listless trickle

Today's been a bland, boring day. I was taught that being bored is a bad thing, and for the most part, it is, so I'm reluctant to use the word and to admit that I'm, well, bored. But I am, so I will.

It's just been one of those "is this all there is?" days, you know, days in which you get up early, go through the routine, commute, work, eat lunch, work a little more, call it a day, then head home so that you can rest up and do it all over again. And through it all, you're totally and irritatingly conscious of the fact that you're locked into a routine existence.

At the end of an "is this all there is?" day (like today) you reflect and slowly realize that life isn't always the torrential drama, or narrative, you'd hoped for. Sometimes it winds up feeling more like a listless trickle.

Today's boredom has been dramatically compounded by the fact that I work with apathetic students, day in, day out. Or maybe it's the fact that I work with apathetic students, day in, day out, that's producing the acute sense of boredom in me. Stinks either way.

It gets a little tiring starring into the same sea of disinterested faces everyday. I show up, eager to talk about something really important, like writing, and they, in turn, can hardly stay awake. Or they text. Or they just stare ahead, as if looking through me. They just don't give a damn, glazed eyes and all. They're just bored, no matter what you do. You could tapdance or blow fire, and they'd just stare. The problem is, they'd rather do anything than write, or even read for that matter. Strange, since this is college...

It's just hard to get through to these people. Don't get me wrong. They're cool kids and we share as many laughs as we can. But as students, they're just totally, unequivocally disinterested.

When you've staken your all on activities like writing and reading, and when you've set out to help others excel at them, and when the others you've set out to assist exhibit disinterestedness and boredom all the time, you can't help but become bored yourself.

Blunt materials dull a sharpened edge. I'm certainly losing my edge, working day in, day out, with something so quietly cancerous and corrosive as apathy.

While it is punctuated by fleeting moments of satisfaction, enjoyment, and enlightenment, teaching is, for the most part, a drag characterized by apathy, on the one hand, and beaucracy, on the other. At least in my field. Which is why I can easily see myself walking away from the profession, permanently. I'm a good, innovative teacher; but if the chance comes along to do something else, anything else, I'll happily take it and say goodbye to all of this.

George Orwell once said that by the time most men hit the age of 30, or thereabouts, they lose all sense of individual ambition. Evenutally, they forget the aspirations and dreams that motivated their youth; in other words, they give up on the idea of one day setting themselves apart from the mass of people in the world by "doing something great." Instead, most people, according to Orwell, slip into quiet, anoymous lives doing whatever they can to get by.

In his words, most people end up succombing to drudgery.

This may sound pessimistic and depressing but really I think it describes a very natural process in which a person gives up on ambition. You start out with ideals but experience eventually bleeds you of those ideals. I certainly feel like I've been bled a little; but at least wisdom always comes with wounds.

Right now, I think more and more about taking walks with Meg, or the next cup of coffee, or watching the leaves change, or last Sunday's sermon at Urban Grace, or planting the vegetable garden we've been wanting for so long, and less and less about my job and the ideals that used to motivate me. This trade off, strangely, is comforting and soothing. Letting go is the surest way to inner peace.

I used to imagine myself living to work. Now I see myself forgetting about ideals and working to live. There's a universe of difference between the two.

dance off

I began class, this afternoon, by examining this trenchant political analysis, from minimovie, with my students. Buckle up; this'll have you rolling.
CLICK THIS LINK.

a couple of joe sixpacks

Meg and I are reviving a classic, all american, joe-sixpack past-time. I mean bowling. Not Wii bowling, which has practically entirely replaced the real thing, but bowling bowling, shady lanes, shady characters, cheap beer, cheese sticks, onion rings and all. Meg and I usually head to Secoma Lanes, in Federal Way on Friday or Saturday night. It's a great way to relieve stress, unwind, and work on our game.

We brought Heath and Grant along with us tonight - we all bowled in the low to mid 100s. Meg did especially well, racking up a few more stikes than usual. All in all, the night went well, that is, until Meg got busted by the lane manager for sneaking a six pack of Bud into the alley, in her purse of all places :)

Oh, and Heath's pregnant, by the way. Meg might have mentioned this in a previous post. As you can see in the photo, she looks great. She's really (and unusually) fit, too, cause she still runs consistently each week, even at 5 months pregnant. Go Heath.

passing

Mike Richard's dad passed away. He died from cancer.

A lot of my family knows Mike, somewhat. He is a dear friend of mine, from college. Mike joined the Army last year and recently shipped out to Germany for continued training, en route to the Middle East. While in Germany he learned of his father's death; the Army granted him ten days of emergency leave to fly home and be with his mother and sisters.

The family buried Michael Sr.'s ashes in a plot in Whitefish, Montana.

Mike's doing well, all things considered. He wrote to me and told me that he is happy that his father no longer has to endure the torment and intense pain of terminal cancer; he also told me that he is even more happy that his dad is "truly in paradise." "Sometimes ," he continued, "I'm almost ecstatic for him."

Nevertheless, Mike has to leave his mother and sisters and return to Germany, tomorrow I think. His separation from them, in dark days like these, is compounded by the fact that he's heading to war in a couple weeks.

Anyways, if you know Mike, please pray for him and his family.

that's a nice pie

Meg and I make pizza together, from scratch, once a week. I used to make the crust but Meg makes the crust now, from bread flour, olive oil, and yeast. While she's doing that, I chop all of the vegetables and grate the cheese (all in all, it requries about a quarter brick of cheddar, pepperjack, whatever). Every now and then we grill up some barbecued chicken as a topping. We've got our timing down pretty good, so that by the time she finishes her task I've finished mine and, if we've remembered to preheat at the start, we can just pop the pizza into the oven and wait about twenty minutes. This is a cheap, delicious, reasonably healthy meal. A bottle of good red wine really puts it over the top.

FUN!

A jar, some paint, a sock, and Christmas lights. This was super easy, and so fun. One of these little guys is partially blind, so this was really stimulating for him. I'm so happy to meet kids as excited about Halloween as I am!!

Never Underestimate

After reading aloud a great kids book, "It looks like Spilt Milk", I poured a glob of white paint on blue paper, folded in half, and opened it up to create a kind of ink blot. Then I directed the kids to write down what they thought the ink blot looked like. No joke, one of my students (from Samalia) insisted that the ink blot, on the right, "looked like George Bush."

doublespeak

Sarah Palin:

"I know what Americans are going through. Todd and I, heck, are going through that right now even as we speak, which may put me again kind of on the outs of those Washington elite who don't like the idea of just an everyday, working-class American running for such an office."

NBC News:

"The Republican National Convention has spent more than $150,000 at luxury stores like Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue to dress Sarah Palin in designer suits."
Politico:
"An additional $4,902.45 was spent for her husband Todd in early September at Atelier, a high-class shopping destination for men."

Connpost.com:

"Gov. Sarah Palin charged the Alaska state government $21,012 worth of airfare for her daughters."
The Associated Press:
"Palin charged 64 one-way and 12 round-trips for her three daughters, as well as hotel rooms. The expenses included a trip Palin took with daughter Bristol to a women's leadership conference in New York for a four night stay at the $707 per night Essex House Hotel."

Connpost.com:

"Gov. Sarah Palin was paid $17,000 in per diem payments for more than 300 nights she slept in her own home."
The New York Times:
"Gov. Sarah Palin’s makeup artist was paid $22,800 for the first two weeks of October."

a good man speaking well

Meg and I are watching John Adams, a recent HBO miniseries that cleaned up this year at the Emmy's. For those of you who like period dramas, and especially for those of you who want to brush up on early American history, you gotta check this out. The device of narrative, adapted to film, is such a superior way of teaching history, in comparison to the stale, bloodless, bullet points most of us had to regurgitate from textbooks in jr high and high school.

Watching the series through the prism of contemporary politics has been especially interesting. Along with its meticulous attention to detail, its probing analysis of colonial gender roles, and its innovative cinematography, what struck me about John Adams was its representation of the revolutionary politicians of the latter 18th century.

21st century folks are accustomed to marathon multimillion dollar campaigns, secret service squads, and media hype. But before the spectacle of stadium sized Conventions, before the blogosphere, before the advent of 24 hour election coverage, and before $150,000 luxury clothing spending sprees, politicians of days past balanced statesmanship with running the farm, avoiding the pox, or ensuring their children learning proper latin. They were a different breed of politician altogether.

Above all, the revolutionary politicians depicted in John Adams exhibit a sheer command and mastery over language. Their penchant for speaking and for writing - their simple, stern, structured, colonial prose - is a far, far cry from modern-day candidates, who parrot lines their speech writers feed them and who reason in soundbytes.

So passeth a fine thing in this world. Political discourse in this country has fallen from the height of logical argumentation to the dirty depths of name-calling, ad hominems, and fear-mongering.

Here's the thing. Politics is inherently rhetorical; that is, it's a business that revolves around mustering arguments, debating, informing, persuading. In classical times and in Revolutionary times, the idea of a politician was never, ever separated from the idea of a rhetorician. Both activities - that of politicking and that of speaking eloquently - were considered one in the same.

The identification between politicking and speaking eloquently, however, no longer exists. We live in an age in which are presidential candidates focus more on managing their images than on delivering coherent sentences. Just read a Palin or McCain debate transcript, and you'll trip over a tangled mess of disconnected statements, characterized by run-on sentences, fragments, stutterings, worn out catchphrases, errors in diction, as well as a total lack of transition terms.

Such and such were the days of old. So much for men (and women) speaking well. I miss the prosaic politics of old. If you do to, watch John Adams. I guarantee you won't be disappointed.

delish-nutrish

Okay. Best fall combo: butternut squash soup with cranberry spinach salad.

Every once and a while you create a meal that just makes you feel like a winner. This is one of em. Super filling, super colorful, and, as listed above, DELISH.

my job is the coolest

I get to work with 9 kids that have severe disabilities. They make my life so fun. I've been teaching them for the past 2 months. I'm learning that we all have quite a bit in common. Each one of them laughs really hard (even when it's not that funny), struggles every day, and are OCD (clinically) when it comes to picking things on their body. JUST LIKE ME! After spending so much time with a group of kids like this, you kind of start to....love them. I'm pretty certain that God has gracefully given me the coolest job ever.

....if you ever want to teach a lesson (could be on anything. really. anything. it's all new to them). Please tell me. You will be welcomed by nine of the most humorous, hyper, forgiving kids you'll ever meet. For example: Heath came in and taught them to identify some plants. They were thrilled. She took them on a nature walk, where they could identify some plants on their own. You would of thought they were in Disney world...and Heath was Mickey Mouse. They loved her, and now, are also in love with sword ferns (thanks, Heath).

da crib

All my family's down in California. I certainly miss the golden state, especially during the summers. But when fall comes around, up north, I always fall in love with Washington all over again. The persistant sweater weather, the colors, the intermittent showers, the crisp air - it's all just wonderful and beautiful, in a quiet way.

Meg and I live in Auburn, to be exact. Auburn is a strange place. For one, it's polarized. Wealthy white people live on the hills, while the poor live in the valley. There is no in-between. Distinct class lines carve Auburn into bits and create barriers between the well-to-do and the down-and-out.

Second, Auburn's large and sprawled out so there's no unifying sense of community, nor is there a happening downtown main street culture. Actually, most Auburn residents despise the local city leaders for failing to renovate the improve Main Street. The downtown area has no industry, no retail, no fine dining, no theaters, no culture, period. So, with no cultural epicenter to rally around, Auburn is just made up of tons of people living atomistic lives. Auburn's city slogan is "more than you imagined." It's nothing like that. You can figure this place out in a day. Personally, it's less than I imagined. A very good friend of mine, Fred, lived here in Auburn for awhile; he calls Auburn the armpit of Washington. It's certainly a cultural armpit (though, Meg and I are going to see a local production of Bram Stoker's Dracula on Halloween night - I'm really looking forward to that); but at least the area, and especially the surrounding countryside, is pretty and overhwelmingly green. Auburn's also strategically located half-way between Seattle and Snoqualmie Pass. In other words, civilization and nature are equally accessible, depending on what you want to do.

Three, Lakeland Village, the specific part of town Meg and I live in, is very clean and pretty. It's situated on one of Auburn's three hills. We live kitty corner to a town center which has restaurants, a grocery store, coffee shops, a brewery, a movie rental house, and a variety of miscellaneous shops. Across the street is a large park from which you can see Mt. Ranier. There are also lots of interurban trails good for walking and running. All in all, it's probably the nicest place to reside in Auburn. But we're also smack in the middle of suburbia, which means zero diversity (always weird); it also means we're surrounded by a lot of gross, in-your-face, moms-with-plastic-surgery-driving-yellow-H2's-with-rims kind of materialism. The houses are humongous and identical. The individual neighborhoods within Lakeland Hills are virutally indistinguishable from one another. Everyone and everything just kinda looks the same. It's a study in conformity.

Case in point. This morning, I was drinking coffee in Starbucks. In the span of ten minutes three different mothers, outiftted in stilleto heels and blue-tooth headsets, entered the store at different times, each with a daughter. I kid you not, in each case, each daughter was named "Chloe" (I overheard each mom call her respective daughter by name). After that, while walking home, I stopped at a traffic signal. While waiting to cross, I read a notice posted on the traffic pole. It depicted a missing white poodle, can you believe it, named "Chloe." The coincidence, here, sorta represents the suburbian homogeneity that characterizes Lakeland Hills. It reminds me of some lyrics from a song by Malvina Reynolds:

Little boxes on the hillside,

Little boxes made of ticky tacky,

Little boxes on the hillside,

Little boxes all the same.

There's a green one and a pink one

And a blue one and a yellow one,

And they're all made out of ticky tacky

And they all look just the same.

And the people in the houses

All went to the university,

Where they were put in boxes

And they came out all the same,

And there's doctors and lawyers,

And business executives,

And they're all made out of ticky tacky

And they all look just the same.

In spite of the criticisms we could all rehearse of the little spot of land we call home, Meg and I are happy and content, above all, finding happiness in one another and not in our external circumstances.

Anyways, I've attached a brief video tour of Meg and I's place, as well as a few snapshots of the streets directly outside our apartment, for those who live far away :)

mt. si

Meg and I hiked up Mt. Si last weekend; it was our second time up this particular rock. Mt. Si squats majestically 30 miles east of Seattle, off of interstate 90, along Snoqualmie Pass. While Meg and I aren't too crazy about Auburn, our close proximity to Mt. Si and to the Pass is probably one of the best things about living where we live. Anyways, the hike up Mt. Si is fairly difficult, mainly due to 4 miles worth of steep, steep switchbacks. The air is thin as well. The hike itself wreaks a lot of havoc on your quads, gluts, and hampstrings on the way up, and a lot of havoc on your knees and lower back on the way down. But it hurts so good.

Originally, Meg and I planned on hiking Rattlesnake Ridge, a site we'd discovered a few weeks back on an impromtu hiking excursion, on our way home from Oktoberfest in Leavenworth. But the day was extraordinarily clear and still, and so we decided to hike Mt. Si in hopes of catching a view of Seattle, the Sound, and Mt. Ranier. Our hopes were realized. After about two hours, Meg and I reached the initial peak and had lunch. From our little perch we could see Seattle. We could even see the Space Needle. The cityscape, so distant yet clear, looked like a miniature plaything. Beautiful. Serene. What eagles must feel like, viewing the earth with penetrating clarity and detachment. Anyways, we snapped some of the following pics. The peek in the background is Mt. Ranier. After lunch, I went ahead and scaled the tip of Mt. Si. It involed a somewhat perilous ascent (perilous by my standards anyway) through steep rock, snow, and even some ice. I reached the top after 20 mintues or so (the image at the top of this blog was taken here) and found some moutaineers sitting and starring lackadaisically. One was eating a sandwich, another was praying, or so it seemed, and another was smoking a joint. I sat, reflected on the hike up, and felt sorta like a philosopher. Sometimes things become more clear the higher up you are. It was a wierd intersection between the spatial and the spiritual.

A favorite passage from the writings of Albert Einstein came to mind: "A finely tempered nature longs to escape from his noisy cramped surroundings into the silence of the high mountains where the eye ranges freely through the still pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity." The top of Mt. Si certainly felt like eternity. Too bad we had to come down.

"special" art

Meg and I have taken up painting out of a desire to add some color to our otherwise barren, off-white walls. Actually, "painting" is a generous word for what we really do. Really we just paint a canvas a certain color and then layer different colored stripes on top. "Special ed stuff," as Meg calls it. Nevertheless it produces a decent effect. Here's some of our latest:

the strings still sing

Been working a little on this bit, in my spare time. I've been playing this particular guitar for a long time, too long perhaps, but at least the strings still sing.

Oh yeah!

Today, Andy and I are pretty pumped. We woke up to a bright fall day, and had huge bowls of raisin bran. Then, off to our most favorite event: our new church, Urban Grace, in the heart of downtown Tacoma. We've been searching a long time for a church that loves God, loves learning, serves the community, and loves the arts. We found it, and we love it.

After church, we went to my twin sisters place. She is 15 weeks pregnant. So weird. I'm excited for her, but, it so weird to me. It is nutso to watch someone with the EXACT same body as you, change into a shape that you never thought your body could change into. Every time I see her, we scurry into the bathroom to compare the differences in the mirror. It is so fun! She is the most fit pregnant person I've ever seen. She runs 15+ miles every week. What a woman.