BrainDrain

Who knew that being unemployed would be so full of busyness? I've been able to do a lot of things during this jobless stint that have been nice and relaxing, and I've also finally - FINALLY! - been able to keep some of the fish I've caught down at the coast!

For posterity, the record, and the library of congress (Echelon, I know you're watching this), I wanted to post pictures of my latest fishing trip over Labor Day week to show you the majesty - nay, the ENORMITY - of my success! Talk about going from zero to hero...

Let me just whet your appetite:

Check out some more pics after the jump! Oh, and click on any of the pics to be taken to the Flickr photo pages where you can see even more of my shots from the trip. It was so exciting for me!

"Childhood is over the moment you know you're gonna die."

I'm not sure why this line from The Crow has stuck with me all this time - perhaps because a band that I used to listen to featured it prominently in their sample selection. Recently it has bubbled up to the surface of my thoughts but in a slightly different form. I think my own permutation of this line is more along the lines of "Adulthood sets in the moment you realize you can't be anything you want to be."

I think that some of my thought processes on this topic will sound similar to the previous entry regarding celebrity because I think that they are very similar; for many, celebrity (or its slightly ne'er-do-well cousin, notoriety) is the ultimate goal because it sets one apart from the rest of society or one's peers. I don't think people consciously wish for it but I do think that American children grow up being told that they are special and that they can be anything that they want to be. But that simply is not true and there comes a harsh reckoning in the mind once that realization sets in.

Recycling some old tech manuals at Half Price Books the other day allowed me to pick up a used copy of Kat Von D's latest book, "The Tattoo Chronicles". Over the past few years, I've really gotten into tattoo art (although I still do not have a single tat on my body) and I've also enjoyed watching some of TLC's shows on the subject. Kat Von D is the owner of High Voltage Tattoo and the star of TLC's LA Ink. Thanks to her and the crew from Miami Ink, tattoos have become much more mainstream and have introduced the idea of celebrity tattoo artists.

Kat's first book, "High Voltage Tattoo", was mainly a picture book which highlighted some of the more important stories from the show to that point, and was a good collection of Kat's artwork. "The Tattoo Chronicles", while similar to the previous book (glossy, photo-laden pages), is mainly based on some of the journals that Kat kept for a year - primarily the year that she was dating Motley Crue's Nikki Sixx.

I've found this book to be fascinating primarily for the fact that within the journal entries about certain tattoos and customers, a picture starts to emerge of a person who has become enormously famous doing something that she loves to do, and yet that very fame is taking a huge toll on her life, love, and the thing which she holds so dear. One of the stories that stuck with me regards a time when "fans" of the show in the shop booed Kat when she wouldn't drop the tattoo work she was doing to take a picture with a fan. This ended up causing her to dread being out in the front of her own shop, and instead she decided to do a lot of her work in her back office where she could hide from all the non-tattoo junk out front.

Being a musician with a passion that I will exercise whenever given the chance, this sort of serves as a little bit of a wake-up call to be careful about wishing for the life of the rock star, because once you become known, it's very difficult to stay you. There are always those who can stay true to themselves and their art (whatever it may be), but I submit that they are the rare exception to the rule; the entertainment industry is littered with the wreckage of people who became famous for one thing and lost sight of that which made them famous. It's hard to maintain your artistic vision and/or edge once you become beholden to a public that demands that your life revolve around them rather than the passion that made you famous. Reading Kat's journal entries is really kind of sad because it depicts someone who's in love with something being driven further and further away from that thing by the trappings of fame and celebrity, and the pain in that becomes evident the further in the reader gets.

Be careful what you wish for. If that wish is for fame, celebrity, or notoriety, you may soon find that you are no longer able to do that which you love because your time will be taken up with a public that will never, ever be satisfied with what you give them. Whatever you do, think about what you want that to become and stick to that. If you become famous, great! if you languish in obscurity, great! Being true to yourself and your art and keeping that a priority in your life will always be preferable to celebrity and notoriety in the long run. It seems like everything I read from celebrities, when they're being honest, would bear that out. Don't get swept up in what the media displays as celebrity, because the life you see is only 10% of reality, and it seems like 90% of what you do see is fabricated or massaged in some way to make it look as appealing as possible.

We need to get over our fascination with celebrity. I needed this reminder. I want to get our music out to as many people as possible, and it seems like being famous will do that, but not at the cost of forsaking songs I believe in for that of writing something meaningless that has no substance just for the sole purpose of being recognized or receiving some perks.

While watching an old episode of Law & Order which was aired during the height of the gay marriage debate, the final scenes show Jack McCoy arguing that spousal privilege was not meant to apply to gay couples "because the founding fathers never conceived of marriage consisting of anything other than a union between a man and a woman."

I've been thinking a lot about this because we (especially those in the church) are always trotting out "what the founding fathers meant" when we're trying to justify or modify our country's founding documents and tenets. The thought occurred to me that homosexuality in social settings is not a new thing; if it was written about in the Bible, then that means that same-sex relationships are part of the human experience, and I think it's fairly safe to assume that gay couples two thousand years ago wanted to be treated as equal to hetero couples just like today. So we can assume that while not perhaps socially acceptable at the time of the founding of the country, homosexuality was certainly occurring. Doesn't it make sense that if the founding fathers only meant heterosexual marriages (or only the possibility thereof) that they would have called out those restrictions?

One of the biggest challenges in my Christian experience has been unlearning all the "what Jesus really meant when He said..." interpretations that I've been taught over the years and instead just reading what the words actually say and taking them as literally as possible. If I believe what the Bible says, then the Spirit of God living inside me will correctly interpret what God meant.

Shouldn't the same apply to the law? I can only assume that the founding fathers knew that their documents would stand for the long term as the foundation of a new nation, and it doesn't make sense to me that they didn't think to make their documentation as specific as possible for future scenarios. If they left some statement general or ambiguous, I'd think that they left it so in order to allow a continuously evolving society to maintain order using that document in an ever-changing cultural landscape. Additionally, I think it takes a large amount of hubris - whether in a legal, national, or biblical context - to assume or speak for what anyone "really meant" when they wrote something if they are not personally around to ask in regards to their intentions.

I'm not telling you what to think about gay marriage, abortion, immigration, or whatever other legal or spiritual ambiguities get your panties in a twist these days. I'm just asking you to really think based on what the words actually say on their own instead of assuming the intent or (worse yet) projecting your own bias on what someone else meant if they didn't explicitly spell it out. I believe that is a dangerous place to be.

So they don't get lost, here are the links I'm going to be referring to in this post:

Galveston Urban Ministries (GUM)
Tim & Jenn Schwartz's blog

"Those who oppress the poor insult their Maker, but helping the poor honors him." - Prov 14:31 (NLT)

I came across that verse in my Twitter stream the day I returned from Galveston, and that pretty much sums up what I was doing there. Whatever I thought the trip was going to be, whatever I wanted it to be, and whatever it wasn't, the basic reason that we were down there is to help enable some of our brethren to help those who can't help themselves by providing them with a place that they can conduct classes and education to empower people who have been marginalized by society.

For my regular readers who don't know, I've just returned from a weekend in Galveston doing some work to help rebuild the community in the wake of Hurricane Ike 2.5 years ago. This was my fifth trek to Galveston and the third trip that was spent working with Tim & Jenn Schwartz. Previously we've done some work with them in the Hispanic church that Tim pastors, Primera Iglesia Bautista. However, the work there seems mostly done and Tim has begun working with Galveston Urban Ministries to build a community center to engage, educate, and empower the community. Please visit the links above to learn more about GUM and also about Tim, Jenn, and their beautiful baby daughter, Emma. There's more information about Galveston in general on the Schwartz's website.

The trip was challenging for me from the get-go; there was pretty much nothing I felt confident in or sure of when I got in the truck to go down there with our crew. Everything from the length of the trip to what we would be doing there had changed multiple times and everything was pretty much in flux. I've been on mission trips before, so I know that the motto of Semper Gumby ("Always Flexible") is the order of the day, but still - it's really disconcerting to me to not have any idea on what's going to happen.

I'm not going to bore you with the daily play by play: the short of it is that we framed out an office, hung drywall, and started taping & floating the drywall in the newly acquired GUM center. Some of the ladies and kids sorted through a room full of donated school supplies and put together back-to-school backpacks to hand out in the community. We did some other things as well, but that was the meat of it. Our main objective was to help GUM be ready to open their doors for their first phase of community interaction in August, just in time for school. They own a building on the corner (a former washateria) and the house next to it, so our goal was to get the front half of the building done to allow other crews to finish it out so that GUM can start after-school programs in the center and the house next door when the school year starts.

A lot has changed in Galveston since I was there last year. Federal money has finally started to come in and it sounds like there will be a good number of HUD houses built within the next year. The volunteer rebuilding efforts seem to be winding down, but there is still community rebuilding to be done. The faces of the communities are not the same as they were 3 years ago before Ike hit; some people left and never came back, others moved in to the spaces that were left. But while those vacant houses are being filled slowly but surely, the new communities that have emerged are not being cared for and are dealing with racial, ideological, and financial fragmentation.

That's why GUM's mission is so important. They're faith-based, so they will talk about Christ and their motivations to anyone who asks, but they're also about serving the community in whatever way it is needed most, regardless of whether or not someone accepts their faith. The first words out of Jesus' mouth were usually not, "believe in me first and then I will help you"; He helped people first and then as a result, they often believed in Him. GUM is following that same example by doing what Christ did by not imposing artificial restrictions or conditions on helping. My prayer for them is that as they exemplify Christ in the way that they respond to the people of the community - the children, the adults, and those who are skeptical of their motivations - that people would ask why they're doing this so that they get an opportunity to talk about Jesus.

Take a look at Prov. 14:31 again - it doesn't say, "those saving the poor honors him", it says "those helping the poor honors him." We went in a shepherding capacity this time, not to directly interact with the people (although we were prepared to), but to provide support to those who will be interacting with them in the future by offering our time, sweat, knowledge, and muscles to make ready a place where the GUM folks can use their gifts to reflect Christ. So many times we make "missions trips" solely about sharing Christ and yet sometimes it's more missional merely to help someone who is worse off than you instead of trying to share the gospel with them when they're not ready to hear it. Serve first and the spiritual conversations will follow, I guarantee it (and so does the Bible).

David Platt says in Radical that a "calling from God is not where to go, because we're commanded to go. A calling is where we stop and how long we stay." One of those personal challenges that I mentioned earlier was that there were only three of us from my singles group at church that went on a 3-day trip to help someone else. If we as Christians were doing what God commanded us to do, we should have had so many people interested in going that we had to turn people away. Imagine how much more we could have gotten done if we had ten or fifteen more young, able-bodied people on the trip, even in just three days! We might have been able to get another 30-40% of the building ready for others to follow through. But we just had six. That, to me, was immensely frustrating.

You'll hear the best excuses when you ask someone if they're going on a missions trip. But from this point forward, the only reason that I will accept for someone not going on a trip is that they're not going on this trip because they're really praying about going on that trip. Just because you don't feel "called" to go somewhere when you have the ability to go there is no excuse not to go, especially if you're not going anywhere else either. You've already been commanded to go, but you won't ever hear the call of where to stay if you're not going out and following through on the initial command. A lot of us have been singing a new worship song that says "where you go, I'll go; where you stay, I'll stay; where you live, I'll live; I will follow you." Is that true?

Paige Patterson said at GHBC one Sunday, "there are two kinds of Christians: those who are on mission, and those who are outside the will of God." I firmly believe that to be true. Honestly, which one are you?

Probably the hugest gap in my ability to interact with the opposite sex is my failure to learn how to just go up to a woman I find attractive and say hello in any context. Whether this is a by-product of my religious upbringing, poor self-esteem, fear of rejection, or (more likely) my penchant for geekiness in high school, I never learned the formative skills of how to approach a woman that I don't know in a bar or whatnot and strike up a conversation. When it comes to looking for cues and other subtleties, I'm dumb as a post.

So, ladies, this is where I could use your help - if you're at the pool by yourself, getting some sun or dipping in the pool now and then, is it ever appropriate or desired for a random dude to come up to you and strike up a conversation, even if it's a "hello, I'm {name}...what's yours"? Perhaps further, how would you indicate in that setting that you're open to conversation, or at least an attempt?

I ask because this was the situation I found myself in yesterday at the pool. An attractive young woman was there by herself getting some sun and dips in the pool when I got there. She was wearing sunglasses so I could never tell where she was looking and thus I can't say she was looking at me or giving me any indication that she necessarily wanted anyone to come talk to her. It's not like she swam past me a couple of times with that "hey, look at me swim" look (and don't tell me you don't have one of those, ladies - I know you do). On the other hand, she wasn't reading a magazine or listening to an iPod, so there wasn't really anything to interrupt in starting up a conversation other than her personal inner peace.

And yet, I didn't strike up a conversation. There aren't many times when I like to be bothered if I'm doing something, and one of my greatest fears is being the guy who interrupts someone to initiate a conversation that they don't want. My uncle was famous for this (to the embarrassment of both my cousins and me when I was with him), but he was also adept at making friends with people. I don't want to miss out on opportunities to meet new people, especially if that new person is a cute girl, but I also recognize that I'm no Brad Pitt/Hugh Jackman/Russell Crow/insert hunk-of-the-month here. Call it fear of rejection, but I don't want to be the guy that is blocking your sun and asking questions that you're not interested in answering because you just want to be left alone.

So I ask you again, ladies, to help me and all the other boys out there, when you're out somewhere alone - be it the pool, a coffee shop, at the park, whatever - what are the green flags that say "hey, come talk to me" and the red flags that say "stay away from me, sucka, or I'll taze you"? Aside from a bar or place where the express purpose is to "hook up", when is it appropriate for a dude to come up and say hello?

And fellers who are more adept at this than I (which ain't hard), what do you look for when you decide to go up to that woman across the pool and introduce yourself?

On my way home from Panera today, some nutjob pulled out in front of me, and the dumbass just stuck his arm out and waved at me as I stomped on my brakes so as not to merge our automobiles into one chunk of twisted metal. I really hate this situation because there's nothing that can be done. It makes me feel so impotent. Why? Well here's why.

On the one hand, what do you do? The cars are in motion and it's not like you can tell the offender off right then and there. I could flip him the bird and give him angry faces (which I really wanted to do), or I can try to make him feel really bad by replying with as sarcastic looking of a face as I can muster and a thumbs-up to signify, "hey, buddy! A-1 job there, making me slam on my brakes like that!". Thing is, it doesn't do any good. I'm mad, they're oblivious, and there's no recompense. I wouldn't even know what recompense there could possibly be, other than some sort of assurance that this experience would cause them never to do it to anyone else again. Especially me. Impotent rage.

On the other hand, I don't want to just smile a knowing smile and mouth the words, "it's okay", because it is most definitely not okay. Just because you didn't have a car in the country you came from or you're new to driving or whatever other excuse you can offer doesn't mean that it's okay to drive like an idiot. This is how accidents happen. This is how people die. A simple wave out the window to acknowledge how stupid you just were is not enough. We were not on waving terms before you pulled out in front of me, you moron, and we're certainly not now that you've just cut me off.

And by the way, if you DO end up cutting someone off coming out of a parking lot, you'd damn well better stomp on the accelerator and get up to speed as soon as possible rather than driving the same speed you were driving in the parking lot. Don't continue to make the mistake worse by drawing it out and causing even more delay.

But, like I said before, there's no recompense to mitigate the situation. I can only hope and pray that this person learns their lesson and doesn't do it again. My frustration got the better of me and I felt like venting it here and you know what? It helps to do so.

What do you do when someone does something boneheaded right in front of you that causes you to have to react decisively and then just throws the little "oopsie" wave at you? I'm curious to know if my "super thumbs-up of venomous sarcasm" is the best I can hope for or if there's something else out there that I can wield like a hammer for my impotent rage and driver angst. Let's hear it!

I ain't got no job...again. And, as irony would have it (at least I think it's irony - unless it's Alaniss Morisette's version of irony, which isn't irony at all), it sounds like the manager of this Panera Bread that I currently find myself in is interviewing prospective Panerians to fill the roster at the front register. I'm predominantly listening to TRON Legacy: Reconfigured on the iPod, but in between getting up to throw my trash away and my subsequent desire to eavesdrop, I gather that this is what's going on. It is amusing to hear high school kids interviewing for jobs.

Anyhoo, at some point I got involved with following Max Dubinsky, a feller who's life consists of blogging from coffee shop to coffee shop, traveling America and relying on the goodness of strangers for daily life. Much like Max, I'm unemployed; un-much like Max, I still have a home and some resources from which to draw on. I will admit, when I first started following Max on his blog and on Twitter (@maxdubinsky), I thought that the blogging life would be pretty interesting and it would be really cool to do on a daily basis. There's an undeniable romance to living the life of a "techno-hobo" - someone who has plenty of personal electronics (laptop, cell phone, etc.) but no real place to call home, which is exacerbated by my recent discovery of Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern's shows on Travel Channel.

But it's not glamorous. I think I find it very isolating. Sure there's potential to meet a lot of interesting people and have interesting conversations, but there's no potential to really develop a relationship. It seems that this would also be much more difficult to do in America, where everyone who's not with someone at a coffee shop is surrounded by their own isolating bubble of personal electronics that makes those meetings far less possible. I'm doing it right now, in fact - the iPod is on and I'm sitting here hunched over my laptop, impervious to any external stimuli unless I choose to look up and around.

Now I imagine what it would be like if I knew that I had nowhere to go after my time in this place is done or I got bored of it, or if that place I had to go was someone else's house who I barely know. Or, in the case of a travel show host, back to yet another nice-but-random hotel in a city with which I am unfamiliar. I think that would suck. A lot. No matter where you go, it's always nice to be able to come back to somewhere where there are people who know you, and who you know. It's imperative, I think. Tangentially, it just serves to drive the plight of the homeless even deeper down into my heart, I think, because many times their only distraction from this lack is that of illicit substances.

So I've decided that this time during my jobless stint, I'm going to do stuff. Sure there are some things that I need to get done during the week because it's easier - like recycling some old electronics and books - but there are also a lot of things that this town has to offer that I've never done. There are relationships to be built in doing those things, and I aim to find them. I'm going to spend some time just walking around downtown again for a day and see what I can see and discover in a city that I've lived in for eleven years. Like Ferris Beuller once said, "There's a lot going on in life and if you don't stop and take a look around every once in a while, you could miss it."

I don't plan to miss it. This post has been all over the place in my mind, and it didn't turn out anything like I thought it was going to. As I've typed it out, I think that the following conclusion has bubbled to the surface of my consciousness: having a job is good and important, but it doesn't define me as a person. When I'm presented with an opportunity to take some time and enjoy life due to the goodness that God has bestowed upon me, I should take it. The balance comes in making sure that I'm not greedy with it, or lazy with it, but that I use it to become a better me - more like the me that God created me to be than the one society says that I should be.

Many a woman has been confused and confounded by a certain major segment of "guy talk" - that of speaking largely in movie/television quotes. They're left wondering why there is a constant back-and-forth of quote trading when men converse together. So why do men do so much quoting of external sources in casual conversation? I won't necessarily claim to speak for my entire gender, but I do feel that my reasons outlined below will resonate with most of my bros and will, in large part, apply to a significant portion of the male population (whether they realize it or not). Menfolk, please feel free to add to/detract from/correct my statements in the comments section if you have anything to add to help clear this up for our lady friends.

I think the incessant movie quotes serve the following functions in male conversation:

These may not be all the niches in the male psyche that quotes fill, but I think that to me (or at least in my personal experience) these are the main reasons I tend to speak in quotes when I sat down to think about it. Some of the niches are intertwined and depend on one another in order to "work", and those that miss the references are left on the outside and wondering what in the world people are talking about.

The thing that I'm starting to see is that this particular dialect of communicating is really only effective primarily amongst males. There are always exceptions to this rule, of course, but by and large I believe that most women don't speak this dialect and therefore do not understand it. I believe that this is a side effect of the fact that men watch action and comedy flicks and women watch chick flicks. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but neither gender for the most part really understands nor is interested in the types of movies that the other prefers.

There are studies out there that talk about how many more words women will use in conversation versus men, and it's quite possible that the movie quote is a man's way of gaining additional words to express thoughts - words that have already been used in a particular situation which require only the mental exercise of recall as opposed to that of the more difficult act of formulation.

Incidentally, from my observations I think that women tend to do it as well, or at least more often than they realize - it just so happens to be song lyrics instead of movie or television quotes.

Anyway, what do you think? Men, did I adequately represent the reasoning here?

I had the opportunity this weekend to head out and give some food and water to some of the people living on the street around GHBC. A couple of us headed out after service to take some hot pizza, chips, and waters to anyone we could find. We spent a couple of hours out there just talking with people and hoping to help them in some small way. All in all, we ended up meeting eight individuals that have no place to live and are just trying to survive in any way they can.

You want to find God? He might be in that country-club megachurch that you attend, but I'm betting that He's actually out on the streets and in the prisons with people that are in positions to realize that without His protection, they are dead. Literally dead. You find angry people out there, but they all recognize God when they see Him because He's the only one they have to depend on.

The most surprising thing to me while talking with the people is the sense of optimism or normalcy that they exhibited. They're just trying to survive like everybody else; it just so happens that their survival depends on the generosity of others rather than receiving a paycheck from The Man. While they all had heartbreaking stories of either how they came to be out there or why they were still there, not a one of them seemed to blame society or claim the victim mentality. Would they change things? In a heartbeat. But they don't feel that the world owes them anything other than the chance to survive.

Spend time talking - really talking - with some of these folks. Shake their hands. Pray with them. Treat them like people, because all too often they are not treated like people. You want to make a difference in a homeless person's life? Ask them their name, shake their hand, and just talk to them for a while. If you can help them out with something they need (which isn't always money), do so. But just show them that while the government may ignore them, or the military might ignore them, or while society in general might ignore them, that there are people out there - especially those of us who claim to follow Christ - that recognize that "religion that God considers worthy is this: care for the widows, [the poor] and orphans, and do not be corrupted by the world."

A friend and I are going back out there today to meet up with a group of five people that we met under a bridge who needed some items that they either couldn't afford or couldn't find. Imagine having some special needs - maybe you're a larger-sized person and can't find clothes at Goodwill or Salvation Army; maybe you're diabetic; maybe you're going deaf from being on an artillery squad in the military. Now imagine that you have no money, no place to live, and need some shirts but can't find anything larger than size Large. Or you need something on which to cook your food when you can get it. Or you're waiting for the government to pay you the disability benefits that they owe you so that you can get off the streets.

Oh, and you can't get a job, because if you get a job, then you're ineligible for any assistance from any government agency, even if that money isn't enough to live on. And, depending on the nature of your mistakes which got you out on the streets to begin with, that might also deny you the opportunity for jobs or assistance as well even if you've been clean for years.

Think about that the next time you see someone on the street corner. They could be an undercover cop; they could be someone who wants to be out there for some reason; or they could be someone who just got caught at the wrong place at the wrong time and will do anything for a way back to even a basic lifestyle where there's four walls and some sort of security instead of trying to go to sleep to the roar of traffic underneath a bridge somewhere.

I didn't get everyone's names, but I do know Stepan, Matt, Jennifer, Scott, "Houston" (Gary), Chris, Byron, and Paul. If you're the praying sort, these are a few folks that could use some prayer for daily survival.

"Anything that you do unto the least of these, you are doing for Me."