Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Six Things You Don’t Know About Washington (State).



Well, some of you might know these things. Maybe all of you do, I don’t know. I needed something to write a list about today. So sue me.

  1. You know all that top-secret domestic surveillance that the NSA has been taking heat for? Yeah? Well, it turns out that a lot of it is being done right outside my hometown of Yakima. If you’re ever driving I-82 from Yakima to Ellensburg, right after crossing the Fred G. Redmon Memorial Bridge, look to your right. Out there, amidst the inaccessible US Army Yakima Training Center there is a cluster of large satellite dishes. This compound is the Yakima Research Center, run by the NSA and part of their Project Echelon thingy (you know, the whole FISA thing). There is one other compound like this in the US in West Virginia. Don’t worry, I’m not divulging any information that hasn’t already been in the newspaper.




  2. If it was that big of a secret, Google Earth wouldn't show it, right?


  3. Speaking of Fred G. Redmon Memorial Bridge, it is the longest free-standing single-span concrete span bridge in the world, 1336 feet long, 330 feet high. And a popular suicide spot, unfortunately.


  4. Idaho is the biggest potato producer in the nation (131.97 million cwt in 2004) but did you know that Washington is number two at 93.8 million cwt? That’s over 20% of the national production! And nobody even knows about it. Well, Washington has so much other stuff going for it that we had to throw Idaho a bone. In addition, in 2002 Washington ranked first in the nation in production of raspberries (87.8% of total U.S. production), hops (74.4%), spearmint oil (also 74.4%), wrinkled seed peas (65.6%), apples (60.2%), Concord grapes (51.8%), sweet cherries (48%), pears (44.9%), lentils (41.9%), peppermint oil (35.2%), carrots for processing (34.5%), tart cherries (32.8%), Niagara grapes (32.4%) and sweet corn for processing (29.2%). Washington also ranked second in the nation in grapes (all varieties taken together), apricots, asparagus (over a third of the country's production) and green peas for processing; third in the nation for wheat, prunes and plums, summer dry onions, trout and butter; fourth in barley and peaches; and fifth in cranberries and strawberries.


  5. I’m sure you know that Microsoft is headquarted in Washington State. And Starbucks. And Amazon.com. But did you know that WA is also home to Costco? And Nordstrom? And Rainier Beer? And Nintendo of America? And Boeing? And REI (you should see the REI flagship store in Seattle. Frickin’ amazing.)? And Red Robin? The original Red Robin is right across Portage Bay from the University of Washington. Here’s an interesting story about it. Back in the day, the UW and the city of Seattle had an agreement that there were no bars allowed within one mile of the University. The location of the Red Robin (at that time just a bar) was just over one mile away. That’s why it is where it is. To this day, you can draw a one mile radius circle around UW and find bars all along it, including the famous beatnik bar, the Blue Moon.

  6. In half (or actually a little more than half)of the state, it hardly ever rains. Seriously. I know, I know, your mental image of Washington is a bunch of flannel-wearing lumberjacks and insufferable Volvo-driving liberals wandering around under a suffocating dark sky and pounding rain. First of all, the rain is almost never “pounding.” It’s more of a constant drizzle. And second of all, once you get over the Cascade mountains, there’s almost no rain whatsoever. Yakima? 8.25 inches per year. Wenatchee? 9.12. Moses Lake? 7.69. Spokane? 16.67, and okay, that’s a little higher, but still not much. Walla Walla (yes, that is a real place)? 20.05. Still not a lot.


  7. The United States almost fought a war with the British Empire in 1859 over a pig in what would later become Washington State. The story goes that an American farmer shot and killed a British dudes pig because it was eating everything in his garden. The British guy, a soldier, got mad because it was killed on British soil. The Americans were all, like, “No it wasn’t, this here’s our land!” And the British were all, “Whatever, dudes. We have cannons and a Navy, what are you going to do about it?” Basically, the near-war came down to a cartographical dispute over which nation owned San Juan Island. The original American brigade dispatched to the Island was headed by Captain George Pickett. Yes, that is the same Pickett who later went on to lead Pickett’s Charge at the battle of Gettysburg. At the height of the tensions, 461 Americans with 14 cannons under Colonel Silas Casey, were opposed by three British warships mounting 70 guns and carrying 2,140 men. No shots were ever fired. The dispute was eventually (twelve years later) resolved peacefully by Kaiser Wilhelm I, who decided that the USA had rightful ownership of San Juan Island. It’s hard to believe that the Germans solved something peacefully, isn’t it?
    For more info about the pig almost-war, go to Wikipedia.

Monday, January 30, 2006

The TSWG is Back With A Vengeance



I couldn't believe my eyes this afternoon. There, in the inbox for the highly regarded and unilaterally ignored Twenty Something White Guy was an actual question. I know. I didn't think it could possibly be true either. It's the first one the TSWG has received in over 4 months. Wow.

So, in the fleetingly mortal words of SB, "here I come, back from the dead. Oh, holy crap!"

THE QUESTION:
Did you know there's a town in New York called Schuylerville? Would you ever consider vacationing there just to get a picture of yourself in front of the town sign?


THE ANSWER:
No, but it doesn't surprise me at all. There seems to be a whole raft of place names similar to my given name in that part of the country. The Schuylkill Mts, the Schuylkill River, etc. It must be the Dutch heritage present both in that area and in my name. I'm not Dutch, mind you, just my name. I'm more German than anything with just a little bit of Native American thrown in for good measure. Also, I am aware that there is a "Schuyler" county in New York, possibly in which Schuylerville sits. The reason I know this is that if you Google my name (oh, come on, like you've never done that with your own name. Don't even try to deny it.) Most of the results come from lists of New York counties. It just so happens that when you arrange NY counties in alphabetical order, Schuyler county is followed immediately by, you guessed it, St. Lawrence county. And that just makes finding my blog harder, dang it. Because I'm sure people search for me all the time but never find my writings because they are buried on the third page of results. It's highly unlikely that anyone ever digs that far because, come on, Googling people you used to know is a half-hearted commitment at best.

And to the second question, probably not. If I really wanted that picture, I would just doctor this one to show me hanging off the telephone pole or something.


I WOULD, however, visit Schuylerville in order to see the Saratoga monument, the tallest free standing obelisk outside of Washington DC (maybe, I didn't actually check this fact). I guess you could say this monument is so-o big!


Finally, I have no idea why, but the following image shows up in a Google image search for Schuylerville

Friday, January 27, 2006

It’s The End Of The Week As We Know It

I read something the other day. Not a real big surprise in and of itself, I suppose. I read something on my younger brother’s blog the other day. Yes, that’s right. My younger brother, the amazing Z, has his own blog. Unfortunately for you, he asked that I not reveal his fount of wisdom, so you will not be blessed by it. Consider yourself lucky, as reading from his blog can and does cause brain function collapse. Ha ha. Just kidding, Zach.

Anyway, it is true that I read something he wrote. It was all about finding yourself. It was about trying to separate who “you” are from those around you. To really get to know yourself by yourself with no one else around to influence what you see. Okay, so if I’m not going to link to him, I’ll quote him:

Right now for the biggest problem for me is understanding who I am. I know I am well liked by most everyone that knows me, but right now I feel like I don't know me. What do I have that is my own? What can I claim? When people think of me, what do they see? Am I just a bunch of pieces of what my friends are, or am I something completely different? Sometimes I think that I just need to get away from what I have and start over fresh. Maybe its a vicious cycle, since that is what I did when I came to EOU. I have made so many awesome friends here, but I feel like I am just pieces of them, and not what "I" am.


No offense to my little brother, but maybe there’s no need to find out what we, as individuals, “are.” Does it make sense to define yourself in a vacuum, without any outside influences? And I’m already getting bored by this. I thought it would make a good post, but now…. not so much. Anyway, here’s the heart of it. I think that it is exactly through not in spite of our relationships that we find out who we “are.” If not, then we are destined to spend our lives vigilantly defending ourselves against the encroachment of others, making sure that they don’t leak into our preciously constructed vacuum chamber of self. I prefer to think of life as a palette of paints. Every time a new one is added, the colors get mixed a little and the result is somehow both different in appearance and the same in character. And to assume that we can find out for all time who we are is, I think, ridiculous. I am constantly changing as I meet new people and experience new things. Only God knows “who we are.” For us it’s just a lifetime long learning experience. Well, this all made a lot more sense to me before I tried to write it down. Oh well.

Okay. That little thing put me up to 487 words in this post. I need to hit 1272 words in order to accomplish my goal of 10,000 words for the week, but it is really getting hard. I just don’t have that much to write about! 10,000 words is a lot, especially considering that I was at about 60,000 in total before this week. That’s an increase of 16% in one week. Hey, that kind of sounds like one of those spam emails that I get from time to time: Increase your length by 16% in one week with this miracle working drug! Usually the subject line is something like “Re: V1aggara!! Online Orders” and is sent from someone with a weird name like Leathery G. Bulldozer. Anyway, back to the 10,000 words. I’m not sure why I’m trying to do it, just for the heck of it I guess. I’m sort of like Ted Ferguson or something, doing a stupid meaningless stunt. “I’m going to write 10,000 words on my blog…..IN ONE WEEK!” I just hope that, when I finish, someone will bring me a Bud Light. Actually, let me rephrase that. I do NOT want anyone to bring me a Bud Light. That stuff tastes like watered down cat pee. You could bring me some A&W Root Beer instead. How about it? I’m at work, you could stop on by and give it to me? Anyone? Anyone?

So um…..what next. I need about 600 more words…..

This morning on the way to the Metro station I was thinking about the word “blog” and how it pretty much sounds like a euphemism for “vomit.” I think I’m going to start using it in that sense, as in the following story.

Last night, I must have had some bad sushi or something. We were just sitting there watching TV when all of a sudden I started to feel my stomach flip over. I looked at my wife and said “I think I’m going to blog!”

I took off for the bathroom, and I almost made it. I had my hand up over my mouth as I was running, trying to hold it closed so I didn’t blog all over the carpet. Actually, I did make it to the bathroom, just not the toilet. I opened the door and I just couldn’t hold it in anymore. First, it started to squelch out between my fingers, but then I just let go and blogged all over the tile. I tried to get to the toilet, but instead I slipped on the blog and fell. That’s right, I fell right into the toilet and made a huge crack down the side of the bowl. So now, I was laying half conscious on the floor, bleeding profusely from the head and toilet water was spraying everywhere. I wasn’t really sure where I was so I just laid there in a growing puddle of blog, blood, and water. And all the while I’m still, just, blogging all over the place. I couldn’t make it stop.

As I slowly regained full consciousness, I grabbed the roll of toilet paper (my blogging had pretty much stopped at this point, mostly showing up as empty posts) and held it to my forehead to try to stop the bleeding. The only trouble was that the toilet was broken, so there was nowhere to put the bloody toilet paper. So now I’m laying there in puddle of blood, blog, water and bloody toilet paper. “This is how I’m going to die,” I thought. “Right here. I’m going to die right here in my own blog. This sucks.”

After about a half an hour, I managed to pull myself into the shower and rinse off. I basically just sat there in my clothes and let the lukewarm water run all over me. Eventually, I realized that, no matter what, all that blogging had done irreparable harm to my clothes, so I took them off and left them in a soggy, smelly pile in the shower. Somewhere along the way I think I crapped myself a little, too. Ugh, blog and crap do not go together well.

Finally, I grabbed some fresh clothes from the dryer and walked back to the living room where my wife was still sitting peacefully on the couch, watching TV.

“What the heck! Why didn’t you help me? Why did you just sit here watching TV!” I shouted at her.

“What do you mean?” she asked. “I left you a comment! Didn’t you see it? You should try hitting ‘refresh’ sometimes.”

And now, this right here is this week’s word number 10,000!!!!!

Random Moving Picture Friday





I have no idea what in the world this is about. It sure is weird though, whatever it is. Also, I hope it's not related to some sexually deviant practice that I don't know about, because that would just be embarassing. Not that any of my readers would know anyway.

In addition to the above picture, I'd also like to take the time to publish an animated gif that I found funny. What's better than poking fun at an over-the-top dorky movie like Lord of the Rings. Don't get me wrong, I loved all three films, it's just that it's also fun to make fun of them. And I'm sure most of you have seen this before, but I don't care.

Thursday, January 26, 2006




Yesterday, I heard someone fall off the end of the escalator on the Shady Grove of Metro Center. It's a very distinctive sound, the sound a falling person makes. Well, actually, there are a host different sounds, but they are all distinctive. Before I turned around to look and see if the guy (I already knew it was a guy) needed help, I knew he wouldn't. See, the sound he made as he fell was a nice solid sort of thud. Sort of like the sound a stack of phone books would makes if you dropped them onto the first floor of your hip, warehouse loft condo. It's always a relief when someone falls and makes a thud. It's when you hear a snap, crackle, and pop that you know something bad happened, usually to a little old lady. That "thud" sound told me to things: 1 the person had a lot padding, so he probably wasn't hurt, and 2, he is some kind of idiot. I was actually wrong on the second point, though. It appeared that he had been tripped up by some weird plastic piece of litter, so it was someone else's fault. Anyway, he bounded right back up with an embarassed look on his face and shooed away his potential assistors. And that was that.

I will also take this chance to mention the most horrible display of fashion gone awry that I think I have ever seen on the train. There was this woman, she looked reasonably well put-together, fashionable some might even say. However, and this is a big however, she was wearing a silk-screened coat. A silk-screened coat with a stylized cartoon of a hipster girl in a green hoodie. The pattern was varied so that some of the cartoons showed only the girls face while others showed her from the waist up. It was a horrible abomination that should have been taken out behind the shed and shot three times. Not the woman, just the jacket. The woman looked perfectly normal. Except for the jacket. I'll never understand that one.

Two Hundred Words of Bad Poetry



Hmm. I'm liking this idea of writing bad poems of nonsense with an arbitrarily decided number of words. I think it could work. Next, I'll arbitrarily decide the structure that the poem must fit. Wow, I love writing bad poetry. It doesn't even have to make sense. Actually, I think it's better when it doesn't.



The Absence of Fire

by SJSTL


When a synapse fires in the morning
Does it make a sound
Like a pop or like a thud
Or is it something that we as robots
Aren’t supposed to worry about
Okay then, just let me find my socks
Amidst the tangled thoughts of the masses

At a time when everyone else
Would never speak a line out of turn
Some idiot wandered
Over to the smoothie machine
And threw up
All over it

Man, I really wanted a smoothie today
I guess that an
Italian Soda With Whipped Cream
Will suffice
Hold the fire, and don’t forget the ice

This is the way the world ends
Not getting what you want
And settling for something
Similar but not quite the same

And now this lovesong is stuck in my head
I think all things to all people
Is nothing at all to anyone

What a weird day to notice for the first time
That one leg is shorter than the other

A large bird just landed on my window sill, dead.

Or maybe it was a vision
A prophetic vision of death and life
All wrapped up in a total wash
Of the windows
Of an office building

P.O.E.T.R.Y. Thursday



Fifth Amendment
by David Lehman

The fear of perjuring herself turned into a tacit
Admission of her guilt. Yet she had the skill
And the luck to elude her implacable pursuers.
God was everywhere like a faceless guard in a gallery.
Death was last seen in the auction room, looking worried.
She hadn't seen him leave. She narrowly avoided him
Walking past the hard hats eating lunch. Which one was he?
She felt like one of those women you sometimes see
Crying in a hotel lobby. But he couldn't figure her out.
She wrote him a letter saying, "Please don't phone me,"
Meaning, "Please phone me." And there were times when she
Refused to speak at all. Would this be one of them?
On went the makeup and the accessories. Her time was now,
And he could no more share her future than she
Could go to college with him twenty years ago.
She would have had a tremendous crush on him
Back then, with his scarf flying in the wind like
The National League pennant flying over Ebbets Field
In Brooklyn, borough of churches, with the pigeons on the sill
And the soprano's trill echoing in the alley.

Terror Down Under

Let me tell you, Google Earth has the coolest stuff. You can see satellite images of the planes that were used to transport Guantanamo Bay prisoners overseas for torture, you can find top secret black helicopters. But my favorite little juicy nugget is this flying car photographed in Perth, Australia. Those Aussies have some pretty sweet technology. If you have Google Earth, check it out here... Honour Avenue, Point Walter, Perth.

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

All The Jobs I Have Ever Had: The Boring Version


Okay, so I didn’t actually get a question in email format, but I really want to run this banner/picture again so I’m going to pretend.

The ever-inquisitive Kate recently asked me to follow up my long-winded history of my life in church with a similar post documenting my working life. Fortunately, for both you, my readers (now numbering in the upper ones!), and me, this post will not be nearly as long. I think.

The very first job I ever had outside of the home for which I was paid real money was a paper route. I delivered the Yakima Herald-Republic up and down 10th Avenue, between Tieton Dr. (yes, the same Tieton Drive upon which Tieton Drive Bible Chapel is located, only 33 blocks east) and Nob Hill Blvd. It was a pretty standard, run-of-the-mill paper route. I started the summer before 8th grade because I wanted money to buy a guitar. I finally gave it up three years later when my Junior year schedule had me taking Physics at 7 AM. Ugh. (here’s a funny aside about 0 period Physics. It was in that class in particular that I started to get a crush on this girl named Maggie. Finally, at the end of the year, she actually talked to me. She said “Hey, you cut your hair!” and I had. My response was “Well, I didn’t cut it, but I had someone cut it.” D’oh!! That has to be the all-time stupidest response in the history of the world. I can’t believe she was even willing to talk to me ever again, let alone go out with and eventually marry me.) So anyway, the paper route was not very interesting. I hated collecting my money from my customers. I once got bit by a poodle. And by the end of three years I could land a rolled-up paper right smack in the middle of everyone’s porch (without hitting the screen door mind you) from 20 yards.

Concurrent with my paper route starting the summer after my freshman year of high school, I worked at Franklin swimming pool in what can only be referred to as The Snack Shack. Basically it was one of those storage sheds set up as a vendor of snacks. Hot dogs, candy, soda and even the dreaded Italian soda. I say dreaded because it was the most time-consuming to make of all the things we sold. Usually, no one would order one, but once one person did, it was all downhill from there. Everyone would want one, the line would back up out to there, and I would get all stressed. I originally got the job when my sister (who also worked there) was going to be out of town for a week and the usual replacements were unavailable. So I took over, and for three summers I worked in that little hot house. And let me tell you, when it was 100 degrees and I was running two microwaves, it was HOT. Oh, if you ever find yourself at a job like this and a little kid comes up and ask for “that,” he or she means “a Lik-M-Aid.” Seriously, like 80% of the time this is true. But I shouldn’t complain too much about this job. We got all the free stuff we could eat, which is cool for about a week and a half. After that you are so sick of nachos and pop and everything else that all you do is drink water and eat the occasional ice cream thing. And I knew a bunch of the lifeguards, so I often had someone to talk to. And finally, as a teenage boy I lived for the chance to see cute girls in bikinis. Not that this happened very often, but it did sometimes. Sometimes it was even Maggie, though I didn’t really know her at the time, I still thought she was a hottie.

I also spent the summer after my junior year working as a day-time nanny for three boys, in addition to working at the pool in the evenings. I was pretty busy that summer, what with a weeklong trip to Nashville for the International Key Club Convention (also known as high school dork capital of the world. If you want a longer description, send the twentysmthingwhiteguy(at)yahoo(dot)com and email) and a weeklong stay at Leadership Camp (also known as dork capital of Washington State). Nashville was fun, since none of our group was that dorky, but Camp was retarded. I so would have rather stayed home and earned a few more hundred bucks working. Well, back to the story of babysitting. I was in charge of Garret (8), John (6) and Michael (4) Hildebrand from about 8 to 4 (or 5) every weekday. They were good kids in general whom I had babysat quite often over the previous 6 months (they might even still remember our epic day of digging snow tunnels during the crazy winter of 96-97). That’s not to say we didn’t have our share of excitement, though. Two windows were broken over the course of the summer, one downstairs during a particularly exciting game of American Gladiators which involved the throwing of footballs at each other (and unfortunately an innocent window), and another through which a yo-yo was thrown in a fit of rage (not by me) after I sent John to his room. It was a pretty fun job, and I really liked those boys, even if they were a handful at times. It seems weird to think that Garret has probably graduated from high school by now, and that John is probably a Junior now, or maybe just a sophomore, but still. I don’t know if they remember me or not, but that summer we were pretty much inseparable. I also hope that Michael no longer eats peanut butter and jelly and ketchup sandwiches.

My first big-money job started the summer after I graduated and filled up every summer from 1998 to 2001. At this point you may notice that I have yet to have a job during the school year. There is a simple reason for that: it was forbidden by my parents, which was actually kind of nice. Once less thing to worry about, you know? So, this new job was in the agricultural industry, as are about 50% of the jobs in Yakima in some manner. I worked for Diana Fruit as a forklift driver at a cherry processing plant. My dad was the manager, which might be why I got such a cush job. I drove the “dumper.” It was a slow-as-molasses forklift with hydraulic gripping and dumping forks. Basically, I dumped cherries that arrived in orchardists’ bins into our bins so that the growers could have theirs’ back the next time they rolled in. The first year was really fun seeing as I was working with a bunch of friends from high school including Steve Fontana, Ben Meals, Dave Cole, and John Pham. On the slow days, when we had finished all our work until the next truck showed up, we would hang out and play cards in the tool shed. Actually, all 4 years were pretty fun. Maggie even worked there for three of them. So did her sister. And her sister’s boyfriend, and my brother (the disappearing brine maker). Nepotism all around. It was a pretty dirty job though. When I was done with my forklift duties, I had to go join the other pad workers doing the fun stuff. For example, pumping a relatively caustic chemical solution into bins of cherries in order to bleach all the color and flavor out of them. If you weren’t paying attention, it was easy to get a face full of the brine (at about a gallon per second) after which the smell would not leave your nose for days. Actually, even if you didn’t get a face full the smell wouldn’t leave you. It was pretty bad. And it was hard work. During the busiest times of the season we could sometimes put in14 hour days, 7 days a week. That’s a real good method for saving money. You make a lot of overtime and have no time to spend it. Sweet. But this job is the reason why I won’t eat maraschino cherries any more.

The one problem with the cherry job, as it was always referred to in my family (seriously, my dad had been working there every summer for like, 20 years) was that it ended in early August and UW didn’t start until the end of September. So, due to this, I had a plethora of various other temporary jobs into which I will not go in depth. Here they are
  • I worked at a winery bottling and boxing that year’s Chardonnay

  • I worked for a few days with a contractor cleaning up the Yakima Target’s parking lot and grounds

  • I worked for a few weeks as a dishwasher/salad chef at the now-defunct Tratorria Russo (owned by one of Maggie’s mom’s friends).

  • I worked for quite a while actually at Eschbach Park (for those of you not from Yakima, the proper pronunciation is ash-ball. Don’t ask me why) as a fee-taker/litter picker-upper/bathroom painter/off-roader. I’m telling you, those little carts can get some serious air if the bumps are big enough.

  • The summer after my sophomore year, I didn’t get a second job because Maggie and I were married on August 26th of that year. Just in case you were wondering.


  • So, that wraps up my summer jobs. Now on to my college jobs.

    There are really only two that fall into the college job category. To be honest, all but my sophomore year I (or we for the last two since I was living with Maggie) had enough money from scholarships. Ah, the beauty of in-state tuition. But my sophomore year I was dead broke. I ended up working two jobs just to make ends meet and borrowing money from Maggie when they still didn’t. My first job was a pretty standard campus job. All I did was work for about 15 hours a week at the Chemistry Library checking out and reshelving books. Nothing to it, really. My second job was way more rewarding and time consuming: tutoring high schoolers for the SAT. I pretty much aced mine, so that gave me good credentials in the parents’ eyes. I worked as a subcontractor basically for a company called Score!Prep. I spent 7.5 hours over 5 weeks with each kid (at their houses, of which almost all would fall into the “mansion” category) going over strategies for the SAT. Mind you, I wasn’t teaching them how to do math, I was teaching them how to do SAT math, which is totally different from math in general. It was pretty fun, and I think I was pretty good at it. At least the kids’ parents seemed to think so. I managed to be very forgiving and kind (I know, can you believe it) to the point that one girl, whose parents didn’t want here being tutored by men because they were to mean, flourished under my tutelage. I wish I could have tutored her at life, because she needed it. She was a not perfect girl living with perfectionist parents who were slowly destroying her will to live. I hope everything turned out okay for her. Anyway, I had the library job for one year and the tutoring job for two. My senior year, I didn’t have any jobs other than school, and that was enough.

    Hmm, we seem to have now reached that critical after-college time. Let me say this. I did get a job right out of college, but not until one week before graduation. Up until that point, Maggie and I had no idea what we would do after graduation since neither of us had jobs. I was thinking about working at the local Blockbuster or going to film school. Then, in the nick of time I got a job with the company for which I am still working. I won’t say anything about the job I have now because I don’t want to get fired if they read about it. Suffice to say I work in the automotive safety industry. I once worked with propellants as a quality engineer and now I work in research, often with the government. If you want more details, I’m afraid you’ll just have to talk to me.

    As I read back over this list, I come to the realization that I have never really had a bad job. Huh, no wonder why this post isn’t very funny. I much prefer Ryan’s list of jobs.

    Tuesday, January 24, 2006

    The Longest Post In The History of A Ton of Bricks

    As a caveat for all you casual readers out there, this post will probably not be entertaining. There probably won’t be very many sarcastic, pithy turns of phrase. There definitely won’t be any long-winded, profanity-laden half-thought-out rants. What there will be is a narrative of my history of involvement with various churches so that those that want to know me better will have more of an idea where I’m coming from. Also, there is a chance that this will be more than a little disorganized and that you will have to do some work to really see the narrative, but if I don’t write it all know, I’ll never get around to it. Also, I’m warning you that it is very long, over 4,000 words actually, so I don’t really expect you to read it all. Think of it as a reference for when you are wondering where in the world I’m coming from. So read on if this sounds interesting. If not, just wait until tomorrow. Or maybe later today, I’m not sure yet if any of my other thoughts will be half cooked by this afternoon.

    I was born and raised in a church named Tieton Drive Bible Chapel in Yakima, Washington. I spent the first 18 years of my church life there, as well as several additional summers during college. I guess it would best be described as a sort of Plymouth Brethren style congregation. There was no pastor, or any paid staff for that matter. There still isn’t, as far as I know. Instead, the church was led by a group of 4 to 5 men: the Elders. There was also (and I keep using the past tense because for me it is in the past. I assume that much of what I am saying still holds true.) a team of Deacons who were responsible for more of the day-to-day issues of running a church, like the maintenance, the sound production on Sundays, that sort of thing.

    I hate to say that it was a traditional church because I don’t think I know enough of “tradition” to make that claim, but I’ll say it anyway. To me, it was a traditional protestant-style non-liturgical church. We had three meetings every week. The first one was called “Breaking of Bread,” otherwise known as communion or eucharist or whatever. I still love the fact that we had communion every week (thought my family didn’t attend this meeting for the first few years of my life. Too many kids.) and have always looked for that in other churches I have attended. It was a relatively short meeting at which, for the first 30 minutes or so, any man in the congregation could stand up (or not) and say something. Maybe a prayer, maybe a mini sermon, maybe a prayer request, maybe a song request, which we would all then sing (out of the black book, or the red book, though at this meeting, it was primarily the black book, don’t ask me why). When “about that time” was reached, one of the men would say a prayer that would begin the communion time. After the prayer, the Head Usher would get up and start to distribute the bread. I never reached the status of head usher, but I did get to be assistant usher (the guy that hands the bread plates from pew to pew) starting at about age 15. We’d do the same thing for the grape juice and finish up with the offering. One thing I really like about the way we did our offering at TDBC (when I look back on it) was that we did it only at the “members only” service. That way, at our main service (I’ll get to it, hold on) any newcomers didn’t feel obligated to put some money into the velvet bags. I’m not saying that visitors weren’t welcome at the first meeting, they always were, it’s just that they rarely came. The Breaking of Bread meeting served more as a congregational time of togetherness, which I also like.

    Hmm. I’ve only described one meeting from one of the churches I attended and I’m already at 500+ words. This could be a long post.

    Anyway, the second meeting was your pretty standard Sunday School time. The kids went downstairs, sang some songs and then had short classes divided up by age. We would also have wicked awesome flannelboard stories. I don’t really remember much about Sunday School, to be honest. I remember more about the parties we would have at the end of the quarters. Those were always fun. In high school, we didn’t call it Sunday School anymore, but it still was. My parents taught that class for awhile, which was actually pretty cool. They let us paint our various high school logos on the wall and our names next to them, sort of a documentation of our time there. Now that I’m thinking about it, there’s not much at that church that my parents haven’t done. They are like the go-to people there. Back to the point, there are also adult Sunday School classes. I don’t know much about them because I never attended very often. After high school, I went off to college and during the summers I worked in the agricultural industry which means you work Sundays, so I don’t think I ever managed to attend an entire quarters worth of classes. There were usually two or three to choose from (yes, my parents were involved in teaching these too, though my mother was not allowed to teach a class with men in it).

    Finally, we had our hour-long Family Bible Hour. This involved about 30 minutes of worship singing, which could be hymns or praise songs depending on who was leading it, and various other things. The mission moment (I’m sorry Mr. Nelson, but that was always my dedicated space-out time), announcements (done by my father for as long as I can remember) and other things as needed. Then, one of a relatively small group of men would get up and give a sermon about a bible passage. We usually structured the sermon series around books of the bible, almost like a bible study. There was no set preaching team (as far as I know) but it was usually the same 5 or 6 guys (many of whom were also Elders, my dad included) that talked. And I don’t mean to sound ungenerous, but some of them had no concept of relevance, pace, timing or theatre. Maybe their spiritual gifts had been misdiagnosed and they weren’t actually teachers. My dad, on the other hand, always ended on time and always held everybody’s attention. I know it sounds like I think my dad was, like, the best guy there, and to be honest, I pretty much do. He is one of two or three men that I would like to grow up to be like.

    So, what else can I say about the church of my youth? Well, I guess I’ll try to describe it a little more in general. And the reason I’m spending so much time talking about this church is because I think it has had the most profound effect on my life of any of the churches I have attended.

    Here’s TDBC in their own words.
    We Are....
    ....Christians who believe the Bible to be inspired by God, the standard for faith and practice; that the Lord Jesus Christ, as the Son of God, came into the world, died a sacrificial death for our sins, rose from the dead, ascended into heaven and will return again to earth; that upon a personal acceptance of Him by faith one receives forgiveness of sins and eternal life; that there is one Church of which the Lord Jesus Christ is the Head and all who believe in Him are members.


    So there you have it. Basically it’s a traditional Bible Church. A little bit Calvin, a little be Anabaptist, a little bit Reformed, a little bit Quaker and a little bit American. Fundamentalist, you might ask? Yes, and no. Yes in the sense that they are relatively strict about some things, particularly women in ministry, but no in the sense that it is definitely not a personality driven church. It’s actually pretty communal and loving, just from a Fundamental framework. It’s not a church from which you will be ostracized if you decide to leave. They encourage young people to attend Bible Colleges, but none of my siblings or I did, and my dad’s still an elder and one of the most respected men in the church. They hold to a pretty much strict Protestant individual, personal salvation model, you know, the bottom line being getting people’s butts into heaven. I made a primitive declaration of faith when I was, what, about 4? I don’t remember much other than that it was spring and I was outside with my mom. But, being the worrisome kid that I was (still am) I must have prayed that classic “salvation prayer” hundreds of times growing up, each time convinced that last time hadn’t really done it, that I would be going to hell unless I prayed it again. I guess that’s just how most kids understand things. But the good thing about this individualized, sola scriptura attitude is that it fosters a better than average knowledge of the Bible. Memorization and bible reading were always very important, and looking back, I really appreciate how much this has done for me over the years.

    When I was growing up, the church was, well, old. Lots of old people calling the shots, you know how it is. And while I think that old people can be a great asset (something missing from our current church) it can also be a problem in terms of momentum, if you know what I mean. Nowadays, the church is growing (there is no official membership or anything, just a weekly count of people. It’s up to probably 150 or so now) and is pretty healthy. They’re getting lots of young people, lots of new babies and seem to be doing lots of good work in the world. So they must be doing something right!

    But, on the other side of the coin, I don’t think that I would want to go back to TDBC as a home church if we sometime returned to Yakima. I mean, it’ll always be my home church in the sense that I will always be accepted and welcomed there (as is everyone pretty much, at least in theory) and that it was the church I grew up in. It’s just that my spiritual journey has taken me in a slightly different direction. I guess the biggest thing for me about TDBC is that women aren’t allowed in general ministry. As a kid, and even as a high school kid, I was convinced that this was the right way to do things, I mean, that’s what Paul says, right? But I guess I had an epiphany of sorts when I realized that I was dating a wonderful, brilliant woman who would never be allowed to stand up and say something that might help the congregation, while at the same time, a 13 year-old boy, could. This didn’t feel right to me, and it still doesn’t. Actually, let me backtrack about 9 years from that point. My mom worked/volunteered for a long time at the local Crisis Pregnancy Center. There was one point where she was going to give a brief talk about something related to the CPC (I don’t remember what) during our Family Bible Hour. I distinctly remember wondering why it would cause a controversy to do this. I mean, she’s my mom! She’s smart, she knows what she’s talking about, why shouldn’t she be allowed to say something about it? She knows more than anyone else? Eventually she did get up and say it, but what I most remember about the episode is how it didn’t seem to make sense that it was such a big deal. I guess from an early age I already started to see something strange about it. But I’m not going to condemn them for it because it DOES feel right for a lot of people. And like I said, the church is healthy so they’re doing something right.


    Now, here's a picture of a squirrel waterskiing in case you were getting bored. Ha ha, look at him go!!



    This leads me to my next stage. Actually, it doesn’t yet involve another church. I started dating Maggie our senior year of high school, and ever since that time she has been a huge factor in my spiritual growth. (Not to say that she has led me along my path. All along it has been more of a joint journey, each leading the other when we need to, growing together in our faith. At least that’s how I see it. I like to think that we have had profound and good effects on each other. I won’t speak for Maggie, but I hope she’ll agree.) First, there was what I mentioned above. Then there was the fact that she was Catholic (capital C). At times in my home church, Catholics could end up on the wrong side of the us-them divide. In particularly bad points they could be downright demonized. And, being the impressionable youth that all young people are, I bought it, not out of personal knowledge, but out of respect for my elders. Imagine what a shock it was for me to learn that, really, Catholics weren’t all that different from me! They didn’t sacrifice their young to Mary, they weren’t hell-bent on bringing about popery and world domination. In general, the Catholics that I met were concerned with the same things that my church was: helping others, loving God, doing good, loving justice and mercy, walking humbly etc. And their Mass, at least the Life Teen Mass at St. Paul’s was not all that different from our Family Bible Hour, except that eucharist was included. Now, I must mention here that I wasn’t comfortable with everything Catholic. I still can’t take communion at Mass because I refuse to believe in transubstantiation and I feel that it would be dishonest to take communion at Mass not believing it. But I don’t resent them for that fact. So really, Maggie was the beginning of my experience seeing things outside the structure of my little home church. Overall, I think the theme of seeing and understanding other traditions and being able to appreciate them is pretty important to my story.

    Oh yes, I forgot to mention the brief time in high school when I tried to stop liking “secular” music. This would have been in about 1997. I was planning to get rid of all of my rock and/or roll CD’s and replace them with Christian Music. Now, I wasn’t in to the whole Amy Grant/MW Smith thing. And this was in ’97. So guess what that meant? That’s right! SKA! I think there is actually a passage in Jeremiah somewhere that foretells the fact that all Christian “alternative” teenagers are required to like ska music. Seems pretty true. I actually only ended up getting rid of maybe two CDs, though I did go to a lot of Christian concerts. I even got to hang out with POD before they became big, back when they were just playing little church shows. I guess you could say that this time was the beginning of my realization that a lot of the Church was pretty much completely irrelevant to our culture. Anyway, more on that later. Maybe.

    So, in fall of 1998, Maggie and I went off to the big city (Seattle) for college. We pretty quickly fell in with the default church for those coming from TDBC: Hope Bible Fellowship. It was here that we met another of the more important role models in my life, Mike Vederoff. He was Hope’s paid worker. He didn’t go by the name “pastor” because he was just one of the elders (this church was set up almost identically to the one in Yakima) but he also handled all the administration and spiritual guidance for the church. He is a really great guy, and it makes me kind of sad that we haven’t seen him in so long. Anyway, everyone at the church was really friendly and all, but right from the start something felt a little weird. We started going in January of 1999 and within two weeks, we had been invited over to the Dickerson’s for lunch after church. This all seemed nice and normal until Maggie got invited into the kitchen (gender roles were pretty strictly enforced at this point at Hope) and I was in the living room with Terry, a pretty great guy. Then he started grilling me. He wanted to know all about whether we were Christians or not, what did we believe, etc. etc. I was kind of put off by it and didn’t know how to react to it, so I didn’t. We just kept going to Hope.

    Now all of this was happening during college which meant that church was not the number one thing on my priority list, even if it should have been. I was more worried about getting good grades. Often, especially after we got married and were living together, we had to talk ourselves into getting up for Church. Actually, shortly after we got married, Maggie and I started to think that maybe Hope wasn’t for us. Maybe we wanted something different. So we talked to Mr. Vederoff about this, and he understood. Actually, he was pretty sure what we were going to say as soon as we told him we wanted to talk to him. We’d spent a lot of time talking to him before our wedding since he did our pre-marriage counseling, so we were really comfortable talking to him about big stuff. Anyway, what he told us has stuck with me and maybe affected how I look at church more than anything anyone else has ever said. I know that’s a big statement, but I think it’s true. He said that he understood, but that we might want to think about the fact that maybe church isn’t just something you show up to once a week. Maybe it would be good to get more involved, to be more active. And he was right. This was the genesis of my current view of church, that it’s not just something to be consumed once a week. It’s so much more meaningful when you participate. That conversation led to Maggie and I taking over leadership of the Children’s Church program from Michael’s wife Evangelina. This was really my first involvement in any kind of church administrative position. Oh, wait, I was also on the money counting team, so that was two things.

    And that’s how we spent our last year and a half or so at Hope, getting more and more involved until we moved. I should also mention that we had a pretty good college-age bible study group going on at the time at the Vederoffs’ house. The only part I really remember was a long series we did on the Sermon on the Mount and the Kingdom of God. It was the first time I ever started to look at the words of Jesus in a different light than what I had always used.

    We had a great time at Hope, in general. I would actually say that Hope played a big part in our growth out of the more conservative circles in which I grew up, and I feel like that has been a good thing for us. I hear that Hope now even allows women to talk at the meetings, and I would love to get the chance to go back and visit. Maybe soon.

    For the next two years, nothing much changed. We spent 6 months traveling around the country and thus not attending church. When we moved to Moses Lake, Washington in January of 2003, we found ourselves in the middle of Mormon country. To give you an idea of what this means, there were 4 large Mormon churches in a town of 15,000 and 1 non-Mormon church that wasn’t about to die. Guess which one we ended up at? That’s right, one of the Mormon churches! Just Kidding!!!! Yeah, we ended up at the big one, Moses Lake Alliance church. We tried some others around town, first. For example, we went to a little Methodist church with the nicest pastor you good ever hope to meet, just a real stand up guy. Unfortunately, the church was dead. About 20 people were there and there was no energy, nothing was being changed to bring more life (probably because as part of an international denomination, not much could be changed). We went to a small Church of Christ and it was really weird. It was like they hadn’t had a visitor in months and the head guy actually lectured the attendees about being more excited and doing a better job. He didn’t say that it was because we were there, but….it was because we were there. Plus they didn’t have any musical instruments, and singing without musical instruments is weird. So we didn’t go back. We also tried an Episcopal church, which was actually kind of cool. I’m not sure why we didn’t go back there. Anyway, the bottom line is that we became anonymous faces in the crowd at what passed for a mega-church in Moses Lake, maybe 800 attendees per week. Their MO was lite-rock praise songs followed by a nicely put together smarmy sermon preached by a fired up pastor just trying to do his job and fill his coffers. We did try to get involved with the nursery there and had some success in that department, but the whole time we were in Moses Lake we struggled with the anonymity and the lack of community afforded by such a large church. Of course, if we were that concerned about it, we would have switched churches, but with a newborn on our hands, I’m not even sure we wanted anything other than anonymity and no commitment.

    From this point on, I’ve basically told the story before. Remember? Way back in the beginning days of this blog? But since the time I wrote that post, Maggie and I have joined the design team at Mars Hill, which has allowed us a freedom we’ve never known before. Sure, our interpretations of scripture are different know, we’re questioning some of the things we thought we knew. But we’re also more excited to be living as followers of Christ than we ever have been before. Again, I’m speaking just for myself, but I think that Maggie would agree. Also, I’d like to give a shout out to Mike Stavlund, who I have to say is quickly becoming the third mentor/friend that I would put in the same category as my dad and Mike Vederoff. Two Mikes, that’s weird.

    I’ve grown a lot on this journey, and for that I’m very happy. Am I a different person because of it? That’s hard to say. I don’t think so, but I will admit that I have changed the way I look at the world along the way. Some things that used to matter so much have faded into the background. Some things I used to think were stupid have become very prominent in my faith. But through it all I’ve held fast to the concept of Christ as our one and only savior. It’s beautiful to think that this one idea will always be a constant in my life no matter where I end up.

    So what’s the moral of the story? I guess I would have to say the moral is that I have been on a pretty continuous journey for my whole life really, my adult life in particular. I’ve never had a hard break with my past as have a lot of people at Mars Hill. I’ve never had to look back at my history with regret, and I feel lucky for that. I feel like God has always led us to the right place at the right time. I’m thankful that I’ve never had to go through a process of violent and relationship breaking upheaval. And I’m curious to see where God leads us next. Will he keep us here, with our new family at Mars Hill? Will he take us somewhere else completely unexpected? We’ll see.


    If you've got any questions about any of this, or want any clarification, just ask. I'm more than happy to share it with you.

    List Tuesday: The Location Version




    Over the past couple of days (the last 100 hits to A Ton of Bricks, now averaging more than 50 a day!) this blog has hosted visitors from the following locations. Or, at least the servers/routers were at the following locations.

    1. Washington, District of Columbia
    2. Reston, Virginia
    3. Laurel, Maryland
    4. Beaverton, Oregon
    5. Denver, Colorado
    6. Calgary, Alberta Canada
    7. Mountain View, California
    8. Lynnwood, Washington
    9. Falls Church, Virginia
    10. Ambridge, Pennsylvania
    11. Yakima, Washington
    12. Kennewick, Washington
    13. Manassas, Virginia
    14. Centreville, Virginia
    15. Silver Spring, Maryland
    16. Mclean, Virginia
    17. Las Vegas, Nevada
    18. Brooklyn, New York
    19. Cadier En Keer, Limburg Netherlands
    20. La Grande, Oregon
    21. Sunnyvale, California
    22. Baltimore, Maryland
    23. West Mclean, Virginia
    24. Bremerton, Washington
    25. Provo, Utah
    26. Waltham, Massachusetts
    27. Woodbridge, Virginia
    28. Auckland New Zealand
    29. Seattle, Washington
    30. Los Angeles, California
    31. Tacoma, Washington
    32. Renton, Washington
    33. Kent, Washington
    34. Redmond, Washington
    35. Mount Laurel, New Jersey
    36. Kirkland, Washington
    37. Bethesda, Maryland
    38. Grand Rapids, Michigan
    39. Webster, Massachusetts
    40. Tallinn, Harjumaa, Estonia


    I have a good idea about who most of them are (most of them are random searchers) and I've made it my sworn duty to find out who the rest are. That's right Sunnyvale, I'm coming after you. Actually, probably not.

    Monday, January 23, 2006

    Nevermind the Boondocks

    First, I need to get this off my chest: the title of this post has no relation to anything that will be contained herein. There, I said it.

    Second, I don't really feel like writing a long, well-researched, thoughtful post today. Big surprise, huh? But I am thinking about several things today that probably don't deserve mention, but who cares? That's the beauty of the blog. I would estimate that blogs are the source of 95% of the non-politician generated BS. Or in other words, about 1/10th of one percent of all the BS generated. Maybe I just think that because I'm here in the world capital of BS, but still, I stand by that estimate.

    Anyway, here's the first thing I have been thinking about. Yesterday, we gave our friend Erin a ride home from Church. We are the only attendees who are non-suburban so we have a certain urban affinity for each other. An urbaffinity if you will. Anyway, she lives in what is best described as a transitional neighborhood. You can see sketchy old apartments and corner convenience stores right next to new high rise luxury condo buildings. All this development amid the obvious semi-poverty really got my attention. I mean what is the deal with those buildings? I'm not a structural engineer, but I don't get it. Also, ha ha ha ha ha. You thought I was going to launch into another poverty/race/sociology style post didn't you? Your brain was working overtime already trying to come up with a comment you could leave in which you would come across as both smarter than everyone else AND not at all condescending, wasn't it? Well, keep those typing fingers in your, um, pockets? because I don't do that anymore, remember? Unless you're a structural engineer, then please answer because I want to know. What I want to know is why some of the main concrete supports in this building I saw were cocked at about 15 degrees from vertical? At first, I thought it was a mistake, but then, about 1 out of 6 was at an angle like that. What purpose does it serve, does anyone know? I never took statics, so I have no idea.

    Second, I've never been a huge football fan. Baseball? Maybe, but even that has been trailing off over the last two years or so. I've always taken charges of an "east coast bias" with a grain of salt because everyone wants to feel like their team is underrated and isn't getting the respect they deserve. But honestly, it's like the national media has no idea how good the Seahawks are! I mean, the guys on Fox were shocked last night with how well the Seahawks dominated the game. It ended 34-14, but was just a hair away from 44-0. The Seahawks pulled all their punches in the last quarter practically. And still, the Steelers (the number 6-seed, a wild card team) are the favorite to win the Superbowl! How does this make any sense? First, the Seahawks were supposed to get rolled by the Panthers, the real cream of the NFC crop. Instead, the Panthers were humiliated on national TV by a clearly very superior team. Now that clearly superior team is still considered a lucky break team that doesn't really deserve to be there, it's just because the Panthers had so many injuries. I for one will not be surprised when the Seahawks beat the Steelers like a rented mule. Not that it will make a difference in the reporting, but I won't be shocked.

    Third, (there's always a third, isn't there)I've been reading a lot of non-fiction/philosophy books on church related stuff lately. This is odd for me, since I'm almost exclusively a novel reader. Not pulpy stuff. I don't want you to think that. I like to read great works of literature, like, you know, Harry Potter. Well, I do read other books too, but I can't force myself to slog through Gravity's Rainbow, so I'll never be a true book snob. Anyway, back to the point. I just finished a new book called Emerging Churches by Ryan [something] and Eddie [Something]. It was pretty good. That's really all I have to say about it. That and that the whole Emerging thing is kind of weird, often self-contradictory, youth-centric (to the point of exclusivity sometimes), open, exciting, and not well defined. Now, on to the next book I just started reading this morning: The Divine Conspiracy, by Dallas Willard. First, it took awhile to get past the idea of reading a book by a guy named Dallas. What kind of person would name their child Dallas? And why, upon reaching adulthood, would one keep that name? If you have to be named after a Texas city, I think Austin is the way to go for guys. Definitely San Antonio for girls. Second, I'd heard good things about this book from Ross and Mike. But that was nothing compared to the book's foreword. Here are a couple of quotations from the foreword penned by Richard J. Foster, whoever he is.

    "The Divine Conspiracy is the book I have been searching for all my life. Like Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling, it is a masterpiece and a wonder."


    So, he is seriously comparing a book published only 8 years ago with one of the most timeless masterpieces of art in the history of mankind? That is not a valid comparison, in my book. I think a work has to stand the test of time (i.e. more than 8 years, or about 0 years from when the forward was written) before it can even be mentioned in the same sentence as true masterpieces. Sort of like the baseball hall of fame rule, but more so.

    Here's another quotation (not quote. Quote is a verb):

    "I would place The Divine Conspiracy in rare company indeed: alongside the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and John Wesley, John Calvin and Martin Luther, Teresa of Avila and Hildegard of Bingen, and perhaps even Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo. If the parousia tarries, this is a book for the next millennium."


    I mean, I understand that a foreword is supposed to be all excited and stuff, but don't you think this is a little overdoing it? Those are some big names he dropped in that paragraph, and now I am expecting this book to be the greatest thing since, well, the stuff that those names wrote. I expect this book to be world changing, and if it's not, then it hasn't met my expectations. I will not be satisfied with it. Unfair standards? Maybe, but nothing more than was set up in the foreword. And maybe I will be satisfied, who knows?

    Sunday, January 22, 2006

    The Seahawks Are Going To The Superbowl?

    That's right! The Seahawks are going to the Superbowl!
    The Seahawks are going to the Superbowl!
    The Seahawks are going to the Superbowl!
    The Seahawks are going to the Superbowl!
    The Seahawks are going to the Superbowl!
    The Seahawks are going to the Superbowl!
    The Seahawks are going to the Superbowl!
    The Seahawks are going to the Superbowl!


    Said the fair-weather football fan who generally never cares about the Seahawks!

    WOOHOO!!!!

    Friday, January 20, 2006

    Random Picture Friday








    What do you think, Mom or sister/aunt/cousin? My vote is for "sister."

    Thursday, January 19, 2006

    Horrid Poetry Thursday




    Let's try a little self-pity poetry, or what I like to call self-pietry, today. It's fun, it's easy, and it sounds like real poetry! Try it, you'll like it!

    Understranded

    by Schuyler

    No one
    gets it
    Nope, not anyone
    No one understands my plan
    Or what it is I am
    tyring to say
    No one cares
    that I am stranded
    here on an isle
    of shimmering sand
    that might collapse at any moment

    No one knows
    my master plan

    Poetry Thursday



    Sleeping On The Ceiling
    by Elizabeth Bishop

    It is so peaceful on the ceiling!
    It is the Place de la Concorde.
    The little crystal chandelier
    is off, the fountain is in the dark.
    Not a soul is in the park.

    Below, where the wallpaper is peeling,
    the Jardin des Plantes has locked its gates.
    Those photographs are animals.
    The mighty flowers and foliage rustle;
    under the leaves the insects tunnel.

    We must go under the wallpaper
    to meet the insect-gladiator,
    to battle with a net and trident,
    and leave the fountain and the square
    But oh, that we could sleep up there....

    Wednesday, January 18, 2006

    Dispatches From The Metro




    You know, sometimes, riding the metro makes me really sad. I don't know if this is related, but it's usually when I didn't get enough sleep and haven't had any caffeine yet. Like this morning. At Woodley Park a bunch of fresh-faced young men and women boarded my car. You could tell that they were new to the whole Metro thing by the way they hogged poles, blocked the door and otherwise made nuisances of themselves. I mean they even talked to each other. Out loud! Since they were opening themselves up to eavesdropping, I, well, dropped a couple of eaves (the brickwife knows that this is a public transportation habit of mine, remember the Nightride?). I quickly learned that these pretty, confident young women and men were all in town for an internship program. Here they were, ready to take on the world, to go out and make a difference. What makes me sad is that, if they stay here in DC, within a year that will be warped, frustrated young people. Their idealism and youthful enthusiasm will be crushed and they will turn into hopeless, bitter, selfish troglodytes.

    Just like the rest of us.

    Ooh, Decisions!

    Just like a savory mixture of peppers, onions, thinly sliced steak and various spices all topped with a healthy dollop of sour cream, decisions can be the most satisfying when wrapped inside a warm corn tortilla. But that's pretty much where the similarity to fajitas ends.

    Anyway, I've decided that it's not worth the trouble to write about sociological problems here at A Ton of Bricks. There's enough of that strewn about the web as it is. The last thing I need to do is add to that. It's not my job to solve the world's problems. It's not my job to even think about them, at least here. What? Are you trying to tell me I have to? You're not the boss of me! So I think I'll stop doing it. Oh, don't worry, I won't stop posting stuff, I just won't discuss much of global import. I may get philosophical/self-absorbed/annoyingly trite at times, but hey, until you start to pay me for this, suck it.

    I was planning on writing a further post related to yesterday's, but I'm not going to. If you really want me to, send some questions to twentysmthingwhiteguy(at)yahoo(dot)com (remember that failed gimmick??) That way I'll be forced to answer them. Otherwise, just talk to me or something. If you've read much of what I've written, however, you probably don't even need to talk to me. Even if you've never met me, your impressions of me are probably dead on, so you can guess what I would say. Yep. I'd say "Oh, I'm not racist" and then launch into a stinging criticism of what I would probably call "underclass culture" while primarily meaning "underclass black culture." And I would couch all my statements in pithy words that make me sound considerate. Finally, I would pay a little lip service to the fact that "of course, I'm a product of the system too and I'm not above any of this" while secretly thinking "well, really, I am above all this because I can see it, so ha ha!"
    And then, we could all chime in on the comments feeling really smug about ourselves and how we are all so compassionate and caring and not racist and so on until we reach the conclusion that we were right all along and aren't we a bunch of great people.

    There, that's good enough, right?

    Tuesday, January 17, 2006



    11 Top “Helping Verbs” and 100 Top Chickens


    11 (or actually 8 conjugations of one and three of the other) Top Helping Verbs: Why are these still taking up room in my brain?

    1. Am

    2. Is

    3. Are

    4. Was

    5. Were

    6. Be

    7. Being

    8. Been

    9. Has

    10. Have

    11. Had




    Top 100 Chickens in History


      1. Camilla*

      2. Clucky McCluckerson**

      …skip a few…

      99. Little

      100. Fried



    * You know, Gonzo’s girlfriend?
    ** Famous for leading the Great Chicken Uprising at Harper’s Ferry the day before the more-famous John Brown thing.

    Sunday, January 15, 2006

    On Portraiture and Truthiness

    Last night, the brickwife and I, along with our small son, visited our friends house to watch some playoff football. We're Seahawks "fans" and they are Redskins Fans. You can guess who went home happy. Anyway, that's not the point of this.

    Our friend is a pretty fantastic painter, especially when it comes to landscapes.

    (Sorry, but here's a quick aside. That Steelers-Colts came had a pretty spectacular ending, no?)

    Anyway, on the way out to their house yesterday I mentioned that I wanted the brickwife to commision a portrait of me as a birthday gift or something and she said that our friend doesn't do portraits. Then, we got to their house, went in, and what do I see on the easel? That's right, a portrait. Not finished yet, but a portrait nonetheless.

    So I decided. When I get a portrait painted of me, I want it to depict me rocking out on a guitar, back-to-back with Tom Petty. You know, just totally wailing away under the lights on a huge stage. Because here's my thought process: why in the world would anyone want to see a painting of me just sitting around? If you really want to see that, just come visit me at work some day. Heck, I'll even be wearing a suit at work! No, I want a picture of me doing something super-cool and almost infinitely unlikey. That would be way better and much more of a conversation starter. So what do you think, Becky? Is this something you could do?

    Friday, January 13, 2006

    Random (Scary) Picture Friday

    Seeing how it is Friday the 13th and all, I decided to put up a cool scary, eerie sort of picture today. You know, one full of foreboding and the feeling of imminent doom? But as I was surfing the livejournal pictures, I couldn't find anything good. Then I came across the following picture and it just scared the bejesus out of me. I almost spit my coffee all over my desk! True story! Well, at least a semi-true story.

    Try not to scream....





    Bah! She's still freaking me out with that stare, that vacant, deathly stare. Bad luck indeed, on this the most unluckiestest of days. Also, I don't mean to alarm you, but the ides of January are fast approaching, and that just means more bad luck. Doesn't it? Or am I thinking of something else?

    Thursday, January 12, 2006

    Bad Poetry Thursday



    More non-genreficated bad poetry today for you. Not for anyone else, just you, and I think you know who you are...

    A Taste of Things to Come
    by Schuyler


    I've had it up to here
    he said
    while pointing towards his limpish hair

    I'm going to blow this popsicle stand
    And take my toys and go home

    As night slowly crept into the city
    he walked home
    at a very determined pace
    so as not to disrupt the way of things
    or cause havoc in the bars and restaurants
    because that is the sort of thing that often happened
    as he made his way about the streets
    of the city
    on his way to I don't know where
    to find a new popsicle stand
    and a new place to keep his toys
    especially his wooden toys
    since leaving them outside overnight can
    ruin them completely.

    Poetry Thursday




    Cold Morning

    by Eamon Grennan


    Through an accidental crack in the curtain
    I can see the eight o'clock light change from
    charcoal to a faint gassy blue, inventing things

    in the morning that has a thick skin of ice on it
    as the water tank has, so nothing flows, all is bone,
    telling its tale of how hard the night had to be

    for any heart caught out in it, just flesh and blood
    no match for the mindless chill that's settled in,
    a great stone bird, its wings stretched stiff

    from the tip of Letter Hill to the cobbled bay, its gaze
    glacial, its hook-and-scrabble claws fast clamped
    on every window, its petrifying breath a cage

    in which all the warmth we were is shivering.

    Wednesday, January 11, 2006

    I Don't Have Time For This

    Listen, everybody. I'm tired, sick and tired of your thought-provoking posts. I don't have time to have my thoughts provoked. Whenever I do, they end up being provoked for hours at a time and playing with my emotions. And I can't take it anymore. Can't you all just write silly nonsense?

    Well, since my thoughts are already provoked.....

    What if our whole way of life was a con? What if everything about "The American Way" is wrong? What do we do? Is it possible to opt-out of the rat race? How do you do it aside from being a subsistence farmer? Was our country founded on misguided ideals? Should we really care about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?" Is pursuing our own happiness morally superior to pursuing the happiness of others? Or pursuing reconciliation even if it doesn't make us happy? Are our lives so important that they have primacy over everything else? Or is it true that whoever seeks to save his life will lose it? Am I being un-american by even suggesting that? And what about liberty? When we are locked into a way of life that demands total allegiance to the almighty dollar, can we ever be liberated? Should we even be concerned about liberty? Why not be concerned about peace? Why not worry about forgiveness? Is our own personal liberty more important than the betterment of the human race? And on and on ad nauseum until I've questioned every single thing that I've ever thought in my life.

    So somebody please answer me on these points, or I quit. I just can't take it any more. I'm sick of having to think about this crap all the time. Can't we just pretend like it's not a problem and just chat about insignificant stuff? Like the weather, or the Redskins, or maybe something cute our children did the other day? What do you say? Can we just act like there's nothing to worry about? Hakuna Matata?

    Tuesday, January 10, 2006

    Very Important Statistical Analyses

    Hold on to your hats and glasses folks, because this here is the boringest ride on the internet. I'm going to present to you some shoddy statistical analysis I've done that you can use to impress your friends and colleauges.

    First, I wanted to point out that most bloggers are quitters. Stupid quitters. Well over half of all bloggers (at least those that show up in the profile viewer on blogger.com) have made less than 10 posts to their blogs. The overall average is about 38 posts, but that is highly skewed by the few that have made hundreds (yours truly is not quite in that rarified atmosphere yet. I'm at 163). The median number is actually 2. Here's a chart that shows the frequency distribution.




    Now there are a couple things to note here. First, many of the people in the sample may not actually have blogspot based blogs and only have a username in order to comment. This would skew the data lower. Second, there are certain demographics of people that are much more likely to maintain their blogs. For instance, fans of The Shins, and The Postal Service (it says so in their profiles) are much more likely to keep up with posting than are fans of say, The Rolling Stones, though I have not quantified the relative differences. I think it's a generational thing.


    On to the second analysis that I have been working on in fits and starts for quite a while now: How many pseudo-random clicks does it take to uncover a bomb in MS Minesweeper? In the chart a result of "2" means that I managed 2 clicks without uncovering a bomb, i.e. the bomb was found on the third click. Here are the results of 200 trials...



    First, please note that there were no games in which I uncovered a bomb with the first click. I believe this is programmed into the game. The result of this is that I am slightly more likely than normal to find one on my second click, which the results tend to show. However, due to the presence of the non-bomb programming, my average number of clicks was slightly higher than would be expected if the program was totally random (4.98 vs 4.85). Also, take these results with a grain of salt becuase my clicks were not actually random, they were pseudo-random in that I was intentionally forcing an appearance of randomness by clicking all over the screen and very rarely in close proximity to the previous click.

    A Ton of Bricks: doing pointless and ridiculous statistics so you don't have to.

    Lizst Tuesday




    All of These Things That I Have Done (And Two I Haven't)


    1. Visited the ruins of an ancient civilization in the American Southwest while suffering from mononucleosis and got some kind of puking disease from brushing my teeth with non-potable water.

    2. Tutored insufferably rich and ungrateful brats, and one insufferably rich sweet girl with overdemanding parents who will one day (maybe already) drive her to outlandish rebellion, on strategies to beat the SAT.

    3. Climbed Mt. Adams

    4. Trained myself to have a wicked good jump serve in order to intimidate the opposing teams in our recreational volleyball league.

    5. Ran Hope Bible Fellowship's Children's Church program for about a year while in college.

    6. Played a solo for my high school band's annual competition. I totally nailed the solo too. Even the judge singled me out for awesome.

    7. Got in a fight at a bar in which I broke my friends rib.

    8. Flown to Detroit, inadvertantly driven through the ghetto in a Buick, eaten dinner at Outback Steak House and flown home the next morning.

    9. Played an entire season of baseball without striking out. Until my very last at bat.

    10. Driven about 380 miles in one day on about 7.5 gallons of fuel.




    Finally, a couple of notes.
    First, please notice that it is American Idol week over at the Song O' The Day.

    Second, Maggie, you're not allowed to guess which ones aren't true.

    Friday, January 06, 2006

    Random Philosophical/Picture Friday




    Warning: This post will contain of several tenuously connected, not entirely thought out ideas, so if that's not your cup of trendy, yuppie, self-satisfied $4 tea, then you might want to bow out here. Or not. Whatever, geez.

    These thoughts have been going around and around in my head like a punch-drunk dog chasing his own three tails for about 2 weeks now, essentially since we got to the west coast for Christmas. And now, as I sit here trying to think of the best way to express them, I'm not sure if they even make sense. But when has that ever stopped me before, right? So I'll fire both barrels and see what happens.

    Here's my thesis. I think that most of our current societal malaise, or petty immigration arguments, our ambivalence towards our neighbors, our rampant consumption and worship of material goods all comes down to our (and by our, I mean the human race's, not just American/Western, though we have about reached the pinnacle here in the US) proclivity to seek comfort above all else, which in turn leads us to aggressively and insatiably seek to increase and defend our territory.

    Sometimes it seems as though we hold our own comfort as the ultimate good in the universe. We want freedom from hunger, from want, from danger, from not having more than our neighbors, and in so seeking we force ourselves to worship at the altar of "how do I feel today? Am I satisfied with my current state, or could I be more comfortable?" thinking. All of our time is spent desiring something new, something that will make our lives easier, or more efficient, or more relaxing or whatever. And then, through this constant effort, we train ourselves never to be satisfied. We trap ourselves in a downward spiral of greed and resentment and vanity that is hard, nigh on to impossible to break free from.

    What finally crystallized this thought in my head was a simple piece of construction paraphernalia that I saw yesterday while walking through Philadelphia. It was a concrete highway divider. You know the ones. They're about, oh, 8 feet long, three feet high and can be set in rows as temporary lane dividers. Anyway, this one was sitting alone, several yards away from where all the others were neatly lined up. On it was written the word "remove." And this brought that visceral feeling of being tied to a heavy weight of selfishness that is pulling me further and further down the spiral into sociopathy, total absorption in the self. How can we remove it? You can't just pick it up and toss it away, it's too heavy! Is it as simple and quick as untying the rope from your ankles? I doubt it. I think it is a slow, slow process. One in which we need to take our chisel and hammer and relentlessly and unceasingly fight against that weight. Not just soften up the edges a bit so that when our weight hits others on the spiral we don't hurt them quite as much, but to instead pummel it down to nothing, until we're free of that anchor. Now, I have my doubts that any of us, especially me, can ever truly be free of that weight, at least entirely, but I'm trying because if there's one thing I don't need it's a stress induced ulcer.

    And look at where these weights are pulling us? Further and further into ourselves, away from human contact. We're learning to become completely self contained, with no need for or respect for others. We view others as competition, something standing in the way of our finally, finally getting that last thing we wanted and really being happy. Or maybe we just see them as getting in our way. They slow us down for three seconds on the metro escalator by not walking! They don't block the intersection and we miss a light! They buy the last copy of that DVD we really wanted! They're out to get us!

    Do you see where this lead? The more we seek our comfort, our stuff, the more we get pulled into this awful, myopic worldview in which we become convinced that everyone is trying to stop you from achieving whatever it is you want. And in some cases this attitude is celebrated. It's the AMERICAN thing to do! It's self-reliance! It's independent! It reminds me of the Washington Examiner hander-outer-guy that stands at the top of the Metro Center escalator every morning. On the day before Christmas Eve his attention grabbing line wasn't "Spread the Christmas Spirit everybody!" No. It was "don't let anyone steal you joy!" Because that is what we've become worried about. Other people stealing from us, from using us, from taking advantage of us. And it makes me sad that I see that attitude so strongly in myself.

    This attitude, this defensiveness brings me back to my thesis (you probably thought I'd never get back to that, didn't you?) in that I see most of our societal ills being caused by this selfishness and defending of our territory. We want to defend our nice, quiet neighborhoods against the encroachment of "those damn Mexicans." Why? Because they make us uncomfortable. They might live with 15 people in a three bedroom house. They might play loud oompah music. They just don't fit into our nice little corner of suburbia. We never talk to strangers because, well what if they try to rob us? What if they talk and talk and talk and take up all my reading time? What if they say something that offends me? I could go on and on and on with more examples of how I see our constant territorial warfare affecting our humdrum quotidian lives. But I won't, because I'm trying to be more positive, really I am.

    I am a Christian (take that for what you will) and part of my particular worldview insists that I see the Kingdom of God in the world today, no matter how woeful things seem sometimes. So maybe the heavy rock analogy isn't a good one. Maybe (and this is where the picture at the top comes in) it's more like we're each in a room with one big window that looks out onto the windows of everyone else all lit by the beautiful sunshine of Christ. We can all see each other and communicate and share because we are united through God. This is what the Kingdom looks like to me; God and our neighbors are involved in every part of it. However, as time goes on, we see that other people are looking into our window, so we turn the shade-closer thingy so that a little less light can get in, I mean, we don't want to give up all our territory, right? It's good to have a little of "my own" space that's just for me and not for God or man, right? What if they tried to learn my secrets! And we keep progressively closing it more as we become more and more paranoid of "the others" until the shades are all the way closed. Maybe we even eventually forget that the shades were ever open. Maybe we even break of the shade-closer/opener thingy and throw it away. We try to seal ourselves off from each other. We try to seal ourselves off from God. And I believe we can seal ourselves off, irreversibly from each other. We can become so self-obsessed that we will never come back into community with others. But we can't do that with God. No matter how tightly we close those shades, light will still seep through the cracks between the slats, will still sneak in around the edges...