my first award

One of my tunes is track of the day on Garageband.com. It’s not exactly a Grammy, but it’s my first award so i’ll take it.

I love this guy

I know everybody loves this guy, and it probably doesn’t warrant a blog post. But, I haven’t had a president in my adult life that I could really get behind. Bush Sr was a disaster. Clinton was a good president but a questionable guy. Bush is probably a good guy but quite possibly the worst president in history.  This guy, however, is brilliant and he’s in it for the right reasons. He really is fighting for the lower and middle classes, and I love him. I’m so glad he’s in this race. I feel bad for McCain, because he could have been a great candidate in almost any other election, but he’s had to resort to all this crazy Karl Rove negative stuff, and even that doesn’t seem to be working; I guess we’ll see in a couple of weeks.  But no matter what happens, this is my boy right here.

it’s been awhile, I know

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything, but I’ve been pretty damn busy with school and church and race training and all that. I’ve barely had anytime to write songs or anything, much less blog posts. But I’ll try to be better about it. I’ve had a couple of interesting experiences this past week or two; i preached, i saw a terrible concert by one of my favorite musicians, i went camping; plus there’s probably some other cool stuff in there (there=my life) to write about that I haven’t even thought of. I’ll try to do those justice here shortly. Anyway, for now, sorry I’ve been slacking.

tax cuts

Here’s a graphic from the Washington Post that shows the two presidential candidates’ tax proposals side by side. On the left-side column, find you or your family’s tax bracket, then see which candidate has your back.

you gotta love politicians. . .

This pretty much speaks for itself. . .

so i suppose i am an INTP, #4, World 3, kinda person. . .

I really hate  tests that ask you a lot of questions and use the answers to put you into some dumb-ass group/personality-type that is supposed to define you. I took such a test tonight in Theology class. It decided that I am in theological world #3 (out of 5). I would tell you what that means, but the truth is, it doesn’t mean anything. Just like it doesn’t mean anything that I am INTP, or a personality enneagram type 4 (by the way, I’m just guessing there, I’ve never taken the test, but I google’d it and I thought ‘romantic’ sounded like the coolest one from the short descriptions). Maybe I do value time to myself, but I also like conversation and meeting new people. Maybe I do like to think things through, but that doesn’t mean I don’t value feelings and emotions as well.

People are much too complicated to be grouped into arbitrary “personality types”. Whenever it can be said that “John is a type x so he does xyz,” then we have lost an important piece of our humanity. Maybe you can say, “monkeys eat their own shit” because they’re monkeys, but God didn’t create people so we could make broad generalizations about them and assign them numbers or letters. By the way (and this is something that I’ve only figured out recently) this also goes for Democrats and Republicans.

I hope my generation learns this. But I have my doubts that we will. We are quick to criticize the “moderns,” but at the same time, we are equally as quick to classify “post-moderns” as people who don’t believe in this and do believe in that. I hope that we will start to see people as individual people. I hope that we will stop trying to figure out people in large chunks and start trying to know them in meaningful relationships.

But, maybe that’s what INTP, #4, World 3 kinda people always think.

reluctantly crouched at the starting line. . .

So, I ran my first race today, the US 10K. There were 12,000+ people in it, lots of walkers, some wheelchair racers, some inline skaters, (I have to say I agree with the Dos Equis ‘most-interesting-man-in-the-world’s’ assessment of rollerblading. To quote him, “No.”) and some bicycle folk.

It was a lot of people, which is contrary to my normal running mindset of relative solitude, but I really enjoyed it. The worst things about it were that the course was really hilly and that they didn’t have enough port-a-johns at the starting line to accomodate the crowd, so I didn’t get to take care of my recently hydrated bladder before the race started. Therefore, as you can imagine, I had to pee really, really badly for the first 3 miles of of the race, which kinda sucked. I also had to stop at the 3 mile mark and hit the port-a-johns there, which cost me at least a minute or two off my time. I still don’t know my time, it takes a couple of days to get the results posted online, but I felt like I ran well, especially considering the unplanned bathroom break and the extreme hilliness. Next up, the Battleship Half Marathon in Wilmington.

. . .and I’m going the distance.