Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Out like a Lion?

Ha. More like roasted lamb.

March opened this year very lamb-like, and that lamb simply got slow-roasted all month long with abundant sunshine and a dearth of rain. No roaring weather in sight.

So much for all that March "Lamb/Lion" nonsense.

Hm.. how's the weather in Toronto, I wonder? Guess I'll find out this afternoon! I'd settle for mostly cheery, with a strong chance of offers.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Expatriating?

maybe.

As I get set for my first ever job interview in a foreign country (the concept is at once thrilling and alarming), I made use of my relative proximity to a regional office of the US State Department to renew my expired passport.



It was a pretty nondescript old marble building in government gray, but convenient, as these things go, and the Passport office itself was a fairly well-organized shop.



You still do the usual take-a-number drill like at the DMV,



but by the time I ran down the hall to the washroom, anticipating a long wait... my number was called. Wow. Efficiency in government? Amazing what an international airline reservation and $135 buys you. Zip, zip. In & out.

Afterwards, I had enough time on the meter to grab an oatmeal and a coffee at a Caribou a couple blocks away. This location had a "haiku board" hawking Caribou products in verse, so... hey, game on!

tea fusion latte'
blending of two essences
ancient yet modern

By their reactions, I apparently made the barristas' day. :)

On my way back to the car, I walked by a bit of downtown sculpture.



This was appealing on several levels. You may guess which. ;)


The only downer in this process was comparing my passport pictures from today to those of 12 years ago when I first got one. Yikes!

Back then I actually looked like a security risk. Now I just look harmless. Old, and harmless. :)

Ha - little do they know how much trouble lives in this innocuous-looking package. As they say, beauty may be skin-deep, but trouble goes all the way to the bone. Canadians have no idea what's heading their way...

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Communion vs Eucharist

An article in Relevant Magazine this month (the issue with Jack White of The White Stripes on the cover, and articles inside about Sigur Ros, She & Him, etc. etc.) brought up the topic of the Communion service, and posed some questions about how Evangelicals view it and treat it.

One of those questions was this: "In de-emphasizing Communion, might we possibly be missing out on something central to our faith?"

What the author meant by de-emphasizing was the typical Baptist practice of viewing Communion as "merely a symbolic memorial of the Last Supper", and participating in that memorial no more than monthly, often less frequently than that. He said "even if it's only symbolic, that symbolism calls attention to so many aspects of our Christian faith. Inclusion at the table. Salvation in and through Christ. The call to love and serve one another. Sacrifice, mercy and the presence of God. Why de-emphasize something so holy, meaningful and fundamental?"

He then went on and asked: "Is it possible Communion is more supernatural than we think?"

This question revolves around the issue of the Real Presence of Jesus in the sacrament. The author suggests that if Catholics and Orthodox are right in their view that during the Eucharist the elements become the body and blood of Jesus - His Real Presence in the Sacrament - then "the Eucharist should be emphasized to the point of obsession. The Catholics are right to structure their worship around it, and low-church Protestants like me are missing out on something big."

He goes on then to suggest that Evangelicals, who are wont to take the Scripture literally as a default position and are rarely budged off of that position, are unusually quick to take John 6:53-56 figuratively.

He also suggests that Evangelicals, who like to apply Pascal's wager to the dilemma of believing in God or not (especially when they argue with atheists), would do well to apply Pascal's wager to the dilemma of believing that the Real Presence of Jesus is in the Eucharist. The wager would go like this:

"If we take [the Eucharist] believing Jesus really is present in the consecrated host and the Communion wine, then the best-case scenario is that we're right, and we should be commended for treating it as a deeply sacred, serious event. Worst case? We've observed an event of remembrance and symbolism - an event which points to the life and resurrection of Jesus - only we've done so with a slight misunderstanding of what it means. Still, not a huge loss.

"But what if we bet against the Real Presence and it turns out we're wrong? Yikes. We've made a big mistake. We've marginalized something essential to the practice of Christianity."

Hm. He further asks: "It's Jesus, after all. Why shouldn't strange and mystical things [...] happen upon ingesting the elements?"

Why not indeed? I think that what has happened in Protestantism over the years to get us to this point is a confluence of an anti-Catholic separatist sentiment and an anti-supernatural modernist worldview. No doubt these things are left over from the Reformation and the Enlightenment, respectively, and will hopefully fade as we move into a post-modern and post-Christian society.

But, even after all these arguments, the author apparently remains conflicted about Communion. Personally, I choose to bet on both sides of Pascal's matrix. One bet is on Saturday at Mass, and the other is on Sunday at worship. I can deal with a little mystery and a little doubt when it comes to faith. Something tells me faith is more genuine and vital when it's uncoupled from a comforting but numbing certitude.

The red pill, please, Morpheus.

Friday, March 26, 2010

New Yorker Haiku

My mother-in-law got me a subscription to The New Yorker magazine for Christmas, and now I feel so literary... almost elitist. It's such a heady feeling, to be in the company of the intelligentia. ;)

Seriously, I do like the magazine, even if there are some issues that don't connect with me on any level. Others are terrific. And in almost every edition, something is worth reading.

This time around I saw in the poetry section something that immediately grabbed my attention: a multi-stanza haiku based on a verse from Ecclesiastes. I mean, how much more of a connection could there be? It's like, "you had me at hello.." :)

So here it is.. self-explanatory, and lovely. Nicely done, Rich, old boy.



ECCLESIASTES 11:1

We must cast our bread
Upon the waters, as the
Ancient preacher said,

Trusting that it may
Amply be restored to us
After many a day.

That old metaphor,
Drawn from rice farming on the
River’s flooded shore,

Helps us to believe
That it’s no great sin to give,
Hoping to receive.

Therefore I shall throw
Broken bread, this sullen day,
Out across the snow,

Betting crust and crumb
That birds will gather, and that
One more spring will come.

----- Richard Wilbur

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

buzzer

.


shot clock running out
not many interviews left
need to sink one soon


.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Schumann & Introspection

It was another truly beautiful early Spring day today, and a great day to disconnect from NCAA basketball for a few hours and readjust my sense perceptions. Benson Great Hall and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the music of Robert Schumann (1810-1856) were the perfect vehicles for that perception shift.



Free tickets didn't hurt, either.

I like Schumann. I like most all the composers of the Romantic era. No surprise, yes? :) Lovely concert, and right afterwards I made a beeline for the library to see if they had anything by him. Score! A three-CD set of his symphonies and overtures. Yum.

And lest you think that indulging oneself sitting on one's butt at the symphony is little different than doing the same in front of the TV and March Madness... just try and absorb the content of a scholarly article from the Harvard Theological Review on "The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West" while watching Wisconsin get crushed by Cornell.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Style vs Form

I'm not much of a hip-hop fan, as some of you know, but now and then I run across an artist (like Michael Franti) or a CD (like Kanye's 808s & Heartbreak; The Beastie Boys' The Mix Up) that appeals to me at some level.

But the guy who is head and shoulders above the rest, at least for me, is a guy named k-os (pronounced chaos), a rapper from Canada. His songs are melodic, approachable, and not captive to the self-focused hedonistic blinged-up gangsta culture of popular hip-hop. I've been listening lately to three of his CDs, Joyful Rebellion, Atlantis: Hymns For Disco, and his latest, Yes!

Something in the liner notes of Joyful Rebellion caught my eye. He writes about the difference, and the interplay, between Style and Form. His comments are particular to hip-hop music, but they hearken back to concepts that philosophers from Plato to Kant have dealt with. He's given this stuff some thought, apparently, and it shows in his music (also probably why I like it!)

What he says is that there is a Form to hip-hop, and he speaks of drum patterns, vocal delivery, instrumentation, lyric content, etc. Style, on the other hand, is more about the "perpetrated lifestyles", as he calls it, the overt sexuality and flashy videos, the gimmicky effects such as auto-tune, gunshots, sirens, etc.

Form, he says, is like enjoying tea for what it is, without milk or sugar, just pure tea. Style is frothing it up into a tea fusion latte', sticking it on a poster, and running promotions for it that connect it to a certain lifestyle. (ha. That Style part I got from spending time at Caribou this week.)

Anyway, he argues that hip-hop "audiences have been over-stimulated by STYLE", and goes on to say:

STYLE is cool... it can communicate how we feel inside and be an expression of persona. However, if the STYLE of a music becomes more important than its substance, then that music becomes trendy. When the music becomes trendy its parameters then are much too narrow... too limited to express Universal Truths... and since the truth is not a trend, we lose depth of perception. In a battle between FORM and STYLE, FORM will always remain victorious in underground circles - no doubt. Unfortunately, in 'pop culture' presenting FORM without STYLE is like casting pearls before swine.

This holds true for all art forms, really, and all sub-cultures. There is a constant tension between Form and Style, with Form being pure (Style-less) in the beginning, but with Style taking over as the art form achieves wide popularity, until the point where all that remains is Style, and Form is driven underground (only to re-emerge later, with a cult following).

Hm. Universal Truths coming from a hip-hop artist. Yeah. Bring it. :)

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Jesuit Madness

I love NCAA tournament time. :)

It takes me back to when I was a 10 year old, and I would make brackets for my various Hot Wheels cars and race them to see which model would come out on top. Or... to when I would play chess against myself, and keep track to see whether I won more playing Black or White. Um... somehow I skipped the question about how could I "win" at all? Hmm.

Or... back to when I would take turns as different teams (Team A & Team B) and shoot hoops in the hallway (using a superball and a paper Dixie Cup with the bottom hollowed out tacked up to the wall as the basket) outside my bedroom door and keep statistics on which team shot better from the floor... what a nerd. 1001 ways to amuse myself.

Anyway, I dig brackets, and statistics... and March Madness just, oh... it brings people together all doing brackets, you know? :) It's almost perfect.

And this year, there are four Jesuit schools in the tourney, so...



Rock on, Jesuits. And Go, Marquette!

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

rhinovirus

.


change of seasons cold
coughing, sneezing, blowing nose
hard to sleep at night


.



I could be a walking advertisement for Zicam, though. Just like the ads say, it seems to shorten the duration of the cold and minimize the symptoms. Think I'll become a fan on Facebook..

The perfect drug?

I have a feeling that the author of this Venn Diagram for Drugs (courtesy, Good Magazine) is personally familiar with what appears to be the ideal drug (covering all the bases of physiological and psychological effects - see center of diagram).

Personally I can't speak to that. But it's nice to know that my drugs of choice at least have offsetting effects. Something has to keep me on an even keel. ;)

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Fit or Fat?

Or... something in between?

Having just returned from my semi-annual visit to my Milwaukee-based endocrine clinic, I was feeling a little sensitive about this. And not because of another brutal misguided stabbing session at the lab, either - it was about the smoothest blood draw yet. Talented woman, that phlebotomist. Scary looking, but talented.

No, I'm feeling sensitive because the doctor gave me a scolding about the extra 9 pounds I came with on this trip to see her. I pleaded my case of plantar fasciitis that sidelined me from running for 5 months. Being a runner herself, she cut me some slack, but was pretty serious about my dropping weight by the next time I see her (late October of this year). Yeah, yeah, I hear you, doc. I'll get back on the running track soon enough. At least all the blood readings were okay. A little high on the LDL, but.. manageable. Blood sugar, triglycerides, PSA, TSH, testosterone levels.. all good. :)

Still, every morning's look into the mirror has got me thinking... sure I know the Body Mass Index is just so much hot air, since it pays no attention to lean body mass, but I can't really scoff at it in my particular case unless I know what my muscle/fat balance actually is, right? I have never wanted to find that out, though, because you have to go underwater to do it accurately. Ick.

But just recently I became aware of a breakthrough in this area. A variety of fitness assessments are offered in the Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene and Exercise Science at U of M. The one I liked the looks of a lot is the BodPod, which gives you a body fat percent without having to be submerged in water (which, for a non-swimmer who lost consciousness in his college swim class final, is a pretty big deal!) It uses air displacement instead of water displacement.

I quote from the manufacturer's website: "The BOD POD Gold Standard Body Composition Tracking System is an Air Displacement Plethysmograph which uses whole-body densitometry to determine body composition (fat and fat-free mass) [...] based on the same gold standard operating principle as hydrostatic (or "underwater") weighing." Thank the Lord for improvements in technology.

So on a beautiful Spring-like afternoon today I head down to the U (and in the process get a sideways peek at the new ball field, TCF Bank Stadium. Nice looking, and easy to get to.



I checked in with the front desk, paid my $40 for the test, and headed down to the lab to see Sarah, the technician. She's a junior in a rec major, and has worked in the lab for quite some time, so was really knowledgable, and walked me through the drill. The machine itself looks kind of like a big egg with a door, and a seat inside.



I first heard about this from a news clip where a local reporter demonstrated its use. It seemed easy enough, so I made an appointment and then read the literature they emailed me. All looked fine until I read the requirement about having to wear "only" Speedos or skin-tight lycra shorts. Um.. wait. Only wear WHAT?

Well, I'll spare you the details on that part. Let's just say I improvised, with Sarah's kind permission. ;)

She takes height and weight and a few other measurements, sits me down in the egg, and shuts the door. Glad there was a window! Much whirring and popping ensues, and...the result? I'll get back to you momentarily on that...

My current BMI says I am "morbidly obese". Bah. Overweight, I'll grant you. But "Morbidly Obese"? Nuts to that! I mean, my endocrine specialist has given me a target weight which would produce a BMI of 30.4, or Obese. What self-respecting physician would do that?
Um.. one who sees me naked twice a year, that's who. She knows.

The charts say that obesity for men my age starts at 27% body fat. Overweight starts at 22%. Sarah said that the "risky" category begins at 30% body fat for men.

Women are fortunate when it comes to these measurements. Their corresponding percentages for obesity and overweight are 40 and 35, so they can carry much more fat than men, and be just fine. But then again.. they have better places to put it. mmhmm. :)

So, the result. Drum roll, please...

I was 4 pounds into the risky range. I'd have to lose 40 pounds of fat (basically where I was a year ago..) to reach my personal goal weight (which I picked as the high edge of the healthy weight range), and lose 20 pounds of fat to stay out of the obese range. Strength training will help keep the lean mass as is.

Both weight goals are within reach in about 6 months, especially if I am in temporary living quarters in some new city working some new job. Nutri-System and a gym membership should do it. Late October and target weight, here we come! :)

Thursday, March 11, 2010

needles

.


young phlebotomist
patting, swabbing, puncturing
knowledge without care


.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Crisis Cycles

Facebook. Love it or hate it, it IS a way to stay connected and keep up with people. This week J1 posted this article on her wall, not because she's having an existential crisis herself (she's had hers already!), but because she's a culture-watcher, like her old man.

For those of you who hate to click through... (even though you should, at least for the lead cartoon), here's how it opens:

Welcome to Your Quarterlife Crisis

You can't make any decisions because you don't know what you want. And you don't know what you want because you don't know who you are. And you don't know who you are because you're allowed to be anyone you want. How messed up is that?


Imagine a day in the life of a couple you probably know. He’s 27 years old, and she’s 26. They wake up beside each other in his downtown bachelor apartment and have sex that neither of them particularly enjoys. They’ve been sort-of dating for a while now, but they’re not willing to commit to each other: he likes her, but doesn’t know if he always will. She can’t decide if she likes him more or less than the other two guys she’s sleeping with.

He bikes to work at an advertising agency, where he uses his master’s in English to proofread ad copy, and spends several hours reading music blogs and watching movie trailers, periodically Twittering updates about his workday to his 74 followers. He doesn’t really hate his job, but feels as if his skin is crawling with vermin most of the time that he’s there, so he has a plan to move to Thailand, or to maybe write a book. Or go to law school.

At her government job, she instant messages her friends and mostly ignores the report she’s drafting because she’s planning on quitting anyway — and has been planning to quit for about a year now. She spends her lunch hour buying boots that cost slightly more than her rent, then immediately regrets it.

He listlessly works through lunch, then goes to the bar after work to meet up with some university friends, where they talk about their jobs and make ironic jokes about other people. Back at home, he wonders why he feels so gross and empty after spending time with them, but it’s mostly better than being alone.

She walks to the house that she shares with three friends and spends a few more hours on celebrity gossip websites, then clicking through the Facebook photos of girls she knew in high school posing with their husbands and babies, simultaneously judging them and feeling a deep pit of jealousy, and a strange kind of loss. “When did this happen for them?” she wonders.

They both eventually fall asleep, late and alone, each of them wondering what it is that’s wrong with them that they can’t quite seem to understand.

*****

Um, yeah.

The article goes on to plumb the depths of the issue, with lots of real-life testimonies to twenty-something angst, and includes various coping resources in web links at the bottom. Oy.

While the formal study of the "Quarterlife Crisis" is new, I do remember having one of those, at about... oh, 27. :) As I recall it was something about leaving a dead-end job & going completely broke, in order to simultaneously go back to school for a career change AND adopt a kid - a new daughter (the aforementioned J1). Now that was a crisis, a real beauty.

Honestly, I think human beings tend to go through cycles of crisis, averaging about 13 years apart. Maybe if we took the Biblical concept of sabbaticals (a one-year break after every six) more seriously, we could avoid these. But I think that we push through the sabbatical, and then we sort of.. crash, then take a "forced" sabbatical, in terms of a life crisis and then some change. So, plus or minus a few years, here's how it goes through life:

Age 0 - Beginning Of Life crisis.
Age 13 - ok, who doesn't have a crisis in Middle school?
Age 26 - college/committment/direction crisis (see above)
Age 39 - 'Yikes! Almost 40?!? Where did my youth go?' crisis.
Age 52 - Let's not discuss this one, okay? It's still painful. :(
Age 65 - Retirement Crisis. Yes/No? When? Where? How?
Age 78 - Rocking Chair Crisis. How to stay vital?
Age 91 - End Of Life Crisis. Get your house in order, bud.
Age 104 - 'Woah. I'm still here?' crisis.


See what I mean?

Skip the angst and the self-help links. Take a year off, clear your head. Move somewhere exotic. Or at least different. Like Toronto! Or in a pinch... Des Moines.

Monday, March 08, 2010

They don't write liner notes like this anymore

Just picked up from the library a CD reissue of Sinatra's 1967 collaboration with Jobim, the great Brazilian singer/songwriter and guitarist of Ipanema fame. I wondered... how the heck can this work? Very interesting to hear The Boss's phrasing on bossa nova tunes. Different; for him .. and for the tunes.

But the best part of the album was in print. The liner notes are vintage 1967 coolness. :)

****

It had begun like the World Soft Championships. The songs, mostly by Antonio Carlos Jobim. Tender melodies. Tender like a two-day, lobster-red Rio sunburn, so tender they’d scream agony if handled rough. Slap one of his fragile songs on the back with a couple of trumpets? Like washing crystal in a cement mixer.

Seemed like the whole idea was to out-hush each other. Decibels treated like daggers. The arranger tiptoeing about, eliminating some percussion here, ticks there, ridding every song of clicks, bings, bips, all things sharp. Doing it with fervor matched only by Her Majesty’s Silkworms.

And Sinatra makes a joke about all this. “I haven’t sung so soft since I had the laryngitis.” Singing so soft, if he sang any softer he’d have to be lying on his back.

Hours earlier, Sinatra & Co. moved into Studio One. Nobody much around except a couple of Rent-a-Cops. Sinatra there half an hour early, as never before. He begins running down the melody of the new songs. Softly whistling, smoothing away wrinkles.

The booth begins to fill up with gold cuff-links, Revlon red fake nails, Countess Mara ties.

Outside, through double-glass windows, musicians with black fiddle cases wander warily in, chatting about the weather in Boston, the governor in Berkeley, anything but pizzicato. Along the studio walls, the wanderings of miscellaneous Brazilians in yachting caps and silver mustaches.

And then, casually, at eight, exactly eight, Sinatra looks over at the conductor and “Well let’s try one, huh?”

At first, it does not groove right. This is not ring-a-ding-ding. Sinatra mother-hens the session closely: “Let’s have an ‘A,’ huh?” as he snaps the orchestra. The “A” passes quickly around the infield: piano to strings to reeds.

They run through the song once. Then . . . pause. Long. Long. Like standing there while the Judge opens up the verdict envelope. The arranger-conductor, not made of asbestos, sensitive in his position, there between Jobim and Sinatra, looking over at Sinatra, worrying “Tempo?”

“No, it’s a good tempo. It’s the only way you can do it. You have to hang with it.” Sinatra’s assurance: there is only one tempo for this song; any other tempo would be wrong. Have been, are, and forever shall be wrong.

One more exploration of the song, to catch more wrinkles. Sinatra himself, at a rough spot in the bridge, stops cold. Long. Long. He points to himself as the culprit. “That was an old Chesterfield that just came up on me. Around 1947, it felt like.”

You feel for anybody who will blow it on the next take. It begins. The long, long. About a minute and a half in, then the trombonist braaacks a note. Braaack. That obvious. He can’t look over at some other trombonist; he’s the only trombonist. So he sits there, a blutch-colored felt hat sagged across the bell of his horn, hung there to keep it Soft. Poor Trombone Player knows: his music said B and it came out F and Jesus was it wrong.

Sinatra looks over. “Don’t sweat it,” he says. The trombonist tries a joke back: “If I blow any softer, it’ll hafta come out the back of my neck.” Next to Jobim perches Jobim’s personal drummer, a Brazilian who can look simultaneously alert and stoned. Flew in to Hollywood specially for this, but not from Rio. From Chicago, figure that out. “Soft, son, hold it down.” A bronze- colored sofa pillow slumps back against his bass drum.

This drummer, named Dom-Um Romao, looking like he should be selling weird rugs and Arab doorways. Looking like a tricky one, Martha. Between takes, the way he keeps the tips of his fingers warm under his armpits. His arms crossed that way, the fuzzy goatee, looking like a road company Buddhist.

In contrast, the Conductor, a German. Claus Ogerman, speaking always Germanic phrasing. “Yes the introduction, I will slow down each time the fourth beat.” There in his blue cardigan sweater, fully buttoned. So starched even his sweaters have creases.

The buzzing continues, with grey-templed producer Sonny Burke conferring on last-minute scoring changes, standing by with vats of oil lest troubled waters rise. To the side, Jobim’s goateed producer, Ray Gilbert, soothing softly in Portuguese. On the next number, Jobim will sing duet with Sinatra. “Tone,” as Sinatra calls him, bends in close to his microphone. His hair undressed, finger combed. His jaw moving with precision, moving to each new vowel, his lips moving like yours do when you write a check for over $1000.

The slight and tousled boy-man, speaking softly while about him rushes a world too fast. Antonio, troubled not by the clamour in the world. Troubled more by the whisperings from his heart. The song’s last note. Keep quiet until the cymbal stops ringing. Dead quiet. Only Sinatra, a born peeker, can’t wait. He liked that take. He bends over, peeking into the control booth, unwilling to wait for the endless cymbal overhang to end. Peeking in at the engineers, as if daring them to reveal any Electronic Irreverances. They reveal none.

“That,” says Sinatra, “should be the record.”

During playback, Sinatra leans on the conductor’s vacant podium. The only parts of him you see just popped white cuffs and worry lines in his brow. He’s Worry personified, like he’s in the last reel of “The Greatest Birth Ever Given.” Around him circle the rest. The circle, too, listens to the playback.

Grown men do not cry. They instead put on faces gauged to be intent. They too listen hard, as if half way through someone whispers buried treasure clues. It’s over. Sinatra walks away. “Next tune,” he says.

Around him, the circle. Half-stammering, half-silent, because they can’t think up a phrase of praise that’s truly the topper.

Except for Jobim. He walks up to Sinatra. A peculiar walk, like he’s got gum on one sole. He puts his arm around Sinatra. He hugs Sinatra. Both men smile. Jobim turns out to look at the circle around them. His face alight, proud of his singer. His face triumphant. As if to say "And all along, you thought he was Italian."


--STAN CORNYN

Saturday, March 06, 2010

What's a few weeks, anyway?

Back in the early 70's, the CCM artist Andre' Crouch had a song the lyrics to which I memorized. It was about waiting patiently for the return of Christ to "take us home" (based loosely on John 14:1-3). The thrust of it was this: when life gets hard and you long for Paradise, adjust your perspective on time. The lyric went

count the years as months
count the months as weeks
count the weeks as days...
any day now, we'll be going home!

So this morning when I saw this headline on the NPR website, that lyric came flying back:

Unemployed Keep Busy As Weeks Become Months

As of today, the four weeks of February have turned into one month of unemployment for me. One. Feels so much longer than that (and it may well yet be). So, time to adopt the flexible time scale again... and sure enough...

any day now, I'll be back to work.

Thursday, March 04, 2010

Buono Fortuna

Yesterday, sitting in the sunny Bethel dining hall on a spring-y afternoon, swilling soda/pop (goes by either name around here) and doing a little recreational reading ("Coop" by Michael Perry), suddenly I got the munchies.

There was a bowl of fortune cookies at the end of the chow line, so I scooped a few, refilled my glass with Diet Dew, and went back to my book. But before I dove back into another story about growing up on a dairy farm and watching the artificial inseminator guy from American Breeders Society perform his craft like a "combination science exhibit and freak show on wheels", I thought I'd pop open my fortunes.

Because, see, if I were to start eating cookies and then read another line about how the cows looked as they're being inseminated (apparently they would pause in their cud-chewing, "kinda freezing in a 'hunh?' sorta pose, their eyes would bulge a tad, about like yours would at the point of realizing your taxes were due yesterday...") undoubtedly I'd laugh so hard cookie bits would come out my nose. Unpleasant thought, that.



So.. cookie number one, let's have it. Give it up.

Your nature is intense, magnetic and passionate.

Woah. Myers-Briggs, look out. Cookie here is pretty good!



Number two, step up. What you got?

You tend to be contemplative and analytical by nature.

Yo! What up, cookies? How you be findin' me like this, bro?



(Honorable Cookie-San is now 5 for 5 on personality trait discovery. Gettin' creepy, here.)



Dare I ask you now, cookie three? What? What?

It's okay to slow down and smell the roses.

Aww... now that's timely. Especially since pretty much all I'm doing these days is slowing... and smelling...

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

John Mayer


"When you get to the top, you have to renegotiate with your dreams."

----- John Mayer


Well, he's made it to the top, he should know. And I do, too, in my own way. He talked last night at the end of the concert about getting to the point where he exceeded his own expectations, accomplished more than he set out to do, and then... didn't know what to do next.

I get that, John. For me that happened in 1999-2000, and for the last 10 years I've been negotiating with my dreams (and with everyone else in my life). I think I've reached an uneasy agreement with them now, and am working toward laying hands on the next set of dreams, but.. how can you really know until you get there? As he said last night, to move ahead from being on top... and to feel the wind in your face again... you have to go down for a while before you turn it back upwards again. Just... stop that downward run in time. :)

So last night... we went down to go up! In the parking ramp, I mean.



And up was... way up. Nosebleed section, rail seats. Yikes!



This time of year the Xcel Center is a hockey stadium. How you can see the puck from up here, I can't imagine.



Eventually the place filled up.



But I was surprised how sparse it still was for the opening act, Michael Franti and Spearhead. He's a talented guy, with a diverse style ranging from hip-hop to reggae to retro soul - and the tunes are pretty melodic throughout.



Regardless, they sure went nuts for Mayer. Groupies galore, and the whole place seemed to know the lyrics. (yeah, me, too..) You know they're fans when a song's first three chords make them erupt. :)



And while it was not exactly the U2 show in Chicago, it was still pretty fun. The guy is a remarkable guitarist as well. He could play blues alongside B.B.King and not be embarrassed. On the acoustic ballads he could share the stage with James Taylor and hold his own.



So, John.. thanks for the show.. and for the philosophy lesson.
I'm with ya, bud.

Monday, March 01, 2010

lamb

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pale morning sunshine
grows to warm the frozen earth
slowly melting snow


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what a string of beautiful days. sunny, mid-thirties...

a lion at the end of the month, you say?... naaah.
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