Category: general

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Where Would I Be?

First, I want to thank everyone for your prayers and good thoughts during my surgery and recovery.  It was not an easy experience for me.  My time in the hospital following the surgery was especially rough.  My adorable mom came and took care of me during the week following being released from the hospital.  I could not have made it without her help.

Now that I have been home for a couple weeks I realize that the physical distress felt from this surgery is no where near the emotional distress I am feeling now.

This surgery is just the beginning.  What I need to do now is change my life.  I don’t want to have my life changed by the weight I lose.  I want the weight I lose to be caused by my change in lifestyle.  A lot of people assume that this surgery is a magical cure to obesity.  It is not.  I am still doing the hard work.  The surgery just makes it so it is almost impossible to cheat.

I need to surround myself with people who can encourage me, and who are as dedicated to living healthy lives as I need to be.

I have just begun this difficult journey.  The best is yet to come.

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general mushy

Love Me Dead

On Thursday I undergo surgery. It is a fairly common operation, however I am at high risk. I am nervous about having this procedure done, despite the fact that it will change my life forever in a positive way. Even though it is possible that gastric bypass surgery can in some cases lead to death, I am pretty certain that what I am doing now, isn’t living.

I do not feel human. I exist outside of the rest of the populace due to my size. I know full well that I did this to myself. There have been millions of choices that I have made that has led me to this point. Changing my decision making process at this point has become impossible without help. I need a drastic change. This surgery is that drastic change.
There are a few things that I need from my friends and family as of right now:

First is prayer. Please pray that God is there with me on the operating table.

Second is support and encouragement. If the surgery goes well (and with your prayers, it will) my lifestyle is going to change dramatically. I need the support from my friends and family to push me to continue down the right path. I will need the encouragement and reminders as to why I have chosen this change in my life.

Lastly, I need understanding. As I begin to change outwardly a lot of you guys might assume that I am changing inwardly as well. I will always be me (whether you like it or not). Just because I might begin to look different doesn’t mean how I feel about any of you will change. You know how much I care about all of you. This will always remain a constant – unless you do something to make me hate you. 🙂

I was debating whether or not I was even going to post this. This is a very personal thing. I am ashamed of myself and the fact that it has to come to this. It is not very often that I openly talk about these kinds of emotions. I usually keep my true personal feelings to myself. This is different. I need the support. I need the accountability. I need the transparency. I need as much prayer as I can get.

Please think of me this Thursday. If something happens… just know that I will be seeing most of you again. I was privileged to be able to lead a lot of you in worship before, maybe there is still a spot open for a keyboardist and vocals in heaven.

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So Much to Say

I find sometimes it’s easy to be myself. Sometimes I find its better to be somebody else.

I say my hell is the closet, I’m stuck inside.
Can’t see the light.
And my heaven is a nice house in the sky; got central heating and I’m alright.
Can’t see the light.
Keep it locked up inside don’t talk about it.
Talk about the weather.
Can’t see the light.
Open up my head and let me out.
Here we have been standing for a long long time.
Treading trodden trails for a long long time.

-Dave Matthews Band

It has been recently brought to my attention that I have not updated my blog in over a month. I could give countless reasons as to why I have not had the time/energy/desire to do so, but instead I will spare you, dear reader, from such boring and dreaded details. There is so much to say, and I am not feeling as transparent today as I was feeling at the time of my last entry.

Speaking of my last entry, I spoke of how I have been taking better care of myself. Life, being the cruel ironic beast that it is, decided to reward my efforts by making me severely ill. I have visited the hospital 5 times in the last 2 weeks, and probably have a couple more trips to go. Again, I will not go into the details of this ordeal, just know that it has not been the greatest time of my life. Since I am a realist (please do not confuse this term with either “optimist” nor “pessimist”), I see the silver lining. Work has been so crazy busy in the last few months, that my recent physical trauma has allowed me to catch my breath. The downside too all of this (again, being the realist that I am) is the fact that I have had too much free time to contemplate things that would normally be repressed by distraction.

The last month hasn’t been all bad. There have been some truly amazing things that have happened in my life that have seemed to give me hope. My intended lack of transparency forces me not to expand on this topic.

Tomorrow, I will go back to work a new man. I’m feeling better. I am ready to kick the tires and light the fires. I think the fall/winter season, which for me usually leaves me feeling cynical and irreparable, has a chance of being salvaged.

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Burn One Down

The mountain north of my work was on fire today. The view from my cushy chair on the 3rd floor of the well air conditioned building left me without a care in the world. Besides, I didn’t see any houses on fire; only grass and bushes and trees. I’m sure there were houses in danger, however, I was protected by my own complacency. The airplanes flew over countless times and dropped water they picked up from the nearby reservoir.

I wanted to tell them that it was ok, that they could stop their mission. *I* was perfectly fine, so there was no need to put out the fire. There is something that I have always found comforting about the flames of a huge fire. Something burned inside me as I watched the mountain set ablaze.

When I drove home from work and pulled into my apartment complex the view changed. The smoke and flames seemed WAY closer to me, and I felt like it could actually be possible for this fire to reach me. My complacency dissipated. I looked for the planes that I had wanted to call off earlier. They were still flying and dropping water. I am glad they didn’t listen to me.

It’s easy to be apathetic or content with evil or mediocrity when it only impacts everyone else. As soon as it has the ability to affect me, I get scared. I guess it is time to fly straight and put out some fires of my own.

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Devil’s Dance Floor

Alright, we have a piper who’s down. It’s alright, he’s just pissed. We have a piper down, I repeat, a piper is down!

-So I Married an Axe Murderer

Today, of course was St. Patrick’s day. So in Utah, not unlike anywhere else in the country, everybody was Irish and drunk! Wait… isn’t that redundant?

There was nothing down about the first bar Kevin and I went too. Things were in fact very much alive at Piper Down.

It was so busy that Kevin and I finished off our Killian’s Irish Red and our Irish Car Bomb and bailed.

We then went to a non-irish bar conveniently named O’Shucks, as to not disappoint the spirit of the evening. To top it all off the bar is connected to a sushi bar that served excellent sushi.

Overall, it was an excellent night.

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God Gave Rock and Roll To You…

…and put it in the soul of Lasse Gjertsen. I like watching this video. It makes me smile.

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Zombie Nation

I had an epiphany the other day. If it was not for computers and the internet I would not be as intelligent. The internet in no way placates my desire to learn, adapt and grow, however, it does add greatly to the sum of my knowledge. The threads of my life have been so interwoven with this Ethernet cable that I can actually feel my I.Q. points dropping as my cable modem loses packets. For the average home internet bystander an internet outage is a minor inconvenience. For me, it is a major catastrophe with detrimental results.

There are so many things that I no longer need to memorize due to the fact that it is at the tip of my fingertips. A couple mouse clicks and a Google search later and I could tell you the factors that led to the great depression, the name of Jack Johnson’s new album, and the actors name in that one movie.

With every day that passes the internet becomes an extension of my conscious mind. If this is true for me now, imagine what it will be like in 10 or 30 or 50 years. Mankind will be so dependant on wireless linkups that a simple software hiccup or power outage will mean that we forget how much that cup of coffee will cost, and where our seat on the plane is. For the brief moments without our connection we will be a nation of zombies, without having purpose, direction, and information.

Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

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general

Hardest Button to Button

Things have been different lately. Sometimes I get so caught up in the daily routine that I forget about the beauty of the mundane. Two weeks ago I started paying close attention to the habits that I have acquired over the years. I witnessed myself performing tasks and going through a routine that I started approximately 6 years ago when I first moved to Utah (albeit, slightly evolved – for example, my dog, Brandy, has added quite a bit to my routine)

As a sort of quasi-social experiment, I decided last week to make intentional adjustments and sometimes downright omissions to the rut I have become so accustomed. I did this thinking that it would put me in a better mood. I figured my brain would treat this as a sort of “vacation from myself”. This wasn’t the case at all. I found that I was more irritable at work and throughout the day in general. As much as we complain about how stagnant our lives are, we are fundamentally dependent on the little things in our life remaining unchanged, or parallel.

I quickly ended my experiment and stopped paying as much attention to my little daily quirks. Routines are not bad. They are a required way to help us handle the big things that come up. I compare it to breathing, blinking swallowing, walking, etc. Our brain doesn’t use a big percentage of its CPU power to do these things. It works on the premise that these tasks are functioning within normal parameters, allowing us to run our word processors, media players and networking tools without any memory leaks or server overloads.

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California, Rest in Peace

I hate moving. Since my initial move out of Southern California I have moved 10 additional times. That is WAY too many times, especially considering I only moved out 5 years ago. That is an average of 2 moves per year. Ridiculous.

I just finished my 10th move a couple weeks ago. Pretty much got everything packed, loaded, moved, unloaded and unpacked in 2 days. It is sad how efficient I have become at moving. For someone who hates moving, I have ironically become a master of it. Comcast came out and installed the cable modem and DVRs a couple days ago. It is nice to have internet back. I was starting to have withdrawals. It is hard to realize what an impact the internet has on our lives until it is taken away from us.

I was supposed to come out to California last month to go to Laura’s wedding and hang out with friends. I was really looking forward to it, however moving took precedence. I hope the wedding was lovely.

Hopefully I will be able to come out and visit soon. I miss a lot of people.

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Circles

Life is one big circle. So many facets of our existence are truly ironic. We spend all our lives trying to find meaning. We have jobs we despise in order to make that “decent paycheck” thinking money is going to unravel the mystery of the universe. What do we need the money for anyway; to buy more things? Why do we need so many gadgets and toys? If I didn’t have to work so hard to make money, I wouldn’t have to spend so much money to feel better about working so hard.

And so, like so many people I know, I have missed the big picture. Every once in a while I am able to take a step back from myself and catch my breath. What I observe is hysterical. I run away from what I need to obtain that which confuses me into running away even more.

What would happen if I just stopped running for once?