alright, all, i'm posting from home. not from washington home but from my original home here in denver. first time in a while, eh?
just went skiing today. and not the pansy alpine style, mind you, i went nordic. i'll say that i'm much better at nordic because i've been doing it longer. today my dad and i conquered an easy black diamond route up the hill a few hours. it was fun, the snow was powdery and it was cold and windy. perfect conditions. our tracks were almost gone by the time we got back to them. it was a great time and i didn't fall once. booyah!
other than that it's been baking, chilling with friends and trying to make sure gabe keeps his mitts of my girl. the latter is proving to be trying at best so i'm going to take a break from seeing him.
for a "best friend" he sure does try to get in her pants a lot...
maybe that's a compliment?
more on all these things later.
until then, have a great christmas or whatever as long as it isn't kwanza (for all you who have no idea what that is, it's a holiday that african-american studies teachers made up in the 70s so that they could have their own holiday; nothing traditional or african about it even though that's how it sounds.)

well, yet again i really don't care about a title. i think that the title is too darn constricting. it's like a jock strap, you should only use it when you really need it. yesterday my girlfriend, sara, and i decided it'd be a great idea to wash the feather bed. for those of you who have done this two things will come to mind: how you wash it and how you dry it. these didn't really pop into our heads. we thought laundromat but they were all closed. then we though washing machine at home but when we'd stuffed all we could stuff it looked like an airbag had gone off in a space capsule. but, at the end of a long day of searching for a laundromat open past 8:30 (and then, after a short time, 9:00p), we gave up and went with the next best thing...pedal aggitation. and we're not talking about kicking any kids asses into gear here, moms, we're talking about what i like to call the new revolution in home washing!*

*may not be new. also, i may not call it anything other than good cleaning fun.

you guys ever have moments of extreme clarity when you're ridiculously sick? because i seem to. know what i thought of last night? we humans on the whole are like one human in that each of us is a cell in a whole. countries are organs and continents are organ systems that function together to form the body of humanity residing on the earth. now what you have now is a lot of strife in the body, what would be called cancers and the like; these are people who divide the body against itself and also people who destroy other parts of this body. saddam hussein, bush, nancy pellosi, the religious right, terrorists, they are all examples of this type of human- the type that only see matters in terms of personal or sectarian gains. these are the people who don't deserve a major voice in humanity but they are the ones who always have the lion's share of the discourse. are the rest of us so timid that we wouldn't put these people out of power? i believe that we haven't proved ourselves to be anything but timid as far as politics go and that's why we're stuck with a "lesser of two evils" system rather than a system of proper repressentation of american and world civic values. and so i would propose that we stop thinking that what is good for america is good for everyone. self-interst is important but acting with the world is necessarily in our self-interest lest we be left in the dustbin of crushed countries.

you can see my feet...they're 25 feet straight up a tree with no branches below then. 

this is our jack-o-lantern that i carved and am still proud of over a month later. 

hey guys, this post is about how fun it is to climb things

and i wasn't kidding. that last picture is true. crappy but true. i was up about 25 feet on a rope you wouldn't think would hold up. i climbed straight up the rope using nothing but rope and knowledge. i used prusik knots. what's great is that i don't have to lug around accenders that cost at least $26 each and weight more than 10 feet of rope that cost a total of $1.90. there really is no feeling like being up a tree solely based on your own ingenuity. in two days i'm going to set up multiple rappel points and climb up at least 40 feet maybe 50+ if i've got the time. i've just had a lot of fun at this. i'll have better pictures, too, i promise. i'll be a little speck, lol.
so i'm excited by the fact that i can do this now. i even did a smooth rappel down to the ground today. maybe i'll take a weighted pack up, too, just to make sure that i can do this all with a wierd weight distribution and a makeshift chest harness...we'll see, lol. at least i'll use it to weight down my rope. we'll just say that i'm training up to get out to lisa's neck of the woods. we'll say that i'm looking at going up some side canyons in the area or maybe a bit more towards Moab. we'll find out later on. trip coming in may, you guys, so if you know anywhere amazing tell me now! i'll talk to you all later.
that is all.

I figure that i should take a more circumspect view of the world as it relates to the divine but i have found that so often people absolutely refuse to think before they speak. on of my favorites for all time are the men who would say that God doesn't love, nor did he create, gays. now i would say if you're believing in a God who created every single thing in the universe you'd necessarily have to concede that he made gays, end of story. if he made everything and gays are alive then obviously he created gays. very simple logic there. easy to tie together. you can't hide behind the guise of God to disguise your own ignorance and prejudice. because one of the things that i see most often is that those who believe in the Christian God do so because they are weak individuals who need a crutch. every person who has ever lived has done something wrong. even the Lord doubted God on the cross- if either or them are what some people think they are. the truth is that religion is a way of staving off death and a way of attempting to make ourselves feel a purpose in our short time on earth. i am already at least a quarter of the way through my life. and it feels like i've barely begun. i will say that this unknown arena after death is something that i don't like but it is something that i can't examine with reason. and anything that i cannot examine with reason is something that i will put off until later. considering i've got an easy way into heaven if i'm wrong i'm not that worried. am i going to go to hell? you can't possibly know. i'll say that i've commited enough sins to go if it's real. but you and i don't know if it is do we?
so i will say that for the longest time i've gone to church without the faintest idea of what i was there for. i must have a sceptic running my soul because only once did i feel the presence of God in my 18 years of being a churchgoer. nothing of it rang true to me. it was the hour of my life that i lost every week to be around people i never felt comfortable around. they were the people i was convinced were judging my every move. and the gossip that spread like wildfire only served to confirm my beliefs: the church is the place for the weak hearted or the hypocrites. the most righteous men know little of it and instead follow personal responsibility to salvation. again, if any of this exists.
what do you think? Is religion really the opiate of the masses or is it the only thing keeping us human anymore?

the first draft of the first pages of the fictional account of me

Somewhere between the end of high school and the beginning of my real life as a functioning adult i'd hit a roadblock. that cliche moment of my life where in the middle of studying for one career i suddenly found myself either wanting another or wanting to become a hippie. the solution changed almost as often as the weather as the two sides fought for supremacy over the rest of my life. the stakes were always high as i knew that it meant enjoying the next 60 years or hoping that my decision about the existence of God was seriously flawed. To be sure the intellect that could be said to reside with me was nascent and had none of the worldly charms nor graces of those my peers had seen develope in their short time. still, they held, for me at least, a certain quaint charm and value. at the beginning of what was to be my twentieth year none of these thoughts had dawned on my with the same ferocity that they soon would. i was a calm, shiftless gulf intent on becoming useful and respected.

as new year's day passed i was enjoying an admittedly short escape from the reality of life away from the woman i loved. there we sat drinking orange juice- not for lack of convivial feeling but because we were still hung over from the night before- while we waited for the celebration of the brand new year with a truly decadent seattle tradition: watching with fascination as, for ten minutes or perhaps slightly more, our famous space needle was devoured in fires and explosions of green, white, red, blue and every imaginable phosphorescent combination thereof. meanwhile, from the inside, people who had paid a pretty penny for a ticket to the party at the top sat in a grey haze as thick as those i often imagine carpeted civil war battlefields.
this, of course, brought me back to the reality of my own, for the sake of this obvious metaphor, clouded situation. i was a second year student in college with grades far below what was expected from a person who had standardized tests scores as high as mine happened to be. here i will add that i am not being egotistical or praising myself unduly. i have been able from a very young age to turn out consistently high rankings in standardized tests. i have always been, and still remain, among the top ten percent of all people taking any test that i have been forced to waste myself taking. the reason is simple, if there is a right answer on the page i can find it at least eight times out of ten. that is not to say that i am actually intelligent but only to say that i can read into the intent of questions and find the answer that most closely resmembles the lesson i am supposed to learn from them. this fact meant that even though i never earned a semester with grades above a C average, i made it to the 90th percentile of individuals taking any standardized test be it the ITBS, the ASVAB or the ACTs. the most startling part of the test was that i even showed up to take it, as far as i was concerned. after all, only two years prior to this very day i decided that i would much rather sleep than show up for my schedules SAT test. my father repeated his mantra that someday i would learn the errors in my ways and that it would be by taking the hardest way through them. i often joked that it was not up to me because i was a Scout and we must always go about anything we undertake the hard way. i still believe that there is a grain of truth to that saying today.

the scenario would not be so bad if it were not the general tenor of my life. those things that i enjoyed i did and those things which i did not enjoy i did not do. a very simple equation but one that meant that while i would read the story of the famous jumping frog of Caliveras County or the beautiful and haunting tale of a mariner cursed i would never do any assignment related to these.
the reason was twofold: firstly, i didn't enjoy doing essays or answering assinine questions, and secondly, there were far more stories in the world than i had time to read. the second, sad fact meant that even though i wanted to experience all that a human could experience i did not have the time nor ability to do so. this is the cruel twist of life. you can only enjoy the knowledge of life when you have almost passed beyond its breadth and into the harsh, final firing of your neural net. is that blinding light the beginning of something new or is it truly the end of all that you ever were?
at the end of my senior year of high school i was quite sure that it was the new beginning and that i wanted to be a nurse. this would allow me, i thought, to travel the world and to see the many sights that my fellow humans had to put on for me. but two years later while i was doing clinical in a recovery facility i realized that the best a nurse, or any human being for that matter, can do is watch the dying as they pass from this life into nothingness. it was then that i realized that i could never wash myself clean of the endless tide of blood that always seem to pass under the watchful eyes of doctors and nurses.


There are endless proofs that God may never be proven to exist. an ironic fact, to my mind. perhaps the one that rings most true to me is the argument that God and the Big Bang have equal philosophical footing in relation to the basis of their conception to us human beings. both make an argument for something we cannot see and will never experience but nonetheless believe we have strong evidence for. the faith of a man is unshakeable if he believes he has seen proof of his God in the sky, his life, his family or any other thing that is dear to him.
and now i'm tired for tonight. in tomorrows assignment i'll find my lighthearted banter!
stay tuned.