the resolution most likely to fail
(hannah and caroline and me)
((part forty-five))


back on tuesday, january 25th, i played cocky with my new year's resolution number "4", which was to "run". i even called it a gimme, which was completely freaking ridiculous. it was a way of self-motivating myself to believe in something that, on that day, i didn't truly believe. yes, i had bought running shoes. yes, it seemed like a good idea at the time. yes, i felt, physically, i was ready to try something different than my tried and true "rocky training montage" that i've been doing three times a week since caroline kicked me out of my workout room and sent my bench and most of my free weights to some dude who i am sure has pawned them by now. i was ready to do something different, but i didn't know if i could.

as i've said to many friends and others that didn't care to hear in the last two months, i have never, read: NEVER IN MY LIFE, run when it wasn't attached to some stick or ball sport. and even when i did, i didn't like it. mind you, i didn't consider myself lazy. i didn't shortcut any of the conditioning that the activity i was participating in asked of me, but i didn't go any farther than i had to either. running seemed like a waste of time. i had a young man's metabolism burning away all the fat and poor diet choices i made for the greater portion of my adult life. i was fine with the exercise that i got, which in the last ten years had consisted of either my old free weight program, my newer rocky training montage, six months of softball one night a week and three months of basketball one night a week. not a whole lot, if any, of cardio mixed in. i wasn't unhealthy. i wasn't fat. i wasn't partaking in anything illicit, unless you considered the occasional kiker burger a drug (some do). i wasn't even close to optimizing the potential for health that my body still had in it, though. sending one kidney to the dump, you would've thought, would've triggered my awakening. i am sure to some degree, at least indirectly, it did. but it's not what kick-started the running program.

remembering back to november, i was probably heavier than i've ever been. around 184 pounds. i remember my primary doctor visit vividly, because, after i stepped on the scales, the kind young nurse said, "ooh. looks like someone ate a little extra birthday cake this year." in a minor win, i didn't call her any names, because she didn't call me one. in so many words, though, i heard, "ease up, fatty." my blood pressure registered a little higher than normal and the doctor decided to schedule another check-up for early february, just to make sure it wasn't something they were going to have to keep an eye on. i went back shortly after making out my resolutions. about two weeks and three or four runs into what i still wasn't sure was something i really wanted to do. i had gained three more pounds, maybe five. i wasn't sure, because the same kind nurse didn't make any comments and i couldn't make out her handwriting on the last number. my blood pressure checked out fine that day. so did my kidney function. i set up another visit six months down the road. rather than dwelling on the two small victories, i did what i do best. i found something negative. i called sarah and told her i was fat. it was settled. whether i liked it or not, i was going to run and i was going to be more healthy. i was also going to lose weight, which i am told to this afternoon, isn't always "healthy". we'll debate that on a later post.

i give a lot of credit to meg denson. she ran her first 5K in the freezing temperature of winter last year. in the beginning of my efforts toward the spring portion of the running resolution, i told myself on many days that if meg could do it, i could do it. i told her of my new goal. she said that she would like to get back in the habit of running herself. a couple weeks later, we talked and she mentioned the flapjack 5K in trussville on march 26th. as overwhelming as it seemed at the time, somewhere mid-february probably, we said we'd do it.

along the way, we picked up partners in crime. jacob sutton (jacob, playing the role of my expert and answerer of most of my questions, given his cross country experience in high school), katie gibson, amy gibson, and philip gibson all shared in the idea that running would be good for them. sometimes one of the above would run with me. sometimes, several. sometimes, it would just be me. i feel qualified enough having been doing this for two months now that i can safely say that doing it alone sucks. having a partner with me was and is exceptionally motivating, even if we weren't always training at the same pace. knowing that they would see me if i slowed or stopped running to walk for a bit was a shameful nudge towards pushing harder and pushing farther. as we got closer to the date, we put vaughn banks in a corner and dared him not to join our tribe. vaughn, being the freak he is, didn't have to train with us mortals. vaughn ran a 5K in 24 minutes in early march cold turkey. we badgered him about it, but, really, we were all just jealous that it seemed to come so easy. when vaughn started his move towards the flapjack, he immediately jumped to jacob sutton level training, and they left us behind to champion their efforts and proudly claim them part of our team, even if we didn't deserve them.

moral support came from several different places, too. meg's husband, reagan, was a proud cheerleader throughout the entire two months. sarah never once gave me a hard time about leaving on a sunday afternoon to go run for an hour and then come home to complain. amy and katie's mom championed our effort and was there (along with christina tidmore) to show her support at the race.

the flapjack 5K came on saturday, and all seven of us that participated (eight if you count nicole oglesby, repping for humc, herself) reached our goals. all seven ran the entire course. all seven posted our best outdoor times (that i know of) in the two months leading up to the race. it was a spectacular success made even more spectacular because we did it together. personally, i finished 54th out of close to 200 racers. (here are the results)

the flapjack isn't the end of the running. really, i hope it's just the beginning. i took sunday and monday off as a celebration, but went back to the indoor uab track with amy today. i ran 3.1 miles (approx 5K) in 27:34, two full minutes faster than my outdoor run on saturday. amy and i walked around the track, happy to run without the expectations of the flapjack looming, that freedom and the predictable conditions inside helping us both achieve personal bests. we walked two times around the track, then we ran another mile just for the hell of it.

meg has already eyed the vulcan 10K in october as our next carrot on the stick. after today's run, that seems totally attainable. who would've thought that way back on january 25th. i sure wouldn't have. and i wouldn't have been able to do it without my friends.

thank you to everyone mentioned above in this post, for making this journey with me. thank you to my girls for being there with there big honkin' smiles at the finish line on saturday. i love you all.

'til the next race.

p.s. - today, march 29th, i weighed 170.4 lbs.

like. a. boss.

since when did i know anything about anything


i missed my window to publish my usual and annual "nobody knows anything" post before the ncaa tourney began.

just as well. the sentiment holds true, year after year. the tournament may have seemed more unpredictable this year as compared to most, but it wasn't. every year in the last 5-10 years, the tourney has been unpredictable. this year, four double-digit seeds remain in the last sixteen. that's about right. there's a butler that people tend to remember have a really decent basketball program only after they pull an upset against an overrated big conference opponent. there's a wisconsin that nobody picks in their bracket either because they play a horribly unattractive brand of basketball that people who watch games don't want to see advance or you might have heard that they scored 33 points in a game late in their season and the casual bracket challenger figured they couldn't really be any good. there's duke because there is always duke. same with kentucky. the power conference team in ohio st. that seems better than they are because a one and done freshman has been outclassing inferior opponents all year. there's jimmer. there's kemba. and a couple of also-rans that will likely end up in the final four mainly because i didn't mention them today.

hindsight proves nothing just as it proves everything all at once. not one bracket out of 5.9 million entered on espn guessed the sweet 16 correctly. not one.

so, why am i so mad? disappointed? angry even at finding new ways to find myself at the bottom of my bracket pool?

if nobody knows anything, should i be excluded? of course not. i didn't watch any college basketball this season. remove a few frustrating alabama basketball experiences and one jimmer masterpiece, i did not watch one other game from start to finish this season.

nevertheless, i entered my picks with confidence. surely, i would have seen enough sportscenter to make up for my lack of first-hand knowledge of the teams in question. and then it hit me. all sportscenter shows are alley-oops and dunks, maybe the occasional three. i don't know who's any good. i just know that one guy that used to play at alabama made top ten plays that one time. holy. shit. i've become my wife!

speaking of my wife, her bracket predictions are currently in the 96th percentile in the country. mine? 37th?

how effed up is that? you know what my wife really gets fired up about? grey's anatomy. and twilight. and mashed potatoes.

i don't know what that says about me, but it's not good.

i am fearful that one of these days i will understand and own that my being brash and claiming "nobody knows anything" as a subtle sleight of hand to make you think that i do doesn't really make any sense. i'll realize that i am no better at predicting the sports future than my three year old and i'll give up the ghost.

i won't even fill out a bracket. yeah, that's it. i won't fill one out and then i'll tell you and you and you how stupid you were for picking louisville over morehead st. you should've seen that one coming miles down the pipe.

yeah, i'll do that next year.

"hello, welcome to regions. my name is ann"


back when i subscribed to sports illustrated, one of my favorite little blurbs was a short snippet/fact/stat/absurdity that could be found towards the beginning of every issue under the header, "sign of the apocalypse". it would be something like, "the yankees asked the city of new york for $370 million dollars in bonds for their new stadium the same week they signed cc sabathia to a $161 million contract." or "shawn king, a former nfl defensive lineman, says he failed a league drug test because the woman whose urine he had used to help hide his marijuana use turned out to be pregnant". they were always really funny, most because they were insane and totally grounded in this world's reality all at the same time. ever since, i feel like i notice my own personal signs of the apocalypse all the time in my daily routine or reading. this week, at regions bank, one of those such happenstances occurred.

regions bank has been struggling for a while now. having gone in the huffman and/or roebuck branch 5 days out of 7 for the last five years, i've noticed many different attempts to change their look/perception/image at the only level most of their customers will ever see, the branch level. they painted shit kermit the frog green. they advertised by showing people riding kermit green bicycles around downtown and in their promotions/commercials. (i have no idea what that was about.) they added flat screens to their lobby to take people's minds off the fact that they were waiting fifteen-thirty minutes in line because someone had only scheduled two tellers on a payday friday. tellers have always been asked to be nice to the customers, at least i assume this has remained the case since my one year of teller-ship at amsouth before regions bought them out. now, though, tellers are trained to be SUPER nice.

like many businesses in the last five-ten years, name recognition is becoming an increasingly annoying method of welcoming a customer into your establishment. WELCOME TO COLDSTONE!!!, anyone? pet supplies "plus" tried this for a couple weeks two or three years ago until we realized that "hello!!! welcome to pet supplies "plus"!!! can we help you???" rang entirely insincere and counter to the sentiment we want our customers to feel when they came in the door. regions has tried to institute this method in the last year or so, at least if the branch manager is taking notes. it's funny to me, because the effort is absolutely and directly related to the idea of "if the cat is away, the mice will play", meaning if the branch manager is in her office, i will be warmly greeted upon entering the branch. all of the customer service reps. will smile a fake smile at me as i move past them. i will be told "good-bye" as i leave. it's a wonderful put-on. if she is not there, though, well, it's a different story. the csr's don't look up as i walk by. i am not told "have a nice day" when i exit. i'll eavesdrop on conversations concerning haircuts or old people. i'll smile and think, "that's more like it. at least now, you are being yourself". when you approach the teller line, name recognition effort has been more successfully indoctrinated. "hello. welcome to regions. my name is ann."

i love ann. she is a sweet older lady. great at counting. very generous with giving out paperclips and rubber bands to separate my change order. she's awesome. the perfect teller.

i digress.

let's just choose to ignore the "welcome to regions" endeavor. it seems that it's here to stay. nevermind that it implies that the customer is either an idiot or asleep when they take a right/left into the bank next to the big regions sign, walk into the building that reads regions on all four sides and then through the lobby where every piece of literature is marked with the regions logo. i get it.

let's get to this week's sign of the apocalypse. another personal touch exercise that regions asked of its tellers in the last year or so was to have the teller sign each deposit slip they hand back to the customer. a subtle name to the face of the teller that handled your transaction. i kind of liked it. it was almost like they were handing me their business card. i was happy to take care of you today. my name is ann. come back and see me. i will, ann. i will come back and see you. tomorrow even!

unfortunately, that changed this week. at the end of my transaction monday morning, ann put my deposit receipt into her printer, pulled it out and put it on her desk. instead of reaching for her pen, she reached for something else, a stamp. i thought, what the fuck is going on? why does ann need a stamp? she popped my receipt with the stamp, handed it back to me, and i looked at it. the stamp read, "thanks, ann".

seriously? it wasn't even a copy/mold of ann's hand-writing. i know ann's handwriting! this isn't fucking ann's stamp! not my ann!

some regions executive that is probably paid more than me and most of you was likely presented an idea from below.

minion: listen to this idea, jim. it's fucking brilliant. our tellers have been signing their name to deposit receipts for about a year now, and our research has shown that this takes a lot of fucking time. also, most of our tellers can count, but some of them can't write for shit. i can't tell you how many emails i've gotten from concerned customers saying that they had know idea who signed their deposit receipt. they have threatened to move their money somewhere else, jim, if we don't fix this problem. i know how to fix this problem, jim. instead of tellers using their chicken scratch to personally sign their names and take up to 3-5 extra and valuable seconds of our customers day, we can make stamps for every teller and ask them to stamp the shit out of that receipt with a totally legible, if not totally accurate, facsimile of their name. whaddyouthink???

jim: do it.

so, ann stamped the shit out of my receipt. she handed it back to me with a smile. i smiled back, but it wasn't a 100 percent smile. it was like ann had punched me in the face with a frail right cross. the branch manager wasn't there that day, so i didn't get a "good-bye" from a csr either. i walked by the wackenhut security guy with his cell phone pressed up against his ear. i hoped i didn't get jacked in the parking lot. i didn't think he would notice. i heard the silence tell me to fuck off as i left the branch. i forgot where i was, prob'ly wachovia or compass. it doesn't matter.

nothing matters anymore. soon enough, we'll all be assimilated into this crazy, mixed up machine that tells us we can't sign our names anymore. we'll be issued a stamp and ink pad at birth and that'll be it.

"welcome to regions. my name is ann. my i rip out a small part of your soul?"

sure, ann. be gentle, please.

"if everyone in this room shows up with a paintbrush, we'll finish in about twenty minutes"
(cue laugh track)
((we were there six and a half hours))
(((you do the math)))


for two consecutive sundays in february, i pimped our church daycare's second paint day with the above joke. it wasn't terribly funny, but, then again, i didn't really mean for it to be. i said it in a light-hearted enough way, for i knew the way that it sounded would come across as exaggerative.

surely, he doesn't mean all of us could fit into those tiny daycare classrooms. that would be foolish. he must be joking. i'm gonna laugh to ease my tension.

on the second and third sundays last month, we probably had around 200 people in worship. some of them young. some of them young-ish. some of them middle-aged. some of them older. some of them older than that. most of them all capable of holding the smallest of paintbrushes. those that were not, i would never hold them no-showing against them.

the daycare has been floating our church for more than two years now. in my head, it seemed like a very fair request, even if i didn't word it in this way.

because of the children's place, no staff have been let go. because of the children's place, no significant ministries are no longer offered. because of the children's place, no hard and fast conversations have been had or been necessary to radically reshape our budgets to accurately reflect what our congregation is able to support. as a thank you for the hard work and dedication of the children's place advisory board, the daycare staff, and, most importantly, the sweet children that OUR daycare serves, let us rearrange our own schedules, re-prioritize our own lives and come give those children a whole new world to walk into on monday morning, february 28th!!!

how i worded it was this way. "the daycare is having a paint day on saturday, february 26th. it would be greatly appreciated if you could help. (insert above joke)".

it didn't work. much like the first paint day, hardly anyone showed. a few church members. a couple daycare families. some daycare staff. that was it. as someone pointed out to me on facebook, it turned out that everyone else had another commitment that day.

and that's fine. the work got done. the kids got freshly painted rooms, and i got to re-teach myself the same lesson that i've been studying the last 11 years. what i think is important to others, what i think should be important, what i really, really want to be important to the life of our church often isn't.

and there are hundreds of different reasons for that, not many of which i am interested in re-analyzing today. today, i thought it important to write about the church in the hopes that it would kick me back into gear of writing about her more.

the natural church development survey has been taken. the results are in. the factor on which the church will focus its intentional energy has been chosen. i intend to track our progress here. i, in no way, intend to sabotage or throw darts at the effort, rather i intend to attempt to take a somewhat analytical look at the process. i will use actual numbers, true statistics, some of my own opinion, and gauge how i feel like we are doing. if this thing is truly a working process, the proof will be in whether or not the congregation literally moves together towards...something.

let's look at paint day: the sequel as our starting point. the entire church was corporately invited to the one of the most convenient and reasonable service projects that we could offer in several different forums (church announcements, messenger, bulletin, fliers on doors, etc.). not counting church or daycare staff, fewer than 15 members showed up. for the sake of starting the conversation, we'll be generous and say that we average around 200 folks on sunday mornings currently. that will make the math easy. for paint day: the sequel, the ppr (parish participation rate) was 7.5%. we'll introduce more statistics in the coming weeks, but we'll see and track ppr most often in the hopes that, over the course of the next sixth months, we see that number start to rise. if we notice the average attendance in worship over a four week span rise or fall, we'll adjust our calculations accordingly. meaning, if our ppr goes up just because attendance on sundays goes down but the same 15-25 people are still around and doing everything, we don't want to qualify that as a good thing.

i'll end here with a similar question that i asked on facebook last week. what has to happen for our church to be interested in moving together? our health team has posited that if we improve the functionality of our "effective structures", we will be closer to finding that answer.

let's pray they are right.