The Guy Eventually Falls For the Girl.
Posted on 9 February 2010 | No responses
I have a confession to make. It happened two weeks ago. I won’t go into the details, but trust me, if I had only known prior to what happened, I would not have done it. Although I’m sharing this with you, please don’t bring it up in conversation, if you do I’ll never make eye contact with you again.
With that said…
I watched the movie “He’s Just Not That Into You.” Now before you take away my man card (which expires later this year. I’ll have to renew that) please let me explain a few things.
First, I do not like Drew Barrymore. Ever since I sat through that hellish movie where she stands on the baseball diamond for three hours waiting for a kiss, she has forever been tarnished. Like a roommate that eats your food when you’re not home, she cannot be redeemed. That movie is guilty of murder of the first degree; thousands are dead from its boring, stupid plot.
So when I realized that I was about to watch a Barrymore movie my insides squirmed. My body got feverishly hot, than cold, and then my lungs decided to stop functioning for awhile. It was a terrible feeling.
Barrymore does get one exception when it comes to E.T.. That movie is awesome.
Secondly, I made myself bothersome. I was the guy who will not shut up while watching a movie. My goal was more talking time than any of the major characters and I proudly succeeded. Any chance I was given to make clever banter I took. I applauded any beards I saw, scorned Barrymore when she appeared on the screen, and made a lot of jokes at the expense of women (there may have been a few bad tasting jokes, but in my defense I was fighting a battle against a large opponent. Estrogen).
Thirdly, I made it known how stupid the movie was. I’ve sat through chick flicks and afterwards acknowledged that I enjoyed the movie, HJNTIU was a bad movie with a bad plot. The whole idea of the movie is that if a guy is into a girl, he will make it known. He’ll call you, or find you, and make sure that he meets you again. As a guy, I would say this is a fair assessment of how things work. The problem is with the ending of the movie. This guy spends the entire movie far from being romantically interested in the girl. He does not pursue her. Even after she throws herself at him, he’s still not into her. Then finally after the girl has learned her lesson, He shows up at her door ready to sweep her off her feet. In other words, instead of taking a cue that he is not interested in you, keep pestering him and he will eventually come along. Ridiculous.
Anyways, I hope that you can forgive me for what I have done.
Bleak Portrait of Haiti Orphanages
Posted on 6 February 2010 | No responses
Read it here. Please continue to pray for these kids.
Teaching Kids to Care
Posted on 5 February 2010 | 3 responses
At work, I was watching over the blacktop and there was the cutest little girl running as fast as her miniature legs could take her. Seeing kids run is almost as funny as catching the rare glimpse of an old person running.
Keyword: almost.
The thing with kids running is that they haven’t quite figured out the whole running motion. They know what to do with their legs, but that’s it. Old people know how to run properly, but they’re old and moving fast is contrary to their natural state. If by sheer luck you see an old person running, you’ve not only seen something rare enough for planet earth footage, but comedic gold in the making.
As for the little girl, she went with a boxing stance while she ran. Clenching her teeth and bundling her hands into fists, she ran with arms held in front of her. I might have mistaken her for Notre Dame’s leprechaun mascot had she a beard or disappeared when I blinked my eyes.
She was closing in on a lone jump rope, and was nearly there when her feet bumped.
And away she soared,
Right into the pavement.
Let me be clear, I laugh a good amount at my job. 60% of my laughs come from kids falling. But this was not a simple trip; this was a crash and burn situation. No laughs were had. In the case of this little girl’s fall, it was not funny. It would have been less painful to take a slug to the gut with a brick.
I ran over and picked her up. Her arms and legs were scratched with bits of dirt and rock embedded in the cuts. I coaxed her over to the first aid, where I performed a miracle surgery on her limbs. Thirteen band-aids, one ice pack and a few side hugs later she was ready to get back to the playground.
As she walked away from me, her little girlfriends ran up to her and took turns giving her hugs and letting her rest her head on their shoulders. It was rad, in an “aww-that’s-precious” kind of way.
There are lesson plans for teaching children to read or learn addition. You can have kids memorize how to spell words, or the names of the Presidents, but there are some things that are hard to teach kids. Teaching a child to sincerely care for others is one of them.
I can be an example, and tell them how to care for others. I can let the child know what words build others up, and which words tear people down. But the thing is, each kid is different. They have different living situations and grow up in varying environments. For some an attitude of love and care for others seems to be natural, for others it’s a real struggle. So whenever I see these kids get it, and understand how another person feels, I am stoked.
I killed a lampshade.
Posted on 1 February 2010 | No responses
This past Sunday my roommate brought his blowgun into the apartment. If you’re unfamiliar with blowguns, it’s a simple pipe that can be loaded with darts. When blown into, the air pressure fires the darts at lightning fast speeds at whatever you happen to be aiming at. The feeling of firing a crazy sharp dart across a living room and sticking the lamp shade is a feeling that every man should feel. For that split second, you are an ancient Eskimo hunting down the great woolly mammoth.
As it is bound to happen when you have a group of guys with a weapon, things escalated quickly. We decided that the best solution to avoid making millions of tiny holes in our walls, cupboards, furniture and television would be to construct a shooting gallery, along with a refined scoring system to determine who the master of the blowgun was. With the help of markers and tape, the kitchen became decorated with a collection of targets made of milk jugs, cardboard, pictures of cats, and a miniature Stonehenge (because who doesn’t feel the need to knock over Stonehenge?).
It only took a few shots to realize that it was possible for the dart to ricochet off certain targets and get scary close to our faces. With some minor improvements we made the targets ricochet proof, and spent the next few hours taking turns firing the gun.
Needless to say I dominated the competition; nobody stood a chance against my precision accuracy. After shooting all the targets, I got bored and shot a fly out of the air. Well……actually I was terribly inaccurate. I did the worst out of everybody, although I did hit a target once, maybe twice. Even though my score was weak, compared to the other guys, I had a mountain of fun.
After the day dwindled down, I thought about how I had spent it playing with a blowgun, this obscure thing. Nobody ever thinks to play with a blowgun unless someone else talks about it. There has to be other obscure things out there that I haven’t been introduced to, equally obscure stuff in the world that is just as fun as a blowgun. The question is: what is it?
Beekeeping? Magnets? The game of Risk? Unveil your secrets! I want to know what is out there!
Pedaling through the night.
Posted on 31 January 2010 | No responses
I rode my bicycle late into the night yesterday.
I was pedaling next to the San Diego River; the moon was brighter than it would be for the rest of this year and it reflected on the still water. As I pedaled along, I prayed aloud to God. Thanking him for my life and the many blessings I have.
Family, friends, food, a home, a job, good health, a bicycle.
And once I was done talking I rode quietly onward, listening to my wheels go round and wondering about how God responds. Somewhere in all those words the bible talks about how a man who believes on faith alone will be blessed, yet I constantly want to see or hear from God in a more tangible way.
I see the stars, and the ocean, and relationships and feel deep inside of me that there is a God. Unexplainable coincidences have occurred in my life and I believe it to be God. I look at the world in all its brokenness and see the gospel as the answer.
But even knowing all of this, I still want to see God.
Faith is a tricky thing, and for the most part it just frustrates me. It just seems that everything would be a whole lot easier if God would come down, even if in cloud form, every 50 or so years to remind us that He is in fact real. But then you realize that the God you believe in is not only all-powerful, but all-knowing and that He has this whole design of His on lockdown and it is a perfect plan, so God’s whole not showing Himself to you is the right choice. Another wrench in the complex engine of faith.
And to make it even more complicated a man would think that by having a relationship with God, that a desire to have tangible verifiable proof of His existence would cease to be, or more to the core, doubt would be eliminated. But as a man who would say that he does in fact have a relationship with God, doubt still lingers around.
Crazypants.
Time at ole CC.
Posted on 27 January 2010 | 1 response
As someone who has enrolled in half of the community colleges in California I will vouch for the graph’s accuracy.
The Dreaded Question
Posted on 24 January 2010 | 1 response
I’m graduating with a degree in business management in March. College is near over and the great freedom is about to begin or as I like to call it, the great unknown.
Finally being able to graduate is AWESOME! But there is one small problem that has presented itself because of the graduation. The problem lies in small talk. There are two topics that I usually** hate to small talk about. Work and school. What has happened now because of the upcoming graduation is that when people ask about school and I tell them the diddlydoo they congratulate me and then immediately ask me the dreaded “What are you planning on doing next” question.
I hate that question.
I hate it nearly as much as relatives asking if I have a girlfriend. The answer is no, no girlfriend and no idea what is next for me. Thanks for reminding me Mr. Person-Over-40.
This question wouldn’t be so bad, if people didn’t seem so letdown when you told them that you have no idea what is next. “What??! You aren’t pursuing a career in your degree as soon as you possibly can?!”
Nope. I’d like to move around some more and through my degree I realized that business sucks balls. I’m staying far away from anything business related.
I need to come up with some alternative to the truth so that instead of hating the question, I will love the question. Maybe I’ll just start telling people that I am going to start working in a business that manufactures furniture for space.
Yea, maybe I’ll do that.
**I am willing to small talk with you about my school and work if you are blond, single and love things that are awesome, like pinecones and pirates.
SUIT UP!
Posted on 22 January 2010 | No responses
The best part of the weather is that I can semi-justify watching a ton of “How I met your Mother.”
shoot, that’s a real bummer.
Posted on 15 January 2010 | No responses
At this point if you are even semi-aware of what’s happening in the world (i.e. watch t.v. or use a computer) you’ve probably read through, looked at or watched something related to the Haiti quake. There are a lot of words flying around all directed towards the disaster. Through my siftings two things have stuck out to me.
The first is that it is embarrassing that it takes such an extreme atrocity to get people worked up on helping others. The earthquake in Haiti has done horrible damage and I don’t want to downplay how terrible this incident is, because it really is terrible, but at the same time there are people all around the world who have been suffering before the earthquake and who will continue to suffer long after this earthquake. It is my prayer that God fills the Church with a sincere and honest love for others, to the point that we aren’t only helping our neighbor every now and then, but continuously through our lives.
The second is a single sentence in this post.
“Pray as if it was your mother or your daughter or your son who was trapped and in fear of their life. It’s what we are called to do, because it matters.”
I was in a conversation with my friend Keith on prayer. He was telling me how he didn’t fully grasp the concept of prayer or how it worked, but that the one thing he was sure of was that God is a God who likes to be asked. Ask God to accomplish his purposes in Haiti; that the Gospel would be spread in the devastation, and that healing would happen.
You have cut me deep Hitchhiker.
Posted on 11 January 2010 | No responses
One of my brothers gave me a stack of books for Christmas. During the in betweens of the day I have been reading through them. They have been some great reads with the exception of one. I just finished “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and it has to be one of the most disappointing reads I have read in a long, long time.
I know a deal of people who cherish this book and bellow to the skies that this book is so funny that my sides will split. Would you like to know how many sides of mine split while reading this book? Or just how many laughs escaped my mouth?
Zero. Nilch. Nada. Nothing. 0.
It reminded me of the time that I was told that the Harry Potter movies were on par with the books.
It’s just not true.
And for that I was disappointed; disappointed that the book did not meet my expectations, but also a bit unsettled for another reason.
It was a bizarre book, but the most bizarre part of it was that I earnestly believe that if I was to write a book it would be similar to A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Things were crazy and didn’t make sense, everything is unpredictable and that is the kind of stuff that normally I would find hilarious, but for whatever reason I didn’t see any humor in it. Reading through that book was like listening to my own jokes and not laughing.