Ok, ok, I get it I am a truly horrible person. I have not blogged in ages, ok moths really but a lot has happened since then. Warning this might be a little long I have a few things that have happened in the past couple days that I really do want to share about. One thing happened a while back that I have yet to write about—I graduated. It is hard and strange to believe that I am done with school, twenty-two years in the hallowed halls of American academia reached their culmination. One of the most unusual things for me since then is realizing at various times that I don’t have to read. Not that I have stopped reading by any means but I no longer have that persistent guilt ridden feeling looming over me telling me that I need to be reading need to be reading faster, need to be writing over what I just read, starting research papers, working and doing anything but hanging out talking with friends or watching TV, or reading something simply for pleasure. I welcome these days with arms wide open (thanks Scott Stapp . . .RIP Creed).

Ok there are three big other topics on my mind at the moment.

1. One of my best friends Travis has a link on his blog http://travisharsch.blogspot.com/ to mine. The sub header on that link reads “friend who has bad things happen to his car)”. Well it happened yet again. Last night sometime between the beginning of the epitome of American commercialization (aka the Superbowl) my car was broken into for the 5th time, for the third time since my last birthday. This time nothing was stolen, I just have to mess with yet another broken window—yippee.

2. On Friday night I saw Hotel Rawanda. While this movie has good acting, and I do believe Don Cheadle certainly is deserving of his Oscar nomination—he shows an incredible range of emotion. This movie is not superb. I probably will not watch this movie again. Yet, I must say that it is probably the most intense movie I have ever seen. Not in the Jerry Bruckheimer sense, but in the oh my God this actually happened sense. I have never reacted in the way that I did in this movie. I truly believe that everyone should see this movie. Everyone walks out of the theater in stunned silence. Most shocking of all is the fact that this happened in our lifetime, a mere ten years ago, and yet I no practically nothing about it. Even though a million people died in this Genocide. Our knowledge base is so prejudice. I won’t watch this movie again not because it is not worth seeing, but because I don’t know if I could handle seeing it again.

3. This past weekend I went with some friends to a really neat Hispanic art exhibit in Dallas entitled el Corazon. After taking three hours to get there—many wrong turns—we finally made it to this really cool exhibit. Which had a number of rooms of paintings, photography, and sculpture all themed around the heart and done by Latino artists (shout out to V-Day), they also had performance art too. We got there quite a bit late obviously, and thus were only able to see (?) performances of the oral history, and a blues bad. Regardless it was a great experience, I wish I took more time to appreciate the arts.

Well that is all for now, hopefully I will make this blog thing happen a little more often than once every other month.

gloer update

just wanted to let it be known that i saw gloer again today, and he appered much better than yesterday. when i went in he was sitting up in the wheelchair reading some crossan. and he was much more lively, but his speech was still slurred. he wsa excited to report though that he walked eighty feet today with his 'hemi' walker. i guess like any road to recovery there will be bad days and good day, let us jsut pray for more of the good days and for each to be better than the last.

things

Ok, so now the ‘check engine light’ is on and off intermittently—I better take it in. But, I don’t want to think about that right now. Nor do I want to think about my theology final on Thursday, or the huge project due on Friday.

Somethings though that I don’t want to focus on I am forced to do so. This afternoon I went to visit dr. gloer in the hospital, he is one of my preaching and scriptures professors, he had a stroke on the Sunday before thanksgiving. It was good to se him but at the same time disheartening. He has paralysis on his right side, the doctors seem to think that he will be able to recover from this. More disheartening than his loss of motion was his slowed and slurred speech. Dr. gloer is a master orator, he is the type of person that can’t speak without preaching, but it never gets annoying as it does with the cast majority of that type. He is so skilled in the art of rhetoric that it is always a joy to hear him speak. But to se the frustration in his eyes and hear him, slow and slurred and say ‘my mind is moving so much faster than my mouth,’ makes my heart ache. I hope and pray that he will soon return to his normal self. We love him no matter how he is but we beg to see healing in his life.

Now, though, to what I really want to talk about, something exciting, something which brings happiness to think about and discuss. . . . two of my best friends—andrew and dana—got engaged over the t-day break. It is so awesome when two people whom I love individually not just because I am called to love them as persons, but because they are truly awesome people who are bright and truly good people, people whose fellowship with me is the manna of my life find each other and get together. Its not one of those cases where one is settling or one person is just a jerk in disguise, but rather they are the type of people that constantly push each other beyond which they thought was possible before. I am overjoyed at the thought of these two committing life and love together.

t-day

So I awoke Thursday to finish getting ready for Thanksgiving. I had already baked my pies: pumpkin and bourbon chocolate pecan, but still needed to do some cleaning. When I let nova, jessy’s dog, out to pee he ran away so I went and got my keys to bring him back in my jeep which is when a couple things happened. One getting into my car I notice that junk was everywhere, as it normally is in my car, but I had just cleaned my car the other day. Stuff was everywhere because yet again, for the fourth time, I had been broken into. Fortunately this was the least painless of the times though: someone had left a door unlocked so, there is no window to replace and they only got away with 2 things: a hundred dollar inverter that lets return the cigarette lighter into an outlet and the cigarette lighter adapter for my cell phone. But, that is the lest of the two things which happened. When I was getting Nova my engine started to sputter and I could only go like 15 mph. So that means its gonna have to go into the shop again, and I have no money to pay to get it fixed—especially after the last breakdown.

But thanksgiving was not all bad. A bunch of people came to house and vegged all day over a feast of goodness. We ate, played games, napped, ate, watched movies, and drank, and ate. We ate more than I could have imagined.

politics

Ok, it has been some time since I last posted. It is after all that time of year: papers due, money running out, mourning over the election. I have a big paper due tomorrow that I am way behind on, but I feel the need to post some stuff that I have had on my mind for some time, also I am in class right now, so you could say I am multi-tasking (taking/recording notes and writing this).

Ok, while I was upset by the election, my frustration was more over who won I am not upset that some undue process was wrought upon the American people as I was to a degree four years ago. Bush won both the electoral and popular votes. Sure some peoples votes didn’t count that should have and some may have been ‘disenfranchised’ but chances are this happened going both ways. The only case I have noticed that was despicable is in Ohio where people had to wait in line for nine hours to vote—I wonder how many turned away not able or willing to wait that long to vote.

Here is what really bothers me though. Bush has claimed to have a ‘mandate’ and that he has gained ‘political capital’ and he intends to use it. I am not arguing the fact that he won, I do contend thought hat he is far from having a mandate. Consider: if you had a group of one hundred voters only 1.3 of that hundred would need to switch from Bush to Kerry to have a dead heat. This is not a mandate. This is an incredibly close election, even though the electoral college skews it some.

Now my frustration has grown since yesterday morning; Colin Powell, one of the few voices who advocated global alliances and would offer Bush counsel divergent from the Bush team, has resigned and Condoleezza Rice will take his spot. So instead of the president being surrounded by mostly ‘yes men’ Bush will be surrounded by ‘I don’t even have to say yes because I think what you think men (or women).’ The great and brilliant leaders of history have surrounded themselves by even smarter people whom disagree with them. Oh how, I long for a leader to do this.

vote

So I voted early on Friday. Had I known then that my polling place was literally across the street from my house, close enough to go during a bathroom break then I would have waited till today. No surprise here when you hear that I voted for Kerry. But that isn’t exactly what happened. In reality I didn’t vote for Kerry as much as I voted against Bush. But, there was one vote which brought my joy to vote FOR someone—Chet Edwards. I can’t describe how refreshing it was to vote for someone because I was truly excited about them and not voting a certain way because it is the lesser of evils.

halloween

Oh wow, so a lot has happened since I last posted. Most notably it seems that the discovery has been made that hell is located on the moon and that it did actually freeze over during the lunar eclipse last week. Evidence: the red sox swept the world series, football. Kind of crazy, if you ask me.

Also the lair hosted our infamous annual Halloween party (it is annual because Halloween only comes once a year). It was a lot of fun, but exhausting. I think we had around 80 people there, but I think I only knew two-thirds of the people there. There were a good number of first semester Truett students whom I don’t know if I had ever see before. It it is cool that they came. The house dressed as characters form the ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ and I got to be Daisy.