when the world is your toilet

Today as I was walking out the door I noticed a large black dog making in the neighbor's yard across the street. I am pretty sure that neighbor doesn't have a dog, so I walked out to my car suspiciously.

As I approached my car the dog, which had started walking slowly down the road, turned and bayed at me while he was about ten to fifteen feet away from me. I wasn't really scared, but I was trying to be realistically alert because I figured the dog might consider me someone who is invading its personal space. At that moment a woman standing in front of a house two houses down from my across-the-street neighbor and talking to another woman called to the dog and he came running.

Am I the only person who sees something wrong with this picture? A large dog which may be domesticated but is still a large dog is consciously allowed to romp around the neighborhood and take a dump wherever it feels. I guess I am just not an animal person.

autum

Mrs Dust has a cat. Her name is Autum. Why she is named Autum and not Autumn we do not know. When we first got the cat two and a half years ago she was already three, had already given birth to a litter of kittens, and had already lived with whatever shame she could have from a misspelled name. We decided against renaming a cat that was so old, though I am sure Autum could care less.

Autum is a skiddish cat. She loves to be around Mrs Dust but she has never trusted me. If I so much as take a step in her direction she heads to the other room. She will only stay within arm-reach of me if she is closer to Mrs Dust. Even then she frequently darts away from me if I move to pet her.

Autum now has one more reason to hate me. She has had an infection in her ear canals on and off for the past few months. When it flares up we are supposed to squirt a drop of medicine in her ears every day to get rid of the infection. Have you ever held down a well-adjusted cat and shoved something in her ears? How about a neurotic cat who believes you have it in for her? Needless to say, when she goes through those treatments we are not on speaking terms. She does forgive Mrs Dust for her role in the squirtings, though. Stupid cat.

potayto, potahto

This is one of those posts that you'll have had to have read my previous posts to understand.

I had one of those experiences in Sunday School today where I started to talk about something then realized that I would have to explain a lot of foundational information for most anyone to understand what I was saying. I ignored that because I didn't want to hog much class time, said what I wanted to say anyway, and let everyone think I was a confusing person.

This afternoon, after discussing this with Mrs Dust, I concluded that I am often a literalist (not the same as a realist), but moreso I am unwilling to stay on the surface level of a topic if I am truly involved in a discussion about it. I will often regale Mrs Dust with detailed (and typically irrelevant) information about a topic that we are discussing because I view conversation as a time to solve issues or learn rather than relay feelings. I'm working on that.

Anyway, I have a short song that I think illustrates this quite well. I hope Louis Armstrong won't mind the edits.

You say either and I say either
You say neither and I say neither
Either, either
Neither, neither
Let's call the whole thing off

You like potato and I like an edible tuber native to South America
You like tomato and I like a widely cultivated South American plant having edible, fleshy, usually red fruit
Potato, an edible tuber native to South America
Tomato, a widely cultivated South American plant having edible, fleshy, usually red fruit
Let's call the whole thing off

But oh, if we call the whole thing off
Then we must part
And oh, if we ever part
Then that might break my chambered muscular organ that pumps blood received from the veins into the arteries

express myself

For those who haven't noticed yet, I am not someone who does a good job of fully expressing myself with a few short and guarded words. Since most of my interaction in my life is short and guarded, that means I really don't express myself much. Actually, now that I am in a job where I am more comfortable with my coworkers, I do express myself quite a bit more than I used to.

I have determined that I cannot really relay many cogent thoughts in single, contextless posts without my audience having some understanding of the warped mind behind the posts. I have to lay down a foundation bit by bit of how I think in order for most of what I really want to say to make sense. To borrow an example from literature, I feel I need to establish my character before what I say has proper context. This is the reason you will see posts about worlds colliding and the difference between an optimist and a pessimist. It gives context into how I think so that when I say something that might otherwise sound stupid on this site it will make some sense.

I have already passed on a few posts because I couldn't fully explain what I wanted to explain in a short amount of space. What I would have had to write for the paragraph I cared about to make sense would amount to an epistle.

Why do I care? That isn't a rhetorical question. I'm asking because I don't know. Maybe I'll figure it out sometime.

the pianist

This past weekend while we were at Mrs Dust's family's house we watched The Pianist, in part because there are those who believe I need to be more in tune with my emotional side. I say cynicism can be an emotion, but I digress.

I can summarize the movie in the following bullets. There are minor spoilers.

• The Nazis take Warsaw.
• Horrible things happen to Warsaw Jews.
• More horrible things happen to Warsaw Jews.
• Majority of Warsaw Jews are killed.
• Horrible things happen to those remaining Warsaw Jews.
• The main character escapes to a hideout where horrible things happen.
• One Nazi shows mercy.
• The merciful Nazi goes to a concentration camp along with the scumbuckets that did horrible things to Warsaw Jews.

I certainly do not mean to belittle the Holocaust or those who went through it, but I do have a difficulty with the movie. My complaint is that there only seem to be three relatively simple points that were made.

1. All Nazis were horrible people who arbitrarily and happily killed or tortured any Jew that happened to be within eyesight.
2. Warsaw Jews endured horrible hardships.
3. Did I mention the Nazis were horrible?

These are not necessarily ignoble points, but they were fully made within 15 minutes of the start of the movie. I didn't need the full two hours to understand them. When I am watching a movie like this I feel like I am either the dunce of the class who is bored because everything is over his head or the genius who is bored because he is not learning anything new.

I think part of the point of the movie was the experience. I don't fully understand that, though, because the experience completely consists in either hating the Nazis or feeling empathy for the Jews. Again, fine for the film, but two hours of nothing but hate and empathy is draining.

Is there something more to this movie (or movies like this in general) that I am not getting? Is there some emotional or artistic intricacy that I am unable to comprehend? If so, I certainly need to be enlightened because I must be missing out. If not, does the movie need to be quite so long?

Note: For fear that this comes across as all negative, the cinematography, storytelling, acting, and entire atmosphere of the movie is spectacular.

weekend update

There was a cute woman from KC
With family so yonder it's crazy
She hopped in the car
And went really far
And brought her husband along though he's lazy

The entertainment that night was bloody
It was a movie starring the actor Brody
Mrs Dust cried a tear
With her distracted hubby near
But cry he would not cause he's moody

The next day they all piled in a boat
They were thankful to find it did float
They fished through the day
And caught a couple strays
But did not keep any fish in tote

Now the weekend is all but gone
But the memory and smells live on
I'll wash till I'm red
Before and after bed
But the fish and I have a bond

acting serious

Things are never gonna be the way you want.
Where's it gonna get you acting serious?
Things are never gonna be quite what you want.
Or even at 25, you gotta start sometime.

Again with the Jimmy Eat World lyrics.

I have a bad habbit of making snide, sarcastic, or otherwise dry wisecracks that don't always get noticed or acknowledged as jokes and sometimes are believed as honest opinion. This problem is magnified when I try to relay them online. I think I need some help to improve this. I have come up with a few ideas.

Idea #1 is to use smileys a lot. For example:

So, Citi has at least 3.9 million customers? :) :) :) :) You'll never guess how I know that! ;)

Idea #2 is to use shortened AOL-speak a lot. For example:

O Mi Ga, the posterior regions of these jeans are real tight. ROTFLOL!

Idea #3 is to point out the sarcasm and punchlines. For example:

Pessimists are the biggest risk-takers around (this is sarcasm).

Or I could just combine them all.

O Mi Ga, have you heard the difference between Dust and God? :) :) :) God doesn't think He is Dust (this is the punchline)! ROTFL

Let me know what you think. Will my ideas above work? Do you have any other ideas?

you gotta start sometime

Things are never gonna be the way you want.
Where's it gonna get you acting serious?
Things are never gonna be quite what you want.
Or even at 25, you gotta start sometime.

I hate it when a song convicts me, especially when the song has little to do with what I am convicted about. I was riding in the car minding my own business kind of blaming God for some things in my life not too long ago, and Jimmy Eat World's A Praise Chorus came on. About the time I heard the lyrics above I had to stop and think. Since I am 25 for another month, even the last line is applicable in an ironic way.

The point of the song as a whole seems to revolve around the idea that it just screws up your life more to let your personal issues paralyze you from taking a first step. Truthfully, I don't have any particular first steps to take right now, but it got me thinking about what I expect from God in my life.

In my pessimistic way I claim to understand that things aren't going to be quite what I want, but then I get upset at God when they aren't. What is really ironic is that a lot of what I had been telling God was wrong in my life has been dealt with already, and so it is no longer wrong. I guess I need to start trusting God more. Even at 25, I gotta start sometime.

i love your hair

At the encouragement of Dar and Dash I watched Fire Me Please last night. While it was fun watching the antics of people doing everything they could to get canned, something that intrigued me even more was the coworkers involved. There were three types that I noticed.

Ignorers: They tried to act like the offensive or annoying person wasn't there. They were the least entertaining to the audience, but they were not shown in a very embarrassing light. I would be this type of person.

Glarers: Actually, there was only one of these. She was a lady who looked about fifty and took her job seriously. When someone else sang "this is boring" throughout the day she gave some wonderful expressions.

Duplicitous: For anyone who watched the show, just about all of the girls at "Blush!" fall in this category. No one was willing to say anything to the new coworker about her habits, but they were more than willing to talk, talk, talk about the person behind her back. When it comes down to it, I think this proves that girls can be more vicious than guys when they want to be.

My favorite duplicitous line was, "She cannot work here--I love your hair!" Do gossips not consider that they might get caught if they go overboard? Now I wonder what all those people who complimented my hair were really thinking.

let's jam

I got slowed down on the way to work today due to an accident. In normal circumstances this is not really a big deal and definitely not something worth commenting on here. However, the accident was on the northbound lanes of the highway and I was southbound. There is a large patch of grass between the north and south traffic as well, so there was no chance that any part of the accident even came close to the southbound lanes. The entire traffic jam on my side of the road was caused by rubbernecking!

For my sake, please keep this in mind. If you have to slow down significantly to see if there are serious injuries in the accident or if you might be prone to cause a second accident, it probably isn't worth taking the chance. It certainly isn't worth the chance if you are somewhere between my house and my office from 7:30AM to 8:00AM.

oops, i did it again

I don't know why, but I can barely go a meal without spilling something on myself. Because some of us at work had to pick up some extra responsibilities from the San Francisco office on Thursday, we were treated to Chipotle. Just about everyone in the office is addicted to Chipotle, so it was nice to get a fix that day. In the middle of eating my steak fajita I noticed a warm liquid dripping in my hand and, before I could stop it, onto my white shirt.

I don't care much if the shirt is destroyed, since I have had it five years and I think I oringinally paid $8 for it. It has served its purpose. What I do care about is that I have to walk around for the rest of the day with a fajita juice spot on the front of my shirt.

My strategy was to announce what I had done immediately so that I wouldn't have to deal with eight different people asking, "what did you do?" when they saw my shirt. My second plan of action was to suavely (yeah right) hide the stain from view when traveling to the bathroom. I have to admit that I got through the day without too many problems with the blemished shirt, though. I didn't even run into a suit in the elevator.

get real

From my perspective there are four types of people in the world. They are optimists, pessimists, idealists, and realists. I do not believe that there is anyone in the world who fits precisely into one description but a lot of people come very close. The types described.

Optimists: These people see good even when things are down. Generally speaking, people view optimism as a positive thing. In most circumstances, it is nice to be around an optimist. The problem with a full-blown optimist is that he or she has little grasp on reality and will often make decisions based on pie-in-the-sky predictions. My unprovable opinion is that optimists are by far the most likely people to get into serious debt. This is because they don't grasp that it might be difficult to make a $200 minimum monthly credit card payment for the rest of their lives.

Pessimists: These people see bad even when things are good. Most pessimists are burned out idealists. Pessimists typically claim to be realists, but the distinguishing factor is the assumptions that a pessimist will make. A pessimist will assume the worst in all circumstances while a realist simply accepts the possibility that the worst will occur.

Idealists: These people believe in attainable perfection and furthermore believe that they know the key to that perfection. Idealists are not just 19-year-old peace protestors. Almost everyone has some soapbox from which they like to spout untenable ideals.

Realists: These people get mistaken for pessimists because the world is filled with optimists and idealists. A realist sees the facts, both good and bad, and makes an objective assessment based on those facts. A realist also keeps an understanding of the scope of the situation and can differentiate between a disaster and a minor incident.

I like to say that I am a realist, but the more I type the more I realize that this is not always the case. Some examples.

• I can be an optimist. In the name of laziness I often tell myself things like, "that noise the car is making isn't serious," or, "this Adam Sandler movie will be funny unlike the last five."
• I can be a pessimist. If three or more things go wrong at once, you probably don't want to be around me. I will not believe that anything can possibly go right at that moment.
• I can be an idealist. I tell myself all the time that people are logical and cannot be swayed by empty emotional appeals and that true facts will be accepted as true if presented logically.

Though I may not be there yet, I always strive toward realism. The truth may sting but I'd rather be hurt by the truth than comforted by a lie.

underdressed

A large Fortune 500 automotive company has offices on the top floor of the building I work at. I generally know the people who work there when I walk in and out of the building because they have strict business attire and all seem to have gotten good deals on the SUVs that their company makes.

I work in support for a software company, so the dress code in my office is casual. I am not talking khakis and a polo shirt casual, but rather t-shirt and shorts casual. This was actually a big selling point to me when I was interviewing because I work better and am an overall happier employee when I can wear comfortable clothes. This isn't really a big deal, either, until I get in the elevator and run into one of the suits from upstairs.

There is something about being dressed extremely differently from someone else that is unsettling. There is also something unsettling about being in a closed space with someone I don't know for just long enough that the silence is awkward, but not long enough to strike up a conversation.

Yesterday, I hit the down button on the elevator and prayed silently that the elevator would be empty so I wouldn't have one of those awkward moments. God answered. He said no. As I stepped into the elevator the man inside gave me a look that said, "What are you doing in an office building." The doors closed, we both stared ahead, the doors opened, and we left.

In truth, he was probably as uncomfortable as me. It isn't easy to share an elevator with an obsessed paranoid introvert who misreads a smile for condescension.

when worlds collide

Throughout my life I have been able to get along with the vast majority of people I have met. I can't say that I get along with everyone perfectly, but it is rare that I am at odds with anyone for long. The reason for this is that I almost never rock the boat on anything. There are well-documented exceptions to this, but there are usually extenuating circumstances involved.

Because I usually get along with people, I tend to become acquaintances with groups of people who wouldn't socialize with each other freely due to differences in belief or interest. Therefore, I have many "worlds" in my life. I have my work world, probably three church worlds, a couple of worlds each in mine and Golden's families, and so forth.

Given that this is the way I have grown up, I have gotten used to living a life of different worlds. I learned what offends people in specific worlds and avoid that. I learned what parts of my personality I can reveal in specific worlds, and tend to gravitate toward and enjoy those worlds that allow me to put on less of a front. I don't like people thinking that I feel the same as they do on social, political, religious, etc issues. If I am in a more restrictive world, though, sometimes civility expects that I bite my tongue when these issues appear. I reserve enough back to keep from offending (à la Romans 12:18), and I always fear that if someone from one of my worlds discovers the parts of me that I expose to other worlds that I will appear two-faced. I am also concerned that those from my less restrictive worlds will consider me naive if they fully understand most of the worlds that I grew up in.

Now I have added one more world to the mix, the off the bridge site. My intent originally was (and really still is) to be as up-front and honest about the way I think on this site, even if a few people are bothered by it. In this way, I could have a world that I could gravitate to where I would have the least facade of all. In truth, I have been selective of the people I have told about the site so that when I let my facades down it is not divisive. Even so, relaying opinions that I would normally reserve can be intimidating. I'm just going to approach this with the idea that being open may not be a bad thing.

a tale of two dispensers

The bathroom on the floor of my office building that I work on has two paper towel dispensers. One is near the door and has a trash can below it, and so is the natural one to use. The other is on the far wall from the office door and is out of the way for anyone who is not using the stall on that far end of the room. Don't be misled by the phrase, "far end of the room," though, because this is not a large bathroom. Because of this setup I have gotten into the habit of using the paper dispenser nearest the door.

There is just one problem with this arrangement. The paper dispenser nearest the door oftentimes does not want to dispense paper. It is not uncommon to push down on the lever for the paper dispenser, hear a thunka sound, and not see any paper come out.

Yesterday, while I was in the bathroom, I got into one of those awkward situations where myself and one other person went for the same sink at nearly the same time. Since I was a little behind the other guy going for the sink, I decided to let him use that sink and I took the sink closest to the not-very-frequently-used-but-it-works dispenser. As I was doing this I noted in my mind that the more commonly used dispenser had not been providing much paper lately. About this time I looked over, saw the man at the dispenser, and heard that familiar sound.

Thunka. Thunka. Thunka-thunka-thunka-thunka.

(pause)

Thunka.

At this moment the guy looked my direction as if to ponder whether it was worth walking past me at the sink to get a full paper towel sheet. Then he looked back down at the incredibly small amount of paper sticking out of the dispenser, ripped it out, used it with what I have to assume was a purpose of putting on a show more than drying his hands, and walked out of the bathroom.

I smiled and dried my hands with a full paper towel.

making connections

For two days in a row our network at work has been down when I got to the office. In most places that I have worked this wouldn't be a huge deal, but since almost every job responsibility I have requires a network connection, this has slowed me down quite a bit. Add this to the fact that I still don't have a computer set up at home, so I would like to have something that resembles an Internet connection for at least a few hours a day.

The main issue I have is what to do when I can't be doing work. Generally speaking, I sit around and talk with coworkers. Ironically, when our network goes down, it improves my networking. Some of the people I interrupt have things they can do without a network connection, though. What does everyone else do when technical difficulties prevent work? I can't be the only one with this recurring issue.