It Just Clicks. Or, It Doesn't
I don't know why some things are funny to me or how my mind puts things together. I have told Cilla before when she has asked, "How did you get from here all the way to there?" And it is amazing how that works and connects so quickly. And then there are other times when I am telling a story and there is a word I need to finish the story and I cannot think of that word to save my life. I will stand there with Cilla and just wait. And wait. And wait for the right word to show up. With others, I have to just find the best word that will do and stammer it out. But I am still disappointed that the best version of that thought or sentence didn't get out there.
Southeast Asian Poultry
Was watching a cooking show that was featuring chicken wings. The host then had a college professor come out with a few varieties of live chickens. The professor pointed out that all varieties of chicken originated in the jungles of Southeast Asia. That was fascinating to me. When you think of wild jungle creatures, is chicken the first thing that comes to mind?
And then I started laughing. Cilla looked at me and knew better than to ask the question. So I answered it anyway. "I was just thinking - dude is holding a Vietnamese Jungle Chicken. Doesn't that sound like a racial epithet? Like, if you called someone at work a 'Vietnamese Jungle Chicken,' you could get fired."
For the rest of the day when either of us did something stupid or frustrating we called each other a Vietnamese Jungle Chicken.
Lost 60 Pounds in 2013
Lost 60 pounds in 2013 and was sporadically good at running. The goal this year is to lose around 60 more. I wanted to lose 100 pounds in 2013 and was making pretty good progress for most of the year when I changed jobs and moved across the country. Lost another 15 pounds once we got here and then flattened out with the stress of the new job.
I only HAD to work 3 days a week. But I came in on a couple of my days off just because... just because. There are so many things that happen during the day of a work week that are unplanned, that I have always felt that you needed a day or so with no responsibilities to focus on admin and anything else you could do ahead of time or after the fact.
Work just dominated every piece of energy we had. I went from running 6 days a week for an hour each day, to doing almost nothing. And it was much more the emotional drain than a physical one really. It was very much a case of "I only have so much CONCERN to go around. I have my God, my wife, my work, and then the Braves got that last little bit."
I needed something mindless and effortless and sports are perfect for that and baseball is the best because it ALWAYS on. Having to go out and work out and plan my workouts - it just wasn't mindless enough. My plan is to get a baseline workout routine set up that is just that - routine. I can always add things to keep my interest up, but also have this healthy thing that is no mental stress at all either.
Things are better for me at work now. I can not only see a light at the end of the tunnel, I am growing more and more confident that it is not an oncoming train. That, in the words of convicted felon Martha Stewart, is a good thing.
I Can Name Every County in Delaware
Sussex, Kent, and New Castle.
That's it. All THREE of them. Uno, Dos, Tres, ain't no Cuatro.
I Need a Church
I need a church. I need believers singing hymns in honor of Christ's sacrifice and teachers teaching me things about the love of God that I don't know or that I need reminding about. I need fellow believers who serve one another and MORE IMPORTANTLY serve others. Serving others, being the mild, soft spoken ones that provide food to the hungry, clothes to the cold, and shelter to the homeless - those are the people that win people to Christ.
I am not mild. I am not soft spoken. Loving is not the first word that comes to mind when one thinks of me. I am selfish and bombastic and loud. But I love you. To the extent that Christ has changed me from the sinner I was to the saved sinner I am, I love you. I look at you sometimes and I forget how unlovable I am and how He loved me anyway. That is why I need a Church. To remind me that I must serve. I must serve because I am blessed.
But I also need a church to allow me to humble myself before God and Christ. If you are able to keep in mind how perfect God is and that the God of the whole universe is just fascinated with you as an individual, it becomes hard to get too down on yourself. If you are reminded of all the pain and brutality that Christ faced on our behalf, it gets harder to be overwhelmed with the trivial inconveniences of our modern lives. If you understand that someone without blame at all sacrificed himself to spare you, it gets harder to hold a grudge against those folks who wrong you.
I need that in my life.
No Domino's or Pizza Hut or Papa John's
One tidbit that might be interesting to some of you is that while my weight loss program kind of stalled a month or so after getting up here to Delaware, it did not do so because of franchised pizza places. Pizza has been my guilty pleasure for ages now. It is the perfect FAT SLOB RAY food. You don't even have to leave the house to get it! They will bring it to you. The internet even allows you to order without dealing with live humans. The only shame you have to deal with is when your 30 hot wings and extra large Dominator or Pepperoni Lover Deep Dish pizza gets to the house is the delivery guy. And there is no judgement in his eyes at all - unless you stiff him on the tip.
But I have not had pizza from a national franchise since we got up here. It has been too easy and too tasty to pick up, dine in, or have delivered pizza made by people that have an inordinate number of vowels in their last names. Since I have gotten to Delaware, I have had more pizzas prepared by guys named Vinnie that they had guys named Vinnie on the Sopranos.
And pizzas with the best ingredient almost always being the crust. A crust that has an audible "crack" as you first bite into it but then has an incredible chewy quality that follows. I had never ordered a plain cheese pizza before I got here. And even though that is what I have ordered a few times now, I have never gotten a plain cheese pizza. I have had that magical crust with tomato sauce that has never seen the inside of can married to cheese that in some cases had been made earlier that day - cheese made all the richer by bubbling for just a few moments in a wood fired, brick or stone oven.
It is so good that it is almost unfair when we release the cook to add fresh basil or pepperoni or roasted broccoli with bacon or ... Well, you get the idea. The two places we go have family working behind the counter, in the kitchen, or in the garden growing a lot of what we find on the pizzas. I should have stuck to the seafood places. Might have made it to a hundred pounds lost this past year if I had.
An Evil Man Was Nice
Many years ago when I was at my worst the city of Houston provided me a place to stay for the night. Part of me wants to list all the ways I was worse. But a young woman in the church I attended a year or so after Houston's hospitality department catered to my excess taught me different. She was giving her testimony and refrained from listing all the depraved things she had done before Christ found her wandering and wondering on that road to Damascus.
You could tell it was not shame that kept her from sharing - at least I could. I knew she spoke the truth when she said she did not want to "honor the wrong things." I knew it was true because I have sat with others talking of our sins and the hazards from those sins and I have felt that perverse pride when my depravity was greater than theirs. So, I won't be listing all the ways I was worse. Just understand that as bad as I am now, with the benefit of Jesus Himself sanding away the rougher, coarser edges, at one time, I was worse.
But the night that Houston kept me as a guest... I had been drinking. I had spent hours drinking. I had gone from club to club with an extremely seductive young woman and her friends who really, really LOVED... my money. At the last club she and her friends had gotten thrown out. I had not.
I had found an even more attractive woman who also LOVED my money but not only laughed at my jokes, but seemed to actually GET the jokes. That told me she was smarter than the other one. Maybe she was not smart enough to get the jokes, to actually think they were funny - I will never know. But she was smart enough to make me think that she did in the moment. That was far smarter than the other one. If I am going to be played, I at least want to be played well.
At some point a friend of her boyfriend showed up and started asking loud questions. He had had so much alcohol that he could not get my hearing to understand him properly. Or I was so drunk I could not get him to speak clearly. Or something like that. Time to go.
I will skip over some really good parts to save them for another time. But I wound up in a large concrete room with concrete benches and exposed toilets and a solid steel door with a shuttered window that only opened from the outside. And I was not alone. I was with drug addicts - some blissfully within the grasp of their chosen oblivion of self and others horrified to find themselves confined once again to their own minds, their own selves with no means of leaving behind the one person they hated the most. I was with other drunks - most dressed as lower middle class laborers who had not yet made it home from just a few beers with the guys and a few of us dressed rather nicely from an evening with the girls and one obnoxious fellow in a tuxedo who had lost his bow tie the same as all of us had lost our shoe laces and belts. I was with drug dealers - some of whom appeared to have been smart enough to not actually use their own product and others whom I would have put with the drug addicts until I heard their charges read later that night. Of course the homeless and the mentally disturbed were there - arguably the most comfortable of the lot with the wind and the rain incapable of finding them in this grey on gray purgatory.
They fed us that night. Two pieces of bologna, two pieces of bread, a piece of cheese, a granola bar with blueberries all in a plastic bag. There was nothing to drink served with it. I did not complain. I was working diligently to perfect my impersonation of concrete. As my hangover started to progress throughout the night, it actually helped by graying my complexion. I watched the elders of this urban tribe of the concrete room empty the contents of the plastic bag and then fill that with water from the water fountains that were mounted above each toilet. I went to the fountain and drank and drank in an effort to hold off the worst effects of the hangover that I knew was coming.
A couple of hours later an ancient black man, skinny to the point that I could have identified specific bones if I had paid enough attention in biology, woke up and was hungry. He had missed the meal. He asked several around him when they were going to feed us and most of them did not answer him - conversation was not a popular pass time. Finally someone told him that they had served the food and gone.
"I am hungry," was all he said before he started crying. Not loud sobs or wails or anything so dramatic. Just a hungry man with no hope in the world crying at the latest example of how the world was beyond his ability. He cried. I turned my head away while noticing that others were turning just as I was. He cried softly and barely audibly. He cried.
A young black man, shorter than me by a couple of inches but in shape, sleek looking, like a runner, put his arm around the much taller, much older man. "C'mon, let's find you some food Pops."
The younger man was a drug dealer. I knew this because we had already been before the judge and had our charges read. He was a drug dealer who had been arrested selling to an undercover cop. He was a drug dealer who was arrested in possession of an unregistered firearm. He was a drug dealer who had not looked away from a crying, helpless, hungry old man.
They walked together among the rest of us, slowly as the old man shuffled his feet, and the younger man would ask, "Yo, man, you gonna eat that bread?" "Hey, pahtnuh, you gonna eat that granola shit?"
They walked among us until the young man had put together a meal for the older man from the things that others had not wanted. He then took his own old plastic bag and filled it full of water for the older man. He even asked,"You don't mind drinking after me, do ya, Pops?" And of course the old man didn't.
It is hard to look like concrete with tears in your eyes. I don't know that young man's name. I have no idea if he was convicted or how his life turned out. I know based on the charges read that he sold crack and meth, that he traded in misery. I know he carried a gun. He might have rationalized that he needed the gun to protect his drugs and money, but that is just another way of saying that he was willing to kill someone over crack and meth. Those actions are evil.
But on that night, in that place, he was nice to an old man who was hungry and hopeless and helpless. On that night when I looked away, he put his arm around a hurting human being and offered comfort. He saw misery and hopelessness and he took action. On that night, in that moment, he was the better man.
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