Clearing the cobwebs

It's been almost two months since I put anything new up. I'm going to retreat to my usual defense: a busy home life and lack of impetus to blog lately. It's not like I can complain that there's any lack of interesting things to blog about, it's mainly been that thanks to a relatively recently acquired sense of responsibility, I've been focusing on more important things than poisoning the blogosphere with my thoughts.

The one big piece of news (for me, anyways) during this blogging absence was that my hockey team won it's beer league division championship!

Thanks to a recent comment, I plan on finishing a long-over due post, and eventually I hope to return to a semi-regular schedule of updates.

Carry on.

Monthly update

I can't believe October is almost gone already, and without a single post yet! New content has been so sparse, it's starting to look like George's blog around here.

My excuse? I've just been crazy busy lately, playing hockey three times a week and, thanks to a huge phone project at work, spending at least one evening working overtime until 10 PM every week since the start of the month.

The phone project runs until the end of November, but I might quit one of my hockey leagues to free up an extra night, so hopefully I can get back to posting at least semi-regularly.

I've got a long way to go before I can catch up to some of the other blogging freaks out there, who manage to hold down full-time jobs, spend time with their families, play video games, immerse themselves in artistic hobbies, and still find the time to comment on substantial subjects at least two or three times a day. Maybe I just need to up my posting volume to 95% cute animal video filler. Right Jason?

My teen years distilled

In a Lance Mannion post about him attempting to educate his young boys about comic books and lessons about life, he made a comment that I think perfectly represents me in my Christian teenage years:

I wanted to tell them that the world is full of young men who are afraid of everything. They are afraid of women, of sex, of their own urges and desires. They are afraid of other men. They are afraid of what they might be themselves. They are afraid they are weak, useless, powerless. And when people who are this afraid dream, they dream of not being afraid, but their dreams aren’t of achieving self-command and of gaining mastery of over their fears. Their dreams are of instilling fear. They dream of gaining power over what makes them afraid.

I hate to take a quote out of context but I'm a terrible writer, which is why I have to find people who are good at the wordsmithing trade, so that I can steal their descriptions of the world around me. This is a perfect distillation of how I remember my teenage years: being afraid of fucking everything.

Oh sure, like most teenagers I had attitude, snark, and more than a hint of belligerence oozing out my pores (which really hasn't changed in the sixteen years since), but as most adults can admit at some point in their lives, it was all youthful bluster. Keeping everyone else at arms length, seeming at the verge of a violent outburst at the slightest provocation, and making fun of anything and everything was a coping mechanism - a method of covering up inexperience, ignorance, fear, and a little bit of stupidity by offending anyone and everyone around you, in the hope that they don't examine you too closely, lest they discover the child hiding in the flesh of a young adult.

Christianity, at that point in my life, offered some solace. After all, if your invisible friend is the creator of the entire universe, the deity that drowned the entire populace of the world save for eight of his chosen people, and the galactic emperor that will soon slay all those who oppose him, it helps to alleviate some of the apprehension about stepping out to make your mark in the world.

Unfortunately, experience can slowly reveal to the observant that the great sky fairy doesn't have your back and, indeed, seems to be perfectly absent - almost as though he was never really there to begin with. It slowly began to dawn upon me that the driving force that helped me through the difficult times in my life were my own strengths, buttressed by support and advice from family and friends.

At any rate, Lance outlined possibly the greatest reason why I wouldn't ever desire to relive my teenage years again: since high school, I've learned that fear doesn't have to be the default reaction to change or uncertainty.

Oh, and if you're not following the writings of Lance Mannion yet, do yourself a favor and head on over there. I've stolen so many ideas from him that the least I can do is send one or two people to browse his writing.

Anything I Can Say, You Can Say Better...

Remember my little rant from a couple of days ago about the state of politics in (North) America? I found a post over at Driftglass that puts my thoughts into a beautifully succinct single paragraph (emphasis mine):

"But this simply is not that country: not some feisty middle-brow Camelot with a couple of equally wacky, equally flawed and equally honorable political philosophies contending in an arena with rules and referees. Instead,...this is a country where one political party is ruled by loathesome men with grotesque motives on behalf of a tiny clique of plutocrats and bulwarked by an electoral army which is kept constantly tweaked to the point of near-riot by a carefully-cultivated media cocktail of rage, ignorance, bigotry and God."

That is almost my entire post in a nutshell. Go read the whole thing.

The Memory Hole Strikes Back!

I use Firefox, and I use a lot of tabs. I mean a LOT of tabs - Firefox usually eats up between 250-500Mb of memory and takes a minute or so to fully open when I restart. The reason for this is that I like to keep an eye on some sites that I occasionally post at, especially those places where you can't (or I'd rather not) subscribe to the comments.

One such site you might remember was Christian Governance (formerly "Christian Government"). Well, a few days ago I noticed one of the pages I never bothered to close started coming up with a 404 error - page not found. I kind of chuckled to myself because I figured that they must have closed down or changed domain names again. For some reason, I didn't close the tab. I then noticed a few minutes ago that the page started loading again, so I revisited it, and found the post back up again, but with the comments section completely wiped out. Unfortunately, the Google cache has been updated to the latest version without the comments. Even more unfortunate, I can't recall the comments happening at that post.

I posted again there, asking where the comments disappeared to. I'm curious what the excuse for the use of the memory hole will be (if one is forthcoming). Anybody else surprised that a Christian website that claims to hold personal responsibility as a virtue will drop an entire section of comments if they don't like the direction a conversation is going?

A little further digging confirms that, yup, the two main threads I posted on a while ago have been scrubbed clean of all comments. Yet again, my neglect to obtain a screenshot of comments at a fundy site has come back to bite me in the ass.

All that time wasted arguing with closed minded ignoramuses, with nary a record of my brilliant wordsmithing saved for future reference!

Slightly New Look

Well, due to some complaints (well, only one - thanks George!), I've made some style changes to the ol' blog. Hopefully this will look a little bit better in Firefox (and the other browsers). Unfortunately, the alterations won't make the content any better, but like basically every movie coming out of Hollywood lately, perhaps if it's pretty enough nobody will notice the lack of substance!

I'm back!

But I'm busy Poe-ing at my new favorite Canadian Christian Reconstructionist blog. I think I've made a couple of fun comments, but I think I took it a bit too far at least once.

Unfortunately, I have a long way to go to meet the brilliance of Mad The Swine over at Dispatches From The Culture Wars!

I'll have an update on the Vancouver trip later.

Away From Keyboard

I'm going to be partaking in some geek training this week, so posting might even be lighter than usual until the second week of October.

I'm sure you'll be fine without me.

The evils of Perfection

You've heard the saying, "Perfection is the enemy of the good". Here is a slightly different opinion on the idea of "Perfection" and how the ideals created by perfection are completely unreal and can cause depression, self-hate, and all manners of personal illness. The quick summary that I took away from that essay (and my summary doesn't do that essay justice at all - go read the whole thing) is this: so many people get so wrapped up in the fake perfection we see in people all around us, we can abuse and hurt ourselves for not meeting those same ideals, not realizing that nobody is actually perfect.

At the end of the essay, the author offers this challenge:

Will you help me spread "Real"? Tell us below just how perfect you aren't. You never know who might be alive tomorrow because you were real today. You never know who needs to feel like they aren't alone in their inability to be perfect. Even if you comment as an anonymous guest, please comment. Tell us what you struggle with. Tell a sad or dark secret. Get vulnerable. Get real. Let's see if we can get 10,000 people showing the world that we're not defined by perfection.

Okay, here goes: one of the biggest reasons why I haven't been posting as often as I'd like is that I feel like it takes me way too long to create a new post. I make a post, then reread it anywhere between three to ten times in an attempt to catch spelling and grammar errors, and to help meet technical writing standards, which is a subject that I struggled with in college.

So this is me being real. I'm not re-reading this post or editing it later if I find a mistake or a sentence or two that I think can be rephrased better. Who knows - maybe after reading this essay I can convince myself to be a little less "perfect" and get some more posts up.

Edit: Okay, I re-read my post, but I didn't make any changes to it, even though there were about three sentences that I really wanted to rephrase. Don't hate me! ;)

Too much stupidity in the world

I'm still crazy busy with work and personal life, and it doesn't help that I've been distracted by a handful of stupid topics on the interwebs that have popped up recently. From rich folk bitching about a nonexistant tax hike to minor celebrity teabaggers, I've got over a half dozen lengthy diatribes full of indignation started but not yet ready to post.

It's high time I realized that I can't cover everything that I'd like to, and start picking one or two things to deal with at a time, and leave some of the heavier lifting to the professionals.

Busy-ness

After some wife-related health issues last week that required my full attention, I'll be spending most of my spare time at the Vancouver Canucks Young Stars Tournament in Penticton. Expect things to be quiet on the blogging front until the end of the week, at least.

I'm sure you two fans can find something else to read in the meantime.

On drinking and posting

There is one simple rule regarding drinking a substantial amount of alcoholic beverages and posing messages to your blog: don't do it!

On that note, I'll post some substantial posts this week that are guaranteed to increase the amount of regular readers I have on this site. Of course, those are certain to be dreams of grandeur, not that I care right now.

Have a good weekend!