All It Is For What It's Worth

2011-08-12T15:18:00.002-04:00

I don't think I'll live as long as my financial planner thinks I will.

The average male in the US lives 75.6 years. The average Masterson male? Well, my Dad is the current record-holder as far back as anybody can remember. He's 67 and in good health, but so far he is defying the tally sheet.

But this is not a post about morbitity. That would be morbid. This is a post about mutual funds.

I saw a speaker today at the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit who yelled a lot and pointed his finger a lot and smiled a lot on words that most people tend to frown around. But he said something that spoke to me:

"I don't want to fill a retirement account and buy a boat and die some day. I want to have stories to tell..."

I immediately thought of Tyler Durden, who told me not to die without scars. And I thought of my friend Andrew (see: http://t.co/4mulTNe) who encouraged me to live a life story that merits retelling. And then I thought of my financial planner, who told me that I need a safe retirement and buy so much life insurance that Bayla will never have to worry about money when I pass.

I'm saving like I'm going to live to 90. I'm putting money away. While other people starve for want of a meal or freeze for want of a roof or die of malaria for want of a mosquito net, I am squirreling money away on the long shot that, despite generations of evidence to the contrary, I might make it past 80. I'm slowly investing in something that I am reasonably certain I will never ever have the opportunity to enjoy in full, and the remainder of which will be taxed at 50% and handed to my already-grown-and-financially-stable daughter. I am trying to make the wholly imaginary octogenarian years of my life as comfortable as possible.

Let's face it, when I drop that money in the old 401(K), I am really not investing in a storehouse of old-Justin-pills . I'm making myself feel better, now. I'm convincing myself that if only I can invest enough money now, I can avoid the inevitability of my own mortality. I'm buying imaginary water from the Fountain of Youth in tiny decanters.

The problem is, there are lots of people who need that money now. There are lots of ways for that that money could be used to make my story worth telling right now. I think I will squirrel away less, and find something more real, and less imaginary, to do with some of that money now.

I'm not advocating not saving, or being financially irresponsible; just being less focused on trying to pretend to secure an imaginary future. What would happen if you planned as if you were going to die at the average age of 75.6 years (men) or 80.9 years (women), but lived in the realization that some very non-imaginary things may deserve your money now? What would you do differently today, if anything?

Cheers,
Justin

2011-07-22T18:09:00.003-04:00

I have a confession to make: there is a dent in my couch in the shape of my ass.

It is a relatively new couch; just a couple of years old. It's a sturdy couch, a nice thick foam-covered-in-leather cushion in the seat...not the loose cotton-stuffing type that lends itself to butt dents. No sir, this is the genuine article... I think it might have been fair for the manufacturer to even tout it as butt-dent-resistant.

This is embarrassing. Do you know how many hours of laying/sitting on a nice leather couch it takes to create a butt dent? A lot. A whole lot. If it were a ten-year-old couch, or one of those well-seasoned couches that goes through the decade-long Couch Circle of Life (living room, family room, basement, college dorm, son/daughter's first apartment, curb, back to someone's living room, repeat) I could understand it. But no, I made that butt-dent through countless unfocused hours of sloggily lazing about on that couch over the last two years. And here's the thing: I didn't even enjoy that time all that much. It would have been one thing if I spent it doing exactly what I wanted to do, but I think I just default to that position; it is a weak sort of "home base" for me when I'm not sure what to do with my time and energy.

I tell you that to tell you this: I have wasted many, many hours of my life and I plan on not doing that anymore, because it's dumb.

It's not about "watching TV is bad," or "vegging out is bad" or "hooray for exercise, now blast those quads!" It's simply about being intentional with one's hours. I'm starting to think that the two greatest blasphemies are squandered time and self-pity, and I dare say that squandered time may be the worse of the two. If I want to watch TV or a movie, I will... but it should be because I want to enjoy the experience. I will dial up the program I want to see, that I chose beforehand, and I will take it in with presence and attention. And when it is over, I will turn it off. I will surf the internet with direction, and if I don't have direction, I will attend to one of the fifty other things I would like to accomplish. In short, I will choose my attention, not piddle away to a static default.

When I was single, I thought I was as busy as any human can get. "Where has all the time gone?" I thought.
When I got married, I was amazed at how much busier I got. "Remember when I was single, and I had all that free time? Where has all that time gone?" I thought.
Then I had a child. And I thought, "What did I do with all of my free time when it was just the two of us? NOW I am busy."
Then I became a half-time single parent. And I frequently think, "What did I do with all of my free time back when I had a partner in parenting and taking care of the home? Where has all that time gone?"

The couch ate it. I will feed it no more.

Cheers,
Justin

2011-07-09T12:41:00.005-04:00

It's nice to see you again, blog. It has been far, far too long. May I tell you a story to catch you up a bit?

Very late last night, lit by the last orange embers of a summer campfire, someone smarter than me told me of a book that has inspired him to consider his life as a story, and himself as a character in that story. He asked me if someone were to see my life written as a story or reenacted as a movie, would it be worth reading or watching? Would it be interesting enough to stick around for the ending? Memorable enough to talk about in the break room the next day? Meaningful enough to shed a little light on the reader/viewer's own life? He identified a few elements that make a compelling story: exterior tensions and risks, overcoming adversity, ultimate victory against all odds...but the one that stood out to me most was character arc; the idea that a great story needs its central characters to change to be interesting: Darth Vader goes from well-mannered rambunctious kid to dark lord, Jason Bourne goes from confused and wandering ass-kicking-robot to hero driven by love, Jenny comes back to Forrest to start a family with the only man who ever loved her.

He told me of many intentional choices he and his wife have made and continue to make to live a story worth telling; he did so with neither bravado nor pride, he did so in kind instruction. Then he asked me about my story. I sipped a dram of bourbon from a plastic cup and glanced into the wispy burn of the fire's final moments, and I felt a strange sort of melancholy. It wasn't regret, not exactly; but rather a familiar dull weight in my chest that reminds me that my story is not yet stunning, but that my character is in the middle of a remarkable character arc.

The last year and a half has been, without exaggeration or effect, the most rapidly changing and ultimately character-defining season I have experienced yet. I changed positions in my company twice, adopted a baby, got separated (on the way to divorced) from my wife of eight years and drained the bank account in the process, and have learned to be a half-time single parent of a one-year old. My character today is starting to look pretty different than my character of two years ago.

There are stories within each of these chapters, and these are probably stories worth telling. But I'm not going to, not right now. I am instead going to tell you several things I've learned in the process, in the hopes that in doing so, I might remind myself of my own character arc to date, and even begin to imagine how the outline for the next chapters might look. Here are a few belief changes that have defined and driven my own character arc in the last eighteen months:

Great marriage is a partnership of self-realized individuals. A married person must love their spouse choicefully and work hard at that relationship, but must never forget that what his/her spouse truly needs is a whole person to be married to... the most important promise I can make to a future spouse, if there should ever be one, might not be "I will forever work on our relationship," but rather "I will forever work on becoming the man I was made to be."
Boys are everywhere; men are hard to find. I could write for weeks about this, but many others have already done so, and have done well. A real man is both strong and sensitive, fully present to his life, and ceaseless in his work on himself and his world. He loves the woman and the world into beauty around him.
Parenting Is Insanely Hard, and Impossibly Rewarding. Being a single parent with half-custody is not half as hard as being a full-time single parent. It is exactly as hard, just half of the time. I had no idea what parenting really felt like until I was the only person there to do it... and I am so grateful for that chance. I cannot ignore her, hand her off, or wait for someone else to fix her problems for me. When she is with me, I get 100% of the frustration, sadness, and exhaustion, and I get 100% of the reward, love, and sense of satisfaction of actually seeing a real human being grow and flourish in my care. I know this sounds nuts, but I feel really lucky for that.
Humility Is the Only Sensible Reality. Humility is not a character trait or a personality bonus, it demonstrates a basic grip on reality. No one; no one who reflects in earnest on the magnificence of the world around him and the simultaneous sacred depth and chaotic absurdity of the human experience can live in arrogance or pride. Our world, our spirit, our experience is too deep and too profound and too ridiculous to merit it. As someone who frequently falls into the insecurity of arrogance, I'm praying that my character remembers this.
Hard Work is How You Get Things. File this one under "duh," but somewhere along the line I got the impression that if I dabbled in enough interests for long enough, I would naturally pick them up and find myself a fully-realized man. It turns out I was wrong, and I was lazy. If I want to be fit, I must work hard for a long time. If I want to be informed, I must learn hard for a long time. If I want to be spiritually connected, I must work hard at connecting for a long time. If I wish to become a skilled writer, I must practice hard and for a long time.
Self-Pity Is a Curse. I cannot choose actions for others, and I cannot choose what the world will offer me... but I have full control of my choices. Self-pity presumes otherwise on both accounts, and disallows both accountability and gratitude. I may be sad, confused, and lost at times, but I may not pity myself; it is a heresy against all I am given, and all I am able to choose.

I'm sure there are dozens more, but this will do for now. I want to live a life worth retelling; I've no aspiration that the story will actually be retold, but merely that it be worthy of being retold... that I have honored all that I have been given by living a life worthy of it.

It's nice to see you again, blog.

Cheers,
Justin

2009-12-15T22:08:00.002-05:00

Hello blog world.

A: I realize that not many follow the blog. To those that do follow, I'm grateful and flattered and entirely undeserving given my recent dearth of posts.

B: I'm not going to post on this blog for a while.

The reason is, Stacy and I recent underwent an adoption process which requires a great deal of confidentiality, for the safety and protection of the baby. As much as I love to write, I have been waiting to decide what I want to do... and what I'm going to do is to continue my blog privately on Facebook (as I have been doing) and discontinue it on here until the privacy concerns have been satisfied.

Thank you so much to the many, many folks who have read and posted comments on this blog... it has been an INCREDIBLE form of expression and catharsis for me, and has allowed me the impossible luxury of sharing my deepest thoughts without fear of face-to-face confrontation or rebuttal. THANK YOU. If we're friends, I'll see you on Facebook. Otherwise, I'll likely pick it up again soon; I'm just going to pause for now.

My very best,
Justin

2009-09-15T21:31:00.006-04:00

It has been a long, long time since I've posted.

I'm starting to wonder if my zeal for life is somehow tied proportionately to the global economy? It seems that when we are in times of plenty, so are my hopes, my aspirations, my trips to the gym, and my blog posts. When we are in tumult, the dreaming, running and writing stop. It's a bit unnerving that AIG and Fannie Mae may have more control over my daily life-improvement choices than I do... but I digress.

So, with that all said, here is a random list of the 5 saddest non-country songs I can think of, with a few relevant lyrics (but click and listen to the whole song where you can).

#5: Alone (Blues Traveler)
In order to truly understand the sadness of this BT bar anthem of unrequited love, download a picture of John Popper circa 1995 and stare at it as you listen. Picture this overweight songster with a meeky alto voice and a homemade vest of harmonicas trying his best to keep the attention of the one woman who could make him truly happy...

I said I love you
She began to cry
She said she needed a friend
I said I'll try
Soon we'd say nothing
Somehow I never wondered why
You see, she left me
She left me
I'm alone

Beauty and the beast
Was how it seemed to be
A love like hers
Ain't meant for guys like me
Some call me crazy
Some politely call me free
But either way you see
You see, she left me
She left me
I'm alone

I guess some day
Love will soon be here
And maybe then
I'll see things more clear
I guess I got excited
Cause it felt so near
And
You see, she left me
She left me
I'm alone

#4: When I Fall (Barenaked Ladies)
I love this ode to the underappreciated and underrealized. Here's a man whose life's work, at its best, amounts to leaving nothing behind, and who knows it... all the while his every day forces him to stare in at contemporary royalty and wonder what it's like in the air-conditioned comfort of being somebody who matters.

I look in the boardroom; a modern pharaoh's tomb
I'd gladly swap places, if they care to dive
They're lined up at the window, peer down into limbo
They're frightened of jumping, in case they survive.

Look straight in the mirror, watch it come clearer
I look like a painter, behind all the grease
But painting's creating, and I'm just erasing
A crystal-clear canvas is my masterpiece

I wish I could fly
From this building, from this wall
And if I should try,
would you catch me if I fall?

#3: Slow Dancing in a Burning Room (John Mayer)
The only thing sadder than unrequited love (see #5) is perfect love going wrong, and being perfectly conscious as you are unable to control its gradual demise. To me, it's the romantic and spiritual equivalent of Lou Gehrig's disease. I love this song for its wrenching tension of holding and dancing with the only love you've ever had, and realizing that it will never, ever work. As you listen, let Mayer bring you into that last dance, and feel the heat from their bodies as you feel the slow burn from the support walls melting around you.

It's not a silly little moment,
It's not the storm before the calm.
This is the deep and dying breath of
This love that we've been working on.

I was the one you always dreamed of,
You were the one I tried to draw.
How dare you say it's nothing to me?
Baby, you're the only light I ever saw.

We're going down,
And you can see it too.
We're going down,
And you know that we're doomed.
My dear,
We're slow dancing in a burning room.

#2: Hush, Hush, Hush (Herbie Hancock feat. Annie Lennox [written by Paula Cole])
I don't know who Paula Cole was thinking of when she wrote this song, but I wish I had. With as sad as songs 3-5 were, this one rises head and shoulders above for me... the crushing story of a gay man dying of AIDS at the age of 20, and his father sitting nearby trying to comfort him. He waited his whole life to come out and find true love, and it was too late to save him from the mistakes made in the dark corners of his closeted life. If you don't cry during the bridge, you may want to check your pulse.

Long white arms
Losing their strength and form
Sixty year man on twenty year old skin
Skeleton, your eyes have lost their warmth
Look to your father for some support

Oh maybe next time
You'll be Henry the 8th
Wake up tomorrow Alexander the Great
Open your eyes in a new life again
Oh maybe next time
You'll be given a chance

Hush, hush, hush

Says your daddy's touch
Sleep sleep sleep
Says the hundredth sheep
Peace peace peace
May you go in peace

#1: Praying for Time (George Michael)
I once had a Christian-savvy friend of mine tell me that the saddest verse in the Bible is the verse in Job where God searches the planet for a righteous man and can only find one (Job), and that Job eventually lets him down too. "Praying for Time" seems to believe that Job has long gone, and we are left with no one. I made the mistake of listening to this song on the way to work once, and had to pull over outside of my office and cry for a good ten minutes before I could go in. I hope you listen to this (the Carrie Underwood version is surprisingly moving) and find something genuinely worthwhile to do.

This is the year of the hungry man
Whose place is in the past
Hand in hand with ignorance
And legitimate excuses

The rich declare themselves poor
And most of us are not sure
If we have too much
But well take our chances
Because God stopped keeping score

These are the days of the empty hand
Oh you hold on to what you can
And charity is a coat you wear
Twice a year

So you scream from behind your door
Say whats mine is mine and not yours
I may have too much
But Ill take my chances
Because God stopped keeping score
And you cling to the things
They sold you
Did you cover your eyes when
They told you
That he cant come back
Because he has no children
To come back for

So... it's hardly an exhaustive list, but I'd like to hear yours. What are the 5 saddest non-country songs you can think of?

2009-02-12T17:31:00.002-05:00

Words ...
Originally uploaded by Ieneke.

I was recently reading a book about writing, and the art of writing, when I came upon an apocryphal tale of the power of brevity. I’m not sure where and when and even if it happened, but it’s rumored to, and it doesn’t matter if it did because the story is just as powerful as a story.

The story tells us that Ernest Hemingway, an American literary deity who was maligned by Classics scholars for his undecorative, straight-to-the-point writing style, was dared by a friend and contemporary to “write a compelling short story in six words.” The only rules were that the story must have a beginning, middle, and end, and must be compelling enough to get published. Hemingway accepted, and spent an evening or two with pen to paper, scrawling out miniature narratives. He returned with a story so compelling, and with such depth, that it was published the very next week in The New Yorker. The story read:

For Sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.

As I read this little gem of writer’s folklore, I was struck by how powerful, rich, and deep this six-word story was. It brought so much to mind...let my imagination fill in the plot gaps and the faces and the names... but what was more remarkable was how much it explicitly told me. In six expertly selected words, I could access 29 years of human experience to instantly and powerfully fill in these gaps with more than just conjecture... I could lean on my gut to fill in the gaps...and without wild subjective conjecture or speculation. Someone had a baby on the way (pregnant, likely), and planned ahead. She anticipated that child, she looked forward to it, and even planned far enough into the child’s life to invest into shoes the baby wouldn’t need for several months into his/her life. Then, something happened. Likely something dreadful. The baby was gone, the dream with it, and the shoes rendered a purposeless reminder of what should have been. The would-be parent even went so far as to sell the shoes; to post an ad to both remunerate her now useless purchase, and to excise this tragic memento from her home.

This is a tragic story with a beginning, middle, and end, and is every bit as emotionally compelling and haunting as some of the best short fiction I’ve read. And it reminds me that, when crafted carefully and artfully, even a few words can tell a very big story. Whether in a letter to a loved one, a Carlos-Williams poem, a song lyric, a quotation scrawled on a blackboard, an epithet yelled at an enemy, a commercial concept, a political mantra, etc. etc., it only takes a few choice words to make a huge impact. And when I sit down to write long summaries of research, or tell a neverending tale to a friend, or to pen lengthy blog entries (such as this one), I do well to remember that, and to flex the power of selection a bit.

As an aside, if you haven’t explored this genre of “flash fiction” (stories written in a few words or a single sentence), I encourage you to check out onlineflashfiction.com and onesentence.org. There are some very funny, sad, and encouraging pieces on there [one read something like, “‘I’ll never do that again,’ he thought, as he slipped cautiously into the warm tub.”]. And I hope you’ll try to write your own...you can’t possibly claim you don’t have the time. Here are four one-sentence short stories I wrote on a flight back from Orlando:

“No one will hear you scream through the gauze,” he told me as the nitrous took over.

As I groped for my wallet in the dark, the morning sun made it clear she was not, in fact, a flight attendant.

The only sound left was disposable booties toeing the linoleum floor, and the long, thin electronic whine.

“’How much,’ will never matter again,” he told himself, as his last quarter scraped his final ticket.

Cheers,
Justin

2009-02-03T16:34:00.004-05:00

The order in which I hunt down and eat specific ingredients in my Grilled Chicken Salad:

Grilled chicken
This one is a given. Always go for the meat first. It's sustaining, life giving, and tastes like meat. As the "Grilled Chicken Salad" name implies, the rest of the salad is simply a medium to hold up the meat.
Dressing-saturated croutons
Everyone knows that dressing is, right after meat, the main reason you eat a Grilled Chicken Salad. However, since "dressing" isn't an ingredient you can hunt out discreetly, you have to seek out the most efficient dressing-carriers...the porous dressing-sponge known as "crouton." I will warn you here, mixing saturated croutons and unsaturated croutons is dangerous, as you will chomp down as if expecting a marshmallowy wet crouton, and instead crack your pearlies onto a granitesque dry one.
Cheese Shreds
After picking out the meat and dressing-saturated wonderments, the next best tasty is the Cheese Shreds. Unfortunately, much like the dressing, Cheese Shreds are more a fluid than a solid, and tend to spread ubiquitously throughout, making them difficult to solo out without accidentally tining some of that yucky lettuce. Your best bet here is to use the side of your fork as a shovel, and scrape around the outside of the bowl or carryout container, as Dressing+Cheese creates a covalent bond with Container, and will result in a delightfully minimal cheese-to-lettuce ratio.
Non-Saturated Croutons
Well, it's not great, but it beats lettuce and tomatoes (see "Lettuce and Tomatoes" below for further information).
Lettuce and Tomatoes
Lettuce and tomatoes are the primordial stew from which the salad phylum evolved, and I think we owe L&T a debt of quiet gratitude for that. However, as far as vittles go, Lettuce and Tomatoes are less of an ingredient, and more of a penance for eating the other salad components.
Author's note: For those who consider Lettuce a separate ingredient from Tomatoes, and one which merits its own address... well, you're wrong. By the time they've lived in the salad for a few minutes, they taste exactly the same. And shut up.

6. Onions
The only ingredient I seek out less than Lettuce and Tomatoes is Onions, which I actively avoid scooping up with every forkload. I still have no idea why raw Onions made it into the Salad Canon, but presume it was clever lobbying by the Red Onion Association, and certainly not due to consumer demand. These sour and spicy groundlings are magnificent in other applications, and delictable when cooked... but in a Salad only serve to make everything taste like onions, and to leave your breath reeking like humid shoe closet.

Other "improv" ingredients, such as broccoli, egg, and bacon bits, cannot be addressed here, as giving this apparently limitless collection of foodstuffs proper review would make the blog unweildy and even more unreadable. Please consult your local Salad provider for more information on these rogue additions.

Cheers,
Justin

2009-01-31T10:38:00.004-05:00

There is a social experiment spreading rampantly on Facebook. Instead of the tired "answer these 25 mundane questions about your favorite color, book, etc. that nobody cares about," the challenge is simply to post "25 Random Things" about yourself.

It has been so intriguing to find out what people think of when they are encouraged to pick any 25 points of data about themselves. Sometimes, you get things like, "I like blue." Other times you get things like, "since my wife died, I've been more empathetic to others' suffering," and sometimes it's things like "I don't have a particular side of the bed. Every night I pick a random side, my husband sleeps on the other." I love this experiment; they could pick ANYTHING, and it says a lot what each person chooses.

So, with that, here are the 25 things I posted. I encourage you to try it... on your blog, on Facebook, on your locker, on your mirror at home...it's worth the 15 minutes to find out what comes to the top of your own mind when given free reign to pick 25 facts about yourself.

25 Random Things

1. I have no recollection of ever using Chap-Stik, or any derivations of lip balm thereof. It's gross, and you're just going to have to get over that.
2. I am not a real germaphobe. I am a selective germaphobe, choosing to focus only on bodily fluids (i.e. - no concern for dirt, outdoor germs, rotten food, etc.), and completely lose my germaphobia when in a state of total comfort. If I were a shrink, I'd bet it's a control thing.
3. I learned to play the bass at age 12 because my older brother had already become a shreddin' guitar player, and I thought playing only on 4 strings would make me better faster. I'm now playing guitar in his band. Well, the best laid plans...
4. I got an English degree largely by accident. I kept taking English courses, and my Comm advisor mentioned that if I take 1 more I'd have a degree. So, Avant Garde Lit, here I come!
5. I have an intense fear of being snuck up on. (Don't even think about it; I'll freak and punch your throat or something).
6. I'm learning to hug. (It has heretofore been more of an academic activity than an experiential one). [Thanks, Alison]
7. I'm smack dab in the middle of a major spiritual quest, and discovering I have far more questions than answers. Almost no answers, really. Lots of questions. It's both a cold and luminous place to be.
8. I cried through most of my brother's wedding. And my other brother's. And mine. Shut up.
9. I was the Prom King and Homecoming Prince my senior year, and both as a result of what I'm fairly sure was a cruel joke by the popular kids.
10. Despite years of acting lessons, dialectic practice, and an intense desire to be cool, I am entirely incapable of using slang in any kind of believable way. (I had my license to use slang revoked by a jazz drummer once... which is like having your license to drive revoked by Dale Earnhardt).
11. I read three books at a time: one fiction, one non-fiction, one philosophical/spiritual. And all of them very slowly.
12. I love mushy, lumpy food. Mashed potatoes, chicken pot pie, shepherd's pie, biscuits and gravy, chicken w dumplings... if my meal can be mushed into a big steaming amalgam of goo, it's right for me.
13. My worst job was as an overnight radio announcer and board operator on a traditional jazz station. I worked midnight - 8:00, two days a week, and was on the air for ONE MINUTE every hour doing traffic and weather...and there was a CCTV camera to make sure you didn't sleep inbetween. (But I did learn to love jazz, and to love the station).
14. My best job ever is the one I have now, and I feel tremendously lucky about that.
15. To borrow a line from Ben Doepke, music trumps almost anything. It is the truest language of the holy.
16. I have a deep and abiding love for Eminem's music. (Which is only enhanced when it's flanked by Edgar Meyer and Parliament on my iPod's shuffle).
17. I'm insecure about most things. If I'm coming off arrogant or condescending, it's because I probably worry you're better than I am.
18. I collect 2-5 new cigars a week, and smoke one or less a week. So... the collection keeps growing... and I'm running out space.
19. Despite being around it in the music scene for the last 15 years, I've never smoked pot. I really want to give it a shot, but I want to do it up right... save the experience for a really decent atmosphere and moment in time. Anybody got any suggestions?
20. Self-disclosure gives me the willies. This gives me the willies. I have the willies. I'm wondering if I'll ever publish it.
21. I once got to meet my musical hero, Bela Fleck, and the only thing I could think of to say to him was, "do you like pie?" Then I got embarrassed and walked away. We haven't spoken since.
22. My favorite drink is a Knob Creek, on the rocks, with a splash to open it up. My favorite beer is Guinness, in a glass, followed by another.
23. I come from 5 generations of Irish firefighters. My brothers and I blew it for everybody by becoming a doctor, a lawyer, and whatever the hell it is I do. (Fortunately, my cousin is keeping the tradition alive in NYC).
24. I dream of publishing a book some day. The problem is, I'm not sure about what, or written to whom. Again... anybody got any suggestions?
25. Growing up, my nickname was "fussy." I've never had a nickname since.

Peace to you,
Justin

2009-01-20T22:04:00.006-05:00

Today, I was party to the changing of our story.

At 4:30 this morning, I woke up from my air mattress on the floor of the Elections Assistance Commission in downtown Washington DC, where my brother works, and began my meeting with something truly historical. Stacy, my brother Matt, and my sister-in-law Jo had done a magnificent job of planning and packing...and we lit out for the subways around 5:00, armed with longjohns, cameras, subway tickets, and our Silver Passes to the standing-room section of the Capitol reflecting pool area.

By 5:30, we were on a short train ride to the Capitol, surrounded by the earliest-rising of the Obama inauguration-goers, all with eyes puffy with morning but wide with anticipation. By 6:00, we had joined thousands of people who had lined up for entrance to the "Silver Section" for those with passes.

The crowd was astonishingly polite, considering the time, the temp, the throngs, and the tease of six hours of waiting before we got to see our new President sworn in. Folks huddled with their friends and family for warmth, and good-natured joking prevailed over the few pushes and scattered dumbassiness. We worked our way through line after line, through checkpoints and by National Guardsmen and countless police and volunteers. (I told a bit more of the story of getting to our spot, complete with pics, here on my Flickr account, or on the ol' Video Diary if'n you're interested).

The hope that seemed to electrify the air in the District yesterday became actual overt, tangible expressions of joy and energy today. Everywhere we went, people were talking to strangers, chatting it up about what Barack Obama means to them, sharing stories of their excitement, their background, their journey to this spot, and their hopes for what today's inaguruation means. Obama ran on a platform of change and hope...these are sentimental footnotes to most Presidential campaigns, the kind of comulsory claptrap used to putty together vague campaign promises. But for this campaign...for this candidate...change and hope were built-in...they were inherent in becoming the first African-American president. You couldn't elect Barack Obama without electing for change. I won't list here all the reasons why the person and policy of Barack Obama, far beyond his race, underscores every inch of his platform for hope and change...it's a topic I've covered before and will likely cover again soon...but what the people of the US voted for was real change, echoing well beyond politics and into damn near every facet of how we live together as Americans.

The inauguration was stunning. By the time we were in and shifted a few times (again, check out the Flickr account), we were about 400 yds away from the Capitol steps, and surrounded on all sides by coats, hats, and the steaming breath of the excited. Three hours of waiting punctuated by the occasional shot of Obama's limo closing in on the Capitol (which was always met with huge cheers from the crowd) were spent trying to keep the handwarmers warm and the toes from getting stepped on. The anticipation built with every passing minute, and despite chilly winds and more than a little claustrophobic crowding, we couldn't but palaver with those around us as if we had all just come from the same cocktail party, and had already spent an evening chattering. Despite being in the absolute racial minority (I'm guessing 70/30 black/white mix in our section), I was talked to as a brother and Stacy as a sister...I was encouraged into choruses of "Yes We Did!" and presumed to be an equal advocate for social and political racial equality. It was incredible...and the sense of general trust and positive regard for humanity was tremendously inspiring.

As musicians played and speakers spoke and poets read, there was a slow-sea change in my heart...I began to feel proud of my country...not just in my head; not just in theory anymore. I don't tend to feel much of anything until I've really thought about it first...and today was finally my chance to culminate my many thoughts on what makes this election mean so much to me into actual feelings about it. My chest was swelled with national pride as the trumpet flourishes announced the arrival and entrance of our new President, and my own cheers drowned out the screams around me as he took his seat, and as he took his oath.

President Obama (I'm not getting tired of saying that any time soon, if you're wondering) gave a very stirring speech that truthfully, I need to read a half dozen more times to truly understand. I encourage you to take the time to read it...preferably out loud...but here are two passages that instantly brought tears to my eyes:

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the fainthearted -- for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things -- some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor -- who have carried us up the long, rugged path toward prosperity and freedom.

and...

To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.

By the conclusion of the ceremony, I was exhausted...physically, mentally, emotionally...and I was euphoric. As we joined the streaming throngs who filled the streets to celebrate and meander back towards wherever it was we were going, it was as if we'd spilled into a post-WWII ticker-tape parade. There was cheering, laughing, hugs, signs being waved, and bits and pieces of paper and scraps flying everywhere. I felt like our nation, in that moment, exhaled...like we had finally made it through, and felt comfortable enough to just rest for a moment.

We found our way to L'Enfant Plaza station, shuffled our way through the tired (and by this point occasionally crabby) crowds, and found our train towards home. By the time we made it through the front door and collapsed into bed for a late-afternoon warming nap, I had spent nearly everything I had in me to take part in this historic event...and I loved it. I'm so grateful to have been one of the 2,000,000 people there to congratulate our new President and, most importantly, to share in this massive step forward for our country.

More to come.

Peace to you,
Justin

2009-01-19T16:35:00.002-05:00

Party!
Originally uploaded by Tkalifa.

I can't help but feel like I'm just hours before experiencing a pivotal moment in my life.

I'm in Washington DC, staying with my brother, and getting ready to head to the inauguration of America's first African-American President. We will be joining the estimated 2 million other Americans in reveling in this historic occasion. I can't believe I get to be a part of it.

The drive out here had a sense of electricity throughout. Technically, it was just Stacy and I in the car together for nine hours plowing our way through the snowy and largely darkened midwest...but it felt like we were part of something much much bigger. As we passed and rode alongside the other drivers bound for DC, I felt like an electron chasing a wire towards the first electric bulb. I felt momentum, a sense of moving forward...something I haven't felt for a long time, and certainly something I wouldn't have felt driving towards our nation's capital.

To think I'm currently sitting a few miles from the spot where Barack Obama will be elected tomorrow...and to think that tomorrow I will be standing only couple hundred yards away while it happens...it's insane. I have never before seen two million people in one place. I have never heard the roar of two million voices, or the rattle of two million hands...I can't wait to hear it tomorrow as President Obama concludes his oath. I can't wait to celebrate with two million others...to scream and cheer with those around me...to embrace my loved ones around me and the strangers to either side of me in a communal celebration of a truly new day. To walk in the center of the electricity that is this remarkable moment in history.

We must be careful not to deify Mr. Obama...not to mistake this remarkable man as the sole reason for our energy and vibrance this week. I am more thrilled to have Barack Obama as our next Commander in Chief than I can articulate, and for reasons that I have largely already articulated in public and private forums...but this is not about Obama alone; far from it. It's about our next huge step, and the realization that we have finally broken the barrier to the nations most aspirational role. A country as rebellious, young, and radical as ours is bound to have massive flaws as we grow and create our own rules...and the flaw of cultural and institutional racism against Africans (and then African-Americans) has been perhaps our most visible sin. While the battle against this type of racism is far from over, tomorrow we get to celebrate our next biggest step.

To think that I get to be party to this culmination of the story of our nation to this date...it's unimaginable. I will keep ya'll updated as we go... but please join me in celebrating this unprecented victory step in the war against racism in this country, and in embracing and welcoming our nation's new leader.

I'm really, really charged.

Peace to you,
Justin

2008-11-06T21:36:00.003-05:00

I am so proud of my country today. In fact, for the first time in a long time, I am a very proud American.

Two days ago, our country elected Senator Barack Obama as our next president. I don't need to retell his story here; anybody who has found this blog stepped here on a sea of news articles, biographies, and stories about who this extraordinary man is, where he came from, and what he wants to do.

But I will repeat our story. We are a country which, for the last eight years, has lived under a sneaking suspicion that the end of the last great superpower was nigh, and that our great nation of freedom, opportunity, and personal liberty was being chipped away by a relentless pattern of human rights violations, wiretapping, misrepresentation and the war it was predicated upon, foolhardy executive power-grabbing, economic tumult, and the discouraging feeling that we, the American people, were having the wool pulled over our collective eyes.

I am tired of going to foreign nations and sheepishly admitting my country of origin, for fear of the string of foreign-language expletives and shameful curses that I would be forced to respond to. I'm tired of defending the liberty that my grandfather fought, shot for and was shot for in light of a bumbling figurehead, a puppet executive, and an inexplicable drain of the very liberties and respect for humanity that our country was built on. I'm tired of being embarrassed by our leader, and by the kind of myopic zealotry and undereducated fundamentalism that came to characterize our twice-elected leader. (For which I am equally to blame...I voted for our current President in both elections...and I am sorry).

...and today, I am breathing with fresh lungs, and a heart beating heavily with hope.

This week, we elected America's first African-American president. To be slightly more broad, we elected America's first non-white president. And I can't imagine being any happier that this person is Barack Obama.

I cannot wait to tell my children that I was there when Barack Obama was elected. I am so thrilled that my children will not grow up in a world where only white males can reach the highest office in the land. I am so proud that the rows of pictures that make up the "wall of presidents" at every grade school, middle school, and high school in the country will now have a dark-skinned face...at least one dark-skinned face, and hopefully many more...for as long as this country is established. My children will never know a world where black men and women have no President who looks like them to aspire to. And the children of black men and women across this country will never know a world where the "white majority" did not trust someone who looked like them to serve as their chief executive and leader.

I truthfully wondered if I would ever see this day. And it is one of the great honors of my life that I got to be a part of electing this man.

I don't know that I believe that God takes a hand, or even necessarily an interest, in the politics of our country. But I will tell you that I thank Him for a race well run, for two candidates that made this country proud throughout...for many of us, proud for this first time in years...and for the gift that is this radical milestone in the development of our young nation. And I hope He hears it.

John McCain is an, without dispute, an American hero, and would likely have made an outstanding leader...I have been proud to support his cause and character in my small social circles where I could throughout his campaign. But this is Barack Obama's time, and this is America's time for Barack Obama. I think maybe we are finally ready. I hope we are.

May God's hand guide you and protect you as you take your first steps of executive leadership, President-Elect Obama. I'm proud to follow.

Peace to you,

Justin

2008-09-07T13:30:00.004-04:00

[photo by Ellen Karns]

Of Zen and the Art of Humidor Maintenance...

I've taken to smoking cigars. Well, that may conjure the wrong image. Better said, I've taken to the hobby of cigars, which includes some smoking. Mostly, it includes reading about cigars, learning about cigars, shopping for cigars, setting up one's humidor to season cigars, and, after smoking, reviewing and journaling cigars.

I guess it's a little like Carson Palmer saying, "I've taken to playing football on Sunday afternoons."

So, what makes it all worth it? Of all things, why cigars? Certainly, I could have found a hobby that's cheaper, less smelly, more socially acceptable, and generally doesn't make you die...

I've been wondering this same thing. Why, of all the things i could spend my ever-dwindling free time on, would I choose this archaic throwback to the days when we didn't know any better?

...I think it's because it's meditative, and that makes it fun.

When you spark a cigar, even a smaller Corona or a stubby Robusto, you're committing to 30+ minutes of doing nothing else. You are engaging in a fully immersive self-indulgent activity. The thing is rich, and deep, and attention-keeping...and, perhaps more importantly, it's pungent and smelly and the smoke spreads everywhere...meaning you can't very well do it inside, and you can't really do it while you're doing anything practical. When you have a cigar in your hand, it becomes what you're doing for that half-an-hour, and I love that.

I've also discovered that cigars are inherently social, as long as those you're being social with like the smell of cigars. For some reason, in a way more powerful than beer or vodka or appetizers or cigarettes or dance music, when you light a cigar with someone, you're bound to talk about things. Usually, things that matter to you.

I like my new hobby. It's simultaneously profound and generally useless. It's meaningful, and its purposeless. It's masculine and timeless, and hopelessly stereotypical and outdated. It's instantly social, and turns people off immediately. It's delicious and tasty, and it smells like rotten campfire the next day.

Mostly, it's relaxing. So let me know if you'd like to join me for a cigar sometime...I'd like that.

Cheers,
Justin

A 2:30 a.m. poem...

2008-08-05T02:39:00.001-04:00

magnetic poetry
Originally uploaded by surrealmuse.

As I sit awake with another periodic bout of entirely inexplicable insomnia, here is a scrap of poetry I made on my fridge about a cure for the problem...

if you ask a book
as i do,
delight in no repose as sanguine
as its scholarly ennui

Peace,
Justin

2008-07-21T11:36:00.005-04:00

[photo from by michael wilson]

I keep turning up the music to try and drown out the sadness.

I’m on a plane from Dallas back to Cincinnati, and I’ve got my headphones on. The good ones. The ones that surround your ear, block everything else out. They’re supposed to anyway. But I’ve been through Fiona, then Fallout Boy, then Metallica…pushing it louder and louder, trying to forget about it, because men on business don’t cry on planes.

I’m trying to stop thinking for a moment about my friend Katie who died this week, and mostly trying to stop imagining what it feels like to be her family right now.

It feels surreal, to tell you the truth. Like an abstract poem I don’t quite understand, but the more I study the words the less I like the shadows they keep casting.

God damn it.

She was so bright, so fun, so powerful, so sweet, and so unstoppably honest. She was brave as hell, too…from her career to her relationship with her partner to her motherhood to battle with this tumor…so brave. More brave than I’ve ever hoped to be.

She was articulate, kind, and creative. She had a singing voice that spelled sugar and push simultaneously to me; a boyish timbre rutted into a Brownie undertone, as if Scout herself bought a guitar and learned to wail. Her recordings became a critical part of the soundtrack of my college days. Her recording of “Blue Like That” still stands as one of my most treasured audio-lockets…and if I think more about that, I will cry on this plane, and I don’t intend to do that.

Katie was giving and adventurous. When I called her in the midst of putting together her second record and invited her, at absolutely no pay, reward, or promise of decent food, to trek out into the wilderness of Indiana with my brother and I to play music and entertain junior high kids for a weekend…she didn’t hesitate. She packed her guitar, donned a preposterous wig and Cruella deVille jacket, joined our silly weekend without fanfare or prodding, and spent the next 72 hours improvising the flavor of ridiculous dialogue that makes 13-year-olds giggle.

When I caught my hand on fire trying to play a lighter-fluid dragon, she did the only thing that made sense to her at the time…shoved it between her thighs and squeezed. We laughed until one of us peed.

The only thing that ever bothered her was when someone would call her by her full-name-as-one-word, like “TigerWoods” or “GarthBrooks.” She was a musician and aspired to sing for the world, but I never got the feeling she wanted to be a celebrity…not like that.

Katie gave out of a very honest place, and she gave a lot. She sang out of a very real place, and she sang beautifully. She was hilarious, and she was lovely.

I have no idea how to think about Katie’s death.

I’m sad, and I’m angry, and I’m doubting. And I’m so, so sorry. Reider family, I am so sorry. Karen, I am so sorry. I feel like you deserve better than this.

Katie, I miss who you are. I’m glad you are not suffering any more, and I know you’re back home with your mom…wherever that place is…but I can’t help but feel like the world was better with you here.

Peace,
Justin

2008-04-30T22:50:00.001-04:00

Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt.
"The Fates lead him who will. Him who won't, they drag."
Seneca, ~30 a.d.

I think of the future sometimes.

Most of the time, I'm thinking of the very, very near future. As in, eight hours from now when the project summary comes due or twenty four hours from now when I'm supposed to be on a plane, or five minutes from now when I will have needed to be at a meeting for 15 minutes.

I spend a lot of the remaining time thinking about the past...what went right, what went wrong, and how what went right was probably just something going wrong that went at it wrong. (I am, despite the words of those close to me, not truly a cynic at heart...I am a rampant and disappointed idealist, perhaps, but not truly a cynic). I worry, and worrying for me is a mostly about confusing the near future with a distant past.

But sometimes, I think of the future. The real future.

For me, right now, these moments are occupied wondering about being a dad. I am not a dad, and I have no immediate reason to believe I will soon be a dad. But I think about it a lot...we think about it a lot. For me, it's not a yearning, exactly...not a need...but it feels like a want...like the happy memory of a first crush, it's a quiet and peaceful want that won't quite leave, but doesn't cause much trouble.

My friend Jimmy just had a baby, and my friend Ryan just had a baby. I have met one, and can't wait to meet the other. Two of my best friends in the world are dads. Like, the real kind of dad...like my dad was a dad. I struggle to imagine them as my dad...waking up early to get chocolate Entenman's donuts on Saturday mornings and grunting under the car as he drains engine oil in the hot afternoons. But, for some reason, I can imagine me doing it. They may become their dads, and that is likely a very good thing. And I may become mine...that is also a very good thing. We will learn to clap at recitals and work late for soccer-uniform money and to sit and watch and genuinely love our kids when they do the little things that bring them joy, whether we understand them or not. I hope I have those days. I don't need them just yet, but I hope I get them.

At the same time, I'm surprised at the lack of aching. I think, after two years and some change, I may be finding some peace in the unknowable To-Come. I'm tired of trying to predict it, honestly, and I'm becoming slightly thrilled at my inability to beat it. There is a peace in that...it's strange, but there is.

I don't know what is to come. I don't know if it includes birth, or adoption, or joy, or heartache, or another 50 years of the a marriage better than my tiny imagination would have sketched...with child or without. I don't know. But the peace, perhaps, is in knowing that I'm allowed to stop telling myself I should know.

Peace,
Justin

2008-01-17T02:12:00.001-05:00

Aaaah, Gay Paris...the city of romance, the city of love, the city where bread is a mandatory part of every balanced breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack. Aaaah, Gay Paris.

So my travels have taken me to thriving little burg of Paris, France, where I'm learning at least several words in French, pronounced with an accent reminiscent of a garbage disposal filled with whole artichokes. So far, while in Paris, I have found my way from the airport to my hotel with a cab driver who spoke no English other than "Jou Like George Boosh?" (my answer to which I'm certain he didn't comprehend...but the tone defied borders), bought a magazine (no small achievement when you don't know the words for "buy" "how much," "magazine," "can I" and "a"), found my way 2 kilometers from my hotel to our facility on foot, and even got an old guy to respond in French when I said "bonjour," implying I sounded French enough to fool him.

I have also, during my time here, eaten some of the finest tasties that have ever graced my palate. I had pastisse, a delightful licoricey pre-meal liquer intended to shock your taste buds into licoricey submission to the meal to come; coc a vin, which the menu described as "a homemade old rooster soaked in Marsala wine," prompting both the questions, "how old was the rooster, and how do you home-make one?"; escargot soaked in butter, garlic, and what I assume was heroin; crepe Suzette, which is French for "creepy Suzy"; and enough freshly-baked baguettes to make one consider shredding one's Adkins book and crushing it into some kind of spreadable jam.

I also ate a creme brulee for lunch that will likely prompt any number of lurid dreams for the next few days, and real French Fries which were...umm...well, they were pretty much like American Fries, but in France.

Despite their reputation, the French people have been remarkably kind, polite, and generally agreeable. With the exception of the bar owner who kept yelling about how ridiculous it is that the "French can't smoke in France despite France being French," everyone has been very well-behaved...downright hospitable at times, even. This is a far cry from my single day in Paris ten years ago, when I, as a high school near-grad backpacking with no money to spend, was welcomed as a leprechaun welcomes a drought. I've even carried on tiny conversations with real-deal French people, and enjoyed learning tons of little cultural ideosyncracies and idioms (such as, "I lost my G," which refers to shedding an accent when speaking English, and not, in fact, to having a buddy from da hood pass away).

So far, it's been a great trip! I look forward to sharing more after tomorrow, when I get to get out and actually see the city a bit (been cooped up inside of a facility most days). Au Revoir! C'est La Vie!

Peace,
Justin

2007-12-05T14:00:00.000-05:00

I don't believe in angels, but I do believe in maids.

I'm in Dallas, Texas this week...home to JR (and the one who shot him), the grassy knoll, and the first Steak-House/Gas-Station I've ever seen. I'm surrounded by pickup trucks and people who wish they owned bigger pickup trucks in a land so expansive that the office towers seem to be built out long before they're built up, just because they can. Dallas, Texas is also the home to Narrissa, the Ecuadorian Maid, and the closest thing to an angel I think I've met.

I met Narrissa while she scrubbed my tub. I had come back from breakfast to find the door open, her giant-maid-cart (home to villages of tiny soaps) in front of my door, and her feet sticking out of the entrance to my hotel room's bathroom. She was yellow-gloved and scrubbing furiously...working so hard at something nobody would ever, ever thank her for...and unaware of my presence. I cleared my throat, which I gather scared the living @#$# out of her, as she jumped in a way that only a person on their knees can. She immediately turned around and stood, a vision of tiny Latin maternalism, less than five feet tall and with a wholly ambiguous aging that Latin and Asian women seem to have won in the racial-bonuses lottery. (I guessed her somewhere between 30 and 60...turns out she was 62). What got me was the smile...real, deep, proud, humble, and born from somewhere I've never been.

She greeted me with a "hi, sir, do jou wan me to leeb?"

"No," I replied...stumbly and a little taken aback by her grandma's-cookies warmth, "No, not at all."

"OK, I'll be done in a mow-men. Is OK if I pass de bac-ume?"

"Yeah, of course...please."

She pulled off her gloves, started the vacuum, and swept around me while I opened my computer and started to get to work. An email came in from a co-worker that included a picture of a child recently born to (another) co-worker. I opened it to my screen. The sweeper stopped behind me. A confident, quiet, and infinitely cinnamon voice:

"Is your baby?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Is a peek-shur of your baby?"

"Oh...OH, no, no...just a friend's baby."

"You have cheel-drun?"

"No. Not yet."

"How long you haf been married?"

"Five years. Well, just over five years."

"Oh. Good! Cheel-drun come soon."

I paused. I had nothing to say back to this. I hoped so. I hope so now. I want that...we want that. We have for a while. We worry. I said something very, very honest to someone I just met:

"You really think so?"

"Jes. I think so."

Sweeper clicks back on. Engine spins up, carpet meets rotating-bristle-brush, and Narissa goes back to sweeping. I'm left feeling very different than when I woke up...a little stunned, and a bit like I just got half-a-telegram from Jesus, that got cut off right after, "Justin, I've got something important to tell you, but it's good news..."

I turned back to my computer. My heart was thumping a little. I can't tell you why I believed her, but I did.

The sweeper shuts back off. I look into the desk mirror over my shoulder.

"Can I pray for jou?"

Total....stunned...silence.

"Umm, what?"

"Can I pray for jou?"

Yes.

"yes."

"I'm shore. Jour tall...will you seet while I pray?"

I sat, flushed and a little shell-shocked.

"Whas jour name?"

"Justin."

"Ju-stin. Good. I pray in my language. OK?"

Yes. Absolutely, yes.

"Yes."

She stood across from me while I sat on the edge of my (just made) bed, held a hand up in a Christian mudra I'd seen many times but never felt until now, and prayed in Spanish. She prayed for me, for Stacy, for the blessing of a son...she spoke of wombs, and organs, and fruit, and health, and birth...she spoke of something so private that to have done it in English would have been offensive. She spoke with reverence, but with authority, and seasoned with a knowledge so deep of something so deeply unknowable that I shrunk in a kind of humble shame. I felt her prayer rinse over me, starting at the heart and radiating outward, spilling over my gel-hair and polished shoes and just-ironed shirt. She prayed, and she meant it, and I think she actually spoke to God. I don't claim to know how that works, but I think she did it.

She finished praying, said "Amen," and looked at me just long enough to let me know that her prayers were in love, not in plea for my response. She rushed over to the desk drawer, grabbed a Gideon's Bible, opened to Psalm 127, pointed at it, and waited for me to read aloud. I did. She smiled. And then she went back to the bathroom to scrub the tub.

She was done. She wanted nothing...no money, no thanks, no conversion moment, not even a prayer in her favor. She just wanted me to be prayed for, and fully expected me to receive the blessing. It's like she waited...like she was planted there...like she had been there, in my hotel bathroom, in Dallas, Texas, just waiting for me to come. I feel like she was waiting for me to come along, all filled with insecurities about child-bearing and reproduction and would-we-ever-be-able-to and just waited. I came, she prayed, then she was done.

I tried to thank her profusely. Good god, I even tried to give her money to say thank you...it's stupid, but it's all I had to offer. She would have none of it. It didn't fit her somehow...it was far too cheap, it didn't fit the plan. She was there to pray, and she was there to scrub, and that was all.

As you may have noticed, it's been a very long time since I've written. My last post was about an inspiration lost...and I think I've been waiting to find it again. I had no idea I'd find it in a hotel bathroom in Dallas.

Thank you, Narrissa. I can't wait to send you a picture of the blessing some day.

Peace,
Justin

Saying Goodbye...

2007-09-01T16:57:00.001-04:00

far away ~
Originally uploaded by Paula Anddrade.

I got a chance to say goodbye to my friend Gaile today.

There was a memorial service for her at our old church. It was unlike any other memorial service I've been to. There were two videos, a live band on the stage singing worship songs, cameras recording the event...and 800+ people in attendance. Oh, and an airplane fly-over and a parachuter tribute. I'm not kidding.

If you're wondering what kind of royalty merits this kind of sendoff celebration...you didn't know Gaile. What made this all made sense is that she never would have believed it was for her.

The 800+ people in that auditorium came because they had been touched by this one woman in some deep way. Think of that...here's a woman who was by no conventional definition "famous"...she held no office, hosted no talk show, owned no corporation. She just loved every single person she came in touch with. Every one. And nearly a thousand came today to try to find some way to say thanks.

To some of us, she was a mother, to some a counselor, to some a sister and peer, and to most a walking example of what we want to be like when we grow up. She felt like love, like light, like the kind of humble shining understanding of God that I only taste on my best days.

As I wrote in my last post, Gaile was truly good, and what an honor it was to be among the hundreds of people who came today to celebrate that.

I don't begin to understand heaven. But if it exists, then Gaile is there. And my guess is the celebration at her arrival is far louder than ours in the wake of her departure. But for one hour, we may have rattled the windows up there a bit...proclaiming that, for whatever her return to God may be like, she sure did a damn fine job down here. And that, for all that heaven will bring her, we miss her like hell.

Goodbye, Gaile. And thank you, from one of the many you loved.

Peace,
Justin

2007-08-22T11:08:00.000-04:00

I lost a friend this week, and the world lost something bright.

Gaile Reider was magnificent. She was smart, beautiful, maternal, wise, and...most of all...benevolent. She was, as few are, thoroughly good.

For those of you who knew Gaile, I'm joining you in mourning, and in celebrating her life.

I miss you, Gaile. I know whatever comes next is probably better, but I can't help but feel like we're lesser for your passing. You were good to me...thank you.

Peace,
Justin

2007-08-09T13:19:00.000-04:00

For my 100th post, I'd like to offer you...

...the Tao of the Starfish-Thrower.

I remember when I was in high school attending a “motivational speaker” who came to encourage us to stay off of drugs, or stay in school, or don’t drink at the prom, or make the most of ourselves, or something. The speaker was doing pretty well endearing herself to us, for the most part; she had not tried to use “teen language,” she didn’t enter to a canned rap backbeat, and she didn’t fall down. That and the fact that she got you out of history class bought her some credibility.

Just towards the end of her presentation, she began to share a personal story about something that had happened to her on vacation. You see…there she was, on the beaches of North Carolina, enjoying a morning walk…when she happened upon a shore full of at least a thousand beached starfish. If you don’t know where this story is going, you’ve never been to a charity fundraiser or a Christian church, and may want to stop and go here.

It probably goes without saying that the assembly turned into a jeering mass of high-school jadedness shortly thereafter, and, if I remember right, ended with a vice-principal threatening to give us (all 1800 of us) detention if we didn't force ourselves to listen to the speaker's conclusion.

The plight of the speaker isn't the point of this post, however...it just gave me a fun way to talk about starfish...

As I sat on the porch last night with Stacy and my friend Dan, the conversation turned to charity, responsibility, and justice. We had expressed that we all felt guilty about living in a suburb in Ohio, versus in a dump in Mexico, a street in China, a FEMA trailer after Katrina, etc. We all felt bad that we had, while others didn't.

We talked a lot about what we were doing for the world...and, perhaps more emotionally-impactful, what we weren't doing for the world. We talked about giving money, giving time, and the nagging sense that if we were really good people we'd be in Darfur, or Iraq, or Applachia, serving the poor. And maybe that's true. But I also realized something else, and it had everything to do with that starfish story. It is this:

...the guy who threw the starfish back acknowledged two truths:
1. I saved that one.
2. (By implication) I did not save the rest.

The reality is, the Starfish-Thrower knew that the other starfish would die. He had to. The other guy told him so, and his reply denotes agreement. By choosing the 3,418th starfish on the beach, he chose to let the 3,417th starfish die. That starfish was no different than that which he threw, save for its location only inches away. In any given moment, he picked one to throw, and by doing so, doomed all those he would not pick.

I have to realize that every time I spend a dollar on a double cheeseburger or half a beer or 1/3 a gallon of gas, I am not giving it to feed Katrina victims. True. But I also have to realize that every dollar I spend feeding Katrina victims, I am not clothing the children of Afghanistan. And every dollar I spend clothing the children of Afghanistan, I am not releasing the sex-slaves of Malaysia. Every choice I make to save a starfish lets another one die.

So, given this reality...how do we deal?

Here are the options I see:

1. We do nothing, because people will always suffer and starfish will always beach.
2. We try do save all the starfish.
3. We pick a starfish, and let others die.

#1 is tempting. The amount of suffering in the world is absolutely unending (as, for what its worth, the amount of joy), and totally unfathomable. Therefore, it's tempting to shut one's eyes, huddle in the corner and rock oneself in to sleep in a sort of nihlistic possum-catatonia. But it's also a cop out. That's the whole point of the story...save one even if you can't save 'em all.

#2 is stupider. There's no quicker way to assure you're completely ineffective than to dedicate yourself to something you're bound to fail. You'll burn out, become uber-cynical, give up hope of ever accomplishing anything, and drink until it stops hurting.

#3 is hard as hell. OK, great, you throw a starfish back. That's the easy part. You donate to Red Cross, you show up at Ground Zero, and you serve in the Peace Corps. But then what? How do you eat that $7 Quizos while children die of hunger? How do you drink your $4 Starbucks while pregnant women die of cold for lack of blankets?

The answer...as far as last night's thinking would get me...

..you just do.

You accept it as reality. Just like the Starfish-Thrower.

People will suffer. They will always suffer. In unimaginable ways. (Again, just as we will experience joy in lush profundity). That is truth. And that sucks. Somehow, you learn to accept it, and you find the one thing you're going to do about it in that moment.

That one thing.

You contribute to the cause.
You drive to the blast zone.
You parent.
You volunteer.
You hug your mom.
You eat, and laugh to get stronger and revived.
You fight the war against something evil.
You protest the war against something human.
You come home from work because she waits for you.
You write the blog.
You work, to make the money.
You pray.
You hope as much as you can.
You sleep, so that you can do it again.

You do the one thing, and you value that for what it is. It is a drop in the bucket, and until you become present to that reality, I think you will inevitably go to #1 or #2. Let it be your drop in the bucket. The bucket will never fill...true. Live with that. It never will. But that doesn't mean you didn't add your drop. Choose futility; it's forever superior to ambivalence.

I am not a world-saver. I am not even yet a Starfish-Thrower, really. Not really. But I am learning to love those that were saved, and mourn for those that died, and perhaps to do so with equal reverence.

Peace,
Justin

2007-07-01T18:04:00.000-04:00

When I started this blog, I made a promise to myself that I would not focus on how "good," "interesting" or even "remotely intelligible" my writing was...that it was about the exercise and thrill of writing, and not what is produced. As a result, I've made it my practice to publish nearly everything that I take the time to sit down and write...knowing that once I start being selective, I'll never publish anything, and then I'll just stop writing.

Notice, I said nearly everything.

Sometimes, I get halfway through a post and realize it's going nowhere. I thought I had something to say; thought I had something to offer the world. Thankfully, at some point, I realized I did, in fact, not.

With that, I'd like to offer you two half-posts for which I have no explanation, and presented with a tone something like apology, and mostly like a confusion: I'm scratching my head as much as you are on these.

#!: My would-have-been gas-price rant. Honestly, I think I actually meant to get to saying something about gas prices on this one. Something about how I hate paying more, but that hopefully it would force Americans to save energy. Unfortunately, I got about 700 words into a nonsensical reminiscent metaphor, and completely derailed. Please join me in a rousing chorus of, "where the hell were you going with that one?":

--

It seems like these days every blog in the country is whining about the price of gas.

Please let me join in the chorus...

This is ridiculous. And it's very, very good for people like me.

Do you remember when you were a kid and you had a Nintendo...and you'd be right in the middle of the 4th-level Big Boss in Rush N' Attack...and your mom would call for dinner. You'd write down your save code ('cause a "hard drive" was nigh unheard of back in the day) and run off to a plate of meat and peas, scarf it down with eager ferocity, and run back to your game...only to find out that turning the power "on" only yields a blinking grey-and-half-title-slide? [Long sentence]. You'd pull the cartridge out, you'd blow in it, you'd stick it back in. Grey-blink-halfscreen-blink. You'd turn it off, push the game up and down a couple dozen times as fast as possible, and try again. Grey-blink-halfscreen-blink. You'd even take out your old dusty Duck Hunt cartridge to jam in on top of the current game, hoping somehow that wedging them together will dislodge the game just enough to confuse the Nintendo fairies into accidentally letting it work...

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#2: 46 Thoughts. I woke up one morning a couple of months ago with thoughts firing through my head so quickly and with such scattered subject matters, I thought it may be cathartic to try to record as many as I could between the time I woke up and the time I had breakfast. Fortunately for you, my last thought of the morning was, "this is a terrible idea." I stopped 46 thoughts in, realizing that virtually nobody would make it past 4 and still care:

---

Here are 46 thoughts I had before breakfast this morning:

1. Instead of training me to wake up and start my day, my snooze button has taught me how to sleep comfortably in nine-minute increments.
2. My cats have learned nothing since we got them. Nothing.
3. I don't need a new car.
4. I'd rather have great speakers than a great TV. I'd prefer both, though.
5. "Magik, The Gathering" would have had a chance of being really fun if the uber-dark scary kids hadn't taken it over.
6. It would be really fun to have a wicker-furniture fight with someone.
7. I don't think I could hold the same position/job for more than five years without becoming very bad at it.
8. If you're smelling a fart, does that mean you're actually inhaling little particles of someone else's poo? Scent has to have some vehicle/mass right?
9. We've got about eight more years before Americans start to notice other Americans dying from global climate change.
10. We wash the sheets each week. We change the mattress cover each month-ish. We even dryclean the comforter a couple times a year. But what about the mattress? Isn't it just kind of a giant sponge for grossness?
11. Count Chocula + Milk = purple?
12. I have to pee. But it's warm in bed. I wish I could pee in bed.
13. I wonder if my dreams are being planned all day, or if my brain just makes them up as it goes.
14. I want to be able to drink shower water as it leaves the showerhead...and in theory I should be able to, just like tap water...but I can't bring myself to do it.
15. There's something about pony-tails. I can't explain it. There's just something endearing about them.
16. I constantly feel like I'm late for something.
17. Whitney Houston had nothing but potential.
18. I wish I liked martinis. They seem very cool. And when I order straight whiskey, people assume I'm an alcoholic. If I order a martini, people assume I've read Vogue.
19. I used to like to draw. I wonder if I can still draw? Probably not.
20. Even when I have nothing to worry about, I fill in stuff. If I can't come up with stuff, it drives me nuts that I can't remember what it is I should be worrying about, which opens up the possibility that I'm actually being snuck up on by EVERYTHING now.
21. Twins are creepy. I know, I know. But still.
22. I love using the F-word at just the right time. It makes me feel rebellious.
23. I haven't touched my bass in a long time.
24. Could I bench-press my car if I had to?
25. The Red Hot Chili Peppers were way better when they were on heroin.
26. I'm late for work.
27. I would trust the Church a lot more if they admitted being as confused as I am.
28. My entire life, milk has just "shown up" for me. I've never had to buy it...it's just there when I open the door.
29. I'll never be an adult until something really tragic happens to me.
30. Harry Potter was good, but c'mon. This is getting silly.
31. I wonder what my chin looks like.
32. Chivalry: wonderful old-timey respect for the elegance of women, or subtle form of misogyny?
33. Robert Frost is better than "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening." It's like loving Mr. Big for "Be With You."
34. I'm kind of over fireworks.
35. Is it better to smoke one cigarette a day, or seven on Friday night?
36. Do germs kill each other too?
37. We need a new kitchen floor. But I don't want to do that until we fix the bathroom. But I don't want to do that until we get a shed.
38. Mo' money, mo' problems.
39. I always grab a toothpick when I'm leaving Steak N' Shake, cause it makes me feel nonchalant.
40. I hate the smell of makeup.
41. I loved high school, but I almost never miss it.
42. Really on-the-ball people always have charged phones.
43. Polo shirts don't work for heavy guys.
44. Stacy's voice feels like home.
45. Now I'm really late for work.
46. I used to love the airport. Now it feels mostly like work.

---

That's all! Stay tuned for more half-baked crap from the past!

Peace,
Justin

2007-06-24T16:17:00.001-04:00

P6200155.JPG
Originally uploaded by Justin Masterson.

It’s absolutely unimaginable that I would be in Moscow.

I remember growing up in the midst of the cold war. I remember fearing nuclear attack from Russia. I remember Ronald Regan’s dramatic demand that Mr. Gorbechav would “tear down that wall.” The Russia that I know is a communist state, ruled with fear and failed idealism in the strength and integrity of the worker, and dedicated to destroying capitalist America with…lord…whatever it was they had aimed at us in War Games.

And yet, I am in a city of full unbridled capitalism, teeming with market-won wealth, and, perhaps most amazingly, me. The immigration process was, of all things, uneventful, consisting of five nervous minutes of an immigration officer oscillating between staring at my visa and staring at me, then finally stamping it with what appears to be “CRMNNICTAR,” but probably does not mean criminal, dictum, nectar, or any combination thereof.

I sped through the city in the back of a taxi, and marveled at how many Mercedes and BMWs I saw, and how very few old wrinkled women in head scarves carrying swaddled babies I saw. (To date, none). There were no huge statues of Stalin or Lenin, no giant communist flags, and no scary soldiers in war-green outfits and sloped hats. Mostly just people who look like white Americans, but with skinnier clothing, bonier cheeks, and far more attention paid to their mustaches. The buildings blurred by in a Germanic theme, colorful remnants of a period of magnificent culture and art before communist rule, many with brand new signs on the front, blazing Cyrillic interpretations of names I know from my local shopping mall…Sbarro, McDonalds, CitiBank.

I ate dinner in a very modern Russo/Euro fusion restaurant, very appropriately named Vogue. It was a European take on Russian favorites…my dinner consisted of Borsch (warm red beet soup), Beef Stroganoff (sautéed beef, noticeably without noodles), black caviar (far more common here than in the US…sometimes spread on toast in casual meals), roasted vegetables (vegetables which have been roasted), and raspberry blini (a pancake blintz with liquid fantastic on the inside).

Magnificent dinner…but, after receiving the bill and running a quick exchange-rate-tally…it became apparent why Moscow was just announced to be the “most expensive city in the world.” Dinners ran over $100 apiece, hotel costs somewhere pushing $680/night, and a bottle of water in the room will cost you just around $12. This a great city to visit if you’re on business, you’re insanely wealthy, or you’ve stolen someone else’s credit card.

If you're interested, you can check out pics at the ol' Flickr site.

Peace,
Justin

2007-05-07T22:19:00.000-04:00

I feel a little bit like a scorned wife. And my cheating husband goes by "Fox."

Firefly was canceled due to a "lack of interest" by the Fox Network. I am still angry about that. It was a critically-acclaimed program that, among a sea of reality-TV shows and brainless sitcoms, stood out as a shining beacon of brilliant writing, fine acting, and real storytelling intoning Cino-Western variations on the heart's most ancient themes. I mourned the loss in my own nerdy ways, reading forums and following fan sites and hoping beyond hope that Fox would see the dollar signs painted on the stacks of sold-out DVD sets and high-grossing follow-up movie, and resurrect this gem. It was not to be.

Meanwhile, shows like "The War at Home," "So You Think You Can Dance," and "Bones" continued to live in comfort on the network. "American Idol" continued to thrive, even with a grass-roots effort to have its most talentless pseudo-crooner voted to #1 every week, and "Hell's Kitchen" defied cancellation with episode after episode of sensational screaming Brit. I continued to wash my dishes and set the table for my wandering Fox every night, with fond memories of our early-Simpsons honeymoon and a distant hope of another surprise Firefly romantic weekend.

Then, just when I threatened to pack my bags and leave for the last time to my cousin Netflix's house where I can find safe haven and old episodes of Northern Exposure on DVD, Fox promised me change...Fox promised me renewal...a Bed & Breakfast redemption for a failing marriage...

...it was called Drive

Drive was written and produced by Tim Minear, Joss Whedon's Firefly-writing-partner. It starred Nathan Fillion, the former hero of Firefly/Serenity, as the lead actor. It featured Richard Brooks, who played Firefly's most intriguing and notorious character, Jubal Early. And, more than anything, it had whispers of the clever writing, magic characterization and vortex wit that I had been yearning for since Laura Palmer's dad was exposed, Jim Prufrock disappeared from the streets of Push, and Joel Fleischman boarded a plane for the mainland. It wasn't perfect by any means...several bad actors and a sense that Ford was one memo away from ubiquitous product placement hampered the show...but it was good. Not just "TV good"...like, actually good. It had heart...and it had clever. And, for the first time in a couple of years, it felt like somebody was actually trying to produce something new for network television.

My heart rose. I told everyone I came into contact with. I raved to my bowling league, and I spread the gospel at work. I told the guy next to me on the flight back from Boston. In retrospect, I may as well have been saying, "yeah, but he told me he actually won't cheat this time."

They canceled Drive after two episodes. It was on TV for ten days. Critics loved it. Fans raved. But it was a startup...it was complicated, and nuanced, and it required the better part of your frontal lobe to follow the dialogue. In short, it wasn't "So You Think You Can Dance." They had spent TWO MONTHS promoting this show...dropping enticing ads in American Idol and 24...two of Fox's most highly-rated shows. Ratings were good...but apparently not good enough for a show that cost that much to produce. Fox canceled it. After two episodes.

I found out yesterday. I found a strange thread in a random google search that read "SAVE DRIVE FROM THE AXE." It was lipstick on the collar; a waft of unfamiliar perfume in the laundry. I told myself I probably was jumping to conclusions...I mean, he promised...but I clicked anyway. It was Fox site dedicated to drive...and it was page after page of fans lamenting the loss of this promising show.

I was tricked again. I thought good TV had a chance. I was foolish.

I skipped 24 this week. I think I'm protesting. It's passive-aggression. It's one step closer to calling Netflix back up for a romp...like the old days.

Probably best. I've been watching too much TV for a guy with full-time job and a wife and a house. And now, I've got one less reason.

Peace,
Justin

2007-04-08T17:30:00.000-04:00

I owe the Christian Church an apology.

I went to church this morning.

No...let's be more accurate.

Stacy went to church this morning. I followed Stacy because it's Easter and I wanted to be wherever Stacy was. So, I was in a church.

I've had a bit of trouble going to church for the last couple of years. And by, "a little bit of trouble," I mean, I haven't gone. I haven't gone because I'm angry, because I'm a little bitter, and because, deep down, I'm having a hell of a time reconciling my conception of faith with what it is that the churches I've been to spend their weekends talking about. I also haven't gone because I worked in a church...a good church by all accounts...for four years, and I made mistakes that meant prioritizing my job more than my wife and my friends. I didn't want that any more. I didn't want god-sounding-work to mess up my actual life.

So I've been avoiding church pretty adamantly. And being mostly quietly pissed. Walking back into a megachurch this morning, in some ways, felt like crumpling; like walking into an old sore and lying down beneath the loose bits of torn skin.

But I went back because Stacy wanted to go. I'm glad I did. I realized something this morning.

Nothing about this morning's church service was incredible. It was very lightsy-soundy-drama-y, and a lot of people worked really hard to make it happen, but nothing about the service struck me. What struck me was the fact that a lot of people worked really hard to make it happen. People...just like me, just like you. They put a bunch of time and energy and money into putting on this weekend service for me and for Stacy and the other 2000 people there. They created an imperfect service, extolling things I kind of mostly believe in, and sharing ideas they care passionately about and I generally don't buy.

Here's the thing...the Christian Church is a bunch of people. It's me, it's them, it's us.

I've held the Church to such high standards for so long, it was inevitable I would feel let down and disappointed. I built this set of ideals that suggested that other men and women would be able to tell me about the Perfect Unknowable in ways that made sense to me, and that they would do so cleanly, smoothly, and without error, contradiction, or personal foul-ups. I held the Church to an impossible standard, if we're being honest. No one...no human...no group of humans...could possibly meet that standard.

I don't know who to apologize to exactly, so I'm apologizing here. Church, I'm sorry. I'm beginning to realize that my expectations were ridiculous, unrealistic, and more than a little hypocritical. If anyone should understand that the church is just a group of people, it would be a guy who worked at a church for all that time. I'm flawed just as deeply as anyone else, and I'm certain I screwed up the church experience for others during my tenure there. Perhaps even now. And yet, I expected the other people to rise to a standard much higher than that which I can meet. I sought perfection, because, at some level, I didn't distinguish between a Perfect God, and those who are doing their best to follow Him.

I'm sorry, Church. I would never hold others to the standard that I've held you. I wouldn't even hold myself to that standard. It was unfair, and my anger and bitterness are my own product and responsibility, not yours. You deserve the same leeway that all of us flawed and wonderful humans do. Again, I'm sorry.

I have no reason to expect I'm going to be cool with the Church overnight. I certainly don't expect I'm going to start going again right away. Honestly, going to church isn't an end-goal for me...growing in my pursuit of understanding whatever little bits I can about God is. Maybe I'll get there in a church, and maybe I won't. But I hope today adds a bit of much-needed perspective to my criticism of the group of people who claim a knowledge of God through Jesus Christ. They deserve the same grace I do. I will continue to rage, critique, and complain...I know I will. But hopefully I'll at least consider the people before I rail the institution, and hopefully I can continue my search for truth from a more honest and graceful place.

I think the Church deserves at least that. I think I do.

Peace,
Justin

2007-03-14T00:11:00.000-04:00

I’m in a list mood. (I think Clinton from Zombie Fights Shark is inspiring me). SO, here is a list of five things I’ve learned in my two days in Mexico:

1. Tacos are genuine Mexican food, but burritos make Mexicans laugh when you try to order them, as they’re apparently something Gringos made up. (Note to self: consult Wikipedia before going anywhere, ever).
2. Fried worms, while entirely disgusting looking, are actually entirely disgusting tasting. (I’ll post the picture as soon as I can find a cable and D/L it to my computer).
3. The people of Mexico City, in great contrast to those bastards in Paris and Milan, are very happy to speak English with you, and are delighted when you give Spanish your very best shot.
4. No, it’s cool, just park that anywhere.
5. Nobody likes it when you correct their spelling or grammar, regardless of how relevant that correction might be. (This has nothing to do with being in Mexico, other than the fact that I just corrected the grammar of the one of my team-mates, and he smiled the kind of polite smile that, if you look deep enough, says, “I went to Harvard Business, and you’re telling me about a misplaced ‘a’?” Point well taken.

2007-03-08T10:00:00.000-05:00

There's nothing like a little perspective to give you some perspective...

This is a shot of Seattle at 6:30 this morning, taken from my terrifically crappy mobile phone camera, taken from my terrifically terrific hotel room on the 43rd floor of the North tower of the Westin, Seattle. You can see Puget sound and even a little bit of the mountain ranges. And some buildings. But somehow, even those are pretty.

If you're a long-time blog reader, and you happen to be a mutant with the power to remember even the smallest of details, you may recall that I've been to Seattle for my work before. Just about two years ago, I was in this very spot, writing about the hope and possibility of things to come, and pleased as punch to be leaving my old gig to try something new.

Now, a bit less than two years later, I'm back here, and it feels poetic. I spent the six-hour plane ride out here lamenting the fact that I've been on the road for three out of the last four weeks, and away from Stacy. I've been a bit down about that...feeling like I travel too much...and, in the way only the truly short-sighted can...not taking the time to look back and figure out what's so great about exactly where I am.

Then, this morning, I found that old post. And I marveled at my own capacity to forget the past, and to ignore the clear and obvious signs of blessing on me.

Here I am, eighteen months after my previous post, sitting in the same hotel room, with thousands of miles, dozens of cities, several countries, and a bunch of money between this me and that me. I also have memories of places I never would have gone, conversations with people in cultures I never would have gotten to explore, chances to stretch myself in ways I never would have dared, and the chance to taste food no one should ever eat. I love my job, and, in some kind of moderation, I love to travel. To sit and ruminate about the one down-side of my job while flying to my favorite visiting-city in the US where I'll lodge in my favorite hotel and overlook one of the most beautiful sights in the country...again, short-sighted.

I'm very happy this morning. I woke up at 6:30 (woke up in Newark yesterday...big time difference), opened my curtains and gaped at the Sound. I will drink my Starbucks, and perhaps even play some Indie music while I workout, just to get the Seattle feel. I will be where I am for today, and look forward to what is, rather than wish for what isn't, what was, or what I think should have been.

Starting to sound like a Daily Affirmation, isn't it? Don't mean to get corny, but the view from up here made me want to do something taller.

I had Pacific Oysters for dinner, and they were delicious. Here's to the good things.

Peace,
Justin

2007-03-06T00:12:00.000-05:00

I've not made a lot of universal rules. Those I've made have been neither widely disseminated, nor routinely abided. Among those rules nobody seems to follow:

- Orders at Starbucks must be limited to fourteen syllables or less. You came for coffee. You ordered an in-ground pool. Stop it.

- People must show .006 seconds of concern for your well-being after you've told them you just had a bout with food poisoning before they're allowed to ask, "where did you eat?"

- Shut up, cats.

- Martin Lawrence, before being allowed to make a new movie, must sit and watch any of his other movies. If he can still see, he's allowed to make one more.

But now I’d like to make a new rule, and if this one doesn’t stick, damnit if I’m not going to…I dunno…sit and bitch about it some more. Here is my new rule:

- No leaning back in airplane seats if you’re in Coach.

I fly Coach. For those of you who fly Business Class or First Class, let me give you a sense of what us Coach flyers are experiencing back behind that Iron Curtain.

Let’s have an activity…

What I want you to do is to go to your nearest elementary school and steal two chairs. (Don’t worry, you’ll get to put them back when you’re done, and if anyone stops you, just tell them it’s for science). Take these tiny chairs home and put them in the crawlspace of your home, facing a wall, and about seven inches from it.

Then I want you to invite your wife, husband, or domestic partner to sit in that chair, and to rest his/her arm on the armrest of your elementary-school-chair.

Next, I want you to grab a briefcase, a laptop bag, and an old Brookstone plastic bag (The Sharper Image or Chic-Fil-A may be substituted), and fill them with rocks. Once this is accomplished, please re-enter your crawlspace while carrying all three, and work your way back to the elementary school chair without touching any other items or boxes with any of the bags. (If you touch one, please yell “Hey, watch out” at yourself and then glare angrily at yourself, and then start over). Once next to your Significant-Other, you must push your way past your SO to the empty chair without touching your SO with any of the bags, or your butt, or your crotch; then sit in the elementary-school chair and find a way to stow all three bags of rocks under the elementary school chair (or, if you’re an overhead-bin kind of person, in a shoebox nearby).

Sit in that chair, facing the wall, with seven inches of clearance between your chair and the wall, for four hours. If you feel you need to pee, please cram yourself in a ventilation duct to do so, then return to your seat immediately.

You are permitted one snack of eleven peanuts and four ounces of generic spring water at the two-hour mark, but you must refer to them as “refreshments and beverage service,” and can only store them on your lap on top of a tray the size of a graduation cap.

…Now…

Let’s do this…let’s now presume the guy in front of you put his seat back.

…approximately ten minutes into your four-hour journey, I want you to scoot your chair closer to the wall by four of your seven inches.

You now have three inches left.

Your shoulders are pushed back into the elementary school chair, your legs are arched with your shins digging into the wall, and your hands are stuck helplessly at your side as you try to imagine how much better it will feel when the lack of blood in your feet moves from “pins and needles” to “totally numb.”

For additional hilarity, please have your SO, at that very moment, turn to you and say, “ladies and gentlemen, you are now permitted to take out your laptop computers.”

Here’s the thing…

If you’re in an airplane seat, and you lean back, you get MAYBE four degrees of lean. MAYBE. Let’s face it…you’re not any happier…if anything, you’ve just shattered hope that this ride could get more comfortable by eliminating the one option you had to make it so.

Moreover, the guy behind you loses four inches. This may not seem like much, but remember, he only had seven. You’ve just taken away 60% of his space.

I know you’re allowed to lean back in airplane seats. I know that. I’m not saying you’re not. You’re also allowed to fart in small cars, and allowed to use the bathroom on busses for #2. But if you’re any kind of a reasonable, sensible person, you don’t. Because that’s what makes us human.

Can we all agree to this new rule?

So it is written, so shall it be done.

Peace,
Justin

2007-02-18T12:23:00.001-05:00

IMG_3062.JPG
Originally uploaded by Justin Masterson.

I am writing this from the comfort of my living room, back here in the good ol' US-of-A.

(I feel like I should give my best Toby Keith sneer when I say "US-of-A." And then maybe there should be beer).

My trip to China was incredible. I lived as a minority in a city older than my own language. I ate food that my culture would eschew as dangerous, or gross or pets. I got to spend time in the homes of very kind and very polite people with deep spiritual convictions, intense dedication to family values, and a household yearly income lower than my monthly salary. I walked the streets and talked with the people and bought a handbag for my wife. I loved my time there as a tourist, as an outsider, and as a curious observer.

One thing I learned is that getting into China is much, much easier than getting out of China. Do you remember how they tell you to get to the airport 3 hours before an international flight, and how you always wonder why when you get through customs and security and still have 2 hours and 45 minutes left to wait?

Apparently, China is the reason they made that rule.

Greg and I got there 2.5 hours before our flight. We spent the first 20 minutes or so being misdirected to several locations in the huge Pudong airport by airport-staff who meant well, but who had apparently been hired some time that morning. Once finding the proper check-in site, we were able to breeze up to the front of the line in about ten minutes. Upon getting to the front of the line, we were greeted by a very smiley and very polite Korean Air woman, who, while very kind, wasn't really in a great position to do business with a couple of Americans trying to get back home.

(Please don't hear this as me being angry at her...we are the Americans who don't speak her language...and she tried very hard to speak ours. She worked very hard to make it work, but it didn't).

After she had called over another woman and checked in our bags to make sure they would follow us to Seoul, then Los Angeles, then Laguardia, then finally to Cincinnati, we began the process of explaining that we were not, in fact, going to LAX or Laguardia, which began a good 15-minute conversation on how Chicago and New York are not the same place, and that CVG (Cincinnati's airport) and PVG (Seoul's airport), despite having similar 3-letter-codes, have several important geographical differences.

I'm still not sure where she got the Los Angeles part from.

After we had sorted out the bag-destination piece, she sent me to the counter where I was meant to pay for the baggage-shipping. This counter was manned by one very very old lady and five teenagers who, it can be presumed, were there as some sort of detention. I waited in line until I got to the front, where I watched a very nervous-looking girl try unsuccessfully to fill out the required baggage paperwork. Several times. Nine, actually. Nine times. She tried nine times. I counted. Nine. There were no computers, so when I say "paperwork," I mean ancient-looking Chinese-government forms which must be filled out in triplicate in Chinese. She would work through each set of three forms all the way before deciding something about them wasn't working for her, then crumple and throw away and start over. Nine times. 30 minutes. Watching her fill out one form.

When she finally had filled it out to her satisfaction, she passed it to the very old woman, who I gather was a cashier. The old woman looked at the ticket and handed it back to the girl, muttering something in Chinese.

The girl threw the form away and started over.

She must have gotten it right on the tenth try, because the old woman took the form, read it over, and pulled out an abacus. As in, "welcome to the museum of natural history, please take a moment to look at this abacus and marvel at its ancientness. Now, on to the stalactite collection..." I'll give you, she was a whiz at the abacus, but still. She wrote out my receipt in Chinese and sent me on my way.

I returned to the counter, where they promptly sent me to security to verify that my electric toothbrush was not a bomb. It was, in fact, not.

We jumped on the plane and went to Seoul. It was a great flight, and very relaxing. Somewhere around midnight, we got off the plane in Seoul and headed out the gate to the "Transit Hotel" which is a hotel cleverly built into the airport, intended to allow international travelers who are simply laying over in Seoul to a place to rest without having to collect their bags and go through customs and immigration.

Aaah, the best laid plans of mice and men...

Apparently, when they built the transit hotel into the Incheon International Airport, they neglected to tell the staff of the Incheon International Airport that they had built the transit hotel. The woman whose job it was to make sure we got directed to the right place had actually never heard of the transit hotel, which was weird because it was her job to send people there. She even had a list of people who had reserved rooms in the hotel in her hand, which ended up becoming the focal point of a very confusing debate between us and her as to whether or not the hotel exists. (She maintains no).

She sent us through immigration (despite a letter in my hand from the hotel which says "DO NOT GO THROUGH IMMIGRATION OR CUSTOMS") and out to Customs before we finally got fed up enough to find someone else to help us. By the fourth person we asked about the hotel, we finally found someone who had heard of it. As it turns out, it's right next to the gate. Aaaaah. Damn sneaky hotel. 90 minutes after beginning our quest to get to our "easy and convenient" hotel, we were able to convince the one employee left in the airport at 1:30 in the morning to allow us through to the hotel. I tried to sleep that night...but honestly, I was pissed enough that I didn't sleep. I did, however, watch the movie "Honey," with Jessica Alba, which, mercifully, had all of its dialogue over-dubbed in Korean.

The rest of the trip home was relatively peaceful, with another magnficent flight on Korean Air. I was sick for the last few days of my visit, and knocked myself out with cold medicine for most of the flight, but my few waking hours were spent munching on great Korean food and playing Tetris with Greg. (He came out the big winner...won twice as many as I did in the end). I got home somewhere around 3:30 on Friday, exhausted and very, very grateful for my trip.

As wonderful as the trip was, though, I will tell you that I'm very, very happy to be home. Upon my return, I got home, fired off a couple of quick emails, and joyously waited for Stacy to get home. She had cleaned the entire house, and made me my very favorite dinner, which was entirely meat-and-potatoes, and undeniably American. She made my favorite dessert and even lit candles. It was magic. I hit the couch immediately afterward, and have slept for 26 of the last 44 hours.

I will upload the final pics Greg and I took (mostly Greg, he has the nice camera) to the ol' Flickr account shortly, and hopefully share a couple more stories. Thanks for prayers and interest throughout my trip...it was really great knowing that my friends back here in the States were following the journey; it made home feel close, and that was very good. I look forward to having slideshows, and catching up on what's going on here. A week's not a long time to be gone...but I was very far away, and really out of touch with American media...so you'll have to let me know if anything really crazy happened.

It's been a fun journey. Thanks for being a part of it. I may head back in April for some follow-up work...I'll keep you posted.

Peace,
Justin

The Cod That Refused to Be...

2007-02-14T11:30:00.001-05:00

P2110010.JPG
Originally uploaded by Justin Masterson.

I have been in research all day for two straight days. As a result, I have no pictures to share. In lieu of pictures of those days, I offer you this picture from my first day here, when we ate a fish whose head joined the rest of itself on our dinner table.

I'm learning that "ordering" in Shanghai, China is not what it is in the U.S. in the US, when you "order" something, whether it's a dish in a restaurant or asking to buy a jacket in a store, the employees generally consider this a mandate of sorts to provide you with the thing you asked for.

In China, it seems, "ordering" is actually just an opportunity to open up a dialogue in which the server/shopkeeper gets to tell you what it is you REALLY wanted, and then bring it to you.

Greg ordered a cod. The picture you're looking at is very not a cod. It's some kind of very weird Mandarin fish dish. Greg pointed at the cod on the menu. The waiter pointed at a dish on the other page. Greg said, "No," and pointed back at the cod. More enthusiastically, the waiter pointed at the dish on the other page. Clearly thinking the waiter was simply misunderstanding where he was pointing (I assumed pointing was an international language of sorts), Greg pointed vehemently at the cod. Even more vehemently, and somewhat nonplussed at Greg's refusal to speak Chinese Point-Finger, the waiter pointed at the cod, took the menu, and walked away.

Fifteen minutes later, out came this thing.

It was a fish. A whole fish. They were kind enough to separate the fish's head from it's body, as is traditional in Western fish-eating, but did not go so far as to actually remove the head from the plate. Instead, they deep-fried the head along with the fish, and then doused it in vegetables and some kind of mung-sauce.

We ate a lot of bread.

Some of the Chinese food has been really good. Some has been really not good. Most has just been very exotic, and I'm glad to have the option to try it. Here are a few of the dishes I've tried in the last couple of days:

1. Loose grass-clipping tea
2. Raw "black chicken" (chicken whose skin is naturally black)
3. Pumpkin rind
4. Teriaki eel strips
5. Drunken fish
6. Raw beef
7. Sino-Italian Grapa moonshine
8. Bulgur wheat tea
9. Pork-tofu
10. Unnamed animal on a stick

So, last night, in the middle of the NYC of China, I ordered up my favorite Chinese dish yet.

It was a cheeseburger. And it was delicious.

i have loved this country. But I'm looking forward to my return home.

I'm heading back to the Yu Yuan gardens tomorrow...the thought of having visited such a place without taking pictures made me ill. (Well, that and the raw chicken). So, Greg and I head out tomorrow morning to shoot some shots of the Gardens. I hope to post 'em before I get home on Fri afternoon.

Please pray for our safe return if you find the time and the spirit, and I'll keep ya'll posted.

Peace,
Justin

My Day As an Asian Man...

2007-02-12T02:29:00.000-05:00

Yu Yuan Gardens Chinese Archt
Originally uploaded by silverlinedwinnebago.

It's kinda hard to blend into Shanghai, China when you're 6'2", pale as a blister, and wearing a solid white button-up.

Because of overcrowding on our research team, I "subbed out" today while the rest of the team went to do the research throughout greater Shanghai. So, I'm left at the facility in the middle of the city by myself, with 9 or so hours to kill. So, I did what any self-respecting white guy with a nigh-paralyzing fear of the unknown would do...

...I went out.

For those of you who are naturally oriented towards world-exploring in strange and unfamiliar cultures, this story will seem stupid and banal. For those of you who land somewhere in the middle, this story will just seem banal. But, for those of you like me, who automatically think "I wonder if I can find an English-language gameshow network on the hotel room TV" when you have spare time in an unfamiliar country, this story may be slightly inspiring.

...I spent the last five hours, by myself, wandering around downtown Shanghai.

Unfortunately, I sent all four of the cameras that I brought with me out with the research teams, so I don't have any photos to share of my adventures. So, I'll have to use my rapier wit, my cunning language, and my "descriptive words for dummies" tome to paint the picture for you.

As I stood in the elevator of the research facility, I knew I had a choice to make...I was either going to take the easy road and go back to the air-conditioned comfort of the Westin, or I was going to go it alone. I breathed deeply, walked out the front door of the World Trade Tower, and just started walking.

I walked for nearly an hour, peeking into shops and repeatedly saying "Bou Yow" (no thanks) to people who kept yelling "Hello sir! DVD, Bag, Watch, Gucci, Prada?" (The fake stuff black market is alive, well, and downright ubiquitous here). I navigated the streets, I figured out how the crosswalks work, and I dodged entire families piled high on little motorscooters as they weaved in and out of traffic without regard for signals or right-of-way. I exchanged currency, bought water, and asked for directions...all fairly complicated tasks when you don't speak Chinese and the vendors don't speak English. I meandered down the narrow alleys and back roads, ducking under laundry lines and passing fruit stands and lots of men smoking. I got pointed at and laughed at by little Chinese children, which is the furthest thing from offensive and actually quite endearing. (BTW: Chinese children may be the cutest children on the planet. If you have a degree in advanced genetic manipulation so Stacy and I can have one, please let me know). I chatted with old men who spoke English, I admired the waterfront and massive Chinese tugboats at the Huangpu river, and I met a guy who cuts paper and sells it to tourists (again, more interesting than it sounds).
I eventually picked a destination, the Yu Yuan Gardens, and spent another good hour looking for it. I eventually found it, after trading odd directional hand-gestures with several polite Chinese policemen, and paid my 30RMB (US $3.50) to go inside.

I can't possibly do it justice here.

The gardens were built during the Ming dynasty, and have continued virtually unchanged ever since. They are pristine, stunning, and intensely Chinese. It was like walking into a rice-paper painting...every bit as delicate and intricate. The halls and gardens had names which translated to "Hall of Mildness," and "Thoughts While in Silence." The goldfish were huge and odd and, somehow, just as Chinese as their surroundings. People were quiet and respectful, and the loud, bustling city around disappeared among this architectural and horticultural masterwork. My eyes watered with awe throughout...I literally dumb-struck...I didn't speak a word for nearly two hours as I wandered the gardens. It stung deep to not have my camera with me, but the experience will showcase in my brain-movies for years and years to come.

I left the gardens in a sort of Buddhisty trance, and felt lifted and washed.

I was also hungry and desperate to pee...and toilets and English-friendly restaurants have both been a bit elusive here. I pushed and excuse-me'd my way through the throngs of Chinese New Year celebrants in the Yuan district, and eventually found a cafeteria-ish thing with tons of food and a restroom. Score.

I have no idea what I ate. I'd like to guess, but it would be pure speculation. The meat thing seemed to be cooked-animal-kabob, but it didn't taste like any animal I've eaten before. The soup involved a grain, and the drink was either watermelon juice or some kind of coffee. I had the honor of coining the international symbol for "where can I sit to where I'm not looking directly into the sun," and, again, got laughed at by Chinese children. I ate in courage, and, in some ways, I ate in victory.

As I walked back to the hotel, I met a Chinese "friend" (read: guy who pretends to be interested in Americans so he can take you to a hole-in-the-wall store in order to sell you cheap crap), followed him to a tea shop, and chatted for some time about Buddhism, communism, and what a great deal I could get on a genuine Rolex.

(I am now the proud owner of a $40 "genuine" Rolex...it was more about the experience than the having).

As I walked back to the hotel, my feet hurting and my chintz-bag in tow, I felt victorious. I had, in some ways, beaten my fear and done something scary. I couldn't wait to get here and share it with you.

Today was a big day for me. I'm growing.

Peace,
Justin

Fruity Oaty Bars...

2007-02-11T02:27:00.001-05:00

P2100004_1.JPG
Originally uploaded by Justin Masterson.

Doesn't this billboard just make you wonder, "what's in the bowl?" The little girl seems to know...in kind of a sly way, at that.

Wow. This morning, Greg and I wandered around Shanghai, shopping and exploring. Wow. This is a very very different place.

I can't wait to tell you stories. We're running out the door now, but I'll write tonight, which will be your this morning.

If I didn't write about it in the next entry, please remind me to tell you about the quest for the black jacket, how to say no to a watch salesman, and the cod that refuses to be.

Peace,
Justin

2007-02-10T04:29:00.001-05:00

Fri 743 p.m. (US)

As I write this, I'm eight hours into a 14-hour flight from Chicago to Seoul, South Korea (the good Korea)...and the little map in front of me tells me we're somewhere over Alaska.

I’m flying on a Korean Air 747-400…the double-decker kind of jet…and I’m up on the upper-deck. We took a Comair puddle-jumper from Cincy to Chicago…Delta (sigh)…and I couldn’t help but laugh when they announced that, due to our imminent approach to Chicago, “service would be discontinued in the cabin.” By “service,” I’m assuming they mean the surly woman who grumbled by me with a six-ounce (not kidding) Dasani water bottle and said “want water?” with the same enthusiasm a polite man in a downpour asks, “want my umbrella?” They also offered a tacky piece of dried biscotti in a Delta cello-wrap. Frankly, I was pleased to see it discontinued.

This is compared with Korean Air, where, after being escorted to the upper-deck and shown our all-in-one-music-TV-movie-videogame-shopping-massage-phonecall-vibrating-recliner-seat (with about four feet of legroom), we were given slippers, a glass of wine, a glass of fresh watermelon juice, and a plate of warm cookies. This was followed by two four-course meals during the course of our flight, any number of liquor, wine, beer and coffee services, a bunch of random foods, 65 napkin-replacements, and about 46,000 bows. (Read as in “bow at the waist” not as in “nice bow in your hair). God help me, they even gave us face-spray.

If you read my last blog entry, you'll know that I'm afraid of Asia. Not Asians, mind you...who doesn't like Asians?....but Asia itself. I don't know if you've watched much National Geographic Channel, Travel Channel or anything else at all, but if you have, you may have noticed that Asia is very different than the US.

In China, they speak languages which sound nothing like ours. They write with strokes that look more to me like beautiful little sketches of houses than letters. They don't wear shoes inside. And they eat ducks.

Yes, quite different.

And that kinda freaks me out. I know virtually nothing of China. I can say "hello" in Mandarin, and have learned a number of very dirty curse words from Firefly, but that's about the extent of it. I'm going to be helping out on a project in the middle of a culture I can't possibly understand. I'm nervous.

I miss Stacy already. She always makes me feel comfortable. She's great at that.

I'm REALLY looking forward to this week, but it's a really healthy blend of fear and joyful anticipation.

I'll post pictures. I'll describe things. I'll probably fall asleep fairly early by their clocks, but I'll do my best to post what I can.

China man....freaking China.

Cool. (Slow, slightly shuddery breath). Cool.

Peace,
Justin

Sat 3:48 a.m. (US) 5:48 p.m. (Korea)

I am writing to you from the Sky Lounge from the airport in Seoul, South Korea. Since I’ve been in Korea (which has been about an hour now), and given only the evidence that one can gather from one’s plane at gate 17 to one’s Sky Lounge near gate 26, I have learned several things about South Korea:

1. Koreans are very clean.
2. Koreans are very polite..
3. Koreans are very, very sweet and helpful, even to stupid Americans.
4. Koreans spend a lot of time in airports.

If China is half as clean and kind as Korea, I’m set. (In fact, the rumor is that China is exactly half as clean and kind as Korea). In the 22 hours that I’ve been on this trip so far, I’ve yet to see my fears realized. No attempts to thieve my passport, no communist prisons, no bird flu or SARS, and very little kung-fu battling. Greg and I have gotten along just fine, as everyone seems to speak at least a little English, and we smile and bow our heads a lot.

I’m starting to get tired…as you can see, it’s 4:00 in the morning by my standards, and sleeping on the plane, while pleasant by comparison to most airplane experiences, was still far from restful. I’ve just downed 12 oz of some Korean drink called “Pocari Sweat” which, according to the English side of its label, “is quickly absorbed into the body tissues due to its fine osmoalaity and contains electrolytes.” I also picked up a carton of “Seoul Milk,” which, despite the great opportunity for a heart-inspiring play on words, is actually just milk from Seoul.

I’ve half a day tomorrow to attempt to catch up on sleep…but I think I’d rather spend it out and about. We’re not really going to have any touristy time during our stay in China, so I’ve got to get whatever shopping/tourism in tomorrow morning. For me, this means going to Shanghai’s shopping district, and trying to find something pretty to buy for Stacy. I hope I find something cool…I am very, very far away, so I want to bring back something that feels exotic. I’ll keep you posted.

We’re off to our quick flight to Pudong airport in Shanghai.

2007-01-27T09:44:00.000-05:00

There was a time when I would have called in sick, and I would have missed it.

Last night, I stopped by a bachelor party for a friend in my bowling league. ("Bowling league?" you ask. "Yes, my bowling league." I reply, scowling a little at you for your tone). It was a surprise for him...the party, not the marriage...and it was held at a bar down on Main Street.

I'd been in a work-related-social-meeting-thing-with-beer in Newport until about 9:00 or so, and picked up a ride from a friend over the bridge into downtown. I walked into the bar on Main Street where, apparently, everybody but me knows the owner. I was greeted with a rousing chorus of guy-heeey! and about two-dozen handshake-into-hugs. (Hyphens were on sale this Wednesday, you'll have to forgive me). I've seen these guys 35 out of 52 Thursdays a year for the last two years, and they greeted me like I've been in their group of friends since high school.

In my khaki pants, blue ox-cloth button-up, and dark brown blazer, I stood among a sea of ripped jeans, pierced what-have-yous, and t-shirts with cuss words on 'em. I felt grossly out-of-place, and very naively dopey. I felt like a whitewashed condo built in the cool-brick arts district, the new Hyundai you regret trading your beat-up college car for. I really like these guys, and though they accept me as one of them, last night it was clear to me that I am still not...not because of them, but because of me.

You see, I'm still afraid of things...things I don't know much about. Included in this category are (but not limited to): poverty, manual labor, dance clubs, perpetually-hot cities, alternative sex, real illness, hard drugs, and most of Asia. And strippers.

For a long time, things like drugs and strippers and hard drinking and smoking and [insert your favorite un-Christian-sounding vice here] were just plain wrong as far as I was concerned, and therefore deserved no further exploration or learning. But I'm starting to think that's not the case. Are strippers/prostitutes/random hookups wrong? Jeez, I don't know. They're pretty damn wrong for me; I'd prefer to be married, and to be married I need to not be doing those things. Hence, wrong.

Are they wrong for everybody? I'm guessing they feel kinda gross for most of the strippers and prostitutes and people who are being used. Or not, I don't know, I'm not them. Maybe it's not wrong at all for them. Maybe the strippers who showed up at last night's bachelor party (OK, "showed up" is euphemistic...as if my friends hadn't paid hundreds of dollars for them to be there) are confident, self-actualized women who feel free to express their sexuality and make a ton of money at the same time. Again, I don't know, I'm not them.

Whether it's wrong for the strippers, or wrong for the guys who paid them to come, or the guys who stayed to watch, I don't know, and it's not the point. I hope all had fun, and that my buddy felt well-loved by his friends as he got ready to get married. I like him, and I want him to be happy. The point is that, a few years ago, I wouldn't have gone down there to begin with. For me, as ridiculous as it may sound, even going to the bar on Main Street to meet up with a bunch of guys having a raucous bachelor party was pretty risky...pretty scary. It's not my world...at least, it never has been. But I've been afraid of things for a long time, and while it may have saved me from doing things I might later regret; I've also missed a lot of good learning experiences...and I regret that, too.

I think I made a good choice last night. I stopped in and drank with these guys until the strippers showed up, then I took off. I wished them a great evening, gave 'em a goodbye-man-hug, and headed off. That was probably a really good choice for me. [Again: married and happy]. I'm proud of the way I was raised, and I'm proud that I keep to one woman. At the same time, I'm proud that I went down there. I stretched myself a little, and in some ways I aspire to be a little more like them. Without judgement, without condemnation...and in spite of the fear of the unknown that would have prompted both...I went down there to an unfamiliar place and a more unfamiliar situation to celebrate with my friend.

I hope everyone had a good time last night...the guys, the strippers, the bartenders. I hope all wrapped up well, and I'm looking forward to seeing everyone again next Thursday. And when I do, I'm going to go in knowing these guys just a little better; and, more importantly, knowing a little more about the world.

That's just slightly less to be scared of, and that's good.

Peace,
Justin

2007-01-17T21:47:00.000-05:00

It's not often that American Idol gets profound.

But tonight, somehow, it got there.

The picture you're looking at is a guy named Jonathon. Jonathon is, without a doubt, mentally retarded. I don't mean that as a rude figure of speech...he actually was mentally retarded. Jonathon tried out to be the next American Idol.

He was horrible.

But...

Jeez, I can't help it, I was really touched. Jonathon could barely put a sentence together...he was awkward, overweight, and sung very poorly...but he was so excited. He really believed he could do it. Like, not in a manic "I'm so hot, I'm 'bout it, so step off" kind of way...like in a "why couldn't I do it?" kind of way. It had never really occured to him that he couldn't do it.

Something tells me that his parents and family told him to go do it, and that something was a big poster he brought with him that said "Go Jonathon!" and "Follow Your Dreams!" He made friends with the very creepy-looking guy next to him, and the two of them, in all of their ignorance and total lack of self-awareness, supported each other through the whole waiting, auditioning, and failure process.

They hugged each other before they went in. They listened intently to the door as the other one sung poorly for the judges. They encouraged each other as they walked out without a gold slip. They railed against the judges together, and told each other that they would make it.

It was sad, and it was beautiful. I got sad because some people are mentally retarded, and I got sad because I wonder what it would be like to have friendship like that. Seriously. I know, it sounds ridiculous, but it was pretty incredible. It was pure love...simple, stupid, and kind of perfect. It's probably most what friendship should look like, at its very best.

I'm not going to write more about that. But if you get a chance, watch it.

Peace,
Justin

2007-01-01T21:52:00.000-05:00

A murderer of millions was killed a few days ago.

My friend Keith wrote a blog entry linking to a list of 11 reasons not to support the death penalty.

I wrote a response to his post...and I wanted to post it on my blog as well.

So, here it is.

---

Keith,

I was deeply satisfied to watch Saddam Hussein face the gallows. He was hung, without ceremony or fanfare, in a building that he used as a base of operations for his genocidal regime. He is a murderer on a mass scale, and he committed unimaginable crimes for which no punishment could possibly atone. He deserved death at the hands of those he oppressed.

And yet, I believe killing Saddam Hussein was a mistake. I think the death penalty is wrong.

Throughout nearly every philosophy and idealogy that I am attracted to, the notion of killing an unarmed person who poses no threat to others is deplorable. Saddam Hussein deserves death, yes...but that justice is not ours to mete out. We should stop him, and if killing him is the only way to do that, fine. But we did it without killing him. We caught him, desheveled and dirty, hiding in a spiderhole. We disarmed him, we cut off his communications with his regime and network, and we put him in jail where he can't hurt anybody. We didn't have to kill him to neutralize him.

Killing Saddam Hussein felt very, very right. But we made a martyr of him...the same way we did to Timothy McVeigh, and to David Koresh. They can't get old and weird looking and publicly nutzo like Charlie Manson is. They die "at the hands of [insert anti-American derogatory term (i.e. - Western Devil, Great Satan, etc.) here]," and it gives them an immortality that growing old and batty wouldn't. Dying by noose in the prime of your megalomaniacal tyranny is romantic and strong; dying of bladder cancer in your late 80's isn't.

I read a bumper sticker a while back that I liked. It said, "Why are we killing people who kill people to show other people that killing people is wrong?"

I wanted Saddam to die, because it makes me feel better. But I think it's the wrong choice.

Peace,
Justin

2006-12-26T01:18:00.001-05:00

IMG_0854.JPG
Originally uploaded by Justin Masterson.

I had a wonderful Christmas...I hope you did too.

Before I dive into the post, I'd like to note a couple of things about the picture which accompanies this post:
1. I just discovered the joy of "Flickr" photo sharing, as evidenced by the fact that there IS a picture accompanying this post. It's a fun tool, check it out.
2. If I would have known I was going to discover Flickr, and post a random happy-moment-with-wife picture from Christmas morning to my blog, I would have come up with something better than a skin-tight red pajama shirt to share with the world.
3. In case you're wondering, that angel over my shoulder is the "top of the Christmas tree" variety of shoulder-angel, and not the "whisper better ideas and gentle admonishments into my ear" variety of shoulder-angel. She stopped coming when I hit puberty.

Now, back to the post.

Christmas wrapped up all of 56 minutes ago. Stacy and I did lots of Christmasy things. We wrapped presents together, we drank coffee together (mulled cider was in short supply), we decorated our tree together, we listened to Christmas music together, we ate with and hung out with my family together, we opened gifts together, and we watched A Christmas Story four times together as it repeated on TBS.

It was a wonderful Christmas. Perhaps the best we've had.

In a couple of days we leave for her hometown to hang out with her parents and family. Their celebration of Christmas, much like Hannukah, lasts for eight days. Her mom is one of 10 kids, and each day the entire extended family moves from house to house looking at who got what and talking about who they got it from and then asking that who how much she paid and how much she could have paid if she would have driven across the state line to buy it and used a coupon. Stacy's family is fun, and, like mine and yours and everyone else's, full of characters and oddballs and drunken uncles and crying babies and fun cousins with life-partners. I like going out there, and it'll be a relaxing three days.

I hope your Christmas was brilliant, warm and deep, and that the Indescribable Love I felt was with you too. God is good, and this was a magnificent time of year to re-learn that.

Peace,
Justin

2006-12-11T23:53:00.000-05:00

"You know that old saying about how you always hurt the ones you love? Well it goes both ways."
-Jack, Fight Club (1999)

A friend recently moved into our house for a few days.

She moved into our house, because she moved out of hers.

She moved out of hers, because her husband abused her. A lot.

She moved into our house. For the second time in a week.

The hardest part wasn't that she left him. The hardest part was that she had to do it twice. For me, that hardest part was that she walked back into her house...kids in tow...into the home of an abuser...and lay down next to him again.

I've much to share with you, but tonight I want to share this. I'm amazed and I'm confused and I'm really, really sorry for her, and for her kids. And, in some weird way, for her husband. This is not my world...I'm lucky that way. I live in a home with a woman who I not only love, but most of the time really like. My wife lives with a husband who she loves and most of the time likes, and who they both, deep down, believes won't ever intentionally harm her. I live with a woman I yearn to see after a long day, and she lives with a man she can go to bed at night knowing wants the best for her. I believe that Stacy and I could bring kids into the world and, somehow, raise them to be people who respect and love the opposite sex. Not because we're better, I don't think. We grew up that way...our kids will believe it because our parents, at some level or another, believed it. We were lucky.

My guess is that my friend's husband grew up in a home where he saw his mother treated with contempt, shame, and disgust. My guess is that his father was dominating, and his mother either stooping or overcompensating by raging against the kids. That's just my guess. I'm fairly sure that my friend grew up in a place where she questioned her own worth, and where her parents, by example, taught her that she was only as good as her foul shots and her pretty smile, and she had to know that someday she would slowly lose both.

I think she went back into that house not because she truly believed he would change, but because she believed she didn't deserve for him to. She's smart, educated, strong and beautiful...and yet she learned along the way that she wasn't worth true love; just marriage, and children, and a house, and the abuse.

We helped her get away. For now. I don't know if she'll stay away. I wonder if some twisted sense of destiny will bring her back to him. God, I hope not. No woman deserves that treatment. None.

I'm angry with my wife at this moment. I'm not going to tell you why, because it's her business and it's my business. But it doesn't matter. I'll be over it tomorrow or the next day or maybe next week. That doesn't matter either. What matters is that, by God's grace and decent parenting, I'm choosing to love right now. I'm loving by breathing slowly, remembering who she is and who I am, and typing furiously at my blog until I can fall asleep. And tomorrow, when I wake up and head off to work, I will choose to kiss her goodbye. It is my choice to love her, and it's a choice both of us make each day, whether we feel it with everything we have or whether we conjure it in spite of some squabble, petty or otherwise.

I'm not a great husband. But I'm a good one. And when our friend calls us tomorrow to ask us if she should return to her husband again, I'm going to close my eyes and, for as long as it takes, be grateful for what I have.

Please pray that she stays away, and that he seeks help. Her story is one of millions, and she and her kids deserve better.

Peace,
Justin

2006-11-11T19:17:00.000-05:00

My friends just had a baby.

She is beautiful. I held her. She smelled new.

I liked it.

Peace,
Justin

2006-11-01T19:43:00.000-05:00

IMG_0393.JPG
Originally uploaded by Justin Masterson.

I am in-between moments of heart-wrenching, sacred pride.

I will tell you about that in a moment. But first, I want to say thanks.

I've received several extraordinary comments, a few emails, and even a couple of phone calls about my last few posts...a sort of still-going chronicle of my fall from the faith or my hopeful toeing right into it, depending on how you look at it.

Thank you. Josh, Jacob, Patrick, Black17, Keith, Ryan, Denis, Anonymous and everyone else...thank you. I've heard everything from, "you're finally evolving [away from fundamental Christianity]" to "I'd like to meet with you, and I promise I won't try to convert you back [to fundamental Christianity]" to "wanna go for a beer and talk? [presumably about fundamental Christianity?]" I feel really loved, and I really appreciate it. Even if you did try to convert me...toward or away from your system of belief...I'd still feel loved, because you care enough to try.

That's all...thanks. I'll keep writing as I keep asking questions and getting answers and finding time between whatever it is I do all the time.

...Now, back to the topic at hand.

I am in-between moments of heart-wrenching, sacred pride.

A couple of weeks ago, my oldest brother married his wonderful and beautiful fiance. It was a gorgeous wedding, held in my parents' home, with a total of ten of us in attendance. I had the great honor of presiding over the ceremony...an honor whose profundity I could not understand until the moment came to actually do the presiding. As I stood between Brian and Maria, standing next to my twin brother and just a few feet from my parents...as I opened my mouth to speak those first words of the ceremony ("dearly beloved..."), it hit me: I have been asked to officiate the uniting of my own brother to his wife. My own brother. My own brother, Brian. My own brother, who I love more deeply than I know how to articulate.

I had the chance a couple of weeks ago to tell you about my twin brother, Matt. Now I'd like to tell you about Brian.

While Matt was my doppelganger present as we grew up, Brian was, in a way, a walking, talking, chest-hair-growing future. He is four-and-a-half years my senior, and acted simultaneously as my bully, my mentor, my spiritual advisor, my mom-ruiner, my hero, and my coal-mine canary all throughout my youth. I followed Brian the way perfume follows your churchy Great Aunt on a Sunday afternoon...just a few steps behind and lingering in the aftermath. Brian taught me how to take a charley-horse, and how to write a rhyming poem. He ruined my mom by breaking all the good rules before I could, so she would tighten them up by the time I got there...then he taught me how to defy her. (Matt needed no teaching in this regard; seemed to come as naturally as a morning pee). He went ahead of me, getting hurt by girls and making best guy friends and discovering clumsy football and taking final exams and picking up an accoustic guitar to see what happens when a guy who can't fix a car or throw a baseball or build a table decides you can be just as much a man with Rosewood and nickel-wounds. He cried over things I couldn't understand yet. He broke curfew doing things I only imagined as I lay in my bed listening to mom worry loudly over the phone to a friend. He was the first to do most everything. He was my brave future, and I loved him for it.

And somewhere in there, we became friends.

I remember when I was 12 or so, when he said, "man...you guys [meaning Matt and I] are cool...it's like you guys actually have personalities now. Like, you're actual people." He was right...when I began to become Justin and not Vince and Pam's son or Brian's brother or "one of the twins," he and I were ready to begin becoming friends. We grew together for the first time...instead of me just following him. We started to open up to each other, to experience life together as peers of a sort, despite our age difference. He soon became the closest friend I've ever known.

Brian and I share most everything. We talk about religion and faith and politics and beer and wives and swearing and philosophy and cars and sex and the Simpsons. I call Brian sometimes with a rhetorical question or one-line joke or a quote from a movie we saw ten years ago...I think I call to reconnect, and I think I call just to hear him. I ask him before I do anything that truly matters to me. I call him when I can't understand my wife, and he tells me when it's probably my fault. I love my time with him, and as he moved out of our house (his temporary digs until he got married), I felt like I was losing another brother, even though he'd be living just up I-71 a bit. I miss him when he leaves, and I love it when I see my message indicator flash on after I've deliberately ignored his call so that he'll leave some ridiculously stupid message. We seem to vibrate at the same frequency, Brian and I, and I think I'm so much better for it. I think I always have been.

Standing that evening, between Brian and Maria...I stood in the past, present and future at once. He was my older brother; a doctor, a rocker, and a traveler. He was still doing the things I've yet to try. But he was also my peer...my friend in a sense so deep I can't possibly express it here. But, in a weird way, I was the older brother for a moment...and perhaps for the first time. I've been married almost four-and-a-half years...I was able to share a few words about some of the pitfallsl, the joys, and the romance of commitment. I got to warn them and encourage them. I got to hug them. And when I got done, and they made their amazing promises to each other...I got to pronounce them husband and wife. It was one of the happiest moments of my life, and one I shall never neglect nor allow to fade.

So now, here I am. My twin brother, Matt, has just passed the Ohio Bar and will be sworn in on Monday. My older brother Brian just got married to a woman I am proud to know, and prouder to call my Sister. I am so damned proud I have no idea how to express it. I wear my joy like a sweater these days.

I'm so proud of you, brothers.

Peace,
Justin

2006-10-27T08:29:00.000-04:00

Sometimes revelation is a mountain-top. Sometimes it's church confessional. Sometimes it's a hospital bed. And, every once in a while, it's a long red light on your drive to work.

I didn't expect much from my drive to work yesterday. I was a bit sore from the workout, a bit full from a rare breakfast of eggs and toast, and more than a little anxious about all I had to get done before my noon meeting. I had my iPod plugged in to the car stereo (I have forgone driving with earbuds in; turns out it's fantastically illegal), and it was shuffling through it's 10-GB songload, flitting fickley between genres like a DJ with the very worst kind of ADHD. On I-71 at Smith-Edwards it was Billy Joel, at Kenwood it was Evanesence, and by the time I got to Pfieffer, Elvis Costello was half-finished whiney-warbling his way through one of my favorite love ballads of his, "She."

As I pulled up to the intersection of Kenwood and Pfieffer and waited at a red light whose greatest pleasure is letting everyone go straight and nobody turn left, a new song came on. And this is where the revelation begins.

The song came from a band that doesn't exist anymore, and the only album they ever made and that the vast majority of you have never heard. They were called "Dividing the Plunder," and consisted of a husband and wife just about my age. They live in Greater Cincy, and I came in contact with them when they came by VCC for a performance one weekend. I loved the song they sang, bought the album, and digitized it into my iTunes, where it now sits, nestled in the cultural warm front between Diana Krall and Dr. Dre.

It's a good album. Decent music, OK production, but great writing. That's what caught me. The writing.

The song that came on was called "Maybe It's Faith," and it goes like this:

(the full version...like, the kind with music in it...is on iTunes, I just checked).

---

“Maybe It’s Faith”
Dividing the Plunder - The Ordinary

I wish I had more to say.
It’s such a quiet room.
But today I can’t give voice to anything but doubt.
It starts doubt deep inside me
In my blood and in each cell.
And it makes it’s way to the blank look in my eyes
And the questions on my lips.

I wish I had less to say
It’s such a crowded room.
But the sun came up this morning
And it all began again.
The compulsion's is inside me
And it beats against my doors
It seeps into my sterile polished closet
Brings the skeletons outside.

There was a time I would have covered my face
I would have turned away
I would have broken my bones trying get out the door.
Here it is, come and take a good look.
Get out of the way.
Maybe it’s faith when I just don’t know for sure.

I wish I had a thousand books
To fill in what I’m missing
And a thousand days to read them
And a time back guarantee.
It starts down deep inside me
Every breath and every fiber.
And it makes it’s way up to the empty stare
And the tears on my face.

But I wish I’d never read a word
The answers were too easy
And I’m grown enough to know there’s more mystery than proof.
But it stirs down deep inside me.
And it stirs the dust of faith
Cries out to me about my hollow nature
And the desperate human need.

There was a time I would have covered my face
I would have turned away
I would have broken my bones trying get out the door.
Here it is, come and take a good look.
Get out of the way.
Maybe it’s faith when I just don’t know for sure.

And it’s a little more earthy than I’d like to believe
Like the holes in God’s hands
Like the dirt on God’s feet.
But I’m not alone in that it’s comfort more
Than I ever felt pretending I know anything for sure.

There was a time I would have covered my face
I would have turned away
I would have broken my bones trying get out the door.
Here it is, come and take a good look.
Get out of the way.
Maybe it’s faith when I just don’t know for sure.

---

This is where revelation came. It washed over me like a backrub. Maybe where I'm at is faith.

Yes, I've got more questions than answers. I always have, and I suspect I mostly will. I'm in a place right now where it seems I'm not sure about much. I'm searching for theology, a system to follow, a religion to belong to that I can reconcile well enough to play along. But I don't know that I'm searching for faith itself.

There was a time when the question itself scared the hell out of me. A search for spirituality is, inherently, a search for your own identity. And whenever you question your identity, you're questioning the very essence of who you are, as well as your relationships, your friendships, and everything you know about your social circles. To question fundamental Christianity is to question most of my young adult life, and that's scary. As the song says, "there was a time I would have covered my face, I would have turned away, I would have broken my bones trying to get out the door."

But I think that time is not now. I'm losing that fear. My previous post (Oct 04) was kind of a big deal for me...it's not that I have begun to have these questions, it's that I'm becoming unafraid of what it means that I've had them all along. I think theology can be a wonderful, powerful structure for understanding the entirely ununderstandable...but the quest is a little more earthy than I'd like to believe. It's blood, and it's dirt, and it's God...it's sacred, yes; but it's also human. I can't worship the quest, but I am beginning to recognize it's inherent value. I refuse to believe that God's primary concern is whether or not I had the single salvation experience at some point before I get hit by a bus...our lives are lived in a constant tension between sacred and secular, and our purpose seems to be more about navigating that tension rather than relieving it. The quest is not God, but the quest for God may be salvation itself.

I may find absolute truth, and a theology, existing or created, to match. And I may not. But I don't think I'm lacking faith. Maybe it's faith that I'm continuing to seek God, perhaps now more than ever, despite the personal and social ramifications that result from questioning the faith of my youth. Maybe it's faith that I believe that it's safe to question Christianity, because I believe that Christ himself is greater than both the religion and it's questioning, and that earnest pursuit of Him will inevitably land me in His presence.

I am in a hard period, but it is a good period. I don't know much, and I'm asking a lot. And I think I've long feared that I'm losing my faith because I can't claim the same outward surity I had in high school or college. But maybe it's faith that I just don't know for sure.

I've got a lot more to write to you about. It's about Manhattan, neon at 40 floors, and my brother the Esquire. But it's time to get to work now.

Peace,
Justin

2006-10-10T00:34:00.000-04:00

My friend Ryan wrote a great response to my last post...

If you're interested, check it out at:
http://c-change.blogspot.com

More to come...whoever has been reading in New Zealand, post something! I'd love to hear from ya!

Peace,
Justin

2006-10-04T19:58:00.000-04:00

Some of my best conversations come over my first cup of coffee in the early morning, and some come over my last beer in the very, very early morning.

This post is about the former.

Lately, I've been working out each weekday morning with a good friend. In my attempt to lose the 35 pounds necessary to remove my least favorite set of chins, I've taken on a fairly rigorous diet and excercise plan. The plan goes like this:
1. Get up at 6:20, pick up friend down the street and get to gym by 6:30.
2. Work out until 7:30.
3. Sit on friend's porch and drink coffee until 8:15, and talk about the stuff of life.

Every morning we tackle the same three topics, and one wildcard. We talk about sex, we talk about faith & religion, and we talk about the squirrels that are eating a hole in his roof. The wildcard topic depends on what movie was on in the cardiocinema, how work is going, and how strong the coffee is. Either way, it's always a pleasant way to start my morning, and I love the conversation.

This morning was harder than previous...

This morning we talked about heaven and hell and what makes a Christian and what makes you saved. My friend is a very smart 20-something with a lifetime of history in the church, several years of missionary experience, and deep knowledge of the Bible. I am a very smart 20-something with a lifetime of history in and out of churches, several years of church employment, and a deep-seated need to keep asking the question.

He talked about his very cool experiences traveling the country and watching pagan people in pagan rituals at pagan festivals worshiping humanism and reveling in relativism. He said he hates relativism. He's got answers that involve Jesus, and the Bible, and what you have to figure out before you die.

I respect that...but I don't have those answers. I've got lots and lots of questions...but not a lot of answers. I know it's supposed to be noble to have questions...it's the intellectual pursuit, right? But that's not entirely true...I do have answers, I just have them for a while. I've known for a long time that a belief that the Bible is infallible feels wrong to me. I've known for a long time that the idea that you must "give your life" to Christ before you die in order to be with God in the afterlife feels wrong to me. I've known that the pursuit of God may be the end in and of itself, and that feels right to me.

It's a weak man that pretends shys away from what he knows is true...and these are what's true, at least as far as I can tell right now. And he shared what he believes is true, and that makes him strong too.

He is what most would call a Christian. And, for the first time since high school, I'm fairly convinced that by many standards, I am not. Some of my questions...and some of my truths...don't match those of the Christians I went to Young Life with and volunteered at church with and sit next to at work. In fact, it's quite probable that I've become the dangerous brand of pseudo-Christian that my youth-group leaders warned us about...the kind that question the basic truths of Christianity, and bit-and-piece out the Bible at there own discretion to match their worldviews. For the first time since becoming a young man, I am the moral relativist compared to those who used to be my peers. I still have so many questions left to answer, and I'm not ready to settle into some of the truths of fundamental Christianity.

I am the outsider in some ways...stuck in bizarre purgatory between religions...and I think I'm learning how to value that.

More to come, I'm sure.

Peace,
Justin

2006-09-24T21:26:00.000-04:00

Watching the Simpsons of the last four or five years is a little like having your 95-year-old grandma to Sunday dinner...

You love your grandmother. You have many, many happy memories with her. She has been so good to you for so many years. She was a crucial part of you growing up, and you often spent all week looking forward to a happy Sunday spent with her. Her contribution to your life is immeasurable, and you will always be grateful...

...but now, things are starting to go. You love her, and you want the best for her, and it pains you to see her slowly failing. She doesn't remember who she was, her thoughts are often rambling and incoherent, she keeps telling the same stories over and over again. And, periodically, she pees her pants.

You don't laugh, because it's not funny. It's sad. Every week you hope she'll be more like she use to be than like she is. And you work hard to remember the younger, present, coherent, dignified woman she used to be You still keep inviting her to Sunday dinners because of all she has done for you. But it's not fun anymore...it's more for her than for you.

So, with that in mind, I offer this open letter to the producers of The Simpsons:

Dear James L. Brooks, Sam Simon, and Matt Groening,

I love your show. I have loved your show from its first season. I owned and proudly wore my "Who The Hell Are You?" tee to my eighth grade Catholic school math class, knowing full well I would be asked to remove it in lieu of a school-issued lost-and-found tee, complete with a note sent home to my mother. I gladly accepted this persecution...damn near proudly...because it was for The Simpsons, the first prime-time show in my lifetime with the guts to tell it like is, the willingness to offend me, and the humor to make me laugh about it. Your show changed television forever, and forever upped the bar for comedy TV, cartoons, and adult prime-time entertainment. You created a cultural mega-icon that changed the way we think about marriage, gender roles, politics, religion, and what's really funny, and I am forever grateful.

In that gratitude, I'd like to entreat you to please stop making your show. Please let the film project quietly disappear, let the existing merchandise work it's way through the gift-shops and fast-food happy meals, and let this season's episodes stay vaulted until they can be gifted to your great-grandchildren as a personal reminder of your powerful legacy. Please stop production on everything Simpsons, save for the DVD sets of your existing shows.

I want to remember you as you were, and not as you are now. I want to remember a show that is fresh, clever, biting, subversive, fearless, counter-cultural, and, most of all, funny. Before the weekly random guest-stars, before the nonsensical rambling plot-lines, before Homer went pseduo-effeminate and clinically retarded, before your writers started taking the easy jokes and kitschy pop-culture slams, and before you accurately recognized that true Simpsons fans will watch anything, and were willing to rest into complacency with your ideation and writing.

I want to celebrate everything you were. I continue to tune in every week out of respect...which is my choice, and for which I can't hold you accountable...but I have to admit, I keep hoping every week that you've been canceled. I want to relish my Simpsons DVD's (I will continue to buy them the day they come out...all the way through Season 11) and watch and re-watch your brilliant show in its prime.

Please, save your dignity, and make sure your legacy gets the celebrated and virtually untarnished reputation it deserves. After holding out hope for the last four or five years that you would go out strong, the unfortunate truth is that I'm now begging you to just go out.

Please let me enjoy The Simpsons for its brilliant inception and eleven brilliant seasons. Please stop making The Simpsons, and let's celebrate your hard work together with a glass of champagne as we watch and laugh at those magnificent years.

Thanks.

Respectfully,
Justin Masterson

2006-09-05T20:55:00.000-04:00

I have reason to believe that nearly a dozen uteruses are conspiring against me.

In the last six months, approximately all of our friends either got pregnant or had babies. It's not a perfect statistic, but it's pretty damn close.

When the first couple were born, I thought, "Wow, how cool...what are the odds of two of my friends having babies at the same time? I should introduce them...perhaps the little bundles of cry could play together some day." When the next couple were born, I thought, "Wow, how fortunate...that God, in all of His generous bounty, had decided to bless our community of friends with such a cornucopia of little souls for us to tend to." When the next couple were born, I thought, "Wow, how creepy...the condoms around here sure are unreliable." Finally, when the most recent six were born and four more friends got pregnant...the truth became all too clear...

...there is a global conspiracy to try to get me to have a baby.

Somewhere underneath the streets of Cincinnati there is a an underground HQ, complete with large-screen plasma displays constantly updating with new pregnancy info, vertical pieces of glass that you can write on with markers from both sides in order to chart my progress, and a big black onyx table where all of the women in my life meet to plot every nuanced move necessary to change my heart from irresponsible young ragamuffin to responsible, reliable Pop.

...and at the head of that table sits my dear wife...hands tented together, head tilted slightly downward, an evil grin on her face and holding another picture of another cousin who just gave birth to another wrinkly squish-dough screamster.

...

Here's the weird part: it's kind of working. No, I'm not the hardened, wild-oats sowing bachelor who is turning into a big soft teddy bear. I was never that wild, and I'm not that teddybeary now. But my heart is changing. I think I like babies...at least a bit. More likely a lot.

My favorite part is when I get to be one-on-one with them. Nobody taking a picture of me holding the baby, nobody asking me how I'd like to be a daddy, nobody gesturing with their elbow at me holding the baby and then knowingly winking at Stacy. Just me and the baby...little, breathing, warm, helpless, surreal and perfect. That's my favorite part.

I want a son. I want a daughter. I want a newborn baby that kind of looks like me and kind of looks like Stacy and mostly looks like an old man. I want to hold my baby and know that I don't have to give her back. I want to wonder what my tiny son will be like when he's done fighting to stay asleep at night and has begun pulling the covers over his own head to dampen the wail of the alarm clock so he can stay in bed for a few more minutes. I want to fear the rise and fall of her chest, impossibly small and complex in my hand, as her eyes dart wildly beneath closed lids in her newborn dreams. I want a son to teach, a daughter to be perplexed by, and Saturday mornings of fallen Cheerios and headless Barbies.

I want it to be safe, I want it to be scary, I want it to go right and I want to build a rebel. I don't know what I want, but I want the experience as much as I fear it.

We're thinking about it. I'm thinking about it. A lot.

Peace,
Justin

2006-09-01T11:30:00.000-04:00

My friends are in a hurricane right now, and I'm very afraid for their safety.

Please stop what you're doing and do this:

Those who pray, pray.
Those who meditate, meditate.
Those who intend, intend.
Those who envision, envision.

Evan and Ellen.
Cabo San Lucas.
Hurrican John.

Make it stop, keep them safe.

Thanks.

2006-08-11T18:00:00.000-04:00

My twin brother left town this morning.

Technically, it was this morning, but it felt like a very late night just after midnight as my brother, Matt, and his wife, Jo, loaded the final hangers and pillows and boxes of books into their taxicab-yellow Penske moving truck, and pulled the clanging metal door shut. We had all had a party together for the hours before their midnight departure, ostensibly celebrating this new chapter in their lives, I suppose...but my older brother Brian said it well when he described "a pall over the whole thing." It was a celebration of new things, I guess...but for me, it felt a bit like a funeral.

I've never lived apart from Matt, really. We grew up in the same house, as you might imagine, and shared a bedroom for the bulk of our youth. We went to college together and lived next door from each other. We got ourselves married, and moved down the street from each other. Hell, we even shared the same room in-utero, and that was close quarters. We played together, we sledded together, we swam together, we joined rival ten-speed biking gangs in our neighborhood together, we fought each other, and we bled sometimes. I hated him when I was still in the stage where I could hate someone for stealing my dessert or not handing over the TV remote, and I loved him when I was still in the stage where you believed you didn't have a choice. He was my rival, my playmate, my bully, my confidant, my equal, my conscience, and the only one of us brave enough to tell Mom off.

Matt and I have always highlighted the enormity of the differences between us. He is a sports fanatic, an athlete, a social butterfly, and a raucous and loud voice that carries in any crowd and that sneers in the face of disagreement. I am an artist-type, a sedentary, an extrovert who fears the disappointment of others, and a peacemaker. But jesus, we're so alike sometimes. We did life together in a way that, unless you're a twin yourself, I don't think you can understand. In some ways, we polarized in order to live our lives as two halves of the same exprience, I think...we polarized to differentiate ourselves, and we polarized so that we could experience the completeness of life more fully together.

As kids, we were often asked if he could feel the same things I feel, and if we had any kind of special "twin power" that would allow us to sense what was going on to the other twin at any given time. I always laughed and said no. Today, I wonder more.

If this reads like a eulogy, it's because it is. Matt is far from dead...he is beginning the next step of a journey that will undoubtedly prove magnificent, frightening, resonant and powerful. He and Jo are finally going to be in a town big enough to accomodate their talents and their training. He will practice law, and he will excel. She will write and publish, and she will excel. They deserve this success...and I would never wish for them to stay here. But the fact remains, he's further away than he's ever been, and for the first time in my life, I can't just go see him. This is new, and this is hard.

Matt and I, for all these years being so close to each other in young adulthood, never spent a lot of time together. Truth is...I never felt like we had to. My love for my twin brother is as saturating, profound, and as unconditional as I will ever know. He was a constant for me...I quietly trusted because I knew he was there. He was always there.

Matt, if you're reading this...I miss you already. I cried last night, I cried this morning, and I'm crying now. I am so happy for you and Jo, and I have no doubts that this is the best move for you...but I don't want you to be gone. You are the only twin brother I will ever have, and I can't help but feel like a part of me is in DC now.

I love you deeply, and I look forward to seeing you soon.

-Justin

2006-06-18T21:25:00.000-04:00

I always become a nihlist when I'm on vacation...

Not a dedicated, Uli Kunkel, floating in a pool surrounded by Jack Daniels bottles, "I beleeve in nuh-zing!" nihlist, mind you...just a "nothing means anything" nihlist. Which, as I think about this again, may not qualify as nihlism...or any ism for that matter...it may better qualify as good ol' fashioned depression.

I had a great weekend this weekend. I drove up with Stacy to Put-In-Bay, a tiny little island on the Ohio side of Lake Erie whose homes and city streets resemble Pleasantville and whose night-times resemble Mardi Gras. It's essentially a party paradise for four months out of the year, with all varieties of wealthy white boat-owners and their college-aged offspring gathering together to drink beer, flash people for beads, and spend a lot of time saying "WOOOO!" Fifty-something men with white hair tucked under straight-billed baseball caps roam the streets by day, buying cigars and t-shirts with funny sayings on them, and young people wake up at nooon and slowly take over the town by nightfall, when all is transformed into a pulsing, sexy, simmering party for those who can afford to get themselves blurry.

In short, it's a lot of fun.

However, I don't tend to enjoy it as much as I would expect. In the middle of everything I get introspective, distant, and navel-gazing. I wish I could say it was some kind of pious soul-thing...watching that sort of gluttony and debauchery from a distance with a holy discontent for the short-lived things of this world...but I'm usually four or five beers south of that ivory tower by then. No, I think it's more the realization that several hundred miles, several hundred dollars, several dozen cigarettes, and seven days of severance from my soberest sentience later, I'm left with a feeling of..."is this all there is?"

Right now I'm sitting in a bed in the Seelbach Hotel in downtown Louisville. I'm in a very large room with very dark oak, surrounded by four posters of bed and lying on a duvet with a thread count that exceeds the average Nicaraguan's yearly salary. The lighting is perfect, the dinner was magnificent, and the Kentucky bourbon that followed deserves a post of it's very own. I was lucky to be treated to these great amenities on this particular trip, and I'm glad to consume them and to smile while doing it. Yet, for all of the soft touches and scented soaps and leather seats and tasty glasses of wine...I still feel a bit hollow, and more than a bit useless.

I think that's the problem. I work at work, and I feel useful. I work at home sometimes, and when I do, I feel useful. I occasionally get to counsel my friends, console my parents, and fix things that break around the house...and I feel useful. But when I'm on vacation...all I do is consume. I just keep taking things in. The only thing I'm doing as I move from hotel to restaurant to rental car to playhouse to hotel is contribute to the GNP and global warming. I'd like to relax, to be sure, but I feel like there has to be more than just tickling my own underbelly, and that thought keeps me discontented. That discontent, if left to simmer long enough, eventually turns into a bland form of disgust, which eventually commits itself to pseudo-nihlism. That nihlishm takes the shape of, "If I am having all of the finest things in the world and all of them offer only momentary feelings of joy or growth...than nothing can mean anything."

Seems dramatic, doesn't it? I realize. But I can't get that feeling to go away. It comes as one of the many flavors of my neurosis, I guess...one little Buttered Popcorn in the multi-colored bag of Jelly Bellys we call the human condition. (Lord, that metaphor is a stretch, isn't it?) But it is what it is, and it's my blog, so there you have it.

I sleep now, and I dream of Stacy. I love to travel, and I look forward to going home.

Peace,
Justin

2006-06-06T18:41:00.000-04:00

Hola amigos...it's been a long time since I rapped at ya.

(Onion fans, grin break now).

I had a wonderful after-dinner conversation with a very good friend last night about the relative goodness or badness of humanity. I don't know why dinner tends to induce good conversation, but I suspect it has something to do with the blood leaving your brain to support your bloated stomach, freeing up the brain from the burden of all those nutrients, and readying it for brash opining over tiramisu.

The conversation began with a discussion about drinking, as I recall. Which was odd, because neither of us were. In fact, now that I think about, that very fact probably made the discussion so topical. My friend is not a drinker...she will have an occasional drink here and there...but she's not a drinker like I'm a drinker and my father's a drinker and the men of Omega-Delta-Chi are drinkers. She samples, she sips, she moves on. She drinks to taste. I drink to drink for the most part, and I drink to get dull and happy.

My friend is very, very smart; so I tend to listen to her pretty carefully. She said that she doesn't drink much because she wants to live a healthy, natural life, and that getting buzzed or drunk doesn't seem natural to her. I told her that when I drink, I usually drink in order to feel more natural. I am an anxious person by the combined efforts of nature and nurture (with a healthy tip of the scales toward the latter), and I spend a great deal of my time worrying and fretting about one thing or another. I have a hard time letting go of what concerns me, and tension leaks out of me the same way gold bricks leak out of Fort Knox. So, when I drink, I drink to help me let go, settle down, and smile more. I don't know if it's a good policy or a bad policy, but I drink with relative modesty, so I'm not too worried about it.

What really interested me about the conversation is that she kept saying, for me. "Drinking is unnatural for me." "Being drunk is unhealthy for me." "It's a bad idea to get drunk to make yourself feel better...for me, anyways." She's like that...it's one of my favorite things about her...she refuses to exercise judgement against others as being good or bad in any real sense, which works out great when you're a solid mixture of both and you hang out with someone as excellent as her.

The trouble is, something being bad solely for me is a pretty foreign concept to me. I tend to believe that most things that are bad are bad, and most things that are good are good. I think it's the Catholic in me, or at least the Christian. Christianity doesn't have a lot of tolerance for moral relativism. If the Bible is to be believed, then Jesus didn't have a lot of conditional morality to share with the world. Nor did the God of the Old Testament. There are a lot of hard lines in the Bible, and less grey area than I think I'd like. At least, that's the case as I see it at first glance...

..but if you look a little deeper...

In Exodus 20, God says "Thou shalt not kill." (Thank heavens God speaks fluent King's English, or I'd have a hell of a time understanding him). But, then he orders the Jews to slaughter the Philistines. He says, "Thou shalt not bear false witness" [or, "lie" in modern translations], but then in I Kings 22 it says "The Lord hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these thy prophets, and the Lord hath spoken evil concerning thee." God says, "Thou shalt not steal," but also orders His people to "...spoil [steal from] the Egyptians" in Exodus 13.

So, if you think the King James translation is somewhat accurate, it seems you have a couple of options:
1. The Bible isn't accurately reflecting God's words to man.
2. The Bible is accurately reflecting God's words to man, and God is unintentionally contradicting Himself.
3. The Bible is accurately reflecting God's words to man, and God is intentionally contradicting Himself.

Or...of course...

4. Justin, it's wrong to question God and the Bible. Just have faith, or go to Hell.

If you believe #1, which I'm still trying to make up my mind about, then this conversation can probably wrap up here, because what's the point of worrying about something somebody made up a long time ago?

If you believe #2, then you don't believe in the same God I do, because my God tends to remember stuff.

If you believe #4, then enjoy this video, I'll pay you back for the time with a prompt money order to your place of residence.

But if you believe #3, which I ostensibly do, then you have to ask why God would do such a thing? Is it possible that morality can't simply be spelled out with hard rules? Is it possible that it's OK to kill some people some times, and not OK to other people other times? If that's the case...are there any hard rules? Is it ever OK to have sex with children? To eat your parents? To abort a baby? To lie?

And...if it can't be said that there are absolute lines of good and bad...how can it be said that a person is either? For the pedophile who was molested as a child, and who knew nothing in his life other than pain and suffering, and for whom the desire to understand his pain drove him to molest another...can we call him "bad?" If so, can we call him "worse" than he who steals two dollars from the register on his way out of work at Starbucks...providing the man at Starbucks knows it's wrong and has the ability to control his impulses?

If those who are driven by madness, revenge, or a crippled past (or a tasty cocktail of the three) to perform horrendous acts against humanity were truly oppressed by their disturbances, can we call them "bad?" Can we rightfully punish them? Shouldn't the child who has everything be punished more severely for a small transgression than the child with nothing who commits a large one?

Can a person ever be called "good?" Can a person ever be called "bad?" If not...can we call God either of these?

It was a good conversation, and it was a troubling conversation. I've thought about it all day...which is probably best. I don't want my fear of what would happen if there were no moral plumb lines to drive me to presume that there is one.

Peace,
Justin

2006-05-16T19:21:00.000-04:00

The following is the most romantic post about stomach flu you'll read all day...

I got sick this week. Quite sick. The kind of sick you don't talk about at dinner parties. And for the last 36 hours or so I've been lying on my couch waiting for the sick to pass. And, lying in the overstuffed and oversized chair five feet from me has been my also very sick wife. (It seems she got me sick with the flu she had last week...and, not to be outdone, I returned the favor this week. I didn't think it was possible either, but then again, here we are). We have spent the last day-and-a-half trying to sleep, trading turns in the bathroom, and trying to guess how long ago four hours ago was so that we can take the next batch of Tylenol.

OK...I'll give you...not a formula for high romance.

However, for some reason, it was romantic. We were sharing the experience together. We took care of each other, watched each other get worse, and we've begun to watch each other get better. We called out quietly for one another in the hot and wakeful midnight hours, and we did so hoping that, for some reason, the other person would be awake enough to respond, just so we know that they're there. We hoped for each other, and even prayed for each other a little bit. We loved each other in our sickness...the kind of love that is bigger than grossiness and pukiness and trashcans by the bedside.

I loved my wife today...and she loved me. It's a strange thing to say, but I actually enjoyed being sick with Stacy. Being sick is life, and I love having life with her.

Peace,
Justin

2006-05-06T23:49:00.000-04:00

I've been trying to post for two weeks about something I'm not sure how to talk about...

I have written a number of posts, edited them, and deleted them...all because I'm not sure how to say what I want to say on this very difficult and inflammatory issue, about which I am extremely emotionally connected.

All to no avail. So...on the excellent advice of my friend Steve...I've promised myself I'm just gonna write it and let it be what it is. Here is what I've been trying to say:

...

...I think being an illegal should be illegal.

...

...

...there, I've said it.

Whew...that feels better.

I'll expound a little.

I tend to think of myself as a liberal, progressive, dare I say Democratic kind of guy. I tend to think that I'm a compassionate kind of guy...at least in certain squishy areas of humankind. I also tend to think that I tend to speak without thinking, so I took some extra time to think about this one before I started speaking. And I still think being an illegal should be illegal.

If you've turned on the TV...or the radio...or the newspaper...(let that one go)...you've surely seen the great debate on immigration in America. Or, more specifically, the debate on Hispanic immigration into America. Nobody seems too concerned about the extraordinary number of people from India, or Korea, or China, or Eastern Africa who are streaming into the United States. And there's a perfectly good reason for that...

...they came here legally.

What's pissing everybody off is that people from Cuba are floating in on rafts, people from the D.R. are stowing away in the bottoms of freighters, and people from Mexico are t across the border in the middle of the night to get into this country. And get in they are...to the tune of an estimated 700% growth in illegal Hispanics living in the U.S. over the last ten years.

...wait, I'm not done. That part isn't pissing everybody off. In fact, as you may have noticed, illegal Hispanic workers have been living in the U.S. for quite some time, and doing a fine job at it. I don't know who was legal and who was illegal, but I know that Hispanic workers with very little English at their disposal have cooked my meals, mowed the lawn where I work, constructed my gym, cleaned my hotel rooms, delivered my Chinese food (which was a strange surprise), and so much more. And you didn't hear me complaining. They work cheap, they work hard, and they seemed happy enough.

That's where we get to the part where everybody is pissed off.

The seemed happy enough...for a while. And then, protests started. Protests about equal pay for equal work, protests about getting social services and schooling for the children of illegal immigrants, protests about minimum wage increases...and...here's my very favorite...protests about the U.S. Government's attempt to enforce and toughen immigration laws.

You know what, let's change the POV here to make things easier...

---

The following is an open lettter to pissed off illegal Hispanic immigrants:

---

Dear pissed off illegal Hispanic immigrants,

Thank you for doing all that hard work for me. You do really good work...truthfully, you do better work than I would have done, and you worked twice as hard without complaining. Thank you for doing that...I'm really glad that you chose to do that work, and I'm thankful that I could benefit from your tremendous work ethic.

However, I'm a bit concerned. You see...you're not supposed to be here. I know it sounds insensitive and elitist...but I'm actually just telling you what the law says. The law says that you're not supposed to be here. It says that you're welcome in this country...as tired and/or poor as you may be...and that you may come and work our fertile lands to make your living. All you have to do is what everyone else on the planet who wants to come and work in America has to...you have to apply, and you have to be accepted. I'm sorry that we let you make your living here without kicking you out sooner, because I can see why you'd get the impression you had the right to be here after a few years of nobody saying anything. That was our bad. But now you need to go home.

You see, I have a good friend named Maria. Maria is a brilliant woman, and a gifted lawyer. She wants to move to America from Peru so she can be a lawyer in the US and make a life for herself here. She went to school here on an educational visa, she fell in love with an American man, and now she wants to work here. She applied for a work visa and was denied, unfortunately, so she went back to Peru where she now waits for a chance to return to America, see her love again, and try to get a visa again. She's playing by the rules, and it hurts her. My prayer is that she gets her visa, moves here, and gets married to that man. My hope is that she may even some day wish to be a citizen of the US, though I will always respect her even if she doesn't.

So, here's the thing...I don't think you should be here. You weren't invited, you weren't cleared, and you sure as heck weren't approved for a work visa. In fact, we did everything we could to keep you out...we spent millions and millions of dollars building fences and hiring guys to drive up and down the border, just so you wouldn't come. But you made it through our fences, and you made it past our guards, and somehow you made your way into your current job. I admire your courage and your resolve...but you still shouldn't be here. This isn't "Red Rover"...just because you made it across the border and through the locked arms of the patrol doesn't mean you get to stay on this side. You don't get to stay, you don't get to work, and you sure as shit don't get to live off our social services.

You are here against the laws of this country. You broke the law, and like any other resident of the US who breaks the law, you are subject to consequences. You can march in the streets, sing our anthem in your language, and fly your flag above ours...you may be as polite or rude as you like (that's the beauty of our first amendment), but you're still here illegally. And until we make running over the border in the middle of the night a legal shortcut to the immigration process, you will remain illegal.

It sucks that you come from a shitty country. It sucks that I was fortunate enough to be born into a free country with great opportunity, and that you weren't. I hope that your country changes, and I hope that my country changes its laws so that good people can find good homes here easily. But that hasn't happened yet, and you're not supposed to be here.

Go home, find the application office for an American work visa, and get in line. While you're there, look for Maria...I'm praying she's up near the front.

Good luck,
Justin

---

Peace,
Justin

2006-04-24T22:31:00.000-04:00

I've been neither funny nor clever in recent days, and as much as I'd like to post my shopping list and a copy of my insurance policy, I thought I'd post something of real content.

This is a blog entry from someone who I don't know who that someone is. Another someone sent it to me, and I thought it was both brilliant and sort of stupid at times. I thought the collective you might like it.

------

When you build up a structure and slap the word church on a sign out front, it becomes very easy for people to forget that church is not a place to go once a week, but rather something that we are. Uh oh, here I go...
Forgive me, but I dont need a weekly program of rehearsed hooky tunes followed by a barrage of announcements and a puffy theological dissertation. I dont need cell groups, home groups, singles groups, young married groups or mens groups. Frankly, I'm pretty grouped out. What I need is fellowship. Not "Fellowship Bible" or "Fellowship Community" or "Fellowship Covenant" or "Fellowship Baptist." I need community. Not "Christ Community" or "Faith Community" or "Real Life Community." And dont get me started on grace. God knows we need that, but not in the form of another catchy church name. I don't need to read another trite quip on a marquis telling me that a church is "prayer conditioned" or that "regular bible check ups prevent truth decay." And I don't need to be professionally greeted at the door of the sanctuary. I need to be known, not counted and alphabetized. After all, Mr. Greeter, is it really nice to see me, or are you just happy to see another seat filled? No, I don't want a bulletin. Associate Pastor Whats-His-Name is going to read it all to me during the prayer-slash-announcement time anyway. Besides, it's a good way for him to squeeze in some face time between "worship" and the offering. Oh excuse me, I mean "tithe" (the word church leadership uses to ensure Gods promises will be fulfilled to His people). The "freedom isn't free" sales pitch: Freedom comes at a cost! And that cost is 10 percent of everything you have. But if you're a guest, please don't feel obligated to give (only members should feel obligated). Excuse me, do you not see that we are clinging so desperately to these laws that Jesus [admittedly] lived to fulfill, but also bled and died to free us from? James says if you take on one law you must carry the weight of the entire law on your shoulders. Brothers and sisters, that is not a burden we were meant to carry in light of the finishing work of Christ! Tithe is merely a control device for leaders who can't trust the work of the Holy Spirit in the Body if Christ (or who don't understand that we have been freed from those regulations and rules). It's the same thing they did back in the early church with circumcision. Am I saying we shouldn't give? By no means! The apostle Paul has plenty to say about that. He said that we should excel in the grace of giving just as we excel in the other good gifts (he also had a teensy weensy tiny bit to say about the end of the law too, which includes the mandate of tithing). I didn't want to get started on tithe. Guess its too late for that. This is not merely a piece on tithing. Rather, it is a satirical challenge issued to the prodigal church of America.
You see, we don't need churches with schedules to keep, fundraisers to promote, and people to reintroduce to life under law. No thanks. I'm over that. What I need is a safe place for people who know each other intimately and, at a moments notice, can lay hands on one other and exercise their gifts with confidence and without fear. Gifts like prophecy and healing. It isn't wrong for me to desire a place where I can come to be prayed over without the formality of a scheduled altar call at the end of a service. Besides, what kind of service is it to erect a building and obligate everyone to come and help pay the utility bills, outrageous mortgages, expansion funds, and salaries (for a staff who claims to equip, but mostly enables laziness amongst the members by doing all the work for them) when there are congregants who can't find healing from a common cold, let alone afford to pay their own rent? And when we do attempt to reach out to those people, we stamp our church brand all over the project and piously advertise our "mission."
Is that authenticity? Yes, it is very authentic. But I can take you out in my back yard and show you something very authentic that my dog left behind - and no amount of clever marketing will make it stink any less. We don't need authenticity. We need truth. And truth is not a marketing strategy. It is not programmed. Truth is only a formula when it is math. The gospel is not math. It is not an equation. It is mystery - mystery revealed in the person of Christ our Deliverer, who never prepared a four point sermon, rented out a billboard, or handed out a tract. He taught, he corrected, he rebuked, he interacted, he had compassion, he healed, he prayed, he studied, he believed in others, he cared for the poor, he had close friends who knew him well, and he looked people in the eyes simply because he took the time to. But most of all, he loved. And that's the truth.

-----

What do you think?

Peace,
Justin

2006-04-10T09:32:00.000-04:00

I just had a terrifying dream.

I tend to dream vividly, and, fortunately, I tend to demonstrate no hint of a gift for prophecy in my dreaming. Which is comforting when you have the dream I just woke up from.

Bear with me...it may be hard to follow...

I dreamt that I was on a gameshow. I don't remember much about the gameshow, other than at the very end, it was possible to run up a giant ramp and grab a big TV and slide down with it. (Your prize was that you got to keep the TV). My brothers and I were competing as a team on this show, and I was the last to go. I ran as fast as I could, I grabbed the TV, and I got it back before the buzzer. (This is not the bad part of the dream). I handed it to my older brother and we all celebrated.

Then, something happened. I don't remember precisely what, but something. Somebody criticized me for not doing it fast enough, I think. I was hurt, and yelled back. Fine, no big deal. But the conversation escalated into a full-blown argument, which escalated into a full-blown fight. Once again, I don't remember why, and I don't think it matters much why. All I know, is I felt a rage boiling up in me, and I'm pretty sure that's why I had the dream in the first place...to address that feeling. Our verbal fight soon became a physical confrontation, and my twin brother, at this point, was smart enough to walk away. That left me and my older brother. I felt like he painted me into a corner...he had called me irresponsible and foolish, and had threatened to prove it to everyone I knew. The only thing I had left was my weight to push around, so I did. I attacked him, and I did so viciously. It was a good fight, and it should have been a fair fight...it was on paper, anyway. I did not significantly out-strength or out-skill him...it's just that I was so angry, I went nuts on him...and really hurt him. And I was glad.

...I wish the story ended there. I love my brother very much, and that was bad enough. But it didn't end there....

...On the way out the door, as my brother lay beaten on the floor behind me, I ran into a friend of mine. My friend is a she and she is a good friend and a good person. She asked what was going on, and I tried to explain why what had happened was totally reasonable and how I was pushed to it. She became frightened and angry and...worst of all...disappointed in me. She began to yell at me and even worse, I could see in her eyes that she didn't trust me. (BTW, I'm fairly sure she represented Stacy...because while I like this friend and all, I don't have the sort of heart investment in her that would make this dream as scary as it was. My guess is that my subconscious couldn't handle the thought of this being Stacy, so it made the nightmare more bearable by making it someone else). She saw me as a different person, and despite all of the relationship equity that we had built up over the years, it was all forgotten because of one bad choice. She threatened to tell everyone what a monster I was. I felt painted into a corner. I was angry, hurt, and felt trapped. (Are you seeing a pattern yet?) She tried to leave...so I hit her.

...I couldn't believe it. This strange gameshow dream had turned into a horrible nightmare...and it wasn't a nightmare where I'm chased by a knife-weilding psycho or confronted by an armed mugger on a dark street. In this dream, the psycho was me, the mugger was me...and that was even more terrifying.

I hit her twice. She fell to the ground, bruised and a little bloody, and yelled for help. Nobody came. As soon as I had done it, I knew it was wrong, and I immediately begun to apologize. I tried to help her up, but it was too late...she wouldn't let me come near her (and with good reason). She called the police from her cell phone. My she called my twin brother, and my parents, and even a couple of friends of mine who are much, much bigger than I am...just to protect her from me. They showed up, they comforted her, and they told me how despicable and disgusting I am. They stared at me with disappointed and hateful eyes. A couple of the men threatened to kill me if they ever heard that I did this again. In short, they did what I would do if I heard this about someone I knew.

The last thing I remember is my twin brother looking at me with a hurt, anger and disappointment and saying, "you're disgusting." That's when I woke up, and that's when I started to write this blog entry.

...please bear in mind, I have NEVER hit my wife. Nor any other woman. I haven't even been in a fight with another man for years. I am, for the most part, a gentle person who keeps his fists reserved to the punching bag, not for hurting others. I have never hit a woman, and that's part of why this bothered me so much. Why would I have a dream like this? Am I secretly a wife-beating husband? Am I harboring some deep resentment I don't know about? Am I truly dangerous?

This was a horrible dream. I woke up sweating and scared. I want to dismiss it and forget it, but my mind doesn't work that way. The best way to deal with it, for me, was to write it down. So I have.

I scared myself this morning.

Peace,
Justin

2006-04-04T22:08:00.000-04:00

I'll give you... a space western is stupid.

...That's why it surprised me so much when I fell spurs-over-lasers in love with one.

Truthfully, I only kind of like cowboy flicks (save for Young Guns II and Tombstone...pseudo-cowboy, but fine filmmaking), and I really can't tolerate science-fiction. Star Wars makes me angry, Star Trek bores me and Star Crunch tastes like chocolate-covered boogers. (OK, I like Star Crunch, and it tastes nothing like boogers, but points are best made in threes).

So, when my friend Allan told me to pop in a DVD of a failed TV series from 2002 called "Firefly," I kept waiting for the punchline. However, it was better than editing the video I was supposed to be editing at the time, so I tuned in.

Holy....

...

....shit.

I have never loved a television series more. I have never had more heart investment, more head investment, and more wallet investment in a television series. I've bought the series DVD set twice, I bought the movie version twice (which we'll get to in a minute), I bought the comic book, and...good lord...I even bought the action figures. I love each of the ten principal characters with an interest that borders on perversion, when you consider that all of them are fictional, and when you consider that one of them is a spaceship. I've found myself using words like "Warp drive," "Grav-boot," and "Pert Near" in casual conversation. I've even cussed in Chinese once, which may seem odd, but it makes sense when you see the show. I listen to the podcasts about the show, I keep up with websites about the show, and I'm even a member of a couple of them.

I...am...a...geek.

I didn't mean to be. I've actually been in a six-month-long get-cooler regimen, including new clothes, frequent haircuts, and a scented spray I'm told is made of toilet water. This regimen isn't actually making me any cooler, but at least it's expensive. But this whole "Firefly" thing is really screwing things up.

It's the writing more than anything. The writing is so....so....so well-done. The writer, Joss Whedon, writes like I would if I were twice as smart and thrice as clever. It's deep...it's meaningful. Like, actually meaningful...it's about God, it's about family, it's about love, it's about trust, fear, gender roles, free speech, prostitution, God, the government, and sometimes it's about guns. The acting is almost entirely brilliant, with some exceptions, and even those exceptions are poorly-acted resucitated by well-written.

The show was cancelled because nobody watched it. Nobody watched it because it was on against something that was apparently much more interesting, and because Fox made them play the episodes out of order, so they made no sense. It also failed because "Space Western" is a pretty stupid idea.

But it worked. It totally worked. It is powerful, and it is profound.

The show failed, but the fans spread the word. They did such a good job, that the DVD sales of the failed show (it lasted less than a season) blew away expectations. They had to do a second and a third run...they flew off the shelves, and as word spread, they did more flying. They sold so many that Universal Studios picked up the failed (now extremely profitable) TV show and did the unprecendented and unthinkable...they made a big-budget movie out of it. The movie is called "Serenity," and it's a phenomenon.

Please please go rent the movie. If you can't rent it, borrow it from me. If you don't know me, buy it on Amazon. Better yet, buy the series. Watch at least three episodes. If you don't like it after that, I'll buy it from you.

I hate science fiction. I love Firefly. Go see Serenity, go and buy Firefly.

Now, I have some geekdom to get to.

Peace,
Justin

2006-03-28T10:56:00.000-05:00

Transvestites make the best freaking moccachinos.

...at least, that's been my experience.

Yesterday, Stacy and I followed the advice of a good friend to check out the isolated little burg of Yellow Springs, Ohio. It's about an hour northeast of Cincy, and is the home to Antioch College, WYSO, and Dave Chappelle. It is also a little island of liberal thought in an otherwise uber-conservative state. The "downtown" area consists of about three blocks of shops, most of which sell batiked scarves and Indian jewelry and incense holders and....err-hmm...tobacco water-pipes. It's a little hippie paradise with a terrific record store, a tasty place to get a veggie burrito, and a lot of women with nose piercings. It was, in short, a very cool place to be.

It is also home to a very tall man who dresses in women's clothing as he serves coffee drinks at the Mermaid Cafe and Bookstore. He stands probably 6'2", wears a long brown wig, has yellowed teeth and a baritone voice, was donning a string of pearls and bracelet to match, and sported a flower-print dress that June Cleaver would have envied. He was very kind, well-spoken, and friendly...and he made a hell of a moccachino. (I'm referring to this person as "he," by the way, because I'm not certain if he would consider himself a "transvestite" [man dressing as a woman] or a "transgendered person" [woman stuck in a man's body]...and I never got to asking his name, because the only reason I wanted to know was out of morbid curiosity...and that seemed exploitative to me). He served several other customers while I was there, and nobody really had anything to say about it...or even seemed surprised or taken aback by this very tall man in women's clothing.

...and, for some reason...this made me feel quite proud of this little town.

I have heard Yellow Springs and its university anchor, Antioch, referred to as "progressive" on several occasions. This is usually spoken to mean "open-minded," "non-traditional," "having a diversity of thought" and...most accurately, I think, "liberal." That is to say, reflecting the values of social and political liberalism...

read as: ...save the environment, local business is better than big-business, the government can't be trusted, political activism is the highest form of patriotism, feed the poor, use less, live communally when you can, women should have the right to choose, being gay is just fine thank you, have a veggie burrito...etc., etc.

These things are called "progressive," implying that subscribing to these ideologies is more than just a choice that a person makes, for better or for worse...but that it is actual progress. That this an ascent of sorts...someone who lands on these believes has progressed from a less-evolved state of being to a more-evolved state.

...Here's where I'm headed with this.

I was proud of this "progressive" little town, with it's "progressive" little cafe run by a crossdresser, because I think deep down, I do believe that this is progress. I think I agree with those who call it "progressive" to have a town where a man can dress as a woman and still keep a job and still sell coffee and not be mocked or laughed or shunned day after day. Now, I'm certain that the guy at Mermaid's has had his share of ridicule...but I saw nothing but smiles and friendly faces buying books and coffee from him for the 90 minutes I was there. It was as if this was ...gasp... OK. And, that was heartening to me...it was encouraging.

I don't know whether or not crossdressing is morally wrong. I don't even know if that's a fair question. I think a better question is, "is it healthy for that person?" For instance...if his gender-identity issues had driven him to the point of suicide...and he instead opted to simply embrace his feminine side and dress as a woman in order to carry on with his life...it's hard for me to call that wrong....I'd call choosing a string of pearls and a pair of panty hose over a bullet pretty damned healthy. However, if he dresses like that in order to avoid dealing with some very deep hurt that needs addressing...if he's using it as a crutch to stave off the sense that he has to deal with the tough stuff of his past...then I would suggest it is unhealthy. Either way, I don't know that it's a matter of right and wrong...more a matter of what is going to bring this person closer to God and to his own personal mission.

If that's the case...and I'm perfectly aware that you may not be convinced it is...then why should he be ridiculed? Why should be shamed, ousted, or even encouraged to change his ways? To love people where they are, while still encouraging them towards the things that will bring them closer to God, seemed to be Jesus's way. I want to live that way. I want to live as a person who does not judge or condemn others, but helps them to discern what is most healthy and likely to reconnect them with God. Sometimes, this may mean a "tough love" approach of telling people that the choices they are making are not healthy, but I suspect that most advice needs to be worked out on an individual basis...not as a blanket rule of "activity x is morally wrong" or "activity x is morally acceptable."

It's possible that the guy working behind the counter at the Mermaid Cafe in Yellow Springs is living the healthiest possible life he can right now...and that that healthy life involves doing something I don't understand and can't possibly empathize with...dressing as a woman. I hope that I would always walk into a situation like that wanting to understand him first, and then, if allowed, to help him find whatever is most likely to bring him closer to God...without self-righteous judgement, without condemnation, without ridicule. To me...that sounds a great deal like progress.

Peace,
Justin

P.S. - Let's face it, I am quite judgemental...my previous posts should make that abundantly clear. I'm just judgemental about other issues. As much as I'd like to be the loving, Jesusesque guy described above...well, I'm not. But I'm working on it.

2006-03-08T00:29:00.000-05:00

I don't claim to know much about politics.

Whatever it is that I might know about one political happening or another I learn in one of two ways:
1. By catching it on Morning Edition on NPR. Morning Edition is my way of both getting a healthy dose of intellectual-sounding words in my head before I get to work, and getting just enough liberal crap in my head to offset all of the conservative crap I hear on my radio alarm clock, which is tuned to AM talk radio. My hope is that I’m fairly moderate, or at least appropriately confused, before I get to work.
2. By reading the free New York Times or USA Today that gets left on the doorstep of my hotel rooms. I don’t know how they decide which one to leave me on any given day, but I’m starting to collect some quantitative data on that, and so far I have linked it to whether or not I rehang my bathroom towels.

And, true to my form, despite having a breadth of political knowledge that resembles a Necco wafer, I tend to spout off about it a lot. So, in that vein, here are my honest positions on issues that make people angry:

The Death Penalty: If I could write a slogan more clever than this one, which I saw once on a bumper sticker outside of a Catholic school, I would: “It seems wrong to me to kill people who kill people to show people that killing people is wrong.” The death penalty is not a deterrent, it’s not a cost-saver, and the only person it seems to stop is the guy strapped into the chair. The defenseless guy strapped into the chair. The fact that we’re killing people based on our legal system, which is biased, influenced, affected, racist and flawed (as any legal system is) really really freaks me out. Since the birth of DNA evidence analysis, more than 60 inmates have been released from death row. Just… …think… …about… …that…

Abortion: For all of you who are waiting for this Christian to say something right-wingy and intolerant about how cruel and awful abortion is…
…you’re right on time. Abortion is cruel and awful. I’m a little mixed on situations where the mother’s life is in danger, because then it’s kill one person or kill another…but babies, unborn or otherwise, are people, and they deserve the same chance to screw up or champion their lives as the rest of us do.

Homosexuality: I don’t know if being gay is wrong. I think most gay folks are born gay, and I’m guessing a few other folks subconsciously become gay because of one reason or another, and very very few choose to be gay on purpose. The Bible says it’s wrong. My heart says it isn’t. So…what do you do with that? I’ll tell you what you do, if you’re me: you realize that if being gay is wrong then gay people are doing wrong stuff just like I’m doing wrong stuff every day, and that I’m no different…no better or worse or more loved by God or less loved by God…then they are. Bottom line. If you choose to be gay, then you’re a braver man than I’ll ever be…I can’t imagine all that you’d have to put up with. Point is, I’m not better than you are, and I’m no worse. You’re a child of God, not a gay child of God or a straight child of God. Go be gay, don’t be gay, but God loves you and I just the same.

Euthanasia: I respect people’s right to die, and particularly respect their right to kill themselves, so long as they don’t kill or wound anybody else in the process. I think your right to die and your right to your thoughts are just about the only two inalienable rights on the planet, and unless we can prove that you are mentally unfit to make any decisions about your own life or death (such as a jilted lover who, in a fit of depression, goes running to her GP looking for a lethal dose of sodium pentathol). If you’re a cancer patient who is struggling with the pain everyday…or even just a cancer patient who doesn’t want to fight it anymore and is ready to go home…and has carefully thought this out…by all means, Doc, make it happen. Seems contradictory to be so against the death penalty and abortion and so in favor of euthanasia, doesn’t it? The key difference is who is making the choice. I respect your choice to die, though I hope you’ve got a damn good reason.

The President: George W. Bush is a monkey. He is a magical monkey who learned how to talk. I think we should congratulate him. I don’t think he’s immoral…I just think he’s retarded. And not in a cute way, either.

The Bible: I like the Bible. I downright love parts of it. The Bible seems to be the richest fount of knowledge, spiritual insight and historical teaching I’ve read thus far. It tells the story of a man who I believe was/is God, and it does it through the eyes of those that knew him…or, if you believe the Jesus Seminar, those that knew the guys that knew the guys that knew him. I think it is God’s inspired word. With that said, I’m also not entirely sure it’s God’s infallible or uncorrupted inspired word. Every translation is an act of interpretation, and after 3,000+ years, the thing’s been screwed with pretty heavily. I’m not sure that every word in the original text is the inspired word of God, either…but I know that I’m not a competent judge of what is and isn’t God’s inspired word, and that I know that I’ve had parts of the Bible validated by my own first-hand experiences with God…so I know at least some of it is, and I’ve yet to find nonsense in there. The bottom line on the Bible is that it seems to know a hell of a lot more than I do, and if I use my own sense of right and wrong as my sole moral plumb-line, I’m going to end up a morbidly obese sex-crazed drug addict who dies in prison on a car-thieving rap after trying to steal the original KITT. So, I have to look somewhere else….I look to the Bible…but that’s not the end of it. I ask my friends. I ask people smarter than me. I check with my gut. It’s not a great system, but I’ve yet to go to jail, and as far as I know KITT is still in Orlando.

OK, so that was just six issues. But it’s enough controversy for one post. I hope you agree with me, because that means the world looks one more person just like me, which means I stand a better chance of getting a better mortgage loan. But, if you disagree, I hope you post and tell me why. And do it loudly, so I’ll be sure to hear.

Peace,
Justin

2006-02-26T11:29:00.000-05:00

If, right at this moment, you only have five minutes to read a blog.

Read Ryan Cook's.

Ryan wrote a response to our discussion on how I'm a jerk. He's my friend, and he's the kind of thinker and writer I want to grow up to be.

Peace,
Justin

2006-02-24T10:37:00.000-05:00

This is a post about epicureanism, about Jesus, and about my dead fish.

I'll start with the latter.

This week, my fish died. He was a Beta, and his name was Sparky. As there was no funeral, please allow me to make my eulogy here.

When we were first married, Stacy and I attended an auction to raise money for my grade school. It was a good auction...we bought two things we couldn't afford for more than they were worth, which means the fundraiser went well. At the end of the night, the final thing to be auctioned off were the centerpieces on each table, which consisted of a rotund vase, filled with polished colored stones, with a green leafy plant poking out of the top and a Beta fish swimming around the plant's watery tendrils. I haven't owned a fish since I was five or so, and I was broke from buying whatever the heck it was we bought...so I was ready to pass. Happy and half-drunk auction attenders quickly snapped the fishy centerpieces up and, one by one, carried the large vases out with the lone fish inside of each sloshing around as its proud new owner toted it out.

As Stacy and I were leaving, a middle-aged woman with too much perfume and a very friendly smile came up to us with her own fish-in-a-jar, and begged us to take it, as her husband didn't seem to want a new pet as much as she did. Sparky had been a pet for all of five minutes, and already he was an orphan being moved into a foster home. Poor guy.

We took him. And for the last four years, he's been with us. He swam his lazy circles while we laughed, while we talked about getting pregnant, while we fought, while we tinked wine glasses to toast our first home purchase, while we celebrated my new job, while we cried over Stacy's first job (long story), and he swam while we did the thing married people do. We fed him as frequently as we remembered to, which probably averaged out to about once every week or so. Stacy changed the bowl water every month...give or take...mostly take. The plant that Sparky shared his bowl with has long since died, but Sparky pressed on. In fact, he pressed on, even when we went on vacation and forgot to feed him for a couple of weeks. He pressed on when we tried to change his water and dropped him on the floor. He pressed on when we moved the bowl to a place where we couldn't see it over the Christmas holiday, and thereby forgot to change the water for a couple of months. He even pressed on when he slipped by the sieve we use when we change his water and dropped right down into the garbage disposal...I had to fish him out with my hand, and he pressed on.

Sparky was a survivor.

And for some reason, that meant a lot to me. I'm not kidding...I really liked Sparky. I liked him more than the cats...which bothers me, because Sparky was free and required no effort at all, and the cats are expensive and loud and, let's face it, they're cats, which sucks. He pressed on, day after day, year after year, and never asked for much. I miss Sparky.

---

This ends the eulogy. And begins the other bit.

---

I had a very strange night a couple of nights ago. I was in Philadelphia working, and met up with a friend in Philly for a beer. Whilst sipping a stout dram of my favorite Scotch draught, two girls approached us and told a very long and complicated lie which I won't bother repeating but which was basically a long, stupid and highly involved pick-up line involving fake names and a greek man who doesn't really exist. As you might imagine, I opted out of the whole, "being picked up" thing. If you are wondering why right now, you haven't read enough of my blog or I haven't blogged enough of my love. I did, however, offer to play "wingman" for my very single friend, who is a bit of a ladies' man. To keep things short and tasteful, I spent the bulk of the evening talking to one girl about my marriage and her recent breakup, and he spent the bulk of the evening getting quite laid. He had a great time, she had a great time, and the girl I spoke with eventually left to meet up with some guys she met in the bar who had cocaine. And thus, the evening ended.

And I woke up the next morning and called my buddy and we had breakfast...and here's the thing...

...he was really happy.

He didn't sit down and say, "My god, man...I knew her for two hours before we had sex...what am I doing with my life?" He didn't say, "Man, I am so unfulfilled...I'm totally just living for myself...where's the bigger picture?" He sure as hell didn't say, "Justin, could you tell me about something better than this...like Jesus?"

In fact, he was really happy. He got to have sex with a pretty girl, and she was really excited about it, and they didn't have to exchange "I love you's" or digits or even learn each other's last names. And that's it. Lots of endorphins and fun and giggling and things that feel good when they touch you. And that was it.

Now don't get me wrong...I love sex. He loves sex. I do it with one person every time, he does it with different people. And that's totally cool with him.

That's what struck me...there was no gaping hole. There was no sense that, at the end of the day, he sits at the end of his bed and feels desperately alone and empty. There was no sense that he's missing a big chunk of his heart that only God could fill. He's a smart, successful, very cool guy, and he seems really generally pretty happy. And I think that's what confuses me so much.

When I was with Young Life ministry, we were told that every person needs Jesus. When I was with the Vineyard, we were told that every person has a God-shaped hole in their hearts/souls that calls out to be filled with what were offering. And those things may be true...but I don't know that I see it. And I don't know that those with the hole feel it as clearly as I assumed.

Truth is, epicureanism seems pretty great. It seems fun, and exciting, and somewhat fulfilling. Living each day as a hedonist seems like a pretty great way to live...and assuming you're not hurting other people, it's pretty hard to argue with. This presents a problem with evangelism as I know it.

How do you talk to someone about filling a hole in their hearts when they don't feel a hole? How do you tell somebody about Jesus's healing power when they don't feel sick? How do you share the story of Jesus fixed a broken you when he doesn't sense a broken him? And what happens when you don't sense a broken him?

I don't have answers. I want to know what you think. Christians speak up. Hedonists speak up. Christian hedonists, speak up. I need to think about this with other people.

Peace,
Justin

2006-02-10T11:05:00.000-05:00

On a plane back from Baltimore…

I tell that you that only because I’m still in that stage where I feel cool saying on I’m on a plane back from anywhere. Even someplace silly, like Baltimore.

Here’s what I learned about Baltimore while I was there: 1) Crab Cakes are tasty when they’re made from crabs who were swimming just the day before, 2) even cities you don’t think about much can have big traffic problems, and 3) Cal Ripken Jr. was apparently quite popular for doing whatever it is that he did.

It’s a very pretty city…the harbor is beautiful, and there are lots of fun places to go. I was pretty busy, but I may return sometime to try out some of the neat-o stuff I drove by on my way to less neat-o stuff.

This ends the section about Baltimore.

This begins a section about how I’m not that great.

A guy who logged in anonymously but left me the name “Tito” had something to say in a comment to my post about Verizon Wireless and Capitalism (see previous post). If I’m reading his comment right, he basically said, “hey, you’re a funny guy. Not much of a Christian, but a funny guy.” Am I reading that right, Tito?

Man, I completely agree. Seriously, please don’t read this as sarcastic or cutting or facetious…I mean it. I’m really not a great Christian. And, I think it was really cool that you had the guts to point that out. I think the way you said it was, “you’re not much like what Jesus called us to” or something like that (can’t look it up, on a plane)…and I think you’re exactly right. I’m really not.

It’s not something I’m proud of. As much as I like giving the middle-finger to things and saying “I’m not following your rules, man!” [or insert some other suburban-white-kid-raging-against-the-world comment here], living as God wants me to live isn’t one of those things. In fact, that’s probably the only set of guiding rules and regulations that really matter in the loooooooooooong run [read:eternity], and I’m screwing many of them up.

Let me give you a laundry-list. It’s by no means complete, but at least it’s somewhat deplorable:
1. I’m very self-centered. I think of myself nearly all of the time, and I rarely do anything that makes me even remotely uncomfortable, regardless of how it might help other people
2. I swear like a sailor. And not just righteous swearing, like when I’m bowling or when I really mean something…I swear around kids sometimes on accident, and I swear at my wife when I’m angry. I picked it up as a little shingle of rebellion, and I haven’t learned how to put it down when it’s not going to be helpful. Swearing is great in some circumstances…lord knows I’m a proponent at times…but you’ve got to be able to hold your tongue when your tongue bears holding.
3. I’m a pervert. My mind is constantly darting in directions I don’t want it to, and while I don’t let my wang follow it in those directions, I can’t even claim that as righteousness because thinking and doing are so freaking married that it’s like I’m three-quarters-doing whatever it is I’m patting myself on the back for not doing. Nuff said on that topic, and no, I don’t want to talk about it.
4. I’m extremely critical and judgmental. I pick these niggly little human flaws and bitch about them to total strangers. Why? Probably just to make myself feel better about my own failings. Which, by the way, makes me a
5. Total hypocrite. As cute as it is to sit here and play humble by listing stuff I do wrong, the reality is that I really live this stuff. I criticize others, and I continue to live a life which begs criticism.

You know what? I was going to keep listing but my plane is landing and I’m starting to get depressed. I just picked the first five things I can think of…there are, no doubt, hundreds more. So, you’ll have to figure them out as you go, just like I am.

Sometimes, I’m a great guy. Sometimes I do great things for people and, every great once in a while, I do it for the right reasons. And sometimes…most of the time…I’m a pretty mediocre guy. I do and think things that are neither good nor bad but just are…I choose to live in lukewarm grays and browns for long periods of time without being outstanding in either direction. And sometimes I am a terrible guy, for a thousand reasons and in a thousand flavors.

I’m not great. I’m OK…I’d like to think I may get to be a better guy…but right now I’m just OK. Tito, man, the truth is you’re right…bottom line.

Peace,
Justin

2006-02-01T21:02:00.000-05:00

I’m on the way home from our nation’s capital.

Actually, to be more specific, I’m on the way home from a little cookie-cutter suburb about half-an-hour north of our nation’s capital, named Rockville, Maryland.

It's possible that Rockville, Maryland might be the capital of something, but the odds are pretty good that it’s the “200+ Thread-Count Duvet Capital” or “The Residents Who Undergo Regular Prostate Exams Capital” or something equally mundane. For the most part, it was just hotels and chain restaurants…though I’ll concede that I really only saw as much as was within walking distance…which includes my hotel, and the chain-restaurant complex next to my hotel. So, for all I know, it may very well have been a small town inhabited by mermaid queens and fairie pixies of yore…but most of what I saw was little Mexican men working behind the swinging white doors at the chain restaurants, and little Haitian women who leave new soaps by your tub every morning.

I promise, this is not a blog entry about race, class, immigration, or the plight of poor Spanish-speakers in America.

It is, however, a post about the mystery of capitalism.

See, here’s the thing…when I was growing up, my dad and mom would come each evening into my bedroom and take turns lying down for 5-10 minutes with me to help me go to sleep. We’d talk about the day, we’d talk about what to expect tomorrow, and we’d talk about whatever it is they felt like talking to me about in order to get me to calm down enough to sleep. My mom, for the most part, nurtured. It’s what she’s best at, and I can tell you she’s brilliant at it. She would say comforting things and kind things and sleepy-bye kinds of things. It’s a wonderful topic for another post.

My dad, however, preferred to teach. I loved it. He would talk about how combustion engines work, or what Mastadons looked like, or how our bodies turn oxygen into carbon dioxide or how a bill becomes a law. Mind you…I was, like seven. But he told it so well, and with such interest and drama, that I was enthralled, and I was actually learning it.…it’s one of the reasons I think I know so many helpful little bits of reality today. One of my favorite talks…and one which I remember fondly…was the one about capitalism. He would tell me, night after night, about supply and demand. About widgets, and how the trick for the manufacturer was to create interest in widgets through advertising and PR, thereby increasing the demand, and then to meet that demand by orchestrating a supply. And the sweet spot, he explained, was to come as close to meeting demand as possible with the supply…that’s where the real profit was. He always said, “A thing is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it...no less, and no more.” It was a beautiful and simple explanation for a terrifically complex subject, and it’s the reason why I can always pay less for a hotel, an eBay purchase, and concert tickets.

And I’ve always believed it. I believe Adam Smith when he says that supply and demand will control the market. I believe my college economics prof when he says that competition will hone the skills and agility of business the way natural selection hones the skills and agility of the woodland critters. I’ve believed that good businesses (or bad businesses with good marketing) will succeed, and bad business will either sharpen its operation, or it will fail.

Yes, yes…I believed all of it…my dad, my economics prof, Adam, Karl…

…and then, I went to a Verion Wireless store.

Good freaking god.

Let me back up. My phone died two days ago. Dunno why, just ceased to function. Fortunately, my hotel was directly across a very busy street from a Verizon Wireless retail store, which has a counter marked “customer service,” and a counter marked “technical support.” (The poetic irony of these two appellations will strike you in a minute). I was so excited; I thought I may be able to turn my phone in on my lunch break, and perhaps pick it up later that day or early the next.

Yes, that’s what I thought indeed. And it's only now that I realize, that’s a little like thinking, “perhaps my sweater will turn to solid marmalade that I could eat on my flight home.”

Instead, what happened was I entered a customer-support-hell, full of very very angry customers, and some tremendously stupid employees.

I don’t mean stupid like, “My god, that pizza man is so stupid, he forgot to give me back my change.” Rather, I mean stupid like, “Hey, is that tubby guy with the absent grin pooping his pants right now?”

The Verizon Wireless store in Rockville Maryland, should anyone ever ask you, is operated by a gang of imbecilic 17-year-olds whose IQ’s are only subbed by their basmented sense of motivation and pride in their work. I won’t get into the furry details, lest you get so empathetically angry that you punch your screen…but I will summarize:

Phone dies =
6 trips to Verizon Wireless store in Rockville Maryland.
4.5 total hours spent waiting in the lobby for the lethargic teens of tech support to diagnose the problem
2 new batteries, one of which didn’t fit in my phone, but was jammed in forcefully by Malak in tech support, in the hopes that maybe if the wrong battery is pushed into the wrong phone hard enough, God will sympathize and provide power to the phone.
1 complete loss of all my address book and contacts. The only reason this "1" wasn’t a higher number is because, let’s face it, you can only completely lose something once.
2 battery covers, neither of which fit, and one of which, I’m pretty sure, was just the top to a peanut butter jar.
2 brand new V710 Motorola phones to replace the one that Malak-the-tech-support-guy broke with the battery. (The second new one was to replace the first new one, which Greg in tech support broke when he dropped it trying to get the wrong battery cover on it).

And…in case you’re interested…I eventually did what the guys in Tech Support at Verizon Wireless could not…I figured out what was wrong with my original phone.

...The battery charger wasn’t working.

Seriously…it just needed a new battery charger.

Not a new battery, mind you. A charger. The little thing you plug into the wall.

That’s it.

And now I’m out a phone.

I was not alone…in the 4.5 hours that I stood in line at Verizon Wireless over the course of six trips, I watched at least 50 people get very very very angry with the people who work there. The employees were slow, they were stupid, they were poorly trained, they were poorly equipped, and they lacked basic customer support skills.

And, if capitalism works like it is supposed to, this store would be shut down. Its managers would be fired and its employees would be thrown to the wolves with nothing but their glitter encrusted cell phones, Usher or Beyonce ring-tone blaring, to protect them. If capitalism works, I would have a working phone and I would have spent another hundred bucks on cheap plastic electronic goodies while I was there, just because I was so enthralled with this amazing store and it’s brilliant associates.

Instead, I’m just pissed. And Verizon Wireless is still getting my $120 a month, because they offer better shitty service than the other shitty phone companies.

Hey, I wonder if the Verizon Wireless store in Rockville, Maryland is hiring? I’m pretty sure I know a guy…he sat two rows behind me at an Over the Rhine concert recently…

Peace,
Justin

2006-01-23T10:04:00.000-05:00

I just lost a great post.

I had written a blog entry about loss. (Yes, I can see the irony oozing out from under my spacebar). I had written about four hundred words contemplating whether or not you ever truly get over losing something you love...or whether you just spend the rest of your life with a tender spot in you that hurts if it is poked or slept on wrong. It told the story of an acquaintence of mine who lost his mom...it's a tragic story, and it may very well have made you cry. I told the story of an old heartbreak of mine... a trivial story in light of somebody's mom dying, but nothing is trivial when you're seventeen, you're insecure, and you're infatuated with romanticism. I was just getting into a section about how I have a hard time letting go...that memories, even happy ones, produce a kind of melancholy in me and feel a lot like loss...

...and then I closed the window.

Why would I close the window, you ask?

Because I'm an idiot. I wanted to check my calendar for something, and so I instinctively clicked the little red "close" icon in my web browser to clear a path.

So, here we are. I didn't want to rewrite the whole post because I'm trying to spite my web browser by not giving it the sastisafaction of watching me retype the whole thing. Also because the second time, it's just not going to feel as good as the first one...that first one is gone in a tragic moment now, and much like Curt Cobain or John Lennon, it is thereore perfect, and can never be replaced.

At the same time, I didn't want to write about anything else because, let's face it, I wanted to talk about loss.

So, here is a very short thought about loss that I didn't type in the original post...

I think part of your development process can halt abruptly in the presence of loss. Based on what I heard last night from my acquaintence, I wonder if he is still waiting for his mom to come home. I think there may still be a five-year-old inside of him who stands at their afternoon rendevous point, waiting for a mom who will never arrive. I think, in many ways, I am still waiting as well. I don't want to get into it...it's too personal for me and probably too boring for you, but there is a part of me that is still waiting, hoping that I'll get what I've been waiting 24 years or so for. I don't know if I'll ever get over it...I don't know if I'll ever stop waiting. I wonder if any us do...if we ever stop waiting for that girlfriend to call and apologize, for Dad to call Mom and say he's returning, for your wife to come home from the hospital, for that shaggy golden retriever to come bounding through the door, or for God to answer.

I tend to think not. I tend to think there is a little part in us that keeps calling out, keeps waiting, keeps a hope alive that in the end, it's not a loss...it's just a delay.

Peace,
Justin

2006-01-17T18:53:00.000-05:00

It seemed easy enough...

I had the mic, I had the headphones, I had the really neatO computer. I had a blog that I really enjoyed writing on, but I found myself without the time to do it. I also had a bunch of things that would probably sound cool if spoken in a nice deep voice about two inches off of the fuzzy mic-cozy. It seemed easy enough.

I'll make a podcast!

Yee-haw, look at me everybody! I'm going to join the internet revolution! I'm going to be cutting-edge! Yes, yes....I'll be cutting-edge...and perhaps, if I do a really, really good job, I'll also be other buzzwords...like "postmodern," and "relevant," and "innovative." Yes, I'm headed for the future of communication...I'll join the likes of David Bowie and Ricky Gervais and some guy named Mike from New Jersey who likes to talk about his cat...I'll be a podcaster!

I'll just plug this mic in...test, test, test...

And I'll just record this. Chickity-check, microphone check.

OK, now I'll just take what I recorded...and add some music...and export as an mp4...

And now...ummm...

OK, folks. See, this is where I got kind of hung up. What happens next?

I don't know. But I sure as shit tell you what doesn't happen next. You don't hit the "publish my podcast" button on your keyboard and wait to get famous. No sir. You don't do that at all.

Instead, you spend three or four days going to hundreds of websites and downloading a dozen or so applications trying to turn your mp4 file into a usable podcast. You process your audio every which way possible to try and get it into podcasteriffic form...to no avail. You check out help sites, user forums, FAQ's...you write to the people at iTunes, the manufacturer of the podcasting software, and even the guys who made your microphone, on the off chance that they can help. You even get the magic key at the bottom of the labrynth, give it to the werewolf in the dark forest, get the silver medallion of Moon'sRune from him, and use the medallion to gain entrance to the witches quarters, where you hope she will give you the magic Podcasting tonic, so that you might be able to join the other relevant, cutting-edge postmodernists who have joined the podcasting revolution.

All to no avail.

I have no clue how to podcast. But I made podcast. And I would love for you to hear it.

If you're interested, it's at http://www.archive.org/details/JustinMastersonsPodcastEpisode1/

Just click on the mp4 file. It's like podcasting, but for techidiots like me who can't figure out how to podcast, so instead we just upload an audio file and make you do all the work.

I don't know that I'll make a habit out of doing audio recordings...but it was really fun. I may do it every once in a while. Tell me what you think, eh? Would you rather read, or listen? Or neither?

Let's look to the next wave of blogging...TACTILE BLOGGING. I'm not sure how it'll work, but you'll be able to TOUCH everything the blogger is talking about.

I'll get right on that. In the meantime, download the mp4 file eh? It'll make me feel like all that work wasn't for not.

Peace,
Justin

2006-01-09T22:36:00.000-05:00

The New Look...

My hair has a cowlick.

My wardrobe is lackluster.

My body type is what scientists call "Exomesomorphic," and what Lee Jeans calls "husky."

So, you change what you can.

Hence, the new look to the blog.

(My goodness, from a distance, this looked suspiciously like a haiku. A very very stupid haiku).

Will post soon.

Peace,
Justin

2006-01-06T09:23:00.000-05:00

I think my eyes are starting to go.

It's a weird thought...that I wouldn't be able to see as well. I've always had perfect vision...better than perfect, really. My vision was 20/25...what most people could read clearly at 20 feet, I could read at 25+. It's hardly adamantium claws or telekenesis...but I guess I always thought of it as my little mutant power. I could read road signs well before the other people in my car, I could read addresses on darkened houses as we drove by, and I could pick out the time on my alarm clock from across the room.

But now, things look kind of blurry. I have to really try to focus on something...my casual glance isn't enough...I have to make a real effort to see it clearly. For those of you with glasses/contacts...is this a sign that my eyes are going downhill, or is it possible that they're just tired or overwhelmed?

Perhaps it's a mental thing. I have trouble focusing my mind...why shouldn't it carry over? Perhaps my brain just lags a bit...instead of looking with focus, I look...and....then....I.... ummm.....wait for it.... focus. Perhaps I'm afraid to focus...afraid to see too closely. To look at the faces and expressions of my friends and my co-workers and my wife up close...to get that intimate. Hmmm....

If it turns out that my eyes are going weak...I wonder if I would be a glasses guy or a contacts guy. What do you think, those that know me? Stacy says my face doesn't work for glasses...which, however accurate that might be, is a strange thing to tell a person.

All this seems shallow, to be sure. But I love my eyes...I love what they do for me, what with the whole "seeing" thing and all, and I'd hate for something to go wrong with them.

Peace,
Justin

2005-12-18T00:02:00.000-05:00

An short poem to the guy who sat two rows behind me at tonight's Over The Rhine concert:

---

Cell phone, it rings.
Ring, cell phone, ring.
Beer bottle, it tinkles
It tinkles noisly on the concrete floor.
Your laugh is loud, your cheers are harsh,
Your exclamations are random and out of place.
Ring, cell phone, ring.
Your demeanor is gruff, you smell like cigarettes,
And you keep leaving the door to the lobby open on your repeated trips for more beer.
RIng, cell phone, ring.
You pick up the phone and talk,
Despite the fact that the concert is still going on.
Ring, cell phone, ring.

You are a dick.

---

Peace,
Justin

2005-12-11T23:05:00.000-05:00

It is one of my chief disappointments that life happens at 60i.

I'll explain.

Be prepared for three short paragraphs of nerd-talk, then on to the relevant stuff.

The term "60i" is video-nerd-speak for "60-frames-per-second, interlaced," which is the speed at which standard video is recorded. Basically, it means that my video camera takes 60 half-pictures per second, and then interlaces each half into a whole, for a very clear and crisp 30 frames of video.

But there are other standards for shooting. There is 30p, or "30-frames-per-second, progressive," which means that it takes 30 WHOLE pictures a second, instead of 60-half-pictures. Then, there is 24p, which is just like 30p except it only takes 24 pictures per second. (This is what movies are shot in).

If you want to think of the difference visually...watch an episode of COPS, then an episode of CSI, then watch Braveheart. COPS is shot in 60i...it looks depressingly like real life. It's full-motion...very crisp...and very...ummm...real. CSI, however, is shot at 30p. It's video's best attempt to look like film. (Video is MUCH cheaper to shoot and process than film is, so it would be very rare for a television show to be shot on film...though it's been done). It feels a little more...dramatic. A little strobe-ier, a little dreamier. Braveheart, and every other feature film for that matter, was shot on 24p. It looks like...well, it looks like the movies. The drama is more dramatic...less like life, more like movies. Things move a little slower. I can't explain it any better than to tell you to watch all three, and you'll see what I mean.

OK, enough with the video stuff. Here's the point: I don't want to live at 60i anymore.

Real life is to crisp...to clean...too real. It's the green flourescent buzzing over your head at the Jiffy Lube while you wait for your car to get done...it's the awkward hug you have with your dad after a saturday breakfast...it's the little bits of acne under your beard...it's the cell phone ringing in the theater. It's the difference between the triumphant moment at the end of the film where the two long-lost lovers embrace for the perfect kiss (the one that embodies every bit of passion, angst and energy that the audience has been storing up for the first 90 minutes of the film...and the one that ensures that they will always be together), and the lackluster first-kiss I had in a parked car outside of Talbot's at the Kenwood Mall (subject for another post). Real life is sharp, full-motion, crisp, and broad-scoped. The movies are dreamy, targeted, scripted, and narrow. And I can't help it, but every time I come out of a movie, I long to be back inside.

I'm getting the feeling I'm not expressing myself very well here. But I'll press on...let me know if this gets more clear.

It's interesting to me the way movies work on us. I think they work because they make us think of things that remind us of real life. For instance, I watched "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe" last night, and the film opens with the bombing of London during WWII. During this very brief scene, my ears teared up as I watched a young English family scamper through their backyard into a homemade bomb-shelter, as blasts echoed in the streets of London. I was not, as you might expect, ever present at the actual bombing of London...nor have I ever been present at any bombing of any kind...ever. (I saw a car on fire once in fifth grade...that was about the closest thing). So why was I tearing up? Because I do know what fear feels like, and love for my family, and the belief that one or all of us may soon suffer pain or die. And the movie reminded me of those things...on a mostly subconsicous level, I think...and that made me cry. It reminded me of something that actually happened to me in my actual real life, and which I had actually stored in both my conscious and subconscious minds. A group of actors on a set surrounded by very expensive lights followed a script that some gifted writers had written. Then the film that was shot was brought to some gifted post-production guys, who added sound effects and lighting tricks, and made it feel like an actual bombing raid, and not a sound stage in northern London. Some guys, in real life did something fake to remind of real life, then mailed it to where I really live, so I could pay nine bucks to experience fake real life long enough to remind me of something real in my life.

And the amazing thing is...it worked. I cried a little bit in this otherwise unoutstanding film. And I left the theater regretting that real life is nowhere as great as the movies.

Huh.

Peace,
Justin

2005-11-23T16:30:00.000-05:00

As I write, I sit.

As I sit, I stare.

I am looking at a wall of books in front of me...nine feet tall, about five-and-a-half feet wide. They sit on white shelves, colorful and silent, inviting and intimidating.

And the best part is...they're in my living room.

About three months ago, a very generous friend of mine made me a giant bookcase for my house. It was made to fit right inside of the wall of my living room. It is made of what my carpenter-friend calls MDF, which I can only assume stands for "Multi-Dimensional Foam," which is odd considering it is nothing like foam and a great deal like wood. It can, however, boast that it exists in all three dimensions.

...that was three months ago.

For the last 90 days, give or take, it has been sitting in pieces in the corner of my living room. The day after I got it, in my new-bookcase zeal, I primed it with white primer paint. (For the uninitiated, primer paint is a lot like regular paint except you can put it on with a great deal less care, as you're just going to paint over it anyway. I think it is less a painting technique and more just a right of passage). Then, I stacked the shelves inside the empty case, and put my painting and sealing materials down below the bottom shelf.

...and then I walked away.

...and I haven't touched it in three months.

...until yesterday.

...(forgive me, but ellipses were on sale again this week, so I stocked up).

Yesterday, I got tired of staring at the barren shelves stacked up inside of the empty bookcase...so I did what any responsible homeowning husband would do with a disassembled half-painted bookcase would do...

I just hung the damn shelves and put books on them.

Sure, sure...I could have painted them. I could have dragged them outside in the 35-degree afternoon, painted one side, waited for it to dry, painted the other side, and re-caulked the half-caulked bookcase in the meantime. Then I could have waited for it to dry. Then I could have sanded it, repainted, waited for that to dry, and then hung the shelves.

And I could have perhaps invented a cure for square-toe, baked a pineapple bundt cake, and called my mom just to chat. But I didn't. I just hung the damn shelves and put books on them.

And, if you don't mind me saying so, they look awfully nice, thank you very much.

At some point I had to be realistic with myself. I'm not going to paint those shelves. Not soon, anyway. I'm searching for time to do the things I love and that I absolutely need to do, and painting my bookshelf falls in neither category. However, my poor wife has had to stare at the half-assembled bookshelf long enough. So, I took a long, hard, honest look at myself, and I saw a man who does not paint bookshelves. At least, not right now.

So, I dug a few boxes of my books out of the basement and stuck 'em up there. I would guess I've got 400 or so up there...just random selections from the boxes...and stuck 'em up there in no particular order at all.

And as I sit, staring at this bookshelf...I am very, very pleased. There is so much potential up there. I haven't read all those books...there are still some left to read. And that is potential. If you'd like to borrow something, let me know...I'll see if I have it.

And if I do, I'm going to just reach up and grab it off of my bookshelf.

Because I can.

Peace,
Justin

2005-11-12T12:57:00.000-05:00

50th blog entry.

Moving on...

Here is a nonsense poem I wrote this morning during a long, long, long meeting.

It sits. Silently. Slipping beneath the slithering words off the tongue,
Thundering, stumbling under its own clumsy lumbering.
It's a misogynist. An optimist.
An offering offered for providents,
Proffered beyond its own aspirations,
Taciturn nations betraying relations
For longstanding vows of promoted vocations.

And then I stopped writing because it was my turn to say something in the meeting. I think it's a poem about sound. Or the war in Iraq. Or summer camp. I'm not really sure. I only kind of like it, but I really enjoyed writing it down. It was a little like blowing your nose...messy and stealthy, but relieving. I'm sure I would have written more nonsense on it, but I had to stop.

The point of this blog entry is threefold: 1) To get over the intimidation of writing entry #50. 2) To share that 5-minute train-of-thought poem with you. 3) To say this:

I've discovered that I learn best when I'm doing something other than listening.

What I mean is this...if I sit down and try to make listening to someone talk my primary activity, I won't hear much. I'll have an overflow of energy...a desire to shift around...a need to look around a lot...a restlessness in my legs and arms and chest. They call it Attention Deficit Disorder. I don't agree. I think it is an over-abundance of attention...it just needs to be multi-directed. I think I've got more attention to go around than I have things to pay attention to. That's not a deficit, it just needs more than one focus.

So...I've discovered that I learn best when I'm doing something else. Here's how I figured it out. I was at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit at the Vineyard back in August. I sat through the first three hours of white men in colorful shirts telling me about leadership...and probably retained about 8-10% for more than a few minutes. And that was the peak...the first 45 minutes or so. After that, I started to go downhill...and my guess is that by the end, though my eyes were locked on the speaker...I was really only hearing about 2% of what was being said, and retaining nothing but the stuff immediately after something loud happened onstage. So...in a moment of martyrdom, I made a tough decision on how to use my time.

I decided to go play X-Box.

I went in the back room, called Robbie, and started a game of Halo 2 with him. In an effort to at least give the impression that we were working, I put the live audio from the Summit on the overhead speakers while we played. I kept on shooting Robbie and he kept on shooting me, and more than a few grenades were exchanged. And...in the meantime...without trying or even recognizing it...I learned a lot about leadership. I absorbed, I would guess...about 80% of what was being said. I'm serious...I'd say I actually heard (sound goes to ears, ears change sound to electrical impulses, impulses go to brain, brain turns them back into words, heart understands words) about 80%. After the session was over, I had retained a good half of what was said. That's huge for me, and I would imagine it beats the heck out of whatever that human average is for that sort of thing. Robbie and I continued to play as we discussed what the speaker said...we went deep, and went comprehensive. And we didn't even mean to...it's just what made sense to talk about...after all, it was what we had listened to for the last hour or so while we bloodied each other up with rifles and plasma guns and the like. We heard it, and we kept it. And it was a secondary activity.

I learn best that way. I am writing this blog while a co-worker presents a bunch of her findings on new opportunities for my company to break into new markets. And I can all but guarantee that, if you ask me two days from now what she said, I'll be able to tell you at least half of it. And, by my standards, that's incredible.

Peace,
Justin

2005-11-04T10:34:00.000-05:00

Let me tell you of God’s goodness…

Nevermind. I can’t. I can’t begin to understand what goodness is. Or justice. Or mercy.

But this week I got one thing a little clearer.

Let me tell you of God’s grace.

This week, I had the biggest single business-related moment of my life…and I almost blew it all.

I had a thing for P&G. It was important to me, and to the people who showed up, and entirely irrelevant and unimpressive for your life. So we’ll move on. Suffice to say, it meant a lot to me, and it meant a lot to all the people who paid a bunch of money for it.

And, after a good three weeks or so of working on it for 12 hours a day, the time came to present it…and I wasn’t ready. I stayed up for three days (I’m not exaggerating…if I were, I would have come up with a more impressive number) to get it done…and time came, and I wasn’t ready. I did everything I could, I worked as hard as I could, and I wasn’t ready. I showed up at the meeting with holes in my presentation, missing links in my media, and two entire videos that had gone AWOL.

Then the timer started, the suits started filing in…the countdown got up on the screen…and it was time to present.

And here’s the grace-y part…

Everything went without a hitch.

I’m not kidding. Stuff was there that shouldn’t have been, videos played that hadn’t worked only an hour before, and I swear to you there were slides and video commands I don’t remember putting in. It went brilliantly, and a whole bunch of people who are used to speaking in corporate acronyms told me I did a really nice job and that they wanted me to do it some more. It worked out great…and I have no good reason to believe it was because I did great work.

This was grace.

Don’t get me wrong…I did a lot of work. A bunch of us did…Stacy put a bunch of time and energy in, my brother Brian bravely worked through the night with me…we did a ton of work. But not enough. God showed up and filled in the gaps. Got stuff working that shouldn’t have. Made things go.

I’m not delusional enough to presume that God gives a damn about whether or not P&G sells more of whatever it was I was helping them sell. I don’t think he gives a damn about whether or not Seek gets more work with P&G, either. I do think, however, that he hates to see me hurt. And I was hurting. I was scared out of my mind…crying to my wife at 3:00 in the morning, hadn’t slept in days, and it wasn’t going to get done. I cried out to God, and he listened. And he chose to make it better…to make it go.

I don’t understand goodness. It is too complicated. Somehow, God’s goodness includes both the birth of babies and the death of them. I can’t understand that, not ever. I can’t understand God’s bigness either, nor his mercy. These things are outside of my reach. But this week, I understood his grace in a tangible way. In a simple way. In a way that saved me at a very tough time. In a way I didn’t deserve.

I cried all the way home. I cry now as I write this, four days later. It is unthinkable, and it is wonderful.
Glory be to God; He is Graceful.

Peace,
Justin

2005-10-21T23:34:00.000-04:00

When you stop and look at your favorite films, books, poems, songs...whatever it is that does it for you...you can learn a little bit about yourself.

For instance...this afternoon, I learned something about me.

...I'm a dark, cynical, and semi-horrible person.

And I'm just proud enough of that fact to qualify as pretentious.

Here's what I mean:

My favorite films? Fight Club. Pi. The Apostle. The Story of Us. Pleasantville. Requiem for a Dream.

My favorite poets? Edgar Allen Poe. Emily Dickinson. Byron, Shelley, Browning.

My favorite contemporary writers? Chuck Palahunik, Stephen King.

My favorite books in the Bible? Job. Ecclesiastes.

OK, enough of listing stuff. The point is, I tend to gravitate toward the darker side of things, I think. I don't wear the white makeup with the black lipstick, I don't light candles and sit in the center of pentagrams, and I've yet to slaughter a live animal for any reason other than damnit, that cat had it coming. I'm not a goth kind of guy. However, I think I find a lot of satisfaction, contentment, peace and sometimes even beauty in the darker things of life.

I think suffering is powerful, just like joy. Somewhere along the line, our Western minds became convinced that our lives should, for the most part, be dedicated to erradicating as much pain and discomfort as possible in our lives. If we're self-serving, it's about eliminating our pain (see: free refills, heated car seats, antibacterial dish soap) . If we're altruistic, it's about eliminating the pain of others (see: Hurricane Katrina relief, medicare, consoling a crying friend). Either way, the problem is, after a while I think we fail to see the beauty and progress of pain. Don't get me wrong, the things above can be great things...Lord knows I take full advantage of the free refills thing, and if it weren't for wireless internet access, I probably would have stopped writing long ago). Joy can be a wonderful experience...it can teach, it can change, it can inspire. But so can misery. There is very little good in the world that didn't come out of something either thriving or dying, or often both. It's just kind of how things are done...it's entropy, it's fertilizer, it's the Crucifixion. Somehow, pain brings joy, anguish brings ecstacy, death brings life.

I wrote a piece of advice to a friend who was in a rough time and was tired of being told "things will get better." Here's what I wrote...I'd love to know if you agree...or if I just made a bad thing worse:

---

Dear [Friend's Name],

I'm not going to tell you to cheer up. Or that it's going to get better. Or that life doesn't suck.

Life does suck. Sometimes. Sometimes it f@#$ing hurts, in fact. Is it going to get better? I hope so. I don't know. It seems like it should. But it didn't for everybody...there is no happy ending for this life guaranteed. In fact, some of the people who loved God the most and served God the best ended up dying miserable, drunk, naked and/or bleeding. That sucks. Life can really suck.

I don't want to cheer you up. That's the really fun part...I don't think you need to feel better. In our culture, we look for the remedy. Our primary concern is our comfort (and I am no different, it's my primary concern if I'm truly honest with myself), and part of comfort is finding ways to quell discomfort. We want to feel better...it's how we're built, perhaps...but it's equally about how we're taught. Comfort is king in the States...go anywhere else for any length of time, and you'll see what I mean.

So, we value what we see as healing... that is to say, we value feeling better. I know I do. But that's not necessarily the answer, and it sure as heck isn't necessarily healing.

Hurt. Cry. Sob, and put your head in your hands, and ask God why. Regret. Writhe, even. Pain is real, and is very, very human. At the same time, please know that we know what pain is because we know it's opposite. For each hurt, there is comfort. For each mourning, there is celebration. For each anguish-ridden moment, there is an ecstasy. And each side of each of these dualities is equally valuable. You will not recognize joy if you have not known pain. You will not recognize comfort if you haven't known hurt.

I'm not trying to sound Eastern here. I'm a fat American like anybody else. I've just found this truth in my life...pain is life, just like joy. And that, in itself, makes pain sacred. Your regret means your heart continues to beat, and that makes you way better off than most of the people who have walked the Earth. Embrace this pain. Your tears are real, and they hurt, and it sucks...and thank God that's true. You are truly alive.

I hope it doesn't get better. I hope it just feels more like reality, and that reality makes you feel more alive...joyous or miserable...more alive.

Peace,
Justin

2005-10-06T15:59:00.000-04:00

Baby, I hear the blues a’calling…
Tossed salads and scrambled eggs.

I’m writing this blog entry from the 23rd floor of a hotel in downtown Seattle. This is my first visit to…umm…(does Seattle have a nickname?)….the ol’ “Big Grungy.” And I learned a few things about this amazing city.

1. I kind of want to live here. The best part is the weather. The temperature peaks out at around 80-degrees during the summer, and bottoms out at around 35 (on average) during the coldest days of winter. This, of course, as compared to Cincinnati, where the temperature peaks out somewhere in the middle of July at around 1,168-degrees (with heat index, of course), and bottoms out around –40 somewhere the-day-after-that-day-in-mid-July. Sure it rains a lot, but there is plenty of coffee to keep you perky, and if for some reason you manage to get yourself into the murky depths of serious depression, you can always buy a flannel shirt, start a rock band and do very well here.
2. Starbucks is quite popular here. Let me tell you a very brief anecdote about that quaint little coffee franchise. I got done making some copies at FedEx/Kinkos (does anybody remember when these two merged? It’s a little creepy…like finding out your uncle married your sister, and you didn’t know until you saw her new last name on her mailbox), and made the grave mistake of asking the clerk, “Do you know if there is a Starbucks around here?” I’m not kidding, this was her actual reply…

ME: Hey, do you know if there is a Starbucks around here?
KINKOS LADY: Sure, there’s one across the street, about two stores North.
ME: Oh great, I’ll just—
KINKOS LADY: That one gets kind of busy sometimes, though…so you might want to try the one half a block down the street to the right
ME: OK…thanks for the—
KINKOS LADY: Actually, now that I think about it, your best bet is probably to go to the one on the first floor of the Wells Fargo building on the corner.
ME: Right, I’ll just—
KINKOS LADY: Nevermind, that one never has anywhere to sit. Go to the one on the third floor.
ME: Third floor of what?
KINKOS LADY: (Blank stare) …of the Wells Fargo building.
ME: I thought you said it was on the first floor.
KINKOS LADY: (Blanker stare) …No, that’s the older one. The newer one is on the third floor.
ME: There are two Starbucks in the same building?
KINKOS LADY: (Black-hole-ish stare) ….ummm….yeah…but if you want it really quick, just go to the one in the lobby.
ME: Of…the Wells Fargo Building?
KINKOS LADY: Yeah, the selection of pastries and stuff isn’t as good, but the service is quicker. I’d go to that one.
ME: ----.

I’m not making this up. I really felt like asking her if perhaps the owners of the FedEx/Kinkos/Wheaties/UnitedOilConsortium I was standing in had considered putting a Starbucks franchise in the men’s room to save us all a lot of unnecessary walking. I didn’t though, as it would have been rude…or worse, would have just encouraged her to do just such a thing. You gotta admit, though…it’s damn fine coffee.
3. If you’re going to live on a coast, live on a giant sound in the Pacific Northwest. Man, it is stunning up here. Rocky beaches, sure…but where else can you see rippling ocean waters, majestic snow-capped mountain peaks, towering jagged rows of distant pines, and, for the love of crap, a giant building shaped like a needle that somebody tried to a string a UFO through. This place is gorgeous, friendly, and well planned. Traffic is manageable, sirens are few and far between, and it’s just overpriced enough to make a guy feel really cosmopolitan.

Don’t get me wrong here…I’m not leaving Cincy any time soon. But it is nice to see a little more of the USA. I expect I’ll be doing a lot of that in the coming months, and I’m really looking forward to it.

I took a job at a market research firm in Cincinnati called Seek, Inc. I’d point you to the website, but it ain’t much to look at now, as it’s in the middle of a huge redesign. It is a small company…12 employees last I counted…which makes company picnics as easy as a Ford Econoline and a $75 gift certificate to Chipotle. I love the work, and I’ll tell you more about it soon. In the meantime, suffice to say I think this gig will use a lot of the things God built me to do, and hopefully I will be good enough at it to do it for a while. We’ll see, and I’ll keep you posted.

As for things at VCC…I am going part-time there starting on Monday of next week. We’re interviewing for my replacement now. Why I left is a topic for another post, but I’ll tell you that I left on excellent terms…that I still love my church, that there is absolutely no scandal or behind-the-scenes ugliness involved, and that I have never enjoyed my job more than I have in the last six months. It was just time to go…nothing too fancy, nothing secretive…it was just time to move on. So I am. I am really looking forward to finding someone to replace me who shines in totally different ways, and I’m looking forward to volunteering for him/her some day. In the meantime, I’m going to help out at VCC on a 15-hour-per-week basis, and hopefully I can continue to contribute something of value in the coming months.

I’m looking forward to telling you about the new gig. I’m hoping that all the airplane time and hotel-room time that I’ll be spending with this new job will afford me the opportunity to blog a bit more often…we’ll see. Either way, if you’re the praying type, please put in a few for Stacy and I as we figure out how to live as Stacy the teacher and Justin the qualitative research guy…I have no idea what that means, but I reckon I better figure it out soon. Better yet, let’s just hope we learn to live as Justin and Stacy in a way that we never have before, and that this new job becomes my first job to remain just that.

Peace,
Justin

2005-08-20T22:07:00.000-04:00

I'm tired of talking about my job.

If you've never met me in person, and for some reason you've taken to just reading my blog (which I am both flattered an utterly dumfounded by), you're probably wondering, "when have you been talking about your job?" I haven't...not much on here, anyway. However, if you're a friend of mine...or even an acquaintence of mine...or even just that guy with the funny mustache that I frequently pass on the way to work...you've heard me talk about work. I talk about it a lot. I think it's because I find so much of my identity in what I do. I do so because it's what my dad did, it's what his dad did, and I can only assume it's what his dad did. It's a sickness that Americans seem prone to the way the way RPG gamers seem prone to nosebleeds. And I'm tired of talking about it.

So, I'm going to talk about something else.

So....umm...how was your day?

Mmm-hmmm.

And...ummm...isn't this nice weather?

Yup. Mmmm-hmm...oh yes. Yes, I see. No, not for ducks, not for ducks, indeed. Mm-hm. Yes. That high, and all without the aid of pneumatic power, eh? Wow. Yes, it's really something.

Hmmm.

OK, I've run out of things to talk about.

So, I will talk about my job.

Here's the thing about my job: I won't have it much longer. I've actually turned in my 6-week notice. (2-weeks seemed a little to quick for a church to try to find a new video guy). I'm leaving the staff of VCC, and going to a new job.

I'm not going to tell you what the new job is. You have to guess.

Sure...

...OK, go.

Nope.

Haha, yeah that would have been good.

OK, try again.

...No, but it's a good guess.

One more try...

...yes, it's slightly larger than a breadbox.

...no, it's not a tank.

OK, want me to just tell you?

Alright. I'm going to Seek , a Qualitative Market Research Consulting group located right here in beautiful Cincinnati, OH. I have to put the words "Qualitative Market Research Consulting" in proper caps...because I have no idea what it means yet, and so it becomes a title. It may as well be, "Seek: A Glooglemock McTrudenbloob Conflageration." However, I'm told it has something to do with getting inside the heads of consumers and finding out why they buy the products they buy and use them. I'm also assured that this requires very little experience with a scapel, and usually does not involve fire or actuarial tables, both of which I have not had good luck with.

I'm really really really excited about the job. Seems to be something I'll be good at. We'll see. I love to get to meet new people, I love to try to figure people out, and I really like making lots of money. Don't know how much of that third one will happen, but here's hoping. If I do make a bunch of money, you can have some. It's more fun to make it than to keep it or even to spend it. Once you've got your basics covered (shelter, food, guitar strings), it's actually usually more fun to give it away than anything. It just does something to a person, I think.

'Nuff digressing. The point is, I'm really hoping that a change of employment will enable me to serve the church better than before, to serve Stacy better than before, and to take care of myself more than I have in the past. You can't work 65 hour weeks at any job for any length of time before you start to lose little bits of yourself, and you sure as hell can't work that much for a church without losing a part of your spiritual depth and joy. I hope to regain these things, and that, much like the lining of my acid-happy esophagus, the damage will be un-done in time.

I've even given some very serious thought to asking the Board at VCC to put me on the Board with them. Don't think they'll go for it, but I'd love to be able to make some very positive changes in the church I love enough to quit from, and I think the Board would be a great place to do that.

In the meantime, I'm dunking my cookies and drinking the milk afterward on the porch of my little house as we enter the twilight of a beautiful fall night. All is well, all is well.

Peace,
Justin

2005-04-24T21:33:00.000-04:00

This week, I finally taped what I know best....

For the first time in my life, I brought a video camera on vacation. If you find it surprising that a professional video guy has never recorded his own family or vacation exploits, then you're not alone...my wife has been wondering the same thing for a couple of years now.

It's like this: after a full day of planning video, scripting video, shooting video, editing video and talking video, the last thing I want to do is go home and roll tape. I'm sure any middle-school teacher who comes home to her own teenagers and any accountant that files an extension for his own taxes can understand that...like they say, the cobbler's kids go barefoot. However, with a town like Las Vegas, it's difficult to really capture the experience with the few really good words that I know, so I brought the camera along.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed having that little camera around. Stacy and I took some really cool video...and more than anything, it was relaxing. I found that I was less concerned about creating those unforgettable vacation moments when I knew I had a way to remember them later. I may make a habit out of it...we'll see. I'm tempted to run back home and edit it into a nice, polished fifteen-minute video...but I think that may ruin it. (A college professor of mine wrote her doctoral thesis on the folkloric value of home movies...she sees an incredible beauty in their rawness, and when her book comes out, I will buy it. Her name is Judi Hetrick, and I intend to read it cover to cover). If I do edit it, I'll see if I can put a two-minute version on the blog.

We had a wonderful time in Las Vegas. Somewhere over the course of the four non-working days that I spent with Stacy in Vegas, Stacy and I made the switch from noctural to diurnal living. And I don't mean that as an exaggerated way of saying we stayed up late...I mean we actually began to sleep during the sunlight hours and remain awake during the darkened ones. We started coming in somewhere around 7:30 a.m. and waking up around 4 p.m. After a couple of days, we discovered that Las Vegas is a very different place at 4:30 in the morning. Most of the revelers have fallen asleep or passed out by this point...and the streets are sparsely populated, mostly by gambling addicts moving from casino to casino, and prostitutes who haven't called it a night yet. The prostitutes are easy to spot...and if you just thought, "how?" then I think you owe yourself a pat on the back and a cup of hot chocolate. The compulsive gamblers can be spotted by their shifty, droning, joyless playing of slots, roulette, blackjack. They aren't necessarily poor, they're just joyless. They may even be doing well, but they don't seem to be alive. They just keep doing it.

There are signs and pamphlets all over the casino advertising help numbers for gambling addiction. It seems to me a little like putting the number to the Mayo Clinic on every pack of cigarettes. We're handing people the loaded gun, and daring them to play with it without getting shot. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying gambling is a bad idea...in fact, I did quite a lot of it this week, enjoyed almost every minute, and ended up about $100 ahead. It's just amazing how the very things that God built us to be attracted to (risk, gain, sport, food, sex, etc.) are the things which, if we are weak in our ability to manage that enjoyment, will destroy us. We have the wonderful taste and stress-relieving effects of our pilsners, stouts and heffeweizens, and AA meetings and rehab clinics to help repair their damage. We have the profound pleasure and soul-sharing of sex, and porn recovery programs and VD clinics to help repair the damage. We have the thrill of risking a little bit of our hard-earned income on the chance that we may leave with more than we walked in with, and we have gamblers anonymous and the NV Trouble Gaming Helpline to help repair the damage. (BTW: "Gaming" is now the correct word to use in Las Vegas...apparently "gambling" sounded too much like "gambling.")

All it tells me is that God was very right in making some very key demands of man. These demands don't ask for joy or even understanding of God's will...just obedience. Man is a brilliant design, but it seems to me that while we are capable of astonishing innovation and acts of absolute genius, we may not, on the whole, be trusted to know ourselves deeply. We seem to be able to understand both the fantastically minute and awesomely large...but some of our most brilliant minds have also been our most tragic biographies. (Hemingway had his drink, Plath her drugs, and Byron his sex, to name a few). God knows our beautiful strengths, to be sure...and I'm confident that He revels in them. But if He is omniscient, then He also knows our weaknesses, and He knows that they would reveal themselves most readily under the pressure of our pleasures. That's why, I think, He tried to beat us to the problem by offering those key commandments. At the risk of sounding preachy, I think the big idea was that, when our weakness impairs our ability to make rational decisions, we can choose simple obedience as our rationale.

Now, obviously, the big questions then come in how to interpret what God's commandments for our lives are. That's a topic far too big to handle here....probably to handle anywhere. But my hope lies in my belief that our earnest effort to follow that which we truly believe is God's will is, in itself, pleasing to God...for our sake, it had better be, anyhow.

Peace,
Justin

2005-04-19T09:03:00.000-04:00

The blisters on my feet have organized, and their leader is demanding paid coffee breaks.

Craig Spinks and I (see: www.quadrid.com) have been traversing the surprisingly clean streets of the Las Vegas strip at the rate of three blisters a mile, five miles a day. The Strip is approximately three miles long, two blocks wide, and four inches deep. Everything is gilded, shiny, opulent and blinking. I really like Las Vegas...in our trip to the Sahara last night, we passed by New York, Paris, Egypt and Rome...we heard screams from two rollercoasters mounted atop gigantic hotels, watched Caesar as he watched us pass his Palace, and saw a pillar of light extending from the top of a shaded glass pyramid into the midnight sky. We saw gamblers, revelers and honeymooners; drunkards, lovers and those who sell love. We spent almost three hours (starting just after midnight) tossing our silver coins onto blackjack tables in the hopes that our jacks would meet our aces. At one-dollar per hand (you've got to walk a long way in Vegas to find tables that cheap), I ended up drinking terrific cocktails for three hours and getting paid $20 to do it.

We spent our day wandering the labyrinth of exhibitions at the NAB floor show...an amazing collection of what seems like every media and tech company in the world, each showing off their latest innovations and next greatest inventions. I heard words today that I've never heard before, (words like "datacast," "info parity," and "bitstream") that I have no idea what they mean, but I'm pretty sure they all mean the same thing. Sometimes I wonder if tech companies have a machine similar to slot machine, with words like like "data" "media" "info" and "tele" on the first wheel, words like "flow," "rendering," "logic" and "infra" on the second wheel, and words like "engine" "processor" and "solution" on the third wheel...and when they need a new product, well, they just pull the handle. I saw some unbelievable feats of technology today...it made me really excited to try some new video stuff. I was excited in a way I haven't been in a while about making videos...it's great to get a boost like that every once in a while. I look forward to going back tomorrow.

We're in the LAS-McCarren International Airport right now, waiting for my lovely bride to arrive in Sin City. She's joining me just as the business end of my trip ends and the vacation end begins. I have really been looking forward to having her here...it's hard to have so many fun experiences and not be able to share it with her. Most everybody who is married for any length of time tries to remember what life was like as a single person...if these last couple of days are any indication, it reminds me of one of the reasons I love being married. My thoughts, my reactions, and my experiences just don't feel complete anymore unless I get to share them with her. Is that weird, do you think? I guess that's the closest thing I'll ever come to being Jerry MacGuire, which is probably for the best.

I'm looking forward to seeing her get off the plane. It's a giddy kind of anticipation.

Peace,
Justin

2005-04-18T22:36:00.000-04:00

As every stand-up comic in America has noted, airports are funny places....

I look around the airport terminal before we board. It's 5:25 a.m. Business folk in rumpled jackets slump over their laptops, lazily fingering their touchpads like a disinterested lover who is just buying time until the football simulcast. Total strangers are sitting next to each other in faux leather chairs colored like you might imagine a candle called "Blueberry and Jasmine" might be. They sit, six inches apart, reading their books or newspapers or staring at their boarding passes...clinging to their boarding passes...perhaps hoping that staring long or squeezing hard enough will magicaly rearrange the letters in "business class" to read something more favorable. They sit, six inches apart, awkwardly wondering whether or not to strike up a conversation. You never know, this may be your friend for the next three hours.

As we board the plane, we slowly shuffle by the pilot, who greets everyone as they walk in the door. Unfortunately, the line moves slowly enough that once he greets you, you've still got a good 25 seconds of standing next to him before you can move on. It's hard to imagine what to say to a pilot at 6:00 in the morning. I want to ask him questions like, "So, how are you feeling this morning? Alert? Well-rested? Steady-handed? Sober?" Instead, I ask, "how's the weather look for takeoff?" "Just fine, just fine," he responds, in a tone that sounds both authoritative and surprisingly distant. We now have 15 seconds left to kill, and I've run out of appropriate pilot fodder. I'll just stare ahead blankly at the line of people trying to shove oversized bags into undersized overheads.

Getting seated is a little bit like a microcosm of high school. You come in, unsteady and unsure of your surroundings, just hoping to find your locker and your seat without looking stupid. You're a freshman, and those already seated are the sophomores. But...once you get your stuff jammed into your overhead compartment, your smaller luggage stowed under your seat, and your tray tables in the upright and locked position, man, you've graduated. You're now the sophomore, and you get to sit and look fed up with those greenies just coming in the door.

As the freshman class passes by my seat, I see them looking at each row number and seat diagram (A,B,C on the left, D,E,F on the right) carefully, as if the ascending sequence of row numbers might suddenly skip a few, work backwards, or go to decimals. They'll be pleased to find that row 13 comes directly after row 12, and that D, E and F are still on the right side of the plane. Here's to consistency.

I sit down, and try to read a bit from "Dr. Zhivago" by Boris Pasternak. It's a brilliant read...absolutely brilliant...but it's a bit much to handle at 6:10 on a Monday morning. I fold the book closed. The passenger on my right is a very pleasant accountant in a floral shirt on his way to Cozumel. He's reading a book called "The Conspiracy Theory," which I hope is a bit more manageable at this time than "Dr. Zhivago." I hope he doesn't notice as I write about him...we're so close that our arms are touching, and you hate to make things awkward at that proximity.

Our captain comes on the PA and announces the vitals. 2-hour-fifteen-minute flight. 32,000 feet. Good weather both places. Please listen to your flight attendants. Enjoy the excellent in-flight service, including a "breakfast snack." Don't smoke. Don't tamper with the lavatory smoke detectors...and if you do, for the love of god don't lie about it, 'cause we'll know. I'm encouraged to close my laptop to prepare for departure. Apparently the screen of my 12-inch iBook produces too much drag. I'll be back in half-an-hour.

7:30 now. Once we takeoff and reach altitude, we're handed our "breakfast snack," which consists of a muffin the approximate size of my adrenal gland and a choice of beverage. I want a bloody mary. I order water. Five dollars seems a lot to pay for a bloody mary. I drink my water. I wish I had ordered a bloody mary. Now the flight attendant is gone...she's already three rows down and, worst of all, she's on the far side of the cart. Short of a tremendous gymnastic display on her part, there's no chance I'm going to get my bloody mary for quite some time.

11:52 - It's amazing how much a guy can write when he doesn't have anything else to do. On a plane from Houston to Las Vegas now. People seem a lot more aware...I'm certain that has everything to do with the fact that it's no longer 6 in the morning. "Finding Neverland" is playing on the in-flight movie. I'd like to tune in, but I'm rejecting it on the principle that movies that are free to view shouldn't cost five bucks to listen to. Plus, Stacy and I have been waiting to see it together.

I can't help but be a little nervous that I won't be able to relax in Las Vegas. Let's face it, that's what history would indicate. I dream of vacation, I plan vacation, I pack for vacation, I get to vacation, and my brain doesn't slow down throughout the duration. (Seriously, I didn't mean that to rhyme). Then, I get home and I walk into work, and everybody says, "welcome home, I"m glad you finally got a chance to rest!" and I feel just as tired as before, and now it's another six months until I get to try again. Maybe I'm just not cut out for vacation. Or, I've got to figure out a better way to do it....something that will get me out of my head long enough to be in Bermuda, or New Orleans, or Colorado, or, in this case, Las Vegas. I think the fact that I'm actually still at work will help...that is to say, I'm on church business for the first couple of days. That will provide a proper transition....brain says: "I can still work, but I can be on vacation at the same time." Should alleviate the pressure of enjoying myself a little bit.

Its my first time carrying a laptop, and I've got my iTunes playing. Elvis Costello is a fine, fine song writer.

I'm sitting next to a delightful retired Texas middle-school teacher...haven't caught her name yet, but I'll find out shortly. BTW: The guy on the last flight was named Ken, and I"m pretty sure the friend that he's heading to Cozumel with is a special friend. Ken seemed remarkably comfortable with long periods of silence without something to occupy his eyes, and I respect that a lot. Anyway, our Texas schoolteacher has a great story about teaching a remedial middle school class back in the late 60's...she says she kept plants around the room so it didn't feel "so institutional." One day, she noticed sprouts coming up through the soil around her potted plants. As the sprouts budded she realized that her seventh-period students had been planting marijuana in her class, in the hopes of harvesting it at maturity. Knowing it would do no good to say, "Stop growing pot in my class," she instead encouraged them to only plant "those little plants" (playing ignorant) in spots in the soil where it wouldn't choke out her plants...and then after all the students had gone she would poison the little sprouts one-by-one. When the kids came back and the plants were dead, she simply explained that many plants don't grow well in a classroom setting, and that they would be better off doing their little horticulture project outside. Her name is Harriet, and I get the sense it's a lot harder than it sounds to outsmart a classroom full of remedial junior high students.

That's a story worth writing down, I thought.

Plane lands...a strong list to the left on touch-down...and we exit. Welcome to Las Vegas.

Peace,
Justin

2005-04-12T14:17:00.000-04:00

Somebody emailed me a terrific question about God...I answered it today. I hope I'm right.

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What exactly does fear of God mean applied to the New Testament and to revivals in the church? Exactly how do you have fear of God in our times? Why is the term fear applied to God when the New Testament emphasizes the love of God??
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Dear XXXXXX,

Thanks for sending in your question about “Fear of God.” This is a question that I struggled with for a long time, and this dilemma of how to understand both a God who loves us and a God to be feared is one that has had theologians scratching their heads for centuries.

I have read where many pastors have advised that the term “fear,” when applied to God in the context of the New Testament (that is to say, under the understanding that our sin is forgiven by Jesus’ death on the cross), is best understood to mean “respect,” or “reverence.” The idea conveyed here is that, because we are forgiven by God for all of our sins, that we are not to fear God anymore, but rather to revere and respect Him.

Frankly, I think this is a mistake, and, while a very pleasant thought, a misinterpretation. I think that “fear” is exactly the right word...and it’s not a proper translation to equate “fear” with “respect” or “reverence.” (Can you imagine Abraham willingly slaying his own son because he respected God? [Genesis 22]). Throughout the Bible, we see the word fear used to mean exactly that...a reaction of awe and even terror at God’s supreme power.

I think that fear of God is, when you think about it, a pretty natural outcropping of understanding His power. Have you ever been to Niagra Falls? I had the good fortune to visit the falls in the dead of winter at about 3:00 a.m. when I was a child. I was about nine years old, and we swung by Niagra on the long journey home from our Christmas vacation in Maine. My dad woke me as I slept in the back of our old Pontiac station wagon, and told me to get my coat on. I stepped out of our dark and silent car, and was startled to hear a low rumble off in the distance. We passed pine trees laden with thick coats of ice as we moved closer and closer to the rumbling sound. After about ten minutes of walking, with the rumbling now almost ear-piercing, we stepped through a break in the trees and I saw a sight I will never forget: millions of gallons of water thundering over the majestic Niagra Falls. I clung to my Dad’s side and gaped open-mouth at the Falls...even though there was a guard rail, a chain fence and 100 yards between the falls and me, I couldn’t help but feel like I was going to be sucked in. I was in a the sort of awe and fear that only an encounter with incomprehensible power can conjure.

This, I think, is what the fear of God is about. It is not a choice...you don’t choose to fear God...any more than you choose to be loved by Him. I think you fear God as a very natural outcropping of realizing, even in small part, His enormous power and incomprehensible sovereignty. The choice for each human is whether or not to pursue the kind of wisdom and humility it takes to begin that realization. When the Bible talks about God-fearing people, it is describing powerful humans (such as Abraham, Moses and Ruth) who have come to recognize how infinitely more powerful God is.

How do we balance that with the idea of a loving God? That’s my favorite part. My fear of God couples with my understanding of His love for me in such a beautiful paradox...the all-powerful Creator of all things, who is mighty and deserves our fear and awe, actually loves me with a love so profound that he chose to sacrifice Himself instead of me. That’s the amazing thing...we should fear God, and yet the ultimate sacrifice came from Him.

Does this help? Does this answer your question? Please let me know if I can shed any more light here, or if I can help you with anything else.

Peace,
Justin

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What do you guys think...is this close to truth?

Peace,
Justin

2005-02-21T01:38:00.000-05:00

There is no easier way to encourage me to ignore a particular cultural phenomenon then for every Christian I know to tell me that I absolutely have to engage it.

To list a few: "The Purpose Driven Life," "Saving Private Ryan," the Cornerstone Festival, Billy Graham's travelling roadshow, "Body for Life," Switchfoot, anything Bill Hybels wrote, "The Passion of the Christ," Icthus, "A New Kind of Christian," and "Wild at Heart."

This is not say that these are all bad creations...The Vineyard sent me to a compulsory viewing of "The Passion of the Christ" and I found it to be an extremely powerful and beautifully horrific adaptation of the story of Christ's death and resurrection. In fact, for all I know, these are all amazing pieces of work...I just hate it when every Christian I know decides that if Jesus were here and He had a gift certificate to Borders, this is fer sure what He'd spend it on.

I never said I wasn't a bit of a jerk.

Anyhow, I ended up taking a gamble on a couple of these. I ended up really liking Switchfoot (though I'm still not certain they are, as I was told, 'like Radiohead for Christians'...I'm pretty sure that Radiohead was Radiohead for Christians). I started to read "The Purpose Driven Life" to see what all the fuss was about, and put it down after 15 pages or so, because I was tired of Rick Warren telling me that my life could now begin to carry some real meaning because I had bought his book.

I am also just finishing "Wild At Heart," which was another compulsory Vineyard thing...and I am really glad that it was. "Wild at Heart," for all of its hype and overselling, has turned out to be a fantastic read. I plan to write a bit more about the book as soon as I finish it. I can't say for sure, but I think it may actually change the way I choose to live in some ways...we'll see...I'll keep you posted.

But may I share with you three books that changed my life? Strangely enough, all three are not only not Christian books...but they are distinctly counter-Christian...at least as I read them. But it was these three that gave me some incredible lessons in both the power and weakness of humanity, and gave me a perspective on my own place in the universe that pointed me toward a God who is manifested in an impossible triad of Sovereign, Benevolent and Unchanging.

1. The Fountainhead. Ayn Rand's seminal humanistic tome, this book both empowered me to know my own strength and forced me to reconcile it with my inability to account for it's genesis.

2. Siddhartha. German philospher Herman Hesse's fictional retelling of the life of the Buddha, this book was a two-hour read that continues to challenge everything my body and my mind tell me will offer me lasting fulfillment.

3. The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. Restoration kingpin Samuel Johnson's profound tale of a young prince's search for meaning, this short book echoes many of the themes that I had read in Siddhartha four years earlier, but left me with a nagging sense of despondence at man's search for purpose and meaning apart from a divine power. (See: Ecclesiastes).

I don't know if these texts will do it for everybody...each person has his or her own art that will speak to him or her...but they did it for me. I hope you get time to give one, two or all of them a read, though...if nothing else, it will give you one more option when the Final Jepoardy category is, "Relatively Obscure English Literature."

And I'm sure I'll see "Saving Private Ryan" someday...I'm told I need to be sure not to eat beforehand.

Peace,
Justin

2005-02-09T10:47:00.000-05:00

Men should be able to fix cars.

That's kinda what I always figured...men should be able to fix cars. They should also be able to use whatever a router is (the wood-cutting kind, not the cable-modem kind), be able to tell the difference between a Camaro and a Firebird from the back, know who drives #32 in NASCAR, and be able to spot a nickel prevent defense from the blimp-cam.

By these standards, I am not only not a man...I may actually be a woman. It took me a good 20 minutes to put new wiper blades on my Toyota yesterday, I wouldn't know a router if I were holding one, I'm fairly certain that I could tell a Camaro from a Hummer but that's as much as I'll claim, I can only assume #32 is driven by a mustachioed man named "Darryl" or "Cole," and...I think I made up the term "nickel prevent defense."

This is the part of the blog where I am supposed to stick my digital finger (seems redudant, doesn't it?) in the air and say "But no! These are outdated, archaic ideas of manhood! The modern man isn't constrained to these kinds of criteria to achieve manhood!"

...but I'm not so sure.

I've went to the "Fight for Freedom" weekend last weekend, which is based on the perversely popular "Wild At Heart" by John Eldredge. To summarize way too briefly: the idea is that men must reclaim their masculinity from a society that tells us that men are to be docile, soft and tractable. That we spend the rest of our lives fighting the desires that God built us with...the desire to know that, in the end, we are strong enough to come through when the time comes for us to fight.

Now, don't get me wrong here...I'm not convinced that watching NASCAR has something to do with being a real man. But I think there is an element of our culture that tells me that I need to be calm, pleasant and an all-around nice guy to everybody I come in contact with...and that the more carnal, visceral nature of manhood is something to be tamed and eventually extinguished. It's one of the reasons that Fight Club speaks so powerfully to me...the idea that we can meet God somewhere between burning, acidic breaths in the middle of a fight with another man. You don't have to be mad at him...you don't even have to know him...you just have to fight him, and let that be your entrance to the Cathedral. It's an intriguing idea for me...not because it's strange and violently subversive, but because I think that, deep down, I long to connect with the carnal Justin that lies somewhere between layers of 50/50 poly-cotton plaid.

What is a man? How do you know? I think you're supposed to learn from your father...what if you don't remember him telling you anything about it? I think he's teaching you regardless, either in his presence or in his absence. But the question for me becomes, what did I learn from that absence, and is it really truth?

Peace,
Justin

2005-02-04T14:40:00.000-05:00

I have spent the last couple of months doing everything but writing on my blog, which I silently, but emphatically, chalked up to having nothing to say.

That's bullshit.

Verbal discretion has never been my strong suit, and I am foolish to think that all of a sudden I came down with a case of quiet humility. It's just not me. I think I had plenty to say over the last couple of months...the same half-formed opinions on topics I barely understand that comprise the bulk of my conversations. I like to opine more than I like most things, and that certainly didn't change. I think what happened is that I got depressed. For whatever reason, I got down. And when I get down, I start to lose inspiration to create much of anything.

The truth is, I think part of me started to believe that my thoughts weren't worth putting up on the blog...that they didn't meet whatever standards for public discourse govern the blog world. But that's just it...there are no standards. I've read many brilliant blogs (see: c-change.blogspot.com) and many very very stupid blogs (see: 1spframes.blogspot.com/). and many inbetween. And yet I held on to this idea that every sentence I post has to meet some standard for decent writing...that I have some plumb-line of inspiration to meet, and should I fall short, I will lose 10 charisma points, be sent a written reprimand by the "counsel to make sure everything Justin Masterson does is OK," and be kicked squarely in the small of my back.

This idea raises two questions for me...why do I think I'm so damn terrible...and why do I think I'm so damn important?

It's like I hold these expectations for myself...that I constantly have to live up to some kind of standard, or people will notice. Exactly which people do I think are watching? I don't know. I can't boast the kind of paranoid delusions that, say, John Nash can...but I still can't shake the feeling that everything has to be done perfectly, or somehow everybody will find out that I'm not all that great a dude.

If I can shake my own Justincentric perspective long enough, I can see the reality that most people are far too busy monitoring themselves to pay any attention to me. But I can't stay in that perspective for very long...I tend to drop back into this mindset that I'm not allowed to fail.

My parents weren't terribly perfectionistic, I don't think. Though my mom did like to vaccuum...but that may have just been because it drowned out the 80's hair-metal-glam-rock blaring from my older brother's room. My dad kept a comb with him most of the time...but I still don't think that qualifies as perfectionistic. We had wire hangers. We had clothes on the floor sometimes. We even had socks that didn't match.

So how does a guy end up thinking that if he doesn't do well at everything the world will fall apart?

I don't know. Do you have any guesses?

Either way, I'm glad to post again.

Peace,
Justin

2004-12-22T09:49:00.000-05:00

I watched a drunk girl dance with a couple of guys last night.

It was a little like anebriated pinball...the men stood as two rubber bumpers, one in front of her and one behind, and she dully bounced between them like a pinball might if it had a few too many and turned to Jell-O. (There's a mixed metaphor if I've ever seen one). Her eyes were 70% closed the whole time, and she had the half-smile of a dental patient just before he succumbs the anesthetic cocktail. It was that look...that face that got me. It was a spooky mix of distance and relief, and I suspect that the former caused the latter.

Please don't hear this as a judgement thing...I have spent many nights in just such a state, and I enjoyed most of them. It's just that...for whatever reason, as I stood next to a couple of my friends at a tavern last night, I noticed this trio, and I felt bad. I didn't feel pity for them...I didn't feel like I needed to throw a Bible at their heads and offer them saving grace right there next to the subbed-out speakers blaring Eminem. I felt bad that, lots of the time, this feels like the best that things can get.

Our salon commercials talk about "escape." Our vacation packages are called "getaways." Our bath bottles advertise that with their products you can "slip away" into a bubbly abyss. It seems that the best thing we can hope for is to not be where we are. We want to get out of our heads...to get out of our bodies...to feel less...to be lighter, to diminish.

What are we escaping from? Why have we been created to inhabit our bodies and carry about our brains, only to wish nothing more than to relieve ourselves of each? Why do I want the same thing?

I want more for our species than to hope for non-existence. Though that may be our end, it bothers me that escape...numbness...seems to be a highly desireable and heavily marketed quality. I want to hope for a true consciousness marked by presence, not by absence.

Do you remember that scene in Fight Club where Tyler pours lye on Jack's hand...and forces him to keep present to the pain? I wonder if this is where they were headed with that.

Peace,
Justin

2004-12-17T09:48:00.000-05:00

Sometimes it's the art that gets me, and sometimes it's the palette.

I don't know if you ever have these palette wonder experiences...but I imagine all of us do...and I love them. I was sitting in my living room yesterday, remarkably underwhelmed, and zoning out to what I remember as "Nanny 911," but what may well have been some other banal waste of my time, such as "Meet Your New Mommy," "Survivor: Vanuatu," or "Cold Case." As my brain steam-bathed luxiuriously in its color-stim stew, a commercial for shampoo came on. A blond woman hocking the latest innovation in personal home hair solutions used the word "soothing." I love that word. It is an emotional onomatopoeia...its very sound makes me feel what it denotes. The word is thick like whole milk, and warm like tomato soup. I wore it as a sweater for a second or two, and then marveled at its effect on me. And then I realized...that was just the one word.

Here's where I'm headed with this: we have many, many, many words. My delight in the word "soothing" was pleasant, but the palette wonder came in the overwhelming reality that I have so many more words to choose from. Did you ever go down into your grandma's basement and find that ancient stack of National Geographics? Did you pick one out (probably from the middle), and open it to find a beautiful, exotic photo on the page before you? That was the art. Then, did you step back and realize that each of those yellow magazine spines with black print sitting in front of you meant another whole collection of such beauty? That was the palette. I love that feeling...it's overwhelming...it's immersive...and it feels reverent.

It works in libraries for me. It works with colors. It works with music. I love that feeling.

It's nice to post again.

Peace,
Justin

2004-12-07T13:29:00.000-05:00

I haven't had much to say lately...

...it's one of the most written-about topics by novelists, columnists and, in time I imagine, bloggers. It's that feeling that, regardless of how much is going on in your head, on your radio, in your life...that you've got no way to get it down on paper. Writer's block.

Fortunately, I have no deadlines, no fans, no J. Jonah Jamieson standing over me barking, "Where's that copy I asked you for?"

Which is nice.

I look forward to having more to write about.

Peace,
Justin

2004-11-16T10:34:00.000-05:00

An old friend wrote to me this weekend...

To be precise, she's not really old...she's 25...and at my age it's not safe to call anybody "an old friend," as when I'm 65 I won't have any proper way to describe friends who really have held out that long. Either way, this old friend has recently married a bearded fellow with a gift for writing named Ben, and she wrote to tell me that Ben recently won a writing contest in Nashville. Ben wrote about what it was like to meet his hero, Mr. Tobias Wolff.

(By the way, that was first time I've inserted a link in HTML code. It feels a little bit like going on the big-boy potty).

In his piece, Ben asked, "What is it about our encounters with people we idolize that reduces us to nimrods?"

Another gifted writer, Dave Barry, asked the same question when he spoke at Miami. He told us of the time he ran into Barbara Bush at an important socialite function, and the best thing he could think of to say to then First Lady was, "I shop at the same grocery store as your son." Her reply was simply, "oh."

I relay this to you because I, too, have been inflicted with idol-proximity-nimrod-tongue. For me, it struck when I had the chance to meet my favorite band-leader on the planet, Mr. Bela Fleck. (Say "BAY-lah"...I would have put the accent in the right place, but that would be akin to not only using the big boy potty but also finding a way to engineer it to use 25% less water without a loss in functionality).

I was just outside of Nashville, in the wooded beauty of Montgomery-Belle State Park, where Victor Wooten was holding his first Bass-Nature Camp. I was reporting on the camp for NPR (a thin excuse to spend a few days with the best bass player I've ever heard), and on the third day, Victor invited his bandmates from the Flecktones to join the campers for a jam session. Bela showed up, banjo in tow, and sat down for a bit of lunch (root soup, as I recall...it's only marginally better than it sounds). Bela Fleck, my hero...sitting just a few feet away all by himself at a picnic table. What's a musical sycophant like me to do?

I did the only thing that made any sense...I got myself a bowl of root soup and sat down across from him. With my hands trembling and my breath in short, deliberately quiet spurts, I sat down next to Bela Freaking Fleck and His Freaking Bowl of Freaking Root Soup. Holy crap...how can I eat? What if I spill a little? What if I dribble soup on my shirt? What if I miss my mouth entirely with my spoon and accidentally render the best banjo player in the world blind in both eyes? I focused a great deal of energy on getting my spoon into the soup and DIRECTLY into my mouth, so as not to allow that fiendish soup the opportunity to run. I was doing pretty well...too well, in fact, as I was concentrating solely on the soup, and not communicating with Bela Freaking Fleck.

I had to say something...but what? I mean, what do you say to the guy that you've been waiting for years to say something to? Shoot...I've had plenty of time to think about this...WHY DIDN'T I COME UP WITH SOME WITTY REMARK? I had eight hours in the car on the way down...certainly something very funny rhymes with "banjo," and fits the limerick meter. Damn...time is wasting...quick...come up with something...Justin, you've got to have something unique to offer...something that nobody else could possibly offer...

...something totally unique...

...something regional, perhaps...or indigenous to Cincinnati...

...OF COURSE! PIE! Why yes...that's it indeed! I've never had a pie better (or taller) than the Banana Coconut Cream Pecan Pie that Cherrington's used to make....and I know the owner! Why, I could even provide such a pie for Mr. Fleck, should his discriminating tastes require it! Why yes, that's perfect...I'll have a pie sent to him. Next time he's in Cincinnati, I'll have a Banana Coconut Cream Pecan Pie sent to the good boys of the Flecktones, for them to eat and enjoy! Victory is mine!

Wait...no...there's still one obstacle. How do I voice this? How do I give voice to this singular act of generosity that I intend to offer to the world's best banjo player? Why, Justin, just get straight to the point! Certainly nobody wants to delay the acquisition of PIE! Yes, that's it...just offer it.

(To unabashedly borrow a literary device from Mr. Ben Vore): BACK TO THE ROOT SOUP TABLE:

Nothing has been said for a good 45 seconds now. I've been slurping my soup as Bela Fleck slurps his. Not a word spoken....but now I've got a plan. To break the silence, I present my first words to my musical hero....

"...Hey Bela?"

"Yeah?"

"....umm....do you like pie?"

Bela stares at me with a bizarre mixture of heard-from-stupid-drooling-fans-a-million-times jadedness and did-he-just-ask-me-if-I-liked-pie novelty. He answers...

"Sure...yeah, I guess."

Now what? Man, THROW OUT YOUR OFFER! WHO IN HIS RIGHT MIND WOULD TURN DOWN FREE PIE?

But wait...what if he doesn't like coconut. It's a pretty divisive fruit, coconut. It's why Mounds haven't really hit the mainstream. What if he doesn't like it...this whole pie venture hinges on the coconut now...and you can't afford to lose the sale on the coconut element.

But...without the coconut, what have you got? Everybody has had a banana cream pie...and pecan crust is standard pie-foundation. It's the COCONUT that unlocks the Pie-ey goodness...damn you, controversial coconut! I've got nothing to offer this guy. I have nothing to offer!

So, I replied.

"OK...great."

Then, I picked up my bowl of root soup, and walked away.

This marks my last substantial encounter with Bela Fleck. It may very well come to pass that either Bela or I will pass away some day, never having improved on our pie conversation. We will never break the post-pie barrier...never jump over the hurdle that I erected with my nimrod-mouthed pieatribe.

...and I'm certain that Mr. Bela Fleck will be the lesser for it.

Peace,
Justin

2004-11-14T10:38:00.000-05:00

I am conducting a highly scientific research experiment, and I will require your support.

I am writing to solicit your donations to a grant that will fund my highly scientific research experiment. My experiment is already in progress, so a portion of the grant will reimburse me for charges incurred in its exercise. My highly scientific research experiment is very cost-effective, and may change the future of medicine, technology and the consumer home plastics industry.

If you are not already convinced to contribute, let me explain my highly scientific research experiment:

Eighteen months ago, I began a specimen collection. My collection consists of various sizes, shapes and colors of Rubbermaid and Tupperware, which, at one point or another, each housed leftovers of a meal that my wife made. Each of these specimen containers was transported to the church where I work, and left in highly scientific refridgeration for about four hours, next to some cans of Diet Rite and an old half-eaten Wendy's salad. Then, right around noon on the day they were introduced into the church environment, they were removed from refridgeration, had the lid removed to expose the specimen to the elements, and the large majority of contents were shoveled into my mouth. Chew, swallow, digest. We will no longer follow the story of these particular contents, as they are scientifically irrelevant, and had a rather nasty end.

The remainder of the specimen...that is to say, those morsels which were stuck to the side of the container, huddled together along the bottom of the container, or were just too plentiful to eat...were then re-sealed in the container, and the container was left on my desk for the rest of the afternoon, (often with the plastic fork I had used...just a reminder to the remaining morsels not to try anything funny).

This is where things get really scientific...

After a day or so, I would, in a highly scientific manner, get disgusted by the mostly-eaten leftovers sitting on my desk in a tinted polypropylene container. I would then, with great care and precision, move said container into a large pile of similar containers, which grew ever larger in the corner of my office. I would then, with equal care and precision, tell my wife that I fully intended to take them home and wash them, and do so with a straight face. (Environmentalists are always trying to thwart scientific innovation).

After several months of such behavior, my specimen collection was complete...each container exhibiting a different stage of bacterial and fungal growth. It was at this point that we moved into stage 2...or the "Chrysalis" stage. Annoyed by the ever-growing pile of multi-colored specimen containers, I brought a large cardboard box to work, piled all of the specimen containers in, and drove home with my windows open. Upon arriving at home (and being harshly lobbied by the environmentalists to shut down the experiment and clean up the site), I highly scientifically snuck the cardboard box around to the side of the house, closed it up, and taped it shut. Thus begins the Chrysalis stage, and this is where you come in.

I am seeking reimbursement for the cardboard box (40 cents), the tape (1 cent) and the various specimen containers (25 dollars). I am also seeking adequate funds to pacify the environmentalists (pretty earrings = $39.95), so that the experiment may continue. I will also require 1lb (one pound) of Chuck Roast Sumatran Blend coffee ($7.95), a well-padded lawn chair ($15) and a good book about glass blowing or interpersonal conflict ($7-$10), in order that I might sit and observe the progress of the Chrysalis stage. Finally, I will require the sum of $200 for a three-day-stay at the Red Roof Inn down the street when the environmentalist faction decides that until I get that mess cleaned up, I can no longer live at home.

Thank you for your support. I look forward to receiving your checks, made out to me, in the mail or by PayPal. I thank you...and the future of technology thanks you.

Peace,
Justin

2004-11-05T13:56:00.000-05:00

I have decided to open up an electronics store.

...but not just any electronics store. The most EXPENSIVE of all electronics stores. It'll be called PriceyWires, and we will charge 15% more than our competitors. We will mark up EVERYTHING, and unashamedly add extra taxes and fees at every turn. Our prices will soar over those of Circuit City, Best Buy and H.H. Gregg, and we'll have the biggest, fanciest price tags on the market.

...and the people will come.

"Why?" you ask? Well, because of my special innovation in consumer electronics retailing: I'm going to call it "Customer Service," and it's going to take the nation by storm. Here's how it will work:
1. You will enter through the gigantic sliding PriceyWires doors, and you will see uniformed sales people all over the sales floor, waiting to talk with any customers who might need assistance
2. All sales people will be required to pass a basic skills test, which will include arduous criteria such as "Must be over 14," "Must have a basic command of the English language" and "Must be able to competently identify and understand the products you are selling."
3. Our sales people will be paid solely on a commission-based basis, and will therefore be more motivated to help customers choose products. Also, a series of genital-and-car-battery-based punishments will be incurred if salesperson stands and talks to other salesperson while local church video guy stands 16 inches away, waiting for a simple answer to a very basic question about an audio adapter. (Scenario may be adapted for various situations).

I know, it's crazy...but I think it just may work. My thought is this: deep down, people really want to be treated promptly and with respect and knowledgeability when they go to purchase thousands of dollars in electronics equipment. Despite the popular notion in consumer electronics, I think that, in their heart of hearts, people actually want to be well informed by a competent sales associate when they make major purchases.

Yessir, this "customer service" thing will sweep the world.

Peace,
Justin

P.S. - Yes, this post demonstrates the exact lack of perspective on my part that I wrote about a few weeks ago...but man, dude just needed a headset for his phone, man.

2004-11-02T16:03:00.000-05:00

I've seen many an American walking around today with an "I voted today!" sticker stuck to his or her chest.

Most of them look happy. That may be for one of two reasons:
1. Participating in the single most powerful act of democracy available to the individual fills their hearts with pride, consequently filling their faces with smile.
2. They like stickers as much as the rest of us.

I am guessing the majority would agree with #1. I, myself, am not so happy about the whole thing. Don't get me wrong...I love voting...sharing my opinion is among my favorite pastimes, as evidenced by my blog, my epinions account, and my ever-shrinking pool of sympathetic friends. I think that the ability to vote is to democracy what the Resurrection is to Christianity and what the brown-sugar apples are to Boston Market. My problem is that the system allowed me to vote for one of three people: 1. An intellectual Lilliputian with an ideology that seems more based on loosely Christian hunches than on hard facts, 2. SuperChin, the six-foot-three New England Python with a sharp wit, a forked tongue, and enough vague promises to make Herbert Hoover blush, and 3. A whole bunch of write-ins that nobody has ever heard of and who don't include the only guy I could stand to vote for four years ago: Ralph Nader.

It amazes me that, out of the 260 million Americans who make hot dogs and run banks pick up trash and provide versatile furniture solutions for modern living, THIS is the best we can come up with. All of all the men, women and brighter squirrels in this country, these two guys are the best we can think of to run the country. At the risk of being too forward, I think that should bother you too.

It's frustrating to think that I am left with the option to vote for one of two men that I don't like to have more political power than anyone else on the planet.

But...I made my vote. And no, I'm not telling you who I voted for. I want to keep the few blog-readers that I have. :)

Peace,
Justin

2004-10-22T08:38:00.000-04:00

I think I'm still in that phase where swearing is a novelty.

Which is odd, considering a do a fair amount of it. I think the trick there is to hang around people who will probably be offended by it, then try your best not to do it around them. That way, it feels naughtier when you do...hence, the novelty.

Speaking of offensive...I'd like to get gross for a minute. In my last entry, Ryan Cook (brilliant writer, at c-change.blogspot.com) asked why peeing on a campfire is an act of aggression. Well...it just so happens...

An acquaintence of mine challenged me to do something very bizarre yesterday...he challenged me to pee in public. It wasn't some sick exhibitionist thing, as far as I know...and if it was, I can't wait for justinpeesonatree.com to go public...it was a response to this issue of male aggression. If you're missing the connection there, you're remarkably close to being me 15 hours ago. We got to talking about aggression (seems to be the topic de mode this week) and how I'm beginning to think that it's generally oppressed in an unhealthy way in most modern American males. So we got into it, and I told him that it seems wrong to me to show aggression in public, regardless of how morally "OK" I feel like natural male aggression is. I told him it just seems socially wrong...I don't want to be that guy. So, he challenged me to pee in public. He said that he thinks that peeing is an aggressive action (hence, he suggested, terms like "pissed off" and "piss on you"), and that if I didn't feel comfortable starting a fight with someone, that I should try peeing in public. You know, like on a tree, or a curb, or a building, or a schnauzer who is peeing on a car tire (just for the poetic justice). He said it would be an aggressive action. I said it would be public indecency. He said take a risk, do it in the dark, go in my backyard if I'm afraid of going somewhere else. I told him that I don't care for him much anymore. He said it would be freeing.

As I left my acquaintence's place, I really started pondering on this ridiculous idea. Then, on the way out, I very seriously considered peeing on his Honda. Then, in a gracious blessing of social suppression, I decided not to. But I did decide two things:

1. I need to make better acquaintances.
2. I need to think about this more...there might be something to this.

Have you ever read Alexander Pope? Jonathan Swift? These guys seemed to be obsessed with peeing...I wonder if it could be a...umm...something? I dunno...that's why they won't let me shrink heads.

Gotta run.

Peace,
Justin