A few items of business

One. I just realized I am wearing the same shirt that I wore on Monday. Embarrassing. I can just feel the women in the department judging me and I can feel the men in the department...um, not noticing or caring.

Two. My status update last night: "Of course the guy on the treadmill next to me had horrific BO and of course he had to wave his arms around as he played air drums to his music." It was seriously bad, definitely not just the smell of fresh sweat. His gym clothes had definitely been stewing in it for a while.

Three. I am now officially legal to roam around the People's Republic of China and I have a new camera to help me capture it all.

That's all.

To Catch a Predator

So yesterday Konrad came to church with me. I was trying to give him directions to the church, but it’s kind of hard to find. I was trying to think of an easy place to find just off the freeway near the church where we could meet and for some reason the first thing that popped into my head was Chuck E. Cheese. I quickly realized when I got there that probably wasn’t the best idea. I wasn’t sure what kind of car he drives, so I was slowly driving through the parking lot of Chuck E. Cheese, leering into all the cars to see if I could see him. Fortunately, no one called the police, or if they did, I found Konrad and we left before Chris Hansen showed up with the cameras.

Saturday, Jarrett and I went hiking at Silver Falls State Park where a man died the same day. We were stopped on the trail by some women and they were there to warn us that someone had died just around the bend. She wasn’t very clear about what had happened though and she said she wanted to warn us in case it was the type of thing that bothered us and she said, “It’s dead.” I thought she was trying to tell us that the waterfall had dried up or something and was warning us of that in case we didn’t want to continue hiking only to be disappointed. I said, “It’s dead? Like the waterfall is dead?” I was the thick one. Jarrett said he sensed someone had died when the women first stopped us.

Two weeks from today I will be in Hong Kong hanging out with these two!

The Sexuality Dragon

Back in January I read a thought provoking post on By Common Consent called The Black Hole. The subject of the post is male sexuality. For some reason I didn’t blog about it then, but I want to now. You should read the post, but just in case you don’t, here’s the key point. John C, the author of the post, says that “We have a tendency to treat male sexuality as a great untamed beast.” He also says we treat male sexuality like the Hulk. “You don’t know when it will come to the fore, but when it does it will take over everything in your life and the results won’t be pretty.”

He also makes reference to the Ted Bundy story. Raise your hand if in YM’s or YW’s you heard about how Ted Bundy said that it was pornography that started him on the path to where he ended up. This story was shared at church to keep us from looking at porn. Cause if you do, you will end up killing over 30 women in the most horrific ways imaginable. Not that they said it that directly, but I took things pretty literally as an adolescent. I think a lot of people take things literally as children and adolescents. Then I also wonder if by looking at male sexuality that way, we’ve kind of created the beast.

So we put male sexuality in this mysterious box that is unknowable and uncontrollable. Don’t even open the box, because if you do, your life will crumble before your very eyes. I’m not saying that we should open the box and let it all out and do whatever feels good, but I am saying we could stand to study and explore and seek to understand male sexuality more than we currently do, both inside and outside of the church.

Taking it a step further, I think that approach to male sexuality gets even more intense when we talk about homosexuality. If we see straight male sexuality as the Hulk, then homosexuality is seen as the perverted, horny teenage Hulk who somehow manages to have even less self control than his straight counterpart and who is even harder to understand. Jeff Robinson compares homosexuality to a dragon that you should just walk away from (very helpful advice from a straight dude who’s never experienced homosexuality) instead of engaging the dragon and chatting with him because his name might be Pete and he might be your friend and he might even have some important things to teach you.

Instead though, the approach is to pretend like it doesn’t exist, don’t associate with openly gay people and don’t consume any media that promotes “the gay agenda”. Because the gay agenda is all about turning everyone into a homosexual and certainly not about asking for basic rights and mutual respect. I realize the delivery doesn’t always communicate that, but I think lots of groups and sides and people struggle these days with perfect delivery of their ideas and hopes and dreams.

I think too many years of not seeking to understand male sexuality has led to a lot of serious dysfunction in good peoples’ lives. Tiger Woods? What about the (insert name of politician) sex scandal? Or the (trusted religious figure) sex scandal? Like I said before, it’s time to sit down with the sexuality dragon and have a talk. Find out how he’s doing, ask him what he’s all about. Mark Wahlberg style.

Oh Drudge, what will you do next?

Sometimes reading the Drudge Report is fun just for the pictures he uses. Headline associated with this picture? "MOST POWERFUL WOMAN IN 100 YEARS".

Wingnuts

I rarely post anything even slightly political on here. I find a lot of discussion about politics to be frustrating. Especially on facebook. Cause it’s not really discussion. It’s more like people gather talking points that their chosen party supplies and then they just repeat those over and over again. I think a lot of people surround themselves with people who think exactly like they do so they can further convince each other they are right (Mormons don’t do this though….). Then they talk AT and sometimes yell AT the other side as though that’s going to convince the opposing side to understand and convert to their side that I don’t think they even really understand themselves that well to begin with.

It’s a nice feeling to feel like you can participate in political discussion. It makes people feel like they are informed and intelligent. It’s pretty easy too; you just choose a party and let that party tell you what to think. They even give you clever talking points and sound bites to use and some of them are even cleverly crafted responses to the known talking points of the other side. It’s nice. It gives us a nice comfortable feeling that we are involved and informed and right (or left, I guess). It also gives us an identity with a role to play so we don’t have to worry about coming up with that for ourselves. We can feel like we are involved in the political process and helping it move forward. Cause we’re talking. At people. About things we don’t really understand. But we have sound bites. So it’s all cool.

WHAT??

I occasionally watch The View. I used to watch it religiously, but I’ve scaled back. The current panel consists of the following cast of characters: Elisabeth Hasselbeck. She’s the token conservative. She basically regurgitates whatever she saw the night before on Fox News. You don’t even really need to listen to her because you can pretty much guess what stance she’s going to take on any given subject. Joy Behar. Joy is the same as Elisabeth, but on the other end of the spectrum. She regurgitates from the other side and is very predictable. At least she can be funny sometimes though. Sherri Shephard doesn’t fit either of those molds, but prior to being put on the panel a couple of years ago, she didn’t pay much attention to politics.

Then there’s Whoopi. She’s harder to pin down. And I like that. Granted, she probably falls more towards the liberal end of the spectrum, but the woman usually provides a fairly nuanced and well thought out response to any given topic. She’s much less predictable than the others. And I like that. She seems more apt to consider all sides of an issue and weigh each one. Perhaps this is why I had the dream about her helping me find my office when I was appointed to fill a vacancy in the Supreme Court.

A lot of these thoughts bubbled up after listening to Doug Fabrizio interview John Avlon about his book Wingnuts on RadioWest. John’s book is about how the extreme right and extreme left are hijacking the political system, making it difficult for real discussion and progress to occur. It’s a great interview. Check it out.

Harold Crick goes down under

My friend David recently sent me a quote that reminded me of my Harold Crick post. It comes from a travel website called Gone Walkabout and the source of the quote is unknown. Here it is:

The term Walkabout comes from the Australian Aboriginal. The idea is that a person can get so caught up in one's work, obligations and duties that the truly important parts of one's self become lost. From there it is a downward spiral as one gets farther and farther from the true self. A crisis situation usually develops that awakens the wayward to the absent true self. It is at this time that one must go on walkabout. All possessions are left behind (except for essential items) and one starts walking. Metaphorically speaking, the journey goes on until you meet yourself. Once you find yourself, you sit down and have a long talk about what one has learned, felt and done in each other's absence. One talks until there is nothing left to say -- the truly important things cannot be said. If one is lucky, after everything has been said and unsaid, one looks up and sees only one person instead of the previous two.

I love how Harold Crick, Jerry Ruhl/Carl Jung, and some dude's travel website can all say basically the same thing but in their own unique way. I think that's partly why we're here. We all have these lessons to learn that are basically the same for each of us. We each learn our lessons, put our own stamp on it, and share it with others until we all come to one great collective truth.

Sign above the toaster at work

ATTENTION TOASTER USERS -- Toasters are for BREAD ONLY

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DO NOT PUT CHEESE, TORTILLAS FULL OF STUFFING, OR ANYTHING ELSE IN THE TOASTER that will fall out and melt all over the inside and bottom of the toaster, thereby RUINING THE TOASTER FOR EVERYONE ELSE.


THIS IS NOT A TOASTER OVEN! Gravity is involved, which means that melted CHEESE, CREAM, ORANGE JUICE and the like tends to fall downward INTO the toaster melting and posing a FIRE RISK.


The toaster you see before you is the THIRD TOASTER we've had sitting here this week due to someone DESTROYING THE PREVIOUS TWO TOASTERS WITH THEIR MELTED CHEESE and TORTILLA combos.


From the entire floor who also uses this toaster, PLEASE STOP PUTTING YOUR CHEESE or other meltable foodstuffs in this toaster!!!!

Damn. I guess I'll have to stop warming my morning OJ in the toaster.

Learning from Harold Crick and the Gemini Twins

A couple of weeks ago I attended an Oregon Friends of Jung lecture with Jerry Ruhl that I discussed a little bit in this post. I watched Stranger Than Fiction this weekend and it reminded me a lot of many of the things that Dr. Ruhl talked about. I’m going to try and summarize. The basis for his lecture was the story of the Gemini twins. If you want to read more about that, you can go here, but basically the purpose of the story is to illustrate that we have two aspects to ourselves, the earthly and the divine, that are at times at odds with each other. Sometimes we go back and forth between the two, like we can only devote attention to either one or the other and usually it’s the earthly side that wins out. He discussed how this can lead to what we call the mid-life crisis (which doesn’t necessarily happen at 40 something, it can happen much earlier or much later). The trick is to learn how to divinize the earthly, learn to let each one inform the other and become more integrated.

So that’s a lot of words that don’t make much sense. This is what he means though. We live in a world of expectations. Our families have expectations of us, our American culture has expectations of us, our churches have expectations us of and so do our jobs and we spend much of our time focusing on meeting these expectations. We go to school to be able to get a job that will enable us to provide for a family. We trudge through the work week, just waiting for the weekend to come. We rarely take the time to stop and listen to what our own inner voice or the spirit tells us we need for nourishment for our souls. Instead we focus on meeting expectations.

At some point this all breaks down though. Dr. Ruhl said it usually happens during mid-life because at that point we start to not care what other people’s expectations of us are. When I stop caring so much about what other peoples’ expectations are, I am better able to turn inside myself and listen to what my soul needs. I are better able to divinize the earthly and make my life something that feeds me instead of something that only carries out the wishes of others.

I think the message just gets a little bit jacked up at church because we are taught that we are to think of others first and not be selfish but that message gets hijacked and suddenly the message is not only to give OF yourself to others, but to completely give yourself to others to make what they want with you (example: I am long past the age when it is expected of me to marry. If I had followed counsel that had been given to me to just get married in my early to mid 20’s, I would have messed up at least two lives. I say that based on what I know about who I was at that age).

The real message is to give of myself without stripping myself of my identity. I take into consideration the earthly expectations (and by earthly, I’m including any expectation by another mortal, including those of ecclesiastical leaders). I realize though, that more important than the earthly expectations are the more specific divine ones that I have access to within myself. I also realize that it doesn’t have to be a strictly either/or situation. I can take the earthly and divinize it. I kind of like that word, I imagine myself divinizing with a wand while wearing a robe.

Relating this all to Stranger Than Fiction, Harold Crick is an IRS agent and lives a rigid life. Everything is perfectly timed and measured and counted. Then he starts hearing Karen Eiffel’s voice narrating his life, almost like it’s the beginning of his self-awareness. He unexpectedly falls in love with his polar opposite and gradually begins to live outside of his expected lines and listen to what he wants and needs. As a result, his life begins to have more meaning and resonance. It also becomes more emotionally dangerous.

Spoiler Alert: I also love how Harold Crick’s watch, what is seen as his downfall or character flaw, is what ends up saving his life in the end. That’s probably another post for another day though.

Turns out I'm not a homosexual

As it turns out, I am actually not a homosexual. I thought I knew what love was and then on Wednesday I met this guy:

Turns out that I am a droidsexual. I want to marry my Droid. I know it’s only been a couple of days and you all probably think it’s too soon to jump to any conclusions, but sometimes you just know. It’s just so satisfying to wake up next to it in the morning. I’ll keep you updated on the progression of this budding relationship.

While we’re on the subject of bizarre crushes, a while ago a friend of mine asked me if I had any bizarre celebrity crushes. I couldn’t really think of one at the time, but I think one is presently emerging. It’s the character Andy Dwyer on Parks and Recreation, shoe-shiner and former lead singer of the band once known as Scarecrow Boat. I don’t get it. He’s pretty sloppy and not very bright and lives in his own alternate reality. And at one point lived in a tent at the bottom of a pit. I’m pretty sure he would drive me nuts in real life. Why do I like him? Maybe the crush is really on Chris Pratt for being able to so convincingly play that character. His character Andy is all I know of him though. So who is the crush really on?

Anybody have any strange and unexpected crushes? Celebrity or Android or even a hybrid of the two?

Why stop at a Snuggie?

Of course my friend Ruth was able to find the material used to decoupage the tray table in my last post. And of course the company selling the fabric is J&O Fabrics. I really enjoyed the overview of the product:

Construction Guys is a designer fabric for the ladies featuring pin-up guys for a change. Although I personally find this fabric to be absolutely unnecessary, here it is for you to purchase. The print of this here quilting fabric consists of half-dressed men shamelessly exposing themselves during what must be their lunch break. These men have good complexions because true construction workers recognize the value of exfoliating after pouring cement. The construction guys are frolicking with drills and stuff over a white background with a blueprint design.

Please notice that another option is pin-up cowboy fabric and pinup policeman fabric. Of course all of these are out of stock. It's got me thinking though, why stop at just a Snuggie? The possibilities are endless. The pin-up policeman overview suggest that you "make accessories, pet clothing, draperies, lampshades and other decorative items." And if you make can make draperies from this, why not take a cue from the Sound of Music and make lederhosen and dresses?

Hopefully, this provides you with some inspiration, Lizzy House.

Dinner for one

Jarrett sent me this picture that his friend Kristal snapped of a TV tray table that she found at a second hand store. I'm not sure who would have ever given up this fantastice decoupaged piece of work. I'm also not sure why Kristal didn't buy the table.

Strangely enough, I think I've seen another TV watching accessory made out of that same material. My friend JaneAnne (who I sing with) and her husband are fairly involved in the Portland Affirmation group. Back in December we had a get together with the choir we both sing in and the same night was the Affirmation Christmas party. JaneAnne asked me if I wanted to go with her to the Affirmation party after our choir thing and catch the last part, which was the white elephant gift exchange. I went and I swear there was a pillow that was part of the exchange that was made out of the exact same material.

Actually, if I remember correctly, I think someone at the party actually made the pillow. Now I'm wondering if they also decoupaged this tray table. I think the next step clearly is to make a matching Snuggie. Can you think of a better way to welcome my home teachers over for a visit? "Go ahead and share your message while I sit here in my Snuggie and finish up dinner. Here's a pillow if you need some lower back support."

Other funny side note about this party: the gift that I brought was a pair of baggy gangsta' jeans that I got from Marshall's for Halloween. I failed to notice that the patch on the side of the jeans had the words "raw & uncut". It didn't take long however for other party goers to catch that and get some mileage from it.

PS, I love Zooey Deschanel. I guess that should come as no surprise, because as my friend Ninny told me, every man is in love Zooey Deschanel, even (and I would probably say especially) the gay ones.

Elevator POW!

Quinn sent me this picture a while ago and I forgot I had it. I wonder how many panicked people pushed the emergency button in that elevator thinking they were trapped before that sign went up. Fun to think about.

I’m sick yet again. Fortunately not with strep this time. I’m just coughing and my voice is all deep and sexy. One thing that is fun about having sickness affect your voice is when it changes dramatically and unexpectedly. Last night I was talking to Christina and it was a fairly serious conversation. Without warning, my voice went from Barry White to Darth Vader. I think Christina was a little bit frightened that Vader had momentarily inhabited my body.

This weekend is looking good. I am going to a friend’s art show tonight and then watching the Chris Rock documentary Good Hair. Tomorrow I’m going to see A Single Man. Sunday will be an Oscar party hosted by two ladies who know how to throw a fabulous Oscar party. All day Saturday I will have to myself and I’m probably most excited about that.

Does anybody watch Community on NBC? I’ve never seen an episode but I caught the tail end of last night’s episode. Joel McHale’s character was playing pool with an old man and it quickly devolved (or I guess evolved, depending on how you look at it) into a naked pool match. Joel McHale is surprisingly ripped. I did not expect that; it came out of nowhere, kind of like my Darth Vader voice.

Carl & Jerry & Joseph & Jack on Suffering

I’ve developed an emerging interest in Carl Jung recently as the result of a friendship with a man who has both an innie and an outie. He participates in the Carl Jung society where he lives and has told me all about it. He sufficiently piqued my interest and so I turned to Google to find out if such an organization exists in Portland. Pshh, of course such an organization exists in Portland. It turns out that it is one of the most active Jung organizations in the US. They have monthly lectures and the February lecture by Jerry Ruhl looked intriguing, so I decided to go.

He talked about lots of wonderful things and I’ll probably blog about them, but I wanted to focus on one thing in this post. Jerry quoted a guy by the name of Joseph Campbell who coined the phrase, “Follow your bliss.” I’m sure you’ve heard it before. It’s kind of become cliché and something that people put on bumper stickers. It’s kind of taken on a life of its own and has lost its original meaning.

Jerry said that most people haven’t heard the second part of that, which is, “your bliss is at the core of your suffering.” I can understand why that second part hasn’t quite caught on in the way the first part has. It’s not fun and fluffy. Not really something you’d sell in mass quantities on a bumper sticker.

Jerry also talked about how the word suffer is related to the word allow. Like when Jesus said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” It’s amazing what happens when I sit with whatever negative feeling or emotion or experience I’m having and allow it to do what it’s supposed to do for me. When I allow myself to ask what this is all about instead of trying to push it away. It’s almost like it’s a separate voice within me that I need to pay attention to and be compassionate towards. When someone I love comes to me with something difficult they are suffering, my reaction is to try and show love and support. Why not show the same to myself?

On a related note, I’m currently reading a book called A Path with Heart by Jack Kornfield. He illustrates different ways to respond to suffering by telling the story of the poisoned tree. He says that at level one, our first reaction is to reject the tree and to want to uproot it and get rid of it. At level two, we might have more compassion on the tree and not try to uproot it but build a fence around it so as to protect others from the tree. A person at the third and highest level would say, “Oh, perfect, a poisonous tree!” As Jack says, “This individual picks the poisoned fruit, investigates its properties, mixes it with other ingredients, and uses the poison as a great medicine to heal the sick and transform the ills of the world.”

Even though it’s not a popular bumper sticker, I can see how my bliss might be found at the core of my suffering.

Different Plans

I don't know how long
I can do this, he said
I think the universe
has different plans
for me

& we sat there in silence

& I thought to myself
that this is the thing
we all come to
& this is the thing
we all fight
& if we are lucky
enough to lose,
our lives
become beautiful
with mystery
again

& I sat there silent
because that is not
something
that can be said

-Brian Andreas