"it's been a while." -staind


first of all, how cool are you if you can get away with naming your band staind without the "e", act all mopey and disturbed, sell millions of records, make tons of cash, and then be nowhere close to the radar a few years later? staind cool is how cool. i bet that guy wishes he never was friends with fred durst. you know? the frontman for that also now forgotten but sold tons of records and made bunches of cash band limp bizkit? god, i loved me some limp bizkit. went to a limp bizkit concert with my cousin richy. loved it!!! it was the darkest, dankiest pit of a club i have ever been in, but they rocked the motherscratchin' house that night. oh, wes borland and your crazy make-up...

anywho...i digress.

second of all, we are moved. no, we are nowhere close to "settled". the boxes are not all "unpacked". and no, we do not yet have dining room chairs to go along with our dining room table. things could be worse. we could still be crammed into ascot place. but we aren't. we are free from those handcuffs dammit! the move went extraordinarily smooth (for us) this time around. no truck malfunctions. no bad weather. the sun even stayed behind the clouds for us for the first half of the day. sure, we tried to kill heath, but the doctors at the er assured him he was not having a heart attack, and so we move on. i feel like i am about to fall back into messenger mode, but the move would not have been so event free had it not been for some amazing friends and family. along with the aforementioned heath (who was entirely helpful before his body malfunctioned), who chickened out on us due to something he called "chest pains", there was the always there kiker. what would we do without kiker? well, we would have to pay three people for everything that kiker ends up doing for us on moving day. i don't know the official count, but kiker vila has moved me now, like, five or six times in as many years and has never complained. not once. he's the fucking man. there was andy. andy took time away from pissing off the good people of hopewell baptist church to come lend a serious hand and sense of humor. who knew so much laughing would ensue on the way to making our backs and forearms and fingertips so incredibly sore. there was joseph. pulled into duty yet again because of the unfortunate reality that his sisters move way too much. even sick and with something he called "homework" and a "back to school bash" on his mind, he put in a half day. there was my dad. i know. readers of this nonsense i call a blog just breathed a collective "what the fuck?", but it's true. dad and i seem to somehow not be able to escape the fact that we are related, no matter how hard we try. maybe we are trying to turn over a new leaf again. more on this later, but for the day, he was a trooper and in it 'til the bloody (or at least sweaty end). and then of course, there was marie. i have to say, if i had to be trapped in a life foxhole, i could be trapped with a much worse and less reliable life foxhole partner than marie. the children crump, hargraves and florence must and do know how lucky they are to have a mother as invested and loving as she. i am only lucky to play a role on the periphery of their family play. needless to say, the bitter or bloody or sweaty end to this, our move has not reared its head yet to marie. so thanks to amazing friends and amazing family, our moving day has come and gone and we are home.

wait a second. hannah is correcting me.

"not home, daddy. we are in our new house."

oh yeah.

according to blogs, livejournals and the sort, we are all experts.


after revisiting the matrix trilogy a couple of weeks ago, i've come to this conclusion. there is no super-hero...ever...that ranks as high on the bad-ass-ometer as neo (my friend cookie will probably disagree). i had forgotten how goosebump inducing the second and third movies were to watch. to watch neo inside the matrix, bending the rules of that universe because he understood that, in that universe, there were only self-induced rules. rules that most plugged in to the matrix were happy to live by, but rules still that could be circumvented if one allowed his or her mind to drive around the speedbumps. what a wonderful metaphor for the world we live in today. if only i could manipulate this world like neo could manipulate the matrix...

if only i could fly, or be stronger or download kung-fu without putting in the years of training...

of course, that's why we have the movies. that's why we have blogs...

to continue the thought down matrix lane, here we are the trainmen and women. here we make the rules. but do we? a friend of mine wrote in his own blog this week about how we still need to understand the consequences of what we write. about how eyes that may happen across our worlds may not understand where we/i are coming from. and therefore we/i should temper our thoughts if we are unwilling to sleep in the bed of words that we make.

i suppose i agree with his sentiment, but still, i lay terribly unhappy with the thought. i can choose to let my thoughts go and share an honesty with those that read my thoughts that i might not be able to articulate out loud. but if i let my thoughts run without a governor, i have to worry about who i might upset, who i might offend, who may feel like i am talking about them. or i can choose to be so vague that when i look back a week removed from writing, even i don't remember what the hell i was talking about.

i don't like the vague idea. what's the point? i still harbor the idea that hannah may one day read my thoughts, and i want her to know what was going on without having to decipher my code to get the point. i've never been one, though, to intentionally try and hurt, anger, or confuse anyone either. i've wanted to, but even here, i guess i have already censored myself. that's too bad.

so i am not even the trainman here. and i am nowhere close to being neo. not in this "matrix" and definitely not in the real world. because i am chickenshit. that's too bad too.

what's worse? seeing the light and being too scared to walk towards it? or not seeing it at all?

i don't know.

far be it from me to be vitriolic...
(hannah and me...part thirteen)

ed. note - i wasn't at church on sunday, and for once, this has nothing to do with humc.

...but there is just too much sticking in my crawl at the moment not to be. firstly, and i am not going to drop any names here, but boy is it a lot easier to preach a sermon than live it. and this is something that i have struggled with, myself, and will continue to struggle with for the length of time that i continue leaving "messages" here or living messages in my daily life. not one time when i have stood in front of a group of students or a small church plant congregation or a handful of employees did i not struggle with the words coming out of my mouth matching up with the character i displayed outside of the "church" environment. sometimes they did. sometimes they do. sometimes they don't. but here's the part the rubs me the wrong way. you are not above accountability just because your feeling of being "called by god" has been affirmed by some denomination's board of ministry or equivalent. you are not above being called on the carpet when someone disagrees with you or your approach. you are not above being wrong. you are not a more credible commentator on society because your occuptation requires you to "preach" from a pulpit. you are not any more observant or worldly or wise. and if you believe or misunderstand otherwise, you need better friends. friends that will tell you when you are wrong or misguided. friends that will make you accountable. or a wife. or a child. you need to back up off this idea that your "sacrifice" is worth a lifetime of moral immunity. moving on...

hannah, apart from the ambiguous rant above, today has been a good day. your room is almost ready for you. yes, we'll have to do something about those shelves, but your carpet is clean, your room is a beautiful purple fit for a queen, and we are less than two weeks away from being in our new house. how fun.

hannah's been an interesting character the last month or so. her memory is striking and the way she is putting together sentences is just a tad scary. her mom found herself counting the words to one of her run-on's a few days ago and i wondered to myself when the last time was that i used eleven words in a sentence that i didn't type. she makes no qualms anymore (most of the time) about cleaning up. she loves to help with everything. instead of everything being completely instinctual and reactionary, you can literally see her understanding and processsing her actions now. it truly is amazing how far she's come as a little person while maintaining all her cuteness that she's had since christmas day 2003. it's weird to think back on my own first memories and know that the house we are about to move into will be the one she remembers as her first. i remember my first house and it's such a good memory. not for any sort of romantic reason such as my parents still being together. more that it's one of my first. first memories are very special i think. you don't have very many and they are all over the map. i can count on one hand how many true memories i have from the age of 4 through 8 or 9. that's a lot of years and days and time with not a lot of recall. but one that i will always carry is the picture in my head of my first house.

you and your future brother or sister (god-willing), hannah, were very much in mind when your mommy and i chose this house for your mental scrapbook. i hope you like the purple and your puppy and your big back yard. i hope you remember how much love filled the walls of your first house as soon as we stepped in it as a family.

it makes me sad to think of all the blowhards, the teachers, and the preachers that will fill your mind up with all sorts of garbage about the world and what you should or shoudn't do to fit in, how you come to understand right from wrong, how you deal with the fact that you were "born crappy" and in need of some sort of enlightenment. don't let them bother you too much, though. your mom and dad have a pretty good grasp on things. we'll make fun of all the noisemakers around our dinner table and figure out ways to make them take themselves less seriously.

we're moving in less than three weeks!
but, wait!!! we haven't packed.


the worst part of moving is, naturally, the whole moving part. the entire process is just a labor (and this is coming from someone that hardly touched a box until it was ready to be lifted in our last move). the worst part may be the anticipation of putting things into boxes and the house being a wreck for a couple of weeks. ask anyone that knows a little about me and they will tell you i am not a big fan of messes. the anticipation of putting things in boxes combined with the thought of a two to three week mess may in fact be part of my headache today. i woke up and realized today was august 1st. our moving day is august 19. yikes!!! not one box is ready to go. i think i am even more anxious because my role in the move will be considerably larger this go-round. by move time last year, i was already in huntsville and sarah and marie did all the packing. this time, sarah might as well be in huntsville for as much as she has on her plate, and so i feel like it's my time to step up.

but step up how? i don't know how to do this. as many times as i have moved, i don't know if i've ever really packed. someone has always packed for me. that doesn't seem fair, but it's true. it's all about that first box i think. like conquering any fear, it's that first step that you have to take before you can move past it. getting hit by a baseball in the batter's box. the first rollercoaster with a loop. a first kiss. long division. eating tomatoes. it's all about that first step. you take it, you know you can do it. and so you do it. and so it's all about that first box. there are boxes behind me right now as i type. i could take one of the books off the desk and put it in a box.

but what would sarah say? that might be the wrong box. i might do it wrong. stack it wrong. that might be the one book that's supposed to go on top. or not in at all. maybe it's not our book. i could pack up something else. yeah, something else. like hannah's toys that are constantly making such a "mess" of the place. but we might not be packing that toy. or at least, not in this box. what do i do? i will wait. yeah, i will wait. for instruction. that will be good. for me. for now. it's only august 1st. we have three weeks. who needs to start now?

i think i'll go play ncaa.