Are you a dreamer?

I've heard that everyone dreams at night, but not everyone remembers their dreams. Well, I remember most of my dreams. Like last night; our youth group was abducted by a cult from outer space [though not aliens] and we were being held hostage. I was doing covert ops, exploring the building and developing strategy, etc. I woke up in the middle of it, tossed and turned for a bit, then when back to sleep and returned to the dream. Earlier this week I had a dream that I had accidently killed a mobster's brother, and was groveling at his feet for him to not kill me. In the morning I thought about it and actually turned it into kind of a cool plot for a movie.

What gets really weird is that I still remember dreams that I had when I was really young. I'm talking about dreams from when I was in elementary school. I can only remember a few details right now, but sometimes I will remember the entire dreams out of nowhere. All of a sudden I'll remember a dream I had about a dirtbike and a middle school [not mine though], or the werewolf driving the semi [thanks to Teen Wolf], and various others. It's kind of weird what hides in the recesses of my mind; what I remember and what I don't remember. I've never had reoccurring dreams, but sometimes I'll be in a dream and it will feel really familiar, as though I've had other dreams in the same setting. Odd. Best dream-experience ever: I was running away from something in the desert, when I come to a cliff and I fall off. Upon hitting the ground I wake up and realize that I've rolled right off my bed [thankful only a foot or two off the ground]. That was pretty sweet. Any crazy dreams from anyone else? you have my love.

Goals, etc.

Have you ever woke up and suddenly realized that you haven't blogged in a week and a half? Yeah, sorry. Anymore my weeks slip by slowly and hastily, at the same time. It's a bizarre phenomena, but I can attest to its actuality. In truth I merely have been losing myself in a narrative that is not my own, whether on film or in print, and when I'm not lost in narrative I'm immersing myself in work or music or sleep. It isn't healthy, but I get by, and that's all I'm trying to do right now. Yeah, I'm wearing my heart on my blog's sleeve, but since the people who read this are mostly my friends I feel that I can afford that privilege.

I resonate with the Brawl, in that I have no goals right now, and for me it seems to be increasingly conducive to a life of apathy. So for the time being I sit back and wait for something to happen, hoping that it will breathe life into this life of mine. I'd like to be proactive, but I just don't know what I would do.

[I stopped writing for a few minutes there to think about where I was going with this post, fyi.]

My goals used to be about finishing school, finding a job, paying off school loans [still working on that one], but now, like I said, I have none. According to my favorite prof, Metzger [not Bruce], the chief end of man is to "love God and the byproduct of that loving relationship will be the glorification of God." Is that to be my goal? If so, how am I to love God when I don't feel like it? What is the answer?

In my case, the answer is fairly simple. It's friends, people whom I trust, people who will keep me on the path, and will remind me of a great and loving God who cares for us and has created us with the ability to relate to one another. There are too few of these friends in my [immediate] life right now, and it scares me a bit. Tomorrow I'll embark on a expedition to alleviate that. We'll see how it goes. When I think about it, it makes an incredible amount of sense that I felt closest to God when I was living in 104. I can't duplicate that experience, but I don't want to live in its shadow any longer [though I can never forget or deny what it means to me]. Here's to a new day of goals, ends, means, community, a lack of buzz words and friends. My apologies for the lack of coherency and perhaps the raising of worries, I had to write what I had to write. you have my love.

There is no [buried] treasure

As I was looking out the windows of our building down upon the numerous parking ramps, with their large piles of snow, I remembered one of my fondest winter pastimes: building snow forts. Less than a block away from my house there is a large parking lot that we used for many things; riding bikes, street hockey, throwing stuff and in the winter, when they piled all the snow in the corner in huge mounds, we would hollow them out into our own palaces. It begins with a plan, you can't just start digging. You have to find the right pile, decide where the entrance should go, and then the escape tunnel, and of course the lookout tower. We would use my orange sled as a dump truck of sorts, using the snow from the inside to fortify the outside. You had to be careful not to make the roof too thin, or too thick. There was no intention of using this fort in a snowball fight or anything of the like, it was merely an activity to fill up our winter weekends and develop our creative and hopeful architective minds [we all wanted to be architects back then, didn't you?]. This wasn't just a winter activity, year round we built forts out of all types of building materials, but snow forts were definitely my favorite. An added bonus was taking hot cocoa breaks and standing on a register to warm our feet. It was fun, and as I stood up in our building I sort of wished that I was outside building a fort.

In other news, I was using Microsoft Word to work on my resume and a cover letter and became increasingly frustrated in Word's automatic formatting. "No thank you, I didn't want it spaced like that. Oh, you're going to move it back, are you? Well, backspace, backspace, backspace. Just stop, stop moving my tabs, damn you!" In exacting my revenge I sold my Microsoft stock. Take that! But seriously, the Dutch helped me get my resume in order for a nice job at a med. school, so take some time to pray that I might actually get this one. It'd be nice. And if you want to build a fort this weekend, call me, I'll get out the garden trowel and scout out snow piles. you have my love.

A fine winter's day

It's been quite the pleasant day today. Sleeping in and eating donuts by the fire was a great way to get going. Then on to frantically cheering on da Bears and jumping ferociously about the living room as Gould hits the game winner. As I barely pay attention to the AFC game, I realize that I have passed over the halfway mark in Les Miserables, only six hundred more pages to go. I've considered taking a break from it, but I don't know if I'd be able to pick it up again, so I forge on. I let my dog out for a run and stand in the gently falling snow, looking up the valley that our backyard is at the foot of. It's nice have this bit of rural in the suburbs. This snow is why I like winter so much. Out there it's so peaceful and so beautiful, pretty much the opposite of what traffic will be like tomorrow morning, but for now I can enjoy it. Well, back to reading. Do try to enjoy the snow while it lasts. you have my love.

It was

And so passes oh-six, a year that my heart cannot entirely understand. Yet. I'm just going to come out and say that oh-six was a damn tough year for me. It really started about eighteen months ago when I first moved to Portland, found myself dissatisfied with said choice, made the choice to move back to Iowa, finally settled in to life in PDX, moved back to Iowa, and my seven or so months here in Iowa have been partly cloudy, so to speak. Not without bright spots though. Oh-seven finds me in a similar place as oh-six, and oh-five, as well as oh-four. That place is the "what am I doing with my life?" stage. If you have any answers to that, do let me know. Anyway, here are some special moments of oh-six.

- Starting it off with some fellow Des Moinesians in Portland at a fancy Cuban restaurant.
- The Jeff Tweedy show. Awesome.
- Andy getting a synth and messing around with it.
- Seattle. Though it was miserable, I did read hundreds of pages of Brothers Karamazov there.
- Easter with friends. Discovering that I had friends outside of the Manlantis/Second Base bubble.
- Donuts. Yeah.
- Joseph Wood Hill Park.
- Reading so much that my eyes fell out [they're back in now].
- "Surviving" my first earthquake [the pleasure of which I was robbed thereof].
- The battle of Manlantis and Dave's brute force of death [poor little mice].
- Pacifism.
- "Running" up Mount Tabor.
- The wood-burning stove.
- Theology of liberation. Theology in general really. I like mine Trinitarian if you don't mind.
- Cinco de awesome.
- Being a grad-school dropout.
- Grad class retreat and sleeping on the beach. What a great time I had there. Sigh.
- Au revoir to Manlantis, PDX.
- Birds in the warehouse.
- Frustration with church.
- Working on the farm.
- The Drake House.
- The Envy Corps show. The PJWA show. The Anathallo show.
- Aces: the Grabher spectacular in the U.P. [and all that is found within].
- Running in Des Moines.
- iPod Morrison's wedding.
- Buying a car [Lucille four].
- The Ohio trip.
- The return of Walter Ray.
- My friendship with Katie, Chris and other ragamuffins de Ames.
- Fall retreat. Pledge groups. Thursday nights [TiVo].
- And an awesome weekend of New Years-ing.

It wasn't a bad year. But it sure wasn't easy either. I'm not one to ask for the easy [yoke] way out, but to be honest, I could use an easy year. Not lazy or apathetic, as I find myself slipping back in to [as well as cynicism; damn you cynicism!], but a year without mass amounts of confusion and slight amounts of despair. However, things will be changing this year, as they always do. I plan on hanging around with some different folks, some folks that will hopefully provide the community here in Iowa that I desperately want/need. With this will come somewhat of a change in my local church community. I hope to be able to leave my parents' house once again. This would be much easier with a better job, which is number one on my list of hopes for oh-seven. And hopefully this year will bring much writing, reading, working with films, and creativity upon creativity. And a healthier me. That's needed as well. And so, to celebrate the new year and the completion of the obligatory new year post, I will now go eat some ice cream. Here's to oh-seven. you have my love.

Wiped out

I'm just plain tired here folks, so my year-in-review will have to wait until next week. The past week has been filled with much laughter and fun and movies and not-so-much sleep. After sleeping on the floor for four nights and the couch for one more, I slept in my own bed last night. It was marvelous. I get one more night in it until our high schooler's conference in downtown DSM. It should be fun, but I would love to get some quality sleep time in. Will it happen? No, it will not. Oh well. Okay, back to work. you have my love.

Oh yeah, happy new year, and now to remember to write oh-seven on everything I sign.