nonetheless.
And if, God forbid, I ever want to run a facebook application (which I most assuredly don't), then to do so, I have to sign away the rights to all my personal information, as well as the rights to my first, third and fifth-born children, second-born cat, and probably, from what I can tell from the fine print, my immortal soul.
At this point, facebook probably has a claim on the inheritance of half of the population.
But not only has facebook become overly intrusive, it's also become really hard to figure out.
Every time I think I've learned the various contours of how to navigate facebook, the powers-that-be change something. Facebook has made roughly 237 changes to its operational system in the last four years, and every single one of them made the site just a little bit harder to navigate.
It used to be that all my information was displayed on the same page. If I wanted to see my friend list, or search for other friends, I could just click on a button that allowed me to do so. I used to have a virtual pet and a virtual billboard, but they've both been abducted into cyberspace. I ended up with something called a "timeline" despite my fervent opposition.
It used to be that if I wanted to change my profile picture, I could just click on my old one. I used to be able to edit my facebook status without deleting it entirely.
Those were the good old days.
Facebook won the social networking battle over Myspace because it was simpler to use, and once it did, it immediately decided to make itself as complicated as possible.
Brilliant.
The way things stand now, I have no idea how to do anything on facebook.
It takes me half an hour, and lots of frustrating failed attempts, to change my profile picture. If I try to search for new friends, I get five results at a time, many of which are my friends already. I can block people from tagging me in their posts, but I can't block pictures of me from 15 years ago that could still get me fired today, nor can I block people from posting I was with them at some remote location during a time when I was actually at work. Or at least was supposed to be.
I just can't win.
I know I shouldn't complain. Facebook provides me with a method to publicize my writing that wouldn't have been possible a few years ago. It's been good for the blog. So I wouldn't say anything, except that I'm not the only one in this situation. Most of my friends are far deeper into the facebook realm than I am, and it seems clear that they are never going to make it out.
Pretty soon, facebook will have so much personal information about all of us that we'll be powerless to ever leave it, or do anything but submit to its arbitrary and unreasonable demands.
For example, facebook has the rights to all your photos. If you ever want to see them again, or don't want them sold to the sex trade industry, you'd better agree to those new terms of service. Even if they include something scandalous involving a chicken.
Your friends no longer email you because facebook is so convenient. So if you ever want to hear from them again, you'd better agreed to give facebook a sample of your DNA, and sign the waiver allowing any clone created therefrom to take over your life. And, of course, your facebook account.
Because, after all, the distinction between the two grows smaller and smaller every day.
Facebook continues to become more intrusive, powerful and annoying with each passing day.
I used to like facebook. It didn't require all the customization or creativity that Myspace did. Most of my friends were on there, many of whom I hadn't spoken to in awhile. It gave me a way to talk to people without picking up the phone, which is every introvert's dream. Signing up seemed like a good idea at the time.
Now, however, facebook is ruining my life. And pretty much running it too.
Facebook has entirely too much control over my existence. It tells me how many friends I have. It tells me when someone I thought was my friend no longer is. It dredges up unflattering photos from 20 years ago that I am powerless to delete. It provides an unerasable diary of all the intimate thoughts of my daily life.
Facebooks decides for me which of my friends update I get to see, even though I manually change the default setting from facebook's self-determined "top stories" to "most recent" every single time I sign on. But facebook insists on being the gatekeeper of my social life, nonetheless.
And if, God forbid, I ever want to run a facebook application (which I most assuredly don't), then to do so, I have to sign away the rights to all my personal information, as well as the rights to my first, third and fifth-born children, second-born cat, and probably, from what I can tell from the fine print, my immortal soul.
At this point, facebook probably has a claim on the inheritance of half of the population.
But not only has facebook become overly intrusive, it's also become really hard to figure out.
Every time I think I've learned the various contours of how to navigate facebook, the powers-that-be change something. Facebook has made roughly 237 changes to its operational system in the last four years, and every single one of them made the site just a little bit harder to navigate.
It used to be that all my information was displayed on the same page. If I wanted to see my friend list, or search for other friends, I could just click on a button that allowed me to do so. I used to have a virtual pet and a virtual billboard, but they've both been abducted into cyberspace. I ended up with something called a "timeline" despite my fervent opposition.
It used to be that if I wanted to change my profile picture, I could just click on my old one. I used to be able to edit my facebook status without deleting it entirely.
Those were the good old days.
Facebook won the social networking battle over Myspace because it was simpler to use, and once it did, it immediately decided to make itself as complicated as possible.
Brilliant.
The way things stand now, I have no idea how to do anything on facebook.
It takes me half an hour, and lots of frustrating failed attempts, to change my profile picture. If I try to search for new friends, I get five results at a time, many of which are my friends already. I can block people from tagging me in their posts, but I can't block pictures of me from 15 years ago that could still get me fired today, nor can I block people from posting I was with them at some remote location during a time when I was actually at work. Or at least was supposed to be.
I just can't win.
I know I shouldn't complain. Facebook provides me with a method to publicize my writing that wouldn't have been possible a few years ago. It's been good for the blog. So I wouldn't say anything, except that I'm not the only one in this situation. Most of my friends are far deeper into the facebook realm than I am, and it seems clear that they are never going to make it out.
Pretty soon, facebook will have so much personal information about all of us that we'll be powerless to ever leave it, or do anything but submit to its arbitrary and unreasonable demands.
For example, facebook has the rights to all your photos. If you ever want to see them again, or don't want them sold to the sex trade industry, you'd better agree to those new terms of service. Even if they include something scandalous involving a chicken.
Your friends no longer email you because facebook is so convenient. So if you ever want to hear from them again, you'd better agreed to give facebook a sample of your DNA, and sign the waiver allowing any clone created therefrom to take over your life. And, of course, your facebook account.
Because, after all, the distinction between the two grows smaller and smaller every day.
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
A Man's Shopping Trip from Hell
What started as a routine trip to the grocery store ended up as a married man's version of Hell. Here's what happened:
8:30: Grab the grocery list and head to Kroger. Liz is really tired, so I offerred to do it on my own.
8:36: Notice six items on the list. Five of them are no big deal, but kinda nervous about number 6. I've never been secure enough in my manhood to feel comfortable shopping for feminine hygiene products.
8:40: I'll grab everything else first, and then grab those things at the end. That way, no one will see them in my cart.
8:42: What exactly are the difference between pads and liners anyway? I've never understood why women need two different versions of these things.
8:57: Everything else is done, so I'll grab the pads. I hope this is painless...
9:00: There are only 15 people in the entire grocery store right now, but 12 of them are hanging out in the women's hygiene aisle. And they all suddenly shift their eyes to stare at the man who just entered it. How is this possible?
9:01: I hope they move quickly. I don't want to reach around other shoppers for the sake of buying maxipads, but being creepy guy standing right outside the women's hygiene aisle is probably even worse.
9:05: Everyone has cleared out except for one group, but they've left their cart directly in front of the section I need. So I'm still lingering around the hygiene aisle, wishing I could disappear...
9:08: The group with the cart is shopping for hair products, but they've left their cart in front of the maxipad section. They aren't moving very quickly, so I'm just going to have to dive in. Wait, that came out wrong.
9:11: Hmm. Maybe I'll look less conspicuous if I pull out my grocery list and pretend to stare at it. That way, maybe people will know buying these things wasn't my idea. I pull out the list and try to weave around the cart to reach what I'm looking for.
9:12: How are there this many varieties of pads???? I'm supposed to buy regular-sized, unscented, with wings. So far I've found scented with wings, regular-sized without wings, long without wings, and regular-sized, scented, without wings. Also, there's some purple package that seems just like everything else, but doesn't look like what Liz usually buys. This is so confusing.
9:13: Why is everyone staring at me?
9:15: Crap. Here comes another set of shoppers. I'm just going to grab something that looks right and go.
9:17: These are unscented with wings, but they are extra long. I can't bring these home. I screwed up and bought these once before, and that didn't work out so well. I have to walk back.
9:18: Of course, the package won't fit back on the shelf. As I fumble with my extra long pads, still navigating around the cart directly in front of where I need to be, another set of shoppers walk by, and stare for roughly 30 minutes. At least it feels that way.
9:23: After five more minutes of camping out in the pad section, I finally found what I'm looking for: regular sized, unscented, with wings. Thank God.
9:24: That was awful. At least maybe now I can go to the self checkout and disappear into the night.
9:25: There's a really long line at self checkout, but the lines are open at the cashier. Maybe it won't be too bad.
9:27: The minute I put the pads on the conveyer belt, a 30-ish single guy gets in line behind me. He watches me put the pads on the belt, gives me a funny look, and immediately moves to another lane. I'm not making this up.
9:30: Realize I left my wedding ring at home on the nightstand. I guess that explains some of the funny looks.
9:33: Just my luck, I'm stuck with the young cashier who always talks my ear off. Usually, she tries to flirt with me. I'm guessing that's not going to happen this time. Or ever again. At least some good might come from this.
9:37: Cashier bags the pads at the very end of the process, leaving them visible for every possible second. Moments before she puts them in the bag, a young woman comes behind me in the checkout line and watches. She gives me a dirty look.
9:42: Arrive home.
9:43: "Hey honey, but how come you bought the store brand instead of Always?"
8:30: Grab the grocery list and head to Kroger. Liz is really tired, so I offerred to do it on my own.
8:36: Notice six items on the list. Five of them are no big deal, but kinda nervous about number 6. I've never been secure enough in my manhood to feel comfortable shopping for feminine hygiene products.
8:40: I'll grab everything else first, and then grab those things at the end. That way, no one will see them in my cart.
8:42: What exactly are the difference between pads and liners anyway? I've never understood why women need two different versions of these things.
8:57: Everything else is done, so I'll grab the pads. I hope this is painless...
9:00: There are only 15 people in the entire grocery store right now, but 12 of them are hanging out in the women's hygiene aisle. And they all suddenly shift their eyes to stare at the man who just entered it. How is this possible?
9:01: I hope they move quickly. I don't want to reach around other shoppers for the sake of buying maxipads, but being creepy guy standing right outside the women's hygiene aisle is probably even worse.
9:05: Everyone has cleared out except for one group, but they've left their cart directly in front of the section I need. So I'm still lingering around the hygiene aisle, wishing I could disappear...
9:08: The group with the cart is shopping for hair products, but they've left their cart in front of the maxipad section. They aren't moving very quickly, so I'm just going to have to dive in. Wait, that came out wrong.
9:11: Hmm. Maybe I'll look less conspicuous if I pull out my grocery list and pretend to stare at it. That way, maybe people will know buying these things wasn't my idea. I pull out the list and try to weave around the cart to reach what I'm looking for.
9:12: How are there this many varieties of pads???? I'm supposed to buy regular-sized, unscented, with wings. So far I've found scented with wings, regular-sized without wings, long without wings, and regular-sized, scented, without wings. Also, there's some purple package that seems just like everything else, but doesn't look like what Liz usually buys. This is so confusing.
9:13: Why is everyone staring at me?
9:15: Crap. Here comes another set of shoppers. I'm just going to grab something that looks right and go.
9:17: These are unscented with wings, but they are extra long. I can't bring these home. I screwed up and bought these once before, and that didn't work out so well. I have to walk back.
9:18: Of course, the package won't fit back on the shelf. As I fumble with my extra long pads, still navigating around the cart directly in front of where I need to be, another set of shoppers walk by, and stare for roughly 30 minutes. At least it feels that way.
9:23: After five more minutes of camping out in the pad section, I finally found what I'm looking for: regular sized, unscented, with wings. Thank God.
9:24: That was awful. At least maybe now I can go to the self checkout and disappear into the night.
9:25: There's a really long line at self checkout, but the lines are open at the cashier. Maybe it won't be too bad.
9:27: The minute I put the pads on the conveyer belt, a 30-ish single guy gets in line behind me. He watches me put the pads on the belt, gives me a funny look, and immediately moves to another lane. I'm not making this up.
9:30: Realize I left my wedding ring at home on the nightstand. I guess that explains some of the funny looks.
9:33: Just my luck, I'm stuck with the young cashier who always talks my ear off. Usually, she tries to flirt with me. I'm guessing that's not going to happen this time. Or ever again. At least some good might come from this.
9:37: Cashier bags the pads at the very end of the process, leaving them visible for every possible second. Moments before she puts them in the bag, a young woman comes behind me in the checkout line and watches. She gives me a dirty look.
9:42: Arrive home.
9:43: "Hey honey, but how come you bought the store brand instead of Always?"
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Life is Good. No Really, It Is.
Life is hard, cruel and often unfair, and I'm not just talking about the board game.
The combination of it all caused me to spend the summer wondering whether life is good.
As I wrote in this space back in May, I couldn't bring myself to wear my favorite t-shirt because I couldn't bring myself to advertise its message that "Life is Good." At that time, my brother was going through multiple surgeries and 12 rounds of chemotherapy hell, while his wife and three kids watched helplessly.
At that time, I'd just hit the 5-year mark on trying to sell the house we left in St. Louis, without success. The situation is especially ironic because I left there for better opportunities that my continued ownership of that house has pretty much stripped away.
My wife didn't like her job, and it didn't seem that stable anyway.
Four months later, things haven't changed all that much. My brother's chemo sessions ended two weeks ago, and we await further news, but otherwise, things are pretty much the same. Which is to say, things haven't exactly gone according to plan.
Maybe you can relate.
In some area of life, someone else got something that you deserved. A loved one suffers, your life feels like a never-ending parade of small catastrophes, and the one thing that could happen that would suddenly make it all ok seems as far away as the horizon.
Maybe you worked hard for that promotion that was promised to you, but it was given to someone else. Perhaps you've struggled so hard at a goal that the achievement of which just happened to just fall haphazardly in someone else's lap. Or maybe it just seems that, at some cosmic level, other people's dreams come true while yours just don't.
If these things have happened to you, I understand.
They've all happened to me too, and most of them very recently.
But if there's one thing I've learned through it all, it's that life isn't defined by its worst moments.
I've been reminded of that lesson everytime someone asks me how I'm coping with the ways life is falling apart. I think about that when I see an old friend I hadn't seen in awhile and am instantly reminded of why I liked them so much to begin with. I'm reminded of it when a difficult struggle passes. I become convinced of it in those moments I'm doing the exact thing I'd most like to be doing with the people I love most.
The memories that truly linger in our souls are the ones that bring us joy, because God wired that to be the currency of our lives.
Even if these moments don't occur as often as we'd like, the fact that better times are out there somewhere itself represents hope.
I try not to get too preachy in this space, because there are a million places you can go to find that sort of thing already. But here's the deal:
In my darkest moments, it used to bother me that God put didn't ask us if we wanted to be put here before placing us on this Earth. After all, if life is imperfect and struggles are inevitable, it doesn't seem fair that we don't get a choice whether to sign up. Sometimes I've felt like a puppy whose master threw it unsuspectingly into the deep end of a pond and then expected me to be thankful upon being helped to the shore.
But that's not really the God in whom I believe. I don't believe in a God who seeks our dismay, but I do believe in a God who'd rather walk in the desert with us than put us on the beach alone. I believe in a God who doesn't always answer my questions about tomorrow but always is there to help me make it through today.
More than anything, I believe in a God who loves me--and everyone else too. I've seen too many examples of it in my own life to think otherwise, even when there are things I can't explain.
And I just can't believe in a loving God who would give us life if that life wasn't good.
To be clear, life is full of broken dreams, disappointments and injustices against which we spend our better moments fighting.
But where there is love, life is good. Not because life always meets our expectations, but because there are people who always love us anyway.
When I posed the question in this space three months ago as to whether life was good, it never occured to me that I'd already covered the issue in a prior post.
When I re-read that post a few days ago, I knew I'd already answered my own question. So if you'll indulge me, I'll speak again here now as to why I've come to believe life is good, despite everything that isn't:
Today, the birds sing. The sun shines. It sets and returns tomorrow. And more often than not, I don't even notice.
A chirping bird might not seem like much when life is falling down around you. But its symptomatic of a greater truth. Despite its imperfection, the world is filled with beauty, if only we will look for it.
Someone around you loves you, warts and all. Someone else around you loves you more than you know, but doesn't know how to say so.
There is some bigger purpose that you care about more than yourself. Through struggles beyond what seem fair, love overcomes, because God created no force more powerful.
These are the things that matter.
When life feels like more than you or I can handle, there is someone who will listen, who has been through something like it before.
At some point, someone did you a favor for no expectation of a return, just because it was the right thing to do. Someone else forgave you for something stupid you did, and that mistake you learned from made you better for the experience.
And even on a day when we feel like life's garbage dump, someone around us celebrates something wonderful in their own seperate world. And some day, we will too.
Our problems are just a drop in the bucket of life. It's tapestry is greater and more beautiful than our temporary circumstances.
(As U2 has taught us):
What we don't have, we don't need it now.
What we don't know, we can feel it somehow.
It's a beautiful day.
Don't let it get away.
The combination of it all caused me to spend the summer wondering whether life is good.
As I wrote in this space back in May, I couldn't bring myself to wear my favorite t-shirt because I couldn't bring myself to advertise its message that "Life is Good." At that time, my brother was going through multiple surgeries and 12 rounds of chemotherapy hell, while his wife and three kids watched helplessly.
At that time, I'd just hit the 5-year mark on trying to sell the house we left in St. Louis, without success. The situation is especially ironic because I left there for better opportunities that my continued ownership of that house has pretty much stripped away.
My wife didn't like her job, and it didn't seem that stable anyway.
Four months later, things haven't changed all that much. My brother's chemo sessions ended two weeks ago, and we await further news, but otherwise, things are pretty much the same. Which is to say, things haven't exactly gone according to plan.
Maybe you can relate.
In some area of life, someone else got something that you deserved. A loved one suffers, your life feels like a never-ending parade of small catastrophes, and the one thing that could happen that would suddenly make it all ok seems as far away as the horizon.
Maybe you worked hard for that promotion that was promised to you, but it was given to someone else. Perhaps you've struggled so hard at a goal that the achievement of which just happened to just fall haphazardly in someone else's lap. Or maybe it just seems that, at some cosmic level, other people's dreams come true while yours just don't.
If these things have happened to you, I understand.
They've all happened to me too, and most of them very recently.
But if there's one thing I've learned through it all, it's that life isn't defined by its worst moments.
I've been reminded of that lesson everytime someone asks me how I'm coping with the ways life is falling apart. I think about that when I see an old friend I hadn't seen in awhile and am instantly reminded of why I liked them so much to begin with. I'm reminded of it when a difficult struggle passes. I become convinced of it in those moments I'm doing the exact thing I'd most like to be doing with the people I love most.
The memories that truly linger in our souls are the ones that bring us joy, because God wired that to be the currency of our lives.
Even if these moments don't occur as often as we'd like, the fact that better times are out there somewhere itself represents hope.
I try not to get too preachy in this space, because there are a million places you can go to find that sort of thing already. But here's the deal:
In my darkest moments, it used to bother me that God put didn't ask us if we wanted to be put here before placing us on this Earth. After all, if life is imperfect and struggles are inevitable, it doesn't seem fair that we don't get a choice whether to sign up. Sometimes I've felt like a puppy whose master threw it unsuspectingly into the deep end of a pond and then expected me to be thankful upon being helped to the shore.
But that's not really the God in whom I believe. I don't believe in a God who seeks our dismay, but I do believe in a God who'd rather walk in the desert with us than put us on the beach alone. I believe in a God who doesn't always answer my questions about tomorrow but always is there to help me make it through today.
More than anything, I believe in a God who loves me--and everyone else too. I've seen too many examples of it in my own life to think otherwise, even when there are things I can't explain.
And I just can't believe in a loving God who would give us life if that life wasn't good.
To be clear, life is full of broken dreams, disappointments and injustices against which we spend our better moments fighting.
But where there is love, life is good. Not because life always meets our expectations, but because there are people who always love us anyway.
When I posed the question in this space three months ago as to whether life was good, it never occured to me that I'd already covered the issue in a prior post.
When I re-read that post a few days ago, I knew I'd already answered my own question. So if you'll indulge me, I'll speak again here now as to why I've come to believe life is good, despite everything that isn't:
Today, the birds sing. The sun shines. It sets and returns tomorrow. And more often than not, I don't even notice.
A chirping bird might not seem like much when life is falling down around you. But its symptomatic of a greater truth. Despite its imperfection, the world is filled with beauty, if only we will look for it.
Someone around you loves you, warts and all. Someone else around you loves you more than you know, but doesn't know how to say so.
There is some bigger purpose that you care about more than yourself. Through struggles beyond what seem fair, love overcomes, because God created no force more powerful.
These are the things that matter.
When life feels like more than you or I can handle, there is someone who will listen, who has been through something like it before.
At some point, someone did you a favor for no expectation of a return, just because it was the right thing to do. Someone else forgave you for something stupid you did, and that mistake you learned from made you better for the experience.
And even on a day when we feel like life's garbage dump, someone around us celebrates something wonderful in their own seperate world. And some day, we will too.
Our problems are just a drop in the bucket of life. It's tapestry is greater and more beautiful than our temporary circumstances.
(As U2 has taught us):
What we don't have, we don't need it now.
What we don't know, we can feel it somehow.
It's a beautiful day.
Don't let it get away.
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
2012: The Summer of Sweat, Llamas, and other Adventures
I can't remember if summer officially ends on September 20th or 21st, or possibly some other date, so let's just save the trouble of researching it and just say it ended yesterday.
Whether Labor Day was really the end of summer or not, it marks an even more important milestone: the return of this blog from summer break!
So what happened while I was away?
Mostly, it was hot outside. And it still is most places, especially ifHurricane Tropical Storm Tropical Depression Isaac is dumping Caribbean moisture on your city like it has on Nashville the last three days.
But you know what month was even hotter?
JUNE
June was a momentous month for our country in that it provided writers everywhere the opportunity to write the word "momentous." Also, temperatures reached momentous heights in most of the country.
Nashville, for instance, hit 107. If you are thinking that "hit 107" should be the name of a radio station rather than a phrase used to describe the temperature, you might have a point. The temperature gauge should never go higher than the radio dial.
But in the midst of an unprecedented heat wave, a rare celestial event occurred: the path of Venus crossed the surface of the sun, a feat not scheduled to happen again for another 100 years. When it happened, astronomers everywhere were shocked that upon crossing the surface of the sun Venus decided this was actually preferable to being near the orbit of the Earth, and chose to linger for awhile. It said it would leave once it found a job, but it just bought a cat and things aren't looking good. It might just say until next century.
Everyone is struggling in this economy.
Speaking of which, the United States' economy continued to struggle in June, as millions of would-be employers decided to forgo interviewing prospective hires in favor of showing up to work without wearing pants. Little did they know, things would just get worse in:
JULY
July started on Independence Day, which happened to fall on July 4th this year. Cities across the country cancelled their traditional fireworks demonstrations this year, because no one quite remembered why they ever held them to start with. Also, it was so hot outside that both fireworks and humans carried a 50 percent chance of exploding upon 12 seconds of exposure to sunlight.
Temperatures in Nashville and elsewhere across the nation's heartland rose to 109 degrees and stayed there for roughly 412 straight days. Locally, Tennessee republicans attempted to egg Al Gore's house as a show of contempt, but all such eggs fully cooked while in flight and became spongy upon arrival, creating minimal mess. The Gores may, or may not, have enjoyed a lovely brunch, however.
Meanwhile, the economy improved slightly, as employers rushed to fill vacancies left when their former employees spontaneously combusted. These gains were largely offset by employees who chose termination of employment over venturing out into the oppressive heat, however.
This didn't make national news, but a llama was spotted in the Smoky Mountains. It was in the back of a truck, or at least the back of a trailer attached to one. The truck was parked in the parking lot near the entrance to a hiking trail at a remote back corner of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. Also, the llama was spotted by the author of this column.
But the sighting was remarkable nonetheless.
The spotting of the Smoky Mountain Llama raises many questions. Where was the driver ultimately taking the llama, and why did the driver stop for a lovely mountain hike while transporting it?
Why was the llama left in the trailer? Wouldn't it have been helpful in navigating the hike?
The great irony is that the llama was in one of the few places in America where it could have been put to the use for which the species has for thousands of years been bred, and it was just sitting in the truck. Did its owner forget to pull him out, just as I left my hiking stick in the trunk?
Or was it that someone with a trailer attached to their truck coincidentally happened to capture and confine a wild llama, 3,000 miles from its home territory, in route to Saturday hike?
I still don't know the answer.
I do know that the Olympics started later in the month, but we'll talk more about that in:
AUGUST
In June and July, it was too hot to go outside, too hot to stay inside, and everyone was miserable. August was pretty much the same way, except that the Olympics were on.
Ratings for Olympic swimming drew all-time highs, partly because Americans anxiously awaited to see if returning champion Michael Phelps could fuel national pride by becoming the greatest and most decorated Olympian of all-time, but mainly because looking at the water made us feel two-percent cooler.
The Olympics consisted of a stunning number of other events that can best be described in one word: dumb.
I mean no disrespect by this term. Some of the more obscure Olympic events are, undoubtedly, really hard. I'm sure the participants would kick my tail if I could somehow figure out the rules and tried to compete against them. But the fact remains that about 1/3 of all Olympic events are really silly, and appear to have originated after their founders ingested large amounts of chemicals.
My favorite dumb Olympic sport is handball. It's a game where players on each team gather up a running start, fly into the air, crash into the other team's human wall of defenders, and try to hurl a ball into the other team's net in the process.
There's an episode of "The Simpsons" where the writers illustrate how dumb Homer and Bart are by having them gain a running start and crash into each other while wearing pots on their heads. After the collision, Homer announces: "that makes 22-16." Add a ball to the equation, and this, basically, is handball.
It looks really fun.
But the game is dumb, just like how my siblings and I used to have water-drinking contests. There's a skill, a technique, and an endurance to it, but it measures talents for which there is limited outside use, and no one comes by except in curious fashion. Synchronized swimming, water polo, and something called the "modern pentathlon" (consisting of five "modern" events, including such relevant-for-the-times components as fencing and steeplechase) also fell into this category, and don't even get me started on the "sport" where the horses compete to see which is the best dancer, but humans somehow win the medals.
It's called "dressage." Look it up.
Watching it all was great fun, and everyone was sad when it ended, because it meant we had to go outside again.
August brought us more than the Olympics, though. It also brought us Hurricane Isaac, which hovered over New Orleans on the 7-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and decided it liked the town enough to stay for an extra shrimp poboy and an order of beignets.
Isaac moved about as quickly as Mrs. Fletcher, the old woman in the Life Alert commercial who fell and then couldn't get up. It soaked the entire Gulf Coast in its wake, before eventually moving on the Mid-South and Midwest and doing the same things there.
All told, the enormous, slow-moving storm brought muggy tropical air and moisture to half the nation, which had been just on the verge of cooling down as summer drew to a close. It was exactly what everyone needed to remind them that summer is, in fact, miserable when one becomes an adult.
I, for one, am glad summer is finally over.
Let's not have another one for at least nine more months.
Whether Labor Day was really the end of summer or not, it marks an even more important milestone: the return of this blog from summer break!
So what happened while I was away?
Mostly, it was hot outside. And it still is most places, especially if
But you know what month was even hotter?
JUNE
June was a momentous month for our country in that it provided writers everywhere the opportunity to write the word "momentous." Also, temperatures reached momentous heights in most of the country.
Nashville, for instance, hit 107. If you are thinking that "hit 107" should be the name of a radio station rather than a phrase used to describe the temperature, you might have a point. The temperature gauge should never go higher than the radio dial.
But in the midst of an unprecedented heat wave, a rare celestial event occurred: the path of Venus crossed the surface of the sun, a feat not scheduled to happen again for another 100 years. When it happened, astronomers everywhere were shocked that upon crossing the surface of the sun Venus decided this was actually preferable to being near the orbit of the Earth, and chose to linger for awhile. It said it would leave once it found a job, but it just bought a cat and things aren't looking good. It might just say until next century.
Everyone is struggling in this economy.
Speaking of which, the United States' economy continued to struggle in June, as millions of would-be employers decided to forgo interviewing prospective hires in favor of showing up to work without wearing pants. Little did they know, things would just get worse in:
JULY
July started on Independence Day, which happened to fall on July 4th this year. Cities across the country cancelled their traditional fireworks demonstrations this year, because no one quite remembered why they ever held them to start with. Also, it was so hot outside that both fireworks and humans carried a 50 percent chance of exploding upon 12 seconds of exposure to sunlight.
Temperatures in Nashville and elsewhere across the nation's heartland rose to 109 degrees and stayed there for roughly 412 straight days. Locally, Tennessee republicans attempted to egg Al Gore's house as a show of contempt, but all such eggs fully cooked while in flight and became spongy upon arrival, creating minimal mess. The Gores may, or may not, have enjoyed a lovely brunch, however.
Meanwhile, the economy improved slightly, as employers rushed to fill vacancies left when their former employees spontaneously combusted. These gains were largely offset by employees who chose termination of employment over venturing out into the oppressive heat, however.
This didn't make national news, but a llama was spotted in the Smoky Mountains. It was in the back of a truck, or at least the back of a trailer attached to one. The truck was parked in the parking lot near the entrance to a hiking trail at a remote back corner of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. Also, the llama was spotted by the author of this column.
But the sighting was remarkable nonetheless.
The spotting of the Smoky Mountain Llama raises many questions. Where was the driver ultimately taking the llama, and why did the driver stop for a lovely mountain hike while transporting it?
Why was the llama left in the trailer? Wouldn't it have been helpful in navigating the hike?
The great irony is that the llama was in one of the few places in America where it could have been put to the use for which the species has for thousands of years been bred, and it was just sitting in the truck. Did its owner forget to pull him out, just as I left my hiking stick in the trunk?
Or was it that someone with a trailer attached to their truck coincidentally happened to capture and confine a wild llama, 3,000 miles from its home territory, in route to Saturday hike?
I still don't know the answer.
I do know that the Olympics started later in the month, but we'll talk more about that in:
AUGUST
In June and July, it was too hot to go outside, too hot to stay inside, and everyone was miserable. August was pretty much the same way, except that the Olympics were on.
Ratings for Olympic swimming drew all-time highs, partly because Americans anxiously awaited to see if returning champion Michael Phelps could fuel national pride by becoming the greatest and most decorated Olympian of all-time, but mainly because looking at the water made us feel two-percent cooler.
The Olympics consisted of a stunning number of other events that can best be described in one word: dumb.
I mean no disrespect by this term. Some of the more obscure Olympic events are, undoubtedly, really hard. I'm sure the participants would kick my tail if I could somehow figure out the rules and tried to compete against them. But the fact remains that about 1/3 of all Olympic events are really silly, and appear to have originated after their founders ingested large amounts of chemicals.
My favorite dumb Olympic sport is handball. It's a game where players on each team gather up a running start, fly into the air, crash into the other team's human wall of defenders, and try to hurl a ball into the other team's net in the process.
There's an episode of "The Simpsons" where the writers illustrate how dumb Homer and Bart are by having them gain a running start and crash into each other while wearing pots on their heads. After the collision, Homer announces: "that makes 22-16." Add a ball to the equation, and this, basically, is handball.
It looks really fun.
But the game is dumb, just like how my siblings and I used to have water-drinking contests. There's a skill, a technique, and an endurance to it, but it measures talents for which there is limited outside use, and no one comes by except in curious fashion. Synchronized swimming, water polo, and something called the "modern pentathlon" (consisting of five "modern" events, including such relevant-for-the-times components as fencing and steeplechase) also fell into this category, and don't even get me started on the "sport" where the horses compete to see which is the best dancer, but humans somehow win the medals.
It's called "dressage." Look it up.
Watching it all was great fun, and everyone was sad when it ended, because it meant we had to go outside again.
August brought us more than the Olympics, though. It also brought us Hurricane Isaac, which hovered over New Orleans on the 7-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and decided it liked the town enough to stay for an extra shrimp poboy and an order of beignets.
Isaac moved about as quickly as Mrs. Fletcher, the old woman in the Life Alert commercial who fell and then couldn't get up. It soaked the entire Gulf Coast in its wake, before eventually moving on the Mid-South and Midwest and doing the same things there.
All told, the enormous, slow-moving storm brought muggy tropical air and moisture to half the nation, which had been just on the verge of cooling down as summer drew to a close. It was exactly what everyone needed to remind them that summer is, in fact, miserable when one becomes an adult.
I, for one, am glad summer is finally over.
Let's not have another one for at least nine more months.
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
A Blog about the Blog (and a colonoscopy)
The summer is almost over, which means the blog is about ready to dust off its mothballs and return to daylight.
What can you expect when it returns?
Absolutely nothing! The key to satisfaction in life is low expectations. If you want to be happy, just expect very little, and be thankful for whatever you get. Usually, we get angry when our reality fails to meet our sense of entitlement.
But this isn't a blog about abstract notions of satisfaction and fulfillment. It's a blog about the blog.
It will return next week, and there will be a post every week from that point forward. If one fails to meet your expectations, then you can have your money back. Just let me know, enclose a $5 handling fee, and I'll be glad to send you a full refund.
If you do happen to enjoy reading this site, here's the deal:
You probably need medical help. But that is not my central point.
The blog has been growing over the past couple years, but not in a manner that is sustainable. We're only getting a significant number of hits when I post a facebook link to a new blog post. While I appreciate that my facebook friends are reading, we've kind of hit the limit with our growth potential that way. If we're ever going to get enough monthly hits to pay the bills, we need hits beyond my limited number of facebook friends.
So if you enjoy the blog, check back to this site itself every Tuesday, rather than waiting on seeing a facebook link on my page. Tell your friends about this site, and post the blogs you particularly enjoy to your own page. Email them to friends.
I like doing this, but I need your help.
Good times are ahead.
You know what was behind? My April colonoscopy. (In more ways than one.) So to tide you over until next week, here's a recap of the what I endured last spring. We'll recap the entire summer next week.
http://andrewsmithsthoughts.blogspot.com/2012/04/what-to-expect-when-youre-expecting.html
What can you expect when it returns?
Absolutely nothing! The key to satisfaction in life is low expectations. If you want to be happy, just expect very little, and be thankful for whatever you get. Usually, we get angry when our reality fails to meet our sense of entitlement.
But this isn't a blog about abstract notions of satisfaction and fulfillment. It's a blog about the blog.
It will return next week, and there will be a post every week from that point forward. If one fails to meet your expectations, then you can have your money back. Just let me know, enclose a $5 handling fee, and I'll be glad to send you a full refund.
If you do happen to enjoy reading this site, here's the deal:
You probably need medical help. But that is not my central point.
The blog has been growing over the past couple years, but not in a manner that is sustainable. We're only getting a significant number of hits when I post a facebook link to a new blog post. While I appreciate that my facebook friends are reading, we've kind of hit the limit with our growth potential that way. If we're ever going to get enough monthly hits to pay the bills, we need hits beyond my limited number of facebook friends.
So if you enjoy the blog, check back to this site itself every Tuesday, rather than waiting on seeing a facebook link on my page. Tell your friends about this site, and post the blogs you particularly enjoy to your own page. Email them to friends.
I like doing this, but I need your help.
Good times are ahead.
You know what was behind? My April colonoscopy. (In more ways than one.) So to tide you over until next week, here's a recap of the what I endured last spring. We'll recap the entire summer next week.
http://andrewsmithsthoughts.blogspot.com/2012/04/what-to-expect-when-youre-expecting.html
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