I curse you and laud you.
And what I assume you certainly don’t assume.
For every skill that belongs to a normal ape
certainly doesn’t reside in you.
(my adaptation of whitman’s “song of myself”)

I’m not sure how it happens: competant and intelligent human beings rendered useless and paranoid when touching a computer mouse. All common sense and logic flies out the window, only to be replaced with child-like reason and loads of fear.

“Save the document.” “The what?” “The document!, Go to the file menu and hit save…” [long pause] “But i’m just trying to save my document…?”

“I’ve deleted the internet!” [grumble] “Huh? You did what?” “I deleted the internet! It’s gone! Oh Lord, save me…” “Calm down, you can’t delete the internet” “NO! I DID! LOOK!” “Ok, the next time you scream absurdities at me like this i’m going to kick you.”

“Just go to this address: h-t-t-p…” “Wait a minute, wait a minute. What? Where is this?” “Open whatever browser you use…safari, IE. What do you use to access the internet?” “Nothing, i use my email to download to the internet.” “Oh God help me.”

And if, just IF one of them actually figures something out (usually involving multiple pages of notes that they’re not even sure what they mean) such as the complex process of putting a file on a shared network drive, they not only expect a congratulatory parade, but that task becomes “theirs.” If you dare ask them to do it a different way, or to not do it a certain way again, it’s as if you were calling their baby ugly. Hell has no wrath like questioning a technophobe’s process.

I understand they didn’t grow up with technology. I empathize with the fact that they’ve had to learn all new skillsets just to continue working. But at some point you have to want to learn, instead of kicking and screaming your way through a simple task like checking your email.

I pray for teachers and IT people alike. You are the modern day saints for taking all the anger, frustration, cockiness and paranoia that today’s workforce has to give. I’m so sorry.

They didn’t deserve it. None of them did. Ryan was too young; Nate had such a good heart; Jenny was full to the brim with vitality; Kevin was too popular; Matthew’s just lucky to be alive. They all passed violently, without purpose or reason. And now Pete. Sure Pete’s still here but in what capacity? I don’t even know. I’m not sure about much these days.

Do you like flirting with tragedy? Does defying history and statistics with such blind braggadocio swell your ego? Sheepishly I answer yes. Apparently. Years of losing friends has taught me nothing. I’m 23 and have lost too many friends and classmates to the insatiable jaws of vehicular destruction. And while I wipe away the tears with my left hand, my right is adjusting my stereo instead of securing myself behind a seat belt.

All of my friends have tried relentlessly to break me. They’ve pleaded, reasoned and humored me for years. I have tried, but now I submit to the truth that it was half-hearted. I was doing it for others. For Kate. For Ray and Seth. Never for myself. But why?

I don’t value my own life. I’ve always been comfortable with death, and especially my own death. Now I’m sure that sounds just a smidge morbid for most, but I am. At an early age, I was confronted and submerged in an environment of death in gradeschool (88 funerals in 9 months as an altar boy, to be exact) and in personal life. I’ve been confronted with the possible death of several immediate family members more than once. And of course suffering from depression for years is like the black powdered sugar on top. It’s not that I don’t *value* life, perhaps I’ve just become comfortable with the concept of death. Is it possible to become that at peace with such a monumental psychological construct that you could attach less importance to it? I’m not entirely sure, but for about 9 years or so I’ve been fine with the idea of me passing (read: not *wanting* to die. just not afraid)

But i’ve never given much though to others. Not everyone is as jaded to death and loss as I am. As much as I don’t see why, my friends and family would probably be mildly upset, at least for a time. And the only reason I have come to see this is because I’m finally starting to take stock in my own feelings of loss and hurt when *my* friends are killed. And Lord, have they been.

So this is my pledge…to no one but myself…while I may see my death as insignificant and trite, I cannot play down or belittle the emotions of others at such an event. Therefore I’ll stop being the pompous ass that I am and actually make a concerted, heartful attempt to “buckle up for safety.”

Because as I’m often reminded from concerned friends, “what’s holding [me] back?” — I have been.

My friend Tyler finally graced me with a 50-minute aural treat.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Thanks t.

[2 new links and 1 new pic to the right]

I promised myself I would give this up. I know it’s wrong, but she smelled of an odd mixture of conditioned leather and body butter. God that made me nauseous. And now I have to purge myself of this before I can move on.

I was in, of all places, Church. Supposedly praying. Supposedly refocusing my life. But instead of turning inward, I began to feel my stomach turning over. And that ring on her finger…

Her children were out of control and out of her range of vision. She looked outward for approval and they shot glances to see if they could get away with mischief. Her skin painfully bronzed, but perhaps I was the only one thinking it odd that her face was a few shades of orange darker than the rest of us. I guess the sun was shining on her house, and her house only for the past several months as the rest of us in the midwest palely await the first signs of spring.

Damnit, I didn’t want to stoop to this level. Forgive me.

Her interactions with her children were as superficial as her cheeks. I think she even wore a smaller pants size than her 9 year old daughter. As her 8 year old boy ripped half the hymnal page out to put his gum in it, she shot an, “oops, wasn’t that cute” nose-scrunch to the lady beside them. And then she took the opportunity to reposition her hair.

I tried. I tried to hide my eyes. To not look. To not be distracted by her and the little people that rode with her in her beamer SUV. But the smell. It was awful. Perfectly conditioned leather and aveda body butter clearly out-aroma’ed the rest of the cosmetics employed in this morning’s reconstruction. They were the winners, taking my senses and concentration by storm. Her purchased persona stole my Sunday morning, and now she was checking to see if my roomate was eyeing her.

But now I thank her. I took from this experience one golden nugget of truth that I was not privy to before she wafted into my life: If you decide to visit a doctor-friend to be, ahem, ‘enhanced,’ don’t go anywhere with the rest of your family. Ever. Because if you’re trying to change your appearance, you might not want the rest of us to see five other instances what you looked like originally.

And the faces of babes don’t lie.

…this might not be the final version…still learning…bear with me, please.

I was 13. 8th grade. Sitting on my front porch in a late Toledo autumn evening. What’s weird is that I was with my sister, and we were in fact not at each other’s throats. We were on the steps and she was relaying to me her dilemma about not knowing what “type” of person she was. Unbeknowst to me, my older sibling was struggling with an issue that I would later inherit, much to the same degree but with a different outcome.

My sister’s (and now my own) issue was that she was torn between what type of person she was at heart. She knew a large portion of her wanted to live in a big city, to be immersed in diversity and culture, soaking up the vitality and open-mindedness of the sea of people around her. But she also had the nagging notion of wanting her own little plot of land, a retreat where she could hunker-down and focus on the things in life that mattered to her. Hell, farming wasn’t even out of the question.

So here I am today, several years into the same battle. She grew up, moved east and is stubbornly adherent to her ubran lifestyle. Me on the otherhand? I was torn as well. I love the cultural aspect of big cities. I love the graffiti, the skateboarding kids downtown, the scent of importance and tradition that hangs in the air in larger metropolitan areas. I thought I could be the city mouse just like my sister. So I grew up, went to college in a reasonably large city and decided it wasn’t for me. Sure, the art museums are awesome. The bars, if you have unclaimed amounts of cash to frivolously toss around, would be splendid and chic. But it’s not me. It’s not mine. I miss my space, my privacy and most of all, grass.

So I’m looking into buying land. No, not a house (although I continue to watch the market). Just land. I’m not sure how far I can stretch my dollar, but I want to buy some land, and not in a subdevelopment. The trick is, for me at least, is chosing a city that’s big and friendly but has outlying areas that prove comfortable and retreatable while still leaving only a short jaunt to the city for Culture.

But would I be missing out? I don’t really like the suburban mindset of “let’s sprawl-out all commercial shopping areas and make obscenely large outdoor malls that have the potential to be abandoned in a few years if business dries up.” There’s the ever-increasing need to “expand” in suburbs, taking over everything and moving further and further into the cherished countrysides only to build clone-like houses in a development pairing a cheesy adjective with a boring noun (Windswept Farms, Fallen Leaf Estates). But most of all, it’s the suburban people that I’m not sure I could ever stomach. The grossly-stereotyped-majority of them lack sincere individuality. So many people I know that seem like such great friends just up and decide to build a cookie-cutter house on a plot that costs some nausiatingly high amount of money only to ensure that their next door neighbors will in fact now be *ten* feet on either side of them, as opposed to eight. That’s not me either. I don’t want to surrender my indivduality to a housing development committee or standard architecture and minimal backyard.

I suppose that the moral of this story is that perhaps I’ll never be *completely* happy with my choice. If i live in a large city, I’ll miss my breathing room. If I live in the suburbs, it’ll mean instant death to my spirit. If I live in the country, I’ll be ever fearful of the slowly encroaching Army of Soccer Moms. But I’ll take my chances.

So come visit me in the country. You can paint my barn with your graffiti and your many children can skateboard until their hearts are content w/o fear of the five-oh’s busting up their fun. We can have our own art gallery, music studio and hip bar all in my barn. There will be no paying to park and no one trying to wash your windshield. But bring some ammo to ward of the advancing Enemy, won’t you?

So the reason that i’ve been so remiss in writing as of late is because i’m working on a redesign. Why you ask? Because this design looks like a circa-1995 geocities page and I shudder every time I have to look at it. That’s why. Damnit.

So bear with me. Hopefully no one will find the next design as repulsive as I do.