I had not a minute to surf this week (and yes, its been incredibly difficult for me, thank you for asking). Hence, instead of the normal "here's what I've found," today is "here's what I normally surf."

My (online) day usually starts with a stop by my work email and my gmail (I have plenty of invites if you want one). And I usually try to drop by Woot earlier in the day than later. Most times the best stuff has already sold out by the time I get there, which is why some nights I try to remember to check it before going to bed.

If I do have time to surf, I usually kick it off at Metafilter, and that usually leads me to askMeFi and MetaTalk. And from there to all other kinds of places.

I also like browsing the del.icio.us' popular list from time to time.

If I have time for news, its either Google News or WSJ, usually. And I'm usually learning about a couple random things that come up via the ever wonderful Wikipedia.

Most years I would be checking my fantasy team at Yahoo pretty regularly, but I missed my draft this year thanks to work, so my team stinks, so I've lost most interest.

And I'll occasionally refer to craigslist, ebible, menupages, and Lifehacker, although I get to the latter a lot less than I used to. And sometimes when I actually just need to channel surf the internet, I hit the good ol' StumbleUpon button.

Oh, and of course, this time of year, I am consumed with playoff baseball.

There shall always be the Church and the World

And the Heart of Man

Shivering and fluttering between them,

Choosing and chosen,

Valiant, ignoble, dark and full of light

Swinging between Hell Gate and Heaven Gate.

And the Gates of Hell shall not prevail.
– T. S. Eliot

Happy birthday, T.

So thanks to a number of different reasons, I've been learning all about the Jewish holidays of late. I've met / spent some time with a number of people who either practice or are interested in how to practice the Messianic Jewish faith - most recently Karen, the sweetest old lady you could ever hope to meet, who sat next to me at (my) church this past Sunday. She gave me a hug and a traditional Rosh Hashana greeting when we reached the part in the service where we greet those around us. And today happens to be Tzom Gedaliah. Happy Tzom Gedaliah. And, since I missed it, happy Rosh Hashana too.

Cooked tonight. My own special pasta meatavera recipe, and its tres delish, if I do say so myself. Used the new Barilla Plus, thanks to this miracle I can eat pasta again. Caught the second half of Heroes, which I had really hoped to catch both halves of - but then I need to kick this TV watching thing anyway, reading has all but dropped off the radar, again. But they are going to have a replay of the premier online, and that's too cool to not watch.

Trying to get an update to the side-bar sometime soon, but doubtful that will happen - I have a lot of work to get done on my day off, if I can't stall it, and I have to get it done before noon because Cregan, Dave, David, and I are headed to Whitetail for the afternoon. And I have a blog post to write.

Saturday I worked all day and did my lesson that evening, and Sunday was your typical fall Sunday - church, youth group, and meeting Dave at Merc Bar (although we ended up at Joshua Tree) to watch the Steelers lose a game they should have won by two touches. Ridiculous. But kind of karmically deserved after the way we decimated them in the playoffs last year.

And I found a new song, from Mayer, that's going to get me to finally pull out the guitar after a summer off. Plus lil bro Jon introduced me to Current Swell, and I seriously dig their stuff.

You peaches from Jamaica? Cause Jamaican me crazy. I love that Stop and Shop ad.

Albeit in a smaller, much more hurried manner...I have that annual happy- its-fall feeling that I get when the weather starts to turn and the regular fall activities ramp up.

First the days get a little more bearable temperature wise, and things are just beautiful for a week or two. Then you start to feel a comfortably cool breeze in the evening that gives you hints of sweat shirts and long pants. Before you know it, its nice enough out at night to leave the windows open instead of the AC on - and you can sleep comfortably with the sound of cars and people walking their dogs and whatnot, passing in the street below.

It will be another week or so and we'll be shifting all the vents again. My room tends to be the hottest in our place, so during the warm months we close the all the other vents and open the one in my room, and in the cool months, close the one in my room and open all the others. And a week or two after that, it will be one of my favorite times of the year - when the down comforter comes back out and the light one goes back in the closet. And I sleep better for 4 months or so.

But its not just the weather. I like fall because usually I've had a good summer with some long weekends and a few adventures and perhaps a weeks' vacation or so. And the beginning of fall kind of signifies wrapping up the fun break and getting back to things - work, youth group, home fellowship group, et. al.. This year there wasn't much of a summer, but I have a feeling it will be a good fall all the same.

The folks are taking me and the sisters to Greece for a week and a half, after all. Life goes on.

The people of Save Darfur were marching on the UN this weekend when Bush spoke, and I was sadly unable to join them. These people are doing a good thing.

I want a Firefox extension to...

Yep looks pretty cool. As does Peanut Gallery (possibly may have linked to this before - no idea).

Forgot all about fo.rtuito.us, haven't really been using it.

Cool Google link, as usual: Biiible.

102 WPM with 4 (corrected) mistakes. Yep...stilllll got it.

I may someday turn to this for sleep help.

FreeNYC. And NY's best cheap eats.

I think I'm going to try these guys for my next pair of glasses.

The issues facing our generation today.

Only in Hoboken: Giant Robot imprisons parked cars.

Open House New York - almost that time again. Also see: The New Yorker Festival.

And last, but the very furthest extreme opposite of least, a belated happy 10th birthday to Homestar.

And that's how you turn 35 open tabs into 8. Ok, 9, I admit it. I have a problem.

As you might have noticed, yesterday I finally threw up a blog post, after some weeks off. And here's the strange thing: it wasn't so much work's fault. Yeah, I've been working the same crazy hours on the same crazy project, but there's been time here and there. And yet blogging seemed like this huge looming burden I had to deal with, even though I knew after just one post I would break through and be, hopefully, back in the swing.

Anyway, I don't expect that to make sense to anyone, it barely does to me. Suffice to say, I'm back, and I'm going to make a earnest effort at throwing something up here on a Mon-Fri basis again, even if its just pointless drivel like this. Because that's what keeps them coming back, the pointless drivel. And my cunning wit.

Tomorrow is Thursday, which means links.

Oh, and yesterday's post - I've had all but the last paragraph or two written since shortly after the trip. Along with a few other posts. And pictures. What is wrong with me?

Here's the pics from the trip. Well, 10% of them. Hoping to add some more to the same set, soon.

Welcome back...

Go A's.

For me, of all the 300+ photos I took during my trip to New Orleans this past summer, none said more to me than this one. This guy, sitting there, on break from work, reading his paper and smoking his cigarette. For him, life is normal. He lives and works in New Orleans, one year after one of the most catastrophic natural disasters to ever strike our nation.

The city will rebuild. Its part of our human nature - we fight back against the rest of nature, we dominate it, and even though it may lash out at us from time to time, we live in a perpetual state of perceived dominance over it. People will eventually return to this city, live there, work there, worship there, and take their smoke breaks there. But it will take so much time.

Imagine the place that you live, the place where you sleep and keep all your belongings - filled to the top with muddy water. The water subsides, your belongings, what's left of them, settle to the floor after floating for so many days, scattered and broken. And then everything sits for one year. No windows, no locks on the doors, everything just sits in the humid, motionless air. Imagine the dirt caked on everything. Imagine the dank water still sitting in broken dishwashers, refrigerators turned on their sides, tubs with the plumbing clogged. Imagine the smell.

This is the house we walked into on day one of our work week in New Orleans. There were 18 of us, leaders and kids from the youth group at my church, split into two teams. Although this was not your typical international missions trip, we might as well have been on the other side of the planet - this was a disaster zone left to sit, for all intents and purposes. With my team, we helped gut 3 houses. Imagine someone going through all your things, your secret possessions, your life built up around you, tearing it all out and placing it in a pile on the street. This is what we were there to do. Family picture albums, closets full of clothes, books and bibles, jewelry, household chemicals, pornography, kitchens full of utensils, electronics, furniture, guns, everything. All in piles on the street.

They are still finding bodies to this day in New Orleans. The neighborhoods where we were still sat empty by and large - I never once worked in a house that sat adjacent to any other inhabited residence. With so many deserted homes, neighborhoods, and other uninhabited areas, I imagine they'll still be finding bodies years from now.

What amazes me most is that anyone would expect a city full of people who were totally dependent on the government - who couldn't even provide for themselves the most basic of necessities in the time of the storm, and who couldn't find even a ride to points north - that anyone would expect these same people to rebuild their entire house. To gut it, to throw out everything they once owned, to rebuild from the ground up. In one year.

One year after the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, hundreds of thousands of displaced people had begun to move back into the city and rebuild it, but that was a different time. Nobody was waiting on the government to help - in the end, the same government that had ordered the law enforcement to shoot looters on sight was only able to establish temporary housing for some 20,000. And this was in 1906.

We live in a different era now. Now there are cities full of people that expect the government to care for them when things go bad. New York City is no different - the blackouts in Queens recently and the region at large 2 years ago provide preliminary evidence of that. Society at large relies on a system that it believes will be there for them in their day of greatest need. In that sense, we are on a razor's edge.

I believe this is the failure of the church. Our failure was not in a lack of immediate response to New Orleans, when the government failed to act, or even in the fact that the church lacked even the ability to respond to a disaster of that magnitude. The church's failure at large has been to sit idly by while a godless nation has ever so slowly but surely placed its faith in the government, not in God.

I think it was C.S. Lewis that once said, "We turn to God for help when our foundations are shaking, only to learn that it is God who is shaking them."

I wonder how much hard He's going to have to shake, before things change.

That said, we were all very glad that we went on the trip. Almost everyone expressed a desire to return and help keep rebuilding next year. And the knowledge that the need would still exist went unspoken - there is simply no question about it.

I think, most importantly, at the end of the day, our goal, whether we realized it at the time or not, was to show people what it really means to rebuild your life. We were there to help people who had seen their physical reality completely displaced. And we did. But in any place - especially a place like New Orleans - our greatest need is to rebuild the misplaced foundations of our faith. To rebuild our lives on something that cannot be shaken. I hope that in some way, some tiny little way that may never be known, we helped towards that end.

OK here's the difference between right now and a couple of months ago before I was sentenced to this gulag of a project: before this I had time to complain about how little time I had outside of work.

Now, my schedule is essentially sleep, work, eat, repeat. Period.

Everything, just everything, has been dropped so that I can work. The only luxuries I'm taking at this point beyond the necessities of sleep and food is the time I take to shower in the morning and listen to the radio on the way to work. I can't do dry cleaning, I can't do laundry, I can't write, I can't read, I can't watch TV, I definitely haven't worked out in weeks, I can't keep in touch with people (although I'm making a concerted effort from work with a few), and I can't prepare a decent meal. I can't find 5 minutes to search for new projects, which it was agreed upon that I'd be doing in the first place when I came to this role. I certainly can't relax, which is what I should be doing with the 2 or so weeks that I actually don't have youth group to worry about before the school year starts again.

And worst of all I am spiritually drained. First this project ate through my physical stamina, then my mental, and now it feasts on what little I have left. And its now that I realize that I can't complain, either. Because I don't have time to do that, either. But more importantly, because in some sense I had no choice to go onto this project, but in another, this is the line of work I've decided to go into. At any point I could quit, but instead I've quietly gone along with an oppressive workload instead of refusing it.

Theoretically its all supposed to end tomorrow night when I work my last day shift, but I doubt that it will be that easy, as things are not settled and the client is certainly not ready to lose the full support team.

This is where I am. This is why I have not even been able to recap my trip to New Orleans at this point. I'm aiming for something decent by Monday of next week, with pictures, but based on my predictions lately...you do the math.

The ballet people are champagne drinkers; a younger, more exciting crowd than the opera people. - Walter Nurena

This is mainly a tribute to my new found appreciation for Flickr, to some extent. And my enduring appreciation for ballet. And a cryptic self reminder to mention this quote to a ballerina that doesn't read my blog. And a reminder to myself that sooner or later I need to get a decent post up, now that its been more than a couple of weeks...

I'm back safe. Hope to get a recap post up tomorrow before I start working night shifts again, tomorrow night. Otherwise, I'll get it up when...I start working night shifts again, tomorrow night. In the meantime, here's a picture of the team, before we left last Saturday.

Why is it that I can't even stand to watch the trailers for Stone's WTC movie when they come on? I mean I literally have to change the channel, because seeing the shadow of an airliner flash across a Tribeca building makes me physically ill. It just all seems so wrong - Flight 93, now this...complete capitalization on the most horrible event of my generation.

I've never liked going down there, taking the Path to downtown makes me uncomfortable every time. I mean, its the biggest tourist attraction in the city. Hundreds of street vendors still making a living off of it. And now Hollywood needs to get their cut. Makes me sick.

Don't get me wrong, history needs its proper memorials, but these are clearly not it. A better example? Saving Private Ryan. Amistad. Schindler's List. Movies that weren't trying to make a buck off of horrible events in human history so much as tell the real story and make people remember. Neither of the 9/11 movies are trying to do that. I doubt many 9/11 movies will be able to do that, for years to come.

I've linked to it before, but I'm still interested in seeing The Great New Wonderful. This looks like a real movie for a real (good) reason.

Its morbid.

And yet stuff like Falling Man is fascinating to me. Because its the real, raw history. Its not commercialized.

Anyway, that said, I'm off to New Orleans for the week, as of tomorrow morning. Doubtful you'll see a blog post before next weekend, and even that will be difficult - as my work week will start Sunday evening on that weekend. Please keep me and the kids and the other leaders in your prayers.

This is Ozzie and Harriet. You can guess which is which. I picked them up at Ikea the other week as kind of a birthday present to myself. I figured I'm officially killing off my late 20's now so I should give having kids another shot. That's how I refer to keeping plants alive - its like having kids practice for the bachelor. They require periodic attention and nurture. Yes, I realize they require less than a normal child. But the basic underlying precept remains the same: I and no one else am responsible for either their life or death. My goal is to keep them alive until I move, which I suspect will be some time next year, either for school or necessity of a newly married roommate - who knows which would come first, if either.

Well, the school part better come one way or another. When you work a 15 hour day and come home in time to eat, sleep, and start it all over again, you find about 2 minutes, somewhere around the point you're stripping out of the work clothes and changing into sleeping garb, to wonder why it is that you can't meet someone nice to come home to and bitch about your day. When the only thing that didn't go wrong, right down to the 15 minutes you had to spend looking for parking after driving home from work, is the fact that you didn't find out that you *didn't* get promoted. Or worse yet, why you can't meet someone to come home to and tell that you got promoted. (Pray Lord let it be.)

I find out in the next week or two.

Basically it will determine exactly when and how hard I start pursuing my enrollment in a school for next year. If I do get the promotion, I figure I'll sock it out for a year, and hit school next fall if things work out smoothly, maybe wait 6 months past then and start the following spring - basically get some experience at the next level on my resume. If I don't get it, I'll be filling out applications starting the following weekend. No point in staying somewhere that isn't going to put you where you should be, isn't going to maximize your potential. That's right, I said it.

So anyway, other things I got for my birthday (from people other than myself) included, from the fam:


Which I have wanted for so very, very long. And this:


Which Mom loved, along with the accompanying documentary. And from the grandparents, the best table game of all time:


Oink.

That's it. That's all the presents I got - parents and grandparents. This is what happens when you get old. I remember reading in the 5 Love Languages that gifts or giving gifts or something like that is one of the languages, and I'm like 98% sure that its mine, along with a small mix of one of the others - words of affirmation. Problem is, it hardly seems to be anyone else's.

Well I blogged through last weekend and so didn't have much to blog about on Monday, and then it was Tuesday and all of a sudden its Sunday night.

Started working on Wednesday of last week, Friday morning I went to work and by the end of the day I could barely breath, my throat was so swollen. So, I had to get that taken care of. Saturday I didn't go in, but I did get over to Matt's in the afternoon after I woke up and ganked a Zithromax off him - they have a powder-in-a-bottle version now that you just add water to and guzzle. Then I came home, had another gallon of soup, and crashed again.

Today was church - for our commissioning for the missions team, then right back to work. Had a good conversation with the manager I'm actually enjoying working with, because he's cool. Might end up staying on this project and taking on a manager role, if nothing comes up in retail.

Going to work tomorrow and Tuesday, maybe a bit of Wednesday too, then I think I'm going to hit the beach for a day or two before we take off for New Orleans.

This week - a half-decent links post and the *original* Snakes on a Plane story (long story short - I had this idea years ago).

P.S. Football is in the air. Hall of fame game. Eagles and Raiders - I couldn't possibly care less, but I do hear Madden's voice and men hitting each other at high speeds in the background, and that makes me happy. Fall's coming. Joy.

Blogger says this is post # 500 for me, but as I've said before, Blogger's count is way off, I've done a good number more than that.

Spent the evening playing a rousing game of Pass the Pigs with the gang - Mossy sent it to me for my birthday, its basically the best game ever. Swine and gambling. Some guy some where is sitting on his own private beach because he thought of that before I could. Some day I'm going to think of something somebody else never had, and then I'll have my own beach, too. Maybe. It will probably involve swine.

Didn't sleep much as I'm still on the night shifts schedule, and then it was meetings all morning, and after lunch as well. Then free time. We're at a resort type place so I decided to spring for my first ever massage.

I swear between that and the sushi I'm becoming a full-fledged fru-fru adult. Ugh. I need to go skiing or wakeboarding or something, right quick.

Anyway it really didn't do that much for me. I told her a good 4 times she could use more pressure, and she did, but it never seemed like it was quite doing the trick. Very relaxing, but not the deep muscle kneading I was really hoping for. I'm thinking perhaps I need one of those small asian women walking around on my back to really do the trick. Maybe I was spoiled by Jen the chiropractor's daughter. Anyway it was weird to have someone touch you so much, after so many years with next to no touch at all.

Tonight is dinner and more meetings, hopefully a half decent night's sleep before tomorrow morning's worship / meetings / driving back to the city.

Later...

Dinner was burgers from the grill, then more meetings till late this evening, where more pigs were passed. Right now everyone's alseep, and I'm probably the only human being awake in about 20 miles. Which is a distinctly different feeling from being awake in the middle of the night with a couple million people in the same predicament within that same radius.

Tomorrow we're hiking up some hill for a "mountain-top" morning deal (there are no mountains in Pennsylvania), then driving back in the afternoon. I like driving through Penn. because you pick up a lot of country stations, and although I don't know most of the songs anymore, I still enjoy driving long highways while listening to country.

Off to middle of nowhere Pennsylvania for the weekend. Youth leaders annual summer planning retreat. Why we needed to drive this far from the city to do it is beyond me. We're in the middle of the woods and this place doesn't even have a pool. I guess we'll be focused at least. I'm voting that we return to the beach location next year.

Worked the first part of the week then took last night off as it was the annual summer social for the New York office - they rent out a club and we all do our best to drink / party them into the ground. This time was at Pacha - really weird joint on the far west side, but it was good to see old faces and meet some new ones. I knew my sleep schedule was going to be screwed up for the weekend - I had woken up in the afternoon with just enough time to shower and head to the club - so I decided to be good and not after-party with the masses. All the same, I only got about 3 hours sleep and I was wide awake at 4am this morning. Waited for the world to wake up then I went and got some shopping done and had yet another sushi lunch at Whole Foods. Kinda growing on me.

Came home with all the good intentions of putting together the new dresser I picked up at Ikea earlier in the week, and instead finished my latest Netflix - Running Scared - and took a nap. It was thunderstorming out so it was perfect weather for sleeping on the couch. Woke up, packed, picked up Russ, Libby, and Liane at the Path, and we made the drive out here.

I'm supposed to be leading worship this weekend but my guitar practice has been about as dead as my worship practices lately, with this idiotic work schedule, so I'm feeling particularly under-prepared for that. Sometimes the only prayer I can muster is asking for the desire to pray more. If God meets us where we're most lost, I should be finding Him pretty soon, I figure.

In his heart a man plans his course,
but the Lord determines his steps.
- Proverbs 16:9

When I was growing up - a kid, a teenager - I always thought I'd marry in my early 20's. Mom and Dad married in their early 20's. So did everyone else's moms and dads. When I went to weddings, that's how old the people getting married were - early 20's. By my late 20's I'd be entering parenthood, perhaps even twice over. I'd have a house and a couple cars. And a couple dogs. I'd be happily married.

This was the way the world worked, and this was my reality. This was how my life was going to be.

I still remember the first day of college. My aunt drops me off, gives me some cash, made a wise remark about how I probably was more than ready for her to leave, and then she took off. And I was left there, surrounded by a couple thousand mostly Christian girls. For the next 4 years.

How I screwed that one up, I'll never know. And yet somehow, before it all began, I already knew...

Later that morning at the first general assembly, the ancient dean of students crowed for us her centuries old mantra: "Look to your left, look to your right, your future mate may be in sight." Or something similar. It rhymed, I remember that much. She told us 80% of us would marry a fellow student of the institution. For many of us, that meant that, although we hadn't met them yet, our future mate was sitting in the same nervous room with us, at that very moment. Probably with their parents still sitting next to them too, helping them make their way through day 1. Not me, though - I was on my own, standing in the back of the auditorium, not knowing a soul in the room, and ready to do this college thing. And I was also vehemently opposed to the idea that I would be marrying someone I met there.

To this day, I don't know why that was. Perhaps it was just the rebellious streak I was on at that age - I wouldn't be grouped with the herd - I suppose. But, deep down, somewhere, I knew that my future mate wasn't going to be someone from the 4 years to come. I knew it right then and there. And time would prove me right. But it still took time for my preconceptions about my future to change.

Being surrounded by that many girls, and being free from an upbringing that had made girls all but taboo, and being the generally attractive single guy I was, I was soon dating. I enjoyed it, having a girl actually interested in you as a person - you above any other guy walking around that place. Someone to sit with at breakfast. Someone to go to the movies with, someone to study with. Someone to talk to on the phone when you were lying on your bed falling asleep, a few hundred yards away from her on hers. It was nice. And I still knew that I wouldn't be marrying someone from there. I had my doubts at times - but for the most part it was straight knowledge, strong as the first day, standing alone in the back of that auditorium. I think maybe it was somewhere around the middle of my college experience when I first started to realize that I might be in my mid-twenties when I was getting married, not the early 20's I had always imagined.

Pretty soon college spat me out, the same way it took me in - completely alone and ready to take on the next thing coming my way. Senior year went way south for me in the relationship realm - you can't go much lower than a painful breakup with the girl of your dreams. For one thing, you learn to stop having those kind of dreams.

I knew coming out of that storm that I needed to be single for a while just to get back to a healthy emotional state. I had been pretty heavily invested, so it took me a while - maybe a year or two. Not more than two, I don't think.

Around the end of that second year out of college, I moved to the NYC area and began another new chapter. Still alone. Busy with life. Not really thinking about the fact that I was fast burning through my mid twenties. And then they were gone.

I woke up this morning and I was 28. Officially in my late twenties, and as alone as I was 6 years ago leaving college, and as I was 10 years ago starting college. Every bit as far from where I thought I'd be in life as I was from it back then, before reaching the preconceived age. Probably a lot further. I'm not saying I wish things had worked out differently - I wasn't nearly ready for marriage in my early 20's. But now I sometimes wonder in passing whether or not I'll be married in my early 30's. There's almost zero chance it would happen before then, and if it doesn't happen by then, chances are it won't happen at all. Now, 10 years wiser than I was when I knew there was no one in that auditorium for me, I wonder if there's anyone out there for me at all. I don't know if there is or not.

Somehow I'm ok with that. Its not an easy thing to explain, quite frankly. I am content with life, but I still feel there is something missing - and not in that way like I'm missing out on High Def television or a leather couch or something else I could go out and buy. Something missing in that way that makes each life experience - waking up, going to work, eating and drinking, relaxing and playing, going to sleep - makes each of them feel somewhat incomplete. And I believe they really are, because we get the most complete joy out of anything when we can share it with someone.

Now, even if there is someone out there, it will be different from what I always had imagined. There won't be the more carefree vitality and animated passion of young love. I'll be older, I'll have seen more of the world, I'll have been an adult on my own - longer than my parents ever were. And unless she's a younger girl, she'll likely be much the same way. Its like this: the other day I sat on the side of my bed and put my shoes on the way I always sit on the side of my bed and put my shoes on. And then it just kind of hit me - I realized that, if she's out there, she'll likely never lay there and watch me and love the fact that this is just what I do - the way she might have if she had been with me through the twenties and seen me sit there to put my shoes on every day. She'll have her own things like that too - maybe the way she puts her makeup on or answers the phone or folds the laundry - things that I might never stop to love and appreciate about her because we missed younger years together. We'll have missed out on at least some of what we might have imagined.

You do lose your imagination with age. I never used to believe it - its just a little at first but then it starts to go faster. Reality replaces it - cold, hard reality. You realize that your ideas about the future are probably much more accurate, but you also realize something else important. You realize that the you of 10 years ago had absolutely no idea where you would be in 10 years. And dangerous hope springs from this, because that means the you of right now might just - despite all its lost inspirations and gained substantialities - it might just not have any idea where the you of 10 years from now will be.

When I was growing up - a kid, a teenager - I always thought I'd marry in my early 20's.

Boy was I wrong.

The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.
- John 3:8

The problem with working nights is that you have to try to sleep during the day, which no one should have to do. I have enough trouble trying to sleep at night, for crying out loud. Usually I hit the wall around 4am or so, but then you just push through and by the time 8am comes you're driving home wide a-freakin-wake. When you do fall asleep you wake up 4 hours later with a headache like you only slept for 5 minutes. Then its time to blog, shower, and go start the magic all over again.

And for the life of me I can not find a better project to save me from this...project.

Messes with your weekends too, when you have them, when you try to be up while normal people are up. Friday night was out at Naked Lunch with D and some work kids, Saturday was struggling to say awake until I picked up Darin and Sonny at the airport on the way back from their missions trip to Gulfport, MS. Sunday was a 9am exec committee meeting for the youth group leaders, church, final prep meeting for the youth group missions trip, and then over to Cregan and Mindi's with Jenny for a bit. And that evening a bunch of peeps from the Hoboken church came over for the annual St. Anne's festival celebrated on our roof. Basically we get food from the festival and then bring it upstairs to chill away from the sweaty festival people. And usually there's throwing of Zeppoles off of our roof but this year the line was too long for them. The lengths we go to for tradition.

Monday I made a run out to Ikea. Best time to go, found the sheet set I needed in 5 minutes, grabbed some impulse-buy candles, and found a nice replacement for my dresser, which is coming apart right on schedule - 6 years after I got it at Ikea. Checked out bed-frames briefly too - mine seems to be holding up, but I did get it when I got the dresser, so its suspect.

Grabbed some groceries and a sushi lunch at Whole Foods - first time eating sushi by myself, which was an adventure. Socks at TJ Maxx and bug spray for the missions trip at Target and then it was time to lug everything upstairs and get ready for work. Which is what I have to do again now.

Time for Thursday linkery...like good ol times.

How to beat pac-man for good.

Guess where I'll be August 4th.

The best show on TV is on the web this summer.

How do you steal a bike in NYC? Any way you want.

Apparently we're killing the bees that make our food supply possible. Great. In other news, I'm investigating a career in bee-keeping.

A riveting slide-show from the New Yorker - letters read by those serving in Iraq. Part of a preview for a new book compiled of the same, which I will be picking up.

I got another hit on a Where's George bill. So far its been a very underwhelming site for me.

Peanut Gallery - MST3K your own movies - brilliant!

Things I figured out. Ok, not me, but other people.

What makes women happy. I like how it doesn't even really answer the question definitively.

I want a Firefox extension to...

New York Brain Terrain

Wine Log

There, that gets me back to only one line of tabs open in Firefox. That's what we call progress these days.

4:04 AM. I don't even know what day it is anymore.

The US Postal Service's largest processing facility is located in Secaucus, NJ. On top of a majority of the domestic mail sent throughout the northeast, it manages all international and military mail, coming in or out of the the entire eastern half of the states. That means trucks. Trucks from other postal facilites. Trucks from the piers. Trucks from the airports. Trucks from the trains. Trucks. Thousands of them. Actually only the trailer parts. Technically the truck is the tractor part that pulls the trailer, and the trailer is the part that the trucks drop off here, full of mail waiting to be processed and reinserted into another empty trailer. So, thousands of trailers. Less trucks.

Anyway. We're here putting in a new system to track them, or something. All I know is that these are the worst hours I've ever worked in my life, ever. This week has been 7pm-7am shifts, which always turn out to be a good deal longer than 12 hours. And that's about all I have to say about it.

So...since sis was in town for the holiday...I really don't remember much besides work. Sundays after church we've been having our prep meetings for the missions trip, and this past Friday was the annual Dorney Park trip, but other than that its all been a big blur of work.

Speaking of the missions trip, you can help support me by praying for me - I'll be helping lead the youth group as we help rebuild in New Orlean's 9th Ward area from August 12th through the 19th. You can also help support me with your wallet, here (you'll find my name in the drop-down under the "Katrina Youth Team" section).

I'm thankful even in this valley of overworkingness for good friends and kind words and providential encounters of late that have all combined to reignite my desire to investigate pursuing an MDiv in the near future. Even if I do make my promotion - perhaps especially if I make it - next month, I think I will be filling out paperwork and visiting a few schools. I'm not saying that my mind has been made up, and there certainly needs to be a good deal more prayer - and likely a concerted effort at a return to daily writing for a number of months - but I suppose I am starting to lean more heavily in that direction.

Three more nights of getting home and having breakfast before passing out for a few hours of tortured daytime sleep and then I'm off for the weekend. Maybe blog then. Doubt it. And I want an MBA again because why?

They say that when a man faces his destiny, his destiny ends, and he becomes the man that he really is. - Mos Def, as Eddie Bunker in 16 Blocks

Time for another clearing of the firefox tabs and general excusing of myself for not posting much at all lately. In that order, this evening.

You can pay money to see this guy shock himself with a dog collar. The internet yet again bestows another manifold blessing upon us. You can also pay to have him not shock himself, in which case you are the one that should be shocked.

The Downtown Boathouse puts on free kayaking on the Hudson for people on the weekends and holidays during the summers, and its all volunteer run/funded. I'm out of town in DC this weekend, but I hope to volunteer with them some this summer, at some point. Meanwhile, if you're a cute, single gal in DC, this weekend is your big chance to meet the Daves (however I'll be the only single one, this time).

In other free-in-NYC-during-the-summer-news, Philharmonic in the Park. I'll be there on the 12th. Ladies of NYC, this is your big chance.

Music.metafilter.com

Your morbid link of the day is last words from pilots of downed planes.

The Modern List could have been a cool site if it wasn't so freaking small.

Scary because its true.

The Great New Wonderful might be as close as I'll ever come to watching a movie that has anything whatsoever to do with 9/11.

This is the only online apparition of that French cafe I had brunch at a couple of weeks ago that I've been able to find. Apparently its remained completely unlisted elsewhere - impressive.

Best burgers in the city (shake shack dropped to like 6th!).

Funny how this one didn't make very big waves in the media, huh?

OK, that was as far as I was able to get before I had to leave for our farewell dinner for the seniors in the youth group. Always a bittersweet event - and it always makes me feel older, like a parent sending their child off to college, in a sense. Except I get to do it every year. It was at Jerry's in Soho, which despite the external facade has great ambiance inside, complemented by equally above-par service. Food didn't really do it for me, though.

Worked in the West Village office today - glad to be back there in a sense, I really love that area. I just wish it was filled with more single women and fewer gay men, but we can't have our cake and eat it too, I guess.

Had a good holiday weekend. Friday was quiet. Saturday was helping a friend with way too many material belongings move to Hoboken, and then golfing with Ko that afternoon. I hit par on the second hole - that's all I have to say about that. Sunday I caught church and then brunch with 'tina - a friend from Grover days. Then off to JFK via train to pick up Margy. I left my super-umbrella on the subway, garh, but at least Margy showed up dressed in all black with black luggage - I was so impressed, what with her looking for all the world like a local. We caught the evening service, I was able to introduce her to Pastor K on his way out, and then we caught a ride back to the boken. Monday we biked to the ferry, up the west side highway, did the free kayaks, biked the loop in the park, back to the WSH, back over by ferry, back home. It was a blast, but it was hot out so we were wiped out after. Sushi dinner late with the roommate - I have officially inducted sushi - well, the tamer forms of it - into the hall of foods Dave will eat. That leaves pretty much everything but things that are alive, things that are a bug, things that are eyeballs, and Ethiopian food still outside the hall.

For the fourth we were quite patriotic, we got up early and took sis to the Statue of Liberty, which is like my 9 billionth time there, but its not something that's easy to do without a local - takes about 9 billion times as long - so I don't mind tour guiding. Then a BBQ with some of the old Hoboken church kids, and then sis dragged me down to the waterfront to watch the fireworks. I am getting old - for the first time I actually wanted to watch them from my deck.

Put her on a plane Weds. morning and it was back to work for me.

So, there you have it - a real blog post. Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow.