Faded glory

It's funny how I can get off of work (in which I spent the whole day staring at a computer screen), come home and get right back on the computer. I think I'm nuts. I'm rather happy with my after work computer work tho. I successfully transferred a test blog from blogger.com software to WordPress software. It took longer than I expected, but everything takes longer than I expect. I think sometimes (all the time) that my learning curve is a bit unstable...or curved in the wrong direction. Still, I feel a sense of accomplishment and I'm going to call it a night.

Donnie Darko and a cup o' tea is has now be queued up.

Cup of tea

I would like to write about how funny it is that guys who ride crotch rockets would ride their crotch rockets to meet up at the local Starbucks to have a cup o' joe.

I can't keep focused long enough to make a decent point about it, so, I'm not going to write about crotch rockets and the men who ride them.

I just finished watching the end of The Last Samurai. I was thinking that the leading lady character is attractive, and I wanted to continue understanding what it is that makes someone attractive (continuing, because I had good conversation about attraction last night). I think when someone exhibits a passion they become attractive. The one example I have of this is from the movie Contact. Jodie Foster is lovely in this movie. Why?? Because she is so extremely passionate about what she loves. She is an individual striving to the best of her ability to accomplish her goal. Why is the girl in The Last Samurai pretty? What is her passion? I keep thinking grace...strength...peace. Could these things be passion as well? Outside the normal idea of what passions are?

We should have passion in everything we do. We should burn with life in every movement. My hands touching this keyboard...how aware am I of the intricate nature of it? It's like beautiful hands playing the keys of a piano.

The things that bring us peace and understanding. Is that what passions are? Can I find passion in doing the dishes? Calmness? A sense of peace in the duty of it? Hmmm...ever marching towards (what I hope is) wisdom.

Post Christmas depression

Man, I really question the giving of gifts sometimes. Sometimes I think that the Jehovah Witnesses are really onto something with the whole not giving gifts thing (even tho my reasons are somewhat different). On to a tangent a bit...I hate the fact that the one thing Witnesses are known for is not celebrating birthday's. I am embarrassed to say that I don't know more. Can someone fill me in? Why don't Witnesses celebrate birthdays, Christmas, New Years, holidays? What else makes Witnesses different from other forms of Christianity?

Anyways, for my birthday, I had a really hard time accepting gifts from friends. There was a combination of reasons for why I didn't want to even celebrate it.

1. I am embarrassed that I still live at home at the age of 29. I don't care what anybody says, and what excuses I can come up with for me still being here (which I feel are somewhat legitimate) I am still embarrassed. In fact, I have vowed not to celebrate another birthday until I move out.

2. I feel like I didn't celebrate 2 (actually more) of my friends birthday's properly. I completely missed one. Duh. Not celebrating mine felt like some sort of payback.

So I rejected a person's wish to go and celebrate my birthday. I thought I did the right thing. I explained my reasons, it made sense to me. So, I didn't understand when they got angry. I reasoned, that if birthday's are so important to this person, then they should be able to accept my wish not to celebrate it. I didn't know that she had gifts for me. And that is how I understand her side of the story.

It sucks to have someone reject your gifts. I honestly didn't care if they didn't have a gift for me. Now the gift sits here like some soul in limbo. Neither here not there, Hell nor Heaven. I can't keep it, I already have it. I can't give it to someone else, because it wasn't for them. And now, I don't want the person who it was intended for, to have it either.

But enough with that...I have to admit, again, that I think I deserve this bit of payback...for reasons not previously discussed.

The making of a tradition

I received a gift today. A very nice one. Still intrigues me after all these years. Thank you.

On to another subject...but closely tied, I know one day soon I will wake up and simply require a bit of jazz to start my day off. (I WILL RESIST YOU SMOOTH JAZZ!) When I was younger I hated jazz, I have a feeling we all did. Then came the day when I saw the high school jazz band perform in the Christmas concert. It was nice, it had something lively to it. I declared that, "Jazz sucks, but I like it live." 4 or 5 years later, I witnessed a 3 piece in a little bar named Cezanne. A couple of drinks down the hatch and I came out with a memory etched in my mind, "Jazz still sucks, but it really rocks when it's live!" I then dug up Bjork's jazz album...my first interest in listening to a jazz recording and enjoying it. Sinatra, Goodman, Squirrel Nut Zippers all found my ears (yes, not the most jazziezt of jazzinezz, but it's getting there). Dave Matthews opened me up to the sax and the drums (previously I was a complete saxophone hater). Tori Amos changed my mind about the piano (later giving way to the jazzy over tones of Ben Folds). Then there was Matty (DIE SMOOTH JAZZ!)...and my boss. Yes, smooth jazz took me way to the ends of what I don't like about jazz, and coming back has given me some perspective. For that, I appreciate smooth jazz. ... One day at work I was listening to a piano piece on our local classical station, so I thought out loud to my boss, "Ya know, that would sound pretty cool if it had a snare drummer jamming behind it." He said, "Then it would be jazz."

Tonight, a song from Charlie Brown's Christmas Special randomly played on my iPod. And that, is what makes the gift just that much better.

2 legit 2 quit

I was writing a response to the response to my "Jamble" and I thought I would write that response here...not necessarily like a responsible person should do.

I don't recall dissing the sport of football. I don't recall dissing sports.

I was, however, upset because there were players that seemed to exhibit the lack of passion. Pushing a guy instead of tackling him in an attempt to stop a touchdown warrants my skepticism. I was also slightly ticked when I realized I had been staring at cheerleaders for 5 minutes because we were on a TV commercial break. That sucks. THANK GOD there are not cheerleaders in baseball...but on the other hand, good thing there are cheerleaders for these ridiculously long lapses in entertainment (and I'm not talking about half-time). And I used to think baseball was slow. I was also pissed when I saw a guy doing a dance after a totally lame excuse for a play. He could have stopped him for 2 yards, but 5 yards later, he gets him. THEN he celebrates, like tackling him is just good enough.

I love football, but I have come to realize that football seems to be in a pretty horrible state. The other day, my brother and I were immensely more entertained by visibly slower players in the infamous "Ice Bowl." The temperature was 13 below and had a wind-chill of -40. I'd like to see today's players play in that, yea, ok. There were two things that were great about what I saw:

1. The players still played clean and with passion. (I even saw sacks in which the sacker helped the sackee back up!)
2. The game involved Tom Landry and The Cowboys.

K-Dox, you would be happy about the ending...The Packers won. =)

Hail to the weak

I was here today! Which was cool. Dad took me and when I look back at that, I have to say that this was a rather strange occurrence. Dad used to get pissed when we did anything sports related. The more I think about it, the more I believe baseball has been one the most important activities in my life. Sports are not just some waste of time like I used to believe (due to the way Pops always looked down upon them). They are essential. I've been comparing sports to art lately too. In sports there is passion. I realized once that I would have bad weeks at work when we didn't play a little football over the weekends. Softball has brought my family together like nothing has ever brought my family together. Tho, this post was going to be about how annoyed I am with the Texans-SanFran-Bush fiasco, I am being too jamble minded. And in conclusion, I still can't believe Dad bought me a Dr Pepper and a bag of peanuts.

Who knows what "jamble" means anyways? Err.

Grey M&M's

Once upon a time I received grey M&M's as a gift. It was funny when I brought them to work, I told my co-workers that I had left them out in the sun and they had faded. They believed me until I started laughing. I was proud of them (the grey M&M's that is). I thought about how witty the gift was. Why not all blue? After all, blue is still my favorite color (along with a shade of baby blue and black).

This weekend, I went to the same place to pick up some M&M's...only to find that all the M&M's were gone. All that remained was a wall sized M&M dispenser with extremely faded labels. How ironic.

Cream Soda

A particularly bad day. A particularly bad weekend. I would love to complain to you all, but redundancy is not one of my finer points.