looking back on my life thus far i see a lot of places where i've tread the path of the trendy. i follow what the world does. anywhere from my attempt at punk rock (to which i still reap the benefits today) to the "ska ska ska" anthem which i held onto probably longer than most. this is mostly music, but that's where i see it most. now its the quasi-chic emo scene. and these things i truly enjoy, but i wonder where i'll be in a few years, will i just follow the curve of my sub-culture...i feel i've done that thus far. i've just moved as it moved, i conformed to its patter. or i wonder if i'll anchor myself, like my dad, to the music of my prime. a comedian once said "if you look at old people you can see they had one good decade and then decided to ride that out for the rest of their life." i wonder if i'll be like that. will i still wear cargo shorts and t-shirts one size too small? i realized this weekend, being away from austin and really having a vacation for once, that i need to zoom out on life. i get so burdened by watching my planner (iCal) fill up that i want to become a monk. i guess its the nature of our society, we have to be at work at a certain time. there i go, conforming to society again. but i think i need to rework my mind, get it transfromed somehow (jesus) and see my life on a enjoyment scale. sure every minute of every evening was planned for the last eight weeks straight, but what did i do? what did i take? and sometimes when i ask myself i say "nothing". that's not the best answer, but i can use that as a learning tool.
"men like to create, then maintain" - mark driscoll mars hill church
i have to agree wholeheartedly. i don't like the maintaining part so much, but it comes with the territory. its the man side of the issue. any old bloke can create something, but a man will maintain it. but enough of that soapbox, i just sat around all last night smiling to myself because i made a (what i think is) good song. there's something to ponder.
so now i'll fill out the form that pulls my money out of my retirement fund and in a few hours walk away from here never to return. i'll expunge my collection of mountain dew bottles and caps and leave. but not with out my collection of awkwward application materials to be forwarded to reagan ray for catalogging. take care and God bless.
so as mentioned before, traer rock and rolled. but what else has been going on? well...
my roommate got engaged . . . to my ex-girlfriend! that's exciting. i'm really pumped up for them, because they love each other. and looking back i wonder why i was ever with her, because its clear -oh so clear- that they should be together forever. whenever this happens (and believe me it happens often) i look back and say to myself, man its so obvious! it always comes with a bit of weirdness to tread through, but there's always weirdness in change. so sean and darcy, God bless you and His face be on you both.
saying anything after that is petty, but my pakistani friend and i went out to indian food, then downloaded and installed america's army the video game put out by the Army as a recruitment tool. pretty sly, uncle sam. its really cool though. and free...and monitoring of your behavior. its probably the only game in the world where you can get banned for breaking the rules (ie. killing someone you're not supposed to) and for cheating. what ethics! its also hard, because you have to follow every iota of rules.
last night i went for coffee with a lot of folks and talked about going to Japan and i got really excited about going.
afterwards my other roommate and i went to Wal-Mart because they have a bin of $5 DVDs and we thought we'd check 'em out. i made three impulse buys -someone help me. i bought some Little Debbies (yum!) and Nothing But Trouble and Ernest Goes To Camp. God help me. why do i own Nothing But Trouble it was probably the worst movie ever made...but it has such a good cast (Chevy, Moore and Akroid). well, as long as i get $5 out of it. that'd be nice. And Ernest, not good either, but i bought it because i love the song that he sings to his turtle that rainy night. it makes me cry. so my house for Ernest and possibly the worst "comedy" ever made.
HOT OFF THE PRESS! i got the call this morning. i was offered a job at camp for a couple of weeks to sub in. i'd be doing "program staff" which is basically awesomeness and i drive around in a golf cart all day and maybe drive a bus. i think i might take the job because it'd give me a chance to say farewell to my camp friends and a lot of free time to sit around and read my bible and stuff. and lastly, it'd be some bank i think...even though i'd do it for free. but it might be enough to put me over the top for my finances. so i'll pray about it and check it out. so i might be going to camp...ain't that a kick (in the head).
i'm blogging this from the airplane from omaha to dallas. i was up at 5 this morning so bear with me. this weekend was great: woke up early saturday to get on a plane at 7:30am. suffered through the st. louis airport again. landed in omaha round 1 something o' clock and went out to eat with my brother, his wife, my step-mom, and my dad. ate at the usual restaurant, upstream brewery in downtown "old market" omaha. a nice little joint with decent beer.
my original hope actually was to be eating meat by this weekend because i knew that going to traer, iowa would be what we in the vegetarian business call "a potato salad weekend". you see when you don't eat meat and there's any sort of cookout going on and people realize "oh, hey, you don't eat meat!" they then say, "well, there's potato salad." sweet. i've grown accustom to the mustardy, eggy, potatoey goodness that is potato salad.
why wasn't i eating meat by this point? well that's a good story as well that i forgot to tell. last saturday i was planning to start eating meat and i even went to the corner store to buy a can of tuna. i bought the little can of starfish tuna and spent the whole day staring at it. i ended up not eating for the better part of the day (not until i went bowling and got some fries). i decided that saturday wasn't the day...too stressful and i didn't want to suffer the aftermath of breaking vegetarianism. i figured i have 2 months of unemployment ahead to diarrhea my guts out.
so after eating we picked up my step-brothers and made haste to Des Moines, Iowa for a little shindig with people i didn't know. while on the way to Des Moines i was showing off my computer to my little step-brother and we were playing DOOM II on it and we both got kind of motion sick...so we stopped and slept the whole way. when we wake up we find ourselves en route not to the shindig, but to our other step-brother's girlfriend's apartment because apparently the shindig was a dress up shindig and we, in true d@ve rupert fashion, were under dressed. the situation could have sucked, being stranded for a couple of hours at some stranger's house, but we lucked out and caught The Simpsons and the endless barrage of saturday night COPS shows.
**ok. truth be told, this blog is so freaking long that i'm not blogging from the airplane any more. its the next day and i'm blogging at (where else?) work. so bear with me and i'll give you the skinny.**
so we get to traer late in the evening, the party went longer than expected. had horseradish flavored cheese...pretty nice, packs a punch.
next day: wake up, mess around. i rode the four wheeler around and that was radical. we ended up pulling a camping trailer out and trying to get into it for hours. so instead of worrying too much about getting in, we pulled the shade, set up chairs, sparked the fire and then started the drinking at around noon.
i got to ride in the cultivator with my step-cousin. this is the hugest tractor out there with a big fat attachment that plows the field. we were listening to, kid you not, John Denver singing "Country Roads" and "Thank God I'm A Country Boy". i felt like Crawl (played by Pauley Shore) in Son in Law. i realized as we were plowing...i work a whole day, and i did little to nothing. he works a whole day and he can say he plowed a field! what the heck!? there's something more satisfying about saying "i plowed a field" at the end of the day than "i piddled around on the internet and pushed some paper."
my brother showed up and we were quick to invent a new X-TREME Sport we called "Hubbing". basically its the old circus trick but we took a tractor tire rim, put it in its natural position, jumped up on it and started walking it back and forth. this wasn't extreme enough so we started doing tricks, like the running man, etc. then we spent all night racing it back and forth. boones, my sister-in-law took first, she had XTREME BALANCE!! it was a fun night, i busted it pretty hard a couple of times.
brian's dog, daisy, was the entertainment of the weekend. she's got ups. she can jump, seriously, 5 feet in the air and level out horizontally. she's a freak of nature. she got to Traer at around 3 that day and played catch (frisbee or ball) until about midnight when she got scared by fireworks. oh! did i say fireworks? yup. those were fun. one of the artilleries though shot up only about 20'-30' and showered everyone in sparks. i ran like a sissy. stupid fight or flight syndrome.
then monday came, monday was a lot like sunday but with more people. it was my step-grandparent's 50th anniversary and the whole town of Traer came out to celebrate. i didn't drink much at the party, mountain dew just tasted good that afternoon, so i got to drive back to nebraska that night.
we were going to try to see the matrix but the last showing for movies in bellevue is like 9:45pm, we were a little late for it and butt tired for it. 9:45pm is like the early show in austin.
well then i went to bed shortly after getting into bellevue. hung with my siblings a bit and watched cable. ahh! cable. i don't see you enough...and that's a good thing. you see ms. cable, we have a love-hate relationship. you're so entertaining but yet so...[insert things i hate about mainstream culture here]. went to bed. woke up at 5am. boarded a plane, talked to a nice guy...etc. i sort of flubbed the ending of my story, but i, like you, am really tired of this post, so i'll post more later. and check back to this post for added links and pictures once i get things rolling...and i'll post again about what's been going on outside of the Traer Adventure.
a final thought: i realized i haven't seen my family enough. leaving didn't feel like closure. so i'll likely use my voucher to go hang out with them in colorado or omaha. my family is cool, so i'd like to see more of them before i leave. monday was another weird day where i found myself saying goodbye to my step-brother's and thinking i won't see them for maybe three years. pretty sad, but its a part of the deal. it feels like Acts 21:12-14 a bit for me. so, i'd like to see my family some more before i go. so i'm going to swing that. farewell.
random fact: an airplane with a load weight 116,000lbs needs 145mph to land.
that title was mainly for shock value. but it actually comes from a letter we received in the office. it read, "i want to intimate you with my application..." oh, thank you sir, but i'm not that kind of guy.
ani moller is running an ad on her site for a writing companion...i think i fit the bill. i have a laptop and i enjoy a good cup of joe. but ... i don't live in houston. bummer. i'll be in houston some this summer, but probably not enough to hang out with someone from the internet. but gives me hope that there's someone out there who might want to enjoy a cup of cheap coffee doctored up like candy, a composition notebook and a good pen (or laptop), and some company.
election election might go to houston (our show in china got cancelled). details to come. oh, we also need more than two point five songs.
i forgot this in my last post. if you haven't read it, go there now ("citizens of Supertown beware!") its the most important part of my day. but here's a little thing that happened today. when i went home to get my letter from japan (see next post) i got to the house to find a ton of trees all in my parking lot. appearantly the people pruning are trees are just not too keen on putting the branches they've cut into the chipper. they just fill up every square foot of our yard with trees scraps. but as i was going in i find two chickens in the yard. they're the neighbors'. so i tried to wrangle them but i'm a big wuss and i worry about them pecking and scratching me. i guess i get that from growing up with fiesty parrots (i really did have fiesty parrots!). or maybe i've been involved in too many cockfight gambling circuts to know better. so i just sort of corralled them so the neigbor lady (who's a bit of a loose screw) could grab them. these "baby" chickens are huge, a good ten pounds. she picked them up like her children and talked to them a lot, then walked gingerly walked back to her house. i was wondering why she didn't just throw them over, then i realized...their dogs would probably see a flying chicken as a nice target/chewie toy to play with. that's reason number one why i don't own chickens.
then as i was getting the mail i walk out -in my yard i might add- and i see a strange (as in "stranger") girl with a strange dog standing at the mailbox, her dog is tied with leash and collar to the post the mailbox is atop. and a split second later the dog locks on me and begins running at me full steam. this suprised me. what suprised me more was when the dog's collar broke and he's now running at me full speed snarling and barking. i jumped up and back putting my buttcheek towards the animal. faithful buttcheek, always willing to take the hit. i probably screamed like a girl at some point in all this. then i notice the dog isn't biting me but rather just poking me with his open mouth. his owner, the strange girl, then wrangles him and apologizes profusely. that's cool, i'm easy going, i can accept an apology, but its still scary as hell when a dog who's tied up begins to run at you and breaks its restraint. its a brief, yet extremely powerful, display of the animal's power and prowless. its also a lot like a cartoon or the movie Sandlot (which i ironically watched earlier this week).
so that was my barnyard afternoon. only in south austin can you get this kind of runaway chicken/mutant dog action. go 78704!
then my finale to which reagan alluded to in a previous post's comment, i went to buy a mountain dew at the 7-11 on my credit card (i'm that desperate now) and the lady rasped out, "cash only!" who carries only cash!? its the future lady! why isn't there a back up to the credit card system. this would be a major cash cow if you could develop a back up system for credit card systems that go down. i know that i've been at the grocery store when that happens and the whole store is held hostage until the credit card method goes back online. you can have that patent for free. my gift to you, the people!
