Monthly Archive for April, 2007

Silent No More

Published on Monday, 30th April, 2007 in Activism, Blogging, General and personal philosophy. 3 Comments

I know it’s been a while, and I wish I could blame my absence on school or work or any number of other things, but I can’t really. All I can say, dear people, is that I have been negligent.

I chose today to make sure to post. Today, you see, has been set aside to be a Day of Silence in the blogosphere, in memoriam of the Virginia Tech victims. Let me get something straight: I am not posting today to be spiteful towards these people who are abstaining in remembrance. If that is how they wish to give their condolences, then more power to them. Secondly, I also realize that the VT people don’t need anyone else speaking for them. Thanks to the Big Media, we got 24 hour coverage of the whole thing. (That’s something I take issue with too, but that’s for a later entry)

I’m posting today not to be in defiance of that effort, but I am posting today because that’s what I think the world needs to do. I’m not saying that what happened was a big deal, but what I am saying is that if we allow this event, or any other disaster, to make our collective wheels stop spinning, then the gunman/extremist group/whatever wins. A disruption, a pause in the status quo, people stopping to gawk. It garners attention, which is exactly what is desired.

My heart goes out to the families and friends of the VT shooting victims, but forgive me if I refuse to give attention to a madman. Forgive me if I encourage VT, their families, and their friends to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and show themselves, the university, the city, the state, the country, the world that they are made of the tough stuff. They are strong, and they are victorious, and they are unstoppable.

Gunmen, bombers, natural disasters, you name it: we are a country who stands strong, and we are a country who remembers our dead by working to better the place in which they so needlessly died. We remember our dead with honor, not with pity, but with staunch resilience to continue on, to improve, to edify, to make sure the world remembers what we stand for.

I realize that the VT shooting was no Civil War, but Abraham Lincoln spoke truthfully when he said “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

So, be strong; live strongly; remember fondly your family and friends who died, and work ever the harder to make them proud.

HAHA, because it makes you human.

Published on Tuesday, 24th April, 2007 in General, Life and personal philosophy. 0 Comments

Rachel has done it again. Another blog entry spawned from some off-handed comment she made.

First of all, I guess you all need to know how this all went down. She and I were chatting away earlier this morning (Tonight? Who knows. It’s 2:00 right now, and I haven’t gone to bed. I’m on the fence on that issue, but that’s another entry.), and I showed her a story I had written. After she read it, she, very graciously, complimented me on a well written piece. With instant messaging being an entirely textual medium, I genuflected virtually, like so: “*bows and does that stupid finger twirl thing*”

I suddenly realized that I had just said “that stupid finger twirl thing.” That may not seem like such a big deal, since I don’t know of a word that conveys that particular idea, but after being lauded for writing ability, it was a little non sequitur. I mentioned my amusement that I could be so articulate at some times and so non-articulate at others; to which she replied, “HAHA, because it makes you human.”

It’s a wonder to me that the imperfection, the non sequitur, and the idiosyncratic are the definitions of who we are as humans. If you really think about it, you’ll notice it’s true. When you describe a person, you point out the things which stand out. “She had long, blone hair and big boobs” “He walked with a limp, and he only had one arm.” You wouldn’t describe a person as “Well, she was a perfectly average woman. She had normal hair, and a run-of-the-mill chest.” or “Well, he was male, and he had on some clothes, and he had arms, and legs.”

It is the strange, the different, the out of place that catch and hold our attention, to the point were we might just be losing our appreciation for the merely average, the mundane, the day-to-day. Have you ever stopped to consider how amazing your car is? How amazing that computer you’re using to read this is? How amazing it is that by rubbing a piece of processed wax a person can be clean? How amazing it is that the pen you have in your pocket is nearly identical to millions of others?

The world around us if chock-full of amazing things, and often, if they’re really examined, the day-to-day workings of our lives can really make us human.

On First Loves

Published on Tuesday, 24th April, 2007 in Creative Nonfiction, Life, Love and Memories. 4 Comments

On First Loves

Like the weasel, love is wild. As a slightly overweight—soft I’ll say—male, the high school dating scene held a few challenges for me. But, as my grandfather always said, “Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then.” Find a nut I did.

Her name was Samantha. Her shoulder-length downy hair culminated, as one would reasonably expect, at the top of her scalp. That scalp reached almost to a foot below my own. Her emerald eyes sparkled when she smiled, or should I say grinned? Her pale lips never quite made that inverted parabola; rather they curled inward at the ends much like the Grinch’s smile did. She was a very fine nut indeed.

Our love started simply enough. She and I had several classes together and got to know each other fairly well. I invited her to church several times. The two of us began to talk more and more often, and those first sprouts of a blossoming relationship began to spring from the topsoil of shared experiences. I have always been one for romance, hopeless though it may be, so rather than “asking her out” directly, I wrote a rather clever short story in which the main character was a bumbling oaf asking a beautiful princess to be his girlfriend. The ending was left intentionally blank, allowing for Samantha herself to pen the fate of that bumbling oaf. Later that day, I received my story back with a hug attached, and so it was that things became “official.”

Samantha and I (it was mostly me) were plagued with all the loveable awkwardness that young puppy love awards such star-crossed teenagers. In the age where girlfriends and boyfriends were required to hold hands, I was an odd duck because the very prospect filled me with such paralyzing fear that I was not the one to make such a brave move, but am I ever glad she was braver than I in that respect. The tight intertwining of fingers even now makes my fingers twitch in delight. Each of her fingers sat gracefully between each of mine; the slight pressure of the stretch our hands had to make to accommodate the foreign phalanges gave me then and gives me now that warm fuzzy feeling that crawls from the base of the spine into the base of the brain. That warm fuzzy clouds any and all sane judgment, so be wary.

Things could not have been better. About a month and a half after I timidly “asked her out,”—as was the custom of my peer group—, I spent the day at her house lounging around the pool. Both our sets of shoulders had been drawn taut and painted red by the day’s relentlessly beating rays. The sweltering Texas sun made the pool a welcome refreshment to quickly parching skin.

We laughed. We talked. I was totally enamored with this girl. For lunch, we made my favorite meal: a warm, gooey pot of macaroni and cheese. We ate; we laughed; we talked some more. As the sunlight quickly waned, she and I were sitting nervous hand in nervous hand in her room. She asked what my favorite part of the day had been. I thought hard, hands twitching, trying to decide which particular moment was the best part of what had already seemed to be a perfect day. Out my answer came thudding dully to the floor saturated with that sap only puppy love can produce: “Everything.”
She giggled and I felt my face begin to burn. Burning hotter than its sunburn should, that sudden rush of insecurity that threatens faintness washed over me. And then it passed. I returned the question expecting, hoping for that same sap I had just delivered when it happened.

“When I did this,” she said.

I can still feel her hands gently grasping the sides of and turning my unbelieving head. There were ten nearly imperceptible tingles as her fingers gently pushed causing minute movements in my hair. Then, as equally unfathomable as it was expected, the painful scrape of sunburned nose on sunburned nose. Then with the softest of touches, the lightest of brushes, her lips and mine did meet: warm, moist, the slightly ferrous taste that only a kiss can bring. Then it was over.

Her face was a new shade of red— red as the digital clock on the table across the room that read 9:18—we both giggled uncontrollably as that mind-numbing warm fuzzy filled both our brains. My face burned ever more fiercely with a new found modesty being simultaneously created and destroyed within me. That night, that week, that month, these last five years, I have carried the memory of the soft, moist, warm first kiss.

From that point onward things went well for us. We were young, and the longer we were together, the more and more that puppy love grew into a Dalmatian, then a St. Bernard.

First-love giddiness left my mind swimmy and after a year of our relationship she decided that it was time for our love to come to an end. I went from swimmy to sunk in a matter of seconds. Having been thoroughly crushed by the loss of my first love, I withdrew. The warm fuzzies had faded; rather, it was a cold prickly feeling snaking up my spine, wrapping itself ‘round my stomach, forcing its barbs deeply into each of my internal organs before bursting forth to the indescribable horror of those around me as the gore of my heart spilled forth from the gaping hole left in my chest.

Although that particular event was one of the more painful events in my short lifetime, it should be duly noted that broken hearts do mend. Immediately after she and I had parted ways, I felt as if I was swimming in tar. Every movement I made only served to stick me faster in the quagmire. The year following our breakup was a year of torture. The barbs of the cold prickly dug deeper and deeper as I struggled through the flypaper valley I had found myself in. I had some good friends who dug deeply in the muck and mire to rescue their quickly sinking buddy, and those friends will forever have a debt owed them.

I was young. She was young. Perhaps it was foolish to think of things beyond our ages, but I will never forget the tingles in my hair, the comfort of the pressure of another hand in my own, that warm, fuzzy, swimmy feeling that enveloped my brain. My first love will always and forever hold a place in my now mended heart. Other nuts are out there, scattered on the forest floor, and this blind squirrel will keep searching for the perfect nut for me.

The Black Donnellys

Published on Monday, 16th April, 2007 in Activism, General, TBD and TV. 0 Comments

Well, NBC canceled what was, to me, the best show they had running: The Black Donnellys. There was instantly a petition was created that has since garnered over 24,000 signatures.

If you would like to see TBD after Heroes again, you ought to sign the petition too. You can go to the Petition Page to sign your name, and maybe, just maybe, NBC will listen.

Ethiopian Banquet

Published on Sunday, 15th April, 2007 in Creative Nonfiction, Faith, Fundraising, General and Project Ethiopia. 0 Comments

Three weeks ago, the Project Ethiopia team started planning for a banquet which was held last night (the 14th). I have no reservation in saying that the first night of planning was disastrous. The rest of the team, I thought, was being a mite too altruistic about the whole thing, and I was—as always—the eternal pessimist, seeing half-empty (if not completely dry) glasses all over the place, but none were daunted—except for me. I was convinced that the banquet was going to be a failure; we were going to lose money, not raise it; and, worst of all, we were going to be made to look as fools in front of friends, family, and whomever else we were able to cajole into coming. I was not pleased.

The next week, I couldn’t make the meeting, so I’m not sure what all was worked out there, but from the emails that began flying around—and I think there were somewhere in the vicinity of 700,000 by the time the thing was said and done.—I was still not at all certain that the thing would work. Then came Wednesday the 11th of April, just 3 days before the banquet was scheduled, and everything was still in disarray. I voiced my concern to team leader, Jordan Callaway, after the meeting, and we went on from there, with my promise to continue to help as much as I could, even though I was prepared for, and expecting, failure.

I ended up getting up at 6:45 Saturday morning to drive to Dallas to pick up the food, and our resident Ethiopian, Asmamaw tagged along. Boy, was I glad he was there. The people were all speaking in Ethiopian, and I would have been completely lost had I been there alone. When we got to the Ethiopian church in Dallas, we were taken to the kitchen where we were shown two tubs of what appeared to be soup and I was floored. I bitterly and angrily thought that these people had just given us a gallon of soup to feed 150+ people, and they expect $125 for it? They must be kidding. Asmamaw seemed very happy, but Asmamaw always seems very happy. After that, I found out that I had to go buy Injera (Ethiopian bread). I was under the assumption that we were going to Dallas to buy a completed meal for $125, not that we were going to have to buy more stuff. I kept my mouth shut, soldiered on, and we made it back to Longview 7 hours after we had left. At that point, we had to begin preparing everything immediately.

At this point, I was unsure whether or not I thought the banquet might just happen, or if I still thought it was going to be an utter disaster. Sodexho, the food service company that serves LeTourneau University, was amazingly helpful. They allowed us to warm the food in their professional warmers, use their counter space to prepare the salad and the Injera, and gave us all sorts of equipment for free that we normally would have had to rent from them. As we began to unload the food in the kitchen, Asmamaw started telling us what was in it, and how to prepare it. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the soup we picked up was not just soup, but a full lamb dish. I suddenly felt much better about the money we spent to get it all. I’m sure if I spoke Ethiopian, I would have known all that sooner, but learning Ethiopian just hasn’t quite come up on my to-do list.

I spent the next couple of hours preparing food, ordering some volunteers about, and making sure everything was setup and ready to begin serving at 5:00 pm. At 4:50, I had to leave so I could shower and get ready for the evening.

When I returned, the food had been moved from the kitchen to the banquet hall, the sternos had been turned on about an hour before, and we were ready to keep the food hot and serve the arriving guests. The banquet went off without a hitch. Everyone who came (and there were about 120-130) was served, afterwards, the volunteers, musicians, and Project Ethiopia members were also served. This banquet, for which we had no idea how many people were coming and for which it didn’t look like we would have anywhere near enough food, was truly a fish and loaves situation.

At about 6:45, fifteen minutes after the banquet was scheduled to be over, I stood in the serving line, plate in hand, ready to enjoy my portion of the fine Ethiopian cuisine. Asmamaw came over and asked if we had anything left because someone just came in and wanted food. I looked down and saw that there was enough for just one more person, told him so, and began to scrape the last of the food out onto the plate to take to this final guest. When I set the plate down in front of him, I had a thought (surprising, I know). This meal had just served everyone here except for me. I, the one who, from the beginning, said it was going to be a failure, was the only person who did without. Now, I don’t know for sure, and I don’t guess I really will, but I cannot help but wonder if that was a moment where God just finally beat me over the head, saying, “Just have a little faith, you idiot.” That moment has changed my jaded outlook on the whole trip.

After some setbacks in fundraising, I decided that if I was going to go to Ethiopia this summer, God would have to provide a way, and like the banquet, I didn’t at all expect that to happen. After the banquet, my dad and I went to get something to eat because I was hungry and he wasn’t so fond of the Ethiopian food. My dad mentioned that he was thinking much differently about the trip than he was the last time we had spoken on the subject. I voiced my similar opinion, and he decided that he would support me to go. What a windfall.

Not only did God show me that I needed a little faith, but he also provided a way to go to Ethiopia. He’s a big God; he’s a good God, and he’s a God with a sense of humor, too.