Tag Archives: about me

1827 days

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In a few hours I will have completed thirty-five trips around the sun. This isn’t a tremendous accomplishment, for the most part I was just along for the ride and hanging on for dear life; and based on the average maximum age of the men on both sides of my family, I’ve got about ninety years in me, so I’m still a decade away from half way there.

Still, a friend of mine pointed out a few days ago that thirty-five is “the age when even the elderly don’t think you’re young anymore.” That kind of hit me.

Birthdays Past and a list for the future…

If you waxed this, you’d get less smurf on your hands.

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The last time I wrote about the van I drove for two years in high school, mockingly dubbed “The Smurfmobile” by friends, I noticed that I only recalled fond memories. This amuses me because when I was driving it, I wasn’t fond of it at all. Not ever. Not for even one moment.

When I was sixteen, I didn’t think fondly of “my” van because it wasn’t even my van; it was my Grandma’s van that she had bought for her drapery business and taken all of the benches out of except the one in the back. It smelled like an old van. It LOOKED like an old van. And to a sixteen-year-old kid, it was about as cool as Dan Quayle. I was perpetually “borrowing” it, even though my grandma had no use for it and had her own little Subaru that she drove regularly, it never EVER was “mine” by any stretch of the imagination.

Yet, I had no reason to despise it. It never broke down, it never failed me, it never caused any issue that I can ever remember. It just trucked along like the old, true-blue trooper that it was.

Memories of a van, a bonfire by a lake, and the music of 1992…

What I’m Looking For – Line 13

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Felt the healing fingertips

For almost nineteen years I have been a liar. When asked about this, I have never told the truth about these events. Not even once. For about two months after it began, I thought about this all the time. After September 28, 1992, I have not let it cross my mind more than a dozen times.

Total.

Teenage boys spend a lot of time thinking about “First _;” “First Kiss,” “First Base,” “First Time,” …and we anticipate them in that order. I was no exception, but the summer before my Junior year of High School I still felt like I was a lifetime away from any of those. I’d had a couple of girlfriends in the “chaste hand-holding and going-steady when there’s nowhere to go” sense of the word, but nothing serious enough to even warrant a reasonable shot at that mythical moment of lip-locking that some of my friends talked endlessly about.

I constantly felt behind, which I know now is a pretty normal state of mind for a teenager. Personally, I had almost no first hand knowledge about “serious” boy-girl relationships; and all my second-hand knowledge was either bragging or hearsay, neither of which were particularly reliable even when coming “from the source.” Compounding that, in a private/parochial/conservative Boarding High School in the early 90s, no one who knew better was actually telling us “the truth.” It was like there was a big secret out there that we were all searching for, and none of us were smart enough to actually compare notes. How much we REALLY knew was a closely guarded personal secret, and discussing it put you at risk for exposing what you didn’t know, and the social tragedy that would ensue. Falling to the status of complete-social-outcast always felt like it was just one mistake away. No one makes a mistake if no one talks about it…so silence was the rule of the herd.

The first time I’ve ever talked about my first time

Slight Navigation Fixes

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GREETINGS!!!

See, not dead! (and I know some of you suspected different.)

Ok, so this isn’t a post per se, just a quick note. I’ve watched several people visit this blog recently from my GoodReads profile and They tend to start with my navigation section on the left, hitting my Author’s Note, the Preface and Prolog, and then they start in on some recent posts. They usually find one of the last “What I’m Looking For” posts and then peter out. Mostly I blame the ridiculous length of my average posts, but I also realized (ok, someone emailed me and told me) that navigating within the larger sections is pretty much impossible.

So, I’ve added a top page for the “What I’m Looking For” series and stuck it in the Navigation Pane, and also put some line by line links in the posts. I’ll try to keep up with that as I add more.

Which brings us to the next point, i.e. adding more.

I’ll be honest, I’m struggling with this right now. Not because I don’t know what to say, or I have a hard time writing the next few lines…it’s because I don’t like what the next few things say about me. So far the sequence has largely followed events from my youth and teen years, and while I’ve really learned something from writing some of them, for the most part they don’t make a statement about who I am now. Mistakes or victories that happen when you’re a teenager (or younger) are meaningful, but they’re not necessarily indicative of who a person is as an adult.

I just finished reading an autobiography, and I was reminded of a quote a college professor once passed on: “Autobiography is when we tell the story of our life the way we want to remember it. Biography is when someone tells it like it really was.”

So far I’ve tried to be relatively true to my personal history, even when I don’t look particularly “cool” or “suave” or “with it.” Not being “with it” isn’t something that is particularly bad, or even particularly unusual; especially for teenagers and young adults. But what comes next is largely bad. And ugly. And I don’t get to hide behind the “I was just an awkward teen” defense anymore.

I once started to draft a post about all of this titled “The Lesser Angles of My Nature” that never got past paragraph one because I’m terribly disappointed in myself when I read back through it. But, I’ve started to recount my past, and what makes me “me,” and that means being true to the history, even when it’s not the Autobiography I wish I could write.

Bare with me, the next few lines are coming. Perhaps slowly, and with stops and starts, but they are coming.

[Word Count: 466]

In Defense of the March Hare

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This is the second of my “Things I Like” posts and I’ll admit that the topic isn’t something I’ve always been comfortable with.  Let me go on record as saying that I’m a fan of Playboy magazine.  Specifically, Playboy magazine from before about 1975.  I was a subscriber in the mid-to-late 90′s and I have nothing against the more recent generation of the publication, but I vastly prefer the era before airbrushing, cosmetic surgery and full frontal nudity.  But my preference actually has very little to do with the photos and a lot to do with the fiction, the interviews and the journalism that defeated McCarthyism and ushered in a new era where adults took control of their own pursuit of personal, and cultural, pleasure.

A couple of things make it uncomfortable for me to talk about Playboy magazine:

First, I grew up in a conservative world with a lot of focus on “moral values” and “pure thoughts” being pushed pretty much from kindergarten until I graduated from high-school and entered the real world.  Any of the secular things that might have been seen as salacious or risqué were not only prohibited, they were generally treated as though they didn’t exist at all.  I doubt I had an educator or pastor from K through 12 who would admit to having ever seen a movie in a theater, as “theaters were the devil’s playground” according to Ellen White.

Second, I consider myself a feminist.  An actual, “equality for the sexes” true believer.  While I accept that there are some (physical) activities that are inherently more well suited for the average member of a particular gender’s physical build, muscle mass, and bone density; I’ve met women who could do any physical job a man could do including roughneck, work cattle, shoot things, and play american football.

More about feminism, porn and why 1975 was “The year of the bush”…

Blood of a Lazarus Heart

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Alright, I’ve started writing this post three times, so this one MUST be the charm.

I haven’t felt like this in a long time and I guess I wasn’t expecting the depression to hit quite so hard.  Sarah, my eight-year-old daughter, has gotten on a plane and flown back to her mother.  She was here for her spring break, and I was lucky that it coincided with my birthday on the 14th.

We took her to the airport Friday and she completely and utterly didn’t want to go back.  I understand, we have chickens and goats and horses and 20 acres of woods to explore and a giant house to ramble about in; but, never the less, we took her up to PDX and I sat in the gate as she walked to the plane and then waved once more through her tears before climbing the stairway and disappearing for another long span of months.

Now, I find myself in that dangerous place, the place where I have trouble balancing the world “as it is” with the world “as I wish it could be.”  Right now, it would be very easy for the dragon to grab me by the throat again and squeeze me for all I’m worth once more.

Which brings me full circle back to writing and blogging and whatever.  There was a time when I wrote things that I was proud of having written.  I have not felt that way about something I’ve blogged in a long time.  At one point I felt that anonymity was the key; that by being behind a veil of self-defense, I had the freedom to say things in a way that wasn’t filtered and ultimately made for better writing.  Now, I think that’s just crap.  I think that for the last year or so I’ve just been too damn cautious in my writing, and that it has suffered for it (when and if I even bothered to post it).  It wasn’t the anonymity that made it better, it was the confidence to just write and let the chips fall where they may.  I used to be the kind of person who “did” first and “worried” later (if ever).  Now, I calculate everything.  I analyze, and measure, and contingency – until I don’t act at all.

More self-reflection PLUS music and lyrics…

Seven Things About Moi

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Alrighty, so I was tagged for an award by my lovely wife/fellow blogger/training partner/life coach and I’m extremely tardy in posting it up.  I am supposed to tag fifteen blogs that I am new to following, which, would be impossible.  I don’t follow fifteen blogs regularly in all of the blog-o-sphere, so fifteen new ones is just not gonna happen.

I am also supposed to list seven things about myself I’ve not mentioned before.

Seriously?  I wrote out “101 Things About Me” twice already with no overlap…I’m tapped out people!

Oh, OK.  Fine.  How hard can seven things be?  Right?

The actual list PLUS maudlin pensiveness follows…

*Poetic Translation

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As my wife pointed out, it would have been more meaningful if I’d have added the translation to the latin I was studying.  My problem is that the translation loses so much, especially since a five-hundred year old version of that passage in english is perhaps the most well known prayer in Christianity, and english from five hundred years ago doesn’t really speak to the intent of the passage as well as I’d like.

The latin is taken from the Roman Catholic Common Mass.  If I were to translate it myself, it would start something like:

Father of all things, existing above and beyond in a place outside of our dimension, we hold sacred even the invocation of our feeble human attempt to describe you.  May the entirety of creation come to know unity, and a transcendence of our mortal existence through an utter and all encompassing surrender to the perfection and peace that is your intent and plan for all creations in every shard and facet of the universe.

As a child asks for food at a grand dinner table, laid out with delicious things to eat, so do we ask for that which you have already prepared for us.  The request honoring the offer to provide that you have already made to us.

We ask that you will actively and personally forgive and redeem us from the failures we have stumbled into; both failures with the holy and infinite, and failures with others here in our day-to-day experiences.  As you forgive and redeem us, so do we seek the knowledge and grace to imitate and repeat that forgiveness with others who have failed in their relationships with us.

Guide us away from those things which will cause us to fail you and others, and when we begin to go down the wrong paths and blind alleys, we ask that you would lead us back to the best roads and the safe harbors that will help us continue to improve ourselves, our families, our communities, and our world.

That about covers the first paragraph, from “Pater noster” down to “sed libera nos a malo.”

The current Missal translates that paragraph as follows:

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.  Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.  Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who have trespassed against us.  And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Yes, I realize my translation is more “wordy” but there’s just so much more poetry to the actual latin (and even more so with the actual source Greek, but that’s another post for another time).

Ash Wednesday

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I will go into more detail about this later; probably a lot of detail, and probably not much later:

For Lent, I’m giving up Agnosticism.

(That line KILLS in the right circles.)

What follows is a quote I’ve spent a lot of time reading over and thinking through.  For all three of my readers, I realize I’m the only one who can read it as quoted.  Sorry about that.

Pater noster, qui es in cœlis, sanctificétur nomen tuum: advéniat regnum tuum: fiat volúntas tua, sicut in cœlo et in terra panem nostrum quotidiánum da nobis hódie; et dímitte nobis débita nostra, sicut et nos dimíttimus debitóribus nostris: et ne nos indúcas in tentatiónem. Sed líbera nos a malo.

Líbera nos, quæsumus Dómine, ab ómnibus malis prætéritis, præséntibus, et futúris, et intercedénte beáta et gloriósa semper Vírgine Dei genitríce María, cum beátis Apóstolis tuis Petro et Paulo, atque Andréa, et ómnibus sanctis, da propítius pacem in diébus nostris: ut ope misericórdiæ tuæ adjúti, et a peccáto simus semper líberi, et ab omni perturbatióne secúri.

Per eúmdem Dóminum nostrum Jesum Christum Fílium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitáte Spíritus sancti Deus.

Per ómnia sæcula sæculórum.  Amen.

I promise: not preachy, just personal. To each his own.

Nothing Spectacular

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So, last night I stepped on a scale for the first time since last autum.  I was expecting to be EXACTLY where I was then, about 275 give or take a pound or two.

254

That’s more than twenty lbs.  I haven’t even DONE ANYTHING yet.  I gave up Soda…big whoopie deepie doo.  Well, and started tracking my calories.  Again.

Now, this is exactly what I don’t want to get into this time around.  No focusing on the scale, no pouring over every missed opportunity, no berating myself every time I eat more than 2000 calories in a day.  The number on the scale is just a number.  It’s not me, it doesn’t say ANYTHING about how healthy I am, what I look like, what I FEEL like…just how much resistance a pressure pad dispersed when I stood on it.

I will not be posting regular weigh-ins here.  In fact, I doubt I’ll weigh myself again anytime soon, it doesn’t help me.  In fact, it does the opposite; I generally either feel bad about not losing enough, or I slack off because I think I’m ahead.

But not this time, no weight goals carved in stone.  My only goal is to dive into the water at the breakwater docks and swim under the Hawthorne Bridge on August 22nd; swim, bike and run like a man possessed; and not stop until I cross the finish line in Waterfront Park.  750 m in the water, 26 km on a bike and 5 k on my feet.  I don’t have to “win”.  I don’t even have to do well.  Just finish in less than four hours.

If I train well enough to survive, then weight loss is possible.  But it’s not about the weight loss, it’s about finishing.  I just want to finish.

And tonight I took the first steps down that path, litterally.  I stretched, warmed up with a slow walk for 3 minutes, walked at a fast pace for 10 minutes, ran for 2 minutes, walked at the same fast pace for another 10 minutes and finished with a two minute cool down.  Nothing spectacular, it’s my first time on the treadmill in a LONG time and my first time ever in the new shoes…so I took it easy.

One down, four more days to go.