Archive for May 2006

May 31, 2006

The Basics

6:56 pm | Religion | Comments: 1

Tonite around the dinner table, my dad read the last few verses of Isaiah 40 to close the meal. Very familiar words, but today it struck me in a peculiar and powerful way. I’ve lately been feeling a heavy weight on my shoulders of unknown origins, just some kind of strange pressure. It’s like a collection of worries, annoyances, bad memories, regrets, guilt, and confusion all wrapped into one subconscious mass. How do people deal with this? Isaiah knew how to deal with this. Commit your life to the service of the Almighty God and he will take the weight from your shoulders.

Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: but they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.

May 25, 2006

Duck

9:59 pm | My Life | Comments: 3

SIO is currently under a relentless spam assault. Currently there are more than 2,000 spam comments that have been automoderated by Wordpress waiting for me to delete them. I believe that is why SIO loads so slowly these days. But we soldier on.

I’ve been working away diligently at my internship for the past 3 weeks, mostly with a strange thing called Microsoft Access. Microsoft Access is actually very helpful in many respects. I was looking up some literature on how a certain date feature of Microsoft Access works, and it informed me that it worked for any date between 0 and 9666. That got me thinking. What will the world be like in 9666? That’s only 7,660 years off, you know. Certainly there’s been no loss for such mental meanderings over the centuries relating to the future. Jules Verne never got off the subject. Then there’s the famous book “1984″ by George Orwell. If you think about it, if the year 9666 (by Gregorian standards) ever does come to pass, the world will look nothing like it does today. That may sound obvious, because it is. There can be no telling what the year 9666 will bring; the only thing we know is that Microsoft will have to update its date functions.

May 15, 2006

Dream-like

3:54 pm | My Life | Stories | Comments: 7

Drops of evening rain glisten everywhere in the morning light as I walk down a residential street in Cambridge, drinking in the scent of the sweet-smelling lilac bushes. The air is chilly, yet heavy with humidity from a night-time thunderstorm. Clouds obscure the morning sun, mixing its light into a blanket of grey sky. It fits the morning perfectly, like a well-played instrument in a glorious orchestra. The end of Broadway St. is obscured by morning fog. Even though mere blocks from downtown Boston, the buildings and trees produce a distinct silence broken only by the wailing of sirens or a passing vehicle. There’s something about the atmosphere that urges you to stay; to partake of the panorama of urban life that makes every city unique. But I cannot stay.

In Boston the traffic is chaotic. Courtesy and rules are thrown aside as motorists seek desperately to gain an advantage on the competition. Roads bend and twist, sometimes changing names, sometimes not, one-way then two-way then back to one again, abruptly splitting off into two directions with no indication of where or why. Vast archipelagos of traffic islands form intersections and you weave through them, hoping that when you’re finally out you’ll be heading in the intended direction. You get used to it fast; if you don’t, you’ll go insane. There’s no time to hear the centuries-old buildings tell their stories because the light just turned green. You’re already moving but the guy behind you honks his horn, apparently just for good measure. That’s Boston, I suppose.

On the street you drive by the full spectrum of humanity. Olive-skinned police officers yell at their partners. Hey hey, hey Freddie! Passing by groups of people you catch small bits of chatter in a foreign language, and though you can’t understand a word it still makes perfect sense. You see college kids gripping cups of Starbucks, trying to look like they don’t care that they go to Harvard. Couples smile and laugh, consumed in the delicate balancing act of looking into each other’s eyes while trying not to walk into a fire hydrant. They’re caught up in the romantic urban atmosphere, seeing only Boston and their beloved, having lost themselves together and not caring if they are ever found again. I know that if I lived here, I would most certainly fall in love. Cities do that to me. Especially in the morning.

Much to soon it’s time to leave. The blink of an eye affords little satisfaction, only enough exposure to the city to get me thinking, a drop of honey on the tip of the tongue that tantalizes but so quickly fades away. Back on the road, ten miles behind me and 10,000 more to go. The city remains in Massachusets, but my throughts remain with me; memories of chaos, history, love and beauty in Boston.

May 6, 2006

Thoughts About the Red Wings

6:36 pm | Sport | Comments: 10

Many adjectives come to mind when describing the Red Wing’s recent playoff performance. Atrocious. Shameful. Outrageous. It was an absolute, unmitigated disaster. I think Legace has to go; it was more than just bad defense that allowed those soft goals. It was bad goaltending, plain and simple. I also think the Dead Wings need to find a way to motivate themselves beyond all the factors which should have been motivating them but strangely didn’t. When you take a 2-0 lead into the third period of a game which means eliminiation if you lose, the last thing on the planet that should happen is Edmonton putting the game-winning goal into the net with a minute to go. Detroit’s intensity disappeared the moment the 3rd period began, but Edmonton’s did not. This all doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of how bad the series with Edmonton was.

I still like Mike Babcock. But hey, even Dave Lewis got the team to a President’s trophy. Dave Lewis’ team also crapped out early in the playoffs. Live and learn, I suppose. I won’t call the season a complete waste, but many excellent opportunites were indeed wasted. Additionally, it’s become apparent that Detroit’s search for a franchise goaltender continues. Three Stanley Cups (in recent memory) with three different netminders and counting. If you see me socially anytime in the near future, don’t ask me about all this. I might hip-check you into the wall or something.

May 4, 2006

Love

1:27 am | My Life | Relationships | Comments: 7

I’ve been asking people this week if they’ve ever stood in one spot at any given point in the day, thinking that it would be altogether possible to stand in that one spot for the next 30 minutes and not care. That has been my life since college ended. Typing that just reminded me to look at my final grades. Deep breath.

It makes perfect sense that the server that handles that stuff is currently down. How ironic that information technology is preventing me from making pseudo-progress at this moment in my life. Today I packed up my drum set and moved it out of the Sikma’s place. It was somewhat melancholy, I’ll admit. Lots of melancholy going on these days. Lots of drumming, too.

My favorite thing to do when drinking wine is to let it swish down below my tongue. A good merlot caressing the underside of my tongue is something like falling in love for a brief moment. The best thing about it is you can do it again and again until the glass is empty. That’s something like true love, isn’t it? The glass might be empty occasionally, but there’s always more in the bottle. Falling in love is a very appropriate idea. It’s a descent into emotional co-dependence and irrationality. The jury is still out on whether or not that’s a bad thing. Truth is I don’t claim to be much of an expert; I haven’t been in love with anybody for six years. Well, that’s not true. But she ran off with some chump with a big nose. I suppose love is only a feeling, anyway.