happy belated anniversary

yesterday was our 1-year anniversary of moving from california to oregon. am i still happy with that decision? see my obama post as metaphorical preview of coming paragraphs.

my job may be a little busier than i'd like -- although obviously i have enough time to write this today! - but at least i have a job. if i'd stayed in california, as a mediocre developer, i'm sure i would have been laid off. instead i'm on a team where my skillz pass for superior. go mediocrity! and, go occasional time for writing at mostly-mellow workplace.

and though i need to work on making more friends, at least we have a pretty friendly crew here. my writing group is pretty cool too, and speaking of words, hope to hit wordstock this weekend. if nothing else, this town is a fan of words. as you might imagine, that warms my heart a wee bit.

one of the main reasons we moved up was to be closer to my parents. now my mom is a lot closer than i'd anticipated - and that is going fine, thank you - but obviously with heartwrenching results. in the fallout from that, my dad has written me and min off as being untrustworthy and, i'm sure, a host of unflattering things he won't say to our face but directs to my sister and mother via email. classy. also classy is his attempt to woo other women while still trying to get my mom back. quite the prize, he is.

otherwise life is mostly the same, i'd guess, as it would've been in california...except that almost every day i go outside, i am stunned at all the beauty around me. not that i didn't ever note beauty in the sparkling smogopolis of san jose, but in addition to the air, there's just all the green, orange, blue, and (yes) rainbow of colors that perpetually surround us.

so yeah. color me happy to be home again.

the audacity of faith

me and my faith been gettin reacquainted lately, in a roundabout way. it's mostly through reading [1] [2] [3] [4], of course, but also through discussions with family and friends. for example today, as i was reading a magazine that a coworker gave me because of an article on the relationship between hope and fantasy stories, given because of an earlier discussion on science fiction, creativity and staving off boredom, the latter being a perennial topic of interest round these parts.

coworker euphemistically warned me that the mag was put out by a religious school. naturally this put me in an intrigued but defensive state. was i going to inadvertently read something homophobic? proselytizing? boring?

gilly on the boring count, and the actual article in question was rather tepid. but the featured article was on the author of this. indeed, the whole issue was centered around hope, such that i wished they'd gotten an interview with ob@ma, audaciously hopeful sort that he is. but suffice to say, this mingling of hope, faith and the particular intersection of western christianity with my own noggin has really got me thinking... what do i really believe? why? and why should it really matter?

because let me tell you, i am a hodgepodge of faiths. i'm my own spiritual melting pot. i'm sure i can attribute a lot of that to my parents, but not because forced a variety of sunday schools down my throat the first 11ish years of my life. no, it's because they encouraged me to think for myself. which means that, by the time i got to college, started living a little, taking religious classes, and learned that the bible is not really what i've always thought it is...

well, it put me into a crisis of faith that i've never quite recovered from. but over time i realized, it wasn't my faith in god that was shaken -- it was my faith in religion. and as any thinking person can tell you, religion is a construct of man. spirituality, my perception and relation to the divine as i perceive it -- that's really the only thing i can rely on.

and yes i am perfectly aware of how fluid that is, but it's *mine*, thus i can rely on it with absolute conviction. however, my amalgamated set of beliefs - and you'll note i'm not detailing them here - are starting to skew my view of religious statements to such a degree that i'm feeling a little startled.

for example, reading about a woman feeling confused after reading about gideon and moses, looking for god to give her a sign, trying to obey god's commands. my initial thoughts, in order:

1. ah, i remember being devoted and reading like that.
2. how silly! does she really think god wrote those commands?
3. this sounds a little pretentious.
4. wait, it's ok. she gets to god her way, and i get there through mine.

i suppose there's a term for this kind of uberfaith (other than uberfaith), and while it tends to create cognitive dissonance, ultimately i find it too stimulating, i believe, to proceed in any other way. that said, if any of you feel like sharing your own views on this obviously personal topic, i'd love to hear them.

then again, since i've already admitted to being an amalgam, this really shouldn't surprise you.

another year of a-muse-ment

somehow fitting to have a pun in there. anyway, i finally found a meme i could get behind, from rpp. i don't have to think (which is great, since it's late), i only have to collect data in a bizarrely meaningful fashion. so without further adieu, here are the first lines from the first post of each month this year:

January: thanks to rashenbo:
February: lately i have been completely overwhelmed with a desire to return home. and by home, i mean oregon.
March: i'm sure it's all those answers about reading books that did me in...
April: this just in!
May: in my last post i mentioned someday writing a book based on my particular brand of crazy.
June: i got this from wen the other day.
July: although i am, in fact, working on my boston post.
August: it can happen, folks. at least in your head.
September: that was the title of the skype chat we had going all night during last week's live code push at work, and yes i came up with the title, and yes i purposely mispelled kegger.
October: i am tired.
November: i'll post a more comprehensive update in the future, of course, but suffice to say:
December: as evidenced by this shot:

from this i surmise i need to work on my use of colons, and also stop doing memes or quizzes at the beginning of the month. anyway, if anyone is interested in doing this, consider yourself tagged!

and now you'll have to excuse me, i'm off to finish watching the lovely dana scully and fall asleep. night!

humor, i love it! whee!

last night m's sister lori came over. they were busy making dinner in the kitchen, so i went out to the living room and, after pearl decided we were done playing, i sat down to write. i didn't have a specific idea in mind, i just knew i wanted to write. i wish that wasn't normal for me, but it is.

anyway, i flipped through my notebook designed for such randomness. reread the very silly children's story i'd started eons ago, some post-therapy session entries, and trip planning checklists. i finally got to a blank page. what am i going to write about?

i heard lori humming off-key in the kitchen. well, i'll start there, i thought. what followed were two paragraphs of dark humor. i'd have written more (how can you not continue something that ends in 'discussing the delicacies of the social security office roach coach'?) but dinner was ready.

this morning i woke up thinking about all of the writing i've been doing lately. its themes, tones, and what those say about me. i realized that a lot of my work is riddled with dark humor. why so dark?

as i pondered, a scene popped into my head: my sister and i sunbathing at home, happy little teenagers listening to the radio (like 'adult education' by hall and oates, the song playing on RadioHeather this morning), while my parents were at a conference. my father was one of the conference speakers, lecturing on satanic cults.

that led to another shot: video of my father, lecturing in an auditorium, a display table next to him filled with miscellaneous cult accoutrement. at least on one occasion, they videotaped his lecture, and i specifically recall a shot of him picking up a cow skull and gesturing to some points on its head.

i thought, i need to write this down. and i did. and again, it ended up being this dark piece because, as i have alluded to in the past, my dad really fucked the family over. the short version is that there was a sustained history of lying, and you can imagine how that would mess things up.

the long version...well, someday i will write a book. i think today's entry was a start to that, but after reading it i thought - hi. no wonder your writing gets so dark. look at all this crap you're still processing! it's been almost 20 years since a lot of this shit went down, and you're only writing about it now.

but the other thing was, why dark humor? i am sure the answer is obvious: defense mechanism. what's the best way to deflate a pissy situation? be funny. sometimes humor is the only way you can get through something tortuous. so it's no wonder that humor is so incredibly important to me. factor in that i was raised to be silly, and you can see why i am more than a little nutty.

if you made it this far, thank you for strolling with me down Memory And Self-Reflection Lane. i'm sure this is more interesting to me than the rest of you, but i just had to write that out.

behold the power of silence

i think in another life, i was a monk.

the other day i started thinking about silence. it's one of those things that, when you have the ability to be comfortable in it with others, is kind of rare and precious. but what about when, with another person, your relationship to silence changes over time? for example:

i have a friend of many years - seriously! at first, there was the occasional awkward silence as we got to know each other. however, as we were meant to be good friends, in short order we hit that space where a spot of silence seemed perfectly fine. a lull in the conversation, to be sure, but i felt just as comfortable and happy to be with her as when we were talking.

it was this way for quite some time. then some changes happened for both of us, that were difficult to talk about. enter a new silence, and a not a comfortable one...at least for me. with time, we've been able to discuss *some* of those things, but it still often leaves me (moderately) ill at ease, i guess because i know there are things left unsaid.

i do think that finding comfort in shared silence is really a measure of one's own comfort in stillness. now me, i find stillness, solitude, alone time, not only comfortable but necessary. not that i don't crave human contact...but i definitely need time on my own, without any noise but the clocks, keyboard, cat purring, rain, birds, or wind around me. my core needs silence for restoration.

don't get me wrong, this is not about being shy. but because of this need for silence, i can be perfectly comfortable being around *most* people without talking up a storm. which i think means my perspective on this topic is a little off, with respect to others.

i suppose what i am really wondering is, when with someone you care about, how much silence is too much? even though my friend and i have grown apart some, and can't discuss everything, the thought of discussing nothing (calling it quits) is not high on my list either. ah, dilemmas.