The Word of the Lord.

O Me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless - of the cities fill'd with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of my eyes that vainly crave the light - of the objects mean - of the struggle ever renew'd;
Of the poor results of us all - of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;
Of the empty and useless years of the rest - with the rest of me intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring - What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here - that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.

Uncle Walt1

God languished at the edge of the universe for lack of something better to do. He was just so bored by everything he had been doing for the last half of eternity (infinite minds are awfully hard to occupy indefinitely). So he told himself stories and waited to run into something or someone interesting. The universe that he had seen this far had ceased to interest him especially since there wasn't much to see, mostly shades of black on darkness; so he abandoned the void where he resided and his profound thoughts that can really only be contemplated in absence of anything else and went in search of something other than empty space and empty-headed thoughts. As there was still nothing to see God closed his eyes and watched the colors and forms that danced on his eyelids and wrote stories about the color and the little points of light. God liked to think that he was a great story-teller and his stories were filled with the detail and sensuous delight his universe was lacking. People with depth and life filled every scene; they had back stories and dialogue and were story-tellers in their own right. God was actually very proud of his creations; they were unorthodox in the void which swallowed everything that couldn't stand on two legs of truth and that they could stay in his head without being sucked up by the void as well delighted him. Most of the inhabitants of the void, those true things which couldn't be denied, agreed with its philosophy that anything that wasn't true should evaporate into emptiness because that's all lies and fictions are anyways, just emptiness, the absence of truth; some even thought God should evaporate as well since he was just full of it but none of them could deny his truth, so he stuck around and spent his days imagining entire worlds of imagining people.

With his eyes closed God could see everything ever wanted in the way of interesting worlds and things and people except one thing that he couldn't see because it wasn't inside his eyelids and he was very startled when he bumped into it. The soul that he bumped into shrieked, well it would have if it had known what a shriek was, but God had some idea and that's how he heard it. God whipped around and opened his eyes to see what he had unwittingly disturbed but like everything in the void it was black against darkness and even with Gods keen eyes he couldn't pick it out until he brushed up against it again and another shriek trumpeted in his ears. It was a speck and God feeling especially guilty for frightening it so badly cupped the speck of soul in his hands to calm it down, but when he reached out to it again to soothe it he was taken aback with shock and wonder. The little soul he held in his hands has no senses, it couldn't see the void or hear the booming voices of truths that passed though the universe whenever they were announcing their new platforms; it had never perceived or known anything until their chance encounter and since then all it felt was mortal fear. God was puzzled but his immediate reaction was to calm the trembling soul, to make it feel something other than fear since that was certainly the worst way for any truth to go through life. He spoke to it softly and tried to feed it calming thoughts but the soul was panicking at the intrusion to its previously blank mind and it darted frantically from one palm to the other only feeling more and more trapped. God was visibly upset and was afraid that if he did any more that he would only make the souls condition worse. But he wanted it to have more on its mind than just a terrifying encounter with something so much bigger than itself so he started feeding it images from its mind so that one day it might be able to remember those and not only its own experience. The soul fled eventually and God watched it go until he blinked and suddenly couldn't make out its form any longer. He had scared off the first interest thing he had run across in the universe: he sat and pondered since there was really nothing else to do and turned his mind back upon itself.

Bump! God was so confused. Bump-bump-bumpbump-bummmmp! He had been lost in thought for ages and this was such a weird, persistent feeling that had broken his reverie. He looked down at the speck that was poking him in the side with such conviction. The soul was back; and putting on the most impertinent display God had ever seen. God knew why it was here, every bump communicated the same idea and conveyed it very intently; interest, in anything God had to say. Ironically all God could think to say was "Huh."

The speck followed God wherever he went, mostly latching on to hear stories and thoughts that were constantly flowing from Gods mind and devouring each one with eager delight. God let colors and forms flow out of him and into the void where they mostly dissipated and some were captured by his enthralled parasite; God no longer cared that his thoughts were fading into nothing into the void, he was broadcasting for everyone to hear and was triumphant in the knowledge that he had one listener. Then out of nowhere came another bump-bumpbump, and God looked down; another stray soul had pressed up to God. It had just heard the faintest sound but after existing for an eternity without a single voice the soul flew to the sound of God. Suddenly scores of souls were flocking to God, all hearing and thinking for the first time. He had stumbled upon thousands of souls all clustered together as they had been since the moment of creation. They swarmed and flew around and God stood in awe for the first time in his life. All this time they had been sitting here at the edge of the infinite universe without a thought, a question, a voluntary movement or a story to speak of and every single one was now pressing up against him to hear something, well just anything at all. God thought, and pondered; he was so intrigued and he had hoped for someone to listen to his stories ever since he could remember wanting anything and now he had writers block. What to say, what is good enough? Then the very first soul did something he hadn't expected, it articulated exactly the story it wanted; it wanted to hear its own story, and at that moment God knew exactly how to begin.

God began his epic poem and said "Let there be light" and everything was bright. The souls could see the world of his invention and watched with anticipation. God separated the light from the dark to distinguish everything in it; unlike the universe, his mind was filled with things that were light on dark, where you could really see. Then he created an object, huge and permanent; a world to stand on and just for variety he gave it water and air because this world would be more than just something and the absence of it. Then God looked and said "There needs to be more, this world should be decadent and full of things that multiply to make more and more until there is no space on the world for anything stale or bland. So God imagined into his world, plants that grew and reproduced to fill water and the land. God also played with the light in the sky so it always moved and so every night he and the souls could look up and see twinkling stars: he was really on a roll. Then God looked at the teeming souls, without eyes or ears that could really only see and hear him and he decided to make them something too. He experimented with forms putting each one on the Earth and tweaking the next until finally he came up with something suitable for what they were; in fact as he saw it now they all were human and he gave each a body. The souls all started talking, touching, smelling, tasting and hearing the world God had created and they loved their story. God sat back and listened because he loved their stories too, each of them had at least one to tell. God had made them all in his image; they were all story-tellers too. They told stories of love, passion, hatred, war, honor, courage, loyalty, adventure and every quality that could motivate their tongues move. God watched every story unfold and people listened to people recount them again and again. Humans died, they died a lot but each time their souls would wake up from their dreamlike state in the universe and bed to be let back into the story of their life, even if they had to start over.

One day a soul came rocketing out of the story, screaming, shouting, cursing at the world and life itself and in his rage he ran straight into God. He looked bewildered for a moment but then aimed his curses and rants at God himself, saying that everything was a lie, screaming at him for deceiving all the people the world, never allowing them to know anything because he has shut them off from the truth and the real world. God was perplexed; no one had ever told him that they felt this way before; no one ever thought the story was a bad thing, or even a deception. He asked what the outraged soul wanted in the clearest of terms. The soul responded simply "I want to see the world for myself; I want to know what my existence really is; I want to know the truth!" "Oh." God said he picked up the tiny speck that was so full of anger and he placed him an arm's length away. "Here you are." he said and let go. The souls sight went black, his senses numb and he could no longer scream. He couldn't hear the truths trumpeting their ideologies and he barely even knew he existed at all.3 God watched with pity as the little soul squirmed and darted blindly one way and then another. He wanted something that his nature denied his having and God regretted that he could never show the souls what he feared some of them desired most, a glimpse of reality itself. It was in their nature that they were unable to sense reality for themselves and his nature was to to invent stories and fabrications and in consequence he could never truly show them it himself. He listened to the blaring truths but he could never recite their knowledge, their teachings. He looked at the souls crowded around him and wondered whether his stories had anything to teach.

The end.


1. Walt Whitman. For those of you who enjoy footnotes, Whitman is referred to as Uncle Walt in the Dead Poets Society which I just watched last week.
I found this particular poem (O Me! O Life) while searching Poets.org which I highly recommend to anyone who has some free time and can stand to read in verse. (Yes I do search poetry websites in my free time. Don't judge.)
2. The only reason this got published is because I couldn't sleep. It's 6:10am. I have church in 4 hours and 20 minutes. Hopefully the Scotts think this an appropriate excuse for falling asleep during the service.
3. I wrote the following after publishing this post on Sunday, I wasn't satisfied with the ending so I rewrote it on Monday. Just in case any of you were interested enough to read it again. =)

"Oh no, not again."

I want to feel like a real writer for once so I'm dedicating this short story to my parents who have given me a wonderful sense of humor to keep my spirits up. And to Mrs. Campbell who first taught me how to write.

Phillip had always been stuck to the rest of his family, and their constant presence was starting to agitate him. Immobilized by cellophane walls and held fast at the tail which was inconveniently stuck into his brother, Shane's breast, he couldn't even turn himself over. He just watched the world with the one eye facing out and a mind overflowing with curiosity. Phillip yearned to see the world but in the short span of his existence he rarely ever saw anything other than the box in front of him. Luck and a large marshmallow spewing snake had placed him at the edge of his family so that whenever the number of boxes to his right dwindled to three or less he could get a glimpse of the world beyond. Things moved, made noise and took boxes away constantly. Since they had arrived on their shelf Phillip had always wished for a spot right on the edge; nearer to the movement and noise that plagued his thoughts.

Compared to the thoughts excited in Phillip by the world beyond, his family's thoughts were infinitely less interesting. They spent their copious free time memorizing nutrition facts and ingredients printed on the box that claimed their entire view. It bore all the ideas that they chose to live according to, that they must always have 200 mg of sugar and 0 mg of protein and of course that Marshmallow Peeps must always be a low-fat snack. Phillip had no clue what they were thinking but he couldn't avoid it. Being physically attached right to someone's heart gave you a pretty good understanding of them, inside and out. Feelings traveled especially well down the family. Mostly there was just the dreary feeling of complacent reverence and occasionally a bit of agitation in response to his insatiable curiosity. He sometimes considered that they only scorned his interest for a lack of a better view themselves and that maybe when the box preceding theirs was removed they might find a world that was more interesting to them than meditating over a few sentences that never changed in meaning. Until the moment when he could touch the world and not just his barriers of cardboard and plastic Phillip thought he could bear the gravity of their thoughts and when that day arrived he hoped that maybe with a change of heart his family would join him in the adventures he was to have.

Phillip had no way to measure time, he knew that sometimes the lights and the noise ceased but he felt the time of light, noise and motion was much longer. The light had just arrived and murmurs of sound were starting to pass by when the box in front of them was suddenly removed. Phillip's rejoicing was almost entirely drowned out by the shock and terror emanating from his family. They had known of the world beyond from his thoughts but they were now acutely aware of their exposure, the precipitous drop before them and perhaps most keenly felt was the loss of their precious text. Phillip could hear his father's trembling prayer to be delivered from their plight and for the safe return of their saving words and guide. Momentarily their prayers and the wishes of Phillip were all answered. To the temporary horror of his family their box was removed from the shelf and placed in a bag with the other box. Phillip was in awe of all he saw. He thought that there was nothing more wonderful in the world than movement and he relished the feeling that he had dreamed about endlessly. They stopped and started, turned and accelerated, rose up and fell down and there was noise surrounding him always.

After a while the movement stopped and Phillip though desperately curious to examine his new surrounding and to be set at liberty from his cellophane enclosure and the unbearably distressing attitude his family had assumed. To his relief the movement suddenly returned and they were pulled into the open. Phillip was delighted and his anticipation only increased from observing how often their box was being handled. He dared not hope that they would be free so soon but the creature broke the plastic just below him and his anticipation was proved not to be in vain. Fresh air filled the box as it was opened and for the first time Phillip smelled aromas other than that of sugar and corn syrup. They were light and intermingling, the scents of the entire world, it seemed had all been let in at once and just for him. He watched in admiration as the creature reached in and separated one Peep to give her freedom, but his admiration suddenly turned to horror and fear as the creature lifted her into the air and without warning removed her head with it's terrifying teeth. Phillip plainly saw the disgusting saliva running down her side, ruining her crystalline coat and those vicious teeth besmirched with yellow pigment.

He could think of nothing but escape but for all of his screaming and agitation nothing could posses his feet to move. "No!" he cried aloud. "I need to live! I have to see the world! I was never meant to die! All I have seen is the inside of this box and those useless words!" At that moment he felt his father calm himself and direct his words towards Phillip. "Maybe if you had read those words more and endeavored to understand them you would not be so afraid right now. Have you considered that maybe what they were telling us all along was that this was our future and our place in the world, in the grand plan?" Phillip struggled and fought with all his might, whatever his father thought he had not intended this to be his future. He knew that those silly words they had studied were no substitute for the real world even if he would never feel it. Even their feeling of certainly, of purpose, of security in their fate could never compare with the reality that he saw through plastic walls every day. When his father was taken he felt his resolution falter for just a moment and felt the fear that still resided in him despite his courage and faith. He hadn't escaped it at all. Phillip was taken after Shane and he screamed at the top of his lungs "What was the point?! Why did I dream of adventure and the world beyond if I was just made to be food for some monster?!"

Bits and pieces fell down and dissolved. As Phillip's pieces fell on top of his family's he screamed in agony with them though for a very different reason. He had just been freed, let into the world and was now entombed again, his chance for a real life gone forever and it pained him more than being reduced to moistened shreds. As the pieces of him dissolved he calmed and just began to think "I was just food, all along. Despite my dreams and hopes for a better life, I was always just food for something else. What was the point? Did my life have more meaning than just being a low-fat snack? What about my ambition to live? Doesn't that mean anything?" His thoughts swirled around in stomach acid and were slowly digested. As his body became part of his captors he felt the thoughts swirling through monsters head too "What is the meaning of life? There are so many ideas and I don't know what is right. Where do I go when I die?" As he disappeared Phillip whispered "You are just food, food for someone else who doesn't understand it either."

The End

The title is taken from the bowl of petunias in Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
This story was inspired by a journal I wrote in fifth grade in Mrs. Campbell's class as a creative writing assignment. It was originally titled The Peeps.

"We're making a better world; all of them, better worlds"

After one semester of school I have already come to the conclusion that I really dislike the Virginia Tech College of Engineering or at least the Department of Engineering Education (though I am still set on being an engineer myself). I am sick of the focus on sustainability (yes I did just say that), the arrogance expressed in our textbook and the attitude of half the freshmen that I meet who think that all the world's problems will be solved by strapping solar panels to the blades of a windmill. I am exaggerating a lot but I have heard the phrase renewable/sustainable energy so much that you might just think it's really going to fix all the worlds problems. Well I have some sad news for the Department of Engineering Education; sustainable energy won't fix the world's problems, but neither will Jesus nor Superman; politics won't help nor will free public education (sorry if I'm saying something you don't like, but it's my blog and I can be as ridiculous as I want). With that said I would like to propose the preposterous idea that I do have the solution to all the worlds problems. Yes I am being a little full of myself but I'm entirely in earnest; and it's pretty simple (and certainly a lot easier than Jesus' commandment to love one another). All that needs to happen is for everyone to get a little more comfortable with their neighbors.

The problem that I have spotted, the one that everyone else missed is that individually we have too much space and as a race, on a planet of limited size, we have far too little. This modest proposal asks that everyone just get a little closer together. It asks for the reduction of the suburbs and the elimination of the exurbs (large McMansions that have been intentionally built in the middle of nowhere) and just to put as many people as possible in large cities. Why do something so counter intuitive? It's pretty easy to predict that when you put a lot of people together you will get a lot more robberies and muggings, the crime and violence you always find in cities. Well the first thing to think about is that with a lot more people living in one place you will certainly have a lot more police, but that is not a solution to the problem. Something to think about is that people in general would not like to live in an area with lots of crime and violence and most of the people left the city to avoid those problems. However if they do stay, the people the city will try to make their lives better, which is something people routinely do and I would hope that if they tried long enough they would eventually start to succeed. I think most of the people in the world would like the streets to be safer so they weren't afraid to leave their homes. Most would like to have good grocery stores and restaurants. If people want these things bad enough someone is going to oblige and clean up the streets, open up restaurants and other stores if only to make money off of their desire for something better.

Now that I have cleared that general concern I want to address some specific concerns.

Cities are wonderful places, if they have jobs. But the wonderful thing about having everyone in one place is that all the jobs can be in one place too. Imagine that every day, people in Town A get in their cars and drive on the free way to work in Town B 10 miles away and at the same time everyone in Town B gets into their cars to drive to work in Town A. Well doesn't this sound like every day driving to work? A river of taillights flows out in front of you on one side of the road while cars on the other side of the road drive in the exact opposite direction to where you just came from to work. Wouldn't it be great if all the people could work in their own town? Can you imagine how much gas and frustration that would save? Except the people in Town A were only qualified for jobs in Town B and the people in Town B could only find work in Town A. However if you put everyone in City C and all the jobs are there then no one has to travel for a job because it's right next to them. So, are you happy outraged environmentalists and frustrated white collar businessmen? I just saved you all 20 miles of travel every day and if the city has good public transportation then you will only need a car for family vacation and camping trips so, everyone can have an SUV without worrying about gas money.

Now there are a lot of hungry people in the world, or so I was often reminded at the dinner table when I refused to eat. How does this idea help them? Well since the whole world population is now concentrated into small areas there are now lots of places to grow good food that can be shipped to the nearest city and with all of the heat in the city it becomes a perfect greenhouse to grow foods inside large buildings as well. With so much food it becomes dirt cheap and the basic foods would be barely worth selling at all. Also with a sudden abundance of good farmland there is no reason to keep burning down the rainforests at all because that land is not needed. Nature preserves can be kept as an escape from the city and now it would be a lot more wild because there would be no people anywhere. Poor starving kid in Africa satisfied; check! Naturalists and people who chain themselves to trees satisfied; check!

Now for the cherry on top of my social planning sundae; war and disease, the two worst killers of civilizations. Disease is certainly handled much better in cities with hospitals and modern medicine than out in rural areas but what of war? One of my heroes Nikola Tesla was an inventor more prolific than the famed Wizard of Menlo Park, Thomas Edison. He invented our current system of AC power, he was the inventor of radio (which was NOT invented by Marconi!) and he invented the science of robotics. Tesla believed that with his robotics the world could engineer away war. He envisioned remote controlled planes and mechanical men to fight wars in our place. He wanted war just to become a big game until it just faded away as a novelty like every other game we have played. We have robotic planes now, electronically guided missiles and machines of war that should keep our soldiers away from the bullets flying across the battlefield but war continues, our soldiers still die and the people who lack these machines to put distance between them and the bullets die as well. War is not going to be engineered away. But if you put all the people closer maybe they won't fight each other as much. It's a pretty common idea that if you allow people to get to know each other they will fight less and less. Tesla thought that his invention of the radio would help people communicate better and reduce conflict. Alberto Santos Dumont thought that if he invented a personal plane the world would seem like a smaller place where people could get to know each other. The problem with both of these ideas is that people don't have to live with each other in either case. They still can go home at night and they still have another country to which they have sworn allegiance. People in the same city may not get along that well but they still call the same place home which is a lot to have in common. Also they can't really blow each other up, especially if the military is all on the same side.
War; Poof! Gone!

Any questions?

Well then, I am done being silly for a bit. I don't really know if this would work at all and I have hardly worked out all the details but I was just making a very long example. I just said that you couldn't engineer away war and earlier that sustainable energy couldn't fix the world's problems. In the same context you can't engineer away hunger or poverty, you can't fix deforestation with technology and you can't make people happier by making a bigger car to drive to work in. You really have to think outside of engineering to solve the problems of the world. But this plan wouldn't work without engineers, it couldn't be built, it couldn't be organized efficiently, it couldn't be designed without them. I'm still set on being an engineer though and I don't want to relegate my profession to just enabling the dreams of others. Engineers and inventors have always had the big ideas that made the world a better place and I would like to be in that position someday.

For New Years Eve I was partying with my parents at the house of a NASA engineer, Chris Burke and at the end of the night he was talking to me about how to go about being the best engineer that I could. He told me simply that I had to think outside the box, the engineering box. He started talking about perpetual motion machines and their physical impossibility but the abundance of people attempting to make them. We both knew that thermodynamics prevented them because they violated conservation of energy.** All that means is that it is useless to try to make them at all. But he suggested to me that instead of thinking they were impossible and giving up, to try and think outside of the box to use the energy that is everywhere in the world to make the illusion of one. To make a machine that seemingly could go forever and even make energy out of nothing but really just converting the energy around it. This is what engineering really is. We are not just physicists determining what is possible and impossible, and instead engineers think beyond the rules to make something interesting happen. In essence it is our job to think creatively and not keep our minds trapped in what we have learned.

This is the kind of engineering and inventing that I want to do with my life, the kind that has nothing to do with my drawing or programming skills and nothing to do with the physics and math I have learned. Those are tools which should only help us think outside the box and not define the walls that hold us in.


Ta ta for now!


*The quote in the title is from the Assassin in the movie Serenity.

**A simple explanation of the three laws of thermodynamics. 1) You can never get more energy out of a machine than you put in. You can only break even. 2) You can only break even at absolute zero. 3) You can never reach absolute zero.

Ice and Parlor Walls

Waiting out in the cold can really be an unpleasant ordeal. The cold and the wind really doesn't bother me but the waiting is what got me a week ago and the reason I care so much is that I hardly ever get bored or frustrated with waiting because there is always something interesting to do. However on this cold and blustery Saturday night there was only the traffic going in and out of Burger King, a large yellow arm blocking off the sidewalk from any errant vehicles mistaking it for a road and my mind which could only think about how much I just wanted to leave already. After a few minutes my girlfriend arrived and I we embarked on an adventure down one of the longest and darkest roads in Blacksburg to make cookies. But on the way there my mind didn't leave the bright yellow arm and the cars parked in B.K. and my utterly blank mind was eating away at me.

There's nothing wrong with boredom but I avoid it like the plague. It eats at me in that insidious way that just kills all the life within me and just makes me feel like motion is impossible. Still there is nothing that I can say about it that proves it's a bad thing; even though it's killing me inside I can't condemn it and I certainly can't avoid it. It always comes when I need a break and I need to relax, when I don't have the energy to fight it off. It comes during the holidays when I have escaped from all my work and it makes me want to escape back into hard work and bury myself under a pile of papers. Worst of all boredom strikes the fastest when I'm watching TV or my roommate playing Call of Duty 2. I look at the screen expecting to be entertained but I never am; so I get bored but I can't take my eyes off the explosions and guns on the screen because I'm waiting for something interesting to happen, something that will relieve my boredom. I see the same thing that I feel when I walk around campus past the people with headphones wedged in their ears. What they want from their music is an escape from the boredom of walking from place to place; to forget about all of the other places they would rather be and all the things they would rather be doing. It's like living in a distorted and milder version of Fahrenheit 451 where all anyone wants is another distraction to keep them from feeling boredom.

The trick of boredom is that it always appears when we don't enjoy something or more precisely it comes when we think that we would enjoy something else more than what we are doing right now. So when we are bored we try to do something we enjoy to keep us from thinking about all the things we would rather be doing. I hum and sing to myself; many people listen to music from their Ipod; a kid who was on the bus to the Math Emporium with me on Monday beat boxed the entire way there. This is a great way to avoid boredom but I keep seeing earbuds as seashell radios and Call of Duty on 54" screens as blood dripping down parlor walls* and I wonder if it's right to avoid boredom, if there isn't some other way to deal with it.

After trying over and over I have found that the best way to avoid boredom is to always occupy yourself; with activities and clubs and sports or if you want you can just join the marching band which will consume all of your time. But I am not the Energizer Bunny, I don't just keep going and going and going; I need to sit down and take a break even if I would like to just continue on with life. Also I get sick and bogged down with work, marching band and clubs end after a while and 6 months ago I graduated so I no longer have marching band, Aca Dec or rocket club. Of course I have so much work that I can barely finish it and much of the time I put it off just so I can sleep, but work and I'm assuming anything else gets tedious after awhile and sometimes all I want is a break. Finally there are times like now (Christmas break for those of you who don't own a calendar) where there is nothing to do, no work, nothing pressing to go out to do and a bunch of family members that just want to plop down in front of the TV and want you to be next to them. Right now I am spending some time in Norfolk with my grandparents and I love them dearly but the last time I was here I couldn't bear the stillness and the lack of life in their house, so I started leaving unexpectedly for things like Black Friday shopping and bar hopping with my girlfriend and midnight walks along the water near their house; I really felt like I was suffocating and I didn't know what to do.

Well the solution I have designed, since visiting them last and last Saturdays struggle with boredom while waiting for a ride, is to learn to enjoy the time in which you are relaxing. Enjoy it enough that you don't care about something else more. Trying to avoid boredom is like trying to avoid death, it is frankly impossible. There are simply not enough things in the universe to keep you interested forever and you will eventually feel it eating you away. But if you enjoy the time you are using to relax you cannot be bored. In fact if you learn to enjoy every minute of your life then boredom can't touch you, not because life is so interesting, simply because there is nothing you would rather be doing. The interesting thing is that relieving boredom doesn't require any action it just requires a thought. If your mind is ready to think about every situation so much that it can make you enjoy every moment then you don't have to worry about boredom or tedium or monotony every again because the world is just too wonderful a place for you to ever wish to be anywhere else.

The adventure doesn't end with that though; it actually continued all the way into the next morning. My girlfriend Karen and I were headed out on this long and winding road to visit her roommate from freshmen year who lives out in the country with her fiance. We made cookies with her and her family who was visiting for the weekend and had an absolutely wonderful time and around midnight we decided it was about time to head home. We had heard rain on the roof earlier that night and really only worried about the road being a little flooded but as we were getting ready to leave our hosts warned us that there might be some ice because it was so cold. Obviously neither of us was especially excited about ice on winding country roads in a small car. But we wanted to get home and there was really nowhere for us to sleep since their guest room was filled with family.

We started driving and immediately Karen began to notice how there was ice completely covering the road on a few of the hills. I wasn't really paying attention and didn't know how much were slipping until we came to a fairly sizable hill just at the edge of town. It was long and straight with a large ravine on the right side. As we went up the wheels began to slip noticeably and the car started to slow and fishtail. Karen gunned the engine a few times getting the speedometer all the way up to 70 mph barely able to get us moving faster than 2 mph up the hill.** Unfortunately for us the ravine happened to be on our side of the road and that side of the road was slanted slightly in its direction and because of this unfortunate quality hitting the brakes resulted in an unpleasant sliding motion towards the edge of the road and subsequently a 40 foot drop. We tried to get to the other, safer side of the road a number of times only succeeding in entrenching one front tire in a previously formed rut on our side of the road. I decided to get out and investigate our situation but finding my door unable to open I climbed out back door directly onto the road. I was only a little surprised by the fact that I couldn't stand on the road without supporting myself on the car. I got over to the other side of the car without falling and saw that the only way out of the rut was to back down the hill until it sloped up to meet the road about 40 feet behind us.

About this time Karen decided that she would prefer it if I tried to back the car out of the rut because she was getting stressed. So she directed me down the hill and I tried not to throw myself and her new car off a cliff. I had some difficulty getting out of the rut and ended up with both front tires in the rut at which point I pushed the pedal a little farther and got the car out but perpendicular to the road. To my utter dismay while the front tires were still spinning, the front of the car swung down the hill and the entire car slid to the edge of the road so that when I looked out the window to my left I just saw a few inches of grass and then only trees and black emptiness. For a few minutes after that I tried to drive down the hill in the wrong lane and edge the car over to the right lane. Finally after a few minutes the car fishtailed for the umpteenth time bringing the car closer than ever to the edge of the ravine. This time i could not see grass there was only blackness out my window. Karen and I both got out of the car so that neither of us would go over with it and I got the idea to push it down in neutral while steering from the outside through a window (not the best idea but at least the car wasn't spinning out of control.) It worked for about a minute but then I realized that the car was starting to roll on its own and I didn't have the strength to resist it. I ask Karen to quickly jump in the car and hit the brakes which she amazingly did before the car got away from me. We then slowly let the car down the hill with Karen driving while I walked outside making sure the car wasn't going to roll of the edge.

We eventually got all the way down the hill to the safety of a Baptist church where we called my dad and calmed ourselves down. After a few minutes we made the drive back to her friend's house and banged on their door until they woke up and let us crash on their living room couch. They brought us sheets and pillows and everyone settled in for the night. Before falling asleep Karen and I were talking and she thanked me for not yelling at her when we were stuck on the side of the hill. I was a little taken aback because I hadn't even thought of doing that but she explained that had she been with her father she would expected that out of him. When I thought back to the moment when I was trying to explain to her how to get over to the other side of the road I can distinctly remember being anxious and upset and wanting to shout directions so we could get across as fast as possible. But for a split second I thought twice about how much yelling would help and I realized that it could only make her more stressed. There was no real need for us to hurry over to the other side; I just wanted to hurry because I was afraid.

The most shocking part of my thought process at this point was that I actually felt like I understood the purpose of courtesy and manners. For those of you who don't know, I abhor formality and good manners, I really just think that they get in the way of any mutual understanding people can have because they mask any real feeling we can express. Suddenly though I understood that manners and courtesy aren't wrong or bad at all, we just keep applying them in the wrong place. They aren't meant for the dinner table and fancy receptions, instead they are meant for the most stressful situations to keep you from blowing your top. They keep you from hurting feelings and making the situation worse with outbursts and tantrums. These situations which are the most stressful of all are also the hardest times to remember your manners and to keep calm and collected. The reason manners are only ever remembered at the dinner table is because that's when it is the easiest to think about them; it's so easy that they hardly require any thought at all. So the way to really use them in the right way is to think when you are stressed and you need them the most, think to use them instead of just freaking out and think to understand your situation better so you don't panic and mistake a situation as worse than it really is.

The reason that I decided to present these two ideas in the same post, other than the fact that they were both generated the same night, is that both problems have the same solution; which is thought. Thought can relieve you of boredom by allowing you to let go of the idea that you would rather be somewhere else, doing something else. Thought is an alternative to the mindless diversions and distractions we all use on a regular basis. Thought also prevents us from reacting badly by allowing us to restrain our fear and frustration and it allows us to understand our fears instead of just trying to get away from them. I really believe that to live better that I need to think more and more until nothing is automatic and I have a real reason for everything that I do. Living doesn't have to be continually pondered and agonized over but we shouldn't let habit and routine rule our life. Life without thought, where you just do the same thing day in and day out just sounds monotonous and mundane and more fit for a machine than a person. Life seems like it has more to it than just breathing and eating and to be more than a machine I think life requires spontaneity and variety which only thoughts can conjure up. The most interesting thing about this is that now it seems that life requires effort to make it true living. In my eyes that just makes it more worthwhile.

Well that's all the thoughts I have for now. I am about to fly home and see my friends who I have not seen in over 4 months which is very exciting and it's almost Christmas which is exciting as always. I will catch Santa this year, there is sure to be an interesting story about that.

Merry Christmas! (Insert any other holiday greeting if you so prefer. =D )


*If you haven't read Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 you probably will not understand what I'm talking about. Seashell radio's were put into your ear and were almost a constant attachment to everyone's ear canal and parlor walls were replaced with large TV screens and were often filled with bright changing colors that looked like blood dripping down the walls. It's a wonderful book and possibly my favorite book of all.

**By no means should you ever think that this adventure is how you should handle getting up and down an icy hill. Karen and I made a lot of mistakes and were lucky enough to be fast learners. If you ever really want to get up an icy hill buy a very heavy car with all wheel drive and lots of sand and then call me for an explanation or talk to the nearest Canadian.

Showers... Car Washes... Freeways

I believe I should start off with a little apology for letting almost a month pass without a post or even a few words to explain how busy I have been. Now it is Thanksgiving break and I have finally recovered from an exhausting all-nighter working on the most difficult paper I have attempted. It turned out really well though I had the misfortune of believing that I needed to write 5 - 7 pages single spaced when the requirement stated the paper was to be double spaced. After handing it in I napped for 16 hours and I really needed a good rest after working myself so hard.

My post today actually begins after my sixteen hour "nap." For those of you that don't know this about me, I take very long showers. I was sore and still mostly asleep so this shower was dragging on to thirty minutes by the time I put shampoo in my hair. About this same time another one of my hall mates decided it was time for his shower. He looked like he had just woken up as well but I was shocked by his efficiency getting in. Of course any of you that have spent any time in a male dorm/residence hall will know that the first thing you notice when someone else gets in the shower is how it smells like they are literally bathing in cologne and the kid next to me was no exception. I happened to casually glance at him as I turned around in the stall and I saw that in the minute it had taken me to put shampoo in my hair, he had already started the water and started to wash himself from head down. A few minutes later as I was finally getting the last bit of soap out of my hair, I heard the water go off and in the next ten seconds he was dressed and gone. The shock of seeing someone get in and out of the shower in the same time it took for me to get soap in and out of my hair kept me standing, staring blankly at the wall for five minutes. It hardly seemed like he had taken a shower. It was more like he had just walked through an automatic car wash.

This morning in the shower I was thinking about it again, his incredible efficiency and speed in his morning routine. As I pondered it and how different it was from my own luxurious and time consuming showers I wondered if his way of showering, car wash style, meant that he really thought nothing more of his body than he would a car. Obviously the technique used was the same, spray with lots of water and soap then start from the top and work your way down and finally dry as quickly as possible to avoid spots and hard water stains. I hoped it certainly wasn't the case because how sad would it be for people to think of their bodies as nothing more than vehicles. They certainly are not as replaceable as cars and we get them for free, but they are also all that we are. Really if you take away our bodies what do we have?

But what I see is that many people do believe that all we are is the mind and that our body is just a car or bike we are chained to. I'm sure most people wish they could trade theirs in and pay a little extra for a better one too. It certainly makes a lot of sense to think that way about it. After all the human body is just a complex machine that needs fuel and maintenance just like any other; and in many ways it's just a computer as well. In essence it's a high tech car that transports and does the bidding of our soul.

It's an incredibly appealing idea too, because in our cars we are alone, completely alone; we can be who we want to be and do what we want. We're in complete control of how far we go and how fast we get there. And in the absolute solitude of our car we can be ourselves, whether that means singing, cursing out the rest of civilization, blanking out for a while, contemplating what we want to do with the rest of our day or just drive to escape everything we want to forget. Who wouldn't want to be able to just plug in some headphones for awhile so they could just be alone and be themselves, if only in their heads.

Have you ever looked at people in their cars, just while you are driving by? I don't drive a lot and I spend a lot of my time as a passenger looking out the windows, and one of the things I have noticed is that even though people on the road may only be a few feet away from you and only separated by two walls, they are in a world that is entirely their own. I wave my hands back and forth, bounce up and down in my seat, make faces and act like a child just to get their attention and to try and have some communication, but the drivers are always stuck in their own worlds. They are too busy singing along, talking to someone on the phone or just zoning out for awhile to pay attention to my antics, too caught up to even see me even though all I want is to be noticed.

It really upsets me when this same thing happens in life, when I'm on campus or walking to church and people just pass me by without a nod or a smile, like I'm a ghost. It's just like passing cars on the freeway; they don't see me, they don't care about me unless I'm about to run into them, they just want to be themselves, but only in their heads. I think people should be who they want to be, but I don't want to be ignored. I really want the drivers, and the people on the street to smile back. I just don't want to live in a world that is just a freeway, where people pass each other all the time, but never really notice who's sitting just a few feet away.

What Must I Do?

So this is the first post on the blog that I have been promising to the Facebook community for over a month and to myself for a much longer time. I'm sorry that it is so late in coming to fruition but my honest reason for not beginning it sooner is that I have never made adequate time in which to complete it. I finally found, after a month and a half of trial and error, that I can accomplish much more in a limited space of time if I simply make time for everything in advance (meaning that I actually use my planner for once.) As this is the case I believe that I have been humbled to the point where I must publicly make note that my mother was right and being able to keep a calendar is indeed a very important skill to have.

Now I want to get down to the essence of why am writing this blog. However it is already 12:30 Thursday morning and I need to get enough sleep to wake up in time for my 8 am Calculus class tomorrow. For that reason I am going to attempt to finish this blog in as little time as possible. Anyways, getting back to the blog, the name of this particular post and it's content were both inspired by another blog written by the Rev. Kurt Wiesner. His most recent post by the same name is a sermon written on a reading from the Gospel of Mark and it is certainly one of the best that he has ever published. I will try to avoid telling the entire story or paraphrasing too much of his sermon since I believe that he had done much better justice to the story than I could right now. But I feel that I must tell you a little bit about the man that this story revolves around. I don't mean Jesus as much as the man who seeks him out. He is a man who is searching for greater meaning , but he is sad and frustrated even to the point of despairing because though he has led a virtuous and admirable life up to this point he still finds that at times his life is lacking meaning. It's that feeling that you get where you are just empty, drained an worn out, and when you really think about it the question that you always ask yourself is "Why does it feel like something is missing?" Maybe most of us don't feel this feeling as acutely as him but there are always the times when at least I feel that no matter what the effort I put forth, there is always just something deep at my core that is absent and has always been, I just learned to be without it.

I live a life that sometimes feels empty, what should I do? Should I try to fill it up, cram my life so full that I have no time to feel empty alone or lost? I don't really believe that this would be an honest way of dealing with the emptiness in my life. If I were to just fill up my life I would never have asked myself what is it that I am missing and much more importantly, if I never gave myself time to feel the emptiness how would I ever know if indeed it had been filled. This wouldn't be honest because it would give me such an easy way to lie to myself and to claim that I was whole and healed without ever having proof that I actually was. It's only one of many ways I could have tried to fill the hole in myself, there are probably as many hypotheses concerning how to fill this hole as there are stars in the sky. Hey if there are so many ideas why hasn't someone told me how to fix my life already, really it can't be that big of a secret, right? Well the truth is that I have been bombarded with possible solutions since I was a child, but not a single one has gotten through to me. That's why I'm not going to talk about the solution Jesus gives to the man in the story for now. Even though I am sure that he is right in every possible way, I just cannot believe that his solution is exactly right for me.

The essence of this blog and the meaning behind it's existence lies in that previous statement, I cannot believe Jesus' words or the words of anyone not for any lack of faith or understanding. The only reason that I cannot believe them is that they are not my own. Not to say that the words that come from my word are better than any other words but any thoughts that I construct with a deep personal understanding are a truth for myself even they on the surface they don't seem profound or of universal importance. The reason that I am seeking this personal truth is that it is essential to what I am really searching for and that is a way to live life itself. I actually don't believe that finding truth about myself, knowledge alone really can't fill up the emptiness in me, however I believe that living into life as fully as possible is something that can. It is such a contradiction to say that to undo this empty feeling in my life I am trying to live a full life but to do this I cannot just fill my life up. But they are not the same thing. Living a full life is a bit more complicated than that and interestingly enough it begins with a very similar contradiction for me.

I have said for a month or two that how I begin to live life fully is by choosing to live every day. Well, how is that really different from what I have been doing for my entire life? Obviously I must have been choosing to live for more than just two months otherwise I wouldn't be alive to write this blog. But I believe that choosing to live is a much different thing than just waking up and going about my normal routine every day and before I discovered that I could make the choice the only time I ever really did live was when I chose to through random chance. You see, choosing to live is such an important step for me because once I choose to live I find that I want every other choice I make to agree with that most basic decision because if the subsequent choices I made did not reflect the first then if would mean nothing at all. What I really want to say is that once I make the choice to live I can no longer go about my life forgetting to ask myself the most basic questions that really if I forgot to ask myself them I wouldn't really be living at all. One thing that I believe defines human life is our ability to make choices about everything that we do but if we hold off from deciding anything at all what makes us any different from the rest of the world which goes on only according to the laws of physics and their own instincts. Understand that to me this simple daily act of choosing life over death is so much more important than choosing not to die. It is choosing to be human, to be a creative force not bound by any laws of nature and have meaning beyond that of a rock or tree or toothbrush. Now to bring this back to the idea of personal truth and the meaning behind this blog, I try to choose every day to live fully into the world, but only with a knowledge of myself can I understand what choices I must make to fulfill this dream of living fully, and once I have a complete knowledge of myself then the life i live will be complete as well.

In this final statement I want to draw again from Kurt's blogs as well as from the blog of another Episcopal priest Joy Caires. The conclusion of Kurt's blog post is that what the man who has come seeking help from Jesus is missing is simply that he is not vulnerable to the world. Wait what does that have to do with choosing to live. We the wonderful thing about vulnerability is that is allows us to make choices every day that we wouldn't normally make, to never take things for granted which is exactly what makes us alive. The other side of my understanding can be found in Joy's blog. In a post from this summer she concludes that "living is daring to do the joyful things" not just doing the joyful things but daring to do them. In that word lies all the meaning of life. That we cannot just live a certain way and be alive, we have to choose and dare to live the way we want to. Being complete is not a state of being that I can achieve by living according to a set of rules, it is just a mindset where everything is chosen, to keep me alive.

Well now that I have already given away the essence of what this blog will be about I will certainly have to get more creative in the future just to keep you all interested. I hope to post again soon and wake up in time for my Calculus class tomorrow.

Bonsoir!

p.s. Since I am posting this almost 24 hours after I wrote it I would just like everyone to know that I did make it to my 8 am Calculus this morning, which was a good thing because we were learning integration by parts which I really need to know. Anyways I woke up 13 minutes before my class started and still made it there with one minute to spare. Hooray!